International Plant-Based Nutrition Healthcare Conference

This year was my first visit to the International Plant-Based Nutrition Healthcare Conference in Anaheim, a massive 900+ gathering of doctors, nurses, health coaches, nutritionists and all sorts of healthcare providers assembled to learn about plant-based nutrition.

I arrived a day early to attend a seminar on how to market your plant-based medical practice, which will be very important (more on that topic soon!!).  The next two and a half days were full of lectures from various doctors, nutritionists, and even a cooking demonstration!

This is what a full lecture hall looked like on the last day of the conference:

This was from Brenda Davis RD's talk.  She gave an overview on the benefits of plant-based diets.  Since I hear all day from patients telling me how they feel they need more protein, and personal trainers who push protein on their clients, I found this slide and the discussion around it very important:

Bottom line -- higher protein intakes, greater than 20% of calories per day, particularly when from animal sources, associated with increased mortality.  That said, I would be cautious even with vegan protein supplementation.

I clicked this slide from Dr. Garth Davis's talk.  He and Dr. Kim Williams, the past president of the American College of Cardiology, gave exceptional talks.  Dr. Davis put this slide up to summarize the ways meat increases mortality:

More reason to give up meat if you want to be healthy.

I think I nabbed this slide from Dr. Davis's talk as well.  There's lots of people who are "pescevegan".  They're vegan except that they do eat fish.  (Ironically, I gave up fish at age 11 due to having fish for pets, but spent the next five years eating chickens and hamburgers and thinking nothing of it).

TMAO (trimethylamine-N-oxide) is found in the gut, and higher amounts are associated with increased plaque in the arteries.  Fish consumption leads to the highest levels of TMAO.  So, if one is concerned about health, here's another reason not to eat fish.

And of course, one of the coolest things about attending a course on plant-based nutrition -- the food!!!!  Everything served was vegan, plant-based, and relatively healthy, either with no oil or minimal oil, minimal salt and sugar.  I ate quite well.