#241: Neal Barnard, MD - These Are Your Power Foods for Lasting Weight Loss
The Power Foods Diet comes out March 26, 2024
Sustainable weight loss is hard, which is why PLANTSTRONG is dedicated to helping others achieve optimal health and weight loss with the power of a whole foods, plant-based diet.
We’re grateful to Dr. Neal Barnard and other pioneers for providing the research and evidence-based studies that validate our “food as medicine” approach to health. Today, we celebrate the release of Dr. Neal Barnard’s latest book - The Power Foods Diet - The Breakthrough Plan That Traps, Tames, and Burns Calories for Easy and Permanent Weight Loss. or you, without feeling hungry.
Dr. Barnard highlights the scientific principles behind appetite-taming, calorie-trapping, and metabolism-boosting foods, emphasizing how these power foods can optimize weight loss naturally. The importance of fiber in enhancing weight loss and overall health is also discussed, with a focus on incorporating whole grains, fruits, vegetables, and legumes to reap the benefits of fiber in daily meals.
The conversation also dispels myths surrounding foods like bananas, oatmeal, potatoes, eggs, and soy - offering Dr. Barnard’s medical perspective on their nutritional properties and role in a balanced diet.
Plus, we couldn’t let Dr. Barnard go without asking his thoughts around the new weight loss drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy…and why even shows like 60 Minutes can’t even be trusted anymore.
Episode Highlights
0:11:23 Appetite Taming Foods: The Power of Fiber and Plant-Based Diet
0:16:52 Calorie Trapping Foods: The Impact of High Fiber Foods
0:22:37 Calorie Burning Foods: Boosting Metabolism with Plant-Based Diet
0:28:14 Harnessing the Power of Power Food Meals for Lasting Weight Loss
0:31:29 What are Anthocyanins?
0:32:58 Bananas: The Truth Revealed
0:42:18 Let’s Talk Oatmeal, Soy, Cheese, and Dairy Crack
0:49:16 The Truth About Eggs
0:56:56 Overcoming Diet Failures
0:57:57 Are Ozempic and Wegovy Miracle Drugs?
0:59:41 Exciting Upcoming Research at PCRM
Learn more about PCRM and the work of Dr. Neal Barnard
About Neal Barnard, MD
Neal Barnard, MD, FACC, is an Adjunct Professor of Medicine at the George Washington University School of Medicine in Washington, DC, and President of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.
Dr. Barnard has led numerous research studies investigating the effects of diet on diabetes, body weight, hormonal symptoms, and chronic pain, including a groundbreaking study of dietary interventions in type 2 diabetes, funded by the National Institutes of Health, that paved the way for viewing type 2 diabetes as a potentially reversible condition for many patients. Dr. Barnard has authored more than 100 scientific publications and 20 books for medical and lay readers, and is the editor in chief of the Nutrition Guide for Clinicians, a textbook made available to all U.S. medical students.
As president of the Physicians Committee, Dr. Barnard leads programs advocating for preventive medicine, good nutrition, and higher ethical standards in research. His research contributed to the acceptance of plant-based diets in the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. In 2015, he was named a Fellow of the American College of Cardiology. In 2016, he founded the Barnard Medical Center in Washington, DC, as a model for making nutrition a routine part of all medical care.
Physician’s Committee for Responsible Medicine Website - https://www.pcrm.org/
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Full Transcription via AI Transcription Service
[0:00] I'm Rip Esselstyn, and you're listening to the PLANTSTRONG Podcast.
Today I am speaking with the president of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.
You know him, you love him. He is such a constant in the plant-based movement and has been since 1985.
I'm talking about Dr. Neal Barnard about a breakthrough plan that traps, tames, and burns calories for easy and permanent weight loss.
I'm talking about Neal's latest book that comes out on March 26.
It's called The Power Foods Diet. And we're going to dive in right after this message from PLANTSTRONG.
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[1:15] Plus, you can organize and save recipes into personalized menus, so all your favorites are right there at your fingertips.
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[2:41] For most people, weight loss is a riddle. It is a riddle inside of a lockbox that nobody seems to have the combination for.
And you all know that the solution is very, very simple.
It's just most people are barking up the wrong tree.
And this is why we are so in love with a whole food plant-based diet is because it really is the solution to this riddle on how to lose weight really effortlessly.
[3:22] And as you all know, I've dedicated the last 15 years of my life to help people achieve optimal health and weight loss with the power of a whole food plant-based diet. it.
[3:33] That being said, I am so, so grateful to Dr.
Neal Barnard and other pioneers for providing the research and the evidence-based studies that anchor and validate our food as medicine approach to health.
And that's what I love about Neal's latest book, The Power Foods Diet, it, The Breakthrough Plan That Traps, Tames, and Burns Calories for Easy and Permanent Weight Loss.
This is a book that will help you lose weight permanently, letting the food do the work for you without feeling hungry.
Now, we pack a lot of valuable information into this jam-packed hour, including a discussion around those foods that will tame or reduce your appetite.
[4:32] The foods that will trap calories so they are then flushed away and cannot be absorbed, and even foods that will boost your metabolism and increase your body's ability to burn those calories hours after eating a meal.
What are the best foods for weight loss? And what are some of those foods that may not be quite as healthy as people think.
You're going to hear about all this in my conversation with Neal today.
Plus, I couldn't let Neal go away without asking his thoughts around the new weight loss drugs like Ozempic and Wegovia and why even shows like 60 Minutes can't even be trusted all the time.
Let's talk about power foods with Dr. Neal Barnard.
[5:24] Hey, Dr. Neal Barnard, welcome to the PLANTSTRONG Podcast. It's nice to see you again. It's great to see you too, Rip.
Neal, the last time I saw you was November 7th in Washington, D.C. at the National Press Club.
[5:41] You and Chuck Carroll were nice enough to award the Esselstyn family with the Midge stage stuber ambassador for a better life award and it was a barn burner of an evening, it was such a blast i gotta tell you rip your whole family is such i mean they just don't make them like that and it was really such a blast to honor your father your mother your sister you the whole family so yeah thank you for coming thank you for coming to the historic press club a lot of things have happened there they've had a lot of presidents but rip i don't think anything beat this event.
So thank you. And I'm serious. Well, I don't think anything beat Anne Kryle Esselstyn dragging a tire across the floor for the audience.
That was such a highlight.
I can't believe she did that. And then your sister comes in and does cartwheels on the way in.
And anyway, but it was a lot of fun.
But it was also really educational for everybody, everybody from you from your father from everybody so it was it was really quite an event and thank you for for being there well listen it was our pleasure thank you so much so Neal what i want to talk about today with you is i want to talk about your latest book the power foods diet i can.
[7:06] Dove in. And what I love about it, Neal, is, you know, you've taken a subject that even I feel like I know a ton about.
And you've told people how you can basically lose weight permanently, let the food do the work for you without going hungry, counting calories.
You can do this eating carbohydrates and you don't have to exercise and you have these you talk the whole book is really around these three scientific breakthroughs that i want you to talk about and then after that i want you to talk about and i want to go through the foods that you recommend that we eat and then what foods are unhealthy then i want to finish it up by talking about about drugs and money because there's so much swirling right now around ozempic and wagovia and stuff like that so does that sound good to you that sounds perfect rip there's a lot to be said a lot so why don't we start with well why i mean listen you've written so many books why did you feel it was time now to write the power food diet because i think So up until now, people have really thought that health depends on not doing something.
[8:28] Taking out all the foods that I love and I'm going to be left with only a few things. And we started to realize that, wait, wait, wait, wait.
If we look at foods that are healthy for us, it's not just the leftovers from all the things that you love.
The foods that are healthy for us are power foods. They're power foods for your body.
They do important things to help you to lose weight. but they also really enrich your the culinary side of your life too so there are foods that you're bringing in that you might have forgotten about you might have neglected you might not have been taking advantage of them they're good for health they are good for weight loss but they are bang up great for breakfast for lunch for dinner so the point is not so much what you're not going to have it's what you are going to build into your diet and my hope is that people People will take advantage of it for themselves, but also for their family.
Let their family members share the joy of really great foods.
And let me also, before we go any further, I want to really say a big thank you to Dustin Harder and to Lindsay S. Nixon.
They are brilliant recipe developers and they worked with me on this.
So we've got 120 some recipes that use the power foods.
So it's really been a blast. Yeah. And they look great. I mean, it's sort of as close to food porn as we could get.
[9:48] They really just made beautiful foods, and the publisher did a great job with this book.
Yeah. Oh, I got to show you. Those are Justin's blueberry pops and then the triple berry sorbet and carrot cake.
These are things, you know, people love these foods. If you want to have kids over and you want them to eat healthy foods, it's got to look good. It's got to taste good.
And so we made them in really, really healthy ways. There's nothing in it that you'd have to apologize for.
Oh, and French toast. We're going to have a few things to say about that.
French toast, most fattening food known to humanity.
We did it in the exactly opposite way we built in the power of food.
So, yes, it's a slimming French toast rib.
So let's talk about some of these three scientific breakthroughs that kind of make this all possible.
And the first one that you talk about, Neal, is appetite-taming foods.
Going back to research that you started at PCRM with the help of NIH in 2005.
[10:50] Right. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. NIH funded us to start looking at, is there a better way for people to change their diets?
And the idea was to tackle not just weight problems, but type two diabetes.
And we found that, yes, if we change our diets in a very different way from what people had been told to do.
The idea is not to count calories.
The idea is not to try to limit carbohydrates and those sorts of things.
We were using a very plant, a strong emphasis on plant foods and limiting fats, limiting oils of all kinds.
[11:24] And what we found is that you could really improve blood sugar.
However, we did a number of studies. And what we found is really remarkable that when people would eat certain things.
And by the way, they were afraid at how indulgent this might have sounded.
You're going to have pancakes.
You could have it could be could be French toast. It could be linguine, you know, pasta, things that people hadn't eaten in a long period of time.
[11:48] But we would let them eat until they were full. And we wouldn't track calories.
We wouldn't track carbohydrates at all as far as they knew.
But as we were watching how much they were eating, what we discovered was something that was a really remarkable breakthrough.
Through and that is they would get full and satisfied about 200 calories before more more, before uh 200 calories say less than what they had been eating before in other words let's say a person normally ate 2 000 calories a day they came in we gave them these foods and they would say i'm eating just as much as before i feel perfectly satisfied we would add it up they were eating 1800, instead of 2000. You could say, would you, would you want a little bit more?
No, no, this is the portion. This is the way I eat. And we found people eating 1800, 1700 calories, feeling perfectly fine.
Uh, we've repeated that over and over again. And what we found is that it's consistently true and it's not really rocket science. You're not eating spam.
You're not eating a chicken breast. You're eating foods from plants.
They've got fiber. The fiber fills you up. It has almost no calories.
Uh, carbohydrate, although it's maligned has only four calories in a gram compared to fats.
So people get full, they get satisfied, they feel great, but the appetite taming effect is really important.
And so just to kind of reiterate for our listeners, what is it exactly that tames the appetite?
Is it the fiber? Is it the water that's in these foods? What is it? Okay.
[13:18] Fiber, water, carbohydrate. These are all foods that are all products, so to speak that really don't have a whole lot of calories that's part of it so that the calorie density goes down let's say in contrast i'm going to eat cheese you can eat cheese it'll fill you up too but at the point where you are full if you were to record the number of calories you've taken in for cheese it's huge because cheese is 70 fat and so it will fill you up but by the time you reach your satiety point you've taken in a lot of calories that's why your average american American Rip now eats 70,000 calories of cheese every single calendar year.
70,000. Some people even more than that. So part of it is the low calorie density.
Fiber fills you up. That's great. The watery foods fill you up, obviously. High carb foods, yes.
[14:13] There's one other piece of this, though.
Ozempic wagovi these are the big blockbuster injectable drugs they are trying to simulate something that you can do with foods here's what it is let's say you eat a meal the meal the foods go down your esophagus through your stomach through your intestinal tract and as they hit your intestinal tract they trigger the release of glp-1 glp-1 this will not be on the test is it's a natural compound it goes through the bloodstream to the brain turns down your appetite.
That's the point of it, is you need a system for your digestive tract to say, hey, we've eaten enough. You can stop now.
So GLP-1 comes out into your blood in response to food, goes to the brain, and says, you can stop eating now.
So that's not something a company can patent.
So Novo Nordisk made a synthetic. It's called the GLP-1 agonist, Wagovi Ozempic.
They're the the same drug. They just have two different names depending on the dose and the indication.
And so those drugs, you inject them once a week, they go to the brain, they stimulate the same center, and they say, stop eating. And this is a big blockbuster. Isn't this amazing?
[15:26] Hanna Kaliova on our research staff, she's the head of our research program, she fed a single meal to a group of individuals and found if it's high in fiber, high in complex carbohydrates, free of animal products, you get this nice, big GLP-1 increase. It goes right up.
That means your body is making the natural GLP-1. It is going to your brain.
It is taming your appetite.
Now, you can do the same test again, and she did.
[15:57] A meat-based meal. And you know what you see? A lot of nothing.
Your GLP-1 level does not go up so much. It just kind of sits there.
So a meat eater says, gee, I'm not really feeling full yet.
Let me have another portion. Let me have another portion. They end up overdoing it a little bit.
So the power foods are the ones that give you that appetite taming effect, partly the low energy density.
It's partly that you're getting that blast of GLP-1 that foods ought to be giving you.
So is that GLP-1, is that similar to like ghrelin and leptin or not?
Not exactly the same, but you're thinking right. Your body has an amazing number of hormones that will help you and that will help tame the appetite. Hmm.
[16:44] So yeah, I want to circle back to those drugs that you talked about here in a second, But OK, so appetite taming foods.
[16:52] So that's the first scientific breakthrough. The second one that you mentioned is calorie trapping foods.
And you base this off a Tufts University researchers in 2017.
What what exactly are calorie trapping foods? This was the most amazing study.
And these are terrific researchers at Tufts University in Boston, one of the premier nutrition centers in the world.
They brought in individuals they gave them two different kinds of meals one group was asked to eat white bread white rice and by the way what makes them white is that you've taken off the fiber the brown rice that brown or that little tan coating that's fiber you take it off it's white rice uh so white rice white bread the other group got whole grain bread the fiber is still in it and brown rice. So they're getting more fiber.
And then they did something that I got to tell you, my research team is never going to do, which is they collected stool samples from all the participants for...
[17:56] This long study and they analyzed the stool samples and what they found was that the high fiber foods were actually picking up collecting and trapping calories that had not yet been absorbed by the body and carry them out with the waste and so the participants in other words day after day eating these high fiber foods their body is expelling calories before they could be absorbed and they literally flush them down the toilet so the question is how much is this significant and the answer is about 100 calories per day just from the calorie trapping effect of the whole grain breads brown rice now that's not a lot 100 calories a day isn't huge but you're going to take about 200 or 300 calories a day from the appetite taming effect another 100 for calorie trapping and even more from metabolism boosting, which we'll talk about.
And you're starting to see why these power foods are so effective for weight loss.
So the power here is in the fiber. It could be whole grains.
It doesn't have to be. It could be fruits.
[19:03] It can be vegetables. The granddaddy of all the high-fiber foods is the bean group.
The beans, peas, lentils. So in the Power Foods diet, you'll see I've got a lentil soup.
And you make lentil soup, and your mom makes lentil soup. You know, delicious food, but it's got enough fiber to go down your digestive tract, trap those calories, carry them away.
You never even see them. Did you...
[19:29] Have you been aware of all of the incredible benefits of fiber or are you just constantly amazed as I am with what it can do for what you just mentioned, calorie trapping foods?
You know, we've learned from Will Bolschewitz and Fiber Fueled about what it does for the immune system and, you know, the microbiome.
It just seems like fiber is so vitally important for us as human beings.
And as you and I both know, most Americans are fiber deficient.
You know, a generation ago, people didn't talk about fiber at all. And it was 1991.
[20:06] Dr. Dennis Burkett, who was a wonderful man.
He was an Irishman. He became a surgeon, lived in England for a long period of time, but he spent a huge amount of time in Africa as a missionary surgeon.
He has a had a heart that just wouldn't quit.
And he started to discover something that in Africa, he just wasn't seeing people having appendicitis, colon cancer and other similar things.
And he discovered that what was different about them was they were eating root vegetables, beans, lots of foods that were very high in fiber.
And compared to Ireland, the UK, Europe, America, where people were neglecting the high fiber foods.
And so he became the biggest fiber advocate.
And at first, people wanted to ignore him and say, fiber, you know, what's the point of it?
Well, the point of it is that it helps clean you out. And there are two kinds of fiber, the soluble fiber, which also lowers cholesterol, the insoluble fiber, which sweeps your digestive tract clean of carcinogens.
And he became very famous and really did a world of good.
[21:16] Yeah. Yeah. By the way, one other thing I got to tell you, Dennis Burkett came to Washington, D.C.
In 1991 to join me and Colin Campbell and Oliver Alabaster, who's a cancer researcher at George Washington, to say that you don't need meat. You don't need dairy products.
What you do need is these healthy plant foods.
[21:37] Yeah, that's so incredible that you got to meet him.
I assume he's no longer alive. Is that right? No, he died a number of years ago.
He was quite up in years when he came over, but he was the most generous person.
He reminded me of your father, who is always so generous with his time. I was talking to Dr.
Burkett back in the 1980s, and I just wanted to tap his brain because people weren't talking about this then.
And he said, well, Neal, I'll tell you, I've got to come over to the U.S.
I've got a meeting in Chicago, but why don't I stop in Washington and we can spend some time together? And I thought, what a generous man.
So he broke his travels. He stopped in Washington.
And I just asked him a bunch of questions. I had my tape recorder going.
And I learned so much from him.
And then he came back and he did this press conference. And as long as he was alive, he was such a great ally.
Yeah.
All right, let's move on to your third scientific breakthrough that allows all this to be possible.
[22:38] And that is you mentioned metabolic boosting foods, but you call them calorie burning foods.
And there was a some research done in 2020 by none other than PCRM again.
[22:51] Yes, exactly. In fact, we've done a study a couple of times.
We'll bring in individuals and we track their calorie burning speed.
And the way you do it is you sit the patient down comfortably in a chair and we have a mask that we put over their mouth and nose so that we're tracking how much oxygen their body is consuming minute by minute and how much carbon dioxide they're putting out.
And what we with some pretty simple arithmetic, you've got their calorie burning speed.
So when a person is on a diet of fatty stuff, let's say I give you a stick of butter or two sticks of butter.
Your metabolism does not rise it just stays flat but instead let's say i give you plant-based foods uh carbohydrate and protein from plant sources your metabolism goes up for about three hours after the meal that's good that's normal but what we had discovered uh in a couple of studies that we did including the one you just mentioned is that one once a person sticks with this where they're having no animal products at all, they're keeping the oily foods really low, is that their metabolism not only rises.
[23:59] But it rises much more than before.
You can use the very same test meal, but they're burning about 15% more calories than they were earlier in the study.
So your body adapts to it and you get a bigger and bigger metabolism boost each time.
How much? It can be good for maybe a couple of hundred calories per day of an extra metabolism.
And so you're adding up the appetite taming effect, the calorie trapping effect, and then the burning effect, calorie burning effect. And it's quite significant.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. All three kind of jumping in at once.
You said 15% on the calorie burning foods.
It can affect at 15%. I mean, 15% is not nothing. That's pretty substantial. Yeah.
[24:47] It is substantial. And you can also then accentuate this even further.
So, OK, to give you a quick example, let's say I get up in the morning and I make oatmeal.
And today I'm going to do something a little different. I've got my little Ceylon cinnamon on my on my shelf and I'm going to put a little bit of that on my oatmeal.
OK, the oatmeal is great, you know, raisins and so forth on top.
But the addition of the cinnamon.
Cinnamon has a natural compound called, it's an aldehyde, and researchers not being very creative, they called it cinnamaldehyde.
The cinnamaldehyde goes down your digestive tract. It's a natural compound in the cinnamon.
It attaches to a receptor in your digestive tract that triggers the release of a little touch of adrenaline adrenaline that increases your metabolism.
So researchers thought maybe that would accelerate weight loss.
And they did a double blind trial where they gave people capsules of either cinnamon or placebo and found that the people with the cinnamon capsules were about seven or seven and a half pounds lighter after the 16 week study compared to the other people.
Now they were having a fair amount. They were having about a teaspoon a day.
So you may not want to have that much but what we're found it what we found is that you get a calorie burning effect from cinnamon.
[26:06] Ginger uh hot peppers i'm not saying you want to have a jalapeno every day but if you ever did and i'm sure you did uh yeah probably you know you put some diced jalapenos on your veggie burger or something like that or on your on your bean burrito um if you kind of overdo it a little bit on the hot peppers you'll start to sweat a little bit and you you feel hot yeah researchers have have measured that and they have discovered that the capsaicins that make the peppers hot trigger the release of calories. So you're burning calories faster.
So all we're doing in the power foods is we're using them and you're putting them to work in a smart way. So I've got my Southwest chili.
You can imagine what's in there and you can burn calories faster if you want.
You know, it's so funny about what you just said in that whole story with the spices is that when I was at the peak of my triathlon career.
[27:01] Training anywhere from two to eight hours a day. Yeah, I was a lean, mean hundred and sixty six pounds.
I I loved having hot stuff. stuff.
And literally we'd be at a dinner and I would be breaking out in a sweat.
Like I was, like, I just gotten done doing a 10 mile run and it was just the spices.
But I don't know if it's because I was as lean and mean and in shape as I ever was.
And literally all I was eating were, you know, whole food, plant-based the three different, you know, um, methods that you talk talk about here in your book but um yeah it just everything you said just ranks so true there i would just be like i had just showered it was crazy right yeah and so the whole idea here is why not pick some foods that are power foods that will tap your tame your appetite and so forth and let's just put them into a dessert or put them into to a salad or a soup or or a main dish or whatever and so uh french toast i'm gonna make some french toast i'll put some cinnamon on top and I'm not going to make the French toast with cream or butter or eggs or the usual kind of stuff. It'll be a nice.
[28:14] Healthy french toast and i'm going to put on the top of it blueberries because blueberries have, anthocyanins in them that's the purple color which has been shown to be strongly associated with weight loss specifically abdominal fat loss let's put this all together and you got a great great breakfast let's do it for lunch with a maybe a lentil soup or make a doll maybe a mango doll, fine these are all power foods let's have a pasta for dinner for every dieter who is told you can't that pasta because it's carbohydrate bring it back because i'm going to show you how to make it into a slimming dish and then if you want to have dessert um you can do that too i've got black and blue brown black and blue brownies with black beans and blueberries in the brownies carrot cake all kinds of wonderful things with the pasta and you talk about this with a lot of other foods, it isn't so much the food it's what you put on top of the food that makes it so So fattening and weight gaining, correct?
Yeah, right, exactly. Now, there are different pastas. I mean, there are pastas that are whole grain pastas, a better choice.
There are pastas that are egg pastas where they're trying to put in cholesterol in there, not such a good choice.
But, yeah, what you said, Rip, is exactly right. Where people run into trouble, they go to their nearest Italian restaurant and they douse the stuff with ground beef sauce.
Instead of that, use our, I've got an arrabbiata sauce. That's the Italian word for angry, and it means a little bit spicy.
[29:44] And it's delicious. It's filling, and it's a calorie burner.
I want to come back to some of these foods in a sec, but first I want to ask you about, you talk about in the book how, our food choices can actually change our fundamental body chemistry.
Can you give me some examples?
Yeah. Back in 2015, Harvard researchers looked at more than 100,000 people and they tracked their weight over time, but they also tracked the foods that they were eating more of or less of.
And they found something remarkable that there are certain foods that if you increase increase your consumption of these specific foods that was associated with more weight loss.
And the granddaddy of all, number one, was blueberries and other berries in that category.
Blueberries, strawberries, raspberries, blackberries.
Number two, by the way, I'll give you this real quick.
Cruciferous vegetables like broccoli or cauliflower.
Yep, exactly. You can't go wrong.
[30:44] Number three was green vegetables in general, like spinach and so forth.
Number four, the citrus group, which was a little bit of a surprise to me because it included oranges, grapefruits, and also orange juice.
So fine. It's okay. Yes. Fine.
Number five, melons. So cantaloupe, watermelon.
And number six, our granddaddy, the bean, the whole bean group, beans, peas, lentils. But back to the blueberries, just really quick to answer your question.
The question is why? Why are they causing weight loss?
What's happening in the body? Well, what makes the blueberry blue is a special antioxidant called an anthocyanin.
And there's actually many anthocyanins. There's a reddish anthocyanin that makes strawberries red.
[31:30] Researchers two years after the harvard report came out researchers in the uk did an amazing study they had almost 3 000 twins and everyone got a dexa scan where you measure how much fat do you you can measure your body composition how much fat do you have on your thighs and your abdomen and so forth and what they found was that the twin who ate more anthocyanins had nine percent less less abdominal fat compared to her genetically identical twin sister.
So the genes aren't there. It's just the food. And it was the anthocyanins.
Now, anthocyanins are in blueberries and other berries.
If you have a pear, that kind of pinkish blush on the peel, that's anthocyanins too. There's grapes, a little bit different one.
So bringing these things into your diet helps. but you ask the questions what's it doing in your body well anthocyanins are number one very powerful antioxidants but before you even absorb them or let's say you don't absorb them at all while they're going down your digestive tract they are changing your gut microbiome affecting your metabolism foods there plus to tell you the truth they're just a marker also that's It's a visual clue that these are foods with a really low glycemic index. They don't spike your blood sugar.
They've got a lot of fiber in them, and it's just a really healthy food.
[32:59] I want to ask you about a couple foods right now because there's a lot of, I think, misinformation swirling around them, and people are getting very, very confused.
So let's start with bananas. bananas.
You know, people think that a banana has as much sugar as a candy bar and it's going to spike your insulin and your sugar levels and stay away from the banana.
What do you think about bananas?
I think bananas are great. I think I would use them for anything.
First of all, it's a good food normally.
It's a good food if you're having a snack and you want to have a snack at night.
It's a really good thing to have before bed as opposed to some really heavy meal.
After After athletic endeavor, I think it's great. Bananas, 100% fine.
All right, good. What about oatmeal? I hear more people saying, I'm wearing my continuous glucose monitor and I can't believe what my blood sugar does after my bowl of oatmeal. And I'm like...
[33:58] Give me a break. What do you say about oatmeal? Well, if a person has diabetes and they've got a continuous glucose monitor for that purpose, different people do react differently to certain foods.
So you can just, you know, if they're saying this is spiking my blood sugar now, I would say, okay, try that test again on a different date and try it over time and see if things don't change because they usually do.
But once in a while, you have a person who reacts in a kind of unpredictable way.
To certain foods, but oatmeal themselves, what is it? It's first of all, it's a whole grain.
[34:33] Secondly, it's in a wide variety of forms and you can, and they're all still, they all still have the oat fiber in it.
It's not just good for weight loss, terrific for weight loss, but it does other things too, because the oat has both soluble and insoluble fiber, the soluble fiber, that's the one, that's the one that kind of makes the oats kind of mushy.
It's, it dissolves in the water and it becomes a little more puddingy that soluble fiber will take your cholesterol down a few notches as well so uh oatmeal fine and extra credit what if i take that oatmeal which is already a slimming food and i put blueberries on it with the anthocyanins and a little cinnamon on it as well you can see i mean you know you don't think of it as power foods you think of just healthy stuff but these are power foods that will help you to reach your weight loss goals.
Yeah. Well, Neal, this morning on my cereal, I had blueberries, mangoes, grapefruit, and banana.
And it was knock down, drag out good.
What about potatoes? So many people are afraid of the potato.
You in Power Foods diet, you're a huge fan of potatoes. Why? Why?
Okay. Well, number one, let me say something that's going to surprise the viewers today. A potato has more protein than an egg.
[36:01] People will say, wait a minute. I'm going to the gym, and my trainer told me I need lots and lots of protein.
So I went in the store, and I got a whole bunch of eggs, and I ate them raw.
Fine. If you want to do that, what you're doing is you're getting a huge load of cholesterol and some significant saturated fat, zero fiber.
A large egg and a large potato, look it up.
The large potato has more protein than the large egg. Wow.
Okay. Yes, it does. Now, potatoes have a bad rep. The idea is that they're fattening.
Part of that is people just love potatoes.
And anything that we really love that much, people want to say bad things about it because we assume that our tastes lead us astray.
But the thing that, you know what I mean. But the problem with a potato is that this innocent potato comes out of the oven.
And what do we do to it? We cut it open and throw a tablespoon of butter on top and another tablespoon of sour cream and some little cheese doodles and some bacon bits. And we gain weight and we blame the potato.
The potato was an innocent bystander for all the fatty toppings that go on top.
And, you know, there have been a lot of folks who have used potatoes to slim down. I think maybe the most famous was the magician Penn Jillette. Yeah.
[37:19] Penn and Teller. You know, he had a lot of weight to lose. And he thought, I got to deal with this.
And so he ate a huge amount of potatoes. And man, did he get slim fast.
The potato is a fairly low calorie food, a really healthy food.
So the key, those toppings.
Do you have a favorite potato, sweet potatoes or Yukon gold potatoes or just any old potato?
Potato? Great question. To tell you the truth, I am really partial to the sweet potatoes.
And they all come in different varieties. And they're not the same plant, you know, a Yukon Gold or a typical, say, maybe a baking potato or a roasting potato, not the same as a sweet potato.
But the sweet potato is an amazing thing.
In Okinawa, which is one of the real blue Blue Zones. You know Dan Buettner's brilliant work looking at where people live the longest.
Okinawa is one of the Blue Zones and the number one staple food.
[38:18] In Okinawa is not steak. It's not chicken. It's not rice.
It's not fish. It's sweet potatoes. And they have a special purple sweet potato that they eat a lot of. And you'll see it occasionally in markets here.
Absolutely knockout delicious. And you can cut it up, roast it.
You don't need to add any oil to it or anything. It's just absolutely great. So enjoy them.
Yeah. I have one of those purple ones and one of the white ones two days ago for dinner. I found the purple one to be particularly dry.
The white one was nice. And then I also had a normal sweet potato that was just so succulent and juicy.
[38:57] And the orange ones, though, you know, the typical orange ones, what we say is a yam or sweet potato.
That's that orange color comes from beta carotene. Yeah.
And beta carotene is an antioxidant also and is associated with weight loss, too. too.
So yes, it's a good cancer preventer. Good idea.
But beta-carotene rich foods ought to be front and center in your plate.
Let's talk about soy, because I know you mentioned soy as being a good food here on the Power Food Diet.
There's a lot of, again, misinformation, I think, swirling around.
[39:31] Soy, is it good or bad? And what's your verdict?
Okay. There is no question anymore about it. Soy is fine.
Soy is a good thing. And this is so important because, oh, what was it, maybe 20 years ago or so, scientists said that soy isoflavones.
[39:53] Dadesine, genistein, glycetine, these are isoflavones within the soy, that they bind to estrogen receptors.
And if it binds to estrogen receptors, maybe it would cause cancer.
Or if you you have cancer, maybe it would cause the cancer to grow.
Well, researchers have had time to test this.
And so they'll take large groups of people and they'll look at those eating a lot of soy and those who tend not to eat soy.
And the rather consistent results are that women who consume the most soy have about 30% less breast cancer risk compared to the women who avoid soy.
So it It doesn't cause cancer. It's the opposite. It reduces cancer risk.
Some studies may be closer to 40% cancer reduction.
And then women who have had a cancer diagnosis already, a woman who was diagnosed with breast cancer, and her well-meaning but ill-informed oncologist says, I wouldn't eat soy because it attaches to estrogen receptors, da, da, da.
It turns out that the women consuming the most soy have a 25% to 30% reduction in the risk of their cancer coming back or risk of dying of it.
So soy is a cancer preventer.
And it helps women with cancer to live longer. So soy is fine.
Now, soy is totally optional.
[41:06] But remember at the beginning or a little earlier, I was talking about the Harvard study where they identified beans as one of the six groups of foods associated with weight loss.
Soybeans are in there and soybean products, tofu, tempeh, miso, all of the soybean products are part of it. So I start my day.
I'll grill some some tofu in a nonstick pan, put a little nutritional yeast, a little bit of organic soy sauce on top.
And it's got a lot of protein. It's sort of like what people use sausage or bacon for.
Except it's got no cholesterol, no animal fat, and it has the soy isoflavones, which don't just reduce breast cancer risk.
For us guys, it reduces prostate cancer risk, too. Bam! I like it, Neal.
You mentioned Okinawa. I know that they, I think also, aside from the sweet potato, I think they also do some tofu.
Is there an ideal amount of tofu like we want to consume, like two ounces a day, four ounces a day?
Do you have any any any research on that or no?
[42:18] Not exactly. What we what we do know is that if you did a study only in Americans, say Fargo, North Dakota, where I grew up and nobody's eating tofu, you don't really it's hard to tease anything out because nobody's really doing it to really see the effect. you have to include populations that eat a fair amount.
So something like three or four ounces a day would put you in probably in the right area. But I'll tell you one other thing.
Different soy products are different. We recently did a menopause study where we brought in women who had hot flashes that were driving them crazy.
And what we found is that if you gave people just a plant-based diet, the hot flashes might've reduced a little bit, but they didn't go away.
If you cut Cut oils and fats, little benefit, not huge.
If you gave them soy extracts or soybeans, little benefit, not huge.
If you do all three together, no animal products, really keep the oil out and a half a cup of soybeans every day.
The hot flashes were reduced by almost 90 percent very rapidly.
Life changing. It's as strong as HRT.
But the soybeans we used, Rip, in this case, we used mature soybeans.
[43:30] So let's say you're at a Japanese restaurant. They give you the little edamame.
Those are baby soybeans.
Leave them on the vine. Let them mature. And the isoflavones really come out.
So the mature soybeans, that's what you want.
Cook them in your Instant Pot, 40 minutes or so.
You can toast them if you want to carry them with you to, a business meeting or something like that. And they work really, really well.
That's wonderful research. Congratulations on that. I know there's lots of women in particular that would love to hear that.
And they're suffering from the hot flashes, big time.
[44:07] Neal, one more thing before we leave soy.
I would assume that you're not a fan of the highly processed soy, that the soy dogs, the soy burgers that have the soy protein concentrates and isolates is that right or not well the closer it is to a bean the better it's going to be so if you take a soy product and you maybe just ferment them at like tempeh fine uh however the benefits are seen with things where the soybeans are are played around with a little bit more you turn into tofu or so no and i am going to say that if you take a soybean and i mean it's amazing how versatile it is you can make bacon out of it you can make hot dogs one day rip they're going to to make snow tires out of it.
[44:49] They make everything out of it. If you give your kid a soy hot dog, you should pat yourself on the back because it is way better than the meat hot dog.
If you get soy bacon and your kids will eat that, it is so much better than the animal-based, animal-based bacons.
But what you're saying is, okay, have, have your foods be as close to normal as possible, in the natural state as possible. That's a good idea. Yeah.
[45:14] I want, I want to delve into some of the less healthy, um, food groups that, that are out there that you recommend people kind of stay away from.
And to me, one of the things that you do so brilliantly is how you describe things like like eggs and cheese and and and oils so if you don't mind i'd love to throw lob ball it out to you and then have you uh talk for a sec on each one so let's start let's start with animal protein why are you not a fan of animal protein well animal protein when we were kids we really thought that you needed lots of animal protein that was a good complete protein but in 2016 that crashed and burned at harvard university they looked at at individuals who got their protein from plants got their protein from animals.
And they found that if you substitute instead of animal protein, if you were to substitute plant protein, your risk of dying was diminished.
And that was true whether what you were taking out was meat, or if you were taking out the dairy, or if you're taking out eggs, if you're taking out fish, in every case, the plant proteins were associated with longer, with less mortality.
So yeah, protein, yes, but it's got to be plant protein. Okay.
I know you wrote a whole book on it with the cheese trap, but talk to me about cheese and dairy products and why you are not a fan.
[46:42] Well, lots of reasons. I mean, the first is you can't ask for a more fattening food than that. Cheese is 70% fat.
If it were any worse, it would be Vaseline.
I'm serious. But the big problem with it is that it's a little bit addicting, or for some people, more than a little bit.
And I'm sure you've seen this where people would say, OK, I'm PLANTSTRONG, except except for cheese or that's the hardest food to give up.
There's a reason for that.
It's partly because when they make the when milk is converted into cheese, they add a lot of salt and they concentrate the fat.
They take away the water and the natural sugars. So it's very fatty and very salty, like potato chips or onion rings, fatty, salty things. addict us.
But the dairy protein contains casomorphins, which are natural opiates that go to the same brain receptor as heroin.
And it addicts us, so to speak.
I'm not saying that's as strong as heroin. It's not. But the casomorphins, there's one called casomorphoseptin. It's one of the casomorphins.
It has about one-tenth the brain binding power of pure pure pharmacy-grade morphine.
So it's not enough to get you arrested, but it's more than enough to make you want to eat this and your body expands before your very eyes.
I love that. It's not enough to get you arrested. That's brilliant.
[48:10] You and the cheese trap, you talk, I just want to say this for the audience, because I use it all the time.
You talk about an eight-ounce glass of whole milk is about 150 150 calories.
But you take eight ounces of cheddar cheese and you melt it down, you put it into that glass, you now have 975 calories.
Just to give you an idea of the calorie load that people are getting in cheese. It's mind-numbing.
And I'm sorry to say that milk sales are dropping and dropping and dropping, consistently dropping.
So the dairy industry has found the way to make money is to turn your milk into cheese. And they are putting cheese in everything.
And the U.S. government, to market American agricultural products, signs contracts with fast food chains to put more cheese on their menu.
And there's a reason that our kids are having more problems with their weight than previous generations. Yeah.
So you mentioned earlier how a potato, a large potato, has more protein than an egg.
But what are the two main things that you hate about an egg?
[49:16] Well, I guess you'd have to say the yolk and the white, you know, but, you know, Rip, think about it.
You know, eggs, eggs do not order room service. When a chicken lays an egg, that egg sits there and, you know, she, she's laid this egg and that egg one day is going to hatch. And when it hatches, It's got feathers. It's got a beak. It's got eyes. It's got a liver. It's got little feet.
It's got all this stuff. And that was all there in the egg when it was laid.
How do you get an entire animal to be constructed in an egg?
The way you do it is when you lay it, you fill it full of cholesterol because cholesterol is needed to make cell membranes, animal cell membranes.
And so if a person decides, I think I'm going to eat that egg, you're eating all the ingredients of a chick and that means you're getting a huge amount of cholesterol now the white what's the white it's just a big glob of animal protein you don't need that the yolk is where the fat and the cholesterol yeah i remember hearing you say that one egg yolk has as much cholesterol i'm sorry one yeah one egg yolk has as much cholesterol as two burger king whoppers with cheese boom mine explodes yeah yeah and of course the egg industry is trying to to fight back.
They say, well, you don't really absorb that much. You do.
We've gone through the literature. They can complain all you want.
If you consume cholesterol, maybe a good about half of it goes straight into your bloodstream. Wow.
[50:42] Okay. I think my audience is pretty savvy on oils and why we don't want to do oils, but could you just dive into quickly maybe coconut and palm oil and why are they the worst?
[50:55] Well, all oils have nine calories in every gram, but the kinds, which is a lot.
And so they all tend to slow down our weight loss efforts.
And if a person is trying to lower their cholesterol level, man, people run into trouble with coconut oil and they run into trouble with palm oil.
And you can see it. If you take a bottle of corn oil, it's a liquid.
If you take a jar of coconut oil, it looks like wax.
You don't need to send it to to a lab, you know the reason it's waxy is it's very high in saturated fat.
Saturated fat raises cholesterol. Now, to prove this.
[51:34] Bring in volunteers, feed half of them coconut oil, feed half of them another kind of oil or nothing.
And what you see is very predictably the coconut oil eaters, their cholesterol levels go right up. Same thing with palm oil.
And the reason I'm concerned about it is there's a big market for it now.
They taste buttery. They have that mouthfeel and they got a shelf life of 3,000 years, whatever.
I mean, they don't go rancid because they're so heavily saturated.
And so they will add them to everything. They add them to baked goods.
They add them, unfortunately, to vegan cheeses. They'll add them to peanut butter.
You get a jar that you think would be peanuts, and you look on the back, and they throw palm oil in there. Take that, put it back on the shelf, don't eat it.
Especially with the no-stir varieties, that's where they add the palm oil.
Right. All right. Let's move on. I want to dive in a little deeper into the drugs and money that you talk about in this book around Ozempic and Wegovy, you talk about side effects, right?
And how almost two-thirds of people that go on these drugs typically stop within a year. Is it because of the side effects that they stop?
[52:46] That's part of it. When you consume them, you feel sick. You feel nauseated.
You might vomit. You're going to have diarrhea.
The digestive effects of them are no joke. And then over time, some people have pancreatitis, so they have have gallbladder disease or other issues.
But I got to tell you, one of the real issues with these drugs is they are so expensive that it means people, either their drug plan, their insurance plan doesn't pay for them at all, or if they ever switch drug plans, maybe they can't continue with it.
The current price is about $15,000, a little bit more than $15,000 a year for it, and very, very pricey.
So let's say you decide, well, I'm desperate.
I'm going to do it. I'm going to take these drugs. And you do it for a year.
You do it for two years. And you do see weight loss with them.
The weight loss kind of plateaus after a while. It's not, you know, it's not, it's significant, but it's not as much as you would want it.
However, when you stop paying and you stop taking that drug, that weight comes right back and it comes back aggressively.
So the question is, what am I doing?
[53:53] Blue Cross Blue Shield did a study because the question was, was should an insurance company pay for it?
What they discovered is for every 1% of people in your insurance plan who are taking Ozempic or Wegovy, everybody else's premiums go up by almost 15 bucks a month. So you have one, no.
[54:12] I don't mean to say that people who have weight issues don't deserve good treatment.
They obviously need good treatment. But good treatment doesn't mean injecting yourself with a drug every week for the rest of your life.
Maybe for some people there is an inborn genetic issue where that might be the solution.
But in the vast majority of cases, what they really need is good, healthy foods and a little bit of support.
Because everyone's going to hit a bump in the road. You're at a party. You're traveling.
You're not too sure about this or that choice. But it becomes so much easier than committing yourself to taking drugs forever.
It seems like there's just so many different factions of people in the medical community that are getting behind these drugs right now.
Tell me, how incentivized are physicians to prescribe these drugs and do they get any kind of kickback?
$27 million is the amount of money that Novo Nordisk pays doctors every single year.
Now, it's illegal to pay a doctor for prescribing a drug.
What you can do instead is you pay them for doing a presentation to their colleagues about how good these drugs are.
Or you give them a consultancy fee or something like that, $27 million a year.
[55:28] And Novo Nordisk also paid. Novo Nordisk is a Scandinavian country, but they take a big interest in American politics.
So they pay into the campaign funds up to the max allowed to encourage people running for office to say that these drugs should be paid for out of your Medicare plan.
So stay tuned. Oh, and the saddest thing I have to say, growing up, I always would watch 60 Minutes on CBS News.
January 1st, 2023, 60 Minutes did a 12-minute program all about Wegovian and what a great thing it was.
And afterwards, we looked at every single medical expert they quoted was paid by Novo Nordisk and Novo Nordisk also sponsored CVS. It was basically a commercial.
So the money is really leading the way on this. And I'm hoping that we'll start to see things in a better way.
Yeah, that's super sad to hear that, especially especially about 60 minutes that I thought was basically, you know, better than all than that.
[56:30] So doctors, you write about how typically doctors, they're not supposed to basically prescribe this drug until after their patients have tried some sort of a diet.
But I think you and I both know that they're probably not being prescribed the power foods diet.
So, of course, whatever diet they're being told to go on doesn't work.
And they come back saying, you know, give me give me the drugs. Right. Right.
[56:56] That's exactly what happens is somebody will go on a diet. They might do an Atkins diet or a South beach side, or they might do a calorie counting diet where by Wednesday they're so hungry. They say, I can't do it anymore.
At by Novo Nordisk guidelines, they will say, well, you are now a diet failure because, so you qualify for injections. And I would say that's a mistake.
How about if we support the patient in eating the foods that are healthy for them, the kinds of foods that you've been advocating for for a long period of time, PLANTSTRONG foods.
And if we get away from the oils and we get away from the animal products and we filled our plates with healthy foods, and if we emphasize these power foods, have fun with them, enjoy them, the weight comes off automatically.
Instead of spending 15 grand a year, the average person on a plant-based diet saves about 500 bucks a year compared to what they were doing before. Yeah.
I think to sum up this, it's just these drugs, you just said it, these drugs do artificially what your body can do naturally with a PLANTSTRONG and power foods type diet.
[57:58] Will you touch upon cholesterol, cholesterol, lowering drugs and insulin and why those also.
[58:08] Perpetuate the weight gain? Yeah. Now, let me be clear. Some people are going to need insulin.
There's no question about it. But insulin will really slow down weight loss.
It interferes with it. It causes weight gain.
So what's the answer? The answer isn't to throw your injections away.
The answer is to also be on a healthy diet.
Because what we have found is that when people are on a plant-based diet, no animal products, keeping oils really low, high fiber foods, the power foods, their insulin requirements drop dramatically.
That's true for type 2 diabetes.
It's true for for type 1 diabetes. For type 1, you'll still need insulin.
You can't stop it. But the amount you need is typically reduced by about 30%.
Now, with statins, an amazing thing, statins are cholesterol-lowering drugs.
What researchers have found is that although they have a pretty good safety profile, we've started to see that they do a lot of mischief, starting with muscle pains.
[59:02] Liver disorders sometimes, but more recently, a higher risk of diabetes and perhaps even a higher higher risk of other issues, including weight gain. And the question is why?
If you have more fat cells, your fat cells make leptin, which reduces your appetite, except when you're taking a statin, it reduces the fat cells ability to make leptin.
So when people go on a statin prescription compared to placebo, they're gaining weight, unfortunately.
So some people are going to need them, but probably 80 or 90% of people on a statin don't need them, meaning they wouldn't need them if they would follow a diet that didn't have animal fat or cholesterol in it. Wow.
[59:42] It's so wild. This is such a great book, Neal. You've done such a fabulous job.
Tell me, you've been at the helm now of PCRM that you founded in 1985.
[59:56] What are some of the most exciting things that you're working on right now?
Well, we're doing some really big research studies right now.
We're doing a study with Blue Cross Blue Shield to look at whether a plant-based diet will help reduce medical utilization.
Basically, do you become a cheaper date? Do you need less time in the emergency room? We'll see. We're in the middle of that study. I'll let you know.
We're also doing some more diabetes studies where we're looking at actually what's happening inside the cells as people are changing these things.
And lots more going on. But perhaps more importantly, our job is to really get the word out as far and wide.
And Rip, that's something I want to salute you for because you've done such a brilliant job of letting people know about what healthy foods are, how to incorporate them into their life to realize that this is good.
This is, it's a little bit cool, may I say also. You make it fun.
And I got to salute you for doing that. Well, I salute you right back.
My PLANTSTRONG brother in arms.
[1:00:55] Thank you for everything that you're doing and for doing it so incredibly well and with such class.
Neal, give me a PLANTSTRONG fist bump on the way out.
Power Foods. Go get them. All right.
Thank you, Rip. Great talking with you today. day Neal's new book "Power Foods" comes out on march 26th and it's one that you'll want to order right away and I'll be sure to provide the link in today's show notes remember that there are foods that fill you up and actually help you burn more calories and what are those foods Well, they're PlantStrong, of course.
Thanks so much for listening and sharing this episode.
And until next time, always, always keep it PLANTSTRONG.
[1:01:51] The PlantStrong podcast team includes Carrie Barrett, Laurie Kortowich, and Ami Mackey.
If you like what you hear, do us a favor and share the show with your friends and loved ones. You can always leave a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
And while you're there, make sure to hit that follow button so that you never miss an episode.
As always, this and every episode is dedicated to my parents, Dr. Caldwell B. Esselstyn Jr.
And Anne Crile Esselstyn. Thanks so much for listening.
