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There is an increasing wealth of information showing how a plant-based can provide myriad health benefits.
According to leading plant-based physician Dr. Neal Barnard, among the important information, these three studies are particularly compelling.
In this exclusive Plant Based News‘ video, Dr. Barnard talks about this data – and how it could inspire you to ditch animal products.
Type 2 diabetes and a vegan diet
“In 2003, the National Institutes of Health funded the Physician’s Committee to study head-to-head a low-fat vegan diet, and a more conventional diabetes diet for people who had type 2 diabetes, says Dr. Barnard.
“Up until that point, people were saying ‘if you have diabetes that means there’s too much sugar in the blood, don’t eat sugar, don’t eat too much carbohydrate that turns to sugar. If you need to lose weight, cut calories’. That was the conventional diet.
“We wanted to see if a completely plant-based diet – a vegan diet – with no limit on calories, with no limit on carbohydrates, would be as effective or maybe even more effective than the conventional diet. Well in 2006, we published the first results, and what we found was astounding.
“When you looked at people who made no changes in their medications at all, the people who went on the conventional diet – they did well. But for the vegan group, the diet was dramatically effective.”
Heart disease
“Dr. Esselstyn is a surgeon, but as he will tell you, he would rather not have to operate on people at all, he’d rather get to the cause of the disease,” says Dr. Neal Barnard.
Dr. Esselstyn decided to look at the potential of a plant-based diet to reverse coronary artery disease [CAD]. Dr. Neal Barnard says: “Dr. Esselstyn brought in people who had heart disease, who were at risk of death, who were on a list of medications as long as your arm. He said ‘let’s go to the cause’ – the cholesterol, the animal fat that’s in meat, dairy products and fish. He threw those off the plate completely. This was a completely vegan diet.”
Cholesterol improved, blood pressure fell, and the patients lost weight as they enjoyed saturated fat-free healthy vegan foods. Dr. Barnard adds: “The arteries were starting to open up again, their chest pain melted away…Dr. Esselstyn proved that when people adhere to this diet, they become just about bulletproof.”
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Prostate cancer
“I want to share with you the results of a really important research study,” says Dr. Barnard. “It was done by Dr. Dean Ornish. Now you know [him] as the medical genius who showed you can reverse heart disease through a program of lifestyle changes including a healthy diet. Well he then set his sights on prostate cancer.”
This study took a group of participants and divided them into two groups: a control group taking standard medical advice, and a group employing lifestyle changes including a healthy vegan diet.
According to Dr. Neal Barnard: “What he found, was that among the people who were in the control group, about six of them couldn’t wait anymore, they had to go ahead and have surgery or radiation before the study was over because the cancer was progressing too quickly.
“In the vegan group, nobody needed treatment in this year-long study because they were tracking their blood tests, their prostate-specific antigen [PSA] showed that their cancer wasn’t progressing. In fact, for them, their PSA levels actually dropped by about four percent overall, over the course of the year.”
