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2011-06-15 Neal Barnard MD Obesity in the United States: Causes, Solutions and the 21 Day Kickstart Program

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KIRK HAMILTON: Hi, my name is Kirk Hamilton, your host of Staying Healthy Today. Our message is simple: To provide you credible usable health information from interviews and our educational resources to help you Stay and Be Well in the busy modern world. Please take a few moments before or after listening to this interview to browse through the Prescription2000.com website, the home of Staying Healthy Today Radio, for our free educational services.

Today's show topic is Obesity in the United States. Causes, Solutions, and Dr. Neal Barnard's 21 Day Kickstart Program. Our guest today is Dr. Neal Barnard, founder and director of the Physician's Committee for Responsible Medicine. Dr. Barnard has written at least 16 books. The two most recent are "Dr. Neal Barnard's Program for Reversing Diabetes," and "The 21 Day Weight Loss Kickstart," both of which have been programs on public television. Dr. Barnard is also a clinical researcher utilizing plant-based diets as therapy for treating chronic diseases.

Welcome Dr. Barnard. Thank you for coming on the show today.

DR. NEAL BARNARD: Well it's my pleasure. Thank you.

KIRK HAMILTON: You know, I saw your PBS television special, I guess the excerpt of it on the 21 Day Kickstart for Health and I have to say, and it's not just because you're on the show, but you have this way of speaking and it makes things very simple, to the point, clear and focused. And just that little blurb on your home page was excellent so I'm going to enjoy doing this interview. So thanks for coming on the show.

DR. NEAL BARNARD: Well thank you. Thanks for spreading the good word.

KIRK HAMILTON: The obesity epidemic. Everybody talks about it. You know the figure's somewhere over two-thirds of Americans are either overweight, obese or now we have extremely obese. And I'm wondering if you can give your view on some key points of why do you think the modern lifestyle and diet makes Americans overweight.

DR. NEAL BARNARD: Not too long ago we did a review of what Americans are eating. And the Department of Agriculture actually keeps some really interesting statistics on it that you can dig into. And we looked back when the USDA started keeping records back in 1909 and compared them to today, a century later basically. And what we found is that Americans now eat 75 pounds more meat, every person every year compared to a century ago; 75 pounds more meat; about 30 pounds more cheese, every person every year; and maybe as much as 50 pounds more sugar. So why are we overweight? It's because we're eating more meat, more cheese, more sugar. And maybe a few other things. More fryer grease comes out with the french fries and those kinds of things, but those are the reasons for it. What is not the reason is a lack of exercise. Exercise is important, people should exercise more, but that is probably a minor issue compared to these horrendous changes in what we're eating.

KIRK HAMILTON: I've got to tell you, you just stole like, I'm finishing up with my book, "Stay Healthy in the Fast Lane," and the first chapter has those five same graphs made up from the USDA on increased meat consumption over the last century, calorie sweeteners increasing, cheese consumption increasing, refined grains increasing, though total grains have actually gone down.

DR. NEAL BARNARD: Well also the grains are sort of a U-shaped curve. If you look back a century ago people ate a lot more grain and then it sort of fell into B it fell down and then it went back up.

KIRK HAMILTON: Good promo for my book. Thanks.

DR. NEAL BARNARD: You're welcome.

KIRK HAMILTON: So what if we're overweight? What's the problem with being overweight?

DR. NEAL BARNARD: Well obviously the motivating part is the cosmetic issue and that should be taken seriously. People don't like having trouble fitting into an airline seat, fitting in their clothes and feeling like they're not themselves. But what matters from a medical standpoint is that being overweight is unhealthy. It's the contributor to heart disease, to diabetes, to hypertension, to postmenopausal breast cancer, and it is not something that we need to do. So it's a good idea to lose weight.

KIRK HAMILTON: You know I think I heard it from you, and maybe I'm wrong, but you know I want to talk about what overweight issues do to our economy. And I thought somewhere I heard you say $1500.00 to every car in Detroit goes to healthcare coverage, or am I misquoting you?

DR. NEAL BARNARD: Uh, that's right and that figure is not original with me. But people have looked at what weight problems and the diets that contribute to them have been doing to healthcare costs and the figure you gave is what we've seen in the big manufacturing sector, meaning automobiles. And the same thing is it's attacking every other financial entity, whether it's private business, nonprofits or government.

KIRK HAMILTON: How about children and obesity? What's happening with children?

DR. NEAL BARNARD: Well kids are gaining weight as well and it's occurring strikingly early, as early as 3 and 4 years of age you can see the kids are heavier. They're not massively obese for the most part like their parents are. But it does start and in some terrible cases we're seeing kids who are developing the sequelae of it, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, cholesterol problems when they're in the teen years. That should never happen. Looking ahead, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say that if these current trends continue, one in every three Americans born in the year 2000 is going to develop diabetes at some point in his or her life, and financially we can't afford that. Healthcare costs are already terrible as we were just discussing. But personally diabetes is the biggest cause B or an enormous cause of blindness, amputations, loss of kidney function, and we need to do what we can to prevent it.

KIRK HAMILTON: The title of your book, "The 21 Day Weight Loss Kickstart. Boost Metabolism, Lower Cholesterol and Dramatically Improve Your Health." In that dietary approach before I break that down, what are the major foods that you are encouraging in that diet approach?

DR. NEAL BARNARD: We think of four groups. The whole grains, vegetables, fruit, and the bean group or legume group, beans, peas, lentils. And in addition to that I make sure everybody gets some good source of vitamin B12 which could be a multiple vitamin or fortified foods. That's it, very simple.

KIRK HAMILTON: And you leave out nuts and seeds why?

DR. NEAL BARNARD: Nuts and seeds are okay but they're not a required thing and I don't push people to consume them. And if people are trying to lose weight, I think they should be careful with peanut butter and nut products because they're so fatty. But for a person who's in good health and is slim, the fact is that those foods are pretty high in calories is probably not going to do them much harm.

KIRK HAMILTON: How about just staying on the fatty acids for a moment. Lots of research on omega 3s, those kind of things. So in your diet, are you getting the omega 3s from greens...or where are you getting them from?

DR. NEAL BARNARD: Vegetables, fruits and beans. They don't have very much fat altogether, but what they have is proportionally rather high in omega 3. And that's really all you need. If you want to go crazy with it, you can add walnuts, tofu, flax seed, which are particularly concentrated in omega 3. But just a bean, a bean is about 4% fat and proportionately an ample amount of that is omega 3, and the proportion seems to be what counts.

KIRK HAMILTON: You know, your program, you said 21 days and I'm always interested in why people choose a different thing. Some people say a six week weight loss for 20 pounds, and you chose 21 days or three weeks. Is there a psychology or physiology to that or why'd you do it?

DR. NEAL BARNARD: Twenty-one days is magic time for breaking habits. If I say to a person you've got to change your diet and you've got to do it for six months, for some people that really seems daunting. If I say to a person do it for one or two days, that's easy but it doesn't get them enough results to inspire them to continue. But when a person has done this for about three weeks, the first week or so it might feel new to them. I mean they're getting away from meat and dairy products. For some people, that does seem awkward or the diet may seem a little bit too light. Around week two, they start to feel quite well adjusted to it and then about week three, their tastes have changed to the point where if they brought back in a double bacon cheeseburger it would just not be the joyful experience that they remembered. So we use three weeks for that reason.

KIRK HAMILTON: You know it's interesting you say that because I routinely, in the practice that I've been doing twenty-some-odd years, I routinely take people off dairy products or encourage them to try, and one of my mantras is "Listen, in three weeks your cravings are gonna go away." And I didn't make that up. I just observed that for some weird reason, especially dairy, and cheese in particular, cravings went away. Now is there B I know you wrote a book on about food addiction. Are there components in dairy products and glutinous grains, but dairy products as well, that are addictive?

DR. NEAL BARNARD: Yeah, there are, and I observed, I guess what you have observed, which is that for a lot of folks you know they're able to get away from other foods, but that desire for cheese sort of lingers on. And you think why is that? It smells like old socks, you know, why do people want it so much? The casein protein that's in all dairy products, all cow's milk products I should say. It's not in soy milk but it's in milk products. The casein protein breaks down in the digestive process to release opiates, meaning compounds that are in the same chemical class as heroin. Much weaker of course, but opiates nonetheless. They're called casomorphins. And I believe that that is the reason that people tend to get a little bit hooked on dairy products, but especially cheese because cheese is the most concentrated form of casein that you can get in any kind of food.

KIRK HAMILTON: Well I see it all the time and it's almost clockwork with cheese in three weeks and I really mean that. It's interesting that you brought it up that way. How about the second part of your subtitle, "Boost Metabolism and Understating the Calorie Burning Secret." I remember in Dr. Campbell's book on the China Study he talked about the rural Chinese when they're on the strict plant-based diet actually consuming more calories and there was something magical about the strict plant-based diet burning calories. Now is that something to do with what you are saying or is your view different?

DR. NEAL BARNARD: In our research, we measure metabolism. And so when we brought people in, we lay them on an exam table, and you put a canopy over their head and shoulders and so you can measure how much oxygen is using minute by minute and how much carbon dioxide they're putting out. And with some pretty simple calculations you can tell how fast their calorie burning speed is. And there's a particular part of that, that occurs after a meal. So you give people a standard meal, and in this case it was a liquid meal and they would drink it down, 720 calories if I remember correctly. And their metabolism will rise after a meal because you're absorbing and digesting it. After they had been on the vegan diet, we gave them exactly the same meal in exactly the same room. But their after-meal calorie burn was increased by about 16%, which doesn't sound like much except it lasted for three hours and it's a little extra calorie burn. And then we looked at the reasons for that. And what appears to be happening is that their bodies are becoming more and more insulin sensitive. What that means is the cells of their bodies take in the nutrients out of their blood. Some of that is burned off as body heat rather than being stored as fat and so that's the calorie burning advantage that they get. Very easy to get. You do it without having to get on your treadmill or having to sweat or do anything special.

KIRK HAMILTON: So the vegan diet improves insulin sensitivity and that allows you to have that after-meal calorie burn. Is that B

DR. NEAL BARNARD: Yeah.

KIRK HAMILTON: How about the cholesterol-lowering part. You know, everybody wants to lower their cholesterol and I was recently B my supervising physician came in and he went to a conference and the doc said it's malpractice not to put somebody on Lipitor (a statin). He said this blatantly, you know, to lower cholesterol. And I thought to myself well it must be malpractice not to put someone on a strict low-fat plant-based vegan diet then, you know. If I was smart I could have said that if I was there, but I probably wouldn't have. But tell us about the cholesterol and lipid changes that occur on this program.

DR. NEAL BARNARD: You know I use the words A, B, C B or the letters A, B, C. A is for appetite to control. B is for the burn enhancement, that's that metabolism boost you mentioned. And C is for cardioprotection. And the idea is you can be on many different kinds of diets to lose weight. You could be on a low carb diet, but many people on low carb diets discover that their cholesterol does not improve very much or in some cases it gets worse. Sometimes dramatically worse. That's a bad diet to be on. Or if I'm on say an American Diabetes Association diet. For some people their cholesterol improves, for others it doesn't because it still includes meat. So my thought is let's not just help you lose weight, let's get you healthy. So when people go on a vegan diet, plant-based diet, there B there's no cholesterol in the diet. There is no animal fat in the diet. There's a lot of soluble fiber to help the body rid itself of cholesterol. So it's a terrific way to protect the body not only from heart disease but to protect our health everywhere blood flows. So that means lower blood pressure, it means protecting organs from cancer risk and just benefits all the way around.

KIRK HAMILTON: We are talking to Dr. Neal Barnard, founder and director of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, and also author of many books, but two that I particularly like, the two most recent are "Dr. Neal Barnard's Program for Reversing Diabetes," and the one we are talking about now, "The 21 Day Weight Loss Kickstart." Many times people talk about food cravings and you have a title, and chapter 2 titled "Foods That Tame the Appetite Demons" and I am wondering if you can explain that for us.

DR. NEAL BARNARD: Yes. Well part of this is really simple. Is that if your diet doesn't have much fiber in it, you're eating yogurt and chicken breasts and these kinds of things, they're animal derived so they don't have fiber. Then everything you eat, every single mouthful just gives you the full load of calories that are in those foods. If on the other hand you're eating vegetables and beans and fruits and whole grains, they have fiber in them. The fiber tends to fill you up, but it doesn't have much in the way of calories. So your appetite tends to take care of itself. But then in addition to that, there are certain foods that sort of get away from us and that is sugar, for example, or chocolate. We already talked about cheese and of the dairy products and also meat. Those are foods that people tend to eat more of even when they're already full. And I discussed why that is. It's because they B these foods have opiate affects. Red strawberries and asparagus do not have an opiate affect. So am I saying that sugar or chocolate or meat or cheese can be additive? Um, yeah, that's what I'm saying. I don't mean to say that they're heavily addictive. But you do see that they're in a different category compared with other foods.

KIRK HAMILTON: So why does the 21 Day Kickstart Diet approach reduce carb cravings? Because that is the number one thing. I work in a general practice and even though it's focused on nutrition, people come in with every different kind of diet thought known to man and carb cravings is probably the number one thing they talk about. How does this deal with that?

DR. NEAL BARNARD: Well I think the first thing is to understand that carbohydrate is not the devil. Carbohydrate is good. Carbohydrate is to your body what gasoline is to your car. It's your fuel. So carbohydrates, whether it's from rice or sweet potatoes or beans, that starchy part of it breaks down in your digestive tract to release the glucose your cells need to function, whether they're in your muscle or in your brain or in your heart or any other part of your body. So carbohydrate is a good thing. Part of the residue of the Atkins craze was this idea that carbohydrate is somehow bad. But we need to remember if the thinnest people on the planet are the ones who eat the most carbohydrate. I'm talking about people in Asia, Japan, China before McDonald's arrived. They're eating rice and eating noodles in huge quantities and they're very slim. Vegetarians eat a lot of carbohydrate. So it's a perfectly fine thing and for anybody who's not yet convinced, a gram of carbohydrate has exactly 4 calories. A gram of fat, whether it's cheese fat or beef fat or chicken fat or salmon oil, has 9 calories. So carbohydrate is not and never was a problem. Having said that, some people take healthy carbohydrate-containing foods and they mix them with butter and shortening and sugar and all kinds of things and make them less healthful and that is maybe what people are talking about when they talk about cravings. And what we're trying to do is to get on a diet that includes foods in as natural and healthful a way as we can.

KIRK HAMILTON: How much weight is B you know, can you give a ballpark generally lost in this 21 day program if someone stays on it pretty strictly?

DR. NEAL BARNARD: Well everybody loses weight at their own speed and somebody might only lose two or three pounds, or somebody might lose ten or twelve pounds. But my goal in just that three week period is not to have them lose a huge amount of weight. My goal is to get them out of their bad rut and to get them onto a better path. So let's say I lose five or six or seven pounds in that period of time. Great. My goal is to have learned some new tastes and new ways of relating to foods that will allow me to really solve my problems over the ensuing weeks and to make it a one-way street. So many people are used to yo-yo-ing where they lose weight and it comes back on. With this, the weight loss really can be a one-way street.

KIRK HAMILTON: So this lifestyle approach is really B it's a therapeutic diet, but it's also a lifestyle diet. In other words, this would be the same maintenance diet once you got there, correct?

DR. NEAL BARNARD: Yeah, exactly. The idea of 21 days is to allow you to jump in the water at the deep end and then you can get out if you want to and you can keep as much or as little of it as you're comfortable with. But after 21 days, almost B I mean your body is just different. You feel different. Your metabolism is starting to improve. Your weight loss is easy. So most people just feel so dramatically different they never want to go back to how they felt before.

KIRK HAMILTON: How does this program improve sleep? It's got to be the number one complaint I see in the clinic is B actually it is. It's, you know, good sleep and not waking up in the middle of the night.

DR. NEAL BARNARD: Part of it is that your body is getting healthier so problems over the long run like sleep apnea which are linked to bad diets and overweight tend to go way. But the immediate thing is that when we are having our evening B well let me back up. I encourage people to actually choose foods specifically for sleep or to stop sleep. And if in the evening you're eating foods that allow your brain to make serotonin you're gonna doze off to sleep. And what those foods are are complex carbohydrate. Carbohydrate causes the body to release insulin and insulin doesn't just take sugar out of the blood which is what people know about. But it also takes protein out of the blood. It takes amino acids out of the blood and puts them into the cell. But when you eat complex carbohydrate and you get this nice little insulin rush that removes that extra protein from your cells, it leaves behind tryptophan. The amino acid called tryptophan. The thing goes to brain and produces serotonin and it can finally go there because the insulin has removed all of the competing amino acids that were getting in its way before. So now you get this little serotonin rush, you doze off to sleep and you feel great. In the morning, you don't want that. You want to wake up. So I encourage people to have a little bit more protein in the morning, and it's not gonna be eggs or bacon because those are unhealthy food. What instead we would have would be whether it's beans or tofu or a little bit of tempeh or veggie sausage, veggie bacon, some higher protein food first with the starchy foods like pancakes or toast or oatmeal afterward. And that little extra protein dose then causes us to stay more alert because you can't make serotonin if you've got a big protein load.

KIRK HAMILTON: How does this diet fight pain? I know you wrote a book on food and pain, but how does this improve pain syndrome in people?

DR. NEAL BARNARD: In several different ways. Some pains are based on circulation. Chest pain for example. Even lower back pain is caused, we believe in at least some people, by poor circulation to the vertebrae and the discs in the lower back causing the discs to become fragile. So if we improve our circulation, those things get better. But there are some people who have migraines or arthritis or other kinds of inflammatory pain where certain foods are triggering that inflammatory process and dairy products are the most common one. So we've seen a lot of people where their joint pain just goes away. Simply because they're not having dairy products anymore. There are other food triggers, but dairy's the most common one. And then there's a third category of hormone-related pain and that's for women before their period. They can have some cramps on the first B oh, just before or the first day of their period. When they go on a low fat vegan diet their estrogen activity is modulated a little. By that I mean it's settled down so that they don't have this crampy pain. They don't have so much PMS. And we did study on that back, and we published it in the year 2000 in Obstetrics and Gynecology. So people come in to lose weight or they come in to get their diabetes better and suddenly their joints feel better or their cramps go away and I'll tell you, that makes you a believer.

KIRK HAMILTON: Let's talk about two things that are of great concern as we have an increasing aging population. One is healthy aging. And I saw on the PBS preview or overview that you had, you talked about Alzheimer's disease a bit. But let's talk about this dietary approach and aging and also preservation of mental function, i.e. Alzheimer's and mental clarity and such.

DR. NEAL BARNARD: Yeah. I think that we are probably going to start viewing Alzheimer's as being a disease that is not related to aging and I know that sounds surprising. But in the same way as lung cancer, lung cancer occurs in older people, but it doesn't occur because we're old. It occurs because we've been smoking for a long time. A person who's 16 years old can't get lung cancer because they just haven't smoked long enough. Alzheimer's disease may well turn out to be a disease where people have been exposed to causes of the disease for a long enough period of time that it finally kicks in. We don't know that for certain, but here's what we do know. That the same factors that seem to contribute to heart disease also are linked to Alzheimer's. Diets high in saturated fat. In other words animal fat for the most part. High cholesterol levels, overweight, high homocysteine levels. Homocysteine is an amino acid that is reduced when you have a vitamin rich diet. So your average American eating meat and cheese, they have a lot of saturated fat in their diet, that's linked to Alzheimer's disease. They're gaining weight, that's linked to Alzheimer's disease. They may have diabetes, that's linked to Alzheimer's disease. And they don't have the vitamins they need to get rid of homocysteine. So you put all this together and as time goes on our brain is damaged by it. We don't have good studies to know that if I put people on a vegan diet that we can prevent Alzheimer's disease, but we do have a number of studies where people have looked at people on variations of healthful diets. Eating less saturated fat, staying slim, and we do see that the risk of Alzheimer's is cut quite substantially so it's a very exciting area.

KIRK HAMILTON: Let's talk about aging for a second because it's one of my great interests and passions and I always think we should be studying aging cultures to see what they do and kind of mimic and work backwards, and so some of my favorite books are "Healthy at 100" by John Robbins, "The Blue Zones" and also "The Okinawa Program." And though I am a vegan myself, the truth is I don't know any vegan culture, that's you know 100% vegan culture, that's in that group, maybe the Seventh Day Adventists and some Blue Zone areas, but they all eat some small amounts of animal protein generally speaking, and unprocessed food diets. So how do you answer that question? You know, we don't have any record of vegans living you know really long, long functional lives, or do we?

DR. NEAL BARNARD: Well we don't have any populations that have been nonsmokers. You know we don't have people, we don't have populations that you know are entirely teetotalers and so forth. It's simply because people do whatever they can. Now on the other hand, there are populations where most people don't smoke, and you can show that their lung cancer risk is pretty low. You can show that there are populations where many people don't eat meat and they tend to do better. Within the Adventist population, they're an interesting natural experiment because their religious tenets suggest that Seventh Day Adventists should not smoke, should not drink, should not use caffeine and should avoid meat. And most of them are pretty good with the first three of those, but a lot of them are meat eaters, and of various kinds and some are vegans and some are ovo-lacto-vegetarian. When you compare these groups, the meat eaters are always the heaviest. The vegans are always the slimmest. They're in right in the middle of the healthiest diet range as a group B healthy weight range. And then people who have fish but no other meat, they're kind of in the middle. People who have cheese or other dairy products, they're not as healthy as the vegans. And that gradient of vegans doing the best and the meat eaters doing the worst, you see it not only for weight but you also see it for diabetes risk. So the evidence suggests that if you tease out that part of any population, including the really healthy population, you tease out that group that is avoiding the animal product the most, they do the best. So that's the prescription.

KIRK HAMILTON: I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. David Jenkins. You know him well because you've done some research with him. And I know that you encourage a vegan diet and encourage medical research that doesn't involve animals and some people don't care that you kill animals for food. But one of the things that Dr. Jenkins said was his desire to put people on plant-based nutrition wasn't just for health reasons, but was for to protect the ecology of the planet. And you had a little section in there or chapter about animals and things like that. And I was wondering if you can talk about other reasons besides being kind to animals, which is obvious to me, but some people don't really care about that message per se.

DR. NEAL BARNARD: If I'm talking to a 65-year-old man who was just diagnosed with prostate cancer, I'm gonna tell him about Dean Ornish's work that showed that a vegan diet can improve your survival. If I'm talking to a 15-year-old kid, he doesn't care about his prostate. So far as he knows he doesn't have a prostate. I mean he's not gonna learn about that for quite a few decades. What he cares about is the environment or about animals or something like that. And that is an important consideration for him and for everybody else. And whatever your motivation may be, you get this tremendous payoff in the animal's benefit, the environment benefits and your coronary arteries are glad, too. So I think it is important to recognize all of these things. I'm a doctor, but I'm also a thinking human being. And when I reflect on my own youth when I grew up with B in North Dakota. My grandpa was a cattle rancher and so was my B much of my extended family and my father grew up in the cow business. And I know what that business is about. And I hunted as a child. I took aim and shot and killed animals myself. And as I reflect back on that, I believe that was ill-advised, unnecessary and did not make the world a better place. And when we look at what is happening environmentally now, you really have to have your head buried in the sand to not recognize that animal agriculture is a major threat to the environment. And we also have to recognize that just like recycling, or any other environmental step, cannot be done by a government alone. It requires each individual contributing personally. And that's also true with our treatment of animals and other steps. And so it's incumbent on us to not just wait for somebody else to take these steps for us. We can do them ourselves. So our health improves and these other considerations improve, too.

KIRK HAMILTON: Just briefly, list what are the environmental impacts. Just list them of mass production of animals.

DR. NEAL BARNARD: First of all, cows are not ordering room service. They have to be fed something and on feed lots they're fed corn, maybe soybean. Hogs, chickens likewise are fed feed grain. And so when I drive through the Midwest visiting my parents and acre after acre of corn catches the setting sun and it's really gorgeous, I come to realize that not one ear of corn in that vast field is going to feed a human being. It is all being fed to animals. And the problem with that it takes a good, maybe 300% more corn to go into a chicken, something along that nature, compared to the nutrition that comes out of it. In other words, you have to put a lot of feed grain in to get a rather small amount of food out. If you're talking about a cow, the ratio is even worse. So it's a very, very inefficient system. But that corn has to have nitrogen applied in the form of fertilizer, and then it has to be irrigated, so there are all these places that have water shortages. Well where's the water going? I mean the biggest user of it is agriculture. Then the water picks up the nitrogen, carries it into the streams, it then coalesces into rivers and ends up in the Gulf of Mexico, which drains 40% of United States. There is an area in the Gulf of Mexico that is biologically dead and it's as big as the state of New Jersey out below Louisiana and Texas. It's a dead zone. And the reason it's dead is because nitrogen and phosphorus from fertilizer has caused the overgrowth of algae that then saps the oxygen from the water and it kills that chunk of the water ways and nothing can grow there. It can come back but it will never come back as long as we are using a huge portion of our land mass to do nothing but create livestock feed. And the other piece of this, just to be quick about it is, that if you took all of the cows in North America and put them on one side of the scale and put all the humans on the other side of the scale, the mass of cows is substantially bigger. I mean they weigh more that we do. Every cow is as big as a sofa and they're living, breathing animals and they breathe out methane. And methane is a very potent greenhouse gas. So if you had one, that's not such a big deal. If you have a hundred million of them in the United States, that is a big deal. And the United Nations came out with two different reports saying that animal agriculture was a humongous contributor to climate change. Well we're seeing climate change on a dramatic scale month after month after month and I know there are people who say this can't be real, this is normal variation. I think it is irresponsible and very risky to assume that it's not real and just continue the things that have been predicted to cause climate change. It is time for us to treat this planet with a bit of caution and by changing our diets we can do that.

KIRK HAMILTON: One other connection with that and I think I heard you said it. E. coli is either from animal intestine, so to speak. or from human intestine so to speak. And when we get an E. coli outbreak, I think I heard one about spinach or some produce. I don't think people relate it to, that it probably came from drainage or wastage from animals?

DR. NEAL BARNARD: You can sometimes hear of food poisonings where sprouts or spinach or tomatoes or something was contaminated with E. coli. E. coli is spelled E, period, coli. Coli as in colon as in intestine. In other words, this is a germ, bacterium, from the B from an intestine and one of the nicest features of spinach is that it doesn't have an intestine. So it doesn't have E. coli. It came from somewhere else. Where did it come from? It came typically from cows. So how could something from a cow get on produce? Well it could come from fertilizer, so if you're using manure from an animal to fertilize or if you're irrigating using contaminated water, or if you have meat eaters who work in your plant and they weren't very hygienic when they used the bathroom, the E. coli will go from either an animal or a meat-eating human onto produce. That is the problem. If people were not meat eaters, the food-borne illness prevalence would be cut dramatically.

KIRK HAMILTON: Well I could go on for days on those kinds of issues because those are what really interest me but I want to close up and get back to the 21 Day Kickstart Weight Loss Program by Dr. Neal Barnard. You were on public television and did that go well with you? Did you get a good response?

DR. NEAL BARNARD: Yeah, we had a terrific response. We've done two programs. The first was on diabetes and the second one was based around my book "The 21 Day Weight Loss Kickstart." And I have to say I was really delighted with this in a couple of ways. One is that it means that the idea of changing your diet is at least reasonably mainstream so that some people are willing to hear this now, and the second thing is I'm just grateful to public television for having been willing to not only produce these programs but to send them around to their member stations and people have been embracing it. And then I hear from them and people are losing weight and getting healthy and that's really exciting, too.

KIRK HAMILTON: And lastly, just rounding it up, to make it the real world. I really liked your study where you took this program to Geico. Can you explain that one a little bit?

DR. NEAL BARNARD: Yeah. When I look out my office window I happen to see Geico's national headquarters. It's right near my office here in the Washington, D.C. area. And so we went over to Geico's headquarters. There are 2500 people who work in that building, and we instituted a vegan diet for anybody who wanted to do it. And we used as a control site a different Geico facility in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Well, with a vegan diet here, people lost weight, their cholesterols improved, if they had diabetes they got better. So we published that finding in three different scientific journals. What we showed is that an effective thing right at the work place, people like it and their nutrition improves. And we're now in the midst of a much bigger study with Geico doing the same thing at 10 sites. And so that's very exciting. My hope is that is a model for how businesses can help people stay on a healthy vegan diet.

KIRK HAMILTON: That's awesome. That's the kind of stuff I'm B you know as soon as you get it published, zip me a PDF so I can talk about it because I think that's the stuff that changes heads. You know it's one thing to do it individually or in some kind of spa, but it's another thing to take a diet and put it right smack in the middle of a business and see it work.

DR. NEAL BARNARD: Okay, well we have published. We have three publications already and then the new study has not yet been published because it's still in progress, but I will definitely keep you posted.

KIRK HAMILTON: Alright, thank you. And how do people get a hold of B well, PCRM B just give a blurb about what PCRM does.

DR. NEAL BARNARD: Sure. Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine is a nonprofit group that vigorously promotes healthier diets. We do this with education. We do it with lobbying and litigation when we have to. Yes, we are suing McDonald's and Burger King and just about everybody else when they are not doing right. And we have lots of publications that I hope people will take a look at. And our website is PCRM.org. We have a Kickstart Program that's been really popular and people can just go to PCRM.org and register and take advantage. It's totally free.

KIRK HAMILTON: And your books are obviously available on Amazon, correct?

DR. NEAL BARNARD: Yeah, "The 21 Day Weight Loss Kickstart" is on Amazon, it's on Barnesandnoble.com, it's at your local book store and I'm sure they'd appreciate your business, too.

KIRK HAMILTON: Dr. Barnard, thank you so much for being on the show today and thank you for going through that. It was quite a long list, but I think it gave a good picture of what you do and congratulations.

DR. NEAL BARNARD: Well thank you for spreading the good word. Pleasure talking to you as always.

KIRK HAMILTON: And I want to thank you, the audience, for listening to this edition of Staying Health Today Radio and until next time, Stay and Be Well.

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