Foods for Protecting the Body & Mind: Dr. Neal Barnard

Hello hello good evening, welcome everyone to Murdoch's

mind

,

body

and spirit series. I'm Gina Murdoch. It's great to see so many of you here. I love the front row. We are very honored to have my husband Jerry and I host this series in Aspen. Institute and we are very happy to see a full house once again for this series, connecting

mind

,

body

and spirit, this is truly part of the founding principles of the Aspen Institute. We have an incredible speaker here tonight and we are very, very excited. about listening to Dr. Neil Bernard, if you weren't here for that talk, you can just walk out, no, I'm kidding, uh, let's take a collective deep breath, it's the Aspen summer season and I know there's quite a bit of frenetic energy, so just close your eyes, take a few deep breaths and really connect to this space so that we can be present in this talk here today, so just breathe in and out through your nose and close your eyes.

I will not leave. I know I saw you. Take a couple of deep breaths so we talk a lot about mind, body and spirit and a lot of that is just about mindfulness, being present in the moment and here we are already in August August 5, 2015 and to some of us. We're wondering how we got there, so take a few deep breaths and reflect on all the amazing things you've seen in this space at the Aspen Institute. Personally, I would like to thank Crystal Logan for helping us put this series together and the staff at the Aspen Institute, so just take a deep breath one more time through your nose and as you exhale just one breath, let's do it one more time, inhale through your nose, oh , that feels good, let's talk about

foods

to protect. the body and mind tonight with Dr.

Neil Bernard and um I'm just going to tell you a little bit about him and you can read more in the program book. Neil Bernard is an adjunct associate professor of medicine at George Washington University School of Medicine. and Health and Sciences in Washington D.C, president of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, through numerous studies has found ways to reverse and prevent diseases and has worked tirelessly to educate the medical community, as well as the public, about the findings from a large number of colleagues. reviewed studies Dr. Bernard is the author of more than 70 scientific publications as well as 17 books, including New York Times bestsellers, Brain Power Foods, and Kickstart to Lose Weight in 21 Days.

He will be signing his books after this program, so please take some time. To connect with him afterwards and very quickly, the bio is very impressive and we know that all of our speakers here are incredible human beings who really push the envelope with innovation and creativity. When I was going to introduce Dr. Bernard, I received an email. from a friend of mine named Martin Oswald Martin, are you in the audience? Yes, Martin, I'm sorry to embarrass you, but the wonderful thing is that Martin is a local chef and what he has done was inspired by Dr.

Bernard, and I think you have too. he went online and went ahead and did an experiment at Grand Valley Hospital in Rifle and used the diet that Dr. Bernard talks about. Were there 50 different patients who had prediabetes and through diet they all cleared up? from diabetes and their cholesterol went down, some of them had their acne gone, they got happier, they looked better and lo and behold, this really works so I just wanted to share that story, let's give this guy a hand, join me to welcome. Dr. Neil Bernard come on stage thank you, come on Neil, welcome, thank you, thank you very much, thank you Gina, thank you Jerry, it's a pleasure to be here, what a wonderful place.

I didn't grow up in such a wonderful place. place, I have to tell you I grew up in Fargo, North Dakota, has anyone been there and seen the movie, okay, anyway, that's my mother in that movie, my father, he grew up in the cattle business and his father and his father and his father them. We were all ranchers and my dad didn't like the cattle business so he left and went to medical school and came back and became the diabetes expert for Fargo and all of North Dakota and western Minnesota and I never did. I heard it said that anyone improved.

What they did was control his illness. Diabetes was a one-way street. It was a progressive disease and our goal was to try to control it and do the best we could and when we could. He was around 60 and early 7, he started to succumb to symptoms we had never seen in him before and his mind was starting to work a little like his father's mind had gone to where St's story started repeating itself and then His words were leaks every day and many times a day and when he died with severe dementia I realized I had never heard of any way to prevent it.

I want to talk about those things today. It's a new world. Now we know more about all this. of what we had known before and we have tools not only to show us what is happening but to take this power in our hands and share it and change this world for ourselves and our loved ones and that is what I want to talk about today First, a little bad news, This is diabetes, it's not your imagination, it's getting a lot worse and people come to my office and say, I'm pretty good. I'm quite well. I don't eat bread.

Because what you're thinking is diabetes means I have too much sugar in my blood. Sugar is glucose and it comes from carbohydrates, so the idea is don't eat bread, don't eat potatoes, don't eat sweet potatoes. Don't eat cookies, don't eat cakes, don't eat rice because those are carbohydrates. Well, if you look around the world a little bit, Jerry and I were talking about this earlier. Take a look at Japan. In Japan you have the thinnest people. oldest people on the planet what is the staple food of Japan huge amounts of rice for breakfast, lunch and dinner and if you look at diabetes in Japan in adults over 40 years old before 1980, diabetes was rare among the 1 and 5% of the population, but what?

It happened in Japan around 1980, someone known as William Castelli at Framm's heart studio always said that when you see the golden arches you could be on the way to the Pearly Gates and this is not traditional Japanese food, but it has become very popular and if you look on the can you can see that the fat content of the diet is not as bad as ours, but it is increasing and the carbohydrates are decreasing. They are eating less rice year after year and in 1990 diabetes was 11 to 12%, this shows us two. The first thing is that diabetes is not caused by eating rice.

In a little while I will tell you what it is due to. The second thing is that diabetes is not genetic. For the most part, there are genes for type 1 diabetes and type 2 diabetes. diabetes, but did the genes change during that time? no, they didn't, there are two types of genes, there are dictator genes, those are the genes that say blue eyes, you are going to have blue eyes, they give you orders, you must obey, diabetes genes are more like committees, they do suggestions: You might have diabetes, but you might not be able to, so let's learn a lesson from the United States: we don't have a rice-based diet, we have a meat-based diet, and in 1909 the Department of Agriculture.

I started tracking what we eat and meat consumption. It increased especially in the post-World War II period and reached an all-time high in 2004 and what was the big increase. Pork Meat. Chicken. Americans eat a million chickens an hour. Let me say a special word of condemnation. For cheese back in 1909, when the government started tracking cheese, it was a European thing. We don't eat cheese in North Dakota, but in the '60s, '70s, and '80s, fast food chains and especially pizza chains brought cheese into our lives. You know, pizza is a delivery. The vehicle makes cheese and in 2012 the average American was eating 30 pounds more than a century before, that would be fine except it's 70% fat, mostly saturated fat, which is bad fat, it's got a lot of cholesterol, it's got a lot of sodium .

If it were worse, it would be Vaseline and we are eating enormous amounts of this substance, enormous amounts of sugar, when Americans were gaining weight in the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, what we saw was different types of sugar moving in different directions, the blue line is table sugar. the green line high fructose corn syrup put it all together you get the red line we are eating more sugar okay so more meat more cheese more sugar why do we have an obesity epidemic? I don't know, we're not getting enough exercise, right? that has nothing to do with it, it's all on the input side of the equation and the reason this is important is that if we point the finger at our children telling them that they simply need to stop reading, put down their iPad and start exercising, they can't.

Exercise without exercise is great, but the reason for obesity and the diabetes epidemic and other things I'm going to talk to you about is because we're eating in a way that human beings have never eaten in the history of this planet. Here is the diabetes of 20 years ago, 1994, there is North Dakota up there, less than 4% of the population has had diabetes. Here we are out of favor in Louisiana and Mississippi, more than 6%, but as our diet changed, the map began to change. Here's '95 and '96 and '97 and '98 and '99 2000 2001 diabetes doesn't wait if you change your diet, it comes on strong now I'm going to change the color scheme because I want to focus on certain counties um, but the map is getting worse and Colorado better than all, but even in Colorado things are starting to get worse, who does it better?

Researchers have long studied Seventh-day Adventists and when I began my research career I couldn't understand why they were putting Seventh-day Adventists under the microscope, I soon learned that, according to their teachings, Seventh-day Adventists are supposed to Seventh-day Adventists should avoid tobacco, alcohol, caffeine, and meat, and almost all Adventists are good at the first three, but some eat meat, some don't. smokers, non-drinkers and in 2009 the American Diabetes Association published this data. What they were looking at was BMI. Are you familiar with BMI body mass index? It is your weight, but it is adjusted according to your height and ideally below 25, they did not observe. around 61,000 people and they separated them according to the diet they usually followed and the red bar on the left is what they called non-vegetarians or mediators and they were not below 25, they were at approximately 28.8 and the next group was semi-vegetarians They meet less than once a week a little thinner the third group Pesco vegetarians Pesco means okay, no meat except fish, a little thinner than lacto oo vegetarians lacto meaning okay, dairy products or Eggs, okay, no meat, but dairy and eggs, and what's that blue line?

I have the right to tell my patients that a vegan is not a person from planet Vegas um but this is a person who does not consume animal products at all and that is the only group that is right in the middle of the healthy weight range but this is not That's why the American Diabetes Association published this data, they were looking at diabetes and you see the same gradient, mediators have a lot, vegans have almost none, so that's very impressive, so my research team thought That was fine, let's try that. in people who had never thought about doing something like this before and let's see what happens, so we brought in a group of people who were postmenopausal women with moderate to severe weight problems and we didn't say cut calories or avoid carbs. said no animal products and kept the oils low so don't grab that bottle of olive oil and go glug glug glug glug glug glug glug your whole past is going to be low fat

foods

uh we asked them not to change their exercise and It was a 14 that we studied, so what we asked them to eat was what we call the energy plate fruits, grains, vegetables, legumes, legumes are fine, beans, peas, lentils, foods that grow in pods, so breakfast It could be blueberry pancakes or oatmeal with cinnamon raisins. or chili without meat but with vegetables or beans and if my Linguini arrives uh instead of alfredo sauce I could have artichokes and seared oyster mushrooms this is not a demanding diet uh without counting calories without counting carbohydrates and at 14 weeks the average person had lost 13 pounds, his waist dropped 2 inches, and his insulin sensitivity improved, which we measured with glucose tolerance tests, based on these results that we published in the American Journal of Medicine, NIH, uh, oh.

I forgot to tell you that we tracked them. for two more years and we compared them with a control group that followed a diet of chicken and fish the control group is the red line in the long term they didn't do as well the blue line was the vegan group and because you don't starve there's no reason to overeat there's no reason for the weight to come back and it's just a one-way street to a healthier waistline, so the National Institutes of Health gave us a grant and said why don't you try this to determine the type? two diabetes, so we use a plant-based diet and thewe compared to a conventional diabetes diet restricted in calories and carbohydrate counting, uh 22.

We studied approximately five months and one year of follow-up. We had 99 people and what we track is something called hemoglobin A1c if you have diabetes, you know what I'm talking about, and what happens with A1C is if I measure your blood glucose level, it goes up and down minute by minute, but A1C stays pretty stable and should be below seven if you have diabetes, so the red line was the conventional diet, they had a nice drop to 7.5; People who followed the vegan diet, no calorie counting, no carb limits, were free to eat whatever they wanted, had this massive drop on average, more than 1.2 absolute percentage points. with A1C, which is not only better than any other diet ever tested, but also better than any oral diabetes medication we had available.

And when we saw these results, some unusual things happened. This is Vance. Vance had been a police officer in Washington. His father had died at the age of 30. Vance was diagnosed with diabetes at 31. He came to see us when he was 30 and he was randomly assigned to the vegan group and after about 3 weeks he said this is the easiest diet he has ever done. Don't tell me to tell anything. Don't tell me not to eat things. I can eat whatever I want. I just learned different types of foods, but he said it was easy to lose about 60 pounds over the course of a year, his diabetes medications were stopped, and his hemoglobin A1c was not below seven at first, it was 9.5 , which is terrible, dropped to 5.3. which is normal this is what this when I was in medical school they taught me that you can't become normal here was a man in front of me and his lab test showed that without any medication he had a hemoglobin A1c of a teenager diabetes Ya It wasn't, do I tell you?

I had to say that I thought about this for a long period of time. Could I tell him that he no longer had diabetes? I have to say this as we are starting to see many, many cases of this. You feel pretty comfortable telling people that his diabetes is gone, that doesn't mean he can't come back, it's waiting around the corner or if Vita comes back into your life, diabetes will find you. This is, by the way, I was asking your permission. to share your experience, she said, be sure to tell everyone that my erectile dysfunction is gone too, you can write that, this is Nancy, same story, she lost about 40 pounds, she stopped taking her diabetes meds, her A1C improved, is still in diabetes. range, but much, much better and her arthritis improved dramatically, effectively disappeared and that's another talk, but in summary, when you are not eating dairy products and dairy proteins, the inflammatory processes that attack the joints in many cases disappear. and there are other parts of the diet that can also cause inflammation, but this is important, okay, okay now, I want this to be my most important slide, if there are any doctors, I want you to turn on your phone and take a picture of this um , this is a muscle cell and the reason I'm showing you a muscle cell is because that's where the sugar goes.

Some of the blood sugar goes to the brain, some goes to the liver, some goes to other parts, but most of it. It goes to your muscles because it drives your movements and then there is glucose to enter that cell, it needs a hormone called insulin and there is insulin, it is like a key, so here is the insulin that attaches to that red receptor . like a key in a lock and once the insulin attaches it tells those channels to bring in the glucose and that's where it goes in, that's what's supposed to happen, but there's a problem here, this was when I was a child and growing up in the North.

Dakota, I lived in a part of town where other kids did this not-so-nice trick when no one was home, they put chewy G's in the front door lock and you came home with a perfectly good key that no longer opens. the door. I hope you've never lived in a neighborhood like that, so instead of going in and out the window, all you know for the rest of your life, clean the lock on the door and your key will work again. You don't have gum in your cells what you have is chicken fat cheese fat beef fat frying fat fat olive oil extra virgin olive oil extra virgin olive oil there may be a little bit of 40 motor oil in there, so I know, anyway this fat builds up inside the cell and stops the insulin key from working are you with me? fat buildup causes insulin resistance now doctors hate words like fat it has one syllable so we'll call it intramyocellular lipid it's fat inside the cell so why did Vance's diabetes disappear? well think about it how much fat is there in a low fat vegan diet how much animal fat is there there is none and if I keep the oils low do you think the fat will stay there it will gradually dissipate and the insulin can work? again and so time goes back the cause of his diabetes is starting to disappear and not just for Vans but for anyone with type two diabetes and by the way this is not abdominal fat, you can be skinny, it is fat inside the cell that I can only be detected with Mr. spectroscopy is inside the cell, okay, and now I would like to talk to you about your car insurance, this is Geico, uh, when I look out my office window, Geico national headquarters It's about three blocks away and back in 2006, the head of Geico's health service said we need you here.

We have 5,200 employees here. They were self-insured. You wouldn't believe what we are paying for Lipor, insulin, blood pressure pills. Why don't we do your Diet at Geo and I said let's do it, but let's do it as a test, so we chose two different Geico facilities, this one in the Washington area and one in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and this one they got a program to introduce a healthy diet at work and at the other they didn't and we tracked everyone's weight and health and the idea was that once a week they would form a lunchtime discussion group about how to start a vegan diet if someone wanted to do it completely voluntarily and the other The thing was that they would be served vegan food in the cafeteria, but this was totally new to the cafeteria manager, um, um, anyway, but they realized, it took a little bit of time and the people in Fredericksburg didn't lose weight, but the people in the Washington area lost weight very well and then Geico said well, that was pretty good, let's do it in Georgia, let's do it in San Diego, let's do it in 10 different cities and exactly the same thing happened if you had weight to lose you lost weight if you had diabetes you got better and now we see this all the time and I have to say that my instructors who taught in all these cities were actually very happy because instead of thinking that people are people resistant they love it, it's something fun and cool that you can do at work, except there were two participants that my instructors kept complaining about, they were in the Washington area and every week the instructors came back and said Hillary and Bruce, I don't I don't know why they show up because they sit in the back of the room and chat and talk and don't pay attention to what everyone else is saying and just distract everyone.

I wish they wouldn't come. and every week I kept hearing about how bad Hillary and Bruce are and I want to tell you something you might miss, judge the people they were distracting, but what they were really talking about was the food they were going to pick up at the store on the road. at home how they would convince their dad to go vegan with them how they would have a vegan Thanksgiving for all their friends and a year later they sent me this photo um Hillary lost 85 pounds Bruce lost 100 PB um and the other thing about This if you've been hit with a diet and you've been hit with a diet, I mean you thought it was going to work and it was hard for you and somehow you're not getting the results that other people were getting, that's not just bad for you. physically that is bad for you psychologically because it teaches you that something is wrong with you and I want to tell you something there is nothing wrong with you there is a lot wrong with diets that are based on starving yourself or telling you that you can't eat healthy complex foods carbohydrates and things like that and There are a lot of dumb diets out there, but a diet based on healthy vegetables and fruits, whole grains and beans is the fuel that your body works on and allows you to automatically succeed and heals you physically, but also allows it to repair some of the damage that happens to us in years of dumb, dumb commercial diets that we've had to live on, okay, so this is a man named John R who lived in Canada.

He sent me these pictures because he was at 320 pounds his doctor said you have prediabetes and his wife found out about the program we were doing she gave him a book when he got to chapter 4 he had lost 160 pounds and just like Hillary and Bruce she discovered that he liked it exercising now has energy uh this is Gina the same story she needed to lose not so much weight but she didn't want to lose it by starving but simply by making qualitative changes she regains her waist and her health and this is what works well At the same time we were doing this work on diabetes, some researchers elsewhere began to discover a parallel pathway leading to brain health, and if it's okay with you, I'd like to dig a little deeper first.

The bad news is that Alzheimer's is becoming much more common, this is not just because the baby boomers are getting older, that is part of it, the disease is more common not only here but in other countries and it starts as a lapse , What was the name of that movie? This happens from time to time, that's normal, that's sleeping, but if it's every day, it's mild cognitive impairment, um, and if you have problems with learning, remembering, reasoning, and visual-spatial ability, you can't understand anymore. a map properly, uh, language. and the personality begins to disappear, this is what begins to lead us to a diagnosis of Alzheimer's.

Now you're going to say, I don't want that to be the last disease I want to even think about getting because when you have Alzheimer's. you lose everything everything your doctor will tell you I'm sorry, it's genetic there is a gene called apoe epsilon4 alal if you received it from one of your parents you have three times the risk if both parents gave it to you you have 10 to 15 times the risk of having new parents I don't think so, let me show you what the brain is like, what is happening in the brain, this red crescent that is the hippocampus, which in Latin means seahorse, this will be in the test, the hippopotamus, some anatomist . 2000 years ago I thought it looked like a seahorse.

Anyway, I'm the hippocampus. The hippocampus is tasked with deciding what is worth remembering. Then the waiter approaches your restaurant table and greets you. My name is Kelly. I'll be your waiter tonight. and says hippoc campus I don't think so, but there are things that have to be remembered, they go to the cerebral hemispheres and you don't get a new cell for each new fact, what you get are new connections and stronger connections between the cells, but Yes You look inside the brain hemispheres, you find that these cells, these normal brain cells, are squeezing out strands of proteins and these strands of proteins get into these sort of balls of thread or little meatballs that we call beta ameloid plaques and they don't look like that.

Well, it's like one of those old-fashioned sausage makers that takes out strands of protein and then packs them into these meatballs in the brain. It is a hallmark of Alzheimer's disease. Well, anyone knows what this is. It's Chicago 1993, Chicago's health and aging project. They started and what they did was they interviewed thousands of people, all they asked them was what they had for breakfast, what they had for lunch, what they had for dinner and then they carefully tracked those people for years to see if there was anything related to brain health and the first thing they What caught their attention was something I knew when I was a kid growing up in Fargo, my mom had had five kids and the smell of bacon wafted into our room and we all ran downstairs and my mom was pulling the bacon strips out of the frying pan. and putting them on a paper towel to cool and when the pan was out of bacon, I had that hot bacon grease in the pan and I didn't want to throw away that good bacon grease, so I was carefully pouring it into a jar to save it.

Did your mom do this? That jar didn't go in the refrigerator, it just sat on the shelf because I knew that when bacon grease cools. If you look at what happens to it, it solidifies and that's a sign that it's high in saturated fat, bad fat, and the number one source of saturated fat is dairy, but it's also found in meat. Well, in Chicago some people don't eat much. and some people eat a lot and we're going to separate those two groups, so the researchers tried to compare the low saturated fat group with the high saturated fat group and I'd like to show you the numbers for that low group. a high group, so people who eat more saturated fat, more dairy, morebacon, had three and a half times the risk of Alzheimer's compared to other people.

Where does it come from? Two eggs, three grams of saturated fat, one strip of bacon, another. gram, do you know anyone who has a strip of bacon, chicken thigh, even without skin?, four and a half grams of a glass, a glass of whole milk, another four and a half grams of pizza for one, 12 grams, do you know to people who eat these foods? There is food everywhere and you just add that up and you are automatically in the high risk group. Well, researchers in Finland said: What happens if we don't look at Alzheimer's? What if we only look at mild cognitive impairment?

That situation where you're having a lot of mental lapses later in life but you don't have Alzheimer's you're still driving you're still controlling um they took a little over a thousand adults tracked their diet at age 50 and then monitored them for the next few years. 21 years old and some of them ate relatively little saturated fat, others ate more and it wasn't just Alzheimer's. brain problems, well, what about that gene that supports epsilon4? Well, they redid the data looking at just those people and here we are, some people had relatively low fats, some people had high fats and here are the numbers. just so you understand that these are all people with genetic risk, but if you avoid the bad fats , the risk of developing these memory problems is reduced by 80%.

Genes are not destiny, just as in the case of diabetes, the genes for Alzheimer's disease are. a committee that is making a really strong suggestion and now is the time to say: I don't think so, I don't want that disease, the solution is not perfect, but we have tools that we didn't use to have. oh yeah, what is that? Now there's fat in uh Donuts, does anyone know what they're called trans fats, that's right, uh, some people in Chicago know what a donut is, some people avoid it, some people eat a lot of it and I want to show you the numbers. exactly the same thing, so all we are doing is adding the tools, if I avoid saturated fats, if I avoid trans fats, I have reduced my risk dramatically, are you with me, okay now?

We're just getting started, but why would this be? The Kaiser Permanente researchers said maybe it's cholesterol, bad fats, high cholesterol, so they brought in 10,000, not exactly 10,000 people, and some of them had lower cholesterol, a little higher, a little higher. high and a little bit higher cholesterol and then they looked at your likelihood of getting Alzheimer's the higher you are here, the more obvious pattern you'll see of Alzheimer's if you have a low cholesterol level, your risk of Alzheimer's is relatively low if you maintain high cholesterol, your Alzheimer's risk is high, but these cholesterol tests were completed when they were 40 years old and ruled their Alzheimer's risk three decades later, it's never too early to change, okay, so what else is hiding in those plaques? , there is protein, there is cholesterol, there is also iron and copper.

I don't know if that's surprising. you uh if your cast iron skillet rusted if your copper penny rusts well the same thing happens to O iron and copper in your body we eat iron and meat and various foods copper is in many foods it rusts in your body as that oxidizes it releases free radicals, you know about free radicals, these are the sparks that attack your skin and attack your brain, they are destroying the connections between cells, so cast iron pans, copper pipes, meat, liver , probably the worst of all, uh, multiple vitamins, the vitamins. They are fine, but they put iron and copper that you don't need now this St Silver says we know you don't need iron anymore.

You are getting a lot from Foods, they will take it out but they are still charging. If you're taking copper, they're 20 years behind the science. You should take a vitamin B12 supplement which is good, but if you are taking a multivitamin, buy one called just vitamins, no, no iron, no copper, you don't need it. you get them from Foods, okay, okay, so I've been saying stay away from animal products, eat healthy natural foods, it sounds like a Mediterranean diet and it is, and in fact, if you look at the Mediterranean regions. Those people who have a glass or two of wine every day have less Alzheimer's than other people and it's true, in fact when I was in college I think some of my roommates felt like they were in the Mediterranean program and they were doing everything possible to follow him. a good healthy Mediterranean diet, um, but some researchers said maybe it's not the alcohol that's causing it, maybe it's the grapes, so at the University of Cincinnati, researchers brought in a group of people who had an impairment mild cognitive, an average age of 78 and what they tried was just grape juice, uh, a pint a day, which is a lot, but what they found was that in three months their learning was better and their memory was better.

Why do I want to say it's too easy? Three months, how good, think about it, a grape has a difficult life. on the vine all day Under the sun without protection or wait a minute that purple color, they are anthocyanins, they are powerful antioxidants, they protect the grapes well. If so, maybe other foods that have that same color will do it again to the laboratory, let's try the cranberry juice, so we brought in a new group of people and gave them a half liter a day of Blu Gray juice exactly the same benefit. Well, now I'm not suggesting that you need to drink cranberry juice or grape juice, which I am.

What I'm suggesting is that, oh, sorry, what I'm suggesting is that those colors aren't there just to be pretty. If you go to the produce aisle of a grocery store, the orange color of carrots or sweet potatoes you can see that at 100 yards the lopine red color that is in a tomato, you can see that across the room, the anin deep purple and blueberries and in grapes and many other foods, you can see it from very far away, but if your cat came with you, your cat would say I don't see. What are you so excited about?

Your cat does not have your color or your vision. Your cat is carnivorous and looks for movement in the distance. Cats and dogs have a very keen sense of hearing and smell and are very attuned to movement. but the human retina has evolved over time to recognize antioxidants and the human brain has created a positive veil that says I want us to now take those colors and put them in a bag of M&M's but the original function is to save your life is this to do. OK, so food isn't everything, exercise is important too and at the University of Illinois, researchers did something interesting: they brought 120 adults and asked them to take a brisk walk three times a week and it reversed brain shrinkage, especially in the hippocampus, which is Latin for seahorse, he ate asparagus today, that's very good and it improved his memory, so exercise is good, it gets oxygen into the brain and removes waste products, so I have my own exercise tips that I would like to share. share with you um get to the airport as late as possible um carry very heavy luggage run to the plane um I do this about two or three times a week um but what they did at the University of Illinois was a little different, they only said 10 Walk of five minutes three times a week, this is not a painful walk, this is a fast walk.

Then add five minutes each week so it's 15 15 15 and then the next week 20 20 20 once you get up to 40 minutes, a brisk walk three times a week, that's the level that reverses brain shrinkage okay, imagine what happens if you eliminate saturated fats, trans fats, excess metals and you are pumping your brain, are you getting energy? We are absolutely just getting started, okay, it's not just physical exercise. It's mental exercise and you know, it started in Canada. Some people in Canada speak a language. Some people speak two. People who speak two languages ​​have a delay in cognitive decline of about five years compared to other people, if you speak three languages, even better. um, your high school French won't help you, you have to use it today if you're using it, it will help you, okay, so intellectual activities, documentaries, newspapers, these are all good for you, this is the one I read, uh, choose the right one.

That is the most meaningful meaning for you, but anything that makes the word Machinery work is good for you. Okay, crosswords and anagrams are especially good. I was sitting in a lecture by Dean, or you know, Dean Orish, he's a medical genius, he showed that you can. reverse heart disease with a plant-based diet and a healthy lifestyle and he, he, he was sitting at a conference and he showed this slide, he said, if I focus only on myself, if I focus on myself, I will be sick, But if I focus on us, if I receive the support of a group.

I may be fine and he was making his point about getting support from the group very well, but while he was making that point I was thinking about something completely different, which was Isn't it cool that these words are hidden in other words and it's probably a good thing that your brain sees it, so I started taking words like this and if you rearrange them, it's amazing what you can find and by doing this, this helps your gray matter improve, this helps your white matter improve and If you do this daily you will see many improvements in your brain.

Well, now there are some companies that are making money doing this. You've heard of lumosity.com. Oh, hello, David, I remember. what you ordered the last time you were at my restaurant and you get a tip or how many words start with diig are working on memory and reaction time and reasoning five minutes a day I'm not pushing Lumosity There are many others, but the idea is that these resources are there for you, okay, now the most important thing, whether it is physical exercise or intellectual exercise, the most important thing is to stop, you have to stop, you have to go to sleep because the first part of The Night, when you are asleep, Your brain is involved in what is called slow wave sleep, it is integrating words, facts and experiences, it is as if all the memories and things that came during the day were a jumble of file folders that you have to stop to file away. second half of the night is REM sleep rapid eye movement your brain is sorting out physical skills like a musical instrument or riding a bike or playing tennis and emotions in dreams if you're up all night and if you're up night after night you just don't sleep well your memory will be poor and your emotional control will be poor so there is a physiological substrate in the night your amalo that that sausage machine turns off stops producing so much protein amalo but that only turns off if you go to sleep, sleep well, so this is my most important medical device.

I don't care how good your book is. 10:00 close it, turn off the light, go to sleep if you have trouble sleeping. I have a regimen that using it for people is very, very easy to do and it's in my book energy foods for the brain or we can talk about it in the question and answer section um, it's a very easy thing to do, right? um so what is a healthy diet? fruits, grains, vegetables, legumes, those should be our staples and we, we, the physicians committee, are some of you members of the physicians committee for responsible medicine, thank you if it is, um, if it's not , join us, we are trying to promote a healthier world in many ways and I would love for you to know what we are doing, but in 2009 we sent this to the US government and we said the pyramid has a nice shape, but people eat from a plate, give them a plate and you don't need a meat group and a dairy group, these are the foods to emphasize, well we didn't hear back from them so in 2011 we filed a lawsuit against the USDA and we received response from them, and no I don't know if you've seen it, but that's what the USDA now calls my plate and they said okay, fruits, grains, protein, protein could be meat, but it could be beans, tofu or nuts.

For the first time in American history, there is no meat. group no longer, the dairy group now includes soy milk, it's not perfect, but we are going in the right direction. C. I don't take any credit for this change, it could be a coincidence, but we are making, we are making progress. Well, by now you might be thinking, "Okay, Dr. Brard, I get it, if I followed your diet, I'd probably be healthier, but my family would divorce me. I'd have to live in the garage, all the pleasures of life." life would end." Am I going to do this right?

I want to show you how we do it in research studies. We've done it with hundreds of people and I've never seen anyone unable to do it. I want to walk you through two steps, step one, check. To determine the possibilities during the first week we are not going to eliminate any foods, all we are going to do is try to identify the plant-based foods that we really like, so you take a sheet of paper and mark breakfast, lunch, dinner, snack and you go to the store or try different recipes and see what fits well, oatmeal tastes like pastafor wallpaper, I have to put some raisins and a little bit of cinnamon in it and now it's okay, blueberry pancakes that will work.

I've never done. I tried almond milk but I'll put it in my Flakes brand and see what I think so all I'm doing is trying different things and for lunch I'll try the veggie pizza without cheese and I'll try a veggie hot dog or a tangerine stir fry whatever. I'm just trying them and I'm going to an Italian Italian restaurant where I'll try the salads and the pasta fol or the angel hair pasta with arabiata sauce or uh, Mexican, I'll try the vegetarian fajitas or the bean burritos. um, in Chinese, I might try rice, tofu, and vegetable dishes, bonus points for the Japanese because they're often delicate and very low in oil, so all I'm doing is tasting the plant. based on options and if I go to a submarine sandwich place, would you be willing to make it without meat or cheese?

Sure, so you load it with lettuce, tomato, onion, cucumber, olives and red wine vinegar and they toast it for you and Taco Bell may not be the pinnacle of culinary art, but they will make you a bean burrito, so there it is where you're eating, you're trying out these options, so whatever you're eating, the idea is just find your breakfast, lunch, and dinner snack that works for you and then once you've found those, the second step is to mark only 21 days, not 22, not 28, just 21 on your calendar and make it all vegan all the time for three weeks, as well as a test that I can do, okay, easy, at the end of that time two will have happened things: the first is that you are healthier, you are physically healthier, you are healthier, your blood sugar is going down, you are losing weight, your digestion has finally taken care of itself, but the other thing is that your tastes are starting to change in ways I didn't expect and if that sounds strange, let me ask this group how many of you have ever switched from whole milk to skim milk or skim milk.

I see Hands, how good when you made what it wasskimmed milk like at first watery it's also a little blue it doesn't look good how many of you got used to that? How many got used to the lighter flavor? Have you ever gone back and tried whole milk again? How was that too? thick, creamy, like waiting a minute for your entire life, it was fine, but what happens if you don't try it for a period of about three weeks? Your taste buds physically change and prefer the lighter taste, so if you start a low-fat Plant-Based Diet for the first week It will seem light to you, you will think if I have to acquire a taste for folk music.

Now bring out the tie dye. I am doing a vegan diet. Well, the second week it starts to make sense and by the third week you heard that Serena Williams is doing this and Bill Clinton I think Ellen is degenerate and I think El Gore started doing it and a lot of people are doing this and there are like 10,000 books and there are a Million websites, DVDs and shows and lots of fun products in the store, so it becomes cool and you discover that all your friends have adopted you as Nutritional Authority and after about four weeks, if you come back and eat a cheeseburger and double bacon.

What you discover is not the joyful experience you remember, but rather it is simply like being a smoker. If you smoke every other day, you never forget it, but if you've been without smoking for about 3 weeks, you have energy, that's why we do it that way. This way if you want transitional foods like the veggie burger instead of the beef burger or instead of Jimmy Dean there's gim lean you can do this if you want so I'm not pushing them but meat substitutes They are there, we have a free one. online program called Kickstart is 21 days of menus, recipes and cooking videos, so on the first day Alisia Silverstone will send you her menus and recipes.

I'm not making this up and many other Hollywood celebrities and athletes will do the same. Same thing we have an app, it's also free 21 day Kickstart, it's all here at pcrm.org, sign up, by the way, for those of you who are caregivers, we have it in English, Spanish, Mandarin and a program for people of the En the Indian subcontinent, we have had around 450,000 people who have used this program, all completely free, without commercial prejudices of any kind. And the world is changing? I showed them that meat consumption hit an all-time high in 2004, but around 2005 67 started to sizzle and in 2008 it fell in 2009 it fell in 2010 2011 it started to fall and if you do the math around 2012 we had lost about 20 pounds. of meat per person per year if you are an animal lover, each 1% drop is 100 million animals that are not eaten If you are an environmentalist person, that is a lot of feed grain that did not have to be irrigated by infrared and if You're a cardiologist, that's a lot of lipo, you're not using it, so we're not where we need it. be but it's not your imagination either the world is changing things are going in a much better direction however I want to tell you something and this is where I would like to focus your attention on something in which you are facing a serious challenge.

Remember this? There are many people who benefit from things that are not so healthy and may say things that sound good in a clip but may not be entirely true. Eat butter. Butter is fine. uh, the dairy administration, the beef industry, Atkins, there are a lot of people who spend a lot of time trying to convince you to eat their products and their secret weapon is research, because if I can do a study that says that the 20% of teenage girls are low in iron, so I can make a press release and every TV station on the 6:00 news says that a new study shows that women tend to be low in iron, so , do doctors recommend more red meat or can I do another study that shows people are low in iron. calcium, so we need cheese and sour cream and milk and dairy products.

The industry uses this. They are not stupid. This is the Cattelan meat joint. Look at your research budget. $6.7 million per year. Part of that is marketing. A lot of that is stuff to get. evening news want their kids and grandkids to buy their products now the dietary guidelines advisory committee saw this earlier this year this is a group chosen by the federal government to decide what americans should eat and they released a report that said The available evidence does not show any relationship between dietary cholesterol consumption and serum cholesterol. Cholesterol is not a nutrient of concern for excessive consumption;

In other words, we can finally go back and have what we've been longing for, which is this and apparently this is the most important thing. in our lives and we can shove it down our throats, in fact, if cholesterol doesn't matter, why stop there? We can eat sausages again and this is what Americans in recent months have begun to think. A Gallop post earlier this last month showed that Americans are less worried than ever about food and not just this, we can eat salt, we can eat sugar, we can eat all these things, who cares? I took a look at a research study that happened to be published by one of the members, Alice.

Lickstein, who is a good researcher at Tuft University, published a study that I think they relied on and showed that dietary cholesterol actually has only a very modest effect on blood cholesterol. In other words, are you with me if you're eating a lot of eggs and other high cholesterol foods, according to this study, they don't actually do much for your blood cholesterol, so don't worry, that's the headline, but I'm glad you are. I got this study and it is like this. It was a review of 12 previous studies and here they are. This will not be in the test.

Don't try to read this, but there are 12 of them. These are the sponsors. Can you see that 11 of the 12 are the industry? 10 are the egg industry. and one is fishing, which is the prawns that worries them now, jump in with the interventions but what I put here I'll tell you if they found an unfavorable effect of the eggs on your cholesterol level I'll tell you if it had a favorable effect and in some cases for For statisticians, it was statistically significant in others, but is the pattern seen in practically all studies? If you're feeding eggs or shrimp or whatever, your blood cholesterol goes up, it goes up a little bit or it goes up a lot and that's what people weren't seeing 92% of cholesterol studies are industry funded this one isn't was the case in the 50s and 60s what happened what happened is that in 1990 1995 cholesterol was clearly defined and food about half of it was absorbed into the blood causes blood cholesterol to increase end of story the federal government stopped researching about it it's like they stopped doing studies to see if smoking causes lung cancer just stop studying it the only people who fund the research now are the egg industry who and to some extent the shrimp industry to try to argue that it doesn't matter and if I bring relatively small groups of participants I can get results that are not statistically significant.

I can say that it could just be a coincidence. and they do a lot of these studies, they say it's just a possibility, find out it's not significant and then they send it to good researchers to say it's small, it doesn't matter, you can forget it, this is a lie, okay, so there are five. You are with me? This makes sense? There are five steps to winning this battle. The first is to use research strategically and I mean honest, solid, well-conducted research. Second, you need to incorporate nutrition into education and healthcare. Not being able to leave your doctor's office without the doctor telling you if you smoke and telling me what you are eating.

The doctor does not have to give you an hour of lecture on nutrition, but the doctor should know where to refer you. and to give you those resources and if the doctor doesn't do them, they're not doing their job, you need to involve the insurers to be in the game and you need to involve the schools and you need to involve businesses, so we did this at Geico, but we didn't There is no reason why every company can't say: you know that if we can reduce our healthcare costs, we will be more competitive. My cars in Detroit can compete with the cars in Japan if I'm not going to spend $2,000 per car on number one Viagra, Lipor, blood pressure meds, diabetes meds, they're all diet related, okay, all business. in America they might say that at lunchtime you can have a class on Wednesdays, now this is a little bit bigger.

It's one of our classes a little bigger than we like, but you can do this. We did it at Geico, we did it at the power company, and in Washington we've done it in all kinds of places once you bring these things to work. Now you can revolutionize your workplace when it comes to research studies. I'm going to tell you what we need: we need meta-analyses that bring all the data together because in 5 years the dietary guidelines advisory committee will meet again and that's what they are. we're going to look, so if the egg industry buys them, that's what we on the doctors committee will get, this is what we do and this is what needs to be done, good clinical trials are needed on diabetes, Alzheimer's disease and hypertension. and exploratory studies are needed, so if rheumatoid arthritis is something that may not have to be treated with drugs but with diet, let's study that and not wait for another drug trial, that's what we have to do now.

What I just want to say is that we can get there because we have been here before a generation ago. I was sitting in a meeting at my hospital, George Washington University Hospital, we were deciding whether or not to ban smoking, we were selling cigarettes in the gift shop, I bought them, my chief of surgery bought them, we were walking down the hallway to the ward. doctor smoking cigarettes our patients smoked in bed and you remember that this time we decided to ban smoking and all the other hospitals did it The same thing in every restaurant and in every airline and in every government building and in every business it says you can't smoke here and That became the greatest gift for every smoker who wanted to quit but needed some support and now it may be a February morning in Washington.

DC there's a guy shivering in his shirt sleeves outside him finishing his cigarette before he's allowed into their non-smoking building. Well, people are changing their diet too, but not fast enough. We are like when we were with smoking. We weren't idiots then. We were just taking our time because it takes time to get cancer eventually I can call it quits we made the decision the time is now with cigarettes one generation moving forward to today that's where we are with food now is the time because we don't do just anything thatour children are at risk, everyone we love is at risk and we are at risk, but we can make these changes and the way to do it is to have fun trying new foods, new recipes, new books, new DVDs, new explorations, a new restaurant . try it if you have a flop who cares we're having fun with this and then if you find something you like share it at work share it with schools share it with people you love share it with a letter to the editor share it with a call dear member of Congress on what foods we subsidize if we make enough noise yes there are industries that benefit from this but there are more doctors, nurses, dietitians, concerned parents, concerned principles and teachers, our problem is that we are quiet if we have fun If we explore with it and if we make some noise we can revolutionize the health of this country.

Thank you so much. Can I thank you? We have time for some questions. If there are any, I would be more than happy to answer. them and we have a microphone for the people okay yeah if you have any questions I'll bring you a microphone okay yeah hello um I just want to say I'm one of your fans. I love your website and understand your nutritional information. data and everything, I get emails every day and I work with Dr. Feininger in the valley and he started a whole foods plant based program for his patients and I help support it, but my question today is have you done any research on chronic fatigue syndrome?

It seems to be a real problem and I was wondering if you had any ideas about this. Well, it's a great question. The question is what happens with chronic fatigue syndrome? And we see a whole constellation that also includes fibromyalgia and others. conditions and I don't think enough research has been done and that's on my list of things that need to be addressed and haven't been addressed adequately; however, we see a pattern with rheumatoid arthritis with migraines to some extent with fibromyalgia and some For people with chronic fatigue C, there appears to be some benefit to eliminating certain foods from your diet and often they are the same foods.

It's often the same list of foods for some people, it's dairy, for some people it may be gluten, not all. The body is sensitive to gluten, but some are, it could be citrus or tomatoes, and we have an organized system to eliminate them to see which ones are the bad ones and which ones aren't, but I think a lot more research should be done. in addition to looking for foods that are supportive to help the body regain balance, so I am with you 100%. Where is our microphone? Well, you said you had it. Oh, some tips on how to go to sleep.

If where you are? oh there you are okay, very simple, this is what I do, first of all, we do a little bit of sleep hygiene, which starts with caffeine, if you're a coffee drinker, about a quarter of your morning coffee, the caffeine is still there at midnight. So whether you like it or not, it makes your sleep light and easy to interrupt. Alcohol will lure you to sleep, but around 4 in the morning the alcohol molecule transforms into alahh, which are stimulants and cause a certain type of awakening where problems and discomforts hit you around 4:27 in the morning and you know exactly what I'm talking about so we deal with that initially and there are some other things too that we don't eat high protein foods at night and then we do physical exercise and I like to tighten the muscles a little bit, I don't mean hurt you , but to things like push-ups or anything that causes the muscles to get tired because for a lot of people when you were seven years old you were physically active, you didn't drink coffee, you didn't drink alcohol, you were very physically active and your muscles got tired, so when You went to sleep, your body demanded sleep and you did it. you just collapse when you are an adult the only exercise we do is this or this now so when we go to bed our brain is wired and our body is not really fatigued so we don't sleep well so do some physical exercise too . and the last thing I would mention sounds completely ridiculous, but this is true.

Look at what a toddler or toddler does before they go to sleep for about 45 minutes, they go through this ritual of stretching their arms and yawning a lot and your cat does it too and your dog does it and when I was in school in medicine I had a little rescued lab rat that lived with me and she would take out her rat PAW at night and do this big rat yawn and fall asleep adults don't do that we just close our book and do it like this I know I can go to sleep If I try it tonight when you go home if you don't do this naturally pretend make a big effort and a big yawn hopefully no one is looking at you and in a couple of seconds it will become a real one do it about four times activate the sleep mechanism and you will sleep well, so try those things, uh, be careful with certain medications that are I'm also bothering you, but see if it doesn't help you, where are we now?

Yeah, I'm just wondering in terms of the four types of foods you recommend, are there particular places you recommend buying them, like health food stores? or Whole Foods or whatever, okay, great question, no, I'm not recommending any particular store, however I would recommend that if you have the option to choose organic products and you almost always have options these days, you don't have to It will be expensive if you buy dried beans and a bag of yam, it is really very cheap, but I suggest you buy the best quality food you can find, it is a very good investment, where are we now?

My favorite kitchen equipment is my grandmother's mold. cast iron skillet should I throw it away um oh great question if you are using your cast iron skillet every day are you getting too much iron if so if you are taking it once a month who cares yeah yeah here I have qu I have a question about the difference between grass-fed animals and grain-fed animals. There is a lot of information that we are in a part of the country where we have ranchers who switch to only grass-fed beef instead of shipping their animals. to confined feeding operations and where you have hunters bringing home elk and deer and I'm wondering if you've seen any research or done any research with your own patients to compare the two different types of animal protein if the animal is on a natural diet or a force-fed human diet, yes, I'm sorry to say that while it sounds great, if we took the same ruminant animal and fed it grass instead of corn, all the health problems would disappear. but it doesn't really seem to be the case, the cholesterol content, the fat content, and even several of the contaminants are more or less the same and a lot of the research was done on cardiovascular diseases and other things were done before Feed Lots became so good.

They are now and in my own family everything was grass fed generation after generation and it was a health issue then too, so I have to say that I think the big push for organic grass fed meat is promotion, not science. the microphone here yes, can you allude to this, but could you be specific about the work of Nina Tholtz, who wrote the book Big Fat Surprise, right, and your question is the hypothesis that she intelligently defends. he's uh fat no big deal um we uh we've been wrong about that and that seems 180 degrees from what you're saying and yeah, I think she's a really nice person.

I think she's done many, many good things in her life and I think a lot of people really like her. If you read her book and check out what she says, you will find just one distortion after another that will make you slam it shut, for example, the MSI in Africa eats blood and dairy products that they don't eat. They don't have any cardiovascular disease in fact they have massive cardiovascular disease um well but they don't have it yeah okay they have cardiovascular disease but they don't get heart attacks. It's very difficult to document heart attacks in rural Africa, something that could be considered sudden death, it's not classified as a myocardial infarction, um, so to hang your hat, it's commercial nonsense.

I'm sorry, well, I don't want to say that she's a very good person, um, but I really say that "I've read that book and there's a lot of them, there's a million of them, um, and they're true believers in what they say." , but, um, the science is really very, very poor, yes, please, there are websites like BioTrust, which says some of what you say, but also suggests that complex carbohydrates or complex proteins, snacking. at night, like turkey, chicken, cottage cheese and dairy products, they are beneficial for you. What I hear is totally different, of course, what they sell at a very high price, could you comment please? you know it's true and um and these are fantastic questions and I feel like I feel your pain um there's so much confusion out there people will say my good friend David Pearlmutter said The whole problem is cereal don't eat cereal and I say , David, what do you think people ate in Japan before McDonald's came along?

It's a grain based diet and there are a lot of people who are trying to say that the whole problem is carbs or grains or whatever, I hope the information I presented intrigues you to see that healthy foods are these very simple traditional vegetables. , fruits, whole grains and beans on our website and those of you who are members will receive updates. We try to bring science to them all the time. I haven't found a way to reject the D from competing messages, but I hope we're making progress, we should probably stop at that point. um, yes I do.

Many thanks to the Aspen Institute and specifically to Gina, thanks to Jerry. I really appreciate you letting me share this time with you, thank you.