In this captivating episode, we have the privilege of embarking on an enlightening journey with James Polakof, Ph.D., and his esteemed guest, Dr. Neal Barnard. These culinary experts delve into some of the most intriguing questions surrounding veganism and nutrition.
One of the central topics they tackle is the common misconception that vegans struggle to obtain sufficient protein. Dr. Barnard refutes the misconception that plant-based proteins are incomplete. He emphasizes the significance of diversifying plant-based protein sources to achieve a well-balanced diet.
Another fascinating topic they explore is the psychological aspect of meat-eating and why some meat-eaters may feel intimidated by vegetarians. Dr. Barnard openly takes on this topic and emphasizes the importance of respecting individual food choices.
The discussion also delves into the topic of healthy weight loss. Dr. Jim and Dr. Barnard highlight the significance of adopting a nutrient-rich, plant-based diet as a sustainable and effective way to achieve and maintain a healthy weight. Dr. Barnard explains how whole, unprocessed plant foods are naturally lower in calories and higher in fiber, leading to greater satiety and improved metabolic health.
Furthermore, Dr. Neal Barnard also shares insights from his groundbreaking book, "The Power Foods Diet." This comprehensive guide provides practical strategies for incorporating nutrient-dense superfoods into one's diet.
Throughout the episode, James Polakof and Dr. Neal Barnard engage in a thought-provoking conversation, offering valuable insights and dispelling common misconceptions about veganism and nutrition. Their expertise and passion for promoting a plant-based lifestyle shine through, making this episode an informative and inspiring listen for anyone interested in making healthier food choices.
Books By Dr. Barnard https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B001ILHHG0
Physicians Committee https://www.pcrm.org/about-us/staff/neal-barnard-md-facc
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/drnealbarnard/?hl=en
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/NealBarnardMD/
Twitter https://twitter.com/DrNealBarnard
#Nutrition #PowerFoodsDiet #HealthyEating #MetabolismBoost #DrNealBarnard #HealthyLifestyle #PhysiciansCommittee
Let's Get Social ...
Visit my website click here
H and L show site Click Here
Visit the Health and Lifestyles Show CLICK HERE
Facebook Click Here
Instagram Click Here
X aka Twitter Click Here
In this captivating episode, we have the privilege of embarking on an enlightening journey with James Polakof, Ph.D., and his esteemed guest, Dr. Neal Barnard. These culinary experts delve into some of the most intriguing questions surrounding veganism and nutrition.
One of the central topics they tackle is the common misconception that vegans struggle to obtain sufficient protein. Dr. Barnard refutes the misconception that plant-based proteins are incomplete. He emphasizes the significance of diversifying plant-based protein sources to achieve a well-balanced diet.
Another fascinating topic they explore is the psychological aspect of meat-eating and why some meat-eaters may feel intimidated by vegetarians. Dr. Barnard openly takes on this topic and emphasizes the importance of respecting individual food choices.
The discussion also delves into the topic of healthy weight loss. Dr. Jim and Dr. Barnard highlight the significance of adopting a nutrient-rich, plant-based diet as a sustainable and effective way to achieve and maintain a healthy weight. Dr. Barnard explains how whole, unprocessed plant foods are naturally lower in calories and higher in fiber, leading to greater satiety and improved metabolic health.
Furthermore, Dr. Neal Barnard also shares insights from his groundbreaking book, "The Power Foods Diet." This comprehensive guide provides practical strategies for incorporating nutrient-dense superfoods into one's diet.
Throughout the episode, James Polakof and Dr. Neal Barnard engage in a thought-provoking conversation, offering valuable insights and dispelling common misconceptions about veganism and nutrition. Their expertise and passion for promoting a plant-based lifestyle shine through, making this episode an informative and inspiring listen for anyone interested in making healthier food choices.
Books By Dr. Barnard https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B001ILHHG0
Physicians Committee https://www.pcrm.org/about-us/staff/neal-barnard-md-facc
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/drnealbarnard/?hl=en
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/NealBarnardMD/
Twitter https://twitter.com/DrNealBarnard
#Nutrition #PowerFoodsDiet #HealthyEating #MetabolismBoost #DrNealBarnard #HealthyLifestyle #PhysiciansCommittee
Let's Get Social ...
Visit my website click here
H and L show site Click Here
Visit the Health and Lifestyles Show CLICK HERE
Facebook Click Here
Instagram Click Here
X aka Twitter Click Here
Welcome to Live Healthy Longer, the podcast created especially for seniors and designed to enhance the quality of your life as you age. Our host, Dr Jim Polakoff, is a certified nutritionist who believes you are what you eat and that food is the best medicine. Now let's join Dr Jim.
Speaker 2:Yes, I'm Dr Jim Polakoff, and this episode will take us a step closer in discovering how we live healthy longer. I'll begin with a question why are meat eaters so intimidated by vegetarians? Even though veganism has become more mainstream, omnivores still advocate you need to eat meat to be healthy and to have vitality and energy. After my interview with our special guest, I'll get into this controversy a bit more, but first we're going to be hearing from Dr Neal Barnard. Dr Barnard is president of Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine and he's been the principal investigator on several clinical trials which focus upon healthy weight loss. He has been the host of three PBS television programs and written 15 popular books. His latest book is the Power Foods Diet, so certainly he'll be shedding light on losing weight the healthy way. Welcome, dr Bernard.
Speaker 3:Well, it's good to be with you today.
Speaker 2:You're a strong advocate of a plant food diet.
Speaker 3:I'd like to begin by having you explain what exactly is a plant-based diet. A plant-based diet really means you're eating abundant vegetables and fruits and whole grains and beans and all the wonderful things that they are made into For example, a beautiful plate of pasta topped not with a greasy ground beef sauce but with a spicy arrabbiata sauce or marinara sauce, or a bean burrito, or a chili made not with meat but with chunky vegetables and beans. And it means that you're not eating animal products at all. Animal products have cholesterol and animal fat and the occasional salmonella and E coli, and you're not eating any of that.
Speaker 2:So many are accustomed to eating meat on a regular basis. The first question might be will I get enough protein on a plant-based diet?
Speaker 3:More than enough protein. Protein is something that you need for structural repair and other functions in the body, and proteins are all made up of essential amino acids in the same way as a necklace is made of a chain of beads and all the essential amino acids are found in all plants, and you'll get more than enough of all the essential amino acids and more than enough total protein. And to give you an example, the US government says that an average man needs about 56 grams of protein per day, for a woman about 46. And it varies depending on your activity level and how big you are. But let's say, could you get that 46 grams or 56 grams from plants?
Speaker 3:If tomorrow you were to say well, I normally eat about 2000 calories a day, what if, as a crazy experiment, I decided I was going to eat nothing but broccoli all day? 2000 calories worth of nothing but broccoli? Would there be protein there? And the answer is there would be about 146 grams of pure protein in it. In other words, you get all you need plus about 100 grams. Broccoli has so much protein in it. And if you do the same experiment with lentils and if you just ate nothing but lentils for a day, you'd get 157 grams of protein. So hopefully you're not going to do either of those experiments. But you might have some broccoli or other green vegetables, you might have some lentils or other beans, you might have fruit, you might have grains. The amount of protein that you will get is more than sufficient, and if anyone has any remaining doubts about this never-ending question about protein, go look at an elephant or a giraffe. These are vegan animals and they're getting all of the protein they need from plant sources.
Speaker 2:That's exactly right. I agree with you 100%. I do have a question, though when we're talking about a plant-based diet, what about fish such as salmon, with all the omegas that really are quite essential, in my opinion at least, to a diet? Do you exclude fish from your particular diet?
Speaker 3:I think the role of fish in a diet is that it's something that, if it's carefully prepared, it provides excellent nutrition for a cat or any other carnivorous animal. I think they would do well with it. Human beings are not carnivores and we don't do very well with salmon. Where we really see people running into trouble with it is anyone who desires to lose weight. If they start bringing salmon into their diet in a big way, their weight loss grinds to a halt and they are left unsatisfied and they can't figure out why. But if you look at the nutrition label, you see the answer.
Speaker 3:Atlantic salmon is 40% fat as a percentage of fat. If it's Chinook salmon, it's 50% or even more, and every fat gram has nine calories. In other words, it's just a calorie bomb. So, yes, it has some omega-3, but it also has saturated fat and a mixture of other fats, as well as mercury and heavy metals and pesticides and other things in the human sewer that we call the ocean, and people are eating these things hoping that it's going to be helpful for them. There are omega-3s in plant sources and they are more than sufficient. If a person desires to pump it up with supplements, there are supplements of EPA or DHA that you don't need. Some of them are fish-derived, but there is the exact same kind of DHA and DPA that is vegan. It's derived from algae. Perfectly fine, if you want that.
Speaker 2:All right, I was going to ask you about supplements because, on a plant-based diet, do you recommend taking supplements and, if you do, which ones would you focus upon?
Speaker 3:Yes, a person should take vitamin B12. It's the only supplement you really do have to take. Vitamin B12 is essential for healthy nerves and healthy blood, and it's not made by animals or by plants. It's made by bacteria, and a meat eater is likely to get some B12 because the bacteria in the cow's gut makes it, but the absorption is sometimes limited and the US government recommends that everyone, regardless of diet, over the age of 50, supplement with vitamin B12. I recommend that for everybody, at any age, regardless of diet, but it's essential for a vegan.
Speaker 2:Now I hasten to add… At what strength? Probably would you recommend B12?.
Speaker 3:I'm sorry. Can you repeat the question?
Speaker 2:At what strength would you recommend B12?
Speaker 3:US government's recommended dietary allowance is 2.4 micrograms per day. All the supplements have more than that, and so if you're taking 200 micrograms per day or something like that, it's fine. You'll see them in the store at 500. If it's much beyond that, I would take it perhaps every other day. I should say a quick word for anyone who imagines that a plant-based diet is somehow deficient in nutrition. A meat-based diet is far worse, because meat has zero vitamin C, zero complex carbohydrates, zero fiber, which is why meat eaters tend to not do very well. They have higher mortality and more of other illnesses, illnesses and so forth. So a meat eater might have to supplement with a fiber, supplement with antioxidants and all kinds of things, and their nutrition is still not as good as that of a vegan.
Speaker 2:I'd like to discuss the impact of plant-based foods and what they have on major diseases, and I think you've spoken about this on some occasions. For example, we've yet to find a cure for most cancers. How does diet, your diet and plant-based foods affect prevention, and can it improve survival after you've had a cancer diagnosis?
Speaker 3:Well, what an important question. When we look at something like breast cancer, which is extremely commonly diagnosed and sometimes fatal, we do see that when women follow diets that are predominantly plant-based, the more you bring in vegetables in particular, but probably also fruits and other plants, the lower the likelihood of developing this disease. Diagnosis suggesting that reducing fat, increasing vegetables and fruits, as well as other healthy things like lacing up your sneakers and exercising, that these steps could be very, very helpful with reducing recurrence and mortality. For men, prostate cancer might be the analogy here Extremely common, sometimes fatal, and Dr Dean Ornish did an amazing study more than a decade ago where he showed that people after a diagnosis of prostate cancer who adopted a vegan diet when I say vegan I mean people who eat no animal products whatsoever that it had a tremendous benefit with regard to disease-free survival.
Speaker 3:So we highly recommend a plant-based diet for both prevention and for survival. I would go further there is no one for whom a low-fat vegan diet should not be recommended. Let me repeat that in case it's not clear. Everybody does well on a low-fat vegan diet. It's an optimal diet and there is no reason, medically or otherwise, to bring in meat or dairy products or eggs or other junk food into the diet.
Speaker 2:That's interesting. Now, what about heart disease? I would assume that the same applies in terms of prevention, but what about reversing heart disease? Can a plant diet actually be valuable in reversal, dr Kahneman?
Speaker 3:Yes, what a great point.
Speaker 3:Back in 1990, dr Dean Ornish at the University of California at San Francisco did an amazing study where he wanted to go further than the typical approach with heart disease.
Speaker 3:He wanted to see if individuals with narrowed coronary arteries could improve with diet and lifestyle changes. He brought in individuals who had existing heart disease and he asked half of the group to avoid animal products, to exercise, avoid tobacco and to deal with stress. And what he showed is not only did these individuals lose a huge amount of weight about 22 pounds on average in the first year and their LDL cholesterol, or bad cholesterol, dropped by 37%, which is phenomenal but beyond that, everyone had an angiogram at the beginning and end of the study and he was able to demonstrate that the arteries reopen. The narrowed arteries start opening up again, so much that a measurable improvement was visible in 82% of the participants in the first year. This was achieved without drugs, without surgery, and with diet and lifestyle changes alone. So we now believe very strongly that this is the diet of choice, both for prevention of cardiovascular disease but also for its reversal.
Speaker 2:Well, that's a very impressive information. I'm certainly familiar with Dr Arnish, being originally a Californian, and Dr Arnish, I've met him in Sausalito and I have to say he's been in the forefront of this for many, many years Now. Let's turn to a question, because many members of our audience are in the senior age group. Alzheimer's is always a concern, and I believe that evidence shows that eating the wrong foods can actually cause cognitive decline. Am I correct? And if so, what does a plant-based diet do in terms of prevention or deceleration?
Speaker 3:What's good for the heart is also good for the brain. In 2003, the Chicago Health and Aging Project published the results of a long-standing survey of individuals in Chicago. Their dietary intake was tracked, as was their cognition, and they found that those individuals who avoided, for the most part, who avoided saturated fat that's the fat that's predominant in dairy products as well as in meat, some in eggs those individuals who avoided saturated fat cut their risk of Alzheimer's by half to two-thirds, which was terrific. Such as excess iron and excess copper, and probably aluminum as well, may be helpful, and exercise here can be helpful as well. So all of these things are important. What we believe is that simply avoiding the foods that raise cholesterol, the animal products, which of course, contain cholesterol and contain saturated fat, avoiding those is again good for the heart and that's also good for the brain.
Speaker 2:Well, I think that's valuable information, thank you. Well, let's get to the key feature element of the interview here, the key concern about overweight obesity. It's so easy to gain pounds, but so difficult, as you know, to take them off. So are drugs like Ozempic a solution, or calorie restriction that unfortunately leaves you hungry. What's the healthy answer to weight loss?
Speaker 3:We've done quite a number of research studies on this. Back in 2005, we published the results of a study in which we brought in 64 women who had had chronic weight problems for many years and they had all tried Atkins and South Beach and Jenny Craig and Nutrisystem, and you name it. They tried it Cabbage soup, the usual things and what we asked them to do instead was to avoid animal products and keep oils to a bare minimum. Those were the only rules. We asked them not to change their exercise or anything else, just avoid animal products, keep oils really, really low. And we had a comparison group following a more traditional kind of weight loss diet and what we found was that the people following the plant-based diet lost weight without any attempt to restrict calories, without any attempt to avoid carbohydrate eating until they were quite full and satisfied. They lost about a pound per week, week after week. After the study was finished, we followed them for two additional years and found that they never regained the lost weight.
Speaker 2:So we now believe that's very interesting, because that's the big problem on diets. You know it comes back with a vengeance once you've lost it, so that's good advice. So about a pound a week then. Actually, if you just go to a plant based diet, you don't restrict how much of it you eat.
Speaker 3:There's no reason to restrict, because restriction means hunger. Hunger means rebound, hunger means long term failure. Restriction means hunger. Hunger means rebound, hunger means long-term failure. If a person feels satisfied with what they're eating and they like the taste and the quantity, then there's no reason for the weight to come back.
Speaker 2:Well, one of the I'm curious about this because you had mentioned this, I think in something that one of your writings and that how does a plant-based diet actually trap calories and then flush them away?
Speaker 3:This was an amazing study done at Tufts University back in 2017. They brought in individuals and some of them were asked to eat white bread, white rice. The other half of the participants ate whole grain bread and whole grain rice, brown rice, and what they discovered which was a bit surprising was that fiber in foods that's plant roughage breaks apart and becomes sort of like a million little sponges going down your digestive tract and as they go down, they trap unabsorbed calories and carry them out with the waste. Now this is good for eliminating about 100 calories every day rather than absorbing them as fat. So there's fiber in whole grain breads and in brown rice, but also in beans and vegetables and fruits and plenty of foods. So meat eaters and people who eat a lot of dairy miss that fiber. Those foods don't have any fiber, so every last calorie in those foods is one that's going to be absorbed. So this is one of the many reasons why we recommend a plant-based diet for weight loss.
Speaker 2:You mentioned bread because obviously in many diets bread is excluded, but I believe that you're suggesting, as far as plant-based foods, that bread can be in. That is something you can eat and still lose weight.
Speaker 3:Sure, if you want to make a sandwich, there's nothing like starting with bread, and this self-punitive notion that for the rest of your life you can never have a piece of bread comes from people who are following bad advice. Now, we recommend it being good quality bread, whole grain bread, and the most important thing is, when you are making your sandwich, don't top it with butter cheese cold cuts, because the bread is an innocent bystander. It's not going to cause weight gain. It's all the things that we wrap up in the bread that are causing the problem. What about a peanut butter?
Speaker 2:and jelly sandwich that are causing the problem. What about a peanut butter?
Speaker 3:and jelly sandwich. You're okay there. Now, if a person is really trying to lose weight, they would do better to minimize the peanut butter. But because it's rather fatty, but the quality of fat is certainly better.
Speaker 2:That's interesting. That's very interesting advice. I think it's in your power foods to diet book. You mentioned the body's ability to burn calories for about three hours after a meal. I'm curious how this works, because typically you're sedentary after a meal and particularly as you age, your metabolism really isn't working effectively or as effectively as you did in your youth. So how does that actually happen that you burn calories? You continue to burn them three hours afterwards.
Speaker 3:If you were to eat a stick of butter as your meal not that anyone would do this, but as an experiment your metabolism doesn't change. You absorb that stick of butter within the first 40 centimeters of your intestinal tract and it's going to add to your hip fat, thigh fat or belly fat. If, on the other hand, you had a plant-based meal that has fiber and healthy complex carbohydrates in it and plant-based protein and so forth, your metabolism rises quite significantly after the meal. This is called the thermic effect of food and it has that name because, as the nutrients are absorbed, your body uses those nutrients. It's expending energy to store them, to metabolize them, and it also uses them to generate body heat. And it's good for about 200 calories per day.
Speaker 3:And you can manipulate this depending on two things. One is the type of meal that you eat. If it's a meal that has healthy complex carbohydrates in it, you get a nice after meal burn. But the other thing is that you can manipulate this by continuing with a low fat, completely vegan diet. After 14 weeks on this diet, our research team found that that after meal burn is increased by an additional 15% using the same test meal.
Speaker 3:But your ability to burn calories improves when you've been following a low-fat, vegan diet over a period of about three months. We believe that the reason for that is that, because you're not eating any animal fat and you're not eating much of any kind of fat, the fat content of your muscles starts to diminish, and when that happens, your muscle cells are more insulin sensitive and they burn calories more readily. So we repeated this study in I believe it was 2020, and published it in JAMA Network Open, and we find that again when people follow this sort of diet, that they get about a 15% augmentation of their ability to burn calories, and so that's part of the reason that people following vegan diets are slimmer than their meat-eating friends slimmer than their meat-eating friends.
Speaker 2:I think what you're saying also is that eating animal foods actually slows down the metabolism, whereas a plant-based diet increases it. Is that correct? Yes, that's right Interesting. I think what you're really saying is you can eat all that you want without going hungry, as long as it's a plant-based diet. And, of course, I'm curious about I mean, you mentioned bread, which is something that I always felt that when you're overweight or you're trying to cut down on your calories, that certainly bread is something that you avoid, but I think you've been very articulate in pointing out that's not the case. What about things like pasta? I mean, people enjoy pasta. That's at least gives you a little, shall we say, a little spice in your meal. Would you suggest that that would be okay if it's whole grain?
Speaker 3:Let me give two numbers that really can serve as a useful guide for people going forward. Those numbers are four and nine. Nine is the number of calories in a gram of fat. Any fat chicken fat, beef fat, pork fat, fat coming out of Atlantic salmon that is wild-caught and sold at Whole Foods there are nine calories in every fat gram. Carbohydrate has four calories in every gram. That's true for carbohydrate from bread, from rice, from potatoes, from pasta, from beans, even from pure sugar.
Speaker 3:The reason that I emphasize this is many people have this backwards. They think, gee, I'm gaining weight, so I should stop eating bread. That's one of the lowest calorie things that you're eating, unless you're smearing it with butter and cheese. So the fatty foods meat, animal products in general have animal fat as well as oils, vegetable oils. They have nine calories per gram as well. Now, vegetable oils are a better quality of fat. They're lower in saturated fat for the most part. That's good, but they're just as fattening. So if a person wishes to lose weight, bread can be okay, but what I would do is avoid animal products, keep oils low and eat as much as you want of vegetables and fruits and whole grains and beans, within reason, of course you don't want to take and fruits and whole grains and beans Within reason. Of course you don't want to take a funnel and just jam food in, but you should be able to enjoy meals and you will lose weight naturally.
Speaker 2:That's some very healthy advice. I'd like to turn to something that I had mentioned during my introduction of you, and that is that you are the president, or president, of Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. Can you tell us a little bit more about the organization? I understand there's about 17,000 physicians worldwide involved.
Speaker 3:Yes, and hopefully more after this broadcast. The Physicians Committee began in 1985 as really a committee. It was a small group of doctors who lent their expertise and our concerns were that in American medicine we weren't really doing much of anything about a heart attack until it came into the emergency room door about a heart attack until it came into the emergency room door. We weren't doing anything about breast cancer until it showed up on a mammogram, and yet we had knowledge of the antecedents to these problems.
Speaker 3:You can see that heart attack coming based on risk factors high blood pressure, overweight, diabetes, smoking and you can intervene and prevent that heart attack from happening. You can see breast cancer coming based not just on genetic risks but on alcohol use, on a poor diet, on persistent overweight, on the use of hormone replacement therapy, and you can guide patients to take steps that will reduce their risk. These steps are imperfect. Guide patients to take steps that will reduce their risk. These steps are imperfect, but they are nonetheless powerful. So we felt it was important that we advocate in this area. We also advocated for more research, ethically done, focusing on human beings, so that we can do so, that we can answer the questions that persist. We've grown enormously over time and the Physicians Committee now does quite a lot of research and advocacy and education to promote healthy diets.
Speaker 2:Very interesting. You're going through medical school and you learn, as a doctor, very little about nutrition. And yet, as an individual that obviously comes down with certain ills, you go to your primary care doctor. They're not giving you good advice. What do you suggest? Just take the bull by the horns and learn more yourself about nutritional aspects, because that's a definite weakness in our medical system.
Speaker 3:Regrettably, the US medical system has a great tolerance for incompetence in certain domains.
Speaker 3:One of these is nutrition.
Speaker 3:That's regrettable because the cause of overweight, which affects what roughly half of the US population, the cause of heart disease, which is the final event for most people, the cause of cancer, which affects between one-third and one-half of our population a primary cause of all of these things is the food choices that we make and for some reason, because perhaps doctors are well, maybe I shouldn't speculate too much about why this is, but it's regrettably left out of medical education to a very substantial degree.
Speaker 3:So if anyone like me or you or other people who have completed medical education and they want to make up for lost time, it really is a good idea to become educated about nutrition. That's part of why I write books, that's why we have continuing medical education, that's why we also have our International Conference on Nutrition in Medicine occurring in Washington DC every August. Doctors, I have to say, despite the fact they have not been trained in these things, are extremely eager to learn once they discover the power that it has when you see a patient whose diabetes actually goes away because of nutritional changes they have made under your guidance, because you see a person who has been able to conquer their weight issues or hypertension or a high cholesterol level or other things, aided by dietary changes. It has a profound impact on the practicing physician to see these things and they want to be able to use that power more and more.
Speaker 2:It would seem that one of the things you can do is to recommend to your primary care doctor that they should look into the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, that there might be some enlightening information, and that's certainly something that you can do that will help others, am I correct?
Speaker 3:Well, thank you for suggesting that, and I certainly couldn't agree. More help others, am I correct?
Speaker 2:Well, thank you for suggesting that, and I certainly couldn't agree more. As we conclude, I have one last question. I'm aware that you've written 15 books and your latest is the Power of Foods Diet. Can you tell us a little bit about this book and what motivated you to write it?
Speaker 3:Yes, the Power Foods Diet had an interesting genesis. Back in 2015, harvard researchers did an amazing study Following more than 100,000 research participants. They discovered that those individuals who increased their intake of certain foods over time, for whatever reason, tended to lose weight. In other words, specific foods were associated with weight loss, and the more you ate, the more you lost. Now, at the top of the list of the foods that were somehow associated with weight loss was the humble blueberry blueberries, and also strawberries and raspberries. People who increased their consumption of these foods lost weight. So researchers then and there were many other foods like cruciferous vegetables, beans, melons, cantaloupe and others that were also associated with weight loss. So researchers in the United Kingdom did a fascinating follow-up. They brought in more than 2,700 identical twins, and everyone had a DEXA scan that shows where the body fat is on your body thigh fat, abdominal fat, for example and what they found was that the twin who ate more anthocyanins that's, the pigment in a blueberry or a pigment in a strawberry in a blueberry or a pigment in a strawberry the twin who ate more of these foods had substantially less body fat and specifically less abdominal fat, compared with her genetically identical twin sister.
Speaker 3:So we have been studying the effects of not so much calorie restriction and that kind of thing, but adding certain foods, and we have found that not just blueberries, but certain spices like cinnamon or ginger, or even hot peppers that contain capsaicinoids. These foods tend to facilitate weight loss, either by taming the appetite, by trapping calories, as we talked about earlier, or by boosting the metabolism, boosting the calorie burning speed. So we build them into French toast Cinnamon on your French toast, and top it with a blueberry syrup. It's suddenly a slimming breakfast.
Speaker 3:Wild blueberry muffins, a lentil soup, a mango dal, a pasta arrabbiata, a chili made not with meat and cheese, but made with healthy, plant-based ingredients. Even desserts like carrot cake, delicious things you'd want to eat, consumed as much as within reason you would like. These are foods that facilitate weight loss. People have loved this approach. We've studied many, many hundreds of people and found that this is really by far the easiest way and most enjoyable way to lose weight. So the Power Foods diet has more than 120 recipes, plus tips for how to do this at a restaurant or a fast food, or how children can eat these same foods and have a healthy weight for life.
Speaker 2:Well, I think you've just mentioned the formula. Go to your book Power of Foods Diet. They're going to find recipes. You mentioned over 120 recipes. That's going to take you a long way, particularly if you want to lose weight. That's going to take you a long way, particularly if you want to lose weight. But, most importantly, I want to thank you, because some of this information all of it actually has been extremely enlightening. It's. You know, I've studied quite a bit about nutrition, but it's turned my head around a bit and I have to tell you how much I really appreciate you being a guest on the program.
Speaker 3:Well, thank you very much.
Speaker 1:It's been wonderful speaking with you today, jamespolakoffcom. Our website also has some great blogs, which are all designed to help you live healthy longer. Go to jamespolakoffcom. That's jamespolakoffcom. Now back to Dr Jim.
Speaker 2:So thanks again to Dr Neil Bernard. He's provided some great food for thought about healthy eating. I really do encourage my listeners to discover more about Dr Mardard and look into his positions. Committee. All you need to do is go to our website, as mentioned, jamespolikoffcom.
Speaker 2:You'll recall, during my introduction, I asked why meat eaters are intimidated by vegetarians. Well, to begin with, most omnivores believe you need to eat meat to get enough protein. Now, certainly, dr Bernard enlightened us. We know we can get protein from various sources, such as beans, fruits like blackberries, nectarines and bananas, vegetables, including spinach, asparagus, sweet potatoes and even Brussels sprouts, and then there are nuts, tofu, which I enjoy, and edamame. These are just a few of the foods that give you sufficient protein that you need to carry on each day. This is Dr Jim Polikoff. Thanks for joining me once again, and every week there's another episode of Live Healthy Longer. Please visit our website for more information about our guests and I think you're going to enjoy some of the really healthy blogs that have been written. So that's jamespolakoffcom, and remember food is the best medicine.