Garth Davis: Are You a Proteinaholic? Why One Doctor Says Too Much Protein Is Bad for Your Health
It’s a controversial theory that’s sending shock waves throughout the medical community. In this interview, Dr. Garth Davis, author of the book “Proteinaholic” argues that our obsession with protein has reached epidemic levels, and could have irreparable consequences for our health. How much meat should we be eating? And what constitutes too much? The surprising research is all revealed here! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
You know, you go and ask for a salad, you know, and they're like, do you want some protein with your salad?
And my wife hates this now because I'm like, what do you mean?
And they're like, well, do you want steak?
Well, I'm like, steak is, you know, at least a third or more fat.
You ask me if I want fat with my salad?
And the guy's like, look, I'm a 16-year-old waiter.
Peter, can you give me a break?
Hey, everyone. everyone.
I'm Dr. Oz, and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
We'll be right back.
Today, a controversial theory that's sending shockwaves through the medical community.
My next guest, new book, Proteinaholic, argues that our nation is addicted to meat.
Dr. Garth Davis claims that our obsession with protein has reached epidemic levels and could have irreparable consequences on our health.
And just to put it in context, Dr. Davis is a surgeon with his dad as It has a hit docu-reality medical series called Big Medicine.
So he's not a fly-by-night fella.
He's thoughtful about this process.
And I actually wanted to hear a little bit about your argument because it's going against their prevailing winds today in medicine.
And you introduced yourself on the first page of the book as a former proteinaholic.
What does that mean?
Well, you know, I was kind of going through life based on what I saw around me.
And you think about doctors.
I mean, you've been through medical school.
We had no training in nutrition.
And it gets worse than that.
Not only do we not have training in nutrition, we almost look at a patient like you were a heart doctor.
You looked at their heart.
You know, they came in, it was the heart.
And then you send them to the endocrinologist for their endocrine organ or the pulmonologist for the pulmonary.
And I did the same.
I remember in residency, it wasn't Mrs. Smith in room 101. It was the colon cancer in room 101. I had such a disconnected view of people.
And the other thing I had, which was kind of, I think, interesting, I see this a lot in my patients, is almost this belief that we're going to get sick.
It's just a matter of time.
We have lemons for our body.
Our job is to fix it, like we're mechanics, but it's going to break down.
That's just nature.
And, you know, I ate what I thought was an okay diet.
I mean, it was eggs and bacon for breakfast.
Everyone does that, right?
I'd have, you know, chicken sandwich.
A little hot sauce.
Yeah, a little hot sauce on there.
That must be great for me, right?
And then, funny enough, I trained at University of Michigan.
And there was a Wendy's there.
And I would eat the bun, I mean the burger and not the bun, which this is what blows my mind now, is that America thinks that the problem is the bun and not the burger, which so blows my mind now, but I believed that back then.
And my waist got bigger and bigger, but again I thought, okay, that's just the way it is, right?
About the age of 36...
I was going to have my first child.
So I went to get a life insurance policy test.
My cholesterol was sky high.
I was hypertensive.
I had fatty liver.
I already was suffering with irritable bowel syndrome.
I had gone and got an eye exam.
They said you had cholesterol.
I had lipidemia.
And they were...
Isn't it 36?
This is 36. And I have a family history, but...
How expensive was your life insurance when you got it?
Oh, yeah.
It was really expensive.
But the thing, it really set me off because I said, wait a second.
I mean, you know, so then I go and see my buddy.
He said, oh...
No problem.
I'm going to throw you on a little bit of this, a little bit of that.
I'll put you on Lipitor.
If you get pain, we'll put you on this.
But I know how it is because I've seen these patients coming in, and they've got these long lists of medications.
There was something in me that said, wait a second.
Is there another story here?
And I had written a book at that time called The Expert's Guide to Weight Loss Surgery, which was heavily researched because I'm really big into research, and there's all this stuff about weight loss surgery.
But there's a chapter on nutrition, and I didn't research that at all.
I just said, eat protein, because that's what all my colleagues did, and that's what I did.
And that's when I really stopped and said, well, is this right?
And then I started looking at the research and I saw a different picture.
But at the time, I was a proteinaholic.
I thought to myself, you know, I would eat eggs for bacon, you know, like a chicken sandwich for lunch and a steak for dinner.
And then I just put a protein shake in there because I need more protein, obviously.
Where does that myth come from then if it's faulty?
So many people are saying that.
We hear it all the time from the paleo crowd.
Where is that research coming from?
Well, I wouldn't say there's research to prove it, but we can get to that.
But I'll tell you where it comes from.
It's a long story.
So many, many years ago, Mulder discovered that all of our tissues, our organs, have this compound protein in it.
And there were even studies back then.
A guy named Von Voigt, he looked at some day workers, and he looked at how much they ate a day, and he saw that they ate about 115 grams of protein.
He said, well, therefore, that's what we need to eat is 115 grams of protein a day.
And so they've got this concept of, you know, eat more meat at the time.
Now, funny enough, at the time, there were other doctors saying, wait a second, don't do it.
Or like Sylvester Graham from the Graham Cacker fame.
He was like, wait a second, don't do that.
That's making you sick.
A guy out of Yale said we only need 60 grams.
He did some really good studies.
But at the time, look, people weren't worried about obesity and cardiac disease at the turn of the century.
They were worried about getting an infection.
And in fact, being overweight was a sign of being wealthy and healthy.
And so that really wasn't an issue.
I think the time really changed around the Senate Select Committee for Nutrition in the 1960s, 1970s that was chaired by McGovern.
Because what they did is they came in and they said, let's look at what's wrong with us.
Because at that point in time, they were actually designed to look at food scarcity.
And they said, okay, we can address that, food stamps, etc.
But our bigger problem is too much food and too many calories and too many sick people.
And this was when heart disease was getting really bad.
And they had many, many meetings.
Lots of science was discussed.
And they came out with some recommendations.
And one of them was to eat less meat, eat more fruits and vegetables, eat more complex carbs.
Well, obviously, the industry went crazy with that.
And there was a huge battle over this.
And in fact, Senator Dole changed the recommendation from eat less meat to eat more lean meat.
And we started getting away from food at this point.
This was the big problem.
One of our big problems with nutrition is the reductionism.
We never really talked about protein and fat and carbs that much.
Certainly not on a layperson type discussion.
We talked about food.
But now, all of a sudden, the discussion changed.
And we started talking about fat and carbs and protein.
And we went low fat, though we never actually went low fat.
We were eating more fat, actually, more calories in general.
But we started eating, you know, snack wells, low fat, you know, no fat cookies.
And we thought that that would make us healthy, which it didn't.
Interestingly, our cholesterol level did drop because we had new medications and did make some nutrition changes.
But this really set off a whole thing because then if you look at the literature, there's these tons of low-fat versus low-carb studies, millions of them.
I mean, it took me forever to go through some of this literature.
And so low-fat people are battling low-carb people.
And in the background, protein's like, oh, okay.
I could hang out here and not get any of the fray.
And then what happens is...
Marketers jump on that, right?
We got Atkins, and then you got, I mean, look now, we know protein cells.
If it says on it, I say to my patients, and this happens to me on a day-to-day basis, I start helping them meal plan.
And I say, you know, for a snack, why don't you eat an apple?
Then I come back and I read their diet log.
There's no apple.
There's beef jerky.
And I'm like, why the beef jerky?
And they're like, well, the protein.
You know, I want to pull my hair out.
And I'm like, so the beef jerky is better for you than the apple.
Yes, this is very, very solid in the American psyche right now that that is the case.
So...
Who are you targeting with this message?
Why is it that it's not being heard?
Because you're not the first person that I've heard make this argument, who's well-based and researched and thoughtful about the process.
In fact, you do bariatric surgeries.
You're operating on heavier-than-heavy people.
Right.
Look, I mean, the problem is so widespread.
When I first started reading the research and I started realizing, we eat more protein than any other country in the world.
And we've got some of the best healthcare.
So how's our health?
It's some of the worst.
If you look at some of the WHO data, we're the most unhealthy country in the world.
And then if you start looking at the countries, and you can start with the blue zones, right?
And you can look at these places where they eat a predominantly plant-based diet.
And there's other reasons they're healthy, right?
They're active.
They've got purpose in life.
All these different things that Dan Buettner has studied.
But they eat a lot less protein than we do.
About 7% of their calories come from protein.
7% to 10%.
We're eating 15% to 20% and we want to eat higher when you look at the studies.
People want more.
But it really came to me with my patients because in bariatric surgery, there is a very, very strong belief that the patients need protein.
Very, very strong belief.
And so all the doctors tell their patients to eat 80 grams of protein a day.
And I did too.
And my patients lose weight.
The first year after a weight loss surgery, we call it the honeymoon phase.
Everybody loses weight, and they come in a year later, and they're so excited.
Look at my picture, Dr. Davis.
I love you so much.
But it reminds me of that movie, Awakenings.
I don't know if you remember that movie where the guy had Parkinson's, and they cured his Parkinson's, and he was so excited, but then the Parkinson's came back, and it was devastating.
Amber Sachs' work.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Yeah.
You see this with weight loss surgery.
And it's devastating.
To see a patient that was so successful when it was coming back.
And I started to panic about it.
And I go to the ASMBS conferences, our National Society for Bariatric Surgery.
And we're talking about weight regain.
And the funny thing about these conferences, this is the conference for weight loss surgery, right?
Weight loss.
We don't talk about food.
There's no discussion about food.
You're kidding me.
No, we don't talk about food.
We talk about the latest surgeries and what can we do and what's next.
And we talk about, this patient failed gastric bypass surgery.
What surgery can we do now?
Should we throw a band around it or should we extend the bypass to make them malabsorptive?
And I'm just sitting there going, is this right?
Now, at the same time, I'm going through my own health changes.
And I'm starting to notice that when my patients come in, it's like, I don't know why I'm...
Gaining weight.
I'm doing what you say.
I'm eating all this protein.
I'm stuffing protein.
I'm eating a protein shake.
And then I'm seeing it also in public.
You go and ask for a salad.
And they're like, do you want some protein with your salad?
And my wife hates this now because I'm like...
What do you mean?
And they're like, well, do you want steak?
Well, I'm like, steak is, you know, at least a third or more fat.
You asked me if I want fat with my salad?
And the guy's like, look, I'm a 16-year-old waiter.
Can you give me a break?
That's right.
But I'm noticing how...
Yeah, I'm still noticing.
You should film that next time it happens, by the way.
Oh, my wife, every time it's like, oh, no, here he goes.
So that's a dreaded question.
But I started to see this in my patients, and I started doing food logs with them and looking at their fiber intake, and their fiber intake was next to nothing.
And I started wondering whether this was a factor in their diabetes coming back, whether this was a factor in their hypertension coming back, and their weight coming back.
And that's when I really started looking into the data and trying these different things with my patients.
After the break, find out why Dr. Davis argues it's not carbs that are making you fat.
Stay with us.
Stay with us.
A lot of the people we've spoken to will say that going on these very high protein, no carb, ketogenic diets will help diabetes.
It will.
Okay.
Or maybe cure diabetes?
So this is a semantics question.
And I didn't know this before.
Okay, so this blew my mind.
Diabetes is what really blew my mind.
Because this is a problem that's getting worse and worse in America, right?
We're seeing worse and worse diabetes.
And we are very strong on the fact that carbs cause diabetes.
But when I started looking at cultures around the world, and I looked at, for instance...
Asian cultures in these blue zones, they're eating very high-carb diets and they don't have diabetes.
Now, the interesting thing in Japan is they started to get diabetes.
It's starting to get there.
And their Ministry of Health looked into it and they said it was meat.
This blew my mind.
They actually said it was meat?
Yeah, they actually said it was meat.
Yeah, the Ministry of Health.
And they've had a big increase in meat, especially chicken intake.
Yeah.
And then I started looking at the Japanese, because I thought maybe the Japanese don't get, or any of these blue zones don't get diabetes because it's genetic.
They're just genetically not set up for it.
But if you look at migration studies, there was a great study that I have in the book in Brazil where they looked at second generation Japanese that went there.
They were starting to develop diabetes on the same rate as the Brazilians, which is a very high meat diet.
You have to use both deductive and inductive reasoning.
In other words, you've got to say, okay, there's these populations getting that.
What could possibly be causing that?
Then you've got to look at what is the biochemical reactions that might be doing this and kind of meet in the middle.
And that's kind of complex talk to say, we've got it a little bit wrong because we're using semantics.
So, yes, with diabetes you have high blood sugar.
But that's not the disease.
All right?
Our bodies are perfectly designed to eat carbohydrates.
That's what our bodies do.
Every cell in our body works on sugar.
The problem with diabetes is not that you have the high...
Well, the high sugar is not good for you, but the problem isn't that you have the high sugar.
It's that you can't process the sugar.
And so if I take away the sugar...
And go on a low-carb diet, yes, your blood sugar will drop.
But has the problem that has made you not be able to tolerate the sugar gone away?
And the answer to that is no.
And what is that problem?
So, the number one source of utilization of blood sugar in our body is our muscles.
Alright?
And so, our muscles produce insulin receptors.
The insulin helps drive the sugar into the muscle cell.
So when you eat a food that's got carbohydrates in it, your body will secrete insulin and that pushes the carbohydrate into the muscle cell, into the mitochondria, and that does our respiration and gives us our energy.
However, and there's many different things that may cause this.
I don't know how technical or scientific you want to get it because I could go into the weeds.
But if fat gets into that muscle cell, you get what's called intramyacellular fat.
And that fat will disrupt the ability of the muscle cell to generate an insulin receptor.
And if the muscle cell can't generate an insulin receptor, your blood sugar can't get in there and it will start to rise.
And then the pancreas will say, oh my gosh, I need to secrete even more insulin to try to push that cell in there.
And you'll get by for a while.
That's when you're insulin resistant.
But eventually that's going to start to fail.
And then you become diabetic.
That's a simplification.
But the science behind that is humongous.
So just to be clear about the clinical approach here, if you take a patient who's a diabetic and you take them off their traditional meat-based protein diet, does their diabetes get better?
Yes.
So there's been several randomized controlled trials on this.
Dr. Neil Barnard did a really good one that he did three years.
Three years of comparing a...
And to his credit, his control group wasn't just a standard American diet.
It was the ADA diet.
It was a pretty respectable, good diet.
And the vegan diet...
These studies are tough.
You say to someone who's a meat eater, you're going to go vegan and that's it, and they do some classes once a week.
It's hard to make them go vegan, so you're not getting 100% of the people doing it.
But still, his study that was, I think that was in JAMA or American...
Yeah, I think that was in JAMA, showed a very good reduction in A1C. Now, I've had even better reductions in my patients, anecdotally, because we have a much more intensive program to help them change the plant-based diet.
Help me with this, because it is frustrating to me, it's not just a doctor, but someone who's got to parse through medical information and try to deliver it to our audience.
We're shows in dozens and dozens of countries.
Probably 20 million people a week hear what we're saying on the show.
And I've never actually processed it that way.
In fact, I was on a panel at the Vatican recently with Neil Barnard, who I've had on the show many times.
Mm-hmm.
And Walter Willett, who was next to him, another big icon, someone we all, I think, a lot of us trust, pushed back a little bit on this observation that there was such a direct, linear correlation between getting rid of meat and dealing with diabetes.
And so I sit here and I think, okay, if it's true that there have been several studies showing that stopping or ceasing eating of meat helps people with diabetes, I would think everybody in the country would be debating whether that's worth doing or not.
We're not even debating it.
I don't think most of us are aware it's true.
I think there's a lot of people that aren't aware.
It's true.
I would be very surprised that they were pushing back on that because Walter Willett has published some very good epidemiologic studies showing that animal protein is strongly correlated with it.
And Neil did this.
I mean, I've talked with Neil often.
He's pretty strong behind it.
It was a sensitive point.
Maybe I'm misconstruing what Dr. Willett was saying.
But he wasn't saying that you go, I need as much meat as you want.
He was pushing back on the fact that it was just cut and dry so clear that eating meat was going to, for example...
Hinder your ability to lose weight or whatever.
All the other allegations that are made about it.
The reason it comes up is because there's obviously strong financially motivated forces pushing back on the possibility that eating meat causes diabetes.
But diabetes costs our country a lot of money in addition to the ethical problems with not addressing it.
Look, if you look at the large population studies, and you know...
The debates go, we could really get into the weeds in it, because people say, well, if you look at a large epidemiologic study, then there's correlation, not causation.
This is the big thing you see on the internet all the time.
But in these large studies like the EPIC database, which is one of the largest studies out there, 500,000 people, 10 different countries, they've been following these people over 15 years, there's a clear correlation between meat consumption and diabetes.
And that's after you do what's called a multivariate regression analysis where you're controlling for factors.
Assuming that's true, which I'm trusting you because this is what you do for a living.
And Proytonaholic, by the way, your book spends a lot of time on this exact reality.
And I love books because people who write books spend a lot of time thinking about what they're going to write.
It's not a newspaper article that you came up with last night.
So I'm believing that.
I'm just trying to figure out why don't we know this?
Well, I think there's a huge industry that doesn't want you to know this.
I think there's, well, first of all, there's a huge industry that doesn't want you to know this.
Second of all, there's great ways to manipulate data.
So the problem is that, and you see this all the time in news media, right?
You have, well, like usually we would have a conversation like this.
It wouldn't be, I love podcasts because we get to have a real conversation.
But usually it's a person doing the thing, one person saying one side of the story, one person saying the other side of the story, and the American public's left with Oh, I don't know which one to believe.
I'm just going to believe whatever tastes better.
Yeah, exactly.
Disinformation.
It's disinformation.
And listen, if you look back to the tobacco times...
The tobacco industry was great with this.
They didn't have to prove to you anything about whether or not cigarettes were good for you or bad for you.
They just simply had to start a kernel of doubt.
And that kernel of doubt comes when you take me and put me against a ketosis expert, all right?
And the ketosis says, well, my stuff works, and his stuff does work.
He will drop A1C with ketosis.
My study shows that I'll drop your A1C, and both are true.
But...
The difference is when you're doing it on a plant-based diet, you're actually getting to the source of the problem.
And there's other things involved.
I mean, we get down to why does that fat get in there.
It gets in there because of meat.
It's not that meat causes diabetes.
Meat causes inflammation.
There's different things in meat.
For instance, meat has heme iron.
The funny thing I always hear is people say, oh, I need iron.
I'm going to go and eat steak.
That iron is the most toxic, worst thing you can eat.
So we know this on many, many different studies that heme iron is toxic to the beta cells that secrete the insulin.
We know that it causes fat cells to become lipotoxic, which you probably know in your experience.
And so you could go like take, for instance, cancer.
It's very hard for me to prove to you that meat causes cancer.
There's so many other variables.
That's the other problem.
Why don't we know this?
Because there's so many variables.
And they do these big studies, and it's hard to control for all these variables.
And if they control for some of them, for instance, if I'm doing a study on cancer, we know that an independent cause of cancer is weight, right?
We know that being overweight causes cancer.
So if we're going to do a study, we've got to control for weight.
But if you could control for weight, that's one of the ways that plant-based diets help you prevent cancer because they keep you at a lower weight.
So you've already weakened my argument, and I can still show you that a plant-based diet has less cancer with it.
But that weakened in the article.
The World Health Organization and the American Academy of Cancer Research came out with a paper about red meat being a class 2A carcinogen and a processed meat class 1. And I had doctors say, yeah, but it's only a slight increased risk in cancer, so I'm fine with my patients getting it.
I was like, you don't understand.
That's like toned down stuff.
And in the end, it causes cancer.
And you go to your hospital cafeteria and you got cancer patients going down there to get their bacon and it just blows my mind.
But there's going to be a lot of people that argue back and forth.
I think if I had to get to your, the juxtaposition of your question is that I think when I go to a scientific meeting, as I'm sure you've gone to, and we have these really big scientific arguments, We learn from each other and we get ideas, but that's not what happens in the media.
In the media, media people aren't like scientists.
Media people are interested in the latest, greatest, butter's good for you story.
We want the noise.
Yeah, they want the noise.
As scientists, what we want, I don't care about the latest article.
I care about what are all the articles together in a big picture telling me.
And that's much more difficult to tell to a lay population.
We have a lot more to talk about, but first, let's take a quick break.
Carbs.
Yes.
You defend them.
Of course.
They've been maligned a lot of late.
So what is the problem with maligning carbs?
Well, okay.
First of all, it's funny with people when I look at my patients what they call carbs, right?
So they'll be like, you know, And it's so funny because—let me tell you a story because the stories are always kind of funny.
But I see a patient in my office, and she's the sweetest lady in the world.
She's a rocket scientist.
This is an intelligent lady from Ghana, been in America 10 years.
Comes in, overweight, diabetes.
Literally a rocket scientist?
Literally.
And I say to her, okay, well, you know, why do you think you're overweight?
She said, oh, the carbs.
And I'm looking down at her diet log, and her diet log is eggs, chickens, there's not a carb to be found.
And I was like, but there's no carbs in your thing.
She goes, well, you know, once in a while, my friends from Ghana, we get together, and we have a traditional Ghana meal.
And in that Ghana meal, there's, you know, a lot of bread, there's grains, they do a lot of root vegetables, it's bean stews, and we do that, you know, two, three nights a week.
I'm like, and that's why you're overweight?
She's like, yeah.
So I said to her, okay, When was the last time you've been to Ghana?
And she said, well, I went recently.
I was like, were there overweight people there?
She's like, no, not a single person.
People looked at me funny.
And I said, she stops and she says, you know, I was there for two months and I actually lost weight.
And I said, exactly, because it's not the carbs that are making you overweight.
It's your diet in general.
And so here's the thing about carbs.
Not all carbs are created equal.
Pure sugar is different.
But when you really get down to it, Your body can't turn carbs to fat.
Now, people don't seem to know this.
Everyone says carb goes to fat.
So if I do a radioisotope labeled study where I label the carbohydrate that you eat and you consume it, your body either burns it or stores it as glycogen.
They did these huge overfeeding trials where they gave people tons and tons of carbs.
only about 2% of it got turned to fat through a very complex process called de novo lipogenesis, which requires energy to do it.
So you actually increase the energy expended to do it.
Only 2%.
And that's in a carb overfeeding study.
Now, that's not that overeating carbs is good for you.
The problem with that is if you're insulin resistant, like we talked about, and you got fat in your muscle cells, and you're eating tons of carbs, and your sugar's rising, Your insulin has to put out more.
I mean, your pancreas has to put out more insulin.
The insulin will, in that situation, make you gain fat.
So the next thing you eat is fat.
But people really don't eat carbs, all right?
They eat carbs and fat.
Theoretical question.
Same number of calories.
Yes.
Pancakes, bacon.
Same number of calories.
Yes.
Which is more fattening?
They're the same.
The same.
Yeah, but that's a different scenario.
So in the end, it is going to be calories to a point.
But what's going to happen is, like, so this one, to illustrate that point, this one professor...
Rocket scientist again?
Not a rocket scientist.
This is a nutritional professor.
Maybe smarter.
He wanted to prove this point, and he went on an 1,800-calorie junk food diet where he ate nothing but junk food.
Twinkies...
Doritos, I think there was a lot of.
And he lost weight.
His cholesterol all went down, etc., etc.
So, if you're eating a calorie-deficient diet, it doesn't matter.
It doesn't mean that's going to be good for you.
You could get cancer and heart disease.
Yeah, you're not advocating that people go out and eat junk food.
But calories are key.
But what I am saying is that this fear that you're going to eat carbs and it's going to make you fat, the opposite is true, too.
It's not...
It's not the carbs that's making you fat.
It's your total calorie intake.
Now, the beauty of a plant-based diet.
And once again, we're committing the biggest crime I have when it comes to talking about nutrition.
We are in the weeds in reductionist science.
And you can make fun of me because I wrote a book called Protein and Hog.
It's all about protein.
And that is reductionist science at its peak.
But I did that to show you...
My theme through the book is stop looking at it like this.
People say to me...
You know, my nutritionist, I just started a new job, and the nutritionist was like, well, you've got to tell the patient how many carbs and how much protein.
I never tell patients that.
That's a bad word in my office.
Don't tell me your macronutrients.
I don't care.
I want you to eat food because in my entire career, and I'm sure in your entire career, there's never been a single patient that has adequate calories that is protein deficient.
Protein is important, but it's so important, it's everywhere.
It's in every food we eat.
So, if I can, push back a little bit on what is often called the vegan agenda.
Are you vegan, by the way?
I am, but let me...
Yeah, okay.
So go with the vegan agenda.
So it becomes almost an ethical argument.
And people say, you know, you're doing this because you want to save animals, you want to keep the planet clean.
By the way...
All good things.
All good things.
I get all that.
But not to conflate that with actually human health.
Right.
Very important point.
And this is very big in my clinic.
So I tell people in my clinic...
I want you on a whole food, plant-based diet.
I never tell anybody to go vegan.
And I don't mind if they have a little bit of meat and dairy.
What I want is to flip the plate.
Instead of the typical American animal protein at every single meal, I want fruits and vegetables and beans and they can have a little bit of meat and things like that.
I'm not biased because I'm vegan.
I'm vegan because I've learned this stuff and I believe it so much that I trust it for me and my family.
So I look at it more as I'm walking the talk rather than it being some kind of bias that's affecting what I do.
Now, the fact that I wear fake leather shoes and belt and that kind of stuff, that, yes, that fits into a different thing.
But that's not what I bring into the science and what I do with my patients.
Garth Davis, thanks for being here.
I think you did a fantastic job explaining what is a complicated area.
The book's called Proteinaholic.
Check it out.
Lots of information, lots of insights, and spread the wisdom.
