Doctor Neil Bernard is back to talk about menopause and healthy diet

Wendy Valentine: Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the midlife Makeover show. I am so excited because we have a special guest joining us today, someone you all loved the last time he was on the show. That’s right. Back by popular demand, we have the incredible, Doctor Neil Bernard with us. Doctor Bernard is an adjunct professor of medicine at the George Washington University School of Medicine and the president of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. You might remember him from episode 201 was a very popular episode where we dived into his amazing book, the Power Foods Diet. It was such a fantastic conversation that I just had to bring him back for more this time around, Doctor Bernard is here to talk about his latest book, your body in balance, the new science of food, hormones and health. We’ll be focusing on some super important topics that every single woman should know about tackling menopause and a healthy diet. His recent research has shown that simple diet changes can dramatically reduce symptoms of menopause. And I can’t wait for him to share this life changing information with you.

Neil Bernard: Eating the foods that love you back is key to weight loss

So let’s dive in and give a warm welcome to doctor Neil Bernard.

Dr. Barnard: Ta da. It’s great to see you today.

Wendy Valentine: Good to see you. And I’m so glad to have you back.

Dr. Barnard: Glad to be back.

Wendy Valentine: Yeah. And the last time, I forgot to mention Shauna. Shauna Hayes. She was such a great guest as well. She lost, I was like 100 pounds. And I saw her recently on instagram. She’s killing it. She looks amazing.

Dr. Barnard: Yeah. Yeah. She’s putting the power foods to work. And it’s, it’s wonderful to see because, you know, she gets there. Not calorie counting, not carbo avoiding, not portion limiting, but it’s eating the foods that love you back. So anyway, that was.

Wendy Valentine: Yes, I love that you said that. Yeah, that was actually, the introductory clip in that episode was you saying that. And it’s so true. Like, the foods that love you. And speaking of menopause. And she even mentioned some of her symptoms just gradually went away. whether they were menopause related or not or perimenopause related. But she just felt better because she was eating better. Amazing how that works.

Dr. Barnard: Yes. Yeah, it. Yes, exactly. But, but I have to say, it’s not necessarily automatic. Like, a lot of people will try to eat better and they still got symptoms. And so the question is, what is eating? Right? What should it really be? How is this going to affect my body so that I actually am not just a little bit better, but I want to be a lot better? so we found some answers, some things that really do work for people. Luckily.

Wendy Valentine: Yeah. And I, had shared with you earlier, I was so excited to talk about menopause, which is funny because I’ve made a few comments on the show.

Dr. Barnard: I was like, oh, we got to.

Talk about menopause again, because it’s the hot topic right now

Wendy Valentine: Talk about menopause again, because it’s the hot, no pun intended topic right now. which is interesting because I even read in your book about how menopause, instead of it just being a natural phase of life, it has become as if it’s a diagnosis. So talk about that a little bit.

Dr. Barnard: It is a natural phase of life. It should not be a diagnosis. But, I gotta tell you that there’s, every pharmaceutical giant out there is looking for something to turn into a diagnosis and things they can sell you. that’s maybe number one. And, and also, I also have to say, kind of in fairness, that for many people, I mean, it feels like something is totally wrong. all of a sudden, out of the blue, life goes through some pretty big changes for people. you’re sitting in the board of directors meeting, well composed, looking great, giving your presentation or whatever it is, and suddenly the room becomes 200 degrees, and everything else goes crazy, too. Your mood is strange. All these things happen. and maybe a couple of things should be said. First of all, bottom line is we do have a solution that is as good as hormone replacement therapy. Totally non drug, entirely done by food choices. And when we were doing the research on this, it blew us away how effective it is. So that’s the thing to say. But here’s what menopause is not. Menopause is not a disease. Menopause is not what some people said. Well, it’s kind of the end of life. A century ago, people just didn’t live much after 50. So you kind of lived past your sell by date, and you should expect everything to go wrong. And that is complete nonsense. there have always been people who have lived into their eighties, nineties and beyond. And 50 is a time when Mother Nature said, you don’t need a toddler on your kitchen floor. Now, that’s true. You got a whole lot of other limit to do. That’s true. End of life nonsense. It is not that. And so people have been pushing that view for a long time. Yes, but also, you know, wendy, when you look at different countries, totally different experience, you go to Japan. Prior to McDonald’s showing up in Japan, back 1960s, 1970s, maybe around 1980. they hadn’t really westernized so much. What was the japanese diethyde people were eating more rice, more vegetables, a little meat, but not huge. Some fish, not enormous, basically no dairy. And hot flashes. About 15% of women had hot flashes. The other 85% said, what are you talking about? And the 15% who had them, pretty mild. Not m really too serious. and we saw the same thing in other countries. studies in China, studies in the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico. What do they have in common? Mostly plant based diethyde.

Wendy Valentine: Yeah.

Dr. Barnard: then fast food showed up in Tokyo, in Osaka, all over the place. And dairy entered the diet. And m meat went up, fish went up, rice went down. soybeans are still there to a degree, but kind of been replaced to an extent by meat and hot flashes by about, I think, early two thousands or thereabouts were up from 15% to, over 40%. breast cancer, much more common. Heart disease, obesity, depression, much more common. And they follow the diet. So anyway, those are things that first caught our attention and started.

Wendy Valentine: Yeah, I thought that was fascinating about the study of the women in Japan, and which reminded me of the documentary how to live to 100, the study of the blue zones. And at the very end he mentioned, okay, because I think it was Okinawa, I think was one of the blue zones. And now it’s decreased towards, the end because of some of the McDonald’s and the meats and all of those convenient foods that people will start to eat, and then their health declines, which is really interesting. Yeah.

What is menopause? Menopause means your ovaries stop releasing eggs

So, yeah, menopause, there’s so much to unpack with menopause. Well, let’s just say that I’m going to ask a really basic question. What is menopause?

Dr. Barnard: Menopause means that m your ovaries are no longer releasing eggs. M and when they stop, some hormonal changes happen. Your estradiol level goes way down, your progesterone level goes way down, and the symptoms all kick in. now I have to say, scientists are still trying to unravel. Why is it that when you get this hormonal change, that somehow a radiator goes off in your skin?

Wendy Valentine: that’s crazy. So bad.

Dr. Barnard: Well, it does happen. what’s happening when you have a hot flash, what’s happening is the little blood vessels in your skin dilate. That’s called, vasodilation. Your blood vessels open up. It’s just like opening up a radiator. So the cord heat comes to the surface.

Dr. Barnard: And it happens really quickly. And so many other symptoms happen as well. so anyhow, our research team started to try to understand this. And we looked at dietary patterns, and then we ended up putting to the test.

Wendy Valentine: And the night sweats can be just as bad, sometimes even worse, than just your daily hot flashes. And for me, I mean, I’ll just share, which I’ve shared before on the show. I already had autoimmune disease going on. I had Lyme disease, black mold toxicity, and then going through some major life changes as well. And then I get hit with menopause. And menopause, I mean, you name the symptom. I had it, like, the mood changes, the night sweats, the hot flashes, the. I mean, all of it times 100. So I was definitely a hot mess. No pun intended, or maybe pun intended, but I was looking for solutions, and, I mean, and I actually ate fairly well. I mean, I had a plant based diet. I exercise, and even still doing all those things, I still struggled a bit. But now, like, looking back, it’s still passed. I felt like it reached its peak, and then it. And. And I think if I had known, like, that it even was like, oh, this is perimenopause, or this is menopause. Okay, all right, let me see how I can manage this a little bit better. Instead of, like, I was just freaking out because there weren’t. I don’t feel like back. Back then, it wasn’t that long ago, but there weren’t the solutions. People weren’t talking about it as much as they are now, especially in the last five years, I feel like. But even just reading your book, oh, my. I wish I’d had either one of your books, because I would have even changed a good diet to make it even better to relieve some of my symptoms, because I know, like, even the soy, like, I should have been. And that was during, I don’t know if you remember, years ago when they were like, no, soy. Soy’s bad for you. I’m like, oh, my God, soy’s bad now. You don’t know what to believe, right? So, yeah, just making so, like, those few changes can really make a difference.

Dr. Barnard: That was really, unfortunate, the whole, idea that soy could hurt you. I know. And you can kind of understand why that myth arose back. Oh. Some decades ago, researchers did discover that soybeans contain what are called isoflavones, the technical name for them. They’re genistein and dayzine and glycyteine. These isoflavones are in the soy products, and they do attach to estrogen receptors on cells. So researchers freaked out, and they thought, wait a minute. Estrogens, estradiol in your body will attach to estrogen receptors, and m if you got too much of that, that can drive breast cancer. So the idea was, well, if soy attaches to estrogen receptors, then that could maybe cause, breast cancer, too. Or if you’ve had cancer already, it’ll cause it to progress. That was the idea. However, researchers studied that in more detail as the years went by. And what they found, to everybody’s relief, was it was exactly the opposite. We have, oh, by now, probably a dozen studies or more, women consuming the most soy, whether it’s soy milk or tofu or you name it, women consuming the most soyez have about 30% less risk of developing breast cancer compared to women who avoid soy.

Wendy Valentine: Interesting.

Dr. Barnard: Soybeans don’t cause cancer. They clearly reduce, and they’re not just neutral, they reduce breast cancer risk. And we have at least five big studies of, more than 11,000 women previously diagnosed with breast cancer. If they have a high soy intake after diagnosis, their mortality goes down by that, maybe 25%. You’re saving lives. So I, you don’t have to have soy. It’s totally optional. We’re not necessarily promoting it, but.

Dr. Barnard: It doesn’t cause cancer. It reduces the risk of getting it. It reduces the risk of dying of cancer. And by the way, for men, it’s also good. It reduces the risk of prostate cancer. It does not cause man b****.

Wendy Valentine: unless you want them.

Dr. Barnard: Well, yeah, anyway.

Wendy Barnett says soybeans can help control estrogen and other hormones

But, Wendy, let me tell you kind of the story of what got us on this. I wrote this book. This is the book you’re talking about, the.

Wendy Valentine: Oh, nice.

Dr. Barnard: I love the COVID Oh, they did a nice job. Very, just simple. Yeah. And the reason, I gotta tell you, Wendy, the reason I wrote this is I got all excited about the fact that we could control our hormones 20 some years ago. I was helping a young woman who had really bad cramps, menstrual cramps. At the time, researchers had discovered that we could change estrogen’s roller coaster. we could reduce the peaks, in estrogen by adding fiber to the diet and reducing dietary fat. And I did a randomized controlled trial with the department of ob Gyn at Georgetown University, and we found this diet change really works. Anyway, I described that, I described our work to control insulin, which is another hormone, and the fact that we could get diabetes to improve and sometimes go away, that was funded by the NIH and published by the American Diabetes association, really changed how people view diabetes. It’s a reversible condition for many people. Not everybody, but many people. Anyhow. So I started looking into menopause. What is menopause? It’s a huge hormonal shift. And I laid out the data that you and I just talked about in Japan. In, Well, take Japan. you have a country that’s eating lots of grains, not that much animal products, plus soy, and doing well. And after they westernize, they’re doing worse. We looked at China, we looked at other asian countries, but also Mexico. And the reason that I was interested in Mexico, is they eat beans, but they don’t eat soybeans.

Wendy Valentine: Yes. Yeah.

Dr. Barnard: Black. In the yucatan peninsula, like around cancun, and to the west, there’s a little city, called valladolid, and, which is sort of a tourist area. And researchers interviewed mayan women who were eating lots of black beans, and they eat grains, but it was not rice, it was corn, was their grain. Tortillas and so forth. And they ate a lot of vegetables that us gringos never heard of, like lechaya and others. And they interviewed more than 110 mayan women. None of them had any menopausal symptoms whatsoever. Interesting period. Stopped. That was it. Peel. Fine. No hot flash. Yeah. anyhow, wendy, here’s what I did. in the menopause chapter, I wrote all about these findings, and I got a call. A woman named Betty called me up. She said, doctor Barnett, I read your book. I did what you said, and my hot flashes were gone within five days. And I said, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I thought this would be helpful, but I didn’t think your hot flashes would be gone in five days. Please. That sounds like a better response than I was guessing you’d have. Tell me what you did. Take out my piece of paper, take my pen. And she says, well, you said it’s better to eat plants. So I went totally vegan. No animal products at all, 100%. So check writing this down. Vegan. And, she said, and you said that eating fried foods and all this stuff is bad. So I stopped eating or added oils, and I kept the oils really low. Okay, great. Low fat. third, she said I ate soybeans. I said, what kind of soybeans? Well, whole soybeans. Not like tofu or soy milk. I mean, that’s okay. But she, bought what we call mature soybeans.

Wendy Valentine: Yes.

Dr. Barnard: This is not edamame. Edamame is like baby soybeans. In the pod. The mature soybeans are the ones that are more grown up. And the reason I’m saying that is that they have more isoflavones, they’ve got more genisteine and dezine in them compared to the baby ones. So I said well where did you get these soybeans? Well I bought them on Amazon. Well what brand was it? Laura brand, non gmo soybeans. and I said how much did you have? Half a cup every day cooked soybeans. And you were cured in five days? Yeah, my hot flash is totally gone. Okay, thank you very much. Goodbye.

Wendy Valentine: Wow.

Dr. Barnard: Yeah, Wendy, I gotta tell you, I ran down the hall, to Hanna Kaliovasov, doctor Kaliovas is an endocrinologist and she has our research studies. I said Hannah, we have to do a test. we’ve got to do a randomized clinical trial of the Betty diet. and we did this, we did this. We brought in 84 women. Everybody had hot flashes. On average they had about five hot flashes a day, some more, and also at night. we asked them to do exactly what Betty said and it was randomized. We had a control group with no treatment but the treatment group. No animal products at all.

Zero vegan diet. 50% of participants had zero hot flashes after 12 weeks

Zero vegan diet. This is not sort of toward it, this is not entering it.

Wendy Valentine: Yes, totally vegan, no animal products.

Dr. Barnard: Number two, keep oils really low. Now here’s what I mean. I don’t mean sort of, not too much oil. Whatever we said for twelve weeks we’re going to do this. We’re not going to have fried junk. We’re going to learn how to use a nonstick pan or saute in wine or vegetable broth, whatever it is. we’re not going to have nutty nuts and avocado toast. Just live with it for twelve weeks. We’re going to try this. And step three, oh, I forgot to say, Betty said that she got an instapot instant pot.

Wendy Valentine: Yeah, a pressure.

Dr. Barnard: And so I call, I called up the head of instant pot and I said I’m doing a research study, could you send me some instant pots? And nicest guy in the world. They all started arriving. He just gave us the instant pots, which we gave to our participants. Okay, so give them a little plug.

Wendy Valentine: I mean, yeah, they deserve it after all those instant pots.

Dr. Barnard: Yeah, we don’t take any commercial sponsorship any time, any kind. But they were nice. So everybody got Laura brand soybeans, everybody got instant pots and all this stuff. And we met on Zoom just like this once a week to show them how to do the diet and, and to work through problems, you know, you’ll have a problem, like, my family’s going to Orlando and, you know, I want to eat ice cream and how do I not do that for twelve weeks? Or I’ve got a craving for cheese, you know, how do I just not do that? And in a nutshell, we’ve done many of these studies for other things, for diabetes and cholesterol and weight, and we’ve worked with thousands of people. And going vegan is really quite easy. Surprisingly, people take, I mean, it’s, what are you doing? Instead of spaghetti with meat sauce, you have spaghetti marinara, you go to Taco bell. You’re not having the meat taco, you have the bean burrito, hold the cheese. Like easy. Go to subway. I mean, they start.

Wendy Valentine: Yeah, it’s really not bad. I did vegan, this past summer and ended up ordering from purple carrot. Another plug there. but I learned how to cook like vegan and it was so easy. I was like, oh, this is great. But yeah, sorry, continue.

Dr. Barnard: Even people who don’t cook, I mean, there are plenty of conveniences. going low fat is harder. because it’s, it’s easy if you prepare the foods, but when you go to a restaurant, the restaurateur is in love with their bottle of olive oil that they want to drench your salad in it. So, so that’s an issue. But I got to tell you something, wendy. after twelve weeks, moderate to severe hot flashes had reduced by 88%. That’s almost 90%. That is as good as hormone replacement therapy. 50% of our people had zero hot flashes. Gone. Cured. Thank you, goodbye.

Wendy Valentine: This was as, simple as that. And think it’s so simple and so affordable. I’ve thought about that. Like with hrTs, like, that can be pretty expensive.

Dr. Barnard: Well, it’s worse than that. I mean, the side effects you hear about are real. Anyway, this is one of two papers that was published by the North American Menopause Society. Thank you very much. In the journal menopause. It’s real. when we do these things, I don’t just write books. We are primarily clinical researchers who put things to the test. We don’t take any food industry funding. what we’re doing here is just the best science we know how to do. And then when we find stuff, that’s when we write books and things like that to let people know what works and what doesn’t work. So, bottom line, all three of those steps matter. And I don’t want viewers to think that well, if I just sort of do m a better diet and I eat right, I’m going to get better. You’re probably not, you’re probably not going to get better. And think of it this way, lets say you had a urinary tract infection and God forbid, but this happens, you go to the doctor, the doctor starts you on antibiotics. It says, I need you to take these antibiotics three times a day. And you say, well, thats not really where im at. id like to take it only every three or four days. And the doctor says, well, youre not going to get cured. Well, how about if I take it every day but maybe one pill? I want to cure you and to cure you. There’s a certain regimen that we know works and it’s take the antibiotic a few times a day. We could cure hot flashes for the vast majority of people, to a very, very substantial degree. But if a person says, well, I don’t really want to do it vegan because I love cheese so much, or da da da da, it’s unlikely to be very effective. So what I suggest people do, the people listening to this are probably going to say, well, I’m not sure if I really want to be a vegan forever. I don’t know, do I really want to do this? Here’s what I say. Take my hand, let’s jump into the deep end together. Let’s really do this. And once you feel great and you’re cured, if you decide, give me three months or so. If you decide you didn’t like feeling good, you want to go back to other foods or whatever, or maybe it didn’t work for you, whatever, you can decide. But see what it’s like to feel good because dealing with hot flashes is no joke. of course. But also, the women in this study didn’t just have their hot flashes go away for the most part. I mean, it wasn’t 100%, it was 88%. But that’s great.

Wendy Valentine: It’s huge.

Dr. Barnard: Well, it’s huge. They also lost a substantial amount of weight in this.

Vegan, low fat plus soy diet is perfect for treating hot flashes

The bonus, which was welcome, if you’re already skinny, you’re not going to lose more. But m many women had weight they wanted to lose that. It came off eat effortlessly. Because you and I talked about that in our other episode, why that works. Cholesterol levels fall. they feel better. And now is the time when a woman is 50, 55, 60, this is the time when she’s starting to think about, my doctor’s a little worried about my heart health.

Wendy Valentine: Yes.

Dr. Barnard: Or I’m a little bit worried about will I develop breast cancer? Or maybe you’ve already got a diagnosis like this, or we’re starting to think, am I going to be like my mom?

Dr. Barnard: Who developed Alzheimer’s disease? Could that happen to me? The diet that I just described, vegan, low fat plus soy, is not only the diet for treating on flashes. It is the perfect diet for minimizing breast cancer risk, for protecting your heart, for minimizing the risk of Alzheimer’s disease. I don’t mean to say that anything is perfect. Let’s face it, our body is not necessarily perfectly designed. Things go wrong with our body just like they go wrong with our cardinal no matter what you do. But this is the diet that gets you in the best possible shape for all those things plus what you discover for the first week. Well, actually, can I just share with you, Wendy, how we introduce this diet to people?

Wendy Valentine: Yes, please.

Dr. Barnard: Okay, here’s what we do. You come in and you’re going to be, you know, a person’s going to be skeptical, say the hot flashes are killing me. I don’t know if I want to really change my diet, but I. What do I do? What we say is take you say in our clinic here, Barnard Medical center, which by the way, we do telemedicine everywhere. Oh, nice. Okay. Yeah. Oh yeah. That’s the residue of the, pandemic we started. We’re here.

Wendy Valentine: Good residue.

Dr. Barnard: Yeah. We still see most of our patients in person, but Barnard medical Center is on the Internet and we do telemedicine both with our physicians. But also people could see a dietitian and they all know what they’re doing. They’re all really good. more or less anywhere. Okay. But anyhow, somebody comes in, they say, I want to not have hot flashes. What I would say, let’s take four weeks. our study was twelve weeks, but let’s just take a four week adjustment. Week one, don’t take anything out of your diet. You eat whatever you want. But what we’re going to do during week one is figure out plant based foods that you like. You can make a list. So a, patient might say to, us, I don’t do anything fancy for breakfast. I just put cornflakes in a bowl and I throw in some milk. I mean, that’s like, that’s like it. That’s what I got time for. Fine. That’s where you are. If you top it with almond milk or rice milk or soy milk or oat milk, that’s vegan. Okay, so if you like it, write it down. but I like hot cereal too. I’ll have oatmeal, and I could top it with some berries, strawberries, blueberries, a little cinnamon. Okay, good. Right? If you like that, write it down. Lunchtime. I go to taco Bell. Well, not the pinnacle of culinary art, but, skip the meat taco. Have the bean burrito, hold the cheese. That’s vegan. If you want to put it on jalapenos, you can. All right. If you like it, write it down. if you’re having a meat chili, could you have a bean chili? I don’t know. Give me a recipe. You got one week. Try it. If you like it, write it down. a week goes by. Everybody has a huge long list of stuff they like, including what they would eat at their favorite restaurant. The italian restaurant where I’ve always been having angel hair pasta with a meat sauce. They’ve got an arrabiata sauce, which they explained is the italian word for angry. Well, arrabiata means spicy. into a chef. So I had that with grilled vegetables, and I sell it in espresso and a glass of red wine and I feel great. Okay, fine. So after a week, people had a ton of choices. So that was week one, week two, three and four. Eat those foods. That’s it? Yes, that’s it. During week two, three and four, no animal products keep oils really low, but eat the foods you already know work for you. But we also keep in touch with people every week during that time because they’ll have a question. what, do I do if I’m traveling or, you know, what if my husband doesn’t want to do this? Or, you know, there’s always little issues, but that you could solve them all. And by the way, you should take b twelve, a vitamin b twelve supplement. It’s in every multiple vitamin you took. So.

Wendy Valentine: I saw that in the book.

For some people, their hot flashes are gone in week one

Yeah.

Dr. Barnard: Yeah, do take b twelve. I mean, that’s good advice for everybody. I don’t care who you are, but it’s important. Okay. So then, after weeks two, three and four go by, a person discovers something. They say, I haven’t been exercising differently, I haven’t been limiting my portions, but I’m losing a little bit of weight. Well, how much did you lose? Not much. Like two, three pounds. Okay, that’s good. do you want to stick with it? Yeah, yeah. I’m feeling better. And not everybody gets. Some people do get better. For some people, their hot flashes are gone in week one. that’s not most people. I think for most people it’s around week four, five, six, where the hot flashes, you see this big drop in them. And by week twelve, that’s where we saw 88% were gone. M and when people don’t have that result, what we always like to do is look at what they’ve been eating. And what we usually find is one of those three pieces was gone. Either some animal products sneaked in, oh, what’s that doing in my fridge? Or they couldn’t keep it low fat. They did some oily stuff. oil changes hormonal concentrations in the blood, or the soybeans dropped out or something like that. And so you just put it back on and off you go. So that’s the deal. it works really, really well. And after about week six, week seven, week eight, people start to realize it’s getting really so easy. And eventually everybody’s different. But for many, many people, they decide, I never want to go back. Now, some people do say, well, I’ll do this, but I’m going to add cheese. May smell like old socks, but I just miss it so much. People do that and then of course, their symptoms come back very often. but people could do however they want to do it.

Some people might be concerned about not getting enough protein in a vegan diet

Wendy Valentine: Question for you, because some people might be concerned about this not getting enough protein in a vegan diet. So how can you get that protein in a vegan diet?

Dr. Barnard: For some reason that has lived on in the same category as soybeans are dangerous that you won’t get protein. first I suggest that a person find their car keys, get into their car, go into the nearest rural area and look over the fence at, the cows and the bulls and the horses that are there, and look at them when they’re up close. Ah, look at their rippling muscles, look at those huge muscular thighs, and then ask yourself, where did they get their protein? They’re all vegan, right?

Wendy Valentine: Exactly. I know as they’re sitting there chewing the grass.

Dr. Barnard: Yeah, no, I’m not suggesting you eat grass, but back in the 1950s, we had this mistaken idea that plant proteins were inferior.

Wendy Valentine: isn’t that crazy?

Dr. Barnard: a protein molecule, Is made of amino acids. Those are the building blocks of protein. And there are 20 of them and nine of them are essential. Meaning you can’t make them, you need them with food.

Dr. Barnard: We used to think that plants were deficient. In fact, you’ll still see this online then. Plants are deficient. In one or more amino acids, and you’ve got to carefully combine plants to get adequate amino acid. That was wrong when people started writing it, and it’s wrong today. Let me say this definitively. All plants have all the amino acids. Wow. Yes. Yes, you heard that right. All plants have all the amino acids. Now, it’s still good to eat a varied diet. You want beans and grains and vegetables and fruits because they all have nutrients to provide. But protein deficiency is not going to be a problem. it’s the problem you’re going to have is if you can’t get over that, then you’re eating animal protein. And animal protein is associated with higher mortality than plant protein. This comes from a really great study at Harvard in 2016. They looked at what if I substitute instead of the animal protein we grew up with? Chicken.

Dr. Barnard: If I substitute plant protein, then they looked at more than 100,000 research volunteers. They found that your mortality in any given time period was significantly dropped. If you substituted any animal protein, took it out and replaced it with plant protein. What I mean is, protein from a cow, beef from a chicken, from fish, from dairy, from eggs, in every single case is associated with higher mortality, higher risk of dying at, ah, any given time point compared to protein from plants. Partly that’s because plants don’t have cholesterol. They have, they’re really vitamin rich, they’ve got fiber, which animal products don’t. But even controlling for all those things, animal protein is inferior. It’s associated with higher mortality. now you might say, well, how can it be? Because animal protein is just like my protein. I’m eating the muscle of a chicken. It’s going to go into my muscle. It’s got to be the same. Here’s what we think is going on in the same way as we learned back in the 1960s and seventies, that a little iron is good for making red blood cells. But if you have too much iron beyond your need, it becomes toxic. It creates free radicals that can hurt you and kill you. A little iron, good, too much iron, bad. A little protein, good, too much protein, bad. What I mean is the amino acids that are in animal products unfortunately favor certain ones that appear to be toxic and overdose. That’s what we’re thinking, and I’m speaking a little bit informally, but methionine and lysine are ones that where in animal products you tend to get too much. And we think that’s a big problem. And so our ancestors, we’re not cats and dogs, our ancestors are great apes and our cousins now are gorillas and chimpanzees and orangutans and, and their bodies, like our body, is designed to take the amino acids in plants, rearrange them into the amino acids our bodies need, and that’s what is best for our survival.

Wendy Valentine: Fascinating. I learned so much. It’s a short period of time. But you know what I was thinking with, getting protein from a vegan diet, even like tofu. I looked on the package of tofu and I was like, I had no idea it had that much protein. If someone is like so concerned that they’re not going to get any protein, there’s plenty of protein in a vegan diet.

Dr. Barnard: Yes. tofu is very rich in it. All soy products are rich in it. And soy is a bean. All the other beans are really rich in it too, as our grains. But let me suggest what if, let’s say you eat 2000 calories a day, you’re an active woman and you’re exercising a lot. You need about 2000 calories or something like that. let’s say you ate broccoli.

Dr. Barnard: You know, it’s got vitamins in it, it’s got fiber. Does it have protein? Not that you would do this, but if you did as an experiment, if tomorrow you ate nothing but broccoli, that’s all you ate all day, and you ate your normal 2000 calorie diet, you know how much protein you would get? The government wants you to get 46 grams of protein per day. As a woman, that’s their number. For a man, about 56. But if you ate nothing but broccoli all day long, you wouldn’t get 46 grams of protein.

Dr. Barnard: You would get 146 grams of protein from broccoli.

Wendy Valentine: Wow, really?

Dr. Barnard: And the next day do it with lentils. Have nothing but lentils all day. You get 157 grams of protein from lentils. There’s a huge amount of protein in plants. Now if you want to go crazy, just go down to the nearest drugstore and they’ve got the little protein aisle and they’ve got products like vega and others that are entirely plant protein. They’re typically derived from pea protein and they are sold to either for people who have, for whatever reason, some kind of physical problem where they’re just not able to eat normal amounts of food. And so you go back to gramps and you make a little smoothie for him and you give him a little extra shot of protein. Or they have ensure which there’s a vegan ensure. You don’t need those things, but they’re there. So if you’re nervous about it, you could get as much protein as you ever want. But vegetables, fruits, whole grains and beans, take your vitamin B. Twelve. That’s a powerful regimen.

Having a vegan diet and adding a few supplements can improve sexual function

If you’re not getting sun, take vitamin D. Vitamin D should come from the sun. If it doesn’t take a supplement. 2000 ius a day is a normal good amount. do you need omega three? S very controversial. Some people take them, some don’t. You could test your omega three level really easily with a company like omega Quant or others. They’ll sell a little test kit, put a little drop of blood, then you’ll know if you want to supplement that. But just the basic thing, get the animal products off your plate. Your life is going to change.

Wendy Valentine: You took the word out of my mouth, basic. I was just thinking it’s like really going back to the basics. It’s not rocket science, you know, but I think that’s like with, with all the talk about menopause and all these things, like all these different solutions and the HRT, it’s so complicated, but it really doesn’t need to be. And just with what you said, having a nice vegan diet and adding a few supplements if you need to, and the soy. It’s interesting though, I was thinking back at that time when I was going through like that peak of menopause for me, I did, because I used to drink soy milk, I did all this and then I gave that up because of all those studies that came out coincidentally, all the symptoms came back very right.

Dr. Barnard: And there really were, good scientific studies suggesting the soy caused cancer. No, it was, it was more of a, a mythology that arose and the scientific studies really just proved it. I have to say, by the way, it wasn’t just the vasomotor symptoms that got better. we use a questionnaire called menqual, which is looking at the quality of life in four different domains. We look at vasomotor symptoms, which is hot flashes. We, looked at psychological symptoms, how people just felt depression, for example, or anxiety or stress. we looked at physical symptoms like headaches. And we also looked at sexual symptoms and we found that all of them got better. And I have to say I wasn’t surprised by most of that because we’ve seen that before with plant based diets. partly because a plant based diet is anti inflammatory and inflammatory compounds that arise in the body, appear to affect brain function and aggravate depression. At least that’s our theory. But the sexual symptoms, surprised me. I didn’t expect to see a benefit there, but we did see quite a significant, we did see a significant benefit. That said, I can’t imagine that even the dietary suggestions that.

Dr. Barnard: We’ve tested, I don’t believe this is going to make people, be able to be sexually active forever and ever and ever with no changes. I think there will be changes if a woman decides to take hormones for that. My only suggestion is not to use pills or patches because that’s flooding your bloodstream with it. If you need a little local cream for it, for that purpose alone, that’s the one that’s not associated with breast cancer risk. So there you are.

Wendy Valentine: Ah, there was a documentary, you are what you eat. They had the study of the twins, and it was fascinating that the twins that had the vegan diet, as far as their sexual, function improved and like off the charts. It was crazy. It was like, okay, so the conclusion is a vegan diet’s the way to go, like with it is, right. It just seems like there’s so many studies that are pointing back to like, okay, yes, eating a vegan diet is better for the human body.

Dr. Barnard: I think it’s the diet we’re designed for. We’re clearly not designed for dairy. dairy products were Mother nature’s idea was that the cow breastfeeds the little calf and that humans breastfeed their babies. But after a year or 18 months.

Wendy Valentine: Or whatever, we start drinking the cow’s milk.

Dr. Barnard: and that’s something we’ve gotten used to culturally. But there are estrogens in cow’s milk that are associated with breast cancer. This was a huge controversy, wendy, because when you look at many past studies, you couldn’t really detect a relationship between dairy and breast cancer. But there were two studies that did. Something other studies hadn’t done, is they looked at a wider range. one of them was in Adventists. 7th day adventists get put under the microscope when you’re looking for people who have this wide range from zero dairy to huge dairy. and the adventist health study too showed very clearly that there was a link between dairy and breast cancer risk, which they said was probably because of the estradiol that comes out of the cow’s body. But after that was published, the China Caduri Biobank study, they looked at chinese women, many of whom never westernized their diet, and so they’re not consuming dairy, and some of whom have. And they showed that you could, if you had about a cup of milk per day. That increased the risk of breast cancer about 68%, in that group. So, we take it seriously, and it’s probably because of the hormones that the cow makes, and you’re unwittingly drinking and feeding to our children and wondering why our children are having hormone related issues.

Wendy Valentine: Exactly. Yeah. So good.

A vegan diet is a great way to stay healthy into your midlife

I’ll have to say that one of the reasons I love living in Portugal, at least more than half of the year, is, like, they grow a lot of their own fruits and veggies on this island on Madera, and they’re so good because they’re not genetically modified. They’re. They don’t have pesticides. And I have fallen in love with eating more veggies since I’ve been here. And then even the last time when I went back to the states, I was like, oh, my gosh, I’m just gonna stick with my fruits and veggies because it’s so good. Like, it’s. It’s so easy when you go back to the states to fall back into that american diet. I’m like, because I feel so good. I feel. I feel so much better when I’m. When I’m on a vegan diet. And it’s really. It’s just a lifestyle.

Dr. Barnard: Yeah, it’s, It’s sort of like when a person quits smoking. At first it’s challenging, and, you know, you kind of have to get used to it. But after about three, four weeks, you think, I’m glad. I don’t want to go. I don’t want to. I don’t want to bring that back into my life. And that’s what people discover. And for me, I grew up in North Dakota. I come from a cattle ranching family, and it was a change for me, but it was, an easy change, and I will never look back. It’s a way to stay slim. It’s a way to stay energetic. It’s a way to stay as youthful as nature will allow you to.

Wendy Valentine: Yeah. And it’s a way to take care of your. Your 90 year old self. And, like, your 90 year old self will thank you. Because it’s easier, as you know, to prevent than to repair, to be proactive, than reactive. And it’s like, why not? Like, that’s why I think it’s so great about midlife. We. Yes, there’s a lot of things to learn, and there’s a lot of things to unlearn, but it’s a great opportunity to completely change physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, to like, so that you can have a great second half of life, I think.

Dr. Barnard: Absolutely.

Wendy Valentine: Yeah.

Where can we find you and how can we get the book, most importantly

Where can we find you and how can we get the book, most importantly?

Dr. Barnard: Okay, well, Amazon or any. Well, here’s the book we’ve been talking about today. Yeah, over here, I have the one we talked about last time, which.

Wendy Valentine: Is, they’re both so good. They are really, really good. And I do want to say, though, because I’ve read both of them, and they’re, of course, as you can tell, that you’re so good at explaining everything. So even when I’m reading it, you don’t have to be a doctor to read the books. It’s very well laid out. It makes sense. You can actually read it and go, okay, I’m ready to go the store. And you know what you need to do. So I love that it’s so simple and direct.

Dr. Barnard: You’ll find them online on Amazon and target and Barnes and noble. And if there was a surviving bookstore in your neighborhood, they’ve got it, too, and they would probably love to see you before they go bankrupt. so patronize them. And let me mention one other thing. our organization here, where I am now is the physicians committee for responsible medicine. And we have a website, pcrm.org, where if you go there, go on our website, pcrm.org, and search menopause. Search hot flashes, and you’ll see a video that I made when we did the first half of the study. We did the study half in the fall, half in the spring, and with our first half, we found that hot flashes were going down so much, I think at that point, it was about 84%. so I did a video on how to do this. You’ll see it. have a look.

Wendy Valentine: I actually did see it before we started. I went on to the. Was, it pcrm.org site.

Dr. Barnard: Yeah. That’s amazing.

Wendy Valentine: Amazing website, by the way. and it’s funny because when I owned a couple of integrative medicine practices, I would get your yelp material from them, but I’m, like, very familiar with it. But amazing resources on there. Fascinating. Like, there’s. So. I mean, I could hang out there all day long. So. Yes, it’s, I love what you’re doing. I even. I saw the video that’s on the very front page, and I love everything that you. That you’re doing. It’s great.

Dr. Barnard: Well. Well, thank you. There’s lots more. Lots more to do.

Wendy Valentine: Lots more to do. Always more to do. Thank you so much. Thank you, for. For coming back again. A fabulous time.

Dr. Barnard: I wouldn’t miss it. Thank you, wendy. Thanks for all the wonderful work that you’re doing.

Wendy Valentine: Thank you, everyone. Have a great day.