Voices of the Food Revolution. John Robbins

He lost about sixty pounds over the course of a year, at which point the diabetes was no longer detectable.

      Another man in the study had had diabetes for nearly twenty years and was on injections several times a day. He suffered from a complication called diabetic neuropathy, which is pain in the feet and ankles that comes from the nerves being attacked by the disease. I remember him telling me how miserable this had been, and that life was hardly worth living. After about five or six months on a healthy, vegan diet, he came in to say, “You won't believe this. My neuropathy is completely gone!”

      I followed with him for years because I had never heard of this happening before. In medical school we were taught that diabetes is a one-way street. But for this man, the neuropathy never came back. And we have seen this for many people since that time. What we discovered is that diet changes really are powerful. They vary from person to person, of course, but it is wonderful to see what can happen when a person puts a healthy diet to work.

      JOHN ROBBINS: You founded Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) in 1985. What does your organization do?

      DR. NEAL BARNARD: We promote preventive medicine, especially good nutrition. We also do clinical research studies. We have done quite a lot on the role of nutrition in diabetes, weight loss, and cholesterol management, as well as a number of studies looking at migraines, arthritis, and menstrual pain. We have done studies on the applications of dietary changes, such as on how people can make nutritional changes at the workplace or in doctors' offices. We also want research to be done better, meaning more ethically. So we promote alternatives to the use of animals in research.

      JOHN ROBBINS: When you publish your research in medical journals, have you ever been challenged for your advocacy of a vegan diet on the grounds that you may be concerned for the animals, regardless of the actual health data?

      DR. NEAL BARNARD: No, and there are a couple of reasons for that. First of all, let me say that concern for animals is a really good thing. I wish everyone were motivated by compassion, because that would make for a better world. And for myself, I wish that I had a keener, ethical sense earlier in life, because I have often reflected about the times when I drove cattle to slaughter or went hunting as a kid. We did a lot of things that, now that I am a little older and maybe wiser, I really wouldn't do again.

      Having said that, when we do a clinical trial, it goes through a rigorous process of independent peer review. Our statistics are all done by people who are unbiased and are masked to the specifics of the research. When they are evaluating blood tests and other results, they don't know who is in which diet group. So when the NIH or other funders or reviewers look at our data, they can see that they are without bias. As a result, our diabetes trial yielded six or seven separate research publications. The American Diabetes Association published our first results in its journal, followed by The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, The Journal of the American Dietetic Association, and several others.

      With that said, sometimes a broader social perspective can be helpful. People come in to see us because they want their diabetes to get better or they want to lose weight or to get their cholesterol down. But after they have been on a plant-based diet a little while, many end up saying, “You know, I read an article by somebody named John Robbins.” Or they read other enlightened authors, and they say, “The diet that is good for the environment is not much different from the diet that is good for my coronary arteries.” Or they read something about animals. They have these “ah-ha!” moments that I am glad to see, because it means they have that much more motivation for staying on a healthy regimen.

      JOHN ROBBINS: I actually find it a source of gratitude that the same food choices that are healthiest for us; that give us the strongest immune systems and the healthiest, longest lives; and that lead to the least susceptibility to diabetes, heart disease, and cancer, are also the kindest to other animals and the best for the environment. The fact that there is that coherence doesn't jeopardize or cast any kind of aspersion on the diet, it actually strengthens it and it shows that we are connected to the world in which we live in ways that we sometimes aren't even aware of.

      DR. NEAL BARNARD: Yes. And think back a few years. In the late 1950s and early 1960s it was becoming quite clear that tobacco caused lung cancer. The researchers doing that work found themselves absolutely convinced. And yet they still studied smoking in order to try to tease out what is it in the cigarette smoke that causes cancer, what happens to people over time as they develop lung problems, or other aspects of the tobacco-health puzzle. In the process, most cancer researchers stopped smoking. The same is happening now, a generation later, with diet.

      Now researchers are saying, “Wait a minute. Vegetables really are good for you, and so are fruits. And so is getting away from cholesterol, and, for that matter, from animal products in general.” There comes a time when research findings are so overwhelming. We have seen that, for example, with hot dogs and other processed meats and colorectal cancer. It is beyond dispute that these foods contribute to colorectal cancer. You simply can't be open-minded about it anymore because now the evidence is just open and shut. Even so, there are still open questions, and we still have to do our research in as unbiased a way as possible, and we have ways to eliminate bias among those who analyze the results.

      JOHN ROBBINS: Well speaking of research and public confusion, you and I have both been highly critical of The Atkins Diet. When Dr. Robert Atkins died, PCRM obtained and released a medical report on his death and there was an ensuing controversy. What actually happened there and most important, how does this reflect on the health consequences of the diet that Dr. Atkins followed and advocated?

      DR. NEAL BARNARD: Well it was quite a time. The Atkins books were at the top of the bestseller lists, and Dr. Atkins encouraged people to believe that they could safely eat high-cholesterol foods and high-fat foods without risk. All the while, he was hiding from the public that he had cardiovascular disease himself. When he died, his autopsy report laid out the facts. A cardiologist who lived in the Midwest asked for a copy from the coroner, because he felt it was important for people to know the truth. So he sent it to us and we released it to the press. People did, with some justification, ask why we were talking about a dead man's medical condition. I made the judgment that it was critical for those tens of millions of people who imagined they could safely eat gravy and bacon to know that they really were putting themselves at risk. Unfortunately much of the residue of that diet has continued. People still, in many cases, think there is something wrong with bread or rice and that there is something safe about pork rinds. That is a terribly dangerous lesson for people to have memorized.

      JOHN ROBBINS: There are many people who are afraid that soy products are unhealthy. Can you share some of your insights?

      DR. NEAL BARNARD: The Internet is a wonderful thing. It shares information very quickly, but it shares misinformation just as quickly. Many decades ago, researchers became aware that soy products and many other foods in the legume (or bean) category contain substances called isoflavones. If you were to draw the chemical structure of a typical isoflavone on a blackboard, it would look somewhat similar to estrogen—female sex hormones. Isoflavones are not estrogens, but they look somewhat similar. So some people then worried that, if isoflavones really did act like female sex hormones, then men consuming soy products might become effeminate or have a lower sperm count, or women consuming soy might be at risk for cancer. Researchers have studied these things, and it is very clear that in parts of the world where men consume large amounts of soy—for example in China or Japan, where tofu and soy milk have long been consumed—there has been no problem with fertility.

      Studies following girls who consume soy products during adolescence, when the breast tissue is forming, have shown that their risk of developing breast cancer is actually about 30 percent less than that for women who did not consume soy. So, if anything, soy products are helpful.

      We now have three research studies looking at what happens when women consume soy after they have had breast cancer—two in the United States, and one from China. They show that women who consume tofu, soy milk, or other soy products have about