Dr. Neal Barnard: Foods That Fight Pain

today we're going to talk about one of the more unusual reasons why people change their diets and that's using foods to fight pain which is something you wouldn't normally think of as having anything to do with each other but they do. People with migraines have often discovered that if you get a migraine... if you catch it really early, you go into the kitchen and you brew some pretty stiff black coffee and you have two cups of it real quick, it will knock that migraine out. for many people caffeine is a pain suppressant which is why if you take a look at some Excedrin, it has caffeine in it. It's not to perk you up, it's to suppress pain. Now, on the other hand, sugar does the opposite if I take some research volunteers and I give them a little shock on their hand andI gradually increase the voltage and then I give them sugar they feel that pain and it becomes intolerable. At a lower level college sophomores are the only people who agree to this kind of research, by the way. So we get up in the morning and we have a big cup of coffee which suppresses pain but we dump in a whole bunch of sugar, which accentuates pain. Sugar readjusts brain chemistry so you

feel pain more acutely and for the whole rest of the day we're mixing up our pain trigger foods and our pain safe foods not recognizing which is which. So tonight I want to focus on four different ways we can use foods to fight pain. Let me go ahead and show you the first slide. These are four things we can do we can reopen our circulation for chest pain, back pain even... other kinds of circulatory problems. We can separate our pain trigger foods from our pain safe foods if the problem is migraines or arthritis or fibromialgia or irritable bowel. We can rebalance our hormones for menstrual pain, breast pain, even some kinds of cancer pain and we can rebalance body chemistry for diabetes, shingles, sickle cell anemia, many other conditions where food is the last thing you'd think of Well let's start with reopening circulation. How many of you?...know Doctor Dean Ornish most of it. Ornish is a young Harvard-trained physician. He's at the University of California in

San Francisco and he has revolutionized cardiology. What he did was he wanted to see not if we could prevent heart disease but rather can we make it just go away? Can we get rid of heart disease? Can we reverse this process and he split the patients that he had into two groups, one group got basically the American Heart Association type of diet you know what that is: the chicken without the skin... eat more fish... don't eat so many eggs... don't smoke... take a vacation... that kind of thing. Now the other group was asked to follow a pure vegetarian diet and they didn't even know what a lentil was, starting out, but they had to figure it out and they were also asked to do a few other things. Let me show you the next slide... They had to also take a half hour walk every day or an hour three times a week if that works better to try to manage stress in their lives which is why he didn't do the work in Washington, D.C., where I live, and to avoid tobacco completely and a year later everybody goes back into the hospital

and they have an angiogram, which is an x ray of the heart and it shows you the artery blockages and you compare it to the results to the same test done at the beginning of the study and what they found was that all these people taking the skin off their chicken night after night after night and eating fish whether they like the taste or not when they looked in their arteries they found that the blockages were actually worse than when they started. If you if you switch from red meat to white meat your artery blockages continue to grow and get worse but on the vegetarian diet these people who learned that when they had soup it had to be minestrone or lentil or split pea or something like that and if they made spaghetti instead of the meat sauce it had to be the light Marinara and when they went to Taco Bell instead of it being the meat taco, it had to be the bean burrito, hold the cheese, or if they had a hot dog or a burger, it had to be the one to get at the health food store that was made of soy or wheat derivatives or something like that when

they made all these changes their chest pain first of all was gone in about five to six weeks just gone like magic. But at the end of a year when they looked in their arteries and measured the blockages they were actually dissolving the artery blockage were starting to go away so much that you could see a difference and 82% percent of patients in one year. No surgery, no drugs, no nothing just simple easy lifestyle changes. There's something about this way of eating that is not possible with any other kind of diet and that is that it allows the body to heal itself. Now, let me show you the next slide. This is the most important slide I have to show because a lot of people think well you know I don't eat much red meat but I eat white meat. Well, the leanest beef is about twenty nine percent fat as a percentage of calories. The leanest chicken is about twenty three percent fat. Fish vary... some are lower some are higher some are a lot higher. Chinook salmon fifty two percent fat

but broccoli is only eight percent fat and beans are only four percent fat and rice is one to five and a potatoes is one percent fat and none of these foods because they're from plants they never any cholesterol at all... zero. Whereas beef, chicken, fish all have cholesterol. Cholesterol and fat are two different things. Animal products have both. They both encourage a higher cholesterol level in your blood and that stimulates the blockages to form. But the plant foods have zero cholesterol virtually no fat and that's when the healing occurs. If you got a loved one and you say ok "I don't want you to have a heart attack" or you yourself you're concerned about your arteries. Do you go from here down to there and call it a day. If you do, you're headed for a heart attack. As a matter of fact, we have a half dozen studies now showing that if you follow the American heart association diet of chicken, fish, and so forth, you are going to die of a heart attack. You get progression. The American

heart association diet actually causes heart disease. I'm not saying it's as bad as an unrestricted diet it's just not enough better. If you get down here to the power foods, heart disease reverses, not in a few people, it reverses in almost everybody. Let me show you the next slide it's not just heart disease though if you could look inside your back something remarkable is happening. Between these bony vertebrae is a leathery cushion we call it disk and if you've got... any of you have back pain? Any of you have a history of back pain? You ever have back surgery? Ok, the surgeon says here's a problem this disk, the cushion here is breaking apart, the inside is coming out like stuffing is coming out of a pillow and it hits against a nerve and that causes pain that nerve might be the sciatic nerve going down your leg so sciatica is this pain all the way down your leg. The doctor says: fine we'll pull the disk out problem is, six months later, you've got more pain than you started with. And you can operate and again

and again and again but things tend to get worse we've learned that this actually doesn't start in the spine at all. It doesn't start in these bony vertebrae. It doesn't start in the disks. It starts in the arteries that lead to the spine. There are two lumbar arteries to every one of these disks i'm sorry to every one of these vertebrae. And those lumbar arteries are there to bring in oxygen, nutrients, and also there are veins to carry away the metabolic products of your body's metabolism of the cells. Well, it turns out that the very first place that artery blockages form in your body is not here in your heart but rather in the arteries to the back. Let me show you the next slide. Here's your heart. The aorta comes off, goes right down smack in front of the spine, it gives off

two lumbar arteries at every single segment and then it splits to get on the right and left leg. Now when I was a kid, I grew up in Fargo, North Dakota. And, I'd get out of bed and my three brothers and my sister and Iwould be crowded around the kitchen where my mother would be frying bacon and she would take all these bacon strips out of the pan and put them on a paper towel to drain and the hot grease left in the pan she would pour off carefully into a jar and that grease as it cools what happens to it? It solidifies, right? Turns into kinda like wax so you don't have to refrigerate it, you just throw it in the cupboard and the next day she would pull it off the shelf and dig the spoon back in it and throw it back in the frying pan and fry eggs in it. And it's amazing that any of us made it to adulthood, as I reflect on it now If you could look into the arteries, here's what you see in a kid of four and five, you don't see too much damage to the heart arteries but down

here in the lower aorta, you will see the beginnings of fatty streaks in kids as young as two and three and four and the first place where an artery blockage forms is not in your carotid arteries to your brain not in the coronary arteries to your heart it's in the right at the entrance to the lumbar arteries to your back. By age twenty ten percent of young people in America have at least one advanced blockage in a lumbar artery. And that's about the age isn't it when we start to see back troubles You don't know see heart attacks at forty, but you'll start to see some people with back strain and back problems. If you think about it, you've been using your back hard all your life. You were tumbling around as a kid though if you got big wide open circulation you can heal. The oncce you compromise the healing process the disease process takes ove. A couple decades later you see the beginnings of heart disease and a couple decades after that you see the stroke but the stroke is not a neurological illness and the hearts or cardiac illness and the back problems an orthopedic illness. They are all

signs of eating foods, smoking cigarettes, doing things that block blood flow It's all the same. In fact, there's another piece of this that I've sometimes had to use as a secret weapon. I was giving a lecture in Lubbock, Texas and there's some parts of the country where I notice nutritional lectures go over like really like a lead ballon I was at Texas Tech University and I was giving a talk and I was talking... I was saying that meat really is a problem that encourages artery blockages and basically the less of it you eat, the better off you'd be and a vegetarian meal wouldn't kill you. Anyway, the longer I went on the louder the audience got, heckling.. and kind of elbowing each other what's it's all about? It suddenly dawned on me Texas Tech University in Lubbock Texas is the middle of cattle country. This is where you go to become a cattle rancher and they consider this sort of a threat to their future careers but it isn't just heart attacks. A meat-based diet encourages colon cancer, many other problems and so we press on giving

our lecture but the audience got louder and louder and louder and it got to the point where you could almost not hear a thing I was saying. So I finally say: "look you guys, you can heckle me as much as you want to, but this process of atherosclerosis, this hardening of the arteries that comes from a lifetime of eating beef and other high fat foods, it doesn't just cause heart attacks, it can also make you impotent." And I had their complete attention for the rest of my lecture. I wasn't making this up: by age sixty, one in four American men is is impotent and the reason isn't a Viagra deficiency. The reason is that if you block... are with me on this? If Yyou block the arteries to your heart, you have a heart attack. You block the arteries to the the brain, you have a stroke. You block the arteries to the back, the back cannot heal. If you block the arteries to any vital organ, if you catch my drift, it doesn't work so well anymore... So anyway, at the end of my lecture I had all these guys lined up for my macho tofu recipes and power brown rice and everything

I finally found something that young men care about. Anyway, let's go to the next slide. So the first thing we want to do is reopen our circulation and that's the first key to healing but the second one is to separate pain-trigger foods from pain-safe foods. Migraines wonderful example. Any of you ever have a migraine... headache... lot of you... which food... have you ever noticed foods that trigger them? Sal o.k. anything else? Wine... Which kind of wine? Red wine. Any any other fruits trigger migraines Chocolate'll do it. Ok. People have noticed this and you find it over, first first you kind of suspect it, then you try it later and you confirm it but if you see the doctor, the doctor's likely to say "ah, you know, I wouldn't waste much time thinking about that." Except in 1983, researchers at the hospital for sick children at Children in London took kids who had migraines, which I have to tell you, is the saddest thing in the world. you see a nine year old kid... if you never had a migraine this is not "I'm having a bad day kind of tension pain" this

is pounding pain on one side of your head, it's accompanied by nausea and vomiting and it last for hours, it can go overnight these kids can't do anything... they can't study they can't read... they can't think... they can't play... they can't go to school... they can't do anything. All they do is was lie in the dark hoping to go to sleep because if they if they could wake up without a headache that's their cure. Well researchers in London took 88 kids with migraines all they did was take out of their diet the foods that trigger migraines. eight were cured. 4 more were improved. Only 6 kids they couldn't help. What were the foods? Let me Let me show you. The next slide will show you. These are the dirty dozen dairy products, worst migraine trigger. Most common... even skim... It's the protein not the fat. Dairy fat is ever bad as... every bit as bad as you thought it was but it fatten our waistline, it will clog our arteries. The proteins trigger the migraine Chocolate is number 2. Eggs are number 3. Followed by citrus fruits, meat... I put chicken here because people they

go "oh chicken, I... I don't eat meat, I only eat chicken." Chicken is meat. Wheat... Nuts tomatoes, onions, corn, apples, and bananas. Now there are a couple things that I should say the first is you don't have every trigger, you might have one trigger you might have 2 triggers. So what we do is to figure out which triggers are yours is we take them all out of the diet simultaneously for 10 days and I have recipes for you, so you're not gonna go hungry. Take a look... I have an elimina... a whole elimination diet section of foods that fight pain. Then, after 10 days when the migraines have stopped coming, we put the foods back into the diet 1 at a time, starting at the bottom of the list with bananas. Have a lot of bananas. Have 4 or 5 or 6 of them a day for 2 days... Really test yourself and see what your reaction is if you don't have a migraine, then that's not your trigger. Then you go to apples... do the same for 2 days then to corn, then to onions... keep any that you seem to tolerate if you get a migraine pull that out and don't test it again for another 2 weeks. I would say

it's a sensitivity. I'm reluctant to say "it's an allergy" because you go to the doctor and the doctor says "pull off your shirt" and does little scratch testing on your back and may give you a list as long as long as your arm of all the things you are allergic to, but it might be nothing on this list and it may... it may have nothing to do with migraine headaches. That's only one kind of allergy. There are other kinds of hypersensitivity that aren't... that that don't manifest in that way. But it is a physical reaction it's not just that you're so joyful having you know eaten huge gobs of chocolate and washed it down with red wine. It's a physical reaction in your body and what you can actually do if you want to and the researchers do do is they will give you different capsules. one of which has the dairy protein in it, the other which is a placebo and you'll show over and over and over again that it's real. Um, the other thing I should say the real quick is these aren't all unhealthy foods, are they? I mean what's wrong with a tomato? What's wrong with a banana with wrong with an apple? but in in fact that tomato... that red color is lycopene... Have you heard

of this it's a cousin of beta carotene. A carrot is orange because of beta carotene A tomato's red pigment is lycopene, it's also in a watermelon. That red color is not there to make it look nice. It's a very very powerful antioxidant that protects the tomato it protects you too. A man who has 10 or more servings of tomatoes every week has 35 percent less risk of prostate cancer. I hate to say that Dominoe's [Pizza] is somehow therapeutic but it seems to be. Um... anyway... these are simply foods that people tend to be sensitive to rather like if you knew someone who is allergic to strawberries, they get a rash. There's nothing wrong with a strawberry, they're just sensitive and in a minute I'm gonna tell you why these foods. Let me show you the next slide... If you still have migraines there's an herb called fever few. Have you heard of this? It goes way back to the Middle Ages... been used for fever and everything else and for migraines. It's very good... you can go to the health food store and buy a plant you can grow your own fever few, you just tear 2-3 leaves off and eat them... throw them in a salad or

you can buy capsules, they work fine. We have 2 placebo-controlled research trials showing that they work so it's uh no adverse affects as far as we're aware. Next slide please Where this is even more important is in arthritis because in rheumatoid arthritis we have to tell patients,I can give you drugs that will stop the pain or at least reduce the pain but they don't do anything to the damage the joints. The damage to the joints continue... However, in 1981 researchers reported the case of a woman who had rheumatoid arthritis for 25 years that turned out to be nothing but a sensitivity to corn. She got the corn out of the diet and the arthritis was gone But about 6 weeks later, the symptoms came back and the doctors first thought well it was a placebo improvement and then they figured out by looking very carefully at what she was eating... that her cook had started using cornstarch as a thickener and that's what caused the pain. They took it out of the diet again, her arthritis went away. Around the same time, there's a case of a young woman

who actually had juvenile arthritis, had for years. turned out it to be entirely due to milk it's a milk protein sensitivity, very common... this was initially thought to be rare but then researchers took larger numbers of people. This study was published in 1991 in the Lancet as a lead article. They found that using a vegetarian diet and when I say a vegetarian diet, I mean a pure vegetarian diet, a vegan diet because we avoid the eggs and dairy and when you do that, you've knocked out two of the biggest triggers and people get better. Their pain goes down, their swelling goes down, their stiffness goes down and if you change your diet enough 70 to 80 percent of people with rheumatoid arthritis improve or it flat out of goes away. Let me show you the next slide Here are the foods. They look remarkably like the foods from migraines, don't they? Dairy's again number 1, corn is now number 2. There's meat again. Wheat, eggs, citrus fruits, potatoes are on this list, tomatoes, nuts, coffee. We do it exactly the same way. If you've got rheumatoid arthritis, take them all out of the diet, wait for 10 days to 2 weeks

let the joints cool down. It doesn't take long, it's very quick, and put them back in 1 at a time at the bottom of the list. Wait 2 to 3 days before you reintroduce a new one and you're gonna see the results are... I... I don't wanna say it helps everybody, I don't think it does but it is surprising not only how many people it helps but how stunning the degree of improvement is that they have. In fact, I even hesitate to sometimes... to tell about how... it just does'nt sound possible... um, but I'll tell you anyway. The first lecture I gave in this series was in Michigan during the summer and there was a woman taking careful notes because her daughter was 39 years old and had had rheumatoid arthritis for 27 7 years. She had... It was so bad that she could not walk for more than about a block and half or two blocks she couldn't take her dog out because the leash hurt her wrist too much, she was sedentary and she was just sitting around the home, gaining weight and out of shape at 39

and her mother attended a conference that Iwas giving and told her about this list and the daughter was angry. She said "now it's another diet thing I got to do. I got to give up this and this and this and this and this and this" but only for 10 days-2 weeks, not forever. But she still didn't wanna do it, so she said "I'll just I'll give up this one, that's it." And in about 4 days, her pain was dramatically less. And after about a week, she was able to walk much further without pain and she improved and she improved and she improved. And her mother wrote me this long two-page letter about what she had seen and what what really brought tears to the mother's eyes and then made her write this was that this young woman's brother got married at about this time and so they went to the wedding and after the wedding was the reception and the band starts playing and the bride and groom get up and they dance around and then this 39 year old woman's husband they take they join hands they

stand up and they're dancing too. along with everybody else. Whereas before that everyone thought she couldn't this was impossible she'd given up on ever having any kind of a normal life and I see this kind of thing as not unusual now, it's absolutely routine. It's not everybody but as I said. if you change the diet enough, 70 to 80 percent people improve or simply goes away Any of you know John McDougall's work... ok, a lot of you... McDougall has just completed an arthritis study too. He's doing another one and his diet is actually much looser than this. All he does is take the animal animal products and the oils out. And it's astounding. He sees huge improvements, just from that. So never say never. Regretably a lot of arthritis specialists say there's no evidence that diet works it's a complete mistake. Those people need to get back in the medical library and give it a try it's very quick. Let me show the next slide... oh as a cup of coffee yeah... uh ginger... this is actually... it's an interesting compound. it's mild but it's surprising what it does. It's been used in asian medicine for

a long period of time and it's been used for arthritis. Modern medicine shows us how it works. What it does is it stops the white blood cells from making compounds that sparked inflammation so people with arthritis can use it, rheumatoid arthritis or osteoarthritis in fact people with osteoarthritus should use the diet elimination as well. With ginger it really doesn't matter how you take that what matters is the amount you need about half a teaspoon to a teaspoon per day but you can take it ,either you can slice it off a ginger roo,t throw it into some water, boil it makes a very palatable tea. Or you can take powdered ginger just add it to vegetables that you might be eating or you can pour it into a glass of water and just drink it down. Its fine. The oddest things I ever saw was a man who treated rheumatoid arthritis with crabtree and evelyn ginger marmalade which works fine.It's fifteen percent pure ginger and it works. Let me show you the next slide When we look at the different foods that cause sensitivities,uh any of you have fibromyalgia

a miserable condition where go to the doctor and the doctor says ok we know what this is this is this is not joint pain like arthritis it's pain between your joints and tenderness and th doctor pushes on different pointsin of your body and you go ouch and when the doctor has found this in eighteen spots the doctor he has a look of satisfaction because you have a diagnosis fibromyalgia and then you say great what'll I do at that point the doctor kind of furrows his brow says well we don't actually know what causes it we don't know how to treat it and they send you to a different doctor who never heard of it descended to a third doctor who says it's in your head go see a psychiatrist and it's not in your head it's in your body it came out of the blue it hit you very hard and you're miserable. Well researchers have started to file, we're not with fibromyalgia where we are with rheumatoid arthritis in migraines but there's a lot of emerging evidence that food sensitivities play role. I suspect they may interact with infections and other things but

we've seen remarkable improvements when people get away from certain foods, dairy is again very big on the list the other traders are very common, plus sulfites they're in certain wines, they're also spread all over salad bars for to keep to preserve them and for folks with fibromyalgia it's often a problem.You can do an elimination diet you can also get a blood test uh your doctor can draw blood samples send it to a lab in Reston Virginia and they will give you a list of the foods that you need to avoid it's much more accurate than common skin testing um you don't have to use that lab there many other labs and if you want I'll be glad to give you the numbers that your doctor can call. But when we look at irritable bowel same story same fruit crohn's disease same kinds of foods you might think well why is it that the foods that trigger migraines are a lot like the fruits that trigger arthritis and the foods the trigger fibromyalgia and irritable bowel. Why is it the same why is it these usual suspects. Well i'm going to suggest that the reason is that these are not

natural foods for human consumption. I don't mean they're necessarily all bad. I mean they're not natural and our body is reacting to them as if they are a unnatural.Let me tell you what I mean. If you have an autoimmune condition like rheumatoid arthritis in other autoimmune you know what I mean, that it's your immune system attacking your own tissues an auto immune reaction. Well what's our immune system really for, anybody what do you have an autoimmune system for? Why is it there, to fight disease like what like bacteria, right ,anything that doesn't make enemies, bacteria, viruses, telemarketers, cancer cells whoever your immune system is there to force these things away. Well was our immune system programmed in Portland Oregon last week.No we had to have an immune system for as long as we've been on this earth and where did the human species start? Where did we begin? Where where were the first humans

strolling around, Africa o.k/ and not South America, right not North America, not Australia it's probably East Africa now some might argue for the middle east somewhere that neck of the woods.Well was there a cow's milk in East Africa three million years ago? Well hold on about that .Dairy products were really consumed only by calves until about 4,000 bc and in 4,000 bc there was an amazing technological advance.Human beings figured out how to make cows stand still. and then human beings had access to something that nature figured was out of primates reach, it was in a cows udder and even adult cows don't drink milk.No mammal drinks milk in adulthood and when the're infants they only drink their own species specific milk. But primates, let's face it we're restless, we like to try new things and if we can make a standstill

and milk them and make products like cheese and yogurt and ice cream and flavorthat with sugar and things like that we'll you know we'll do it and that's what we've been doing ever since and it's no big surprise that many conditions are linked to the cow's milk proteins and arthritis is one, migraines are another irritable bowel is another, lactose intolerance which affects seventy percent of Africa Americans fifty five percent Hispanics ninety percent of Asian Americans but only fifteen percent of caucasians so it's apparently caucasians working at the Department of Agriculture making that pyramid thing and saying everybody needs milk. Yeah sure you've got your own belly ache anyway but also juvenile onset diabetes is now believed to be a reaction to cow's milk proteins or kids were breast fed or when that's impossible on a soy formula we cut down the rates of diabetes. Wheat well wheat requires some effort really doesn't it. It's a grass or take that little seeds you got a pound them and you gotta make flour and dough and noodles

and loaves of bread and then you need fire to prepare this. It's a job so people were'nt doing that three million years ago.Now oranges are very low tech feel you don't do anything it's become but you've got to get to asia to taste a mandarin orange. We're not from there that took a while and in fact you've got to get to North America which humans first did about 25,000 years ago before you could taste corn. That's a new world food, corn, peanuts, tomatoes, chocolate. Can you believe people waited for 25,000 years to first, to taste chocolate.It's true. Now what about meat products? If you look in the mouth of a true carnivore this is the cats and all their cousins, lions, tigers and dogs. Dogs too the whole dog clan wolves, and fox's and so forth. They have what kind of teeth, big long canine teeth don't they. Well if you look in your mouth your canine teeth are they any longer than your incisors, no and that change occurred three

and a half million years ago at least. Primates actually can't do what a dog or cat if you look at a cat they can capture a mouse or a little baby squirrel, a rabbit or something and they can kill the animal with those sharp teeth they can tear the hide off they can tear the meat off the bones but humans don't have claws, we don't have long protruding teeth we're really good at picking stuff but the stone age changed everything. The stone age gave us spears and arrowheads and knives and so that we could capture prey we could kill it we could dismembe remove the hide and when we had fire we're really on to something but we've never accommodated to it. Meat eaters to this day have more colon cancer more heart disease,more diabetes more hypertension more of many many many conditions that people avoid meat and the reason simply is that you don't accommodate to anything that kills you after you've already

reproduced and past your genes on to the next generations like tobacco.You can smoke all you want and if it killed you when you were twelve or thirteen and the only people who could safely smoke would be those who had some kind of genetic defense against and they would pass that along to their progeny but tobacco kills you when you're forty, fifty, sixty, seventy years you've already passed along your genes to your offspring and you never safe from tobacco same with meat. Eggs people would always eat an egg if they could get their hands on them but birds hide them they put in the weirdest places and without fire I gotta tell you it's a totally unpalatable thing. Um to see what it's like to be a pre- stone age person trying to eat meat the next time you're driving down the road and you see a road kill get out of your car and walk over there and just imagine no tools no fire eating this thing.It's a job that would take you forever to deal with that. now when I think about these foods I sometimes think about the koala bear. Anybody know where the koalas are from?

From Australia that's right and for extra credit what do they eat? Eucalyptus leaves that's right, they eat them from breakfast and they eat them for lunch and they have them for dinner and if the're hungry in the middle of the night it's about their big thing. Well let's say I take a koala bear and we're going to go and live in Portland for while and right around lunch time the koala says hey you know let's eat so we pull into the Seven Eleven and were looking for something to eat and the koala is really disappointed there's nothing in there he wants nothing at all and we say well just fit into the culture just kinda get used to it and we'll check on you in a couple years. Two years later we're back at the Seven Eleven we run into our old friend and this poor little koala he's now eating spam and Hostess cupcakes and he's reading the National Enquirer and he's not dead but he's not well and the point is we are the koalas at the Seven Eleven. We left home

and we're eating the foods that technology or migration have put us in contact with and we have no idea what our eucalyptus leaves are. We've completely forgotten because those foods that we're able to consume and that are nearby and also that can be seductive to us because they're sugared upper greased up or salted up and so forth it's miraculous what technology has done to take us away from the foods that are natural to us Let me show you the next slide. These are your pains take foods. Uh these are bandages for the body we use lots and lots lots lots of them for people who are in pain. Brown rice is your best. Any of you see A.M. Northwest on your television today? Any of you see the program? Um, the host there's says oh don't give me brown rice. If you're interested I'll show you a good way to cook brown rice so you actually enjoy it and it will not taste like wet newspapers. Any green, so rice is number one especially if you have a digestive problem it's a good bandage for your digestive tract. Green vegetables any of them, uh broccoli, spinach, collareds ,

kale, brussel sprouts, asparagus, these are just examples of any cooked green vegetable. If you have any kind of digestive problem don't be a hero until you have to have it raw or almost raw for the vitamins. Cook the be Jesus out of it. Knock out those last synthesizing proteins then later on when you have no pain you can back off of cooking if you choose to. Orange vegetables, carrots sweet potatoes, the yellow vegetables, summer or winter squash, non citrus fruits like a pear. So rice the green vegetables, orange or yellow vegetables non citrus fruits have lots and lots of these they are bandages for the body. Why do I say that? They have no cholesterol virtually no fat so they don't encourage artery blockage is they won't encourage weight gain, they also don't trigger migraines, they don't trigger arthritis, they don't trigger fibromyalgia they don't trigger irritable bowel, so you can use lots of them. So we've reopened our circulation that's first key. We've now separated are pain triggers from our pain safe foods and the third thing is to get our hormones into balance. When I was a third year medical student

I used to have to take care of some women who had breast cancer. I was working on a ward where many women had positive mammograms. We would treat we would have treatment there and I must tell you that in some cases surgical treatments and chemotherapy and radiation are life saving. In many cases we lost those battles because mammography does not detect breast cancer until it's grown for eight to ten years. It is not early detection oh go get your mammogram we'll catch it early. That's baloney it's good to catch it but if cancer starts as one cell you can't see that on a mammogram but when it divides into two you can't see that either and when that divides into four and eight and sixteen you are years away from being able to see that. It has to grow into a big lump that you can see on your x ray which is what a mammogram is. At that point it's often spread to other parts of your body and that's what happens in so many cases. I'd rather not see it on a mammogram, I'd rather

keep it negative and to do that we have to do something other than screening and treatment. We have to do prevention which a mammogram is not, there's nothing magical about those x rays. What can you do? There are a few things, one is alcohol. Alcohol increases cancer risk. If a woman drinks every day even if it's one drink if it's every day her risk of breast cancer is increased probably because alcohol interferes with the B vitamin called folic acid. Do you know about folic acid? You know what contexts do you hear about it in, for birth defects, right . For a woman who is going to become pregnant she needs a lot of the B she needs a lot of folic acid one of the B vitamins. Yeah it helps uh prevent what we call neural tube defects such as spina bifida um and it's in beans it's in vegetables and it's also in your Flintstones vitamins but

if you drink alcohol every day even one drink a day it disables some of your folic acid it and it will also increase your colon cancer risk same for men, men and in women and for women breast cancer risk. Uh vegetables and fruits are protected vitamin C rich foods are protected and there's something about fat thats a problem. Countries that have a high fat intake ones on the right have more breast cancer. Netherlands, Canada and Switzerland Australia, USA, Germany, Austria. Why do these countries have high fat diet? Well the reason seems to be that the more well it let's say I open my refrigerator, let's say I open up my cupboard, let's say I open up a restaurant a restaurant menu what do we center that meal around? Some kind of animal product right? I mean that's our dietary staple, for breakfast it's eggs and bacon. These are animal products, for lunch it's chicken salad or tuna salad or a bologna sandwich, for dinner we go to a restaurant and we say I'll have the steak I'll

have the chicken, I'll have the lobster, I'll have the shrimp, that defines a meal. We don't really care if it comes with carrots or green beans, salad or not, bread or rice or potato. Who cares that's not our culture, our culture centers the meal around the meat product the animal product that pushes a straight out on the right of this slide and straight up in cancer risk because you can't get any fat free meat. Meat is not a nutritional supplement for human beings it's a muscle tissue that was designed by nature to move aa cows bones around or chicken wings or a birds' tail and so all it is is protein mixed with fat and the occasional parasite a little dioxin and what ever but aside from that it's protein mixed with fat and it's a surprisingly large amount as you remember from the earlier slide but let's say i'm from Thailand or I'm from Japan or maybe some of the Latin American countries where my dietary staples are not meat. it is rice or corn tortillas and beans and if I was raised as a Buddhist I probably never tasted meat at all. Those people who did was a little bit of flavoring

on the other foods. Well why would there be a link between fat and cancer? The next slide shows that the more fat there is in your diet the more your body makes estrogen and estrogen is the female hormone it's actually a group of hormones. Its job is to make things grow. Its responsible for breast development at puberty. Its responsible for the thickening of the uterine lining the endometrium every single month because this optimistic organ the uterus thinks we gonna get pregnant this month so it makes a nice thick bed for the baby to grow in and the more estrogen you have the more all of this occurs and it's a big stimulus for the growth of cancer cells. If I have more fat my diet my body makes extra estrogen every single month more risk of cancer, men same story. More fat in the diet more testosterone more prostate cancer. Meat eaters, dairy eaters have a lot more prostate cancer. Men in Sweden has twice

the risk of a man in Hong Kong of getting prostate cancer and eight times the risk of dying of it and Hong Kong has kind of a semi westernize semi Asian diet. If you go into rural Asia you see a much more dramatic difference. Let me go to the next slide. If I look at blood samples of a woman before menopause she doesn't have much estrogen in her blood right as one period begins but it gradually rises in two weeks it's at a peek and it falls and that's ovulation. The ovary releases an egg then it arises and it falls for the next two weeks and that's one month. The next cycle same thing same thing same thing as a hormone roller coaster it's going by every single month. The next slide you see a high fat diet it pushes everything up so that you have more estrogen every minute of every day. Now this isn't just important for something like breast cancer. Some years ago I got a call from a young woman who said I got such cramps I can't get out of bed. Can you write me a prescription for some

Demerol and I said sure I can. It's a narcotic pain killer so you don't want to take it forever but two days ok it's as she was asking it suddenly hit me what is menstrual pain except the thickening of the uterus under the influence of estrogen and that's whole thickened layer is sloffed off at the end of the month.As it does that it releases these nasty chemicals called ?prostic gland?that causes cramping. I suddenly thought what if we took the fat out of a diet or virtually all the fat then you have less estrogen less thickening of that lining, less ?trusted? may be maybe less pain so I suggested there how about an experiment would you do this for for the next four weeks no animal products at all we are going to be vegetarians for four weeks but we're also be to keep the vegetable oils really low so that means no donuts no french fries no olive oil glug glug gluging all over are salad we're not going to do that we're going to keep all oils really low and we're going to push this whole curve down. She said I'll try anything

so that's what she did and at the end of the month she found virtually no pain and but she's also noticed that in subsequent months if she wouldn't deviate from this even a little bit even like back here a bag of potato chips three weeks before her next period she would feel it at the end which is what you'd expect because you're pushing the whole curve up. I just completed a research study thirty three women at Georgetown University and they all had moderate to severe menstral pain in the study and what we found is that it doesn't this diet doesn't help everybody but it does help the majority of women in two ways, one is that coming into the study the average woman had about four days of pain of either mild, moderate or severe pain but four days worth so we cut that down about two and a half and the pain itself reached a lower peak, it was much more subdued in some cases it was flat out gone. All we're doing is instead of swallowing fistfuls of motrin were getting our hormones into the balance nature wanted us to have

but that we were never in because we didn't realize that diet was pushing it off kilter. Let me show you the next slide. Now why we're picking on chicken um I should mention one thing chicken has cancer causing chemicals in it and I don't mean there are things the chicken is being fed, it's very important when you heat meat in your stove, in your oven, anywhere the heating process causes a chemical change in certain molecules in that meat such that cancer causing chemicals called headero cyclica means are formed. Now people have heard of this because on the fourth of July we barbecue in the coals. You know what I'm talking about the some comes up from the coals and it coats the ribs or whatever with his black stuff that has carcinogens in and that's true but that's not what we're talking about. Any kind of cooking any kind of heating of meat causes certain chemicals in the meat called ?criatene? and ?criatinene? the molecule actually changes its shape and confirmation to become a ?hedero cyclicamene?

The point is it's not just in beef, it's in chicken as well. You can grill it or broil it fry or barbecue it you'll find it in chicken and how much if you look at the next slide you'll see that if I have a hamburger about thirty three nanograms per gram it's not a lot but it's enough to get a cancer researchers attention. Cancer researchers have been trying to puzzle out why do meat eaters get colon cancer so much. They do about three hundred percent more than vegetarians even I'm talking about even a careless Hagen Daz eating vegetarian. The meat eaters get a lot more and the reason seems to be that well one of the reasons may be that these ?heterocyclicamene? but in 1995 researchers at the National Cancer Institute said hold on a sec. A lot of Americans think it's healthy to eat white meat instead of red meat so are there ?heterocyclicamenes? in that grilled chicken breast that seems so healthy and they analyze it and you know what fifteen times worse than beef. In fact there was just a study about four months ago show that people who eat

white meat have more colon cancer than people who prefer red meat. Now there's a third choice here if I have a hamburger and I cook it up carcinogens are going to form and by the way you don't want to eat it raw okay we know we know about salmonella and listeria and ecoli. If I grilled chicken even more carcinogens are going to form but if I heat up a veggie burger, a tempae burger or something you know what happens it's if I heat that up it gets warm. Let me show you the next slide. Is there a next slide? Yes. To just bring things to a conclusion I don't think there's ever a time when it's too late to change your diet. These are the,this is the way to eat ,grains legumes or vegetables, fruits you get plenty of calcium without dairy products the green leafy bowls and the beans are loaded with calcium. If you want to you can use calcium fortified orange and apple juice that's fine. Um you'll save calcium much more effectively if you cut down on sodium and if you avoid animal protein because

sodium encourages calcium to leak through your kidneys into your urine. Nobody makes money if you go on a low sodium diet but every calcium researcher in the world knows that if you it cut your sodium intake you can worry a lot less about calcium, It's dramatic, its huge cut your sodium intake in half its equivalent of taking hundreds of extra milligrams of calcium. If you avoid animal protein same story animal protein causes calcium to leak out of your bones into the blood and through the kidney into the urine. B12 you need vitamin B12 for healthy nerves and healthy blood and it's actually not that many vegetarian sources is made not by animals or plants it's made by bacteria and meat eaters get a lot of it because the cow's intestinal tract is loaded with bacteria that are making us B12 gets in their flesh not a very appetizing source but it's there. Um in vegetarian in the world of vegetarian cuisine you find it in total cereal and Product Nineteen and Kellogg's corn flakes and in fortified soy milk and some yeasts and things like

that but frankly if you're not eating any of these just take your vitamins take any multiple vitamin it will cover you for B12 you got no worries. Now yeah (question from the audience) you can it really doesn't actually matter um you can take it with food, without food the amount that you need is extremely small.You need about a half of a a micro gram per day so it's a teeny tiny mite. You'll also see even brands of uh vitamin B12 that are actually just used they pass through the mucus membrane Yeah that's right, the amount that you actually need wouldn't be visible so what they do is they sell these enormous amounts that I think are not worth bothering with it. In a

typical multiple vitamin there might be six or eight or ten or twelve micrograms and that's all you really need. Um I don't think there's ever a time it's too late to change your diet. Researchers have looked at cancer patients and found that the risk of dying at any point in time say a woman who has metastatic breast cancer, cancer that has already spread, risk of dying at any point in time is increased by forty percent for every thousand grams of fat she eats in a month which is actually less than the difference between a typical pure vegetarian diet and a typical meat eating diet. Very easy to change your diet and take power in your hands. Do you know the work of Anthony ?Sattalero? anyone heard of Tony ?Sattalero? He wrote a book called "Recalled by Light" maybe some of you have seen that? A wonderful book, a best seller a few years ago Tony Sattelero was a a physician and President of Methodist Hospital in Philadelphia and he was working very hard he was a young guy maybe about around forty taking over running the hospital. They were building a new wing and they had all kinds of programs that he was involved in.

One day though the radiologist called him because he just had an employee chest x ray and the radiologist said Tony can you come back down to radiology for a minute. He went down there and on his chest x ray was a big spot a density on one of his ribs and no doctor wants to see this because to a doctor that means I have cancer somewherer in my body and a piece of it broke off and got into the bloodstream and got stuck in one of the tiny little blood vessels going through the rib and its now lodged there and it's a growing and he thought that's why i've been having some aches and pains in my back and in my chest and so forth. He said I need a bone scan I need a bone scan today and he got one, he went back that afternoon and he lay down on the scanning table and scanner went over his body head to toe and when the scanner was done it detected metastatic cancer in his skull, sternum

ribs and spine and in a few days they found that the source was the prostate. Now for a man of seventy five prostate cancers a slow growing cancer for men of forty five this is a shark it's very aggressive and he had about four months to live and to make all this even worse his father had been diagnosed with lung cancer and died shortly after that so he had to drive up to New Jersey and bury his dad and try to comfort his mother. He was her only child and in the midst of all this he was panicking thinking he's going to die himself. And he thought all I can do is to get back down to Philadelphia and just run the hospital as well as I can get it into shape and hand it over to another doctor. That's what he decided to do so he got in his car and he got on the NewJersey turnpike and he was driving down toward Philadelphia and he happened to see a couple of hitch hikers along the road and they were about at twenty years old kind of scruffy looking and he never picked up hitchhikers in his life

but he felt that he would really value having to somebody there to talk to so he pulled over and they got in the car and as fate would have it they had just gotten out of macrobiotic cooking school and they want to tell him about it . Oh so you got cancer well what's the big deal. Do you now how to make brown rice? We'll show you how to make vegetables if you don't know about macrobiotics you know about macrobiotics it's basically Chinese medicine kind of distilled through Japanese cuisine so they eat a lot of rice a lot of vegetables very down on dairy very down on meat and they got rules for everything which foods to eat how to slice them which direction to stir your soup what kind I'm not kidding everything because because they want to make every single food preparation decision to get your body into as good a balance as it possibly can and it's not perfect but there actually are quite a lot of really remarkable cures associated with it and anyway they're telling him all this and he says well thanks but what you guys don't understand is that i'm a doctor

and I know what I'm dealing with here and I don't need all this alternative mumbo jumbo to make me feel better but they managed to pry loose his address with the promise that they'll send him a package of materials that he can look at.. They did that but about three days later he gets a package in the mail sixty seven cents postage do and he's opening it up and it doesn't mean anything to him except that there was a testimonial from another doctor who did very well with this diet with a cancer very much like is and thought okay . I got no choice I'll try it so every day he would pick up his food that the deal was they would make the food and he would eat it and he would walk into the physician's dining room with his bowl and his chopsticks he had that was part of a deal that you'd use chopsticks and the other doctors would look at this poor dying man struggling you know grasping at straws and the remarkable thing though was that even though this is a completely different way of eating after about three or four days he felt better he didn't have very much pain

and after about three weeks his pain has flat out gone. He said well I don't know if that stuff is still in my ribs but I don't feel it anymore and after two months he felt better he was walking around the hospital with color in his cheeks kind of slimming down looking good and after four months he wasn't dead and six months went by eight months and ten months and twelve months and he went back to radiology he said I want a repeat my bone scan and a radiologist said I don't think so and we both know what's going on here you are doing a lot better than we ever could have dared hope but the cancer is not gone you just were just buying time and that's great let's not push it but he's the president of the hospital who gets what he wants.He gets his bone scan so they did the scan and the cancer was gone it was undetectable you couldn't see if it was there it was too small to show up and that made medical history. A man with this tremendously aggressive cancer just going away without treatment

and so he wrote a book called "Recalled by Life" that was it's actually a very nice book I'd encourage you get your hands on it and read it. A very quick easy read and he went on all the talk shows and he started doing lectures and he said I only got one point that I wanna make and that there's something in eastern medicine that we can profit from and there might be things that we have that they can profit from and we ought to keep an open mind and use what works. The best of both worlds I think he was right and I got to know Tony and we became friends and I gotta tell you I've seen his scans and one is horrible and the other is great but then about eight years after he was supposed to be dead Tony's said to me something that was very disconcerting. He said Neal you're not going to like this one bit. I decided to quit the diet going off the diet. I'm bringing cheese back in my diet milk and ice cream and meat back in my diet because

I wanna know, I have to know if I can be sustained without this diet and this made me a little uncomfortable so I said how are you doing. And he said well I have a little swelling in my hands a little edema otherwise I'm okay. But he really wasn't so ok because his energy level started to drop and he started too get aches and pains and he just wasn't his vibrant healthy self and as time went on he was kind of going to slowly downhill and downhill downhill and one day I called him up and I'll never forget his speech was slurred it sounded to me like a person on drugs.He was almost falling asleep on the phone.I thought this sounds like a person on narcotics and I suddenly thought cancer patients are treated with narcotics. I said Tony you're cancer is back and he says that it's back viciously and in two

weeks he was dead. For one person did diet cause his cancer? Although we do know that a high fat meat and dairy based diet increases testosterone it's concentration in the body it's action on the prostate the likelihood of cancer cells forming, spreading and being invasive where they go. You also cannot know for one person if he stayed on the diet today we he still be alive. I don't know but i know this for sure if the only treatments we use in medicine are ones that we can shake out of a bottle of pills or they come in a sterile feel of our operating room we're missing the most important allies that we have for health. Think about this you cut your hand does the bandage heal you. No it protects you. Your skin has intricate ways very gradually but very surely

healing itself. If I break my arm and I get a cast on it does the cast heal my arm? No the cast protects your arm so the healing that the bones reconnect on their own, the blood vessels reconnect within the bone so the blood will flow again as good as new but if I irritate that cut on my hand and I pick at every single day can I slow down the healing? Yeah I can and if I open up my cast I can wiggle my bones around twice a day will those bones ever heal? No if I spray my arteries with particles of cholesterol beyond what they can tolerate will my artery blockages ever reverse? Will my chest pain go away will I have a healthy back? If my joints are being assaulted every day by foods that I'm sensitive to cause I just didn't recognize which ones they were will my joint pain ever go away? The healing car of the body isn't perfect but it's the most powerful thing we have by far and most of us frustrated not

intentionally but we simply didn't know how to plug it in and let it work. Now if you're thinking about changing your diet the simple rules of thumb that I have are to get away from the animal products get away from them completely keep the vegetable oils low, look at the food you may be sensitive to if have any residual pain make sure that you get complete nutrition but it's not that difficult but I have a couple of tips the first is if you have any kind of pain any kind of of health concern if you have some weight you wanna lose follow the diet exactly follow it perfectly don't do it kind of gradually just putting your toe in the water do it all away and the reason I say that do that is if you do it all the way you're going to see the maximal result. If you try to get your cholesterol down you kind you know you go to white meat instead of red meat that will lower your cholesterol five percent but we have many studies it's not as if we had time to test this cholesterol say two hundred fifty that's only twelve points twelve thirteen points. That gets you down to

thirty seven that gets you a prescription for cholesterol lowering drugs. Do the diet all away and let the health actually show you what it can do for you and then if you if you like it you can continue with it but initially because it sounds so calvinist does'nt it. good heavens you're going to reform at nags n g derek that sells very tough do it for two weeks like you do have to just as an experiment just to see what it's like because if you do if it you do it really well at the end of that time you lost weight for energy will be better and you'll find a lot of things that you didn't think anything to do with food like that soreness in your throat post nasal drip the other bronchial congestion, skin condition it's amazing what happens when you make these changes. At the end of two weeks or three weeks when you've really done a good job you decide if wanna a stick with it or not. If you like being healthy if you like losing weight effortlessly go ahead but if you feel it isn't worth it that you can always go back to your old diet. This is what I say to my alcoholic patients,I don't care about the year 2025

I wanna get through tomorrow. Well that I can do. We're doing it in the short term we're doing at all the way we don't say I just have like one vodka when you get out of bed. No we're going to be completely healthy but we're going to focus on the short term that works for diet. Use other motivators I think this is really good. A lot of your environmentalists, right, we care about the environment but environmental I gotta tell you when I have a patient that is an environmentalist they come lecturing me so Dr. Barnard do you know that one cow makes as much manure as sixteen point for human beings that's true and just when I think they're done they tell me that we have a hundred million cattle in the United States and the math is pretty easy that's one point six billion extra human beings that's basically the equivalent without working plumbing. That's a lot of manure were living in. And as you drive through Iowa there's corn on the right and corn on the left which human beings are never going to eat. All the irrigation all the pesticides all the soil erosion

is to make food for cows, for hogs, for chickens so that this huge amount of food goes in to produce as little bit of meat and I got to tell you, my father's side of the family is all in the cattle business they're wonderful people and I love them dearly. But I've come to the conclusion that the livestock business is not exactly the most attractive thing human beings ever figured out and so for some people that's a good motivator. Environmentalists say I'm not going to eat meat not just because of atherosclerosis but because I've got the weight to the world on my shoulders. I'm not going to do it. And that's great cause that gets you through a moments of doubt. People who care about animals they'll say you know where we get chickens we don't get .. it's not the farmer's wife sneaking up on a chicken in the backyard and cutting it's head off. No Americans eat a lot of chicken and so the way we get that many chickens is there are thirty or forty thousand of them in a steel building and the thing about chickens is they don't enjoy that. They push and they shove and they try to get out. They'r unhappy in there. Right

so what does a chicken do to try to get out? He pecks and pushes and if he pecks another bird that'll cause a sore that could get infected and that'll hurt the product. So the smart farmer has a solution for this. You know what the farmer does, that's right, every chicken you ever ate on day one of his miserable little life was put in the debeaking machine and his beak was cut off and he was thrown in the steel building with thirty thousand other identical birds and at eight weeks of life he was rounded up by people who grab them by the legs who get paid next to nothing shove them in boxes they're trucked away to the slaughter house put down in a funnel people then hang them up by their legs and cut their heads off and the head if you could look at it would be this little eight week old chicken head cut off an obese body and has this blunt little beak. And well if we gave Thanksgiving around a different dead bird, a turkey, it wasn't just you never knows there's no head on that turkey. He had his beak cut off too and his toes were cut off and is waddle was also cut off because we don't want anything

damaged and it just isn't exactly a terribly attractive business. So for those folks who are concerned about animals that's a great motivator and the four and five and six year old kid who says I don't really wanna eat animals. When I was a kid in the 1950's we made them we said you have to for iron and proteins and so forth. The kid was the smartest one at the whole table. For other folks their biggest motivator is their own family and I say we should exploit that because if you think about it we put our house in the best neighborhood that we can afford because we want our kids to go to good schools and they hang out with other good kids and to see good things on television and not to get we don't want them to get led astray into things that are going to harm them. We want them to have moral values and good training that will stand them in good stead for the rest of their life.But by the time kids are three and four years of age they know the word McNuggets and they don't want anything else for birthday and I gotta tell ya kid when there are two and three and four they learn those tastes

and kids are the most conservative people in your family. When they're eight years old a new food that comes in the house or ends up on the table in front of them freaks them out and they don't want to see foods touch each other on the plate and there are all these rules about everything and they have to be twenty five before they'll taste a different food. The point that I'm making is that kids get in that rut right away and it's tough to change it but you can change it and it's incredible the power that we have when we take advantage of it. So if we take this power into our hands it's not perfect but it's true the earth is going to breathe easier. It's true that there will be a whole line of animals that will probably wave, like I think this is wonderful it is a great and if we listen we will probably hear our coronary arteries thanking us as well. Thank you very much. {Audience clapping} Let me show you one more slide. And we can bring the lights up as well.This is our organization and if you are members first of all I

wanna thank you very much for your support, it's what allows us to do all of these lectures always free. I do them every day and in different communities and I just really appreciate your support in helping us get the word out and doing the research that we do as well . Um if you're not a member please take a copy of "Good Medicine" over here and whether you're a doctor or a lay person we'd love to have you as part of our network and I promise I'll send a postcard when we next have an event. We'll send you merciless appeals to support our work. We also have copies of "Foods that Fight Pain" over there which is my most recent book that covers everything we talked about. It has some really nice recipes in it that I think you'll like a lot. Uh we have a couple of copies of "Food for Life" and "Eat Right Live Longer". "Food for Life" is a general nutrition book. "Eat Right Live Longer" talks about things that relate to aging, menopause, osteoperosis and so forth and we have a nifty little book on healthy recipes from fancy restaurants around the world so if you want to impress your friends, foods from Paris and Sidney and everywhere else they're all vegan and very very nice and a nice gift. Uh with that let me take

questions or comments or anything that anybody has, please. (question from audience) "Eat Right for Your Type", um yeah well I think he's on to something. For those who haven't if you haven't seen this by "D. Adamo" and the idea is that your blood type kind of influences the foods that you're eating and he says different people kind of wander to different parts of the earth and ate different things and got adapted differently. I think that there's merit in that viewpoint but I believe that he goes way too far. He says type A should should be vegetarian and that's certainly true but he says for type O, oh it's going to be a struggle for you for well first of all I'm a type O. Secondly loads of Dean Ornish's patients were all type O and they didn't happily they didn't read the book because they would've said you're not supposed to get reversal of your lesions and feel better and lose weight. Um from my standpoint everybody ought to be a vegetarian. There's nobody who needs muscle tissue or eggs or dairy products

in their diet however there are some people who do better with say a very fruity diet lots of fruit for breakfast. There are other people if they feel they eat that they feel just totally unprepared for the day and they need more protein but it shouldn't be animal protein they're you know, there are plenty of high protein plant foods. There's a question, yeah please. Acid reflux, ok I'm glad you asked that because there's probably nothing that bugs people more and you turn on the tv every night you see one commercial after another after another. Here's what's going on. I have a whole section on this by the way in "Foods That Fight Pain" if you're interested. Your stomach has a little muscular valve that's supposed to stop acid from going up the esophagus and if the acid if that valve gets weak the acid we'll go up there and it'll cause what we call heartburn, a burning in the area of your heart. Now there are a couple things to think about, the first actually has nothing to do with food. The first is ?heliopact choleri? you heard of this bacterial infection? When I was when I was a kid my father had ulcers and

he would stay away from spicy foods he would drink huge amounts of milk he would take Tums he would take Rolaids, swallow Mylanta and then we cotton on to ?psymedadine? Tagamet which reduces acid secretion but then only much later did somebody figure out, wait a minute, there's an infection in your stomach and they treat you with antibiotics and it takes 10 days to two weeks and ninety five percent of people never have another ulcer. It cured and the milk was a bad thing anyway because that actually increases acid secretion. With heartburn many people also have ?helicobactor? This is kind of in my category of if you whack your thumb pounding nail don't eat a turnip, go and have a Motrin. There's something that western medicine is good at and this is one so I would suggest just go ahead and you can be tested for it but a lot of doctors will say don't bother with the testing it's very easy you just take antibiotics and you knock it out. And if you want the latest regimen for the antibiotics I also have that in the book. So you can go to the doctor and say I understand that I should and I will also have give you the scientific article that if your doctors

not heard of it. When I wrote "Food for Life" and first mentioned that many people hadn't heard it. Now it's considered absolute common practice but a few diehards haven't heard of it. Now if you do that and you still have acid reflux couple things you should do. Make sure you're very low in fat, fatty foods loosen up that muscle muscular valve. Alcohol will do it and peppermint oddly enough will do it. Any peppermint flavored food weakens that smooth muscle quite dramatically. Certain other fruits alcohol, citrus coffee can sometimes aggravate the throat. Yeah you can add to that all things a doctor prescribes anywhere like sleeping on a couple pillows and so forth but frankly that's not a very good solution. You're much better off knocking out the infection and tightening up that muscle. Yes please. {question from the audience} Yes yeah well I'm not saying

it's dangerous a lot of body builders are are swallowing this and um the real danger what I was speaking of here is when you heat it, then it undergoes a chemical change so that it actually becomes a carcinogen. Having said that I am not a fan of people boosting their protein intake to try to increase muscle mass anyway um and within the muscle building community there's a controversy over whether that really matters. If you look at a bull in the field that bull is strolling around with rippling muscles or a gorilla or an elephant or a stallion, these are the vegans they're not taking creatine they're not taking you know soy shakes or ?? casine or what supplement. They're eating grass and leaves and you get plenty of protein doing that. Broccoli is forty percent protein if it weren't it wouldn't be like that it would be like that. There is protein in these foods and what what matters is your genetics and your your physical workout. If you're not getting a workout

you're not going to have muscles. Now the other thing about this is um and without making any judgements on it I think people are designed to be a certain size. Every animal is designed to be a certain size and and sometimes we get, I think, a little for reasons other than health we want a change our size. For some folks especially women it's anorexia that we get into. For some guys it's a preoccupation with excessive musculature um which is ok and I think it can be quite healthy and I don't think creatine is necessarily terribly dangerous but some of the things these folks do really is dangerous.Growth hormones and steroids are really a risky business. Yeah, {Audience question} {inaudible} very quick Well it depends on what your motivation is if your motivations is animal rights you should first give up shrimp and anchovies because they are the smallest and so you have to eat lots and lots of these poor little lives to save you know that

you can save them and not eat them. The last thing you should give up his whales because you could feed the whole village on one whale. A cow would be ..I'm kidding, a chicken you wanna give up early because a chicken only feeds four people. Yeah here's what I would do,, the first thing I would give up is animal products and added oils, added oils that's the first thing and the second thing I guess I would just give up any other foods that I was sensitive to any plant food. {Audience question} Yeah yes yes and that's not what I recommend I don't recommend it at all. I think it's it's important the reason I say that is it's important to feel good when a person's let's say you quit eating beef and you're eating chicken and fish and you're not going to feel much better and if you try to you're not gonna lose weight and you're gonna say I followed a low fat diet and I didn't get any result

and I promise you you're not. If you have diabetes or hypertension I can't get you off your medicines medicines that way but if for me I view these things in much the same way as I view addiction. If I have a patient who's on heroin and they're also doing barbiturates and so forth I'm going to say I want to get you off off all that and it's it's a job. There's no question about it, in in the last research study we did about a third of our participants slid into a low fat vegan diet no problem. Two thirds of them do need help but it's not really difficult. You you need to work with them you read a book talk with other folks, get a social network go to a vegetarian group or something like that so you can figure out where the restaurants you can eat what are the new products and have fun with it and the difficulties melt away. It doesn't take long. After about two weeks people are used to and they're feeling better and their tastes have changed that's it. Think about this, did you ever switch from whole milk to skim. What was skim milk like when you first tasted it Awful, why, it was kind of watery wasn't it it kind of looked blue even.

After about two or three weeks what happened ? You got used to right totally used to it. And then much later if you went back and had whole milk again what was that like? It was like paint it really was, wasn't it your tastes change but if you mix around you have whole milk one day skim the next whole milk you never change it you never get used to it.You give yourself now I'm not saying skim is health food, not at all, it has a lot of other problem a lot of other problems but when you change your diet completely you allow, it's it's like quitting smoking. A person who quits smoking, I used to smoke. When I was an intern I used to to drop by radiology and light up a Merit menthol and look at my lung cancer and say that's terrible. I tried to I wasn't a dummy I know it was dangerous but I was under so much stress I thought I'd cut down. Any of you ever you smoked you cut down that lasts for like how long a half hour and you're back to two packs a day. It doesn't work but when it's a job to quit but once you quit your you've got momentum, that's what you need. You need the momentum so get the foods of the diet and you'll do fine. Yes, yes

the one that I mention is called the Elisa Act Test ELISA/ACT. Now this is just one, they're competitors that are very similar but I have and I have no relation with these folks who do it but I respect their work. This is from the ?Serum un? labs in Reston Virginia and if you look in the chapter on fibromyalgia in "Foods That Fight Pain" I'll give you the number. The number is there it's an 800 number. The way that you do this is that your doctor draws the blood sample and mails it to them and they'll send the results to you. Now it's very pricey um this is one of the highest priced labs there is. So check around locally alternative physicians here probably offer the same test at a big savings but that's one and that's a perfectly reasonable one. Is there a question here. Yes{audience question} yes yeah um I wouldn't say you can never have nuts at all but I would say

don't don't do what I used to do. When I was a kid I would open a jar of Skippy and and this is my legume group and I would just have a spoon and that was dinner. Nuts are high in fat seventy percent fat so now the fat in there is tends to be reasonably high in omega three and happily and that is not very big for I wouldn't have terribly large amounts of it. The only um unusual part of this though is walnuts which are as fatty as every other nut for some reason lower cholesterol levels quite substantially. People eat large amounts of walnuts they have lower cholesterol levels. I have no idea why, it hasn't been shown with almonds. yes yes. {audience question} yes is the shingles early or has it been there for a while.

Ok, reasonably early,I have a whole chapter on shingles would strongly urge you to to xerox for him um because shingles is for for those who aren't familiar with shingles, miserable condition it's chicken pox. The chicken pox virus that ended your body when you're a little kid and you get an eruption its not gone it actually migrates back of your nerves and just kinda sits there waiting for your immune system to get weak then it goes back down the nerves erupts in your skin and causes a painful condition along the distribution of that nerve. It can be in your abdomen can be on your face it hurts like the dickens and you want to knock it out as aggressively as you possibly can because if you don't it goes into a chronic pain condition called post herpetic neuralgia and you don't want that. Now food doesn't have too much to do with it except that certain foods help bolster the immune system. Very low fat, high beta carotene is good for boosting immune strength. Now there's also jalapeno peppers contain

the substance called capsaicin which is applied externally and it will actually knock out the pain. You can go to uh any drugstore and they'll sell you capsaicin cream and it zings a little bit, but what it's doing it depletes the nerves of something called substancey and you no longer feel pain. Um and I mention all that there but also if I had a patient who had shingles in the first month I would put them on antidepressants not for depression but because that's going to help fight pain. You'd use anti viral says you can use the capsaicin cream. I would put every bazooka as that I could if you want to knock it out as whatever pain medicine they can tell, which possibly it's it's hard to say the and the other thing that's lysine ,people use lysine which is very good for herpes cold sores as wells genital herpes um very benign doesn't doing anything bad and it prevents some

and lysine may help with shingles I do mention in there but I'm not a hundred percent convinced that it really can do much for shingles and we don't really have very good evidence.It really has never been tested very well I think it's worth trying it's totally benign but I wouldn't limit myself to that. I would give everything I would use every possible treatment you can against early shingles. It's time for a couple of last of questions. Yeah. {audience question} Was there anything in particular about lyme disease? Yeah I don't really know much about about it beyond what you already know which is that it's a challenge to diagnose and quite often doctors miss it. Um often times people don't even go to the doctor with it early because your symptoms are't terribly bad but that if it continues on it can be a miserable thing and I don't know of a treatment that's better than antibiotics for it.

Yeah I think growth hormones is a serious mistake. Um growth hormone is a hormone and if you look at people who have, you know about this ,it's used for all kinds of things, and it sort of to keep a man robust throughout life and it's being marketed to women as well and so forth. Um people who have more growth hormone naturally just in their blood have higher cancer risk. If you have a lot more you have a condition called acromegaly where you look like um who's this guy in the Adams family Lurch? Um this is acromegaly and growth hormone does that now. You know you're not going to do that to yourself, but people who have that condition have it for only one reason that they have too much growth hormone and have a lot more cancer than other people which is why we sued the federal government PCRM sued the federal government several years ago to stop growth hormone experiments on kids. We don't object to if the kids are clearly deficient but we objected strenuously when

to an experiment when non deficient kids were injected with a genetically engineered growth hormone. You're just asking for cancer in that case. Um so I think that's also true for older folks. so I would try to stay away it. I know that people are drawn to it well meaningly they've gotten a good pitch but I think it's very risky. It may, and the thing about hormones is that it's the spiders web, you pull on ,it's not like an aspirin you pull on one strand and it affects everything and hormones are like that, they all interact and we have no clue where they're going. Uh time for one last question. Oh yes please {audience question} Yeah a great great question, um first of all there are some false positives and some false negatives

meaning it will occasionally indicate you are sensitive to a food that you really can't tolerate and it will sometimes uh miss a food that is a problem for you without your recognizing it that can happen um although they are more accurate than they've been and they're much more accurate than skin testing um however there still should be even on the worst test result there still should be plenty of foods left that a person can eat. It's quite common that several different beans will react but that they're usually many many many left that you don't have troubles with you might have uh say pinto beans react but lentils don't in the pea group, split peas and so forth that you have no problem with them so you should be able to find foods that you can can tolerate ok. Um we want to have something from the grain group, rice tends to be very well tolerated for most folks uh but some of the others like wheat and it's cousins like barley and rye will sometimes cross react but you'll find things that you can eat there and keep in mind that the only things that aren't vegetarian

are the meats, the dairies, and the eggs so that's not going to broaden your horizons terribly much. So anyway uh let me encourage you please do pick up our materials please buy six of everything.