Reverse Disease, Slow Aging And Maximize Longevity

Joel Fuhrman, MD

Great to be here today.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah. Hey, let’s start with your background. You have an amazing background you actually were and I didn’t do it in the introduction, but you were a a champion figure skater growing up and competed for the United States and and then you didn’t, you did not end up becoming a doctor until a little bit later. You didn’t go right out of school. So talk about your journey to becoming a physician first and then let’s dive into some of your work.

Joel Fuhrman, MD

Right. I was in the United States World figure skating team, I was a pair skater with my younger sister And the third in the world in 1976 and the world’s professional championships and then I went at that point I was coaching 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 then 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, I went back to the post graduate premed program at Columbia because I didn’t have my all the pre medical requirements in college at N. Y. U. And then I went to University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and graduated in 1988. So I didn’t go to I didn’t go to medical school for 84 when I was about 29 years old.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah but how did Nutricia become your passion? I’m just curious like what what was it that that sparked that fire in you that now you’ve had for so many years. What was it back then?

Joel Fuhrman, MD

My father introduced me because he was sickly and overweight and had some back some medical issues.

Tom McCarthy

Okay.

Joel Fuhrman, MD

And so he introduced me to the work of Dr. Herbert Shelton from the American natural hygiene society. So as a child in my early teenage years I was already reading a lot of books and magazines on nutrition and natural healing and visiting, going to conferences in my teens of people and seeing people who recovered from serious illnesses through nutrition interventions. So I’ve been involved with this kind of thought processes since I’m a teenager, you know?

Tom McCarthy

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 your perfectly fit and you’ve got this amazing retreat center out here near where we both you actually live there, but near where 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 the new tree Terrian diet? Talk us through how, you know what is the new neutral terrian diet? Talk talk us through that a little bit.

Joel Fuhrman, MD

Well, the word neutral terry in, you know, this means rich in nutrients and comprehensive in its exposure to all the nutrients humans need to maximize their health and and and slow aging and promote longevity, which means preventing heart attacks and strokes and preventing cancer. You’re gonna promote longevity. You have to not get cancer and 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 97 100 and seven years old should be the center of the Bell should center around 100 years older, a little bit further. What I’m observing in my people following my program who are elderly, how what they were able to achieve. 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. 

Micronutrient Excellence we’re saying is a high concentration of foods that have a high 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 the finish line because they’re so low in calories but nutritionally concentrated and we’re a green vegetable dependent animal. The intra epithelial lymphocytes that surround the villa in the small intestines that our first line of defense against infection are fueled and activated by green vegetable compounds and the green vegetables also produce the healthiest type of grand positive bacteria that that quote the villi. 

The combination of these foods and I’m talking about to raw foods and to cooked foods that synergistically build the healthiest microbiome and the two raw foods are lettuces. Raw lettuce which has the richest source of soul folk Lenovo’s which is the necessary nutrients to support the growth of bacteria in the gut and the tile cyanide from green cruciferous vegetables like bok choi and arugula and cabbage and things like that. So that combination of eating those things raw maximizes the production those beneficial anticancer compounds and also the fuel to grow the bacteria. 

And then we use raw onions and scallions and have those organo sulfide compounds and Kirsten and other factors that an insulin that grow that also have anticancer substances that thicken the microbiome and the biofilm that cover the villi that connect that produce serotonin, build our immune system good for the brain, good for the you know, so build our defenses and then the two cooked for 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 resistance starch. There’s a carbohydrate source. They have the slowest digestible carbohydrates, there’s and 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 which then build back which help thicken the microbiome. 

And also the cooked mushrooms of a tremendous powerful effect and immune function were much from dependent animals in the sense that all our cells have receptors on the surfaces for ergo theon in a substance found in mushrooms that we have this connection with mushrooms in the natural world, why would we have receptors in our cells that come from mushrooms. If we weren’t, you know. So we’ve developed over the centuries or millenniums of 50,000 years to be or whatever and how it happened. But were our immune systems function dependent on these foods? And so we’re eating a lot of these protective foods that have this this association with prevention of cancer. And I use that Akram, I made up an acronym G bombs.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah, I know your mom, We have that in our kitchen. Yeah.

Joel Fuhrman, MD

And that’s just representative of having people remember the foods that have the most scientific support to prevent cancer so they can decide to divide an anti-cancer cancer prevention diet. Because I’m saying that 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 from a young age and there weren’t even many cancers. And but for the 17th century before the 1700s, there were hardly any cancers record because people couldn’t eat that much meat, they couldn’t afford it. And there’s no processed foods and junk food and sugars around, they just were eating mostly vegetables and what they could survive on. 

And the first cancers that were first recorded in any number in human history where scrotal and testicular cancers in males who worked as chimney sweeps from inhaling smoke. And we know that polycyclic, that poly aromatic hydrocarbons from burning from burning wood and from burning buildings and is not good for our health and that smoke is definitely. But but in any case we’ve learned so much in the last two decades and we have such advancements in nutrition science that enable us to develop a dietary portfolio that can push the envelope of human longevity and really know how humans should maximally to slow aging and max and live to be without the fear of disease.

Tom McCarthy

I love that. I love that. That’s so exciting and promising what you’re gonna talk about what you’re talking about. So G bomb, let’s go and let me see if I can get it. Okay Because so greens is G. Right?

Joel Fuhrman, MD

Yes

Tom McCarthy

Okay. And then berries. Okay so so beans, onions, mushrooms and then berries. And the last s on the end O. S.

Joel Fuhrman, MD

Seeds, seeds like 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 then and those that ate a little bit of lignin. The lignin is the substance and flax seed that most that binds estrogen Lower session production protects the breast against extra stimulation and protects the prostate. In other words have powerful anti cancer effects. But those that had a third of a milligram of Lignin had a 71% decreased risk of dying of breast cancer compared to women not having lignin diet. There’s no drug there’s no intervention that the medical vision can do. 

That can drop risk of death by 71%. That was the third of a milligram of lignin. And a teaspoon of ground flax has seven mg and that was only a third of one mg. So that was too little too low of a dose too late in life. You know, we should start, they should have waited till they had advanced cancers to do it. But even with a low dose so late in life, it still decreased risk of death by 71%. So this was powerful to put together a dietary portfolio with all these different foods that independently works in and work. Synergistically like studies on mushrooms show they reduce the risk of breast cancer by about 64% when you just taking 10 g of mushrooms a day on the average, which is the size of your thumb.

Tom McCarthy

Really, wow. So hey, on mushrooms, we can obviously we can buy mushrooms. There’s also mushroom powders that seem popular now are the powders effective.

Joel Fuhrman, MD

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 mushrooms have their own unique property. And I buy this bag of like dried wild collected mushrooms with black trumpets and Armenian because the wider assortment of mushrooms you consume, especially wild mushrooms are very protective. And then of course, You know, for I even have my website a 10 anticancer mushroom extract that I give people who have issues, but just to make sure they have a wide exposure of different varieties of mushrooms. So yes, all every way you increase your mushroom exposure, it can potentially improve your health. People don’t need a wide variety of fresh mushrooms and how it’s hard to get a wide variety of fresh mushrooms in our diet.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah, absolutely. So another question, you know, some people are touting, you know, beware of elections, beans have elections, 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 elections are destroyed. Or do we even need to worry about that?

Joel Fuhrman, MD

Well, you’d only have to worry about that if, like you said, if you didn’t cook them because lessons can cause him a gluten of red blood cells. So beans are food that can be harmful if you 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 populations and all along of 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 people of the population. That beings live the longest individuals that eat beans and modulate their being 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 variety of foods increases our potential for lifespan. So we don’t just eat chickpeas, sure red kidney beans and split peas and you know, and so we eat different types of beans in our weekly schedule of foods we’re eating. You know,

Tom McCarthy

One of my favorite snacks that I’ve picked up recently is um they are fava beans that have been roasted and they’re super crunchy. Is that okay?

Joel Fuhrman, MD

You know, the problem is, is when you dry cooking food to make it crispy and roasted, you lose some of the protective anti cancer effects and you form some acrylamide, which 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 because water based cookie message to keep the food soft, not crunchy, you know, don’t dry out the food and damage the nutrients. And plus the fact that we do make some crunchy things, but I usually use them in a dehydrator, like I use kale chips and I’ll make like tofu pizza jerky and I’ll make dried crackers but I’m making them into a cracker or a granola at a low, low temperature. So I’m not like 100 and 20 degrees for like 10 hours. So I’m not bringing out too much of the road, not baking it to form the more harmful compounds that are more dark and make the food more darker and browner, you know.

Tom McCarthy

And one of the things you recommend, which you know, we try to do at our house here is a big salad for lunch, right? Why is that so important? Like a big, I mean, you know, not just a little side salad, but you say the salad should be a huge portion of the launch.

Joel Fuhrman, MD

Well that’s a great question because I want people to either write this down what I’m gonna say right now or memorize it. It’s very important to know to memorize its 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 to memorize law, vegetable consumption has the most consistent and powerful association with the reduction of cancers of all types. 

So I’m saying eating a big salad day is a hallmark of a neutral terrian diet at least once a day, 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 maximum anticancer effects. And also brings out. The other unique feature of Neutra terrian diet is that most Americans get their fat intake from eating oils or animal fats and we get our fat intake from eating a whole food form of fat in the form of nuts and seeds, almonds, cashews, pecans, walnuts, hemp seeds, sunflower seeds. In other words, we’re making a dressing that may have almonds and hemp seeds blended with tomato sauce and roasted garlic and some black fig vinegar. And that might be the dressing or it might be orange navel oranges or red or blood blood oranges whipped with some blood orange vinegar with some cashews and toasted sesame seeds mixed with some squeezed lemon or something. So we’re making or make a caesar dressing. So we’re making dressings that are made with a whole nuts and seeds and that’s like three or four reasons why that’s so important. Number one, the fat intake with the salad facilitates the absorption of the anticancer phytochemicals. So we like people have about a half an ounce of nuts with every meal you can absorb the nutrients, you can put them on, you don’t have to make the dressing and with it you have to put them on the salad. If you make it just a low fat dressing and you still have a few nuts and seeds to eat with the salad, you know, Okay. 

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. The body can preferentially burn it for energy. When you extract the oil from the nut and seed and take it as an oil, not from the nut and seed the oils come into the bloodstream instantaneously. And the body has to turn on fat storage mechanisms to store it as fat instead of burning his energy and the 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 chloride concentration. So it makes people overeat and it makes them green weight. So oil is fattening, it’s 100 20 calories a tablespoon it’s an appetite stimulant and it leads to food addiction. 

And when you cook oil or fry oil or heat oil, then it forms carcinogenic changes that makes it more potentially a cancer promoter where so and nuts and seeds are linked in scores of studies that show incredible high degree of corroboration, which mean the studies show the same thing for researchers all over the world and that is they show about a 40% read reduction in cardiovascular death and about a 30% reduction in cancer deaths when people utilize them in their diet, even when they don’t, even when they don’t need a neutral Terrian diet, just adding nuts and seeds to a regular diet lowers risk of heart attack by about 40% is a source of yes, yes, including nuts and seeds and avocado. 

But if you are overweight and you couldn’t have enough caloric room to have both, you probably get more protection from the nuts seeds, especially walnuts, hemp seeds, those high omega three ones. So if you have the work room to include an avocado, I avocado because I exercise and and I’m not working out 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 in the salad, maybe another time during the week, maybe twice a week. But we don’t give them too much avocado because we’re working moderately calorically restricting them. You know, if your caloric restrict people too far, then they start to obsess about food and they start to binge and go off the diet. And so I’m not talking about radical caloric restriction, we’re talking about just moderate caloric restriction. So they get to their perfect weight. So they lose weight regularly and a neutral terrian is somebody eating super healthfully at their ideal weight or a person eating super healthfully and moving towards their ideal weight at about £2 a week. If they’re not losing £2 a week, then they’re not really following the Neutra terrian program because it takes about a kilogram of weight loss a week for the body to stop producing free excess free radicals and promoting inflammation from the fat cells and reduces insulin resistance and it reduces aroma taste. I mean roman enzyme production of estrogen and angiogenesis promotion. 

So what I’m saying right now, I know I rushed through that, but I’m saying that cells have certain dangers that promote cancer and accelerate aging. But when you’re overweight and losing weight at £2 a week, the dangers from the frat cells diminish so significantly. And because you, even though you’re still overweight because you’re losing weight steadily, you don’t see the inflammation and the dangers occur from being overweight as much. So if you’re on the way to your ideal weight, you’ve already immediately and you’re in the losing process reducing the risk of having a heart attack or stroke dramatically.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah, that’s awesome. Well obviously vegetables are so critically important. What are your thoughts on fruit? And we have berries and bomb obviously, but other fruits or smoothies, you know, that have whole fruits in them, things like that. What are your thoughts on that? Because a lot of people have been taught, oh, it’s too much sugar or other things like that. What do you tell people about fruit Joel?

Joel Fuhrman, MD

I want, even people looking to lose weight. I want to eat at least three servings of fruit a week roughly, 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 the more variety of foods of plant 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 so many different types of natural plants, sprouts, microgreens, wild berry, These pomegranates, kumquats, you know, and still have a wide assortment of vegetables and mushrooms. And you know, so we’re saying that this assortment of foods is an advantage in modern history that our ancestors and even the blue zones don’t have available to them. So even the blue zones live about 6-8 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, with the blue zones moving in the right direction. But we could do much better than the blue zones. And I’m making this radical claim. I’m saying that people can live 20 years longer with predictability and with good, healthy life expectancy, their full mental faculties intact in our later years and dramatically increase our healthy life expectancy.

Tom McCarthy

That’s compelling. That’s 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’s okay to eat.

Joel Fuhrman, MD

Well, that’s a good point. It’s that when you juice, the juice just have the juice and take the fiber away, like drinking apple juice, you don’t get the benefits, not health food. So if you’re making a smoothie, you don’t want to add fruit juice into it. You want to add the whole fruit into it. And and we’re not giving a fruit based diet, we’re eating one or two pieces of fruit after a vegetable or low glycemic meal. And don’t forget we are the beginning of this presentation. I described how eating this combination of foods thickened the biofilm that covers the villi that slows the glycemic exposure into the bloodstream, the rate at which fruit calories enter the bloodstream, the rate at which sugar enters the bloodstream is controlled by the microbiome and the thickening the type of cells and the thickness thickness of your might of your biofilm. So how do you turn a moderate glycemic load into a low glycemic load food. 

Then you eat the beans and the mushrooms and the onions and the greens that will control the absorption and eat the mango for breakfast. It’s low glycemic and that’s why people on keto or paleo diets, like a person of keto dieting 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 the roof because you have so many gram negatives and you eat so much saturated fat that distorted the shape and function and of the insulin receptor. So now you’ve become insulin resistant. So now you can’t eat a mango without your sugar’s going up. So the keto diet caused them to be sugar sensitive. So then, so then they’re doing their blood sugar. They see a heightened response to eating a piece of fruit, rust Neutra, terrians. Of course, 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 the these benefits.

Tom McCarthy

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 do people have such a hard time changing their diet giving up the salts and oils and, you know, refined sugars and meat, why is it so tough for people?

Joel Fuhrman, MD

Well, because we don’t just develop preferences when we’re young and you know, any person who eats a certain diet, like those 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 a food addiction and I’m using what’s that?

Tom McCarthy

Almost like a drug?

Joel Fuhrman, MD

It is like a drug, particularly we’re talking about white flour products, because white flour products 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 the food has substances to support lifespan and there’s no vitamin and mineral or there’s no content of nutrients just other than the caloric macro nutrient there. And in doing so that your body can’t converted into energy effectively. The mitochondria need vitamins and minerals cofactors and they produce free radicals that have to be diffused with phytochemicals and antioxidants. 

So when you’re taking these empty calories, the body is stripping the body of nutrients and then it’s the high flood of calories into the bloodstream, by the way, the body more readily stores is fat because it can’t convert into energy as well either, makes you feel lethargic and not really feeling being active and it also dummies down your brain at the same time, but it but it makes you become dopamine insensitive from the chronic flood of calories in the blood. And I’m saying these two foods have the biggest effect on becoming dopamine sensitive and driving up your caloric driver, you can’t stop eating food. And those two foods are oils and flour, sugar, maple syrup, you know, sweets and oils and I’m 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 eating a salad bowl of vegetable, bean soup and a piece of fruit is not satisfying. They need something that has more of a caloric rush and more of a caloric hit. So they need that. So they so meat will do it. Meat or cheese or fried foods or oils will do it, but you can’t get enough calories in the bloodstream all at once, so people get acclimated and then they can’t, you know, their their addictions that they’ve developed and their their food preferences become become so powerful that we say they’ve lost the keys to the bank, which means they can’t make decisions anymore because they’re primitive. Brain becomes too much of an overriding factor affecting their decisions in life and what they choose to eat or drink or. So we’re talking here about alcoholics, cigarette smokers, cocaine addicts, you know, most overweight people they’re no longer can could behave in their own best interest. 

They have to be in use, they have to eat in a self destructive matter and the brain will come up with rationalizations, why it’s okay to do that, or it’s impossible not to do it because their food addiction is too difficult to, to fight off and 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 can come and stay with me for a few months and we can counsel them and teach them and have their taste buds change and change their preferences from foods food for when they go home they can enjoy and stay in like eating this way. But a person who is 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 to be difficult the first week to make the change. They try and don’t feel well and so agitated and uncomfortable. They want to go back to eating junk food again. You know?

Tom McCarthy

Yeah. What are some of the results you see from people that come to your retreat center and and stay with you for a month or two? Because I know many of the people are overweight, sometimes extremely overweight. They have all sorts of chronic conditions. What, what are some things that you see happen to people when they actually start eating the new vegetarian diet and stick with it?

Joel Fuhrman, MD

Well, that’s the thing, that’s why I’m so passionate about what I do and so excited about what I do because I’ve been doing this for you no more than three decades, almost 40 years already. So it’s really and so I’ve taken care of tens of thousands of people and you know, and I have 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 and they don’t need surgery and they get there, you know, and people that come to me right out of the hospital where they’re where they leave against medical advice and they come right in here, we’ll just get rid of your problems, arteries, clear up the arteries, open up, their ejection fraction comes back to normal. I’ve had people with, with cardiomyopathy, swollen hearts shrink right to come back to normal again. The ejection fraction has come back again and diabetes goes away, their high blood pressure goes away. But I have a lot of people whose asthma go away and their lupus has gone away and the rheumatoid arthritis has gone away and they’re also colitis has gone away and their headaches have gone away and their fatigue have gone away. So I have it’s remarkable when a person is on like asthma inhalers and they can’t take an exercise class. 

So they have to wake up in the middle of night to use the 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 lupus 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 a kidney, completely came back to normal again. And my issue is then why I’m so excited about this and why I try to do research and wanting 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 from 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 to make it taste delicious and we make some, we make the repetition and the learning and the training, the taste buds and the emotional counseling and emotional eating addiction counseling. We give them makes it so they prefer to eat this way and stick with it. So we reduce that we reduce the chance of recidivism. So 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, eat more easily incorporate in their life and get the support they need to make it stick.

Tom McCarthy

And also you 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 to write fun stuff.

Joel Fuhrman, MD

You have a sand volleyball court, nobody plays volleyball though, they just use the stands. But I have a disc golf course and a pickleball court and right next to 100 miles of hiking trails and a saltwater pool. And so we have, we have water aerobics and exercise classes and you know, some equipment, equipment, you know, you got to come here and play pickleball here,

Tom McCarthy

San Diego, it’s here in San Diego, which everyone loves coming to San Diego.

Joel Fuhrman, MD

Yeah. And we have that, we keep the pool pretty warm so we can use it all year round, you know?

Tom McCarthy

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?

Joel Fuhrman, MD

Yeah, I think that’s a great question because I think there’s some in the last five years we have some new research that strongly corroborates the trend of research over the last decade. And I have to say, you know, this has been my passion for more than 30 years and I’ve reviewed more than I’ve reviewed more than probably 10,000 studies a decade. More than 30,000 studies on human nutrition to to come to this. These recommendations and even my roast recent book is called for Life. And that book has more than 2000 scientific references in them. And we 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’m highly interested in supporting what I’m saying with fact. So people can take this information and B B can be taught at colleges or in PhD programs and can take it to their doctor and have and show that scientifically supported. And so one of the most fascinating research in the last five years 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 diet, it shortens human lifespan. So more animal protein means more death and the shortest lifespans. 

The most early life deaths, premature deaths occurred in people on keto diets who are carbohydrate restricted. So the and so they and you know, this has been around for decades, like the Atkins diet back in the 19 sixties, late 19 seventies, 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 see in a dose dependent manner as animal protein goes up, it raises certain aging hormones raising I G. F. One which creates an and pro angiogenic environment promotes cancer and also promotes T. M. A. O. Tri methyl amine oxide, which in flames the end of thallium of blood cells, increasing risk of heart attack and stroke. So we know diets rich in animal protein shortened lifespan considerably and diets richer in plant protein, extend human lifespan to the same degree as animal protein, short human lifespan, which is really fascinating because most of the vegan community, you know, used to mean macrobiotic diet, just eat rice or fruit based diet, just eat fruit. But now we know that there’s that having that the excess I G. F. One is damaging but being too low and I G. F. One 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 and activate the antioxidant response element in the healing elements and cells and genes silence abnormal genes. 

So the plant protein foods and the high plant protein foods. We talked about them already. Or green vegetables, seeds and beans, like the plant foods that have the highest protein are green are nuts and seeds, beans and green vegetables. And when you put those foods in the diet, you get adequate protein but not which stimulate the body, which stimulate the immune system but stimulate the factors that have anti aging phenomenons. That means stem cell maintenance, anti inflammatory effects and prevent aging of telomeres or cells.

Tom McCarthy

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, would Mexican food with beans and that might have been the healthiest beans. But now we eat it in a way where there’s not oil in it and stuff like that.

Joel Fuhrman, MD

They still call that the Hispanic effect because they noticed that in the scientists note in what we call food deserts, people don’t have access to fruits and vegetables and beans where they’re mostly eating processed foods. Black Americans have higher rates of disease processes living in those areas because they’re not eating healthy enough, which affects their future health and their economic and emotional well being because they’re not eating healthy enough. 

But the Hispanic people living in food deserts 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 into the degree that they integrate and add beans to the diet. It lessens the damage from the other dangerous things they’re doing. So beans have an effect to mitigate the damage unless they eating meat, they absorb the iron and absorption of the toxic compounds. So there’s these advantages to just shoving beans or shoving nuts in the diet, even if you’re not eating healthfully. And that’s called the, it’s called the Hispanic paradox. Scientists trying to explain why Hispanics don’t do as badly as blacks in food deserts. And the paradoxes is because they’re still eating beans.

Tom McCarthy

Well, grains. What are healthy grains? Brown rice, Is that healthy Quinoa, things like that?

Joel Fuhrman, MD

Quinoa, yes. Teff 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 to efficiently. It’s a large exposure to arsenic, 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 paddies, 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 arsenic containing pesticides to kill boil. 

Weevil on the effect of the cotton. So the combination of the arsenic content of the soil and the rice’s ability to suck up arsenic with the flooding of the fields is too high. So the only rice I eat today would be the rice that are the wild rice is that our you could say collected by indians living on reservations in natural marshes, they’re not commercially grown and they’re knocking down there, driving in their canoes and knocking down the, the rice off the, in the, in the marshes with, with a bamboo stick and then what falls in the canoe. So they’re more expensive rices that are naturally grown harvested. They’re not commercially grown.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah. Thank you for that. And are there any ways to, like you mentioned pizza? Like I don’t eat, I don’t eat sometimes I’ll have like a gluten free crust on pizza. Are there any ones that are new to terry in any types of pizza crust or

Joel Fuhrman, MD

They make that cauliflower stuff. They make cauliflower tortillas and cauliflower wrap wraps. Make pizza from, but sometimes you know, make a, you know, make a pizza from a whole wheat pita or something. I like the Ezekiel, food for life brand of bread or pizzas because they’re made with sprouted grains which are lower glycemic. Have you seen the brand in the frozen section? So I usually use that and just make a pizza out of that or something. You know, I want to have tomato sauce and some roasted mushrooms and roasted pepper on top. You know what I mean?

Tom McCarthy

Okay. So, but stay away from white flour obviously. And but you’re, you’re not, what about people that are gluten sensitive? What are, do you, is that a real thing or

Joel Fuhrman, MD

It’s a real thing, but it’s much rarer than people think because there are many people that are they think they’re gluten intolerant and they’re not they’re just intolerant to eating white flour. And most of the books on the dangers of gluten and bread are bringing up studies that show that white flour is dangerous. They’re not demonstrating gluten is dangerous in the general population. So they’re not really using studies that 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 you ground into a flour and it would be much lower glycemic if you took the hull off and ground into white flour, like pastry flour. So it’s how you prepare the wheat. That makes it more dangerous. If your water cooked as a grain it would be 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 of 10 are not once they take out the glycemic effect.

Tom McCarthy

Okay, interesting. Well, amazing, amazing job today Joel, how do people, what resources do you have for people that want to check out the Neutra, Neutra, terrian way of eating and and how can they access those resources?

Joel Fuhrman, MD

Well they can always come to DrFuhrman.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 neutral Terrian diet and and like a trial membership for if they want to go to my website and we’re giving up some gifts for people and the summit which you can make available through a link or something.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah, Yeah, those will be on the summit website. So please check out those and then go to DrFuhrman.com and on your site you’ve got all sorts of resources. You’ve got obviously information about coming to stay with you and your beautiful retreat. And then I know you do other retreats, you were just in Italy or somewhere recently I think

Joel Fuhrman, MD

I did in Italy. And I’m having 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 and have some fun and we eat super helpful while we’re there, you know,

Tom McCarthy

That’s amazing. And then you’ve got different supplements and bars and things like that on your side too. Right?

Joel Fuhrman, MD

Right. I have food products like salad dressings and sauces and g bombs bars which have the greens and beans and right in the bar and I have some so I won’t have the additional products to make it easy to do this for people who don’t have the time to prepare all the food so I want to make it so I’m just developing things too. But mostly the knowledge, the motivation, the support the camaraderie so people can achieve excellent health.

Tom McCarthy

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.

Joel Fuhrman, MD

Don’t accept being sick, don’t accept taking medications for the rest of your life. You’re on high blood pressure medications or what your cholesterol on diabetic medications and you know, don’t just control your disease, get rid of them. In other words, you gotta get, get totally well and don’t think you can’t do it, you can do it.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah, I love that, wow, so empowering. Thank you, Joel. Great job today. Really appreciate you being with us.

Joel Fuhrman, MD

Thank you.