Original subtitles

hey everybody welcome to the podcast my

guest today is dr alan goldhamer

dr goldhamer is the founder of true

north health center in santa rosa

california

he is the co-author of this book the

pleasure trap

and he's a pioneer in the plant-based

nutrition space

this conversation is about many things

but there is a particular focus on

fasting today and

it is fascinating i think you're going

to enjoy it

if you enjoy my content in general

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and without further ado please enjoy my

conversation with dr alan goldhamer

right let's do it nice to see you thank

you for coming out here to do this

it's my pleasure it's been a long time

in the coming um we're going to talk

about

fasting we're going to talk about a

whole food plant-based diet particularly

your specific bent on it the sos

version of a whole food plant-based diet

but before we do that

i think what would be really interesting

and something about your

work specifically that i find

fascinating and that i appreciate

is that it's very much rooted in as much

in

psychology as it is in nutrition science

and and physiology

and beneath all of that

again which i appreciate is the fact

that

um there are some uncomfortable truths

about

about our relationship to food that

is premised in this vernacular around

addiction and as somebody who

is a long time in recovery this is the

lens that i kind of

approach all of these things and it's

something that i think is under

addressed in this conversation about

not just a healthy diet but how we

transition to a healthy diet because

people

um you know we're emotional beings

and it's less about the information

than it is about trying to help people

figure out how to

traverse that tricky you know

sort of tight rope between old habits

and new habits and by by kind of

couching all of this

in those uncomfortable truths about our

addictive relationship with food i think

is

is really powerful well the reality is

you know humans evolved in

on a very different environment than

when we the one we live in today

we lived in an environment of scarcity

so most humans actually didn't live to

reproduce

they didn't pass on their genes they

died from predation they died from

starvation

a few survived our ancestors our

ancestors were the winners

they got enough to eat they didn't get

eaten they lived long enough to

reproduce

and our bodies and our minds were

perfectly designed for that environment

of scarcity

so now human beings being the innovative

creatures we are we change everything we

change the environment we live in

dramatically

and now we don't live in that

environment of scarcity at least most of

us don't

we live in an environment of abundance

and

although we're perfectly designed for

that environment of scarcity

this environment of abundance can trip

us up and it does

and it's responsible for the systematic

overeating that people do

that leads to the obesity that leads to

the metabolic syndrome that leads to the

vulnerability to infectious disease and

the chronic degenerative diseases the

cardiovascular disease

and many of the cancers and so that

that reality is why it's so difficult

for people to adjust to the idea that

they just can't eat as much of whatever

they want

and get away with it yeah it's almost as

if

you know if you're if you're a heroin

addict or an alcoholic everywhere you go

everybody is a heroin addict or an

alcoholic there is no

safe space right we've normalized our

behavior

and our respective relationships with

food to such an extent

that the radical notion is to step

outside

of that and do something different

two-thirds of people

in industrialized societies are

overweight or obese if you're not fat

you're abnormal

right and if you go to a physician and

you

say you're significantly overweight and

you've lost a bunch of weight

the physician doesn't immediately think

oh you must have adopted a whole plant

food diet and become an exercise program

their differential diagnosis is uh oh

this could be colon cancer

eating disorder or drug addiction

pathologize a healthy choice well the

only experience they have of people

losing weight and keeping it off is when

they've got cancer

they've developed an eating disorder or

they're a drug addict

and so it's not even in their

expectation

that people are going to actually get

well you go to a physician with most of

the diseases of dietary excess the high

blood pressure the diabetes

and they're going to tell you look

you're going to be on drugs

the rest of your life if you do what i

tell you i promise you

you'll never get well you'll be sick

forever

because it's not in their expectation

that people are going to actually

recover their health

yeah because they're not addressing the

actual reasons why they're developing

the problem to begin with they're not

addressing the causes of the problem

i think in tandem with that there's also

this pessimism

from the typical general practitioner

that

any advice or or kind of advised

protocols about healthy

lifestyle change fall on deaf ears it's

like yeah i could tell this person they

should

go to the gym or they should eat better

and and you know maybe i'm gonna maybe

i'll say that but

there isn't a real expectation that

that's gonna

move the needle or that that person is

going to be able to adhere to any kind

of

prescribed lifestyle change and and

that's because we're dealing with people

that are addicts

yes and so talk about that expound upon

expand expound upon that idea because i

think it's really important

you don't just say to an alcoholic oh

you know how your life

sucks yeah it's because you're a drunk

uh stop drinking

yeah and the alcoholic would say i've

been told that oh

it's the alcohol i had no idea

thank you so much i won't drink again

right it doesn't quite work that way

we don't currently lie to alcoholics the

same way we do

lie to people for example that are

overweight we tell alcoholics look

you have a particular vulnerability you

can't drink

you need to come up with a strategy each

and every day that allows you to not

drink

and if you can figure out how to do that

you win but if you don't

you're going to be in trouble so the

same thing is actually

true in many degrees to people that are

overweight but what we tell the

overweight person is oh

just put your food on a smaller plate

here cut your food with a knife

and and put your fork down between each

bite and you won't be overweight anymore

you just need to learn to eat moderately

and just eat a little bit less it's it's

the analog in addiction is

you know quit the quit the whiskey and

just drink beer

or put your beer in a smaller or only

binge on the weekends and maybe don't

get behind the wheel of a car

and it's not real we know with alcohol

the answer is don't drink that and the

truth is

for people that are suffering with

obesity for people who are suffering

with these diseases of dietary excess

it would be better to avoid the

chemicals that are fooling your brain

into allowing you to systematically over

consume than it would be to pretend that

you can just have a little bit

if you could have just had a little bit

you would have just had a little bit and

you would have had the thing under

control

you can't you don't if you're an

alcoholic you're not the person that can

have an occasional drink

okay and if you're the person that's

suffering with these diseases you may

find it's easier to just adopt a

strategy

that eliminates these chemicals that

fool the brain we talk about this

pleasure trap

the artificial stimulation of dopamine

in the brain that results from chemicals

that we put in our food

that fool our brain the chemicals we put

in our food

are things like salt oil and sugar these

are highly fractionated food

byproducts not food and they stimulate

the dopamine cascade in the brain

they make food taste better they make

food more

interesting to us and as a consequence

we will systematically overeat now

just like some people can occasionally

have a drink and not become a drunk

some people can have bits of this

without it becoming a

health compromising uh problem but if

you're the overweight person if you're

the person with the heart disease the

cancer the diabetes

it's not you you're the person that

would be better off saying let me

avoid those chemicals i'll stop fooling

my brain

i'll eliminate the systematic overeating

i'll reverse the disease and pathology

and i'll adapt a strategy that doesn't

include

continually beating myself up with these

things that i'm not capable of

regulating

people have an easy time understanding

that alcohol is a powerful drug

that heroin is something that is going

to kill you

the addictive nature of these substances

is

is is well understood but when it comes

to food

that's a leap of faith for a lot of

people it's it's a bridge too far to say

i understand alcoholism and drug

addiction but when you start talking

about

food as addictive you're starting to

lose me

yeah well the reality is that the the

neural cascade that's associated with

addiction of any kind is very similar

now i'm not arguing that alcohol or

cocaine or heroin might be even more

potent than say the sugar

or the oil or the salt or the

combination but the net

effect of salt oil and sugar in the diet

is actually obvious and devastating

around us it's why you see

obesity in the disease of dietary excess

that's what's making people fat

it is the hidden force that undermines

health and happiness it is a

pleasure trap and it because people

don't recognize it it's very difficult

for them to take action

uh to eliminate it at least with alcohol

most people know

oh if you're an alcoholic you probably

shouldn't drink if you go to a party

and they say oh you have some alcohol

and you say well i i can't because

you know i have an alcohol problem most

people at least will be

tolerant of you because okay you got an

issue you don't have to but if

if you go in and you say oh no i don't

want to eat you're going to really upset

people oh what's wrong with this mike

you can have this that's great a little

bit won't hurt

yeah so it's complicated it's

complicated

in terms of the internal psychology in

trying to reframe our relationship with

food but there's also

all of these social constructs that

create even additional complexity that

make it very difficult to

modify behavior there's no question in

fact the the social roadblocks to health

are probably some of the limiting

factors

i think that's probably true in all

addiction though you know one of the

challenges for people

with alcohol is oftentimes the social

consequences yes

of not participating and this is

definitely true with food we've built so

much of our social interaction around

food

that even even if you're looking to just

modify

the type of foods you eat it can be very

upsetting for people and they can get

really defensive about it

right so let's talk a little bit more

about the pleasure trap specifically

what that is you co-authored this book

seminal work with with doug lyle i've

seen his ted talk i've seen him give his

presentation many times on this subject

and that really you know elucidates this

dysfunctional relationship with food and

and why it is from an evolutionary and

psychological perspective well you know

there's this

idea of dopamine is a neurochemical

associated with pleasure

and there's two behaviors critical for

human beings survival

and that is food and sex you have to get

enough to eat in order to be able to

sustain yourself

and you have to engage in enough sexual

behavior so that you can pass on your

genes and the whole process can start

over again

so it's not surprising that food insects

are heavily reinforced

and the way the body the brain

reinforces the body's behavior is by

rewarding us with dopamine which is the

neurochemical associated with pleasure

so the more dopamine the more pleasure

the more dopamine the better the food

tastes

and so you react to food in response to

largely caloric density the higher the

caloric density the more

valuable it is in this environment of

scarcity in which we evolved

and so the higher caloric density foods

are tend to be more reinforced more

dopamine

better tasting so what we've done as

humans we're innovative creatures we

said oh if a little good

a lot's better let's figure out a way to

make the food taste even more special

by increasing its caloric density and we

do that by adding things like oil and

sugar to the food

and as a consequence we like it better

and if that's what you get used to

eating

that's all you like and eventually

people get to the point they really

don't

like the taste of simple whole natural

foods anymore because this

hyper drug like stimulating effect of

the more concentrated foods is more

appealing

so we literally become addicted for

example if you want to

neuro adapt to a lower salt or lower fat

diet it actually takes time

in order for the body to go through that

adaptation we can speed it up with

fasting but the bottom line is there is

a period of adaptation

where food doesn't taste good if you eat

whole foods and you're used to eating

highly processed foods

it's not that appealing now over time

you adapt

and then the body gets to the point

where you like the simpler foods again

yeah

people have a hard time believing that

you adapt there's this

baked in assumption that you're you're

you're

you're just gonna you're looking you're

staring down the pipeline of a lifetime

of drab

foods that are unappealing and you're

just gonna have to tolerate it

and we know there's a literature on this

though with for example sodium

uh people use on high sodium diet it

takes about a month on a low sodium diet

for the average person to neutral adapt

to a lower salt diet

you know with fat it takes almost three

months wow

it takes three months on a lower fat

diet before that satiety mechanism

that's used to being kicked in by

the higher caloric density fat begins to

adapt and you will feel

satisfied on a lower uh

density foods so the the fruits the

vegetables or grains of goons

you will now feel satisfied whereas

initially you don't because you're used

to being satiated with these high fat

uh this high fat intake and that that

can take months and

so it's a problem if you say to a person

well look you're going to eat this new

diet

you're going to feel like crap and

you're not going to like it and but

it'll only be a few months

right adherence may be lagging whereas

if you can make that process happen more

quickly

the ability to get people to make

dietary changes speeds up and that's

what we found with fasting and sometimes

that's a way of

getting people to the point where good

food tastes good more quickly yeah

there does seem to be something about

preparing people for

that stage of acclimation and there also

seems to be something

magical about the 90-day window in and

you know with drugs and alcohol that's

sort of the typical window that people

say it takes

you know it takes about that much time

to kind of wean yourself off these

cravings and

reset your system a lot of people just

wanna

they wanna they're not willing to

weather

that period of discomfort

and perhaps there's a lack of belief

that they'll reset

and be able to reframe so that you know

what they once create like

to get over the craving you have to

deprive yourself

and then you reboot and then those

things that have held you hostage for so

long

suddenly hold less and less power over

time and the fact that it can happen

more quickly

with fasting is really an interesting

thing for example smokers

you know it's not easy to quit smoking

once you're addicted to nicotine

but most smokers by somewhere between

day two and day four of fasting no

longer report with right

from cigarettes now some people say yeah

they're so miserable fasting they don't

even think about them you know

cigarettes but the reality is that that

whole adaptive process just is sped up

dramatically

now that doesn't mean you don't have

psychological and social challenges

afterwards that you still have to

address in order to sustain

good behavior patterns but just getting

rid of that first

phase of a physical withdrawal and just

feeling so crappy and feeling like you

know

you're wondering why you're putting the

effort out getting that behind you

quickly really does

enhance a person's ability to make the

transition yeah to be drug-free

i i understand the you know when you

were talking about caloric density

fat and sugar these are things that are

evolutionarily

you know we're wired to seek out and to

maximize

the salt thing though that's different

like why is it

why is it that salt is such a trigger

for people yeah this one is probably the

most controversial

recommendation that we make people have

come around as you said with oil they

realize a highly fractionated

food product like oil high caloric

density little satiety feedback you know

they can understand that sugar

pretty well accepted that refined

carbohydrates they cause your

blood uh insulin levels to rise and then

it drives your sugars

lower and it follows the brain and now

you got cravings and that's what a lot

of the binging and craving and stuff

comes around is because of physiological

alterations of refined carbohydrates

but salt also is a really important part

of this and let's talk about a few

reasons why that might be number one

um salt is an essential nutrient that is

sodium

central nutrient without which you die

fortunately you get

all of the sodium you need in a whole

natural food diet just like you get all

the sugar you need and all the oil you

need you don't have to add a

fractionated concentrated food to get

the amount of sodium the milligrams of

sodium that's needed to sustain optimum

health

salt also has a powerful effect on

passive overeating

and you can do an experiment yourself if

you just sit down and figure out how

much

brown rice you'd eat until you feel

satisfied you don't want any more

and on a different day everything else

being equal salt it up and see you'll

eat

significantly more before you feel

satisfied now some people say yeah it

tastes better

well what do you think tasting better

means it means it's stimulating more

dopamine in the brain

as a result of this artificial type

response and you will systematically

eat more on heavily salted foods when

you're adapted to that than you will

wow whole natural foods the other thing

is salt has a preservative effect

doesn't it when they salt

foods it's to keep bugs from being able

to affect it well

you have five pounds of bacteria living

in your intestinal tract right now

a trillion creatures a thousand strains

very important to your immune system to

protect you from infectious disease and

other problems

and these thousand creatures are living

eating and pooing

inside you right now so if you have five

pounds of organisms pooing inside you

you might be concerned about

what they're pooling in you because they

might be pooing some nasty toxic waste

chemicals like tma which becomes tmao

and irritates the vessels and creates a

problem if you're eating animal foods

if that's what you're feeding your

bacteria you're feeding your bacteria

soluble fibers

you're getting fertilizer you're getting

vitamin k you're getting a lot of other

good stuff so if you want

your bacteria pooling fertilizer in tea

you want to make sure you're feeding

them

a healthy diet if if salt is a powerful

preservative let's just

imagine what happens when we put a high

sodium diet into this bacterial rich

environment

it can alter the gut microbiome and so

sugar can affect it oil can affect in

silicon salt so it's been our experience

that salt in the diet is an important

part of obesity

for many people that it's an important

part for causing fluid retention which

increases blood volume which is

associated with not just high blood

pressure

but also the joint pain the congestion a

lot of the aches and pains that people

have oftentimes is because of this

fluid that the body retains to protect

itself from the consequences of salt

so it has many downstream effects even

though it doesn't have any

calories per se it can still be an

important part

of the dietary excess profile and

by eliminating the sodium from the diet

you also eliminate a lot of the highly

fractionated foods that you just can't

eat without salt

even products like bread and cookies and

crackers and a lot of this stuff without

the salt

really doesn't taste that good because

they've refined out most of the natural

flavors of the food and what they do is

they take these

federally subsidized grains like wheat

and soy and then they

and corn and they add oil salt and sugar

to it process it into various looking

foods

and call that the diet go into a grocery

store and walk around

and you'll see a lot of those foods are

really nothing more than one grain or

the other

with various concentrations of sugar oil

and salt right which

which basically allows you to make

anything taste good

and you strip away those things and

there's

something completely unpalatable right

and nutrition

nutritionally deficient underneath it

and so what we're encouraging people to

do

is a really radical departure from what

they're currently doing but that's to

adopt a whole plant food diet

that's free of this added chemicals free

of the salt oil and sugar

and what you're left with is things like

fruits and vegetables raw cooked

minimally processed grains beans nuts

and seeds but you don't have the meat

fish val eggs dairy products oil salt

sugar

and highly processed fractionated foods

that make up the majority of the

people's diet in industrialized society

and it's that diet that makes them fat

and sick and develop the disease of

dietary excess

and that what makes you vulnerable to

con infectious disease you know when you

look at what are the vulnerabilities

about why do some people get an

influenza or a covid or

an infectious disease and you know they

recover they survive

they have minimal consequences other

people it's devastating or deadly

well if you look at the risk factors

associated with what makes people

vulnerable to these diseases as well as

the disease the chronic diseases the

heart disease the cancer the stroke

it's the same metabolic syndrome in all

of its associations

it's the same obesity and diabetes and

high blood pressure and all the

consequences of dietary excess

these are reversible and preventable

conditions

people don't have to have these

conditions and even if they have them

they can largely reverse them by taking

responsibility

to control what they put in their mouth

so this is the

the underlying premise uh that that

drives

uh true north which you founded what

like 30

years ago at this point 35 in 1984

wow was when my wife dr moran and i

started true north health i can't

imagine what it must have been like to

basically open the doors to this

medically supervised

water fasting clinic back in that time i

mean now

it's all the rage we have walter longo

and all kinds of scientists studying the

phenomenon of fasting deeply it's part

of the public awareness

everybody's it's very cool to be out

there you know sort of experimenting

with intermittent fasting

this was not the case back then like i i

i mean

potentially criminal right well at one

point the california board of medical

quality assurance had

rendered an opinion that recommending

fasting to a patient

constituted such a gross violation of

the standard of medical practice

that it rose to the level of criminal

negligence i was actually the first

person in my family that required the

services of a criminal defense attorney

my father was so

proud wow what happened there

um they ultimately decided that

recommending fasting was not criminal

negligence that in fact

there was even a provision at that time

in medicare to pay for fasting but as

long as it was for rapid weight loss

necessary for urgent surgery

if you got well unfortunately it wasn't

a covered benefit

um there was also uh every hospital

today in this country will

use versions of fasting for treating

conditions like acute pancreatitis we

were able to demonstrate that this

was not criminally negligent behavior

but was actually a rather innovative

look at

trying to help sick people get well

we've gone from being criminal quacks to

cutting-edge researchers as you said

there's been some wonderful people like

walter longo

and matson and and fontana and others

that have published in major

impact journals uh this idea that

fasting or

some modification of an intermittent

fasting or modified fasting

could be a helpful tool in fact it was

interesting lanco did some research

that i think really was pivotal he

looked at

cancer treatment and he took you know 30

rats

with cancer and gave them enough

chemotherapy to resolve all the cancer

cells you have to kind of kill all the

cancer cells so they grow back

the problem is all the rats died so that

wasn't a really good outcome but he took

the same rats with the same cancer

and the same chemotherapy but he used

fasting before during and after

the treatment and not only did all 30

rats survive

but dramatically enhance cancer-free

survival and so what he found was that

there was these

things like differential stress

sensitization and differential stress

resistance that cancer cells were more

vulnerable

to the effects of chemotherapy in the

fasting states probably because of their

higher metabolic rate

they don't adapt to the environment

without glucose as well there's lots of

differences in cancer cells to healthy

cells and in the fasting states the

cancer cells were put at a selective

disadvantage

and not only that healthy cells appeared

to be protected during the fasting

from the effects of chemotherapy and at

that point people went

particularly pharmaceutically-oriented

people went oh

so fast it could make the drugs work

better oh well maybe it's not quackery

after all and so there was a lot better

tolerance and acceptance of this idea

that perhaps

fasting may have a role in enhancing

conventional treatment it was

interesting to note too that many of the

biomarkers that predict cancer and

disease

turn off whether you use chemotherapy or

not so the active fasting itself puts

the body in a selective environment that

may be more conducive to healing

and so this type of research of course

now is taking off and there's been a lot

more

uh interest and including by the work

that we're doing at the true north

health center

yeah you have this uh this study and

this experience working with a patient

who had stage three follicular

lymphoma right where you had like this

tremendous result

um yeah we had a young woman with uh

stage three follicular

lymphoma that had been uh well

documented

excisional biopsy the whole bit and had

progressed over a period of

a couple years and uh

she had asked her family physician along

the way was there anything she could do

conservatively in terms of diet and

lifestyle

he had assured that diet had nothing to

do with follicular lymphoma that she

could eat whatever she wanted eating

and when she inquired about fasting he

informed her that fasting was criminal

quackery

nonetheless she decided that she didn't

want to undergo

conventional chemotherapy because with

this particular condition

it's not really effective it doesn't

affect all cause mortality there's a lot

of side effects and so often it's not

unusual for them to defer

treatment until the condition is quite

progressed in this case

it progressed enough that he referred to

the medical school talked to an

oncologist an oncologist

also reinforced the idea that diet was

irrelevant to this condition

uh that fasting was unproven uh and

even with that advice she decided to

come to the true north health center

underwent

21 days of water only fasting during

which time her tumors that were

previously externally palpitated

palpable disappeared

so we fasted for three weeks fed her for

10 days

sent her back to the oncologist and

he examined her couldn't find any

evidence of the lesions

um expressed some surprise

uh she explained he said you know what

did you do and she said well

i went to the criminal quacks and i did

the fasting and the tumors went away

and he said well that's very impressive

suggested he'd give me a call and talk

to me about it

um she asked to have the follow-up ct

scan that we requested

and we had warned her that they might be

a little reluctant since she didn't have

any

obvious evidence of symptoms and he said

well she didn't really need a

ct scan but she said well she'd really

like to objectify

the changes that had occurred he got a

little nervous but ultimately he did

admit

agree to uh order the studies and

um he mentioned that because she was

still a little bit neutropenic maybe

some gentle chemotherapy might still be

a consideration nonetheless she refused

after a couple months for white counts

had normalized by a year she's doing

great

senator back got a whole uh you know

follow-up

evaluations and at that point we decided

that

it was time to try to write up the

report so we wrote up this

case report we submitted it to a british

medical journal

and after some back and forth they

eventually did publish the paper

they had asked us if we could get the

oncologist to sign on and so we wrote

him a letter and

it you know thanked him so much for all

the confidence he had shown in referring

the patient to us for

fasting and uh which he didn't okay well

you know in spirit and uh so uh but

unfortunately he hasn't gotten around to

responding to us yet so we didn't

how long how long ago was this uh well

what happens we published that paper

and then they asked us to do a follow-up

because they said you know about 10

percent of

lymphoma patients will go through

periods of permissive state but

sustaining it would be impressive so we

followed this patient for three years

and she continued she had lost a

substantial weight she had maintained

that weight loss for three years i think

in part because i explained to her that

you know she had to stick to the diet

or it could be fatal because i'd track

her down and kill her

and i police think she'd believe me

because she stuck to the diet

and at three years we got a whole body

ct follow up with the oncologist and

she's completely cancer free

at that point um we submitted

back to uh the british medical journal

which had invited us to

do the follow up they actually refused

the the article the first time we

we appealed and resubmitted and then

they did decide to publish the follow-up

one of the reviewers felt like well

maybe she just got lucky so

but anyway so she resolved her problem

she maintained it for three years we now

have a four year and now we're working

on a five-year fall she continues to do

well

now since then and since the publication

of that article

we've managed to treat a number of

patients with various stages including

stage four lymphoma

and so far the results look very

promising we have some follow-up data

now

we're getting in the we're in the

process of submitting another

case report with long-term follow-up on

a stage four flickr lymphoma

and ultimately we're hoping to publish

enough case reports that we can

um do a clinical trial that's amazing

justify a clinical trial because i think

we're going to do very well with this

condition in highly motivated

self-selected patients that are willing

to do dangerous and radical things like

eat well

and exercise and go to bed on time the

results seem to be promising

what led you back in the 80s to

[Music]

to basically open this clinic that's

premised upon fasting like what

what was it about your education or your

experience that

you know that that you know you found

this protocol

and what led you to believe in it in its

efficacy

well yeah it was uh it was deep

frustration

um being constantly beaten by dr lyle in

basketball

i grew up with dr lawson's fourth grade

and we played basketball and and he

would beat me and i i've known him your

whole life oh my god

and you know it was really frustrating

because he's really good so and he's

just naturally

got tremendous talent so i just thought

well i've got to be able to beat him

somehow

and so i started reading some books i

came across a book by herbert shelton it

made sense

the idea that you know health was a

result of healthful living

and that diet played a role so i thought

well i'll get an edge

and i adopted this diet vigorously and

lifestyle vigorously

thinking this was going to allow me to

be of course it failed miserably because

he adopted the same kind of eating

pattern he still beats me to this day

here we are 61 years old playing

basketball i still can't manage to beat

you your whole life is basically a

result of you trying to try to beat

doctor

okay yeah and it's and it's frustrating

i picked the wrong guy i didn't even

realize that you know the person i'm

trying to be just you know

this bookish stanford psychologist how

hard could it be

you know i thought finally i was getting

desperate i thought well i you know he's

too quick he's got

i can't but maybe i can beat him in a

free throw shooting contest because i

thought you know

free throws is just practice right so

for six months i go out i'm shooting 500

free throws a day really working on my

form

and i just casually one day say hey doug

why don't we do a free throw shooting

contest uh-huh he says

okay you know he hasn't even played for

a week well he he strikes me as a

as a like a world-class sandbagger like

the guy's always going to tell you that

he's no good right he's always down

playing right that's his whole strategy

for all of this

i go out and hit 48 out of 50 and i'm

thinking i got him

he hits 19 misses one and then hits 80

in a row

80 free throws in a row in a row 99 of

course i'm telling him well what a joke

if you can hit 99 why don't you just hit

100.

i mean yeah so the point is it total

failure

got involved trying to be a better

basketball player but what i would say

is that we're both

still playing and so you know

how good you can become in a sport may

largely be dependent on genetics and

luck

how long you're going to live in life

may be largely dependent on genetics and

love but how well you're going to live

in the time you have left may be

dependent on what you put in your mouth

and the diet and lifestyle choices that

you make and so what we're trying to

explain to patients is you're not going

to live forever you're going to die

there's been a hundred over 100 billion

humans modern humans born on the planet

there's 7.3 or 4 billion alive today but

there's only been five well-documented

people that'll live past 117.

so the thing is you're not going to live

forever but you don't have to spend the

average 9.6 years of ability or 17 years

in poor health that the average american

is spending

you know giving up compromise in the

last decades of life that could be your

richest decades of life

because of chronic degenerative diseases

because we haven't taken control of our

diet sleep and exercise patterns

and that's what we're trying to point is

you may not be able to live forever but

you can reduce dramatically

the years of debility that you have your

vulnerability to infectious disease

your likelihood of developing heart

attack stroke and other debilitating

conditions

that's where the big payoff is not

living forever

but living well until you die having a

good life and then having a good death

all right so how does the fasting come

in though a pathway towards that

so fasting is interesting because you're

dealing with people that are oftentimes

addicted to the artificial stimulation

of dopamine in their brain whether it's

to drugs

or dietary issues fasting is a great way

of breaking that cycle

it can be a very effective way of

getting the person to the point where

good foods taste good

it's a great way of lowering the blood

pressure enough you can eliminate the

the medications along with the chronic

cough fatigue the impotence and

premature death that's associated with

them

normalizing the blood sugar levels so

your insulin levels normalize so you

don't have the cravings and the binging

and all the other stuff that sometimes

go along with it

or in autoimmune diseases oftentimes

pain

is significant inflammation is only

people can't be active they can't

dissipate their attention they aren't

able to engage

effectively and so when you get people

out of pain it's like an epiphany

experience

and now the motivation goes up it's hard

to be motivated

to make diet lifestyle changes when you

feel like crap all the time

but when you get a taste of feeling good

again it's very motivating

and now oftentimes that's enough

motivation to help people overcome

their addictions and their tendencies

the reality is i found the most

effective patients or those are most

motivated and motivations that are the

most powerful

is pain debility and fear of death yeah

100

the only problem is you know a lot of

these people that get out of pain and

they're not fearing death anymore and

then they might slip slide a little bit

because they think i'm better now i

don't have to work quite so hard

so you know there's there's challenges

on both sides but yeah

the reality you guys have had a

tremendous success with getting

with keeping people on the path like the

recidivism rate for you is pretty low

compared to other in fairness though we

have highly motivated self-selected

people

people are willing to get bad shape well

they're motivated

yeah it's it's one thing to talk about

intermittent fasting or

you know a fasting mimicking protocol

it's another thing all together to talk

about a 40-day water fast well that is a

very

extreme moses david elijah

jesus and our patients right you know do

fascinating it's interesting that

fasting is you know shows up

in all these various religious

traditions isn't it interesting the jews

the jeans the hindus the muslims the

buddhists the christians

all these religions that's diametrically

opposed on so many things that are

killing each other in the street over

disagreements they have one thing in

common

and that's a tradition about fasting

because fasting changes how you feel

about yourself and the world around you

you can't help it

and so true north health center is not

coming from a spiritual

orientation we're coming from a very

much of a health orientation we have

different doctors with different

backgrounds and we don't try to impose

our

beliefs on anybody because we're not the

experts in you know how you get into

heaven or any of that stuff

our focus is health from healthful

living but virtually every major

religion has a tradition

i mentioned not just about fasting but

also about the value

of a whole plant food diet you know

these um

traditions resonate throughout history

and

you know the reality is perhaps it's

because that's what works

how dare you

all right so walk me through

all right well first let me say this so

in the in the

decades that you've been doing this you

and doug have taken

and and your staff i mean i've had i've

had

you know chef aj in here explained to me

her

you know experience of being at she goes

to true north like

for vacation when she wants to get out

of town i mean she

she's got to be your most regular

customer um

but i've had i've had dr longo talking

about fasting

uh who else have i had in here i've had

you know true north comes up all the

time on the podcast

so i've heard about it anecdotally and

over the years you've taken what like 20

000 people through this

fasting procedure you know and had

tremendous success so i want to

understand

the the process that is entailed here

somebody comes to you

they're in bad shape they're overweight

they have hypertension diabetes obese

cardiovascular disease whatever you know

this is the kind of person that's

arriving in your doorstep

so the first step is that they usually

go to our website

so they go to truenuthealth.com and they

fill out the registration forms which

gets us their medical history

and we get their previous laboratory

work that comes in and they get a free

phone conversation with me so we offer

people free

you still do that right like still do

they call up and you'll give them a free

consult

i still do that so i talked to them as a

screening about whether or not

fasting might be appropriate if anything

that we do or we recommend might be

helpful for many people they may not

even need or be ready for fasting but

they may just need to talk to a doctor

that's not a complete idiot so we have a

phone coaching service where

our attendings are available they go

online through the website

we have all their medical records put

together they can schedule a formal

phone call uh consultation with one of

our attending physicians they can

discuss

get a second opinion they can do

whatever they want to do where they talk

to a doctor they can look at their

history objectively

and give them advice um if there are

appropriate candidates

for fasting then i schedule them into

the

center for a stay i give them an idea

about what we expect as a reasonable

period of time

they come to the center they go through

with one of our attending physicians a

history exam

laboratory monitoring we initiate them

into a fasting protocol if that's

appropriate

and then after fasting they go through a

refeeding process now while they're

there

fasting they're seen twice a day by our

staff doctors we make sure it's done

safely and effectively they're monitored

carefully

we have detailed educational classes

what i call brainwashing

where they're able to go through all in

detail the process about what they're

going to need to do why they're going to

need to do it

there's some social dynamics because

they're there with other people from

around the world that are getting a

chance to do this

you know our facility has about 70

patients staying at it

so they're interacting with those other

people plus the

the staff and the educators and so it's

a pretty

like immersion type of inexperience they

go through fasting they go through

re-feeding

if they have specific health problems we

have chiropractors naturopaths

body workers all that kind of stuff that

they can get the kind of attention

that they need and then when they're

going home they have very specific

recommendations that we expect them to

follow

and we try to provide follow-up support

and then because of the phone coaching

they're able to continue to access these

attending doctors

affordably without necessarily because

you know half our people are out of

state

15 are four and they're not all living

locally where they can pop in

and right see our doctors or use our

deli business or you know any of that

kind of stuff

what are what are the important vectors

or variables that determine

the appropriateness or you know for

somebody to

do one of these protocols like not

everybody is suitable for this

no the biggest one is that they have a

condition

that is appropriate for fasting so

there's many uh people

that are not good candidates for fasting

and we can talk about that

there are some things that are

particularly amenable to fasting and for

example the conditions that are caused

by dietary excess

are particularly responsive to fasting

it makes sense

obesity cardiovascular disease high

blood pressure

type 2 diabetes autoimmune diseases

certain forms of cancer

these conditions we know are made much

worse by poor dietary choices so it's

not shocking to find out

that fasting kind of the ultimate in

undoing the consequence of excess

would facilitate the recovery of those

patients and it does and we've been able

to prove that we've been publishing

papers looking at these conditions like

high blood pressure looking at diabetes

looking at autoimmune diseases

and the fact is we can in highly

motivated patients

generate safe and effective uh responses

with fasting right in fact we've

actually published a fasting safety

study the first

comprehensive look at long-term water

only fasting and what the risks are in

art

uh in response to this process so we've

been able to show it is a safe process

when it's done according protocol in

fact dr

longo who cautions people in his book

about long-term water fasting and its

safety

makes an exception and that's if people

fast at the true north health center

because he's familiar with our safety

now i evaluate other scientists

intelligence based on how much they

agree with me right i'm glad

i'm glad you know your bias is intact

here

um if somebody has

anorexia nervosa or if somebody is

uh you know on the other side of

chemotherapy where they're

maintaining their weight is an issue i

would suspect that that's probably not a

great candidate what about

somebody who's coming in and they're on

a battery of medications you would

you would have to wean them off of that

i would presume on some level before

they could undergo this

yeah you know there's um most

medications you do not water fast while

you're taking medications those have to

be weaned down

beforehand but we have physicians that

are experts at helping people

unwind the consequences of their medical

treatment and most medications

interestingly enough

the day you change the diet you have to

begin changing the medication profile

right because most medications are

treating the diet

most people are being treated that is

medicated

for their diet when you change their

diet

the need for medication dramatically

responds you have to reduce

the blood pressure medication you start

crashing these patients because they're

not going to be hypertensive

once you eliminate the reasons why

they're hypertensive

and they're not going to be needing the

same level of medication once you

normalize their dietary intake as far as

their diabetes or

getting them off their pain medication

once they don't have the pain they don't

need to be on all that oxy

because now the pain is being reduced

because the inflammation has been

reduced because of the dietary change

and then ultimately the fasting

so that's one of the reasons why fasting

does need to be done in a controlled

medically supervised setting it's not

the kind of thing that you do

long-term fasting at home at home right

you know

so you do that in a controlled setting

where there's been a proper history exam

lab and daily monitoring so we're seeing

each of these patients twice a day

and that's how we're able to ensure that

this is a safe and effective experience

so they may withdraw their medication

with careful feeding

initiate the fasting normalize the

condition and then after we're done

most of the time there's no need for

medication because their blood pres you

know they've gone from 220 over 120

capped out on five meds

to being 120 over 70 off medication

and so there's no reason for anybody to

want to put them back on drugs that

cause chronic cough fatigue impedance

and premature death

if the condition is actually normalized

now the side problem is

you have to keep on the healthy diet and

lifestyle yeah because you're not curing

anything

you're just managing it but you've

rebooted this operating system

and wiped the slate clean so you can

build a new foundation

it's very much like treating a you know

when your computer becomes corrupted and

you don't know exactly what's wrong but

you turn the thing off you turn it on

you can't explain

but now it's working right and it seems

and we're trying to figure out exactly

what those changes are that's occurring

uh in fasting the i know the

pharmaceutical injury is very interested

in what's happening because they want to

come up with what are called fasting

mimicking drugs

they want drugs that will do just what

fasting does to you but without that

nasty fasting

that's something that they can sell in a

pill yeah so a lot of the research

of interest is trying to figure out what

exactly is it that's happening in

fasting that's allowing the body to get

well so that we can try to reproduce

that without having to go through the

process right i mean that's my next

series of questions like does it have to

be

water only what is it about that

deprivation protocol that is so special

um you know uh physiologically

that is causing this cascade of positive

impacts like what would happen if you

were eating a little bit i mean i know

what

longo has this fastic fasting mimicking

um protocol where he is allowing people

to eat something like i don't know 600

calories a day

and he's able to reap some of the

benefits of what you're experiencing

without having to go on a complete water

fast but

what is happening to the body when

you're depriving it of food in such a

you know comprehensive way yeah the

intermittent fasting protocols are just

that

fasting mimicking diets or fasting

mimicking programs trying to reproduce

some of the changes that we know occur

with fasting without the risk profile or

the complications of long-term water

only fasting

and i think they can be very effective

as they've demonstrated

however long-term water-only fasting

has a much more profound impact on these

mechanisms that are associated with

fasting for example

just the most obvious is weight loss you

know when you're water fasting you're

going to lose an average of a pound a

day

now some people say well you lose weight

but then you gain it back afterwards now

interesting we've done a study we have

now uh recently acquired a

hologix dexa scanner with the new

software that allows you to do a whole

body detail composition it looks not

just a

percent body fat but how much visceral

fat there is and we have a paper that

will be coming out that looks at

the fact that yes you lose a bunch of

weight fasting and you regain some

weight after fasting but it turns out

the weak weight you regain after fasting

when you're eating a whole plant food

diet is exclusively water

fiber glycogen and protein there is no

fat in fact the fat profile continues to

drop during re-feeding

even though the scale weight obviously

goes up as you rehydrate put some fiber

back into right

as long as you adopt as long as you

continue to adopt the whole plant food

healthy

you know dietary style but the point

that the old wives tale was well you

lose fat and you just gain the fat right

back well

that might be true if you go back to

eating greasy fatty slimy dead decaying

flesh processed foods but that's not

what's happening

in these patients that we're re-feeding

appropriately

and so weight goes up but what the

weight that goes up is re-elementing

your glycogen stores and

muscle stripes which is really exciting

so preferentially

not just do you lose fat but you

preferentially lose

visceral fat that the ratio of visceral

fat to adipose tissue loss is 3.0

in other words there's a significant

preferential immobilization of this very

type of fat that we think is most

compromising to health

the fat the abdominal fat stores around

the organs so

now we have what may turn out to be an

effective strategy of specifically

mobilizing visceral fat

now we've done some preliminary work we

have we're actually enrolling patients

in the study starting in august

looking specifically at body composition

changes long term with follow-up so

you know we'll be able to speak more

definitively about it by the end of the

year

there's also a process that happens in

water fasting that you don't see as

profoundly

influenced in juice diets or modified

diets and that's natural resistance

there's a selective mobilization

elimination of excess sodium from the

body

and water fasting it happens right away

it's very powerful more powerful than

say taking hydrochlorothiazide or a

diuretic

and it's responsible for the big dump in

fluids that happens initially on fasting

that drops blood pressure so

dramatically gets rid of the congestive

heart failure symptoms that eliminate

some of the arthritic symptoms and joint

swelling

and the non-healing wounds and this by

selectively getting rid of this excess

sodium that's accumulated

that the body's having to deal with

because of the dietary choices

the traditional justification for

fasting was the idea of detoxification

this idea that there's toxins in the

body and now we know that's

true they've actually been able to

that's controversial well it's actually

not controversial in the sense that you

can take a fat biopsy of a human

and break it down and you'll find

there's hundreds of different chemicals

there at various concentrations pcb

dioxin pesticide residues mercury

and the only thing that's controversial

is that oh well it doesn't matter

well it turns out it does matter it just

matters at different thresholds to

different people

and so this this idea of rapidly

mobilizing toxins during fasting

has been so uh well accepted by some

that they say that's the reason not to

fast because the body would rapidly

mobilize these fat soluble nutrients too

quickly and your body wouldn't know what

it's doing

and it would overload your system unless

you take their proprietary products

then apparently it's okay but what our

experience has been that there is a

rapid detoxification

we know that there are some studies

looking at they've even done total body

load measurements before and after

fasting and showed that pcb levels would

drop

um clinically you're not taking any

chemicals into your body

and you're allowing the liver and the

kidneys to just do what they do

right but it's more than just what you

would calculate

through burning 2000 calories of

internal fluids there's a selective and

rapid mobilization for example

with tumors let's say you have a breast

tumor

and you lose 10 percent of your body

weight

you would assume that you'd probably

lose 10 percent of your tumor weight but

what happens in

the for example in lymphoma you lose 100

of the tumor

so the body's preferentially mobilizing

some nutrient stores

versus others and it seems to be able to

do that in inverse proportion of the

value of those

tissues to the body right so it's

getting the visceral fat which we think

isn't probably healthful fat

before it's mobilizing adipose fat and

certainly before it's getting to

critical nerve tissues and other things

that are preserved the body has an

intelligence where it's unwinding itself

and what we're suggesting is

it appears that both endogenous and

exogenous toxins are preferentially

mobilized in water only fasting

at a much more powerful rate than they

are saying when you're going on a

healthy diet

and lifestyle and that may be a way a

justification for

trying to facilitate and speed this

process

there's also the effect on enzymatic

induction think about athletes

one of the things of being a trained

athlete is you induce for example

glycogenolytic enzyme systems you get

better at mobilizing glycogen stores and

you know this whole business of carb

loading and trying to increase

uh glycogen storage so you have more to

pull on so that you don't hit the wall

so quickly when you're running that

marathon or whatever you get through

that process

though that isn't induced with

persistent exercise

the same enzymatic production for

glycogen for

what balitic enzymes for a protein for

gluconeogenesis

enzyme systems is induced during fasting

because you have to mobilize

all your glycogen stores you're entering

the chamber you're taking that battery

and draining it all the way down

and and it's suggested that not only do

you induce

improved efficiency of enzyme systems

but they persist

after fasting which is just like you get

better and better at exercising every

time you do it

you get better and better at fasting

every time you do it which is perhaps

one of the justifications for

intermittent fasting if you fast 16

hours every day

and you limit your feeding window to an

eight hour window you may be inducing

some changes in that

even that limited fast that 16 hour fast

day after day after week after month

cumulatively

that may have a very profound effect on

body physiology and that's one of the

suggestions that's being made by those

advocating

intermittent fasting or short periods of

fasting that cumulatively may be

well when you do a long term fast this

is a

huge impact and now this is some of the

stuff we're working with people like

luigi fontana from washington university

where they're looking at changes in

microbiome

changes in whole body composition

changes in these

these various exotic biomarkers and what

happens in short-term and long-term

fasting

nobody knows yet because we're really

the only people doing

and monitoring long-term water only

fasting and its physiological effects

so this is all virgin data and very

exciting but what we can see clinically

is that

when you induce changes with exercise or

you induce changes with fasting they're

often

the same changes if you look for example

exercise people that

exercise two rats in a cage genetically

identical give one rat an exercise wheel

and the other not

everything else is equal the rats with

the exercise wheel

one they'll use it and number two they

don't get alzheimer's disease and

dementia

and they said well why why does exercise

prevent how does exercise prevent

dementia

and they look at those rats and they

find out that bdnf brain derived

neurotrophic factor

is dramatically higher and rats that get

their exercise

lower and those that don't the ones that

don't much more vulnerable to

alzheimer's

well bdnf it turns out the precursor to

that is beta-hydroxybutyric acid which

is the fatty acid that your brain is

preferentially mobilizing during water

only fasting

bdnf goes up with water fasting just

like it does in

exercise glycogen mobilizing enzymes go

up and exercise just like they do in

fasting

in fact all of the biomarkers that we've

been able to look at that are improved

with exercise

improve with fasting which is weird

because you think wait a second

exercise you're up vigorously running

around inducing all these changes

fasting you're sitting around we don't

even let you exercise much you maybe can

do a little yoga

how is it that they would do the same

thing to the body but when you think

about it

exercise and fasting are both reversing

the consequences of dietary excess

when you exercise vigorously when you

fast you're undoing the consequence of

diatrixes

i'm not surprised at all that fasting

induces the same kind of bio changes

that we see with exercise

in fact for us it's saving a lot of time

because we just look at all that fast

exercise literature

and start looking for the things they've

discovered and seeing how much of it's

mimicking

mimicked with fasting um i think that

both of these processes fasting and

exercise

share a common biological benefit

and that's why we're seeing the

biomarkers changing with both

that is crazy the other thing that

happens is insulin insulin is the

hormone that drives sugar from the

bloodstream

into the cells where it's needed to burn

so if you look at type 2 diabetics you

might assume mistakenly that they don't

have enough insulin

they have plenty of insulin they have

more insulin it doesn't work

because there's insulin resistance

there's resistance to the insulin

carrying out its function

so what drug can you take that reverses

insulin resistance

there isn't any there's drugs that will

force sugar bond the cell and they have

all kinds of side effects

what can you do to reduce insulin

resistance well you could exercise

you know that helps weight loss healthy

diet

um you can fast fasting has a profound

effect on insulin resistance in fact

as much as 80 percent of our type 2

diabetics can achieve normal blood sugar

levels without medication

and if they're willing to continue to do

the diet and the exercise they can often

sustain those results now you might say

well couldn't they do that with just

diet and exercise

absolutely many diabetics that are able

to make aggressive diet lifestyle

changes over enough time are successful

at resolving and reversing their

diabetes but it's difficult for people

that aren't able to do it on their own

that's where we would use

the next level of support and

intervention which is fasting it can

also be a little tricky

unwinding the medications and all that

kind of stuff so you know doing whatever

it is whether it's feeding or fasting in

conjunction with doctors that are

able to be supportive and that have an

expectation of you getting well is

important now think about it

if you go to a doctor and you've lost

weight

does the doctor assume you've adopted a

healthy diet

no they assume you've

got an eating disorder you're a drug

addict or you're dying of cancer

you know that's the differential colon

cancer eating disorder

drug addiction because many doctors have

never had an experience of a diabetic

getting well i gave a lecture

this year in texas at a medical

conference

for physicians who specialize in

diabetes so there's 250 people there

what are they serving them pulled pork

sandwiches chocolate cake

you know most of them are overweight or

obese i do my presentation

i explain our results afterwards one of

the ducks comes up he's about maybe 70

80 pounds overweight

he says you know i've been in practice

25 years treating diabetics

i've never seen one get well he's never

had the experience of a single

patient recovering stabilizing his blood

sugar taking off medication

it's not part of the paradigm

how likely is he going to give

meaningful diet and lifestyle advice to

a patient when he

doesn't do it himself doesn't believe

doesn't even know

that it would work or even if you

thought it would work knows the

patient's not going to do it because

people don't make diet lifestyle changes

he's seen the literature

93 recidivism rate that that you know

you

is to ask people to make diet lifestyle

changes very difficult

so when you get up and you give a

presentation like that to

that type of audience what is the

receptivity to what you're saying

well in the past it was aggressively

negative

now it's actually becoming where at

least a percentage of the audience is

actually interested the way that we made

that contact was

one of the doctors that that runs the

residency training program came in

had his own experience wanted it for his

students and now

those second and third year residents

can rotate as part of their training

at the true north health center so they

can get the experience of actually doing

something that some of them have

never done before which is see these

patients get well

because under a conventional treatment

you don't get to do that and it turns

out there's some doctors that rings

their bell

they like the idea of patients getting

well and so they're willing to put the

extra time and energy and effort in

but if you're in a traditional system if

you're an hmo system and you're a

physician and you have to see 26 patient

contacts a day

do you think you have time to review

their history do an exam

write the prescriptions and then sit and

ch chat about them why they've got to

give up everything that they eat

for that no it's not set up for that

it's not set up for the accountability

that's required to

get somebody to maintain any kind of

lifestyle change protocol

anyway and i'm not sure many of them

even realize that it's

actually worth their time because

they've never actually seen it happen

before

so you know and of course the criticism

is well yeah but you're working with

special patients well that's true

we're working with the people that are

highly motivated self-selected willing

to make diet lifestyle changes

it is a self i'm not saying you can take

our advice give it to everybody and

everybody's just going to go

oh great whole plant food diet just what

i wanted that's not the reality

but for people that are willing and

interested they should at least have the

right

somebody should listen well you could go

on this diet and lifestyle

you know but it's a lot of work or you

can just take these pills and you'll be

sick forever

what do you want to do you know but they

don't even know that it's not i can

guarantee this physician i was talking

to never tells his patients well if you

did

radical and diet lifestyle changes you

could get i'll give you an example my

brother my brother's six years older so

we're raised together he's

slowly gaining weight his wife

adopts our diet comes in and fast

overcomes her own health issues

he's on a vegan program 15 years later

my brother's still eating chicken and

doing stuff and getting fatter and he's

got

he can't play volleyball anymore his

legs all swollen up

i you know i'm poking him but he he

won't do anything finally he calls me

from the hospital

he says alan i'm in the hospital i had a

heart attack

i said that's great he goes no no no you

don't hear

i had a heart attack i said i hurt you

best thing that could have happened so

he said oh they want to do a quadruple

bypass

and i said well talk to your surgeon ask

the surgeon says

if you do a bypass won't they plug up

again and search

yeah eventually but you know lasts

longer than stenson he says

what if i made radical diet and

lifestyle change

he said the surgeon laughed at him he

said mark

you're not gonna make diet and lifestyle

changes come on

checked himself out got on a whole plant

food sos free diet

lost the 50 pounds back to playing

volleyball past his stress test still

has his vessels

wow but my own brother it took yeah it's

willing and ability

it's just like in 12 step it's like it's

all about willingness

and pain is is the fulcrum for that

right when people are in a desperate

state or they've suffered

a you know a severe medical

you know trauma like that then they're

ready to actually

implement those kinds of changes short

of that it's very difficult and i think

that

speaks to the pessimism that most

practitioners have about the

you know the viability of advising

somebody to change their lifestyle

habits

absolutely i completely understand this

is amongst the most difficult thing you

can ask a patient to do

adopt a health promoting diet in a world

designed to make you fat sick and

miserable

not an easy task certainly not for

sissies

and in my brother's case you know he had

the advantage his wife my sister-in-law

already

doing the work of providing support to

the family with

healthy food and stuff but still

difficult

now i just saw him a few days it looks

great completely different person

do you think he's going to like oh no it

wasn't worth it you know no it's the

best thing he's ever done

fabulous so you you approach fasting

from a perspective

of of um weight management and also

disease prevention and reversal but

there's al also all this emerging

science around longevity and anti-aging

of course that's longo's you know

specific lens on this but

by dint of autophagy and all these other

you know like sort of you know

biomechanical systems that are affected

by fasting there's now this whole

world of research opening up around

prolonging life as a result of

this i actually think the people that

are going to turn out to get the most

benefit from fasting

this one in two week fast that we do

with healthy people is healthy people

healthy people that are looking to stay

healthy too for example to avoid

vulnerability of infectious disease to

avoid the problems that you know not

waiting like my brother did until he has

a heart attack but the people that are

willing to use it to prevent the

problems from beginning

and interestingly enough i've been

communicating with walter long ago

recently about doing a joint study where

we're going to use his

expertise and access

and our facility to do some look not

just at intermittent fasting

but long-term fasting and compare and

contrast and see what the very best bang

for the buck so to speak of is in terms

of

taking healthy people and helping them

stay that way we've got a study that's

planned for next year looking

specifically exotic biomarker changes

with these dietary changes with fasting

and then trying to differentiate

how much fasting how frequently what's

the right combination that's all

relatively new uh territory you know

there's other

impacts of fasting that are not as well

recognized for example

the gut you have a tunnel through your

body that starts your mouth and it goes

down your

esophagus and your stomach and your

intestinal tract and gets to the rectum

you've got a hole at one end and another

hole at the other end and digestion is

essentially shoving things in one hole

trying to push it out the other hole but

it's only the stuff that gets absorbed

the intestinal mucosa that enters the

body

and that intestinal mucosa acts like a

screen

keeping flies out if the screen becomes

inflamed things can leak through that's

essentially what gut leakage is

and the things that cause inflammation

of the gut we believe are free radicals

that come from not just smoking or

drinking alcohol

you know smoking it's obvious you see

smoker's face cross-linked collagen

tissues we know that's

cross-linkaging from the free radicals

from smoking it also affects the

animal lining of the blood vessels it's

my contention that cigarette smoking may

protect people from getting lung cancer

actually protects people well think

about it

eighty percent of smokers say that come

on eighty percent of smokers never get

lung cancer

and twenty percent of smokers get cancer

and i believe it's because smoking kills

people from heart attacks before they

live long enough to grow their tumors

because of the damage to the animal

lining of vessels

cardiovascular disease may occur

slightly quicker than the

inevitable lung cancer would have and so

if you could make smoking more dangerous

and kill everybody from heart disease

perhaps they could advertise it as

cancer safe

okay now i understand

well you know they say statistics don't

lie that liars use statistics

and the fact is you can look at these

this data and twist it around

in a way that sounds good even though

it's completely ridiculous right smoking

damages animal lining it damage it

causes lung cancer

alcohol peroxidation of alcohol leads to

cirrhosis of the liver

why do you think people that drink a lot

of alcohol get fatty liver it's a scar

tissue that comes from the

detoxifying effect of that nasty alcohol

but today they're trying to tell you

that alcohol is health food

if you don't drink you should start that

resveratrol a little bit of

powerful antioxidant from this grape

skin is some justification for drinking

alcohol

they're trying to take oh it thins the

blood like aspirin does so if you're on

a greasy fatty slimy dead decaying flesh

diet and risk of clotting stroke

that thinning effect is going to reduce

your risk of dying from a clotting

stroke which might be true

but you're going to increase your risk

from a hemorrhagic stroke you're not

going to reduce your all-cause mortality

so the only reason to drink alcohol is

if you'd rather die of a bleeding stroke

than a clotting stroke maybe that's a

justification

you're a passionate man dr goldhammer

why is it that uh why 40 days or 21 days

like what is it about that extended

period that's so important

well what we do is we want to fast as

short as possible but long enough to get

the problem resolved

and so it's not like we're setting out

to try to beat jesus in the in fasting

duration

we don't go over 40 days generally

because if you keep the fasts

under 40 days there's few metabolic

complications as you start getting into

the really long fasts

the 60 days the 80 days the longer fast

that were done in the past

it's a much more delicate balance in

terms of electrolyte balance and other

things

and so the guy that i trained with alec

burton in australia used to do fast as

long as 100 days or longer

and i asked him by the time i got there

that was 36 years ago

he was no longer doing over 40 days as a

routine just

very occasionally and i said why and he

said well because of the sleep

deprivation

i said oh i didn't know that patients

had any more trouble

sleeping on long-term fascicles oh no

not the patients

me he had sleep deprivation he was just

worried too much yeah he'd worry too

much about it so he

he decided to keep it to 40 days because

we knew from experience that that was

the period of time you could go without

getting into more of the

complications and there's no electrolyte

supplementation or

vitamin and mineral supplementation

during this period you're looking at me

like

there's crazy water only fasting is the

complete abstinence of all substances

except pure water in an environment a

particular kind of water

we use fractionally steam distilled

water just because it's pure water

patients that are fasting get really

sensitive they won't tolerate municipal

contamination and other stuff they just

want pure water it's h2o it's just what

rainwater would be if the environment

wasn't polluted and so anytime you start

supplementing like for example there

were some long-term fasts done by

medical authorities that that killed

people

and the reason why is because they

supplemented what they would do is they

would supplement potassium if potassium

got low but

if you don't allow something to be the

rate limiting nutrient and you're not

measuring obviously everything that's

possible to be measured

you can get into depletion of something

else and they did you see evidence in

the literature of myocardial fibril

breakdown or other problems that you'll

not see

if you don't let the rate limiting

nutrients be rate limiting for example

potassium is pretty sensitive

if you don't supplement potassium and

you use potassium as a rate limiting

mineral all the downstream things that

you might not necessarily

know to measure are not likely to become

an issue so we use 3.0 potassium as

an arbitrary termination if it gets

below that then we modify the protocol

now it's not necessary to do that you

could push people further but if you use

that as a protocol we've proven you can

do it safely and effectively

over 20 000 consecutive times the reason

why we've been able to do this so

consistently is we have strict protocols

that we follow

that are time tested and proven and

supplementation of electrolytes although

you might think well potassium would

just give them some potassium but that's

an example

of letting arrogance exceed your

ignorance because you don't know what

the downturn

consequences of that is and so we're

using a protocol that we've been able to

test now it may be there's a better way

to do it and that's why we do research

and that's why we look at these things

or maybe

but until that's done i exercise caution

because the fact is this is a

you're in a physiologically vulnerable

state particularly in a person that's

coming off medications and

has a health history and you want to

make sure that everybody that walks in

walks out and that's why we use the

protocol we do

i would suspect also a psychologically

delicate state

walk me through the experience of this

journey that you see with the typical

patient i mean you're demanding a lot of

them

they're going through something they've

never done before like what is the

you know what it what is that like for

that individual when they're on day

three day 10

day 30 yeah so the first a few days of

fasting are actually the most difficult

because you're adapting off the

uh alpha glucose metabolism into a fat

metabolism so the brain is changing

fuels

from burning sugar to blurring largely

beta-hydroxybutyric acid which comes

from the ketone bodies from the fat

breakdown

so there's an adjustment there you're

detoxing oftentimes a lot although we've

learned to minimize

the effect of detoxification by getting

people to eat

a fruit vegetable only diet for a few

days before we start fasting

that's made a huge difference so they're

not coming off caffeine addiction at the

same moment that they're trying to adapt

to the fast

they've already gotten that stuff out of

their system and that's actually the

most difficult stuff

getting the cigarettes the caffeine the

alcohol all the meat fish foul eggs

dairy products processed foods

all the host of chemicals that people

are putting into their body with

over-the-counter prescription

medications so we've gone through a

wean-down process

and then we start fasting and their

mouth may coat up and taste like

something crawled in there and died

and they may have some skin rashes or

elimination they may get mucus

discharged they may get

some vivid dreams they may have aches

and pains and

they may have difficulties with all

kinds of adaptive process but they go

away

and then something else comes along and

then it goes away and then it becomes

very empowering

because they realize that they're able

to get through this process that just

because they had a headache doesn't mean

they have to rush out and try to

suppress those symptoms of the pill

it goes away the body's able to heal

itself and then

once you get into four or five days of

fasting the body's pretty well

acclimated to the fasting at this point

there's no hunger

people are going to cooking

demonstrations they're coming to

lectures they're going to the dining

room to socialize with people

they're five days ten days into a fast

you think oh my god you haven't eaten

for 10 days no just enjoy being there

that's not a problem um so then um

depending on the patient sometimes they

start getting relief they're pain

maybe for the first time in years the

pain that they've been suffering with

is going away and they may find that

you know some people have these chronic

debilitating problems

start resolving things start falling off

tumors start shrinking they start

getting excited like oh maybe there's

something to this idea of the body

healing itself

and you know we're monitoring these

patients to go through the process and

then at some point you get to the point

where

there's a limiting factor maybe their

electrolytes start to drop a little bit

or their energy is not

acceptable they're not able to maintain

accurate ambulation or maybe they've

just

that's how much time they've got because

you know some people have jobs and lives

and responsibilities so we only have so

much fun here for 40 days

so my life completely craters on the

outside but for many people this is an

intense epiphanic experience because

they've got this intense education that

they're really open to

they've seen these other people

sometimes what looks to them like

miracles going on

because they're seeing people that they

have no expectation that that could get

well

getting well they're experiencing

themselves sometimes for the first time

you know a sense of empowerment because

they're able to actually reverse these

processes that they were told nothing

could be done

learn to live with it what do they

expect at their age that's just how it

is

and now they're thinking wow if they

were wrong about that maybe they're

wrong about other things too

you start you know looking at all

aspects of their life the empowerment

aspect of it has got to be huge like

even if you set aside

all of these you know physical benefits

that are a result of this

simply the fact that they did something

that seems impossible very very

difficult

and get to the other side of it has to

you know sort of um make them feel like

okay now nothing is impossible like i

just did this thing that almost nobody

does now

now what's the next challenge that i can

tackle you know the idea is that many

people think that if you fast you die

they believe if they got on a plane in

new york and they were to fly all the

way to california

they would die over colorado except they

ate the peanuts

you know that the pretzels saved their

life what do you eat when you fly and

somehow if you fasted for

10 days or 20 days sometimes the idea

that you might have to skip a meal

because there was nothing healthy to eat

doesn't seem quite so overwhelming

there's definitely empowerment and i

think that

the other thing that happens is when you

start feeling what it feels like to be

you

instead of what you'd become that's very

important i think the same thing happens

to athletes

you know when people first start

exercising at first it's not pleasant

they got aches they got pains they

they're fatigued they're not they're not

getting the success they can't do what

they want

but as they do it they get to the point

where not only do they tolerate they're

not just doing it because they want to

you know maintain the weight or get the

figure or whatever it they're doing is

they start realizing they're getting

real intrinsic benefit

from engaging in this consistent

activity and now they don't want to give

it up

and i think the same thing happens when

people really get into a healthy

lifestyle yeah they're really exhausted

they don't want to go give it up and

feel like everybody else feels because

of some greasy slimy convenient food

they're willing to pay the price of

trying to do the planning and do what it

takes to try to ensure that they can get

their needs met just like i think people

that get into a regular exercise regime

realize that now this is so beneficial

they will literally structure their

schedules around making sure that that's

an important part of their activity

and the same thing happens with sleep

when you realize how important sleep is

to health and maintenance and energy you

start prioritizing that

and you don't compromise your sleep you

don't compromise your exercise

and hopefully you don't you learn to not

compromise your time lifestyle i tell

people

here's what you need to do first get

enough sleep because it's your most

critical activity

then engage in regular exercise so you

can dissipate the tension you can

build fitness and have the time to

prepare and eat healthy food if there

happens to be any time left well fine

you go to work

[Laughter]

um let's talk about the uh

the food part of all of this so uh

well first of all does anybody freak out

in the middle of this and

flee like i can't handle it like there

has to be some people that just

psychologically can't handle it you'd be

surprised by the time people come to the

trunk health center they're pretty well

vetted

they've gone through some screening

we've evaluated their history they're

usually pretty motivated

most of the time the only way they find

out about us is some doctor or somebody

they know is referring to us to begin

with yeah

and you know it's like you're not going

to refer somebody that if you know

what's going on there

that's not going to be a good candidate

so there's a lot of filtration that goes

on

and so the exceptions that i've seen

i've had some patients that are coming

off

drugs like cocaine and other stuff that

don't last 12 hours you know because

they're just they're not really ready to

make the change

but as far as fleeing because the diet

no because the true north health center

is set up to meet people where they're

at

not everybody's ready to do vigorous

water only fast or should would it even

be appropriate so for those individuals

maybe we just do a healthy eating regime

and just eating the diet doing the

classes doing the yoga the meditation

is enough to induce significant changes

sometimes after they've been a while

they might say well you know maybe i'll

try a little intermittent fasting maybe

i'll try a little bit of a fast and see

how i do with that and that's fine so

it's not like

everybody comes in and we lock them up

and that's it in fact

you know i tell a story when we first

moved to the new facility

one day a really large police officer

showed up at the door and he said he

wanted to interview one of my patients

and i asked him what did they do and

they said well

you know i don't need to know and i said

well if you want me to tell you if

they're here or not i need to know you

know what the issue is and he said okay

we got a complaint and the complaint was

from this patient's relatives and they

said they were that the patient was

being held against their will

by religious cultists and being starved

to death to go to be with jesus

[Laughter]

and i thought i'd say like the person's

not here involuntarily and you know i

got into i said fine

i'll let you interfere but first would

you like a nice tall cup of kool-aid

uh-huh right and dr lyle says that when

a police officer puts

relishing in your role as a cult leader

he is not comfortable

and i'm not to speak to authorities

anymore but that's you know i'm thinking

it's an obvious joke because kool-aid is

full of sugar where would you serve that

at the trump health center

well i know it's funny the reality is

that today it's not as much of an issue

because now the idea of fasting doesn't

yeah it's quite so much

it's in the cream now it's not the jim

jones kind of you know

perception right so are you still the

only

medically supervised clinic that's doing

this well you know i'm really excited

because i just visited yesterday

one of our doctors that trained with us

nathan gerschfeldt is running a facility

here in the los angeles area and he's

it's beautiful i went to see his

uh facility and it's absolutely

beautiful and for anybody that uh

you know and also we have another doctor

uh

dr ewan in ohio that's opened up a small

facility

is doing really well i've gotten

excellent feedback from people we have

other doctors that we train we have an

intern residential training program

and those schools i mentioned texas a m

there's other medical schools

the naturopathic professions uh

graduates can come and spend a year as

an as a resident

doing a rotation at the triumph health

center the chiropractors often come and

spend three months

as part of their training at the truman

health center and those doctors were

hoping to open up more facilities around

the country

and we make uh people that contact our

website can get

access to whoever the local right

fasting supervisors are we're happy to

provide that

uh information and it's really exciting

to see these guys

not only learning how to do it but

actually figuring out how to get these

places open and offer affordable care to

people

and you know the thing uh that it's

always gratifying to see the clinical

results that they're seeing because it's

really a hard

thing to do in an outpatient practice

yeah unless you can control a person's

environment

it's hard to really induce these kinds

of profound changes

it's got to be incredibly gratifying as

a medical practitioner to see

such dramatic results well i think

that's one of the reasons we've been

successful we have a dozen clinicians

now with the truman thousand we have

five medical doctors we've got

osteopathy chiropractic naturopathy

all represented and these doctors once

they come they often are with us

their entire career in fact dr clapper

just retired

after nine years at triathlon we joke

that we're like the firm

you know once they start yeah and but

it's because they like the low

patient intensity in others they're not

having to see high volumes of patients

so they're spending a lot of time with a

few people instead of a little time with

a lot

they like the the center set up where

the doctor's able actually to get all

that intense education done

without it coming out of the visit time

that they can spend the visit time

really working with a patient's specific

needs

and they like the idea that people get

well

and so the combination of that allows us

to keep the doctors even though they

probably work harder for less with us

than they would if they went off and

worked for the local hmo or whatever it

is that it's enough gratification and

enough benefit

that those doctors really like working

at treatment health

and what that what is the kind of

current

relationship that you have with the

conventional you know medical

establishment like how are they

perceiving what you're doing well it's

been a revolution actually it's been

amazing change because when dr sultana

who's been with us now about 20 years

came the first thing we did is we got

him to take a job

with the local hospital as an urgent

care doctor

and so he became known to the medical

staff there and the nurses and he's such

a wonderful doctor they loved him

and so that allowed us to have a good

relationship with the immediate we have

a

trauma center you know just a mile away

and so

some of their nurses or patients of ours

we provide

chiropractic support to the nurses at

that hospital the uh some of the

hospitalists

purchased their food through our

outpatient deli so we have a good

working relationship

and now that they're seeing some of our

referral

uh patients that we're doing for

diagnostic workups and people getting

well

that's really helped too because they're

not used to seeing people actually

recover

and so today it's completely different

than it was

20 years ago where we were seen as some

kind of you know

crazy people now i think they see it as

a little bit

odd and different but at least for

people that have whatever it is they see

get well

acceptable right right and they know

we're well intentioned the other thing

that's made a big difference is we've

published a number of papers in

peer-reviewed medical literature

including on the safety of fasting the

effect of fasting on high blood pressure

we've recently finished a study with the

mayo clinic looking at primary

prevention of stroke

that's in review right now in a major

journal we're hoping that we'll get

positive uh publication of that here in

the next couple weeks

we've done a study with luigi fontana

from washington university looking at

biomarker changes in the gut microbiome

before and after fasting right we have a

couple other studies that we're

enrolling in right now so now we're

getting some affiliations with some of

these major players like

um walter longo which is going to allow

us to get into journals that we might

not otherwise have been able to access

because of the power that these guys

bring yeah his credibility and his

pedigree i would imagine is very helpful

oh he's done unbelievable just fabulous

work and he's a wonderful guy

yeah you know we're so fortunate that

you know we've got these kind of people

out there

trailblazing into the scientific and

medical literature

because as clinicians and particularly

alternative health clinicians we're not

always viewed

uh with the most open uh mindedness from

much of the medical profession yeah

well the other big piece here is the

diet and nutrition piece

i would suspect that a lot of people

come to true north because they saw

you and they saw those case studies

portrayed in

in what the health the documentary we

all saw

those individuals they're kind of before

and after stories that were very

dramatic

um and hardly criticized

and heavily yeah controversial for sure

we have uh people telling us i see

there's stuff on the internet that says

those people were all paid actors

you know reverse photoshop and i've seen

some unbelievable

kip and keegan just kind of grabbed them

randomly right like how did that happen

they they showed up and wanted to do the

film so we did some interviews then they

came back and they said well they've

decided they wanted a little more

can we just interview some of your

patients and they went out to the

courtyard whoever happened to be

standing around yeah i wish we could

have cherry-picked it and stuff because

there was that one guy he had all his

pills you know he went through all of

his medications and all that kind of

stuff

is that type of experience is pretty

routine yeah true north we see

what looks like miracles it's not

miracles at all it's just getting rid of

the crappy diet instituting a whole

plant food sos free diet and using

fasting effectively

you know that's the reality um and i

know they've got a new movie coming out

and i know they've done

a bit of filming with us as well also

i'm very excited that i think it's

september netflix decided to do a

special on wellness

oh they did and one of their six shows

was filmed at the true north health

center oh wow

and it's on fasting who's behind that do

you know

um i can't i don't recall that yeah who

the

producer and what else but it's i know

it's purchased by netflix

it's a netflix original oh that's cool

you know so i know it's gonna get pushed

out

i had john lewis in here a couple weeks

ago

um who's working with with keegan on the

hungry for justice project and so i've

been behind the scenes kind of looking

at

what they're doing that's going to be a

really big one i imagine it'll be very

controversial and probably piss a lot of

people off i'm really excited to see it

keegan

that's that's keegan's specialty yeah

but all right so the food part um the

the protocol

that you're that you recommend and that

you

you apply with your patients is you know

owes its

debt of legacy to caldwell esselstyn

and you know a whole legion of those

pioneering doctors who have put

the whole food plant-based diet onto the

forefront of public awareness we've seen

it

grow in adoption and recognition

and we're seeing the benefits of that i

think it's still

you know um somewhat controversial

there's all these diet wars with the

loaf the low carb people and now ketosis

and all of that so that's kind of all

kind of going on in the background here

but

maybe you know you can just speak to why

you believe so strongly

in a whole food plant-based diet well

the exclusively whole plant food diet i

think is

has a lot of support whether it's john

mcdougall or esselstyn

or you mentioned one of my heroes um t

colin campbell

you know just a brilliant guy so they

all make a very compelling case that

people should eat a whole

plant food diet and essentially you call

it a whole plant food diet i notice that

you always do that instead of calling it

a whole food plant-based

diet what's the reason for that so i

want a whole i want whole plant food

diet because a plant-based diet implies

that yeah

it's based on plants but it allows room

for it allows flexibility interesting

and so i think that dr mcdougall and dr

campbell would argue that we want to

have as broad a diet as possible to

attract as many people as possible

because remember most people in the

vegan vegetarian movement

are not just interested only in health

but actually dominantly in animal rights

moral ethical and spiritual reasons

environmental impact

and so their argument is well maybe it

doesn't have to be mr perfect you know

diet if it encompasses a broader range

of people we'll get more people doing it

we'll save the planet we'll save the

animals we'll go to heaven whatever it

is

and i don't disagree with any of that

that's that's great but when it comes to

maximizing health

if a person's overweight wants to lose

weight if a person has heart disease

diabetes if they've got cancer

or if they're healthy and their goal is

to live the maximum healthy life

possible i believe

the evidence supports the idea of an

exclusively whole plant food diet

that's free of sos sos is the

international symbol of danger

and it stands for salt oil and sugar now

can you have a little salt and still be

healthy yes

just like sometimes people can have a

beer and not be a drunk

but for my patient population which is

either sick people that want to get well

or the healthy people that really want

to maximize their health

a whole plant food sos free diet i

believe will prove

to be the most health promoting diet out

there now is it the best diet for

society to add

no i'm not arguing that i'm so grateful

that people like dr campbell and dr

esselstyn and dr mcdougall are out there

educating the world i'm not that nice of

a person i'm only interested in my

patient

and the and the maximizing the people

that that's in front of me and the

people that i see are often sick or

healthy and want to stay that way

and so i believe that is the best advice

for them now does that mean somebody

can't have a more flexible diet and

still be healthy

of course they can and if it's working

for you that's great i'm not going to

argue with it

but if you're struggling don't pretend

that there's not another level of

compliance that's possible

and i suggest people try it this way

because they might find out you know

they don't miss all that salty sugary

stuff anyway and they

may be just as happy and if not that's

fine if you can modify the diet maintain

the numbers not screw up our outcome

data

you know i'm not a policeman i'm just

trying to give you the best advice i can

but i i do believe i'm right now if it

turns out i'm wrong

and the evidence supports that you're

better off having more than 1500

milligrams of sodium a day because

that's an important reason for some

reason

then i'll change my recommendation okay

i'm recommending what i'm recommending

based on the combination of 36 years of

clinical experience watching people get

well

and my ability to interpret the

scientific literature

and the and the staff that we have at

the true north health foundation that

are doing the same

and so up till now a lot of the stuff

that we used to advocate

was criticized heavily most of the stuff

that we've been advocating if you go

back for 36 years has been

accepted as reasonable the two things

that we do that are still controversial

is recommend a lower sodium intake than

some of our colleagues

by in this type of diet ends up having

about a gram of sodium in it

naturally and water only fasting and i

believe

in both cases the data is going to prove

we're right

what do you say to the the low-carb

proponent who

tells you uh listen you know we need

some of these oils in our diet you know

healthy

olive oil has its place we've seen that

in the mediterranean diet

we've had tremendous results with people

losing weight and

maintaining their weight and reversing a

whole litany of conditions so

you know why not just go that route like

what when you have to

measure those two protocols against each

other how do you

well there's a number of protocols

you're actually covering there yeah like

for example these things get conflated

in this conversation

the uh the dead dr atkins diet the high

protein high fat diets they'll argue

what we got weight loss i don't disagree

and a lot of times what's really good

for short-term benefit isn't necessarily

the same thing that's good for long-term

outcome

same thing in athletics you can inject

antibiotic steroids and you can get some

pretty powerful short-term effects but

then you get the testicular atrophy and

you get cancer and die and it's not so

good in the long run

so what's good for short-term weight

loss isn't necessarily the same thing as

what's good for long-term health support

and i don't disagree that a lot of these

programs are effective for weight loss

heck

you can cut the hip off at the leg and

lose 40 pounds overnight

now it may not be you know a net benefit

to you

but just because you want instant weight

loss there's lots of things you can do

as far as the other alternatives which

is maybe a higher fat low protein

diet in inducing a ketogenic state that

may very well have some short-term

benefits it may even have some

long-term benefits but when you compare

the results that we see clinically

in the conditions that we treat there's

nothing i've seen that's worked better

than exclusively whole plant food sos

free diet

and i have the luxury of having patients

living with me sometimes for a period of

a year or more

so we're able to really test the diet

and see

what it takes for them to actually

recover their health that's one of the

downsides of living with your patients

because if they don't get well

who can you blame right they've been

with you we've got wow you have people

stay

with you for a whole year sometimes

longer than a year i've got people there

now

longer well sometimes we've had people

checked in that we're being sent to the

nursing home

we came as the alternative and then they

get well and go home and it was you know

two thousand a month less staying with

us then at the nursing home so

you know for those individuals it was an

economic benefit

other people come in because they're

gonna do long-term fasting long-term

recovery

they've got serious health problems

sometimes it takes a couple months just

to get people off all their drugs

some people come in because they don't

feel comfortable living freely

because they've got some issues with

food and eating they want to live in a

controlled setting until they really get

it down

so they feel comfortable going out there

and same thing true with alcoholics some

people you say quit drinking and they

quit

some people go to outpatient treatment

they do great some people do 30 day

programs

some people do 90 day programs some

people you know

have to do longer yeah so you have to

make it to

meet the patient's need so i'll tell you

a funny thing

we have this phone coaching thing i told

you about and so one of our doctors uh

dr chili veras does a lot of phone

coaching with people

and so people would call upon me and we

decide okay they need to come in and

fast but it's a couple months before we

have an opening so i say why don't you

work with dr varess in the meantime

and when you come in you won't have to

be here so long you'll and then they go

and get well

and it's happening a lot i'm giving her

a hard time you got him well before he

could come here we couldn't even screw

up our study or our documentation

they're all well you know

but it's okay how many how many beds do

you have though you probably are at

capacity most of the time yeah we have

yeah we can handle about 70

people so we're right we're going to run

about two months or so out

you know it was interesting after the

covet thing

all of our foreign people had to cancel

and that's 15 of our people we had 50

people who couldn't get in

but we had so many more local people

because now people can work from home

so some people that wanted to come in

but they you know they couldn't

afford to miss work during the very time

so they're working so

some people are able to come in and do a

fast but then they can during recovery

they can go back to working remotely

because we have excellent wi-fi

bandwidth and all that stuff

so you know those patients are able to

actually function

you know in a controlled setting but not

necessarily miss work

um sometimes we have situations where

they've got kids

well now we have like suites that people

book family units so they may come into

fast but they can have their family

there

and so the family learns to eat good

food and there's no cooking you know

and so there's lots of different ways to

adapt to people's needs depending on

what it is they're really wanting to

accomplish

our limiting factor is we have to have

highly motivated people that really want

to pay the price to get well

yeah and if that's the determining

factor in success i mean it's so similar

to the recovery community i mean you

have

outpatient you know situations you have

input i mean i did inpatient for 100

days and

you know now i think i should have

stayed longer like it was it was

it had such a dramatic i mean it saved

my life and it

gave me a new life but i needed that

much time and then

you know a lot of people from that

experience and i work with people today

who

are in halfway houses or you know sober

living facilities there are all these

transitionary

scenarios that are available to people

to help them

not just create these new habits and and

and you know build a new foundation for

their life but you need that support

system in place in order for it to

really

lock in so that they can carry it out in

the world

in a permanent way you know we have a

because we're a 501c3 nonprofit research

driven organization our price pro

is quite modest our rights are the same

as they were 12 years ago 149

chef aj goes she's like it's cheaper for

me

to go to hotel we actually have

businessmen sometimes they'll choose to

stay with us when they're on the road

because they get their meals and

it's cheaper than the doubletree you

know what i mean so you need to charge

more

well no the idea is or you need more

beds or i don't know we want to keep the

price point as low as possible

there's a reason we haven't raised rates

in the last 12 years is because

people need to stay long enough to get

well they need to be able to come back

if they need support

and by keeping as low rate as possible

it broadens the

number of people that can actually

afford to insurance cover it the

insurance will cover their medical exam

the all the traditional

medical management things not the part

where you get well that of course

wouldn't be part of health insurance the

daily rate at the center the 149

but if to seeing the medical doctor

getting any scan or lab that would be

treated just like it would any

insurance what is interesting though

people that have medical savings

accounts

that covers the state at the center

fully because you are

temporarily disabled you are under

direct medical supervision you are being

treated in an inpatient

basis it seems like with the explosion

in the rates of obesity and diabetes and

all of these

you know chronic lifestyle ailments that

are

debilitating millions of people every

year and escalating at a shocking rate

that there would be clinics like this in

every city available to people because

it really is

an opportunity for you to reboot and

reframe your relationship

to the habits and the foods that you're

eating that are

creating these problems in the first

place otherwise you just become

a ward of the pharmaceutical industry

well i hope you're correct i hope you're

predicting just exactly what we're

starting to see new facilities opening

but you also have to remember

any place that makes you give up coffee

alcohol

tobacco meat fish foul

eggs dairy products oil salt sugar yeah

and maybe consider fasting

i mean that's a tough yeah yeah you know

i have patients that their friends say

well what do you go there too fast just

come you can come to my garage i'll give

you the hose you don't

want to charge anything yeah that is

true

although you know i think when people

are looking at that quadruple bypass

you know other those options don't seem

so

onerous anymore and i think the thing is

we've we've arrived at this cultural

moment where

anything uncomfortable is seen as you

know

optional in our lives right we're so

disconnected from

challenge and stepping outside of our

comfort zones and to tell somebody look

you've gotta

you know overhaul everything that you're

doing is

a difficult message it's it's a very

undigestable message

but at the same time like i know in my

own experience and look you've done this

with 20

000 people to get those people through

those uncomfortable weeks and have them

arrive on the other side where you know

you can pull the curtains open and the

sun shines in

and suddenly those foods they thought

were unpalatable actually taste good

their cravings have changed they

actually look forward to

their meals with these you know plant

foods i mean that's a

miraculous thing that i just wish more

people could discover in their lives

yeah it's it is a miraculous thing yeah

and i think

for the specific highly motivated

self-selected people that we treat

uh we have a really high satisfaction

ratio and we're still here which is kind

of a miracle in itself just the idea of

it

and you do have a really high rate of

people that maintain these these

practices you know we're interested how

closely do you

tabs do you keep on people we're doing

uh a uh adherent study

starting in january of next year which

is designed to do long-term tracking of

very carefully in terms of patient

actual dietary compliance it's actually

difficult research to do

in terms of monitoring specifically what

people are consuming and not consuming

but we've actually designed a study

that's going to let us do some really

long-term tracking of people because

what we're trying to find out is how

strict you have to be to get the best

ratio of return do you have to be as

strict as we say or could you be more

flexible like many of our colleagues

recommend programs

right problem we have with them is their

recidivism rates their

theory is that by being more flexible

with the diet you'll get more people in

our theory is by being strict with the

diet you can keep more people

in i can't prove that yet because that

data hasn't been done we did just

recently though do a retrospective

analysis

of 1100 people that had been to the

center and that had experienced

10 or more of weight loss looking at

what people had sustained that magnitude

of weight loss over a period of a year

and it was over 30 percent

and so although that means a lot of

people didn't maintain the full

magnitude of weight loss that doesn't

mean that they haven't improved their

overall health but just the fact that

people can do that and sustain that

and as much as a third of those people

apparently are able to that's to me very

encouraging

because under conventional treatment

weight loss is around 93 to 97

failure rate no matter what wow gastric

bypass when you look at who sustains

long-term weight loss what kind of

health benefits very poor

it's so poor that most physicians say

yeah it's not even worthwhile just let

them be fat

forget about it right um what is the

study

that you'd like to see done whether with

respect to fasting or

or eating a whole plant food diet like

what what

where's the gap right now well the real

gap is

looking at what effect on healthy people

does healthy living have and

what effect on healthy people does

periodic fasting have in terms of

preventing them from ultimately getting

debility

and that's why we're doing what we call

this navigator study where we're going

to enroll a large number of people

and track them the rest of their life

and so the goal is to be able to

demonstrate now it'll take us a while

you know until they reach that that

point uh and it's particularly a problem

because once people adopt this diet and

lifestyle habits they tend to live a lot

longer my mother when she turned 92

years old

she used to get all kinds of trouble

from her friends because her son's crazy

diet that she's fine but at 92 she

realized she had outlived all

52 of her lifelong friends they were all

dead

and she said she realized here she was

92 years old

everybody was gone and she said alan you

need to warn your patients

if they're going to eat this kind of

diet make younger friends

much younger because she said even the

people 10 years younger

didn't want to play bridge and do stuff

they were too busy suffering with their

consequences

so the bottom line is that it's likely

that if you avoid the causes of

premature death

you know you're still going to die

you're going to reach your genetic

potential someday

but the period of debility may be

dramatically reduced

so you have to be prepared to live a

fully functional life up until you reach

your genetic potential

and not count on vegetating in some

nursing home waiting for people to

change your diaper for the last 10 years

of your life

i like that you got your mom on board

well my mom and my father my father

actually when he when i just started

practice was having transient

shaming attacks had had to retire from

teaching because of cognitive decline

and he was really suffering he came in

and was probably one of my most diligent

patients

did the fasting recovered his health and

20 years later he helped edit the

pleasure trap

oh wow so you know he was cool he was

really good to see how both my

my mother and father uh you know got it

started later in life because

i didn't know you know yeah early enough

but uh and both ended up doing uh uh

doing really well

so that was good and good lives and good

deaths

deaths in close proximity to the end of

their life where

that's what it's about i think it's an

important issue it's oftentimes not

really addressed

that how valuable is this is to spend

the last eight years of your life

however long that's going to be

fully functional capable of taking care

of yourself and what percentage of

health care do we expend

on treating people where we don't affect

their all-cause mortality and we may not

even be improving the quality of their

life

but we're basically just fostering the

consequences of poor dietary choices

and oftentimes because people don't even

realize

that what they're doing is killing

themselves with their fork and knife

yeah and warehousing them through those

later years where

they're so uh debilitated that the

quality of life is de minimis at that

point

so we talk a lot about longevity how how

how many years are you going to live but

it's really about the quality of those

years

yeah healthy life expectancy to me is

even more important than life expectancy

an interesting life expectancy for the

first time is actually starting to drop

healthy life expectancy the number of

years you spend fully functional

that should be i believe the target and

that's what i believe that

where fasting can have the greatest good

is in healthy people that use it

preventatively

to stay healthy in conjunction with a

diet sleep and exercise regime that's

health promoting

are there other cultures overseas where

fasting is more a part of

the kind of mainstream well if you look

in germany

modified fasting at least the book

entire clinic and others are

covered by the system and i think

there's a little bit more acceptance of

it water only fasting is still pretty

extreme yeah and i think it's up to us

to actually demonstrate that what we're

doing is not only safe which we've done

but it's effective and and i can't say

that that's been done there's not enough

research done

but that's why the true north health

foundation is excited we have a

laboratory now

we have an affiliated irb so human

subjects communities can be

approved by people that actually know

stuff about um fasting in fact dr

clapper is one of the uh professional

members of the

irb and um we have a research team dr

meyers our director of research

and others that we've now hired to be

able to actually conduct these trials

we've got these affiliations with

researchers around the world some of

these

big impact researchers like walter longo

so hopefully we'll be able to do some

meaningful research in the next couple

years

we have a great human subjects

laboratory at the 200th health center

we admit a thousand people a year for

fasting already we

already have all the mechanisms in place

to conduct the trial to collect the data

you know it's happening and so for me

it's 36 years waiting to get to this

point to where we can actually start

doing meaningful prospective studies

we're there now and we're ready to do it

and the proceeds from the true north

health center

fund the true north health foundation

and so we're not dependent on exogenous

grants in order to we thank goodness in

order to be able to fund our research

because we can do it internally

and and that's perhaps one of our

greatest successes is really pulling

that off that's why you don't see i

don't think a lot of clinical research

being done by other than

university-based facilities with all

their politics we're really a

freestanding independent

research facility that isn't dependent

or beholden to anybody

and you need to educate the next

generation of medical practitioners

which is exactly what dr clapper

treasure to humanity is doing in this

like third act of his career going

around and lecturing to young medical

students

absolutely that's cool and that's what

our internship in residency training is

all about yeah

so you only have 70 some odd beds right

not everybody can go to true north so

what is the recommendation like how do

you talk to the person who's listening

to this or watching this who's looking

to make some lifestyle changes but isn't

ready to

you know just get in their car and drive

up to northern california we'll share

with you for foreign coaching service is

really great they can go into our

website and get access to a doctor

right where they sit for under a hundred

dollars they can do a phone consultation

where all of their

records have been reviewed and worked

with a doctor in detail on an ongoing

basis

they can talk to me for free they can

call and i'll help at least point them

in the right direction

send them to a place that's closest to

them hook them up with the appropriate

doctor whatever it is they need to do

or they can read the books now get dr

campbell's

whole book and read it or china's study

look at dr

mcdougall's excellent books star

solutions the start solution is fabulous

um dr esselstyn's book wonderful i mean

we've got so many great resources now

from people that are out there doing a

really good job representing the

scientific literature accurately

in it but in a way that people can

understand and they're meaningful and

useful

our website everything we do is freely

available on our website

at truenorthhealth.com so they can go on

there there's video

in fact we're just about to launch our

own roku channel where all of our

content is going to be available

including our

lecture program our live lecture program

at the center so people have

access to that kind of education and

support obviously

you know nobody should do a water only

fast

without medical supervision but if

somebody

does want to start experimenting with

some intermittent fasting or some things

that they could do at home like how do

you

what's the kind of advice that you give

to that the first advice it's really

important that history exam and lab they

looked at just because

the medications particularly can really

be complicated even with intermittent

fasting

unless you take care of the medication

complications

you know you can get yourself into a

little bit of trouble so whoever's

prescribing that medication

at least needs to be discussed with a

lot of times they don't know anything

about diet they don't even know how to

get people off drugs

and so that's why i would suggest find a

local uh plant-based doctor or use one

of our phone coaches to at least make

sure

am i a good candidate for this and then

they can tell you look you'd be a good

candidate you might want to do vulture

longo's programming you might want to do

here's something you can do on your own

these are things that are reasonable the

problem is people are so screwed up

from long-term dietary abuse and

medication complications

that even simple things like we'll just

eat a good diet yes that's great

anybody can do that but you still may

need to keep into account that you might

have to modify the the pharmaceutical

preparations that you've been given

inappropriately

and what about um people that are that

are

moving in the direction of eating a more

whole plant-based diet what are some of

the

sort of psychological tools that they

can rely on

that would be helpful in making them

successful in that switch well one thing

i'd say is keep it to yourself

don't become you know born again

hygienist where you're trying to shove

down your beliefs and other people's

it because it doesn't work very well

you're just going to antagonize

everybody around you and make a lot of

stress

so you can set a good example but my

advice is only answer questions that are

asked directly don't be going around and

and trying to shove your belief systems

and everybody else but support is also

important right having some

accountability to somebody

seems to be effective yeah and that's

why i always encourage people to

to take advantage of you know around the

country now there

are doctors that aren't complete idiots

that are trying to encourage and

advocate support the plant-based

uh physicians et cetera so there are

resources available that's one of the

reasons i'm excited about this phone

coaching business because we can expand

that

uh broad you know all across the world

this is you know

automated systems are highly efficient

we're adding more doctors to the list

as the demand increases so that there

will be people

and resources available to people that

are serious about making these diet

lifestyle changes honestly for

relatively healthy people

all they got to do is start eating a

whole plant food diet and stop the rest

of it

for those of the you that struggle

making those changes

those are then you have to find the

appropriate support that you need and if

you can have even one friend

that they don't even have to do it they

could just be tolerate you doing it that

does make a difference

yeah so right now you i'm sure know the

statistics better than i do

but something like 70 percent

of americans are obese or overweight

childhood obesity rates are through the

roof

type 2 diabetes epidemic is what

30 of america whatever it is it's going

to be more tomorrow

right these these things are escalating

astronomically

and this really is you know covid

pandemic aside like this is that this is

a you know a health pandemic epidemic of

a different nature

that um needs to be addressed in new and

different ways what we're doing right

now

certainly is not working and the path

forward and what you have so

beautifully demonstrated through a

lifetime of work is

to show that agency plays a huge part

here and that we can

take better control of our health by

making some pretty basic

simple lifestyle changes that are rooted

in evidence-based

medicine and science that are proven to

work i mean 20 000 patients

over the years the a level of success

that you've experienced

the long-term success of these patients

speaks for itself and it's powerful man

and so

for somebody who's listening or watching

who feels stuck who feels like they

can't make that change who

is mired in the vicious cycle

of the pleasure trap to be able to give

people a lifeline and say it doesn't

have to be this way that there is hope

and there is a way out i think is

you know that's god's work that you're

doing yeah we're having fun

you know and uh you know it's

interesting the uh the uh

feedback from the pleasure trap has been

interesting because that book came out

uh

more than that it's been a long time but

actually the sales of the pleasure trap

now are actually

increasing so it's take that message is

a message maybe you've been a little bit

of ahead of its time

but now it seems like it's resonating

with a broader audience

and that uh that's been really

interesting to see we have a new book

that we're working on right now on

fasting that will be on or be done by

the end of the year so we're excited

about that

actually dr lyle is finally coming

towards the end of his book that he's

been working on

for a number of years is he in hawaii

he's on

a white right now he's on a writing

sequestration in hawaii right now and

he's not to come home until he finishes

the book so

i had dr greger in here the other day

and i think there

he is now out there they're all out

there writing books together yeah so i'm

really excited i've heard

20 of the chapters off dr last book and

it's brilliant and it's i'm really

excited

to have him put that out there because i

think that's going to be a whole nother

you know message and another angle

that's going to be really necessary and

very useful

cool final question that i ask all of my

medical professional guests if you were

suddenly in the position of being the

surgeon general

in charge of making policy decisions and

regulatory decisions about health in

america where do you start well what i

would say right now the most important

thing is

recognizing that we need to make our

people less vulnerable

to the various diseases whether it's

chronic diseases like heart disease and

diabetes

or the acute diseases like cova 19 we

need to make them

less vulnerable so we have to start

educating people up that health results

from health

living so we need to fight to improve

the diet and lifestyle habits of people

because honestly you're not going to

completely avoid exposure to every

infectious

agent that comes along and we're not

going to be able to escape

heart disease cancer and diabetes unless

we adopt

healthful habits so we should be

incentivizing encouraging intimidating

whatever it takes people

to adopt a health-promoting diet

lifestyle my opinion is that

is close to a whole plant food sos free

diet with regular sleep and prioritized

regular exercise and prioritized sleep

as you can get that that's what's going

to result in healthy living

diet sleep exercise you do that you'll

do more than all the other

job boning that's taking place right now

powerful dr goldhamer thank you

my pleasure thank you for having me yeah

of course i appreciate it

thank you uh for sharing your powerful

testimony today

um if you want to learn more about dr

goldhamer and his works pick up the

pleasure trap book that he co-wrote with

doug lyle

and where is the best place to direct

people online to learn more about what

you're doing well if you go to

www.truenorthhealth.com

you'll get access to everything you need

if you want to learn specifically about

fasting

there's a website called fasting.org

which is a fast and compendium website

cool and i'll link all that up in the

show notes and

your phone's going to start ringing all

right

come back and talk to me again

[Music]

you