Is Being 100% Plant Based Better Than Just Mostly Plant Based?

i’d like to ask another set of six questions for each of you to answer one and to please try to make it a three-minute answer question number one tell us the information that was published in 1959 showing that if you grew up in japan you have a cholesterol of 120 and you almost never see a heart attack if you move to hawaii your cholesterol rises to 180 and your heart attack risk triples and then you move to los angeles your cholesterol is now 210 and you have 10 times the heart attack risk than you had when you lived in japan that’s question number one question number two tell us about the 2014 study by harvard researcher morgan levine where she looked at 6 000 people prospectively where she concluded that if you’re an animal protein eater you would is this the same exact question i asked okay sorry let’s skip that okay it’s question two in the year 2000 the world health organization after looking at 800 papers with 22 world experts reported an 18 increase in cancer risk from eating processed red meat please tell us more about this number three it was mentioned that the journal of the american college of nutrition said intake of fish was correlated positively with the increased risk of diabetes please tell us more about this question four how did finland in the 1970s go from having the highest heart attack rate in the world to dramatically lower question five tell us more how dean ornish showed increased telomeres activity after only three months on a plant-based diet and what does telomere activity why does telomere activity matter and question six do we need to is there a reason why we have to be a hundred percent plant-based so those are the six questions if everyone would answer those in three minutes

i’ll i’ll take the last one um well and then you can cut you’re going to have something to say i know and we might just have to agree to disagree and we’re still going to be friends i promise so so the the question of 100 plant-based we talked a little bit about this type of issue last night and the and i appreciated dr katz’s comments on this on this that if you look at the blue zones um you have some adventists in the blue zones who are vegan but there are also adventists who are pescetarians and and uh vegetarian and and so not all of them are vegan and then if you look at where the other blue zones are they almost all eat some animal food and some a little bit more than you might imagine and so what i’m taking away from this is not that i think animal food is required in the diet that’s not the point that i want to make at all what i am saying is that veganism is not required and i think that when we draw a line in the sand and say look the price of admission to our club where we eat well is that you have to make this extreme change which a lot of what we do seems very extreme to other people i don’t what i do doesn’t seem extreme to me but it’s not about me it’s about the uninitiated person sitting in des moines iowa right now watching this on the feed who’s saying i want to improve my diet i want to improve my health but i have to deal with the practicality of what i’m willing to do and we have very good research right now about the science of change that shows that there are two criteria that people consider when they’re getting ready to make a change of any type and this includes diet and you know if you swear at work and all kinds of things that people try to change one is that they have to think that it’s going to benefit them and the second thing is they have to see themselves doing it and so um we have never drawn that line in the sand first of all because we think it’s a bit scientifically disingenuous for the general population to say if you don’t do this there’s no hope for you to be healthy i don’t think that that’s true and second of all because we have to be very careful that we don’t win the battle and lose the war

one last thing i’ll say about this and i know we’re trying to keep these to limited time one of the things about my company that is a little bit different than some of the other practices that you might hear about we’re a membership organization and some of our people have been members for 25 years this is our 25th year in business and so we get a chance to see what happens to people over a very very long period of time and one of the things that we look at of course is health change i mean if you used to have migraines and you don’t have them anymore we’re pretty excited about that right but the other thing that we look for is compliance in other words what kind of journey has this been for you did you do this for two weeks and quit and then resurface six months later and start again and we have some people who do that or did you do this and maybe it wasn’t perfect but you’ve sustained it over a very long period of time and gotten better incrementally over time a lot of our people do that and they even become accidental vegans and so all in all looking at our data for over a hundred thousand people in 33 countries we think that this let’s not draw lines in the sand and make this harder than it needs to be let’s do the level of restriction it takes to get people on the path to health and then hopefully keep them engaged to the place where they may do more later but i have heart attack patients who aren’t vegan who’ve gone 19 20 years without an event they’re not back on their cholesterol meds their blood pressure is normal and i’ll take less than perfect for a long time of that rather than the cycling in and out that i see people doing all the time

okay i’m going to address that same question and i’m going to start off by saying that i agree with you 100 that we have to meet people where they are because we all learned in chemistry that the likelihood that a reaction will go forward depends on how low you get the activation energy and if you make people think they got too high i’m out in the climb they’re not going to do it but that’s a really separate question from is there benefit to excluding all animal foods from the diet and the problem i have with the way a lot of researchers address and approach this question is they will make what i consider to be a disingenuous statement by saying well we don’t have any evidence that being a hundred percent vegan is better than being mostly vegan and they’re right we don’t have that evidence because nobody’s done the studies yet but that doesn’t mean that it’s not true and we’ve got to be careful because nobody’s ever done a placebo-controlled double-blind study to prove that mothers love their children but we know they do okay so you know a study is not the answer for everything necessarily to answer this question of whether or not a strictly healthy whole food plant-based diet is ultimately better than a mostly whole-food plant-based diet with a little bit of animal food is going to take 20 maybe 30 or 40 years and i’m not sure if anybody’s actually doing that study yet but it definitely needs to be done but we don’t have to wait for the study to make some inferences because we have enough scientific principles and enough evidence that point us in the right direction the study he just asked about the 18-year study looking at those who ate the most animal food died they crapped out they had more cancer what does that tell you is animal food good for you no it’s not um it’s like jumping off a building if we did a study had 100 people jump off a 10-story building all of them would die if we had 100 people jump off a two-story building 98 of them would survive so do we conclude that jumping off buildings is not bad for you no it’s just you don’t get as much damage at jumping from two stories as you do from 10 but you still get damage and that’s what the evidence in my opinion shows us about animal foods it turns on genes that cause cancer it increases inflammation in the body animal protein residues in the colon are are basically rotted by the microbiome to release toxins that when absorbed into the bloodstream go alter blood-brain-barrier chemistry make you more prone to depression anxiety and they actually interfere with the action of oligodendrocytes and can alter brain chemistry so yeah we may not have definitive proof but we got enough evidence pointing in the right direction that i can say to someone my recommendation is that you do all plant-based but i don’t have that proof yet but that’s where the evidence is pointing

i i could um i’ll take the w.h.o with the cancer and their the the thing you hear about a lot with the processed meat being a class one carcinogen meaning it almost certainly is a carcinogen and red meat being a 2a based on 800 studies that they looked at and this has been a very interesting thing it’s been hotly debated and it gets a little bit into what milton was saying because a lot of the the criticism of the world health organization’s findings were that a lot of these studies were what people say is correlation and not causation because they’re epidemiology studies and in epidemiology you are looking at a group of people over a long period of time and looking at their diet habits and yes there are all kinds of other factors now in research i don’t people don’t seem to understand this we have statistical methods to try to control for these things so it’s called multivariate regression analysis we take a big group like this whole group here and we’re going to look at cancer but if you’re smoking that’s an independent cause of cancer so all of you that smoke you get left out of that that study in that equation and so as as dr mills was saying we’re never going to have a prospective randomized controlled trial where we randomize someone to red meat or no red meat and follow them for 20 years to see whether or not they get cancer it’s just not going to be done it would be impossible to be done so we do have to rely understand there were no randomized controlled trials that showed us that smoking is bad for us that was all based on epidemiology and correlation you can’t just have one study of correlation but you start getting many and the world health organization looked at over 800 and you start seeing this correlation over and over again and you have mechanistic studies in other words we know that red meat and processed meat increase igf-1 and we know that’s a risk factor for getting cancer we know that when you cook meat you get heterocyclic amines and that is a risk for cancer we know that there is advanced glycated end products when you cook meat and that’s a risk factor for cancer we know that new 5gc that’s present in meat and that gets incorporated into our cells could possibly increase cancer there’s a lot of possibilities and goods but it all comes together into a recommendation from a group of absolute experts on this topic more expert than we are sitting up on this on this panel that came to the conclusion after a lot of research and these aren’t vegans that said that red meat and processed meat could definitely increase cancer

i will just keep this moving down the line here so the 1959 study was not japan honolulu and los angeles as advertised it was japan honolulu and san francisco it was the nihosan study and this was a migration study one of the early epidemiologic landmark studies that attempted to unbundle the influence of genes versus lifestyle the one thing that makes this both interesting and complicated is that this wasn’t just a change in lifestyle this was a change in culture and so there were a lot of variables in flux and one of the things we like to do in science is compress the number of variables they’re in motion at one time so we can extract from studies attribution what was responsible for causing the results that we saw so when you do a migration study lots of things are changing but essentially the the takeaway message from altitude was japanese people living in japan traditional japanese diets traditional japanese lifestyle very low rates of obesity heart disease almost all cancers not quite all cancers there’s actually a relatively high rate of gastric cancer in japan but certainly overall cancer much lower than the us overall better health with a move to honolulu and that was just the migration pattern so a lot of people who were on their way to the mainland u.s park for a while in honolulu the diet the lifestyle the culture were somewhat intermediate somewhat hybridized between a japanese influence and a u.s influence rates of chronic disease all this bad stuff that is so routine here in america wound up being intermediate between the homeland and japan and mainland u.s and then the migration pattern completed itself and these groups came over to san francisco in particular hence the name of the study where rates of chronic disease approximated those of all the rest of us living here so the particular value of the niho nihosan study was to say the japanese are not defended against american diseases by being japanese it’s not japanese genes that are protecting them because the people that wound up in mainland america had the same genes that they started with but they had our diet they had our lifestyle and they wound up with all of our diseases

i’ll i’ll dovetail uh on to that with uh ornish’s studies and uh certainly i i guess one of the sayings you may have heard before is uh is our genes um uh determine you know may affect our risk of disease maybe five percent the rest is determined by diet and lifestyle so uh it’s a really diet and lifestyle the genes may load the gun but diet and lifestyle pull the trigger and ornish’s studies he did i mean you’re very familiar with dean ornish’s studies on on you know the lifestyle heart trial in 99 1990 in heart disease reversal but he also did a series of studies beginning in 2008 2005 another in 2008 and and carried them on looking at men with prostate cancer and what would happen if they were provided with a similar kind of diet and lifestyle he used in in the lifestyle heart trial and one of the one of the first things that was reported is that your um that basically jeans could be turned on or off by changing your lifestyle so so your genes are not your destiny if you will but that the way you live could turn on cancer preventative type genes and turn off cancer promoting genes and this was quite a revelation i would say at the time and he went on to show that that you could also affect the length of the these little things at the ends of our chromosomes called telomeres which essentially predict our longevity and of course as we age one would expect the length of these telomeres would get a little shorter and in fact what happened when these folks were put on uh this diet and lifestyle program is they actually got slightly longer so you could actually you know again change your destiny by changing your lifestyle i think these studies were very important and they opened a lot of doors for scientists in terms of looking at at health and disease a little differently