Boost Your Health With Nutritarian Diet

Introduction and blood pressure basics 0:00

Welcome back for another very informative discussion we're going to have with Dr. Joel Fuhrman, a dear friend and very, very helpful when you need to understand the scientific data. How are you doing today, Dr. Fuhrman? Great. Having a lot of fun. Thank you. Well, let's dive right in because you are a wealth of knowledge and I can't wait for people to learn from you. So, first of all, which whole plant based foods have been scientifically proven to help lower blood pressure? And really what makes them effective?

Well, it's the totality of the whole the body works, you know, it's in other words, there's a combination of the full complement of phytochemicals and antioxidants and fibers and plants, which all work together, but also they support the growth of healthy bacteria in the gut. More gram positives and they thicken the biofilm and thickening of the biofilm that covers the delay in the small intestines, then slows the absorption of glucose entry and caloric entry into the blood. And I'm saying it's the caloric rush that has pro-inflammatory effects, putting so many calories into the bloodstream, particularly from oil and sugar and salt and white flour, of course, is a sugar equivalent.

It floods the body with calories that you could not get in a natural state. So I as you know, I don't consider sugar honey, maple sirup and white flour. I consider them drugs, natural drugs that affect the brain and cause inflammation. So because not only do fruits and vegetables enter the bloodstream slowly, but they favor the growth of bacteria that thicken the biofilm that lowers the entry. Even when you eat something that's relatively that's moderately glycemic, like a mango, that absorption of that glucose is also slowed because you're regularly consuming green vegetables and onions and mushrooms.

And I think in berries and things like that. But so it's the total anti-inflammatory effects of what you're eating, what's in those foods, and also salt. That's that's so high in the American diet. People don't recognize salt as a pro-inflammatory substance. It's an irritant to the endothelial lining of blood vessels. So it leads to more microvascular injury. And over decades of over of excess salt use, it weakens the lining of the blood vessels, making them predisposed to more, you could say, fearing or aneurysms or a hemorrhagic stroke from years and years of excessive salt intake.

So it's not that it doesn't. Salt is not only dangerous because it raises your blood pressure, it also weakens the blood vessels themselves, making them more susceptible from damage from that blood pressure that it caused with the salt Okay. So go ahead. Sorry. But there are also specific bio flavonoids and proanthocyanidins in plant foods that also have a natural blood pressure lowering effect.

Fruit, fructose, and protein balance 3:14

For example, the garlic is very powerful blood pressure levels which are concentrated effect. But if you cook the garlic, it's still a great flavoring, but you're not going to get much blood pressure and cholesterol lowering effect from garlic. But if you when you in raw garlic is too strong to be chewing on that multiple times in a day. But if you partially cook the garlic, so you get rid of its bitterness, but you don't overcook it. It can be used in traditional therapeutic adjunct to be having a clove of raw garlic or two cloves of raw garlic cooked enough so it's not bitter or not not biting, but not cooked so much that it lost its therapeutic effect.

And as you know, we use other foods liberally that also lower blood pressure, such as eggplant in a diet, like I'll take a salad. And by the way, the skin of the eggplant is also very good for you. If you water, cook it like you cook it in a soup and chop the eggplant and leave the skin on. If you making a stew with beans in the crockpot, cut up the eggplant and leave the skin on because you're not going to. But if you're going to bake it in the oven at 330 for 45 minutes, then the skin gets crinkled and a little damaged.

And then we would scoop it out, remove the skin and throw it away, because with dry cooking, you get more damage to the food on the outside. But with wet cooking, you don't. So that's why we wouldn't use the eggplant skin. But utilizing cooked eggplant is part of the meal is also effective at lowering blood pressure and lowering blood glucose. The benefit has beneficial effects. Okay. And so I'm curious, there's been a little discussion around fructose and the difficulty, you know, causing harm, for example, fatty liver and different things.

And then people will extrapolate that to saying, oh, fruit must be bad. Could you just highlight a little bit difference between the differences between like high fructose corn syrup products versus like whole food fruits with fructose in them as well? It's good. So people really get a vivid picture of what we're talking about here because when we're eating fruit, the sugar, fructose and glucose is intracellular inside the cell wall. So it's bound to fiber. So not only have when you chew it, obviously you're chewing it and it's because you're chewing it and mixing it with fiber.

And it not only goes into the bloodstream more slowly, but it also creates activity of the bacteria that work that work in the gut, that feed off the sugar and grow off that fructose that's bound to fiber. So you get more activation. So all the sugar and the sugar enters the bloodstream doesn't come in as much, and it comes at a much slower rate. And for example, berries are sweet, but they have so much flavonoids that they actually have antidiabetic effects, particularly blackberries and wild blueberries, because they have so much that black small skin has so much anthocyanidins in them.

But yes. But still, you can get too much fructose from fruit if you juice it, let's say actually removing some of the fiber. So you're not getting the bacterial benefit. You're not chewing it with and mixing it with saliva and with the fiber and saliva. And the fruit mix affects the biochemistry of how it's absorbed. And also, we don't recommend people be on a fruitarian diet where 80 to 90% their diet is mostly fruit because, number one, the diets too low in protein. And number two, their level of fructose is relatively high, comparatively to what they would include more vegetables, beans and nuts.

It's that as we age, as we go to 60 to 70 to 80 to 90, particularly as we go from 70 to 90, our ability to absorb protein goes down and we can weaken our immunity. And for a diet is too low in protein, and that's where the fruitarian diet gets into trouble. The fruitarian diet could have been adequate protein because they were eating 10, 20% of nuts, avocado, vegetables, salads. When they started keeping that high level of fruit as they passed the age of 70, when the protein viability goes down, now they can have their IGF 1 going to low their immune system, dropping to function, dropping too low, more susceptibility to fungal infections or pneumonia and, you know, infectious related causes of death and loss of loss of strength and vitality later years, because their diet doesn't have enough of the high protein plant foods and the high protein plant foods, are the intact Plant foods that are not that are non fruit, which are vegetables intact, grains, nuts and seeds and beans and legumes.

Those are the categories that give us the most protein, not fruit. So the fruit heavy diet isn't going to give us protein adequacy as we age, but may be okay when we're younger, you know. And as far as the protein intake, how much protein do you recommend for the different ages as we get older? And I don't I don't recommend different proteins for different ages. I recommend the same diets where all the age is because of the diet. That's not fruit heavy. That contains fruit. Yes. But it contains at least 75% of non fruit categories.

It contains nuts and seeds and beans and and vegetables and whole grains. Is better for toddlers and children, for people when they're growing. And then in middle age, it's better for building bone mass and muscle mass, which then and brain mass, which then suits us to do better when we're in our elderly years because it's hard to build bone and muscle over the age of 70 or 80 years old. So it's the middle years to have that protein adequacy where we're going to put more bone and muscle on. So I'm not even but so but theoretically, it's still it's still possible for a person to be healthy and build adequate mass.

Nutrition diet and nitrate-rich vegetables 9:20

I'm not recommending that. But it's still okay to lower the protein in the diet. Let's say once you fully grown from, let's say, 25 to 45, if you wanted to lower your protein intake when you're at the highest amount of tissue growth potential and then you proteins, it could be lower, you could have more fruit in your diet. But as you go into your fifties and sixties and later, you probably should not be a fruit centered diet. You could still have, you know, five pieces of fruit day, two pieces of fruit after every meal.

But you're not going to be eating all fruit with a little bit of salad and, you know, eating a whole fruit diet. Some that, you know, some plant based advocates advocate extremes. You know, some people say take all the fat out, don't eat nuts. And other people say take all the fruit out. And other people say, think, eat only fruit. You know, you have these and it's better not to be extreme, but to get a good variety of plant foods. Gotcha. So that means you're getting you're getting a good amount of protein.

And I just analyzed the amount and it was really amazing because I analyzed there was a study coming out of England which showed that vegans had higher hip fracture rate and more osteoporosis. So I analyzed the diet they were eating. They were getting about 10% of calories from protein and about 500, 450 milligrams of calcium in their diet compared to the meat eaters. And milk drinkers were getting about 800 milligrams of calcium, double the calcium and about 16 to 18% of calories from protein and the people eating meat in eggs and dairy.

So I analyzed the new criterion and see where does it fit. And it came out with more calcium than the meat based diet, and it came out more protein and meat based diet. Instead of being like 16 to 18%, it had like 17 to 19%. And it did just as much as more protein as the people eating meat, because the people eating meat were still eating oil and sugar and other junk food. And when you like, which in US news, Qataris are not eating the empty protein and empty nutrient food, so everything has calcium and protein to it.

So what I'm saying is that if you put in 400 calories of oil in your diet with three and a half tablespoons of oil a day instead of three and a half instead of a, you know, two ounces of nuts you just took, you know, ten grams of protein at off the plate because we used oil instead of nuts and seeds. And then if you put sugar and honey to get another couple of hundred calories in a white bread at Crusader, a bagel bun or a pizza, then you just took in a whole bunch of calories in your milk and other times of ten grams of protein or if you play it.

So they they still had meat and eggs, but it didn't make up for all the things like all the processed foods and all the oils that were pulling protein off their plate by diluting the protein concentration by using processed foods in their diet. So actually, on a new criterion type diet, we get a lot of protein and a lot of calcium. So can you explain the nutrition diet and what that is exactly? Well, it's it's a diet that's not grain based, a fruit based, but it's vegetable based. But we're paying attention to getting all the different types of foods in the plant based kingdom, particularly the ones that show the strongest effects on preventing cancer and extending human longevity, which are the g bombs which stand for g, b, o MBC screens.

Beans, onions. Mushrooms, berries and seeds. So we're using seeds and nuts. We're using multiple types of beans. We're using multiple types of vegetables, ringing vegetables, cooked and raw, and we're getting fruit and some whole grain intact, whole grain and using seeds liberally, like flax seeds, chia seeds, hemp seeds, you know, wheat usually with breakfast. So it's a very it's a it's a new it's a plant rich, nutrient dense diet with lots of variety in the diet and particularly paying attention to having a large raw salad every day, the big set with onions and, and to have like soup with mushrooms and cooked onions and beans in it.

So we're trying to get the full complement of plant foods because it seems that this full variety of these natural foods works synergistically to support our immune system to a higher level of function, to support our bacteria in the gut, to a higher level of function and protection, and to slow the aging process. And also when you have a meal that mixes some bean with some green vegetable with some nothing seed, the combination slows gastric emptying and makes you feel more satiated from that meal so you're more satisfied, fewer calories.

So the other thing about being nutrient dense, nutrient adequate and filling all the little non-op optimal holes in the diet is that you satisfy the lower amounts of nutrients to amounts of calories, so you're less likely driven biologically to overeat food. Exactly. Well, getting to the vegetable piece of that, can you discuss the role of the nitrate rich vegetables like beets, leafy greens in promoting vascular health and improving hypertension? Yes, there's a there's a benefit. And that's one benefit of actually chewing over blending and making a smoothie.

Because when you chew the vegetables, beets and also obviously green vegetables and leafy green vegetables, you not only break open the enzymes in the cell wall, because obviously we're instructing people to chew to a liquid and to chew much better than you think you should, you know, try to keep it in your mouth longer. You feel like you want to swallow it. Don't swallow it, keep chewing. But there's also these benefits. You produce more nitric oxide, which has anti oxidation and vasodilation effects, natural relaxing your blood vessels and protecting you against aging.

You get more of those effects when you mix the food products with more of the saliva and the bacteria between the teeth. So when you eat a healthy diet, you produce a healthier digestive tract. Flora and the flora in the mouth is healthier as well. And the flora in the mouth interacts with the enzymes and nutrients in the food to create more nitric oxide. So it's better to chew it and to just put it in a blender, let's say. So we're asking people have a big salad and put the scallion, the onions, the shredded beets, the green vegetables, the arugula, and really chew it real well.

So that's what we do here at our retreat. We really instruct people and keep reminding them. And I remind myself because I have a tendency to fast too, and do not shoot well, that I'm thinking of. I chop the salad with one of those roller choppers in the air and I put it in my serving bowl to eat it. And then I'm thinking, they're really chewing it well before I allow myself to swallow it, to enhance those beneficial effects. And I'm sure there's some other mindful components to that as well, making you sit down and be mindful of your eating, which slows you down.

You get satiated. It's time for the body to digest. So absolutely. And you know what? I've been lately, I've been trying to be mindful of those people asking me about, you know, the value of organic and gardening and also saying, mindful of the people that grew the food, picked it for us. Look at the people that work to pick those little wild blueberries, that pick the, you know, the and and their exposure to chemicals and pesticides working in the farms, because that's the highest amount of lymphoma and leukemia are people who actually work with these chemicals in the farms.

So we have to be so supporting organic agriculture, even though it may cost us more if even if tough for some people to afford it, it's as we build the you know, as we support the organic food movement, we have more farms reverting to organic farming. As there's more customers for it, they can make more money and they can hire workers and protect them that so their workers don't have to work with chemicals. So we're appreciative and grateful for the people that helped us form the food to make this wonderous miraculous, healing, beautiful food, but also to try to care about those those people's health as well, you know?

Absolutely. So with everybody, you're not only helping your own health, but you're committing

Organic farming and mindful eating 17:00

and promoting the health of those who brought the food to you. So it's a yeah. And you're supporting them with your dollar. When you're eating organically, you're supporting those farmers who grow organically and those workers who work on organic farms and hopefully spread the movement. So more people have that opportunity. Absolutely. You're definitely voting with your dollar in your work. So I think another good question. You know, there's a lot of buzz around like mega threes and heart health.

So how come someone on a plant based diet ensure that they're actually getting enough? Well, that's a you important conversation for me, because my entry into the plant based world was early in life when I was a youngster, about ten years old, through the American Natural Hygiene Society. And my mentor and the person I respect and admired was Herbert Shelton, who wrote all these books. So I was amazed how prolific he was. But of course, he died young of Parkinson's disease. I think he died around his like 77 and Parkinson's disease.

But and many of the leaders in these in these natural vegan movements had neurologic disease. And I was that and and even though a lot of these people were my these doctors and when my mentors and I admired them, when I became a physician, they became elderly people with medical conditions that I actually took care of as a doctor. So I took care many of the leaders and the people who were involved at the early entry to this to the vegan plant based movement who were naturalists and not eating junk food, vegan diets, being healthy diets of all natural foods.

So so I found in my practice many of these people like Herbert Shell, died of Parkinson's and Kiki Sidhu, who got Parkinson's. And the leaders of the natural organic movement in America had Parkinson's that there were who were vegans and Dr. Vitorino got dementia and Dr. and we couldn't we can name all these leaders and people used to be in a board of directors with me, but because I became a physician, a younger physician, when they became elder, I had the opportunity to take to take their blood tests and to evaluate them as they were developing more neurologic problems and found that the the omega three levels were were some were slow and sometimes even undetectable.

And then we know from science now that lower levels of omega three produced more inflammation in the body and expose you to more damage to the brain from chemicals that can cause Parkinson's and also, of course, shrink the brain and lead to cognitive impairment. At this point in human history, we have corroboration from within 15 separate studies that show the same thing that low levels omega three index through decades of life is linked to smaller brains, more susceptible to neurologic deficit in later life.

The problem with that the you know so we're finding that omega we can control our omega three index we can't control it totally by the consumption of flaxseeds and chia seeds or because some people just don't convert. It's more genetically determined, even with even with dietary gymnastics, many people don't convert enough, some people do. Some vegans can make enough. We can determine that in a blood test. But even with the most perfect diet animals, the highest consumption, a lot of people still don't make sufficient amounts of omega three.

So we've got to be very careful of that. But we have plant based omega three DHEA, an EPA could take to modify your level. And I'm suggesting that the level should be above six, between six and eight. And that's a blood test you get just like at Quest or LabCorp. Yes, it's a blood test. You get at many labs, which I think Quest calls an omega check or Omega quant. We have the card available. You can self test yourself. But my doctor from Endocannabinoid Ricard, if your doctor won't do it and there's there's two other caveats here.

As one is taking high dose fish oil also has negative effects. I wrote my book, The End of Heart Disease, that omega three deficiency is going to increase the risk of atrial fibrillation, but high dose fish oil can also increase risk of tribulation. So if some people are saying take non industrial, saying take a lot, then it's really has to be that sweet spot to take enough, but not too much. Like any nutrient, too much vitamin D is dangerous and too much iodine is dangerous. You can't take too much.

And the other thing is we used to think that or at least I used to think that, you know, I'll have a little bit of clams or oysters and that'll really bring me up a little sardines because they're smaller fish

Omega-3s, supplements, and seafood concerns 21:08

that maybe aren't as contaminated as salmon. I could do it naturally that way. But now to think a few things have happened, not only the thousands of tons of plastic we dump in the ocean every hour, which has now these smaller fish, including sardines, have plastic lining their digestive tract. You know, smaller fish. You don't took the Total Digest tracker. So we're actually exposing yourself to more plastic particles, which are more of a cancer risk and a endocrine disruptor than eating larger fish, which are more chemical contaminated with PCBs and with toxic metals.

And then there's actually, you know, a incidence of higher incidence of ALS, clusters of ALS around lakes where people eat fish and clusters of Parkinson's dementia syndrome or cleft water with coastal waterways where they grow bivalves and shellfish with people eating clams, oysters, mussels and scallops, a bivalve or those foods that live on the bottom clams, oysters, mussels and scallops. And they have the highest concentration of BMA, including lobster and crab. Shellfish, which have could have, you know, 30 to 50 times as much b m a as deep sea fish because they because of the BMA builds up from the agricultural runoff, from farming activities which create more algae overgrowth and cyanobacteria that live on the algae that contaminate the waterways.

So that's why I'm saying to people, you know, let's not rely on seafood for that extra omega three, which may have been in human history, a little bit of animal product, a little bit of salamander frogs, snake fish, seafood, oysters could have been enough. But now we're not relying on those natural things. We're trying to get it from a, you know, a vegans source because we don't really don't want to use seafood. It's not a clean source. That itself is a risky source. You know. How much do you recommend taking daily in what is supplement form or is there something more specific?

Yes, a supplement form. And the one that I sell comes in glass bottles because we keep it refrigerated so it stays fresh. But we also have it in a dropper so people can adjust their dose accordingly to their blood test. They can take less if they need less and more if they need more. And most people do need around 250, but some people need 300 or 400 to keep their levels up. So and some people need less. But I'd say, you know, 200 to 50 is probably where most of us can get their level at least above five, but preferably above six.

Especially if they're eating ala rich foods. That's right. And I do recommend half of the nut in the seat intake be a rich ala rich. In other words, if the recipe calls for, you know, a cashew cream sauce or a cashews salad dressing, take out half the cashews out of the recipe and use the other half hemp seeds. So half you're not in intake should be from flax seed, chia seed hemp seed, which is which can be and walnuts. Those are the four now you could have the other half could be pistachios and almonds and and pecans and cashews and and Brazil nuts.

But that should only be about half. So that way we keep a better HLA ratio because the risk factor here from taking nuts and seeds out of the diet is ala deficiency is also increased risk of irregular heartbeat and atrial fibrillation. So people who are thinking they're helping their heart by moving nuts and seeds are not sufficiently supplying enough fat particularly way for the heart that has a anti-inflammatory soothing effect on the myocardium and the and the irritability of the heart muscle as it ages.

So determine when come you just kind of spoke to the microbiome and its importance. Can you describe a little bit more about dietary fiber that's found in plant based diet and why that's helpful in hypertension in in maybe describing new people here, starch versus non starch? Like what are those different types of fiber? What do they all mean exactly? Yes. What it means is that there are more hypoglycemic plant based foods and those plant based foods that have more slowly digestible starches, which means the glucose goes slow into the bloodstream.

And and then besides the slowly adjustable starches, which are found in peas and beans and also, by the way, in kohlrabi and cauliflower and beets and carrots. But if they're raw, if they're cooked, you increase the sink load somewhat and then you have the foods highest in resistant starch. Resistant starch is more resistant to enzymatic degradation, and it's converted almost fully into bacteria that support the health of the microbiome in the gut. Now, because the resistant starch is carbohydrate is counted as carbohydrate, and 90% of it doesn't get absorbed into the bloodstream, it passes into the toilet bowl.

The bacteria turn the resistant starch into fat, but 10% of that fat to short chain fatty acids produced beneficial, healthy short chain fatty acids. Anti-inflammatory fats like Butyrate and Butyrate has significant negative feedback loop on the hypothalamus apostate. So it makes you feel like eating cuts your appetite down. So the more resistant starch you eat, the more slowly it's going into the bloodstream. And because the carbohydrate is not absorbed as carbohydrate, it increased the stool. Fat increased more calories in the stool.

What that did is increase the amount of relative absorbable protein, because when you think about the amount of protein in a bean, in the amount of carbohydrate, the beans, let's say the bean is is 15% protein. And then if you remove, let's say, 20% of the calories that are carbohydrates and throw them away, then it means the 15% is really 19% protein because you didn't because the carbohydrates are not there. So, you know, in other words, that the loss of carbohydrate absorbed ability from the resistant starch in beans and legumes and peas means that the protein percent of calories absorbed is even higher than we think.

And that extra amount of carbon hydrate that that has been degraded by bacteria is fueling the growth of healthy bacteria simultaneously, thus leading to what scientists call the second meal effect, which means that other meals, when you're not eating beans or peas, are going to slow their they're glucose absorption because the extra bacteria growth you get from eating all the resistant starch from beans and peas that so the combination of all these foods the I always see the two raw foods or raw green vegetables including lettuce.

By the way, don't think lettuce is not a superfood.

Fiber, resistant starch, and microbiome health 27:48

It's a superfood because lettuce is the richest source of sulfur. Quinoa, both, which is supports the growth of good bacteria in the gut. And also lettuce is very low in oxalic acid and has no oxalic acid. So all its calcium is readily absorbable compared to spinach or beet tops. So in other words, lettuce is readily absorbable calcium, readily absorbable protein and readily absorbable carbohydrate that feeds the growth of good bacteria. Then you have lettuce and other raw leafy greens that we put in the salad chewing very well and raw onion, and Ros can cause all the organelles sulfide compounds have beneficial effects on the immune system and these combination of foods support the growth of the Intraepithelial lymphocytes that surround right behind the VILLI that are support your immune system growth to defend you against toxins and viruses and bacteria from translocated into the into the bloodstream.

And the cooked foods are beans and mushrooms, the cooked beans and cooked mushrooms, which are highly supportive of favorable bacteria in the gut. And we're saying here, and very different from other people, is that we want good soil, we want good natural organic soil with the full amount of fungi, bacteria, insects, worms. You know, we want all this natural material and soil to have the full spectrum of nutrients and food, which leads to the highest concentration of nutrients in our cells. And we have this relationship with nature where our cells get extra protection from food, that healthy foods from a variety of these foods consumed in excellent soils.

So we're all utilizing this science to target and allow ourselves to have higher protective immunity and higher brain function and higher body and higher intellectual function as we age. You know. Exactly. So we've been speaking to how much it's important to bring in the healthy foods, the raw, cooked, chewing your food. Well, you describe a little bit about why it's important to reduce processed plant foods, because many times people go, oh, does that mean I can eat an impossible burger? Or some of the other highly processed, very popular vegan junk food, so to speak?

Can you speak to that a bit? Yeah, because there's so much we could be speaking about. But it seems like your body gets into a rhythm of healing and detoxification where it's vigilantly protecting itself and the minute you start taking in food list substances, it shuts it off and starts just building up more fluid in the tissues. And it's just amazing how when you start eating processed foods, empty calorie foods, the body tries to convert them into energy. But to convert food into energy, it requires cofactors and phytochemicals are diffused of the the free radicals produced in the mitochondria or production of energy.

So it slows the conversion and interferes the conversion of this food into energy. So it's more readily shunted and comfortably shunted for fat and it turns on fat storage hormones. So the more processed foods you're eating, you're turning off detoxification, you're turning off energy production, you're increasing fat production, you're slowing down detoxification, and you're allowing the body to hold on to fluid, to dilute the acidity and toxicity of the of the free radicals produced because you're still converting that food into energy.

But with lack of antioxidants and the conversion of energy, you're allowing free radicals to escape out of their confines in the cell and you're producing more inflammation in the body. So as you eat processed foods, you just allowing your body produce more inflammation and more inflammation leads to more acidity and more acidity and more so you just allow your body to put more fluid, put more ways toward detoxification store fat, not, you know, you just accelerating poor health to the degree that you eat those foods.

We're trying to say, why eat self-destructive early? Why not eat constructively? We can make healthy foods taste great. Why not choose to do good for yourself? You know, so people live through taste and they're forgetting that they can learn how to make the healthiest foods taste good. And that 30 seconds of of extra taste from having these things isn't worth the health problems that it could potentially bring. And most people, because they haven't lived healthily the first 50 or 40, 50 or 60 years of your life, they can't play around anymore.

They've got to allow to let their body heal and recover and repair. And then they think that I'm too radical advocating such a healthy diet, but in reality, I'm just giving people the tools they need to protect their future, to prevent tragedies and give them a healthier and happier and more peaceful life with more creativity and more ability to enjoy their life by the by really being constructive and feeling appreciative and feeling good with everything you put in your body. In your mouth. Absolutely.

Yeah. It's funny. You'll have someone who's very ill like, well, can I can eat a little bit like this? Can I eat in moderation to let it go some moderation kills. And you had your time to play. It's time to grow up and eat well to get to stay well. So. Absolutely, I appreciate that. But one last question. Sometimes a lot of people ask about, you know, given the role of minerals like potassium and magnesium in blood pressure regulation, which plant foods are rich sources of that and which and maybe should be staples in your diet, would you say at least from the blood pressure component?

Processed vegan foods and mineral balance 33:38

Okay. The real answer is that all plant foods have adequate potassium, magnesium and the reason why people that are needy for those nutrients and the reason they is because they're salting their food. And when you add salt to your diet, the body has to remove the extra sodium in the sweat and in the urine and removing extra sodium that you don't need. It takes away other minerals with it, but it can't. Isolatedly just pull out the sodium, keeping all of the minerals in the body. It has to just excrete more electrolytes to get this extra sodium out.

So you lose magnesium, phosphorus and potassium in use in your urine and in your sweat. But when you eat a low sodium diet, your body's not excreting sodium. And when you sweat, it's water. It's not you're not sweating salt and other electrolytes. So you don't have to worry about eating, you know, bananas, have potassium. The whole idea that you're eating a certain food to get more minerals is not the way. I'd really like people to think about it. I'd like them to recognize that the natural plant food diet already has the perfect amount of minerals, the right amount of sodium, the right amount of potassium, the right amount of manganese, the right amount of phosphorus, and the right amount of potassium.

Already, if you don't use just add, if you don't have sodium chloride to your food. That's a great. Like a no brainer. Yes, I love it. And I'm also telling people that food doesn't taste that great once you're in the coffin. So if we want to enjoy our life and enjoy eating food, we have to stay alive in order to do so. And that's going to be my new phrase. I'm going to steal. I will give you credit, but I will steal, though. Okay. Oh, goodness. Well, this is a great way to end it. Well, thank you, Dr.

Fuhrman, for sharing your insights and your decades of experience. But could you give us a little bit more information about the work that you do down in San Diego? Because I think people may find that you have a new book as well, correct? Yes. My most recent book is called Eat for Life. And I do you know, as you know, I do offer people, you know, events and counsel, and they can ask me questions in the form drfuhrman.com But for some people who just need extra help and as you know, there are many people who don't who seem to be there have food, they have food addiction, and they have difficulty following the diet.

So I so this retreat I have in San Diego is a beautiful place for people to stay minimum of two months, to try to lose their weight, get their health back on track, get off some of the medications, get rid of their food addiction, build back the taste muscle, and learn the mindfulness and philosophical and emotional tools to be able to leave the retreat and be able to continue to do this in their life in a comfortable, peaceful and fun way because they've learned how to do and get used to eating this way.

So it keeps my connection with people. And frankly, it's so much so rewarding because my wife and I have built so much many friends here. We built like life friends and it's really exciting to watch people get well and to get to know them and still keep connected with people like that. So I'm still not just talking to a zoom, empty audience of screen. I'm actually working with people which I've always loved to do. So I have this retreat in San Diego, a lot of fun, and we and we always revel in watching people transform their health to come here.

Yeah, that is honestly the joy of doing the work, even though it's hard. Yeah. You know, at times you get. Keep going. Is it the end of the day you help people get well and live better lives That feels it's very rewarding. And also it's amazing that you have the camaraderie and people have camaraderie among themselves and you're building little nest of social support groups on the way to, you know. Yeah, which is very, very important. It's a constant conversation. And so absolutely. Thank you again for sharing that.

And thank you, everyone for listening and we'll see you on the next conversation.