The World’s Top Nutrition And Lifestyle Doctors Explain The Latest Research On How To Dramatically 2

I think I have a little explaining to do
we’ve spent $20,000 and printed 30,000 of these magazines and passed them out all over Long Island we drove everyone crazy for the last six months promoting this conference and thank God people have come in a big way and a lot of people say I’m not sure what the purpose of this whole conference is is doesn’t seem very profitable you’re not charging anything what exactly is going on and then the other ends I asked these speakers to come they’re very busy they have other commitments and I asked them to please take time from their life with no benefit to them other than to be here to speak to you and not only that there’s eight of them when one of them could easily explain this easily

so what is the reason that I have made such a big deal some into all of Long Island’s summons everyone nationally and asked eight of the top experts in the world to come and fly here and spend their time and the reason is quite simple this is what’s going on

I would say that the health and environmental situation is as serious as it could possibly be the statistics are startling they are beyond startling the environmental statistics are terrifying this is not a time to say let’s just go meatless on Mondays turn the thermostat to 68 and everything will be fine we are in a situation that couldn’t be more urgent

the only reason that everyone doesn’t know that is because not everyone’s reading all the statistics if you’re reading the obesity statistics and the diabetes statistics and all the other related health statistics you would understand that things have never been this advanced the problems never so severe the economic implications on our country are tremendous

so I have asked these people who have spent so much time researching it who are unbiased who have no affiliation except to tell you the truth to come here and once and for all let’s get the clear crystal truth and let’s spread it as fast as possible because this situation is critical

and I guess I would just say you know one more time that if in 90 if everyone could go back in a time machine to 1910 and say to everyone don’t smoke it’s gonna be really bad a lot of people a lot of families would have been spared so maybe the point of this is to get people’s attention so they don’t have to suffer the consequences but instead could find out today where we stands

so I’d love to open by saying this is gonna be on YouTube not every single person will watch every second of our video and this might be the only time that some people who watch this in the future actually see you they might not read your book they might not watch your video and there might not be another opportunity for you to communicate to people all over the world except right now

so if each of you would take three minutes and tell people what’s on the top of your mind you’ve been writing books you’ve been lecturing you’ve been doing research for years what is it that you want people we’re all here you’re fans but around the world on video there’s gonna be a lot of people that are seeing you for the first time before we get into specific questions if each of you would take three minutes and tell everyone what it is that you think they need to know in case you don’t have another chance to speak to them

just push the button and keep about 6 inches long start off and my guess is what I will say will be pretty similar to what other people might say too

but I completely agree that this is a time that is unprecedented in terms of the seriousness of what we as a as a planet face and in terms of climate change 30 years ago we recognized that this was a change but we thought it would be something that would be happening over a course of centuries but we’ve seen a huge acceleration and it’s happening right before our eyes and the consequences happening right before our eyes – and it’s just nonlinear phenomena that is really frightening

that tomorrow give her a few bits of data but the news this past year has been full of information just something like the Greenland ice cap has melted seven times faster in the last decade than it did just two or three decades ago with so it’s really this enormous upswing in ice melting temperatures climbing that in a very nonlinear way

we’re way off track to stay under the 2 degree centigrade limit that the United Nations IPCC has set as a goal for 2100 we’re headed toward if this present double or more increase in temperature unless we make some major major changes and again that’s not far off that this is the world that our grandchildren are going to inherit that it’s not hypothetical it’s real and it’s it’s it’s in our family

so I’ve studied and worked on health for all of my career but now I am feeling that impact this is a more important issue because if we can’t address that issue everything we do with health and everything we do in terms of better diets will will fall apart and be irrelevant we have to deal with that situation the climate change issue in a very urgent way

at the same time the obesity epidemic is undermining health in a way that it has never before and again it’s the steady increase it’s not just that we have a very difficult problematic situation at the moment but the projections are that by 2030 which is not very far away at all about half of Americans will be obese and it’s there’s been now we thought a few years ago there might be a little slow down but no it the numbers keep going up

and now we’re seeing that in terms of its consequences that in people adults under 50 cancers like colon cancer that had been going down for 50 or 60 years after around there going back up again my diabetes is still going up very steadily a heart disease rates which had been coming down we had reduced mortality from heart disease about 80% among younger adults that’s on its way back up again

it’s really the the fundamental problem is that that generation that became obese as children and has now moved into adulthood when the consequences that we knew it happened are actually happening right before our eyes so these are really very serious phenomena we’re on track for things to get much worse unless we make big changes

but I will end with good news there is a possible way out that is a double wind that we can be healthier we can have a healthy planet and it’s methey diets are a very important part of that solution they’re not the only thing I ride my bicycle but we just got an electric car last week for the first time we have to get fossil fuels out of our out of our society as fast as we can so anyway that’s my three minutes thank you

[Music] push the button thank you dr. bullet what I really would like to hear your thoughts on because I can remember when you were at the Vatican conference was it sweet was it three years ago you made a profound statement about mr. 30% of the Roma’s plant-based would you can you remember that would you okay that was absolutely I think the capstone of what you were saying I should remember it I don’t make too many trips to the Vatican am I saying that uh I think we were saying somewhere around 25 30 percent of mortality could be prevented by a healthy diet if the world moved to a healthy diet

yes so I I will say amen to everything dr. Willett just said and actually that goes for everything doctor will it will say to the the one thing that I would append to Walters comments is he is the lead author of the eat Lancet Commission report on diet people and the planet and if you’re not familiar with that please get familiar with that it maps out the boundaries we have to honor if we want a sustainable diet

what I would add to those great comments is that diet is it the confluence of everything that matters most personally to the public all of its intimate effects all of its ecosystem effects and it reverberates through current events coronavirus traces its origins to the flaws in a global food system incursions into fragile ecosystems inequitable distributions of food and a reliance on bush meat in certain markets that’s probably what resulted in exposure everybody seems to think – bats where this virus originated not it goes but essentially failure to honor the value of a plant predominant food supply worldwide Mal distribution inequities failure to develop a fair and sustainable agricultural system is probably the reason for this current global public health emergency

it’s certainly one of the key reasons diet is as Walter Willett indicated is a crucial component of everything going on with the climate diet is the reason that we’re burning down the Amazon so we can graze cattle to satisfy the global demand for beef diet is the reason that we’re burning down the rainforests in Borneo so we can replace them with palm oil plantations so on the one case it’s an appetite for beef on the other it’s an appetite for processed food and palm oil

and then of course diet is the single leading cause of premature death in our culture there was an op-ed in The New York Times on August 26th of 2019 entitled our food is killing too many of us it was by dairies Moza Ferry and Dean of nutrition at Tufts and Dan Glickman former Secretary of Agriculture of the United States they cite the evidence in that op-ed in The New York Times that died is the single leading predictor variable of all cause mortality and all major chronic disease

so it’s the explanation for ravaging the planet it is a clear and present danger for us and our families in terms of our health and its effects reverberate from coronary artery disease to coronavirus so I think on behalf of all of us I thank all of you for having enough interest in the topic to be here on a Friday night [Applause]

if I can jump in here I agree with what you just said dr. Katz you know the whole question for certain environment cost of health care all being related to what we choose to eat I like your word confluence I think you just said

I just had an opportunity I’ve been in this business as some of you know as I said today for 65 years since my graduate studies that’s counting by Graduate Studies yeah you and I are the same boat he is my senior advisor in any case I some years ago I represented field and nutrition as I explained and I have to tell you being in the field of nutrition stuff that concept of nutrition which I call I devised the expression of food you know sort of by coming for the metabolic and and so forth that concept of nutrition I find very troubling in the sense that is so confusing for so many people

yet at the same time the power of nutrition to actually express itself in a way of creating health is really really impressive Lisa what I’ve seen emerge over those years and along the way if I said the whole idea of confusion struck me some years ago now about 27 40 50 years ago I guess but it’s probably you know why why is it so difficult for the public to get to know it’s not just the public it’s we in the professions as well why is it so difficult to really get a handle on what nutrition really means I mean all we need to look at there’s all the claims that are going on here and there and stores and everything else in media to realize as the troubling non-concept

and I would argue that until we can somehow convey what this means to the public so everybody gets to know it better and in simple way so they can actually use an effective way that’s what we need to do if the sort of reach to some of these problems

I recently had an opportunity to thing about writing a book again which I’ve done and the just goes to that question can certainly why are we so confused I find that to be a fascinating subject and so I in the book I’ve had the opportunity going back and look at the history back to the 1700s looking for the roots of why we think what we think look for the roots of why we are so troubled with this concept because the tradition has a sciences I don’t believe my medical colleagues here would disagree with me nutrition is not really effectively taught in medical schools I think that’s best point number one

and I’ve often wondered why there’s an a discord between nutrition and let’s say clinical practice quite a discord the medical system doesn’t I think they appreciate it very much partly because the professionals are not being taught the subject but in history no labor just of this in history I think I found something very exciting and that is the way we sort of started thinking about how food works through nutrition way back in the 1800s and on through that period and there were two prominent ideas at that time

one was that it wasn’t that the whole idea of food being related to disease was said to be a constitutional effect constitutional effect really an interesting word whole bodies involved all that sort of thing the alternative was the idea that diseases is locally formed locally treated locally caused so the two concept the local theory of disease and the constitutional nature of disease

once you get into exploring that particular concept then you can see the roots of why we got to where we got now because we tend to think it’s such small little particles or small little ideas about the whole the whole subject thank you it says so we tend to think instead of its they think of the whole we’re always going for little bits and pieces to carve out some pictures and information for ourselves or maybe for some other purposes

and I just find this concept of nutrition now I’m really sold on the idea it is a whole listing and I like the word W in front of that word although it’s a holistic effect whereas the infinitely complex we can mechanistically of course but in reality once you realize how to to look at this system sense in a system sense we can get fairly simple ideas out of it and that’s where I get breaks I was about the whole food plant-based diet push because it is after all at the end of the day it is our eating plants not use and not not use of livestock for example which is that the root of the environmental issue as we all know and cost of health care is just a source expanding like this all starting with the idea and it’s just really understanding what does that concept really mean it’s something more than this nuclear that neutered this disease that mechanism it’s the whole thing working together in a very systematic way

I’ll follow up I press the red buttons when you’re done so that you’re not thank you I’ll follow up on dr. Campbell’s comments which I agree with everything that’s been said here the confusion about nutrition and the message that people get about nutrition

I’m probably I think I am the only person here who came from a business background before I was involved in health care and there’s some value in that because you look at things through different lens like how how much attraction are you grain and gaining in the marketplace how how are you convincing people how many can art people are you convincing and I think that we have a marketing problem we need to solve and a messaging problem that we need to work on

and I said last night that I think part of this is making sure that we focus on the things we have in common instead of the things that we differ on and I think the other thing is figuring out how to take a cohesive message that is attractive to the public making them will want to jump on board

now we have the best story in the world this is the best story in medicine what we have right here that you can without any expense at all in fact your grocery bill will go down if you do this you can go to the grocery store and make meals like you’ve always been doing nothing really changes much except the content of the food and you can prevent and reverse diseases like heart disease and diabetes and some cancers and that sort of thing

if you could put this in a pill I gave a lecture in Denmark last year that if I could put this information in a in the form of a pill I’d have the biggest richest drug company in the world you would all want to invest in it and so would everybody else but the problem is the messaging because people aren’t getting the message

so I think what we have to do is is really work on how were conveying what we’re conveying to the public in a way that makes them want to come in and join us and I think that that involves targeting different populations of people with different messages this is what you do when you’re in business testing messaging working together actually for the purpose of not only furthering research but furthering how we message this to the public so that we gain traction faster

dr. Fuhrman said last night that his estimate of the number of people who are actually eating an optimal diet is about two and a half percent of the population not just a plant-based diet but people who are really doing it right I’ll give you another statistic that might blow your mind even more and that is that right now the data show that 85% of people who have adopted a plant-based diet did it for ethical reasons not health reasons which tells us the message isn’t getting through

so when you have the best product in the world think of it if it was a drug that we were trying to market and you’re not selling it to the public our problem is not that the research isn’t right and the problem isn’t that what we’re doing doesn’t work and the problem isn’t that the results speak for themselves or the science is on our side our problem is messaging

and I think that we should be having conferences among ourselves to not debate the science but to figure out how to sell this to the public and I think that’s maybe the most important thing we have to do

so my message to patients is that as important as these larger external environmental issues are that they can perhaps have the biggest effect on the external environment by beginning to focus on their internal environment and the way that you resolve your internal environmental imbalances is through diet sleep and exercise and that the type of diet that’s going to be most effective at producing a health promoting internal environment as a whole plant food diet that also eliminates the addition of salt oil and sugar that’s it

when I guess I’m finishing up and I think I’m going to finish up by telling you a little story so this story happened about 40 years ago when I was in university and I was visiting my parents and my dad he loved to tease me about my interest in nutrition and I remember him walking by I was sitting it I was actually standing in the kitchen making lunch and he walked by me and he stuck his belly out as far as he could he had two cigarettes hanging out of his mouth and a bag of chips in one arm bag of licorice allsorts under his armpit and a two-liter bottle of coke in the other hand and he looked at me and he just had this big cheeky grin on his face and I just of course gave him the look of disgust

and and a couple of hours later I went and talked to him and I said I don’t I don’t understand why you’re doing this you know we what we want you to stick around we want you to to be here for the long haul and he said to me he said you know he said I I’d sooner live 50 years doing all the things I love to do than live 75 having to give up my freedom to do what I love and he said you know I could get hit by a truck tomorrow

and I looked at him and I said I know dad but it doesn’t mean you have to walk out in front of one and the reality is but probably about 80% or more of the chronic diseases that are killing most of us are entirely preventable it is our choice and I think the thing that prevents people from making the right choice is is that a huge need to belong to their tribe and as we see main stream shift it will get easier and easier for people and we knew we need to do everything we can to make it easier

and and the reality is when we make a choice for our health there are consequences beyond ourselves and the consequences were very eloquently laid out by the other speakers the consequences are we preserve this planet for future generations and we remove to a large extent the suffering of the 70 billion animals that are slaughtered on this planet every year for our food to me it makes no sense that we can we that we cause pain suffering and death to other living beings when it is not only unnecessary we are destroying our planet in the process we have a choice and we need to make the right one for ourselves and for every other being that is on this planet

I’m gonna ask the question you’re all thinking to ask Brenda what happened to your dad well it is quite a story and you know my dad didn’t make the kind of changes I wish he would have made but he was told he he actually about two three years after this interaction he had a stroke and was taken to the hospital his blood pressure was 220 over 120 his blood sugar was over 500 milligrams per deciliter and he had to have graphs put below his heart into his legs and he was told if he didn’t stop smoking he’d lived three months and if he did he might live three years

and I can still remember sitting on his hospital bed and right after the doctor told him and the tears were coming down and he looked at me and he said I don’t want to die I I want to dance with the love of my life at our 50th wedding anniversary I want to see my grandchildren grow up and it was at that point that my dad I think understood that without health there is no freedom at all

and and so my dad quit smoking and he started eating oatmeal and blueberries and flax seeds instead of bacon and eggs for breakfast and and I’m very happy to say that that he stuck around for probably twenty six more years way longer than anyone ever thought he would and for that I am grateful he died in 2011 and I miss him every day thank you

i listening to the others and i thought that the way i’d like to make a few comments about why it is the general surgeon gets interested in nutrition and in the late 1970’s and early 80’s when i was chairman of our breast cancer task force i got quite disillusioned with the fact that for no matter how many women I was doing breast surgery I was doing absolutely nothing for the next unsuspecting victim

and that led me to a bit of a global research and it was really quite striking that find that there are other cultures were indeed breast cancer rates were 30 and 40 times less frequent in the United States and if you looked at the women in rural Japan and post World War two breast cancer was very infrequently identified and yet as soon as the Japanese women would migrate to the United States for the second and third generation still pure Japanese American they now had their same rate of breast cancer as their Caucasian counterpart

perhaps even more compelling was looking at Japan in 1958 in the entire nation of Japan how many autopsy proven deaths were there from cancer of the prostate well 18 that was the most mind-boggling Public Health figure I think I’ve ever encountered by 1978 they were up 237 which still pales in comparison to the 28,000 who will die this year in this country frost from prostate cancer

but was long in this global research I began to notice that I was encountering multiple cultures where cardiovascular disease was almost virtually non-existent and it suddenly dawned on me that you know that’s the leading killer of women and men in Western civilization and really it would be probably much more bang for the buck if we could do research on cardiovascular disease and show indeed that we could not only halt but reverses

but the dream was that if people could be taught to eat to save their heart they with us at the same time be likely diminishing the likelihood of having the common Western cancers of breast prostate colon and pancreatic

but here’s where the rubber hits the road everybody’s talked about this message you cannot send out a message that is based on hype and snake oil you’ve got to do the science because then I think everybody the science the sceptics if you’re solid science is solid that’s what will happen so that was read but my first study and the second study and I think I feel that the way you’ve heard me conclude time and again about cardiovascular disease is that coronary artery disease is nothing more than a toothless paper tiger that need never ever exist and if it does exist it need never ever progress this is a but completely benign foodborne illness

so I guess my plea to the to the moderators wish that we could all sort of see what we have for the vision my vision is that we can actually solidify the science and really get that message of science in a format that the public can get their arms around so we can really then move forward thank you

so there’s actually really one question that everyone wants me to ask more than anything by far and the question is of all your years of research all the studies every single piece of data you’ve ever looked at do you know how we could avoid cancer diabetes heart disease chronic kidney disease multiple sclerosis and all these other horrible diseases that’s what we just want to know we really don’t want to do research we’re not that interested in health and nutrition we just want to stay healthy from all that and we argue with each other because we all have opinions but from what the hardcore unbiased best research says do you know how we could avoid these diseases anyone who would like to answer

I think I probably can echo what everyone here will say basically mostly I believe and that’s the wholeness of food I like that concept the whole foods that doesn’t mean to say that we just eat raw Whole Foods salads only all day long but it’s the wholeness of food no no we actually choose the food the whole thing together whether it’s cooked or novice diced and sliced that’s one thing I think is a simple message just offering that idea to people to get as close as they can to that concept of eating that kind of food go the whole way that’s nice to suspect to the best of all they’ve become accustomed to it and they stay there

the second thing that I was saying I have just to tilt fairly simple straightforward things the second is try to avoid foods with animal protein in it basically animal-based foods that’s a hard thing for me to say it was early days because I was raised on a farm milking cows and I started out by career actually advocating for greater consumption of animal protein products but through the years I finally arrived at this point once we sort of decide that were that we happy to animal foods to get that special protein we distort the whole rest of the diet and so we see these rather remarkable correlations other correlations Walt you know we have to worry about causation correlation not being equal to causation but actually when you see this and they’re consistent usually called by all the names other kinds of foods the correlation is so perfect when we look at across countries to see the relationship between the consumption of the animal protein or surrogates such as cholesterol consumption of saturated fat and so forth well you see that it’s really consistent to see that when society start gravitating towards more and more consumption of animal based foods there’s a problem

so two things eat the food in a whole food form not take the individual nutrients out and try to do stuff with it and secondly just try to eat plants it’s fairly simple I think if we get just sorted today that simple message will be able to capture probably I would say just eighty to ninety percent of achievable and eighty to ninety percent of the chaebol more gains that we can make without getting caught up in all the details

Steve and I’m going to redirect the answer a little bit if a so you asked us how we can prevent all these scourge is how we can avoid them Brenda told the story of her father and these personal and intimate stories are always poignant so I have one too a thoroughly was a dear friend of mine naturopathic physician first my resident then my protege then my colleague the first naturopathic physician ever on the faculty at Yale one of the most beautiful people I’ve ever known plant-based diet no exposure to toxins loving wife beautiful children tranquil peaceful meditated daily slept enough and died tragically at 42 of esophageal cancer and I still have a hard time saying it I still hear his soft voice in my mind anytime I talk about him

so I think one critical consideration for all of us is humility we are vulnerable creatures we control ship and sail but never wind and wave so nothing you hear from any of us can ever offer guarantee all we can hope to do is shift the odds in our favor but I agree emphatically with dr. Campbell about how massively we can shift the odds

so to pivot again and reinforce the message I completed my training in internal medicine in 1991 went to Yale to do my training in preventive medicine for the next two years and in 1993 the year I completed that training a paper was published in JAMA which had a major influence on the trajectory of my career this was by Bill foggy and Mike McGinnis entitled actual causes of death in the United States and it was an evidence-based answer to your question Steve

so what these two epidemiologists did was enumerate the factors the root causes explaining the leading causes of death every year in our country so they went beyond what winds up on a death certificate to say okay the death certificate says stroke or heart disease or cancer but we want to know what caused that and by the time they were done almost all of the premature deaths that happen in this country every year but for a rounding error were explained away and the full list of factors was 10 things and that list included environmental exposures to toxins socio-economic disparities poverty is a leading cause of death right

so some of what we need to do is not just about how we take care of our own bodies some of what we need to do requires action by the body politic but what reverberate ‘add with me as a young man just starting my career in preventive medicine was that 80% of the net effect was concentrated in the first three things which I’ve described ever since as bad use of feet forks and fingers physical activity levels were inadequate dietary patterns were bad and we were smoking excessively again died it’s now number but if you go beyond that list you can append a few more I like feet Forks fingers sleep stress and love that’s a bit more holistic Colin to tap into the theme and so we can shift our personal risk and we can shift the risk at the population level massively away from all of these chronic diseases and premature death from any cause that’s got to be good enough because we don’t get a guarantee no matter what we do

I’ll just add to that a little bit and I completely agreed with dr. Katz that we do need a good dose of humility and we’re not going to prevent all of those things and the list and become immortal and talk about planetary health that would be pretty bad if we did so we have to realize that it’s appropriate that we have a finite period on this planet but we in addition to just making it as long as possible we want to have it be the best quality as possible and it’s I agree with what others have said about the general direction of diet that we’ve been described is clearly well established well they based on strong evidence

and I think we a Melissa sweet to focus on the big picture where there’s strong agreement there’s always going to be some disagreements about some of the details maybe not always but at least for quite a while I’m sure there will be and that’s where we tend to focus our discussion but we shouldn’t lose sight of the commonality it naturally is there’s no interest in talking with each other about the things where we agree because we don’t learn anything it’s boring it’s where we disagree it’s more interesting and it stimulates science and advancement

in and there are lots of details we don’t know not all vegetables maybe it’s very possible but not all vegetables are healthy even whole vegetables because those number one have been bred to be they’re all not none of them are natural the things we eat except wild blueberries in the few other things they’ve all been distorted to be most attractive to our taste and yield and things like that so it’s not automatic that everything is healthy

and the other thing is that there David is quite right that we can’t forget smoking physical activity and a lot of those do converge to in terms of overweight being a very big risk factor and then there are some things on your list like multiple sclerosis we are learning now that there’s almost surely an environment a viral component to that but now very strong evidence that inadequate vitamin D is part of the picture of multiple the ideology of multiple sclerosis as well so a diet isn’t going to cure everything but it does as David said put the odds strongly in our favor

and we had a paper just published this past week looking at how much healthy life expectancy we could gain by adopting that simple set of healthy behaviors we had earlier published that we could add 10 years to our life by that simple set of behaviors where the causality is well established I think through multiple kinds of studies in particular not smoking being physically active maintaining a healthy body weight and adopting a healthy diet

what we just published this past a couple of in the past few days was the these added 10 years are all healthy 10 years it’s not that we’re just headed toward more years in a nursing home or something like that with dementia and so it does seem that the that there is a huge opportunity for putting the odds of having healthier years in our favor but any one of us could have something really bad happen to us next week we could be diagnosed with a lymphoma that we don’t know how to prevent yet and things like that so we there’s still a lot to learn but with what we have in hand we is Pam says this is better than any medicine on the shelf

couple of things I I think it’s great that we’re talking about you know dr. Campbell you’re the father of holism in our movement right and whole food whole whole food diets but there’s a bigger hole and you were talking about it last night the importance of rest and water and exercise and that sort of thing so talking about the whole lifestyle picture because you can watch every morsel you put in your mouth and if you spend your life sitting you’re gonna have problems that’s you probably are going to be living to an old age independently if you do that

so the first thing is I think this focus on holism with this panel is maybe a taking things to another level when it comes to risk I don’t think we can promise anybody anything but people ask me all the time so if I do this you know if I do everything you’re talking about you know does this is this a guarantee that I’m not going to get sick it’s not

but I teach through analogy so I tell people I want you to think about your health like driving a car okay I Drive a car keep in good working order I have insurance I fasten my seatbelt I observe the speed limit laws almost all the time and I and I watch I mean I’m very careful I don’t drive when the conditions are terrible and I don’t drink and drive and do stupid things like that now having said that I could on my way home from the airport on Sunday get hit by a bus the proverbial bus there’s nothing you can do about that

the problem is if you get so worried about the bus which is not likely to happen you don’t pay attention to the things that are most likely to happen which is degenerative disease and that’s where the habits that we’re talking about here becomes so important so I don’t think we have to give people a guarantee I think we have to put the promise that we’re making in perspective that way and it’s the best shot you have it isn’t perfect but it’s the best shot you have and I don’t think if anybody really understood the statistics like the group of us do that they would opt to do anything else because from a statistical standpoint it’s your best shot of living to old age independently not in the home

so I like mnemonics so I always give my patients the deep mnemonic diet environment activity and psychology those are the areas that you can do something about and like you said if you can shift the odds to be dramatically in your favor people say well you know what if I what I what if I get old and get hit by a bus my answer is what if you get old and you don’t get hit by a bus

and just to comment at the confluence of what you said Walter what you said Pam I think the value proposition Steve isn’t just dialing down the risk of something bad happening at some point in the future yeah you can do that shift the odds massively in your favor but per this paper you just published Walter and when is there a week you haven’t just published a paper let’s let’s be honest about I mean it’s really annoying

we’re not just talking about adding years to life we’re talking about adding life to years and if if every day you live between now and that unknown future is filled with vital energy and you can seize the day that’s the price it doesn’t get any better than that right nobody knows about tomorrow but if if you can live today fully that’s the price okay

so now my marketing business mind is working and one of the things that I think has happened in our culture is that old age doesn’t seem very attractive to most people I’ve actually had people say I don’t want to live to be 90 oh my gosh until they’re 88 and sick and then they definitely want to live to be 90 I never had anybody in my office matter how old they are they didn’t want to live some more right

but one of the things that I think we could do from a marketing standpoint is show people what healthy old age looks like look at dr. Campbell look at dr. Esselstyn right what great role models dr. Goldhamer is just said are you calling them old well but they’re older than me and and I’m I’m understanding how to love people were older than me now that I’m this age right but but anyway

I think that would be such a great way to show people what you have to look forward to I mean if you look at people but no wonder people don’t want to get old they see family members ending up in memory care and nursing homes I don’t want to do that either but if you show me a way that I could be productive and still living in my own home and working every day and doing what I want to do when I’m 97 I want to sign up for that and most people I think actually do

I’m glad I have I’m sitting next to someone who’s interested in marketing because I agree that we’ve been a failure in that area and I spend a lot of my time a good bit of my time working with the Culinary Institute of America for the last 15 years because it it’s not gonna be you know easy sales to telling people what they shouldn’t eat and it’s much better to be able to show them allow them to taste enjoy food that is really good tasting and pleasant and so I think we want to be able to market something that is really aspirational is something people want and we have a really a triple win here it’s good for you good for the planet and buy and it also tastes really wonderful and that’s why chefs and that whole world is those are people we really do need to get on our side

we’re not going to sell deprivation that’s a hard sell even though you could make a statistical case for it but I think we we can sell this in a very positive way but I’d like to hear your thoughts on a little bit more Pamela and the best way

yeah I think one of the big most important things you said is we’re not gonna sell deprivation we have to sell how spectacular it is how what a great life you can have and the fact the food is delicious and and that it’s easy to do and it’s inexpensive to do and this is sometimes an unpopular thought but I always put it out there anyway and it doesn’t have to be perfect because when people think that you know

but I always help you I did not start a company called I want to be like Pam I’m not perfect by the way but it’s called wellness forum health and the reason for that is that I again I think we have to I said this last night we have to have a bigger tent to invite more people in and meet them where they are and start them on a progress you know progress toward a better goal and be a little bit more tolerant of people not making great big leaps

some of them are ready to do it and they’re fun to help and some of them are not so ready to do it they’re also fun to help that they have to be helped in a different way so I think part of it is making sure that our message isn’t so difficult for people to embrace

I’ll tell you something interesting I’ve done a lot of reading over the last few years over about the science of change because that’s as important really as what it is that we’re the fact that we’re asking people to change and what we’re asking them to do the two biggest reasons why people do something is first of all they think it will benefit them my gosh we’ve got that covered don’t we really but the second one and it’s just as important they can see themselves doing it

and I think that’s where we have to really work on our message that’s where we have to really work on meeting people where they are not only is this the best thing ever for your health but we promise you can do it or your money back okay we promise you’ll be able to do it and those kinds of I think that is an area we could work on too is making people feel this is doable by anybody let us show you how

um my friend was very smart he said red died for New America and said I’m never having beef or chicken again but he continues to eat fish and dairy what woody what do you need to say to him you know there’s he’s only interest like what’s the what’s the problem with he it’s what’s gonna happen in his life differently if he was eating beans in quinoa and beans and grains vers eating fish and she is fish and dairy well what’s the what’s gonna 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 something about the dairy thing growing up milking cows but that’s what you were referring to 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 was valued calcium and it’s valued protein if you will the data really show very clearly that that’s problematic pretty socially compliment problematic

I I don’t know I fall back I guess I’m cliches in 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. dietary 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 in a very young age to get started

so I don’t know I’m kind of dancing around your question Steve but I the data for me haven’t been on both sides of the fence 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 up with the children especially did I I don’t know whether that’s great [Applause]

Cal and I share a little bit of background I could milk a cow by was by the time I was four years old to it that I worried dairy farmers for many generations in Michigan and we still have family farm they’re owned by my cousin now but I think I would and responding to your question about your friend maybe I think go the down the path that Pam describes and not necessarily say that you need to give up dairy completely forever

there are there’s lots of evidence that replacing dairy with some healthy plant-based protein sources like nuts and legumes and soy products will randomised trials showing it will prove 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 Collins 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 an alternative or one way to go is to say you know there’s lots of evidence and we I can help point you to some of that if you want it but that these changes in the whenever we talk about reducing something it is really important to describe what we would do I used to replace it because if we replace it with coca-cola and other high sugary sources of course that’s not going to be better could even be worse than dairy but I 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 all together going down a path and that’s that’s what we see in our studies that the farther you go down that PLAs path toward a healthy whole food plant-based diet the better it’s getting you every step in that direction is better

but when you start to get – really a difference between vegan and somebody who’s having fish a couple times a week in fact that what data we have said 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 this awesome I said I love it when patients come in and are using dairy products cuz I know that that’s the single biggest factor that we can change that’s like they’d have short-term benefit in their life whether it’s their joint pain their sinus congestion their bowel disruptions their our 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 dairy because I know I have a quick fix that will have a powerful impact on him

I was inclined to reaffirm Walters 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 e Koreans

but that doesn’t mean dairy is the reason they’re living to be a hundred they’re looking to be a hundred 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 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

iíve 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 US 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 are introducing it against a backdrop of an optimal plant exclusive diet we’re 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 think if we are going to stick with science which is something that se 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 for dominant 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 hundred free of chronic disease your friend no because they’re doing that in II Korea Greece they’re doing that and started in Italy maybe they’re doing it despite the fact that they 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 fallback position is eating fish may be good for people may be bad for people it’s bad for the fish

one thing I went 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 acharyas Greece lives in a cloistered environment it’s 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 certain any of your whole life and your diet was perfect from the get-go but included some dairy and that sort of thing you probably can’t get away with it but that’s not our patient base right

yeah I think there’s some fascinating parts of this discussion I think we always have to as least as physicians we have to distinguish whether we are advising people who are well what they should eat and people who was sick how we can alter their diet and actually restore their health and 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 as their lips that is going to further endanger their endothelium as its capacity to make nitric oxide and we’ve shown time and again we can do this we can halt the disease coming off and get reversal

but the point I want to make about wellness as I’ve been out on the circuit with this now for more years 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 gonna be patient persons who were sick that I’m addressing and then they’re gonna be those that are well and it’s been haunting me more and more in the last year or two but really who are the people who were sick they were Alda previously well how did they get sick by eating the foods that injured them and some of those people in 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 nine hundred and five thousand patient years of follow-up and 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 found him for 30 years at age 85 now 30% of the women and 40% 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 will put a lot of patients out of 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 end it vertically 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 friends 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 antigenic response those people you need if they may or may not notice but with dairy products I feel really strongly that the patient experience them suffer you can just get them to stop it for a week or two they themselves can tell whether or not this is a health promoting food or not

while we’re here in this um seven of you it’s very easy to feel like this is the consensus but when you go on the internet there’s all kinds of people and on YouTube and I want to read you something from someone who has her own following and your response Nina ty Schultz author of the big fat surprise way butter meat and cheese belong in a healthy diet wrote the following Ronal M Christ Krauts decided in 2000 to review all the evidence purporting to show that saturated fats caused heart disease Krause is director of authorial sclerosis research at Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute and an adjunct professor of nutritional studies at the University of San Francisco at Berkeley

Krauss concluded in 2010 after reviewing all the scientific literature that saturated fats could not be said to cause heart disease in March another group of scientists including faculty from Cambridge and Harvard came to the same conclusion after conducting a similar meta-analysis for instance the mice Maasai warriors in Kenya were observed in the 1970s eating nothing but meat milk and blood not a vegetable in sight if they would not over ate their cholesterol levels remain low even as they aged and scientists could find no evidence of heart disease despite conducting electrocardiograph some four hundred them

in India researchers studied a million railway workers and found that those in the North Aden eight to nineteen percent more fat mainly from dairy products and their co-workers in the south yet the northerners lived in average twelve years longer this disparity led these study authors to conclude in a 1967 paper that to prevent heart disease people or to eat more fermented milk products such as yogurt yogurt sherbet and butter

half a world away scientists observed 80 percent fat they should have been in a wretched State Road Vladimir Steffensen the Harvard trained Canadian anthropologist who lived in the Inuit for years but to the contrary they seem to be the healthiest people I ever lived with the best possible science from the past decade now indicates that too many carbs overall even of the supposedly healthy whole grain coin increased the risk of these diseases compared with a diet low in carbohydrates in other words too much whole-grain cereal for breakfast and whole-grain pasta for dinner with fruit snacks in between add up to a less he died then one of the eggs sausage followed by fish

our dietary guidance has been followed by the followed the Ancel keys view for 50 years now despite a half a billion pounds spent trying to prove this hypothesis the evidence of its health benefits have never been produced meanwhile the rates of obesity and diabetes so rising and heart disease remains a leading cause of death your thoughts

I might be happy to take that on although there’s about 25 things you mentioned there I can’t be sure that I can remember all of those but the main points that yes I dr. Koh’s is a colleague and actually some of the very early papers who are with our data on small LDL particles but that particular paper that you mentioned does bring up a very important issue in any kind of study be an epidemiologic study or a randomized controlled study that the comparison always is really important and will affect the results

and in the kind of analysis that most people did actually until not too long ago if they were looking at something like red meat in the diet they would look at red meat compared to everything else in the diet and we already heard I can’t remember who said that the average American diet quality is really low that only about two and a half percent have an optimal diet by some criteria by the dietary guidelines only 5% of Americans meet the dietary guidelines we’ve scored the national diet it gets about 50 out of a hundred score and our in our business that’s a pretty low F

so if you’re comparing red meat with that rest of the diet and you don’t find any difference it means that red the red meats as bad as the rest of the American diet which is a huge amount of refined starch sugar and until recently a lot of trans fat as well so the real issue is red meat compared to what we would think would be a healthy diet that would be predominantly plan protein sources like nuts legumes soy products etc with lots of fruits and vegetables and whole grain and when you do that kind of analysis red meat is raises LDL and randomized control trials and also we see very clearly in the epidemiologic studies is related to higher risk of cardiovascular disease

now Ron Krause and also the paper more recently that you mentioned couldn’t do that kind of analysis because they were that was a meta-analysis summarizing published papers and those published papers had not done that kind of appropriate comparison looking out a healthy alternative not just the rest of the junky American diet and that’s a fundamentally important point I know Collins made that point earlier on too that the comparison is is critically important whether it’s an observational epidemiologic study or a randomized trial that comparison determines to a very heavy degree them what you’ll have is the outcome

so a lot of these others sort of anecdotal comparisons the Eskimos for example Inuits that reality we don’t really know what their health was that the best data we have is that they didn’t live I haven’t been living very long so but we just simply haven’t had good records

human beings are remarkable we can survive and reproduce and an incredibly wide range of diets we are adaptable we’ve got our evolution has equipped us to exist for a while and reproduce on a very wide range of diets but that doesn’t mean that they’re going to be optimally healthy if we want to be living to age 70 or 80 with the best function that we that we possibly can so I think those those kind of anecdotal or comparisons maybe get us started they ask questions that raises interesting questions about the what any weights have been eating and their health conditions but it really is if you want she’s been critical of epidemiologic studies but you raise the crudest kind of epidemiologic study – to try to make a point

now she also raised the point about the carbohydrates versus fat and there’s a now a huge amount of data to say that the percentage of calories in the in the diet from fat is really not important all kinds of studies but the quality of the fat and the quality of the carbohydrate is very important that plant sources of fat are have positive health values and in the quality of the carbohydrate whole grains especially intact whole grains have a very different effect than refined starches do

and in the studies from India there is a real issue and most of the diets around the world people are eating they are consuming too much carbohydrate probably in general often 80 percent of calories from carbohydrate and increasingly it’s refined carbohydrate so a lot of that a lot of what would have been consumed by the South Indians there would certainly be very far from what we see as an optimal diet it would be very unbalanced until very recently very little fruit and vegetables and for the most part what we’ve called poverty diet the cheapest thing which is a lot of carbohydrate and increasingly refined carbohydrate so we really can’t gain we can’t conclude very much from that kind of study

I I was really I was hoping Walter would step and go first with it I was tempting to go with what a shocking load of rubbish kind of leave it at that but Walter did a much better job but just a couple things to a pen in 2020 we no longer have the privilege of talking about diet for human health without considering environmental impact

even even if it were true and it’s not but even if it were true that your diet could be optimal if you were eating red meat and high intake of saturated fat routinely if it’s going to destroy the planet frankly scarlet who gives a damn I don’t understand that blind spot in the car never argument there are no healthy people there are no healthy people on a ruined ravaged planet it’s our one shared home all dietary discussions have to factor that in so completely omitted

Walter went over all of the epidemiology and I completely agree the one thing that I would have penned there’s a Shibboleth in the mix here and that’s the notion and you hear it all the time from this particular writer and many others we’ve had this dietary advice to cut back on saturated fat for a long time and yet were fatter and sicker therefore the advice was wrong no we never took it and besides there’s more than one way to eat badly and the American public is totally invested in exploring them all

so we never really cut back much unsaturated fat but to whatever little extent we did we load it up on snack wells we weren’t eating more broccoli rabe and lentils and so what we wound up with was a higher intake of total calories a high intake of refined carbohydrate and for the most part an excess of saturated fat relative to recommendations into the bargain you can’t say the advice was wrong if all of the data you have about bad outcomes pertain to people who never followed the advice in the first place

and then in terms of why we never followed the advice Pam I think that’s in your sweet spot because the marketing of all the junk food was highly effective right when we were fascinated with cutting fat if all there had been were wholesome natural foods to do it with maybe we would have eaten those but immediately we got snack Wells and low-fat junk food when we became obsessed with cutting carbs there was a whole suite of low carb junk foods now you can have gluten-free junk food and you know that basically you can have any flavor of junk food you want and that’s all marketed very successfully so we never followed any sensible guidance and for the most part we still don’t

oh I’ll add something to that as well I think that a couple of things worth mentioning one is that there was a recent study 2018 I think was Seidelman scroop that that looked at carbohydrate intake and and mortality risk and and in fact those eating the least amount of carbohydrate had a 32% increase in mortality the folks that had as a group the the lowest mortality were consuming about fifty to fifty five percent of calories from carbohydrates and then at the other end of the spectrum the people eating the most carbohydrates had about a 23 percent increase in risk

however there the the research team said that that it was very clear that there was a segment of that group that had higher mortality that their carbohydrates were coming from refined foods and of course you can’t remove everything of value to human health from a food add a bunch of crap to and expect it to support health that doesn’t happen but what was really interesting was that though the the other end of that high carbohydrate group what was actually the lowest risk of mortality of all segments of that particular population and those I would expect were the people that were getting their carbohydrates from foods that were packaged with fiber and phytochemicals and antioxidants and everything else

and that and that study when another step and they they looked at replacing carbohydrates if you replaced carbohydrates with with animal protein you increased mortality 18 percent but if you replaced carbohydrates with plant protein you actually reduced mortality by 18 percent and that tells us something

and then the second thing I would like to mention is people need to understand sometimes research can take a slant that that we might not necessarily recognized based on headlines butter is back and so forth I think one of the best summaries of what we know about the effect of fats on on human health and saturated fat in particular was the presidential report from 2017 and and and they concluded what we know saturated fat increases the risk of heart disease

but what’s really interesting was I remember when the 2014 Chowdhury study came out that that concluded that that saturated fat has been vindicated essentially and those studies that that that suggested saturated fat has been vindicated I don’t think any of them actually showed saturated fat has been vindicated rather if you replace saturated fat with refined carbohydrates you’re no further ahead if you replace saturated fat with polyunsaturated fat you are further ahead so those are the kinds of things that we learned from these studies

but one of the things I thought was particularly interesting was I realized that one of the authors are co-authors on that study had been a researcher with epic Oxford and I asked her I said can you can you explain the findings of this study well she said it’s very simple she said I had no idea that she she was involved in the beginning and she said in the beginning when they did this study we we found that there was a 19 percent increased risk in in heart disease with increased intake of saturated fat I can’t remember all of the details but she said the study was rejected by the journal we submitted it to so they so so the the lead author reworked to the data removing certain things until there was a different result and the study was accepted and she said in no way does that study change anything we know about saturated fat and is some impact on heart disease as far as I’m concerned and she was one of the co-authors we still need to be restricting saturated fat

that’s a very interesting story that the journal basically changed the route conclusions and I heard that from another co-author on the paper and the other critic who is not it was not told by the primary author that they had basically changed the data and the conclusion and it’s very curious because it was the same journal in the same editor that just pushed this story about you can eat all the red meat you want to yea that’s disturbing

I just had great comments by Brenda and raised some good points about the studies just one thing she mentioned a presidential report that was the American Heart Association president wasn’t Trump thank you yes exactly

okay I’d like to ask each of you a different question good you could all answer each of your own questions and comment on someone else’s if you like and ask them all at once and then you could each answer it

dr. Katz you mentioned in a previous talk the 23,000 people in a study had an 80% less lifetime risk of all major chronic diseases such as heart disease stroke diabetes cancer and dementia what did these people do to achieve this result

dr. Willett tell us about the study out of Harvard that showed the higher that showed the higher the percentage of total calories from saturated fat from meat processing meat dairy and process dairy the higher the rate of premature death from all causes the higher the percentage of fat from unsaturated sources the lower the rate of premature death

dr. Campbell in Chapter 13 of the China study what did you mean by science the dark side

dr. Esselstyn why do you say we have built a billion-dollar industry around an illness that does not even exist on half the planet is it really possible to be heart attack proof or is that just a way to get everyone’s attention do you I mean can we really go to what does that mean is that mean we could really completely eliminate the risk

dr. Goldhamer what is the ideal fasting schedule for a person who is going to do it from home should they fast one day a week for each month once every three months what what is how long would the fasts be if they wanted to do it from home

dr. popper and Brenda Davis our audience is probably predominantly woman and it’s probably more of an over 40 audience what is the reality for pre menopause and menopause and others what should women expect their hormones their emotional state the physical state the sex drive to be it seems like it’s an under discussed topic and women are led to believe that they’re supposed to be like they are in their 30s when it’s completely a different situation and it’s not really addressed so what is the realistic expectation of what they should be expecting and what can they do to make it the most comfortable experience anyone can start and answer

your question I’ll go first I’m better now than I was in my 30s in my 30s I was still eating cheese and I was fat so this is a whole lot better I think that the the thing that we have done in the United States is we have medicalised women’s stages of life women can’t have a menstrual period without some kind of intervention we have trouble getting pregnant pregnancy is treated like a disease menopause is a disease that requires treatment and I always think about how it must have been when we were hunter-gatherers and cave dwellers and somebody said well I can’t go looking for food today I’m PMSing I mean seriously this is not the way we were designed to live

so what happens at menopause is that it all catches up with you you know the bad habits the the excessive eating being overweight not exercising not taking care of yourself the older you get the more this stuff catches up with you and so most of the women who come to me to talk about what do I do about menopause I’m miserable if you ask them enough questions they’ll tell you that they were miserable when they had their first menstrual period now at the age of eight unfortunately it used to be a lot older than that and then ever since then they’ve been having problems

so the key is the earlier you start taking care of yourself the more uneventful this will be an uneventful meaning it doesn’t really change much other than we are all getting older and we can’t do much about that darn it because I’d love to stick around for a couple hundred more years if I could but if you have reached the age of menopause now what you have to do is the accelerated program in other words you got to get in the gym and take off that weight and go to hot yoga and start sleeping well and eat an optimal diet and get yourself hydrated and you got to stop running around after everything on the planet except for yourself

I mean I’ve been thinking about writing a book called me first why you should take care of yourself before you worry about everything else on the planet and the good news about women who are in this condition is they’re willing to do anything even go to the gym and eat plants I mean they’re really miserable and one of the best things that’s helped in terms of motivating them is some of the more recent studies that have come out one large one recently showed that any hormone replacement estrogen alone for just rent alone combination together any period of time you take it increases your risk of breast cancer so women are once again feeling a little terrified of hormone replacement which they should be and they’re very motivated to approach this from a diet and lifestyle perspective so that’s all good

Steve can I ask you did I have the same question as Pat yes oh okay well I guess we may as well I’ll contribute as well you know I completely agree of you know talking about how you feel even better than you did when you were in your 30s I can honestly say I don’t really feel much different than I did when I was in my 30s and and I’m 61 years old now and and I’ve been married for well it’ll be 42 years this year and and yes certainly after menopause things can change a little bit but you know I think that the most important thing is that you’re making healthy choices in every aspect of your life balancing your life in terms of your family what you do socially but also of course all of the healthy choices you make but the thing that people need to realize is that if you keep doing what you’re doing making healthy choices in your 20s and 30s and 40s and so on things don’t change quite as quickly and and so I I mean honestly and not to be braggy or anything but I think I can still run as fast as I did in my 30s I can still do the splits and headstands and handstands and you know all of those things the push-ups and all of those things it doesn’t I find that it’s not changing quickly and I’m really hoping that it’ll continue

I absolutely love this story that John Robbins tells in one of his books about this 96 year old I think he was 96 year old a martial artist who was pitted against a 39 year old world champion boxer for the Millennium celebrations and these two men were put in the ring and and the boxer was just he just kept trying to hit this old man and the old man kept dodging him and after about 20 minutes the young boxer was was getting really tired lost his concentration the old man flattened him and and of course the reporters came running and they said to the young guy well what happened now can you explain this he said I don’t know but the old Matt just beat me they went to the old man and they said well you know how can you explain beating a 39 year old box a world champion boxer and the old man said I don’t understand why anyone surprised I have far more experience than he does

and and I think we can all take a lesson from that but I you know as in terms of diet and and going through menopause and so forth it’s the same song and dance all over again a lot of greens and beans and I actually didn’t really notice menopause to be honest it did I didn’t feel much of anything I felt I felt fine I didn’t have a lot of hot flashes or anything like that I do eat a soy on a pretty regular basis I eat a lot of greens I eat I eat very healthful ei eat plenty of essential fatty acids and so forth and so I think that’s just a lot of the experience of a lot of people who either exclusively or largely plant-based diet that they sail through fairly fairly easily [Applause]

well I told Brenda I thought she still was in her 30s oh so my question was about Earl Ford study 2009 the journal at the time was called the archives of internal medicine it’s now JAMA internal medicine healthy living is the best revenge if it was a nested cohort analysis within something called the epic trial which is a long multi-year prospective study in countries throughout Europe looking at cancer and other chronic disease outcomes

so what was interesting to me about the Ford study is that it was the other side of the coin that launched my career in lifestyle medicine so I already told you about that first faced 1993 actual causes of death in the United States Bill Mike McGinnis 80% of all premature death and chronic disease is attributable to bad use of feed forks and fingers and almost a hundred percent of premature death is explainable by modifiable factors

the Ford study which came out in 2009 was survey analysis involving 23,000 people living in and around Potsdam Germany and the study focused on four factors do you smoke yes or no do you eat well yes or no in a very simplistic definition of that eating well was habitual intake of fruits vegetables and whole grains and not eating well was the absence of that are you physically active on a regular basis and that was also dichotomized yes or no and you have a healthy weight yes or no

and they went on to compare the two ends of the spectrum over the multiple years of the study and you know back to Pam’s contention that if we could put this in a pill it would be the best medicine in the world has ever known so the people who had for good answers I don’t smoke I eat well I’m active my weights fine had an 80% lesser incidence of all major chronic disease over the multi-year span of the study than people who had four bad answers I smoke eat badly don’t exercise my weights not so good

if you flip the switch from bad to good on in one of these factors the probability of developing any major chronic disease went down about 50% but fire on or all four cylinders it’s an apparent 80% reduction as best we know from other data sources its life long 80% reduction in the risk of ever getting heart disease cancer stroke diabetes dementia all the things we don’t want to have happen to us

now some of these conditions are much more modifiable than others we could virtually eliminate type 2 diabetes we could virtually eliminate coronary disease we probably have a little less control over cancer but when you aggregate all major chronic disease and look at that as one variable 80% reduction by not smoking eating well being active healthy weight this was just one study but to me it was quite provocative because the McGinnis and Figgy study said here’s all the bad stuff that happens if you get these wrong the Ford study was a beautiful rebuttal saying if you get them right here’s all the good stuff [Applause]

could you repeat the question for me again I didn’t hear the last of it yes um in your book the China Study chapter 13 um you the title was called science the dark side what did you mean by that

well first off let me say I’ve enjoyed a career in science and I love science I love the the basic customs and and rules of regulations if I can call them that the practices I dislike the concept of science because for me it if we do it right do it as well as we can it really said it’s a force that just drives toward being honest for one thing being objective just one portion oneself to live that way so I I think of science in a classical sense as being a really delightful sort of discipline to work in I enjoyed it a great deal

but what I have seen unfortunately over the years particularly having been involved in policy activities for some pretty intensively for about 20 years I just come to realize unfortunately that we confused the word science with technology the but the public tend to think of scientific evidence in a sort of a singular way it’s either evidence or not evidence when in fact what I find is that so much of the thing that we call evidence scientific evidence particular in the media and so forth really is is detect a lot is technology in a sense people are doing work to prove a certain point which in many ways doesn’t exactly square with what science is all about

science to me is the art of observation you see something you see something possibly interesting and so there at that point you know if you’re really into research you sort of starts asking some questions and always be prepared to get either one answer or the other answer being prepared to be wrong and admit it being prepared to offer your findings to others to kritis I mean I like that whole engagement of the back and forth and that sort of thing and unfortunately you say especially haven’t been a policy community for pretty intensively for quite some years I see the corporate sector I see the hand of the corporate sector become an ever so strong so strong

and so in that particular case people for whatever reason consciously or unconsciously paid or unpaid tend to really want to prove a point want to prove a point and so too often those points being proved if you will or very specific items of information they’re missing the B story

and I find just for example the conversation we were just having here tonight to some extent it’s very very very nice conversation on the one hand but I think we we have to worry a little bit about getting caught in the weeds getting caught in a way he’s talking about you know specifically saturated fat for example saturated fat is the the bad guy and the block has been for a long time supposed to be unsaturated fat for plants this is a good thing but in reality the saturated fat story I think has been vastly overdone it’s one just I’m using as an example

you know we’re just putting our finger on saturated fat or crush or whatever over 100 years ago it was shown in the laboratory that saturated fat was not the key determinate of the level of cholesterol in the blood for example it was animal protein it was animal protein and that research started in 1909 with an observation by a russian fellow but then continued for the next 15 years i think it was several research groups looking at that question finally in 1923 and again 26 there came as sort of a statement from the group at the university of michigan claimant has been beyond proof essentially i mean he said it very strongly that group said it very strongly saturated fat was not the cause of high cholesterol levels pensively saturated fat it really was protein which animal protein in particular

that in turn energized me to some extent because then when it starts to ask question well how does session how does protein really work we’re looking at some mechanisms and so forth how does it intervene in the synthesis of cholesterol and that kind of thing and you pretty soon you start getting lost in the weeds and that all of a sudden we realize that that the animal protein at least seen an epidemiological studies is an indication of a much larger change than a dietary scope

so when we start thinking then about the right relationship between diet and disease heart disease cancer and so forth and so on the just a mere notion just the mere notion for people to say I want to eat animal protein I need it no Chili’s return you know eating animal-based foods which then distorts the diet so it’s sort of for me at least as stretches my thought pattern into a much larger scope and drop trying to put my hands on something know I can say but Britain has breath to it everybody has breath to it

and so that’s coming back to the scientific question again i i i just find too much of the science that’s being done in our institutions better academic institutions in particular being compromised by the influence of the corporate sector and i think it’s getting worse

I’ll leave it for your thoughts I think that the question of how you change a billion-dollar cardiovascular injury how do you get rid of it I think there are several thoughts along this line I should share with you an editorial that I’m working on now and I haven’t quite decided where I’ll try to submit this huh but it has to do with one of the organization’s which I am a member of the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association because historically what was so fascinating about smallpox we got rid of it why we treated the causation of it we got rid of polio myelitis why we treated their causation at the turn of the century from 1899 to 1900 and in that area era we had what we had this great understanding of bacteria and as sewage disposal and clean water became paramount where there was a huge increase in survival and get rid of hundreds of thousand diseases because we were treating the causation

now how long it’s really been almost since the turn of the century in early 1900s that suddenly I guess it was wait a molar in 1899 giving an address he talked about angina but he had never seen a case but by 1910 William Osler was talking about in China and he was aware of really 40 or 50 or more cases so now we had this illness that was building up in this country that to become burned number one

now along comes the American Heart Association the American College of Cardiology and you know they’ve been around it’s about 7080 years or more and we have tens of thousands of papers from these organizations and even beyond that plus they have these annual meetings we get a bulletin every month and we get it Journal’s every week and yet still cardiovascular disease is number one

so I looked at this a little bit more carefully and who you suppose are the sponsors of the American Heart Association you ever hear about the Montana Beef Council Kentucky Beef Council Iowa beef council Kraft Domino’s Pizza is something that got struck me as being a little peculiar about all this and then you look at the American College of Cardiology and it’s turned a little differently but there is mostly for all the different 20 pharmaceutical houses

then when the rubber really hit the road was I looked at the guy at dietary guidelines yep okay they had vegetables they had fruit and yeah they had grain then they also had meat and then they also had dairy and then they had oils and then they had sugary drinks what is this this was an absolute denial of the science of disease causation in these very same organizations that are supposed to be at the forefront of stopping heart disease

and you look at in a very simplistic way I was of some of this civilizations that don’t seem to have heart disease what about the Pappa Highlanders the Pappa Highlanders are fascinating they live in this high absolutely serene arena in these mountains and yet what is their leading cause of death lung disease why well they all seem to smoke this very harsh tobacco 19 different fuming a very harsh tobacco and when they smoke it they smoke in a large communal hutch so everybody gets the benefit of everybody else’s smoke but when they autopsy these people over 60 their arteries are clean even with all that smoking what’s going on they thrive on 19 different varieties of sweet potato fascinating

and the other group you look at of course of the Tarahumara Indians in northern Mexico what do they thrive on the three sisters beans corn and squash heart disease virtually non-existent fantastic athletes then we always heard about the Masai the Messiah and Africa are thriving they’re the exception they’re thriving on dairy and blood and meat milk and so with George man the American Journal of Epidemiology in 1972 decided he would go over and settle this question see how these grass fattened beef were so safe for everybody they did 50 autopsies the Maasai are loaded with a de toros grossest yep

so I guess in summary what I want to say is I think that there are some forces here at work that really perhaps to try to keep us a little bit off the trail and that’s the way I’m so proud and delighted the place is like but this Melville Long Island where what Steve Shore has done and bringing this cast of characters together ha to try to share with you some science thank you

did everyone answer the question you asked me the question about this very large population that we studied looking at types of fat in relation to a total mortality and also calls cause specific mortality this was a summary combining our three large cohorts which in this analysis we started off excluding anybody who had any major disease so we had about 130,000 people and we’ve tracked their diets for up to 30 or so years and during that time about 30,000 of our participants died unfortunately and we all will at some point in time but that gave us a lot of information

I must say this work has really only been possible because of the committed participants in our study they’re all registered nurses or other health professionals some other men are other health professionals who essentially what we’ve done is set up a framework for them to share their personal experiences what they eat medications family history sleep physical activity all of that so when we want to look at a question like saturated fat we can adjust for all of those other variables and again this would not have been possible without the unprecedented dark commitment to this research by the many tens of thousands of participants

so in this analysis we took a sort of deep dive looking up type of fat in relation to again total mortality and cause specific mortality and in the comparison here again we were specific about the comparison which was Carbajal carbohydrate intake and we do we did see there was an association of a greater mortality with higher intake of saturated fat compared to compared to carbohydrate this is the analysis that Ron Kraus couldn’t do his the paper that you mentioned earlier that was quoted by you know titles and of course we also looked at trans fat which is sort of off the chart and how bad that was and partly for this kind of data from these studies we we’ve eliminated trans fat it’s not legal as of 2018 in the United States

but we did also find that unsaturated fat from particularly plant sources of monounsaturated fat and interestingly even more so polyunsaturated fat was related to lower mortality a lower risk of heart disease and there’s a big myth out there that polyunsaturated fat are especially omega-6 is bad for you it’s pro-inflammatory there’s dozens of studies that have looked at that omega-6 fatty acid is not pro-inflammatory it actually tends to reduce inflammatory factors in the blood and as an innocent creates more sensitivity to insulin it looks like so interestingly enough there was this strong inverse the lower risk of total mortality with a higher intake of sources of polyunsaturated fat

now I agree with Chi with Thailand that we have to be a bit careful about somehow the to much reduction is focusing on just specific nutrients but I think it’s sort of like the proverbial Indian blind men feeling an elephant that it’s really something as complicated as diet it’s useful to look at it from a number of different perspectives and looking at it from this whole dietary pattern is really important and we’ve done a lot more of that recently bringing it down to foods is really important because that’s we make our choices among foods and bringing it down but I also think we do want to learn about specific nutrients and looking at it from that more mechanistic lens as well it does help us understand what’s really going on and the fact that we there is this association both in randomized controlled trials with feeding saturated fat does increase LDL cholesterol no question about and we see the same pattern when we look risk of total mortality or cardiovascular disease and that kind of information can help us generalize I and make decisions where we can’t do a randomized trial say of olive oil versus soybean oil and to look at over a couple of decades total mortality is something like that

so this kind of information can tell us along with other types of information that if we have to take a choice and people are going to eat oils in their diet that more in saturated kind of oils would be better than like palm oil that’s highly saturated and this is important because globally by far the greatest source of fat is palm oil diet it’s it actually is probably cutting down rainforests is not a good idea for sure but we don’t have to grow palm or produce palm oil in rainforests territory we can produce another kind of torreón and from other standpoint palm oil production actually can be a relatively ecological good a favorable source of producing oil

I must say we’re in this eat Lancet report that David mentioned feeding what will be about 10 billion people on our planet by 2050 is a big challenge whatever we do it will have big footprints just 10 billion people eating is gonna have big footprints so we’re Minh a lot of negativity about palm oil production but soybean oil also has a big negative impact as well every every place we’ve put down got 10 billion feet no it’s going to be 20 billion feet there’s gonna be big footprints each person this is two footprints so this this is one just piece of the evidence can help us make decisions but it does say it say that in general that that in our diets that saturated fat was coming from dairy products and and bread meat primarily and what we see is if we then sort of look to step back look at the bigger picture this is one more reason why a lot of dairy products and red meat and the diet is not going to be good for us

could I just add just a quick comment wall to what you were saying I don’t mean to say that you know we should ship the balance from all reductions research for example to all hauless research we’ve got it obviously take consideration both sides very clearly I mean the reduction side is the details make the whole so what we but what we do unfortunately in research and in clinical practice I would argue too sometimes we focus almost exclusively on reductions ideas at the expense of talking to the larger picture that’s my that’s my main point yeah I completely agree with you we’ve gone way overboard in that direction right fully agree with you right

so my question was about what people can do on their own and I think everybody should fast every day for a period of between 12 and 16 hours depending on what your goals are in your circumstance and some people say well how do you how do you do that I get hungry I get cravings a lot of the reason why people are getting hungry and cravings is because of what they’re eating if you’re eating refined carbohydrates and you’re stimulating your body to have excess insulin production which drives your Sugar’s down which tells your brain that you’re starving of course you’re going to have cravings that’s what a lot of those cravings are is a reaction to a very poor dietary choices

but once you adopt a whole plant food SOS free diet you find your blood sugar levels tend to be much more stable it makes it much more much easier to make good decisions about what you eat for meal the meal and it also makes it possible for you to fast for a period of 12 to 16 hours everyday by not eating right before you go to sleep for a few hours by delaying the morning meal perhaps so that you get that period of fasting there’s evidence to suggest that even that period of the fasting cumulative ly it can reduce glycemic control reduce the recurrence of conditions like breast cancer regardless of the variables in the diet but if the other variables in the diet are good you’re eating a whole plant for the SOS free diet you’ll find that this is a rather easy thing to do compared to people on conventional feeding programs

just quickly Alan or dr. Goldhamer do you recommend once a month that we do a full day water fast at home now I recommend that people do between 12 and 16 hours a day are fasting there’s actually good evidence of the benefit of 12 hours a day fasting as a routine there’s some suggestion that extending that to as much as 16 hours may be beneficial but beyond that I’d recommend that medically supervised water only fasting be done with long periods of fasting are going to be entertained

so you’re not saying that if we were willing to three four times a year you know for a full thirty six hour period at our home to a water fast you not record I don’t think we have evidence that supports those types of recommendations at this point okay

all right everyone another series I’m gonna ask everyone another series of questions and I guess you could try to keep these answers to just two minutes okay um so the questions are dr. Goldhamer you are saying to do a no salt no sugar no oil diet so if you’re against oil what fats do you recommend such as avocados nuts seeds olives so that’s your question

dr. Katz in October of 2015 the World Health Organization said red meat has the same live level of carcinogenicity as smoking cigarettes please explain this and are there any studies this dramatic about chicken turkey or pork

Brenda what does the evidence say about eggs or even egg whites

dr. Willett what percentage of the studies review review are not biased or paid for by someone with a vested interest in the study in other words there was a New York Post article two months ago that said red meat is good so for those of us who are just reading studies you know what what percentage of these studies are actually accurate unbiased not pay for by someone sorry but that

dr. Esselstyn isn’t it possible that when you did your studies that the studies worked not because people gave up nuts but that it isn’t it possible that your studies would have worked out just as well if the people were also eating seeds and nuts

okay and dr. Campbell you say that only 9% of university professional professors are on tenure and can’t get fired why does this matter whether professors are on tenure or just a paid employee and should we be considering university studies and information and of universities is accurate

and finally dr. popper I want to go back Margaret Paul was here on Sunday of last week and she was very clear she was saying that men and women sexually have a different sex drive in that or a different experience that once women go through menopause that in many cases they have less just whatever the hormone is and they are more likely to connect first emotionally then sexually and that therefore it’s not really realistic for women to have this expectation when they reach into their 50s or whatever or menopause is happening that they should be like they are than when they’re younger yet Society keeps telling them that they’re supposed to be and we’re shaming and blaming and judging women when the reality is it is it is normal to have a significant change

and I guess I want to validate this I’m concerned that if you and Brenda is saying look I feel the same way I felt in my 20s and 30s and there’s all these women who are thinking I feel totally different that they’re gonna think there’s something wrong with them when Margaret is saying no that’s the norm the norm is for women to feel significantly different especially sexually so if each of you would answer your question with a two-minute answer

so I can start question because it’s simple we record the diet that we serve at the True North health center typically is around 15 to 18 percent of calories from fat or on 10% of calories from protein the balance from whole plant food carbohydrates and so that allows for the inclusion of small amounts of nuts or seeds up to an ounce a day in the diet or limited quantities of higher fat vegetable foods like avocado we don’t use any kind of oil of any kind and we certainly don’t use any animal products okay

I’ll go next on the issue of menopause and sex drive and all that sort of thing it’s complicated and the reason is that the if women took care of themselves all through their lives menopause would be a non-event now that doesn’t mean that things don’t change your relationship with your significant other changes I mean there are a lot of things that go into how much sex you when I have and who you want to have it with right

so I talk to women who are overweight and malnourished and dehydrated and sedentary and they don’t feel good and it makes you not want to do anything sex is just one more of those things that you don’t want to do right I talked to women who really don’t like their husbands very much and sometimes it’s easier to say I’m going through menopause than it is to say I don’t like you anymore if I could have gotten out of here I would have done it 25 years ago you know so so that’s a factor

so I think that you know in response to this woman who spoke last weekend yes things change and they can change but and one thing I will say vaginal dryness is an exception to the rule and that’s easy enough to fix with with over-the-counter products that don’t contain hormones and or dangerous and and that sort of thing and we recommend them regularly but but other than that I think this is an issue of how you take care of yourself how you feel about yourself your state of health and the relationship that you have with somebody else and that’s highly variable and I don’t think that we can basically that all women go through menopause and and it just all goes to hell I don’t think that that’s what my experience and a lot of other people’s experience has been and I think for women who have had that experience I think that there are a lot of mitigating factors and it isn’t just hormonal changes

yeah question I had was about funding of research and I haven’t actually tried to get a tally of how many what percentage of studies are one way or another supported by industry but it’s too great way too high and sometimes it’s not very obvious it’s indirect and we really if we want less biased research we need to pay for it and that means public funding through NIH that’s the main mechanism and there’s way too little funding for such an important topic

we’ve been company become infatuated with genetics and things like that that I really there’ll be some benefits around the margin but it’s not going to have a huge impact on the really major causes of ill health that we have in our society so there’s huge imbalance in the public research community partly because there’s a lot of potential payoffs and gold my gold mines of patents and things like that in the genetic area that that we’re not going to have ourselves in nutrition research

that we do I was asked specifically about the study it was this red meat that study what we talked about saying you can eat a whole red meat that you want or eat and it’ll have it’s not a problem for health in the annals of internal medicine the reviewers claim that authors claim no conflict of interest but it came out of the New York Times that the one of the authors is the first author dr. Johnson was in fact paid by a front for the soda industry and which a couple years ago they exonerated sugar in the same laws in the same journal same editor and then the Washington Post came out with a story that the there was only one senior nutritionist on this paper where you’d expect a review of red meat would have a lot of experience nutritionists who had done research in this area one senior nutritionist hadn’t done research in this area but as a the chancellor and dean for the department of agriculture at Texas A&M University and that some would interpret that possibly as a conflict of interest

Washington Post article talked about that and a couple other papers stories have more recently it’s sort of like saying you know if there’s a big review on health effects of potatoes and the only nutritionists and there is the Dean of the Department of Agriculture at the University of Idaho now isn’t there you might suspect there could be a little conflict of interest there by the way if you look on the Texas A&M website December 26 it declares big story national bacon day and actually first I thought oh this is really good you know there’s one day of the year you can have bacon know but that wasn’t the story

as a question was whether or not and we can still get the same reversal of cardiovascular disease if the patients were having nuts and seeds and if you ever look at my book on page 69 and on 70 you’ll see that where I define that for patients who do night I had do not have heart disease I have no restriction on nuts and seeds as a matter of fact with patients with heart disease I encourage them with either flaxseed meal or chia seeds and if they have a bun with a few sesame seeds I don’t have a problem with that

but with patients with heart disease when I started this back in 1985 and we didn’t have a lot of the knowledge we had then but I just knew that I didn’t want them to have a lot of saturated fat so I asked for the heart patients to give up nuts I don’t hadn’t I had no restrictions on patients who didn’t have art disease restricting their nuts but for heart disease no nuts

now be okay for the patients who have heart disease to have three or four or five walnuts every day probably yes but you will not hear me say that why why would happen if anybody ever hears that I said that at this conference they don’t remember I said three half walnuts on your suit they would say Esselstyn said nuts for okay and then what happens they are so addicting they’re going to be in the glove compartment they’re going to be in the hallway they’re going to be in the bathroom in the basement the living room the workbench they are so addicting that’s all that saturated fat that’s the last thing that I want my patient seriously oh with heart disease to have

and also to me there’s there’s yet to be a single study of patients seriously with heart disease where you give them peanut butter cashew sauce and all the nuts they want and you will arrest and reverse their disease that hasn’t been there now there’s a thing called pretty men pretty men little peculiar because the authors always had these ties to the oil industry they had these ties to the nut industry and the title of the article was the reversal of cardiovascular disease with the Mediterranean diet all right they had three groups now they’re qualify for this study you could not have had a diagnosis of cardiovascular disease okay three groups all right the first group is a Mediterranean diet with nuts Mediterranean diets with oil and that can group third group low-fat diet 39:37 percent fat which is actually quite high

and at the result in the first group they were and actually in all three groups there were scores of patients who had major cardiac events cardiac that’s death heart stroke heart attack and death and now wait a minute this is a group that came into this study without any cardiovascular disease and now all three groups developed scores of these major cardiac events so when the New York Times reporter nailed me and said dr. Esselstyn this disagree disagrees with you what do you have to say about it I said well look it’s very easy they created disease these people who didn’t have it before the title should be changed it should be the creation of cardiovascular disease with the Mediterranean diet

so now when I was growing up as a kid if I wanted nuts you didn’t just open a bag there we had him in the house but they were always in shells and there were these these more specific nut pliers that we had with it there was this thing that every time you use these pliers you’re gonna pinch your finger you have four or five nuts that was enough with this wasn’t worth we’re working to get them nowadays you’re going to any gas station and you can have every kind of nut on earth and it’s in a bag you don’t have to just open it and start to start chewing them

now I guess I just as a kind of running end at the end of our presentations I have a word I want to say say I don’t uh stir it I don’t underestimate for one minute the public now it’s going to take a longer time for this message to get out why do I say I have this confidence in the public look at smoking cigarettes 1964 the Surgeon General report boy took a while but do you know that 20 million people have stopped smoking I remember when I was first married man and I would had company to the house we would put out ashtrays with cigarettes in our house we never swear never smoked but we thought it was discourteous if you didn’t do that what does look at this change nobody would think about walking into your house lit up it’s not gonna happen the public has changed

and the other thing that happened was the public changed I remember when seatbelts first came out people would say my god I’m never gonna wear one of those I Drive off into a canal I’ll drown well there have been that many canal drownings and hello lo and behold you wouldn’t think about sitting down in the passenger seat seeking the front seat without clipping in so I really basically have a great optimism that this message can get out as we keep after it and especially with ambassadors like yourselves

you asked me to speak about I think academic freedom is that the question in any case there’s something similar to that I find us that for me this is a very personal very I’m very passionate about this idea in fact I’m going to go out on a limb and say one of the greatest existential threats to the ability of academics to speak concerns the fact that we have been losing tenure opportunities at university

and to figure that I the nine percent figure I gave to you Steve that you read comes from a 2010 report from the American Association of University Professors who kind of lay down the rules for this this game that at that time in 2010 nine percent only of all the faculty in the country had achieved not only academic tenure but also had reached the highest level of full professorship only nine percent that was 2010 these days as the years have rolled by especially in the last ten years or so now we have people on almost on hire adjunct professors instructors hired for cheap labor under the control to by the authorities to war let’s teach the subject the way they want it to be told this is a very serious problem the public to not be aware

now let me just for a definition just so we could be on the same wavelength here academic freedom is the opportunity to be able to speak what is on our minds without being punished for or losing our jobs if you will that’s protected by the concepts of tenure okay so nine percent of the people basically have tenure in the full boat as far as their level of activity is concerned when we take away when that is disappearing from our scene this is the one place in a society that considers itself to be a democratic society and I would argue this is their almost a court definition of a democratic society freedom of speech the First Amendment that we have in this country is freedom of speech one place to practices practice that art and to illustrate it for the society at large I would suggest is then teaching institutions whether in school higher higher institutions of learning we have to maintain the opportunity for those who are being trained and have a responsibility to talk about serious matters we have to maintain the opportunity for those people to have the freedom to say what they feel I say without being controlled by the university authorities for example the one what I’m familiar with and I as I say it’s just declined like that and I’m really concerned now where that’s headed

because if we’re going to lose the opportunity for university people academic people to be able to maintain their freedom to say what they feel like what they learned if we’re losing that and we have lost a lot of it we’re in trouble and I would suggest that a lot of the misinformation that comes forth is people within the research community in fact sort of doing research tethered to corporate money for one thing incidentally but – I’ve had fingers on that wall there – in 2010 again it was 2/3 the the funding now is from the corporate sector I didn’t know we’re so how I used to be much lower but that’s one figure that I blurted about and I think it’s more or less true it’s alarming you know and when in fact reality it’s much nicer to be able to be funded by you know public money but whatever

I think that academic institutions are in trouble these days the public to not to know this we’re not able to tell a lot of my colleagues are not able to actually stand up say what they have to say according to what they say be right or wrong but to say it and have the freedom to say and so we’ve got to be on guard we’re now just sort of drifting into this territory where people are teaching and doing research on higher with special private money I’m maybe just too harsh Bob Walter I know you’re set a place that I think is a serious problem [Applause]

well the first thing I want to say to you good people as I look at the time is up sign flashing at us is that sitting through two and a half hour panel discussions is probably bad for your health so Steve you need to shorten these things

so my question was about meat being a carcinogen this was a 2015 report from IARC the International Agency on research on cancer a subsidiary of the WH o if a causes B one time in two and we know it for sure or if a causes B one time in two hundred or two thousand or two million and we know it for sure than in each instance we know for sure that a is a cause of B but the magnitude of risk is very different that’s clear right

so what a art concluded was that the quality of evidence linking processed meat to cancer was decisive they did not say that the magnitude of risk was the same as tobacco it’s not processed meat is a bad actor but it’s not as bad as tobacco in terms of cancer risk and in terms of meat in general it was a class 2 carcinogen which simply meant that the evidence was suggestive okay so that’s that’s what the IARC report said not that eating bacon once a year at Texas A&M will cause as much cancer as smoking daily but rather a decisive link between processed meat consumption and rates of cancer magnitude of risk is smaller but the quality of evidence was strong and and it’s my bedtime so it’s really fast

my question was about eggs and I think certainly you can do a search on PubMed and you’ll find research on both sides of the argument but I just want to mention one study that it is really interesting and that was a study from Harvard that looked at all was it 280,000 people like something like that over about three decades so we’re looking at you know just a large number of people and what they found was taking a three percent of calories from animal protein and replacing that with plant protein resulted in a reduced risk of mortality so this was specifically a mortality looking at mortality and all of these individuals and it was quite interesting

so three but just just to put this into perspective three percent of calories in a 2,000 sort of standard diet 2,000 calorie diet is about 60 calories so take 60 calories worth of meat and and replace that or replace that with plants and this is what you get not sixty I’m sorry 60 calories worth of animal protein and replace it with with plant protein you get a reduced risk of death so if it was processed meat it was a 34% risk reduction if it was eggs it was a 19% risk reduction it was unprocessed meat it was a 12% risk reduction if it was dairy it was an 8% risk reduction and if it was poultry or fish it was a 6% risk reduction so I think I’ll just leave it at that

I’m very grateful to all of you for coming here spending your time we really appreciate it we don’t have this opportunity often so on behalf of all the people here on live stream on utrom YouTube in the future we are so grateful that you are willing to come today thank you