an Adjunct Associate Professor of Medicine at the George Washington University School of Medicine in Washington, D.C. The author of dozens of scientific publications, Dr. Barnard has also written fifteen books, including the New York Times bestseller, 21-Day Weight Loss Kickstart: Boost Metabolism, Lower Cholesterol, and Dramatically Improve Your Health.
Find out what Dr. Barnard has to say about the latest findings in diabetes treatment, some of which come from studies he has personally directed. Hint: The most powerful tool isn't a drug, it's the food on your plate. Then, get his take on cancer, soy, weight loss, and many other crucial topics of our day.
JOHN ROBBINS: You grew up in a North Dakota family of cattle ranchers and doctors. When you look back now, do you feel that those early experiences helped shape your current view of the world and your work?
DR. NEAL BARNARD: My grandpa was a cattle rancher, and his father was a cattle rancher, and his father was a cattle rancher. And my own father was too, except that he really did not care for the cattle business and soon got out of it. He ended up going to medical school and then spent the later part of his life treating diabetes in Fargo. But we still ate like we were in the cattle business. I have vivid memories of bringing cattle to slaughter and that kind of thing. Now, all of those people were good, decent folks, and I am sympathetic to how people have gotten into these walks of life. At the same time, we can clearly do better. Science has moved on and shown us that there is a better path.
JOHN ROBBINS: Speaking of science moving on, you were awarded a $350,000 research grant from The National Institutes of Health a few years ago to study the effect of a low-fat, vegan diet on diabetes. The study results, which you published in Diabetes Care, the peer reviewed journal, found that a low-fat, vegan diet did improve glycemic and lipid control and actually did so with greater results than those achieved on a diet that was based on the American Diabetes Association guidelines. Has the Diabetes Association made any changes in their guidelines as a result of your findings?
DR. NEAL BARNARD: When you look around the world, people who tend to not get diabetes don't follow the sort of typical diabetes diet that American doctors hand to patients. A typical clinically recommended diet says that patients should avoid carbohydrates: “Don't eat bread, don't eat pasta, don't eat sweet potatoes, don't eat rice, etc.” But if you look in Japan and China in decades past, rice was a staple, and they were the thinnest, healthiest, longest-lived people on the planet—that is, until burgers and cheese came in. Then as rice consumption fell and fat intake rose, diabetes rates skyrocketed.
What the NIH funded us to do was to test an entirely plant-based diet, loaded with vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and beans. It was very low in fat, and the animal products were eliminated. Several things happened. People lost weight very well, and their cholesterol levels improved. But what the diabetes researchers especially noticed was that their blood sugars improved so much that many of them ended up reducing their medications and in some cases, diabetes was no longer even detectable.
In 2009, the American Diabetes Association began citing our research studies in its clinical practice recommendations, and we are grateful for that. We hear every day from people whose diabetes is improving dramatically. More importantly, when people make dietary changes, they may be able to prevent this disease from starting in the first place.
JOHN ROBBINS: My father, who as you know was the founder and for many years the owner of the Baskin-Robbins (31 Flavors) ice cream company, developed a very serious form of diabetes in his 70s, and the prognosis was very poor. But as a result of reading my books and similar ones, he made some major changes in his diet and his diabetes went into remission. He no longer needed injections of insulin or even diabetic pills. The amputation of a foot or a leg that had been envisioned wasn't necessary, and he lived many more good years. He didn't go as far with his dietary changes as you or I might have ideally wanted, but he made major ones. I thought, if a person at that age with such an investment in the lifestyle that he maintained could make those changes and experience dramatic health results in a positive way, then perhaps there is hope for just about anybody.
DR. NEAL BARNARD: Your father was very lucky to have you looking out for him. And we have seen the same sort of success many times. I vividly recall a man who came into our research study and told me about his family history. He had diabetes all up and down his mother's side and his father's side, and his own father was dead at age 30. This young man was 31 when he got his diabetes diagnosis. He came in to see us five or six years later. We put him on a plant-based diet. He was thrilled to do it, and he told us it was much easier than the diets he had been prescribed before. Because he could eat as much as he wanted, and he felt good and energetic. He lost about sixty pounds over the course of a year, at which point the diabetes was no longer detectable.
Another man in the study had had diabetes for nearly twenty years and was on injections several times a day. He suffered from a complication called diabetic neuropathy, which is pain in the feet and ankles that comes from the nerves being attacked by the disease. I remember him telling me how miserable this had been, and that life was hardly worth living. After about five or six months on a healthy, vegan diet, he came in to say, “You won't believe this. My neuropathy is completely gone!”
I followed with him for years because I had never heard of this happening before. In medical school we were taught that diabetes is a one-way street. But for this man, the neuropathy never came back. And we have seen this for many people since that time. What we discovered is that diet changes really are powerful. They vary from person to person, of course, but it is wonderful to see what can happen when a person puts a healthy diet to work.
JOHN ROBBINS: You founded Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) in 1985. What does your organization do?
DR. NEAL BARNARD: We promote preventive medicine, especially good nutrition. We also do clinical research studies. We have done quite a lot on the role of nutrition in diabetes, weight loss, and cholesterol management, as well as a number of studies looking at migraines, arthritis, and menstrual pain. We have done studies on the applications of dietary changes, such as on how people can make nutritional changes at the workplace or in doctors' offices. We also want research to be done better, meaning more ethically. So we promote alternatives to the use of animals in research.
JOHN ROBBINS: When you publish your research in medical journals, have you ever been challenged for your advocacy of a vegan diet on the grounds that you may be concerned for the animals, regardless of the actual health data?
DR. NEAL BARNARD: No, and there are a couple of reasons for that. First of all, let me say that concern for animals is a really good thing. I wish everyone were motivated by compassion, because that would make for a better world. And for myself, I wish that I had a keener, ethical sense earlier in life, because I have often reflected about the times when I drove cattle to slaughter or went hunting as a kid. We did a lot of things that, now that I am a little older and maybe wiser, I really wouldn't do again.
Having said that, when we do a clinical trial, it goes through a rigorous process of independent peer review. Our statistics are all done by people who are unbiased and are masked to the specifics of the research. When they are evaluating blood tests and other results, they don't know who is in which diet group. So when the NIH or other funders or reviewers look at our data, they can see that they are without bias. As a result, our diabetes trial yielded six or seven separate research publications. The American Diabetes Association published our first results in its journal, followed by The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, The Journal of the American Dietetic Association, and several others.
With that said, sometimes a broader social perspective can be helpful. People come in to see us because they want their diabetes to
