Education Quote by Neal Barnard

There is a quiet flex hidden in Barnard's self-portrait of delayed enlightenment: he frames dietary change as a clinician-in-training’s evolution from a common-sense tweak (drop meat) to a more sweeping conversion (reject dairy and eggs). The sentence is built to reassure and recruit. By admitting he was "a bit slow", Barnard positions himself as relatable rather than doctrinaire; he’s not scolding the reader from a pedestal, he’s inviting them to follow his arc. That modesty is strategic. It lowers defenses in a culture where food choices are bound up with identity, tradition, and perceived virtue.

The real payload is the reclassification of "dairy products and eggs" from wholesome staples to suspicious actors. Calling them "not health foods either" is a rhetorical judo move: it treats the verdict as self-evident, as if the only obstacle is noticing what’s already true. That "either" matters. It implies a logical chain: if meat is out for health reasons, the remaining animal-derived items are simply the next dominoes. The subtext is that partial reform is a kind of complacency, a halfway ethics and halfway science.

The context is Barnard’s long-running project of translating a plant-based agenda into medical authority. By anchoring the decision in "medical school", he borrows credibility from institutional medicine while also hinting that standard medical training didn’t deliver the whole story. It’s a gentle indictment: the future doctor had to learn, unlearn, then learn again.