WASHINGTON, 1 December 2004 — Dr. Neal Barnard was working as an autopsy assistant when he examined a patient who died in hospital of a massive heart attack. He was required to inspect the heart by removing a section of ribs from the front of the chest, and found the arteries were totally clogged. Plaque had also clogged arteries leading to the brain. Bernard said the pathologist explained this was a common problem and that these blockages in the arteries began quite early in life, in the mid-20s, with heart attacks following in the next twenty years.
“At the end of this exam, I took the ribs and put them back in his chest. We sewed up his skin and washed our hands and made our notes, and then we went up to the cafeteria. They were serving ribs for lunch,” said Barnard. “It smelled and looked just like his body and I just couldn’t eat it. It was a gut-level experience. This started me down the road of thinking about how what we eat directly connects with the condition of our bodies.”
A cadaver’s ribs and ribs for lunch led Dr. Neal Barnard to now become one of the leading US physicians to advocate diet and lifestyle changes to dramatically improve a person’s health and well-being.
In the following interview, Barnard talks about how what you eat can lead to impotency, obesity, high blood pressure, cancer and diabetes — and how a vegetarian life-style can help reverse these illnesses. He also explains how certain foods act as opiates within your system.
While head of the psychiatric ward at St. Vincent’s hospital in Manhattan, New York, Barnard counseled ill and depressed patients. “I started to have concerns about these medical patients, because they got no information about nutrition. Not only in the hospital, but there had been no prior effort to prevent the heart attack until it came — full-blown — through the emergency room door. There was no effort to prevent cancer until it showed up on the mammogram, or colonoscopy, or elevated PSA levels for prostate cancer.”
Convinced this was wrong, Barnard set up the Physician’s Committee for Responsible Medicine in 1995 with a group of 20 doctors. Today, the Washington-based PCRM has a membership of 5,000 doctors who advocate a vegetarian diet for optimum health.
If some people find it hard to become vegetarians for more than physiological reasons, it is probably because they are addicted, said Barnard. “Certain foods behave like addictive substances,” Barnard said, explaining why this discovery led him to write his latest book, called “Breaking the Food Seduction,” where he examines the “drunk-like effects of foods.”
These are four things: Sugar, or anything that turns to sugar — like white bread, chocolate, cheese and meat. These are the only food groups that people resist giving up.
“From an addictive perspective — people will fight for sugar, cheese, chocolate, or meat. I’ve met men who’ve already had three attacks and still have high cholesterol level. But when his doctors tell him that he’s going to die if he doesn’t change his eating habits, the one food he will not give up is his steak, or his fried chicken. So, it makes good sense to view these as addictions.”
As for chocolate, Barnard said people have suspected it acted like a drug for a long time, “particularly toward the end of a woman’s menstrual cycle, when she’ll say she needs chocolate.”
Two-thirds of Americans are overweight, and observers say men and women develop a similar “bovine” shape. “What happens is that fat tissues produce estrogen. The reason why men are looking more like women is that overweight men have breast development — breast augmentation and their hips are wider — that’s the effect of estrogen on their bodies. And when men become impotent it’s usually due to their diet and their fatty intake.
“That’s due to any source of fat. There are several effects working simultaneously, all by the same kinds of foods. High fat foods stimulate high hormone production — in particular, estrogen and testosterone.
“So those who were smart ate beans and vegetables and fruit for lunch — this goes out with all the waste. But if a person didn’t have high fiber foods for lunch, and instead ate chicken breast and yogurt and white rice, and the fiber, which is only found in plants, is not there — the estrogens still go down, but they end up being re-absorbed, because there’s no fiber to hold on to, and they come right back into the (blood) circulation and go back into the liver, and it continues this circulatory process.
“There is a great interest about this in cancer research; as it’s a great way to protect against, say, breast cancer. But it also affects our size and shape.”
Barnard is greatly concerned about what children are being fed in schools and was dismayed to learn that a milk-in-schools program was recently introduced to students in Saudi Arabia. “It’s disgraceful,” he said.
“This Western set of dietary habits should not be emulated by other countries, unless one wants to emulate our rates of cancer, heart disease, and obesity — which are bankrupting our country and destroying our children.”
Barnard says schools’ educational materials are often donated, often by the dairy industry, so they emphasize the foods the companies wish to sell.
Instead of thoughtful nutrition at schools, said Barnard, “what you see is a dumping ground used to regulate an agricultural crisis: When beef prices fall, the cattle industry goes to the Department of Agriculture and asks them to execute a federal purchase.”
PCRM’s chief says the government has bought up beef and dairy surpluses for decades — several hundred million dollars of beef or dairy in the course of a year. “And when they buy it, they have to put it somewhere, so it ends up in hospitals, prisons and schools. “Soft drinks start with what the body actually needs, which is water, and then it adds a lot of seductions to it to make sure you’re hooked,” said Barnard, noting that each soda also has the equivalent of about 17 teaspoons of sugar.
“Kids’ behavior is directly affected by what they eat,” said Barnard. “Look at kids who are hyper-active. Take them off the colorants and preservatives in their foods and drinks, and general sugars. Then get them away from fatty foods and into healthy diets, and you’ll see that many of them settle down.”
Similarly, said Barnard, men who eat high-fat meaty diets tend to have hormonal differences that cause their behavior to be different than men eating a high fiber diet. He referred to a study called the “Massachusetts Ageing Male Study,” which measured “SHBG” in the blood, or Sex Hormone Binding Globulin.
“SHBG holds, and inactivates, sex hormones. And it’s in your blood, circulating, and it keeps these hormones inactive until they need it. So the more SHBG you have, the less active your testosterone is going to be.
“... if you’re on a high-fat, low fiber diet your SHBG falls, you don’t have this natural method of reining in your hormones. It explains why meat-eating folks are sometimes less cooperative and more aggressive and why vegetarians tend to be less aggressive and more apt to work things out. And I think there must be a political message hidden in there somewhere...,” said Barnard.
Barnard said research shows there is more iron in a vegetarian diet than a meat-eater’s diet. Green, leafy vegetables and beans are so high in iron that most folks, who go on a vegetarian diet, find that their iron level does not fall, but actually increases. There’s plenty of protein in plant-based diets.
Using Hollywood stars as models, he said: “Kim Bassinger, Alex Baldwin, Pamela Anderson — all of these people who have enviable bodies — are vegans. And if you look at the John Candy’s of the world — is that the kind of diet that you want to follow?
