Richard Jacobs

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Introduction:Finding Genius Podcast

Forget frequently asked questions. Common sense. Common knowledge. Or Google. How about advice from a real genius? 95% of people in any profession are good enough to be qualified and licensed. 5% go above and beyond. They become very good at what they do. But only 0.1%. are real geniuses. Richard Jacobs has made it his life's mission to find them for you. He hunts down and interviews geniuses in every field. Sleep science, cancer, stem cells, ketogenic diets, and more. Here come the geniuses. This is the Finding Genius Podcast with Richard Jacobs.

Richard Jacobs

Hello, this is Richard Jacobs with the Finding Genius Podcast, now part of the Finding Genius Foundation. I have Vesanto Melina. She's a registered dietitian and an author of a book called Kick Diabetes. And we're going to talk about her consulting work on plant-based diets. So Vesanto, thank you for coming.

Vesanto Melina

Thank you, Richard. It's a pleasure.

Richard Jacobs

Yeah, tell me a bit about your background. Were you like a meat lover years ago and you changed? So how did you arrive at where you're at today?

Vesanto Melina

I did. I used to have a Chateaubriand a lot. That was a long time ago, but I thought that was pretty good, and I’m actually pretty old. I turned 80 about a month ago. And so I've had a very, very long history with nutrition. And nutrition is a pretty new science. We only started recognizing vitamins in 1914, so just over a hundred years ago. And so I've been part of this evolving concept about what's good nutrition. And I started teaching university in 1965, so I've really seen the evolution and change. And my parents, my dad taught physiology at university, and my mother taught children. She liked teaching children how to cook. So I got kind of a good blend of this is healthy, this is how you support health, and also how you make food and enjoy it.

Richard Jacobs

Oh, very cool. I guess if you want to really promote your work, you should tell people you're like 200 years old, because they'll be like, Oh my God.

Vesanto Melina

I heard of somebody who did that. Oh, Bragg, I think it was Bragg. He used to tell people he was about 10 years older.

Richard Jacobs

Since you've been around for a lot of the history of nutrition in the U.S., how has it evolved? What was it like in the mid-60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, onward? How has it changed?

Vesanto Melina

Oh, it's really changed. When I was first, I actually became vegetarian in the 70s. I went to India for four years, but before that, when I was teaching university, we thought vegetarians were kind of people who had hairy legs and didn't shave them and wore sandals and were hippies, which I was kind of a hippie too, but teaching university. But we didn't think much of vegetarian and we really wondered about it. We wondered if it could support health. And there was some legitimacy to that because Vitamin B12 wasn't even recognized until 1949. And that's a nutrient that we get from bacteria, but it's in animal products because of the bacterial contamination. So people were vegan or vegetarian a long, long time ago. I think actually St. Francis was vegan, but it was pretty risky because we didn't have acknowledged sources of vitamin B12 in plant-based diets that were entirely plant-based. And so what was thought of a risky diet, you know, 30, 40, 20 years ago, now is seen as the healthiest diet you can get.

Richard Jacobs

Okay, so vegetarianism or veganism, how do you distinguish between the two?

Vesanto Melina

We actually have pretty good data from some of the huge Adventist health studies on vegan, vegetarian, and near vegetarian, like people include a bit of fish, as all being pretty healthy. Of course, fish has now some of that ocean contamination and vegetarian, you can get way too high on the eggs and the cholesterol and some of the dairy products like cheese that are 75% fat. But overall, if somebody's nearly all plant-based, that can be a good way to eat. You don't have to go 100% to get the really high marks.

Richard Jacobs

So the data you're saying shows that no meat consumption is good, or a small amount of meat consumption, or for certain people it's good, or what do you see?

Vesanto Melina

What we find is with the World Health Organization considers red meat, so that's beef, lamb, pork, to be probable carcinogens. And that means, and they have a lot of data to back up that they're probably linked with cancer, causing cancer. Now, cured meats, so that, and that was actually the last one I gave up in the '70s was bacon. But cured meats, which is bacon, sausage, ham, salami, those kind of things are convincing carcinogens. They're in the same category as Roundup and cigarette smoking. So that's a real, really big change. And the World Health Organization does not put out this kind of information and the American Institute of Cancer Research without having a lot of really good, solid data.

Richard Jacobs

Well, I've spoken to people that are into the ketogenic diet and people that are on the carnivore diet, they'll distinguish between, let's say, concentrated feeding of regular animals that get antibiotics and hormones and ones that are grass-fed and more organically raised. Do you see any difference in those two, or to you, it's all the same?

Vesanto Melina

Well, it is better to have things be organic, but of course, the feed that most animals get is not organic, so they're harboring all these pesticides, and we do not show that if you're eating organic meat, that you're better off, you still have TMAO produced in your intestines. You know, we used to be thinking a lot about cholesterol and saturated fat, and those are indeed problematic with meats and animal products. But what we find now is that it's TMAO also linked to heart disease and new 5G that's related to cancer. So there's not really a big advantage using those products. If you shift to chicken, you're better off. And if you avoid all of those, we think of them as protein foods, but they're actually pretty high in fat. Like the rest of the whole food is fat. And some of the really confusing things for people are say with the ketogenic diet where you, you know, focus a lot on getting the protein and getting the fat. What's good about that is that you leave out the refined carbohydrates. You leave out the sugar, you leave out the white flour, all the potato chips, all those kind of stuff. But you end up with pretty high fat, and it can be quite good for a while, but you end up causing harm for your arteries down the line. You can increase your risk of diabetes. So they seem good for a while, but they're not good in the long run, and the data shows that.

Richard Jacobs

The data shows what? happens? What is the long run and what is it?

Vesanto Melina

The long run is increased risk of type 2 diabetes, increased risk of heart disease, possibly increased risk of like cancers, particularly gastrointestinal cancers. So they're good for a while and they do seem good. And it's really good for people to dump those refined carbohydrates, the sugar and the white flour, that kind of thing. And people do that and it's a lot better. And then they have the problems that result from the high fats and they don't need such high protein intakes.

Richard Jacobs

Okay. In terms of veganism and vegetarianism, just in my own eyes, it seems like a lot of people that do those don't do them right because they just look awful. Again, I haven't run any studies or anything, but I've seen quite a number of vegetarians and vegans that just look terrible. So I wonder if they're just doing it wrong or what are the common mistakes people make where that confounds the results of the diet.

Vesanto Melina

Well, I guess we're seeing that with any kind of diet that people can do it badly. They can certainly do diets that include meat, that include fish, include chicken very badly. And what I've been working on is helping people do it right. And I'm working with clients across the spectrum. Like I'll help somebody who is a meat eater or a fish eater or whatever, and just to do it right within their parameter. Because I have sympathy across, I've eaten myself across the board, you know, the whole spectrum. And what we want to be doing is including more plant foods, including whole foods, like rather than having very refined carbohydrates, we want whole grains. We want oats and whole grain breads if you're going to have them, the wheat ground up, but you can have even whole oat groats. So with something like diabetes, we go for grains like quinoa and whole oats, that kind of thing.

Richard Jacobs

So again, what are some of the mistakes that people make on, you know, vegetarian or vegan diets that you've seen?

Vesanto Melina

Okay. Well, one, I used to work at a chef school on the coast in California, Mendocino. About four times a year, I'd be teaching at this raw chef school. And that was very interesting to me. We've got one book called Becoming Raw. And our publisher wanted us to do it, Brenda Davis and I. And we said, we don't know about raw foods, you know, it's plant-based, but this wasn't a specialty. And he said, well, if you go and investigate, you'll do a really good job of figuring out some of the problems, the pitfalls. And we did find out there were a lot of beliefs. People believed that it was bad to cook. People believed that you had to go 100% raw to be really clean. And people believed that you could go through a pregnancy with an entirely raw food diet. And so our book, Becoming Raw, was a real help to that because we dealt with all these challenges. And what we found was that, yes, you can go 50% raw, 75% raw, have lots of veggies and fruits and salad dressings that have nuts and seeds in them and taste delicious. But it's better to include some protein foods. Like I had real trouble getting the protein levels up to recommended intakes. It was better to have some lentil soup or chickpeas in your salad or some marinated tofu that tastes really good, something like that to boost the protein level. And it can also make it a lot easier to have things like baked sweet potatoes, something like that, to add some cooked items.

Richard Jacobs

What about GMO in soybeans and chickpeas, et cetera?

Vesanto Melina

Well, as you know, most of the food, the soy that's fed to animals, because most of it is that's grown is fed to animals. That is genetically modified. But for humans, what's in tofu is primarily organic and GMO-free. So most of what's produced across North America is organic and GMO-free. And we used to have these, about 10, 15 years ago, people wondered about soy. They found that, for example, there were a couple of guys that ended up growing man ***** after a year. Well, it turned out that one of them was eating 12 servings a day of soy, and one, the other, one was 19, one was 60. The other was eating 20 servings of soy a day. Well, if you eat 12 or 20 servings of anything a day, it's going to unbalance your diet and lead to potential problems. You know, with carrots, you'll go orange, and there can be all kinds of things that happen when you skew things that way and don't just get a mix of foods. So anyway, after a year, they ended up going to their doctors and each of them, they didn't know each other. It was completely separate situations. and stop doing that crazy thing, and it ended up reversing back to normal. But a lot of, say, industries or people who were anti-soy have really publicized those situations a lot and generalized them. And it turns out actually the opposite of what was worried. There are these components in soy called isoflavones. They're kind of like estrogen, and that was what was causing these problems, but it turns out the isoflavones actually block the absorption of real estrogen and the real absorption. And so what we find instead is that soy foods, and this is very well established, if kids have soy, boys lower their risk of prostate cancer later in life, and girls definitely lower their risk of breast cancer. And when we're older, we can reduce our risk of these hormone-related cancers by including some soy. And boy, that's not, you know, 12 or 20 servings a day. It's like one serving, two servings for adults, maybe three, but not these high, high amounts of soy. So soy turns out to be protective, whereas a lot of people are still scared of it because they go with that early misinformation.

Richard Jacobs

I mean, I don't do well with soy. It's made me have terrible allergies and I don't feel well and various carbs, same thing. So I mean, for me, it's just not doable. And I've seen that with a bunch of people, too. So what do you do with someone that just can't tolerate it? It doesn't work for them or legumes or those kinds of things.

Vesanto Melina

There are about 20 kinds of legumes. Can you eat green peas?

Richard Jacobs

I don't know. I don't know if it's that granular. I just know soy is just awful when I had it.

Vesanto Melina

Yeah, so soy is one of the big allergens. As you know, fish are too. And so are dairy products, so are eggs. They're all high allergenic potential. People aren't all allergic to all of them, but these are the real heavy hitters. And so, obviously, you need to avoid those foods. But there are, in terms of plant foods that provide protein, there are 20 different types of legumes. And they're all things that grow in pods. So examples are peanuts. Examples are lentils, peas, beans, like green beans. And then there are white, red anasazi. They're black chickpeas, garbanzo beans. all kinds of beans used all over the world. And when you do an allergy test, often they'll just test two or three of those kinds of beans. And there's still a lot that you're fine with. So you can get good sources, even if you're allergic to one or two of the beans.

Richard Jacobs

Okay. Do you just search for something different? Gotcha.

Vesanto Melina

Yeah, you just look in a different direction. That's often what I'm doing with people when they have one of my early books was called The Food Allergy Survival Guide. And I had to go through this very carefully. Allergies are tricky because people are often allergic to several things. And so what we did was start people on a very, very meager diet. Just some of the things that hardly anybody's allergic to, and then gradually add in something, take a couple of days and then see if there's any reaction. And when you add it in, you add it maybe two or three times in the day, and then you can really tell, wow, soy is not for me, you know, or it's fine, no reaction at all.

Richard Jacobs

But for someone on a standard American diet that wants to change over. How fast and how can they do it, let's say in a safe way where they're not going to blow themselves up and not feel well?

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Vesanto Melina

We have one in a little section, sometimes in talks, called International Solutions to the Gas Crisis. Because if people just start adding a lot of legumes, you know, say they want to switch their protein source, all their gut microbiota, the little bacteria that are in there, will go, Yikes, Richard, what are you doing? You know? And so you have to start with small amounts, and you can start with the smaller legumes, like red lentils. the ones that cook quickly and they're easy to digest. And then you just add a bit. And so you don't start out like, okay, I'm going to get all healthy and I'm going to change my breakfast, lunch, and supper tomorrow. It's better to just be very gradual and you end up creating a much healthier mix of bacteria in your gut. But if you do it too quickly, you'll end up with a lot of gas. And gas is normal. It's normal that people pass gas. They actually did some really funny experiments on a military base in the Midwest and checked out from these people who were on the base had contraptions strapped to their behinds and they counted and I found out we normally have 12 to 15 passing gas each day, but you don't want it to get problematic. So anyway, we just and people should pre-soak legumes and not use the canning water, which has oligosaccharides in it that cause gas.

Richard Jacobs

So if you get canned, you know, various legumes, you said in the water itself, they use what, various sugars to maintain the canning?

Vesanto Melina

No, no. When beans are cooked, there are components in beans called oligosaccharides, and these get into the canning water or the cooking water. Like if you cook some kind of beans like chickpeas, this foam comes to the top and you just skim it off. Or when you're using canned black beans in, say, a bean salad or a black bean soup or something, you just rinse the beans. You don't use the canning water.

Richard Jacobs

Oh, okay. And that'll take out, what, some of the excess sugars or what's the matter?

Vesanto Melina

That reduces these carbohydrates called oligosaccharides. So they're like fiber, kind of, but we can't digest them. But our bacteria digest them and then make gas out of them. So you want to get rid of them. And you do that by starting with the small ones like lentils, which don't have many in the first place. And you use small amounts, you cook them well. You're supposed to cook them well enough to mash on the roof of your mouth with your tongue so they're soft. And then you just gradually increase. And people around the world use different herbs. Mexicans use episote. I don't know if I said that right. It's a culinary herb. In the Middle East, they use hang or asafoetida in India as well. And people use ginger. So there are different herbs that people use in their cooking, which make it taste really good, but they also very easily digestible.

Richard Jacobs

Are you supposed to sprout beans or just soak them? And if you soak them for how long, like any... Any recommendations there?

Vesanto Melina

Yeah, any that are bigger than lentils, you're supposed to soak. You can't soak lentils and that makes them even more digestible, but you don't have to. And they, the red ones cook like 15, 20 minutes, the black and, or the, yeah, black, beluga, gray, brown, green, they all take about 45 minutes to an hour, depending on how old they are. So then they're, just as long as they're well cooked, they're fine, but then the bigger ones, like chickpeas, you really need to soak them first and discard the soaking water.

Richard Jacobs

Should you sprout them or just soak them?

Vesanto Melina

You could sprout them. Yeah. When I was doing that raw food book, I did, you know, looked a lot at the sprouting, but you take like a quarter cup of lentils and sprout them, you'll end up with a quart of sprouted lentils. Like they get really big, so nobody's going to eat that much. So it doesn't end up as being a significant protein source. You get much more protein from those kind of things when you cook them. So you could sprout them first. It makes the minerals slightly more available, but it's not, I personally don't think it's worth the bother, but some people like to do it and that's okay too.

Richard Jacobs

What about pesticide contamination and things like Roundup, et cetera, and vegetables?

Vesanto Melina

Yeah. Actually, I was just speaking at the Oakland Convention Center last week to dietitians, and the lead speaker was somebody who was from UC Davis, and she was really making a good case for organic food. And the more I see it, we know that pesticides can be linked to cancer, for example. And it's good to avoid it. And people will spend a lot on their cappuccino or their coffee or whatever, but complain if organic food is a little bit more. But I think it's worth doing. It's worth spending on that kind of quality. I wish that our government would be supporting and subsidizing plant foods and organic foods rather than meats, you know, the probable carcinogens, the convincing carcinogens, because there's a whole lot of subsidy money going into these foods that are actually causing health problems.

Richard Jacobs

I know the government subsidizes corn and wheat and all that very heavily.

Vesanto Melina

It does, but that's for animal fodder. Like they're subsidizing animal fodder for dairy cows for, and as you know, most of that food goes to animals. I mean, they eat huge amounts and they eat, they don't eat organic produce. So it's good for humans to be eating organic produce, but not, and not eating the products that have pesticides in them.

Richard Jacobs

So you're saying the government subsidizes wheat, but only for animal feed? They don't subsidize wheat in general. So if you grow it, you got to tell them, oh, this is for animal feed and they'll subsidize it, otherwise they won't.

Vesanto Melina

Well, they have been... What I'm saying is I think they should be subsidizing the organic farmers more. But I mean, they subsidize farmers in lots of different ways, but the subsidies are very heavily skewed. I think the lobbies for meat, for dairy, for dairy cattle, even for slaughterhouses sometimes have been significant. And that's not a wise place to put our subsidies now, when then people have to pay for all these chronic diseases. Like if you go more plant-based, you can drop your risk of type two diabetes. and of heart disease and of hypertension by about 66%. That's a huge drop. You can drop your risk of cancer by 19 to 50%, depending on which type of cancer it is. So if it makes sense to subsidize the foods, that will be helping people stay healthy.

Richard Jacobs

Yeah, and normally it would make sense, but I don't think the government does much that makes sense, but yeah.

Vesanto Melina

Yeah, well, there's an interesting Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, PCRM, they've been doing some legal cases with the government and actually winning. Because the Department of Agriculture was so much influential towards creating the food guide. And I think things are changing. Like when I spoke at this conference last week in California, the lead author, and she wasn't a vegan, she was actually a professor at UC Davis, and she included chicken in her diet, as well as lots of plant foods. But then placing her as a main speaker and including my presentation, my presentation what's called Plant Foods, Perfect for People and the Planet. And it had a new section in it, which was about the environment. So whereas a lot of guys haven't been interested, this has been a big change over time. When I first started doing vegetarian courses in the early 90s, there would be like 95% women coming. But now things are changing and guys are getting on board because they're starting to see the environmental impacts. Like, yeah, we're seeing, for example, that if you get the same amount of meat or the same amount of tofu, the meat takes 95 times more land because you've got to grow all these crops. You have, even when they're roaming around, and I lived on a farm, a cattle ranch for a while, and, you know, I saw what the process was. They would be out there roaming around, you know, but then they feed them some crops that are harvested, and then they truck them many, many miles to a different state or a different part of the country, and then they put them on feedlots and feed them huge amounts because, of course, people are paid by weight, and they're fed typically not organic produce, soybeans, grains, and so on. And then they go to the slaughterhouse, and then they're trucked back again to where they were out in the field, you know, where the products are. We're just seeing that there's a huge problem with how we've been doing food in terms of the environment. People think of like transportation and cars as being problematic or different, you know, airplane flights and all that. But about 26% of our greenhouse gas emissions is directly related to food and primarily to animal products.

Richard Jacobs

Okay, well, very good. What's the best way for people to get a summation of your work and recommendations? Is it this new book? You're taking diabetes or where can they go for more info?

Vesanto Melina

Well, we've got, my website is called nutrispeak.com, like nutrition speak, N-U-T-R-I-S-P-E-A-K.com. And that has, are different books. I've actually written 15 books. And then the most recent one is the Kick Diabetes Cookbook. And we have a website, kickdiabetescookbook.com. And we've got videos on these websites. And there's also a website becomingvegan.ca. And so, yeah, people are having fun with it, with the change. That's an important thing, you know, that we end up getting really good food. We are careful with our recipes. Most of my books are actually about nutrition, but with our recipes, we have them tested, quite a wide range of testers. And our books are now in nine languages, and they're used around the world, the Becoming Vegan comprehensive edition is a textbook in the US and also in Taiwan. So we're in a lot of languages. Yeah, people are changing all over the place because they want to be healthy and help the environment.

Richard Jacobs

Okay, well, very good. Thank you for coming on the podcast and I appreciate it.

Vesanto Melina

You're welcome, Richard. Yes, thank you.

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Conclusion: Finding Genius Podcast

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