Doctor Reveals How Water Fasting Unlocks Secret Healing Powers | Dr. Alan Goldhamer on Health Theory

hey everybody this episode is brought to you by our very own relationship theory subscribe to relationship theory at youtube.com forward slash relationship theory or click the link at the top of the episode description and i will see you there along with my lovely wife and they all say the same thing including my mother who at 92 had outlived all 50 of her lifelong friends every one of her friends was dead she was alone and she said alan you need to warn your patients if they're going to do this diet make younger friends hey everybody welcome to another episode of health theory i'm here today with dr alan goldhamer who is the founder of true north health center a leader in the field of plant-based nutrition i'm super excited to talk to you because i come from i won't say an entirely meat-based approach but i am no stranger to meet um so first of all welcome to the show thanks for having me absolutely i was very intrigued by something that i've heard you talk about and this was really the thing that sucked me into your world which is that if you go to a doctor today they don't actually expect you to get better and that gave me the chills just saying it now and when i heard it the first time i was like oh my god that is so true that's not the paradigm why is that not the paradigm well you know in medicine particularly for conditions like high blood pressure diabetes autoimmune diseases certain forms of cancer like lymphoma that make up you know a significant percentage of the problems that people have medical management is just that it's management they'll say take these drugs and you'll be on these drugs the rest of your life because they'll guarantee you that you'll never get well so uh the reason for that is that the drugs have nothing to do with the reason why you got sick and they're strictly trying to manage the consequences of your illness and today for example conditions like high blood pressure you're not even being treated for your condition you're being treated for your diet you're being treated for the diet that causes hypertension the diet that causes uh 40 of people over 25 and 63 percent of people over 60 to have high blood pressure to have the leading contributing cause of death and disability the major justification for prescription medications it's a huge multi-billion dollar business and what's uh really ironic about it is that it's completely treatable in the vast majority of cases through diet and lifestyle intervention you know we did a study uh medically supervised water only fasting in the treatment hypertension 174 consecutive patients 174 people achieve low enough pressure to eliminate the need for medication if the largest effect size ever shown in treating high blood pressure in humans with an average effect size of 60 points in stage 3 hypertension not taking into account the fact that most of these people are medicated when they start none of them are medicated when we're done and it's sustainable to the degree that they're willing to adopt a whole plant food sos free diet okay so sos is that international symbol of danger or it also stands for salt oil and sugar the chemicals added to food that make people fat sick and miserable and give them conditions like high blood pressure given my proclivity for meat from how it makes me feel and a health standpoint i would say the fact that your diet is so hardcore i never would have thought you'd be the one to draw me in um with your stance on this so i want to i want to take things sort of one piece at a time so first i want to talk about true north the things that you see in the clinic are what really pulled me in so one tell people when you founded it i was startled by how long you've had this going on and talk to me just about the the number of people you've put through your clinic right well so my wife dr moreno and i started to north health in 1984 so we've been doing medically supervised water only fasting for 36 years we've had over 20 000 patients undergo fasting uh so one thing that i find crazy just to give people some context is when you started you had to retain a defense attorney because of how fasting was perceived walk us through that because we're in a weird moment now where i think fasting is sort of catching on but people don't understand just how far we've come well yeah i mean when i was starting fasting the california board of medical quality assurance at that time determined that recommending fasting to a patient constituted such a gross violation of the standard of medical practice that it rose to the level of criminal negligence so now in fairness now we've gone from being criminal quacks uh to cutting-edge researchers because you know fasting's gained some notoriety and our 501 c 3 true north health foundation is doing original research with fasting and looking at some of these exotic biomarkers there's other people like walter longo who's been publishing some really fabulous work in major impact journals talking about intermittent fasting and and fasting mimicking approaches and uh so you know now this has kind of come full circle and so the idea that people are sick from dietary excess and that reversing the consequences of dietary excess may be a key to stimulating everything from autophagy to you know reducing acute phase reactive proteins associated with inflammation to increasing brain derived neurotrophic factor in the brain to prevent alzheimer's disease all of these mechanisms that fasting induces interestingly enough many of them are the same biomarkers that change with exercise exercise and fasting both tend to impact these health promotion disease reversal biomarkers and it may be because both fasting and exercise reverse the consequences of dietary excess it is dietary excess particularly refined foods whether it's refined carbohydrates the sugars the oils the salt or refined meat foods you know animal foods that have been highly refined either one of those these high animal protein high refined carbohydrate diets these are the things that cause people to be fat sick and miserable this is why we have this epidemic of chronic degenerative disease because of what we're putting in our mouth you know it's interesting just like you know meat would be considered a whole food processed meat products and processed animal food products dairy products etc are have completely different effects on the body same thing with you know complex carbohydrates whole plant foods have a certain effect but you refine them into sugars and flowers now you get a completely different response i want to get into the specifics of the diet and stuff but first i want to revolve around fasting a little bit more so do you have a sense of okay we've got this thing it's incredibly good for you we've got the saying that's a part of religious tradition going back god knows how long like it seems like if i'm not mistaken virtually every major religion has some sort of fasting application to it so there's obviously a spiritual understanding of it and yet becomes the thing that once we're talking medically becomes so grossly misunderstood maligned attacked is it just that the feeling of being hungry triggers this like sense of urgency of like yo i've got to eat that causes people to have what i'll call a sort of deranged response to it is there something else why people are people are very afraid that uh not eating they're not sure exactly how much period of time would result in their demise and it feels that way because you know you're programmed to make sure that you overcome deprivation in a world of our ancient ancestors it was scarcity that was the dominant rule most humans didn't live long enough to reproduce and that was because of deprivation and scarcity people didn't get enough to eat or couldn't avoid being eaten so your basic instincts are eat as much as you can whenever you can of the most concentrated foods available and if you're lucky maybe you'll live long enough to reproduce and so that's your instincts now we live in a very natural environment of abundance of excess it just doesn't ever really happen in nature except when uh human you know foodstuffs become available animals don't suffer obesity even animals you think of as being fat like whales are really nine percent body fat so they're lean mean machines and again you know survival is get enough to eat and don't get eaten that's that's true for all animals we because of our innovative capacities created a situation we invented agriculture and we figured out how to get food and then we figured out how to refine it and concentrate it and then we figured out how to do animal husbandry so we could raise lots of very rich uh food processing machines essentially in the form of animals and so now we're in a situation where we can get enough to eat not even get off the couch we don't have to exercise we pay other people to do it we call it the nfl we sit in a couch drink high caloric beer and engage in mock warfare pretending we're part of the winning coalition i love the way you describe stuff is is pretty amazing and i think over the course of the interview people are going to realize you are not afraid to contradict people or uh to say what you think is right or to carry a little fan in your pocket so if somebody starts smoking near you that you can actually blow the smoke back in their face there are so many things about your personality that make you perfectly suited to focus on what works and so one i want to know why are people seeing the profound effects of that and then two why you you're so careful to always say medically supervised why does that matter well what we really recommend there's two types of fasting there's there's short-term intermittent fasting which we recommend people do every day that everybody fast every day for between 12 and 16 hours depending on what your target is and that means that you don't eat at least three hours before you go to sleep hopefully going to sleep at a reasonable hour and so that gives you 12 to 16 hours of fasting and eight hour feeding window we recommend that that in that eight hour feeding window that the you know whole natural food diet that you eat excludes all the chemicals and the processed foods and the other stuff and in doing that you get the quantity and quality of nutrients you need and you give yourself a 16 hour period of fasting every day and cumulatively that's thought to induce changes and and stimulate factors that are that promote healing it also helps minimize overeating and so you know the net effect of that intermittent fasting which virtually everybody can do safely on their own is something we recommend and then periodically we recommend people take a longer period of time to do water only fasting in our clinic we fast people from five to forty days and so typically faster two three four weeks of time that needs to be done in a matter of only for people that are obese no no not at all in fact most of our patients uh it's high blood pressure diabetes autoimmune diseases lymphoma uh and we have also healthy people that are just coming in for a shorter period of time like a week the reason we talk about supervision in that regard is number one not everybody's a good candidate for fasting some people should not be fasting anybody well if people have for example cranium levels over 2.0 their kidney function is inadequate putting them on a fascist shut their kidneys down result in kidney failure and death um if they have cardiovascular why i've never heard that but why would your kidney shake because when you go on a fast you massively mobilize a detoxification response and the kidneys can only process so much material and if you overload the kidneys you end up with a kidney failure situation and that's you know you've heard recently there's been people that have tried dry fasting and dry fasting particularly puts a heavy load on the kidney and there was a death associated with one of its proponents just because you know you have to have a solute in order for the kidneys to function you have to have a way of getting the material that's mobilized out of the system why is fasting triggered detoxification well if you think about it when you're going on a fast there's nothing for the body to do except mobilize its reserves and in water fasting particularly in a resting state those reserves are predominantly fat in fact we've done a study recently at the true north health center where we've used a dexa scanner with software that allows us to do whole body composition we've determined not only is mostly fat mobilized during water only fasting but specifically in preferentially visceral fat so a person might lose say for example 20 of their adipose tissue but they'll lose fifty sixty percent of their of their visceral fat which is really exciting much faster than for example being on a a low carbohydrate diet in terms of the ratio of visceral fat mobilization to uh subcutaneous fat and in that fat contains a lot of fat soluble materials and it's where a lot of toxins are stored when those fats are mobilized you get a increasing load pcbs dioxin pesticide residues etc all these fat soluble nutrients are rapidly mobilized processed and eliminated but you need to have the capacity to actually eliminate materials and most of those materials are eliminated in the urine that's the blood being processed by the kidneys and if you do a fat biopsy on any person you'll find hundreds of different chemicals in various concentrations and if you track back how did those chemicals get in the body where did they come from obviously if people take drugs or they smoke and they drink alcohol and they eat foods from the environment that are polluted that's a potential source but about 90 according to some researchers got there from one behavior and that's eating animal foods animals biologically concentrate the toxins from their environment so a calorie of animal food could have two to a thousand times the concentration of a given chemical compared to say a plant-based food calorie and so the consumption of large amounts of animal food potentially expose people to proportionally higher ratios of these materials and it's also why people on very high animal food diets often have a much more difficult time adapting to the fasting state initially because there's just literally more to process and eliminate but it does and so that's particular i might mention true of refined animal products just like refined plant products have particular problems so i think we need to be clear that it's actually these highly processed foods of any kind that seem to be the biggest sources of concentration of chemicals it's not necessarily the brown rice that's the main problem it might be the rice syrup or it's the products that the highly concentrated products that result in the the largest concentrations of materials and desirable materials when you fast though the body rapidly mobilizes these materials if you fast and exercise them once you've depleted your glycogen stores after say 24-48 hours the only way the body would get the needed glucose to maintain muscle activity or excess brain activity would be through gluconeogenesis you'd have to break down proteins in order to get that so what happens is if you fast and exercise you actually lose more weight but more of it's lean tissue if you fast and rest you you mobilize predominantly fat and specifically and preferentially visceral fat so in addition to making sure a person is a good candidate for fasting with a history exam and lab we also need to make sure they rest during fasting now there's modified fasting when you take a certain amount of calories therefore you have more glucose available you're able to you know minimize gluconeogenesis that's a different process water only fasting though needs to be done resting if you're going to maximize detox preserve lean tissue and maximize fat loss and that we've been able to prove now you know we've actually done this and we've done you know before during after fasting six-week follow-up so we've got the data and so we can put a lot of the old wives tales to rest that paper will be published later this year and and i think that'll really make people aware of just why this rest which is so contraintuited to people trying to maximize weight loss is important with fasting and you know if the goal is to really detoxify the best way to do it is prep properly before fasting really important people that try to say quit coffee at the same time they're going on a fast really undermine themselves because the caffeine withdrawal is actually quite difficult fasting isn't so difficult if you prep well all of a sudden fasting doesn't even look that hard people go to cooking classes they're interactive they go down to the dining room they interact with people even on these long fast two three four five weeks and they're they do fine but they are resting and so resting in some ways is a little bit harder but it's more effective i say it's harder because you'll detox more you'll feel worse but we don't care how you feel we care how well you get so if you feel bad in fasting doesn't bother me as long as you get well you'll totally forgive us and so next time you fast you want to make sure you rest during that doesn't mean you can't do some stretching you can't do meditation there's things you can do but they're more passive and then you look at how your recovery is post-fasting you'll find it's really quite fabulous because not only you get rid of the inflammation and the joint pain and some of the chronic injuries but then you recover quickly and we and we're able to demonstrate that quantitatively now as as lean tissue recovers fat continues to go down after fasting so you're losing fat you're losing fat you continue to lose fat even though you're regaining quote weight because glycogen water fiber and muscle come back after fasting fat does not what's interesting is you have two pounds of glycogen so you know you're going to get that 2 pound back you've got fiber that has to go back in the gut unless you're eating an all meat diet then there is no fiber and there's also hydration there's a physiological dehydration with fasting now that's more when you're exercising you dehydrate more so it looks like you're losing more weight but all you're doing is dehydrating why are you dehydrating if you're drinking water it doesn't matter if you're drinking water if it's you hold it in the cells there's a physiological adaptation to fasting where there's a natural dehydration state it's probably part of the conservation mechanism there's a lot of weird things that happen very contraintuitive during fasting like for example you know we talked about exercise increasing b brain derived neurotrophic factor that preserves the brain and protects the nervous system it also increases in fasting you think about exercise you're vigorously active fasting you're laying on your around and not doing much they both are changing these same things in the same way it's it's really really um non-intuitive but when we look at the science if we look at the data and then we look at the clinical outcomes it's really apparent and now we're tracking people 30 35 years i've got people now that are in their 80s that we started off in their 50s and they all say the same thing including my mother who at 92 had outlived all 50 of her lifelong friends every one of her friends was dead she was alone and she said alan you need to warn your patients if they're going to do this diet make younger friends so i'm telling people starting right now make younger friends so when you're older and you're still around you know they'll you'll have people to interact with that i mean you know still heartbreaking but good problem to have so talk to me about the longer duration fast so i know that the longest fast is like 280 days or i mean just something absolutely absurd so i knew that it was physiologically possible but i imagined it was more proportional to the amount of body fat that you have but like somebody with a normal bmi maybe will peg them at something like 15 body fat how long can they fast water so an 155 pound 70 kilogram male okay could go 70 days well the problem is once you get through fasting you enter a process called starvation and now once you enter starvation there's a relatively short period of time and then you die we don't do that because it would really be bad for our outcome data so we're very careful to avoid that we've had 20 000 walk in 20 000 people walk out we are experts at not letting people enter into starvation the other thing with fasting while we're talking about risks is the re-feeding period if you have a long period of fasting and you re-feed inappropriately you can get a condition called re-feeding syndrome which can be fatal it's a very serious problem where electrolyte balances and all kinds of stuff can occur we've never seen that because we have a very specific refeeding protocol that's followed and we refeed for a period of no less than half the length of the fast in a controlled setting so it is it is important you can also get a condition called post-fasting edema when you get off all the greasy salty processed crap that people are living on and you do a fast all that gets flushed out of the body if you then expose a person to very high concentrations of sodium like in commercial soups or something like that the body will suck that material and fluid up to protect itself from it and that can result in post-fasting edema if you do it slowly you can get back to whatever your normal diet was without that problem but it has to happen over a period of time so there's a refeeding period that's important particularly in this long term fasting you know in the three day the five day fast for most people that's not going to result in you know as much of it of an issue they may get a belly ache if they eat eat too much food but they're not going to get the very serious consequences as you can see in very long-term fasting now the other concern here is of course medications some medications you don't want to rapidly discontinue anticoagulant medications steroid medications any psychotic medications the rapid withdrawal of those medications can induce a very serious or life-threatening response some medications you want to get off as soon as possible but you don't want to be taking those medications during fasting so medications that might not do that much damage feeding can be very serious fasting even non-sterile anti-inflammatories and common over-the-counter medications in the fasting state strongly contraindicated result in all kinds of downstream consequences supplementation is included lots of complications in the fasting state whereas you wouldn't necessarily see any problem in the feeding state that's one of the reasons we talk about making sure before a person undertakes a long-term fast they have appropriate history exam and lab remember 99 of patients have no complications uh with fasting but one percent can have very serious complications important that percentage be identified monitored and so you don't end up with bad outcomes because that's what gives fasting a bad name is people doing it inappropriately they continue to work they get dehydrated which is one of the main issues with fasting is maintaining adequate hydration and drinking water itself won't assure that in fact drinking too much water can flush your electrolytes out and result in water intoxication so if we don't solve the problem drinking water how do we solve the problem right we solve it by resting maintaining appropriate hydration and allow the natural recycling mechanisms in the body to maintain nutritional status and monitoring people so that we don't get into a depleted state that's why we're monitoring electrolytes that's why we do twice daily examinations on patients so it is a safe and natural adaptation remember fasting is a biological adaptation you notice everybody every human can fast we have to be able to fast every human that couldn't fast died because every time spring came late there was no way to sustain this bulbous neural net our massively oversized brain two and a half times the vas of say a chimp chimps don't fast you don't feed a chip in a week or so they're dead they that's why you'll never see chimps wandering away from the tropics they live with a constant year-round supply of food because their brain doesn't change to burning ketones your brain is a bi-fuel brain it changes completely the normal fuel is glucose and that's your main burner of glucose is your brain that's the biggest thing and when the brain goes in the fasting state it changes to burning ketone bodies particularly beta-hydroxybutyric acid and it becomes preferentially burning it just brings a tiny little bit of glucose and that's the little bit of gluconeogenesis that continues during fasting unless you're active then of course your muscles burn glucose and now you really start breaking muscle down so um the brain being a bi-fuel brain had to be that way because otherwise humans when spring came late because we burned so much glucose in our brain we wouldn't have been able to make it and this is the mechanism by which fasting mimicking diets and keto diets play because if you go on a very high fat diet or a high fat high protein diet which some people do and you don't eat carbohydrates this fasting mechanism kicks in so your brain changes over to burning ketones you go into ketosis and it has a hunger blunting effect when you're in a ketotic state you don't feel hunger and as a consequence that helps people that are trying to do short-term weight loss the problem is what's good for short-term weight loss isn't necessarily the same thing that's best for long-term health stability so in our clinic we're not a weight loss clinic we're not looking to maximize gross weight on the scale over a short period of time we're interested in fat loss and improving health so we're looking at what does it take not only to live a long life everybody wants to live their full potential but more importantly how do you avoid debility how do you avoid spending the last 79.6 years in debility 16 years in poor health what the average person is doing how do you avoid finding yourself unable to talk or move lying in some nursing home bed waiting for people to change your diaper for the last years or decades of your life how do you increase healthy life expectancy not just life expectancy the years you live fully functional how do you ensure a good death that means you live your life to your full potential one day you go to sleep you don't wake up because you reached your genetic potential and not become debilitated uh individual for years and decades where we spend most of our money and effectively trying to manage illnesses that were caused by poor diet and lifestyle choices that's what we're using fasting to do is try to help healthy life expectancy and then a whole plant food sos free diet to sustain it yeah so i think now now's the time to get into that so the whole idea of no salt no sugar no oil um this was the thing that really pulled me in so we used to joke my last company was a nutrition company and we used to joke if it tastes good spit it out and it was just like so many things that taste good are just absolutely terrible for you and but you know that's because people are addicted to the artificial stimulation of these chemicals we've done a study a taste adaptation study we've shown with fasting your actual ability to detect salt and sugar your hedonic response to food actually changes and you can taste vegetables that are naturally high in sodium but most people don't you know they don't notice it after fasting oh my gosh you think wow this is really amazing and so good food starts to taste good again and sometimes the stuff you used to like is too spicy too salty because your actual polish no it can adapt back go back to eating that jerky and stuff eventually you'll get back to you know craving the salt but the point is it's not as hard as people think it's going to be long term because you get to the point you actually would prefer you know the the beans and grains and nuts and seeds and these kind of things it's not just discipline you know that dries it except initially and that's where fasting can be helpful it makes that transition quicker you asked about how long do people have to fast well sometimes it only takes a few days of fasting to induce these real unhealthy people to induce these changes that's why people that maybe do a yearly fast of three to five days or seven days find it can be very helpful not just the detoxifying for the three days five days but the effect that it has and how they feel they can overcome their hypertension their diabetes their autoimmune diseases you know glucose and insulin everybody's interested in glucose and particularly insulin it's profoundly affected by fasting fasting is one of the few things you can do to actually reverse insulin resistance you know what another thing that helps with insulin resistances exercise that's why diabetics you got to get them eating right now is the smile because you're seeing another place where those two things line up it constantly repeats itself in fact one of the things we did to save time was identify the markers that improve with exercise and then test them in fasting it's like it just saves a whole bunch of time because you know like for example igf-1 insulin growth factor one the lower the igf-1 the longer the animals live periodic fasting in rats for example you can double their lifespan just by doing periodic fasting right in what duration like just 16. well and remember rats are completely different than people so with rats you can only fast about four days as their potential not like humans which goes 70 days or more rats are very short so it's proportionately different time you don't compare days to days but the process of doing say for example every other day eating at living them will add you know significantly to the lifespan of the rat why well they measured biomarkers and they found out that insulin growth factor goes down and that's associated with both fasting and exercise another one um leptin which is the the lower the leptin levels is associated with reduced inflammation and now the general theories are that inflammation largely responsible for all kinds of things not just the joint pain but also your heart disease and cancer possibly and kidney issues and so lower left and levels seem to be good leptin levels go down uh with fasting blood pressure heart rate i already told you largest effect size ever shown treating hypertension in with with fasting we have very dramatic and consistent results with that we're doing a study right now with the mayo clinic looking at a phase one clinical trial the treatment of high blood pressure using fasting instead of medication the microbial load you have what five pounds of bacteria living in your intestinal tract a thousand strains of different bacteria living creatures eating and pooing inside you right now and what those bacteria poo in you depends on what you feed them and so if you feed um your bacteria soluble fibers which is their from our viewpoint natural food you get vitamin k and fertilizer but if you feed them animal-based foods you get completely different by-products that are associated with increased inflammation so that's why we want to be careful about how much quantity particularly animal protein the inflammation markers like if you look at il-6 and tn alpha and all these different markers they've identified that associate with inflammation they go down with exercise and fasting people that exercise regularly people that fast periodically have lower levels of these inflammatory markers but fasting doesn't just reduce things it also increases things so there's all kinds of markers now that have been identified going up with fasting things that improve and reduce inflammation ghrelin and ato ah diponectin what is that yeah uh it's it's one of these markers that's associated with insulin sensitivity and inflammation ampk down regulates something else called pgc1 alpha which is associated with increasing mitochondrial biogenesis so the actual energy producing guys that live in your cells go up with fasting all right how do you know when it's time to break up will having kids ruin your dreams why can't you control that ugly jealousy when do you know if it's time to move in or get the hell out these are just a few of the no holds barred no bs conversations we'll tackle on the new youtube channel relationship theory along with my wife the lovely and talented lisa billy will bring our 20 years of experience juggling our entrepreneurial aspirations while maintaining a strong relationship through all the obstacles that have smacked us in the gut walloped us upside the head on a daily basis it's just as hard to maintain a relationship as it is to build a successful company maybe even harder but it is well worth it certainly more worth it than building a company and if you can't maintain a healthy relationship then there's no way you're going to be able to thrive in your business environment it's absolutely impossible we might be thriving now but it wasn't always the case for us we had to deal with family pressure financial struggles and a never-ending stream of obstacles and just when you think one problem has been solved ten others are going to slam right into you and let me tell you if you can't deal with the inevitable struggles that are coming your way there's no way that you're going to stay together like most of our success we've gotten to where we are by making a lot of mistakes and learning along the way and now through relationship theory we're sharing everything that we've learned lisa and i will tell you that if you want to stay together you better open up or shut up we'll also share some secrets on how to keep the sexual spark alive and practical tools to help you stop fighting for anyone that wants to improve their relationship or get ready to have one this show is for you so if you want to level up on your relationship game boys and girls you need to watch and subscribe to relationship theory at youtube.com forward slash relationship theory or click the link at the top of the episode description take care and be legendary now if we were going to build out the ultimate fasting protocol and in fact what do you do annually i know you're doing the the narrowed eating window so maybe a 16-8 or something like that but when do you do a multi-day fast yeah so i i i hate fasting yeah it's it's awful because you can't exercise you can't you know play basketball you can't you have to rest it's really awful but it's also very helpful so i do it every year i fast for a week our basic protocol is in healthy people you know that are on healthy diets uh generally have almost no downward symptoms during fasting they don't have hunger they don't have terrible healing crisis they don't get a lot of it's pretty boring frankly so we meditate we relax and we rest and try to do all the right things and i do it for a week and if at the end of a week perfectly stable no symptoms that's it back to refeeding carefully takes half the length of faster we feed back to the whole plant food sos free diet and we do that every year and i i just did mine in in november very uneventful very helpful on many levels but not exciting patients much more entertaining because they're coming off animal products they're coming off coffee they're coming off alcohol they're coming off medications they'll have active healing crisis inflammation mucous discharge they'll have skin elimination you'll see the lumps and bumps falling off you'll see low back discomfort you'll see headaches you'll see sleep disruption it can be very what i call entertaining uh and that you just keep going until that resolves are they getting those symptoms though because of the release of toxins like why on earth would your lower back hurt oh because the kidneys are processing most of these metabolic products and you get what's called visceral somatic referral pain for three to five days and then it goes away the other thing that happens is things mobilize in inverse proportion so in other words you can lose fifty percent of your visceral fat but you only lose twenty percent of your adipose tissue and only four percent of lean tissue and then the lean tissue comes back with re-feeding but the fat doesn't the fat continues to drop if you're doing the sos diet right so if you you can't go back to greasy fatty slimy processed crap and i want to talk more about that sos part of the program is to educate people about how to eat we do cooking demos we do lectures we have a whole roku channel we've got you know we do all kinds of stuff to what i call brainwash people so that they're prepared to go home and efficiently apply a whole natural foods diet get lots of we particularly like vegetable materials so both raw and cooked vegetable materials and these starches like cupboard squash and butternut squash and kombucha we're not talking about uh you know tater tots and flour products and sugary things and all kinds of artificial processed crap type of whole foods okay so your fruits vegetables um non-glutenous grains we don't use glutinous grains at all we don't we're using more like when we talk about grains we're talking about quinoa and millet and rice and you know like you'd kind of let's let's dip into a few things specifically that as somebody who's um dabbled in sort of a plant first approach but never gone vegetarian or vegan um one i've always told people that fruit is nature's candy bar um what what is it about like can i take an unlimited amount of fruit cause like if you told me i could eat watermelon apples bananas oranges all day i'm in homie like i don't need anything else that's not gonna work so the problem is today's hybridized fruits are very high in sugar and very low in fiber so they're not like the wild apples in hawaii where they look more like vegetables i mean these are and they're perfectly good foods if they're used appropriately so we use whole fruit not fruit juices not dried fruits not processed you know artificial sugars we're talking about your berries your melons and we usually have one meal that might have some fruit and two meals that are really more vegetable dominated so they might let's say for example somebody has oatmeal in the morning with some blueberries and maybe some flax seeds ground or some walnuts they have a huge salad with big steamed vegetables at lunch and dinner with enough complex carbohydrates so they don't get too skinny and so the idea is we're looking at about 10 of calories from protein about 15 to 18 percent of calories from fat with the balance coming from whole plant food carbohydrate now there's a problem in order to get enough calories on this kind of a diet you have to eat a lot of volume you're talking about several pounds of food a day because you know potatoes rice and beans all have 500 calories a pound not you know 2 000 calories a pound from say nuts or seeds or even higher from animal products so you have to eat or 4 000 calories a pound from oil so you we're not pouring olive oil over everything we're just eating whole foods there's no salt oil or sugar it's just the salt oil and sugar naturally containing in these whole foods why is salt bad well salt has a couple problems salts not bad sodium chloride is an unnecessary nutrient without which you die you have to have enough sodium in your diet it happens to be that you get all the sodium you need from the large volumes of these whole natural foods just like you get enough carbohydrate you don't have to add sugar and then you get enough essential fatty acids including decosaxonic acid etc that you form from your dha are you formed from your omega-3 by eating whole plant foods but the problem with added salt is that it stimulates what's called passive overeating so if you just give an animal it's filled till it feels satiated say rice whatever it'll eat a certain amount and then it feels satiated you salt it they'll eat significantly more people say yeah it tastes better you're eating more because you like it better but you're eating more because the salt the chemical salt the sodium chloride in higher concentration stimulates dopamine in the brain results in increased intake it affects satiety and so the problem for people trying to lose weight if they're eating salted foods usually too the salted foods are things like flour products that are turned into breads or crackers or cookies that are also hyper concentrated in calories but the salt will allow them to eat more think about bread if you take the salt out of bread it's and and you take out the sugar it's called matzah well you know it's they have to eat it once a year and on passover and that's it because that's the only time you'll talk nobody's running out buying big boxes and lots as a routine because it's flour and water it doesn't taste good because any highly fractionated food needs salt oil and sugar or combinations in order to increase flavor that's what chefs are is people that take hyper-concentrated foods and add salt oil and sugar to it and deliver it to the palate so it stimulates the brain in the most intense way possible we're saying get away from all that let's um your addict analogy i think is very apt and i want people to burn that into their soul that there are some people that can get away with having some of this stuff and it doesn't become a huge problem though they would almost certainly be better off from a longevity perspective from a feel-good perspective if they went to a totally plant-based sos diet um but so for someone like me i don't struggle with my weight i don't have an addictive personality i can fast if i want just because i think it's better for me but i when i think about going to a full plant-based diet sort of forgetting about a pure sos diet for a second but one of the things that i already eat that i know that i would eat is an avocado like literally the avocado mash it nothing else added to it i take a raw baby carrot and then i put salt on the avocado it is delicious is it still bad for me though if i am i'm not overweight i don't have a problem overeating it at that point does salt still have such a problem that i should be cutting it out on my diet or am i only cutting it out to stop me from passive overeating well i think it's not just passive overeating because salt also is a very powerful preservative which is why it's used you know throughout history before we had refrigeration and stuff that helped food not go bad so people to get sick from eating spoiled meats and other foods and so it is an effective preservative but when you think about the five pounds of bacteria that live in your gut it may not be too good an idea to put too much of a preservative into that gut because it will alter the microflora part of the reason people on meat-based diets have completely different microflora than plant-based diets may in part be because of the higher salt intake that's oftentimes associated with it now let's be clear you know vegan diets can be total crap soda pop uh potato chips and other generic terms for highly processed fractionated foods can all be vegan you know oreo cookies are vegan that doesn't make them healthy it just makes them not have animal food in it so i'm not arguing uh that that vegan foods can't be crappy foods they certainly can i get in trouble speaking at national vegan conferences explaining to people that as as challenging as meat products can be the vegan processed food products may be worse and that they'd be better off eating the meat and that just gets them all upset because they're being driven from you know moral ethical and spiritual viewpoints and saving the planet and all that stuff i'm not arguing that i'm just arguing i just want patients to live a long and healthy life and not be debilitated and we know that too much animal protein is definitely a detriment so people that are eating large amounts of animal protein have higher problems with kidney disease and cardiovascular disease there's definitely at some point there's too much that needs to be reduced even for people that are going to advocate animal foods as a whole natural food now you might ask me can people eat meat and still maintain optimum weight absolutely because meat isn't a highly fractionated pleasure trap food it's a whole natural the problem with meat is it's very concentrated if you eat too much of it you can have problems but it's not the same thing for example as dairy products which are a highly processed animal food that has all the challenges of animal foods but now it has the problems of the salt like try eating your cheese without salt and see what it tastes like it's the salt that people really like about it absolutely so that's why this gets very clouded and confusing is that because it's not just meat or it's not just plants it's it's really a question of how processed foods are and how do we get away from having so much processed foods and frankly meat itself without salt you know just boil some meat and chew on it a bit and see if that's how appealing it is to you know what i'm saying it's like yeah now i think people get sugar and i think a lot of people so associate salt with heart disease or high blood pressure that they're they can buy those two the one that trips me out and then i'm super interested to get your take on is not bad oils things that everybody considers bad like um you know vegetable oil you know french fries fried oil like that kind of thing but like olive oil on a salad like that's the one i want to talk about so olive oil is way less bad than the other ones it's omega-9 fatty acid has a different ratio of fatty acids it can be less processed you know theoretically you can squish those olives and extract the oil the thing is it's still nine calories a gram of highly processed fat that begins to peroxidize as you break it down so there's still challenges even with olive oil now would you would i agree that olive oil is less bad than the others oh no question and particularly if it's not heated at high temperature which is the other problem with fats when you do fried foods and i mean that's a whole nother cascade of problems i don't think most people are arguing that that's good though most people know that's not that but they're going to want to try to preserve well like mcdougall says john mcdougall says that people love good news about their bad habits and so the arguments are that this is so much less bad that now it makes it good well that's not really true less bad just means less bad it doesn't make it good you don't need to fractionate or process your oils down you can get all the essential fats you need by using your avocado or and minimally processing it okay you mush it or you chew it up but you don't have to extract the oil out of the cells and increase its concentration remove the fiber remove a lot of the other benefits the problem with too much fat in the diet though is that fat is very efficient uh and so as a consequence it's really easy particularly eating refined oils to overeat you know that one tablespoon of olive oil has more calories than the salad so we we aren't really i just drink a little put a little drip but it's so rich we just aren't getting the proportion here that pound of salad has 100 100 calories whereas you know you've got 100 you know uh more than 100 calories in that in that dressing serving so it's more than you think and if you really literally just put a few drops on which you find is you can't taste it there's no reason for it to even be there so if i would say have your your avocado and your carrots just leave leave the salt alone you don't need the extra added salt that and you know then you'll be back to a whole natural food diet that's sos free talk to me about variety because honestly i could eat avocados carrots kale um a really small handful of things a banana maybe an apple you know a couple times a week whatever i get that we can't overdo the you know now sort of bastardized fruit but how much variety do i need to not be malnutritioned on a vegetarian diet what surprisingly small amount and particularly if it rotates with the season for example if you ate just 2 000 calories we'll just assume for a second that you are the average you need more than that but if you are the average guy weren't working out didn't use your brain that much and you only needed 2 000 calories a day just which is the rda average um my guess is you probably burn 3000 calories a day or more but at 2 000 calories a day if you ate 2 000 cars of just say brown rice and broccoli that was it your entire diet you would get all the vitamins minerals uh protein essential amino acids you get about 80 grams of protein out of that and you know three cups of rice uh four cups of broccoli it would be a boring diet but you would get everything except b12 that you need you know and that is one thing on these plant-based diets if you really aren't getting the fecal contamination associated with animal foods you do need to get a source of b12 it only comes from bacteria and we use recommend a thousand micrograms of methylcobalamin a day and that'll meet virtually everybody's needs so that is an issue you have to get out in the sun to get enough vitamin d because you're not drinking your vitamin d fortified milk because you have to actually make it in the sun or supplement it if necessary so um fortunately you can avoid most of the other pills and potions and powders because these large volumes of plant-based foods have high degree of nutrition and particularly when you emphasize the green vegetable materials the raw and cooked greens and your broccoli and chard and kale these are really nutrient-rich foods very low in caloric density but you do have to eat a lot and so that's that's one of the downsides a lot more eating and chewing the good news is though you have normal microflora to feed your gut so you're not getting tma which becomes tmao which is so dominant in the meat gut flora you're getting all of the micronutrients that you need you get the fiber you have satiety you're getting enough hydration because you get a lot of water content from these water content-rich foods in addition to whatever water you're drinking but you do you and you don't have the chronic constipation which means you don't get the fissures and the uh hemorrhoids and you're not having the varicose veins and the prolapsed uteruses and the ptosis and the diverticulitis and all the other conditions that come from a very low fiber diet and this is one of the challenges for people even they're trying to eat healthy but using an animal-rich diet unless they get enough fiber in they're not feeding the microflora in their gut that's why colitis patients have so much trouble literally that microflora ends up having to eat the the coating of the intestinal tract you know because it's going to survive just like you want to survive you feed it soluble fibers you get a different balance so even if you're going to do a meat in the diet you better get enough vegetables in addition so that you know you get the fiber and the nutrients and the materials that you need talk to me really fast about rice brown rice can i have white rice i get no salt no oil um but if i could just shovel my face full of white rice um i would be a pretty happy camper i love adding that to other things like it's just such a cool base um yeah not a fan of white rice because you eliminate the fiber the the micronutrients that are so you know so beneficial to rice all you're doing is basically getting that that carbohydrate now granted it may not be as refined as sugar and white flour and stuff there's another problem with rice rice is one of those bio-accumulator foods because of the ways it's grown so if you buy rice that's been raised on land that they raised cotton on they used arsenic pesticides on those cotton fields and there's still arsenic in those soils and it sucks up into rice more so than it might other people and so arsenic concentrations in rice particularly white rice grown on fields that were sprayed with arsenic pesticides can be a potential bioaccumulation threat now there are some places like california where they never raised cotton didn't use as much arsenic pesticides and so like we buy lundberg farms organic rice and they are very public about posting their arsenic concentration there's some of all this kind of stuff in virtually everything actually the people that should be most concerned are big chicken eaters because chickens tend to be really high because of the feed that they get and other stuff but anyway so if you're going to use rice there's things you can do to reduce the concentration of arsenic one is cook it like you would pasta which is five water five parts water one part rice that'll reduce the the buy rice that's you know like i said grown by companies that are growing on land that they don't use arsenic pests and that's organically grown so they're not spraying it with crop today um there's other grains so like quinoa and millet and other grains that are also alkaline forming and you know don't have that kind of bio accumulation problem so i'd say you you'd use a variety of those but i would prefer whole grains not the refined grains right what about glyphosate for somebody taking out so much vegetable matter that's got to be on your radar right it is an issue uh for people fortunately now there's um a higher and higher percentage of organically grown fruits and vegetables available in fact do you know who the largest seller of organic produce in the country is now no it's costco foods wow okay costco foods is the largest producer or seller of organic produce you know who number two is no it's walmart ah i should have guessed so what's happened now is they've said oh i don't think these companies sat down and said well we really want to help the health of our clients they said oh people will pay a premium for food that doesn't use glyphosate or doesn't use chemicals well why don't we sell them that food and now it's become a dominant source of their produce sales because people spoke with their dollars and they said we would prefer to have our vegetable material grown without this and they're doing the same thing with meat you know they're trying to buy free-range meat that doesn't have all the antibiotics and the chemicals because they know that animals biologically accumulate and concentrate these materials and i don't always think it's an and or too even if you're going to for example include animal foods in your diet if you eat a dominant amount of vegetable materials in addition to that your likelihood that your negative consequences from the animal food will be minimized and then the health benefits of being a healthy diet are going to be maximized i think it's a question of proportion in quantity that's the major issue i don't think that there's any evidence that 100 vegan necessarily has any advantage over the person that's mostly vegan and uses a small amount of other products in their diet i don't know that we can demonstrate that difference not from a health standpoint yeah that makes sense dr goldhamer dude you are a lot of fun there is something about the twinkle in your eye when you get going on this stuff that i find just absolutely amazing you've made me question things that you know up until this point i had never stopped to really look at the way that you present i think it's extraordinary where can people engage with you if they want to come to true north like what's how do they do it well we have a service for your viewers that if they would like a free phone conversation with me about whether their particular issues would be benefited by anything like we're talking about here diet and fasting they can go to our website at truenorthhealth.com and complete what are called the registration forms which is just their medical history basically i'll review that they can call me at no cost and i'll be happy to talk to them and if there is something that's relevant i'll be happy to refer them to who if they want to do fasting to the closest place to them that does fasting or two we have a a dozen doctors that do phone coaching and telemedicine that are available remotely and we've got medical doctors chiropractors psychologists all those people that are available and our website has um true north uh tv which is uh and there's also a roku channel true north uh on roku that has all of our video content educational materials everything's freely available they can go to the site they can look at our studies our articles we even have a fasting.org site that's just fascinating bendium site so it's our and other people's research on fasting again all freely available to people they just go online and uh if they have any questions give me a call that's amazing dude i hopefully you and i will cross paths again um this has been really really incredible and researching you was beyond enlightening guys if you haven't by the way um gone into his world i highly highly encourage it this is somebody who is a lifelong devotee of meat um and he's really got me thinking about things that i'm going to be experimenting with and trying you know look you know my thing i want to live as long as humanly possible and in good health uh and this is the man that has it he's putting it to the test check out our book the pleasure trap it'll bend your mind no for sure um the concepts in that book are extraordinary definitely that's in fact we should bring you back for round two to talk about the psychological problems that people go through when they try to do this and that's a whole interview unto itself all right guys and speaking of things that are unto themselves if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care thank you guys so much for watching and being a part of this community if you haven't already be sure to subscribe you're going to get weekly videos on building a growth mindset cultivating grit and unlocking your full potential you

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 767,449

Rating: 4.8904929 out of 5

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Impact Theory, ImpactTheory, TomBilyeu, Inside Quest, InsideQuest, Tom Bilyou, Theory Impact, motivation, inspiration, talk show, interview, motivational speech, Dr. Alan Goldhamer, Health Theory, HT, health, advice, health advice, fasting, tips on fasting, fasting benefits, how to fast, modern medicine, curing illnesses, curing disease, power of fasting, keys to fasting starting your first fast, detoxification, dehydration, detox, long-term fasting, changes to your health

Id: 5RT4qIO27uw

Length: 55min 11sec (3311 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 28 2021