70% Of All Deaths In Western World Are From Diet And Lifestyle: with Brenda Davis

thank you so much Stephen thank you all for being here and thank you for putting this amazing conference on and thank you for my cheering section over there you know how to make me feel very welcome

I’m actually really excited about this presentation because I think it shares some of my favorite moments I’m going to talk a little bit about the Marshall Islands and a lot about the research what we know about the connection between plant-based diets and our risk of chronic disease so just a quick outline and we’re going to talk about longevity cardiovascular disease cancer diabetes and that’s where I’ll tell you about the Marshall Islands and then just a little overview of other diseases and then the practical implications of these findings

so what we know right now is that the number one killer globally is chronic disease about 70 percent of all deaths in the Western world are due to chronic diseases that are essentially lifestyle induced they’re induced by what we consider lifestyle norms within our culture it’s about 63 percent worldwide an estimated 90 percent of type 2 diabetes 80 to 90 percent of heart disease and about 50 to 70 percent of all cancers are considered entirely preventable think about that for a moment if you will it’s really unbelievable that the diseases that are killing us and the people we love are mostly entirely preventable by very simple lifestyle changes

the four big lifestyle culprits according to the global status report from the World Health Organization are number one and healthy diet number two a sedentary lifestyle number three alcohol and number four tobacco

the World Health Organization makes specific recommendations for a healthy diet and they are this is the World Health Organization this is not a vegetarian organization eat more fruits vegetables legumes nuts and seeds cut down on salt sugar and fat choose unsaturated fat instead of saturated fat and eliminate trans fatty acids

the 2010 and I’m going to apologize right now because we had problems with getting my presentation on the screen so the pictures are totally messed up as you can see there’s things over top of the writing and so forth so I apologize for that but the 2010 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee report had four main action points and they were eat fewer calories shift to a more plant-based diet significantly reduce intake of foods containing solid fats and added sugars and increase physical activity

the 2015 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee report added the following for the first time ever eat last meat it’s the first time they’ve ever said eat less meat they said he left saturated fat they’ve said eat less cholesterol but they’ve never before come out and said eat less meat especially red and processed meat as its consumption is associated with increased disease risk and they also stated for the first time ever emphasize plant foods and de-emphasize animal products to improve environmental sustainability can you imagine really quite remarkable

[Applause]

so how strong is the evidence plant-based diets confer a health advantage well here’s what we know about dietary patterns and disease risk and a lot of it comes predominantly from two large studies and you know what’s really neat about these studies is these studies they’re so valuable because they are comparing people who consume different dietary patterns non vegetarian semi vegetarians pesco vegetarians lacto-ovo vegetarians and vegans but they’re all health-conscious so they’re trying to select for people that are similar health-conscious in their daily practices in their lifestyle practices

so the first is the Adventist Health Study 296 thousand individuals and it began in 2002 and is ongoing and this is an American Canadian North American study and then epic Oxford with over 65 thousand participants and it is out of the UK it began in 1993 and is ongoing so we’ve got a lot of information and a lot of this information has come out just in the last two three four years

so let’s talk first about longevity and we can’t talk about longevity with talking about the Blue Zones because there are places in the world where people commonly live to be 90 or 100 and even when they reach those advanced ages they are still very productive they feel good they’re out gardening they’re walking and so on there are 5 recognized Blue Zones Okinawa Sardinia Italy the seventh-day adventists the vegetarian seventh-day adventists of Loma Linda California Icaria Greece and the Nicoya Peninsula of Costa Rica

and I talked a little bit yesterday but I’m just going to go over it again to remind you and for the for the benefit of those that didn’t hear yesterday presentations there too there are actually six common lifestyle practices that that are sort of the things that we weave through all the blue zones strong families they’re socially engaged they do constant moderate physical activity they can not to smoke and wear diet is concerned there are two things that they tend to do they all consume plant-based diets and they all consume legumes

and the the researchers involved with the Blue Zones put together sort of the best from all of these Blue Zones and came up with what they call the Blue Zones longevity diet and here are the six principles number one eat less hairy hot chi boo it’s called in in okinawa stop eating when you’re 80% full number two move more be as active as possible in your daily activities number three eat primarily unprocessed food so you want to minimize your intake of packaged foods fast foods fried foods eat more plants load up on vegetables fruits beans whole grains Nutkin seeds and finally eat less or number five eat less meat and avoid processed meat and number six eat at home

so what do we know about vegetarians do vegetarians actually live longer and in a word yes they do the Adventist Health Study to found that vegetarians including vegans live on average about nine point one nine point five years longer for men and about six point one years longer for women and what’s really interesting is when you look at the percent of people in this population living to age 85 nearly half of men live to age 85 in this Adventist population compared to only 15 to 20% of men in the general population and over 60% of the women compared to about 30 to 40 percent of the women in the general population

now when we look at vegetarian mortality and the Adventist Health Study – compared to similar this is not compared to the average Western eater but compared to similar health-conscious non-vegetarians mortality rates are reduced by about 28% for vegan men about 19% for pesco vegetarians 15% for vegans and 9% for lacto-ovo vegetarians and when I say vegans I’m talking about as a whole including women the thing was is the women didn’t do as well as the men and the reason that I think that is and this is just a hypothesis I don’t really know for sure I think it’s because within the Adventist community even the non-vegetarian women eat really well they tend not to eat much meat they tend to eat a lot of fruits and vegetables even if they’re not vegetarian they’re very health conscious whereas there may be a greater discrepancy in the men so the vegan men have you know an even greater difference than the non-vegetarian men and so they would have that extra advantage

have have any of you ever watched the videos with dr. Ellsworth Wareham if you haven’t please look this guy up on the Internet he is absolutely amazing he was a practicing cardiothoracic surgeon till he was 95 years old he was doing surgeries and he said the only reason I retired was because I promised my family I would spend more time with them he said that a hundred I could still be doing this at a hundred he’s still you know mowing his lawn and driving everywhere and still speaking eloquently and very intelligently it’s really fun to listen to him so he’s one of the Blue Zone Adventists

and there was also a meta-analysis in 2012 looking at seven prospective studies and this included about a hundred and twenty five thousand participants from the UK Germany the US the Netherlands and Japan and they found compared to non vegetarians vegetarians had a lower overall mortality of about 9 percent in that included vegetarians and vegans