Rebuild Your Body with Hall of Fame Dietitian Brenda Davis

Intro

hello out there welcome to the switch for good podcast thanks for joining us and who am i i’m dotsya you’re alexandra i was getting ready to say i am alexandra paul and we’re so you know it’s two years now it’s our two years we’ve been doing this podcast and uh so we’re sort of entwined yeah okay let’s have a little more of you and me oh heavens all right wake up dancing today we have who veg news called the godmother of vegan dietitians her name is brenda davis and she really lives up to the title because she’s been plant-based since 1980 wow and ironically she became plant-based thanks to a hunter friend so we’ll find out a little bit about that story

she’s the author of 11 books with the 12th one coming out and they range from topics to uh from how to go vegan to raising vegan families to treating diabetes to eating raw uh she was also the lead dietitian for this really important study based in the marshall islands which is the diabetes wellness research project which we’re also going to talk about since so many of our listeners are interested in diabetes and prevention most importantly she’s also a fantastic recipe developer so you and i could learn a lot about from her about that so brenda davis welcome to the switch for good podcast we’re so happy to have you on

i have to clarify one point to start and that is i’m not that great of a recipe developer because i’m allergic to cups and spoons i hate measuring things so i’ll i’m a great cook i love to create recipes but i hate to have to turn them into actual you know cups and tablespoons and teaspoons because you know you do something and and and it turns out so well and then you try to recreate it and it never comes out quite the same and you have to do it 14 times before you actually get it right

you and i are going to get along well i’m the same like i just i just it’s like a little bit of this little bit of that little bit of this oh this is delicious and then my parents were on their journey of going plant-based and and my mom is like to the tea she’s a seamstress so like every inch every cup every teaspoon you know she has to measure and shelly can you send me the recipe and i’m like i don’t know the recipe i don’t know she she gets so mad she’s like i can’t remake it unless there’s a recipe oh the same page definitely definitely

so you alex alexander said you went uh vegetarian in 1989 uh and and it was pretty much vegan in 1989. okay okay so it’s kind of it was it was it was the meat and then really short after the dairy i’m assuming because we’ve read that a hunter friend of yours said just because you don’t do the dirty work doesn’t mean you’re not pulling the trigger every time you eat yikes and that that was that just shook you to your core

it did because i i was really challenging him he was on his way deer hunting and i just felt like i i didn’t want him to kill another deer i i just didn’t see why he had to do that and i and and so i said to him i don’t understand why you do this it it it does it is it some macho thing that you have to go kill something i i was i was being a little bit mean but i said i i just it’s not a sport i mean in sports both teams have the same equipment that does not apply in hunting and uh and so it it just when when he replied he he basically said as you said see just because you don’t have the guts to pull the trigger does not mean you’re not responsible for the trigger being pulled every time you buy your piece of meat camouflaged in cellophane in the grocery store and then he said at least the animals i eat have had a life um and it it did it i i thought to myself you know one of the things that i want my life to be about is compassion and kindness and and i never you know i i can remember being three years old i was in spain at a bull fight and and i was absolutely horrified by what was going on and i can remember when the bowl got a few points i jumped up onto my chair and cheered for the bull as loudly as i could and i thought to myself you know what happened it just made me start to think about what goes on with animals for them to become our food

and and so i started to research and i just started to read everything i could i got agricultural journals i you know even read john robbins diet for a new america and you know on some of the sort of stuff for the general public and some for for professionals and and within about a week or two i i decided i thought to myself i i can’t do this anymore i get i get that the farm is not the place my mother was raised on where they had one cow her name was betsy and that’s where they got their mouth it’s not the same anymore um that what what farming for a large population has become i just couldn’t in good conscience support that system of cruelty

and and it scared the hell out of me because i was a registered dietitian i taught canada’s food guide in the four food groups i was a public health nutritionist every bit of public health material i had was based on four food groups two of which were animal products and so um it was scary i didn’t know how i could be a dietitian and be a vegan or a you know almost completely plant-based individual and i thought i didn’t know if there were any other vegetarian or vegan dietitians on the planet um i had certainly never met one so it was really scary at that time and i can remember having this internal struggle with myself thinking about what other careers i could do i had you know toyed between dietetics because i loved nutrition but i had considered law and several of my teachers at high school said you should go into law and i was on the debating team and all of that so i thought well maybe i should i should go into law and forget about dietetics and and nutrition and and then i i i had this internal battle and i i just thought i love this subject um why when i’m seeing a bigger picture here why should i walk away when i could potentially make a difference for um consumers and for my profession uh by staying you know by by trying to move our profession forward from within and and i thought to myself i hate the thought of being a fringy person i don’t like the idea of of of people judging me because i’m thinking differently i always wanted to be part of the the cool kids club uh and that was scary to me but i thought i need to have the courage to do this because if i don’t who will and and so the journey began

and that i just want to clarify the journey it sounds like the journey began uh because of ethical reasons and when you started questioning your career you weren’t yet confident in the health reasons for giving up animal products uh we didn’t have much information at that time it was more can it be done can a person be vegan in good health is it even possible um a few of the studies we had on vegans uh you know though i can remember dignali and shinwell and all of these studies from europe and communities that were using vegan diets where children were dying and developing uh you know serious serious forms of malnutrition because of the inadequacy of of what they were being fed and and so there the this was a different time and and uh although in 1990 we had the lifestyle heart trial from dean ornish which was definitely showing the the potential for disease reversal with this diet but the questions of adequacy were still very much up in the air and so i i did a lot of work myself to try to prove that uh that this diet could be safe and adequate uh if it was done properly and that was where my career sort of the the you know the direction that my career went was was making sure that every single person that wanted to do this could do this well for themselves and for their entire families

and did you leave your job as a public health nutritionist during this time no i didn’t but it was a very short time after maybe a year after i became pretty much vegan myself i had two small children ages four and one at the time and my husband and i had been married for about 10 years and i have to tell you this part of the story because when i asked my husband if he would be willing to become completely vegetarian of course he was raised in northern ontario with hunting and fishing and he looked at me and he smiled and he said i thought you’d never ask i would love to be a vegetarian so i i i lucked out big time and his reasoning was because of the environment right he’s an environmentalist and he understood the footprint absolutely he just believed that that was the best way to leave a softer footprint on the planet

and and so you know it it it slowly i mean pretty pretty rapidly after i started we started to see the potential advantages to human health and i knew that a plant-based diet would have more fiber and phytochemicals and all of the the good things that we want and i didn’t see why uh it would be an issue to get enough protein or iron or zinc based on my knowledge and so i just kept digging and digging and trying to to figure even essential fatty acids the concern uh was that you know you needed fish and and so there were all kinds of still holes in the literature and and so it was it was quite an experience

is it true that you were one of the first dietitians along with a couple of others that kind of put forward the idea uh that a healthy human diet does not have to include um cow’s milk and dairy yeah yeah so so the the you know within about a year of of this decision to become completely plant-based we moved to vancouver and that was where we met other real live vegetarians it was just amazing and i can remember walking into a veggie potluck thinking it was going to be all hippies and that we would feel so out of place because we weren’t even if i tried i could not not match everything i wore you know it was just i was raised that way and i thought we were going to stick out like sore thumbs but anyway i was so amazed when we walked in and there was all these just every different kind of person you could have imagined there were lawyers and there was a judge and there were teachers and there were police officers and it was amazing to me

and so that that was really exciting but that was where i met vasanto molina my writing partner of over 25 years and and i i met other dietitians who were you know vasanto at that time was a veg lacto-ovo vegetarian and i met another lady who was lactose vegetarian who was a dietitian and that was beyond exciting to me to think there were other vegetarians at least uh uh in the world who were dietitians and and that was when i i ended up with visanto and another friend victoria harrison we decided we would put in a proposal to write a book on becoming vegetarian and that was the name of our book and this was 1992 when we started and you know we wrote a one-page little proposal and sent it to two publishers and they fought over us it was amazing we couldn’t believe it we hardly had to do anything they just said the time is right to have pro you know professionals doing this this is awesome so so we wrote our first book and it was published in canada in 1994 and within probably six to nine months it was a national bestseller and it got translated and it it did very very well

and i’ll tell you we had a chapter in that book called without dairy and the chapter without dairy was what do people do if they don’t want to consume dairy or candy dairy how can you you know we had a chapter called without meat as well and that was well how do you get enough protein iron and zinc without meat then the without uh dairy how would you possibly get enough calcium and vitamin d without consuming cow’s milk and and and what happened was i think we were really the first registered dietitians in canada that’s that that i actually said that people could survive without consuming cow’s milk that it it wasn’t an essential food or an essential food group for that matter and and the dairy industry uh thought that becoming vegetarian would be a book that would be promoting a lot of dairy because most vegetarian books of that day did it was you know lacto-ovo was the thing ours didn’t and they ended up writing a 45-page rebuttal to our book not only that they made it free they they gave it free of charge to every health professional in the country and they took out a full page ad in our professional dietetic journal to discredit us so they spent thousands and thousands of dollars trying they called us irresponsible um you know and then it was really quite quite a little show so i wrote a 45-page rebuttal to their refund nice work and and it was it it ended up becoming quite a you know a talking point for dietitians and physicians in our country and it i think the results were actually really good for us

it i was so embarrassed to see you know to be called irresponsible when i one of the things that i’ve always prided myself in is being very responsible and being very careful um dotting my eyes and crossing my t’s because i knew we would be on trial in the eyes of our peers uh for some time and so i wanted to make sure i got this right and and when i read the rebuttal it was it was actually really funny it they took stuff out of context they actually quoted the very people that reviewed different chapters of our book saying that you know well according to you know connie weaver or whoever it was he’s really famous nutrition people um you know this is what’s the truth and here’s what they’re saying and they they didn’t look at our acknowledgments or have any idea that those were the very people that had actually reviewed our book and and so it was really easy to rebut their rebuttal right one of the things they said which which really had me rolling on the floor was that if people actually followed our advice and ate more plant foods and fewer ruminant animals well the rates of cancers would just go through the roof because everyone knows that ruminant fat is protective whereas unsaturated fat from plants is is highly carcinogenic basically is what they said it was uh quite laughable

so we were yeah where did they cite the where’d they get their um their science from did they oh my goodness well you know that’s they they they did cite a few a few studies and and of course we were able to to cite uh far far more because the weight of the evidence was definitely in favor of plant-based foods even at that time for cancer

so now we know that canada has removed dairy as a food group for humans from their dietary guidelines and we’re working on it down here in the south were you a part of that well in we we as dietitians we were able to uh contribute a lot and we had been putting pressure on the government for a lot of years and by we i mean visanto molina and myself and visanto was you know it’s so interesting she actually went to visit uh one of the powers that be at health canada and they had a copy of becoming vegan on their desk they were looking carefully at what we were saying and so the discussion was was really important and we talked about racism we talked about you know um the the degree of lactose intolerance in most ethnic populations and and uh and and then um in 2017 uh visanto was awarded the highest honor uh from dietitians of canada and uh which is incredible we have one big award given once a year and uh and she got it for she’s 78 years old now so it it was her time but uh really uh it’s it it’s really quite mind-boggling to think of how far we’ve come over 30 years and uh some of what’s going on today we never imagined we would see in our lifetime

yeah dude can you tell us the the the the reasons um you know that they were vulnerable to challenge by uh the people that were saying dairy shouldn’t be a food group and what they considered as the evidence to then eventually remove it was it was it the lactose intolerance was it a combination of that and some health concerns it was it was definitely a combination of many things and some of some of it was what we know about the relationship between diet and disease and the food guide was developed uh really to help people reduce their lifetime risk of the diseases that kill 70 of us um we are challenged with a lot of overweight and obesity and of course heart disease cancer diabetes all of that and so they wanted to to have a guide that would really put a dent in what kills most of us and and so that was a big part of it uh the considerations of our ethnic populations was a big part of it i you know and and certainly um the evidence now pointing in the direction that dairy is is not a necessary part of the diet in old food guides we had four what we always called essential food groups and recognizing from numerous studies that dairy is not only not essential in some cases it may actually increase risk of disease i think that this i really helped to to to move the um you know the pendulum in that direction and i’m so proud of the health canada uh for what they’ve done it’s it’s really quite remarkable uh that they made that decision and i know not all dietitians are happy with that decision did you get a lot of pushback from industry did they get a lot of how did health canada get a lot of pushback from the dairy industry health canada decided that industry uh should not have the voice that they used to have in in our food guide in our national food guide and and so they were you know they didn’t have they didn’t have the weight that they used to have we could learn something from that yeah exactly that’s all it’s full of right now yeah yeah the whole committee’s industry funded our us dietary guidelines committee and subcommittee members or all of them have ties in history the the the um the main committee member um barbara shenahan was the researcher at den own institute for nine years and what’s what are they oh dan and the the yoga company ah okay anyway yeah anything else you want to add on the on that because you know you’re working so hard on it now yeah well it’s just wonderful to learn from brenda how our neighbors up north got it right yeah we can follow suit

um i’d like to talk specifically about some diseases one that you mentioned diabetes because you’ve written three books on diabetes and you’ve done research in the field on the disease i mentioned it in the intro that you are you headed up a research study in the marshall islands um that studied diabetes i’m curious if you can first talk about um we and we’ve talked about it a lot the mis the basic misconception that diabetes is caused by sugar that instead it is fat that is the root cause of the issue um please you know much more about it than i so tell me where i’m right and where i’m wrong

yeah so so first of all to clarify i definitely didn’t head up the study it was headed up by john kelly who was the founding president of the american college of lifestyle medicine i was the lead dietitian and pretty much created the program so we had five overlapping cohorts i i created the program so the you know exactly what we were going to be doing with our participants and and our results were really quite stellar so we’re it’s it’s uh it was a just a wonderful project to be involved with it was in the marshall islands which are kind of halfway between hawaii and australia and a very very remote islands with a small population uh almost impossible to have a control group because everybody knows everybody and and uh so they can influence one another a lot uh but it is just a beautiful uh group of people and we i really enjoyed working with them

uh but you know diabetes is really and truly we talk about fat we talk about sugar uh they they are both implicated in all honesty and because what diabetes is about is it’s about over consumption so we see people in the world who eat you know fifty percent of their calories from fat they get no diabetes uh so you would look they’re almost non-existent for example the marshallese people so people of the marshall islands um you know 80 years ago had no type 2 diabetes their diet was 60 coconut which it may be a shock to you but but basically what we see is we see people who remain lean who are eating whole unprocessed foods so the foods basically as they’re grown they’re eating fish and plants is what they were eating back then but if they’re eating you know a lot of plants particularly there and they don’t get overweight they don’t get type 2 diabetes we see people in the blue zones who have very very low rates of diabetes eating their traditional diets well there’s a blue zone called okinawa that’s about six to ten percent of calories from fat there’s another blue zone called icharia greece they eat 40 to 50 percent of calories from fat they don’t get diabetes when they’re eating their traditional diet so that to clarify is really important it’s not so much the percentage of calories from various macronutrients that really matters it’s the source of those macronutrients when fat is packaged in whole foods like nuts and seeds and avocados and even coconut you know it’s it’s not so harmful to health when sugars are packaged in fruits and vegetables sugars aren’t so harmful to health but when you extract fat and concentrate it and you extract sugars and concentrate and you create all of these processed foods that are literally they are designed to to to mess up our appetite control systems to to make us hit this kind of bliss point where they we can’t stop eating that’s when we end up over eating and whether the calories are coming from fat or sugar you know whatever the calories are coming from when you overeat and you gain a lot of weight your body can’t um you know it can’t cope with all the extra calories and what happens is so let’s say you’re eating um you know a lot of uh fructose for example that’s been added to food it it goes to your liver to get converted into some storage form unless you know if i mean if you didn’t overeat and you could use those calories you could use the calories but when you’re overeating you have to store them and what ends up happening is that fat gets shuttled into our you know adipose tissue but quite often we can’t shuttle it fast enough so the body has to do something with it and what ends up happening is it gets stored in the liver um as as fat and it gets stored in the pancreas as fat and it gets stored in the heart and it gets stored in the in the muscle tissue is intramyocellular lipids so but the the lipids that are the most problematic are those in the pancreas and the liver uh so when you have a liver that’s a that’s a fat storage depot uh you become very insulin resistant and so insulin resistance is really the name of the game and when you have a pancreas that has even a small percentage of of of fat in the pancreas it destroys your beta cells and so your pancreas can’t be putting out insulin the way it should be putting out insulin so these are you know really critical pieces of the diabetes puzzle

so some people say oh you need to eat a less than 10 fat diet uh you need to be really really rigid on on you know getting rid of the oils and all of that but really what’s most important is that you’re eating whole foods and you’re not overeating that you’re you’re get you’re lowering your body uh fat stores so that you get rid of the fat in your liver and the fat in your pancreas and the fat in i mean obviously your muscle tissue needs some fat because your intra myocellular lipids the people that have the highest levels of intramyocellular lipids are athletes um intramyocellular lipids are are actually energy reserves they’re organelles that provide energy that you need when you’re when you’re active

now we hear you know neil barnard for example talking about intramyocellular lipids being so problematic in diabetes and they absolutely can be when you’re eating really unhealthy fats and the type of intramyocellular lipid you end up with too much fat in those organelles and it’s bad fats the fats that actually affect the fluidity of the cell membranes and and so it affects your insulin resistance and all of that uh but it’s a complicated story it’s not that simple so diabetes is really a function of several drivers um lipotoxicity lipo is lipid and lipid is fat and so lipotoxicity is essentially lipids or fats being stored in parts of the body where they really shouldn’t be stored because they cause great harm in the liver in the pancreas in the heart in the you know too much in the muscle tissue so that’s lipo toxicity it’s toxic to the body when you have lipids stored in those places and then the second dysbiosis dysbiosis is really just a um you know an unbalanced gut microflora so that we have all of these microbes that live in our intestinal tract and for years we didn’t think much of them we just thought they were you know they would use up fiber and they were kind of like little parasites in our bodies that nothing could be further from the truth uh and and there are some unhealthy gut microbes and there are some very healthy gut microbes and sometimes the unhealthy take over and you don’t have enough help you don’t have enough diversity you don’t have enough of the the healthy microbes you have too many of the unhealthy whatever it is but there’s this balance that that ends up not only being bad for your gastrointestinal system it affects your insulin secretion it affects your brain health it affects your risk of inflammation and oxidative stress it affects the production of of things like short chain fatty acids which increase which can help to decrease your risk of cancer so we don’t get enough of them we get increased cancer risk it affects everything it’s unbelievable how vital that microbiome in your gut is to your entire well-being and so yes when you’re you know your gut microbes are out of whack it’s a problem and the way that you your gut microbiome is is kept healthy is by feeding it healthy things and what it needs is it needs prebiotics and you know because it’s probiotics basically it needs food and so prebiotics come from various fibers various fermentable fibers and plant foods and so eating plants is absolutely critical to the gut microbiome

and and so the the third thing i mentioned is oxidative stress and oxidative stress again is a balance of these pro-oxidants versus the antioxidants in the diet so a pro-oxidant would be something like heme iron from meat can be a very strong pro-oxidant whereas an antioxidant would be carotenoids or vitamin e from plant foods largely and and so we need a reasonable balance of those because when you get high levels of pro-oxidants and not enough antioxidants you end up with what we call oxidative stress or free radical damage to your to your all of your body systems and then the last one is inflammation and this one most people know about but but we when we think of inflammation we think of you know you get a cotton it turns red and that’s external inflammation but you get this chronic low-grade inflammation in your body where that affects um it affects atherosclerosis because it allows different kinds of cells to get into your blood vessels that can really promote atherosclerosis and and the disease process but it affects every disease it affects insulin resistance it affects alzheimer’s disease it affects everything and so those are four big drivers of chronic disease and every single one of those drivers uh we literally put a lid on by eating plant-based uh because that’s where the compounds the you know the the things that keep our gut microflora healthy the the the the uh the you know the the various anti-inflammatory compounds and the antioxidants that’s where they’re concentrated is in colorful plant foods so a plant-based diet essentially minimizes the components of the diet that are most pathogenic and and maximizes the components that are most protective and that that’s why eating plant-based it can can work its wonders and it really can it’s phenomenal to see the changes in people’s health when they move in this direction

i noticed when i went whole food plant-based that first of all i felt more satiated more of the time and then secondly and this took a little a little while i noticed that um my cravings went away just any kind of cravings and and maybe even more specifically sweet cravings and i know that when you feed yourself um processed foods processed sugars white sugar um that the more you put in right your stomach can feel full with the volume but your brain is still telling your body that it needs nutrients because it’s not getting nutrients and that’s what then can set off this like cycle of not feeling satiated and cravings and then that can lead to um obesity and so eating whole foods from the earth from trees from the sea that changed everything to for me in regards to uh well overeating because i was i was definitely doing that before even you know after i was much much better much much better for my eating disorder you know if i was stressed or had a bad day like the rest of us sometimes i would turn to food and now it’s just it does it’s not even an option anymore because i feel so satiated and so complete and i think because my brain knows that i’m getting enough nutrients so the phytochemicals and the phytonutrients and the antioxidants like you’re talking about

yeah and it’s so interesting to hear you say that because it i see this over and over and over again and i experienced it myself as well uh it’s you know you’re eating a much more fiber you’re eating such nutrient dense foods you’re getting so much for your calorie that your body is satisfied and it’s kind of wonderful i know after i’m finished dinner at night i have absolutely no desire to eat i don’t get the munchies ever i can’t stand the taste of concentrated sweet in food i just can’t stand it it’s such a turn off to me and i don’t understand sometimes you know why anybody would want something that sweet and so i i your body your taste buds um readjust and the wonderful thing i think about the human body is i think our bodies really want health uh we want to survive and and so when you start providing the raw materials to build healthy cells healthy brain cells healthy cells in every place in your body you really rebuild yourself and it changes everything and if people could just understand that it’s you know that those cravings are really quite temporary and you don’t and the other thing i think that’s important to recognize is you don’t have to do this in a day you know it can be a gradual process and you know you can start with one meal you can start with one snack just one step at a time and you’ll get there and and your body will be it’ll just be rebuilding itself as you go and your desires will start to change it’s really quite a miracle

you wrote a book called becoming raw a lot of people feel like they won’t get satiated if they eat raw food they feel um that cook food they couldn’t even imagine what they just eat salad um will you talk to us a little bit about raw food in a healthy diet and what your book is about

yeah so becoming raw this is a little bit of a funny story but our publisher said you know we need a raw book that is science science-based because there’s so many uh claims within the raw food world that may not be substantiated by science and if we could have a a book about you know raw diets and and how to make them adequate that would be so awesome and my my writing partner visanto and i both said pretty much in unison not a chance we are not writing a book on raw foods because we were so we just we were so exposed to so many of the myths within the raw food world that were so not substantiated by science that we didn’t want to we didn’t want to uh jeopardize our professional credibility by being mixed up in that world and and so it you know vasantha said well you know maybe we’d learn something maybe it would be i remember us having this discussion and maybe we should just consider it and so we really started looking at at you know a lot of these claims and and i wrote letters to the people that were quoted all over the world in the raw food community to see if the claims were reflecting their research and and and we decided that it was a project we wanted to do in the end and what ended up happening is we learned i mean the raw food world has figured out so many things that are absolutely fascinating and useful to the world of nutrition and so i we just we i think it was the book that that i learned the most from doing to be quite honest it was absolutely fascinating and so one of the one of the things that it and it shifted my own personal practices in my diet and and yes it was true there were many claims that were unsubstantiated and i think we we you know basically shared the problems with some of those claims in that book and i think we we did a very reasonable job of that but we also discovered some of the wonderful techniques that include in in preparing foods that are common to raw food practice that are just extraordinarily wonderful

and so one of the things about cooking is cooking can reduce nutrients and phytochemicals uh and and it can also create products of oxidation so you can create things like heterocyclic amines if you cook meat or eggs or any animal products which are known carcinogens you can produce polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons which are again known carcinogens and they’re formed in anything that’s blackened and so it doesn’t matter if it’s animal product or not you burn a piece of toast or barbecue something and blacken it you’re producing uh polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons there is acrylamide that is formed in in foods that are high in asparagine like potatoes when you bake them or especially when you fry them um there’s advanced glycation end products that are formed when you um you know this is part of the mayard reaction when you brown foods and and all and and just so people recognize advanced glocation end products are the highest in processed meats that’s the most concentrated source of ages or advanced glycation end products and so there are all these products that can form when you cook foods and so when you eat a good portion of your diet raw you’re minimizing those components and minimizing nutrient losses and maximizing phytochemicals

now the other thing is there are a lot of techniques that raw food raw foodies use like for example soaking and dehydrating that actually help to re to to reduce anti nutrients in food see what happens when you soak a seed is you’re telling that seed to get prepared to support the life of a new baby plant and so what happens is all of the anti-nutrients that are present in that seed to stop the release of nutrients prematurely well those are broken down and the nutrients are released so the new plant can grow and thrive and then the phytochemical army that’s poised to protect that plant just multiplies because it needs a bigger army when there’s just a little baby there and so you see things like you know broccoli sprouts having 50 times the sulforaphane of mature broccoli because it’s expanded so much to support that new little plant so you see a you know five to fifty times increase in phytochemicals it’s phenomenal you see changes in amino acids and essential fatty acids when you soak and sprout food so these are all really good things

the problem with raw for many people is that quite often we see people actually losing too much weight sometimes not getting enough protein iron zinc and some of those trace middles they start minerals they start losing their hair their their skin gets thin they you know they stop menstruating we see this quite often and so so one of the things that i suggest is to do a little bit of a combination eat more raw foods uh you know and and try some of these wonderful raw entrees which are amazing like collard wraps or raw lasagnas these are fun things to do and then have some lentil soup or something that’s cooked if you’re wanting a really clean diet then you cook the foods in a moist environment so if you’re cooking foods with water as in a soup or your or your steaming or your water sauteing then you’re not going to be producing the products of oxidation that are produced with dry heat or with high heat and so that’s really helpful and so i think that’s a a really reasonable compromise now it’s not you know from my own personal perspective i eat a higher raw diet in the summer than i do in the winter because i live in a very cold climate and i want warm foods my body wants warm foods but but i do try to minimize the the high temperature cooking the dry heat cooking i make more stews and soups but that doesn’t mean i don’t barbecue i do barbecue in the summertime i love grilled tofu and grilled vegetables they’re wonderful quite often i’ll put them in in foil or something like that to you know minimize any blackening but i still love the flavors and you know it’s it’s a fun thing to do when you have company and so i think we want you know i guess what we really want is we want for our plant-based diet to be attractive and fun and really nutritious and healthy but we wanted to appeal to the masses we want people to to think this is doable i can do this and we don’t want to scare them off um by making our rules so rigid that people just say i could just never do that and so i think there needs to be a balance in that way lean into those high nutrient dense foods

and then i have a question because i just got an air fryer well i guess i’ve had it i don’t know a year now that’s high heat it is high heat and and the studies are a little bit mixed now air fryers don’t produce the the um near the amount of acrylamide as as oil fryers probably about 90 percent less but they still do produce some and they produce other products of oxidation so so one of the things that i would say is while these tools are really fun and add variety and spice to our you know our our diets um they probably shouldn’t be used every single day for you know snacks and meals and you know we’re more of a fun uh a couple times a week kind of thing we don’t we haven’t really quantified it so we don’t know we can’t say that oh well you’ll definitely be doing damage if you use it every day but just based on what we know to this point it’s probably prudent to not overuse it okay i can do that i only use it like once or twice a week so we’ll stick with that for now

you’ve mentioned orthorexia um you believe it’s becoming more prevalent can you explain what orthorexia is and why it’s getting in the way of our health when actually it is a focus on health but it seems to be getting in the way of our health yeah so so you know for for a lot of us in the plant-based based world we’ve kind of thought oh orthorexia that’s just a label that people are putting on on this you know whole food plant-based movement that’s trying to eat super healthy but i’ve actually in the last probably three months or so run across and tried to help i i am still actively helping about three individuals who uh i would say are or who have orthorexia and what this means is that they have they are generally people who would who had had that personality type to become anorexic where they’re perfectionists they you know do everything to the nth degree and and they have latched on to the to the plant-based rules of very tightly and so there’s no oil there’s no nuts or seeds or peanut butter heaven forbid or you know so they’re they’re they’re following the rules really really tightly and and to the extent where and and i can say the one one of the um people that i’ve recently been working with to the extent we’re um absolutely terrified to eat in a restaurant because there might be a drop of oil or a dr or a teaspoon of half of a quarter teaspoon of sugar that there might be something in that food that would be not permitted they won’t eat with their families because they’re eating you know the kids want pasta and pasta is you know refined ground grains and heaven forbid that they would have any ground grains um and so they take it to the degree that it becomes socially crippling but also in all three instances the people that i’ve been working with have a bmi of 16 or less and that means extremely underweight uh so so where they’re you know where they’re being told they need to go in um to an eating disorder center for treatment uh because they’re gonna die if they continue at the rate they’re going and and so this is scary to me and and i think people really need to be careful of that um we want to be able to eat with our families we want to be able to go to a restaurant once in a while and not worry about whether or not there might be a drop or two of oil in the food it’s just we need to balance our healthy choices with a life that’s sustainable and joyful and i think that’s just critical you don’t want to um you can imagine what it would do to a family if if the mother of the family won’t eat with the family um it’s just not appropriate and so i i i just really encourage people to not get so black and white about things and and to to think about oh what is enjoyable and what is reasonable in their lives so that it really is an issue that deserves some consideration

can we talk about um plant fat as it relates to our brain and our and our high functioning uh brain i have a superstition that i completely realize is that uh that any time before i speak i have a coconut water and like a large handful of almonds and i feel like it’s the the fat and then in the nuts that makes me be able to be uh quick on my feet or be able to remember well and uh i did low oil for a little while and you know i’m just one person and it could have been psychosomatic but i uh i i felt um groggier i didn’t feel as sharp my short term memory wasn’t as good uh and i started to feel a little sad so and now i just i mean i i don’t eat low or eye high oil i don’t really think about it that much but there’s some nice olive oil in my salad dressings and i definitely love going to restaurants and dining with my husband back in the day when we used to be able to go outside and go to restaurants i miss that and so um but uh i i have a friend who i think is for sure or orthorexic and she’s in a in a pretty big spiral of depression right now and and never has been her her whole life so what what is the connection like what kind of fats do we need uh and and specifically as it relates to our brain function

yeah so you know all of the macronutrients whether it’s protein carbohydrate or fat our bodies need all of them uh fat is really critical for cell membranes and it’s really critical for brain function because in our cell membranes the types of fats in our cell membranes affect the permeability the shape the flexibility uh you know the cell to cell communication between cells all of that is affected by what fats are there when those cell membranes are filled with trans fats and too many saturated fats it it dumbs them down it makes our cells stupid basically and so in our brains um the fats that become really critical i mean we need we need all kinds of fats but but we really need uh the long chain omega-3 fatty acids like d especially dha for brain function and epa is also associated quite strongly with depression and so we need these long-chain fats and so that’s one of the reasons a lot of people say that plant-based diets are inadequate because we don’t directly consume epa and dha generally that’s from fish and unless you’re taking um that again a lot of people don’t realize but fish get their long chain omega-3 fatty acids from plants in the ocean which are called microalgae they’re very tiny plants that kind of move up the food chain to get into the fish and so of course we can get them from the microalgae as well in supplement form uh but a lot of people there’s tremendous controversy controversy about whether or not we we need these and the reality is that is that uh we really don’t know for sure what we do know is that young women uh pre-menopausal women tend to have a really good ability to convert alpha-linolenic acid into epa and dha and and if they convert probably about while the one study that really looked a quantified it was a study from the uk and they had about a 36 percent conversion which is really quite phenomenal to either epa which is that ghost pension oil acid dpa or or dha which is docosahexaenoic acid and and so one of those three things 36 was converted whereas in young men uh they converted i think it was 18 no i think it was 16 8 uh uh to to epa and six and eight percent to dpa none to dha none at all and so this made people think well can men convert can even post-menopausal women convert and we don’t know for sure uh how well they’re converting the the bottom line is that what we do know is that people have go who have good omega-3 status tend to be at reduced risk for certain um conditions and possibly including depression and so in my view i think it makes sense to to have a diet that includes i don’t think you have to include oil but if you don’t include oil i think you need to include a reasonable amount of avocado nuts and seeds so a lot of my salad dressings are hemp seeds cashews um you know tahini so these nut and seed butters or hemp seeds is one of my favorite things to include and so they’re high in fat but it’s whole food fats and so you can do it either way you can use you know small amounts of oil or you can use some some nuts and seeds or avocados or whatever but i don’t think it’s it’s great for a lot of people to go too low in fat unless you’re you know really trying to do the esselstyn heart disease reversal diet because you have severe coronary artery disease but for most you know other reasonably healthy people you want to include enough fat for healthy hair healthy skin healthy brain healthy cell membranes and and so there are a variety of ways of doing that but i think it’s really important to do that

and so do i recommend epa and dha well i’ll tell you we because we don’t know and i know it’s very controversial what i say at this stage is i see no reason not to and i know michael clapper’s been saying well it could down regulate our ability to convert ala but if you look at the general population and the people that eat two or three servings of fish a week if you had two or three um supplements of of microalgae-based omega-3s a week it would be similar to doing that which is really quite standard for humans over many you know centuries so i i just don’t see a big problem with doing that and for me i would rather see um a little better level of dha and epa and vegans than what we often see and and the people that do get tested often have somewhat low levels of of especially dha but often epa as well so for me i think it’s quite reasonable to include plenty of ala and ala you’re looking at that’s alpha linolenic acid and it comes from chia seeds flax seeds hemp seeds walnuts leafy greens are about half the fatter is is ala but they’re so low in fat you have to eat like a horse or a cow to get enough of them so you know we need about two to four grams a day you’d need 20 to 40 cups of leafy greens to give you that okay so including some seeds like a a tablespoon of ground flax a tablespoon of chia seeds two tablespoons of hemp seeds an ounce of walnuts would do the trick but then you still have to wonder is my body converting and as we get older conversion ability declines if you have diabetes or you have hypertension conversion ability is reduced so there are lots of people who may not be very good converters men are as as as efficient the reason men young men aren’t as efficient as young women is young women have to be prepared to support the life of a young baby right a fetus and that fetus needs to grow a brain and so they need to be able to convert really well to give that brain enough dha so those are you know factors involved but i’m i’m on the same page as you i really do think getting enough healthy fat is is really helpful and not harmful to health

thanks for that i’m going to stick with the hemp and the chia and the walnuts which is what i always put on my salad so okay doing something right over here oh you’re doing a lot right a lot right before we go you have a 12th book coming out uh can you tell us a little bit about it

well i this has been a book that has just been such a joy to write i i ended up on an airplane going to the plantrician conference and the person sitting in the middle seat we ended up talking and it turned out she was on her way to the same conference she was a pediatrician from san francisco her name was reshma shaw and we just clicked and started hanging out at plantricion and um she we stayed in contact and she did a presentation at her hospital and she said you know brenda what else can i do i want to make a real difference and i said reshma you’re a pediatrician we don’t have a solid book to guide plant-based families with young children that would be the perfect thing to do and she said you know what she said i’ll do it if you’ll do it with me so i said you’re on i’ve got two books i had two books i have the two the kick diabetes essentials and the kick diabetes cookbook that i was in the process of writing i said when i get done those two we’re on and so you know with covet and everything we actually met our deadline we were able to really focus and she was an absolute joy to work with she is so knowledgeable and so multi-talented and the book just came together beautifully and we submitted it june 30th and we’re very excited and she’s really good at stuff i’m not good at it all like social media and all that so she’s doing you know we’re doing a great promotion and the book is called nourish and it will officially be released uh in november

that is so exciting that’s terrific that’s gonna be a great holiday present for a lot of our peeps yeah i hope so yeah thank you so much for being on our show brenda we really appreciate all the information that you’ve shared with us oh it was my privilege i really enjoyed it thank you so much thanks for going so deep with us in some areas i learned a lot so thank you so much for tuning in today if we helped you in any way then click the subscribe button and let’s keep hanging out together we have so much more to share with you and if you need more information on actually making the switch for good please visit us at switchforgood.org for loads of info and you can subscribe to our mailing list where you will receive all sorts of super cool gifts discount codes to our very fav dairy free products and a lifetime of powerful health tips so join us on the journey to switch for good this is the future