#31: Tobias Schmidt Hansen – Optimize Your Health with a Plant-Based Diet

Listen to it on your favorite podcast provider: 

 More and more people are getting into a plant-based diet so I found an expert on the field to interview 🙂 Tobias Schmidt Hansen is a medical doctor and co-author of the book “THE PLANT-BASED DIET“. The book guides you through why a plant-based diet is good for you and how to live a plant-based life. Tobias shares some of the highlights from the book in this interview. 

“We tend to make the diet very complicated. But if you just follow these two basic rules, you’ll be well off. Like your risk of getting most of the lifestyle diseases that we see are extremely common today.” 

– Tobias Schmidt Hansen

 During our discussion, you’ll discover:

Why did Dr. Hansen start his journey to become a medical doctor [00:56] 

• Tobias had experienced brain inflammation encephalitis when he was quite a young age; that’s why he decided to study and quickly learn ways how to change his life through eating right. He started eating a whole food plant-based diet without even having a piece of knowledge, by just applying trial and error. The illness got him interested in health and made him study all sorts of alternative therapies. He tells how medicine changed his outlook on health and wellness as he started his journey of studying medicine 

Lifestyle affects your health, be considerate to your body, and contemplate a healthy based diet.  [7:36]

• It’s was not easy to teach and tell people all he had learned in medical school in just 15 minutes, and that made him decide to write a book about the plant-based diet. 
• By writing ” THE PLANT-BASED DIET,” he has helped so many people changing their lives.

 Choose what you eat. You don’t know how that affects you. [13:45]

• “People don’t have any idea to a healthy diet if they only follow two basic rules on a healthy diet it can almost eliminate the risk of diseases.” as Tobias explained
•  “Each gram of processed meat you eat increase your risk of type two diabetes increases by 1%. Avoid processed meat.”. He advises minimizing animal fat and all inflammatory food. There are some examples he provided in replacement of meat as you go by this podcast

The plant-based diet is good for people with heart disease [19:59]

• “Plant-based design is the only diet ever that has been shown to reverse atherosclerosis, which is a root cause of heart disease.”, he explains. 
• And most people think that by eating a plant-based diet, “You will not get the protein that you need in your body, which is wrong.”, as Dr. Hansen clarifies.
• “If you are eating plant-based, you will get the protein you need.”, he assured. But what are the examples of plant-based food we can get proteins from? As he proposed, we could eat beans, lentils, and even broccoli or rice as these have many protein ingredients in them.  As you go by this podcast he will also enumerate the importance of Vitamin B12 and Vitamin D in your body.

FINAL RECOMMENDATIONS FROM DR. TOBIAS SCHMIDT HANSEN: 

1. It’s never too late to change your diet
2. Look to the science, not to newspapers, but actually, find sources where there’s complete transparency to where the literature is.
3. Eat more plant-based.

RESOURCES MENTIONED:

• How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease by Michael Greger: https://www.amazon.com/How-Not-Die-Discover-Scientifically/dp/1250066115 
• NutritionFacts.Org: https://nutritionfacts.org/ 
• The Plant-Based Diet by Maria Felding  and Tobias Schmidt Hansen: https://www.goodreads.com/da/book/show/34888165-den-plantebaserede-kost 

CONNECT WITH TOBIAS SCHMIDT HANSEN

• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tobias.hansen1