What You Should And Shouldn’t Be Eating To Stay Healthy

okay so i have more questions and i guess for time’s sake if we could keep them to two minutes that would be ideal
okay so the first question is do plant-based eaters or vegans have to be especially careful to get enough vitamin d dha epa iodine taurine vanadium chromium and omega-3s is there any risk in getting all of these from supplements as opposed to food that’s question one

question two is uh dr khan you’ve said i’ve been inside the heart fifteen thousand times and i’ve never scooped sugar out of a blocked artery i scooped cholesterol out of blocked arteries please explain this

question three what does the science say about fish consumption and health does fish raise our tmao levels and why does this matter does fish have mercury in it and why does this matter

question four are there any whole food plant-based foods we should avoid such as potatoes certain high oxalate green vegetables nightshade vegetables peanuts cashews which supposedly are not really raw because they have to be heated because that’s how they get them

brian clement from hippocrates says black beans are very hybridized and very hard to digest people have been saying brown rice has grown in areas where there’s high arsenic so are there any whole food plant-based diets that are not on your list to say go ahead with

question five how do you prevent and treat urinary tract infections and question six um it was said 21 international organizations including the world health organization american heart association american college of cardiology institute of medicine all say eat as little saturated fat as possible it couldn’t be more clear

and these are high brow organizations not associated with the vegan movement 21 out of 21 groups say the same thing please explain this a little more so one more time first question was on the supplement second was dr khan third was on fish and tnao fourth was on whole food plant-based foods that we might want to avoid fourth was your fifth was urinary tract infections and the six was the 21 out of 21 groups

i’ll go first and i want to talk about the foods to avoid the first thing is this issue of hybridization comes up a lot and if you were to go to the grocery store and say i would like for you to point me in the direction of the area of the produce section where the non-hybridized foods are there are none and this is a good thing for the most part

in fact the reason why there was a potato famine that killed a million people in ireland was because there was only one kind of potato that was grown there and had they been hybridizing potatoes and there were lots of varieties of potatoes people would have just eaten the potatoes that weren’t hit by the blight all right and so hybridization has been going on since the beginning of agriculture

and breeding plants together like tomatoes with tomatoes and soybeans with soybeans to come up with bigger tomatoes like my father after he retired got involved with the osu horticulture department he got a master’s degree in horticulture and they were breeding something that ended up being the mortgage lifter tomato

this guy invented it because he lost his job and he helped pay off his mortgage with these tomatoes but anyway they were they were designed to be like the size of a slice of bread so that you’d have one slice of tomato that really held its form and there’s yeah it was cool and there’s nothing the matter that tastes really great

so so the first thing is discarding a food because it’s hybridized you’ve got nothing left to eat we need to hope that there are new hybridized foods coming out all the time that can meet the needs of the population around the world the problem is people confuse this with genetic modification and they’re not the same thing all right that’s not the same thing

um i think the the biggest without going into all these individual foods because steve wants to keep us to two minutes and we’re doing such a good job following your directions have you noticed that um but the the problem with the foods to avoid list is that this goes back to this one-size-fits-all i mean people write books about gluten is bad well you know what if you have celiac disease it’s really bad

all right and if you have certain types of autoimmune disease it’s probably good to stay away at least from high gluten foods but not the rest of the world if you go into anaphylactic shock when you’re exposed to peanuts you should not eat them but i don’t and so there’s no reason for me to not have peanut butter once in a while

so i think it’s very important that we not try to come up with hit lists of plant foods that we’re not supposed to eat because most people can eat most of them without any problem at all so first of all if you have a food allergy i mean if you eat strawberries and your tongue swells up and you can’t swallow do not eat them all right but that’s not an indictment of strawberries and everybody should stay away from them so in the interest of time i won’t say more but there’s lots more to the topic okay [Applause]

i’ll take fish for 400. i when when when patients or conference attendees ask me the question well what about fish if i’m feeling flippant i’ll say well what about them but the question i typically asked them i said let’s say you were someone or an animal that had to eat lungs that’s all you could eat would you eat the lungs of an animal raised in a coal mine and everybody scratches up their face of course not because it’d be filthy they’d be full of coal dust and tar and god knows what else

well the oceans are filthy they are loaded we dump sewage and all sorts of industrial wastes and toxins in them and fish have to filter that to breathe so fish tissue is actually some of the animal tissue that has the highest loads of toxins of anything someone can put in their body so that is a problem and it’s not just the mercury it’s also pcbs it’s pesticide residues i mean you name it on and on down the line

but also because of all of the fertilizers we are dumping into the oceans we are creating these algae blooms that where these toxic algae uh blooms release these toxins into the water that are also taken up by fish and studies have shown that people from certain areas who eat a lot of fish are at higher risk for developing what is colloquially known as lou gehrig’s disease or als

it’s what stephen hawking had it’s generally a relentlessly debilitating and ultimately fatal neurologic disease and there’s also some suggestion from certain studies that these algal toxins are also related to parkinson’s and possibly dementia risk

but the bottom line is fish flesh is animal flesh and as garth has pointed out as we’ve talked already higher intakes of animal tissue correlate with increased mortality a higher risk for cancer because it turns on cancer genes not to mention the fact that it you have all of the cancer-causing compounds that comes from cooking the fish and then of course it does increase tamo which is another toxin and so the bottom line is let the fish swim and be happy and eat your plants

i don’t i i don’t feel strongly about it how do i treat utis with antibiotics is yep thank you there actually was a report in the last two weeks again of lower uti rates and vegetarians i didn’t read the study in detail and some of it is handling the chicken in the kitchen and the same ecologies yeah exactly

so but i guess and there’s just built-in infection again i think i mentioned this a bit on my talk today don’t food is medicine but it is not the only medicine and there will be times that we need lipitor and there are times that we need antibiotics and i have seen some very very sick people who refused to use medicines until it was almost too late

so don’t get into that idea that western medicine is absolutely terrible it’s not it’s good at sick care it’s not good at health care but it’s good at sick care yeah great i made the same point earlier yeah yeah we have we have the opportunity to rely on diet and lifestyle as primary medicine and everyone can benefit and then a lot fewer of us will need a lot fewer medications but when we happen to need one it’s a good thing that we have them

rates of stroke have declined primarily because of effective treatment of hypertension which is genetic sometimes some people eat optimally they’re still hypertensive effective drugs that they tolerate well maybe the difference between having a stroke and not so yeah i completely agree there uh there are only a couple questions left i guess one of the remaining ones was that 21 of 21 august organizations cite a link between higher intake of saturated fat and higher rates of heart disease and other bad stuff uh yeah that’s because it’s true that’s it [Applause]

no i wanted to say something about the utis yeah so you know being a little bit glib but you know for example um last night on the panel colin you know i think argued against saturated fat placing the the emphasis on animal protein i i’m a pragmatist so you know yes i do believe the evidence regarding the mechanistic adverse effects of saturated fat i also believe the mechanistic adverse effects of animal protein

but we eat foods and and the simple fact is that we get our excessive animal protein and our excess of saturated fat from all the same sources i think one of the ways to sidestep a lot of unnecessary controversy generate a lot more light and quite a bit less heat is to talk about foods which i think is the native predisposition of this group anyway

when we say whole food plant-based we’re talking about whole foods okay then what are the foods diets made up predominantly or exclusively of vegetables fruits whole grains beans lentils nuts and seeds and water when you’re thirsty and then frankly you’re avoiding the animal protein you’re avoiding the saturated fat you fix a host of ills fixate on any one nutrient there are still ways to get the foods wrong and you know let’s be clear you could be strictly vegan on a diet of coca-cola and cotton candy that wouldn’t make it a good idea right so saturated fat’s not the only thing wrong get the foods right the nutrients tend to sort themselves out

i just wanted to add something about the utis and that is that i agree you have a uti you give an antibiotic but we get people in our office who have six utis a year and they take antibiotics again and again and nobody ever stops to say why do you keep getting these utis and so um and and plus you know you do this for three or four years and antibiotic resistant bacterial infections are life-threatening and we have to be more conscious of that i think in medicine

um so you can deal with utis a little bit differently and you have to by the time somebody’s had 24 rounds of antibiotics that’s not fixing anything and in fact the next one comes more often so we look at hydration we look at we look at using plant antimicrobials and with very high dose probiotics to restore um to to address the infection without more antibiotics

and also to restore the immune system which has been completely wiped out of the microbiome which has been completely wiped out and it adds increased susceptibility and then high using cranberry juice not from concentrate with mixed in with raw honey because raw honey has antibacterial properties and there are studies in medical journals about this

so drinking cranberry juice you have to sweeten it with something anyway or a lot your lips will wrap right around the bottle it’s so sour so so if you do these things it takes some time but we have people who’ve had five to six utis a year for five and six years and wiped it out like they never have another one again and so i think one time antibiotic don’t worry about it but if it’s repetitive you have to say something’s going on here and before we uh really make do some damage with the antibiotics we should look at why and fix that

just a quick thing on the saturated fat because it comes up a lot and you’ll you will hear about the study which is called the siri torino study which was the study that really started all the saturated fat doesn’t cause heart disease it was sponsored by industry as you might imagine

but they did a kind of a simple trick they they took a bunch of different it was a meta-analysis they looked at a bunch of different studies you got to understand these studies they’re trying to show a relation between saturated fat or lack of relation between saturated fat and heart disease they controlled for independent risk factors of heart disease one of those being cholesterol

so you understand the problem here if you control for cholesterol one of the methods that saturated fat causes heart disease is by raising cholesterol so again if i take this big group of people and i say everybody in you that are out here that have high cholesterol leave the room i’ve kind of eliminated all the people that are being affected by saturated fat and so therefore i’m kind of you know making the game play in my favor which is what they did with that study and how we started with this whole weight saturated fat isn’t bad for you