- It is so counterintuitive.
Eat meat, eggs, cheese, lose weight.
NBC chief science correspondent Robert Bazell tonight
with a new study.
- And here's the most important thing to remember.
The studies--
- This study that takes on one of the biggest diet debates.
Is it more important to cut carbs or fat
if you wanna lose weight and stay healthy?
Here is what the researchers found.
- Is one healthier than the other?
Is one healthier?
- I think the no carbs is metabolically
and nutritionally is healthier.
- There's certainly doctors out there who like
to say things that aren't true
because the media loves stories like that.
They love to have a doctor say,
"Oh, meat is good for you."
- Hey everybody. This is Klaus from Plant Based News.
So in this video, I interviewed Dr. Dean Ornish,
the pioneering heart health doctor.
I interviewed him at PCRM's
Nutrition and Medicine Conference.
And I want to say if you're interested
in any of the topics discussed in this video
then you'll definitely be interested in a free summit
which I've linked down below.
It's put on by Ocean Robbins.
It's 100% online so you can access it
from anywhere in the world.
There'll be some more information by Ocean Robbins
at the end of the interview.
But in the meantime, I hope you enjoy the interview
with Dr. Dean Ornish.
Dr. Dean Ornish, thank you so much for doing this.
- My great pleasure.
- You were recently featured in The Game Changers,
which has been getting a huge amount of attention.
How was that experience?
- It was great.
I think that this film is really gonna be a game changer,
hence it's name.
It addresses the most common misconceptions people have
about eating a plant based diet,
which is that you're a wimp
and you don't get enough protein.
And so, having all these elite athletes
who raised their game and became Olympic medalists
and heavyweight boxing champions,
mixed martial artists, national champions,
NFL super stars and so on
is really gonna help people understand that
when you go on a plant based diet,
it makes you stronger
and more powerful and more effective.
- I think there's gonna be a lot of backlash
and haters and naysayers when the film come out.
In fact, online in the keto community,
the ketogenic diet community,
there's a lot of people saying, for example,
that Arnold Schwarzenegger could never have built his muscle
off tofu and lentils.
- Well, the best narrative is to listen
to Arnold Schwarzenegger himself.
He says he knows this world.
He grew up in that world.
And when he says that this is the best way to be strong,
why wouldn't you believe him of all people?
- Some people in social media are saying the film
has a plant based agenda. What do you say to these?
You've probably had these people in your career
saying your work is just some holistic agenda.
- Well, if an agenda means you're trying to present
that's scientifically based
so that people can make informed choices,
yeah, that's what it is.
It's an agenda to try to educate people
about the power of these simple choices
that we make everyday.
That's exactly what it is.
- Some other critics of the film say
that it's fear mongering around fat.
You obviously promote a low fat diet.
What do you say to these sort of naysayers
and haters and shot jots that are making these accusations?
- Well, there's lots of people that recommend things
that aren't good for you that may sound good.
The reason I spent 40 years conducting
the highest quality research published
in the leading peer reviewed journals
is that's really the whole point of science,
is to help people sort out what's true and what isn't
and we've been able to show in studies
over the last 40 years that these simple lifestyle changes,
the whole foods, plant based diet
that's low in fat and sugar,
moderate exercise, various stress management techniques
including medication and psycho-social support
or love and intimacy or to reduce it to it's essence,
to eat well, move more, stress less and love more
can actually reverse the progression
of the most common chronic diseases.
And it's not all or nothing.
To agree that you move in this direction,
there's a corresponding benefit.
Even if you're not ready to
go on a entirely plant based diet,
have a meatless Monday.
Whatever you do, in all of our studies,
we found the more you change,
the more you improve at any age.
- You've obviously done so much over the last 30,
40 years, yet it's not integrated significantly,
I think it's fair to say,
into the kind of mainstream system,
certainly not as much as we'd like.
How much of the kind of keto camp,
do you think, has held back your work
in sort of plant based lifestyle medicine kind of movement?
- After doing this work for 40 years,
this is finally the right idea at the right time.
On the one hand, Medicare and most insurance companies
are now covering my program for reversing heart disease.
We've been training hospitals
and clinics around the country,
we're getting bigger changes in lifestyle,
better clinical outcomes, bigger cost savings
and better adherence than anyone's ever shown.
Now, the keto or paleo are just the latest versions
of the Atkins diet which itself is the later version
of earlier kinds of things like this.
It's worth mentioning that when Dr. Atkins died,
his autopsy was released which showed he died
of massive heart failure.
Studies have shown that when you go on a keto
or paleo diet, your risk of dying prematurely
from heart disease, diabetes, prostate, breast,
colon cancer goes up significantly.
There's certainly doctors out there
who like to say things that aren't true
because the media loves stories like that.
They love to have a doctor say,
"Oh, meat is good for you."
And then you say, well, how much nutrition
training do doctors get?
And I coauthored an article in one of the
leading peer review journals here a few months ago
with my college from the American College of Cardiology's
nutrition committee and we found the average doctor
in the US gets four hours of nutrition training a year
and the average cardiologist in four years of training
gets zero in training.
So doctors may say all kinds of things
because they don't know any better.
The media love that because they're always
looking for clicks and they're looking for readers.
- Playing devil's advocate here that
I guess your argument is that doctors don't recommend
plant based nutrition because they're not trained
in their nutrition field.
But then people argue that well,
dieticians or people studying dietetics
also don't recommend plant based nutrition.
- Well, the American Dietetic Association
recommends a plant based diet.
So I think things are changing
and it's good that they are
because we actually have over a dozen men and women
who had such severe heart disease
they were waiting for a heart transplant.
Their heart was in such bad shape.
They said the only thing that's gonna save your life
is to get a new heart.
And while waiting for a donor,
they went through my program
and nine weeks later, their heart is so much better
they didn't need a heart transplant anymore.
It's like what's the more radical invention here?
A heart transplant or eat well,
move more, stress less, love more?
There's more evidence than ever people wanna see that.
- You've obviously just said that keto people
are pretty good at getting airtime
and that's probably because they're telling people
what they want to hear.
You, however, have been able to navigate the system
and you've influenced a lot of people,
got a lot of sort of mainstream attention.
How have you been able to do this?
- Well the truth is very powerful
and the whole point of science is to find out what's true
and my role is to first do the highest quality research
to see what's true and then to get it out there
like interviews like this to having seen
what a powerful difference these changes can make.
I want to make it available to people
so they can make informed and intelligent choices.
And what happens on a keto or a paleo, an Atkins diet
was shown very graphically in an article
that was in the New England Journal of Medicine
by Steven Smith a few years ago
and said what actually happens
in arteries in different diets.
And at the top, they showed an artery of someone
on a whole foods plant based diet.
It's clean, it's unclogged.
The blood is flowing through very normally.
On a standard American diet or a typical British diet,
they're partially clogged.
And on a ketogenic or paleo or Atkins diet,
they're severely clogged.
Even if they lose weight,
even if their blood chemistries may look a little better,
if you look at really what matters,
which is really what's happening in the arteries.
You get much worse on those kinds of keto
and paleo and Atkins diet.
So I'm not here to get anybody to do anything.
I just want to make sure that people,
when they make choices, do it on the base of
scientifically based, accurate information.
- You've affected a lot of people in your career.
You've had a lot of influence.
Can you just talk about what happened last night
at the Physicians Committees Gala
where Bill Clinton came up on the screens to thank you?
- That was a nice surprise.
Bill Clinton made a testimonial talking about 10 years ago,
his bypasses clogged up and his cardiologist
had a press conference and said,
oh, it was all in his genes,
and his diet and lifestyle had nothing to do with it.
And having been working with him since 1993
when I was asked to train the chefs to cook for him
at the White House and Camp David and Air Force One.
And so I became one of his consulting physicians.
I knew that his diet and lifestyle
had everything to do with it. So I sent him a note, we met.
He then went on this lifestyle program that I developed
and he's been doing it now for 10 years
and he's continuing to get better.
And so, I think whatever your politics,
when a former president,
especially one that wasn't eating very healthily
makes these changes, I think
that's a beautiful example for everyone.
- You mentioned off camera
that you've recently been to London,
which is where I'm from.
What were you doing there?
- My wife and I met with
His Royal Highness Prince Charles again.
He's very interested in our work
and the possibility of the national health service
making the program available
and also this whole new movement
of what's called social medicine, social prescribing.
It turns out that the real epidemic
in both the UK and the United States
and so much of the world
is what I call emotional heart disease,
loneliness and depression and isolation,
the breakdown of the social networks
that used to give people a sense of love
and connection and community.
And study after study have shown that people
who are lonely and depressed are three to 10 times
more likely to get sick and die prematurely
from pretty much all causes when compared
to those that have that sense of connection and community
and I don't know anything
in medicine that has that big an impact.
So in the last three years in the UK,
they've come up with something called social prescribing
where the NHS will cover a doctor referring
because the average visit for a doctor is 10 minutes.
You really don't have much time
to talk about diet or exercise or what's going on
in your family or your job or your school
or your work or your kids.
And so, you can prescribe, if you're a doctor,
other ancillary personnel to spend time with patients
to help them with their diet, with their lifestyle,
with what's going on in their families and so on
and realizing that that's not only the right thing to do
but it's also cost effective as well.
- Think there's less or more stigma when it comes to
talking about creating awareness around mental health
and love and connection compared to, for example,
getting people to ditch animal products?
Both there are obviously stigmatized.
Yeah, from your experience, what's been harder to promote?
- Well, it's hard to understand why someone would have
a resistance to teaching people how to love more
and to be more compassionate and altruistic and forgiving.
These are spiritual truths that are found
in all cultures and all religions
and all pathways because they work.
The one emotion that's been most constantly
and consistently linked with heart disease
and so many other chronic diseases is chronic anger.
If I'm angry with somebody,
it hurts me as much as it hurts you.
If I point my finger at you,
there's three fingers pointing back at me.
And so, the most selfless thing we can do
is to learn to be more compassionate
and loving and altruistic and forgiving.
When you forgive somebody, it doesn't condone
or excuse what they've done but it frees you
from the suffering that goes along with that.
- Last question.
Are things happening, are things changing fast enough?
- Well, I've been doing this work for 40 years
but I think we're hitting a point now where
these changes are happening exponentially
because on the one hand, the limitations
of conventional approaches are becoming clear.
At the same time, the power of these lifestyle changes
is also becoming more well documented.
Things are changing in the United States.
It took 16 years but Medicare created a new benefit category
to cover my program for reversing heart disease.
And most of the major US insurance companies
are doing the same thing.
And they're finding that it's actually cutting their cost
in half in the first year by 50%.
Now, the National Health Service is reaching a crisis point
and that's happening in the US as well.
Simply paying more drugs, more surgery
isn't really reducing costs.
It's only increasing them.
In my new book which is called Undo It!,
I review all of these studies and say why is it
that the same lifestyle choices can reverse
and prevent so many different chronic diseases?
And the theory that I put forth here,
which I think is true is that you was trained,
like all doctors, to view heart disease and diabetes,
and prostate cancer and high blood pressure
and high cholesterol as different diseases,
different diagnosis, different treatments.
But to me, I'm realizing that
they're really the same disease,
manifesting and masquerading in different forms
because they all share the same
underlying biological mechanisms,
which in turn are directly influenced
by these lifestyle choices we make each day.
And that's why it's not like there's one set
of diet and lifestyle recommendation for treating
or for preventing or reversing heart disease,
a different one for diabetes and so on.
It's the same one that we found that can help prevent
and reverse all these conditions.
That's why you often see that the same person
will have multiple what are called chromo divinities.
They'll have heart disease and high blood pressure,
high cholesterol, diabetes, be overweight and so on
because they're really the same condition
coming out in different ways.
(swooping)
(crash)
(piano music)
- Heart disease has become a global epidemic.
It's the number one causes of death on this planet.
Have you or a friend or family member had a heart attack?
Chances are you know somebody who has.
A heart attack occurs every 40 seconds in the US alone
but the good news is there is a growing
and overwhelming body of evidence now.
Your choices can be absolutely critical
to preventing and even to revering heart disease.
So what's the number one factor you need to focus on
if you want to help heal and prevent cardiovascular disease?
It is the food on your plate.
My name is Ocean Robbins.
Each year, my dad and colleague John Robbins and I
host the Food Revolution Summit.
You may have heard of his work.
He's the two million copy best selling author
of Diet for a New American and a lot of other books as well.
In the Food Revolution Summit,
he interviews 24 of the top food experts on the planet.
During this free online global event,
you'll get access to some of the most brilliant,
revolutionary experts and ideas about food and health.
You will leave the Food Revolution Summit
with trustworthy, actionable, empowering information
that you can use right away.
So enter your name and email right
on this page to join in the free summit
and to get your heart healthy super foods handbook.
The truth is you were meant to thrive.
So grab the tools you need to put
this life changing wisdom into action.
Enter your name and email and I will see you in the summit.
(bright music)