Is It Okay To Stop Eating Meat But Still Eat Fish And Dairy?

my friend who’s very smart said red died for new americans said i’m never having beef or chicken again but he continues to eat fish and dairy what what do you what do you need to say to him in other words he’s only interest like what’s the what’s the problem with what’s going to happen in his life differently if he was eating beans and quinoa and beans and grains versus eating fish and cheese fish and dairy what’s the what’s going to happen in his life differently health-wise because on a regular basis heats fish and dairy as opposed to if he was eating a whole food plant-based diet

i think i have to say something about the dairy thing uh growing up milk and cows but uh that’s what you’re referring to uh yeah i found it a little bit difficult to digest the information i was getting no pun intended but the question concerning dairy especially because of its valued calcium in this valued protein if you will the data really show very clearly that that’s problematic pretty seriously complement problematic um i i don’t know i fall back i guess on cliches of one sort or another the dairy is just simply the data are not there to support the consumption of dairy and i really like to emphasize on that point the role of feeding our children one of the specific things i have in mind is the fact that the u.s died to our guidelines in part but more to the point the school lunch program is such that for schools to participate in that they’re required to at least offer the dairy option i’ve found that troubling because that in that case is a marketing ploy as far as i’m concerned it’s not a health food and it really locks in children at a very young age to get started so i don’t know i’m kind of dancing around your questions steve but i the the data for me having been on both sides of the vents on that one is very persuasive the dairy is i often say when people ask me what should i drop first i usually say dairy because i think it is problematic in many different ways starting out with the children especially did i i don’t know whether that’s great thank you

yeah um colin i share a little bit of background i could mock a cowboy i was by the time i was four years old too that i we were dairy farmers for many generations in michigan um and we still have a family farm there like owned by my cousin now but uh i think i would uh in responding to your question about your friend uh maybe i think go down the path that pam describes and uh not necessarily say that you need to give up dairy completely forever now there are there’s lots of evidence that uh replacing dairy with some healthy plant-based protein sources like nuts and legumes and soy products will randomize trials showing it will improve your blood lipids we have long-term epidemiologic studies showing that it will be related to lower risk of cardiovascular disease and also your bones are not going to fall apart colin’s right you don’t need to have large amounts of dairy we do need some calcium and for people who are really not getting it for other reasons getting from other sources a small amount of dairy could could fill in some nutritional gaps so i think a an alternative or one way to go is to say you know there’s lots of evidence and and we i can help point you to some of that if you want it but um that these changes and whenever we talk about reducing something it is really important to describe what we would uh use to replace it because if we replace it with coca-cola and uh other high-sugary sources of course that’s not going to be better could even be worse than dairy but uh cutting down to one serving of dairy a day would probably be a huge step forward and actually fish has some positive nutritional value too and i think it’s for most people it’s good to have fish once or twice a week that otherwise they may not be getting optimal amounts of omega-3 fatty acids so it’s not necessarily giving that up either if you if that person decides they want to become a strict vegan well that’s also okay but they’re going to have to pay some attention to sources of vitamin b12 but again we don’t have to make one huge step altogether going down a path and that’s that’s what we see in our studies that the farther you go down that plast path toward a healthy whole food plant based diet the better it’s getting every step uh in that direction is better but when you start to get down to really the difference between vegan and somebody who’s having fish a couple times a week in fact what data we have say that the pescetarian actually it looks a little bit better but we really don’t have data to make a sharp distinction between those those two kinds of diets

i love it i’m sorry i i love it when patients come in and are using dairy products because i know that that’s the single biggest factor that we can change that’s likely to have short-term benefit in their life whether it’s their joint pain their sinus congestion their bowel disruptions their obesity eliminating dairy and particularly cheese and some of the other highly processed dairy food products have the biggest short-term benefit to people in terms of what their direct experience is so i i’m glad to hear people that are suffering or including jerry because i know i have a quick fix that will have a powerful impact on them

i i was inclined to to reaffirm walter’s perspective alan you just mentioned highly processed areas so one of the things i was going to say is what dairy and what fish and and what are the ancillary considerations and what’s the dose so the idea that you can’t eat any of this if you want to live long and prosper is rather belied by the fact that four of five blue zones around the world you’re all familiar with the blue zones where people routinely live to be a hundred don’t get chronic disease four or five are omnivorous the only one that potentially is not is the seventh-day adventists in california a lot of them are vegetarian so there’s dairy there too the vegans may do better than the vegetarians but four or five are certainly omnivores and dairy is a part of the diet in the two mediterranean cultures that figure among the blue zones the sardinians and the koreans but that doesn’t mean dairy is the reason they’re living to be 100 maybe they’re going to be 100 despite the dairy or maybe it’s because it’s locally sourced organic grass-fed no hormones no antibiotics all that good stuff maybe it’s because the dose is very limited so you know i i think the critical point here is that if you massively shift the diet in the direction of plant predominance whole foods minimally processed all that good stuff there may not be as precise a definition of the one way to live long and prosper as our ideologies might make us favor but then there are other considerations how are we treating animals how are we impacting the environment i i’ve heard colleagues say for example that fish is toxic eating fish is toxic well it certainly is for the fish most of the epidemiology would suggest it’s beneficial to people but compared to what keep in mind that when we talk about the health effects of isolated foods in the united states usually the background for comparison is the stuff most people are eating and the stuff most people are eating in the u.s is the seafood diet i see food and i eat it whatever the heck it is even if it glows in the dark almost almost any real food is better than that so yeah fish looks good but would fish look good if you were introducing it against a backdrop of an optimal plant exclusive diet where the only way to fit fish in your diet is to bump out some beans and to bump out legumes we don’t know that study could conceivably be done i’ve not seen such a study done optimal plant exclusive versus that plus a little fish and then maybe adjust the dose so i i think if if we are going to stick with science which is something that essie asked us to do here and emphasize that we have to be honest with you about the data gaps is the addition of some amount of sustainable fish good or bad against the backdrop of an already optimized plant predominant diet i don’t think we have data to answer that will some small amount of locally sourced dairy preclude you from living to be a hundred free of chronic disease your friend no because they’re doing that in ikorea greece they’re doing that in sardinia italy maybe they’re doing it despite the fact that they eat dairy maybe dairy is making some small beneficial contribution but what’s pretty clear is wherever people are living long and prospering with vitality diet is mostly plant-based and so dairy occupies a very small niche and again i think fish may be a somewhat more complicated topic in terms of the health effects for us but we’re depleting the ocean so again my fall back position is eating fish may be good for people may be bad for people it’s bad for the fish

one thing i want to add to this i would be with dr goldhamer for getting rid of the dairy because i think it is the low-hanging fruit to help people get better quickly the mitigating factor with the blue zones that i think we have to take into consideration is there’s a difference between somebody who grows up in aquarius greece lives in a cloistered environment eats an optimal diet from the very moment they enter the world breast fed good food fresh food and what can be in a diet when life starts that way versus the types of people who are ending up in our office who did not start life that way that’s what you see in your practice dr esselstyn so so i think that’s a mitigating factor that has to be taken into consideration that if you lived in sardinia your whole life and your diet was perfect from the get-go but included some dairy and that sort of thing you probably can get away with it but that’s not our patient base right

yeah i think there’s some fascinating parts of this discussion uh i think we always have to at least as physicians we have to distinguish whether we are advising people who are well what they should eat and people who have sick how we can alter their diet and actually restore their health in in my particular practice with patients who are all sick with triple vessel coronary artery disease i play hardball i don’t want them to have one single morsel past their lips that is going to further endanger their endothelium and its capacity to make nitric oxide and we’ve shown time and again we can when i do this we can halt the disease and we often get reversal but the point i want to make about wellness is i’ve been out on the circuit with this now for more years than i’d like to remember it’s possible that that i’m beginning to be to be haunted somewhat by the fact that almost invariably in the audience that i’m facing there are going to be persons who are sick that i’m addressing and then they’re going to be those that are well and it’s been haunting me more and more in the last year or two that really who are the people who are sick they were all the previously well how did they get sick by eating the foods that injured them and some of those people and took enough of those foods to injure them to the point where they got sick i’m reminded of a study several years ago of 905 000 patient years of follow-up and what happened in that particular subset that i was fascinated with were the men and women who were 55 years of age and they had absolutely optimal risk factors their weight their blood pressure their cholesterol everything was fine and they followed them for 30 years age 85 now 30 of the women and 40 percent of the men had now developed cardiovascular disease so i i think that we have to kind of think carefully about those who are well today and what is the message that we want to give them to maintain them in that state

i work with a lot of patients that have autoimmune disease and you turn on and off their symptoms sometimes with a single dairy meal i mean they’ll tell you because they’ll inadvertently get exposed to something and that one meal is enough to activate their symptoms so as far as dairy products are concerned i think your friend’s experience is going to be pretty obvious most patients that stop using dairy products don’t come back and say oh that wasn’t worth the trouble because they can notice that when they do go back and have the occasional exposure if they happen to be sensitive as many autoimmune patients and other ill patients are they can tell themselves very very quickly i don’t have that same experience for example with fish exposure you know it doesn’t have apparently the same type of anagenic response those people need it they may or may not notice but with dairy products i feel really strongly that the patient experienced himself if you can just get him to stop it for a week or two they themselves can tell whether or not this is a health health-promoting food or not