E-mail a friendDr. Neal Barnard
airdate January 29, 2007
Dr. Neal Barnard is an advocate for health, nutrition and higher standards in research. He's president-founder of Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, which advocates medicine based on vegetarian diets and other positive lifestyle changes, and also president of The Cancer Project, which promotes the benefits of a healthy diet for disease prevention and survival. A psychiatrist by training, Barnard is the author of several books, including Dr. Neal Barnard's Program for Reversing Diabetes.
Dr. Neal Barnard
Tavis: A look at some of the new ideas in the treatment of diabetes tonight with Dr. Neal Barnard. He is an associate professor of medicine at George Washington University, and author of over 10 books. His latest is “Dr. Neal Barnard's Book on Reversing DiabetesTavis: Is that possible? Let’s go right to it.
Barnard: Right now, maybe so that we’re all on the same page, so what diabetes really is is there’s too much sugar in the bloodstream. It’s building up and building up, instead of going where it’s supposed to, which is into the cells of the body. Glucose is the fuel for the cells. If it’s building up in the bloodstream instead, it can damage the eyes and the heart and the kidneys and the extremities.
It’s the leading cause of blindness, it’s the leading cause of heart disease, it’s the leading cause of kidney failure. And what’s possible to reverse is that people with this condition, they find their sugars are going higher and higher and higher, they're needing more and more medicines, they're getting more and more complications. All of that can be reversed in the sense; this doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a cure.
Because people may still have diabetes. But what they have is more control than ever, and it’s hopefully not so much an intrusion on their lives. However, having said this, I don't think it can be done unless we make very strong changes to what we’ve been eating. We cannot do this with medication alone, and we cannot do this if we just continue the kinds of dietary patterns that most of us have grown up with.
Tavis: Tell me more about the combination of those two things that when conjoined, reverse the trend.
Barnard: Well, the things that we have to do ... and by the way, for full disclosure, I have to say even though I've now done research for the federal government on diabetes and written a number of books. I grew up in Fargo, North Dakota. I come from a long line of cattle ranchers. And so every day of my life, it was roast beef, baked potatoes, and corn.
Except for special occasions, when it was roast beef, baked potatoes, and peas. (Laugh) But the reason I mention that is that what I'm asking the people in our research studies to do, and what I'm asking everybody to do, is a tall order. It means change the fundamental parts of our plate. And, but it relies on a new understanding of what causes this disease.
If I could look inside your cells, we see ... inside, say, the muscle cells. These are the cells that are supposed to be taking that glucose out of the blood. There’s something inside there that doesn’t belong. What’s in there is tiny little droplets of fat. So insulin is made in the pancreas, it comes to the cell, it’s like a key. It’s supposed to open up the door to let the glucose inside.
Somebody has gummed up that lock. The cell is full of droplets of fat. What this diet does, we believe, is clean some of that fat out. It’s un-gumming that lock, if I can put it that way. So it’s getting at the cause of the diabetes. So, what kind of diet would do that? We use vegetarian diets. We take the meat out of the diet. We take the dairy out and the eggs out of the diet.
So, we also keep the oils very, very low. So a typical day, instead of the bacon and eggs that I grew up with, we’d have maybe a big bowl of oatmeal with cinnamon and raisins. For lunchtime, you might have a stew or soup, but it’d be one of the vegetarian options. Split pea or a bean soup, or something like that. For dinner, if you had a pasta dish, not gonna be the meat pasta.
It’s not gonna be the alfredo with cream and cheese. But it would be, say, a marinara or something like that. Now, people who have diabetes who are watching this program are saying, “What are you talking about? I'm not gonna eat pasta at all. That’s filled with carbohydrate, and that’ll make my blood sugar go through the roof.”
That’s exactly the issue. Diets up until now have focused on exactly the wrong thing. They’ve said, “You can’t handle sugar? Don't eat sugar. Don't eat anything that turns to sugar, like white bread or pasta or rice.” That’s catering to the disease by saying, “You can’t handle it;” just don't have it anymore. What I wanna do is zero in on the cause. I want to clean up the cell so that we can handle these foods again. So that our body is healthy again.
Tavis: I don't need to tell you, you’ve written 10 books about this. Diabetes disproportionately affects my community, the African American community. And I was listening, as you ran down your menu options. And I was thinking to myself, can you sell that to Black folk, Dr. Barnard? How do you sell (laugh) them eating oatmeal every morning, split pea soup for lunch every day, and no meat for dinner? Are you crazy?
Barnard: First of all, when people make changes, everybody has difficulties with making changes. But my job is I'm half a doctor, I'm half a coach. I say, wait a minute. What direction are we gonna go? Are we gonna go toward more and more body weight? Maybe losing our vision? Or are we gonna go to a healthier road? But the truth is, when people experience this, it’s a little bit like sticking your toe in the swimming pool.
Feels a little bit chilly, but after you're in there, you're really glad you did it. It’s like switching from whole milk to skim. At first, skim milk tastes really watery and horrible, but after about two or three weeks, people are totally adapted to it, and they don't wanna go back to whole milk anymore, 'cause if they do, it tastes like cream. Now I'm not saying that skim milk is health food.
We go another step beyond that. But I'm saying that anybody can adapt to their diet, and people really do. One of our participants was named Vance. Vance was a retired Washington, DC policeman. His grandfather died at 30. Vance was 31 when he was diagnosed with diabetes. He’d gained a lot of weight, he was on medication, and by just changing the type of food he ate, not the amount.
We didn’t say, count calories, count carbohydrates. Vance lost 60 pounds, and his doctor said, “Your blood sugar is totally normal.” His doctor said, “It’s time to stop your diabetes medicines.” And he improved just dramatically. And this is not unusual, but I cannot do it, I cannot do this if we don't make big changes in our diet. If you look at what’s happened in America, if you go back to, say, the early part of the twentieth century, people knew what beans were.
They knew what greens were. We knew about things out of our own gardens. Well, those days are gone. Nowadays, we’re eating meat two or three times a day. Fast food restaurants bring them, and we are exporting this to the rest of the world. Where staples used to be grains or beans, now the staple is meat, and that’s the center of the whole diet.
We go into a restaurant, we say, “I’ll have the steak. I’ll have the chicken.” We don't care what else it comes with. That defines the whole meal, and that is what’s causing us to have not just diabetes, but heart disease, many forms of cancer, as well.
Tavis: One of the things that we’ve discussed on this program heretofore is that when you try to do everything you can to assist specifically persons of color to eat healthier and to live healthier, one of the things that they run up against is that the neighborhoods that they live in ... you know this as well as I do. The neighborhoods they live in don't often cater to living healthy lives. The diet that’s prescribed here, what’s laid out in this book, is it going to be a difficult find for these persons in these communities of color to access?
Barnard: It can be done in different ways. There are people who do this by going to the most expensive health food shop, and they buy all sorts of processed foods, and you can spend your life savings in some of these places. Or, you can buy a sack of dried beans, and some yams and sweet potatoes and produce, and you do it much more inexpensively.
But what you're saying is real, in that some places, you don't see either of those things. You don't see dried beans and fresh produce. What you see is snack foods in a package. And that has to change. That really has to change. And I think we’re gonna have an opportunity to do that, at least my hope is that we will, later this year.
The federal government will take up the farm bill, which deals with all the subsidies and the kinds of ways we help people to eat certain kinds of things, and the way we make other things more expensive. And if Congress decides that it’s important to be healthy, then we can make it easier. And I would start with schools.
Right now, in some schools, it’s a tragedy to see what kids are putting on their plate. Because our schools are used as pawns in a game that is more economic than it is health-related. Not every school. There are some schools that are exemplary. But there are others where we really need to give kids a real good option.
Tavis: I was about to ask whether or not you think that the real message here is one that ought to be delivered to kids, because to the extent that we are losing the obesity battle with young kids, these are the people, obviously, who end up having diabetes who need this book 20 years down the road.
Barnard: One in three kids born today is gonna develop diabetes. One in three, at some point in their lifetime. Not when they're 10 or 12 in most cases, but when they're in their thirties or forties or fifties. And we cannot let this happen. If that happens, then that means we have to rely on hospitals and clinics, which is where they're gonna be spending an awful lot of time.
It shouldn’t be that way. And along with it come heart disease. Sixty-five, 75 percent of people with diabetes have heart attacks. It’s usually the fatal event. We can change this. But if I'm gonna help a kid to eat in a more healthful way, we’ve gotta work with their parents, and we’ve gotta work with the schools. Because the kids are products of their culture that’s around them.
And if we only preach to the child, but the parents are going in a different path, it doesn’t work very well. Now, I realize this is a tall order. I'm suggesting that people get to know vegetarian foods. Simple foods. Beans, vegetables, fruits and legumes. The good thing is, we’re seeing athletes saying, “That helps my performance.” We’re having people who’ve had erectile dysfunction saying, “I didn’t realize that was reversible by changing your diet and getting circulation back again.”
One of the participants in our study had arthritis. She didn’t think that would ever go away. Six months on this diet, not only did her diabetes get a lot better, her arthritis improved, too. So when people see it’s like getting your body back, I think we want that for ourselves, and we want that for our children, too.
Tavis: His name is Neal Barnard. His new book is “Dr. Neal Barnard's Book on Reversing Diabetes”
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