Speaker 1: 0:00

I am so lucky to have had the chance to speak with Dr Robert Lufkin, a metabolic health and longevity expert and the author of the new book Lies. I Taught in Medical School. Dr Lufkin, a practicing physician and former professor at UCLA and USC Medical Schools, challenges the conventional medical thinking. He argues that many chronic diseases, including obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer and Alzheimer's, are actually rooted in metabolic dysfunction. So in his book, which is, by the way, a New York Times bestseller, dr Lufkin criticizes the medical community for misinterpreting research and perpetuating lies that have harmed public health. Of course it wasn't intentional. He encourages people to understand the root causes of metabolic dysfunction and adopt a pre-agricultural whole foods plan. So during our conversation we had the or you and I. I had the opportunity to ask Dr Lufkin questions about his research and the arguments he makes in his book. We discussed the limitations of the traditional calorie in versus calorie out and the general model of weight loss. We discuss the role of insulin in fat storage and the impact of sugar and refined carbohydrates on metabolic health. So this really is for you if you're ready to dive into the world of metabolic health and discover how to take control of your well-being, and so I suggest you grab a cup of coffee, cup of tea, a notebook and pen and let's get started.

Speaker 1: 2:04

Welcome to Bodyholic with Dee. No fads, just facts. I'm Dee and I'm here to help you ditch the noise and build a life you love. Let's go. Oh, but wait. I'm not a doctor, so use your common sense. Now let's dive in. Dr Robert Lufkin, I am so excited to have you here. Thank you so much for joining us.

Speaker 2: 2:25

Oh, thanks, dee, it's really a pleasure. I'm looking forward to our conversation.

Speaker 1: 2:30

Yeah, me too, and you recently came out with the book the Lies I Taught in Medical School and that triggered so many questions for me and there's so much information there that I just would love us to actually dive in but also touch on other things that you know might feel like you we need to touch on, cause I feel like we're both on a mission.

Speaker 2: 2:59

Right, yeah, there's a lot, a lot of stuff to cover there.

Speaker 1: 3:03

Right, we were talking about our time frame right before we started and I was thinking to myself we might need about four or so hours. So we'll figure that out. Other than being on the New York Times bestseller list, is there anything you want to say about the book or anything before I dive in, because I have so I have so many things on my mind.

Speaker 2: 3:30

Yeah, let me. The book is tells a little bit about my personal story, which motivated me to to take this, this viewpoint on things, because I, the book is critical of western medicine. But let me say, uh, first of all, I, I'm, I'm part of western medicine, I'm a product of the system. I've spent my entire career as a professor in various medical schools in southern california which is responsible for the, the doctrine that is Western medicine around the world, really everywhere. And although I'm critical of it, I have to say that you know, even today, if I got hit by a car, I would want Western medicine. In other words, I want that blood transfusion, I want that splenectomy, I want the bone set.

Speaker 2: 4:23

But the problem is in well, in the 20th century, for those of us who were around then, western medicine was transformative, it was magical, it made the world a much better place, largely through the elimination of infectious disease and public health measures. But literally the pills and surgeries that were developed by this Western medicine technology and it's not all in the West, I don't mean that at all, but just sort of modern, orthodox medicine I guess I should call it was really transformative in the 20th century and the pills, the surgery were nothing short of magical. The problem is, in the 21st century we're now facing literally a tsunami of chronic diseases that, while they were present in the 20th century, most of them Today we're seeing them in biblical numbers, in actual, unprecedented numbers, which indicates that it's not a genetic problem. Something has changed in our environment. But the problem is when Western medicine takes the same pills and surgeries that were so effective in the 20th century and just applies them to these chronic diseases. They work for in many cases for the symptoms, with dramatic relief of symptoms and even in the short term can be life-saving. But for many of the diseases in fact probably most of them, long-term, the pills and surgery that are available don't do anything to the progression of the disease. In other words, the disease progresses and continues to get worse and worse and worse.

Speaker 2: 6:14

So that's kind of the basis for this book, because I came down with four of those diseases Unexpectedly. I went to my doctors. They told me to, um, they prescribed medicines for each one prescription medicines and, um, you know, I I said, hey, what about lifestyle? Does that really work? And they go nah, it doesn't, doesn't really work. Um, you're going to be on these medicines for the rest of your life, so get used to it. It and at that point I still had young kids in school, I still do, and I knew it wasn't going to end well.

Speaker 2: 6:50

So it literally forced me to examine my beliefs, what I've been teaching and what many of my colleagues are still teaching about these diseases and the best way to handle them, and I realized that there's been a revolution in our understanding, the knowledge that that that that these chronic diseases, although they appear very different different, you know, how is arthritis linked to Alzheimer's disease or how is hypertension linked to mental illness? But, as it turns out, there is a root cause that I believe and it's not just me. The evidence is very strong that there's an underlying metabolic basis for these diseases and they're metabolic factors that when they go out of order, we will get one or many of these diseases, depending on our own genetics and other factors as well. But the interesting thing is there are things we can do, broadly called lifestyle, that will improve our chances for getting these disease and actually reverse them. In some cases In my case I was able to reverse all four of those chronic diseases, get off all medications, and now I've made it my mission to help other people take back their health and not make the same mistakes I made. So the fascinating thing is, the same lifestyle techniques that we adopt for things like obesity and type 2 diabetes will also improve our chances for Alzheimer's and mental illness and cancer and everything like this.

Speaker 2: 8:36

And the audience members may be saying well, you know what, I don't have any of those diseases yet. So when I get them, I'm going to any of those diseases yet. So when I get them, I'm going to pay attention to my lifestyle. And the problem with that approach is and this was eye-opening for me too, because as a traditional physician I was trained to look at diseases as you either have them or you don't. You know your blood pressure goes above a certain point, you have hypertension Below them, or you don't. You know your blood pressure goes above a certain point, you have hypertension Below that, you don't you know. Same thing with diabetes you either have it or you don't.

Speaker 2: 9:12

But the fact of the matter is, for practically all these chronic diseases, they don't begin the moment the doctor diagnoses them. The doctor's diagnosis is sort of for our billing system, for our insurance. We have to draw a line in the sand somewhere. But the reality is, for almost all these diseases, they start years to decades before the doctor diagnoses them. And if we wait until the doctor diagnoses them, you know lifestyle still works you know, as it did in my case but we're all missing a great opportunity to minimize the effect of these diseases and push them back even further. So that's kind of a long answer for a short question, but that's the idea behind this book about lifestyle and these chronic diseases and how. What's being taught is sadly not that today.

Speaker 1: 10:22

I didn't share this with you before, but I got my master's in public health in Tel Aviv University and I was a research assistant and we had a special program for the accelerated MDs to be and the program was basically for the health promoters. What I was doing, I was doing my master's in research and health promotion, so we had a program that we created for them, for the MDs Like what is health promotion? Not everybody took it, but a lot of people did. Everybody took it but a lot of people did and it was brand new at the time and I think that's very innovative actually to have the and it was a very specific accelerated program. But I wish everybody sent the MD students to health promotion, because that's basically lifestyle.

Speaker 2: 11:23

Yeah, yeah, it's sort of a different way of looking at, rather than being disease focused, but it's health focused. And you know the saying goes I'm a doctor but I've learned that doctors can't make me healthy. Doctors only make me less sick. And, as a patient, to be healthy, that's in my hands and the pills and surgeries can help. But I would argue the most powerful thing that most of us will ever use for our health is our lifestyle, the choices that we make, and it's something we get to do. Every day when we wake up it's a new day. We get to decide, you know, what food we're going to put in our mouth, how we're going to exercise, how we're going to sleep, how we look at the world. You know, is the world? Is it a stressful place, full of dangers and you know, and hatred, or is it a loving place full of opportunities and possibilities, and you know? Those choices are are in a large part in our hands.

Speaker 1: 12:30

Yeah, I'm curious to actually touch on the PAW food plan, the pre-agricultural whole foods plan, and how we can also kind of compare it to the more traditional calorie restriction diets.

Speaker 2: 12:53

Sure? Yeah, that's a great, great question. Well, that PAW plan is something that I one suggestion for a way of eating that we talk about in the end of the book. But I think you know, nutrition is one of the most of the lifestyle choices we make. It's the one medicine that most of us, unless we're fasting, we put in our mouths every single day. So it is very powerful and the type the choices we make around our food are literally drivers for the metabolic diseases that we represent with those chronic things. And the idea with this particular nutritional strategy is based on the observation that somebody made a while back that if and it's a little disturbing if you think about it, but for most of us, if we changed what we ate and we didn't consume anything that our great grandparents didn't eat 200 years ago, most of us would experience an improvement in our health. What does that say about our current food supply and our current attitudes towards eating? So, part of the you know, something happened in the 1980s. That's when the obesity epidemic took off, you know, for the last 40 years, literally and the diabetes epidemic took off 10 years later and everything else followed. So happened then and it's fascinating to speculate. There are a lot of ideas.

Speaker 2: 14:26

You know, fatty liver disease, which 50 percent of uh upwards of 50 percent of americans now have, which is, which is inflammation, fatty replacement of the liver, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, which is the most common type and is now the number one cause for liver transplants in women and soon to be in men. It didn't exist before 1980. In other words, if people got fatty liver, it was due to, it could be due to infectious diseases, there's some things there but it was also due to alcohol consumption, so it was called alcoholic fatty liver disease. It's also due to alcohol consumption, so it was. It was called alcoholic fatty liver disease and the problem was, in the 1980s the number of people with fatty liver disease started to take off and the doctors would, would diagnose them in their clinics and they go.

Speaker 2: 15:16

You know, you have this disease. Then the patients say what can I do for it? And they say Well, you need to stop drinking. And they go, doctor, I've never, I've never consumed alcohol in my life. And they go right, well, please stop it anyway. You know, and you know I mean, it created, you know, created some tension. I'm being, I'm being a little facetious here, but then then of course it moved to children, and now children get fatty liver disease.

Speaker 1: 15:41

And that's really mind blowing.

Speaker 2: 15:42

And you know they realized that it wasn't due to alcohol anymore and it was due to something else. And to this day, fatty liver disease is one of the chapters of the book is about fatty liver disease and you know it's taught. Well, we don't know what causes non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. We know what causes alcoholic, but the big one is this non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. And in the book we talk about implicating fructose, because fructose is a sugar, it's a carbohydrate that has nearly the same metabolic pathway as alcohol in the liver. In other words, unlike other sugars, it's only processed in the liver. The liver is a detoxification organ and the fructose is broken down into the similar components that alcohol is broken down in. Alcohol causes fatty replacement. It raises urate. It decreases endothelial reactivity and nitric oxide synthetase, which makes for healthy blood vessels, oxide synthetase, which makes for healthy blood vessels. Alcohol decreases those. That's why alcohol is a risk for hypertension, which is a blood vessel disease. Well, fructose does similar things, but it also is the driver, I believe, for non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.

Speaker 2: 16:58

And, interestingly, in 1980, something happened with our food supply High fructose corn syrup was discovered. Before that, people used cane sugar or other types of sugars in all the junk food and the sodas and everything. But in the 1980s high fructose corn syrup was discovered and it was a low-cost alternative to these other sugars and it wouldn't. It wouldn't crystallize in the food, so it would. It would stay better. Plus, in the united states and I suspect in many other countries, sugar corn is one of the the food products that are subsidized by the federal government. There are a number of junk food materials that are subsidized, like corn and soybeans, which artificially lower the price. So high fructose corn syrup made from corn was cheaper than the other sugar alternatives and in one fell swoop it replaced sugar in basically almost all junk foods.

Speaker 2: 17:59

And you know, pepsi and Coca-Cola famously announced they're switching to high fructose corn syrup, and who knows that may have been. In effect, about the same period seed oils actually replaced. All foods became fried in pro-oxidative seed oil. So that's a whole other discussion and another consideration. But basically our food supply got really scrambled in the 1980s and these diseases have just exploded. And there are other factors too. There's environmental factors and other things as well. But at its root, lifestyle, I believe, can reverse these diseases um the the description of the 1980s.

Speaker 1: 18:44

it feels like there's really nowhere to go, like who who knew right in the 1980s. It's it's like now people are paying such a heavy and high price for just being bombarded by something that no one knew about. Really it's. It's wow Cause you just say high fructose corn syrup and I think like it sounds like taboo, it sounds like a curse word to me. But yeah, in the eighties they didn't know.

Speaker 2: 19:15

And it's actually. It's not chemically. You know, sucrose, which is the table sugar that we eat, has is about 50 percent. It is 50 percent glucose and 50 percent fructose. That's the. That's the way. High fructose corn syrup is a combination of glucose and fructose in liquid form and it doesn't have that bond, but it's still about 50 50. It may vary slightly from that, plus or minus 15 percent. So it's not like it, it's. It's a dramatically different product, but it was put into everything. So now you have spaghetti sauce with high fructose corn syrup, you have bread with high fructose corn syrup. It's really ubiquitous.

Speaker 2: 19:57

But something really went on then with our food supply and up until recently there was no medicine at all for non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. In other words, it was taught that we don't know what to do. If you have this, what can you do? Lose weight, get rid of fat? Well, it doesn't really work that way, because obesity is not necessarily concomitant or doesn't occur in all people with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.

Speaker 2: 20:32

And Robert Lustig, who is at the University of San Francisco or used to be, did a great study with kids.

Speaker 2: 20:39

He's a pediatric endocrinologist, so he deals with children and today, dealing with children as an endocrinologist. You see, fatty liver disease because they all you know the large percentage have them. So he did an interesting study because he's written a great deal about fructose and its possible factor in this. So he took children with fatty liver disease and he measured the amount of fat in their liver with imaging studies. So it's quantitative determination. Then he took their diet and he basically without changing the number of calories in their diet so it's not like they lost weight or they changed how many calories they ate he just substituted glucose for fructose. So he just got rid of the fructose basically and put other carbohydrates in there, kept the calories the same. And a fascinating thing happened in about six to eight weeks, I think it was, these children had dramatic improvement in their fatty liver disease, to the point, on the, on the measurement studies, on the imaging studies, they could actually see the liver fat improve. So it's it's it's pretty amazing.

Speaker 1: 21:51

I was actually going to just ask you, um, about how, how we look at the, how you look at the calorie in versus calorie out model and um, you already just touched on it. Uh, with with that answer, that's so interesting, did um? Was there any change in weight or was it only in the fatty liver? Cause I can understand what you're saying about the liver, the change between the fructose that. That makes sense to me. You also explained that beautifully.

Speaker 2: 22:25

Um, yeah, and they did not lose weight. That was the whole point. Because people are going to critics of the study. You need to make sure that you're not just making people lose weight. And then the belief is well, if you lose weight, your fatty liver goes away, which is not really true, because body fat is very different from liver fat and there are different pathways that that you know. Support them.

Speaker 1: 22:50

And can you say a few words about the calorie in versus calorie out model?

Speaker 2: 22:58

Oh yeah for sure.

Speaker 2: 22:59

I mean I, you know, I was. I was raised on that, basically when my mom was a dietician. So I, you know, one gift she gave me was the. I was I. I was raised in a world where I, that she, believed that that food mattered to our health, what our food choices were. Now, sadly, the food choices that we made, based on my mom's knowledge, were incredibly unhealthy, and they were bad Because she was.

Speaker 2: 23:33

She, like many dietitians today, are still influenced by the idea that high fat is bad, low fat is healthy, idea that high fat is bad, low fat is healthy. Carbohydrates aren't that important. So we ate a low-fat diet, so we got rid of the fat on our meat. We ate low-fat ground beef. We got rid of healthy butter and substituted margarine which is full of seed oils and trans fats.

Speaker 2: 23:59

We ate low-fat yogurt, which, basically, when you, when you make something low fat, you add sugar to it. You get rid of the saturated fat and you add sugar to it, which, as we talk about another chapter of the book, I, I believe, and I think the evidence is very strong you're more likely to raise your heart attack risk with a sugar donut than you are with with a steak, because it's the metabolic health, the carbohydrates, not the saturated fat that that drive that. But to your question about um calories in, calories out the, the standard food advice that is given today everywhere pretty much um is to if you want to lose weight, eat less and exercise more, and the problem with that is yeah, the problem is exercising more.

Speaker 2: 24:51

We all know that. You know, exercise has many, many health benefits, no question. Sadly, though, weight loss is not one of them, for the simple reason that how do we work up an appetite? You exercise, right. It increases our appetite, and the amount of calories we burn with exercise is relatively small compared to the 500 calories I get from Starbucks if I eat a muffin or something like that. So it's just that the math doesn't work out. So it's just that the math doesn't work out, but it belies a deeper underlying lie or principle that the belief, the mistaken belief. I believe that all calories are equal, that a calorie is just a calorie and it doesn't matter what calories you eat, just eat fewer ones of them. That clearly doesn't work. Based on our obesity epidemic In the United States, basically everyone, the majority of people, are either overweight or fat.

Speaker 2: 25:48

Not everyone, of course, but now more than 50% of people are in this area. So what's the problem with a calorie is just a calorie? Well, that's not the way our body works. Fat is literally stored based on hormone signals, and the number one signaling hormone for fat deposition is insulin, and of the three food groups you know fat, protein and carbohydrates, only the two required ones for life fat and protein, which will die if we don't get, don't stimulate insulin that much. But the third one, the carbohydrates, which actually we don't need to survive at all. There are more than one human populations that eat practically no carbohydrates and they live fine.

Speaker 2: 26:38

When we eat carbs, we stimulate insulin. Insulin drives fat storage, so it diverts our food to fat. So what does that mean in common sense? Well, we all know that if I eat 100 calories of potato chips, I won't be able to stop there because I'll eat the whole pack and it will drive fat storage. I won't get the energy from it. If I eat 100 calories of a hard-boiled egg, most people can stop there and they don't eat the whole dozen. Right, but it's the same 100 calories. But they're clearly not equal the way our body sees them, because they're giving them different messages. The potato chips are saying store fat, continue to create fat throughout the body, and the egg, which is largely fat and protein, has very few carbohydrates in it, gives a different message to our body. It tells our body to do healthy things with it.

Speaker 1: 27:37

And just to touch on cancer a little bit, you explain things so beautifully. I really so. I'm this. It's fascinating. You criticize the emphasis on genetic mutations in cancer research and you acknowledge the role of metabolic dysfunction. How do you explain the success of targeted therapies like Gleevec? Am I pronouncing it correctly? Yeah, gleevec, yeah, gleevec, which directly addresses specific genetic mutations in cancer cells. Mutations in cancer cells.

Speaker 2: 28:32

Yeah, let me backtrack a little bit and just lay the groundwork on this. Yeah, the original cancer researchers were. One of the true pioneers was a very, very interesting, peculiar man named Otto Warburg. He was German and in the early part of the 20th century science most science was done from Germany, or certainly in Europe, so it was the center of science. He did some groundbreaking work. He won a Nobel Prize. I mean to give you an idea of his personality. When he won the Nobel Prize, his response was well, it's about time. He's a quirky personality.

Speaker 2: 29:16

He continued working under Adolf Hitler even though he was Jewish and he was homosexual. There's one thing that Hitler, you know, feared the people who are Jewish, or people that is cancer Exactly. And and he was the leading, he was their best shot for curing cancer at the time. And he, he developed a number of things and part of his understanding was that cancer has certain metabolic hallmarks of changes in oxygen utilization and respiration in the mitochondria. And he did brilliant work on it. And what happened was at the end of World War II, all this knowledge about the metabolic basis of cancer just sort of went away. And the problem was in 1953, these two guys did x-ray crystallography and they discovered the shape of the double helix for the human dna and it started, jump started the molecular biology revolution, which is, which is dna basically in it, in it basically, almost single-handedly, changed the path of science and knowledge in our, in our curiosity about cancer, from a metabolic, biochemical basis which was Otto Warburg and all the European scientists, and suddenly these two scientists in England, but they came to the United States and it triggered a new revolution which was very exciting. The idea that DNA could be understood. Dna was the basis of life, and if it's the basis of life, it's the basis of disease too. And so it started, this whole path of which culminated in the human genome project in the early part of the 20th century, where the human genome, as everybody knows, was sequenced. It was a big, you know, world all over the world, headlines everywhere, world all over the world, headlines everywhere.

Speaker 2: 31:28

And science was working towards the idea that all diseases had a genetic basis and that diseases, especially cancer, could be treated with identifying the genetic mutations in cancer and then coming up with drugs like Gleevec. Is the, is the, you know, the the poster child for that, and certainly there were some big wins with it. Gleevec was a drug that was used for, uh uh, cml, which is a type of leukemia. This there was a movie about it, so-called Philadelphia chromosome, and Gleevec was a drug that was developed to correct this genetic, this gene, this chromosome 22, in these patients and it transformed their survival, I mean, orders of magnitude better. It was really revolutionary and everyone, rightly so, held it up. Hey, this is the future. All we have to do is we're going to look at every cancer, we're going to figure out the mutations in it, just like we did with CML and Gleevec and the Philadelphia chromosome. And we're just going to go down the line and boom, boom, boom, and we're going to, we're going to engineer drugs for every cancer and we're going to wipe it out. And that that's how it's, and and that was the hope.

Speaker 2: 32:46

And then something happened, people, after the Human Genome Project, everyone said, well, hey, what we need now is a human cancer tumor project, in other words, where we take all the cancers, we sequence them, all the cancers, we sequence them, we develop a genome map of the cancer. So you know, just like we did with CML and Gleevec, we'll do it for all cancers. And for this study there was a large project on the order of the Human Genome Project, but it was the Human Cancer Project and they had, I think, 30 different types of cancers. They sequenced them and all it took several years. And the problem was, when the results came out, there was no fanfare, there was no big announcement, there was no celebration, because what they realized is that while cancers had genetic defects, they weren't consistent across the cancers, other than a few things, like the Philadelphia chromosome for Gleevec or BRCA mutations. There are a few that are that way, but the vast majority of cancers they had gene mutations, but they were different in different tumors and they were actually different in the same tumor, in the same patient or in the metastases. And the point being, there didn't appear to be consistent targets that could be hit with this strategy of gene therapy.

Speaker 2: 34:16

And I don't want to throw out gene therapy entirely, but it you know, and there are some, you know some great wins with Gleevec and a few others, not a lot, but a few others, but even Gleevec, they realized that not all people with the CML mutation, cml leukemia, have the mutation and some people with the mutation don't respond to Gleevec. And the other thing, gleevec also works on certain other cancers. They tried on myeloma that doesn't have that particular mutation, so there may be other. There probably are, of course, other factors going on. So, long story short, the gene therapy has not panned out like we thought it would. There's still great hope with immunologic therapy and CAR-T cells and many, many things on the forefront, but the idea of sequencing human tumor cells, coming up with individual targeted therapies for them, has really been a huge disappointment.

Speaker 2: 35:29

But right at that time the idea that metabolism is playing a role, back 100 years ago, literally to Otto Warburg in Germany people are reviving that. People like Thomas Seyfried and others are talking now about a metabolic basis for cancer. Well, nobody argues that there are gene mutations in cancer and nobody argues that there are metabolic defects in cancer. The problem is which are causal and which are upstream and which are downstream. In other words, do the mutations cause the metabolism abnormalities or do the metabolism abnormalities cause mutations? And it matters because you want to treat the root cause. Whatever is causal, because if you treat the downstream stuff it won't stop the disease or have an effect on it. You need to treat the, the drivers of the disease. It's just.

Speaker 2: 36:23

Like you know, for decades we chased beta amyloid as a cause for Alzheimer's disease. Now there's a great deal of criticism and skepticism now that beta amyloid, while it's present in a lot of Alzheimer's patients, it may be downstream from the cause. In other words, removing beta amyloid doesn't necessarily cure Alzheimer's disease. And so the similar thing is for the question with cancer. And so what evidence are we seeing? Well, now we're seeing metabolic therapies applied to cancer, whereas still to this day the main cancer treatments are surgery, radiation therapy developed, you know, 70 years ago or more and chemotherapy the same time, with a few immunotherapies, car-t and some things like that, but it really hasn't changed much.

Speaker 2: 37:23

For the first time, people begin doing metabolic therapy. What is that? Well, it's the kind of lifestyle things we touched on, the nutritional approaches, for example, going into what's a ketogenic diet, which is a low carbohydrate diet, introducing ketosis. People are finding that it not only improves Alzheimer's disease and mental illness and obesity and diabetes and all these other things, but it also appears to in some Warburg suggested going to a ketogenic diet will drive the metabolism to fat instead of glucose, and cancers have disordered glucose metabolism. We all know that because PET CT scans pick up almost all cancers by increased glucose activity. So it's interesting that for cancer. Now there's growing work on the possibilities of metabolic treatments as maybe not replacing all the other treatments. At this point, certainly I'm not recommending anyone not follow their doctor's orders, but at least think about these as something to include.

Speaker 1: 38:44

And support help. Whatever treatment you're receiving, do its job Exactly.

Speaker 2: 38:53

And that's the great thing about these lifestyle things is the lifestyle approaches that I used and that were so effective in the diseases that I encountered and that I believe and the evidence is strong works on all these chronic diseases. The great thing about them is you don't have anything to lose really. In other words, you change your diet so you eat certain types of food, you avoid certain types of other food, you get your sleep in order, you get your exercise in order, you get your stress in order, but it's not like, well, I'll do that, but I may make my disease worse. No, you won't. These lifestyle things only, in the vast, vast majority of patients, only have a positive benefit. So there's no downside really to them other than the other, than the willpower and the opportunity cost of doing it. You know you have to pay attention to it, but and that's not insignificant, but still it's it's it's our lives, it's our, it's our health. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Speaker 1: 40:00

Absolutely, and the the you were getting into the standard American diet in the book as, of course, the cause of many chronic diseases For those of us who are not in the US. I feel like we've already touched on it just because we were talking about high fructose corn syrup. So that's like the basis I feel maybe I'm wrong to the standard American diet, but is there. Can you maybe elaborate on that a little bit?

Speaker 2: 40:40

Yeah, the standard American diet is the diet that's evolved, that people believe is healthy, that trusted medical health institutions recommend it. So this is what you should eat to be healthy. The problem is, those trusted health institutions have been corrupted from a number of ways. The food pyramid which you may have heard of. It's a pyramid that's made by the USDA Department of Agriculture and it's a pyramid that it's a simple approach, that it basically the food on the bottom of the pyramid listed. You should eat that most of the time, the middle a little you know less and then the top very seldom at all. And this food pyramid is is. It's a US thing but it's followed all over the world and you know, basically, the schools in the US follow that. You know, basically the schools in the US follow that. You know the veterans, the military, the prisons, and you know moms and dads everywhere who just want their kids to be healthy. They take this as healthy advice.

Speaker 2: 41:42

Well, recently it's come to light in peer-reviewed published papers by Nina Teicholz and others that the committee that does the most recent food pyramid and presumably ones prior to this, but the paper was the most recent one showed that over 90% of the people of the committee members had conflicts of interest with big food. Basically they were junk food conflicts. They were paid for by junk food makers and if you look at the food pyramid it's no surprise. The bottom row which we're supposed to eat most of is junk food. It's basically cereals and grains and things like that, and you could see that these influences are present there.

Speaker 2: 42:29

You know the American Heart Association, which is a trusted you know the number one leader in heart disease. They recommend eating seed oils, canola oil as a heart-healthy oil, and these seed oils are pro-inflammatory. They drive oxidation. There's great evidence we talk about in the book that they're unhealthy and while they do lower the cholesterol slightly, they make us worse in many, many other ways, including fatty liver and oxidation.

Speaker 2: 43:04

But if we look back in the history, the American Heart Association was funded in the 1950s by a multimillion-dollar grant from Procter Gamble, which was the maker of the original seed oil which was originally repurposed as a lubricant in German U-boats in World War I and they found out as a motor oil. They found out that people would eat it and they rebranded it Crisco and they sold it as a replacement for lard. And Upton Sinclair's book the Jungle had just been published and people were up in arms about the meat industry, and so this was a way that people could still cook things with this white pasty stuff. But it wasn't lard, it wasn't from animals, but it was from from healthy plants. Unfortunately it's. It's not not so healthy after all, and that's Crisco. And today we you know it's margarines and corn oil, canola oil, soybean oil, peanut oil, rapeseed oil, all these very highly processed seed oils which are harmful. But if we have trusted institutions like the American Art Association, it still recommends it on their website.

Speaker 1: 44:20

I have trouble every time. I see, well, at least in Israel there's a, there's a big promotion of artificial sweeteners by um, again, the, the bureaucratic uh institutes, um, uh, like Multitol. They'll, they'll, they'll put the sticker on Multitol saying that you know, this is healthy for you if you're diabetic, and even aspartame, I think they're still promoting that. What do you think about that?

Speaker 2: 45:04

Well, any type of sweetener, any type of non-caloric or caloric sweetener, will cause our insulin to spike through something called a cephalic response and we think of something as being sweet. That in itself is enough to trigger the insulin. So there's that effect. But different sweeteners and there are many, many different sweeteners Some of them literally will cause cancer and lab rats and there are different things to avoid. Some of them literally, you know, will cause cancer and lab rats and you know they're different. They're different things to avoid. Some of them disrupt our gut microbiome and can have disruptive influences there.

Speaker 2: 45:38

So I I know, as a general rule, I would, I would say we're better off just consuming less sugar so that, so that we don't need the sweeteners as much, because if we just take artificial then we get used to it again. I mean, I've cut as part of this journey myself. I've cut back on carbohydrates, obviously a lot if I practice what I preach, and I realized a few things. Things like I used to not enjoy fruit that much like an apple. It's kind of tasteless Now because I don't eat sugar that much like an apple. You know it's kind of taste, you know, tasteless now because I don't eat sugar that much when I bite into an apple.

Speaker 2: 46:16

It's like a symphony of flavors you know it's, so you know it's so great because you know I taste the sweetness and you know it's dialing that down. But um, for, you know, for health and weight control, for weight control certainly I, you know I don't recommend artificial sweeteners. Control, certainly I, you know, I don't recommend artificial sweeteners, certainly not diet Coke I used to live on that stuff but it's it's, it's so bad. I hope Coke is not your sponsor, but anyway for your podcast.

Speaker 1: 46:41

Definitely not my sponsor, not after today at least. Right, I argue with with with so many people about the artificial sweeteners. Um, it's, I'm, I'm, you know, extremely against it. I can't, I can't even look at the packets, the pink packets, and uh, I, I just can't believe that it's still everywhere, absolutely everywhere, and it's totally normal, just like, I said, the stickers that say this is healthy for a diabetic, and I can't wrap my head around that.

Speaker 2: 47:18

But you know, you know it's going to change. You know it's going to change things with weight, I believe, and with weight, with diabetes, with metabolic disease. It's not a replacement for lifestyle, but it's going to help people get there and as an indication of that, for the first time in 40 years, the graph of obese people and weight. There's evidence to suggest it stopped this year and it's not because people suddenly got their lifestyle together, because it's a class of drugs called GLP-1 agonists, ozempic and everything, and I think these drugs are going to transform the world. They're going to, they're going to help people get a healthy lifestyle, because you have to do a healthy lifestyle with those drugs, otherwise they don't work. And you know, we're already seeing it People who take GLP-1s.

Speaker 2: 48:09

They eat less junk food, they buy healthier food, they don't drink alcohol. They're addictions, whatever it is, whether it's shopping or porn or tobacco or whatever. All those dopamine-driven things start to decrease. It's amazing. And they have effects on Alzheimer's disease, they have effects on diabetes, independent of weight, and they have effects on inflammation broadly and they've just been well. They haven't been approved yet for the FDA for this indication, but the studies have come out showing that they are effective for non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, which is amazing. So yeah, glp-1s, and I think people are going to start taking it for longevity. I just started taking them myself and I don't have diabetes and I'm not fat.

Speaker 2: 49:00

I mean last time I checked.

Speaker 1: 49:04

Wow, I recently recorded an episode on my take on Ozempic because a lot of my clients have been asking me about it, and basically I was saying you know, the studies are vast and it's really interesting, they are doing a great job, but only if you really get into the lifestyle change Like you can't do Ozempic, and then you know, keep living the previous life.

Speaker 2: 49:36

Yeah, and I think yeah, absolutely that's it. And and lifestyle, I think, is the answer. But not everybody can do it. You know, it's like I have a friend who's a bright guy, he's a professor at a university and he, he has some health problems and he's like it's like I have a friend who's a bright guy, he's a professor at a university and he, he has some health problems and he's like he's read about lifestyle now and now his whole purpose in life is to not eat sugar. You know that's what he focuses on every day, and staying on this lifestyle thing and it's it's taking up all his bandwidth. In other words, he's not doing anything else.

Speaker 2: 50:13

That I don't want to. You know, I don't want to be defined in my life by you know. I mean lifestyle is important, but I thought anyway, I think these, I think these drugs and it's very, very new now. It's who knows what's going to happen down the road but I think there's a glimmer of possibility that they may help some people make the lifestyle shift and then get off the drugs and embrace the lifestyle more fully, because they actually change your brain, they actually change the dopamine motivation pathways in a lot of ways we still don't understand yet and have a lot of effects. So anyway, I don't know.

Speaker 1: 50:52

Very interesting. Stay tuned. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So you recommend the, the, the paw diet. We were talking about that, but I want to know. I want to kind of end on a practical note, Like how practical is it for the average person to eat the PAW diet, or accordingly, or something similar?

Speaker 2: 51:27

Yeah, let me narrow down the diet a little bit and clear. It's basically three things. For me, it's low-carb diet, so that means not only sugars but starches, rice, grain, flour, all that kind of stuff. So low-carb diet and then I eat. That's the first thing. Second thing is healthy fats, and healthy fats are like um, saturated fats, avocado oil, coconut oil, olive oil and get rid of the unhealthy fats, which are the seed oils that we that we already talked about. And then the third thing for me is grains. I mean, I don't have celiac disease, which is a gluten allergy that some people have, but I believe that the evidence is pretty good that many, if not the majority of people have low grade inflammation related to grains in their diet, the protein in the grains in their diet, related to grains in their diet, the protein in the grains in their diet, and they benefit from not eating grains. And if that's not bad enough, in the US at least, our grains are soaked in a weed killer called glyphosate, which is outlawed in 30 countries because of its cancer and other problems. And also grains tend to be high in carbohydrates. But don't get me wrong.

Speaker 2: 52:51

I love, I love bagels, I love donuts, I love cupcakes. But I love my children more and I realized that it matters and I'm willing to make the substitute. But I don't feel like I'm on a diet. I don't feel like I'm giving something up because I get to eat. I get to eat butter, now, you know. I get to eat cream cheese. I get to eat things that I wouldn't eat on a low, you know, previously, on a low fat diet. So it it's it. It works for me. I don't feel like, and I've been doing it for several years now, so I think it is doable. It doesn't work for my teenage daughters. You know they're still eating junk food and sugar, and you know. But you know we don't know about kids anyway, necessarily, and I, you know it's not possible for me to impose my will on them anyway.

Speaker 1: 53:42

No, no, I mean it's also. You know, there's like phases you go through when you get to ketosis. I mean for a teenager to go through those phases where you're kind of foggy. You're kind of tired. That's hard. It's hard for anyone.

Speaker 2: 54:02

Yeah, so so that diet, I mean that, that that lifestyle choice, I think I think it's doable. You know, it's not. I don't feel like I'm deprived or anything, and um, you know, I'm see, I'm wearing my CGM now and um, whoops, I guess it's it's not bright enough anyway. But you know, I watched the glucose go along and it's all good.

Speaker 1: 54:30

Interesting. So is there like a practical tip, yeah, a game changer tip that you can-.

Speaker 2: 54:42

Yeah, for me the way I started out was my mom, the dietician, had told me which many people still believe is to eat many small meals throughout the day and have, you know, have snacks. My kids at their school, they get fed snacks, you know, between classes and stuff. So there's this in my belief, in my opinion, misconception that eating all the time is healthy because the simple act of eating forget what you're eating. But any food you put in your mouth turns on inflammation because that's the body's normal response to foreign matter coming into it. So if we're eating all the time, inflammation is turned on all the time. Inflammation is one of the main drivers of metabolic disease and aging and everything. So first thing I did was I just stopped snacking. I ate dinner at night and then I didn't eat for the rest of the night until the next morning, and then between lunch and breakfast, breakfast and lunch, I stopped. That that was a huge thing and made a big difference.

Speaker 2: 55:35

The other thing you can do, even if you don't change what you eat, little things like food order. Remember fat and protein. Those are good things. They don't spike insulin. The thing to watch out for is sugar or carbs. The thing to watch out for is sugar or carbs. So if you eat anything that has sugar, never eat that first. Always eat carbs or fat beforehand. You coat the lining of your stomach.

Speaker 1: 56:03

You delay the absorption of the glucose. You mean always eat protein and fat beforehand?

Speaker 2: 56:05

Yeah, I'm sorry, always eat protein and fat first, sorry, yeah, and eat sugar last. So if you help me, sorry, yeah, and, and eat sugar last. So you know, if you help me remember, think of dessert, how the sugar lasts. But you know, and ideally, don't drink your sugars, don't drink your calories, if you can help it, you know.

Speaker 1: 56:22

I, I, I really think that's. That's super, super helpful. So eat the protein and the fat first and don't drink your sugars. And there was another one you said oh, well, cut out snacking, the snacking Right.

Speaker 1: 56:43

And I actually wanted to say something about that. I am not a snacker at all and I don't even understand how that happens, so but, but I see it all the time around me, I really. I think it's so interesting for me to see, like, how we're just wired differently. It's I, I, when I'm hyper focused, I'm hyper focused and there's no food or I can forget to drink even, which isn't a good thing. So it's it's very interesting, and I love the approach of the not snacking. We don't need food all of the time. I mean, yeah, so I appreciate that.

Speaker 2: 57:27

And a lot of people snack for for different reasons for like obsession, or it's a distraction. Whereas when we have a meal, we do it with intention, with our family members or friends.

Speaker 1: 57:36

There's a purpose to it, whereas snacking is more of a compulsion, you know, sometimes with people and it's unconscious even very mindless and um, I'm not saying that in a judgmental way, it's, it's just the opposite of mindful when you're sitting down and you're eating with intention. Um, and it's a social thing also, where you know you could be uncomfortable in a social setting, but there are snacks there, so you're just going to kind of snack away.

Speaker 2: 58:03

Exactly.

Speaker 1: 58:05

Um, so those tips, I think, are fantastic and thank you so much for sharing your knowledge and for being here with us and for those tips and for the book. I really really appreciate everything you do, thank you.

Speaker 2: 58:23

Oh, thank you so much. This has been a wonderful conversation. I really appreciate it and I appreciate the work you do with your podcast and everything also. So thank you so much.

Speaker 1: 58:34

Thank you so much. Hey, thanks so much for tuning in and if this hit home, please share it with your crew. Likes, comments, shares Show your loved ones you care.