Q & A on the Health Aspects of a Vegan Lifestyle by Brenda Davis

How did you become vegan

Okay. My name is Brenda Davis and I’m a registered dietician. And a lot of people ask me how I became vegan being schooled in mainstream sort of nutrition world. And I’ll tell you, as a small child, I was always very interested in animals and just understood, as most children do, that they have sensibilities. But I think as we grow up, we become a little desensitized to those things. I went through mainstream school. I became a community nutritionist. Uh, and I was teaching Canada’s food guide. I’m a Canadian. I’m from Canada. And I was teaching the four food groups. And I remember one day I had a friend who was on his way deer hunting. He happened to be the best man at our wedding and he called up and said, “Can I stop by for a coffee on my way deer hunting?” I said, “Oh, sure.” But on as he was approaching, what was going through my mind is how can I make him feel really guilty about going out and shooting another deer? And so he arrived and I gave him a coffee and I said to him, you know, I just don’t get why you want to do this. Like why would you want to go out in the bush and, you know, shoot some beautiful innocent creature? I just don’t understand. The only thing that I can think of is somehow it makes you feel like more of a man. And it was what he said back to me that changed the course of my life. He said, “You know, Brenda, just because you don’t have the guts to pull the trigger does not mean you are not responsible for the trigger being pulled every time you buy your piece of meat camouflaged in cellophane at the grocery store.” He said, “At least the animals I eat have had a life.” I doubt you can say the same for the ones sitting on your plate. It was the first time anyone had ever forced me to take responsibility for my food choices. And I vowed to myself, I had no response because I knew he was absolutely right. And I vowed to myself at that moment, regardless of whether or not I was a dietitian, that I was going to find out more about where the animals I was eating were coming from. And I started reading. I got journal articles. And what I learned, um, I could not continue to justify purchasing animal products. I just said this is it. And to be honest with you, I I um I didn’t know if I could continue in my profession. Everything I was teaching was the food for food groups. It was it was what we did. And uh I had I really seriously considered the possibility of having to leave dietetics. And I thought to myself um that if I leave and everybody who starts to get this leaves, how will things ever change? And I thought to myself, I need to have the courage to stay and try to change this from within my own profession. So that’s what I did and that’s how I wound up here. And and incidentally, I was in Northern Ontario, which is basically beer, bingo, hunting, fishing, right? and I moved to Vancouver area where people are it’s west coast it’s much more like California and people are eating vegetarian and I had never really met real live vegetarians in my whole life but you know and at this time I was married I had been married for 10 years I had a a little two little children a four and a oneyear-old and and and it’s I have to tell you this story because my three-year-old Um he it was very interesting. We were vegetarian and he he I think didn’t really realize why we were vegetarian. One day we were driving by McDonald’s and and um he said to me, “Mommy, I’d really like to stop and get a McDonald’s hamburger.” And I thought, “Okay.” He seen the commercials, the you know, picking the hamburgers off the tree. You know, the hamburger that steals the hamburgers off the trees. So I thought, “You know what? I think it’s time to tell him. I think it’s time to tell him why we don’t eat animals and that we don’t eat animals. And so I explained to him that, you know, the the burgers at home were made from beans and tofu and things like that, whereas at McDonald’s they’re made the burgers are made from cows. and he looked at me, he was 3 years old, and he looked at me and he said, “Mommy, people do not eat cows.” Like, it was the stupidest thing he had ever heard. And and so then I proceeded to explain to him that not only do people eat cows, but they eat pigs, they eat chickens. And I could just see the tears starting to come. And he said, “But mommy, them have eyes. Don’t they know that cows are people, too?” And it was just like he got it. Like children get it and then we desensitize them to it. And so for me it’s, you know, this this whole thing is really about making choices that not only sustain our own human health, but choices that sustain all life on the planet. Um so after we moved to Vancouver um I started a private practice and I decided that I was just going to deal with people who were wanting to move in the plant-based direction and within fairly short order I actually met some real live vegetarians and a couple of them were actually vegetarian dieticians. So this was huge for me and then I went to the international congress on vegetarian nutrition in in Arlington Virginia. This was in uh 1992 and within two years I wrote uh along with two other dieticians a book called becoming vegetarian and the book became a national bestseller within six months and then it was translated uh into a number of languages and a US publisher picked it up and I went on to write another eight books after that and became the ve the actually the chair of the vegetarian practice group of the American American Dietetic Association and have been, you know, quite uh quite active and and even I’ve been doing research in the Marshall Islands on diabetes and I’ve published papers on omega-3 fatty acids and vegetarian nutrition in a number of uh medical journals and so I’ve been very very active sort of in the vegetarian nutrition world and very I feel very privileged to have done so and continue to do So,

What is an optimal diet

so what is an optimal diet and and are there areas of the world where people do exceptionally well and what do they eat in these areas? Well, let’s start with what is an optimal diet. And when I think about an optimal diet, there are number of things that to me would make a diet optimal. Number one, it’s got to support optimal health and well-being in in in people. It’s got to minimize our disease risk, which means it’s got to maximize the components that are most protective against disease. It’s got to minimize the components in the diet that are the the the most harmful, obviously. And then, of course, it’s got to meet all of our nutrient needs. It’s got to be reasonably appealing and satisfying. But to me, a diet can’t possibly be optimal unless it’s ecologically sustainable and ethically justifiable. So to me those are the the factors that we have to consider. Now, if we look around the world to determine, you know, where in the world are people healthiest, there have actually been really good studies looking at this. And what we know is that there are what we call blue zones. And these are places in the world where people live very long lives, but not only do they live long lives, they’re actually healthy when they reach 90 or 100 years of age. There are more centinarians in these populations than anywhere else in the world. And there are five known blue zones. And so they are Okinawa, Japan, uh, Iicaria, Greece, uh, Lomol Linda, California, uh, the Nicoia Peninsula in Costa Rica and Sardinia, Italy. So in in these blue zones, when we really look carefully at the diet, uh, what are they doing? Well, number one, their diets are very unprocessed. So they’re not consuming foods in bags and boxes. They’re they’re consuming foods out of their gardens. They tend to eat very few animal products. And the animal products they eat in, for example, in Okinawa, they eat a small amount of fish, maybe 2 ounces a few times a week. uh in um in Greece and in uh Sardinia, Italy, they include some uh dairy products, but it’s mostly things like cheeses and yogurts. Uh in now, it’s very interesting in the NCOA Peninsula, very few animal foods. It’s a sort of a bean and rice and vegetable diet in uh Lomolinda, California. This is a 7th Day Adventist population. And the part of this population that that makes them a blue zone is the vegetarian part of this population. And so a a a section of of them are lactoovo vegetarian and then a another section are actually completely vegan. And so we actually see vegans within the blue zone. So this is very important. uh and and then the other things within the the diet that I think are very very significant is these people tend to be lean they tend not to overconume food so in uh Okinawa for example they have something called Harry Hatchibu and Harry Hatcheboo is eating only until you’re 80% full uh they also tend to eat at home they tend not to eat in restaurants so their sodium intakes would be lower and their intakes of oils would be lower. But another thing that I think is fascinating about about the blue zones is the percentages of macronutrients vary widely within these populations. So for example, in Okinawa, it’s 11% of calories from fat. But in Sardinia, and I grease, it’s over 35% of calories from fat. It matters far less the percentage of calories from protein, fat, and carbohydrates than it matters the source of those calories. When we get our calories and our macronutrients from whole plant foods predominantly, the percentages matter far less. So, I think this is really important, too.

Vegans and health

the there we actually have it’s really interesting we have two populations that we’ve been following for years that that uh within these two populations and the the populations are epic Oxford and uh and the Adventist health study too and within these two populations we have been comparing similar healthconscious meateers semi-vearians pescovearians which means lack Lactoovo vegetarians who eat some fish, lactoovo vegetarians, which means people who eat some dairy and some eggs, and pure vegetarians or vegans. And within these two populations, I I love these studies because they’re not comparing vegans and vegetarians with people just eating a western style diet because the differences would be enormous. They’re comparing with similar healthconscious non-vegetarians. So people who exercise the same, people who are eating lots of fruits and vegetables, people who aren’t, you know, terribly overweight and so forth. So this is a these are both very very interesting studies. So what have we learned from these studies? Well, it’s within the last probably three or four years that the evidence is really unfolded. And here’s what we’ve learned. We’ve learned that vegetarians and vegans have about a third less heart disease. And the people experiencing the lowest rates of eskeemic heart disease and coronary heart disease and cardiovascular disease are actually vegan men. And in the Adventist health study, vegan men had about half the rates of of heart disease compared to the uh healthy meateers. Uh and then if we look at hypertension, vegans have 75% less hypertension. Lactoovo vegetarians about 55% less hypertension. Uh if we look at kidney disease, vegetarians and vegans together had about 52% less kidney disease. Vegans have 62% less diabetes. Uh lacto vegetarians about 50% less type 2 diabetes. And uh and then uh other diseases like GI disorders less. cancer was about 15 to 20% lower in the vegan population. In the lacto ove vegetarian population, it was only about 8 to 11% lower. So overall, the vegans were really doing the best. So this is really good news. Okay, one of the questions that I often

Is a vegan diet safe

get asked is is are vegan diets really safe and adequate? And the answer is absolutely without any doubt they are safe and adequate. And I however if they’re appropriately planned there is there are ways of blowing it on any diet. If we look at uh your typical omnivorous diet 70% of people on the typical omnivorous diet will die of chronic diseases that are absolutely diet induced. Uh so there are some you know potential pitfalls of vegan diets. But let me tell you right off that even the most conservative health organizations, nutrition organizations on the planet endorse vegan diets as being safe and adequate. And and the the best example would be the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, which was formerly the um uh American Dietetic Association. So the we have I’m a member. We have position papers on vegetarian nutrition that very clearly state that vegan diets are not only safe and adequate, but they’re safe and adequate at every stage of the life cycle for infants, for pregnant and lactating women, uh for adults, for seniors, for athletes if they’re appropriately designed. And so what do we mean by appropriately designed? Well, appropriately designed means that the diet is designed so that no nutrients will be lacking and so that again we’re maximizing protective components, minimizing the components that could be harmful. And I think it’s really really important to mention that, you know, you can do a really bad vegan diet. I technically potato chips and coke are vegan. You can eat a junk food vegan diet and be very you can have a much better non-vegetarian diet than vegan diet if you’re eating a junk food vegan diet. And I want to make a point here because I I just want to drive this point home. And that is that many vegans that I’ve come across say that, you know, I I don’t feel that well on a vegan diet, but you know, I’m my life is really about protecting animals or protecting the environment. I don’t have time to, you know, be preparing big salads and doing all of these foods from scratch and so forth. And and my response would be rethink what you’re doing because when you blow it on a vegan diet, you become exhibit number one for why people need to eat meat. And I tell you that the your colleagues at work, your friends, your neighbors, your family, they notice. They notice if you sneeze. They notice if you get sick at all. And what do they blame it on? They blame it on your lack of meat consumption. When you do well, when you’re the only 60year-old at your workplace that’s not on drugs, for medications, for all of these diseases, people notice that, too. It’s really important that we set an example that other people simply can’t ignore. And so, do your best to do. And honestly, that’s why I’ve written the books I’ve written. I want to help people who choose to be vegan do it really well. So the next question might be well what are the pitfalls? What do we really need to be conscious of? And to me the number one pitfall is switching from meat and potatoes to pasta and bagels. You know you will never achieve optimal health by basing your diet on refined carbohydrates. Because when we refine a carbohydrate, what are we really doing? We’re taking a perfectly healthy plant food and we’re removing almost everything of value to human health before we eat it. And we don’t eat it. We don’t, you know, I mean, you take a a grain of wheat for example, and you how do you make flour? You remove the germ and the brand. That’s where the nutrients are stored. And what you’re left with is endoperm. And in the process, you’ve removed 75% of the vitamins and minerals, about 80% of the fiber, and about 95% of the phyitochemicals. No one eats a bowl of white flour. What do they do before they eat it? They add a bunch of garbage to it. They add sugar, fat, and usually it’s the the cheapest, most unhealthiest fat you can imagine. sometimes trans fats, uh, salt, um, artificial colors and preservatives and stabilizers and just garbage. And then we eat it and we wonder why we’re getting sick. Vegans can do that, too. And vegans that make that switch from meat and potatoes to pasta and bagels don’t do well in my opinion. And so I think that’s number one. Number two is we need to be conscious of the nutrients when you when you remove meat and remove dairy. Think about the nutrients that people get from those foods if you want to call them foods. But from meat we get protein, iron, zinc. So where do vegans get those nutrients? Well, they get them from legumes and from nuts and seeds predominantly. And and so for vegans that switch to, you know, to more refined foods, they’re not getting those nutrients. They can become deficient in those nutrients fairly rapidly. And it’s very, very important. We, none of us, I shouldn’t say none of us, but very few of us in North America grew up on lentils and tofu. We didn’t grow up eating legumes. And so I think it’s really important that we we check out populations that did grow up eating legumes and and just adopt their their ways and learn how to cook these foods from these uh populations, the Asian populations and the East Indian populations and the Mexican populations and you know South American populations that actually know how to use these foods and incorporate those foods into our diet on a daily basis. And then we need to be aware of um you know obviously vegetables and fruits we need to be eating about 10 servings or more of these foods a day. Uh we need to be eating them in their whole form. We need to have I would say at least half of them should be raw if not more. Uh because again the phyitochemicals are higher in raw foods. There are certain enzymes in the raw foods that are responsible for converting phyitochemicals into their active metabolites. the metabolites that are actually really protective against cancer and heart disease. So very important uh we need to be consuming sufficient nuts and seeds. And I know there are a lot of uh people in the vegan world that say don’t eat nuts and seeds because they contain fat. And I think that’s a a really flaw uh serious flaw in logic because these foods are are critical sources of essential fatty acids. And essential fatty acids are what the gray matter of our brain is

Nuts and seeds

made of. We need enough essential fats and they will come from our p predominantly our seeds but you know things like walnuts as well are very important sources. So whatn nuts and seeds, chia seeds, flax seeds, hemp seeds are extraordinary. Uh they’re loaded with protein. They’re loaded with essential fatty acids. These are very, very important foods and some people don’t convert the plant forms of omega-3s into longer chain omega-3s very efficiently. And so there’s all sorts of things that we can do to fine-tune our diets to make that conversion more efficient. But lacking that, say there’s still insufficient conversion, we can actually get EPA and DHA from somewhere other than fish. And you know what’s really interesting is people think we’ve got to have fish for EPA and DHA, but fish don’t even make EPA and DHA. EPA and DHA are ma made by microalgae. In other words, by tiny plants in the ocean, and the fish at some point along the food chain eat the microalgae to get that EPA and DHA. And we can actually get it directly from those tiny plants. And there are dozens of companies now that are producing um the this you know vegan uh sources of EPA and DHA and selling it in as a supplement. So that’s that’s an option too for people. Uh and then the other nutrient that I think we really or the other nutrients are uh calcium, vitamin D and uh of course vitamin B12. And so uh thinking first about vitamin B12 vitamin B B12 is a nutrient that I it’s not people say well you know vitamin B12 proves we need meat because we don’t get it from plants and and I think that’s that’s a little bit of an overstatement. Vitamin B12 is made by bacteria, microorganisms and it you know if we uh ferment um uh foods in unclean unsanitary conditions we will get some vitamin B12 if we uh you know um uh make tempeh in unsanitary conditions and in some Asian countries that’s just traditional way of making it they’ll get some B12 but we tend to in our in North American In western societies, we tend to be very conscious about sanitation and so we get rid of any B12 from plant foods that might naturally be present. There are there are some um B12 producing bacteria present in seaweeds. But the problem is when we dry seaweeds, a lot of the active forms of B12 are converted into inactive what we call inactive um uh B12 analoges or non-cobalamin uh inactive non-cobalamin coronoids. And so generally you wouldn’t want to rely on seaweeds as a primary source of of B12 even though there’s some evidence that uh things like um um mic uh no let me state that again. I got to think about it. It’s uh um blue green algae algae and um spirulina corella cor not spirulina but corella and and blue green algae. So, so there’s a little bit of evidence that chlorella and blue green algae may actually have some active B12. Uh, but we really don’t have enough studies to say rely on these things exclusively for B12. So, what I would say is is to ensure that you are either consuming fortified foods. So, you might be consuming, for example, a nutritional yeast that’s grown on a B12 medium or some sort of non-dairy beverages that have been fortified with B12. You need at least two servings a day of these foods to provide sufficient B12 or you can rely on a supplement. And what I would suggest is to have at least 1,00 to 2500 micrograms uh two to three times a week and that will cover you. If you’re just relying on a multivit, which you know, if you’re relying on a multivit and it’s got 10 or 20 micrograms of B12, I would say probably take uh 1,000 micrograms once a week just to top yourself up. Um, but if you’re just doing a daily supplement, you need about probably 25 to 250 micrograms a day and that will cover you for B12. Then getting on to calcium and vitamin D. calcium. It’s really interesting if you look at people in Paleolithic times when human beings didn’t actually consume the milk of any other species. And speaking of the milk of other species, to me, it honestly defies rationality to assume that human beings require the milk of another mammal for their survival. It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. As a matter of fact, and you you often hear and we’re taught in schools that we’ve got to have cow’s milk. Well, deer milk and moose milk contain about twice as much calcium as cow’s milk. We don’t call them essential foods. And it’s true that cow’s milk is a very rich source of calcium, but it doesn’t make it essential. Back in Paleolithic times, before people consumed the milk of other mammals, they consumed between a,000 and 2,000 milligs of calcium a day. The RDA is a thousand milligrams of calcium a day. So they were getting their calcium mainly from wild plants, leafy greens and so can we. And I can I can tell you from a personal experience. I um my mom developed osteoporosis uh when she was about 49 50 years old and I’m 56 years old and I had my bone density tested in my late 40s because I was concerned about the possibility of osteoporosis and my physician was very concerned because I was I I’ve been vegan for 25 years and uh and so he had a complete sort of the gold standard bone density test done on me which me measures your bone density throughout your body And uh when he got the results back in his office and called me in to go through all my test results, um he opened my chart and I can honestly say that his jaw dropped because my bone density, my um spinal bone density was two and a half standard deviations above norm for my age. And my lump uh what was it? I I think it was my leg bone density was two standard deviations above norm for my age. and osteoporosis is two two standard I think two or two and a half standard deviations below norm and he said your bone density is so high that they couldn’t plot it on the chart they had an arrow um above the chart saying you know not plotable uh so high and he said I’ve never seen anything like this whatever you’re doing keep doing it and I can tell you exactly what I do I make sure I get exercise every day and so I do weightbearing exercise and the other thing is I make sure I get a source of calcium. I get several sources of calcium. The beauty of eating whole foods vegan diet is that you’re getting bits of calcium from almost everything you eat when you’re eating real food. So, the beans you eat have calcium. The dark green leafes you eat have calcium. Now, I’m going to make one small uh caveat here with the leafy greens is there are some leafy greens that are absolutely loaded with calcium, but you hardly absorb any of it. And that is spinach, Swiss chard, and beet greens. And these greens are very, very high in oxylic acid. And oxylic acid binds with calcium, making it pretty much unavailable. So you’ll still get a little bit. You might absorb five or 10% from these foods, but from kale and from broccoli and from, you know, turnup greens and these other greens, you you’ll absorb more like 40 or 50 or 60% of the calcium. And that’s you know you absorb about 32% of the calcium from cow’s milk. So this is even higher than the absorption that you would get from cow’s milk. So the lower oxalate leafy greens are exceptional sources of calcium. Uh things like uh figs and um nuts and seeds and and all of even oranges, you know, fruits and vegetables. You’ll get bits of calcium from all of these foods. And then of course from fortified non-dairy foods like fortified non-dairy almond milk or coconut milk or soy milk, you’ll get calcium from those foods and they’re very heavily uh fortified. So that’s that’s a you know pretty good source for people. Uh people who consume tofu uh tofu is often made with calcium sulfate. So you’re getting a a quite a rich source of calcium there as well. So calcium, you know, if you do all of these and you include all of these foods in your diet, uh you can easily meet that thousand milligram recommendation. However, uh a lot of vegans there was in epic Oxford the study that you know compared the healthy vegetarians and healthy meateers with healthy uh vegans. What they found is vegans had an increased risk of bone fracture of 1.3 times if they consumed less than 525 milligs of calcium a day. The people who consumed more than 525 milligrams a day had the same rate of bone or same risk of bone fracture as as everyone else. So, I think that’s really important for vegans to know that if you just don’t pay attention to calcium, you’re not conscious of the types of greens you’re eating, you’re not conscious of consuming, you know, calcium richch nuts and seeds and beans and so forth, your calcium intake can be quite low. And so, you just, we weren’t educated to learn about non-dairy calcium sources. Everything we learn about calcium in grade school is dairy, dairy, dairy. So, it’s understandable that people don’t know about non-dairy calcium sources. And then, of course, vitamin D. And vitamin D, you know, you’ll get in an omnivorous diet from fish and from eggs. And you’ll get it from from um fortified non uh fortified milk, uh dairy milk. Of course, in a vegan diet, you’re getting it from fortified non-dairy milk, um and not much else. a little bit from mushrooms if they’re grown in sunlight, uh, but very few other sources. And so, we need to be really conscious of sun exposure. But I live in Canada, so there’s what we call the vitamin D winter. It should be called the no vitamin D winter, but between October and probably March, we don’t produce any vitamin D. And not all of us are rich enough to go, you know, to Hawaii or south to get sufficient vitamin D. So, we need to be conscious of including a vitamin D supplement um if we don’t get enough sun exposure. And that means maybe a,000 or 2,000 micrograms a day for for most people. And um I think those are the nutrients we need to be conscious of. And the other thing that I think it’s hugely important to say with regards to children is that you know we put in the vegan world we put so much emphasis on disease risk reduction because 70% of the population dies of heart disease and diabetes and cancer and all of these lifestyle induced diseases. And what we need to re recognize is that the number one, you know, the we make the risk reduction of disease, the number one nutritional priority for adults, the number one nutritional priority for children has got to be the provision of adequate nutrients and adequate energy in the diet. So it means designing the diet for children a little differently than what we would design it for adults. The they need more fat. Children need more fat. They need per pound of body weight or per kilogram of body weight. They need more protein. Uh we need to ensure sufficient iron and zinc and all of these trace minerals. They need enough calcium for for um you know maximizing bone density. All of these things they need sufficient essential fatty acid for for brain development. So these things become very very important. And so it just to recognize that it’s a slightly different focus for for children.

Nutritional deficiencies

And you know, another thing I’d like to mention is it’s really important to recognize that it doesn’t matter what kind of diet you’re on, whether you’re on eating an omnivorous diet or a semi-vearian diet, there there is potential for deficiencies, for nutritional deficiencies and for nutritional excesses. And it’s really interesting if you look at malnutrition, for example. Um, micronutrient deficiencies are common to people eating all kinds of diets. So, say you’re an omnivore, you’re eating lots of meat. Can you become B12 deficient? Absolutely positively. As a matter of fact, the Institute of Medicine in the United States recommends that everyone over 50 includes uh B12 from non-animal s or gets their B12 from non-animal sources because 10 to 30% of the population above 50 years of age can’t cleave the B12 off the animal protein that it’s bound to in animal products. And so you must get your B12 from the same places that vegans get their B12. So this is important. Many uh non-vegetarians lack calcium. They lack almost everyone seems to be deficient in vitamin D. So it’s not just a problem for vegans. Uh there are iron deficiency is the number one nutritional deficiency in the world. So it’s not just vegans who are iron deficient. And as a matter of fact, vegans actually take in more iron per day than non-vegetarians and even meateers because people who are meat eaters, they eat tend to eat maybe 20 or 30% of their calories from dairy and dairy is extremely low in in iron and and it inhibits the absorption of iron. Whereas vegans, everything they’re eating, they’re getting a bit of iron from if it’s a whole food. So I think those are really important considerations. But vegans tend to be at slightly if you look at a sort of a spectrum of of um malnutrition. Vegans would be a little um closer to the side of the potential for uh deficiencies whereas omnivores would be far closer to the side of a type of malnutrition that we will call over consumption. This is the type of malnutrition and it is a type of malnutrition that is responsible for the chronic diseases that are killing people. Vegans are at far lower risk for those diseases, omnivores. It’s just another type of malnutrition and it results in heart disease and diabetes and cancers as well. So I think we really need to recognize that. So, you know, when you take everything into consideration from a nutritional perspective, there is no question. And within the scientific community, there’s no debate that a plant-based diet is best without any doubt. Leaning more and more towards a vegan diet. Uh, and and so when you look at, it’s very interesting when you look at um national food guides and national nutrition recommendations. We’ve we’ve geared those guides to omnivores for years and years, but we’re starting to see some shifts happening. We’re starting to see recommendations for fruits and vegetables increasing. We’re starting to see recommendations for meat decreasing. We’re actually starting to see, if you look at national food guides where the number one recommendation sort of in the protein group is for non-animal sources of protein like legumes. And what’s really interesting is very recently the 2015 dietary guidelines advisory committee report uh came out and people have asked me what do you think about the report? Uh is it you know is it promising and I think the report is very very encouraging. For the first time ever, the the Dietary Advisory Guidelines Committee states beyond any question that a plant-based diet is optimal for human health and that we need to increase our intake of vegetables, fruits, beans, nuts, and seeds and decrease our intake of animal foods. They’ve never said that before. Secondly, they have actually stated that one of the key reasons we need to decrease our intake of animal products is for ecological reasons. And and they’ve been widely criticized for saying that by the meat industry, of course. Uh and the meat industry is basically saying, what do they know about the environment? They’re nutritionists. So, it’s it’s very interesting, but they’ve never taken that stand before. And that is very very encouraging. So there they’re and and I think we have to acknowledge the dietary advisory guidelines committee. They don’t have the absolute final say in the dietary guidelines. Okay? It is released to all of the stakeholders. So the meat industry, the dairy industry, the the bean industry, every industry gets to have their say. And so often there’s compromises made when you see the final versions of the guidelines come out. And the compromises unfortunately are compromises often due to the most powerful industries like meat and dairy. For years, the guidelines never said eat less meat. The guidelines would say eat less saturated fat. The guidelines would say eat less cholesterol, but they wouldn’t say eat less meat because of the power of the meat industries. And I think that’s worth noting that they’re they keep taking strides in the right direction because of the awareness and the growing awareness of how powerful plant-based diets can be in helping to reduce diseases. So what we’re seeing in in food pyramids and so forth and food we now we have something in the United States called uh choose my plate and in the plate what we’re seeing is threequarters of the plate is plant foods and and so you’ve got half the plate is fruits and vegetables a quarter of the plate of is grains and a quarter of the plate is um your protein sources. uh but they’re recommending beans as being one of the optimal protein sources and choosing leaner meats and um fish instead of red meat and not consuming uh processed red meat and so forth. And then there’s a little circle of dairy off to the side. And where we’ve made some tiny little inroad into the dairy group is they’re now suggesting that nondairy alternatives like fortified soy milk would be an option for people which they didn’t used to do before. So we are definitely moving in the right direction uh without any doubt. And in our books, in my books, um, uh, becoming vegan, uh, for example, comprehensive and express editions, we have a guide that is, um, sort of designed to be similar to this choose my plate so that health professionals are comfortable with it so that people can choose a completely 100% plant-based diet and be absolutely insure, you know, guaranteed that their nutritional requirements will be met if they’re, you know, if they’re choosing with the guide. So, another question

Animal products

that I often get asked is, are animal products really that bad? What do we know about the connection between eating animal products and our risk of disease? And and we actually know a lot. We’ve got a ton of studies and and probably the the strongest evidence is against red meat and processed meat and and what we know if we look at heart disease for example just in the last couple of years there have been four huge metaanalyses looking at uh intakes of red meat and processed meat and risk of heart disease and we know that um un unprocessed meat is less damaging than processed meat but both increase risk. So for example, processed meat increased risk by about 10 to 20%. Um unprocess or processed meat probably more that like 20 to 40%. In terms of cancers uh we see we’ve got seven meta analyses in the last couple of years looking at a wide variety of cancers. The strongest evidence is against uh uh red meat and colon cancer. And we know without any doubt intake of red meat increases your risk of colon cancer. In fact, it’s it’s so significant that the American Institute or the um American Institute of Cancer Research and the World Cancer Research Fund have put out um you know series of recommendations for diet and cancer. And one of the recommendations is about plants and one is about animals. And with plants, it’s make sure you eat at least this many, you know, plant foods a day and make sure it includes unprocessed um you know, legumes and cereal grains and plenty of fruits and vegetables. And with meat, the recommendation is make sure you don’t eat any more than 500 grams of, you know, of of red meat per week and don’t eat any processed red meat at all. I mean, they literally say avoid processed red meat completely because the evidence is so strong against processed red meat. And so, but we’ve seen um associations with all sorts of cancers, uh brain cancer, bladder cancer, prostate cancer, breast cancer, uh all sorts of cancers, non-hodkkins lymphoma, uh and red meat intake. So, there’s no question. And then there was a a recent study that came out showing uh that red meat intake increased our risk of diabetes. For every half serving of red meat, which was 1.5 ounces of red meat, your risk of diabetes would increase 48%. I was just stunned. And this was, you know, not a clinical trial, but but looking at populations who were eating these foods and their risk, uh it was just just fascinating. And so we know that red meat intake is is a problem. And why is red meat intake a problem? Well, uh red meat is um a very rich source of heem iron, which he just means blood. And it’s a very powerful proxidant. So it can increase oxidative stress. Red meat contains something called new 5GC, which is a very pro-inflammatory molecule found in meat. Uh red meat is a source of um of uh carnitine and carnitine gets converted uh by first of all by gut bacteria to TMA then by your liver to TMAO and it’s very atherogenic and it’s carcinogenic and and red meat contains I mean we cook it and when we cook it we produce heteroscyclic amines and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and and all of these advanced glycation end products and all of these are very pro-inflammatory and they increase oxidative stress and so forth. Uh red meat is our richest source of you know one of our richest sources of saturated fat. Uh so there are just many reasons why it may be contributing to disease. We tend to eat way too much of it and ideally we should be eating none of it. Uh what about other meats? Um uh poultry, we’ve got some good evidence against poultry, not as strong as against red meat. uh fish well fish is actually our mo our richest source of many environmental contaminants. So for example dioxins um uh many of the persistent organic pollutants uh um heavy metals like mercury uh fish is the most concentrated source of those of those things. And so fish consumption, you know, fish again is only as clean as the water it’s swimming in. And our waters are extraordinarily polluted. Uh and so again fish we recommend most organizations recommend health organizations a couple of servings a week and I think this has to be questioned. It’s uh it’s not a perfect and the only reason it’s recommended is because of the uh longchain omega-3 fatty acids. We can get clean sources of omega-3 fatty acids from you know omega-3 rich microalgae in the ocean makes much more sense. Eggs have largely been vindicated in the eyes of mainstream uh scientists in the last uh couple of years to the extent where in the 2015 dietary guidelines for Americans uh they’ve actually taken out the caution against consuming too much cholesterol. It used to be no more than 300 uh milligrams a day. Now there’s no recommendation regarding cholesterol. And the reason being that um there have been a few studies that have not found an association between egg consumption and heart disease or egg consumption and and um uh cancers. But we’ve got tremendous evidence uh that uh people who are eating eggs on a regular basis have incredibly higher rates of diabetes. And so it’s not that there’s no evidence against eggs. And it’s so funny when you look at the studies, um, often studies that show there’s no adverse effect, they’re comparing eggs to, you know, bake, deep fried bacon, uh, or to butter or, you know, to to something that’s even worse. And, uh, and so there’s still some question marks. And we definitely know that dietary cholesterol is less of an issue than we used to think it was. Uh certainly blood cholesterol levels are an issue but but uh if we consume uh you know a lot of saturated fat that increases blood cholesterol levels or trans fatty acids a lot more than dietary cholesterol does. So that’s less of an issue than we used to think. But still again uh there are you know all sorts of issues with with uh eggs. And eggs are really not a very nutrientdense food. They’ve got some protein. They’ve, you know, got a few nutrients, but they’re not anywhere close to what uh vegetables would be in terms of nutrient density, and they’re not a necessary food by any stretch of the imagination.

Dairy products

Yeah. And and um and dairy products, it’s it’s interesting. Why do we encourage people to consume so much dairy? Uh two to four servings a day, for example. And it’s really got to do with bone health and and understanding that we need uh calcium to build and maintain strong bones. And if we look at the standard American diet or the standard western diet for that matter, uh dairy products tend to be the most concentrated source of calcium that most people are consuming. And in fact, um you know, it’s it’s not because there’s something magical about dairy products. It’s because people aren’t eating very healthy diets and they’re much better places to get calcium in my view than dairy products. Dairy products contain no fiber and the same with meat, no phyitochemicals. Uh they are, you know, one to me one of the big concerns about dairy is the the levels of hormones and antibiotics and the protein in animal products increases IGF-1 levels which increase uh cancer risk. So there are all kinds of of issues. Now there have been a couple of big metaanalyses out recently showing you know dairy products don’t increase risk of diabetes and don’t increase risk of heart disease. And so people were hearing a lot about those studies. Um, but I think we need to recognize that the dairy products have been fairly strongly associated with cancer, especially prostate cancer, possibly slightly less strongly associated with um breast cancer. But certainly know we know that there’s no question if men substituted um uh dairy milk for soy milk, the risk for uh prostate cancer goes down very very significantly. And and so there are, you know, there are significant problems. I know the there’s a strong connection between dairy intake and acne. There’s a fairly strong connection between dairy intake and asthma. So there are number of issues. And to me, it it just doesn’t make sense for us to be pushing uh dairy products on people to the extent we are when there are a far more nutrient-dense and more um less risky sources of calcium. And I think the reason we don’t is just really due to the power of the dairy industry. You know when I wrote um with my colleagues my first book becoming vegetarian um we had a chapter called without dairy and uh we talked about uh you know that dairy isn’t um necessary uh for uh human health and that we can get enough calcium elsewhere. And the dairy industry spent I don’t know how many thousands of dollars trying to discredit us. They wrote a 50-page rebuttal to our our book and made it available to every health practitioner in Canada. They took a full page ad in our uh professional journal uh to try to discredit our work. And it was very very interesting because the very first page of their uh critique was saying that uh you know these dieticians are saying that you should eat less ruminant fat and if you ate less ruminant fat you’d be eating more unsaturated fat and you’d be getting more cancer. And we just we just couldn’t believe what we were reading that they were that desperate to go to that extent to say something that is so unscientifically um you know so unfounded scientifically. uh it was just beyond ridiculous and and so but the dairy industry is a very very powerful industry and it’s a you know a very wealthy industry and so it’s going to take a lot of doing to knock dairy down a few notches within our food guides and our dietary recommendations.

Eggs

One of the really interesting things about eggs and the marketing um sort of the egg marketing board has uh they’re not allowed to say eggs are healthy. Um they’re not allowed to to say say much about they get they get um uh censored constantly with their with their marketing stuff by the USDA and and they’re not allowed to to claim very much about eggs. So, one of the because they they don’t even have they have seven, you know, it’s about seven grams of protein per egg. So, it’s not even quite enough protein to say an egg is a great protein source. So, they they really looked and and tried to figure out what they could they could push as being the nutritional wonder for eggs and they started pushing choline. Choline is a B vitamin and choline is as a you know wheat germ is really high in choline and and and soy lecithan is really high in choline and there are a number of plant foods that have choline but eggs are a particularly rich source of choline. Um but but what was what’s really quite quite ironic is that is that we I talked a little bit about the carnitine in meat getting converted to TMA and then going to the liver and getting converted to TMAO which is very aogenic. It’s a you know it it’s a real problem. And you know what’s the interesting thing about TMAO is that you only produce TMA in your intestines if you have a certain kind of bad bacteria. TMA producing bacteria. Vegans don’t have any of that bacteria in their systems. So even if you feed uh vegans uh carnitine by in a supplement, they can’t make TMAO because they don’t have the bad bacteria in their gut to make it. So this is a really interesting but the other thing that makes TM the the other thing that that is sort of a substrate to form TMA and TMAO is actually choline and and so you can make TMAO as an omnivore by eating meat or by eating eggs. They both are, you know, one with the carnitine, one with the choline, but both are are uh responsible for this high TMAO production, which is without a doubt a serious problem.

Why vegan

So, I often get asked, why vegan? when a plant-based diet seems to be supporting um people in the blue zones very well, what would be the reason to completely eliminate animal products? And to me, it’s really about the big picture. I am moved by what matters beyond my own health. I think we need to to consider that everything we do affects all life on this planet. So thinking about what we’re eating when we take and funnel our food through animals, we are literally right now there are 7.5 billion people on this planet. 1 billion of those people are going hungry. They would not need to go hungry if everyone was eating a vegan diet. We could sustain even more people than what we currently have. You know, if everyone ate the way Americans eat, it’s estimated we would need 3.48 planets to sustain the Earth’s current population. If everyone ate the way um paleolithic people are eating or paleo paleo promoters, we would probably need 10 because they’re tripling the average meat intake. When you think that we are, you know, losing 21,000 children every day because of starvation, it to me makes no sense that we aren’t making some sort of a shift and recognizing how profound our consequences of our choices are for others. According to the United Nations Environmental Program, the number one drain on this planet’s life support systems is animal agriculture. Number one. And according to the United Nations, one of the most important shifts that the people on this planet can make to sustain Oh, shoot. I’m wasting time. Keep starting because we get out of it. Okay. So, according to the United Nations Environmental Program, the shift towards a vegan diet is an ecological imperative if this planet is to survive. There was a study done in 2008 at Carnegie Melon University by Weber and Matthews that showed that simply by eating vegan one day a week, we would reduce greenhouse gas emissions more than eating 100% local 7 days a week. The other thing that I I strongly believe we absolutely can’t ignore is what our appetite for animals means for the animals we’re eating. We are slaughtering 70 billion animals every year on this planet. You know, there was a time when 40% of the population lived on farms. Now it’s 1.9% of the population. And yet the population has increased hugely since that time. What we have to do to produce the amount of animals that people eat is we have to raise these animals as if they were commodity units in what we call concentrated animal feeding operations. and the lives of these animals is just to me it’s there is nothing nothing that could ever justify the way that we’re treating these creatures. First of all, these are thinking feeling beings. Pigs are probably smarter than dogs and yet they live six months in horrendous conditions. When you think about it, it’s really to me it’s very simple. Most of us love animals and we’re so far removed from these factory farms that we take no responsibility for what’s happening to them. But it’s in my view very very simple when you think about it. Why would we contribute to the pain, the suffering and the death of these innocent creatures when we don’t have to? There is absolutely no need for human beings to be consuming the flesh of animals. We have got to have have reached a a a point in our in our evolution where we have enough intelligence to figure out how to eat without torturing our fellow beings. To me, it makes no sense to be doing this when we don’t have to. Vegans enjoy greater longevity. They have about a third less heart disease. They have 15 to 20% less cancer, 75% less hypertension, 52% less kidney disease, 62% less diabetes. When you think about this, when you really think about it, it makes absolutely no sense for people to continue eating animal products when it is absolutely not only unnecessary, it’s harmful to us. And if everybody ate a plant-based diet, we would protect the planet, we would protect the animals, and we would protect ourselves.