2009-04-29 Neal D. Barnard, M.D. Diabetes Reversal
Diabetes Reversal Without Drugs
An Interview With Neal D. Barnard, M.D.
April 29, 2009, By Kirkham R. Hamilton, PA-C
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KIRK HAMILTON: Welcome to Staying Healthy Today Radio, a talk radio show committed to bringing you each week experts in the fields of nutrition, prevention and integrative medicine. Hi. My name is Kirk Hamilton, your host on Staying Healthy Today. Our mission is simple. To providing you credible and useable health information from our interviews and our educational resources at Prescription2000.com, to help you STAY and BE WELL in this BUSY world. In short, this information is to help YOU prevent, slow or reverse chronic diseases that are plaguing modern society. Take a moment to browse through the Prescription2000.com site for our health education resources. For example, our free weekly healthy letter called Rx2000 One Liners, reviews and condenses in two or three line summaries key research and then links these summaries to an abstract in the National Library of Medicine. Browse through our Educational Handouts, print them out. They are excellent guidelines on diet, exercise, stress management and food intolerance. Browse through the Expert Pearls and you might see some treatment protocols approaches to conditions that you may have. Look at our Educational Links. These are excellent websites that provide health education. Look at our Special Offers for upcoming books and seminars. You can also go into our Staying Healthy Today Interview Archives and look up past interviews. So please take a moment before we start this interview or after, and browse through Prescriptions2000.com.
KIRK HAMILTON: Welcome to Staying Healthy Today Radio. I am very pleased today to have Dr. Neal Barnard, founder and director of Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine in Washington, D.C., to do an interview today on the title AReversing Diabetes Without Drugs. Is It Possible? Dr. Barnard has quite an extensive background in prevention and nutrition education. He has written some 15 books. One of the most recent is Dr. Neal Barnard's Program for Reversing Diabetes - The Scientifically Proven System for Reversing Diabetes Without Drugs, by Rodale in 2007. I know this book well because I use it a lot with my patients and it's very, very helpful. It is scientifically oriented but then also is very user friendly. He has also been a principal investigator on a variety of clinical trials on diet and health, some have been sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, and in particular, one recently on Dietary Interventions and Diabetes. He received his M.D. degree at George Washington University School of Medicine in Washington, D.C., where he did his residency, and he is now Adjunct Professor currently at George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences.
Dr. Barnard, thank you for taking the time to come and be on the show with us today.
DR. NEAL BARNARD: Well, thank you. It's my pleasure.
KIRK HAMILTON: Diabetes. I hesitate to call it an epidemic, but I think that's the appropriate word. I was doing some research on the American Dietetic Association website. Some 24 million people in the United States, both children and adults, have diabetes, or approximately 8% of the population; 18 million have been diagnosed with diabetes, and maybe 6 million or 25%, aren’t even aware that they even have the disease. And then there's this condition called pre-diabetes, which I believe is a fasting blood sugar between 100 and 125 B that may be about 57 million people, or 19% of the population. So, with those kinds of staggering numbers, why did you get involved with diabetes research and why did you write a book on this particular topic?
DR. NEAL BARNARD: Well, just as you said. It is an epidemic and it is a dramatically worsening epidemic. There's so many people that have the idea that well, it's genetic and it runs in families, but if that were the whole story, then it would stay relatively level from one year to the next. But that's not what's happening. It's getting worse. And we’re seeing it in younger and younger people. We used to call it type II diabetes. We used to call it adult-onset diabetes. But now we can see it in a kid of 15 or 16 years of age or even younger. So it's a problem and I think diets have been going in the wrong direction. They have been saying the problem is sugar in the blood, and so don't eat sugar and don't eat starches that are digested to produce sugar. But we realized that the populations around the world that eat the most starchy foods like rice in Japan, they traditionally have very little diabetes and it's only when the meaty diets and fast foods come in does diabetes really wells up. So, we wanted to do some studies to turn all that around and to test plant-based diets, to see if they could improve diabetes. So that was really our rationale.
KIRK HAMILTON: What are some of the diet changes that have occurred, let's say in the last 50 to 100 years in the United States or in industrialized countries, that may increase the risk to diabetes?
DR. NEAL BARNARD: Great question. In Western countries, we've always had worse diets compared to Asian countries. By that, I mean an Asian diet or even a traditional, say African diet in many places, is based on plant foods. Rice in Asia, perhaps certain beans and grains in parts of Africa. In the United States, a meal wasn't a meal unless meat was at its center. I grew up in North Dakota, so for us it was roast beef and then a baked potato on the side, and maybe some vegetables as an afterthought. In other words, you're contrasting a plant-based diet in other countries to a meat-based diet in the U.S.. However, a bad diet has gotten worse. In the U.S. about 100 years ago, the average person consumed about 150 pounds of meat per year. But now, the average person consumes about 50 pounds more than that. Over 200 pounds per person per year. Cheese consumption was less than 4 pounds 100 years ago. It is now about 32 pounds, and so in addition to more meat and more cheese, we also have more sugar. That's gone up about maybe 40 pounds per person per year. So we are eating a lot more of really unhealthy foods, especially the meat and the cheese that got us into trouble in the first place, and add to that sugary foods. Those are the problems.
KIRK HAMILTON: So you've just steered away from what presently is very popular in American culture and that the carb is the bad food and there is “carb phobia.” That is what I call it in my practice. And you've steered us back towards the word fat and excess calories. So how does excess calories and/or fat cause your blood sugar to rise abnormally and stay abnormally high in the bloodstream?
DR. NEAL BARNARD: I'll tell you what we think is going on. First of all, I should say clearly these do play a role. There is no question about it when a person is on a very fatty diet, and also as they gain weight because of all the fat and the calories that they are consuming, that diabetes tends to come in and if you take them off of that diet and put them on a plant-based low fat diet, ideally a vegan diet B Vegans are not people from the planet “Vegus.” A vegan diet meaning no animal products at all, if you keep your oils low. That is as close to a perfect diet as you can get. People's diabetes improve and it improves rapidly. I will tell you what we think is the explanation for this. That is, if we look inside the muscle cells, and we look at muscle cells because that is the main place that blood sugar is going to. That the sugar in your blood is like gasoline for your car. When it's in the blood stream is, you can think of it as being in the fuel line, and once it gets to the muscle cells, it’s like gasoline going into the engine to power it. When glucose gets into your muscle cells, it is the power for your cells. In diabetes, that's not happening, the sugar is not getting from the blood B into the muscle cells. It's not getting into the muscles where it belongs and it's building up in the blood stream. And that's where it causes problems. The reason seems to be there's too much fat inside the muscle cells and it gums them up. It's rather like chewing gum inside your front door lock. It makes your key not work very well. You don't have chewing gum inside your muscle cells, but what you do have is a lot of grease and a lot of fat, and when that is inside the muscles, the insulin can't escort sugar in very much or very well. So the answer is to get the fat out of the cells and that's why a low fat vegan diet seems to work. There's no animal fat in it at all, very little vegetable oil, and when you're on this very low fat diet, it appears that the muscles clean out and rejuvenate themselves.
KIRK HAMILTON: I've read the term in your book called Aintramyocellular fat. So you can get that from two different ways possibly? Excess calories just in general gets stored as fat, and then excess fat calories? Is that correct?
DR. NEAL BARNARD: Yes, that's right. Although the two are quite similar. If a person is eating very much fat B think of chicken fat or beef fat or pork fat or for that matter, even vegetable fat. Fats have 9 calories in every single gram of fat. If you compare that to carbohydrates, whether it’s from rice or a potato, there's only 4 calories in a gram of carbohydrate. So the fats are the very calorie dense foods. If a person's on a fatty diet, that's a calorie dense diet in most cases. If a person wants to lose weight or get their diabetes better, one of the key steps is to keep their fat low. Let's say I wave a magic wand and I'm able to take all of the meat out of a person's diet and all the cheese and so forth. Suddenly, all the animal fat is gone and they tend to slim down ever if they're not counting calories just because all that fat has been taken out of their diet.
KIRK HAMILTON: Let's talk about this plant-based diet. So, there's two types of carbohydrates. We talk about the good kind, which are the complex carbohydrates with the fiber and the germ and the endosperm all together, and then we have the “white” carbohydrates. Everybody talks about eating more whole grains and that type of good complex carbohydrates such as in a bean. But how about in Asian countries? They eat white rice predominantly. So, can you explain the difference between “good” carbohydrates and “bad” carbohydrates, and does it make that much difference to eat whole grains?
DR. NEAL BARNARD: Whole grains are helpful because what makes it a whole grain is the fact that the outer coating is where the fiber is. That adds fiber that the body needs for good digestion and other things. However, the speed at which the sugar comes out of the grain of rice, or any other part of food, is often independent of the fiber content of it. White rice and brown rice aren't dramatically different in that respect. Brown rice is better, brown rice still has the fiber coating on it, but even the white rice is not a terribly high glycemic index food. By that, I mean it tends not to cause a tremendous spike in blood sugar. Also, it is very, very low in fat, so a person who is eating a lot of rice is B about 1% of it is fat, compared to chicken, which is about 23%. If you're eating a lot of rice, you're getting very little fat. The fat can drain out of your muscle cells. If there's no fat inside your muscle cells or very little, the muscles can take the sugar out of the blood very, very efficiently. So a rice based diet is a very, very healthy diet. Now, brown rice is better, white rice is okay.
KIRK HAMILTON: Can you tell me your basic food groups in the diet that you recommend, and the types of foods that you would tell someone to go on as a diabetic?
DR. NEAL BARNARD: Sure. Four groups. The first one, of course, is vegetable, and the vegetables can be greens things like broccoli or spinach or collards and kale and so forth, or they can be orange vegetables like carrots, yams, sweet potatoes, that kind of thing. But anything in the vegetable group is good. The second group is fruits. The third group is the legume group, legumes meaning beans or peas or lentils. And the fourth group is the whole grains, so vegetables, fruits, beans, whole grains. And if you consume a lot of those foods, and also B one other thing, I encourage everybody to take a multiple vitamin, primarily because I want to make sure they have adequate vitamin B12. Those four food groups, vegetables, fruits, the legume group or bean group, and whole grains, plus a daily multiple vitamin gives you really, really, really good nutrition and a very powerful menu. Notice I did not talk about animal products, I didn't talk about a lot of oils added and that's because I would tend to avoid those foods. And you put all that together, you are on a powerful program.
KIRK HAMILTON: Fruit. Sometimes we hear people talk about fruit in diabetes as a concern for the diabetic. Comments?
DR. NEAL BARNARD: I think it's okay. Fruit is sweet, but when we actually test it, it tends not to cause blood sugar to rise very rapidly. Now if a person has diabetes, and that means that their cells are resistant to insulin, almost anything they eat will cause the blood sugar to rise some. But fruit tends not to be particularly bad in this regard. So, we encourage people to bring fruit back into their diet.
KIRK HAMILTON: If someone is lean and their body weight is good, what's your problem with nuts or seeds? And avocados as well?
DR. NEAL BARNARD: Well, I think you've touched on the key issue. If a person is overweight, then getting away from nuts, which are about 70% fat. Very similar to cheese. It's not bad fat the way cheese is. Cheese is probably the most unhealthy food you can imagine. With nuts, it's a much healthier type of fat, but it's still a lot of it, so they tend to be dense in calories. If a person's already slim, there's not such an issue with them. However, let's say you are slim but you happen to have type II diabetes. We have to operate on the theory that we're trying to drain the fat out of your cells. So in that case, you're going to want to keep all fats low, including nuts as well. Having said that, there is a very compelling literature that people who eat a fair amount of nuts, by that I mean a small handful a day, seem to be very healthy and they have a low rate of heart disease, and there's even some literature suggesting that nuts will lower cholesterol level. But, I think you put your finger on an important thing and that is some people just get hooked on cashews, it's as if they have heroin in them or something like that. They just eat enormous amounts of them and sometimes weight gain can be an issue.
KIRK HAMILTON: Compliance with this dietary regimen. How do you get people to start on it and what's your experience with compliance?
DR. NEAL BARNARD: You know, it's a funny thing. People imagine that to be on a vegan diet is tough . And sometimes, healthcare practitioners are even a little bit concerned about raising it with the patient because they think the patient will think, AAlright, if I'm a vegan, I've gotta like folk music or I have to wear a tie-dyed shirt or something like that. I have to tell you, we have been studying that in great detail and what we've found is really, really important. First of all, compliance with this diet, by that I mean being able to stick to with it, is at least as good with this approach as with any other kind of diet, and that is because, let's say I put you on a classic diabetes diet. What does that mean? That means, first of all you've got to lose weight. So how do you lose weight on a typical diet? The way you lose weight is by cutting calories. That gets old by Wednesday. People just don't want to go to bed hungry. On a vegan diet, I haven't talked about cutting calories at all. What I'm suggesting is that we're going to eat healthier foods. And I don't care if it's 9 o'clock at night and you're hungry. You can go ahead and eat because we are concerned about the type of food, not so much the quantity of food. The other thing is, if I give you a regimen that worked, you're going to stick with it. So, a low fat vegan diet helps people to lose weight, it cuts their cholesterol, it brings their blood sugar down, helps them get off medicine, makes their joints feel better in many, many cases. So people think B they feel young again. So they really tend to want to stick with it. We have studied this very carefully, and over and over again we find that the compliance is at least as good with this diet as with any other.
Now, I do have a special way of introducing it. I do it in steps. The first step is that I ask people to just try out these healthy foods. If they haven't made a bowl of oatmeal in some years, go to the store and buy it. And if you think oatmeal tastes kind of pasty, well, you>ve got to buy some cinnamon and some raisins and things to put on top of it, and find a way that you really enjoy it. If every day of your life you're having chili, well, go to the store and buy a bean chili. Or, if you like to cook from recipes, get a recipe for it so that’s vegetarian. So, step 1 is going to the store, shopping, trying out healthy foods. Then, step 2, once you know the foods that you like that happen to be vegan and low in fat, then step 2 is a three week “test drive.” You have in every meal one of the vegan foods that you already know that you like, and you do it for about three weeks. At the end of that time people feel better and their tastes have changed so they now really enjoy the lighter way of eating.
KIRK HAMILTON: Well, let's get to the bottom line. You've outlined a theory and it makes sense. What about studies? Have you taken people in studies, put them on this type of dietary regimen, compared them to maybe the ADA diet, and what is your experience with success on slowing, preventing or even reversing diabetes?
DR. NEAL BARNARD: Yes, that's what we're all about here. The National Institutes of Health starting funding my team in 2003 to see how this kind of diet would work, not just with regards to prevention, but what if a person has had diabetes. What if they've had diabetes for six or even eight years or ten years? Would this diet help them. So we did a controlled trial. We've done more than one, but the one we published lately, brought in people who had diabetes. Half of them went on a diet that was vegan, meaning no animal products, very low in oil and a low glycemic index. Instead of white bread, they might pick rye bread or pumpernickel bread. Instead of a white potato they would choose a yam or sweet potato. A typical day might be a big bowl of oatmeal for breakfast, a veggie burger instead of the meat burger for lunch. If you have pasta for dinner, that's okay, but it's going to be a tomato sauce instead of the meat sauce. You have lots of vegetables, fruit as a snack, no calorie limit, each as much as you want. What we showed was several things. First of all, the people on this diet lose a little bit more weight than people who are on a calorie-restricted diet. So even though they're eating till they're full they're feeling quite good. They're eating basically in an unrestricted way, they're losing weight, week after week after week on average, and that's because these high fiber foods fill you up without so much in the way of calories. Secondly, their blood sugar falls. In many cases, they need less medicine, sometimes they get off all their medicines. Their cholesterol falls, and all of these things happen at the same time, and we've published a number of papers on this and what we've shown is that after even a year and a half on this regimen, you're getting benefits that appear to be better with a vegan diet compared to the more standard diabetes diet.
KIRK HAMILTON: How quickly do…for example, wouldn't you have to warn patients that were on either diabetic medicines or insulin, whether they are type II or type I, if there's a sudden drop in weight that they have to be cautious of medication reduction because they might get hypoglycemic or low blood sugar or problems with their blood pressure medicines?
DR. NEAL BARNARD: Yes, you sure do. That's an important point and obviously patients are thrilled to discover that they need to get off their medicines or to reduce their dose, but you want to do B it's really important that the healthcare provider be in close communication with the patient. The way to think of it is that if people have a high blood sugar because of a not so healthy diet, so their diet is pushing their blood sugar up and their medicines are counteracting that by pushing their blood sugars down, well, what if you take the diet and change it so that it's suddenly not a factor. You're on a healthy diet, but you're still on those powerful drugs that are pushing your blood sugar down. The blood sugar gets too low, so the patient experiences shaking, they might get sweaty, they might feel quite nervous, they might feel very, very hungry. These are symptoms of low blood sugar and the doctor really has to back them off on their drugs. This happens very commonly if you are treated with insulin or the drug class called sulfonylureas like glipizide, glyburide, glimepiride, very, very, very common. So the patient then says to the doctor, AYou know, I have these symptoms. ACongratulations, we've got to reduce your medications, and that's a good thing.
KIRK HAMILTON: How quickly can this happen?
DR. NEAL BARNARD: Oh, this can happen in a matter of days, and it often happens over and over again. You reduce the medication dose and then they're okay for a few days, but they're losing weight, they're getting healthier, they get hypoglycemic again. It just means that these medicines become too strong when you're in a healthy body. It's like if you gave big doses of insulin to a person who didn't even have diabetes. They can't tolerate that insulin. They're a healthy person. They don't need it. And, when you are becoming a healthy person day by day by day the medicines get too strong.
KIRK HAMILTON: What are the side effects to your plant-based diet? What are the most common complaints? I would know that I would hear in the practice I work in, maybe people are wheat sensitive or they get too much gas and bloating. What are the common complaints that people tell you?
DR. NEAL BARNARD: Uh, the most common complaint is that you have to buy new clothes. I don't think there are any problems with it. All the side effects are good ones. You're putting your body on foods that are healthy for it. You mentioned one, that a person might get a little gassiness or something. Well, if you're eating…some people will say, AI eat this much steak so I have replace it with a huge amount of beans well that will cause some gassiness . So have a smaller serving, and make sure your beans are very well cooked. It's not going to be an issue. When you follow this diet to get your blood sugar down, at the same time it reduces your weight, it reduces your cholesterol, it reduces blood pressure, energy improves, people's skin improves. A person in our study named Nancy, who's arthritis went away in the course of this, and that's because, I believe, dairy products were removed from her diet that had been the trigger her arthritis. Dairy products are very common contributors to arthritis. We had a man in our study named Vance. I described their stories in the book. He had erectile dysfunction and he talked about what a problem this was for him, and after being on our vegan diet for a while, all of that improved. If you want to have a compliant patient, help him to lose weight and return their sexual potency…my goodness sakes, they're going to stay on that diet for a long time.
KIRK HAMILTON: Why do you think conventional medicine or just health professionals in general are resistant to seeing the obvious right here? If you have such dramatic results with a very simple, low tech approach of a four food group type of regimen, why, and the evidence is there, why do you think your professional colleagues are resistant to it?
DR. NEAL BARNARD: I don't think they are terribly resistant. I think a certain amount of skepticism is good. When we first started looking in this direction quite a number of years ago, our first diabetes publication was in 1999. It was a pilot study and it got a lot of attention, and at the same time I think there was some skepticism and I think that's fair. But, no, I don't think people have been overly skeptical. The American Diabetes Association has invited me to speak very, very frequently at their scientific conferences, and in fact I am going to be speaking at their conference here in a couple of weeks. We have been published by the American Diabetes Association, the American Dietetic Association, published two of our papers from this study. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, in its current issue, has an article from our group. In Nutrition Reviews, the same story. And the American Medical Association in 2007, I think it was, came out in favor of vegetarian diets being a part of what children are served in school. So, it's a new day now. I think people are recognizing that diet is critically important and gone are the days when the idea of a vegetarian diet was somehow alien.
KIRK HAMILTON: Do you recommend the diet for type I and type II?
DR. NEAL BARNARD: Yes.
KIRK HAMILTON: Same recommendation?
DR. NEAL BARNARD: Yes. Now, a person with type I is not going to get off their medicines. A person who has got type I no longer has the ability to make insulin so they will need an external source. They will continue to need insulin injections. What this diet will do for them, though, is to help them to stay healthy overall and most importantly to minimize their risk of complications. That's what counts with diabetes. It's the attack on the eyes, the attack on the kidneys, the attack on the legs. If by changing the diet we can minimize those risks, that's really our goal.
KIRK HAMILTON: Do you think that the diabetic model is a model for other chronic diseases? I mean, the same diet that applies to diabetes that's an epidemic, and if it can reverse that, do you think this can be applied to cancer risk reduction, to heart disease, obesity?
DR. NEAL BARNARD: Yes. And I think you can think of it like a car in the sense that if I put diesel fuel in a car that is designed for unleaded, more than one thing goes wrong with it. It doesn't have good acceleration, the ride is rough, the exhaust looks terrible. If you suddenly put the right fuel in, all of those things sort out. Your body has fuel also, and if we are treating our largely vegetarian bodies as if we are honorary dogs and cats, and should be eating meat, in other words if you start putting meat into a body that's designed for plant foods, well, everything goes wrong. Our arteries start blocking up, our cancer risk rises, our blood pressure rises. The fat, the saturated fat that's in animal products tends to make the blood more viscous, thicker, so that makes it harder to push blood through, so our blood pressure goes up, the fat gets into the cells causing insulin resistance, leading to diabetes. All these things go wrong. But it's a dynamic system meaning that you can change it by putting the right fuel in your body and you can reverse these things, at least to a degree.
KIRK HAMILTON: Applying this to the business world out there, weren't you doing a study comparing one insurance firm putting a plant-based diet in one of their locations and then having them eat a normal B regular American diet B in another one and compared health improvement?
DR. NEAL BARNARD: Yes , that's Geico, the car insurance company. And the reason we worked with them is Geico is right near our office, and we have been working with them for some time at one of their sites they. It is very simple. What they did is they instituted a vegan diet. So if you're in the cafeteria, you could get lentil soup or minestrone or for breakfast you could get a big bowl of oatmeal. They had a portabello sandwich and a veggie burger. You could also get all the meaty choices too, but if you wanted to go vegan you could. And then, the foods were there, and we also offered a lunchtime discussion group. Very easy. So we had people saying they were willing to go vegan, 100%, between July and December, and we used a comparison site in Fredericksburg, Virginia, another Geico facility, where they were willing to be weighed and track their cholesterol and so forth, but not make any diet changes, at least not right away. And exactly what you'd expected happened. What happened was that the people who went on a vegan diet, they'd loss weight and they were healthier. Their absenteeism diminished. It's a good thing overall. Those data we have been presenting. In fact, we just presented them two days ago at the Centers for Disease Control conference on the West Coast. A lot of people are really interested in this because American industry is not as competitive as it should be. If you look at the cars that roll off the assembly lines in Detroit, $1500.00 off the sticker price of that car is nothing but healthcare costs. This is bankrupting American industry. Every single CEO of every single business would love to have a population of workers all of whom are nonsmoking, exercising vegans because those people are the cheapest, most productive employees they'd ever have. And if they have a bunch of smoking meat-eaters, they've got a very costly bunch of folks.
Not only while they're working, but when they're retired. General Motors and Chrysler, they've been paying healthcare costs to their retirees and its killing them. So, yes, this is a model for people to get healthier and if anybody who is listening to your program is in a business setting and would like to work with us, we would be more than happy to show them how the model works. It's very, very easy to do.
KIRK HAMILTON: Lastly, why don't you think traditional insurance companies pay for your work, pay for the education to go into businesses, etc?
DR. NEAL BARNARD: Well, I might be able to take part of the blame for that in that we haven't really been pushing them very much. We have put out feelers from time to time, and it's just not been on their radar very much. But I think this day will come because many of the insurance companies are starting to realize that if they do not have to pay for the coronary bypass, if they don't have to pay for the cancer treatment, if they don't have to pay for cholesterol lowering drugs, which cost B a typical one, Lipitor, costs about $3 to $4 a day for one person, one pill…if they don't have to pay for that, that's money in everybody's pocket. And I think that is the way of the future.
KIRK HAMILTON: Well, thank you. That's obviously common sense to me. I just wonder why it doesn't happen sooner.
DR. NEAL BARNARD: Well, a lot of it is an educational process and I should mention a couple of resources. We have two websites that I hope people will visit. One is our main website, PCRM.org. It stands for Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, PCRM.org. There's a lot of information there, including a live support group that we offer every Thursday night for free. The other one is NutritionMD.org.. Nutrition MD, is a website that has about a thousand recipes that anybody can access and use. It's a free website. We also have lots of information. Everything from acne to varicose veins. It's for healthcare providers and also for patients and interested consumers, so that's NutritionMD.org.
KIRK HAMILTON: Is there anything else you want to say before we wrap up?
DR. NEAL BARNARD: One last thing. It's important for people to get healthier, to learn about this, but what is more important than anything else is the health of the next generation. If you go into any school in America, kids are overweight. They have the beginnings of heart disease before they get their high school diploma. There was just a study out showing that 1 in 5 kids is obese by age 4. We can't afford this financially. We can't afford is personally. The suffering that is going to happen as you go down the road is immeasurable. The way to change that is for kids to eat in a healthier way. That must happen at home, it's got to happen at breakfast, it's got to happen at dinner, and it has to happen when the kids are in school eating their lunch. Right now, in every school in America, kids might have a ham and cheese sandwich or the cheeseburger, and they don't have a choice that doesn't have meat in it or cheese in it. And we are pushing the federal government now to say that there has to be a healthy meal at least as an option for kids who want it, and that means a vegan choice, like a bean chili or a veggie burger. It's not hard to provide it, but if schools aren't pushed and if the government doesn't make it easy for them, this is never going to happen and we are never going to conquer this obesity epidemic. So I am encouraging people to visit our website, PCRM.org, to find out how they can get involved, not just to get healthy for themselves, but to make this a healthier country, too.
KIRK HAMILTON: Well, I want to note to the audience that I have a link on my site to PCRM.org as one of my educational links that I use frequently myself, and I can attest to it.
I just want to thank Dr. Barnard for his excellent work on diet and health, and in this particular review of diabetes and encourage people to read his book. I use it in all my patients, this book, Dr. Neal Barnard's Program for Reversing Diabetes - The Scientifically Proven System for Reversing Diabetes Without Drugs, I think we can say that we can reverse at least type II without drugs. So, Dr. Barnard, thank you very much for taking the time today to be with us, and I will talk to you soon.
DR. NEAL BARNARD: It's been my pleasure. Thank you.
KIRK HAMILTON: Again, I'd like to thank Dr. Neal Barnard for his excellent interview on his research and also on his book on approaching diabetes with a plant-based diet. I would like to encourage people to think about the power of food and that diabetes, at least type II, which means you still produce insulin but it doesn't work as well, or what is called insulin resistance, is a reversible condition. And, that 90 to 95% of diabetic problem is type II. So, in that light, I encourage you to go and look at some our educational handouts, in particular the TRIAD Wellness Program has a whole section on diet. It's just a four page handout, but it talks about a whole food plant-based diet very similar to Dr. Barnard's and it's for free on the website under educational handouts.
I look forward to speaking with you soon, and until next time, at our next Staying Healthy Interview, “Stay and Be Well.”
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