Dr. Danielle Belardo

A great study that I encourage and implore your listeners to check out, it's called the Leon Heart Study.

This is a tremendous study.

It's a randomized controlled trial.

So when we look at research, we have different levels of evidence.

Randomized controlled trials are one of the best levels of evidence because people are randomized to an intervention versus a control arm.

And in this study, they randomized individuals to people.

These are people who have already had a heart attack or stroke, so they were called secondary prevention.

They randomized them to either being on a standard diet, which included red meat, butter, some amount of fruits and vegetables, versus the intervention arm was a Mediterranean diet that was very high in fiber from fruits, vegetables, legumes.

They reduced the amount of saturated fat from red meat.

They replaced it with

They had more plant protein, more poly and monounsaturated fat.

They replaced butter and high fat dairy with a higher polyunsaturated fat sort of oils.

They had fatty fish and they actually, the study was planned to be about four years and they had to stop it early.

They had to stop it about two years because there was a 50 to 70% reduction in further heart attack and stroke.

It was so effective that these dietary changes that they, it was unethical for it to continue.

And so that's one of the things that when you look at the research, it's kind of inarguable.

That's just for heart disease when we talk about carnivore diet and things like that.

When you actually look at even the cancer research, we know that cancer develops over time.

And so you can't randomize people to one diet or the other and say who develops colon cancer first because over two years, you're not going to see that difference.

This happens over decades.