When your arm falls off, a medical doctor’s obviously the best person to see.
Having a heart attack? I’d recommend the hospital. But what about when it comes to preventing
diseases through sound nutrition and lifestyle? We trust our doctors to heal us, treat us,
and help us live long, healthy lives. But what if the advice our doctors, medical professionals
and organizations are imparting isn’t true or grounded in reliable science?
And worse, what if it’s actually making us sicker?
Hi it's Emily from Bite Size Vegan and welcome to another vegan nugget. When it comes to
nutrition and preventing disease, the last person you may want to see, is a medical doctor.
Unless, of course, that doctor is my guest today. I’m honored to again have on my channel
Dr. Michael Greger of nutritionfacts.org. Dr. Greger spends countless hours pouring
over the most current studies in nutrition science and distilling all of the noise into
approachable videos and posts.
His most recent masterpiece is his book “How Not To Die,” which I interviewed him about
in this video. Most of Dr. Greger’s conclusions, which are based on thousands of studies he's reviewed,
conflict with the most common recommendations we hear from the medical field. So why are
we being given false information by those who we trust with our health? And how much
do doctors really know about preventing disease? Let’s find out from the doctor himself!
Emily: The recommendations that you have in your book for both nutrition and fitness,
they vary quite a bit from the standards that we see. For example, you're recommending
90 minutes of low intensity, over 40 minutes of high intensity exercise a day, when usually
we hear something like 20 to 30 minutes three times a week.
Could you explain the gap that exists there?
Dr Greger: Not low intensity but moderate intensity - 90 minutes of moderate intensity,
okay and it’s the differences between what authorities feel is practical, doable, versus
what the science actually says. So, their fear is that if they actually tell Americans
the truth that it’ll be so, that Americans will be like, “oh, there’s no way I’m
going to do that,” and not do anything. So they soft pedal it by saying,
"yeah, get 20 minutes, sure, 20 minutes is much better than zero, 10 minutes is better than zero,
but it’s a little patronizing to have them make their decision for you that you don’t
care enough about yourself, you don’t care enough about your family’s health, to be
able to handle the truth. And the truth is that, you know, 30 minutes is better than the
recommended 22. They have science suggesting 45 minutes is better than 30, 60 is better
than 45, and 90 minutes a day is better than 60. What about more than 90 minutes? They
don’t know because there’s never been enough people to study that actually got more
than 90 minutes a day, 7 days a week. So, the best available data suggests 90 minutes
a day is the best. How else can we make decisions about how best to feed ourselves and our family
and how best to live than by the best available balance of evidence. So there it is. Do you
have to do 90 minutes to be healthy? No! But, you should know that that’s what we should
shoot for and any is better than none. It shouldn’t intimidate people to lie on the
couch all day. But, you know, you want to know - why do the science?
Why do studies if you’re not going to tell anybody about them?
Emily: And does that also hold true then for a lot of the dietary recommendations when
they give recommendations for protein amounts, fat amounts, those kind of things?
Dr Greger: The same thing, so I talk about in the blood pressure chapter, how not to
die from high blood pressure - I talk about the so called DASH diet. The Dietary Approach
to Stop Hypertension. So that’s the official diet, recommended by The American Heart Association.
And, so what is the DASH diet? The DASH diet is kind of a low meat diet. So, the question
is why not a no meat diet? Since meat consumption has been associated with, in fact not just
associated - you give people meat, you give a vegetarian meat, their blood pressure goes up,
you take a meat eater - you take meat away, out of their diet, within 7 days their
blood pressure comes down. Not rocket science. So, why not a vegetarian diet?
So, The American Heart Association is very clear that the only population in the western
world that actually gets down to an ideal blood pressure, which is about 110 over 70,
are the strict vegetarians. They’re very clear about that, they’ve been clear about
that for decades. So, why do they recommend a diet that contains meat? Well, are they
just unaware of this landmark research done by Harvard’s Frank Sacks back in the 70s?
No, they were aware, the guy who came up with the DASH diet, the head of the design committee
was Frank Sacks, in fact they’re explicit that the number one goal of the DASH diet
was to capture the blood pressure lowering benefits of a vegetarian diet, yet - they’re
very explicit about this, contain enough animal products to make it palatable to the general
public. So, they’re saying yes, this will kill people, but you see what they’re thinking.
They’re thinking is look - we need to, you know on a population scale, maybe if we soft
pedal the truth, more people will get onboard and overall, you will actually do more good
in the world, right? If we actually tell people the truth - no one is going to eat a vegetarian
diet, right, then no one’s going to be healthy. At least now, we can help people a little bit.
Lots of people a little bit. Okay, tell that to the thousand families a day that lose
a family member to high blood pressure. Alright, maybe it’s time
to start telling the American public the truth.
Emily: Within this book you talk about, this is something that I think people, not in the
mainstream are more aware of that, in medical school doctors aren’t really getting nutrition
education. Most schools are having maybe one course, or something, it’s quite lacking
and yet, we almost trust medical doctors entirely with nutrition advice. Why is it that this
is still yet to kind of shift with all of the research showing that, of course,
what we put in our body affects our health?
Dr Greger: Not one course, only a quarter of medical schools have a single course. So,
75% of schools don’t even have one course. So the average doctor may just get a few hours
of nutrition training. In fact, this is a study that I did an early video about years
ago, in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition they pitted doctors vs. patients in a simple
10 true/false question basic nutrition information, sometimes patients beat out the doctors. People
out walking around the street may know more about nutrition than the doctors and we all
know how much people walking around the street know about nutrition, alright. Yet, people
continue to go to their doctors for advice on healthy eating, right. And what
their doctor may be telling them may be killing them. Until your doctor knows more about nutrition,
their advising you about your diet is physician assisted suicide, as far as I’m concerned.
Why? Okay, well there’s a number of reasons why this hasn’t penetrated yet. One - you
know, the role the pharmaceutical industry plays in medical education and training. You
can ask your doctor when is the last time that big broccoli took them out to lunch.
It probably was not that recently. There are reimbursement problems, doctors don’t get
paid to counsel their patients about diet. There’s time issues - they may not be given
the time to counsel patients about diet, although how long does it take to go 21daycasestudy.org,
nutritionfacts.org, buy this book. Come on, people. And there’s a tremendous kind of
inertia within the medical profession.
You know, what really helped me was going back and looking at the 50s, and smoking.
You know, my latest annual review, Food Is Medicine, I talk about what it was like back then.
People didn’t realize, I certainly didn’t realize, the average per capita cigarette consumption
was 4,000 cigarettes a year. Average person in the United States smoked a half a pack
a day. Most doctors smoked, right. So, it’s like today, where most people eat meat, right.
Okay, so go back to the 1950s, and everybody smoked. The AMA said, “smoking in moderation,
totally fine.” Right, sound familiar? Right. The government said to smoke, everybody
said to smoke, right. The AMA said, on balance smoking’s probably beneficial. Alright, okay.
So, now, the science was in already in the 1950s, there were decades of science
showing that, you know, non-smokers 90% less lung cancer risk, right? So we had decades
of science. The science was there, yet, all of society, everybody, doctors were telling
you to smoke, the doctors were smoking themselves, right? It wasn’t until the 1960s when the
first Surgeon General’s report came out, it took 25 years, 7,000 studies they had to
accumulate. You’d think after the first 6,000 they couldn’t give people a little
heads-up or something? No, 7,000 studies, okay how many people died before the Surgeon
General? What if they’d come out 10 years earlier, 20 years earlier, 25 years earlier, right?
We’re in the same situation today. The overwhelming evidence, we already have
the science. Right. Yet, what do we hear from our doctors, from everybody, because they’re
just not aware of the science. Now eventually, society will catch up to the science.
Like it did in the 60s, okay. How many people have to die until that happens, right? We can’t
wait until society catches up to the science because it’s a matter of life or death,
we have to take the responsibility for our own health, for our family’s health, as
doctors for our patients’ health, and encourage people to eat the diet that prevents and reverses
our leading killer, not to mention type II diabetes, and hypertension, and everything.
Right? Plant based diet.
I hope you enjoyed hearing from Dr. Greger. It never ceases to amaze me how much education
medical doctors receive about how to treat diseases versus how to prevent them. Luckily
there are physicians out there like Dr. Greger, who provide this vital information.
You can find a link to Dr. Greger’s book in the description below. I highly recommend
it and all proceeds go to charity. I’d love to hear form you on this. Have you had any
negative experiences with the medical field? Are you surprised by how little nutrition
education doctors receive? Let me know in the comments. And check out more of my videos
with Dr. Greger linked below and in the sidebar.
If you liked this nugget of truth, do give the video a thumbs up and share it around
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links below or click the Nugget Army icon there or the link in the sidebar. Now go live vegan,
don’t buy the lie, and I’ll see you soon.
All that we really need to say to convey the sad state of the medical profession in regards
to nutrition, is the fact that there's McDonalds inside hospitals.
So not only do your patients die...
...but so does science.