Neal Barnard Lecture: McDougall DVD Review
The second McDougall Advanced Study Series DVD I’m going to review is from Neal Barnard, MD, president of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM). The two hour-long lectures on this DVD are “Breaking the Food Seduction,” and “New Dietary Approaches for Diabetes and Cancer.”
The first presentation is based on Barnard’s book of the same name, where he shows that a lot of the foods people crave, such as sugar, milk, chocolate and meat are actually chemically addictive. Barnard says a lot of this activity is a product of nature not leaving anything to chance.
He starts with the example of dipping a baby’s pacifier in sugar water and holding eye contact with the baby for several minutes while it sucks on the sugared pacifier. If you then leave the room and come back with a group of people, the baby will specifically track you around the room. There is a similar opiate effect in milk to ensure calves and babies nurse from their mothers. Chocolate ups the ante by building several addictive things into its product including caffeine. It’s an interesting lecture that also links some of these addictions to their ability to promote cancer, such as a graph where countries with the larger consumption of dairy products have the highest incidents of prostate cancer.
At one point, Barnard said that there is a drug they give in emergency rooms to people overdosing on heroin, who are about to die. It is an opiate-blocker and it stops their brain from being affected by the heroin, saving their life. If the same drug is given to someone who regularly craves and binges on chocolate, they will lose their interest in chocolate.
I first saw Barnard give this lecture several years ago when the book was released, to a room that included many invited members of the medical community, to try and get them to include nutrition as part of their practice. The lecture hasn’t changed too much over the years, but helps to show people that in many instances there is more going on than mere cravings or weakness when it comes to certain foods in our diets.
The second lecture starts with a look at the fundamentals of diabetes and how different diet-based studies have affected people with diabetes. After that, Barnard goes in a different direction than the standard vegan diet and cancer connection, focusing on studies where people already have cancer and how different diet choices affected their health and survival rates. It focused primarily on breast, colon, and prostate cancers.
I don’t think I’ll be giving away the results here if I say that a low-fat vegan diet seemed to provide the best result no matter what area of focus the study was addressing. But it was interesting to see how the low-fat vegan diet compared to other tests and control groups in the various studies. The second lecture is less interesting to a general audience, but still helps to reinforce the power of a low-fat vegan diet for everything from weight loss to diabetes prevention to reducing the symptoms of various cancers.
I’m a big fan of the McDougall Advanced Study Series DVD set. The DVDs cost $20 each, but you can get all five new DVDs for $60 total, including additional lectures from Howard Lyman, T. Colin Campbell, John Abramson MD, and Michael Greger MD. You can order them from McDougall’s website.
