Dr Neal Barnard - Will a Vegan Diet Improve Your Health?

Full transcript: Dr Neal Barnard on London Real

3:49 This is London Real, I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Dr. Neal Barnard, the American nutrition researcher, author, and health advocate. Your work promotes a plant-based diet and has been featured in the vegan documentaries What the Health and Forks Over Knives. In 2011, you were inducted into the Vegetarian Hall of Fame.

4:05 Your upcoming book, Your Body and Balance, explores the new science of how hormones are wreaking havoc on the body and a solution that improves health, reduces pain and sheds weight. Dr. Neal, welcome to London Real. Thank you, delighted to be here really. Great to have you here.

4:18 First off, what’s it like coming to London? Is this a city you know very well and how are some of the food choices here and how do we eat? It’s great to be in London. I have to say, I love this city. I don’t get here nearly enough.

4:33 Although I have to say, I have a little bit of PTSD about London because I was here for several days, oh, maybe 10 or 15 years ago, during the McLible trial. Do you remember when there were these activists who were leafletting outside of a McDonald’s, saying the food is unhealthy and anti-environmental, and McDonald’s sued these activists, dragged them into court for what turned out to be the longest running civil trial in English history. So I was brought over to testify on behalf of these leafleting activists saying, you know, the food really does leave a bit to be desired.

5:05 So anyway, having been grilled by a man in a wig has left me with some. I missed that, it was off my radar for some reason. Oh yeah, no, it was a big thing. And how is, in general, does the British diet compare to the American or some of the choices or do you notice anything when you’re here? Like, okay, there’s this or there isn’t this.

5:23 It’s changed over time. You know, British beef gave way to a lot of vegetarian options before anybody else. You know, there was the veggie burger that was ubiquitous. And I would say London was ahead of the rest of the world with promoting plant-based diets. But then America started catching up.

5:41 And anyhow, but every time I turn around, there is more and more options and here perhaps more than anywhere else. Yeah, and I know you travel to France quite a bit, and you’re saying in the last few years, like, it’s just a thing. Like, you have options when you go there. 30 years ago, it wasn’t that way. I remember I went into a restaurant in the south of France, and I was looking at the menu, and in my kind of broken French, I was saying, you know, what do you have?

6:07 And I explained to the server that I didn’t need animal products, and she said, m’est bizar! And I was back at the very same restaurant a couple years ago. And then I noticed all the way up and down the menu, they have these little V’s for their vegetarian choices. So things are changing there too. Yeah, things are changing.

6:28 And I just saw a post from Niemey Delgado, who’s the vegan bodybuilder who was in the movie Game Changers, which I’m sure we’ll talk about. And he’s in Greece and he’s holding up a veggie burger. And he’s like, the last thing I expected on an island in Greece is to have this option. So everybody’s waking up. Everybody knows people want these options as well.

6:46 I was told by vegans when they come to Britain that the choices of locally produced vegetables are just really high. I think this country has one of the highest concentrations of all these different types of organically grown vegetables because of the weather and things like that. So everyone always says there’s a lot of great options here. There are, and also, first of all, the agriculture here is wonderful, but secondly, it’s also a bit of a melting pot, especially London.

7:11 There must be 200 different cuisines represented at restaurants all down the street. So you’ll have no shortage of choices. Yeah, British food is no longer bad. Don’t believe the hype you hear. It’s all good now, there’s a lot of choices.

7:25 You and I actually grew up with a similar background and you don’t know it yet, but I’m gonna drop this on you. I know you grew up in North Dakota and your grandfather was a cattle rancher, is that true? Grandfather, uncles, cousins, and my dad as well. Up until my dad was old enough to vote with his shoes and he hated raising cattle, and so he left, and he went to medical school. And then he came back to the Midwest, and he became the diabetes expert for Fargo and all of eastern North Dakota.

7:59 But I gotta tell you, we still ate like we were in the cattle business. It was every day, roast beef, baked potatoes, and corn. Except for special occasions when it was roast beef, baked potatoes, and peas. That was it, it was a very limited diet, and it was very meat-heavy, And my dad kind of paid a price for it personally because I don’t think he ever really recognized what food could do for him or his family. And he didn’t put it to work in his practice.

8:22 For him, diabetes treatment was load up that insulin syringe. We’re gonna do the best we can with your diabetes while you’re alive. And it was not something that attracted me, I have to say. Isn’t that fascinating how medicine can not sometimes see what’s right in front of it and then a generation later, your work is all about, Hey, what about the diet? And animal products can cause diabetes, not the story everyone hears about sugars and starches.

8:49 Does that ever surprise you? Because you’re a doctor and you’re in the field, probably trained very similarly to your father, and yet there was that strange disconnect. I never once heard my father say that anybody ever got better. He would come home, it was six o’clock, he’d sit down in his bag. I never once heard him say, the patient came in, his diabetes is gone.

9:09 Never. And of course now, we see that all the time. And of course the answer is not a magic pill, it has to do with rearranging the contents of your plate. But of course it comes from something we’ve been exploring for many years, which is what really causes this disease? How can I change what’s going on inside the cells of my body so that the diabetes process can reverse?

9:31 That’s something my dad didn’t know. We know it now and the answer turned out to be much more simple than loading up an insulin syringe. It’s fascinating, because like you said, what’s in the syringe, let’s stick some more things in our body, and yet the simple, slightly different choice of foods in your mouth could have a massive effect. Well, diabetes is not a metformin deficiency. Any more than a high cholesterol level is not a Lipitor deficiency, or high blood pressure is treated like a lisinopril deficiency.

9:59 The patient comes in, and instead of helping them to understand how they got there, we hand them a prescription. And some of those prescriptions are a good idea. But there’s a lot of times when, if we address the disease process itself, that patient’s life is just transformed. Yeah, well look, I wanna talk about that. I also wanna talk about my plant-based year, last year.

10:22 My grandpa, Benedict, which was my mother’s father, had a feedlot just outside of Phoenix, Arizona. And he was a cattleman all of his life. And a feedlot, for people that don’t know, is like 10,000 ahead of cattle being fed right before they die with like a high concentration of grains in order to get their weight up and then boom. And I remember as a kid going to visit the feedlot and all I could remember was how bad it smelled because it was just really bad and it was these animals about to be killed.

10:52 And I remember we would take a half a cow home every year and we would literally drive it from Arizona to San Diego and I grew up around this. And funny enough, you know, Neil, I remember my brother and sister kind of started going vegetarian when I was a kid. And my grandpa, I mean, he almost had a heart attack and he later had a heart attack, but he almost, he just didn’t know how to process that back in the 80s, that anyone would think that way. But it’s enough to make you a vegetarian.

11:18 I remember when I was a kid, and my father had left the cattle business, but we nonetheless drove some cattle to the stockyards in East St. Louis. And as we were bringing the cows off the truck, you could see the look in their eyes, they’re scared. Of course, they’re a product, their value is just based on the pound, but you can look in their eyes and you can see a scared animal and they were messy because they’d been pushed all around in the truck, some of them were injured.

11:48 They’d come down and you’d think, is this really civilization at its best? And I have to say, I think we can do better than that. Yeah, I guess it was another one of those things like you just eat what’s on your plate and you just kill these animals because that’s what we’ve always done, so. And you think you have to. And some people believe then and some still imagine that you can’t get protein without it or you, whatever.

12:14 Culture has a tremendous amount of momentum and it really keeps us going in a not very helpful way. Yeah, most people have no idea or would never admit that most of their decisions are based on what they see and they just repeat other people’s behavior. Logic plays almost no role in human behavior. I really mean that you know when a person plans their breakfast They don’t think hmm. I’d like to have maybe 15 grams of fiber and could use some beta-carotene. They don’t do that It’s culture number one what you grew up with and what your friends do Noise number two by noise. I mean you turn on the television. It’s this new product and that new product and then there’s wishful thinking and addictions and Money when people get more money, they start eating a maybe not so helpful way You see that in China now, for example, China’s got enough money They can dramatically increase their pork intake and so diabetes is going up in that country But no logic plays almost no role in not only in our food choices, but almost anything else that humans do Unfortunately, but nonetheless we appeal to that little sliver of logic and something to see if we can turn human behavior around Yeah No, I know and I remember my mom had me on non-fat milk because that was what was being talked about like in the 70s and 80s, it was like, so we were on skim milk because fat was bad or fat made you fat or I don’t know.

13:30 And then later, there was always a trend based on kind of what was happening. But yeah, I just finished on the cattle thing. Yeah, something probably inside of me thought something’s not right here, you know, because it just, I mean, if you’re into a feed lot, it’s just like, it’s not a natural smell. It’s pretty bad. Yes.

13:46 And there’s a lot of death there too, or soon to be death, so. How did that upbringing then kind of take you on the route you’re on now? Because you could have kind of been a clone of your dad or just continued down that path. What was the thing that really switched your path? A couple things.

14:05 One was in later high school, I was an exchange student in Europe for just a summer program. Very short, just a couple of months, I was in Northern Belgium where the language is Flemish. So my high school French didn’t help me at all. But I was plunked into a family that didn’t share my North Dakota, Republican, Protestant views of anything and the kids in the city made, it was a village. The kids in the village would make fun of me because I didn’t speak a word of the language and the family I lived with, they were lovely, but they made fun of this American capitalist boy who didn’t share kind of their values.

14:44 Anyway, to be in a different family, different language, different religion, different everything and then to get thrown right back into Fargo. I just got the bends, and for the next year or so, I found myself rethinking all of the values that I’d grown up with, and then went to college, and it was a liberal time with civil rights and so forth, welling up. But then, the year before I went to medical school, I had a peculiar experience. I was working in a hospital in Minneapolis as the autopsy assistant, and down in the morgue, the morgue was in the basement.

15:13 Nobody would ever go down there. The phone was probably from the 1940s. It would make this big click. You know, the phone guy didn’t want to go in the morgue. So, but that was my job.

15:22 And when a person died in the hospital, I would prepare the body for the pathologist to do the autopsy. And a guy died in a hospital of a massive heart attack and probably from eating hospital food, but that’s another story. So the pathologist knew that I was gonna go to medical school the following year and so he made this a lesson for me every time. So he made this big incision in the skin and pulled the skin back and cut through the ribs and took this huge wedge of ribs off the chest and put it on the table.

15:53 And then suddenly you see this heart. He says, look in the coronary arteries. They’re called coronaries because they crown the heart. He took a scalpel and he opened it, one of the coronaries, and he said, look inside. So I got to put my gloves on and poke around inside.

16:08 And it was not this rubbery, flexible artery. It felt like concrete. He said, bacon and eggs, Neil. What are you talking about? He said, atherosclerotic disease has killed this man.

16:22 And then he opened the carotids to the brain. The carotid arteries, the big arteries that go up your neck. Same process there. The renal arteries, the arteries to the legs. The same atherosclerotic process.

16:32 Okay, he’s done. He writes up his notes, myocardial infarction, massive systemic atherosclerotic disease. He leaves. I take the ribs, put them back in the chest. sew up everything, clean up, and I went up to the cafeteria afterward.

16:45 And they were serving ribs for lunch. And I have to say, I looked at it, and I thought, this is, it was just like the body. And the smell of it was the smell of a body. And it was not a human body, but I thought this is a dead body, and I didn’t become a vegetarian on the spot. But I couldn’t eat it, I couldn’t take it.

17:06 I mean, I couldn’t put it on my plate. And so, anyhow, this started to work on my brain, And then I started medical school right after that, and you can’t unlearn something like that. So that was, for me, a bit of a turning point. And this is like 80s, or this is 70s. 76, wow, so really early, these are new ideas.

17:24 Not many people were talking about being a vegetarian back then. Or was there a small culture? I met three vegetarians when I was growing up. They were all doctors from India, whom my father brought over to the house. And the only reason I knew they were, I never heard the word.

17:38 My mother served roast beef. An hour after dinner and they had left and they were very polite, my mother went, oh my God. I said, mom, what is it? She said, I served beef. I said, mom, you serve beef every night.

17:56 She said, they’re probably vegetarian. And that was the first time I heard of it. Did they eat? I was trying to remember. I imagine they pushed things around on their plate.

18:08 They didn’t say anything. Okay, so when you were going to medical school, you were all looking through it at a lens of maybe there’s a root of a problem here. Maybe there’s a diet is the issue, and maybe that a vegetable diet or a vegan diet is potentially something that’s gonna help us. It was that, and also, yes. The health issues were starting to come up.

18:27 There was growing evidence at that time that cancer was related to what we ate, which was totally new, because we thought it was only cigarettes and genetics, and that’s it, and with breast cancer and colon cancer, people started to look at meat, dairy, and others. But I also started to realize, I started to rethink what animals go through. And for my upbringing, that was not something you’re supposed to deal with, because I spent every fall with my dad, with my 12-gauge shotgun, waiting in the cold for the ducks and geese to come out of Canada.

19:01 And we would sit in these marshes outside of Fargo, And we’d blow the ducks and geese out of the sky and bring their corpses home, and my mom would fix them up, and we’d go to the rodeo, and all of these things that I took as normal and fun, really. But I started to rethink all of these things, and I started to rethink, there’s sort of no more animal more gentle than a duck trying to get out of cold weather. Wanna just admire them, let them go. So I started to think that maybe a more civilized approach to animals might be a good one.

19:37 Okay, so this wasn’t just science for you, there was also some ethics involved as well. There was, there was, and it was brought to the fore for me in quite a different way. In medical school, one day the professor came, pharmacology professor came in and said, form your groups next week as dog lab. We all, everybody knew what dog lab was, it was a required experience at almost every medical school. Half education, half hazing.

20:01 Four to six students, you take a dog. The dog’s like a German shepherd or some beagle, some dog’s not gonna do anyone any harm. Put the dog on the table, take the dog down, then you start an IV and you knock the dog out. And then you pump in epinephrine, norepinephrine. You write the fact that the dog’s heart rate has increased.

20:23 You pump in propranolol. The dog’s heart decreases, the pulse decreases. You run an EKG, you put it in your report. You exsanguinate your dog then. You drain the blood slowly out of the dog’s body.

20:37 And you record what’s happening to the dog’s pulse, which gets thready and then stops. And then everyone looks at each other. I guess we’re done. And then at the end of that day, there are trash bags all up and down the hallway. And then you go home and you explain to your girlfriend or your partner, your spouse, here’s what we did today.

21:00 And they look at you and say, You did what? So anyway, the instructor was extorted. He tortured a dog. Well, you killed him. And yeah.

21:07 You’re first patient. And anyway, we all knew about this. We all expected it. But when the instructor said next week his dog lab, I said, I’m not doing that. And he wasn’t asking me if I was doing it.

21:23 It was required. But just as he was explaining this to me, a student sitting next to me said, he’s not doing it. I’m not doing it. So we had a movement of two people who were gonna let the dog live. And I made a vow that day that

21:41 Since there are two victims, the dogs and the part of the human brain that values life that dies to that day, I thought I’m gonna save both of those if I can. So we made it our business and I did make it and have since succeeded at eliminating all of those labs at every single medical school in the United States and Canada, took me some time to do it, but we have done that. My point is this, I’m a doctor, my job is health, and that’s been my journey. But along the way, you start to discover that if you have no ethical foundation for what you do, your work is bankrupt.

22:16 And so I think it’s important to assert that, whether the potential victims are life forms you recognize and sympathize with, or ones that might be a little bit more new to you. Wow, that’s super powerful, yeah. I remember the cat autopsies in my high school and like senior biology class and there were garbage bags all around and they would, you know, take apart these cats for like months and months and months. I never did it because I wasn’t in those classes.

22:41 But yeah, again, one of these things you just kind of accept as normal but gross. But you know, most people don’t question it. I guess you did. Well, I didn’t question it. When I was younger, I did all kinds of horrible things.

22:52 Just as everybody else growing up does. And I mean, I wasn’t filled with remorse when I was hunting or all these things. But at some point in life I started to rethink these things and decide that there’s precious little compassion in the world and there’s more than our share of suffering. And if there’s something you can do to spread a measure of kindness, we don’t wanna miss that opportunity. The good news is there’s a hell of a lot you can do.

23:19 You can transform this world. And my thought is let’s not be shy, let’s put the damn thing to work. Yeah, what was the point in your career where you noticed they’re becoming a critical mass of people wanting to hear your views on plant-based diet? There must’ve been an inflection point or a certain year where you’re like, okay, I feel momentum for people listening to my ideas more than before. To tell you honestly, I don’t think we’re there yet.

23:47 Here’s what I mean. Yes, it’s true. There are so many people who are changing their diet. Yes, it’s true. A lot of people have gotten my books and I’ve been on TV, which is wonderful.

23:56 And movies as well. Yeah, that’s lovely. I’m delighted to get the word out. But I have to say, there are so many people, while it’s true, the number of people who are going in a healthy direction is bigger than it’s ever been. The number of people who haven’t yet gotten this message is huge, too.

24:12 And I’m doing a lot of work now in Washington with one of the hospitals that happens to be in the poorest part of town. And when I talk with people about why do you have three times the colorectal cancer incidence here, compared to the rich part of town. There isn’t any understanding on the part of the patients, the doctors, the nurses, anybody. So we have our work still ahead of us. And it’s an economic issue as well, right?

24:41 The lower income you make, the worse your health is, and it’s quite magnified, right? Absolutely, yes, exactly. And this is not necessarily, this is not at all. People who have decided, I get what you’re saying, but I’m not going there. It’s not an informed decision.

24:56 These are people who are victims of marketing and the ignorance of, and sometimes willful ignorance of a government that promotes unhealthy foods on people. What I’m talking about is unhealthy things are subsidized, are dumped into schools. Anyway, don’t get me started. But the fact of the matter is that, I don’t think we’re there yet. I’m happy with the changes that have come, but there’s more to do.

25:20 So we’ve got like Beyond Meat that’s IPOing for billions and people are putting it in all the fast food places, but we’ve also got the lower, say, 25% of the population that’s getting more obese, more diabetes, and the diet maybe is getting worse in some cases. And you’re looking at this and saying, Brian, we’re not necessarily where I want us to be. Couple of examples. In young people, and by young, I mean anyone up to the age of 49, colorectal cancer rates are rising.

25:47 And that’s not that genetics are changing. It’s all because bacon is now a fad. You can get bacon-flavored soap. And if you’re a young person, you’re immortal, why worry about it? The World Health Organization says it is a clear-cut group on carcinogen.

26:02 Also causes breast cancer. That information hasn’t come out. And the big tragedy now is in India, which is the second biggest country on the globe, China, which is number one. India has a vegetarian tradition that is now viewed by many people as the quaint habit of their grandparents. Modern poor, maybe.

26:24 Modern young people are non-vegetarian and diabetes rates are going through the roof. And if they are vegetarian, it’s also dairy heavy that you may as well have eaten a pork chop. In China, it’s a changing economic situation. When people have more money, they can afford more pork. And in China, it is becoming devastating.

26:46 Cardiovascular disease is through the roof. Diabetes is way, way up. A country like Japan that used to have the skinniest and longest of people on the planet and a diet mostly based on rice and meat was little flavorings, not the center of your plate. There are now so many fast food chains in Japan that breast cancer is up, Alzheimer’s is starting to go up, cardiovascular disease, diabetes is up, and also some depression and other things are up. Is it food or is it something else?

27:16 I don’t know, but when we have more knowledge than ever, we should be healthier than ever. Yeah, I remember I went to Brazil in the early 2000s and we’ve all heard of the girl from Ipanema, but on the beaches, there were just these massive people that were no longer eating the way they probably had eaten for the last hundred years, and it just was really noticeable. The girl from Ipanema was diagnosed with type two diabetes recently, and I’m kidding. Well, the country’s on fire, because the Amazon.

27:47 What’s that about? It’s not that lightning struck, It’s the people set the fires to clear the jungle in order to grow feed crops for more beef. And not just in Brazil, but everywhere else. So yeah, we’re kind of making a dog’s breakfast of things. But the good news is what you put your finger on, which is that more people than ever do have this message.

28:10 And it’s just like smoking. I used to smoke cigarettes, along with my burgers. to. You know you can you know you’re not stupid you know you know it’s gonna cause cancer but you take your time to quit and and finally there became a critical mass and now if you light up at somebody’s home they would they would be scandalized in a restaurant you can’t even do it legally so so the meat eaters will get there too. Right I mentioned Beyond Meat and I mentioned that a lot of these fast food chains are now taking on these meals.

28:46 Is that a net positive or is that just also propagating bad eating habits in these fast food places? Clear cut, net positive, absolute net positive. Now who it’s a positive for is either the meat eater who came in and thought, I’ll try that. Let me see, I mean that’s, for that person to realize you can have something that’s not meat, that’s great. Or a family member, a couple brings in their seven year old kid.

29:10 And your child is imprinting on what you do. And a 55-year-old guy who’s on the exam table after a heart attack, in his heart, is a five-year-old kid who learned the wrong things to eat that got him there. So when those are there and they are marketed and people realize they taste good, that’s all positive. The only thing I would say, though, is they’re a door. They’re a transition.

29:32 They’re sort of, for a heroin addict, your methadone, a beef addict’s methadone is the veggie burger. It gets you over your addiction. But once you get there, you wanna go further because there are so many other choices that are tastier and over the long run, healthier as well. But no, the veggie burger is a good parachute out of meat eating. Right, but if you keep eating veggie burgers your whole life, you still might end up in the more of the same problems, right?

30:02 They vary. There are some that are pretty high in fat. They’ve got so much coconut fat in there. You can almost hear your arteries snapping closed. There are others where the fat content is low.

30:12 It’s just basically grain. You top it with ketchup and a pickle and it’s hard to indict it. Yeah, yeah, although I don’t know if a burger’s ever the way forward, but okay, you also mentioned something else. You live in D.C. and maybe recently there’s kind of a culture of exaggeration, maybe brought on with the Trump administration, I don’t know.

30:30 Maybe it’s not fake news, but this thing of, like you said, people can say something’s true and it is, like bacon’s good for you, which some people would say it is, but you’re saying, you know, talk to me about this, this kind of freedom that everyone seems to have now to say something or exaggerate something without the scientific facts. That didn’t exist, say, six years ago, four years ago? I don’t know if it’s Trump, and I mean, nowadays people have, on a daily basis, they just assume that the things he says are not true.

31:01 And even his supporters will say, well, that’s just him. He just makes stuff up, and it’s kind of endearing in a way, I mean, here he is with his hand in a cookie jar and crumbs all over his mouth saying, what, I didn’t take those cookies. It’s just kind of sad, but. It’s also becoming more accepted, isn’t it? That’s the issue.

31:19 That’s the issue, that if it’s acceptable to just make things up and stick to them, that’s a problem, or I’m not sure if it’s social media has contributed to this where what really matters is the headline, not the depth, But we’re seeing this in medicine now, and a huge scandal we had just recently was headlines everywhere, said you don’t have to reduce meat for good health. There are new guidelines out. I’m not sure how much this traversed the Atlantic, but in the United States it was all over every newspaper.

31:54 What it was, was the Annals of Internal Medicine published a series of meta-analyses where you crunch the numbers from previous studies into your new meta-analysis. And although they found that reducing meat intake does reduce your risk of cancer and reduce your risk of heart attacks and reduce your risk of stroke and diabetes, they also did studies showing that meat eaters really value meat. And their conclusion was it’s not worth it. The reduction in your cancer risk and heart disease risk and stroke and diabetes isn’t worth it if it means you gotta change your diet.

32:28 So therefore, go ahead and eat meat. And that was such a man bites dog kind of headline that the newspapers really ran with it. If you read the studies, you realize nothing has changed. Meat is dangerous, getting away from it’s a good idea. But the quick sound bite, the contrarian viewpoint is unfortunately taking over.

32:52 Okay, that’s a good point. All right, let me talk about my experience last year. I wanna get your thoughts. Then I wanna talk about game changers and I also wanna talk about diabetes and a bunch of your other IP. So last year, a guest came on my show.

33:04 His name is John Joseph. He’s the former lead singer of a hardcore punk band called the Chromags. It was big in the 80s and 90s, and he had become a Harry Krishna monk back in the day, and it actually started a vegan diet about 35 years ago, way before many people were talking about it. He also went on to have a crazy career as a lead singer and a crazy crack addiction and all sorts of other stuff, but he used to smoke crack and drink wheat grass juice, he told me.

33:30 So, yeah, go figure. And so he came on my show, he’s been sober for many years now, and he’s been running these Ironman triathlons, about 10 full Ironmans, serious stuff. And he challenged me to come to New York City and train with him, and when I was there, he said, Brian, I got this half Ironman coming up, I want you to do it with me, and I want you to do it on a plant-based diet. Now for me, I had never gone really plant-based. I had played around with Meatless Mondays, I had a lot of people on the show before, like Dr. Greger and all sorts of other people talking about the diet.

34:00 But when John did this to me, I was like, okay, I’m in. So I went 100% plant-based last year, you know, in about three days, I did it. And John kind of gave me some guidance, took me to some great places in New York City. The same time, I’m training a lot. You know, I’ve never done endurance race.

34:16 I never had done distance swim or bike or run. And John said, Brian, you’re actually gonna feel better. You’re gonna have less injuries if you go plant-based. and I was like, that doesn’t make sense to me. But okay, I trust you.

34:27 So I came back to London and told my wife, and she’s like, what are you talking about? She’s from Bulgaria, where again, there’s not a lot of, she didn’t grow up with a lot of vegans. But we figured it out. And all of a sudden, she starts finding different substitutes, sometimes meat substitutes in the form of soy, and then later, maybe not. Maybe just all these other wonderful foods.

34:46 And we kind of fell in love with vegetables again, and I was like, wow, these things taste really good, and there’s all these different options. And once I realized I had to eat more, because at first I just wasn’t eating enough, because you have to have to eat more, also I was training a lot, but I just needed to eat more, I got into a really good rhythm. And despite at one point my B12 being low and I had some B12 injections, otherwise everything was fine.

35:09 And then also people said my B12 couldn’t have dropped in a few months anyway, so it was probably already B12 deficient. So I did it, I actually ran the race, I finished the race, I did really well. And so it was a great experience And everyone thought I was gonna have a steak and a beer at the end of the race, and I didn’t feel that way. I actually was like, I feel good. So I told myself I was gonna keep it up, and I kept it up, and I kept it for about four or five months, and then I started thinking, am I doing this because I’m dogmatic, or am I doing this because this is the long-term lifestyle and health for me?

35:41 And I have a history of doing things to death in my past. I can be very dogmatic, and sometimes it takes me in good places, and sometimes it makes me try to drink myself to death. So I have both things, you know, and sometimes it can make me do a great show like this. So at the very end of the year, I said to myself, am I doing this for dogmatic reasons or is this really the right thing? And I said, you know what, I am not gonna hold myself to this restrictive diet.

36:05 And I had some, I said, I’m gonna try some things. So I, and I also went down the ethical thing too, because I think the more vegetables you eat, the more you think about the health of animals, you know? And so I also started thinking about farm factory animals and I’m like, I don’t wanna be a part of this. and I had flashbacks to the feed lot, I don’t wanna be a part of that. Something as me as a four year old kid knew this was wrong.

36:26 Okay, so I get to the end of the year and I’m like, all right, I’m gonna have a bit of sushi. And I had some sushi and my body was like, okay, I think this is okay. And my stomach was like, this is okay. And so now I have certain types of animal proteins. And for me, I feel better and I feel stronger.

36:44 And I still have a lot of vegetables, I still train a lot, I still don’t have any factory farm meats. But for me, I don’t know. I don’t necessarily have the scientific proof one way or another, but this feels like the right diet for me. What do you think of that? Well, first of all, what you did is amazing.

37:02 And it sounds like you trained up quickly. You reaffirmed what so many other people have found, which is that it’s totally counterintuitive. People imagine if I’m gonna bulk up, I’ve got to be eating meat. And of course they realize that all the biggest animals are herbivores and so forth. but what you accomplish is wonderful, that’s amazing.

37:25 And also you did it for long enough that it’s there for you. So if you decide, okay, you know, I brought back the sushi or whatever it is, but I’d like to go back into not having animals on my plates. You’re an expert in it. You can get back there if you want to. There was never a person, I’m not gonna speak about you for a minute, I’m gonna speak about somebody else.

37:44 There was never a smoker who didn’t feel better lighting up a cigarette or a person with an alcohol issue who didn’t feel better having a drink. They know it’s better for them to not smoke or to not drink at all. But when they have whatever that thing is that’s tickling their brain, they do feel a little reward to it. And when they’re not having it, they kind of miss it. Now, everyone’s different.

38:11 I have to say for me, when I got animal products off my plate, I think I went through about two weeks of doubt and thinking what would I miss, but then it was gone and now not only do I not miss it, I don’t want to be anywhere near it. It’s like quitting smoking. I don’t want some tobacco near me anymore, it’s just creepy. And for me, fish for example, we think of fish as protein, well what is it? When I was a kid going into the lakes in Minnesota and we were cooking fish on our lines, we’re playing the fish.

38:47 The fish isn’t playing. The fish is trying to survive. And if you look at how people obtain fish, if it’s through fish farms, it’s frankly sickening. In fact, there’s a new documentary out called Artificial that talks about hatcheries and fish farming. It will make you not want to eat it.

39:06 But then the wild caught is even worse. Some of them are like taking a lawnmower on the ocean floor and just destroying every species they ever could. So these bigger issues are there. And when they weigh on us, we can decide, all right, I’ve been around, I’ve tried all the different things and plant-based diet is always glad to welcome people back. And I appreciate the analogies between drinking and smoking and I’ve stopped smoking and stopped drinking.

39:28 It took me a long time, but I finally have. But I don’t think that analogy necessarily plays through into meat. I just don’t. And I’m not convinced that completely avoiding meat is the most healthiest thing to do. I think there’s people out there that can do it and maybe they have a genetic propensity to do it, but I’ve had a lot of vegans that have sat in that chair that have come off that.

39:49 They did it for a few years and they found that it just wasn’t sustainable for them. And so I still am not sure if it’s the right diet for everyone. And I know as soon as you go plant-based, you wanna make everyone go plant-based and it’s all the right thing, but I’m not sure and I’m still not sure of the science. and I know you are sure, but I’m just not sure. And I don’t consider myself to be completely unscientific, but that’s just a strong feeling I have.

40:14 Two things to weigh in. One is the science, and hopefully we’ll talk about that because we’ve been funded by the U.S. government to actually test these things, and the data are very robust for the effect of a vegan diet on diabetes, weight loss, cholesterol lowering, that kind of stuff. But in the broad scheme of things, Human beings, whether we like it or not, are great apes. And great apes don’t eat ice cream, and they don’t eat cheese, and they don’t have yogurt, they don’t have dairy at all.

40:44 And they are, for the most part, herbivores. Now there are some exceptions, but the great apes are human beings, and chimpanzees, and gorillas, and orangutans, and bonobos, that’s it. They are not dogs, they are not cats, we’re not carnivores. The exception is with chimpanzees, you’ll see maybe 4% of the chimpanzee diet is they will go up a tree and kill a monkey, which they do by biting into the monkey’s head. It’s creepy.

41:13 Anyway, apart from that, they’re really herbivores, and human beings are herbivores, but the fact is we’ve been such restless herbivores that we were happily living in eastern Africa, and then we had the bad judgment to leave that area go into places like New Jersey. And along the way, there were times where we went over the Bering Strait that plants didn’t grow. And so we would do our best to eat what we could and survive. But we are still herbivores with herbivorous coronary arteries.

41:47 And when you compare people, almost regardless of any other aspect of their diet, those people who avoid animal products are the healthiest and longest-lived. And I’m speaking not just about heart disease, but things like Alzheimer’s. Other things you wouldn’t think of as relating to diet. Definitely. Is there a direct link between Alzheimer’s and meat consumption?

42:06 This is the new frontier. But it started, it really started in 1993 in Chicago. Researchers at Rush University started something called the Chicago Health and Aging Project. They just rounded up people. They didn’t tell them what to eat.

42:20 They just said, what are you eating? And about 10 years later, they started to have enough data to say, suspect number one is saturated fat. And saturated fat is the solid fat that’s in cheese and dairy, and meat is number two, source. Plants have almost none of it. And the people who ate the most saturated fat had about three times the risk of Alzheimer’s compared to the other.

42:43 And then right behind it was trans fats, the artificial fats that are used in a lot of snack foods. Pretty much the same effect. And then they started noticing that people who ate more vitamin E, which is in seeds and nuts, and some vegetables as well, cut their risk by about half. So anyway, this research has been ongoing now for a couple of decades, and there’s still a lot of gaps, but it appears that a plant-based diet is largely protective, and the reason that’s important is when I make a list of all the things I don’t wanna get in my own life, number one on my list is Alzheimer’s, because I imagine you’ve had either family members or friends or relatives where you lose everything, so.

43:27 Yeah, it’s not pretty. And we can get to some of the studies later, but I’m always curious, I mean, are the studies really looking at people like me who are active eating maybe grass-fed meat for small portions of my meals, or are they looking at meat eaters in general who are having Big Macs three times a day? I’m always just very curious about the sample size, the study, the length of it, because I don’t think anyone is really talking about someone the way I’m eating and pointing the finger out that this specifically isn’t working.

43:55 It’s still kind of very big, general chunks of data. Is the feeling I get, I don’t know, am I wrong? I think you’re raising a really important question which is how much can I get away with? If I can eat meat, can I get, can I just have some? Will it be okay?

44:11 And if the cow was fattened on grass rather than on corn, will that make a difference? I think those are legitimate questions. Although I have to say my whole family raised grass-fed beef, that’s all there was at the time, and that was a terribly unhealthy product. I mean, you’re eating an animal’s muscle in either case. It is not broccoli.

44:33 And mussels are a mixture of protein and fat and the occasional parasite that got in there, and that’s really what it is. Right, but it does have nutritional value. I mean, I can survive on it, right? And it does help me build muscle, I mean, in musk. No, I don’t think so.

44:49 Not at all. Well, there’s no. First of all, you can’t survive on it. If you try to eat nothing but meat, you remember the English sailors who all got scurvy? Yeah, OK.

45:01 I mean, that’s sort of the Atkins diet taken to an extreme. And somebody realized, wait, wait, meat doesn’t actually have vitamin C, guys. And that’s where the limes came in. OK, limes. But there’s a lot more to it.

45:12 There isn’t any fiber in that diet whatsoever. There is protein. But the whole idea that meat jealously guards protein is not true, I mean there’s protein, if you, you ate 2,000 calories a day, roughly, I’m gonna say, unless you’re training, in which case you’re eating 3,000. If you ate 2,000 calories of nothing but broccoli, not that you would ever do this, but if that’s what you did, you would get about all the protein that you need, that the government says you need, plus about 90 extra grams.

45:41 And if the next day you ate nothing but lentils, you would get all the protein you need, plus an extra hundred grams. Plants have enormous amounts of protein in it. But to make it short and sweet, for anybody who’s just tuning in for just this one bit, a healthy diet is four things. Vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and beans, or the legume group, beans, peas, lentils. Vegetables, fruits, whole grains, beans.

46:03 And you should supplement with vitamin B12. People can get low. And I mean, meat eaters get low. But I think everyone should supplement with B12 and that’s something we can talk about. But that’s, to me, is a healthy diet.

46:14 And meat doesn’t add anything to that at all. What do you think about these meat eater diets lately? I mean, there’s been some famous people like Dr. Jordan Peterson who’s like on all the meat and I know he had some autoimmune issues and maybe by doing that, that helped some of that but some people are thriving on that. What do you think that is?

46:33 It’s hard to thrive on that for very long. Autoimmune issues are real and sometimes when people restrict their diet to a great degree, they end up leaving out whatever food they’re reacting to, which is good. If they get away from dairy, my sense is that dairy proteins probably trigger more autoimmune issues than any other food. So getting away from that’s a good idea. But I wouldn’t go that direction.

46:56 I would, in our clinic in Washington, what we do is for an autoimmune condition, we will bring the person to rice and vegetables and things like that, leaving out all the dairy, all the meat and whatever. And very often people get completely better. And then you bring in more and more plant foods to see which ones might also trigger it. Because maybe they’re allergic, or not allergic, but sensitive to dairy, but also wheat, for example. Let’s test it.

47:23 So we put it to the test. Okay, so you think the carnivore diets are short-lived and you want to see if they can be- The diet and the people. And the people, you think so. Yeah, well I guess to be determined. Last thing I want to talk about, and then I want to talk about the movie.

47:37 We can say they’re not harming animals, but the latest argument is that by harvesting vegetables, there’s all sorts of animals that they’re killing the rodents in the fields and all of the things that cause and creating the soybeans. I had someone in here who was a vegan for five years and now he’s eating red meat and he said, Brian, when I eat red meat, I kill one cow and I can survive on six months on the one cow as opposed to the vegetables that are killing all of these little animals. Just wanted to get your reaction.

48:02 That is ridiculous and… Why? Because the cow isn’t ordering room service, The cow is on a feedlot, as you said, and the pigs and the chickens, they’re eating soybeans and corn. When I go back to Fargo, you go outside of town, and as far as the eye can see are fields of corn, beautiful, identical, genetically engineered. And on the other side of the highway, it’s soybeans, beautiful, identical, GMO.

48:33 No human is eating any of that. So if you’re thinking there’s mice in the field and they’re all being killed, maybe so, to feed chickens, and to feed pigs, and to feed cows. So when the cow is killed, that cow represents enormous amounts of agriculture that had to go in to get this miserly amount of meat. This was the argument made by Frances Moore-Lapey with her book, Diet for a Small Planet, I think in the 1970s. So apart from that, to make that cornfield grow, you need fertilizer, you need irrigation, you need pesticides, and all of that washes into the rivers and streams.

49:13 And the Missouri River that runs right through the heart of North Dakota picks up all that junk and the fertilizer causes algae to grow and ends up in the Mississippi. And as it flushes out below Louisiana and Texas, there is now a dead zone. As big as the state of New Jersey, from all of the fertilizer and the growing algae bloom that then died off and killed everything in the water, thanks to growing feed crops for animals. So the idea, I’m not going to eat that, I’m just going to eat the plants directly, it may be that some animals are killed in the process, but it’s nothing remotely like raising all of these crops to then feed to animals to get the tiny little bit of meat out of it.

49:57 Made on the scale, but there are some animals that are gonna die if you’re a vegan. So there is blood on the vegan’s hands to a certain extent. I have no doubt that there are all kinds of things, costs to almost anything that we do. Certainly a good point. But when a person stops eating animal products, they’re making a really good shift.

50:19 And to the extent that we help other people to embrace that, you’re helping animals, you’re helping your health, their health, and the environment. I mean, the idea of a grass-fed cow is still belching methane, just like the one on the feedlot. And methane is a far more potent greenhouse chemical compared to CO2. So yeah, it’s a darn good thing to go on a plant-based diet. But let me again say that for the first half of my life I wasn’t there, I was on that side of it.

50:48 And when I see my cousins, you will see signs for Barnard stock farms in the Midwest. Those are my family, I love them dearly, and I understand it and I had a taste for it and I worked at McDonald’s and everything. But at some point my feeling is it’s just a good idea to put that in the history book. Sure, I understand that, I appreciate you addressing that stuff. I mean the only last thing about the vegan movement is that sometimes it seems to get a bit of a cult feel to it, because people join it, they feel really good, and then there’s the ethical issues which are just really hard to deny and you can get really empowered by saving the animals.

51:24 And then sometimes it seems to move as a cult as opposed to a evidence-based, science-based movement. Is that a problem sometime? Yeah, I think it can be. I sometimes call it the hallelujah moment where I see it in our research participants. We do research studies.

51:40 I’m doing a study right now where I’m comparing a vegan diet to a Mediterranean diet, head to head. The people on the vegan diet, they feel great. And sometimes they feel a little too great. if they have high blood pressure or they’ve got a cholesterol level that’s high, they throw their medicines away. And I say, wait, stop, stop, don’t, maybe do that later, but not now.

52:02 They’ve got type two diabetes, they throw everything away. You’re still sick. It takes time for your body to heal. And so if a person is following a healthy diet, that’s great, they quit smoking, that’s great. But your body’s a fragile thing.

52:15 It’s like your car, it’s not gonna last forever and things are gonna go bad no matter what you do. So take advantage of medical care a little bit. And the other thing, I know what you mean, that I feel it myself sometimes, because when people discover what we’re doing to this planet and when they discover cruel things that they’re doing, to creatures that really are doing no one any harm, and when you see what’s happening to children, three, four, five-year-old kids who are going into the fast foods and eating chicken nuggets and other things, and you can see where they’re headed, it does make you want to slam your fist on the table and say, please, can we go in a different direction now?

52:58 And you do have to restrain a little bit of that. And I worry that maybe that movement isn’t always rational, because there’s a whole lot of, it’s almost like a crusade, unlike the rest of human experience with the rational person who’s dishing up the stakes in the kitchen for other people, yes. Perhaps. It’s funny that the vegans have slipped away from all the rationality that runs our government. Perhaps.

53:22 But I’ve known some people that are five years vegan and they now, they wanna stop, but they can’t stop because they’re wrapped up in a movement and now they’re ostracized and then when they admit that okay, when I eat some animal protein I feel better, they can’t get out of it. And then they’re, like I said, ostracized. I’m sure that vegans don’t like me anymore either. So there is a little danger to that cult. No, they are welcoming you back.

53:43 There is a little danger to that cult, a little bit. I wouldn’t worry too much about that. When people do something that was outside their culture, keep in mind, let’s say you’re in a new city. You flew into Paris or Cairo or somewhere in your hotels in a certain part of town. You don’t know what you’re gonna eat.

54:01 It’s really awkward at the beginning. You don’t know what you’re gonna do and then you finally find the things and you find you’re sorting out. For a person going to a plant-based diet, it’s like that. The world is very different. It takes you time to sort it out.

54:13 It does feel awkward and when you do finally get to what’s a good equilibrium, it’s not quite the same as if you had grown up that way, where you really know exactly which foods work the best and give you the best digestion, all that kind of stuff. So it’s understandable that some people are awkward with it and some people want to abandon because they didn’t have any history with it. But 99.99% of people do phenomenally well with it, despite the fact that they have their own culture dangling bacon in front of them every five seconds on TV commercials and in restaurants and so forth.

54:49 They do really, really well. So those of us who are in the medical field have to be patient with folks. And I learned this a long time ago. My job is to be a coach, a patient I’m dealing with who’s got a drinking problem. I’m not gonna fire them because they slipped.

55:06 You kind of got a, this is not the right way to put it, but you sort of have to love them back into your practice and say, I believe in you, you’re gonna conquer this thing. I know you lost your job, and I know your wife thinks you’re an idiot. I believe in you, you’re gonna make this work. The smoker, no smoker ever got there right away. They stuttered their way into it.

55:27 They goofed up like crazy, but your job is to love them back. So a person’s on a goofy diet for a long time, and then they get on a sensible diet, but foods lure them back, and all kinds of rationalizations in marketing to lure them back, that’s okay, I don’t worry about that. Our job is to do the science to help people to get back into it, and luckily, the marketplace is stepping up with products that make it so easy to stay on a healthy diet. I think comparing meat eaters to alcoholics and smokers is a little bit of a cheap shot.

55:59 No, you’re right, meat eaters have much more problems than alcoholics do, alcoholism can cause liver disease and colorectal cancer and breast cancer, but meat causes a far greater range of problems. I still think the comparison’s a little unfair. It’s a great analogy. No, why is it unfair? I’m gonna assert that alcohol, people are not drinking it for logical reasons.

56:20 They’re drinking it because it works on the brain. And despite the fact that it does a variety of neuromuscular things to you, you can’t drive anymore and speak coherently and walk straight, the reason people drink it is because sooner or later in the brain elicits dopamine. Same is true with cocaine. A lot of dopamine, yeah. The same is true with every drug of abuse and the same is also apparently true With meat and with dairy and with Netflix and any other behavior. I don’t know if you want to compare that to alcohol No, I do. Okay, I’m listening. I do now a person can say alcohol can take It can cause much more dramatic situations every drug of abuse is different and and I’ve often wondered why is it?

57:03 There are a lot of curiosities, why does one person like beer, another person likes wine, another person likes their scotch with a mix, and they’re very particular about how their drug gets into their brain. And it’s also true that many lives have been destroyed by it, and some lives may have been enhanced by it momentarily. That’s all true. The drugs are all different. But in my view, it’s a good idea to look at certain foods as drugs.

57:29 We see this with sugar. On day one of life, I’m talking about a newborn baby. If I do a heel stick to draw a drop of blood for a blood test, if I take sugar water, dribble it into that baby’s mouth, a minute or two before I stick him, he cries less. Because the sugar went to the brain, it triggered the release of opiates in the child’s brain. Fast forward into adulthood.

57:53 Sugar will still affect that adult, now adult’s brain, they don’t know it, they just like it. Cheese liberates, as you digest it, opiates that attach to the very same receptors in the brain that heroin attaches to. They’re called mu receptors. And in a significant way, the same as heroin? I mean, am I going to get anywhere near that dose? You’d have to work at it to get the same dose. I had some experience with heroin as well, so you’re speaking to someone who knows a lot about these drugs. It’s not enough to get you arrested. It’s enough to make you really like cheddar. I mean, why would anybody else like something that smells like old socks. I mean, let’s face it, it’s because it has a drug effect. The drug I’m speaking of is KZN, C-A-S-E-I-N, that’s the protein in milk. And when it came out of the cow, what comes out of the cow’s udder is this white, gooey mixture that has protein and sugar and fat and hormones and a little bit of feel good, that yes, it does have a calming effect on the calf. And when you turn the milk into cheese, the case-o-morphens, casein-derived morphine-like compounds, are concentrated in the cheese. Now it’s only a trace. Yeah. But it is, it’s, the traces are enough to affect your GI tract, which is why people get constipated from cheese, and enough to affect the brain. Right. And there’s also, it tastes good, and there’s a lot of cultural conditionings, and like you said in some of your speeches, they

59:18 Started sticking it on hamburgers, and now everyone started consuming it. So yeah, There’s a lot of that too. I mean, is there a drug trace in there? I don’t know and yes a lot of things can be addictive But you know you could also tell me that you know when you when you don’t study Islam that you’re also You know going down the wrong path as well But we can test these things and the way that you can test it is I can give you an injection of naloxone Which is an opiate blocker? Mm-hmm and for cheese. Oh, this is for the cheese thing. Yeah, or to take a A really good example, take a chocolate lover.

59:51 And I don’t mean a person who appreciates fine Belgian chocolate, I mean a chocolate binger. A person, you give them a tray and it’s gone. If you, in a controlled setting, set up an IV and you run naloxone into their body. Naloxone is what’s marketed under the name Narcan. It’s a heroin antagonist.

1:00:09 So a guy shoots up on the street and he’s overdosed. If you inject Narcan, you’ll save his life. So you give this not to a heroin addict, you give it to a chocolate addict. Most amazing thing happens. You give them a tray of chocolate and they’ll take a bite.

1:00:21 I’ll set it down. You say, have some more. I’ll have some. No, no, go ahead. It’s just not calling to me.

1:00:29 It knocks out the narcotic, the opiate effect of the chocolate. So it’s still the taste, same taste, same mouthfeel. What I’m gonna argue is the taste and mouthfeel of chocolate and cheese and a steak is secondary. You’re getting a brain effect and your brain then associates all that other stuff, the smell, whatever, with what happened in the brain. If you take away that brain effect, none of the rest matters.

1:00:53 Wouldn’t that also happen with my porn habit as well? You can give me some of that Noxolone and it’ll top my porn habit. But that doesn’t mean porn is gonna kill me. I don’t know if that’s done through opiate receptors. I don’t either.

1:01:03 But you understand my point. You can try it. You understand my point. Is it just because it does that blocking doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily going to kill me? It could have been good anything.

1:01:11 Oh no, no, no, I didn’t mean to say. I didn’t mean to say that something that has an opiate effect is necessary. dangerous. I’m only alleging that when people eat cheese, they are physically attracted to it, and it is addictive. And had I said that 15 years ago, people would have thought that was ridiculous. But that was before we…and it’s not as strong as heroin. The strongest of the casomorphins, there’s a whole group of them in cheese. The strongest one is called morphoceptin. And you can pull it out of cheese, and it has about one-tenth the brain binding power of pure pharmacy grade morphine.

1:01:44 So, it’s there. Yeah, look, your cheese IP is strong. You’re gotta be one of the most researched guy in cheese. Well, the reason I did that, we were doing these research studies. People with diabetes would come in.

1:01:55 They were overweight, they were on insulin, everything else. They would come in and their lives were transformed because we would take the meat and the cheese out of their diet. But the cheese habit would live on. They would say, the one thing Dr. Brown and I crave, I would just love some cheese.

1:02:10 And you think, why? What is it about this yellow goo? If it was nutritional, if it was any worse, it would be Vaseline. Why do they want this stuff? And so I started investigating.

1:02:20 And I wrote a book called The Cheese Trap because it’s such a goofy world. And it’s an interesting world. You can get in a car here in London and go out to Cheddar. How many people even realize there is a town of Cheddar? That’s where it started, you know?

1:02:33 And you can go to Camembert. There’s a little crossroads called Camembert. And it’s a funny, goofy world all based around this yellow drug. I’m with you on the cheese. We can definitely send cheese down the river.

1:02:46 I’ll back you on that one, Doc. You’re sticking with meat, though. Yeah, I’m just not sure. There’s a little bit of lean. The fish is the one you want.

1:02:52 A little lean meat protein. I don’t know if it’s gonna be the same as. Yes, but you can’t call it protein. I can’t. No.

1:02:59 Okay, because it’s not. Because it’s not. There’s no protein in meat. There is protein in meat. But people like to say, in fact, sometimes you go into one of these little restaurants things you go into the store and they say pick your rice and noodles and pick your protein and by protein they mean meat but meat is not protein protein is a macronutrient meat has some protein and a lot of fat in it as well and the occasional parasite and whatnot so it’s it’s muscle tissue it’s not protein okay point made all right we agree to disagree on the other stuff let’s move to game changers big movie that’s out it was anticipated for a long We had Niemey Delgado in here last year and he was in it. He’s great. I really I’m a big fan of Niemey I really like him a lot and You know, he’s living that lifestyle and it definitely works for him and you know, that’s all great. The movie came out I’m curious on your thoughts for it. It’s been hit the theaters and everything for people that don’t know it It’s kind of a bad name James Wilkes who’s a former UFC fighter I actually followed his early career and he’s kind of exploring plant-based nutrition and going around the world talking to all sorts of different athletes What are your thoughts? I thought I just saw this film I thought it was fantastic.

1:04:07 It’s brilliant. It shows these huge beefy athletes who have been following a vegan diet for the longest period of time. Like Patrick Baboumian, the world’s strongest man. You see? He’s not the world’s strongest man.

1:04:20 He’s a strong man. I guess he’s a huge strong man. They do these really almost sadomasochistic things. And I’ve met him. He’s got arms as big as, I mean, it’s amazing.

1:04:32 Totally, totally vegan. It shouldn’t surprise anyone, really, but okay. Well, I guess it shouldn’t surprise people because if you look at vegan animals, I mean a bull has got like muscles. Right, and a gorilla has muscles. And the elephants and the giraffes, frankly.

1:04:47 That’s a funny thing. People think that if they eat meat, they’ll get muscles, but your pussycat eats nothing but meat all day long and does not turn into this ripped weightlifter. In fact, their size doesn’t change at all. They just get diabetes. True, true.

1:05:01 Yeah. So anyway, but to answer your question, I thought the movie was great, but I was filled with envy, I have to tell you, because I was in that movie in the first cut, the first thing. James Wilkes, this amazing guy, this mixed martial arts phenomenon. And you meet him, he’s the most gentle, smart guy you ever met, but he could rip your heart out in this, in the cage. He’s got some moves.

1:05:25 So anyhow, I was in this movie. And he interviewed me, he was really great. But then as time went on, he realized his technology of the movie wasn’t what he wanted it to be. He threw out the entire movie. He hooked up with James Cameron, you know, Titanic and Terminator and all this stuff, and they made the movie over.

1:05:42 And I’m not in the movie anymore. That’s a shame, we gotta get you back in. I told them, I said, James, next time you make a movie. But no, I thought it was wonderful. And Lewis Hamilton, I think he’s just conducting his life in such an exemplary way.

1:05:59 He’s, I mean, not only is it the world’s greatest driver But he’s a kind man and when he went vegan and then he appeared in the movie and he really Makes a good case for just treating other people. Well, anyway, don’t get me started I wasn’t a Hamilton fan before but I have sure become one and in the fact Louis if you’re watching I’ve got copies of my book that I’m gonna give to everybody in the Mercedes factory and we’re gonna veganize everybody who works there Oh look out. All right, that’s good. No, I I’m serious I’m serious. I got boxes on my on my loading dock ready to send him I’ve been told Lewis watches this show, so I’m sure he’s gonna get the message.

1:06:33 I’m sure he gets all his family to members to watch it too. Probably, so yeah, Wilkes made the movie and then obviously I think Cameron got wind of it. He’s a, I think a vegan and definitely a vegan advocate. And then they think they remade it, like you said, and then got Schwarzenegger to drop by and all that stuff, so. And Schwarzenegger is hysterical.

1:06:50 I mean, he’s a hysterical person anyway, but you know, he was the most accomplished, or I don’t know, very accomplished bodybuilder, but he is very, very funny in this. Yeah, he’s funny. And I think it does a good job of trashing some of the myths that you need meat to get big or you need meat to get manly. I think there are some people that think that, but that’s kind of ridiculous. And anybody who’s been on a paleo diet, they don’t do it to get meaty and beefy.

1:07:16 The only problem I have with it is that they put all these athletes out here and sure, you can take, I mean, you know statistics. You were in medical school. I mean, they found 15 people who are vegan athletes to play some sports, but that’s a statistical anomaly and none of them are necessarily at the top of their game. There are a few of them. But for me, great to hear their stories, but it doesn’t actually prove anything to me.

1:07:41 And that’s a problem I have with it. And I think that’s a fair argument. You’re absolutely right. A movie is a movie. It tells a story and intrigues people.

1:07:50 It’s not a randomized clinical trial. That’s my job. That’s what I do. That’s what my whole team does. So, we do exactly what you’re gonna say I need, which is we bring in people, and we randomly assign them to different diets, and we practically turn them inside out, watching what happens to them as time goes on.

1:08:10 Yeah, and we need to probably do this in another 20, 30 years, till we really know. Was it Kant who said that we know enough to take action if not enough to satisfy the intellect? We still don’t know what it is in tobacco smoke that causes lung cancer. There are a lot of suspects in there, but we know it’s time to quit. We don’t know all the pieces of an animal-based diet that cause problems, but we knew enough many years ago to know that it’s time to go on a different path.

1:08:39 What we don’t know, in my view, is what’s the best pattern. Some people will do a more raw pattern, lots of fruit, not much grains. There are others who do a more macro, macrobiotic pattern, huge amounts of grains, not much fruit. There’s so many different ways of doing this. They’re, I’m not 100% sure, but I think it was when NIH, our National Institutes of Health funded us to do a head-to-head trial of the best current diabetes diet and a low-fat vegan diet, and the vegan diet just, it was dramatically better.

1:09:13 For me, at that point, the jury was back in and the verdict was delivered. Okay, all right, I’ll wait a little longer, but I appreciate that, and yeah, it’s a very good movie, it’s good inspirational. It’s a lot like the vegan burger. It lets people have a glimpse into a potential option. Maybe they can try the option.

1:09:28 And I think everybody should try it. I mean, I won a year on the plant-based diet. I think everyone should have it. I still love plants. I still go days, plants only, but we’re not all in, that’s all.

1:09:39 I’m hoping that people won’t feel that it’s a guilting movie. It was more of a pump-you-up kind of movie. And James Cameron and Susie Cameron have become good friends because for them it was the earth, the environmental aspects. But whatever a person’s thing is, it kind of celebrates that. And then it does try, they clearly, I’m sure James Wilk was clearly trying to reach out to other guys with this movie, and that’s why he put in the part about erectile dysfunction, where they hooked up guys to equipment that you wouldn’t really wanna sleep with, but then they track their sexual responses during the night and they feed them various foods before they go to sleep.

1:10:20 And I won’t spoil it for the people who haven’t seen it, but it confirmed what we have seen in our research studies is that when we put men on vegan diets for their diabetes or weight issues, a lot of times they come back in to our study facility and they’ll say, hey, raise the flag last night. There are physiological reasons for that and it’s good to see, and I’m glad they put it in the movie. Yeah, it was interesting. I found it a little hokey and not necessarily the most scientific thing, but yeah, it’ll get people’s attention, so, you know.

1:10:52 Yeah, but it’s a movie, it’s a movie. People are doing the scientific part of that. There are people who are looking at erectile dysfunction. And by the way, this is not just because of the importance of sexuality. The reason why people need to look at erectile dysfunction is a guy walks into the doctor’s office and he says, doc, I’m having trouble with my nature.

1:11:12 And the doc hands him a little blue pill, Viagra. Huge mistake, enormous mistake. because the reason he has erectile dysfunction, it’s not performance anxiety. It’s because he’s got atherosclerosis. And the penile artery is just kind of small.

1:11:32 And if you get atherosclerotic changes in the arteries leading to it, you don’t get blood flow and the hydraulics no longer work anymore. It’s a sign that you’ve also had atherosclerosis in your coronaries and in your carotids. So you’re gonna have a heart attack or a stroke The chances of having that within about five years are rather high for a man who’s taken Viagra now. So the guy can take Viagra, but the doctor has to give him a little speech about let’s reverse your atherosclerotic disease.

1:12:02 If we do, your erectile dysfunction will return in many cases, but what’s more important is I’m gonna save your life. So anyway, I’m glad they talked about erectile dysfunction, even though they just did it in kind of a garlicky, movie simple demonstration way, it’s nonetheless real. And for all the guys out there who suddenly realize their erectile function is the canary in the coal mine that just died in a cage, it’s time to make some other changes. No, I agree with you on that.

1:12:34 I mean, a lot of times we’re medicating the symptom and not the problem. And I think that’s a great example of that completely. So I’m with you on that. And yeah, I mean, just to finish on the movie, it was great. I just thought that the athlete examples were just not people at the tops of their games.

1:12:47 They weren’t the world’s strongest men. They weren’t necessarily the Olympic gold medalists. They weren’t necessarily the professional football players. They were all, they were a few different examples. And it was a great movie, it was inspirational.

1:12:56 It starts a conversation. It’s all good, but yeah. But Lewis is the greatest. Yeah, Lewis is the greatest. Yeah, Lewis is amazing.

1:13:03 Let’s say it again, Lewis is the greatest. And he happens to be a vegan, I don’t know. I don’t think that’s correlation. It could be causation or one or the other. I don’t know, we’ll see, you know.

1:13:10 I’m cheering for Lewis, you know, he’s got- I’m a fan. He is going to win. I don’t want to jinx him, but he is so close to winning his sixth championship this year. And he’s behind Michael Schumacher, who I loved in his day despite the fact that he did a few things that he shouldn’t have done. He was a great driver, too.

1:13:27 And if all goes well for Lewis, I’m cheering for him to be the winningest driver ever. And I’ve got my Mercedes. I drive a smart car. That’s my Mercedes. I love smart cars.

1:13:37 But I’m going to wear my Mercedes hat and cheer him on when he wins numbers. What if he had some bacon and still won? Then what would we do? We would be disappointed, but we would bring him back. I appreciate that, Doc.

1:13:47 Let’s just maybe talk about diabetes a little bit, because I know you talk a lot about that, and I’d love to talk to you about your vegan starter kit and some of the things you suggest to people. Also, you have these two steps to change your diet, which always sounds really weird, because we’re waiting for 12 steps, so maybe you could just share some of your IP. And also, the hormones. Your next book is gonna talk about hormones. Nobody talks about hormones.

1:14:08 With putting cheese in hormones, We have stuff that people won’t really talk about, so where should we begin? Let’s start with diabetes. Just really, really quickly. So many people still have this naive idea that diabetes came from eating sugar. And it’s understandable people would have that idea because diabetes means you have too much sugar in your blood, but you didn’t get that from eating sugar.

1:14:28 The reason that people got diabetes is that normally sugar that you eat, or sugar from carbohydrates, like bread, digests to release sugar. Normally, that sugar goes from your bloodstream into your muscles so that when you’re running a marathon, your muscles are running on glucose and your carboloading in the days leading up to it so that your glycogen releases sugar into your blood to power your muscles. If you’ve got type two diabetes, what happened is the sugar isn’t getting into your muscles.

1:14:55 It can’t get in anymore. That’s the problem. Why not? The reason it doesn’t get in is because fat particles are inside the muscle cells, filling up the muscle cells and stopping insulin from being able to bring sugar in anymore. So nobody’s ever heard of this, but.

1:15:12 Is this agreed upon in the science community? Yes. Okay. And I can demonstrate it because at Yale University, where Jerry Shulman and Kit Peterson, their whole lab, bring in people, we partner with them. We bring in people who have had bad diets for a long time, they’re overweight.

1:15:29 We put them on totally plant-based diets. We send them up to Yale. they go into what’s called an MR spectroscopy machine. It’s like MRI that people have for a twisted ankle or something like that, except now, I’m not looking at your ankle, I’m looking in your muscles and in your liver. And as fat builds up in the muscles and liver, and I can see it, it causes insulin resistance and that leads to type two diabetes.

1:15:51 So we used a vegan diet so that there was no animal fat at all and kept oils low too, and that fat goes away from the muscles, it dissipates. And with the fat out of your muscles, insulin works again and it sucks the sugar out of your blood. Your blood sugar goes down and it’s the most amazing thing. There was a man, I got an email from this man. He lives here in England.

1:16:14 And he had tried this approach, which I wrote about in my book, Dr. Neil Barnard’s program for reversing diabetes, here’s how you do it. He went completely vegan. He went to see his doctor who did blood testing on him. And this is a doctor had been treating him for a long time.

1:16:29 He drives home. He gets home and the phone rings. And his doctor’s office says the doctor needs to see you back immediately. There’s something about your blood test. He panics, gets into his car.

1:16:40 He raises to the doctor’s office, and he thinks, what did they detect in my blood? What have I got? And the doctor sits him down and says, tell me exactly what you’ve been doing. He said, I haven’t been eating any animal products. I’ve kept oils really low.

1:16:51 I’ve been following this Dr. Neil Barnard’s diabetes thing. What did you find in my blood? And the doctor said, you’ve had diabetes, but your blood sugar and everything is better than mine. And I don’t have diabetes.

1:17:08 In other words, his diabetes went away. He was unaware of this. His doctor was unaware of this. And when I talk to people on a day-to-day basis, it’s astounding that nobody knows about the cause of type two diabetes. But yes, type two diabetes comes from eating fatty foods like meat and cheese.

1:17:22 The fat gets into the muscle and liver cells so insulin can’t work anymore. Get rid of those foods, your insulin works again. That’s plant-based fats as well. You gotta watch those as well. Yes, exactly.

1:17:34 So if you’re eating lots of peanut butter and fried foods, it’s not gonna work. I do believe that the animal fats are probably worse because the saturated fat I think is especially bad, but yeah, I keep them all low. But we’ve done this with people with late stage diabetes where they’ve got neuropathy, and their feet are killing them. It’s miserable, and even for them, they improve. Now, if a person has diabetes for a really long time, the pancreas has been beaten up and we probably can’t get rid of it.

1:18:01 If I get you a diagnosis, you’ve got a good chance of getting rid, I mean, it’s just gone for many people. For others, it’s improved. But it has completely changed things. And I think about my dad. Used to come home at six o’clock, sat down in his bag.

1:18:15 Never, never cured a case of diabetes. We, with us, it happens all the time. Because because we’re dealing with the cause You know I mentioned I had a meal after the Iron Man race And it was one of my actually students in the academy who had actually had diabetes He’d actually burned his feet by standing on a fire, and he didn’t even know it and he actually went 100% plant-based Traveled across America might have even interviewed you for his series called I thrive And reversed his diabetes, so he had some success with that in a big way To this day insulin is not a generic drug It’s a money-making business and in China now as they’re eating more pork diabetes is through the roof And you know who’s salivating you know who the buzzards are on the on the wires all around China the pharmaceutical companies They’re they’re making out big so nobody wants to reverse this disease We’ve got to get the word out, but you also said it that with hormonal conditions You know diabetes is a hormonal condition where insulin doesn’t work, but what about all the other hormonal conditions?

1:19:19 Menstrual cramps. What? Could that relate to food? Endometriosis, PCOS hormone related cancers. Yeah, they do.

1:19:29 And that’s gonna be the next book that’s gonna go deeper on that stuff. I was sitting at my desk one day and the phone rang and it was a young woman who said, I can’t get out of bed. I said, what is it? Many women have cramps but in her case it was like off the scale. And so we knew from breast cancer patients that you can change the diet to reduce estrogen stimulation because estrogen causes cancer cells to grow.

1:19:54 So the short answer is you get the fat out of the diet and you greatly increase fiber and that reduces estrogen a bit. So I suggested to her, would you wanna try for the next month? No animal products at all and keep oils low too. She did it and she called me back a month later. She said, this is the weirdest thing.

1:20:13 My period started with zero symptoms, no symptoms whatsoever, and she kept noticing that. And so I thought, well, this is cool. So I then did a randomized clinical trial with my friends at Georgetown University’s Department of OB-GYN, and it works. And I thought, okay, cramps aren’t gonna kill you, but breast cancer could kill you, or prostate cancer. Let’s see what we can do about those hormones, or polycystic ovary disease, or endometriosis.

1:20:40 And what we’ve got here is a key to directing human biology in a way that we never had before. So anyway, I got all excited. And I said, I don’t wanna talk about diabetes right now. I wanna talk about menstrual cramps. I don’t wanna talk about these things.

1:20:55 So I wrote a book called Your Body and Balance. And my hope is that when it comes out, people will not spend quite so much time at the pharmacy and spend a little more time picking their foods more effectively. That’s exciting, sounds like a really interesting book. You mentioned China, it’s come up a few times. I mean, isn’t that the real big ticking time bomb with 1.3 billion people getting more affluent and wanting this pork, I mean, doesn’t that outshine anything going on in the U.S. as far as a global problem?

1:21:21 It sure does, yes, it does. And we have, I have a PhD named Josh Hu who works for me, and he runs programs for us in China. And so he’ll cycle with other athletes across China and give lectures, he’s given lectures at just hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of cities. And so it’s true that the culture has kind of prized having some pork, but they could never really afford it until now, it was always a lot of rice and noodles and a little bit of pork, now they can afford it.

1:21:50 And it’s hurting the country. But the number of people who are hearing this message and wanting the best for themselves and their family is great, and Joss sends me these pictures of him lecturing to people, they all have great posture, they’re all paying attention to him and they’re learning what I hope is a better way. Talk to me about the psychology of trying to get someone to change their diet because maybe a place like China, culturally it’s this thing for the affluent and it’s this thing and the pork is such a big deal and it’s the meat of choice.

1:22:21 Or even in America, try telling an American that they can’t have their steak. And in a cow conspiracy, you touched on this a little bit in the movie where the guy’s like, okay, put a little thing on your faucet and that’s how you’re gonna conserve water. And the guy’s like, well, why don’t you just stop having us eat meat? And they’re like, no, no, no, no. We can’t tell an American what not to eat because they’ll really, they won’t take that because that’s like a civil liberty, it’s against the Constitution.

1:22:45 Tell me about this cultural psychology thing about people and their diets. It is different in different countries. In America, the biggest driver is weight loss because two thirds of Americans are there about our overweight or obese, so it’s a big driver. But in our work in China and also in Japan, we have found that weight loss is not of interest. Some people may prize having extra weight and not, of the population, not for the most part overweight yet.

1:23:13 But for many of these people, what is a bigger driver is looking young, having that youthful appearance. So it’s something that’s really quite different in different places. But in our work, I have a, we do research studies, but I also have a primary care clinic. And when people come in, it’s gotta be what matters to them. Like what is it that you want?

1:23:36 Is it that you don’t wanna have a heart attack or you don’t wanna be diagnosed with cancer or is Alzheimer’s your concern? Or do you just wanna look good in your bathing suit? It’s gotta be what drives them. We do need to give a little bit of education. Like as I was describing with diabetes, what’s the cause?

1:23:52 Because nine out of 10 people or more than that have never heard what we just talked about. I’ve never heard it. Or the cause of erectile dysfunction or the links with Alzheimer’s. Most people have not heard these things and it’s tragic. The TV isn’t gonna tell them.

1:24:06 Their own doctor may not, well their own doctor is not gonna tell them because doctors don’t learn these things in medical school. So, step one is to make sure that the patient has information, then they can decide to change. And if they want to change, it’s like a smoker. The smoker wants to quit, but then you’ve got to also give them a pathway. And that’s kind of where our tricks come in, to make that pathway a really fun and easy one.

1:24:31 Right, two steps to change your diet, where are they? Step one, once the person says, okay, all right, I’m in. I want to try a vegan diet. I’m not saying I’m gonna do this forever, but I wanna try it. What we’ll do is step one is you take seven days.

1:24:44 I give the patient a piece of paper, and the piece of paper says breakfast, lunch, dinner, snack. So come back in a week and I want you to fill in vegan things that you’ve tried that you actually like to eat. Okay, so the patient goes home. I everyday have cereal with cow’s milk. I wonder if almond milk is any good.

1:25:04 So if they like it, they write it down. I never had the veggie burger. If they like it, they write it down. They go to an Italian place, and I’ll have the Arabiata sauce on my angel hair pasta. If they like it, they write it down.

1:25:16 They come back in a week later. They got a list of all kinds of things that they like. Step two is now you take that list and you’re gonna do it all vegan, all the time, for three weeks, 21 days. But it’s the food you already liked. Ah, easy, okay, I’ll do that.

1:25:33 Three weeks later, the patient comes back, and two things will have happened. Physically, they’re changing. they’re losing weight, if they have diabetes, their diabetes is getting better, their blood pressure is better, their digestion is better, their outlook is better, if they run, they’re running better. So physically, they’re different, quickly. But the other thing is that their tastes are changing and they weren’t expecting that.

1:25:55 They think, this is kind of cool. I found a new vegetable, and I don’t really miss the meat or whatever. You didn’t tell them that would happen, but it happens. And so then they can go on, they can stop, but they can go on again. So we break it into those two steps, I’ve never seen anybody unable to do it.

1:26:13 That’s really smart, that’s really good IP. It works. Is there a book for that? Because that’s being cried out for. And look, I agree, when my wife started making vegan nachos, I mean, they were amazing.

1:26:24 It was like quinoa and black beans, and vegan cheeses, especially if they’re with something else, are really good. Maybe not on their own as much, but they’re getting better and better, So I’m not hating, I’m not hating on the vegan food. There’s a lot of options there. Tell me about you. I mean, you travel a lot.

1:26:39 What’s something for you as a person that’s just non-negotiable every day? Any kind of habit that keeps you at peak performance yourself or? I do all kinds of stuff. I mean, I always eat vegan. I always go to bed at 10 o’clock, rigidly.

1:26:54 I compose music when I have time to keep that part of my brain going. You’re in a band, aren’t you? Ever since I was a little kid. Wow, what do you play? Guitar and keyboards.

1:27:03 Okay, all right. Yeah, actually my band, my current band is called Carbon Works, like we are made of carbon, these are our works, and I just work with some of the greatest musicians. Life is too short, I don’t have time to tour and stuff, but we record and it’s fun stuff. Wow, what kind of music? You’ll see it on, if you go on YouTube, you’ll see.

1:27:21 I saw a guitar on stage next to you in one of your talks, I don’t know if you could play it later. It’s cool, if you ask me. Okay. We’ve got, in the old days a song was a song, Now a song is got to be a video. So all the carbon work songs are videos.

1:27:36 And our musicians are cool. One of them is a guy named Chris Thomas King. If you ever saw, Oh Brother Where Art Thou, the movie that had George Clooney, he breaks out of prison and he picks up this guitar player at the street corner. He just sold his soul to the devil. That’s Chris Thomas King.

1:27:55 So I was at a club where Chris was playing. And I said, wow, you are the greatest blues player ever. But that Sunday we were in the studio and he played on one of my tunes and then there’s a beautiful Italian singer named Naif Erhan Who I heard on Belgian radio and I thought you’ve got the greatest voice ever So she came to the US and she’s saying a couple things with us. So anyway, it’s all it’s all in carbon works You’ll see it. Wow, and you’re in the videos. What are the videos like you tell me? They’re good. I think they’re great Chris and Naif and all I mean in some of them And we just went into this big warehouse and filled it with smoke and started playing.

1:28:32 And others tell a story. There’s one where I have, I wrote a song called Samurai, which is in 15, eight time. It’s, the musicians sweat blood playing this song. It’s a really fast punk song. But in the video, there’s this little girl who is in bed looking angelic and she wakes up and there’s a rock band in her bedroom and she gets up and she finds a samurai outfit in her drawer, she puts it on, she raises her sword, and she’s gonna be the samurai who saves animals.

1:29:02 And so you see animals being freed while the rock band plays, and her little image, her little dream comes true. So some of these are just cute. Okay, you like punk music then? When I was in medical school, that was punk days. In fact, sometimes it got me into trouble.

1:29:21 I was working on the psychiatric ward in the hospital at the time, And my band was playing at this club in D.C. called the 930 Club, which is a kind of well-known place. So I was there at night, and into my dressing room came a patient from the psychiatric ward who was there. She just had a really bad eating disorder. She wasn’t psychotic, but she had this bad eating disorder and needed to be contained, but they would let her out on the weekend.

1:29:44 She came into my dressing room, drunk out of her mind, and oh, Christ, what’s this? So Monday morning, I’m back in the hospital. And one of the attending physicians grabs me, says, Dr. Barnard, we need to talk. Said, like, what is it?

1:29:56 I’m really worried about this patient. She, we thought it was just an eating disorder. She’s apparently hallucinating. We need to medicate her. Said, what do you mean?

1:30:04 She came up with this elaborate story that her doc was playing in this punk band down at the 930 Club, and they wanted to medicate her. I had to fess up. I said, this is, she’s not hallucinating. Anyway, so sometimes, but when I was six years old, my parents decided that any civilized person should play two instruments. So at that time it was classic, but you know.

1:30:24 Okay, so you must have heard of the Cro-Mags if you were under the proxy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the Bad Brains, you heard of the Bad Brains? Of course, everybody. So the Bad Brains were obviously, they were kind of had Rastafari links and they were eating vegan.

1:30:37 Aitau is vital and so they mentored John Joseph of the Cro-Mags and that’s why he started going vegan. DC has long had this funny music scene. Yeah, they were big there, right? The Bad Brains? Yeah, yeah.

1:30:50 Very much so. Yeah. So, anyway. And I saw videos, when I first met John Joseph, I didn’t really heard of the bad brains, and he said, watch this one set at CBGB’s that’s on YouTube. And like, they’re going crazy.

1:31:02 And John saw those guys and he said, these guys don’t eat meat? Like, they must eat meat. How they get all that energy. And then asked when he was like, converted. And that’s how he went vegan.

1:31:12 So, go figure, the punks. I do hope that, you know, as a doctor, the left side of my brain will hopefully You give people some information that will reach their head, but I sometimes do think that music can reach your heart in a way. I think you’re right. I just started picking up a guitar about three or four months ago when I’m playing, and any advice to a budding guitar player to learn faster or any suggestions? Yeah, I have one.

1:31:37 Play what you want. If you have a teacher and the teacher makes you play let it be on the acoustic guitar and you don’t want to play that, don’t play that. Play something you want. Also, I have a bunch of guitars, but I have one that’s a steinberger, which is really small. It’s the same head thing, but it doesn’t have the tuning pegs at the top.

1:31:56 So it’s so small, if you travel, it can practically go in your luggage. So you can play it anywhere. So if you’re in some exotic place, you can sit at the beach and you can do your thing. Wow, okay, nice, nice. Also, there’s some great apps these days.

1:32:09 I’m using something called Usician, and I’m amazed. I don’t know what it was like learning back in the day, but it can hear my notes and tell me what I’m doing wrong and then like you said, if I find a song that I love, I’ll keep playing it because I feel like I’m playing something that I dreamed of, even if I’m only playing a few chords, so it’s great advice. Play that, it’s like learning the language. You know, don’t learn the words for where is the laundromat if that’s not what you’re gonna do.

1:32:35 You know, with guitar, play what you wanna play and you’re gonna love it and you’re gonna be great. That’s really good advice. Next question, if I were to ask like five of your best friends, what is Dr. Neal’s superpower? Like how are you able to get everything done that you do?

1:32:50 What would they tell me? What do they think, what would they say is special about you? I don’t know that I’ve achieved that yet, but they would tell you what I maybe strive to do. I think we’re hopefully still growing. Number one is I think it’s good to have a sense of urgency and to maintain that.

1:33:08 I’m not an optimist or a pessimist. I’m just damn determined. And so I maintain that sense of urgency. To me, the world is a burning building, and there’s somebody in it that needs to get pulled out, and I feel that way every minute. Number two, I was really motivated by Dennis Burkett, who, I don’t know if that name rings a bell, he was a, he grew up in Ireland, he became a well-known surgeon because as a missionary surgeon in Africa, he discovered a kind of lymphoma, now called Burkett’s lymphoma, that he cured, and he became world-renowned.

1:33:41 But then he said, wait a minute, Food is killing people, that’s the issue. And he’s the guy who discovered the value of fiber. And he’s the whole reason why fiber became a known thing. So anyway, when I started getting into nutrition, Dennis Burkitt came to the US and helped me a lot. And his generosity for no money or anything and just kind of mentoring me and helping me is something that I wanted to bring in with the people who work for me.

1:34:04 So I’ve always thought that’s important. And I have to say, two completely conflicting things. You gotta work really fast, but you gotta be so thorough and make sure you’re right. So when we’re doing a research study, or I’m writing up an article for a journal, you have to work hard, work fast, get it done. Life is damn short, but you have to be so thorough and make sure your details are absolutely right.

1:34:27 You cannot do anything B minus. Like look at your operation here. I mean, ever since I walked in the door, you have a team here, everything you do. And this is part of your life. I mean, look at your dedication to sports.

1:34:41 You pick it up, you’re not gonna do a C minus job. That’s success. So that’s what I try to emulate. I don’t think I get there always, but that’s what we try to do. Wow, that’s super powerful.

1:34:53 And I totally get it. And the thing about what you do is, yeah, if you make one little mistake in one research paper, then everyone’s gonna go to that, right? For the rest of your career and say, point at it. So like you said, you have to be urgent, but if you’re not accurate, they’ll go right to that. And you also have to be forgiving with your staff, with yourself, with your friends and others, people goof up, they mess up, it’s human nature.

1:35:16 And thank you for the kind words about the team, I appreciate it, we have some. It’s true, you’re the most impressive operator I’ve ever seen. Oh, thank you. I wanna come back next week. They’re amazing, and we do have some emergency with us as well, we think these messages are important too, so.

1:35:29 Best day of your life and worst day of your life? I’m not sure I’ve had either one yet. Wow, that’s a great question. I have had some bad days. My mother was a tough patient.

1:35:50 She didn’t want to change her diet. She had a high cholesterol, wouldn’t change. And I realized why my mother wouldn’t change her diet, because I’m her third born child. And you know, parents will take advice from the first born. If you look at the photo album of the families, a lot of pictures of number one, there’s a few pictures of number two.

1:36:08 Get to you. Third, number three, you got to look in the index. So my mother isn’t going to take advice from me. But her doctor was threatening her. You’ve got a high cholesterol that’s going to kill you. I’m going to put you on drugs. Finally, my mother picked up a book that I wrote, and she actually went vegan. Didn’t tell me. After my pleading with her for years, she went vegan, went to see her doc, and the doctor did a blood test and asked her to come back. He said, there’s something wrong with our laboratory.

1:36:36 What do you mean? Your cholesterol is 70 points lower than it was. This is obviously an error. Come back to the lab, we’ll sort it out. She just laughed.

1:36:43 She realized this vegan diet works. It really did lower my cholesterol. So she stayed vegan. And she made, my father was a filter feeder. You know, he only, he didn’t know where the kitchen was.

1:36:53 Whatever my mother made, she would eat. So he was vegan by default. So they were happily doing this and she didn’t need medication or anything. Then later in life, they moved into what I’m gonna call old folks home, where the whole idea was, you know, now is the time to be rewarded. So they didn’t start vegan food or vegetarian, it was all steak and all this kind of stuff.

1:37:16 And my parents were too polite. So they started eating that stuff. And her cluster went right back up, they put her on drugs, the drugs kind of get you halfway there. One day I got the call, she was on the floor of her kitchen dead. And I thought, holy Christ, you know, she completely lost a carotid artery, it just paid over and you think, oh, you know, you’re not gonna live forever.

1:37:39 But, anyway, that is not a good thing. Anyhow, but… And it’s just education. That’s what’s frustrating about it. Well, it’s education, but logic and information only gets you so far.

1:37:57 We have to have the support of a culture because culture’s always working against us. Culture is working for dopamine. Culture’s working for money. Culture’s working for a lot of things other than your longevity. And when you pass on to your celestial reward, businesses know that there’s gonna be some other customer to take your place.

1:38:18 To counter these forces is not always easy. Yeah, what about a good day or a best day or a good day? What’s a memory of something that’s like that? No, I’ve had lots and lots of good days. I mean, I do like the rewards of this work.

1:38:31 I like publishing papers. I like speaking at major conventions and getting the turnaround in these doctor’s eyes where they’ve now got tools that they didn’t have before. But I mean, for me personally, my real life is, I get up real early in the morning and the day is coming up and to me there’s a certain magic there. Wow, okay. What scares you?

1:38:54 Not being as successful as I need to be to get this message out. I’m not afraid of my own personal demise, but I am afraid that the forces of ignorance are so strong and I don’t mean just with nutrition but with everything and we see this politically where you can create a fictional narrative that has tremendous power and resilience and that will hurt people. The human species, we are bipedal primates who are kind of slow on our feet and slow to think things through and we can do a lot of harm And in the same way as a baby who grows up is capable of things, except for restraint.

1:39:40 They can throw things and scream before they can place things carefully and form words. And the whole process of maturing is to restrain impulses. And then at the end of life, when we become demented, we lose restraint. And we scream again, and we wet ourselves, and we do things. Society is like that.

1:39:57 Society is all in a toddler phase, where we’re learning what I can do. can do before we learn to restrain it. We learned how to take slaves before we learned that we shouldn’t be doing that. We learned to attack women before we learned that respect and not taking victims is something we have to do. Restraint is very thin. It comes late to the game, and it’s not strong enough yet to restrain the bad stuff that we do to each other, to ourselves, to our planet, to the other animals that we share it with. To the extent that we can give ourselves a little bit of wisdom and put it to work, we can change that. But the one thing I fear is that there are not enough efforts to restrain the bad parts of what this bipedal primate is capable of.

1:40:39 Yeah, I appreciate that analogy. It makes a lot of sense with the society, so thanks for that. What keeps you awake at night? There’s work to be done the next day. There are all kinds of issues and problems, and funny. I had this naive view years ago that somewhere I’d heard that people have to hear something seven times before they’ll change their behavior. So I thought, that’s great.

1:41:06 I’ll do a book and I’ll tour all around and then the next year I’ll do another book. And then pretty soon it’ll catch a critical mass and people will change. But then I realized I can do seven book tours. But there are other people with the contrary message. The headwinds that are there are enormous.

1:41:24 So that’s our issue. But I’m not a pessimist nor am I an optimist. I just, I think, all right, where are the battle lines now? And let’s just push them as hard as we can. And the beauty of it is that there are more people than ever before who are promoting a healthy diet, who are promoting compassion, who are aware of the environmental issues.

1:41:42 And I do think that we’re growing up bit by bit. Do you think we’re gonna make it? I mean, obviously you’re in the middle of DC right now with some, you thought it was crazy the last couple years, now it’s getting super crazy, you know, are we gonna make it? It’s an open question, but it reminds me of when the League of Nations was being formed. After World War I, more destruction than the world had ever known, and the people who were organizing it were asking, are you optimistic?

1:42:10 And they said it’s not a question of optimism or pessimism, it’s just a question of being determined. So are we gonna make it, I don’t know. but my job is to do the science of it and to do honest, good trials where we show what can happen with diabetes or what can happen with heart disease and these things and then allow people to put these things to use and to work with other people who make it easy, who make it tasty, who make it fun, and then you can take it from there.

1:42:37 Yeah, no, for sure. Dr. Barnard, I always ask a few questions at the end. I’m gonna ask you if I could give you a magic phone where you could pick it up and call the 20-year-old Neil and give that young man a bit of advice. I guess you’re at undergrad.

1:42:50 What did you study, pre-med, or what did you study? Yeah, yeah, well, my major was psychology at the time. Okay, where, where were you? A little school called McAllister College in St. Paul, Minnesota.

1:42:59 Okay, all right. If you could give that young man some advice based on everything you know now, what would you tell him?

1:43:09 Well, I grew up with all these prejudices. I mean, at the time I thought that diabetes was this boring, incurable disease that my father had dealt with, and if I had realized that I should have paid more attention to my science class and things like that. I thought doctors were boring and the whole practice of medicine was boring. I didn’t realize that it gives you so much. There’s so much you can do with this.

1:43:31 No, I wanted to play rock and roll and things like that. I was into a different view. But no, I would certainly tell myself, I was a good student, I worked hard, I did all those things, but I didn’t have an understanding of kind of where it would take me. Okay, all right. On that same note, best advice you ever received, could it come from a professor or the guy in the morgue or a parent or anything, just something over the years that sticks out in your mind?

1:44:01 Well, I mean, with regard to physical habits and things like that, you know, people should follow a plant-based diet and they should go to sleep at 10 o’clock and the things which I’ve integrated into my own life. But I think it’s good advice, but it shouldn’t be advice. These should just be values. I mean, you do have to be honest with yourself and with your colleagues. You do really have to work hard.

1:44:23 You do have to be honest about your foibles and shortcomings. If you make a goof, you’ve gotta correct it. I think the only reason that these things have to be emphasized is you and I grew up with those as being values that everyone would respect. They’ve become more rare commodities more recently. Yeah, well said.

1:44:41 Last part, to that 20-year-old that’s watching us or listening to us somewhere around the world. Advice to them. What do they need to think about in their life? What do they need to prioritize? It’s a whole younger new generation that’s been grown up with different values than us and also different opportunities and now a lot of new knowledge.

1:44:58 What do you think is important for them to focus? The following success secrets are only available inside the London Real Tribe where you get exclusive access and insights from our high performance guests on wealth creation, productivity, leadership, morning routines, health, and well-being. To join our Tribe community, go to londonreal.tv forward slash Tribe. Now, let’s continue with the show. Super good advice, and I’m really glad you took that trip to Belgium when you were a kid.

1:45:28 Amazing how just a few months abroad could actually just completely turn the tables on. It’s not that different from where I grew up, really. It’s just a slightly, you know, a little different family, different culture, and the fact they made Merciless Fun of Me for a couple of months probably didn’t hurt either. But, yeah, it makes you have to rethink things. Yeah, it’s good for everyone to travel.

1:45:46 I had similar experiences as a kid, just going to Japan and going to Europe, and it definitely changed my life, just seeing these different cultures and different observations. It starts the ball rolling in a good way. For sure. Neil, thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate your passion.

1:45:59 I really appreciate your work, and you’re obviously super dedicated, and dedicated really your life to this stuff, and so I totally respect that, and I also appreciate you engaging with me in the debate today about some of these topics. And yeah, it’s great. It’s great for everyone to hear everything that we talked about tonight, and then they can really think about it. And I think this is gonna really seep in, and it’s even gonna seep into me, all right? I’m gonna start also thinking and rethinking some of my diet choices.

1:46:25 So just really appreciate everything you do. So thank you. Well, I very much feel like I’m always learning every day with all these things, including everything that we brought up. So thank you for letting me be part of this program, and I really appreciate being able to share this time with you. My pleasure.

1:46:41 Website, should they go to? What’s the best way to get the book when it comes out? Thank you. Your Body and Balance is coming out next year and it’s gonna be on all the online places and in stores and whatnot. And all the other books that I have, I hope people will look at now, especially my diabetes book and the vegan starter kit because you can put that to work now.

1:46:59 Our website is pcrm.org. That’s Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, pcrm.org. Excellent. Well, my grandmother in Bulgaria has been struggling with some diabetes and I’m gonna be hitting her with this knowledge literally tonight. So, thank you so much for that and I appreciate it and I think this is the beginning of a relationship.

1:47:19 I hope you come back soon and again, thanks so much. Thank you. All right, appreciate it.