Posted Sept 15, 2011
If you’re serious about wanting to lose weight, Dr. Neal D. Barnard says you really need to do just two things: stop consuming animal products, and limit your use of oil.
OK, going vegan from an omnivore diet isn’t the easiest thing to do, particularly if you have a lifetime of habits related to eating meat, eggs and dairy. But switching to a plant-based diet while cutting out a lot of cooking oil can boost your metabolism, cut cholesterol, help fight diabetes, and improve your overall health, he says.
The approach is the foundation of the 21-Day Weight Loss Kickstart, a program he developed and now is a best-selling book, filled with recipes to help people change their diets.
Barnard hits Portland this week to talk about the Kickstart diet Friday at Powell’s City of Books, and Saturday at VegFest, where he’s the featured speaker of the two-day celebration of plant-based living. Barnard talked with us by phone recently from Washington, D.C., where he heads the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a nonprofit that advocates following a vegan diet and pushes for higher standards of research related to the way people eat.
America is facing an obesity epidemic. What is it about the Kickstart diet that’s different from all those other diets out there?
If you look at other diets, they’re very short-term and artificial. If you go on the Atkins diet, which says don’t eat any fruit, no pasta, no cookies, no bread, it’s not realistic and it’s not healthy. Or if you go on a starvation regimen of eating just 800 calories a day, you just can’t (sustain that), and the weight inevitably comes back. But if you’re eating truly healthful foods, you don’t need to limit calories, carbohydrates or portions, and it becomes a one-way street towards weight loss. This is very well-studied. Having said that, a vegan diet just means no animal products. My approach is a little bit more than that. It’s leaving out animal products, keeping use of oil low, and sticking to healthful foods to the extent that people can. There are so many vegan manufactured foods now, and some of what’s out there is not very healthful.
Why is this approach so effective in the fight against obesity and diabetes?
When you look around the world, the people who are the slimmest and live the longest and have the least occurrence of diabetes are people who are basing their diets on plant foods. In our research studies, it really does improve people’s diabetes, blood pressure and cholesterol. When it comes to diabetes, it’s fairly simple. The cause of type 2 diabetes is microscopic amounts of fat that build up in the muscle cells and stops insulin from working. We’re taking most of the fat out of the diet, so fat drains out of the muscle cells, and finally glucose can get into the muscle cells where it belongs, so the blood sugar falls, and in some cases people no longer have diabetes.
What about olive oil, which is a foundation of the Mediterranean diet and has some healthful properties? Are all oils bad?
Your body needs a tiny amount of certain fats, but beef fat and chicken fat are terrible. They’re high in saturated fat, which causes artery blockage. If you switch to olive oil, it’s just as fattening — every gram has 9 calories — but it’s lower in saturated fat, so you’re less likely to have artery blockage, but it’s not going to do anything for your waistline. What I’m trying to do is help people who would really like to lose some weight, and limiting oil does that. This is not a zero-oil diet, however, because vegetables and fruits and beans all have natural oils in them.
Didn’t we do the whole low-fat thing in the’90s with SnackWells?
Are you talking about the argument that when people went low-fat before, they gained a lot of weight? Well, that’s not true. It’s a myth that goes like this: When people knew that fat was bad, everyone stopped eating fat and bought Entenmann’s low-fat cookies, and everyone was pigging out on low-fat things, but they were eating so many carbohydrates that they all gained weight. That’s simply nonsense! If you look at the figures on what happened, the fat content of the American diet has remained high and has never dropped at all. The American diet has always been bad, but as the years have gone by, the average American eats 70 pounds more meat per year than a century ago, 30 pounds more cheese per year, and 30 to 40 pounds more sugar per year. My message is simple: Don’t do that.
So what should we be eating instead?
In the morning, if you want to make blueberry pancakes and have six of them, you can. If you want to pour maple syrup over it, you can. But we’re not going to put butter or even margarine on them. If you’re at an Italian place in the evening, start with a glass of wine, then your salad comes, so enjoy it. Then have a cup of minestrone, followed by angel hair pasta topped with seared oyster mushrooms, wild mushrooms, chunky tomato sauce, and if the waiter says, “How about an espresso?” say, “Sure, I’d love one.” The idea is there are many, many things you can eat and enjoy.
Why 21 days? Why not two weeks or a month?
It’s sort of a magic amount of time, because it’s long enough for you to start seeing the benefit. In that period of time, you’ll start losing weight, and your cholesterol and blood pressure will start coming down. Your energy will be better. Beyond the physical, your tastes start changing, and no one expects that. When a person changes over to a vegan diet, in the first week, it will seem light — you’ll wonder if you have to start listening to folk music now, do I have to wear tie-dye? The second week it starts to make sense, and by the third week you’ve mastered it and are starting to feel well. After three weeks, you can do anything you want to. You can throw it out if you didn’t like it, or stick with it if you did.
What are your favorite things to eat right now? Are there any foods you obsess about?
I love Mexican food, so a bean burrito with jalapeno thrown in is very typical of what I’ll have for lunch. Washington, D.C., is similar to Portland in that you can have anything you want — every cuisine is there, and they can all do vegan.
— Grant Butler
©2011 The Oregonian (Portland, Ore.)