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Just to be perfectly clear… eating a vegan or vegetarian diet doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re eating a healthy diet.

There’s an enormous difference between simply eliminating animal products from your meals, and adopting a whole food, plant-based diet.

That’s just one of the topics we’re going to discuss in today’s NEW podcast episode with Dr. Joel Kahn, M.D. 

The optimal way to eat still has controversy swirling around it. There are different camps offering conflicting information, and often times it can get muddled, confusing, and emotional.

Joel is a repeat guest on the show, and in this episode he shares the latest science as well and answers some of the questions that listener sent in, including… 

• What are the healthiest fats, whether you’re vegan or not?

• How can you minimize the impact of the meat on your blood vessels? 

Dr. Kahn is one of the world’s top cardiologists who believes that plant-based nutrition is the most powerful source of preventative medicine on the planet. He is the author of The Plant-Based Solution, and sometimes refers to himself as the Top Broccoli in the United States. 

Connect With Dr. Joel Kahn, M.D.

Website | Podcast – Heart Doc VIP | Instagram | Facebook

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[KATHY SMITH]: Joel, welcome to the show.

[JOEL KAHN]: Well, thank you so much. I’m excited – sort of the badass vegan heart doctor.

[KATHY SMITH]: You certainly are. And you invented Badass Vegan, by the way, from what I heard on a recent podcast, for 40 years now? 40 plus years?

[JOEL KAHN]: I just posted on social media, it’s my 44th year without meats, turkey, eggs, cheese, dairy. So, yeah, going on entering the 44th year of it.

[KATHY SMITH]: Okay. I want to dive in. I mentioned before the show that I heard you on the Joe Rogan show with Chris Kresser. I feel like we have these tribes. We have these camps. And people have dug in their heels. You’ve got the paleos, you’ve got the vegans, and then, you have in between. But in general, people have dug in their heels. They believe in a certain way of eating. And what we’ve talked about before, and I want to delve into – start into – what is some of the science? What is the science, and how can we be sure that the science you’re giving us today is the real science? Not that I think you wouldn’t. But you know what I’m saying – that every camp has science to support their point of view. I want to delve into that. So, you start the conversation.

[JOEL KAHN]: That’s a really important question, because any day of the week, you can see a doctor, talk about a low-carb, high-fat curative diet, and you can read exactly the opposite for the camp where I’m in. Although, I’m flexible. And I have been gracious and invited to speak at paleo conferences, keto conferences, carnivore conferences, because I’m willing to discuss– not necessarily engage in battle (although, sometimes you feel that way). And the Rogan four-hour podcast in 2018 was, to some degree, a battle. But I tried to be gracious.

Now, I don’t like the divisiveness, first of all, because still, the unsaid part of paleo/keto/vegan is they’re all elitists and maybe better than average diets. We’re all sharing the common platform. We’re not buying donuts, we’re not pulling into fast food restaurants, we’re not eating cave faux meats and cheeses and eggs and poultry; although, you can see them mixed up sometimes in the paleo and the carnivore movement. So, we’re not speaking to the 65-70% of the people who are eating basically crap every day, which can be divided into calorie-rich and processed foods. We’re talking to people who already get the concept that food is a fuel for the body, food can be a medicine for the body. So, it gets down to the upper crust that are arguing, “What’s the best fuel for the body?”

But first, we still have to reach people. And I see people every day in my clinic there of wealth, they’re educated, they may be executives. And it’s still McDonald’s drive through at lunch, and it’s like I want to pull my hair out literally, which fortunately I still have hair at age 62. So, let’s not lose sight of that. We have to have a platform that the way the American food system has gone in the last 60-70 years. I think it was 1959 or thereabouts is when McDonald’s came in and Coca Cola, and now, we’ve got Starbucks as one of the more evil food influences in the United States in terms of Frappuccino’s and their food choices. I’ve been waiting decades to see that improve. That’s the biggest battle. The only blessing, maybe, of COVID-19 is many people have cooked more home meals of basic, simple ingredients. Hopefully not too many carry-out pepperoni pizzas, because that didn’t do any good for their health. And that is the bottom line. How many fruits, vegetables, whole grains, beans, peas, lentils a day, a week do you eat?

But when you get past getting rid of crap – calorie-rich and processed foods – then, you get down to that conversation. And I believe you did mention it your introduction, you’ve had Valter Longo on your show. And I consider– and just in case the audience doesn’t know, Valter Longo is a PhD, born in Genoa, Italy. He’s been in Los Angeles for over 25 years at the University of Southern California KECK School of Medicine. He heads up a biogerontology research study, which is a fancy word for he’s figuring out why we age and how to use predominantly fasting and diet to slow the very source of the aging process. He’s just banging it out of the park with innovation after innovation. And he has, in his book, The Longevity Diet, in 2018, a concept to answer your question: Five Pillars of Science. One day you read that the ketogenic diet is awesome for diabetes and maybe cured somebody of heart disease. And the next day, Dr. Dean Ornish, the dean of plant-based research is interviewed and talks about love and joy and yoga and stress but whole-food plant diet – and very often, low or no added oil and low in fat diets.

How do you figure it all out? Dr. Longo says, Five Pillars. What does the biochemistry say? I know this is technical, and I’m not going to go into it. I can list for you 10 reasons a meat-heavy diet and a basic biochemical level, exactly what it does to our cells from events like [inaudible 00:07:35] products to elements called TMAO to creating an immune reaction to something called Neu5Gc, inflammation; c-active protein, insulin resistance. I won’t go any further. Plant whole-food diets, brightly colored, this simple food plate of Physician Committee for Responsible Medicine (that’s both legumes and 100% whole grains) wins biochemically.

Then, you get to randomized studies. There are very few randomized studies. They’re hard to do when it’s food. Go tell 1,000 people, “500 eat one way and 500 eat in another for five years.” It’s virtually impossible. It’s been done a couple of times. It’s been challenged of the day if it was even worth anything once they’ve been done, and it was very expensive.

We’ve got a few. We’ve got Dr. Neal Barnard taking Diabetics (Type 2) with a whole-food plant diet, low in oil versus American Diabetes Association. The whole food plants diet won.

Of course, Dr. Dean Ornish did a randomized study for heart disease. We talked about it that last visit. So, we do have randomized things.

Then, we’ve got the biggest war, which is about something called nutritional epidemiology. We studied 400,000 people in Europe. We asked them a bunch of questions 20 years ago, and we found out 20 years later who was alive, who had cancer, who had heart disease. And we found that people that eat more fruits and vegetables have less cancer, heart disease, diabetes. We found that people who incorporate more whole grains have less heart disease and diabetes. All these are real observations.

Well, the keto and the paleo people go crazy. How do you know it was the diet? How do you know that people who eat more fruits and vegetables don’t smoke less, don’t exercise more, don’t live in better communities with better hospitals? Well, the reality is in most of these studies, they do technical statistics to try to eliminate those variables and isolate just the food. And it’s never perfect. But God knows, there’s hundreds, if not thousands, of these studies.

The bulk of them indicate diets high in saturated fat – cheese, butter, meats, lard, poultry, fish – correlate with more risk of heart disease. If you lower your saturated fat, you lower your risk for heart disease. Diets rich in fruits and vegetables show less risk for diabetes, even less risk for Alzheimer’s. Study after study after study correlates– doesn’t prove– but correlates plant-rich diets, less disease.

00:10:03

JOEL KAHN]: Then, there’s something called centenarian studies. If you want to live to 100 and healthy, let’s go study people who are 100 and healthy. The majority of them are at least plant-strong diets. They’re certainly not going to McDonald’s. But they’re also not eating red meat two times a day. They’re not frying their food. They’re not eating tremendous amounts of cheese and dairy. There may be small amounts of it, and there’s going to be variability. The classic is Okinawa, Japan in the 1950s, 60s, 70s. A plant almost-exclusive diet with some fish, very high-complex carbohydrate, very low in fat, tremendous health benefits. There was very little cancer, very little Type 2 diabetes, very little dementia and heart disease.

And then, the last– and I’m done– of Dr. Longo is what does this diet impact in terms of the environment and other factors? A meat-heavy diet is an environmental disaster. They’re cutting down and burning the Amazon to grow more grains to feed cows to feed humans. If we just eat the grains and eat the soy beans, we wouldn’t have to do all that, because we’ve got plenty of land in the United States that we could convert to more plant diet.

So, there is an analysis that gives us the answer. And it’s either only plants or largely plant diets. And you can pick the last 10% unless you’re a sick patient where you probably ought to do all-plant diets.

[KATHY SMITH]: Okay, it sounds like whichever food plan you pick, as you’re saying here– and it seems like as you were talking, so many people that are following the ketos, the paleos, the vegan diets, the centerpiece is fruits and vegetables. So, let’s just focus in on that. I have two reasons for going here. First of all, what is the recommended amount? Let’s get really in the trenches of how much people should be eating. What is the average American eating? Because I’ve heard everything from– Sara Gottfried says, “You need to eat a pound of vegetables a day.”

I’m taking a course. I don’t know if you’ve heard of the gut doctor, Dr. Will Bulsiewicz (Dr. B)?

[JOEL KAHN]: He’s a buddy.

[KATHY SMITH]: So, fiber fuel. I’m taking a six-week course with him. But it’s like 35 plants a week that we should be eating. And talking about how many– and I think– what is the average American eating and what is the expectation if you want to shift to eating a more plant-based diet?

[JOEL KAHN]: That’s a great question. Dr. Will is a wonderful guy and a good friend, and that’s a great book. I didn’t know he had a course. That sounds fun.

[KATHY SMITH]: By the way, it’s all about pooping.

[JOEL KAHN]: Yeah. There’s a famous English M.D. who has passed on – Denis Burkitt – who studied nutrition in Africa, and there are actually diseases named after him. I don’t know if that’s an honor, but it usually is. His famous statement was, “You can judge the health of the community by the size of their bowel movements.” Bigger poops, better health, smaller hospitals. It was an observation he made 50 or 60 years ago, and I think it’s very true. So, you’re right on track. Study poop. There’s also a funny t-shirt I have, “Eat plants, epic dumps.” So, it all goes back to that.

[KATHY SMITH]: Well, it’s all that fiber, which I want to get into. Because I don’t think people understand why fiber– we hear fiber and we think Metamucil and whatever. And it moves everything through our gut – but once you find out the prebiotic and the effects of fiber. So, I’d love for you to delve into that if you would.

[JOEL KAHN]: Let me go to fruit and vegetables. Let’s talk heart disease for just a minute. This is in answer to your question. The classic risk factors for developing heart disease are smoking– now, in America, about 15% of the people smoke. It used to be 50%. So, we’re at 85% of nonsmokers. Exercise– you’re the queen– but the data is that maybe about half of Americans get daily fitness. Not bad. Not good enough, but not bad. How about control of blood pressure, diabetes, cholesterol? We’re doing better. Let’s go to the last one there: nutrition. The recommendation is frequent servings of fruits and vegetables. The government says five or more a day. Three percent of Americans– remember 85% of Americans don’t smoke. Three percent of Americans get five or more servings of fruits and vegetables a day.

[KATHY SMITH]: Shocking.

[JOEL KAHN]: And many, many studies out there have shown even if you’re not completely committed to a whole-food plant diet, that five or more servings of fruit and vegetables a day– Harvard School of Public Health, a woman that’s part of the equation might live 14 more years, a man 12 more years in good health. If you want to look at preventing heart attacks, five or more servings of fruit and vegetables a day. If you want to look at cancer prevention studies, it’s linear. It’s like with a medicine, 50 milligrams gets one response and 100 milligrams gets another. Five servings of fruits and vegetables a day is awesome. But seven, eight, and nine might get you more of a response. Now, there is a limit.

And the last thing I’d say, if you’re sick, you might need more of a dose. If you’re trying to treat rheumatoid arthritis with fiber-rich, plant diets, which has been effective, you may have to up that to levels. Or even multiple sclerosis, there’s a famous protocol out there called the Wahls Protocol. It’s not all plant-based, but it can be. We’re talking 10 plus servings of fruit and vegetables (emphasizing green leafies) a day. Because you’re trying to treat a disease.

But for those listeners who are healthy, if you just hit five, you can do that in a smoothie and be done for the day, but I’d rather you eat whole foods. Grab an apple, have an orange, always a salad, a slice of tomato, lettuce, have starchy vegetables like potatoes. I just have gotten on a yuca kick, because I have a daughter-in-law from Cuba and Caracas and they love yuca, a really starchy plant. It’s really delicious.

Anyway, that’s the answer to the question. Five or more a day, I’m happy. Unless you’ve got a disease, you might have to double the dose.

[KATHY SMITH]: Okay. And then, you were actually even following up on that. You mentioned that if you are going to eat a piece of meat, if you eat some dark, leafy greens with it, it minimizes the impact of the meat on your blood vessels?

[JOEL KAHN]: It does. And I don’t want people eating burgers. But there’s been, again, an unbelievably interesting study about five years ago. They took healthy volunteers at a hospital. They put an apparatus on their arms to measure blood flow and artery health. They went down to the cafeteria and they got a hospital hamburger. What a great study. They fed them the hospital hamburger and for a number of hours, their artery function went down.

They brought the same people back another day. They either got a big bowl of of salad with the same burger or they actually got a slice of avocado– a pretty big hunk of avocado on the burger. They did not have the same decrease in artery health, demonstrating your gut is the key to health or disease of many systems, including your arteries. And any time you add in fiber-rich, brightly-colored fruits and vegetables to a poor-quality meal– you have a sloppy pizza, but you have it with a big salad, you’re better off. You’re best off if you just skip the “bad” foods. That’s a judgement, but the science supports that those are not really healthy foods. But yeah, plants are the antidote to the calorie-rich and processed crap that we put in our life.

[KATHY SMITH]: So, what about fats? I know that, again, big debates on how many fats. And within even the vegan community, you have the Ornishes, the Pritikins that were going below 10, 7, 8% fat. And then, you have a range in between as far as the guidelines. One of the USDA guidelines are something like 30% fat now or up to 30%.

[JOEL KAHN]: Up to 30% calories from unsaturated fat. And specific fat you’re going to find in butter, lard, meats, cheeses, egg yolk, and some pastries like croissants, less than 10%. So, maybe I’ll do the debate. I’ll just play both parts.

[KATHY SMITH]: Okay. I’m going to give you a little bit more information to fill this whole thing out. Because I know that – full disclosure – that I can never use you as my doctor, so I don’t. I can only use your information. But I did mention that my LDLs were creeping up, and I did something. You probably don’t remember. But I did switch a few things. I started some red yeast. I’ve heard you preaching low LDLs. I’ve never in my life had low LDLs, but I did get off all saturated fats including the coconut oils and things like that – even the plant-based ones. And my LDLs dropped to a– nice for me. But here’s the big thing. I went in this week – literally, the beginning of this week because I knew that you were going to be on the show– and I went and had a CT scan at the University of Utah here to see my calcium score. And guess what? Zero, zero, zero.

So, I thought, “Joel’s going to love this.” Now, having said that, two questions, because I don’t want to go on too much about me. But I talk to other women. I want to hear about if you have a calcium score, explain that. If you have plaque in your arteries, can that be reversed? That’s one thing I want to know. And then, just get back to this fat. Because honestly, I’m confused because some people are saying, “Olive oil is not good for you. It’s not whole-food, plant-based.” And I love olive oil.

You can’t have too many seeds or nuts. So, give us, Dr. Joel–

00:19:41

[JOEL KAHN]: I’ve got good news for you, Kathy. Let me spend two minutes on the CT scan called the calcium score. This is one of my favorite topics. This is not a plug, but about four years ago, I wrote a book with a funny tale Dead Execs Don’t Get Bonuses. I plead with people to get the CT scan you just talked about. You need a prescription usually from your doctor to go to the hospital assuming you don’t know anything about your heart arteries– you haven’t had a stint or a bypass.

As you know, you lie down for about 10 seconds. You hold your breath. There is no needle, no injection. You go home. When you come back zero, you’ve got the ultimate screening. That tells you your arteries are youthful. All that fitness, all that great diet, all that hard work you did, Kathy. Some, maybe to a degree, genetics. You won the lottery.

And it actually, it correlates to the incredibly low risk for years of heart attack and strokes, healthier kidneys, healthier lungs, better brain. It’s one of the best things somebody can do, and it’s typically $75 or $100.

[KATHY SMITH]: I was going to say, it’s cheap now. It used to be $2,000. Now, it’s $100 to get this test.

[JOEL KAHN]: This is an example from my practice brochure. The yellow arrow is pointing to a heart artery. It’s not yours. There’s a hunk of white there. That’s calcium in a heart artery. That’s bad news; although, we can manage it. And to answer your question, we can help it go away with whole-food plant diets.

But that’s enough on the CT scan. It is the most important screening test to get, maybe age 45 to 55, depending on your risk and depending on when you learn about it, except if you’ve already had a heart attack, a stint, or a bypass, you don’t need it. Dead Execs Don’t Get Bonuses.

But to answer your question, over the past 70 years, there have been a dozen important studies. A group of patients with heart disease – sometimes very severe – can diet improve their outcome? When there was Mr. Nathan Pritikin, Dr. Dean Ornish, Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn, Dr. John McDougall, you can actually go back earlier to a Dr. Lester Morrison. Good or bad, the diets they designed to study and publish– real science– always were naturally low-fat diets that advised avoiding avocados, nuts, oils, and certainly butter, lard, ghee. Coconut oil is the king. There’s more saturated fat in coconut oil than even in a steak, and there’s a little controversy, but the vast majority of nutritional cardiologists are “no” to coconut oil.

So, if you have heart disease and you’re seriously striving to reverse it, the science says you should avoid oils. Now, Kathy, you just proved you don’t have heart disease with a calcium score of zero. Plus, there is ample data that really high-quality, extra-virgin olive oil – very different than coconut oil – has been studied over and over and over. And it has the potential to lower inflammation, to lower cholesterol levels, and to actually be artery friendly. So, I am a pro– I’m a snob about my extra-virgin olive oil. It’s got to be European in a glass bottle. It always has to be extra-virgin olive oil. Spend a little more quality, and I don’t dump it all over.

Let me just give you an example. Published two weeks ago, as timely as could be, from Spain– it’s one of the vast gens of extra-virgin olive oil science, and maybe there’s a little bias, because it’s culturally so built into their diet. They took 805 people with heart disease– not you, Kathy– heart attack, bypass, other abnormalities. Half were put on a lower-fat, plant-strong Mediterranean diet. Not as low as Dr. Ornish but pretty low. The other half were encouraged four, five plus tablespoons of extra-virgin olive oil a day. Which adds up to you’re buying a lot of extra-virgin olive oil.

A year later, when they checked artery functions – some of the most sophisticated measurements, the results were far better with extra-virgin olive oil than what they called a higher-complex carb, lower-fat approach. Nowhere near as low as the therapeutic diet of Dr. Esselstyn and Dr. Ornish.

So, if somebody will go get that calcium scan, and it’s zero, or they have never had a heart attack, a stroke, a bypass, and you want to drizzle extra-virgin olive oil on your salad, on your vegetables, maybe use it to sauté even, it’s the best choice. There is other data from Harvard School of Public Health that goes right along with it.

If you’re using butter, extra-virgin olive oil, it’s a winner. If you’re using lard, using ghee, extra-virgin olive oil is a winner. Whether the other plant oils are as healthy is not as well studied, so just go with the one that has all this science.

[KATHY SMITH]: And then, you also could eat your avocados and your seeds and your nuts and your almonds, etc.

[JOEL KAHN]: Yep. I’m much more lenient even with most of our patients – avocados, nuts, seeds, and now, extra-virgin olive oil. But if you came to me today and said– not you– “I’m supposed to have bypass next week. My arteries are like a 90-year-old, and I’m only 60,” I might well advise that person to start out with a more naturally low-fat diet. “Let’s go with the science, and let’s get you better, and we can see about backing off a little bit.” But all plants.

[KATHY SMITH]: Okay. So, I know we only have a little bit more time with you. So, one of the things that I know I’ve been getting a lot of questions about is one, this supplementation. All vegan, going all plant-based, not necessarily getting certain vitamins and minerals, which you’ve talked about. The biggie everybody talks about is B12. But I kind of have a list here, and I’m just going to throw them out and maybe could just address them. It’s your Omega 3s, your selenium, your zinc, and your vitamin D, and of course, your B12. Would you recommend supplementation? I want to jump into also the Omega 3s, because once again, people are saying, you don’t need your fish oil salmon capsules. You can get that from hemp seed. And I’ve heard controversy about that. Like, you really can’t– I don’t know if you say adjust, but you really can’t metabolize it the same way.

[JOEL KAHN]: So, is there a controversy?  There is. Dr. John McDougall says, take B12 only. Don’t take too much. You’re done. And if you do more than that, you’re kind of bastardizing the beauty of an all-plant diet. There are two others – Dr. Joel Fuhrman and myself – that have tested the levels of the exact nutrients you mentioned in blood in thousands of people. You can get your selenium, your zinc, your Omega 3, your vitamin D, your B12, your iodine. All of these are testable and covered through insurance. If you know why you’re testing for them, nutritional deficiencies are covered.

There’s an amazingly high frequency of nutritional deficiencies in meat eaters, fish eaters, and vegans. It’s just uniform. This isn’t a new finding. Our USDA said 70-80 years ago, the majority of Americans are low in magnesium. We don’t use much Morton salt anymore. We’re low on iodine. So, if you test, you’ll find a lot of nutritional deficiencies. The controversy is do you replace them or not?

You can eat mushrooms for vitamin D; flax seeds, chia seeds, hemp hearts for Omega 3; you can throw in some kelp for iodine. You can eat some Brazil nuts for selenium. I’m all for that. But there is now – industry has created multivitamins for vegans – that have in one capsule B12, algae Omega 3, vitamin D, selenium, zinc, iodine. I use a lot of them in my practice, because it’s one-stop shopping. [overlapping speech 00:27:14]

[KATHY SMITH]: Which brand are you recommending?

[JOEL KAHN]: I’m using a brand called Complement Plus. And I think their website is LoveComplement.com. It’s just an easy solution. The last patient, right before we got online there was an internationally known yoga instructor– obviously, no name. And last year, despite one of the cleanest diets, all the vitamins we talked about were low. He’s been taking three capsules, which is the recommended dose of Complement Plus. All of the vitamin levels are where they should be this year. So, it’s an easy fix. And people like to see normal lab values.

Now, 50 years from now, did I just prevent him from having a brain or an associated thyroid or other disease? I don’t know. But I do like to see those things correct back to normal either with food or some simple supplementation.

[KATHY SMITH]: I think the last topic I want to touch on. I know it’s also a delicate subject. But given the fact that California and the West Coast is on fire and burning up, and we have a lot of things that some people believe are attributed to climate change. Other people don’t believe that. So, whether we go down that path or not, and that’s not the topic of this show, why are we doing good things for our children? Because when I look at my two daughters and then, my grandchildren, that’s another thing that I start factoring in. It’s like what kind of planet are we leaving them? So, do you want to just talk a little bit about the industry?

[JOEL KAHN]: Yeah. I already brought that up a bit with Dr. Longo’s Five Pillars of Evaluating Nutritional Plants. Because the fifth pillar involves talking about the environment. There are advantages to having a nearly or totally plant-based diet in terms of your carbon footprint, in terms of water utilization, in terms of desert greenhouse gas production, CO2 emission. And it has been judged by the World Health Organization, the United Nations, the USDA, and others that eating plants is less of a stress on the planet. We can feed more people, we would use less resources, we would pollute the planet less. And it includes air.

Yes, it’s true. We may have to truck broccoli from California to Michigan in the winter. That’s pollution. And if it were animal foods, it might be the same. But in the actual industry of raising the enormous amount of meat and animal-based foods, it’s much more energy intensive and polluting.

00:29:56

[JOEL KAHN]: The example is– I’m not a big fan of the Beyond Meat burger as a regular treat. But the University of Michigan down the road from where I am in Detroit did a study with an eight-ounce hamburger and an eight-ounce Beyond Meat burger. They analyzed what goes into it. It takes 90% less water to produce a Beyond Meat burger compared to a beef burger. And that’s multiplied by burger after burger after burger. It’s a huge amount of stress on the environment that we’re able to relieve. Now, you want to recycle and you want to be cognizant of the cars you drive and you want to buy green-friendly companies and products. But our food is at least a small part of the program. But if you multiply it by millions of people, it could be a pretty big part of the program.

[KATHY SMITH]: I do like those Beyond burgers, but I know you’re not a big fan. I don’t eat them much, but when you’re in a pinch or whatever, they’re good.

[JOEL KAHN]: Here’s a little tip. I don’t own stock, but if you have Trader Joe’s in your community, they have a meat substitute burger and a chicken substitute burger. The ingredient list is so much cleaner than the other two major brands. So, again, I don’t own Trader Joe stock.

[KATHY SMITH]: Oh, I’m going. We have a Trader Joe’s. Got it.

[JOEL KAHN]: That’s what I put in my freezer. I think they’re really good.

[KATHY SMITH]: Okay. I know you’ve got to run. It’s always a pleasure having you on the show. I don’t know how you find time to do everything you do. I just imagine you in the operating room, looking at hearts and whatever, and promoting your books and bringing your message to the world. And honestly, I am such a big fan because I just admire your passion for what you do. So, thank you for being on the show. I can’t wait until we can do this once in person.

[JOEL KAHN]: I agree. And if somebody listening doesn’t have the energy they want, go clean, whole-food, plant-based. Throw in a little fitness and sleep and friendship and community, and you might find your energy just really pick up on what nature really provided us, which are these super, super green and colorful foods. Thank you. It’s always a pleasure being on your show.

[KATHY SMITH]: Thank you, Joel. Bye now.

[JOEL KAHN]: Bye-bye.

[KATHY SMITH]: So, my biggest take away today is that to win the war on chronic diseases like obesity, Type 2 diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, and dementia, all nutrition camps have to join hands to teach practical ways to get more plant-based meals and snacks into our everyday routines. So, if you want to learn more from Dr. Kahn, visit his website at drjoelkahn.com.

Now, if you enjoyed this episode, I’d really appreciate it if you would come and join me on Instagram @KathySmithFitness. I look forward to connecting with all of you. I love hearing your questions. I love getting feedback from you. And as a quick reminder, with these podcasts, guess what? They’re great to listen to when you’re walking. I call it walk and talk. You walk and I talk. You can burn calories while listening to something new. You’re going to learn some new information. And don’t forget, there’s dozens of other episodes in the archives. So, if you’re interested in separating the facts from the fiction, the fads from the fiction, then you will want to check on time-restricted eating or ways to help increase weight loss with the new game changer, whether it’s HIIT training or strength training. So, check out some of the other shows.

Now, the podcast is available wherever you listen. So, search for The Art of Living with Kathy Smith whether you’re on Apple podcast, Stitcher, or Spotify. And you’ll find all of the episodes. You can even do a shoutout. Sometimes, I go, “Hey, Siri. Play that Kathy Smith podcast.” And guess what? It pops up, which I think is very funny. It makes me laugh when it does.

So, while you’re there, don’t forget to leave a review. Because you see, reviews – especially on Apple podcasts – they’re the life blood for people that make shows like mine. So, if you can, put your review. Tell me what you like. Tell me what other guests you want to hear. I love reading them. And I’m always here for you. So, until next time, here’s to your health.

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