Neal BarnardMD, FACC · founding president, Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine
Not while you are doing this properly
What it rests onThe dietary intervention as specified in the WAVS trial, and the roughly 10 percent of energy from fat composition used across his weight and diabetes trials.
Source: pcrm.org ↗
Michael GregerMD · founder, NutritionFacts.org
Every day, and flaxseed gets its own line
What it rests onThe Daily Dozen checklist, and controlled trials of flaxseed in which 20 g was the smallest effective dose he could find for cholesterol lowering.
Source: nutritionfacts.org ↗
Barnard's exclusion is a trial protocol addressed to people with a specific target (hot flashes, type 2 diabetes, weight loss) for a defined period, and his general-audience advice is far softer: move plant foods to the centre of the plate. Greger's instruction is a permanent daily checklist for a general adult audience.
Read against the right populations the gap narrows, and Barnard's version is a trial protocol rather than his standing advice. It does not close: the two men give opposite instructions about the same food to the same person on day one of a plant-based diet, and a user following both is following neither.
Nearly everything else. Both are at the plant pole, both build the plate from vegetables, legumes, fruits and whole grains, both require a B12 supplement, both reject the ketogenic route, both reject calorie counting, and both treat added oils as the thing to remove first. Neither disputes that whole plant foods are the base. The fight is over one category of whole plant food and it is about fat density, not about food quality.
For Barnard: a trial isolating the no-nuts-and-seeds component, showing that a low-fat vegan diet including nuts and seeds performs worse on his endpoints than one excluding them, which is the comparison none of his trials makes.
For Greger: his own platform has already reported that nuts may not help telomeres, so the position that would move is the cardiovascular one, on evidence that nut fat blunts the metabolic effect of an otherwise low-fat plant diet.
You do, and your call is dated, kept, and yours to change. Follow the people you already trust and what they publish turns into a short daily practice.
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