The Vegan Dr: The Truth About The Vegan Diet, “Eggs Are Making You Fat”, “Stop Eating Cheese!” – Neal Barnard

0:00:01 I love cheese.
0:00:03 – Well, men who consume the most cheese
0:00:07 have the lowest sperm count and a rectilus function.
0:00:09 – Oh, Dr. Neil Bernard.
0:00:12 – One of America’s leading advocates for health, nutrition.
0:00:14 – And legend in the plant-based world.
0:00:16 – People need to understand this.
0:00:18 Getting away from animal products is always a good idea
0:00:21 because once you ban animal foods,
0:00:23 not only do you solve the weight issue
0:00:25 without counting calories, without reducing carbs,
0:00:26 without even exercising,
0:00:29 but also their health problems get better.
0:00:31 But health experts say it’s okay
0:00:32 to have a little bit of animal proteins.
0:00:34 – Great idea, it doesn’t work.
0:00:36 – And there are a group of people that just eat meat alone.
0:00:37 – Well, it’s a ludicrous diet.
0:00:39 It’s very fiber deficient.
0:00:40 – How do you take on the idea
0:00:42 that veganism is a diet for the privileged?
0:00:45 – We did a study and the average person saved 16%
0:00:48 plus the fact their need for medications come down.
0:00:50 So for example, we had a man who came into our study.
0:00:51 He had diabetes.
0:00:53 So we put him on the plant-based diet.
0:00:55 After about a year, he’d lost 60 pounds
0:00:57 and he could go into any clinic in the world
0:00:59 but he would not diagnose him as having diabetes.
0:01:00 – But how do we know in that case
0:01:02 that a Mediterranean diet
0:01:05 wouldn’t have had the same reversing effect on his diabetes?
0:01:06 – You just don’t get the same result,
0:01:08 but this was extremely controversial.
0:01:13 – The most controversial of all, though, is eggs.
0:01:15 You can come for everything else,
0:01:18 but coming for eggs is particularly triggering.
0:01:20 – Well, eggs have lots of issues.
0:01:23 The first is, and even the studies done
0:01:25 by the egg industry do show this.
0:01:27 (dramatic music)
0:01:38 – Dr. Neil Barnard, the work you’ve committed your life to,
0:01:40 what good do you hope that it’s doing
0:01:44 for everyday people in their day-to-day lives?
0:01:47 – Right now, unfortunately, people are not well.
0:01:49 They’re not where they want to be.
0:01:52 By age 30 or so, people feel like their life
0:01:53 is starting to slip away.
0:01:55 They’re gaining weight they don’t want to have.
0:01:56 Their cholesterol is going up.
0:01:57 They’re on medications that they know
0:01:59 they’re never going to get off of.
0:02:00 And perhaps worst of all,
0:02:04 they tend to hand this same fate to the next generation.
0:02:07 And that’s something that not only has to stop,
0:02:08 but it can stop.
0:02:10 The body can heal.
0:02:11 We know how to do it.
0:02:13 The job is to put it to work.
0:02:14 – When you look back over, I don’t know,
0:02:19 15, 100 years, what are the key sort of health outcomes
0:02:21 that have really changed?
0:02:22 And how does that correlate to the way
0:02:24 that the world has changed
0:02:27 and our sort of consumption habits have changed?
0:02:28 – Economics has changed everything.
0:02:32 If you look, say, at rural Japan, 1950s,
0:02:35 the country had a diet that was not entirely plant-based,
0:02:37 but it was a rice-based diet.
0:02:39 Lots of vegetables, no ice cream.
0:02:41 This was not the velvita culture.
0:02:45 And some meat, but not really very much.
0:02:48 And then suddenly, the Golden Arches arrived in Tokyo.
0:02:49 – The Golden Arches.
0:02:52 Donald’s Burger King, KFC,
0:02:55 the country Westernized, breast cancer doubled.
0:02:56 – Really?
0:02:57 – Diabetes went way, way up.
0:02:58 Wastelines expanded.
0:03:01 Life expectancy went from longest in the world,
0:03:04 just it’s still better than many other places,
0:03:07 but it has declined and declined and declined.
0:03:09 Despite having more knowledge than ever before,
0:03:13 the westernization of the diet has been a killer worldwide.
0:03:16 You see it in Japan, you see it now in China.
0:03:18 As economics are changing in China, there’s more wealth,
0:03:20 there’s more cardiovascular disease.
0:03:22 And you know who’s on the wires outside of town
0:03:23 looking down like buzzards?
0:03:25 It’s the pharmaceutical industry.
0:03:27 Because if you eat more pork and your cholesterol goes up,
0:03:29 I can sell you more statins.
0:03:32 And that is the way, that’s the world we live in.
0:03:33 That can change.
0:03:35 – Why do you care?
0:03:37 Of all the things you could have committed your life to,
0:03:39 was there a catalyst moment
0:03:42 where suddenly this became your mission?
0:03:43 Was there something you saw,
0:03:45 something you did or an experience you had?
0:03:47 – The year before I went to medical school,
0:03:49 I was working in a hospital in Minneapolis.
0:03:51 And I didn’t have a very glamorous job.
0:03:53 I was the morgue attendant.
0:03:58 And so my job was to take the body out of the cooler
0:04:00 and put it on a table and assist the pathologist
0:04:04 to do an autopsy to determine the cause of death.
0:04:06 There was one day there was a man who died in the hospital
0:04:07 of a massive heart attack,
0:04:09 probably from eating hospital food,
0:04:11 but that’s another story.
0:04:16 And the body was there and the pathologist took out a scalpel.
0:04:19 And you make a Y-shaped cut across the skin like this.
0:04:20 And you peel back the skin
0:04:22 and then he took what looked like a garden clipper
0:04:26 and went crunch, crunch, crunch through the ribs on this side
0:04:29 and crunch, crunch, crunch through this side,
0:04:31 pulled the ribs off the chest
0:04:32 and put the ribs on the table.
0:04:34 So he took his scalpel
0:04:36 and he sliced through a coronary artery.
0:04:38 And it was, it was like a medical lecture.
0:04:41 They’re called coronary arteries because they crown the heart.
0:04:43 And as he sliced it open, he said, “Feel that.”
0:04:45 I had gloves on.
0:04:46 So I felt inside the artery
0:04:51 and you would think a coronary artery would be a rubbery tube
0:04:53 that would carry blood to your heart.
0:04:55 It was like a pipe stem.
0:04:58 It was like concrete, it was hard.
0:05:02 And he said, “That’s calcified atherosclerotic lesions.
0:05:05 And this is your bacon and eggs, Neil.”
0:05:08 And what he meant was cholesterol in the diet
0:05:11 causes an irritation of that artery wall.
0:05:14 And it forms what’s kind of like a blister in the artery
0:05:16 and it calcifies over time.
0:05:18 And what was most worrisome was not
0:05:20 that this had attacked the heart,
0:05:21 but we then looked at the carotids.
0:05:23 Those are the arteries going to the brain.
0:05:24 They had the same process,
0:05:26 meaning if he hadn’t died of a heart attack,
0:05:29 he was headed for a stroke.
0:05:32 And the arteries to the kidneys had the same process.
0:05:34 He finished the exam, wrote up his findings,
0:05:36 systemic atherosclerosis.
0:05:39 And as time went on, I then went to medical school
0:05:40 and I started to learn about the connections,
0:05:42 what does cholesterol do?
0:05:44 Whereas cholesterol found it’s only in animal products.
0:05:46 And I started to reflect on these things
0:05:48 that were culturally normal for us.
0:05:51 And we thought that heart attacks were culturally normal.
0:05:53 You’re old, you know, 60s old.
0:05:55 You’re gonna have a heart attack.
0:05:57 This is just the way it is.
0:05:59 Alzheimer’s, you’re likely to get all these diseases.
0:06:04 And I suddenly realized that if we can truly connect
0:06:08 what we’re eating with the things that happen to our body,
0:06:11 it gives us the most frightening lesson ever,
0:06:13 but the most empowering lesson.
0:06:14 Because we can change that.
0:06:15 My mission is to take that knowledge,
0:06:17 hand it to people in a form that they can use,
0:06:21 and encourage them to spread the word in turn,
0:06:22 hopefully to the next generation.
0:06:25 If not, all we’re spreading to the next generation
0:06:26 is our own bad habits.
0:06:27 – We’re gonna go through all of that.
0:06:28 We’re gonna go through the diets.
0:06:30 You’ve got a new book out which talks about
0:06:32 the perfect sort of diet for weight loss.
0:06:36 And it says the breakthrough plan that traps,
0:06:38 tames and burns calories for easy and permanent weight loss.
0:06:41 We’re gonna go through that as well.
0:06:45 From that moment in the morgue until you sit here now,
0:06:49 what is your sort of academic and your,
0:06:52 I guess your experience with doing studies
0:06:54 and being exposed to research and data?
0:06:55 What is that?
0:06:57 Give me an overview of what you’ve done.
0:06:59 – We were, it really started with,
0:07:01 I was approached by a foundation
0:07:03 that funded diabetes research.
0:07:06 We ended up executing a small study
0:07:09 where we used a very different diet
0:07:10 from what had been used.
0:07:14 It was more modeled after the diet of countries
0:07:17 that don’t have much diabetes like Japan
0:07:19 before Westernization, for example.
0:07:20 Very successful.
0:07:23 We found that people were losing weight easily
0:07:26 without counting calories, without reducing carbs,
0:07:29 without even exercising, much as I love exercise.
0:07:34 Then we did another study on people who wanted to lose weight.
0:07:35 The participants were women,
0:07:37 all at the age of menopause and after.
0:07:38 They had all done.
0:07:41 Jenny Craig and Nutrosystem and Atkins
0:07:42 and South Beach and everything.
0:07:45 And they all had initial success followed by frustration,
0:07:48 followed by blaming myself, that kind of thing.
0:07:51 And what we said is, let’s not do that.
0:07:55 Let’s use the same kind of diet we’re using for diabetes,
0:07:58 which in a nutshell, plant-based diet,
0:08:01 animal products gone, keeping oils really low,
0:08:05 but not limiting spaghetti or carbohydrates in general,
0:08:08 not limiting calories.
0:08:11 And what we found is that people lost weight really easily,
0:08:13 but more than that.
0:08:15 Their metabolism started to ramp up.
0:08:18 So they’re 50 years old or 60 years old,
0:08:21 but they’re burning calories more like they were burning
0:08:22 when they were 30.
0:08:24 – When people think about weight loss at the moment,
0:08:26 you used a word, they used the word calories.
0:08:29 There’s a prevalent school of thought that says,
0:08:31 you just need to count the calories you’re having.
0:08:33 For men, it’s about 2,000 calories,
0:08:35 if you’re sort of my age and my weight.
0:08:36 And as long as you have less than that,
0:08:37 you’ll lose weight.
0:08:39 That’s kind of the top line school of thought.
0:08:40 How do you receive that?
0:08:44 – It’s true that we’re not gonna reinvent
0:08:46 the laws of thermodynamics.
0:08:48 I mean, if you take in fewer calories, you’ll lose weight.
0:08:51 The problem is, if you voluntarily try to eat less
0:08:54 than your body normally wants, by Wednesday,
0:08:56 you’re ready to eat the sofa.
0:08:57 It’s just not gonna work for you.
0:08:59 I have to tell you, in every hospital,
0:09:02 not only in the United States, but everywhere else,
0:09:05 people will sit down with somebody who wants to lose weight
0:09:06 or who wants to tackle their diabetes
0:09:08 and they’ll say, you just need to eat less.
0:09:09 Here’s the menu.
0:09:11 It adds up to 500 calories less than before.
0:09:12 You stick to this and you lose weight.
0:09:14 Well, the patient can’t do that.
0:09:16 You just can’t be hungry forever.
0:09:19 Your brain says, you can’t be doing this, I’m starving.
0:09:22 And everybody’s had that experience.
0:09:23 And so then what happens?
0:09:24 You blame the patient.
0:09:26 The patient blames himself or herself.
0:09:28 And I say, stop.
0:09:31 How can I, without knowing it,
0:09:32 reduce the calories that come in?
0:09:34 And the answer is really simple.
0:09:37 The answer is change the quality of the food,
0:09:39 not the amount.
0:09:41 Stop worrying about the amount.
0:09:46 If for 21 days, a person didn’t experiment with me.
0:09:49 And I said, for 21 days, no animal products at all.
0:09:52 Okay, so I’m at an Italian restaurant,
0:09:55 spaghetti not with meat sauce, but with tomato sauce.
0:09:59 Bean burrito instead of a meat burrito.
0:10:01 You’re not limiting the amount of food.
0:10:03 You are just changing the type.
0:10:05 Suddenly the weight kicks in, the weight loss kicks in.
0:10:07 People start losing weight and losing weight and losing weight.
0:10:08 Why?
0:10:13 Because once you ban animal foods, which have zero fiber,
0:10:15 pork chops don’t have fiber.
0:10:17 Cheese has no fiber, eggs have no fiber.
0:10:19 Then suddenly everything you’re eating has fiber.
0:10:20 What does that matter?
0:10:22 Fiber is this boring word that puts everybody to sleep.
0:10:26 But fiber is big stuff because fiber does two things.
0:10:27 It has almost no calories.
0:10:29 So it fills you up and it makes you think
0:10:31 you had a huge amount of food.
0:10:34 The other thing it does is as it goes down your digestive tract,
0:10:38 researchers at Tufts University tracked what happens.
0:10:41 2017 study, they brought in individuals
0:10:46 and put them on a diet either with high fiber foods,
0:10:49 whole grain bread, compare it to just white bread.
0:10:52 It’s the same thing, but one has all the fiber, one doesn’t.
0:10:55 And what they discovered is that the people
0:11:01 on the whole grain bread, they were excreting calories.
0:11:05 What happens is the fiber goes down your digestive tract.
0:11:08 It finds unabsorbed calories and it carries them
0:11:08 out with the waste.
0:11:10 You ate the calories, but you didn’t absorb them.
0:11:12 You flushed them down the toilet.
0:11:14 Now it’s not huge.
0:11:18 The effect of just that change was about 100 calories per day.
0:11:20 That’s about a half a soda you’re not having.
0:11:25 But that’s 36,000 calories a year from just that one change.
0:11:28 So if we aren’t eating animal products,
0:11:31 everything we have is fiber, that tames the appetite,
0:11:32 you’re gonna lose weight naturally.
0:11:35 What we find is that if I can help people to focus
0:11:39 on the type of food they eat and learn to love foods
0:11:41 that are better than the spam we grew up with,
0:11:44 what you’re gonna discover is that not only do you solve
0:11:48 the weight issue, people can lose weight very rapidly
0:11:49 and very easily without going hungry.
0:11:52 And even without exercise, much as I love exercise,
0:11:55 but also their health problems get better.
0:11:56 – Just to pause there for a second
0:11:58 because there’s something going on in my sort of dietary
0:12:00 while at the moment that I wanna get your opinion on.
0:12:03 You mentioned whole grain bread versus white bread.
0:12:05 There’s now all of these breads on the shelf.
0:12:06 When I go to the hotels
0:12:08 and you have the little breakfast bars,
0:12:10 there’s the sourdough, there’s the rye,
0:12:12 there’s the white bread, there’s the whole grain bread.
0:12:14 And I’m so confused by which bread I should be having.
0:12:16 I’m pretty sure not the white one,
0:12:18 but I don’t really know about these others.
0:12:22 So which bread is highest in fiber and best for my health?
0:12:25 – Well, they all beat the heck out of chicken, fish,
0:12:27 meat, eggs.
0:12:28 Bread is always better.
0:12:31 Yes, it is. – Then chicken.
0:12:33 – Completely. – Chicken breast.
0:12:35 – Take the skin off it, it’s still 23% fat
0:12:37 as a percentage of calories.
0:12:40 Yes. – And why is that a problem?
0:12:41 I eat a lot of chicken breast, you know?
0:12:43 – Well, every fat gram has nine calories
0:12:46 going right into our body fat that we didn’t want.
0:12:49 Every carbohydrate gram has only four.
0:12:51 So those numbers, I want people to tattoo
0:12:52 those numbers on their forearm.
0:12:55 Because all the people who think carbs make them fat,
0:12:56 they should realize carbohydrate,
0:13:00 no matter what form it’s in, bread, potatoes, pure sugar,
0:13:04 carbohydrate has only four calories in a gram.
0:13:07 But on the other hand, if I have fat, any form,
0:13:11 chicken fat, fish fat, olive oil, straight from Tuscany,
0:13:14 it’s got nine calories in every gram.
0:13:15 And a person can say, well, it’s gotta be good fat,
0:13:16 isn’t it?
0:13:18 Sometimes it may be like olive oil,
0:13:22 but it’s still gonna be fattening for you.
0:13:25 We did a study, we brought in 62 people.
0:13:27 They all wanted to lose weight.
0:13:29 Half of them went on a low-fat vegan diet.
0:13:31 They lost weight really very easily.
0:13:34 The other half began a Mediterranean diet,
0:13:36 which they thought, great, this is indulgent,
0:13:38 I’ll be able to have fish and some chicken
0:13:40 and a little bit of cheese here and there
0:13:42 and some extra virgin olive oil, how wonderful.
0:13:46 And the foods are wonderful, except that by about week three,
0:13:47 the participants were saying,
0:13:49 well, when does the weight loss start?
0:13:52 The fact is it doesn’t happen with a Mediterranean diet
0:13:55 because the fish fat, the chicken fat,
0:13:57 that whatever beef fat there may be,
0:13:59 and all that olive oil is so packed with calories,
0:14:03 it slows down or stops the weight loss.
0:14:06 After 16 weeks, everybody stopped.
0:14:08 They switched to the opposite diet.
0:14:11 The people who had been going Mediterranean
0:14:13 now did the plant-based diet
0:14:15 and they start losing weight like crazy.
0:14:17 And they said, well, why didn’t you give me this before?
0:14:20 The people who had been doing the vegan diet,
0:14:22 by 16 weeks, they were totally accommodated to it.
0:14:24 I know how to eat at Taco Bell now,
0:14:26 I know how to ask for the bean burrito and whatever.
0:14:29 We asked them to begin the Mediterranean diet.
0:14:31 And they said, well, first of all, I don’t want to,
0:14:32 I’ve lost my taste for cheese,
0:14:33 I don’t care about that anymore.
0:14:36 We said, this is science, please do begin the diet.
0:14:38 And they got angry.
0:14:39 We met with everybody every week
0:14:41 and they were about to walk out
0:14:44 because the scale was getting worse week by week by week
0:14:48 because we’d reintroduced chicken and fish and oil
0:14:49 and all these kinds of things.
0:14:50 This was published in the Journal
0:14:52 of the American College of Nutrition.
0:14:55 And it just won an award for the best article of the year
0:14:57 by the American Nutrition Association.
0:15:02 The point being that if you focus not on how much you eat,
0:15:05 but if you focus on the types of foods you eat,
0:15:07 you get the answer,
0:15:09 which is you can satisfy the appetite
0:15:11 without counting calories.
0:15:12 You don’t have to blame yourself.
0:15:15 There will still be all kinds of things that will attract you.
0:15:16 There will be cravings and so forth,
0:15:18 but we can deal with all that.
0:15:21 – Obviously, when people talk about the vegan diet,
0:15:24 there’s lots of popular rebuttals.
0:15:25 One of them is about supplementation,
0:15:30 about protein levels, about vitamin B12, about omega-3.
0:15:34 You know these rebuttals because they’re very popular.
0:15:36 So how do you take on the idea that,
0:15:38 if I’m not eating chicken at all,
0:15:41 where am I getting my protein, my B12 from,
0:15:42 my omega-3 from in my diet,
0:15:45 and if I have to supplement any of these things,
0:15:47 is that evidence that it’s unnatural
0:15:50 for me to be eating a vegan-based diet?
0:15:52 – Okay, that’s a critically important question,
0:15:53 but before I answer that,
0:15:57 let me go back to why would anybody want to do this?
0:15:58 And this is really important
0:16:01 because the issues of supplementation
0:16:02 are super easy to answer.
0:16:05 The issue of why do you want to do it?
0:16:10 For me, this was answered about a year into our NIH trial.
0:16:14 We had a man who came into our study.
0:16:15 He was 35.
0:16:17 He’d had diabetes for four years,
0:16:20 and he said, “I need help.”
0:16:22 He told me his grandmother had had diabetes.
0:16:24 His grandfather had diabetes.
0:16:26 His father was dead by 30.
0:16:30 He said that, “If I don’t get this together,
0:16:33 “I’m gonna check out early and on the way,
0:16:35 “I’m gonna be on dialysis, I’m gonna lose a leg.”
0:16:36 That’s what it meant to him.
0:16:39 So we put him on the plant-based diet.
0:16:41 And about two weeks into it,
0:16:45 he said, “Easiest diet I’ve ever been on.”
0:16:46 And that kind of surprised me
0:16:48 because people imagined vegan to be hard.
0:16:50 And he said, “No, it was super easy.
0:16:53 “Previous diets that I’d been on told me
0:16:54 “I had to count my calories.”
0:16:56 And I was hungry all the time.
0:16:59 After about a year, he had lost 60 pounds.
0:17:02 Without ever limiting calories at all.
0:17:07 He had gotten his A1c from nine and a half down to 5.3.
0:17:10 5.3 is not diabetes.
0:17:13 5.3 is not pre-diabetes.
0:17:14 It’s normal.
0:17:15 And when I got his lab slip,
0:17:18 I kept to tell you I closed my office door.
0:17:21 And I paced around for about 10 minutes
0:17:23 to try to decide, can I tell him
0:17:27 that his diabetes has been cured?
0:17:29 This was extremely controversial.
0:17:31 You can’t tell a person their diabetes is gone.
0:17:33 Once you have diabetes, you’ll always have diabetes.
0:17:35 That’s what everyone said.
0:17:37 And people said that with good reason
0:17:40 because they wanted you to take your medicine,
0:17:43 test yourself, don’t mess around with this
0:17:44 because diabetes will kill you.
0:17:46 And that was a well-meaning advice.
0:17:48 But here was a man who didn’t have diabetes
0:17:49 based on diet changes.
0:17:51 We’ve now, I mean, we can laugh about it now
0:17:53 because we see it all the time.
0:17:56 Diabetes is a reversible disease.
0:17:57 And everything that goes along with it
0:17:59 is reversible as well.
0:18:03 So then that brings the issue up of how do you answer
0:18:05 all the questions that people will raise?
0:18:07 Like, where do you get your protein
0:18:07 and what about B12?
0:18:10 But those are quite easy to answer.
0:18:12 – So how do we know in that case
0:18:13 that that guy wasn’t eating a ton
0:18:16 of sort of ultra-processed foods of McDonald’s
0:18:17 and all of those things?
0:18:22 And that a Mediterranean diet, for example,
0:18:25 wouldn’t have had the same reversing effect
0:18:26 on his diabetes?
0:18:28 – Well, let me be clear
0:18:30 of what we know and what we believe.
0:18:33 What we know is that this man had a result
0:18:35 that just hasn’t happened before.
0:18:39 And it was really remarkable.
0:18:41 We’ve seen this over and over and over again.
0:18:44 And when we bring people in who have diabetes
0:18:45 and we put them on a Mediterranean diet
0:18:46 or something like that,
0:18:48 you just don’t get the same result
0:18:50 in a randomized clinical trial.
0:18:52 But we’ve gone further.
0:18:55 We’ve looked at why is it that this diet is working.
0:18:58 Processed foods are not the cause of diabetes.
0:19:01 Eating sugar is not the cause of diabetes.
0:19:03 Eating carbohydrate and potatoes and rice,
0:19:04 that is not the cause of diabetes.
0:19:06 I’m not saying there aren’t health issues
0:19:07 about all these foods there are.
0:19:08 But the cause of diabetes is something
0:19:11 that has been clear in science for two decades
0:19:15 and nobody can get this through their thought process.
0:19:17 – Because they thick skulls, I know you were pausing.
0:19:21 – I’m not only talking about the lay public,
0:19:22 I’m talking about doctors.
0:19:23 There are many doctors
0:19:24 who have somehow gotten their medical degrees,
0:19:26 never understanding the cause of type two diabetes.
0:19:28 And here’s what it is.
0:19:32 This is a muscle cell, your muscle, a muscle in your shoulder.
0:19:36 If I take a needle in your shoulder, I stick a needle in,
0:19:38 I pull a muscle cell out.
0:19:39 It’s this long oval.
0:19:42 It’s favorite fuel is glucose.
0:19:45 That’s why marathon runners are carboloading.
0:19:48 That glucose gets into the cell and it powers it.
0:19:51 But the problem is the cell membrane keeps that glucose out,
0:19:54 will not let it in until insulin,
0:19:57 the insulin key made in your pancreas,
0:19:58 arrives at the surface of that cell,
0:20:01 opens the door, in goes the glucose.
0:20:03 Now, everything’s going fine.
0:20:04 My pancreas is making insulin,
0:20:06 it’s letting the glucose in the cell,
0:20:07 things are going great.
0:20:09 You eat chicken.
0:20:13 Your body takes that 23% fat
0:20:15 in the skinless chicken breast
0:20:16 and takes some of that chicken fat,
0:20:18 sticks it inside the muscle cell.
0:20:21 Fish fat, beef fat, cheese fat,
0:20:23 cheese is loaded with fat
0:20:25 and that fat gets inside the muscles.
0:20:27 Now, doctors hate words like fat
0:20:28 because it only has three letters.
0:20:31 So we’ll call it intramyocellular lipid,
0:20:33 but it’s fat inside a muscle cell.
0:20:35 Same thing happens in your liver.
0:20:37 So that’s hepatocellular lipid.
0:20:39 The fat is getting into your liver cells,
0:20:40 the fat is building up in your muscle cells.
0:20:43 It came from the food choices we thought were healthy.
0:20:46 French fries, your body pulls out that fat,
0:20:47 packs it in the muscle cell.
0:20:48 Now the insulin key comes along,
0:20:50 attaches to the surface of the cell,
0:20:51 the cell is now filled with fat.
0:20:53 It’s just like going home,
0:20:55 sticking your key in your front door lock
0:20:58 that somebody jammed with chewing gum.
0:21:00 Key doesn’t work anymore.
0:21:02 Okay, so what do we do?
0:21:04 I will say let’s take the animal products out of your diet.
0:21:06 There’s now zero animal fat in your diet.
0:21:09 Let’s keep oils really low too.
0:21:11 So baked potato instead of the chips.
0:21:13 Okay, no fat in it.
0:21:14 Great, what happens?
0:21:15 And I can show this to you
0:21:19 with magnetic resonance spectroscopy.
0:21:21 I can look inside your body.
0:21:23 That fat starts to dissipate.
0:21:24 And as the fat comes out,
0:21:26 I’m not talking about belly fat.
0:21:28 That dissipates too.
0:21:29 But what I’m targeting now is the fat
0:21:32 inside each muscle cell and each liver cell.
0:21:34 As it comes apart, it leaves,
0:21:37 then the insulin key can work again.
0:21:39 And I’ve reversed your insulin resistance
0:21:41 and I’m reversing your diabetes.
0:21:43 And that’s why now the blood sugar
0:21:46 can get through that membrane very easily.
0:21:48 That’s why this man’s diabetes went away.
0:21:51 We didn’t give him a new insulin prescription.
0:21:53 We got the fat out of his muscle cells.
0:21:54 Got the fat out of his liver cells.
0:21:57 And suddenly his body said, “I’ll take it from here.”
0:22:00 – So let’s talk about the supplementation point then.
0:22:01 People that are vegan,
0:22:03 my partner was vegan for some time.
0:22:06 She had a lot of sort of health complications with it.
0:22:09 So I’ve got a little bit of a sort of clouded opinion
0:22:10 around that.
0:22:12 And again, when I talk about my partner,
0:22:13 she was vegan for two years.
0:22:15 I tried for two weeks.
0:22:18 I struggled, long story.
0:22:20 But she was vegan for two years.
0:22:22 In her words, and she shared this publicly,
0:22:24 she gained weight.
0:22:28 She had issues with her menstrual cycle
0:22:30 and the lots of other consequences.
0:22:33 And she now points to the two years being vegan
0:22:35 for both those outcomes.
0:22:40 She had to supplement B12 throughout that process as well
0:22:42 because she wasn’t getting it naturally
0:22:43 in her vegan diet in Bali.
0:22:46 So what do you say to the point of supplementation
0:22:48 that we were talking about a second ago?
0:22:50 – Vitamin B12 is the only thing
0:22:51 that you do need to supplement.
0:22:54 And people following a plant-based diet
0:22:56 definitely should be supplementing vitamin B12.
0:22:59 But B12 is not made by animals
0:23:01 and it’s not made by plants.
0:23:02 B12 is made by bacteria.
0:23:05 And so people will speculate that prior
0:23:07 to the advent of modern hygiene,
0:23:10 the traces of bacteria in the soil or on plants
0:23:12 that we would pull out or frankly on our fingers
0:23:15 or in our mouths would give you the tiny amount
0:23:16 that you need.
0:23:20 You need 2.4 micrograms per day.
0:23:22 You need it for healthy nerves and healthy blood.
0:23:26 And you will get a B12 from meat
0:23:29 because the cow’s intestinal tract has bacteria
0:23:30 that make B12.
0:23:33 But some people don’t absorb that very well
0:23:37 because the B12 in meat is tightly adhered to the protein.
0:23:39 And some people can’t really remove it very well,
0:23:40 particularly if you’re over 50
0:23:42 or you’re on certain medications.
0:23:44 But you need B12.
0:23:46 But when it comes to overall nutrition,
0:23:50 a meat-based diet is the most efficient diet of all.
0:23:53 It’s much worse than any other kind of diet
0:23:55 because meat doesn’t have the vitamins
0:23:57 that are in vegetables and in fruits.
0:24:00 There’s not a gram of vitamin C.
0:24:01 There is zero fiber.
0:24:04 There’s no complex carbohydrate at all.
0:24:06 Now your cat can be a mediator
0:24:07 ’cause cats make their own vitamin C.
0:24:10 They say, “I don’t need it, but we are not cats.
0:24:12 We’re not carnivores at all.
0:24:14 Whether we like it or not, we’re great apes.
0:24:16 So our cousins are chimpanzees
0:24:19 and gorillas and bonobos and orangutans.
0:24:22 And they are never eating dairy at all.
0:24:27 They are mostly or exclusively herbivores.
0:24:29 So that’s our natural diet.
0:24:32 – Those are our great eight ancestors.
0:24:34 Do they, any of them eat meat?
0:24:35 – Some do not all.
0:24:38 – Okay, and going back to your point about vitamin B12,
0:24:40 you were saying just so I’m clear
0:24:42 that we historically would have got that
0:24:44 from our less sanitary environment
0:24:46 by our ancestors pulling up leaves
0:24:48 and eating some of the soil in the process
0:24:49 and those kinds of things.
0:24:50 Is that what you’re saying?
0:24:52 – Well, that’s one possibility.
0:24:53 And the other possibility is frankly
0:24:55 that we could absorb our own B12.
0:24:58 Your digestive tract makes B12,
0:25:00 but the question is how absorbable really is it?
0:25:04 And most people believe, and I think it’s quite possible,
0:25:07 that it’s produced too low down by the gut microbiome
0:25:09 to really be efficiently absorbed.
0:25:12 So either way, my suggestion is,
0:25:16 I wouldn’t worry about it, you just take B12.
0:25:18 It’s in every multiple vitamin you ever took
0:25:21 and it’s at the store and you would just take it
0:25:22 and that way there’s no worry.
0:25:25 – The health experts, the nutritionists
0:25:27 that I speak to on this podcast,
0:25:29 I would say agree with what you’re saying
0:25:32 by about 90, 95, 90%.
0:25:34 They, you know, thinking through
0:25:36 what they’ve told me in private and on the show,
0:25:40 they say you want to predominantly plant some of the plate,
0:25:41 you know, fruit and veg and all that stuff.
0:25:43 And then it’s okay to have a little bit
0:25:45 of animal proteins as well on that.
0:25:48 So like a little bit of chicken breast, for example, is okay.
0:25:50 And that as a balancing act gives you
0:25:53 what we sort of a nutritionally complete diet.
0:25:57 How, what’s your thoughts on that?
0:25:59 – Great idea, it doesn’t work.
0:26:00 It’s a little bit like the person
0:26:02 who comes in to see me in the clinic
0:26:04 and they’ve got a chronic cough.
0:26:07 I said, doc, I’ve had this cough for months now.
0:26:10 I said, well, maybe it’s time that we do stop smoking.
0:26:12 And they say, all right, doc, I’ll stop.
0:26:15 So they come in a week later and say, I’m still coughing.
0:26:16 Well, did you stop smoking?
0:26:18 Well, almost completely.
0:26:21 I’m only having maybe two cigarettes a day.
0:26:23 Say, well, let’s just cut it out completely
0:26:24 and things get dramatically better.
0:26:27 So by analogy, when a person comes in,
0:26:28 they’ve got a high cholesterol level
0:26:29 or they’ve got weight they can’t lose.
0:26:31 And they’re sort of 90% vegan.
0:26:36 That last 10%, you know, really makes such a huge difference.
0:26:39 And it makes a difference in a couple of ways.
0:26:40 And by the way, I’m not encouraging people
0:26:41 to take this on faith.
0:26:44 If you just try it, you’ll discover
0:26:46 that when a person really gets the animal products
0:26:48 out of their life, first of all,
0:26:51 the physical benefits are dramatically better.
0:26:54 A person who follows a plant-based diet on average
0:26:59 is 35 pounds leaner than the typical meat eating American.
0:27:01 Or put it the other way,
0:27:03 your average meeting in America is 35 pounds heavier
0:27:06 than the typical not very careful vegan.
0:27:07 So it’s a big difference.
0:27:10 But beyond that, let’s say I’m trying to follow
0:27:11 mostly a plant-based diet,
0:27:12 but once in a while I’ll have some meat.
0:27:16 What that does is that reawakens the neural circuitry
0:27:19 for those addictive things.
0:27:20 It’s sort of like a smoker
0:27:23 who decides at parties I’ll smoke.
0:27:25 What you’re doing is you’re never able
0:27:27 to forget the taste of it.
0:27:29 So it’s a good idea to just,
0:27:32 if something doesn’t love you back, just get rid of it.
0:27:34 But because that sounds like a heavy load,
0:27:35 what I say to people is this,
0:27:38 and the way we do it in our studies,
0:27:39 take the first week.
0:27:42 And your goal is just to lose some weight.
0:27:44 You wanna be able to see your abs again,
0:27:45 whatever it is.
0:27:47 You wanna get off insulin, you wanna feel better.
0:27:50 Here are the studies that prove that it works.
0:27:52 And then we sit down with the patient
0:27:53 and his reluctant spouse,
0:27:55 and they’ll kind of map out what they’re gonna have
0:27:58 for breakfast and for lunch and for dinner.
0:28:01 And then they just think about it for about a week.
0:28:02 They try the foods
0:28:03 and they figure out the ones that really work.
0:28:06 Great, now we’re gonna do a three week test drive.
0:28:08 And people at home should do this.
0:28:10 21 days, you can do anything for 21 days.
0:28:12 And you’ve already made your list
0:28:13 of the foods that you like.
0:28:15 At the end of 21 days,
0:28:17 number one, physically you are a different person.
0:28:20 You’re losing that weight without calorie counting,
0:28:22 without ramping up your exercise.
0:28:24 People are noticing the difference in you.
0:28:26 But apart from the physical changes,
0:28:28 your tastes are changing.
0:28:31 You’re discovering new things that you didn’t have before.
0:28:32 And better than that,
0:28:34 you’re forgetting the things that didn’t love you back.
0:28:36 – One of our former guests, Charles Yeo,
0:28:39 made a comment that veganism is a diet for the privileged.
0:28:43 And he doesn’t like how vegans make other people feel bad
0:28:45 when they are just trying to support their kids.
0:28:49 And I think there is a train of thought
0:28:52 that says being vegan is expensive and it’s difficult.
0:28:53 And if you’re a sort of time poor,
0:28:56 financially poor family,
0:28:58 how does one become more plant-based
0:29:00 when you’re just trying to think first and foremost
0:29:03 about how to get some food in your kids’ bellies?
0:29:05 – That’s such an important question.
0:29:07 Because when we feed our children,
0:29:09 we’re not only nourishing them today,
0:29:11 but we’re setting in motion
0:29:13 the foods that they will eat in the future.
0:29:15 You’re accommodating the child’s tastes
0:29:17 to the things you put on the table.
0:29:19 So it’s essential that they be healthy foods.
0:29:21 We did a study that we just published
0:29:23 in JAMA Network Open,
0:29:26 the American Medical Association’s online journal.
0:29:29 And we brought in 244 individuals
0:29:31 and half of them were asked to continue their current diet.
0:29:33 The other half were asked to avoid animal products,
0:29:34 keep oils low.
0:29:36 It’s a healthy vegan diet.
0:29:38 And we tracked their weight
0:29:40 and as you can imagine, they lost weight.
0:29:42 And we tracked their insulin sensitivity, got better,
0:29:44 the things that you would imagine,
0:29:47 all the benefits, their cholesterol has improved.
0:29:51 But we also tracked their food expenses.
0:29:53 And what we found is that overall,
0:29:56 you’re spending more on vegetables.
0:29:57 You’re spending more on fruits.
0:29:59 You’re spending more on beans and grains.
0:30:03 And you’re spending nothing on meat, nothing on cheese.
0:30:05 Your oils are, you know, you’re cooking without them.
0:30:08 And the average person saved 16%.
0:30:09 – Including the supplementation.
0:30:13 – Yeah, yes, B12 is pennies.
0:30:18 So the average person’s food bill dropped by about 16%.
0:30:21 So in America, that means about a 500 bucks a year,
0:30:22 something like that.
0:30:24 So why is that?
0:30:27 If a person is low on money,
0:30:29 here in this country, we have the SNAP program,
0:30:31 we used to be called food stamps.
0:30:33 You get a card, you go into the store.
0:30:35 The cheapest thing in the store
0:30:39 are these little bags of dried beans and the dried rice.
0:30:41 And you can get a block of frozen broccoli
0:30:42 that’s three for a dollar and that kind of thing.
0:30:44 And if you go into the back and say,
0:30:46 well, I’d like to have some cheese or some meat,
0:30:47 that’s where the money is.
0:30:50 So when a person’s on a plant-based diet,
0:30:52 they’re gonna be saving money.
0:30:55 Plus the fact is their need for medications
0:30:57 goes way down, they’re not at the doctor so much.
0:30:58 Now, don’t get me wrong.
0:31:00 There are places that would love to charge you
0:31:04 for asparagus water or some kooky thing.
0:31:06 That’s not what we’re talking about.
0:31:10 – You have a book coming out called The Power Food Diet.
0:31:12 You can get it everywhere now on Amazon
0:31:13 and everywhere you’d find a book.
0:31:15 It’s this book here in front of me.
0:31:16 And you kind of reverse the narrative
0:31:17 as it relates to weight loss
0:31:20 because you provide a much more positive perspective
0:31:21 on how to lose weight.
0:31:23 Your book doesn’t tell people what they shouldn’t be eating.
0:31:25 It tells them what they should be eating.
0:31:27 And although there’s been lots written instead about weight loss,
0:31:30 there is quite a lot of original thoughts and ideas
0:31:33 and there’s a huge amount of supporting evidence,
0:31:35 which I think really puts your book,
0:31:37 stands it apart from the crowd.
0:31:38 Why did you write this book?
0:31:41 Why did you write a book about weight loss?
0:31:43 – Up until now, the whole idea has been,
0:31:45 if I want to lose weight, I have to say no.
0:31:49 I have to say no to calories, no to seconds, no to dessert.
0:31:50 And I started thinking, wait a minute,
0:31:52 there is a huge body of research
0:31:55 that allows you to just push that off the table
0:31:58 and say yes to certain specific foods
0:32:01 that I call them power foods because they do three things.
0:32:05 There are certain foods that are appetite tamers.
0:32:08 The same reason that people are buying Ozympic and Wigowi,
0:32:10 these injections that tame your appetite,
0:32:13 food will do precisely the same thing.
0:32:15 That’s right, food releases GLP-1 agonist
0:32:18 and will tame your appetite.
0:32:19 – What is GLP-1?
0:32:22 – Oh, I’m sorry, GLP-1 is a compound
0:32:24 made in the intestinal tract.
0:32:26 And this is the thing that Novo Nordisk
0:32:29 is trying to simulate with its weekly injection,
0:32:31 initially marketed as Ozympic
0:32:34 and then marketed under the name Wigowi.
0:32:36 In the US, it’s been hugely controversial
0:32:38 because it does cut down the appetite
0:32:39 and people lose weight,
0:32:43 but it costs them more than $15,000 a year
0:32:46 and the side effects nausea, vomiting, diarrhea,
0:32:48 feeling terrible.
0:32:51 And when you stop, all that weight comes right back.
0:32:54 So anyway, it’s hugely very controversial,
0:32:57 but what we’ve discovered is we brought in people,
0:32:58 fed them different meals
0:32:59 and found that there are certain foods
0:33:02 that cause GLP-1 release naturally
0:33:03 that tames your appetite.
0:33:05 So there are certain foods that tame your appetite.
0:33:06 If you don’t know what they are,
0:33:07 you’re trying to lose weight
0:33:09 with one arm tied behind your back.
0:33:12 The second thing is that certain foods
0:33:14 trap calories in your digestive tract,
0:33:16 carry them out so you don’t absorb them.
0:33:18 And the third and the most fun
0:33:21 is that certain foods ramp up your metabolism
0:33:22 so that you’re burning calories
0:33:25 for about three or four or five hours after the meal,
0:33:30 faster than you were before, which we can measure.
0:33:33 And we first published those data back in 2005.
0:33:34 The American Journal of Medicine
0:33:36 published our results showing
0:33:38 that your after meal metabolism ramps up,
0:33:41 not hugely, but about 15%, something like that.
0:33:44 So then again, in about, I think it was 2020,
0:33:46 we published this with JAMA Network Open,
0:33:52 that they looked at a new group of participants.
0:33:54 And the same thing happens,
0:33:56 that your metabolism ramps up.
0:33:58 But so many people are struggling with weight,
0:34:02 blaming themselves, and my answer is, wait a minute,
0:34:05 we can, I can make you a wonderful meal
0:34:06 and you can lose weight naturally.
0:34:07 Let me give you an example.
0:34:12 There is a twins registry in the UK.
0:34:13 Great registry they’ve got.
0:34:15 In this particular study,
0:34:18 they looked at not quite 3,000 twins,
0:34:20 identical twins, same genetics.
0:34:22 But then they did dexa scans.
0:34:25 It’s a scan that looks not just at body weight,
0:34:27 what it looks at is body composition.
0:34:29 So how much body fat do you have?
0:34:32 And they discovered that one twin,
0:34:33 compared to the other twin,
0:34:37 had 9% less abdominal fat,
0:34:41 if she was the twin eating more anthocyanins.
0:34:42 What is that?
0:34:47 Anthocyanins is the blue in a blueberry or in a grape.
0:34:49 This is nature’s painting box.
0:34:52 And they’re powerful antioxidants.
0:34:55 And so then at Harvard, researchers looked at,
0:35:00 okay, which foods are associated with weight loss?
0:35:02 They looked at about 130,000 people
0:35:03 in the nurses health study
0:35:05 and the health professionals follow-up study.
0:35:06 They track them year after year.
0:35:09 They say, okay, these people are eating more of this food,
0:35:11 more of that food.
0:35:13 How does that affect their weight change?
0:35:14 And this is just an association.
0:35:18 But what they discovered is that people who ate more beans
0:35:19 would tend to lose more weight.
0:35:22 People who ate more citrus fruit,
0:35:24 even fruit juice would lose more weight.
0:35:26 People who ate more melons,
0:35:29 watermelons and cantaloupes and things would lose more weight.
0:35:31 And then green vegetables,
0:35:35 but the number one food of all the foods
0:35:37 that was associated with the most weight loss
0:35:40 was blueberries, blueberries and all their cousins
0:35:41 like raspberries and so forth,
0:35:43 these anthocyanin rich foods.
0:35:46 So why the heck is it that people who decide
0:35:48 to eat more of these foods and bring them into their diet,
0:35:49 why are they losing weight?
0:35:52 Well, okay, if you’re eating the blueberries
0:35:54 for the dessert you’re not eating,
0:35:56 the cream custard, maybe that’s part of it.
0:35:58 But even when you control for that,
0:35:59 you still see the weight loss.
0:36:01 And we believe that the reasons are
0:36:03 that these are always high fiber foods.
0:36:05 They are always very modest in calories.
0:36:08 And there is something about the effect of anthocyanins
0:36:10 that may affect either our appetite
0:36:12 or more likely our metabolism.
0:36:13 – On the point of anthocyanins,
0:36:17 is the color of the fruit somewhat an indicator
0:36:18 of an anthocyanin?
0:36:20 – Yes, it is, but it could be tricky.
0:36:24 Anthocyanins is a huge painting box
0:36:26 that nature uses for blueberries,
0:36:29 for the red grape that’s anthocyanins,
0:36:32 strawberries are red, but it’s a different anthocyanin.
0:36:36 And in October, when the leaves are turning,
0:36:39 those yellows and reds and golden colors
0:36:41 are different anthocyanins.
0:36:44 Now a tomato or a watermelon,
0:36:45 that bright red is not anthocyanins.
0:36:48 That’s lycopene, and that’s an antioxidant too,
0:36:51 but that’s the cousin of beta carotene.
0:36:53 So beta carotene is the orange in a carrot,
0:36:55 lycopene is the red in a tomato,
0:36:58 and the anthocyanins are the purples in the grapes
0:36:59 and in the blueberries and so forth.
0:37:02 – With blueberries, is there a positive impact
0:37:05 on memory in the brain with blueberries as well?
0:37:06 – Very likely.
0:37:08 I think personally, I think we need more research,
0:37:11 but our team and many others have been really excited
0:37:12 about this ever since.
0:37:14 Researchers at the University of Cincinnati
0:37:16 brought in a group of people,
0:37:18 and not just random people off the street,
0:37:19 these were people selected
0:37:23 because they were way up in years, average age 76, 78,
0:37:26 and they already had memory lapses.
0:37:30 They had what we call mild cognitive impairment.
0:37:34 They gave them a huge infusion of anthocyanins
0:37:39 in the form of grape juice, a pint in a day,
0:37:41 so maybe a cup in the morning, a cup at night.
0:37:42 And over three months,
0:37:45 they then tracked your ability to retain knowledge
0:37:46 and your ability to remember.
0:37:49 And what they showed is it was measurably increased
0:37:50 over a placebo.
0:37:53 And okay, that sounds to me too easy.
0:37:55 So they did the study again,
0:37:57 and they used a different anthocyanin source.
0:37:59 They now used blueberry juice, same result.
0:38:01 So I continue to think that,
0:38:04 I think it’s a good idea to be skeptical
0:38:08 because people want to find some easy answer to things.
0:38:08 – Yeah.
0:38:11 And what’s the rest of their diet controlled in those studies?
0:38:12 – In this case, no.
0:38:14 – Okay, so it could have been anything?
0:38:16 – Could have been, very likely was.
0:38:17 So what they did– – Was it randomized?
0:38:18 – Randomized trial.
0:38:20 And what you do is you take people
0:38:21 and you just give them the anthocyanin drink
0:38:24 versus some kind of placebo that looks the same.
0:38:26 So I do think we need to be careful.
0:38:27 And I think industry,
0:38:29 you’ll have the blueberry industry
0:38:32 or the grape juice industry jumping in with money
0:38:35 as the dairy industry has been doing for a long period of time.
0:38:36 So I think we should be skeptical.
0:38:39 But when you see, for example, our group,
0:38:43 we take no money from any food industry group ever
0:38:45 for exactly even healthy foods.
0:38:46 We won’t take their money
0:38:48 because we want to make sure that we’re unbiased
0:38:49 in what we find.
0:38:53 And you want to look for consistency of findings.
0:38:55 Do you ever wonder if you are biased?
0:38:58 ‘Cause you’ve got that experience,
0:39:01 that very sort of honestly traumatic experience
0:39:03 from that morgue that day.
0:39:06 And you end up writing books about these subject matters.
0:39:07 It becomes part of your identity.
0:39:09 And I even think with myself,
0:39:12 like for example, I said about my girlfriend
0:39:13 struggling with the vegan diet,
0:39:16 that’s created a bias in me, hasn’t it?
0:39:20 Do you ever wonder or do you ever think about the chance
0:39:24 that you might be biased in the way that you look
0:39:26 at the data or the data you look at?
0:39:27 Of course.
0:39:29 Every good scientist recognizes
0:39:31 that bias can enter in any study.
0:39:35 We all have biases and that’s why you have to do studies
0:39:36 in a careful way.
0:39:38 So for example, when I do a study comparing
0:39:40 a Mediterranean diet to a vegan diet,
0:39:43 I make sure that the Mediterranean diet is taught
0:39:45 by dieticians who personally follow
0:39:48 a Mediterranean diet themselves and will talk it up
0:39:49 and I hire them for that purpose.
0:39:51 And the vegan diet is taught by dieticians
0:39:52 who believe in that diet.
0:39:54 And then your statistics have to be done blindly
0:39:56 by somebody who’s not partial.
0:39:57 But everybody has biases.
0:40:00 And with tobacco, we went through this.
0:40:03 Back in the ’50s and ’60s, you could say,
0:40:06 well, I’m not sure if tobacco really causes lung cancer.
0:40:09 And if somebody thought it was, well, you’re biased.
0:40:13 As today, if somebody does not strongly believe
0:40:15 that tobacco causes lung cancer, you’re just an idiot.
0:40:17 I mean, it clearly does.
0:40:18 But that doesn’t mean you don’t do tobacco research,
0:40:22 you do, but you try to set your biases aside.
0:40:25 – A lot of people will just eat chicken steak
0:40:27 because they just think it tastes nicer.
0:40:28 I think I’m in that camp.
0:40:31 I think I was, you know, whether that’s just a nature thing.
0:40:33 You know, I was raised on eating chicken.
0:40:34 My mom cooks chicken all the time.
0:40:38 I love going to this steak restaurant in London
0:40:39 called Flatiron.
0:40:40 If you guys want to give me a discount code,
0:40:42 it would be my fucking go there all the time.
0:40:45 But I just like the taste of it.
0:40:48 So that’s why, big part of the reason I eat it,
0:40:52 and as a young man, I want to get as much protein as I can.
0:40:55 I want to work out, I want big, strong muscles.
0:40:57 I like the taste.
0:41:00 It helps me grow my muscles, you know?
0:41:02 – You can do anything you want.
0:41:04 You can.
0:41:09 However, what you want today is what you ate yesterday.
0:41:12 Our tastes can drift very, very readily
0:41:14 to foods that we expose ourselves to.
0:41:15 So if the past week I’ve been eating chicken,
0:41:17 it’s over, that’s what we tend to come back to.
0:41:19 And that’s what we accommodate to.
0:41:20 And that’s true for caffeine.
0:41:22 That’s true for every drug of abuse.
0:41:24 That’s true for foods that we get hooked on.
0:41:26 It’s true for cheese more than anything else.
0:41:27 People listening to this broadcast
0:41:29 are all nodding exactly right now
0:41:32 because they’re like, “I could be vegan except for the cheese.”
0:41:34 And that’s- – I love cheese.
0:41:36 – Well, it doesn’t love you back, unfortunately.
0:41:40 Cheese has, not to divert too much,
0:41:43 but cheese is the one food that actually contains narcotics.
0:41:49 The casein protein that’s in milk
0:41:51 comes out of the cow’s udder.
0:41:54 It digests in the calves’ stomach
0:41:56 to release what are called caesomorphins.
0:42:01 They’re casein-derived morphine-like compounds
0:42:03 and they go into calf’s blood to the calf’s brain
0:42:05 and they attach two receptors,
0:42:08 the very same receptor that a narcotic attaches to.
0:42:09 So if you drink a glass of milk,
0:42:11 the very same thing happens
0:42:13 is that your body takes the casein protein,
0:42:14 pulls out the caesomorphins,
0:42:17 they go to your brain and attach there.
0:42:19 But the reason that cheese is more addictive than milk
0:42:23 or even ice cream is because when you make cheese,
0:42:26 you concentrate the protein and the fat.
0:42:28 You remove all the lactose sugar and all the way
0:42:31 and it’s just basically casein mixed with fat
0:42:34 and it’s basically dairy crack.
0:42:37 The big problem here, and for any guy who’s thinking,
0:42:39 “Do I want to stop eating dairy?”
0:42:42 Estradiol, female sex hormones,
0:42:44 if your mom has hot flashes
0:42:47 and she’s taking estradiol to calmer flashes,
0:42:51 that female sex hormone is in cheese.
0:42:52 It’s in milk.
0:42:54 The cow’s, the cow makes it.
0:42:58 Cows naturally make estradiol
0:43:00 and so it’s in every slice of cheese you ever ate,
0:43:02 but it gets worse.
0:43:06 To get cheese, you have to milk a cow
0:43:08 and cows normally don’t make milk.
0:43:11 They make milk only after they’ve been impregnated.
0:43:12 And if you don’t mind,
0:43:13 let me just walk you through how this happens
0:43:16 ’cause I think it’s good for people to be aware of.
0:43:18 In every dairy farm, everywhere in the world,
0:43:21 there’s an underpaid guy who takes his left hand
0:43:24 and puts a glove on it up to his shoulder
0:43:27 and he sticks his hand into the cow’s rectum,
0:43:29 up to his elbow and he grabs the cow’s uterus.
0:43:32 You can feel the uterus through the rectal wall
0:43:34 and you hold it steady and with your right hand,
0:43:36 you take what looks like a knitting needle
0:43:38 and you jam it into her vagina right through the cervix
0:43:40 and you inject sperm that you took from a bowl.
0:43:43 Now, she will become impregnated and she will not object
0:43:44 because she’s chained up by the neck
0:43:47 and she can’t turn around and stomp you.
0:43:48 And then you go on to the next one,
0:43:49 the next one, the next one.
0:43:51 Nine months later, after her gestation has finished,
0:43:55 she will have a calf, which she didn’t volunteer for,
0:43:57 but this is now her baby.
0:43:58 And she will look at that calf
0:44:01 and the calf looks up at mom
0:44:03 and all the farm hands gather around
0:44:05 because I gotta tell you there’s nothing cuter
0:44:07 than this big bag of bones of this little calf
0:44:11 who was just born and this is like the first hour of life.
0:44:14 And then they say, “Well, wait a minute.
0:44:17 “You don’t want that calf to suckle
0:44:19 “because that milk is what we’re gonna sell.”
0:44:22 The milk that’s made for her calf is we’re gonna sell.
0:44:24 So we have an implement that solves that problem
0:44:26 and that’s a wheelbarrow.
0:44:28 So you put the calf in a wheelbarrow
0:44:30 and you carry the calf away.
0:44:32 Now, the mother infant bond
0:44:35 is the strongest bond we have in nature.
0:44:38 She will follow and she’ll follow
0:44:40 like effectively in her own bovine way,
0:44:43 saying, “This is my baby.”
0:44:46 And then a gate will hit her in the face
0:44:49 and she will stand right there and cry out.
0:44:51 And the calf, if the calf is male,
0:44:53 will very soon be killed for veal
0:44:56 because you can’t use a male in the dairy industry.
0:44:58 And if that calf is female,
0:45:02 she will be put in an isolation hutch fed milk replacer.
0:45:03 And when she’s about a year old,
0:45:07 she’ll get a hand up her butt and she’ll be impregnated.
0:45:09 Now, in nature, a cow lives to be about 20.
0:45:13 On a dairy farm, their milk production,
0:45:15 although they’re impregnated every single year,
0:45:17 slacks off by about age four.
0:45:18 And then they are hung up by their leg
0:45:21 and they are slit for low grade beef.
0:45:25 So the dairy industry is a meat industry.
0:45:27 It just takes you a little while to get there.
0:45:32 And every dairy cow is impregnated artificially,
0:45:33 they’re separated from their calf.
0:45:36 And we just kind of put up with this.
0:45:41 And during each pregnancy, she is continued to be milked.
0:45:44 The estrogen comes down those milking tubes.
0:45:47 It gets into the, this little swimming pool full of milk
0:45:48 when they throw in the rennet,
0:45:50 which is this genetically engineered enzyme
0:45:51 that makes it clot.
0:45:53 Then you throw in the bacteria.
0:45:55 They give it that funky fermented flavor
0:45:57 and people get hooked on this stuff.
0:46:00 And you’re eating this mixture of estradiol
0:46:02 along with a huge amount of fat
0:46:04 and these animal proteins that have
0:46:06 the casomorphins in them.
0:46:08 And everybody gets hooked on this thing.
0:46:11 And your average American eats 77,000 calories
0:46:16 of cheese every year.
0:46:18 And then they think they got fat from eating bread.
0:46:21 It wasn’t the bread, it was that hunk of cheese
0:46:22 that was in between there
0:46:23 that could explain the entire weight problem
0:46:25 we have in America.
0:46:26 – So you’re saying also that then men
0:46:28 who are drinking the dairy products
0:46:29 or eating the dairy products have,
0:46:32 there’s an implication for their own hormone levels
0:46:34 and their own sort of sperm counts, et cetera.
0:46:37 Is there any evidence for that drinking milk
0:46:39 as a man will reduce your sperm count?
0:46:42 – Exactly, that has been discovered in New York,
0:46:42 New York state.
0:46:46 Researchers went into a fertility center
0:46:48 and you do sperm counts on men.
0:46:49 And when you do a sperm count,
0:46:51 what you’re looking at is the count,
0:46:53 the number of little sperm.
0:46:55 You also look at their morphology,
0:46:57 meaning their shape and their motility,
0:46:59 meaning are they swimming straight?
0:47:02 And what they have shown in at least two studies
0:47:03 that I’m aware of,
0:47:05 that men who consume the most cheese
0:47:07 have the lowest sperm counts
0:47:10 and the worst mortality and morphology,
0:47:11 motility and morphology.
0:47:12 And the reason, of course,
0:47:15 is you’re swallowing estrogen every day,
0:47:17 but it gets worse than that.
0:47:17 When you eat cheese,
0:47:20 you’re eating something that’s three quarters fat.
0:47:22 It’s really high in calories.
0:47:25 And added to your chicken fat and beef fat
0:47:27 and the fat that people get all over the place,
0:47:28 you’re gaining body weight.
0:47:29 And guys are struggling with this
0:47:32 and mistakenly blaming carbs and so forth.
0:47:33 But as you gain body weight,
0:47:37 every fat cell in your body is an estrogen factory.
0:47:39 What I mean is your testosterone
0:47:42 goes into a fat cell and estrogen comes out.
0:47:46 You have enzymes called aromatase enzymes
0:47:48 that take that testosterone from your bloodstream.
0:47:50 And the more body fat you have,
0:47:52 the more they are reducing your testosterone
0:47:54 because they’re converting it to estradiol.
0:47:57 – Is this in part, in your view,
0:47:59 why there’s been a decline in testosterone in men
0:48:00 over the last couple of decades?
0:48:01 – Without question.
0:48:04 I can reduce your testosterone level
0:48:05 within a matter of a couple of weeks
0:48:08 just by putting you on a cheesy, meaty diet.
0:48:10 The more your body fat expands,
0:48:13 the more your testosterone level is neutralized.
0:48:14 It gets worse.
0:48:18 Because there’s estrogen in the dairy itself,
0:48:21 that adds to the estrogen your body is now making
0:48:22 in your body fat.
0:48:27 An animal-based diet is just a recipe for hormone haywire.
0:48:30 You know, I have to ask about the carnivore diet,
0:48:33 which is, you know, I’ve had guests on this podcast,
0:48:34 that weren’t health experts,
0:48:35 we’re even talking about healthful food
0:48:36 or nutrition at all,
0:48:39 but certain guests, in one in particular,
0:48:41 who is on the carnivore diet,
0:48:43 because, you know, I also think about Michaela Peterson,
0:48:45 who I think is a wonderful person,
0:48:47 and she’s also on the carnivore diet.
0:48:50 She had loads of health complications in her life
0:48:53 to the point that I think she was virtually disabled
0:48:55 at one point, in bed couldn’t move,
0:48:56 lots of pain, lots of problems.
0:48:59 And then she went on a carnivore-only diet,
0:49:02 which meant that she eats pretty much only steak
0:49:04 with salt and pepper, I believe.
0:49:05 Don’t want to get that wrong.
0:49:08 And all of her health problems went away.
0:49:10 And when you hear about those stories, you go,
0:49:11 “Jesus, that’s incredibly compelling.”
0:49:13 I’m not saying that that is the correct diet at all,
0:49:15 because I’ve sat here with enough nutritionists
0:49:17 and health experts to know
0:49:18 that there’s a general consensus
0:49:21 that you want as much plants on your plate
0:49:24 as you possibly can, with a little bit of protein.
0:49:26 They seem to be pretty decided.
0:49:30 That little bit of chicken breast isn’t a problem.
0:49:32 But there is a school of thought,
0:49:35 and there are a group of people that just eat meat alone.
0:49:39 And they seem to be doing okay.
0:49:41 Is there any research that has been done
0:49:42 on the people that are on a carnivore diet
0:49:43 that you’re aware of?
0:49:46 – I don’t know.
0:49:48 I haven’t really looked at the carnivore diet very well.
0:49:50 It’s a ludicrous diet.
0:49:51 First of all, it’s very fiber deficient,
0:49:53 and somebody like that is going to spend hours
0:49:58 in the bathroom struggling to go to the bathroom
0:49:59 because they’re not getting any fiber.
0:50:01 So that person goes to the drug store,
0:50:03 and they’ll get metamucil, which is a psyllium fiber,
0:50:05 which is a seed fiber,
0:50:06 ’cause they don’t want to eat the seeds,
0:50:10 but they’ll sell you the fiber to counteract it.
0:50:11 You’re getting a massive amount of cholesterol.
0:50:13 Now, the one thing you could say for it
0:50:16 is if a person says, “Well, I’m chucking out
0:50:19 “a bunch of just sugar, and I’m chucking out the cheese,”
0:50:20 and so forth, and I’m focusing on meat,
0:50:22 well, half of what you’re doing is good,
0:50:23 is you’re getting rid of some other things
0:50:25 that were frankly not so good for you.
0:50:27 The donuts and things aren’t very good,
0:50:31 but a meat-based diet is a romantic fantasy.
0:50:34 When people think of themselves as hunter-gatherers,
0:50:37 we are gatherers first, and hunters second.
0:50:40 Our nature is not to be racing over the hilltop
0:50:41 and capturing an antelope
0:50:44 and bringing it back to the applause of our families.
0:50:47 That’s a romantic notion that people like to pretend.
0:50:51 And if you look at human cultures over the millennia,
0:50:55 we are clearly designed for and have followed
0:50:58 either an exclusively plant-based diet
0:50:59 or a mostly plant-based diet.
0:51:03 Now, that said, we’ll take what we can get.
0:51:08 When people don’t have tremendous means,
0:51:10 if a rabbit comes by and they can capture them
0:51:13 in their snare and they’ll eat them, they will.
0:51:15 Having said that, I have to say,
0:51:19 I put this question to Richard Leakey some years ago,
0:51:21 and I asked him, I said, you know–
0:51:22 – Who’s that?
0:51:25 – Oh, Richard Leakey was a wonderful paleoanthropologist.
0:51:27 His father was Louis Leakey,
0:51:30 and Louis Leakey is the one who launched Jane Goodall
0:51:32 into Tanzania to study chimpanzees
0:51:34 and Diane Fossey to study the gorillas.
0:51:36 Louis Leakey was a wonderful paleoanthropologist
0:51:39 and his son, Richard, worked for many, many years
0:51:42 in Kenya and died recently.
0:51:43 But I put this question to him.
0:51:45 I said, all the work that you’ve done
0:51:48 studying human behavior and human diet,
0:51:51 aren’t we naturally carnivores?
0:51:53 And he looked at me in the eye and he said,
0:51:55 understand, we are not carnivores
0:51:58 and never have been carnivores.
0:52:00 What allowed people to start to eat
0:52:03 as if they’re carnivores was the advent of the Stone Age,
0:52:06 when we were able to make stone tools
0:52:09 that became axes and arrowheads.
0:52:11 Left to your own devices without those tools,
0:52:14 you can’t chase down a deer or an antelope.
0:52:17 There’s, you might occasionally get some roadkill
0:52:19 or something like that or not roadkill,
0:52:20 but you know what I mean, you would get,
0:52:22 you could scavenge from something left over
0:52:24 by a lion or a hyena.
0:52:25 And in fact, that’s he believed
0:52:27 that that is how meat eating began,
0:52:31 was that there was kill left over in a carcass
0:52:35 that wasn’t fully eaten by an actual carnivorous animal.
0:52:39 And then once we got fire, which we didn’t have before,
0:52:41 once we got fire, now you’re onto something.
0:52:43 Now you can actually make meat,
0:52:45 at least over the short term, safe to eat.
0:52:47 – I wanna talk a lot more about hormones,
0:52:49 but just to close off the section about weight loss
0:52:50 that we were talking about.
0:52:52 We were talking originally about the blueberries.
0:52:53 There’s another group of foods,
0:52:54 which you include in the Power Foods diet,
0:52:57 one of which is the, and I’m gonna get this word wrong,
0:53:00 cruciferous vegetables.
0:53:01 – Yeah, cruciferous vegetables.
0:53:03 – That’s exactly what I said.
0:53:04 Can you say that again?
0:53:06 – Cruciferous.
0:53:11 Cruciform, the flower on broccoli or cauliflower
0:53:14 or Brussels sprouts, when they’re growing,
0:53:15 they present this little flower
0:53:17 that has kind of a little cross shape in it.
0:53:19 So it’s called cruciferous.
0:53:20 – Cruciferous.
0:53:22 – Yeah, and they’re healthy foods.
0:53:23 They are good in many ways.
0:53:25 – And they’re good for weight loss, specifically.
0:53:26 – Yeah, they are.
0:53:27 They’re one of the top foods
0:53:31 that the Harvard researchers associated with weight loss.
0:53:33 And frankly, it’s kind of for a no brainer reason.
0:53:35 They’re really high in fiber.
0:53:39 A cup of broccoli has maybe five grams of fiber in it,
0:53:43 but all of about 50 or 60 calories, like none.
0:53:45 So it’s very, very filling, very low in calories.
0:53:47 – So what’s in that category then?
0:53:49 Broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, Brussels sprouts,
0:53:50 those kinds of things, right?
0:53:53 – Yeah, arugula and lots more, yes.
0:53:55 They have a second benefit.
0:53:57 Researchers at Johns Hopkins have been studying them
0:53:59 not for weight loss, but for cancer prevention.
0:54:02 And they find that maybe not surprisingly,
0:54:04 people who eat more of these have less
0:54:06 of various forms of cancer.
0:54:09 But it turns out that what they do is a surprise.
0:54:13 If you eat a couple of servings of broccoli today
0:54:16 and the same thing tomorrow,
0:54:19 then by about the following day, at that same time of day,
0:54:23 your liver is making more of what are called phase two enzymes.
0:54:25 The phase two enzymes are there
0:54:27 to remove toxins from your body.
0:54:31 So if you inhale, bus exhaust,
0:54:33 or some other toxin that’s in your body,
0:54:35 your liver is there to filter them out and get rid of them.
0:54:37 And your liver is more powerful
0:54:39 if the cruciferous vegetables were in your diet
0:54:40 because they cause it to make more
0:54:42 of these detoxification enzymes.
0:54:43 But there are lots of these foods.
0:54:45 And some of them are not foods,
0:54:47 but they’re flavors like cinnamon.
0:54:52 Cinnamon has a compound in it
0:54:53 that scientists didn’t know what to call it.
0:54:56 They ended up calling it cinnamaldehyde.
0:54:57 You know, researchers are not always very creative
0:55:00 for their naming, but cinnamon contains this thing
0:55:01 called cinnamaldehyde.
0:55:03 And it’s associated with weight loss.
0:55:07 And it appears that it works by increasing metabolism.
0:55:08 So what researchers have done,
0:55:09 there are many of these studies,
0:55:12 but there was a 2017 study where researchers,
0:55:15 all they did in a randomized trial
0:55:17 was give cinnamon or nothing.
0:55:21 And the amount of cinnamon was about one teaspoon per day,
0:55:23 which you could throw in water or whatever.
0:55:26 And what they showed was about a seven or eight pound weight
0:55:28 loss over a matter of several weeks.
0:55:32 And so I’m not recommending that people just add cinnamon
0:55:35 to bread that’s slathered with butter
0:55:37 because you can undo the power.
0:55:41 But the whole point of the power foods dietary approach
0:55:43 is rather than thinking about all the things I can’t eat,
0:55:46 let’s bring in, we know that berries are good.
0:55:48 So let’s say I make a muffin
0:55:50 and instead of cooking it with butter,
0:55:51 I’m gonna cook it in a healthy way
0:55:54 and I’m gonna have blueberries in it.
0:55:56 So the food’s gotta be, they have to be good
0:55:57 so that you’ll like them
0:55:58 so that you’ll serve them to your family.
0:56:02 And then the weight loss just kicks in automatically.
0:56:03 – A teaspoon of cinnamon per day
0:56:06 caused an average weight loss of about half a pound
0:56:08 per week, that’s from page 24 of your-
0:56:08 – There you go.
0:56:09 – Which was really surprising to me.
0:56:10 The other thing that I found quite surprising
0:56:13 was you talk about hot peppers.
0:56:15 I love hot peppers.
0:56:18 And you say that they’re a great weight loss food.
0:56:20 – Who knew that that hot feeling
0:56:22 that you experience afterwards,
0:56:23 it’s not just hot in your tongue.
0:56:25 You can put a sensor on your forehead
0:56:29 and you’ll actually see the body is burning off calories
0:56:31 as a result of eating the spicy food.
0:56:34 So I’m not suggesting that people take a couple of
0:56:36 jalapenos and just eat that.
0:56:39 But what I am suggesting is that there are spices.
0:56:40 There’s cinnamon.
0:56:42 There is the capsaicins.
0:56:44 Those are the hot in the hot peppers.
0:56:45 There’s also ginger.
0:56:48 They all have these kinds of effects
0:56:50 where they readjust your body chemistry
0:56:51 to be a calorie burner.
0:56:53 So the foods taste great.
0:56:55 You’re not increasing your workout,
0:56:56 but the weight comes off.
0:56:59 And I don’t want people to get modest about this.
0:57:02 I’m working, we’re in a study right now.
0:57:06 And the study has been going on for about 18 weeks now.
0:57:08 One of the guys in the study has lost 60 pounds already.
0:57:11 Now I don’t encourage people to lose weight that fast.
0:57:12 And the person who’s going to lose weight that fast
0:57:15 is a person who’s got a lot of weight to lose.
0:57:17 But if you’ve got five or 10 pounds that you want to lose
0:57:20 or maybe 30 or 40, that’d be very typical.
0:57:21 Let’s lose it.
0:57:23 Let’s not fool around.
0:57:25 Let’s put yourself in a body that you want to be in
0:57:27 that makes you feel good.
0:57:30 That doesn’t just help you to knock off that weight.
0:57:31 It helps your arteries to open up,
0:57:33 it helps your sexual function to return,
0:57:35 helps your mind to work today
0:57:36 and to protect it for tomorrow.
0:57:38 We can do those things.
0:57:40 It’s all a question of having the information
0:57:42 and then putting it to work.
0:57:45 – Is there truth in the fact that spicy foods,
0:57:48 specifically spicy peppers, like hot peppers,
0:57:49 reduce your appetite?
0:57:52 – They seem to.
0:57:54 But I don’t believe that that is the main effect.
0:57:56 I think the main effect is on metabolism.
0:57:59 They do seem to affect the appetite in a helpful way.
0:58:01 But the main effect I think is the metabolic increase.
0:58:05 We see, we can measure this where we bring people in
0:58:08 and you put on kind of a mask.
0:58:10 You look like a pilot.
0:58:12 And what I’m actually measuring
0:58:14 is your carbon dioxide output
0:58:15 and then your oxygen intake.
0:58:17 And that’s proportional to your metabolism.
0:58:19 It’s proportional to how fast you’re burning calories.
0:58:21 And almost anything you eat
0:58:23 will cause you to increase your metabolism
0:58:27 while you are in the post-ingestion period.
0:58:30 But two things, there are certain foods
0:58:33 that cause a bigger burn than others.
0:58:34 The ones that cause the biggest burn
0:58:36 are the ones that are high in carbohydrate,
0:58:39 but also peppers are for some reason in that category.
0:58:43 And if a person has been on a low-fat vegan diet,
0:58:48 going into the test, they get an even bigger burn afterwards.
0:58:51 And that’s because their body is, we believe,
0:58:54 is more insulin sensitive than it was before.
0:58:57 So if I wanna really increase your burn
0:58:58 and help you to get the weight off,
0:59:00 I would not only serve you these healthy foods
0:59:03 at each meal, but I would take advantage of the fact
0:59:06 that they are adjusting your physiology for the long term.
0:59:08 – What about ginger?
0:59:10 – Yeah, ginger is also, it’s a relative
0:59:14 of these other foods where you see that capsaicin
0:59:16 is the one that’s really killer spice.
0:59:18 Ginger is kind of its first cousin
0:59:20 and it causes a similar effect.
0:59:22 – Weight loss effect.
0:59:24 – Yeah, and other things too.
0:59:26 I mean, people use ginger for many, many things
0:59:29 and people using it for migraines as an anti-inflammatory.
0:59:31 There’s a reason that these spices
0:59:33 have been used since time immemorial.
0:59:35 And our goal now is to tackle this big issue
0:59:39 of extra weight and to see if we can put it to work for that.
0:59:41 – Mangoes, papayas, legumes, green vegetables,
0:59:44 orange vegetables are all some of the things included
0:59:46 in the power foods diet.
0:59:51 The most controversial of all though is eggs.
0:59:53 – Yeah.
0:59:54 – You know, you can come for everything else,
0:59:57 but coming for eggs is particularly triggering.
1:00:01 You say in the book, eggs are not helpful for your waistline.
1:00:03 – Well, eggs have lots of issues.
1:00:06 The first is that it’s a cholesterol bomb
1:00:10 and the egg industry would like us to believe
1:00:12 that they don’t raise cholesterol, they clearly do.
1:00:14 And we published a review on this
1:00:18 where we looked at every study ever done on eggs
1:00:20 and they clearly raise cholesterol.
1:00:23 And even the studies done by the egg industry do show this
1:00:26 although their interpretation is different.
1:00:28 If the studies were funded by the egg industry,
1:00:30 they’ll say, well, it increased cholesterol,
1:00:33 but not significantly or something like that.
1:00:34 But they clearly do.
1:00:38 And that’s for a reason that an egg, when an egg is laid,
1:00:41 that egg doesn’t call out for room service.
1:00:45 That chicken developing inside has to make the chicken’s body
1:00:46 from everything that was in the egg.
1:00:49 And so it’s laid with a ton of cholesterol
1:00:51 because the cholesterol is an integral ingredient
1:00:52 for the animal’s body.
1:00:54 If instead you boil it and eat it,
1:00:56 you’re getting a ton of cholesterol.
1:00:59 So anyway, you can have eggs if you want them,
1:01:01 but it’s got a huge amount of cholesterol
1:01:03 and you don’t need the rest of it.
1:01:04 – You wrote a book in 2020,
1:01:06 which touches on a few of the subjects
1:01:11 we’ve already touched on around the hormones within our body.
1:01:14 I think hormones are a under addressed,
1:01:17 but very interesting and very important subject matter.
1:01:19 For someone that doesn’t really understand hormones
1:01:20 and doesn’t really know the relevance of them,
1:01:22 what are our hormones
1:01:25 and why does understanding a hormone balance
1:01:26 is matter at all?
1:01:29 – Hormones are the director
1:01:31 that controls everything in your body.
1:01:35 And the old way of thinking about food,
1:01:38 the old fashioned way of thinking about food was,
1:01:40 I eat a bad food, I have a disease.
1:01:41 I eat high cholesterol foods, I’ll get a heart attack,
1:01:42 fair enough.
1:01:46 But what we have now learned is that hormones control
1:01:50 everything in your body and foods control your hormones.
1:01:54 Hormones are directions, they’re letters, they’re messages
1:01:56 that go from one part of the body where they’re made
1:01:58 to another part of the body where they tell it what to do.
1:02:02 And if we’re just eating foods without any understanding
1:02:03 of what that’s doing to those hormones,
1:02:07 then you’re a victim of everything that’s in your diet.
1:02:08 I was sitting at my desk one day,
1:02:10 a young woman called me up.
1:02:13 She said, “I can’t get out of bed.”
1:02:15 And a lot of women have menstrual cramps
1:02:19 for maybe one in 10, it’s off the scale.
1:02:20 I can’t go to work today type cramps.
1:02:22 And that was her situation.
1:02:23 She said, “I got a business meeting,
1:02:25 “I’m supposed to be at the airport tomorrow morning,
1:02:27 “but I can’t even move.
1:02:28 “Could I give her demoral?”
1:02:31 That was her question, it’s a narcotic.
1:02:33 And I said, “I can give you a heavy duty painkillers
1:02:35 “for a couple of days.”
1:02:39 But I was thinking, what’s causing this?
1:02:43 And I started to realize that there was a very good chance
1:02:45 that she had too much estrogen in her blood.
1:02:49 The estrogen every month thickens the lining
1:02:51 of the uterus in a woman’s body,
1:02:53 in anticipation of pregnancy.
1:02:54 And that endometrial lining,
1:02:57 if there’s too much estrogen, it thickens up too much.
1:02:59 And then with the menstrual fluid breaks apart
1:03:02 and it releases these maladjusted chemicals
1:03:05 called prostaglandins that cause the cramping.
1:03:07 So I started thinking, wait a minute,
1:03:10 let’s reduce her estrogen, let’s change her hormones.
1:03:12 How are we gonna do that?
1:03:16 As luck would have it, researchers at Tufts University
1:03:18 in Boston had done a study.
1:03:20 They brought in a group of women, 48 women,
1:03:22 they put them on a metabolic ward,
1:03:24 they locked the door, they prepared all the food.
1:03:27 They gave them diets for eight to 10 weeks each,
1:03:30 either cutting fat, increasing fiber,
1:03:32 or doing both at the same time.
1:03:34 And what they found was amazing.
1:03:37 The more you cut fat, the more estrogen levels came down
1:03:38 to a more normal level.
1:03:39 The more that you increased fiber,
1:03:42 again, the more that estrogen came down.
1:03:45 What they were thinking about was breast cancer.
1:03:47 If I contain estradiol, I can reduce breast cancer risk.
1:03:51 But I was thinking, this woman has hormone haywire
1:03:52 that’s causing her cramps.
1:03:54 So I suggested something I don’t think
1:03:56 any doctor ever suggested before.
1:03:58 I said, let me give you some painkillers for today,
1:04:00 for tomorrow, so you can function.
1:04:03 But would you like to try and experiment?
1:04:05 Everything in your diet, I want to be from a plant
1:04:06 for the next four weeks.
1:04:08 And keep oils really low.
1:04:08 What am I doing?
1:04:11 I’m making sure she gets max fiber, minimum fat.
1:04:13 She called me back four weeks later.
1:04:16 She said, “Dr. Barnard, I got my period today.”
1:04:21 Nothing, no symptoms whatsoever.
1:04:23 She said, “This is miraculous.
1:04:24 This hasn’t happened to me ever.”
1:04:27 And she was cured as long as she stuck with it.
1:04:29 But then she would kind of loosen up her diet
1:04:31 and then the pain came running back.
1:04:33 So we then did a randomized trial,
1:04:34 which we published in the journal
1:04:37 Obstetrics and Gynecology with our partners
1:04:40 at Georgetown University’s Department of OB/GYN.
1:04:41 And it was randomized.
1:04:43 It was the diet versus a supplement
1:04:45 that was actually a placebo.
1:04:46 And it works.
1:04:49 And the diet reduced the duration of pain,
1:04:52 the intensity of the pain, as well as PMS symptoms,
1:04:55 like loading and water retention and moodiness,
1:04:56 all these things got better.
1:04:57 Now there’s some variability.
1:04:59 For some women, it’s just cure.
1:05:01 For others, the effect is more mild.
1:05:04 But then we started to realize, wait a minute,
1:05:07 how about menopause, where women has hot flashes
1:05:08 that are driving her crazy?
1:05:13 You can change that whole scenario dramatically with food.
1:05:15 And things like thyroid function,
1:05:17 where a person’s hypo or hyperthyroid.
1:05:21 All of these things have food connections.
1:05:22 We need more research.
1:05:23 Not everything is known.
1:05:26 But there is more than enough known now
1:05:28 that people should be able to put it to work for themselves.
1:05:30 – Speaking specifically there about,
1:05:31 I want to talk about the other things you mentioned,
1:05:33 thyroid, menopause, et cetera.
1:05:35 But on the point of fertility,
1:05:37 a lot of people are struggling with fertility
1:05:38 for a variety of different reasons.
1:05:40 I think we’re all getting a little bit,
1:05:42 we’re having kids later than ever before,
1:05:43 both men and women.
1:05:47 And fertility as a conversation is rising.
1:05:51 And also IVF is becoming more popular for obvious reasons.
1:05:56 What impact does our bodies,
1:05:59 specifically how large our bodies are
1:06:01 and how much fat we have on our bodies,
1:06:03 have on our chances of being fertile?
1:06:07 And are we seeing any sort of macro trends in human fertility?
1:06:08 – Yeah, we are.
1:06:13 Fertility is threatened and you see more infertility
1:06:16 now than you’ve probably ever seen.
1:06:17 Now let me say that I’m not cheerleading
1:06:19 for increasing human fertility.
1:06:20 We’ve got more than enough of it.
1:06:22 And I think people shouldn’t feel pressured
1:06:26 to jump into it if it’s not their thing.
1:06:31 However, for women and men who want to have kids,
1:06:34 there are certain things that are good to know about.
1:06:37 And one is that excess body weight interferes.
1:06:39 No big surprise.
1:06:42 When women are carrying more body weight,
1:06:44 it’s a hormone producing organ.
1:06:47 Body fat is not just jello in a bag.
1:06:52 Body fat, each fat cell is metabolically active,
1:06:55 creating estrogens that are causing your body
1:06:56 to be in an abnormal state.
1:07:00 The sweet spot for fertility is,
1:07:02 if you measure your BMI, your body mass index,
1:07:04 and if people don’t have never done it,
1:07:07 you just go online and you can look up BMI calculator
1:07:09 you put in your height and your weight.
1:07:12 And what it’ll say is that a healthy BMI
1:07:14 is between 18 and a half and 25.
1:07:17 Over 25 is overweight.
1:07:21 But within that huge broad fork,
1:07:25 the sweet spot for fertility is around 19 or 20.
1:07:27 So it’s not just within the healthy range,
1:07:32 but within kind of the skinny side of the healthy range.
1:07:35 Why does my body weight, my sort of body mass,
1:07:40 impact how well my reproductive organs are working?
1:07:46 Well, for men, we don’t see quite so much that sweet spot.
1:07:49 Although what we do see is that
1:07:51 if a man acquires more body fat,
1:07:54 what’s gonna happen is he’s making more estrogen
1:07:55 and losing his testosterone.
1:07:56 So the more weight you have,
1:07:59 the more of these sort of estrogens and testosterone
1:08:01 the body produces.
1:08:02 The more body fat that you have,
1:08:05 the more a man’s body will take the testosterone
1:08:07 and convert it to estrogen.
1:08:09 So you’re losing testosterone, gaining estrogen,
1:08:11 which is the last thing that you want.
1:08:13 But there’s another part of the fertility issue
1:08:15 and that’s dairy products.
1:08:16 And researchers have been looking at this
1:08:18 for a long period of time.
1:08:19 There has been concern that dairy products
1:08:22 interfere with fertility, both for men and for women.
1:08:24 And Dan Kramer at Harvard University
1:08:27 was really a proponent of this.
1:08:28 Looking at different countries
1:08:31 and countries where dairy was just not their thing.
1:08:33 There are a lot of countries, particularly in Asia,
1:08:35 where dairy just isn’t a thing.
1:08:38 And there are others where it’s everyday food.
1:08:42 And you could see fertility tracking inversely
1:08:44 with dairy consumption.
1:08:46 There was something about dairy that was getting in the way.
1:08:49 And what his theory was that it’s not, in this case,
1:08:53 the dairy fat, he believed and wrote
1:08:55 that it might be the dairy sugar
1:08:57 because the dairy sugar is lactose.
1:08:58 And it’s famous ’cause a lot of people
1:09:00 don’t digest lactose very well.
1:09:03 But the ones who don’t digest it are the lucky ones
1:09:05 because you’re not gonna consume it.
1:09:09 The unlucky ones are people who can digest lactose
1:09:11 and it breaks into two sugars.
1:09:16 The lactose sugar has glucose and galactose attached together.
1:09:17 And when you breaks apart that galactose,
1:09:19 we believe is toxic to the ovary.
1:09:21 That’s a theory, but there’s evidence to suggest
1:09:22 that it’s true.
1:09:26 And our concern is not just that it interferes with fertility,
1:09:28 but that it’s also associated with ovarian cancer.
1:09:29 So stay tuned.
1:09:33 – Is there a link there also with fiber and fertility?
1:09:38 If we have a low-fiber diet, will our fertility drop?
1:09:40 – We would have to think so
1:09:43 because all of these things sort of go in the same direction.
1:09:45 A plant-based diet tends to get your hormones
1:09:46 in a better balance.
1:09:47 – Why though?
1:09:49 What is fiber doing inside the body
1:09:51 that’s causing my hormones to change?
1:09:54 – Okay, your liver, every minute of every day,
1:09:56 even while you’re asleep, is filtering your blood.
1:09:57 One of the things that filters out
1:10:02 is anything that shouldn’t be there, a toxin,
1:10:03 or even a medication.
1:10:05 Your liver says, “I’m not sure we want this in your blood.
1:10:06 “It’ll try to remove it.”
1:10:09 And excess estrogens are also removed.
1:10:11 When they’re removed by the liver cells,
1:10:14 they’re sent through into the intestinal tract.
1:10:17 Your liver, through the bile duct,
1:10:21 sends unwanted estrogens, excess estrogens,
1:10:22 down into the intestinal tract,
1:10:25 and they go out into the toilet.
1:10:30 Except, let’s say I don’t have much fiber in my diet.
1:10:33 Let’s say that I’m eating cheese
1:10:35 and I’m eating a lot of meat, these don’t have fiber at all.
1:10:37 Then in that case, the estrogens go down
1:10:40 in the intestinal tract, and before they can be excreted,
1:10:42 they’re reabsorbed through the intestinal wall
1:10:43 back into the blood.
1:10:45 Doctors call this enterohepatic circulation.
1:10:48 And so that very same estrogen molecule,
1:10:50 that your liver spotted, and it removed it,
1:10:52 and it sent it down into your intestinal tract,
1:10:53 thinking it was getting rid of it,
1:10:55 it went through the intestinal wall back into the blood
1:10:57 and ended up at the liver.
1:10:58 – Because it was not enough.
1:10:59 – But the liver.
1:11:00 – Because there wasn’t enough fiber.
1:11:02 – Because there was not enough fiber.
1:11:03 If you have fiber in your diet,
1:11:06 the fiber grabs those estrogen molecules,
1:11:07 and it carries them out with the waste.
1:11:09 – Okay, so this is my conclusion here,
1:11:10 just to make sure I’m perfectly clear.
1:11:12 If I have a lot of excess fat on my body,
1:11:14 that means that I’m gonna be producing more,
1:11:15 if I’m a woman, I’m gonna be producing
1:11:16 a lot more estrogen.
1:11:17 – Yes.
1:11:19 – Because the fat cells produce estrogen.
1:11:20 So there’s more estrogen being produced.
1:11:21 And if I don’t have the fiber,
1:11:23 that estrogen’s gonna go into my liver,
1:11:26 and then it’s gonna be reabsorbed back into my bloodstream
1:11:27 and stay there,
1:11:28 increasing my estrogen levels to a point
1:11:30 where I’m struggling with fertility.
1:11:32 But if I do have a lot of fiber,
1:11:34 the fiber will grab that excess estrogen
1:11:36 and it will take it out into the toilets.
1:11:38 – Exactly, and you want hormones,
1:11:40 you want to be in balance,
1:11:42 not too little, not too much.
1:11:44 Hormones will kill you, thyroid hormone.
1:11:48 All of these things can ultimately be fatal
1:11:51 if they’re in too high an amount or too low of an amount.
1:11:53 – What’s a thyroid?
1:11:55 – The thyroid is this little clarkent
1:11:56 at the base of your neck.
1:11:58 – Yeah.
1:12:00 – You can barely feel that it’s there.
1:12:01 But the thyroid gland makes thyroid hormone,
1:12:03 which gives you energy.
1:12:07 And if it’s not working, you know it.
1:12:08 You get out of bed in the morning,
1:12:09 you look in the mirror and you see it.
1:12:11 I just don’t look right.
1:12:12 My energy’s not good,
1:12:13 there’s something wrong with my hair,
1:12:15 my skin doesn’t feel right.
1:12:18 And a lot of people are low in thyroid.
1:12:20 – I’ve heard that phrase before a few times,
1:12:22 underactive thyroid.
1:12:25 Does that just mean that the thyroid’s not producing enough
1:12:26 thyroid hormone?
1:12:28 – Exactly, it’s not making enough.
1:12:29 And there are two reasons for it.
1:12:33 The first reason is that you can’t make one molecule
1:12:35 of thyroid hormone if you don’t have iodine in your diet.
1:12:39 And iodine is an element that’s in the earth,
1:12:41 that’s in seaweeds, it’s in a number of things like that.
1:12:44 But you may not be consuming it.
1:12:47 Now, luckily, there is iodide added to salt.
1:12:51 So your average person in most countries
1:12:54 gets iodine from that source.
1:12:56 And people who live in Japan and countries
1:13:00 where they see vegetables a lot get huge amounts of iodine.
1:13:01 But if you’re low in iodine,
1:13:02 you can’t make thyroid hormone.
1:13:05 The bigger reason though, here in the US,
1:13:10 is antibodies, that your body makes antibodies
1:13:14 to kill bacteria or to kill viruses.
1:13:16 And your white blood cells make these antibodies,
1:13:19 which are protein torpedoes that find that virus
1:13:20 and knock it out.
1:13:23 But for some reason, your white blood cells
1:13:26 will make antibodies that attack you.
1:13:29 And they attack your thyroid gland.
1:13:30 And they stop it from working.
1:13:34 And autoimmune conditions are,
1:13:36 there are many of them, rheumatoid arthritis,
1:13:40 is antibodies are attacking the lining of your joints.
1:13:44 And what we believe is happening
1:13:46 is that something entered your body
1:13:48 and triggered that antibody release.
1:13:52 And that something could be a dietary protein,
1:13:54 like dairy proteins or meat.
1:13:58 Now, no one has ever done a study to this point
1:14:00 to see if a plant-based diet
1:14:02 could reverse hypothyroidism.
1:14:05 But we have evidence that they should,
1:14:06 because first of all,
1:14:08 in the Adventist Health Study too,
1:14:11 they brought in 60,000, 70,000 people.
1:14:12 And they showed that the people
1:14:15 with the most hypothyroidism,
1:14:17 the people in whom it was most common,
1:14:19 were the big dairy consumers.
1:14:21 In fact, vegetarians who were eating
1:14:23 lots and lots of milk and cheese,
1:14:27 the dairy protein, we believe, is the trigger for this.
1:14:29 The people who had the least hypothyroidism are the vegans.
1:14:32 When it came to hyperthyroidism,
1:14:33 the same thing happens,
1:14:35 but the physiology is a little different.
1:14:40 Your antibodies are now attacking the turnoff switch.
1:14:42 So the thyroid can’t turn off.
1:14:44 You can’t regulate it anymore
1:14:45 and you’re cranking out too much thyroid hormone.
1:14:47 They are the people who have the most risk
1:14:49 are the meat eaters, omnivores,
1:14:51 people eating a lot of meat, a lot of dairy.
1:14:52 Again, the vegans are the lowest in both.
1:14:56 And we do see individual cases, anecdotal cases,
1:14:57 of people who’ve changed their diets
1:14:59 and their thyroids improved.
1:15:01 But what we need is a randomized trial.
1:15:02 – Yeah, and I think that’s the important point, isn’t it?
1:15:05 Because I always think when I’ve heard people talking
1:15:09 about the sort of meat eating diet versus the vegan diet,
1:15:11 my brain goes, well, you know,
1:15:13 the fact that this could be a massive stereotype
1:15:16 and it might be wrong, so just to caveat that.
1:15:18 But I tend to think that people that eat a vegan diet
1:15:22 generally make better health choices outside of their diet.
1:15:24 They tend to have more exercise.
1:15:26 They tend to just be more conscious.
1:15:28 They tend to probably smoke less.
1:15:30 They probably drink less alcohol
1:15:32 versus someone on the typical American diet
1:15:34 who’s having McDonald’s, drinking, having alcohol,
1:15:37 lots of sugar, processed foods, et cetera,
1:15:38 probably exercising less.
1:15:40 So in those sort of mass scale studies
1:15:42 that aren’t controlled and randomized,
1:15:43 I go, it’s hard to believe anything
1:15:46 because I don’t know the full picture.
1:15:49 We saw this particularly when we looked
1:15:50 at intelligence testing in kids.
1:15:52 The kids who are raised on plant-based diets
1:15:55 have scored much higher on intellectual testing.
1:15:58 And I believe that in those kids,
1:16:01 it’s probably an artifact that they’re raised by parents
1:16:04 who are very well-educated
1:16:05 and are giving their kids every opportunity.
1:16:07 And so they’re using a plant-based diet for the kid
1:16:09 because they think it’s the best thing.
1:16:16 However, the way the answer to this is to use,
1:16:18 to do a randomized trial
1:16:19 because when you bring in people
1:16:21 who are already a junk food diet
1:16:22 and then you can randomly assign some people
1:16:24 to a control group and others
1:16:27 to a specific dietary intervention,
1:16:30 then you’re taking people who have been eating
1:16:31 the same kind of diet,
1:16:34 but what you’re changing is the foods that they’re eating.
1:16:36 And let me be clear.
1:16:39 Getting away from animal products is always a good idea.
1:16:43 However, when you pick and choose what’s left,
1:16:47 there is a big difference between a bowl of blueberries
1:16:49 and a plate of chips.
1:16:50 So what we want to,
1:16:52 it’s always a good idea to go into the animal products,
1:16:55 but we want to bring in the best of what’s left.
1:16:57 And if we choose the foods the right way,
1:16:59 we can knock off that weight we’ve wanted to knock off
1:17:02 and we can really reclaim our health in a good way.
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1:18:04 As you know, we are a sponsor of this podcast
1:18:06 and I’m an investor in the company.
1:18:07 And last month I had the chance to sit down
1:18:10 with Kristen Holmes, she’s the VP of Performance at Woop.
1:18:12 And I learned so much from our conversation
1:18:14 about circadian rhythms and things like sleep.
1:18:17 Studies show that for every 45 minutes of sleep debt
1:18:20 that you accrue, that your decision-making ability
1:18:22 will drop by up to 10%.
1:18:24 And when you’re chronically underslept,
1:18:26 you’ll only be a fraction of the person,
1:18:29 the fraction of the boss, partner, friend, manager
1:18:30 that you can be.
1:18:32 That’s why I’m obsessed with Woop,
1:18:34 which not just tracks but coaches you
1:18:36 on how to get better at sleep
1:18:38 so you can bring your best to everything
1:18:39 that you choose to do.
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1:18:45 completely risk-free with zero commitment
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1:18:57 If you don’t like it, there’s no commitment,
1:19:01 join.woop.com/ceo.
1:19:02 The other book of yours that I was reading
1:19:05 was about the power foods for the brain.
1:19:07 I recently had my brain scanned.
1:19:08 Found out lots of interesting things
1:19:10 about why I am the way that I am.
1:19:12 And since then, the doctor that scanned my brain,
1:19:15 Dr. Armin, he prescribed me a bunch of different things
1:19:18 to help with my, I guess to regrow my brain in many respects
1:19:21 because there’s a couple of concerns
1:19:22 or there’s at least a trajectory
1:19:25 which might not be great if I don’t make some changes.
1:19:29 The book you wrote discusses Alzheimer’s a lot
1:19:32 and general sort of things like memory, et cetera.
1:19:35 Why did you write that book?
1:19:36 What was the, what was the call there,
1:19:38 the personal reason for doing that?
1:19:41 Well, there were a number of things,
1:19:44 but I have to say my father died.
1:19:50 And on the day that he died, his heart stopped beating.
1:19:53 But the truth of the matter is that he died
1:19:56 for all intents and purposes five, six, seven years earlier
1:19:58 than that because he had dementia.
1:20:01 And it started out, he was an intelligent person.
1:20:05 He was a physician, very well read,
1:20:07 but he started to have memory lapses
1:20:09 and it got worse and worse and worse
1:20:12 so that it was every day he had trouble with his memory.
1:20:14 And then he couldn’t control his emotions
1:20:18 and ended up not being able to control anything in his life.
1:20:20 And had to be separated from my mother,
1:20:22 carried for 24/7 and he finally died.
1:20:26 It’s a horrible thing to have happen.
1:20:32 And in 2003, the Chicago Health and Aging Project
1:20:33 published some amazing findings.
1:20:35 What they did is they went around Chicago,
1:20:37 they just rounded up people and said,
1:20:39 “What did you eat for breakfast?”
1:20:41 And people would write down what they ate for breakfast,
1:20:43 what they ate for lunch, what they ate for dinner.
1:20:44 And then they just waited.
1:20:49 As time went on, who retained their cognitive abilities?
1:20:50 – Over years or?
1:20:51 – Over years, exactly.
1:20:55 So you do structured tests where you look to see,
1:20:56 can you recall words?
1:21:01 Can you draw a face or a clock
1:21:03 and put things in the proper perspective?
1:21:05 And there are a number of other tests.
1:21:07 And those people who stayed mentally clear
1:21:10 tended to be the ones who tended to avoid saturated fat.
1:21:15 And the specific number was about a two thirds reduction
1:21:17 in the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease
1:21:20 in those individuals who are very low in saturated fat.
1:21:21 What’s saturated fat?
1:21:24 That’s the solid fat that is in dairy number one,
1:21:25 meat number two.
1:21:30 That alone was amazing.
1:21:31 In the journal Neurology and other journals,
1:21:34 these studies started coming out and we thought,
1:21:37 let me make the clock go backward
1:21:38 because I want to tell my father,
1:21:40 my dad grew up in a cattle ranch.
1:21:43 We ate like we were in the cattle industry all my life.
1:21:45 You’re getting this huge load of saturated fat
1:21:47 going down your gut, affecting your heart,
1:21:50 affecting your brain in ways that we only have recently
1:21:51 come to appreciate.
1:21:54 But the truth of the matter is, it’s not just that.
1:21:57 There are five things you need to do to protect your brain.
1:22:00 If you’re not doing them, you’re playing with fire.
1:22:03 Number one, get away from the meat and the dairy products
1:22:06 because they are pushing the saturated fat into your diet.
1:22:09 And there are others too, like coconut oil and palm oil.
1:22:10 They’re marketed as healthy,
1:22:12 but they are as bad as butter.
1:22:14 Number two, there are metals in your diet.
1:22:17 You’re not aware that they’re there, but iron, copper,
1:22:20 these are things you need a tiny bit of.
1:22:23 You don’t need the overload that comes in liver and in steak.
1:22:26 Aluminum is a metal that you don’t need any of at all,
1:22:29 but it’s an added ingredient in all kinds of foods,
1:22:31 as well as in medications.
1:22:33 Number three, you need to exercise.
1:22:35 Place up your sneakers.
1:22:37 You are great with this, you are a role model.
1:22:38 People should do what you do.
1:22:39 – Thank you.
1:22:42 – And researchers at the University of Illinois
1:22:46 brought in 120 people, older folks who were not exercising,
1:22:51 and what they asked them to do was a 10-minute walk,
1:22:52 a brisk walk.
1:22:56 Now brisk means I’m breathing a little faster
1:22:59 than I was before, but not so fast that I can’t speak.
1:23:01 And 10 minutes, three times a week.
1:23:04 Then the next week, 15 minutes.
1:23:06 Then the next week, 20 minutes.
1:23:07 And when they got up to 40 minutes,
1:23:10 three times a week, they stayed at that level.
1:23:13 And what they showed is that the hippocampus,
1:23:16 which had been the seat of memory in the brain,
1:23:20 which had been shrinking, started to reverse that process.
1:23:22 And you could see a measurable reversal
1:23:24 of that brain shrinkage.
1:23:28 Number four, you have to stop.
1:23:31 You can’t exercise all the time.
1:23:33 You can’t read things all the time.
1:23:34 You can’t watch documentaries all the time,
1:23:36 hoping to protect your brain.
1:23:38 Your brain needs down time.
1:23:39 And when the clock strikes 10,
1:23:41 I don’t care how good the podcast is
1:23:44 that you’re listening to, turn it off and go to sleep.
1:23:45 Get up early the next day if you need to.
1:23:47 The first–
1:23:49 – Even if it’s this podcast, turn it off.
1:23:51 – Even this one, pick it up tomorrow morning
1:23:52 and you’re gonna learn better.
1:23:54 Because in the–
1:23:55 – I agree to disagree.
1:23:56 You’ve said a lot of things that are controversial,
1:23:58 but I think that might be the most controversial.
1:24:00 – All right, this one will allow you to watch it,
1:24:03 particularly if it’s me talking.
1:24:05 But in the first part of the night,
1:24:08 your body is engaged in what’s called slow wave sleep.
1:24:10 That’s where you’re taking your apartment
1:24:12 and organizing things.
1:24:13 All the file folders and things
1:24:15 that are all over higgly-piggly.
1:24:17 When in the early part of the night,
1:24:19 11, 30, 12, one o’clock in the morning,
1:24:20 your body is filing away.
1:24:22 Here’s a new word and it’s putting it in a place
1:24:24 where you can find it when you need it.
1:24:26 Later on in the night,
1:24:29 the brain does what’s called REM sleep,
1:24:32 rapid eye movement, you’re dreaming.
1:24:34 And now you’re integrating physical skills,
1:24:38 like playing the violin or tennis or anything physical
1:24:41 and also emotions.
1:24:44 So if you are not sleeping, what’s happening?
1:24:45 You’re gonna have crummy memory.
1:24:48 Anybody can test this themselves.
1:24:50 Just look at a time when you were sleep-deprived.
1:24:53 You discover your memory is shot after about three, four days
1:24:56 and your emotional control is much worse.
1:24:57 Get a good night’s sleep.
1:24:59 After a few days, you’ll get right back together.
1:25:02 So we’ve talked about avoiding saturated fat.
1:25:04 You wanna avoid the excess metals.
1:25:06 You need to exercise, you need to stop and sleep.
1:25:09 But there’s a fifth thing.
1:25:14 When somebody has any rapid change in mental status,
1:25:16 you gotta walk in the bathroom,
1:25:19 open up the medicine cabinet and see what’s new.
1:25:22 Because we have seen so many medications
1:25:26 that are causing brain effects we never expected.
1:25:28 One of the most surprising was statins.
1:25:31 We have seen hundreds and hundreds of cases of individuals.
1:25:33 By now it’s thousands of individuals
1:25:34 where you’re having memory problems,
1:25:36 sometimes severe from statin drugs.
1:25:38 Don’t get me wrong, statins effectively lower cholesterol
1:25:41 for some people that has a life-saving effect.
1:25:44 But that and many other medications
1:25:47 are gonna affect the memory in some ways
1:25:52 that can be so severe that when we take that medication away
1:25:53 and let your body re-heal,
1:25:55 you can pack your bags and get out of that nursing home
1:25:56 and go back home.
1:25:59 – It’s a really interesting example there.
1:26:03 I think as you say that there is life-saving consequences
1:26:07 for statins and also that is a side effect, right?
1:26:08 In some cases.
1:26:09 – Yes.
1:26:11 – Right, but not all cases, I guess is the point.
1:26:13 – Not all cases, exactly.
1:26:17 But 90% of people on statins don’t need them
1:26:20 or wouldn’t need them if they followed a healthy diet.
1:26:22 The reason they have a high cholesterol
1:26:24 is that they are eating products
1:26:26 that cause their body to make more cholesterol.
1:26:27 And those are animal-derived products.
1:26:30 – If I was able to look at your father’s brain
1:26:32 before he passed away,
1:26:34 would I have been able to see the dementia?
1:26:36 – Yeah, you can.
1:26:39 This is the terrible thing is that we do know
1:26:43 that if you catch dementing processes early,
1:26:46 reversal is possible.
1:26:49 You see that not only with paper and pencil testing,
1:26:50 their memory is getting better,
1:26:52 but you can see it on the brain scan
1:26:54 where the hippocampus is,
1:26:57 the reversal process is turning around.
1:27:00 But there is a point where the brain cells themselves
1:27:04 are dying, it’s like a shriveled cauliflower.
1:27:07 And there is a time where that memory
1:27:09 is just not gonna come back.
1:27:10 And so we wanna prevent it,
1:27:12 we wanna prevent it starting now.
1:27:16 At Kaiser Permanente, researchers did a study.
1:27:17 They brought in almost 10,000 people
1:27:19 and they tracked their cholesterol levels
1:27:21 and found that if you got a high cholesterol level,
1:27:24 it’s not just bad for your heart, it’s bad for the brain.
1:27:25 The cholesterol levels were taken
1:27:28 when the people were about 40.
1:27:31 So the point being that what you’re doing now
1:27:36 is affecting your heart, it’s affecting your brain now.
1:27:37 – There’s someone listening to this right now
1:27:42 that is 21, 24, 26, 28.
1:27:44 What’s the message to them?
1:27:47 – The message to them is pick the bean burrito.
1:27:50 The message to them is pick the foods
1:27:51 that are healthiest for you.
1:27:53 – But does it matter then?
1:27:53 Does it matter?
1:27:55 Because a lot of them will think,
1:27:56 well, I’ll worry about that later.
1:27:58 I’ll worry about, I’m 31.
1:28:00 I’ll worry about this stuff when I get to 50.
1:28:04 – I absolutely know what you’re talking about.
1:28:06 When I was that age, I smoked cigarettes.
1:28:07 I smoked about a pack a day.
1:28:09 Yes, it’s true, I did.
1:28:10 In fact, all the medical students did.
1:28:12 We figured I’m under so much stress.
1:28:14 You know, when I’m done with medical school,
1:28:16 I’ll quit at that point.
1:28:19 You know, nowadays medical students wouldn’t do this.
1:28:23 We smoked the cigarettes we bought in the hospital gift shop.
1:28:26 Now, that’s the, yeah, our patients could smoke in bed
1:28:29 as long as there wasn’t oxygen flowing.
1:28:30 But anyway, let’s face it,
1:28:33 young people take any risk that they can.
1:28:35 But what really got our attention
1:28:39 was studies showing that if you look at the tragic cases
1:28:43 where teenagers are killed in an accident
1:28:46 or killed in wartime and you look at autopsies,
1:28:47 what you see is atherosclerosis,
1:28:50 that the hardening of the arteries has already begun
1:28:52 and it’s been working through their teens.
1:28:56 By about age 18 or 19, many kids have already lost
1:28:59 one of their lumbar arteries.
1:29:02 What this means is your heart gives off the aorta,
1:29:05 the huge main line that goes up
1:29:06 and then it does a U-turn,
1:29:07 goes right down in front of your spine
1:29:11 and it gives blood to each vertebral segment
1:29:14 and the very first place
1:29:16 where those atherosclerotic lesions form
1:29:20 and pave off those little bifurcating arteries,
1:29:22 the little side arteries
1:29:23 that are gonna help your lumbar spine.
1:29:26 The very first place where atherosclerosis occurs
1:29:28 in a big way is in this lumbar spine.
1:29:31 So you’ll see a guy, 18, 19,
1:29:34 has completely lost the blood supply
1:29:36 to one part of the lower back.
1:29:38 Now there are collaterals,
1:29:40 but eventually he’s gonna get lower back pain
1:29:43 because the discs between the vertebrae,
1:29:45 they don’t get any blood supply at all.
1:29:47 They get oxygen by diffusion from the vertebrae
1:29:50 and the more you cut off the blood supply,
1:29:52 the weaker that disc gets.
1:29:56 And it’s like a pillow where the outer covering
1:29:59 of the pillow degenerates and the stuffing comes out,
1:30:00 pushes on a nerve
1:30:01 and you got pain all the way down your leg.
1:30:03 And you thought, well, that was because I’ve been stressed
1:30:05 and I’ve been strained, I was in an accident.
1:30:07 Yeah, those are all precipitating factors,
1:30:09 but you were set up for it
1:30:10 because your body cannot heal anymore
1:30:12 ’cause you’ve got no blood supply anymore.
1:30:14 So a clean diet can help protect against those things.
1:30:16 – Well, what I’ve seen in your father’s brain,
1:30:18 if I looked at your father’s brain under a microscope,
1:30:20 what I’ve seen like a plaque buildup,
1:30:21 is that what it’s like?
1:30:22 – You would see several things.
1:30:26 You would see plaque between the neurons,
1:30:30 between the brain cells or what we call beta amyloid,
1:30:33 and it’s these proteins that the brain cells make.
1:30:35 And it’s still controversial what it’s doing there,
1:30:38 but most people believe it’s part of the disease process.
1:30:41 And there are malignant proteins called tau proteins
1:30:43 that are in the neurons there, they’re there.
1:30:45 They’ve been, we’ve known they’ve been there
1:30:47 for a long period of time, but it’s worse than that.
1:30:51 The brain itself, I mean, at 100 feet,
1:30:53 you could see the difference.
1:30:54 If you could look at that scan,
1:31:00 a healthy brain stays big and vibrant.
1:31:03 The Alzheimer’s brain is visibly shrinking
1:31:05 and deteriorating, and that person
1:31:07 is not gonna come back from that.
1:31:08 – Do you know that there’s a big school of thought
1:31:10 that doing a lot of sort of crosswords
1:31:11 and stuff like that helps the brain
1:31:14 to kind of defend against that shrinking,
1:31:16 that shriveling you’re talking about.
1:31:18 People, one of the things I was prescribed for my brain
1:31:22 is to do a lot of paddle sports and like racket sports.
1:31:23 What’s your view on that?
1:31:25 – I think we need more research on all those areas,
1:31:28 but I am inclined to think that the more we use it,
1:31:29 the less we lose it.
1:31:33 So if we use our brain, and not just reading, thinking,
1:31:35 vocabulary, things are good in Canada.
1:31:37 Researchers discovered, you know,
1:31:38 some people speak English in Canada,
1:31:42 some people speak French, some people speak both.
1:31:44 Some people have three languages or four languages.
1:31:46 The more languages people speak,
1:31:50 the more delayed is any kind of cognitive decline.
1:31:53 So what we believe is that it may well be
1:31:56 that using the neurons keeps them active,
1:32:00 but we’re not just using our brains to remember words
1:32:02 and remember sentences and remember facts.
1:32:03 You’re using your brain every step you take
1:32:05 when you’re out running.
1:32:08 Your brain has to anticipate where your foot is gonna go,
1:32:10 where the pavement is to keep you from falling down,
1:32:12 and you’re not just running along.
1:32:15 Your brain is automatically tracking where you’re going.
1:32:17 It’s keeping you from falling over.
1:32:19 It’s regulating your balance.
1:32:22 And that is a big job.
1:32:24 It’s not just muscles.
1:32:26 Exercise involves a brain in a huge way.
1:32:29 And that is great to feed your brain
1:32:30 with physical exercise,
1:32:32 with things that allow your vestibular system,
1:32:34 you know, to work.
1:32:35 That means anything that is involved
1:32:36 with turning and movement.
1:32:39 All that is great for the brain.
1:32:41 – I also read in your book that exercise
1:32:44 in particular helps sort of clear out toxins
1:32:46 that are associated with sort of cognitive decline
1:32:48 and the decay of brain cells.
1:32:52 – To make it simple, if the more you’re moving,
1:32:53 the more your heart is pumping.
1:32:55 It’s doing that to get oxygen into your muscles.
1:32:57 That’s its job.
1:32:58 But what is it doing in the process?
1:33:01 It’s sending the blood up to your brain
1:33:02 and the blood is coming out of your brain,
1:33:03 carrying things away.
1:33:06 So the more active we are, the better off we’re gonna be.
1:33:08 – And in that book, you say overall,
1:33:10 they show that regular aerobic exercise
1:33:12 trims the risk of dementia by about 30%
1:33:17 and cuts the risk of Alzheimer’s disease roughly by 50%.
1:33:18 – And I think the numbers are better than that,
1:33:19 to tell you the honest truth.
1:33:22 If you combine a healthy diet,
1:33:25 which means getting away from the saturated fat,
1:33:26 which is the dairy and the meat,
1:33:28 and having the vitamin E rich foods,
1:33:30 like some nuts and some seeds,
1:33:32 which are healthy vitamin E rich foods, not pills,
1:33:34 you get it from the foods themselves,
1:33:36 avoid the metals, lace up your sneakers.
1:33:39 And if you can get a good night’s sleep,
1:33:41 I would suggest that we could probably
1:33:44 cut Alzheimer’s risk by 80%.
1:33:45 It needs to be proved.
1:33:46 We need to prove it in research studies,
1:33:48 but there is no reason to wait.
1:33:50 You don’t wanna be in the control group
1:33:53 that is doing nothing to see what happens to your brain.
1:33:54 – Participants in a Chicago study
1:33:56 who got three to four vegetable servings per day
1:33:59 slowed their rate of cognitive decline by 40%
1:34:02 compared to those who got only one serving of vegetables
1:34:03 per day.
1:34:04 And I guess that speaks to the importance of vitamin E,
1:34:07 which is in all of those vegetables, right?
1:34:08 There’s vitamin E in those,
1:34:10 but there’s a bunch more in the vegetables as well.
1:34:12 There’s fiber and there’s many other vegetables,
1:34:14 B vitamins as well.
1:34:17 And I gotta say, to be in the high vegetable group
1:34:19 in the United States, even having one or two vegetables
1:34:22 per day is pretty great, except for unfortunately,
1:34:23 the only vegetable a lot of Americans eat
1:34:26 is french fries or a potato chips or something like that.
1:34:28 So bringing the vegetables in a big way.
1:34:29 – Coffee?
1:34:31 – Who knows?
1:34:35 People have wanted to say coffee is a healthy thing.
1:34:37 And in fact, there have been studies
1:34:39 that show that people who drink more coffee
1:34:41 are at less risk of Alzheimer’s disease.
1:34:44 Now the problem is it had to be a lot of coffee.
1:34:46 It had to be five cups a day or even more.
1:34:51 And there are other studies that do counteract that.
1:34:54 I’m inclined to think that maybe the biggest consideration
1:34:56 is what goes into your coffee.
1:34:57 So if what’s going into your coffee
1:34:59 is some cream or a whole bunch of sugar
1:35:01 that’s really not so healthy for you,
1:35:02 maybe that’s not the best choice.
1:35:05 – And lastly, you said the word metals.
1:35:06 When you say metals, what do you mean?
1:35:09 Like this cup here is metal.
1:35:10 What do you mean by metals?
1:35:12 Keeping metals out of my body.
1:35:14 – There are three metals we’re concerned about.
1:35:15 Iron, copper and aluminum.
1:35:18 There may be others too, but those are the biggies.
1:35:20 Iron is something that your body needs.
1:35:23 Your body makes hemoglobin with iron.
1:35:25 And you need that to carry oxygen.
1:35:27 That’s what makes your blood red.
1:35:30 However, your body only needs a certain amount.
1:35:32 And if you get too much, it can damage the heart
1:35:34 and can damage the brain.
1:35:36 It’s easy to get too much.
1:35:39 Our bodies are built for plant foods.
1:35:43 And plant foods have what’s called non-heme iron.
1:35:45 And the beauty of this form of iron
1:35:48 is if you’re already iron overloaded,
1:35:50 your body says, I got it.
1:35:53 Let me absorb less iron now.
1:35:54 If you’re low in iron,
1:35:57 your body can take that non-heme iron and absorb more.
1:35:59 It’s the form your body can regulate.
1:36:01 But if like me, you grow up in North Dakota
1:36:02 and you’re eating a lot of beef,
1:36:03 there’s a lot of iron in it.
1:36:06 And your body cannot regulate the heme iron.
1:36:08 It just comes into your system
1:36:09 and you end up iron overloaded.
1:36:11 So iron is the first one.
1:36:13 And the solution is avoid animal products.
1:36:16 Or if you want to be clever, you can go donate blood.
1:36:19 And you can give your iron to somebody else, it works.
1:36:22 Copper, copper pipes.
1:36:25 If you have copper pipes in your house
1:36:26 and all night long the water sits in them
1:36:29 and then you fill your coffee maker in the morning,
1:36:31 you’re getting a big load of copper.
1:36:34 The aluminum is quite a story though.
1:36:37 In England, researchers looked at different counties
1:36:40 where there was more aluminum in the drinking water.
1:36:42 It’s not in the well and it’s not in the river.
1:36:45 It’s used in the purification process.
1:36:47 The aluminum compounds are added to clear the water
1:36:49 and you have to then carefully extract them.
1:36:50 And if you don’t extract it,
1:36:52 you get aluminum out of your tap.
1:36:54 And the counties with the most aluminum
1:36:58 in their drinking water had 50% higher risk of Alzheimer’s.
1:36:59 So researchers have looked at that.
1:37:01 And there are plenty of neurologists
1:37:02 who think it’s just a fluke,
1:37:06 except that you do see it with some frequency.
1:37:09 The reason we think it’s not a fluke
1:37:11 is that aluminum is a neurotoxin.
1:37:13 And we learned that from industrial accidents
1:37:17 where aluminum compounds are suddenly inhaled by everybody.
1:37:20 It’s without question a neurotoxin.
1:37:23 And secondly, there is zero use for aluminum
1:37:26 in human physiology, you don’t need it.
1:37:30 So if you’re taking an antacid that’s made with aluminum
1:37:32 or you’re putting on a deodorant
1:37:34 that’s got aluminum as one of the antiperspirant ingredients
1:37:37 in it, some of them have that, a lot of them have that,
1:37:38 goes through the skin
1:37:41 and you’re getting this neurotoxin, which is in your body.
1:37:43 So while the research is continuing,
1:37:47 my advice is steer clear of the aluminum completely
1:37:49 and be careful about the iron and copper.
1:37:50 You put this together,
1:37:53 your body can be as healthy as nature wanted it to be.
1:37:54 – I’ve started thinking a lot about that,
1:37:56 about the products that I have around my house.
1:37:59 I just for many, many years just bought whatever
1:38:02 was in the supermarket that I thought had a nice label
1:38:04 or I was a victim of marketing.
1:38:06 So whatever marketed the product best to me, I just buy.
1:38:08 And then in the last sort of six months,
1:38:10 I’m now sort of scanning the things that I’m buying
1:38:14 from supermarkets and shops and the things by my bathroom
1:38:17 sink to just try and make sure that they are clean
1:38:19 as clean as possible from some of these
1:38:21 sort of toxic chemicals.
1:38:22 Do you do that?
1:38:26 – Absolutely, and that comes to everything you’re reading.
1:38:29 If I’ve got the opportunity to choose organic
1:38:30 or non-organic vegetables,
1:38:32 even if the organic takes cost more,
1:38:34 if you do, I want one with chemicals
1:38:37 or without frankly, it’s a no-brainer.
1:38:38 – The app I use just for any bit,
1:38:39 I’m not affiliated with the app at all,
1:38:42 but just I know people are gonna be sat there thinking,
1:38:43 how are you scanning your stuff?
1:38:44 The app I use to scan my products
1:38:46 is an app called Think Dirty,
1:38:49 which has a big database of their ingredients.
1:38:50 So I’d recommend that.
1:38:55 – Neil, what is your closing message?
1:38:57 If someone’s got this far into the conversation,
1:38:58 they’ve heard everything you’ve said,
1:39:03 and they’re thinking, God, I do love my food,
1:39:07 I love my animal proteins, I love chicken, I love steak.
1:39:12 I’m probably not gonna quit chicken or steak
1:39:14 because it’s just, it’s one of my favorite foods,
1:39:15 it’s convenient.
1:39:17 What’s your closing message to those people?
1:39:19 – My message for everybody is,
1:39:21 let’s see what your body can do.
1:39:23 Let’s see how foods work.
1:39:24 Let’s not think about the long run.
1:39:26 Let’s think about the short run.
1:39:28 If a person comes in and they’ve got diabetes,
1:39:31 my job with them is to see, can I cure you?
1:39:32 So if a person is, well,
1:39:33 I don’t really wanna make big changes,
1:39:36 I’m gonna say, let’s make some huge changes right now,
1:39:37 because if we can get cured of this
1:39:41 in the next six or eight or 10 weeks, that’s good to know.
1:39:43 So let’s say you’re not in that situation,
1:39:45 but you’ve got weight you’d like to lose.
1:39:46 You’d like to feel better.
1:39:47 Let’s make some big changes now.
1:39:49 Let’s do a little bit of boot camp.
1:39:51 Let’s see the foods that love you back.
1:39:53 Let’s put those power foods into your diet
1:39:54 and see what they’ll do for you.
1:39:57 And then after you’ve had a chance to experience it,
1:39:58 then it’s up to you.
1:40:01 You use it as much or as little as you want to.
1:40:02 And for most people,
1:40:05 they just view the world differently ever after.
1:40:07 – Neil, we have a closing tradition on this podcast
1:40:08 where the last guest leaves a question
1:40:11 for the next guest not knowing who they’re leaving it for.
1:40:15 And the question that has been left for you is,
1:40:22 what would you whisper in the ear of your younger self?
1:40:25 – Well, I would tell my younger self,
1:40:27 the frankly the same thing that I would tell my older self,
1:40:31 which is to be grateful for the things
1:40:33 that we have and that we have learned.
1:40:35 And I would share that with you.
1:40:38 You could do anything that you want to,
1:40:39 you could have any kind of guest
1:40:41 on your show that you want to.
1:40:44 But what you’re doing is you’re taking information,
1:40:46 you’re asking terrific questions
1:40:47 and talking about important things
1:40:50 in a way that is gonna get people talking
1:40:52 and thinking and trying new things and learning things
1:40:54 and maybe disagreeing or agreeing or whatever.
1:40:56 But you’re starting a discussion
1:40:58 that goes around the dinner table
1:40:59 and it affects the next generation too.
1:41:01 You will never know how many lives you save.
1:41:05 But I mean this in all sincerity.
1:41:07 You’re changing people’s lives by changing what they know
1:41:08 and what they’re trying out.
1:41:10 And there are people who are gonna be alive because of you.
1:41:14 And I’m grateful to be able to play a part
1:41:15 in that kind of work.
1:41:17 But I’m also grateful to you
1:41:21 for using your podium that you have
1:41:23 to share that with other people.
1:41:25 – Thank you, Neil.
1:41:28 And that’s a really incredible compluence that-
1:41:31 – It’s absolutely the truth.
1:41:32 When you can share information
1:41:34 with people that changes their lives,
1:41:37 you’ll never see the effects and they won’t thank you.
1:41:38 So that’s my job.
1:41:40 – Thank you, I appreciate that.
1:41:42 And I extend that point of gratitude
1:41:44 to our entire team here.
1:41:45 There’s almost 30 of us that are behind the scenes.
1:41:47 I get a lot of the credit in the street
1:41:48 because people see my face.
1:41:52 But for the other 30 people that sit behind the production
1:41:54 and work very hard to find people like you
1:41:56 to have these conversations with,
1:41:57 they deserve all the credit as well.
1:41:59 And I have to say,
1:42:00 I have lots of people on this podcast
1:42:03 that talk about health, diet, nutrition, all those things.
1:42:06 The reason I do it is because I’m interested in it
1:42:07 and I wanna get better and better and better.
1:42:09 And I’ve seen an improvement in my diet,
1:42:12 in my gut problems have gone away over the last three years.
1:42:13 Lots of people come on the show.
1:42:16 They have lots of different ideas about eating meat,
1:42:18 about not eating meat, about eating this fruit, da, da, da.
1:42:22 What I gain from it, and I probably should say this,
1:42:25 although the information can sometimes be conflicting,
1:42:28 which I think information should be conflicting,
1:42:29 I think that results in progress.
1:42:32 I think it’s two ideas clashing with each other
1:42:34 that results in a new way of doing things
1:42:36 or a new conclusion or a new solution.
1:42:37 But for me, what I do,
1:42:39 and this is what I advise all my listeners to do
1:42:41 when they hear these conversations,
1:42:45 is to listen, is to reserve judgment,
1:42:47 is to do your own research,
1:42:51 and finally, it is to not worry about perfection,
1:42:54 but it is to pick and mix things that get you closer
1:42:56 and that induce progress.
1:42:59 And that’s what I do when I sit and listen to these experts.
1:43:00 There’ll be things you say today.
1:43:01 Like I’ll be honest with you,
1:43:03 I can’t see myself quitting chicken breast, right?
1:43:07 However, there are many things you’ve said about blueberries,
1:43:11 about metals in my diet, about exercise,
1:43:14 about legumes, and about vegetables,
1:43:17 and about these power foods that you talk about in your book,
1:43:22 that I now have more motivation to bring into my life.
1:43:25 And that’s honestly,
1:43:27 I’ll never tell anybody what to do with their life,
1:43:30 but that’s honestly just how I consume this information,
1:43:32 especially when it’s like varied and conflicting,
1:43:35 and there’s, I find the overlaps,
1:43:38 and having spoken to, let’s just say I spoke to 10 health experts
1:43:40 or authors or scientists,
1:43:42 I find worth that the information overlaps,
1:43:45 and I take on that information into my life.
1:43:48 And that is how I proceed with necessary caution.
1:43:49 Neil, thank you.
1:43:50 Thank you for being one of those people
1:43:54 that is pushing conversation forward
1:43:56 by presenting new ideas in new ways
1:43:58 and doing it in such a compelling,
1:44:01 accessible, story-driven way,
1:44:04 ’cause I think that makes the information land
1:44:04 in a way that it should.
1:44:06 And thank you again for all the lives that you’ll save
1:44:10 because of the messages and the way that you’ve brought forward
1:44:11 the conversation around nutrition.
1:44:13 It’s an incredibly important work,
1:44:14 and I throw back the compliment you gave me.
1:44:18 I’m sure you’ve saved many thousands and thousands
1:44:20 and thousands of lives just by doing what you do.
1:44:22 So thank you on behalf of all those people as well.
1:44:23 Thank you.
1:44:26 (upbeat music)
1:44:27 Quick one from one of our sponsors.
1:44:29 A lot of you have asked me the question about Huell
1:44:33 over the years about where Huell fits into your life.
1:44:36 Is it the most healthy choice one can make
1:44:38 when they’re thinking about their nutrition?
1:44:40 And here’s what I would say to all of those people.
1:44:42 I think in an ideal world,
1:44:44 I would be able to sit down and cook
1:44:46 and prepare all of my meals.
1:44:48 I think that would be my ideal option.
1:44:50 But because of the nature of my life,
1:44:51 because I’m moving around often,
1:44:53 what used to happen before Huell
1:44:56 was I’d end up making bad choices.
1:45:00 I’d end up snacking, I’d have junk food options on the go
1:45:02 because I was busy and my nutrition would come second
1:45:04 to whatever my professional priority was.
1:45:07 What Huell allows you to do is to have a healthier option
1:45:09 on the go that is convenient,
1:45:11 that contains a lot of the nutrients
1:45:13 that you need to have a complete diet.
1:45:15 And that’s exactly where it fits in my life.
1:45:16 They’ve now expanded the range.
1:45:19 If you haven’t yet checked out the Huell RTD,
1:45:21 I highly recommend you do go to your local Tesco Boots
1:45:25 or Sainsbury’s or online and you can grab and try one there.
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