We live in an environment of abundance and it's responsible for the systematic overeating that people do that leads to the Obesity that leads the metabolic syndrome that leads to the vulnerability to infectious disease and The Chronic degenerative diseases the cardiovascular disease and many of the cancers 2/3 of people in industrialized societies are overweight or obese. If you're not fat you're abnormal if a person is overweight wants to lose weight if a person has heart disease diabetes,
At ease if they've got cancer or if they're healthy and their goal is to lift 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 will and sugar how long you're going to live in life may be largely dependent on genetics and left. 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 healthy life expectancy to me is even more important than life expectancy and interesting life expectancy for the first time is actually
He's 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. We're fasting and 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. That's dr. Alan goldhamer, and this is the ritual podcast.
The Rich Roll podcast.
Hey, what's up people? How goes it it is high Rich Roll welcome. When you hear the word Addiction what typically comes to mind. I don't know about you. But when I think about that, I think about mind-altering substances things like drugs prescriptions alcohol. Sometimes Behavior like gambling, but what's really not adequately embraced and
Cast in this conversation around addiction is food. But the reality is our hyper industrialized culture is entrenched in an epidemic of food addiction and it's something that I think it's fueled by this ever-increasing array of Highly processed foods that are scientifically designed with just the right amount of sugar salt and fat to hijack our nervous system our hormonal response to hook.
Gus to enslave us and ultimately over time make us sick and subsequently a ward of the pharmaceutical industry. Meanwhile we've completely normalized this so much so that right now in the United States more than two-thirds of adults are overweight or obese, which is absolutely insane. It's bananas and it's no question that dietary excess makes us vulnerable to a Litany of
Says including covid and yet for a variety of reasons not the least of which is a highly addictive nature of these foods that are driving compulsivity millions of people find it extremely difficult. If not downright impossible to change their habits to just stop. So, how do we do that? How do we stop? How do we transition to a healthy diet in a sustainable way? How do we
we modify Behavior to eat only to satiation? Well, according to today's guest a great place to start perhaps the best way to start is with a fast now, I'm not talking about intermittent fasting. I'm not talking about valter. Longo is fasting mimicking diet. I'm talking about what I think everyone would agree would be classified as pretty hardcore fasting.
A pioneer as well as an iconoclast in his field. Dr. Alan goldhamer is the founder of True North Health Center one of the first and largest facilities in the world that specializes in medically supervised water only fasting among many other health services. And when I say fasting again, I'm not talking about a day or a couple days. I'm talking about nothing but water for 28 days and often upwards of 40 days.
It sounds nuts even with medical supervision. This is something that sounds like scary quackery. But here's the crazy thing over the last couple decades. Dr. Goldhamer has successfully supervised the fasts of thousands of patients something like 20,000 people and has really helped them radically transform their lives from ditching medication to overcoming common diseases such as hypertension diabetes autoimmune.
Immune diseases and many others not to mention breaking these addictions to unhealthy eating habits. This guy is a true Paradigm breaker. This is a fascinating and also a challenging conversation that I think is going to leave you questioning and rethinking the power of the body to restore itself and the incredible power of healthy whole plant foods to heal. So if you're struggling with upping your game in this department, I would be
Remiss in not reminding you that we have created an incredibly powerful digital platform to make your plant forward food habits, which convenient affordable and delicious. It's called the plant power meal planner and it is a game changer for just a dollar ninety a week you get unlimited access to thousands of delicious nutritious easy to prepare plant based recipes. Everything is Thoroughly customized based on your specific preferences with access to our team of experienced nutrition coaches. Seven days a week it also
Eclis creates simple grocery list based on selected recipes and it even integrates with grocery delivery in most urban areas. So basically everything you need to eat the way you deserve magically arrives at your doorstep. So to learn more and sign up visit meals Rich Roll.com or click meal planner on the top of any page on my website Rich Roll.com because as you will soon hear with dr. goldhamer who confirms this one of the most important decisions we make every day is what we put in our
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Roll or use the code role at checkout. That's fo you are SI G. M-- ATI c.com / role to receive 10% off your order. All righty, dr. Goldhamer his work and Studies have appeared in countless medical journals, including the international Journal of disease reversal and prevention and many more you might have caught him in the documentary what the health some of his patients were depicted in that film getting off their meds, or maybe
you stumbled across his book the pleasure trap, which is a really great powerful primer on why unhealthy eating habits are so hard to break. He co-authored that book with dr. Doug Lyall. I highly suggest checking that out if you haven't already. So today's conversation is of course about water fasting everything water fasting specifically medically supervised water fasting and it's mind-blowing whole body systemic benefits and the power it has to stop reverse and even prevent disease.
We talked about the origins of fasting a practice that dates back thousands of years across many cultures and religious traditions. We talked about how fasting can create a foundation a table Raza to then make the transition to a sustainable healthy Whole Food plant diet and why dr. Goldhamer Advocates what he calls an SOS or very low salt oil and sugar version of that diet, but more than anything. This is
About our overall uncomfortable relationship with food how most of us don't realize we're killing ourselves with our fork and our knife how our food and our food culture is making us fat sick and frankly miserable and how almost all of us despite weight and health use on some level food as a powerful emotional crutch. I understand full well that dr. Goldhamer is controversial.
Hershel what he Advocates is a radical departure from our traditional Western industrial medical Paradigm, but he also makes a lot of sense and is patient results. I have several friends who have undergone his protocol speak for themselves final note, please. Please people do not attempt a water fast or any fast for that matter without medical supervision. That's said I give you dr. Alan goldhamer.
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.
I'm excited to talk to you. 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.
And as much in psychology as it is in nutrition science and Physiology and beneath all of that again, which I appreciate is the fact that there are some uncomfortable truths about about our relationship to food that is Promised in this vernacular around addiction and as somebody who is 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 you know, we're were 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 tightrope between old habits and new habits and bye-bye kind of
In all of this in those uncomfortable truths about our addictive relationship with food I think is really
powerful.
Well, the reality is, you know humans evolved in a very different environment than 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 winners. They got enough to eat. They
didn't get eaten. They live long enough to reproduce and our bodies and our minds were perfectly designed.
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 mmm 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.
He's 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've 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
A whole plant food diet and become an exercise program their differential diagnosis. Oh, this could be colon cancer eating disorder a drug addict
ethology eyes a healthy choice.
Well, the only experience they have of people losing weight and keeping it off is when they're 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 going to actually get well you go to a physician with most of the diseases of dietary exits the high blood pressure the
He's 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.
Sure that any advice or or kind of advised protocols about healthy lifestyle change fall on deaf ears like yeah, I could tell this person. They should go to the gym or they should eat better. And you know, maybe I'm going to maybe I'll say that but there isn't a real expectation that that's going to move the needle or that that person is going to be able to adhere to any kind of prescribed lifestyle change and
that's because we're dealing with people that are addicts.
Yes, and so talk about that expound upon
Spent 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 cause you're a drunk. 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 doesn't quite work. That way. We don't currently lie to alcoholics the same way. We do lie to people for example, they were overweight. We tell our colleagues. 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. 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 we tell the overweight person is oh just put your food on a smaller plate here cut your food with a knife and put your fork down between each bite and you won't be overweight anymore. You just need
Learn to eat moderately just eat a little bit less.
It's the analog and 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 tighter excess. It would be better to avoid the chemicals that are fooling your brain into allowing you to systematically over.
Umm, then it would be to pretend that you can just have a little bit if you could have just had a little bit you Woulda just have 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 suffering with these diseases you may find it's easier to just adopt a strategy that eliminates these chemicals that fool the brain we talked 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
It are things like salt oil and sugar. These are highly fractionated food byproducts not food and they stimulate the dopamine cascading 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 problem. But if you are the overweight person if you are the person with the heart disease the cancer.
Diabetes it's not you you're the person that we do 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 in pathology and all adaptive 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 the substance.
Is is well understood but when it comes to food that's a leap of faith for a lot of people. 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 neural Cascade that's associated with addiction of any kind is very similar. Now, I'm not arguing that alcohol or cocaine or her it might be even more potent than say the
GE or the oil or the salt or the combination, but the net effect of salt will 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 than in mines 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 to eliminate at least with alcohol. Most people know. Oh if you're an alcoholic, you probably shouldn't read if you go to a party and they say, oh here have some
Calling you say well, I can't because 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 you go in and you say oh no, I don't want to eat. You're gonna really upset people. Oh, what's wrong with this - just one
little bit won't hurt. What? 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
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 often times the social consequences. Yes. I've not participating in this 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 food you eat.
Be very upsetting for people 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 Lyall. I've seen as 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 so in 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 and 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 and sex or heavily reinforced and the way the body the brain reinforces the bodies behavior is by rewarding us with dopamine, which is the neurotransmitter associate with pleasure. So the more dope me
The more pleasure the more don't mean the better the food tastes. And so you react to food in response to largely caloric density a higher the caloric density. The more valuable. It is in this environment is 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 is humans were Innovative creatures. We said, oh if a little good lots 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 to fought the body will go through that adaptation. We can speed it up with fasting but the bottom
And if there's 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 going to your look at your staring down the pipeline of a lifetime of drab foods that are unappealing and you're just going to have to tolerate
it.
We know there's a literature on this though with for example sodium people using high sodium diet. It takes about a month on a low sodium diet for the average person to neuro adaptive lower salt diet, you know with fat 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 density Foods. So the fruits of vegetables or grains of goons you will now feel
Where's initially you don't because you're used to being satiated with these high fat this high fat intake and that to a can take months. And so it's a problem. If you say to a person will 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 and here, it's Me Maybe lacking 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.
Yeah, there does seem to be something about Preparing People for that stage of acclamation. And there also seems to be something magical about the 90-day window in you know, with drugs and alcohol that's sort of the typical window that people say it takes, you know takes about that much time to kind of wean yourself off these cravings and reset your system. A lot of people just want to they want to they're not willing to weather that period of discomfort.
Art and perhaps there's a lack of belief that they'll reset and be able to reframe so that you know what they want scrape 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 the nicotine but most smokers.
Hers by somewhere between Day 2 and day 4 of fasting no longer Report with robot Spectrum 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 were 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. Yeah
free. 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 in a 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
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 insulin levels to rise and it dries your sugars lower and it fills 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.
You reasons why that might be number one salt is an essential nutrient that is sodium is essential 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 fraction into the 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 UV until you feel satisfied to you don't want anymore 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 of response and you will systematically eat more on heavily salted Foods when you're adapted to the death and you will wow whole Natural Foods. The other thing is salt has a
Derivative 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 organisms pooing inside you you might be concerned about what they're pooling in you because they might be
doing some nasty toxic waste chemicals like TMA which becomes tmao and irritates vessels and creates a problem for reading animal Foods if that's what you're feeding your bacteria, you feeding your bacteria soluble fibers, you're getting fertilizer. You're getting vitamin K2 getting a lot of other good stuff. So if you want them your bacteria pooing fertilizer into you want to make sure you're feeding them healthy diet 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.
biome and so sugar can affect it oil can affect in silk and 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 often times is because of this fluid that the body retains to protect itself from the consequences of salt so it has many
Jim effects even though it doesn't have any calories per say it can still be an important part of the dietary excess profile and by eliminating the sodium from that 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
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 of 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 and nutrition nutritionally deficient underneath
and so what we're encouraging people to do is a really radical
Archer 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 or cooked minimally processed grains beans nuts and seeds, but you don't have the meat fish fowl 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 its that diet that makes them fat and sick and develop the disease of dietary, excess and
What's makes you vulnerable to contain 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 consequence 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 heart disease to cancer the stroke. It's the same metabolic syndrome and all of its associations. It's the same obesity and diabetes.
He's in 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 underlying premise that drives True North which you found it what like 30 years ago at this point
35 in
1984. Wow.
Was when my wife dr. Brown and I started to 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. He now it's all the rage. We have valter 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 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 constitute such a gross violation of the standard of medical practice that it Rose to the level of criminal negligence. Mmm. I was actually the first person in my family that require the services of a criminal defense attorney. My father was so
proud. Wow, what happened
there?
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. There was also 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 ya.
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 valter Longo and Matson and and Fontana and others that have published in Major Impact journals this idea that fasting or some modification of an intermittent fasting or modified fasting could be a helpful tool. In fact, it was interesting long ago did some research that I think really was pivotal. He looked at cancer treatment and he took
30 rats with cancer and give them enough chemotherapy to resolve all the cancer cells. You have to kind of kill all the cancer cells are they grow back? The problem is all the rats die. So that wasn't really good. How can we take the same routes 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 is these things like differential stress sensitization injure.
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 then the fasting states that cancer cells were put in a selective disadvantage and not only that healthy cells appeared to be protected during the fast as a branch forced under the effects of chemotherapy and at that point people went particularly pharmaceutical or and people went oh
Fast could make the drugs work better. Oh, well, maybe it's not quackery all after all and so there was a lot better tolerance and acceptance of this idea that perhaps fasting what may have a role in enhancing conventional treatment. I was interesting to note too that many of the biomarkers that predict cancer and disease turn off with use chemotherapy or not. So the act of fasting itself puts the body in the 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
East and including by the work that we're doing at the True North Health
Center. Yeah, you have this this study and this experience working with a patient who had stage three follicular lymphoma right where you had like this tremendous result.
Yeah. We had a young woman with stage 3 follicular lymphoma that had been well documented excisional biopsy the whole bet and had progressed over a period of a couple of years and
She had asked her family physician along the way was there anything she could do conservatively in terms of diet and lifestyle and 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 you refer to the medical school talk to an oncologist psychologist also reinforce. The idea that diet was irrelevant to this condition that fasting was unproven and even with that advice she decided to come to True North Health Center underwent 21 days of water only fasting during which time her tumors that were previously externally palpated palpable disappeared. So we faster for three weeks Federer for 10 days.
Days, send her back to the oncologist and he examined her couldn't find any evidence of the lesions express some surprise. She explained. He said, you know, what did you do? And she said well, I went to the criminal coax night of 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. She asked to have the follow-up CT scan that we requested and we have warned her that they might be a little reluctant.
Since she didn't have any obvious evidence of symptoms and he said why she didn't really need a CT scan, but she said she'd really like to objectify the changes that had occurred. He got a little nervous. But ultimately he did admit agree to order the studies and he mentioned that because she was still a little bit neutropenic maybe some gentle chemotherapy might still be a consideration nonetheless you refused after a couple months for white counts of normalized by a year. She's doing great Senator bakk got a whole, you know.
A follow-up valuations 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 British medical journal and after some back and forth. They eventually did publish the paper. They asked us if we could get the oncologist to sign on and so we wrote him a letter and you know, thank him so much for all the confidence. He had shown and referring the patient to us for fasting and which she didn't. Okay. Well, you know in spirit.
And I so but unfortunately he hasn't gotten around to responding to us yet. So we didn't know how long how long ago was this? Well what happens we published that paper and then they asked us to do a follow-up because they said, you know about 10% of lymphoma patients will go through periods of for mrs. State, but sustaining it would be impressive. So we follow this patient for three years and she continued she had lost a substantial weight. She had maintain 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 track her down and kill her and I believe think she believed 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. We submitted back to the British medical journal which had invited us to do the fob. They actually refused the the article the first time 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 today.
Way, so she resolved her promise. She maintain it for three years. We now have a four year and now we're working on a 5-year follow-up 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 4 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 for flicking lymphoma. And ultimately we're hoping to publish enough case reports that we can 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.
We'll be right back with more from dr. Goldhamer and a minute but first were brought to you today by seed here to supercharge your gut biome, which you are well aware after my recent podcast with dr. Bohlson wits or the podcast. I did way back when with dr. Robin shut can is
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What led you back in the 80s, too?
Basically open this Clinic that's premised upon fasting. Like what was it about your education or your experience that you found this protocol and what led you to believe in it and its efficacy.
Well, yeah, it was it was deep frustration being constantly beaten by dr. Lyle and basketball I grew up with dr. Lawson's fourth grade and we played basketball and he would beat me and I've known him your whole life my whole life and you know, it was really frustrating cuz he's really good. So and he's just naturally
Ali 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 made sense 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 view your
Life is basically a result of you trying
to try to be a doctor. Laughs. Okay? Yeah, and it's and it's frustrated picked the wrong guy didn't realize that you know, the person I try to be just you
know, Miss 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 guy 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 it?
Free-throw shooting contest he says okay, you know, he hasn't even played for a week. Well,
he strikes me as a like a world-class sandbagger like the guys 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 ahead and hit 48 out of 50 and I'm thinking I got it. He hits 19 misses one and then hits 18 in a row
80 free throws in a row in a row
99. I've of course. I'm telling him. Well what a choke if you can hit 99, why don't you just had a hundred?
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 left. 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 lifestyle choices that you make and so what we're trying to explain to patients as you're not going to live forever.
Are going to die. There's been a hundred over a hundred billion humans modern humans born on the planet. There's seven point three or four billion alive today, but there's only been five well-documented people that live past a hundred and Seventeen. So the thing is you're not going to live forever, but you don't have to spend the average nine point six years of debility or 17 years in poor health that the average American is spending, you know, giving up compromising the last Decades of life that could be richest Decades of life because of chronic
Of 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 as with a pathway towards the
so fasting is interesting because
you're dealing with people that are often times addicted to the artificial stimulation of dopamine in the 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 dot the medications along with a chronic cough fatigue the impotence and premature death that's associated with them normalizing the blood sugar level. So your insulin levels normal is you don't have the cravings and the binging and all the other stuff that sometimes go along with it or an autoimmune disease.
Uses the oftentimes pain is significant inflammation swelling 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 and lifestyle changes when you feel like crap all the time. But when you get a taste of feeling good again, it's a very motivating and now oftentimes that's enough motivation to help people overcome their addictions in their Tendencies. The reality is I found the most effective
Active patients or those are most motivated and motivations that are the most powerful is pain stability and sure death. Yeah hundred percent. The only problem is, you know, a lot of these people to 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. Well compared to other
In fairness though, we have highly motivated self cfpb PR the fact that shape well their motor will and yeah, it's it's one thing
to talk about intermittent fasting or you know, a fasting mimicking protocol. It's another thing altogether to talk about a 40 day water fast as a very
extreme Moses David Elijah Jesus in our patients Rhino do fasting is interesting
that fasting is a you know shows up and all these various religious Traditions, isn't it?
Interesting?
Arresting the Jews the genes the Hindus the Muslims the boot is the Christians all these religions that 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 it 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,
You get into heaven or any of that stuff. Our focus is Health and 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 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 explain to me her, you know experience of being it. 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. But I've had I've had dr. Long ago talking about fasting who else have I had in here.
I've had a you know to not 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, it had tremendous success. So I want to understand the process that is entailed here. Somebody comes to you. They're in bad shape. They're overweight. They have hypertension diabetes obesity 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 True North health.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 they'll do that call up and you'll give them a free
console. 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 know.
Either be ready for fasting but they may just need to talk to a doctor. That's not a complete idiot. And 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 cam 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 that can look at their history objectively and give them advice if there are appropriate candidates for fasting then I
Agile them into the center for a stay I give them an idea about what we expect is 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 refeeding process now while they're they're 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 Brain.
Watching what 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 staff and the Educators and so it's a pretty like immersion type of inexperience. They go through fasting they go through refeeding if they have specific health problems. We have chiropractors naturopaths model.
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 fall of support and then because the phone coaching they're able to continue to access these attending doctors for tably without necessarily because you know how far people are out of state 15% are for and they're not all living locally where they can pop in and right see our doctors are use our Deli business or you know, any of that
kind of stuff. What are the important vectors are variables that determine
The appropriateness or you know for somebody to do one of these protocols like not everybody is suitable for this, you know,
the biggest one is that they have a condition that is appropriate for fasting. So there's many 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 and make 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 and 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 immune diseases and the fact is we can in highly motivated patients generate safe and effective.
Responses with fasting right? In fact, we've actually publish the fasting safety study the first comprehensive look at long-term water only fasting and what the risks are and art in response to this process. So we've been able to show it is a safe process when it's done according particle. In fact, dr. Long ago 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 Dino. I evaluate other scientists intelligence based on how much they
Agree with me right so I consider him. I'm glad you know your
biases is intact here. If somebody has anorexia nervosa or somebody is, 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 can undergo this.
Yeah, you know, there's most medications you do not water fast while you're taking medications those has 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 Mimosa few medications are treating the the
diet most people are being treated that is medicated for
Diet and when you change their diet the need for medication dramatically or such 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 in 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 pressure, you know, they've gone from 220 over 120 cap that 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 impotence and premature death if the conditions actually normalize 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 but you've rebooted this
operating system and wipe the Slate clean so you can build a new Foundation. It's right.
Much like treating a you know, what your computer becomes corrupted and you don't know exactly what's wrong. But you turn the thing off your turn it on. You can't explain but now it's working right and
it's what have you
and we're trying to figure out exactly what those changes are that's occurring 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'll do just what fasting does to you. But without that nasty fasting. Yes something that they can sell in a pill. Yeah. So a lot of the research that's
Interest is trying to figure out what exactly is it that's happening and fasting that's allowing the body to get well so that we can try to reproduce that without having to go through the
process. And 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, you know 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 his face.
Static fasting mimicking 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.
Doubt 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 as weight loss. You know, when your 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,
Now recently acquired a whole Logics dexa scan it with the new software that allows you to whole body detail composition. It looks not just it percent body fat, but how much visceral fat there is and we have a paved it'll 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 week wait 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 refeeding even though the
Wait obviously goes up as you rehydrate put some Fiber back in the 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 were refeeding appropriately and so weight goes up, but what the weight that goes up is real amending your glycogen stores and and muscle Sprites, which is really exciting. So preferentially,
Not just you lose fat, but you preferentially lose visceral fat that the ratio of visceral fat to adipose tissue loss is 3.0 other words. It's there's a significant preferential mobilization of this very type of fat that we think is most compromising to health the fat the abdominal fat if I stores were in 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're actually enrolling patients in the
Study starting in August looking specifically body composition changes long-term 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 Is profoundly influenced in Juice diets or modified diets, and that's naturally since there's a selective mobilization elimination of excess sodium from the body and water fast and it happens right away. It's very powerful more powerful than say taking Hydrochlorothiazide or a diuretic and it's responsible.
Well 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 is 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.
I've actually been able to that's controversial. Well, it's actually not controversial in the sense that you can take a Fat Bob see of a human and break it down and you'll find there's hundreds of different chemicals that are various concentrations PCB dioxin pesticide residues Mercury and the only thing that's controversial is it? Oh, well, it doesn't matter. Well, it turns out it does matter. It just matters it different thresholds to different people. And so this is this idea of rapidly mobilizing toxins during fasting has been so well accepted by some that they say that's the reason not to fast is the body
would rapidly mobilize these fat soluble nutrients to quickly your body wouldn't know what it's doing and it would overload your system unless you take their proprietary products that apparently it's okay, but what our experience has been that there is a rapid detoxification. We know that there's some studies looking at they've even done total body load measurements before and after fasting and showed that PCB levels would drop clinically clean. 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?
It's 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% of your body weight. You would assume that you'd probably lose 10% of your tumor wait, but what happens in the cloud for example and Lymphoma, you lose a hundred percent 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 or in certainly before it's getting too critical nerve tissues and other things that are preserved the body has an intelligence where it's unwinding the self and what we're suggesting is it appears that both endogenously and exogenous toxins are preferentially mobilized in water only fasting and 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.
And 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, glycan a general lytic enzymes systems, you get better at mobilizing glycogen stores and you know this whole business of carb loading and trying to increase 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 is an induced with persistent.
ER size the same enzymatic production for glycogen for what political enzymes for protein for gluconeogenesis enzyme systems is induced during fasting because you have to mobilize all your glycogen stores. You're emptying the chamber you're taking that battery and draining it all the way down and it 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
Laughs 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 leaving that limited fast that 16 hour fast day after day after week after month cumulatively that may have very profound effect on body physiology. And that's one of the suggestions being made by those advocating intermittent fasting or short period of fasting the cumulatively maybe 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 I lose you Fontana from Washington University where they're looking at changes in microbiome changes and 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 there often,
The same changes if you look for example exercise people that record exercise two rats in a cage genetically identical give one rat and 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 will be D and F. It turns out the precursor to that is beta-hydroxybutyrate acid, which is the fatty acids. Your brain is preferentially mobilizing during water only fasting bdnf goes up with water fasting just like it does in exercise glycogen immobilizing enzymes go up an 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 it the
Thing which is weird because you think wait a second exercise your app vigorously running around inducing all these changes fasting you're sitting around. We don't even let you exercise much you maybe could 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 your undoing the consequence of diet Rex's I'm not surprised at all that fasting induces the same kind of Bio changes that we see with exercise.
In fact for us at saving a lot of time because we just look at all that and fast exercise literature and start looking for the things they've discovered and seeing how much of its mimicking mimicked with fasting. 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. Wild. 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'll Force sugar Bond the cell and they have all kinds of side effects. What can you do to reduce insulin resistance? Well, you could actually sighs mmm, you know that helps weight loss healthy diet.
You can fast fasting is a profound effect on insulin resistance. In fact as much as 80% 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 and lifestyle changes over enough time or successful at resolving in 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.
Is fasting 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 if you go to a doctor and you've lost weight does the doctor assume you've adopted a healthy diet know the 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.
You just order drug addiction because many doctors have never had an experience of a diabetic getting. Well, I gave a lecture this year in Texas Adam had a medical conference for Physicians who specialize in diabetes. So there's 250 people are what are they serving of pulled pork sandwiches chocolate cake, you know, most of them were overweight or obese. I do my presentation. I explained our results afterwards couldn't one of the docs comes up. He's about maybe 70 80 pounds overweight. He says, you know, I've been in practice 25 years treating
X I've never seen one get well hmm. He's never had the experience of a single patient recovering stabilizing it blood sugar. You can off medication. It's not part of the Paradigm. Well 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 back in the do it because people don't make that lifestyle changes. He's seen the literature 93 percent recidivism rate that the you know,
To ask people to make Don last I'll change is 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 we're 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 we wanted it for
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 belt they like the idea of a patients getting well and so they're willing to put the extra time and energy and effort it 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 chitchat about them why they've got to give up everything that they eat on the Senate doesn't set up 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 not sure many of them even realize that it's actually worth their time because they've never actually seen it happen before. Um, 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 soft. I'm not saying you can take our advice give it to everybody everybody. 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 has released it. Well, you could go on this diet and lifestyle, you know, but it's a lot of work or you 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 six years older. So we're race together. He's slowly gaining weight. His wife adopts. Our diet comes in and fast overcomes. Her own health issues is on a vegan program 15 years later my brother still eatin chicken and doing stuff and getting fatter and he's got can't do play volleyball anymore. His legs all swollen up. Like, you know, I'm poking him, but he won't do any finally he calls me from the hospital.
This is 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 heard you best thing that could happen. So he said, oh they want to do a quadruple bypass and I said, we'll talk to your surgeon asked the surgeon says if you do bypass won't they plug up again? Mr. Say yeah eventually but you know last longer than stents and he says what if I made radical diet and lifestyle change, he said the surgeon laughed at it. Mmm. He said Mark you're not
Big-time Lifestyle Changes. Come on. Check 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, but my own brother it took. Yeah, it's will handle it in to throw it out.
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, you know a severe Medical
No 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
My sister-in-law already doing the work and providing support to the family with healthy food and stuff, but still difficult now, I just saw him a few days ago looks great completely different person. Do you think he's going to oh now I was wasn't worth it. Let me know not the best thing he's ever done fabulous. So you
you approach fasting from a perspective of of weight management and also disease prevention and reversal, but there's also all this emerging science around
Cavity and anti-aging of course, that's Longos, you know specific lens on this but by dint of a toffee G 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 and two week fast that we do with healthy people is healthy people healthy people that are looking to stay healthy to of
For example to avoid vulnerability infectious disease to avoid the problems that you know not waiting like my brother did till he has a heart attack, but the people that are willing to use it to prevent the problems from beginning and an interesting enough. I've been communicating with valter Longo 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 to study this plan 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 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 got to hold.
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 through the intestinal mucosa that enters the body and that new testament closest acts like a screen keeping flies out if the screen becomes inflamed things can leak through that's essentially what got 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 you smoking it's obviously see smokers face cross.
And collagen tissues. We know that's cross-linking 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 that actually protects people still think about it eighty percent of smokers say that come on 80 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 the
Souls 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
they say she just don't lie but Liars you 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.
Answer alcohol approximation 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 affected 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 the little bit of powerful antioxidant from this great skin is some justification for drinking alcohol there. Try to Teo 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
The 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. Lambert. Why is it that 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 fast under 40 days, there's few metabolic complications as you start getting into the really long fasts the 60 days the 80 is longer fast that we're 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 Alberta in Australia used to do fast as long as a hundred days were 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 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 patient's me. He had slipped out agent. He was just worried too much. Yeah worry too much about it. So 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 in the complication. So when there's no electrolytes,
Supplementation or vitamin and mineral supplementation during this period you're looking at me like there's crazy water. Only
fasting is the complete absence of all substances, except pure water in an environment. Is there a
particular kind of water we use fractionally steam distilled
water just because it's pure water patients that are fast and get really sensitive. They won't tolerate Municipal contamination and other stuff. They just want pure water is H2O. It's just what rain water would be if the environment wasn't polluted and so anytime you start supplementing.
Like for example the word some long-term fast done by medical authorities that kill people and the reason why is because they supplemented what they would do is they would supplement potassium and 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 and you see evidence in the literature of myocardial fibril breakdown or other problems that you will 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 ask him 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 consistent as we have strict protocols that we fall that are time-tested and proven.
and supplementation of electrolytes, although you might think well, it's a stem cell would just give him some potassium but that's an example of letting arrogance exceed your ignorance because you don't know what the down term consequences of that is and so we're using a protocol that we've been able to test now it maybe 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 Exercise caution because the fact is this is a urine a physiologically vulnerable state particularly in a
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 is that like for that individual when they're on day 3 day 10 day
30? Yeah. So the
First few days of fasting or actually the most difficult because you're adapting off the off of glucose metabolism into a fat metabolism. So the brain is changing fuels from burning sugar to blurring largely beta-hydroxybutyrate 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
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 to getting the cigarettes the caffeine the alcohol all the meat fish fowl eggs dairy products processed foods all the hosts of chemicals that people are putting into the body with over-the-counter prescription medications. So we've gone through a ween down process and then we start fasting and their mouth make code up and taste like something crawled in there and died and they may have some skin rashes or elimination they make it mucus.
Charge 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 is mean after Russia and try to suppress those symptoms of the pill it goes away. The body is able to heal itself. And then once you get into four or five days of fasting the place pretty well acclimated the fasting against this point, there's no hunger.
Our people are going to cooking demonstrations. They're coming to lectures are going to the dining room to socialize with people. There are 5 days 10 days into a fast you think oh my God how you have a need for 10 days. Now just enjoy being there. It's not a problem. So then depending on the patient, sometimes they start getting relief their paint maybe for the first time in years the pain that they've been suffering with is going away and they find that you know, some people have these chronic debilitating problems start resolving.
Loving things start falling off tumor starts 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 who 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 of their energy is not an acceptable. They're not able to maintain accurate emulation, or maybe they've just got that's how much time they've got because you know, some people have jobs and lives, right? She wants abilities so we only have so
much fun here for 40 days. So I life completely.
There's on the outside but
for many people this is an intense Epiphany 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. There 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 may be in the wrong about having student you start looking at all aspects of their life. The empowerment
aspect of it is 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 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 the eight the peanuts, you know that the pretzel save their life where 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 eat doesn't seem quite so overwhelming there is
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 where I think the same thing happens to athletes and when people first start exercising at first, it's not pleasant. They got aches they got pains they are fatigued. They're not they're not getting the success. They can't do what they 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 whatever it is. They're doing is they start realizing they're getting real and true.
In Zeke 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. They realize I stood 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 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 realized that now this is so beneficial. They will literally structure their schedules around making sure
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 diet and 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 will find you go to work.
Let's talk about the the food part of all of this. So well, first of all, is anybody freaked out in
the middle of this and fully
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 truth how Center they're pretty well vetted. They've gone through some screening. We've evaluate 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 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 what vigorous water-only fast for shit.
Would it 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 I 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 don't start when we first moved to a new facility one day really large police officer showed up at the door, and he said he
want to interview one of my patients and I asked them. 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 patients relatives and they said they were the patient was being held against their will by religious cultists and being starved to death to go to be
Jesus and I thought I've say like the person is not here
involuntarily look at it.
Is it fine? I'll let you know if you but first would you like a nice tall cup of Kool-Aid? Uh-huh, right. Dr. Lyle says that when a police officer puts
like a Relish 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 colloids full of sugar. What would you serve that at the True North 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 it's in the curry now, it's not the Jim Jones kind of you know, right perception.
Right. So it's 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 the trained with us. Nathan Gersh belt is running a facility here in the Los Angeles area. Mmm, and he's it's beautiful. I went to see his facility and it's absolutely beautiful and for anybody that you know, and also we have another doctor a doctor yuan in Ohio that's opened up a small facility is doing really well. I've got an excellent feedback from
some people we have other doctors that we train we have an intern or resident. I'll promise program and those schools. I mentioned Texas AM there's other medical schools the naturopathic professions. Our graduates can come and spend a year as a resident doing a rotation at the truth house under the chiropractor's often come and spend three months as part of their training at the truth how Center and those doctors were hoping to open up more facilities around the country and we make people that contact our website can get access to whoever the local right fasting supervisors are.
Happy to provide that 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 that it's always gratifying to see the clinical results that they're seeing because it's really a hard thing to do on 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
see such dramatic
results. Well, I think that's one of the reasons we've been successful. We have a dozen clinicians. Now that your thoughts are we have five medical doctors. We've got osteopathy Chiropractic naturopathy all represented in these doctors. Once they come they often are with us their entire career. In fact, dr. Klapper classifier just retired after nine years at your house and we joked that we're like the firm, you know, what's like start? Yeah and it but it's because they like the low patient intensity and others are 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 center set up where the doctors able to actually be 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 specific needs and they like the idea that people get well mmm, and so the combination of that allows us to keep the doctors, even though they probably work harder for last with us and they would if they went off and worked for the local HMO or whatever it is that it's enough gratification enough benefit that those doctors really like working.
King at yourself and what is the
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 know 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 in 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 some of the hospitalists purchased their food through our outpatient Delhi. So we have a good working relationship. And now that there are seeing some of our referrals
Patients that were doing for Diagnostic workup sand people getting well that's really helped to 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 four people that have whatever it is, they see get well acceptable. Right? Right and then no 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.
ER 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 two major journal. We're hoping that we'll get positive publication of that here in the next couple weeks. We've done a study with Luigi Fontana from Washington University looking at bought a biomarker changes in the gut microbiome before and after fasting right. We have a couple other studies that were enrolling in right now. So now we're getting some
Nations with some of these major players like valter 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 nose his talent ability and his
pedigree I would imagine it's very
helpful. Oh, he's Daya unbelievable just fabulous work and he's wonderful guy. Yeah, we're so fortunate that we've got these kind of people out there trailblazing into the scientific and medical literature because as clinicians and particularly Alternative Health clinicians were not always viewed with the most
open 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 and in what the health the documentary we all saw those individuals their kind of before and after stories that were very dramatic and abetting hardly criticized and heavily. Yeah
controversial measure. We have people telling us I see their stuff on the internet.
At that says those people were all paid actors reverse Photoshop and I've seen some unbelievably Kevin
Keegan just kind of grab 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 happen to be around. Yeah. I wish I could have Cherry Picked it and stuff. Well, there was that one guy had all his pills, you know, he went through all of his medications and all
that kind of stuff. Is that type of
Prince is pretty routine. Yeah sure enough. 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 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. 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. So wow, and it's on
fasting who's behind that, you know.
I can't I don't recall the who the producer and what has right. It's I know it's purchased by Netflix. It's a Netflix original. That's cool. So I know it's getting pushed out.
I had John Lewis in here a couple weeks ago 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
that he can that's that's Keegan specialty.
Ha, but all right. So the food part the protocol that you're that you recommend that 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 on to 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, somewhat controversial. There's all these diet Wars with the loaf 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 a 16 or you mentioned one of my heroes.
T Colin Campbell and I'll just a brilliant guy. So they all make a very compelling case that people should eat a whole plant food diet. Essentially you call it a whole plant food diet. I
noticed 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 went whole plant food diet because a plant based diet implies that yeah, it's based on plans, but it allows ruin it allows flexibility arresting. 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 as well. Maybe it doesn't have to be mister perfect, you know diet if it encompasses a broader range of people will get more people doing will save the planet will save the animals will 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
Persons 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.
With a whole plant food SOS free diet. I believe will prove to be the most health-promoting died 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 in the maximizing the people that have 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
Means 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 as 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 do believe I'm right now if it turns out I'm wrong and the evidence supports you're better off having more than 1,500 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.
Criticized heavily. Mmm 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 they're still controversial is recommend a lower sodium intake than some of our colleagues by and 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 where right. Mmm.
What do you say to the low-carb proponent? Who tells you
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
think there's a number of protocols? You're actually covering that? Yeah, like for
example, those things get conflated in this conversation
the the dead doctor
Can start at 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 with Lennox. You can inject anabolic 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
I can't lose 40 pounds overnight now 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 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 this work better than exclusively whole plant food SOS from 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 patience because if they don't get well who can you
blame right? They've been with you
if we got wow, you have people
stayed 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. Hmm, and it was you know, two thousand a month less staying with us than at the nursing home.
So, you know for those individuals it was an economic benefit other people come in because they're going to 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're don't feel comfortable living freely because they've got some issues with food and eating they want to live in a controlled setting till they really get it down. So they feel comfortable going out there and the same things true with alcoholics some people you say quit drinking and quit some people go to outpatient treatment. They do great some people do 30 day programs. Some people do 90.
Programs some people, you know have to do longer. Yeah, so you have to make it to meet the patients 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. Dr. Chill over s is a lot of fun coaching with people and so people will 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. 4S 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've given her heart. I see you got a well before we could.
Our study our documentation, but it's okay. How many how many beds do you have
though? You probably are at capacity
most of the time we have. Yeah, I can handle about 70 people. So we're going to run about two months or so out. You know, it was interesting after the covid thing all of our foreign people had to cancel that's 15% of our people had 50 people couldn't get in but we had so many more local people because now people can work from home. Hmm. So some people that wanted to come in, but they couldn't
Afford to miss work during their events. So they're working while they're some people are able to come in do a fast but then they can during recovery that can go back to working remotely because we have excellent Wi-Fi bandwidth and all
that stuff. So, you know, those tastes are
able to actually function, you know in a controlled setting but not necessarily miss work. Mmm. Sometimes we have situations where they've got kids. Well now we have like sweets that people book family units so they may come in too fast, but they can have their family there. And so the family learns to eat good
Wouldn't that it's no catch, 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 factors. We have two 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 in pain. I mean I did impatient for a hundred days. And you know now I think I should have stayed longer like it was it was it had such a dramatic image 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 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 501 c 3 nonprofit research driven organization. Our price point is quite modest our fights the same as they were 12 years old hundred
forty nine night. AJ goes through. She's like it's cheaper for me to go to check North Dakota hotel. We actually have
businessman. Sometimes they'll choose to stay with us when they're on the road because they get their meals
and there it's jewelry DoubleTree make some need to charge
more well-known ideas. Are you need more beds are I don't know what you want to keep the price point as low as possible. Well, there's a reason we haven't raised rates in the last
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 can actually afford to insurance cover. It insurance will cover their medical exam that all the traditional medical management things. Not the part where you get well out of course wouldn't be part of health insurance the daily rate at the center of the 149. But if to seeing the medical doctor getting any scan or loud that would be treated just like it would any I'm sure 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 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 fowl eggs. Dairy products
boiled salt sugar. Yeah, and maybe
consider
I mean, yeah, I have patients that their friendship. Well, what do you go there too fast. Just come to 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 ownerÃs 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 got a you know, overhaul everything that you're doing is a difficult message. It's a very undigestible message, but at the same time like I know in my own experience and look you've done this or 20,000 people to get those people through those uncomfortable weeks and have them arrive on the other side.
Side where you know you can pull the curtains open in the sun shines in and suddenly those Foods. They thought were unpalatable actually tastes 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. I think for the specific highly motivated self selected people that we treat mmm. We have a really high.
Satisfaction ratio and we're still here which is kind of a miracle in itself. Just the idea that and you do
have a really high rate of people that maintain these these practices, you know, we're interested. How closely do you tap the tabs? You keep on P,
we're doing a current 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
in 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 a strict as we say? What 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 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.
A retrospective analysis of 1,100 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. It was over 30% Mmm. And so although that means a lot of people didn't maintain the full magnitude of weight loss that doesn't mean that they have an 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 a conventional treatment weight loss.
It's around 93 to 97 percent failure rate No Matter What wow gastric bypass me. Look at hoot sustains long-term weight loss. What kind of health benefits very poor. It's so poor that most Physicians a that's not even worth worrying about just letting me fat forget about it.
Right? What is the study that you'd like to see done whether with respect to fasting or eating a whole plant food diet. Like what? Where's the Gap right
now where the real Gap is looking at? What effect on healthy people does healthy living?
Have and what effect and healthy people does periodic fasting half 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 roll 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 well, you know till they reach that that point and it's particularly a problem is 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 found that 92. She realized she had outlived all 52 of her lifelong friends. They were all dead. And she said she realized her 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 has said even the people 10 years younger didn't want to play bridge and do stuff. They're 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're still gonna die. You're going to reach your genetic potential someday, but the period of stability 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 ten 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 ischemic attacks had to retire from teaching because of cognitive.
The decline and he was really suffering he came in and was probably one of my most diligent patients and did the fasting recovered his health and 20 years later. He helped edit the pleasure trap. So, you know, he was little he was really good to see how both my mother and father, you know, got it started later in life because I didn't know, you know, yeah early enough but and both ended up doing doing really well. So that was good and good lives and good deaths deaths in close proximity to the end of their
Where that's what it's about. I think it's an important issue is often times not really addressed that how valuable is is to spend the last eight years of your life. However long that's going to be fully functional capability taking care of yourself. And what percentage of Health Care do we expend on treating people where we don't affect our 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 debilitated that the quality of life is de minimis that point so we talked a lot about longevity 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 and 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
Leave that we're 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 we're 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 that 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 as effective and I can't say that that's been done. There's not enough research done. But that's why the true north authentication is excited. We have a laboratory. Now, we have an Affiliated IRB. So human subjects committee can be approved by people that actually know stuff about fasting fact. Dr. Klapper is one of the professional members of the IRB and we have a research team doctor Myers our director of research and others that we've now hired to be able to actually conduct these trials. We've got these
Nations with researchers around the world some of these big impact researchers like valter Longo. So hopefully we'll be able to do some meaningful research in the next couple of years. We have a great human subjects laboratory at the True North Health Center. We had a thousand people a year for fasting already. We're 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 where we can actually start doing meaningful prospective studies. We're there now and we're ready to do 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 beat the with 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 free-standing independent research facility that isn't dependent or beholding to anybody and you need to educate
the next generation of medical practitioners.
Which is exactly what dr. Klapper treasure to humanity is doing in this like third Act of his career going around and lecturing to Young
medical students. Absolutely. It's cool. And that's what our internship and residency training is all about.
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.
Get in their car and drive up to Northern
California will stay with you for 40 days phone coaching Services really great thing going to our website and get access to a doctor right where they sit for under $100. They can do a phone consultation where all of their records have been reviewed and work 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 him 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
Eat it or China Study. Look at dr. Macdougall's excellent books are solutions start solution is fabulous. 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 and 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 True North health.com, so they can go on there. There's video. In fact, we're just about to Launch
Launch our own Roku Channel. We're all of our content is going to be available in one hour of lecture program are live lecture for him at the center. So people will 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 the
upper first advice? It's really important that History exam and lab.
They looked at just because 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 plant based doctor or use one of our foam coaches to at least make sure Mi a good candidate for this and then they can tell you look you'd be a good candidate you might want to do valter. Longo is
And you might want to do hear 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 pharmaceutical preparations that you've been given an appropriate.
When and what about people that are that are moving in the direction of of eating a more whole plant-based diet.
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, a born-again hygienist where you're trying to shove down your beliefs and other people's because it doesn't work very well. You're just going to antagonize everybody around you 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 trying to shove your belief systems and
Anybody else's but
support is also important right having some accountability to somebody seems to be
effective. Yeah, and that's why I was encouraged people to take advantage of you know around the country. Now, there are doctors that are complete idiots that are trying to encourage an advocate support the plant-based Physicians Etc. So there are resources available. That's one of the reasons I'm excited about this phone coaching business because we can expand that broad, you know, all across the world. This is you know, automated systems are highly efficient where
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 and lifestyle changes. Honestly for relatively healthy people. All they got to do is start eating a whole plant food diet and Saddam 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% of Americans are obese or overweight childhood. Obesity rates are through the roof type 2
diabetes epidemic is what
30 percent 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 you know a
Pandemic epidemic of a different nature that 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.
In evidence-based medicine and science that are proven to work. I mean 20,000 patients over the years the level of success that you've experienced the long-term success of these patients speaks for itself and its powerful man. And so for somebody who's listening or watching who feel 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
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 you know, it's interesting the feedback from the pleasure trap has been interesting because that book came out more than recognized been on one. 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 that's been
Really interesting to see we have a new book that we're working on right now on fasting that will be out 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 here in Hawaii was not a 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 work.
So I had dr. Greger in here the other day and I think there he is now out there with they're all out there writing books together. Yeah,
so I'm really excited for her.
20 of the chapters off doctor 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 asked all of my medical professional guess 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 covid-19. We need to make them less vulnerable. So we have to start educating people up that health results from healthful 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 prioritize 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.
Jawboning 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 for sharing your powerful testimony today. If you want to learn more about dr. Goldhamer and his Works pick up the pleasure trap book that he co-wrote Doug Lyall and where is the best place to direct people online to learn more about what
you're doing? Well, if you go to www.truthfortheworld.org calm, you'll get access to everything.
You need if you want to learn specifically about fasting there's a website called fasting dot 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 to talk to me again.
Peace plants.
Okay mind officially blown, right? I don't know how this one landed for you, but that was quite a bit to take in again. Don't feel like I have to say this but I should and I kind of have to say it. Please do not try a water fast at home. If you're interested, please seek out medical guidance and supervision under somebody specifically trained in this kind of thing. Dr. G is a much for social media. But if you want to learn more about him and his work go to the true north
At
health-promoting.com check out his book the pleasure trap which expands on much of what we talked about today and will not disappoint. Finally check out the episode page at Rich world.com where we have tons of show notes where you can dig deeper and everything that we talked about today. If you'd like to support the work we do here on the show subscribe rate and comment on it on Apple podcast and Spotify hit that subscribe button on YouTube and also hit that little notification Bell. So you're always a prized when a new video hits the
This one is on video. You're going to want to see it. Go to youtube.com slash Rich Roll to check that out. You can share the show or your favorite episodes with friends on social media. We create all these beautiful assets and quote images and video clips that seemed to percolate across the internet. I love seeing that stuff show up and you could support us on patreon at Rich world.com / donate. I appreciate my team who works very hard to help me put on the show every week Jason Kami yellow for audio engineering production show notes and
Special music Blake Curtis and Margo Lubin for videoing Today Show, Jessica Miranda for graphics Ali Rogers for today's portraits dk4 Advertiser relationships and theme music by my boys Tyler Trapper and Hari. I appreciate you guys. I love you. You guys give me the gift of being able to do this and share this information with you. I don't take it for granted. So thank you for tuning in today, and we will be back here soon with another cool episode TBD.
Until then treat your body's right be kind be compassionate toxo. Peace.
