Talking With Joel Fuhrman; Family physician & NY Times best-selling author

Today I am talking with Joel Fuhrman. Joel Fuhrman, M.D. is a board-certified family physician, seven-time New York Times best-selling author and internationally recognized expert on nutrition and natural healing. In addition to his medical practice in New Jersey, Dr. Fuhrman operates the Eat To Live Retreat in San Diego. He  is the president of the Nutritional Research Foundation and is on the faculty of Northern Arizona University, Health Sciences division. Dr. Fuhrman’s five PBS specials have raised more than $50 million for public broadcasting.

 

This series features conversations I conducted with individuals who have dedicated their work and lives to Vegan research, businesses, art, and society. This podcast series is hosted by Patricia Kathleen and Wilde Agency Media.

TRANSCRIPTION

*Please note, this is an automated transcription please excuse any typos or errors

[00:00:00] In this episode, I speak with family physician and seven time New York Times best selling author Dr. Joel Fuhrman, arguably considered a founder in contemporary Vegan dietary science. Key points addressed were Dr. Fuhrman's core tenants behind his most recent book, Eat for Life. We also discussed his world famous retreat, Eat to Live, and how his axiomatic principles are both applied and proven through clients that participate. We wrap the hour up with listener questions regarding Dr. Fuhrman's recommendations and opinions on common and obscure inquiries. Stay tuned for my informative talk with Dr. Joel Fuhrman.

 

[00:00:44] My name is Patricia Kathleen, and this series features interviews and conversations I conduct with experts from food and fashion to tech and agriculture, from medicine and science to health and humanitarian arenas. The dialog captured here is part of our ongoing effort to host transparent and honest rhetoric. For those of you who, like myself, find great value in hearing the expertize and opinions of individuals who have dedicated their work and lives to their ideals. If you're enjoying these podcasts, be sure to check out our subsequent series that dove deep into specific areas such as founders and entrepreneurs. Fasting and roundtable topics they can be found on our Web site, Patricia Kathleen .com, where you can also join our newsletter. You can also subscribe to all of our series on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, Pod Bean and YouTube. Thanks for listening. Now let's start the conversation.

 

[00:01:42] Hi, everyone, and welcome back. I'm your host, Patricia. And today I am ecstatic to be sitting down with Dr. Joel Fuhrman.

 

[00:01:48] Dr. Fuhrman is a family physician and a New York Times best selling author seven times over. You can find out more about everything we talk about, as well as all of Dr. Fuhrman's work on his Web site, W WW. Dr. Fuhrman dot com. That is d r f u h r m a n dot com. Welcome, Dr. Fuhrman.

 

[00:02:08] Thank you. Excited to be here and talk to you.

 

[00:02:10] I'm excited, too, as well. It's a hard road because of your prolific work history.

 

[00:02:17] But I'm going to endeavor to both introduce anybody who hasn't had these splendid opportunity to look at your work and some of the different areas of your career, as well as kind of get into more areas that I feel haven't been explored recently with you. For those of you that are avid fans, for everyone listening. I will offer a brief bio on Dr. Fuhrman before I begin peppering him with questions. But prior to that, a roadmap for today's podcast, just so that you can follow along and see where are Trajector of inquiry is going. We will first look at Dr. Fuhrman's personal history as as it pertains to his wealth of knowledge in whole plant food based Vegan diet and how some of those key terms pertain to him. And then we'll look at unpacking key terms that he has used throughout his career, such as new territory and diet and things of that nature. I will look at things like gee bonds and other things. A lot of you are familiar with him, kind of flesh out some of the areas that he has come to have kind of included in his arsenal of biblical proportion. We'll also look at his eat to live retreat based out of San Diego, California. And then I will look at unpacking a few of his most recent books to kind of garner a sense of where he is headed, as well as look back on a few that have current latter day incredible significance with the covered pandemic. I will also include rapid fire questions that a lot of our audience has written in debt. We were asking us to ask Dr. Fuhrman and then we'll wrap everything up with advice. But before we get to that, a short bio as promised. Joel Fuhrman, M.D., is a board certified family physician, seven time New York Times best selling author and internationally recognized expert on nutrition and natural healing.

 

[00:04:07] In addition to his medical practice in New Jersey, Dr. Fuhrman operates the Eat to Live retreat in San Diego. He is the president of the Nutritional Research Foundation and is on the faculty of Northern Arizona University Health Sciences Division. Dr. Fuhrman, Fuhrman's five PBS specials have raised more than 50 million for public broadcasting. And Dr. Freeman, I know that is a very condensed boil down and maybe even a little outdated biol, which I can allow you to correct right now before we jump into your background.

 

[00:04:44] No, we couldn't. I don't have to. You've got it all OK. OK. It's good enough.

 

[00:04:50] I'm curious. Can you, for anyone who hasn't read any of your literature or know anything about your background, can you kind of describe post medical school, your your entrance into the way and your empire is right now?

 

[00:05:05] Good plant based environment that you came to develop and understand at your own personal story.

 

[00:05:12] Well, to understand my personal story, I was a world class figure skater. It was third in the world in her skating with my younger sister, the nine early 1970s when I was work after I got hurt for I was on crutches for a while.

 

[00:05:26] Mr. 76 Olympics because of an injury. I went into my family's business and I decided after working a few years that what I would my real passion was nutrition and food and natural healing. So I decided to then go back as an adult at the age of 28. I went back to get the postgraduate premedical courses at Columbia because I had graduated from college in nineteen seventy three to graduate 74 as a as a business, as kind of business major in political science major. And in other words, I didn't have the courses to go to medical school. I had to go back to school again to get the specific medical requirements to go back to medical school at the age of 30 to pursue my passion, which was a medical career based on nutritional science. So I didn't I wasn't a conventional physician and then decided to adopt this way of thinking and living. I first adopted this way of thinking and living and and realized its incredible impact it would have on people's ability to reverse disease and get well when we cover their health and I pursue to get an education, a medical degree to pursue my dream and passion of mine. So I've been in practice now for more than three decades, and I I've got tremendous self-satisfaction and personally ward from being able to take people who are very sickly from what are considered chronic, irreversible conditions, everything from asthma for myalgia, migraines, lupus, psoriasis, heart disease, diabetes, and give people the type of information and dietary and nutritional protocols so they can enable complete recoveries and get well again. So my so I developed my scientific and nutritional niche to design diet styles, to maximize human longevity and and tell people that we can win the war on cancer right now. We don't have to have cancer. We don't have to have heart disease. We don't have to get demented. And we can live a long life to which we. Ninety five in 105 years old, we can push the envelope of human longevity, close to 100 years old for the vast majority of people without getting physical and mental frailty and disability. That said, what? So my niche has been to describe to people what is ideal, not to water it down, to make it more acceptable to the masses and more people would like it. My niche was designed for those people who want to know what's best so they can live the longest and use what's best therapeutically to as a therapeutic modality to reverse disease. With that being said, we found over the years that doing what's best can be made to be delicious and can be something you enjoy doing and give you tremendous emotional satisfaction with eating. And it becomes there's no extra enjoyment or living experience that you miss when you eat such a healthy diet. So I kind of just try to dispel the myth that, oh, I'd rather shoot myself and die right now. I'd rather be dead than have to eat that way because I want to enjoy my life more, eat whatever I want, and that's just not true. The more you eat high sugar and highly sweetened and fried foods and more heavily seasoned food salt, it was more dense. Your taste buds, I mean, you get in better health, you enhance your taste. And our and our dietary and recipe repertoire is fantastic. So we actually can show people even have incredibly gourmet tasting food and still not have to worry about getting diseases that afflict other Americans.

 

[00:09:01] Yeah, I find when I speak to Vegan athletes, you coming from this figure skating background and then going to medical school to prove theories that you had already built yourself is unique beyond comparison. However, I'm wondering. Well, with that, I, I find when I speak to Vegan athletes that they have a relationship about healing, natural or let's say more common ailments. You know, muscles that have been stretched too harder, worked you profoundly. And this relationship with food being a fuel and and things like that, that is is beyond what a lot of even chefs that, you know, get into plant based things have. Do you feel like that was the beginning of when you were a figure skater? Do you feel like your relationship with your food and what it was doing to this extreme in a sport that that was the impetus for you beginning your query?

 

[00:09:55] Probably not. OK. It was after that.

 

[00:09:59] What it was. It was parallel to that. It was more the observation of what nutrition can do. I mean, I was involved. My father was overweight and sickly and I was involved in a in and that I learned through the natural hygiene movement and seeing people that were seriously, you know, recover their health to that form of nutrition. And then so I learned about that in subsequent years, obviously refined and took away the myths and and see the problems with some of their tenants. But nevertheless, it was seeing the early people in the field of nutrition being able to get people well, again, from serious illnesses. And how powerful it was and how it never made sense to me that taking drugs, which were poisonous. And, of course, allergenic that putting more drugs in people to give them the ability to continue to hurt themselves with the toxic diet that was nutritionally deficient is going to be the way you get good health. You can't get good health by access to more medical care. Sick with medical care means more drugs, which are poisonous. And don't take away the cause. It just it just inherently made sense to me. When I did the reading of these early pioneers in the history of the nutritional and health movement, the reading by the pioneers made more sense than the reading by the medical. By way of conventional people were thinking. And I kind of put it together and then developed my own way of my own, you know, formulas and my own dietary portfolios to even make it more efficacious.

 

[00:11:24] Yeah.

 

[00:11:25] I'm wondering if you can kind of unpack when the New Cherian diet, first of all, of you would be so kind as to kind of briefly describe or define what that means to you and what you would like your audience to know about it.

 

[00:11:38] And then also tell us about when it was born in in your head.

 

[00:11:46] The word new territory. It defines a diet style that's designed to be could be nutrient rich and also contain all the nutrients humans need to maximize their health. It's another word for a super healthy diet. You know, the word nutrient harriman's nutrient rich, super healthy, designed for human longevity in human health.

 

[00:12:06] There's no other word that I really that encompasses that of a vegan diet doesn't make it healthy. It's Vegan. It doesn't even make it healthy if its whole food vegan, whole food plant based, doesn't even make it healthy. And a diet doesn't even have to be a hundred percent plant based to make Slainte to be neutral barium. So I think the meaning of the word neutral Tarion means we're doing all the right elements. So the most critically important, for example, eating a diet that's rich in green vegetables, whether you read a little bit of animal products or you're a vegan. If your diet is not rich and green vegetables, it's impossible to be healthy. The human body's immune system is dependent on the ability to fight cancer. And the intro to transcription proteins, the body of cells to repair and heal itself is all dependent on exposure to certain foods like onions, green vegetables and mushrooms. Without exposure to those foods, you can't have superior health. What I'm saying right now is that the blue zones around the world identify populations that might live healthier and longer than Americans, but they're not ideal. They usually encompass one or two ideal factors accounting for the benefits of longevity. Well, if we isolate all the science involved and all the studies, the thousands and thousands of studies we've available today, we can do much better in the blue zones can do.

 

[00:13:17] And a neutral Tarion diet in that word describes putting a diet style together with a full portfolio of dietary benefits that a dietary excellence can afford people and let them understand the science that supports it so they can choose to do it. Yes or no, but at least they know that you have a pinnacle of nutritional excellence here with a tremendous amount of irrefutable science that's supporting it. And of course, we're talking here about a diet that's one nutrient rich has a high nutrient bang per caloric block. Number two, it's hormonally favorable. That means we're not going to have we're not we're not eating foods that are high twice, C-MAC, or too much animal protein that could raise IGF one or other assets in the body or other things that could promote death and numbers. And obviously, we're avoiding toxins and other things that are that are potentially damaging chemicals. And, of course, you know, number four, of course, we're trying to be nutritionally complete and not miss any nutritional elements that could benefit or extend human lifespan to include in a diet that's largely plant based or predominant.

 

[00:14:24] I don't use that word plant based much because the word based means more than 50 percent. And with scientists around the world, it has all different meanings. If it's if you're if you're taking a math based course, then it's like 50, 60 percent math and it's not definitive enough. But as some people use plant based, I mean, Vegan another think it means a plant based amines. The American diet is already 70 percent of calories from plants and 30 percent of bugs.

 

[00:14:48] So it's too vague, I think. So I'm trying to be more specific. And we're talking here about it. In any case, I'm also using the conservative use of certain supplementation to make sure like a V as you approach a vegan diet, your diet may not have ideal levels of beach. Well, that may not have ideal levels of DHEA. It may not have ideal levels of zinc. It may not avoid waves of iodine or K2. So we're trying to be very cautious and conservative to make sure we're not giving a person a certain diet that could be causing them a problem later on in life to the long term nutritional deficiencies. So this being cognizant of all the potential downfalls of traditional Vegan advocates.

 

[00:15:31] Yeah, and we've actually had a large part of, you know, some of the interesting rhetoric that's been brought up across industries in this podcast series, which is based on looking at all of Vegan life.

 

[00:15:43] So not just the diet and health, you know, are the food that people normally attached to it, but all of it. The sustainability, the responsibility, all of those things. And one of the biggest fears right now is plant based versus Vegan. And what does two terms mean? And interestingly, my international guests have come on and spoken to us really feel that a plant based term is being adopted criminally by marketing industries and no longer means anything attached to health, but that it's trying to like being fortified with vitamin D was in the 80s and 90s, you know, and all of these things. So it's good that you clarified that for everyone listening and wondering, you you see a lot of your works, your books, anybody who's familiar with you, even when you give your your talks, you you have a very your main point is utility. So you have this incredible scientific work that's constantly evolving that you're keeping up to date, that you're educating people about. But then you also provide platforms and it's kind of your life's work to be able to have people take this infinitely. That's backed by studies and things being done and then put it into utility. And you do that a lot with acronyms and little tidbits that people can kind of latch onto and remember. And one of my favorites is G bombs. And I was hoping that you if you could tell us what that acronym is and why it's kind of this paramount piece of of your platform.

 

[00:17:08] Absolutely, and I do think it's a paramount piece because I was sitting there thinking about what are the five or six most important foods that people need to include in their diet on a regular basis or category of foods that have the most scientific documentation to show protection against cancer. Putting together this anticancer lifestyle style and gee bombs it in, it was a start without an acronym that was some of the different an acronym first.

 

[00:17:36] It migrated to Jeevana, just had self felt better, but it stands for obviously G then bombs B OMB s stands for greens and beans and onions and mushrooms and berries and seeds. And because there's so much data, so much scientific data, we could throw a dart at any of those foods like seeds and say, well, here's the data on seeds that when people, for example, as a women file a study following women with breast cancer for ten years, should a 71 percent decrease risk of breast cancer related deaths for women who had just a third of a milligram of lignin from seed in their diet. Seeds like flax seeds achieve seeds of sesame seeds. And by the way, a teaspoon of ground flax seeds has seven milligrams. That was for women only a third of a milligram of lignin and may reduce the risk of death by 71 percent. We're saying here that that's just one study. Why could alist, you know, 30 studies on an issue and showing that we come to a position of authority, not from looking at one study, but looking at numerous studies that are not only controlled trials, but also the long term epidemiologic studies. Also the studies with large numbers of people looking at heart endpoints like death. We have certain studies, have long term studies have to corroborate the short term studies before you come to more definitive opinion about something. But the point I'm making right now is that each one of these food categories individually show dramatic protection against cancer and even enhancing lifespan even once you have cancer, preventing recurrence of cancer and enhancing life before people have cancer. When we put together a dietary portfolio that includes this for these four categories, then we've reached a program that that's much more protective than even any of the blue any of the blue zones would be to include all those foods in your regular daily food intake. That means having a big salad every day with something raw cruciferous on top and maybe the dressing instead of made from oil and vinegar. It's made from blended nuts or seeds and vinegar and some more tomato sauce or oranges or so, you know, it's we're designing the whole the recipes to go it in conjunction with maximizing nutritional absorption and content of the meal with maybe a bowl of vegetable bean soup or a piece of fruit for dessert. So what I'm saying is whether we're looking at berries or onions or scallions or what are you looking at? Green vegetables. These foods are critically important. And I should say even necessary for four to have an excellent immune function. The minute you remove one major food category, you're going to not going to have optimal the most optimal immune function protection you could have. So in other words. If you took the green vegetables out of the diet, you couldn't have a healthy diet without green vegetables in it. I always make the joke. I say, if you don't like green vegetables, you better live close to a hospital that's going to help you. But the point is, green vegetables are the food that are linked most closely within you with maximizing human longevity. One study with one hundred one hundred thirty thousand people devoted green vegetable intake into five different quintiles. And the ones with the highest quintile of green vegetable intake are 130000 people that are the ones who really had the longest lifespans by four. Not even close. What's the point I'm making is that it's very useful. You look way as you said, it's very important for people to be able to just access that, to know that I have some beans today, have some green, some onion mushroom in my salad or my soup to have some berries. I have some seeds and nuts today that I have some try to give you full dietary portfolio ones. That's one of my acronyms I've been using for years.

 

[00:21:11] Yeah, I like it. And I think that that is it's key.

 

[00:21:14] I also think introducing concepts that can seem daunting and breaking them down to serve as much utility as your recipes and things like that, you talk a lot about phyto nutrients and that can be an area that I think that for a layperson is it can be a little daunting or confusing, especially when it's kind of thrown around in different ways in the medical community, in the diet community. And sometimes those are nowhere near the same universe which we can get into. But you have common threads again and for. So your most recent book, Eat for Life. Another one I want to get into briefly is super immunity. And that is pretty self-evident for those of you who've read it. And then there's eight to live. And one of my favorites we talked about before we started recording was fast food genocide, how processed food is killing us and what we can do about it. I think both of those. They all go hand-in-hand. They all talk about how phyto nutrients or the lack there of relating back to this idea of cancer disease and how a lot of those things, Paektu, particularly of a lot of rhetoric about Type two diabetes, how it doesn't need to exist. It's about eating your way into health and fighting disease, 70 tenuously, which I think always go hand-in-hand. But I wanted to ask you really quickly if that was a mouthful. Let's get into super immunity because and anyone who's read it and remembers it or has reread it recently, you eat you very. I don't know if it was ominous or what it was, but you kind of predicted in the beginning of that book what you did was you discussed the future potential of a pandemic due to a weakened immune system from a lack of phyto nutrients coupled with, you know, a mutating viruses around the world. But this was back in 2013. And you you're having this constant conversation about the weakening of the immune system due to the American diet and also these transforming. So my question for you right now, just out the gate, is when Kovik, 19, set in. I can't imagine that you were shocked, but what was your initial stance on realizing that that was happening? And you'd written this book seven years ago?

 

[00:23:26] Well, my initial stance was that everybody's panicking and and you know what?

 

[00:23:32] Why didn't they panic years ago or why doesn't the sphere of cancer make them panic? And it because they're eating great cancer. And 75 percent of our population over the age of 70 dies of heart attacks anyway. Why are they worried about that? What did you do? But but here we have something thrown right in their face that can kill them right away.

 

[00:23:48] So my point, of course, is I understand that this is a it could result in a person with weakened immune system immunity and a person eating a standard diet die right away. But so my initial thought was this message has to get out. People have to know they don't have to be a number or statistic, don't have to be intubated in a hospital or a heart lung machine. They don't have to have there. It's happened to them. They could immediately start to eat properly to support normal immune function and make KOVA 19 a harmless experience. This is a a relatively harmless virus to a healthy person. And even young people are unhealthy. And, you know, it's mostly the elderly and sickly anyway. We still have a majority of people in America have a ubiquitously.

 

[00:24:32] People are nutritionally deficient in immunosuppressed. We have a complete immunosuppressed population that is putting themselves at risk of having a simple corona virus, possibly kill them, which is utterly insane. They should be eating. They should be eating normally. So they have a normal immune response and encoded that has no effect on a person. Hardly even makes them sick. This is so ridiculous that people don't embrace nutritional excellence and stop this needless fear.

 

[00:24:59] Absolutely. I want to switch gears really quickly and look at your eat to live retreat, and I am based out of San Diego.

 

[00:25:07] And I was telling you before we started today that you're you're very famous in these parts, as is the retreat.

 

[00:25:13] People who don't know even a lot about, you know, that the literature behind it and things like that, none of the retreat because of its its remerge beauty and people who have gone come back really changed. I was hoping you can kind of unpack what it is because you don't have it's not just a one kind of moment, you know, a retreat based on X amount of time. There is a variation of different cycles or systems that you've had running through there. And I was hoping you'd kind of touch on a few. And prior to obviously the pandemic, I was hoping you kind of describe the retreat and what it's what was originally built for and some of the systems happening within it.

 

[00:25:53] Yes. And we're still in operation, obviously, right now. But in any case, I have to say that even in my early in my career in Flemington, New Jersey, with my medical practice, I used to rent a 10 bedroom house in the center of town.

 

[00:26:07] So people were coming in from different parts of the country, could stay with me and go into the Boesel of my nutritional protocols, staying with me, you know, two weeks, eight weeks, whatever it is, they stayed there so I could be in charge of their care as I put them on special diets to reverse disease. Then as I carried on my next career for the next 20 years, I always had the back of my mind that. You know, some people are such food addicts and their conditions are so serious that they're that they really need to have a safe place where they can have and they really can be forced abstinence from their addictive food triggers and they can be taught how to make showing how to make the food tastes great, how they can retrain their tastebuds to prefer this way of eating, get skilled in and living this way for themselves, and then set home without those addictions and desires to eat junk food.

 

[00:26:56] And just like with cocaine addiction, you can't go away to a healthy treat for a week or two, be eating healthy, drop ten or fifteen pounds and then expect to go home and to be able to do it easily for the rest of your life, especially somebody with treats, feeding you sprouts and know nothing that tastes good enough to live that way. And so it was always my dream to have a place where people in need could come into my care. And it's working out that way because people come with, you know, with rheumatoid arthritis or psoriasis or lupus or asthma or diabetes or out of control, high blood pressure that can't be controlled medications or. And they say, you're under my care. And with such an excellent diet and the way our chefs make it taste great will grow most of the food and our own incredible soil. And we have like the 100 exotic fruit trees, whatever it is. But the point is we feed the most incredibly delicious food. And they see their blood pressure come down and I'm able to wean them off the medication safely and gradually get them off their narcotics, their immunosuppressive drugs, their blood pressure, drugs, diabetic drugs, and whatever it is to have them achieve this degree of nutritional excellence that then leads to a miraculous health transformation and then to gain green the skills that they can do this on their own when they leave. And I love doing it this way and not think of living any other way that they learned it and gotten such benefited. In other words, it takes time for some people to be able to grasp this and apply this. So it really can work in their life, especially if they're in serious condition. Some people can read a book, watch a video comments to some of these podcasts. They can do it great. It can follow the recipes that can change your life for them. And thousands of people have done that and the vast majority of people are going to do this on their own. But I want to be able to reach those people, even those who don't seem to be able to get their act together to do this on their own. I need that extra care and handholding at the beginning. They can come into my retreat. We can help and get started up. And most people it's designed for people to stay two to three months. It's not like a hotel or a you know, or a one of these places come for a week and it's set up for you. You're actually coming into a rental property or you're renting a room for two or three months to live in this environment. You know what it means? Those people are staying here a long time because that's what it takes really to have these miraculous health transformations take place. You just can't do it in a week or two. So I designed it for the people who wanted to put in that long term time here and make a complete health recovery.

 

[00:29:20] And that could be somebody that's obese with my average person is just a person who is significantly overweight and can't control their eating habits. And once they're here for a long time, they don't just lose 50 pounds or more. They learn how to control their eating habits.

 

[00:29:35] And they get not just the physical bit of the physical addiction, but they get the training emotionally and psychological counseling to know all the factors that have caused them to develop those problems with food and food behavior that can really set their life now on a much better direction and a better and a completely different destiny.

 

[00:29:54] Yeah, and that's another core tenet of most of the work that I've read recently of yours. And I really appreciate. I think that it can't be said enough, and I don't think it's digested as quickly as it ought to be.

 

[00:30:04] That food a year at your link between food and addiction and poor food choices and fast food being these addictive agents that are exactly like, you know, illicit drugs and things like that and requiring the same amount of time to recode, you know, the body's biology and teach it to do what it ought to do. And the parallel that you run, like even with the taste buds, you know, where you talk about like we have to strip things away and so that we can start tasting things as they ought to have bad and then no longer wanting the other things. I think it's, um, it's it's a really key issue that everyone who is looking towards health kind of overlook. So, you know, we have been, I would argue, since the 70s trying to get it get out of jail free card and make things faster and easier and better. And I don't think that the human body was built that way. And I'm wondering if you have people or so everyone who wrote into us asking you, there were a lot of requests for, you know, your top three, your quick fix this and that, though your tenant is about this kind of you need to give it the time. There's this 12 weeks that the basis of your retreat, however, to that end.

 

[00:31:14] I do want to ask you about it when you sit down with someone.

 

[00:31:20] Do you have a top three things that you start to kind of break people into? At least looking at having another conversation with themselves about how they're eating, what they're eating, what their relationship with their diet is, do you have those kinds of icebreaker questions that you propose to future clients or anybody at large?

 

[00:31:41] You know, you want you understand that my crew, most of my career has been taken care of, people who have significant medical conditions or significantly overweight, diabetes, heart disease, lupus, psoriasis. They're generally people who are coming to me to get well and they want to have the answers how to get well. And I sit across the table from them and I said, do you do you really want to do this with baby steps and get a little better?

 

[00:32:07] Or do you really want to jump in with both feet to it all the way and get rid of your psoriasis completely, get off your medications, completely become non diabetic, get off your blood pressure medications. Do you want to be totally well, you just want to trick yourself, because what happens is when you get to the baby step approach and you have one foot in both worlds, you still constantly crave those things. You're allowing yourself to have a little bit of number one. And number two, you don't get such great results either because you you have a little bit of oil in your diet or a little bit of fried food. And it's stopped at horsefly policies like a stone. You stop losing weight. You know, you want to drop 20 pounds the first month and fifteen pounds the second one. We want to piddle around with two pounds a month doing it.

 

[00:32:46] Ninety five or 90 percent. And inevitably the person says, No one here, I'm spending this, I'm here to see you and I want you to tell me exactly what to do. And I'll say, great, that's what I want to hear, because I'll tell you something, because you got where you are today because of what you chose to eat, what you feel like eating, what you like to eat, what you think you should be, what you learned you should eat, what you think is best for you to eat. And you should get rid of all that stuff right now and not even think anymore, decide what you want to eat or like to eat. And let me make all those decisions for you and eat just what I tell you to eat. Don't even think about whether you like it or not. Just do it and let's see what kind of results you get and let's see what happens in a few weeks, how much weight you lose, what happens to your blood pressure, your diabetes, how much your pain goes down as you ask improves. Let us let me prove to you that this can completely change your thinking about health and about food. And then I will also prove to you to give me the time that you will like eating this way, the flavor and the taste just as much or more as your old diet. If you grant me the time, those periods of a few months to be in that area where you're not sure which you like better and you'll be missing some of those old foods, you'll be desirous of them. But if you do this, those will lessen with time. You'll desire them less and less, and soon your taste buds will change. You'll start to be craving the foods I'm feeding you right now. So forget about what you think you like or to put yourself into that stress. Just do what's right right now to get totally well. We'll worry about the other stuff later. Do this whether you whether you like it or not right now. And inevitably I show them how I can taste. Great. Well, at the beginning of the first week of an incredible tasting stuff. But I take away that ability that I take away that idea that they should be trying to choose whether this is going to they're going to dislike if don't like it as much, assume you're not going to like it as much the beginning and just do it and get some. Just feel better and you'll see what will happen with time. That's usually what I do. But there's no one formula because different people have different needs. And it's an aunt to do what's best for each person, because sometimes if I'm too hot, too hard with the person, I could turn them off and sometimes be too soft with the person. They're not gonna. That's not gonna be the right way either. You have to really know what a way to know the best way to to handle each particular individual. Most people do better because of the addictive nature of processed foods. Most people do better when you have when you are very clear at the boundaries and you have them jump in with both feet and do everything right at the very beginning. Not everybody, but most people do better that way.

 

[00:35:07] Okay. So I want to kind of get into that just briefly as a tangent.

 

[00:35:11] Well, you know, when I was looking in to the retreat and how it's structured and I couldn't help but notice, first of all, because your own rhetoric, you know, I kin's and poor diet to addiction and things like that, the structure is a great deal, both like for me, the Marine Corps, in the removal of one's personal autonomy in order to build up the stronger engine of, you know, faith and things like that with graduation and also Alcoholics Anonymous rhetoric about, you know, giving this power up to like a greater good and giving their sobriety a chance, then wondering, I don't think that you based it off of either of those. But how did you develop the model that you came up with at the retreat? Was it just out of your own research yielding what what would not work for these very, very sick clients or how is it developed?

 

[00:36:01] Yes, because people are coming here and they want to make sure they're going to safe environment, not tempted by things that they're, you know, like saying we're giving a delicious dessert. They know that that dessert, for example, only has one magical date as a sweetener. It's not has five dates per serving. There's a maximum of one date for sweetening. It's not quite as sweet as a conventional dessert. But after a four week of eating those desserts, they don't want sweeter their taste buds of acclimated to what they love it. But the point I'm making, they're in a safe environment. They're here for a long time. What they want most of all is results. They're not going to spend this amount of time and money and not make sure they get rid of their blood pressure problems with their diabetes, whatever it is, and lose the weight.

 

[00:36:42] They've got to have results, but they don't want to be in discomfort with hunger. They want to still enjoy what they're eating. They want to still have the right type of supportive services, the cooking classes that they want to leave here, making sure they know how to make the food tastes great when they go home. They can not only continue the weight loss, but they continue to have these incredible meals that are so delicious that they're what they're reading over. You know, I have three gourmet chefs that are cooking, doing cooking classes, too. And so they're learning skills, whether you're learning gardening skills and cooking skills. They're learning exercise skills, but they're also learning tremendous amount of skills, psychological skills, mindfulness skills, skills about their personalities. They might come here angry and a food addiction mentality. And the more you're an addict, the more you less of a human who, with your full creativity and capabilities intact, the more addicted you are, the more your primitive brain is driving your behavior. So you no longer can really solve the problems in your life and really do the things you can accomplish. And you're not gonna be as caring or, you know, giving to others or appreciative of the outside world. And you're not when you're narrowly focusing on your addiction to control and your behaviors.

 

[00:37:49] So they learn so much about the nature of addiction, how it's emotionally destroying their life, and how that how those foods have kept them in a prison and how we're not putting them in a prison. We're setting them free. And now they have control to eat everything they want in the framework of good health. But they choose to eat these foods. Now we choose to eat these foods because we enjoy eating them more, because we feel good. And I maintain a great health and they taste great. So we have emotional and psychological satisfaction eating this way in addition to it being good for us. The same time. So the learning process in which they're here, they come out of peer, I have to say, happier, better adjusted and without their you know, and also with more, you know, more satisfaction about who they are as a person. And they so they really feel good about themselves. I think we're a couple. They're not just coming here to wear a diet boot camp. They're also a tremendous amount of the educational process that occurs, whether you.

 

[00:38:46] Yeah. And you mentioned and within that, you talked about your perception of hunger. And I'm kind of an.

 

[00:38:54] Obsessed with some of your rhetoric about this, and I'm hoping that you kind you can expand on it.

 

[00:38:59] You talk about the changing relationship with hunger and the perception of hunger changing as one starts to live with, you know, gee bombs ruling their course and guiding their ships of health and diet. And I'm wondering if you can kind of expand on that and what you mean by that, because I think one's relationship with hunger is at the root of every poor choice in health, you know, and diet that happens. And so can you kind of explain what you mean when you say that and how it changes?

 

[00:39:31] Well, thank you for that. And I think that's one of the legacies I left for the scientific and nutritional community is my excellent explanation and science behind the true nature of hunger and toxic hunger. And I published a study called The Changing Perceptions of Hunger on a high nutrient density diet. I think it was published in 2011 in the medical journal Nutrition Journal. And it's been a journal that's been it's been an article that's been referenced by scientists all over the world and they're discussing hunger and food addiction. So very proud of that, too. I'm also grateful for and proud of the fact that there are hundreds of physicians across this country who have been have modified their practices and changed the philosophy of their care by learning from my books in my practice. So I've been a mentor to many different positions across the country. And at the at the core of this year is that I'm so glad you voiced that, is that it's so difficult for people to control the amount of calories they consume, that they become a calorie consuming monster when their diet is not is not nutritionally adequate.

 

[00:40:38] Because the the more your diet is nutritionally inadequate, the more you build up metabolic waste products and toxic waste products like, you know, like free radicals or advanced glycation end products, YPO fusion, you know, ammonia, urea, whatever it is, you build up more waste products. The body becomes more effective at removing wastes and repairing in the non digesting state.

 

[00:41:06] So the liver is busy absorbing and assimilating and storing calories and changing calories into a form in which they can be stored. When you're eating and digesting. It's when digesting is finished. When the liver takes on this role of taking fat soluble toxins and making them water sibos they can be excreted. The kidney is OK. In other words, with the body becomes more effective, the healing and repairing and the non feeding state. You're not eating food if you see is what you'd spend more time in the non eating state, you live longer. But what I'm saying right now is that when your body is toxic and you're not eating a healthy diet, you can't tolerate the way you feel. You feel you feel too uncomfortable in the non digesting and not eating phase.

 

[00:41:49] So you feel too weak and too fatigued and too shaky and headache and stomach cramping and bubbling. And you just feel all kinds of uncomfortable sensations which you mistakenly think are hunger because eating makes them go away again. And what I'm saying right now, you're forced to overconsume calories just to feel comfortable. And people mistake feeling fatigue. They think fatigue is the need for calories to eat, keep their energy up to eat so they can go exercise. I got to go to the gym. I got to eat to do everything. It's always eating.

 

[00:42:16] And they don't recognize that they're feeling that way because they're not eating. The quality of their diet is nuts. It's not good enough. And they built up too much waste products in their tissues. And that's why they feel so sickly or ill. And they think it's hunger. Because once you adopt a diet that's more in a mesh with what humans needs or it's a diet that's not going to create disease, then those symptoms gradually fade away. And a new perception of hunger takes its place, which is felt in the neck, in the throat or the neck and the upper chest, not in the head of the stomach. So you start to feel hunger as a drawing sensation in your throat, an upper chest. And that's where true hunger lies. And when true hunger directs your desire to eat, then you're instinctually in touch with the right amount of calories. Matter of fact, the precise amount to maintain lean body mass, because I'm claiming that real hunger does not exist to store fat on the body and will never have to eat to maintain fat mass. It's only there to maintain, maintain muscle, utilize skeletal mass. It's not there to maintain fat. In order to become overweight. You had to be eaten outside of the demands of true hunger recreationally or eaten because of talks responding to toxic hunger. So removing toxic hunger, it makes it potentially possible for people to comfortably eat the right amount of calories. And until you do that, it makes it almost impossible for people to maintain their to lose weight and keep it off for the rest of their life.

 

[00:43:45] Yeah, and you mention in fast food genocide as well. I think it was.

 

[00:43:49] And that that fast food and foods like that directly disable the body's ability to even understand hunger anymore and replace it with something completely different, which is so powerful when you view it that way. Everyone says fast food is bad. But I think that book does a really good job attaining it for the true stollen that it is. You know, it's and it's a great thing. I'm wondering, when you get into conversations about it just kind of reaches out to you. We had an inquiry about oil and salt. And this is an area that a lot of health advocates and people get really diversified on.

 

[00:44:26] And you're very clear with it like you are with all of your theories. You don't have this wiggle room.

 

[00:44:30] Gray area, which is nice because it's very concise and easy to understand what you're doing, what you're talking about, where you're coming from, but can you enumerate for everyone listening why your take on oils and I mean actually expressed oils and not healthy fats here, like all avocados or something. But the actual oils being all of them. Why you we strictly eliminate them as well as salt and how that kind of plays into your common perception as to what your advice is.

 

[00:45:01] Certainly, you know, I think probably the biggest scam ever perpetrated on the world's population is convincing them that oil is a health food. It's been the most amazing that people would accept that is as a truth.

 

[00:45:11] I don't think there are many I don't think this is controversial in the sense that if we look among the nutritional science community, my peers who publish nutritional research and I have go to a conference room meeting among scientific peers that that produce wheat nutrition research, I don't think anybody would argue that walnut oil is healthier than a walnut or that avocado oil is healthy within an hour, or that sesame oil is healthier or as healthy as sesame seeds or flaxseed oil is as good as the whole flax seed. I think that universally you're going to find all scientists will have no choice but to agree that the whole food is healthier than a processed food made from that food.

 

[00:45:50] In other words, when you eat the whole seed like a flax seed recently seed, you're getting literally hundreds of beneficial compounds that are removed when you take the oil. But you're also getting the calories absorbed into the bloodstream. One or two calories a minute. You're absorbing the calories over hours. So the body can preferentially burn it for energy as opposed to storing as fat. When you take the sesame oil, the hundred twenty calories a tablespoon or absorb within five minutes and the body can't store, can't burn 120 calories fat over the next 20 minutes, it's gonna have to store it on a start on the body. So it's going to rub up fat storage and it's going to hold my policies or halt the breakdown of fat. When you take an oil, it sets up a biochemical mildew in the body to prevent the loss of fat from the body because you're telling the body's store fat.

 

[00:46:38] Oil is such an unnatural and constant source of concentrated calories that the rush of calories into the bloodstream so rapidly also signal dopamine centers in the brain that signal the addictive center of behavior, the same spot that nicotine or opiates narcotics do or cocaine does.

 

[00:46:57] So oil is an addictive substance. It's an appetite stimulant and it's extremely fattening. Now, people could believe that oil is a health food if they want to. If the whole population wasn't obese. But how does a person justify the use of oil when. Eighty eight percent of our population of a BMI, about twenty three, you know. In other words, you're sitting on and you can work on a computer all day, whereas the excess 500 calories of oil you put on your food gonna go except to your fat stores and fat on the body is pathologic tissue that increases risk of cancer and shortens your lifespan. There's no such thing as a healthy, fat person. And you can't believe you're pouring oil on your food unless you're a professional athlete or physical labor or digging ditches or or having or chopping down trees all day unless you want you. There's no way you got to burn those extra 500 calories, 2000 calories. Will you pour out your food? It's just too fattening. So there's no justification. And I have to insist. I don't even think there's a controversy. The controversy is among people who are trying to either to appeal to people because it is all tied to diets out there. And people know that their diet books written. So people buy them because they want to appeal what people want to eat when we're talking to the scientific community. We're not talking to a bunch of people trying to sell a diet book telling the person what they want to hear. This is good. Cheese is good. Oil is good. Honey is good. Whatever it tell people what they want to hear. It's what money scientists now discussing what's best this versus that. It's not that, you know, this versus that. No eggs might be better than donuts. Let us make eggs. Good. When you compare eggs to beans. They don't do so well. Oil is better than sugar. We can put up studies to show olive oil is better than butter. The prevalence study actually did that. They put it they showed that when people given olive oil to take home with them and to use instead of butter and other sources of fat like animal fat, the risk of heart attack went down by 15 percent. So when the scientists took the oil away from them and told me more nuts and seeds than their heart attack, rates were down by 60 percent. This is a European study. The point I'm making is when you compare olive oil to walnuts or whatnot, then you obviously see no comparison.

 

[00:49:05] You always see better results, more weight loss reversal, diabetes, more protection against cancer, and a dramatic protection against heart attacks and strokes not seen with any type of oil. So I don't really think it's controversial among people who've had a chance to review the full portfolio of research available on the subject.

 

[00:49:24] Right. Yeah, I agree. And I think it is one of the greatest scams that I'm hoping the olive oil industry.

 

[00:49:30] Someone started spreading about, you know, it being healthy for you.

 

[00:49:35] Olive oil. It's coconut oil that's MKC to you. It's black. So it's always people trying to sell some oil to you instead of recognizing that oil is still 120 calories per tablespoon. And the most critical thing for your health is to be grap is gravitate towards your ideal weight and stay there. And you couldn't oil on your food. You're not it's not going to happen. It's going to make that so much more difficult to achieve.

 

[00:49:59] Absolutely. To that end, I have a couple of questions that people have reached out knowing that I was going to speak with you today and I'm going to hit some of those right now, did satisfy our beautiful audience.

 

[00:50:10] And we had a few people right in kind of to the same effect of do you prioritize personally? This is you personally. Dr. Fuhrman at home. Do you prioritize specific kinds of nuts in your own personal diet? For instance, are almonds or macadamia? What you you talk a lot about macadamia nuts and your favorite desserts with the banana and things like that. But do you try to prioritize some nuts above others? And is it due to taste or is it a health way out?

 

[00:50:38] Yes, I do. To the health.

 

[00:50:40] In other words, I used to have recipes years ago because cashews were so much of a favorite, not in that particular recipe to make a salad dressing or a sauce. But now I take out half the cashews and put half hemp seed or water in place of half the cash. Usually hemp seed. I'm trying to achieve that. Half of my nut and seed intake comes from the higher omega three nuts instead of the higher omega six nuts.

 

[00:51:05] That means I still can have half my nut and seed from the high omega six nights like pecans and cashews and pistachio nuts and Brazil nuts. But I'm trying the other half to come from flax seeds, G.U. seeds, hemp seeds and walnuts, you know, so I'm trying to utilize more of that in my recipes. And when I end, it tastes just as good for making a salad dressing or a Thai sauce. And I'm putting in taking out some of the peanut or some of the cashew and putting some hemp seed instead in the recipe, a taste almost the same.

 

[00:51:34] You can really tell the difference because there's more omega three. What I'm saying is it's not the omega three Omega six balance of your diet that determines your health. It's the omega three omega six balance of your cell membranes on your body. And when you're at a favorable weight, your body is going to burn off the extra omega six you consume and hold on to the omega three. It needs keeping a favorable omega six or omega three balance. As long as you're not overweight. When you're overweight. You throw up, you put that alignment in off kilter almost no matter what you eat, because you have so much stored or made a sixth of the body's membranes. So what I'm saying is, yes, I'm not trying to go six to one or three to one at once. What I'm trying to do to have adequate amounts of omega three fatty acids. And I also take DHEA, a Vegan DHEA supplement as well, to preform DHEA. But there's benefits from HLA and there's other benefits from flaxseed. And should you see that hemp seeds and walnuts over and above its omega three content, you know, one or two powerful anticancer effects and the ability to stabilize arrhythmias in the heart. So there's other beneficial effects besides only that Omega three content. So I'm consciously trying to utilize some of those nuts in my daily diet.

 

[00:52:44] Okay. And you mentioned the Vegan DHEA supplements, and we've had people write in asking if you can kind of simply clarify why you take that supplement and whether or not you would advised for everyone to be taking it.

 

[00:52:59] Well, you know, I'm one of. I have a unique experience among living physicians in caring for the Vegan community over a 30 year period. And caring for the natural hygiene community of the people who are vegans starting in the 1940s and 1950s with my father's contemporaries back then and being the doctor, the young doctor, caring for these elders back then and finding a lot of them and a lot of leaders in the Vegan community back then developed medical problems related to omega three fatty acid deficiencies that led to dementia or increased the risk of Parkinson's and developing neurologic problems in later life. They lived a long time. They didn't die young. They developed some serious issues. And I still, I mean, chronically in contact with people who were following Vegan diets, who then develop dementia in their late 80s and 90s and ruined the trajectory of their later life. So in having that experience and drawing blood tests on these people and studying this with intensity and carefulness, not wanting to be advising people to go to a near Vegan or Vegan diet and result in some problem like that, then I'd be develop the expertize to be able to test for it, see the studies that support it, and come to the conclusion that I think are irrefutable at this point, that an unsung element in the Vegan is placing themselves at significant and needless risk of dementia if they do not either supplement with DHEA or check a blood test to make sure their Omega three index is adequate. Because some people can make enough DHEA and Omega three on their own without supplementation. We have differences in genetic ability of conversion enzymes and with dietary manipulation. Some people can make more than they choose not to supplement. So I'm not saying that everybody has to supplement. I'm saying everybody should be cautious enough to take care to achieve adequate DHEA adequacy on a vegan diet, lest they put themselves at needless and and risk. And we have these philosophical vegans and people who will die by the sword for their viewpoints, but they put themselves and their followers at risk because they just work there. They're letting their personal bias and philosophy, you know, advise large numbers of people into dangerous practices.

 

[00:55:19] Instead of being cautious and conservative and a little bit humble, realize we have to bear on the side of caution and make sure that people are OK because a vegan diet is not what people followed them for the millenniums of human history. And we're not really designed to necessarily have optimal levels of all nutrients on a because I can't assume that on any diet, perhaps.

 

[00:55:41] And I'm wondering, do you.

 

[00:55:44] How long have you. How is it too late? Like, you know, I'm I'm forty three years old. I haven't. And supplemented. How quickly would you suggest someone do it? And if someone is, you know, an advanced Vegan. Can they start right now and still and have some of the guarantee that you believe you've got by, by supplementing.

 

[00:56:06] Well, I mean, you know, so we go by studies predominantly, and I had all the studies that look at the Omega three index with regard to brain shrinkage or the Omega three index in regard to cognitive impairment. The studies that I've done on this so far all show the same thing.

 

[00:56:26] That lower levels levels, particularly below five, lead to definitive shrinkage in cognitive impairment of the brain, the age. And as the levels get worse below four and below three, you see more definitive brain shrinkage in skin, significant areas of the brain. For memory and for, you know, and from neurologic problems. What I'm saying right now is the studies corroborate each other. Independent studies from one research different will corroborate each other. You develop problems. LAWMAKER three Index. Now, we don't have the data to say at what age of maintaining a level of omega three, index of three. Let's say if you maintain the omega three index to age 65 and then you fixed and got your major three index to six and at the age of 65, would that prevent you from developing dementia at age 85?

 

[00:57:20] Probably.

 

[00:57:22] You know, but I wouldn't take a chance with that, I'd much prefer you to start it whenever you find out about this and have you make it Relix be good your whole life, you know? So what? But if at any point that you haven't done it, start to do it. If you're not demented yet, you can probably protect yourself to a degree. I do agree, though, that once you have a significant amount of dementia or Parkinson's, the brain is not an organ that's easy to heal, but the liver is you know, it's very hard to heal the brain. And you're not going to really be versed dementia by giving person omega three supplements once it's occurred there. That's why this is so important. You can't sue somebody. You know, I've heard a doctor say, oh, well, I watch my patients and if they start to develop problems, they start, then I'll worry about it. Then the time of the first the first symptom gooby dementia. And by that type of significant shrinkage of the brain. And you're not going to grow back a new brain, that doesn't make any sense at all. You know, so you can't wait till you develop a problem. So I'm saying I don't know when a person should start sooner, they start the better. But at any point, if the rebels are abnormal, they should start.

 

[00:58:26] Yeah. One of your mantras has been I've I've heard it. You deliver it. And a lot of the speeches that I've looked up online that I really like because I think it puts onus back where it belongs.

 

[00:58:36] But you said your health is your problem, not your doctors, you know, and it's this whole it goes hand in hand with doctors are treating disease. They're not, you know, promoting health. They're there to fix things, not to create platforms necessarily of it not occurring. And we had a lot of people kind of write in to this to this kind of note. And they were looking for you to advise them as to how to inquiry with their doctors to garner a level of communication, as well as understanding as to how much their doctors understood about nutrition that they themselves align themselves with. And I'm wondering if you can give up a few pieces of advice that you would offer someone to discuss with their doctors so that they can ascertain the doctor's knowledge and also communicate their own requests if they are indeed following the eat for life concepts and Axium Medic's.

 

[00:59:32] I don't agree with that way of thinking. I'm sorry to say. OK. I have to say that.

 

[00:59:38] Doctors have no special expertize in even nutrition or health over and above a lawyer or a plumber, a teacher or a postman.

 

[00:59:47] They may not be. And let's say the doctor did know about nutrition. Should you wait? He developed medical problems the age of 65 and go to a doctor with high blood pressure, diabetes and expect into a partizan nutritional knowledge on you in a 15 and a 10 or 50 minute visit from me. That's what. What do we care what the doctor knows? Sure. The purpose should be to teach the doctor to help the doctor. He's a person who's a human. We want we care about him, too. And we want him to help his health, too, because he's probably overweight and sickly, because he because he doesn't really know much about nutrition. But we don't expect him to be our teacher of health and nutritional policies or or need him to be that we can't expect him to be that. You know, what I'm suggesting is that nutritional science should be taught in grade school and colleges in high school. It should be reading, writing, arithmetic and nutritional science and social studies. It's the most important knowledge we have to import a population to control it. And people can can control their life and their health span. But a doctor, you know, it's like it's like the American Heart Association who tells people, yeah, you should cut your salt intake back to fifteen milligrams after you have heart disease. Well, that's like telling you the way it should cut back on cigarets, maybe quit smoking after you develop lung cancer. The whole thing is just ridiculous. And it's kind of ridiculous to expect your doctor to be you know, if you're into nutrition, who do you care if your doctor knows it, too, because you care about him. You don't want his teachings because he doesn't know as much as you're going to know, because he's not dedicating himself to learning this now.

 

[01:01:13] So to that end, would you equally advise that people not necessarily take nutrition advice from their doctor?

 

[01:01:20] Not only not seek out that communication, but also question heavily or just not listen to advice given by nutrition? Because I know a lot of M.D. they're giving nutritional advice.

 

[01:01:31] Yeah, I mean, I don't think a person makes an appointment to see a physician for nutritional advice. You know, myself excluded, of course. I'm saying that that's been my career. But of course, I'm an unusual doctor. The vast majority of doctors, they're there to see you in a five minute period and to write a script for you so they can get onto the next patient. They're making the money on volume. I'm spending an hour, an hour and a half with initial visit, but I'm even now a. We see people coming in for a month and each of them over a month. But the point I'm making right now is, what do you think your doctor is going to tell you in a five to 10 minute visit that's going to change the way you eat for the rest of your life? It could be motivate you. He's going to convince you. He's going to teach you. Doctors are what most doctors can can go for. We don't need so many doctors because, you know, mostly what doctors do is treat numbers on blood tests with drugs to make them look normal. So you think it's OK to keeping the Diuron because now your numbers look better on a blood test or they did a scan you to think were OK, I take it because now you can keep it the same diet. So whether it's so, what doctors mostly do is give people toxic and even carcinogenic substances called metaphore, pharmaceutical drugs. You know, we give them these substances to make people think they're better or doing better when they're not. So what I'm saying is we didn't have the blood pressure medications that people put forced to change the way they eat and lose the weight. We don't have the cholesterol lowering drugs. People will be forced to lose the way. Change what they get back in good health again. If we don't have a diabetic medication, we will be forced to drop a 30 pounds. Eat the way you're supposed to eat. Get rid of your diabetes. But now they say overweight. They stay skinny and just pop drugs. And then you want your doctor to be a nutritional expert.

 

[01:03:10] I don't think that's the answer to what ails people. I think they've got to take their health into their own hands. It's what they do in their own kitchen, their own life. They've got to learn how to care for themselves. Right. And the goal is to stay away from doctors and medicinal substances.

 

[01:03:24] I don't even go to doctors. I don't even go to myself.

 

[01:03:30] I'm wondering. My final question for today is maybe a little cheeky.

 

[01:03:35] And so I'm not sure if I'll get an answer out of you, but I want to know because you have this incredible voice about immunity and the immune system. And it has been a you know, another core axiom throughout all of your literature, all of your studying, all of your proffering. And I'm wondering, looking, I have to say, with the COVA pandemic, you spoke recently on someone else's podcast. I don't remember her name or I would say it right now. But you talked about immunity and the code of it and your own personal story about, you know, not knowing whether or not you had had it. You'd gotten off a flight. You had like a tickle in your throat. It went away the next day. I'm wondering, just personally, without any knowledge of which we don't have yet. Do you think that there will be any kind of a study with this pandemic? You know, one of the only things that we can do is kind of study groups that weren't hit as hard and why and maybe to do something helpful from that. Do you do you assume or do you suspect that the people who are living in this eat for life mentality that you have, you know, really describe to the world that they will have a better chance of having had covered without suffering from terminal or hospital like symptoms? Or do you think that they will be immunities built by this population? What do you think that any kind of future assumptions?

 

[01:05:02] Do you think that you could give us about immunity and what we're going to learn after that? We find, you know, a helpful immunization for it, the aftermath between immunity, eating this way that you have and.

 

[01:05:19] The correlations, you know, met the match, the way the masses think and the way this the, you know, the medical and health professions teach. I don't see them even taking a look at this to find the answer.

 

[01:05:31] I don't think they're going to come up with all the aftermath and look back and say, yes, if you eat healthy and you eat a salad every day and that's, you know, and you were achieving a normal weight and you were had a low level of white blood cell count, all the things I teach aren't even looked at by the. By these by these people in scientific authority.

 

[01:05:48] So I don't expect them to come up with any, you know, massive new way of looking at things. You knew Niek way of seeing this. I think right now we have sufficient information from the scientific literature, which I've documented, as you know, in my books and writings, that that the coded nineteen virus is harmless to a healthy immune system, the ability of a virus to replicate, invade and then escape immune system, catch capture to cause the category of damage is impossible with a healthy immune system. And we're only seeing this virus attack very sickly people.

 

[01:06:23] And we're seeing it attacks some young people and some people who aren't overweight, who have chronic diseases, but not many. And even those people who are so-called healthy aren't really healthy. They're still eating fast food and fried food and sweets and things and are still. So what I'm saying to you is that we're looking at a new bit. We're looking at an unhealthy population. Our whole population is very unhealthy. That's why Kober is so dangerous. Yes, I'm suggesting that we're not just protecting ourselves more. We're giving ourselves a tremendous degree of security that gives us to remove that fear. And I don't think I have any possibility at all, zero possibility of being hurt by.

 

[01:07:01] And I think most of the people that have followed my advice feel the same way that science is significant enough to feel like that we're totally protected against hospitalization, intubation and death from Cauvin because we live in such a healthy manner. And I even can monitor people when they're overweight and sickly. And I can track their penetration of phytochemicals in their tissues, their inflammatory markers and their white blood cell activity in their body and see how they can improve within weeks to get them to a healthy state. And I encourage people, if they're overweight, to start losing weight at at least two to three pounds a week because you improve immune function dramatically even while you're still overweight with your steadily losing weight towards a healthy weight. So I'm saying right now, a new to Attarian is a person eating a very healthy diet who's at their ideal weight or they're a person in a very healthy diet who is overweight and they're moving steadily towards their ideal weight. And in both cases, they're going to get dramatic degree of protection. Even if you are overweight, if you're following this program because you see in a short period of time, you see things improving right away even. But what if you simply for example, we see people going through gastric bypass and lap band placements, they'll get rid of their diabetes within the first two or three weeks. The mother still overweight. Just because they're losing so much that the body and we start to see certain metabolic and hormonal responses change whether the person's dropping their body weight. So I want people who are overweight to still have some hope. They don't think that just because they're all wakaba going to die if they get cold. But if they start eating healthfully, they start dropping their weight, they start living on these foods and these healthy foods. They can get dramatic amount of protection and they're healthy. They get they get to a point where they have so much protection that Cauvin should be relatively harmless in those populations were totally harmless in those populations and feature issues as well.

 

[01:08:54] Future pandemics, which are in the pipeline, if we can't shift some things, we know that we know that this was going to occur at some point.

 

[01:09:01] And we know that future ones are also going to occur. So you better start taking care of your health and not expecting doctors to care for you, to take you to have all the answers for you, because they don't. And you can't buy good health and a bottle of pills and vaccines. The only way you can be healthy is earning it to live by living a healthy life.

 

[01:09:18] Absolutely. And on that positive note, I'm going to say thank you so much, Dr. Fuhrman, for your time today.

 

[01:09:25] My pleasure. Best of luck to all of you. Absolutely, for everyone listening. We've been speaking with Dr. Joel Fuhrman. You can find out more about everything we've been talking about, about all of the work that he's doing, his books on his Web site, W. Dr. Fuhrman dot com.

 

[01:09:41] And until we speak again next time. Thank you so much for giving me your time. And remember to eat clean, stay well, be responsible, stay in love with the world and each other and always bet on yourself. Slainte.