Alan Goldhamer: How Fasting Can Save Your Life

if you don't mind I'd like to play a just a brief video clip that I think you might enjoy [Music] [Laughter] [Music] what will your last ten years look like [Music] will you be quick enough for a game of tag with your grandchild strong enough to embrace every moment [Music] you grow old with vitality or get old with disease [Music] it's time to decide the average Canadian will spend their last ten years in sickness change your future that make health last za was there anything that she could do to slow down delay or reverse the problem what about diet and he said no there wasn't dietary issues that were relevant to Flicka lymphoma had to have anything to do with it and she asked him what about fasting no and she said he said that fasting was criminal quackery that that wasn't something that you're recommending so she went to the oncologist and the oncologist told her basically the same thing that diet wasn't going to make any difference and that fasting was kind of you know ridiculous so given that tremendous medical support she decided to come to true north health where we underwent 21 days of water only fasting during which time her tumors disappeared so that was impressive we fed her for 10 days after the fasts sent her back to the oncologist a little coaching and she said you know he examined her he couldn't find the tumors even though they had been previously relatively easily palpated he looked at the chart he looked at her he looked at the chart and then he asked her fine what happened and she said well she went to the criminal quacks and underwent medically supervised fasting and the tumors disappeared until I was interesting said you have to give him a call and she asked him to do a follow-up CT scan because we had asked her to make sure she got her condition objectified and he explained to her that he wasn't going to order a CT scan because she was better and she said that she wanted to objectify the changes and he said she didn't need to objectify the changes that he'd been in practice for you know over two decades and that she was better and then she said well are you sure there's not some cancer just lurking beneath the surface and he said okay fine ordered the CT scan and then she continued to follow the diet whole food plant-based SOS read on she continued to lose weight once we get these slides work I'll be able to show you some of the the graphics and you know time went on she continued to make progress her weight continue to come down we sent her back for her follow-up at that time he continued to be supportive over after about a year which she had maintained herself cancer-free continued to make progress and honored diet we decided it would be time to write it up and see if we could present a case report so called my colleague John McDougall how many of you know dr. mcdougal you know what a friendly amiable guy yes I say hey John you know we've got this interesting case of follicular lymphoma that's resolved with fasting this is the I do you have any objective date and I said yeah we've got pre and post cat-scans okay very good can we get us a full screen I guess it is okay and he said yeah I said no we've got the date he says well yeah you should you should submit it I said yeah I'm thinking maybe we'll send it to the British Medical Journal and he says no I'll do that that's ridiculous said there they're never gonna publish it you got to go to a smaller impact Journal that he said he'd submitted some stuff to them they always turn it down said a few other words but you know so given his advice of course I immediately sent it to the British Medical Journal and after a while they did actually publish it the first reviewer had said we had overstated our case because we had suggested that this case suggested that further investigation of a vegan diet and fasting should be looked into as far as lymphoma and they've reviewers that look it's just a kid it's an an of one it doesn't mean anything it could just be random occurrence but he said if we soften the language a little bit they'd recommend publication which we did and they invited us to do a three-year follow-up they said if you could track the patient for a while to prove that actually sustained the outcome that would be even more impressive so we did after the first year we wrote to the oncologist here in San Francisco the medical school and we said dear doctor so so thank you so much for all the support you showed and referring your patient to true north Health Centre for medically supervised fasting as I'm sure you expect did you know your patients gone into remission and we're so looking forward to working with you in the years to come in order to to you know demonstrate her long-term success and we'd like to invite him to sign on as co-author of the paper that's been accepted for publication in the British Medical Journal yeah he never responded anyway now we jump ahead till two now three years later we wrote follow up track the patient let me see if I can find this was actually this was the article here was the first CT scan I don't think you need to be a radiologist to tell the difference between that and that second CT scan and then three years later we did a fop completely cancer-free full body scans and we submitted this follow-up paper and that was just published a few weeks ago so that was really good so we're tracking a number of other lymphoma patients right now we want to put a cohort together ultimately we want to do a clinical trial it shows that there's a better way at least in this condition of treating it rather than the traditional ways and what's interesting is that I can guarantee you 10 or 20 years ago we would never have gotten these papers published so there's a change taking place not that they're you know green with it or supporting it or doing it but there's there's a change institutionally that they're at least willing to have the discussion and of course now we've actually got a four year fob now she's continues to do well another common condition is high blood pressure if you do not have high blood pressure by the time you are 65 you are abnormal the majority of people will have hypertension by the time they're 65 and it's a leading contributing cause of death and disability in the United States the top number or systolic blood pressure represents the pressure of your blood and the vessels when the heart contracts the bottom number of diastolic represents the pressure in the blood when your heart relaxes each are sensitive indicators of all cause mortality you can predict more reliably with blood pressures than many other variables how likely a person is to died prematurely in fact if you look at the conditions related to high blood pressure things like congestive heart failure largely caused by high blood pressure congestive heart follows when the heart muscle loses contractility if you have congestive heart for my new lay down your lungs will fill with fluid and you can actually drown so that's why people tend to sleep sitting up strokes that cause you know motor and sensory dysfunction you lose the ability to walk talk function properly major cause of stroke is high blood pressure most people as I said do develop high blood pressure like 38 million office visits to physicians it's the leading congest off' occation for prescription medication it's worth billions of dollars to the medical profession yet the majority of people that actually have heart attacks or strokes don't have blood pressure high enough to justify medication so why don't we give everybody blood pressure medication because more people will die from taking the medication than from the blood pressure unless your pressure rises to a certain level so it's not just chronic cough fatigue and impotence that high blood pressure medications caused it's actually death as well but at some point blood pressure risk of stroke gets high enough that you can op the benefit of offsetting the stroke justifies the use of the medication but what would be better is actually resolving the blood pressure bringing your blood pressure down to a healthy level which is probably closer to 90 over 60 for every point you'd lower your systolic blood pressure there's a 1% reduction in all cause mortality if not from drugs but from diet and lifestyle changes if you want a vegan diet you get rid of the salt oil and sugar you'll see your blood pressure progressively reduce if you use medically supervised fasting you can see it happen very rapidly but currently this is how we treat blood pressure multiple medications with devastating consequences and limited reduction all cause mortality what does work if you look here number one weight loss if you're overweight lose weight number two a vegetarian diet independent of weight loss just going on to plant a whole plant food diet will reduce blood pressure levels as will getting rid of alcohol alcohol is not health food now they're telling you if you read the newspaper today you think if you you know if you don't drink you ought to start red wine I've got a powerful antioxidant in where does that antioxidant come yeah from the skin of grapes if you want it you could eat some grapes what an idea they tell you the alcohol thins your blood is it true sure works like aspirin thins the blood and if you're on a greasy fatty slimy dead decaying flesh die and risk for a clotting stroke it'll slightly reduce your risk of a clotting stroke it will not increase your lifespan others you'll still die but you'll die from a bleeding stroke instead of a clotting stroke so if it's important that you die from a hemorrhagic stroke rather than a clotting stroke by all means think about alcohol exercise reduces blood pressure walking hiking biking swimming as does medication but medications do it with a price and that price is chronic cough fatigue impotence and premature death salt restriction if you get rid of the salt in your diet a number of things happen number one it dramatically helps with weight loss why is that because salt stimulates passive overeating for example if you just sit down and eat rice however much it takes where you feel full there's a certain amount salted up you'll find it takes more to reach that feeling of being full fault salt stimulates passive overeating and it increases blood volume because the body has to hold fluid in order to protect yourself from the toxic effect the concentrated sodium and as a consequence blood volume goes up blood pressure goes up the moment you reduce the salt your blood pressure starts dropping the swelling the edema the chronic cough all the things that go along with excess sodium begin to improve and blood pressure drops sometimes more significantly with aggressive salt restriction than the use of medications John McDougall did a program where he combined those factors and got a fabulous effect a 17-point drop in systolic blood pressure which only we did great not not as good as the red bar which is fasting we did a study with T Colin Campbell from Cornell University average effect size over 37 points and if we look at a paper then this was published in the paper in a MPT if we look at just stage three hypertension that is where blood pressure starts at 180 or above the average effect size we got with fasting was 60 points it's even bigger than it looks because remember they start off on medication so their baselines taken on meds and at the end they're all off medication so it's 60 points plus whatever effect the medication we're having that's the largest effect size that's ever been shown in the scientific literature in treating high blood pressure in humans doing essentially nothing we did a second we published a second paper on borderline hypertension people taking people that didn't have blood pressure high enough to justify medication but we're still at five times the risk of getting a heart attack because their blood pressure was moderately elevated and of course their blood pressure's dropped proportionally we eventually worked with the International Union of Operating Engineers local three these are the guys that build your highways and whatnot and we did a project with the Union where we took union members that had high blood pressure diabetes we put them on a period of fasting they stayed at two North health center for an average of three weeks they dropped their weight 26 pounds during that three weeks they lowered their systolic blood pressure 30 and diastolic 11 on follow-up they were down 28 not a one-year fault they were down 28 eight pounds which means they you know maintained their loss lost a little bit more maintain most of their blood pressure gain and they reduced their cost of care more than the entire cost of the program in the first year alone which allowed us to go on for over a decade working with this Union treating their members I always remember the first guy I ever saw from the Union though I'll never forget him guy was grossly obese diabetic hypertensive you know 220 over 120 cap down medications and he was the first patient that they sent over to us but they didn't tell him what the program was I know this guy shows up he has no idea he's on five Matt TF soon he was getting another med you know just so he shows up and he's looking around True North health center and he says oh I'm in the wrong place said nono you're in the right place I got your name here on the list he goes no I'm in the wrong place I said no you're here to get well he says I'm not sick said you are sick you're grossly obese you got blood pressure's 221 traces you're gonna die he says yeah well aren't we all gonna die good point I said yeah but you're on $800 a month worth of medications if we get you blood pressure normally you could save a ton dollars a month because we're why care of the Union pays for my drugs that was the point I realized this wasn't my normal self selected highly motivated vegan patient so I don't know what does Jesus say I started thinking about medical history what do you know that happens to diabetic hypertensive males that are on a lot of meds oh yeah so I thought well I'll try that and I said hey you know get you off all those drugs they might be able to do something about your little problem he starts to stand up and I'm thinking that wasn't such a good idea because he's a pretty big guy he says well why the hell didn't you just say so so we're gonna check him in but we thought you know he's telling me about his diet and what he eats is this three of those a day only not exactly this he you see this stuff here that awful green stuff he said if they made a mistake and put that on it he would take it off and so I'm thinking we better put some real food into him before we start fasting because that might be a little bit of a problem after the fast so we start giving him some food from the salad bar and from the hot bar and he's sitting down to eat the food but he's like not able to swallow it you know he's choking he's spitting and I'm thinking oh my god I must have a tumor or something I said no next time I said it looks like you're having a little bit of trouble with the food and he said what food did this is not food said this is disgusting said if I have to eat tasteless well like this the rest of my life I'd rather just die he says why don't you go out to my truck and get my 12-gauge when I'm not looking just shoot me in the head so we checked him in put him on water only for 26 days during which time he got off his meds lost 50 pounds normalized his blood pressure so afterwards though were feeding him the same food only now he's actually eating the food I said it looks like you're doing a little better with the food and I says yeah you're damn chef's finally getting the hang of it took 20 minutes to convince him it was the same food it said no that stuff you gave me when I came in was disgusting he said this stuff it's not bad example of taste notation his taste his palate had actually changed during fasting fact we've just finished a study of clinical trial at True North health center where we actually took people and we objectified their perception of sugar and salt before fasting and after fasts and quantify that were able to show that there is a consistent change in human palate another example of what happens when you do nothing is we had a 16 we had a dentist who had 16 years prior been in the bin outside got hit in the head by a temple developed a traumatic brain injury had chronic headache for 16 years constant daily head pain no relief 8 8 8 to 10 out of 10 pain every day for 16 years despite neurontin and medications and all the rest of it comes in to do a fast kind of in desperation put on a fast 19 days into the fast she still has constantly had pain no change the nineteenth day she woke up for five minutes she had no pain first time in 16 years she said it took her a little bit to even realize what was going on but then the pain came back it lasted throughout her stay until she got into around 30 days 35 days then the pain started eats off by the end of 41 days of fasting she was out of pain broke her fast she had a little bit of prodromal sensations no acute frank pain and then we fed her for six months built her back up then we faster again for 40 days so she had to forty day fast actually a 41 and a 40 day fast and I can tell you now this is I got a seven years now at fob she's had no Noakes if algae's since her headache [Applause] okay so the question is this fasting really safe can you actually take human beings put them on water only for five to forty days and so to answer that question we did a study we did a fad what's called a fasting safety study would you took a chart review five consecutive years of patients going through this the center we used the common terminology criteria for adverse events from the American Cancer Institute criteria where we looked at every patient every symptom every day over five years a lot of work and now they have you great these patients category one two five one is mild moderate three a severe four is life-threatening consequences in number five is death definitely an adverse event so we looked at all the adverse events that happen to all the patients that underwent fasting and we have a total of five thousand nine hundred and forty nine adverse events now to understand this further you need to know that adverse events include things like nausea headache low back pain irritability skin rashes etc etc progressing to more serious consequences the majority of adverse events are mild moderate things you expect to happen during fasting there is a slight correlation between age but there is not a correlation between age and severity which means that just because you're older doesn't mean you're not able to fast effectively there were no deaths thank goodness there was only one category for event which is not was a hyponatremia that was sodium went too low we had to give her some intravenous fluid to bring her sodium up and the rest of the the symptoms were considered moderate interestingly enough I saw this paper was published in the article nor were some comments made on at work they said the high blood pressure was a risk factor for fasting what you think what why would somebody interpret that well what happens is ninety-five of our adverse events were high blood pressure here's how it's calculated if your blood pressure's ever over 160 systolic blood pressure that's considered an adverse event so if a person comes in and their blood pressures 220 and the next it's 200 and the next day it's 180 and the next day it's 170 and the next day it's 165 each of those is an adverse event even though it's clearly getting better so 95 or one third of our quote versus events were people who had established hypertension his blood pressure was dropping so ultimately we realized of course that high fasting is not a risk factor for blood pressure it's a primary treatment so let me ask you this doesn't it sound a little hard to believe that something as simple as doing nothing could be the most effective treatment for the leading contributing cause of death and disability that we're spending billions of dollars of medical management on high blood pressure type 2 diabetes autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis ulcerative colitis of Fallujah - you know problems like lymphoma how is it possible that fasting this ancient non treatment practice can be so effective what are possible mechanisms well what percentage of people that undergo fasting lose weight a hundred percent that that sounds quacky it's the hundred percent well you know the laws of physics and thermodynamics say if you don't eat you're gonna lose weight and we know what happens is at the rate of about a pound a day number two natural resis the elimination of sodium from the body excess salt that you're poisoning yourself with including from the vegan foods that many of us are making available to ourselves the highly processed high salt often high sugar foods that are vegan that is there's no meat fish frogs dairy products but just you know being vegan is good thing it's you know it might even help you get into heaven but it's not going to delay how quickly you go there unless you also adopt a sugar oil and salt free diet so getting rid of the animal foods mate you know moral ethical spiritual all that that's great but from a health standpoint you've also got to carry a little bit further and get rid of the chemicals that make people fat sick and miserable and that salt will ensure natural resis this accumulation of sodium rapidly is eliminated in fasting um rapid natural reading effect much more powerful than your hydrochlorothiazide or the diuretics that are giving you and as a consequence blood volume goes down blood pressure goes down this bloat this fluid rapidly changes in fasting number three detoxification are people really toxic what about vegans are vegans really toxic yeah you bet you bet you if you do a fat biopsy and you analyze and breakdown you'll find hundreds of different chemicals inside that those fat cells ranging from PCB dioxin pesticide residues on down the list no it's true ninety percent of the total body load of the average person got there through taking drugs or eating animal foods animal foods biologically concentrate the material from the environment so every day that animal lives and accumulates toxic material in its body just like you're doing builds up day after a week after a month if you kill that animal and eat it you get its entire lifetime accumulation of toxic material it's almost like they're seeking justice so bottom line is if you want to eliminate 90% of your exposure to the typical background toxic material one thing you could do is not kill and eat meat fish fowl eggs or dairy products okay just doing that gets rid of a huge amount of exposure but if you have accumulated materials inside yourselves one way to rapidly mobilize and eliminate those materials is to use fasting there's a couple versions of fasting there's intermittent fasting where you limit your feeding window maybe you only eat eight hours a day you don't eat before say 9:00 or 10:00 in the morning you don't need after five or six at night that gives you a period of 16 hours every single day of fasting and even that small amount of biological time fasting is enough committed ly to induce some of these metabolic changes that are associated with improved health or if you want to get even more profound effect you could go through a longer period of medically supervised fasting where you went from five to forty days only on water and then you get an even more profound effect so detoxification is a factor detoxification with fasting is in fact a reality fasting protects normal cells the combination of fasting and chemotherapy according to Valter Longo published in journal metabolism 2015 the combination of chemotherapy with for example fast and dramatically enhanced cancer-free survival they took 30 rats with cancer and it matched rats gave chemotherapy until all the cancer cells are gone which you have to why do you have to kill all the cancer cells my kids just kill a few of them yeah they grow back yeah so you got to get rid from all the promises if you have enough kin with her every to kill all the cancer cells the rats died not a good outcome what they did then they took those genetically match rats with the same kind of cancer but this time they fasted the rats okay all 30 rats survived dramatic enhanced survival in fact it's interesting if you just do fasting the biomarkers associate with cancer reversal also kick in but the point was you could it in fasting fasting helps protect healthy cells and it makes cancer cells more vulnerable then of course they've started to apply that in humans heroes if they use fasting conjunction with conventional therapies they got enhanced results there's enzymes in your system how do you think you get rid of fat you have to mobilize fat through lipolysis with mosaic the politicans iams have to mean use how do you get how do you mobilize glycogen when you go out and run how do you get glycogen out of your cells and you can burn it for fuel all enzyme driven when you go on a fast you induce fat mobilizing a glycogen mobilizing enzyme systems and those systems tend to persist after you're done fasting you also mobilize detoxifying enzymes pathways how do you think you get rid of these toxins in your body you have to mobilize those detoxifying enzymes during fasting and as a consequence not just detoxifying while you're fasting but weeks months afterwards you're more efficient at detoxifying and it's cumulative so this mechanism which would have happened naturally by force that we're choosing to use now by choice has a profound way of detoxifying and inducing these detoxifying enzymes you

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Keywords: Vegetarianism (Diet), vegan, animal rights, Vegfest (Recurring Event), Veganism (Diet)

Id: 42QAyVkAS_0

Length: 28min 40sec (1720 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 13 2018