Neal Barnard Is Born

Neal Barnard was born in Fargo, North Dakota, and trained as a physician at George Washington University. In 1985 he founded the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, an advocacy group that put diet and prevention at the center of a profession that mostly reached for the prescription pad. Barnard went on to lead a National Institutes of Health funded trial testing whether a low-fat vegan diet could improve blood sugar control in type 2 diabetes, and by 2019 had written twenty books making the case for plant-based eating. Not everyone bought it. Other nutrition researchers have called some of his claims overstated, and that argument is part of his record too.