If you've been listening to the podcast for a while, you've definitely heard me mention Dr. Neal Barnard and the WAVS study, in which participants ate boiled soybeans and reduced their hot flashes. I wanted to bring Dr. Barnard onto the podcast to talk more about the study, what the participants ate during the study, and what exactly phytoestrogens are and how they can help during menopause. We also discussed hormone replacement therapy, hormones in dairy, how phytoestrogens affect men’s health, as well as Dr. Barnard’s new weight loss book, the Power Foods Diet.
Dr. Neal Barnard is an adjunct professor of medicine at the George Washington University School of Medicine in Washington, DC, and President of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. Dr. Barnard has led numerous research studies investigating the effects of diet on diabetes, body weight, hormonal symptoms, and chronic pain, including a groundbreaking study of dietary interventions in type 2 diabetes, funded by the National Institute of Health, that paved the way for viewing type 2 diabetes as a potentially reversible condition for many patients. His latest book is The Power Foods Diet, the Breakthrough Plan that Traps, Tames, and Burns Calories for Easy and Permanent Weight Loss.
AP: Welcome to the podcast.
NB: Well, thank you. It's great to be with you today.
AP: Yeah, I started reading your books in, I think it was around 2000. I read Foods That Heal Pain. So yeah, you've definitely been a huge influence on me and my vegan journey and my interest in health.
NB: That's great. I'm glad to hear that.
AP: Yeah. Can you share your background, how you got started with the plant-based lifestyle, and how that affected your practice?
NB: Sure. Well, I grew up with exactly the opposite kind of diet. I grew up in North Dakota, and meat was at the center of the plate, and I had a 20-gauge shotgun that I used with my father and my brother as we grew up hunting.
I had a job at McDonald's, all the things, like the worst things. But as time went on, I had a number of experiences that helped me to realize that it was certainly a healthier thing to not be eating animals and leave them alone. It's also better for them, may I say, and it's better for the planet.
And eventually, I kind of think it was sort of a process of maturation. We just realized that to eat in other ways is a little bit childish, and meaning we're sort of ruled by our appetites and not really thinking very hard. So for me, it was a relatively easy change.
And of course, what we've been doing over the years is we've been doing research studies where we wanted to see, okay, how does a diet change affect how much we weigh or how easy weight loss is or diabetes or all the other things that you mentioned? Because there have been some gaps in research, and we needed to really fill them in and see what a diet change really could do.
What are Phytoestrogens?
AP: Oh, that's great. Can you explain what phytoestrogens are and how they interact with the body?
NB: Yeah, plants have substances that affect hormonal conditions, and probably the ones that people think about a lot are the ones in soy products, so in soy milk or tofu or whatever. And I think the really important word here is isoflavones. There are isoflavones in soybeans.
There's some of it in edamame, which is the baby soybean. But as the bean matures, there's a lot of isoflavones in mature soybeans, and there's isoflavones in all the things you make from them. And they have names like genistein and daidzine and glycetine.
Those are all isoflavones. But what is important about them is that researchers have found that they are kind of like medicines when people, let's say women are consuming a lot of soybeans. They're getting a lot of isoflavones.
And we believe that that is probably a big explanation for the fact that soy products reduce breast cancer risk quite significantly. A woman who consumes a lot of soy products, soy milk every day, that kind of thing, has about 30% less risk of breast cancer compared with other women. And after diagnosis, let's say a woman was diagnosed with breast cancer, and she's hoping obviously to keep this disease at bay.
It turns out if she eats more soy products, she is much less likely to have a recurrence. And by the way, I should maybe acknowledge that for a number of people, they've heard the opposite thing. They read on the internet that, wait, doesn't soy cause cancer?
And don't these phytoestrogens and soy cause cancer? No, the opposite is the case. People got a bit confused because the isoflavones do attach to estrogen receptors.
And so people figured, well, they've got to cause cancer then because the female sex hormones in a woman's body attach to estrogen receptors, and they can cause cancer for sure. But the isoflavones ended up in quite a number of studies, very consistently are shown to reduce cancer risk. And both for women and for men, by the way, it's not just breast cancer.
It's also prostate cancer for men seems to be reduced with isoflavones. So we're cheerleading for our friend, the soybean, all the things that soybeans become.
Phytoestrogens vs. Hormone Replacement Therapy
AP: And how do phytoestrogens compare with HRT or bioidentical hormones?
NB: Oh, what a great question. You know, hormone replacement therapy is often used for symptoms that women might have in menopause, hot flashes, for example. And they work.
I mean, if you take hormone replacement therapy, it's either estrogen itself, or it can be a combination of estrogen and a progestin. And they're pretty effective against hot flashes, but the worry is that they're going to cause breast cancer. And there is good reason to worry about that.
I mean, we have a number of studies that show that. Now, I should say that there are people who disagree with that, particularly the people who manufacture hormone replacement therapy. They're very keen on saying hormone replacement therapy can't increase cancer risk.
I have to say, from my read of the literature, I find it quite convincing that the hormone replacement therapy has a lot of side effects, including an increased risk of breast cancer. So with soy isoflavones, they're exactly the opposite. They don't increase breast cancer.
They do precisely the opposite. They reduce it. But what about the good part?
And the good part is that the soy isoflavones appear to help tame hot flashes. They're not super effective on their own, but they do have somewhat of an effect to really amplify that effect and to make it similar to HRT and effectiveness for tackling hot flashes. You've got to combine the isoflavones and soy with a healthy diet.
And when you put those pieces together, you have got some bang up great power against menopausal symptoms as it may be established in clinical trials.
How Phytoestrogens Reduce Hot Flashes during Menopause
AP: Speaking of hot flashes, can you explain WAVS to listeners?
NB: Yes, we did a study, it was called the Women's Study for the Alleviation of Vasomotor Symptoms, which is a complicated way of saying a diet change for hot flashes. So we brought in women who had hot flashes. They had gone through menopause and they would explain it for anybody who's never had a hot flash.
What it is, is you're sitting in a board of directors meeting and you're suddenly asking, is it me or is it hot in here? And they say, no, it's kind of chilly while you're burning up because heat is coming up from your chest, you break out into a sweat, you hope nobody notices. And that's a hot flash.
It's a vasomotor, meaning that the blood vessels in the skin are dilating and it's just like opening up a radiator. You're suddenly really hot. It doesn't last very long, but it's disturbing.
It's annoying. It happens at night, so you're trying to sleep and suddenly it becomes 150 degrees. You break out into a sweat, you've got to change your pajamas, it can happen four times at night.
It's really annoying. So we were motivated to do a study. In fact, if you don't mind, I've got to tell you the background of the study.
I wrote a book called Your Body in Balance. And the reason I wrote this book is I got all excited about evidence that you can modify your hormones just by changing your diet. And insulin, for example, is a hormone and we've known for a long time that you can control insulin release based on what you eat.
You can control insulin action and insulin resistance based on what you eat. So that's a hormone. Estrogen is a hormone, testosterone is a hormone, thyroid hormone, all these things.
So I wrote about how food choices can be used to control them. Anyhow, there's a menopause chapter in there. And I talked about the fact that in Japan, back in the, say, the 1960s, before the diet really westernized, a more traditional Japanese diet, lots of rice, lots of vegetables, some fruits, quite a lot of soy, tofu, soy milk, miso and others.
And there was some animal products, but there's really no dairy to speak of, some fish, not boatloads of it, and not a lot of meat. Anyhow, hot flashes were about 15% of women and they were mild. In the United States, meanwhile, women were burning up at menopause.
So as the Japanese diet started to westernize, McDonald's came in, burger came in, KFC came in, and cheese came in. And milk products and all these things, hot flashes went up to being more than 40%. And everything else started having breast cancer, diabetes increased cardiovascular disease.
So we started to think, okay, what is the lesson here? The lesson here is that something about that older diet that is largely plant-based and had soy in it that was protected. So I described all this and the fact that in other countries, like the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico, they're not eating soy beans, they're eating black beans.
They had a largely plant-based diet too, but it was not rice, it was corn. And they had a number of vegetables like lechaya, which us greengos never heard of, but are consumed quite a lot in Mexico. So I wrote about this.
A woman named Betty called me up. She said, Dr. Barnard, I read your book, I picked up Your Body in Balance, I went to the menopause chapter, and I was being so troubled by hot flashes. I did what you said and my hot flashes are gone.
They're gone. I think she said three days. And I thought, wait a minute, that's really impressive.
And in fact, in the book, I didn't say that it would work that well. In fact, I didn't even say exactly what you should do. I just said that plant-based diets and soybeans were good.
And so I asked her to explain, how did she interpret what I had written? And she said, well, I went completely vegan, no animal products. You said, go low fat.
So I didn't use any fat in anything. And you said, soybeans are good. So I bought some soybeans.
And I said, well, tell me, how did you buy it? What brand were they? She said, I went on Amazon and I bought Laura Brand non-GMO soybeans.
And I cooked them up. I said, how did you cook them? Well, I got an instant pot.
So I put them in the instant pot and I ate it. How much did you eat? Half a cup a day.
Thank you. Click. And I ran into the office of my research director.
Her name is Hannah Kalayova. And I said, I've got our next research trial. We are going to test Betty's diet.
And we brought in 84 women. They all had really bad hot flashes. And I gave everybody an instant pot.
I called up the head of instant pot. I said, could you send me some instant pots? And he was really nice.
He said, for research, yes. And so we got them. Everybody got one.
We gave them Laura Brand soybeans, exactly what Betty talked about. And we said, let's go vegan and really low fat. And this is important.
It's not like avocados and peanut butter and stuff. We said, skip that for now. We're going really low fat.
And we had half of the women do this. The other half did their regular diet. Hot flashes, the moderate to zero hot flashes, the ones that wake you up at night and make you feel terrible.
They dropped 88 percent in this trial. It was a 121week trial. And that is that is what HRT does.
And if you look back in the literature, you see, well, I'll take a soy extract in a capsule. It's not that good. It's OK.
Or I'll have more tofu. Yeah, it's OK. Or I'll go vegan.
That's a good idea. But none of those things really knock out hot flashes to the extent that we saw with this combination of all three pieces. No animal products, no added oils, really.
You're keeping the oils really low and oily foods really low. And a half a cup of mature soybeans every day. And that was the whole intervention.
And it worked really, really, really well. And all the side effects were great. The average woman lost maybe seven or eight pounds over a 12-week period.
Their cholesterol gets better. Their energy is better. Their digestion is better.
Everything is better. So anyway, this is the WAVS trial. It was published by the North American Menopause Society in two different manuscripts.
And maybe the most important thing about the WAVS study is that we showed that without pharmaceutical prescription, you're taking power in your own hands by making your own decisions in your own house. And the diet that you're on is not only like medicine for hot flashes, but it is exactly the diet that you want to be on. If at menopause you think, I'd like to lose some weight. I'd like to protect my heart because my doctor says this is a time when my risk increases. You want to protect your brain because you're thinking, gee, you know, my mother or my father had Alzheimer's. Is this going to happen to me?
This is exactly the diet you want for all of those things. So low-fat, let me be clear, a low-fat, plant-based diet, a vegan diet, is the diet of choice at any age. But certainly at menopause, when women are struggling with hot flashes, I would run straight to it and see what we can do.
AP: And so the soybeans were boiled soybeans, not edamame?
NB: Right. Edamame is fine. Edamame is delicious. It's great. But it's a baby soybean. It's in the little pod. And if you just left it on the vine a little longer and let it mature, it makes more isoflavones. So edamame is good. I mean, all sort of products are fine.
But to give you an example, let's say I want to do soy milk. Fine. It's great. It's very healthy. In fact, I think it's better than the other plant-based milks. But to get the isoflavones from soy milk that you can get from a half a cup of mature soybeans, you need to drink two quarts.
And so Betty was onto something with the mature soybeans.
AP: Okay, that's great information and so many health benefits. And, you know, I eat a lot of edamame, so now I'm going to try these mature soybeans and see how that works.
NB: One other thing to be aware of, people, I think, will rightly say they don't want GMO soybeans. And that's right. If you look out in the fields of soybeans in North Dakota where I grew up, I mean, that's GMO soybeans.
The good news or good or bad news, depending on your point of view, that's cattle feed. That's chicken feed. Those soybeans are there for livestock.
If you are buying any soy product for your consumption, look for it to be organic. By law, it cannot be GMO. And there are some that are effectively organic, but they haven't yet met all the organic standards and are not approved to use that word.
But they're still not GMO, and they'll usually mark that as non-GMO. So those are all perfectly fine. Look for one that's marked non-GMO or organic, and those are going to be fine.
How to Prepare Mature Soybeans
AP: Okay, that's a great tip. And how do you prepare those soybeans? Just boil them up?
NB: Yeah, you can do it the old-fashioned way, which is you put, you know, like any bean, you just put them on a stove and it's good to soak them overnight and then dispense with the soaking water and then put in fresh water and boil them up for a good hour. Now, there should not be al dente beans. If they are crunchy, you need to cook them longer.
They should be soft. And then you use them like pine nuts or something like that on a little salad or whatever you might want to. Now, Betty's method was you put them in an Instant Pot or any pressure cooker.
But once again, cook them until they're really soft. So on an Instant Pot, that would be maybe 48 minutes. The bean setting might be 30 minutes.
If they're crunchy, though, you don't want that. And another tip you can use, let's say you travel a lot, go online and get yourself some pre-toasted soybeans. One brand is called Tosteds, T-O-S-T-E-D, Tosted.
And they're crunchy like, they're kind of like dry roasted peanuts. And you can put them in your luggage. And if you're on a plane, you can haul them out, which is a little bit harder to do with cooked soybeans.
Or you can do it yourself. Cook them up in your pressure cooker on a stove. And then you can put them on a baking sheet, put them in the oven, cook them for about an hour at I think something like 350, something like that, until they're completely dry.
And you can put some cayenne on there, a little bit of salt, a little bit of garlic, whatever calls to you. And they're very cool snacks. And there's a million ways of using them.
AP: Great. Thanks for sharing that. And I'm sure you have some recipes in your books for that too.
NP: Yeah. And people can just use them any way they wish to. The one thing that I would say is if you're using them like a medication, make sure you get your dose.
And that's important because let's say you're putting them into a salad and you're mixing up the salad, but, you know, your partner got some and your kids got some, your mom got some, you may not have gotten your half cup. So make sure that you get, make sure you get your dose.
How Phytoestrogens Affect PCOS
AP: So can you explain how phytoestrogens affect conditions like PCOS and endometriosis?
NB: Yeah. Let me be clear about what we know versus what we're guessing about because there are a lot of things like that. And in fact, to tell you, even with regard to hot flashes, we know this diet works.
I mean, we've, we've done it in lots and lots and lots of women. But if you said to me, what's the role of a vegan diet? What is the role of reducing fat?
What's the role of the isoflavones? We're speculating. We, we're really not entirely sure.
So for, for something like, like say PCOS, polycystic ovary syndrome, or whatever, women, it's a genetically based condition where you're just born. Everybody is born with some, what I'm going to call male hormones, like testosterone and its cousins. And what I'm going to refer to as female hormones, estrogens, estradiol, estrone, estriol.
Now I put it that way, although the truth is everybody's got both. Men have estrogens and testosterone, women have estrogens and testosterone, but they got a different balance. So for women with PCOS, they were born with just a little extra androgen.
Not a lot, but a little bit. And so they might notice the occasional stray hair or their hair might thin a little bit. It's sort of, it's a little bit like what a man might experience, but they have this to a varying degree.
And a number of women have recorded that on a plant based diet, they do dramatically about it. Some have felt that soybeans are helpful as well. And what we presume we're doing is we're simply balancing off the male hormone, perhaps.
But I think there's a little bit more to it than that. And the diet effect, let me speculate with you a little bit. In type 2 diabetes, we found that a low-fat vegan diet has an amazing effect.
It causes the amount of fat inside your cells to diminish. And the reason is you're not eating animal fat. In fact, you're not eating much of any fat.
And so the fat build up in your cells diminishes, but not just the fat in your fat cells. You've got a little bit of stored fat in your muscle cells, a little stored fat in your liver cells. And all that tends to dissipate on a low-fat vegan diet.
So what? Here's what. When women have PCOS, they tend to get some insulin resistance, just like a person who's got diabetes.
And what we have found is that in the same way as a vegan diet is the diet of choice for diabetes, because it helps get the fat out and it allows insulin to work better. It does the same thing. Everyone has got PCOS.
She could be insulin resistant too. The low-fat vegan diet is the fat out of her cells. Her insulin there can work better.
And that's going to help her as well.
AP: Well, that's so interesting.
NB: We're still exploring all of this, I have to say, and learning as we go. But we are well past the point of understanding that the best diet you want to be on is not a calorie counting diet where you're starving yourself. It's not a keto diet where you're avoiding carbohydrate.
It's a diet really rich in vegetables and fruits and beans and whole grains and all the cool things that these turn into.
Estrogen Dominance, Endometriosis, and Phytoestrogens
AP: Can you explain estrogen dominance and whether phytoestrogens would be beneficial?
NB: Yeah, estrogen dominance. Estrogens are in balance with other hormones in your body, not just androgens, but also progesterone, which is, can I call that another female hormone? There's this huge ballet of hormones.
They each have their part to play. And if estrogen is a little too bossy and it's saying, get off the stage. I'm the only actor in town.
Signs of estrogen dominance can be, let's say, in a woman doing her reproductive years, estrogen causes the uterus to get ready for pregnancy. One of the things it does is it thickens up the inner lining of that uterus in anticipation that maybe a little embryo is going to come in and plant. And so it thickens up this endometrial there.
You got too much estrogen. That estrogen can thicken that layer up too much. At least that's what will happen.
And if it's too thick and you've got this whole endometrial layer that is now the end of the month, you're not pregnant, you're going to have a menstrual period which discharges all of that accumulated layer. You got a heavy period. You have a lot of clots and the period lasts too long and it's crampy pain.
It feels terrible. That's estrogen dominance. So there are a lot of ways that we can reduce estrogen activity.
And a low fat vegan diet does that. And we suspect that isoflavones may help with that as well. And a lot of other things.
Acne can be accentuated fibroids, which are not the underlying the endometrial layer in the muscular layer of the uterus. You can have a little knot of muscles, muscle cells. They can grow up to be like a tennis ball.
And that's a fibroid. And they can be totally benign or they can hurt. And they can do nothing to fertility or they can interfere with fertility.
And so we suspect that when women are in better balance with their hormones, fibroids are less likely to occur. So there are lots of other conditions, but that's really what estrogen dominance is. And I would encourage women not to go to the store and pick up some genistein pills and hope that they're going to work.
I would encourage her to, number one, eliminate animal products, especially dairy products. But frankly, all of them keep oils really low. We don't know exactly why.
But for some reason, keeping your oils really low and oily foods really low helps too. And then having soybeans is part of this. That's all part of it.
The Effect of Dairy Products on Menopause
AP: Great. Thanks for breaking that down. That's super helpful.
Now, what about dairy products? Because you mentioned in your latest book that the dairy products do contain estradiol.
And how does that affect menopausal women?
NB: Yeah, they sure do. And here we're on a new frontier. People have been promoting dairy, you know, for a century.
The government works with the dairy industry to promote three glasses of milk per day and people do it if they drink it and so forth. But let's rewind. Mother Nature is a little surprised about her attitude toward dairy because Mother Nature says, wait a minute, I gave a cow an udder because her baby calf needs milk.
And that's what it's for. And in fact, the calf is not going to have milk after the age of weaning. All that milk is for is to help the infant to grow, to be big enough to be able to eat in a more substantial way.
And about 10,000 years ago or thereabouts, humans figured out how to make cows stand still. And when they did that, we had a dairy industry. And now we think it was totally normal that we should have a glass of cow's milk, or sheep milk, or goat milk, or camel milk, or whatever people are in the mood to drink. And the problem is that that came out of an animal who was making estrogens. I mean, that's one of the many problems.
There's lots of problems with it. She's also making fat and other things and putting them in the milk to fat and apple calf. But she's making estrogens, specifically estradiol, which is an exact match for yours.
And so you drink milk, and you're getting traces of estrogens that are beyond those in your body. And to make it worse, cows are impregnated on farms every year, and they give birth. And there's, of course, the whole ethical side of this.
I mean, the artificial insemination process is not something they volunteer for, and neither would anybody if they saw what it is. And then when they give birth, their calves are taken away. The males are typically killed for veal, and the females are taken away and raised in isolation.
So anybody who's got a slight heart will not consume dairy because it's a creepy thing. But from a biological standpoint, what it means is she gives birth three months later. She's impregnated again, and they keep milking her while she's in her new pregnancy.
And a pregnant cow makes lots of estrogens, and it gets in the milk, and it gets into the cheese, and the ice cream, and the yogurt that people make from it. And the dairy industry says, "forget it. Don't even worry about it. Yes, there's estrogens in them. But it's such a small quantity. You shouldn't worry about it."
You say, "well, wait a minute. I'm feeding this to my seven-year-old daughter three times a day because the government says so. I shouldn't worry about those estrogens."
No, don't worry about it. Don't give it another thought. Well, in 2020, researchers from the Adventist Health Study published an amazing finding.
They wanted to see if milk is associated with breast cancer. And up until that point, researchers hadn't been very clear on this subject. And the problem was, you couldn't really find a big population that wasn't really drinking milk.
Here in the US, some people like milk, some don't. But you're getting some kind of dairy. Maybe you're not a milk drinker, but you eat cheese, and the research has been really messy.
But the Adventist Health Study had a great advantage. Some of the Adventists, researchers love this population. They're teetotaling, non-smoking, health-conscious people who follow the rules in research studies.
And a lot of them avoid dairy products and meat. And a lot of them don't. So it sets up this beautiful comparison.
And it was an amazing thing. They showed that even a quarter cup, half cup, or a cup of milk every day would noticeably increase the risk of breast cancer. And if a woman's having two or three cups of milk or other dairy products, breast cancer rates went right up.
And they said, well, maybe the estrogens in milk are the explanation for this, as well as explanations for the fact that dairy products seem to affect other hormonal issues. And people were ready to discount that until China, a huge study called the China-Kadoori Biobank Study, it had a half a million participants, slightly more than that. And China's a great place to study, too, because historically, they don't consume dairy products.
That's not their thing. There's no cheesecake at the Chinese restaurant. But in the past few decades, dairy products have increased among certain courses of the Chinese population, another great ability to compare.
And they found the same thing they found in the Adventist study, that those women who excluded dairy, low burial rate of cancer, those who had even a quarter of a cup of dairy every day, about 50 grams, they had about a 17% increase in their risk of breast cancer. Half a cup, multiply that by two. A full cup of dairy, which is pretty modest by U.S. standards, multiply that by four. So they saw much more of breast cancer. So bottom line, what we think is the hormones in dairy act not differently from your hormones. They act like your hormones.
And if there's one thing we've known that is that hormones are dangerous, the ones in your body will cause cancer if they're too high of a level. And dairy products just add to that. And so I would encourage people to go to their refrigerator, take the dairy, throw it in the dumpster, and from now on, use plant-based milk products on your cereal, soy milk, almond milk, rice milk, and you're going to be much better off.
AP: Yeah, I agree with you completely. That's so interesting also to hear about how, or just to sort of think about how the estrogens in dairy have a harmful effect, but the phytoestrogens in plants have a healing effect.
NB: Part of the reason could be they behave very differently in your body. You have different estrogen receptors on the cells of your body. There's something called estrogen receptor alpha. Estradiol attaches to that. Your own estradiol attaches to that. The estradiol in a cow's dairy product attaches to estrogen receptor alpha.
Isoflavones preferentially attach to estrogen receptor beta. It's a different receptor. And alpha is, think of it as the gas pedal on cancer.
Think of beta as the brake. So the isoflavones attaching to beta help you. The estrogens attaching to alpha, I mean, they get you ready for pregnancy but there's a reason for menopause.
Mother Nature said, look, we don't want to keep playing with this estrogen time bomb too long. And now is the time for us to settle down on our hormones.
Phytoestrogens and Men's Health
AP: Now, what about men's health? Because a lot of listeners might be cooking for a man in their lives and might be concerned about phytoestrogens and how it affects men's health. I know you mentioned that it can be beneficial for prostate cancer, but how else can it affect men's health?
NB: Yeah. Isoflavones are a great thing for both men and women. And soybeans are a great thing for men and women.
Prostate cancer is extremely common, one of the most common cancers that men experience. And soybeans reduce that risk quite substantially. I should also say that some men have heard this urban myth that soybeans caught, and forgive me for this, the word they use is "man boobs".
What they mean is a little bit of breast enhancement. And so this kind of locker room notion was that soybeans will cause breast enhancement in men. Now, you can easily just prove this, go to any beach on a hot summer day and walk up to a guy who's a little heavy said he's pulling off his shirt and you can see he's got a little bit of breast enhancement.
Go right up to him and go ahead and ask, how much tofu have you eaten this week? And I promise you, he will say, "tofu! I don't eat any of that. I'm a cheeseburger guy. That's what I'm going to have, a pizza. That's what I have."
And what he's telling you is he's not eating soy isoflavones at all. He's eating, he's eating estrogens from the camp came from a cow. And more than that, he's eating just fatty, calorie-dense foods.
And those calorie-dense foods make him gain weight. A fat cell, fat cells. The more weight you gain, the more fat, the more fat cells are large.
And fat cells are little factories that turn testosterone into estrogens. So in his bloodstream, he's got testosterone. His testes make it.
Gets into the bloodstream. It goes into his fat cells. It's converted to estrogen.
And out comes the estrogen. It goes to his chest and makes breast tissue. So if he became a vegan, if he stopped eating all that animal junk, he would slow down.
His breast enhancer would very likely go away. And by the way, his fertility would be better. Researchers have looked at fertility in men and they do sperm counts.
And they look at sperm motility and absolute sperm counts and their morphology, meaning the shape of it. And what they find is that the more cheese men eat, the worse their sperm counts. And that makes perfect sense.
I mean, why eat a big estrogen source if you're trying to be fertile as a man? It's not going to help you. So unfortunately men have this macho idea that if you want to be macho like a bull, you have to eat a bull.
But they should eat like a bull. You know, bulls are vegans, okay? As are stallions, as are elephants, as are big, tough animals are vegan. So get your nutrition from plants.
You're going to be better off.
AP: Yeah, thanks for helping to clear that up. There's so much misinformation about soy out there.
NB: Yeah, there sure is. Soy is a great thing and it's very versatile. And even when it's processed to make a soy sausage or soy bacon, it still is dramatically better than the foods it replaces.
You know, one day they're going to make snow tires out of soy products, probably. But soybeans are a good thing and I'm glad that they've got them. You know, I always pick the organic ones, organic products, but they're always better than the bacon, sausage, milk, whatever it is that they're replacing.
AP: Absolutely. Is there any new research or developments in hormone health and phytoestrogens?
NB: Well, research is coming out all the time. The studies that we're seeing now have really been confirmatory, that we know quite clearly that soy products do have a really beneficial effect of cancer prevention and preventing cancer recurrence. We know that's true in women.
We now know it's true in men. That's all to the good. For people who want a healthy source of protein, soy is great.
It also seems to lower cholesterol a little bit. Now, I realize I'm cheerleading so much for soybeans. I should make it clear. We don't take any money from the soybean industry or any food industry at all of the Physicians Committee. We don't take their money because we want to be objective. But as a child, having grown up in North Dakota and having been on the opposite side of all of this, I've come to realize that plants were sort of the Clark Kent's of the world.
They had a Superman inside that we just didn't realize.
The Power Foods Diet
AP: I'd like to move on to discuss your new book. What are some of the power foods and how were they discovered?
NB: Yeah, power foods are cool. What that means is foods that cause weight loss. Many researchers have been working on this, including my team, but I want to tip my hat to Harvard.
Harvard researchers brought in 100,000 people, more than 100,000. They found this curious thing, that if you ate more of certain foods, you would tend to lose weight as the years went by. Completely counterintuitive, because you think, "wait a minute, if I eat more of anything, I'm going to gain weight. It doesn't matter if it's healthy or unhealthy. If I eat more, I'll gain weight."
That is not what they found. They found if you eat more foods, certain foods, these foods can satisfy the appetite sooner, so that they just kind of turn off the appetite and you eat less of the bad stuff. Or some of them increase your metabolism, so you burn calories faster after a meal. And we know what they are.
And let me mention a few. There are foods that we knew were healthy for other reasons, but we didn't know about the weight loss effect. The number one is the berry.
Blueberries, strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, all of them. And the reason we think, or the explanation we think, is anthocyanins. Anthocyanins are the purple color in a blueberry, and there are reddish-colored anthocyanins in strawberries.
And there's a whole painting box of anthocyanins. And after the Harvard researchers found that, just the association, people who ate a lot of berries tended to be slimmer than the people who didn't. Researchers in the UK did a really cool study.
They brought in identical twins. And you can see where this is going. You want to compare somebody to her genetically identical sister, but they brought in 2,734 identical twins.
And what they found is that the twin within each pair who ate the most anthocyanins had substantially less body fat and specifically less abdominal fat than her genetically identical sister. And then other researchers came in and said, okay, all right, we think this association has an explanation. And we think the explanation is your metabolism is ramped up a little bit by the anthocyanins.
And when that was found, we started to realize it's not just berries. There are certain spices that do the same. Some of you might have guessed like jalapeno peppers.
It's true that they are hot and they do induce thermogenesis. So it's not just hot on your tongue. It actually does augment a calorie burn as well.
Ginger will do this. But cinnamon has been a particularly cool thing that cinnamon has been shown to augment metabolism as well. So in this book, The Power Foods Diet, I just take all the power foods. I tell you what they are. And we make them into French toast, like put some cinnamon on a French toast and put blueberry syrup on them. And I now have, yes, it is a slimming French toast or wild blueberry muffins and a Southwest chili and carrot cake and a lot of things that are made with the power foods.
And that's it. It's been really, really fun to show that how you can use foods to tame your appetite or to pump up your metabolism. And people have had, well, both a lot of fun with it because the recipes are great.
And I can say that because I didn't make them. And Dustin Harder and Lindsay Nixon made the recipes and they were just really smart. But also, apart from being fun, it tackles a serious problem, which is that we've got obesity and overweight.
Two-thirds or more people in many parts of the U.S. have unhealthful weight gain. And they are turning to starvation diets, ketogenic diets, ozmpic to try to lose it. And when you use foods that nature designed that are like healthy medications in a way, you get healthy in a natural way.
That instead of hurting you, helps you. You get your cholesterol down, helps you in many other ways. So that's the Power Foods Diet.
It came out in March and it's been really fun.
AP: Did the participants exercise as well, or was it just the dietary changes that helped people lose weight?
NB: Oh, what a great question. When we do research studies, we don't allow our participants to change their exercise patterns because we are trying to focus on what the diet alone will do. That said, exercise is great.
Everybody should do it. Lace up your speakers, get out there, do a 40-minute brisk walk three or four times a week or more. But some people cannot exercise.
They may be so overweight that it's really challenging for them to exercise or they may have a disability that limits their mobility. And if that's the case, I want you to know that the foods are still going to work for you. If you are able to exercise, jump in, get your green light from your doctor if you have any kind of frailties, and then go for it.
AP: Amazing. I think a lot of people are going to be so excited to hear that they can lose weight eating french toast with blueberry syrup.
What are the Power Foods?
NB: And not just that. In fact, let me just walk you down the Harvard list really quickly. It was berries were number one, then the cruciferous vegetables like broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts were number two.
Number three was green leafy vegetables in general, and that could be spinach or asparagus. The fourth is melons. That can be cantaloupe, watermelon.
Keep in mind, cantaloupe is orange, just like a carrot, just like sweet potato, just like papaya, and just like mango. Mother Nature built beta-carotene into all of them, and that may well be the responsible factor here. Don't take beta-carotene pills.
Take beta-carotene in fruits. Same thing as the watermelon. It's red.
It's like a bean. It's an antioxidant, too. And number five is citrus fruits, and number six is the bean.
So that's just the beginning. Those are the ones that Harvard put at the top of their list, but there's a billion more, and the Power Foods Diet lists them, and it tells you how to use them and how to make your reluctant spouse think that my brownies and carrot cake is the best thing they ever tasted.
AP: Well, I like that you're adding so many foods with this diet rather than taking away foods and just having people eat only a few because that's what seems to be a misconception out there that people can't eat their favorite foods.
NB: Well, the doors are opening to healthier foods and to, frankly, a level to health that many people have never experienced, and I hope people will share that with other people.
AP: I think they will. That's going to be really helpful for a lot of people and for being healthy for life.
NB: And I don't want to be modest about it. People lose 100 pounds this way or more. It just depends on what weight you have to lose.
Let's target that. Let's get serious. Let's use foods like medicine and really do it.
Tips for Balancing Hormones
AP: So just wrapping up, I just want to ask, what are your best tips for women who want to balance their hormones?
NB: Oh, what a great question. The first thing I would say is, let's focus on the short term. In the same way as if you might use a medicine for an infection or something like that, you're not planning on what you can do for the rest of your life.
You're using the medicine to fix you. And so think about the changes you're going to make now in the short term. The reason I'm saying that is I'm encouraging people to make big changes so that they feel better fast.
And if you feel better fast, you're going to get a reward. Some people say, well, I'll just make, you know, I'll have a healthy meal on Friday. You're not going to get better that way.
Let's really do it. So what I would suggest you do is, first of all, a plant-based diet is what you want. And that means no animal products, but also keep oily foods really low.
Don't have lots of peanut butter and oil slather all over your salads and things like that, because for reasons we don't entirely understand, fatty foods from any source tend to increase estrogens too. So we want to keep those low. And if you have never done a plant-based diet, take a week and just try out different plant-based foods.
Try the ones in my book, or there are plenty of other books out there. Find the foods that you like for breakfast, lunch, dinner, when you're eating at restaurants too. Keep oils really low as you're doing it.
And then after a week, you'll have a pretty good list of foods you like. Jump in and now three weeks, all vegan, all the time, and without all the added oils. Keep them really low.
Three weeks is a magic number. That's the number that will reset your tastes in a healthier direction. And you're going to feel better.
In three weeks' time, you will feel noticeably better. Noticeably better. If you're dealing with cramps or hot flashes, give yourself a little bit longer time.
Give yourself eight weeks or something like that to see how you do. And you never have to say, for the rest of my life, I'll never have another double bacon cheeseburger. Don't burden yourself of that.
Focus on the short term so that that allows us to really do it right now. And if you like how you feel, share it with other people. Share it on social media.
Share it with your kids. Share it with your partner, your husband, your wife, whoever you're with, so that they can feel better too.
AP: Thank you so much for sharing all your information and wisdom. I know it's been really helpful for listeners to hear this information, and I'll be continuing to follow your research. Where can listeners find you?
NB: Well, thank you for asking. The Power Foods Diet is now on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Target and all the online places where people buy books. And there are even, as I have been told, there are even some bookstores that haven't gone out of business yet.
And if there's one in your neighborhood, I hope you'll go inside, because they've got the Power Foods Diet there as well. And our website at the Physicians Committee is pcrm.org. That's Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, pcrm.org.
AP: Thank you so much for being here on the podcast. I really enjoyed talking with you and learning from you.
NB: Well, thank you. Likewise.
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