The Wellness Scoop - Plant Power; Eat Yourself Healthy

Episode Date: July 23, 2019

Can we really eat in a way that supports and prevents some of the biggest health issues affecting us today? Will going vegan result in vitamin deficiencies? What's the difference between a vegan and a wholefoods, plant-based diet? Should we eat five or ten portions of fruit and veg a day, does it make a difference? What benefits does eating organic really have? With so much conflicting information about diet and lifestyle, this season finale takes a deep dive into the data, evidence and studies around the power of a plant-rich diet with Dr. Gemma Newman. Gemma goes into the facts and figures, as well as talking us through her own experience with the power of a wholefood, plant-based diet and what she’s seen in her patients, touching on everything from cardiovascular disease to high blood pressure, high cholesterol, B12, childhood nutrition, mental health, pregnancy and so much more. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit BetterHelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P.com. Hi, everyone, and welcome to the Delicious Yellow podcast with me, Matthew Mills, and my wife and business partner, Ella Mills. Hi, guys. I cannot believe this is our last episode of Season 3. to see Ella podcast with me Matthew Mills and my wife and business partner Ella Mills. Hi guys I cannot believe this is our last episode of season three the last 12 weeks have gone so fast and we are pausing now to go and have a baby which is even more surreal I'm actually going to really really miss it over the summer but we will be back I promise for season four in the autumn with baby

in tow and I'm also really proud, a little bit surprised to say that as this airs, we will have clocked up 5 million listens on the podcast since we launched last September, which is just absolutely nuts. And we just wanted to take a second to say a huge, huge thank you for all that support. We have so, so loved doing this, creating this space, and hopefully using the podcast to just share a little bit of kind of happiness and healthiness with you. So just a huge, huge thank you from the both of us. So today's episode is all about helping us feel that little bit healthier. And it's one that I've been so looking forward to. I mean, as you guys will know, there is a lot of confusing, conflicting information out there around diet and lifestyle, what to eat, what not to eat. And so today we want

to clear a little bit of that up. So we're going to be diving into the science, the data, the evidence, the studies around the power of a plant-rich diet and asking the question, can we really eat in a way that supports and potentially prevents some of the biggest health issues that we face today? So to help us in this, we have the brilliant Dr. Gemma Newman with us. Welcome, Gemma. Thank you so much for coming. Thank you for having me, Ella. Thank you, Matt. And so, Gemma, before we jump into the episode, can we just start with some basics? So why are five or ten portions of fruit and veg a day? Why vegetables? Why a plant-rich diet? Well, it's funny that we say five portions because that's the government guideline, but there was actually a study done by Imperial not long ago.

They looked at 95 studies and they pulled the data and they realized that if you have 10 portions of fruits or vegetables a day, then you actually reduce your risk of dying early by up to about a third. And they didn't find an upper limit of benefit at all. So basically, we know that the more fruits and vegetables we eat, the less likely we are to die early. Why? Well, they've got phytonutrients, antioxidants, vitamins, minerals. And in fact, some of the phytonutrients we haven't even named yet. There are that many. And also, they tend to have a synergistic effect. So we're not going to necessarily even be able to quantify how much benefit we're getting from these substances. And what is a phytonutrient?

It's a type of nutrient that only comes from plants and things like lycopene from tomatoes, sulforaphane from cruciferous vegetables. So if you think about kale and cauliflower and broccoli, those are called cruciferous vegetables. And they contain this amazing thing called sulforaphane, which helps the liver through phase two detoxification so basically allows your body to kind of process the things that are going through the liver effectively and what's amazing is that you get them from these particular vegetables okay so there's no upper limit so having your five a day is slightly not enough we want to be aiming for a 10 a day, but if we had our 15 a day,

we would keep seeing more benefit. Is that what we think? Yeah, that's what we think. And the question is, how much can you tolerate? If you look at sort of paleolithic man, we wonder how much fiber did they actually eat? And you can look at paleolithic poop

and you can actually see that they had about 150 grams of fiber a day. Really? Because the guidelines are 30 grams, aren't they? Yeah, the guidelines are 30. And the UK average is about 17 to 19, is that right? Yeah, that's right. And most of, you know, if you're having an ultra-processed diet,

you're looking at more like 15 grams. So you can see that actually the more the merrier, really, in terms of fiber from plants. Because you can't get fiber from animal foods. Just to kind of remind our listeners what does the fiber do why is that a good thing oh it's amazing for so many reasons um what stops you from getting constipated uh so therefore it reduces your risk of things like varicose veins and appendicitis and diverticulitis but also more than that what's

amazing is that it helps to feed your beneficial gut microbes so you've got these incredible microbes that serve you inside your gut and all over your body and when you eat fiber-rich foods like fruits and vegetables and whole grains and beans and lentils and chickpeas and oats like all these kinds of foods they help them to produce short chain fatty acids things like butyrate and acetate and propionate. And these are hugely beneficial because they feed our beneficial gut bugs and they allow them to then make things like serotonin, our feel good neurotransmitter. They help to modulate dopamine. They help us to make vitamins and minerals inside the gut from the bacteria that we're housing. So having a variety of plant foods is the best way of maintaining optimal

health. And we learned in a previous episode that up to 70% of your immune system is managed through your gut. Yeah, so you've got the gout, the gut-associated lymphoid tissue, and it all lives right there. There's only one cell of the lining of the gut, and then you've got all of these immune cells just right there next to it. And you have to, if you think about it, because it's the main way you're going to get pathogens inside your body is through the gut. And so, yeah, a lot of the immune system is there.

And that's also another way that the gut communicates with the brain. So the three main ways, you've got the vagus nerve, signals right up to the medulla oblongata, which is at the base of the brain. And in fact, there's more signals from the gut to the brain than the other way around wow so you think who's actually really in control yeah is it the gut bugs or is it you it's really complex but so amazing

that is unbelievable and i wondered if you could kind of share with our listeners a little bit more about how you came to your interest in plant-based eating and whole food diet because obviously you're a doctor and you went through medical school and but at that point you you weren't focused on this no I mean it's so interesting because I always love the idea of helping people I think it's cool most doctors do want to do that that's why they go into it mostly is I think I really want to help people I'm on a mission and then you know you do learn a lot of really really interesting things we learn about anatomy pathophysiology of disease pharmacology consultation skills there's there's so much in the medical degree nutrition doesn't play a huge part we learn more about deficiencies and where things go wrong

but i think the medical paradigm is very much there's something intrinsically wrong with the body and we have to figure out how to fix it. Rather than thinking the body can heal itself if we give it the tools that it needs. And quite early on, I realized that my toolbox was majorly deficient in a sense. I was doing my best for people, but things like chronic lifestyle diseases, hypertension and diabetes, for example, no amount of pills that I was prescribing would ever reverse these conditions. And I'd seen that people could reverse these conditions. So that always piqued my curiosity. I thought, well, what is it? Is it just food?

Is it just exercise? Is it both? Is it as simple as eat less, exercise more? No, it can't be. There are so many complex determinants of health and so I really delved deep early on and I discovered things like solution focused brief therapeutic approaches sort of psychological interventions for people motivational interviewing which really sort of began to help but I never experienced the power of preventative medicine and reversal medicine until I discovered

plant-based nutrition. And that was quite some way into my journey. And it was a personal thing, wasn't it? Yeah. That sparked it for you. Yes, it was. So my husband was running the London marathon and he was constantly getting injured and inflamed and he couldn't finish it. And he was fed up because he wanted to do well. And so he started to look into what do the ultra runners do? How are they able to run all of these kilometers and not injure themselves? And obviously it's partially technique, but he was thinking, what about nutrition? So he read books on ultra runners. So he read about Scott Jurek, Born to Run brendan brazier's thrive finding ultra

by rich roll and he thought hang on a minute these guys are all plant-based maybe i should try it and so he did and at the time i thought hmm aren't you going to get a nutritional deficiency and then i thought oh my god socially we're never going to be invited to anyone's house for dinner again well i think those are two of people's biggest worries. Yeah. And as a doctor, I hadn't really looked into it that much. I thought there must be something wrong with this. It cannot be what they're claiming it is.

So then I began to delve deep into the research. And meanwhile, he'd already started doing his thing. And he stopped getting injuries. And he was really impressed with his progress. So I started reading the books. I started looking into the literature. And then I felt a little bit embarrassed then, to be honest with you. I felt like, why didn't I know this stuff?

Why had nobody taught me this stuff? I thought, well, actually, now I'm looking into it, I can see that it's really beneficial. And his second marathon that he ran, he ran it an hour and 10 minutes faster than his first marathon through the change in diet. And that really got my attention, although I'd already read the research. And it just, it became a sort of a personal mission after that, because I started to see benefits for my family, diverticulitis, pains

improving, recurrent abscesses improving and wasn't there some blood work that you did am i right yes that's right so i'm sorry i'm a full stalker i'm fine with it yeah so i'd lost a lot of weight doing a low carb diet years before and so i thought well that must be the way to do it you know everybody says cut the carbs so i thought okay well i'll do that i just kind of followed convention and decided to cut the carbs. I was eating generally healthy, otherwise lots of chicken, lots of fish, lots of salads, what you'd expect to be eating. And I lost a load of weight. I was exercising every day. I felt good. And then, you know, feeling a bit sort of smug with myself, I thought, oh, I'll just check my

blood tests, my blood panel. I bet I'm really healthy. This is like a benchmark for the rest of my life. And I was really shocked because my lipid profile was raised. And I knew that. And what does that mean? So we look at various things. We look at cholesterol levels. And we look at something called LDL and HDL and the ratio of the two. Essentially, what you're looking for is the proteins that carry fats around the blood and the fats themselves. And it's one of the risk factors for heart disease. It's not the only one. The lipid panel is the main blood test that we do conventionally to look for these things. And my cholesterol levels were raised and my so-called bad fats, my LDL was raised. And I was in my 20s. And I knew at that time that my grandfather had

already suffered a heart attack whilst playing tennis and I was yet to discover unfortunately tragically that my father as well was to have the same fate a few years later he died suddenly of a heart attack and he wasn't obese you know so I knew that there was that family history but I just felt fairly fatalistic about it I thought well there's nothing I can I can do I've everything. I've eaten healthily. I'm the right kind of weight. I just have to chalk it up to that's my genetic destiny and left it at that. But then when I went through the research and I read about the work of the Lifestyle Heart Trial, Esselstyn studies, I began to really see there's a way of reversing this and there's physiological mechanisms that make it so so i tried it and a

month after i started my plant-based whole foods diet my cholesterol levels my lipid panel was all completely normal and this was over 10 years later two kids later exercising less than half the amount weighing more and i'd achieved something that i hadn't managed to achieve in 30 days yeah and i knew i knew how powerful it was because I'd read the data and I'd seen it I mean it's amazing. Are you familiar with Esselstyn's work? Yeah I am and it was one of the things that inspired me massively because I came at this obviously not from a medical background but from a very sceptical place. People had always thrown around phrases like you are what you eat and things like that and I thought well basically

I live off gummy bears and I'm not a gummy bear so I must be fine um and I started researching and reading as I was looking to help myself and I it was work like that where there was I didn't have a heart condition in that in that sense but you suddenly thought okay well if this is powerful enough to help with heart disease then surely it might be able to help me exactly but would you be able to kind of tell tell our listeners a little bit more about that absolutely i mean esselson is one of my favorite physicians because he's truly groundbreaking he got he got 24 people who were essentially at death's door i mean let's not beat around the bush they had heart disease they'd already had a cardiac event either a heart attack or severe angina they'd already had had surgeries often, artery bypass surgeries, angiography.

And there was nothing more that conventional medicine could really offer these people. And he decided to put them on a whole foods, plant-based, no oil diet. And he looked at their medical records. And he's seen that the previous 12 years before his intervention, they'd had 49 cardiac events between them, these people, like majorly sick. And what's so interesting is that those that stuck with the diet, he followed them up. And at the eight-year mark, after they started the diet, there was one event in eight years, and that was in somebody who had stopped doing the diet six years previous and gone back to

their normal Western diet. And so he decided to do more interventions. And back in 2014, he had nearly 200 people doing the same thing, whole food, plant-based, no oil. And there was no mandated exercise in his program. There was nothing but diet intervention. There's been other ones that are very similar, which have had really great results, like the Lifestyle Heart Trial from 1990 that showed regression of the plaques inside the heart vessels but they also had stress reduction and they'd had half an hour of mandated walking they'd had other interventions but esselson's work was just with diet and with the nearly 200 people that he helped back in 2014 it was

absolutely incredible i think they had an event rate of less than 0.6%. And then of those few people that didn't continue with it, he followed them up as well. I think out of nearly 200 people, there were about 20 that didn't go ahead and carry on. And in those that didn't carry on with it, there was a 62% event rate which is basically a hundred times different in the amount of people that had some sort of cardiac event and those that didn't that is it's just extraordinary yeah it's amazing and for any physicians who might be listening and worried about should i recommend this you know what about conventional therapies i'm not saying that you should you should not have a conventional way of looking at things and have the medications

or maybe the angios but I am saying that it's so powerful that if you don't tell people then in a sense you're really doing them an injustice because if they could benefit then it's worth them knowing. But what's the reason that for the medical profession this hasn't become a deeper part of training if these things are out there? Well it's a really good question And you would expect that once Esselstyn's work was published, that the cardiologists would be banging on his door saying, you know, I want to know. But I think there's a mixture of things.

There's partly his ignorance of his work or the work of the other people doing these things. Partly it's remuneration. Doctors are generally good people, but obviously, especially in the US, they have to make money through, generally through procedures and medications. You don't get money for talking about nutrition. So it's not something that's really on the radar in terms of training or indeed, you know,

future training. So that might be part of it. But for the NHS, for example? For the NHS, I think it's just, it's a resistance to learning about things that are not perhaps practical? I ask myself this question because we do have physicians who are interested in lifestyle medicine, for example. Like, you know, they've got the American College of Lifestyle Medicine. We've now got the British Society of Lifestyle Medicine where they talk about lifestyle and nutrition as one part of that. So there is a resurging popularity for lifestyle,

but there's a lot of skepticism around nutrition and I don't know if it's considered to be a little bit of an inaccurate science perhaps like you don't necessarily have the same data endpoints a lot of the time it's very hard to do randomized control trials you can do them but even when you do there are so many other factors confounding factors in people's lives that make it quite difficult and you can't really ever run long-term randomized control trials, which are considered to be the pharmacological gold standard, which in some senses, you have to train yourself to open your mind. Because I think medical training sometimes in some ways closes your mind to looking at other possibilities. So I'm hoping that this kind of education will help to open up the minds of doctors as well as the public.

But they don't need to worry because, I mean, there was a trial called the COURAGE trial, which proved that angiography in stable patients was actually no more beneficial than medical therapies. So you've got nothing to lose. If someone's not having an acute heart attack right there in front of you, then they may not actually benefit from an angio as much as they would from diet advice. But you can't just look at one study. So you've got the lifestyle heart, then you've got Esselstyn's work, which has spanned over a long time back from the 80s all the way up to 2014 and beyond. And you've also got one from India called the Mount Abu Heart Trial from 2011, which is another really interesting one. They had 123 cardiac patients which had been proven by

angiography and they analyzed 360 lesions and they were analyzed by two independent radiographers so this is basically people who have active heart disease and thinning of the coronary arteries which is means more likely to get a heart attack in the future. And of those that stuck with the whole foods diet, there was a 91% trend towards regression. So you can see that people are making improvements, you know, even with quite sort of small interventions over a short period of time. And even in those who didn't see regression of these sort of thickening inside their arteries, what's great about a plant-based diet is that it encourages the lining of the artery to make something called nitric oxide, which really

helps to make it much more supple, much more responsive. It can bring your blood pressure down to normal. And it also means that you can stabilize the plaques that are there, which is also a really important part. So even if you find that if you're on a whole food plant-based diet and your angiography shows that you haven't unfortunately managed to reverse some of the plaque formation in your vessel you're still much less likely to get a clot because the plant-based diet is forming a stronger cap over those plaques so it's helpful in so many ways and outside obviously heart disease is the number one killer in the world right now. Yeah, in the Western world, the number one killer. And I think a person is admitted to hospital in the UK every three minutes for the heart attack. That's British Heart Foundation.

That's what they tell us. So it's number one cause of death and we have to take it seriously. Obviously, you see patients for all kinds of things all day, every day. Do you find this is helping across the board? Are there studies and science and data to show it helps all kinds of things all day every day do you find this is helping across the board are there studies and science and data to show it helps all kinds of other things you know other common issues like high cholesterol high blood pressure the kinds of things that people would often go and see a gp for absolutely and it's funny you should say that because one of the first people that i was brave enough to talk about plant-based nutrition with had high blood pressure and i he was so funny because he he sat down in the consultation he looked at me and he said

I've been sent home from work and I've been told not to come back and I looked at him I thought oh my god what's he done you know because when you're in a GP consult you you never know what someone's going to come in with and I thought you hear all sorts of stories so I said what's happened why why did they tell you not to come back and then he explained that he was a driver he worked at the airport he had a spot test medical his blood pressure was sky high and they said you can't you can't drive here we're going to tell the DVLA go to your GP get it sorted out you're going to have to take the test again you're going to have to have a proper medical before you can come back to work and he was distraught because he loved his job and back then i thought well we've obviously got tablets i've always got my tablets to rely on and i told him about tablets and he said i don't want

to be on tablets i said well what do you want to do he said i want to go back to work there must be another way and i said well there is another way would you like me to tell you about plant-based nutrition he said what's that he's a South African and he was a heavy meat eater being South African he loved his meat and he wasn't an obese man so you know it wasn't because of any kind of a weight issue I said look realistically with the blood pressure this high it was over 200 over 120 I think which normal would be less than 130 over 80 120 or less is optimal so he was way off I said normally with a blood pressure that high we're going to need to use at least three tablets and we're going to need to use them gradually over time low doses of each gradually increase them and we may just about get it under control. I can't

guarantee it would ever be normal. And he said, there must be another way. I said, well, let's try and eat fruits, vegetables, whole grains, beans, lentils, chickpeas, oats, herbs and spices. And he looked at me, this look on his face, it was hilarious. He said, oh, I'll give this plant thing a try. And I thought, oh my God, I really hope this works because he's not going to be happy coming back and if it doesn't so I told him a few things to eat I gave him a few recipe ideas I'm always telling patients about your stuff by the way Ella just so you know and I told him to have a couple of tablespoons of flax seeds a day because I'd read a couple of studies showing that that brought blood pressure down as effectively as an antihypertensive medication and I also told him about the benefits of hibiscus tea for the same reason.

I've read a couple of studies on that. So I said, look, two cups of hibiscus tea a day, two tablespoons of flax seeds a day, crushed up into a powder, so it's more bioavailable. Crack on. These are breakfast ideas. Here are some lunch ideas. Here are some dinner ideas.

Go for it. And he did. Came back to see me the following week blood pressure was completely normal in seven days after seven days i was completely stunned i couldn't believe the results myself i told him to come back to me again the following week i actually brought him back three times because i couldn't believe it wasn't a fluke and i did his medical personally as blood pressure stayed completely normal. And he was delighted. And then of course, you know, when you get those kind of results, you tell everyone. So he was telling everyone about it. Again, I can't say

that everybody is going to have such dramatic results as he did. And I've tried it with many patients. There have been many people that have had very, very good results. I've not seen anybody have no results with it. I think it depends if you're very elderly and you've had a high blood pressure for a very long time, it's probably not going to be so effective. But you'd be surprised. I had one elderly gentleman who was in his 80s and he brought his blood pressure down to normal through diet as well. And I was really surprised because he was also overweight and the results were jaw dropping to me. And in a sense, it makes my job so much more fulfilling and I say this to other doctors you know we all want to help people heal

and you know get get to grips with their bodies and and heal their own bodies and to be able to help with that process is tremendously fulfilling more fulfilling than anything else I've ever done in medicine yeah I can I can't imagine mean, people must feel like it's completely changed their life. It really does. And I have to say there's very few areas of illness and disease where I haven't seen data. I think plant-based nutrition has the power to improve, halt or even reverse 14 of the top 15 causes of death in the Western world. So I've seen data on diabetes. I've seen data on diabetes i've seen data on heart disease i've seen improvements and mechanistic data on cancer autoimmune diseases that there's quite a lot of different diseases that seem to have benefits and there's different

mechanisms at play but it's very powerful and the only nutrient that people sometimes like to dwell on from a fully plant-based diet that you may miss is B12. So you just suggest a supplement for that, but otherwise nothing else is needed. So it depends on the person, but quite often we're very good at storing B12. So if someone has a B12 blood test and their levels are high, they're probably quite good at storing it and it'll be in their body for up to five years. B12 comes from microbes in the soil. So if you're eating grass-fed beef, then they'll probably be munching away on grass and soil and getting their B12 from the soil. And in years gone by, we would have probably got our B12 from the same source. You know, you get vegetables from the ground, untreated water, that's where

your B12 lives. Nowadays, we don't eat vegetables straight from the ground and we don't drink untreated water and unfortunately a lot of the meat that we eat is heavily processed or factory farmed which means that they're not going to be getting any access to the soil either so their feed is often well it's always going to be fortified so really when you're on a plant-based diet you're simply cutting out the middle cow, I guess you'd call it, because you're going to be giving yourself the B12 that is made by microbes directly rather than having it recycled through another animal. In terms of other things, as I say, it's a little bit more individual. I always like to recommend vitamin D because most of us are vitamin D deficient and some of us are not very good at

making vitamin D, predominantly from sunlight. So that's not necessarily a diet thing. I say that to everybody, whether they're plant-based or not, it's a good idea to check your vitamin D levels. I also like to recommend algae oil. Again, it's not necessarily a plant-based issue, but some people are not very good at converting omega-3s the short chain to the long chain omega-3 fatty acids and so fish is an excellent source of long chain omega-3 fatty acids and that's that's what the main areas that you get omega-3s from so you ask yourself well where do the fish get it from are the fish good at making this conversion well it turns out that they swim in the ocean and they go up on algae all day.

And the algae is actually where they get their long-chain omega-3 fatty acids from. So if you want a direct and pure source of long-chain omega-3 fatty acids, then algae oil supplements are a really good way of getting that. It contains EPA and DHA. And you haven't got the same contaminants that you would have, say, if you were taking something like cod liver oil supplements or even fish you know you've got you've got the saturated fat in fish you've got zero fiber but these days fish is not the health food that it used to be because you've got the dioxins and the heavy metals and the pcbs and the ocean you've got all these industrial chemicals that they bioaccumulate because they're swimming in it all day and then as the larger mammal we

eat them and then we bioaccumulate that same stuff in our fat cells. So it's not, unfortunately, the health food that it used to be. And what about other things? I think there's a fear sometimes of protein and calcium and iron. And I wanted to touch on as well pregnancy, for example, and bringing up your children. Obviously, it feels very relevant to us at the moment because there is a lot of fear around this it feels like yes i know i'd really like people to be reassured

by listening to me talk about it today because actually having a plant-based diet can be tremendously helpful if you've if you've got a well-planned plant-based diet then for children you're going to be minimizing their risk of allergies and chronic lung infections and ear infections in childhood and there are studies around that yeah and there's really good books around that as well there's not a great deal of direct research on children because yeah you know you can't really ethically do that but there was an interesting study actually on completely vegan children it was published by the american journal of clinical nutrition and it was on british children in the 1980s and 90s and they were

followed up for about 13 years from pre-pregnancy and beyond and what was really interesting to me about that study was that it was very rare for anyone to do studies on kids in that sense but also when you say pre-pregnancy and beyond what ages were they then so when i say pre-pregnancy i mean that the mums were pregnant and that they were vegan right so they were being followed up as well as the babies and the young children i see and the follow-up period was 13 years and what they discovered was that the vegan children had really good micronutrient profiles across the range compared to their omnivorous counterparts. But there were two nutrients that they had less of, and that was calcium and saturated fat. And of course, nowadays with our obesity epidemic, then I don't think it's a bad thing that the kids

had less saturated fat in their diets. And the great thing about calcium is that it's actually more bioavailable in plant sources so as long as you're mindful to ensure that you've got lots of things like leafy greens and and nuts and seeds and fruits then you're going to have plenty of calcium as well so so you don't actually need as much exactly yeah i think broccoli has 52 bioavailability compared to cow's milk which is more in around 30% range. Wow. Something like that.

So as long as you're mindful to include calcium-rich sources of vegetables and fruits, then you're onto a winner. My favorite is that hummus is so rich in it. It's so. Because you've got sesame seeds and chickpeas. Exactly. And I'm like a hummus fiend. So it's brilliant. Hummus is amazing.

So yeah, there is a lot of fear around it. I do try and reassure people. I think that kids probably need a little bit more in the way of fat in their diet than grownups do. And so making sure that they're having things like nut butters or tahini as well, avocados, olives, if they'll tolerate it. Kids can be so fussy sometimes.

I think that's the thing as well. But pregnancy, making sure that, you know, your little baby's going to be so lucky because she's got you eating all these amazing foods and, you know, so her taste buds are going to be primed for these delicious foods from day one, which is going to be quite helpful. But yeah, I've had a lot of messages from people saying,

if you really stayed vegan throughout your pregnancy, is that safe? And then a lot of people saying, you really stayed vegan throughout your pregnancy is that safe and then a lot of people saying you know are you really gonna bring up your child as in you know gonna plant-based way is that safe and there's a lot of emotion around it yeah absolutely and I totally understand it because this information doesn't feel that widely available and therefore obviously and you feel a huge heavy sense of responsibility and you don't want to get anything wrong and you feel a huge heavy sense of responsibility and you don't want to get anything wrong and you feel like you are kind of going against the status quo which is a challenge yeah i'm sure it is and luckily because i'm looking at it from a medical

perspective i feel very fortunate to be able to look at the you know the evidence at hand and i can say that but even the british dietetic association and the american dietetic association they both say that a well-planned vegan diet is perfectly acceptable for every stage of the life cycle and even has potential benefits for disease reversal and what disease are they talking about they're talking about things like heart disease and cancer are number one and two killers so looking at it logically there's really no reason to to be worried as long as you are giving them a varied diet and that would be the same for anyone so say you have an omnivorous child and all

they'll eat is hula hoops and you know chicken nuggets that's clearly not a varied diet they will fall into severe problems so i think you just have to look at it logically and say well okay if i'm giving them a well-planned whole food, plant-based diet, then really there's nothing that they need to worry about. Just as with anyone, I'd say that the guidelines say, for example, that kids should have vitamin D supplementation. So I think vitamin D would be important. B12 obviously is an important one. And I particularly favor algae oil supplementation because it's a direct source of long-chain omega-3s and as I say some people are not great at that conversion. So you touched on earlier the link between the gut-brain axis and there's some studies that have come out that have started to show links in to support

mental health from improved nutrition and improved gut health can you expand a bit more on those? Yeah absolutely mental health is one of the biggest issues of our time. And I think in clinic, I see a lot of patients with chronic diseases. Mental health hugely impacts those. It's hard to separate cause and effect, but I think it's becoming a big problem. And there is a lot of data now to suggest that what we eat can really affect our mental health. There was a systematic review in the Journal of Psychosomatic Medicine. They looked at nearly 70,000 people and they showed there was a significant

improvement in anxiety if you were eating fiber-filled foods rather than processed foods and rather than processed meats. And the SMILES trial was done back in 2017, which was a modified Mediterranean diet intervention. It's a randomized control trial and they had people who had social support and people who were just basically given advice on having lots of things like whole grains and vegetables predominantly basically a modified Mediterranean way of eating and they showed that their depression rates were much much lower I think there was like a third depression remission versus 8% in the social support group. But what's interesting to me is the plant-based diet aspect of it, because there's quite a lot of data to show that specifically plant-based eating patterns are very good for mood.

There was this weight loss trial that was done about 10 years ago. They had 106 obese people and they split them into a healthy low-carb and high carb diet group and those that had the healthy high carb diet lost about the same amount of weight as those on the healthy low carb diet which was fantastic but really interestingly they had much better well-being scores they had much better anxiety and depression scores much better productivity scores so there was something about eating more of a whole food plant-based approach that improved their mood so much more and i think that's partly due to what i said before about the short chain fatty acids and how they promote dopamine and serotonin release through the microbes but also tryptophan availability tryptophan is the amino acid that we need to make serotonin and although meat is very high in tryptophan,

you'd think that the low-carb dieters would feel good because of that, but actually they didn't seem to. And there's a postulation that it's because actually there's a reduced bioavailability of it because there's more competition with other amino acids in this very meat-heavy diet. And so if you're having more plant-based tryptophan sources, then potentially you've got better mood outcomes because it becomes more bioavailable. So you've got the fiber-based tryptophan sources, then potentially you've got better mood outcomes because it becomes more bioavailable. So you've got the fiber with the tryptophan. So things like sunflower seeds and sesame seeds and butternut squash, they're very high tryptophan foods and they've got the fiber as well.

Folate, for example, has been associated with improved mood scores. Carotenoids in kind of your yellow and your orange fruits and vegetables also improve mood scores you know there's lots of different mechanisms that would that would give you benefits so it's really really powerful it's absolutely extraordinary there's a lot of kind of quite confusing terminology around vegan vegetarian plant-based whole foods etc etc and i think i just wanted to clarify what we're talking about here is a whole foods diet right it's not a vegan diet for ethical and environmental reasons is a kind of different conversation and one obviously we all massively respect but this is about human health and in that

that's about a plant-based diet is probably a better description of it because it is about eating lots of plants whole foods so it's about cooking it's about eating better description of it because it is about eating lots of plants, whole foods. So it's about cooking. It's about eating those kind of fresh fruit, veg, chickpeas, lentils, etc. So it's not so much about like the meat substitutes and the cheese substitutes and like vegan cookies and things like that. Is that right? That is right, Ella. You've got it in one. It's about having plants and whole foods as close to their natural state as possible and just enjoying home cooking seasonal cooking ideally organic fruits and vegetables as well i think is a really useful thing and so why organic well there's some data emerging that

well for example there was a study in the jammer not that long ago it was a french study funded by the french National Institute of Health. And they looked at people who were eating organic foods versus people who weren't. And they attempted to correct for confounding factors like socioeconomic status. So basically, if you're more well-off, then you're more likely to buy organic things. They tried to counter for that. And they found that basically those that ate more organic food had on average around 25% less chance of developing cancer than those that didn't. And there's now quite a lot of strong links between heavy pesticide exposure and lymphoma, for example. Monsanto is being sued.

Obviously, they've been taken over by Bayer. I imagine there's going to be a lot more cases coming up. And you just also mechanistically, you've got to think, well, what's actually happening? Pesticides are antibacterials. They are designed to kill bacteria and fungi. And so, you know, you kill the bacteria, fungi and viruses in the soil, you've got barren soil. It leaches the minerals from the soil. The soil is not going to be as healthy. It's not going to be as nutrient rich as if you have non-pesticide filled soil and the topsoil gets washed away very easily by the rain and the soil becomes quite concrete like whereas if you have regenerative no-till agriculture especially but just you're avoiding pesticides then you're going to be more likely to have a

soil that's going to be beneficial for your own gut bugs you know you don't want to be eating food that has something in it that will then potentially be detrimental to your own gut bugs you know you don't want to be eating food that has something in it that will then potentially be detrimental to your own gut microbes so that's why i think organic is is preferential it's hard isn't it because people can't always afford that yeah it is it's significantly more expensive it's significantly more expensive and this is why the whole food system has to change this is why i i often talk about regenerative no-till agriculture and subsidizing fresh fruits and vegetables rather than subsidizing meats, because we need to make these changes for the whole population's health and the planet's health as well. It's so important. And the kind of economy's health, you know, I understand that completely. And if you live in a place with a high street that's got, you know, it's got Gregg's and KFC and McDonald's, you know, it's going to be the last thing on your mind.

But all I can say is, like, really try to look into, well, what can I afford? Perhaps look at the environmental working groups, Dirty Dozen and Clean 15 list, which is a list of the foods that absorb the most pesticide and the least. So you just at least buy a few things that might be organic and a few things not and try and cook at home try and learn to cook with things like staple foods like whole grains brown rice lentils beans chickpeas these foods are so cheap and so easy to cook with yeah like dolls and bean chilies and things these humble foods exactly and they are they are the best for our health so it's so easy and you can make like a humongous fat for very very little and this is where you come in ella because you can help people you can teach people

how to cook these incredible healthy foods these humble delicious foods it won't cost them a ton and they'll really benefit from it well i hope so i mean our biggest belief is that there's no you know it's amazing to understand the reasons behind it, but if it doesn't taste good and it doesn't feel doable, how long can it last? Exactly. It has to be a diet of abundance and joy. And deliciousness, yeah.

And deliciousness, deliciously yellow. This is it. You know, what you're putting in has to feel good and has to taste good. And that's the joy of a whole food plant-based diet, I think. And it's, obviously, it's not just about diet you know got tremendous importance of reducing stress and improving sleep patterns and feeling a sense of gratitude and love and all these things are great for autonomic nervous system but whole food plant-based diets is definitely one of the most

powerful things as well and so if you were going to leave our listeners with five take-homes, you know, if there were five things that they've heard and they're like, these are the key things I need to remember or these are the things I'm going to tell my friend or my colleague to spread the word, what would your five things be? Learn to cook a basic recipe, perhaps one new thing a week, just to kind of give yourself a little bit more of a repertoire. Because most people, they learn maybe five or six dishes

that they like to repeat each week just learn one new thing each week and make that one of your favorite meal swaps so if you like having a chicken curry think okay well I'm going to learn how to make a chickpea curry if you like to have beef bolognese think I'm going to make a three bean chili if you like to have porridge for breakfast think okay well I'm going to get whole grain porridge organic if I can I'm going to put a nut milk with it instead of my cow's milk. And I'm going to sprinkle some seeds on top because I heard that was good for me. Just one change a week, if you can, will lead to tremendous results. And then if you keep doing that week on week, you're going to have a life that supports the things that you want to do. You're going to have

a body that supports the life that you want to lead so learn a new recipe a week number two I'd say really aim to live with gratitude if you can which is really hard sometimes especially if you're struggling with a long-term condition but really aiming to see things in as much of a positive way as you can and focus perhaps on helping others or what's your purpose what's your meaning what's your reason for being because then that can also lead you to make these health changes rather than just sort of getting down and thinking, I've got to be more healthy thing. Now, what am I working towards? What am I wanting to feel like? What am I wanting to do in my life? So really identifying a sense of motivation. So I want to get healthier because I really want to

spend more time with my grandchildren or I really want to, you know, be able to run a marathon or, you know, identify your motivation. Yes, exactly. Identify what drives you and what will drive you towards your best possible self. So that's number two. Number three, I would limit antibiotics exposures as much as possible. So antibiotics are a good thing. They've increased our life expectancy by about 15 years on average, but they have long-term consequences that we're only beginning to discover through microbial health. They can be linked to long-term risks of things like autoimmune diseases and cancers. So really aim to only take antibiotics if absolutely necessary. That's number three.

Number four is limit other things that can damage your microbes so think about where do we get antibiotics otherwise well they come in the food chain mostly through the meat that we eat and so think okay let's eat low on the food chain so that again i'm limiting my ingestion of antibiotics through other places again thinking about pesticides in a sense that's another form of antibiotic because what you're doing is you're ingesting something that could damage your gut microbes so that's another thing and antibiotic because what you're doing is you're ingesting something that could damage your gut microbes. So that's another thing. And the last one would be sleep.

I think you've had Matthew Walker on here. So we all know the importance of sleep, aiming to get your seven, eight hours in, really prioritize it. And it will just make everything else feel a lot better as well. Amazing. What an incredible end to the series. That was packed full of information.

Thank you so much. Yes, there is so much more I could have said. Well, I think we're going to have to do a round two, but if anyone does want to learn more, Dr. Gemma Newman, she has her website and everything, but also her Instagram, which is just plantpowerdoctor.

She shares amazing evidence-based nutrition, studies, data, et cetera there. So that is 100% worth having a look at. And just the biggest thank you to everyone for listening I feel very emotional I'm thinking that we're signing off to go and have a baby exciting times I know it's absolutely insane isn't it um so we will be back once we've given birth to a little girl and um otherwise thank you guys so so much for sticking around for listening and if you do want to learn more as well on a plant-based diet and you're interested in it at the beginning of

season two we did also do an episode on the kind of key things from iron to calcium to b12 to supplements to vitamin d omega-3s all the questions that people often have and are confused about so it's about kind of how to eat a balanced vegan plant-based diet. So that might be helpful to check back in on. There's also the food and mood episode a little bit more on mental health, which we touched on today. And then in season one,

we've also got a gut health episode. So if you haven't listened to those, there's a little bit more listening for while we're away. And otherwise, we cannot wait to see you in autumn. Thanks so much, guys. You're a podcast listener, and this is a podcast ad heard only in Canada.

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