Participants’ health is assessed at baseline on their regular diets, and then they’re switched to a therapeutic diet. In an effort to make sure any health changes participants experience on the new diet aren’t merely a coincidence, they are then switched back to their regular diet to see if the changes disappear. This kind of rigorous study design improves the validity of the results, but the problem, Dr. Barnard related, is that sometimes people improve too much. After a few weeks on a plant-based diet, sometimes people feel so much better that they refuse to go back on their baseline
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