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Your views about nutrition and the advice that you give your patients, has that evolved or changed over the past decade in in any kind of material ways or is it pretty similar?
>> No, it has evolved tremendously. I think that when I started this journey, I was focusing more on the ideal way of a plant-based diet, but with time, I started reading other guidelines. I started listening to patients' perspectives. So, I started listening to researchers with different views, and it changed my perspective tremendously. The last 5 years, I got to tell you that now I focus more on the things that will do benefit to my patients. I don't go against things that are neutral, and I do try to earn their trust in order to at least impact a little bit in reducing the things that I know harms them.
Just to give you an example. I think Dr. Mozaffarian has this amazing article where he basically displays in in in this scientific article like the foods that are healthy for human beings, right? Fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, olive oil, yogurt, and fish. And he put on the neutral zone things like chicken, eggs, cheese, things of that nature. And I don't remember if he puts in the neutral part red meat. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know for sure. But on the things that harm, sugary drinks, processed foods, and processed meats. So, my perspective, this is my personal perspective, has changed in a way that I emphasize the good stuff all the time without setting a line of what is good and what is bad. Just emphasizing this. Trying to get my patients to eat as much as possible of these protective foods. And when I say as much as possible, it's up to you. My level of of comfort is 80%. If my patients are eating 80% of the time these foods, I'm super happy. And I don't go against neutral foods anymore. I don't. I find that exhausting and irrelevant nowadays.
>> Do you think some of that more, I guess, more dogmatic approach where certain, I guess, fractions of the plant-based or vegan community have kind of positioned all animal foods as bad has led to some distrust towards the advice coming out of that that community. And when I say that, I'm speaking more about distrust from other members of academia or other doctors, people that follow medical guidelines.
>> Absolutely. I think that sometimes with these kind of views, the pragmatic views, we forget that the aim and the objective is to help as many people as possible. It's not about us being right. It's about helping people, right? And I can give you like a super quick example. We know as physicians, especially as internal medicine physicians, cardiologists, endocrinologists, that high blood pressure is bad. I mean, if we haven't talked about it, but if you have to eliminate one simple risk factor on planet Earth that will reduce morbidity and mortality tremendously, it would be high blood pressure, period, full stop. Okay, so we deal with high blood pressure. But you don't see physicians saying, "This kind of medication is the only one, the best." What do we tell them? We tell them, "We have five or six or seven different medications that are being tailored by your preference, by your context, by your background." But with a common objective of lowering your blood pressure. And I think that's the way how I look at nutrition nowadays. I try to find a common ground where I can use my voice, my expertise to push people to eat more of the healthy foods and less of the bad foods without going to one side of the spectrum.
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