PBNHC 2018 Conference

Day 1 – Going to California with excitement in my heart

(with apologies to Led Zeppelin)

I’m writing the first part of this post in the departure lounge at Sydney Kingsford Smith airport, waiting for my flight to Los Angeles and then onto San Diego for the 6th International Plant-Based Nutrition Healthcare Conference.

This will be my fifth PBNHC. It’s become something of an annual pilgrimage for me, and a band of other Australian practitioners who see plant-based nutrition as foundational to health care.

This year’s line-up is the best yet, with presentations on topics ranging from cardiovascular disease and diabetes, conditions that have been known for decades to be highly responsive to plant-based nutrition; to cutting edge topics such as the effect of plant-based diets on mental health, rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis. Needless to say, I’ll be taking extensive notes and incorporating everything I learn into my clinical practice.

There’s an atmosphere at the PBNHC that I’ve never encountered at any other medical conference – somewhere between a Tony Robbins event and a religious revival. Presenters cry as they recount their patients’ remarkable recoveries from diseases that are considered medically incurable. Participants (mostly doctors who receive close to zero education in nutrition throughout their entire medical degree and postgraduate training) regale each other with stories of how discovering the power of plant-based nutrition has transformed their personal health as well as their professional practices, and rescued them from burnout.

And people hug. A lot. Participants hug each other, presenters hug other presenters, and participants hug presenters. I’ve never attended a conference at which there’s so much hugging!

Part of the magic of the PBNHC is the dynamic trio of Dr Scott Stoll, Tom Dunnam and Susan Benigas. Scott and Tom conceived the idea for the conference while sitting at Scott’s kitchen table one night, lamenting the fact that the vast majority of doctors were completely ignorant of the most powerful tool they could have in their therapeutic toolbox – knowledge of plant-based nutrition.

Like all good visionaries, their solution to the absence of the thing they desired, was to invent it themselves. They brought Susan on board to help translate their vision into reality, and the rest is history.

A deeply religious man, Scott Stoll brings a sense of spiritual mission to his work… and the delivery style of the great preachers to his opening addresses, which are always electrifying. Think of Dr Martin Luther King Jr’s epochal ‘I have a dream’ speech, substitute complete reform of the broken ‘health care’ system (which is actually a sick care industry comprising multinational pharmaceutical and medical technology industry behemoths with an obligation to deliver shareholder value, not health and well being) for the repair of the broken social contract between whites and blacks that King sought to rewrite, and you’ve got the general idea.

If you’re detecting that I’m just a little excited about attending this conference, you’re darn right!

I’ll keep you posted as the conference unfolds. I’m also running a conference wrap-up webinar on Tuesday 25 September for my EmpowerEd members, in which I’ll share the juiciest nuggets that I pick up from all the lectures. Now would be a great time for you to activate your 1 month free trial of EmpowerEd!

I’m off to do a few laps of the departures terminal before I bunker down for the 13.5 hour flight to LA.

Day 2 – San Diego

After wrenching my poor unfortunate body through 6 time zones (and passing the time by watching Selma and Chappaquiddick, which provided a thought-provoking juxtaposition between the monumental achievements of a Black man who overcame prejudice and bigotry to tear down the legal structures supporting racism in America, and the failed promise of a privileged White man whose moral cowardice was his undoing), my flight touched down safely in Los Angeles. From there, it’s a short hop on a commuter jet down to San Diego, which perches just north of the Mexico-US border.

San Diego’s trademark bright sunshine helped to clear the fog of jet lag long enough for me to find my way to Ralph’s, a supermarket-cum-salad bar which provided me with everything I needed for an impromptu picnic in the bark overlooking San Diego Bay: prewashed salad greens, black bean hommous, grape tomatoes, baby carrots, sugar snap peas and a wholemeal roll.

San Diego has quite a homeless problem (in common with so many other US cities), and I found myself 3 park benches away from a Black man whose worldly possessions were piled into a shopping trolley beside him. He sat motionless, staring vacantly into the sky, while I took in the sight of multimillion dollar motor yachts and catamarans moored at the marina adjacent to the park, and pondered the ongoing economic and racial disparity that plagues the US, and the tensions that spring from it.

Although, as depicted in Selma, Martin Luther King Jr succeeded in overturning racist laws, racism itself is a paradigm – an invisible frame of reference – that is deeply imprinted into the mind, from the earliest age, and cannot be expunged by changing those laws. The simmering mistrust and hatred of the ‘other’ that boiled over into the terrible acts of violence against unarmed, nonviolently protesting Blacks, graphically represented in Selma, is now being whipped up against Mexicans and other Latinos who provide the cheap farm labour that makes the food I bought in Ralph’s so affordable. Oh, what a tangled web!

After strolling back from downtown San Diego along the Embarcadero (where I was excited to see a vessel proudly brandishing the Sea Shepherd flag), it was time to check in at the PBNHC venue, the Bayfront Hilton.

A solid workout in the well-equipped but near-empty hotel gym, and a dip in the pool, helped me shake off a mid-afternoon energy slump and make it through to night time without napping – something I have found to be totally counterproductive when trying to adjust to a new time zone. However, by 8.30 pm I could no longer keep my eyes open, and tumbled into bed.

Day 3: Pre-conference Workshops and Opening Night

After sleeping like the dead for a solid 8 hours, I woke at 4.30 am, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. My attempts to fall back to sleep proved fruitless, so I did a meditation session and then headed off to the gym. Early mornings in San Diego are dark; I watched the sun come up over San Diego Bay while running on the treadmill.

Then it was off to the San Diego Convention Center for two pre-conference workshops. Dr Michael Klaper and Dr Joel Kahn led the first, on fasting.

Dr Klaper shared his years of experience supervising thousands of water-only fasts at TrueNorth Health Center, while Dr Kahn delved into the rapidly growing body of research on fasting, both in its traditional water-only form, and more recently-popularised forms such as time-restricted feeding and intermittent fasting, including the Fasting Mimicking Diet developed by Dr Valter Longo.

The second workshop, with Dr Micaela Karlsen, was on designing and conducting impactful research to advance the cause of plant-based nutrition. I left with renewed inspiration to commence my PhD next year, and make my contribution to this field!

The opening reception for PBNHC 2018 provided me with the opportunity to meet up with some of the other Aussies attending the conference – the Melbourne contingent consisting of Dr Malcolm McKay and his partner Jenny Cameron, co-founders of Wholefoods Plant-Based Health, dietitian Peter Johnston, and Judith Goorjian; and Dr Heleen Roex, founder of Doctors for Nutrition, from Adelaide.

Then it was time for the opening night festivities. Dr Hans Diehl was the worthy recipient of the 2018 Plant-based Luminary award, for his inestimable contribution to the field, including developing the Comprehensive Health Intervention Program (CHIP), which has transformed the lives of thousands of people all over the world.

Dr Scott Stoll’s keynote, ‘Healthcare Organizational Transformation: What’s Working and Why’, fulfilled all my expectations. He recounted his personal visits to four US hospital systems which have embraced the wholefood plant-based nutrition message, and are incorporating it into every aspect of patient and staff care, in remarkably innovative ways, such as:

• Turning the roof of the hospital into a vegetable garden which supplies fresh food for hospital meals, both for patients and staff.
• Setting up farmers’ markets within hospitals to provide low-cost produce to the community served by the hospital.
• Providing free plant-based meal deliveries for discharged patients for 1 month (which almost halved readmission rates, from 15% to 8%, resulting in dramatic cost savings to the hospital systems).
• Providing the CHIP program free of charge to hospital staff, in order to improve the health of those who are tasked to tend to the health of patients, and get their ‘buy-in’ for roll-out of the program to patients.
• Teaching wholefood plant-based cooking classes on the hospital campus, for both inpatients and outpatients.
• Setting up support groups so that discharged patients could receive ongoing peer support to help them maintain the dietary pattern prescribed to them in the hospital.
• Designing the entire hospital campus to embody health, from maximising natural light, to building teaching kitchens for staff and patients, to constructing outdoor play spaces for children visiting relatives in the hospital.

It wasn’t easy getting off to sleep after this massive injection of inspiration, but eventually, fatigue from the long day kicked in and my brain succumbed.

Day 4: Let the games begin

Past experience at PBNHCs has taught me that if I want to get in a workout in before lectures begin at 8 am, I need to get up early and beat a path to the hotel gym, because attendees at this conference tend to be pretty keen on their fitness. When I arrived at the gym at 5.40 am, half of the cardio machines were already occupied, and by the time I wrapped up my workout, it was quite literally standing room only!

All meals are provided at the PBNHC, and are wholefood, plant-based, and free of sugar, salt and oil. Bliss! I can eat everything on the buffet table without asking ‘Is this vegan?’, and know that I’m not going to regret that I chose it, later on.

A packed day of presentations on inflammation, caloric density, rheumatoid arthritis, prostate cancer, mental health, osteoarthritis and lipids whizzed by, interspersed with delicious meals and fascinating conversations with other conference attendees from throughout the US and Canada.

After dinner, chef Ken Rubin from Rouxbe Cooking School, which offers a brilliant online cooking course, Culinary Rx, that I frequently recommend to clients who are struggling to implement a wholefood plant-based diet due to inadequate culinary skills and knowledge, demonstrated how to prepare delicious and nutritious meals without spending hours in the kitchen each day.

And then it was the moment I’ve been waiting for, for over a year: conference attendees were treated to a world premiere screening of The Game Changers, the James Cameron-produced documentary which showcases the remarkable effects of a wholefood plant-based diet on the performance and recovery of athletes, from lean-and-mean distance runners to bodybuilders and NFL football players. Even better, the man who conceived, wrote and directed the documentary, mixed martial artist James ‘Lightning’ Wilks, was there to introduce the film in person!

The film is a must-see for everyone, particularly all those athletes, gym rats and weekend warriors who are still convinced that they will become protein deficient if they switch to a plant-based diet!

It was nearly 11 pm before I dropped into bed, exhausted but ecstatic, and fell almost immediately into a deep sleep.

Day 5: From great to amazing

Waking up fully alert at 4.30 am is getting to be a bad habit! Once again, returning to sleep proved fruitless despite my best efforts, so I headed to the gym at 5.30 and smashed out a solid workout.

After loading up my breakfast plate with enormous, sweet berries and steel cut oats, I headed into the lecture room for a special treat: two hours with the one and only Professor T. Colin Campbell for a deep dive into the history of our cultural obsession with protein, and the battle in medical thinking between reductionism and wholism – which was won by reductionism, to our great cost on a personal and societal level.

Following Dr Campbell’s thought-provoking presentation, we were treated to lectures on cardiology, multiple sclerosis, medication management for people who adopt a wholefood plant-based diets (otherwise known as ‘deprescribing’- what a wonderful word!), endocrinology and diabetes (type 1 and 2).

And then, after dinner, we were treated to a wide-ranging panel discussion with The Game Changers director James Wilks, and US Olympic track cyclist Dotsie Bausch and Dr Jim Loomis, who were both featured in the film. The depth of knowledge that James Wilks acquired in the process of researching the film quickly became evident, as he deftly and intelligently handled audience questions on the perennial protein conundrum, how recovery and injury repair are facilitated by the plant-based diet, the conflict between optimising athletic performance and ensuring long-term health, and how athletes can manage the transition to a plant-based diet.

Both James and Dotsie shared that some athletes had disclosed to them, off the record, that their contracts forbid them from adopting meat-free diets. This is without doubt one of the most disturbing things I’ve learned in a long time. That fact that sports teams can dictate food choices to athletes – especially when those edicts are based on outdated notions and ‘bro science’, as Jim Loomis colourfully put it – is mind-bending.

Another full-tilt day drew to a close, but my mind refused to obey the plea of my tired body and I spent a restless night wrestling with the dreaded jetlag insomnia. I finally succumbed to sleep at some time well after midnight.

Day 6: Drawing the threads together

In spite of my less-than-satisfactory night’s sleep, when my alarm went off at 5.30 am, I was instantly wide awake again. Another early-morning gym session cleared out the cobwebs and got me in the right frame of mind for the closing day’s lectures.

Fortunately, with Dr Michael Greger in the house, there was no need to employ any strategies to keep myself awake. With his trademark blend of rapid-fire delivery and humour, one of the unlikely rock stars of the plant-based movement got the day off to a high-energy start.

A fascinating presentation followed, on cultural and societal challenges that impede the mainstreaming of plant-based foodways, and how innovative technology may help to solve them.

Right on cue, a multidisciplinary team from Kaiser Permanente, an innovative health system that provides primary and hospital health care to millions of Americans, led us through some of their remarkably effective health education and behaviour change programs that are helping their members lose weight, reverse their diabetes and high blood pressure, get off medications, dramatically improve their quality of life… and in the process, saving Kaiser Permanente millions of dollars. As with so many features of American society, within their weakness (the lack of universal health care) lies their strength (the pressure to innovate). While I for one am an advocate for universal health insurance, the Medicare system as it currently operates in Australia provides no incentive for the practise of Lifestyle Medicine. Kaiser Permanente’s model rewards health care workers for helping patients achieve better health outcomes with less costly interventions, whereas the fee-for-service model rewards exactly the opposite, here in Australia.

A panel discussion with young cardiologist Dr Danielle Belardo, dietitian Andy Bellatti, Dr Laurie Marbas and Dr Michael Klaper ensued, giving participants the opportunity to ‘pick their brains’ on all manner of clinical questions.

All too soon, the conference was over, and it was time to say goodbye to old and new friends… and grab a photo opportunity with the wonderful Dr Klaper.

With a couple of hours to spare before my flight from San Diego to LA left, I grabbed the opportunity to walk along the Embarcadero to farewell San Diego Bay, with its collection of knockabout cabin cruisers, luxury yachts, aircraft carriers-cum-museums, steamships, paddle wheelers and gorgeous old sailing ships.

With time to kill at LAX, I browsed through a store simply called America!, which stocked all manner of merchandise satirising President Trump. Fancy a toilet roll holder that recites Trumpisms while you wipe your rear end? Or how about a device which counts down the days, hours, minutes and seconds until Trump’s term draws to a close (that is, unless he’s impeached first)? A t shirt bearing the image of a poop sporting a toupée? This is the store for you!

Another PBNHC is over, but if you’re bummed that you didn’t get to attend, fear not – I’ll be sharing all the choice nuggets from the conference presentations in my September Deep Dive webinar for EmpowerEd members. Not yet an EmpowerEd member? Activate your 1 month free trial now! You can join the webinar live at 8 pm Sydney time on Tuesday 25 September, or watch the recording afterward.