The Rich Roll Podcast - Dr. Neal Barnard, M.D. On Breaking The Dairy Addiction

Episode Date: June 19, 2017

Last week we discussed the how behind ditching dairy. This week we discuss the why. Right now the average American eats more than 33 pounds of cheese a year. Packed with calories, loaded with saturated fat and teeming in highly addictive casomorphins, it's a habit that's intimately linked to obesity and a litany of chronic illnesses, including heart disease and type-2 diabetes. It's a habit that wrecks significant havoc on the environment, polluting our skies and poisoning our water table. And it's a habit that perpetuates unspeakable cruelty on the sentient animals it relies upon to serve its unabating appetite. Nonetheless, the U.S. continues to produce more cheese and dairy products than any other country in the world. Relentless, well-funded dairy industry lobbying efforts have entrenched government subsidies that not only incentivize production but even quietly fund corporate product development and marketing efforts, such as Pizza Hut's infamous grilled cheese stuffed crust pizza, McDonald's McCafé products and even Starbucks smoothies — all products specifically produced, developed and marketed to increase consumer dairy consumption courtesy of the federal funded and USDA regulated dairy checkoff program. It's time to stop the insanity. So let's talk about it. I can think of no better steward to facilitate a conversation on this subject than my good friend Neal Barnard, M.D. A pre-eminent authority on diet and nutrition and its impact on illnesses such as atherosclerosis, diabetes, cancer and Alzheimer’s, Neal is the founder & president of The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), where he leads programs advocating for preventive medicine, good nutrition, and higher ethical standards in research, and the Barnard Medical Center, a ground-breaking non-profit primary care medical practice where board-certified physicians, nurse practitioners, and registered dietitians help patients prevent and reverse serious health problems, leveraging a holistic approach that involves tackling the actual causes of illness, with extra attention on nutrition. Neal is also an adjunct associate professor of medicine at George Washington University and has authored over 70 scientific publications as well as 18 books, including the New York Times best-sellers Power Foods for the Brain*,21-Day Weight Loss Kickstart*, the USA Today best-seller Dr. Barnard’s Program for Reversing Diabetes* and the subject of today’s conversation...

To see the truth of it, you just have to look at a country like Japan or China, where these are non-dairy consuming countries. And they really weren't eating much meat. You know, meat was kind of a flavoring for the rice and noodles and vegetables and so forth. And back in 1980, diabetes was rare in Japan. It was between 1 and 5 percent of the adult population. McDonald's came in, fast food chains came in, meat came in in a big way, and cheese and dairy started to follow. Some of the people in Japan initially, and then China

afterward, started to say, okay, we need to drink milk so that we're strong like Americans are. And what they've gotten is diabetes rates went up to now 11 to 12% in Japan by 1990. Diabetes is massive now in China. Cardiovascular disease, I'm talking heart disease, huge in China. And it's not because of rice. That's Dr. Neil Bernard, and this is the Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. I'm in Miami right now. I'm in a hotel room.

Can you hear all the ruckus outside my door? I don't know what's going on right now, but it is Friday afternoon. And I have a feeling that this hotel turns into sort of like party time, like ground zero for partying. So if it's a little bit loud and distracting, my apologies. There's nothing I can do to control my environment. I'm powerless. Okay, today's episode. Today's episode, I want you to think about this show as part two in this limited series on ditching dairy.

Last week, Julie and I discussed the hows, specifically her new book, This Cheese is Nuts, and the process of creating yummy, super delicious, nutritious, plant-based versions of your favorite dairy dishes. And this week, I've got my good friend, Dr. Neil Bernard, MD, returning to the podcast to pick up where we left off in our conversation, our first conversation, which was episode 242. And this discussion is specifically focused on the perils of dairy consumption on human health. For those that are new to the show, Neil is a preeminent authority on diet and nutrition and its impact on illnesses such as arthrosclerosis, diabetes, cancer, and Alzheimer's. He is the founder and president of PCRM, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine,

where he leads programs advocating for preventive medicine, good nutrition, and higher ethical standards in research. Neil is also an adjunct associate professor of medicine at George Washington University and has authored over 70 scientific publications as well as 18 books, including the New York Times bestsellers, Power Foods for the Brain, 21 Day Weight Loss Kickstart, and the USA Today bestseller, Dr. Bernard's Program for Reversing Diabetes, as well as his latest and the subject of today's conversation. This, I was going to say this cheese is nuts.

It's not called that. It's called The Cheese Trap, How Breaking a Surprising Addiction Will Help You Lose Weight, Gain Energy, and Get Healthy. So this is a great conversation about the driving forces behind unhealthy eating habits, how everything from government policy, legislative barriers, subsidies, and misinformation fuel unhealthy consumer food choices. And it's about the addictive nature of dairy, the human and planetary health implications of dairy consumption, and why, look, it's time. We got to kick it. There's nobody more knowledgeable and qualified to talk about these subjects than Neil.

He's just an amazing human being. I really appreciate him taking the time to share his wisdom. And I urge all of you to listen in on this conversation intensely. Pay attention to what the good doctor has to say. And with that, I give you Dr. Neil Bernard. All right, Dr. Neil Bernard, we're in the container studio at our house. Thanks for making the trip all the way up to the hinterlands. This is a cool place. Thank you for including me. I appreciate you coming up. It's a pleasure and an honor to have you up here and also to kind of

reprise our first conversation and perhaps dig a little bit deeper into some of the myths and truths surrounding, specifically, I wanted to narrow in on dairy and cheese and talk about your new book, The Cheese Trap, and also the latest news cycle, which I think is landing in everybody's sort of social media feeds over the last 24 hours. A lot of interest and intrigue. I know I got a lot of messages on Twitter and Facebook about this recent study that just came out. I'm looking at an article right now that was in the Guardian. I think it was published yesterday. Eating cheese does not raise risk of heart attack or stroke study finds. So what do you make of this? Well, it's what we've been seeing

now for quite a number of years where the dairy industry, the meat industry, the egg industry, they've all been hammered by science over decades. And for good reason. Because they have cholesterol, they have fat. These things lead to the diseases that we're struggling with. And so they have found a way to fight back, which is they pour a lot of money into studies. In fact, the very study that you're describing. Cheese is safe. Dairy is safe.

When you look down at the bottom of the article, you discover the funding sources are the dairy industry. And although they will say, we gave them money, no strings attached, the scientists all know that if they don't come up with an industry-friendly conclusion, that was the last grant they're ever going to get from these people. So they come up with very industry-friendly conclusion. That was the last grant they were going to get from these people. So they come up with very friendly conclusions. And it's getting to the point where the consumer has no clue what to believe. Because animal fat, the saturated fat that's especially in dairy, also in meat and other things, but dairy is the number one source.

It clearly raises cholesterol levels. And there's a lot of cholesterol in it. But you can do a study in such a way that it's hard to identify that. For example, if I compare, say, a certain amount of milk to 2%, regular milk to 2% milk. The difference in fat content is actually relatively small. And if you show that the difference isn't statistically significant, meaning it could just be chance, they'll report it as negative. And then the headline and the Guardian will say, it doesn't matter. So there are lots of ways of lying with statistics. And the sad thing from our standpoint is these researchers don't have to prove that dairy is completely safe they don't have to even stop the the doubt that people would have or the concern that they have

they just have to sow a little bit of confusion because if the consumer says one week it's aloe on apples and the next week it's sugar and the next week it's this the next week it's that i don't know who to believe then they're going to go back with how they were raised on a Western kind of diet. So I think it's a terrible problem. I honestly don't know where this is going to end. Yeah. Our product is doubt, right? A page right out of the tobacco industry playbook that dates back to the 60s and the 70s. And the truth is, is that the average consumer is going to see that headline. Perhaps they're not even going to read the average consumer is going to see that headline. Perhaps they're not even going to read the article. They'll just see the headline and

then they'll share it on their Facebook feed or on Twitter or what have you. And the inquiry really ends there. And so the larger kind of issue is the sort of, I don't want to say assault on science, but perhaps this perpetration of misinformation in this war, you know, war, this nutrition war that we find ourselves, you know, mired in at the moment. And all you need is a headline like that to interject a little bit of doubt to keep people wedded in their current habits and their current consumer purchasing habits. It's an abuse of science. It's a misuse of science. And they're doing it deliberately.

And they know what they're doing. And when you look at what these companies are doing, on their websites, they will say, we are trying to make dairy fat look good. They're explicit with that. And they say that to their members so that their member industries will support them in this quest. We went through this with, in 2015, the Dietary Guidelines for Americans were being reformulated. And that, of course, determines what every kid in every school is going to eat and what everybody knows or thinks they know about nutrition.

The egg industry was fighting the whole cholesterol thing. And back in the 60s and 70s, the cholesterol issue was solved. Just like tobacco and lung cancer, it was like absolutely clear that tobacco caused lung cancer. It was absolutely clear that if you eat eggs or other high cholesterol foods, your blood cholesterol rises. So the government funding for that research kind of dried up because the only people who cared were the egg industry. So the egg industry started funding studies to try to disprove this. And if you have a really small subject sample, very few people,

and if you pick people, let's say they're eating a lot of eggs and sausage already, you can show that an additional egg doesn't really make much difference because of what they're eating. They are not going to do a study on somebody like you who's not eating animal products at all. If I have research subjects who have a clean diet you start giving them eggs their cholesterol levels rise

so anyway um researchers have been publishing very vigorously these i'm going to call them really corrupt studies and they influence that panel and we had to fight long and hard to get the dietary guidelines advisory committee to look through the science and see the truth of it. So they've got more money than we do. And they are pushing hard to confuse people. Yeah, and the money's important because I actually think that we're losing this war on information. When headlines like this, they travel easily and quickly across the Internet, and they have a massive influence on the public at large.

And just kind of cribbing from this article, there's a paragraph in here that says, there's been a lot of publicity over the last five to 10 years about how saturated fats increase the risk of cardiovascular disease, and a belief has grown up that they must increase the risk, but they don't. So it goes back to that, you know, that Time Magazine article about butter. Butter is back. There's no link between your dietary saturated fat and cholesterol intake and the increase of serum cholesterol and the impact on cardiovascular disease, diabetes, other chronic illnesses. So that is the prevailing conventional wisdom at the moment. And people are going around, you know, with this license to increase their intake of saturated fats, even above and beyond what they were doing before, because they're

under this belief that it has no impact on any kind of deleterious health outcome. But to see the truth of it, you just have to look at a country like Japan or China, where these are non-dairy consuming countries. And they really weren't eating much meat. Meat was kind of a flavoring for the rice and noodles and vegetables and so forth. And back in 1980, diabetes was rare in Japan. It was between 1% and 5% of the adult population. McDonald's came in. Fast food chains came in.

Meat came in in a big way. And cheese and dairy started to follow. Some of the people in Japan initially and then China afterward started to say, okay, we need to drink milk so that we're strong like Americans are. And what they've gotten is diabetes rates went up to now 11 to 12% in Japan by 1990. Diabetes is massive now in China. Cardiovascular disease, I'm talking heart disease, now in China cardiovascular disease I'm talking heart disease huge in China and it's not because of rice and it's not because of vegetables but it seems that it is meat and the

dairy that is coming in and invading their diet and yet the conventional wisdom if you if you if you would ask you know the average person or perhaps some of the researchers behind this study what the you study what the underlying cause of that is, they're going to point to processed foods and sugar most likely, right? Yeah. Sugar is not health food. That's true. That said, sugar consumption in the United States has been falling for almost 20 years. It rose, and I'm talking all sugars together, sugar, like cane sugar, beet sugar, high fructose corn syrup, throw them all in. They rose up until 1999. At that point, sugar has been falling. Sodas have been falling. Largely because so many Americans

are drinking bottled water or diet soda or whatever, sugar is dropping. But obesity is not falling. Diabetes is not falling. And to say, and once again, sugar is dropping. But obesity is not falling. Diabetes is not falling. And to say, and once again, sugar is not health food. But to say that is the whole problem, we should all be thin now. We should have cured diabetes by now. Because sugar has been falling for 20 years, but it's not. So I am going to say a particular amount of blame needs to go on cheese, especially cheese, but also meat.

So that's the issue now i don't want to get totally negative about this though rich because it's true that you know you get into a group of smart people and they'll read that and they some of them see through it some of them don't but the big the big picture that i, it was relatively few people going to a plant-based diet, say, 20 years ago. Now it's like all over the place. This movement, I think, is unstoppable, even with this war of misinformation. I'm reading it like the French election that happened a couple of days ago, actually. There was a lot of concern that that election would be manipulated in favor of the far-right candidate. And the French people said, to heck with your misinformation, and basically threw her out.

Right, like the pendulum is only going to swing so far before it has to swing back and achieve some level of balance. I think so. And for every Ridiculous Industries-funded study, there are plenty of good studies clearly showing the truth. But those studies aren't getting the kind of bandwidth that these other studies are getting. And is it a financial thing? It's like the kale and broccoli growers can't get together and pool their money to compete with the dairy industry and the meat industry. You said it. I got to tell you, it's true.

They not only pour money into doing the research, which is costly, but then they've got their communications teams set to push it. And worst of all, the studies done in the U.S. have the backing of the U.S. government, because by law, the government must promote American agricultural products. And they have specifically funded studies and they fund promotional programs, not only to make dairy products look healthy, but to actually promote more consumption of them, whether they're healthy or not. So that's all the bad news. The good news is if you look at milk consumption, it's been falling despite all the milk mustache ads and so forth. It's been falling. Cheese is going, unfortunately going up. Meat has fallen. Meat consumption has fallen about 10% over the last

decade. We're not where we need to be at all, but we are making progress. So this idea, you kind of touched on it. It's called, what is it called? Government setbacks? Well, yeah, it's the checkoff program. For every unit of milk that you sell or every cow you sell, you see an ad for a Wendy's double cheeseburger or the newest version of the Pizza Hut pizza with injected cheese into the crust and all these sorts of things, that actually there is a relationship between those marketing campaigns and those products and the influx of government funding. So can you explain that a little bit? Because I think a lot of people would be shocked to hear that. By law, the U.S. and this has been the case for a long time. The U.S. government,

by law, must promote American agricultural products. This is something Congress in its wisdom passed a number of years ago. And they promote products regardless of their health value and often in spite of their health value. So they take this pot of money and they pour it into research studies. And the U.S. government did work with Wendy's, with a contract that I can show you, to market the Wendy's Cheddar Lover's Bacon Cheeseburger. I'm not kidding. It sold two and a quarter million pounds of cheese. They then worked with Subway to, which Subway had two sandwiches that didn't have cheese on them. So on contract with the U.S. government, they stuck cheese on those sandwiches. They worked with Pizza Hut to put an entire pound of cheese on one serving of pizza. They worked with Taco Bell, Burger King,

all the others, so that cheese was promoted, for example. You go through the drive-thru, and you can't imagine that what they say over the loudspeaker is going to be government speak. Welcome to Taco Bell. Would you like to try our quesadilla today? They don't say you want a strawberry smoothie. It's like something cheesy. And so these are all done on contract. We got them through the Freedom of Information.

So those talking points are like upsells that are specifically kind of inserted into the talking points that that person at the fast food restaurant is sort of told this is how you communicate with the customer. Yeah, that was part of it. The government has supplied advisors to McDonald's. I'm talking about people going to McDonald's headquarters and advising them on their business practices. I mean, don't you think every computer manufacturer would like to have the government promoting their product? Well, it's wrong. It should stop.

But that's where we are. We live in a country which, if this were a Latin American country, you could imagine drugs infusing their influence in the government. Well, here it's agricultural products doing the same kind of thing. So what would have to happen systemically in order for the government to get behind sort of using that machinery to push fruits and vegetables instead of cheese and meat? and vegetables instead of cheese and meat? Subsidies, eradicating subsidies,

or changing the structure of lobbying in Washington? I mean, it would have to be from the top up. It would literally require an act of Congress. And I have to say that the fruit and vegetable people don't really want to be part of that. They want to fight their own fight, but they are not interested in subsidies for the most part. And none of this would matter if these products didn't have a health impact, but they do. And they have a surprising impact. And this is something else that gets swept under

the rug. Let me give you a short example, if you don't mind. There's a woman named Catherine Lawrence, who you may know. She lives in Texas, but her story is very striking. She was originally from Louisiana. She was in the Air Force. She was an aerospace engineer. She was one of the first people going into Iraq in 2003 to lay down American military bases. Anyway, she's working in this war zone. She's in the military. And you're not gaining weight eating military food and working hard. Her tour of duty comes to an end.

She goes back home to Louisiana. All her friends say, Catherine, let's eat. You're home. And what does she love the most? Cheese, mac and cheese, Cheetos, all this stuff. She had a friend who knew she loved mac and cheese so they gave her a case of 48 mac and cheese boxes those things that the college sophomores eat all right uh she for 48 days straight katherine ate mac and cheese out of a box anyway she gained weight but she also started to have these pains in her abdomen

and it as the months went by it got worse and worse and worse. And her doctor diagnosed endometriosis, which is a condition where cells that are supposed to be inside your uterus migrate out and they seed around your abdomen and they start swelling with your cycle. And the pain is terrible. The treatment can be, and it also causes infertility. And the treatment is a hysterectomy in a lot of cases. And she said to her doctor, you know, I'd rather not have a

hysterectomy. I'd like to have a family. And this was the treatment. And she was not getting better, so they scheduled it. Anyway, a friend said to her, why don't you try a plant-based diet? Because there's a lot of evidence that that will affect your hormones, your hormone balance, and what you got is a hormonal issue. And she was really half-hearted about it, but she thought, like, what's my choice? So she went 100% vegan, no dairy, like no cheese, but no animal products at all. And she started feeling better. She started losing weight. Week after week, she was losing weight. And as time went on, all of these abdominal symptoms started to just go away so she went back to the doctor who did a laparoscopy you look into the abdomen with a scope and he looks all around looks all around the doctor's looking all around

and then sends her into the recovery room and the doctor went out to the waiting room to talk to her husband and he said her endometriosis is practically gone and the husband said you know she changed her diet she went 100 vegan and she's been feeling better week by week and it's her pain has been going away and the doctor said no no no no no no no i don't want to hear about that foods do not cause endometriosis and there is no way that a diet change is going to heal it there's only one explanation for this this is a miracle so the doctor says that's because that's more plausible that's more plausible this is barely written in her medical record but anyway she never had the operation she had she didn't have the hysterectomy her endometriosis is gone she's got two kids and in fact she's her third child is on the way. And she has now become a food for life instructor working with PCRM to tell other women and men

about how foods affect your body and to get healthy. So anyway, my hat is off to Catherine Lawrence for sharing her story. But anyway, the reason I'm telling you this is you're going to promote, not you, people are promoting cheese. They're saying, don't worry about it. It has no effect. Cheese comes from milk. Milk comes from a cow who is pregnant. The cows don't give milk at all, but they don't make milk until they have been impregnated. They give birth and then the milk that their calf was going to get goes to the dairy. A cow pregnancy is about nine months, similar to human pregnancy.

And they're impregnated every year. So what that means, three quarters of their lives, they are pregnant. They are being milked during that time. The estrogen that the cow makes gets into the milk, and it's not much. It's only a trace. But the milk is turned into cheese. The hormones go with the fat. And the average person eats 35 pounds of it every year.

So researchers in Rochester, New York, looked at men. The men who ate the most cheese had the worst sperm counts, the worst sperm morphology, the lowest sperm motility. In other words, they're- Because of the estrogen content of that? Well, that's the theory. The theory is you're consuming just little traces of estrogen with your breakfast, on your Egg McMuffin, the little cheese, and a little bit more at lunch,

and quite a lot at dinner on your pizza. And could those little traces of estrogens matter? Now, we had all thought it couldn't be. But I've got to tell you, Rich, here's the worst. Here in California, researchers looked at women who had been diagnosed with breast cancer. researchers looked at women who had been diagnosed with breast cancer and if you've been if you've had breast cancer in the past and you were treated for it that your concern is is my cancer going to come back of course well the women who consumed the most cheese had a 49 higher breast cancer mortality compared to the women who eat the least.

And the difference is small. The difference is one daily serving or more, less than a half a serving a day. So the women who eat little or no cheese and other high-fat dairy products, it's cheese, it's butter, that's where the hormones go. You compare to these low-cheese consumers, the ones who eat one or more servings a day, which is not a lot, the increased risk was 49%. I'm talking about risk of dying of your cancer. So again, the amounts of hormones are small, but it raises the question, do you want to feed any kind of dairy? I'm talking about cow's milk, goat milk, whatever. Do you want to feed it to your six-year-old daughter or your six-year-old son

or your wife or your husband or yourself or anybody? And my thought is that the dairy products are this cultural aberration that has stuck because people get hooked on it, but it has nothing to do with human biology and we should be avoiding it. It's so fascinating how we've normalized this food product because, you know, as you and I both know, we're the only species that drinks the milk of another species, which is bizarre in its own right. But through history, we've just sort of decided that this is not only okay, but healthy. And sort of, you know, I apologize for continuing to look back at this article, but it's just fascinating to me. There's a paragraph in here that says, young people, especially young women, were now often drinking too little milk as a result of that concern, which could damage the development of their bones and lead to conditions in later

life, including osteoporosis or brittle bones. Consuming too little milk can deprive young people of calcium. And then it goes on to talk about how, you know, the negative impact of pregnant women not drinking enough milk. You know, first of all, let's jump into calcium for a second. Cows do not make calcium. Cows eat calcium just like people eat calcium. A cow Cows do not make calcium. Cows eat calcium just like people eat calcium. A cow's body does not make calcium. Calcium is in green leaves. There's a lot of it

in leaves. It's also in beans and some other foods, but there's a lot of it in green leafy things. So if you eat broccoli or kale or collards or Brussels sprouts, you're going to get calcium. And it's highly absorbable. The cow doesn't eat broccoli usually, but they eat grass. So they get calcium and it goes into their milk. Now the absorption from green vegetables, if you eat green vegetables, you're absorbing 50% or more of that calcium. If you drink milk, you're absorbing about 30% of it. So the dairy industry wants to push it and promote it. Yay, we got calcium. It's just just a byproduct it's a byproduct of the cow eating the green leafy vegetables and how does osteoporosis correlate with dairy consumption well it doesn't really no no don't get don't get me wrong i mean you do need calcium uh in your diet and people should have it and greens beans greens and beans are good sources

of calcium and that's great um but researchers at Penn State looked at kids this whole idea is kids need dairy for strong bones what they found is that if kids exercise that does affect their bone integrity but drinking milk does not the kids who avoid milk have every bit as good bone structure as those who avoid it and at the other end of life again you should have calcium it's important and in green leafy vegetables are good for a whole lot more than just as those who avoid it. And at the other end of life, again, you should have calcium, it's important. And green leafy vegetables are good for a whole lot more than just calcium. I mean, they've got tremendous benefits.

But no, that is a really poor strategy against osteoporosis. Osteoporosis is endemic in milk-consuming countries. And I think you talked about a study in your presentation the other night where the people that consumed the most amount of dairy had the highest incidence of osteoporosis or something like that. It depends on the study that you look at. The data are kind of all over the map. But my big concern is this. There is calcium in healthy foods and there's calcium in unhealthy

foods. Cheese is an unhealthy food. Same with milk. So if I've decided that, I mean, there's calcium in your driveway, in the asphalt. I mean, there's lots of places to get calcium. That's not like where you want to get it. So if I decide, okay, duh, I'll get my calcium from milk. Milk consumption is tightly linked to other hormone related issues like prostate cancer. A study at Harvard University, 34,000 doctors. The milk drinking doctors had a much higher risk, more than 30% higher risk of getting prostate cancer compared to the other men. And prostate cancer is already really common. Anything that pushes it by 30% is like terrible. So they did another study with almost 50,000 participants and showed that the risk of prostate cancer among those consuming the most dairy was about 60% higher than the other men.

So these hormonally, and it's not just the hormones in cheese, dairy products also have hormonal effects in your body. They alter your hormonal balance. Because what's the dairy trying to do? It's trying to make a calf grow fast. Well, it also makes your prostate cancer cells grow fast. You don't want that. That's the IGF-1, right? IGF-1, yeah. Right. Exactly. A calf has a little bit of IGF-1, insulin-like growth factor number one. It's in the calf's body. The calf suckles from mom. And nature's system is that the lactose, sugar, and the proteins in the milk go into the calf's body,

stimulate the production of more IGF-1. And the calf grows. And the calf, now nature, if I can kind of put it this way for a minute, nature is sensible. Nature says, you don't want this to go on too far. How about we get weaned when you don't need to nurse anymore? When you can eat, stop nursing so that your IGF-1 level will start to fall. And that's what happens in calves. Their IGF-1 falls.

So they're not going to get cancer, which comes from the unbridled growth, inappropriate growth of cells in their body. Human beings decided, I'll drink the milk of another animal all my life and i'll never get weaned and there won't be any biological consequence of it well um prostate cancer is like not something you want to have so i mean there are many many issues related to dairy but we've talked about the prostate cancer and the hormonal issues which are really underappreciated so if i'm an athlete and I'm looking to I'm looking only at like I want to make gains right I would imagine that IGF-1 looks like an appealing thing to be taking into your body because it's gonna stimulate growth right but it's also like lighter fluid on cancer cells so you take one with the

other well when bodybuilders inject anabolic hormones i mean they all know that these are risky for them um there's there's a natural way to grow in the natural way to have your body adapt to exercise and then there are unnatural ways that people yeah and it's it's interesting when you compare uh you know human milk to cow milk and do like a line by line comparison of how it breaks down. It's much lower in all of these hormones and everything else. And, and you, you know, obviously nature has designed this to be the best possible sort of nutrient for a baby human to sort of grow and be healthy. Right. Well, you're not going to be, you're not going to grow to be as big as a couch. Right. But the calf on the other hand has a much more ambitious gross growth curve and so they end up huge big fat

you know in a very short period of time um so it's a hormonally active thing the other thing about it is just pure calories um how many americans know that the just cheese alone is 65 000 calories in the average person's diet. Over the course of how long? One year. One year. The average person consumed 65,000 calories worth of cheese in 2016, 2017. They're going to do it again in 2018.

Yeah, it's an amazing thing. And so people are thinking, how do I lose weight? Just, I mean, leave off the cheese. You're going to go a long way toward it. I know, but Neil, it's so good. I'm addicted to it. I would go vegan, but there's no way I could give up cheese. I just, I got to have my cheese.

People, you know what? When I wrote The Cheese Trap, it's funny. I thought I would be saying some interesting things and hopefully useful things. I've done quite a lot of interviews and it's amazing. Every interviewer I talk to says, I'm hooked on it. I can't break away from it. But here's what I think is going on. It's partly because it's salty, partly because it's fatty.

People like salty, fatty things. And by the way, ounce per ounce, there's more salt in cheese than in potato chips. It's like two ounces of potato chips have 330 milligrams of sodium. Two ounces of cheddar has 350. Two ounces of Velve have 330 milligrams of sodium, two ounces of cheddar has 350, two ounces of Velveeta has like 800. But there are opiates in cheese. The casomorphins are casein-derived morphine-like compounds. Casein-derived morphine-like compounds are casomorphins. They are in the milk protein and they are released into the calf's body. They go to the calf's brain and they have a calming effect. They attach to the very same receptors that morphine

would attach to or heroin or Demerol in my brain or your brain. And here's what happens. Eight-year-old kid is at a party with his parents and there's a cheese train that stinks like old socks. And it doesn't, you know, it takes a little taste it does smell the casomorphins work on the brain and suddenly as the opiates kick in and release dopamine anything that that is associated with it suddenly starts to be nice oh i love that aroma it's like a first cigarette first cigarette does not taste good but the nicotine goes to the brain that stimulates dopamine too and suddenly oh i love that or a, 16-year-old kid finds a beer. It tastes creepy.

Once the alcohol works on the brain, suddenly it's a hot summer day. There's nothing he craves more than that taste. So that's what's going on. It is a drug effect that we now call, oh, it's just a food. It's just natural. There's nothing natural about dairy products. Yeah. And it really is the big barrier for people to get over.

I think there's a lot of people who would be interested in adopting this nutritional lifestyle, but they just can't get over that hurdle of cheese. I know for myself, anecdotally, giving up meat wasn't that difficult. I realized I realized like, I never really liked it that much anyway. I just ate it because that's what you do. And it was in front of me. But when it came to giving up cheese, that was sort of a painful couple of weeks, you know, and, and as somebody who's endured many detoxes over the course of my life, uh, I knew like, Oh oh this is just like when i was in rehab for alcohol like i have to weather this but if i stick with it i can get to the other side and i can free

myself from the grips of this thing that is like occupying geography in my brain in an unhealthy way so you know people like you know people always say to me well what about balance like what if you just eat everything? It's okay. Just be balanced in what you're doing. But you remain a prisoner of these casomorphins that are constantly calling to you. I'm happy to say there is cheese methadone now. Treeline cheese, which is made by Michael Schwartz's company, which is wonderful.

It's made from cashews. You don't have to impregnate a cashew and so there are no hormones in it but it tastes just delicious or Kite Hill from San Francisco Kite Hill, Miyoko's, there's tons of great brands they use exactly a standard cheese production process

but they start with almond milk not cow's milk or Miyoko's. It's a cashew based. It's a work of art wrapped in a fig leaf or in this beautiful black Mediterranean ash. I mean, Miyoko's cheese is a work of art. Or Treeline. We had an event on Long Island and Michael Schwartz was debuting Treeline cheese. Alec Baldwin was there as our host and everything. And I was talking to everybody. I didn't have a chance to taste the cheese.

So as I was leaving to drive to the airport, Michael gave me a little chunk of this stuff. I shouldn't call it stuff because it was very pretty. But this was his tree-lined cheese. And I took a nibble on the way to the airport. And I know it's totally botanical. There's no actual dairy in there. There's no case of morphins. But it was out of this world. I ate the whole thing

that he gave me. So, so the point I'm making is you can have cheese, just have the non-animal ones. And then even, even then it's a treat. And for many people, it's a transition towards simpler, simpler, simpler, simpler foods. But if you're a cheese addict, that's a good way to help you to realize, okay, I, you know, I, there is a path for me that won't hurt me. Yeah, it's never been a better time to make this transition because finally the sort of food science has caught up. And these alternatives actually are incredibly delicious and much healthier than it used to be. I mean, it used to be a lot harder. And, you know, after we do this podcast,

you're going to go in and you're going to taste Julie's cheeses. I mean, she spent the best, the better part of the last year and a half, two years, like turning our kitchen into a laboratory to try to crack the code on plant-based cheeses. And she's really come up with some amazing stuff. I'm so excited about it because I really think that if you, and like with your book and her book that's coming out soon,

to be able to say, look, you can have this. You don't have to be deprived. You can actually enjoy what you think you're going to be missing and do it in a healthy way. There's no deprivation whatsoever. Of course you can. You absolutely can. And where I think this matters, this is so important for parents of young kids. If you have a kid who's got asthma or respiratory problems or frequent allergies or migraine or juvenile onset rheumatoid arthritis, run, do not walk, run to a plant-based diet, get the the dairy out it's not going to cure every kid but

it's going to cure a lot of them um and in the cheese trap i discussed the story of chad sarno and chad was a really athletic young boy growing up in new hampshire except he couldn't get through a ball game because exercise induced asthma would would like lay him flat and he was allergic to pets and everything you know dogs cats everything um so uh eventually when he was 18 he went vegan and within about three months his asthma is completely gone his allergies are gone so now he works with ruby the online cooking school and for their whole plant-based division and if you think back go back in time and help him as a four-year-old or five-year-old to go vegan or or do it at conception.

There's no need for these sensitizing. This is the protein in milk. And get that out of your life. How many people pay such a price for these food addictions? The number of people that have contacted me, and I can't imagine what you're on the receiving end of, of stories of what happens when they give up dairy. It's just miraculous. People that are walking around with all kinds of chronic ailments their whole life, and in a matter of weeks of getting off dairy, these things just vanish. Yeah. And I got to say also, for all those people who are ethical

vegetarians, because they don't want to kill the cows. I, um, I think it's, this is a gift for them too, because when they realize what happens in the dairy industry and how much good they can do by switching to the plant-based cheeses, it's a wonderful thing to learn about. And if you don't mind, can I just say a word about that? Yeah. I mean, I wanted to get into that anyway, because I think there's a lot of people who are ethical vegetarians, um, who are, uh, ethical vegetarians who are uneducated on what actually goes on in the dairy industry. Because if you're in it for the ethical reasons, you need to understand the impact on these animals as a result of this industry. Because it's not any better, and in many cases, much worse than just eating a meat-based diet. It's a surprise because dairy products and cheese, they look so innocent, I have to say.

Well, you're like, well, the animal's not getting killed. You think the animal isn't getting killed. You think they don't kill them to make milk or whatever. Well, here's what happens. Cows don't produce any milk until they've been impregnated and give birth. And the farmer is not going to wait for nature to take its course. You know, hi have some chocolate and roses and maybe make love and maybe somewhere out in the field you'll get pregnant and you know the farmers impregnate the cows every single year. And this is not done

with grace. What they do is they take a glove that's really long. It goes from their fingers all the way up to their shoulder and they stick their left hand right up the cow's rectum so that they can feel the uterus through the rectal wall. They can feel the uterus and they grab a hold of it and they stabilize it. Then with their right hand, they take what looks like a knitting needle and they push it through the cow's cervix and they inject semen into it. And the cow is not going to object because she is chained by the neck. And then they write on her flank the date.

And nine months later, she gives birth. The gestation is about the same in a cow and a human. And when she gives birth, she looks down at her baby, who is in the hay, and the baby looks up at her and is blinking his eyes, and this mother-infant bond is extremely strong.

And the farmer thinks, isn't that beautiful? Except the farmer knows that, wait, wait, wait, wait. If this calf stays with the mother and takes the milk, then what am I going to have? So the farmer has an implement that solves this problem. It's called a wheelbarrow.

And the farmer picks up the calf, puts the calf in the wheelbarrow, and takes the calf away from the mother. And this bond is the strongest bond we have in nature. And so the mother fights back and says that effectively, excuse me, that is my baby. That's why, you know, why are you taking away my baby? And she will fight, you know, she will push. I mean, they don't really fight. They push and follow. And then the farmer slams the gate in her face. This is every day and every, you know, every dairy and the calf goes away and she will stand there and she will cry out all night long. And if you live near a dairy farm, you hear this crying and the baby will cry for mother. And she will be impregnated again three months later. And every year she will be impregnated. And this is where the hormones

then get into the milk. But from her standpoint, it's not so pleasant to get artificially inseminated and have your baby taken away. And this goes on about four times. When she's about four years of age, the farmer does the math and says, I'm not getting enough milk out of you for the amount of feed that I'm feeding you. So how about if I hang you up by the leg and I slit your throat and we can sell your meat for low grade hamburger. And I'm going to replace you in the milk line with your daughter, who is, I've been keeping here in a hutch. And the offspring go in, and they are artificially inseminated and separated from their offspring, and then their offspring. And that's what the whole dairy industry is. It's a meat industry that just forces the animals to get impregnated and separated and impregnated and separated before

they're finally killed at about four years of age. And I have to say, as you know, I'm a musician and I did a video for our song called Louder Than Words. And there's some people in Germany who did this beautiful video of a cow. Cows actually shed tears. And when, in fact, if you look at Carbon Works on YouTube and you look at Louder Than Words, look at this. You will see these, there are cows, here's a cow being taken away and she's crying. They actually have tears. But then you release them into a field. Not only do they have tears, they also jump around. There's nothing kind of funnier than a cow who is actually freed from this.

They jump around around they push each other and they play like they're a little puppy they may weigh like two tons but they jump around and scamper and they have such a wonderful uh existence so anyway so here's the message um people who have a heart for animals um are going to want to not just get away from the meat but they're going to want to get away from dairy too. It's interesting how speciesism works with the human brain and how we anthropomorphize certain animals and then refuse to anthropomorphize other ones. We've made a decision that animals that are for food fall into a certain category, and then we look upon other animals in a different way. But that's totally cultural. I know I don't need to tell you this.

In Korea, hey, I can have a dog. You know, I can have dog for dinner. In the United States, that is shocking. Where I grew up in North Dakota, beef were what's for dinner. In India, I mean, you can't even discuss that. So it's totally cultural. But what they all have in common is this willingness to make artificial rules for the sake

of short-term appetite and that's what we need to step away from right let's talk a little bit about antibiotic resistance and also the beyond the natural hormones the additional hormones that find their way into the dairy products that we consume yeah um the the uh in theory well cows are bred to be milk making machines effectively they still have a brain they still hurt and they still don't want to be part of this but they produce a lot of milk and on many dairies not all of them but many dairies bovine growth hormone is also used to push them to produce even more they get mastitis and then because mastitis is not good i mean this is an infection of the utter antibiotics are used and the rules are that you can't milk the cow when they're used when they're on antibiotics

whether you believe that or not is the whole other issue and the farmers who are not using bovine growth hormone have gone to the FDA and said we want to put on the the label of our carton that this is hormone-free milk. And the FDA said, no. They said, you cannot call your milk hormone-free, even if you're not using bovine growth hormone, because the FDA said quite correctly, whether you inject that hormone or not, out of that cow's udder, hormones are coming out in the milk. So there's no way for the consumer to know whether there's additional bovine growth hormone injected into the dairy products that they're consuming.

Correct. Correct. That's partly because the FDA wouldn't let them. But it's also because, frankly, the dairy industry is not interested in you knowing that brands do or do not have added stuff in them. And what is the health consequences of that additional bovine growth hormone? Does it just amplify all the other conditions we've talked about? I think it does.

To tell you the truth, I think whether it's organic or not, whether it's hormone treated or not, I think it makes relatively little difference. I think if you're consuming those products, you're at tremendous risk of weight gain, certain cancers, cardiovascular disease, diabetes. And when I say great risk, I mean tripling or quadrupling what your risk would be otherwise. So antibiotic resistance is more of an issue in meat products than dairy. You know where it's a big thing? This is an amazing thing. Americans eat a million chickens every hour. And the chickens are in the case. You bring them home. And you're not looking back in time to how the chicken got there. The chickens are hung up by their legs.

And they're eviscerated by a machine. The guts come out and the poop splatters around. And it's not a clean process. And then they go through this water bath to cool them down. But the feces gets in the water and it soaks into the muscle. The chicken muscle is like a sponge. It just soaks up that fecal material along with bacteria. And so you get home and you put it on your cutting board and you cut it up and you might have some on your fingers. And then your child comes in and you pat your child on the head and whatever these bacteria are spreading all around it turns out that when you do a genetic test on women who have had urinary tract infections and you look at the the bacteria that have infected them in the vast majority of cases it is an exact match for the bacteria that came from chicken manure chicken

feces and what happens is it just traces of it are on her fingers it's on the faucet it's on the knife you know you wash things but you didn't get every last bit and you swallow it and it grows in your intestinal tract and it's coming out it's in your body and it doesn't it's a pretty short trip over to the urethra, and she gets an infection. So the point I'm making, and then it gets worse. Because the animals were treated with antibiotics quite often, these bugs, they can conquer the antibiotic, and you're going to more and more and more challenging antibiotics to try to knock it out.

It's brutal. It's surprising. Now, I do not mean to say that a vegan diet makes all diseases go away but it makes diseases that are really common go away and there will still be issues you know people like you are still gonna have a bruise from the kind of training that you do and you're gonna strain your muscles and stuff like all you're gonna have the issues yeah you don't become superhuman like i certainly don't get sick like i used to but i'll get sick once in a while it can happen it's like i'm you know and i'm aging and all the things that happen to us you're not aging i've seen you and you're not

aging however however you're you know we're not going to live forever but you these unnecessary things that come from food do not have to happen if you leave the unhealthy foods aside right the interesting thing that that i've started to see you know, in my experience is that people are starting to look at me as an outlier. I've been vegan for 10 years now. And at first, there's a lot of interest and a lot of support. And then there's a lot of like, oh, well, he can do it. But, you know, he's unique or he's different or he has some kind of enzyme that the average person doesn't.

And so all of the work that I'm doing to try to establish that you can be fit and healthy and kill it as an athlete and all of that starts to rubber band backwards, almost like it's setting me apart rather than demonstrating that I can be an example for the many. And it goes back to this war of information that we're in right now. And when I see these news articles, it's very concerning to me because I'm thinking we need better PR

or we need a better, more organized system of promulgating this helpful information. There was, I think you were on this email train that went around a couple weeks ago that Garth Davis started. I think you were on it. There was a bunch of people, a bunch of leaders and doctors in the plant-based movement that were part of this sort of discussion because Garth was sort of expressing his frustration at these articles continuing to come out and confusing people. And he's like, what are we going to do to reverse this trend and start to sort of get

in front of all of this instead of reacting to it? Yes, but this is not the time for discouragement because things are moving in the right direction. It is true that as long as there is an industry profiting, they will fight and they will not fight fair. However, there's a lot of things happening. This afternoon, after we're done, I'm going to the LA Unified School District, where they are considering having vegan options available in the LA schools every day for every student. That's amazing. I mean, we didn't have that yesterday. And I don't know if we're going

to win or not. But just the fact that it's getting discussed, and you have the opportunity to go there and have a debate about it well we will win this whether it's today or next year we're going to win it sooner or later um the american college of cardiology passed a new policy that instead of the heart patient waking up to bacon and eggs in the morning that the foods that should be available and promoted are plant-based foods, meaning vegan foods to heart patients. That doesn't mean every hospital is going to follow suit, but they can. The American Medical Association is going to be considering a similar resolution shortly. So things, people that we thought... And we've seen the evolution of the food pyramid to the plate and how it's improving. Yeah, now I have to say... In no small part pyramid to the plate and how it's improving yeah

now now i have to say no small part due to the work that you guys have done it well if you don't if you have to say if you just let the the devil do his work um so to speak uh you don't get anywhere but if you work really hard you can change things i mean we we have an active lawsuit now against the california board of education because in 2015, the World Health Organization said bacon, hot dogs, sausage, bologna, all these foods clearly cause colorectal cancer. So they serve them to children in school. So we have a lawsuit to stop it. If you don't fight. How's that going right now? Is that out here in California? It's here in California. Yes. How far deep into it are you? We only just filed suit about two weeks ago okay so

we're on it's a it's a whole new thing um but people can join us as plaintiffs if they want to I to tell you the truth I think we're going to win um they don't want to give up these things because kids love bacon it's familiar food we don't get you know the kids are all happy to eat it um but I mean sooner or later people are going to realize you don't give cancer to children. Whatever you eat in your life as an adult, you don't start kids off on this path. 50,000 Americans die of this every single year. Let's stop it. So ultimately, we're going to win.

But we do have to fight. Yeah. And there's still a long road to go in terms of regulatory policy and labeling laws. Like it's amazing that, you know, we can't get sort of more information about how these companies are operating and translate that into, you know, sort of responsible labeling on the food product so that consumers understand what they're purchasing. Right. It's true. But the beauty of it is that we don't make our decisions all as a block and people are choosing on their own. People who listen to your podcasts are making choices. People who are all over the social media make choices and they really, they'll view this

idea that you can have a big greasy block of cheese that won't affect your health. I think people view that with a large grain of salt. So there are people who will be confused by that, and the industry is trying to confuse them. But I think the momentum is clearly in our favor. We just have to push as hard as we can. Well, you're doing God's work at PCRM, and I applaud you for you've been in the fight for a long time, and there's a lot of momentum and a lot of interest,

and it's pretty exciting what's going on right now. And keep up the good fight because you're making a huge difference in the world and in how people are viewing these products. And it's having a really positive impact on the world. So I applaud you, and I'm at your service. Well, thank you. Right back at you. You're reaching a whole lot of people. And I have to say this is a team effort, pushing for a healthy cause that many of us share, whether the beneficiaries are the animals on farms, the earth that is more fragile than we thought, or the health of ourselves and our families, it all goes in the same direction. families, it all goes in the same direction. So pick up The Cheese Trap. It's a beautiful, wonderful, amazing book that will basically illuminate you in many ways.

Oh, before we go, I have to say one quick thing, if you don't mind. Dreena Burton did the recipes for The Cheese Trap. And for all the people who think, I'm going to be deprived, whatever, try Dreena's fettuccine alfredo or try her cheesecake, try Drina's Fettuccine Alfredo or try her cheesecake which has no actual dairy in it and it will knock your socks off so yes there is yes we're going to get away from all the bad stuff

but there is an adventure waiting for you and fun things you know when you go when you go to a plant-based diet it's not like torture it's exciting because there's cool books

cool DVDs cool programs, cool recipes, neat products, all kinds of stuff. So that's the other part of the cheese drive. And if somebody's listening to this and they're like, okay, I'm ready. Like I'm ready to finally ditch the dairy, ditch the cheese. Like what is the first step or how do you help somebody kind of get over that hump and weather that kind of addictive detox that's going to take place? Great question. Focus on the short term. Don't focus on, don't feel like you've got to decide today forever. You know, you don't burden yourself with that. Step one, just get informed.

So in the cheese trap, I talk about like what the hormones are in dairy or the addictive qualities. Once you know, then take about seven days and just try out all the things you'll have instead. So instead of feta on my salad, I'll have a little avocado or whatever. I'll have the cheeseless pizza, which I saw in the freezer case. Let me taste it. I never made scrambled tofu for breakfast. Let me try that. So you're just trying out different things. That takes a week. Then the final thing is once you found the foods you like, That takes a week. Then the final thing is once you've found the foods you like,

now do about 21 days dairy-free or ideally just totally vegan, plant-based, healthy foods. At the end of 21 days, two things happen. Physically, you are healthier. You're losing weight. Your blood sugar is coming down. Your energy is better. Your digestion finally sorted itself out. But the second thing is that your tastes are different you start to like these foods and you you're looking back at cheese like it's you've kind of broken that bad love affair it's like when a smoker

quits after you got a month under your belt you couldn't like you couldn't pay them to go back because they broke free and they can feel that power that's what happens when you get away from unhealthy foods. Yeah, that's great advice. The only thing I think I would add to that is, I think it's really helpful to just root yourself in the day that you're having. Because if you conceptualize, oh my God, I'm never going to have cheese again. Like, what am I going to do?

I have a wedding. I'm going to go here. I'm going to try out. Like, you can talk yourself out of it instantaneously. So you can say to yourself, you know what? Tomorrow I'm going to have a Pizza Hut with cheese in the crust and like then go to Wendy's right after. But today I'm going to eat this and I'll worry about tomorrow, tomorrow. And just focus on what's your next meal?

What's the next best choice that you can make? And that tends to dissipate all the charge, like all the power out of that. So you don't have to worry about tomorrow. I mean, you should plan, of course, responsibly kind of plan ahead. But at the same time, the more you can just kind of root yourself in what you're doing in the moment, that tends to be helpful for me. It turns out to be remarkably easy. It's much easier than quitting smoking. And all the benefits are just huge.

You're going to be so glad you did. All right. So thank you. Thank you. Uh, you're going to go in and taste some of Julie's cheeses right now. I can't wait to Facebook live or like make some videos and stuff like that. So super fun. Uh, again, the cheese trap, how breaking a surprising addiction will help you lose weight, gain energy and get healthy. Pick up this book. You will not regret it. And also I thought it'd be great if the last time we did the podcast, uh, we ended it with one of your songs. So why don't we do that again? Do you want to do that? Should we do that? I would love to. Well, thank you for doing that. And by the way, louder than tears. Should we do that? Louder than words. Uh, yeah, do that. And, um, I got it

just this morning. I got a call. call it's it's making all it's all in the radio it's in a lot of radio stations are picking it up i never wanted to be a top 40 musician but apparently people like this song go on youtube look if you go on youtube look for carbon works there and you'll see works is the name of your band carbon works is the name of the band we are all carbon at the base of it these These are our works. So what can I say? I'll put a link in the show notes to that video. And go to our website. If you go to our website, which is carbonworksmusic.com,

you can sign up for the email list, and we'll give you some songs and stuff like that. There's a lot of cool stuff, because I love my musicians. They are the coolest people in the world. And you'll read all about them there. But louder than words, look at that. And if the words don't melt your heart, the images will. Beautiful, man.

All right. And while you're at it, go to PCRM.org. Follow Neil on all the social networks. You're at Neil. Is it Dr. Neil Bernard on Twitter? You would think I would know. BernardMD. I don't know what it is.

Just type in Neil Bernard. You'll find him on Twitter. Easy enough. All right. Thanks, man. Thank you. Peace. Easy enough. All right. Thanks, man. Thank you. Peace. All right.

We did it. What'd you guys think? Dr. Neil Bernard, always on point. Hope you guys enjoyed that. Once again, I'm in a hotel room here in Miami and there's all kinds of noise right outside my door. It's been so quiet all week and now they decide they're going to vacuum and have arguments right outside my door. So my apologies if you can hear that. It's certainly distracting me. I hope it's not distracting you

guys too much. Okay. Are you guys wondering about that song that we have featured throughout this episode, the interstitial music that sort of we've been using to cue or transition in between the intro and the interview. Well, that song is called Louder Than Words, and it's by Neil and his band, Carbon Works. And amazingly, Neil, he emailed me the other day and he's like, hey, check this out. This is so cool. Louder Than Words is now charting on the US radio top 40 list at number 17. And he showed me the list. It's insane. It's sandwiched in between the band Train and Taylor Swift. Like, insane, right?

How does that even happen? I don't get it. In any event, that's the song. And at the very end of this episode, we're going to take you out with the entire song, the full version. For all the reasons that we talked about today on why you gotta ditch dairy, please pick up Neil's new book, The Cheese Trap.

To ease the transition, like the how to Neil's why, pick up Julie's brand new book, This Cheese Is Nuts. It's got all the vegan cheese recipes you need. And you're gonna wonder why you ever ate dairy to begin with. Also, I wanted to let you know that Neil's participation in the petitioning of the LAUSD, the Los Angeles Unified School District, the school board around here, as you remember from the interview, he said he had to go down to this protest, to this meeting,

to kind of petition them to implement vegan options on the school lunch menu, the school lunch program. And he wanted me to let you guys know that that was quite the successful attempt. The board voted unanimously to pilot a vegan meal program, which is pretty awesome, right? I mean, it's pretty hard to move the needle with LAUSD. It's a massive organization. There's so much bureaucracy. So that is a huge win. And PCRM's nutrition team is going to work with them moving forward to help ensure the pilot's success, the pilot program's success. I shared some media related to this in the show notes. So be sure to check that out and many other resources related to today's episode in the show notes. And you can find

that at richroll.com on the page dedicated to this episode. I wanted to tell you guys a little bit about our new meal planner, the Plant Power Meal Planner. I know you guys have heard me mention it before, but I'm not sure I've really sort of explained to you in full or let you guys know just how excited I am about this. I mean, every single day I get emails from people and messages on Facebook with questions about nutrition. Like, I get it, I want to go plant-based, but I don't quite know how to do it. And I'll recommend them my cookbook or what have you, and they're still sort of confused, or where do I buy this stuff, or I don't really know how to begin. And so, meal planner is this brilliantly designed, incredibly intuitive

online program that solves all of those problems for everybody. And it does it incredibly cheaply, affordably. It's only $1.90 a week. And with that, you get access to literally thousands of plant-based recipes, unlimited meal plans, grocery lists, and everything is totally personalized and customized to you. So when you sign up, you have to answer all these questions about how you live your life and what your budget is and your time constraints and food you like and food you don't like and food you're allergic to, et cetera. So through like machine learning, basically like AI, this program starts to understand how you live and can anticipate your needs, what you like, what you don't like.

And that's how the customization takes place. It's really quite amazing what we have been able to come up with for you in partnership with Micah Risk and Alexis Fox, the two women that we collaborated with to prepare this program for you. It's really amazing. And we even have grocery delivery in 22 metropolitan areas. And the program continues to get better. They update it, we update it. And so it just is going to grow alongside with you. It's just amazing. I'm so proud of it because it's this incredibly robust service that we can just put out and offer everybody at a very affordable price point that solves a lot of your questions and your dilemmas and your problems and makes accessing the plant-based lifestyle just really facile and easy for you. So in any event, we're getting amazing feedback.

Everybody who has signed up for it is thoroughly enjoying it. I'm getting tons of messages and sort of videos and pictures on Instagram, people sharing what they're experiencing through this program. So I'm really proud of it. And I just want to sing down from the mountains about how excited I am about this for everybody. So please check it out. You can just click on Meal Planner at richroll.com. You'll see it there at the top, or you can type in meals.richroll.com and learn more

about it there. We've got a retreat coming up, Plant Power Ireland, July 24th through 31st. We have spaces still available. It's going to be at this incredible manor called Ballyvalon on 90 acres in the countryside of Ireland in the vicinity of Cork. We're taking a group of about 40 people through a really fun but intense seven-day experience of transformation. We're going to eat amazing food. Julie's designed this incredible plant-based menu. We're going to have cooking instruction. We're going to go running together. We're going to do tea ceremony. We're going to have intensive workshops on creativity, unlocking your best self, relationships, nutrition, et cetera. It's going to be really great.

Super excited to be doing it. And we're doing it in partnership with the guys from the Happy Pair. The Happy Pair lads, they're going to come down for a couple of days, join us and teach you guys all about what they've learned about this lifestyle. So there's that to look forward to. So if this sounds like something you'd be into, go to ourplantpowerworld.com. If you would like to support this show and my work, share it with your friends and on social media, leave a review on Apple podcast, subscribe to the show on Apple podcast.

We have a Patreon for those who would like to support my work financially. Thank you so much to everybody who has done that. Patreon recently underwent a whole like brand regeneration, and they're offering some really cool new services for creators and audiences. And I'm going to dig into this a little bit more deeply. I really want to be able to provide those who are supporting me through Patreon something exceptional and extraordinary beyond what I'm offering for free. So I'm thinking about other podcasters are doing it, creators are doing this, but I'm thinking about perhaps doing a monthly Ask Me Anything episode of the podcast, maybe do it on video, I'm not sure, And just making that available to the

people that are supporting on Patreon is sort of a VIP thing. Like in exchange for you contributing, you're going to get a little extra content that's not available on the podcast. Let me know what you think about that. You can send me an email through my website or hit me up on Twitter or Facebook and let me know your thoughts. If you would like to receive a free weekly email from me, I send one out every Thursday. It's called Roll Call. Basically, five, four, five, six things I've stumbled across over the course of the week, some articles I read, podcasts I listened to, a documentary I watched, a product that I'm enjoying,

just things that I want to share with you guys in an effort to connect with you more directly. As social media gets kind of blasted out and there's a lot of noise there, this is a nice way to just kind of be more directly in contact with you guys. So when you sign up, you'll get the roll call email, you'll get podcast announcements and occasional product offers. And that's it. I'm not going to really spam you or do anything else. It's just my way of being in touch with you guys more directly. I want to thank everybody who helped put on the show today. Jason Camilo for audio engineering and production and help with the show notes and the WordPress page. Sean Patterson for help on graphics and theme music, as always, by Analema. But of course, we have Neil's song by his band Carbon Works, Louder Than Words. We're going to take you out with that. So thank you, Neil and your bandmates for allowing us to share

your beautiful music with you guys today. Thanks for the love, you guys. I'll see you guys back here soon. Peace, plants, and as Julie would say, namaste. When we're all just shades of grey Walking alone with your demons in tow And memories that won't go away And if I reached out my hand And I found words I could say And you, trembling in awe Could you understand?

Or would you turn away? I hear your heart Beating your heart Singing your heart Louder than words could ever be. Louder than words could ever be. There is a time Here on the earth The colors are all

Too slow to fade And yet I'm holding Fast in my heart No one will ever take you away I hear your heart Beating your heart Singing Your heart Louder than words

Could ever be Louder than words Could ever be I hear your heart, beating your heart, singing your heart Louder than words could ever be Louder than words could ever be Thank you.