How To Heal Decades Of Chronic Disease Using Food As Medicine

Cyrus Khambatta, PhD

You’re too kind, I appreciate it, You’re such a you’re such a gem to be around. And the fact that you’ve invited me to be here today is awesome. So thank you so much.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah, it’s great to have you and you know, this is the energy healing summit and food is not only medicine, food is energy, it’s how we derive our energy and the way that, you know, you look at it, you go down into the chemistry and and you know, all that. At the end of the day though, it is energy and our bodies, if they can’t handle That food, then we have illness, we have disease and if we eat the right types of food, which you’re gonna advise us on today, we have health. And you literally tell us your story though, tell us what it was like going through. I think it was 2002 when you found out you had diabetes, but lead us up to that and take us along your path a little bit here.

Cyrus Khambatta, PhD

For sure, for sure. So I when I grew up I grew up in Palo alto California, born in 1980 from the time that I could start walking, my mom recognized that I was a little bit of a handful. And I remember, you know, when I was three years old, four years old, five years old. I just like, I would wake up in the morning and I just had this energy and I just wanted to go do things with it. So at a very young age, my mom and my dad had enrolled me in sports. Like, hey, go play some soccer, go play some basketball, right, go play some baseball, just like stop bothering me, right? And I was like, cool. So by the time I was like eight years old, I was enrolled in three sports at a time my parents would drive me from basketball practice to soccer, practice the baseball practice and that was just normal for me. You know, I grew up being an athlete and I loved every single minute of it. So by the time I got to college I started to notice that things started to slow down. I was 22 years old. I was a senior at Stanford and all of a sudden I was like, I’m unusually tired right now. I don’t understand why like this just doesn’t feel right. 

And then I would, I was studying for finals one day and I was studying for a thermodynamics final, which is like requires a lot of brain power and like I didn’t understand the subject to begin with. I still don’t, but as I was studying it, I was like trying to pay attention to it and my brain just was not working well. And I recognize that I was very thirsty. So I would drink a glass of water, put it down and I’ll continue to do these heat flow equations and all of a sudden I was like, I think I’m thirstier, so I drink another glass of water, put it down and then I would continue working and this process continued for, you know, a day or two days. Then I got to a point where I was like so thirsty that I was like, something is wrong because I’m drinking a lot of water. I started drinking a bunch of Gatorade thinking that I was electrolyte depleted. And yet, despite that my thirst was actually growing. In addition to that, I was going to the bathroom, I kid you not 17 to 20 times a day, every 30 minutes, like clockwork. And I would urinate and I would, I would let a lot of liquid and then I would do it again and then again and then again and then when I would go to sleep, I would try and sleep for, you know, eight hours at night and every 30 minutes or so I would be woken up in the middle of the night with like a very intense muscle cramp. It was either in my calf muscle or my abdomen or my chest or my bicep. And I was like, I felt like I was in rigor mortis at certain points. So I called my sister who was a doctor and she’s a doctor of osteopathy, She’s brilliant. And she’s a family practice medicine. 

And I said, hey, can you explain to me what’s going on? And I gave her my symptomology. She’s cool as a cucumber, always. And she literally was like, cyrus, stop everything you’re doing right now, go straight to the health center. This is a life threatening condition. I was like, whoa, what’s going on? She was like type one diabetes. I know the symptomology. Just go straight there, I’ll meet you, I’ll meet you in five hours. And she drove down to the hospital to meet me. There. I go to the health center first in the health center. They checked my blood glucose 600 60. Okay, what that means in english? Is that your blood glucose was supposed to be between 80 and 130 at any given moment of time. So if I were to check your blood glucose right now, it would likely be between 830 it’s that way before a meal. After meal. During exercise, you name it. My glucose was six times as high as it was supposed to be. The nurse came come back, comes back into the room after measuring my blood glucose. And she looks at me, she goes, how did you get here? And I was like, I walked and she’s like, we gotta get you to the hospital right now. So I go to the hospital over the course of 24 hours. 

They diagnosed me with three chronic diseases, three autoimmune conditions. Number one, type one diabetes, number two, Hashimoto’s hypothyroidism, number three alopecia Universalist, which is just fancy gobbledygook for can’t grow hair, lost my hair. So I used to have hair. But now, as you can see, I got no hair, no eyebrows, no eyelashes, Nothing. So I got diagnosed with the autoimmune conditions within, you know, almost instantaneously. And my life changed immediately. So I got into a state of like fear. I didn’t know if I had done something wrong and maybe I was the cause of all of these conditions. I just had no idea. For the first year I ended up listening to the doctor’s advice and their advice was eat a low carbohydrate diet. Okay, cheese, meat, fish, eggs, turkey burgers, peanut butter, whatever you do. Don’t touch fruits, don’t touch potatoes, don’t touch pasta. Don’t touch rice. Okay, those foods are going to make your book because higher they’re going to make your insulin requirements higher. We recommend staying away from those foods. And I was like, great, I mean, I’m a 19 year old kid, 20 year old kid at this point, I’m like, great, you’re telling me I get to eat more meat? 

Awesome. I’ll do it. So that’s what I did for a year, my blood glucose became really hard to control. Like, very hard to control my insulin use doubled and my energy levels went even lower. So it got to a point where I was like, I was in a deep dark hole and there’s nothing no matter what I did, no matter what I tried, my glucose was just a disaster. So I ended up thinking about changing my diet. I ended up looking for a new way to be and I just happened to stumble across this idea of eating a plant based diet. So this is the year 2003, and I was like, great, let me let me do a plant based diet. I met a guy, his name is Doug Graham. Doug Graham went on to write a book called the 80 10 10 book, brilliant guy. He took me under his wing and for a week he basically was like, I’m going to experiment on you, we’re gonna flip flop you from eating a low carbohydrate diet to a plant based diet. And when you eat a plant based diet, you’re literally gonna eat nothing but fruits and vegetables. That’s it. Let’s see what happens. So, under his guidance, I switched over to eating fruits and vegetables in exclusion and my blood glucose.

Tom McCarthy

What was that like that when he first said that because it was challenging all this knowledge that you’ve gotten from these other doctors, was it like, I’m gonna try it? Or were you like, hey, where I’m at? Anything else? Could be better this time? What were you thinking back then?

Cyrus Khambatta, PhD

It’s a great question because my brain was sort of like split. There was like, there was like the angel on one side and the devil on the other side. And, and the angel was like, well, you know, like, you should listen to what he says because he’s very confident in what he’s saying and this might have some promise. And if you keep doing the same thing over and over again, you might drive yourself insane, right? And then there’s the devil on the other side. He was like, no, no, no, no, no. What’s his, Does he have any medical, you know, background, Does he know what he’s talking about? Like this is different than what a guy in a white lab coat told you you should be concerned, right? So I was sort of like, well, well, you know, what am I supposed to do? But I figured this could be a 30 day experiment in my mind, right? Nothing’s gonna happen in 30 days, maybe nothing. So when I switched over to eating this way, it literally felt like I was an iphone that was running on a really low battery for many years. And I took this Iphone and I plugged it into the wall. 

And within 24 hours I was like, oh boy, this is crazy. 24 hours. 24 hours in me. That’s how long it took. It’s a rapid change. Most people don’t feel that way over 24 hours, but for whatever reason it did. So energy levels increased blood glucose fell like a rock. Okay. The story was that by eating more fruits in particular and more vegetables that I would be, you know, increasing my carbohydrate intake and carbohydrate are bad for you. They’re gonna make you more diabetic, blah, blah, blah blah. And they’re gonna spike your blood glucose and insulin you. So I was expecting that I would inject more insulin. I started eating a bunch of fruits and vegetables. My blood glucose fell by 50%. My insulin use fell by 42% in the first week massive change. So the, the beauty is that I went to, I62 pulled my carbohydrate intake and my insulin use in blood glucose came down. That’s not supposed to happen, right? And I knew that. So, I long story short, I ended up practicing this lifestyle when I got back into my normal routine and just getting better and better and better at it. And like I was saying earlier, I got so much energy from this process that I went and I purchased a bike because I was living in San Francisco and I was like, I need to do something with this energy? I got too much. This literally feels like I’m a five year old kid again and I love it. Right? So, I was going to the gym which I could continue to do forever, but I went and I got a road bike and I signed up to ride a ride called the death race because I, I have a little masochistic side of my brain and the death race basically is 100 and 29 mile bike ride that climbed 16,000 ft in one day. 

And it took me six months to train for this thing and I ended up training, you know, I rode 8000 miles, something like that, just to train for it because I had so much energy and I felt so good. So long story short, I I got to a point where I was like using my body more like Lucas was very controllable. My insulin use was down, I felt phenomenal. And so I put myself back to graduate school to go get a PhD because I wanted to learn the science and while I was there, I just, my, my brain exploded in a good way. I learned so much about how you can use a plant based diet to minimize your risk for not only diabetes, but also minimize your risk and actually not just minimize your risk, but reverse conditions like type two diabetes, pre diabetes, coronary artery disease, high blood pressure, A. K. A. Hypertension, high cholesterol, atherosclerosis, chronic kidney disease, fatty liver disease and even dementia and Alzheimer’s and I was like, how come, how come the scientific world knows this information and it’s been around for almost 100 years. But yet the stuff that doctors say is literally the exact opposite. Something, something’s wrong, something doesn’t make any sense, right? 

And I don’t want people to interpret my words as though I think doctors are bad people because they’re not, they’re amazing human beings. It’s just that the information that they have and that they learned in medical school is pharmaceutical heavy. And as a result of that, the only tools that they have in their tool box are the primary tools are to say, oh, you have this metabolic disease. I have a potential solution for you and it comes in this pill this bottle. So why don’t you take this? That’s the way to delay to improve your health. Right? So long story short, I got to a point where I felt great. My health was under control and then I learned it from a scientific perspective and I said, you know what now it’s time for me to give it back. Like it’s cool that I feel good. Okay, awesome, thank you. You know, I appreciate that. But I have an opportunity here to go help hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions of people. So now I need to go and pay it forward and try and help other people out because there’s a lot of people who are in similar situations, if not worse situations. And if they don’t have the opportunity and the information to change, then maybe that could be my job to help them learn that information so that they can change their lives for themselves.

Tom McCarthy

That’s amazing. That’s amazing. So people are so confused about nutrition because, you know, and we’re gonna talk about a plant based diet here, which I’m on too, by the way. So I’m a big believer. But then you have other people that take opposite views and they are so called experts. And they’re telling people, you know, what you were talking about, eat more protein, eat, you know, more fats. Tell us about your research and why you settled on your philosophy. I mean, the first reason was because it just made you feel so much better, but go into your research a little bit and and I know you’re not, you know, you’re not gonna shame somebody for, you know, deciding to have, you know, a piece of fish or chicken or meat or whatever it is, because I’m sure even some people that follow your philosophy will will do a little bit of that. But the core of what you’re going to talk about and what you believe in is really plant based and take us in Some of your research and and some of the reasons why you’re such a big advocate for that and and and and some of it too is just because you’ve helped so many people. You’ve seen it work in other people, but take your research a little bit correct.

Cyrus Khambatta, PhD

Okay, so let’s venture backwards in time right now. It’s the year 2022, And if we travel backwards approximately 100 years to the year 1920 and change. And you read some of the research that came out from researchers who were, you know, using relatively primitive tools at that time, but conducting, in my opinion, extremely good and very rigorous science. There were some researchers like JP Hemsworth as an example, he’s just one name that really pioneered this idea of eating a plant based diet. And he demonstrated that in laboratory animals like rabbits and mice and rats, that carbohydrates were not the enemy. They never have been the enemy. But even then there was this feeling of like, oh, carbs are bad for you, like shouldn’t need carbs. And he did experiment after experiment after experiment where he demonstrated that the more carbohydrate energy that he fed these animals, the healthier they got, the lower their blood pressure, got the lower their insulin use became. 

And the longer they lived. Then if you fast forward to the 19 thirties, you get more research that comes out from other groups, including the guys like Inder Singh and then you get to the 19 fifties, you get research out of Duke University from blanking on his name. I can’t think of his name right at the top of my head. Sorry about that. Then the information came to the 1970s and you had James W. Anderson, James W. Anderson provided did some very powerful scientific research to continue to replicate this research over the course of time. And he did it in humans. Okay. So there was one paper that he published in 1979 which just kind of like blew my mind at how powerful this approach really was. And what he found out was that if you take individuals and you transitioned them from a sort of meat centric diet to a plant based diet. And he took people with diabetes who were living with type two diabetes that had been prescribed insulin as a tool to lower their blood glucose. So it took 30 people who were injecting insulin and he put them onto a diet where he fed them nothing but plant based foods. 100% plant based foods. And he gave them one caveat. And he said, listen, you can eat plant based foods as much as you want, but under no circumstances are you allowed to lose even a single pound. Okay, I will kick you out of the study if you lose any weight because I don’t want anybody to come to me and say, hey, your patients improved because they lost weight. I don’t care about weight loss, I care about the change of the actual diet. Right? 

So he conducted this study and he fed people plant based diet and he watched as they maintain their body weight. And he literally almost like force fed people to prevent them from his weight. And what ended up happening was that the people, the 30 people who had been given insulin as their tool had been required to take insulin. Half of them stopped using insulin altogether completely. And you might think to yourself like, Okay, cool. Well that’s pretty awesome. But like, how long did that take? Six months? Did it take a year? Did that take two years? Okay, the answer was 16 days. So he took individuals who were prescribed insulin who were using insulin for a minimum of a year and he got them off of insulin in 16 days with £0 of weight loss. It’s kind of a big deal. Right in the research world. That’s a very dramatic results in a very short period of time. Then you fast forward to the two thousands and you get more molecular based research that came out of Yale University. And then you get to Dr. Barnard in the early two thousands who has continued to publish over the course of time about a use of a what here first was a vegan diet or a plant based diet in human beings. 

You get these large epidemiological research studies that are performed in 90,000 people that are followed over the course of seven years, came out of Loma Linda University in this thing called the adventist health study too. And they every single time these types of studies are performed, they find some dramatic results which is that eating more plants lowers your blood pressure, eating more plants lowers your body weight, eating more plants lowers your cholesterol value, eating more plants lowers your glucose value, lowers your A one C. And it just goes on and on and on and on and on. Right? So what scientists have to do in order to like convince themselves most of the time that something is true is you have to see it, You have to see a result and then you have to see the result replicated over and over and over and over and over again in different groups of people. So one experiment might be in a metabolic ward, that’s in a very controlled environment in 30 people. Another experiment might be in 250 people who are free living individuals. A third experiment might be in 1000 people who are women. 1/4 experiment might be in 5000 people who are free living individuals over the course of two years that are, you know, span from 20 years to 60 years, so on and so forth. But when you see it in different populations and you see very similar results repeated over and over and over again It becomes this tidal wave of evidence that basically shows you that to a certain extent, it doesn’t matter how old you are, it doesn’t matter whether you’re black or white, it doesn’t matter matter whether you’re female or male, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a teenager or whether you’re 75 years old, the biology is conserved. And by switching to a plant-based diet and eating more plant-based foods and less animal based products, you’re bound to get some significant metabolic improvements and that’s likely to increase your life over the course of time.

Tom McCarthy

That’s awesome. When you talk about plant based, we’re talking about vegetables, we’re talking about fruits and and and then you know, other grains I guess and things like that, potentially. So one of the food groups that got beat up very badly in the past, probably 20 years are fruits and here you are a diabetic, right? A type, you have type one diabetes and you eat fruit and you eat a lot of fruit. Like explain that to people because I know there was a point in my life where I was, I was vegan, but I would not eat fruit or not eat that much fruit or only eat certain types of fruit, you know, don’t eat a banana. I see you eating bananas like and so and so I got away from eating fruit and now I’m back, you know eating fruit really enjoying it and not fearing it. But I think a lot of people have been fed information or fat fad diets that keep them from eating healthy. So talk about fruit and the sugar because there are some sugars, you’ve told me this before, like refined white sugar. Yeah, we don’t want to eat any of that. But fruit sugar is different. Can you get that explanation to everybody? Because I know there’s other people that were in my situation too.

Cyrus Khambatta, PhD

Yeah. No, it’s a great question because fruit has become such as like controversial topic. I mean who knew that? Like eating fruits and vegetables would become controversial over the course of time. You know, I mean it’s an absurd topic, but if you really think about it at the root, what the messaging on the internet is, is that carbs are bad for you? Ok? You see this all over the place, you can be on instagram, it could be on Youtube, it could be on google, it could be on webMD It could be in science, it could be anywhere and people are saying carbs are bad because when you eat carbs you get fat and when you eat carbs they turn into sugar and sugar is bad for you, everybody knows sugar is bad for you. So don’t eat carbs, right? And then the next logical leap they make is like, okay, well look, bananas are carbs, therefore bananas are bad for you, right? So people just sort of use that methodology to convince themselves that fruits are actually just nothing but a pile of sugar and that sugar is bad for you. Ok. One of the main problems here is that the in order to be biologically accurate when talking about carbohydrate rich foods, you have to use the right words and you have to be extremely specific about what you’re talking about. 

Okay, so just lumping everything into this carbohydrate boat and talking about sugar, blah, blah, blah. It’s just too generic and it’s not true. So, when people talk about carbs, I don’t even like the word carbs, I refer to carbohydrate rich foods because there are foods that just happen to have more carbohydrate energy than they have fat and protein, right? But they do have other things in them. So the point being is carbohydrate rich foods can be separated into categories category one stuff that is whole, whole means unprocessed or minimally processed fruits, Starchy vegetables, legumes, whole grains, mushrooms, herbs and spices, green leafy vegetables, Okay, plant material that doesn’t require very much processing. The second category are refined carbohydrates cookies, crackers, chips, pastas sodas, sugar, sweetened beverages, right, stuff that comes from the middle of the grocery store that is requires a manufacturing process in order to be edible, and as a result of that, the two different types of carbohydrate rich foods cannot be talked about in the same sentence unless you specifically put the word whole or refined in front of it.

Tom McCarthy

Okay, so one second because you said something really cool stuff that comes from the middle of the grocery store because I was just in my mind I got a picture like the produce stuff is usually on the side, right? And the stuff in the middle is all the process stuff where it had to be processed and it’s probably harder for our bodies to process it. To doubt. No question about it. The middle of the grocery store. Be careful of the middle of the grocery store. I mean that’s gonna I’m already careful that that’s a good image that you just planted in my mind.

Cyrus Khambatta, PhD

Yeah. Good. I’m glad you, I’m glad you’re learning that because if you go to the middle of the grocery store, I mean you’re basically looking at like aisle after aisle after aisle of nothing but like packaged food that either it comes in a box or a can or a bottle. And like I’m not gonna say that every single processed food on the planet is bad for you. But as a generality the stuff that has to end up in a package has to go through a manufacturing process and in the process of doing that it gets stripped of micronutrient material, like it’s stripped of fiber and that decreases its nutrition value, right? So instead of eating those foods you go for the stuff that literally has no label on it. It has no sticker, it has no ingredient list because it doesn’t need one. You don’t you don’t pick up an apple at the grocery store, pick up a mango and they’re like, huh, I wonder I wonder what’s inside of this, right. The answer is it’s an apple, right? Or it’s a mango. There’s nothing else inside of it except the fruit itself, right? But here’s my point. You got the whole foods that come from the produce section. You got sorry, The whole foods that come from the produce section, the bulk section, which is where you find beans, lentils, and peas, the whole grain section, which admittedly requires a little bit of processing, right? Or heating in order to become edible. And then the starchy vegetables and non starchy vegetables sections which come from the produce area. Right? So point being, is if you can derive most of your energy from those foods and you can minimize or eliminate your processed food intake, then that’s gonna have profound impacts on all tissues, your brain, your thyroid gland, your liver, your kidney, your heart, your vascular, you name. 

All of that is those ingredients are going to significantly improve your health. Now this question of sugar sugar, sugar, sugar sugar sugar. Okay, we gotta like hammer this one down because this topic is too confusing in my mind. Okay we know as a culture that sugar is not good for you. Okay and when I say sugar, I mean refined sugar. White table sugar. Okay. White table sugar literally is a crystal that you can pour out of a bottle onto the table and it is you know you can pick it up, you can stick it on your tongue and it’s got a very sweet flavor to it. Okay if you ever think about, well where did that white crystal come from? Because if you walk out in a forest, you’re not gonna find it. The white crystal came from either sugar cane or sugar beets. And they take that material and they grind it, they process it, they dehydrate it, they then mill it into a powder and then they bleach it and then they crystallize it and then they put it into a box and then now you can have it. Right? So in that process of all those steps, well guess what fiber gone doesn’t just decrease. It is literally gone. It doesn’t exist anymore. Micro nutrients gone, vitamins, minerals, gone, antioxidants gone. 

Micro Sorry What I’m looking for phytochemicals, there’s these disease fighting phytochemicals that come along for the ride in many fruits and vegetables. Gone all you end up with is this very highly purified white crystal that is literally nothing but glucose and fructose co violently attached to each other and as a result of that when you consume it, what that means is that you’re eating a food that’s as refined as something like cocaine and I kid you not right, It’s addictive like cocaine, it lights up the dopamine producing centers in your brain like cocaine, right? And so as a result of that, I want people to understand that white table sugar is a toxic substance. White table sugar is a highly refined substance, It’s very palatable. And food manufacturers have recognized that from the second you put that on your tongue, your tongue lights up, It sends neurological signals up to your brain, your brain lights up and it’s like, give me more of that stuff. That stuff is good, right? And so it becomes a very highly addictive substance. But there’s there’s ramifications for eating that. You put white table sugar into your body and over the course of time, well, guess what blood flow decreases your vasculature gets damaged, your brain gets damaged, your liver ends up converting a lot of that stuff into fatty acids and then accumulating those fatty acids, developing fatty liver disease, your muscles and incorporating that stuff, your liver takes it in and you end up developing insulin resistance, your pancreas doesn’t like that stuff, blah, blah, blah blah blah. The list goes on, right? So white table sugar equals a no, no, don’t put that into your body and it doesn’t matter what walk of life you come from. White table sugar is bad for you. Here’s the logical flaw. People say if you eat a fruit like you would a banana, as you’d asked me earlier, banana turns into sugar and therefore you should need a banana because it’s bad for you because sugar is bad for you. Okay, here’s the problem. A banana doesn’t turn into sugar. 

Okay. Most people believe that that’s what happens. That’s what they’ve been told and that’s what the marketing suggests. Right? People have this image in their head, they’re like a banana and then they put an arrow like, you know, human digestive system in the middle turns a banana into a bunch of white table sugar. And the white table sugar is bad for you. But no, no, no, no, no, that is not what happens. Your digestive system is a very complex machine and its role is to extract nutrients out of food and then take those nutrients and put them into your blood and then transport them to tissues where they can be used as energy. Your digestive system has to recognize the food that comes in at first. So a banana is a perfect example. A banana contains carbohydrate and fat and protein and vitamins and minerals and antioxidants and sorry, carbohydrate, fat, protein, vitamins, minerals, fiber, water, antioxidants and phytonutrients, nine classes of nutrients. Okay, your digestive system has to be able to recognize it and figure out what is it going to do with the carbohydrates and the fat and the protein and the vitamins and the minerals and the fiber and the water and blah blah blah. So there’s very specific processes for let me take the fat and put it over here. Let me take the carbohydrate and put it over here. Let me take the protein and put it over here. Let me take the water and do this. Let me take the fiber and pass it on yet. Yet. Yet. So that justice system knows how to do all this stuff. And that’s a good thing, right? 

The end result is that you end up with a very complex food that has been broken into hundreds of thousands of different pieces and those hundreds of thousands of different pieces, then go on to have different positive metabolic effects in many tissues. And yet what people believe is that banana literally turned into one pile of white table sugar and nothing else. Right? And so that’s the logical flaw that people are making. And so my point is that fruits do not equal white table sugar. It’s just biologically inaccurate fruits result in a plethora of disease fighting micronutrients and macronutrients like carbohydrate fat and protein that you can extract for energy. And so if people can just think about the complexity that exists in nature, then they’ll begin to recognize that no single food. I don’t care if it’s a walnut or an avocado or a coconut. Every single food is a very complex collection of carbohydrate, fat, protein, vitamins, minerals, fiber, water, antioxidants and phytochemicals. Every single food that comes from the natural world. Okay, this is excluding animal products. Right? And so if you think about it from that perspective of like, okay, they’re just coming in slightly different amounts from food to food to food, then you can begin to realize that a complex input results in a very complex output and the complex output can actually be very beneficial for your long term health.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah, that’s awesome. Hey, what about juice is one of my favorite things is a fresh squeezed grapefruit juice. Is that still okay? Or should you be careful of things like that?

Cyrus Khambatta, PhD

Yeah. Okay, great question. So if you’re, my recommendation would be, if you’re gonna be drinking juice is the problem I would say with juices, is that when you put them through a juicing machine, you take a very complex input and you strip out the fiber. Okay, so the fiber is basically separated from the liquid and you end up drinking a concentrated liquid. Now the liquid tastes pretty darn good. You juice, grapefruit, you drink it and you’re like, wow, this is unbelievable. This is like, you know, it’s very flavorful and very refreshing. The fiber has a very, very powerful effect on your digestive system and it’s actually required for like optimal digestion. Okay, so you’ll drink grapefruit juice and you’ll feel good and it’ll taste good and that’s great. 

But the problem is that when you’re, when you’re juicing fruits, especially for people who are living with some form of metabolic disease, it can end up causing blood glucose to rise quickly. It can end up causing their insulin secretion to rise quickly and it can end up causing, you know, your liver and have to work harder than it necessarily should. So point being is that I’m not going to say that drinking fruit juice is bad for you. If you have fruit juice and you drink it with a meal that contains other foods, other solid foods, then you’re basically getting fiber and the fruit juice at the same time and it can kind of slow down the deleterious effects of it. But in isolation, just drinking fruit juice can certainly be problematic. So, you know, have it in combination and you should be just fine.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah, I almost always mix it like maybe a quarter of the juice and then three quarters like green juice. Right? So there you go to. So Okay, cool. So, hey, listen, this is amazing. Tell people like the top three things as we’re talking about healing decades of chronic disease using food as medicine. If you would break it down into maybe your top three tips of how to do that. What would those be?

Cyrus Khambatta, PhD

Okay, top three tips of how to do that, how to transition to a plant based diet for long term success number one, don’t do it quickly, Okay, okay, that may sound weird, right? But the reason why I recommend not doing it quickly is because good things take time and there’s this feeling, especially in the world of health that you have to do things quickly in order for them to be effective. So you’ll go to the grocery store and you’ll see these magazines and the checkout aisle that say lose £30 in the next two weeks, right? You know, lose £60 in the next three months, right? There’s these big numbers in short time periods and it kinda makes you feel like like I gotta do things quickly in order to make them work, you know? But what I find is that when people try to do things too quickly when they migrate to a plant based diet in particular, that they don’t develop good habits, they just like go onto a diet that’s almost kind of feels like a get rich quick scheme. And as a result of that they end up not creating good habits. 

They hit some roadblocks around along the way, maybe, you know, they end up with like withdrawal symptoms when they look at a hamburger and I really want to eat that and as a result of that they end up trying something and then they throw up their arms at some point in the process and they’re like, you know, this didn’t work, screw it, I’m gonna go do something else, right? And then they report back, they go, oh I tried eating a vegan diet and didn’t work and I’m like no no, you didn’t try to a vegan diet. You tried to do things too quickly and then you ended up causing yourself a problem, right? So number one, take your time, transitional plant based diet, literally, it should take between three and six months. Okay, that’s number one number to turn off the internet. Yeah. Try not to listen to fad information. It’s hard to fish out what’s real and what’s not real, but people on Youtube and on instagram and on Tiktok that don’t really have scientific credentials about what they’re talking about.

Tom McCarthy

Trying to have a PhD in chemistry.

Cyrus Khambatta, PhD

Yeah. They certainly don’t have PhDs and there’s a lot of people who don’t, but here’s the problem is that there’s a lot of M. D. S. And there’s a lot of like quote unquote health experts that are saying literally the exact opposite of what I’m saying. So it’s hard for your average person to know what’s true and what’s not true, but use your spider senses, use your spider senses and just try and think logically use your common sense and say wait a minute if somebody’s telling me to eat a lot of animal products and to eat you know, organ meats and to eat a lot of eggs on a daily basis and more sausage and more meat and more processed dairy, just use your common sense and recognize that a lot of that information is just there to tell you what you think you want to hear. But in reality it doesn’t actually have a scientific basis. That’s number two. And then number three is exactly what we talked about earlier. Don’t fear fruit in particular. Okay, fruits are very, very, very powerful disease fighting foods. And if you can eat a lot of fruit and a lot of, you know, plant material in general and do it in a low fat environment with a small amount of total fat in in in total, you’re gonna put yourself in a very, very powerful metabolic state that’s going to have lasting positive consequences in the short term. And for many years to come.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah. And the thing about these fad diets is many of them are effective in helping you lose weight, right? So that’s what people are looking at. But you really have, do you want to just lose weight and die of heart disease that, you know, 59 years old, right? Is that what you want or do you want to lose weight because plant-based diet will do that maybe not as quickly in some instances as as some of these fad diets that really force your body to lose weight because it’s it’s stressing it out and and and causing it to like, you know, freak out but correct the plant based diets are if you look at the inside and you look at your blood work and and all these great things. It’s getting all of that better in addition to losing weight and maybe it does take a little bit more time but you’re allowing your body to shift in a more powerful way that increases longevity and all those other things that you talked about, all those other benefits.

Cyrus Khambatta, PhD

Yeah, you you nailed it, you absolutely nailed it and then, you know, a good friend of mine, I was just talking to earlier today, he really hit it on the head where he explained he has a quote, his name is Adam Stud and he himself has lost 160 pounds and reversed food addiction and type two diabetes and obesity and hypertension. I mean the dude is a is a walking genius and he’s got a lot of positive, you know, a lot of good information to teach people and he said to me, he said quote long lasting change is a result of monotonous, boring looking repetitive and unattractive effort and if you’re willing to put in that effort every single day and just work and continue to work and continue to work but find ways to make it enjoyable no matter how monotonous it is, no matter how boring it feels, no matter how unattractive and how repetitive it might feel the results are going to knock your socks off, right? So just be willing to have a long term vision in the same way that you have a long term vision for your financial health, you have a long term vision for your relationship, you have a long term vision for getting a degree in economics, you have a long term vision for your career. 

Try not to fall into this path where you’re trying to make short term decisions that are designed to make you improve your health really quickly because you might, but it might not work and I would rather you just have a long tradition say, hey, what am I trying to accomplish over the course of the next 2 to 5 to 10 to 15 years and if I can do it that way and just like set a goal and continue working in that direction all day long, every single day, it’s going to work and you’re gonna be in a much, much, much healthier state than you’ve ever been in. And it’s not gonna take that long to feel the effects.

Tom McCarthy

And it becomes second nature. So when we talk about it being, you know monotonous and doing it every day, like we all have things that we that are monotonous we do every day that we enjoy because there are habits first, you make your habits then your habits make you like we brush our teeth every day, it’s not a big deal. We just brush our teeth, right? Yeah. And so and for me the same thing with what I eat and I just you know, I eat plant based and again, you know, I understand not everyone’s gonna do what we’re talking about, right? But it’s a choice based on research. I’ve done that I’ve just made for myself because I wanna I wanna I wanna live a long happy healthy life and and I want to have you know a healthy heart and and and all these great benefits that we have from it. So great information. But my point is once it becomes a habit it’s not it’s not hard, it’s not monotonous, it’s just who you are now. But that does take a little while to develop. So last question or two is how can people get more of your work? Where can they reach you? What resources do you have? How can they find out more of all this great information that you have?

Cyrus Khambatta, PhD

Yeah, thank you. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. So I started a company called mastering diabetes. So you can go to masterdiabetes.org and you can learn all about what we do. We have a coaching program that really is designed to help people transition to a plant based diet and stick with it in a long term. In addition to that we also wrote a book in the same way that you’ve written a book. we wrote a book called mastering diabetes and you can go to amazon, you can pick that up there and that book has really transformed the way people think about their health and really helped you solidify a lot of the concepts that we talked about today and it goes into a lot of depth about those, those concepts that book also has for the super nerds in the audience. That book has 800 scientific references in there and we did that on purpose because we’re not here to, you know, talk about fad dieting. 

We literally go by the science and we show you the effects of 100 years of scientific information that can really set you up and give you the confidence that is required in order to make long term change possible. And then the third thing I will say is that we are, we are now working, we have a partnership with another company and then the other companies called healthy America and healthy America is led by John Mack, the former Ceo of whole Foods. And his mission is to change the way that health care is performed in this country. And John Mack is a very incredibly, incredibly nice guy. He’s got a very ambitious vision and we are now going to be working very closely with them to change the healthcare landscape over the course of the next 5 to 10 to 15 years and beyond. So look out for more information about healthy America and you know, we’re here to try and change the affect the lives of millions of people as we move forward and I do think that it’s gonna happen and it’s gonna happen real quick.

Tom McCarthy

I love it. Yeah, big things ahead. Big things ahead, Cyrus, so excited about everything you’re doing. Thanks for being with us, You’re amazing, great friend to me and now friend to so many more people. Thanks so much for being on our summit.

Cyrus Khambatta, PhD

I appreciate it. Tom, thank you for inviting me back here again. And I really do hope that people think that they find this information valuable and can really take this information to change their life and also think about their ability, just how powerful you have the ability to change your own life, okay. A lot of people think that they’re just products of everything around them and to a certain extent you are, but you have the power to change your own life and if you really take this information plus all the other information that we find in the summit to heart, you can change your life and you can make some serious powerful change that can last you the rest of your time. So thank you so much.

Tom McCarthy

Great job. Thanks so much Cyrus.