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

Joel Fuhrman, M.D.

Well, hi, good to be, glad to be here, of course and talk to you today, looking forward to this exciting talk. Yeah, 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, Gale, in the 1970s. And we used, we were into nutrition ’cause my father got us into eating healthy, ’cause he was overweight and sickly and changed his diet and he read Dr. Herbert Shelton’s books and that were written in 1940s, 1950s. And I started reading health and nutrition books when I was a teenager, just to improve stamina and not get sick from competing around the world. And then, as I became older, in my experience and exposure to that movement, 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 that’s that’s bound to fail and it’s just compiles more toxins on the person’s body, accelerating their death and risk of cancer. I’m saying right now that the treatments for autoimmune disease, the medications, increase risk of cancer and cut short a person’s life. And nobody’s told that they can get rid of their rheumatoid arthritis, their psoriasis, their scleroderma, or their Sjogren’s syndrome. Nobody’s telling them that nutrition could make for a reversal of these conditions, even of lupus and multiple sclerosis. They’re just given 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 diabetes and become non-diabetic. If you have high blood pressure and high cholesterol, that signs you eating the wrong diet, don’t just treat numbers with a medication, that’s enabling people to just live their diet and continue on their unhealthy habits, allowing their body to deteriorate further. 

So I am passionate about this, even when I was younger and I decided to go back to the postgraduate premed program. I already had graduated from college, but didn’t have the premedical requirements, and I was working and my family had a shoe business, I think about 10 shoe stores in the New York metropolitan area. And my father, I was gonna be taking over my father’s business, and mostly running it. But I decided it was much more passionate and excited about being a physician. So we told my father to sell the business and retire and I’d go back to get my premedical requirements. So as a postgraduate, I went to the postgraduate premed program at Columbia and then applied to medical school, I didn’t start medical school ’til I was 29 years old. But for the last 35 years, I’m 68 now, and for the last 25 years, 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 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 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 gonna stay sick the rest of their life. When your a person with a disease, you go to doctors, 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, ’cause we can do this.” And like you were saying with enough education, information and 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, “Well, what are you coming here for? Do you wanna just lose a little weight or get healthy? Or do you wanna get rid of your problem completely? You wanna become completely nondiabetic and get rid of your breathing problems and get rid of your…” And they would say, “No, I want it all. I wanna get back to my favorable weight. I don’t wanna have asthma anymore. I wanna be nondiabetic.” And then I would say to them, “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, ’cause to do a scientific test, we gotta 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 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 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, ’cause the soreness will go away and you’ll start enjoying exercise.” So I get them, so really my job was mostly a motivator to get people to wanna make that change such a radical change to nutritional excellence and then over the years show that they can learn to enjoy it, find it tastes great and understand the addictive nature of conventional foods that makes people have recidivism and weight regain and make so typical people succeed on diets, ’cause they have all the wrong information. 

They don’t have a really thorough understanding of the danger and addictive nature of these foods that they build this illicit love affair with that 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 all always here. So there’s people staying here, 2, 3, 4 months. I have one person here, a woman 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, 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. So in other words, her sugars still were running. I took her off all her medication within the first few weeks, but her sugars were still running between 110 and 140 in the first couple of months. But now, her sugars are running between 70 and 80, her fasting blood sugars on no medication. So now she’s clearly not diabetic, but she lost 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 how in most cases how rapidly these diseases go away and most people stay between 30 and 90 days. 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, my members, my website, but for some people who really have tough food addictions and need this period of enforced abstinence away from the things that they can’t stop eating is helpful to get away from those things and retrain their food preferences, learn the recipes, be 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.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

And you know, it’s interesting. When I made that transition as well from conventional medicine to functional medicine essentially 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 they needed to make to improve their lives, most people felt great, they felt better. Nevermind the diseases, that’s good enough, that’s important enough. But the important thing is they actually felt better, right? So they were very happy to continue those diets, 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 a 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 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.” We didn’t know much about nutrition back then. So we said, “We have to take control of this. This is not real medicine.” So the pharmaceutical companies then helped the medical schools at that time develop curricula that were basically science-based and mostly biochemical. Right, and that didn’t allow for any other kinds of inputs into the training programs. And they then influenced the licensing boards, influenced the legislators, and with the licensing boards, they began to restrict what a medical doctor was called and what training they received and nutrition was absolutely not part of this, except for the nutrition that we have for diabetes or uremia or kidney disease or-

Joel Fuhrman, M.D.

Or maybe like scurvy and beriberi.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Exactly. The real outliers.

Joel Fuhrman, M.D.

Yeah, the real outliers you don’t even see.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Yeah, so 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 pharmaceutically-based, but at least it was scientific, it still has scientific value. And then those of us who were renegade doctors, went out there and did all that and found people were getting better. Now, we had a problem though, because we were getting people off their medication. So I don’t know whether you ran into any trouble with conventional medicine, because of the nutrition therapy.

Joel Fuhrman, M.D.

Well, not really. I mean, you know it’s funny ’cause they made me the 25th-year anniversary of my medical school graduating class, they made me the keynote speaker, and it’s amazing how all the doctors I went to school with were so grateful to have learned nutrition from me, they’re classmate, and said that I had a better, a bigger effect on them, than most of their teachers in medical school and I’ve changed their personal lives and their medical careers. And as one of the original founders of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine, I’ve mentored and helped support the growth of doctors who now, who’ve actually changed their career, central part of their career to be treating patients, their patients primarily with nutritional methods and not just giving drugs all the time. There’s a lot of, there’s thousands of doctors today utilize these methods. I’m sorry about my dog there, making noise. I can lock her up if she gets too… Rain, shush!

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

We’ll edit this little bit out. And you’re right, you’re right. Actually, it was only in the late seventies that finally doctors became healthier than their patients.

Joel Fuhrman, M.D.

I don’t know if that’s the case now. I still see, there’s a lot of doctors that are healthy, but they’re sure a lot of doctors who are still over-weighting. Food is addicting. 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 gonna get what other Americans get. I speak to large audiences say, “Raise your hand. If you’ve been shot by a bullet or stabbed by a knife from your torso, your neck or anything like that in your local neighborhoods?” And nobody hardly raises their hand. I’m speaking to a group of 700 doctors. And I’d say, “Raise your hand, if you have a family member or a neighbor who got to a cancer diagnosis or a heart attack or a stroke?” And everybody’s hand goes up. I’m saying, you wanna stay in that dangerous neighborhood? You wanna stay and not expect it’s gonna happen to you, what happens to everybody you know eventually, when these are the diseases of nutritional stupidity, when we have the scientific advances in nutritional science, where we don’t have to get cancer and you don’t have to get a heart attack or a stroke and you don’t have to get dementia? Instead of living to be 95 to a 105 years old in great health and your full mental faculties, you wanna deteriorate at the age of 70, be in a nursing home for 10 years or 5 or 10 years, die in a hospital with tubes stuck in the orifices of your body and take 20 years off your life and have all your money taken away from you, and suffering the last… I mean, you can’t wanna do what other Americans are doing with food, it’s self-destructive.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

And this is to other doctors that you were teaching.

Joel Fuhrman, M.D.

Yeah, and sometimes it’s funny ’cause when I spoke to the T3 conference and cardiology conference in Florida, these are doctors who are interventional cardiologists who put stents in people, right? And they gave me an award for the doctor that have influenced the most, that had the best effect on cardiologist, nutritional training or something like that. So in other words, and then Dr. Koushik Reddy the head of the cardiac intervention training at the VA got up on the stage and says, “Three people that influenced my life the most in my career as a physician, my parents and Dr. Fuhrman.” And I’m sitting in the audience in the back. So I’m really proud of the fact that my influence have influenced other physicians to be nutritional-aware and realize the power of nutritional medicine. And that’s always been my passion and goal. I’m saying, you can’t change everybody. And every person may not wanna eat this way, this healthily, 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 have stents put in, they don’t have to have these things happen, and they have a choice. They can choose to smoke cigarettes and chance getting a heart attack or lung cancer if they want to. But they should know that those cigarettes are gonna lead to some medical problem down the road. It’ll be much better that 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 are of 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 point of living if there’s no enjoyment in life, I’d rather…” And they think that they’re enjoying their diet more than we’re enjoying our diet. They don’t realize your taste buds adapt to what you eat. You build more taste muscle, you learn fantastic recipes, that’s the myth. I just wanna say that food addiction makes it only 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 white flour and white bread, because white flour products and sugar has no biological difference than candy. So white flour is sugar, it’s candy, it’s cake. 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 our body needs co-factors, vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals, antioxidants, diffuse the production of reactive oxygen species from metabolizing sugar into energy. And because it can’t be shunted efficiently into energy, a lot of it’s just put into fat stores, and you get myo-lipid accumulations. In other words, you get fat mixed in with the muscle tissue, weakening your muscle tissue and making you feel lethargic and not getting energy. You don’t even feel like exercising. But the point I’m making right now is that, that pizza, that pasta, those bagels, those croissants, those products are not, those are dangerous substances and self-destructive, and these oils, these oils and white flour products people are eating, form the major are part of the calories and they can’t think of living without them. And when they stop them, they go through withdrawal depression. 

When they stop them, they go through profound fatigue and maybe headaches and cramping. What I’m saying is it’s day 3, 4, and 5 after the dietary change where people feel the worst. So the day 1 and 2, you’re not feeling that bad, but day 3, 4, and 5, you’re feeling wiped out and you’re going through it, it’s like going to a cocaine rehab facility, 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 3 or 4, 6 weeks later, where they have some more fatigue or headaches. But it’s mostly at day 3, 4, and 5, 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 gotta go back to eating my other diet again,” ’cause they don’t realize there’s a flood of toxins that are now coming out of your body when you’re stopping addictive substances. And these things that enter the bloodstream so rapidly, like oil and flours, that 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, you become dopamine insensitive. And it’s the dopamine insensitivity, over-stimulation of brain centers from over-creating calories and too much caloric concentrations that make people develop food cravings and overeating behaviors, ’cause they’re not satisfied with normal amounts of calories. They have to over-consume calories to replicate, to still get enough dopamine stimulation to their overstimulated brains. And it accelerates brain aging, depression 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 dysthymic. The word dysthymia for those that don’t know, it means you’re not totally depressed, where you can’t get outta bed, but you’re not that excited about life. You don’t wake up-

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Low mood.

Joel Fuhrman, M.D.

Low mood and you just know they live just to make money, get through their jobs so they can 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 become more narcissistic, because the more addictions you accumulate, the less compassionate, the less emotions you have about other people, about the world around you, the beauty around you and the world about your passionate own interests and being an 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, your own narrow world around yourself and meeting your addictive needs. And you think that that 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 intelligence, reduces their ability to think rationally and logically, ’cause now the addiction, the addictive part of the brain, the primitive brain, becomes a major driver of their behavior. 

And the cerebral brain loses out, because the primitive brain becomes the master controller. That means you’re driving, you want that cigarette, you need to have that donut, you need to be drinking, having that pizza, you got it, you know what? And you come up with a million rationalizations why you can’t quit, why you can’t change, why you can’t eat healthy, why you can’t lose weight. The primitive brain rationalizes to maintain their attraction, this kind of magnetic attraction that you’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, to health conditions, overweight, needing drugs. Nothing is gonna stop this self-destructive behavior. And that’s really why you need this type of education, not just on how to eat healthy scientifically the foods are gonna 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.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

And that’s where people fail, as you said, right? So that you make that change and 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, and continue.

Joel Fuhrman, M.D.

That’s right, that’s really right. And 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 on television is setting up and on through my website, I have forums, support groups, local meetups, events, and then eventually retreat, if people can’t do it on their own. So I’ve developed 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 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 that they get recipes, they know what tastes great. So in other words, they know that wherever they are in the country of the world, there’s people who wanna help them. And so, we’re all on this together and to encourage each other to be healthier. And I feel very passionately that this is important for the world to be kinder to each other, and to us protect the planet and for people to interact in more caring and loving way. I think that what I’m saying right now is I think this cake diet and this dangerous way people are eating, I think it interferes with people’s ability to be creative, to be rational, logical and kind. I think it hurts their brain and makes it more likely to become more deviant and more… ‘Cause 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, more sweets, more candy, more oils 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 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 physical health it affects your brain as well, not just your body.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

It affects behavior then obviously.

Joel Fuhrman, M.D.

It affects behavior. And we could say 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 emotions, when you’re eating poorly.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Well, 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. I used to tell people regularly as well, I heard the story about anything in a box or a can, but they fed the food to rats and they found the rats ate the box and left the food alone, that tells you something about dead food, right? Processed food.

Joel Fuhrman, M.D.

I don’t know. But you can train an animal like a rat to eat themselves to death. It’s just amazing how you can… But anyway, the squirrels in New York city near McDonald’s and the people hand ’em French fries and drops some food on the ground and you have obese squirrels in New York city in the parks, and then they’ll stop eating their regular food. But anyway-

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Not normal food. So you developed a concept called the Nutritarian Diet. So tell us about that please.

Joel Fuhrman, M.D.

Right, and the word Nutritarian means rich in nutrients. And 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, ’cause you have to, you can’t be overweight and expect to be healthy, but 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. 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 Nutritarian diet is a diet rich in nutrients per calorie with a high nutritional bang per caloric buck. And then, we focus on some foods that have proven science to slow aging and lower cancer and to prevent cancer. and I use that acronym GBOMBS. G-B-O-M-B-S to represent those six foods, which are greens, beans, onions, mushrooms, berries, and seeds. 

Seeds like flaxseeds, 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 ITCs, the ITCs stand for isothiocyanates. And this different types of isothiocyanates from different vegetables have the most powerful effect at protecting the DNA in cells and activating the cell repair machinery. We’re a green vegetable-dependent animal, just like the other primates. Without an intake of sufficient green vegetables, we can’t of optimal health. So 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 normal immune function. It’s funny ’cause I’m an avid snow skier, and I love to go to travel to places and ski and go down moguls and jump jumps and mogul, and anyway. And I know to all these expensive condos and homes on the side of the ski slopes, it costs millions of dollars that people pay for. They’ll pay for a $3 million home just to be on the near to a slope, right? So I’m saying most Americans should be, you 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 all the time, get the medical care back and forth.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Oh well, that’s true. And they won’t get the help from the hospitals either. So you don’t go to doctors or hospitals to get good lifestyle advice, right? ‘Cause doctors are not trained in nutrition.

Joel Fuhrman, M.D.

Yeah, doctors are, we’re not talking 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, they can treat the blood test, they can treat the cholesterol in the blood or the sugar in the blood with a drug. They can treat the blood pressure with a drug. They can treat whatever’s ailing you with a drug. They can treat your stomach pain with a drug, you’re indigestion with a drug, your weak muscles with a drug, your weak bones with a 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 and most of them increase risk of cancer. And they taught us that in the first week of medical school. And then you never to see that, to mention that again through your training in the last two years in your residency training, you just learn how to give people drugs for everything that ails 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 shake them by the shoulder and say, “You gotta start eating healthy food and losing weight,” and some person with high blood pressure, “Get off the salt and the meat and start eating vegetables and lose and dropping some weight and getting your blood pressure down.” 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 ’em a pill which enables them to just go back to McDonald’s and Burger King and keep eating junk food and keep eating pie and cake and fries and meats and barbecue and just deteriorate your health. You think, ’cause your number looks good, your number looks okay on the blood test now, you’re okay. The number looks okay on the blood pressure, you’re okay. It’s really a scam.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

It’s also the wrong numbers too, anyway.

Joel Fuhrman, M.D.

Yeah, exactly. The beta blockers don’t even lower central nervous system blood pressure, they just lower peripheral blood pressure in your arm. Your brain pressure still increases.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Well, A1C, the myth about A1C that an adequate A1C is seven. So that’s the myth in medicine.

Joel Fuhrman, M.D.

But the more they give you these drugs, they push the beta cells and the pancreas that produce insulin that are already pooped out from producing too much insulin, they push ’em 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 you gain weight and become more diabetic and they accelerate your death. So we’re the whole thing is based on a lack of understanding of how the body works, but also, the idea that people don’t wanna change and that you just gotta give ’em a pill, that they’re trained like that. It’s funny ’cause in medical school I was the same way and I was openly, talked about my viewpoints and the professors and doctors and medical doctors, would always say, “Yeah, we know you’re right, but people don’t want that. And you gonna make a good living that way, because you’re not gonna get people who wanna change their life. It’s easier to give ’em a pill you’re not gonna spend…” They always say, “We can’t make money that way, we can’t take so much time with each patient. You’re not gonna convince people to do it, even though it’s gonna work, it may work.” So that was their always rationalization. It’s funny, ’cause after grad when I was already as a researcher now as a nutritional researcher, going back to the diabetologist at Penn, 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 interested in doing research with you.” So, and by the way, the ophthalmology department saw the macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy resolve, and they did wanna put a research with me and put in a 1.5 million grant to the NIH to do a research project on the reversal of macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy through a Nutritarian diet. But the diabetologist, “So I’m saying, but that’s your skills. Those are lack of your skills. And see, ’cause you don’t have the skill, the knowledge, the experience to induce people, to motivate people and to induce them to change and to keep going, then you just assume you’re not interested, because it’s easier for you to just give people a drug,” because they don’t know how to do it, it’s not the right way to do it. You know what I’m saying? They have no skills and no training in having to change people’s behavior. So then you can’t change people’s behavior, you just give ’em a drug.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Well, there was a study done at Wharton when they looked at the thought patterns and the habits of people who were basically dependent on drugs, medications, and the people who were doing supplements and lifestyle. The people who are dependent on medication had the philosophy that basically the advertising put on them, which is that, “This will cure you, this will take care of you, that’s all you need is this pill.” Whereas the people who are more aware who were taking care of themselves with lifestyle, realized it’s all about them, it’s not about the pill. And so, we still have that culture. And the culture around us is that way still. To a great extent, people who tend to go to doctors the most 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 preach some more, let’s give them better lessons.

Joel Fuhrman, M.D.

I always say, I don’t go to doctors. I don’t even go to myself.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Well, you have to shave every morning. Say you have to look at yourself at least. So tell us about animal proteins and the risk of cancer. So let’s talk about that for a second.

Joel Fuhrman, M.D.

So that’s right. We’re saying here, we have to eat a diet richer and 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 in 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, sterols, stanols, antioxidants. They’re just calories with no significant load of protective nutrients. And the more you eat these empty calorie foods, the more you’re accelerating your death. But they’re also similar, the bagels similar to a piece of chicken. And that they’re both hormonally unfavorable, because the bagel will raise insulin too high. ’cause it’s still processed as a carbohydrate and the high protein animal products promote the excess production of IGF-1 or insulin-like growth factor 1. And it’s the insulin IGF-1 sandwich that it really is the primary factor, accelerating growth as an adult when you shouldn’t be growing anymore. The excessive levels of IGF-1, particularly linked to cellular replication and promotion of angiogenesis. So replicating cells can glean a blood supply and become metastasized and become cancerous. So the animal products become a necessary factor in driving cancer. So because of the promotion of IGF-1. 

Sugar does lift IGF-1 sum up, but not as much as animal protein does. And animal protein lifts insulin a little bit, but not as much as sugar does, but the American-style of eating the ham and cheese, the spaghetti and meatballs, what we’re talking about, the burger with the bread and the meat that the combination of those foods are particularly damaging. And then you add fried foods to it and you’ve got the cancer, heart attacks, stroke, obviously, going through our whole population. But in any case, what I’m saying right now is that there’s multiple factors in 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 CD36 fat controller is almost, you can say, controlling cells’ ability to leave the base tumors and for tumors to start to metastasize and grow more rapidly and cells to slough off and become cancerous. So it’s also the saturated fats activate the CD36 fat controller, most aggressively in saturated fats, also activate the cholesterol-raising and inflammatory side of putting down plaque that causes heart attack too. And saturated fats also distort the insulin receptor more mono-unsaturates do. In other words, you have a high saturated fat intake, you distort the function in shape of insulin receptors to become more diabetic, even at a lower weight, at a lower weight. 

You know these people on these keto diets, they say, “Oh, I can’t eat a mango, I can’t eat oatmeal, ’cause my sugar go through the roof.” Yeah, because you’re eating so much saturated fat, all the animal products you’re eating that you’ve distorted your insulin receptors, so now when you go to eat a piece of bowl of oatmeal or a piece of fruit, you’re just get an excess response to the sugar. But fat on the body in general, body fat of course, makes people more insulin-resistant. And the factors that lead to being a healthy centenarian 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 and having a diet that’s high in nutrients and low in saturated fats at the same time. And low in fat, low in saturated fats. And when you eat your fats from nuts and seeds, from sesame seeds, from almonds, from walnuts, from flaxseeds, 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, because so much fat calories come at one time, it enters the bloodstream so rapidly, the body has to store its fat as opposed to burning it for energy. And also, the concentration of fats in extracted oils make it, so it suppresses weight loss and turns off and makes 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 them body start losing more body fat. So one of the things we do in a Nutritarian diet is make a salad dressing, not from oil and vinegar, but from nuts and seeds in vinegar for I might take a peeled naval orange, some ground toasted sesame seeds, some cashews and some squeeze of lemon and some blood orange vinegar and make a delicious salad dressing or a sauce from my wok-ed vegetables, maybe a Thai curry sauce with hemp seeds and a little coconut and date and lemon grass, ground lemon grass, and turmeric, and a little curry or cumin in there and make a delicious sauce for the vegetable dish. So I use the real, the nut or 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 waste line and to get healthier.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

So there must be at least some amount of animal protein you could take. What’s an acceptable or allowable amount?

Joel Fuhrman, M.D.

That’s the very variable on 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% to the higher range of 30%, we see an increase in death rates and we see a 75% increased risk in cancer rate and about a fourfold increase risk in overall death, when you’re going from 7.5% to 10%. For disease reversal like Dr. Ornish and most of the studies of doctors showing reversal of heart disease are 5% of animal product or less would be ideal for most people with serious illnesses, but based on genetics and age and body weight, and whether you’re a food addict or not, we’re saying for some people can probably have a little more. A lot of the people I see who are significantly overweight medical conditions, I put them on strict vegan diets, 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 wanna have more of them and push them over the line to excess calories, and they get more satiated and full. And we start to mirror 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 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 ’em in delicious forms, ’cause 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 or small amounts of things like a little bit of oil or a little bit something off their diet, ’cause it’s not gonna trigger them to become a binge and go crazy and go haywire with their eating behaviors. And so, a lot of the times, I do recommend a total vegan diet for people who can’t keep those things under control especially.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Now you do talk about infections as well and the immune system. How do these different foods affect the immune system?

Joel Fuhrman, M.D.

That’s particularly critical, ’cause I’m saying that the same foods that have immune system strengthening effects to protect us against cancer. Those same greens and onions and mushrooms and different, six different varieties of mushrooms in the week, have different colorful, different types of berries, have different types of beans in your diet, have different types of green vegetables. The salad, even just plain simple lettuce, a few different types of lettuce and even has sulfoquinovose 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. We have a good protective biofilm, which covers the villi. And our first line of defenses are the intraepithelial lymphocytes that surround our digestive tract. So the defenders at the gate of the castle, where toxins come into the body and bacteria, viruses come in. We have a huge and natural immunity to these things. 

And obviously, I’m saying that the COVID deaths we’ve seen across the world are indicative of how poor people’s nutrition and health been, because obviously, the worst health you have and the worse immune function you have and the more overweight and sickly and the more chronically ill you are, the more you’re at risk of having a COVID death and even thin, so old, healthy people who aren’t overweight, having severe COVID outcomes are related to their poor diets. 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 chemicalization of our environment. We didn’t see much cancers 300, 500 years ago. The cancers in the 1780 that we only mostly saw were scrotal cancers and testicular cancers in men who worked as chimneys sweeps, inhaling smoke. The rest of the people didn’t get cancer. And most pure people living on vegetables, they grew in their gardens, never got cancer years ago. And now this explosion in cancer, and I’m saying the same thing with COVID 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, great nutrition, it’s all just reflective of how poor people eat and how our modern societies have become drug-dependent, junk food-eating populations, susceptible to these diseases that can ravage large populations.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Well, you’re certainly a tremendous advocate and proselytizing the proper kind of diet for just a host of benefits, lifestyle benefits. Now 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, and the fact these transitions are not easy. So you have to accept that fact, depending on how bad off your diet is, how far you have to go.

Joel Fuhrman, M.D.

That’s right.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Is there 1 or 2 or more books that you specifically recommend for people about the Nutritarian diet?

Joel Fuhrman, M.D.

I do, I do. 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 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 2,000 scientific references. And so, it’s the most, I would say the most scientifically supported book, but written in a way so the lay person could really understand these concepts and get motivated and see all the success stories of people who’ve recovered from rheumatoid arthritis and ulcers colitis, and multiple sclerosis, and congestive heart failure, and cardiomyopathies. And it shows all these people reversing their diseases and how it worked. So I think that’s the most recent book, “Eat For Life”.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

“Eat For Life”.

Joel Fuhrman, M.D.

They should start. But 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 I think generally speaking, people should start with, “Eat For Life” and get the most updated, most recent book.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

And that’s the most broad spectrum.

Joel Fuhrman, M.D.

It’s very broad spectrum. It covers about food addiction and about dangers of dieting and yo-yo dieting. So it gives people a real good roadmap of how to proceed.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Now, would you be willing to make a claim that you can cure diabetes? Not type 1 necessarily, but type 2.

Joel Fuhrman, M.D.

I would say that approximately 95% of type 2 diabetics can become nondiabetic. There are some type 2 diabetics that develop almost a form of type 1 where they’ve destroyed their beta cells. They’re almost like not even an overweight type 2, they’re like a thinner type 2, that they’ve burnt out their beta cells, and they have such low insulin production. They may still need some small amounts of insulin. But yeah, but I’m saying 95% of type 2 diabetics can become nondiabetic meaning their blood sugars now will run below 100 without medication. And then somebody will say, “That’s not nondiabetic, if they ate unhealthy and gained weight again, they could become diabetic again, because of that genetic predisposition for diabetes.” And I’m gonna 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, sure, if you eat badly again, you can develop disease again. That doesn’t mean they’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 nondiabetic, their sugars are low and they’re in good shape now, and they don’t need blood pressure medications. 

And in my diabetic rehearsal study, which all but one person came off their diabetic medications, one person stayed on Metformin. 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, shown the average systolic blood pressure dropped 26 points while the people’s medications were being removed, for starting blood pressures to the ending blood pressures off medications, to starting blood pressure on medications at a 26-point systolic differential. So we’re talking about a tremendous that nutrition is much more powerful than drugs. And within a month of eating this way, your risk of heart disease, heart attack death would go down by more than a thousand-fold, even when you didn’t take all your weight off yet, ’cause it stops the vulnerable plaque from inflaming and cracking and causing platelet clots and stuff like that.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

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, ’cause doctors can’t tell you what you should do anyway. So they’re not gonna be able to give you advice on how you should eat or what you should eat, et cetera. 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 practiced 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 conventional system, to get all this benefit.

Joel Fuhrman, M.D.

And I’ve been teaching that for years. I’ve been saying that this is 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 the dangerous medicine, that’s the medicine that’s ineffective, and that’s mostly malpractice, because you didn’t give people the options that to tell ’em they could possibly get well, before you start prescribing a medication for them. You know what I mean? The first thing is to give people their choices like you were saying earlier of, you could say to a person, “I could give you a drug to lower your blood glucose, lower your blood pressure, but those studies, even 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 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 or way out type of medicine or healthcare. This is the right way to practice.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

In fact, actually, as you were saying, my medical training was back in the sixties and seventies. So back then, the PDRs were very thin, weren’t that many drugs. Now, the PDRs are this thick and they’re throwing stuff out all the time, right? So what’s happened is that when I was originally practicing medicine, since I had very few drug-type resources, it was lifestyle, you did talk to people about lifestyle, you did talk to people about how it changed the impact of different diseases, prevention and therapy. So we have to find that, we have to kind of go back and find that again. Since this is the PEMF Summit, I did wanna say one thing about this, and I’ve said this along other interviews as well. And while we absolutely, PEMF do not take a 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 healthier cells to be able to rebuild themselves. Now, if you’re not on the edge of a cliff and a gale, 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 PEMF therapy at that time, but once you get the nutrition set up, then the PEMF therapy and nutrition actually work and glove together to make it even more optimized.

Joel Fuhrman, M.D.

Absolutely, and you know, I see people with all kinds of problems here. And just to give an example, I had a person with just 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 in here with the nutrition, with the weight loss, with electrical magnetic therapy, to build back her nerve healing and with some massage, she got full rid of her carpal tunnel syndrome, full use of her hands, lost weight, got healthy. When you mix these things together with optimal nutrition, the right type of physical therapy and the electromagnetic therapy too, that can help stimulate nerve healing and reduce pain, we combine it all together, we get people back to health. Fibromyalgia disappears. When you try sometimes one without the other, when you soften the tissue, we’ve giving people such kind of nutrients, we’re giving them special juicing, we’re giving them 1/3 lettuce, 1/3 dark green, 1/3… We’re getting all these nutrients in their body, but if the nutrients can’t get into the tissues, due to spasm in muscles and tight hard tissue, then you’re not gonna relax the tissue and reduce the pain. By giving the nutrients and the physical modalities with the, then you can often see a profound physical healing when people have musculoskeletal conditions, including nerve pain conditions, muscle spasm.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Inflammation reduction.

Joel Fuhrman, M.D.

Inflammation reduction. So it’s excellent that us physicians who can work together using these modalities simultaneously.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Yeah, life is like that, isn’t it? Life is not one treatment, one option. Life requires multiple avenues, multiple approaches to be able to optimize a person, a life.

Joel Fuhrman, M.D.

That’s correct and I’ve experienced that.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Well, I’m glad to have you on our show, share with us your wisdom and knowledge and experience. And what’s the name of that book again, please?

Joel Fuhrman, M.D.

“Eat For Life”.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

“Eat For Life”.

Joel Fuhrman, M.D.

Yeah, and I have a lot of information about the disease reversal protocols at drfuhrman.com. So I’ve got a lot of resources there for people who wanna learn more too.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Okay, so drfuhrman.com and “Eat For Life”.

Joel Fuhrman, M.D.

You got it.