Tackling diabetes with a bold new dietary approach: Neal Barnard at TEDxFremont (2)

And one is called the dental test. Do you know the dental test?

What you do is you wait for your cat to yawn,

and you look in your cat's mouth and what you notice is

in its mouth are these very, very long protruding canine teeth,

and on each side of its mouth, it's just like a pitchfork

that's really good for capturing pray, killing small animals,

and ripping the hide off the flesh and eating meat.

So now look at your own mouth.

What you discover

is that your canine teeth are no longer than your incisors.

And that change occurred at least 3,5 million years ago.

So our molars are really good for crunching on an apple,

they're not so hot for handling roadkill.

There's the bunny test. Do you know the bunny test?

(Laughter)

You take a bunny,

and you put the bunny in front of your cat

(Laughter)

what you discover,

no matter how young your cat is, the cat has this irrepressible desire

to capture, attack, kill, and swallow that bunny.

Now, you put the very same bunny in front of a toddler or baby. (Laughter)

And what you discover is the toddler say, "Bunny, bunny!"

They want to play and the baby is just absolutely delighted,

the idea of killing and eating him would never occur to him

in a million years.

We're learning something here.

Do you know the box test? (Laughter)

You take a box that it was used to carry electronic equipment,

and you look around at the bottom and what you find is silica gel.

And silica gel is there to take moisture out of the box.

And apparently, the manufacturers of silica gel have realized

that human-beings are so indiscriminate in their eating habits,

that they have to put these words on it, "Do not eat".

(Laughter)

So, here's how I put this together:

human-beings are naturally herbivores, but we're really easily thrown off track.

(Laughter)

The fact of the matter is, before the Stone Age,

people would have been just terrible hunters, really.

You know this is true because we're not very quick.

A lion, a lion is quick,

in the forest, a lion can easily catch a gazelle.

A hawk or a falcon can easily catch a mouse.

Humans, we sort of catch cold. That's like it. (Laughter)

We don't really detect pray very well, we don't have sensitive noses.

If you look at the dog,

a dog has a very highly developed sense of smell,

they can detect pray at long distances,

which is why they are used in airports

to detect bombs, and drugs, and that kind of things.

And their sense of hearing far outstrips ours,

they are outfitted to be able to detect pray.

Now, human-beings, we have cute noses and we have cute ears,

but we really are pathetic as hunters.

And if you're going to succeed as a carnivore,

you need good sharp claws, good sharp teeth,

you need to be very, very quick,

and you need to have sensitive hearing, sensitive smell, sensitive vision.

Which actually raises the question:

what is the most sensitive part of the human body?

What do you think?

Well, I actually learned the answer.

As I was coming here, I was at the airport.

And the TSA agent pulled me aside and said, "I got to do a pat down,

and when I get to a sensitive part of your body,

I'll use the back of my hand."

And I realized that apparently,

the most sensitive part of the human body must be our back side, I guess.

So, anyway, what I take from this is that meat eating began somehow.

How did it begin?

I put that question to Richard Leakey.

- Richard Leakey, the famous paleoanthropologist -

and what he said was,

"You know, human-beings as herbivores, you don't have to be quick,

you don't have to be particularly sharp or sensitive

because you don't really have to sneak up on a strawberry,

it's just sitting, not doing anything.

But to become carnivores really took some work.

And it probably started as scavenging."

In other words, a lion doesn't eat everything.

When they walk away from the little pile of bones they've left

there's a little meat there,

and humans could relatively easily sneak in

and cut some of that off and take it back.

Now, that requires having some tools to do that with.

So once the Stone Age arrived,

then we had the possibility of actually doing that.

And once we had arrowheads, and axes, and that sort of thing,

then we were really on to something.

Meat eating really became a big thing. But, we have pre-stone age bodies.

To this day, when a person puts into their body plant foods,

their arteries open up again, their diabetes starts to get better,

their weight starts to come off, their bodies start to recover.

Americans, unfortunately, are really not on a diabetes reversal diet.

Americans today eat more than a million animals per hour.

And the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say

that one of three kids born in the year 2000 and in the years since

is going to get diabetes at some point in their life.

And you see the truth of it, turn on the television:

half the commercials are for burgers, chicken wings, snack foods,

the other half of the commercials are for medicines

to undue the effects of all the foods that we're eating.

So, that's where we are.

And what if it happened

that instead of a hundred million Americans

having diabetes or pre-diabetes,

what if all hundred million had diabetes itself?

Or more people than that?

All of them need medicines, and testing, and hospital care, and so forth.

Financially, it's a disaster.

But, personally, the personal cost is just incalculable.

I think we're starting to turn the corner:

my family has promoted me for generation after generation, after generation.

However,

in 2004, we reached the peak at 201,5 pounds of meat.

That's what the average person consumed in that year.

And in the subsequent years, it's dropped and dropped,

and we're now under 190,

and hopefully, that downward trend will continue.

But to this day, doctors, dieticians, nurses will say,

"Diabetes is a one way street, it never goes away."

But that was before we looked around the world

and saw, you know, there are dietary patterns that are more helpful.

And that was before we realized that looking inside the cell,

we can understand how this occurs,

and we can understand how to reverse this process.

And it was before we realized

that patients will make bigger changes than we gave them credit for.

So, families like mine,

that have been selling meat for generations,

instead, maybe could sell carrots, asparagus, sweet potatoes, and beans,

and hopefully, the autopsy room will more neglected than ever,

because people are going to live longer, and look better,

and maybe the hospital cafeteria, instead of serving ribs,

could serve a bounty of helpful foods,

and instead of studying epidemics,

maybe we could celebrate a resurgence of health.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)