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Common symptoms and anxiety and depression
are profoundly affected by how
well you sleep,
how you exercise, what you eat,
and if you utilize fasting effectively,
you stuck to the diet.
And now she continues to be cancer free.
So she cured her cancer.
We know that the cure for cancer is.
Doctor
Alan Goldhaber is a pioneering physician.
This is the man redefining
how we think about him.
Yes, it is the Hindus, the Muslims,
the Christians.
Everybody has a tradition about fasting.
We slow down the rate of people age.
And you see that in my patients,
and they'll tell you the same story
over and over again.
Everybody they know is dead.
He became widely known for helping
thousands through therapeutic fasting.
Is the fasting diet real healing
or just hope dressed up as science?
Doctor Alan Gold,
thank you so much for being on the show.
It's my pleasure.
So you're the founder and director
at True North
Health Center,
and you've been doing this for 40 years.
You've seen over 25,000 patients.
You're, by all accounts, the world's
number one expert
when it comes to fasting.
I was introduced one time
as an expert at not feeding people.
Okay.
Tell me, Alan,
what are the biggest benefits of fasting?
Well,
fasting is an interesting intervention
because it does something
that's really novel
in terms of medical care is it
can actually help people get well.
And when you're treating
some of the common causes of death
and disability, high blood pressure
and cardiovascular disease, diabetes,
autoimmune diseases and certain types
of cancers like lymphoma,
the standard medical recommendation is
that you take these drugs or you do this
procedure and you'll be on these drugs
for the rest of your life.
They're guaranteeing you when you walk
in, you're never going to get well.
It's getting
well isn't even part of the paradigm.
It's not even part of the conceptual
framework.
It's just
you use these to manage your symptoms.
You'll be on the drugs forever.
And that's just how it is.
And when people come to true north,
you mentioned some of the conditions
you treat right.
High blood pressure,
diabetes, autoimmune disease.
What diagnosis responds
quickest to fasting?
Well, disease is associated
with dietary excess,
naturally tend to be responsive to fasting
because fasting is a very rapid way
of the body of mobilizing and eliminating
not just fat, but also a visceral fat.
About 10% of the fat that people have in
their body is called visceral fat.
It's the fat that tends to accumulate
around the organs,
around the belly, and it's hypertrophic
and it's hyper metabolic.
It's hyperplastic, it acts like a tumor.
So people that have excess fat
also have excess visceral fat.
It's like if you went up to somebody
and said, you know,
you got a 2 pound tumor in your abdomen
and it's giving off inflammatory products
that's associated with heart
disease, cancer, diabetes, autoimmune
disease, they might be concerned
and maybe take it seriously.
Most people don't even realize
that all of these different common
diseases are actually related.
You wouldn't know that
because you have to go to like
a different doctor to even be diagnosed,
let alone treat it.
But the reality is,
these conditions are all associated with
an inflammatory process that's associated
with excess fat and visceral fat.
They're all diseases of dietary excess.
They used to be called
the diseases of kings,
because it was only the wealthy,
elite kings that could afford to
overeat consistently enough to be able
to get the fat and visceral fat
and get the disease.
So now we have a situation where there's
an epidemic of these conditions
that are actually preventable
and actually reversible,
but people don't know it
because under medical care,
you just take the drugs,
you manage the symptoms
until some other problem comes along,
which opens up some other treatment.
What do most doctors
get wrong about fasting?
Well, most.
People think
if you get on a plane in New York
and you flew all the way to California,
you die somewhere over Colorado.
If you didn't eat the pretzels or the
or the food, you just starved to death.
And you know, the idea that fasting
a starvation is a is a misnomer.
Fasting is a very specific
biological adaptation.
In fact,
all the ancient humans that couldn't fast,
that is, essentially convert their main
glucose burning organ, the brain,
from burning sugar,
which is the normal fuel, to burning fat.
All those people that couldn't do that,
they died.
Because the reality is,
when humans started wandering away
from the tropics
and the ready supply of available food,
spring comes late
and sometimes there's nothing to eat.
And for other animals,
it's not as big of a problem.
But humans,
because of our ridiculously large, bulbous
neuronal net called the brain,
our biggest burner of glucose,
we can only go about a week
before we would enter
starvation, which is the process
of breaking down vital tissues.
And then we would die
because humans can fast, because they're
able to convert from burning sugar
to burning fat in their brains.
The average 70 kilogram
male could fast around 70 days.
So I'm not saying you should fast
for 70 days, but you could.
And in the natural setting, that was such
an important biological adaptation
that the people that could do that
survived
and the people that couldn't do it died.
And we know that
because if you go all over the planet,
8.3 billion people
take food away from humans.
Those processes stereotypical.
It's always the same.
The body mobilizes
its glycogen stores after about 48 hours,
it has to begin a process
of gluconeogenesis or breaking down
lean tissue,
but it converts into burning fat,
specifically ketones and most
specifically, beta hydroxybutyrate acid.
And it lives on that fat,
which is much more efficient, which is,
you know, all we've really done is taken
this biological adaptation
and applied it in a modern situation
which was never present in nature.
And that's where he had consistent
dietary excess because of the industrial
revolution, in our conversion of our diets
to these ultra processed foods
and animal rich diets,
we now have already available calories
around the clock
and as a consequence, 75% or maybe 76%
by today of people in industrialized
countries are overweight or obese.
So if you're not fat,
you're actually abnormal. Now.
You said 70 days.
What's the okay in your 40 years 25,000
plus patients?
What's the most dramatic transformation
that you've witnessed?
Well, you know,
we've seen a lot of transformations.
And depending on which class of conditions
you're talking about,
what's really interesting is, for example,
we did a study with 174
consecutive patients with hypertension.
All 174 people normalized their pressure
enough to eliminate medication.
We recently did a prospective study
with our colleagues from the Mayo Clinic
and of the 27 stage two
hypertensive patients that were fasted,
26 were able to completely normalize
their pressure.
One required half dose of medication
at six week follow up.
And what was interesting, at one year,
we followed those people
to find out what percentage of them
had maintained their weight loss
that they achieved during fasting.
76% of those people
had maintained their weight loss,
and the majority were still normal
blood pressure without medication,
which shows that at least highly motivated
patients
are capable of making fundamental diet
and lifestyle changes.
The criticism of fasting is that,
oh yeah, you'll lose weight.
Perhaps you'll lose fat and visceral fat,
but you're just going to gain it back.
And the truth is, if you go back
to eating a diet based on greasy,
fatty, slimy, dead, decaying flesh ultra
processed food, you will gain it back.
There's no question about that.
Fasting has to be used as a as a catalyst
to make a lifestyle transformation.
It has to be a motivation to be able
to get on a good diet and lifestyle,
diet, sleep and exercise
all critically important
to maintaining health
and happiness. Right?
And that seems to be one of the challenges
is someone comes in to your clinic
or they're they're fasting on their own
and maybe there is a change,
but then when they go home,
when they go back to their regular life,
if they go back to the original diet,
that probably got them to your your office
in the first place, then what happens?
Right. That's actually the big challenge.
You know, essentially true.
North Health is a 501 C3 human subjects
laboratory disguised as a clinic.
And in most research settings,
the rats don't go home.
They're not released to free living.
They're just kept there for.
And of course,
that would be my preference.
If we could just.
Enroll the patients and keep them there
and not have to go home,
because when they go home,
they're facing a world that's designed
to make them fat, sick and miserable.
It's not designed to support them
in making health promoting choices.
The social pressures,
the economic pressures
the circumstances are going back
to are incredibly difficult.
And you see that in all types
of addiction, not just in addiction
to ultra processed foods,
but also, for example, alcohol.
If people decide that they don't
want to be an alcoholic anymore
and they go to a inpatient facility
and spend a large amount of money
for a 30 day program,
and then they go to 90 visits in 90 days
and they have family support.
Around 85% of those people will be back
to drinking within 12 months
with heroin addiction.
If they're arrested
and have to go through rehab
and are threatened with incarceration,
about 90%
will be back to using heroin within
12 months.
What's interesting,
though, is if you
if you have a person
that wants to lose weight
and they go to a doctor
and they want to lose 5%
of their body weight, there's a 95% chance
they're going to fail within 12 months.
So actually,
the physician has a better chance
of treating heroin addiction
than they do weight loss.
So, you know, it's a it's
a really interesting phenomenon.
And of course, now the pharmaceutical
industry have introduced drugs
which have some unfortunate side effects
like nausea and gastric motility problems,
but they're effective at helping people
reduce their intake of their same diet.
So they don't tell people you have to
change your diet because that's difficult.
They say you keep eating the same diet
you're eating.
We'll give you these drugs
that will make you so sick
that you won't be as hungry for it,
and you'll eat less.
And over the short run, it works.
People lose weight over the long run.
Of course,
there's some serious consequences.
You can see the class action suits are
already being discussed on late night TV.
The reality, though, is being overweight
is so dangerous that short term,
anything you do to lose weight
may have some short term benefit,
even if the long term consequences
is undesirable.
One more thing here is
you said fasting can improve
depression and anxiety, which it almost
sounds too good to be true.
I'm like,
oh my gosh. So tell me about that.
Well, think about it.
You know, when they talk
about traditional views of depression
and anxieties, people talk about dopamine
and serotonin and all of that.
And even though we know
that there's really not a deficiency
of these, these substances,
if you actually look at the literature,
it's pretty clear that the whole premise
of using search taking hitter
medication is based on a false premise.
Most of those neurochemical substances
are actually produced
in the digestive system,
not actually just in the brain.
So it does make sense that diet
and fasting could have a profound
influence on that,
because one of the things
that fasting done does is it helps
you reboot your gut microbiome.
Typical person has 5 pounds of organisms
living in their gut.
I mean, these are bacteria and protozoa
swimming around,
eating, drinking, defecating in you.
And what those organisms
release in
you is affected largely
by what you feed them where.
Don't feed them.
So if you're feeding them
an animal based diet, for example,
you have different organisms than you do
if you're on a plant based diet,
if you have ultra processed,
refined carbohydrates,
you have different organisms
and those organisms
have different waste products.
So animal, animal rich diets,
you'll have much higher levels of TMA,
for example, which is trimethylamine,
trimethylamine oxidase,
which is thought to contribute
to heart disease and other problems.
Whereas, you know,
you can also get those organisms producing
fertilizer
like vitamin K and other things.
So what you eat
and whether you fast or not
and how you fast
has a profound effect on the microbiome.
The microbiome has a profound effect
on your chemistry.
Neurochemistry may have an influence
on people's depression.
Depression is also affected
by other issues besides diet
and chemistry,
also by psychology and other variables.
Sometimes, when people gain
control of their life because they learn
that some of the things they're dealing
with aren't helpless and hopeless,
that in itself can be very empowering.
It can affect sleep quality
and the the how well you sleep can have
a profound effect on your tendency
towards anxiety and depression.
So it happens.
These common symptoms of anxiety
and depression
are profoundly affected by how
well you sleep,
how you exercise, what you eat,
and if you utilize fasting effectively,
whether it's intermittent fasting,
like where people are fasting
12 hours every day by not eating 3
to 4 hours before they go to bed at night,
or whether it's this longer
term, medically supervised fasting
that we do for periods up to 40 days
can have a profound effect
on a person's state,
and many of our patients are able
to eliminate the need for medication,
stabilize to do much better off
drugs than they ever were on drugs.
And a whole food plant based diet is seems
so central in everything that you do.
And you preach, right,
even beyond fasting.
Why is that?
Well, if you think about it, since modern
humans have been eating food
for several hundred thousand years,
we ate a diet, essentially of whole foods.
So fruits, vegetables,
grains, legumes, nuts and seeds.
The ability to use heat to process those
products was probably largely responsible
for why humans were able to become humans
and grow the big brain that we have, etc.
so that's the diet we ate for up
till about the Industrial Revolution,
which is really just about 200 years ago.
And then we started learning
how to process food and get into more
different diets.
So now for relatively recent
period of time, we've been eating a diet
that's contained largely based on animal
foods and salt, oil and sugar.
We started adding these chemicals
to our diet to enhance the flavor of food,
make it more appealing.
And it's led us to
what we call the dietary pleasure trap,
where people are literally addicted
to the artificial stimulation of dopamine
in the brain.
Dope means the neurochemical associated
with pleasure.
So when you eat foods that are richer
in calories, you produce more dopamine.
Because remember, your brain
evolved in environment is scarcity.
Your brain's job is to make sure you get
enough to eat, don't get eaten, and live
long enough to reproduce.
You can pass on your genes.
And so from an evolutionary standpoint,
higher caloric dense
foods are more valuable.
Like if we said to you like,
why don't you just live on salad?
Salad has 100 calories a pound.
You'd need to eat 20 pounds of salad a day
just to survive.
And you know, if you start eating salad
at sunrise and you didn't stop
till sunset, you still couldn't
get 20 pounds of Saladin.
So you're not going to be overwhelmingly
attracted to salad
because your brain's not stupid
and your brain understands it needs Clark.
Density fruit has 300 calories, a pound.
It's three times the density of salad.
It tastes better because it results in
more dopamine stimulation in your brain.
Potatoes, rice and beans. 500 cars
a pound.
You only need 4 pounds of that
a data survive.
You get into nuts and seeds
and other foods are even richer.
Of course, now
when you get into refined carbohydrates,
sugars 1800 calories a pound.
So as far as your brain is concerned,
sugar is more valuable than salad is.
And so it makes sense
biologically that you would crave
the most concentrated food
that was available to you.
And manufacturers of food understand
that they've got laboratories out there
to fool your brain.
For example, would you rather have celery
that was soggy and soft or crisp?
Your brain detects crisp
as fresh, so when they give you chips,
you're not going to want soggy chips.
You want to get crisp chips
because that's what your brain thinks
is associated with value.
They design the foods
to appeal to your natural instincts,
and they do a fabulous Java,
if a little is good, lots better.
And when they say bet
you can't just eat one.
They're not kidding.
Guys, we've been so passionate
about finding the biggest geniuses,
and this is just one of the many episodes.
If you want to make sure you don't
miss the next one, make sure to subscribe.
All right, let's get back to the episode.
Is red meat a problem?
Because I know you preach whole food
plant based, right?
And then you think about red meat, you
think about chicken, you think about fish.
Are those a problem?
Is it about limiting those?
Is about eliminating those completely?
Well, one of the problems
with animal foods, particularly
in the modern world, is the concept
of biological concentration.
So animals live their life.
You think about cows, for example,
and particularly cows
that are raised commercially.
They're fed a concoction of chemicals,
antibiotics,
all kinds of concentrated food and food
products in order to hormones and drugs.
In fact, about half the antibiotics
that are made are given to cows
because they're raised
in a very unnatural situation.
And so in order to keep their disease
load down and make them get bigger
and fatter faster,
you know, there's a whole formula
that's used and they concentrate
those materials day after day after week,
after a month in their tissues.
So when you kill that animal
and you eat it or you drink its milk
or its byproducts,
you get its entire lifetime accumulation
of biologically concentrated toxins.
If you just think about a calorie
per calorie, a carrier of animal food
could have any where from 2 to 1000 times
the concentration of various chemicals
that, say, the plant foods would.
So just from a biological concentration
standpoint, animal
products end up being one
of our richest sources of toxins.
If you do a fat biopsy in a human,
you'll find there's PCB,
there's dioxin, there's pesticide
residues, there's heavy metals,
there's all kinds of contaminations
building up in various concentrations
in the inside our bodies.
And if you think, where did that
come from?
Well, sure.
Breathing air and drinking polluted water
and taking drugs as a source.
But as much as 90% of
some of those chemicals
are actually derived
from our habit of eating animal products.
So meat, fish, eggs and dairy products
all share these common problems.
It also turns out that excess protein
and excess fat are a bigger risk
in industrialized societies
than protein or fat deficiencies.
Excess protein is more of a concern with
kidney disease, heart disease, and cancer.
You know, t Colin Campbell
did some great research
describing his book hole,
where he could turn on and off cancer
gene markers by how much animal protein
was given to the animals.
It's really pretty shocking that
if they lowered the protein concentration
low enough, it didn't matter
how much aflatoxin the animal was exposed
to, the liver cancer
that's associated with aflatoxin exposure
is dramatically affected by the diet.
So you see lots of evidence
to suggest that animal foods,
if they are used, the less the better.
And in our program, we're helping people
try to strive for maximum health.
So we advocate an entirely whole plant
food diet that's free of animal products
and particularly ultra processed,
refined carbohydrates.
Let's talk about intermittent fasting
because my wife jokes with me,
she says, if I miss a meal, I get hungry
and I always tell her I fast every day.
What are you talking about?
Because I eat dinner at 5 p.m., okay?
And I don't eat breakfast until 8 a.m.
so am I actually,
without thinking about it
or trying to doing an intermittent fast
15 hours with no feeding.
That's exactly what you're doing.
And in fact, one of the things
we've advocated for 40 years
is that people not eat 3 to 4 hours
before they go to bed at night.
Now, there's a couple advantages
that, number one,
the calories people eat at night.
When you think about it,
you just had a big dinner.
Why are you eating?
It's because you're tired or board
or hungry or angry or whatever it is.
It's not a true biological hunger.
Usually you don't need extra calories,
and those calories you eat at night
and then you go to
sleep are going to be more easily
converted to fat
because you're
not going to be burning them.
So there's an advantage to not eating 3
to 4 hours before you go to bed.
And by definition,
that's going to give you a 12 hour fast.
Now, people trying to lose weight
might decide to extend
that period in the morning
by delaying breakfast,
doing some active exercise in the morning,
and then they could go up to 16 hours
a day.
And there's lots of evidence
supporting a 12 hour feeding window
and some evidence supporting that
even a shorter eight hour feeding window
might be beneficial in the long run
in kicking in some of these changes
that occur with fasting.
Now, that's a little bit different
than the longer term fasting
that we talk about,
where people are going up to 40 days
in a controlled,
medically supervised setting,
and there's kind of a geometric effect
that happens with that.
But day after day after week after month,
that intermittent fasting you're doing
is thought to have good long term
biological benefit.
Okay. And does it matter
if it's 12 versus 14 or 16?
Or is it maybe more important for me
to just be consistent with it?
Well, I think the most important thing
is to not eat 3 to 4 hours
before you go to bed and so that you're
getting that 12 hour window.
The reason for extending it might be
to facilitate additional fat loss.
As far as the routine and most of the data
is concerned, it's that 12
hour fasting and 12 hour feeding window
that's strongly recommended.
What breaks a fast
or how do you break it fast,
especially the ones that you're
administering that are longer fast?
Well, with your.
12 hour fast, you break it like you
normally would, hopefully on a whole food
plant based diet.
So you're eating fruits,
vegetables, grains, lagoons,
nuts and seeds on a longer, fast fasting.
Termination is actually
a very important issue, and particularly
when you start talking about faster
going on for for days or weeks,
it takes about half the length of the fast
to properly terminate the fast.
And there's a progressive reading program
that we follow.
For example,
there's about a day of fresh fruit
or vegetable juices
for every week of fasting,
a day of raw fruit and vegetables
for every week of fasting.
And then we progressively introduce
steamed and starchy vegetables
till by the time they've been feeding
for half the length of fast,
they're on an exclusively whole plant
food S.O.S free diet.
And the reason for
that is if you take a person that say,
did a long, fast, maybe 2 or 3 weeks
and you were to feed them
very concentrated animal foods or salty,
sugary foods,
they could very likely experience
post fasting edema
where they would get swelling.
The body would hold sodium
excessively initially, or they could even
get into refitting syndrome,
where they get into electrolyte imbalance,
which could cause cardiac arrhythmias,
even death.
So we never see that in 40 years
and 25,000 patients, we don't see that
because we have this protocol
that we follow.
That's one of the reasons we wrote
the book, Can Fasting Save Your Life?
Because we wanted to lay out
for physicians
a protocol on how to determine
who's a good candidate for longer fasting,
how to go through that process safely,
and most importantly,
how to terminate that fast
so that you don't
get into the complications that can occur
if people are foolish about it.
The other thing about longer term fasting,
it's important that people rest.
So people say, well,
if they were really active
and they did a long term fast, wouldn't
they lose more weight?
And they would,
but it wouldn't be more fat.
It would be lean tissue
because they would force gluconeogenesis,
because after 48 hours of fasting,
you've depleted your glycogen stores.
So the only place for the extra sugar
you'd need for the extra
activity is going to come
from the breakdown of lean tissue.
We want to conserve lean tissue.
And in fact, we've done a study that looks
at that very issue body composition,
composition changes in fasting.
We used a Dexa scanner.
And for example in males
that fasted two weeks
on average
they lost 10% of their body weight,
but 20% of their entire fat
and 40% of their total visceral fat.
They only lost 6% of lean tissue,
all of which was replenished by six week
follow up.
So what happened
was, after fasting with proper feeding,
they get their lean tissue back,
but they continue to lose fat.
So there's a preferential mobilization
of visceral fat,
which is the fat
that has that tumor like effect.
And so we believe that
it's not just weight loss.
This facilitated by fast, it's fat loss.
But in order to maximize fat
loss, rest is an important component.
And you said visceral fat.
And I've heard you call
that the silent killer.
That's the silent killer. Okay.
For everyone out there watching,
what is visceral fat.
So visceral fat is a type of fatty tissue.
It's typically the fat that accumulates
around your belly and around the organs,
but it has different properties.
And one of the properties that visceral
fat has is a pro-inflammatory process.
So it's associated with the inflammation
that is associated with the development
of cardiovascular disease, with diabetes,
with auto immune diseases, where
the body is actually attacking itself,
and as well as cancers like lymphoma.
And why is visceral fat so much more
dangerous than other types of fat?
Well.
The general adipose tissue
is really just storage, and it doesn't
have this active biological process
that seems to be so associated
with disease and debility. So
you can have a
person that doesn't look particularly big,
but they may be over fat, so they may not
be overweight, but they may be over fat.
You can have a person that has a very high
BMI, but they're all lean, mean machine.
And so you have to be very careful
at using BMI, because sometimes people
that are very muscled
will have a high BMI,
but they're not over fat,
or a person may not have a high BMI,
but they still may have a disproportionate
part of their body being fat
and particularly visceral fat.
So someone could look thin
on the outside, but
still metabolically be unhealthy
because of the visceral fat. And.
You know,
we also see things like that
when it comes to certain
biological markers like cholesterol.
Remember,
most cholesterol is produced by your body.
And so although high cholesterol
is associated with cardiovascular disease,
the reason for it is because it's a marker
for how much animal food you're eating.
And so while it's true, lowering
animal food intake also generally lowers
cholesterol levels.
And most people on whole plant food diets
have very low total cholesterol levels,
there are people that make high amounts
of cholesterol naturally, so they'll run
higher levels of cholesterol,
but they don't appear
to have proportionately
higher risk of cardiovascular disease
because their
inflammatory markers like CRP or normal,
they don't seem to have the same issues.
So I think we have to be careful
about taking drugs, for example,
that lower cholesterol,
under the assumption that that's
going to reduce all of our risk factors,
when in reality it's rather disappointing
when you actually look
at the data critically,
the effectiveness that that has.
What's more effective is getting people
to live healthily, adopt the whole plant
food source, free diet, exercise,
get enough sleep and avoid the health
compromising habits like consumption
of alcohol, including organic red wine.
I think that better.
We should call alcohol cancer juice
because that's
what it correlates best with.
Is your lifetime risk of cancer.
Wow. Alcohol equals cancer.
Juice. From my opinion, yes.
Wow. I haven't heard that one before.
Something interesting you said.
You said fasting and exercise
improve many of the same biomarkers.
Which seems counterintuitive, right?
How can not eating on one hand
and on the other hand moving intensely?
How can they do the same thing?
It is really interesting
if you look at the exercise research
and there's lots of. It.
It shows tremendous health promotion
aspects of exercise.
People that exercise regularly
have tremendous benefits
over people that don't.
For example,
they did studies on rats.
One was really interesting.
They took genetically bred rats.
So they're identical that exactly
the same diets in the same environment.
But they gave half the rats
a wheel in the cage,
and the rats that had the wheel
in the cage ran on the wheel.
They would exercise.
And when they tested those rats,
they found the rats that had the wheels
didn't develop dementia,
they didn't get the Alzheimer's disease.
And they said, why?
And then they analyzed the rest,
and they figured out the rats.
That exercise had dramatically higher BDNF
brain drive, neurotrophic factor,
which is a chemical
that prevents oxidative
damage in the brain that's associated
with the development of dementia.
It turns out another thing
besides exercise
that stimulates BDNF is fasting.
So in fasting, in fact, if you take rats
and let them feed ad libitum,
they live to a certain age.
If you take the same rats
with the same diet,
but you periodically fast them,
you can as much as double their lifespan,
a dramatic increase in lifespan.
And one of the changes,
one of the many changes that occurs
is they have much higher BDF.
In fact,
if you look at all these different studies
on exercise and all the benefits
that seem to be accrued, oftentimes
the cardiometabolic changes
and the things that you find with exercise
also occur with fast.
So you start to say,
why would this be fasting?
Well, you're resting and exercising.
Well you're out there
sweating and figures
how could they do the same kind of things.
But when you think about it,
what does exercise
and fasting have in common
is they both undo the consequences
of dietary excess, which is fat
and particularly visceral fat.
And so when you exercise regularly,
you have lower fat and visceral
fat concentration.
When you fast periodically,
you can reduce the fat and visceral fat.
So I think that this this inflammatory
process is associated with visceral fat.
Maybe one of the factors
that are profoundly
influenced by both exercise and fasting.
If someone had the discipline
to just do one of those consistently
faster exercise, which should they do?
Well, I think that fasting,
if we're talking about long term fasting,
that's a periodic intervention.
The most important thing is what you do
every single day,
which is diet, sleep and exercise.
What you put in
your mouth has a profound effect on
not just how long you live,
but more importantly, how well you live.
It's not life expectancy
that you're going to be influencing
with diet and exercise.
It's health span.
It's healthy life expectancy.
It's not how long you live. Absolutely.
Because that's largely determined by
genetics and luck, but how well you live.
Will the last 20 years of your life
be enjoyable and enriching,
or will you find yourself unable
to talk or move,
lying in a nursing home bed,
waiting for people
to come and change your diaper
because you had a stroke or heart attack?
Because you didn't listen to good advice
about living healthily?
They need to listen to you.
If they'd listen to you.
They'd be. In a better place.
Need to listen.
They have to take. Action, to take action.
And attitude is a good thing,
but action is what determines outcome.
And what we're interested in
with our patients is helping them live
in such a way
that the last 20 years of their life
are the best, richest, most enjoyable
part of their life, instead of becoming
dependent on everybody around them.
What's the longest fast
that you've personally supervised,
and what did that person look like
when they came to you?
And in the end. We've. Done 25,000 fast.
The longest fast that I've ever supervised
was 44 days.
Normally we stop at 40 days.
In this particular case,
they had some some inflammation of a gland
that it's not comfortable to break a fast
while that's still swollen.
So we wanted to wait
until it was resolved. And it did.
But so that was an exception.
One other exception I made was
I had a patient.
She was a dentist, actually,
and she had had an injury
where one of the outdoor tent poles
hit her in the head
and she obviously got an injury
and had a headache.
But the thing that happened
was she ended up with a dural tear
and the headache didn't go away.
And so when I first talked to her,
she'd had 16 years of daily headache,
eight out of 10 to 10 out of ten
pain, every minute of every day
for 16 years to become disabled around it.
She'd gone and done a lot of treatments,
had not been non-responsive
to the traditional medications.
And so she came in to fast under the hope
that the
anti-inflammatory effect of fasting
would be successful.
In her case, she had no relief
for the first 19 days of fasting,
so she had same basic pain.
By the 19th day, she woke up and had
five minutes of relief.
First time in 16 years
she had no pain, she said.
It took her a little while to realize
what was going on.
Then the pain came back.
By the time we got to 40 days,
she was largely out of pain
and we were going to break the fast
and she said no.
She had to go one more day
and I said, no, no, we go 40 days.
She goes, no, she has to go one more day.
I said, what do you have to go?
One more day?
She goes, the men fast for 40 days.
Moses, David, Elijah, Jesus.
She said, women always have to do
just a. Little more.
So she went 41 days. We broke the fast.
She had no acute
head pain, but she had some symptoms
that were prodromal symptoms.
You know, we fed her for six months
and then we faster again for 40 days.
So she had a second 40 day fast.
We now have published her outcome data
but she has 12 year.
She's not had headache in 12 years.
So in her case it was successful
resolving this chronic Kefalonia.
It seems like there's
a number of these conditions
that there are with medicine
and they come to you and it seems shocking
because most doctors wouldn't
go to probably that.
Oh let's, let's, let's go to Allen,
let's go to fasting.
What is that.
Well, the thing is, getting well
is not part of the paradigm in medicine.
You know, in blood pressure,
they tell you right in the beginning.
Oh, no, you'll be on these drugs
the rest of your life.
And when the first drug becomes less
effective, we'll add a second and a third
and sometimes a fourth,
and we'll just keep adding drugs
and try to control your pressure.
Now it turns out that's not going to
actually reduce your risk of heart attack.
It might reduce your risk of stroke.
And that may offset
the fact that these drugs have side
effects like chronic cough,
fatigue, impotence, and even death.
Which is why they don't give everybody
blood pressure medication.
They don't put it in the public water
supply yet because the medications
themselves have untoward effects.
So they wait until your pressure so high
that the benefit of reduction of stroke
offsets the downside of increased death
from other complications.
It's true with autoimmune disease
and cancer as well.
You know, autoimmune disease
and cancer are very interesting,
even though they're treated
as completely separate entities.
If you think about it, cancer
is essentially a disease
where the immune system is not working
well enough to keep down the tumors
that are foreign and people are forming
cancer, tumor or cancer cells
all the time.
There's always cells mutating
and transferring, but your body through
autophagy eats up those cells.
And as long as you eat them up faster
than you form them, you do fine.
But if they start forming faster
than you eat them up, you got tumors
and it progresses,
you get metastasis and it's fatal.
Well, so cancer treatment is about trying
to stimulate the immune system,
whether it's immunotherapy
or chemotherapy or radiation
kill off the cancer cells or surgery.
Cut the tissues out
that involve the cancer cells.
But essentially we're trying to stimulate
the immune response with chemotherapy.
The problem is in the process
of doing that,
you often end up with secondary
complications and mortality.
If you think about autoimmune disease,
it's where the immune system is working
too much.
So it begins to attack yourself.
And rheumatoid arthritis, it's
your immune system attacking your joints.
So that treatment is about shedding
the immune system down, using steroids
or methotrexate or other medications
to suppress the immune response.
The problem is,
if you successfully treat autoimmune
disease, you increase your risk of cancer.
And if you successfully treat cancer,
you often increase
your risk of autoimmune disease
because you're basically turning up
or turning down the immune system.
Well, the nice thing about fasting is
that it's a way of rebooting the system.
It's like taking that corrupted computer
and you shut it off and you turn it on,
and you don't always know why,
but now it works again.
You shut everything off with fasting
and you turn it back on with a health
promoting diet and lifestyle.
And oftentimes
the body is able to heal itself.
And so we see, for example,
in the case of lymphoma,
we published a paper in
the British Medical Journal
showing a woman
that was in her 40s that had had two year
history of progressive flicker lymphoma.
Stage three, who came in, underwent
fasting
for three weeks, was you could
literally feel those tumors going away.
By the time three weeks of fasting,
you couldn't feel them anymore.
She showed follow up on CT
scans of dramatic improvement.
At one year, she's cancer free.
At three years
following, she's cancer free.
We just got ten year follow up
data continues to be cancer free.
Now, in fairness,
it wasn't just the fasting.
She adopted a health promoting diet,
and we explained to the patient
that she had to stick to that diet
or it could be fatal.
I told her I'd track her down
and kill. Her.
And she. Believed me.
Because she stuck to the diet.
And now we've got actually 12 year
follow up date, and she continues to be
cancer free as a consequence.
We've done case series.
We've had a number of patients,
including more severe
cases with metastasis into the bones
that have continued to do well.
And we're looking to do
a prospective study on lymphoma.
The problem is we run into interference
with one of the big national HMOs
because they're reluctant
to engage in a study because
unless they can figure out a way
to use fasting and profitably,
there would be in a bit of a pickle.
Because if they do a study and it works,
they have to offer the service, but
they don't see any way to offer something
like fasting in a profitable way.
So there's reluctance
to even get collaboration in finding out
just how well this process
actually can be proven to work.
So she cured her cancer.
I don't think she cured her cancer.
I don't
really believe in the concept of cure
any more than you cure your obesity.
You can lose the weight and keep it off,
but you go back to eating greasy
fatty slime.
You process
stuff, you're going to get fat again.
And if this one goes back
on a conventional diet, starts drinking,
doing all the stuff. Everybody else.
I have no doubt
that lymphoma would manifest
because I don't think you're curing it.
You're managing it,
but you're managing it with diet, sleep,
exercise and fasting rather than drug
surgery, chemotherapy, etc..
Yeah.
So she didn't, in your words,
cure her cancer,
but she managed her cancer
through fasting, through diet.
And did she have exercise as well?
She actually does the interesting enough
she was exercising even before,
so we didn't add that to it.
We just she just. Continued that.
Through fasting and exercise and diet.
She's managing her cancer.
It's interesting
if you look at conditions like weight,
which obviously we know that excess weight
and fat and visceral fat is a problem,
even though it's not politically correct
to acknowledge that overweight is a health
compromising factor.
So exercise is important as this for
health is not an effective weight
loss strategy on its own.
If you just exercise
but don't modify your diet, you will not.
It has not been shown
that you can be effective at maintaining
optimum wait and wait.
Balance at sleep
is very important to maintaining health,
but just sleeping all the time
isn't going to manage weight.
You have to control your diet
if you're going to control your weight.
And that's a problem
because some people think they can.
They can drink what they want,
eat what they want,
but they're going to exercise it off.
And that's not a good long term
strategy, right?
You told a story about your brother
calling you from the hospital and you're
laughing now, but I'm
sure at the time, you know, you may have
you may have an emotional about it.
Can you tell that story again?
Well, I have. An older brother.
He's he's five years
older and wasn't living healthfully.
He was living very conventionally.
And he kept getting bigger and bigger
and bigger, you know,
then he started develop symptoms as he age
and he got some arthritis.
And then he couldn't play volleyball
anymore because his knee pain was so bad.
And then he got even bigger.
Meanwhile,
his wife had developed a problem.
Come in to us, done a fast,
gotten well, adopted a plant based diet
and continued that.
But despite the fact
his wife was supportive,
he wasn't so interested in this.
And you know, I used to bug him,
give him a hard time.
He's my older brother.
And then one day I got a call.
He's in, he's in the hospital.
He said, Alan, I'm in the hospital.
I said, what happened?
He said, I had a heart attack.
And I said, well, that's great.
He said, no, no, no, I had a heart attack.
I said, yeah, I heard you
and you didn't die,
which means
now you're going to be forced to do
the stuff we've been talking about all
along and change your diet and lifestyle.
And he says, yeah, they want to do this
surgery and and do this,
put the bypass surgery.
And I said, well,
you got to talk to your surgeon
and talk to him
and gave him some suggestions.
And he asked the surgeon
and he said, well,
you know,
why are you recommending the bypass?
And he said, well,
because it'll last longer than the stents.
And, you know, he said,
Will my vessels plug up with fat again?
He says, yeah, but it'll,
you know, it'll last longer doing it
this way than the other way.
And he says, well, what if I made
radical diet and lifestyle changes?
And he said, the surgeon who he actually
knew, the guy started laughing.
Oh, Jesus.
He said. Mark, look at you.
You're not going to make diet.
And lifestyle changes. That's ridiculous.
Long story short, he checked himself out
and made the diet and lifestyle changes.
He lost the 50 pounds.
He got back to volleyball now.
Now it's, you know, ten years later
and he's doing great.
And his wife is thrilled
because she doesn't have to make two meals
now because.
She can, you know, he's. He's
eating the healthy food.
So he's doing great. He did well.
But it took even my own brother
I couldn't get him to do it too.
He was forced by the most common motivator
for people,
which is pain, debility and fear of death.
People don't want to make diet
and lifestyle changes
until they're forced to do it,
which is a shame because the people get
the most benefit are actually younger
people that are doing it preventative.
It's a lot easier
to prevent disease than it is,
wait till you get sick
and then try to undo the consequences.
But we as a society don't do that.
We treat the leading
causes of death and disability,
which are heart disease,
diabetes and cancer.
And what we do is
we wait till people develop it
and then we use really expensive,
largely ineffective interventions
like stents and bypass
procedure, invasive drugs, chemotherapy,
all kinds of surgeries
to try to undo the consequences
of something
that should have been prevented.
Because instead of treating the leading
cause of death,
we need to start
treating the actual causes of death.
The reason people get heart
disease, cancer and diabetes.
And that includes smoking, drinking
alcohol, including organic red wine
and eating a diet
that's built on animal foods and ultra
processed, refined carbohydrates.
If we treated the actual causes of death,
we wouldn't
have to face the leading cause of death.
Or if we do, it would
certainly be far later in our existence
and we would dramatically shorten
the years of debility,
which is where we spend most of our money,
is ineffectively treating disabled
individuals that suffer as a consequence
of their diet and lifestyle choices.
What is PCOS?
Peaks is a condition that's polycystic
ovarian syndrome that's common to women.
Fortunately,
men don't have to deal with PCOS.
It's one of the diseases that's common
to women, including uterine fibroids,
tumors and fibrosis, breast disease
and dysmenorrhea, and minerals
and all of these hormone
mediated problems.
What's interesting about all of them,
including PCOS, is
they respond to fasting.
And we don't know exactly why that is.
But one of the theories is
that those diseases are often associated
with elevated estradiol
levels, and estradiol is supposed
to not be as high as it is in people.
And it's usually broken down
to something called estriol.
The process of breaking down
that happens in the liver, and also
with the microbiome that live in the gut.
And we know that fasting reverses
fatty liver disease
and it changes liver dysfunction
and it reboots the gut microbiome.
So what we're thinking
is that that process
of cleansing the liver and rebooting the
gut has something to do with normalizing
of the hormonal imbalance that's
associated with these different diseases.
Unfortunately,
we haven't done good research on that.
It's kind of tricky to do and
hasn't been completed yet, but I think
that's what we're going to find
is that amongst other changes, changes
in liver function and gut microbiome
probably are responsible for why
patients consistently get improvement
in dealing with those conditions.
Let's go back to cancer.
From what you're telling me,
it seems cancer prevention actually works.
We have a general idea
of what we need to do.
But why does modern medicine
focus a little on a prevention?
Well, we.
Know that
the cure for cancer is prevention.
That is the cure.
By not getting. It.
We know the causes
or some of the causes of cancer
that's smoking dramatically increases
your risk of conditions like lung cancer.
Now, it was, you know, many, many years
that we were in denial about that.
But eventually, you know,
we had to kind of admit
that no smoking cigarettes does,
in fact increase your risk of of cancer.
And you know, what's interesting
is that smoking can also protect people
from getting cancer.
Most people don't realize that.
But smoking also damages
the animal lining of the blood
vessels, the inside lining.
And that's why smokers
get so many heart attacks and strokes.
And so by getting a heart attack
and stroke before you live long enough to
get cancer,
smoking can actually prevent you from
living long enough to get lung cancer.
If you could make smoking more dangerous
so that everybody died
from a heart attack,
I wonder if they would allow them
to advertise cigarettes
as cancer preventing.
So the bottom line is smoking
does a lot of things.
It also gives people that wonderful
smokers face.
The wrinkling wrinkles are essentially
cross-linked collagen tissue.
And so when you smoke
you get massive free radical exposure
which prematurely ages the face, which is
why you get that smokers face look.
It also damages the vocal cords.
You get the voice changes in voice.
It also damages the inside vessels.
There's other things besides smoking
that cause free radicals drinking alcohol.
That's why people get fatty liver
and cirrhosis of the liver,
because the liver is a detoxifying organ,
and it's trying to break down
this nasty substance.
And some of the scar tissue
that forms from
that inflammation is fatty liver.
You also get free radicals from high
fat diets where fried foods,
bathing the body with free radicals,
which is why they contribute
to the premature aging process.
If we just don't smoke, drink
and eat these ultra processed
carbohydrates, we slow down the rate
with which people age.
And you see that in my patients
that are now in their 70s, 80s
sometimes 90s and they'll tell you
the same story over and over again.
Everybody they know is dead.
All the people of their peers are dead.
Many of them are outliving their kids
because their kids are having heart
attacks in their 60s.
They are in their 80s.
And it's
because they're slowing down the rate
with which they age
to a more normal process.
We're not supposed to be falling apart
in our sixth or seventh decade.
You know, I see it as a basketball for
I play basketball five, six days a week,
but usually with much younger people,
because the older people have, you know,
they got knee problems, they've aged out.
They can't really
they can't really compete.
So we're stuck having to play against.
These young people.
But even they are starting
to get aging effects.
Even in their 40s, you know,
they can't really keep the wind.
They have problems with recovery.
And so you do see the rate
with which you age is affected
by what you put in your mouth.
You said, we live in a world designed
to make us fat, sick and miserable.
What do you mean. By that? Well.
I mean that.
The. Powers that be,
the people that are making money on us,
are designed to give us what we want,
not necessarily what we need.
And what we want is to engage in short
term, pleasure seeking,
self-indulgent behavior.
Because we're addicts, what we need
is to learn how to escape the pleasure
trap and live a health promoting life.
The problem is that that takes energy and
the natural order of things is disunity,
not unity.
So if you want to build something
consistent,
you have to put energy into it.
And most people are sick and tired because
of their diet and lifestyle changes.
They take sugar,
so their insulin levels spike
and it drives the sugar down
and the brain thinks they're starving.
And then they get angry and they having,
you know, food cravings
and they're having all kinds of problems
and they just keep feeding it.
And then they give themselves
a highly addictive nervous system
stimulant like caffeine, which we take
as if it's some kind of health food.
And every time you stimulate the person,
there's compensatory depression
that follows.
And then we're sleep deprived,
so we're not getting recuperative sleep,
we don't get non-REM deep sleep, and then
we get depressed and we get angry.
And so we take more drugs, which compounds
itself until eventually we collapse.
And usually we're collapsing much earlier
than we would need to collapse
if we were living a health
promoting diet and lifestyle.
But once you're in addiction,
it's very difficult to escape
if you have friends
that are alcoholics in their lives
eventually suck,
and you go up to them and say, oh,
you know how your life, it sucks.
It's because of the alcohol.
They don't.
Go, oh, it's the alcohol.
I had no idea.
I'll just. Quit drinking.
No, they just tell you to mind
your own business because you know,
they're not interested
in hearing about it.
And so the same thing is true when you try
to talk to people about dying lifestyle.
They're so caught up in their addiction
that it's very difficult
for them to escape.
And that's why we love fasting,
because it's a way to break people
out of their environment,
give them a chance to reboot.
They still have to do all the hard work
to adopt diet and lifestyle changes,
but at least they get a chance
to get a taste of what it feels like
not to be sick and miserable.
Right?
And at the end of the day,
do you think this simply comes down
to the financial interests
of large corporations?
Right.
They're beholden to their shareholders.
They need to make a profit.
They're okay
selling you sugar, processed food, crap,
and they're pushed to sell
you more and more of that.
So is this an environmental problem?
What would a health supportive environment
actually look like?
Well, I think the companies
are just doing what their job is,
which is to give people what they want.
You know,
they're they're not seeing themselves
as the person to determine what you need
or what's in your interest.
They're just giving you.
And where do you make
the most money in society today?
Selling the pleasure trap.
So drugs,
whether it's pharmaceutical drugs
or recreational drugs, ultra processed
foods, often by.
The point.
Owned by much of the same companies.
You know, if you look far enough back
into the economics,
much of the money
that controls the processed food industry
is the same money and corporate interests
that control the drug
and pharmaceutical industry.
So big money giving people what they want.
If people want a change,
they can get a change, for example.
As far as I understand it,
the biggest seller of organic produce
in the country right now is Costco Foods.
Now, I don't think that's
because the people at Costco Foods
said, well,
you know, people in the environment
would really be benefited if they would
consume more organic produce.
So we're going to really push that.
No, they just said, oh, people are willing
to pay a premium for this.
We'll we'll give it to them.
And now the second biggest seller
of organic produce is Walmart.
Oh, wow.
So I think if we want to see changes,
I don't know that it's going to come
from the corporate interest.
I think it's going to come from people
saying,
okay, I'm
going to spend my money on this or that.
And if you tell people
clearly what you want.
I think people will figure out
a way to give it to you.
I don't think there's any prejudice
on the part of industry
to not give you what you want.
They're just trying to make money,
and it's easier to make money
giving people what they want
and what they need. Yeah.
And so this is the environment we live in
and it's up to the individual.
You're saying it's like,
you know, we're not going to probably
change the environment.
But every person
has can make a change themselves.
They know what to do.
We're giving them the knowledge here.
It's about them
actually getting up and taking action.
But if you go ask for advice about health
and you ask, say, the medical profession,
which has nothing to do with health
doctors, by virtue of their training,
aren't trained in health care.
That's just a word that's used.
They're trained in disease management.
And if you want
good advice about how to use drugs
and surgery to manipulate your symptoms,
there's no place on the planet better
than, you know,
industrialized countries,
medical profession.
They do a wonderful job of that.
And oftentimes their recommendation makes
the difference between life and death.
It just has nothing to do
with getting healthy.
It's not about diet, sleep, exercise.
That's not what they're interested.
That's not what they're paid for.
Like for example,
if you're washing machine got broken,
you wouldn't necessarily
go to your auto mechanic and ask advice
how to fix your washing machine.
They might be able to help you,
but it wouldn't be by virtue
of their training. Right.
And so why would you go to a person
that studies
how to use drugs and surgery
to make diet and lifestyle changes
when they have no interest,
no compensation,
it's not part of their domain,
may not even part of their experience.
So I don't blame the medical profession
for doing what they do.
It's just when they start
becoming deceptive and pretend
that this is health care,
when in reality it's medical management.
Is it interesting to you
that most religions mention fasting?
I mean, I heard you talk about it
Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism.
Yeah.
The Jews, the Jains,
the Hindus, the Muslims, the Christians,
everybody has a tradition about fasting.
I think it's because fasting changes
the way you think and feel about yourself
in the world around you.
You just can't help it.
It's one of those processes
that when people go through it.
It has a fundamental change in how
they see the world,
how they see themselves as very empowering
when people realize that they're not,
you know, if they don't have
that particular thing or that particular
meal, they're not going to collapse.
And, you know,
so I think it has a very powerful effect.
And also when people realize that
they don't have to learn to live with it.
It's not inevitable
just because they're old or whatever, that
there have to be have pain and ability.
It's very empowering.
And also it tends to make them challenge
all their belief systems,
because these are such fundamental strong
belief systems that we have around
diet and lifestyle,
that when you change that,
it has a potential effect in changing
how you view the world as a whole.
I know you talked about your diet, but
I'd love to learn what you do
personally right around diet.
Exactly. Around fasting.
Are you doing intermittent fasting?
Are you doing that?
Plus maybe one week a year?
You know what is what is your game plan?
What do you actually do?
You practice what you preach.
Yes. So I fast every day.
I have my last meal,
much like you do at 5 or 6:00.
Don't eat again until breakfast.
I usually exercise early in the morning,
so I playing basketball
from about 530 to 7 usually.
And so get to work
and maybe have breakfast at 8 a.m..
So I've got a 5 p.m.
to 8 a.m., you know, routine.
My food is very simple.
I eat just like we talk about
exclusively whole plant foods.
So fruits, vegetables,
grains, lagoons, nuts and seeds.
I don't use meat, fish, foul
eggs, dirty products, all salt, sugar.
I've never drank alcohol
or had a cup of coffee or used drugs
or any of that kind of stuff.
And you know, because I got started
really young, I was 16 years old.
Now I'm 67 years old.
So I've had a lot of years of doing this.
My exercise is basketball,
I love basketball, I play basketball
5 or 6 times a week.
I would recommend to patients
that they do a variety of activities
walking, hiking, biking, swimming,
flexibility, strength is probably better.
You know, basketball is essentially
mock warfare.
It's a higher. Risk behavior.
I just happen to like it.
So, you know, that's what I do.
And I'm far enough on the spectrum.
Whatever I do, you know,
I just tend to take it to an extreme.
So my diet for me is really easy.
For most people, it's more difficult
because they worry about what other people
think, the social implications,
the trying to go along and get along.
For me, I don't care what people think
doesn't bother me.
It's pretty easy for them.
I realize being a normal human being,
being neurotypical, it's
going to be more of a challenge
because if you don't eat
what everybody else is eating,
they're going to get upset.
It's particularly of a problem
I find for women because they they want
to lose weight, but when they lose weight,
then they piss everybody off.
And the other women are not always
friendly.
And supportive because they look better.
Oh my God.
Just so you know,
you have to kind of narrow depth.
In our book
The Pleasure Trap,
we talk a lot about strategies,
about how to go along and get along
and not get people so upset.
Just because you're becoming successful
with your diet and lifestyle changes.
You've said sodium stimulates
passive overeating.
Explain that. Well.
If somebody says to you,
eating salt is going to make you fat,
you might think, well, that's ridiculous
because sodium has no calories.
So how could eat?
Eating something that has no calories
result in gaining weight?
It turns out that if.
You. Eat your normal satiety
fill of a certain substance, anything,
say rice, you'll eat a certain amount,
and at some point
your brain will stimulate hormonal changes
that will provide
you satiation, and you'll be full
if you take everything else being equal,
take the same substance, but salt it up.
You'll eat more
before you get triggered that you're full.
It's called passive overeating.
And people say, well, yeah.
It tastes better.
And that's right.
That's what tasting better means.
It means it results in more dopamine
stimulation,
the neurochemical associated
with pleasure in your brain.
And the reason is salts
an essential nutrient.
Without salt, you die.
It's so important that you can detect it
at very small concentrations in food.
And that's part of what draws you
to Whole Foods.
Well, we figured out, you know, how
to concentrate salt and process it.
And so our brain says, oh, little is good.
A lot must be even better. And so.
We can process
foods, increase cork density,
and then put a bunch of salt on it
to fool the brain into thinking it's good.
For example,
if you take bread which has 1500 calories
a pound before you turn it into a butter
boat,
spreading coagulated cow
pus all over it, it's highly desirable.
But if you take the bread but
you remove the salt, it will the sugar.
Take the yeast out. You have a different
product. It's called masa.
And masa is punishment.
On Passover,
nobody's getting fat eating matzo, but the
the wheat and the
water became a carrier agent
for the soul of the will of the sugar.
And so salt can fool us.
For example, meat,
if you just take boiled beef
and go to non it
not particularly appealing.
Put the salt. The sauce is the gravy.
The meat is a carrier agent
for those those flavors.
So ultra processed foods would not be able
to be successful were it
not for our use of these chemicals.
And so indirectly what's happening
is because of stimulating
passive overeating, salt ends up helping
make us fat.
And if someone reduce their salt intake
significantly,
what would they notice in their appetite?
What they would notice
is that they would tend to overeat less.
And so it helps with overeating.
The American Heart Association says
you need about 500mg of sodium a day
to meet your needs.
The low sodium diets are around
1500 milligrams.
Typical persons
eating an average of 3500mg
of sodium means people
as much as 10,000mg of sodium.
You know salt.
If you give a tablespoon or two,
as in a medic,
it'll make you throw up
in a larger concentration.
Actually, as an Ld50, it can kill you.
So remember, what's something good
at a small concentration
doesn't necessarily mean it's
good for you in a large concentration.
It sounds like we know
the solution, right?
You have the answers.
It's eat whole foods
less or low salt, sugar or
movement, exercise and fasting.
And also sleep. And sleep.
One of our most important
activities is sleep.
If you don't get enough
non-REM deep sleep,
you will suffer seriously.
Not just psychologically,
but also physically.
One of the most important parts of healing
is the anabolic cascade of hormones
that happens during non-REM deep sleep.
So when you don't get enough sleep,
it also makes you more vulnerable
immunologically.
Also, metabolic rate is effective,
so it can actually help make you fat.
I'm saying
that reason people are getting fat
is they don't sleep enough,
so they don't have the metabolic activity,
and they don't have the energy to exercise
and do what they're supposed to do.
They don't eat enough because they're
eating highly concentrated foods,
which are high in Clark density
but low in nutrient density.
What they need to do is eat more
low density foods like solids and steam
vegetables and starchy vegetables
and beans, and not the concentrated
ultra processed foods.
And they need to fast more,
which is something we suggest
they do every day for 12 hours.
So if they control diet,
sleep and exercise,
they control fasting,
they control their health.
They regain their health.
They lose the weight.
They recover their normalize
the blood pressure.
They get off the diabetes medications.
They slow down the rate of progression
and formation of cancer, and they reverse
autoimmune diseases.
We know how to do this.
We're seeing it.
We've been watching it for 40 years.
We can get people to do it.
The challenge is
even when they're successful,
they still have to go back to the world.
And it's a challenge living healthy
in that world.
Today, right?
Because the problem is modern
life makes it so easy to do the opposite.
It makes it so easy
to I'm going to go get some fast food.
I'm going to sit on the couch,
I'm going to watch Netflix.
I'm going to play video games.
Do you believe we're capable
of fixing this or are we screwed?
I think that there's
a percentage of people that can fix it.
The people that I find
have the easiest time
are those that are motivated
by paying debility and fear of death.
People that are coming in and agonizing
pain and debility
are willing to do anything, even dangerous
things like eat
well, or exercise, or go to bed on time,
and they're even willing to fast.
So most of my patients are people
that are trying to regain their health.
But now we're seeing
we did a study recently
looking at the effect of fasting
unhealthy people.
And it turns out that
when you look at cardiometabolic risk
factors, as beneficial as fasting is in
sick people, there's even proportionately
more change in healthy people.
And so it turns out that the people
that may get the very most benefits
from fasting and these diet and lifestyle
changes are the healthy people
that are doing it to stay healthy.
It's easier to stay healthy than it is
to recover your health.
And so we're seeing more younger people
that are using these interventions
as a way of health preservation
to help improve health span.
You said food and sex or
the only two natural dopamine triggers?
Well, the only.
Normal concentrated source of dopamine
in humans are food and sex,
food and sex, which makes sense
because you have to get enough to eat,
and you have to have enough sex
in order to pass on your genes.
That's absolutely true, except for males.
It's slightly different in males.
In males, it's sex and food.
But whether it's food and sex or sex
and food, the principle is the same.
The artificial stimulation
of dopamine interferes with that.
And that's essentially what the nature
of addiction is, whether it's alcohol
or drugs or the chemicals that we put into
food like salt, well, and sugar, salt
and sugar are not food.
They're chemicals added to food
to stimulate
dopamine in the brain,
and they lead to the excess consumption,
which leads to the fat,
which leads to the visceral fat.
It leads to the disease of dietary excess.
You coauthored a book here, The Pleasure
Trap, which I have and I've read.
And in it you argue
this isn't a willpower problem.
It's an environmental problem. Yes.
Our most people failing at health.
Are we being set up to fail?
We're being set up to fail
because it turns out it's more profitable
for us to fail than for us to succeed.
And it's much easier to give people
what they want than what they need.
And so this is a very difficult problem.
And that's why the nature of addiction
is so difficult in general, whether it's
alcohol or cocaine or methamphetamines or
the use of ultra
processed, refined carbohydrates,
which have a drug like effect on people.
If you could give someone
just one piece of advice
to immediately start breaking
free from the pleasure trap,
something that they could do
in the next 24 hours, what would it be?
Well, health results
from healthful living, so focus on diet.
Eat a whole plant food, diet, sleep,
get plenty of sleeps.
You can wake
spontaneously feeling refreshed and engage
in exercise within your capacities.
Stay hydrated and if you're having trouble
breaking out of the pleasure
trap, consider doing a longer term,
medically supervised fast.
You talked
about the medically supervised fast.
For someone that maybe won't go
to a clinic or health center, right?
What's the safest way
for them to fast at home?
Is it intermittent fasting?
So what we would recommend
they do, number one is
they should read
the book can fast and save your life,
which explains everything
they need to know about fasting
and also everything
their physician needs to know.
It has.
It's been written so it's compelling
and convincing for physicians
because it cites the 22 papers
of original research that we've done.
It gives them a very clear protocol of how
to determine who's a good candidate,
what's needed during fasting,
how to monitor fasting, how to repeat
after fasting
so the information is all there,
and then they can work
with their physician.
We also offer telemedicine support.
If people want to work with a doctor
that's used to people getting well
and give them good advice
that can work with their local doctor,
that maybe he's not familiar
with some of these things.
They can work with our physicians remotely
wherever they are in the world.
Is there a certain age
where fasting is not appropriate?
Well.
In the very young and the very old,
you have to be much more careful
about fasting because of basic
hydration issues.
So the very young typically
and fortunately don't need to do long term
fasting because by manipulating the diet
you can usually get a good response.
And in older individuals,
when I'm talking about older,
once they get into their ninth
and 10th decades,
sometimes we'll have to
keep the fasting very short or use
modified fasting on broth and juices,
because they may not have the ability
to adapt to the more vigorous water.
Only fasting.
And when they go to break the fast,
what are the top three five foods
that they should just completely
stay away from?
Well, we avoid.
Animal foods and ultra processed, refined
carbohydrates that was assaulted sugar.
So we just stick to whole foods.
So fruits and vegetables,
grains, lagoons, nuts and seeds.
Is there anything we haven't
talked about that
we should have when it comes to fasting?
You know, the thing is fast and can be
an intense and miserable experience.
But there's things you can do
to make your fasting experience
not only safer but more productive.
And that's adopt a healthy diet
and lifestyle before you fast.
Don't just.
You know, go into fasting on caffeine
and alcohol and nicotine.
Make the changes as best
you can prior to fasting.
And then the transition to fasting
is much easier.
And follow the protocols
laid out in the book,
and you'll have a better chance
of having a safe and effective experience.
But also remember,
not everybody's a candidate for fasting.
If you're on medications,
you have significant health issues
working with your physician
to appropriately wean those drugs before
you try to fast, because fasting and drugs
don't go together.
For all the people out there listening
and watching, where can they find you?
If they want to learn
more about what you. Do well, they.
Can go. To our website at.
And we offer a service to your readers.
To your viewers.
I guess we'd say that
we offer a free phone conversation with me
if they fill out the registration forms,
all review their medical history,
I'll be happy to talk with them
without cost.
Point them in the right direction.
Either get them to a doctor
that can help them specifically,
or get them advice that they,
whether it's relevant for them to consider
fasting or whatever else, might be of
some use to them.
Doctor Alan Goldhaber, thank you so much
for coming on to cottages.
Thanks for getting.
The word out. Thank you.