1.04 Peter Johnston

Peter Johnston is the Victorian Lead Dietitian for Doctors For Nutrition, an independent health-promotion charity, led by medical doctors & dietitians. Peter has been exclusively plant-based since 1991 after learning of the health, environmental and ethical benefits. He has expertise in the prevention, treatment and reversal of chronic diseases through the use of whole food plant-based diets and the holistic approach of lifestyle medicine.

You can find Peter at Perfect Human Food.

0:00:11 Peter Johnston

Our first cat, when I was a child and I think it was a stray that we adopted. It was black and white and we called it Patch. Very imaginative for kids and she was a delightful pet to have around the house and build some empathy with animals and see the joy in another critter that has its own desires and goals and things it likes and doesn't like in its own personality.

Every animal, every companion animal I've had has had a different personality and that's part of the joy and getting to know other souls, other sentient beings.

0:00:58 Adam Walsh

Australians are among the highest meat and dairy consumers in the world. But there's a lot of really important nutrient deficiencies. What's the systematic impact on the body over a high meat and dairy diet?

0:01:13 Peter Johnston

You were just saying we've got half an hour. I could give this two weeks. It's dreadful. It's all bad news eating animal products.

The biggest deficiency in the modern diet is fiber, which animal food has none of. They think, it's estimated about 97% of humans don't get enough fiber and that has devastating consequences for our health, particularly our gut microbiome, which, as the research emerges, it looks more and more to be utterly foundational for health or disease. All good health and all disease begins there, it's looking more and more like. So that's a first huge problem.

But there's linear relationships between the amount of meat you eat and the amount of colon cancer, the amount of diabetes, the amount of heart disease. It increases your risks and all cause mortality the more you eat. And conversely, as shown by the immensely powerful China Health Study, the less you eat and seemingly all the way to zero, the less risk you have of chronic disease. And that manifests itself in multiple, multiple ways.

The causative impact of the animal food is complicated, but it's firstly the lack of fiber. It's the high amount of saturated fat and cholesterol. The animal protein doesn't agree with us as well. It overtaxes and damages the kidneys. It's the higher concentrations of environmental pollutants that accumulate up the food chain. So every trophic level there's approximately a tenfold increase in environmental contaminants and pollutants, such as in heavy metals, DDT, things like that, and long lived or forever chemicals like PCBs and PFOS chemicals.

Every step up the food chain, these increase about tenfold. So if you eat the chicken, you're getting ten times more than the chicken got that was in the plants the chicken ate. If you eat the egg of the chicken, that's likely to have tenfold higher level again. Similarly, the breast milk of a meat eating mother will be more concentrated in environmental pollutants than the mother herself. But if you eat something like a swordfish, which has about an eight level food chain, then you can just do the math and see how high the concentrations are of things like mercury, cadmium, PCBs, nickel, lead and the microplastics, the forever chemicals. It's just a health disaster.

And animal foods also have potent growth hormones and growth promoters which facilitate the growth of cancer in the body. Red meat has heme, which causes oxidative damage. So on and on and on. There's just many, many I've only touched on the surface.

And it also competitively displaces the room in our stomach to have more plant foods which are full of phytonutrients and phytomining plants. So they're only in plants which animal foods don't have, and they're 100 times higher in antioxidants when you eat plants. Animal foods have very little or none. The plant foods are more nutrient dense in that regard, so any amount of meat or dairy or eggs you have it pushes out your room to have more vegetables and legumes and whole grains and fruit, mushrooms and so on. So it's just disadvantaging you nutritionally and health wise.

So the less you eat all the way to zero, the longer you're likely to live. And we know this from lots of studies and big population studies like Adventist Health Study 60-70,000 people. The people who eat the least animal food or no animal food do better on every indicator. The Blue Zones might have heard of the five parts of the world where people live the longest, and there's lots of centenarians, they're 95% to 100% plant based. That doesn't mean they wouldn't do better if they were all 100% plant based. But they live a lot longer than the non Blue Zones populations in the rest of the world.

One of the biggest things is that they're eating so little animal food, or none in the case of many of the Seventh Day Adventists.

0:05:13 Adam Walsh

In advertising, it's commonly claimed that dairy consumption is a sufficient source of calcium. How are we best to ensure that we consume and absorb enough calcium?

0:05:23 Peter Johnston

Calcium deficiency is not such an issue for most people. Dairy products have a lot, but the research shows that the countries that consume the most dairy have the most hip fractures and Asian cultures which traditionally had no dairy hip fractures and osteoporosis was super rare.

It's much more a problem of lack of weight bearing exercise because in the modern world, we're all far too sedentary which is why I'm at a standing desk now, not sitting, and I go to the gym and do yoga and run and walk and try to keep physically active. Because prior to the modern world, we didn't have the luxury of sitting around all day, we had to work hard to grow our food or to forage lug things around, lug firewood, lug whatever we harvested or killed. So it seems like with the research, it's indicating that when you have dairy products or animal proteins, you get a net calcium loss because of the acidity of those in the body and the body compensates. They've done studies tracing the flow of the calcium in and out with radioisotope labeled calcium, and it seems that there's a net loss when you eat the dairy.

The best sources are beans and greens, which are high in calcium, and they should be a daily part of the diet, and you should be calcium sufficient. Also, keeping in mind, the body has this amazing homeostasis where it's exquisitely sensitive to what we need and what we don't need. And if we're low in something, it will absorb more from the food passing through the gut than if we were replete and had plenty of it. We'll let stuff go if we don't need it through the gut and out into feces, or if we're low we'll really draw more in. So it's a beautifully managed equilibrium, this homeostasis that we have. And the plant based diet allows you to manage that really well.

0:07:09 Adam Walsh

Is there a benefit for newborns and children in drinking dairy milk?

0:07:13 Peter Johnston

Absolutely not. They're more likely to have health problems, not the least of which is colic, but iron deficiency. Dairy products impair our iron status in three different ways. Firstly, they have no iron, and so they're displacing more iron rich foods that you might otherwise eat, such as greens and beans or whole grains. But they also inhibit iron absorption when they had as part of a meal with foods that do have iron. So they mean we get less of that iron.

And thirdly, they lead to some micro hemorrhaging, so we lose a little bit of iron when we eat dairy products. It's quite harmful.

Conversely, we'd be much better to feed our newborns, well not the newborns, newborns should have breast milk only to around five or six months before they start on some solids. But children would be much better having soy products. Soy milk is super beneficial in multiple ways, particularly the phytoestrogens which reduce cancer risk and there are studies showing that young people who grow up having soy products in their childhood have a 60% lower risk of cancer as adults. So, who wouldn't want to confer that benefit on their child?

Children are more likely to have acne, have asthma, be mucosy, other problems like that. Dairy products are perfect food for a baby cow, but I don't think anyone, any human's baby is going to look much like a baby cow. So it's designed expressly for baby cows. And you might have noticed that adult cows don't drink dairy products, nor should we as adult humans. We have perfectly designed food for us as infants, which is human breast milk and if the mother can't provide that, then there are alternatives that should be soy based, not dairy based.

Yeah, we're not designed to be breastfeeding as adults or post weaning.

0:09:00 Adam Walsh

Where does B12 come from? And how are Australians best to make sure they're receiving enough?

0:09:06 Peter Johnston

B12 is made by, it's a vitamin, it's made by bacteria, and we need tiny amounts of it. But you don't want to mess with your levels because if we get too low, you can get catastrophic and irreversible nerve and brain damage. That's pretty rare. And omnivores will get it from the animal food, but the animals get it from the bacteria in their environment when they're feeding. Although factory farmed animals that are born and raised in factories their whole life and being fed palletized food like say factory chickens will have B12 in the food added because they're not eating wild food and drinking untreated water, et cetera. So a gorilla cousins would get it from puddles and streams that are not treated, from food that's not washed, et cetera, traces of bugs, dirt, feces, et cetera.

So if you're eating predominantly or exclusively plant based, then it's not negotiable, you have to take B12, and that's just an artifact of modern living. Like if we were living in the Amazon jungle eating plant based, we wouldn't need to worry.

And I recommend the smallest dose you can get and have say 100 or 50 micrograms on a daily basis. And definitely have it checked once a year at least to make sure that you're tracking in the right range for B12. You can take 1000, twice a week, micrograms, but 100 micrograms or 50 micrograms a day should be enough for everybody.

And it's probably more, that trickle dose, that's more akin to what we get in nature. So the risk of taking a mega dose of a vitamin or mineral is that it can upset the balance of the absorption of another nutrient. It's all interconnected and that homeostasis is delicately balanced and throwing in a mega dose of one can tip other things out of whack.

And if you're over 50, even if you're an omnivore, you should take B12 because we absorb it less, so it's absorbed very slowly, it's also lost very slowly. So if your reading is relatively high, you could probably go six months without taking any and it would drop slowly through that time.

We're talking about say, four micrograms a day is what we need. It's minuscule, but it's not something to be messed with.

0:11:21 Adam Walsh

What are the best sources of iron? And what is the best way to make sure our bodies absorb enough of.

0:11:28 Peter Johnston

It’s actually the same as for calcium, beans and greens. So lots of dark leafy greens. I just had some steamed kale and chard and beet greens for my breakfast before my porridge. We can control the rate of absorption of plant based iron, whereas heme iron from animals, from red meat especially, floods in. We don't really have a lot of control over the levels. And some people who are predisposed can get iron levels too high, which is an increased risk for heart disease. If they're verging on the hemochromatosis, which is a condition where the iron stays too high, but not eating heme and just having plant iron get it largely from beans and greens, some from whole grains.

And the things that can inhibit iron absorption are having tea or coffee one hour either side of a meal. So if you want that hot drink, have a turmeric latte like I just did, or a herb tea. Save the coffee or tea for an hour either side of that meal. And you can include some vitamin C foods and some alliums. So anything from the onion family. Those things facilitate absorption. And obviously, as I said earlier, dairy products inhibit absorption, so it's another good reason not to eat dairy.

0:12:36 Adam Walsh

There do seem to be plenty of good reasons not to have dairy.

You did touch on this a little bit, but if someone wanted to take a supplement to complement their food choices, what should they look for in a supplement?

0:12:47 Peter Johnston

Well, first off, I don't recommend supplements in general. They're not needed if you eat a balanced, whole food, plant based diet, except for B12, as discussed.

The other one that you might need in the winter in the southern or the climates that are colder where we're rugged up is vitamin D. It's best to try and get some sun exposure through the warmer months. Like in Melbourne, the eight months or so where it's more warm and you can have some more skin exposed and get 20 minutes of sun during the day. Or if you've got darker skin, like Indian or African origin, then you might need double that, at least, because they make vitamin D more slowly. Other than that, it's better to get the nutrients from the food. As I said earlier, when you take a concentrated dose in a pill, research is showing it can tip the balance and absorption of other things out of whack.

There's a gray area around omega-three supplements, EPA, DHA. There's debate back and forth amongst scientists and plant based experts around whether adults should have it, whether it's more required in older age. It's not uncommon to recommend that pregnant women have some extra algal omega three. The fish oil ones are not recommended because fish species are collapsing through overharvesting. The oceans are just being hoovered clean of life, which is devastating. But the algal ones are cleaner. They're less likely to have mercury contamination. So pregnant women may want to take a DHA EPA supplement. That would be around 200 milligrams of DHA especially, which is important in the brains.

Other than that, I don't recommend supplements. Just eat whole food. And as in nature, you'll get what you need. We don't see parrots or kangaroos dropping dead, commonly from iron deficiency or calcium deficiency or iodine deficiency. The body balances these things. It's exquisitely sensitive and complicated and brilliant at meeting its needs from the foods that we're evolved to eat. And we're not evolved to eat cheese or milk or chocolate or oils. These things weren't in our natural environment.

0:14:53 Adam Walsh

What are the most important foods for new parents? To adopt into their diet when they have or are expecting children?

0:15:02 Peter Johnston

Well, more plant foods and a wide variety of plant foods.

The infant's taste buds are influenced by the amniotic fluid and the mother's diet when she's pregnant and also by the breast milk, it's influenced. So the amniotic fluid can be a little bit garlicky if the mum eats a lot of garlic and so the infant's taste preferences are shaped while in gestation in the womb. So the wider the range of whole plant foods the mother eats, the more likely there is to be a child that likes a wide range of foods and also is healthier because they predispose the mother to being healthier, therefore the child is growing up in it, getting healthier nutrient balance and a minimum of the environmental contaminants and toxins that I mentioned earlier.

We know that heart disease begins in gestation and that if the mother's on a rich western diet and by [age] ten you can see with the naked eye the fatty streaks on the arteries of a ten year old, if they die tragically and are autopsied. All of those kids, when they've looked at them on a Western diet, they all have visible signs of early heart disease by age ten.

So the more you can have plant foods, the less you can have animal foods, the better prospects for that child growing up and going through life. And related to that, you definitely want to avoid the animal foods because some of the long life forever chemicals, like the PCBs, et cetera, they can have a very long half life in the body. So Dr. Michael Greger from Nutritionfacts.org has said mothers should really avoid fish for five years before getting pregnant, not just avoid fish while pregnant, this is five years before because of the long half life. The mercury has a half life of about 90 days, so that diminishes much more quickly. But these long lived chemical pollutants, many of them, you want to have a five year window without the animal food to get the levels low enough to be a safe gestational environment for the infant.

0:16:54 Adam Walsh

Wow, I didn't realize that was so long before [getting pregnant]. That's really interesting.

0:16:58 Peter Johnston

It's quite shocking, isn't it?

0:17:00 Adam Walsh

Yeah.

0:17:01 Peter Johnston

It wouldn't have been a problem pre-industrialization when the oceans weren't full of these contaminants, but apart from the other problems of animal protein and animal food, but the environmental toxin side wouldn't have been there. This is a modern development through using the oceans as a sewer for 200 years plus. So those pollutants are now right through the oceanic food chain and we eat them at our peril.

0:17:22 Adam Walsh

Crazy.

0:17:23 Peter Johnston

It is. It's very sad.

0:17:25 Adam Walsh

If you could suggest one small change that someone could make for themselves and for animals, what might that be?

0:17:31 Peter Johnston

Eat less animals. Eat less animal excretions like the eggs and the dairy. Put them aside, you don't need them. You'll be happier, healthier, less risk of chronic disease, much more likely to have a longer, happier life.

Because these things affect mood as well. I routinely see patients who stop eating animal food and come back a month later and say, ‘My anxiety and my depression are less, I'm happier, I'm less stressed, I feel back to normal’. And we see this at the retreats that I run with colleagues. By day five or six people's, mood has lifted significantly.

So the more plants you can eat, it's better for the animals, but it's also immensely better for the environment. We are killing the planet through animal agriculture as well as other ways, but we just need to eat vastly less animal food and put a lot of that land back to wilderness. For most people, that's the single biggest thing you can do for the environment, is eat less or no animal food. Unless you're a frequent flyer, which has a big footprint, for most people cutting out or cutting down on the animal food, [is the] single biggest thing you can do.

And we want the children to have a planet to live on and have a safe, long, happy lives like most of us have been able to have.

Transcribed with Deciphr.AI