Fast Food Genocide: The Shocking Truth About What’s Really on Your Plate

Introduction to Long-Term Weight Loss 0:00

My experience over the years is that people who lose the 100 pounds, the 50 pounds, the 150 pounds, and keep it off for the rest of their life are people who learned the information, became, studied the information, became knowledgeable, and then jumped into it full blast and did it all the way because that kept them, because doing it makes you feel so good. and you feel satisfied, and you lose the desire, the longer you're away from those dangerous foods and self-destructive foods, the less you think of them, the less you desire them, and the less you actually like them when you have them again, the longer you've stayed away from them for a long enough period of time.

So I'm at the point in my life where I say the chance of recidivism and the chance of really having long-term great success is enhanced when to the higher percent you adopt the healthy eating. So the cheat diet and doing it 90% or 80% doesn't give us effective results as doing it 100%. This is Doctor Talks, real talk from real doctors on the issues that matter to you most. Welcome to Vitality Made Simple. This is the podcast that equips you to feel better, look better, and to enjoy better relationships.

Well, folks, this podcast is going to help you have better relationships. Hold on to your seat. I've got Dr. Joel Furman. Welcome, Dr. Furman. Hi, great to be here. Well, and you know, of course, immediately he's like, where are you from? Where are you from? And so we talked about that he's actually been to Oklahoma. He was a competitive ice skater in the early seventies, second in the United States, almost went to the Olympics, but had an injury. So it's pretty exciting that you've been to Tulsa.

Yes, I love Tulsa. I even had friends there, but I remember that competing in the figure skating championships back then and thinking what a beautiful city this was. Oh, thank you. It really is. This is really God's country down here. We have all the seasons. We have great farmland growing, a lot of the things that you're going to talk about today. So just thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. I have three of your books. The first one I bought was Fast Food Genocide. And Dr. Furman, you were actually absolutely leading the charge on processed foods.

You know, it's all in the news now, but you were talking about this way back in 2017, I believe the copyright is on your book. Fast Food Genocide is absolutely a masterpiece. Because of reading that, I got some other of your books about fasting and food. For our listeners and for you, I have a disclaimer. I'm an omnivore, but if you're an omnivore and you're thinking, Oh, Dr. Jill Fuhrman is all about, you know, veganism. This podcast is going to help you so much because we're going to talk about the nutritive.

content of foods and how it's going to improve your life in every single way. And Dr. Froman, I think we can talk about even addition before subtraction in terms of, you know, where people are in their current eating pattern. So let's just dive in to your book. You talk about that fast food is much more than just burgers and fries. So clarify for us what fast food is. Well, my interpretation and my definition not only include commercial baked goods like bagels and cookies and even white bread,

What Counts as Fast Food 3:34

because I'm considering all products made with white flour to be a sugar equivalent because white flour converts into the bloodstream as sugar in a high enough glycemic load to be classified as fast food. The term glycemic load means how fast the sugar enters the bloodstream, the peak of sugar in the blood after you eat that food, with no fibers or accessory nutrients, either B vitamins or phytochemicals, to counter the antioxidants that are formed in the digestion and utilization of those calories for energy.

So what I'm saying right now is that fast food includes any food you can open up a bag, chips, cookies, cold cereals, Froot Loops, anything. And I consider so commercial baked goods, not just fried foods and foods you purchase in a fast food restaurant, but also foods that are processed foods, let's say, and all foods made with white flour and sugar or other sweetening agents. So we're talking here about how fast calories enter the blood. and the caloric rush or the load of calories in the blood at one time.

And explaining that the glycemic load is one form of the caloric rush, these calories that rushing very rapidly, right? That's the glycemic load. So when you eat, A bean, a black bean, a calental, a chickpea, those carbohydrates enter the bloodstream very slowly over hours, like one or two calories a minute. Everybody can burn it for energy. But when you have a carbohydrate in the form of sugar, apple juice, you know, white flour, it ends up you get 200 calories into the blood at one time. The body has to store that as fat and process it and push it out of the blood with a high insulin response.

The same thing with the lipemic load. The glycemic load refers to the sugar in the blood. The lipemic load refers to the fat in the blood. Now, when you eat nuts and seeds as a source of fat, flax seeds, pistachio nuts, and almond, because the fibers and the sterols and stanols are like fat magnets, your body takes hours to digest those fats and they're absorbed gradually over time without spiking the huge amount of fat in the blood. Now Americans get their fat from oils and animal fats. Us nutritarians get our fats predominantly from nuts and seeds and avocado, which put the fat into the body slowly.

And I'm saying that this huge rush of calories in the blood, that was not possible. in prior centuries. In other words, if we lived 10,000 years ago, 30,000 years ago, 40,000 years ago, you couldn't get these foods that were processed in a way to get so many calories in the blood. And this rush of calories in the blood affects the neuroplasticity of the brain. It's a brain stimulant. It affects the same areas in the brain that are stimulated by opiates. It makes you dopamine sensitive, and it gets you habituated and addicted to the caloric rush.

And now we have a whole nation or a whole world of overweight people addicted to overeating food, addicted to the caloric rush. And if they had a salad and a bowl with tomatoes and shredded carrots and beans and sprouts and a nut-based dressing and a bowl of vegetable bean soup and a mango or a piece of fruit, they wouldn't be satisfied. those foods you're full you had enough food in your stomach but you're not satisfied because there's no caloric rush I need a chocolate bar I need a pizza I need some french fries I need something I gotta have something more heavy because you habituate yourself this huge amount of calories thus we have a nation that's I'm just giving one side of the triad of addictive potential of food.

There's a lot more things that create addiction. I'm just giving one aspect of it right now. But we have a nation that's thoroughly addicted to overeating food, and almost everybody in America is considerably overweight. And I can say it right up front in a kinder way as possible that I'm not blaming people I'm saying it's the un-consequence of living in the United States in our social norms and our food norms, which gets people addicted to overeating food and it makes them almost impossible to desire the right amounts of calories because their diet is so nutritionally deficient.

And I'm saying there's no such thing as a healthy overweight person. because fat on the body increases suppressor's immune function and creates toxic inflammatory compounds and makes you insulin resistant. And I just said three things and it raises estrogen levels into the cancer promoting range for both prostate and breast cancer. So then I just said four things that slow, that accelerate aging and kill people. from being overweight. So it's not a cosmetic issue. It's a health issue. And there's no animals running around with half their body weight as fat.

And there's no primitive humans that ran around that way either. And when you have so much fat on your body, and as your fat goes from, let's say, a woman's fat level of fat percent, As a woman's fat percent goes from 25% to 27% to 30% to 35%, as their fat percent goes up, so does the risk of cancer and risk of premature death. And same thing for a male, a SPAC goes above 15%. So now I just said that To be relatively normal, a woman needs to have a body fat percent below 25% and a male needs to have a body fat below 15%. That's at least to be, because above those levels, we see insulin resistance start to spike up, which means the body has to produce more insulin to get glucose out of the blood.

So even if you're not diabetic yet, you're still in a pre-diabetic state if you're overweight because your body's forced to produce extra insulin because the fat cells just interfere with the function of the insulin receptor, and insulin doesn't work to get the glucose out of the blood, and that's called insulin resistance. So now I'm explaining that there are two factors that make you insulin resistant that shorten lifespan here considerably. One is the body fat that's excessive and two is the postprandial lipemic load of the meal and the glycemic load of the meal.

So we're saying here that as the oil or fat goes up in the bloodstream, that interferes with the insulin receptor as well. So now we've got the fat in the meal and the fat on the body. because these fats Americans eat, which are animal fats, and oils go into the bloodstream so fast that almost everybody in America is exceedingly insulin resistant,

Addictive Foods and Caloric Rush 10:10

which sets the stage for heart disease and cancer and premature aging. And makes every other chronic inflammatory disease worse. Correct. And even being 10 pounds overweight can dramatically increase with infectious related death or COVID related death or having pneumonia as well. So people underestimate the damage from body fat. And if you live like other Americans live and eat like other Americans eat, then you get what other Americans get. That is, you become overweight and you become prone to cancer and heart disease and you die prematurely of those diseases.

And I'm making the radical. I'm saying something usually radical here. I'm saying the normal lifespan for humans is between 95 and 105 years old. That's even conservative. And we have the worst healthy life expectancy in America compared to 50 other countries. And we spend more money per capita on drugs in this country than any other country. We spend the most on drugs and we have the worst health outcome. And we think we have the best medical care. And really, you can't expect to have medical care to be able to, in any way, compensate for people committing suicide with food and eating fast and becoming overweight.

There's no way. Well, we're, we're calling the best medical care, lots of medications, lots of doctor visits, lots of hospitals. And you know, you, you mentioned this highly addictive food. There was an interesting article in the New York Times in 2013, the extraordinary science of addictive junk food. I think our listeners can still find that article that talked about how this food is engineered to be addictive, to hit those dopamine centers. Expand on that. Your book does a beautiful job of explaining that.

Yes, thank you. Well, I'm saying here that when you go to a fast food restaurant, of course, of food, and commercial bakers, you buy foods in bags. Of course, you have food scientists. And I have a food scientist that works for me and tries to help me make products that are healthy. But there are food scientists that make products that pass the bliss point, that make them hyperpalatable, and make people hooked on them. And when you buy a french fry in a fast food restaurant, it's not potato that's fried.

It's potato batter. They mix salt and sugar and MSG into the batter and they freeze it and then they cut it into potato slices and then they fry it. By the way, when you eat fried foods, food's oil, in proportion to the amount of heat used on the oil and how long the oil is heated for, it becomes carcinogenic, it becomes rancidity. and anything that's fried in oil, especially in a fast food restaurant, exacerbates the dangers of fried foods because the same oil is fried for hours and hours and they keep putting more food in the same oil that's being cooked.

So it's literally a carcinogenic bath. And even working in a fast food restaurant, even if you don't touch the food, just inhaling the fumes from the fryers is dangerous to your health. So we're talking here about you couldn't design foods better to cause cancer than we have done in America. Besides, they're frying the foods, of course, then we're mixing all the other elements to create cancer. So we're saying here that in the meat, right, inside the burger, they put sugar and salt in the burger meat because they know sugar, salt, and oil are addictive substances.

salt, sugar, it makes you drink more water, makes you be more thirsty, it's a stimulating substance in the brain. And people, you know, have been brainwashed to think that oil is healthy, like pour the olive oil on food, you know, pulling all these extra calories on your food. Well, of course, there's calories, concentrated calories, no fiber, it doesn't fill you up, so you can consume two or three thousand calories a meal without getting full. So it's all about hooking people and habituating them to overeating so they consume a lot more food and they are better consumers to spend more money and to eat more calories and of course they die younger.

But in any case, I'm saying right now a different, a new concept here. that I'm saying half of what you eat feeds your needs, and the other half feeds the needs of your doctor. And that sounds like a joke or an exaggeration, but primitive long-lived societies around the earth have always eaten around 1,400 to 1,600 calories a day. I'm saying most humans in the history of the world survived adequately and healthily on about 1,500 calories a day, and Americans averaged 3,200 calories a day. So we are eating close to double the amount of calories humans are expected to have.

And they can't help themselves to a degree because their diet is so low in nutrients. And we know that the amount of micronutrients and phytochemicals consumed, the diversity of those phytochemicals and diversity of fibers consumed completely correlate to a person's lifespan and protection against cancer. And so I'm saying that the same foods in the same dietary portfolio that protects against cancer also protects against cardiovascular death and stroke death. So we literally have these modern advancements in nutritional science that can enable people to live longer than ever before in human history.

and live without fear, and our body is already designed to be disease-proof and not to get cancer, heart attacks and strokes. Those are indicative of how much we've deviated from the foods, from healthy food and a healthy diet designed for the human species, the fact that everybody gets cancer and heart disease and strokes and dies prematurely. And that this unprecedented opportunity, because we have so much science now, we have a concumulation of 30,000 studies. You know, I highlighted 2,000 of those best studies in my most recent book, Eat for Life.

And I'm mentioning that book, Eat for Life, if people are interested, because you mentioned some of my favorite books, but I've written 12 books. Is that, I don't have Eat to Life, Eat to Live is different? Yes, Eat to Live was written in 2004 and upgraded in 2011. So the book you're holding is written in 2011. I was just mentioning Eat for Life because it was published in 2022 or 2021. It has much more recent research in it. And I'm saying that the research, I have more than 2,000 references in there, scientists, educators, and those interested people know that every paragraph is referenced with numerous studies documenting where that information came from.

But I'm saying that the evidence is now overwhelming to enable us to live longer and healthier than ever before. And if we need to take advantage of this to live without fear or not get cancer, we can win the war on cancer. We can win the war against cardiovascular death. And keep in mind that, of course, the number one cause of death for adults in America is still cardiovascular death. It's still heart attacks and strokes. Number two is cancer. And number three is medical care and drugs. And I'm saying drugs are the third cause of death, right?

The third most common cause of death is drugs. No, I appreciate that you brought that out because when you look up cause of death, it's not going to be on there, but it absolutely is and is well documented. Now, one thing I want you to clarify is that with your plan of eating, people are not hungry. So they may be eating more calories, but because, or you know, you correct me, because these foods require more active digestion, that the body doesn't absorb as many calories. Correct, Dr. Fuhrman? I'm not sure what you're saying, but let me just say one or two things that the lower your diet is in micronutrients, the more you drive to eat excess calories.

So because my diet is very micronutrient rich and I have micronutrient adequacy, then my natural desire to eat calories has been blunted. But when your diet is deficient, you get excessive cravings to overeat food. That's one aspect. And the other is the more toxicity you have in your tissues, the more you feel wiped out, fatigued, and uncomfortable if you don't constantly keep yourself in the catabolic phase or in the, excuse me, if you don't constantly keep yourself, in the anabolic phase of digestion, which means you've got to keep eating food all the time.

You require more food to keep your energy up because your body is so toxic. What I'm saying right now is one or two things.

Micronutrient Density and Healthy Weight 18:30

Number one, that I'd like people to write down and memorize these five words, because this is the most proven or only proven methodology to slow aging and live longer. It's represented by five words, and that is, moderate caloric restriction in the context of micronutrient excellence or moderate caloric restriction with micronutrient excellence. Those are the words that, so I'm saying here too that we show we need to eat less, we need to be slimmer. But when you achieve micronutrient adipacy, you instinctually desire the right amounts of calories.

You're not going around hungry. You're not going around, you know, you're just eating what you feel like eating. Look around you. All the antelopes and zebra and deer and chipmunks, they're not overweight. They know how much to eat. They don't, you know, So we humans should eat when they're feeling like they had enough food, they would know the amount of food to eat too. But we don't because our diets are so nutritionally deficient and they're eating too much processed foods and animal products, and oils, which is a processed food, of course, which these foods, American diet is 60% of calories in processed foods and 33% from animal products and about 2% from vegetables, by the way.

And we're vegetable-dependent animals. And when our diet is so deficient in antioxidants and micronutrients, then it facilitates the drive to overeat. That's one aspect is we're talking about, and that's the eating more nutrients to lose weight, to have our dried-to-eat calories be lessened, right? And then, of course, we're saying that the factors that govern the aging of cells and protection against cancer are the micronutrient density and diversity in a cell, right? And if you have more fat on the body, you're stretching those nutrients out to a bigger mass, and you have to eat healthy and be slim to get those nutrients.

The amount of toxicity or chemicals in this, or abnormal chemicals in the cell and the abnormality of toxicity in the cell is a mixture of exogenous waste and endogenous waste. The exogenous are chemicals in the external environment, smoke, pollution, pesticides, chemicals. But what our body endogenously makes, you know, lipo-fusion, formaldehyde, ammonia, uric acid, free radicals, glycation end products, we make toxins that the body makes as a normal product of living in, right? So we have the combination of toxicity.

When our cells get enough nutrients, it keeps the toxicity low and helps remove carcinogens and irritants from the tissues. So we're talking here about the the amount of nutrients in the cell, the lower level of toxic elements in the cells, and that combined with some other factors, of course, like a favorable omega-3 index and other factors that govern the ability to live with full mental faculties and to live into later years without having medical tragedies. So with your eating plan, Dr. Furman, you're minimizing supplements.

I really believe people take too many supplements and should be eating more real food. What, if any, supplements do you recommend for your patients? Right, well, there's two ways I can answer that. And the first thing is, there are certain ingredients and supplements that are synthetic. They try to duplicate, such as folic acid, which is not found in nature. It's folate that you get from green vegetables and beans, not folic acid. They're two different compounds. And there's numerous studies, I would say more than 20 studies that document that folic acid and its supplemental form increases risk of breast and prostate cancer.

So we're talking here that retinol palmitate and acetyl palmitate, vitamin A increases risk of cardiovascular and cancer death and even increases risk of osteoporosis. Taking isolated vitamin E. So we're talking here about certain supplemental ingredients they put in cheap multivitamins that actually increase your risk of death. And, like, we're giving women of childbearing ages folic acid to prevent neural tube defects. Do people ever think why they need folic acid to prevent neural tube defects?

Is there something wrong with the human body that, you know, without a synthetic substance made in the laboratory, you can't have a normal child? And the answer, of course not. Women are supposed to be eating, all of us are supposed to be eating green vegetables. Green vegetables, the word folate comes from the Latin term for foliage. And you have high levels of folate in the blood, really high, even outside the normal range being high in the Nutritarian diet that I recommend. So the medical profession always looks for a drug answer to a lifestyle cause.

In other words, you're eating too much salt, Your overweight, your blood pressure goes up, give you a drug. Not lose weight and exercise and cut the salt out, it's take a drug. You have a baby with birth defects, give person a folic acid, an aesthetic supplement. Don't have them eat green vegetables and eat beans without high in folate to prevent or give them the drug, the folic acid. But the drug always comes with some price to pay. And you know what? There's a link between childhood cancers We're talking about brain tumors and the number one cause of cancer death in children is called acute blastocytic leukemia, being linked to the lack of green vegetables in the diet.

And also the consumption of luncheon meats and processed meats increase the risk of cancers in children and brain tumors. So we're saying here, Instead of telling women of childbearing age to take folic acid, how about telling them not to eat processed meats and to eat a lot of green vegetables to get folate. And then you would not just reduce birth defects, neural tube defects, but you reduce other defects too. And you'd reduce risk of un-childhood cancers and brain tumors in children. But we don't do that.

We look to sell them a pill. You know, so it's all, it's the medical profession is based on a upside down premise. It's a drug answer for every cause. And keep in mind that diseases have causes. They don't come out of the air from no reason. They're there because of the reasons. They're discerning the reason and removing that and putting, substituting something that's good for the person. Instead, we just give them drugs to suppress the, to modify the expression of disease. But in any case, your question that I was about vitamin supplements and Yes, I mean, we want to use supplements conservatively and get most of our nutrients from food, of course.

But as you move towards a plant-based diet and even a total vegan diet, which I do recommend, because there's so many reasons why we extend lifespan as animal protein goes down and there's so much contamination, in animal products and seafood, especially from inland lakes that have algae overgrowth and cyanobacteria causing toxic effects on. We know there are clustering of ALS and Parkinson's disease around people eat fish from inland lakes. And we know off the coastal intercontinental shelf, there's so much dumping of garbage.

that we have now that the shellfish and bivalves are linked to Parkinson's dementia syndrome because they're toxic too. And certainly if you ate French Polynesia or somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean eating wild, different types of small, colorful, interesting fish, it wouldn't be the same as the polluted stuff we can get in continental America, in the United States. Nevertheless, The question is about supplements, and I'm saying there are certain nutritional elements in seafood that are very beneficial, that for those of us that are not eating seafood, we take extra zinc, EPA and DHA, and B12.

There's a few extra things we take.

Supplements, Vegan Diets, and Nutrient Gaps 26:00

Now, I also recommend people monitor their vitamin D levels and take sufficient vitamin D. And I'm also recommending people take iodine if they're not salting their food with iodinated salt or eating seafood or seaweed. So there's certain nutrients that you would get better exposure to if you ate animal products, particularly seafood, that you would not have great exposure to on a vegan or vegetarian diet. They're important to supplement to make up for those gaps. But if you use seafood in your diet, you would need those supplements, but then you would expose yourself to more potentially waste products from pollutions and commercial farming that have now invaded our water supply with fisheries.

So it's a matter of weighing what's less of a risk, and it's somewhat controversial. in the scientific literature today is which way is better, but I'm thinking that the evidence probably, compared to using fish as a force of supplement for zinc and DHA, of actually using a supplemental zinc and DHA and cutting back your fish lower. So that's really the conundrum here, you follow me? And let's all know that the amount of animal products Americans are eating are short in lifespan. So, you know, saying you're an omnivore or you're a vegetarian or anything like that, there's not, I don't think, there's internet and there's people giving, you know, opining, giving opinions, but the science is overwhelmingly corroborative.

In other words, there's numerous studies that show from following people long-term with different types of diets and different amount of animal products, we know that increasing animal protein in a diet shortens human lifespan and increases risk of cancer. And increasing plant protein lengthens lifespan and protects against both cancer and cardiovascular death. That we know is factual. And the Americans are eating, so worldwide American populations like in China, for example, eat one-tenth the amount of animal protein that we do, but they have twice as much salt, so they have more hemorrhagic strokes.

But whatever the point I'm making is that worldwide, the amount of animal products consumed in America is still consumed very high. But even when we're comparing 5% to 15%, you see more deaths at 15%, much more deaths compared to 5%, but Americans are eating more than 30%. So, most of the studies show even when you move from 5% to 15%, you get a dramatic more cardiovascular and cancer deaths. Even the 7-day Baptist Health Study 2, which compared vegans to flexitarians who eat animal products once or twice a week, showed a significant lower reason of cardiovascular death from being a vegan.

But, even though significant cardiovascular death reduction, there was increased risk of Parkinson's disease, an increased risk of dementia from shrinkage of the brain due to DHA deficiency from not eating seafood. That's where the supplemental question came in of where do we judiciously supplement, particularly if you're not eating seafood to get those omega-3 fatty acids, you will still want to have the omega-3 fatty acids from supplements. And for us vegans, we have omega-3 fatty acid supplements that are made from algae that have the EPA and DHA that you can get from fish.

So these are somewhat complicated, but of course it's better to know as much information as you possibly can and then make the decision for yourself how you want to handle it. No, I appreciate that because if our listeners, including me, can move toward eating more of these nutrition foods, we're going to be better off. One of the questions I wanted to ask was about a patient I saw recently who had, who came to me after she had a lot of implants, dental implants that failed and she was a vegan. Really, I think.

not knowing all the implications. And that's one of the reasons I wanted to have you as a guest to talk to people about the potential nutrient depletions. When she had nutrient testing, she's just low in everything. And so in some way, she's not properly addressing her nutrient needs with her vegan diet. So talk about what problems you see and how people mitigate those problems while staying on a vegan diet. Of course, sure. Well, first of all, keep in mind the major problem with most things people understand in American diet, because they're more significantly dangerous because they're eating both processed foods and they're also eating animal products, both.

So their level of plant foods is dangerously low. So there's both processed foods. I'm saying a bagel is like a piece of chicken because they don't contain any phytochemicals, antioxidants, and fibers. So, we need fibers and phytochemicals and antioxidants. So, that's the first thing. Now, as you take out all the animal products, like we mentioned, there might be things missing, but the word vegan doesn't define a person not eating processed foods. Processed foods are vegan. So, being a vegan diet doesn't have anything to do with being healthy or not.

You could have a cruddy vegan diet or keep causing disease or even have a healthy vegan diet not causing disease based on how much sugar, flour, and junk food you're eating, which are vegan junk food, right? Doughnuts are vegan. Doughnuts are vegan. When you're on a vegan diet, obviously, you have to pay attention to protein. We said the more plant proteins you eat, the longer you live. There are only five plant foods that you can possibly eat. Let's name those five foods. vegetables, beans or legumes, nuts and seeds, and intact whole grains.

Everything else is a processed food or an animal. The only food low in protein is fruit. All those other foods are protein adequate. And we're saying more protein in a vegan, more plant protein to make you live longer, means the three foods highest in protein are green vegetables, beans and nuts and seeds. And those are the three foods, green vegetables, beans and nuts and seeds, that have the most anti-cancer phytochemicals in them. It's not the protein content that's making you live longer. It's the fact that even though they're protein adequate, And then some of these foods are more as much protein as beef.

So we're talking beans are very high in protein, and the combination of greens, beans, and so you're not protein deficient. My 1,600 calories I just gave a person who had it analyzed had 84 grams of protein at 1,600 calories. If it was 3,000 calories, it would have 150 grams of protein. In other words, the point is that some of the protein analysis are higher than people eating meat. But that's not the issue. The issue is how much phytochemicals and anti-cancer nutrients you get along with that diet.

And because of the phytates binding zinc and because you're not, and you're getting plenty of calcium too. You're just, you're not low in protein or calcium. You're low in, on the vegan diet. If you're eating whole natural foods, you're low, you could be low in B12, zinc and omega-3 fatty acids. and maybe iodine if you're not eating seaweed or seafood. So those four nutrients, you could be potentially low in. But this person on a vegan diet, we don't know what she was low in. She could be low in a million different things.

She could be low in calcium and protein and anything, just meeting processed foods. Now, once you set that diet on your plate and you analyze it, let's say, If I took out 300 or 400 calories of nuts out of the diet and in place of using nuts and seeds as a source of fat, I used oil as a source of fat. Instead of using the nuts and seeds, the pistachios and the sunflower seeds and the hemp seeds and the sesame seeds, which contain lignans and anti-cancer nutrients, if I instead poured olive oil and took out the nuts, well, I just moved 20 grams of protein off my plate by using oil instead of using nuts and seeds as a whole source of fat.

So once you're on the plant-based diet and not using a real concentrated protein like meat, then you really don't have much room in your diet to eat junk food and pour oil and fried foods all over it because then you're going to remove even more of the protein. You have to actually eat real food. real natural plants that the gorillas and the giraffes and the elephants eat, that big natural animals that live on plants are plenty big enough and muscular, hippopotamus, rhinoceros, plant eaters. But the point I'm making is they're not eating junk food and processed food and pouring oil into the food to get enough protein.

They're actually eating real whole plants. So there's no deficiency of protein here. It's the processed foods and the vegan, you know, the vegan, we don't know what this person is eating. Whether you're vegan or not, you should be paying attention to eating whole natural foods and eating sufficient amounts of green vegetables, particularly. But I have that acronym, G-bombs. Yes, and I want to talk about G-bombs. But I want to talk about G-bombs, Dr. Forman, but I also want to talk about intact whole grains.

I appreciate that you brought that up, so hit it. Well, intact whole grain means you're eating the oat groat or the wheatberry, quinoa or the tefft or the amaranth or the camout. You're eating something, a grain that you're cooking in water versus grinding it into a flour, making it glycemic and then baking it in the oven and making bread out of it. So I'm not recommending, I recommend eating whole corn and peas, not cornbread as much. So I'm not saying you can't have any of that stuff, but I'm saying that the white rice and white flour products are a major source of calories worldwide.

And those are junk food, and they're addicting. And white flour and white rice make up like more than half of people's diets when you consider sugar, white flour, and white rice. And it's empty calorie junk. So we're talking about whether you're a... And then, so where are you getting your phytochemicals and nutrients? No wonder we have every dying of cancer. And of course... we're having more people eating more processed foods. And you think with all the nutritional science people would improve in their diet, but no, the addictive, the food industry and the addictive natures of

G-BOMBS and Cancer-Protective Foods 35:40

concentrated foods gets people hooked. And getting them hooked makes them, makes their brain give rationalizations. why it's okay and why it's good and why they have to eat this way. And I'm saying people listening to me speak on it with you right now. They're not liking some of them, you know, think, oh, this is interesting and it's, you know, probably a lot correct. And, you know, it's kind of, but it's, but they're thinking of some way to escape. There's some way to not have to do it because the addictive part of them still wants those foods so badly and they just want to make up an excuse for rationalization while they continue eating burgers and pizza and junk food and candy and pie and...

and cakes, and recreating with food, and donuts, and coffee. And they want people to just rationalize why it's okay to do anything they want, thinking that food's not gonna make a difference because they're addicts and they're not in control of the bank. In other words, their brain is now addictive, and the addictive brain wants to protect its addictive relationships. And it's not fair. It's not in your best interest. Part of your brain is not working on your behalf. It's working against you because it wants to protect its addictive interests.

You know, so that's why I want our listeners to know you can start making changes in this direction and that's going to start healing your body. Uh, we had, I had a wonderful interview on Intax whole grains on actually milling milled flour for bread. If you're going to eat bread at all, you've got to make it fresh, mill your own and just all of the extra nutrients, you know, natural oils and all in the bread. Super good. And that's something I do every week. So you're going to talk about G-bombs next.

This is an acronym that Dr. Ferman has on that you guys are going to love. Yeah, G-bombs is just five letters, right? G-bombs, G-b-o-m-b-s, and that stands for just six foods, right? Six foods that have the most science documenting their cancer protective benefits. Huge cancer protective benefits when you include those foods in your diet. And it stands for greens, beans, onions, mushrooms, berries, and seeds. So let's say, do you eat some flax seeds or chia seeds or sesame seeds every day, the richest source of lignans, which protect against breast and prostate cancer in a huge fashion.

Are you having multiple flavors and multiple types of mushrooms every day? Because the studies on them, for example, large studies show that women who ate 10 grams of mushrooms a day, 10 grams like my thumb, there's a little piece the size of my thumb, reduced risk of breast cancer by 64%. With green tea, it reduced the risk of breast cancer by 89%, by the way. It was crazy how much protection you get. Greens means green vegetables like salad and broccoli, but also paying attention to cruciferous green vegetables like sprouts and like broccoli sprouts or kale or bok choy or broccoli arugula.

And eating some raw in a salad, you get the most isothiocyanides, which are the ITCs, the isothiocyanides, are incredibly documented to be cancer protective in green vegetables. Then beans. Beans are, you know, even in nurses' health study, people eat beans just twice a week, reduce the risk of breast cancer by 24% compared to women not eating beans. Beans are incredibly protective. They increase the body's immune system to prevent cancer cells from replicating and recognize abnormal cells to remove them.

And then onions and scallion and garlic, incredibly protective against cancer and heart disease and diabetes and blood pressure, eating onions and garlic every day and scallions. Do you do that every day? Are you eating different types of mushrooms every day? Not just one type. Do you have a variety of mushrooms in your diet? Or taking a mushroom supplement or a mushroom drink? B, the last B, the first one was beans, and the last B is berries. Berries, cherries, pomegranates, kumquats. Do you have these high flavonoid foods that are shown to protect against cancer?

Very powerfully so. And the last one, we mentioned seeds. And I mentioned that 10-year study in women with breast cancer who had a 71% reduced risk of death from just having a third of a milligram of lignin a day. Whereas one tablespoon of ground flax seeds has 21 milligrams of lignin. That's like three times 20, that's 60 times the amount of lignin that they had in that study just from one tablespoon of ground flax seeds. Demonstrating that even a little bit of these healthy foods each day gives you huge protection.

Chia seeds have about eight or nine milligrams of lignin per tablespoon. Sesame seeds have about 20. whole sesame seeds, not the white ones, but the ones that have the shell on them. They're called un-whole sesame seeds, have about 20 milligrams of lignin. I'm saying seeds are incredibly protective. We make salad dressings by mixing nuts and seeds with the rich tomato sauce and roasted garlic and maybe black fig vinegar or balsamic vinegar. We make delicious sauces for the salads and dips and stuff.

Instead of using oil, we use real, the whole nut and seed with all our anti-cancer benefits with all the proteins in there too. So the nutritarian style of cooking is a new way of cooking where we're not flavoring things with salt and oil, but we're utilizing things like lightly toasted sesame seeds and pistachios or cashews or avocados or making a hummus with intact whole grains or making We might be adding a lot of roasted garlic to a tomato sauce to bring out the flavor and putting in some black fig vinegar.

Or you may be using some dried tomatoes that we sliver in diha and riha and soak in a fluid to thicken the flavor and bring out the flavor of the tomato sauce. Or maybe making a blood orange with orange and lemon dressing with cashews and toasted sesame for a dressing. We're making desserts, a chocolate ice cream with bananas and macadamia nuts with real cocoa powder and a couple of dates. We're not using sugars in artificial flavorings. We're using real vanilla bean powder. We're not using a vanilla flavoring.

We're using natural foods that add the phytochemical diversity to the diet. And all our delicious tasting recipes are chock full of these natural substances that defend you against cancer. There are some incredible recipes just in the, the, the boots I have, Dr. Furman, you have vanilla and ice cream. I thought that was hilarious. And then another one we like is the sweet potato pie and just all the, you know, the nutrient density. I mean, that's the key to move toward nutrient. nutrient density and nutrient diversity, the more different types of...

See, Americans eat such a narrow diet of the same foods all the time, the same few foods, and they're not eating foods that are grown in a different diverse area. I just mentioned multiple types of vegetables and green vegetables, multiple types of mushrooms, and a lot of different types of nuts and seeds, and a lot of different types of beans, including soybeans. But the question is, is that what level of your nutrient diversity, I'm asking the audience this question, I'm saying, do you have a large salad every day that you chew very well with cruciferous greens and onion in there?

Do you expose yourself to beans every single day, at least a quarter cup of beans, or I say at least half a cup of beans a day, but are you eating at least a half a cup of beans a day? You know, beans result in the sign of illiteracy with a sign called the Hispanic effect. What that means is that In the food deserts, in the inner cities where people are eating more poorly, mostly areas where more black Americans live, they get higher rates of prostate cancer and strokes and heart attacks. Poor, worse health outcomes, proportional to the amount of lack of produce and plant food in the diet.

And then, but Hispanics living in that area don't have health outcomes that are as negative. And the account for the Hispanic effect is even when people are economically challenged, not living in an area where they have a lot of fruits and vegetable availability, they're still eating more beans. And because the Hispanics were consuming beans added to their diet, they had better health outcomes. So beans are a superfood to include in a person's diet. I'm recommending for all people to be eating the beans every day.

I have some beans with lunch and some beans with dinner. You know, I actually have some greens, some beans, and some nuts and seeds with lunch. and I have some beans, some greens, and some nuts and seeds with dinner. My dinner might be predominantly a cooked vegetable dish with, you know, I have some little beans and nuts, you know, and the sauces. And my lunch is mostly a salad with a vegetable, with a put, you know, have some vegetable bean soup with it and a piece of fruit for dessert, you know.

So, and then my breakfast will be intact whole grains with berries and seeds and maybe some plant milk on top or something like that. But I have nectarines and apricots and blueberries and wild blueberries and frozen berries and mixed with, you know, and tap, oat groats and made, you know, whatever, whatever it is. So I'm eating a huge diversity of different types of plant fruits throughout the day. I'm getting so hungry. I had a really good interview with Karen Heard. It's been a year or so ago.

Her daughter got poisoned accidentally by some carpet cleaner, and she used beans to detoxify. So we talked about how beans are a natural detoxifier for stress hormones also. So I totally agree. We try to eat beans every single day. Also, Dr. Furman, I interviewed Doug Evans, who pretty much... Oh, you know Doug Evans? He's a friend of mine. Yeah. Oh, he's awesome. And I have five of his sprouters in my kitchen. Oh, really? Cool. Overboard, but eat those homegrown sprouts every single day. Can you imagine if everybody in America had a salad with lettuce?

something cruciferous like baby kale or arugula, and a handful of big sprouts on top, and had a nut and seed dressing with onions and scallions in there, right? What if they just changed their lunch? What if everybody in America just changed their lunch to salad with sprouts? You make those sprouts, you're making your whole food in your house and so rich in nutrients. It's incredible how much nutrients are in the sprouts. And then you're having that vegetable bean soup with mushrooms and beans in there, and it feels you're filling up.

And what if they just ate that for lunch? We would cut healthcare costs. in America down by 80%, just the people changing their lunch, because that's the meal people are eating out of the home, and they're tempted to eat fast food, and they might have donuts at work or something. And if they just had that, you know, it's crazy what we did. Well, you know, Doug Evans, that's so cool. Yeah. Oh, he's so cool. We had a lot of fun. And so I'm sprouting, of course, broccoli seeds. I eat broccoli seed sprouts every single day.

Sprouting lentils. Lentils are surprisingly delicious sprouted, crunchy. I have found a way to kind of toast them and put them on salads. And then I'm sprouting a salad mix. And I want our listeners to know how easy it is and how inexpensive. It is. Right, you get a lot of food. It's not expensive. I take the scoop of the mixed salad mix that has the lentils and the mung beans and has the latishes and has the broccoli and has all that mix in there, right? I take a mix of that sprout and I take a little bit of the broccoli sprout separate and I add a little bit of the extra broccoli sprout to the mixed thing.

And that's where I put in my spatter every day. Okay, okay, I'm gonna start. I have three spouters in the kitchen. I have three of them because it's more than just me and my wife. My kids eat, my adult children eat some of that, eat some of it too. So I have three of them going. Yeah, no, that's great. I have five sitting there. I probably have two of them going at a time. I need to just give, give a couple more away. You know, my friend's got Spratters for Christmas, Dr. Fulman, because of that interview with Doug.

And it takes minutes a day. I mean, it's so pretty. No time. You just put it in there and you rinse it out. What's the big deal? There's no time. You could be living literally in an RV and still do it. It takes no time and no money. And his sprouters are, they're, they're fantastic. I've tried, tried sprouting before in a regular jar and I just didn't pay it up. It's elegant. It's an elegant solution. It's well thought out. Yeah. It makes it so, so clean and easy. You just rinse it out and you do it.

Yeah, but don't get soggy. And you know, if you can mix any kind of sprout in there, it just, I don't know, it just makes it easy.

Sprouting, Salads, and Chewing Well 47:40

Yeah, it's for fun. So if you all make one change, think about sprouting. I mean, it's really great. Well, if they would make one change, I'm thinking about eating Nutritarian lunch. How to eat salad every day and put the sprouts on it, right? Yeah, sprout. And, you know, buying sprouts in the market, it was expensive. When you make it yourself, it's cheap as dirt, right? So you can make, and it's better when you make them yourself, because they're so fresh. They're so fresh, you rinse them, and they're not, there's no mold on them or anything, and you put them, When they're done, you can put them in your refrigerator.

Imagine if everybody, and what about all your listeners, had a big salad, a fresh salad, at least once a day. I say, make the salad the main dish. Your salad is your main dish for at least one meal a day. And you have to chew it very well, because don't forget the anti-cancer ITCs in the sprouts and the greens are formed in the mouth proportional to how well you chew. And so you can put it in a smoothie? Yeah, but when you chew it in the mouth, you're mixing it with bacteria between the teeth. It forms more nitric oxide and other more anti-aging compounds.

And you're forming more ITCs because you're breaking up the myrosinase. So you know a lot about chewing. Yeah. And we're talking here about you waste your money of getting these anti-cancer nutrients from the raw vegetables if you don't liquefy them adequately in your mouth before you're allowed to be swallowed. So it's getting the right foods on that salad, but then being mindful enough to chew it really well to get the full maximum anti-cancer benefits before you swallow it. Yes, and Dr. Foreman, I've been a dentist for 40 years.

So what I've seen in terms of airway problems escalating in our world is shocking because people are eating all of these soft foods that they really don't even need to chew. So children and children are drinking these juice packs and they're not developing their muscles in their face. They're ending up being a, there's a lot more mouth breathing than I used to see. I mean, it is fascinating. Oh, they're so sick. It's just amazing what we're doing to kids. And, you know, people are so confused and so addicted to food.

It's such a tragedy what people have done to the health of their children. By them, you know, and you know, it's, I made a comment earlier that the diet you eat before you have your kids. Right. could affect the health of the children after they're born. So we're so screwed up in this country, and it affects, like I explained in the book Fast for Jennifer side, that after World War, after the Civil War, how much violence was caused by nutritional deficiencies in the South. causing Palladra, which makes people anger and violent.

And we're seeing it today that nutritional deficiencies and nutritional stupidity and food addiction and fast food and eating processed foods doesn't just make you overweight, diabetic and cancer prone. It also affects your brain function. It reduces your creativity. your kindness, your compassion, and you become more hastily angered and irritable, and you even can believe things that aren't true, or you're open to being affected by conspiracy theories and nonsense because you can't weigh evidence appropriately.

So we're dummying down our population because we've dummied down their diets that can feed the brain. Well, and that's relationships. You know, as I said earlier, you know, vitality made simple is all about feeling better, looking better and enjoying better relationships. Relationships are the thing in life that gives us our joy. And it really, really does matter. One thing you didn't touch on that I almost interrupted you on is that when people are eating more of the Nutritarian lifestyle, they're going to have a bowel movement every day.

I mean, in my clinical practice, I ask everybody about their bowel movements, and it is shocking how many people are constipated. But that's just not something you have to worry about if you're eating a nutrient-dense, high soluble fiber diet. Absolutely. Soluble and insoluble fiber diet. And you know, I'm giving this impression that the norms in America are dangerous, but also the psychological norms that you're reflecting to are also not great either because we're not really learning to feel good about ourselves because of our compassion and kindness and care for the world and people and all other people and the equity of people and how important other people are.

And helping other people gives us so much, puts ourselves at peace. We're not trying to promote our own egos to be superior to others or to protect our ego against offense or being looked at negatively. We don't care. It's not about how people praise you or put you up on a pedestal or looking for your own personal accomplishments. Those don't give you long-lasting health. And you build relationships. What builds you long-lasting health and peace and ability to love and care and emote for other people?

is feeling like them, with them, part of them, feeling for them, compassionate for them and wanting to be useful for other people. So we use our creative intelligence when somebody to help other people and to try to have creative goodwill for them. So when somebody says to you, if I had to eat that way, I'd rather be dead. Who wants to live on carrot sticks? So if somebody says something, whatever somebody says to you that you feel is somewhat insulting or not favorable, it doesn't matter. It reflects that person.

Your goal still is the same. How can I show this person I care about them? How can I show this person some love? How can I use my creativity and intelligence to be useful to this person in some way? In other words, we build relationships and peace in our own selves, because not from being superior or being important or impressing other people with our accomplishments, but by feeling content with the way we are, in a way we're compassionate, kind, and think and have relationships with other people.

And the more we're into ourselves and the bigger egos we have, the less it separates us and the less we have compassion, feelings, and emotions that give us good emotional health. Our emotional health and our relationship ability comes from our ability to constantly keep a check on our ego, watch our egos, and try to think, is this about me and me being my own importance? or my own vision of myself, or really am I being compassionate and caring to this other person? So I think that that's helpful for emotional health and for relationship building.

I 100% agree. And of course, there's so much good research these days about emotional health and actual physical health, people that harbor anger, people that harbor unforgiveness. It translates into our cellular health. That's right, and it's all intertwined like fibers of the cough. Our diet, and I'm saying in the book Fast For Genocide and in this interview, I'm saying how our poor nutrition can exacerbate those tendency towards anger and frustration and irritability-ness. and reduce our ability to have creative goodwill by lowering our ability to be creative.

So all these things interrelate, and we have to work on them all together. Sure, get sleep, exercise, good food, emotional habits, emotional wisdom, all these things we're trying to do, and that's what we call lifestyle medicine. It's all these factors that affect a person's life, compared to drug-centered medicine. Right. Well, and here on this podcast, I'm always coming about it from body, soul and spirit. I think it's, you know, we cannot separate those things. I want your input on the GLP-1 agonist, these drugs like Ozempic that people are taking.

Relationships, Emotional Health, and Lifestyle 55:40

You know, we in Oklahoma, we're a pretty fat state. I hate to say that, but it's the truth. And so lots and lots of people are suddenly losing all this weight, getting that look on their face of muscle loss, which seriously concerns me. And then just all the other side effects. So Dr. Fuhrman, talk about the side effects of these medications, the long term stability, and how you help people They wean off of them. They can't be on these forever. They're so expensive. Well, first of all, the main thing is that when people follow my Nutrituring program, The women lose about 15 pounds the first month, the men about 20 pounds, and they level off to about eight to 10 pounds a month.

And they lose weight till they get to their ideal weight. When they get to the perfect weight, they stop losing. So the GLP, you know, the GLP-1 inhibitors, people lose 10%, 15% of the body weight. You know, they lose some of their fat. They're 80 pounds overweight and they lose 15 pounds, but that's what, and they stop losing. On a new sharing diet, you lose all the whole 80 pounds you're over. You don't lose 15 pounds and then stop losing. So losing 15 pounds is better than nothing, but it's not going to put you in good health.

And then there was no educational, you know, the person still didn't learn how to do it. And they're still overeating and they're still eating the wrong foods. And to me, it's the same thing as giving people medications for any problem. People shouldn't be taking blood pressure medications. They'd be changing their life and be getting normal blood pressure. They shouldn't be taking diabetic medication. They should be eating health and get rid of their diabetes. My people come to my retreat here in San Diego and three weeks to diabetes is gone.

Three weeks, they could be living unhealthily, putting 100 pounds on, but in three weeks, they've lost the 20 pounds. The diabetes is gone, the high blood pressure is gone. They're losing weight effortlessly. So one thing is that the drugs are not effective. They're not effective enough, even though they're affected more than doing nothing. And they don't continue to make progress. And as you said, when you stop it, then you gain the weight back. And they can't stay on it forever because they're just so expensive and they have side effects.

And we don't even know all the side effects of it down the road. But I wanted to... comment on one statement you made about muscle loss. And that is that overweight people, there is too much strain on their heart to carry around, have such a big body. And when you're carrying 50 pounds of extra fat on your back, your muscles get bigger and get enlarged too, your thighs, your hips, your legs, your calves get bigger. And when you lose weight, you need to lose fat and you need to lose muscle too. You can't maintain, when you're 100 pounds overweight, you have, 100 pounds overweight, you probably have about 75 pounds of extra body fat you didn't need, and you have about 25 pounds of extra muscle you don't need either.

So you need to lose the 100 pounds, and you need to lose 75 pounds of fat and 25 pounds of muscle. It's somewhat of a myth that people think they can get to a healthy weight without losing any muscle. It's true that we want people to be muscular and slim and strong, but we don't want them to maintain an artificially elevated amount of muscle tissue. And you have to lose muscle tissue when you lose weight. So it's using as a criticism of GPO T1 inhibitors. And the fact that people losing muscle along with fat is to be expected, number one.

And number two, the shortest lifespan of any profession in North America are linemen on football teams who overeat to get that big. And they're big with a lot of muscle, but they're still gonna have the short lifespans because they're eating so much, so much food and so much animal protein. Maybe in the past, you know, people took steroids to get that big. Getting artificially large does not enhance your lifespan. We want to be lean and strong, but not artificially large. And yet then to lose, I have some of these former football players and linemen that now come to me after their careers are over and they want to get fit and lose weight and get healthy again.

And they still maintain, we get them to maintain a low body fat percent and still be strong, but they lost a lot of muscle in the process. So they've lost a lot of muscle and they've lost a lot of fat, but they still have low body fat and they're still muscular and strong, but they're just much in a smaller body now. You know what I mean? That's interesting. I've never heard that perspective. Thank you for that. How would you counsel somebody who is on those medications in terms of helping them wean off the addictive fast foods?

Is it a taper? you know, that they slowly do? Is it all at once? Because I think there's going to be a tsunami of people who realize, yikes, I've lost weight, but I'm still eating the calories I'm eating. It's still a burger and fries, and I still don't feel good. And, you know, where do I go from here? Right, and I've been doing this for almost more than 35 years. And I've changed my viewpoints over the years, where now I recommend, that's why I built this retreat where people can come and have enforced abstinence and eat so healthfully and so delicious.

Because what I'm saying right now is that it's like an alcoholic trying to cut off alcohol, but still going out to binge on the weekends. As they keep having more of those foods, even small amounts, it keeps lighting the desire to make them want them more. But once they totally abstain and give them up, then every week they'll desire to want those things fade and they eventually find no one who desires them or even likes them anymore. The longer you abstain from your addictive habit, the easier it is to not want to do it anymore and prevent yourself from doing it.

The more you keep it, and especially people who have addictive relationships with food and are overweight. You know that if you keep feeding them the burgers and the pizza and the sweets and the salted foods they're into, they never develop the taste muscle to like the more simply flavored foods. They keep desiring those foods. They keep lighting the fire under their desires. My experience over the years is that people who lose the 100 pounds, the 50 pounds, the 150 pounds, and keep it off for the rest of their life are people who learned the information, studied the information, became knowledgeable, and then jumped into it full blast and did it all the way because doing it makes you feel so good.

and you feel satisfied, and you lose the desire, the longer you're away from those dangerous foods and self-destructive foods, the less you think of them, the less you desire them, and the less you actually like them when you have them again, the longer you've stayed away from them for long enough period of time. So I'm at the point in my life where I say the chance of recidivism And the chance of really having long-term great success is enhanced when to the higher

GLP-1 Drugs and Sustainable Weight Loss 1:02:00

percent you adopt the healthy eating. So the cheat diet and doing it 90% or 80% doesn't give us effective results as doing it 100%. So your perspective used to be that you would maybe let people have a cheat day? Correct. In the book Eat to Live, which you held up, I don't agree with myself anymore. In that book. That's wonderful. Yeah. I say, you know, learn how to eat this way and then do it 90% of the time, 10% have whatever you want. That's good for a lot of people who are not addicts, but for so many people I've come in contact with over the last 30 years, it doesn't work for them.

And I get much better results because when people really learn not to self-destruct with food and not to eat any things that are unhealthy, it seems so radical and so crazy, but it's contraintuitive, but it works. And the point I'm saying right now is that that these people who can't control, and it's too difficult for them to do the changes because they're addicts, when you get them to, and they spent half their life, by the way, eating unhealthy food, and why would they continue to consume more self-destructive food?

If we can get them off their addictive behaviors, it's amazing the miracles that happen now, and people start to love eating this way, and they get habituated to it, and it gets like, wow, I'm a different person because their brain fog lifts, and they think with more clarity, and now we're giving them hope. and against the fact that their downhill spiral of their health they gave up on and getting hope and getting greater results. I give an example of one girl, I called her a girl because she was 19 years old and she left college because she couldn't focus and she weighed 380 pounds.

But she was forced to come here from her parents and when she came in, she said, no way am I going to eat like this. You're just wasting your time. I'm here because my parents are forcing me to be here. I was here at some other place they mentioned and I showed this place, but don't think I'm going to be into what you're doing because it's just I'm paying this punishment for my parents, blah, blah, blah, blah. So she lived here for three months and she lost 80 pounds in three months. And it changed her mentality, so she loved living this way.

And she had now some hope in her future to have a normal life. And she went home and lost 150 more pounds the following year, after leaving here and lost me 80 pounds. It completely changed her outlook on life. Now she went back to school, she could think clearly, she thinks she has a future, she thinks she can be a normal person now. She had already had accepted the fact that her life was destined for this kind of addictive behavior that she could never change. But I can give you one example after another that we've changed people's lives and that's the personal pleasure that myself and my wife have is that we enjoy doing what we do because we see these profound and incredible transformations and the people are grateful and we're grateful that they trusted us to help them and we feel a lot of personal satisfaction that we've changed people's lives for the better and for the long term better.

No, you really are. Tell us how the retreat works. So people, I thought it might be a week long thing, but it's obviously not. No, people stay for one, two, or three months. I have a person here now who's been here four or five months. Because sometimes, as you know, people have a lot of weight to lose, and they feel that the longer they're away from their addictive temptations, the better results they get. And you know, when people go to drug rehab, cocaine rehab, they go for three months. And they know that after a month, there's still a higher chance of recidivism after a month.

You need time away from your addictive substances. So we encourage, so most people come for a month, But we encourage people to stay longer if they could, two or three months. And also, we can imagine if a person has asthma or rheumatoid arthritis or frozen shoulder or carpal tunnel or knee cord, we treat their other issues while they're here. So we have a soft wave machine. so we can make them walk better, take care of their cartilage injuries and their knees, their overweight, their feet are hurting and their ankles hurt, their back hurts.

We can have them lose weight, fix their body, fix their and go home without pain, able to walk, able to exercise. We repair the problems with the new technologies that we utilize with combination with nutrition and weight loss. Maybe I'm adjusting the orthotics in their feet so they're in better alignment with their knees, but whatever I'm doing, I'm going to take care of their issues. they're going to be able to leave and have the tools now to be able to continue to live this way when they go home.

So it's not a week stay because that's, it's not like a health farm or, you know, it's not a fun one week of a healthy vacation where people go and they eat healthy for the week and they go back home and they're back on their old diet again. They have to learn a lot of giving them 15 hours of education while they're here about about nutrition and about emotional wisdom and health and they're really going through a whole like PhD level program of training to learn how to take better care of their health and live and and it's very You could say motivating and invigorating and it gets people to have a different outlook of life before they leave.

So yes, it's not a, we're open all year. We're never closed. We have four chefs. We have a full-time, we have a full-time trainer and we have nurses and we, so yeah, we have, so we're, we're, we're really take this seriously and people are here to really change their life forever. It sounds like it's very much about relationship. Absolutely. I mean, the relationship you form with your clients and patients, as well as their relationship to food, their relationship to their taste buds, I mean. And their relationship with each other, they become, they form like a little support group of the 15 or 20 people that are here with each other that are here.

And we build friends that we have now for the, that we've had from all over the world that have come here in the past, right? It's incredible, right? Oh, that's incredible. One of the reasons I wanted you on the podcast is that my clinical area of interest is in an oral bacteria called Fusobacterium nucleotum. And this is an oral bacteria, Dr. Forman, that starts in the mouth and it moves to other parts of the body.

Retreat Program and Final Resources 1:08:10

It moves to the gut, now we find it in the blood-brain barrier. And so I've been doing a lot of research on it because one thing Fusobacterium does is that it inhibits natural killer cells in the gut. And it's also, this bacteria is considered causal for colorectal cancer. So I did some research before our discussion on the foods that inhibit fusobacterium nucleotum. And it's literally the G-bomb. There's a lot of things you and I have talked about, you know, strategies to control. Use a bacterium, oral bacteria, that doesn't stay where it starts.

But it's things like resistant starch, you know, beta-glucans, pectin, green tea, berries, pomegranates. I just like turmeric. It's really super interesting. Superfoods and the beta-glucans come from the mushrooms we talked about. Right, exactly. And then, of course, to limit all the refined carbs and white bread and pastries and, you know, all the stuff that our taste buds change from. I mean, even in, you know, for Mike and I, our eating plan, we know the rancher that we get our beef from. So my taste buds have changed.

I used to keep a bag of Oreos under my car seat, you know, 20 years ago. And I don't think I, I think I could starve before I put one in my mouth now. All right, well, you're doing lots of good stuff and we covered a lot of information. Yeah. You can have me on another time in the future if you'd like, you know. Oh, yeah, I've really enjoyed your book. Tell us about how people can find you. Well, the easiest way is just go to DrFurman.com, D-R-F-U-H-R-M-A-N.com. And if they can learn more about the program, they can join the membership and ask me their questions and give me guidance through the Ask the Doctor Forum.

But they can also click on the retreat button and decide if they are a candidate, if they want to come here and visit me. But yeah, they can find me through the website very easily. Great. Well, you are a wealth of information and I appreciate your time today. Listeners, thank you for sharing this podcast. We're in almost 150 countries now and about 6,000 cities and that's because you have shared. Thanks for joining me on Instagram. I'll put all of Dr. Froman's information in the show notes. And you know, we just want you to live with joy.

We want to enjoy a long and vibrant health span and have awesome relationships. Blessings until next time. 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.