Joel Fuhrman, MD: Combating Obesity and Treating Disease with a High Nutrient Dense Diet

okay so i am really honored to be able to introduce one of the country's uh best known physicians dr joel fuhrman and probably don't really need too much introduction for for most of you he's a board certified family physician he's a new york times best-selling author a book uh eat to live five books well oh i'm loud that's wow that is loud but eat to live was on on the new york times bestseller list for like 90 weeks or something like that that's just amazing over a year that's very very cool a nutritional researcher and he's been a featured expert on many radio and television shows if you've seen more recently he's just got a new pbs special that's out that's called in dieting forever and one of the things that i think is just really exciting being a pbs fan myself he's raised over his his programs and stuff have have helped raise 30 million dollars for pbs [Music] not only to raise money for pbs but to make a huge difference in the world i mean he's constantly running into people who have watched some of these presentations and just seen life transforming experiences as a result of that so a real real blessing he received his medical degree from the university of pennsylvania but before entering the world of medicine and nutrition he gained national and international recognition for something very different anybody know what that was ice skating yes i don't know too many physicians who have that part of their cv but um i think that's pretty exciting and if you'll notice that he has um more active kind of shoe wear than just dress fancy stuff going on here so he came running in here so anyways um yeah he's been second and third place awards in both u.s and national pairs championships and all that so some pretty high level um experience in the world of figure skating i love to watch figure skating but i'm dr fuhrman i'm very pleased that your life path took you a little different direction because uh your amazing work has blessed millions and we want to welcome you to portland and we look forward to your presentation combating obesity and treating disease with a high nutrient dense diet thank you so much thank you well i'm really excited to be here and to talk to you today and i would like to present i'd like to finish all the slides and present all the information if we have time and leave time for some questions if we could so i want to get it done as quick as we can so we can interact and take a few questions and i'd love to spend hours and hours with you guys and just tell you know give you as much information i can tell you my experiences how much fun this is and what i've seen but i'm going to try to just give you some highlights and what i think is important at this point in the history of nutritional science and i am going to talk rapidly because of the audience and i think that if certainly raise your hand if i'm going too quickly or i went over too fast and i need to slow down a little bit please you know stop me or ask me to repeat something okay so let's get started so i can get go through as much of this as possible i what i'm going to go through today is what's a nutritarian diet and maximizing its design and effectiveness for disease reversal and obviously if a person is going to have a hundred percent occlusion of a major carotid artery and and open it up completely and get well again they're not going to do it unless they drop tremendous amounts of weight and their body fat becomes very low they're not going to get rid of their diabetes and become non-diabetic which defined as a person with a fasting blood glucose below 100 and with no need for medication unless they get their body fat both the subcutaneous fat and the visceral fat very low so obviously this is very effective for weight loss as it reverses disease and you can't separate losing weight from the disease the therapeutic disease effects so let's so obviously it's about weight loss as well but i'm highlighting its therapeutic efficacy for various diseases and how i adjust the protocol for those diseases um and then we'll go through some case histories and some potential problems i've experienced over my 25 years of medical practice in this field with with um low-fat vegan diets the problems people can get into and how you can solve those problems and the nutritional what nutritional deficiencies or issues might arise and the conservative use of nutritional supplements to prevent and treat depression and prevent later life dementia so we'll talk we'll touch on that also so first i want to define what is a nutritarian diet i want everybody here to be able to explain what is that's this type of diet style that dr fuhrman recommends what are its primary principles what does it expect people to eat or not eat and how do you define it you know and i want you to be able to really understand it completely so let me go over that quickly it's based on three basic principles and the first principle is that the diet has a high micronutrient density and that means that when i say a high micronutrient density i'm talking about a lot of phytochemicals and antioxidants a lot of micronutrients per caloric buck but also i wanted to have comprehensive micronutrient adequacy cma not be missing anything a person might need you could be eating a ton of kale and broccoli and that may still be low in vitamin d or b12 or iodine for example so you have so we're talking about high micronutrient density and comprehensive micronutrient adequacy as well so the um and the american diet is the opposite of a nutritarian diet because it's focused on about 50 60 percent of calories come from processed foods like pasta white bread salad oil mayonnaise donuts cookies crackers rice cakes breakfast parsnips let's go a little faster than i can slow down and those foods as most people know have no significant micronutrient load there's no no significant vitamins minerals and no phytochemicals and antioxidants in processed foods almost none though they're mostly plant derived and then you have about 27 percent of calories now from animal products and animal products do not contain any antioxidants or phytochemicals those micronutrients that whose predominant role is to prevent cancer and stabilize the genome in the cell structure and and yes micronutrients have the ability to arm the nrf2 transcription proteins which activate the are the antioxidant response element in the cells that repair broken dna crosslinks and remove methylation defects that eventually accumulate lead to cancer so the body's ability to fight cancer is totally dependent on the consumption of these foods that are high in phytochemicals and the chief one of the chief phytochemicals i'd like everybody to learn about today is is called itc stan abbreviation itc which stands for isothiocyanates that are found in green cruciferous vegetables because the itc's and green cruciferous vegetables fuel the development of the interstitial lymphocytes that minor digestive tract they fuel the development of the bone marrows development of you know of natural killer t cells they fuel development of the anti-cancer a body's anti-cancer ability to detoxify and repair broken dna crosslinks remove free radicals in other words they're very critical you could say without green vegetables you can't have a normal functioning immune system you can't be normal you can't be expected to be a normal human with all its lifespan and health potential unless you eat green vegetables that's where the money's at so as you can see i say a piece of chicken is just like a bagel it's the same thing why do i say a piece of chicken's like a bagel somebody please help me right because neither one has a significant micronutrient load they're just a source of macronutrients they contain calories macronutrients by fat carbohydrate protein but no significant micronutrient load especially antioxidant phytochemicals but there's another reason why you may not be aware of and another principle of a nutritarian diet that that where a piece of chicken is like a bagel too and that is i not only want the diet style to be micronutrient favorable but i also want it to be hormonally favorable you can understand that i don't because we eat a diet let's say with a high glycemic effect it's going to push up insulin secretion and a heightened level of insulin insulin is a growth promoting hormone it encourages the storage of fat it promotes cellular replication high levels of insulin associated high rates of cancer insulin promotes angiogenesis i say in my pbs television show that angiogenesis is not the first book of the bible as some of you may think it means the promotion the new growth of blood vessels to fuel the fat supply in other words to grow fat on the body successfully you the the fat cells secrete pro-angiogenesis hormones to help the blood vessels grow into the fat supply to feed it with oxygen and calories and glucose to stabilize its growth and the same energy pro-angiogenesis hormones are secreted by cells that become that become pre-cancerous and eventually turn into cancers metastases and swelling on cancers don't grow unless there are angiogenesis promoting promoters allowing its growth but these healthy foods like mushrooms onions and beans and berries have anti-angiogenesis nutrients in them that say no way jose i'm not letting you put fat on your body and i'm not letting you spread cancer and promote cancer these they have anti-cancer effects and insulin is a pro-cancer effect and the other hormone we have to be careful of is igf-1 insulin-like growth factor 1 or igf-1 which is one of the hormones most closely linked to high rates of cancer it's well established in many different meta-analysis that as igf-1 levels go up in a nation under a population we see higher rates of common cancers especially breast cancer not controversial at all and that igf-1 accelerates aging of the brain and aging in general and when we know when we take animals and feed them less calories one of the mechanisms which scientists recognize they can live longer is through keeping their igf-1 low they put the humans in the biosphere years ago they fed them 30 less calories and their igf-1s didn't go down and they thought what are humans different than other animals we take their calories away and they don't igf-1 doesn't go down but we realize that animal protein or complete biological proteins are such a powerful effect on keeping igf-1 elevated that if you restrict calories without cutting back on animal protein you don't see igf-1 drop drop in other words it's the opposite of what we learned in grade school when we were kids we learned that the higher biological proteins from animal products were favorable because of their higher biological value and now we've learned the opposite is true that the plant proteins are more favorable because they have a lower biological value and because they have a lower biological value they don't promote higher levels of igf-1 secretion and in those studies we're finding that for example vegans run an igf-1 usually below 150 whereas long distance runners might run between 175 and 200 and the conventional average americans run between 225 and 275 on levels of igf-1 so let's go so here i'm saying that a piece of chicken is like a bagel because the baked the bagel i've made of white flour is very high glycemic enters your blood as if you're entering sucking on a sugar cube and spikes a level of insulin which is which is carcinogenic you know cancer promoting and the chicken has the high biological protein spikes igf-1 and igf-1 is also cancer-promoting they both have sources of macronutrients they're both deficient in micronutrients and that we couldn't as i always say we couldn't have designed the diet style with less than five percent of calories from high nutrient produce and i say five percent because it says ten percent there i'm saying five percent because half of that is french fries half of that ten percent is white potato and ketchup when you take that out it's less than five percent so the really colorful plant foods is less than five percent of the american diet and we couldn't do a better job of getting the best nutritional scientists in the world together to design a diet like this unless when i always say it's designed by al qaeda they wouldn't let me say that joke on pbs they stopped me from saying the joke and i had to change it then i had to say it was designed by darth vader i'm saying darth vader that's not even funny who am i offending am i worried about defending al qaeda and then they took out the joke about cookie monster they cut that out of the show i couldn't say i met cookie monster backstage we became great friends and now he's changing his name to veggie monster they wouldn't let me mess with cookie monster they wanted me to say anything about cookie monster that was a no-no so here's the point is that we could we're eating a terrible diet in america and obviously we see the results a nation riddled and burdened with diseases of not just obesity but 40 of the population dies of heart attacks and strokes about 30 of these cancers people wind up in nursing homes they you know they're they have the worst healthy life expectancy of almost all kind of modern countries in the world is right here in this country not saying other countries are that great but the world the word healthy life expectancy is defined by the world health organization are the parameters of living whether you can take care of yourself whether you're mobile whether you're in pain whether you can whether you're having having uncomfortable surgeries whether you're whether you're depressed whether you have your full mental faculties all those parameters stink in this country your last 10 years of life are pretty much not very well in this country and of course i'm saying almost all americans are micronutrient insufficient and and leading to dna decay mitochondrial damage and telomere decay the signs of premature aging so the the my um basic principle of health and longevity is to maximize your healthy life expectancy and the quality of your life you want to eat a diet with a high micronutrient per calorie density and to do that you have to look for seek out and eat foods and chew them well eat foods that have give you micronutrients so what foods give you micronutrients so i just took 36 different nutritional parameters that the government keeps track of i couldn't make up ones we didn't have good records on i had to use the every one that the usda and the fda scores in foods in the foods that have scores and i added up all these 36 different parameters per same amount of calories and i got a number divided it you know normalize it to a hundreds to a zero to one thousand score based on 100 calories of food so people could just have a cheat sheet not the critical basis of this program but a tool one tool that's useful people to encourage them to eat more of colorful vegetables because they can see that green vegetables don't just have twice as much nutrients as potato chips and bread and chicken breast and oatmeal but they've got like 50 times the nutrients right 50 times the nutrient levels and of course not only which under represents the difference in micronutrient density because we don't we're not we don't keep track of all those thousands of different phytochemicals that have been newly discovered you know we're finding out that all the different polyphenols and berries and all the you know different um you know compounds and beans that just doesn't even represent most of those those newer nutrients we're talking about so if anything it under-represents the differences the purpose of this is not to say that um you know almonds are better than a cashew and you know this kind of meats better than that kind of meat the difference the purpose of this is really to tell people i want you to eat more of these high micronutrient foods and especially greens it's not the whole story there are lots of foods that are moderate in micronutrients like mushrooms or onions or sesame seeds or flax seeds that have individual phytochemicals profound anti-cancer effects that we have to recognize differently that don't that isn't represented adequately in this scoring system either so it's not a perfect tool it's just a tool it's got flaws like have you heard of that study where just to jump ahead for a minute where they first they took women with breasts with a diagnosis of breast cancer and it was a blinded controlled study where they gave half of them a muffin with flax seeds in the muffin and the other half got a muffin that looked the same without the flax seeds and they've re-biopsied their breast tumors and found that they had significant apoptosis and regression of cellular proliferation and tumor differentiation in the group having the flaxseed muffins so then they followed the woman for 10 years a different group for 10 years who all with a diagnosis of breast cancer and they attract the amount of lignans they ate ligands are found in flax seeds and chia seeds and sesame seeds and broccoli stems and things like that but but it's mostly the they're very rich source of them is brown flax seeds ground flax seeds have about seven milligrams of lignans per teaspoon that's 21 milligrams per tablespoon and the highest quartile of living consumption in this study was a third of a milligram point three milligrams of lignin in the highest quartile and those women followed for 10 years had a 71 decreased risk of breast cancer death from eating a third of a milligram of ligand compared to no lignans did you follow that now of course the ability of a nutritional intervention to reduce risk of cancer or death from cancer increased mortality morbidity mortality has to do with the earlier in life you start it the more effective you it is because as the cancer or any disease advances the chance to reverse it becomes it you know it expands a lot of different reasons we can talk about time for now but the biggest chance for the body to protect itself against dysplasia and carcinogenic changes is earlier in life before the disease advances itself so the fact that they had a 71 decreased mortality is remarkable and the women were only eating a third of a milligram of ligand what if they ate a reasonable dose of living like 10 milligrams of ligands a day not a third of a milligram and what if we got them to do it before they even got a diagnosis of cancer and that's just one food that's just one of the many superfoods we're talking about if i can show you i can show you studies on it which we don't have time for today but on every one of those g-bombs greens beans onions mushrooms berries seeds i can show you every one of those foods have between a 60 and 80 percent reduction of cancer when people eat it in the highest quartile of consumption but we put it all together when they work synergistically and i'm suggesting that we have a tremendous power to influence the obviously our population's risk of cancer was with nutritional excellence so we're so i'm advocating obviously people eat high in the nutrient density line right higher and eat higher nutrient density line eat more green vegetables eat more squashes and berries and beans and you know and eat less animal products and processed foods and oils and sweets obviously and then we're talking about insulin like growth factor one that a lower level extends lifespan and how sensitive this is to sugar but also but mostly to animal protein and one of the main the question is at what level of animal protein consumption do we see igf-1 start to tilt spike up you know what level is it kind of like pitter patter along at like for example in korea they had one tenth the breast cancer rates we had in this country in the 1970s and now they have one half the breast cancer rates from one tenth that means their cancer rates in korea went up 500 percent in that period and what they do differently in their diet well they went from six percent of calories from animal products to sixteen percent still half we have in america right but their sugar consumption double their oil consumption went up by fourfold they changed their diet even though they still always eat a lot of white rice but it seemed like the effect on the insulin promoting effect of the white rice was magnified intensified when they started putting enough animal protein in their diet to because insulin and igf-1 have a negative effect when you mix them together especially like if you do like for example a hamburger macaroni and cheese you know sandwiches um you know the point is is that we've got it down to a science in america right a science how to kill people we just mix the the high glycemic foods with the high igf-1 promoting foods i always say that the food manufacturers did a wonderful job at testing this out with lab rats to make them addicted to the food how to add the salt now they don't put the salt on the french fries they inject the salt in the french fry so you can't taste it they don't just put sugar on they put actually sugar in the burger meat inside the meat they put em they got they they've got it down to a science they tested out a rats how do you make the rats become obese how do you make the breasts going to eat more you put salt in the coca-cola you know they got it all figured out but now we don't even need the rats anymore you got it okay so just to review the glycemic load and chronic disease most of you guys know this stuff the point is it's not just obesity heart disease and diabetes it's cancer high glycemic and the high glycemic foods are more cancer promoting in p in people that are more insulin resistant let me say that one more time that white potato has a high glycemic food and its studies link white potato consumption to higher rates of colon cancer in overweight women not in normal weight women because its effect on promoting insulin is so much more powerful and the insulin the more insulin resistant you are the more your body secretes a larger insulin load in response to a high glycemic food did you follow that so here's glycemic loading cancer we're talking about meta-analysis showing increased risk of breast cancer white rice and breast cancer increased 19 increase in risk of breast cancer for every 100 grams a day that's about 400 calories and white or black rice has the opposite effect because the low glycemic effect is about 15 points lower from a 20 glycemic load to what goes down to a seven if you switch from white rice to black rice and here's just where people say that you know that saturated fat remember here in the you know the newspaper the new york times you know eat all the meat and butter you want saturated fat is no longer bad for you remember i heard that on the unbelievable it's like the it's not worse than the blind leading the blind but anyway the studies show nothing showed nothing of that that that meat or saturate or butter was good it didn't show anything like that it just showed three things number one when people switch from a diet that's has a lot of animal products into it and eat lower fat animal products from more egg whites and white meat chicken and other meats with the fat cut off their heart attack rates don't go down a lot because they're still eating a lot of animal products they didn't cut out they didn't eat more beans and nuts they lower fat contents in meat number two they reduced their calories from fat and in the group where the rates of heart attacks didn't heart disease didn't go down they had higher intake of hypixemic carbohydrates so this slide just shows you that with a low glycemic carbohydrates we saw the heart attack rates go down and reduce saturated fat when they gave highway semi-carbohydrates like white red white rice and sugar then the heart attack rate went up so what the study should have said was that high glycemic carbohydrates like white rice and white bread and sugar are just as heart disease and cancer promoting as eating foods high saturated fat and in these particular men analysis it came out even worse all the groups all the quartiles in the group studies in the meta-analysis had high rates of heart attack at heart rates of right they weren't not one was a healthy population you don't compare you buy a car by comparing it to a junkyard wreck that was like a semi-joke i'll raise my hand if i want you to laugh so here's the glycemic loads chart which just sells white potato white rice white chocolate cake corn sweet potato but you can see what the point is here is that almost all natural foods are below 15 there's almost no plants that have a high glycemic effect even white potato isn't such a natural food it's genetically been bred for hundreds of years to make it much more fluffy and to be able to make you know french fries and mashed potatoes the traditional potatoes that were developed in the andes you know hundreds of years ago were colorful and thin and tougher to eat and didn't have a high glycemic effect so we're really talking about that natural foods are not very high glycemic unless you process them is the point and here's you know eat more greens and beans well let's look at beans for a minute because we're talking about the glycemic effect we know that the glycemic effect of beans is very very low but beans have the more resistant starch than any other food there's two types of starches carbohydrates and beans one is slowly digestible starches because b this the carbohydrates and beans are absorbed over a period of two to four hours instead of two to four minutes have a tablespoon of oil it goes into your bloodstream within three to five minutes you got that what does your body do with something with 400 calories in your bloodstream in three to five minutes it can't process it for energy you're only burning 50 calories an hour to sit in here listening to me it has to store it as fat right what do you have to produce fat storage hormones and secretes all these hormones to make you feel right but when you take in nutrients like beans it's absorbed over many many hours but a portion of that carbohydrate isn't even broken down to carbohydrate it's resistant starch which means it's resistant to enzymatic degradation by the pancreatic enzymes so you have to so that has to be degraded by the bacteria in the digestive tract now it's degraded by bacteria in the digestive tract they turn it into short chain fatty acids they turn the carbohydrate into fat but 90 of those calories pass through you into the toilet bowl because the time they turn into the calorie into absorbable calories it's down to your large intestines already it's past the point where it could be absorbed the 10 percent that are absorbed have anti-inflammatory effects that keep you more that slow the absorption of glucose and the bacteria those beans grow in the gut they're a prebiotic forcing the growth of certain types of bacteria talking too fast oh i'm sorry i thought you got i know i'm going fast but i figured your guys are a highly educated group i'll slow it down a bit thank you i just wanted to get a lot of information i only had an hour so i just doubled up the rate you know everybody listen to those old radios you put them on 78 instead of 33 and just play them i got the song on 78 rpms okay all right so we're saying here that when you eat the when you eat certain foods especially raw green vegetables and cooked beans and mushrooms they promote the grow you have a different bacterial flora in your digestive tract than how you eat in a more americanized diet right and the bean bacteria in particular which degrade which actually breaks down and digest beans eventually the time you stop producing so much gas not as much fun but you know but you're digesting it better but in the process those bacteria are producing propionate and other nutrients and fat and factors that slow the absorption of glucose not from the beans but from the other foods you eat like you eat a piece of fruit and the glucose instead of being absorbed in 25 minutes will now be absorbed in 45 minutes because you have those bacteria in the digestive tract that slows the absorption because you have beans in your diet on a regular basis it's called the second meal effect you heard that the second meal effect it means that the next day when you have your oatmeal in the morning these absorb much more slowly the glucose is eased into the body because you've eaten beans on a regular basis and you have the bacteria to digest beans are part of your normal by probiotic makeup in your gut did you follow that now okay you're welcome and now you can see what this slide does it shows the percent of resistance starch and the resistance starch plus the fiber and to give us a number just a just a nice number but it represents a certain degree of therapeutic power wouldn't you say that number the fiber process resistant starch how may be favorable the source of calories this would be for a person with heart disease diabetes compared to eating rice and potato and oatmeal and those kind of foods all right so we look at though then we can so i we could skip through this slide did you get that right now because this slide just repeats what i just told you right it says what is a nutritarian diet it says a nutrient diet is a diet that strives to be nutritionally comprehensive avoiding ins potential insufficiencies strives to be hormonally favorable recognizes individual individual differences in nutrient needs requiring supplementation sometimes or sometimes not or dietary modification to maximize disease free mortality which we're going to start talking about now okay guys following this so far do i have a few minutes left i do i got i'm good i only went i only went to half hour so far wow that goes fast it seems like i talked to it like 10 minutes and a half an hour went by already wow amazing okay so i want to present this information in a manner that people recognize because that this is not controversial people always say oh you're radical and you know and all and that does how who do we believe there's a million different diets out there all the different viewpoints and i'm saying not really you know there's all these different crazy diets out there yes but if we took of 500 of the best nutritional scientists in the world into a room we wouldn't see those controversies we wouldn't see disagreements we'd see us all generally agreeing on some simple principles it's very hard to agree with these simple principles for anybody to you know so the ant so one of these principles number one vegetables beans seeds nuts fruits whole plant foods should form the basis of their diet right most of what we eat they're good for us they contain nutrients humans are supposed to take in can't disagree with that number two excessive amounts of animal products cause disease you know if a person on a paleo diet you know thinks their diet is good and my question is well well do you think that any amount of animal products are okay you know we could we could argue at what percent might be favorable or what percent might be acceptable but you can't but a lot of these paleo people are advising people to eat sixty seventy eighty percent of calories from animal products what does this go back to the videotape what is the literature show well there was a major um analysis done that followed 60 000 people for 18 years just published in 2014. just published it about six months ago it followed all these 60 000 people for 18 years and tracked how much animal protein they ate and those in the highest quartile of animal protein intake had a 75 percent increase mortality in the 50 to 60 50 to 65 age range and a 400 percent increase risk of cancer compared to people in the lower quartile of animal protein intake now let's describe what that high quality of animal protein intake was with the 400 percent increase of cancer it was people eating 20 of calories animal protein was the highest quartile 20 of calories from animal protein was the highest quartile the lowest quartile was about 8 percent the highest quartile of 20 calories from animal protein considering animal products are mostly about 20 to 30 calories in fact that's about 25 percent of calories from animal product that's about the same amount of animal protein most americans eat did you follow that so far so the paleo the atkins the ducan the south beach all these popular diets are advocating people eat not 20 percent they're advocating people 40 50 70 calories manual products the breast increased risk of breast cancer could be not of course sudden cardiac death rightly not just talk about heart attacks we're talking about irregular heartbeat sudden cataract death atrial fibrillation breast cancer dementia from brain brain shrinkage with aging we're talking about maybe it increases breast cancer rates by you know tenfold eightfold six-fold there was any four-fold increases for breast cancer just when you're up to twenty percent i don't know how much it would be but it's certainly it's certainly not what's what's the word it's irresponsible completely irresponsible to be advocating diets like that and you'd be amazing how many doctors advocate high protein diets even because they you know they they're just like you know lawyers electricians and everybody else they believe what they read and they what people they read these books that are popular and what people want to eat and it's really macho and sexy you know you know the paleo diets really popular they're dangerous dangerous dieting and refined number three refined carbohydrates cause disease and lead to overweight and obesity and also cancer right so this is this is not controversial stuff it's not radical it just seems that way because americans are on a race to see who could die first and food is addicting so this we discussed some increased risk of diabetes in cancer from white potato consumption we know it's not from the butter and cheese they put on a potato we know that because the scientists control for those variables and they find that its effects the negative effects were mostly visible as people became overweight which speaks to the what you see with all high glycemic foods you see their ability to promote cancer is enhanced when people become more insulin resistant or overweight so i may not be as damaged by a potato as some person who's 50 pounds overweight would be same thing in the diet in the nurse's health study where we linked potatoes to diabetes the social potatoes and diabetes was a glycemic load not added fats so there are a lot of people promoting you know vegan diets that are high in starchy foods like potatoes and they're very much fearful of eating nuts and seeds and not fearful of eating potato i'm not so fearful of eating potato if you're in good shape and eating a reasonable amount of it i just don't want to baste this is the diet to be potato especially when you're taking people that are overweight and prone to diabetes or cancer because of their weight this slide just sl slants out grasps out the risk of the decreased risk of cancer from various foods the green vegetables showing for example the green vegetable line that the more green vegetables you eat the risk reduction of cancer goes to nearly a hundred percent i extrapolated the line in other words i took the line based on various studies and 20 from this much and 40 from another much so i took a bunch of studies and i extrapolated the graph and put its final point up at 100 getting to just using just for fun to see how much of this food would you have to eat to get to a hundred percent if 50 of that level of food gave you 50 reduction did you follow right there on the graph so and the purpose of the graph and other graphs like this is really to show people that you don't just to show that some of the studies that show there's about a sixty percent reduction in breast cancer for women who eat mushrooms on a regular basis that the you only need a small amount of mushrooms and when you went from 20 to 60 percent you don't get a lot more money bang for your buck when you need a whole bowl of mushrooms in other words 20 grams is probably all the medicine for you to get from mushrooms you don't need to eat a lot of mushrooms a little bit gives you those benefits you follow that but when you take green vegetables it's different because green vegetables when people keep eating more amounts you get more protection and more protection you get you understanding this so the red line is of course you know is non-starchy veggies like tomatoes and onion and green vegetables and those foods are really have powerful effects as well and this is just we talked about this showing those foods that i call fast foods versus slow foods i already discussed the rate at which foods enter the bloodstream affects the release of fat storage hormones and angiogenesis promoters and i call fast food not only the food that we get in a fast food restaurant but also foods that are digested and absorbed fast you don't see a bottle of oil grown on a tree because when you eat the original food the oil come from came from it doesn't have the same biological effects the oils and fats are bound to sterile sterols sterols stenols and fibers and they're absorbed into the bloodstream slowly as opposed to being absorbed into the bloodstream rapidly they're different foods a walnut is not the same thing as a walnut oil sesame seeds not the same thing as sesame oil they took this out of my pbs show too i i was going it's fun filming a show because all the things you like that cut out all the things you know it's kind of but interesting so i have this table like i can tell it to you now just because it's i liked it oh they have this table like this and i'm going to say to the audience and by the way i got this audience of 700 people in the show of all people that had had like the the whole audience had either lost 50 to 100 50 to 150 pounds and a whole 600 people lost more than 500 pounds and kept it off in the audience but i couldn't they wouldn't let me communicate with the audience they wouldn't let me ask them questions when they say stand up if you lost 50 pounds kept it off for a year stamina will be lost if you kept your weight off for two years i couldn't do that that's why anyway but so i had this i had a job i'm going to say to the audience i'm going to hold up the and you're going to tell me the food makes you thinner makes you fat sesame oil and they yell makes you fat right sesame seeds makes you thin walnuts makes you thin watermelon makes you fat and here i put up more oil oh i hardly ever eat the stuff they cut that one out too oh that was one of my best ones all right so you're getting the point here that the that fast food let me say this again that fast food and rapidly absorbed food is not just like it's linked to food addiction it sets off this rush of calories into the bloodstream so at such a huge bolus sets off dopamine releasing the brain as if you had a snort of cocaine or shot yourself with heroin it makes people go after that heightened pleasure they're thinking about that waking up for that donut they can't they're thinking about their ice cream for dessert they can't get out of their mind they're sucked into a vortex of death of disease it's addictive stuff because it's rapidly absorbed into the bloodstream right this stuff and it's linked to poor performance lack of intellectual development aggressiveness and depression let me say that one more time there's a dose-dependent link between fast food consumption and commercial baked goods with depression dose-dependent and it's very important because we have a population suffering with mental disorders and depression and then and apathy and lack of interest and they're addicted to a diet they can't change their they can't change their habits because of the vicious cycle of addiction and apathy so i always talk about beans a lot and one of the reasons i talk about beans a lot is because also the paleo people are telling people not to eat beans because it wasn't a food of early the early i guess some you know prehistoric man or something i said yeah i know that's a theory it's okay to have theories but then we gotta look at the evidence from the science and see if the theory holds up to water always up to scrutiny you know and it doesn't because the more beans people eat the longer they live and beans actually have besides an acetone pentecost phosphate that has to be is that 26 letters long has to be healthy if it's 26 liters long it must be good for you i always say that you know two such beans twice a week 50 reduction in colon cancer i'm just two servings of pisa beans a week god imagine if you had beans every day no more friends left but less cancer but here's the thing i don't have the next slide i do have it i must have it it's the not i talked about the propionate from the bacteria it's the phytic acid in beans where people say it you know it binds iron or zinc it's not it's an anti-nutrient no it's a it's going to bind the iron radical from the meat it's going to prevent the hydroxy radical lowers the inflammation in the gut it's beneficial and some and the phytic acid gets absorbed and actually adheres to the cells wall of dysplastic and abnormal cells marking them for removal by the natural carot cells it increases it increases immunorecognition of abnormal cells did you follow that it's a positive thing not a negative thing inhibits cancer cell migration and invasion and we're saying here that it link and actually if you're going to eat some meat if you pull the beans out of the diet it makes the meat more toxic the beans actually give you some protection when you have a little meat in your diet if you're gonna have to make a burger then make the burger with beans and oats and mushrooms and onions put an ounce of meat in there per burger to give it a meat flavor but put all that other stuff in you take from tell people eat all meat and remove all the carbohydrates you need to move the beans you've increased the risk of you know one of the risks of meat isn't just the fact that it's high in fat it's the animal protein it's not just the animal protein it's the it's the bacteria produced from all that meat leads to certain tm tmao tmao that increases intravascular inflammation and deposition of atherosclerosis it's also the iron from the meat the excess iron that we get absorbed increases the risk of intravascular inflammation interferes with intravascular elasticity and the beans have some effect to bind the phytic acid bind some of that iron lessening the negative effect of the meat did you follow that so we have good science and i'm saying what i'm trying to um teach people and demonstrate is that nutritional science is interesting it's fun it's therapeutically applicable and we gotta you know we should be learning it more in school and not ignoring it and the medical profession hasn't done such a great job in utilizing it and have it permeate every doctor should be an expert in nutrition so you know and so whole grains versus beans and when people switch from white flour to whole grains they saw improvement in cardiovascular and diabetes parameters but when they switched from whole grains to beans they got significant further improvements so the point is forgetting this following that so we want to get more fiber lower glycemic lowers the hemoglobin a1c so what if you take these principles and you imply them with more greens more beans more nuts and seeds well then you see a dramatic lowering of glycemic load and diabetic and cardiovascular parameters and that's what some of the work i've done has shown and my i've seen more than probably 20 000 patients in the last 25 years with i just got i wish i could show you some of these well i could show you a few of the cases but before i do that let me go into the seeds and nuts thing because just like beans no just like walnuts versus walnut oil just like beans versus bread we're talking here when you eat the whole nutter seed you have beneficial biologic effects because all the fat calories don't get absorbed into the body because the steroids and sterols act like a fat sponge which which draw fat out of the body into the stool not only is the fat not only does eating nuts and seeds increase stool fat but the fat found in a toilet bowl isn't the fat that was in the nuts and seeds to begin with think about this for a minute because you have intra-hepatic circulation of fat so the body has the ability to suck out saturated fats and ldl cholesterol and put it in the stool and put some of that glitter fat the health glitter [Laughter] put some of the the fat the other monounsaturated polyunsaturates in the body in place of saturated fats there's a fat exchange going on here when you remove some of those fat calories from nuts and seeds they're beneficial and they make people and they also increase increased lifespan because they increase the absorption of phytochemicals from other foods that are not the nuts and seeds when you're eating a salad with that's rich in isothiocyanides and and organo sulfate compounds from onions and green vegetables and you're chewing it you're going to get more absorption when you eat some nuts and seeds in the same meal versus having the salad dry with a low-fat dressing or a non-fat dressing nuts and seeds in many different studies more than i just took a hundred different studies of nuts and seeds and i sent them to dean ornish 100 studies i collected to show him that there's not one or two or three but a hundred studies not one study showing a negative effect an error one of the hundred have shown a positive effect on lowering cardiovascular parameters increasing lifespan low risk of sudden cardiac death there's no legitimate reason to be telling a person with heart disease they're afraid they're afraid to put a woman on a salad that's that's craziness you can have a theory but let's test the theory and see if it holds up to science and it doesn't hold up nuts and seeds lower cholesterol and they increase intravascular elasticity that's the marker of you know of course you know what post pressure is right the difference between the diastolic and the systolic number which keeps which what's what's wrong with blood pressure medications what's wrong with blood pressure medications why don't they well really what's wrong with them is because as we age we get more intravascular we lose intravascular elasticity and we need more and more medication to lower the diastolic blood pressure it pushes excuse me i said that wrong i need more and more medication to lower the systolic blood pressure it also lowers the diastolic blood pressure to levels that are unfavorable because when you have because during diastole when a healthy blood vessel should contract keeping the pressure elevated so the carny vessels can refill during the actually the the the um ventricles don't just refill during vastly the car vessels fill during vastly if the actually drops too low you don't get co you don't get good coronary filling of the carnivals and you lead to more irregular heartbeats and sudden cardiac death when you lower you when you when you eat a nutritarian diet you lower blood pressure radically making blood people will faint on the floor if their medications aren't lowered they lose weight they're increasing of intravasculasticity without the negative effects of medication besides the fact that calcium channel blockers increase risk of breast cancer by double the risk of breast cancer and ace inhibitors increase kidney cancer and and beta blockers and increase the risk of diabetes and it does as the statin drugs and there's you know you don't you pay a price for using a chemical methodology for trying to control symptoms the best thing to do if people would not need those things they always say to people you know and we're talking about you know a naturopath or an herbalist or getting stuff in your blood in the health food store to lower your blood pressure to make you go to sleep it'll wake you up or to make your pee more make you pee less and i always say that that we learned in the first year of medical school maybe the first week of medical school that the efficacy of a pharmacological substance is proportional to its toxicity right natural or not we have to live in a manner to avoid the need for medicinal substances as much as we can that's what we learned in the first month of medical school they kept saying over and over again you want to teach your patients live in a manner to avoid the need for hormonal substances we want to right but then we go on through our career and we think that's too hard and we just give people what they want to take you know we just think oh people aren't going to it's funny but i went back to penn and i said to them i want to do a because the the um eye doctors there and the eye institute was noticing my patients come in and they had to cancel their surgeries their their laser surgeries because they their diabetic retinopathy went away their immaculate degeneration reversed itself and they would so they so they put in so they were so excited and some of these guys were my professors when i went to medical school were still there working at the school so they were brought you know really great so they put together a 1.5 million dollar grant for the nih you know to to do a study on to do a study this way so it's really exciting working with people um so i went to the diabetic department and their their position was like oh we know all this stuff already but nobody listens to us we try to know we can't get people to do it i never wanted it was like you know but don't you understand that that speaks to your skills as a teacher as a motivator what your training was in you know i've been practicing and refining and improving the skills of convincing and and how to get people to to do it and to be unaddicted to you can't just give up because people think they think it's not hard to do did you follow that one of the leading nutritional researchers in the world dr david jensen from toronto which i am friendly with now you know he was once speaking and he said yeah this is he did a study testing a nutrition diet in 2001 that's 13 years ago he tested in medical journal metabolism and he showed that it lowered ldl cholesterol 33 which was more powerful than most statin drugs in practice and it did so without by making the by increasing the with other beneficial oxidative effects like ldl particle size oxidation it doesn't just lower cholesterol it's much better than just low in cholesterol you follow me other beneficial exercise lower cholesterol but he said that only 20 of people were willing to stay on a diet long term so i'm saying you know you know that's the figure that's that you found in your fine your studies that's good but doesn't mean that has to be the figure forever but maybe we can improve our skills at educating and motivating and you know all this stuff to teach people doesn't have to be a fixed figure of 20. it was acting like it was a fixed figure of 20 you follow that and if so going on to let's keep moving along before i get run out of time here so nuts and seeds reduce the risk of coronary events and the most um fascinating and interesting element of these studies including the nurse's health study the physician cell study you know big studies that are very well known gone on for you know many many years the most fact was that they increase they dramatically decrease the risk of sudden cardiac death in other words sudden cardiac death which is not the same as a heart attack it could happen in a heart attack but it's usually we're talking about you know getting into an irregular heartbeat that can kill person was decreased by more than 60 percent and in the seventh-day adventists what benefits were seen in vegans as well as meat-eaters and nuts and seeds and show the consumption that's inceed so a dramatic reduction all cause mortality and all-cause mortality means not just heart disease but cancer as well because those are the leading causes of mortality to take nuts and seeds out of the diet is foolish here's the seventh-day adventist study which showed that the average seven-day adventist who lives in loma linda california lived on the average 13 years longer than the average male caucasian right they were comparing male caucasians to male caucasians 13 years life span but if we look at all the parameters and the ones that lived the longest were the vegans who ate nuts and seeds the ones that the non-vegans the seven-day adventist non-vegans were not eating a lot of animal products the religion advocates people reduce animal products are going or eliminate them totally and some have very little animal products and some have none but the vegans who did not eat nuts and seeds did not live as long as the non-vegans who ate nuts and seeds did you file that one and here's the i cut and pasted it from that study which showed actually some fascinating findings look at the differential on nuts from eating nuts tonight an age of 79 to 87 compares the differential on vegetarian status versus non-vegetarian status you're following you see the slide where past smoking bmi nuts exercise you know so we're talking about a very diff differentiating variable whether you ate nuts and seeds or not leading to a year of life difference and the nuts and seeds that i want people to pay attention to intentionally eat are those that are high in lignins we talked about flax seeds and chia seeds and sesame seeds and those that are high in omega-3 fatty acids particularly ala alpha linolenic acid that is walnuts hemp seeds chia seeds and flax seeds are very high in both you can add sesame seeds in that mix but sesame seeds are not high in omega-3 they're just they just have lignans in it but they don't have as much ligands as flax and shia so that's why i didn't put them up there so we want to have some of these high omega-3 now if you're taking some walnuts and flax seeds which have omega-3 in them and the body can convert some of that omega-3 into long-chain omega-3 epa and dha commonly known as fish oil then why should we have to take any supplements of epa and dha what we just can eat more walnuts or take more flaxseed or flaxseed oil wouldn't the body have the ability to convert enough epa and dha what do you think the answer that question is what do you guys think the answer is it varies tremendously from person to person there's a tremendous genetic variable let's look at some of the data here because let's skip through this it just shows that it's a walnut study that showed how beneficial walnuts were at increasing vast vessel elasticity and endothelial function i'm just drumming this home that when you put a person on a vegan diet to reverse heart disease you don't want to take away all the nuts or get a person afraid to eat a walnut has a beneficial effect so a nutritarian i'll get back to the point a minute so this slide will just go in order here for a minute this slide shows you what a nutritarian diet in practice a lot of vegetables fruits beans nuts oil is loose sparring like it's a fast food and of course we want to save the fats to eat more nuts and seeds not have more oil and oil is 120 calories a tablespoon that may have worked okay if you're in the you know 14th century working behind a plow eight hours a day with a with an oxen but if you're sitting on your can behind a computer all day long how you're gonna burn those extra 400 to 600 calories of fat americans are taking in form of oil and here's a study which i did of 700 and over 700 participants which was really the study where i'm discussing the toxic hunger where people switch to a stop eating the american food and they go to a healthy diet they feel headachy and weak and fatigued and stomach cramping they feel ill they can't they can't stop eating and they have to keep eating unhealthfully and they have to keep eating between meals and all because they think they're hungry they don't recognize that they're driven to eat too frequently and too much because when you're in the catabolic phase of the digestive cycle when you're in that phase where you're not digesting calories and you're just living off of the calories stored in glycogen glycogen that's when the body is in a heightened detox phase that's when your liver a kidney can make to devote itself towards repair removal of waste products and when that happens you feel like crap when you're unhealthy and because the detox is halted by eating again people keep eating all day long they're on one constant meal because the minute they stop digesting they start to feel ill i got to keep eating and they got to keep their body digesting calories all the time so they have to become overweight and this study showed that if i give people enough high nutrient foods that those sensations disappear eating healthy makes people now longer need to eat all the time they have a different perception of hunger and they don't require or desire as many calories you can't tell a person to eat less it's like telling them to breathe less oxygen instead of breathing at 14 breaths a minute breathe at six well you'll be gasping for air in a couple minutes because you don't feel well if you do that and you can't feel well cutting back your calories unless you focus on nutritional quality because there's too much drive too much addictive drive to overeat when you're eating poor food so here's a study we did on diet we followed diabetic patients and here's the thing they all became non-diabetic all of them all of them became non-diabetic one of the patients was still on glucose only because the only it says uh the only one that was on glucose because his doctor didn't want to take him off the glucose but his blood sugar was below 100 and i would have taken him off he was my patient that would have meant all the patients would have been off their medications so to reduce their bmi every one of them dropped their high high triglycerides more than 100 points the hypertensives saw blood pressure reduction with the systolic mean went from 148 to 121 with a 67 medical reduction medication blood pressure medications so here's some of the data and you can see the bmi drop and the ldl cholesterol and of course we want people to avoid medications that cause weight gain obviously and that's why you know you know you guys know the accord study they had people who had better medical care better diet management management by diabetic nurse practitioners and now we had them having increased risk mortality increased morbidity because they were lowering their glucose more medications because the medications make you gain weight and become more diabetic and what the medications take the beta cells in the pancreas that are failing struggling to produce too much insulin because the average diabetic is producing five times as much insulin as a slim healthy person without diabetes so i'm producing x amount of insulin and here's a person who weighs 80 pounds more who's producing 5x insulin did you get that so now that 5x insulin isn't enough insulin because their glucose is too elevated so we give them more insulin worse we give them these medications that cause the beta cells in the pancreas to work harder to produce more insulin which causes them to fail faster in other words the reason you go to the emergency room with your with your first heart attack or your first car you know event is because insulin is atherosclerosis insulin promotes the cellular proliferation it promotes atherosclerosis almost weight gain and when you're in the pre-diabetic phases you have high levels of insulin accelerating atherosclerosis and then your first glucose starts to rise because the failing beta cells in the pancreas from being so overworked no longer produce five times as much insulin as a normal person can produce they only produce four times as much but it's not enough and the glucose levels start to rise so we give them more drugs that make the beta cells work harder they're going to poop out even faster the accord study was stopped because those that results from intensive treatment diabetes led to more problems and i hear i sometimes will come across medical studies or medical groups discussing and they don't even understand why this happens they don't even they're confused about why this occurs the point is lowering the blood pressure with medications is not going to have be as stroke reducing and lifespan promoting as lowering the blood pressure without medications withdrawal with nutrition and lowering the glucose medications isn't going to have the same beneficial effects as low in the blood the glucose with change in diet and exercise the glu you can't just look at the number that's just this one end point you understand what i'm saying here's a guy oh i got to some cases now let me see how much time i have left it's now i have till five i got almost 12 minutes left i'm doing okay oh except i want it to end early so we can do questions and answers but i'm almost done we'll try to get this i'll just speak a little faster you can always play it back you know here's a guy who came to me in 1994 with triple vessel disease he couldn't even walk a couple of a block or so with chest pains he had a stress test which was positive his cardiologist said he needed urgent bypasser urgent angioplasty i said you know it's not urgent you're not unstable what if we just give me a couple of months to see if i can get you feeling better to go back to the cardiologist and see what he says you know so he gave me a couple of months and he lost you know a couple of maybe 30 pounds within three months they couldn't detect any ischemic changes on his stress to his repeat stress test at the end of the first year he lost 60 pounds his desire you could see went from within within three blood medications he had no blood pressure medications with normal blood pressure in one with the first year so he never had the heart surgery never had the heart surgery but this is now 20 years later now he's 93 years old he's no longer 72 years old never had a heart problem since then he's on his roof chopping wood and working in his backyard you know the moral of the story is that people think that atherosclerosis and high blood pressure and we think it's the process of aging and i'm saying i'm showing these people that actually as they got older his native blood pressure in other words his unmedicated blood pressure actually continued to improve and get lower in the second and third year on the diet program whereas the first year into medication it was still running the 130s maybe in the second year third year was running 120s now you've got blood pressure that's like a little kid and you know we see that in studies on population studies and primitive populations from different areas of the world with the most elderly people in the population most elders don't have high blood pressure if they didn't salt their food and you know and didn't do if they lived in that natural environment but people say oh you know i'm not salt responsive but don't you notice how you're you know you take people's blood pressure and it's always low and then like some year they come in you know five years later it says hi they said that's funny my whole life i was told it was so low and now would you tell me it's high well yes you thought you you know if you keep eating the high soil diet all those years like everybody else well don't forget 90 94 of americans over the age of 65 are taking medication for their heart of high blood pressure if more than 90 of medication of americans develop high blood pressure it's most likely going to happen to you too just because you don't have high blood pressure now doesn't mean it's not going to eventually happen unless you live a healthy life now don't wait till it happens because your siblings just sympathetic tone flips in the brain is then cutting the salt out of your diet isn't going to have the same effectiveness it's let's do it now before you develop the high blood pressure and here's a woman who julia incredible story can you imagine three heart attacks in three months i didn't know that in in my residency i used to remember that a person has a third heart attack in the fir in that year usually they're dead right they died with the third heart effect in that year she still lived she had her come in in a wheelchair though to my office she couldn't walk she without having chest pain she couldn't even get up she had five angioplasty i didn't know anybody had five angioplasties i couldn't only believe it ten medications now she's ten years later i went to her son's wedding i danced with her at a wedding she says i shop i cook i garden i do everything for more than 10 years of my life i look healthy it's good health and then it's wonderful i'm having a love affair with doctor not with dr fuhrman oh i'm given this lecture in tampa florida reminds me i'm getting structure in tampa florida with group of physicians like 600 doctors right and one of the doctors comes up through the aisle and puts his hand up in the air and starts yelling at me you got my wife pregnant go huh what are you talking about he goes we've married for six years been trying to have a baby and when she saw your show on pbs we changed the whole family we changed our diet and now she's look look at her she's pregnant so [Music] so here's julia and here's ronnie lost 140 pounds in in 12 months he lost more than 140 pounds because his scale his bathroom scale only went up to 300 pounds he was over 300 pounds but he wasn't trying to lose weight fast he was just following my instructions i never met ronnie he was following me instructions on talking the member center at drfurman.com i was communicating them through the through the um forums you know those forms of communicating on blogs i was telling them what to do we read the books i've talked to him on the phone a few times since then this is like maybe five years ago so look at some of his parameters his blood pressure on two medications couldn't even come down you know he had oh by the way he had bypass surgery first and then he had angioplasty after bypass surgery right and then within three months of having angioplasty he gets restenosis and they tell him they can't do anything for him anymore because he already had bypass so it was they so they sent him home essentially to die he couldn't so he googles reverse heart disease or somebody finds me but he's doing great this is like six years ago he has a waste of 30 you know 332 he's dropped all his weight he got back in great health again his ldl cholesterol is 75 with no medication and he's well seen so many cases like this can go over one of one case after another here's a guy at the top oh he's an interesting per case let me just quickly tell you this one case so i'm given this lecture in fort wayne indiana and this guy's sitting in the front row the person who set up the lecture lost 120 pounds and she wanted me to come to her church and speak because she looks great now and she used to be obese and she's kept the waiter for more than 10 years and her husband was right there in the front row kurt so hey great to meet you kurt how you doing and his wife started telling me he wasn't doing that well and he says well you know i was doing no okay i was having i had to stop running or exercising too much because i was getting chest pain pressure on my chest with exercise and i so i curtailed my activity now i but now so i can only walk but unfortunately the last couple of days i'm feeling pressure right here sitting even at rest so i'm getting a lecture and he's having either a heart attack or unstable angina at rest right so i say well you can't really stay if you hear me give the lecture then you got to go to the hospital you know because unstable angina is a medical emergency you know you've you've what your story you're describing is that over the past six months you've gone to mild engine and a more severe engine a stable now you're unstable and you know you can't just ignore it so he essentially said to me i'd rather die than go to the hospital and tell me what to do i said well this is not emergency treatment it takes time you know to work with the process you could be dead before it works you know so um so anyway so what happened to him is that within you know he was able to walk with his resting pain went away in a few days a following died a few days his walking pain went away in a few weeks eventually so eventually he loses 30 pounds in the first three months his blood pressure drops to normal in the first week within eight weeks he can jog with no symptoms in one year his blood pressure is great he has no symptoms he's fine he can do everything anything he wants he can sprint the point i'm making here is that one i have another case it just came to me recently he had 100 occlusion 100 occlusion his left anterior descending artery told him an urgent emergency surgery and refused to have the surgery so you know so in any case he got well totally well you know he's doing great he dropped 70 pounds he's slim he got you know they if they're really motivated you know it works even in most even these really really severe cases here's a guy who has an eighty percent occluded carotid one year ultron at ultrasound it's forty percent occluded in one year in the second year carotid ultrasound the they couldn't find anything they couldn't find any um plaque at all in this carotid arteries after a year or two years we're talking about a lot of reversal here you know well don't forget that a lot of these patients are too sick to do much exercise yes it includes exercise as their health improves sufficiently so they can tolerate exercise and when you get in great health you want to exercise and be active but obviously you can't start with exercise if you're not healthy enough to exercise right and of course we can go on but i think we gotta we gotta move on here oh yeah i got to talk about this briefly let me just go through this briefly we're talking we're talking about depression i think it's important to go over this for a minute because how i want to leave you with how effective this is for a depression because how many people would so even major dispersive disorder can get well without drugs because first of all you but you know you guys know that the melatonin peaks about 10 o'clock at night after a couple hours after it gets dark out and melatonin helps us sleep better and stay asleep but it's exposure to bright light in the morning that halts melatonin secretion and if you're in a dim atmosphere in a dim light like this melatonin could continue into daylight hours and if melatonin secretion continues in the daylight hours then you have less peaking of melatonin and secretion at night and you're not going to have as much serotonin production during the day because the serotonin which is a feel-good hormone is can't be produced if you make a melatonin instead so light therapy is very effective not just for seasonal affective disorder but it's effective for major depressive disorder as well and here we're talking about the antidepressant studies show that the antidepressants are not very effective and in a head-to-head comparison light therapy outperforms drug therapy for major depression but what if you combine dha and epa supplementation which has been shown very effective for depression even in low dose it's forty percent effective and they can some of these studies show that if you go to higher doses it's a hundred percent effective an ssri resistant depression i have been exposed to many vegans who became depressed because of low levels of fatty acid conversion whose depression was fixed by taking supplements with epa and dha and zinc which i'm gonna that's what i'm gonna discuss right now so i'm gonna i'm gonna so here we're talking about the meta-analysis are consistent that depression is commonly associated with lower levels of epa and dha and a vegan diet could precipitate that in some people who genetically don't genetically convert favorable and i was going to talk about that five ten minutes ago but i got into some different slides we'll get into it now and that because of the extra phytic acid and binding of iron and copper and zinc there could be borderline zinc in some people as well which could further exacerbate the tendency towards anxiety and depression i have some of my family or some people many patients i've seen who develop depression when you give them the epa and dha usually about a thousand milligrams of epa a day initially with about 30 to 50 milligrams of zinc a day they come out of it pretty quick i've seen one person come out of it like within two days of giving the z within two weeks of this of the epa and when sometimes within two days of giving them zinc their anxiety gets better and what if you add what if you add a high nutrient diet and remove the processed foods and you give them a nutritarian diet with all the right nutrients for the brain as well well then i'm saying what i'm saying to you is that the protocol i have which involves light therapy vegetable and fruit this heavy healthy diet with flax seeds or chia seeds with walnuts with epa and dha with no processed foods with saffron sometimes with additional zinc is extremely effective not only in treating major depressive disorder but helping people who aren't getting response to their drugs what does the conventional psychiatrist do is they put them on antipsychotic medications right too they add they try to prom they try to give them more powerful more dangerous drugs instead of just figuring out the nutrition and if i don't want to conclude with that dha and depression that dha excuse me and dementia that's supposed to say dementia i couldn't change the slide so insufficiency increased risk of dementia not depression on that slide you follow that brain shrinkage with aging is proportional to lower levels of people with lower levels levels below four and the omega-3 index have developed smaller brains with aging if we're going to be making people or helping people live longer into their 80s and 90s we have to protect their brains in doing so and this is the point i wanted to make earlier when i asked the question whether vegans convert enough of ala into epa and dha and somebody said no and somebody said yes and my answer was you're both right you're both wrong because the studies that we just did on 160 vegans and about 166 vegans showed that the ratio of differences was amazing across the board where some people produce plenty of epa and dha and some people produce dangerously low levels and here's the thing that was so fascinating it didn't correlate with a level of ala intake meaning that it was caused by genetic differences in conversion and conversion enzymes did you follow that one so it's a subset of vegans it's about 27 percent that actually have levels built the dangerously low levels might say below three that could get into depression or dementia but you want to be aware of this because i'm claiming that the vegan community is irresponsible is irr is is irresponsible because they some they want to give the impression that an unsupplemented vegan diet is the perfect diet for everybody and we have to be cautious here and careful because some people are more do require certain high levels of things that might be animal product dependent due to genetic differences maybe the way they ate maybe what they were raised them maybe who their parents were whatever the reasons are we have to be somewhat more cautious and we can't say well vegetarians have less depression therefore they don't need if we can't that's not true you can say the mediterranean diet is that would be the perfect diet because they have less heart attacks but they still have 35 percent of people die of heart disease it's not there's a lot of stuff we could do better than a mediterranean diet did you follow that there's still depression and it's still treated fixable and there's still dementia and it's still preventable and why not have nobody get a problem if it's possible to do that so finishing up here here's a women's health initiative memory study which followed a thousand women for eight years and followed that greater brain volume and higher epa dha omega-3 index had larger brain volume and retained their um and especially larger volume hippocampus which controls thinking and emotional decision-making you know and and so so i'm saying here that we have to be cautious that a vegan diet is most likely the most favorable diet for its cardiac and anti-cancer effects but we have to be careful and not consider individual differences and make sure we feed people healthy food and also supplement intelligently either by because you know that b12 we should talk about b12 and vitamin d as well that b12 differences occur between people and as they age but also when you're taking animal products almost all day long you're absorbing um you know you need less b12 when you're on a vegan diet you need more b12 because you can only absorb about a certain percent of that b12 you're taking and if you're absorbing that certain percentage with every meal you bring in animal products you get sufficient levels but if you're only taking a pill or a vitamin pill once a day only getting a small percent once a day and since the body can only absorb a small percent at once you need a higher percent because you're taking it once a day did you follow that do you got that it's a little confusing i recognize but just remember that um that if you're on a vegan diet you need a little higher level the rdi for b12 is not sufficient for a person on a vegan diet that's what i leave you with and i think finishing this up those are some references and um vitamin d and cognition we're out of the sun we're indoors we have to make sure that we're have adequate vitamin d levels to prevent dementia vitamin d and dementia we'll skip through this so this is my think my last slide it's saying that i don't advocate there's a lot of well-known vegan authors and nutritional gurus who advocate a loaf that the benefit of the of a vegan diet is it's low fat because it's so low fat and they recommend no oil and no nuts and seeds and i'm warning against that and saying the science has advanced the point where those viewpoints don't hold up to scientific scrutiny anymore and i think that we have to let science direct us to more advances and make sure more people are adequately protected and sometimes egos get in the way of saying what i've said about 10 years ago was no longer right and i have to modify my message a little bit and people are reticent to modify their messages

Channel: Northwest VEG

Views: 30,227

Rating: 4.9012346 out of 5

Keywords: Adventist Health, Dr Fuhrman, Eat to Live, Joel Fuhrman MD, NW VEG, health professionals, nutrient density, nutritarian, plant based diet, vegan

Id: GGfgmq3hrTQ

Length: 77min 11sec (4631 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 08 2021