A Masterclass On Plant-Based Nutrition | Rich Roll Podcast

A Masterclass On Plant-Based Nutrition | Rich Roll Podcast



Rich Roll presents a master class on plant-based nutrition, breaking down the latest research and wisdom shared by physicians & experts who have graced the show. For more, go here👉🏾http://bit.ly/richroll719
✌🏼🌱 – Rich

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TIMESTAMPS
00:00:00 – Intro
00:02:29 – Dr. Gemma Newman
00:12:16 – Simon Hill
00:18:21 – Dr. Dean Ornish
00:24:37 – T Colin Campbell
00:30:05 – AD BREAK
00:32:03 – Dr. Michael Greger
00:40:39 – Dr. Garth Davis
00:47:22 – Dr. Michael Klaper
00:54:59 – Dr. Neal Barnard
01:02:40 – Dr. Robert Ostfeld
01:08:48 – Drs Dean & Ayesha Sherzai
01:17:20 – Dr. Joel Kahn
01:22:53 – Dr. Kim Williams
01:30:32 – Dr. Alan Goldhamer
01:35:43 – Final Thoughts

FULL EPISODES
Dr. Gemma Newman – https://youtu.be/5S3UzS5YhcA
Simon Hill – https://youtu.be/l2TB6pEDZu8
Dr. Dean Ornish – https://youtu.be/BGcU9wy8_Dw
T. Colin Campbell – http://bit.ly/richroll79
Dr. Michael Greger – https://youtu.be/auZDWTMLM8I
Dr. Garth Davis – https://youtu.be/MyydwWcYtMo
Dr. Michael Klaper – https://youtu.be/Rhs1BB7MbHo
Dr. Neal Barnard – https://youtu.be/133n0BTYXOQ
Dr. Robert Ostfeld – http://bit.ly/richroll140
Drs. Dean & Ayesha Sherzai – https://youtu.be/YUw5F4L_iaY
Dr. Joel Kahn – http://bit.ly/richroll349
Dr. Kim Williams – https://youtu.be/X4TMsRKOe8Q
Dr. Alan Goldhamer – https://youtu.be/yaWVflQolmM

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FILMED AND EDITED BY BLAKE CURTIS & DAN DRAKE
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Hi I'm Rich Roll. I'm a vegan ultra-endurance athlete, author, podcaster, public speaker & wellness evangelist. But mainly I'm a dad of four. If you want to know more, visit my website or check out these two the NY Times articles:
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one of the most fundamental aspects of being human is our innate daily Reliance on food to survive the food we eat of course delivers essential nutrients to our bodies it gives us the energy to perform our daily tasks and it can also unite people of every cultural background around this Universal need that we all share but no matter what your dietary restrictions may be or what your preferences are I think we can all agree that not all food is created equal 16 years ago I suffered a health scare and became motivated for the very first time to give up junk food and attempt to eat healthier and that Journey led to a profound and surprising discovery which is that the more whole plant Foods predominated my plate the better I felt and the better I performed this Epiphany led me to adopting a 100 plant-based diet which has served me better than well for the past 16 years it's powered me through some of the world's most grueling endurance challenges and it continues to motivate me to evangelize its many benefits all of which brings us to today last year and a half we here at the podcast have been doing quarterly episodes around a singular theme that we characterize and offer up as a master class for example in past episodes of this series we've covered addiction we've talked about mental health that gut microbiome spirituality and Longevity but today we're going to turn our attention to plant-based nutrition and we're going to begin today's master class with the plant power doctor herself Dr Gemma Newman Gemma is a senior partner at a family medical practice in the UK where as part of our practice she provides evidence-based nutrition and lifestyle advice to her patients in this first clip Gemma helps us answer tough questions like how could we choose a lifestyle that is typically not widely socially accepted and what is the right mindset in a relationship when one partner chooses to be plant-based and the other does not Dr Newman is uniquely Suited it to help answer these questions because she herself reluctantly came around to a plant-based lifestyle later in life and in her medical practice so here we go this is me and Dr Gemma Newman perhaps even the bigger issue in stumbling block is really the social issue like people get all up in their heads about what other people are going to think about them what's going to happen when they go to Susie and Dave's you know dinner party and they don't want to make a fuss or I have to go on vacation with my neighbors and you know it's just going to be too problematic and people like relinquish their boundaries or you know are are just too afraid to to stand up for themselves or to like make that conscious choice because they don't want to be difficult yeah I can totally relate to that because that was my instinct first of all when I started on this journey my main thought was oh this is going to be so awkward for everybody people are going to think this is so strange you know it's I think as social creatures it's one of the main considerations that a lot of people have um and I guess it comes down to living in alignment with the things that you most want um do you most want to be somebody that pleases others do you most want to be somebody that lives in alignment with things that are important to you are those things one and the same if you can have a conversation with yourself around the values that you're living by it becomes much easier to then make conscious choices that are in alignment to those values so I would actually encourage everybody to have this conversation with their loved ones or even just with themselves they could write it down in a journal write down their top values in life and how their food choices can relate to those values and then it becomes a lot easier because you're taking away a lot of the extra choices that you're having to make or these social situations that you're having to navigate because you are consciously living in alignment with the things that matter so if it matters to you to minimize your risk of heart disease because you have a relative that died young you want to see your children grow up then you write that down and you find ways to make it work within that kind of framework if you like your values framework if Animal Compassion is important to you it's probably a lot easier because you've already made that decision for another outside purpose it's something that's outside of yourself and perhaps the same can be true for someone that cares deeply about the environment and the planet they've already made that decision based on a value that's so strong to them that it Max actually makes it a little bit easier stick to I think health overall is probably one of the first ways people go towards plant-based nutrition but it's also one of the hardest ways to stick with it if that's your only goal because it's quite self-focused whereas if you can focus on something outside of self then it potentially could make those choices a lot easier either environmental health or Animal Compassion or reasons to stay healthy for others it tends to be in my experience ways that make it stick a lot more yeah that's that's a really good way of thinking about it one of the questions that I get all the time I'm sure you do as well is I want to do this but my partner doesn't want any part of it and you began this journey Richard was doing it ahead of you two different dinners meals Etc but for a lot of couples that becomes very problematic especially when those values might come into conflict with each other yes you're so right and I think my advice from that being the partner that was most reluctant perhaps I can speak to this more um is the idea that what I needed was um was patience and time and sometimes people will never come around sometimes the people you love the most will never want to do the things that are important to you when it comes to diet and I think that taking away that expectation is important because when you start to expect things of other people that's where you can start to become very unhappy you know you have it builds kind of criticism in your mind it builds comparison uh it builds expectation and that can be quite toxic for your relationship so my best advice is just to do the thing that's making you happy do the thing that brings you in alignment with who you want to be and show your partner through your actions how much happier how much healthier and how much more abundant you feel in your life and then if they want to come along for the ride they can right but you have to be detached from that expectation otherwise you're going to be vibing them all the time and then that piousness creeps up and that just becomes a disaster exactly you've got to let that go even if it's in the back well if I keep doing this they'll eventually come around oh it's no no you gotta like get rid of that I I do think that that's probably the best way for you to sustain a healthy relationship with the people that you love the most and it's hard because often the people you love the most may you feel need it the most especially if they have a health condition that could benefit from doing that but you have to let it go because it's not your life it's their life I mean that's advice for this particular scenario but for for you know a zillion others exactly like in terms of like partnership Dynamics yeah and in a partnership you will often have expectations of a partner that are unspoken and that could be true for any kind of scenario um and that's not to say that you shouldn't communicate the things that are important to you of course you should but it's the expectation that is attached to that which I think can become very negative in in the relationship so letting go of the expectations of your partner is probably the key to a happier life in all sorts of ways did Richard do that yeah he was very patient with me but that brings up an important issue which is you know somebody who's listening to this or watching it is thinking well my life is just going to become infinitely more complicated it means like we're gonna have to prepare two different meals I'm gonna have to spend all this time in the kitchen I'm gonna have to plan out everything in advance it's probably going to be expensive and suddenly my life which was kind of going along pretty good suddenly gets hijacked by this new lifestyle habit that is going to commandeer all my time energy and money yeah and those are very valid concerns and I guess what I'd say to that person is you have to find the thing that helps you know um where you're going for the future I think a lot of the time we kind of Coast through and we do things because they are the path of least resistance and sometimes a path of least resistance is a great path and it works and everything's going well but sometimes over the course of maybe weeks months to years we start to notice actually this isn't really working for me anymore you know although this is the easier route I'm not feeling this I either don't feel healthy or there's something niggling me in in my conscience about things I want to do differently and sometimes changes do require a certain amount of Forward Thinking so the person who's sticking that seed into the soil right now and getting ready to water it but doesn't know how to water it like how do you think about the the early phases of this like I'm somebody who went all in that's just my personality type I recognize most people aren't like that uh I suspect you're somebody who would counsel people to make tiny changes Master them like how do you get somebody engaged in this and give them some actionable advice about how to begin in a very practical manner so number one is literally write down the foods that you buy in your weekly Shop number two is write down all the foods that you make with those ingredients and if you can find one meal a week that you'd like to have more plants in then that can be your first step it's literally just cook one meal a week that is plant-based and see how you feel and then if that works for you then you can cook another one and then maybe cook another one there's always a starting point for everybody if you're somebody that just eats takeout then you know what for you the best thing would be perhaps just to start with one home-cooked meal a week rather than trying to change everything just cook one meal at home rather than having all meals take out um for my elderly patient who was just eating like small ready meals from the supermarket switched to a plant-based one and see how you feel see if it changes your health over time so it's just it is for a lot of people about those baby steps yeah um for others like you they jump in and they'll get started and they'll figure it out along the way and they'll enjoy that process and that's great but for most people it's just little steps and you know there was research by B.J Fogg to show that only one like one change is enough to then start changing Shifting the identity and then sort of adding in something new after that so yeah just one thing one thing is all you need to do it's one thing to go vegan it's another thing to go strictly Whole Food plant-based and then optimizing your plant-based diet for things like Health longevity and athletic prowess is yet another thing altogether so let's better understand this and to do that we should talk to an expert shouldn't we about the early stages of your adoption of this lifestyle some of the things that you should be made aware of that you should focus on and you should include in this adaptation to this new way of eating and living so to do that we're going to talk to the brilliant Simon Hill my friend who is a nutrition science expert he's an author a restaurateur he is a fellow podcaster just a fountain of practical knowledge that can benefit the newly reformed as well as the more seasoned plant-based Advocate Among Us so let's say Okay Simon I've been eating a plant-based diet for six months or a year how do I know I'm doing it right what are some of the common um things that trip people up or where they go astray before they have kind of the full you know encyclopedic knowledge of how to do this properly there's probably two or three main things that I've identified anyway in in working with many people who are going through this and also through my own experience and and talking to people like you I think the first is understanding when you're minimizing or removing these animal foods that we have grown accustomed to eating all the time what do you replace them with because there's a lot of different options everything from black beans and lentils to very processed uh vegan foods the second would be understanding the difference between an animal-based diet and a plant-based diet in terms of calorie density so animal foods are typically much more calorie dense and therefore if you're wanting to eat the similar number of calories your plate needs to look fuller right when it's plant-based food I mean that's a pretty common thing that you hear like oh I tried it but I was starving all the time yes and that is something that I personally experienced so as I was making these changes I was not fully cognizant of the differences in calorie density and I I was experiencing in in the very beginning of my transition a little drop in energy and I I was doubting whether the plant-based Foods were working for me and really it was just that I was not consuming enough overall calories so understanding what to replace animal foods with calorie density and then the third I'd say is having a general awareness of specific nutrients of focus so all diets whether it's an omnivorous diet or a plant-based diet need to be appropriately planned or they can fall short and you know if we look around at our current sort of state of health the the omnivorous diets not really serving us that well it has a number of holes and gaps and while a plant-based diet can really improve your overall disease risk profile and we spoke a lot about that in terms of you know shifting these biomarkers in a favorable Direction your cholesterol your blood glucose control inflammation blood pressure and lower your risk of these chronic diseases that are plaguing our society at the same time there are a few nutrients that you need to be aware of so that you are getting them in the the required amounts to not just prevent your risk of these chronic diseases long term but to really optimize yourself and and feel at your best in your day-to-day so the obvious next question being what are those nutrients yeah uh so I I call these nutrients of focus and I think that's a positive spin on nutrients of concern and I just I want people I want to draw people's attention to them in the book I write about eight of these and some of these are quite easy to get through your diet and or fortified foods and then others are best access through a supplement so as a list these are vitamin B12 vitamin D omega-3 fatty acids iodine iron calcium zinc and selenium right so given that a skeptic would say well if I have to pay extra close attention to these things or I have to go outside of my food that I'm consuming and supplement then this must be a deficient diet by definition I think we need to zoom out a little bit and understand that nutritional gaps are nothing new and it's the very reason that folate and iodine have been used throughout the food system fortifying foods to prevent iodine deficiency and folate deficiency in the general public so this idea of fortification or supplements is nothing new and lots of those nutrients I just reeled off like zinc selenium iron calcium you can easily access them through your diet you don't need to supplement those it's just a matter of understanding what foods do you want to be incorporating in your diet regularly and for example if you're choosing a plant-based milk to swap out Dairy which is rich in calcium what should you be looking for and what we should be worried most about is heart health outcomes so I I have nothing against a diet that includes some supplementation if that means the best outcomes for beer for myself or or anyone that I'm working with and and that is what the data suggests if you want to move down this path of very plant Rich plant predominant diets or even plants exclusive to lower your your risk of chronic disease then taking some of these supplements is going to allow you to do that in a more optimal manner right an early Advocate and practitioner of preventative medicine long before it was trendy Dr Dean ornish is an absolute legend in the plant-based nutrition movement for his groundbreaking work and the holistic prevention and reversal of chronic lifestyle diseases his vast experience and deep wisdom are perfect primers for those curious about the benefits of a whole food plant-based lifestyle and he's here today so let's hear from him well first of all unfortunately because I debated Dr Atkins so many times and he was the low carb guy I got pegged as a low fat guy our program has never just been about fat it's really about a Whole Foods plant-based diet that's low in fat and sugar and Stress Management moderate exercise and what we call social support which is really love and intimacy or eat well move more stress less love more you know that's it um but even the idea of fat the problem was number one you know people say oh Americans have been totally less fat you know we're fatter than ever low-fat is dead it's all sugar but we may have been told to eat less fat but I went to the U.S department of Agriculture database because they keep track of the entire food supply not what people say they're eating but what they're actually eating and oftentimes there's a big discrepancy and what we found is that in every decade since 1950 we may have been told to eat less fat but we're eating a lot more fat 67 percent more fat more sugar more meat and more calories more of everything more of everything so not surprising we're fat not because reading too little fat but because we're eating too much of everything yeah so the idea is that that it's not that the low-fat thing didn't work it's that people didn't actually do it and the other thing is besides getting more fat is people when they did replace fat they would replace it with sugar so you have the snack well cookies and you know the Entenmann's cakes and things like that and that's not a good choice right but I think if you actually look at all of the data there's more evidence than ever that an optimal diet is low in fat and low in sugar it's predominantly fruits vegetables whole grains legumes soy products in their natural forms and we've been doing studies for 40 years so you know having been in all these different diet Wars and diet debates I said you know look I'm done you know we we've done every study that we've done has shown that these same lifestyle changes can reverse heart disease we're able to show that for the first time type 2 diabetes high blood pressure high cholesterol obesity we're doing the other first randomized trial now to see if we can actually reverse Alzheimer's disease we found that when you change your lifestyle it changes your genes you know hundreds of genes over 500 genes in three months turning on the good genes turning off the Bad genes in just three months we found that in a study we did that we published that with Craig Venter who first decoded the human genome right we did a study with Elizabeth Blackburn it got the Nobel Prize for discovering telomeresians of our chromosomes that regulate how long we live we've shown for the first time that in just three months we can increase telomerase the enzyme that repairs and lengthens telomeres by 30 percent and over a five-year period we showed again for the first time we can actually lengthen telomeres in a sense reversing aging at a cellular level so the more diseases we study and the more underlying mechanisms we look at the more reasons we have to explain why these simple changes are so powerful and how quickly people can get better these things are so much more Dynamic than we once realized that when you eat this way your brain gets more blood flow you can actually grow so many new brain neurons in just a few weeks your brain gets bigger in particular those parts of your brain like the hippocampus that control memory that you want to get bigger you know when people get older they say like you know what was where do I leave my keys and what was that person's name a lot of that's reversible your skin gets more blood so you don't age as quickly your heart gets more blood we found you can reverse heart disease or sexual organs get more blood flow and when people realize that it's not just about living longer it's about feeling better and improving the quality of life it really reframes that debate from you know fear of dying which is not sustainable to Joy of living and feeling good and pleasure which really are right what is the difference between mean how the body metabolizes the animal protein versus plant protein or is it like the saturated fat and cholesterol that generally is conjoined with the intake of animal protein well animal protein is is harmful and plant-based protein is not only not harmful it's actually protective there are literally hundreds of thousands of substances and fruits and vegetables and whole grains and legumes and soy products that have any cancer anti-hard disease and anti-aging properties things like phytochemicals bioflavonoids carotenoids retinols isofibones genosine lycopene there's a whole alphabet soup of these things and where do you find them with few exceptions you find them in in plant-based Foods the animal-based foods besides being high in saturated fat and dietary I mean you only get dietary cholesterol in animal products is the animal protein itself is inflammatory and in our new book part of what the this kind of unifying theory that we're putting together for the first time is why is it that these same lifestyle changes are so powerful the more diseases we study the more underlying mechanisms we look at the more reasons we have to explain why these changes are so powerful and it's because although we tend to think of heart disease as being different than diabetes different than prostate cancer and different than Alzheimer's disease and so on the radical idea here is this unifying theory is that they're not they're different expressions of the same underlying disorders the mechanisms like chronic inflammation oxidative stress over some stimulation of the sympathetic nervous system changes in the microbiome changes in as we've been talking about in gene expression and telomeres and angiogenesis and each of these mechanisms in turn is affected by what we eat how we respond to stress how much exercise we get and how much love and support we have and so seen in this larger context the animal protein activates all of these different mechanisms in negative ways which is what makes it harmful in an independent of the fact that it's also high in saturated fat dietary cholesterol and other things like that you know it's like people say oh I'm not going to get enough protein on a plant-based diet and you said well ask Mr elephant you know that's uh or that ask Rich for holding I mean you're a living example of what can be done on a plant-based diet I mean most most guys would be uh happy to do half of what you can do my next guest may not have invented the whole food plant-based diet but he's certainly the Regal line of the movement he's a guy who pioneered it from Fringe acceptance all the way to widespread mainstream adoption of course I can only be referring to the one the only T Colin Campbell the man best known for writing an incredible book called The China Study which to date is one of the most important groundbreaking massively best-selling books ever written on health and nutrition this is excerpted from a conversation we recorded many years ago so I'm very excited and proud to resurface this clip this excerpt between me and T Colin Campbell on the power of a plant-based diet it really coming back to the question of concerning animal protein I mean that had been a lifelong or career-long question because we were able to in the prior studies we were able to show that we could turn on and turn off cancer just simply by feeding of all things the protein of cow's milk which brought me back to the dairy farm in a sense and that was very provocative to say the least and I think it's you know there might be a perspective out there that you were out to you know sort of prove to establish an objective that you already believed in but you're coming from this dairy farm background and it had been your whole you know the the conviction of your entire upbringing that you know the hook does a body good that this is the perfect food right so where did you start to begin to see kind of cracks in the in the firmament of that concept was the initial observation I think we did was the the the there were some Indian researchers who had done some Laboratory animal sledges that showed that at the time that I was in the Philippines and but they didn't believe what they got it was published in obscure Journal but I kind of believed that because it was consistent with what I was seeing with the children and so as we went into that research we looked at it in Great depth and I had become convinced you know by that time we we did it so many different ways that animal protein actually increases cancer risk period and so I was really interested to know in The China Study where there was any evidence for that uh and my bias was to find the opposite right really was I mean if I if I had a Prejudice and that's a very important point you know I think that that you weren't out to you know sort of be on this Crusade uh to uh you know with this foregone conclusion that you already had in your mind you went out and you surveyed a gigantic population of people across innumerable variables and and remained open-minded and I to take what you just said hopeful that maybe it might prove the opposite that's right absolutely I I was always kind of swimming Upstream against my own sort of Prior prejudices but finally the evidence was overwhelming with respect to for starters was the effect of animal protein on encouraging the development of cancers if you will but then there were other questions that arose too at the same time and always having this doubt you know about the significance of this we had asked I would want to ask broader questions what if we eat animal protein containing foods what about all the other nutrients that come along with it what's happening there do they cancel each other so we started investigating all the nutrients of the cancers all the diseases and the more that I looked the more consistent became the data everything seemed to all the nutrients in animal-based Foods as opposed to all the nutrients and plant-based Foods they seem to be doing opposite things and and their activities were sort of mutually supportive you know the biochemical physiological level so the story became for me even ever more impressive was uh but it was always coming from a position in my case and it says someone was trying to disprove right you know what I had observed and this is this is a a landmark Discovery right this is this had never been sort of established or presumed or even conjured by anyone prior to you it's an interesting question and I'll come in just a minute but yes when we were doing all the research in the laboratory and because of my skepticism about a lot of things what we ended up discovering were a lot of fundamental ideas that were against the rules against what I was teaching against what was in the books such as well for example turning cancer on and off by nutritional means I mean that was a big deal and that it turned out we didn't do it just with protein and liver cancer we also did it with dietary fat and pancreatic cancer and things like this so that that phenomenon of thinking about the causation of cancer and later other diseases as a result of Simply modifying you know nutrient intake and and the idea of actually reversing disease right it's the turning over reversing disease yeah and and cancer I thought this is incredible and so we're already learning other things too like um that the relationship between nutrition and genes a lot of people think and a lot of people still think that somehow genes predetermine whether or not we're going to get a certain kind of disease and what we are showing no it's not the case we can have the genes to cause it to start the initiation of events but that we can control it by nutritional means big thing another one sort of principle like if you will an a like protein it causes cancer let's say for starters one of the things that I was really being pushed to do to prove my point was to find what the mechanism was you know which enzyme was this was that and so we started looking for the mechanisms and it had a series of PhD students to spending four or five years like each of them looking at a mechanism and it turned out there is no such thing so that was another myth that I was all of a sudden running across too and so a lot of the things that we we learned really were I think the result of my skepticism I feel like most people want to eat better they want to improve their diets absolutely have you heard of it I've heard of it this trips up so many people we thought hey we know a couple things about how to do this a few so we created this thing called the plant power meal planner that is this beautiful offering whereby you gain access to literally thousands of plant-based recipes that you can totally customize based upon your preferences your allergies your peccadillos it integrates with grocery delivery so all the ingredients that you need get shipped right to your door so you can make the stuff that you've pre-selected and we all could use a little inspiration and support when preparing meals for our families in our busy lives so we hope you join us no matter what your eating style is we have our arms open wide and we've saved you a space at our family table to join us in eating more healthy vibrant plant-based meals so if you want to learn more if you want to go on this exploration that's been so nourishing to Julie and I I would encourage you to visit meals dot richroll.com [Laughter] who's next my friend Dr Michael Greger is next that's who Dr Greger for those that don't know is one of the preeminent Authorities on the plant-based lifestyle and plant-based nutrition he's the man behind the nutrition facts website which is an incredibly robust resource for searching for the latest most up-to-date information on a vast spectrum of medical nutritional and lifestyle topics he's also the wildly best-selling author of books including how not to die and how not to diet he is an incredible Communicator of nutritional information I love him to death so here is a clip between me and Dr Michael Greger what is a day in your personal life with food like how do you make it work well on the right well again yeah and how do you deal with the airports and all of that yeah airport food courts yeah well look it's getting easier now you can get like brown rice in an airport I mean that's great like these like you know fast casual places like I you know things you never expect to see before and look there's you know I've grown better you know if I can you know land someplace and find Whole Foods and have a hot bar and I can grab some food and you know first few days I have snacks and then slowly it's all gone you know what I've been doing recently is I we tell the organizers you got to bring me food you know I mean there's only so many marketers in the rider there's only so many sweet potatoes the guy with the crazy Rider right right what does he think that's Van Halen not only no green M M's no M M's buried it's all right um and so right and so look I you know I need to I yeah and typically I don't even have time even if I could I mean right even if there's healthy food around here I am Southern California I can get healthy food but I don't have time I mean it's just and on the rare days that you're at home oh now then once I have control over my life how excited you are and no that's a beautiful thing I well I mean I just yeah this is my first day of this this few weeks stint and so I'm feeling the the leaving home thing it was it was it was hard to get up this morning but um yeah then I can eat this beautiful diet oh my and it's like it's almost it's like a it's like a it's like a game like how healthy can I get I mean it's really um and uh and you know what helped so I do a lot of food delivery like Whole Foods delivery and then then you're not even tempted to buy junk because it's not in front of you grab and so it's like everything I eat so my house just has healthy food and so if you get hungry enough you're gonna eat an apple right I mean there's nothing you will eventually eat that apple right and so with only healthy stuff you know I can I can build up my my healthy immune system a healthy choice the uh the the most convenient right oh yeah I could go out in the in the in the Philadelphia winter and bike someplace to get something to bike to the donut shop but so much easier when I have a fridge full of yummy food and do you prepare stuff ahead of time I do a lot of batch cooking yeah yeah yeah um particularly now I'm doing a lot of this this Prebiotic mix I talked about my uh when I in studying the improving your uh microbiome for the new Big microbiome chapter in the in the diet book um and just learning how again how important microbiome is and where the most concentrated source of prebiotics and so I I discovered sorghum for the first time discovered all these weird millets that I had no idea that have poorly digested starch and so they are fed to animals but poorly digestive starch is exactly what we want because it's poorly digested in our small intestine makes it down to our lower intestine where our good gut bugs can have a bounty have prebiotics and that has all those knock-on benefits and so that's the kind of thing where I just instant pot a huge amount and just you know Tupperware in the fridge um and you know take out one every day since it's over and you know so I always have uh always have my intact grains and a whole bunch of wonderful black lentils and then it's a matter of just getting Greens in the house what else did you learn about the gut uh the gut biome and and prepping for this what's neat is now we have these Interventional trials so we've always known you uh you can so flashback a few years ago it was a black hole almost no pun intended where because most gut bugs are actually unculturable in laboratory conditions like we can't grow them outside of the human colon we don't know without gas or we don't know and so we have black bike we had no idea what was going on there until we had genetic fingerprinting techniques and also and for the first time we'd be like oh okay we can actually track people's microbiome over time compare people's different microbiomes and we can correlate diseases with um with different uh bugs in our gut and change people's diets change the microbiome see the beneficial or adverse effects but that's the problem if you improve someone's diet all of a sudden you give people lots of whole grains and legumes being splurpy chickpeas and lentils lots of prebiotics they get these beneficial changes in their microbiome and also and they have amazing health benefits uh yeah but you just fed them a whole bunch of healthy food how do we know microbiome has anything to do with it that's where fecal transplants come along right then we can prove it's the microbiome because we can take those gut bubs and put it into somebody who's continuously the crappy diet and see if we can get those same metabolic benefits and that's what we're saying so we're seeing um yeah so you know someone gets a fecal transplant for someone who's overweight all of a sudden they start packing on pounds eating the same food um or there's that's crazy mental health changes um all sorts of crazy things um and and then we can prove it's the gut bug now what happens is of course it's temporary because right you you infuse the gut bugs but then you keep starving them by not eating any fiber and then they die away but you see initially those same benefits of course you got to feed those bugs and they're going to die off but but so so what went from a from a correlation science now we have a causation science um and it's just fascinating that we can transfer the benefits of healthy diets so so I mean so the the black market Rich Roll stool you could I mean you know the the the the the the the I mean yeah start selling that [ __ ] it's exactly I mean who wouldn't pay it is it is fascinating I mean the links to Cravings as well like the nature of the gut Flora impacts the foods that you create yeah yeah yeah yeah and it it also I think is is because it's so complex that it's Rife for confusion and people kind of making claims about what you should and you shouldn't do that we don't necessarily have the ability to really back up at this point particularly this kind of personalized nutrition like people all the time are sending me things my I sent my stool sample in to this company and gave me back a thing and said I should be eating this and I shouldn't be eating this we don't have that because it does not same thing with DNA testing right people that get back there their genome and say oh well I you know I'm whatever I shouldn't be eating the Xbox we don't have that kind of um but is it true we should be eating fermented foods and we should be eating you know nutritionally a variety of nutritionally dense foods to be kind of seeding that that gut Flora with a diversity of of of bacteria so it's the three right so it's prebiotics probiotics and polyphenols which are these kind of attempt to be brightly colored pigments and fruits and vegetables these are kind of the three uh the three things that benefited good microbiome and you can use all three of them or just two of them I mean the problem with probiotics is you take them and then they just die off you don't continue to eat healthy and so if you just have like antibiotic Associated diarrhea or something you wipe out your bugs then I see a therapeutic roll of something like probiotics but otherwise taking probiotics is useless because they'll just die off if you put them in the same environment that didn't grow good gut bugs in the first place putting in some good acid office they're just going to die off because you're not feeding the establas because good gut bugs are by definition fiber feeders resistant starch eaters these are I mean that's that that's what makes good gut bugs grow and so what we really need is we just need to feed our good gut bugs pre-box and people are like oh I eat so many fruits and vegetables but let's realize fruits and vegetables are almost all water like you know uh fruits or like 80 water or some water resist vegetables 90 95 water they're water in vegetable form not actually a lot of fiber you can actually have a pretty deficient fiber deficient diet if you're not including whole grains and legumes some of these drier Foods into your daily diet wow what can we learn from one of the leading weight loss surgeons in the country well next up is Dr Garth Davis Garth is a friend he's a multiple podcast guest he's the author of an Incredible Book you should all read called protein a holic and somebody who is well steeped in the medical literature of countless studies the conclusions drawn from his in-depth reading and direct surgical practice experience are that if we want to prevent obesity and disease if we want to attain and maintain ideal weight management and if we want to ultimately achieve true Optimal Health and long-term Wellness we're going to need to embrace our inner herbivore so I think in one of your I think it was in your talk that I saw recently you said something like uh you know only three percent of the population is protein deficient and but oh I would say lesson but like but like 97 of the population is fiber deficient and what we should be talking about is fiber and not protein right right when you look at they came out the new and Haynes data and what do we actually eat in this country no one's protein deficient you gotta understand the RDA well a protein deficiency would be starvation it would be starting like core sugars yeah exactly you'd have to you would have to not be eating you'd have to be eating less than a thousand calories to probably get it um and so we just don't see that um so the RDA when they set up their recommendation for protein requirements they based it on some nitrogen balance studies and all this kind of stuff and they came up with a figure like for men 56 grams and for women 44 grams or 42 grams and that figure is actually an optimal amount it's not a minimal amount I think people think that's the lowest amount that I should get it's actually the optimal amount based on those studies probably you would do fine with 30 grams of protein but they just want to make sure that everybody was covered now we eat 70 to 100 sometimes 130 grams of protein a day so we're way over the optimal amount we're way in excess and when all these studies where they've gone and interview people the one thing everyone's looking for is even more protein to make it's crazy yet we eat unbelievably low amounts of fiber and there there are not a lot of good studies that show that there's long-term health and eating a lot of protein there's tons of good studies tons and tons showing eating a lot of fiber is good for you long term and we are unbelievable we are in a mass deficit of fiber and yet no one's talking about that because it's not just the fiber it's what the fiber is you know there's no fiber in the animal products there's only fiber in the plant right but if you forget just forget about protein and let's shift all of that Focus that you had on protein and put it on fiber and then see what would happen yeah my message would be it's almost impossible not to get enough protein no matter what you're eating that's number one number two eating more protein will make you sick eventually um and number three eating more plants is really like finding a fountain of youth makes you it's not just because people say oh I don't care if I live you know 10 years longer if you know I have to eat that crap the food's delicious it's just your whole taste buds change that's the thing I think people miss or don't get they don't and they can't imagine that they'll actually get to a place where they will desire or crave healthy foods yeah I have patients say to me I wish I had your willpowered to me it's not willpower it's not willpower for me to eat a kale salad I crave a kale salad but I used to crave a double cheeseburger and you could change that I could talk about how I change that with patients but you could change this thought process and you could change your taste and everybody who goes through it I get this you know blessing you know all these people online yakking about this and that and they've never treated a patient I get to sit across from a patient actually see these changes and the changes are amazing the way people feel the way they look what they're doing in their life it's it's really rewarding and when I think about how many people in this world could benefit if we just got rid of this idea of protein and went to the idea of you know Whole Foods fruits vegetables beans it would really change the health of the country the health of the environment and uh and and have so many other benefits out there I personally never count ever never count I never think to myself I need to get protein I'll make a post-workout Shake where I will throw in some hemp seeds and I'll get some protein there I eat nuts during the day I'll get protein there I ate a lot of beans and I'm only getting stronger and faster I mean is there an argument to be made that uh that the protein from animal flesh is qualitatively different from the protein from plants in other words is an amino acid an amino acid irrespective of where it comes from or is the Matrix and which it's delivered to your body does that make a difference in terms in terms of how you metabolize it the bioavailability and all of that yeah you know um you bring up a good point but um the studies that have shown that bioavailability of plant-based proteins is excellent um like for instance plant-based proteins are much higher in glutamic acid now glutamic acid is fantastic for lowering blood pressure which might be part of the reason plants are so good with lemon pressure meat based proteins are higher in branched chain amino acids now if you're a bodybuilder this is good for several reasons it increases igf-1 igf-1 is a growth hormone so it's a growth hormone you're going to grow your muscles number two um there are definitely things like leucine definitely stimulate muscle protein synthesis and so if your bodybuilder you want to stimulate muscle protein synthesis but here's the catch we know from aging studies and from cancer studies that having a high igf-1 and high leucine actually leads to premature aging and cellular death and cancer so what I'm seeing from these bodybuilding protocols that may in fact make bodybuilder have more muscle may make them unhealthier in the long term I mean it's impossible to do a good study on it but if you look at old bodybuilders they all have a scar down the middle of their chest they've all had heart surgery now is that the high protein diets or is it the steroids you know I can't differentiate that and tell you that um definitely a heavy animal protein diet is associated with heart disease definitely is associated with high blood pressure and it's definitely associated with a shorter length of life and the interesting thing about the longevity studies is we talked about taking out confounding factors if you take out a lot of confounding factors you get to the point where you're almost taking away a correlation and yet after really rigorous statistical analysis there's still a finding that if you eat a plant-based diet or if you eat less meat you live longer after a lifetime what do seasoned medical doctors have to say to incoming doctors as they pass through their medical training well Dr Michael Clapper personifies that question Dr Clapper is a renowned physician who spent his years treating diseases that he felt were reversible or completely avoidable but rather than impacting single patients at a time he shifted gears and went directly to the medical schools to lecture incoming Physicians on the virtue of food as medicine here is Dr Clapper over the course of your uh many decade career I'm sure you've seen diet Trends and fats come and go and you know it's interesting to see what sticks and what doesn't and what passes I'm sure you've seen it all um and right now we're in a moment where we are seeing you know the explosion of interest in plant-based diets and the science that backs it up in lockstep with that though there's also a very you know strident growing movement around low carb eating and the keto diet and so I'm sure these questions come up all the time especially with these students and just in general so how do you kind of think about that and how do you communicate around those other protocols and what is your perspective on that oh my uh there's a another show at itself plenty of times good okay well I mean this is like you know listen there's a lot of plant-based people that listen to the show but there's people that are on different kinds of diets absolutely and I think the reason I'm asking you this question is you know for even a very well educated motivated listener or just consumer in general they go online or they you know read whatever's happening and they see the stuff about plant-based but they also see the stuff about keto and low carb and it's confusing even if you're you know going to PubMed and and reading abstracts which almost no one does it's still confusing right there's science to support different perspectives and it's all very disorienting and so I'm always trying to drive people towards you know what is common sense here where you know what are the facts really say what does the science really say and what are some principles that we can hang our hat on that can guide us in a trajectory that's doable in the context of our busy lives very important of course so we'll put on our miners cap here and uh drilled out on this I've heard off um and he and it starts with a recognition on on everyone's part how toxic the standard Western diet has become and um if you're especially uh even dabbling in fast foods at all every piece of meat you eat is going to be come with with white bread and sugary ketchup and hydrogenated oils and and the the toxic load that comes uh with with whether it's the peaches or the burgers or the buffalo wings Etc and all the diets who are serious about getting people healthier whether it's paleo or keto or plant-based whatever all of us we all we strip away that that outer hole of toxic we can all agree that we all agree standard American diet the fast food diet is bad indeed and once you do that then that step alone is a Quantum Leap is a huge Improvement uh and you reduce a huge load of refined sugars and uh and fats and foods that are grossly obesogenic and as a result uh people and especially the the Paleo folks strip out the dairy products as well uh and uh as well as the oils and when you take out the dairy the oils and and junk flower products people are going to lose weight and the Very Act of losing weight does good things in most people's bodies and their lipid profiles get better their diabetes gets better they feel better their energy level goes up and so you see this improve this initial Improvement in health in in most all of these dietary Styles and it's enough to provide very powerful reinforcement I went paleo boy I lost weight felt good man it's the diet for me and and I hear that with the with the keto folks as well but as a physician and as a person who respects the biology of this body that we have um I mean no Guerrilla packs its intestines full of meat two three times a day like we do um and having been in the medical game for so long I have to say wait a minute granted you see this initial Improvement but I urge folk do not be seduced by this Improvement that you're seeing now what the reality here is you pack that colon full of meat two three times a day a day now and you send this surge of cholesterol and saturated fat and oxidized meat proteins through the tissues day after day after day as the months go by as the years go by this is a recipe for colon cancer this is a recipe for artery disease as a recipe for strokes recipe for dementia recipe for autoimmune disease from leaky gut and the problem and and I put this my slideshow I said medicines become very segmented Medical Care has become very fractionated very segmented and the odds of you seeing the same doctor when you go back to the clinic are small doctors move away patient move away and the point is people the especially these young docs make these recommend oh you already eat paleo you ought to eat keto and then you never see them again and I asked those John you make these recommendations you're going to be around in 10 years when this guy passes his first bloody stool from that colon cancer that your diet spawned you won't even be around to see it you'll be around in 12 years this lady's joints light up from the autoimmune arthritis that your diet's leaky gut gave her you won't be around to see it you think you've done something good for her but you're going to be around in 15 years when this guy has a stroke from that carotid plaque that your diet stirred up in his arteries are going to be around to see that and that's my concern as a seasoned Physicians have been in this game a while now what what are you really Brewing up in these patients colons what are you really Brewing up in their arteries what are you really Brewing up in their joints when you Brewing up in their immune systems and their prostate glands and their colon and their breast tissue and and the folks were making these initial recommendations don't I say did you really know what you're doing doctor and the phrase Do no harm applies to dietary advice as well and you can really hurt somebody with the wrong diet and I think a lot of wrong advice is being given here we're plant eating creatures we need to be true to that and you have a little piece of Flesh once or twice a week yeah I'd probably get away with it but but we're not homo carnivorous we're not flesh-eating apes and uh we're meant to run on whole plant foods and when we do that the body gets lean and healthy and the arteries open up and inflammation subsides and right the body has a has the final word on that quality esteem Dr Neil Bernard quote some foods are fattening others are addictive cheese is both if cheese were any worse it would be Vaseline end quote while sugar and meat consumption across the U.S has declined over the past decade how should we think about dairy in the standard American diet well Dr Bernard is here to educate us Dr Bernard is the president of the Physicians committee for responsible medicine he's the author of more than 100 scientific Publications and 20 books for medical and lay readers several of which have been New York Times bestsellers we have done three in-depth shows with him as he's a fountain of wisdom and practical advice in this area and Beyond so here are a couple clips that I believe you will find helpful but to see the truth of it you just have to look at a country like Japan or China where these are non-dairy consuming countries and and they really weren't eating much meat you know meat was a kind of a flavoring for the Rice and Noodles and vegetables and so forth and and back in 1980 diabetes was rare in Japan it was between one and five percent of the adult population uh McDonald's came in fast food chains came in meat came in a big way and cheese and dairy started to follow uh some of the people in Japan initially and then China afterward started to say okay we need to drink milk so that we're strong like Americans are and what they've gotten is diabetes rates went up to now 11 to 12 percent in Japan by 1990 diabetes is massive now in China cardiovascular disease I'm talking heart disease huge in China and it's not because of rice and it's not because of it but it seems that it is meat and the dairy that is coming in and invading their diet and yet the conventional wisdom if you if you if you would ask you know the average person or perhaps some of the researchers behind this study what the you know what the underlying cause of that that is they're going to point to processed foods and sugar most likely right yeah you know sugar sugar is not health food that's true that said um sugar consumption in the United States has been falling for almost 20 years it Rose and I'm talking all sugars together sugar like cane sugar beet sugar high fructose corn syrup throw them all in they rose up until 1999. at that point sugar has been falling sodas have been falling largely because of so many Americans are drinking bottled water or diet soda or whatever sugar is dropping but obesity is not falling diabetes is not falling and to say and once again sugar is not health food but to say that is the whole problem we should all be thin now right that we should have cure diabetes by now because sugars has been falling for 20 years but it but it's not so I'm going to say a particular amount of blame needs to go on cheese and especially cheese when you see an ad for a Wendy's double cheeseburger or the newest version of you know the Pizza Hut pizza with the injected cheese into the crust and all these sorts of things that actually there is a relate relationship between those marketing campaigns and those products and the influx of government funding so can you explain that a little bit because I think a lot of people would be shocked to hear that by law the U.S and this has been the case for a long time the US government by law must promote American agricultural products this is something congress in its wisdom passed a number of years ago and they promote products regardless of their health value and it's often in spite of their health value so they take this pot of money and they pour it into research studies and the US government did work with Wendy's uh with a contract that I can show you to market the Wendy's cheddar lovers bacon cheeseburger I'm not kidding it sold two and a quarter million pounds of cheese they then worked with Subway to it which subway had two sandwiches that didn't have cheese on them so on contract with the US government they stuck cheese on those sandwiches they worked with Pizza Hut to put an entire pound of cheese on one serving of pizza they worked at Taco Bell uh Burger King all the others so that cheese was promoted for example you go through the drive-through and you can't imagine that what they say over the loudspeaker is going to be the government speak welcome to Taco Bell would you like to try our quesadilla today you know they don't say you want a strawberry smoothie you know it's like something cheesy and so these are all done on contract we got them through the Freedom of Information so those talking points are like upsells that are specifically kind of inserted into the talking points that that person at the fast food restaurant is sort of told this is how you communicate with the customer yeah that was part of it the government has supplied advisors to McDonald's I'm talking about people going to a McDonald's headquarters and Advising them on their business practices I mean don't you think every computer manufacturer would like to have the government promoting their products uh well for some it's it's wrong it should stop um but that's where we are we live in a country which If This Were a Latin American country you could imagine drugs it kind of infusing uh the uh their influence in the government well here it's agricultural products doing the same kind of thing people are promoting cheese they're saying don't worry about it has no effect cheese comes from milk milk comes from a cow who is pregnant the cows the cows don't give cows don't give milk at all but they don't make milk until they have been impregnated they give birth and then the milk that their calf was going to get goes to the dairy um a cow pregnancy is about nine months similar to human pregnancy and they are impregnated every year so what that means three quarters of their lives they are pregnant they are being milked during that time the estrogen that the cow makes gets into the milk and it's just it's not much it's only a trace but the milk is turned into cheese the the hormones go with the fat and the average person needs 35 pounds of it every year so researchers in Rochester New York look looked at men the men who ate the most cheese had the worst sperm counts the worst sperm morphology the lowest sperm motility in other words they're because of the estrogen in contact well that's the theory the theory is is you're consuming just little traces of estrogen with your breakfast on your egg McMuffin the little cheese and a little bit more at lunch and quite a lot of dinner on your pizza and could those little traces of estrogens matter now we we had all thought couldn't be but I got to tell you right here's the worst um here in California researchers looked at women who had been diagnosed with breast cancer and if you've been if you've had breast cancer in the past and you were treated for it your concern is is my cancer gonna come back of course well the women who consume the most cheese had a 49 higher breast cancer mortality compared to the women who eat the least and the difference is small the difference is one daily serving or more less than a half a serving a day so the women who eat little or no cheese and other high-fat dairy products it's cheese it's butter uh that's where the hormones go you compare to these low cheese consumers the ones who eat one or more servings a day which is not a lot The increased risk was 49 I'm talking about risk of dying of your cancer so again the amounts of hormones are small but it raises the question do you want to feed any kind of dairy I'm talking about cow's milk goat milk whatever do you want to feed it to your six-year-old daughter or your six-year-old son or your wife or your husband or yourself or anybody and my thought is that the dairy products are this cultural aberration that has stuck because people get hooked on it but it has nothing to do with human biology and we should be avoiding it here's a quote outside of an emergency medical condition that requires an urgent intervention I have never seen anything come close to providing the breadth and depth of benefits that the plant-based lifestyle offers end quote that quote is from my next guest Dr Robert osfeld a summa [ __ ] laude graduate of the University of Pennsylvania with a medical degree from Yale and a master's in epidemiology from Harvard here is a deep dive into more on his perspective there's this thing that I like to do called the Cal scan and so we've all we're all familiar with CAT scans you know where they do a big radiologic picture looking at looking for a problem in your body whether it's in the chest or the belly or something like that well I thought wouldn't it be cool if we could do a kale scan which instead of looking for a problem can look for ways that a plant-based diet might be beneficial for you and so I looked through uh some of the studies and so like we were talking about a healthier diet doesn't just point to heart disease so if I could I'll go through the the Cal scan and these are things that a plant-based diet has been Associated not necessarily unequivocally proven but just other things pointing in the right direction associated with improving so first of all it's been associated with less mortality less death and so I'll start from the top down many of us are on social media on Facebook we were talking about Facebook just before so a lot of us saw the ice bucket challenge well a plant-based diet elements of that have been associated with less ALS less stroke less depression less cognitive decline over time less Alzheimer's improve skin complexion less acne in fact some investigators suggest that um acne is so tightly linked to the Western diet that it's not actually a Vestige of teenage angst but actually your body crying out for help from lack of nutrition fewer ear infections less periodontal disease less laryngeal cancer less heartburn less lung disease less lung cancer less breast cancer less heart disease of course less obesity and the former Surgeon General Dr Carmona said that this generation will be the first to live fewer years than its parents because of sequally of obesity 70 of our population is overweight or obese less high blood pressure we call high blood pressure the silent killer because you don't feel it but it can kill you and it's important that all listeners get screened for high blood pressure but now there's a statistic that I read that blows my mind if you're a 55 year old adult in the U.S your lifetime risk of developing heart disease is about 90 percent and that's based on information from the Framingham art study and every time I read it I have to reread it it's just so hot it's unbelievable and but if you eat a plant-based diet you are anything but the average adult and you know for example blueberries can lower blood pressure um there's less diabetes there's less colon cancer less inflammation less constipation less prostate cancer associated with less prostatic hypertrophy and so guys may recognize that of having to wake up four or five times at the night during the night to pee because I can't pee all the urine out because the prostate's big improved sexual function in men and women and we call of course erectile dysfunction the canary and the coal mine for heart disease and getting an erection is a psychological event it's a neurologic event and it's a vascular event and by the time you have a blockage in the artery to the penis so the artery to the penis is smaller than that to the heart and by the time you have a blockage in the artery of the penis giving erectile dysfunction it's extremely likely you have such blockages in your heart that just have not yet clinically manifested right your body's just trying to tell you that you have something that you need to deal with exactly and and the solution is not to take a small blue pill so that you can forget about it but rather to do the opposite which is to heat it and try to you know take a look at what you're eating and how you're moving your body and maybe make some changes totally agree so when I look at I mean a couple of observations first of all it's you know thank you for that rundown I mean it's so compelling and when I hear that and I think you know I put it in context of you know heart diseases America's number one killer and thinking of that study and the 90 figure it's just astonishing and I wonder why isn't everybody you know doing this like what is the impediment to people adopting this and you know that's the that's the sort of frustration that that I experienced and kind of what I was getting at with the people that are out there trying to you know sort of debunk The China Study or poo poo the you know the the the the the the Fantastic benefits of eating a plant-based diet so when you see that whether it's on Facebook or you know some blog on the Internet or whatever like how do you you know what do you do what is that how does that make you feel what do you think well it's very frustrating to me um having some background in some of the science of it and we're ramping up our research arm of our wellness program too but um and but I think that people oftentimes like to have the um the behaviors that they're doing whether they be good or bad reinforce people kind of like taking bad habits yeah exactly right exactly yeah you know eating that Animal product yeah that's great for you go for it right now at least 50 million people worldwide live with Alzheimer's disease and rates could exceed 150 million people by 2050. incredible so how should we think about brain function on a plant-based diet can we prevent neurodegeneration through the choices that we make around our diet and lifestyle and what are the best foods to boost brain function these questions are best answered by doctors Dean and Aisha sure the leading neurology team in the country studying Alzheimer's disease as their life mission directors of the Alzheimer's prevention program at Loma Linda University Medical Center this amazing husband and wife team delivered two clips that address these questions head on all of the genes involved in Alzheimer's except for those three percent or three genes are all our lifestyle genes how your lifestyle affects those genes which means you have control over it even the most benign studies the ones that had minimal effect the Mind study and others mind study just looked at diet very well done study just a diet adjustment reduce your risk of Alzheimer's by 53 wow and that was a watered down version of the diet we think is optimal how how long would you need to be you know eating and eating in that certain way leading up to it it varies from person to person their their background other things like if they had multiple head traumas uh childbirth like multiple variables but in reality if you're on that diet for several years you continually reduce your risk like smoking if you've smoked all your life and if you come off of smoking come off of that bacon I've come off of that you know uh well let's then the more years you pass I believe in smoking it's after five years five to seven years yeah seven years you back to Baseline right meaning that you're back to the lowest risk factor um so the longer you stay on a healthy lifestyle which is exercise and you know all the things that we say and especially if you do all of them the reason I say all of them was coming back to our grandparents one of the elements is cognitive Reserve or what the term you and I love idea density you know we say that if we have a musical band that's going to be called I idea dancing idea density yes that's a it's a great great uh concept they both both our grandparents had immense idea density and and philosophers think but they used to come to alzheimer's why the other elements weren't taken care of they had diabetes cholesterol high blood pressure sedentary bad food didn't exercise philosophers are not supposed to exercise for some reason but so you have to do all of it right so we're going to get into these lifestyle interventions but before we do that let's talk about the brain more generally um we sort of think of the brain as this mysterious black box that is unknowable and something that sits outside of our body right like there's our body and then there's our brain and these things don't really overlap but in truth truth brain health is really uh it's about vascular Health in the same way that heart health is right like we're dealing with I don't know how many zillions of of you know arteries that are going into going into the brain you know you know putting things in your brain and taking them out Etc um and and when you think about you know heart disease we we all know we're trying to not have plaque in Our arteries and keep those pipes running clean and brain health is really not that different is it that's very true you put it beautifully um when you look at the brain it's about three pounds like jello it's like hard Jello when you hold it in your hands and it's about two percent of your body's energy and when you look at the tissues and the vessels there are the same vessels that are in your heart and in your kidney and your body I'm a vascular neurologist so I teach a lot of anatomy to medical students and residents about the vasculature of the brain but basically you know you have artery shooting from your heart going through the neck there's two major ones in the front the carotid arteries and the vertebral arteries and these are the major vessels that take blood to your brain and there's just branching of these arteries and somebody actually calculated this but if you put the vessels uh in your brain end to end it would span about 400 miles so just imagine all of these tiny hairline arteries taking in oxygen and nutrients to these susceptible areas of the brain for this this incredible organ to function and at any moment our brain as little and as small as it is it can consume up to 25 percent of the body's energy so just imagine the amount of work that it does and if we don't address vascular health and if we don't really take care of it it will succumb to disease you know we we always say in our cardiologist plans don't really like that but we say the rest of the body is there to carry the brain um and it essentially comes down to the same pathological processes that affect the brain that also affects the heart the kidneys and the other systems as well so let's look at the foods that that are beneficial like when you look at the the plant kingdom what stands out you know I know we want to stay away from quote unquote superfoods but some foods are better than others like what should people focus on who are trying to enhance their brain health I think to give a quick version of of what's out there as far as data is concerned consumption of green leafy vegetables for example seems to be very helpful and it's like unanimous results that you see across different studies berries such as blueberries and strawberries they stand out whether it's the mine diet or the Mediterranean diet or even in the Adventist Health study because these are foods that have the highest amount of anti-inflammatories spices like turmeric we actually wrote a paper and when we were in Cedar Sinai where we gave our patients high doses of turmeric and turmeric seems to have the curcumin part of it is a very potent anti-inflammatory and it seems to bind with amyloid which is the bad protein associated with Alzheimer's disease and it it removes it oh wow we measured the amount of amyloid the amyloid load in retina and after giving them high amounts of turmeric we actually saw the turmeric binding to the amyloid in the retina just really really interesting and we're learning more about it as we speak um and uh yeah so high fiber green leafy vegetables and berries and spices especially turmeric seems to be on the top she and flaxseed and flaxseed which are amazing sources of plant-based omega-3 fatty acids hemp seeds nuts like walnuts whole grains they seem to have the right kind of micronutrients whether it's thiamin or riboflavin or folic acid bound beautifully synergistically supporting each other's absorbance and bioavailability they all tend to reduce the risk for Alzheimer's disease and we have studies that have looked at individual foods and risk of Alzheimer's disease and the combination thereof too are there any plant foods to avoid I would say the plant foods to avoid seems to be coconut oil I know that that again is a controversial area and a lot of people are just yeah they love coconut I know I'm sorry but you know I I love that used to be the thing coconut oil for brain health yeah I know and unfortunately the data was pretty flawed when it came out it was based um on a couple of uh case studies and it as it happened somebody gave their loved ones some coconut oil and they seemed to improve but then there was no long-term follow-up but coconut oil and I'm happy to say that there's consensus on it and you know as a scientist I want to look at different sources of data whether it's clinical trials whether it's epidemiological whether it's case series and there's consensus between different scientists and doctors and Physicians that coconut oil seems to increase our bad cholesterol LDL which can result into vascular damage and the reason being is because coconut oil is one of the few plant oils that that is more than 90 saturated fats and so is palm oil Dr Joel Khan is an esteemed cardiologist who's authored hundreds of articles on heart disease and has performed thousands of cardiac procedures Dr Khan was a feature contributor to the documentary what the health and has been a guest on this show three times I asked Dr Khan what the results might be if we were to introduce a fasting mimicking process to a plant-based diet what he shares is astounding and further illustrates the unique power and healing capabilities of plant Foods Dr Khan references research by longevity experts like Dr Walter Longo and he brilliantly summarizes for us the benefits of adding intermittent fasting to a plant-based lifestyle so take a listen could we mimic fasting but still eat provocative crazy idea could we create a diet that doesn't have the components that food causes that accelerates the mtor pathway the PK pathway these Pathways that accelerate aging and um uh destruction of cells can we create a diet that lets you eat some and can we actually still benefit from what fasting seems to do which is a accelerate a process a fancy word autophagy the clearing of damaged cells to allow them to function better that process real quickly they won the Nobel Prize last year autophagy is like the hot mutton right now of anti-aging that if you eliminate it every case of heart disease cancer and diabetes would extend human life by 13 years if we could end damage to cells and improve the efficiency of autophagy to take your cells that are aging and restore them to a youthful state would extend human life by 30 years so the research is going now in this anti-aging world and he created bottom line to die diet that five days in a row of in The Human Experience 800 calories a day of a plant-based diet low in sugar and low in protein but containing Whole Food fats like olives and nuts and containing moderate complex carbohydrates so that the carbohydrate calorie loads about 35 percent that he found in animal models and in a study published February 2017 and 100 humans that you could see the responses you get with a complete fast but you don't have the pain of a complete fast you don't have the risk of a complete fast he called that and patented that fmd fasting mimicking diets um and he has shown that not only do they favor losing visceral fat around your belly which is what so many people are doing 10-day belly bloats five days in a row in a month and you can do it as many months in a row as you can tolerate and all and we're talking about eating a nut bar for breakfast we're talking about eating soup and kale crackers for lunch we're talking about eating soup um and occasionally a little cacao bar for dinner these actually come pre-packaged in a startup that he uh engaged in with the University of Southern California that doing that five days in a row activates these Primal Pathways that actually not only favor improved metabolism losing visceral fat you don't lose muscle mass which is fantastic but you actually lower igf-1 levels which is one of the goals and lastly you actually create a flood of stem cells from your bone marrow into your bloodstream stem cells that people are going to Tijuana and paying a ton of money for that will go to injured and damaged parts of your body and clear out damaged cells so there's data now in animals and some human data that multiple sclerosis may be responsive to a five-day fasting mimicking diet of plants low in sugar low in fat that actually brain growth occurs in animal models and right now cognition is being studied in Italy using Dr Longo's five-day fasting diet in addition to just weight loss that cancer patients it's called chemo leave it's a product they've developed and not released it it's being studied at the Mayo Clinic in other places that if you're getting chemotherapy and you do this fasting mimicking diet and use plants and use low sugar low fat you actually get a better kill rate for the chemotherapy and you get less side effects profound data athletes are being studied in Verona Italy right now to see if this enhances performance if it will enhance recovery and allow you to go back and do the next athletic event with more success so several hundred worldwide studies using this exact model I would describe it it's a plant-based cyclical ketogenic diet cyclical because it's five days a month and it's plants so it's not the extreme of what you're seeing on the blogosphere it's the plants and the plant proteins that don't seem to activate aging like animal-based protein and it's 800 calories a day it's not water fasting so there are people who shouldn't do it underweight people pregnant people brittle diabetics brittle heart patients 800 calories a day I've done it seven of the last 11 months I'm down 25 pounds wow I bound this energy my labs show Improvement my blood pressure shows Improvement I have dozens of patients who have had the same experience and you know what do you do with a heavy vegan who's really doing it right you've got to change your metabolism and this is one of the hacks that might you know allow our movements one to have the scientific basis is say we're in the right sector of the food plate and two to actually help people get more out of it than they're getting because not everybody eating a whole food plant-based diet with oil without oil is going to achieve their optimal blood pressure blood sugar and weight and we need more tools and this is one of the tools the American College of Cardiology a more than 50 000 member medical society is the professional home base for the entire Cardiology profession and five years ago I sat down with his former president Dr Kim Williams Dr Williams is one of the most inspiring the most intelligent and pioneering leaders in the growing movement to modernize how we think treat and hopefully prevent heart disease which is still our most onerous threat to human health one out of three people in America dies from cardiovascular disease it is and remains our number one killer and it's still the number one killer of cardiologists plants are the solution and no master class would be complete without the words of those who know best so in his own words here is Dr Kim Williams last year was the first time in 40 years that cardiovascular disease deaths in the country went up and that is just something that we just can't abide by and you know they've you we are we're always bragging about this decreasing curve about 50 over 40 years in cardiovascular mortality and it's bypass surgery and statins and beta bloggers and eights and there were all these medications for heart failure and decreasing sudden death because we put in defibrillators that shock people when they when they have a fatal arrhythmia and they come back to life and we were so proud of all the stuff and then the American population somehow is overcoming an end run around this no matter what you do exactly yeah and when the CDC put those numbers out there they said it was obesity and diabetes that's driving it and that's a nutrition and so it all the fundamental issue that we've been dealing with for the last so many years is really at the core of all we do and it will uproot and and undo any success that we can do with devices and medications yeah it's got to be a shift in priorities and focus because it is amazing to reduce by 50 percent the mortality rate of people who are suffering from heart disease as a result of all this amazing science and technology but if that comes at the cost of really addressing the fact that the incidence of people who are you know you know becoming patients in the first place then you're you're waging a losing War right ultimately yeah everyone's going to get older and they're going to pass away at some point wouldn't it be nice if we were as healthy as possible until that happened and not have these chronic diseases that are completely avoidable by uh by lifestyle a lot of the Publications weren't out there in 2003 but the data's out there now animal protein is bad for you heme iron is bad for you the cholesterol the igf-1 and the animal protein this is this is all science and so the difference is now I read it now the other major controversy which I probably shouldn't repeat one more time but I guess I'm gonna do it was making that comment which was completely half joking but I was making a statement about cardiovascular research and the fact that nutrition research is typically in the American journal of clinical nutrition it's not in the general American College of Cardiology so much and so it's not in front of the cardiologists and so I made that statement again more than half joking the statement that that um yeah why don't you you say it right two kinds of cardiologists vegans and those who haven't read the data now I got you into a little trouble yeah it did well the interesting part is that uh you know it's with like like they say if you take the text out of the context then all you're left with is the con and so people were misunderstanding I thought I'm throwing all my colleagues under the bus when I'm really claiming or asking for more research more review articles more you know more data to go into Cardiology journals so that people are actually seeing it then it can influence their their lives and their patients but then two things started to happen one is uh the you know the pushback from that uh was actually I think most people understood that I was saying that if they know me at all that they don't know me they wouldn't say anything to me if they did know me they knew that I was you know saying that in a joke in a jocular manner but there were some people who took it seriously particularly at rush where you know I'm the chief of Cardiology and we now have uh you know nine vegan cardiologists people looked at the data and they saw that you know this is probably something I shouldn't be eating and they've they've uh changed their own lifestyle which is wonderful because it gives us a good Cadre of people who work on prevention the other thing that happened though uh I have to say is that um I spent six years on the American Board of internal medicine doing the Cardiology exam and then the ACC leadership position folks so I'm seeing a lot of cardiologists than my time at the American side of nuclear Cardiology I was president 12 years ago each one of those organizations has had some luminary person who died of heart disease and I'm kind of saying that's where we really need to start that is in order to fix the population through all the powers of our Acca guidelines the the people who are actually getting that data out there and putting it in the hands of patients and the prescriptions and telling people what how they should live is Cardiology so at this point I've had enough of the sudden cardiac deaths I'm actually my my new goal is to not retire until the leading cause of death and cardiologists is no longer heart diseased and so it's amazing that it it precipitates at that level amongst you know amongst your peers you know on some level it's like you can't transmit something you haven't got like if you're if you're not living this life in a certain way where you're you know or you're an embodiment of the message that you're promoting that's inherently problematic right so I it really has affected me in terms of the the guilt when one of my friends would pass away you know they knew that I was eating different I I ate with them they knew that I was getting different and did I say anything and did I say it loud enough and so now any quip that I can come up with that gets on my face today or Twitter or I'm fine with I'll take the backlash if it's going to save some of my colleagues lives ultimately that will help our country that will help uh reduce this this terrible epidemic of heart disease even if it makes me unpopular nutrition is the most important decision that we can make if we could change one thing it would be to have heart-healthy information coming out and and have that be a real definition um and so for the individual patient finding out where they are and seeing what are the elements that are going to create more more and more diseases uh similar to what brought them to my office in the first place and uh and I I understand that this this is not Primary Care this is not Family Practice not you know these are people who already have heart disease when they're seeing me and so I have a little easier job because they're already motivated the fact that they're in my office means that they're motivated to try to make some kind of change they're expecting to come out of there with something different that's going to change their outcome not every physician has that Advantage but it's something that we all should take advantage of because you know almost everyone has had a family member who suffers from heart disease or his hand heart disease or has sudden cardiac death and so just trying to get them to understand that there is a relationship between your lifestyle and your outcome just make that connection if we could do that we would all be so so much better off right a whole food plant-based lifestyle is also a recalibration of our relationship with things like salt oil and sugar modern food additives that Spike dopamine and can create all sorts of problems so how do we reframe our often dysfunctional relationship with food so that we are never again a victim of addictive behaviors well taking us through this complex issue is Dr Alan goldhammer co-author of the book the pleasure trap here's an excerpt from one of our all-time most popular episodes the social roadblocks to health are probably some of the limiting factors I think that's probably true in all addiction though you know one of the challenges for people with alcohol is oftentimes the social consequences yes of not participating and this is definitely true with food we've built so much of our social interaction around food that even even if you're looking to just modify the type of food you eat it can be very upsetting for people and they can get really defensive about it right so let's talk a little bit more about the pleasure trap specifically what that is you co-authored this book seminal work with with Doug Lyle I've seen his Ted talk I've seen him give his presentation many times on this subject and that really you know elucidates this dysfunctional relationship with food and and why it is from an evolutionary and psychological perspective well you know there's this idea of dopamine is a neurochemical associated with pleasure and there's two behaviors critical for human being survival and that is food insects you have to get enough to eat in order to be able to sustain yourself and you have to engage in enough sexual behavior so that you can pass on your genes and the whole process can start over again so it's not surprising that food insects are heavily reinforced and the way the body the brain reinforces the body's behavior is by rewarding us with dopamine which is the neurochemical associated with pleasure so the more dopamine the more pleasure the more dope mean the better the food tastes and so you react to food in response to largely caloric density a higher the caloric density the more valuable it is in this environment is scarcity in which we evolved and so the higher caloric density foods are tend to be more reinforced more dopamine better tasting so what we've done as humans we're Innovative creatures we said oh if a little good A lot's better let's figure out a way to make the food taste even more special by increasing its caloric density and we do that by adding things like oil and sugar to the food and as a consequence we like it better and if that's what you get used to eating that's all you like and eventually people get to the point they really don't like the taste of simple whole Natural Foods anymore because this hyper drug-like stimulating effect of the more concentrated Foods is more appealing so we literally become addicted for example if you want to neuroadapt to a lower salt or lower fat diet it actually takes time in order to the body to go through that adaptation right we can speed it up with fasting but the bottom line is there's a period of adaptation where food doesn't taste good if you eat Whole Foods and you're used to eating highly processed foods it's not that appealing now over time you adapt and then the body gets to the point where you like the simpler Foods again yeah people have a hard time believing that you adapt there's this baked in assumption that you're you're you're you're you're just gonna you're looking you're staring down the pipeline of a lifetime of drab foods that are unappealing and you're just gonna have to tolerate it um we know there's a literature on this though with for example sodium uh people use on high sodium diet it takes about a month on a low sleeping diet for the average person to neurodapt to a lower salt diet you know with fat it takes almost three months wow it takes three months on a lower fat diet before that satiety mechanism that's used to being kicked in by the higher caloric density fat begins to adapt and you'll feel satisfied on a lower uh density Foods so the fruits the vegetables or grains of goods you will now feel satisfied whereas initially you don't because you're used to being satiated with these high fat uh this high fat intake and that that can take months and so it's a problem if you say to a person well look you're going to eat this new diet you're going to feel like crap and you're not gonna like it and but it'll only be a few months right adherence may be lagging whereas if you can make that process happened more quickly the ability to get people to make dietary changes speeds up and that's what we found with fasting and sometimes that's a way of getting people to the point where good food tastes good more quickly yeah what we're encouraging people to do is a really radical departure from what they're currently doing but that's to adopt a whole plant food diet that's free of this added chemicals free of the salt oil and sugar and what you're left with is things like fruits and vegetables raw or cooked minimally processed grains beans nuts and seeds but you don't have the meat fish Val eggs dairy products oil salt sugar and highly processed fractionated foods that make up the majority of the people's diet in industrialized society and it's that diet that makes them fat and sick and develop the diseases of dietary excess and that what makes you vulnerable to con infectious disease you know when you look at what are the vulnerabilities about why do some people get an influenza or a covid or an infectious disease and you know they recover they survive they have minimal consequence other people it's devastating or deadly well if you look at the risk factors associated with what makes people vulnerable to these diseases as well as the disease the chronic diseases the heart disease the cancer the stroke it's the same metabolic syndrome in all of its associations it's the same obesity and diabetes and high blood pressure and all the consequences of dietary excess these are reversible and preventable conditions people don't have to have these conditions and even if they have them they can largely reverse them by taking responsibility to control what they put in their mouth okay we did it I hope this master class was valuable and actionable for you and as we conclude this deep dive into the plant powered lifestyle I want to acknowledge that in some cases for a variety of reasons not everyone can or will make the pivot to a 100 percent Whole Food plant-based lifestyle and if that is you you'll find no judgment here what I would like to submit however is that intentionally creating small goals for yourself toward moving away from an ultra processed food-based diet and adding more plant foods to your plate could be transformative for your health for your energy for your performance and for your longevity that has been my experience and that has been the testimony of the experts collected here today it's my hope that this master class has helped you on your journey or could be used as a way of helping a loved one and if you have been personally inspired please consider visiting the full in-depth conversations with these esteemed guests you can find links to each episode posted in the YouTube description or in the show notes at richroll.com thank you for listening thank you for watching and please know that I'm wishing all of you the greatest life possible powered by as many plants as possible until next time peace thanks [Music]

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