Moby (00:00:12):

Hi, Lindsay.

Lindsay (00:00:13):

Hi Moby.

Moby (00:00:13):

Hi Bagel.

Bagel (00:00:14):

Hi, Moby.

Moby (00:00:16):

Bagel. You sound very <laugh>. I don't know. Kind of like smooth.

Lindsay (00:00:21):

Yeah, she's like, that's her radio voice. <laugh>,

Moby (00:00:23):

<laugh>. And, hi everybody. Hi. So we want to keep the intro to this podcast episode very brief because we have a very, not long, long, but like, we have definitely like a good fantastically long conversation with today's guest.

Lindsay (00:00:37):

We do. And I'll tell you why. It's long because Dr. Neal is a man who has done so much in his lifetime that has shaped the way that I see animal activism and all activism and human health. And he has so many amazing things to say. But also this man has done so much, can I say some of the stuff he's done?

Moby (00:00:58):

Well also, I wanna disqualify, I wanted to just qualify <laugh>. I made it sound like I was disqualifying.

Lindsay (00:01:04):

I wanna disqualify everything you said. Yeah.

Moby (00:01:06):

So basically, I don't wanna disagree, but I disagree with everything you are and everything you just said,

Lindsay (00:01:10):

<laugh>. No, I'm really upset and I actually kind of love it. So,

Moby (00:01:12):

No, I want to qualify it by saying I have a lot of animal rights, activist heroes. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And we've, we've spoken to some of them, but Neal Barnard has been my activist hero since the eighties. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Um, when I first heard about the work he was doing, as we talk about in this episode, the fact that he's a doctor and a researcher and a scientist and his organization, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, it's filled with doctors and researchers and re re Why am I having a hard time with words today? What

Lindsay (00:01:42):

Happened? You feeling a little scared?

Moby (00:01:44):

<laugh> <laugh>. So everything they do is so legitimate and serious and they change policy and they get universities to change their policies. So please continue. I don't, uh, disagree with anything you are or you've said. So sorry for my little addendum there. No,

Lindsay (00:02:02):

But I think that really matters. I mean, you've been on the animal activism scene for so long and you have met so many of these people and you know about everyone. And the fact that this man is leading the way, I think is no small feat, but he's done so much. He's, he's written over a hundred articles for medical journals. He's written over 20 books about it. He was part of the research that changed the way we see type two diabetes as a reversible disease. That was him. Yeah. Like he has done so much and continues to do so much, uh, about the way that we think about animal testing, the way we think about disease. It's massive. What he's doing. He's in dc he's lobbying, he's trying to work with the NIH work on the farm bill. Yeah. Like he's doing so much and constantly and he's, he's a hero for sure.

Moby (00:02:48):

So, without further ado, let's go talk to Dr. Neal Barnard. Yes. Dr. Barnard <laugh>. Okay. So we've known each other for a while. I was thinking of the first time, I believe the first time we met there was a P-C-R-M Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine Event in DC with Alec Baldwin. And did I ever tell you about what I tried to do at that event?

Dr. Barnard (00:03:21):

I don't know if I know the end of this story, <laugh>, but

Moby (00:03:23):

It didn't, it didn't work out. So if you remember, this is probably 2005, maybe two early-ish. 2000 at

Dr. Barnard (00:03:31):

The organization of American States. Yes,

Moby (00:03:33):

That's right. It was big fancy column columned building. So the honoree that night was Dr. Heimlich

Lindsay (00:03:40):

From the

Moby (00:03:41):

Maneuver from the man who had invented the maneuver. Okay. And so I was sitting with me in park and a few other people I tried to choke because I thought it would be the greatest story in the world, <laugh> to get the Heimlich maneuver from Dr. Heimlich. So I was actively like drinking water and eating quickly in the hope that I would choke. 'cause like, wouldn't that be the most amazing thing you could say? Like, wow, I got the Heimlich maneuver from Dr. Heimlich. Were

Lindsay (00:04:09):

You close enough to him where he could have come up and just like, I

Moby (00:04:12):

Was gonna like run over, like if I started choking, I'd like hurry over there and be like, dude are like, uh, gesture. And so I didn't joke, which is probably for the best, but <laugh> <laugh>,

Dr. Barnard (00:04:25):

You could say that about choking. Well, actually you could have had a heart attack because there were doctors there who could have done CPR. But

Lindsay (00:04:31):

Is there a famous heart doctor? Oh, that's true. Who has

Moby (00:04:34):

Some sort of Dr. Jeremiah CPR <laugh>, like getting CPR from him. That's, but like to get the Heimlich maneuver from Dr. Heimlich. Ugh,

Lindsay (00:04:44):

That would've been so good. Missed opportunity. I, I should've, I'm so sorry.

Moby (00:04:47):

Yeah. I should have just like positioned some food in my mouth, pretended I was choking.

Lindsay (00:04:51):

You should have, well, if we ever invent time travel, I think we should go back to that day and try

Dr. Barnard (00:04:55):

It. Oh, that's so lovely. I do remember that. You didn't read the teleprompter.

Moby (00:04:59):

It's not my strong suit.

Lindsay (00:05:00):

Moby has a hard time with teleprompters.

Dr. Barnard (00:05:01):

No, you didn't want to. We wrote up all these bland things and you looked at it and you said, that's not me. And you said, stop. Turn off that teleprompter. And you spoke from the heart and it was perfect.

Lindsay (00:05:11):

Did you cry?

Dr. Barnard (00:05:11):

It was wonderful. I cried.

Moby (00:05:13):

Don't think, I don't think I cried, but it was, so here's okay, I've been a vegan now for 37 years and of course in the vegan movement, there are a whole bunch of luminaries. You know, there's Peter Singer, there's Ingrid Newkirk, there's Gene Bauer, you know, like so many people. But in my world, from the time I first became aware of you in the eighties, you were always sort of like at or very near the pinnacle. Like you and Peter Singer from you are like the, I wouldn't say rock stars. Okay. Rock stars. 'cause you are a great musician as well. But you were always sort of at this like the academic pinnacle, you know? 'cause Peter Singer being a professor of philosophy at Princeton, you being a medical doctor and I don't know if you have other PhDs. Probably do. Do you have other PhDs?

Dr. Barnard (00:06:03):

No one one's enough. Okay.

Lindsay (00:06:04):

Yeah. That's a lot.

Moby (00:06:05):

<laugh>. It's more than that. I mean, I'm a college

Dr. Barnard (00:06:07):

Would. No, but thank you. Thank you for saying that.

Moby (00:06:08):

So that event, I remember just like, I felt the way like a guitar player would feel meeting Jimi Hendrix or something. Oh. Like, so

Dr. Barnard (00:06:19):

Thank you. Thank you.

Lindsay (00:06:20):

And that was the first of many times that you got to meet. Yes, exactly. Yeah. Which is very cool.

Dr. Barnard (00:06:24):

But it was wonderful. I have to say it. I remember it very clearly and it was wonderful to have you there. And I'm glad you didn't choke <laugh>. I'm

Lindsay (00:06:30):

A little sad about it, I'm honest, but I'm like, glad you're okay or whatever.

Moby (00:06:33):

So there's so much stuff we want to talk about. And, and to contextualize it a little bit, we've already mentioned that you, you've been my vegan animal rights here. Do we, are we still allowed to use the word vegan? Why not?

Dr. Barnard (00:06:43):

Do

Moby (00:06:43):

You use it? I don't know. Some people

Lindsay (00:06:44):

Or do you say plant-based now? Well,

Dr. Barnard (00:06:46):

I think, I think they mean different things or they ca they could mean different things. Vegan means I don't need animal products at all. Plant-based for many people means that, but there are some people who use that word just to mean I'm mostly plants it sometimes it's not too exact. I see. I wrote an article for a journal and I used the word plant-based. 'cause I thought it would sound more normal. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. You know, and I thought vegan would sound political and I didn't want them to reject it. So I said plant-based it. She wrote back it said, you mean vegan? Just call it vegan. And so, huh. So I said fine.

Lindsay (00:07:14):

I guess vegan is more uncom like you probably aren't buying leather. Vegan is more of like a touching on everything. Could be. Yeah. I mean in addition to diet. Whereas plant-based feels maybe just purely diet based. I don't know.

Dr. Barnard (00:07:25):

I not, I use, I use plant-based when I want to sound more normal,

Lindsay (00:07:28):

I see <laugh>. It depends on the company.

Moby (00:07:31):

I mean, I know some people, you know, we, because we talk to a lot of plant-based vegan luminaries. And some people won't use the word vegan. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. I like the word vegan. Yeah. Quite a lot. I mean like plant-based is a very gentle, nice way of describing it. But I'm a vegan. I've got it tattooed on my face. Like it'd be weird to have a vegan tattoo on your neck and then say, oh, but I'm plant-based. Yeah.

Lindsay (00:07:53):

Plant-based for life is so much. It's real estate on your neck.

Moby (00:07:57):

It would also involve a different font. Yeah. <laugh>. Like more curly cues and flowers. Yeah. <laugh>. So before we really get into the vegan meat of the matter, oftentimes when we get to interview almost everybody, what I really like to do is go way, way, way back to childhood because I don't know anything about your childhood. Um, and clearly the person you are today, as is true for all of us, is the result of formative childhood stuff.

Lindsay (00:08:26):

Or in spite of which is also really

Moby (00:08:28):

Interesting. Yeah. So super basic question. Where were you born and what were things like when you were growing up?

Dr. Barnard (00:08:35):

I was born in a military base in Massachusetts. My parents were just coming from Germany where my father was in the occupation forces. And uh, I happened <laugh> and they got a 53 Chevy and drove to Fargo, North Dakota, where I grew up.

Lindsay (00:08:49):

You grew up in Fargo? Ever been there? No, but I've watched it portrayed and depicted in many <laugh>. I was,

Dr. Barnard (00:08:55):

I was gonna say yeah. Yeah. If you've seen the movie. Yeah, exactly.

Lindsay (00:08:58):

That's it. <laugh>.

Dr. Barnard (00:08:59):

Yeah. Kind of. Yeah. That's where I grew Up.

Moby (00:09:01):

I have an ex-girlfriend who was from North Dakota, but Fargo was like her big city. Yeah. Her parents were farmers, so they were like three hours from Fargo. Like, Fargo was like bright lights, big city for them. Levels of cold that I still can't believe are real. Mm-Hmm.

Lindsay (00:09:16):

Don't like that.

Dr. Barnard (00:09:17):

Yeah. Yeah. It's very cold

Moby (00:09:18):

There. Yeah. And what then led your parents to move to Fargo?

Dr. Barnard (00:09:24):

My father was a doctor and I think it was a job that appealed to him. Um, he had grown up in the Midwest himself in a cattle ranching family in Illinois. And uh, when they decided that, you know, they, the military thing was done and they heard it was a good, safe place to be. And that was true. You could walk down the street and bike down the street and do things and it was a good place to be. You

Lindsay (00:09:45):

Enjoyed it Yeah. As a kid. Yes,

Dr. Barnard (00:09:47):

Exactly.

Moby (00:09:47):

How were the mosquitoes in the summertime? Oh, they're

Dr. Barnard (00:09:50):

There. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. But, but they're not vampiric, um, any more than anywhere else.

Moby (00:09:54):

Okay. And then the winters, it goes down to about like minus 18,000.

Dr. Barnard (00:09:58):

Um, every winter it's, there's about a week of minus 30 or something like that.

Lindsay (00:10:03):

That's so dangerous.

Dr. Barnard (00:10:04):

Well, you wonder, you wonder, you look at the sparrows Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and the squirrels. And you think, how do you make it to spring? And I honestly don't know the answer to that

Moby (00:10:13):

Little tiny buses that take them to Florida <laugh> To the, to the Gulf of Mexico. Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Barnard (00:10:19):

<laugh>, I wish. Yeah. Yeah. It's cold.

Moby (00:10:22):

Okay. So then, was your childhood happy, healthy, normal? Was it dysfunctional insofar as you feel comfortable saying? No,

Dr. Barnard (00:10:30):

It was, it was fine. I was the middle of five kids. Wow. Which means you can be kind of ignored and it was Okay.

Moby (00:10:35):

So then college rolls around. Where'd you go?

Dr. Barnard (00:10:39):

I went to a little school called Macalester, which is in St. Paul, Minnesota. And it was, it was a good school, a liberal school. Didn't have any rules. The football, it had a football team that lost every game. Literally, literally every game the entire time I was there. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And it had no, no fraternities or sororities. So it was a good place to That sounds perfect. Yeah. Really. It was a good place to be.

Moby (00:10:59):

And may I ask what year this was?

Dr. Barnard (00:11:01):

I started in 71, 19 71. Okay. So

Moby (00:11:04):

This was like the education experiment. This was protests on campus and like teachers on LSD and,

Dr. Barnard (00:11:12):

And students.

Moby (00:11:13):

Yeah. And, uh, I'm, see I'm really interested in this. What was, what did you look like? Like, because right now, because you're very clean cut. Yeah. Which is great for a doctor in 1971, did your freak flag fly <laugh>? What am I ruining this <laugh> <laugh> Can't tell if you're laughing with me or laughing at me. And I'm like, I'm not laughing. So it's really, I would say it's a

Lindsay (00:11:37):

Blend of the two. But also, I wanna know, I'm like imagining like a Lieutenant Dan version of you.

Dr. Barnard (00:11:43):

I mean, it was hippie days. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you know, I mean, it was the end. The Vietnam War was still going on when I went there. And, um, there was lots of protests and, and things like that. And, and, and I was glad that there was protest and it was the time of civil rights unrest, which had to happen. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Um, which is really important. And, uh, the school had gotten a lot of money from Readers Digest. Um, the people who owned Readers Digest donated a lot of money, but they were offended by the school getting liberal and there being a lot of protest. And so that was kind of in the backdrop, is that the school was a very liberal school, but no, it was, it was fine. It was nice. It was, it was good to be there. And my hair was short when I started and got a lot longer as time went on. And

Moby (00:12:23):

When did you start playing guitar? 'cause 'cause you're, you're in a band now.

Dr. Barnard (00:12:26):

Carbon Works.

Moby (00:12:27):

Carbon Works. So, and when did you start playing guitar?

Dr. Barnard (00:12:31):

Ooh, I guess I was, you know, in high school or, or maybe a little bit

Moby (00:12:34):

Before. And were you in a band in college? Yeah. Okay. What sort, what was it called?

Dr. Barnard (00:12:39):

Well, I, we were had just different bands and for better or for worse, there was, there was a lot of rock going on, but there was also a lot of folk still happening, which nowadays you think, what were we bothering with that for? I have to say with what we, what we did. But, you know, I was in various bands, but it wasn't really till medical school that I was more serious about it.

Moby (00:12:58):

And musically were the bands like MC5, like 11 minute guitar solos and

Dr. Barnard (00:13:05):

Oh man, you know, it's kind of embarrassing. Um, yes. I mean, we, this

Moby (00:13:10):

Isn't, this is an embarrassment free zone. I mean, I feel like I've already lowered the bar for embarrassment. Like we're,

Lindsay (00:13:16):

We've reached peak embarrassment over on this side.

Dr. Barnard (00:13:18):

But it is true that, that that was the time when people would really go off into to solos and things like that. And now I think, you know, I think there's something to be said for editing, especially,

Moby (00:13:26):

Especially when it comes to guitar solos. Yeah. <laugh> a good 32nd guitar solo. Perfect. Yeah. More than that. Mm. Very few people can get away with that. Right.

Lindsay (00:13:36):

Indulgent. But some people can. So at some point in your life, you had to have said to yourself, I think I'll be a doctor now. What point was that?

Moby (00:13:46):

Oh, and also, what did you study in college?

Dr. Barnard (00:13:49):

I went there because I was gonna become a lawyer, and I thought it would be a really good school for that. And I got so bored with studying political science, which was what I was getting interested into. And so I ended up getting into psychology. I started taking psychology classes just because I thought it'd be interesting. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And then as time went on, I, I thought it was really curious how the mind worked and how things went wrong. And I decided I was gonna become a psychiatrist. And that's the only reason I went to medical school. Wow.

Lindsay (00:14:15):

Was to become a psychiatrist. Yeah.

Moby (00:14:17):

In terms of authors, writers, academics, anybody who inspired you at that time? Like, like one of my favorite writers from that period would be Albert Ellis. Do you know Albert Ellis? Yeah. He started Rational emotive therapy, which became CBT. His books are really funny 'cause he was such a hipster. So the books are sort of academic, but also kind of sound like they're written by Abbie Hoffman <laugh>.

Dr. Barnard (00:14:40):

Yeah. To tell you the truth, I really enjoyed just reading Freud Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and what, what Freud wrote and, and what still is valid about it and what has, what seems kind of ridiculous in retrospect. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And then there was this whole generation of people then who kind of reacted to Freud as well. So that, that was all interesting. But the bad part of my education was that it was also the time of BF Skinner. Mm. And the idea that it's all, um, reward and punishment. I don't know

Lindsay (00:15:07):

Much about this

Moby (00:15:08):

Behavior.

Dr. Barnard (00:15:09):

Behavior, yeah. Behaviors. But

Lindsay (00:15:10):

What does that mean from an outer place or from like an inner place like your brain does

Dr. Barnard (00:15:13):

That It was that that sort of what you're rewarded for doing is what you do, um, or what you're punished for doing is what you don't do. And that, that all human behavior can be explained by rewards and punishment. I'm being overly simplistic, but, but that's sort of the way we

Moby (00:15:27):

Took it. My understanding of behaviorism and skin. It's sort of like when you think of nature versus nurture, uhhuh, um, the Skinner rights, the behaviorists were like, it was pretty much all nature. It was treating the human as like a physical being as opposed to a complicated, it was sort of reductive and simplistic. I see. Or am I, or am I mistaken?

Dr. Barnard (00:15:49):

To me, it seemed really simplistic to tell you the truth, the whole thing. And I was, I'm glad that people have forgotten about it, to tell you the truth.

Moby (00:15:55):

Okay. So now you've gone to medical school. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, when did you start becoming interested in animals as sentient beings or animal? When did you start feeling like a sense of compassion towards animals? Or did you, I mean, we've talked to some vegans who have no compassion for animals, but are just interested in like, the medical environmental aspects of it.

Dr. Barnard (00:16:16):

Growing up as a child in North Dakota, I hunted, I had a 20 gauge shotgun. And my father would take his three older boys, me and my two brothers, and we would go out before dawn and go next to a pond. And you would sit in the reeds and wait for ducks to come at dawn. And they would fly over and you'd shoot 'em and they'd fall to the ground and they wouldn't necess, it wouldn't necessarily be dead. And you'd grab them by their head and swing them around to try to break their neck and kill 'em. We did the same with geese. And I didn't particularly enjoy it, but I also didn't particularly object to it. I also drove cattle to slaughter. My, my dad grew up raising cattle and his uncle still did. And we drove, uh, truck of cattle to East St. Louis to the stockyards.

Dr. Barnard (00:17:02):

And I remember seeing them, the cows were scared when they came off the truck. The reason I'm telling you these things is I didn't have a bad upbringing, but I was able to do things that now I'm horrified by. And I've often wondered how it is that a person who's got all the same intelligence, it it, it's, it's not that you suddenly get clarity, <laugh>, you're the same person. How is it that you can do things that are terrible and then later on you realize things that are, they're very different. But I can tell you what happened to me. We were given a little white rat in my introductory psychology class. And the rat was put in a box called a Skinner box after BF Skinner. They didn't skin the rat. It was named after <laugh>, named after BF Skinner. And the rats had been deprived of water.

Dr. Barnard (00:17:49):

Um, so that they were extremely thirsty and they would do anything to get water. And there was a little dipper that would come up into their, into a little hole to give them a drop of water. And so our job was to shape their behavior. So if the rat would move in a certain way, you would push a button, they could get water, and then you would wait for them to move in a little bit different way. You could get them to turn left and to turn circles or to jump up and down or whatever you wanted to. You could shape their behavior by rewarding them for little incremental things. See what I mean? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So that was to teach us operant conditioning, which is such a simple concept that you're, you'll do what you're rewarded for. That it was really crazy. I had a friend who was the work study student, his name was Clark.

Dr. Barnard (00:18:32):

And Clark said, these psychologists, they're a bunch of Nazis. I said, Clark, they're psychologists. They're not Nazis, you know? And he said, oh yeah. Um, his job was to take care of the rats and he had to deprive them of water, um, to get them ready for us. And when we were done with them, he had to put 'em all, he had to kill them. He put them all in a trash can, all of them, one after the other and then put chloroform over the top, poured it on their bodies, and then closed the lid and let them all die. And this was his, what he had to do. And I thought, well, okay, that doesn't sound so good. But it didn't really move me very much. And later on I took a class, um, where we would actually drill holes in the rat's skull.

Dr. Barnard (00:19:15):

We put the rats in a stereotaxic device, which is you put these little bars in their ears and you put their teeth in a little vice and they're anesthetized. And, um, you drill a hole in the skull and you put an electrode in the medial forebrain bundle, which gives them a, a pleasure signal with when you shock them. And so they'll do anything they can for that reward. It's like being on the most massive cocaine dose you could get. And when I put my rat in the stereotactic device, I could hear his eardrums snap. I dunno if I'd heard it or could feel it, but you could tell it was happening. So I said to my professor, I think I just broke his eardrums. And the professor said, well, he wasn't gonna listen to his stereo in the morning anyway. And I thought, you are a nice man. Mm-Hmm, <affirmative>. I, I'd known him for a long time, said, you are a nice man. How could you say that? That he's, it seemed so callous to me, but still I was so deten de desensitized that I just went ahead and I did this experiment anyway, so to make what is already too long of a story short, um, I did all these things. And then years or so later, my girlfriend at the time was in the same lab.

Moby (00:20:24):

Oh, by the way, when you were in medical school, where was

Dr. Barnard (00:20:27):

This? Oh, George Washington University. Okay. dc dc Washington, dc And she didn't turn her rad in at the end of the lab. And hers ended up in her pocket. And that was our rat. And as long as a rat is in a cage, they just look like a rat in a cage. And, you know, they pee on the paper and you have to change and it's kind of dirty. But we started leaving the door open and the rat looks out, you know, their vision's not so great. So, but they look out and they're smelling this world and they start walking around your apartment and they're exploring and you discover that they wanna do things and they find you and they kind of wanna play with you. And it's the weirdest thing. 'cause they're only one pound and you're a big person and you can't really play. But, but they wanna play. They're like a dog. And they're, you know, the thousandth generation bread from some laboratory supply house, but they don't know that. And they wanna do stuff. And so I would sort of like play around with my rat and we'd play tag with just my hand and things. And they are so clean when they can get away from, from their cage, they actually preen like a cat. And they have a

Moby (00:21:35):

Meticulous, I mean like, sorry, sorry to interrupt, but like, I was rat sitting once. And you, you have experience with rats Lindsay as well, right? Well, I, and my, yeah, I've had, I've had some rat experience. I was stunned at how fastidious this little rat was. You know, this tiny little rat was way cleaner than any dog or cat or animal. I mean, they're, they're arguably the cleanest animals, even more so than humans.

Dr. Barnard (00:21:58):

Oh, well that is a low bar <laugh>. Yeah. They're extremely clean. And they also have scent glands so that they smell, they smell like perfume. So you walk into a room, and this was really strange. I had noticed what is the smell? And it was their perfume that they have. And so we would just leave, let her run around to do her thing. But one day I discovered she had a mass on her abdomen. And there are vets for dogs. There are vets for cows. There are not really good vets for rats. And so you sit in the, the waiting room at the vet's office thing, and, and you discover how people feel about animals. If you've got a gibel, it's okay. If you have a bird, it's okay. Um, if you've got a hamster or a Guinea pig, it's okay. But a rat people can like, move away from <laugh>.

Dr. Barnard (00:22:42):

The rat doesn't know she's scary, you know, she's just like, can you diagnose me? And I, I learned about veterinarian incompetence. The first vet said, well, this is actually a male rat that's a testicle. I thought you're a complete idiot. Sorry. Because this is a female. And then another vet said it was a, a fat pad. And I said, look, I'm sorry. This is asymmetric. This is growing. This is some kind of tumor. And so finally a vet did take this out. Um, and I got my rat back from the vet after the operation. And she was in a, a, a cast from here all the way down. You know, she was in agony. And people can't sort of relate to an animal, but if you've seen the animal, animal, like every day you c you can, you know, you know their personality and Mm-Hmm. And so I cut her out of the, the, the cast and she had metal sutures all up and down her body because they took out the whole milk line.

Dr. Barnard (00:23:33):

It was a mammary tumor she had. And they took out the whole milk line. And I would try to keep her from chewing out her sutures. 'cause like, as you say, they're so fastidious, they don't like any impurity. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And they wanna remove sutures. I said, no, no, don't do that. And I would sleep with her in my hand. So I would wake up if she would, um, move to try to pull him out. Anyway, she wasn't getting better. Um, it turned out he had accidentally nicked her urethra or something. And so urine came out under her skin and it started to s skull the skin. And I thought, holy, this is not good. And so I brought her back and they said, well, maybe we can fix this. And they tried to fix it, but they're not good with surgery with a rat. And so they ended up making it impossible for her to urinate. Um, and she was in the worst agony ever. And so I was trying to think what vet do I know who at least was kind. And so I went to the vet who was kind, and I said, will you kill my friend?

Dr. Barnard (00:24:27):

And so, um, <weeps>

Dr. Barnard (00:24:32):

I held her in my hand like this. And they loaded up a syringe and tried. She, they should have done a, a peritoneal stick where you just inject it in the abdomen and it will slowly kill 'em. But they tried to find the heart. And so this vet was stabbing for the heart, which is like that big in a rat. Yeah. And she went, and, and rats can scream, but I was holding her still. And I finally just said, inject it wherever you are. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And she injected it and it went into her lung and it came out her mouth. And she just went limp and died in my hand. And so I went out to the car and I just sat there and somehow I remembered driving cows to slaughter and shooting the ducks and holding them in. My hands are killing them.

Dr. Barnard (00:25:19):

And I started thinking, what is it about these animals? Why is it that people can't, why, why do they not elicit compassion in us? And also, I think it was important that it was a rat, at least for me. 'cause if it had been a chimpanzee who died, or a dog or a cat, you could think, well, these are popular animals. But if it's the most denigrated animal that people, the animal that people hate the most, if they suffer, then I know every animal suffers. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And that was it. So I <laugh> about three days of doubt and then threw away all the meat and stuff that I had in my house. And what year was this? 1977. And then just, just one last thing. Shortly after this happened, I was in pharmacology class, second year of medical school. And the professor says, form groups four to six students per group.

Dr. Barnard (00:26:14):

'cause next week's dog lab. And you take a dog and you tape the dog down to the table and you inject norepinephrine. And you write the fact that the pulse goes up, you inject propranolol, you show the fact that the pulse goes down, all of which you knew from the book, <laugh> in the lectures. And then you kill your dog, um, in various ways. And I said, I'm not doing that. And the professor says, look, this is not an optional class. And as the words were coming out of his mouth, the student next to me, she says, he's not doing the dog lab and I am not doing the dog lab. So we had a movement of two students who weren't doing the dog lab. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And that was it. You know, I just, I was embarrassed that somehow I hadn't recognized that animals suffer in terrible ways. So forgive me for the fact that I get emotional when I remember this all those years ago. But, um, that rat taught me more than any of the professors in the psychology lab.

Moby (00:27:12):

Yeah. Please don't apologize.

Lindsay (00:27:14):

No, that was a beautiful story, I think about like how the journeys that we have to take to understand, to like expand our own empathy and understanding. But I think, you know, you were open to it and connected to this being, but also it's interesting for you because you had been in a space where people were experimenting on these animals. I think that's an, an experience that a lot of people don't ever see firsthand.

Moby (00:27:43):

And I mean, it, it, it is one of the very strange, disconcerting, fascinating things about being a vegan animal rights activist, is our perspective now seems to make so, so much sense. Mm-Hmm. You know, like, why would we engage in behavior that causes suffering if we don't have to? Why would we pretend that animals are not sentient sensitive beings? But in a way, thank goodness for the early parts of our lives, we were part of the herd. You know, we contributed to suffering, we contributed to death. I remember I only actively killed one animal in my life. My friends and I were playing with BB guns, and we accidentally shot a bird and it was lying there suffering. We're like, oh, we have to kill it. So we all shot the bird until it died. And I remember it excruciatingly clearly. But everything from, you know, from hunting to driving cattle to ringing ducks next to experimenting on animals, it's all sanctioned.

Moby (00:28:43):

I mean, I know I'm stating the obvious, but it's, it's normal. It's sanctioned. Oftentimes it's seen as like, it binds us to our community. It binds us to our families. It binds us to our parents. It's done in the name of research. And we all bought into it. Lindsay. You did. I did. Yep, you did. And when you turn that corner, when you have that, at least for me, when I had that saw on the road to Damascus moment, I was like, what the hell? Like, I'm horrified by suffering. I don't want to cause suffering. I fully recognize that animals are sentient. But I also spent 19 years of my life ignoring all that. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And when you turn that corner, it's like, once your eyes are open, you're just baffled at the status quo, at the dominant paradigm that does enable 9 billion people to pretend that animals aren't sentient. To pretend that hurting animals is okay. We as vegan animal rights actors, we live in a strange place. You know, trying to, on a daily basis. And especially, 'cause if you've been doing this since the seventies, how have you been able to, assuming you have been able to maintain sanity and equanimity, knowing what you know, and living in the world in which you live

Dr. Barnard (00:30:01):

Is a hard thing to understand how it is that people know, for example, pe people know what a chicken sandwich is, and they know what chickens go through and they know what cows and pigs go through. And you can go to a hot dog restaurant and they'll have a picture of a pig or a cow there. And, and so it's, it's really obvious what, what's happening and how it is that people somehow aren't bothered by it. That I don't know. And, and don't really understand. However, in my own world, my job is to stop these things. My job is to address them and to address them aggressively. But honestly, so we have the great advantage of the fact that when you get the animals off your plate, you're healthier. And so we can honestly point that out and do really solid research studies nailing down that when a person adopts a vegan diet, their diabetes gets better. They lose weight. And so we do that hard work, um, and publish articles and educate doctors and educate patients and get on the news and all these things. And we know that what we're doing is good and honest for human health and welfare. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. But it also is good for all the animals that would otherwise become dinner.

Moby (00:31:08):

And then, I mean, there's so much to get into there. 'cause obviously this is what PCRM does, but also from my perspective, having been the supporter of PCRM for a long time, there's also the research side of things. Because on one hand, almost everybody knows that animals being raised for food, they suffer very hard to find someone who doesn't feel little guilt about that. Even in the mediating world. That's my perspective. But when you get into the world of research, the majority of people would never question that. They're like, oh, well, you have to experiment on monkeys. You have to experiment on rats. Tell me, or tell us a little bit about that, because the majority of people accept that you have to experiment on animals. But then you take a step back and you're like, but animals physiologically are not human. Like this is what's always confused me about experimenting on rats. Like, you can't have a blood transfusion from a rat. Right. You know, you can't, I mean, physiologically dogs are very different from human bein gs. Primates are close, but still very different. So what are some of the recurring misconceptions that people have about animal testing?

Dr. Barnard (00:32:23):

I think by and large, people have given a, a real pass to researchers using animals. Um, they don't question it very much because even things that are obviously unnecessary are allowed to go forward. Take the, the rat lab that I did, there was no pretense of necessity. It was just a graphic exercise that people participated in, or the dog lab in medical school. I mean, they could say, you're required to do this. But the truth is, it was utterly and completely unnecessary as evidenced by the fact that that was one of our first campaigns when I started the physicians committee, was to end those dog labs. And I'm happy to tell you, we succeeded. We got rid of not only the one at my school, but at every other medical school in the United States and Canada. They would fight us. At first they would say, well, we'll make 'em optional for squeamish people.

Dr. Barnard (00:33:09):

Um, or we'll switch from dogs to an animal. You will care less about like a pig or a goat. But one by one, we, we got them to eliminate every use of animals at every medical school up through the MD degree. Wow. And that's gone. And I'm glad about that. Uh, be frankly, because you don't wanna kill the animals, but you also don't wanna kill that nugget of compassion in the student's brain. Yeah. Uh, which is what these labs do. But it means that those labs were never necessary. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And nobody questioned it because it's sort of like when, when little kids are go to the doctor or the dentist and they're getting a vaccination which hurts, or they're getting a procedure which hurts. They believe that somebody smarter than me thinks it's good to do. And I think we transfer that sort of childish faith, uh, in authority to the world of science, that somebody smarter than me must know that this is good. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And we don't wanna question it, but I have to tell you, when you pick up medical journals, as, as we do, and we look at the kinds of experiments that are done in so many cases, there's no pretense of necessity at

Moby (00:34:12):

All. Um, I mean, what you're describing that trust and authority, uh, it applies to a lot more than just science. It applies to corporations, it applies to governments. And I don't wanna be too cynical, but this is something that I learned from you and physicians committee for responsible Medicine, nutrition in medical schools. How many, historically speaking, how many medical schools have included nutrition as part of their core curriculum?

Dr. Barnard (00:34:39):

I don't think that any of them really focus on it as part of their core curriculum. There are some that approach it a little bit. In my medical school, I remember we were taught about the, the chemical structure of vitamin C and how sailors in the whichever century it was, would get scurvy if they didn't have vitamin C. Nothing about <laugh>. What what would relate to people who would come into your, your office?

Moby (00:34:59):

And I think I remember reading in one of your articles, this is going way back, that there was a period, maybe it's changed, maybe it's gotten better, that Johns Hopkins had a six hour optional seminar on nutrition. But apart from that, that was the only real mention of nutrition at any medical school's curriculum.

Dr. Barnard (00:35:16):

You know, and, and that was, that was not entirely indefensible at one point, because at the beginning, say the early 19 hundreds, the causes of death were infectious disease. It was pneumonia, and you could have a death in childbirth and so forth. It all had to do with infections. Antibiotics changed that. And instead of infections killing us, now it's cardiovascular disease. And it's cancer and diabetes. And these things are all so strongly related to food. And so if a person comes into a doctor's office and they're at risk for heart disease, the number one thing you need to do is to change their diet and to take away the, the foods that are causing that. And digestive type cancers like colorectal cancer or hormonal cancers like breast cancer or prostate cancer, are strongly related to diet as well. Now, it's not the only cause there are other contributors as well. So you would think doctors would focus on these things and doctors will very rapidly adopt knowledge about a new drug that's out. But for some reason, there, we're still in the sort of 1920s era when comes to nutrition.

Moby (00:36:18):

When you say some reason, are you being rhetorical <laugh>? Because it seems like that some reason is potentially pretty clear for a lot of doctors. They're not getting paid by big plant to promote plant-based foods. You know? Yeah. Like big pharma's definitely in there promoting and paying and taking people on junkets. And like, I don't see big broccoli doing that.

Dr. Barnard (00:36:42):

<laugh>. That's, that's certainly part of it.

Moby (00:36:44):

I don't wanna be too cynical, but,

Dr. Barnard (00:36:45):

Well, I think that's part of it. Um, if you look at Wegovy and Ozempic, you know, the injections for, for weight loss, which are really popular, there are dietary approaches that over the long run are safer and highly effective. But doctors don't really know how to use it. And, and, and their office is not structured to do it. And part of that is that Novo Nordisk pays doctors $27 million a year to, you can't, you cannot pay a doctor to prescribe a drug. But you can pay a doctor for having a talk to their staff about how good wegovy is, uh, or doing a Grand Rounds presentation at their hospital. And so yeah, that's the amount. And, and Novo nor so much, Novo Nordisk pays more than they, they also pay members of Congress. This is a Scandinavian country. Why are they paying the US Congress? It's because they're gonna vote on whether wegovy should be covered by Medicare. And so they're buying friends. But, but there's another part of this though.

Moby (00:37:40):

So, so you're saying the blueberry lobby isn't doing the same thing, <laugh>?

Dr. Barnard (00:37:43):

They're not. And I wish they did. Um, that's, but that's part of, but there's another half of this. I really think that, um, was sort of embodied. And I had a good friend when I was, um, in the third year of medical school, this is when you're on the wards and you're taking care of patients. And I had a, a friend there who liked to wear a surgical cap, had a surgical cap, and, and it made him feel like a surgeon. And we all had white coats, and he would wear a surgical cap no matter where he was, um, anywhere. And I realized, you know, there are a lot of doctors or medical students in training and doctors who feel that to be a doctor is kind of a macho thing. I, I hope, I'm not saying it's something unfair to my colleagues 'cause I have so many friends who are doctors. But the idea that you're gonna talk about food, I mean, Ben Casey wouldn't have done that. That was not Dr. Dr. Kildare. You raced in to an urgent scene and you rolled up your sleeves and you did surgery and you did some big macho lifesaving thing. It's, you're not making carrot cake. So food doesn't fit into their image of themselves.

Moby (00:38:47):

Oh. Now I do kind of want some carrot cake <laugh>. That

Lindsay (00:38:49):

Does

Dr. Barnard (00:38:49):

Sound good. Sorry to trigger you, but

Lindsay (00:38:51):

Also preventative medicine, it, I mean, that's what diet is, is just preventative. But maybe is that ideology of like, by the time you're here, we're too far beyond that. But that can't be it because we have, both have talked about how we have family that have gone in for heart problems, even in like the deep south, like south Texas where doctors will say, go on a vegan diet or your life will be very, very short. They don't do it <laugh>, but they still, the doctors are telling them that at some point, but that's after they are on the verge of having to have like a quadruple bypass and have had one. And like, but they're not saying this to people before they get to that point.

Dr. Barnard (00:39:30):

Yeah. Doctors are not reimbursed for, for doing this very much. Uh, doctors are typically reimbursed more per procedure when the, when the patient leaves you, you write down the procedure numbers that you, that related to what you did. So if you did an eek g you're gonna get paid for that. And if you did a scan of some type, you get paid for that. And the more procedures you do, the more money the practice makes. So if you talk to a person about what they had for breakfast, that's not a procedure, that's just time. Mm. So you can bill for time too, but it's, it's not the same. So an average cardiologist, they do lots of procedures. The average cardiologist makes more than $500,000 a year as that's just an average cardiology salary, which I think is immoral to tell the honest truth. But that's the world. So, so why do they wanna tell you to eat asparagus? Um, they wouldn't want to.

Moby (00:40:15):

I mean, again, I, I don't want to go too far down the rabbit hole of cynicism. I mean, it seems actually kind of linear, almost like Occam's razor like prevention prevents illness, but it also prevents profits. You know, healthy people are not getting these procedures done. And what you're describing is a system that rewards doctors for doing these procedures. And if everyone was eating blueberries and broccoli and exercising and practicing stress reduction, there'd be fewer procedures. Um, am I being too cynical? Is that, is that too reductive and simple?

Dr. Barnard (00:40:49):

I think you're right. At the same time though, there are lots of doctors who really want the patient to get well. And doctors who have discovered the value of a healthy diet in their own lives. And they are the doctors who talk with patients a about this. And they need to be in a system where it's supported. And, and that's what we have at, at our clinic, Mar Barnard Medical Center. We have doctors who want this to happen. And, but you know, in many clinics they'll say, well, I really wish my patients would go vegan. The doctor will say I'm vegan myself. But, but I don't really have time to teach them. But what I have to say to the, the doctor is you shouldn't be doing the teaching. If you were an orthopedic surgeon and you worked on somebody's knee and they needed physical therapy, you would refer them to the physical therapist to do it.

Dr. Barnard (00:41:31):

If the problem is diet, because you've got a heart patient, then refer them to a diet expert that's a, a registered dietician and have one that you refer to. And it's, it's the easiest thing in the world. In our clinic, the doctor needs two minutes. They need to say you're at risk for heart disease, the cholesterol, the saturated fat that's mainly in cheese and meat and animal products. We're gonna sit down and map out a diet that doesn't have that stuff in it. And I'd like you to give it a try. They don't have to, they don't have to deal with skepticism or anything. They, they just answer some questions and say, this is the treatment. And they're done at that point, then the patient sits down with the registered dietician who will also bring in their reluctant spouse and they'll talk about the diet together and they'll map it out.

Dr. Barnard (00:42:13):

And you never confront the, the, the skepticism you allow the patient to be, I'm not so sure this is gonna be good, but, you know, you don't have to believe in tetracycline. You just take it and it works. So you try out the diet and so you help the patient to map out what they can eat. You meet with them every single week and by about week two and a half, they know what to eat. They're starting to feel better, their chest pain is about gone. And it makes perfect sense to them. And so that's a model that works really well. And the doctors love it. So there are plenty of doctors who are doing this kind of thing and, and they like it very, very much. And the patients are thrilled. Yeah.

Moby (00:42:46):

Like I said, I don't wanna be too cynical and assume all doctors are just working to make profits. Yeah. So I feel bad. I'm, I have to apologize to doctors out there. 'cause I know that almost every doctor I've ever had, like, clearly they wanna do the right thing, but it's hard to resist the lure of profits, I imagine. Right.

Lindsay (00:43:03):

But there's also a lot of misinformation, I feel like, because I was working with a nutritionist for a while and she was so annoyed that I wouldn't drink bone broth and eat fish. <laugh> was angry about it. She was like, I just don't understand why you, it's like, it's so much better for you was so frustrated. She was like, this is what I tell my people to do. Like this is my plan. And I eventually, I had to, I was like, I, this doesn't make any sense to me. But it's because she had been given some information in her where the place she was educated that said, this is how you get people healthy.

Dr. Barnard (00:43:36):

We could say doctors don't know anything about nutrition. The bad news and the frightening news is a lot of dieticians don't know anything about nutrition either. Because I mean, the world is vast. Uh, the world of nutrition is vast and there's so many things out there. And, but when I was in medical school, it was all less red meat, more white meat. Take the skin off your chicken. That's a healthy diet. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And that's part of why, by the way, part of the reason the doctors didn't embrace nutrition because those diets just didn't work very well. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And the doctors thought, forget that. I'm gonna give you some Lipitor and I can really knock your cholesterol down. Why worry about diet? 'cause these diets are no good. Or the low carb lobby will get ahold of dieticians and say, you know, don't eat rice and don't eat root vegetables, and that kind of thing. And so there's, there's all kinds of, there are many different schools of thought. And so well-educated plant-based dieticians are no means representative of the entire profession. So when we work with registered dieticians, we only hire the ones who have figured it out. And, and pre not only prescribe a vegan diet, but follow it themselves. Because if you don't follow it, then you don't know what to tell the patient who says, I'm at the Taco Bell. Drive through, what do I get? You know? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. You have to know how

Moby (00:44:42):

It works. Can I get back to history stuff? Yeah. I

Lindsay (00:44:45):

Was just gonna say, because we're talking about your clinic and we're talking about Okay. How, how all this functions. And I really wanna know

Moby (00:44:50):

How, so in his, in, in our history, we got up to about 1977 mm-Hmm. <affirmative> when you became a vegetarian. Um, do you remember when you've made the switch to veganism? And what inspired that?

Dr. Barnard (00:45:02):

Well, it just, you know, it's a black hole. You know, once, once you start to see the animal suffering kinds of things, um, it becomes a black hole in you. You know, it's, it's, it's funny. I gotta tell you another rat story. Rats are so cute. You know, they are completely obsessional. Not only are they clean about their own bodies, but if you have a glass of ice water that infuriates a rat, they would say, water is water and ice is ice. <laugh>, why are you putting them together? And so a rat will work very hard to take all the ice out and they'll dip their little head in and they'll grab the ice cubes and make a little stack over there. And the water is over there. If you leave your laundry bag open, they'll probably sort your colors and white. I'm not sure <laugh>. Um, but they are very, very

Moby (00:45:43):

To that point. Sorry for interrupting. I was reading about rats and how they behave in the wild. And there was a story about rats who had lived in an abandoned building and they had very specific ways of moving around the building. Someone tore the building down. When the building was gone, the rats still moved in the exact same way. It's like as if the building was there. 'cause they were so OCD in fastidious <laugh>, there's no more building. But they were still going around imaginary walls because they're like, this is how we do it. So they're such fussy little OCD for animals

Lindsay (00:46:16):

Love. Now I wanna, now I wanna wrap.

Dr. Barnard (00:46:17):

They are, they, they they are very sweet. I have to tell you, the work study student I mentioned earlier, Clark, this was back in the seventies when he told me psychologists are Nazis. I talked to him last week. Wow. He still feels the same way. It's been all these years. He was so traumatized. It's not funny. He had to kill all these animals. And he told me how the psychologists, when they weren't looking, he would secretly feed the rats that he wasn't supposed to feed. They're supposed to be te their food withheld so that they would respond. And anyway, all these years later, he was really angry about it. So anyhow, we gotta stick up for the little ones. But, um, I completely sidestepped your question.

Moby (00:46:50):

So late seventies vegetarian, then when did you Oh yeah. Become vegan. And what, like, for me, I went vegetarian in 1984 because I finally connected my love for animals with the fact that eating meat and dairy and wearing leather was inconsistent with loving animals and respecting them as sentient beings. And I went vegan in 87, uh, after reading Diet for New America, the John Robbins book. Um, and so I'm just wondering what your, what prompted you to, were there any books, any literature or experiences that led you to go from vegetarian to vegan?

Dr. Barnard (00:47:26):

Well, I, I should say it wasn't a question of loving animals, it was just a question of recognizing that there's a person inside who doesn't wanna hurt. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And that it was true for animals that were really humble. And so that was it. I didn't love a duck or a goose or, you know, or a rat necessarily. You know, it was just that you don't wanna hurt somebody. Mm-Hmm. And I think that's an important thing. 'cause you don't have to love a homeless person to realize they're suffering. And if, if there's something I can do to ease your suffering, I'm gonna do it. Uh, with me, you know, with, part of it is, this was a time when I thought maybe dairy products were okay. Um, that they weren't harmful. Um, I didn't realize then that they're the leading source of saturated fat, that they've got hormones in them. Um, there's a lot of problems with dairy products from a health standpoint. And I also, from an

Moby (00:48:07):

Ethical standpoint

Dr. Barnard (00:48:08):

And from an ethical standpoint, I,

Moby (00:48:10):

I thought taking baby cows away from their mothers and locking them imp pen and so many

Lindsay (00:48:14):

People Yeah. They don't know that a cow has to be pregnant to make milk, which is such a, I mean, I, it never occurred to me until, you know, somebody I had to read about it and be like, oh my God. That yes, that does make sense. How could that not be the case? You know,

Dr. Barnard (00:48:28):

It ends up being worse than meat. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, um, the dairy industry is worse than meat, but didn't, but I, I didn't understand that. You know? Yeah. They, the fireman takes his left hand and sticks it up the cow's rectum and through the rectal wall, you feel the uterus and grab it with your hand. And then you stick a big ni knitting needle through the cervix that's loaded with semen and you impregnate her and you write a number on her flank, she's gonna give birth nine months later because you impregnated her and her male calf is taken away and pretty soon becomes veal. Unless she's allowed to grow up to be a, to be older beef. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. But they're not gonna live out more than a year or something like that. And then the females are all taken away too, and they're raised in isolation.

Dr. Barnard (00:49:09):

And the mother cries, uh, out because there, there's no bond stronger than the mother infant bond. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And when you talk to people who grew up in dairies, they'll, they'll talk about this Mm-Hmm. The animals crying out all night long. And they go through this about three or four times. And, you know, in nature, I mean, they're, they're impregnated every year. And their animals, their, their offspring are taken away. And then in nature, a cow would live to be 20 or thereabouts. But on a dairy farm by four, their milk production isn't enough to justify their existence. And so they will kill them at that point, uh, for a low grade burger. And so it's a meat industry. Um, but it's, before they kill them, they make them go through all this other stuff. So anyhow, at some point you just, when you learn about how people get their hands on animals and what they do to them, it's enough to just put you off whatever it is.

Dr. Barnard (00:49:57):

Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And once you've been away from dairy products for a while, I have to say they kind of seem sort of slimy. Yeah. <laugh>, you know, you don't, you don't want it anymore. And then when we started to learn about the fact, as you said, they're pregnant, they're impregnated annually, and so they are milked at the end of one pregnancy and well into the next Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And so they're making estrogens in their pregnancy, and the estrogen gets in the milk. So if you're eating cheese, you're eating sex hormones from the cow that happened to be a match for yours. Or a guy is eating it and he's getting female sex hormones in his dairy products. Um, which has a lot of, which

Lindsay (00:50:32):

Makes it very funny that there's the whole like, soy boy emasculating thing about men who won't drink dairy. It's like, you should look at what's in your <laugh> in your milk, in your, it's, it's precise cow's

Dr. Barnard (00:50:43):

Milk. It's exactly the opposite. What Yeah. What people think that, that the cow's milk does have estrogens in it. Yeah. And in fact, there were researchers in Rochester, New York who went into fertility clinics, and they found, if you look at sperm samples, you can rate the, the sperm count and the morphology, which is the shape of the sperm and the motility. Like do they swim straight? And the more cheese men eat the worst, their sperm samples, and it's obviously because they're in, they're dosing themselves with estradiol. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> from eating cheese. Cheese is kind of the mother load of it, but all dairy products have it. But soy, soy doesn't have estradiol. It has isoflavones, which don't attach to the estrogen. The estrogen receptor alpha, they attach to a different receptor. They, they don't cause feminization at all.

Moby (00:51:27):

That's phytoestrogen. Correct.

Dr. Barnard (00:51:29):

They, they sometimes call it phytoestrogen. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. But the real term is isoflavone. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So no. If a guy has man boobs that did not come from eating soy, and you can prove this, just go to any beach in August. And if there's kind of a heavyset guy there and he's pulling his shirt off and he's got some kind of breast enhancement, you can go right up to him. Matt,

Moby (00:51:48):

I'm picturing Chris Christie.

Dr. Barnard (00:51:49):

You could, you could walk right up to him and say, how much tofu have you eaten this week? And he will say,

Moby (00:51:54):

He'll punch you in the face. He'll

Dr. Barnard (00:51:55):

Say, I don't eat tofu. What are you talking about? Yeah. I'm

Moby (00:51:57):

A real man.

Dr. Barnard (00:51:57):

The reason that he got man boobs is because he's been eating meat and cheese, and these are fattening foods. And as he's gained more fat, mass fat cells create estrogens from his testosterone. Hmm. So a a man makes this

Lindsay (00:52:12):

Fat cells create estrogen. Yes.

Dr. Barnard (00:52:15):

That's correct. Here's the man, his testes make testosterone goes through his bloodstream, passes through body fat. And a, a fat cell is not just a bag of calories, it's an active factory. Testosterone goes into a fat cell in a man's body, and out comes estrogen. The more body fat a man accumulates, the more estrogen will be in his bloodstream. That's also true for a woman. Hmm. And this is not making him more masculine. And that's the reason he's not only got fat, but he's also got breast enhancement because of his gaining weight. And it's aided and abed by the fact that when he consumes dairy, he's getting estrogen as well. Wow.

Lindsay (00:52:49):

I never, I never, that's a

Moby (00:52:51):

Really good point. Knew that, well

Dr. Barnard (00:52:52):

Here's, here's how a man could build up his testosterone. Let's say he's 55, 65, whatever it is, he's going to the, to the doctor 55.

Moby (00:52:59):

So young, what exactly

Dr. Barnard (00:53:01):

<laugh>, whatever. What? But, but this is the age. The guy goes to the doctor says, I must have low t you know, which is the most brilliant fake diagnosis ever. You're low in testosterone. And so the doctor can prescribe testosterone for him. What you do instead, you take the animal products out of his diet and first you've removed all the estrogen from his diet. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you know, because the, the cheese has it and, and meat has a little bit of it as well. It's gone. And he will start to lose weight. So as his body fat tracked, he will stop producing so much estrogen. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and his testosterone will, will rebound. Wow.

Lindsay (00:53:33):

Yeah.

Moby (00:53:34):

I don't wanna be OCD on, um, I feel like a little baby rat over here, <laugh>. Um, I, I'd love to get back to the historical stuff as well.

Lindsay (00:53:40):

Though,. I would like to see you putting your whole head and body into like a large vessel and pulling out ice cubes. Okay. That would be fun to watch. Yeah. <laugh>. Anyway, but yes. No be OCD.

Moby (00:53:50):

So, 'cause I wanna get to PCRM Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. So did you stay in DC after medical school? And how did you get introduced into the world of actual animal rights activism? Like, and, 'cause you were at PETA when they basically opened the door, right? Thereabouts. Early, mid, mid eighties. Well,

Dr. Barnard (00:54:10):

I didn't work with them, but I was friends with them and Okay. And, and I, I know I moved to New York, um, I was running a psychiatric ward in New York City where, uh, there's a hospital called St. Vincent's Hospital. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> used to be between sixth and seventh Avenue. Yeah. And 12th

Moby (00:54:21):

Street. My, my first recording studio was 14th, between seventh and eighth. Yeah. So I would see St. Vincent's all the time. I even got a sinus cat scan there once. Um, and that's when I, I was so curious what cat stood for. 'cause I was like, clearly it's not feline. Right. Well, it is like something, something tomography

Dr. Barnard (00:54:40):

Computerized. Axial tomography. Yeah.

Moby (00:54:41):

<laugh>. So I knew St. Vincent's. Yeah. St. Vincent's was also legendary, like in the sixties, seventies, eighties as being where like the drug addicts went, you know, unhoused people. Like it was, so if you were there in the eighties, you must have seen a lot of stuff.

Dr. Barnard (00:54:55):

Well, it was right about the village. Yeah. I mean, it was a great hospital. A terrific hospital. And it was a great job. Um,

Moby (00:55:00):

And now I believe it's condos.

Dr. Barnard (00:55:01):

Yeah. It's gone. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> it's gone. But I was there. And why did I start the physicians committee? Because I was aware that there were animal rights groups and I, and I wanted to work with them, but there were folks who were concerned about the use of animals in laboratories, but they didn't have the scientific expertise. They didn't have the medical expertise that I thought they needed. And there were also groups that were promoting plant-based diets, vegan diets. Well actually at the time it was vegetarian diets. Uh, the word vegan wasn't really used very much then if they used it, they pronounce it vean or whatever. Yeah.

Moby (00:55:33):

I remember lots of debates in the late eighties about how you pronounced vegan. Really? I actually Okay. I, for a couple of years thought it should be veg. And I still think

Lindsay (00:55:43):

It's kind of silly.

Moby (00:55:44):

It sounds silly, but also like, 'cause there's no VEG hard sound. Right. For the most part in the English language. Like, there's vegetarian, there's vegetable, there's vegetative. I was like, why would we have a hard G when everything else is a soft G? So luckily I was wrong because veg sounds even wimpier than vegan to most people

Dr. Barnard (00:56:06):

<laugh>. So Yeah. Or people would say végan put a little accent on it Anyway. Um, but there were, there were groups promoting that kind of diet. And I thought that they needed some more medical expertise too, because let's face it, if you can show the effects that the diet has on health, that's really important to be able to do. So I set up this group called, with a horrible name called the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. And it was gonna be a committee of maybe 15 doctors who would opine on these issues and sort of be experts who could help out groups. And so we started working with lots of people.

Moby (00:56:37):

And what year was that?

Dr. Barnard (00:56:39):

1985.

Moby (00:56:40):

Wow. My math is not great, but that's approximately,

Lindsay (00:56:43):

That's 38 years ago. That's amazing.

Moby (00:56:45):

39

Lindsay (00:56:45):

Years ago. Oh yeah. After about

Dr. Barnard (00:56:47):

Eight years. <laugh>. We were recording this in 2023. So <laugh>.

Moby (00:56:52):

Wow. Um, and so it started in New York. Right. And where were you living? Where did it, did it just start in your living room?

Dr. Barnard (00:57:00):

I had a folding table at 23rd and Lex <laugh>.

Moby (00:57:04):

Did you eat a lot on the street?

Dr. Barnard (00:57:06):

Not on the street. And I had an apartment. I'm imagining you was a, you know, it was a New York apartment. It was smaller than this room. Yeah. Did you, you know, what apartment are, did

Moby (00:57:11):

You eat a lot of vegan Indian food? 'cause that is definitely ground zero.

Dr. Barnard (00:57:15):

I didn't eat much of it, but you're right. That was the neighborhood. It was a nice neighborhood. It was good. I liked being in New York.

Moby (00:57:20):

When did PCRM Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, uh, when did it become bigger than just you with a folding table?

Dr. Barnard (00:57:27):

I realized as soon as I started this group that it was gonna be much bigger. Um, and so I started it pretty much as soon as soon as I got in New York. And I, I did this 'cause I was working at St. Vincent's and I was really busy, but I wanted to do this work. And so I set it up and I went in to see my boss in like, October. And I said, I'm gonna work for you for a year and give you time to hire somebody to take my place. And then I'm gonna go back to Washington. 'cause I need to be there because that's where, that's where the government is. That's where the USDA is. That's where the media is. And, and that's what I did.

Moby (00:57:59):

That was 38 years ago. Right, Lindsay? Sorry, I

Lindsay (00:58:02):

Only see that. 'cause I was born in 85 and I'm 38 and math is hard. Okay. <laugh> <laugh>.

Dr. Barnard (00:58:08):

We're, we're approaching our 40th year. Wow.

Moby (00:58:09):

Are there any big 40 year plans? Well, I

Dr. Barnard (00:58:12):

Hope so. And if so, I hope you'll that you'll come and I hope that you'll not not read the teleprompter.

Moby (00:58:17):

<laugh>, I've gotten a little better.

Dr. Barnard (00:58:18):

And I hope you don't choke. I I

Moby (00:58:20):

<laugh>

Lindsay (00:58:21):

Imagine you choke at this one when Heinrich isn't there. I

Moby (00:58:24):

Know. That would be, that would be ironic and sad. Yeah.

Lindsay (00:58:27):

<laugh>. Um,

Moby (00:58:29):

And when you were becoming a more aware of the consequences of animal agriculture on health, on the environment, on, you know, why re animal research and animal testing is bad science, were there any teachers or authors or academics who inspired you? Like for me it was the obvious. Like Peter Singer and John Robbins. That's

Dr. Barnard (00:58:51):

A good question. I I

Moby (00:58:53):

Or even non Yeah. Sign. Like was it spiritual people? I know for some people it would've been Jeremy Bentham or it would've been the Janes or

Dr. Barnard (00:59:03):

No,

Dr. Barnard (00:59:03):

You know, I, I I'm not a religious person. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Um, and forgive me for how this sounds. It's not rocket science to the ethics of it. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Um, you don't, it it, you don't have to go through a PhD in philosophy to understand you're not gonna hurt another person or steal from them or take their children. And to apply that to animals is relatively simple. Um, it's just a question of, okay, now what do I have for breakfast? <laugh>, you've gotta sort that out. But the philosophy of it is, in my view, quite simple. Um, and try to, trying to explain why people don't connect the dots, that for me is difficult. But no, in, in my own life it was quite easy. But then we have to do the hard work. And the hard work is, okay, let's say we're going to come up with a good alternative to this or that experiment. We have to be right. And so we have to read the literature and opine and, and work with scientists. And when we were getting rid of the dog labs, frankly that was, the alternatives were pretty obvious. But we had to work with people and be diplomatic and, and to build bridges and, and do that kind of

Moby (01:00:09):

Hard work. And what replaces animal experiments and why is it better

Dr. Barnard (01:00:14):

Animals when they're used in science are themselves an alternative to what you're really wanting to do is understand the human body. And so the idea is, well, what we want to do to humans would be cruel or unethical. So we're going to do it on animals instead. And that was sort of the idea, you know, we, we can't test this medicine on people 'cause it might be dangerous. So we'll, we'll feed it to a dog instead and see what happens. And so the idea as well, alright, that's, is that ethical? Well, let's say we don't wanna do that nowadays. We have the ability to do things we couldn't have done a generation ago. We can look in the human body, we can scan inside your body, and I can see things that we couldn't have seen before. We have ways of, of testing the toxicology of compounds very, very readily without the use of animals at all.

Dr. Barnard (01:01:02):

But not everybody's aware of these methods. Not everybody can afford them, but we have to, if we wanna study human health, we have to be studying human health. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And perhaps one of the most telling things was the NIH. Well, the Institute of Medicine convened a panel to deal with chimpanzees. The question had arisen whether chimpanzees should be used in experiments or not. Because there was a group of chimpanzees that was being put back into, uh, research after retirement. And they became a cause. And so the Institute of Medicine was asked, what do we need chimpanzees for? And they pulled together a panel of scientists who batted things around. And they came up with a report that said, we don't need 'em for anything. There isn't any part of science where we need chimpanzees. And so they gave the report to N-I-H-N-I-H said, good enough for me. And they retired all federally held chimpanzees to sanctuary. I mean, it's been a long process. But anyway, my point is this. If you don't need chimpanzees, chimpanzees are the animal that is biologically closest to us if you don't need them, how do you make an argument for I need a cat or a dog or a rat or a zebra fish. I need to experiment on them. They are biologically further away. The results are much less likely to apply. What you need to do is to understand human beings.

Moby (01:02:11):

Has the NIH accepted that or embraced that? 'cause it seems like they're still testing a lot of stuff on mice and other animals.

Dr. Barnard (01:02:18):

There's a lot of bad stuff that continues. However, um, NIH has turned a bit of a corner recently. They are now accepting what they call nams. You know, you could, if you wanna be in science, you gotta come up with a, you know, an acronym. <laugh> I love, I love non, I love method. Okay. A non-animal method is a nam. Um, and so they, that means in vitro methods, lab bench methods. But to tell you the truth, that what we really need to do is mostly what I call just a clinical trial where we bring people in. Right now, I, I'm doing a trial in diabetes looking at the causes of type two diabetes. And I bring in people and I have a partnership with Yale University and the Department of Endocrinology. Our patients go to the university, they lie on a table, we run a scan, it's called magnetic resonance spectroscopy. And I'm looking inside their bodies and I could see in their liver cells and in their muscle cells, the buildup of microscopic fat particles that are causing insulin resistance. You don't hurt them. There's no danger to this. They're in a, in a gown. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, they put on their clothes. They,

Moby (01:03:19):

When you say gown, I'm imagining them like wearing tiaras, like they're dressed.

Dr. Barnard (01:03:23):

Oh, lab gown. You know, lab gown. My, my point is, is

Moby (01:03:25):

It okay if I think of them in a fancy gown? Mm-Hmm.

Dr. Barnard (01:03:27):

<affirmative>, you could take it any way you want <laugh>. And, and, and then they come down to Washington. We then put them on a completely low fat vegan diet. And we sent 'em back there 16 weeks later and scan them again. And you could see the difference. Now in my grandparents' time, we couldn't do that 'cause we didn't have that scanning. But the point that I'm making is the kind of research that I wanna do. I'm not gonna feed a rat a vegan diet and then cut them open and, you know, how much look at their insulin resistance. I mean, that's just crude, cruel, unnecessary. We use good scientific methods that get us where we need to go.

Lindsay (01:03:58):

I'm sure there's many, many people who are fighting to keep it right. Or is it just that it's status quo and people don't have the energy to change it? Well,

Moby (01:04:05):

And also aren't, isn't there a profit motive? I mean, there are labs who their business model is testing on animals. Mm-Hmm.

Dr. Barnard (01:04:12):

<affirmative> you can call an 800 number and have rats delivered to your door. And yes, they're making profit. There's a huge profit motive for that. And they have lobby groups supporting what they do. But, but the fact of the matter is drug discovery has changed dramatically as well. Um, it's mostly with computer modeling nowadays, where you, you look at the, the molecule on the computer screen, you have an, in the same way you're gonna design a car. You're not gonna sit there with some sheet metal and hammer it out. You're going to, you're gonna design it using a computer. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And then, then you're gonna make prototypes and see how they go. And they, we do the same thing with, with drugs. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and drugs, frankly, nobody knows the best way to test drugs for safety. 'cause it's, it's dicey. It's dicey. If you test it on animals, it's dicey if you don't.

Dr. Barnard (01:04:54):

But the best testing methods nowadays are really using human cells. You, you may, you may have seen these things. You can have a little chip and you put human cells inside. It's like a microchip. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you put human cells in, it can be lung cells, liver cells, uh, all kinds of human cells. And you can flow through it, um, through little channels that are similar to blood vessels. You can flow through drugs that you're testing. You're testing them either for toxicity or some kind of action that they have. It is cheap. It is fast. And it is human there.

Moby (01:05:26):

Obviously, there's a lot of people talking about ai. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. It's evolving in leaps and bounds in ways that we can't even imagine, for better or for worse. But we were reading recently about how researchers had used AI to discover a sort of manufactured source of lithium for creating batteries. And they said it would've taken approximately 20 years with old research methods. It took AI like a day. Um, do you think that this is all, like, is there a world where ai quantum computing can also make, I guess, uh, computer testing for molecules even that much better, that much more effective?

Dr. Barnard (01:06:07):

I'm sure that's already occurring because for example, let's say you've isolated the, the molecular structure of a receptor in the brain, a receptor for dopamine or noradrenalin or something like that. You know, the, the what the str receptor looks like. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Okay. AI give me various mo molecules that will attach to that receptor, which ones will turn up your dopamine, which ones will turn it down. Um, that kind of computer modeling has been going on for a while. And I'm sure AI just makes it faster.

Lindsay (01:06:35):

So in all of your, your research, I mean, you are so tapped in, are there new or old things that you've read, seen or discovered that genuinely shocked you? I mean, it must be hard to shock you anymore because you've seen so much. But is there anything like that, that really genuinely surprised you for, for better or for

Dr. Barnard (01:06:57):

Worse? You mean things that we have found

Lindsay (01:06:58):

Yeah. That you have found or that are new discoveries in your field?

Moby (01:07:02):

And Lindsay especially even mean something like, like the power of fiber or anthocyanins or

Lindsay (01:07:08):

Yeah. Like a factor or a statistic that you were like holy moly

Moby (01:07:12):

About.

Dr. Barnard (01:07:13):

Well, I mean, every day is sort of just mundane things that you didn't expect to happen. Yeah. Um, I'll give you a typical example. I was sitting at my desk one day. A young woman called me up, said, Dr. Barnard, my mother told me to call you 'cause I can't get outta bed. I said, well, what's the problem? And she had menstrual menstrual pain and a lot of women have cramps, but for maybe one in 10, it's like off the scale, can't function today. And that was her situation. And her mother was a doctor in another part of the country who knew me and said, call Dr. Brier. And she wanted a prescription for Demerol, which is a heavy duty painkiller. And she said, I got a business trip outta town. I just need enough painkillers to get on the plane. I said, I can give you some painkillers for a couple of days.

Dr. Barnard (01:07:57):

But, but I was trying to think how we were gonna stop this pain from recurring next month. And I had remembered that there was a study at Tufts University where researchers were looking at how to control estrogens in a woman's body. And they found that if you cut the fat from her diet in, in a big way, and if you increase fiber plant roughage in a big way, estrogen levels go down. Now, the reason they were doing it was that if you can reduce estrogen, you reduce breast cancer risk. But I was thinking, what are cramps? Cramps are, you got extra estrogen that's caused the, the womb, the, the inner lining of the uterus to expand too much. And at the end of the, the month it's breaking up and causing crampy pain. So I thought, let's reduce the amount of estrogen in your blood.

Dr. Barnard (01:08:43):

See how you do. So anyhow, I said, lemme give you some heavy duty painkillers. I'm gonna give you a good pain bazooka for two days, but why don't we try and experiment? And I suggested a vegan diet that was, that had no added fat at all. 'cause I wanted to make sure everything she ate had a lot of fiber. She did it. Um, her cramps basically never came back. And I thought, wow, that's amazing. That really worked. Um, but that's just one person. Uh, but they did come back when she like abandoned the diet, or she tried to get loose on the diet and the, the pain came back. So I thought, that's convincing to me. So we then brought in a, a larger group of women and did a randomized clinical trial on it. We found that it works. So I thought, okay, wait a minute.

Dr. Barnard (01:09:22):

Estrogen is a hormone. I can change estrogen. I know how to change testosterone. Insulin is a hormone. We've learned how to change hormone space just on what you're eating. So anyway, I wrote this book called Your Body Imbalance, which was, here's how you change your hormones and get healthy. And I had a chapter in there about menopause, which happened to say that in Japan before Westernization, women didn't have much in the way of menopausal symptoms in Japan. Um, maybe 15% of women had 'em. They weren't so bad. Why? Well, they were eating rice, they were eating vegetables. They weren't eating Big Macs. Um, and they were also eating soy. So I wrote about that in this book. Um, and a woman called me up after the book came out. She said, Dr. Brown, I did, I read your book and I I did what you said.

Dr. Barnard (01:10:08):

And my hot flashes are gone. I said, wait, wait, wait, wait. I didn't promise that I, I just kind of spoke in general terms about this. What did you do? She said, well, I, I avoided all animal products. I kept oils really low. I ate soybeans, which I talked about. And I said, well, wait a minute. What did you do? I I ordered on Amazon, Laura brand soybeans, and I cooked them in an instant pot for 40, 40 minutes. Thank you. Hung up the phone. I ran into my research director's office. I said, Betty just told me our next clinical trial. And we rounded up 84 women and we had half of them do nothing. They all had hot, terrible, hot flashes. The other half of them did Betty's diet. Exactly what Betty did. You're gonna be vegan, no, no added fats, and you're gonna have a half a cup of soybeans.

Dr. Barnard (01:10:56):

I called up the head of Instant Pot. I said, can you, can you give me some instant pot? He said, sure. And he did free thank you Insat. Um, and so what we found is we could knock out the hot flashes 88% of of the time. Wow. So that was as good as hormone replacement therapy. Here's why that matters. Women go through menopause and their doctors either ignore them, belittle them, don't understand them, or give them a prescription for something that is gonna increase their risk of serious problems. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, I'm, I'm not saying that there is never a purpose for hormone replacement therapy. What I am saying is it does increase the risk of certain cancers. And so, wait a minute, we just did the same thing with a diet that actually reduces your risk of breast cancer and the women lose weight and they felt great about it.

Dr. Barnard (01:11:37):

So anyway, these are just little things, but, but if you're open to trying it and if you've got a little, some resources, you know, and I've, I've got a research team and we can do these things. And so we do, so we've done this with migraines, we've done this with rheumatoid arthritis. Uh, we're doing a study right now with the big insurance company to see if medical utilization goes down. Hopefully a patient becomes a cheap date. You know? Yeah. You don't need so much of the emergency. I mean, that is, so those are things that we do every day. So in

Moby (01:12:07):

Terms of allies, I think you and I have talked about this, but I've been, I remember the first time I met with the people at the Humane Society, I was like, who are our allies? Do we have any, and I thought the insurance companies, 'cause like their goal is to spend as little as possible. And obviously if people are healthy, the insurance companies will be spending less. Have you, am I deluded or is there some legitimacy to that? Like, it seems like the insurance companies would be basically doing everything in their power to get people to be healthier. So they would be paying out less as opposed to hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical care.

Dr. Barnard (01:12:43):

They certainly can be allies. Some of them are not. Some of them just will calculate, okay, here's how much, uh, insurance costs you had last year. And so company, you we're now gonna change it to this new figure for the next year based just on how much you used. And they're just gonna put their markup in it. They don't care how much you're you're spending, they're gonna have their markup no matter what. But there are companies who exactly as you said, want to minimize costs. And there are companies that legitimately care about their customers. And so we're doing a study right now, um, to look at medical utilization. And my hope is that insurance companies, which right now will say, you know, are you doing your preventive care? And to them that means are you getting a mammogram? And, you know, stuff like that, which Okay, fair enough. But it can really also mean what are you eating and why don't you take this free class? And, uh, you know, chicken is not health food. I mean, there are things that they can say that will help them and they'll help the patient. And, and, and anything that helps that one identified person will also help their whole family.

Moby (01:13:49):

Um, what do you think I have, I have an ally, and it might seem a little crazy, but the military, because obviously a healthy military is a good, by the military's criteria is a very good thing. You know, fewer people having sick days, fewer people dealing with type two diabetes, fewer people dealing with all, you know, congenital heart disease, et cetera, in terms of what they're spending. But also in terms of troop readiness, um, I'm wondering if there is a world like where we, you can go to the military and say, Hey, look, a plant-based diet for the people in the military will save you these many billions of dollars and will increase troop readiness. I'm not advocating on behalf of the military, but I see them as potentially being a giant institution who could be our allies.

Dr. Barnard (01:14:39):

Even having a military at all depends in part to a healthy kind of diet. And the reason, what I mean is that a huge fraction of people who want to become soldiers are rejected based on poor health. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> you typically overweight. Um, they're not accepted. Um, and they, they, their fitness is terrible. And there are also people who've worked their way up the military ranks and they're no longer in basic training anymore, and they're gaining a lot of weight and they're no longer fit. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Um, and they end up retiring or dying or whatever. And so, yes, absolutely. Uh, and they should be a better ally than they are. There's a little bit of machos in it, you know, to be vegan means pacifist. Um, it, it conjures up a lot of things, but the fact of the matter is to be strong doesn't mean to eat, to eat the object you wanna look like, you know, the, to be strong means to eat. If you wanna be strong like a bull, you don't, you don't eat a bull. Yeah. <laugh>,

Moby (01:15:40):

I mean, one, the bull is a vegan. It is. And Lindy and I have discussed this before. It is, when you take a step back, just so patently ridiculous, that there's so many men who think that eating meat and milk and eggs is macho just to describe what they're eating, you know, apart from the fact that it's creating estrogen in their bodies, but like it's defenseless, gentle, vegan animals killed by miserable workers. You know, think of like these poor little chickens, you know, these defenseless cows. You know, how is paying someone else to slaughter a confined, defenseless vegan animal, considered macho? I'm so confused. And, and in the process, you know, giving yourself erectile dysfunction and flooding your body with estrogen, it's

Lindsay (01:16:33):

Psych, it seems like it's all psychological. Right? I feel like part of the problem with the American diet is both a mental health and an education issue. Would you tend to agree?

Dr. Barnard (01:16:45):

Yes. And, and this, this, this macho issue that you've raised, it's a little bit sort of like Facebook. Um, you, you're putting this picture on Facebook, you don't know what's gonna know how it got there or what you really had to look like to make it look, you know, you, you, um, enhance yourself in various ways. You know, I never look at Facebook personally, but this is, tell me if I'm wrong, you know, people will make up different things to try to, to, to try to have the best profile they can. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Okay. Trophy hunters. There are trophy hunters who will pose with a rhinoceros, a giraffe, a lion that they just killed. And it's all the same formula. Here's the, the dead animal. Open up the mouse so you can see the teeth. Show the weapon, uh, your bow and arrow, your gun, whatever it is you killed them with.

Dr. Barnard (01:17:29):

Show yourself and smile and trophy hunters. It all looks macho and it is macho. It's a big macho ritual, but it's sort of like a Facebook pose. 'cause if you could go back in time for how they got there, they went with a guide and the guide said, here's this lion who comes here and we fed them, we put stuff out, so they're gonna be there and, um, try to take a name and if you miss, I will shoot him. Um, and then they set the whole thing up and it's all a bunch of fake stuff. So the guy who wants to say he's eating meat in the back of his mind is this wonderful warrior in his loincloth who went out and slayed this beast and brought it back to his family and his, and that's his image of himself,

Moby (01:18:12):

As opposed to a defenseless little chicken locked in a cage with three other chickens producing toxic eggs and meat. I mean, it's like, there's, I mean, if, if, if I have to say like, if some macho guy said that he was out there wrestling hyenas with his bare hands, I'd be like, you know what, that's pretty macho. Like, if you're gonna go like attack a hyena and like fight it with your hands, like yeah, kudos to you. That's like, I don't approve of it. But it's, it's macho as opposed to like a hunter standing 200 yards away from an animal and their exertion is pulling their finger. But

Lindsay (01:18:55):

Don't you think there's some people that might enjoy the idea that they're eating something that has suffered

Moby (01:19:00):

Trump? Well, obviously <laugh>

Dr. Barnard (01:19:03):

Freud said, and I think he was right, that the two fundamental human drives are sex and aggression. And what, what they, what he really meant was that our DNA has coded in it reproduce my whole job. My chromosome's whole job is to make sure that my lineage continues. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And so how are we gonna do that? Um, you're gonna do that by having territory and that means having land or defending your family. And those are, that's a fundamental drive. And you're gonna have sex. Um, and so people spend a whole lot of time, high school boys go and get the right powder, blue tuxedo and girls spend time in front of the mirror and all this kind of stuff. And they're just living out what their DNA tells them to do. And so you say to a person, wait, stop. Um, I know that your brain is hardwired young man for sex and aggression and testosterone is pumping your brain in exactly this direction. And you're saying be compassionate. It's not in our DNA it is a little bit because otherwise we'd need our own children. And so we have to learn to <laugh> plug into that part of us that allows us to get along with our own and pump that up. And pretty soon the not inconsiderable amount of intelligence that people can bring to bear does kick in. And we realize that we can kind of free ourselves up from some of that hormonally fueled stuff that we inherited. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.

Moby (01:20:23):

So we should start to wrap up. 'cause I'm starting to feel guilty that we we're taking off a lot of your side. I mean, we, we, we brought you here and we're like, oh yeah, 45 minutes, 50 minutes. And now we've been talking for an hour and a half. So in terms of goals, like for yourself, for our species, for the physicians committee, for responsible medicine, for healthcare, what do, I mean, obviously you've accomplished more in this space than pretty much anyone. What are your goals for the next 10, 20, 30 years?

Dr. Barnard (01:20:55):

Well, we work in, in different domains, um, regarding clinical research. Um, I think it's really, really important to do good quality clinical research to prove what a diet change will do. Because people used to think it wasn't even safe to follow a vegan diet. You won't get protein, da da da. So we have to make it clear that it's safe and show what it does. And that's for the benefit of human beings. It's also for the benefit of animals as well. So that's a big area. Excuse me. So we're, we're very busy with the research and there's a whole lot left to be done. Um, how, think about the kinds of interventions you could design so that a 14-year-old kid who's eating cheese pizza in school and is gaining, gaining weight and getting the beatings of diabetes, you see this all over the place. We can find creative ways to intervene in those environments to, to reform the, the health of a whole generation.

Dr. Barnard (01:21:45):

That's what we need to do. And it will be a diet that also happens to be compassionate. So we've got a lot of work to do there in research. We also have a lot of education to do because we already know enough to help people to change their diets. We do a lot of work with the government. Um, right now we're working with the government to have healthier diet policies. And that's working in, in a good way. We're making progress. And regarding animals in laboratories, we work with industry a lot. I mean, they're industries using animals. We work with them to help understand better ways to, to do it. And we're making proper

Moby (01:22:21):

Better, better ways to replace the animal, not not better ways to test on animals. <laugh>. Well, just trying to qualify that a little bit. Yeah,

Dr. Barnard (01:22:27):

No, no ways of replacing animals. Yeah. That work far better because you

Moby (01:22:31):

Said better ways to do it, as in referring

Dr. Barnard (01:22:33):

To that better way, better ways to do the replacements. Yeah. Um, and I have to say that work is, is is moving forward in a good way. Um, we have some headwinds. If you look at, uh, China, India, the two biggest countries in the world, um, they are rapidly westernizing due to economic forces in particular. And so you're seeing diet related diseases come in and, you know, it's pig farms in the United States are controlled by China, you know, Smithfield and, and others. Um, so we have, we do a lot of work in China. We do a lot of work in India. Tell people to wait to really, this sounds kind of mean, but to say, wake up to the causes of the diabetes and cardiovascular disease that is emerging in these countries there. So we have lots of, lots, lots of work to do internationally too. Are

Lindsay (01:23:21):

There things that, any other things that people might not know that you think that they should be aware of in their daily lives? Of what to choose and what to what not to choose or what to do or what not to do to be their healthiest, most compassionate version of themselves?

Dr. Barnard (01:23:38):

I mean, foods they should eat. Yeah.

Lindsay (01:23:39):

Foods. Foods or like, I don't know. I feel like people sometimes are hesitant to go, if this goes wrong, they don't wanna go see a doctor. But like, that's absolutely something that you should go do. Especially as far as like, things that could come from a diet issue. Maybe that's too broad a question.

Dr. Barnard (01:23:55):

Well, um, you didn't ask this, but I will say that I don't want people to fire their doctor <laugh>. Um, you know, because the, the human body is, you know, someday I'm gonna write a book called Unintelligent Design. I'm sorry to say. There's so many things that go wrong in the human body. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, um, that there, there, there just are. And it's sort of like your car. You can really baby it, but things are gonna go wrong. So teeth, you Yeah. All kind

Moby (01:24:16):

Teeth. Teeth are so badly designed. Like, why do we have teeth? I mean, like, why do they have nerves? Doesn't make any sense. They rot up until recently it killed so many humans. Like, so I put forward for your book, unintelligent Design. Please have a chapter on teeth. Yeah.

Lindsay (01:24:31):

The tooth chapter. Yeah.

Dr. Barnard (01:24:32):

I mean, every, there's so many things. Think of the reproductive organs. Things are going wrong with them all the time. You know, and, and like, what do you need 'em for? I mean, let's, let's, let's face it, how many times do people reproduce handful of times in their life and then they're saddle with only <laugh>? I'm, I'm only partly kidding. I mean, this is the reality of it. So anyhow, um, the point I'm making is that things go on with our bodies. We sometimes need medical care, despite the best you do. And there are, there is a role for medication, there's a role for surgery. Don't forget that there are also certain things, you didn't exactly ask me this, but there's certain things that people think are healthy, that are really not. And a real big one is salmon. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. I don't eat any, any, uh, animal products except for salmon because it's got those omega threes. It's wild cotton. And I bought it at Whole Foods. And, and, and what happens when people do that is they, their weight loss stops cold <laugh>. They, they just, they can't lose weight with salmon. And you, pretty soon you can see why. 'cause it's 40% fat. If it's Atlantic salmon, if it's chinook salmon, it's 52% fat. Every fat gram is nine calories. And not to mention mercury and all these other bits. So that's a good one. Leave the salmon alone. Um, and you're gonna lose weight more easily.

Moby (01:25:49):

Last question, maybe last question. Yeah. Okay, last couple of questions. Best foods healthy, super simple question. What are the healthiest foods? I've asked a few people this, I'm curious to know. We seem to be building a consensus.

Dr. Barnard (01:26:01):

Well, I wrote a book that I have to <laugh> tell you about that to deal with exactly the same question. It's called The Power Foods Diet. Because there are certain foods that I, and it's out now. Yeah. It's, it's just brand new just came up. I I think I've got a copy coming your way pretty soon. Um, anyway, the, the reason I I was,

Moby (01:26:17):

That was a leading question always.

Dr. Barnard (01:26:19):

Oh, thank you. I didn't realize,

Moby (01:26:20):

I'm trying to steer towards The Power Foods Diet. Okay. Okay. So power foods, what are the power foods and what is The Power Foods Diet?

Dr. Barnard (01:26:26):

Okay, well the reason I call it power foods is, well first of all, Harvard University back in 2015, did an amazing study. They brought in more than a hundred thousand people. They tracked what they ate, and they noticed that it turned out that if you ate more of certain foods, you would lose more weight. Now this, this is the opposite of what people would think. People would think. If I eat more of anything, I mean, if I'm eating more of it, no matter how healthy it is, I've gotta gain weight. That's not what they found. If you ate more of certain specific foods as the years went by, people would lose more weight. The more they increased these foods, the more weight they lost. The top of the list was this unassuming, humble blueberry and all their cousins, the blueberries, the raspberries, the strawberries. And the question is why? And the answer seems to be anthocyanins. The, the blue color comes from what are called anthocyanin <laugh>. There you go. Okay. It's a power, it's a powerful, I love

Moby (01:27:21):

Anthocyanin.

Dr. Barnard (01:27:22):

Okay. Powerful antioxidant. Two years after they did this study, researchers in the UK did an amazing study. They brought in 2,734 identical twins. They, they, they were women. Everybody was in a twin pair. And they all got a DEXA scan where you look at body fat, where, where's the, where's the fat on your body? And what they discovered is that the twin who ate the most anthocyanins in each pair had substantially less body fat compared to her genetically identical twin sister. Specifically less abdominal fat. So you think, wait a minute, it's not genetic. 'cause they are gene, they're twins. It's the food. So anyway, our team has been putting this to the test and there's a whole bunch of power foods. So what I wanted to do is to say, alright, if berries are a power food, if cruciferous vegetables are, if certain green vegetables are, if melons are, if cinnamon ginger jalapeno peppers with capsaicin our power food, let's break away from dieting.

Dr. Barnard (01:28:20):

You don't have to cut calories anymore because there are certain foods that satisfy you with fewer calories. They tame your appetite. There are certain foods that capture calories in your digestive tract and escort them out, and you flush them down the toilet before you can absorb them. There are certain foods that ramp up your metabolism. So The Power Foods Diet says, forget dieting, forget your food scale. Uh, forget the, the idea of not eating. Let's have fun. So I worked with Dustin Harder and Lindsay S Nixon, the greatest recipe developers in the world. And we came up with french toast, which has cinnamon, which is a metabolism booster, and it has blueberries in a blueberry syrup. So we're we're just, just taking the power foods and making 'em into breakfast. And we took the capin, which make jalapenos hot, and we put 'em into a, a southwest chili.

Dr. Barnard (01:29:09):

And we made these wonderful blueberry pops and like 123 or four recipes. And the food photographs are about this close to food porn <laugh>. And The Power Foods Diet basically says enough of obesity. 20 years ago, we found we could reverse diabetes. When we discovered that you're asking about breakthroughs. That is a breakthrough. Yeah. That person doesn't have diabetes anymore. And when, when we, when I had my first patient whose diabetes went away, I, it was a big deal. Yeah. I wanna do the same thing with obesity. I want obesity to go away as an issue. I want dieting to go away. I don't want people to have to inject an appetite tamer. And I think we can do this by using the foods that work with our natural appetite mechanisms and our natural, natural mechanism, uh, metabolic mechanisms. It's relatively easy to do. And that's what this is about.

Lindsay (01:30:04):

That's great. Oh man, I can't, I need this book so bad. I need it right now. I

Moby (01:30:08):

Wanna make french toast. Toast Linda have, have a different approach to food. Um, i's

Lindsay (01:30:15):

Very, very virtuous in his diet.

Moby (01:30:18):

Well, I just, I, okay, so this is, I've gotta, sometimes I go off on this sort of like spiritual scientific kick, especially as regards black beans, um, <laugh>. And I won't do that now because, you know, I've done that in the past and I, I can ramble on. And people just sort of look at me like, wait, you're, you're, you're saying that divinity is revealed through black beans and blueberries? I'm like, absolutely. Nobody wants

Lindsay (01:30:46):

To replace churches with beans.

Moby (01:30:47):

Yeah. Basically

Dr. Barnard (01:30:49):

Sign me up. I <laugh>

Moby (01:30:51):

I think black beans. So, so blueberries and black beans, walnuts, I mean like, these foods are insofar as humans can understand the divine. I think they're divine. For example, I didn't interview a while ago about the rise of clean protein and alternative proteins, which is great. But at the end of the interview I was like, what about black beans? They cost nothing to grow. They sequester carbon. They're nutritionally almost as close to perfection as you can get. They provide fiber and fat and protein, but they also are loaded with anthocyanins that protect you. So imagine if humans, I'm sorry, I know I'm preaching to the choir, but I get too excited about this. <laugh>, imagine if we invented food that filled you up, that sequestered carbon, that provided fiber, organic clean fiber, fats and proteins, and also was filled with natural anthos and antioxidants that protected you from everything. And that also probably in the process of eating them, decrease the chances that you're gonna get Alzheimer's. Yeah. Yes. That's black beans. They cost nothing basically, or blueberries or walnuts. All these foods. They're ma So The Power Foods Diet, sign me up. I, I would probably call it like the magic divine foods diet <laugh>. But then again, no one would buy that book. So I'm glad that you didn't call it the magic Divine foods diet. But

Lindsay (01:32:09):

What I'm excited about is that there's a french toast,

Dr. Barnard (01:32:12):

There's a killer French toast. Oh,

Lindsay (01:32:14):

I'm, I'm genuinely there.

Dr. Barnard (01:32:16):

There is. I can't wait to make it. There's a killer carrot cake in there. There are wild blueberry muffins. And we, there are some that are really fun. Uh, we have a, a triple berry sorbet, which is blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, bananas, just a couple. It's, these are all really easy to make you, you zip it down in your, in your blender. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>. Put it in a glass bowl, cover it with a little surround wrap, put it in the freezer, take it out. And it's, it's a sorbet but it's light delicate. And so

Moby (01:32:40):

I eat that every night. It

Dr. Barnard (01:32:42):

Is. You know, it is. So, but I

Moby (01:32:42):

Also add, I also add red and black grapes. Yes. And oranges.

Dr. Barnard (01:32:46):

And because it's from food, it's not you, you're not throwing a box of domino sugar in there. The taste is more delicate and it's really cool. And the best of all is we have this blueberry pops. It's blueberries, bananas, pears, just a few things. You zip it down and you go to the part of the store, the grocery store where they have the can openers. They sell Popsicle forms and sticks. Yeah, I see that. Yeah. Okay. So you, you, you put the, you fill 'em up with this wildly purple stuff that's comes from berries and you freeze it. And when the neighbor kids come by, their 10-year-old kids come by, they start screaming for your purple blueberry pops <laugh>. And you know, you're feeling good 'cause you're giving them something that's actually healthy for

Moby (01:33:22):

You. So you lost me there. 'cause I, I think the goal is to actually make sure that neighborhood kids never come by. <laugh>.

Dr. Barnard (01:33:28):

Well, like

Moby (01:33:29):

H like Halloween. Lindsay puts out the, the healthy candy, the organic vegan candy and has like Halloween lights. I turn off all my lights and sit, I'm like a Halloween scrooge. So you had me up until it involved like making kids happy.

Dr. Barnard (01:33:42):

<laugh>. Well how about this? Give them some extra blueberry pops. Tell them to take them home to their parents. By the time they get home they'll have melted and their parents won't let them come to your house anymore.

Moby (01:33:50):

That's good. Like shell Silverstein. Did you ever read a BZ like, or is it Shell Silverstein's book about how he didn't like children? I like children. I'm just trying to be funny. <laugh>, I don't wanna get in trouble. People think like why I know you're a missing throat, but really goes that far. <laugh>. So power foods diet sounds amazing. Um, I need to find my copy. And Lindsay, we should also buy copies. Oh,

Lindsay (01:34:09):

We should get some copies because I'm just wanna to everyone, but also I wanna make everything, I'll send you pictures when I make stuff.

Dr. Barnard (01:34:15):

Oh well thank Make extra. Share it around I'll, because there, you know, there are people who really are suffering Yeah. With, they don't know what to do and they do really terrible things like starvation or avoiding carbs or drugs and that kind of thing. And when they learn, when we share either the knowledge or share the food, it's a lifesaver <laugh>.

Moby (01:34:32):

But what's amazing is eating a whole foods healthy power foods diet. You never have to really think about it. Yes. You're like, can you, and it's so indulgent, whether it's cacao nibs and bananas and dates and cinnamon and like, it's sweet and it's great and you can sit down with black grapes and blueberries and it's so indulgent and you don't have to worry about it. Like that's, it's, it's magic. So even like an amazing burrito with black beans and pinto beans and guacamole. Can you tell that I haven't had dinner <laugh>. I know you're really, but like, think of it like in the salsa with like garlic and the alliums, the onions and scallions and like some sort of sprouted grain tortilla I've just described a nutritionally perfect meal and it's delicious and amazing. So I'm very excited to dig into The Power Foods Diet.

Dr. Barnard (01:35:23):

Well thank you.

Lindsay (01:35:24):

And thank you for making it, for writing it. I can't wait to see it.

Dr. Barnard (01:35:27):

It's, it's a fun book. I hope people like it.

Moby (01:35:29):

Thank you for everything that you do and for decades of like science and medical activism. You know, it's really an honor to be your friend and to know you. And thank you for coming on Moby Pod.

Lindsay (01:35:43):

And thank you for humoring us.

Dr. Barnard (01:35:45):

Thank you for everything that you do. You've reached so many people in so many ways and you reach people with what you say. You touch their heart with your music. I'm obviously a huge fan and thank you for letting me share this time with you. And

Moby (01:35:57):

Now are we gonna go get dinner? <laugh> <laugh>?

Dr. Barnard (01:35:59):

Let's do it. There's a jalapeno waiting for us somewhere. Yes.

Lindsay (01:36:02):

<laugh>. Okay, great.

Moby (01:36:09):

So of course that was Dr. Neal Barnard and you are Lindsay and that's bagel. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And

Lindsay (01:36:17):

And that was an amazing conversation with an amazing man. There were laughs there were tears, <laugh>

Moby (01:36:23):

And there was a lot of information and education. Yeah. And I love talking like people like Dr. Barnard or Ellie Laks or Gene Bauer or Dan Buettner like people who have dedicated their lives to moving the needle away from the current terrible status quo. Like they're all so inspiring. And Dr. Barnard, even after our conversation, he's more of a hero of mine.

Lindsay (01:36:48):

Same. I couldn't agree more. You should follow him if you aren't already. It's Dr. Neal Barnard on Instagram. And that's Barnard, which isn't that funny. That's like

Moby (01:36:58):

Barnard. Barn yard minus a y. Yeah,

Lindsay (01:36:59):

Exactly. And also, which makes a lot of sense.

Moby (01:37:01):

And also Physicians' Committee for Responsible Medicine.

New Speaker (01:37:03):

It's @PhysiciansCommittee on Instagram. You should follow them. They're doing incredible work all the time. It's definitely worth keeping up with. Uh, read as many books by Neal as you can possibly fit in your little noggin because they're full of fascinating things. And also stay aware of all of the stuff that they're doing because it's always evolving, it's always changing. It's great. So thanks Neal.

Moby (01:37:26):

And, and because we've been here a while and you were just saying thanks to Dr. Barnard, um, I also like to say thanks Bagel.

Lindsay (01:37:32):

Yeah, thanks Bagel. You did a very good job.

Moby (01:37:34):

And thanks Mike Formanski for filming. And thanks Jonathan Nesvadba for audio editing and thanks human content for delivering everything to the world. And

Lindsay (01:37:45):

And thanks Moby for bringing lumberjack vibes.

Moby (01:37:49):

Oh yeah. Well, so the people who are listening won't know what you're talking about, but I'm, I'm wearing an, an old middle-aged guy lumberjack type shirt. Yeah.

Lindsay (01:37:56):

You look like you're gonna go, um, just hold an ax in a cool way and not chop anything down because you love

Moby (01:38:01):

Trees. I would not chop trees down. I know you wouldn't. Yeah. Oh, that leads me as a complete non-sequitur to say that the next episode of Moby Pod in two weeks is going to be a very informative big one 'cause we're working on something big,

Lindsay (01:38:15):

We're working on something that we feel really proud of. But also we're gonna talk a little bit about our production company, little Walnut, which we haven't really done before. So I'm excited to share with people all the stuff we've been doing in our time when we're not talking into these uh, phones,

Moby (01:38:29):

<laugh>. So we'll talk to you in two weeks with lots of new, hopefully interesting and possibly even important relevant information. And until then, thank you very much and bye.

Lindsay (01:38:39):

And bye.