Dr. Greger meets Pei – the interview!

There are few figures as well-respected in the world of plant-based nutrition as Dr Michael Greger. 

An American physician and New York Times bestselling author, he is the founder of NutritionFacts.org, a non-profit, science-based public service that provides free updates on the latest in nutrition research. 

Dr Greger threw his support behind ACTAsia’s Plant Forward Festival earlier this year, and I was very happy to get the opportunity to speak with him.

There is much we can take from his words, in terms of improving our own health, as well as the world around us. I am sharing some of the highlights of our conversation below, and will share more of his thoughts in future months. 

I have followed your work for a number of years, but for anyone coming to you for the first time, can you explain ‘Dr Greger’?

I was only a kid when doctors sent my grandmother home in a wheelchair to die at age 65. Diagnosed with end-stage heart disease, she had already had so many bypass operations the surgeons essentially ran out of plumbing—the scarring from each open-heart surgery had made the next more difficult until they finally ran out o options. Confined to a wheelchair with crushing chest pain, her doctors told her there was nothing else they could do.

Soon after she was discharged, a segment aired on 60 Minutes about Nathan Pritikin. He had been gaining a reputation for reversing terminal heart disease and had just opened a new center—a live-in program where everyone was placed on a plant-based diet and then started on a graded exercise regimen. My grandmother somehow made the trek to become one of its first patients. They wheeled her in, and she walked out.

I think what sparks many kids to want to become doctors when they grow up is watching a beloved relative become ill or even die. For me, it was watching my grandma get better.

My personal passion and the goal of NutritionFacts.org, the health charity I founded, is to share practical advice about how to put life-changing, life-saving science into our daily lives, with every bite we take. My research team and I comb through the latest in science-based nutrition research and pass along the information to you. I think my grandma would be proud.

There are impressive claims on your site, NutritionFacts, around anti-ageing and reversing diseases. What does the science tell us about the role food can play in these areas?

There may be no such thing as dying from old age. From a study of more than 42,000 autopsies, centenarians were found to have succumbed to diseases in 100% of the cases examined. Though most were perceived to have been healthy just prior to death, not one “died of old age.” They died from disease, most commonly heart attacks.

Healthy plant-based diets are associated with a lower risk of premature death and better odds for healthy aging, longevity, and delaying age-related diseases. The benefits of plant-based eating likely derive from increasing protective dietary factors like fiber while decreasing intake of pathogenic (disease-causing) dietary factors like saturated fat. For eighteen years, the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging followed individuals from a starting average age around 60. Researchers found that more fruits and vegetables, as well as less saturated fat, were associated with a lower likelihood of dying from heart disease within that period, but only the combination of elevated produce consumption and decreased saturated fat intake significantly reduced the risk of dying from all causes put together.

The lowest validated rates of Alzheimer’s disease are found in rural India, where people eat traditional, plant-based diets centered on grains and vegetables. In the United States, those who don’t eat meat (including poultry and fish) appear to halve their risk of developing dementia. And, the longer meat is avoided, the lower dementia risk may fall. Compared to those eating meat more than four times a week, individuals who have eaten vegetarian diets for thirty years or more had three times lower risk of developing dementia.

What would you say is the single biggest health benefit of eating more plants and how soon realistically after making changes, might people notice it?

I’ve written extensively about the many health benefits we can experience with whole food, plant-based eating—lower cholesterol, better circulation, better blood sugars, and more and more. For me, personally, I felt more energetic and less fatigued, I lost weight, and I felt empowered because I brought about those positive changes by making the decision to eat a whole food, plant-based diet. I took control of my own health destiny and was rewarded with a whole basket of benefits.

You have spoken previously about the traditional Asian diet as having many advantages – what are they? 

Much of traditional Asian cuisine is centered on whole grains, legumes and beans, and a variety of vegetables, roots, and stems—bok choy, cabbage, eggplant, mushrooms, gourds, bamboo shoots. There’s a reason it’s so easy to follow my Daily Dozen, an aspirational checklist I first introduced in my book How Not to Die that incorporates the healthiest whole plant foods into your everyday routine, when eating a classic Asian diet!

What are the disadvantages to it? I am imagining we are more fond of salt that you would like… 

You nailed it. As much praise as traditional Asian diet gets for being so rich with tofu and veggies, it loses a lot of points for the liberal use of salt in pickling vegetables for classic staples like kimchi.

Asia is changing rapidly, with more processed food and rising meat consumption. What concerns you most about this trend?

To see what effect an increase in meat consumption might have on disease rates, researchers studied lapsed vegetarians. People who once ate vegetarian diets but then started to eat meat at least once a week were reported to have experienced a 146% increase in odds of heart disease, a 152% increase in stroke, a 166% increase in diabetes, and a 231% increase in odds for weight gain. During the 12 years after the transition from vegetarian to omnivore, meat-eating was associated with a 3.6-year decrease in life expectancy. It pains me to see the westernization of once-healthful diets!

Are there specific Asian vegetables or ingredients you consider especially powerful for health?

Soy! Tofu, soymilk, miso, tempeh, edamame—these and other soy products, including the soybeans themselves, are high in nutrients you tend to associate with other legumes, including fiber, iron, magnesium, potassium, protein, and zinc.

For people like myself who are motivated by both health and compassion, how does plant-based eating connect to animal welfare? 

Over the last few decades, hundreds of human pathogens have emerged at a rate unprecedented in human history. Emerged from where? Mostly from animals. The AIDS virus is blamed on the butchering of primates in the bushmeat trade in Africa, we created mad cow disease when we turned cows into carnivores and cannibals, and SARS and COVID-19 have been traced back to the exotic wild animal trade. The United States’ last pandemic (before COVID-19), swine flu in 2009, was largely made-in-the-USA on domestic pig production operations.

Today’s factory farming practices typically overcrowd thousands or even tens of thousands of animals in cramped, filthy, football-field-sized sheds. Animals are intensively confined and live beak-to-beak or snout-to-snout atop their own waste. Animal agribusiness has become a breeding ground for disease. The sheer numbers of animals, the overcrowding, the lack of fresh air and sunlight, the stress crippling the animals’ immune systems, and the ammonia from the decomposing waste burning their lungs—put all these factors together and you have a Perfect Storm environment for the emergence and spread of new “superstrains” of influenza. Factory farms can be thought of as viral incubators for disease—a potential recipe for disaster.

How can we stop the emergence of pandemic viruses in the first place? Whenever possible, treat the cause.

And how does plant-based eating impact on the sustainability of our planet?

A plant-based diet may not only be optimal for our personal health, but for the health of our planet, too. The least healthy foods tend to cause the worst environmental impact, while the foods with the most nutrition just so happen to be the foods that cause the lowest greenhouse gas emissions.

A systematic review found that eating a completely plant-based diet may be the optimal diet for the environment. Diets that include meat require about 3 times more water, 13 times more fertilizer, more than twice the energy, and 40 percent more pesticides than those that don’t. Looking at the total environmental impact of omnivorous versus vegetarian versus vegan diets—that is, looking not only at global warming, but also ocean acidification, agricultural run-off, smog, ecotoxicity of the water and soil, and direct human toxicity of the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the soil in which we grow our food—eating eggs and dairy may be 9 times worse than plants, and eating eggs, dairy, and meat may be 17 times worse than sticking to plant foods.A systematic review found that eating a completely plant-based diet may be the optimal diet for the environment. Diets that include meat require about 3 times more water, 13 times more fertilizer, more than twice the energy, and 40 percent more pesticides than those that don’t. Looking at the total environmental impact of omnivorous versus vegetarian versus vegan diets—that is, looking not only at global warming, but also ocean acidification, agricultural run-off, smog, ecotoxicity of the water and soil, and direct human toxicity of the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the soil in which we grow our food—eating eggs and dairy may be 9 times worse than plants, and eating eggs, dairy, and meat may be 17 times worse than sticking to plant foods.

Thank you Dr. Greger!

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Find out more about Dr. Greger’s work at www.nutritionalfacts.org