Eating For Life

Joel Fuhrman, MD

My pleasure excited to be here and talk to you today.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Well for people out there, I’m sure everybody already knows who you are but I wanna give a little intro anyway. So Dr. Joel Fuhrman is a board certified family physician, nutritional researcher and six times New York times best selling author. He’s serves as the president of the nutritional Research Foundation. Dr. Fuhrman has authored numerous research articles published in medical journals and is on the faculty of Northern Arizona University Health Science division. Its two most recent books are Eat to Live Quick and Easy cookbook and fast food genocide. Well, I’m really excited me there’s nothing that is more important in regenerative medicine than food and eating right for longevity and healthy living.

Joel Fuhrman, MD

Thank you so much for that. And that bio was a little outdated because those are kind of those are my recent books. I have seven york times. Bestselling books by the way.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Seven, Okay,

Joel Fuhrman, MD

I don’t know, maybe an old and bio, but my most recent book is called Eat for Life. Yeah. So Eat for Life is my most recent book, The Eat to Live Quick and Easy cookbook was a few years back.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Okay, good, thank you so much because that’s what we’re going to talk about. I want to talk about what people can eat in order to be able to heal their disease. I mean we’re looking at people are dealing with autoimmune conditions. That’s an epidemic heart disease epidemic. We got cancer epidemic, all of these things that people are dealing with. And it’s these foundational pieces that are so key. So looking first at what people are currently eating, You know, we’re at the fast food epidemic component. What are you seeing? I mean, why are people doing this? I mean, why is it such an addiction for people to eat this? These kind of foods.

Joel Fuhrman, MD

Exactly. And that’s what I’m suggesting. What you’re getting at here is that heart attacks and strokes the leading cause of death in the modern world of people for adults doesn’t have to happen. It’s a result of what people put in their mouth. You know, 90% of cancers do not have to have. And it all, it’s the result. Of course, mostly what we put in our mouth as well as exposure to poisons and chemicals, but these things are not the natural consequence of aging. They’re not predominantly genetic. There we are, genes are molded and change based on how we treat them and what we eat and that the American diet has evolved to a very disease lifespan shortening diet. And people get addicted to that diet. 

They know they should eat vegetables and beans and mushrooms and onions, whatever scallions, but they can’t eat that stuff there because their taste buds have been hijacked and their desire for excess calories has turned has turned them into a person can’t survive feel okay in a lower amount of the right amount of calories. So why is this biology of why is a person desire in calories to shorten their lifespan? Why do they have to eat these large amounts of food? And I’m saying that I’m inherent in this. In a big portion of my work in my research I published in The sign of literature, has to do with the biology of food addiction. And if we could talk about that, just for a minute to let people know that the American diet is ubiquitously micro nutrient deficient, they’re not getting sufficient nutrients that humans are supposed to have. That’s the first thing. When your diet is micro nutrient deficient, you build up more metabolic wastes like reactive oxygen species and advanced location and products and pneumonia and little fusion and all types of, you know, formaldehyde. You build up more metabolic waste products when your diet is nutritionally deficient. So what I’m saying, what I’m saying right now is that when people don’t eat sufficient phytochemicals and antioxidants, your body builds up more of these waste products and the waste products cause symptoms and they cause these symptoms when you’re not eating and digesting anymore because your body goes into a healing and detoxification mode when it’s not eating and digesting food. And those symptoms that that our detox symptoms like that cause fatigue shakiness, agitation, headache, stomach fluttering, you know, occur when people’s finished digesting a meal three or four hours later and they start to feel agitated and uncomfortable and they have to eat again because it makes them feel better there too uncomfortable to not eat. 

And what I’m saying, it’s not hunger. They’re overeating now in response to their diet, which is insufficiently nutritious is not their diet, which is a diet that’s insufficient nutritious for them. They’re not getting their nutritional needs met. They build up too much metabolic wastes and then they have to overeat to fend off the withdrawal symptoms they get from that way of eating. And so they’ve completely disconnected their instinctual drive for hunger and they have this new type of hunger that I call toxic hunger. And people, they have to go from one eating occasion to another. It’s like filling your car with gasoline and instead of driving it to you in your empty you’re driving around the block a few times and try to fill up the tank again. So people didn’t burn off the calories of what they ate there. Still the glycogen stores are still full and they’re eating again already because they don’t like the way they feel. 

And I’m saying that once we achieve a high degree of micronutrient adequacy, then your body is able to rid its backlog of metabolic waste. And as you know, for your profession and your work there. The two types of wastes are the endogenous waste the body produces from its own metabolism and the exogenous wastes that are that are from the environment. So we have some mixture of exogenous means from the external environment. You know, chemicals, pesticides, smoke, mold, whatever is we’re exposed to. And then the endogenous waste produced by our own body as their own factory produces its own waste. And they get intermingled. This degree of these waste get intermingled and it requires a high degree of nutritional excellence for the body to deal with this toxic load. And it could take a person months until they get rid of this. You could say toxic hunger and they lose those sensations and then they eat healthfully enough, they get rid of their, they lower the level of wastes and now they don’t feel hungry after a meal. They can go 345 hours and not feeling weak or fatigue and stomach cramping or headache. They feel nothing until the package in stores get depleted from that meal. And then people get a sensation what I call true hunger which is felt right here in the part of your upper part of your check the lower part of your neck, right in this area. It’s not that hard to deal with. It’s pleasurable. It makes food taste better like if I’m coming home from work in the car and I get hungry and a friend calls me up on the phone and say, hey you want to play tennis is a court open. And I’ll say, okay, let’s go play tennis. I don’t care about the hunger. I just rather play tennis, I’ll go get hungry. And after I have some fun and go back and then it’s no big deal. So, but true hunger does not exist to put fat on the body. It only exists to maintain lean body mass because you don’t get so there’s no inst sexual drive to eat to gain fat. What I’m saying is that a person is overweight, then they had to have eaten outside of the demands of true hunger either because of recreational eating or because of these withdrawal symptoms. I’m talking about that people think makes them hungry. So most people think they keep their energy up gotta because they feel fatigued. They gotta eat before they go to the gym. 

They gotta eat when they are not gonna be around a meal to take food and I’m gonna feel white better. So they don’t understand that fatigue is not a symptom of hunger and people who are healthy don’t feel fatigued and they don’t eat, they just feel hungry. I might have felt a little fatigue and I walked five miles this morning, I came back and just rested a little bit. I wasn’t, I wasn’t, I was fatigued and I felt okay once I swam in the pool, I relaxed in the whirlpool and I felt, I was, I got my energy back a little fatigue from walking for five miles up here. But I wasn’t, it’s not hungry. I wasn’t even hungry then after walking five miles I think, you know. But the point is that we’re trying to get people’s nutrition so perfect so that they can get in touch instinctually with the true caloric drive. 

And then the amount of food they desire is the amount of body requires no extra. And mixed into that cauldron of causes. Is this idea of foods and rapidly absorbed calories. Because when we’re taking in, for example,  sugar, honey, maple syrup, and of course the worst culprit, white flour products, bread, bagels, pasta, donuts, cookies and pretzels, You know, we’re talking about people want to eat, they’re addicted to these things because those biologically flood into the bloodstream as glucose rush. And what I’m saying right now is a piece of bread or a bagel is the same as eating a candy, the same as eating candy and sugar sugar cube. It’s the same thing in the bloodstream differential. And they’re not really behaving like a food, those substances behave like a drug because they rushed into the bloodstream. So wrap rapidly more rapidly than food could possibly achieve that they’re able to stimulate dopamine centers in the brain and make you dopamine insensitive affecting the brain areas where narcotics and opiates are stimulated and after a while you’re not feeling comfortable unless you overly you’re overly stimulated dopamine. So you need this rush of the bloodstream. So I’m saying that people consider fast food foods, they buy in a fast food restaurant. And food’s coming out of bags and plastic bags with, you know, chemical and processed ingredients. It’s hyper palatable and hyper flavored. It contains lights of chemicals, but it’s also food that’s rapidly absorbed no fiber rapidly absorbed. And I’m saying right now and and by the way, oils are rapidly absorbed calorie as well. And people in America get almost all their fat from processed oils or from animal fats. And good health involves getting our fats from nuts and seeds, avocados and whole foods that who’s fat calories are absorbed slowly into the bloodstream. So the slow absorption of calories enables the body to preferentially burn it for energy rather than turning on fat storage. And also because it burns slowly for energy. 

The body doesn’t get hungry for a long time and you’re not inducing overeating behavior, whereas the oil calories or the animal fat calories spike into the bloodstream rapidly. And also the combination of sugar and oil gives you such a caloric bullets that the dope that you’re getting a high that you don’t, that you’re getting a stimulation of the brain that can then cause increased risk of diabetes dementia and certainly overeating behaviors because you’re left feeling wasted like a coming off of heroin from these highs of repeated expressive color clothes. So this combination of human biology with food that’s been designed by food sciences to hope the people have people unable to control their appetite. And let’s just let me just say this clearly there’s no such thing as a healthy overweight person that fat cells get a poor blood supply. They spew out inflammatory compounds. They enhance instant, resist, they promote angiogenesis which promotes cancer cells to replicate. They raise estrogen production, increasing risk of breast and prostate cancer. And they age you rapidly destroying your telomeres and your stem cells and your stem cells. You have no immune function later in life so,

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

And tell me a little bit about because you also have the hypothalamus connection as well. Because the hypothalamus continually will kind of measure and see the nutrients content in the blood. And if the nutrient content is poor then it will continue to say I need nutrition, I need food and then you have hunger again. And then also you have all these chemicals that create this regulation and that signaling. So even though you may have all the calories, you are then continually signaling that you need something and driving that process even more.

Joel Fuhrman, MD

That’s right. It’s comp because you have these endocrine disruptors and plastic compounds and chemicals that affect everything negatively. But also like you said there, there’s an app a stat in the hypothalamus and it’s controlled by nutrients. But the most effective nutrient to lower your appetite or to control your hypothalamus. Apa stat is called beauty rate and Beauty. It is a short change fatty acid produced by bacterial action on fiber and resistant starch in the gut. So when you get your fiber from, when you get your carbohydrate calories from rice and potato and bread, you’re not getting a really you’re not getting the same amount of resistance starch and slowly digestible carbohydrates and fibers that you would have gotten. Had you eating some something like a bean or a lentil or chickpea beans have the highest amount of slowly digestible carbohydrate resistant starch and fiber in the if we scored carbohydrates and a hierarchal scale of quality of course white rice and white bread and sugar. 

And those things of course are completely off the charts and they have no resistance starch and no thing that slows digestion. But in any case when you have, when you eat these resistant starches and fibers it forms a prebiotic of fuel to grow healthy bacteria and the healthy bacteria now can hear and live on the lining of the villa. And when you eat foods like that cause the growth of the healthiest bacteria lining. And those four foods are let’s say I can use to raw foods and to cook foods for example the two raw foods might be Raw green vegetables including lettuce and raw green cruciferous lettuce is a rich source of soulful queen of als which is a primary fuel for the growth of healthy bacteria. People think lettuce is just plain lettuce. What’s in lettuce? Yeah, but you should eat some lettuce, it’s really super healthy for you, you know? So when you put some arugula or bok choy or mustard greens or cabbage and other cruciferous with it and you have a tremendous power to improve the immune function and the microbiome. Because as you probably know, the arrow hydrocarbon receptor fuels the production and health of the intra epithelial lymphocytes that line the digestive tract. 

That’s where our defenders of the castle, that’s where primary immune function occurs on our gut, right? The gut associated lymphoid tissue is fueled by these green. I always say these two statements. I say number one, if you don’t like green vegetables, you better live close to a hospital because we’re a green vegetable dependent animal. I also say half of what we eat feeds our needs and the other half feeds the needs of our doctors. But okay, getting back to these four foods again, enough of those jokes. But getting back to these four foods, you have the raw vegetables and you have onions and scan Italians which have those incredible beneficial effects and all the organic sulfide compounds. And then you have the cooked mushrooms, beans and lentils and things that also have these beneficial effects at promoting healthy microbiome and then what you have is what scientists call the second meal effect. Second it means that you’ve got such an adherent and substantial biofilm covering the billy that when you eat a mango or some oatmeal it slows the absorption of glucose through the wall, the gut easing, lowering the glycemic load of that meal because you didn’t just eat those foods that the meal with the mango because you had those foods the day before, the day before that because you’re a regular consumer of these foods that make for such a healthy microbiome and produced these short chain fatty acids that turned down the hypothalamus that that reduce the apa stat but you also slowly absorption of glucose in the blood at the same time which then reduces the appetite as well. So a lot of complicated interactions going on here and when you start to use nuts and seeds as your source of fat calories. 

Those sterols and stan hall’s those fibers in the nuts and seeds bind fat like a magnet and suck fat out of the bloodstream into the digestive track and the movement of fat in the other direction from the bloodstream into the digestive track has an effect to it to attract more oxidative oxidative fats like like oxidized LDL and leaving you know and saturated fats. So bad fats come out so you increase stool fat but the fact that you put in the toilet bowl is not the fact that was present in nuts and seeds. It was some negative fats that came from the bloodstream out while healthier fats went in a lot of factors that are going on here creating a certain type of body when you eat foods that are the human species does best with so to speak.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

It’s almost like you know the soap I mean you use fat to be able to dissolve fat and get rid of fat that you don’t want. I mean and also you have that power of osmosis. You know where you’re you’re you’re you’re pulling bad things you know from from higher concentration to lower concentration.

Joel Fuhrman, MD

That’s right. See people aren’t aware that things move in both directions to the gut from the inside the gut into the body and into the body out to the gut to they moved both directions.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Yeah. Yeah. And I love how you’re talking about the bacteria because people don’t recognize the importance of you have the biodome about the biodome. You know, which is kind of the all the bacteria that the civilization of bacteria there and you choose what kind of bio dome that you have based upon the food that you’re eating because different type of bacteria like to eat different types of food. So if you eat fast food then you are gonna get garbage bacteria. If you eat food that is wrong and nutritious, you’re gonna get the bacteria that comes along that like to eat those type of fibers and those are the health promoting one’s

Joel Fuhrman, MD

Precisely. That’s right that people say you know years ago we used to think let’s take pills of probiotics like acidophilus and diffidence and dairy products. And we find that the healthiest microbiome comes from a wide variety of colorful plants with lots of different types of polyphony. Als and bio flavanoids produce the healthiest variety of micronutrients. And interestingly because the 36 nutrients That the government keeps record up is just a mere fraction of the thousands of phytochemicals that are in plants. And the thousands of phytochemicals that scientists have identified are the mere tip of the iceberg over the probably 10,000 or 50,000 nutrients that are in natural foods that we don’t even know about. And the healthier the soil and the more we’re using regenerative organic agriculture where you have insects and bacteria and worms and back natural decay of natural material like leaves and you know in in the soil the more you have a richer nutrient structure, structure and symphony in that food itself. So supporting organic agriculture and appreciate the beauty and wonder of food. It’s kind of good for the human soul because you know how people will say oh I couldn’t eat that way. 

I could eat that healthy because I’d rather shoot me right now just kill me right now. I’d rather die if I have to eat so healthily you know they don’t appreciate their taste buds have been dead and they don’t have the taste muscle to appreciate natural foods, they don’t have the know how they don’t have the why and they don’t have this beautiful relationship that with food where you’re grateful for and appreciate the miraculous beauty in in bak choy and an apricot that makes you revel in the fact that you’re eating natural foods that are also good for the body and they taste good and you’re so appreciative of the of it puts you in a better relationship with the natural world and I think better for the human soul itself to the fast food mentality leads to a more, you could say a person who’s been tricked and move towards going for instant gratification and immediate fulfillment. Narcissistic fulfillment because their addictions taken to an extreme and they are people who are food addicts to an extreme too, but they’re like drug addicts. So whether they’re an alcoholic or you’re in a cocaine addict or you’re a junk food eater, then you’re not as good as a parent or a community member, you’re not as thinking of, you’re not as caring and feeling your own immediate needs for instant gratification start to overwhelm and preoccupy the brain. And so many of Americans are preoccupied with this quick level of dis Tomic and addictive thinking, they don’t, they don’t really enjoy life, they’re not passionate about the world, they’re just really, you know, living to make money so they can buy been out alcohol or fast foods or or the most richest, most restaurant meal they could get or or just do something like and you learn that as a child to that, you know, you reward your kids with Halloween and birthday cake and cupcakes and ice cream. They move on to alcohol and harder drugs in high school and college and then they move back, you know, and when people are alcoholics, they moved back to sugar addiction or broken necks and move back to, we’re just, and I’m saying it affects your person affects the people’s personality, their degree of aggressive aggression, anger, lack of appreciation of their own life. 

They’re not the same humans they could have been and it affects their thinking process. So I never retreat in san Diego where we keep people here 2 to 3 months with food addiction, we change their food preferences and we teach them how to make the food taste great, but we also deal with how they see the world in a way that’s more consistent with their own purpose. And it helped and because if you were worried about how other people thinking of you and you’re worried about and you still have these drives to you know, to to kind of impress other people and you can’t you’re like gonna look a little dip different when you eat so healthily and so your drive can’t be to like go after like the approval of others, it has to be that you’re inherently have more emotional connection with the world around you and you care more for humanity, the world, the great grateful for. So it’s a different way of seeing the world that helps people be more content and more satisfied with eating a natural based diet with so many healthy foods in it.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

And what people don’t realize is the the neural development or the richness of neural neural development is directly connected to the diversity of nutrients that you’re eating so by eating that diverse type of food. Like we talked about the you have than a richer spectrum of bacteria of healthy bacteria in your gut. And they see that people that have a a deeper wider variety they in themselves are healthier. But also that comes in along with your brain the function, the brain, your ability, your spectrum of moods, you know, to be able to appreciate the more subtle things. Rather like you’re talking about just the dopamine highs the dopamine fixes that that can adults, your senses dulled your ability than to to have emotions, connections and feelings. And then now you’re becoming more and more isolated and you’re you’re you can’t really connect with people in this the same way and feel, you know what what what feelings are and have that rich social life that that were meant to have because we’re and then we have depression, anxiety and all that that comes along with that

Joel Fuhrman, MD

Absolutely. I don’t think people really too many people recognize this. We’re talking about right now because we’re saying that people recognize that eating unhealthily and being addicted to fast food causes people to gain weight and become diabetic. Them overweight become hard to. They see that part, but they don’t see how the food choices affects their personality, their interaction with others, their emotions, their intelligence and their and their desires. They don’t really see, they don’t understand that when you’re having a negative influence on the body, you’re simultaneously have a negative influence on the brain and that we were developing a nation of people that can’t even think logically and weigh evidence and they’re and they’re easily angered and and and agitated and there’s become more narcissistic consumed with their own immediate gratification. And and they don’t, people don’t see the relationship of food and I wrote this book, fast food genocide to help you know, explain this relationship as people get hooked on this diet and affects them negatively and track it all through history. 

Even go back to the civil war where people were, you know, the Eating poorly and it made them more aggressive and more violence and telegraph, for example is nice and efficiency based on the southern diet back in the 19 in the 1850s where people eating mostly corn molasses, you know, sugar and pork and they weren’t getting enough phyto nutrients enough nice in them. And we get the causes a redneck. That’s why the original red term redneck but also forces homicidal suicidal anger and violence. And the people were put in prisons for paella and they thought it was some genetic defect in people’s brains. But it wasn’t a problem with their diet. And we’re seeing that same thing today how diet affects people’s attitude and the way they behave. And so it’s really critical here for us to emphasize that we can be happier and healthier as we live longer and eat better.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

So the the key, I mean, and fast food genocide. And it’s important people to read that to understand their habits and understand the issue that we’re dealing with. And then as a follow up, you know, your most recent book then Eat for Life is and to understand now we’re shifting away from the bad behavior, shifting away from the things that are causing trouble. But now we we want to take that next step. We want to live, we want to increase longevity. We want to have that optimum vibrant health. And so we don’t we don’t want to be fighting disease. We want to enhance health. But by doing that, we then become disease resistant.

Joel Fuhrman, MD

Exactly. And there’s two things going on here when I’m saying that the same diet style and the same dietary portfolio that’s been shown in the scientific literature to slow aging and promote longevity and have the most anti cancer potential also is most effective when you’re trying to intervene therapeutically to reverse a disease like asthma or like multiple sclerosis or like or even cancer for example. So it’s not like so it helps people in my experience, which I wrote in the book of all these disease cases where they were able to reverse their diseases occurred from the same diet that I’m eating and I’m giving people to lose weight and be healthy is also effective therapeutically. And so the other and the other issue here is that the place to start when people have cravings and food addictions because most people listening to this will say, you know that sounds really good and logical and scientific, but it’s not for me because I couldn’t do that and I couldn’t eat that healthfully. 

You know, they think they can’t do it, it’s not for them. They have all these excuses and rationalizations like the primitive brain takes over. But the point I’m making is the place to start is not by thinking of the first thing you have to give up but what you have to eat to get these nutrients into your body. Like like for example, one of my monsters is the salad is the main dish where I want people at least once a day have a big salad, not like a six inch salad bowl but a full nine inch salad and you’re having like half lettuce and half other greens like bok choi and arugula and watercress and sprouts and red onion or scallion and you know a dressing made of nuts and seeds, some cooked mushrooms, whatever it may be. A bowl of vegetable, bean soup and a piece of fruit for dessert. 

So your lunches that major meal a day, we start by getting nutrients into the body and the nutrient absorption is enhanced or affected by how well the person choose the salad by the way because the enzymes that for example there’s an enzyme called My Righteousness in the cell wall of cruciferous vegetables that’s heat sensitive. So if you ate the cabbage or the bok choy or the brussels, broccoli and you overcooked it, you would deactivate the Morosini. Whereas if you waited a little undercooked or raw, the Morosini is going to make functions an enzyme to make the anticancer ice a file Saya nights in your mouth as you’re chewing the vegetable. I’m saying the most powerful anti cancer elements are formed in the mouth as you’re chewing it’s not in the food before you broke off the little packets housing the enzyme because you’re catalyzing the enzyme catalyzing the reaction and making these things in the mouth as you chew and in proportion to how well you chew it, you chew it better you for more anticancer substances and when you actually mix it with the bacteria between them out in the teeth and the gums and the saliva, it actually forms more beneficial compounds like nitric oxide and beneficial bacteria for the gut. So the so there’s a whole idea of this concept that of how to make a salad and how to make a great salad dressing and we’re using, the salad dressing is super healthy to the salad dressing might be made out of a concentrated tomato sauce with roasted garlic with almonds and hemp seeds and black fig vinegar. Or maybe, you know, kumquats and our and lemon and blood, orange vinegar and sesame seeds and cashews. 

It might be. But the dressings themselves are healthy and a little bit of fat from the nuts and seeds enables people to also absorb 20 to 50 times as much of the carotenoids and phytochemicals and the greens that you’re chewing. So the whole thing is learning how to eat right and you’re eating larger amounts of food, not smaller amounts of food because the food has a lower caloric density to begin with. So it’s the person, the place to start and changing the taste buds, changing food preferences and be able to get in touch with feeling comfortable eating less amount of calories is eating larger portions of healthy food and really eating and putting them together the right dietary portfolio together so you start to get change the nutritional structure of cells

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

And a couple of things. I mean as you’re chewing longer because you have a huge amount of absorbed in your blood passes by your mouth hole continually. So you have a direct access into the bloodstream. Some of the nutrients to get into your bloodstream immediately, you know without having to go through the gut. And then also you are then by taking time and being more meditative and and and doing the chewing then the the hypothalamus that we talked about is unable to then recognize to see we are we have not reached the level of nutrients that we need and so now we can send I’m full signal rather than us just kind of scarfing down and the hypothalamus has no idea what’s going on. And all of a sudden we’ve eaten this massive amount of food and we were full way before we should have been.

Joel Fuhrman, MD

It’s utterly amazing. I see it every day because I have you know, I have a place where people who are overweight and food addicted coming to stay here and they have people who they drop, you know £30 the first month if they’re an overweight male and £20 the second month, you know, or something like that. And they weren’t comfortable. They had to eat between 507,000 calories before they came in and now they’re being large minded suit but that they’re satisfied And have enough food and feel satisfied with 1400-700 calories. They’re satisfied they don’t have to be eating 3000 to 4000 calories. They feel like they have enough food when their nutrient needs are so well met. And we talk about the nutrient density of your diet to enable you to have nutrient density of your body’s tissues. And as you enhance the nutrient concentration of your diet and you lose weight, you’re concentrating those nutrients in the smaller vat of body mass. So you just keep building the nutrient density of your tissues. 

And you can measure that. You know, you can measure that with a scanner of the hand even to see the skin carotenoid score and we’re building up the nutrient density of the tissues and the nutrient density of the tissues get high enough, they stop craving and wanting to overeat calories because they meet nutrient fulfillment. And it’s a really it works. But of course you and I know this is a relatively small number of people that really eat this healthfully. But it’s a growing number of people in society. And the American college of lifestyle medicine using food as a medicine has grown from when I was a founding member for like 6 to 10 people, it now has thousands and thousands of doctors on board. 

So there’s many, even though it’s relatively small, there’s still many more people and many more individuals and even prefer health professionals doing this otherwise you wouldn’t see you know baby kale and bok choy in the in the supermarkets and sprouts wouldn’t sell and mushrooms, nobody would buy in the mushrooms and nobody you see that these things are available in the marketplace today. You know you can say frozen wild blueberries are available in the marketplace. You know, we didn’t see these things in years ago, so some people must have learned that these things are good for us and put them in the stores that we could buy them. 

And I’m thinking we have this unprecedented opportunity in human history to enable us to have these high nutrient disease protective foods and incorporate in their diet in the in our diet that our ancestors didn’t have the opportunity and we can do a dietary portfolio better than the blue zones and live longer than people than so, even though we have the people moving in this fast food mentality and so many overweight, sickly people, we still have a growth sector where more people are also growing healthier and we just have to spread that sector to encompass more people and it’s difficult for people, but they once they get enough exposure with like what we’re doing today, we can encourage more people to join us on this. The passion we have for excellent nutrition

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

And with, I mean so in the blue zones, I mean they’re you have the people that live the longest in their habits and things that they they’re doing, the dietary, their connections and all these different things that are taking place. But we with the research we’re doing now and I know in your latest book it for life you have then delineated research that then shows that if you do like this because we’re becoming more and more specific and more and more conscientious as to what these habits are that are then able to to make that you know to battle cancer or to battle autoimmune condition. So can you give a little bit of some examples or some studies that are out there? So people can really understand that this is just not kind of nice to do. And yes, that’s healthy. But this is scientifically researched and published that. And you have written that in your book that if you follow these habits and do this, these are the likely outcomes.

Joel Fuhrman, MD

Exactly. So you said a lot there. But let me just make a few comments. That’s right. The blue zones are areas of the world where people may be living eight years longer, 10 years longer than the average American. And we can because they culturally to diet from those areas and have food availability that’s better than what Americans eat. But we can do better than that. And my experiences, we can push the envelope of the longevity. 2025 years longer than the average American, not 10 years, not eight years longer because we know much more about the most the foods that make for maximum anticancer benefits. We know much more than the blue zone people just eating from for luck. So and and also here we’re talking about this idea that when we eat these foods that are having a wider variety of plant material than than the blue zones including these. I call them G bombs bombs are just six foods that work synergistically and each have such protective effects. 

Like for example the G bombs, G. B. O. M. B. S. Stands for greens, beans, onions, mushrooms, berries and seeds. But the seeds for example like flax seeds and chia seeds Have been shown in studies to read following women who have breast cancer for 10 years. People who had a third of a milligram of lignin from seeds in their diet, reduce their death over the 10 year period by 71%. Compared to women not having seen any seeds in their diet, 71% reduction just from that one food. And they started after they had cancer. I mean we really supposed to eat these foods healthier before you get sick, they have a beneficial effect. But even when they just started so late night, they still had an effect to reduce deaths by 71%. We can look at any one of the G bomb foods individually and like 50 to 88% reduction in cancer deaths for people eating onions and scallions regularly. That’s different cancers but that’s just just from that one change. They didn’t also eat the greens and the onions and the mushrooms and berries and mushrooms. So 64% reduction of breast cancer instance and women eating 10 g of mushrooms a day versus none. So we’re talking about putting the dietary portfolio together to have a much more level of synergy that the blue zones are not accomplishing and haven’t accomplished to give people this opportunity. And I gave examples in my book, as you’re mentioning that people like so many cases of people able to get well from multiple sclerosis, let’s say reverse their asthma. Get well from advanced heart disease and of course recover from certain cancers as well. I have, for example, I gave the story of a woman named pam who had metastatic ovarian cancer with four liters of fluid extracted from her collapsed lung in 1997 and she was given about three months to live and she’s alive and healthy today. You know, she’s still alive today.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

And what did she do? I mean, what were some of the, I mean obviously we’ve kind of outlined, but do you remember kind of the specifics as to what she did to achieve this?

Joel Fuhrman, MD

Yes. You know, I coined that term, a neutral terrain diet to describe the dietary style that I idealize to maximize human longevity, but with these people that have, let’s say more serious illnesses because their level of nutrients may be low at the beginning, I might be giving them juicing of like a one third greens and one third carat and one third lettuce, you know lettuce, carrot and beet and green cruciferous. I might have that juice today and also might you know give them extra supplementation with you know with tumeric and E. G. C. G. And mushroom extracts. But I’m giving them a you know the salad , sometimes even a salad smoothie but usually they’re just chewing the salad and the mushrooms and the onions, the soups, the vegetable, bean soups, the raw vegetables with a dip before dinner. 

The walked vegetable mix for dinner with different types of mushrooms. And I’m saying that we try to use the shiitake mushrooms with other mushrooms. Even if they’re a little expensive, you don’t need to eat a lot of them. And but in putting a little bit of chanterelle or lion’s mane or trumpet or oyster or you know, other types of mushrooms mixed in is helpful to and really is more you could say consistent with the way human humans been designed because we’re meant to be eating foods in the forest and in the jungle. And there’s this is hundreds of varieties of mushrooms we would eat in a natural environment and we’re eating a lot of different variety of different greens including things we grow like sprouts and microgreens. You know, so the diet might be you know berries and oats and seeds in the morning with a plant milk and then the salad. So we’re trying to give them a diet that’s maybe supplemented with some extra rich nutrients but also eating the primary basis of food we want them to eat as well.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

And so with cancer, I mean by shifting into that direction, bringing in more nutrients. You know what happens in the body? I mean what is your philosophy or I mean I wouldn’t say philosophy, what is your view on what cancer is? And by shifting what happens in the body that resolves the cancer?

Joel Fuhrman, MD

Right. I mean that’s so we’re saying that the body has an immune system that can recognize abnormal cells before they even get cancerous or cancerous cells and attack them and cause them to undergo apoptosis or death. And with a healthy immune system, the body can’t get in its immune system can’t get into a major mass of cells. And that’s why you know a major that’s why sometimes having surgery or having even chemotherapy in in pam’s case she had chemotherapy. But chemotherapy doesn’t kill all the cancer cells. Some stray cells escape. And the stray cells that escaped the chemo are the ones that grow back and kill people five years later and are now resistant to cancer. Chemotherapeutic agents because they escaped the chemotherapy agents to begin with. 

So that’s the way when we when the major load of cancer has been removed it’s the stray cells that are still surviving that are really healthy and strong immune system can now seek out and destroy and enable the body to make long term recoveries from these diseases like metastatic breast cancer when they you know were and and and by the way the run of the mill you could say estrogen positive postmenopausal breast cancer. Chemotherapy doesn’t even work. It doesn’t people don’t get much like any life extension for that. It has just as much harm as it is. 

It’s almost just you know I’m not saying it’s not good to take out the mass but then nutrition is dealing can deal better with a stray remaining cells that may be surviving. Then chemo can in certain cases but some types of cancers where they’re very aggressive and replicating very rapidly like acute leukemias or premenopausal aggressive breast cancers or ovarian cancer. Then chemotherapy can be beneficial because chemo attacks the cells that are rapidly unraveling their D. N. A. And replicating very rapidly with a more slowly growing cancer like prostate cancer and breast cancer. Chemo doesn’t have effect to kill off those cells very effectively anyway. So we so the treatment is but in any case whether you’re using chemo or not. The nutritional excellence becomes a very important adjunct as well as some of the adjunctive therapies you’re aware of I’m sure.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

And this is then to make the healthy cells more resilient and then also to fuel the immune system. So that has the energy and the nutrients that they need in order to be able more intelligently than tart identify and target. Then straight cancer cells that later on can then create a tumor

Joel Fuhrman, MD

That’s correct. And we’re saying that the immune system has that ability when it’s fueled by the right type of foods. Like for example there are antigen binding elections and undergo these mushroom aid which adhere to abnormal cell surfaces that are where cells are becoming abnormal. Their surface of the cell starts to become recognizable. And some of these food ingredients like mushrooms are able to adhere to those cells. So the natural killer t cells can then recognize that cell to be attacked and removed. So there’s this interaction between food food phytochemicals and the function and structure of the immune system. The ability the immune system. What’s fascinating is like there’s an ERG Athenian receptor on cells now is mostly found in mushrooms but our cell surfaces have the ergo Athenian receptors on them. It’s like, wow we have a receptor for a substance found in mushrooms are built into our biology. That’s so interesting.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

It’s just fascinating to see then how we how we evolve together. I mean how we coexist and that you can’t separate man from food that that is grown and but they interact and how we need each other to to continue thriving

Joel Fuhrman, MD

Right. And we’ve completely divorced ourselves from this because how many people do you know that growing their own food and trying to use compost and natural leaves and without pesticides and grow and grow their own food. And by the way around world during world war two the government was trying to get people to trying to ship food overseas To support the soldiers and people were encouraged to have their own gardens, they call them victory gardens. And more than 40% of the food consumed in America was food grown by individuals in their own gardens. And now you know so we’re talking about this idea of healthy living makes us also closer to the soil to nature and this desire to protect the natural world and keep it clean and even grow some of our own food and feel the contact with the soil and the connectedness we feel with nature when we produce a healthy soil and try to grow some of our own food.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Yeah. And just interacting with that soil and interact with the nutrients the bacteria and and then you increase the diversity of bacteria and immune boosting substances. You know just by doing that in itself.

Joel Fuhrman, MD

That’s right. The soil is teeming with healthy bacteria. Yeah exactly. And so we people have become so sanitized and divorced they can just eat a hot dog and eat some ice cream and some french fries and they can drink a soda and how can they put a soda in their body chemicals. I mean, you know in any case some they result of that as a sickly nation, right? A nation of six support the suffering people that does have to be and you know using science and the beauty that nature has in our relationship with these phyto nutrients in natural foods. 

We can have people live with much joy and no fear because who wants to be afraid of having a heart attack or be constantly going to doctors and have being radiated and and have being screened for diseases and worrying about you’re gonna have a heart attack or having to get cancer and having your breasts and your having tubes put in the office of the body and having scanned and checked and measured in blood testing up there always were just becoming medical. So medical dependent instead of just living our life with joy and confidence and no fear when you know that we’re gonna be able to spend their time enjoying life and being happy and being physically active and having your full mental function and your full creativity till your full till death so you can fully enjoy your life. It’s really worth it.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Yeah. And that’s what you’re describing is the American death ritual. You know where we we start we eat poorly and then we start with one medication followed by next medication and it just start to gradually you start to to die faster and faster and now we have to do stronger interventions you know which becomes operations, you put tubes in it and cut this out cut that out and and and then all of a sudden we can’t I mean our bodies are hardy and they can compensate for a lot that it gets to a point where I just can’t do it anymore.

Joel Fuhrman, MD

Yeah and what kind of life is that? How is that fun to abuse your body and then be tortured by the medical profession? I say I don’t even go to doctors. I don’t even go to myself. Another stupid joke. Don’t forget laughing makes you live longer by the way even if the joke is stupid it’s still you know just laughing and smiling is good for you.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

I love it. Before we close. I wanted also just to touch a little bit you talked about M. S. And autumn unity what is your view there And obviously good nutrition is good nutrition and it will address all of these different aspects but in regard part of autoimmunity. I mean what is it in your point that is driving the factor of autoimmunity. And can you just give a case example of somebody in a bad situation that you I know you wrote a lot of examples in your book so people also there can get a feeling of what can truly be done.

Joel Fuhrman, MD

Sure and we’re saying here that auto immunity is when your own immune system is attacking your own cells and causing joint pain or bleeding in the digestive track, or inflaming the lining of your lungs or your blood vessels. It’s causing or devouring your own nerves or defining your kidney, right? So it’s the self destruction of the body. Why is the body’s immune system attacking itself? There’s a defect in immune function, particularly the t suppressor cells, but there’s also a defect in the triggering effect of abnormal tissue, causing inflammation that attracts the immune cells to attack it. I mean, in the book that most medical students read Robinson Coltrane in the pathological pathological basis of disease, It discusses right there that the inflammatory responses in the process of repair and inflammation serves to destroy wall off, attempting to remove the injurious agents and try as much as possible to try to heal and reconstitute damaged tissue. 

And I’m saying that the symptoms of an asthmatic, they trying to suppress that with steroids, but they don’t realize the lung doesn’t doesn’t have any lung tissue, is just trying to get out waste, just trying to throw out the mucus and get rid of the waste. It’s just trying to protect its own cells and causing you not to breathe, but that’s, you know, but it’s so it’s just really we’re getting back to here is good nutrition and getting off these medications that suppress elimination. So it might be slowly weaning off the beta agonists and an asthmatic and putting them on and having them on being on the steroids. And as they eat healthy, you’re getting them off the steroids and right as we’re getting their nutritional good and trying to curtail the use of steroids at that point, we might want to put them on a fast because then fasting, we might lower the auto of the immune attack. It’ll lower the hyper immune activity immediately and make them breathe better and then we can act that they won’t need medication anymore. They’re free of asthma. But I can give you a great example of a person who had lupus and she was on the national renal transplant list with a creatinine of 4.2 instead of transplanting her kidney. She was in, you know, a teenager, I you know, begged her when pleaded with her parents to try eating so healthfully and she got rid of the lupus and her creatinine came back to normal 2.8, you know, just incredibly went from a person with almost no kidney function back to normal again because she was young enough and healthy. 

I guess she was able to make a complete recovery, I guess she wasn’t so bad. The she wasn’t so many years of self of being medicated with so much bad renal function to the point I interceded, it was able still to reverse itself and so many people with, as I mentioned, multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis when and I have, for example, a woman with psoriatic arthritis almost in bed for most of her life on medications, not being able to even cure her, who now now goes to one of our getaways and climbs the mountain with us and put their hands up and says, look at me, I’m a middle miracle. I’m saying you’re not a miracle. 

This is just the person you were meant to be, that you should be when you start eating so helpfully. So a lot of people get rid of their psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis too. It’s and that’s the exciting part of why we become doctors because we revel and get so much pleasure in people’s rejoiced when they rejoiced and we rejoice with them when they were able to conquer disease. Whereas conventional doctors are more prone to burnout suicide. Poor health because they just watch people deteriorate while they jump where they just prescribe more medication and more medication, giving people more poisonous substances on top of their poisonous diet always lead to a negative outcome eventually, You know, So we’re trying to peel back the onion and go the other way.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Yeah, these are what we considered a medical impossibility because medically, you know, the kidneys can’t heal like that. And medically, joints can’t heal like that, but nutritionally Now we’re not operating under the medical paradigm, we’re operating under true physiological functions that are supported by good news. attrition. So, Dr. Fuhrman, it has been such a pleasure. You’re always such a wealth of knowledge and I so appreciate the amount of lives that you’re changing with, you know, physically with your programs and then also all the education that you bring forth. So thank you so much,

Joel Fuhrman, MD

My pleasure. Good luck to you, of course, and all your listeners.