Neal Barnard, MD | How Foods Affect Hormones

Thank you very much for coming. She was sitting at my desk one day, the phone rang and on the other end of the line was a young woman who said that she needed her help and, as she described her symptoms, they didn't sound very pleasant. one day a month I just can't move. Many women have period pains, but maybe one in ten is off the scale and can't function. That was her situation. She had a business trip the next day and said, could you give it to me? some very strong painkillers so I can get on the plane and I said I can, but then how can we prevent this from happening next month and the next month and the next month?

What else can we do? So I gave him some. painkillers, but I also said, would you like to try and experiment with me for the next four weeks? No animal products and keeping the oils very low. She said, I guess so. I guess she tried. She called me four weeks later and said this is it. amazing, my period was symptom-free the next month, same thing the next month, same thing and if you deviated from the diet with slightly fattier

foods

, you really paid for it in the end, so I'll tell you why in a bit. What I made that particular recipe, but I thought, well, this is one person who benefited, but how many other people would benefit, so I connected with, oh, here's food, I connected with the obstetrics and gynecology department at the Georgetown University and I said, let's do a randomized clinical trial of this.

So we brought in a group of women, they all had moderate to severe period pain every month and half of them were asked to follow the diet that I had suggested and the other half took a supplement that was actually a placebo or a pill sham and after two months, two cycles they changed the diet, the group started the supplement, the supplement group started the diet, so everyone had their own control and we published the results in the journal obstetrics and gynecology and, long story short, The diet worked, it reduced the intensity of the pain. It reduced the duration of the pain and even reduced the PMS symptoms that led to this.

Something else happened in the course of this study. We asked all the participants not to use any hormonal medications because we were positing that food was

affect

ing their

hormones

, but if they were taking, say, birth control pills or some other hormone, then we wouldn't know what the diet was and what the medication was, so we said: please don't use any hormonal pill if you were sexually active, please use some other type of contraception. and one of the women in the study said dr. Barnhart, don't worry about me, she and her husband had given up on the idea of ​​having a family years ago, she said we've both been tested, it's not him, it's me, it's just not me. to ovulate I am infertile we did not use any contraception or pills nothing happened for years the second month I was following the low fat plant based vegan diet he came to our research center and said dr beinart hey I have bad news I have good news and I said well what is it?

I'm leaving your study because I'm pregnant um as a surprise she wasn't infertile she had a beautiful baby and then another and another um what she was was unbalanced, that her

hormones

weren't behaving, um, it wasn't just something in her DNA, It was something on her plate that she could change, so okay, we've talked about period pain. infertility and stuff, but what is this about hormones? What are hormones? Well, I think of hormones as a kind of letter that goes from the post office to the interior. Hormones are produced somewhere in your body and go into the blood somewhere. other things in your body to give them messages, like the hormones in your ovaries, estrogens come out and

affect

the reproductive anatomy or in a man's body, testosterone is produced in the testicles and goes to the rest of your body to make you run for president or wearing ill-fitting clothes or whatever Ben does at times like that, not making any political comments, um, in some cases, although you don't have enough letters in the mail, so your hormones don't work as much. enough, in other cases, you simply have too many. a lot of letters in the mail and your hormones are working overtime either way you are not in balance so let's go back to Robin who called me this is what happens in a woman's body over the course of the month at the beginning of the month what's wrong with it. very little estrogen in your bloodstream estrogen is the group of female sex hormones estradiol estrone estriol I will simply refer to all of them as estrogens there is not much and then the next two weeks it rises and then falls very quickly acutely Because the ovary is releasing an egg and then, for the next week, the uterus is the most optimistic organ in the body each month, it is convinced that this could be the most important, so the amount of estrogen increases in anticipation of a blessing. event, so the increase in estrogen thickens the uterine lining thinking that a pregnancy could occur and then several days later the disappointed uterus discovers that we are not pregnant again, this did not work, so the amount of estrogen decreases and the menstrual flow keep going. but all of this can be changed by what you eat, the whole curve goes up and the whole curve goes down, so the way this looks anatomically is this is the uterus, those are the ovaries on the side and depending on where you are in the month. that uterine lining will thicken, but let's say I'm eating a not-so-healthy diet, what can happen is that it thickens too much and in doing so, it releases maladaptive chemicals called prostaglandins that cause pain, so that's what was happening when The young woman was calling me on the phone to tell me that I feel miserable, the prostaglandins were wreaking havoc on her, so I thought, "Okay, I think I know how to lower your estrogen and it has to do with what you eat with me so far." It's all about hormones and how can I use food for this?

Because if I can address the hormones that cause cramps, then I can address a lot of hormones, including ones that could cause cancer or other things. Okay, I'm getting ahead of myself. How do

foods

affect hormones? Let me share with you a story. This is Catherine. Catherine grew up in Louisiana. She was in the air force. She was an aerospace engineer and she was one of the first people to go to Iraq in 2003 because she designed the military. bases for the air force and when you're in a war zone and you eat what the military gives you and you're working very hard, you don't gain much weight, you stay thin and kind of a variant of health, however, at the end of his tour of duty he came home to Louisiana and all his friends said Catherine, what did you miss while you were gone?

She said you know what I missed, I missed cheese, I missed macaroni and cheese and cheese sandwiches and all the things we just didn't have, so her friends took her out for cheese dinners and one of her friends gave her an entire box of macaroni and cheese dinners, 48 ​​of them he ate for 48 days straight. Yes, she gained weight. but he also developed some symptoms where his stomach started to hurt and it went from bad to worse and from bad to worse and as the months went by it didn't get better so he finally went to see a gynecologist who did a laparoscopy, that's where Make a small incision below the navel, look inside with the endoscope, the doctor did this, sent her to the recovery room and when she could talk, he said she has endometriosis.

The cells that line the uterus have escaped and travel up the fallopian tubes. they believe and they are implanted around the abdomen they can be implanted in the intestine they can be implanted in the ovaries they can be implanted in the fallopian tubes and strangle them, which causes infertility as well as terrible pain, that is what endometriosis is and it can be treat with painkillers you can treat it with hormonal treatments, none of which helped Catherine, so finally the doctor said I have another treatment. We can just do laparoscopy, laparoscopy, remove your uterus through a hysterectomy and that will cure the problem, she said, well, my husband and I are newlyweds and we weren't really thinking that we expected to have a family, but as fate would have it she really couldn't get better medically, so she scheduled the procedure for six weeks from now during Those six weeks of duration of six weeks.

A friend said Catherine, I want you to see someone about your diet and she met with a dietician who said, don't you know this diet? Plant-based diet. Get rid of all animal products, including cheese. The oils were very low, he thought okay, I'll try it and reluctantly started this vegan diet with very little oil, a very healthy diet and found that it wasn't that difficult, but most importantly he found that he felt better and began to lose weight. Her energy was better but her pain was getting better day by day, but six weeks went by and she obediently thought that she would go to the hospital and just do this procedure and be done with it, so she walked into the operating room where she was. anesthetized, the doctor made an incision about an hour later, she woke up in the recovery room and the doctor had his hand on her shoulder and said Catherine, I didn't do it, no, I didn't do the hysterectomy, your endometriosis is indeed It was her mother who was sitting with her in the room.

Her mother said she became vegan. The doctor said enough foods do not cause endometriosis and a change in diet is not going to cure her. There is only one explanation. This is a miracle. So I think it is in her chart says she had a miracle and anyway she lost a lot of weight she felt great she never had the procedure she has three children now and she no longer has endometriosis and in fact catherine now works for the doctors committee uh with our food program for the life teaching other women how to get healthy is fine, so I mentioned that she loves cheese, so what's the problem with cheese?

Does she have hormones? Well, yes, cheese comes from milk, milk comes from the cow. The cows are fertilized annually, so for nine months out of every 12 dairy cows they are pregnant, which produces estrogens that enter the blood plasma and from the blood plasma they pass into the milk and the longer the pregnancy lasts, the more estrogen there is now. just a trace but it's there and in fact some dairies went to the FDA and said we want to label our milk as hormone free because they don't inject bovine growth hormone but the FDA said wait there is no hormone free milk. hormones. because the cow produces estrogen whether she is pregnant or not, but when she is pregnant she produces more and more and it goes into milk and cheese, okay, wait a minute, so we are talking about estrogenic disorders. which seem to be related to milk, cheese, animal products maybe and maybe not just for women.

Researchers in Rochester, New York, looked at a fertility clinic and they brought in a group of men and some of them ate relatively little cheese and some of them ate a lot. cheese and the sperm count in the men who ate a lot of cheese was noticeably lower than that of the men who ate relatively little cheese, raising this theory that traces of estrogen in milk and cheese are enough to affect something as fragile like a man's fertility. and eliminating it or regulating endometriosis in a woman or her sexual cycle, all of these things could be unbalanced by hormones that nature didn't think it would get, by the way, talking about men, vitamin v, um, the man.

He goes to the doctor's office and says doctor, I can't raise the flag anymore, the doctor knows what he means, he writes a prescription for a Viagra and hands it to the guy, the guy winks at the doctor and leaves the room If this is a good doctor, the doctor will suddenly drop his pen and run out of the room, grab his patient before he goes down the elevator and say, "I forgot to tell you something, please come back." The patient sits down and the doctor has to explain to him. your erectile dysfunction is not caused by performance anxiety, it is caused by narrowed arteries, you have atherosclerosis, this is due to cholesterol and fat, it is narrowing your arteries and the narrowest arteries are the ones that go to your private parts and that is what defines the male sexual anatomy.

It's a hydraulic system, it was obviously designed on a Monday because things go wrong all the time, but the main thing is that if you don't have good blood flow, it just doesn't do its job well, so if you have narrow arteries, so it doesn't there's blood flow there, the doctor explains to the patient that he has narrow arteries in his heart, narrow arteries and his carotids go to the brain, which means he might have erectile dysfunction now, but in two to three years you're going to have a heart attack or a stroke you are a high risk patient so take your vita if you want but we have to talk about reversing your systemic atherosclerosis which will kill you please consult the dietician before You leave, you just saved this patient's life.

Erectile dysfunction is the canary in the coal mine of systemic atherosclerosis. You are with me? It just makes sense. Thisokay, so keep in mind to skip the cheese. What else affects our hormones? Although your body has. a certain amount of wisdom tries to get rid of excess hormones from your liver, you know, we don't respect our liver, it really cares about us, the things we swallow, it just tries to get rid of them, including excess estrogen, and estrogen passes that's why. green through the biliary tree, this is the common bile duct and from there it goes to the intestinal tract and the estrogens circulate and then they come out, you literally flush them down the toilet, however, this depends on something, it depends on the fiber, the fiber is in your intestine. tract and transports estrogen, but here's the kicker: fiber is only in plants; it's not found in animals at all, so if you had salmon for lunch or an omelette or cheese or something, there's no fiber in that, so that the estrogen in the intestinal tract is absorbed back into the bloodstream and returns to the The liver eventually goes around and around and around and a woman has too much estrogen circulating 24 7. and the same with a man too much testosterone circulating 24 7.

Often I've wondered what would happen to politics in this country if men had a little more fiber in their diet, but that's another comment, so spam, plant animal, what is fiber? Yeah, no, no, trash can, bye, see it anyway, so, um, kfc, no, sorry, gone, but also some plants have had their fiber removed in the process. to refine, so we're also going to get rid of them, so, another, we've been talking about estrogens in foods and we've been talking about how the body has a way of getting rid of them so that you get back into balance, But there is, however, a third thing and it is dairy products, but it is not fat or protein, something else.

Daniel Cramer at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston began looking at fertility loss as you know when a woman is in her uh, maybe she When she's in her early 20s, she's at her peak fertility, but she might say, "You know , I'm starting my career," this is not the time when I really want to take time off and start a family. I'll postpone it and when she gets to 30 and 35. her mother says you know don't leave this let's not wait too long the biological clock is ticking your fertility is decreasing she says I know I know I know um dan cramer observed the drop in fertility between the end of the 20s and late 30s in a woman's life and in Thailand, where the diet is not an ice cream and cheesecake diet, relatively little dairy is consumed.

During that period, between your 20s and 30s, the drop in fertility is about 25 in Brazil, a little more cheese, a little faster. drop in fertility in the united states, a lot more dairy products, especially high fat milk, low fat milk and whatever, and the drop in fertility is about 80 over that time period and then dr kramer filled in a lot other countries and the pattern is not perfect, but you can see that there is a pattern that with more dairy there seems to be a more rapid loss of fertility. Why did you blame the sugar lactose?

The sugar lactose is the sugar in dairy and is the most abundant nutrient in milk. There is more than that. there is a protein or fat or anything else and in your digestive tract, if you are supposed to be able to digest lactose, it is broken down into galactose and glucose and galactose is toxic to the ovary, so what he believed and has suggested and there is substantial evidence that this is true. If the more you expose your ovaries to galactose, the more you eliminate fertility, you eliminate it faster and faster and faster, well, infertility won't kill you, but researchers saw the same kind of relationship with ovarian cancer and this It was a Swedish study.

By looking at women who consumed less than two servings of dairy a day, two to three, three to four, and four or more, you can see that ovarian cancer is on par. There are also some rare genetic conditions in which children cannot eliminate galactose effectively. and they have massive infertility and much higher galactose toxicity, so you hear people promoting milk for calcium and all kinds of other reasons, but at the same time they're promoting something that has estrogen that has other poisons for the body, OK? I've talked about cramps, erectile dysfunction, and infertility. None of those things will kill you, but what about breast cancer?

Estrogen is a stealth hormone. All hormones, if you have too many, can kill you. If you have very little, you can do it. It can also be fatal, in all cases, they must be at an optimal point, that is true for insulin, if they have too much, it can be fatal if they have too little, same story, with estrogen, they are small, these small molecules of estrogen. They can sneak through the cell membrane and once they are inside the cell they can pass through the nuclear membrane and can attach to your DNA, damaging it and causing cancer cells to arise.

I'm talking about your own estrogen, not necessarily the estrogen you have. swallowed and studies show that the higher the level of estrogen in the blood, the greater the risk of postmenopausal breast cancer. Well, let's say a woman has been diagnosed with cancer in the past and she has one thing on her mind: whether this cancer will ever go away. come back or am I going to be able to survive this the women's nutritional intervention study brought together a group of women a very large group over 2,000 postmenopausal women had all been treated for breast cancer and what they asked them to do was make some changes quite important in the diet and they actually reduced the fat content in their meals and what they found was that their risk of cancer recurrence was reduced by 24, we will take it for estrogen receptor negative cancers, it was reduced by 42 and estrogen Receptor-positive cancers were reduced by 15, so this was not a vegetarian or vegan diet, but just these fairly modest changes of reducing fat were helpful.

On the other hand, researchers began to take a closer look at what makes one more likely to succumb to cancer and returned to milk. This was a California study that looked at women previously diagnosed with cancer and those who drank the most dairy products and particularly fatty dairy, whole milk, butter, cheese, etc., had a 49% higher risk of dying from cancer compared to women who generally avoid these products, okay, so when you go home after this lecture and talk to a friend about this, they will tell you wait a minute, it's soy and so is pr. Have you heard people talk about soy products?

Soy has, um, let's see what it is. What did I read in Men's Health? Soy has estrogen or something that will give you man boobs. You know what I'm talking about and if a woman consumes them, she will get cancer. What they're talking about is from 1931. I think it was genistein, which is an isoflavone that was discovered in soybeans and looks like estrogen. This is estradiol and in lab studies people have found that it actually binds to the estrogen receptor, so if a man eats tofu, he will get a man. boobs apparently um well, if anyone suggests that to you, you can do an experiment that I think will disprove it.

Go to the beach in August and you'll see some sort of burly guys who have taken off their shirts and some of them do. get a breast augmentation, walk up to one of them and ask him how much tofu you ate last week tempeh miso edamame and what he's going to say is out of what, I eat hamburgers, that's me, um, what happened here, here it is What happened is fat. cell, you have been gaining weight eating cheeseburgers, fat cells are not harmless blobs of calories, they are little factories and they take your testosterone and convert it to estradiol.

You with me, the testosterone in a man's body is converted into female sex hormones, which causes that not only does he have fat around the breast area that is breast tissue that is developing the same will happen in women too okay, but what? what about cancer? Could soy cause breast cancer? Well, we've had enough time to figure this out and it turns out based on many studies indicating a high consumption of soy, if you could compare, let's say Asian Americans who consume a lot of tofu and soy milk compared to other, consumers high soy have about a 29 percent lower risk of developing breast cancer compared to people who ignore it and then Researchers have looked at women previously diagnosed with cancer, those who avoid soy have the highest mortality, those who They consume a lot of soy, whether it's tofu, soy milk, miso or whatever, they have the lowest mortality and that's true whether it's estrogen receptor negative or estrogen receptor positive tumors.

These are just two different types of tumors, but in both cases it seems to work, so in your car you have an accelerator pedal and if you step on the accelerator, it activates, but you have another pedal in the car and it's the brake. the breakdown um it binds to estrogen receptors you have alpha receptors you have beta receptors it binds to beta receptors and helps slow down cancer growth totally optional you don't have to have it although soy is very useful if you have soy sausage it is much better that pork sausage one day they'll make snow tires out of it they'll probably do all kinds of cool things but it doesn't cause cancer in any case it's a cancer preventative okay, so we've talked about estrogen and testosterone, let's talk about the thyroid hormone.

Many people have thyroid problems, but they are lazy. The thyroid gland is at the base of the neck and regulates energy in the body. If you have hypothyroidism, you are low and you feel. weak and feel sensitive to cold you may be constipated you may have weight gain you may feel depressed your skin and hair change and doctors won't know what to do about this because these are everyday symptoms but sooner or later the doctor will do a blood test blood and that will tell the story. The opposite can happen if you have hyperthyroidism. Your thyroid is producing too much thyroid hormone and that means you may lose weight.

Sometimes you can gain weight. Your pulse will become irregular. that you're nervous, you're irritable, you feel warm, you're basically a little revved up and the doctor can do some tests and it's not a very difficult diagnosis to make, so why do so many people have thyroid problems? Well, problem number. one is obvious from the hormone itself, those big purple spots that are iodine and back in 1924, the Morton salt company said to put iodine in the salt, so people were getting a lot of iodine and they had more than enough to make hormone thyroid, however, I started using the Himalayan hormone.

Salt or sea salt or other types that are actually not iodized, so I may not be getting the iodine I need and my thyroid hormones are starting to go a little out of whack now that the milk actually has some iodine in it. This and the reason is that cows are not super hygienic, the toilet paper roll never seems to be filled properly, so when they milk, when they put the milking things on the end before they do it to kill any fecal bacteria that they spray . them with iodine which contains disinfectant, some of which leaches into the milk, so you can get iodine that way, look, my favorite and most hygienic source, I'm cheering you on.

Sea vegetables have iodine, they have a lot of it, so you go with your friends to the sushi bar. Don't eat the fish sushi unless you're very well secured, but the nori that's wrapped around it and, by the way, not just the nori but the wakame that's in the miso soup and that sort of thing, the aramai that's in your seaweed salad, um, they are very high in iodine, so when people lived on the coast, seaweed that anyone could easily gather was a very high natural source of iodine, but if you grew up in Fargo like I did , you don't recognize them. any of these things and you can easily become hypothyroid, okay, but the biggest reason for thyroid problems in the United States has nothing to do with iodine, it has to do with antibodies.

Antibodies are torpedoes, your body is invaded by a virus and so you produce antibodies against that virus or a bacteria or a cancer cell, but sometimes the antibodies attack you and there was no virus at all and doctors can measure them in blood test somehow your body is producing antibodies that attack your own thyroid, some of them deactivate it. Unfortunately, some of them step on the accelerator and cause the thyroid to produce too much thyroid hormone, so could foods be the cause of this antibody reaction? The reason we think maybe it is is that most autoimmune reactions seem to have a dietary link that we've known about.

I've seen this with asthma and by the way, if anyone has a child with asthma, don't eat a completely plant-based diet and see if that doesn't help your child. A person has rheumatoid arthritis or Sjogren's disease. These are autoimmune conditions where dietary changes appear to help because a trigger for antibody formation is removed, so researchers in the studystudy this, we have to understand this. I am one of one. Let's bring the people in and find out how it works. It is a very well written and engaging book about his history, so I read this book and called him. and he was vibrant and I went and visited him and looked at his scans and it's true that this man was cured, or at least he seemed to be cured, but as I got to know him and we compared notes and so on, time passed.

One day he said something a little scary to me, he said he, I've been fine for so long, it's been about 10 years, I decided to go off the diet, you know? I want to see how I am if I liberalize this. a little and it didn't go well. He very quickly started to have edema in his hands, which he couldn't explain and his energy level was going down. He could sense that something wasn't right, so he tried to get back on the diet. and his macrobiotic counselor said that Tony curing cancer once is a really good thing, curing it twice is very difficult and I talked, I called him one day, not long after this, and his voice was strange, like a person on drugs, I told him Tony.

What's the matter? He said: Sorry, it's narcotics. Said. What do you mean?. He said my cancer came back two weeks later. He was dead. Now you can't tell from a single person whether the diet caused their cancer, even though we have very good studies. Harvard has two very large studies linking dairy products to prostate cancer and also linking certain compounds with protection against prostate cancer, such as antioxidants like lycopene, to reduce the risk, but you can't know if that was the case in his case and we cannot know if the diet is what cured him if there was something else, some other reason and we cannot say if if he had continued with the diet he would be alive today, but what we do know is that We have more than enough evidence and more than enough explanatory biological mechanisms.

To say that medical science can no longer ignore them and simply rely on detecting and removing them, we have to look at what the body can do for itself and my message is that the body can heal if you cut a band on your hand. -the help doesn't heal you built into your dna are all the instructions that your skin cells need to reattach to each other and the broken blood vessels will reconnect if you break your leg the cast doesn't heal you built into your DNA is a program to allow the bone to reconnect. Arteries can heal, but they will never heal unless you eliminate cholesterol from your diet, animal fat from your diet, menstrual pain, fertility problems and even cancer.

The healing ability of the body needs support and gets frustrated so easily. with the dietary decisions we make all the time; It's the equivalent of having a broken leg in an unsafe cast that never stabilizes it, or getting a cut so it can never recover. Healing is what we do with the foods we choose and give to our families, so what is a healthy diet? A healthy diet consists of four things: fruits, cereals, vegetables and legumes, what are legumes, what are beans, peas, foods that grow on a beans, peas, lentils, okay, then, in our clinic of the Barnard medical center we have thousands of people who come in with many medical problems and we talk about a healthy diet and they wonder how can I do this.

Do you want me to go vegan? I'm getting divorced, I'll have to live in the garage, what do I do? So what we do is we break this down into two steps and I've never seen anyone unable to do that if you're in this audience because you were dragged here by someone else, but you're a little bit intrigued and you think maybe there's something to this. This is what you should do. There is a two-step method to try it for yourself. First you check the possibilities and what you are going to do. What you should do is for seven days take a piece of paper like this and fill it looking for plant-based things that you like.

What do I mean? For breakfast, I have corn flakes with milk every day. I'll try almonds. milk I don't know if it's good I don't know you can go to the store and buy it or oat milk or hemp milk or rice milk or soy milk whatever try it um next to it are the vegan sausages I don't know if they're good. Can I try. You have seven days to complete your list every night. I eat at an Italian restaurant and eat my angel hair pasta. Now I guess I could try the arabiata sauce, they tell me.

For me there are no animal products or I go to the subway and make a submarine sandwich. I guess I could ditch the ham and have the vegan sandwich, so we fill it up and what you discover very quickly is that there are many, many, many healthy options, and by the way, in my new book, Your Body Imbalance, Lindsay Nixon did all the prescriptions and when he sent them to me he sent me a note saying: Dr. Barnard, not me. I'm telling you, my own cramps went away while I was on a low-fat vegan diet, so these are everyday things anyway.

The point is, there are so many wonderful foods you can choose from, including those at restaurants when you eat. We have tons of options, so you have seven days to try it. If you go to the sushi bar, you will find that if you could get iodine and a lot of exotic things that we never had in Fargo, North Dakota, including maybe even the taco. It's not the pinnacle of culinary art, but they have vegan things for you, so after seven days you find that you have your list complete, that was the first step. Now the second step is to do a three-week test drive.

Make it all vegan all the time, but only for 21 days and 21 days you can do anything, plus you already chose the foods, so let's try it at the end of that time. Two things will have happened. The first is that you are physically healthier. you feel better you are losing weight if you have diabetes your blood sugar level is going down but the other thing is that your tastes are changing and they are changing a lot so we have other things that you can use other resources we have app called 21 day vegan kickstart that you can get on your smartphone it's free and nobody sells anything it's menus and recipes and all kinds of things this is my new book that I hope you enjoy and share with others for doctors we have the nutrition guide for doctors, from Alzheimer's to veins varicose veins, it is a free download.

We have continuing education in nutrition for all those doctors who didn't learn this in medical school, we will help you for free. The lady credits it and also credits our international conference on nutrition and medicine it would make your heart sing to see a thousand or more doctors in a room deciding that maybe we are doing too much with pills and not enough with food, let's change that, um the last thing I want to take just a couple of minutes, if I may, and I mean, we need to change the world that we live in a little bit.

You would think that hospitals would take advantage of the teachable moment when the patient is in the hospital and whatever they are. For now there's a chance to get them hooked on healthy foods, but have you looked at the hospital menus lately? Some of them are not so healthy for you, including processed meats. This is my hospital. The George Washington University Hospital. There is a helicopter that brings them more. bacon and sausages I took this photo in the cafeteria of our own hospital bacon causes colorectal cancer clearly increases the risk of many other forms of cancer as well and by the way let me show you this from the New York Times cancer increases among meat eaters 113 years ago The hospitals have not changed in all this time, I want to tell you something that things can change.

I wrote a resolution that I brought to the American Medical Association that was silent years ago on diet and I want to tell you something: The 2017 American Medical Association passed this resolution saying that we ask US hospitals to improve the health of patients, staff and visitors by providing plant-based meals low in fat, sodium and added sugars, completely ditching bacon, sausages, ham and sausages. have healthy drinks yes the world really can change and yes I commend my ama colleagues for doing that. They have done much more. This is Albany, in Albany, as you know, and many of you helped with this last year, Governor.

Cuomo signed a bill that says hospitals have to provide plant-based meals, so I applaud those of you who made this happen, but we really have to change this world and that means three things: It means learning to understand the information now. There are limits to what we know and we have to be humble about it and we need more research and we have to explore and learn as we go, but then we have to connect with other people and we have to share information. The people who need this message the most are not in this room.

The people who need this message the most are 12 years old and at school they are eating chicken nuggets and on the way home they buy them string cheese and their parents put a cheese pizza on them. the oven and then they turn on the TV and half the commercials are for snacks and the other half are medications to relieve the effects of the snacks and that's the world that kids grow up in, they've never heard any of this. and the girl is under 16, she has menstrual cramps, she's been told that's what it's like to be a woman, the couple is dealing with infertility and they're told this will probably cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars, and someone has a diagnosis of cancer in their family or they themselves have it and they tell them here are your options, it's chemotherapy, it's radiation, yes, that's important in many cases, but if we don't focus on food, then we are deciding that we don't care that the body is healing. own properties that are more powerful than anything else and need to be shored up so we need to make some noise and that's what it is so I hope each of you grab your personal megaphone which could be your Instagram page . or it could be a Facebook or Twitter account or whatever, let's make some noise, let me also ask you to join us, if you want, turn on your smartphone and go to pcrm.org balance, join our network and We have many more resources there and also an opportunity to subscribe to receive more alerts.

We are working on legislation all the time, including here in New York, we have a bill coming soon that would require doctors to have continuing medical education related to nutrition. three hours a year, um, it's a start, they're going to set us back like you'd never believe, but I think we can win it if we just insist that this is the case. We recently did a survey of 64 doctors who really support it, but the medical staff community itself, organized medicine is not there yet, so help us help us fight with the hospitals and the large area that then has to be In the schools not There is no reason that a seven or eight year old child should be given a good education and even a look at their morals, but they are being fed foods that will make them unhappy and hurt them, and possibly even kill them later in life.

We have to change that, so I want to thank the JCC and I want to thank all of you for allowing me to share this time with you tonight. Thank you so much.