The Vegan Dr: The Truth About The Vegan Diet, "Eggs Are Making You Fat", "Stop Eating Cheese!" - Neal Barnard

Steven Bartlett (0:00)

I love cheese.

Neal D. Barnard (0:01)

Well, men who consume the most cheese have the lowest sperm count and erectile dysfunction.

Steven Bartlett (0:07)

Oh, shh.

SPEAKER_3 (0:08)

Dr. Neal Barnard, one of America's leading advocates for health, nutrition, and legend in the plant-based world.

Neal D. Barnard (0:14)

People need to understand this. Getting away from animal products is always a good idea because once you ban animal foods, not only do you solve the weight issue without counting calories, without reducing carbs, without even exercising, but also their health problems get better.

Steven Bartlett (0:29)

But health experts say it's okay to have a little bit of animal proteins.

Neal D. Barnard (0:32)

Great idea doesn't work.

Steven Bartlett (0:33)

Then there are people that just eat meat alone.

Neal D. Barnard (0:36)

Well, it's a ludicrous diet. It's very fiber deficient.

Steven Bartlett (0:39)

How do you take on the idea that veganism is a diet for the privileged?

Neal D. Barnard (0:42)

We did a study and the average person saved 16 percent, plus the fact their need for medications come down. So for example, we had a man who came into our study. He had diabetes. So we put him on the plant-based diet. After about a year, he'd lost 60 pounds. And he could go into any clinic in the world, and they would not diagnose him as having diabetes.

Steven Bartlett (0:59)

But how do we know in that case that a Mediterranean diet wouldn't have had the same reversing effect on his diabetes?

Neal D. Barnard (1:05)

You just don't get the same result. But this was extremely controversial.

Steven Bartlett (1:08)

The most controversial of all, though, is eggs. You can come for everything else, but coming for eggs is particularly triggering.

Neal D. Barnard (1:18)

Well, eggs have lots of issues. The first is, and even the studies done by the egg industry do show this.

Steven Bartlett (1:34)

Dr. Neal Barnard, the work you've committed your life to, what good do you hope that it's doing for everyday people in their day-to-day lives?

Neal D. Barnard (1:44)

Right now, unfortunately, people are not well. They're not where they want to be. By age 30 or so, people feel like their life is starting to slip away. They're gaining weight they don't want to have. Their cholesterol is going up. They're on medications that they know they're never going to get off of. And perhaps worst of all, they tend to hand this same fate to the next generation. And that's something that not only has to stop but it can stop. The body can heal, we know how to do it, the job is to put it to work.

Steven Bartlett (2:13)

When you look back over, I don't know, 50, 100 years, what are the key sort of health outcomes that have really changed? And how does that correlate to the way that the world has changed and our sort of consumption habits have changed?

Neal D. Barnard (2:27)

Economics has changed everything. If you look, say, at rural Japan, 1950s, the country had a diet that was not entirely plant-based, but it was a rice-based diet, lots of vegetables, no ice cream. This was not the Velveeta culture. And some meat, but not really very much. And then suddenly the Golden arches arrived in Tokyo.

Steven Bartlett (2:48)

The Golden arches.

Neal D. Barnard (2:49)

McDonald's, Burger King, KFC, the country westernized, breast cancer doubled.

Steven Bartlett (2:55)

Really?

Neal D. Barnard (2:55)

diabetes went way, way up. waistlines expanded. Life expectancy went from longest in the world, just it's still better than many other places, but it has declined and declined and declined. despite having more knowledge than ever before. The westernization of the diet has been a killer worldwide. You see it in Japan. You see it now in China. As economics are changing in China, there's more wealth. There is more cardiovascular disease. And you know who's on the wires outside of town looking down like buzzards? It's the pharmaceutical industry. Because if you eat more pork and your cholesterol goes up, I can sell you more statins. And that is the way that's the world we live in. That can change.

Steven Bartlett (3:33)

Why do you care? Of all the things you could have committed your life to, was there a catalyst moment where suddenly this became your mission? Was there something you saw, something you did or an experience you had?

Neal D. Barnard (3:45)

The year before I went to medical school, I was working in a hospital in Minneapolis and I didn't have a very glamorous job. I was the morgue attendant. And so my job was to take the body out of the cooler and put it on a table and assist the pathologist to do an autopsy to determine the cause of death. There was one day there was a man who died in the hospital of a massive heart attack, probably from eating hospital food, but that's another story. And the body was there and the pathologist took out his scalpel and you make a Y-shaped cut across the skin like this. You peel back the skin and then he took what looked like a garden clipper and went crunch, crunch, crunch through the ribs on this side and crunch, crunch, crunch through this side, pulled the ribs off the chest and put the ribs on the table. So he took his scalpel and he sliced through a coronary artery and it was like a medical lecture. They're called coronary arteries because they crown the heart. And as he sliced it open, he said, feel that. I had gloves on. So I felt inside the artery and you would think a coronary artery would be a rubbery tube that would carry blood to your heart. It was like a pipe stem. It was like concrete. It was hard. And he said, that's calcified atherosclerotic lesions. And this is your bacon and eggs, Neil. And what he meant was cholesterol in the diet causes an irritation of that artery wall and it forms what's kind of like a blister in the artery and it calcifies over time. And what was most worrisome was not that this had attacked the heart, but we then looked at the carotids. Those are the arteries going to the brain. They had the same process, meaning if he hadn't died of a heart attack, he was headed for a stroke and the arteries to the kidneys had the same process. He finished the exam, wrote up his findings, systemic atherosclerosis. And as time went on, I then went to medical school and I started to learn about the connections. What does cholesterol do? Where has cholesterol found? It's only in animal products. And I started to reflect on these things that were culturally normal for us.