From Pharmacy to FARMacy | Chef AJ LIVE! with Dr. Bobby Price and Dr. Columbus Batiste

hey everyone and welcome to chef aj live i'm your host chef aj and this is where i introduce you to amazing people like you who are doing great things in the world that i think you should know about well today we continue day four of a special week devoted to black history month with my wonderful co-host it's going to be so sad when he goes back to work and he can't be here every day his name is dr columbus batiste and please welcome him to the show last night's show was so every show was fun but hearing the story of how you got your name and how dr baxter montgomery got his name that was really fun that's good i'm glad i'm glad i was able to make it laugh a little bit about my name you know there was no i didn't feel any particular way about that you know at all and just for clarification now i want to tell you how dedicated i am i actually this whole week i've had full days of work too as well early morning all the way through but i'm gonna tell you the opportunity to come on this show with you aj is incredible and so uh uh dr price you know you don't know this because you're just joined for the first time so i have to say the same thing every single time is that chef aj is a phenomenal woman she's a phenomenal woman and so i mean she's so welcoming of all people irrespective of their backgrounds and so the very first time i met her when i started on this journey she was so embracing and so encouraging and pushing me you know even still like hey when are you going to do this when are you going to do that when are you going to do the other and uh you know it's it's it's such a blessing to have people like that in your life and she's a connector of individuals and i'll tell you i i i've had my eye on connecting with you for quite some time and she made it happen so tonight we get to connect indeed she did and i'm glad not only to connect with you but with her as well yes yes yes well man i'm looking forward to this conversation so let's just jump into this if you don't mind you good yeah i'm good to go all right all right so it's a question i think i like i've asked it the past two nights so i'm gonna ask it again because it's something i like if you could go back well first let me let me let me clarify now you you're you're part of a historically black uh uh fraternity is that correct i am you're an alpha is that right no i'm an omega you're you're oh you're you're a key oh you're an omega all right even better all right so now he's like no don't get confused not an alpha and the cap i'm omega all right yeah yeah so no snipe to them because we're all all it all under one fraternity you know that's right i don't want to but just a different brotherhood so so along those lines if you could go back in the annals of time and sit down with any historical omega frat brother who would it be now you gotta do your brother's justice now yeah yeah yeah man it's so many um can i do can i say founders and let me let me explain why because the founders of my particular fraternity they were all great in their individual respective rights but collectively when they came together like they were just this juggernaut and so you know having one founder who was a professor and who was in the sciences and decided to i mean we're talking in the early 1900s so we're talking 1911 1913 where he decides to go to europe now think about this this is a professor who is leaving a college to go to europe to do studies and to studying in an environment that isn't always welcoming inviting and i would love to sit down with him to understand a little bit more in depth about the experiences he went through and then also the things that he put together in his mind to make sure that he was always uh whenever any type of adversity came what mental sort of notes did he had to himself this is what i do with this this is why i still move on and strive you know and so if i had to if i had to say any it would be the founders as a as a collective so that i can really take an opportunity to have a greater understanding of not only not only overcoming and persevering and the you know when there's barriers outside of you but overcoming those barriers inside of you too because you know um you know going through pharmacy school like i did and the way that you know one of my founders who was a physician when he went through medical school i'm sure the conditions were very different i understand and so absolutely if i had the opportunity that's what i would do i would sit down with the founders get a greater understanding of not only how they persevere on external things but also how they persevere internally with their environment as well love it love it i i have to i have to add in i know when i asked this question before i gave one particular answer and spoke about my father but i you know after that point i thought about another individual and it's very similar reasons why you said the same thing you said and yeah i want to get into all those plaques and diplomas behind your behind you on the shelf there okay audience as well but you know i mean part of the thing is that vivian thomas right so vivian thomas who who who helped really work on the blue babies so there was a and so for those of you out there listening who don't know who vivian thomas was check out the movie something the lord made something the lord made it's one of my favorite movies i had my kids watch it over and over when they were young before they were even 10 because it's so incredible the adversity that had to be overcome that he overcame and that still that he would have this sort of gift that was bestowed on him that he comprehended and was able to do the things that he did in terms of rerouting the blood flow from these these uh babies that had a malformed heart without any training and so so much so that the professors at johns hopkins they did not want to move without him they didn't want to blink without him before they finally bestowed upon him honorary doctorate i believe it was in the late 1970s and so the i i think that our that those who came before us they had so much more to overcome and when i look at things every single day i honestly say am i doing enough am i giving back enough am i fulfilling my debt my my potential my destiny because i think they had so much more and i have it so easy if they have my opportunities yeah what would they have accomplished you know yep and i definitely resonate with that because the particular founder that i'm talking about is earnest ever just and you know the reason why i resonate with him more so is because i had a point where i had to make a decision and i had to decide am i going to move to japan and study these people who live to 100 who eat plumeria or plant-based diet or i'm going to stay where i'm at and climb my corporate ladder and um it was a really really tough decision because before you dig into that you got to tell people because i i over i overstepped i didn't even tell people all the accolades i didn't tell them that you're training and who you are so give it to us man don't don't don't give it to us well so an undergrad i was a double major in exercise physiology and chemistry and um initially i was going to medical school but what i found was that i had this passion for chemistry that i loved and it was obvious because i was a chemistry major and it came so easy to me that i honestly didn't know what a pharmacist did but i just so happened to be on a plane coming back from new york and a lady who was sitting next to me so having to be a pharmacist and she told me what a clinical pharmacist does and that was the first time in my life like i other than walmart or cvs that i had knew what the pharmacist did like i knew they were behind the counter handing out you know prescription drugs but i didn't know what they did and when she described what they did i was like man that's that's gonna that sounds like me and it sounds easy you know because like i mean like chemistry just came naturally for me and so um ended up going to pharmacy school instead and um had an amazing time an amazing experience at pharmacy school and i was a national president of an organization called snafa which is has a very similar uh organization for medical students as well we focus on uh bringing minorities into the health care profession and so i had the opportunity to be the national president of that and um that really gave me my business acumen and so when i came out of pharmacy school i wanted to be a director and a manager of a pharmacy so that was my whole sort of um goal and uh so i came out was a manager also worked at in a clinical setting also worked for the fda just trying to get my foot stones everywhere and figure out where i wanted to land and um you have all the hidden secrets in the fda not quite but it really was a great a great experience for me to learn you know like us as healthcare professional we learn one side of it like we don't we don't typically learn the how drugs come to be we just learn like okay these are the pharmacokinetics behind the drugs these the bioavailability these are the patients that should take it we learn those type of things but how they come to be and sitting in you know um sitting in these meetings where patients are showing up to saying hey uh i took the drug then the trial all these type of things were it was pretty amazing for me and then so leaving that coming back going into the clinical setting um that it what really changed my life was the fact that i got diagnosed with high blood pressure when i was 16. and um yeah and i was an athlete i mean i only had about five percent body fat but the only issue was that i had lost all my grandparents by the time i was in the 10th grade from chronic diseases um colorectal cancer diabetes heart attacks etc and so um getting a diagnosis of hypertension and being fit at 16 years old it was almost like a death sentence it was like okay so i'm going to die early too and so i lived with high blood pressure for about 10 or 12 years and finally i woke up one day and he was taking meds were you taking medications i was taking a diuretic so just a-c-t-z my doctor wanted to put me on a ace inhibitor but i just wouldn't take it and so i just like every i'll tell people this healthcare professionals are the worst patients and so i i wasn't an inception and so um you know i'm i'm i had a like sort of a come to moment where i took my blood pressure and it was stroke level one day and i i mean i felt fine but i also felt like i needed to check my blood pressure so it was like 200's yeah it was like maybe 195 over 200 yeah wow and so here i am 28 in the hospital counseling patients and i'm about i'm on my deathbed and i had a moment where i was like i have got to get my health together or i'm really going to die early because this is i know what those type of blood pressures indicate and so i started trying everything um all these diets and meals you get on wheels and get in the mail and exercise routines i tried everything and nothing worked and um out of desperation i was like i'm gonna try a plant-based lifestyle tried it and lost about 40 pounds and normalized my blood pressure and that was i mean wait wait how did you just stumble on the plant-based diet i mean did you see something did you check out i mean was it a cliff did you see chef aj yeah it's kind of interesting so i was always like i love like motivational inspirational like tapes and stuff like that so i always listen to like tony robbins okay he had a period where he was plant-based and really yeah and you know he promoted a plant-based lifestyle fasting uh eating healthy and because i always listen to him i was like what tony did it for 21 days surely i could do it all right and so i 21 days i lost 17 pounds and lost about 20 points off of my diastolic blood pressure and i was like okay well i got to keep going now like it's only 21 days and in about 60 days i lost about 45 pounds and normalized my blood pressure and that was the point where it was like i i i just didn't understand how plants could do this and that was the really confusing thing so it was like oh you don't know what you think you know you're not as smart as you think you are and that was the deep dive that kind of led me down my path to moving to japan and uh quitting my job and deciding to do some research out there wait a minute well so before you get to the jerry maguire moment where you're like you're out okay before you before you get to jerry maguire moment so i mean that it reminds me of albert einstein and he had this this quote at least it's attributed to him it says ego equals one divided by your knowledge the higher your knowledge and awareness gets the more you realize how much you don't know yes what you thought you know what you thought you did right and so it seems like you had you had entered that phase as many of us who've entered into this plant-based world have have realized i don't know everything yeah i do not know everything and i'm constantly in the state of learning and so that that's that's incredible so you're me you're you're early in your practice climbing the corporate ladder and you just have your jerry maguire moment and like i'm out how'd that happen well i had a moment where so my third year into my practice i got an award for most innovative pharmacists in my state now this is the first time somebody as young as me had gotten an award and this first time a black person had gotten to war too and i didn't know why i got the the award because i had taken a i had quit my job at the hospital and taken the opportunity to work with a physician who had about 21 clinics and he was just looking for a pharmacist to do something dynamic and i was looking to do something dynamic because i'm like maybe we can help people with this diet and you know stuff like that and so he was open to me you know implementing that into my practice and just doing things differently he created a collaborative practice agreement where i could work with all the employees and so as a result i don't know how like the powers that be found out about what i was doing but when they did find out uh i got this award and as i was coming off of the stage after getting the award this guy told me he was like hey if you're looking to start a pharmacy like you really i could help you and i think you could be a millionaire in like a year or so and i'm thinking to myself like i'm a kid i come from the projects like i don't i come from very humble beginnings and so when he said that a light went off like damn this is this could be what i dreamed of because before introducing myself to healing and a plant-based lifestyle that was my dream and now i was being confronted with the old dream but now i had a new perspective and so choice to make you're you're at a crossroads there at a crossroads and so you know i had this vision for what i wanted to do it wasn't a complete vision but i had an idea and i thought if i take that road like i'm not coming back from that and i wouldn't even blame myself if i didn't come back from because it was my initial dream in the first place but i also knew that if i didn't take it yet and i decided to keep going down this rabbit hole that i was going down that i could probably discover something like life-changing and so i i told him no at the moment and uh maybe a couple mo maybe a couple months later i got a call from a friend asking if i'd like to go to japan and study and work out there and uh i thought it was a joke at first to be honest with you so i really didn't i really didn't respond to the emails anything like that but finally like i did respond and found out it was a real opportunity and uh ended up going tell me hello in japan and japanese [Laughter] i'm gonna prove you were out there can you prove you're out there can you say something speak can you say something you know it's like they say speak doctor language to me give me something it's such a the common phrase is konichiwa yeah okay yeah i think i remember uh halle berry saying that in in the movie to you may be too young to remember that movie back in the day but yeah she said that to eddie murphy or something like that back in the day yeah but for all your all your people out there that's maybe it's in the morning already there it will be ohio gozaimasu okay nice nicely done so i mean so how was that so what did you learn i i know you you visit okinawa and that's you did not actually have to go all the way to japan to find the blue zone you know we don't have one here in north america we do have one and it's right down the road from from chef aj and myself yeah you know um so i wasn't familiar with loma linda at this point okay but i had written i had read a book called ikigai and the book ikigai is about living a life on purpose but part of living a life on purpose is it incorporates these philosophies and principles of living well which is eating well and so i had i had this knowledge of okinawa because of the book i had read once i started my plant-based journey and so when the opportunity came up initially they said japan so i didn't know it was okinawa i'm thinking like tokyo osaka someplace like that yokohoma and so when i finally like talked to them i was like well what where in japan is it and they were like okay now i was like goodness gracious man that seems like you're synchronistic so yeah that's cool that's cool so you're so you're out there you're out there we're gonna so i mean i know you traveled all over the world and i'mma say that has that's an adventurous spirit i mean i don't honestly know if i'm that adventurous or i for sure wasn't at your age you described in your late 20s and so forth that would not have been that adventurous um now it's a little bit different you know but um so tell me the the the top three things you learned in japan well the lifestyle but you know like the best example i give people is like when i lived in okinawa you could be driving down the street and if somebody got a call they would literally just stop put on the hazard lights and just take the call and people would like sit behind them not agitated not upset and you know the first couple of like weeks i'm there like i'm like what the hell is going on here but then i finally realized because i started taking karate while i was there and as a way to kind of get to know the people get to know the culture et cetera and you begin to understand that the way that they live is just totally different their philosophy and their approach to not only like life itself but life in in the respect of a human being is totally different and that was really the first place that i went because i had traveled so a lot before that but that was the first place i went where i didn't i didn't think i thought of myself as a human not just as a black person that's what i was going to ask you i mean african-american month how did you feel when you were traveling when you're in japan and thailand and all these places as a black man were you did you receive stairs i always kind of reflect back when i spent time in korea for a business trip i had no stairs that made me think people were looking at me a particular way because i stuck out none and i actually was conscious of it and not zero not one time did i ever receive any glimpse or glance or stare or anything else like that and it was so interesting to me yeah so interesting yeah because what happens is you're looking for it because as as a black person when you go into an environment where you're the one percent or you're the only one you're always expecting the stairs and for me same thing i go in these environments i'm traveling all over asia lao and malaysia and thailand and you know bali et cetera and as i'm going like if i got a stare and any time i went to somebody they would say something i'm thinking like they're thinking like oh he's a black guy but what they're thinking is damn you're tall oh do you play basketball or we have a basketball court over here i love you about you know um yeah it just totally changed my perspective and the best story i had was i went home with a friend of mine from karate class to meet their mother they wanted me to meet their mother and i go home to meet her and she's like oh and then they're like talking they're going back and forth from g uh and japanese and i'm understanding some of the words but i can't quite put it together and i was thinking to myself she's like i'm i'm like this is probably the first time she's ever had a black person in the home and um when i asked i said what did she say and she's like my mom thinks you're very handsome she says you look like um sidney poitier [Laughter] love it so that was the moment i was like you know what i need to get out of my own head yes exactly and just be a human sin they're allowing me to be a human so yes that was really the one of the best things that i really enjoyed about being there but the other part was i had a friend who had grandparents on the northern side of the island uh in a village called oguni and this is where all of the centenarians are the people who live to 100 no disease etc and primarily a plant-based lifestyle so she would take me up there to hang out in the village on the weekends and you've seen these people who are 100 92 105 biking farming walking up hills and it totally changes your whole perspective about longevity and to see that it changed how i thought about aging for myself personally and so that was huge for me as well and then um i think also just understanding a new way of living because we get caught up in like the trends and the fads and the diets but we don't understand like real health and healing is a lifestyle and that's really what i learned by being there is learning a little different way to live i love it i love it i mean it reminds me of the latin root word for diet diato you know which is really about lifestyle you know it's not just a way of living it's not just like oh i want to die from it i'm gonna do this off and on it's that this is what i'm about you know mind body and spirit and my approach to it so that's dope i mean i love i love i love the insight in the exposure and how that's kind of i'm learning how it's crafted and shaped with your background your interest in chemistry your your desire to understand how things work and so i want to dig a little bit more into that just a touch because especially your time in in africa you said you hit jamaica too as well right yeah tell me tell me about those about about your learnings about medicinal herbs and medicinal things from uh africa from honduras from jamaica yeah where haven't you traveled by the way uh well there's plenty because i've i you know and i say this and then people like what but i've been i've only been to 76 countries there's 54 countries in africa alone so i have to put that in perspective for people because they hear 76 and then i say you know there's 54 in africa and i have not i've only been to like maybe seven or eight in africa only but what i can't tell you is that that's where i learned a lot about herbalism uh because typically when you're going to learn about herbs and herbalism here in the us you're not learning from somebody who actually lives that life and i had the opportunity to go to uh south africa and uh and table mountain which is a heritage site you can go to there's a group of people called the sac people they are totally disconnected from society they live in on table mountain in table mountain they live off of the mountain and having the opportunity to not only learn for them but to literally walk around the mountain and them show me there's something called black garlic um so it's literally black garlic but it literally just grows you don't have to plant it nobody is cultivating it but showing you how to identify where it is what it's used for those type of things but going throughout the mountain and learning herbs that way it's totally different experience so i had a really amazing experience there also in namibia um so in namibia there's a group of people called the the himba people again another set of people who are tribal people who live totally off of the grid in huts but they live off of the land and learning herbalism from them in terms of like what do they do when someone's injured someone is sick and learning herbalism from that way is a totally different experience and so that was really my experience going through africa like finding tribes finding people who really live that life in such a way that is not something that they do is just who they are it's part of who they are and so that was really a great experience peru was definitely another great experience as well because you know the my journey wasn't just about plants it was also about healing and what i also discovered that the journey wasn't about learning to heal other people i was actually healing myself in the process not only of you know you know my physical ailments that i experienced but life traumas that everybody goes through and uh going to peru and sitting down with shamans and learning their way of life again lifestyle um also helped me to kind of enter those things into my my lifestyle this thing that resonated with me the most so that i can implement those things because when you have somebody tell you hey this i can see that this happened to you and they don't know who you are and this is what you need to do it will really help you if you started doing this like you really you really buy into that and so um that's what my journey has really been about finding people who do this not for a living but do it because it's who they are and is what their calling is to do and so um it's really been a beautiful journey for me going there peru honduras africa uh italy was a great place to all across of asia honduras was a great place as well because there's a lot of herbalism there that's what dr sadie was a lot of people are familiar with him but uh yeah it's been a beautiful journey so you i mean that that's incredible it is truly incredible to kind of travel the globe and to interact with individuals who understand conceptually and via practice how to apply the earth for the healing of mankind right and and for but not just from a nutritional standpoint or ingestion it sounds like you're looking at mind body and spirit too as well in terms of you brought components of activity in okinawa you talked about aspects that led me to think in terms of whether or not it's meditation or coming and trying to to dig into yourself and who you are all those aspects are extremely important yeah absolutely you know i want to i'll just share with the audience real quick uh one of the things that the shaman told me when i was in peru it was like your blood pressure is how high because your heart is broken you have to make amends with losing your grandmother a lot of people don't understand that sometimes you're not just broken physically you're broken spiritually yeah and when you heal there you can heal everywhere it'll heal the whole body and so um yeah learning those processes learning how to look at not only myself but other people holistically has really been like a life-changing sort of philosophy for me in terms of like how i approach my life and you know when people come to me and ask me for advice how i approach giving them advice on how they can heal themselves love it love it so so tell us a little bit more so i mean are you are you a pharmacy nerd where you're kind of getting down into depths with organic chemistry of the herbs and trying to figure out okay how does this mechanistically happen and yeah what's the reaction that happens in the body and the gut to lead to this and that and the other are you are you kind of taking like the rest of us uh infidels and we just kind of accept it and keep going you know like at first i was like that because i'm one of those people like i will literally pull a radio apart and look at every part in it and then put it all back together so i can know how it functions and works and so that was my approach initially but what i discovered along the journey is that although we're taught here in the us and even other places how to use herbs in the same ways that we use drugs they don't work that way and in many cases they work synergistically many cases they work spiritually many cases um you know people are looking for a nerve to to take care of a symptom and when you use herbs like that you're in my opinion you're misusing them because you're not using the whole purpose of the earth and so what i've gone into these last couple of years is really trying to expand my knowledge in terms of like how to even use herbs holistically because people think just because you use herbs that's a holistic approach but it's become even more you're gonna have to explain that because so let me give you an example um so part of one of my products is my detox right and so i had somebody i just did like a 14 day challenge with like a group of people like 300 people and when we were in there we had a nurse practitioner who was in there and she was really concerned because one of my herbal blends had center in it and we were doing it for 14 days 28 days what have you and so what i was trying to explain to her was well what you're looking at is just the center i was like but this is a herbal blend there's several there's seven herbs inside of there and so what i do is i i ch first of all you can change the ratio to make sure everything is going to be fine but also you have to understand i added other herbs in there to to reduce or blunt the effect that center would have so i add in something like a marshmallow which in a slippery elm because when you actually add them into water you'll notice that they'll actually create a gel you know with those two herbs and that gel will lubricate the digestive tract okay that's not only going to help with inflammation that's in the gut which a lot of patients have anyway but it's also going to blend out some of the effect of the center as well and so that's what i mean by that is it's kind of difficult to explain because i really haven't necessarily like flushed out the philosophy from for myself but i understand it myself and as as einstein would say if you can't explain it to a five-year-old you don't know it yet so i'm still in the phase while really developing that but i do know it mechanistically for myself yeah yes yes yes so okay so then then tell there's a lot of people out there listening and you know i get different things you may say well what's a detox why do you do a detox uh doc if i'm if i'm if i'm whole food plant-based right now actually gotcha gotcha you know the um so with me coming from a chemistry background one of my first jobs even before pharmacy school was i worked in a food plant as a food chemist and so i got to understand food chemistry very intimately and in that understanding i understand how we bake addiction into a lot of foods i also understand how unhealthy foods are like when people hear this food is fortified with this they think oh good it has fiber in it it's fortified with fiber it's 45 with b vitamins etc but what they never think about was why has it been fortified with that because they're thinking like four to five means they added more but what fortify means is the processing of the food remove everything good all the fiber all the vitamins all the minerals there's nothing left the fortified is putting something into it that doesn't exist at that moment and what's important for people to know especially with processed foods is the fortifying that they're doing to it is things that are synthetic these things don't come from nature so they're not natural b vitamins they're not natural fiber you understand and so learning that was instrumental for me because once i learned that it was like okay so 70 of the standard american diet is processed foods we're literally loading ourselves with toxins every day i mean you look at the label at least 50 of it is like chemistry i mean it doesn't there's nothing you could pronounce in it i mean if it's strawberry park talks strawberry is not in the ingredients nobody really thinks it thinks about that it may say strawberry flavor but that is not strawberry no and so that's the number one reason you should be concerned about toxins the second reason is there was a study by the ewg which is the environmental work group and they did a test on adult adults and they also did a test on infants the cedar toxicity level i think it was called the body burden of toxicity in adults in children and what they discovered and they did a fat sample because fat is where toxicity hides out and so they did a fat sample and when they did that fat simple they found over 190 toxins in the human body now you would think to yourself where this baby just came into the world so no way the baby has more toxins the babies actually have more toxins than the adults and it makes sense because the baby's coming in to the world through the mother and so when you come create that placenta she's pouring in the nutrition to the baby and babies are mostly water and fat anyway so it makes sense they're gonna have a lot of toxicity okay and so that's the second reason why you have to understand that the third reason and i learned this through my travels is the food here in the u.s is very different than food anywhere else much of the food in the u.s isn't allowed in other countries for example a bag of ladies chips that you get here versus you get in the uk the ingredients are totally different because there's over 10 000 chemicals that are allowed in our food supply that aren't allowed in europe asia and pretty much nowhere else that's why when people go and they say hey can i get a mexican coke they're asking for a mexican coke because mexico will or not will not allow high fructose corn syrup in there in their supply and so it's really important to understand people look at high fructose corn syrup as a sugar but it's really a toxin it will cause you to have diabetes obesity etc etc and so toxicity becomes important for those three reasons but also the air is more polluted the water is more more polluted the things that we put on our bodies in our cosmetic and hygienic products we're getting toxicity at a level that our grandparents never experienced and as a result it becomes very important to understand that yes we have organs of detoxification like our liver and our kidneys but they become oh burden and oversaturated and they don't work as well this is why hepatic and liver disease is through the roof now this is why so many people have fatty liver disease this is why in our neighborhoods dialysis clinics are almost as prevalent as mcdonald's now absolutely and so as a result it becomes very important to get you know uh some sort of routine with cleansing and detoxifying the body yes yes yes so so speaking of like our neighborhoods what's been your approach to kind of move people inside of uh of disparate communities who are proud individuals who are who are loving individuals who are good people but maybe have adopted circumstantial habits due to life circumstances how do you how do you really address them and get them moving towards it and what you do once you get past detox tell us about the program that you institute once a person gets beyond that detox of two weeks or 21 days and then what do what do you recommend for them in terms of transitioning at that point is really about self-care like you really have to learn how to value health and that's what i'm finding in our society in general but especially in our communities we don't value health in the way that we need to and so one of the like most common phrases that i get is you got to die something doc right and yes you got to die of something i agree with that but you don't have to die diabetes you don't have to die of a stroke you don't have to die of a heart attack these are all preventable conditions and so my thing is getting them to value their health and prioritize their health and the only way i can do that especially and it depends on the population because if it's an elderly population what i always try to do is help them remember what it was like 50 years ago because if they can remember what it was like 50 years ago they will know that things are different today they will know that 90 of the food products in the supermarket today didn't exist in the 1950s okay so you're eating food that is that didn't exist 50 years ago and if i can get them to conceptualize that and say damn that is real and then when i say you know what 50 60 years ago a refrigerator wasn't even popular like it it was just coming into the homes so most people when they got food they got it fresh we are not getting fresh food okay most of our foods are coming coming out of box bags cans jars etc okay and then i tell them well if you had to go get meat there were no like supermarkets you went to go get meat you had to go to a butcher and it was expensive like it wasn't like today's subsidized meat you had to pay your fair wage for meat back then so most people actually ate uh plant-based monday through saturday plant-based and on sunday they would sort of have a celebratory meal and have that big meal on sunday so our great-grandparents were eating primarily a plant-based diet the same way that the clowns were yeah i mean that's the standard american dream right the standard american diet dream and so that spread across the across the world is when you become reach a certain level of affluence now you begin to adopt eating all those things you couldn't have before which means you move away from eating a plant-rich food yeah yeah right one thousand percent that's why they call it king's disease you remember yeah so it calls they call gout and they actually call a couple other diseases rooted in there as well but they call it king's disease because if you were rich in royalty you could afford things like meat and sugar because sugar used to be called white gold because it was so expensive the only place you could get it was from the caribbean so in europe if they got sugar you know before the slave trade it was like only the royalty can have sugar and so all of these diseases began to form in the royalty obesity heart disease diabetes etc that the regular people weren't getting so they called them the king's diseases but the unfortunate thing today is that food has become so subsidized you can go out and buy five hamburgers for two dollars and now we got you know regular people getting kings disease today right that's right and it's spreading it's spreading globally like how heart disease and cancer are and astronomical rates and now that that that's that's powerful so you so you get them on the detox you begin to talk to them about their food substances and realizing do you provide your patients and clients with a plan in terms of like what foods what types of plant rich foods to to eat and partake yeah so like i said it's a mindset shift first you have to go there because emotional eating and food addiction is real i i i never pretend like it's not something somebody really has to deal with it's not hey go harder this isn't like training at the gym like this is something so a mindshift mind shift is absolutely necessary after that is getting them to understand how to use food as medicine and part of that is converting their kitchen into what i call a medicine cabinet you know right now it's like a it's like a graveyard all the food is dead and the food is going to put you in the graveyard too and so we got to get them to convert the kitchen into what i call a medicine cabinet and what i do is i kind of go through the pantries tell them what they should have in there go through the refrigerators explain what they should have in there what type of foods what order you should buy that food in because when you eat plant-based the unfortunate thing is like the food doesn't last as long because it doesn't have preservatives in okay so you gotta you know buy different and once they get that sort of uh sort of education and understand how to transition everything from that point is about how to implement this all across your lifestyle because i always tell people that eating healthy is an act of self-love you know when somebody sees you eating healthy they're like oh okay and then you think to yourself yeah that's right so if you do that enough on a consistent basis subliminally you're going to be telling yourself i love me that's right that's right and it's so important for people to get to that point because that's the point when they say i can't eat that food because that food is associated with me not loving me right and that's a really huge part of sort of making the transition and then from there figuring out what is your why most people don't have a why for one why they need to be healthy and believe me you do need one most people think it's it's a foregone conclusion you need to be healthy but most of us aren't healthy even though in america we spend the most on health care we spend the most on drugs thank you we're still not healthy well listen it's no different than saving i mean as i try and teach my kids about savings and putting money aside it's like well what am i saving for yeah they need to have a why a purpose of what they're saving for i'm just saving just a save i got actually and i'm like yeah and i tell patients it's then your health is an investment in your health future just like your savings is an investment in your financial future so i i feel you with that completely eating healthy is like a health it's a true health savings account that's right it's the only one healthy you're putting something in the health savings account yeah man and even like when it when it comes to i love what you said about loving yourself that's one of the things that i've i've mentioned to folks is that you know we say a lot of times in our platform on slave food project about that resources go where value is placed and talking about the absence of resources in certain community disparate communities but you can look at that for individuals yeah where they put their value is where they put their money if they put if they value things and cars guess where the money goes if they value certain things right and i was telling patients i mean i value my health so yeah i have a fancy blender yeah i spend a little bit more money on the the quality of food i'm eating because that's what's important to me and resources go where values placed indeed indeed yes yes yes now that that's uh that's that's some good stuff in the emotional eating i mean i literally just saw an article come across i haven't read it in full it's all the headlines speaking about 60 of those obese are emotional eaters at least with the majority of those being women and interestingly enough i watched uh my wife uh had me watching the janet jackson documentary yes i did why'd you watch regular tv at times and uh and she spoke really about being an emotional either yeah and she spoke about that burden in the weight of carrying the name and and really in certain relationships where the statement was made well you have to go out looking like the way people expect you to look and how it caused her to go into this emotional swings of eating and so you're so right when we look at the connectivity between our mental health our perception and we hear so much negativity right there's so many negative thoughts going in our own mind am i good enough did i say that right am i looking this way or that way and then we're confronted by people who match us with the same level of negativity yep and all it does is bring us down it doesn't allow us and we wonder why there's so much mental uh disorder inside this country and why it's coming to light like this and most of the time when people are eating emotionally it's because they're trying to fill up an emotional void with food and they do that because food is filling i mean that's what food is for us to fill us up uh it's to nourish us but you can't you can't feel an emotional void with food yeah you know even if it's un even if it's healthy food you're not feeling the void and so i also talked to them about methods and ways of how you feel that void without food because it's really important to know that because it's it's good to know like hey i'm eating emotionally but okay what do i do not to eat emotionally like that's really important as well man i'm kind of feeling this is almost like a truth about weight loss segment right now what i'm feeling uh chef aj i mean i don't know he's breaking down science and mind body spirit you're on you're on mute oh sorry about that dr price i host a summit every year called the truth about weight loss dr batiste has been a guest expert for the past several years but next year you are going to be one i hope okay now not a problem cfa jay you know i got you thank you yes yes yes no i mean you cannot address someone without taking care of the whole person i think that's one of the things that 2020 and 2019 has really revealed to the world is that this idea of social determinants of health of where a person lives where they play where they work where they die where they pray are as equally important towards their health state yes and that's one of the things that is it's it's still impactful inside of communities of color across the nation is that you have these things where i tell a patient okay i want you to go out and eat healthfully and they're like well how do i do it like you're trying to teach people how to do it why it's important then they go out and it's like they look around them and they're in these crucibles of all they have are just food deserts and food swamps around them and we're telling them well they're not compliant yeah then we prescribe them a pill that is is far more pricey than they can afford but we're so rushed and so focused on what we're doing as opposed to them right that they leave our office and we say well they're non-compliant right so i'm now i'm going to ignore them when they come in because they really don't want care yeah so now i make an assumption i have a bias that then supersedes in terms of the care i deliver and so this is why these conversations are so very much so important yes and in hearing how you in the likes of dr baxter montgomery you all are are in the community you're actually looking at a person's lifestyle you're actually trying to address not only the components of what they eat but why they should eat it how they should eat it and expressing the importance of it i think is phenomenal it's phenomenal man that's some good stuff it is it's that's what we doing that's some good stuff so so so you you the the the the business person was presenting to you a million dollar plan right to kind of blow you up and become like this this pharmaceutical king pin right what's the plan what's what's your what's your where where is dr price going to be where's the where's dr price in the next five years ten years what what are you doing well the the beautiful thing is um so i'm starting right now everything is going amazing like i moved back in 2018 after being out of the states for almost five or six years wrote a book and i honestly thought i'd promote the book for six six weeks six months maybe and then move back i was leaving because of the climate of america at the time just was it was very negative and uh it went so well and people supported so much in the reviews and they just kept me here and so the vision now is so i'm in the midst of uh starting a a fruit company and so uh exotic tropical fruits and then that's eventually going to lead to a farm which is going to have a healing center on it and so we're expecting to have that up in the next three years give people opportunity and a space to heal recover rebuild and unlearn and relearn ways to heal maintain health and understand life a little bit different reacquaint themselves with nature too because that's something that i had to do as well you know uh so many people are like afraid of nature like getting their hands in the soil or petting animals or being in nature and i think the more we become one with nature again the more we'll become one with ourselves because when you think about it we always say you know uh you are what you eat and we literally are like we are the food that we eat so if you eat fast processed you're going to be fast processed but you eat nature then you become nature and so um that's what uh that's where everything is headed that's the vision to create the farm the healing center on it the fruit company and to just give people spaces to heal and uh education around that that's powerful we need you in our community we need more people like you we need to support you so you can do all this stuff we don't want you we don't want you leaving and going tracing around the world for five six ten years we want you here making a change where you're needed right because this is the spot that is needed the disparities are are stark and we need a change to happen and so it's the likes of you and others out there who are really kind of driving the conversation and that's what's important where can people follow you find you find you yeah um so my website dr bobbyprice.com i do a lot of content on instagram you can go to instagram and find me as dr holistic d-o-c-t-o-r holistic and uh also on youtube uh so chef aj has inspired me to be better about my youtube channel um so and be more consistent and so uh yeah i'll be posting more videos on there as well that is that is good stuff we definitely want to encourage one support you where can people find your book besides your website is there is on amazon as well yeah so it's on amazon education over medic medication you can just go look up dr bobby price uh has over a thousand five um thousand five thousand five star views so you can check that out on there as well love it love it love it gotta say a little more a little more pumping circumstance next time [Laughter] new york times bestseller i mean you know put it out there put it out there speak into existence but man i it's been a pleasure pleasure pleasure connecting with you i was vibing with your story i love the the integration between chemistry and how everything just i mean it seemed as if a plan was was there for you before you knew it and it seemed as if as you're describing your life how it unfolded i mean it's just it's amazing what a blessing what a blessing that is so keep up the good work keep up the good work chef aj is always a pleasure being with you this week you know we've had her kind of get outside her comfort zone just to kind of deal with me at late hours at six uh 9 p.m eastern standard time so i appreciate this this has been good so far and you've been great amazing and people want to know when your book is coming out dr batiste i'm working i i literally am working on on a book um um but that has to stop i have to stop saying working and i need to get to get it done yeah so that is the goal that's the goal all right well thank you guys so much this was great we have one more show in honor of black history month we would have had more but dr batiste decided to go to saudi arabia in the middle of everything so hopefully next year we can if not do the whole month at least do one very long week that would be amazing and our guest will be coya webb but if dr batista is doing the show we're going to do it earlier tomorrow it's going to be 2 p.m pacific time so that'll be great all right looking forward to it dr price we will connect soon good to see you chef aj see you tomorrow

Channel: CHEF AJ

Views: 101,308

Keywords: plant based, chef aj, weight loss, food addiction, chef aj recipe, plant based diet, vegan kitchen, vegan recipe, plant based recipes, plant based diet for beginners, plant based meals, chef aj ultimate weight loss, chef aj recipes, weight loss journey, plant based weight loss, weight loss tips, author, chef aj live, cooking, diet, health, healthy, nutrition, vegan, vegan eating, vegan living, veganism, podcast, chef aj live youtube, plant based diet recipes

Id: MyP_8mCgxHw

Length: 57min 47sec (3467 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 04 2022