Reverse Disease, Slow Aging, and Maximize Longevity

Introduction to Dr. Joel Fuhrman 0:00

One of the most fascinating research in the last five years has to do with protein. It shows that you can regulate protein to lengthen or shorten human lifespan. And that is, it's really fascinating that as you increase animal protein in a diet, that shortens human life span. So more animal proteins means more death. In the shortest life spans, the more early life deaths, premature deaths occurred in people on keto diets. This is Dr. Talks. I'm excited to introduce you to our next guest. He's actually a friend of mine and also a neighbor.

he lives pretty close to me and sometimes we'll play a little pickleball together. But his name is Dr. Joel Fuhrman. And he's a medical doctor, board certified family physician, also as seven time New York Times bestselling author and an internationally recognized expert in the field of nutrition. Even coined the term Nutritarian, which you may have heard before that that would that came from Joel. So he's an amazing physician. He does so much research. Dives in and he has so many research to back up what he is going to talk about today.

Today he will talk reversing disease, slowing aging and maximizing longevity. Joe, welcome to the Global Energy Healing Summit. Great to be here. Excited about our talk today. Yeah. Hey, let's start with your background. You have an amazing background that you actually were, and I didn't do it in the introduction, but you were a champion figure skater growing up and competed for the United States. And then you did not end up becoming a doctor until a little bit later. So talk about your journey to becoming physician first, then let us dive into some of your work.

Right. I was on the United States world figure skating team. It was a pair skater with my younger sister and who was the third in the world in 1976. Wow.

From Figure Skater to Physician 1:58

In the World's Professional Championships. And then I went at that point and I coached skating, training competitors that trained internationally. that competed internationally and then worked in my father's shoe business with the intention of taking over his chain of shoe stores. And I realized that my passion was really nutrition and what nutrition could do to enable people to recover from serious illnesses. And I decided to have my father sell the shoe stores, retire, and I would move on. And, I went back to the post-medical, post graduate pre-Med program at Columbia, because I didn't have all the pre medical requirements in college at NYU.

I then went to University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and graduated in 1988. So I think I did go to medical school for 84 when I was about 29 years old. But how did nutrition become your passion? I'm just curious. What was it that sparked that fire in you that now you've had for so many years? What it was back then? My father introduced me because he was sickly and overweight and had some medical issues. So he introduced the work of Dr. Herbert Shelton from the American Natural Hygiene Society.

As a child, in my early teenage years, I was already reading a lot of books and magazines on nutrition and natural healing and going to conferences in the teens and seeing people who recovered from serious illnesses through nutritional interventions. So I've been involved with this kind of thought processes since I'm a teenager, you know? Yeah. Yeah, that's awesome. That's so cool. And you definitely have tremendous passion. I can vouch for that. You live what you talk about. But you're perfectly fit.

and you've got this amazing retreat center out here near where we both live. you actually live there, but near I live where people come in from all over the world for your guidance and your health. So what are some of the key features of a Nutritarian diet? Talk us through what is the NutriTarian Diet. Talk to us about that a little bit. Well, the word nutrition, you know, is, means rich in nutrients and comprehensive in its exposure to all the nutrients humans need to maximize their health and slow aging and promote longevity, which means preventing heart attacks and strokes and preventing cancer.

If you're going to promote the longevity you have to not get cancer or die of a heart attack. And you also want to live to be, and I'm saying the natural lifespan for humans. for people eating healthfully should be between 97 and 107 years old. The center of the bell should center around 100 years older a little bit further. Wow. What I'm observing in my people following my program who are elderly, how what they're able to achieve.

Nutritarian Diet Foundations 4:46

And so what I'm saying right now is that the foundational principle has to do with moderate caloric restriction in the context of micronutrient excellence. Micronutrion excellence, we're saying, is a high concentration of foods that have a higher nutrient density, a lot of vitamins and minerals and phytochemicals per calorie, and that puts green vegetables at the top of the pyramid or that puts green vegetables that win the race by, you know, they're way ahead of for the finish line because they are so low in calories, but nutritionally concentrated.

And we're a green vegetable dependent animal. The intra epithelial lymphocytes that surround the villi and the small intestines that are a first line of defense against infection. are fueled and activated by green vegetable compounds. And the green vegetables also produce the healthiest type of gran-positive bacteria that coat the villi. The combination of these foods, and I'm talking about two raw foods and two cooked foods that synergistically build the Healthiest Microbiome. Lettuce is raw lettuce, which is the richest source of sulfoquinavose, a necessary nutrient to support the growth of bacteria in the gut, and the isothiocyanides from green cruciferous vegetables like bok choy and arugula and cabbage and things like that.

So that combination of eating those things raw maximizes the production of those beneficial anti-cancer compounds and also the fuel to grow the bacteria. And then we use raw onions or scallions They have those organosulfite compounds, and cursitin and other factors that, an inulin that also have anti-cancer substances that thicken the microbiome and the biofilm that cover the villi, that produce serotonin, build our immune system, good for the brain, so build out defenses. And then the two cooked, those are raw foods.

And then the cooked foods I'm talking about are an assortment of cooked mushrooms and cooked beans that are cooked to softness. Because beans are the richest source of what we call resistant starch. There's a carbohydrate source. They have the slowest digestible carbohydrates. The slowness of their absorption keeps their glycemic load very low. Resistant starch are resistant to enzymatic degradation, which means they have to be broken down by bacteria. Which means there are fuel for the growth of bacteria, and also the cooked mushrooms have a tremendous powerful effect on immune function.

We're mushroom-dependent animals in the sense that all our cells have receptors on the surfaces for ergothionine, a substance found in mushrooms, that we have this connection with mushrooms in the natural world. Why would we ever have ergotheionin receptors in our cell that come from mushrooms if we weren't, you know, so we've developed over the centuries or millennium of 50,000 years to be, or in whatever way how it happened. where our immune systems function dependent on these foods. And so we're eating a lot of these protective foods that have this association with prevention of cancer.

I made up an acronym, G-bombs. No, I know your G bomb. We have that in our kitchen. That's just representative of having people remember the foods have the most scientific support. to prevent cancer, so they can design an anti-cancer, cancer prevention diet. Because I'm saying this, you don't need to get cancer. That we can wipe out more than 90% of cancers right now, if everybody ate this way from a young age. And there weren't even many cancers, but for the 17th century, Before the 1700s, there were hardly any cancers recorded because people couldn't eat that much meat.

They couldn' afford it. And there are no processed foods and junk food and sugars around, they just were eating mostly vegetables and what they could survive on. Yeah. The first cancers that were first recorded in any number in human history were scrotal and testicular cancers in males who worked as chimney sweeps from inhaling smoke. Wow. And we know that polycyclic, polyaromatic hydrocarbons from burning wood and from building buildings is not good for our health. I mean, that smoke is definitely, but in any case, we've learned so much in the last two decades and we have such advancements in nutritional science that enable us to develop a dietary portfolio that can push the envelope of human longevity and really know how humans should maximally, slow aging and live to be without the fear of disease.

I love that. I loved that that's, that so exciting and promising what you're going to talk about, what your talking about. So G-bomb, let's go ahead and let me see if I can get it. Okay. Cause so greens is G, right? Yes. And then berries? Well berries is the last B. Beans, onions, mushrooms, and then Berries. The last S on the end. Seeds. Hemp seeds and chia seeds, and flax seeds which have amazing protective effects. For example, there was a recent study that showed that they tracked women who had breast cancer for 10 years.

And those that ate a little bit of lignin, the lignon is the substance in flex seed that binds estrogen, lowers estrogen production, protects the breast against estrogen stimulation, it protects prostate. In other words, have powerful anti-cancer effects, but those who have a third of a milligram of had a 71% decreased risk of dying of breast cancer compared to women not having lignin in their diet. There's no drug, there's not intervention that the medical profession can do that can drop risk for death by 71%. And that was a third of a milligram of ligenin.

And a teaspoon of ground flax has seven milligrams. That was only a 3rd of one milligram. So that's too low of dose. too late in life, you know, we should start, they shouldn't have waited until they had advanced cancers to do it.

G-Bombs and Anti-Cancer Foods 10:40

But even with a low dose, so late-in-life, it still decreased risk of death by 71%. So these are powerful to put together a dietary portfolio with all these different foods that independently work and work synergistically. Like studies on mushrooms show they reduce the risk for breast cancer by about 64% when you're just taking 10 grams of mushrooms a day on the average, which is the size of your thumb. Really? Wow. So hey, on mushrooms, we can, obviously we could buy mushrooms. There's also mushroom powders that seem popular now.

Are the powers effective? Yes. I mean, what I'm saying right now is that fresh mushrooms and dried mushrooms, and powdered mushrooms are all valuable additions to a healthy diet because fresh mushroom have their own unique property. And I buy this bag of like dried wild collected mushrooms with black trumpets and cremini. Because the wider assortment of mushrooms you consume, especially wild mushrooms is very protective. You know, I even have my website, a 10 anti-cancer mushroom extract that I give people who have issues, just to make sure they have a wide exposure of different varieties of mushrooms.

So yes, every way you increase your mushroom exposure, it can potentially improve your health. particularly people who don't eat a wide variety of fresh mushrooms and how it's hard to get a variety fresh in our diet. Absolutely. So another question, you know, some people are touting, beware of lectins. Beans have lectin, but in the research I've done is if you cook them until they're soft, which is what you said, that most of the lectines are destroyed or do we even need to worry about that? Well, you'd only have to worry about it, like you said, if you didn't cook them.

Yeah. Because lectins can cause hemagglutin of red blood cells. So, beans are a food that can be harmful if eat them uncooked. But that's irrelevant because every... It's not quite relevant. Well, people should know about it, I guess, because we should well cook our beans. You know what I mean? On the other hand, all populations and all long lived populations, and long live individuals are bean eaters. And beans have been shown to extend human lifespan and be linked to longer areas of the world where they live longer.

The populations that eat beans live the longest. Individuals that eats beans and modulate their bean intake can increase their lifespan by eating more beans, And again, we have this opportunity to have a variety of beans. And we're showing that a of foods increases our potential for lifespan. So we don't just eat chickpeas. We eat red kidney beans and split peas and, you know, and so we eat different types of beings in our weekly schedule of food we are eating. One of my favorite snacks that I've picked up recently is they are fava beans that have been roasted and they're super crunchy.

Is that, is that okay? You know, the problem is when you dry cook a food to make it crispy and roasted, you lose some of the protective anti-cancer effects and you form some acrylamides. We don't really recommend people eat like toast and the crust of like pizza and bagels and things that are roasted and darkened and hardened. So we emphasize water-based cooking methods. Okay. Because water based cooking method to keep the food soft, not crunchy. Yeah. Don't dry out the food and damage the nutrients.

Okay. And plus the fact that we do make some crunchy things, but I usually use them in a dehydrator. Like I'll use kale chips and I make them like tofu pizza jerky and make dried crackers. But I'm making them into a cracker. or a granola at a low temperature. So I'm not like 120 degrees for like 10 hours. Not baking it to form the more harmful compounds that are more dark and make the food more darker and browner. One of the things you recommend, which we try to do at our house here, is a big salad for lunch.

Why is that so important? Not just a little side salad, but you say the salad should be a huge portion of lunch? Well, that's a great question because I want people to either write this down, what I'm going to say right now, or memorize it. It's very important to know to memorize each next like 10 words. And that is raw vegetable consumption has the most powerful and consistent association with the reduction of cancers of all types. I'd like to even say that one more time so people got that. So it's so important.

What I'm saying here is more than 206 epidemiologic studies show, and here's what I want them to write down and memorize. More vegetable consumption has the most consistent and powerful association with the reduction of cancers of all types. Eating a big salad a day is a hallmark of a Nutritarian diet. At least once a days having a large salad and you make it half lettuce and half other leafy greens, kale, bok choy, arugula, watercress, anything, you know, to make the combination of the lettuce with the cruciferous greens that give you the maximal anti-cancer effect and also brings out the other unique feature of Nutritarian diet is that most Americans get their fat intake from eating oils or animal fats.

And we get our fat and take from meeting a whole food form of fat in the form nuts and seeds, almonds, cashews, pecans, walnuts, hemp seeds sunflower seeds. In other words, we're making a dressing that may have almonds and hempseeds blended with tomato sauce and roasted garlic and some black fig vinegar. and that might be the dressing or it might the aren't naval oranges or red or Blood orange is whipped with some blood orange vinegar with cashews and toasted sesame seeds mixed with squeezed lemon or something or make a Caesar dressing.

So we're making dressings that are made with whole nuts and seeds and that's like three or four reasons why that is so important. The fat intake with the salad facilitates the absorption of the anti-cancer phytochemicals. So we like people to have about a half an ounce of nuts with every meal. The absorption, the nutrients from the other foods. On the salads even, right? You don't have to make the dressing with it, but you have put them on the solid. If you're going to just make a low-fat dressing, then you should still have a few nuts and seeds to eat with a salad.

The second thing is when you use nuts and seeds as a source of fat, the fat calories come into the bloodstream very slowly over a three or four hour period.

Salads, Nuts, Seeds, and Healthy Fats 16:58

The body can preferentially burn it for energy. When you extract the oil from the nut and seed and take it as an oil nut from a nut in seed, The oils come in to the bludstream instantaneously. And the body has to turn on fat storage mechanisms to store it as fat instead of burn it is energy. And then oil, because it rushes into the bloodstream so rapidly, stimulates the dopamine centers in the brain and increases appetite and makes you kind of like addicted to higher chloral concentration. So it makes people overeat and it make some lean weight.

so oil is fattening, it's 120 calories a tablespoon. It is an appetite stimulant and at least the food addiction. When you cook oil or fry oil are heat oil. Then it forms carcinogenic changes that makes it more potentially a cancer promoter. And nuts and seeds are linked in scores of studies that show incredible high degree of corroboration, which means the studies show the same thing from researchers all over the world. And that is they show about a 40% reduction in cardiovascular death and about 30% in cancer deaths when people utilize them in their diet, even when they don't eat a nutrient diet.

Just adding nuts in seeds to a regular diet lowers risk of heart attack death by about 40%. How about avocado as a source of fat? Yes, including nuts and seeds and avocado. But if you were overweight and you couldn't have enough caloric room to have both, you'd probably get more protection from the nuts, especially walnuts, hemp seeds, those high omega-3 ones. So if you have the work room to include an avocado, I eat avocado because I exercise and I'm not worried about those extra calories. But for some people, my retreat that come here to lose weight, we give them like avocado toast maybe once a week and another avocado on the salad, maybe another time of during the week, may be twice a.

We don't give him too much avocado. Because we're moderately calorically restricting them. You know, if your caloric restrict people too far. Then they start to obsess about food and they sort of binge and go off the diet. And so I'm not talking about radical caloric restriction. We're talking just moderate calore restriction so they get to their perfect weight. So they lose weight regularly. A Nutritarian is somebody eating super healthfully at their ideal weight or a person eating, super-healthfully and moving towards their idea weight at about two pounds a week.

If they're not losing two-pounds a then they're not really following a nutrition program. Because it takes about a kilogram of weight loss a week for the body to stop producing excess free radicals and promoting inflammation from the fat cells and reduces insulin resistance and it reduces aromatase, aromatase enzyme production of estrogen and angiogenesis promotion. So what I'm saying right now, I know I rushed through that, but I am saying that fat cell have certain dangers that promote cancer and accelerate aging.

When you're overweight and losing weight at two pounds a week, the dangers from the frat cells diminish so significantly. And because even though you still overweight, because you are losing weights steadily, you don't see the inflammation and the danger occur from being overweight as much. So if you, if your on the way to your ideal weight, your already immediately in the losing process. reducing your risk of having a heart attack or a stroke dramatically. Yeah, that's awesome. Well, obviously, vegetables are so critically important.

What are your thoughts on fruit? I mean, we have berries in G-bomb, but other fruits or smoothies that have whole fruits in them, things like that, what are you thoughts about that? Because a lot of people have been taught, oh, it's too much sugar or other things, like what do you tell people about fruit, Joel? Even people looking to lose weight, I want to eat at least three servings of fruit a day. The Women's Healthy Eating and Living study, the WHEEL study has been corroborated by other studies that show that even though vegetables show the most protection of cancers, diets that include fruits and vegetables, people have lower cancer rates than people just having vegetables alone.

So again, all these studies seem to show consistently that for more variety of foods, of plants, foods different types you include in the diet, it increases the potential for a longer lifespan. And I'm claiming that where in human history, especially living here in California, have people had the opportunity to eat so many different kinds of natural plants? Sprouts, microgreens, wild berries. pomegranates, kumquats, and still have a wide assortment of vegetables and mushrooms. So we're saying that this assortionment to foods is an advantage in modern history that our ancestors and even the Blue Zones don't have available to them.

six to eight years longer than the average Americans. It's not still the ideal diets that we're trying to replicate. The science has moved along so we can, you know, well, the blue zone's moving in the right direction, but we could do much better than blue zones. And I'm making this radical claim. I am saying that people can live 20 years, longer with predictability and with good healthy life expectancy where full mental faculties intact in our later years and dramatically increase our healthy live expectancy.

That's compelling. Super compelling, yeah. So people that are worried because they've heard fruits will cause inflammation, you're saying as long as it's a whole fruit, it is okay to eat? Well, that's the good point. It's that when you just have the juice and take the fiber away, like drinking apple juice, so you don't get the benefits. Not health foods. If you are making a smoothie, then you do not want to add fruit juice into it. You want the whole fruits into. And we're not giving a fruit-based diet.

We're eating one or two pieces of fruit after a vegetable or a low-glycemic meal. And don't forget, at the beginning of this presentation, I described how eating this combination of foods thickened the biofilm that covers the villi that slows the glyceamic exposure into the bloodstream. The rate at which fruit calories enter the bludstream, the rate of which sugar enters the by the microbiome and the type of cells and thickness of your biofilm.

Fruit, Glycemic Load, and Food Addiction 22:58

So how do you turn a moderate glycemic load into a low-glyceemic load food? Then you eat the beans and mushrooms and onions and greens that will control the absorption. You eat a mango for breakfast, it's low glycymic and that's why people on keto or paleo diets Like a person on a keto diet, eating a lot of saturated fat, says, look, I can't eat a mango or some oatmeal because my sugars go through the roof. Well, of course your sugars goes through through roof because you have so many gram negatives and you eat so much saturated fats that distorted the shape and function of the insulin receptor.

So now you've become insulin resistant. Now you can eat mango without your sugar's going up. The keto diets cause them to be sugar sensitive. If they do on their blood sugar, they see a heightened response to eating the piece of fruit, whereas nutrients, eating a piece of fruit, eating some mango after a meal, don't see a high sugar point going up because we're eating the diet, the whole dietary portfolio promotes these benefits. That's fascinating. And I've never heard that explanation before. that's really cool.

So why do people, I mean, there's so much benefit in eating this way you're talking, why did people have such a hard time changing their diet and giving up the salts and oils and, you know, refined sugars and meats? Why is it so tough for people? Well, because we don't just develop preferences when we're young. And any person who eats a certain diet likes the foods they've been raised on. But it's also because these substances have been designed to hijack people's taste buds and addict them to prefer...

It's food addiction. What's that? It looks like a drug. It is like the drug, particularly when talking about white flour products. White flour product like pizza, bagels, croissants, cookies and cake, turn to sugar in the blood, you know, they're absorbed as sugar. So white flour bread is sugar, there's no different. And it's not a food because a foods has substances that support lifespan. There's vitamin and mineral or there is no content of nutrients just other than the caloric macronutrient there.

In doing so, the body can't convert it into energy effectively. The mitochondria need vitamins and minerals, cofactors, and they produce free radicals that have to be diffused with phytochemicals, with antioxidants. When you're taking these empty calories, The body stripping the body of nutrients and then the high flood of calories into the bloodstream. By the way, the buddy more readily stores its fat because it can't convert into energy as well either. Makes you feel lethargic and not be feeling being active.

And it also dummies down your brain at the same time. But it makes you become dopamine insensitive from the chronic flood of calories into the blood. And I'm saying these two foods have the biggest effect on becoming dopamine-insensitive and driving up your caloric driver where you can't stop eating food. Those two food are oils and flour, sugar, maple syrup, you know, sweets and oils. I am considering white flour to be a sweet. It's not a food, it works. So now you have this person that's uncomfortable eating the right amount of calories.

They have to try to, and they want the caloric rush into the bloodstream. So when Apple doesn't satisfy them, they need something sweeter, like a candy bar, to be satisfied. Eating a salad in a bowl of vegetable bean soup and a piece of fruit is not satisfying. It needs something that has more of a caloric rush and more caleric hit. So meat will do it, meat or cheese or fried foods or oils will, but you can't get enough calories in the bloodstream all at once. So people get acclimated and then they can, you know, their addictions that they've developed.

and their food preferences become so powerful that we say they've lost the keys to the bank, which means they can't make decisions anymore because their primitive brain becomes too much of an overriding factor affecting their decisions in life and what they choose to eat or drink. So we're talking here about alcoholics, cigarette smokers, cocaine addicts, you know, most overweight people. They no longer can behave in their own best interest. They have to eat in a self-destructive manner. And the brain will come up with rationalizations why it's okay to do that, or it is impossible not to.

Because their food addiction is too difficult to fight off. They feel so poorly and so anxious or uncomfortable if they try to change their diet. I mean, that's why I have this retreat here in San Diego, so people could come and stay with me for a few months. We could counsel them and teach them, and have their taste buds change, change their preferences from food for when they go home, they can enjoy and like eating this way. But a person who's like doing it in their own house without the proper information and knowledge that they are going to feel a little bit off for the first week and it's going be difficult the 1st week to make the change, they try and don't feel well and feel so agitated and uncomfortable they want to go back to eating junk food again.

What are some of the results you see from people that come to your retreat center and stay with you for a month or two? Cause I know many of people are overweight, sometimes extremely overweight. They have all sorts of chronic conditions. What, what are somethings that you happen to people when they actually start eating the nutrient diet and stick with it? Well, that's the thing. That's why I'm so passionate about what I do and so excited about I what do. Because I've been doing this for more than three decades, almost 40 years already.

And so I have taken care of tens of thousands of people. When I had people that had advanced heart disease with poor ejection fractions and blockages in their heart, told they need bypass surgery or angioplasty, and they get well. They don't need surgery. People come to me right out of the hospital where they leave against medical advice. I say, come right in here. We'll just get rid of your problems. The arteries open up, their ejection fraction comes back to normal. I've had people with cardiomyopathy, swollen hearts, come back normal again, the ejections fractions come again.

And diabetes goes away, they're high blood pressure goes way. But I have a lot of people whose asthma go away and their lupus has gone away. Their rheumatoid arthritis has got away their ulcerative colitis has gotten away in their headaches have gone way in there. Fatigue have got a way so. It's remarkable when a person's on asthma inhalers and they can't take an exercise class, so they have to wake up in the middle of the night to use a rescue inhaler, and we have people completely cured of their asthma.

And for example, I have a young woman who was on the national renal transplant list waiting for a new kidney for lupus, where she had lumpus nephritis. who made a complete recovery, and her creatinine, which is a marker of kidney failure, went from 4.2 to 0.8. Completely came back to normal again.

Clinical Results and Retreat Lifestyle 29:28

And my issue is then why I'm so excited about this and why I try to do research and wanting people to promote this is because doctors don't tell people this information. They don t give people the option and let them know how powerful such nutritional interventions can be that can save people's lives. And that excites me because I can really turn a person's life around. And when they come here for the retreat, you know, instead of having a place where people come for a week or two and they lose weight and go back and can't follow the diet and gain the weight back, we really show them how to make them taste, how it's make it taste delicious.

Right. We make the repetition and the learning and training the taste buds and emotional counseling on emotional eating and addiction counseling we give them makes it so they prefer to eat this way and stick with it. So we reduce the chance of recidivism. That's why I produce a lot of books and videos and information so people can get more information so they can put, you know, more easily incorporate in their life and get the support they need to make it stick. That's amazing. And also, they have fun while they're there too.

I know you built a pickleball court and there's hiking trails and all sorts of good stuff too, right? Fun stuff. Yeah. I have a sand volleyball court. Nobody plays volleyball though. They just use the stands, but I had a disc golf course and a pickleball court and right next to a hundred miles of hiking trails and it's in a saltwater pool. And so we have, and we water aerobics and exercise classes and some equipment, equipment. You know, you got to come here and play the pickle ball here. It's here in San Diego, which everyone loves coming to San.

Yeah, and we have that we keep the pool pretty warm so we can use it all year round, you know. Oh, cool. Very cool, so you do a ton of research. What's been the most significant finding over the course of the last decade that you've come across in nutritional science? Yeah, I think that's a great question, because I there's, in the last five years, we have some new research that strongly corroborates the trend of research over the past decade. And I have to say, you know, this has been my passion for more than 30 years.

I've reviewed more probably 10,000 studies a decade, more 30, 000 studies on human nutrition to come to these recommendations. And even my most recent book is called each for life. And that book has more than 2000 scientific references in them. I mean, I want people to really check those references to see them, not just putting references down. They actually are corroborating what I'm saying is being true. So I, um, highly interested in supporting what i'm seeing with fact, so people can take this information and be taught at colleges or in PhD programs and can it to their doctor and have, and show that it's scientifically supported.

Yeah. It has to do with protein. shows that you can regulate protein to lengthen or shorten human lifespan. And that is, it's really fascinating that as you increase animal protein in a diet, It shortens human life span. So more animal proteins means more death. The shortest lifespans, the most early life deaths, premature deaths occurred in people on keto diets who are carbohydrate restricted. This has been around for decades, like the Atkins diet back in the late 1970s. We had people eating high animal product diets, afraid of eating carbohydrates.

for decades and now we see people who follow those diets long-term and we've seen a dose-dependent manner as animal protein goes up. It raises certain aging hormones, raising IGF-1 which creates an pro-angiogenic environment that promotes cancer and also promotes TMAO, trimethylamine oxide, which inflames the endothelium of blood cells, increasing risk of heart attack and stroke. So we know diets rich in animal protein shorten lifespan considerably and diets richer in plant protein extend human lifespan to the same degree as animal proteins shorten human life span, which is really fascinating because most of the vegan communities used to be macrobotic diet, just eat rice or a fruit based diet just to eat fruit.

But now we that the excess IGF-1 is damaging, but being too low in IG-F1 with not enough protein is also damaging. And the high protein plant foods modulate certain hormones that stabilize stem cells and prevent telomere shortening and accelerate the and activate the antioxidant response element in the healing elements in cells and gene silence abnormal gene defects. So the plant protein foods and the high plant proteins, we talked about them already, are green vegetables, seeds and beans. The plant foods that have the highest protein are nuts and seeds, beans and green vegetable.

And when you put those foods in a diet, you get adequate protein, which stimulate the immune system, but stimulate the factors that have anti-aging phenomenons that may need stem cell maintenance, anti inflammatory effects, and prevent aging of telomeres or cells. Yeah. I'm fortunate I've always liked beans. That's an easy one for me. You know, I grew up eating my mom, you know with Mexican food with beans and that might've been the healthiest beans, but now we eat it in a way where there's not oil in it and stuff like that.

They still call that the Hispanic effect because they noticed that in the scientists note in what we call food deserts where people don't have access to fruits and vegetables and beans where they're mostly eating processed foods.

Protein, Longevity, and Plant-Based Nutrition 34:48

Black Americans have higher rates of disease process of living in those areas, because they're not eating healthy enough, which affects their future health and their economic and emotional well-being, but the Hispanic people living don't have as bad an outcome as the black Americans do when they researchers have uncovered the fact. It's because even when the Hispanics are eating poorly, they still put more beans in their diet. And to the degree that they integrate and add beans to their diets, it lessens the damage from the other dangerous things they're doing.

So beans have an effect to mitigate the damage from, let's say, eating meat. They absorb some of the iron and absorb the toxic compounds. So there's these advantages to just shoving beans or shovin' nuts in the diet, even if you're not eating them healthily. And that's called the Hispanic paradox. Scientists trying to explain why Hispanics don't do as badly as blacks in food deserts. The paradox is because they're still eating beans. Very cool. Well, grains. What are healthy grains? Brown rice, is that healthy?

Quinoa, things like that? A quinoa, yes. Tefft, amaranth, there's a lot of healthy grains, but we don't want to utilize much brown rice in a diet because the hull of brown Rice sucks up arsenic too efficiently. It's large exposure to arsenics, which is carcinogenic. So the rice-based diets are out of favor today as a source of a healthy grain. And also most of the commercial rice patties They add chicken manure which contains arsenic, or they're growing them in areas of the world where they used to grow cotton, which used arsenically containing pesticides to kill boil weevil.

So the combination of this arsenical content of soil and the rice's ability to suck up arsenics with the flooding of fields. It's too high. So the only rice I eat today would be the wild rices that are, you could say, collected by Indians living on reservations in natural marshes. They're not commercially grown and they're driving in their canoes and knocking down the rice off in the marsh with a bamboo stick and what falls in a canoe. There are more expensive rice that is naturally harvested that's not commercial grown.

Yeah. And are there, thank you for that. Are there any ways to, like you mentioned, pizza, I don't eat, sometimes I'll have a gluten-free crust on pizza. Any ones that are nutatarian? Any types of pizza crust? Well, they make that cauliflower stuff, right? They make cauliflower tortillas and cauliflower wraps that you make pizza from. But I'll sometimes make a pizza from a whole wheat pita or something. I like the Ezekiel Food for Life brand of bread, our pitas, because they're made with sprouted grains, which are lower glycemic.

Have you ever seen that brand in the frozen section? So I usually use that and just make pizza out of that or if I want to have tomato sauce and some roasted mushrooms or roasted pepper on top, you know what I mean? Okay. So, but stay away from white flour, obviously. And, what about people that are gluten sensitive? Is that a real thing? It's a real thing, but it's much rarer than people think, because there are many people that think they're gluten intolerant and they are not. They're just intolerance to eating white flour.

And most of the books on the dangers of gluten in bread are bringing up studies that show that white flower is dangerous. You're not demonstrating gluten is dangerously general population, so they not really using studies they used whole grains or... So I'm saying that if you took the wheat berry and you cooked it in water until it was soft, it would be much lower glycemic than if your ground it into a flour. And it will be a much slower glycemia if he took that whole off and ground into white flour like a pastry flour, so it's how you prepare the week that makes it more dangerous.

If your water cooked as a grain, It would much healthier and then you would find that probably one out of 10 people that think they're gluten sensitive are the ones that are gluten-sensitive and the nine out 10 are not once they take out the glycymic effect. Interesting way. Amazing, amazing job today, Joel. How do people, what resources do you have for people that want to check out the nutrient, nutrient way of eating and, and how can they access those resources? Well, they can always come to DrFurman.com and get and see what I have available on the website, all these different resources, recipes and books.

But I think for this summit, I'm giving a gift of the beginner's guide to the Nutritarian diet. Oh, cool. And like a trial membership if they want to go to my website. So we're giving up some gifts for people in the summit which you can make available through a link or something. Yeah, those will be on the, on The Summit website. So please check out those and then go to drfurman.com and on your site, you've got, but you got all sorts of resources.

Grains, Gluten, and Resources 39:28

You've obviously information about coming to, to stay with you and that's your beautiful retreat. And then I know you do other retreats. you were just in Italy or somewhere recently, I think, right? I did an Italy retreat and I'm having an, I have an Aspen one coming up in the beginning of April. We're going with a bunch of skiers going away. So we go together, we'll have some fun and we eat super healthily while we're there. That's amazing. And then you've got, you got different supplements and bars and things like that on your site too, right?

Right. I have food products like salad dressings and sauces and G-bombs bars, which have the greens and beans right in the bar. So I won't have additional products to make it easy to do this for people who don't the time to prepare all the food. But mostly the knowledge, the motivation, support, camaraderie, so people can achieve excellent health. Yeah. Hey, great job, Joel. Thank you so much for being with us. Final thought for everybody listening, give them some words of wisdom here. Don't accept being sick.

don't except taking medications for the rest of your life. You're on high blood pressure medications or what? Or cholesterol arms or diabetic medications. And, you know, don t just control your disease, get rid of them. In other words, got to get get totally well and don' t think you can't do it, You can do i. I love that. Wow. So empowering. thank you Joel, Great job today. Really appreciate you being Thank you for tuning in to Doctor Talks. We hope today's episode has enlightened and inspired you on your path to optimal health.

Each day is a new opportunity to make choices that empower your well-being. For more insights and strategies, subscribe to our podcast and visit our website, www.doctortalks dot com. Stay connected, stay healthy, and join us next time on DoctorTalks, real talks from real doctors on the issues that matter to you most.