S4. E16: Adam Sud: Plant-Based Addict
“…I checked into rehab and within 72 hours I was diagnosed with type two diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, erectile dysfunction, bipolar disorder, suicidal depression, anxiety disorder, obsessive compulsive personality disorders, sleep disorder and ADHD…”
– Adam Sud
There was a point when Adam Sud’s life was completely out of control with food and drug addiction; so much so that he found himself cycling between amphetamine benders and fast food binges until things got so bad that he attempted suicide by drug overdose.
Fortunately, it was a failed attempt and Adam reached out for help. He got sober and transformed every single thing about his life. He credits a huge amount of his recovery to a plant-based diet and the connection he feels with all living things through veganism.
Since then, Adam has dedicated his life to helping others transform their lives. He is a diabetes and food addiction coach for Mastering Diabetes, a program that focuses on reversing insulin resistance to master diabetes using low fat, whole food, plant-based nutrition. He is also an international speaker for the plant-based movement and addiction recovery movement. He has worked in recovery centers using plant-based nutrition as a tool for strengthening recovery and relapse prevention. And, he is also the founder of the non-profit, Plant-Based for Positive Change, a program that is dedicated to advancing the research of diet and mental health and addiction and is running the very first research study to investigate the effects of a plant-based diet intervention on early addiction recovery outcomes.
Adam firmly believes that the simplest change on your fork makes the most profound change of your life, and that self-love is the root of all recovery. His story is as extraordinary as it is inspiring. I hope that you learn as much as I did.
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Transcript:
Adam: [00:00:00] I checked into rehab and within 72 hours. I was diagnosed with type two diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, erectile dysfunction, bipolar disorder, suicidal depression, anxiety disorder, obsessive compulsive personality disorder, sleep disorder, and ADHD.
Elizabeth: [00:00:29] Hi. I'm Elizabeth Novogratz, this is Species Unite. Today's conversation is with a remarkable guy. His name is Adam Sud. There was a point where Adam's life was out of control with food and drug addiction. So much so that he found himself going from amphetamine bender to fast food binge to amphetamine bender until things got so dark that he attempted suicide. That's also when he reached out for help. He got sober and he transformed every single thing about his life. He credits a huge amount of this to a plant based lifestyle and the connection that he feels to all living things through veganism. Since then, Adam's dedicated his life to helping transform other people's lives, and he's spearheading the first study investigating the effects of nutrition on early addiction recovery outcomes. Our team at night was so inspired by Adam's story that we decided we want to hear your vegan stories. Now, they don't have to be these big, enormous, life changing stories, although they definitely can. But if you are vegan, write to us. Tell us about it. What made you go vegan? How long did it take? Did it happen overnight or take decades? And if you're not vegan but you're thinking about it, write to us, too. If you have no interest whatsoever in veganism, that's fine, too. But send us your stories. Send them to me, Elizabeth@SpeciesUnite.com and we'll share them and read them on the show. Thank you so much for being here.
Adam: [00:02:13] Well, it's my pleasure. I appreciate it. I'm glad to be here.
Elizabeth: [00:02:16] Where are you right now?
Adam: [00:02:18] I live in Austin, Texas.
Elizabeth: [00:02:20] Is that where you're from?
Adam: [00:02:21] So I'm originally from Houston. I was born in Houston, but then I grew up in Austin, Texas. Yeah. So I'm a native Texan.
Elizabeth: [00:02:28] Your story is incredible. So can we go back to childhood and kind of where seeds were starting to get planted and the beginning of all of this?
Adam: [00:02:40] Yeah, sure. Like I mentioned, I'm a native Texan, seventh generation Houstonian, actually. I grew up surrounded by and I'm a native Texan. I'm also Jewish. So I grew up with these two very interesting dietary cultures, Texas barbecue and Jewish traditional bagels and blintzes. Right. My cultural connection to food was not one around health. It's interesting because I think a lot of people's cultural connection to food is about this belief that your food makes you who you are. So I bought into that because I was obviously you're raising this is what you eat if you're from Texas, what you eat when you're Jewish. I really didn't have much of a second thought about food as a kid. I grew up in the eighties, so it was like the boom of the junk food era. So I can remember my dad has always had this emphasis on healthy living, healthy eating. So from a very young age, I was criticized a lot for wanting to eat the junk food that my friends had that even we had in our house. I think it's really interesting because even though I had this amazing childhood where I was outside playing every single day, I played baseball, I played basketball, I played football, and I played with my friends outside every day and we rode our bikes to school and my dad coached my Little League baseball team and my basketball team. Even though all these wonderful things were a part of my childhood, there were aspects of my childhood that were really profoundly impactful in regards to my relationship with myself and the world around me. A lot of it started with food and with body image. I'm not sure how old I was, probably close to ten years old, and I was alone with my parents and hanging out. When I was a kid, I rarely had a shirt on and I don't know what brought it up, but my parents were like, Wow, you have love handles. How did that happen? I'm ten years old, so not only did I not know how this happened, I had never heard of love handles before. Obviously I didn't know what caused it. I don't believe that their intentions were bad. I think they were just surprised or whatever. I could tell that what their reason they were asking is because it wasn't something that they wanted me to have was love handles. So here's the first time ever that I learned to look at my body with condition.
Elizabeth: [00:05:17] Well and probably some shame, too. Right?
Adam: [00:05:18] Exactly. Yeah. I was openly accepting of myself completely. Never once looked at my body in question. Was it enough? For the first time ever, within 10 seconds, I had bought into a belief that there were reasons to be ashamed of myself physically, and that I could only love myself upon certain conditions of the way my body looked. I felt that was like my earliest experience with shame about my body and I didn't know why I couldn't stop or didn't want to stop eating the junk food at the time. I don't know why my body was looking the way it did, but I realized that I was not able to stop these behaviors of eating junk food when it was in the house. So I decided to hide it and I would take food from the kitchen. I would run into my bedroom and I would close the door and turn off the lights. I would sit in the corner and I would eat this food as fast as possible. Just get it done. Don't let anyone see. I was ashamed. I was afraid that at any moment the door was going to open. My parents were going to come into my room for something. They were going to see who I really was and I wasn't going to be acceptable. That was terrifying because I know for me at that age, my parents essentially represented my entire world. If they didn't accept me, I was almost as if the world was saying, You can't be here. We're not going to love you like this. About the same time I was taken to a doctor, I was diagnosed with ADHD. This is the part of the quote unquote Ritalin generation. The doctor said that all I have to do is take this pill called Ritalin. It's going to make everything okay. It's going to fix the problem. That story that I had just been told by this doctor that there are broken parts of myself. There are broken things about you. That's not what the doctor was actually saying. But this is essentially the story that was being presented to me that, yes, it's true, this thing called ADHD is a representation of a broken part in you. When you're broken, you fix it because you're not enough without this. The world doesn't want you here if you're not if you're acting as you are as you came into the world. So we're going to put you on this medication so that you become what the world wants you to be. Then we'll love you, then we'll accept you. I grabbed a hold of that story with dear life because I wanted to be that. I wanted to be loved and liked by everybody and I think from that point on, I started to always be aware of any indication, any hint that there was something unacceptable about me and try to find the best way to hide it, fix it, manage it, control it so that I could I could present a version of myself that was hiding behind these layers of condition. When we moved to Austin. We moved right before I started high school. So I went to this big, very sports focused high school in Austin, Texas. All the kids essentially went to middle school together, so everyone knew each other. I didn't know anybody. I was late to start puberty, so I was awkward and I had a really hard time my freshman year and then people found out that I was taking Adderall because my prescription from Ritalin had been changed to Adderall. Adderall is just another amphetamine based medication used to treat ADHD and narcolepsy.
Elizabeth: [00:08:48] Is it a lot different than Ritalin? Could you feel the difference like when you switched?
Adam: [00:08:52] Yes, it's much more, it's much stronger. There's a reason why the market made a huge shift towards Adderall, because it works. Not that Ritalin doesn't work. Ritalin is an amphetamine as well, but it's not to the same degree. Once people found out that I had Adderall, then all of a sudden I got invited to parties. I remember getting invited to my first party, being so excited. Then the person who invited me said, Oh, yeah, bring your Adderall. I didn't know at the time that it was a recreational drug. I said, okay, fine. I showed up and I'm going to tell you, the very second that I used Adderall as a recreational drug, I was absolutely hooked because it seemed to be the greatest solution that I ever found to these parts of myself that I believed were not enough. It seemed to magically fix everything that I thought was broken about me.
Elizabeth: [00:09:45] How so?
Adam: [00:09:46] So at the time, like I mentioned, I was kind of awkward, and didn't have a lot of confidence. When I'm on a lot of amphetamine, I all of a sudden just have this superhuman view of myself and I wasn't scared to talk to people and whatever they were talking about I could immediately be interested in. So I seemed like an engaging person that was always interested in everybody else's goings on. I was a little bit overweight in high school and Adderall is an amphetamine so when I take a good amount of it, not only do I not want to eat, but my metabolism goes through the roof. So I'm losing weight overnight and then at the same time, I had this endless amount of energy that felt incredible.
Elizabeth: [00:10:34] And how would you feel the next day?
Adam: [00:10:36] The next day I'll just take more, you know? In the beginning, I didn't have to take a lot. So it worked. I mean, I lost weight. I made tons of friends. I coasted through high school. I got a scholarship to the college that I wanted to go to. My relationship with my dad was fantastic, and it seemed like the more I took, the more it made me into the person that was just this unbelievably unstoppable version of myself. In college, things took a turn because all of a sudden more was not enough. Not enough was a constant concern. How much do I have? How long will it last? Where will I get more? How much will it cost? Will I get money to pay for it? Those concerns became the most overwhelming and pressing questions of every single second of every day. Everything became how much, how long? Where will I get more? How much will it cost? Every second. Every second was that. It became so overwhelming that I dropped out of college. I moved back to Austin because I knew the doctors there that I could scam and I knew the dealers that I could buy from. I started doctor shopping, which is where you have multiple doctors prescribing the same medications without knowing it. I was forging prescriptions, which is a felony. I was buying and selling drugs on the street. I would scam and steal from people. I mean, I would do anything to anybody to get what I needed, regardless of what happened to them. I did not care.
Elizabeth: [00:12:14] Were you aware I mean, obviously, you were aware you were doing it, but were you aware just like how out of control you were?
Adam: [00:12:20] I was aware. But this is an interesting thing. It's an interesting thing when it comes to substance abuse. I was absolutely aware of it, but completely in a complete state of disbelief about it, because I was certain that I was going to figure out a way to get back under control. Right. Because I could never explain to somebody the feeling that I got from using the first time, not my connection to the drug, but to what it did for me. I could never explain to you how amazing it felt to finally be able to escape a life that felt like too painful a place to be. It's hard to put into words how it feels like the best thing you've ever done for yourself. At the same time, knowing that you're going down this horrible rabbit hole of destruction and disconnection and in pain.
Elizabeth: [00:13:22] And are people noticing?
Adam: [00:13:25] Absolutely. My parents and I were constantly fighting with each other. The only time I ever talked to them was either blaming them or shaming them for everything that was wrong in my life, or just to get money and things from them so I could buy more drugs. When I say that I was abusing Adderall, the average prescription for Adderall is about ten milligrams a day. On a regular basis, I was using 450 milligrams in a 24 hour period. There were days I would use 1000 and I would do it for six days straight without sleeping or end up in a drug induced psychosis, and I'd end up popping opiates to be able to go to sleep. I was living alone. I was isolated. I was living in a filthy apartment where my windows were boarded up and I was using so much drugs that I would end up running out very quickly and have like a week or so where I couldn't get any. Then fast food was the best thing I ever discovered for that. If I eat a lot of fast food, it was a great substitute to numb me up and just get through that week and I would get up in the morning. I would go to a place called Torchy's Tacos. I would get four of their breakfast tacos. I would go to Whataburger right after that, get the extra large honey barbecue chicken strip sandwich meal. Then I go to McDonald's, get two super sized double quarter pounder meals for dinner. I'd have an extra large pizza from Papa John's with a side of the chicken strips. Then about three in the morning I go back to Whataburger for three of their breakfast and sandwiches with sausage. I drink like 15 sodas a day.
Elizabeth: [00:14:51] I mean, that's incredible. I mean, that's just like, incredible.
Adam: [00:14:55] My weight got to about 350 pounds when my dad came to me and he was really worried about my health. He offered me the opportunity to attend a seven day retreat with a man named Rip Esselstyn, who wrote The Engine to Die. He's also the executive producer of The Game Changers. His father is Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn from the film Forks Over Knives, who was one of the first people to show that a plant based diet reverses heart disease. Anyways, I didn't know any of these people. I didn't know who Rip was. I didn't care who he was, and I sure as shit didn't want to know what he had to say. The only reason I agreed to go is because I knew if I did, I could get my dad to keep giving me money. That's all I wanted to do. I went to this retreat. It was being held in Austin. I was high every day. I brought drugs with me.
Elizabeth: [00:15:43] What was the program? What was happening at the program?
Adam: [00:15:45] Yeah. So what it was, was a seven day retreat where you learn how to adopt a low fat, whole food plant based diet, eating plants and their whole intact as close to nature state. No added oil, no added sugar, grains, beans, greens, legumes, nuts, seeds, all that stuff. It's an all you can eat buffet, it's all cooked for you. They do a biometric screening day one and day seven, and you get lectures from the leading thought leaders of the plant based movement, Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn, Dr. Michael Clapper. At the time, Jeff Novick was still doing his lectures on calorie density. Doug Lyle, absolutely phenomenal. What you're going to learn is that you can actually not only prevent chronic Western diseases, but you can reverse it simply by changing what you put on your plate. I went to every single lecture, even though I was high as a kite. I listened to everything that was being said and not more so than the message of health. There was a guy there named John Pierre. He was their personal trainer that was helping people with exercise. He's a vegan activist and very close friends with a man named Sean Munson who directed Earthlings. He had a copy of it with him the first night. He goes, Hey, it seems like maybe the health stuff isn't really speaking to you, but why don't you watch this movie? I watched Earthlings the first night. I couldn't watch the whole thing. I've still never seen it all the way through. I had to watch it in parts.
Elizabeth: [00:17:10] I think a lot of people have never seen it the whole way through.
Adam: [00:17:13] Yeah, it's brutal, tough.
Elizabeth: [00:17:15] It's really brutal. For people who've never seen Earthlings. Will you just give just a brief explanation?
Adam: [00:17:22] Sure. So Earthlings is a film that documents and shows the way humans exploit animals from every species for every single industry: food, entertainment, clothing, medicine, makeup, all of it. It's done in a very beautiful and poetic way that is as brutal as possible. But I'd never seen one that actually spoke to the universal commonality of being alive on this planet, that we are all earthlings, that we are all part of this great goings on, and that we have separated ourselves from nature, that they're not separate from us. We separated ourselves. It speaks to the human soul in a way that's not shaming. It's important to take those steps to get closer and closer to suffering, because that is the point of it all, is to not keep ourselves to just know that it exists. But when you see it, you get as close as you can to it, because the closer you get, the more you're going to want to do to stop it.
Elizabeth: [00:18:22] There's nothing like seeing animals on their way into the slaughterhouse, like, right there in front of you.
Adam: [00:18:28] It'll take you to places you've never been in the most wonderful way and give you an experience that's entirely your own. I heard this message. I heard this inner self saying these things that we're saying right now. I wish I could tell you that that alone was enough for me to stop eating animals, to stop using. But it just wasn't.
Elizabeth: [00:18:52] But a lot of seeds were planted, it sounds like.
Adam: [00:18:53] Absolutely. The thing is, I just wasn't ready to give up what was allowing me to escape a life that was too painful a place to be. I wish I could tell you that on day seven I was like, That's it, I'm done. I'm going to change my life. But unfortunately, things just got worse. In 2012, I was sitting alone in my apartment. It was August 21st, 2012.
Elizabeth: [00:19:17] How long was this after?
Adam: [00:19:19] Yeah. So the retreat was in 2010.
Elizabeth: [00:19:22] Okay.
Adam: [00:19:23] August 21st of 2012. I'm sitting in my apartment. I had already developed erectile dysfunction. I had these cuts on my legs from mosquito bites that I had scratched that weren't healing and they were getting infected. I didn't know why. Living hurt, not just physically, but spiritually and emotionally and I attempted suicide by drug overdose. It wasn't something that I had planned. I remember trying to stand up and I had been on the brink of overdose before. I know what that feels like and this was different as I tried to stand up. My entire right side of my body cramp felt like I was getting stabbed in the stomach with knives, and I started to get very dizzy. I see black fading and on the sides. I have this profound experience of believing that that was the last moment I was ever going to have. It was terrifying. Not just the physical feeling of believing that you're dying, but like the feeling that I was going to experience my last moment alive, completely separate from everything that ever meant anything to me. Not because they walked away from me, but because I walked away from them was the most terrifying thing I'd ever experienced in my life. I woke up on the floor of my apartment a few hours later in a puddle of vomit and I had this unbelievable feeling of relief.
Elizabeth: [00:20:58] Relief that you were still alive?
Adam: [00:21:00] Yeah. That feeling of relief forever changed my life because it was shocking at first. I recognized at that moment that I was sad that I was dying and I was going to be disconnected and that I had spent so many years disconnected from meaningful bonds in my life. But I believed that the reason why I was trying to end my life was because I wanted my life to end. But that relief that I was experiencing was a statement of the opposition. That the only reason I would be relieved is because there was something about my life, something about myself that was so meaningful that I loved enough that in spite of all the pain that I knew was going to come that day and the day after, I still wanted to be a part of it all. That I still wanted to wake up and be a part of this world, be connected to other people. I had this idea that if I could simply have a completely new relationship with suffering. Maybe I could reconnect to what was meaningful about life. I called my parents and I asked for help and two weeks later, I checked into rehab. Within 72 hours. I was diagnosed with type two diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, erectile dysfunction, bipolar disorder, suicidal depression, anxiety disorder, obsessive compulsive personality disorder, sleep disorder, and ADHD.
Elizabeth: [00:22:29] Holy crap.
Adam: [00:22:31] They put me on a cabinet worth of medication for life.
Elizabeth: [00:22:36] What was your first reaction to this long list?
Adam: [00:22:39] Oh, I was devastated because I was a walking cliche of rehab. I walked in high and I believe that my whole plan was to get 28 days without using get a hand on shit and go home and use again. I had plans with dealers for when I got out and now I was being told like, man, drugs are the least of your problems. If I wasn't willing to change everything about the way that I move through the world, I was going to be guaranteed five more years. I had a conversation with my dad, and he said, You know what? Let's say you do have these things. You learned from Rip Esselstyn that a lot of these conditions are completely reversible. You also learned how to reverse them. So Adam there's something about your life that's difficult and you don't like it and you can do something about it, that's not a problem. Also, if there's something about your life that's difficult that you don't like and you can't do anything about it, it's also not a problem because that's just the way things are. In that moment, I realized I was going to be the solution to everything that was going on in my life. I wasn't able to change my diet in rehab. But I moved into a sober living facility after 37 days, and that's where I decided to adopt a plant based diet, which is really there's a funny story because I checked in and the house was stocked with food that looked like it had been picked by teenagers watching nothing but Nickelodeon commercials from the nineties. It was a joke, but I also knew that the food was there because the residents got to write down what they wanted. So I walked up to the house manager, whose last name is Hamburger, and asked him to buy me plant based food. So what I like to tell people is that my journey towards veganism started with a hamburger.
Elizabeth: [00:24:26] That's certainly true. But did you know? Because all you'd ever really eaten was fast food for years, right. But did you know, like so many people when they go vegan are like I don't know. I don't know what to do. I don't know what to buy. I don't know about vegetables.
Adam: [00:24:40] So it's interesting because like you say, I was eating nothing but fast food. So the only grains I ate were the occasional piece of iceberg lettuce. They didn't take off my burger at McDonald's. So and then I had these seven days at the retreat. So I was like, I remember what they fed me there. I'm just going to ask for that. I asked for oatmeal. I asked for black beans, broccoli, fruit and ginger and this oil free pasta sauce and brown rice. So he got me that. I can remember getting up in the morning and walking to the kitchen and I would open up the pantry and there would be two options standing staring me in the face. One was the oatmeal that I asked for, and I didn't dislike oatmeal, but it wasn't like the greatest thing in the world. Next to it was Fruity Pebbles and Fruity Pebbles is my favorite cereal of all time. I remember telling myself that what I was going to do was get up and I wanted to create a positive relationship with eating this way because I was just like, You know what? The science of this makes sense, right? So I'm just going to trust it. I'm going to do this for seven days. My A1C, when I got diagnosed with diabetes, was a 12. Anything over 6.4 is type two diabetic. So my fasting blood glucose in the morning when I first started this diet was 390. In a week. It was 150.
Elizabeth: [00:25:56] Unbelievable. Wow.
Adam: [00:25:57] That was really the only biometric I was tracking. I wasn't weighing myself. I wasn't doing blood pressure. I was just doing my blood glucose because I was on 2000 milligrams of metformin, which is an oral medication for diabetes. In three months, I completely reversed my diabetes, my heart disease and my erectile dysfunction. I can remember leaving the doctor's office, my endocrinologist, after month four, when we got my test results back because I did 37 days in rehab and then three months in sober living. So it had been four months. He looks at his chart and he goes, you know, Adam, according to your new A1C test, which is the test that determines whether you're diabetic or not, you're no longer diabetic. I looked at him. I shook his hand and I said, Well, then, according to your charts, I no longer need your services. I stood up, I walked out, and I felt this amazing amount of self worth. Within one year I had lost over 150 pounds. I was off of every single medication I was put on in rehab, including the antidepressants, the mood stabilizers, the sleeping medications, the anxiety medications, and the ADHD medication.
Elizabeth: [00:27:05] That is absolutely unbelievable. That's incredible.
Adam: [00:27:09] It's been you know, I've lost about 180 pounds total. But it's not about weight loss. I mean, you know, weight loss is fun. People like to hear the numbers. They like to hear about getting off the medications and everything. But like I said, I wasn't trying to remove negative things from my life. I was trying to gain these meaningful connections to myself, to the planet, to the world. For the first time, I went through the meat section. I had gone through the meat section before, I was just disgusted by the idea of eating it. But I think it was month three when I went through the meat section and I was emotionally upset by it, where I saw them as living sentient beings that were disposed of and used and and harmed and tortured. I said, you know, what a gift this experience is. Because that must be how I always felt about animals and I'm just remembering it for the first time. People talk about this awakening experience that happens when they go vegan, like they have this new view on the world where they're like, Oh, I feel so connected to animals. It's not new. That's how you felt before someone told you differently and you believed it. I told myself, you know what? What an amazing thing it is to be meaningfully connected to all living things. What a gift it would be if I could do the same thing for myself. Veganism has profoundly strengthened my recovery because I see myself as a part of all of it. It's why when I look an animal in the eye, when I am at the pig vigil in Berne in California, and that first truck pulls up and the pigs come up in the truck and the smell is horrible, the heat is unbearable, the sounds and that's tough.
Elizabeth: [00:29:00] Their eyes, though, it's the eyes that.
Adam: [00:29:02] Exactly nothing will hit you harder than the pig that first looks you in the eye and you immediately recognize how sentient they are. Then you also know that there's nothing you can do for that pig but show it love and compassion. The single and maybe the last act of love they will ever receive from a human. You can look them in the eye and you can say to them, I'm sorry. I'm doing everything I can and I'm never going to stop fighting. It's that experience of being so connected to another animal on this planet that it's just like if you aren't an activist and you go to a vigil, you'll become one. If you are an activist and you show up, they're just going to want to do more. If we can show people the beautiful abundance that comes from accepting that these animals are worthy of love and life in the same way that we are in that in fact, not only is it better for them, it's better for us. We can have greater health, we can have greater abundance in the way that we move through the world. It's better for our planet. We're going to have much more abundance and resources, water, all these things that are becoming commodities and scarcity again, we can have more of it. People connect to that.
Elizabeth: [00:30:12] That's also when change is real and lasting, when it comes from how you feel, you know, not from being yelled at and oh, maybe I shouldn't do something this way. That's the kind of stuff that lasts a week or 30 days.
Adam: [00:30:25] I went to ten months of sober living with people where we all did essentially the same recovery programs, meetings, therapy, all that. I was the only person who ate a plant based diet and at the end of those ten months, I was healthier than I've ever been in my life. I was off of every single medication I've been put on. Most of the other people that I went through recovery with had gained weight were either on the same amount of medications but higher dosages or on more medications than when they started. This is interesting. What does the research say? Well, there's actually never been any controlled trial ever done investigating the effects of any diet on early addiction recovery outcomes. I thought that was absurd. The fact that it's never been investigated is ridiculous. So I founded a non-profit called Plant based for Positive Change, and in January of this year, we launched the very first controlled trial investigating the effects of nutrition on early addiction recovery outcomes. The treatment diet is a plant based diet. The control diet is the diet that they serve in the treatment center here in Austin, which is essentially an elevated Western diet. They've removed a lot of the processed foods, but it's still meat, eggs, dairy and oil.
Elizabeth: [00:31:34] It's kind of what they serve pretty much across the board in rehab?
Adam: [00:31:38] Exactly. So what we're investigating is how do the two different dietary protocols affect the gut microbiome? The gut microbiome consists of 4 to 6 pounds of bacteria that live in your gut. This bacteria perform things for your body that your body cannot do for itself. One of the main things is the creation of short chain fatty acids that do a lot of amazing things, not just for your gut health, but for your brain health. Right? 90% of your serotonin and half of your dopamine originates from your gut. Your gut health is directly correlated to your emotional and psychological health. So we're looking at changes to the gut microbiome. We're looking at changes in full biomarkers, blood biomarkers, your lipid panel, high sensitivity, C-reactive protein, omega three fatty acids. We're looking at how those changes relate to changes and validated scales of measuring emotional health outcomes, anxiety, depression, self-compassion, resiliency, spiritual healing and eating disorders. We have an absolutely incredible team. The lead investigator is an amazing woman named Tara Kemp. The physicians on the study are Doctors, Dean and Aisha Sherzai, who are the plant based neuroscientists who wrote the book called The Alzheimer Solution. They are the world's leading neuroscientists on cognitive longevity. So we've been running the study now for six months.
Elizabeth: [00:32:59] So it's early days.
Adam: [00:33:01] It's early days. I can't give you specific details, but what I can say is that so far in every single category, the plant based diet is doing better.
Elizabeth: [00:33:12] Wow. I'm not surprised, but. wow. I mean, I'm not surprised for a lot of reasons, but just all the health and everything else that goes with a plant based diet, but also when you're more connected and when you're much more conscious and aware about what you're eating, it changes you. That's a really ridiculous way to put it, but it does. I see it with people who go vegan.
Adam: [00:33:39] You’re absolutely right and the other thing about it is that it's the reconnection to the world around you. Right. To have this understanding that what you eat not only has a profound impact on yourself, but that you can have a profound impact on the world around you. One of the most important things about addiction, recovery, or any kind of mental health recovery is to remember that, it is to be reminded that you are an integral part of it all.
Elizabeth: [00:34:02] Yeah.
Adam: [00:34:03] Yeah.
Elizabeth: [00:34:04] That's powerful. It's like I said, that's where real change is, like that full spiritual change as a human being where you do come back to yourself, you come back to, like you say, who you're supposed to be. I have a really close friend who in her late thirties got diagnosed with bipolar one psychotic episodes and never had a diagnosis before that. She was literally so dark, in such a dark place. The first thing I said to her was, you have to stop saying I'm bipolar, like you have bipolar. It's a totally different story and just that is it's such an enormous shift in, oh, it's like something now that's not me, but it's so rare that people use that language.
Adam: [00:34:56] It's very rare. I don't dislike the medical establishment. It's not that I hate everything they do, but it's very hard to convince people that everything has to be medicated. If it's not a broken part of your machinery. Right.
Elizabeth: [00:35:16] Yeah. From childhood. Then they just build story after story into it.
Adam: [00:35:21] Absolutely. The same thing that's why veganism is such a difficult message. I mean, I talk about my brother a lot because I'm just so proud of him. He talks about no social movement in the history of the world has ever faced greater odds than the vegan movement. 99% of the planet is not vegan. But here's the interesting thing, no social movement in history has ever faced greater odds. But I don't know of any two questions that I could ask the entire population of the planet, and I would say 99% of them would agree. That is these questions. If you could stop an animal from suffering, would you? 99% of the planet would say yes. If I asked them, do you care about the planet? If you could, would you save it? 99% of them would say yes. So this idea that 99% of the planet is in opposition to it. What are we asking here? It's not me. I'm not veganism. Right? I just live in accordance with its values because they're my own. They're human.
Elizabeth: [00:36:25] Hey, so where can people find you? Learn more about you and also follow the study. It's called the Infinite Study.
Adam: [00:36:34] That's right. It's called the Infinite Study. So you can follow it at my website, PlantBasedForPositiveChange.org. We're very early in the study right now. We're going to be producing some video updates on it that we'll post to my website. We'll also post my Instagram. My Instagram is, @plantbasedaddict. I also have a Facebook page by the same name.
Elizabeth: [00:36:55] Adam, thank you so much for doing this. It was such a pleasure to have you here and to hear your story.
Adam: [00:37:01] Thank you. I really appreciate it.
Elizabeth: [00:37:14] We will have links to Adam and his work on our website as well, its SpeciesUnite.com. We're on Facebook and Instagram, @SpeciesUnite. If you have a minute and you could do us a favor, please rate and review the podcast, wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps people find the show. If you'd like to support the podcast, which we greatly appreciate, we are on Patreon. Its patron.com/SpeciesUnite. Thank you for listening. I would like to thank everyone at Species Unite, including Gary Knudson, Natalie Martin, Caitlin Pierce, Amy Jones, Paul Healey and Anna Connor, who wrote and performed today's music. Thanks again. Have a wonderful day.
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