Dr. Neal Barnard, M.D. On Breaking The Dairy Addiction

Last week we discussed the how behind ditching dairy. This week we discuss the why. Right now the average American eats more than 33 pounds of cheese a year. Packed with calories, loaded with saturated fat and teeming in highly addictive casomorphins, it's a habit that's intimately linked to obesity and a litany of chronic illnesses, including heart disease and type-2 diabetes. It's a habit that wrecks significant havoc on the environment, polluting our skies and poisoning our water table. And it's a habit that perpetuates unspeakable cruelty on the sentient animals it relies upon to serve its unabating appetite. Nonetheless, the U. S. continues to produce more cheese and dairy products than any other country in the world. Relentless, well-funded dairy industry lobbying efforts have entrenched government subsidies that not only incentivize production but even quietly fund corporate product development and marketing efforts, such as Pizza Hut's infamous grilled cheese stuffed crust pizza, McDonald's McCafé products and even Starbucks smoothies — all products specifically produced, developed and marketed to increase consumer dairy consumption courtesy of the federal funded and USDA regulated dairy checkoff program. It's time to stop the insanity. So let's talk about it. I can think of no better steward to facilitate a conversation on this subject than my good friend Neal Barnard, M. D. A pre-eminent authority on diet and nutrition and its impact on illnesses such as atherosclerosis, diabetes, cancer and Alzheimer’s, Neal is the founder & president of The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), where he leads programs advocating for preventive medicine, good nutrition, and higher ethical standards in research, and the Barnard Medical Center, a ground-breaking non-profit primary care medical practice where board-certified physicians, nurse practitioners, and registered dietitians help patients prevent and reverse serious health problems, leveraging a holistic approach that involves tackling the actual causes of illness, with extra attention on nutrition. Neal is also an adjunct associate professor of medicine at George Washington University and has authored over 70 scientific publications as well as 18 books, including the New York Times best-sellers Power Foods for the Brain*,21-Day Weight Loss Kickstart*, the USA Today best-seller Dr. Barnard’s Program for Reversing Diabetes* and the subject of today’s conversation... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 0:44Rich Roll?

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• 1:05Speaker 01

  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 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 back in 1980, diabetes was rare in Japan. It was between 1% and 5% of the adult population. McDonald's came in, fast-food chains came in, meat came in in a big way, and cheese and dairy started to follow. 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% in Japan by 1990. Diabetes is massive now in China.

• 1:50Speaker 01

  Cardiovascular disease, I'm talking heart disease, huge in China. And it's not because of rice.

• 1:58Rich Roll?

  That's Dr. Neal Barnard, and this is the Rich Roll Podcast.

• 2:13Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast. I'm in Miami right now. I'm in a hotel room. Can you hear all the ruckus outside my door? I don't know what's going on right now, but it is Friday afternoon and I have a feeling that this hotel turns into sort of like party time, like ground zero for partying. So if it's a little bit loud and distracting, my apologies. There's nothing I can do to control my environment. I'm powerless. Okay, today's episode. Today's episode, I want you to think about this show as part

• 2:53Rich Roll?

  two in this limited series on ditching dairy. Last week, Julie and I discussed the hows, specifically her new book, This Cheese Is Nuts, and the process of creating yummy, super delicious, nutritious, plant-based versions of your favorite dairy dishes. And this week, I've got my good friend, Dr. Neil Bernard, M.D., returning to the podcast to pick up where we left off in our conversation, our first conversation, which was episode 242. And this discussion is specifically focused on the perils of dairy consumption on human health. For those that are new to the show, Neil is a preeminent authority on diet and

• 3:34Rich Roll?

  nutrition and its impact on illnesses such as arthrosclerosis, diabetes, cancer, and Alzheimer's. He is the founder and president of PCRM, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, where he leads programs advocating for preventive medicine, good nutrition, and higher ethical standards in research. Neil is also an adjunct associate professor of medicine at George Washington University and has authored over 70 scientific publications, as well as 18 books, including the New York Times bestseller, Power Foods for the Brain, 21 Day Weight Loss Kickstart, and the USA Today bestseller, Dr. Barnard's Program for Reversing Diabetes, as well as his latest, and the subject of today's conversation,

• 4:20Rich Roll?

  This, I was gonna say this cheese is nuts. It's not called that. It's called The Cheese Trap. How Breaking a Surprising Addiction Will Help You Lose Weight, Gain Energy, and Get Healthy. So this is a great conversation about the driving forces behind unhealthy eating habits. How everything from government policy, legislative barriers, subsidies, and misinformation fuel unhealthy consumer food choices. And it's about the addictive nature of dairy, the human and planetary health implications of dairy consumption, and why, look, it's time. We gotta kick it. There's nobody more knowledgeable and qualified to talk about these subjects than Neil. He's just an amazing human being.

• 5:03Rich Roll?

  I really appreciate him taking the time to share his wisdom. And I urge all of you to listen in on this conversation intensely. Pay attention to what the good doctor has to say. And with that, I give you Dr. Neil Bernard.

• 5:21Rich Roll?

  All right, Dr. Neil Bernard, we're in the Container Studio at our house. Thanks for making the trip all the way up to the hinterlands.

• 5:28Speaker 01

  This is a cool place. Thank you for including me.

• 5:30Rich Roll?

  I appreciate you coming up. It's a, it's a pleasure and an honor to have you up here and also to kind of reprise our first conversation and perhaps dig a little bit deeper into some of the myths and truths surrounding, specifically, I wanted to narrow in on dairy and cheese and talk about your new book, The Cheese Trap, and also the latest news cycle, which I think is landing in everybody's sort of social media feeds over the last 24 hours. A lot of, a lot of interest and intrigue. I know I got a lot of messages on Twitter and Facebook about this recent study that just came out. I'm looking at an article right now that was in The Guardian. I think it was published yesterday.

• 6:11Rich Roll?

  Eating Cheese Does Not Raise Risk of Heart Attack or Stroke, Study Finds. So what do you make of this?

• 6:18Speaker 01

  Well, it's what we've been seeing now for quite a number of years where the... Dairy industry, the meat industry, the egg industry, they've all been hammered by science over decades and for good reason, because they have cholesterol, they have fat, these things lead to the diseases that we're struggling with. And so they have found a way to fight back, which is they pour a lot of money into studies. In fact, the very study that you're describing, cheese is safe, dairy is safe. When you look down at the bottom of the article, you discover the funding sources are the dairy industry. Right. And although they will say, "We gave them money, no strings attached," the scientists

• 7:00Speaker 01

  all know that if they don't come up with an industry-friendly conclusion, that's the last grant they're ever gonna get from these people. So they come up with very friendly conclusions. And it's getting to the point where the consumer has no clue what to believe. Because animal fat, the saturated fat, that's especially in dairy, also in meat and other things, but dairy is the number one source, it clearly raises cholesterol levels, and there's a lot of cholesterol in it. But you can do a study in such a way that it's hard to identify that. For example, if I compare, say, a certain amount of milk to 2%, regular milk to 2% milk,

• 7:45Speaker 01

  the difference in fat content is actually relatively small. And if you show that the difference isn't statistically significant, meaning it could just be chance, they'll report it as negative, and then the headline in The Guardian will say, "It doesn't matter." So there are lots of ways of lying with statistics. And the sad thing, from our standpoint, is these researchers don't have to prove that dairy is completely safe. They don't have to even stop the doubt that people would have or the concern that they have. They just have to sow a little bit of confusion. Because if the consumer says, One week it's alar on apples and the next week it's sugar and the next week it's this, the next week it's that. I don't know who to believe. Then they're gonna go back with

• 8:29Speaker 01

  how they were raised on a western kind of diet. So, so I think it's a terrible problem. I honestly don't know where this is gonna end.

• 8:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Our product is doubt, right? A page right out of the tobacco industry playbook that dates back to the 60s and 70s. And the truth is, is that the average consumer is gonna see that headline. Perhaps they're not even gonna read the article. They'll just see the headline and then they'll share it on their Facebook feed or on Twitter or what have you. And the inquiry really ends there. And so the larger kind of issue is the, this sort of, I don't wanna say assault on science, but perhaps this perpetration of misinformation in this war, you know, war, this nutrition war that we find ourselves, you know, mired in at the moment. And all you need is a headline like that to interject

• 9:21Rich Roll?

  a little bit of doubt to keep people wedded in their current habits and their current consumer purchasing habits.

• 9:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's, it's an abuse of science. It's a misuse of science and they, they're doing it deliberately and they know what they're doing. And when you look at what these companies are doing, they, on their websites, they will say, "We are trying to make dairy fat look good." They are, they're explicit with that. And they say that to their members so that their member industries will support them in this quest. We went through this with, in 2015, the Dietary Guidelines for Americans were being reformulated. And that, of course, determines what every kid in every school is gonna eat and what everybody knows or thinks they know about nutrition. The egg industry was fighting the whole cholesterol thing. And back in the 60s and 70s, the cholesterol issue was

• 10:10Speaker 01

  solved, just like tobacco and lung cancer. It was like absolutely clear that tobacco caused lung cancer. It was absolutely clear that if you eat eggs or other high cholesterol foods, your blood cholesterol rises. So the government funding for that research kinda dried up because the only people who cared were the egg industry. So the egg industry started funding studies to try to disprove this. And if you have a really small subject sample, very few people, and if you pick people, let's say they're eating a lot of eggs and sausage already. You can show that an additional egg doesn't really make much difference because of what they're eating. They are not going to do a study on somebody like you who's not eating animal products at all. If I have research subjects who have a clean diet, you start giving them eggs, their cholesterol levels rise.

• 10:52Speaker 01

  So anyway, researchers have been publishing very vigorously these, I'm going to call them really corrupt, studies and they influenced that panel and we had to fight long and hard to get the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee to look through the science and see the truth of it. So they've got more money than we do and they are pushing hard to confuse people.

• 11:15Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and the money's important because I actually think that we're losing this war on information. When headlines like this, they travel easily and quickly across the internet and they have a massive influence on the public at large. And you know, just kind of cribbing from this article, there's a paragraph in here that says, "There's been a lot of publicity over the last five to 10 years about how saturated fats increase the risk of cardiovascular disease and a belief has grown up that they must increase the risk, but they don't." So it goes back to that, you know, that Time Magazine article about butter. Butter is back. There's no link between your dietary saturated fat and cholesterol intake and the increase

• 11:54Rich Roll?

  of serum cholesterol and the impact on cardiovascular disease, diabetes, other chronic illnesses. So that is the prevailing conventional wisdom at the moment and people are going around, you know, with this license to increase their intake of saturated fats even above and beyond what they were doing before because they're under this belief that it has no impact on any kind of deleterious health outcome.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  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 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 back in 1980, diabetes was rare in Japan. It was between one and 5% of the adult population. McDonald's came in, fast food chains came in, meat came in in a big way and cheese and dairy started to follow. 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% in Japan by 1990.

• 13:04Speaker 01

  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 vegetables.

• 13:16Rich Roll?

  But it seems that-

• 13:17Speaker 01

  It is meat and the dairy that is coming in and invading their diet.

• 13:20Rich Roll?

  And yet the conventional wisdom, 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 is, they're going to point to processed foods and sugar most likely, right?

• 13:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, sugar is not health food. That's true. That said, 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 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.

• 14:16Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 14:17Speaker 01

  We should have cured diabetes by now because sugar has been falling for 20 years, but it's not. So I am going to say a particular amount of blame needs to go on cheese, especially cheese, but also meat.

• 14:30Speaker 01

  So that's the issue. Now, I don't want to get totally negative about this, though, Rich, because it's true that, you know, you get into a group of smart people and they'll read that and they, some of them see through it, some of them don't. But the big, the big picture that I see, it was relatively few people going to a plant-based diet, say, 20 years ago. Now it's like all over the place. This movement, I think, is unstoppable, even with this war of misinformation. I'm reading it like the French election that happened a week, a couple of days ago, actually. There was a lot of concern that the, that election would be manipulated in favor of the far-right candidate. And the French people

• 15:11Speaker 01

  said, "To heck with your misinformation," and basically threw her out, so.

• 15:16Rich Roll?

  Right, like the pendulum is only going to swing so far before it has to swing back and achieve some level of balance.

• 15:22Speaker 01

  I think so. And, and for every ridiculous industry-funded study, there are plenty of good studies clearly showing the truth.

• 15:29Rich Roll?

  But those, those studies aren't getting the kind of bandwidth that these other studies are getting. And is it, is it a financial thing? It's like, you know, the kale and broccoli growers can't get together and pool their money to compete with the dairy industry and the meat industry?

• 15:43Speaker 01

  You said it. I gotta tell you, it's true. They, they not only pour money into doing the research, which is costly, but then they've got their communications teams set to push it. And worst of all, the studies done in the US have the backing of the US government. Because by law, the government must promote American agricultural products. And they have specifically funded studies and they fund promotional programs, not only to make dairy products look healthy, but to actually promote more consumption of them, whether they're healthy or not. So that's all the bad news. The good news is, if you look at milk consumption, it's, it's been falling. Despite all the milk mustache ads and so forth, it's been falling. Cheese is going, unfortunately, going up. Meat has

• 16:25Speaker 01

  fallen, meat consumption, has fallen about 10% over the last decade. We're not where we need to be at all, but we are making progress.

• 16:35Rich Roll?

  So this, this idea, you kind of touched on it. It's called, what is it called? Government setbacks?

• 16:41Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, it's the checkoff program.

• 16:43Rich Roll?

  The checkoffs, right.

• 16:44Speaker 01

  There, there are the, for every unit of milk that you sell, or every cow you sell, you will donate money to a kitty that the government administers. And they pay for research and they pay for promotion and all this kind of stuff.

• 17:01Rich Roll?

  Right. So there's that, they kind of touch on it in, in the documentary, What The Health? And you spoke about it in your presentation at Moby's House the other week. When you see an ad for a Wendy's double cheeseburger, or the newest version of, you know, the Pizza Hut pizza with injected cheese into the crust and all these sorts of things, that actually there is a 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.

• 17:35Speaker 01

  By law, the US, 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 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, 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, 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.

• 18:17Speaker 01

  They worked with Pizza Hut to put an entire pound of cheese on one serving of pizza. They worked with Taco Bell, 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 government speak. Welcome to Taco Bell. Would you like to try our quesadilla? You know, they don't say you want a strawberry smoothie or something. You know, it's like something cheesy. And so these are all done on contract. We got them through the Freedom of Information.

• 18:50Rich Roll?

  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.

• 19:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was part of it. The government has supplied advisors to McDonald's. I'm talking about people going to 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 product? Well, it's wrong. It should stop. 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 their influence in the government. Well, here it's agricultural products doing the same kind of thing.

• 19:35Rich Roll?

  So what would have to happen systemically in order for the government to get behind sort of using that machinery to push fruits and vegetables instead of, you know, cheese and meat?

• 19:50Speaker 01

  You know.

• 19:50Rich Roll?

  Subsidies, eradicating subsidies or changing the structure of lobbying in Washington? Or, I mean, it would have to be from the top.

• 19:58Speaker 01

  It would literally require an act of Congress. And I have to say that the fruit and vegetable people don't really want to be part of that. They want to fight their own fight, but they are not interested in subsidies for the most part.

• 20:12Speaker 01

  And none of this would matter if these products didn't have a health impact, but they do.

• 20:20Speaker 01

  And they have a surprising impact. And this is something else that gets swept under the rug.

• 20:26Speaker 01

  Let me give you a short example, if you don't mind.

• 20:28Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 20:28Speaker 01

  There's a woman named Catherine Lawrence, who you may know. She's a, she lives in Texas, but her story is very striking. She was originally from Louisiana. She was in the air force. She was an aerospace engineer. She was one of the first people going into Iraq. In 2003 to lay down American military bases. Anyway, she's working in this war zone. She's in, she's in the military and you're not gaining weight, eating military food and working hard. Uh, her, her, her tour of duty comes to an end. She goes back home to Louisiana and all her friends say, Catherine, let's eat. You know, you're home. And what does she love the most? Cheese, mac and cheese, um, cheetos, all this stuff. She had a friend who knew she loved mac and cheese.

• 21:10Speaker 01

  So they gave her a case of 48 mac and cheese boxes, those things that college sophomores eat all the time. Right. She, for 48 days straight, Catherine ate mac and cheese out of a box. Anyway, she gained weight, but she also started to have these pains in her abdomen. And the, it, as the months went by, it got worse and worse and worse. And her doctor diagnosed endometriosis, which is a condition where cells that are supposed to be inside your uterus migrate out and they seed around your abdomen and they start swelling with your cycle. And the pain is terrible. The treatment can be his, and it also causes infertility and the treatment is a hysterectomy in a lot of cases. And, and she said to her doctor, you know, rather not have a hysterectomy.

• 21:55Speaker 01

  I'd like to have a family. And this was the treatment and she was not getting better. So they scheduled it. Anyway, a friend said to her, why don't you try a plant-based diet? Because there's a lot of evidence that that will affect your hormones, your hormone balance. And what you've got is a hormonal issue. And she was really half-hearted about it, but she thought, like, what's my choice? So she went 100% vegan, no dairy, like no cheese, but no animal products at all. And she started feeling better. She started losing weight. Week after week, she was losing weight. And as time went on, all of these abdominal symptoms started to just go away. So she went back to the doctor who did a laparoscopy. You, you look into the abdomen with a scope and he looks all around, looks all around.

• 22:38Speaker 01

  The doctor's looking all around and then sends her into the recovery room. And the doctor went out to the waiting room to talk to her husband and he said,

• 22:47Speaker 01

  Her endometriosis is practically gone. And the husband said, you know, she changed her diet. She went 100% vegan and she's been feeling better week by week and it's, and her pain's been going away. And the doctor said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I don't want to hear about that. Foods do not cause endometriosis and there is no way that a diet change is going to heal it. There's only one explanation for this. This is a miracle. Cause that's, cause that's more plausible. That's more plausible. This is barely written in her medical record. But anyway, she never had the operation. She had, she didn't have the hysterectomy. Her endometriosis is gone. She's got two kids and in fact, she's, her third child is on the way.

• 23:28Speaker 01

  And she has now become a food for life instructor, working with PCRM to tell other women and men about how foods affect your body and to get, to get healthy. So anyway, my hat is off to Catherine Lawrence for sharing her story. But anyway, the reason I'm telling you this is you're going to promote, not you, 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, 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. A cow pregnancy is about nine months, similar to human pregnancy, and they're impregnated every year. So what that means, three quarters of their lives, they are pregnant, they are being

• 24:13Speaker 01

  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 eats 35 pounds of it every year. So researchers in Rochester, New York, looked, 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 content of that? Well, that's the theory. The theory is this, 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 at dinner on your pizza. And could those little traces of estrogens matter?

• 24:56Speaker 01

  Now, we, we had all thought, couldn't be. But I gotta tell you, Rich, here's the worst. Here in California, researchers looked at women who had been diagnosed with breast cancer.

• 25:09Speaker 01

  And if you've had breast cancer in the past and you were treated for it, that your concern is, is my cancer going to come back?

• 25:16Rich Roll?

  Of course.

• 25:17Speaker 01

  Well, the women who consumed 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, 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?

• 26:02Speaker 01

  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.

• 26:29Rich Roll?

  It's so fascinating how we've normalized this food product. Because, you know, as you and I both know, we're the only species that drinks the milk of another species, which is bizarre in its own right. But through history, we've just sort of decided that this is not only okay, but healthy. And sort of, you know, I apologize for continuing to look back at this article, but it's just fascinating to me. There's a paragraph in here that says, "Young people, especially young women, were now often drinking too little milk as a result of that concern, which could damage the development of their bones and lead to conditions in later life, including osteoporosis or brittle bones. Consuming too little milk can deprive young people of calcium."

• 27:12Rich Roll?

  And then it goes on to talk about how, you know, the negative impact of pregnant women not drinking enough milk.

• 27:21Speaker 01

  You know, first of all, let's let's jump into calcium for a second. Cows do not make calcium. Cows eat calcium, just like people eat calcium. A cow's body does not make calcium. Calcium is in green leaves. There's a lot of it in leaves. It's also in beans and some other foods, but there's a lot of in green leafy things. So if you eat broccoli, or kale, or collards, or Brussels sprouts, you're gonna get calcium, and it's highly absorbable. The cow doesn't eat broccoli usually, but they eat grass. So they get calcium, and it goes into their milk. Now, the absorption from green vegetables, if you eat green vegetables, you're absorbing 50% or more of that calcium. If you drink milk, you're absorbing about 30% of it. So the dairy industry wants to push it and promote it. Yay, we got calcium.

• 28:06Speaker 01

  It's just a byproduct. It's a byproduct of the cow eating the green leafy vegetables.

• 28:10Rich Roll?

  And how does osteoporosis correlate with dairy consumption?

• 28:14Speaker 01

  Well, it doesn't really. Now, don't get me wrong. I mean, you do need calcium in your diet, and people should have it. And greens, beans, greens and beans are good sources of calcium, and that's great. But researchers at Penn State looked at kids. This whole idea is kids need dairy for strong bones. What they found is that if kids exercise, that does affect their bone integrity, but drinking milk does not. The kids who avoid milk have every bit as good bone structure as those who avoid it. And at the other end of life, again, you should have calcium. It's important, and green leafy vegetables are good for a whole lot more than just calcium. I mean, they've got tremendous benefits. But no, that is a really poor strategy against osteoporosis.

• 28:59Speaker 01

  Osteoporosis is endemic in milk-consuming countries.

• 29:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think you talked about a study in your presentation the other night where the people that consumed the most amount of dairy had the highest incidence of osteoporosis or something like that?

• 29:15Speaker 01

  It depends on the study that you look at. The data are kind of all over the map. But my big concern is this. There is calcium in healthy foods, and there's calcium in unhealthy foods. Cheese is an unhealthy food, same with milk. So if I've decided, I mean, there's calcium in your driveway, in the asphalt. I mean, there's lots of places to get calcium. That's not like where you want to get it. So if I decide, okay, duh, I'll get my calcium from milk. Milk consumption is tightly linked to other hormone-related issues like prostate cancer. A study at Harvard University. Thirty four thousand doctors. The milk drinking doctors had a much higher risk, more than thirty percent higher risk of getting prostate cancer compared to the other men. And prostate cancer is already really common.

• 29:59Speaker 01

  Anything that pushes it by thirty percent is like terrible. So they did another study with almost fifty thousand participants and showed that the risk of prostate cancer among those consuming the most dairy was about sixty percent higher than the other men.

• 30:15Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 30:16Speaker 01

  So these hormonally, and it's not just the hormones in cheese. Dairy products also have hormonal effects in your body. They alter your hormonal balance. Because what's the dairy trying to do? It's trying to make a calf grow fast. Well, it can, it also makes your prostate cancer cells grow fast. You don't want that.

• 30:35Rich Roll?

  That's the IGF-1, right?

• 30:37Speaker 01

  IGF-1, yeah. Right. Exactly. A calf has a little bit of IGF-1, insulin like growth factor number one. It's in the calf's body. The calf suckles from mom. And nature's system is that the lactose sugar and the proteins in the milk go into the calf's body, stimulate the production of more IGF-1. And the calf grows. And the calf, now, nature, if I can kind of put it this way for a minute, nature is sensible. Nature says, you don't want this to go on too far. How about we get weaned when you don't need to nurse anymore? When you can eat, stop nursing. So that your IGF-1 level will start to fall. And that's what happens in calves. Their IGF-1 falls.

• 31:18Speaker 01

  So they're not going to get cancer, which comes from the unbridled growth, inappropriate growth of cells in their body. Human beings decided, I'll drink the milk of another animal all my life and I'll never get weaned and there won't be any biological consequence of it. Well, prostate cancer is like not something you want to have. So, I mean, there are many, many issues related to dairy, but we've talked about the prostate cancer and the hormonal issues, which are really underappreciated.

• 31:45Rich Roll?

  So if I'm an athlete and I'm looking to, I'm looking only at like, I want to make gains, right? I would imagine that IGF-1 looks like an appealing thing to be taking into your body because it's going to stimulate growth, right? But it's also like lighter fluid on cancer cells. So you take one with the other.

• 32:06Speaker 01

  When bodybuilders inject anabolic hormones, I mean, they all know that these are risky for them. There's a natural way to grow and a natural way to have your body adapt to exercise. And then there are unnatural ways that people.

• 32:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And it's interesting when you compare, you know, human milk to cow milk and do like a line by line comparison of how it breaks down. It's much lower in all of these hormones and everything else. And you, you know, obviously, nature has designed this to be the best possible sort of nutrient for a baby human to sort of grow and be healthy.

• 32:43Speaker 01

  Right. Well, you're not going to be, you're not going to grow to be as big as a couch.

• 32:46Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 32:46Speaker 01

  But the calf, on the other hand, has a much more ambitious growth, growth curve. And so they end up huge, big fat, you know, in a very short period of time. So it's a hormonally active thing. The other thing about it is just pure calories. How many Americans know that the, just cheese alone is 65,000 calories in the average person's diet?

• 33:09Rich Roll?

  Over the course of how long?

• 33:11Speaker 01

  One year.

• 33:12Rich Roll?

  One year.

• 33:12Speaker 01

  The average person consumed 65,000 calories worth of cheese in 2016, 2017. They're going to do it again in 2018. Yeah, it's, it's an amazing thing. And so people are thinking, how do I lose weight? Just, I mean, leave off the cheese. You're going to go a long way toward it.

• 33:27Rich Roll?

  I know, but Neil, it's so good. I'm addicted to it. I would go vegan, but there's no way I could give up cheese. I just, I gotta have my cheese.

• 33:34Speaker 01

  People, you know what? When I wrote The Cheese Trap, it's funny. I, I, I thought I would be saying some interesting things and hopefully useful things. I've done quite a lot of interviews and it's amazing. Every interviewer, interviewer I talked to says, I'm hooked on it. I can't break away from it. But here's, here's what I think is going on. It's partly because it's salty, partly because it's fatty. People like salty, fatty things. And by the way, there's more. Ounce per ounce, there's more salt in cheese than in potato chips. It's like, two ounces of potato chips have 330 milligrams of sodium, two ounces of cheddar has 350, two ounces of Velveeta has like 800.

• 34:12Speaker 01

  But there are opiates in cheese. The caseomorphins are casein-derived opiate, morphine-like compounds. Casein-derived, morphine-like compounds are caseomorphins. They are in the milk protein and they are released into the calf's body. They go to the calf's brain and they have a calming effect. They attach to the very same receptors that morphine would attach to, or heroin, or Demerol, in my brain or your brain. And here's what happens.

• 34:40Speaker 01

  Eight-year-old kid's at a party with his parents and there's a cheese tray that stinks like old socks. And just, you know, he takes a little taste. It does smell. The caseomorphins work on the brain. And suddenly, as the opiates kick in and release dopamine, anything that is associated with it suddenly starts to be nice. Oh, I love that aroma. It's like a first cigarette. A first cigarette does not taste good, but the nicotine goes to the brain, that stimulates dopamine too, and suddenly, oh, I love that. Or a beer. Fifteen, sixteen-year-old kid finds a beer, it tastes creepy. Once the alcohol works on the brain, suddenly, it's a hot summer day, there's nothing he craves more than that taste. So that's what's going on. It is a drug effect that we now call, oh, it's just a food, it's just natural.

• 35:24Speaker 01

  There's nothing natural about this, about dairy products.

• 35:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And it really is the big barrier for people to get over. You know, I think there's a lot of people who would be interested in adopting this nutritional lifestyle, but they just can't get over that hurdle of cheese. And, you know, I know for myself, you know, anecdotally, giving up meat wasn't that difficult. You know, I realized like, I never really liked it that much anyway. I just ate it because that's what you do and it was in front of me. But when it came to giving up cheese, that was sort of a painful couple of weeks, you know? And as somebody who's endured many detoxes over the course of my life, I knew, like, oh, this is just like when I was in rehab for alcohol. Like, I have to weather this.

• 36:12Rich Roll?

  But if I stick with it, I can get to the other side and I can free myself from the grips of this thing that is like occupying. Geography in my brain in an unhealthy way. So, you know, people like, you know, people always say to me, well, what about balance? Like, what if you just eat everything? You know, just it's okay. Just be balanced in what you're doing. But you remain a prisoner of these caseomorphins that are constantly calling to you.

• 36:36Speaker 01

  I'm happy to say there is cheese methadone now. You know, tree line cheese, which is made in by Michael Schwartz's company, which is wonderful. You know, it's made from cashews. I mean, you don't have to impregnate a cashew. And so there are no hormones in it, but it tastes just delicious. Or kite hill.

• 36:57Rich Roll?

  Kite hill, Miyoko's.

• 36:59Speaker 01

  Miyoko's. You know, kite hill, they use exactly a standard cheese production process, but they start with almond milk, not cow's milk, or Miyoko's. It's a cashew based. It's a work of art, wrapped in a fig leaf, or in this beautiful black Mediterranean ash. I mean, Miyoko's cheese is a work of art. Or tree line. We had an event on Long Island, and Michael Schwartz was debuting tree line cheese. Alec Baldwin was there as our host and everything. And I was talking to everybody, didn't have a chance to taste the cheese. So as I was leaving to drive to the airport, Michael gave me a little chunk of this stuff. I shouldn't call it stuff because it was very pretty. But this was his tree line cheese.

• 37:43Speaker 01

  And I took a nibble on the way to the airport. And I know it's totally botanical. There's no actual dairy in there. There's no caseomorphins. But it was out of this world. I ate the whole thing that he gave me. So, so the point I'm making is you can have cheese, just have the non-animal ones. And then even, even then, it's a treat. And for many people, it's a transition towards simpler, simpler, simpler, simpler foods. But if you're a cheese addict, that's a good way to help you to realize, okay, you know, There is a path for me that won't hurt me.

• 38:12Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's never been a better time to make this transition because finally the sort of food science has caught up and these alternatives actually are incredibly delicious and much healthier than it used to be. I mean, it used to be a lot harder. And you know, after we do this podcast, you're going to go in and you're going to taste Julie's cheeses. I mean, she spent the best, the better part of the last year and a half, two years, like turning our kitchen into a laboratory to try to crack the code on, on plant-based cheeses. And she's really come up with some amazing stuff. I'm so excited about it because I really think that if you, in like with your book and her book that's coming out soon, to be able to say, look, you can have this. You don't have to be deprived. You can actually

• 38:56Rich Roll?

  enjoy what you think you're going to be missing and do it in a healthy way. There's no deprivation whatsoever.

• 39:03Speaker 01

  Of course you can. You, you absolutely can. And where I think this matters, this is so important for parents of young kids. If you have a kid who's got asthma, or respiratory problems, or frequent allergies, or migraine, or juvenile onset rheumatoid arthritis, run. Do not walk. Run to a plant-based diet. Get the dairy out. It's not going to cure every kid, but it's going to cure a lot of them. And in The Cheese Trap, I discussed the story of Chad Sarno. And Chad was a really athletic young boy growing up in New Hampshire, except he couldn't get through a ballgame because exercise induced asthma would, would like lay him flat. And he was allergic to pets and everything, you know, dogs, cats, everything.

• 39:47Speaker 01

  So eventually when he was 18, he went vegan. And within about three months, his asthma's completely gone, his allergies are gone. So now he works with Ruby, the online cooking school, for their whole plant-based division. And if you think back, go back in time and help him as a four-year-old or five-year-old to go vegan, or, or do it at conception. There's no need for these sensitizing, this is the protein in milk. And get that out of your, out of your life. How many people pay?

• 40:19Speaker 01

  Such a price for these food addictions.

• 40:22Rich Roll?

  The number of people that have contacted me, and I can't imagine what you're on the receiving end of, of stories of what happens when they give up dairy is just miraculous. People that are walking around with all kinds of chronic ailments their whole life, and in a matter of weeks of getting off dairy, these things just vanish.

• 40:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I gotta say also, for all those people who are ethical vegetarians, because they don't want to kill the cows, I think it's, this is a gift for them too. Because when they realize what happens in the dairy industry and how much good they can do by switching to the plant-based cheeses, it's a wonderful thing to learn about. And if you don't mind, can I just say a word about that?

• 41:01Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, I wanted to get into that anyway, because I think there's a lot of people who are ethical vegetarians, who are, you know, who are uneducated on what actually goes on in the dairy industry. Because if you're in it for the ethical reasons,

• 41:18Rich Roll?

  you need to understand the impact on, you know, these animals as a result of this industry, because it's not any better, and in many cases, much worse than just eating a meat-based diet.

• 41:31Speaker 01

  It's a surprise, because dairy products and cheese, they look so innocent, I have to say.

• 41:38Rich Roll?

  Well, you're like, well, the animal's not getting killed.

• 41:40Speaker 01

  You think the animal isn't getting killed? You think they don't kill them to make milk or whatever. Well, here's what happens. Cows don't produce any milk until they've been impregnated and give birth. And the farmer is not going to wait for nature to take its course. You know, hi, have some chocolate and roses, and maybe make love, and maybe somewhere out in the field you'll get pregnant, and, you know, uh-uh. The farmers impregnate the cows every single year. And this is not done with grace. What they do is they take a glove that's really long, it goes from their fingers all the way up to their shoulder, and they stick their left hand right up the cow's rectum, so that they can feel the uterus, through the rectal wall, they can feel the uterus, and they grab a hold of it, and they stabilize it. Then with their right hand, they take what looks like a knitting needle,

• 42:25Speaker 01

  and they push it through the cow's cervix, and they inject semen into it. And the cow is not going to object, because she is...

• 42:34Speaker 01

  Chained by the neck. And then they write on her flank, the date. And nine months later, she gives birth. It's the gestation is about the same in a cow and a human. And when she gives birth, she looks down at her baby, who is in the hay. And the baby looks up at her and is blinking his eyes. And this mother-infant bond is extremely strong. And the farmer thinks, isn't that beautiful? Except the farmer knows that, wait, wait, wait. If this calf stays with the mother and takes the milk, then what am I gonna have? So the farmer has an implement that solves this problem. It's called a wheelbarrow. And the farmer picks up the calf,

• 43:17Speaker 01

  puts the calf in the wheelbarrow and takes the calf away from the mother. And this bond is the strongest bond we have in nature. And so the mother fights back and says that effectively, excuse me, that is- That's my baby. That's my, why are you taking away my baby? And she will fight. You know, she will push. I mean, they don't really fight. They push and follow. And then the farmer slams the gate in her face. This is every day in every dairy. And the calf goes away. And she will stand there. And she will cry out all night long. And if you live near a dairy farm, you hear this crying. And the baby will cry for her mother. And she will be impregnated again three months later. And every year she will be impregnated. And this is where the hormones then get into the milk.

• 44:02Speaker 01

  But from her standpoint, it's not so pleasant to get artificially inseminated, then have your baby taken away. And this goes on about four times. When she's about four years of age, the farmer does the math and says, I'm not getting enough milk out of you for the amount of feed that I'm feeding you. So how about if I hang you up by the leg and I slit your throat? And we can sell your meat for low-grade hamburger. And I'm gonna replace you in the milk line with your daughter, who is I've been keeping here in a hutch. And the offspring go in and they are artificially inseminated and separated from their offspring and then their offspring. And that's what the whole dairy industry is. It's a meat industry. That just forces the animals to get impregnated and separated and impregnated and separated before they are finally killed at about four years of age.

• 44:45Speaker 01

  And I have to say, as you know, I'm a musician and I did a video for our song called Louder Than Words. And there are some people in Germany who did this beautiful video of a cow. Cows actually shed tears. And when, in fact, if you look at Carbon Works on YouTube and you look at Louder Than Words, look at this, you will see these, there are cows, here's a cow being taken away and she's crying, they actually have tears. But then, you release them into a field, not only do they have tears, they also jump around. There's nothing kind of funnier than a cow who is actually freed from this.

• 45:27Speaker 01

  They jump around and they push each other and they play like they're a little puppy. They may weigh like two tons, but they jump around and scamper and they have such a wonderful existence. So, anyway, so here's the message. People who have a heart for animals are gonna wanna not just get away from the meat, but they're gonna wanna get away from dairy too.

• 45:47Rich Roll?

  It's interesting how specism works with the human brain and how we anthropomorphize certain animals and then refuse to anthropomorphize other ones. We've made a decision that animals that are for food fall into a certain category and then we look upon other animals in a different way.

• 46:05Speaker 01

  But that's totally cultural. You know, in Korea, I know, I don't need to tell you this, in Korea, hey, I can have a dog, you know, I can have a dog for dinner. In the United States, that is shocking. Where I grew up in North Dakota, beef were what's for dinner. In India, I mean, you can't even discuss that. So it's totally cultural, but what they all have in common is this willingness to make artificial rules for the sake of short-term appetite. And that's what we need to step away from.

• 46:33Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 46:41Rich Roll?

  Let's talk a little bit about antibiotic resistance and also the, beyond the natural hormones, the additional hormones that find their way into the dairy products that we consume.

• 46:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, um, the, the, uh, in theory, well, cows are bred to be milk making machines, effectively. They still have a brain, they still hurt, and they still don't want to be part of this, but they produce a lot of milk. And on many dairies, not all of them, but many dairies, bovine growth hormone is also used to push them to produce even more. They get mastitis. And then because mastitis is not good, I mean, this is an infection of the udder, antibiotics are used. And the rules are that you can't milk the cow when they're used, when they're on antibiotics. Whether you believe that or not is a whole

• 47:33Speaker 01

  other issue. And the, uh, farmers who are not using bovine growth hormone have gone to the FDA and said, we want to put on the, the label of our carton that this is hormone free milk. And the FDA said, no. They said, you cannot call your milk hormone free, even if you're not using, even if you're not using bovine growth hormone, because the FDA said quite correctly, whether you inject that hormone or not, out of that cow's udder, hormones are coming out in the milk.

• 48:06Rich Roll?

  So there's no way for the consumer to know whether there's additional bovine growth hormone injected into the dairy products that they're consuming?

• 48:13Speaker 01

  Correct. Correct. That's partly because the FDA wouldn't let them. But it's also because frankly, the dairy industry is not interested in you knowing that brands do or do not have added stuff in them.

• 48:24Rich Roll?

  And what is the, what is the health consequences of that additional bovine growth hormone? Does it just amplify?

• 48:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:30Rich Roll?

  All the other conditions we've talked about?

• 48:31Speaker 01

  I think it does. To tell you the truth, I think whether it's organic or not, whether it's hormone treated or not, I think it makes relatively little difference. I think if you're consuming those products, you're at tremendous risk of.

• 48:44Speaker 01

  Weight gain, certain cancers, cardiovascular disease, diabetes. And when I say great risk, I mean tripling or quadrupling what your risk would be otherwise.

• 48:52Rich Roll?

  So antibiotic resistance is more of an issue in meat products than dairy?

• 48:57Speaker 01

  You know where it's a big thing? This is an amazing thing. Americans eat a million chickens every hour. And the chickens are in the case. You bring them home and you're not looking back in time to how the chicken got there. The chickens are hung up by their legs and they're eviscerated by a machine. The guts come out and the poop splatters around. And it's not a clean process. And then they go through this water bath to cool them down. But the feces gets in the water and it soaks into the muscle. Chicken muscle is like a sponge. It just soaks up that fecal material along with bacteria.

• 49:40Speaker 01

  And so you get home and you put it on your cutting board and you cut it up and you might have some on your fingers. And then your child comes in and you pat your child on the head and whatever. These bacteria are spreading all around. It turns out that when you do a genetic test on women who have had urinary tract infections and you look at the bacteria that have infected them, in the vast majority of cases, it is an exact match for the bacteria that came from chicken manure, chicken feces. And what happens is it just traces of it are on her fingers. It's on the faucet, it's on the knife. You know, you wash things, but you didn't get every last bit. And you swallow it and it grows in your intestinal tract and it's coming out, it's in your body.

• 50:24Speaker 01

  And it's a pretty short trip over to the urethra and she gets an infection. So the point I'm making, all right, so then it gets worse. Because the animals were treated with antibiotics, quite often these bugs, they can conquer the antibiotic and you're going to more and more and more challenging antibiotics to try to knock it out.

• 50:44Rich Roll?

  It's brutal.

• 50:45Speaker 01

  Isn't it? It's surprising.

• 50:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 50:47Speaker 01

  Now, I do not mean to say that a vegan diet makes all diseases go away, but it makes diseases that are really common go away. And there will still be issues. You know, people like you are still gonna have a bruise from the kind of training that you do. And you're gonna strain your muscles and stuff like all, you know, you're gonna have the issues.

• 51:05Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you don't become superhuman. Like, I certainly don't get sick like I used to, but I'll get sick once in a while.

• 51:10Speaker 01

  It can happen.

• 51:11Rich Roll?

  It's like, um, you know, and I'm aging and all the things that happen to us.

• 51:14Speaker 01

  You're not aging. I've seen you and you're not aging. However, however, you're, you know, we're not gonna live forever, but you, these unnecessary things that come from food do not have to happen if you leave the unhealthy foods aside.

• 51:26Rich Roll?

  Right. The interesting thing that, that I've started to see, uh, you know, in my experience is that people are starting to, uh, look at me as an outlier. Cause I, I've been vegan for 10 years now. And at first, there's a lot of interest and a lot of support. And then there's a lot of like, oh, well, he can do it, but you know, he's unique or he's different, or he has some kind of enzyme that the average person doesn't. And so all of the work that I'm doing to try to establish that you can be fit and healthy and, and, you know, kill it as an athlete and all of that starts to rubber band backwards, like, almost like it's setting me apart rather than, than demonstrating that I can be an example for the many.

• 52:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:07Rich Roll?

  And it goes back to this war of information that we're in right now. And, and when I see these, you know, these, these news articles, it's very concerning to me because I'm thinking, we need better PR or we need a better, more organized, uh, system of promulgating this helpful information. There was, I think you were on this email train that went around a couple of weeks ago that Garth Davis started. There was, I think you were on it. It was, there was a bunch of people, a bunch of leaders and doctors in the plant-based movement that were part of this sort of discussion because Garth was sort of expressing his frustration at these articles continuing. To come out and confusing people and he's like, what are we going to do to reverse

• 52:50Rich Roll?

  this trend and start to sort of get in front of all of this instead of reacting to it?

• 52:56Speaker 01

  Yes, but but this is not the time for discouragement because things are moving in the right direction. It is true that as long as there is an industry profiting, they will fight and they will not fight fair. However, there's a lot of things happening. This afternoon, after we're done, I'm going to the LA Unified School District where they are considering having vegan options available in the LA schools every day for every student.

• 53:17Rich Roll?

  That's amazing.

• 53:18Speaker 01

  That's it. I mean, we didn't have that yesterday.

• 53:20Rich Roll?

  No.

• 53:20Speaker 01

  And I don't know. I don't know if we're going to win or not.

• 53:22Rich Roll?

  But just the fact that it's getting discussed and you have the opportunity to go there and have a debate about it.

• 53:29Speaker 01

  Well, we will win this, whether it's today or next year, or we're going to win it sooner or later. The American College of Cardiology passed a new policy that instead of the heart patient waking up to bacon and eggs in the morning, that the first, the foods that should be available and promoted are plant-based foods, meaning vegan foods to heart patients. That doesn't mean every hospital is going to follow suit, but they but they can. The American Medical Association is going to be considering a similar resolution shortly. So things, people that we thought.

• 54:04Rich Roll?

  And we've seen the evolution of the food pyramid to the plate and how it's improving.

• 54:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, no, I have to say.

• 54:09Rich Roll?

  In no small part due to the work that you guys have done at.

• 54:12Speaker 01

  Well, if you have to say, if you just let the devil do his work, so to speak, you don't get anywhere. But if you work really hard, you can change things. I mean, we, we have an active lawsuit now against the California Board of Education because in 2015, the World Health Organization said bacon, hot dogs, sausage, bologna, all these foods clearly caused colorectal cancer, but so they serve them to children in school. So we have a lawsuit to stop it. If you don't fight.

• 54:39Rich Roll?

  How's that going right now? Is that out here in California?

• 54:43Speaker 01

  It's here in California, yes.

• 54:45Rich Roll?

  How far deep into it are you?

• 54:46Speaker 01

  We only just filed suit about two weeks ago.

• 54:48Rich Roll?

  Okay, so we're.

• 54:49Speaker 01

  It's a, it's a whole new thing. But people can join us as plaintiffs if they want to. I, to tell you the truth, I think we're going to win. They don't want to give up these things because kids love bacon. It's familiar food. We don't get, you know, the kids are all happy to eat it.

• 55:08Speaker 01

  But I mean, sooner or later, people are going to realize you don't give cancer to children. Whatever you eat in your life as an adult, you don't start kids off on this path. Fifty thousand Americans die of this every single year. You know, let's stop it. So ultimately, we're going to win, but we do have to fight.

• 55:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And there's still, you know, there's a long road to go in terms of regulatory policy and labeling laws. Like, it's amazing that, you know, we can't, we can't get sort of more information about how these companies are operating and translate that into, you know, sort of responsible labeling on the food products so that consumers understand what they're purchasing.

• 55:44Speaker 01

  Right. It's true. But the beauty of it is that we don't make our decisions all as a block and people are choosing on their own. People who listen to your podcasts are making choices. People who are all over the social media make choices and they really, they'll view this idea that you can have a big greasy block of cheese that won't affect your health. I think people view that with a large grain of salt. So there are people who will be confused by that and the industry is trying to confuse them, but I think the momentum is clearly in our favor. We just have to push as hard as we can.

• 56:18Rich Roll?

  Well, you're doing, you're doing God's work at PCRM and I applaud you for, you've been in the fight for a long time and there's a lot of momentum and a lot of interest and it's pretty exciting what's going on right now. And keep up the good fight because you're making a huge difference in, in the world and in how people are viewing these, these products and it's having a really positive impact on the world. And so I applaud you and I'm at your service.

• 56:43Speaker 01

  Well, thank you. Right back, right, right back at you. You're reaching a whole lot of people and I have to say, this is, this is a team effort pushing for a healthy cause that many of us share, whether the beneficiaries are the animals on farms, the, the earth that is more fragile than we thought, or the health of ourselves and our families. It all goes in the same direction.

• 57:06Rich Roll?

  So pick up The Cheese Trap. It's a beautiful, wonderful, amazing book that will basically illuminate you in many ways.

• 57:14Speaker 01

  Oh, before we go, before we go, I have to say one quick thing, if you don't mind. Drina Burton did the recipes for The Cheese Trap. And for all the people who think, I'm going to be deprived, whatever. Try Drina's fettuccine alfredo, or try her cheesecake, which has no actual dairy in it, and it will knock your socks off. So, um, yes, there is, there's, so, yes, we're going to get away from all the bad stuff. But there is an adventure waiting for you and fun things. You know, when you go, when you go to a plant-based diet, it's not like torture. It's exciting because there's cool books, cool DVDs, cool programs, cool recipes, neat products, all kinds of stuff. So that's the other part of The Cheese Trap.

• 57:53Rich Roll?

  And if somebody's listening to this and they're like, okay, I'm ready, like, I'm ready to finally ditch the dairy, ditch the cheese. Like, what is the first step? Or how do you help somebody kind of get over that hump and, and weather that kind of addictive detox that's going to take place?

• 58:10Speaker 01

  Uh, great question. Uh, focus on the short term. Don't focus on, don't feel like you got to decide today forever. You know, you don't burden yourself with that. Step one, just get informed. So in The Cheese Trap, I talk about like what the hormones are in dairy or the addictive qualities. Once you know, then take about seven days and just try out all the things you'll have instead. So instead of feta on my salad, I'll have a little avocado or, or whatever. Um, it's, I'll have the cheeseless pizza, which I saw in the freezer case. Let me taste it. I never made scrambled tofu for breakfast. Let me try that. So, so you're just trying out different things. That takes a week. Then, the final thing is, once you've found the foods you like, now do about 21 days

• 58:51Speaker 01

  dairy-free, or ideally, just totally vegan, plant-based, healthy foods. At the end of 21 days, two things happen. Physically, you are healthier. You're losing weight, your blood sugar's coming down, your energy's better, your digestion finally sorted itself out. But you're, the second thing is, is that your tastes are different. You start to like these foods and you, you're looking back at cheese like it's, you've kind of broken that bad love affair. Um, it's like when a smoker quits. After you got a month under your belt, you couldn't like, you couldn't pay them to go back. Because they broke free and they can feel that power. That's what happens when you get away from unhealthy foods.

• 59:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's great advice. The only thing I think I would add to that is I think it's really helpful to just root yourself in the day that you're having because if you conceptualize, oh, my God, I'm never going to have cheese again. Like, what am I going to do? I have a wedding. I'm going to go here. I'm going to try out like you can talk yourself out of it instantaneously. So you can say to yourself, you know what? Tomorrow I'm going to have a Pizza Hut with cheese in the crust and like then go to Wendy's right after. But today I'm going to eat this and I'll worry about tomorrow, tomorrow. And just focus on what's your next meal? What's the next best choice that you can make? And that tends to dissipate all the charge, like all the power out of that. So you don't have to worry about tomorrow. I mean, you should plan, of course, responsibly, kind of, you know, plan ahead.

• 1:00:14Rich Roll?

  But at the same time, if you, the more you can just kind of root yourself in what you're doing in the moment, that tends to be helpful for me.

• 1:00:20Speaker 01

  It's, it turns out to be remarkably easy. It's much easier than quitting smoking and all the, I mean, the benefits are just huge. You're going to be so glad you did.

• 1:00:29Rich Roll?

  All right.

• 1:00:29Speaker 01

  So, thank you.

• 1:00:31Rich Roll?

  Thank you. You're going to go in and taste some of Julie's cheeses right now.

• 1:00:35Speaker 01

  I can't wait.

• 1:00:36Rich Roll?

  Facebook Live or like make some videos and stuff like that. So, super fun. Again, The Cheese Trap, How Breaking a Surprising Addiction Will Help You Lose Weight, Gain Energy, and Get Healthy. Pick up this book. You will not regret it. And also, I thought it'd be great if, the last time we did the podcast, we ended it with one of your songs. So why don't we do that again? You want to do that?

• 1:00:56Speaker 01

  I would, I would love to. Well, thank you for doing that. And by the way,

• 1:01:00Rich Roll?

  Louder Than Tears? Should we do that?

• 1:01:02Speaker 01

  Louder Than Words.

• 1:01:03Rich Roll?

  Louder Than Words.

• 1:01:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, do that. And I got to, just this morning, I got a call. It's, it's making all, it's all in the radio. It's in a lot of radio stations that are picking it up. I never wanted to be a top 40 musician, but apparently people like this song. Go on YouTube. Look, if you go on YouTube, look for Carbon Works there and you'll see.

• 1:01:21Rich Roll?

  Carbon Works is the name of your band.

• 1:01:22Speaker 01

  Carbon Works is the name of the band. We are all carbon at the base of it. These are our works. So, what can I say?

• 1:01:29Rich Roll?

  I'll put a link in the show notes to that video.

• 1:01:31Speaker 01

  And go to our website. If you go to our website, which is carbonworksmusic.com, you can

• 1:01:38Speaker 01

  Sign up for the email list and we'll give you some songs and stuff like that. There's a lot of cool stuff because I love my musicians. They are the coolest people in the world and you'll read all about them there. But Louder Than Words, look at that and if the words don't melt your heart, the image as well.

• 1:01:51Rich Roll?

  Beautiful, man. All right, and while you're at it, go to PCRM.org, follow Neil on all the social networks. You're at Neil, is it Dr. Neil Bernard on Twitter?

• 1:02:01Speaker 01

  You would think I would know.

• 1:02:02Rich Roll?

  Neil Bernard, M.D. I don't know what it is. Just type in Neil Bernard, you'll find him on Twitter, easy enough.

• 1:02:07Speaker 01

  All right, thanks, man. Thank you. Peace.

• 1:02:16Rich Roll?

  All right, we did it. What'd you guys think? Back in Neil Bernard, always on point. Hope you guys enjoyed that. Once again, I'm in a hotel room here in Miami and there's all kinds of noise right outside my door. It's been so quiet all week and now they decide they're going to vacuum and have arguments right outside my door. So, my apologies if you can hear that. It's certainly distracting me. I hope it's not distracting you guys too much. Okay, are you guys wondering about that song that we have featured throughout this episode? The interstitial music that's sort of, we've been using to cue or transition in between the intro and the interview. Well, that song is called Louder Than Words and it's by Neil and his band, Carbon Works. And amazingly, Neil, he emailed me the other day and he's like, "Hey, check this out.

• 1:03:00Rich Roll?

  This is so cool." Louder Than Words is now charting on the US radio top 40 list at number 17. And he showed me the list. It's insane. It's sandwiched in between the band Train and Taylor Swift. Like, insane, right? How does that even happen? I don't get it. In any event, that's the song. And at the very end of this episode, we're going to take you out with the entire song, the full version. For all the reasons that we talked about today on Why You Gotta Ditch Dairy. Please pick up Neil's new book, The Cheese Trap, to ease the transition, like the how to Neil's why. Pick up Julie's brand new book, This Cheese is Nuts. It's got all the vegan

• 1:03:42Rich Roll?

  cheese recipes you need, and you're going to wonder why you ever ate dairy to begin with. Also, I wanted to let you know that Neil's participation in the petitioning of the LAUSD, the Los Angeles Unified School District, the school board around here, as you remember from the interview, he said he had to go down to this protest, to this meeting, to petition them to implement vegan options on the school lunch menu, the school lunch program. And he wanted me to let you guys know that that was quite the successful attempt. The board voted unanimously to pilot a vegan meal program, which is pretty awesome, right? I mean, it's pretty hard to move the needle with LAUSD. It's a massive organization.

• 1:04:25Rich Roll?

  There's so much bureaucracy. So that is a huge win. And PCRM's nutrition team is going to work with them, moving forward to help ensure the pilot's success, the pilot program's success. I shared some media related to this in the show notes, so be sure to check that out, and many other resources related to today's episode in the show notes. And you can find that at ritual.com on the page dedicated to this episode. I wanted to tell you guys a little bit about our new meal planner, the Plant Power Meal Planner. I know you guys have heard me mention it before, but I'm not sure I've really sort of explained to you in full, or let you guys know just how excited I am about this. I mean, every

• 1:05:07Rich Roll?

  single day, I get emails from people and messages on Facebook with questions about nutrition, like, I get it, I want to go plant-based, but I don't quite know how to do it. And I'll recommend them my cookbook, or what have you, and they're still sort of confused, or where do I buy this stuff, or I don't really know how to begin. And so, the Meal Planner is this brilliantly designed, incredibly intuitive, online program that solves all of those problems for everybody. And it does it incredibly cheaply, affordably. It's only $1.90 a week. And with that, you get access to literally thousands of plant-based recipes,

• 1:05:47Rich Roll?

  unlimited meal plans, grocery lists, and everything is totally personalized and customized to you. So when you sign up, you have to answer all these questions about how you live your life, and what your budget is, and your time constraints, and food you like, and food you don't like, and food you're allergic to, et cetera. So through like, machine learning, basically like AI, this program starts to understand how you live and can anticipate your needs, what you like, what you don't like, and that's how the customization takes place. It's really quite amazing what we have been able to come up with for you in partnership with Micah Rysk and Alexis Fox, the two women that we collaborated with to prepare this program for you.

• 1:06:31Rich Roll?

  It's really amazing, and we even have grocery delivery in 22 metropolitan areas. And the program continues to get better. They update it, we update it, and so it just is going to grow alongside with you. It's just amazing. I'm so proud of it because it's this incredibly robust service that we can just put out and offer everybody at a very affordable price point that solves a lot of your questions and your dilemmas and your problems, and makes accessing the plant-based lifestyle just really facile and easy for you. So in any event, we're getting amazing feedback. Everybody who has signed up for it is thoroughly enjoying it. I'm getting tons of messages and sort of videos and pictures on Instagram, people sharing what they're experiencing through this program.

• 1:07:16Rich Roll?

  So I'm really proud of it, and I just want to like, sing, you know, down from the mountains about how excited I am about this for everybody. So please check it out. You can just click on Meal Planner at Richroll.com. You'll see it there at the top, or you can type in meals.richroll.com and learn more about it there. We've got a retreat coming up, Plant Power Ireland, July 24th through 31st. We have spaces still available. It's going to be at this incredible manor called Ballyvolan on 90 acres in the countryside of Ireland, in the vicinity of Cork. We're taking a group of about 40 people through a really fun but intense seven-day experience of transformation. We're going to eat amazing food.

• 1:08:00Rich Roll?

  Julie's designed this incredible plant-based menu. We're going to have cooking instruction. We're going to go running together. We're going to do tea ceremony. We're going to have intensive workshops on Creativity, unlocking your best self, relationships, nutrition, et cetera. It's going to be really great. Super excited to be doing it and we're doing it in partnership with the guys from the Happy Pair. The Happy Pair lads, they're going to come down for a couple of days, join us and teach you guys all about what they've learned about this lifestyle. So there's that to look forward to. So if this sounds like something you'd be into, go to ourplantpowerworld.com. If you would like to support this show and my work, share it with your friends and on social media,

• 1:08:42Rich Roll?

  leave a review on Apple Podcasts, subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts. We have a Patreon for those who would like to support my work financially. Thank you so much to everybody who has done that. Patreon recently underwent a whole like brand regeneration and they're offering some really cool new services for creators and audiences. And I'm going to dig into this a little bit more deeply. I really want to be able to provide those who are supporting me through Patreon, something exceptional and extraordinary beyond what I'm offering for free. So I'm thinking about, other podcasters are doing it, creators are doing this, but I'm thinking about perhaps doing a monthly Ask Me Anything episode of the podcast, maybe do it on video,

• 1:09:26Rich Roll?

  I'm not sure, and just making that available to the people that are supporting on Patreon as sort of a VIP thing, like in exchange for you contributing, you're going to get a little extra content that's not available on the podcast. Let me know what you think about that. You can send me an email through my website or hit me up on Twitter or Facebook and let me know your thoughts. If you would like to receive a free weekly email from me, I send one out every Thursday. It's called Roll Call. Basically five, four, five, six, things I've stumbled across over the course of the week, some articles I read. Podcasts I've listened to, a documentary I watched, a product that I'm enjoying, just things that I want to share with you guys in an effort to connect with you more

• 1:10:09Rich Roll?

  directly. As social media gets kind of blasted out and there's a lot of noise there, this is a nice way to just kind of be more directly in contact with you guys. So when you sign up, you'll get the roll call email, you'll get podcast announcements and occasional product offers. And that's it. I'm not going to really spam you or do anything else. It's just my way of being in touch with you guys more directly. I want to thank everybody who helped put on the show today. Jason Camillo for audio engineering and production and help with the show notes and the WordPress page. Shawn Patterson for help on graphics and theme music as always by Anna Lima. But of course, we have Neil's song by his band Carbon Works, Louder Than Words. We're going to take you out with that. So thank you Neil

• 1:10:52Rich Roll?

  and your bandmates for allowing us to share your beautiful music with you guys today. Thanks for the love, you guys. I'll see you guys back here soon. Peace, plants, and as Julie would say, namaste.

• 1:11:16Speaker 02

  There's a time in early hours when we're all just shades of gray, walking alone with your demons in tow and memories that won't go away. And if I reached out my hand and

• 1:11:53Speaker 02

  I found words I could say, and you trembling and all, could you understand or would you turn away?

• 1:12:21Speaker 02

  Beating your heart, singing your heart Louder than words could ever be

• 1:12:37Speaker 02

  Louder than words could ever be

• 1:12:47Speaker 02

  There's a time, here on the earth The colors are all too slow to fade And yet I'm holding fast in my heart No one will ever take you away

• 1:13:18Speaker 02

  I hear your heart, beating your heart Singing your heart Louder than words could ever be

• 1:13:39Speaker 02

  Louder than words could ever be

• 1:13:49Speaker 02

  I hear your heart, beating your heart Singing your heart Louder than words could ever be

• 1:14:10Speaker 02

  Louder than words could ever be