You may have heard the expression
“knowledge is power.”
Well, today we’re going to give you more power
to control your diet and lifestyle
by giving you the facts.
Welcome to the Nutrition Facts Podcast.
I’m your host, Dr. Michael Greger.
It’s time for the Nutrition Facts Grab Bag
where we look at the science on a wide variety of topics.
Today we start with a pressing question:
why don’t health insurers embrace plant-based eating?
Many of the diseases that cause a constant drain
on health care budgets can be prevented by proper nutrition.
So why aren't the big payors getting involved?
I mean, even like a 1% decline in excess body fat could
alone save tens of billions.
You'd think at least the health insurance industry would try
to get people to eat healthier to try to pay out less money.
Well, one could say the insurance industry actually benefits from
high health care costs because these rising costs are simply
passed on to both individuals and employers in terms of
higher premiums, and insurers take a fixed percentage
of these premiums as increasing profits.
They get a piece of the pie, so the bigger the pie —
the unhealthier everyone is — the bigger their piece.
As such, insurers have not done as much as they could
to help reduce health care costs because lower costs
would hurt their bottom line.
What if there was a medication that could successfully treat
and even reverse heart disease, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure,
and many other chronic conditions without any negative side effects and
offered the promise of dramatically reduced health care costs?
Imagine all the advertising there would be to promote it.
Imagine how much they would charge.
A drug that could not just treat but cure diabetes
and these other diseases?
Then what if you were told that medication exists today,
is available to everyone in unlimited quantities at a low cost,
but the vast majority of the American public has never heard about it.
You want a solution to significantly reduce health care costs?
The solution is to use food as medical treatment,
specifically foods made from minimally processed plants.
One of the main barriers is simply the current widespread belief
that once someone has a chronic condition,
such as heart disease, type 2 diabetes,
there's very little that can be done to actually reverse the disease,
and the best outcome possible is to maintain the condition
so that it just doesn't get any worse.
The fact that a whole food plant-based approach provides
a safe, effective, low-cost alternative to not just eliminating symptoms
but potentially reversing the underlying condition
without drugs or surgery
is unknown to a vast majority of Americans.
In contrast to the pharmaceutical industry that spends large sums
to market new drugs, there are not big profits in promoting
a plant-based diet.
The politics surrounding healthcare is who's going to pay for it,
instead of what kind of healthcare is best?
And the evidence is overwhelming that a whole food, plant-based diet
provides the best opportunity to not only reduce the growth in spending,
but actually decrease total health care costs more than any drug,
medical procedure, insurance reform, or provider payment model out there.
Thankfully, the word is spreading.
A review of the evidence published in Kaiser Permanente's journal
concluded that physicians should consider recommending
a plant-based diet to all their patients, especially those
with high blood pressure, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, or obesity.
Kaiser has followed up with user friendly guides
(freely available online)
for both physicians and patients, explaining the benefits
and practical aspects of implementing a plant-based diet.
So hey, why aren't all insurers sending out such information
to all their members?
You know how all the drug ads are like,
"Ask your doctor if this drug is right for you."
Well, members could be prompted to ask their physicians
about the ability of plant-based diets to reduce or eliminate
prescription drug use, reverse disease.
Though, of course, these materials would also have
to list all the side effects. Side effects include
increased energy, lower blood pressure, improved digestion,
all while eating unlimited quantities of satisfying food.
Ask your doctor if plants are right for you.
Did you know that there is little guarantee
that a dietary supplement will actually contain
what's advertised on the packaging?
Here’s the story.
In a video I did a few years ago, I talked about how press releases
about the latest science coming out of even top medical centers
were filled with overstatements and omissions.
Medical journal press releases suffered from similar problems,
and press releases from the drug companies themselves
were no different, filled with hype and exaggeration.
What about press releases issued by the supplements industry?
Not even the companies that published the studies,
but like trade organizations
for the multi-billion-dollar dietary supplement industry?
Researchers found that 100% of supplements industry press releases
contained "spin," meaning strategies to hype or denigrate findings
to distort the results of clinical studies.
And here's the crazy part: industry press releases advocated
supplement use in response to more than 90%
of even the studies that reported no benefit or harm.
Here are the harm studies.
A study comes out showing a supplement is actually bad for you,
and the vast majority of independent institutions like
the National Institutes of Health or mainstream media stories
are like "don't take it." Duh. But the industry trade
organizations are like, "Harm? Go for it! Buy an extra bottle."
It is, therefore, likely that the propagation of the spin-enriched
industry press releases contributes to the ongoing, and even burgeoning,
enthusiasm for use of supplements in the face of accumulating evidence
of most of their ineffectiveness and, in some cases, harm.
In some cases, people are paying to make themselves sick.
Sadly, the science may not even matter to many supplement users.
Most dietary supplement users said that they would be minimally influenced
by independent, taxpayer-funded studies contradicting
the efficacy claims of supplement manufacturers.
Only a minority of users said they would stop taking a supplement
if public health authorities stated that it was just a waste of money.
The iconic image of the snake oil salesman was actually a real dude:
Clark "the Rattlesnake King" Stanley in 1916.
Turns out that Stanley's snake oil, in fact, contained no snake oil at all
but rather just like spicy mothballs and turpentine,
prosecuted under the newly enacted Pure Food and Drug Act,
and ultimately fined a lofty sum of $20 bucks.
And a century later, here we are with snake oil coming out our ears,
a vast number of supplements marketed and sold without routine oversight.
Now, the supplement industry bristles at such talk, saying that
the supplement industry is regulated to protect consumers.
And it's true there are definitely laws on the books, but the ability
of regulators to successfully carry out this mission is hampered
by the sheer number of products.
The FDA estimates there are more than 85,000 dietary supplement
products currently available in the U.S. alone.
So there's the sheer number, the under reporting of adverse
side effects, the difficulty of successfully prosecuting
cases against offenders, and the ease with which
suppliers can rebrand products removed from the shelves
have led to a largely unregulated environment.
In the real world, there is little guarantee that a supplement
will even contain what is advertised on the packaging and
not contain unlisted ingredients, potentially leading to significant
harms, resulting in an estimated 23,000 ER visits every year.
Now, of course, prescription drugs don't just sicken but kill many more,
making them perhaps the third leading cause of death,
wiping out more than 100,000 Americans, but still,
the less death and disability, the better.
Dietary supplements are often adulterated
with undeclared pharmaceuticals, which could represent
an enormous risk to consumers, most often found in erectile dysfunction,
weight loss, diabetes, and high blood pressure supplements.
But wait a second. What about
supplement manufacturers who say they have independent,
third-party certification of purity?
There is a practice called "dry labbing," a dirty little secret
of the supplements industry, where quality assurance labs
just rubber stamp fake documents.
And if you think that's outrageous, check out the story of BMPEA.
A researcher at Harvard published a paper replicating prior research
from the FDA detecting a designer amphetamine-like stimulant,
beta-methylphenylethylamine,
in various U.S. supplements sold in the United States.
In response, one of the offenders, Hi-Tech Pharmaceuticals,
manufacturers of weight loss supplements like
Black Widow and Yellow Scorpion,
sued the Harvard researcher for libel, slander, and product
disparagement, originally to the tune of $200 million in damages.
This was all documented in a piece by STAT,
which is an excellent source of medical journalism
that I recommend.
The head of Hi-Tech openly admitted that he was
"hoping that we were able to silence this guy."
And while ultimately unsuccessful in court, Hi-Tech's lawsuit effectively
sent a warning to other researchers.
In fact, Hi-Tech's CEO is attributed as saying,
he "hope[s] that the long and costly legal battle will scare away
other academics from investigating the supplement industry."
Finally today, we discover that those
who are eating plant-based diets
have a reduced load of antibiotic resistance genes in their gut.
There are nearly a million salmonella and campylobacter infections
in children 10 and younger each year in the United States.
Some of these infections are severe, causing meningitis and death, and
requiring treatment with antibiotics. The problem is that there's
an increasing problem of antibiotic resistance among
these bugs that threatens our ability to treat them.
Part of the problem is that the same life-saving miracle-drug antibiotics
are being squandered for use in food animals
for things like growth promotion
in such unhygienic, crowded conditions,
which increases the likelihood that pathogens like salmonella
or campylobacter will become resistant.
But there's another problem. The resistance determinants,
the genes that encode antibiotic resistance,
may be transmitted from food animals to humans through the food supply.
See, most resistant bacteria have mobile genetic elements,
like these little circles of DNA called plasmids,
that carry the resistance genes that they can then pass on
to other bacteria, including those in our own gut.
Food animals are, therefore, a reservoir of antibiotic resistance
genes and a potential vector for transmission
of antibiotic resistance genes to the human intestinal microbiome.
In this study, transfer of an antibiotic resistance plasmid
from an E. coli originating from a chicken raised for meat
to human gut bugs was assessed by using a model
that mimics the human intestines. And it happened within two hours.
This spread of antibiotic resistance genes presents an alarming scenario,
a growing concern that antibiotic resistant bacteria present on food
can transfer their resistance genes to the inherent gut microbiome
of the consumer.
But you don't know until you put it to the test.
Assessing antibiotic resistance gene loads in vegan vs. vegetarian
vs. omnivore gut bacteria.
You'd think the results might be obvious,
but antibiotic resistance genes are spread due to
manure application on agricultural fields of fruits and vegetables.
Yes, massive antibiotic use in animal farming is considered
as the greatest contributor to the presence of antibiotic-resistant
bacteria in food of animal origin: meats, eggs, and dairy.
Nevertheless, sewage from treated animals may impact
on vegetables grown on fertilized fields,
but it was largely unknown whether, and to what extent,
antibiotic-resistant bacteria are being transferred to vegetables
and then to the human gut until now.
Researchers looked for antibiotic- resistant genes against sulfa drugs
like bactrim, tetracyclines, penicillins and cephalosporins,
and streptomycin-type antibiotics
and both omnivores and vegetarians showed a signigicantly higher
antibiotic-resistant gene load in their guts
as compared with vegans.
There wasn't a significant difference between omnivores and vegetarians,
but significantly lower loads in vegans compared to omnivores,
and vegans compared to vegetarians, the first evidence
that a vegan lifestyle is associated with
a reduced load of human gut antibiotic-resistant genes,
but not the last.
Fewer tetracycline resistance genes in vegan guts and
more vancomycin resistance genes in the guts of those who eat meat.
No surprise, since they found a correlation between
tetracycline resistance genes
and the intake of eggs, milk, and cheese ---
I like how there are so many types of milk these days
they have to specify "milk from animal sources."
And a higher incidence of vancomycin resistance genes
was found in consumers of eggs, poultry, fish, and seafood.
And vancomycin is one of our antibiotics of last resort, used to
treat serious life-threatening strep and staph infections
like MRSA (M-R-S-A).
Despite the links to dairy and eggs, just cutting out meat
has indeed been shown to offer an advantage in some studies,
as bacteria obtained from meat-eater poop samples showed resistance
to a greater number of antibiotics and carried more tested
antibiotic resistance genes compared to the vegan or vegetarian poop.
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Go to nutritionfacts.org/testimonials.
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To see any graphs, charts, graphics, images, or studies mentioned here,
please go to the Nutrition Facts Podcast landing page.
There you’ll find all the detailed information you need –
plus, links to all of the sources we cite for each of these topics.
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It’s beautifully designed with more than 100 recipes
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