I’m so glad to have Neal D. Barnard, MD, FACC, on my Plant Chat this month. Dr. Barnard is perhaps the world’s most respected authority on vegan diets. He is a faculty member of the George Washington University School of Medicine and President of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. Dr. Barnard is editor-in-chief of the Nutrition Guide for Clinicians, a nutrition textbook given to all second-year medical students in the U.S. He is also editor of Good Medicine, a magazine with a circulation of 150,000. He is the New York Times bestselling author of Dr. Neal Barnard’s Program for Reversing Diabetes and The 21-Day Weight-Loss Kickstart, and The Vegan Starter Kit. Keep reading to learn more about Dr. Barnard’s thoughts on vegan diets, health benefits, and more.
Sharon: What are the trends right now when it comes to more people becoming interested in vegan diets?
Neal: There are several things. First of all, there is a massive increase in interest in vegan diets. We see that in the marketplace. It used to be that the dairy case had dairy in it; now almond, soy, rice, and hemp milk is taking more real estate there. If you go to a regular grocery store, it’s starting to look more and more like a health food store—they are selling veggie-burgers, and plant-based entrees. It is growing very rapidly, and it’s growing in a couple of particular populations. We are seeing many doctors now interested in a vegan diet. We are also seeing many athletes going in this direction. The trend started years ago with athletes, like distance runners, then tennis, like Venus Williams, who used it to recover from Sjogren’s Syndrome and get her arm back. Ninva Djokovic went vegan and went on to win the US open and Wimbledon in 2018. Vegan diets have gone into basketball and football. The diet was previously known for just endurance, but now it also appeals to people who want more muscle mass. Even people like Lewis Hamilton, a five-time world champion of auto racing, has been vegan for awhile. It’s kind of become cool in the world of athletics. The overall population is not in good shape, while there are more and more people eating a vegan diet, those who have not yet done it are not in good shape. They are eating meat and cheese, they suffer from obesity and diabetes, and they are getting worse and not better.
Sharon: Why are people becoming so interested in veganism?
Neal: I think part of it is that the health effects and benefits of a vegan diet have become very clear. Partly it is the work we have done on vegan diets and diabetes and weight reduction, and that Dean Ornish has done on heart disease. The other part is that at some point people have looked up and realized that animals aren’t really interested in having their throats slit, and that the environment is altered by food choices, and that global climate change is accepted by virtually everyone and that it is not up for debate.
Sharon: What is the latest science on health benefits related to vegan diets?
Neal: It’s just the tip of the iceberg. In 1990, we showed that a vegan diet could reverse disease in Ornish’s work. The switch from beef to chicken is a waste of time. Getting animals off the plate allows the arteries to open up. With healthy lifestyle, we showed that diabetes could be reversed instead of just managing it. A vegan diet is going to work with insulin, to help avoid highs and lows, and allows for completely rewriting goals in order to get off insulin and get rid of disease. In fact, that is indeed a possibility for many people. With regard to cancer, it’s the second leading cause of death, and there is overwhelming evidence that diet plays a major role in cancer risk, particularly for hormone-related cancers, and also for digestive cancers like colorectal. More and more evidence shows that a vegan diet may help inflammatory conditions like rheumatoid arthritis, and asthma but the evidence there is not as strong.
Sharon: What is the #1 barrier for people in going vegan?
Neal: I think there is a natural reluctance to make any dietary changes, and that’s in many ways a good thing. Nature programmed into humans and animals a certain amount of dietary conservatism. In chimpanzees in Tanzania, they don’t eat a certain berry; if a baby chimp picks a berry, the mother chimp takes it out of their hands because this is of survival value. We evolved to be not too liberal with what we eat, and it makes perfect sense to stick with what we grew up with and the culture that brought it to us. This is natural. The problem is when we stick with what we grew up with, even if it is unhealthy. It allowed you to survive until you graduate from high school at least. When you ask someone to try tofu, they are programmed to think it could hurt them or that it’s not natural for them. However, if people taste and try it, they can become familiar with it rapidly, in a matter of a week or two they can feel comfortable. I think that some people have trouble visualizing what they are going to eat on a vegan diet, because their meals have been centered around meat and milk. If you think internationally, such as Italian spaghetti with tomato sauce or Mexican cuisines, where vegan foods are very familiar, such as a bean burrito, or cucumber sushi rolls, and Chinese vegetable dishes—there are many cultural dishes that traditionally don’t have animal products that are quite familiar to people. This can help people break through. We use a short-term time framework, for people who fear long term commitment. This is true of any habit change, such as smoking, drugs, and diet. The emphasis is on short term—for 3 weeks. What we do is ask people for one week not to remove animal foods, but to start exploring vegan foods. If you’ve never had almond milk on your cornflakes, try it. If you’ve never tried a bean burrito at Taco Bell, try it. Then for the second step, for 3 weeks you can go all vegan, which will be easy now because of all the foods you have picked out and are familiar with.
Sharon: What your top tips for starting off a vegan diet?
Neal: Learn how to love vegetables. For the person who is broccoli phobic, try teaming up your broccoli, kale, and Brussels sprouts and douse them with Bragg Liquid Amino, seasoned rice vinegar, and lemon juice—the sour cuts through the bitter, and they taste almost sweet. Then you’ll discover that you come to love broccoli. The same goes for adding nutritional yeast to cheese-less pizza, which is a handy topping that a lot of people haven’t heard about. Planning ahead is the best advice for anybody—if you’re on a plane for six hours figure out in advance what to keep in your bas, so you aren’t stuck with eating Pringles and M&Ms. When you travel, get a mid-range hotel that has a refrigerator and microwave in the room. I encourage people to recruit a family member or a coworker to join in on their experiment for their short-term vegan diet. You can ask them if they’d like to do this for 21 days so you can do it together. Couples do this a lot. Almost invariably, the other has weight loss or cholesterol reduction. If it’s not a long-term commitment, the partner usually says sure.
When people are jumping in to a vegan diet, you may wish to take advantage of extra motivators. For example, watch What the Health, Eating You Alive, or Forks Over Knives. Watch it together, and when the movie credits roll they can decide that they want to try it. You can give the Vegan Starter Kit to someone else as a gift. I learned from my mother, who had high cholesterol levels and wouldn’t change her diet. I gave her the books I had written, and they stayed on the same table for three months and she hadn’t read them. The secret was to put a post it note on the cover of the book, saying I gave you this book and on page 37 and 83, I thought of you. They are going to read that whole book. You can do it with a movie; go onto Netflix to see What the Health, and between 45 minutes to 1 hour, I thought of you at exactly that point. They are going to watch it and call you.
Sharon: What does your Vegan Starter Kit offer to people who are considering giving a vegan diet a try?
Neal: We did have a booklet called Vegetarian Starter Kit, many groups copied it, but I decided that, while all those are great, people needed a bit more. We wanted to create a book, unlike my previous 19 books, it was not a big tome; it was something you could read in 45 minutes and it could make you feel confident about how to do a vegan diet and succeed. I am answering all the main questions that people ask, and it’s a book that looks small and thin—you can throw it in your luggage to read on a flight and by the time you get off the plane you’ve read the whole thing. My goal is to lay out a 2-step system with a couple dozen recipes, plus some nice things, like lots of tips for what to choose at restaurants—all of these things in a book form. I don’t care why you are doing it in this book, I’m just showing you how to start it.
Starting a vegan diet is very much like arriving in Paris or Milan or Barcelona; you’re on vacation, you plunk down in a hotel, and the foods are different than you are used to, and you’re not sure what to buy; it might feel weird. But after awhile, you figure it out and you feel fine. It does take people awhile to figure it out and what portion sizes to eat. I ask people to take out some paper, and write down breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks; then write down foods in each category, try them, and then decide which are your favorites. Then go to the store and pick up the winners; this also includes restaurant choices.
This pasta dish is packed with plenty of vegetables and beans, making it more satisfying than and just as delicious as a traditional Italian pasta marinara.
Ingredients
Scale
8 ounces dry whole-grain pasta
2 cups thinly sliced white button or baby portobello mushrooms
1 (6- to 9-ounce) container prewashed fresh kale, chopped (or spinach, collard greens, frozen kale, etc. See note)
2 zucchini or yellow squash, spiralized or thinly sliced
2 cups commercial pasta sauce
1 (15-ounce) can no-salt-added or reduced-sodium white beans, drained and rinsed
1⁄4 cup nutritional yeast
Optional Flavor Additions:
1 (14-ounce) can water-packed artichoke hearts or hearts of palm
4 garlic cloves, finely chopped
1⁄2 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1⁄4 cup julienned fresh basil, for garnish
Instructions
Cook the pasta al dente according to the package directions.
Sauté the mushrooms in a pan on medium heat using 1 tablespoon water to prevent sticking. After 3 minutes, add the kale and any optional flavor additions. Cook for 2 minutes, then add the zucchini. Cook for 3 more minutes. Remove from heat and set aside.
Once the pasta is finished cooking and drained, add it back to its original pan and stir in the pasta sauce, beans, and nutritional yeast. Cook on low heat for 1 to 2 minutes to warm the sauce.
Gently fold in the sautéed vegetables to the pot. Serve warm and with additional nutritional yeast or julienned basil on top, if desired.
Notes
If using other types of leafy greens, you will need to adjust the cooking time. Cook collard greens for 5 to 10 minutes, spinach or frozen kale for only 1 minute.
Per serving (1⁄4 of recipe): 452 calories, 26 g protein, 87 g carbohydrate, 13 g sugar, 4 g fat, 8% calories from fat, 18 g fiber, 393 mg sodium
(7 votes, average: 3.86 out of 5)
Loading...