Brenda Davis takes Audience Questions

so we we actually have a few minutes and I would be absolutely delighted to take any questions you might have

yes a question Mike wooden I’ll have a glass of water thank you for your magnificent presentation all right my question is this I use a a vegan meatball they have chicken a michael protein corn qu ORN how do you feel about that as a product yeah corn where where I am in Canada we can’t get that it’s a like you say it’s a micro protein product very very controversial some people react to it and and to be honest with you I haven’t looked into it with great enough depth to feel really confident in saying don’t eat it or it’s it’s safe does anybody else has anybody how else seen anything that might be helpful you know I guess the bottom line is is in if you’re using meat analogues you want to choose sort of the least processed meat analogues you can if if it’s available so so we see in burgers we see black bean quinoa burgers or we see burgers that are made of soy protein if you’re choosing a very meat like product at the very least you want it to be organic and the reason is is a lot of these proteins are extracted with harsh chemicals like hexane which is a neurotoxin and so if you choose organic they do not use those kinds of dangerous chemicals to extract the soy protein and I would never say I I mean I you know well we’re on the topic and I brought it up the topic of soy there are a lot of strong anti soy sentiments in the even in the plant-based world most of them you can trace back to West the Western a price Foundation and the work of Marion against Ally felon and one of the concerns I have is that we actually have a truckload of evidence on soy and the truckload of evidence is pretty favorable so what we know about so and again if you’re using soy stick to organic soy I would say that for sure and the less processed forms of soy like edamame tempeh tofu those kinds of soy products organic and and so what do we know about soy well we know that women from Asia who consume soy on a regular basis have considerably less breast cancer young children and adolescents who consume soy during that time of their life have a significantly lower risk of lifetime risk of breast cancer women who have breast cancer and consume soy have less recurrence and lower less chance of dying of the breast cancer we know that men who have aggressive prostate or at risk for aggressive prostate cancer have about a 50% risk reduction if they’re regular soy consumers men with for less aggressive types of of prostate cancers but a 30% risk reduction we know that soy reduces blood cholesterol levels and is much easier on the kidney than a lot of well than any animal protein that’s for sure and we’ve even got some evidence that it can reduce male pattern baldness and in in reduce symptoms of menopause and again if you do the acid test two of the five zone of blue zones consume soy on a regular basis the Okinawans and the seventh-day adventists vegetarians and the Okinawans consume two servings of soy a day and they consume that not just fermented soy they consume tofu and they consume miso which is fermented so I think just to to be and because one of the things that I I get concerned about when we say you know don’t you know eliminate everything is is that the intake of soy gives more variety it’s a very high quality very versatile protein source and it allows for just a much more for many people enjoyable diet because it’s a really good substitute for meat and it has that texture if you have really firm tofu for example or tempeh so it allows greater variation and is a good quality food so I at least that’s from my experience and the stew and the the literature searches that I’ve done so any other questions

yes I just heard there was women who had breast cancer they were advised not to use soy yes so so thank you for that and and they they were advised because um soy contains what we call selective estrogen receptor modulators and what that means is that is that the phytoestrogens in soy are serve as weak estrogens in some tissues and anti estrogen in other tissues and in breast tissue we’ve now learned that it serves more as an anti estrogen so it actually attaches to estrogen receptor sites and keeps the really potent human estrogen off which is very you know increases cancer growth it acts as a more of a weak estrogen in brain in bone tissue for example which is a good thing it helps to build bone so we don’t know how significant that is but it seems to do that now in 2012 the evidence became so overwhelming in favor of soy with breast cancer that the American Cancer Society and the American Institute of cancer research actually released statement saying women don’t have to worry about so anymore as a matter of fact it’s probably protective that soy helps with well well you know the studies are limited but what I’m saying is it acts as it seems to act as a weak estrogen in bones and that weak estrogen estrogen increases both you know increases bone density so there’s some thinking that soy may be protective in that way as well

what is that e to the Sun towards meat now oh what is my son’s opinion or his view towards meat now you know the story continues I mean I can remember when he was 16 years old and we went to my parents place and they were doing barbecuing meat and we brought our veggie stuff to to do and I can still remember him running down the stairs crying because he just couldn’t stand it he just couldn’t stand it I can remember one time being on a plane with him and he was even a little bit older and they were serving chicken or whatever it was and I just saw the tears coming down he is a very hardcore vegan

I’ve had breast cancer triple positive her2 cancer and my doctor now has me on a remedy X for ten years do you think on being on a vegan diet with no soy or very little soy that it’s really necessary to be on an estrogen suppressor oh well a soy is an estrogen repressor so so I wouldn’t be saying you need to eliminate soy by any stretch because even people on tamoxifen they do better with soy in their diet than without the studies are very clear on that we have a lot of studies now so so on a vegan diet whether you have soy not I don’t know I haven’t seen studies that would show that you do not need to be on an I mean to me soy in it that’s what it is because it attaches to estrogen receptor sites it keeps estradiol off which you know is the the dangerous estrogen is the human estrogen not the soy estrogen it protects us against the human estrogens attaching to those receptor sites it’s doing the same job as the drug Iran okay so just to realize that so I don’t know I wouldn’t I wouldn’t be comfortable saying that you should go off that medication mm-hmm I’m sorry yeah so if you go on to PubMed and just put in soy breast cancer you will see dozens of studies come up just put soy breast cancer and you’ll see them all very very clear

what is it about the Okinawans that live the longest what is it special about their die cuz I know they eat like 70 percent of sweet potatoes what is it I know sweet potato has almost every vitamin you can imagine but so what it what is it that they do because I know they don’t have any blenders I don’t think they use any juicers and I think yeah so I mean no what is it about them their diet that they they go to 100 and still be working in the field yeah yeah and you know what I think it is I think largely they know processed foods and they are lean they’re not they do not over consume this so they call it Harry Hachi booth stop eating when you’re 80% full they’re very very lean and they stay fit they keep constant constantly active but in terms of diet what they’re doing is about 60% of their calories is from purple sweet potatoes or was I mean their diet has changed the Okinawa is not the traditional Okinawa that is a blue zone it’s changing rapidly which is very unfortunate there’s even we see you know little pieces on on you can look on YouTube and you can see the the centenarians that their kids are dying their 70 year olds are dying of heart disease now because they’ve changed their way of life so much but the traditional Okinawans they the purple sweet potatoes ate two servings of soy a day they ate seaweeds they ate a little bit of rice but it wasn’t a primary food they ate a half an ounce of fish which was is a very very tiny amount and their portions were fairly small and of course they a variety of vegetables and such and that was an miso was their really their diet but also one of the things about the Blue Zones is the social aspects I I mean if you’ve ever read one of the other books that I think is just absolutely beautifully written is healthy at 100 by John Robbins and he looks at the Vilcabamba pne’s and the occasions and the several of that long other long-lived peoples in the world and and it you know it’s just so much he I think he he brings it out more brilliantly than anyone about the social aspects of longevity and the respect for for seniors and for elders and and the way they’re treated and and and just the the social engagement within these these long-lived populations I don’t think we can underestimate the value of that

Steve see recommendations that say that then she’s only a certain amount of soy yes oh thanks for that Steve no I’ll tell you everybody should only eat a certain amount of soy okay so the recommendations and I really appreciate you bringing that up for children we say just one or two servings a day because they have little bodies and phytoestrogens can they can get too many quickly I one time dealt with a couple actually a physician couple whose four-year-old girl was probably consuming ten servings a day and she had actually started to bleed so way too many phytoestrogens so in in in children you know fairly small months in adults the recommendation is two to four servings a day as being very safe amount now in men there were two studies that showed men getting sort of feminization from like growing breasts and feminization from consuming soy in one of the studies I believe the guy was eating 12 servings of soy a day and in the other I think it was 20 servings it was just ridiculous I mean they were just living on soy that’s all they were eating you can’t do that you shouldn’t be doing that with any food so otherwise there have been many studies looking at the consequences of soy for men and it doesn’t affect any much of anything it doesn’t affect their hormones it doesn’t as a matter of fact look on there’s a website which probably you are all familiar with called nutritionfacts.org michael greger he’s got some wonderful little clips on soy and men so he summarizes the data quite low but it quite nicely you’re welcome

oh you were talking about soy and this consumption where would I look to find information as it relates to like someone who has thyroid disease and under functioning thyroid you know and then just soy but also the the types of vegetables the cruciferous vegetables so the question about if you have a thyroid disorder and the goitrogens that are present in food that combined you know that that can actually reduce the uptake of iodine in the production of thyroid hormones and so these goitrogens are present in a lot of foods soy is one of them but flax seeds are fairly high in goitrogens especially if they’re uncooked uncooked cruciferous vegetables like broccoli and kale and brussel sprouts and so forth even nectarines and peaches and strawberries have some goitrogens there are a lot of millet a lot of foods contain some goitrogens if you cook the foods you reduce the goitrogens you know the goitrogenic potential of the food so with flaxseed when they’re cooked you you reduce the cyanogenic glycosides that are problematic so generally you obviously have to be more careful if you have thyroid disease but one of the things that I would say is for many people what we know is Gorgons are not an issue if you get enough iodine okay so it’s the combination of a lack of iodine in your diet and a lot of goitrogens that can put you in into trouble so if your if your iodine status is adequate you can usually handle a reasonable amount of goitrogens including some soy and some cruciferous vegetables so just and what happens we do see this especially in Europe where the soil levels of iodine are a little lower where people go on a very healthy plant-based whole food plant-based diet but don’t include a source of iodine cuz they don’t want to use iodized salt which is you know sort of the vehicle of fortification with iodine for the population they remove that and a lot of people seaweed is just you you know they just the thought of seaweed they don’t like that fishy taste and so they don’t use seaweed because it’s another natural source of iodine and so if you’ve eliminated you don’t eat seaweed and you’re not using iodized salt you can end up with with you know problems with with thyroid so so just be aware of that make sure that you’ve got a reliable source of iodine in your diet

so what do I recommend for as a diet for babies okay I think all babies you know the thing I focus a lot on diet and disease and disease reversal and and so when you’re looking at disease reversal you’re really the number one goal is to you know stop the the harmful components coming in where babies and children are concerned you need to change your focus the focus has got to be ensuring adequate growth and development brain development muscle development you’ve got to make sure that the child has adequate nutrition that’s your top priority so you need to be very careful about being overly restrictive with fat and you need to make sure that you’ve got a source of the key nutrients that could be low on a plant-based diet so a plant-based diet for young children and the other thing is young children have fairly small stomachs they need to eat a little more often and they may need a little bit more concentrated sources of calories especially on a vegan diet so if you look at the literature and you look at failures vegan children that have failed to thrive we see a couple of a couple of researchers that looked at populations there was black Hebrew population there there there there was a microbiotic population for a while and in in almost every case of failure to thrive in vegan infants what’s happening is they’re they’re using a just completely inadequate milk for the baby so the milk might have you know 17 or 20 calories per hundred mils instead of the you know hundred that it should or seventy that it should it so it’s just grossly inadequate formula so number one is if at all possible breastfeed for at least two years okay number one because you will be providing the baby with you know the essential fatty acids the type of protein of the nutrients that are really important for an infant and the protection that are really important that is really important for an infant so I would say child led weaning is is wonderful normal human breast feeding or or nursing is two to four years two to four years is normal and natural for humans less than a year is not so good if you stopped breastfeeding before a year you must use a commercial infant formula and if you’ve ever seen the ingredients on these things they’re not great okay so you really want to do whatever you can do to breastfeed and preferably for a full two years

once you’ve that’s taken care of by six months of age you need solid foods so some people try to go beyond that but what happens is by four to six months iron stores are running out breast milk is not a very rich that the the iron in breast milk is very very very bioavailable as is everything in breast milk but nonetheless there’s not a lot there and babies can start to get iron deficient and iron deficiency means brain deficiency so you just don’t want to fool around with that so what’s a reasonable source of iron well now pediatric associations are saying meet you know stomach meet the first food which just kills me but anyway it’s ridiculous it it sets them up for a nun hell the microflora it just does all kinds of things that are not good so first food you can use you know iron rich vegetables or iron fortified infant cereals would be a reasonable choice and and then you want to start right away getting in the vegetables and a variety of vegetables you don’t have to worry about you we weren’t used to worry about high nitrate vegetables for babies when we were starting with solids when they were really little but when you’re doing this sort of feeding starting at six months it’s not as big of an issue and then the other thing that’s very controversial right now is do you need to puree food and if you start at six months you actually probably don’t you can mash foods you can let babies my daughter did this kind of child lead I mean her little hair little girl has always fed herself pretty much puts the food down and the baby feeds herself and and and she loves beans she loves you know and that’s one of the first foods as well beans would be a very good food to start with you want to start with beans fairly quickly by at least seven months and in a variety of beans so that’s a really important food and you can do some tofu as well but but you just want to get variety in there and make sure that you’re not doing a lot of foods that have very little value because babies tend to eat such little quantity you want everything that crosses their lips to be a value

canned milk no no I’m talking about commercial infant formula period that’s it well you can get soy based or dairy based or you can get these you know amino acid you know the hydrolyzed anyway that you these are not your first choice by any stretch but you cannot should not do a homemade infant formula because whenever we see very sad stories of infants dying or infants with severe malnutrition it’s almost always because parents have been overly restrictive or given them a home-made infant formula that is grossly inadequate nutrition so they need to get the nutrients and you need to make sure vitamin b12 is absolutely critical so if you’re nursing you need to make sure you’ve got a source of b12 because your baby without b12 if you’re not taking b12 and you’re nursing your baby within months your baby could have irreversible brain damage okay so it’s nothing to fool around with your baby needs a source of b12 your baby needs vitamin D and so you should be doing vitamin D drops and those are really important and then the source of exogenous iron by six months those are really important you’re very welcome one more question

yeah okay my feelings on canola oil and canola oil is it was hybridized to remove the heuristic acid because heuristic acid is poisonous and so it was hybridized not genetically modified to produce canola oil however probably you know the greatest percent of canola oil and the market is genetically modified to be pesticide resistant so for that reason if anybody’s using canola oil you would want it to be organic preferably but other you know it canola oil probably has the lowest amount of saturated fat of any oil but my take on oils is oils are highly processed foods taken from Whole Foods that have very little nutritional value and 120 calories per tablespoon it’s the most are that I should say the least nutrient-dense food on the planet so if you look at nutritional density score charts at the top of the charts are leafy greens then non starchy vegetables you know and going down the list and at the very bottom B low French fries and cheese you’ll find oil okay so it has hardly any nutrients and a lot of calories so my preference is to get most of my fat from Whole Foods avocados nuts seeds those kinds of foods rather than getting it from oils if you are using oil a little bit of oil in something I would say to stick to fresh pressed organic oils and preferably if you’re using himself for salads something with a little bit of omega-3 in it so you get that essential fatty acid easily absorbed or something that’s mainly mono rather than something that’s omega-6 rich so omega-6 reach oils are sunflower oil safflower oil grapeseed oil corn oil soy oil so those are Omega 6 6 rich oils and the reason you don’t want an omega-6 rich oil is because it tips the balance between omega-6 and omega-3 in the omega-6 direction too much so you can eat sunflower seeds you can eat you know these higher omega-6 rich seeds like poppy seeds and sesame seeds and so on but you don’t want to be downing the oil so if you’re having oil it’s either mono or omega-3 rich mono avocado oil olive oil would be the high mono oils

really yeah well it they do there there are several companies that do do an organic canola oil but there’s still if you tested it it’s possible that seeds from a GMO flew into their you know into their farm and and it’s contaminated but I know there are companies that do their best to produce organic hemp oil and is a you know hemp seeds are amazing hemp as a crop is amazing it’s probably the greenest crop on the planet because basically you don’t need pesticides you don’t need herbicides it grows in a hundred days it’s quickly renewable and you can make twenty five thousand different products with it and the food itself hemp seeds are super high in high-quality protein but twenty percent of calories from protein and the ratio between omega-6 and omega-3 is about three to one it’s really good and the other thing is that hemp seeds contain something called steroid onic acid and steroid onic acid so you’ve got omega-3 is alpha linolenic acid the parent fatty acid the first conversion in that chain to get to epa and DHA is to steroid onic acid well hemp seed is one of the very few foods that actually contains preformed steroid onic acid and so the conversion from Steyr donek acid to epa is much more efficient than from alpha linolenic acid to epa so that’s another bonus of hemp seeds hemp seeds are are really a food worth looking at I use them all the time so if I’m using almond milk I’ll blend it with some hemp seeds if I’m making a salad dressing I’d blend some hemp seeds in I use them on a regular basis I think they’re wonderful food

Hey well thank you very much