Nutritional Excellence To Reduce Pain, Enhance Immune Function and Prevent Cancer

Introduction to Nutritional Excellence 0:00

Hi, this is Doctor Pollack, and I have a special guest today. The title of today's talk basically is Nutritional Excellence to reduce pain, enhance immune function, and prevent Cancer. That's a simple title. And I have with me today, Doctor Joel Fuhrman. Many of you may have seen Doctor Friedman on TV. I got to know him indirectly by having seen him many times on NPR doing his lectures. So I was always fascinated by him, and that's one of the reasons we invited him to participate in our summit, is to get that wisdom, the nutritional wisdom.

Doctor, for, for him as a board certified family doctor has numerous books that have been on a New York Times best selling list. That's our list. He's a nutritional researcher who specializes in preventing and reversing disease through attrition. He has a retreat that he runs on a regular basis, in San Diego. But he not only does his books, he does television specials, he does virtual speaking engagements. And he shares all his nutritional protocols with hundreds of thousands of people around the world.

In fact, people dealing with things like obesity, addiction, food addictions, diabetes, heart disease, autoimmune disease, cancer and a lot of other things. Now that's my short intro to Doctor Fermin, but we're going to personalize it because I'd like to ask him to help us to understand how he started this whole process in the first place. Well, hi. It's good to be glad to be here, of course, and talk to you today. Looking forward to this exciting talk. Yeah. You know, I was on the United States World figure skating team.

I was actually third in the world in pairs figure skating with my younger sister, Gail in the 1970s. And, we used we were into nutrition because my father got us into eating healthy because he was overweight and sickly and changed his diet and eating. And he read, Doctor Herbert Shelton's books. And then that was written in 1940s, 1950s. And I started reading health and nutrition books when I was a teenager, you know, just to improve stamina and not get sick for, for, for competing around the world.

And then as I became older, you know, in my experience and exposure to that movement, I realized that most of the problems that plague people in this country and all over the world heart disease, diabetes, cancers, asthma, autoimmune conditions are founded in nutritional ignorance and going to physicians and taking what we know are toxic medications to suppress the symptoms of nutritional induced diseases is a methodology. And that's that's bound to fail. And it's just purported, you know, compiles more toxins on the person's body, accelerating their death and, and risk of cancer.

I'm saying right now that the treatments for autoimmune disease, the medications increase risk of cancer in short and cut short a person's life. And and nobody's told if they can get rid of their rheumatoid arthritis, their psoriasis, their scleroderma, or their Sjogren's syndrome or their nobody's telling them that nutrition could could make for a reversal of these conditions, even of lupus and multiple sclerosis. They're just giving drugs the rest of their life, and nobody's told if you have diabetes, don't treat it with drugs.

Get rid of it, lose the weight, eat healthy and get rid of your diabetic BS and come Non-Diabetic diet. High blood pressure and high cholesterol that signs you in the wrong diet. Don't just treat it with numbers with the medication that's enabling people to just live their diet on out, to be continue on their unhealthy habits. Allow anybody to deteriorate further. So I, you know, passionate about this. Even when I was younger and I decided to go back to the post graduate pre-med program, I already had graduated from college, but didn't have the pre-medical requirements, and I was working in my family, had a shoe business, I think, about ten shoe stores in the New York metropolitan area, and my father was going to be taking over my father's business, but I did, and mostly running it.

But I decided it was much more passionate and excited about being a physician.

Fuhrmanu2019s Personal Journey into Nutrition 4:17

So we told my father to sell the business and retire, and I'd go back to medical school, go back to the to get my pre-medical requirements. So as a post graduate, I went to the post-graduate pre-med program at Columbia and then applied to medical school and then start medical school till I was 29 years old. But for the last 35 years, I'm 68 now, and for the last 25 years, I last 35 years, I've been a family physician specializing in nutritional medicine. So right from the day I finished my residency, I opened my own private practice with a special with a as a board certified family physician specializing in nutritional medicine, treating people nutritionally, starting right out of the box with telling people they don't have to have asthma and be on inhalers the rest of their life.

I can help them get rid of their asthma completely so they don't need inhalers the rest of their life. And that's been the most exciting and rewarding part of my career, is enabling people to have confidence and hope that they're not just going to stay sick the rest of their life in Europe, or you're a person with a disease that you don't adapt is there. You're sick the rest of your life. You're taking these drugs the rest of your life. And I'm saying, why be sick, get totally well, get rid of these problems because we can do this if we, you know, and like you were saying, with enough education information and giving the putting the power back in the hands of the patient where they can control their health destiny, it's very, very powerful.

So I'll say to a person, you know, on, well, what are you coming here for? You know, what do you want to just lose a little weight or get healthier, or you want to get rid of your problem complete? You want to become completely non-diabetic and get rid of your breathing problems and get rid of you. And they would say, no, I want it all. I want to get back to my favorable weight. I don't want to have as many more. I want to be non-diabetic. And then I would say to them, then, then don't think about what you should eat, what you like to eat, what you feel like eating, what you think you should eat, what makes you feel good.

Just do what I tell you to do right now for the next month and don't evaluate it. Because to do this, do a scientific test, we got to do make sure you accurately eat the most healthiest healing foods for the body right now, and then I'll guarantee you you'll love eating this way if you give me time to retrain your taste preferences, teach you all the recipes, get you all you know, get your food it, get rid of your food addictions and cravings and you'll start really loving what you're eating. But don't evaluate the first few weeks.

Just do what I tell you to do so you'd like. You're building muscles in the gym because you may not like the exercises at first. You may be sore, but just do it anyway because the soreness will go away and the and you'll start enjoying exercise. So so I get them. So so really my job was mostly, you know, a motivator to get people to want to make that change, such a radical change to nutritional excellence. And then over the years so that they can learn to enjoy it, find it, taste great, and understand the addictive nature of conventional foods that makes people have recidivism and weight regain and makes it difficult.

People succeed on diets because they have all the wrong information. They don't have a really thorough understanding of the danger and addictive nature of these foods, that that they build this illicit love affair with it, destroy their health. And so eventually I set up a retreat in San Diego. By the way, it's open 365 days of the year. It's always here. So there's people staying here two, three, four months. I have one person here, a woman who's who's been here six months. She came in at 280 and now she's 190.

So she's lost 90 pounds in the last six months. And she's got it's funny, the most of the times the diabetes goes away in the first three weeks. But she stayed mildly diabetic for the first two months, two and a half months or so. In other words, her sugar is still running. I took her off all the medication within the first few weeks, but her sugars were still running between like 110 and 140 in the first couple of months, but now her sugars are running between 70 and 80 and fasting blood sugars are no medication.

So now she's clearly now not diabetic, but she lost, you know, like 90 pounds already in the last. So but obviously but she's still overweight. She still weighs 190 pounds. She came in at 280. You know what I mean? But it's amazing. But it's amazing how in most cases, how rapidly these diseases go away and most people stay between 30 day 30 and 90 days and to and and of course, obviously most people who use my methods don't come to my retreat. They just follow my methods from online or in the books and stuff, and they communicate on my members, my, you know, my website.

But for some people who are really, you know, have tough food addictions and need this period of enforced abstinence away from the things that that they can't stop eating, it's helpful to get away from those things and retrain their food preferences, learn the recipes in an environment, see how we structure the program so they can repeat and replicate this at home and really continue the progress they made here. And, you know, it's interesting when I made that transition as well, from conventional medicine to functional medicine or holistic medicine, I noticed that when I put people on diets or had them go on, diets begin to do make this dietary changes that needed to make to improve their life.

Most people felt great. They felt better. Never mind the diseases. That's good enough. That's that's important enough. But the important thing is they actually felt better, right? So they were they were very happy to continue those days because they were feeling better in so many different ways. But let's go back for a second to medicine, how conventional medicine evolved. So you and I, as family physicians, went through traditional medical training. We were trained in a model that was actually established in the early 1900s.

There's something called the Pellegrino report. So the major medical schools at the time were losing control over what they considered to be medicine. And and so there was a lot of other therapies that were being promoted. People were naturopathic doctors, osteopathic doctors, homeopathic doctors, you name it. And the medical schools, and especially with the influence of the drug companies at the time said, well, this is bad because this is not science based, right? We didn't know much about nutrition back then.

So we said, we have to take we have to take control of this. This is not real medicine. So the pharmaceutical companies then help the medical schools at that time develop curricula that were basically science based and mostly biochemical.

Why Conventional Medicine Falls Short 10:38

Right? Right. And that didn't allow for any other kinds of, inputs into the training programs. And they then influenced the licensing board boards influence the legislators. And with the licensing boards, they began to restrict what a medical doctor was called and what what training they received. And nutrition was absolutely not part of this, except for the nutrition that we have for diabetes or Urania or kidney disease or or maybe like scurvy and beriberi, you know, exactly that are really the real outliers.

Yeah. Real outliers you don't even see. Right? Yeah. So we, we we learned over time as we got smarter and smarter and smarter about nutrition, we now had a foundation of knowledge on nutrition that was maybe not so pharmaceutically based. Right. But at least it was. It was scientific. It still has scientific value. And then those of us who were renegade doctors, you know, went out there and did all that while people were getting better at. Now, we had a problem, though, because we were getting people off their medication.

So I don't know whether you had run into any trouble with, conventional medicine because of nutrition therapy. Well, not really. I mean, you know, it's funny because they made me the 25th year anniversary of my medical school graduating class. They made me the keynote speaker, you know, and and it's amazing how all the doctors I went to school with are so were so grateful to have learned nutrition from me. Their classmate, and said that I had a better, a bigger effect on them than most of their tea than a teachers in medical school.

And I've changed their personal lives and their medical careers. And, you know, as one of the original founders of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine, you know, I've mentored and helped, support the growth of doctors who now who special, who've actually changed the career central part of their career would be treating patients, their patients primarily with nutritional methods and not just giving drugs all the time. So there's a lot of this thousands of doctors today now utilize these methods.

Sorry about my doing. They're making noise. I can lock her up if she gets to, to ring. Well, we'll we'll edit this little bit out. So you're right. You're right. That that and that actually is only in the late 70s that finally doctors became healthier than their patients. I don't know if that's the case. Now. I still see, you know, there's a lot of doctors that are getting healthy, but there are a lot of doctors who are still overweight. And, you know, food is addicting. You know, the standard American diet is deadly.

I call it the deadly American diet. It's 60% processed foods, 35% of animal products, less than 2% of calories comes from vegetables. And I'm saying if you eat like other Americans eat, then you're going to get what other Americans get. You know, I speak to large, large audiences. Hey, raise your hand if you've been shot by a bullet or stabbed by a knife and your torso, your neck, or anything like that in your local neighborhoods. And like, nobody hardly raises their hand. I'm speaking to a group of like 700 doctors and I say, raise your head if you have a family member or a neighbor who got a cancer diagnosis or a heart attack or stroke, and everybody's hand goes up and say, you want to stay in that dangerous neighborhood, you want to do what other you want to state and not expect it's going to happen to you.

What happens to everybody? No. Eventually, when these are the diseases of nutritional stupidity, when we have this scientific advances in nutritional science, well, we don't have to get cancer and you don't have to get a heart attack or stroke. You don't have to get dementia. You instead of living to be 95 to 105 years old, in great health, beautiful mental faculties, you want to deteriorate at the age of 70, be in a nursing home for ten years, or 5 or 10 years. Die in a hospital with tubes stuck in the orifices of your body and take 20 years of your life and have no, you know, and and have all your money taken away from you.

It's suffering the last you know. I mean, you can't want to do what other Americans are doing with food. It's self-destructive. And this is to other doctors that you were teaching. Yeah. And sometimes I, you know, so it's funny because when I spoke to the T-3 conference in, in cardiology conference in California, in, Florida, these are doctors who are interventional cardiologist who put Stenson people. Right, right. And they gave me an award for the doctor that is influenced, you know, the most that had the best effect on cardiologists nutritional training or something like that.

So in other words, and then, Doctor Kuszczak Reddy, the head of the cardiac intervention training at the VA, gets up on the stage and says, three people influenced my life the most in my career as a physician, my parents and Doctor Furman. And I'm sitting in the audience in the back. So, so I'm really proud of the fact that my, that my influence has have influenced other physicians to be non nutritional aware and realize the power of nutritional medicine and that, you know, and I'm that's always been my passion and goal.

And I just saying you you can't change everybody. And every person may not want to eat this way this healthfully. But every person should be aware that they don't have to have psoriasis. They don't have to have a heart attack. They don't have to be have stents put in. They don't have to have these things happen to them. They have a choice. They can chose to smoke cigarets and chance getting a heart attack, a lung cancer if they have that, if they want to. But they should know that those cigarets are going to lead to some medical problems down the road and be much better.

They they don't have to have that happen to them. They don't have to get lung cancer. It's the same thing with nutrition. And then people rub this myth that they think they're giving up something of like their value in life is all based around their food addictions and food cravings. They say, oh, you know, shoot me right now. I'd rather be dead now if I had to eat carrot sticks and celery the rest of my life, what's the point of living if there's no enjoyment in life? But you know, and they think that they're enjoying their diet more than we're enjoying our diet.

They don't. Is your taste buds adapt to what you eat, you get, you build more taste muscle. You'll learn fantastic recipes. That's the myth. You know. You know, food. I just want to say that food addiction makes it almost impossible for people to lose weight and get healthy without a lot of knowledge. You need a lot of knowledge to break food addiction, including the knowledge that if you're eating unhealthily, particularly on high glycemic carbs like like white flour and white bread, because white flour, white flour and white flour products and sugar is has no biological difference than candy.

It's so white flour is sugar. It's candy. It's cake. And and it's not food. It's a drug. Because food nourishes the body with things to sustain our life. Drugs poison us with toxins and create more reactive oxygen species. And you can't even turn white flour and sugar into energy efficiently because the because our body needs co-factors, vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals, antioxidants to fuze the production of reactive oxygen species from the metal, from metabolizing sugar into energy because it can't be shunted efficiently into energy.

A lot of it's just pushed into fat stores, which then makes you and it gets you get mild, lipid accumulations. In other words, you get you get fat mixed in with the muscle tissue, weakening your muscle tissue and making you feel a thing and not getting introduced. You don't even feel like exercising. But the point I'm making right now is that that pizza, that pasta, that those bagels, those croissants, those those products are not those are dangerous substances and and self-destructive. And these oils, these these oils and, and white light flour products people are eating are from the major part of the calories.

And they can't think of living without them, you know, and just like and when they stop them, they go to withdrawal depression when they stopped and they go through profound fatigue

The Nutritarian Diet and G-BOMBS 18:18

and maybe headaches and cramping. What I'm saying is the it's day three, four and five after the dietary change where people feel the worst. So the day one and two, you're not feeling that way. But day three, four and five, you're feeling wiped out and you're going through. It's like going to a cocaine rehab facility where you're cutting away your cocaine. You're not feeling better when you cut away poisons. You temporarily have a dip in how you feel. Then they'll start feeling better. They may be a secondary healing crisis that occurs three or 4 or 6 weeks later, where they have some more fatigue or headaches, but it's mostly that they three, four and five because that's where people will fail.

They'll say, well, I tried to do that, but I felt so weak and I felt so sick and I felt so headache. I got to go back to eating like my own health. My other diet again, because they don't realize is a flood of toxins that are now coming out of your body when you stop being addictive, when you're stopping addictive substances and these things that enter the bloodstream so rapidly, like oil and flowers, lead into the bloodstream so rapidly, it's a surge of calories in the blood, stimulate dopamine centers in the brain in the same areas where opiates get stimulated and you develop the that you become dopamine insensitive.

And it's the dopamine insensitive, the overstimulation of brain centers for over for eating calories in too much caloric concentrations that make people develop food cravings and overeating behaviors because they're not satisfied with normal amount of calories, they have to overconsume calories to replicate to still get enough dopamine stimulation for their overstimulated brains, and it accelerates brain aging, depression, and and eventually, dementia. And there's a dose dependent relationship between commercial baked goods and fast food, and developing major depression.

And so the dose dependent means, as you go up and have more commercial baked goods and fast food, the risk of depression increases accordingly. And much of our population is just thymic the word this time of year. For those that don't know, it means you're not like totally depressed. You can't get out of bed, but you're not that excited about life. You don't wake up and low mood, low mood, and you just, you know, they live just to make money, get through their job so they can go and have go to the bar, have alcohol, have restaurant food, have fast food.

They're living for their addiction and they're living for instant gratification. They've lost the neuroplasticity they go for. They become more narcissistic because you just the more addictions you accumulate, the less compassionate, the more the less emotions you have about other people, about the world around you, the beauty around you in the world, about your passionate own interests and being and emoting and feeling for others. The more you're an addict. People know cocaine addicts and heroin addicts can lie, cheat, steal, do anything to get their addictions, and to a lesser degree, but still the same way.

Similarly, when you're a food addict, you get more consumed in your own narrow world around yourself and meeting you addictive needs. And you think that that's is your whole world. And you think and you live just for your addictions. And people only don't become the full. They don't reach their full human potential. It causes these diseases. It reduces their it reduces their intelligence, reduces their ability to think rationally and logically. Because now the addiction, the addictive part of the brain, the primitive brain becomes a major driver of the behavior and the cerebral brain loses.

Now, because the primitive brain becomes the master controller, that means you're driving. You want that cigaret. You need to have that, that, that, that donut. You need to be drinking. You know, having that pizza, you've got it, you know, and you come up with a million rationalizations why you can't quit, what you can't change, what you can't eat healthy, what you can't lose weight, but you can't. The primitive brain rationalizes to maintain their attraction. This kind of magnetic attraction they've developed with these dangerous foods.

I call it this illicit love affair people have with these dangerous foods. They can't give up. No matter what the consequences. Destroying their family life, destroying their work life, terrible health conditions, overweight, needing drugs. Nothing is going to stop there. This this self-destructive behavior. And that's really where you need this type of education, not just on how to eat healthy. Scientifically, the foods are going to make you live longer, but also how to make that change and how to make it so you can stick with it and enjoy it the rest of your life.

And that's when people fail, as you said, right? So that you make that change. You don't feel good. So you fail and you go back to what you did. So you need to have a supportive environment to have you make that transition adequately right and continue. That's right. That's really true. That's really right that that's what I've tried to do through much of my career because through my medical practice initially having but also eventually, with my work through, you know, on television is setting up and on through my website.

I have like forums, support groups, local meet ups, you know, events and then eventually a retreat if people can't do it on their own. But, so I've developed like, ancillary services to set people up when they need a food addiction, a counselor to help them stay on the plan. And so I have a lot of extra services and, and, you know, little things that help people stick with it so they feel they're not doing this alone. So they get their questions answered, they get support, they get friends, they find it.

They get recipes. They know it tastes great. They get they, you know, they get. So in other words, they know that they're wherever they are in the country of the world, there's people who want to help them. And so we're all in this together and to encourage each other to be healthier. And I and, and I feel very passionately that, that this is important for the for the world to be kinder to each other, you know, and to us protect the planet and to be more and to and to for people to interact in more caring and loving way.

I think that I what I'm saying right now is I think the this cake diet and this dangerous way people are eating, I think it it interferes with people's ability to be creative, to be rational, logical and kind. I think it it hurts their brain and makes them more likely to become more deviant and more because we know that there's I wrote a book once called Fast Food Genocide, and I showed all the data showing that how poor diets, you know, more sweets, more candy, more on unhealed more oils lead to and especially in childhood led to increased likelihood of criminal behavior and drug abuse and drug use in adult life.

Matter of fact, kids in the highest quintile, the highest fifth of candy consumption in childhood, had a 60% chance of being arrested by the time they were 35 years old for some kind of violence or drug related offense. So we're talking about the fact that that the unhealthy eating doesn't just cause heart disease and cancer. It also leads to a more volatile, aggressive, and less rational human being. When you don't have good, when you don't have good physical health, and you know, it affects your brain as well, not just your body.

So it affects behavior, then obviously it affects behavior. And, you know, we could say like 50 to 70 years ago, 1 in 500 Americans were mentally ill. Now it's 1 in 5 Americans are mentally ill. So we know it affects thinking and behavior and and emotions that when you're not, when you're eating poorly. But we'll talk in a second about the kind of diet that you have to have. So we're talking about what we need to avoid and the consequences of not having a good diet. Right? I used to tell people regularly as well, I heard a story about, anything in a, in a box or a can, but, they fed, they fed their food to rats, and they found that the rats ate the box and left the food all that tells you something about that food, right?

I don't know, but you can get you can train an animal like a rat to eat themselves to death. You know, you could just. It's just amazing how you can. But anyway, just because the the, the squirrels in New York City near McDonald's and the people can't, French fries and drop some food on the ground. And you have obese squirrels in New York City, in the parks, you know, and then the not being the regular food, you know, but anyway, yeah. So you developed a concept called the neutral Italian diet. So tell us about that, please.

Right. And and the word utilitarian means rich and nutrient. So I have to say that the most proven methodology to slow aging and to extend human lifespan is this. It's these six words moderate caloric restriction because you have to you can't be overweight and expect to be healthy. Be having fat on your body just throws off inflammatory modules. So it's moderate caloric restriction not extreme caloric restriction, just moderately so you stay thin and keep good muscle density in the context of micronutrient excellence as you.

So and I'm saying right now that the micronutrient excellence, the high degree of exposure to micronutrients, vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals, antioxidants, colorful plants, and a variety of these colorful plants rich in nutrients, particularly green vegetables, the higher intake of high nutrient foods naturally suppresses your appetite and makes you comfortable with the right amount of calories. You stop being this calorie consuming monster when you start flooding your body with sufficient amount of nutrients, so we have to put that together.

And then so the neutral Italian diet is a diet rich in nutrients per calorie, with a high nutritional bang for your buck. And then we focus on some foods that have proven, science to to slow aging and lower cancer and to prevent cancer. And I use that acronym G bombs g b zombies to represent those six foods which are greens, beans, onions, mushrooms, berries, and seeds. Seeds like flax seeds, chia seeds, sesame seeds. But the greens refer to the leafy greens. Salad vegetables raw, but also the green cruciferous vegetables like broccoli and cabbage and bok choy and things like that that have all these rich IQs.

The ITC's stand for ISO file scientists and this this, there's different types of ISO file cyanide. Some different vegetables have the most powerful effect that protecting the DNA and cells and activating the cell repair machinery.

Animal Products, Processed Foods, and Disease Risk 28:38

We're a green, vegetable dependent animal, just like the other primates. Without an intake of sufficient green vegetables, we can't have optimal health. So we can we can throw a dart and talk about any of those foods. But I'm just highlighting right now the fact that we need green vegetables for a normal immune function. You know, it's funny because I'm an avid snow skier skier, and I love to go to travel to places and ski and go down moguls, you know, and jump jumps and mobile in any way. And, and I notice all these expensive condos and homes on the side of the ski slopes, of course, millions of dollars that people pay for, they'll pay for like a $3 million home just to be on a near to a slope right.

So I'm saying most Americans should be you. We should set up these million dollar condos and homes next to hospitals for all these people that won't eat green vegetables. They should live right on the hospital premises so they can just shoot right over to the hospital. Yeah, it's a medical care. Back and forth, right? Yeah. Well, that's true. And they will get the help of the hospital either. So you don't go to doctors or hospitals to get, good lifestyle advice, right? Because doctors are not trained in nutrition.

Yeah. You know, you doctors are, you know, not talk about every doctor. But of course, the vast majority of doctors are like pharmacists. They come in, you're asking for a drug and they give you a drug, the first to reduce your symptoms, whatever that symptom might be, that you can treat the blood test. They can treat the cholesterol in the blood of the sugar and the blood. With the drug, they could treat the blood pressure. With the drug, they can treat whatever's ailing you with a drug. They can treat your stomach pain with the drug, your indigestion with the drug, your weak muscles with the drug, your weak bones with the drug. Everything's a drug.

And the first thing you learn in medical school in the first week is that drugs are poisonous, they're toxic, and they age you when they and most of them increase risk of cancer. And they taught us that in the first week of medical school. And then you proceed never to see that, to mention that again through your training, you know, more the last two years in the new residency training, you just learn how to give people drugs for everything around them. And I'm saying that the doctors are enablers because they didn't have a drug for diabetes.

They'd have to take the person and and shake them by the shoulder and say, you know, you got to start eating healthy food and losing weight and, and personal high blood pressure going off the salt and the meat, and start eating vegetables and get loose and dropping some weight and getting your blood pressure instead. And we did that in the 1920s and 30s. People had to actually exercise and eat differently to get rid of problems, but now we just give them a pill which enables them to just kick go back to McDonald's and Burger King and keep eating junk food and keep eating pie and cake and fries and meats and and barbecue and just to to your health, you think because your number looks good or your number looks okay on the blood test, now that you're okay, the number looks okay and the blood pressure, you're okay.

It's just all it's it's really a scam, you know? But it's also the wrong numbers to anyway. Yeah, exactly. This is the beta blockers don't even lower the central nervous system. Blood pressure. They just lower peripheral blood pressure. When your arm, you know, your brain pressure still increases. I want to see what the myth about A1 see that inadequate A1 see, is seven. Well, right. So that's that's the that's the myth in medicine. Right. And the more they but the more they give you these drugs that they push the beta cells in the pancreas that produce insulin, that are already pooped out from producing too much insulin, they push them to pollute more, to produce more insulin.

And insulin, of course, promotes atherosclerosis. Cellular replication promotes fat storage and promotes cancer. And a lot of these diabetic drugs make it gain weight and become more diabetic and accelerate your death. So the whole thing is, is based on, a lack of understand of how the body works, but also the idea that, that people don't want to change and that you just got to give them a pill, that they're trained like that. You know, it's funny because in medical school, I was the same way, and I was openly, you know, talked about my viewpoints and the that and the professors and doctors and medical doctors, you know, would always say, yeah, we know you're right, but people don't want that and you're not going to make a good living that way, because you're not going to get people who want to change their life.

These easier to give them a pill you're not going to spend. You know, they always like would say, you know, we can't make money that way. We can't take so much time with each patient. Nobody's going to want to. You're not going to convince people to do it even though it might. It's going to work. It might work. So that was there always rationalization. You know, it's funny because I have to grad when I was in already as a researcher. Now it's nutrition research. Going back to the diabetes allergist at Penn B, to do a research project.

And they still went back and said, you know, we've tried that already. And even though we know it works, we just can't get patients to do it. So we're not going to interested in doing research with you. So and by the way, the UPS homology department saw the Matariki generation and diabetic retinopathy resolve. And they did want to put a research with me and, and put in a $1.5 million grant to the NIH to do a research project on the reversal of macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy through a nutrient diet.

But the diabetes is still I'm saying, but that's your skills. Those are lack of your skills and your C because you don't have the skill, the knowledge and the experience to induce people to motivate people and induce them to change and to keep that going, then you just assume you're not interested because it's easier for you to just give people a drug because because they don't know how to do it. It's not the right way to do it, you know what I'm saying? It's like they have no skills and no training and having to change people's behavior.

So then you can't change people's behavior. You just give them a drug. When it's a study done at Wharton, where they looked at the they thought patterns and the habits of people, who are basically dependent on drugs, medications, you know, and the people who were doing supplements and lifestyle, the people who were dependent on medication had the philosophy that the basically the advertising put on them, which is that this will cure you. This will take care of that. All you need is this pill, right, right.

Whereas the the people who are more aware, who are taking care of themselves with lifestyle realized it's all about them. It's not about the pill. And we still have that culture. And the culture around us is is that way. Still to a great extent. People tend to go to doctors the most and don't listen, read your books or go to your seminars or watch your lectures. Are the people actually who are listening to this video or watching this video are the people that we want to be talking to, not the people who are dependent on pills.

So we're preaching to the choir, but let's let's, preach some more. Let's give them a better let's say I don't go to doctors. I don't even go to myself. Well, you have to shave every morning, so you have to look at yourself. At least I like. But tell us, tell us about animal proteins and the risk of cancer. So let's talk about that for a second. Right. So that's right. We're saying here we have to eat a diet richer in colorful plant food. And we're talking about the three categories of food plant produce, processed foods and animal products.

And I'm saying that animal products and processed foods are similar and that they don't contain a significant micronutrient load, especially of antioxidants and phytochemicals that fight cancer. So we're talking about comparing a bagel to a piece of chicken. And they're both examples of foods that do not contain any cancer fighting fibers. They're all stencils, antioxidants. They're they're just calories with no significant load of protective nutrients. And the more you eat the extra these empty calorie foods, the more you're accelerating your death.

But they're also similar to the bagel, similar to a piece of chicken, and that they're both hormonally unfavorable because the bagel will raise insulin too high because it's so processed as a carbohydrate and and that high protein animal products promote the excess production of IGF one or insulin like growth factor one. And it's the insulin IGF one sandwich that really is the primary factor accelerating growth as an adult when you shouldn't be growing anymore. The excessive levels of IGF one particularly lead to cell replication and the and promotion of angiogenesis.

So replicating cells can glean a blood supply and become metastatic, metastasize and become cancerous. So the animal products become become a necessary factor in driving cancer. You know. So because of the promotion of IGF one, sugar does lift IGF one summer, but not as much as animal protein does an animal protein. This insulin a little bit, but not as much as sugar does. But but the American style of eating the ham and cheese, the spaghetti and meatballs, the you know, the what we're talking about the the bread, the burger with the bread and the meat and the, the, the combination of those foods are particularly damaging.

And then you add fried foods to it and you've got the cancer, heart attacks, you know, stroke, you know, obviously some, you know, shooting going through our whole population. But in any case, what I'm saying right now is that there's multiple factors and animal products not and some of those factors that we're getting excess amount of animal protein, excess calories shorten our lifespan. But excess animal protein shortens our lifespan and promotes growth as an adult with things that shouldn't be growing, particularly cancer cells.

But also the CD 36 that controller is almost, you can say, controlling cells ability to leave them the base tumors and for cells to tumors to start to metastasize and grow more rapidly and cells to sloughed off and become cancerous. So it's also the saturated fats. Activate the CD 36 fat controller most aggressively in saturated fats also activate the cholesterol raising and an inflammatory side of your, of putting down plaque that causes heart to heart tattoo and saturated fats also distort the insulin receptor more than monounsaturated do.

In other words, you have a high saturated fat intake. You distort the function and shape of insulin receptors to become more diabetic, even at a lower weight, at a low rate. You know, these people on these keto diets, they say, oh, I can't eat a mango, or I can't eat oatmeal because my sugar will go through the roof. Yeah, because you're eating so much saturated fat. Well, the animal products you eating that you've distorted, you're in some receptors. So now when you go to eat a piece of a bowl of oatmeal or, or a piece of fruit, you're going to get an excess response to the sugary.

So much fat on the body in general. Body fat, of course, makes people more insulin resistant, and the factors that lead to being a sent a healthy centenarian along, you know, living to when you're 100 years old and great health has to be you have to be insulin sensitive. So you have to be slim and muscular, low body fat with the end and having a diet that's high in nutrients and low in saturated fats at the same time and low in fat and, you know, low in saturated fats. But and when you eat your fats from nuts and seeds, from sesame seeds, from almonds, from walnuts, from flax seeds, because the fat comes into the body so slowly when it's in the form of nuts and seeds, the body can preferentially burn those fats for energy, as opposed to storing them on the body as fat.

When you get your fats from oils that you pour on your food, including olive oil,

Immune Function, Infection, and COVID 39:28

because so much fat calories come in at one time, it enters the bloodstream so rapidly, the body has to store it as fat as opposed to burning it for energy. And it's just. And also, the concentration of fats in extracted oils make it so it suppresses weight loss and turns off the and makes you in this fat storage hormones instead of the fat utilization hormones. So it's hard to get fat off your body while you're taking in liquid fat. When we switch people from animal fat and liquid fat into making salad dressings and sauces out of nuts and seeds with all the fibers intact, it's amazing how it satiates them more, but also lets the body start losing more body fat.

So one of the things we do on a neutral dairy and diet is make a salad dressing not from oil, but and vinegar, but from nuts and seeds and vinegar. For I might take a peel, navel orange, some ground toasted sesame seeds, some, cashews, and some a squeeze of lemon and some blood orange vinegar and make a delicious salad dressing or or a sauce for my work. Vegetables, maybe a Thai curry sauce with hemp seeds and a little coconut and date and and lemongrass, ground lemongrass and, and turmeric and a little, curry.

You're coming in there and make a delicious, sauce for the vegetable dish. So I use the real the nutter seed, as opposed to using the oil extracted from the nut and seed, which makes a huge difference in people's ability to develop a slim waistline and to get healthy, get healthier. So there must be a, at least some amount of animal protein you could take. What's a what's a acceptable or allowable amount that's very variable to each individual. But most studies show that, most of the blue zones are below 10% of calories from animal products, but not all the blue zones.

The American diet, we're saying, is about 30% in most studies. We see that as you go from about 7.5% of calories, from animal products to the mid range of 15% of the high range of 30%, we see an increase in death rates, and we see a 75% increase risk in cancer and about a fourfold increase risk and overall death. When you go from, you know, 7.5% to 10% for disease reversal, like Doctor Ornish. And most of the studies of doctors showing reversal of heart disease are 5% of animal products or less.

Would be ideal for most people with serious illnesses. But based on genetics and, you know, age and body weight and whether you're a food addict or not, you know, we're saying for some people can probably have a little more. A lot of my people who a lot of the people I see who are, oh, significantly older with metal conditions, I put them on a strict vegan diet. So 100% plant based, because it makes a clear boundary for them just to eat vegetables right now, and fruits and beans and nuts get your weight down.

Because sometimes dabbling with a little bit of animal products could then make them want to have more of them and push them over the line to excess calories, and they get more satiated and full. And we start to clear a clean boundary. So some people that are food addicts with medical conditions, it's better for them not to juggle the little bit of the borders of what are the things that might be acceptable. It's better for them to have a straight guideline and just do a whole food plant based diet.

Sticking with whole plant foods that we show you how to make them into delicious forms, because then they rapidly and consistently get their weight down and get rid of their food addictions and attractions for things they shouldn't be eating much. And then if they're no longer food addicts anymore, then they control and can have small amounts of things like animal products with small amounts of things like a little bit of oil or a little bit something off their diet, because it's not going to trigger them to become a binge and go crazy and go haywire with their eating behaviors.

And so, so a lot of the times we I do recommend, a total vegan diet for the for people who can't keep those things under control, especially now you do talk about infections as well as the immune system. So how how how do these different foods affect the immune system? That's particularly, critical because I'm saying that the the same foods that have immune system strengthening effects to protect us against cancer are those same greens and onions and mushrooms and different it's, you know, six different varieties of mushrooms in the week, you know, have different colorful different types of berries, have different types of beans in your diet, have different types of green vegetables, the salad even or even just plain simple lettuce, a few different types of lettuce and and even the has so pho quinoa which it particularly builds up the beneficial bacteria in your gut, the healthiest type of bacteria.

And you can't take probiotics to get the full spectrum of healthy bacteria as you can when you're eating a variety of these plants. But I'm saying the same anti-cancer immune protection protects us against infection and invasion of the gut. So, you know, we have a good bite. Protective biofilm which covers the the villi prevent in our first line of defenses are the interest, you know, the, intra epithelial lymphocytes that and that, that surround our digestive track that so that the, the defend is at the gate of the castle where, where toxins come into the body and, and chem and bacteria, viruses come in.

We have a huge and natural immunity to these things. And and obviously I'm saying that the Covid deaths we've seen across the world are indicative of how poor people's nutrition health been, because obviously, the worse health you have and the worse immune function you have, and the more overweight and sickly, the more chronically ill you are, the more your risk of having a Covid death and even thin so-called healthy people who aren't overweight having severe Covid outcomes are related to their poor diets.

You know, it's just that with so I'm making this radical claim, I'm saying that cancer is not natural, that the cancer explosion is from poor nutrition and chemical ization of our environment. We didn't see much cancers 300 500 years ago. The cancers in the 17th 800 was that we only mostly saw were scrotal cancers and testicular cancer. In men who worked as chimneys, chimney sweeps, inhaling smoke. The rest of the people didn't get cancer. Then most poor people living on vegetables they grew in the gardens never got cancer years ago.

And now this explosion in cancer, and I'm saying the same thing with Covid, is as crazy as it may sound. I'm saying we wouldn't see any significant amount of Covid deaths if people had excellent immune function and great nutrition. It's all just reflective of how poor people eat and how our modern societies have become drug dependent, junk food eating population is susceptible to these diseases that can ravage the whole planet. Large populations. But you're certainly, a tremendous, advocate and proselytizing, the proper kind of diet for just a host of benefits, lifestyle benefits.

You've you've authored a number of books, so we've given some basic concepts to people about, what they should be eating and how to transition.

Books, Reversal of Disease, and Practical Guidance 46:38

And the fact these transitions are not easy. So you have to accept that fact depending on how bad off your diet is right now, for how far you have to go. That's right. Is there is there a 1 or 2 or more books that you specifically recommend for people about the neutral terrain diet? I do, you know, I do. I you know, I write I've written 12 books and of course, my latest, seven of them have become New York Times bestsellers. By the way, my most famous book is Eat to Live, which sold more than 3 million copies.

But the but my latest book is the book they should start with called eat for life, because it's more updated with the modern references, and it has more than 2000 scientific references. And so it's the most, I would say, the most scientifically supported book, but written of written in a way so the layperson could really understand these concepts and get motivated and see all the success, you know, stories of people who've recovered from rheumatoid arthritis and also have colitis and multiple sclerosis and cardio and congestive heart failure and cardiomyopathy.

And, you know, they it shows all these people reversing their diseases and how it worked. So I think that's the most recent book, eat for life. Eat for life. They should start with, of course, if they have a particular condition. I do have a book called The End of Diabetes The End of Heart Disease, Super Immunity. But the but I think generally speaking, people should start with eat for life and get the most updated, most recent book. And that's the most broad spectrum. It's very broad spectrum and covers, you know, about food addiction, about, you know, dangers of dieting and, you know, yo yo dieting.

So it gives people of, you know, a, a real good, roadmap of how to proceed. Now, could you, would you be willing to make a claim that you can cure diabetes? Not type one necessarily, but type two? I would say that, approximately 95% of type two diabetics can become non-diabetic. There are some type two diabetics that develop almost a form of type one where they've destroyed the beta cells. They're almost like not even overweight type two. They're like a thinner type two that they burnt out the beta cells and they have low.

At such low instant production, they may still need some small amounts of insulin. But yeah, but I'm saying 95% of type two diabetics can become non-diabetic, meaning their blood sugars now will run below 100 without medication. And then somebody will say that's not nine diabetic. If they eat unhealthy and gained weight again, they could become diabetic again because of that genetic predisposition for diabetes. And I'm going to say, well, a person who loses weight and gets their health back can become overweight again if they still eat bad food again.

What does that have to do with anything you could develop? So if you eat badly again, you can develop disease again. That doesn't mean you're still overweight when they're thin or they're still diabetic when they don't have any diabetic parameters. So it's just a semantical argument. They're still non-diabetic, their sugars are low and they're in good shape now, and they don't need blood pressure medications. And and in my diabetic reversal study, which, which all but one person came off their diabetic medications, one person said, I'm at Foreman.

But in any case, in that study, the average systolic blood pressure dropped 27 points while the medications were taken away. And I did a study on blood pressure reversal, which with more than 400 people showed the average systolic blood pressure dropped 26 points while the people's medications were being removed. They were made for starting blood pressure to the ending blood pressure off medications, the starting blood pressure on medications at a 26 point systolic differential. So we're talking about a tremendous that nutrition as much as much more powerful than drugs.

And within a month of eating this is where your risk of heart disease, that heart attack death would go down by more than a thousand fold, even when you didn't take all your weight off yet, because it stops the vulnerable plaque from inflaming and cracking and causing platelet clots and stuff like that. And so the last thing I would say about nutrition, again, in my experience, is you can't ask your family members for permission. You can't ask your doctors for permission because the doctors can't tell you what you should do anyway.

So they're not going to be able to give you advice on how you should eat or what, how what you should eat, etc. so really you have to go to a resource. You have to go to experts who are often outside the house of medicine. The value that you bring to this discussion is that you are a Western trained doctor. You've been you practice medicine the way most doctors have practiced medicine, at least somewhat. So you have to go to somebody like that, who's that kind of an expert rather than relying on that, that, conventional system.

Right, to, to get all this benefit. And, you know, and I've been teaching that for years. I've been saying, too, that this shouldn't not alternative medicine. It's not holistic medicine. This is progressive. This is the way doctors should all be practicing. This is correct medicine. This is right medicine. It's giving people drugs. That's the alternative. That's a dangerous medicine. That's the medicine that's ineffective. And and you know, that's mostly malpractice because you didn't give people the options that tell them they could possibly get well before you start prescribing a medication for them.

You know what I mean? If the first thing is to give people their choices, like you were saying earlier, of you could say to a person, you know, I could give you a drug to lower your blood glucose or lower your blood pressure. But those studies have been cholesterol lowering. Studies on statins don't show the lifespan enhancing effects of changing your diet, losing weight and getting rid of the high blood pressure, high cholesterol with nutritional changes. And so then you wouldn't be drug dependent.

And you're and in other words, giving people informed consent and giving people knowledge to make the best decisions for the life. And I'm saying this is the way doctors should be practicing. It shouldn't be seen as some alternative way out or type of medicine or health care. This is the right way to practice. In fact, actually, as you were saying, my medical training was back in the 60s and 70s. So, back then the doctors were very thin. They weren't that many drugs. You know, the PDAs are this thick and they're throwing stuff out all the time, right? Right.

So what's happened is that when I was arrested, practicing medicine says I had very few drug type resources. It was lifestyle. You did talk to people about lifestyle. You did talk to people about how to change the impact of different diseases, prevention and and therapy. Right. Okay. So we have to find that we have to kind of go back and find that again. So this is the of summit. I did want to say one thing about this. And I've said this along, other interviews as well. And while we absolutely do not take away the need for nutrition, do not, you can't build a house without bricks and mortar.

You need to have the nutrition there to have healthy, have healthier cells to be able to rebuild themselves. Now, if you're not on the edge of a cliff in a gale, right. Sometimes you are on the edge and you're about to die of the problem you have. And maybe you need medical therapy at that time, and maybe you need therapy at that time. But once you get the nutrition set up, then the therapy and nutrition actually work hand-in-glove together to make it even more optimized. Absolutely. And, you know, I have I see people with all kinds of problems here.

And, you know, just to give an example, I had a person with this recently with bilateral carpal tunnel syndrome who couldn't move their hands, right? Couldn't move their hands, couldn't get dressed in the morning, told she needed, surgery bilaterally. And she came here with the nutrition, with the weight loss, with electrical magnetic therapy, you know, to build back her nerve healing. And with some massage, she could got full rid of her. Carpal tunnel syndrome. Full use of her hands was weak. That healthy.

When you mix these things together with optimal nutrition, the right type of physical therapy and the electromagnetic therapy, two, that can help stimulate nerve healing. And nerve. We use pain. We we combine it all together. It's we get people back to help. Five myalgia disappears when you try sometimes one without the other when you soften the tissue. You know, we've giving people such high nutrients or giving them special juicing. We're giving them, you know, one third lettuce, one third dark green, one third.

We're getting all these nutrients in their body. But if the nutrients can't get into the tissues due to muscle spasm, muscles and tight, hard tissue, then you're not going to relax the tissue. When we lose the pain by giving the nutrients and the physical modalities with the you know, then you can often see a profound physical healing. When people have musculoskeletal conditions, including nerve pain conditions, muscle spasm, information reduction, information reduction. So it's a very it's very it's excellent that us physicians who can work together using those these modalities simultaneously.

Yeah. Life is like that is that life is not one one treatment, one option life. Life requires multiple avenues, multiple approaches to be able to optimize a person's life. That's correct. And I've experienced that. Well, I'm glad to have, have you on our show to share with us your wisdom and knowledge and experience. And what's the name of that book again, please eat for life. Eat for life. Yeah. And I have a I have a lot of information about the disease reversal protocols adapted from a.com. So I put a lot of resources there that people want to learn more to.

Okay. So Doctor furman.com and eat for life. You got it.