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- [00:01]
Dr. Neal Barnard
Unlike every other punishing diabetes diet they were ever on before, they can eat all the carbs they want. There's no carb limit. And I saw something I had never seen before. What we found is that by 12 weeks, 88% reduction in hot flashes.
- [00:16]
Dan Buettner
News flash, ladies.
- [00:18]
Dr. Neal Barnard
Exactly.
- [00:18]
Dan Buettner
We have a hot flash cure. How much more likely am I to develop heart disease on my meat and cheese diet as opposed to my whole food plant based at age 40? For anyone suffering from joint pain, menstrual cramps, migraines, or type 2 diabetes, this next guest will blow you away. Dr. Neal Barnard is a physician, a clinical researcher, and the founding president of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, also known as pcrm. He's led studies that have shown the dramatic power of a simple diet to eliminate pain, reverse type 2 diabetes, and effortlessly lose weight. Dr. Neal, you know, you're one of my heroes because you're one of these scientists who has spent a career really understanding the research and the data and putting it to work in people's lives and doing it arguably more effectively than any other human in the United States. And why is that? Because you're actually teaching doctors how to guide people on what to eat. Something they don't really get in medical school, do they?
- [01:30]
Dr. Neal Barnard
Well, thank you for saying that. And you are right. Doctors are subject to the same problems that their patients are, and they've been a little bit slow to embrace it. Quick to embrace a new pharmaceutical, kind of slow to embrace the causes of illness, which are often on our plate. But we're making progress.
- [01:48]
Dan Buettner
I mean, doctors, they have to make a living. And the whole medical industry is sort of profit driven. There's not a lot of profit in keeping people healthy in the first place, is there?
- [01:58]
Dr. Neal Barnard
That's right. But I think there's maybe something else, too. If I had a new drug for type 2 diabetes, I mean, it would be in doctor's hands in a week. I mean, they would know about it, they would be using it, and they would say, you know, my patients want to take this new drug. And there would be commercials all over the television on it, too. But when we, we have been doing work and others have as well about the cause of type 2 diabetes. And we know what it is, and food is the big driver. And it's something that when patients know about it, they can make changes and sometimes make the disease go away. Really exciting. Doctors often don't share that excitement because it doesn't fit maybe their view of, you know, I'm Ben Casey, I'm a doctor I'm going to intervene. Yeah, yeah. Or, you know, surgery is something that's kind of a macho thing that I want to do. And the idea, I don't want to be Betty Crocker. I don't want to be talking to my patients about what they do in the kitchen. And I'm not trained. But I have to say, Dan, I think the saving grace is they don't have to. They don't have to talk to the patients about food. They just have to refer them to somebody who will, in the same case as an orthopedic surgeon, doesn't have to spend 45 minutes teaching you physical therapy techniques you could do. They refer somebody who does it. So the doctor needs our doctors in my clinic. I tell them, I want you to spend two minutes or three minutes on food. That's all you need to do. Because the dietitian will take the patient and their reluctant spouse and they'll kind of walk through it together. And that's a specialist who makes it. But if the doctor doesn't talk about it, the patient will not do it.
- [03:30]
Dan Buettner
You know, on the Dan Buettner podcast, we like to talk about longevity making helping people live a longer, better life. What percentage of the longevity formula is what we eat? I'm just asking to shoot from the hip. You know, you've written many books. Reversing diabetes, the power foods diet, the 21 day weight loss kickstart, the Cheese Trap, foods that fight pain. But you really know the science of what food does and what doesn't do to us. But of, you know, American life expectancy. What percentage is controlled by what we eat? Would you say?
- [04:06]
Dr. Neal Barnard
Wow, dan, that's a $64,000 question. I gotta say, it's a great question. You know, the human body is not designed to live forever. I mean, people aren't living to 300 years. I mean, our machine kind of wears out. But if you look at the things that strike us down early, cardiovascular disease, malignant disease, I mean, cancer, stroke, those things have food as a huge component to them. And when we put it to work, when we put food to work, it's. Well, it does two things. It averts some of those conditions. It allows us to instead of kind of have this dwindling life where in our 30s we've gained too much weight, we're on medicines and so forth, and in our 40s, we're on more medicines and we gradually snuff out. It's a more box shaped life. So you're exercising, you're living, you're getting on the floor with your grandkids, and then maybe when you're 95, you're killed in a fiery inferno in the Monaco Grand Prix or something like that.
- [05:04]
Dan Buettner
If only. Well, we had another guest on the podcast here, Dr. Jay Oshansky, a demographer. And he's figured that if you're an average American with an average set of genes and you do everything right in your life, our bodies are built to go to about mid-90s, so a little bit more if you're a woman, a little bit less if you're a man. And research that you spread both personally through your books, but also through pcrm, Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, I believe, is the diet that will help us get all the years that our bodies offer us. Maybe we could start with diabetes. You wrote this book, Reversing Diabetes. Do we have to get type 2 diabetes?
- [05:48]
Dr. Neal Barnard
We used to think it was genetics. You know, my father had it, my grandfather had it, that kind of thing. It's in my family tree, so I'll definitely get it. There are genetic components, but they're pretty small. They're pretty small. And then people thought, well, it's gotta be from sugar, because diabetes.
- [06:06]
Dan Buettner
Yeah, that was how we grew up.
- [06:08]
Dr. Neal Barnard
Wrong. I mean, you can understand why people would think that. Because my blood sugar is high, and when I eat sugar or sugary things or starchy things that release sugar, my blood sugar goes higher. So it's understandable. People thought sugar was the cause. However, in the 1990s, researchers at Yale did the most amazing thing. They brought in young, healthy, skinny people and volunteers for a research study. They stuck a needle in everybody's arm and they infused lipid fat into their veins. And, you know, don't try this at home, but the fat was going into their veins.
- [06:43]
Dan Buettner
And this is like the. Similar to the type of fat you'd see in a steak or a stick of butter.
- [06:47]
Dr. Neal Barnard
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And what happened was they became insulin resistant not within weeks or days, but within hours. Wow. Fat going into their veins. So what's going on? They repeated the study not with an infusion, but figured, you know, people don't infuse fat, they eat fat. So they gave them one fatty meal. A lot of fat. About the fat that a person might eat in the course of a day in a meal.
- [07:12]
Dan Buettner
And what would a fatty meal look like?
- [07:14]
Dr. Neal Barnard
Just like typical fast food. Double hamburger and a French fries, like a double cheeseburger, something like that, and a big order of fries. It's a lot of fat. But Americans eat that and what they showed is the same thing. You can make a person insulin resistant within hours. And what they discovered, by the way, it was true for bad fats like coconut fat or lard or something like that, as well as what we think of as better fats, like canola oil. In either case, you could do it, because what happened was the fat sneaks into the muscle cells and into the liver cells. You can't see it. You can see it on magnetic resonance spectroscopy, but you can't see it. You know, you can't pinch it. It's little bits of fat getting into the cells. When that gets in there, it stops. The mitochondria, your burners.
- [08:00]
Dan Buettner
Yeah, the little power factories, they can't
- [08:02]
Dr. Neal Barnard
work in a big oil slick. And insulin no longer can act on the cell very effectively. So our research team said, okay, insulin
- [08:12]
Dan Buettner
sort of unlocks the door to let sugar into our cells or glucose into our cells, right?
- [08:17]
Dr. Neal Barnard
Exactly. So the insulin comes out of your pancreas, which is behind your belly button, goes through the blood, parks on the surface of, say, a liver cell or a muscle cell. And it's just a key. It opens up that cell, lets the glucose come out of the blood into
- [08:31]
Dan Buettner
the cell, and that's the fuel. That's what powers our bodies, right?
- [08:35]
Dr. Neal Barnard
Yeah. The glucose is. It is your cell's favorite fuel. When you're in a race, you know, your muscles want that glucose. Your brain does, too. So when the cells are filled with fat. Doesn't happen.
- [08:49]
Dan Buettner
The door doesn't open.
- [08:50]
Dr. Neal Barnard
The door does not open.
- [08:51]
Dan Buettner
Yeah. So that sugar stays in your blood.
- [08:54]
Dr. Neal Barnard
Sugar stays in the blood. And anything you eat at that point is you can have a banana or an apple or a piece of bread, and the sugar cannot get into the cell. So people think, well, I shouldn't eat those foods. That's not the problem.
- [09:04]
Dan Buettner
But just to stick with one minute with the biology for a minute, so the sugar doesn't get in your cell, so your cell doesn't get fuel. Then what happens with that sugar, that glucose in your blood? What does it end up doing to the rest of your body?
- [09:17]
Dr. Neal Barnard
It's circulating in the bloodstream. It goes past the retina, starts retinopathy, damaging your eyes, goes through the kidneys, leading to nephropathy, damage to your kidneys. It goes down through to your feet, leading to the problems that people know about in later diabetes, where the circulation of their feet is no good.
- [09:38]
Dan Buettner
Your feet kind of rot, right?
- [09:39]
Dr. Neal Barnard
Yeah. I gotta tell you, amputations are the night. One of the nightmares we have of this disease, but it also hits your coronary arteries like nobody's business. And that is not what we want. So our research team did this rather naive study. We brought in individuals that said, I'm not concerned about whether you eat carbohydrate or sugar. I don't care about how much you eat. And what I would like to do is see if we can get the fat out of your cells. And to do that, we said no animal products. We made them vegan because we wanted not a drop of animal fat. And we kept oils really low, too, even healthy oils, because we were just going to pull that fat out of the cells. And I gotta tell you, the fat does come out of the cells.
- [10:26]
Dan Buettner
Is that right?
- [10:27]
Dr. Neal Barnard
We worked with Yale University using magnetic resonance spectroscopy and found we could pull about a third of the liver fat out in 16 weeks. A little bit more than that, and the muscle fat starts coming out too, and their blood sugars start to fall, despite the fact they might be eating more carbohydrate. And I saw something Dan I had never seen before. A man came in. He was 35 years old, something like that. Had diabetes for four years. He said, my family history is terrible. I need to do something. He did the diet, and over a year he lost about 60 pounds.
- [11:02]
Dan Buettner
And.
- [11:02]
Dr. Neal Barnard
And his A1C, which is our measurement of your blood sugar control, and you want it below seven for a person with diabetes. He was nine and a half. Wow, this is not good. He lost weight. His A1C was going down, down and down. And his private doctor said, I can't justify keeping you on medicine. Took away his medicine. His A1C fell to 5.3.
- [11:24]
Dan Buettner
Wow. So that's pre diabetes.
- [11:25]
Dr. Neal Barnard
It's not even pre diabetes. It's just normal. And so I gotta tell you, when I got his lab slip, I closed my office door and I paced around for about 10 minutes, trying to think. Could I tell him that he was cured? Because when I was in medical school, that was not a word that went in the same sentence as type 2 diabetes. And Dan, if you don't mind my mentioning this, I grew up in North Dakota. My father grew up in the cattle business and he hated it. And he left and he went to medical school. And my dad became the diabetes expert for Fargo in North Dakota. And a lot of people from eastern part of the state would come see him in western Minnesota, I would see my dad. And he got home every day around 6 o', clock, 6:15. He set his bag down, he'd slump into a chair Dan, I never once heard my father say that anyone with diabetes ever got better, let alone cured. He saw his job as a doctor to slow the damage. And here in front of me was this man with no detectable diabetes. And I thought, let's fight this disease, let's get aggressive about it. I don't wanna slow it down, I wanna get rid of it. And you can't get rid of it in every case. I mean, you have done damage to the body. But we see all the time diabetes improving, people reducing their medicines, getting off them, and sometimes the disease going away.
- [12:45]
Dan Buettner
What is this diet look like? What? So you said 21 or how long do you have to stick with it to start to see results?
- [12:52]
Dr. Neal Barnard
Well, we start seeing results often in the first day. By that, I mean, blood sugar's coming down. Now, sometimes they go up a little bit because the person's very insulin resistant. And we're putting carbs in their diet. And so for a couple of days, it's a little dicey, but within the first week, their blood sugar will start to fall. And then how they do and how quickly depends on how much weight they need to lose.
- [13:15]
Dan Buettner
So let's just put it in brass tacks here. I come to you, Dr. Neal Barnard, and I say, you know, I'm pre diabetic. I went to my doctor, they looked at my A1C, I'm 55 or above, and I don't want this disease. What diet are you going to put me on? What are you going to tell me to eat?
- [13:34]
Dr. Neal Barnard
Okay, what I'm going to do is I'm going to say, here's a cell and I want to get the fat out of your cell. This is news to the patient. They never heard of it before. But I say, you've got it, it's in there. We're going to get rid of it to the extent we can. So what I'm going to say is, let's get the animal products out of your diet and let's keep oils really low. Now, that sounds like a tall order. And for people at the beginning, it does seem challenging. But unlike every other punishing diabetes diet they were ever on before, they can eat all the carbs they want. There's no carb limit, there's no limit on portions. And what we do is we say, what do you eat now? All right, for dinner last night, I had spaghetti. Okay. Instead of meat sauce, that's have tomato sauce.
- [14:16]
Dan Buettner
Okay, so spaghetti's okay?
- [14:18]
Dr. Neal Barnard
Absolutely, yeah. And then I had chili for lunch. Okay. Instead of meat, chili how about bean chili? Oh, yeah, fine.
- [14:27]
Dan Buettner
For breakfast, can you have olive oil? Can you have cooked that chili with some oil?
- [14:31]
Dr. Neal Barnard
What we try to do is to always help the patient to understand. I want to get the fat out
- [14:35]
Dan Buettner
of there, even if it's olive oil,
- [14:37]
Dr. Neal Barnard
even if it's extra virgin olive oil directly imported from Italy. What I will always say to the patient, patient is, if you want to bring that in, bring it in a little bit later. For now, I want to cure you. Oh, and by the way, the patient doesn't have to believe it or believe in it. You don't have to believe in penicillin. If you've got a urinary tract infection and you're hurt, I'm going to give you an antibiotic, and you can be as skeptical as you want. I'm going to cure you. So what I say to the patient is, let's do this now, and let's jump in the deep end of the swimming pool together. And it'll sound like a big thing, but we're going to do it. And we sit down with the patient and their patient's spouse, and we figure out what they can eat. And they take about a week to come up with the best choices. They invariably have lots of them. And then if they want to loosen it up later, that's their business. And you can get diabetes back again. But for the most part, people discover it's easier than they thought. And then they also discover, well, you told me you could help me with my diabetes. You forgot to tell me how much weight I was gonna lose. And you didn't tell me that my joints wouldn't hur. And my skin, you know, I had eczema. I don't have it. It's kind of like you get this big surprise package of things. But it does seem like a change because when I grew up in North Dakota, I never heard of a person eating a vegetarian diet or vegan diet.
- [16:01]
Dan Buettner
Yeah.
- [16:01]
Dr. Neal Barnard
And then there's all these words that
- [16:02]
Dan Buettner
sounds very kind of San Francisco or something. That's not North Dakota.
- [16:07]
Dr. Neal Barnard
Right. Exactly. But on the other hand, people very soon come to get it.
- [16:13]
Dan Buettner
How long do you have to commit to. Usually if I'm pre diabetic or even diabetic right now, or I'm overweight, and I want to see some results. If you tell people you got to do this forever, it's overwhelming.
- [16:27]
Dr. Neal Barnard
Absolutely.
- [16:27]
Dan Buettner
But give us a timeframe where, okay, I'm going to commit to this to see the results. How much time?
- [16:34]
Dr. Neal Barnard
Well, you can do it in different Ways the blood sugars usually start dropping within about a week. Everybody's different, but you'll see it. And that's very invigorating for people.
- [16:42]
Dan Buettner
Oh, yeah.
- [16:42]
Dr. Neal Barnard
Oh, and by the way, you gotta tell their doctor, if they got a private doctor who's doing this, make sure they know. Because you've gotta start taking people off their medicines because their blood sugars can fall fast. And of course the patients love it and the doctors are shocked too. But you'll see results within the first week or two about blood Sugars coming down. A1Cs are usually measured every three months. And if your first A1C measurement is gonna be lower, what you said I think is really important is people don't want to make a commitment to something that might at first they're unsure. So don't make a commitment. Focus on the short term. If you're an alcoholic, one day at a time, that is fine. If you're trying to quit smoking, don't think, I'll never go to a party. And light up. Don't burden yourself. Let's just do this now, see how you like it. And most people adore it.
- [17:36]
Dan Buettner
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- [20:53]
Dr. Neal Barnard
Yeah, well, that's the first task. So one of the doctors who works for me, they'll refer the patient to sit down with a dietitian and just go through it. So they'll say, I'm eating at Taco Bell. I'm meeting some friends today at Taco Bell. So look at the menu. Meat taco? I don't think so. Bean burrito, hold the cheese. Can I have jalapenos on it? Yeah. Okay. Or I'm at Subway. Let's see, I could have the Italian bread and I could put in all the veggies like spinach and lettuce and tomato and the onions and the red wine vinegar. And so you just figure out what you have, where you are. And Italian restaurants, I mean, the chef says, I got you covered. I mean, you know, you start with a salad, you have grilled vegetables. On the side, you have your angel hair pasta with an arrabbiata sauce. If you like it spicy, marinara, if you don't like it spicy, your espresso is okay. And by the way, back on oil. I want to mention one Thing we did a study where we compared a Mediterranean diet to a vegan diet. And the plant based diet had it beat for the most part. But extra virgin olive oil does have polyphenols in it that have some real benefits. And I think that's why we saw a better blood pressure lowering in the Mediterranean phase than in the vegan phase. I think it was because of the polyphenols. Now everything else got better. More in the vegan phase, much more weight loss and better lipids. But there are people who will make a case for the health benefits of certain oils. And I think you can understand that.
- [22:28]
Dan Buettner
I want to sort of parenthetically I want to bring up this vocabulary, plant based vegan. I was with some friends in Miami. They own the Love Life Cafe, John Mackey also owns. And they were telling me that since about COVID that their business has dropped off. There used to be kind of a vegan movement and was their opinion, this vegan movement has lost steam because of some of the other attitude trappings that come along with the word vegan. So what's the difference between vegan and plant based and should we be using one over another?
- [23:09]
Dr. Neal Barnard
I don't worry about it too much really, to tell you the truth.
- [23:11]
Dan Buettner
But you're trying to get people to sign on.
- [23:14]
Dr. Neal Barnard
Yeah, a vegan diet. The definition is it just means you're not eating animal products. Plant based means you're vegan but you don't want people to know it. But isn't vegan sounds easier.
- [23:27]
Dan Buettner
Isn't vegan sort of an ethical. Have an ethical connotation to it?
- [23:33]
Dr. Neal Barnard
I think for a lot of people it does. I got corrected by an editor of a journal because I talked about us using a plant based diet. And the editor said, wait, let's be clear. It's a vegan diet. There's no animal products. That's a term dietitians understand. Use that term. Okay, it doesn't matter. But one thing I will address which is important. Everyone's a little resistant to making any diet change. And I think they should be resistant because there's nonsense out there. So if I say, wait, a low fat vegan diet could really improve your diabetes. People are right to say prove that to me because it doesn't sound. I mean, you can eat bread and you can eat pasta and you can eat potatoes and your diabetes would get better. Yes, it does, but it's hard to believe. So I think people are right to be skeptical. However, when they put it to work, it ends up sort of proving itself and the words end up being detoxified. But we're seeing one movement now that I think is a little bit is well meaning but a little destructive. And that's the idea of processed food. People will correctly say that there's too much processed junk.
- [24:34]
Dan Buettner
You hear it all the time. And that's like the panacea, get rid of processed food.
- [24:38]
Dr. Neal Barnard
Right. And so people will say, I could eat a hamburger that's made straight out of a cow or I could eat a veggie burger and I don't know what's in it. It's got all these ingredients. Well, that's been put to the test. And despite people's reluctance to have something processed, if you eat a veggie burger, it's always better than the product that it replaces.
- [25:01]
Dan Buettner
Is there any level of animal products that's okay for your diet? Just putting the ethical considerations and animal cruelty and the carbon footprint and all those other issues aside, is there any safe level of animal products? Meat, cheese, eggs?
- [25:16]
Dr. Neal Barnard
It's funny, when we got into this, originally there was vegetarian diets and then there was a semi vegetarian diet which meant you ate meat but like less than once a week. There was a pesco vegetarian, meaning you're eating fish but not other things. And then there was the lacto ovo, meaning milk, eggs, lacto ovo vegetarian. And then there's the person who says, well, I'm pretty much vegetarian, but I do eat eggs and milk and some chicken and some fish. And I call them the ovo lacto pesco polo vegetarian. But anyway, what we see from the Adventists population in particular, where, oh, what a research goldmine, they've got people on every kind of diet. And the more you walk down the ladder from a full meat eater to a person who eats no animal products at all, BMI gets progressively healthier and diabetes risk just falls right off once you aren't having animal products.
- [26:08]
Dan Buettner
I know an interesting factoid I can plug in because I know the advent of Zeal study followed 103,000Americans for 30 years and it found that people who are on a 100% whole food plant based diet after 20 years, I've weighed 20 pounds less than their counterpart who are eating meat, cheese and eggs. So yeah, yeah, so you weigh less, which that's the object of a lot of people's eating patterns.
- [26:38]
Dr. Neal Barnard
It works. It works in a couple ways. This is something that's got me so excited. Harvard put out a study where they looked at, they have huge cohorts, the Nurses Health Study and health professionals Follow up study. They follow them year after year after year. And they found these amazing things. The more people eat of certain foods, the more weight they lose. And you think, wait a minute.
- [26:58]
Dan Buettner
Oh, that's interesting.
- [26:59]
Dr. Neal Barnard
Yeah. You think, how could that be? If I eat more, I've got to gain weight. It doesn't matter if I'm on the Snickers diet. But if they eat more of certain specific foods, they lose more weight. And the reason partly is you're crowding out certain other foods. But certain foods will tame your appetite or increase your metabolism. And the top of the list was the humble blueberry and strawberries and all the berry cousins.
- [27:24]
Dan Buettner
This is very interesting.
- [27:26]
Dr. Neal Barnard
Yeah. And you think, well, berries, you know what? I ate berries. Well, you think about it. Actually, I haven't had any berries in like a couple months. You know, I just. I see them at the store, they look so nice. You know, people don't eat them very much, but when they do, they weigh less.
- [27:38]
Dan Buettner
So the more berries you eat, the less you're going to weigh.
- [27:42]
Dr. Neal Barnard
As the years go by, if you're like the people at Harvard. And then number two is cruciferous vegetables, which you know are cancer fighters, but they also are associated strongly with weight loss. The third group was. Yes.
- [27:51]
Dan Buettner
Which is cauliflower and broccoli and kale.
- [27:55]
Dr. Neal Barnard
Cabbage. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Group number three was just green vegetables in general, like spinach. If people ate more, they lost more weight. Melons like cantaloupe, watermelon.
- [28:07]
Dan Buettner
That's surprising because you think a lot of high sugar, not a lot of fiber in there.
- [28:12]
Dr. Neal Barnard
Right, exactly. Associated with weight loss. Followed by citrus fruits and then beans in the bean group. And bean products like soy products also strongly. So.
- [28:23]
Dan Buettner
Glad beans made it in there.
- [28:25]
Dr. Neal Barnard
You know, I'm a bean fan and rightly so. Actually, I thought about you. I was down in Costa Rica thinking about the. The all. What you have written a lot of beans down there. Exactly. And I went on, the more beans
- [28:38]
Dan Buettner
you eat, the longer you live and the less you weigh.
- [28:40]
Dr. Neal Barnard
Exactly. No, it's true. And the less diabetes you're gonna have. But anyway, what these foods are doing, in part, they do tame your appetite. They've all got fiber, and fiber has basically no calories, almost no calories. And so you're filling up and you're just. You're satisfied sooner. Yeah, yeah. But research is at Tufts University, did a study my group is never going to do. They brought in 90 people and took stool samples from all of them and they teased them apart.
- [29:07]
Dan Buettner
Looking for volunteers.
- [29:09]
Dr. Neal Barnard
Yeah. Well, yeah. Do you want to be able. Anyway, what they did, they just said, okay, half of you white bread diet, half of you whole grain diet. And what they found is that the people on the whole grains, amazingly the fiber in them goes down your digestive tract. And in addition to keeping you regular and lowering your cholesterol and all the good things fiber does, it also finds calories you haven't absorbed yet and it just grabs ahold of em and it carries them out with a waste. So you're flushing calories down the toilet. And they found that just that diet change alone was good for about 100 calories a day lost.
- [29:46]
Dan Buettner
Wow.
- [29:46]
Dr. Neal Barnard
Now it's not huge, but you get it every day.
- [29:48]
Dan Buettner
Add some.
- [29:48]
Dr. Neal Barnard
You get it every day. And we found that the appetite taming effect is good for maybe 200 calories a day. And, and then we brought people into our laboratory and we measure their calorie burn, how fast you're burning calories, which we can tell by your oxygen consumption, which is easy to measure. And what we showed is that your calorie burn goes up about 15%. If you have been doing this diet,
- [30:15]
Dan Buettner
eating a whole grain bread as opposed to white grain.
- [30:18]
Dr. Neal Barnard
Oh, I'm sorry, in this case, the whole grain bread is the trapping. Is the calorie trapping that. Okay, flushes the kidney.
- [30:24]
Dan Buettner
When you say this diet, what do you mean?
- [30:26]
Dr. Neal Barnard
Low fat vegan. We brought in 244 people, they all wanted to lose weight and we said, okay, no animal products, keep oils really low. And afterward, everyone came into our office and they sat in a chair and we put this mask on to measure their carbon dioxide output and their oxygen input. And before and after, we used exactly the same test meal. But after. They have been doing a plant based diet without added oils or minimal oils, the fat has come out of their cells, their mitochondria have rebounded. The mitochondrial biogenesis is influenced by what you've been eating in the past 72 hours. Their mitochondria are saying, yay, I'm young again. And what happens is they burn calories faster. So I give them exactly the same meal today that I gave you at the beginning of the study, but you are now burning calories, about 15% more calories in the hours right after the meal. Now that's not huge. It's not huge, but you get each of these every day and you add
- [31:23]
Dan Buettner
it up 250 calories a day or something.
- [31:26]
Dr. Neal Barnard
Well, you get the appetite taming, you get the calorie trapping, you get the metabolism booster, they all come from the same diet. And so as time goes on, people lose weight, they lose weight really, really, really well, and you get all the benefits that go along with it. And you can give all that back. You could say, this is fun, but let's go out for a cheesy pizza tonight. And you can put the fat right back in your cells that quickly. One meal.
- [31:48]
Dan Buettner
So you could work for a month getting the fat out of your cells and have two pieces of pizza and you're back to where you started.
- [31:55]
Dr. Neal Barnard
It'll take you a little while to get back to. And what you can do is you can get your cells to absorb that fat really rapidly. It'll take you some time to lose weight, and by about day three of that, you'll think, wait a minute, I learned a better way. I don't want to do this.
- [32:10]
Dan Buettner
I'm just going to put a plug in for myself. That book over my shoulder is the diet you're talking about, the Blue Zones diet. 100% whole food plant based. Although I do permit my olive oil in there. Not a lot, but we kind of saute our vegetables and olive oil. I don't know if that's a thumbs up or thumbs down or thumbs sideways for.
- [32:31]
Dr. Neal Barnard
Well, let me say two things. Number one, that is a great book.
- [32:35]
Dan Buettner
Ah, there we go.
- [32:36]
Dr. Neal Barnard
No, I'm serious, Dan. That is a phenomenal book. When I first saw that, I thought, A, all the recipes are great. B, it's the kind of book you want to give to somebody you love because you're trying to get them to eat in a more healthful way. And you have done that so good on that one. And the one that. And the follow up is, you know, the One Pot Meals book.
- [32:54]
Dan Buettner
Thank you very much.
- [32:55]
Dr. Neal Barnard
It is a great book. But the other thing I want to say is when Ancel Keys was looking another good Minnesotan, he was looking, yeah, he was at the University of Minnesota, looking out of the snowy landscape in February, thinking, what the heck am I doing here? He went to southern Italy and he fell in love with Nicoterra, the little village there. But if you look at the diet they were eating, it was the 1950s. Italy had lost two disastrous world wars. It was trying to build itself back and it was starting to recover. But these people, they knew what a chickpea was, because that's something they could afford to eat. It was not steak, it was not huge. And even though it was a Mediterranean diet, which is what Ancel Keys said, wow, this is a great diet. It wasn't a huge Fish filet. And it wasn't dripping in oil. The fat content of that diet was 23%. So olive oil was used. It was the one that was preferred. Okay, so now in Washington, D.C. where I live, people think, well, to do a Mediterranean diet, I gotta take my bottle and go, glug, glug, glug, glug, glug, glug, glug. Oil all over everything. I would stick my bread in it.
- [33:58]
Dan Buettner
If you listen to Brian Johnson, you should do shot glasses. Olive oil.
- [34:03]
Dr. Neal Barnard
That is not what they were doing in southern Italy. In southern Italy, oil was what they were using. And if you ever talked to a chef from those days, they would say, butter. Are you kidding? Oh, yeah. Butter was a northern thing. Yeah. Same in France. In northern France, yes. In southern France on Marseilles. No way. Cream sauces? Absolutely not. Today it's all gotten homogenized and people think, no Mediterranean diet. It's fish and chicken and oil all over everything. They were eating modest quantities of those things. Yes, modest. Including the oil.
- [34:33]
Dan Buettner
Very low. You know, I'm working on another book. And we went to another one of Ancel Key's seven country study places, and we found not only did they eat very low meat, what shocked us is they were eating a pound of bread and pasta a day. A day. There's all these carbophobes that, oh, my God, I'm going to get fat. I'm going to get wheat belly. I'm getting hard. A pound a day. And they're the longest lived, healthiest population in the Western hemisphere. So go figure.
- [35:08]
Dr. Neal Barnard
Well, bread is not fattening. You remember there was a French. What was it? French women don't get fat.
- [35:12]
Dan Buettner
Yeah.
- [35:13]
Dr. Neal Barnard
How many French women have you seen with a baguette in their bicycle? All kinds of it. That's French food. Bread has a lot of carbohydrate in it. Carbohydrates have. And I want people to tattoo this on their forearm. Carbohydrate has four calories per gram. Fats and oils have nine. So twice that bread is okay. You know, you can slather it with cheesy goo and, you know, I mean, that's gonna pack the calories in there.
- [35:40]
Dan Buettner
Speaking of cheesy goo, you wrote a great book. I was actually at the opening. I don't know if you recall, it's cheese trap. You know, we eat a lot of cheese in this country. I think something like 400 pounds of dairy products a year. Just an unbelievable amount of dairy. Is cheese bad? We know meat is. But Is cheese bad for us?
- [35:59]
Dr. Neal Barnard
I was really transfixed by this phenomenon. We'd see over and over again. People would come into our studies, huge numbers of people, they come in and they're doing a plant based diet and they're doing great. I'm off my diabetes medicines. I feel terrific. My athletics are better than they've been. But the one thing I really miss, doctor, is cheese. I kept hearing this over and over again. They're talking about it the way an alcoholic remembers, like the last drink before he quit drinking. You know, this fun, this. What is it about cheese? And so we dissected it and there are a couple things to say. Cheese contains what are called casomorphins. These are opiate peptides that are. They come from the dairy protein and all dairy products have them. The nursing calf drinks from mom's udder and the casein protein breaks apart to release these opiates that go to the calf's brain and they have a calming effect. Cheese is the. It's dairy crack, really. I mean, they concentrate. The casomorphants are concentrated in cheese, which is why when people eat too much cheese, they get constipated. It's a narcotic. It's like Demerol going down your digestive tract. Is that right? So you get constipated, but you also get hooked on it because that stinky sock smell of cheese is now associated with the opiates on your brain. They in turn trigger dopamine release. And so people get hooked on it and they end up loving it. And the stinkier the better because that triggers this brain reaction. But when people see what cheese is, the fact that the average American consumes 70,000 calories of cheese every year, just cheese. This is before we get to the ice cream and the fact of what it's doing to your body and also frankly, what it's doing to our environment. And if you ever go to a dairy farm, ask to see the calves, they're all dead. You know, they take them away from mom.
- [37:56]
Dan Buettner
Oh, that's horrible.
- [37:57]
Dr. Neal Barnard
Well, how are you going to get the milk that the calf is going to drink? And you can go to a goat farm too. Same story. So for people who have a heart for animals, they all think, oh, it's so nice here. The cows themselves would normally live.
- [38:08]
Dan Buettner
I'm not butchering any animal here.
- [38:10]
Dr. Neal Barnard
Well, they take the calf away. If the calf is male, he's going to be veiled really soon. If he's female, she goes into a hutch and in a year she's going to get impregnated in a way she's not going to want to because otherwise she won't make milk and then her calf gets taken away and then mom would normally live to be 20. But farmers are smart and they know that they're not getting as much milk per unit feed after about age 4. So she's going to have her be hung up by her legs at age 4 and have her throat slit and she's going to become low grade hamburger. So the reason I say these things is people look at just the veneer of what they're eating. They never look at how did it get there. And after I started to realize the benefits of broccoli and plants. I'm kidding a little bit, but plants in general. I remember going with my dad and my uncle to the stockyards where we'd bring cattle. I kept remembering what they went through, how we kind of tried to make them look healthier than they were. As they're getting auctioned off. There's a lot of spin offs.
- [39:17]
Dan Buettner
Yeah, I think you're right. People, they don't want to see where their food really comes from because if they did they probably wouldn't eat a lot of it. But at the end of the day, I've been through this. I work with populations and you can remind them about the fact that the bacon they love comes from an animal that has the IQ of a three year old child and feels pain the same way and socializes the same way as humans do, but for some reason it's forgotten by the time it gets to the plate. You can remind them that the carbon footprint of meat is something like 20% of all the carbon we admit comes from our might be higher. Maybe you can remind them that eating a whole food plant based diet is much healthier, conveying perhaps a half a dozen extra years of life expectancy over meaty cheesy diet. But at the end of the day what people really care about is deliciousness. They want a delicious lunch and a delicious dinner. And I found that if you take all the effort you'd use to promote or to remind people of cruelty or carbon footprint or health and put it all in just making the food delicious. I use this word, maniacal delicious. That book, the Blue's own Kitchen we went through about 500 recipes to get 100 we knew would be like I have a line of food called Blue Zones Kitchens frozen foods for every single. We have six different meals. For every one of those meals we went through 26 iterations before we got the right one. And so I'm just a big believer. I like to remind people of the. The what's under the iceberg. You know, 90% is underwater that we're talking here about that 90% under what's underwater, the 10% above the water is the taste.
- [41:12]
Dr. Neal Barnard
I think you are absolutely right that people want food that tastes good. And doctors are not into that. I mean, they don't even know where the kitchen is in their house. The food just comes in. And they're not thinking about taste. They're thinking about, I want your mitochondria to work better, but you want something that's good for breakfast. And the Power Foods Diet, I have to say, was the funnest book I ever wrote, because what we did is we took the foods that had been shown at Harvard to be associated with weight loss.
- [41:37]
Dan Buettner
Okay, what are those foods?
- [41:38]
Dr. Neal Barnard
Well, for example, it's like berries and straw. Like blueberries have anthocyanins in them. Yep. Strawberries have anthocyanins, too, but there's a particular one that's reddish called pelargonidin, and it's good for your brain. It's also good for weight loss. The cruciferous vegetable group, all of them are great. So broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, kale, the green leafy vegetables, melons I mentioned. And by the way, this can be cantaloupe, it can be watermelon. Cut it up, put it in a glass bowl in your fridge, and your family comes by and they eat it. They can't resist it. Citrus fruits, bean group, of course. These are really important. And beans, I don't care what kind of bean it can be. Beans, peas, lentils, the chickpea is a bean. And all the bean products. So I worked then with Dustin Harder, who's a great, great, great recipe developer, and we said, we are not in this book telling people, don't eat this, don't eat this. Your doctor's wagging his finger. We're going to say, eat this. We're going to make a lasagna. We're going to make a soup or a salad. Foods that you really love. We're going to make desserts. We're going to make frozen pops that the kids come by, and they're purple and they're sweet and it looks like junk food, but it's made from raspberries and blueberries and things that you feel good about. So it was really fun, I have to say. And by the way, back to you, Dan, I learned this from you. Your recipes that you do in Blue Zone's kitchen. I think of them as kind of the best tested recipes in the universe. Partly because you're drawing on cultures that threw out, a long time ago things that just didn't work. And they've keyed into certain techniques that work, and you've taken that and you've said, these are things that people are gonna like that are gonna work for them because that's what they want. They don't wanna be healthy with something that's punishment. So I've tried to kind of emulate that a little bit and to realize that. Let's use foods that are familiar, that are quick, that don't require you to be a junior chef gourmet, and that your family will eat and that your kids will eat.
- [43:48]
Dan Buettner
And in the power foods diet, how do you define a power food? What are the power foods? Because we are relentlessly marketed power. And I'm generally of the opinion that if the label says power food, it's not a power food.
- [44:04]
Dr. Neal Barnard
A power food has to have power, in this case, to cause weight loss. That's the power I'm looking for.
- [44:09]
Dan Buettner
So are you talking the blueberries and beans, and that's our.
- [44:12]
Dr. Neal Barnard
And all the things that they can turn into. Exactly. So it's going to be a power food if it tames your appetite, if eating this means, for some reason you're satisfied with fewer calories, or if it boosts your metabolism in such a way that I can measure, or if it will trap calories so you don't absorb them. These are power.
- [44:32]
Dan Buettner
Give us five power foods so people know exactly what we're talking about. Just five of your favorites.
- [44:38]
Dr. Neal Barnard
Okay. Let's say it's dessert time. I would take a martini glass, and I would put in there a parfait that's got a little red layer on the top and a little white layer in the middle, a little chocolate layer at the bottom.
- [44:51]
Dan Buettner
And.
- [44:51]
Dr. Neal Barnard
And you're going to think this is just, like, delicious.
- [44:53]
Dan Buettner
Yeah, yeah. Killer indulgence.
- [44:55]
Dr. Neal Barnard
And if you look at what's inside, it's raspberries and it's blueberries and little cacao powder. It's not dark chocolate with all the fat. It's the cacao powder whipped in. And when you weren't looking, I whipped it into some, like, soft tofu, like silken tofu, because I didn't want to tell you that.
- [45:16]
Dan Buettner
Which is delicious. Delicious, by the way.
- [45:18]
Dr. Neal Barnard
It is so cool. And this particular dessert is one that we use all the time. And Then you can put some berries on the top. It looks absolutely gourmet. It is the quickest, easiest thing. It seduces your whole family. They can't believe it.
- [45:30]
Dan Buettner
And we eat with our eyes first, don't we?
- [45:32]
Dr. Neal Barnard
Yeah, you do. Every day's Valentine's Day with foods like that. But, you know, these are really important because me, I am personally not a foodie. I just never really cared about it. And so I've realized that I have to hire people who are. Because if I'm gonna cure your diabetes, it's not all medicine. A lot of stuff is coming out
- [45:49]
Dan Buettner
of the kitchen, you know, in general. The truth is, unless it's a three alarm fire with your health, I'm going to die if I eat this. I just had my third heart attack. Or they just had to cut off my left foot. They're going to have to cut off my right foot if I keep eating. People don't change.
- [46:07]
Dr. Neal Barnard
Oh, my God.
- [46:08]
Dan Buettner
It's so hard to get people to think preventatively.
- [46:11]
Dr. Neal Barnard
True story. Person I know, longtime overweight person, finally quit smoking. Okay. After being threatened by his doctor. Ended up having pretty bad artery blockages in his arteries going all the way down to his feet. And his doctor said, I got to do bypasses on the blood going down to your legs so that you're not going to have an amputation. So they do a surgical bypass like in the heart, but they did it in the legs.
- [46:40]
Dan Buettner
And.
- [46:40]
Dr. Neal Barnard
And he contacted me and said, I don't want to have this happen again. I probably got atherosclerosis in my heart and everywhere else. His father was dead in his early 50s. I said, well, if I were you, I'd get the cholesterol out of your diet. Get the animal products out of your diet. Dean Ornish showed 30 years ago that you'll open up those arteries again. He went to his doctor and the doctor said, vegan diet. Yeah, it'll open your arteries up, but you won't follow it. It's too hard. And you know what? He didn't. And about six months ago, he had three toes amputated.
- [47:13]
Dan Buettner
Oh, my God.
- [47:14]
Dr. Neal Barnard
And you think, wait, stop. Spaghetti is not torture. You could put a marinara sauce on it and have some grilled asparagus with it. This is all right. You'll come to enjoy it and you'll like having your body parts attached. So for many people, the taste trumps the health issues. Not everybody. I mean, there's a lot of folks. If your grandma developed Alzheimer's disease when she was 65, and you're now 61. I don't want to go there. So we will make some changes. And we have now about 200 people in a diabetes study. Every single one says, I don't want to go blind. They're motivated.
- [47:54]
Dan Buettner
But you talk a 30 year old who is eating a large pizza and eating burgers and they feel fine. They might not have a lot of energy after their meal, but it's 20 or 30 years before, or maybe 10 years before they start feeling it.
- [48:11]
Dr. Neal Barnard
They need a reward now. And if they're not getting a reward now, then it's a question of taste. All questions of taste. Now that said, we see a lot of pudgy kids and the question is, should I give them a GLP1 receptor agonist? Should I be injecting them? And the answer is, let's start with why they're pudgy, how much cheese are they eating at school and all these things. And let's work to make foods healthy and tasty at the same time.
- [48:36]
Dan Buettner
I just have a message for moms out there. And I'll tell you what, we have so many headwinds in our food environment here. It is so hard, especially if you don't have a lot of money to go out, to eat, to eat out of the house. Because most, even a nice restaurant, most of the entrees are meat and cheese and fried and you know, yeah, you can go over to the sides, but that's no fun. The secret, I think to living longer and for a 20 year old person, the value proposition for a woman is about 10 extra years. For a man, it's about 12 extra years. Cook at home, get yourself the power foods diet. Get yourself a. It doesn't have to be my book, but a whole plant based cookbook. Get your family together Sunday afternoon, page through it, find a half a dozen recipes that this looks good to me and cook them, learn how to cook them. And the most important thing is taste them. Because once you've gotten the equipment, bought the ingredients, made it yourself and then tasted it, oh my God, I love this Sardinian minestrone or I love this Neil Barnard parfait that has no processed foods in it. Our job is done. Cause you're gonna remember, I love that. And you're not gonna be as hungry to run out to go through a drive through somewhere.
- [50:01]
Dr. Neal Barnard
So we did another study that dovetails onto this. We asked people, in the course of one of the studies I mentioned where we measured their metabolism, we asked everybody to track their food costs. I want your Receipt, you know, from Safeway or Kroger or Publix or Whole Foods or wherever you're buying foods. And we added it up and we found that when people are doing a plant based diet, they are spending more on vegetables and fruits and beans and maybe a soy burger and so forth, but they're spending less or none on cheese and meat. And the average person saves about 15 or 16% on their food costs, which is about 500 bucks a year for one person.
- [50:39]
Dan Buettner
That's a lot of money for the average family.
- [50:40]
Dr. Neal Barnard
Well, if you've got a family of four, you got a trip to Las Vegas, you could sneak in and then find something to eat when you get there.
- [50:46]
Dan Buettner
Yeah, I want to talk about pain. You know, joint pain and the aches and pain people get as they get older. And you've written a book called Foods that Fight Pain. What kind of pains are we talking about here?
- [51:00]
Dr. Neal Barnard
Well, you said one. Inflammatory pain is a big one. Rheumatoid arthritis is a biggie. But I have to confess, the one that started me off. My phone rang one day at my desk and it was a young woman who said, I can't get out of bed. She says, I got such bad cramps. I got a flight today. I got a business meeting, I can't go. And many women have menstrual cramps during their reproductive years, and for about one in ten, they are bad. And she called me up because she wanted a Demerol prescription. And I said, I can give you a pain prescription, pain medications for a couple of days to get you on the plane. But I started thinking, why do you have pain? What is this about? And I realized that it's gotta be one of two things. It's either primary dysmenorrhea and just short and sweet. If you got a little too much estrogen in your blood, female sex hormone. It causes changes in the uterus that lead to significantly more pain at the end of the month. And another condition is endometriosis, which is related to it painful. You get surgery, it comes back, you are miserable, and you hate your doctor with endometriosis. I said to her there was a study in Boston that wanted to see not how could we knock out this pain, but how could we prevent breast cancer. So they used high fiber foods, which reduces estrogen levels. They use low fat foods, that reduces estrogen, too. And I guessed that that would help her. I didn't know because no one had ever done a study. I thought, if I can bring down estrogen, I can get your uterus feeling better. So I said, would you take Demerol for two days, but do a diet with no animal products? Now everything's got fiber. Keep the fat out of the diet. Now there's not much fat. Call me back in a month. She said, Doctor. She called me back a month later. She said, Dr. Beiner, I got my period today and I got nothing.
- [52:52]
Dan Buettner
Wow.
- [52:52]
Dr. Neal Barnard
Like, nothing. And I thought, well, that's cool. Do it again. Another month. She was fine as long as she stuck with the diet. So I thought, that's not proof. That's intriguing. So I did a study with the Georgetown University Department of OBGYN with a large group of people. And it works. It amazingly works. So what you're doing is you're using foods to adjust the hormones that cause the pain. But back to your joints, that's not hormones. Your joints. If I look into a person, they got rheumatoid arthritis. Look in that joint. It looks terrible. It is inflamed. It is red. Something is attacking it. And what's attacking it is antibodies that your body is making against yourself. Well, what are the antibodies for? They are supposed to be knocking out viruses that entered your body, but they mistook that little dairy protein that came from your cheese pizza as a virus. So you can trigger immunity based on what you're eating. And all kinds of autoimmune conditions, from rheumatoid arthritis to Sjogren's disease and many, many others, are triggered by food. Not in every case. And the foods that trigger them. It's a wide range. And in this case, it's not dairy fat, and it's not the dairy sugar that upsets people's stomach. It's the dairy protein. So we're just prospectively eliminating triggers. So the biggest triggers that you'll see are dairy. I'll give you a list. Dairy products, chocolate, eggs, citrus fruits, meat, wheat, nuts, onions, corn, apples, bananas. These are not bad foods, but these are foods that, whether they're healthy or not, like, there's nothing wrong with a strawberry. But if you're allergic to a strawberry, you're not going to eat it. So if wheat happens to be a trigger for your joint pain, we're going to take the wheat away.
- [54:48]
Dan Buettner
I want to refocus this because I think it's really important. What are the types of pain that foods can really help fight?
- [54:58]
Dr. Neal Barnard
Okay. Hormonal pain. I mentioned first, inflammatory pain, which I mentioned. And that can be.
- [55:04]
Dan Buettner
So hormonal is your period, mostly.
- [55:08]
Dr. Neal Barnard
Yeah. And all the cancers that come from it. So if you're having cancer pain. Right, okay, yes, but what I mean is cancer pain is the worst pain that people get.
- [55:17]
Dan Buettner
That's huge.
- [55:18]
Dr. Neal Barnard
And that's hormonally driven as well.
- [55:19]
Dan Buettner
Okay?
- [55:20]
Dr. Neal Barnard
So I'm talking about prostate, breast cancer. So inflammatory pain is dead sore joints, for example.
- [55:28]
Dan Buettner
You got to give it to me. Remember, I have a degree in business. So talk to me like
- [55:34]
Dr. Neal Barnard
inflammatory pain means arthritis.
- [55:37]
Dan Buettner
Okay.
- [55:37]
Dr. Neal Barnard
Anything that ends in itis is inflammation.
- [55:39]
Dan Buettner
Okay?
- [55:40]
Dr. Neal Barnard
So and then if you have pain because of a lack of blood flow, so a person who's got angina, chest pain, they go to the doctor and they say, you know, I got this terrible chest pain and the doctor gives them pills. But what Dean Ornish did years ago was change their diet. So their arteries opened up and now they don't have chest pain anymore. So that's pain from a lack of blood flow.
- [56:05]
Dan Buettner
How about headaches? And that was just common for some people.
- [56:09]
Dr. Neal Barnard
Yeah, Migraine in particular, strongly food related. And every person with migraine, they know this. They went to the reception, two glasses of wine, bang, they got hit with a sledgehammer in the head. Migraines are strongly food related. And here again, it's often the same triggers. I mentioned dairy products and chocolate and eggs and citrus. Those are. And I'm not saying citrus is bad. That was on my list of power foods. But for some people, it's their trigger for pain.
- [56:37]
Dan Buettner
And how about dad is bloated and farty. Is that a type of pain?
- [56:43]
Dr. Neal Barnard
He's giving pain to his family members. Is that what you're referring to?
- [56:48]
Dan Buettner
Okay, so just to repeat, we have hormonal pain, inflammation, pain like arthritis. We have can remember.
- [56:57]
Dr. Neal Barnard
I'm like, lack of blood flow, pain. You can call it vascular pain. Migraines, that's chest pain. Or it's. And. And then you'll have migraine is a big one. And then neuropathy when your nerves are being attacked by type 2 diabetes.
- [57:12]
Dan Buettner
So we have these pains now. What in general are the foods or what's the approach? One more time. I have these pains now. What's the approach? To change the way I'm eating so I'm not feeling these pains.
- [57:26]
Dr. Neal Barnard
Depends on the type of the pain. So if the pain is inflammatory, something is triggering that inflammation. What is causing your white blood cells? What food did you eat that your white blood cells thought was an invading virus? So it was a little bit of a grapefruit and protein that came from the grapefruit got in my blood. The viruses then made antibodies to it and they're now attacking your joints.
- [57:51]
Dan Buettner
I see.
- [57:51]
Dr. Neal Barnard
So if it's inflammatory pain, my whole goal is to find the triggers, which you can do by taking them out of your diet and then you put them back in this list I gave you. You take them out of your diet and you put them back into your diet one at a time every two days. And when the migraine hits that's so powerful or the joints start to hurt, take that food out again, challenge yourself again with it later, and it will change your life when you discover that the whole problem was dairy. And you're now, you know, you can have almond milk and you're fine, but with cow's milk you're not. If it's hormonal pain, it doesn't relate to the, to the, to the trigger foods. If it's hormonal pain, it is just a question of getting your hormones in balance and that means bringing in the fiber and get rid of the fat. If it's vascular pain, you don't have blood flow. So I need to get the cholesterol out of your diet and open those arteries up again.
- [58:43]
Dan Buettner
That is so powerful. Again, the book is Foods that fight Pain. I'm getting this book. I have actually somebody in mind right now who has pain, I'll bet is driven by food. But you give the process of identifying what foods it might be and then how to, how to test to see if it works or not exactly.
- [59:05]
Dr. Neal Barnard
It's usually very quick. And when it happens, it's extreme. It's just life, life changing.
- [59:08]
Dan Buettner
You know, I've had another guest on the Dan Buettner podcast, a neighbor actually, if a friend named Mark Sisson. And he developed the primal diet and he's in his early 70s and he's ripped, he looks great shape. The six pack packs energy. He eats a steak every single day and he swears by the carnivore diet. What's happening? It's so hard to promote a plant based diet or even debate a plant based diet when you sit across the table from a 72 year old, seemingly healthy. What's going on there?
- [59:48]
Dr. Neal Barnard
Well, muscular hyperplasia, which.
- [59:51]
Dan Buettner
How do you say that?
- [59:52]
Dr. Neal Barnard
Having your muscles grow, Having your muscles grow, you know, you're a weightlifter. That doesn't have anything to do with health. That's just a cosmetic thing that guys do to either attract breeding females or intimidate other males.
- [60:06]
Dan Buettner
Breeding females. What kind of females?
- [60:08]
Dr. Neal Barnard
Yes, receptive females.
- [60:13]
Dan Buettner
I'm looking for a breeder, pump some
- [60:15]
Dr. Neal Barnard
iron or more commonly to intimidate other males. I mean, if a guy lives on a. Well, anyway, you get the idea.
- [60:25]
Dan Buettner
The evolutionary roots of. Yeah, yeah.
- [60:28]
Dr. Neal Barnard
So anyhow, that has nothing to do with the healthfulness of his coronary arteries or whether he's got a cancer growing in his prostate or any of those kinds of things. It's completely separate from that. And you can work off experiments and people will. But I have to say, I don't try to talk a person like that out of what he's doing. If he wanted me to, I'd be
- [60:49]
Dan Buettner
glad to, but pretend I'm him. Talk me out of it.
- [60:53]
Dr. Neal Barnard
I have to say that I find that these.
- [60:55]
Dan Buettner
He's a good guy.
- [60:56]
Dr. Neal Barnard
By the way, Marxism is a. Oh, absolutely, absolutely. But what I do find is that people feel a certain loyalty to their diet that is akin to religion. And I don't mean that it's religious. What I mean is you can't. You're not going to talk about it.
- [61:06]
Dan Buettner
Of it.
- [61:07]
Dr. Neal Barnard
And they'll find a study that supports it and so forth.
- [61:10]
Dan Buettner
That's right.
- [61:11]
Dr. Neal Barnard
And they'll quote it. And doctors learned a long time ago that that person's not going to be terribly interested in.
- [61:17]
Dan Buettner
But let me, let me say something confrontational people. He would say that about you. I want you to talk me out of it. I'm Marxist in here. I eat a steak a day. I'm a good guy. Well, why shouldn't I do that? Feel good. My muscles are big.
- [61:29]
Dr. Neal Barnard
You can do that. If that's what you want, you can do that. Now you could grow big muscles the way nature does it. I mean, look at the biggest animals. Look at an elephant, a gorilla. Yeah, look at an elephant. Look at a gorilla. In fact, everybody in our biological group, chimpanzees.
- [61:45]
Dan Buettner
But wait, I like meat, I like steak and I have big muscles.
- [61:48]
Dr. Neal Barnard
Okay. Yeah. I guess my point is that if you want big muscles, you don't need meat to do it. What I would say to somebody like that is assuming that you want to live and be well, the number one thing that's going to take you out is heart disease, malignant disease. Cancer is number two. And those are strongly driven by food choices.
- [62:07]
Dan Buettner
So what? Okay, you are 100% whole food plant based and Mark is pretty much 100% carnivore. Maybe some broccoli. How much better are his chances of developing early cardiovascular disease than you, for example, or early cancer?
- [62:27]
Dr. Neal Barnard
When we look at the things that cause cancer, tobacco is probably the biggest actor still. Although it's losing ground to food. Food is clearly number two, but not for every kind of cancer. The two kinds of cancer that are strongly related to foods are the digestive cancers like colon cancer, rectal cancer, and frankly all the way up to your stomach, and then the hormone related cancers like prostate and breast. And so those are things that you don't want to have. And, and eating animal products is one of the big drivers. Now, that said, there are people who do all the things the doctor says you really shouldn't do, including smoking. Most smokers don't get lung cancer. So many do that it's a risky thing to try. And meat eaters tend to have cardiovascular disease. If you look into their arteries, you get nervous. But there are people who do okay with that.
- [63:24]
Dan Buettner
Okay, so I'm going to ask you to give a stronger argument because a lot of people are listening here. A lot of people listen to this podcast for Food Direction. Let's just say I'm a 40 year old woman and I'm making food choices for my family. One choice, I could make some radical changes. We'll go 100% whole food plant based. Or I can stick to a diet where I'm eating meat twice a day, meat and cheese twice a day. Relatively speaking, how much more likely am I to develop heart disease on my meat and cheese diet as opposed to my whole food plant based at age 40?
- [64:03]
Dr. Neal Barnard
Oh, much more likely. Dramatically.
- [64:05]
Dan Buettner
Twice, three times, five times.
- [64:07]
Dr. Neal Barnard
Sure. I mean, sure.
- [64:09]
Dan Buettner
To which one?
- [64:11]
Dr. Neal Barnard
Everybody is different and I don't know if.
- [64:13]
Dan Buettner
No, I just said average. Like if you have a thousand forty year old women who eat vegan. Thousand forty year old women who are eating cheese every day and meat a couple times a day.
- [64:23]
Dr. Neal Barnard
If the question is heart disease, Dean Ornish answered that by putting people on a plant based diet. And what he found is that the arteries that were already clogged started opening up. So that would mean that if you followed it from day one, you wouldn't develop those blockages in the first place. Whereas on a meat based diet it does. But people aren't really driven so much, as you mentioned, by the future risk of heart disease. What she's thinking is, I'd like to kind of get rid of these love handles I got. And on a vegan diet you're just jumping into the skinniest group that there is. And 10 years later, when she wakes up at 2 in the morning and her pajamas are soaked with sweat and she thinks, damn it, I got another hot flash. Hot flashes are something that we can cure, surprisingly enough, with the plant based diet, is that Right now, for all women who are just sat up straight hearing about hot flash cure, let me just describe this really, really quickly, if I may. We jumped in because we noticed in Japan back in the 1980s, it was mostly a more plant based diet. Rice, no cheese to speak of. Hot flashes were pretty rare. Maybe 15% of women, as the diet westernized, they became much more common. And we thought, well, is it the plant based diet or is it the fact they eat a lot of soy? I don't know. We brought in a group of women, 84 women, they all had hot flashes. And Dan, you never had a hot flash. They're sitting in a board meeting and they're trying to do their presentation and suddenly the heat comes up from their chest and they break into sweat and everybody can see. And then in two minutes it stopped. And now you got chills. And it comes up throughout the day and it hits every night. Yeah, it's bad. And you go to the doctor who says, well, I'll give you a hormone replacement. But then you read the side effects and you think, keep it. I don't want that. What we did is we brought in women and what we did is we said for the next three months, no animal products, keep oils really low. And a half a cup of soybeans, cooked soybeans. And what we found like edamame. Well, edamame is the baby soybean.
- [66:31]
Dan Buettner
Okay.
- [66:31]
Dr. Neal Barnard
So if you leave it on the vine a little bit longer, it becomes a mature soybean. And all that while it's making these magical things called isoflavones which help prevent cancer, but they also knock out hot flashes. So we found that we could with does tofu? Yeah, tofu helps and soy milk helps, but you'd have to have two quarts of soy milk to make the isoflavones in a half a cup of cooked soybeans. Soybeans, yeah. So anyway, what we found is that by 12 weeks the women had had an 88% drop in all their moderate to severe hot flashes.
- [67:06]
Dan Buettner
News flash, lady.
- [67:07]
Dr. Neal Barnard
Exact.
- [67:08]
Dan Buettner
We have a hot flash cure and
- [67:11]
Dr. Neal Barnard
dropped seven or eight pounds and felt great without any need for any kind of medication. And it's exactly the diet that you want for everything else that worries you as a post menopausal woman. What are you worried about? I'm worried about I'm gaining weight now that I didn't weigh before. This is going to help peel that weight off. And I've now got cardiovascular disease that my doctor's threatening me. I need Lipitor and I don't to get demented. I'm feeling. My brain is fuzzy. We found that in these groups, we found vascular changes, sexual changes, they felt better sexually, physical changes. They had fewer headaches. Now, you do have to learn a couple tricks. You take a little time and learn the foods that you like and that your partner or spouse likes, that your family likes. But it becomes a fun kind of adventure. And I want to tell you, this study was so fun. What got me into this was a woman who had read a book that I'd written where I described how this should work.
- [68:04]
Dan Buettner
And.
- [68:05]
Dr. Neal Barnard
And she said, I did your approach. My hot flashes were gone in five days.
- [68:08]
Dan Buettner
Oh, my God.
- [68:09]
Dr. Neal Barnard
And I said. I said, wait a minute. I said, wait, I didn't promise that fast. I said, what did you do? She said, I went totally vegan, no oils. I didn't cook with oils. And I ate soybeans. I said, what brand? She said, I went on Amazon. I got Laura Brand soybeans. I cooked them up. I said, how did you cook them? In a pot. I said, what pot? It was an instant pot. And I said, okay, great. How long did you cook before I wrote all this down? And I then hung up the phone. I ran into my research director's office. I said, I've got exactly the study we're going to do. We're going to do Betty's diet. I called up the CEO of Instant Pot. I said, will you send me some instant pots from my research study? He shipped them all out, and we tested this out, and the women just had fun with it. They were cooking these things and then they roast them. You can roast the soybeans. And let me tell you, 88% reduction in hot flashes. You sleep through the night for a change. You have your brain back. You feel good. I don't mean to say that our bodies don't change and don't age, but you can feel terrific.
- [69:14]
Dan Buettner
That is a very compelling. I don't know if it'll convince Mark Sisson to not eat his steak, but I'll tell you what, I hope the ladies were listening here, because that cheeseburger and slice of pizza, it just isn't worth it when it comes to hot flashes. One final question. If you had the administration's ear, if you had the president's ear or the head of the NIH's ear, RFK, what would you say? And they were really interested. They said, what can I do to make America healthier? What would be the one thing our government could do?
- [69:48]
Dr. Neal Barnard
Well, I think they are Interested. I think the question is which direction are we gonna take that interest and how science based are we going to be? One thing that we need to do is dealing with the SNAP program, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, food stamps. One in seven Americans receives snap. But the problem is that that card allows you to go into the store and buy candy and Velveeta and fatty meats and so forth. And if it were my program, what I would do, or if the government were interested, and we have proposed this to the government, is let's give out food that you would be proud to serve to your own children or people you loved. Let's have beans and mean dishes, let's have vegetables, let's have fruit. So if it's. If you want to open a can, fine. If you want it frozen, fine. But let's have it. Let's have fruits, let's have whole grains, and let's not offer cheese, meat, any of those things at all. Or sodas, or let's not have that at all. If we did that, we would be giving out food that we felt good about and we would save so much money we could feed more hungry people. The costs would go way, way down dramatically. We've costed all this out, but right now this program has been captured by the soda companies, the cheese companies and everybody else. So that's one thing that I would do. The government has been wrestling with what to do about the GLP1s, the injectable WeGovy and Ozempic. What I would strongly encourage us to do is to recognize that when we start paying for those drugs, a person will lose weight, but they plateau. And for the rest of their life they have to continue to inject that drug and pay for that drug just to avoid regaining that lost weight. If instead we use those resources, tell people to learn healthful foods, the weight loss would be about the same amount. And you wouldn't be paying more money, you'd be saving money. But we have to find ways to work together to do that. And the most important thing, Dan, is to think what really matters in our life more than our health, more than the environment, more than the animals in the slaughterhouse, more than taste. The thing that matters to us is the next generation, our kids. And if we can do something to help them to grow up in a world where they will carry good health with them, where they'll be in a body that feels good, where they can go out for a run or get on their bike and they can feel okay, that's a big gift and that's something our government can help us to give.
- [72:15]
Dan Buettner
Well, Dr. Neal Barnard, you have my nomination for the Nobel Prize. Thank you very much. That's a fantastic conversation. You're saving the world. One bean at a time.
- [72:27]
Dr. Neal Barnard
Right back at you, Dan.