he's been a principal investigator and co-investigator and many clinical trials investigating the effects of diet on health including one study that looked at the effects of dietary interventions in type two diabetes patients are to bernard received his m.b.a. degree from the george washington university school of medicine is the author of several books including the twenty one day weight loss kick start and breaking the food seduction joins me now in the studio and also dr bernards dr neal barnard program for reversing diabetes this is the one i find fascinating welcome to the program thank you it's great to be here thanks for joining us what made you get into this what what drew you into diet and the most most physicians it's you know here's the pills yeah it is i have to say what i'm doing now is exactly the opposite of how i grew up i grew up in fargo north dakota come from a long line of cattle ranchers every day of my life roast beef baked potatoes and corn except for special occasions when it was roast beef potatoes and peas but what actually happened to the year before i went to medical school i was working in

a hospital as the autopsy assistant and when somebody would die in the hospital i would help in the examination of the body and there was nothing like seeing atherosclerosis the hardening of the arteries and smelling it and so forth one day we had a person who died of a massive heart attack in the hospital probably from eating hospital food but that's another story anyway we pulled the ribs off the chest to examine the heart which was filled with heart with atherosclerosis at the end of the exam i put the ribs back in the chest sewed up the skin and cleaned up and i went up to the cafeteria where they were serving ribs for lunch and i anyway it's i started to connect what we eat with the diseases that we get it in some ways it was almost an emotional connection but as time went on i as i got my medical training i realized . it's the most important connection that we have because diabetes is not a deficiency of this drug or that drug it's caused by food so did you go through a personal conversion before you went through a professional eureka. it was all the other way around it took time i have to say

for me i took time out my father i'm assuming you eat the diet you recommend i do now oh yeah. exactly the opposite growing up my father left the cattle business and he was a physician and he treated diabetes with medications himself and i have to say i think it was really frustrating because the disease never turned around and so when i was in medical school it was the last thing that i wanted to deal with because diabetes is a one way street to more and more complications and to think that we now know how to really tackle this disease is a wonderful thing but and some of the i mean diabetes is type two diabetes type type one childhood diabetes you know inflammation pancreas still theories virus when i was what. type two diabetes is used to be called adult onset diabetes increasingly now we're seeing this among kids it's epidemic in the united states. some of the complications are what die of diabetic retinopathy blindness blindness

it's the leading cause of blindness leading cause of amputations because of the impaired circulation to the legs so the leading contributor to kidney disease so you end up on dialysis and if you put it all together people lose a decade easily of life or more for having type two diabetes for having type two diabetes so and if it does not have to happen right so what's what is the mechanism what is it that is causing people to have type two diabetes and what can they do about it besides going to the doctor and saying give me some of that whatever the drug here's what it's not and so. when that when the doctor does a blood test they say there's too much sugar in your blood that's glucose and so don't eat sugar and don't eat bread because that turns to sugar and don't need any other carbs like potatoes and passed and so forth and that's not the issue that never was the issue the problem has been shown now because we can look inside the cells in ways we couldn't before and if you look inside the muscle cells in particular they're filled with little particles of fat. doctors hate words like

that we call it interim my own cellular lip it but it's fat building up in the cells and when that is their insulin can't work so the diet that and i h. funded us to test was a diet that really just didn't have the fat it so no animal products vegetarian diet because now there is zero animal fat it's veggies actually a vegan diet though you know dairy products as well no eggs cheese no milk that's right no no animal products and also there's no animal fat and we keep the oils low so the person is taking that bottle of olive oil going. over their salad that fat gets into the body too so we were really minimizing it and what we see is the fat starts to drain out of the cells the insulin starts working again and we've seen people with their blood sugars come down and down and down into the normal range their need for medication diminishes and they don't get me wrong i don't want people to fire their doctor and throw their medicines in the trash because the process is gradual but it's the most powerful program that we've ever seen more

powerful than any of the oral diabetes medications and and. how did you come to this i mean. did you like put some patients on this diet did you do you try your saw. tell me about the study tell me how you got it well the first time there was a diabetes foundation in virginia they came to us and they said we really they have been funding a lot of rat and mouse research and they said we're not getting anywhere with this understandable reasons and they said we need to be studying human beings and how do we do this and i suggested diet studies because if you look around the world the people with the least diabetes live in japan or rural china where their rice in their reading vegetables and the fast food chains have moved in so we did have our first study and it was just dramatic to see how how much people improved so then and i funded us in two thousand and three to really do a more definitive test and. and people lose weight and their cholesterol is

improved we had one man who said make sure you tell everybody that my erectile dysfunction went away so what we'll find reasons to reach a lot of people but the bottom line is it really works now it's really quite remarkable. let me move that well actually just to finish this people on and so on you know they're told you're going to take this insulin for the rest of your life. that's no longer necessary if i can get to a person soon enough what happens is if their blood sugar has been persistently high eventually the pain curious starts to run out of gas and has trouble producing the insulin year after year after year so when a person has had diabetes for twenty or thirty years we've the diet will improve it but they may continue to need insulin but if i can get to somebody at the time they're diagnosed or in the first few years change the chances that they'll ever need insulin are really quite low but i have to tell you tom put what worries me the most is not the people that i see in research it's their kids because kids

today according to the c.d.c. one in three kids is going to have diabetes in their lifetime one hundred million americans now have pre-diabetes or diabetes it's time but we're spending billions upon billions upon billions of dollars and it's it's going to bankrupt us but the personal cost is just incalculable you're pretty thin it seems that there's an association between this weekend diet basically and people getting skinny is is is there a direct correlation between weight and diabetes and is that is that the is that the one of the things that ties us all together it's one of the things that's right when a person is able to avoid overweight the likelihood of diabetes is low but when you study populations if you look at mediators semi vegetarians vegetarians vegans there's even to have very very little risk of developing diabetes and they're the skinniest people on that on the planet i don't mean normally found i mean there.

their b.m.i. their body mass index right in the center of where they should be yeah do you think that that humans basically evolved to be basically for vegetable leaders with the occasional you know cockroach or a little bit you know in sector meat or something but you know as as condiments i mean you talked about japanese and world chinese they use they they eat but they eat is a condiment rather than as a as a staple i put that question to richard leakey paleoanthropologist because if you look at the other great apes there eat you know they're not eating you know need to they certainly don't need dairy products as well occasionally and say yeah exactly so how did mediating begin and what he suggested to me was it's true that human beings if you look at our teeth are into just attracted to all it also herbivore so how did we become mediators his explanation was that perhaps during a time when food was not widely available maybe a drought human beings began to scavenge but that was really only practical when

you had stone tools so that you could cut the meat off of the bones that the lion had left behind so it probably began with the stone age and for whatever reason it just sort of continued and once we had fire then it was something that people could crawl so meat is concentrated i mean fat is concentrated calories it's concentrated calories but to this day if i have a person who comes in and they've got diabetes or weight problems or heart disease they have a pre stone age body so if i feed them the vegetables and fruits and beans and simple plant based foods these disease processes processes reverse their arteries start opening up again what do you think about this hypothesis the it was i think i saw york times article a couple weeks ago that. alzheimer's might be a form of that. i think is true. i think it's true. first of all i should say that people are starting to get used to the idea that food affects your heart or your waistline. the idea that it could affect your brain is

a totally novel thing for many many people but back in one nine hundred ninety three there is a study in chicago affiliated with rice university they brought in thousands of people they tracked what they were eating and it turned out that those people who had the most saturated fat that's the fat in animal products those who had the most saturated fat in their diet had three times the risk of alzheimer's disease compared to other people and the question is why didn't we know what raises cholesterol is it doing something else well the simple minded thing is it's clogging up the arteries to your brain you're getting less oxygen sure true enough but it does more than that the brain cells put out a compound called beta amyloid if you could look at a brain cell it's like a sausage maker and these little strains of sausage are coming out as beta amyloid forms little clumps of plaques called plaques and microscopic meatballs and get in between the brain cells and that is the primary hallmark of alzheimer's disease

well if you have a fatty diet especially animal fat if you run a high cholesterol level the brain puts out more of that and you have more plaque in your brain so the answer is don't be eating these animal products not just for your heart right but to protect your brain that's that's quite remarkable is there a is there a genetic association. they have identified a genus integrated s'posed people alzheimer's does that make them more vulnerable to diet or does that is that independent of what you said is exactly it it's called the epsilon for a leo if you got it from mom you got three times the risk of alzheimer's if you got it from mom and dad ten to fifteen times the risk but what the gene does is it makes a protein it goes around in your bloodstream carrying cholesterol from place to place does the same in your brain so if you're not eating cholesterol and you're not you're not eating that saturated fat because your body to make cholesterol the theory is that the gene will hopefully be left with not much to do. so in other

words there are genes that are like dictators james that say blue eyes or brown hair you can't argue with that may give orders but the genes for alzheimer's disease are committees they make suggestions and you can fight with them in the same way there are genes for diabetes but genes are not destiny you can say i don't think i want to get diabetes and if you don't eat the way your parents say and if you if you don't open your mom's recipe file too often you read in a healthier way suddenly what runs in families may not affect your remark well let's let's take this to heart disease if you can do it right after the break more conversations with great minds with dr neal barnard it's worth. listening. to i. think.

that's the. least. live. with the. least misleading. at least. i mean better at least. so.

conversations of the great minds of dr neal barnard he has been a principal investigator co-investigator in many clinical trials investigating the effects of diet on health but he wants to take a look at the effects of hereditary intervention dietary interventions of type two diabetes patients the author of several books including dr program for reversing

diabetes scientifically proven system for reversing diabetes without drugs and the twenty one day weight loss kick start and breaking the food seduction let's get back to it. i have i have seen this in my own family my my with regard to diet and disease. my brother in law had a heart attack you or so ago. had bypass triple bypass surgery quadruple or whatever some massive bypass and went on total begin diet and lost about your weight and now it has his doctors are totally freaked out because he doesn't need any of the medication that they have to offer and he has literally not taking any of them and it's not because he's being you know a. refractory patient it's because it's because he no longer needs them i mean according to their own analysis of his blood he's getting to the cause of the disease yeah exactly and apparently that's the same story that happened to bill

clinton so how does this diet cures or prevents diabetes also cure or prevent heart disease and can it even reverse heart disease it can clearly reverse heart disease now when i was in medical school this was unheard of heart disease was progressive just like diabetes a one way street and the idea was yes you'll need a bypass sooner or later but that doesn't last forever you'll need a repeat bypass and eventually you'll die of it but it was nine hundred ninety we're talking two decades ago the dr dean ornish said well wait a minute. what if we use a plant based diet there's effectively no cholesterol in the diet anymore and there's no animal fat to drive that cholesterol machinery in your blood because those particles of cholesterol irritate the early walls and they cause the arteries to gradually narrow choking off the supply of blood whether it's to your brain or to your heart so it's an inflammatory across its influence yes it's an inflammatory process and so this very simple approach don't eat the animal products keep the

oils low and don't smoke be physically active simple things when dr ornish did angiograms in the patients at which is it which shows this little trickle of blood . through the heart the arteries were opening up no surgery no roto rooter nothing the arteries were opening up on their own and i called dr ornish i said you know every every i had never met him i said every doctor in america will believe this works but what they will say is nobody could follow that it's too extreme so he said come on out let's let's do a study and i interviewed all of his patients and what we discovered is they were thrilled they were delighted for us of all they could eat spaghetti and you know all kinds of foods they enjoyed they just set aside the animal products but they lost weight and their arteries were opening up again their energy was back they didn't need all the pills they didn't have the side effects and the expense and expense in the same way that president clinton has said you know i reversed my

heart disease but look at me i'm twenty five pounds thinner he looks he looks better than he has in a long period of time so. it's so this is this is reversible there's you know one of the one of the contras to this take cholesterol out of your diet is that the body produces close yes are you suggesting that the or is this correct that the body produces cholesterol it responds to inflammation and that x x x journal cholesterol produces the inflammation that causes the body to produce its own cluster all that. narrows the arteries that the mechanism. that let me give a real simple minded view of it which is the liver makes cholesterol and other body tissues do as well because you need a little bit of cholesterol to make certain hormones testosterone and estrogen are actually made from cholesterol it's also the glue that holds our cell membranes together so if you didn't have any cholesterol you would dissolve into a heap of jelly you need

a bit of it but your liver makes that trace that you need so if you're eating animal products you're getting their cholesterol added to your own and if you eat the animal fat that stimulates your cholesterol making machinery so it's just you're getting too much traffic in the. what of all these cholesterol particles that you just don't need and are better off without so the cow eats the grass the cows liver makes its own cholesterol for the cow and then to eat the column. or the fish or the chicken or in any of the animals any animal product right and and what are your thoughts on eggs same story if you will you know when a chicken lays an egg. everything that makes a chick is in that egg everything to make feathers and a bee and feet and skin and a liver and it's all in there that the chicken the egg does not order out for room service so packed in that egg is more cholesterol than an eight ounce steak a huge amount of fat and so forth and it's not something that we should really be eating because it's it's it really is a time bomb of cholesterol which increases your risk of both of heart disease and

you know this is what about cancer. how does cancer fit into cancer if you look at cancer rates people who thought well how much is genetic and how much is something else will genes are not really changing over time but cancer rates have been changing quite dramatically and in the earlier part of the last century breast cancer was shooting up as our meat and intake was going up in our fat intake and our calorie content in general was going up as our waistlines were expanding so if we reversed those things cancer rates will fall what's the connection it's not cholesterol it's the fact that our diet changes our hormones it's diet can affect the hormones in a woman's body it can drive estrogen it can increase the trojan levels in a man it can increase testosterone it doesn't make it more macho what it will do is increase prostate cancer risks in a man or breast cancer risk in a woman and a plant based diet helps the body to have an adequate amount of estrogen but not

the excess is the same of testosterone. food addiction our our our director kevin is famously addicted to giant slurpee drinks. sorry what happened is not. what i did last year in the studio is what happens when people have you know an addiction to a particular food what is that you know is that a sign of something is that a is that a bad thing or a good thing is that your body craves it as it needs it or is it to take it as it is not that you need it people have rationalized this i have to have chocolate because i magnesium to fish i say nonsense if i take a chocolate binge or i mean a person who just is shoveling chocolate there's a drug called no locks we give it to people who have overdosed with heroin man's passed out on the street he's going to die of heroin overdose i put in the locks on his bloodstream he goes to the brain and it attaches to opiate receptors and the

heroin can't work if i give it to a chocolate addict if i can use that word i can give them a tray of chocolate they take a bite and they just send it back down they've lost interest in it at the theobromine try. some great question it's the means are stimulants but this is something else this is an opiate effect that probably comes as soon as the chocolate touches your tongue opiates are released in the brain the endorphins probably and that triggers it and there are certain foods that just hijack that system more than anything else sugar will do it chocolate will do it cheese does it to a degree meat will do it but you know nobody ever went to the seven eleven and nine o'clock at night to buy cauliflower really because that food people think well it's ok or an orange or an apple or whatever they don't they don't have that drug effect this would all be fine except for the fact that cheese is seventy percent fat and chocolate is fatty too and sugar has calories we don't need so those those even

modest addictions cause us to get a little bit off track and tell you about our p.c. or yeah that's the physicians committee for responsible medicine when i finished my residency here. back in one thousand nine hundred five i decided i really wanted to have doctors to have tools for helping patients to change and one of the products that we've developed our programs i should say is called the kickstart totally free doesn't cost anything but it p c r m doubt or you sign up and then we'll send you an e-mail every day with recipes and little cooking videos and how you can change your diet and my hope is that a woman sitting on the couch and she's using this program will get her reluctance to do it with her because they both need help and it's a fun thing what we encourage people to do is to try a plant based diet but because that sounds like a tall order do it for three weeks you can do anything for three weeks and i have celebrities like elisa silverstone and kathy freston and various athletes who pump

you up and make you feel good about that so that's a kick start it's a p.c.r. and dot org doesn't cost a thing and this is this is basically. you no longer need a physician or at least you're not going to need one for these you're diminishing your need your probability of need for these things so saying an apple a day keeps the doctor away true it's partly true as long as people have apples and green vegetables and whole grains and beans and the whole thing might that be might that be met or might that be part of our our collective experience of a plant based diet is a healthy thing nobody ever said a steak if they keep it which is the opposite by the way i don't think people should fire their doctors particular if a person has diabetes or has high blood pressure it takes time for you to to need to be able to reduce your medications and so the doctor can work with you to keep you out of trouble as the diet is improving right. to what extent if people go on different diets to lose weight if somebody goes on

a diet to lose weight it was dr atkins was and he was like this high fat diet this high fat diet was great. what are your thoughts on it seems totally crazy given what you've been so i think it was a serious mistake his theory was if you don't eat any carb. hydrate you'll lose weight and that's true but the reason is not that there's anything bad about carbohydrates carbohydrates like rice and potatoes i mean that's half of what we eat it's these are the healthiest foods but what happened is about half of what we eat are carbohydrates so if you take half of your food and you're not eating it you lose weight with that mistake you made was leaving in the meats and the dairy products that lead to heart disease and when he died and people talked about the fact that he himself had heart disease many people started looking askance at that kind of dietary approach if a person comes into me and they have a weight problem i do ballads say count calories and go hungry what i'll say is the vegetables and fruits and whole grains and beans and all the things that that turns into whether it's oatmeal with cinnamon and raisins or be in chile or whatever it

might be and don't worry about counting calories because they'll take care of themselves the fiber will fill you up the low fat content will cause your waistline to start slimming and the healthiest people i see other people who just stick with it and stop using oils will more olive oil well if you're on it and tell your restaurant i don't think you need to blot your noodles exactly but but i would keep it modest. it beats the socks off chicken fat but you don't want to go crazy and because it sounds like eating in restaurants we have about a half a minute left his since seems like eating in restaurants could be suicidal no you can do it italian places the chef will love to bring you angel hair pasta with chunky tomatoes a wild mushrooms a chinese restaurant many many choices extra points for japanese filmmaking veggie sushi and me so soup mexican beans and rice you can do it even the steakhouse has to offer vegetables or more dr bernard thank you so much for being with us tonight pleasure thank you for spreading the great work dr neal barnard to see this in

other conversations of great minds go to our website conversations with great stuff . and that's the way it is the night friday december fourteenth two thousand and twelve and don't forget democracy begins when you get active tag your it sort of. side by side.

if you're. going to take three. or three.

three. three stooges three. old three broken videos for your media project st medio gondar t. dot com. good afternoon welcome to capital account i'm lauren lyster here in washington d.c. these are headlines for friday december fourteenth two thousand and twelve whether it is going over the fiscal cliff or spanish house prices suffering a severe fall there seems to be a universal fear of financial fear of gravity we're scared of falling but ironically we don't seem to have much fear of altitude bush should wait jim grant founder and publisher of grant's interest rate observer is here to offer his my monthly outlook plus voters in japan head to the polls sunday to cast their ballots and parliamentary elections and if recent polls are any indication they look set to .