The Consequences of Unmanaged Hypertension

Introduction and blood pressure basics 0:00

This is Doctor Talks, real talk from real doctors on the issues that matter to you most. Welcome back for another very informative discussion we're going to have with Dr. Joel Furman, a dear friend and very, very helpful when you need to understand the scientific data. How are you doing today, Dr. Furman? Great. Having a lot of fun. Thank you. Well, let's drive 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, how the body works. 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 the biofilm that covers the villi and 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 as you know, I don't consider sugar, honey, maple syrup, 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 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 berries and things like that.

So it's the total anti-inflammatory effects of what you're eating, what's in those foods, and also salt 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 excess salt use, it weakens the lining of the blood vessels, making them predisposed to more, you could say fissuring or aneurysms or hemorrhagic stroke from years and years of excess salt intake.

So it's not via, salt is not only dangerous because it raises your blood pressure, it also weakens the blood vessels themselves and making them more susceptible from damage from that blood pressure that it caused, that the salt caused. Okay, so go ahead, sorry. But there are also specific bioflavonoids and proanthrocytins in plant foods that also have a natural blood pressure lowering effect. For example, the garlic is very powerful, blood pressure lowering, such a 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 cooked garlic.

But if you, and 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 an additional 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 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 the 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, then chop the eggplant and leave the skin on. If you're making a stew with beans in the crock pot, cut up the eggplant and leave the skin on because you're not gonna cook. But if you're gonna 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 when we wouldn't use the eggplant skin. But utilizing cooked eggplant as part of the meal is also effective at lowering blood pressure and lowering blood glucose. It 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.

Fruit, fructose, and protein balance 4:47

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.

It not only. goes into the bloodstream more slowly, but it also creates activity of the bacteria 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 that 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 anti-diabetic effects, particularly blackberries and wild blueberries, because they have so much that black, small skin has so much anthocyanin in them.

But yes, but still, you can get too much fructose from fruit. If you juice it, let's say, I could be removing some of the fiber, so you're not getting the bacterial benefit. You're not chewing it 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% of their diet is mostly fruit, because number one, the diet's too low on protein, and number two, their level of fructose is relatively high, comparatively to one that 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 could weaken our immunity if our 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 their protein bioability goes down, now they can have their IGF-1 going too low, their immune system function dropping too low, more susceptibility to fungal infections or pneumonia and infectious related causes of death and loss of strength and vitality in 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 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. Gotcha. 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 recommend different proteins for different ages.

I recommend the same diet throughout all the ages because of the diet that's not fruit heavy, that contains fruit, yes, but it contains at least 75% of non-fruit calories. It contains nuts and seeds and beans and vegetables and whole grains. It's 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, 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 gonna put more bone and muscle on. But theoretically, it's still possible for a person to be healthy and build adequate mass. I'm not recommending that, but it's still okay to lower the protein in the diet, let's say, once you're 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 your proteins could be lower, you could have more fruit in your diet.

But as you're going to your 50s and 60s and later, you probably should not be a fruit centered diet. You could still have five pieces of fruit a day, two pieces of fruit after every meal, you're not going to be eating all fruit with a little bit of salad and eating a whole fruit diet. Some plant-based advocates advocate extremes. 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, eat only fruit. And it's better not to be extreme, but to get a good variety of plant foods.

Gotcha. So that means 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 and 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 which were getting about 800 milligrams of calcium, double the calcium and about 16 to 18% of calories from protein on the people eating meat and eggs and dairy.

So I analyzed the Nutritarian diet and see where does it fit. And it came out with more calcium than the meat-based diet.

Nutritarian diet and G-BOMBS 10:20

And it came out more protein than the meat-based diet. Instead of being like 16 to 18%, it had like 17 to 19%. It had just as much as more protein as the people eating meat, because the people eating meat we're still eating oil and sugar and other junk food. And when you're like, and us nutritarians are not eating the empty protein and empty nutrient foods. 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 two ounces of nuts, you just took 10 grams of protein out off the plate because you 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 breaded croissant or a bagel bun or a pizza, then you just took in a whole bunch of calories and you move another 10 grams of protein off your plate. So they still had meat and eggs, but it didn't make up for 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 nutritarian type diet, we get a lot of protein and a lot of calcium.

So can you explain the Nutritarian diet and what that is exactly? Well, it's a diet that's not grain-based or 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 showed the strongest effects on preventing cancer and extending human longevity, which are the G-bombs, which stand for G-B-O-M-B-S, greens, 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, we're eating 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, usually with breakfast.

So it's a very, 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 the large raw salad every day, the big salad with onions 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 work 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 nut and seed, the combination slows gastric emptying and makes you feel more satiated from that meal. So you're more satisfied with fewer calories. So the other thing about being nutrient dense, nutrient adequate and filling all the little not optimal holes in the diet is that you're satisfied with lower amounts of nutrients, lower 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 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.

Try to keep it in your mouth longer. You feel like you can wanna swallow it. Don't swallow it, keep chewing. But there's also these benefits. You produce more nitric oxide, which has antioxidation and vasodilation effects, naturally 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 than to just put it in a blender, I'd say.

Nitrate-rich vegetables and mindful eating 14:33

So we're asking people to 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 eat too fast too and to not chew well. But I'm thinking of, I chop the salad with one of those roller choppers and I put it in my serving bowl, to eat it, and then I'm thinking there of 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 being mindful of your eating, which slows you down, you get satiated, gives time for the body to digest. So, absolutely. And you know what I've been, lately I've been trying to be mindful of? There's people asking me about, you know, the value of organic and gardening, all of a sudden I'm 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 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 supporting organic agriculture, even though it may cost us more, even if tough for some people to afford it, It's as we build the, 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 so their workers don't have to work with chemicals. So we're appreciative and grateful for the people that helped us farm the food to make this wondrous, miraculous, healing, beautiful food, but also to try to care about those people's health as well.

Absolutely. So with every bite, you're not only helping your own health, but you're committing and promoting the health of those who brought the food to you. 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 and your fork. 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 huge important conversation for me because my entry into the plant-based world was early in life when I was a youngster at about 10 years old through the American Natural Hygiene Society. And my mentor and the person I respected 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 of Parkinson's disease.

And many of the leaders in these natural vegan movements had neurologic disease. And even though a lot of these doctors were 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 of many of the leaders. and the people who were involved at the early entry to the vegan plant-based movement, who were naturalists and not eating junk food, vegan diets, but eating healthy diets of all natural foods.

So I found in my practice, many of these people like Herbert Sheldon, who died of Parkinson's, and Kiki Sidwaho got Parkinson's, and the leaders of the natural organic movement in America had Parkinson's who were vegans. And Dr. Vetrano got dementia and we can name all these leaders and people used to be on the board of directors with me. But because I became a physician, a younger physician, when they became elder, I had the opportunity to take their blood tests and to evaluate them as they were developing more neurologic problems and found that their omega-3 levels were slow and sometimes even non-detectable.

And we know from science now that lower levels of omega-3 produce 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 link to cognitive impairment. At this point in human history, we have corroboration from more than 15 separate studies that show the same thing, that low levels of omega-3 index through decades of life is linked to smaller brains more susceptible to neurologic deficit in later life.

The problem with that, so we're finding that we can control our omega-3 index.

Organic food and omega-3 discussion 18:58

We can't control it totally by the consumption of flax seeds and chia seeds because some people just don't convert. It's more genetically determined. 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 or most the highest consumption, a lot of people still don't make sufficient amounts of omega-3. So we've got to be very careful of that. But we have plant-based omega-3 DHA and EPA could take to modify your level.

And I'm suggesting that the level should be above 6, between 6 and 8. That's a blood test you get just like at Quest or LabCorp, correct? Yes, it's a blood test you get at many labs. I think Quest calls it Omega Check or Omega Quant. We have the card available. You can self-test yourself at Dr. Froman.com. You can order a card if your doctor won't do it. There's two other caveats here. One is taking high-dose fish oil also has negative effects. I wrote in my book, The End of Heart Disease, that omega-3 deficiency is going to increase the risk of atrial fibrillation, but high-dose fish oil can also increase the risk of atrial fibrillation.

So if some people are saying take none, some people are saying take a lot, and it 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 I'll have a little bit of clams or oysters and that'll really bring me up, or little sardines because they're smaller fish that maybe aren't as contaminated as salmon.

I could do it naturally that way. But now 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. Smaller fish, you don't take the digestive tract out. So we're actually exposing ourselves to more plastic particles, which are more of a cancer risk and an endocrine disruptor, than eating larger fish, which are more chemical contaminated with PCBs and with mettoxic metals.

And then there's actually incidents, a higher instance of ALS, clusters of ALS around lakes where people eat fish and clusters of Parkinson's dementia syndrome or coastal waterways where they grow bivalves and shellfish where people eating clams, oysters, mussels, and scallops. A bivalve are those foods that live on the bottom, clams, oysters, mussels, and scallops, and they have the highest concentration of BMAA, including lobster and crab, shellfish, which could have 30 to 50 times as much BMAA as deep sea fish.

because the BMAA builds up from the agricultural runoff and 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, let's not rely on seafood for that extra omega-3, 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 vegan source because we really don't want to use seafood.

It's not a clean source. That itself is a risky source. 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 according to their blood test. They can take less if they need less and more if they need more. And most people need around 250, but some people need 300 or 400 to keep their levels up.

And some people need less. But I'd say 200 to 250 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 seed intake be ALA-rich. In other words, if the recipe calls for a cashew cream sauce or a cashew salad dressing, take out half the cashews out of the recipe and use the other half hemp seeds. So half your nut intake should be from flax seed, chia seed, hemp seed, which can repair, and walnuts.

Those are the four. Now you could have the other half could be pistachios and almonds and pecans and cashews and Brazil nuts, but that should only be about half. So that way we keep a better ALA ratio because the risk factor here from taking nuts and seeds out of the diet is ALA deficiency has also increased risk of irregular heartbeat and atrial fibrillation. So people who are thinking they're helping their heart removing nuts and seeds are not sufficiently supplying enough fat, this particular ala for the heart that has a anti-inflammatory soothing effect on the myocardium and the irritability of the heart muscle as it ages.

Wow, okay. Well, we're gonna pause our conversation just for a moment, but I wanna thank everyone who's been watching us today and thank you for joining us. And I hope you found our conversation insightful and engaging, but if you're a summit purchaser, stay right here because we're about to dive even deeper into this lovely conversation. And if you're not, you can click on the button below or to the side and get access to the rest of the conversation. And if you are watching this, thank you for being a valuable member of our community and let's continue this conversation with Dr.

Furman. So Dr. Furman, we kind of 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 and maybe describing that people hear starch versus non-starch? Like what are those different types of fibers and what do they all mean exactly? Yes. What it means is that there are more higher glycemic plant-based foods and those plant-based foods that have more slowly digestible starches, which means the glucose goes slow into the bloodstream.

And then besides the slowly digestible 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 glycemic 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 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, the short-chain fatty acids produced, beneficial, healthy short-chain fatty acids, anti-inflammatory fats like butyrate.

Fiber, resistant starch, and microbiome health 25:40

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 this 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 and the amount of carbohydrate in a bean, let's say the bean 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 that 15% is really 19% protein because the carbohydrates are not there. So in other words, the loss of carbohydrate absorbability from the resistant starch and beans and legumes and peas means that the protein percent of calories absorbed is even higher than we think. And that extra amount of carbohydrate that that is being 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 where you're not eating beans or peas are gonna slow their glucose absorption because of the extra bacteria growth you got from eating all the resistant starch from beans and peas, that is.

So the combination of all these foods, I always say the two raw foods are raw green vegetables, including lettuce, by the way. Don't think lettuce is not a superfood. It's a superfood because lettuce is the richest source of sulfoquinibose, which 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 the bacteria.

Then you have lettuce and other raw leafy greens that we put in a salad, chewing very well, and raw onion and raw scallion, because all the organosulfate compounds have beneficial effects on the immune system. And these combination of foods support the growth of the intra-epithelial lymphocytes that live right behind the villi that support your immune system growth to defend you against toxins and viruses and bacteria from translocating 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. We want all this natural material and soil to have the full spectrum of nutrients in 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 food 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 intellectual function as we age. Exactly. So we've been speaking to how much it's important to bring in the healthy foods, raw, cooked, chewing your food well. Can 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 foodless substances, it shuts it off and it 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 to diffuse the free radicals produced in the mitochondrial 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,

Processed foods and mineral balance 30:38

you're slowing down detoxification. and you're allowing the body to hold onto fluid to dilute the acidity and toxicity 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 produce more inflammation in the body. So as you eat processed foods, you're just allowing your body to 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 waste, halt detoxification, store fat. You're just accelerating poor health to the degree that you eat those foods. We're trying to say, why eat self destructively? Why not eat constructively? We can make healthy foods taste great. Why not choose to do good for yourself? So people live for taste and they're forgetting that they can learn how to make the healthiest foods taste good. And that 30 seconds 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 let their body heal and recover and repair. And they think that I'm too radical advocating such a healthy diet. But in reality, I'm 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 really being constructive and feeling appreciative and feeling good with everything you put in your body and your mouth.

Absolutely. Yeah. It's funny. You'll have someone who's very ill. They're like, well, can I, can eat a little bit like this? Can I eat a moderation a little? So 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. given the role of minerals like potassium and magnesium in blood pressure regulation, which plant foods are rich sources of that and maybe should be staples in your diet, would you say?

At least from the blood pressure component. Okay. The real answer is that all plant foods have adequate potassium, magnesium. The reason why people are needy for those nutrients and the reason is because they're salting their food. 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 your urine and in your sweat. But when you eat a low sodium diet, your body is not excreting sodium. And when you sweat, it's water. You're not sweating salt and other electrolytes. So you don't have to worry about eating bananas, 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.

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 add just, if you don't have sodium chloride to your food. So it's kind of like a no-brainer. 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. Oh, that's going to be my new phrase.

I'm going to steal. I will give you credit, but I will steal now.

Retreat, book, and closing remarks 34:28

OK. Oh, goodness. Well, this is a great way to end it. Well, thank you, Dr. Furman, for sharing your insights and, you know, 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 and 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 counseling. They can ask me questions in the forum, adoptedfirma.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, they have food, they have food addiction and they have difficulty following the diet. So this retreat I have in San Diego, is a beautiful place for people to stay minimum of a month 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 their 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 like 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, a 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 always revel in watching people transform their health to come here.

Yeah, that is honestly the joy of keep doing the work even though it's hard at times to keep going is at the end of the day you help people get well and live better lives. It feels very rewarding and also it's amazing that you have the camaraderie and people have camaraderie among themselves and you're building little nests of social support groups on the way too. Yeah, which is very, very important. It's a constant conversation. So absolutely. Thank you again for sharing that. And thank you everyone for listening and we'll see you on the next conversation.

Thank you for tuning in to Doctor Talks. We hope today's episode has enlightened and inspired you on your path to optimal health. Each day is a new opportunity to make choices that empower your well-being. For more insights and strategies, subscribe to our podcast and visit our website, www.doctortalks.com. Stay connected, stay healthy, and join us next time on Doctor Talks, real talks from real doctors on the issues that matter to you most.