Why Go Vegan? Neal Barnard MD

[Applause] dr.neil barnard he's the man of the hour [Music] he's a clinical researcher he's a best-selling author he is one of America's leading advocates for health nutrition and higher standards in research he has been the principal investigator of several very famous human clinical research trials all the results of which are published in peer-reviewed scientific medical journals he's just examined really what are the key issues of health and nutrition he's the founder and the president of the Physicians Committee for Responsible medicine PCRM he's also the president of the cancer project which is a nonprofit organization advancing cancer prevention and cancer survival through nutrition education and research and I've known him for what almost 15 years now he's been coming many times which we so appreciate and are so honored he is a really a warm generous and caring person and speaking of honors it's a great honor to introduce them to you all tonight dr. Neal Barnard thank you Joe great to be here for those of you I haven't met I haven't actually followed a healthy diet most of my life I grew up in North Dakota and my grandpa was busily raising cattle and so was his father and his father and his father and my father was in the cattle business but he didn't like it very much so he left and went to medical school and spent his life treating diabetes in Fargo and I never once heard him say that a person with diabetes ever got better and he always felt that people where they would prescribe a diabetic diet people didn't really want to follow it they didn't get much benefit and it was just one way street toward more and more complications and so forth and that was my view of American medicine and I have to say we ate very much like we were in the cattle business every day of my life it was roast beef baked potatoes and corn except for special occasions when I was roast beef baked potatoes and peas and the year before I went to medical school I had sort of an eye-opening experience I was an assistant in the morgue of the hospital when somebody died in the hospital maybe from eating hospital food we would have to examine the body and one day we had a guy who died of a massive heart attack and the pathologist knew that I was going to go to medical school so he said Neil I want you to pay close attention and he took what looked like a garden clipper and he went crunch-crunch-crunch through that through the ribs on one side of the chest and then he went crunch crunch through the ribs on the other side of the chest and yanked off the ribs and said look at the coronary arteries he explained to me they're called coronary arteries because they crowned the heart and he took a scalpel and he sliced one open and he said look inside and instead of it being a wide open artery it was clogged with what looked like chewing gum except he had me feel it and it was hard and that was atherosclerosis and we looked at the carotid arteries and they had the same problem and the arteries to the legs the arteries to the kidneys he said we see these in about three-quarters of people by age 23 which was the age that I was at the time so anyway at the end of the exam he walked out and I took the ribs off the Chet off the table and I put him back in the chest tried to make him fit with the other ribs and sewed up the skin and and cleaned up and went up to the cafeteria where it turned out they were serving ribs for lunch and I have to say I didn't become a vegetarian on the spot but I could have ate that between the look of it and the smell of it it was to me a dead body and anyway you know how it is you kind of stick your foot in it and it becomes a black hole that sucks you in and pretty soon you're a vegan now I have to say Americans are still eating a lot of this and a lot of this and a lot of this and a year ago I wrote an article in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition where I looked at the trends in the American diet over the last hundred years and I just want to walk you through it in 1909 the USDA started keeping track of what Americans eat and in 1909 your average person ate a hundred and twenty three point nine pounds of meat in a year one person per year but what happened well we've been going up and up and up and as of about 2007 we were over 200 pounds every person every year well where are we putting 75 pounds extra meat this year next year next year next year well it's mostly chicken is the big increase beef is falling a little bit but chicken is increasing Americans now eat more than a million chickens per hour it's about 10 billion per year because we think it's health food and we're in the worst shape that we have ever been in let me say a special word of condemnation for cheese back in 1909 your average person ate three point eight pounds of cheese in a year but right around the 1960s fast food chains came in and any bun has a perfect place to stick a little slice of cheese under it so a couple ounces of cheese would go on every fast-food sandwich and then pizza which was not our thing back in 1909 became very popular and you can connect your home to a restaurant with a telephone wire you can dinner in 30 minutes and kids will eat it we can dump it in schools the government starts promoting it and pretty soon you've got Americans eating more than 30 pounds of cheese as of 2005 as of 2011 your average American in a year's time eats about 34 pounds of cheese now I'm not eating any somebody else's get in mine so it's it's bad enough that your average person is eating 30 pounds more cheese every single year compared to a century ago but it's 70% fat it's not good fat its saturated fat bad fat and it's it's 70 percent if it was any worse it would be Vaseline and that's what people are eating and feeding to their children now this will not be on the test but the blue line is sugar cane sugar and beet sugar that's falling but we are more than making up for it with high fructose corn syrup that's the Green Line you add it all together and you get the red line is total sugar and that's going up 30 or 40 pounds so why are Americans overweight I don't know I guess we're not exercising enough I'm not no it's none of that it's because we're eating 75 pounds more and meat 30 pounds more cheese 30 40 50 pounds more sugar every person this year next year the year after that and we're feeding the same thing to our kids it's all on the input side of the equation and if you look at diabetes this is back 1994 and there's North Dakota where I grew up and but less than four percent of the population had diabetes here's Louisiana Mississippi more than 6% but as the years go by 95 96 97 98 99 2000 diabetes has just come right in dramatically in 2006 we needed new colors for some political reason but the map continues to change so you don't see it just from one year to the next but if you step back you discover that we are on completely uncharted territory we have never as a country had such a bad diet for so many people with with such high rates of obesity and diabetes last here in America we spent 120 billion dollars just on medical treatment for diabetes that and well anyway depressing myself alright but there is a better way researchers have said who does better and they've been very fond of studying seventh-day adventists now I didn't know anything about the Adventist religion but when I got to medical school I noticed that people like to study them a lot and the reason is that Adventists are supposed to not smoke not drank alcohol avoid caffeine and not eat meat and almost all advocate Adventists are really good at the first three of those things but some of them eat meat some don't so in 2009 the American Diabetes Association published this figure where they looked at body mass index everybody's familiar with BMI right should be below 25 to be healthy it's your weight adjusted for your height and the first group here are non vegetarians meat eaters and they're not so healthy they're 28.8 that's in the over weight range and the second group is semi vegetarians they eat meat no more than once a week they're a little bit thinner and then you have pesco vegetarians what's that that's fish but they don't need any any meat at all except for fish and they're a little skinnier and then lacto-ovo vegetarians they're a little thinner and then here's this group of vegans out here and that's the only group where they're smack in the middle of the healthy weight range now the reason the American Diabetes Association published this was not because of the weight it was because of diabetes and it's exactly the same graph where the meat-eaters that have the most the vegans have the least and the other groups just slide in and if you think about it in Reverse let's say you're following a diet with whole grains and beans and vegetables and fruits and you decide you know let me have an egg a little bit of milk well you're more likely to gain weight and your diabetes inches up your diabetes risk inches up how about some fish your weight goes up again your diabetes risk takes to jump how me but not too often your wrists go your waist goes up your waistline goes up and your diabetes risk goes up and how about if you have meat everyday well then you're like average Americans high risk for overweight high risk for diabetes so you don't have to be Adventist you could be European and the epic trial found exactly the same gradient this is men this is women the vegans are the thinnest the meat-eaters are the heaviest and the other groups just slot in so my research team said fine let's introduce a diet like this for people who have never thought about going on a vegan diet before we brought in 64 women they were all overweight they were all over the age of menopause every one of them had been on Atkins South Beach Jenny Craig and so forth and they had lost weight but then it would come back they would try a different diet they were on this kind of yo-yo thing what we asked them to do was this eat fruits and grains and legumes and vegetables and not to limit their portions we also asked them not to exercise and to not use a lot of oil so the only food rules were vegan low-fat we didn't want them to exercise exercise is good but this is a scientific study of diet and we didn't want a confounder and it was 14 weeks and a typical day's meals would be me see something like blueberry pancakes maybe oatmeal with cinnamon and raisins half cantaloupe bright toast no butter the foods that you're all familiar with there were no portion sizes they were free to eat as much as they wanted to and I have to say there are sometimes humiliations in the life of a researcher we had every week everybody would get together as a discussion group so they could share their successes and they could share their challenges and kind of support each other and I think it was work week three one of the women came in and said dr. Bronner I found a tree that I can have on your low-fat vegan diet I'm thinking uh-oh what is this and she opens her purse and she pulls out a pack of Twizzlers you know Twizzlers sell them at the 7-eleven that's it's true you look at the label there's no animal products in them there's no added oil it's just sugary starchy artificially colored junk and she made sure that all my research participants knew uniball the trusses you want on this diet so my vegan low-fat twizzler fueled research participants set off on their path to the unknown and as fate would have it they lost about 13 pounds in 14 weeks we tracked them a year later and then two years later and they were skinnier at two years than at 1 year they're skinnier at one year than at the beginning in other words unlike every other diet they had ever been on it was a one-way street and their waist got thinner and let me put a human face on this this is Nancy Nancy lost about 40 pounds over about a year's time and she had diabetes she stopped her diabetes medication she was in better control on noting that she was on medicine and one day she she came into the center to tell me about her cooking spaghetti she had been home cooking spaghetti and she cracked open a jar of spaghetti sauce and she poured it in the pan and she just stopped she set the jar down she looked at her hands she had rheumatoid arthritis and any of you who have rheumatoid arthritis you know it starts at the base of your thumbs and it spreads to the other joints and whoever is making those vacuum-pack jars they are obviously a sadist because you cannot open them up and she realized her pain had just gone away and she wants to know why this was and I mentioned to her that I'd written a book back more than ten years ago called foods that fight pain because we found that the inflammation in the joints is caused by in many cases of foreign protein that elicits a reaction in the body it causes the inflammation that's the pain you take that foreign protein out you get better dairy is the most common it's not the only one there are others but it's the most common bingo she had no more pain and maybe maybe 50 60 70 percent of people with classic rheumatoid arthritis improve or just flat-out goes so if you want to have a person really stick with your diet cure their pain make their symptoms go away this is Vance Vance was a policeman in Washington his father was dead at age 30 Vance was 31 when he was diagnosed with diabetes he was in his late 30s when he came in to see us lost 60 pounds over a year stopped his diabetes medications his diabetes who became undetectable and which is something his personal physician had never ever seen before and when I was asking Vance his permission to tell his historian to share it with other people he said make sure you tell everybody that my erectile dysfunction went away too so okay so how does it work why do you lose weight with this kind of diet the first things that complete no-brainer if you're eating vegetables and fruits they have fiber fiber fills you up holds water doesn't have much of the way of calories so you're full and so all of these foods tend to be filling with very few calories but Velveeta is not from a plant it's from an animal it doesn't have any fiber every last calorie in it and every last calorie in an egg every last calorie and chicken or turkey or beef you get full advantage of it so to speak the second thing though is that you burn calories faster we measure metabolism what patient lies down on a on an exam table and you put a little canopy over their head and shoulders and you measure how much oxygen their body is using minute by minute and how much carbon dioxide they're putting out and you can measure their metabolism and you feed them a meal and their metabolism goes up for about three hours after the meal and you measure it except when they go vegan you bring them back a couple months later well I'm down on the table measure their metabolism and feed them exactly the same meal and what you find is that whole curve rises they are suddenly burning calories faster than they were before not a lot it's about 16 percent faster in the three hours after the meal so why are vegans skinny it's because they're full sooner from all the fiber that they're eating and they're burning calories faster for three hours after breakfast three hours after lunch three hours after dinner it's automatic you don't have to you know nobody here is like starving and pushing away and thinking I've really gotta exercise extra tonight you know none of that happens that the foods do it for you and and here is why I'm gonna stick a needle in your leg and pull out a muscle cell your muscles are your big calorie burners and that muscle cell has a magical thing inside and another one those are mitochondria remember mitochondria from high school biology those are the burners inside yourself they take fats and sugars and turn them into energy and you've got a lot of them the problem is there's something else there there's fat and that fat is growing inside your cell now doctors don't like words like fat because it only has one syllable so we're gonna refer to it as intra it's intra Myo cellular lipid but what it is it's fat inside your cells and how did it get there it got there from eating beef or eating chicken or eating cheese or olive oil or fryer grease or in it with almost no change it goes from your digestive tract into your bloodstream packs into your cells and and this is going to be on the test this is very important when your cell detects this bit of fat and it goes inside your cell says fantastic that's great I need this because your body was designed back when there were famines and your body then stores that fat and to store it in case there is a famine your body shuts down the production of mitochondria and you could start a fatty diet on Monday by Wednesday you have fewer functioning mitochondria in other words you can't burn calories anymore and if you heard people say when I was 16 I could eat anything but something's been happening my metabolism is slowing down I guess I'm just getting older we are deliberate or not told early acts shutting down our own metabolism meal by meal by eating fatty animal-based foods your body is trying to store that in case there's a family you can reason with your body and say I promise you there's gonna be extra food coming very soon but your body is continuing to store it and that's what happens so fat are you all with me okay is it making sense alright so fat in your cells slows down your calorie burn so it's ruining your metabolism so what you need to do is the opposite get the animal products off your plate how much animal fat is there left none keep the oils kinda low don't take that bottle of olive oil go glue glue glue glue glue all over your pasta if you keep the oils low it drains out of your cells it's very quick okay so getting the fat out of your cells boost your after-meal calorie burn let me share with you how we've applied this to diabetes the the in 2003 NIH gave us a grant to test a vegan diet for diabetes that works great and diabetes is not caused by eating rice or by eating bread or by eating potatoes or even by eating sugar what it's caused by is fat builds up in the cell and as fat builds up in the cell this insulin insulin which is a key that goes into this lock and it signals inside the cell to open these little channels and let sugar inside when you've got too much gum in your lock your key doesn't work anymore if you've got too much fat in your cells insulin doesn't work anymore fat inside cells causes insulin resistance all you do vegan diet there's no animal fat keep the oils really low that drains out your insulin works again person gets better very simple now if I can get to you as soon as you've been diagnosed we're gonna do well if I get to you after you've had it for 20 years or 30 years it's harder but people improve I had a man who had had diabetes 19 years he was on insulin three times a day and he not he not only had high blood sugars but he had a late complication called painful neuropathy every night his feet were killing because the nerves are being attacked by the disease process and it doesn't just affect your body every doctor who's been treating people diabetes you know it affects your mind you start realizing I'm not living you're losing ground year by year and about four it took about four or five months on a vegan diet his neuropathy went away and I said it's better right he said no that's not what I said it is gone and I kept following for years it never came back and I had I had never seen this before and I started looking into it and there it happens all the time and when you when your body starts recovering just like the people that you saw in the video that Jeff showed you're living again and I turned to Jeff as we were watching that I thought the terrible thing is that these people had to live for 20 years 30 years 40 years with all of these symptoms and all of these medications thinking that that was the best that they could do so anyway I'd like to talk to you about your car insurance when I look out my office window that's what I see GEICO's national headquarters is right near PCRM and there are 25 2,500 people working there and they're self-insured so every time anybody goes on a cholesterol-lowering drug they got to pay for it so it kind of the light went on a Geico saying why don't we do a vegan diet here at Geico so I said let's let's do it anybody who wanted to go vegan would get two things first thing was vegan food in the cafeteria they have an employee cafeteria and they have bacon and eggs for lunch but they also have an oatmeal bar with cinnamon and raisins and sliced bananas and they have greasy cheeseburgers for lunch but they also have veggie burgers Portobello sandwich a really nice salad bar that's first thing and the second thing that they have is a discussion group once a week anybody who wants to go vegan has a place that they can go at lunch time they bring their food and we sit and we talk or we do a cooking demonstration and we did it as a scientific study this is the one in the Washington DC area at Fredericksburg Virginia they said we'll do our will our weights will check our cholesterol and everything that they're doing but no diet change here they're good the control group and what we found oh by the way there are a few missteps along the way I have to say [Laughter] we had to work with the cafeteria they were doing their best I mean anyway the people in Fredericksburg didn't lose anyway this was July through December the some some people dropped out and they didn't lose anything or they might have gained the biggest weight loss we had was 46 pounds from July through December but your average including everybody was 11 and their waists got skinnier and I want to show you these are my worst participants this was Hillary and Bruce and when I say worst I mean that we had a discussion group in a cooking demonstration every single week and they would show up and pay no attention at all they sat in the back of the room they would just chatter and chatter and look into each other's eyes and talk about things and they were paying no attention and I thought what is with you people but I I realized you can misjudge people and I misjudged them they were talking and it was kind of distracting but what they were talking about was what they were gonna pick up on the way home at the grocery store and how they were going to convince her parents to go vegan and what they would do at Thanksgiving so that they wouldn't have any wrinkles in their diet in other words they were really into it in a year later they sent me this picture and the reason I'm showing you this is two things the first is they are physically healthier Bruce has lost 100 pounds Hillary's lost 285 pounds but the other well the other thing the other thing is Bruce told me in Bruce's words he said I never exercised I didn't want to exercise because first it hurts when you got extra if you're 100 pounds overweight it hurts and you don't want people to see you jogging down the street and jiggling everywhere and you don't want to go to a gym and he said I was embarrassed to it to do it but when they changed their diets and the weight started coming off on its own you know their metabolism is higher their appetite is tricked into just turning off the weight starts coming off coming off coming off coming off their energy starts going up they're starting to feel not so embarrassed and they realize that inside of them was an athlete and they sent me this picture because they did their first half marathon so the reason this is important is that when you gain weight when you get a health diagnosis when you're given your one-way street to more and more misery and more and more complications it doesn't just affect you physically it affects you psychologically and you feel like I can't do things that other people can do and then you go on a diet and you lose a little bit of weight but then you give up on it because it's just hard you think there's something wrong with me and people memorize that and the more diets they go on the more times they fail the more they blame themselves and it becomes a toxic experience for them but once they realize there was not one thing wrong with them there never was they were given a diet that was well-meaning but it was not designed for the human body and once you put the foods in your body that work then you can not only pull your body back together but you can get your mind repaired a little bit and start to argue back all those negative lessons that you've learned and realize you can do things that other people can you could start that process of rebuilding and feeling good about yourself and feeling good about your kids so this is the power plate this we in 2009 we sent this to the USDA and we said why not you know the pyramids a nice shape but people don't eat off a pyramid it requires a lot of abstraction so this is what people do eat off why don't you do something like this we sent it two years ago and did you see what they came out with earlier this year not perfect but kind of close I have to say at PCRM our motto is that's good but not good enough so we actually have a lawsuit in against the USDA to say clean it up you're almost there get rid of the dairy group and get rid of meat you're gonna be okay I'll let you know how we do so [Applause] [Music] so if a person is thinking about starting this I mean how do you get there how do you introduce it the way I everybody has their own way you know I'm sure Michaels got his way and Jeff has his way and Don will do it in maybe in a third way but but what I do with people is I say don't change your diet right now just take a week and try different foods try some vegan foods and just see which ones you like so I'll make a list breakfast lunch dinner snack and just take a week start filling it in see what you like okay blueberry pancakes I can make those vegan I could do my oatmeal you just start filling it in and once you've got things that you have tried you've tried the recipes you tried Ajay's brownies you figured out what you would it really works for you then now what I by the way you know they're people think you're not gonna eat there's none you know you can go Italian to get me all kinds of stuff Mexican restaurants Chinese places there there is so much that you can eat you can go fast food right this is not the pinnacle of culinary art but this is where people are reading they can go vegan there and so we encourage our patients to pick the healthier options so once they know what they like at that point I say let's do it all the way vegan low-fat but only three weeks this is our test drive this is our kickstart and oh I can do anything for three weeks at the end of that time what I discover is that people are feeling healthier but their tastes are changing and they didn't expect that but I have to remind them when you switch from whole milk to skim milk in fact in this room when you've how many of you switched from whole milk to skim milk at some point in your life okay when you did what was the skim milk like at first why'd it did would taste water it doesn't even look right it's kind of blue how many of you got used to it okay did you ever go back and taste whole milk what was that like it's too thick well what you know your first week on a vegan diet it's like that it's it's too light you think I've got to acquire a taste for folk music now and I'm gonna break out the tie-dye anyway the second the second week it starts feeling normal after about three weeks you're there with it and you start to feel good and your Energy's good after three weeks if you go back and have a double bacon cheeseburger it just doesn't it's no longer appealing but when if you try to explain that to a person in advance they're not going to believe you so the the other thing is something I learned from my mom about transition foods growing up in Fargo we did not eat a very healthy diet and my mother kind of led the way and she had a really high cholesterol and after I got out of medical school and residency and I started writing books I was telling my mother that she oughta try a vegan diet it would get her cholesterol down and she didn't think that was very good advice and she completely ignored my entreaties that she'd do something about it and every time I would go back home and I'd visit her I would say you know what's with your cholesterol and it's a little bit higher than it should be but I'll be alright say mother you're gonna have a heart attack you've got to do something why don't you go vegan just completely ignore me and as puzzling about why this is you know my patients listen to me I write in peer-reviewed journals I've been funded by NIH and my own mother is not listening to me and I finally realized I'm my mother's third born child any of you third borns here you ever do you ever open up the family photo album there's a lot of pictures of number one in there there's some pictures of number two but to find you you got to look in the index so what that means is your parents may love you but they know what a dribbling toddler is like they're not really excited they're not paying any attention you you can look your mother in the eye and you can say mother you have atherosclerosis you have hypercholesterolemia she thinks it's cute you know big words she's not paying any attention to it that's my mother so she goes to her doctor and the doctor says enough I'm gonna put you on some medicine I want you to take it okay I'll take it how long do I have to take it for he says you don't get it I'm gonna put you on a cholesterol-lowering drug I want you to take it daily forever to control your cholesterol she says I have to take medicine forever for it to work she doesn't like that idea she says I got to think about this she goes home and picks up a book I wrote called food for life Neal told me I make these meals my cholesterol level ought to go down my mother does it she starts a vegan diet she does it for seven weeks she goes back to the doctor the doctor gets her lab slip and he looks at her cholesterol level and he looks at my mother and he looks at the cholesterol level and he says I need you I need you to come back there's something wrong with our laboratory her cholesterol had dropped 80 points and he thought this was physiologically not possible it's like your doctor Sabrina was just like no you this can't this is not just doesn't happen and she says wait a minute if that's real would I need medicine he said no this is like a 12 year olds cholesterol level you wouldn't need anything at all she says thank you I got it by my mom goes home she picks up the phone and calls me up it says Neal why didn't you tell me about this before so my mother's got religion she's decided a vegan diet is for everybody starting with my dad so my dad grew up in a in a cattle ranch and he is not about to do this veg and political thing that my mother has stumbled into however every man born in 1925 has one thing in common and that is they don't cook they don't they don't prepare meals they don't clean up they don't know where the kitchen is my father has never shopped for food in a day in a day in his life and he sits at a table and when he's hungry food comes when he's done the plates go stick around three or four hours it starts again and that's been the arrangement for decades and so my mother takes full advantage she goes to the store and gets a good bread some dijon mustard which in fargo is saying something and she'll get some romaine lettuce and some plum tomatoes which she slices him up she and she'll put some phony baloney on top like fake meat it could be ham or turkey but it's about is the soy versions of these things are gluten you know it's it's vegetarian meat it gives up too my dad doesn't detect a thing says this is fine Margaret sure you know if he thinks it's great so anyway the reason I'm telling you this is it's been years now and he hasn't really detected it and I I've got two vegetarian parents and only one of them actually knows it so he's the thing is these fake meats are not really a wonderful thing necessarily I I view them as sort of a bridge to get people from where they are to healthier foods you know but like there are times when they're very handy if the neighbor kids are coming over for birthday do not make them lentil loaf you know they're gonna beat your kid up what you got to do is give them veggie hotdogs and they'll think that's like a cool political statement so those are the transition foods just a few resources we've got lots of books based on the work that we've been doing and one thing have any of you done our kickstart program we're really had a lot of fun with this it's just an online program we've had a hundred and fifty thousand people do it and every day you get an email from Alicia Silverstone or one of our many doctors who are involved or a and it just helps people to go vegan we're going to India we're also going to China because and the reason is China and India are the two biggest countries on the planet they are rapidly losing their plant-based traditions China has increased meat intake fifty percent in the last ten years I was meeting with a Chinese doctor yesterday who told me they're seeing diabetes like they've never seen it before so in March we're doing kick start in Mandarin in November we have an english-language one for all parts of China so we're really excited about that and please do spread the words it's all free it's free of commercial sponsorship and we really are hoping that people will take advantage of it all culturally appropriate recipes and Bollywood stars and it's a lot of fun the last thing that I just want to say is the reason this kid looks nervous is if you look at what is happening a generation ago we did not have such a healthy population back then we had more heart attacks than people had in Asia meat eaters were much less healthy than vegetarians but we were great then compared to where we are today childhood obesity is is off the scale and it's in large part because we're wealthier than we have been and by that I mean we're not spending so much on food but it's also part of it is intentional by intentional I mean the US Congress sits down and decides every five years how much money we're going to give to the dairy industry how much money are we going to put into raising feed crops for cattle and hogs and chickens and how much are we going to put into fruits and vegetables well there's how much we're gonna put into fruits and vegetables you need a microscope to see that well we made a proposal about what ought to happen right now Congress is starting to take up the farm again and we suggested that farmers are good honest folks but you do not need to write a check to every farmer in America who makes more income than your average American you don't need to send them a check for raising feed grains for livestock encourage them to raise healthier things on you when they have ups and downs like every other industry the car industry or the computer industry or any others they can take care of their own changes the US government does not have to cover their crop insurance when they pollute they should clean it up if you've got a big concentrated feeding operation that is putting mess into the waters you ought to be held responsible for that as opposed to what happens right now is that the taxpayers have to clean all that up the biggest the most controversial part of this is food stamps and now it's called snaps of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and that's right now that's every year that costs about seventy billion dollars because what what it is it's a credit card that you can get up to about $200 a month to spend at the store and one in seven Americans now gets it and I think they should get food benefits but the problem is that that card buys M&Ms and sodas and Velveeta just as much as it does brown rice and beans so what we've done is we've devised a plan that says there was a time when for any American whatever your level of income candy was a treat it wasn't free for anybody and why don't we do this why don't we say I want people to have the healthiest foods let's have brown rice and beans and vegetables and fruits for adults and for kids wherever they may be and let's leave it and if a person says I want soda the answer is fine you can have a soda but you're gonna pay for it I'm not giving you that free and if we do do you know who our biggest opposites are right now when we advocate for that on Capitol Hill our biggest opponents the biggest defenders of the current food assistance program is not economically disadvantaged people our biggest opponent is Kraft Foods and Hormel and Smithfield because they know that that credit card does not go for gasoline it does not go for a book it doesn't go for a car payment it's gonna be spent on their product and they view this as a shot in their corporate arm and they don't want people to just have brown rice and vegetables and fruits and healthy foods Mars wants you to buy candy and then want the government to tax you to buy it and if our program goes through every American will save 176 dollars a year because that's what you're paying now for junk and that's why we have a population that's unhealthy and I personally think it is demeaning to assume that economically disadvantaged people somehow feel they have to have junk food every every one of us whatever our economic level knows that free food dangled in front of us and tempting us is not really such a good thing and if I'm getting the healthiest things for my family and my kids then that's the best favor of all okay and the last thing is the commodity reform not to get so technical that's when the government says cheese prices are falling let's buy it up and put it in kids lunches at school why do you think there's so many cheeseburgers of cheese pizza in school it's not for the kids it's for the farmers and it's done to stabilize their prices and that's 100% wrong when a kid is growing up they should have only healthy foods and they should have that in the school that's but they should have nothing else dangled in front of them at all so if we do that if we do that over the next 10 years that's the figure that we're going to save three hundred eighty three billion dollars and we've we've given this to the supercommittee that's now meeting in Congress and I can tell you that every single member of Congress is going to say I don't want to go there because if I vote against the dairy industry if I vote against the meat industry do you think I'm gonna have a job after the next election that is what our country is dealing with and so here's what we have to do what we have to do is recognize that there are farmers and they are good folks and there are people who work for the food retailers and they are good people too but they're advocating for things that sometimes are good and sometimes they're not what we have to do is realize that if we can get the bad foods off our plates and off our kids plates we're not just gonna save money on food stamps and on school commodity programs we're gonna save money on health care like crazy we're gonna completely change the debate that we have right now and the most important thing is that families that are now torn apart by disease like the people we saw in the video that Jeff showed we can put that as a thing in the past you remember I want people to say do you remember when diabetes was a real big problem do you remember when everybody was overweight and before we could we realized that we had to go on a better better path it starts with each of us individually none of us was raised on a healthy diet but it starts by exploring it getting used to it and then once we get comfortable with it telling other people sharing the tools that we've had working with the schools working with our businesses making this the norm because even though they're an awful lot of people that who are demanding subsidies for unhealthy foods there are far more worried parents worried doctors worried teachers and the problem is that the parents of the teachers and doctors are silent but if we get together and we organized and we call our members of Congress and say you work for me we're gonna change this world we will win it's as simple as that we've just got to get noisy we've got to get organized we've got to really make our voices heard if we do that will revolutionize the health of this country thank you very much thank you thank you [Applause]

Channel: VegSource - Jeff Nelson

Views: 193,197

Keywords: neal barnard, vegan diet, plant based, weight loss, dr neal barnard, dr barnard, vegan starter kit, plant based diet, neal barnard diabetes, plant based news, neal barnard md, 21 day, kickstart, health, healthy, lose weight, type 2 diabetes, healthy meal prep, healthy food, expo, vegsource, healthy snacks, health tips

Id: xdToIu_ydpA

Length: 43min 37sec (2617 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 04 2019