Raw Food vs. Cooked: Which Is Better for Your Body? Dr. McDougall Health & Medical Center

hello and thank you for tuning in to mcdougall's medicine with Dr John and Mary McDougall I am their daughter and your host Heather McDougall and tonight just like every night I will try to get to as many questions as I possibly can but first I want to say hi to you Mom and Dad how are you good good yeah we're actually we're having a wonderful wonderful weekend together as you know you know because you're very much very much involved here in charge we're running an extremely successful 12-day program right now it's amazing I don't know how in the world we get so many nice people who have so many problems they just kind of show up on our doorstep and you know we're what day 10 of the of the program and every one of them is doing amazing what's that oyster we're having fun too they're having fun yeah so anyway it's been it's been a real exciting week I have to say that when we run a program it's always a good week for me and it's always a busy week I was a really busy week for Heather well you and Mom are a big part of it every morning you wake up and we have a 9 A.M chat where we do just what we are doing here and answer questions and just get to know one another and and then I moderate the whole 12 days so I'm there all the time but it's great I really like some of the comments from people about how much they enjoy the session without us you know we start every morning at seven o'clock with Pacific time with a session that just involves the participants and so they get to talk about how they're doing and you know what kind of problems they've had and successes and failures and how the McDougall staff is treating them and you know but yeah because no staff is there no no they just meet so they meet every morning and they like make uh new friends that they keep for a whole life I think that's one of the problems is a lot of people maybe this five o'clock evening Sunday evening session helps fulfill that is people feel like they're so alone you know trying to follow a diet that we teach and everybody seems to be doing something else and they're very you know they're as strong as they are in their opinions about politics and religion as they are about food so it gets into some really haunted hot discussions and it's nice to be able to have uh like I would guess there must be there must be about four repeats we have more than that repeats in the program but I think four of them they they kind of indicated the reason that they're in this program again well encouragement helps they won't say encouragement is they just want to be around you know like-minded people and uh so that's that's you know certainly the program uh offers that opportunity all day long to be around like-minded people and a lot of people meet new friends that they keep forever and we have sessions going on from three years ago that people are still getting together they've made friends they support each other and and that's one of the problems of course is to get it is to get people around you that eat a healthy diet and we're able to provide that in the program you'll make friends do we also have a a big session Heather where that all the people have been through the McDougall program get together and talk like without us do we do this you know we do this every Wednesday so once you graduate from the 12-day course you're part of a a weekly Meetup so everyone that's graduated from the course is invited and that's every Wednesday at 8 A.M Pacific I think a lot of people do that too yeah you literally get to be with the you know hundreds of other people been through the program and again it's unmonitored by Mary or I or Heather or any of our team you know we don't know what goes on uh we have you know we get some feedback if it's important but um yeah these people have been doing this with us on the telemedicine program for for over three to three years now and uh and they talk to each other about how they're doing yeah and they exchange recipes and uh I mean they they say they have so much fun just talking to each other well I was thinking and there are also some people that just make friends and groups of their particular program so we got you know hundreds of people who've been through the program that you can meet and hear their stories or their complaints or whatever and then you've got uh more personal group that you can develop I don't know whether Heather helps you do that or not but where you can just meet with some friends that you met during the program those are really really interesting people in this program so they're they're all those are you know I I've said it before and I think it deserves saying again on our adventure trips where we used to take people around uh the North and South hemisphere Hawaii Etc you know we always had the nicest people the most interesting people and uh I got to the the part where I had figured that we either do collect really really nice interesting people or will we bring out the best in people I think it's a little bit of both because you're in a situation where everybody has the same goal which is to have a better life and in general they're successful people because quite honestly it's only successful people that follow this program because it takes a bit of work a little bit of effort to do it so you know I'll just relate to you and then we'll get on with the questions my graduation from my medical residency from the John Byrne School of Medicine in Honolulu Hawaii my chief of medicine had a well we had a a love-hate relationship for more than two years I studied it to be an internist yeah we got into arguments about whether food had anything to do with disease Etc but I think he liked me his name was Irv shots from from Honolulu he's died since I hear but Irv uh he called me in the last day of my medical residency and I already had my ticket so I wasn't worried about him penalizing me for what I had to say or didn't say and he said he said John you know I'm really concerned about you with your crazy ideas about vegetarian diets he says all you're going to do is collect a bunch of bums and hippies you're going to starve to death and I thought for a minute and I said you know if that's the case that's the way it'll be because I can't do these things to people that I know are wrong I can't put them on drugs or send them off to surgeries that I know are wrong then I said something that really has turned out to be true and this was like probably half a century later this earlier that this conversation took place as I said to Dr Schatz as I pointed toward his prospering abdomen I said you know I said uh it's not going to be bums and hippies that follow me it's going to be successful people who along the way they say to themselves I'm such a big success I got to create education built a wonderful business I've got a wonderful spouse great children I just succeed in everything I do except for my health why am I overweight why am I diabetic why do I have cancer why am I heading toward the heart surgery and then they say to themselves it shouldn't be that way and my answer to them is it shouldn't be that way if you have the right set of rules that's the problem you don't have the right set of rules and that's why you're failing so you folks beginning this session five o'clock Pacific time Sunday sometime in July 2023. I want to tell you I have no doubt this is a crowd of successful people doesn't mean you're all billionaires it means you put some effort in life so you really care and you don't want to fail in your health after all you know you've heard the saying if without your health you have nothing so that's the kind of clientele that we've collected over the last half century and still do and that's why I say these people are so interested in this group is you know they you know teachers and a wedding planner that I'm going to see tomorrow so good fun yeah great thank you for sharing that okay let's get to some questions I've got a bunch that have been written in so John writes in and he says he's 63 years old very strict Whole Food plant-based for two years last month he went to see his optometrist and they said his IOP was high and they said he's at risk for developing glaucoma he's prescribed a bunch of drugs that made him sick they said he could do laser surgery what do you recommend can diet help yeah diet helps with glaucoma with raised eye pressures there's a couple of different kinds of glaucoma one is called closed angle and it was called open angle and I think I've got the the the correct one is the one that responds in the smokes Communists the open angle glaucoma and uh there was a study done it was a rather informal study it was done at Weimar which is a program similar to ours they're east of Sacramento California they're based on a set of the adverse Advanced religion a great program and Sally melgram who is still a practicing ophthalmologist in San Diego California she went to the program and she measured the eye pressures in people when they started the program when they ended the program and she got enough data she should have published it it showed a dramatic reduction in eye pressure in this short short time you know fewer than two weeks so I would expect that and of course they could have the other kind of glaucomas it's not related to to diet and related maybe to infection or injury but uh you should expect the pressure to get better now the way I'd go about doing it so you didn't risk anything is that Saddam with your your ophthalmologist not an optometrist an ophthalmologist you know an eye doctor medical doctor and I say look I'm going to change my diet whether you like it or not and I'd like to not do anything foolish so I'd like to do is I'd like to come in every couple of months I like to measure our my eye pressure I'm not going to take the drugs right now Doc but I'm going to be really strict on the Google diet because Dr McDougall said that you can reduce eye pressure just like you do reduce blood pressure which we've published the results of it by changing my diet so I will come in every every couple of months and you can do blow this little thing or you got a new technique out they'll blow the air in anymore I just found that out last week when I went and had my refraction checked yes uh they got a whole new way about measuring high pressure so anyway you just check it out and uh if you're not doing well then you should consider the drugs which are generally eye drops and uh and you know you could always look at the evidence to see how effective the eye drops are and preventing blindness I haven't done that so in a long time so I wouldn't comment but I certainly would like all therapies I think you ought to have the evidence that it's going to work and not based on somebody's haunch some big guess from some important doctor who of course has a ton of degrees and so you should respect his or her guess you should base it on scientific work and the best scientific work available is done by a randomized control trials and uh we have our had our our program tested at Oregon Health and Science University with a randomized controlled trial of a group of people who we studied over an entire year you know I had virtually no input into this particular study done at Oregon Health and Science University except to teach them you know I insisted that we'd be the educators of these people because so often when the diet Wars take place and they set up an experiment where they say match Atkins and RNA share you know some other high high carbohydrate versus low carbohydrate diet test they don't educate the people properly like in the study I'm thinking of with ornish versus Atkins they just hand them a book and said do it well you know maybe you can do the low carb diet audible book after all it's just a matter of going through the drive-in line at the fast food restaurant and ordering your food and throwing away the bun and scraping off the ketchup of the mustard the pickles throw them away too and you're on the Atkins diet well we teach requires a little bit more effort except we try and make it as simple as possible for you and uh you know that's a complaint I got from one of the participants that obviously in tomorrow is that you know she's just she's busy she says she works 16 hours a day in her wedding planning business and she just said I haven't done time doesn't have the time to put into the cooking and of course we spend the whole 12 days trying to make it as simple as possible like you told this morning about the enchiladas you made it didn't take you long at all but no why don't you tell us what about that enchilada I know what people want to know about it well um it's it's just a simple meal because I always we really like um Mexican food so I make a lot of pinto beans and I I usually use a slow cooker Heather prefers an instant pot but I've been using a slow cooker forever so I I have my slow cooker going almost all the time I make a big pot of beans and then I use them for either bean burritos or Bean bowls or Bean pizzas or whatever I have and then I make two or three meals out of it and last night I got a request from um our son who lives here in Portland that they would like to have Tex-Mex lasagna for dinner last night so I I had the beans cooking I figured I'd just make them really simple because their kids are you know how kids are they want things really easy so I just took the beans right out of the slow cooker put them in a big bowl added some already cooked brown rice and mixed them all together and then layered the beans on top of the tortillas with enchilada sauce and just did several different layers and uh it was a huge success everybody ate tons of it and it was so simple and yeah you watch me put it together it took me well maybe not much time half an hour you're that kind of a homemaker in the sense that you don't want to spend a lot of time in the kitchen either so the recipes that we have at least the ones that we follow are real simple you know a couple nights ago you made a rice dish with uh some uh some type of soy of condiment oh yeah and that was that was true that was unbelievably good yeah I just took you about five minutes put together so in general we try and teach recipes that are really simple but you know once in a while somebody complains and they say uh you know I like a lot of variety I I can't eat just the same thing for breakfast every day and two or three or four different things for lunch and dinner like we do I need to I tell them I said look we've got we've got on our own work Mary's published over four thousand recipes if you go to Instagram on our account you'll find well thousands of recipes and it's interesting the people who participate in the Instagram they they've they've got the program it's not like we have to go back and say oh you should have left the olive oil out of this one or you know we don't have to do that people get it and the ones that contribute the recipes uh very you know delicious and interesting and some new ideas for Mary and Heather and so on so some people really enjoy spending a lot of time in the kitchen I mean there are some people that are just naturally really they really like to cook and they would like to spend hours in the kitchen putting things together well they should try the feijoada they should which is a Brazilian dish that you know has a whole bunch of layers so we have some rather complex recipes too if you want but you know for us it's just a matter of the same thing over and over again we're just fix the things we like anyway that's got a little bit off the track there a little bit you know it's important to share food ideas because we need to know what we're supposed to eat right yeah okay next question this is from Stephanie she also wrote in she's a 38 year old female female and she has the factor five bleed-in blood clotting mutation and her doctor has recommended lifelong baby aspirin what do you think about that I think that's the standard treatment and I would find no reason not to go against the recommendations this is a uh a genetic issue kind of runs in the family and they have an increased risk of blood clotting and so you don't want that to happen because blood clots are what leads in fact they are the cause of strokes and heart attacks you know it's almost always a heart attack is due to a blood clot forming the blood vessel doesn't rupture you know to the outside it ruptures to the inside so uh you don't want to want to be hyper coagulant coagulable hypercoagulable anyway you want it to to be just normal natural and there's an important thing for you to understand is that this research has been you know around for 50 years and it's still as true today as it was back then there's still still complementary research that's done that shows the exact same thing and that is that animal fat you know from dairy and meat and chicken and so on animal fat increases uh the clotting of the blood it increases clotting Factor seven which is the one that is most active when it comes to having heart attacks uh so you you get the blood all set to to fall over into a clock when you eat animal fat now vegetable fat does the opposite vegetable plant that causes the platelets to be non-adhesive causes the quality Factor speed non-active or not as active and so it thins the blood and it can thin the blood to the point where you could bleed now I I run into patients who tell me that they're taking fish oil alone and fish oil with Aspirin you know they really want to prevent the heart attack anyway and I you know I I every time they wipe themselves they bleed you know there's something wrong here Inuit Eskimos who uh live on a high fish High you know omega-3 fat diet which is the fats that cause the pain of the blood but they're known for fatal nosebleeds so you need you got you got the opportunity to regulate the coagulation your blood based upon whether you choose saturated fat or you choose vegetable fat my my message to you is don't choose either one you don't take the natural fat in the foods so that you don't excessively clot nor do you excessively bleed but if you get the fat from your rice and corn and potatoes and so on in their natural packages you won't run into either one of the problems uh you don't want you don't want to have your blood too thin you don't want to get in a situation where you get into a minor car accident you get a brain hemorrhage which is what you're setting up for like you can ask one person who asked the question well they need to be on they need to be honest yeah that's different the best I know and the last time I treated somebody with a factory five lighted deficiency which has been a while I put in my aspect and I'd have to do the research again to see whether that's the standard of therapy but I'm pretty sure it is but also in addition to the aspirin you know we don't want to get into any blood clotting problems in either direction so you really should eat a healthy diet thank you this next question is from Stacy she wants to know if anything can be done with done for Meniere's disease well menieres is uh is um menaires is a problem of the inner ear and uh I think meners is ringing in the ears no I'm not sure I was just going to look at this is it Virgo or is it I'm a little confused there whether it's vertical it's an inner ear problem veneers I know it's Emma but um yeah what happens is there's one little artery that goes from your carotid uh right up to the inner ear just a single artery and our artery gets plugged well gradually or suddenly with a blood clot rupturing about that people who have lost Hearing in one ear suddenly because they had a sudden blood clot forming but uh you you get hearing loss yeah and you get vertigo there you go it's vertigo okay and then yours is vertical and you get tinnitus so I'm sure after named after a guy named maneer anyway um the guy this guy named Spencer all right he he did some studies and you can look them up on hearing loss and diet uh what he did is he he and his friends decided they were going to go around the world and see if this on a relationship between populations of people who had heart attacks and strokes and people who had uh inner ear disease and so what he found was in countries where they had a high rate of heart attacks in other words they lost some meat and dairy they had high rates of inner ear disease if it made sense because you closed on this artery that goes to the ear just like the coast on the artery that goes to the heart when you have a heart attack or the brain when you have a stroke so anyway so Spencer he went jobs back to his office after he discovered these things he got sick himself he developed Meniere's disease he developed such bad vertigo dizziness said he couldn't get up off the floor and so he remembered what he had learned in his travels and he decided to go on a low cholesterol regime which is the best diet they knew back then and also whatever cholesterol lowering medications were available and he got better and then what he did is he decided to test the next 300 patience he saw who had high frequency hearing loss and he put them on a similar regime and he got reversal of high frequency hearing loss in about half the patients I mean what I see is people who have a vertigo or tinnitus ring into the ears when they changed their diet there's a good chance that they're going to get better there's also a chance they're not you know it's just depends upon how permanently the damage is and you know how bad the particular one artery just one little fellow art who comes up here of the ear that's it yeah so that guy goes you're in trouble uh anyway you can look up Spencer's work just look up Spencer here he lost uh high fat diet you should be able to find it and if you came to the program it would be one of my favorite articles that I offer you in a section on kajavi under mcdougall's Dr Victorville's favorite articles and so I you know I've collected all these articles over the last 50 years particularly the ones that are done many years ago which you must understand articles done many years ago are even more valid than the ones done today and the reason I didn't explain that because you get criticized a lot because people say oh well all of his information is based on all these old studies and he never looks at any of the new stuff oh I've selected the new stuff I know but you should explain the difference you know why when the original research was done they did some really basic understandings like for example with diabetes 1927 Shirley Sweeney showed that his medical students when they ate a high sugar diet we're non-diabetic and when they ate a high fat diet they all became diabetic well if you repeated that study today you get the same results they've already done it personal Hemsworth he was the father of diabetes and he published early in the 1900s and finally he put his classic article out in the British medical journal in 1940 and where he showed that a high fat diet and a type 2 diabetic made their blood sugars really high so the the reason is is that the basic research was done in the past they don't have to do it again it's been repeated confirmed that this is the truth I mean you don't have to once you figure out the world is round you don't have to you don't have to figure whether it's around by other techniques anyway that's one reason the other reason is is before 1980 you could trust the research because you didn't have the meddling of the drug and food companies but what happened was we had the Reagan economics of Dera regulation and they started the government decided it was going to stop paying for scientific research well you got all these Laboratories around the country and all these people making a living by doing scientific research supported by the government all of a sudden their money was taken away so that was in the 1980s and guess where they looked for to get their financing that drug companies in the food companies so since 1980 I have to be very careful about any research that I look at and one of the first things I do is I look at the funding and what you find this has been studied what you find is 70 of the research on drugs is paid for by the drug companies all the research on semi-glutides you know osempic wigavi you know those kind of Miracle weight loss drugs every single experiment is done by a drug company there's no independent research out that you can relying on so 70 percent of research on drugs and equal amount of research on food is paid for by food companies I can't trust them why because you know these these funding businesses they're not going to hire you a second time if you don't get it right the first time so they find themselves scientific you know scientific groups of people well research organizations that will go along with their game and show what they're looking for and you know what you know how to bring methodology you could pretty much show anything you want so I always look at their methods second of all first their funding and then their methods and by doing those two things I almost always figure them out if I don't then what I do is I go to the letters to the editor it'll be published over the next several months and my colleagues their colleagues write critiques of their scientific study and usually they can figure out they figure it out they know the business they figured out the trickery and so once in a while I have to rely on somebody else to explain to me how they're trying to fool the public but they are and that's what they do these are advertisements folks they're not scientific papers they're advertisements I used to get confused because the journal and American Medical Association would put out issues every issue had about 20 full color advertisements plus across you know maybe fifty hundred thousand dollars an ad and they'd have like you know 20 ads at the beginning and then they would have the scientific research and then they would have a few more ads at the end I used to think to myself how stupid do these do these drug companies think anybody looks at the pretty pictures no that wasn't the problem I was the one who was making a mistakes the advertisements are in the middle they are the research papers what industry discovered is that doctors are are influenced tremendously by scientific research so you can get a hold of the science you can you can get the doctors to pretty much do anything you want and that's what they did you know it's just business ladies and gentlemen it's just a business thank you for bringing that up uh let's see next question this is from Jolie she wrote in and is wondering if diabetic neuropathy can be cured following a whole food plant-based oil-free diet sometimes sometimes first of all you should try because there's nothing else that's going to help you you know you're not going to get any benefit from any of the therapies that I'm aware of out there so uh there's two research papers one is published by Weimar that we just talked about remark they did a study on their patients which are similar to our patients except they get a big dose of antiveness religion so they just study on them where they took uh was it 21 people with diabetic neuropathy and they put them on the diet you know the diet that we recommend Stars based diet with fruits and vegetables low fat and out of the 21 people within four months 17 of them got better tremendously better and in follow-up uh basically all of them stay free of their peripheral neuropathy which is pain and burning and numbness usually in the feet the second paper published was by Neil Bernard pcrm published it was in Diabetes Care and what they did is they they studied people with diabetic neuropathy and essentially they used our diet and many of the people were dramatically improved as I say what choice do you have and as everything I tell you is if it's going to work If the message Mary and I are Heather are trying to give you it's got to work you're going to see the results of in four months you know if it doesn't work in four months and you're really doing what we recommended go listen to somebody else the body heals itself that quickly so yeah I think you got a darn good chance of helping the the peripheral neuropathy even if it's not related to diabetes which often it's not and people don't know what the cause is but it's you know it's probably related to the food you know pretty much everything so food at least in my mind it is it's like a broken record right well good grief I mean food is your strongest contact with your environment every day you take in two to four pounds of it you know that where else would you look first besides what you eat I know your genes you know or or bad luck or the wrath of God I know now it's the food that you can fix well you always say a little bit of it maybe your jeans but that you can't fix but you can fix the food so it's been a diversion Heather for patients for all the time I've been in practice is so whatever the the pad answer when a doctor doesn't know the cause is it it's a virus or it's your genes you know I mean how could you disprove it if you said it was a virus or your genes no it turns out it's the food it's what people eat and the evidence is overwhelming and you can prove it to yourself and I don't know a week certainly 12 days just like the people in our program at 10 days now and all I saw was Smiles every single person I could I could see their picture they were thrilled they got more out of the program than they ever expected and it should be that way I wouldn't want to run a medical practice that didn't give you what I promised or even more and that's the challenge the challenge is is you do what we say you do what we say you're welcome to come on this show and tell us it worked or didn't work and you don't have to wait long within you know two shows uh 12 days you could do it but you got to really do the program you got to follow the diet a starch-based diet with fruits and vegetables no animals and no added oil very simple it's foods that you love thank you uh let's see next question this is from Super empathy they want to know if coffee causes fibroids how's this fibroids well there was a big push back in the 80s on how coffee caused fibrocystic breast disease and everybody was so excited about this idea that uh somehow coffee stimulated the female breast and you got fibroids fibrocystic breast disease but you may be talking about fibroids in the uterus I've never heard of a connection between coffee and fibroids theaters but the idea that coffee causes fibrocystic breast disease but pretty much abandoned it was just you know the the flavor of the moment you know people got excited about uh what causes fibroids of the uterus the uterine uterus is made of smooth muscle cells muscle cells okay and the growth of the uterus is influenced mostly by estrogen the female hormone estrogen if you have an over stimulation of the uterus with estrogen the cells become over stimulated and they proliferate and they proliferate into lumps that are called fibroids they're non-cancerous they don't turn into cancer they can get big and they could cause you discomfort or distort your personal appearance but you know the idea that the eternity cancer is just not true uh what you could do about fibroids is you can use a anti-pituitary hormone uh lrh I believe it is but anyway it doesn't matter I remembered or not but there's a injection that blocks the production of estrogen and the fibroids shrink but if it was abandoned as the therapy because if citizen stop the medication the fibroids group grew back and why they grow back because the same stimulus was there they never changed the patient's diets so there's a drug out there that works uh but it's not used very often and I would encourage you to use it unless there was some immediate need for you to shrink the fibroid and uh they also can go in and do myomectomies where they take just the lump out that's sometimes done but there's an important thing you need to understand and know about this is uh fibroids disappear after menopause almost always in fact I I've asked a few gynecological surgeons if they've ever seen fibroids in women in their late 60s 70s and the answer is no well what happened to them whereas you see fibroids in women who are pre-menopausal still have ovaries that produce estrogen or you also see fibroids persist if a woman after menopause takes hormone replacement therapy because you continue to stimulate the the body of the uterus but um yeah they disappear so if you got fibroids and the doctor says well we want to take them out you say well doctor don't they disappear after I go through menopause oh yeah well I think I'll just wait until I go through menopause I mean I mean I've counseled so many women to do that just it's not gonna trouble you it's not you're very unlikely to bleed from them you're you know it turned into cancer it's just a mess do men never get fibroids well they don't have uteruses no well so the only place that a fibroid grows is either in the uterus or the breast I'm trying to think about that okay all right I don't usually no I'm trying to think in the testicles and the prostate I I've really not heard fibroids growing in other places except for the breast but then again you know maybe I'm missing some really obvious thing so okay thank you do we need to worry about the Arsenic that people talk about being in rice we're so big on eating rice is our snake a worry yeah you should you should worry about it you're not supposed to eat arsenic I mean there's such a thing as arsenic poisoning but I've never seen it okay I've never seen it but consumers report came out with a report on rice and arsenic about 20 years ago but what you need to know before I go on with the story is the previous year Consumers Reports came out with a story about fruit juices that children drink in our state and the levels of arsenic from fruit juices were higher than what they reported in the rice arsenic article okay so what it turns out is rice is able to accumulate arsenic from the soil the reason that you have arsenic in the soil is because rice is grown in the United States and Louisiana you know similar Parts the United States where they used to grow cotton and the cotton got infected with bull labels and so what they did is they killed the bowl wavels with arsenic so the Arsenic got in the soil and now whatever you plant on that soil is going to pick up the our snake in this case they just happen to look at the rice yeah yeah there there are certain what we call hyper accumulators and one of the most efficient accumulators in the vegetable kingdom are cruciferous vegetables you know like cabbage and spinach and broccoli and cruciferous vegetables they just suck up the poisonous thallium cesium and you know all kinds of stuff from their soil they're really really efficient at it anyway getting back to the rice uh you just be careful where you buy the rice from uh we have enough evidence to say that the rice grown in California is clean at least you know some of the manufacturers some of the producers um if you buy rice from Asia you don't have this problem but if you buy rice and it's grown in previous cotton fields then you're gonna get the Arsenic and as I say I've never seen arsenic poisoning but I've seen a lot of disease due to Rice deficiency so the idea that you should avoid rice I think is doing far more harm you know than any accomplishment when it comes to our snake poisoning well we never heard anything about the Arsenic and the but you know they did oh yeah I know but nobody ever reported on that well they did it was in consumerous report it just didn't have national attention oh and well you know Mary I have to come back to you know people like to hear good news about their bad habits so anything that they can find that would justify their gluttony they're gonna do so they don't like rice you know they don't want to hear that you need a lot of rice to cure heart disease and prevent prostate and breast cancer I mean it just doesn't fit with me it's what they see on their dinner plate so when anything comes up like this like B12 deficiency or you know the idea that vegetables are whatever you know contaminated with with one chemical or another well some stories they tell about vegetables I don't know but anyways It just fits in with what people like to hear to defend their own eating habits I can give you some positive signs every time an article comes out about red wine that gets a lot of attention or chocolate yeah you know I remember a front page article in the San Francisco Chronicle the whole page was about how healthy chocolate was that that had to be that had to be the biggest selling addition of the San Francisco Chronicle ever people like to hear good news about their bad habits so it might make people eat fruit juice but a lot of people eat rice and chocolate yeah anyways you know just just try try and shop around you know ask the question what Bloomberg rice that we buy yeah and rice from Asia is going to be okay or any organic rice right well you'd hope Heather uh you know I don't know what organic means uh unless there's some kind of definition for organic you know if it is included the thing is is that that the Arsenic is in the soil already so it wouldn't be something that they sprayed on it so it might they might be able to say it's organic and we didn't put any pesticides on top but but a hundred years ago they used to grow cotton here and now there's a whole bunch of arsenic in the soil that could be a way but people eat a lot of rice and they're being threatened by eating rice because of what we say and many other people are saying and we point out just healthy the Asians are were not our until they gave up price before 1980 90 of the food in China was white rice before 1980 there was essentially no obesity no type 2 diabetes you know prostate and breast cancer were extremely rare another rice eating country I know the data from is Japan post World War II there were like 73 cases of prostate cancer in the year following World War II in Japan now it's you know an epidemic among the Japanese uh the breast cancer and when I talked to a group of Japanese women who had breast cancer in Japan they told me that their mothers had never heard of it you know it was they never taught they never discussed it Grandma never heard of breast cancer well you know things have changed the American way is all over the world now okay next question this is from Kathleen she would like to know what your thoughts are about eating raw and juicing instead of eating cooked food well juicing when you juice something what you do is you hit it thousand times with a steel blade you don't make fruits or vegetables healthier by disrupting everything in them what happens when you eat disrupted fruits and vegetables is the body responds differently but first of all I've got to qualify but it ain't a big deal for most of us because good grief the body's strong so don't let this discourage you for me to eat fruits and vegetables but you produces fruits and vegetable juices if you like them but they're not better than the fruit or vegetable for example uh and uh or by a guy named Heaton that was published in about 1978. what he did is he took subjects and he put a needle in their arms so they could take blood from them at frequent intervals and what he did is he measured the insulin and the blood and the blood sugar he fed these people he fed them whole apples to start out with and he looked at the blood sugar and it went up a little bit and then I went down a little bit the insulin levels went up just a tiny bit then he took the apple with the stems peels seeds everything throw it in a blender and made apple sauce out of it and what he found is the blood sugar went up about the same as with the whole Apple but it went down dramatically and the insulin levels went up much higher and then he took and separated the pulp from the applesauce and he made apple juice and the blood sugar went up but it went dramatic drop hypoglycemic and the insulin levels went way high so that that's what happens when you damage the food but again like I say you know you can put up with you know T-bone steaks and gallons of ice cream and you know you have an amazing body that you live in a little juice ain't going to hurt it unless unless you're dealing with problems like hypoglycemia or uh high triglycerides you damage the food and the triglycerides go higher um so you know I have to also answer the rest of the question which is a raw diet all right okay so another subject you know they're they're I mean how can you eat a raw starch-based diet raw brown rice not gonna work raw beans no don't think you're gonna do that one how about raw potatoes well maybe I I hear people can eat raw potatoes how about raw sweet potatoes never heard of beef but eating raw sweet potatoes the human diet is a cooked food diet all right uh Richard rangham well ran him bringing him yeah he's from uh I think Dartmouth we had him as a guest speaker he wrote a book called Catching Fire and he explained that a million years ago the primate harnessed fire which gave us an opportunity to cook the food when food is cooked it releases more energy more calories it's more digestible and so it was the uh the the ability to cook the food to get enough sugar okay that's what fuels the brain is sugar for the development of the brain that the human being has we have a brain three times the size of a chimpanzee so cooked food was required for us to make the transition from a lesser primate to homo sapien and uh so much of the the diet is difficult to eat if not impossible except when you get into some green and yellow vegetables and some fruits of course but this is a starch-based diet you're gonna have a tough time people who were all fall follow raw food diets about my experience with raw food diets we got to this place in uh it was a Tiburon California I think it was large birds you remember them Roxanne Roxanne's okay I couldn't afford to go there but one of our participants decided to reward Mary and I by a trip to Roxanne's for raw food and uh ended up costing 500 for four of us so it was very expensive place well Roxanne served uh a rock was lasagna that I got yeah it was a lasagna okay and you've got something else and the other Trooper got something else but anyway they brought him out on regular sized plates with this tiny little bit of food and it had to be a tiny little bit of food otherwise because it was made of nuts and ground nuts and you know maybe some soy and what else would be raw oh they used cashews yeah and so everything was so high in calories if you did anything more than put a little tiny it was about the size of four four postage stamps that somebody would say well you know every one of your meals is like 800 calories if you gave the size of food that I eat on a plate so anyways we had this meal and my host asked me how I enjoyed dinner I said well that's barely enough food to get me to Taco Bell I guess everybody laughed like nobody quite gets your sense of humor sorry to tell you anyway you know the human diet is a cooked food diet all right if you want to lose more weight then raw food will help you because it's less digestible but you're certainly not going to miss anything in terms of nutrients or health promotion by eating cooked food it does not destroy the food the nutrients I mean if it does to any extent at all it's not not enough to cause any deficiency ever it's a cooked food diet thank you for explaining that okay next question this is from lifelong learner question about fish oil they've been told that they need to take it for severe dry eyes and in this case even then you'll recommend it correct I don't think that works it's pretty dry ice with fish oil they're talking about putting it in the mouth not in the eyes right I think so yeah I I've heard that too again you know I I would have to ask whoever was recommending fish oil to provide me with a randomized control trial should be simple to do you know take one group of people with dry you know take a big group of people with dry eyes divide them into two groups you have the control group which doesn't use the fish oil the intervention group that does and see what happens you know show me the studies you know anecdotal experiences are too often you know based on people's uh you know unfortunately there are really enough um controlled studies well for well you know all the stuff that you hear but marry the amount of money that fish oil salesmen make oh I know good grief this is about billion dollar business and and uh some of your health food gurus out there they they make millions of dollars a year supposed to help everything yeah I mean not just dry eyes it's supposed to help with everything doesn't help the fish and this is a real serious problem is we're depleting the oceans and one of the reasons we're depleting the oceans because of the popularity fish oil you know ninety percent of the fish are gone from the time I was a young boy ninety percent of the sea life is gone so you better be darn sure that fish or fish oil is doing you an awful lot of good because you know the oceans are important anyway I I don't I don't but first of all I don't believe it until somebody shows me the evidence and second of all even if it were true even if we're I certainly look for another way to treat your dry eyes like there are solutions you can put in your eyes to help them sorry but let me tell you the cause of dry eyes most commonly the cause is an autoimmune disease called sojourn syndrome and what happens to the body attacks the lacrimal glands you've got dry eyes and the salivary glands you can't you'll have much spit it's an autoimmune disease where the body attacks these glands I believe that this disease is caused by eating foreign glands all right so you eat pig and cow salivary glands and lacrimal glands now how do you eat pig and cow sell every glance and lacquerable glands hot dogs sausages they waste nothing nothing else everyone so you end up eating these corn things these foreign glands and the body looks at them says this is foreign I must make an antibody against it well in the in looking for that antibody it finds similar tissues in your own lacrimal lacrimal and salivary glands and attacks those and it kills them called sojourn syndrome and uh it's not reversible but there's another reason for you to change your diet is to stop the development autoimmune diseases which are so common in fact I'd have to go so far as to say pretty much everybody on the western diet has some low level of inflammation be caused by the foods that they eat and it's aches and pains and you know burning muscles and things like that you know just generalized mild complaints which is pretty standard for the American person European person Australian person whoever is the Western diet they're sick they complain all the time well this is a low level of inflammation to cause that kind of complaint on it gets real serious the body really gets gets uh efficient at looking for uh for various glands it kills the glands like your thyroid gland the reason you have hypothyroidism your doctor will tell you this is due to autoimmune thyroiditis and again where do you eat foreign thyroid glands well they don't West can't waste anything in a slaughterhouse you know you end up eating kidneys you end up attacking your kidneys you end up eating cow's milk and that has a whole bunch of cow's milk has a whole bunch of proteins that the body reacts to which you know affects the kidneys it affects the joints affects the pancreas yeah anyway that's what I would do with dry eyes I can't remember the question okay next question this is from Claudia she wrote in she used to be a junky vegan suffering from chronic headaches and migraines three years ago she switched to a starch-based diet the headaches of migraines disappeared however she was diagnosed with hyperkalemia which is elevated potassium can you comment on that hyperkalemia boy that that'd be really unusual to occur through diet alone now even taking in potassium salts you know the no salt type stuff which is potassium chloride I don't know that you could get into trouble with elevated potassium by even doing that unless you're in a boxful which one of my patients did once uh usually the cause of hyperkalemia is one of two things the one is you have your kidneys failing and the potassium goes up uh you have to lose about 90 percent of your kidney function because you only got 10 percent left before the body can't handle the potassium in the diet so that's the most common reason and hyperkalemia can become fatal when the potassium level gets over seven so you do want to take it seriously but the other reason that the potassium be red is high is they ruptured the blood cells when they took the blood out of your arm so the first thing I start with unless you have kidney failure first thing I would do is repeat the blood test see what's going on I don't I can't think of any other reason somebody would have an elevated potassium hyperkalemia then what I talked to you about but you know and again there probably are some other reasons thank you next question from Leslie Ann she's wondering if elevated B12 could be a problem well I don't think so but most people on the American diet have an elevated B12 level it's called the luxus vitamin it's vitamin A and b12 are luxus vitamins in other words we have such high levels people eat the American diet because of the animal foods that uh anyway far far more vitamin B12 in your body than you'll ever need so I don't know of any adverse effects to have in high levels of B12 but unless you're taking vitamin DB 12 pills that's an easy way to get it or you're still on the meat you know of course animal foods have particularly meat has high levels of B12 so low levels of B12 are almost unknown almost unknown there may be a few cases out there but even in vegans it's extremely rare to have a disease due to be 12 deficiency you can have metabolic changes you know urine changes and blood changes been on B12 but these are things that happen with within a normal healthy person's life it's not a disease actual B12 deficiency diseases so I don't know maybe there have been six or eight or ten cases reported in the scientific literature I couldn't apply no more than that and I would argue that even though it's eight or nine or ten cases are actually due to something else but you know I don't want anybody to become B12 deficient so you know that our standard recommendation since I don't want anybody to become B12 deficient is we've been recommending for the last almost half a century that if you're on our diet for more than three years it takes about 20 to 30 years to run out of B12 but if you're on the program for more than three years or if you're pregnant or nursing a baby you should add a non-enable source of B12 to your diet and the doses is uh five micrograms a day you need 0.5 micrograms to reverse pernicious anemia I give you 10 times as much when you go to the store you'll find pills that have a hundred times as much or a thousand times as much B12 and I can't go into the explanation so why they do that but they do it they just do it so try and get a supplement with as lower dose as possible and take the B12 once a week once a month every day our recommended recommendations have been five micrograms of B12 you've been on the diet for more than three years or if you're pregnant or nursing covers everybody okay at six o'clock we ran out of time thanks I can't let you go you go tell us when the next program is because this one is such a big success I know we're taking some time off because I'm being a given an award by a Physician Group on September 10th where's that awarded Desert Hot Springs Desert Hot Springs yeah it's called the plantrician society has given me an award for my work for the lifetime anyway so we're taking a little bit of time off there and we're busy giving a five lecture series uh which is uh a brand new series uh that starts at the next week it starts next Saturday next Saturday on top so our next program I know we're really busy in the next couple of months so you had to delay starting another program when is it going to run the next one October 14th and we're taking sign ups now and this last one sold out so you want to we fill up and you know that's that's a good sign isn't it so I'm working for the day when we need to double the number of programs and we will in time I mean this five o'clock broadcast has more than doubled in its attendance since we started you folks you're telling your friends and relatives at least listen to John and Mary McDougall you know come and spend a little time with them get to know them they're not doing anything that's going to be harmful to you and it may be the answer to your problem give it a chance thank you thank you tell everybody thanks Mom and Dad Dr McDougall and Mary thank you everyone for tuning in see you all next Sunday at 5 p.m Pacific I'm

Channel: Dr. McDougall Health & Medical Center

Views: 25,786

Keywords: dr. mcdougall health, dr. mcdougall health & medical center, dr. mcdougall, john & mary mcdougall, dr john mcdougall, raw vegan diet, raw food, raw vegan diet benefits, Raw Food Diet Myths, Raw Food vs Cooked Food, raw food diet, raw food diet for weight loss, Arsenic Poisoning, 12-Day McDougall Program, Hyperkalemia, Can Coffee Cause Fibroids?, food plant-based oil-free diet, Can diet help to reduce IOP?

Id: DNwaki2ij1U

Length: 60min 39sec (3639 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 24 2023