The recent RCT that studied the Effects of a Healthy Vegan vs. Healthy Omnivorous Diet in Identical Twins received extensive media coverage when published in JAMA Network Open in November 2023 and then received even more extensive coverage when it was featured in the Netflix docuseries "You Are What You Eat" released in January 2024. The coverage included both praise and criticism, as would be expected from any nutrition study, but particularly one reporting the benefits of a plant-based diet. Stanford Professor of Medicine Christopher Gardner will apply a unique balance of humor and evidence-based medicine to discuss the opportunities and challenges of designing scientific studies on the topic of plant-based diets and effectively disseminating their results.

This event is part of the Humane & Sustainable Food Lab at Stanford's ongoing Seminar Series. Please visit https://www.foodlabstanford.com/seminar if you wish to sign up for the mailing list.

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Most of Dr. Gardner's 30 years of research at Stanford has been focused on investigating the potential health benefits of various dietary components or food patterns using randomized controlled trials. The interventions have involved vegetarian diets, soy, garlic, omega-3 fats/fish oil/flax oil, antioxidants, Ginkgo biloba, and popular weight loss diets. These trials have studied outcomes that include weight, blood lipids and lipoproteins, inflammatory markers, glucose, insulin, and body composition. Most of these trials have been NIH-funded. Until recently (see below), the most impactful of these was an NIH-funded weight loss diet study - DIETFITS (Diet Intervention Examining The Factors Interacting with Treatment Success) that involved randomizing 609 generally healthy, overweight/obese adults for one year to either Healthy Low-Fat or Healthy Low-Carb diet (JAMA, 2018).

In the past decade, the interests of Gardner's research group have shifted to include three additional areas of inquiry. One of these is Stealth Nutrition. The central hypothesis driving this is that in order for more effective and impactful dietary improvements to be realized, health professionals need to consider adding non-health related approaches to their toolbox of strategies. Examples would be connections between food and 1) global warming and climate change, 2) animal rights and welfare, and 3) human labor abuses (e.g., slaughterhouses). An example is a summer Food and Farm Camp run in collaboration with the Santa Clara Unified School District since 2011. Every year ~125 kids 5-14 years of age come for a 1-week summer camp to tend, harvest, chop, cook, and eat vegetables...and play because it is summer camp! The objective is to study the factors influencing the behaviors and preferences that lead to maximizing vegetable consumption in kids.

A second area of interest and inquiry is institutional food. Universities, worksites, hospitals, and schools order and serve a lot of food, every day. If the choices offered are healthier, the consumption behaviors will be healthier. A key factor to success in institutional food is to make the food options "unapologetically delicious" a term he borrows from Greg Drescher, a colleague and friend at the Culinary Institute of America (the other CIA). Chefs in institutional food settings can be part of the solution to improving eating behaviors. In 2015 Gardner helped to initiate a Stanford-CIA collaboration that now involves ~70 universities that have agreed to use their dining halls as living laboratories to study ways to maximize the synergy of taste, health and environmental sustainability. If universities, worksites, hospitals and schools change the foods they order and serve, that kind of institutional demand can change agricultural practices - a systems-level approach to achieving healthier dietary behaviors.

The third area is diet and the microbiome. His lab partnered with the world renowned lab of Drs. Justin and Erica Sonnenburg at Stanford to conduct multiple human nutrition intervention studies. The most impactful of these studies was the Fe-Fi-Fo study (Fermented and Fiber-rich Foods) study published in Cell in 2021. In that 10-week intervention, study participants consuming more fermented foods increased their microbial diversity and decreased blood levels of ~20 inflammatory markers. Their Maternal and Offspring Microbiome Study (MOMS) examined the transfer of the maternal microbiome to the infant among 132 pregnant women randomized to increase fiber, or fermented food, or both, or neither for their 2nd and 3rd trimester; the infants were tracked for 18 months.

In January 2024, Netflix released a documentary TV series which chronicles portions of the experiences of four pairs of identical twins who participated in an eight week study run by Dr. Gardner which compared the impacts of a vegan diet with an omnivore diet. The full study included a total of 22 pairs of identical twins and randomized one twin from each pair to either a vegan or omnivore diet. Allowing his research to be featured in the series, titled You Are What You Eat, has been one of the most impactful choices he's made. (See https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2024/01/qa-christopher-gardner-featured-netflixs-eat for more details.)

Dr. Gardner's long-term vision in this area is to help create a world-class Stanford Food Systems Initiative and build on the idea that Stanford is uniquely positioned geographically, culturally, and academically, to address national and global crises in the areas of obesity and diabetes that are directly related to our broken food systems.