The Fasting Expert: 40-Day Water-Only Fasting Could SAVE Your LIFE | Dr. Alan Goldhamer

Physicians will tell you look here's the drugs you take and you'll be on these drugs the rest of your life they will promise you if you do what you're told you'll never get well my guest today is Dr Alan goldhammer a Pioneer in plant-based nutrition and the founder of True North Health Center the type of fasting that we do is the complete abstinence of all substances except water so it's therapeutic medically supervised water only fasting over a period of so we routin fast people up to 40 days 3 billion people globally have chronic diseases and in the US over 70% of adults are overweight with 40% being obese help me understand how we got here we fool the satiety mechanisms of the brains of humans by putting chemicals in our feet salt oil and sugar are not food they're hyperconcentrated food byproducts that're added to food to make food tasty better you know health results from healthful living if you just eat a whole plant food SOS free diet and you eat to your satisfaction you will be able to maintain Optimum weight but to the degree that you add salt oil and sugar to the food the only question is how fat are you going to [Music] get today's episode is brought to you by the awesome organizations that make this show possible [Music] Alan it's great to see you uh good to have you back here I think it's been three years since we first sat down it was in the middle of the pandemic we had an incredible conversation about all things fasting uh prolonged water only fasting and True North has been around 40 years at this point and I think you have overseen the medical supervision of something like 25,000 prolonged water only fast during that period of time yeah I mean this is essentially all I've done in my life I got interested in fasting at 16 I'm 65 today and essentially that's really all I've been involved with my whole life um well let's begin with the most you know kind of general question which is what is fasting I mean fasting has become you know quite the popular thing lately but it can mean many different things you do prolonged water only fasting but there's intermittent fasting there is Tim restricted eating there is alternate day fasting twice weekly fasting there's the fasting mimicking diet that wter pioneered there's minimally supplemented fasting so what is fasting what are we talking about when we're discussing this topic well the type of fasting that we do is the complete abstinence of all substances except water in an environment of complete rest so it's therapeutic medically supervised water only fasting there's a lot of fasting mimicking programs out there and they all have potential benefits and uses uh some of them have many advantages over the prolonged water only fasting and that they don't require the level of supervision they don't require uh uh aggressive withdraw of medications they don't have the risk profile that medically supervised water only fasting could have if it's not done properly so particularly volter Longo has popularized um a program where it's you know limited nutrition intake uh it can be done by most people at home it can be very helpful uh to the degree that it's used but it's not long-term water only fasting and as beneficial as these intermittent fasting programs can be in helping with weight loss and and helping people make behavioral changes um they're not necessarily the same thing you'll see in patients for example that have specific illnesses in need to reverse those diseases that you'll that you would see with long-term water only fasting so is that a way of saying that in your experience prolonged water only fasting is a superior protocol when it comes to uh helping people with um acute uh or chronic lifestyle diseases like why is it that you've chosen to focus on this rather than these other protocols that are seeming to be much more a part of the mainstream discourse around fasting well I think that when you can accomplish your goals with intermittent fasting or these other programs that has advantages as I said safer profile simple doesn't require going to a place and requiring medical supervision uh but many conditions won't respond to those protocols and when they don't respond that's often times when we see people when they've done their best they've made diet and lifestyle changes they've you know done what they can do to resolve the but the blood pressure still persists I know my colleague John McDougall calls us the punishment that if he has a patient for example that doesn't resolve their hypertension which most do but for those that don't he'll you know you get the hard cases he'll send us over with with with apologies yeah yeah yeah yeah because what we do is a more intense process it's not something that you know you'd necessarily look forward to uh if you're ill but the fact is it can be done safely it can be done effectively and when it's needed there's nothing else that does exactly what water only fasting does right so at True North the typical hard case that finds his or her way to your doorstep um is somebody that you're going to supervise over a period of how long as they undergo this protocol uh fasting ranges from 5 to 40 days on water only and there's a period of half the length of the fast recovery in a supervised setting so a typical patient might fast for two or three weeks they might be with us a month and those patients will oftentimes come in with specific complaints high blood pressure type 2 diabetes autoimmune diseases or some forms of cancer particularly things like lymphoma right and how do you decide then how long this fasting protocol is going to be on a case-by Case basis like who who are the people that that you recommend a 40-day fast versus you know just a handful of days right so you don't know with certainty before the fast exactly how the fast is going to go and so what we do is we try to estimate long and then you know if we can get it done quicker that's great um I've had enough experience and fasted enough people I can usually by looking at their medical history reviewing their lab get a pretty good idea of what that range is likely to be but there are patients that we expect to go a long time but they get well really quickly and so we just don't need to do it other people we were hoping are going to be a shorter fast but it ends up being it takes longer to get the job done in some cases uh it's pretty simple in the sense that like for example if you have high blood pressure we want to fast you till you have normal blood pressure so that when you eat well you don't have to be dealing with medications and and the risk profile and we know based on how high your blood pressure is what your medical history is in terms of kidney disease and other things how long that's likely to take right um we can do the same thing with type 2 diabetics we can look at your hemoglobin A1c get an idea of how how much insulin resistance there is and a big factor is how much extra weight and extra visceral fat do you have because it's the Obesity uh the extra weight and the visceral fat that's responsible producing the inflammation that causes these problems and so we want to bring people as close as possible down to their Optimum weight now in some cases people are not overweight but they're over fat and so those individuals you know you have to stay within the the reserves other people might have plenty of fat reserves but they may not have electrolyte reserves or they may have other issues that become a limiting factor and that's why we're carefully monitoring patients examining them twice a day monitoring their lab their your analysis the variables that we can monitor so that we can get a good indication and we know we do that safely because we've published a safety study where we have actually shown that if you follow this protocol you know everybody that walks in gets to walk out right what do we know and not know about the causal or highly correlative um relationship between visceral fat and the Cascade of chronic lifestyle diseases that seem to proliferate across the World these days you know everybody's worried about obesity and being fat and they think of it often as a cosmetic issue and it's far from just a cosmetic issue on your body there's a type of fat called visceral fat it particularly accumulates around the abdomen and the organs that has hypermetabolic effects it produces inflammatory products il6 tnl Alpha acute phase reactive proteins and these inflammatory components are thought to be responsible for the heart disease the diabetes the autoimmune immune disease and some forms of cancer uh so getting rid of you can think of visceral fat like a tumor so if you had a multi- pound tumor in your body you would be appropriately alarmed because of its effects and we go to inordinate effects to get rid of those types of tumors and interestingly enough let's say you went on a fast and lost 10% of your body weight you might think well I lose 10% of my visceral fat but that's not the case you may be losing subcutaneous fat or or muscle mass you would lose all those things you'd lose muscle fiber glycogen water and fat when you fast and when you come off the fast you regain water fiber glycogen and protein but not fat when you follow a whole plant food sosf free protocol you'll continue to lose fat and what's interesting is you don't just lose equal amounts of fat and visceral fat you'll lose disproportionate preferential mobilization of visceral fat for example uh we used a dexa scanner to do some studies typical male uh fast for 2 weeks loses 20% of their total fat but 55% of their visceral fat so the visceral fat is being mobilized much like tumors are other words if you lose 10% of your body weight you don't lose 10% of your breast tumor you might lose 50% or all the breast tumor so how does the body know that it wants to get rid of the breast tumor versus anything else because there is mechanisms in the body that preferentially mobilize materials in inverse proportion to their need and visceral fat should be there and as a consequence body appears to go in and deal with that first which is really great because it's one of the great benefits of fasting is the preferential mobilization of visceral fat so people going in might think I'm here to lose my subcutaneous fat uh but the the sort of good news and bad news is maybe not more of the visceral fat but that's actually in your best interest and I suppose there are people who are relatively lean who nonetheless and unsuspecting to themselves also have you know High stores of visceral fat is a dexa scan the only or the best way to figure out whether visceral fat is a problem for you if you're not kind of overtly obese um well a dexa scan with specific software uh that's designed to measure body fat which is what we used in our studies will do that I don't know that it's necessary for people to do that because what's great is if you adopt a whole plant food sosf free diet engaging exercise get enough sleep your body's going to take you down to Optimum weight and even if you're at Optimum weight it's going to start the conversion process of mobilizing fat and replacing it with muscle you know what's interesting is people are losing weight sometimes they're they're are going through the weight loss process they'll actually be getting skinnier but heavier because muscle actually denser than fat so you have to be a little careful with the scale and even even with dexas scanners knowing that you have excess visceral fat doesn't change what you need to do what you need to do is Adopt a health promoting diet and lifestyle program and if appropriate you can use fasting to make the process happen quicker why is it that it's water only why not supplement with just a little bit of food or some juices uh and then perhaps a related question being this this idea that you use distilled water like to me like wouldn't some electrolytes be a good idea here like I'm still trying to understand completely why it has to be water only why it has to be so severe okay well it doesn't in the sense that all these intermittent fasting programs use various amounts of calories and supplements to do their protocol um and I got no problem with that to the degree that that's effective but what works best particularly when you're trying to get into this deep-seated fasting where you're getting mobilization of visceral fat tumors and other materials it works better to allow the body to go into the full fasting State rather than the fasting mimicking state in our experience we have to still prove that we're looking forward to doing some research hopefully with alter Longo to compare and contrast intermittent and total fasting um if intermittent fasting is working at resolving the problem great good for you right but if you have a problem that despite people's best efforts it's not resolving this is the next step and it's what we have the most experience in so our research is all on water only fasting is that's how I was taught that's what's been done traditionally in the nature cure Arena given the fact that most of the people who who end up at true north and undergo this protocol are people who who have severe you know extensive chronic lifestyle ailments acute medical issues um I would imagine a lot of them if not most of them are on medications perhaps even a battery of medications which presents you with the challenge of getting people off of those medications like are they allowed to taper off of them or do they stop them completely I think there's probably a lot of people who might be watching or listening to this who are thinking I'm on all these medications my doctor told me like never to go off of them you're saying you're going to come here and I'm going to get you off of them which is you know contravenes what they've been hearing for probably a long time well there's a wide variety of medications and so the answer is a little bit complicated but when you think about conditions like high blood pressure or diabetes um Physicians will tell you look here's the drugs you take and you'll be on these drugs the rest of your life they will promise you if you do what you're told cold you'll never get well and that's their experience uh in our experience if you're willing to undo the reasons why you have the high blood pressure diabetes with aggressive diet and lifestyle change in the use of fasting we can get you not only off the medication safely but you can stay off the medication again we've got data to support that with long-term followup now I didn't have that last time I talked to you but for example we completed a study on uh 29 patients that were um uh prospectively admitted into our trial uh 28 were able to eliminate the need for medication and one ended up on half dose of medication we followed those people at six weeks and they had maintained those results and then we followed them at a year and the people that were able to follow up at a year 75% of them were able to maintain their weight loss their and their drug-free normal blood pressure state so what it shows is that highly motivated self- selected people are not only able to get well with f but they're able to maintain enough dietary control that they can sustain those results what was the differentiator between the 75% and the 25% was it was it diet and lifestyle adherence diet and lifestyle adherence was actually a problem in everybody we didn't get 100% diet and lifestyle adherence in anybody but 75% of them were able to heere well enough that they maintain their weight loss and the people that maintain their weight loss maintain their normal blood pressure State people that were having struggle in regaining weight those were some of the people that had struggle with recurrence of the hypertension again I think that visceral fat is a major contributing factor to high blood pressure and so if you can get people to and keep them at Optimum weight it's often much easier to control their blood pressure it's not the only variable there's also issues with kidney function Etc that contribute to it but dietary compliance Associates with weight management dietary compliance Associates with normal normalizing blood pressure what are some of the other studies that have been conducted and have come out since we last spoke oh my gosh you know we have I think we got a whole bunch of stuff in 19 papers that we've published in peer review journals and uh many of them have come out some of them literally in the last uh few months uh it's it's becoming you know it takes a couple years sometimes to get uh studies published and sometimes much longer because we not only have to show that people can get well fasting but that they can stay well because the criticism is oh yeah you've got them locked up at the True North Health Center you know you control all the variables what happens when they go back to free living and so for example uh when I was here last time we talked about a woman that we had treated with folicular lymphoma stage three who had undergone 21 days of fasting and resolved her cancer at one year we published a case report in the British medical journal and they invited us to do a three-year follow-up we did a three-year follow-up where whole body CT she was able to maintain a cancer-free state now we have a 10year followup on her she continues to remain cancer but not only that since then we were able to track other patients with fular lymphoma including stage four fular lymphoma with metastasis to the bones that gentleman fasted 40 days did a we had followup did a second 40-day fast and he continues to do well we've have other patients with folicular lymphoma uh one for example that underwent chemotherapy but as often happens a year or two later it comes back you know more aggressive than ever that person also did well so even people that had undergone treatment seem to be responding to fasting now we have a cohort that's been submitted for publication we expect that to come out later this year we're hoping that that's going to be the basis for a clinical trial where we'll be able to take a large group of patients randomly assigned uh some will undergo fasting in addition to standard of care uh versus standard of care and what we expect to see is dramatic Improvement because you know health results from healthful living if you get people living healthfully and they're willing to do it it's remarkable what the body's able to do that is really wild I mean it's not surprising that somebody's going to be able to get their hypertension under control that they're going to be able to um get their blood markers into optimal States apop hba1c things like that um and and uh you know treat some of the conditions that are sort of clearly associated with obesity and metabolic disregulation uh but when you talk about cancer and I think we talked about this last time like I could feel myself clenching you know because when you talk about cancer it gets very intense like there's a lot of people who would call what you just said blasphemy because there's a certain way of treating cancer and a holistic approach um raises eyebrows to say the least to put it mildly well it's the first paper the British medical journal case reports has published on alternative management of cancer they published the followup we've got another Journal that's publishing the the what the response to that uh it's very controversial I got a lot lot of calls and a lot of questions and a lot of criticism um the reason we were able to get it published though is because it's well known that the treatment for for licul lymphoma doesn't affect all cause mortality it often fails and as I said even if you get success where you go into remission it comes back and so the important thing is to find a strategy that not only gets the tumors to go away but keeps them away and that's where the diet and the lifestyle change seems to be so impacting and then we use fasting on a periodic basis uh in order to be able to maintain Health um it's interesting that the concern is it's so dangerous P you know the perception is that it's so dangerous that why would you risk somebody's life doing something so radical like fasting when there's a simple you know standard medical treatment available chemotherapy or or radiation and which is why we publish a fasting safety study where we took all the patients and looked at their Adverse Events and carefully monitored and charted the outcomes and then published a paper uh in biomed Central that is the first long-term fasting safety study and what it showed clearly is that fasting when it's done according to this protocol can be done safely even wter Longo wrote a book on fasting where he talked about don't do long-term fasting because it's too dangerous but the one caveat was unless you do it at the true north house center in the new book can fasting save your life you have a whole thing on safety and it was interesting uh how few um cases there are uh of people having AES adverse effects um and of the people who have suffered some kind of adverse effect they tend to be very mild well there's you know there were 5,900 Adverse Events in the patients over that 5year period but most of them as you said are type one or type two events these are the normal symptoms you would expect to see in fasting the nausea the headache the skin rashes the dizziness the irritability the sleep ruption these are inherent they're almost Universal in fasting fasting can be a very intense process uh most of the Category 3 events which would be considered medically significant were hypertensive crisis and you might say well why would people being treated for high blood pressure on a fast have a hypertensive crisis which is defined as any time for any reason systolic blood pressure is over 160 and the way it works is if people come in and their blood pressure is 220 over 100 and then it's 210 and then it's 190 and the next day it's 180 every one of those is an ad related most of our Category 3 events are people whose blood pressure is coming down or blips up as they come off meds and comes down um we had very little category no category five which is death uh category four we've seen uh very rarely we had one hypon nutrim event where blood sodium goes too low and that does occasionally happen and that's why we monitor electrolytes it's easily solved you break the fast but if you didn't catch it it could conceivably become a serious or life-threatening problem we've also um used to worry about H uh low white blood counts that show up in fasting but now we know a little bit more about why that might be uh in 2016 yosher Yumi won the Nobel Prize in medicine for his work on autophagy and it turns out autophagy is how the body eats up cancer cells and age cells and gets rid of them well it turns out fasting profoundly increases autophagy and so what we realize now is happening is people have a lot of white blood cells some of them are part of an active part of your immune system some of them are no longer functioning when you go on a fast the body rapidly clears out those non-functional cells so your counts drop your immune resistance doesn't drop and we notice people aren't getting infections or problems in fasting but their counts will drop and we believe it's because they're clearing out those non-functional cells and so tempor counts drop and then of course they normalize after fasting and that might explain you know that observation that we see white counts dropping during fasting autophagy is a very popular word that gets thrown around quite a bit uh usually without um a full understanding of what it means or or or the adequate amount of nuance there are there's a multiplicity of physiological processes and things that you can do that will instigate autophagy exercise being one of course so I'm interested a there are there are parallels between what's happening phys physiologically as a result of exercise induced stress and fasting so I want to hear about that um but also I'm curious around autophagy with respect to prolonged water only fasting versus the autophagy that you would see in a different version of fasting say in intermittent fasting or Tim restricted eating for example right well as far as comparing and contrasting water fasting from fasting mimicking approaches we don't know what the differences are cu that research hasn't been done yet we haven't done that comparison that's one of the things we'd like to look at hopefully sooner rather than later and of course that would be very interesting so this is really fascinating because almost you find so much research on exercise and the benefits of exercising that people that exercise have these biochemical changes in fact it's it's overwhelming how much benefit exercise seems to instill in people but the biochemical changes that occur in exercise often parallel and mimic fasting and that's not intuitively obvious because you know in exercise you're out vigorously stressing the body and in fasting you're resting stressing the body maybe in a different way but they both induced many of the same biochemical changes for example bdnf brain Drive neurotropic factor which protects the brain from developing Alzheimer's and Dementia increases with exercise increases with fasting um if you look at all the different biochemical changes that occur with fasting many of them also occur with fasting you might say why would that be why would something vigorous and something passive do the same thing but if you think about it they both have one thing in common is they undo the consequences of dietary excess and they're mobilizing fat and particularly visceral fat and I believe that excess fat and excess visceral fat is a fundamental contributing factor to many of these inflammation related diseases so it's not shocking to find out that people that exercise vigorously get these improved biochemical changes and people that use fasting whether it's every day for 12 to 16 hours or occasionally for a longer period of time are going to induce those changes and they do and they don't just happen while you're fasting a lot of these biochemical changes these enzymatic changes persist it's just like you know when you become a trained athlete uh you get better at mobilizing glycogen stores and it doesn't happen just while you're physically exercising there's a change in entic uh function that persists that's part of what being a trained athlete is and the same thing happens with fasting in fact part of the justification for intermittent fasting like limiting your feeding window to say to8 hours and fasting for 16 hours is the thought is that the changes that occur a little bit in those 16 hours but cumulatively day after day after week after month May approximate some of the changes we see in long-term fasting and also we've notice that people that do intermittent fasting and also people that exercise interestingly enough are much better fasters yeah I was going to ask that is there any understanding of the difference between the average person or the person who's suffering from some form of chronic ailment who's fasting versus say a highly trained athlete who's who's very accustomed to rigorous consistent exercise and does fasting have a different impact on that person versus the other person or do we not know I believe it does in fact we've got some evidence now looking at the idea of does fasting help healthy people or is it just help sick people and we did a study where we actually recruited eight metabolically healthy people which as you know is a little bit more difficult than you'd imagine because only 12% of the population is metabolically healthy even quote thin people aren't necessarily metabolically healthy so we recruited healthy people these happened to all be women because it was a women study and we looked at the changes now remember these people have normal blood pressure normal weight um normal blood glucose levels but we looked at the cardiometabolic measurements and we looked at their biochemical changes and the magnitude of change was actually higher in the healthy people even in than the sick people what do you make of that I what I think is that the people that get the most benefit from fasting are the healthy people that are doing it preventively much like the people that get the most benefit from exercise tend to be healthy people that are doing it preventively rather than trying to induce it in sick people it doesn't mean sick people don't get benefit both from exercise and fasting but in terms of the magnitude of proportional change I think the real cure for example of cancer is prevention and the real you you can't cure obesity you can lose the weight and keep it off but you can't go back to the changes without it coming back same thing with high blood pressure same thing with diabetes medicine is so busy looking for cures that they don't realize that these are all management strategies and so all we're doing is using intermittent fasting or long-term fasting diet sleep and exercise to manage People's Health to support the change associated with health rather than deteriorating into aging and disease we're trying to slow the aging process you can't stop it but you can slow it you can make allow people to age normally rather than this facilitated aging that happens because of our conventional diets you see it with smoking more apparently people get premature wrinkling of their face it's like smoker's face because wrinkles are nothing more than crossling collagen tissue that comes from the um oxidative damage from the effect of smoking so if you don't smoke you you still age you're still getting wrinkles you're still going to age out but it's much slower than that facilitated hyperinflammation from smoking same thing with alcohol the liver ages out you get curosis of the liver it's nothing more than fatty scar tissue from the damaging effect of alcohol and the same thing with the diet if you include salt oil and sugar in your diet you're going to age the body more quickly than you would if you could eat a whole plant food diet I bet there's there's a lot of you out there who've been pondering that new website you'd like to have but just haven't pulled the trigger well with Squarespace it's easy and affordable to build your own beautiful designer website so Squarespace has been a long time partner of the show and what I love about it is it just demystifies everything about what's required to make a website you don't need to be a designer you don't need to know how to code everything is right at your fingertips they make it super simple they've got these unbelievably beautiful templates to choose from that are oriented around whatever your needs may be whether you need a simple landing page or a full-on online shop snap crackle pop Squarespace has the tools you need to launch your business including e-commerce templates and inventory management so make that website you got it click the link in the description below for a free trial and when you're ready to launch use offer code Rich Roll to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or [Music] domain that answers two questions that I had the first being this interesting distinction between your interest in fasting which is treating people with you know significant chronic lifestyle ailments versus the majority of the discourse that you see out there which is around um Health span extension and Longevity when it comes to fasting like you're treating very sick people you're seeing great results you've been doing this for a very long time but everyone else is talking about teir and you know like like sort of living Forever on the other side which you know on some level is a whole different conversation but what you just said um helps me understand where these two things meet and are actually of a piece you know there's been a hundred million modern humans born on the planet we have good evidence that approximately five have lived past 117 and one of them is questionable because they probably adopted the identity of their grandparent to avoid conscription in the military but that's a different issue so the point is you yeah you have about 120 billion chance today of living past 117 now maybe they'll figure out a way to extend lifespan what I'm more concerned about is healthy lifespan how well are you going to live in the time you have left most people spend the last 10 or 20 years of their life unhealthy and compromised I think that those years can be the best rather than the worst years of your life and that's what we're interested in doing is avoiding The Strokes and the Heart Attack the debility of the arthritis that limits people's Mobility inability to exercise and poor choices they make in terms of diet and lifestyle and the price they pay is they find themselves unable to talk or move lying in nursing homes beds waiting for people to change their diaper rather than having a good life and then a good death where you live your life and you go to sleep one night and you don't wake up because you've reached your genetic potential and I think that we can dramatically reduce the debility that happens at the end of the years and we're interested in doing a long-term study to look at exactly that we want enroll a large number of people track them the rest of their life and then compare you know what level of dietary adherence is associated with the best outcome does fasting actually help uh augment that and and kind of tease that all apart because right now there's a lot of speculation but not a lot of data the second question that you answered was why would a healthy person go to true true north or or entertain undergoing one of these extended water fasts you know I just got my blood work done it's like pretty good like do I really need to go you know take a take a month off and you know go and hang out with you lay in bed while just whatever it is you know you're not going to need to take a month off because when we fast healthy people it's usually very brief 5 to 10 days it doesn't take again the way we judge is we fast them until their symptoms resolve so some people don't have any sympt what if I don't have any symptoms well then you're going to fast a week and be done okay but what more often happens is and particularly in athletes that believe they're healthy because they're thin and have good muscle tone they aren't always as adherent on the diet lifestyle and so when you put them on a fast it turns out they do have some toxicity they do mobilize some accumulated inur products metabolism they do go through some symptomatic change now if you don't that's a good sign I use it diagnostically as where as well as therapeutically um but if you think about that intermittent fasting we're doing we're fasting for 16 hours to induce changes when you do a week of fasting it is dramatically more impacting than the the the smaller amount and using that diagnostically and potentially therapeutically I believe will be proved to be useful I can't prove it yet because we haven't done the research but that's literally next on the list right what else do we know about what is happening physiologically when somebody is undergoing one of these extended fast well there's there's a lot of information that's available on the detailed physiology of fasting but essentially what's going on is the most important adaptation is the brain the brain is the biggest burner of glucose for humans we have a ridiculously large Brain two and a half times for example the comparative mass of a chimp if we couldn't fast we wouldn't be able to go more than a week or 10 days before glucogenesis would break down our protein mass and we end up into starvation and die that would have been a problem for humans because they wandered away from the tropics unlike chimps that don't fast and can only go maybe a week or so humans wandered all over the planet and all the humans that couldn't fast they couldn't convert their brain from burning glucose to burning hydroxy butc acid they died and we know that because literally everybody on the planet that's a modern human has this automatic conversion that happens when they go on fasting the brain changes to burning ketones or specifically beta hydroxy butc acid the body conserves and now a healthy uh lean male can fast up to 70 days not that we would recommend you do that but you would likely survive in a restful State 70 days you would not be able to do that if you weren't able to convert your brain to burning um fat and so this biological adaptation was so critical to humans that essentially anybody that didn't have it ate bit the dust and all we've done is take that ancient biological adaptation and apply it in a very unusual situation that has only occurred recently in modern history and that's where people consistently overeat what is the longest documented fast uh 368 days uh in the medical literature but that was in a very obese uh patient how long ago was that um that was in the 70s I believe that's unbelievable it's unbelievable a human being could do that well you can fast essentially as long as you have nutrient and fat stores so we routinely fast people up to 40 days so Moses David Elijah Jesus and our patients fast as long as 40 I tell them they're in Good Company you know and what is the role of of the liver and all of this well the liver is one of the main detoxifying organs of the body it's really important both for controlling uh glucose production and in fasting as well as detoxification and so you know liver plays an active and heavy load during fasting and oftentimes you'll get a lot of bile and other symptoms that associated with liver uh function that can be quite distressing uh but the net effect on liver function is very powerful in fact we have a study here that shows that fatty liver index dramatically improves with fasting consistently and objectively so this fatty liver disease that's now become very common as people are on excess sugar and alcohol Etc is a condition that seems to be able to be responsive to this kind of approach there's an interesting thing that you say in your book which is that the data also indicates that the beneficial effects of of fasting persist even after the fasting period ends so elaborate on that a little bit basically that means that the the beneficial impact of this experience has like a long tail it it isn't restricted to the time period in which you're actually fasting no one of those for example detoxifying enzymes that are produced where the body you know is able to grab onto mobilize and eliminate materials those enzymes don't just disappear because you're back in the feeding State you maintain a higher circulating level of those your glycogen mobilizing enzyme systems a lot of those systems are canalized and persist and it seems to be cumulative you if you notice patients that do periodic fasting it gets easier and easier now part of that maybe because they're lowering their total load part of it maybe the diet you know they're improving their health but just the ability to get into and stay in fasting uh seems to improve you know how when people first start exercising it's really painful it's really tough but if they can get through it and and adapt and make and get the body to go through those acclamations it gets easier to the point where you you like it and the same thing happens with fasting you get to the point where you know your blood glucose isn't being driven down by elevated insulin levels because you're eating some highly processed foods and your brain thinks you're starving and you get cravings and you get binging and you have all these challenges blood sugar levels tend to stabilize insulin levels tend to normalize people if they have to skip a meal because they you know it's not this tragic problem because their ability to adapt is improved and fasting P you know it that's not just a during fasting phenomena it's a ongoing phenomena I understand the exercise analogy like it's something that I tell people all the time like yes it's going to be uncomfortable and challenging and difficult in the beginning but you will come to enjoy it and yet you know I have a hard time believing that this could be the case with fasting like the idea that you're going to go that long without eating any food just seems so unimaginable um so talk a little bit about um you mentioned cravings and and and the like like what is the difference between appetite and hunger I think there are people who would think what you're doing is putting people on a starvation protocol but there's a difference between fasting and starvation and there's a difference between your appetite impulse and actual hunger absolutely so fasting is by definition means there's laball reserves available if you deplete your labout reserves then you enter starvation and then you die so we don't do starvation because that would be really bad for our outcome data so we only do fasting and we monitor people to make sure we don't transition from the fasting state to the starvation fortunately it's very easy to monitor that it's not a complex clinical Challenge and appetite and hunger is a very important consideration because both us and the intermittent fasting Advocates suggest that people not eat 3 to four hours before they go to bed at night I mean that's basically how you get your 16-hour fasting you eat an early dinner don't eat till you wake up maybe defer breakfast and you've done some vigorous exercise you know delay breakfast a little bit now you have an 8h hour window that you eat in that 16-hour uh period of time is essentially Tim restricted eating and is thought to be is thought to be helpful people eat for a lot of reasons they eat because they're tired and if they eat they feel better so they assume they were hungry when really they were fatigued and they got stimulated by the food they eat because they're angry so they have emotional distress so they eat and then they feel the dopamine stimulation from eating so they interpret that is they must have been hungry uh they eat for all kinds of reasons but the only reason to really eat is because you need choric intake and not because you're angry tired or fatigued if you're tired you should go to sleep if you're angry you should figure out a way to dissipate the effects of the anger or get rid of the source of it um if you're bored you should engage in productive activity and eating is not one of those things unless it's because you're hungry and so not eating say for example three hours before you go to bed eliminates a lot of that late night boredom tired eating stuff and then people are more inclined to want to go to sleep and that's exactly what you should do when you're tired and I struggle with this I I have a hard time falling asleep unless my stomach feels full uh so when I do intermittent fasting I tend to eat late um and not eat during the day and I've discovered that that is very disruptive to my sleep cycle I'll generally wake up at 3:00 in the morning or my REM States my deep States aren't aren't adequate enough like it I don't think it's a net positive and so I've kind of stopped doing that so I would challenge you that if you were to undergo prolonged fasting during the fast you may not have good sleep cycles and stuff it can be quite disruptive but as a consequence of fasting you may find that the quality of your sleep may be better than it's ever been before I can't tell you exactly what all the mechanisms are but we see it very commonly people that have trouble either getting to sleep or staying asleep post fasting oftentimes are then able to sleep get to sleep and sleep through the night sometimes it's because people have by nonprostatic hypertrophy they're waking up six times to pee you don't eat before you go to bed you get the prostate uh inflammation down now you're only waking up one time so you have less sleep disruption better quality of sleep um sometimes it's because when people eat late at night they experien just what you did is the digestive process it's a pretty active process you don't necessarily want this active biological processes going on when you're trying to be in a restful State and so there may be other biochemical factors that you know we haven't really elucidated yet but whatever the net effect of fasting often times is improving sleep s cycles and improving sleep cycles is really important if you get the quality and quantity of sleep you need that's where energy comes from right it that that's that becomes a life-changing thing in and of itself like of everything else exercise just you don't have to sell me on that but people that exercise regularly tend to sleep better overall than people that don't people that eat well tend to sleep better than those that don't and people that have used fasting appropriately oftentimes are able to correct imbalances I suspect there's a psychological piece at play here as well because anybody who shows up at true north and does let's say 40 days of fasting it's something that is so mindboggling that so few people have any experience with that I can't help but think that person is going to think differently of their own capacity and capabilities as a result of that and it reframes their sense of what's possible for themselves it's very empowering right it's to to like undergo something like that and then on the other side of it say I can do hard things or now I'm up for a different type of challenge or I'm finally ready to now that I've proven to myself that I could do something like this I now feel like I'm capable of handling other dietary and lifestyle changes that have historically eluded me you know it's natural to be afraid of starvation you know if it was if people weren't very concerned Why come up to True North I'm terrified of you I'm terrified of this whole thing go ahead sorry they're they're naturally afraid of you know starvation and so it's sometimes when they feel hunger you know they interpret it as you know a a serious problem once you've gone through fasting first of all you tend not to have quite as much vacillation in your blood sugar and insulin levels so there's not as much biological input afterwards it calms down but also you realize I went for a week or I went for 10 days or I went for 40 days you know the idea of not eating on the plane isn't going to be terrifying and you're right there's a huge empowering impact and there's more people that have climbed Mount Everest that have done than have done 40-day fast and nobody would say oh I did this huge challenge I ran this Marathon I climb this mountain of course it's going to have an empowering effect on people and laying around doing nothing has the same kind of impact on people you mentioned earlier that uh only 12% I don't know if it's is it of the US population or the global population is actually metabolically fit um it's not news that we're in a global Health crisis but the statistics are still nonetheless incredibly alarming which you illustrate in in the beginning of the book three billion people globally have chronic diseases in the US 150 million people face chronic disease despite substantial Health Care expenditures six out of 10 us adults have some form of chronic disease there's 40 million deaths annually as a result of these illnesses heal us healthcare costs have exceeded 3.5 trillion in 2022 and in the US over 70% of adults are overweight with 40% being obese like that is shocking so help me understand how we got here we got here because of the pleasure trap the hidden force that undermines health and happiness we fool the satiety mechanisms of the brains of humans by putting chemicals in our feed if you put these same chemicals in the feed of rats or mice or Birds they the rodents will gain 49% of their body weight in 60 days the birds will get so fat they can't even fly there is no obesity in wild animals you know even whales are what 9% body fat they're lean mean machines they just wear it on the outside of their body unless those animals get exposed to our highly processed foods with these chemicals added to it and then they'll get fat just like we do and they'll get the same diseases we do the breast cancer the colon cancer the heart disease the diabetes these changes occur in animals the same they the way they do in us and the chemicals that we put in our feed that fool the satiety mechanisms allow us to ere eat and are responsible for the Obesity and overweight that we see are salt oil and sugar SOS and that's why we Advocate a whole plant food SOS free diet because salt oil and sugar are not food they're hyperconcentrated food byproducts they're added to food to make food taste better and that's what tasting better is is the artificial stimulation of dopamine in the brain and foods do taste better to us with those in fact they taste so much better that we'll systematically overeat them if you ask a person to eat their fill of say rice or anything they'll eat a certain amount everything else being equal if you salt that up they'll eat more before they reach satiety before they feel satisfied and people say yeah cuz it tastes better that's right that's what it means is that it will stimulate that dopamine production and you will have to eat more before you feel satisfied if you just eat a whole plant food sosf free diet and you eat to your satisfaction you will be able to maintain Optimum weight but to the degree that you add salt oil and sugar to the food the only question is how fat are you going to get I understand the implications of salt oil and sugar with respect to hyper palatability in our Ultra processed food ecosystem which is the kind of food that we're all overeating that we find very difficult to only have a little bit of but is there a distinction or a difference between the salt oil and sugar that Finds Its way into those Foods versus a little bit of salt on your whole food omnivorous diet or you know one tablespoon of olive oil and um the sort of benefits that you can get from that type of oil in moderate amounts like why so severe to say it has to be SOS or nothing well part of it may be biased by my patient population so I'm seeing the person that has high blood pressure diabetes or cancer and so their ability to just eat a little bit obviously failed because you know and so has 72% of the population in the United States who are have achieved obesity and or overweight and are now Having excess visceral fat and they're dying prematurely and spending 20 years debilitated so if a person in theory could eat small amounts maintain Optimum weight Optimum uh uh visceral fat Optimum blood pressure and Optimum glucose you might be able to make the case that those people would get away with it but that's not what my experience has been it's very much analogist to saying why do you tell alcoholics they can't drink at all can't they just have a little beer and wine in the weekend or couldn't they just control their quantity and then they would be okay and it is true you know some people can have an occasional drink and not become a drunk but if you're a drunk it's not you so I can tell you right off the bat 72% of the population don't have any business adding salt oil and sugar to their food any more than an alcoholic has business adding alcohol into their diet could alcoholics learn to control and have a you know maybe there would be one I just don't get to see those people so I tell alcoholics don't drink at all just stop it and we tell people that are struggling with weight or health stop putting the chemicals in your body that fool your brain and lead you into doing the things that are causing the problem if you have a person that's able to maintain Optimum weight and health and have a little variation you know so be it now in reality that's exactly what happens because if you look at the study we did onee follow upon on they weren't 100% vegan SOS free but they had maintain enough adherence to the diet to maintain their weight loss and that resulted in them being normal blood pressure without medication so I'm more interested in the outcome than some philosophical argument about what can you get away with or what can't you get away with um so the easiest way honestly just like it is in Alcoholics just say don't drink and draw the line and be done with it rather than trying to figure out how much could you titrate in still function I think with uh salt oil and sugar there's no natural relationship in my mind to adding those chemicals to the feed I wouldn't do it in the animals I wouldn't do it in humans if we want to get Optimum Health Now is it going to turn out that we'll be able to be more flexible for certain people and they'll yes very very possible but I don't get to see those people you know yeah no I understand listen I'm on your page you know I'm a alcoholic in recovery um and you know abstinence is easier than moderation and as they say uh in in a in a secret program uh it's the great Obsession of every alcoholic to like enjoy their drinking like a gentleman you know like and this is this is what you know uh leads people to their grave and I think there is an analogy that's appropo with respect to food I think we could quibble over whether food addiction is a real thing but when you look at the health statistics it's pretty clear that there's a level of powerlessness with respect to our ability to modulate our intake and you know abstinence you know being binary about these kinds of things actually makes it easier like it seems harsher and more restrictive but there's freedom in that and I think it it eliminates the decision fatigue around it and it drives um it you know it drives behavior in a in a more kind of clear trajectory forward so I get that but I think it would be interesting I'm trying to imagine the person who's listening to this right now who's thinking well I'm down with Allen when it comes to this fast um but when I complete the fast why do I have to do this SOS thing what if I just did a really healthy Mediterranean diet and was very cautious about my salt oil and sugar intake as a result and I'm wondering whether there are any studies on that or the difference between somebody who undergos a prolonged water fast does the SOS diet versus the person who does the prolonged water fast and has you know a a sort of quote unquote like healthy omnivorous diet in the wake of that yeah no I'm I'm I think your point is well taken and that is research were actively and uh acutely interested in doing finding out how strict do you have to be to get the outcome and to avoid the pleasure trap and you know maybe it's not an absolute thing like it appears to be with alcohol and some of those these powerful drugs but honestly based on Behavior you know people don't want to be fat and they don't want to have visceral fat and they don't want to be sick and they're really trying they're spending billions of trying to solve this problem we have a solution for it if you adopt a whole plant food SOS free diet it becomes exceedingly difficult to maintain obesity or overweight and the when people neuro adapt to it they get to the point where they'll like the diet as much or more than they did when they were on the traditional diet because there's an addictive component it's hard for people to imagine how could they possibly t stand to eat a diet without salt without oil and without sugar and what's even more interesting is in the Alternative Health movement many people will say well get rid of the oil even olive oil and they realize olive oil is less bad than the other oils but being less bad of course doesn't make it good it's still 9 calories a gram of Highly processed fat where we can get all the essential fat we need from the diet from the whole plant Foods that's not so much challenge now there's lots of people that have written about that some people say well look you got to get rid of the sugar the refined carbohydrates cause the insulin to go crazy they're empty calories they suppress the immune system they disrupt the gut microbiome and a lot of people agree okay we got to get rid of the refined the sugars we've got to get rid of those and some people say get rid of the oil and the sugar okay we'll get rid of those now that food choices are narrowing where I really pissed a lot of people off including your viewers was when I suggested that we get enough sodium from the diet we don't need to add salt to the diet in order to get the sodium that we need the gram a day that's needed including by athletes that are sweating um and that if you want to increase your sodium intake you could still do that from whole foods you can eat more tomatoes and charred and other things that are naturally very high in sodium you don't need to add salt that got I think 10 some up comments yeah about how count completely crazy I am and because the sugar well answer them now you know so here's your here's your opportunity to address that the data is coming out more and more that sodium is a problem not just for high blood pressure but I mean just think about the gut microbiome in general you've got a bacterial Rich environment you're putting up high sodium concentration do you think that that sodium could have an effect on bacterial population in the gut of course it can I mean we use salt as a preservative for goodness sake um the data is not conclusive but it's definitely coming out more in the favor that limiting sodium seems to be a highly beneficial Health promoting component now the argument might be well how much I don't know you know do you have to be completely free of added sodium and just rely on the the sodium that comes in the food or can you get away with a little bit and still be healthy I don't know I do know though that in my experience in managing for example hypertens patients salt restriction becomes one of the critical components of maintaining long-term success I want to double click on the SOS whole plant food diet for somebody who's never heard those terms before what are we talking about specifically what does that look like and perhaps even share some examples of what like a daily um series of meals might look like so a whole plant food diet is just that the diet is made up of whole plant food so words we're talking about brown rice uh grains not necessarily we don't use the glutenous grains the wheat rye and The Barley we certainly don't use uh encourage the Breads and you know bread is a great example they call it the staff of life right people really like bread but if you take away the salt the oil and the sugar from bread then they call it matah and it's punishment on Passover nobody's you know getting too crazy about the wheat and the and the water it's the additives that are added and if you take wheat berries and you boil them and eat them it's 500 calories a pound you take bread it's, 1500 calories a pound before you turn it into a butter boat and spread coagulated cowp pass all over it so the bottom line is how you process these foods can make a big difference in terms of whether they're helpful or or not helpful um so we're talking about grains and legum so beans lentils peas this kind of thing but cooked like soup and you know whole grains rather than necessarily processed all the way down we're talking about fresh fruit but not necess fruit juices and dried fruits and highly processed fruits we're talking about vegetables both raw and cooked and we're talking about all kinds of vegetables starchy vegetables like hubard squash and butternut squash and potatoes and sweet potatoes we're talking about the variety of green vegetables particularly and getting these you know High mineral content Foods into us and again I'd rather see people eating more Whole Foods necessarily than relying entirely on juices and and and processed foods where you remove the uh soluble fiber which is so critical to maintaining a healthy gut microbiome and then we're not and we're using small quantities of you know nuts and seeds and more concentrated higher fat plant Foods what we're not using though are animal Foods so meat fish file eggs and dairy products oil salt and sugar so basically what I tell people is they should go inside themselves look at a food if they want to know if they should eat it just say do I really really really want it and if the answerers truly yes you know M you can't have it cuz you get nothing you really really really want it there's it's likely banging on the pleasure trap yeah that begs the question of cravings and how powerful they can be and back to the point about the psychological piece to all of this and and the kind of extended metaphor of of you know alcoholism or addiction versus the landscape in which you operate you know I went to a treatment center to get sober and I was there for a 100 days uh and part of that was a re-education uh part of that was abstinence the physiological response to removing myself from this substance but there's also and the and the empowerment piece of course but in the course of that extended period of time you're you're pattern interrupting you're not doing the thing that you've always been doing and you feel all the cravings and all of the emotions come up and the resistance and you have an opportunity in a controlled environment to sit with that discomfort and what you realize is that if you sit with it long enough it dissipates and with that comes a Dawning realization that you can um choose a different behavior and that those Cravings over time will decrease in their intensity and that in and of itself set aside physiological changes all of it just the idea that Cravings are not static that they are modulated and that the more time and distance you put between yourself and that food or that substance or that behavior that the Cravings will recede into the background and so and that doesn't mean that they don't crop up from time to time and you have to confront them but you have enough experience knowing that you can kind of sit with that discomfort and it will change and I think that is a huge Dawning realization that in and of itself becomes a very empowering thing when people go off into their lives and they find themselves at a bar and somebody says what do you want to drink or they're at a dinner party and they say what do you want to eat or they're at a buffet in Las Vegas and they have a choice about what's going to end up on their plate yeah I think that's absolutely the truth you know it's just why you don't tell newly recovered um alcoholics to become a bartender you know it's probably not the best choice and we kind of know that's intuitively obvious you wouldn't want to tell alcoholic that they should go out and get a job as a bartender that that's going to help them now it's true I have a lot of patients that are recovered alcoholics and they're working as bartenders and they do okay in that environment it doesn't impact their ability to uh maintain sobriety but it wouldn't be a first choice and you don't want to tell people that are struggling with these eating issues you should go to work where there's big piles of candy all around and everybody's going to put social pressure on you to engage in short-term pleasure seeking self-indulgent Behavior it's not it doesn't make it easier and that's exactly what happens to people when they leave True North Health they're going out into a world where everything convenience practical social pressures are all going to be everybody's going to be trying to undermine their success do you have any experience with people with prolonged sobriety or people that have kind of undergone 12ep or something like that um coming to True North do they tend to be more or less successful than the average person because they're already enured to you know this this type of behavior modification longterm recovered addicts are the best they most adherent they totally got the model you don't even have to say anything to me they got it I kicked heroin like how how hard is this going to be right you know in some ways though the feedback I've gotten is that it's actually in some ways even more difficult not physiologically shortterm but longterm because socially if you go to a party and they try to push alcohol you say oh I'm you know I can't drink I'm a recovered they might tolerate that and let you go by but you start to do that with diet forget about it where are you going to get your protein from this is good for you this is you know blah blah blah there's no letting up how do you counsel people on on the social piece because I think that is you know an underestimated limiter in all of this there's our capacity to make these behavioral changes but when pressed and in the context of of friends or loved ones there's a whole Matrix of confusing signaling and emotions that come into play that ultimately lead people to you know lapse even you know against their best you know their best judgment my my first advice is usually make new friends but you know that's probably not the most practical solution for most people um the reality is that Dr Lyall our psychologist explained to me how cognitive behavioral therapy works and as As I understood it or what I got out of it is it's a way of helping people manipulate other people's behavior so they don't annoy them as much and so that's why I got interested in it so the idea is that you can change your response to other people's behavior if you understand really where they're coming from and what the limitations are you don't have to be angry um for example he uses an example if you're in an elevator and somebody's poking you in the back with a sharp stick you don't like being poked in the back with a sharp stick you might get angry turn you see it's a blind person just trying to figure out where they are in reality you're still going to step out of the way but you don't have to be angry about it because you realize they're doing the best they can and the reality is if you understand the limitations that some of the people you're interacting with are working under you don't have to be angry about the fact that they're not only not supportive but actively trying to undermine your success and you can communicate sometimes with people and help them modulate their behavior so they leave you alone or at least be not antagonistic and if you can't make new friends when people leave through North after they've had this experience and you set them on their way with a whole protocol around yeah SOS diet uh is there a caloric restriction piece to this are they allowed to eat as much as they want is that a case by case basis people that are successful are the ones that avoid undereating undereating is a bigger problem on this approach than overeating is because when you're eating a whole plant food sosf free diet you have to eat a lot there's a lot of eating going on because you're eating you know a pound or two of salad and vegetables you're eating fresh fruits this is stuff you have to chew and you have to you know chop and it's it's a it's a bigger volume of food sometimes people are not used to eating large volume of food or they think oh I'll gain weight if I eat that much they aren't thinking caloric density and as a consequence they'll undereat and then they have trouble maintaining energy you can't get them doing their exercise they're not going to be successful so I'd rather see people eating a little more of low density foods and maybe they only lose a pound a week instead of two pounds a week but they're more likely to be successful long run than the one that's underc consuming what their body actual needs are they need to eat enough to maintain Optimum weight just not current weight that is a common rhetoric with people who play around with adopting a plant-based diet like oh I didn't I felt lethargic I didn't have enough energy um it's like well you're probably used to eating a certain amount of food and you don't understand that you actually can and should eat more now as a result and and and that experience that you're having is most likely tied to caloric underc consumption and there's huge psychological overlay because people have all kinds of issues about volume you know if they conscious about their weight um I tell them they if they put their meal down at work people should come in and go oh my gosh you're not going to eat all that are you because if they if it if they don't react with shock and awe they got the wrong size Bowl I mean you know and eating enough is my bigger concern now the problem is you also have to avoid the highly processed foods and that's really hard I mean 93% of calories consumed in industrialized country come from either animal Foods or highly processed foods 7% is fruits and vegetables a third of that's potatoes served as french fries or potato chips I mean right now the stuff we're asking people to eat is the decoration on the plate you can go out you can go to restaurants where there's nothing that meets standards you have you know it can be very challenging because so much of what people are doing is highly processed fried fractionated Foods that's what most of the calories people eating and that's how we've supersized the people and it's a big ass to say you need to eat this way but you're probably not going to have the ability to go to the restaurants you like to go to it's going to be challenging when you go out for dinner with friends It's Tricky socially to kind of navigate that um and a lot of restaurants have a hard time accommodating that and if they do it's it's a pretty dire unpalatable situation actually if you go to a place that actually has a cook somebody that's cooking it rather than just reheating the packag materials that are so common in many of the restaurants nowadays um often if you call ahead and you say look you know we have somebody in our group can you make a couple baked potatoes or a sweet potato and some salad and you can get a beautiful dish it can work out really nicely if you plan ahead and or you go to a restaurant you're used to going to and you have a relationship with the with the waiter the waitress they can often times if the if the restaurant has some kind of food in the kitchen and somebody that can put it together that can work out really well it's just not always the case yeah do you guys do some consulting or counseling around okay you're going to go to Thanksgiving you're going to be with the family here's how it's always gone down but here's what you're gonna say we do we spend a lot of time so that you can you know you know still be in the good graces of your loved ones we spend a lot of time teaching people little strategies how to go along and get along and not piss people off and how to keep your mouth shut and you know there are strategies that you can implement the most important thing is if you're in a uh if you're dealing with people that love you and you explain to them that this is not a judgment on them it's just an adaptation you're making how much trouble are you if you ask them could you put a couple potatoes on for me you know or can I bring a salad for everybody because they don't want to go through all the process of making that what are they going to say oh no that putting a potato on no it's too much trouble we don't want you here you know that's not going to happen if you explain to person and you aren't judgmental about it you don't want to become a born- again natural hygienist and walk in the room and say oh can hear your vessels thickening from over here you're not going to eat that dead decaying flesh I mean you keep your mouth shut you don't need to do that it's just your issue for you you know and it is possible to navigate it yeah I think Top Line how can you be part of the solution rather than the problem and if the family or the community of friends like already know that you're you've kind of jagged in terms of your diet there's already a lot of judgment oh no here comes so and so it's going to be a whole thing or whatever but if you come openhearted with a solution like hey I'm bringing food you know for everybody as opposed to I'm going to come and be a problem because I'm going to make everybody change what they're doing to accommodate me I think that's where the problems come in I'm sure that you experienced some of the same issues uh choosing not to drink in a in a setting where most people are drinking and they can be very uncomfortable uh sometimes initially what you realize though is that you think everybody's thinking about you but they're thinking about themselves people don't care they really don't food's a little bit different because there's a lot of emotion wrapped up in food and you know the sharing of food is how we share love and that can be tricky and complicated especially when there's historic patterns and and you know um way of doing things over time but go ahead sorry if people will just um stop getting in other people's business like stop worrying about what they're eating and just not you because that's where the people get into trouble it's not they're trying to eat well you you haven't been on Twitter lately then have you people seem to care a lot about what other people are eating well they want other people to eat like they are so they can feel supportive they need to stop looking to other people for their support get their internal support and let them be cuz you're not going to change them because you make snide comments about their dietary habits and try to prove that what you're doing is better just keep your mouth shut set a good example answer only questions that are asked and maybe you'll figure out a way to survive it what do you make of all the tribalism around diet what is that about I really don't know I was hoping You' tell me yeah it's very strange but it's very passionate and heated we're seeing it now um with the carnivore diet like that's really grown way more than I would have suspected and adherence of that lifestyle are very passionate in their views what do you make of that diet well you see variations on this you know diet throughout the last 40 years I've been in practice and what's good for shortterm weight loss and there is a fasting mimicking effect of going on a Carnivor diet because you get into ketosis there's a hunger blunting mechanism and they were already eating meat three times a day so I mean it's not like a fundamental necessary difference except they got rid of the carbohydrates and short term they may lose some weight longterm of course we know what the consequences of high fat high protein diets are and it's going to show up and it and it begins to manifest whether it be early on the gallbladder disease or later the cancer and other problems that come about now I know they're vement in defending it but you know the the data is the data the facts are the facts you can't go on that diet long-term as a broad recommendation to the population and expect that that's going to be an improve an overall net Improvement in health because the standard American diet is so crappy though almost anything you do in like getting rid of refined carbohydrates is going to induce some beneficial changes including weight loss so you know you can't argue short term we got to really look long term you to look to the scientific literature I mean I have to say I've been surprised myself watching fasting work but not really understanding how well it worked until we got the data back and you really and then look at I'm getting 30 year 35 year follow-up on patients and you're hearing the same stories everybody they know is dying some of them have outlived their kids you know it actually creates its own challenges and stress just you know being so far outside the norm on health that I mentioned last time when I was here my mom when she was 92 had outlived all her friends and she told me Allan warn your patients if they do this diet make younger friends and she said much younger because even 10 years younger when you're in the 90s isn't young enough yeah um we talked a little bit last time about the medical establishments uh sort of lack of embrace of you to put it politely I mean you are a Maverick and and what you're what you're doing and what you're what you're advocating um is is somewhat radical and orthogonal to the protocols of the way our medical system and our health care System operate I'm curious has that changed at all in the interim period since we last spoke what what's going on there yeah I think it has I think I've gone from being a criminal quack to being a cuttingedge researcher and you can witness the 19 papers we've published in the literature including British medical journal curious know some Major Impact journals are accepting uh the case reports and the studies that we're publishing and I think that that has uh been beneficial I think that the work Walter Longo and others have done publishing major you know Journal metabolism 2015 did a a fabulous piece is making it that at least you can discuss it without it being just immediately shut down as crazy um so I think it's it is starting to shift I think that the diet clearly has changed I mean if you think think 40 years ago uh if you had people like John McDougall in 1986 you know Pioneer writing the McDougall program looked on like he was you know nut job now the idea of plant-based eating as being Health promoting and reasonable I think has you know at least General discussion people aren't necessarily adopting it in Mass but they're at least tolerating it um I wouldn't think you'd have the same social impact you know because you're trying you didn't happen to have animal Foods or something on your plate nobody was going to think you're going to die that day from Ute deficiency fasting the intermittent fasting I think has become pretty much accepted you got 10,000 Medical Offices uh selling prolong so I mean you know there's there's definitely an acceptance long-term water only fasting it's going to be up to us and the other people advocating it to prove that it can be done safely and effectively we're starting to do that now uh with these Publications what is a study that you'd like to see conducted that has not yet been conducted that would put to rest some of the myths or misconceptions well we are going to be doing a study with a major HMO uh we've gotten excellent feedback from them what we're going to be doing is we're going to once again look at high blood pressure because it's just common problem and we're going to be doing a uh the first RCT uh randomized control trial uh where they'll get their standard of care and in addition the 40 people standard of care 40 people randomly assigned will get a 3-we stay at trth Health Center under go fasting and get the additional education and this is a practice already advoc ating a plant-based diet so these are people that are already be encouraged to try to eat healthfully in addition they're going to get some fasting and then we're going to do some long-term trapping with those people and then what's going to happen we're we know what the results are going to be we did a study with the May Clinic as I mentioned we had excellent long-term results including one your followup once we've done that we're going to approach this same HMO and try to do a prospective randomiz control trial in the treatment of lymphoma which will be much more controversial and then our hope is that we'll have good enough success that they'll be forced to integrate fasting into their standard protocol and we'll help them do that and that's part of our foundation's mission is to get fasting to be more accepted in the mainstream and it may only be for this one condition but at least that'll be the start that we think we might be able to accomplish and we've got some good relationships with this major group so that we're optimistic that we can pull it off one of the things that that opens you to criticism is the fact that these studies deal with small sample sizes and I would suspect a part of that is because there's only so many people who are doing these extended water fasts is there a way to increase sample size with respect to these studies to kind of rebut that um that you know that issue that recurs well we've you know this the uh analysis has been done we know what size samples you have to have in order to get statistical significance and it's deceptive because the effect sizes are so large we don't need large ends in order to reach statistical significance and and be clinically valid and so we're Meeting those and that has not been a criticism in the studies that we've done to date even though they are relatively small scale studies now yes would we like to see a large scale study well what's the limiting factor we only have 79 beds so we can only process so many people or you we can process 1,200 people a year so we can't take on studies more than that but we don't need to in order to prove the points that we're trying to prove right now given all the success that you've had at true north and the fact that you've been doing it for 40 years it's curious why there aren't versions of True North in major cities across the world like why hasn't this model been more readily uh replicated by other people who can see what you're doing and the success that you're getting I think there will be we have a residency training program we train doctors that are interested in doing something worthwhile with their life how to use diet and fasting to get people well that program has been successful and the economics of it aren't successful it's it's healthc care that's not covered by Insurance uh in terms of the the stay at the center uh it's we're a 501c3 nonprofit so we have very modest fees if you charged a lot of money the problem is it takes time you have people are there 30 days sometimes you know three weeks six weeks it would be a very uh costly process if you had to charge $22,000 a day like they do in the hospital so we charge a couple hundred bucks a day we can make it work but you can't make it lucrative because we're a nonprofit organization you know we got a lot of less pressure than most places would we have modest facilities we don't do advertising we don't have to do promotion we don't have any of the normal expenses that businesses would if you were go out and do that so I think it will become more acceptable but it probably needs to become integrated into the conventional healthcare system because almost all Healthcare is paid by these uh Insurance modules or or Medicare that's why we're trying to get it into the HMO so that if they're able to offer it it becomes acceptable part of the mainstream I could see a situation much like again with the parallels with treatment centers and rehab and addiction uh an entrepreneur coming along and and replicating your model but making it for profit turning the place into like a high-end five-star Spa situation and charging an unbelievable amount of money and Catering to a high net worth person who's you know extremely unhealthy who would just pay anything to be supervised to get to the other side that's all the other healthare facilities are they're all expensive high-end and they even go further they're not five star though they well many of the resorts are I mean you there's a lot of Health Resorts around they just don't offer F they're not doing prolonged I'm talking about specific to prolonged water only oh no forget that no cuz the people that are going to pay the big bucks don't want to have to do anything uncomfortable they want to be you know told what they want to hear and if you look at most of the examples of resorts they're pretty good about giving people what they want I mean even the pigan center is now serving salmon and you know all kinds of stuff so they're they're going to try to accommodate the people's needs but it's a different model you know we're essentially a human subjects laboratory that looks like a clinic and the research is funded by the participants themselves that are they're participating in the program you know that's not a good business model okay it works well for our needs and we've managed to survive but if you were an entrepreneur you want to charge large amounts of money but that means you have to get give people what they want this is not what they want yeah that's a tricky one they want the end result they want fasting mimicking drugs but maybe they maybe they they don't want it but they do want it so they're going to pay a lot of money as long as like the place is really nice and then they're locked up you know and they can't leave and they're going to pay a lot of money to prevent them from being able to leave I could see a certain clientele who might be up for that well I hope that uh different versions of this do become available to meet everybody's needs because obviously you know we can only handle so many people the size of our facility wasn't based economically it was based on the numbers we needed to be able to do our studies and so we grew the facility to the size we needed so we could actually conduct to fund the foundation to fun to fund the research exactly so that's why it doesn't like I get a lot of very successful people that come as patients and give me lots of advice about how like for example business advice yeah you're running a terrible business here Alan they say you're ridiculous look at this the way you set price in a business is you keep raising the rates until you don't have a three-month waiting list and then you know that's the price point when it drops down it's only six- week waiting list that's the right point that's not our model our model is to get people to come in long enough stay long enough and come back as necessary so they can prove that we're right that health is from healthful living that fasting is a safe and effective tool so if the goal was to make the most money you don't do this business model you do the business model where you give people what they want to hear it's very funny um we talked about metabolic disregulation uh we talked about um diabetes and uh obesity but there's also some other very interesting kind of case studies that you talk about in the book uh there's the person who has like the ktic growth on their face there's psoriasis rheumatoid arthritis autoimmune conditions talk a little bit about some of these other um uh success stories that you've had with with very unlikely conditions that seem to be resolved through fasting which seems like a crazy magic trick it turns out that a lot of these conditions also were caused by dietary excess like for example this is a paper we published uh just recently 2023 an integrative and uh complimentary therapies called prolonged water only fasting in the management of Hashimoto's thyroiditis a case report Hashimoto thyroiditis is the most common cause of hypothyroidism it's where the immune system attacks your own thyroid and interesting there's a theory that the you notice the gene the hlq gene that's common in these patients is the same gene ass associated with people that have gluten sensitivity and so the theory is that people eat gluten 1% of the population get celiac disease where the immune system attacks the intestine very serious you have to not eat gluten and other people the immune system doesn't attack the intestinal system but attracts the thyroid and that's called Hashimoto thyroiditis so we've known that the immune system is taking out the thyroid it hasn't been clear about why is it doing that well it turns out that uh gluten and dairy products the diet you eat can dramatically affect your issue in this particular case we were able to use fasting uh to bring the uh symptoms that are associated with this uh with this condition under control this was a 61-year-old and she had you know had weight gain issues edema joint pain constipation cold sensitivity brain fog all the symptoms that go along with this condition uh and she ended up uh undergoing fasting for 21 days had 10 days refeeding had fabulous outcome data and obviously not just on terms of her thyroid function but she lost uh weight is You' expect her blood pressure dropped from 134 down to 108 um her thyroid or TSH went from 61 which is very high uh down to um 6.8 okay so um CRP which is a met of inflammation went from 13 uh down to 1.2 so huge clinical impact on how she felt and how she funked and would you would normally think Hashimoto thyroiditis would be uh responsive to diet and fasting but it is um and was there followup long term well right now this paper was just published in uh 2023 so she's continued to do well so far but we don't have long-term effect you know some of these other cases where we've been tracking them for 10 years uh it's it's obviously quite impressive I wanted to point out though that we've have cases that we've published here that where we just did the diet so in other words they didn't even involve uh prolonged water only fasting um one was an 82-year-old gentleman who had atrial fibrillation uh uh all kinds of cardiac related symptoms hypertension we put him on the diet only and then took him off his medications he was on a number of medications weaned him off his cardiac medications and not only did he completely normalize his blood pressure and his cardiac Rhythm and get off all his medications but they thought he was having dementia he actually woke up because he wasn't having dementia at all he he was having poly Pharmacy he was having negative reactions to his host of medications that he was taking so there here's a guy who ate carefully uh our medical doctors helped him wean his medications safely and what was fascinating we submitted this uh case report this was also uh the British medical journal and one of the reviewers said wow what an impressive case but what made you suspect it was the drugs wow because these are medications that uh people are commonly uh you know put on uh you mentioned you know uh chotic lesion on on a face that often these lesions just fall off during fasting again you know these products are more common in patients that have active inflammation uh fasting tends to reduce it the body is able to stimulate the healing responses and so we'll get you know impressive cases like plaque psoriasis which is a disfiguring really dramatic condition most doctors will tell you diet has nothing to do with it or maybe they might say well maybe you shouldn't eat too much dairy products or something where we have in the photos that are present on this study show within 10 days of fasting you're starting to see changes and then two Monon followup and just dramatic resolution of pla orias that's sustained as long as people are willing to do a health promoting diet that's very interesting a lot of people suffer from that and it's very resistant to to treatment people spend years trying to figure out how to how to resolve it um many unsuccessfully and we found that um it responds um uh consistently and it is difficult you know it's not an easy condition to trait but it does respond and we've had um you know significant um clinical responses to it and it's not like shocking to me because autoimmune diseases diseases where the body is attacking itself are often associated with gut leakage where you know proteins get absorbed and in genetically vulnerable people the immune system reacts inappropriately and most of your itis conditions are essentially autoimmune conditions whether it's Hashim modus thyroiditis or vasculitis or rheumatoid AR aritis or asthma or eczema or plaxer Isis these all have this gut leakage that appears to be a part of the component when you fast the inflamed gut gets to heal and then when you go on a whole plant food SOS free diet you don't have the oxidative damage that's coming from the highly processed foods and the animal foods and so you're able to manage the condition if you take those patients and put them back on conventional diet so oftentimes their symptoms recur so I don't think you're curing it you're managing it just like you can't cure obesity you can lose the weight and keep it off but go back to the old diet guess what you're going to get overweight again yeah have you had success or experience with people that have other forms of bowel disorders like uh ulcerative colitis you know other things that are related you know leaky gut Etc irritable bow chronic constipation uler of citis are some of the conditions that we have the most experience with because these are conditions that typically don't respond well to Conventional medical treatment you know we tend to get the people that have tried everything and they're desperate and that's tradition know people that have struggled for years trying to figure out a way to get it under control getting it under control is easier than keeping it under control cuz keeping it under control requires dietary control that means you know things like gluten and wheat and sugar you know keeping a whole plant food diet going and then there's another problem is many of these conditions are also aggravated by the hormonal changes associated with chronic stress so when people are under chronic stress they have a different hormonal production and stuff that makes them vulnerable to lots of things and so some patients have to actually change their life so they're not driving two hours a job a day to a job they hate and working in places they despise doing things they don't want to do they have to actually you know find things that give them joy in life in order to be able to get well and stay well right so fasting isn't this Panacea that heals all and one of the things you're always you know quick to say is that it's a practice not a you know not a magic pill basically I mean it does it's pretty atic the results here but I think it's important to place it in context of all the other kind of co-founding factors it's dramatic because you're dramatically changing the diet and lifestyle it's an environment to dramatically change the diet and lifestyle and so if you don't change the diet lifestyle you won't see the sustained results if you just change the diet lifestyle sometimes it'll take care of itself eventually fasting as I see it as a way to happen faster it's sort of like psychedelic art of meditation it's a it's a super highway to the same destination is that how is that a fair don't know anything about psychedelics so I don't know from personal experience but basically it allows you to access a certain state that you could achieve through you know a very devoted practice of meditation over a long period of time but you can reliably and immediately achieve that instantaneously yeah I don't know if it's instantaneous but I do think that the fasting is a great facilitator and like I say I would always encourage people and we do to adopt the diet and lifestyle changes and if you get to the point where you're frustrated because you're not making adequate progress then we can talk about whether it's coming to the center in fasting or now we have the opportunity for people to fast remotely which has also been helpful to people that maybe can't come to California or don't have the resources and that's through our tele medicine practice which since our conversation three years ago we've had to dramatically expand and so now we have doctors familiar with fasting that are able to help people where they are go through a if they're appropriate candidates go through fasting now they have to work with their local doctor so it still requires the same protocol History exam lab monitoring rest proper refeeding the problem with remote fasting isn't that there's any problem fasting uh particularly if you have a supportive doctor you can get the lab you can do the stuff it's getting people to rest sometimes it's hard for them not to be too active it's and and most critically getting them to refeed properly after fasting too rapid a return to Alam can lead to refeeding syndrome and other problems that can be serious or even fatal so it's important if you're going too fast on your own that you use the same protocol that we use at TR North houseal Center which is why we've written this new book can fasting save your life and in that book as you saw we have detailed protocols that patients's doctor can use to explain what kind of testing and monitoring needs to be done so that they can make sure that that gets done it goes through the side effects the concerns Adverse Events the data is all there it summarizes all of this literature that we've done literature other people have done on fasting and it's brought together in a cohesive Manner and so people can read that book they can share it with their physician uh they can use our coaches through the tele medicine practice to provide them personalized support because their doctor may be able to help them monitor them medically they're not going to know how to deal with the issues that come up in fasting sure and it's not an impatient situation so they're not there monitoring them multiple times a day well it means there are certain people that maybe wouldn't be good candidates for that we would encourage them to come impatient but there are many people that are relatively healthy that are not on medications that you know they might be a good candidate for a shorter fast at home and we've done other things we've made all of our uh daily lectures freely available to anybody um through our website we use live streaming so we're live streaming our lectures so they can get the benefit we have a Roku Channel now freely available all of our recorded video so they can get the educational EXP experience um they just have to have a home environment where they can rest I mean it's not you can't take care of four kids and you know uh commute uh drive to the store and do all that kind of stuff if you're fasting you have to build a rest but if you can and you have a supportive doctor and you utilize our tele medicine coach that is a way that we've been able to successfully help people like we had a huge problem during the pandemic 15% of our patient come from foreign countries they couldn't come into the country and so we were working with remote doctors and we were able to successfully help people that you know really needed that now there are some limitations we don't do long we don't go over three weeks uh with remote fasting because it gets more complicated as you get deeper we don't do it with people that aren't stable off medications and we don't do it with people that are poor candidates for fasting so but for the right person this is another way for them to get that experience I would imagine an additional challenge is finding a supportive doctor like how many doctors are actually going to be supportive when the average person goes to their GP and says I want to do this thing the book hopefully will redress some of that but I imagine that that patient is going to experience some resistance we have a number of doctors that have trained with us through residency internship programs that are out there in the world there's also the uh College of Lifestyle medicine whose many of their doctors are supportive of fasting um there's also uh some of the Integrative Medical Doctors out there that have become more supportive of fasting and remember wter Longo has 10,000 offices uh making prolon available many of those doctors might be supportive and then once a doctor has one patient and they have success all of a sudden we're seeing all kinds of their patients now again some people are better candidates for inpatient care some people are fine for outpatient care and one of the benefits of the free consult that I do with people is to help them are they a candidate for fasting are they a candidate for home fasting if so that we can hook up up with a doctor that provides those Services if they really need to do it inpatient they can come to the center they can go to the other places that do this kind of thing or maybe what they need to do is just adopt the diet and lifestyle principle long enough to where then they become a good candidate you know for those changes so we're trying to make sure that whoever does it does it intelligently and does it safely not everybody's going to follow our advice but at least we can feel good that we've done our best to make the educational services available to everybody to make the services available to people at home that are good candidates for that and we have a facility for people that are better candidates to come in patient who isn't a good candidate for inpatient so a person that's on medications that you can't safely withdraw for example if you've had a recent pulmonary embolism cardiac arrest you have atrial fibrillation and you're on anti-coagulant therapy medication you don't just stop those drugs because it can induce a stroke so that it's very careful protocol to withdraw those Med and you don't fast on those medications because they can become like many medications greatly potentiated during fasting they will work differently in the physiology of fasting than are in the physiology of feeding and so fasting medications don't go together there are a few exceptions sometimes will allow some hormone replacement therapies like thyroid replacement therapy you still have to modify the dose and monitor it but you know it's not an absolute uh barrier but we we discuss that in detail in conf fasting save your life we talk about who's a candidate who's not a candidate you know uh what has to happen in terms of medication but it's basically you have to get people stable off meds you have to have people that have a condition that we believe are likely to respond to fasting we don't want to be doing experiments on people uh particularly remotely unless we kind of know what their condition is and what symptoms they're likely to experience so we can educate them about that um you need to have a person that's willing to try to eat healthfully after fasting it's no good to do a fast and then go on some crap diet and get terrible symptoms and then blame fasting you know that's I'm I'm not interested in that we're trying to actually get a good net long-term result and that means we have to limit working with people that are you know willing to try to do these things not everybody's going to be perfect a lot of people are going to struggle but if they aren't going to make a good faith effort it's probably not the best thing to do they should be doing some other kind of program that isn't you know going to put how do you make that determination during the intake process to to gauge willingness well first of all they' filled out a detailed medical questionnaire so I have their medical history that I've reviewed before I've talked to them and we asked those questions in the questionnaire to gauge where they are and also I've I've interviewed tens of thousands of people I mean essentially that's what I do is I talk to people on the phone about their specific issues and try to direct them in the right place and I've been doing it for 40 years I got a pretty good idea who's likely to behave and who's not going to behave and who's a good candidate and who's not and you know witness that everybody that's walked into the center 25,000 people now for fasting probably close to 40,000 people overall everybody that's walked in is walked out so we're pretty good at making sure we don't bring in people that are not good candidates not everybody has an uneventful stay there are patients that have serious side effects that we have to deal with occasionally we'll have to hospitalize a patient if they get into an issue we'll get you know get have to get Diagnostics done whatever uh but as as the safety studies show this is a comparatively safe process when it's done according to protocol what is your personal fasting practice I fast every day uh and it's so you never eat I fast every day for 16 hours um uh or as close to 16 hours as I can manage you're on a 65y year fast I fast every year so you you do a 16 16 hour fast every day so you eat between the hours of what and what well I usually have uh depending on which morning it is cuz I play basketball in the mornings but so depending how long the basketball goes I'm eating between 8800 and 9: in the morning I'm not eating after 5:00 5:30 you know at night so I have a a window in there of feeding and then I don't have anything before or you know after dinner so I do that every day I fast once a year I fast for a week if I'm doing okay no symptoms then I'll stop it if I have symptoms I'll go however long it takes to resolve the symptoms I don't like fasting you have to rest when you fast you can't play basketball it's really annoying it's some I and my wife is Dr Morano is really strict about it because I fast she's my supervisor when fast and she won't let me on my computer that's the hardest part of all I let the patients have their computer what do you do all day oh I just lay around and meditate and rest and it's awful but you know I don't have symptoms which is interesting because I've done this I mean I've you know I never smoked never had a drink I never you know I've been a vegetarian since I was 16 years old so I I've not had the exposure so there's not a lot I don't use medications I don't use drugs so the fast itself is is boring nothing happens in terms of untar symptoms but you still have to rest and for me that's the big challenge is slowing down and and I and I do I find it some of the most beneficial intervention I do is fasting but it's not pleasurable sure uh and your blood work is yeah it's going to be blood works good my blood works great my blood pressure is great you know but again I I started as a kid so you know you would expect it to be doing this a long time um it's so interesting it seems so severe and radical to undergo these things but so many people thousands and thousands of people have benefited from what you're doing you practice it yourself um what is radical though radical is radicas it means root or cause that's the fundamental thing we're doing is we're actually getting to the reason people have these problems we spend all of our time and money treating the leading causes of death heart disease cancer uh stroke diabetes instead of the the the leading cause of death we don't deal with the actual cause of death which is smoking drinking eating animal foods and highly processed refined carbohydrates if we put our time in energy treating the actual causes of death instead of the leading causes of death we'd probably be a lot better off the reason isn't going away we talked about the statistics earlier they're quite dire um but I don't see an eradicated of Highly palatable Ultra processed foods disappearing from our food environment anytime soon if anything it just continues to metastasize and people are getting more and more sick and fatter and fatter uh it doesn't appear to be headed in a great Direction um which demands these types of interventions to save people's lives and get them on a different track what is your prescription for the world like how are we going to as a collective uh conquer this challenge that we have in terms of our food system uh to create something better I mean honestly for the sake of humanity yeah you know to me if I look at Humanity as a whole it would be very stressful and I don't like stress so what I do is instead I look at the fact that I'm going to do everything I can do to influence the one or one and a half or 2% of the population that are hungry for information willing to make these changes and hope that if we can get those people optimizing their health that they'll set a good example and the hundredth monkey effect will kick in and maybe it'll have some Downstream effect maybe not in this generation but in future Generations so I'm not going to try to Take On the World as a whole I only want to work with the highly motivated people that are willing to do what it takes to actually get and stay healthy and prove that this is an approach that can help them you know spend the last 20 years of their life healthy and happy and to kind of end this maybe you know look to camera and say what is the message that you want the person who's listening to this are watching to understand maybe that person has their own health challenges they're trying to figure out what to do about it they're a little bit scared or intimidated by what you shared and aren't really you know surefooted about how to take that first step or or where to begin well health results from healthful living so if you want to be healthy you got to pay the price and live healthfully that means diet our particular version is a whole plant food SOS free diet other people have different opinions but a healthy diet hopefully regular exercise within your capacity abundant sleep so developing the ability to get to sleep in a cool dark and quiet place and maintain good sleep hygiene fast every day for 12 to 16 hours fast occasionally is appropriate and try to figure out strategies to minimize stress perhaps by only focusing on the things you can do something about and not worrying about the things that you have no potential to control I think we covered it is there anything we didn't get to that you feel compelled to share or talk about no I think this book that we've written is a really good book I hope people read it I hope they like it and I'll be interested to hear what feedback uh we'll get after this show the book is great it's called Ken fasting save your life um everybody should pick it up we'll link it up in the show notes and in the description below the video um you can go to the true north website to learn more about everything that Allen is doing and the center there um you can be maybe you they can find the email on that website if they want to get in touch with you um yeah if they the best way what they go is they go to tror health.com they fill out the registration forms which gets me their medical history and we offer them a no cost uh screening call so that we can kind of give them uh help them review their options and point them in the right direction that's great um you're doing great work uh you are truly a servant to humankind and uh I appreciate what you're doing and the gift that you're sharing and thank you for coming here today and and uh getting into it with me I think people are going to really enjoy it thank you yeah it's great thank you all peace [Music] L that's it for today thank you for listening I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation to learn more about today's guest including links and resources related to everything discussed today visit the episode page at Rich roll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive my books Finding Ultra voicing change and the plant power way as well as the plant power meal planner at meals. ral.com if you'd like to support the podcast the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple podcast on Spotify and on YouTube and leave a review and or comments this show just wouldn't be possible without the help of our amazing sponsors who keep this podcast running wild and free to check out all their amazing offers head to Rich roll.com sponsors and sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is of course awesome and very helpful and finally for podcast updates special offers on books the meal planner and other subjects please subscribe to our newsletter which you can find on the footer of any page at Rich roll.com Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Cameo the edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis with assistance by our creative director Dan Drake portraits by Davy Greenberg graphic and social media assets courtesy of Daniel siss and thank you Georgia Wy for copywriting and website management and of course our theme music was created by Tyler Patt Trapper Patt and Harry matthys appreciate the love love the support see you back here soon peace plant namaste h [Music]

Channel: Rich Roll

Views: 107,680

Keywords: rich roll, rich roll podcast, self-improvement podcasts, education podcasts, health podcasts, wellness podcasts, fitness podcasts, spirituality podcasts, mindfulness podcasts, mindset podcast, vegan podcasts, plant-based nutrition

Id: Cze1L2nCwXQ

Length: 108min 15sec (6495 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 17 2024