The Vegan Dr: The Truth About The Vegan Diet, "Eggs Are Making You Fat", "Stop Eating Cheese!" - Neal Barnard

Could it be that what you eat is just as important as the medicines and pills you take? Dr Neal Barnard is the founder and president of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, and has authored more than 100 scientific publications and 20 books. He is also the Adjunct Associate Professor of Medicine at the George Washington University School of Medicine. In this conversation Neal and Steven discuss topics, such as the only supplement you need, the no.1 food associated with weight loss, the dangers of drinking milk for men, and how to reverse erectile dysfunction. You can pre-order Neal’s book, ‘The Power Foods Diet’, here: https://amzn.to/3SImJSP Follow Neal Twitter - https://bit.ly/483rxGX Instagram - https://bit.ly/47W8ZIA Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Steven Bartlett?

  I love cheese.

• 0:01Speaker 01

  Well, men who consume the most cheese have the lowest sperm count and erectile dysfunction.

• 0:07Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, shit. Dr. Neil Barnard, one of America's leading advocates for health, nutrition.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  A legend in the plant-based world. People need to understand this, getting away from animal products is always a good idea. Because once you ban animal foods, not only do you solve the weight issue without counting calories, without reducing carbs, without even exercising, but also their health problems get better.

• 0:28Steven Bartlett?

  But health experts say it's okay to have a little bit of animal proteins.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  Great idea, doesn't work.

• 0:33Steven Bartlett?

  And there are groups of people that just eat meat alone.

• 0:36Speaker 01

  Well, it's a ludicrous diet. It's very fiber deficient.

• 0:39Steven Bartlett?

  How do you take on the idea that veganism is a diet for the privileged?

• 0:42Speaker 01

  We did a study and the average person saved 16% plus the fact their need for medications come down. So for example, we had a man who came into our study. He had diabetes. So we put him on the plant-based diet. After about a year, he'd lost 60 pounds. And he could go into any clinic in the world and they would not diagnose him as having diabetes.

• 0:59Steven Bartlett?

  But how do we know in that case that a Mediterranean diet wouldn't have had the same reversing effect on his diabetes?

• 1:05Speaker 01

  You just don't get the same result, but this was extremely controversial.

• 1:08Steven Bartlett?

  The most controversial of all, though, is

• 1:13Steven Bartlett?

  eggs. You can come for everything else, but coming for eggs is particularly triggering.

• 1:18Speaker 01

  Well, eggs have lots of issues. The first is, and even the studies done by the egg industry do show this.

• 1:34Steven Bartlett?

  Dr. Neil Barnard, the work you've committed your life to, what good do you hope that it's doing for everyday people in their day-to-day lives?

• 1:44Speaker 01

  Right now, unfortunately, people are not well. They're not where they want to be. By age 30 or so, the people feel like their life is starting to slip away. They're gaining weight they don't want to have. Their cholesterol is going up. They're on medications that they know they're never going to get off of. And perhaps worst of all, they tend to hand this same fate to the next generation. And that's something that not only has to stop, but it can stop. The body can heal. We know how to do it. The job is to put it to work.

• 2:12Steven Bartlett?

  When you look back over, I don't know, 15, 100 years, has there, what are the key sort of health outcomes that have really changed? And how does that correlate to the way that the world has changed and our sort of consumption habits have changed?

• 2:26Speaker 01

  Economics has changed everything. If you look, say, at rural Japan, 1950s, the country had a diet that was not entirely plant-based, but it was a rice-based diet, lots of vegetables, no ice cream. This was not the Velveeta culture. And some meat, but not really very much. And then, suddenly, the golden arches arrived in Tokyo.

• 2:47Steven Bartlett?

  The golden arches.

• 2:49Speaker 01

  McDonald's, Burger King, KFC. The country westernized. Breast cancer doubled.

• 2:54Steven Bartlett?

  Really?

• 2:55Speaker 01

  Diabetes went way, way up. Waistlines expanded. Life expectancy went from longest in the world. It's still better than many other places, but it has declined and declined and declined, despite having more knowledge than ever before. The westernization of the diet has been a killer worldwide. You see it in Japan. You see it now in China. As economics are changing in China, there's more wealth, there is more cardiovascular disease. And you know who's on the wires outside of town looking down like buzzards? It's the pharmaceutical industry. Because if you eat more pork and your cholesterol goes up, I can sell you more statins. And that is the way, that's the world we live in. That can change.

• 3:32Steven Bartlett?

  Why do you care? Of all the things you could have committed your life to, was there a catalyst moment where suddenly this became your mission? Was there something you saw, something you did, or an experience you had?

• 3:44Speaker 01

  The year before I went to medical school, I was working in a hospital in Minneapolis. And I didn't have a very glamorous job. I was the morgue attendant. And so my job was to take the body out of the cooler and put it on a table and assist the pathologist to do an autopsy to determine the cause of death. There was, one day, there was a man who died in the hospital of a massive heart attack, probably from eating hospital food, but that's another story. And the body was there. And the pathologist took out his scalpel. And you make a Y-shaped cut across the skin like this. You peel back the skin. And then he took what looked like a garden clipper and went crunch, crunch, crunch through the ribs on this side and crunch, crunch, crunch through this side,

• 4:29Speaker 01

  pulled the ribs off the chest and put the ribs on the table. So he took his scalpel and he sliced through a coronary artery. And it was like a medical lecture. They're called coronary arteries because they crown the heart. And as he sliced it open, he said, feel that. I had gloves on. So I felt inside the artery. And you would think a coronary artery would be a rubbery tube that would carry blood to your heart. It was like a pipe stem. It was like, like concrete. It was hard. And he said, that's calcified atherosclerotic lesions. And this is your bacon and eggs, Neil. And what he meant was cholesterol in the diet causes an irritation of that artery

• 5:10Speaker 01

  wall, and it forms what's kind of like a blister in the artery, and it calcifies over time. And what was most worrisome was not that this had attacked the heart, but we then looked at the carotids, those are the arteries going to the brain. They had the same process, meaning if he hadn't died of a heart attack, he was headed for a stroke. And the arteries to the kidneys had the same process. He finished the exam, wrote up his findings, systemic atherosclerosis. And as time went on, I then went to medical school and I started to learn about the connections. What does cholesterol do? Where is cholesterol found? It's only in animal products. And I started to reflect on these things that were culturally normal for us. And we thought that heart attacks were culturally normal. You're old, you know, 60s old, you're gonna, you're gonna have a heart attack.

• 5:54Speaker 01

  This is just the way it is. Alzheimer's, you're likely to get all these diseases. And I suddenly realized that if we can truly connect what we are eating with the things that happen to our body, it gives us the most frightening lesson ever, but the most empowering lesson, because we can change that. My mission is to take that knowledge, hand it to people in a form that they can use, and encourage them to spread the word in turn, hopefully to the next generation. If not, all we're spreading to the next generation is our own bad habits.

• 6:26Steven Bartlett?

  We're gonna go through all of that. We're gonna go through the diets. You've got a new book out, which talks about the perfect sort of diet for, for weight loss. And it says the breakthrough, the breakthrough plan that traps, tames, and burns calories for easy and permanent weight loss. We're gonna go through that as well. From that moment in the morgue, until you sit here now, what is your sort of academic and your... I guess your experience with doing studies and being exposed to research and data, what is that? Give me an overview of what you've done.

• 6:56Speaker 01

  We were, it really started with, I was approached by a foundation that funded diabetes research. We ended up executing a small study where we used a very different diet from what had been used. It was more modeled after the diet of countries that don't have much diabetes, like Japan before westernization, for example. Very successful. We found that people were losing weight easily without counting calories, without reducing carbs, without even exercising, much as I love exercise. Then we did another study on people who wanted to lose weight. The participants were women, all at the age of menopause and after. They had all done Jenny

• 7:38Speaker 01

  Craig and Nutrisystem and Atkins and South Beach and everything. And they all had initial success, followed by frustration, followed by blaming myself, that kind of thing. And what we said is, let's not do that. Let's use the same kind of diet we're using for diabetes, which in a nutshell, plant-based diet. Animal products gone, keeping oils really low, but not limiting spaghetti or carbohydrates in general, not limiting calories. And what we found is that people lost weight really easily, but more than that, their metabolism started to ramp up. So they're 50 years old or 60 years old, but they're burning calories more like they were burning when they were 30.

• 8:22Steven Bartlett?

  When people think about weight loss at the moment, you used a word there, you used the word calories. There's a, you know, a prevalent school of thought that says you just need to count the calories you're having. For men, it's about 2,000 calories if you're sort of my age and my weight. And as long as you have less than that, you'll lose weight. That's kind of the top-line school of thought. How do you receive that?

• 8:39Speaker 01

  It's true that we're not going to reinvent the laws of thermodynamics. I mean, if you're taking fewer calories, you'll lose weight. The problem is, if you voluntarily try to eat less than is that your body normally wants, by Wednesday, you're ready to eat the sofa. It's just not going to work for you. I have to tell you, in every hospital. Not only in the United States, but everywhere else. People will sit down with somebody who wants to lose weight, or who wants to tackle their diabetes, and they'll say, "You just need to eat less. Here's a menu. It adds up to 500 calories less than before. You stick to this and you lose weight." Well, the patient can't do that. You just can't be hungry forever. Your brain says, "You can't be doing this, I'm starving." And everybody's had that experience. And so then what happens? You blame the patient.

• 9:24Speaker 01

  The patient blames himself or herself. And I say, "Stop. How can I, without knowing it, reduce the calories that come in?" And the answer is really simple. The answer is change the quality of the food, not the amount. Stop worrying about the amount. If for 21 days, a person did an experiment with me, and I said, "For 21 days, no animal products at all." Okay, so I'm in an Italian restaurant. Spaghetti not with meat sauce, but with tomato sauce. Bean burrito instead of the meat burrito. You're not limiting the amount of food. You are just changing the type. Suddenly, the weight kicks in. The weight loss kicks in. People start losing weight, and losing weight, and losing weight. Why?

• 10:08Speaker 01

  Because, once you ban animal foods, which have zero fiber. Pork chops don't have fiber. Cheese has no fiber. Eggs have no fiber. Then suddenly, everything you're eating has fiber. What does that matter? Fiber is this boring word, puts everybody to sleep. But fiber is big stuff. Because fiber does two things. It has almost no calories. So it fills you up, and it makes you think you had a huge amount of food. The other thing it does is, as it goes down your digestive tract. Researchers at Tufts University tracked what happens. 2017 study. They brought in individuals, and put them on a diet either with high-fiber foods, whole-grain bread. Compare it to just white bread. It's the same thing, but one has all the fiber, one doesn't.

• 10:52Speaker 01

  And what they discovered is that the people...

• 10:56Speaker 01

  On the whole grain bread, they were excreting calories. What happens is the fiber goes down your digestive tract. It finds unabsorbed calories and it carries them out with the waste. You ate the calories, but you didn't absorb them. You flushed them down the toilet. Now, it's not huge. The effect of just that change was about 100 calories per day. That's about a half a soda you're not having. But that's 36,000 calories a year from just that one change. So if we aren't eating animal products, everything we have is fiber. That tames the appetite. You're going to lose weight naturally. What we find is that if I can help people to focus on the type of food they eat and learn to love foods that are better than the spam we grew up with,

• 11:40Speaker 01

  what you're going to discover is that not only do you solve the weight issue, people can lose weight very rapidly and very easily without going hungry and even without exercise, much as I love exercise. But also their health problems get better.

• 11:54Steven Bartlett?

  Just to pause there for a second because there's something going on in my dietary world at the moment that I want to get your opinion on. You mentioned whole grain bread versus white bread. There's now all of these breads on the shelf. When I go to the hotels and you have the little breakfast bars, there's the sourdough, there's the rye, there's the white bread, there's the whole grain bread. And I'm so confused by which bread I should be having. I'm pretty sure not the white one, but I don't really know about these others. So which bread is highest in fiber and best for my health?

• 12:22Speaker 01

  Well, they all beat the heck out of chicken, fish, meat, eggs. Bread is always better. Yes, it is.

• 12:29Steven Bartlett?

  Then chicken?

• 12:31Speaker 01

  Completely.

• 12:31Steven Bartlett?

  Chicken breast?

• 12:32Speaker 01

  Take the skin off it, it's still 23% fat as a percentage of calories. Yes.

• 12:38Steven Bartlett?

  And why is that a problem? I eat a lot of chicken breast, you know?

• 12:41Speaker 01

  Well, every fat gram has nine calories going right into our body fat that we didn't want. Every carbohydrate gram has only four. So those numbers, I want people to tattoo those numbers on their forearm because all the people who think carbs make them fat, they should realize carbohydrate, no matter what form it's in, bread, potatoes, pure sugar, carbohydrate has only four calories in a gram. But on the other hand, if I have fat, any form, chicken fat, fish fat, olive oil, straight from Tuscany, it's got nine calories in every gram. And a person can say, well, it's got to be good fat, isn't it? Sometimes it may be like olive oil, but it's still going to be fattening for you. We did a study. We brought in 62 people. They all wanted to lose weight.

• 13:26Speaker 01

  Half of them went on a low-fat vegan diet. They lost weight really very easily. The other half began a Mediterranean diet, which they thought, great. This is indulgent. I'll be able to have fish and some chicken and a little bit of cheese here and there and some extra virgin olive oil. How wonderful. And the foods are wonderful, except that by about week three, the participants were saying, well, when does the weight loss start? The fact is, it doesn't happen with the Mediterranean diet because the fish fat, the chicken fat, the whatever beef fat there may be, and all that olive oil is so packed with calories, it slows down or stops the weight loss. After 16 weeks, everybody stopped. They switched to the opposite diet. The people who had been going Mediterranean

• 14:11Speaker 01

  now did the plant-based diet, and they start losing weight like crazy. And they said, well, why didn't you give me this before? The people who had been doing the vegan diet, by 16 weeks, they were totally accommodated to it. I know how to eat at Taco Bell now. I know how to ask for the bean burrito and whatever. We asked them to begin the Mediterranean diet. And they said, well, first of all, I don't want to. I've lost my taste for cheese. I don't care about that anymore. We said, this is science. Please do begin the diet. And they got angry. We met with everybody every week, and they were about to walk out because the scale was getting worse week by week by week because we reintroduced chicken and fish and oil and all these kinds of things. This was published in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition, and it just won an award for the best article of the year

• 14:54Speaker 01

  by the American Nutrition Association. The point being that if you focus not on how much you eat, but if you focus on the types of foods you eat, you get the answer, which is you can satisfy the appetite without counting calories. You don't have to blame yourself. There will still be all kinds of things that will attract you. There will be cravings and so forth, but we can deal with all that.

• 15:18Steven Bartlett?

  Obviously, when people talk about the vegan diet, there's lots of popular rebuttals. One of them is about supplementation, about protein levels, about vitamin B12, about omega-3.

• 15:31Steven Bartlett?

  You know these rebuttals because they're very popular. So how do you, how do you take on the, the idea that, you know, if I'm not eating chicken at all, where am I getting my, my protein, my B12 from, my omega three from in my diet? And if I have to supplement any of these things, is that evidence that it's unnatural for me to be eating a vegan based diet?

• 15:49Speaker 01

  Okay, that, that's a critically important question, but, but before I answer that, let me go back to why would anybody want to do this? And this, this is really important because the, the issues of supplementation are super easy to answer. The, the issue of why do you want to do it? For me, this was answered about a year into our NIH trial. We had a man who came into our study. He was 35. He had diabetes for four years and he said, I need help. He told me his grandmother had had diabetes. His grandfather had diabetes. His father was dead by 30. He said that, you know, if I don't get this together, I'm going to check out early and on the way I'm going to be on dialysis. I'm going to lose a leg.

• 16:34Speaker 01

  That's what it meant to him. So we put him on the plant-based diet. And about two weeks into it, he said, easiest diet I, I've ever been on. And that kind of surprised me because people imagine vegan to be hard. And he said, no, it was super easy. Previous diets that I've been on told me I had to count my calories and I was hungry all the time. After about a year, he had lost 60 pounds. His, without ever limiting calories at all. He had gotten his A1C from nine and a half down to 5.3. 5.3 is not diabetes. 5.3 is not pre-diabetes. It's normal. And when I got his lab slip, I have to tell you, I closed my office door

• 17:18Speaker 01

  and I paced around for about 10 minutes to try to decide, can I tell him? That his diabetes has been cured. This was extremely controversial. You can't tell a person their diabetes is gone. Once you have diabetes, you'll always have diabetes. That's what everyone said. And people said that with good reason, because they wanted you to take your medicine. Test yourself. Don't mess around with this, because diabetes will kill you. And that was well-meaning advice. But here was a man who didn't have diabetes. Based on diet changes, we now see, I mean, we can laugh about it now because we see it all the time. Diabetes is a reversible disease. And everything that goes along with it is reversible as well.

• 17:58Speaker 01

  So then that brings the issue up of how do you answer all the questions that people will raise, like where do you get your protein and what about B12? But those are, those are quite easy to answer.

• 18:10Steven Bartlett?

  So how do we, how do we know in that case that that guy wasn't eating a ton of sort of ultra-processed foods of McDonald's and all of those things? And that a Mediterranean diet, for example, wouldn't have had the same reverse, reversing effect on his diabetes?

• 18:26Speaker 01

  Well, let me be clear for what we know and what we believe. What we know is that this man had a result that just hasn't happened before. And it was really remarkable. We've seen this over and over and over again. And when we bring people in who have diabetes and we put them on a Mediterranean diet or something like that, you just don't get the same result in a randomized clinical trial. But we've gone further. We've looked at why is it that this diet is working? Processed foods are not the cause of diabetes. Eating sugar is not the cause of diabetes. Eating carbohydrate and potatoes and rice, that is not the cause of diabetes. I'm not saying there aren't health issues about all these foods, there are. But the cause of diabetes is something that has been clear in science for two decades,

• 19:11Speaker 01

  and nobody can get this through their thought process.

• 19:14Steven Bartlett?

  You can say thick skulls. I know you were pausing.

• 19:19Speaker 01

  I'm not only talking about the lay public, I'm talking about doctors. There are many doctors who have somehow gotten their medical degrees, never understanding the cause of type 2 diabetes. And here's what it is. This is a muscle cell, your muscle, a muscle in your shoulder. If I take a needle in your shoulder and I stick a needle in, I pull a muscle cell out. It's this long oval. Its favorite fuel is glucose. That's why marathon runners are carb loading. That glucose gets into the cell and it powers it. But the problem is the cell membrane keeps that glucose out, will not let it in until insulin, the insulin key made in your pancreas, arrives at the surface of that cell, opens the door, in goes the glucose. Now, everything's going fine.

• 20:02Speaker 01

  My pancreas is making insulin, it's letting the glucose in the cell. Things are going great. You eat chicken. Your body takes that 23% fat in the skinless chicken breast and takes some of that chicken fat, sticks it inside the muscle cell. Fish fat, beef fat, cheese fat. Cheese is loaded with fat. And that fat gets inside the muscles. Now, doctors hate words like fat because it only has three letters. So we'll call it intramyocellular lipid, but it's fat inside a muscle cell. Same thing happens in your liver. So that's hepatocellular lipid. The fat is getting into your liver cells. The fat is building up in your muscle cells. It came from the food choices we thought were healthy. French fries. Your body pulls out that fat, packs it in the muscle cell.

• 20:46Speaker 01

  Now, the insulin key comes along, attaches to the surface of the cell. The cell is now filled with fat. It's just like going home, sticking your key in your front door lock that somebody jammed with chewing gum. Key doesn't work anymore. Okay, so what do we do? We'll say, let's take the animal products out of your diet. There's now zero animal fat in your diet. Let's keep oils really low, too. So baked potato instead of the chips. Okay, no fat in it. Great. What happens? And I can show this to you with magnetic resonance spectroscopy. I can look inside your body. That fat starts to dissipate. And as the fat comes out, I'm not talking about belly fat. That dissipates too. But what I'm targeting now is the fat inside each muscle cell

• 21:31Speaker 01

  and each liver cell. As it comes apart, it leaves. Then the insulin key can work again. And I've reversed your insulin resistance and I'm reversing your diabetes. And that's why now the blood sugar can get through that membrane very easily. That's why this man's diabetes went away. We didn't give him a new insulin prescription. We got the fat out of his muscle cells, got the fat out of his liver cells. And suddenly his body said, I'll take it from here.

• 21:57Steven Bartlett?

  So let's talk about the supplementation point then. People that are vegan, my partner was vegan for some time. She had a lot of sort of health complications with it. So I've got a little bit of a sort of clouded opinion around that. And again, when I talk about my partner, she was vegan for two years. I tried for two weeks. I struggled.

• 22:17Steven Bartlett?

  Long story. She was vegan for two years. In her words, and she shared this publicly, she gained weight. She had issues with her menstrual cycle and lots of other consequences. And she now points to the two years being vegan for both those outcomes.

• 22:36Steven Bartlett?

  She had to supplement B12 throughout that process as well because she wasn't getting it naturally in her vegan diet in Bali. So what do you say to the point of supplementation that we were talking about a second ago?

• 22:48Speaker 01

  Vitamin B12 is the only thing that you do need to supplement. And people following a plant-based diet definitely should be supplementing vitamin B12. But B12 is not made by animals and it's not made by plants. B12 is made by bacteria. And so people will speculate that prior to the advent of modern hygiene, the traces of bacteria in the soil or on plants we would pull out or frankly, on our fingers or in our mouths would give you the tiny amount that you need. You need 2.4 micrograms per day. You need it for healthy nerves and healthy blood. And you will get B12 from meat because the cow's intestinal tract has bacteria that make B12.

• 23:30Speaker 01

  But some people don't absorb that very well because the B12 in meat is tightly adhered to the protein. And some people can't really remove it very well, particularly if you're over 50 or you're on certain medications. But you need to be 12. But when it comes to overall nutrition, a meat-based diet is the most efficient diet of all. It's much worse than any other kind of diet because meat doesn't have the vitamins that are in vegetables and in fruits. There's not a gram of vitamin C. There is zero fiber. There's no complex carbohydrate at all. Now, your cat can be a meat eater because cats make their own vitamin C. They say, I don't need it, but we are not cats. We're not carnivores at all. Whether we like it or not, we're great apes.

• 24:14Speaker 01

  So our cousins are chimpanzees and gorillas and bonobos and orangutans. And they are never eating dairy at all. They are mostly or exclusively herbivores. So that's our natural diet.

• 24:28Steven Bartlett?

  Those are great ape ancestors. Do they, any of them eat meat?

• 24:33Speaker 01

  Some do, not all.

• 24:35Steven Bartlett?

  Okay. And going back to your point about vitamin B12, you're saying, just so I'm clear, that we historically would have got that from our less sanitary environment by, you know, our ancestors pulling up leaves and eating some of the soil in the process and those kinds of things. Is that what you're saying?

• 24:50Speaker 01

  Well, that's one possibility. And the other possibility is frankly, that we could absorb our own B12. Your digestive tract makes B12, but the question is how absorbable really is it? And most people believe, and I think it's quite possible, that it's produced too low down by the gut microbiome to really be efficiently absorbed. So either way, my suggestion is I wouldn't worry about it. You just take B12. It's in every multiple vitamin you ever took and it's at the store and you would just take it. In that way, there's no worry.

• 25:22Steven Bartlett?

  The health experts, the nutritionists that I speak to on this podcast, I would say, agree with what you're saying by about 90, 95, 90%. They, you know, thinking through what they've told me in private and on the show, they say you want predominantly plants on the plate, you know, fruit and veg and all that stuff. And then it's okay to have a little bit of animal proteins as well on there. So like a little bit of chicken breast, for example, is okay. And that as a balancing act gives you what we sort of a nutritionally complete diet.

• 25:54Steven Bartlett?

  What's your thoughts on that?

• 25:56Speaker 01

  Great idea, it doesn't work. It's a little bit like the person who comes in to see me in the clinic, and they've got a chronic cough. I said, "Doc, I've had this cough for months now." They say, "Well, maybe it's time that we do stop smoking." And I say, "All right, doc, I'll stop." So they come in a week later and say, "I'm still coughing." "Well, did you stop smoking?" "Well, almost completely. I'm only having maybe two cigarettes a day." I say, "Well, let's just cut it out completely." And things get dramatically better. So by analogy, when a person comes in, they've got a high cholesterol level, or they've got weight they can't lose, and they're sort of 90% vegan, that last 10%, you know, really makes such a huge difference. And it makes a difference in a couple of ways. And by the way, I'm not encouraging people to take this on faith.

• 26:41Speaker 01

  If you just try it, you'll discover that when a person really gets the animal products out of their life, first of all, the physical benefits are dramatically better. A person who follows a plant-based diet, on average, is 35 pounds leaner than the typical meat-eating American. Or put it the other way, your average meat-eating American is 35 pounds heavier than the typical not very careful vegan. So it's a big difference. But beyond that, let's say I'm trying to follow mostly a plant-based diet, but once in a while I'll have some meat. What that does is, that reawakens the neural circuitry for those addictive things. It's sort of like a smoker who decides, "At parties, I'll smoke." What you're doing is, you're never able to forget the taste of it.

• 27:26Speaker 01

  So it's a good idea to just, if something doesn't love you back, just get rid of it. But because that sounds like a heavy load, what I say to people is this, and the way we do it in our studies, take the first week, and your goal is just to lose some weight. You want to be able to see your abs again, whatever it is. You want to get off insulin, you want to feel better. Here are the studies that prove that it works. And then we sit down with the patient and his reluctant spouse, and they'll kind of map out what they're going to have for breakfast and for lunch and for dinner. And then they just think about it for about a week. They try the foods and they figure out the ones that really work. Great, now we're going to do a three-week test drive. And people at home should do this. 21 days, you can do anything for 21 days.

• 28:10Speaker 01

  And you've already made your list of the foods that you like. At the end of 21 days, number one, physically you are a different person. You're losing that weight without calorie counting, without ramping up your exercise. People are noticing the difference in you. But apart from the physical changes, your tastes are changing. You're discovering new things that you didn't have before. And better than that, you're forgetting the things that didn't love you back.

• 28:33Steven Bartlett?

  One of our former guests, Giles Yo, made a comment that veganism is a diet for the privileged. And he doesn't like how vegans make other people feel bad when they are just trying to support their kids. And I think there is a train of thought that says being vegan is expensive and it's difficult. And if you're a sort of time-poor, financially-poor family, how does one become more plant-based when you're just trying to think first and foremost about how to get some food in your kids' bellies?

• 29:03Speaker 01

  That's such an important question. Because when we feed our children, we're not only nourishing them today, but we're setting in motion the foods that they will eat in the future. You're accommodating the child's tastes to the things you put on the table. So it's essential that they be healthy foods. We did a study that we just published in JAMA Network Open, the American Medical Association's online journal. And we brought in 244 individuals. And half of them were asked to continue their current diet. The other half were asked to avoid animal products, keep oils low. It's a healthy vegan diet. And we tracked their weight, and as you can imagine, they lost weight. And we tracked their insulin sensitivity, got better, the things that you would imagine, all the benefits, their cholesterol has improved.

• 29:46Speaker 01

  But we also tracked their food expenses. And what we found is that overall you're spending more on vegetables. You're spending more on fruits. You're spending more on beans and grains and you're spending nothing on meat, nothing on cheese. Your oils are, you know, you're cooking without them and the average person saved 16%.

• 30:07Steven Bartlett?

  Including the supplementation?

• 30:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, yes, B12 is pennies. So the average person's food bill dropped by about 16%. So in America, that means about 500 bucks a year or something like that. So why is that? If a person is low on money, here in this country, we have the SNAP program. It used to be called food stamps. You get a card, you go into the store. The cheapest thing in the store are these little bags of dried beans and the dried rice. And you can get a block of frozen broccoli that's three for a dollar and that kind of thing. And if you go in the back and say, well, I'd like to have some cheese or some meat. That's where the money is. So when a person's on a plant-based diet, they're going to be saving money.

• 30:51Speaker 01

  Plus, the fact is their need for medications goes way down. They're not at the doctor so much. Now, don't get me wrong, there are places that would love to charge you for asparagus water or some kooky thing. That's not what we're talking about.

• 31:06Steven Bartlett?

  You have a book coming out called The Power Foods Diet. You can get it everywhere now on Amazon and everywhere you'd find a book. It's this book here in front of me. And you kind of reverse the narrative as it relates to weight loss because you provide a much more positive perspective on how to lose weight. Your book doesn't tell people what they shouldn't be eating. It tells them what they should be eating. And although there's been lots written and said about weight loss, there is quite a lot of original thoughts and ideas and there's a huge amount of supporting evidence, which I think really puts your book, stands it apart from the crowd. Why did you write this book? Why did you write a book about weight loss?

• 31:41Speaker 01

  Up until now, the whole idea has been if I want to lose weight, I have to say no. I have to say no to calories, no to seconds, no to dessert. And I started thinking, wait a minute, there is a huge body of research that allows you to just push that off the table and say yes to certain specific foods that I call them power foods because they do three things. There are certain foods that are appetite tamers. The same reason that people are buying Ozempic and Wegovy, these injections that tame your appetite. Food will do precisely the same thing. That's right. Food releases GLP-1 agonist and will tame your appetite. What is GLP-1? Oh, I'm sorry. GLP-1 is a compound made in the intestinal tract.

• 32:23Speaker 01

  And this is the thing that Novo Nordisk is trying to simulate with its weekly injection. Initially marketed as Ozempic and then marketed under the name Wegovy. In the U.S., it's been hugely controversial because it does cut down the appetite and people lose weight, but it costs them more than $15,000 a year. And the side effects, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, feeling terrible. And when you stop, all that weight comes right back. So anyway, it's big, hugely, very controversial. But what we've discovered is we brought in people, fed them different meals, and found that there are certain foods that cause GLP-1 release naturally that tames your appetite. So there are certain foods that tame your appetite. If you don't know what they are, you're trying to lose weight with one arm tied behind your back.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  The second thing is that certain foods trap calories in your digestive tract, carry them out so you don't absorb them. And the third, and the most fun, is that certain foods ramp up your metabolism so that you're burning calories for about three or four or five hours after the meal faster than you were before, which we can measure. And we first published those data back in 2005. The American Journal of Medicine published our results showing that your after-meal metabolism ramps up, not hugely, but about 15%, something like that. So then again, in about, I think it was 2020, we published this with JAMA Network Open, that they looked at a new group of participants.

• 33:51Speaker 01

  And the same thing happens, that your metabolism ramps up. But so many people are struggling with weight, blaming themselves. And my answer is, wait a minute. We can, I can make you a wonderful meal and you can lose weight naturally. Let me give you an example. There is a Twins registry in the UK. Great registry they've got. In this particular study, they looked at not quite 3,000 twins. Identical twins, same genetics. But then they did DEXA scans. It's a scan that looks not just at body weight. What it looks at is body composition. So how much body fat do you have? And they discovered that one twin compared to the other twin

• 34:32Speaker 01

  had 9% less abdominal fat if she was the twin eating more anthocyanins. What is that? Anthocyanins is the blue in a blueberry or in a grape. This is nature's painting box. And they're powerful antioxidants. And so then at Harvard, researchers looked at, okay, which foods are associated with weight loss? They looked at about 130,000 people in the Nurses' Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study. They track them year after year. And they say, okay, these people are eating more of this food, more of that food. How does that affect their weight change? And this is just an association. But what they discovered is that people who ate more beans

• 35:17Speaker 01

  would tend to lose more weight. People who ate more citrus fruit, even fruit juice, would lose more weight. People who ate more melons, watermelons and cantaloupes and things, would lose more weight. And then green vegetables. But the number one food of all the foods that was associated with the most weight loss was blueberries. Blueberries and all their cousins, like raspberries and so forth. These anthocyanin-rich foods. So why the heck is it that people who decide to eat more of these foods and bring them into their diet, why are they losing weight? Well, okay, if you're eating the blueberries for the dessert, you're not eating the cream custard. Maybe that's part of it. But even when you control for that, you still see the weight loss. And we believe that the reasons are that these are always high-fiber foods.

• 36:02Speaker 01

  They are always very modest in calories. And there is something about the effect of anthocyanins that may affect either our appetite or more likely our metabolism.

• 36:11Steven Bartlett?

  On the point of anthocyanins, is the color of the fruit somewhat an indicator of an anthocyanin?

• 36:17Speaker 01

  Yes, it is, but it can be tricky.

• 36:21Speaker 01

  Anthocyanins is a huge painting box that nature uses for blueberries, for the red grape, that's anthocyanins. Strawberries are red, but it's a different anthocyanin. And in October, when the leaves are turning, those yellows and reds and golden colors are different anthocyanins. Now, a tomato or a watermelon, that bright red is not anthocyanins. That's lycopene, and that's an antioxidant too, but that's the cousin of beta carotene. So, beta carotene is the orange in a carrot, lycopene is the red in a tomato, and the anthocyanins are the purples in the grapes and in the blueberries and so forth.

• 36:59Steven Bartlett?

  With blueberries, is there a positive impact on memory in the brain with blueberries as well?

• 37:04Speaker 01

  Very likely. I think, personally, I think we need more research, but our team and many others have been really excited about this ever since. Researchers at the University of Cincinnati brought in a group of people. And not just random people off the street. These were people selected because they were way up in years. Average age, 76, 78. And they already had memory lapses. They had what we call mild cognitive impairment. They gave them a huge infusion of anthocyanins in the form of grape juice. A pint in a day, so maybe a cup in the morning, a cup at night. And over three months, they then tracked your ability to retain knowledge and your ability to remember.

• 37:46Speaker 01

  And what they showed is it was measurably increased over a placebo. And, okay, that sounds to me too easy. So, they did the study again, and they used a different anthocyanin source. They now used blueberry juice, same result. So, I continue to think that, I think it's a good idea to be skeptical because people want to find some easy answer to things.

• 38:07Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah. And was the rest of their diet controlled in those studies?

• 38:10Speaker 01

  In this case, no.

• 38:12Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, so it could have been anything.

• 38:13Speaker 01

  Could have been, very likely was.

• 38:15Steven Bartlett?

  Was it randomized?

• 38:17Speaker 01

  Randomized trial. And what you do is you take people and you just give them the anthocyanin drink versus some kind of placebo that looks the same. So I do think we need to be careful and I think industry, you know, you'll have the blueberry industry or the grape juice industry jumping in with money as the dairy industry has been doing for a long period of time. So I think we should be skeptical, but when you see, for example, our group, we take no money from any food industry group ever. For exactly, even healthy foods, we won't take their money because we want to make sure that we're unbiased in what we find. And you just, you want to look for consistency of findings.

• 38:53Steven Bartlett?

  Do you ever wonder if you are biased? Because, you know, you've got that experience, that very sort of honestly traumatic experience from that morgue that day and you end up writing books about these subject matters. It becomes a part of your identity. And I even think with myself, like, for example, I said about my girlfriend struggling with the vegan diet. That's created bias in me, hasn't it? Do you ever wonder, or do you ever think about the chance that you might be biased in the way that you look at the data or the data you look at?

• 39:25Speaker 01

  Of course. Every good scientist recognizes that bias can enter in any study. We all have biases and that's why you have to do studies in a careful way. So for example, when I do a study comparing a Mediterranean diet to a vegan diet, I make sure that the Mediterranean diet is taught by dietitians who personally follow the Mediterranean diet themselves and will talk it up and I hire them for that purpose. And the vegan diet is taught by dietitians who believe in that diet. And then your statistics have to be done blindly by somebody who's not partial. But everybody has biases and, and with tobacco, we went through this. Back in the 50s and 60s, you could say, well, I'm not sure if tobacco really is, causes lung cancer. And if somebody thought it was, well, you're biased.

• 40:09Speaker 01

  As today, if somebody does not strongly believe that tobacco causes lung cancer, you're just an idiot. I mean, it clearly does. But that doesn't mean you don't do tobacco research. You do, but you try to set your biases aside.

• 40:21Steven Bartlett?

  A lot of people will just eat. Chicken steak because they just think it tastes nicer. I think I'm in that camp. Think I was, you know, whether that's just a nature thing, you know, I was raised on eating chicken. My mom cooks chicken all the time. Um, I love going to this steak restaurant in London called Flatiron. If you guys want to give me a discount code, I fucking go there all the time. Um, but I just like the taste of it. So that's why, big part of the reason I eat it. And as a young man, I want to get as much protein as I can. I want to work out. I want big, strong muscles. Um, I like the taste. It helps me grow my muscles, you know?

• 41:00Speaker 01

  You can do anything you want. You, you, you can. Um, however, what you want today is what you ate yesterday. Um, our tastes can drift very, very readily to foods that we expose ourselves to. So if the past week I've been eating chicken, it's over. That's what we tend to come back to. And that's what we accommodate to. Um, and that's true for caffeine. That's true for every drug of abuse. That's true for foods that we get hooked on. It's true for cheese more than anything else. People listening to this broadcast are all nodding exactly right now because they say, ah, I could be vegan except for the cheese. And that's

• 41:32Steven Bartlett?

  I love cheese.

• 41:33Speaker 01

  Well, it doesn't love you back, unfortunately. Cheese has, not to divert too much, but cheese is the one food that actually contains narcotics.

• 41:45Speaker 01

  The casein protein that's in milk comes out of the cow's udder. It digests in the calf's stomach in to release what are called caseomorphins. They're, they're casein derived morphine like compounds. And they go in the calf's blood to the calf's brain and they attach to receptors, the very same receptor that a narcotic attaches to. So if you drink a glass of milk, the very same thing happens is that your body takes the casein protein, pulls out the caseomorphins. They go to your brain and attach there. But the reason that cheese is more addictive than milk or even ice cream is because when you make cheese, you concentrate the protein and the fat. It's a, you, you remove all the lactose sugar and all the way.

• 42:28Speaker 01

  And it's just, uh, basically casein mixed with fat and it's basically dairy crack. Uh, the big problem here, and, and for any guy who's thinking, do I want to stop eating dairy? Estradiol, female sex hormones. If, if, if your mom has hot flashes and she's taking estradiol to calm her flashes, that female sex hormone. Is in cheese. It's in milk. The cows, the cow makes it. Cows naturally make estradiol and so it's in every slice of cheese you ever ate. But it gets worse. To get cheese, you have to milk a cow and cows normally don't make milk. They make milk only after they've been impregnated. And if you don't mind, let me just walk you through how this happens because I think it's

• 43:13Speaker 01

  good for people to be aware of. And every dairy farm everywhere in the world, there's an underpaid guy who takes his left hand and puts a glove on it up to his shoulder. And he sticks his hand into the cow's rectum, up to his elbow. And he grabs the cow's uterus. You can feel the uterus through the rectal wall. And you hold it steady and with your right hand, you take what looks like a knitting needle and you jam it into her vagina, right through the cervix, and you inject sperm that you took from a bull. Now, she will become impregnated and she will not object because she's chained up by the neck and she can't turn around and stop you. And then you go on to the next one, the next one, the next one. Nine months later, after her gestation is finished, she will have a calf. Which she didn't volunteer for, but this is now her baby.

• 43:56Speaker 01

  And she will look at that calf. And the calf looks up at mom. And all the farmhands gather around because I gotta tell you, there's nothing cuter than this big bag of bones of this little calf who's just born. And this is like the first hour of life. And then they say, well, wait a minute. You know, you don't want that calf to suckle? Because that milk is what we're gonna sell. The milk that's made for her calf is what we're gonna sell. So there, we have an implement that solves that problem and that's a wheelbarrow. So you put the calf in a wheelbarrow and you carry the calf away. Now, the mother, the mother-infant bond is the strongest bond we have in nature. She will follow. And she'll follow like effectively in her own bovine way, saying,

• 44:41Speaker 01

  This is my baby? And then a gate will stop, will hit her in the face, and she will stand right there and cry out. And the calf, if the calf is male, will very soon be killed for veal, because you can't use a male in the dairy industry. And if that calf is female, she will be put in an isolation hut, fed milk replacer. And when she's about a year old, she'll get a hand up her butt, and she'll be impregnated. Now, in nature, a cow lives to be about 20. On a dairy farm, their milk production, although they're impregnated every single year, slacks off by about age four. And then they are hung up by their leg, and they are slit for low-grade beef. So the dairy industry is a meat industry.

• 45:25Speaker 01

  It just takes you a little while to get there. And every dairy cow is impregnated artificially. They're separated from their calf. And we just kind of put up with this. And during each pregnancy, she is continued to be milked. The estrogen comes down those milking tubes. It gets into this little swimming pool full of milk. When they throw in the rennet, which is this genetically engineered enzyme that makes a clot, then you throw in the bacteria. They give it that funky fermented flavor. And people get hooked on this stuff. And you're eating this mixture of estradiol along with a huge amount of fat and these animal proteins that have the casomorphins in them. And everybody gets hooked on this thing.

• 46:07Speaker 01

  And your average American eats 77,000 calories of cheese every year. And then they think they got fat from eating bread. It wasn't the bread. It was that hunk of cheese that was in between there that could explain the entire weight problem we have in America.

• 46:24Steven Bartlett?

  So you're saying also that then men who are drinking the dairy products or eating the dairy products have, there's an implication for their own hormone levels and their own sort of sperm counts, etc. Is there any evidence for this, that drinking milk as a man will reduce your sperm count?

• 46:38Speaker 01

  Exactly. That has been discovered in New York, New York State. Researchers went into a...

• 46:45Speaker 01

  Fertility center. And you do sperm counts on men. And when you do a sperm count, what you're looking at is the count, the number of little sperm. You also look at their morphology, meaning their shape, and their motility, meaning are they swimming straight? And what they have shown in at least two studies that I'm aware of, that men who consume the most cheese have the lowest sperm counts and the worst motility and morphology, motility and morphology. And the reason, of course, is you're swallowing estrogen every day, but it gets worse than that. When you eat cheese, you're eating something that's three quarters fat. It's really high in calories. And add it to your chicken fat and beef fat and the fat that people get all over the place, you're gaining body weight.

• 47:28Speaker 01

  And guys are struggling with this and mistakenly blaming carbs and so forth. But as you gain body weight, every fat cell in your body is an estrogen factory. What I mean is your testosterone goes into a fat cell and estrogen comes out. You have enzymes called aromatase enzymes that take that testosterone from your bloodstream. And the more body fat you have, the more they are reducing your testosterone because they're converting it to estradiol.

• 47:54Steven Bartlett?

  Is this in part, in your view, why there's been a decline in testosterone in men over the last couple of decades?

• 47:59Speaker 01

  Without question. I can reduce your testosterone level within a matter of a couple of weeks just by putting you on a cheesy, meaty diet. The more your body fat expands, the more your testosterone level is neutralized and it gets worse. Because there's estrogen in the dairy itself, that adds to the estrogen your body is now making in your body fat. An animal-based diet is just a recipe for hormone haywire.

• 48:27Steven Bartlett?

  You know, I have to ask about the carnivore diet, which is, you know, I've had guests on this podcast that weren't health experts, were even talking about health or food or nutrition at all, but certain guests, and one in particular, who is on the carnivore diet, because, you know, I also think about Michaela Peterson, who I think is a wonderful person, and she, she's also on the carnivore diet. She Had loads of health complications in her life to the point that I think she was virtually disabled at one point, um, in bed, couldn't move, lots of pain, lots of problems. And then she went on a carnivore only diet, which meant that she eats pretty much only steak with salt and pepper, I believe. Don't want to get that wrong. And all of her health problems went away. And when you hear about those stories, you go, Jesus, that's incredibly competitive.

• 49:11Steven Bartlett?

  I'm not saying that that is the correct diet at all, because I've I've sat here with enough nutritionists and health experts to know that there's a general consensus that you want as much plant, plants on your plate as you possibly can.

• 49:23Steven Bartlett?

  With a little bit of protein, they, they seem to be pretty decided that a little bit of sort of chicken breast isn't a problem. But there is a school of thought, and there are a group of people that just eat meat alone.

• 49:36Steven Bartlett?

  And they seem to be doing okay. Is there any diets? Is there any research that has been done on people that are on a carnivore diet that you're aware of?

• 49:45Speaker 01

  I don't know. Um, I haven't really looked at the carnivore diet very well. It's a ludicrous diet. First of all, it's very fiber deficient and, and somebody like that is going to spend hours in the bathroom try, struggling

• 49:56Speaker 01

  to go to the bathroom because they're not getting any fiber. So that person goes to the drugstore and they'll get Metamucil, which is acilium fiber, which is a seed fiber, because they don't want to eat the seeds, but they'll sell you the fiber to, to counteract it. You're getting a massive amount of cholesterol. Now, the, the one thing you could say for it is if a person says, well, I'm chucking out a bunch of just sugar and I'm chucking out the cheese and so forth, and I'm focusing on meat. Well, half of what you're doing is good, is you're getting rid of some other things that were frankly not so good for you. The donuts and things aren't very good, but a meat-based diet is, is a romantic fantasy. When people think of themselves as hunter-gatherers, we are gatherers first and hunters second. Our nature is not to be racing over the hilltop and capturing an antelope

• 50:41Speaker 01

  and bringing it back to the applause of our families. That's a romantic notion that people like to, to pretend. And if you look at, at, at human cultures over the, over the millennia, we are clearly designed for and have followed either an exclusively plant-based diet or a mostly plant-based diet. Now, that said, you know, we're We'll take what we can get.

• 51:05Speaker 01

  When people don't have tremendous means, if a rabbit comes by and they can capture them in their snare and they'll eat them, they will. Having said that, I have to say, I put this question to Richard Leakey some years ago. And I asked him, I said, you know.

• 51:21Steven Bartlett?

  Who's that?

• 51:21Speaker 01

  Oh, Richard Leakey was a wonderful paleoanthropologist. His father was Louis Leakey. And Louis Leakey is the one who launched Jane Goodall into Tanzania to study chimpanzees and Diane Fossey to study the gorillas. Louis Leakey was a wonderful paleoanthropologist and his son, Richard, worked for many, many years in Kenya and died recently. But I put this question to him. I said, all the work that you've done studying human behavior and human diets, aren't we naturally carnivores? And he looked at me in the eye and he said, understand, we are not carnivores and never have been carnivores. What allowed people to start to eat as if they're carnivores was the advent of the Stone

• 52:02Speaker 01

  Age, when we were able to make stone tools that became axes and arrowheads. Left to your own devices, without those tools, you can't chase down a deer or an antelope. You might occasionally get some roadkill or something like that, or not roadkill, but you know what I mean. You would get, you could scavenge from something left over by a lion or a hyena. And in fact, that he believed that that is how meat eating began, was that there was kill left over in a carcass that wasn't fully eaten by an actual carnivorous animal. And then, once we got fire, which we didn't have before, once we got fire, now you're on to something. Now you can actually make meat, at least over the short term, safe to eat.

• 52:44Steven Bartlett?

  I want to talk a lot more about hormones, but just to close off the section about weight loss that we were talking about. We were talking originally about the blueberries. There's another group of foods which you include in the power foods diet, one of which is the, I'm going to get this word wrong. Cruciferous vegetables.

• 52:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, cruciferous vegetables.

• 53:01Steven Bartlett?

  That's exactly what I said. Can you say that again?

• 53:04Speaker 01

  Cruciferous.

• 53:05Steven Bartlett?

  And what?

• 53:05Speaker 01

  Cruciform, the flower on broccoli or cauliflower or Brussels sprouts. When they're growing, they present this little flower that has kind of a little cross shape in it, so it's called cruciferous.

• 53:19Steven Bartlett?

  Cruciferous?

• 53:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, and they're healthy foods. They are good in many ways.

• 53:23Steven Bartlett?

  And they're good for weight loss specifically?

• 53:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, they are. They're one of the top foods that the Harvard researchers associated with weight loss. And frankly, it's kind of for a no brainer reason. They are really high in fiber. A cup of broccoli has maybe five grams of fiber in it, but all of about 50 or 60 calories, like none. So it's very, very filling, very low in calories.

• 53:45Steven Bartlett?

  So what's in that category then? Broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, those kinds of things, right?

• 53:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, arugula and lots more, yes. They have a second benefit. Researchers at Johns Hopkins have been studying them not for weight loss, but for cancer prevention. And they find that, maybe not surprisingly, people who eat more of these have less of various forms of cancer. But it turns out that what they do is a surprise. If you eat a couple of servings of broccoli today and the same thing tomorrow, then by about the following day, at that same time of day, your liver is making more of what are called phase two enzymes. The phase two enzymes are there to remove toxins from your body. So if you inhale bus exhaust or some other toxin that's in your body, your liver is there

• 54:33Speaker 01

  to filter them out and get rid of them. And your liver is more powerful if the cruciferous vegetables were in your diet, because they cause it to make more of these detoxification enzymes. But there are lots of these foods, and some of them are not foods, but they're flavors, like cinnamon. Cinnamon has

• 54:50Speaker 01

  A compound in it that scientists didn't know what to call it. They ended up calling it cinnamon aldehyde. You know, researchers are not always very creative with their naming. But cinnamon contains this thing called cinnamon aldehyde. And it's associated with weight loss. And it appears that it works by increasing metabolism. So what researchers have done, there are many of these studies, but there was a 2017 study where researchers, all they did in a randomized trial was give cinnamon or nothing. And the amount of cinnamon was about one teaspoon per day, which you could throw in water or whatever. And what they showed was about a seven or eight pound weight loss over a matter of several weeks. And so I'm not recommending that people just add cinnamon to bread that's slathered

• 55:34Speaker 01

  with butter because you can undo the power. But the whole point of the power foods dietary approach is rather than thinking about all the things I can't eat, let's bring in, we know that berries are good. So let's say I make a muffin and instead of cooking it with butter, I'm going to cook it in a healthy way and I'm going to have blueberries in it. So the foods got to be, they have to be good so that you'll like them, so that you'll serve them to your family. And then the weight loss just kicks in automatically.

• 56:00Steven Bartlett?

  A teaspoon of cinnamon per day caused an average weight loss of about half a pound per week. That's from page 24 of your book.

• 56:07Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 56:08Steven Bartlett?

  Which was really surprising to me. The other thing that I found quite surprising was you talk about hot peppers. I love hot peppers. And you say that they're a great weight loss food.

• 56:17Speaker 01

  Who knew that that hot feeling that you experience afterwards, it's not just hot in your tongue, you can put a sensor on your forehead and you will actually see the body is burning off calories as a result of eating the spicy food. So I'm not suggesting that people take a couple of jalapenos and just eat that. What I am suggesting is that there are spices, there's cinnamon, there is the capsaicins, those are the hot in the hot peppers. There's also ginger. They all have these kinds of effects where they readjust your body chemistry to be a calorie burner. So the foods taste great, you're not increasing your workout, but the weight comes off. And I don't want people to get modest about this. I'm working, I'm, we're in a study right now.

• 57:01Speaker 01

  And the study has been going on for about 18 weeks now. One of the guys in the study has lost 60 pounds already. Now, I don't encourage people to lose weight that fast. And the person who's going to lose weight that fast is a person who's got a lot of weight to lose. But if you've got five or 10 pounds that you want to lose, or maybe 30 or 40, that'd be very typical. Let's lose it. Let's not fool around. Let's put yourself in a body that you want to be in. That makes you feel good. That doesn't just help you to, to knock off that weight. It helps your arteries to open up, helps your sexual function to return. Helps your mind to work today and to protect it for tomorrow. We can do those things. It's all a question of having the information and then putting it to work.

• 57:41Steven Bartlett?

  Is there truth in the fact that spicy foods, specifically spicy peppers, like hot peppers, reduce your appetite?

• 57:50Speaker 01

  They seem to, but I, I don't believe that that is the main effect. I think the main effect is on metabolism. They, they do seem to affect the appetite in a helpful way. But the main effect, I think, is the metabolic increase. We see, we, we can measure this where we bring people in. And you put on a, kind of a mask, you look like a pilot. And what I'm actually measuring is your carbon dioxide output.

• 58:13Steven Bartlett?

  Right.

• 58:13Speaker 01

  And then your oxygen intake. And that's proportional to your metabolism. It's proportional how fast you're burning calories. And almost anything you eat will cause you to increase your metabolism while you are in the post ingestion period. But, two things. There are certain foods that cause a bigger burn than others. The, the ones that cause the biggest burn are the ones that are high in carbohydrate. But also peppers are for some reason in that category. And if a person has been on a low fat vegan diet going into the test, they get an even bigger burn afterwards. And that's because their body is, we believe, is more insulin sensitive than it was before. So if I want to really increase your burn and help you to get the weight off,

• 58:58Speaker 01

  I would not only serve you these healthy foods at each meal, but I would take advantage of the fact that they are adjusting your physiology for the long, long term.

• 59:06Steven Bartlett?

  What about ginger?

• 59:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, ginger is, is also, it's, it's a relative. Of these other foods, where you see that capsaicin is the one that's that really killer spice. Ginger is kind of its first cousin, and it causes a similar effect.

• 59:20Steven Bartlett?

  A weight loss effect.

• 59:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, and other things too. I mean, people use ginger for many, many things, or people using it for migraines and as an anti-inflammatory. There's a reason that these spices have been used since time memorial. And our goal now is to tackle this big issue of extra weight and just see if we can put it to work for that.

• 59:38Steven Bartlett?

  Mangos, papayas, legumes, green vegetables, orange vegetables are all some of the things included in the power foods diet. The most controversial of all, though, is eggs.

• 59:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:52Steven Bartlett?

  You know, you can come for everything else, but coming for eggs is particularly triggering. You say in the book, eggs are not helpful for your waistline.

• 1:00:01Speaker 01

  Well, eggs have lots of issues. The first is that it's a cholesterol bomb. And the egg industry would like us to believe that they don't raise cholesterol. They clearly do. And we published a review on this where we looked at every study ever done on eggs, and they clearly raise cholesterol. And even even the studies done by the egg industry do show this, although their interpretation is different. If the studies were funded by the egg industry, they'll say, well, it increased cholesterol, but not significantly, or something like that. But they clearly do. And that's for a reason, that an egg, when an egg is laid, that egg doesn't call out for room service. That chicken developing inside has to make the chicken's body from everything that was in the egg.

• 1:00:46Speaker 01

  And so it's laid with a ton of cholesterol because the cholesterol is an integral ingredient for the animal's body. If instead you boil it and eat it, you're getting a ton of cholesterol. So anyway, you can have eggs if you want them, but it's got a huge amount of cholesterol and you don't need the rest of it.

• 1:01:02Steven Bartlett?

  You wrote a book in 2020, which touches on a few of the subjects we've already touched on around the hormones within our body. I think hormones are a under addressed, but very interesting and very important subject matter. For someone that doesn't really understand hormones and doesn't really know the relevance of them, what are our hormones? And why does understanding our hormone balances matter at all?

• 1:01:27Speaker 01

  Hormones are the director that controls everything in your body. And the old way of thinking about food, the old fashioned way of thinking about food was, I eat a bad food, I have a disease. I eat high cholesterol foods, I'll get a heart attack. Fair enough. But what we have now learned is that hormones control everything in your body and foods control your hormones. Hormones are directions, they're letters, they're messages. They go from one part of the body where they're made to another part of the body where they tell it what to do. And if we're not, if we're just eating foods without any understanding of what that's doing to those hormones, then you're a victim of everything that's in your diet. I was sitting at my desk one day, a young woman called me up.

• 1:02:10Speaker 01

  She said, I can't get out of bed. And a lot of women have menstrual cramps. For maybe one in 10, it's off the scale, I can't go to work today type cramps. And that was her situation. She said, I got a business meeting, I'm supposed to be at the airport tomorrow morning, but I can't even move. Could I give her Demerol? That was her question, it's a narcotic. And I said, I can give you heavy duty painkillers for a couple of days. But I was thinking, what, what's causing this? And I started to realize that there was a very good chance that she had too much estrogen in her blood. The estrogen, every month, thickens the lining of the uterus in a woman's body in anticipation of pregnancy.

• 1:02:52Speaker 01

  And that endometrial lining, if there's too much estrogen, it thickens up too much. And then with the menstrual flow, it breaks apart and it releases these maladjusted chemicals called prostaglandins that cause the cramping. So I started thinking, wait a minute, let's reduce her estrogen, let's change her hormones. How are we going to do that? As luck would have it, researchers at Tufts University in Boston had done a study. They brought in a group of women, 48 women, they put them on a metabolic ward, they locked the door, they prepared all the food. They gave them diets for eight to 10 weeks each, either cutting fat, Increasing fiber or doing both at the same time? And what they found was amazing. The more you cut fat, the more estrogen levels came down to a more normal level.

• 1:03:37Speaker 01

  The more that you increased fiber, again, the more that estrogen came down. What they were thinking about was breast cancer. If I can tame estradiol, I can reduce breast cancer risk. But I was thinking, this woman has hormone haywire that's causing her cramps. So I suggested something I don't think any doctor ever suggested before. I said, let me give you some painkillers for today for the marrow so you can function. But would you like to try and experiment? Everything in your diet, I want to be from a plant for the next four weeks. And keep oils really low. What am I doing? I'm making sure she gets max fiber, minimum fat. She called me back four weeks later. She said, Dr. Barnard, I got my period today. Nothing. No, no symptoms whatsoever. She said, this is miraculous.

• 1:04:22Speaker 01

  This hasn't happened to me ever. And, and she, she was cured as long as she stuck with it. But then she would kind of loosen up her diet and then the pain came roaring back. So we then did a randomized trial, which we published in the journal obstetrics and gynecology with our partners at Georgetown University's Department of OB-GYN. And it was randomized. It was the diet versus a supplement that was actually a placebo. And it works. And the diet reduced the duration of pain, the intensity of the pain, as well as PMS symptoms like bloating and water retention and moodiness. All these things got better. Now, there's some variability. For some women, it's just cure. For others, the effect is more mild. But then we started to realize, wait a minute.

• 1:05:03Speaker 01

  How about menopause, where a woman has hot flashes that are driving her crazy? You can change that whole scenario dramatically with food. And things like thyroid function, where a person's hypo or hyperthyroid. All of these things have, have food connections. We need more research. Not everything is known, but there is more than enough known now that people should be able to put it to work for themselves.

• 1:05:28Steven Bartlett?

  Speaking specifically there about, I want to talk about the other things you mentioned, thyroids, menopause, et cetera. But on the point of fertility. A lot of people are struggling with fertility for a variety of different reasons. I think we're all getting a little bit, you know, we're having kids later than ever before, both men and women, and fertility as a conversation is rising and also IVF is becoming more popular for obvious reasons. What impact does our bodies, specifically how large our bodies are and how much fat we have on our bodies, have on our chances of being fertile? And are we seeing any sort of macro trends in human fertility?

• 1:06:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, we are. I mean, fertility is threatened and it's, you see more infertility now than you've probably ever seen. Now, let me say that I'm not cheerleading for increasing human fertility. We've got more than enough of it and I think people shouldn't feel pressured to jump into it if it's not their thing. However, for women who, and men who want to have kids, there are certain things that are good to know about and one is that excess body weight interferes. No big surprise. When women are carrying more body weight, it's a hormone-producing organ. Body fat is not just jello in a bag.

• 1:06:46Speaker 01

  Body fat, each fat cell is metabolically active, creating estrogens that are causing your body to be in an abnormal state. The sweet spot for fertility is if you measure your BMI, your body mass index, and if people don't, have never done it, you just go online and you can look up BMI calculator, you put in your height and your weight. And what it'll say is that a healthy BMI is between 18 and a half and 25. Over 25 is overweight. But within that huge, broad fork, the sweet spot for fertility is around 19 or 20. So it's not just within the healthy range, but within kind of the skinny side of the

• 1:07:31Speaker 01

  healthy range.

• 1:07:32Steven Bartlett?

  Why does my body weight, my sort of body mass, impact how well my reproductive organs are working?

• 1:07:42Speaker 01

  Well, for men, we don't see quite so much that sweet spot. Although what we do see is that if a man acquires more body fat, what's going to happen is he's making more estrogen and losing his testosterone.

• 1:07:55Steven Bartlett?

  So the more weight you have, the more of these sort of estrogens and testosterones the body produces?

• 1:08:01Speaker 01

  The more body fat that you have, the more a man's body will take the testosterone and convert it to estrogen. So you're losing testosterone, gaining estrogen, which is the last thing that you want. But there's another part of the fertility issue, and that's dairy products. And researchers have been looking at this for a long period of time. There has been concern that dairy products interfere with fertility, both for men and for women. And Dan Kramer at Harvard University was really a proponent of this. Looking at different countries, in countries where dairy was just not their thing. There are a lot of countries, particularly in Asia, where dairy just isn't a thing. And there are others where it's everyday food. And you could see fertility tracking inversely with dairy consumption. There was something about dairy that was getting in the way.

• 1:08:45Speaker 01

  And what his theory was, that it's not, in this case, the dairy fat. He believed and wrote that it might be the dairy sugar. Because the dairy sugar is lactose. And it's famous because a lot of people don't digest lactose very well. But the ones who don't digest it are the lucky ones. Because you're not going to consume it. The unlucky ones are people who can digest lactose, and it breaks into two sugars. The lactose sugar has glucose and galactose attached together. And when it breaks apart, that galactose, we believe, is toxic to the ovary. That's a theory, but there's evidence to suggest that it's true. And our concern is not just that it interferes with fertility, but that it's also associated with ovarian cancer. So stay tuned.

• 1:09:29Steven Bartlett?

  Is there a link there also with fiber and fertility? If we have a low-fiber diet, will our fertility...

• 1:09:37Steven Bartlett?

  Drop.

• 1:09:38Speaker 01

  We would, we would have to think so because all of these things sort of go in the same direction. A plant-based diet tends to get your hormones in a better balance.

• 1:09:46Steven Bartlett?

  Why though? What, what is fiber doing inside the body that's causing my, my hormones to change?

• 1:09:51Speaker 01

  Okay, your liver, every minute of every day, even while you're asleep, is filtering your blood. One of the things it filters out is anything that shouldn't be there, a toxin or even a medication. Your liver says, I'm not sure we want this in your blood, it'll try to remove it. And excess estrogens are also removed. When they're removed by the liver cells, they're sent through into the intestinal tract. Your, your liver, through the bile duct, sends unwanted estrogens, excess estrogens, down into the intestinal tract, and they go out into the toilet. Except, let's say, um, I don't have much fiber in my diet. Let's say that I'm eating cheese and I'm eating a lot of meat, these don't have fiber

• 1:10:36Speaker 01

  at all. Then in that case, the estrogens go down the intestinal tract, and before they can be excreted, they're reabsorbed through the intestinal wall, back into the blood. Doctors call this enterohypatic circulation. And so that very same estrogen molecule that your liver spotted, and it removed it, and it sent it down into your intestinal tract, thinking it was getting rid of it, it went through the intestinal wall, back into the blood, and ended up at the liver.

• 1:10:59Steven Bartlett?

  Because there wasn't enough fiber?

• 1:11:00Speaker 01

  Because there was not enough fiber. If you have fiber in your diet, the fiber grabs those estrogen molecules, and it carries them out with the waste.

• 1:11:06Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, so this is my conclusion here, just to make sure I'm perfectly clear. If I have a lot of excess fat on my body, that means that I'm going to be producing more, if I'm a woman, I'm going to be producing a lot of more estrogen.

• 1:11:16Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:11:16Steven Bartlett?

  Because the fat cells produce estrogen, so there's more estrogen being produced. And if I don't have the fiber, that estrogen's going to go into my liver, and then it's going to be reabsorbed back into my bloodstream and stay there, increasing my estrogen levels to a point where I'm struggling with fertility. But if I do have a lot of fiber, the fiber will grab that excess estrogen, and it will take it out into the toilet.

• 1:11:35Speaker 01

  Exactly. And, and you want hormones, you want to be in balance, not too little, not too much. Hormones will kill you. Um, thyroid hormone. Um, these can, all of these things can ultimately be fatal if they're in too high an amount or too low of an amount.

• 1:11:51Steven Bartlett?

  What's a thyroid?

• 1:11:52Speaker 01

  The thyroid is this little Clark Kent at the base of your neck.

• 1:11:56Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:57Speaker 01

  Um, you can barely feel that it's there, but the thyroid gland makes thyroid hormone, which gives you energy. And if it's not working... You know it. You get out of bed in the morning, you look in the mirror and you see it. I just don't look right. My energy's not good. There's something wrong with my hair. My skin doesn't feel right. And a lot of people are low in thyroid.

• 1:12:18Steven Bartlett?

  I've heard that phrase before a few times, underactive thyroid. Does that just mean that the thyroid's not producing enough thyroid hormone?

• 1:12:26Speaker 01

  Exactly. It's not making enough, and there are two reasons for it. The first reason is that you can't make one molecule of thyroid hormone if you don't have iodine in your diet. And iodine is an element that's in the earth, it's in seaweeds, it's in a number of things like that. But you may not be consuming it. Now luckily, there is iodide added to salt. So your average person in most countries gets iodine in that, from that source. And people who live in Japan and countries where they eat sea vegetables a lot get huge amounts of iodine. But if you're low in iodine, you can't make thyroid hormone. The bigger reason, though, here in the US, is antibodies.

• 1:13:06Speaker 01

  That your body makes antibodies to kill bacteria or to kill viruses. Your white blood cells make these antibodies, which are protein torpedoes that find that virus and knock it out. But for some reason, your white blood cells will make antibodies that attack you. And they attack your thyroid gland, and they stop it from working. And autoimmune conditions are, there are many of them. Rheumatoid arthritis is antibodies are attacking the lining of your joints. And what we believe is happening is that something entered your body and triggered that antibody release, and that something could be a dietary protein,

• 1:13:51Speaker 01

  like dairy proteins or meat. Now, no one has ever done a study to this point to see if a plant-based diet could reverse. Hypothyroidism, but we have evidence that they should. Because first of all, in the Adventist Health Study II, they brought in sixty, seventy thousand people. And they showed that the people with the most hypothyroidism, the people in whom it was most common, were the big dairy consumers, in fact vegetarians, who were eating lots and lots of milk and cheese. The dairy protein, we believe, is the trigger for this. The people who had the least hypothyroidism were the vegans. When it came to hyperthyroidism, the same thing happens, but the physiology is a little different.

• 1:14:34Speaker 01

  Your antibodies are now attacking the turn-off switch, so the thyroid can't turn off. You can't regulate it anymore, and you're cranking out too much thyroid hormone. They are the people who have the most risk are the meat eaters, omnivores, people eating a lot of meat, a lot of dairy. Again, the vegans are the lowest in both. And we do see individual cases, anecdotal cases, of people who've changed their diets and their thyroid's improved. But what we need is a randomized trial.

• 1:15:00Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, and I think that's the important point, isn't it? Because I always think, when I've heard people talking about the sort of meat-eating diet versus the vegan diet, my brain goes, well, you know, the fact that this could be a massive stereotype, and it might be wrong, so just to caveat that. But I tend to think that people that eat a vegan diet generally make better health choices outside of their diet. They tend to have more exercise, they tend to just be more conscious, they tend to probably smoke less, they probably drink less alcohol, versus someone on the typical American diet who's having McDonald's, drinking, having alcohol, lots of sugar, processed foods, et cetera, probably exercising less. So in those sort of mass-scale studies that aren't controlled and randomized, I go, it's hard to believe anything, because I don't know the full picture.

• 1:15:45Speaker 01

  We saw this particularly when we looked at intelligence testing in kids. The kids who are raised on plant-based diets have a score much higher on intellectual testing. And I believe that in those kids, it's probably an artifact, that they're raised by parents who are very well-educated and are giving their kids every opportunity, and so they're using a plant-based diet for the kid because they think it's the best, best thing.

• 1:16:12Speaker 01

  However, the way the answer to this is to do a randomized trial. Because when you bring in people who are all reading a junk food diet, and then you can randomly assign some people to a control group and others to a specific dietary intervention, then you're taking people who've been eating the same kind of diet, but what you're changing is the foods that they're eating. And let me be clear. Getting away from animal products is always a good idea. However, when you pick and choose what's left, there's a big difference between a bowl of blueberries and a plate of chips. So what we want to... It's always a good idea to go away from the animal products, but we want to bring in the best of what's left. And if we choose the foods the right way,

• 1:16:56Speaker 01

  we can knock off that weight we've wanted to knock off and we can really reclaim our health in a good way.

• 1:17:01Steven Bartlett?

  The other book of yours that I was reading was about the power foods for the brain. I recently had my brain scanned. I found out lots of interesting things about why I am the way that I am. And since then, the doctor that scanned my brain, Dr. Armin, he prescribed me a bunch of different things to help with my... I guess to regrow my brain in many respects, because there's a couple of concerns or there's at least a trajectory which might not be great if I don't make some changes. The book you wrote discusses Alzheimer's a lot and general sort of things like memory, etc.

• 1:17:33Steven Bartlett?

  Why did you write that book? What was the call there, the personal reason for doing that?

• 1:17:39Speaker 01

  Well, there were a number of things, but I have to say, my father died. And on the day that he died, his heart stopped beating. But the truth of the matter is that he died, for all intents and purposes, five, six, seven years earlier than that, because he had dementia. And it started out... He was an intelligent person. He was a physician, very well read, but he started to have memory lapses and it got worse and worse and worse so that it was every day he had trouble with his memory. And then he couldn't control his emotions and ended up not being able to control anything in his life. And had to be separated from my mother, who cared for 24/7, and he finally died.

• 1:18:23Speaker 01

  It's a horrible thing to have happen. And in 2003...

• 1:18:29Speaker 01

  The Chicago Health and Aging Project published some amazing findings. What they did is they went around Chicago, they just rounded up people and said, "What did you eat for breakfast?" And people would write down what they ate for breakfast, what they ate for lunch, what they ate for dinner, and then they just waited. As time went on, who retained their cognitive abilities? Over years? Over years. Okay. Exactly. So you do structured tests where you look to see, can you recall words? Can you draw a face or a clock and put things in the proper perspective? And there are a number of other tests. And those people who stayed mentally clear tended to be the ones who tended to avoid saturated fat.

• 1:19:09Speaker 01

  And the specific number was about a two-thirds reduction in the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease in those individuals who are very low in saturated fat. What's saturated fat? That's the solid fat that is in dairy number one, meat number two. That alone was amazing. In the Journal of Neurology and other journals, these studies started coming out and we thought, "Let me make the clock go backward because I want to tell my father. My dad grew up in a cattle ranch. We ate like we were in the cattle industry all my life. You're getting this huge load of saturated fat going down your gullet, affecting your heart, affecting your brain in ways that we only have recently come to appreciate." But the truth of the matter is, it's not just that.

• 1:19:53Speaker 01

  There are five things you need to do to protect your brain. If you're not doing them, you're playing with fire. Number one, get away from the meat and the dairy products because they are pushing the saturated fat into your diet. And there are others too, like coconut oil and palm oil. They're marketed as healthy, but they are as bad as butter. Number two, there are metals in your diet. You're not aware that they're there, but iron, copper, these are things you need a tiny bit of. You don't need the overload that comes in liver and in steak. Aluminum is a metal that you don't need any of at all, but it's an added ingredient in all kinds of foods, as well as in medications. Number three, you need to exercise. Lace up your sneakers. You are great with this, you are a role model. People should do what you do.

• 1:20:38Speaker 01

  Thank you. And researchers at the University of Illinois brought in 120 people, older folks, who were not exercising. And what they asked them to do? Was a 10 minute walk, a brisk walk. Now brisk means I'm breathing a little faster than I was before, but not so fast that I can't speak. And 10 minutes, three times a week. Then the next week, 15 minutes. Then the next week, 20 minutes. And when they got up to 40 minutes, three times a week, they stayed at that level. And what they showed is that the hippocampus, which had been, the seat of memory in the brain, which had been shrinking, started to reverse that process.

• 1:21:20Speaker 01

  And you could see a measurable reversal of that brain shrinkage. Number four, you have to stop. You can't exercise all the time. You can't read things all the time. You can't watch documentaries all the time, hoping to protect your brain. Your brain needs downtime. And when the clock strikes 10, I don't care how good the podcast is that you are listening to, turn it off and go to sleep. Get up early the next day if you need to. The first.

• 1:21:46Steven Bartlett?

  Even if it's this podcast, turn it off.

• 1:21:48Speaker 01

  Even this one, pick it up tomorrow morning and you're going to learn better. Because in the.

• 1:21:53Steven Bartlett?

  Agree to disagree. You've said a lot of things that are controversial, but I think that might be the most controversial.

• 1:21:57Speaker 01

  All right. This one will allow you to watch it, particularly if it's me talking. But in the first part of the night, your body is engaged in what's called slow wave sleep. That's where you're taking your apartment and organizing things. All the file folders and things that are all over higgly piggly. When in the early part of the night, 11:30, 12, 1 o'clock in the morning, your body is filing away. Here's a new word. And it's putting it in a place where you can find it when you need it. Later on in the night, the brain does what's called REM sleep, rapid eye movement. You're dreaming. And now you're integrating physical skills, like playing the violin or tennis or anything physical and also emotions.

• 1:22:40Speaker 01

  So if you are not sleeping, what's happening? You're going to have crummy memory. Anybody can test this themselves. Just look at a time when you're sleep deprived. You discover your memory is shot after about three, four days and your emotional control is much worse. Get a good night's sleep. After a few days, you'll get right back together. So we've talked about avoiding saturated fat. You want to avoid the excess metals. You need to exercise. You need to stop and sleep. But there's a fifth thing. When somebody has any rapid change in mental status, you got to walk in the bathroom, open up the medicine cabinet and see what's new. Because we have seen so many medications that are causing brain effects we never expected.

• 1:23:25Speaker 01

  One of the most surprising was statins. We have seen hundreds and hundreds of cases of individuals, by now it's thousands, of individuals where you're having memory problems, sometimes severe, from statin drugs. Don't get me wrong, statins effectively lower cholesterol for some people that has a life-saving effect. But that and many other medications are going to affect the memory in some ways that can be so severe that when we take that medication away and that your body re-heal, you can pack your bags and get out of that nursing home and go back home.

• 1:23:57Steven Bartlett?

  It's a really interesting example there. I think, as you say, that the, there is life-saving consequences to statins and also that is a side effect, right?

• 1:24:07Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:24:08Steven Bartlett?

  In some cases. Right. But not all cases, I guess, is the point.

• 1:24:11Speaker 01

  Not all cases, exactly. But 90% of people on statins don't need them or wouldn't need them if they followed a healthy diet. The reason they have a high cholesterol is that they are eating products that cause their body to make more cholesterol, and those are animal-derived products.

• 1:24:27Steven Bartlett?

  If I, if I was able to look at your father's brain before he passed away, would I have been able to see the dementia?

• 1:24:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, you can. This is, this is the terrible thing, is that we do know that if you catch dementing processes early, reversal is possible. You see that not only with, with paper and pencil testing, their memory is getting better, but you can see it on the brain scan where the hippocampus is, the reversal process is, is turning around. But there is a point where the brain cells themselves are dying. It's like a shriveled cauliflower. And there's going to, there is a time where that memory is just not going to come back. And so we want to prevent it, and we want to prevent it starting now. At Kaiser Permanente, researchers did a study. They brought in almost 10,000 people and they tracked their cholesterol levels

• 1:25:18Speaker 01

  and found that if you got a high cholesterol level, it's not just bad for your heart, it's bad for the brain. The cholesterol levels were taken when the people were about forty. So the point being that what you're doing now is affecting your heart. It's affecting your brain now.

• 1:25:36Steven Bartlett?

  There's someone listening to this right now that is twenty one, twenty four, twenty six, twenty eight. What's the message to them?

• 1:25:43Speaker 01

  The message to them is pick the bean burrito. The message to them is is pick the foods that are healthiest for you.

• 1:25:51Steven Bartlett?

  But does it matter then? Does it matter? Because, you know, a lot of them will think, oh, I'll worry about that later. I'll worry about I'm thirty one. I'll worry about this stuff when I get to fifty.

• 1:26:01Speaker 01

  I I absolutely know what you're talking about. When I was that age, I smoked cigarettes. I smoked about a pack a day. Yes, it's true. I did. In fact, all the medical students did. We figured I'm under so much stress. You know, when I'm when I'm done with medical school, I'll quit at that point. You know, nowadays, medical students wouldn't do this. We we we smoked the cigarettes we bought in the hospital gift shop. That's the yeah, our patients could smoke in bed. As long as there wasn't oxygen flowing. But anyway, let's face it, young people take any risk that they can. And but but what really got our attention was studies showing that if you look at the tragic cases where teenagers are killed in an accident or killed in wartime and you look at autopsies,

• 1:26:45Speaker 01

  what you see is atherosclerosis, that the heartening of the arteries has already begun, and it's been working through their teens. By about age eighteen or nineteen, many kids have already lost one of their lumbar arteries. That what this means is your your heart gives off the aorta, the huge main line that goes up, and then it does a U turn, goes right down in front of your spine, and it gives blood to each vertebral segment. And the very first place where those atherosclerotic lesions form and pave off those little bifurcating arteries, the little side arteries that are going to help your lumbar spine. The very first place where atherosclerosis occurs in a big way is in this lumbar spine.

• 1:27:27Speaker 01

  So you'll see a guy eighteen, nineteen, has completely lost the blood supply to one part of the lower back. Now, there are collaterals, but eventually he's going to get lower back pain because the discs between the vertebrae. They don't get any blood supply at all. They get oxygen by diffusion from the vertebrae. And the more you cut off the blood supply, the weaker that disc gets. And it's like a pillow where the outer covering of the pillow degenerates and the stuffing comes out, pushes on a nerve and you got pain all the way down your leg. And you thought, well, that was because I was stressed and I was strained, I was in an accident. Yeah, those are all precipitating factors, but it was, you were set up for it because your body cannot heal anymore because you've got no blood supply anymore.

• 1:28:11Speaker 01

  So a clean diet can help protect against those things.

• 1:28:14Steven Bartlett?

  Well, what I have seen in your father's brain, if I, if I looked at your father's brain under a microscope, would I have seen like a plaque buildup? Is that what it's like?

• 1:28:20Speaker 01

  You would see several things. You would see plaque between the neurons, between the brain cells are what we call beta amyloid. And it's these proteins that the brain cells make. And it's still controversial what it's doing there, but most people believe it's part of the disease process. And there are malignant proteins called tau proteins that are in the neurons there. They're, they're there. They've been, we've known they've been there for a long period of time, but it's worse than that. The brain itself, I mean, at a hundred feet, you could see the difference. If you could look at that scan, a healthy brain stays big and vibrant. The, the Alzheimer's brain is visibly shrinking and deteriorating.

• 1:29:04Speaker 01

  And that person is not going to come back from that.

• 1:29:06Steven Bartlett?

  Do you know, there's a big school of thought that doing a lot of sort of crosswords and stuff like that helps the brain to kind of defends against that shrinking, that shriveling you're talking about. People, one of the things I was prescribed for my brain is to do a lot of paddle sports and like racket sports. What's your view on that?

• 1:29:23Speaker 01

  I think we need more research on all those areas, but I am inclined to think that the more we use it, the less we lose it. So if we use our brain and not just reading, thinking, vocabulary, things are good. In, in Canada, researchers discovered, you know, some people speak English in Canada, some people speak French, some people speak both. Some people have three languages or four languages. The more languages people speak, the more delayed is any kind of cognitive decline. So what we believe is that it may well be that using the neurons keeps them active. But we're not just using our brains to remember words and remember sentences and remember facts. You're using your brain. Every step you take on it, when you're out running, your brain has to anticipate where your foot is going to go,

• 1:30:08Speaker 01

  where the pavement is to keep you from falling down. And you're not just running along. Your brain is automatically tracking where you're going. It's keeping you from falling over. It's regulating your balance. And that is a big job. It's not just muscles. Exercise involves the brain in a huge way. And that is great to feed your brain with physical exercise, with things that allow your vestibular system, you know, to work. That means anything that is involved with turning and movement. All that is great for the brain.

• 1:30:38Steven Bartlett?

  I also read in your book that exercise in particular helps sort of clear out toxins that are associated with sort of cognitive decline and the decay of brain cells.

• 1:30:48Speaker 01

  To make it simple, if the more you're moving, the more your heart is pumping. It's doing that to get oxygen into your muscles. That's its job. But what is it doing in the process? It's sending the blood up to your brain and the blood is coming out of your brain, carrying things away. So the more active we are, the better off we're going to be.

• 1:31:06Steven Bartlett?

  And in that book, you say overall, they show that regular aerobic exercise trims the risk of dementia by about 30% and cuts the risk of Alzheimer's disease roughly by 50%.

• 1:31:16Speaker 01

  And I think the numbers are better than that, to tell you the honest truth. If you combine a healthy diet, which means getting away from the saturated fat, which is the dairy and the meat, and having the vitamin E-rich foods, like some nuts and some seeds, which are healthy vitamin E-rich foods, not pills. You get it from the foods themselves. Avoid the metals. Lace up your sneakers. And if you can get a good night's sleep, I would suggest that we could probably cut Alzheimer's risk by 80%. It needs to be proved. We need to prove it in research studies. But there is no reason to wait. You don't want to be in the control group that is doing nothing to see what happens to your brain.

• 1:31:52Steven Bartlett?

  Participants in a Chicago study who got three to four vegetable servings per day slowed their rate of cognitive decline by forty percent compared to those who got only one serving of vegetables per day. And I guess that speaks to the importance of vitamin E, which is in all of those vegetables, right?

• 1:32:06Speaker 01

  There is vitamin E in those, but there's a bunch more of the vegetables as well. There's fiber and there's many other vegetables, B vitamins as well. And I gotta say, to be in the high vegetable group in the United States, even having one or two vegetables per day is pretty great, except for unfortunately, the only vegetable a lot of Americans eat is french fries or potato chips or something like that. So bring in the vegetables in a big way.

• 1:32:28Steven Bartlett?

  Coffee?

• 1:32:30Speaker 01

  Who knows? People have wanted to say coffee is a healthy thing. And in fact, there have been studies that show that people who drink more coffee are at less risk of Alzheimer's disease. Now, the problem is it had to be a lot of coffee. It had to be five cups a day or even more. And there are other studies that do counteract that. I'm inclined to think that maybe the biggest consideration is what goes into your coffee. So if what's going into your coffee is some cream or a whole bunch of sugar, that's really not so healthy for you. Maybe that's not the best choice.

• 1:33:02Steven Bartlett?

  And lastly, you said the word metals. When you say metals, what do you mean? Like this cup here is metal. What do you mean by metals? Keeping metals out of my body?

• 1:33:11Speaker 01

  There are three metals we're concerned about: iron, copper, and aluminum. There may be others too, but those are the biggies. Iron is something that your body needs. Your body makes hemoglobin with iron, and you need that to carry oxygen. That's what makes your blood red. However, your body only needs a certain amount. And if you get too much, it can damage the heart and can damage the brain. It's easy to get too much. Our bodies are built for plant foods, and plant foods have what's called non-heme iron. And the beauty of this form of iron is if you're already iron overloaded, your body says, I got it. Let me absorb less iron now. If you're low in iron, your body can take that non-heme iron and absorb more.

• 1:33:56Speaker 01

  It's the form your body can regulate. But if like me, you grew up in North Dakota and you're eating a lot of beef, there's a lot of iron in it and your body cannot regulate the hem iron. It just comes into your system and you end up iron overloaded. So iron is the first one and the solution is avoid animal products. Or if you want to be clever, you can go donate blood and you can give your iron to somebody else. It works. Copper, copper pipes. If you have copper pipes in your house and all night long the water sits in them and then you fill your coffee maker in the morning, you're getting a big load of copper. The aluminum is quite a story though. In England, researchers looked at different counties where there was more aluminum in the drinking water.

• 1:34:39Speaker 01

  It's not in the well and it's not in the river. It's used in the purification process. The aluminum compounds are added to clear the water and you have to then carefully extract them. And if you don't extract it, you get aluminum out of your tap. And the counties with the most aluminum in their drinking water had 50% higher risk of Alzheimer's. So researchers have looked at that and there are plenty of neurologists who think it's just a fluke, except that you do see it with some frequency. The reason we think it's not a fluke is that aluminum is a neurotoxin. And we learned that from industrial accidents where aluminum compounds are suddenly inhaled by everybody. It's without question a neurotoxin. And secondly, there is zero use for aluminum in human physiology.

• 1:35:24Speaker 01

  You don't need it. So if you're taking an antacid that's made with aluminum, or you're putting on a deodorant that's got aluminum as one of the antiperspirant ingredients in it, some of them have that, a lot of them have that, goes through the skin and you're getting this neurotoxin which is in your body. So while the research is continuing, my advice is steer clear of the aluminum completely and be careful about the iron and copper. You put this together, your body can be as healthy as nature wanted it to be.

• 1:35:52Steven Bartlett?

  I've started thinking a lot about that, about the products that I have around my house. You know, I just... For many, many years, just bought whatever was in the supermarket that I thought had a nice label or, you know, I was a victim of marketing. So whatever marketed the product best to me, I'd just buy. And then in the last sort of six months, I'm now sort of scanning the things that I'm buying from supermarkets and shops and the things by my bathroom sink to just try and make sure that they are clean, as clean as possible from some of these sort of toxic chemicals. Do you do that?

• 1:36:22Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And that comes with everything you're eating. If I've got the opportunity to choose organic or non-organic vegetables, even if the organic takes cost more, do I want one with chemicals or without? Frankly, it's a no-brainer.

• 1:36:36Steven Bartlett?

  The app I use, just for anybody, I'm not affiliated with the app at all, but just, I know people are going to be sat there thinking, how are you scanning your stuff? The app I use to scan my products is an app called Think Dirty, which is, has a big database of their ingredients. So I'd recommend that. Neil, what is your closing message? If someone's got this far into the conversation, they've heard everything you've said, and, you know, they're thinking, God, I do love my, I do love my, my food. I love my animal proteins. I love chicken. I love steak. I'm probably not going to quit chicken or steak because it's just, you know, it's one of my favorite foods. It's convenient. What's your closing message to those people?

• 1:37:17Speaker 01

  My message for everybody is let's see what your body can do. Let's see how foods work. Let's not think about the long run. Let's think about the short run. If a person comes in, they've got diabetes. My job with them is to see, can I cure you? So if a person says, well, I don't really want to make big changes, I'm going to say, let's make some huge changes right now, because if we can get cured of this in the next six or eight or 10 weeks, that's good to know. So let's say you're not in that situation, but you've got weight you'd like to lose. You'd like to feel better. Let's make some big changes now. Let's do a little bit of boot camp. Let's see the foods that love you back. Let's put those power foods into your diet and see what they'll do for you. And then after you've had a chance to experience it, then it's up to you. You use it as much or as

• 1:37:59Speaker 01

  little as you want to. And for most people, they just view the world differently ever after.

• 1:38:05Steven Bartlett?

  Neil, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question that has been left for you is

• 1:38:17Steven Bartlett?

  What would you whisper in the ear of your younger self?

• 1:38:23Speaker 01

  Well, I would tell my younger self, frankly, the same thing that I would tell my older self, which is to be grateful for the things that we have and that we have learned. And I would, I would share that with you.

• 1:38:36Speaker 01

  You could do anything that you want to. You could have any kind of guest on your show that you want to. But what you're doing is you're taking information, you're asking terrific questions and talking about important things in a way that is going to get people talking and thinking and trying new things and learning things and maybe disagreeing or agreeing or whatever. But you're starting a discussion that goes around the dinner table and it affects the next generation too. You will never know how many lives you save. But I mean this in all sincerity. You're changing people's lives by changing what they know and what they're trying out. And there are people who are going to be alive because of you. And I'm grateful to be able to play a part in that kind of work.

• 1:39:15Speaker 01

  But I'm also grateful to you for using your podium that you have to share that with other people.

• 1:39:23Steven Bartlett?

  Thank you, Neil. And that's a really incredible compliment that.

• 1:39:28Speaker 01

  It's absolutely, it's absolutely the truth. When you can share information with people that changes their lives, you'll never see the effects and they won't thank you. So that's my job.

• 1:39:38Steven Bartlett?

  Thank you. I appreciate that. And I extend that point of gratitude to our entire team here. There's almost 30 of us that are behind the scenes. I get a lot of the credit in the street because people see my face. But for the other 30 people that sit behind the production and work very hard to find people like you to have these conversations with, they deserve all the credit as well. And I have to say, you know, I have lots of people on this podcast that talk about health, diet, nutrition, all those things. The reason I do it is because I'm interested in it and I want to get better and better and better. And I've seen an improvement in my diet and my gut problems have gone away over the last three years. Lots of people come on the show, they have lots of different ideas about eating meat, about not eating meat, about eating this fruit, da, da, da. What I gain from it, and I probably should say this, although the information can sometimes

• 1:40:23Steven Bartlett?

  be conflicting, right? Which I think information should be conflicting. I think that results in progress. I think it's two ideas clashing with each other that results in a new way of doing things or a new conclusion or a new solution. But for me, what I do, and this is what I advise all my listeners to do when they hear these conversations. Is to listen, is to reserve judgment, is to do your own research. And finally, it is to not worry about perfection, but it is to pick and mix things that get you closer and that induce progress. And that's what I, that's what I do when I sit and listen to these experts. There'll be things you say today, like, I'll be honest with you. I can't see myself quitting chicken breast, right? However, there are many things you've said about blueberries, about, you know,

• 1:41:08Steven Bartlett?

  metals in my diet, about exercise, about legumes and about vegetables and about these power, power foods that you talk about in your book, that I now have more motivation to bring into my life. And that's honestly, I'll never tell anybody what to do with their life, but that's honestly just how I consume this information, especially when it's like varied and conflicting and there's, you know, I find the overlaps. And having spoken to, let's just say I spoke to 10 health experts or authors or, you know, scientists, I find where the information overlaps and I, I take on that information into my life. And that is how I, that's how I proceed with necessary caution. Neil, thank you. Thank you for being one of those people that is pushing conversation forward by

• 1:41:53Steven Bartlett?

  presenting new ideas in new ways and doing it in such a compelling, accessible, story-driven way, because I think that makes the information land in a way that it should. And thank you again for all the lives that you'll save because of the, the messages and the way that you've brought forward the conversation around nutrition. It's an incredibly important, well, can I throw back the compliment you gave me? I'm sure you've saved many thousands and thousands and thousands of lives just by doing what you do. So thank you on behalf of all those people as well. Thank you.

• 1:42:24Steven Bartlett?

  Do you need a podcast to listen to next? We've discovered that people who liked this episode also tend to absolutely love another recent episode we've done. So I've linked that episode in the description below. I know you'll enjoy it.