Foods that Fight Pain with Dr. Neal Barnard

In this week's lecture series is the program: Foods That Fight Pain with Neil Barnard MD in a presentation given in northwest Portland in February, 1999 Dr Barnard is the founder and president of the physicians committee for responsible medicine based in Washington DC and has just released his seventh book titled breaking the food seduction: the hidden reasons behind food cravings and seven steps that end them naturally. Next week on Wednesday June 25, Dr Barnard will speak at a free public event at the first Unitarian Church in downtown Portland at 7 pm. Details on this will be repeated at the end of this program. This is Mel Resler your host and producer in this radio version of Foods that Fight Pain. The topics discussed in this talk include the role that foods play in the pains and diseases of backaches, arthritis, menstrual cramps, and migraines. And just as importantly the influence of everyday foods have on the top two killers of

Oregonians heart disease and cancer. Here is Foods that Fight Pain; a classic from four years ago. 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 would normally think of as having anything to do with each other but they- 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 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 I give them a little shock on their hand and I gradually increase the voltage. And then gave them sugar. They feel that pain sooner and it becomes intolerable

at a lower level. College sophomores are the only people who agree to this kind of research by the way. 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. We can separate our pain trigger foods for from arcane safe routes if the problem is migraines or arthritis or fibermialgia or irritable bowel. We can rebalance our hormones for menstral pain, breast pain even some kind of cancer pain. We can rebalance body chemistry for diabetes, shingles, sickle cell anemia, many other conditions where food is the last thing you think of. Well let's start with reopening circulation. How many of you have heard of the work of Dr. Dean Ornish? Most of you.

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's put the patients that he had into two groups one group got basically the American Heart Association type of diet .You know what that is a chicken, without the skin eat more fish, don't eat so many eggs, don't smoke, take a vacation and that kind of thing. Now the other group was asked to follow a pure vegetarian diet and they didn't 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 DC 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 the 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 you're artery blockages continue to grow and get worse but on a vegetarian diet these people who learned that when they had soup it had been 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, if they had a hot dog or a burger it to be the one that they got out of the health food store that was made of for or wheat derivatives

or something like that. When they made all these changes their chest pain first of all was gone in about five or six weeks, just gone like magic but at the end of the year when they looked in their arteries and measured the blockages they were actually dissolving the artery blockages were starting to go away so much that you could see a difference in eighty two 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 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 potatoe is one percent fat and none of these foods because they're there from plants they never have any cholesterol at all, zero whereas beef, chicken, fish all have 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 get a loved one and you say okay 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. In fact we have a half a 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. Um I'm not saying it's bad as an unrestrictive diet but it's just not enough better. He gets down here to the part where the heart disease reverses not in a few people but it reverses in just about everybody. Let me show you the next slide.It's not just heart disease though, if you could look inside your back something remarkable was happening. Between these bony vertebrae is a leathery cushion we call a disc and if you've got any of you have back pain, any of you have history of back pain have you ever had back surgery? The surgeon says here's the problem. This disc, 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 disc out. The problem is six months later

you've got more pain than you started with and you can operate 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 discs it starts in the arteries that lead to the spine. There are two lumbar arteries to every one of these discs, I'm sorry to everyone of these vertebrae and those lombar arteries are there to bring in oxygen, nutrients and veins to carry away the metabolic products of of your 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 is your heart the aorta comes off goes right down smack in front of the spine it gives off two lumbar arteries

every single segment and then it splits it 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 I would be crowded around the kitchen where my mother would be frying bacon and she would take all these bacon strips out of the panned 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 It turns into kind of wax sit so you don't have to refrigerate it you just throw it the cupboard an the next day she would pull it off the shelf and dig this spoon back in it and throw it back in the fry pan and fry eggs in it. And it's amazing that any of us lived to adulthood as I reflect on it now. If you could look into the arteries here's what you'd see. And in a kid of four and five you don't see too much damage to the the heart arteries but down here in the lower aorta

you will see the beginnings of fatty streaks in kids is 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 is in the right at the entrance to the lumbar back. By age twenty, ten percent of young people in America have at least one advanced blockage in the lumbar artery and that's about the age isn't it when we start to see back trouble. You don't 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 your tumbling around as a kid but if you've got a big wide open circulation you can heal. But once you compromise the healing process the disease process takes over. A couple of decades later you see beginnings of heart disease and a couple decades after that you see the stroke but the stroke is not a neurological illness in the heart or cardiac illness and the back problem is 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 is another piece of this that I 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 know nutritional lectures go over like really like a lead balloon. I guess I could say that I was at Texas Tech University and I was giving a talk and I was saying that meat really is a problem that encourages artery blockage and basically the less of it you eat the better off you'd be and a vegetarian meal wouldn't kill you and anyway the longer I went on the louder the audience got heckling and kind of elbowing each other what's this all about it. Suddenly it dawned on me Texas Tech University in LubbockTexas is the middle of cattle country. This is where you go to become a cattle rancher and they all consider this sort of a threat to their future careers but it isn't just heart attacks. A meat based diet encourages colon cancer and many other problems and so we pressed 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 said now 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 you with me on this, if you block the arteries to your heart you have a heart attack, if you block the arteries to your the brain you have a struck, 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 any more. So anyway it's the end of my lecture and all these guys are 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 re open our circulation that's the first key to healing but the second one is to separate pain, trigger foods from pain safe foods. Migraines wonderful example. Anyone ever have a migraine headache? A lot of you. Which foods have you ever noticed which foods that trigger them, salt, okay anything else, wines which kind of wine, red wine, any any other foods trigger migraines? Chocolate will do it. Okay. People have noticed this and you find it overly at first you kind of suspect it and then you try it later and you confirm it but if you see the doctor, the doctors likely to say I you know I wouldn't waste much time thinking about that except in 1983 researchers at the hospital for sick 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 a 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 they lie in the dark hoping to go to sleep because if they can wake up without the headache that's the cure. Well researchers in London took eighty eight kids with migraines. All they did was take out of their diet the food's that trigger migraines seventy eight were cured. Four or more were improved, only six kids they couldn't help. What were the foods? Let me show you. The next slide will show you. These are the dirty dozen, dairy products worst migrant trigger most common, even skim it's the protein not the fat. Yes dairy fat is every bit as bad as you thought it was but it will fatten our waistline, it will clog our arteries. The protein triggers the migraine. Chocolate is number two, eggs are number three followed by citrus fruits, meat, I put chicken here because people think oh chicken 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 or you might have one trigger. You might have two triggers so what we do is to figure out which triggers are yours is we take them all out of the diet simultaneously for ten days. And I have recipes for you so you're not going to go hungry. Take a look, I have a whole elimination diet section of foods that fight pain. Then after ten days when the migraines have stopped coming we put the foods back into the diet one at a time starting at the bottom of the list with bananas. Have a lot of bananas have four five or six of them a day. for two 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 two days and 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 two 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 a little scratch testing on your back and may give you a list as long as your arm of all the things you are allergic to but it might be nothing on this list and it may have nothing to do with your migraine headaches. That's only one kind of allergy, there are other kinds of hypersensitivity that aren't 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 actually could 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 and the other which is a placebo and it'll show over and over and over again that it's real. Um the other thing I should say is real quick these are all not unhealthy foods are they? I mean what's wrong with a tomato, what's wrong with a banana, what's wrong with an apple but in effect that tomato that red color is lycopene, have you heard of this? It's a cousin of beta carotene.The carrot is orange because of beta carotene,

a tomatoes 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 ten or more servings of tomatoes every week has thirty five percent less risk of prostate cancer. I hate to say that dominoes are somewhat 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 uh allergic to strawberries they get a rash. There's nothing wrong with the strawberry they're just sensitive and in a minute I'm going to tell you why these foods. Let me show you the next slide. If you still have migraines there's a herb called fever few. Have you heard of this?. It goes way back to the middle ages it's 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 two three leaves off and eat them, throw them in a salad or you can buy capsules they work fine. We have two placebo controlled research trials showing that they work

so it's uh no adverse affects effects as far as we are 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 do damage to the joints. The damage to the joints continues however in 1981 researchers reported the case of a woman who had rheumatoid arthritis for twenty five years that turned out to be nothing but a sensitivity to corn. She had the corn out of the diet and the arthritis was gone, but about six 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 and her arthritis went away. At the same time there was a case of another woman

who actually had juvenile arthritis had for years turned out to be entirely due to milk. milk protein sensitivity very common. This is initially thought to be rare but then researchers took larger numbers of people this study was published in 1991 in the ?lancet? a lead article they found that using a vegetarian diet, why I say vegetarian 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 seventy to eighty percent of people with rheumatoid arthritis improve or it flat out goes away. Let me show you the next slide. Here are the foods that look remarkably like the foods for migraines don't they? Dairy's is again number one corn is now number two, 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 ten days to two weeks

let the joints cool down. It doesn't take long it's very quick and put them back in one at a time at the bottom of the list. Wait two to three days before you reintroduce a new one a new one and you're going to see the results are, I don't want to 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 tell about that helped it just doesn't sound possible um but I'll tell you anyway. The first lecture that I gave in this series was in Michigan during the summer and there was a woman taking careful notes because her daughter was thirty nine years old and had had rheumatoid arthritis for twenty seven 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 thirty nine

and her mother attended a conference that I was 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 only for ten days two weeks not forever but she still did not want to do it. She said I'll give-up this one that's it and in about four days here 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 two page letter about what she had seen and what really brought tears to the mother's eyes and 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 thirty nine 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 is not unusual now, it's absolutely routine it's not everybody but as I said if you change the diet enough seventy to eighty percent people improve or it simply goes away. Any of you know John Mcdougal's work on okay a lot of you. Mcdougal 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 products and the oils out and it's astounding. He sees huge improvement just from that so never say never uh regrettably 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. [Man speaking] This is "Foods that Fight Pain" with Dr. Neal Barnard on the lecture series. Dr. Barnard will be in Portland next week appearing at a free event on Wednesday

June 25th at the First Unitarian Southwest 12th and Salmon with a start time of seven pm. This event is also listed in the calendar of Portland's ?Indo media's? website. In the next segment Dr. Barnard describes that modern day humans have left their natural state in the call that left home and the story of Dr. Anthony ?Setelero's" recovery from terminal cancer. [Dr. Barnard] Why is it that the foods that trigger migraines are a lot like the foods that trigger arthritis and the foods that 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 unnatural. Let me tell you what I mean. If you have an autoimmune condition like rheumatoid

arthritis you know the word autoimmune you know what I mean by that. It's your immune system attacking your own tissues an auto immune reaction. Well what's our immune system really for? Anybody? What you have an autoimmune system for? Why is it there fight disease like what like bacteria right. Anything that doesn't make enemies that you have bacteria, viruses, telemarketers, cancer cells whatever. 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 were the first humans strolling around Africa ? okay not South America right, not North America not Australia it's probably East Africa. 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 even adult cows don't drink milk no mammal drinks milk in adult hood and when they'e 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 cow stand still and milk them and make products out of it like cheese and yogurt, ice cream and flavor of sugar and things like that we'll you know we'll do it and that's what we have 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 african 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 saying everybody needs milk Yeah sure you get your belly ache anyway but also juvenile onset diabetes is now believed to be a reaction to cow's milk proteins. If kids were breast fed or that's impossible or so 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 the little seeds you've got to pound them and you gotta make flour and dough and noodles and loaves of bread and they you need fire to prepare this. It's a job so people weren't doing that three million years ago. Now oranges are a very low tech food you don't have to do anything. You just pick them 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 that people waited for 25,000 years to first to taste chocolate? Now what about meat products? If you look in the mouth of a true carnivore, this is cats and all their cousins, lions, tigers and dogs. Dogs too , the whole dog clan, wolves and foxes 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 could kill the animal with those sharp teeth.

They can tear the hide off. They can tear the meat off the bone 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 dismember it 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. For example the reason simply is that you don't accommodate to anything that kills you after you've already reproduced and passed 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 then the only people who could safely smoke would be those who had some kind of genetic defense against it and they would pass that along to their progeny. But tobacco kills you when you're forty

fifty, sixty,,seventy. You've already passed along your genes to to your offspring and you'r 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 them in the weirdest places and without fire I got to tell you, it's a totally unpalatable thing . 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 koala are from? From Australia that's right and for extra credit what do they eat? Eucalyptus leaves that's right. They eat them for for breakfast and even for lunch and they have it for dinner and if they're a little hungary in the middle of the night they'll have it then. That's their big thing.

Let's say I take out a koala bear and we're going to live in Portland for a while and right around lunchtime the koala says hey you know let's eat and we pull into the Seven Eleven and we're looking for somebody 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 of years. Two years later where 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 upped 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 pain safe foods. Uh these are bandages for the body. we use lots lots lots and lots of them for people who are in pain. Brown rice is your best. Any of you see AM Northwest on television today? Any of you see the program? Um, the host there says don't give me brown rice. If you're interested I'll show you a good way to cook brown rice so that you actually enjoy it. 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 ah broccoli, spinach, collards, kale brussel sprouts, asparagus these are just examples 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 for the Bejesus out of it. Knock out those last synthesizing proteins then later on

when you have no pain you can back off on the 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 blockages. They wont 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. Let me show you the next slide. 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 when many women had positive mammograms we would have

treatment there. And I must tell you that in some cases surgical treatments and chemotherapy and radiation are lifesaving. 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 although go get your mammogram we'll catch it early. That's baloney. It's good to catch it but 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're 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 in a mammogram is. At that point it's often spread to other parts of your body and that's what happened 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? What context do you hear about it in? For birth defects right? For a woman whose is going to become pregnant she needs a lot of B she needs a lot of folic acid one of the B vitamins. Yeah it helps prevent what we call neural tube defects such a spinal bifida and it's it's in beans, it's in vegetables and it's also in your Flint Stone vitamins. But if if you drink alcohol every day even one drink a day it disables some of your frolic acid it and it will also increase your colon cancer risk same for men,men and women and for women breast cancer risk. Of vegetables and fruits are protected vitamin C rich foods are protected and there's something about fat

that's 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 diets? Well the reason seems to be that the more, well let's say I open up my refrigerator, let's say I open up my cupboard, let's say I open up restaurant menu what do we center that neil around some kind of animal product right. I mean that's our 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 we'll have the steak we'll have the chicken, I'll have the lobster, I'll have the shrimp that defines the 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

us straight out on the right of the slide and straight up and 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 a cows bones around or a chicken wings or a birds' tail and so all it is is protein mixed with fat and the occasional parasite a little dioxin and whatever, 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 staple is 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 it 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. Estrogen is the female hormone it's actually a group of hormones.

Its job is to make things grow. It's responsible for breast development at puberty, it's responsible for the thickening of the uterine lining, the endometrium every single month because this optimistic organ the uterus thinks we going to 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 in 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 westernized 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 a 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 and in two weeks it's hits a peak and it falls and that's ovulation. The ovary releases an egg, then it rises 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 is 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 doctor can you write me a prescription for some demerol. And I said sure I can it's a narcotic painkiller so you don't want to take it forever but two days ok but it as she was asking me it suddenly hit me what is menstrual pain except the thickening of the uterus under the influence of

estrogen and that whole thickened layer is sloffed off at the end off the month as it does that it releases these nasty chemicals called prostic glanus that cause cramping. I said what if we took fat out of the diet or virtually all the fat then you'd have less estrogen less thickening of that lining less prostic glanus 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're going to be vegetarians for four weeks but we're also going to keep the vegetable oils really low so that means no donuts no french fries no olive glug glug gluging all over our 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 all the way down. So she said I'll try anything. So that's what she did so at the end of the month she found virtually no pain and but she's also noticed that in subsequent months if she would deviate from this even a little bit even like back here a bag of potato chips three weeks before your next period she would

feel it at the end which is what you'd expect because you're pushing that whole curve up. I just completed a research study thirty three women at Georgetown University and they all had moderate to severe menstrual 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 about four days worth. First of all 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 we're 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. Do you know the work of Anthony Satelero? Have any of you heard of Tony Satelero? He wrote a book called your "Recalled by Light" maybe some of you have seen that. A wonderful book, a bestseller actually

a few years ago. Tony Satalero was a physician and President of Methodist Hospital in Philadelphia and he was working very hard he was a young guy maybe 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 had just had an employee chest x ray and the radiologist said Tony can you come back down here to radiology for a minute and he went back 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 somewhere 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 it's now lodged there and it's 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 the scanner went over his body head to toe and when the scanner was done it detected metastatic caner in his skull, sternum ribs and spine. And in a few days they found that the source was in the prostate. Now for a man of seventy five prostate cancer is 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's as well as I can and get it in shape and hand it over to another doctor. And

that's what he decided to do so he got in his car and he got on the New Jersey Turnpike and he was driving down toward Philadelphia and he happened to see a couple of hitchhikers beside the road and they're about 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 just somebody there to talk to a so he pulled over and they got in the car and as fate would have it they had just gotten out of a macrobiotic a cooking school and they want to tell him about it owes Oh so you got cancer well what's the big deal. Do you know 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. Anyway they're telling him all of 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 and they did this but three days later he gets a package in the mail sixty seven cents postage due 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 his diet with a cancer very much like his and he 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 he would eat it and he would walk into the physician's dining room with his bowl and his chopsticks and that was part of the deal that you had to use chopsticks and the other doctors we 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 was 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 and 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 and eight months and ten months and twelve months and he went back to radiology and he said I want to repeat my bone scan and the radiologist said I don't think so, 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're just we're just buying time and that's great but 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 it. 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 it's actually a very nice book. I'd encourage you to 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 is 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. And 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 aren't going to like this one bit. I decided to quit the diet I'm going off the diet. I am bringing cheese back in into my diet milk and ice cream and meat back into 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 than that I'm ok. But he really wasn't so ok because his energy level started to drop and he started to get aches and pains and he just wasn't his vibrant healthy self and as time went on he was kind of going 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 and I thought this sounds like a person on narcotics. And I suddenly thought cancer patients are treated with narcotics. I said Tony your cancers back and he said it's back that viciously. and in two weeks he was dead. Now you cannot know for one person did diet cause his cancer although we do know that a high fat meat and dairy based diet increases testosterone'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 a diet today would he still be alive. I don't know but I know this for sure that 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 the 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 bones so the blood will flow again as good as new but if I irritate that cut on my hand and I pick on it every single day can I slow down the healing? Yeah I can and if I open up my cast can'I wiggle the 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 or my chest pains go away would I have a healthy back? if my joints

are being assaulted every day by foods that I'm sensitive to because I just didn't recognize which ones they were will my joint pain ever go away? The healing car in 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 you have any residual pain. Make sure that you get good 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 gradually just doing it all the way. And the reason I say to do that if you do it all the way you're going to see the maximal result. If

you'r trying to get your cholesterol down you kind you know you go to white meat instead of red meat that will lower cholesterol five percent. We have many studies it's not as if we hadn't had time to test this. Five percent of a cholesterol say two hundred fifty that's only twelve points twelve thirteen points they get it early to thirty seven that gets you a prescription for cholesterol lowering drugs. Do the diet all the way 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 doesn't it good heavens you're going to get away from meat eggs and cheese that sounds very tough. Do it for two weeks. Well I can do that just as an experiment just to see what it's like because if you do, if you do it really well at the end of that time you would have lost weight your energy will be better and you'll find a lot of things that you didn't think had 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 you want to stick with it or not. If you like being healthy, if you like losing weight effortlessly go ahead but if you think it isn't worth it then 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 or we're going to focus on the short term that works for diet. That concludes this program titled Foods that Fight Pain with Dr. Neal Barnard President of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. PCRM's website is www.pcrm.org wu the pc are am the orgy Dr. Barnard is currently on tour with his latest book "Breaking the Food Seduction, the hidden reasons behind food cravings and seven steps to end them naturally"

and will be speaking at a free public event titled "Is Food Addictive" next Wednesday June 25th at the First Unitarian southwest twelfth and salmon in downtown Portland starting at seven pm. For cassette copy of the program that just aired, "Foods that Fight Pain" or the 2001 lecture by Neal Barnard "Turn Off the Fat Genes" contact KBOO radio address 20 Southeast 8th Avenue Portland 97214., Price is $10 dollars each for KBOO members, $12 for non members. This information and details of next week's event will be left with KBOO front desk, their phone number is 503-231-8032 two three one eight zero three to thank you for