Protect Your Heart As You Age

Joel Fuhrman, MD

Eat for Life is the most recent book. So I recommend they maybe start with the most recent.

Joel Kahn, MD, FACC

All right. And thanks for taking the time out of your busy schedule. We’re going to talk today about slowing aging, a topic everybody’s interested in and you’re an expert on. So why don’t you jump right in and give us a little foundation on what the Nutritarian diet is and why it’s so important to this reversing heart disease summit?

Joel Fuhrman, MD

Exactly. And this is my point. My point is if we put together the optimal dietary portfolio to slow aging and to maintain us at an ideal weight with our maximal physical and mental capacity to live a life span between 97 and 107 years old. That should be the normal lifespan for humans if we do things right. And I’m saying the most optimal way of living and eating also is the most therapeutically effective if we want to reverse diseases like diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and reverse heart disease, and prevent cardiovascular death. So I’m saying the diet that most promotes longevity is also the most therapeutically effective to reverse disease when people are suffering with chronic illnesses. So we marry that form together. We marry that together. The foundational principle and the most proven methodology to slow aging in scientific studies and scientific research has to do with these five words. And I want people to write down these five words and memorize them. Here they are moderate caloric restriction in the context of micronutrient excellence. So it’s moderate caloric restriction with micronutrient excellence. So we have to make sure we’re not deficient in anything. We have to eat a diet rich in vegetables, particularly green vegetables. We’re vegetable-dependent animals and we have to control not only what we eat, but the amount that we eat and the timing of how we eat it. All of those things matter to maximize longevity and maximize our body weight. So what I’m saying here and get going into is that we’re increasing the nutrient bang for a caloric buck by eating more vegetables and eating more green vegetables because vegetables have the most nutrients per calorie per caloric buck. We’re eating a vegetable-based diet and lots of salads and cooked greens to maximize our weight. We’re also eating a lot of volume of low calorie, high nutrient vegetables that are just that are non-green like eggplant and peppers and tomatoes and onions and mushrooms and cauliflower. Things that are not green but also have a very high nutrient per calorie density. So people who can eat a larger volume of food and still lose weight and we’re going for nutritional variety in the plant kingdom to get diverse exposure to phytochemicals, carotenoids, Isoflavones cyanide, and other immune boosting and anti-inflammatory substances in the plant kingdom. So a Nutritarian diet is a vegetable-based, plant-based diet. Whereas the conventional diet gets their fat from fats and oils, the Nutritarian diet gets its fat from nuts and seeds, and avocados. Whole foods which then are more satiating and make you desire less calories. So, just before I finished that initial question, I want to finish this point that we’re trying to eat less calories, eat the right, and not exceed our caloric requirements. But I’m saying when you fill the body with nutrients and fiber and resistant starches when you eat the right food it naturally suppresses the appetite. It naturally makes you satiated with less calories. So, you desire the right amount of calories. The calories you desire becomes the right amount for your body’s requirements. And you don’t have to eat or overeat to feel okay. When you eat conventional food. It’s impossible to eat the right amount of calories because your body is deficient in nutrients. You just become craving calories and you’re all fatigued and you just need more calories to feel like you’re okay. So we’re not like, we’re moderately caloric restricting by eating the right foods, which then satisfies us with fewer calories.

Joel Kahn, MD, FACC

Okay. That was a tremendous in a review, and why your books have influenced so many people’s lives for so many years. I just noticing your smash hit Eat to Live has over 17,000 reviews on Amazon and I can’t find too many nutrition books that have reached that many people that were motivated to leave wonderful comments like there are there, so thank you for that. Let’s keep going on this topic of slowing aging and the Nutritarian diet because everybody wants to grow old a little bit better, a little healthier, and a little slower. How does body fat affect aging and the heart?

Joel Fuhrman, MD

Well, that’s the point here is that we’re filling we’re increasing the nutrient density of our diet, which then increases the nutrient density of the cells in your body. The cells have to be filled with nutrients to prevent inflammation, to enhance DNA repair, to prevent telomeres, and to prevent, of course, the aging of tissues, which leads to obviously brittle, hard, aged tissues that can rupture, fracture, and cause irregular heartbeats or hemorrhages and things like that and stuff like and unhealthy things that kill us. So we can maintain the health of our tissues. But body fat is particularly powerful at accelerating the aging process and I’m saying that almost all Americans are overweight because you know, if we look at Americans above a BMI of 23, that’s 89% of people in America, maximum lifespan and maximal protection of cardiovascular death occurs with males with a BMI below 22 and females with a BMI below 21. And that corresponds approximately two female body fat below 25% and a male body fat below 15%. Because as you gain more fat on your body, a male gains more than 15% of female gains more than 25% body fat. You become more insulin resistant in a dose-dependent manner, more body fat, and more insulin resistance. And then the body has to produce more insulin to push the glucose to keep the glucose down and insulin ages us. It’s a fat-storage hormone, it’s a growth hormone that promisingly allows cancer cells to replicate, but it also allows cholesterol to be deposited and to be produced. So high levels of insulin are associated with higher cardiovascular death and of course, higher cancer deaths as well. And body fat because it’s naturally hypoxic tissue. The word hypoxic means it doesn’t get a great blood supply. 

So the fat supply becomes a storage depot for toxins and because it doesn’t get a great blood supply, it produces more free radicals and releases reactive oxygen species, putting out cytokines, lipokines, and other pro-inflammatory substances that increase the risk and injuring the endothelial lining and increase the risk of heart disease. But it also the extra inflammatory compounds suppress the immune function and make the body produce more estrogen. And the estrogen levels go up in proportion to testosterone and progesterone. And so the higher estrogen ratios in females cause more breast cancer and in males obviously cause more prostate cancer. So we can dial in our life span and dial in our risk of cancer, and we can slow the aging process by reducing calories and making sure our body fat is lower. So we have control over this. We have control of how much we eat, when we eat it, and what we eat. But we lose control and our addictive central nervous system drivers take over control, and we don’t want to lose control. We desire to eat when we eat fake food like processed foods, sugar, honey, maple syrup, soft drinks, crackers, bread, breakfast bars, whatever we’re eating white flour products and commercial baked goods. And so I’m saying here that a piece of chicken is like a bagel because they’re both sources of macronutrients to give us calories. The bagel gives us mostly carbohydrates and the chicken gives us mostly protein but neither one supplies a significant micronutrient load. And it’s the micronutrient content of your diet that controls your appetite and controls your desire for excess calories. And of course, we know that they’re both hormonally unfavorable because animal protein raises growth hormones like IGF-1 and high glycaemic carbohydrates like white rice and white bread and white potato and white flour and sugar to raise insulin. And it’s that insulin and IGF-1 rising up that creates this pro-inflammatory process that speeds the aging process and is associated with shorter lifespans, both cardiovascular death and cancer deaths. So we obviously need to eat a diet that’s plant-based. That’s where we are restricting or eliminating both processed foods and animal products and oils while we fill up our natural plants and learn to utilize them in delicious ways. And don’t eat more calories than you need. And here’s what I’m saying, if you eat enough of the G-BOMBS, enough salad and vegetable bean soup and onions and mushrooms and eggplant and peppers. If you eat healthy enough and sprouts, and if you eat enough healthy food, you don’t desire excess calories. And the desire for excess calories is usually because people are deficient in eating enough healthy food. When they eat enough healthy food, their desire for excess calories goes away. So we lose weight by eating the right food and eating enough of the right food to lose weight.

Joel Kahn, MD, FACC

Okay, now that is thorough and wonderful. What about the most important foods? The most important factors? Just pearls that come out of your, you know, so many years of experience to slow aging and protect the heart and brain.

Joel Fuhrman, MD

Well, one is the choice of food, and that means we want to include those G-BOMBS, preferably every day. It’s part of what we eat. The G-BOMBS are the foods with the most scientific evidence for lifespan enhancing and anti-cancer effects and cardiovascular protection. They stand for green vegetables for G, and then BOMBS, beans, onions, mushrooms, berries, and seeds. And we can make flax seeds, chia seeds, and hemp seeds. And let me throw walnuts in there with the seeds because we’re talking about flax, chia hemp, and walnuts as the nuts and seeds that have the most ALA omega-3 fatty acid because ALA has been shown to protect the heart against irregular heartbeat, especially against development of atrial fibrillation. So these things are cardioprotective and they do and they lower cholesterol as well, particularly oxidized LDL. But in any case, we’re talking here about eating the G-BOMBS, having and having one big salad a day, and also having cooked vegetables, particularly cooked mushrooms and cooked greens and cooked onions besides the raw onions, scallions, and other raw vegetables, you eat on your lunch salad. Also adding vegetable content to your diet with a lot of cooked vegetables at dinner as well. So that’s one thing. The second thing is the timing of when you eat it, we want to cause we, but our body heals and repairs itself most in the catabolic phase when we’re not digesting. So we need an extended catabolic phase of not digesting food at night and we don’t lose weight when we are constantly eating and digesting food. We lose weight as two-thirds of the glycogen is utilized for energy, because our body stores glycogen after we eat the meal, and then after we finish digesting, we burn off the glycogen that was stored. The body doesn’t choose to burn fat to remove plaque or cholesterol. It chooses to burn glycogen first. And you don’t really burn off much fat until you’ve burned through two-thirds of your glycogen. Then you start to utilize more fat resources. So I’m saying here is most healing and repair takes place during sleep and it takes place during sleep after digestion ceases and even an hour or two after you finish digestion. So if you eat a big meal late at night then you’re going to keep digesting food while you’re sleeping and you can lose the benefit of the catabolic disease reversal and longevity anti-aging benefits of sleep when your body’s not digested. So, the latest time a person should eat dinner is probably around 5:00, so you’re finished eating by six. So you have 4 hours of no eating before you go to bed at night at 10:00 or 11:00, an hour later. But the point is you want to have that for at least 4 hours so you can finish digesting the evening meal. Now, if you ratchet up the calories in the evening meal instead of eating a 400-calorie evening meal, if I go up to a 600-calorie evening meal, I’m not going to finish digesting by 10:00 at night. I’m watching myself. I know that if I overeat a dinner, even if I eat at 5:00 or 6:00, I still go to bed at 10:00. And I can feel food in my stomach because I ate too many calories. It tasted too good. The dessert was too delicious. I wanted an extra portion. I came back and had an extra this. I know in order to finish digesting in time. It’s not only that I eat early, it’s that I did not pig out and eat till I was full at dinner time. If you eat to fullness, you’re going to keep digesting half the night. And don’t forget you’re not burning fat for a few hours after you finish digesting because you got to burn the glycogen from that meal first. So we have to stack our calories during the day, so we diminish the calories towards the evening. And when we finish eating dinner at 6:00, at 5:30 or 6:30, not too late. When you’re finished eating dinner shut down the restaurant meaning the kitchen, brush your teeth, floss, water pick and learn how to recreate, enjoy life without food. Don’t put calories in your mouth late at night because that’s going to decrease your ability to reverse, to still age slower, and to reverse lower your blood pressure, to lower your cholesterol, to reverse your heart disease, and to lose weight. It’s all tied in there together. So it’s when it’s what you eat, how much you eat, and when you eat it that all play an important role here.

Joel Kahn, MD, FACC

All right. Well, I think you’ve given the audience at the Reversing Heart Disease Summit pearl after pearl, after pearl, after pearl. And hopefully, everybody took notes and wrote down all your years of wisdom. We’re going to come back in a moment and talk about the most important foods to avoid for the premium members. We want to just say thank you to everybody for being part of this and learning with me by interviewing the world-famous Dr. Joel Fuhrman. Thank you very much. Right. Well, Dr. Fuhrman, you gave us a great rundown about strategies using a Nutritarian diet, and foods in G-BOMBS to slow aging. But we just got to dive into this special extra session. And the question, what do we have to avoid? I mean, what are we going to give up to get our Nutritarian diet to work with us?

Joel Fuhrman, MD

I know. You know, that’s the question is that I’m saying you crowd out, you flood them out, you flood your body with high nutrient foods and you don’t desire those foods anymore, but they’re addicting and they drive people to want them. When you’re having flour, especially white flour, and commercial baked goods, we have to avoid white flour as if it’s poison. It’s a drug like sugar. So sugar, honey, maple syrup, and baked goods, commercial baked goods. The commercial baked goods and white flour products act like sugar. They go into the bloodstream as sugar at the same rate as sugar does. You might as well just suck a sugar cube as eating a piece of bagel or croissants, or a piece of pizza and that just floods the body with inflammation. And also so we’re talking about a dieting S.O.S. free, sugar, oil and salt-free because we’re talking about this concept of caloric rush, which means a high level of calories flooding into the bloodstream, driving people to want to eat more calories, you know, driving people to being food addicts and S.O.S. free plus F. Sugar, Oil, and salt-free. Because oil drives up being overweight and drives, you know, aging of the body by flooding it with too many calories all at once to the bloodstream, plus F, which means plus flour, particularly white flours are high glycemic foods that work on the body like sugar. That means all white bread and all white bread products, all commercial bakers are out and the only thing that resembles bread you should eat would be something that’s made from like a sprouted grain or intact whole grain because even whole wheat can be grown into like a pastry flour to make it excessively glycemic. The best breads are like the food for life or the Ezekiel breads that have like that are made of course of grains that are lower glycemic, but you don’t want to eat much bread anyway. So flour, you have to be careful with flour. It’s just concentrated food. And the other thing besides oil and sugar and salt and flour. The other thing is animal protein and animal fat even. It’s with the oil, the fat out of the animal. You cook the chicken, you just add the white meat. You just have straight animal protein with no fat in it. It still drives heart disease, it still raises cholesterol, and it still drives inflammation. It produces a hormone called TMAO or trimethylamine N-oxide from the extra animal protein. And that causes inflammation in the endothelial lining of blood vessels, accelerating cardiovascular death. And it also drives IGF-1 excessively high. IGF-1 is another insulin-like growth factor one is a primary growth hormone, which then stimulates the walls of the blood vessels to thicken and to lay down more plaque. So it’s this combination between IGF-1 being elevated and TMAO being elevated plus you have, of course, the saturated fats from animal products that also drive cholesterol production. So it becomes a big you know, it all contributes to heart disease, particularly when you’re mixing animal fat, animal protein, and refined carbohydrates. Then I say there you got the diet designed by al Qaeda to kill people, to push up the glycemic ones, push up the animal fast animal proteins. So we really have to be if we’re looking to prevent and reverse heart disease, either on a vegan diet or pretty close to a vegan diet and near a vegan diet when you’re using animal products as a condiment or a flavoring on an occasion, but it’s never been becomes a major source of calories. It has to be an occasional minor source. Even the occasional use should be a small source. And when you have heart disease, you might as well just totally eliminate those things and make every meal count and don’t consume anything that’s going to push you in the wrong direction.

Joel Kahn, MD, FACC

Well, that was just tremendous. And I know I learned and everybody learned. Always appreciate your time. I’m with seven-time New York Times best-selling author, Dr. Joel Fuhrman, co-host of Reversing Heart Disease Naturally Summit. Thank you. And we’re going to get a chance to talk some more in the future about some other topics you are expert on. So for now, thanks so much, Joel.

Joel Fuhrman, MD

Good luck, everybody.