Why Am I So Fat? - Brand New Lecture by Dr. John McDougall

hey everybody and welcome to chef aj live i'm your host chef aj and this is where i introduce you to amazing people like you who are doing great things in the world that i think you should know about well it's the first monday of the month which means that we have none other than dr john mcdougall who is going to be giving a brand new lecture today on my favorite subject which is obesity now before he gives his lecture we always like to start dr mcdougall's talk with a testimonial for somebody that was helped by his work if you watched last month we had plentiful kiki on who talked about how she read the starch solution and then lost 70 pounds and reversed all her diseases well today we have a young lady who in her 70s lost over 150 pounds simply from reading this book this is the best book ever written on diet i'm telling you it's i've been a bestseller for probably over 30 years and everything you need to know about weight loss is in this book and she's here today to talk about it you might know her from my show before she's an amazing story an amazing person please welcome esther loveridge i bet you never get tired of telling this story oh no i don't but this is really special to get to be here today to thank dr mcdougall for not only saving my life but for rejuvenating it you know it's one thing to still be alive but then it's wonderful to be healthy and alive and what i really want to say to you dr mcdougall is that you had the best parents you had parents that you taught you to tell the truth and i want to testify first of all to your character and then you also honor all of those special people that came on before you and you always pay tribute to them as well as part of your success and finally you give so freely you know all of your web site is free you've downloaded books free for people and uh there's a lot of power in the book and actually the book that saved my life was a little bit different version from what chef has showed but is this one the big google program i am so sorry i pulled the wrong book that is the show so we have to show the right one because this is the book if i open it inside there is his autograph isn't that wonderful and that was from september 8th of 2018 and that was just two years after i began following this program and i didn't have the privilege of getting to go to the in class program right away but it it's just amazing what you could learn just from the book itself but two years later i did want to pay him back because he had saved my life and so in september of 2018 i took three other people with me and we did attend his three-day uh course in santa rosa which was wonderful and then the next year oh and then i also did the start solution that year because i wanted to learn all i could and how else could i pay back to him because before that i was buying his books online and buying used ones to pass out and he wasn't benefiting from that so i wanted to pay back so he did go to his course and it's fabulous and now he has the 10-day course which is even better people from all over the world can come and attend and benefit from that but basically i'm just so thrilled to tell you that i'm wearing the outfit that i wore back when i was really i don't know where to show this picture will that show it there chef aj yeah wow anyway you can see that i'm wearing the same outfit today so i'm going to stand up and try and do a little strip tease but don't get worried it's going to be decent so as i back up you can see this outfit is just so big on me yeah just really big so i'll take off the jacket and then i've got this big size 3x can you believe that and then i gotta take that off and now we have the shirt that starts i mean the um it's the food and i'll take off my pants and let them drop but look how big i mean they're just huge so now those are gonna come off so all you have to do people is just follow his book attend his classes and get down his webinar and just learn all you can and he's going to teach you all you need to know about obesity but i want to read one thing from disease reversal hope it's a new book by dr stohl because in it he lists all my diseases and my conditions were obesity depression gerd diverticulitis bipolar pre-diabetes hypertension sleep apnea gastritis pancreatitis anemia insomnia vision problems gallbladder disease hyperlipidemia constipation hypothyroidism and knee problems and i didn't think i was sick can you believe that but i lost 130 pounds after following the mcdougall program for maximum weight loss and a total of 155 altogether but i like to claim what i lost under his program so if you have any more questions i just want to say thank you dr mcdougall thank you for saving our planets thank you for saving us people thank you for continuing to teach every day all i mean just are amazing you and mary and i just can't pay tribute enough to you for saving my life thank you very much thank you esther i just want to get people to hear how much you suffered during that 130 pound weight loss and it must have been excruciatingly painful it was pure joy it was pure joy and i and as long as i have a minute i also want to thank you for writing the forward to my book because the timeline was i started in july 16 that was just five and a half years ago and then i did the start solution then i attended your three-day program and then in 2020 you wrote the forward to my book and then because i still want to pay back to you all of the royalties that i get from my book go to your foundation and i'm so thrilled that you accept that and i can donate that way and then dr scott still found my story on your uh starman dougaller and found me that way and contacted me and wanted to use my story and give you all the credit well that's what saved my life in in their new book about reversing all these diseases well it's certainly it's going to take a big army to change the world isn't it but we're we're doing it yeah we're doing it no i i you know i really what i i hope people got your comeback correctly is you didn't suffer at all losing oh no no no prior to that i mean you must have suffered through starvation programs make yourself sick programs you know feeling guilty programs you know maybe even i don't know wearing a corset or something to squeeze yeah what people go through yes they want to look good we want to look we want to be attractive to other people and uh that of course means looking healthy because you're attracted to good health that's what you're anyway so i'm glad i'm glad to hear you've done so well i have as anybody who hears you talk with your enthusiasm i have no doubt you have permanently changed your life oh why would you look back why would you look at any place not at all well i i will say that i did try one other diet before you and it was the athens diet and i almost died with gallbladder disease and pancreatitis at the same time yes so it's everything's gone when i go to kaiser now and they pull up my chronic conditions the page is blank there is nothing there that's where i'll be there the kaiser ought to be collecting your premiums and not putting anything out that to me would be a good business a good insurance company that collected the premiums and yes didn't put anything out oh well you look wonderful it's great to have this opportunity distant well thank you yesterday the good news i mean there's nothing like example um you know i hope people heard is just what a happier person esther is and how much easier life is for her now that she hasn't carried 130 pounds extra and all the guilt that goes along with it you know it just sounds terrible let's let's like i keep saying every day we have a world to save let's get out there and do it yes well there's already and then in the interview between reading your book and now i did start that group on facebook esther's nutritional journey and now there's 12.7 000 people there so we are spreading the word and everyone whose live view is touched we are all replicating your dna to the world well for for a lot of people it's not easy being confronted with learning a new way to eat but once you learn it i mean it's like everything else you've done in life you say to yourself well why didn't i do this before it's so easy yeah such an easy simple enjoyable cost free way of living why did that well i'm going to try and explain why people don't do it in terms of their weight and they obviously don't because good grief we sure have a marketplace out there esther we've got somewhere around 80 of the u.s population where there are 330 million people in the united states and then we've got the world and probably three and a half billion people in the world are over we'll wait we got a lot of work to do we're going to have to stay healthy i know we're going to have to live to be 105 which is beyond my prediction food it's the food people thank you you're welcome my pleasure oh and it saved my husband's life too well i i hope that was an advantage you know yes yes i hope you like him oh i do i do and his job was to take care of me so now he's healthy too he went he used to he used to wait 320. he got down to 220 that was as low as he could go then he finally joined me on the on following your program and he's down to 160 on a six foot frame and he's got it went from a 52 inch belt to a 32 inch belt so i'm very proud of him it's infectious it is it is why not well you've done a lot of good work and i know i know it feels good to you esther just like it feels good to me you never get tired of hearing that you've helped out well it's good well i love to marry and you both have a wonderful day well we're going to do that we're going to start talking about aj's favorite subject anytime you're ready aj yeah let's go dr mcdougall and i'm so sorry i pulled the wrong book off my bookshelf but i gotta say you were quite the looker back in the day okay what now aj come on well you look great now too but i mean what we were really really quite handsome well you know i uh i think mary married me for my personality though you just said she said she's i think she said i'd never want to be bored my whole life so i'm going to stick my wagon to you and i she's not been bored anyway um thank you so what i'd like to i'd like to do is i'd like to talk to you is if you were my patient i want to talk to you about uh your body fat now and i know there are a lot of people out there who this isn't appropriate for because you're really happy with what you weigh and you know the way you look and that's fine but a lot of people aren't happy about the way they look certainly the way they feel their health and they like to they like to have things different and when i say a lot of people what i'm talking about is you know 80 of the population is either overweight or obese now i titled this lecture uh why am i so fat and the initial reaction that i got was you can't say fat it's politically incorrect so i went and looked up the other words for the for fat i mean would you rather say i am portly i'm rotund i'm pudgy uh i'm well padded you know i'm well-rounded i'm brought in the beam what would you like to call yourself i i can't find any pleasant terms associated with being overweight i don't know maybe somebody thinks something complementary or nice but when i looked at various uh various similar words i didn't find anything that i'd like to be called so let's just assume let's just assume that a good share of the population doesn't want to be the way that they are they realize it's a health problem in addition to it being a problem in their sex life their their work life everything affects them and they want to be different how many people are we talking about we're talking about two-thirds of the population of western countries we're talking about a third of the people being obese the estimates are in some parts of the united states that soon two-thirds of the people will be obese not just overweight but obese and that would be in the southeast united states they predict these kinds of changes so it's a growing epidemic pardon the pun why why are you so fat why am i so fat and by the way just as a disclaimer i want you to know that my top weight was 90 pounds heavier than i am now so you know i've kind of been there uh why am i so fat well my my stomach was was built too big for my body or it wasn't built too big but through years of gorging i've stretched it out now it's too big for my body i'm to blame there's something wrong with me or or i'm an obsessive-compulsive overeater all i can think about is food there's something wrong with my mental emotional makeup i need to see a psychiatrist i have an eating disorder i'm to blame there's something wrong with me or all about bad genes you know this has been an excuse given uh for as long as i've been in the medical business and that is that it says a genetic tendency well you know what two-thirds of the population has the genetic tendency i would say because two-thirds of the population is overweight or obese so it must be a pretty plentiful gene to say the least and of course a lot of this has come out of laboratories where they have uh they've caused various animals particularly mice and rats to to to develop a gene that they call a thrifty gene where they easily gain excess weight so how come how come there's a problem with the human design it doesn't seem to be with any other animal there's no animal living naturally that's too fat but somehow our creator when he or she got around to making the human being maybe they were tired out or just frustrated i don't know and somehow the human being was designed flawed i doubt it i mean you have to agree with me that you know nature is perfect uh put things together correctly and the human being is well one of the one of the better designs certainly i wouldn't say it's the best design out there as far as an animal is concerned but we must just like every other animal we must have a diet that's ideal for us and if we're not following that diet then the problem is not with me the problems with what we know if we feed our animals other than their natural diet we know what the consequence is you feed your your dog or your cat table scraps and what happens this is animal abuse if we fed our animals these kinds of foods we might get arrested by the humane society we would be accused by by our friends and relatives of committing animal abuse of causing our animals to be sick and poorly but somehow or another we can do this to our family we can put all that junk food in there it's socially acceptable you get no prison time but it is it is abuse ladies and gentlemen the people out there who who suffer from being overweight and the associated complications they're in real pain you know their life isn't going the way it could or should so this is something that uh needs to be correct if it's genetics or your stomach is stretched out too big for your body or you you have a mental or emotional disorder maybe i can't solve it here but if it's something else maybe i can help you solve it but something else is this we're feeding our families our communities well now the whole world a meal plan that was never known to human beings and it's a meal plan that i know we ask for it you know we ask for these high calorie high fat relatively inexpensive meals as many calories we can get in for a dollar and industry has responded by over the top entrees like 1 1360 calories when they stuff cheese into your pancakes or 1150 calories when you get yourself a a burrito a taco meal from taco bell and if you have four slices of pizza and believe me i used to have four slices of pizzas ladies and gentlemen i would guess you do too that's 1240 calories high fat it's high saturated fat and the newest rendition from mcdonald's is the land sea and air burger it's a combination you got it something from the sea like a fish something from the air like a bird something from the land like a cow they put it all together for you 1330 calories 69 grams of fat half of the half of the calories come from fat so with this kind of meal plan we end up eating a diet that once condemned just a few people to obesity and sickness and these were the rich people of the past you can go back 5 000 years you can see that when the pharaohs and the priests and the priests they ate the rich foods they became overweight they developed uh atherosclerosis in their arteries they had malformations in their children related to eating the western diet these diseases have gone on forever the difference is is that then there were just a few aristocrats a few kings and queens these days at least over the last 50 years maybe 100 years maybe 150 years these days what we have is we have a population on this planet where approximately half the people can eat like kings and queens because of fossil fuels because of the industrial revolution we've made a situation where we can transport food so efficiently we can grow it so efficiently that we can get everybody to eat like a king and a queen and what would you expect them to look like i mean look around you you you if you were putting on a play for king henry viii you'd have no trouble casting it would you your friends and relatives and we don't even joke about it we even name some of our products after royalty like imperial margin or dairy queen or burger king we don't even try and hide it and again you know i started this conversation you may be very pleased with your personal appearance and if uh that's the way you feel about it certainly i know a lot of people do but a lot of people are very uncomfortable and they like a solution so when you eat too many calories you like to eat all these rich foods that i just showed you or you feed your dog and cat too many calories or whatever uh you you have to rebalance the situation if you're going to lose weight it's calories in versus calories out it's the law of thermodynamics you can't beat it and i see three options to rebalance the situation when you overstuff too much rich food you can starve in other words portion control in other words diet or you can make yourself sick which are the low carb keto atkins type diets or you can eat a starch-based diet which is the diet for people that's your three choices i can think of another another uh the first choice portion control while in pain because you're always in pain you know you can live to be 95 years old and it's never going to feel good to be hungry it's a drive that's there to keep you alive it forces you to take in calories so you survive you can't beat it but you try you try by saying to yourself i have willpower you know i can stand the pain the suffering you can't but just for a short period of time and then you give up you go back and eat it gets hungry so hungry you say i'd eat the paint off the refrigerator and then you ask for help dealing with this pain help with starvation help with portion control and of course we have surgeons out there that will rearrange your intestinal tract and cause you to develop malabsorption as a consequence of their surgery intervention and we have drug companies that have tried to give you pills that somehow diminish your hunger drive but they've been a consistent failure over the years too little weight loss too toxic this has not been a good option for people and so out of desperation what folks have been doing and they do it over a cycle of years and they used to do it in the 70s and now it's very popular in the in the uh you know these new times in fact uh 1990s to 2000 the low carb keto diets became very popular i don't see them waning much these days but that's your other choices you can go on a keto diet a keto diet what does keto refer to it refers to ketosis ketosis is a state that develops naturally when you are starving to death or suffering severe prolonged illness when you're starving you don't want to suffer the pain of hunger so that you can't think about getting yourself out of trouble so after about two or three days you go into a state of ketosis which suppresses the appetite likewise when you're sick you're not supposed to be gathering and preparing food you're supposed to be recuperating so you go into a state of ketosis well if you take enough sugar carbohydrate out of your diet you will go into a state of sickness a state of starvation which are the keto atkins type diets the low carb diets and how long can you stay sick well you know a lot of people say not very long in fact a lot of people tell me that's the worst choice they ever made as far as a dietary change but but i know they were thrilled initially because when you go on these keto diets what happens is you burn up your carbohydrate reserves which are the glycogen molecules that are in your liver and in your muscles and you carry around about two pounds of glycogen invisibly in your liver and muscles and when you stop eating sugar you know glycogen is sugar then what happens is you utilize the glycogen stores because that's the preferential food of the body it's the fuel of the body it's sugar glycolysis glycogen you know it all comes to go to go together and so you take and you mobilize that two pounds that are in your liver and muscles of glycogen along with that two pounds comes four pounds of water so you lose a total of six pounds in the first four five six seven days you go nirvana i finally discovered the diet i've been looking for forever and then of course you go into ketosis you lose your appetite you're sick and you can keep it up for a while but there are so many complications related to your health including increased risk of dying increased risk of dying of heart disease kidney stones all kinds of problems too big a price to pay so you can be in pain or you can make yourself sick or the third option there has to be a diet for human beings don't you think you know all the other animals the hippopotamuses the alligators the piranhas even all the insects they have a diet that's ideal for them that makes them look feel and function their best don't you think there ought to be such a diet for us for people obviously we haven't discovered that diet at least as far as the the world picture goes you know what 80 percent of the people in developed countries are either obese or overweight and they're sick with cancer and heart disease and diabetes and constipation we haven't figured out that diet i don't think hopefully you'll find that what i have to tell you over the next few minutes that will convince you that we do know the diet for human beings even though we malign it we ignore it we know what people are supposed to eat now if you don't believe me when i get done with this lecture then i encourage you to do is go find some guru you do believe ask whoever you want to lead you in the direction of better health what do you believe is the best diet for human beings i'm going to tell you what i believe is the best diet for human beings in fact we offer this diet we offer it on our website dr mcdougall.com as a free program you don't have to pay for anything you know instructions on how to get ready for the program on laboratory tests that you should get on relationships you should have with your medical doctor on how to how to shop how to put together meals and a whole bunch of recipes are there and available for you free no gimmicks and the food's really delicious we have over five four thousand recipes that mary has published over the years and we have a thousand on the macdougall mogu mobile cookbook app and we probably have about six eight hundred of them on the website for free and in the various books and you know i've offered you many of these books for free there are also lots and lots of recipes so you're not going to run into a problem with with finding a lot of recipes in fact you need to just find a few things that you enjoy and repeat them over and over again there are three qualities of people's food that i need to discuss with you right now and it's very important you understand these qualities it'll explain to you why other diets don't work why this is the answer for you and why the human being was built for the kind of diet that i share with you the mcdougall diet which is i'm going to mention it for the first time a starch-based diet so let's take a look at some qualities of this diet that cause you to look good feel good and function well and to lose excess weight the the first thing is is this is a what i call a calorie dilute diet okay in other words for a certain volume there are fewer calories than would be in a calorie dense diet so if we start over here on the left hand side we are starting with butter oil salad dressing corn oil any kinds of pure fats or oils they're 9 calories per gram very the most dense of all calorie foods uh cheese about four calories per gram meat about four calories per gram starches like corn and rice one calorie per gram of potatoes are a six tenths of a calorie per gram so what you want to do is you want to fill this hollow organ no it wasn't designed too big for your body no you didn't stretch it out but you need to fill it up with foods that provide a lot of bulk with just the right amount of calories now you have to you know just supplying it with bulk is not going to work for you you know many of you i'm sure have tried fiber pills which don't have any calories that provide the bulk in the stomach and you never get satisfied as far as your hunger drive is concerned and the satisfaction you feel is only fleeting you have to have further things happen and that is that these calories that you do consume have to have to contain the right kind of fuel and uh that fuel which is sugar it's glucose the process is called glycolysis that sugar reaches the brain and lets the brain know that you've eaten it and you get satisfaction of your hunger drive it's much more complex than i just explained to you but generally that's what happens is we eat we eat foods that are not too calorie dense and we eat foods that contain the right fuel for the human body so we get satisfaction so the first principle is filling up the stomach which you can see is done with a lot more volume a lot fewer calories if you pick things like rice corn and potatoes as opposed to butter cheese and meat now a lot of people get confused they say look i i have looked up the calorie concentration of carbohydrate and you say potatoes are only one calorie per gram or six tenths of a calorie per gram but what it says is it says carbohydrate is four calories per gram ladies and gentlemen the reason you got confused is because what they're talking about is pure white sugar pure white sugar table sugar is four calories per gram to turn that into a potato you have to add water and fiber and a whole bunch of other stuff and it dilutes it down to less than one calorie per gram i hope this confusion has been cleared up uh principle two losing excess body fat the fat you eat is the fat you wear if you take a look at uh the left-hand side the same foods that were calorie dense are also high in fat for example butter is 100 fat cheese 70 fat your meat 60 fat whereas your rice is five your corn is eight and your potatoes are one percent fat the body is going to do the most efficient thing possible with everything that you put into it and the most efficient thing to do with the fat is to store it the most efficient thing to do with the carbohydrate is to burn it that's what the body prefers to use for its for its daily fuel and there are some cells in the body that only will burn sugar they won't burn fat or protein like your red blood cells or certain cells in the kidney or your brain prefers burning sugar under desperation it will burn fat so you see that uh the same foods that are calorie dense are also high in fat and the fat you eats the fat you wear and by the way each of the stomachs you're looking at contains 500 calories of food to put it in perspective the fat you eat is the fat you wear somehow or another people don't understand this is that the most efficient thing with the body to do with the fat that you eat is just to move it from your fork and spoon to your thighs your abdomen your buttocks the fat you eat is the fat you wear from my lips to my hips and the scientific evidence is absolutely clear and consistent with something that's so logical and that is that the body is going to store fat as the metabolic dollar for when no food is available and the easiest way to do that is to take fat that you eat and put it in your body fat and it does it so efficiently that it doesn't even change the chemical structure of the fats so in other words if you eat um priscos and margarines your your body fat if i were to biopsy your liver or your buttocks abdomen thighs i was like take a needle and stick it in there and suck the fat out and take it to the lab and analyze it i i would find that your body fat is full of trans fats if you happen to partake in fish oils you know the omega-3 fats when i biopsied your body fat it would be full of omega-3 fats the fat you eat is the fat you wear it doesn't even change the chemical structure when it moves it to your fatty tissues now i have listed for you multiple studies that show this here's the studies you can look them up and you'll see each and every examination shows that the fats on your body come from the fat you eat and there are people out there that tell you that you need a high fat diet especially good fats is going to solve your problems of health and weight you know there's nothing more attractive about wearing good fats as opposed to bad fats they're all they're all detracting all bulging all inconvenient and in one way or another they all contribute to bad health so what happens to the to the excess calories that you say consume in uh in potatoes or rice or corn you're told don't eat rice don't eat rice it turns to sugar which turns to fat aren't you told that don't eat rice turn don't eat potatoes turns to sugar turns to fat that does not happen the process called de-novo lipogenesis in other words the conversion of sugar to fat is insignificant in the human being it's too inefficient for the body to do it now cows and pigs they're quite good at turning carbohydrate sugar into fat but not not people let me give you an example of a study that was published in the american journal of clinical nutrition what they did is they took trim and obese women and they gave them 50 more calories than they usually ate which amounted to three and a half ounces of refined sugar every day fifty percent more calories and three and a half ounces of refined sugar they ate every day and they did this for a period of uh nearly four months and it took four months to gain one pound of body fat in the conclusion of this article just like every other article published on the subject is that the conversion of sugar into body fat does not contribute greatly to fat balance but you've got to discount this whole kind of thinking that somehow eating rice or potatoes turns to sugar and makes you fat and you can start by discounting the fact that your observations of the world prove otherwise are rice eaters thin or overweight are potato eaters thin or overweight all right that's going to be a little bit more complex but i want to go over all the mechanisms for you if you'll just bear with me in a minute what happens is when you eat starch okay this is this is the way sugar is presented to you in the form of rice and bread and pasta and corn and potatoes you start on the left hand corner left hand bottom corner uh you consume starch the intestinal tract breaks down the the chains of sugars into individual sugars like glucose the conversion of glucose into body fat i told you is very inefficient it costs 30 percent of the calories to do this and that's why the body doesn't do it because the body is the ultimate inefficiency so because it's so costly you don't get this kind of conversion as i explained to you just a minute ago however it hardly costs any calories to move the fat to your body fat it only costs three percent of the calories now what what happens say say you need 2 000 calories a day to run the machinery what happens if you take an extra thousand calories of sugar what happens to it it's too inefficient for the body to convert it into body fat i just showed you in four months it took four months to gain a pound with that kind of over feeding so what does the body do with these extra calories well what the body does is it burns them off as heat through respiration through body perspiration all through through on non-athletic movements such as jittering they're just kind of subclinical or sub observation movements the body kind of increases the metabolism just burns it off as heat so next time somebody says don't eat rice turns to sugar makes you fat well you start by correcting them tell them this doesn't happen in human beings to any significant amount all right principle number three is satisfying the hunger drive and you do this with carbohydrate we know that carbohydrate is what the hunger drive responds to in terms of satisfaction in experiments if you take for example and you feed people fat they don't even notice it they consume it without even having any regulatory mechanism for this fat much less noticing any satiety when you feed them carbohydrate sugar what happens is you notice when you ask your participants they tell you that they're tremendously satisfied let's take a look at the carbohydrate content of these same three stomachs that contain 500 calories per stomach you find that butter oil vegetable your best oily salad dressing is all fat it has no carbohydrate it has no sugar to satisfy the hunger drive uh cheese two percent of the calories are carbohydrate to satisfy the hunger drive almost zero meat same thing almost zero carbohydrate calories for satisfying the hungry dog but look how much satisfaction you get out of your rice and corn and potatoes loaded with appetite satisfying carbohydrate now let me tell you why this is important to you or may be important to you is because you don't understand why you can't get control of your hunger drive you just cannot get in control you think there's something wrong with you they think that you're an obsessive compulsive overeater or you've got an eating disorder and the reason is this you sit down to a plate of carbohydrate deficient foods like butter and cheese and meat poultry and fish you sit down to a plate oil of these carbohydrate-deficient foods and you chew and swallow and you get no central satisfaction you you stay just as hungry and you know you get up and get a second plate of food and still you're ravenously hungry and finally you get the signals that it's time to stop eating you're overstuffed and in pain i remember these times when i used to eat this kind of meal plan if i could have found room for one more pork chop i'd have shoved it in so you walk by you walk by the candy machine you say to yourself oh i'm still starving to death i i i it's almost like i didn't eat i must be mentally ill you know you know you may have a lot of emotional mental problems i'm not denying that but your relationship to food is not one of them the reason that you are still hungry is because you did not eat what satisfies the hunger drive which is carbohydrate sugar all right you have certain drives that are necessary to keep us alive let me just play a little game with you for a minute first of all there we have many drives that we don't have to satisfy to keep us alive for example the drive for money the drive for position at your workplace the drive for sex you don't have to satisfy these to stay alive yet would kill for these drives there are only three drives that keep us alive and they are breath thirst and hunger and i ask you what satisfies breath and you say air no no it's not air you could take a mixture of gases and you could leave out what does satisfy the breathing drive which is oxygen you'd be huffing and puffing and dead in three minutes it's not air it's not any mixture of gases it's oxygen that satisfies the hunger drive and i ask you what satisfies thirst and you say beer orange juice excuse me it's only water that satisfies the hunger drive the only other liquid i can think of that people might drink would be pure alcohol and i can't imagine any thirst satisfaction from drinking pure alcohol it's water that satisfies the thirst strife and when i say what satisfies hunger if you come back to me you say food i say wrong it's carbohydrate it's sugar that satisfies the hunger drive at the beginning of this satisfaction is the tongue the tongue tastes with pleasure two substances and that's sweetness and saltiness that's because we're designed as secrets of salt and sugar we need these things to to stay healthy you have to get the minerals associated with salt and you have to get your primary source of energy which is sugar now the other two taste buds that we knew about up until recently were bitter and sour which which are taste buds that cause you to not be poisoned bitter and sour things in nature are at best medicines at worst poisons so we have these two taste buds to protect us from poisoning ourselves when we go out and select in nature the next taste bud to be discovered was umami and this is uh one that is sensitive to msg now meat eaters will tell you that's the one that tells you you're supposed to be a meat eater it's not it's it's a sensitivity to monosodium glutamate the next next taste bud to be discovered was one of repulsion and that was the fast tasting taste but if you can taste fat you're repulsed by it and so it's taste bud that protects you and keeps you away from fat and the last taste bud to discover was discovered about eight years ago it was oregon state university what they did is they blocked the sweet tasting taste buds which with the chemical that they gave to their subjects and then they they gave them starchy foods breads and pastas and potatoes etc and what they found was an independent powerful stark sense of taste bud they found taste buds for starch that was just as strong as those for sugar proving that we are a star cheater you know i thought about going through a whole discussion with you about how the anatomy and physiology of the human being is built to be a plant eater a star cheater and i was going to tell you about the hands that we have for for grasping for for picking up potatoes and bananas etc not not for tearing apart meat i was going to and this picture is appropriate here i was going to talk to you about the teeth people say that we're uh we're omnivores because of these canine teeth excuse me where are the canine teeth i don't i don't see any canine teeth you see canine teeth in a cat i see no teeth in our mouth that are similar to our cat if you were going to explore the cat's tongue you would find no taste buds for sugar for starch in other words carbohydrate in the cat's tongue you'd find taste buds for protein and amino acids because that's the diet of a cat our stomach has about 1 7 the amount of hydrochloric acid as a cat's stomach because the cat needs all this acid to digest their high protein high meat diet our intestinal tract is very long for digesting the the complex sugars like a cat's intestinal tract is quite short so get rid of the remnants of partially digested food uh there's there's well there the discussion goes on and on and on for those of you who are or online for learning about what people eat from our anatomy and physiology the discussion can be easily found and it's absolutely clear and consistent just to summarize uh the stomachs that i've talked to you but i want to make something really clear is that when you go to the grocery store you don't have to choose let's see today i'll make myself trim by picking these foods and tomorrow i'll make myself healthy by picking alternative foods no folks the same foods that make you fat make you sick and the same foods that cause you to be trim and attractive make you healthy you know there's no dilemma here everything is consistent let's talk about high carbohydrate diets uh what i recommend is that you eat about 90 of your diet as starches these are these are parts of plants that are loaded with calories and it should be about 90 and that's based not upon getting out a dietetic handbook or getting your scale out it's based on eyeballing your plate about 90 percent of the food should be starches about 10 should be vegetables and fruits and that's the basic mcdougall diet starches let's talk about starches for a minute plants and only plants use the energy of sun to convert water from the ground and carbon carbon dioxide from the air through a process known as photosynthesis into sugar only plants can do this and plants take some of that sugar they they make they use it for their daily activities for growth for movement but they take a large part of that sugar that they make and they they turn it from simple sugar into chains of sugar amylose and amylopectin these are chains of sugar that are also known as starches and what they do is they store these starches in various plant parts and the reason they store them in various plant parts is so that they can become a new after winter is over in the spring and summer they can sprout they can germinate but they have to have that concentrated nugget of energy available for the new plant to get started in life now we have below ground storage organs and these would be these would be rhizomes potatoes roots sweet potatoes and these below ground storage organs they're very complete as far as nutrition is concerned you can live on them and water alone the potatoes known as the anti-scurvy vegetable they're complete add a little bit of b12 which we can talk about in another discussion your above ground storage organs which are your seeds your legumes and your grains they're deficient in anc and so you have to add a little bit of fruit or vegetable if you're going to consume largely above ground storage organs how much not much maybe a slice of orange or a flower out of broccoli will give you enough anc to meet all of your needs so these are what's what starches are they're built by plants primarily for the plants use but we use them as a source of energy let's look at the history of star cheating and uh this is a good place to start with native americans this is a coin that was put out about 10 years ago it was a dollar coin and uh what it represents is native americans uh it represents the three sisters corn beans and squash which is the diet of people who who as far as we're concerned originated north and south in central america corn beans and squash was their diet in central america the aztecs the mayans they listed they existed for 9 000 years as the people of the corn they fought battles they had children they did athletic events they went through tough times they went through good times there were farmers they were sailors they were you know they they were a complete successful civilization living on corn if you go a little further south what you find is uh in the andes potatoes were in a very important food in fact even today there are 400 to 600 different species of potatoes that are grown in the andes and this is the food primary food that's been for people in south america incas are some of the best examples for 300 years they talk about the importance of potatoes in these civilizations what they would do during tough times is they would freeze dried potatoes and store them in in dry huts and you could do that in the andes because at night up at the high altitude the potatoes froze and in the daytime with sun shining the potatoes were heated up so they freeze dried and they would store these potatoes for as long as 10 years and it got through some difficult times uh wheaton barley that was the diet of people in what was known as the bread basket of the world you know somewhere between five and eight thousand years people lived on wheat and barley as their primary food remember the bread basket of the world and rice most of you would relate to to the asian populations living on rice for 10 000 years that's been the diet i'd like to introduce you to one of our speakers at an advanced study weekend nathaniel dominic he's a anthropologist and an evolutionary biologist he studies ancient people their bones their teeth their genetics and uh he tries to figure out what people ate in the past and he came some important discoveries and the discovery is is that we are we are uh derived as a line of primates and uh we started at lesser primates chimpanzees gorillas and you know the tree of offspring is a little bit more complex than that but we had a population of monkeys and lesser primates that lived around the equator and still do today these the diet of these for example gorillas and chimpanzees is primarily fruits and perishable vegetables they eat a little bit of animal food termites and occasional rodent but it's primarily fruits and vegetables as a result you have to live in an environment that has fruits and vegetables growing all year round and that's the equatorial zones what happened in the ele the evolution of the primate to the human being is we developed the ability to digest starch there's a enzyme that's produced that's called amylase which digests starch and these amylase producing enzymes are produced by genetic material copies of dna that allow for the formation of this starch enzyme if you look at the copies of dna in in the genetic makeup of a chimpanzee or a gorilla you find that they have two copies of this amylase gene they have two copies so they can produce amylase to digest starch in the evolution of the human being the number of copies of amylase producing genes triples quadruples or even greater as much as 16 times 16 copies of this amylase and producing enzyme or gene is present to produce the enzyme so we developed this ability to digest starch and this allowed us to escape from the equator it allowed us to migrate all over the planet and conquer planet earth rather than being tied to the equator like your lesser primates or monkeys are is that uh because of our ability to digest starch we're able to leave the equator where the fruits and perishable vegetables are always plentiful and when fall and winter came we just dug underground and we pulled up roots and potatoes and other kinds of underground storage organs and eventually we also we also harnessed above ground storage organs dr domini came and spoke at one of our weekends and let's see what he has to say and so what do we tell our uh our friends and relatives who tell us that we're primarily meat eaters because we're hunter gatherers with an emphasis on hunter because that's you know the man thing to do and gathering the woman thing to do that's uh that's a myth hunters and gatherers the majority of their calories come from plant foods that's a myth hunters and gatherers the majority of all the calories that any hunting and gathering population gets comes from its plant foods so that's that's what's most reliable meat is just too unpredictable you can't you can't rely on it so kind of it kind of as a summary statement uh as an expert anthropologist you know you've spent your whole life studying the human diet and its relationship to teeth and bones and chemicals and genes and so on your conclusion is the human being is a starchabor can i and of course out of that book came to stark solution and this is an important thing for for us to face for just a minute is what we're talking about when it comes to hunter-gatherers we're talking about gender bias about sexism you know the men who always wanted to accomplish the glory they went out for a hunt and occasionally they were able to harness an animal and sometimes they were able to get it back before it spoiled and they got all the glory but who was back collecting the real calories for that particular village it was the grandparents the women the children it was the gatherers the idea of hunter-gatherers is completely backwards it was the gathers that provided for a community and the hunters they just got a little extra glory i guess now what initial initial studies uh which fostered the idea of hunter gathering and that's what we were as hunters with an emphasis uh on the word hunter in terms of hunter gathering is because of confusion that archaeologists had in in their initial studies in the 1800s and early 1900s and what they would find around the fire pit of a particular archaeological site is they'd find the bones and they'd find knives instruments to cut the bones that cut the flesh of the animal and they would find cuts in the bones and so that's all the evidence they had so they came away with the idea that you know hunter gathers and must have just eaten meat because that's all we could find around the fire pit i mean corn husks are not going to last for eons but bones and stone tools are going to last for eons but modern archaeology has looked at things completely differently they've started studying this they've looked closely into the mouth into the gastrointestinal tract and into the feces that were petrified hundreds of thousands of years ago and it kind of surprised me that i've actually found a research paper that was just published in 2021 which talks about examining the uh the stool the microbiome you know the feces petrified of uh humans that were around 600 000 years ago both neanderthal and homo sapiens and identified that they ate starch and we have a large amount of evidence that talked about how the neanderthals actually ate cooked starch 50 000 years ago and cooking was one of the things that made us who we are in other words when you were able to cook a starch you were able to release enough calories so that uh you could develop this powerful brain that we have the brain burns 20 of the daily calories that you consume and the brain highly prefers sugar as far as a source of energy so anyway we have this evolution which was based upon not eating fish as far as the brain goes not eating animal foods as far as the brain goes but eating starch is what allowed us cook starch allowed us to develop the brain power that we have 170 000 years ago this is a cave in south africa they found underground storage organs associated with this particular 170 000 you know you've been told that the agricultural revolution took place 10 000 years ago excuse me ladies and gentlemen people have been starch eaters they've been harnessing various kinds of starches for hundreds of thousands of years uh there was a uh interesting site that was in southern uh southern chile where they were actually able to find organic materials that have been buried in peat moss in a bog you know most most of the materials found were or organic materials very difficult to find but in this particular village they found actual whole plant parts they identified 44 edible plants from this village and 22 medicinal plants and that's 1400 years ago well we took a group to uh to this particular area of the world we took one of our adventure travel trips to uh to peru and to various other parts of uh south america and it was kind of interesting when we went to peru with this our group of people we had about 40 folks that came along with us on a mcdougall adventure trip is everybody was trim in the population except for you when you went to the restaurants and then the restaurants the waiters and the chefs were all overweight well if you know a little bit about the the people who lived at that time that's only 20 years ago in peru they were primarily starch eaters potatoes and only the wealthy or those who worked in restaurants were able to eat the rich western food and if you notice here that there's ann wheat right there a picture of ann anyway so uh the four corners uh there's something called four corners potatoes discovered ten 000 years ago this is in an area of the southwestern united states so we have remnants of potato eating here we can go back on grains 105 000 years ago to mozambique and what they found is they found these grains located between the teeth of the skeletons and they found them on tools and they found them in their poop starch grains and they determined these people were primarily starch eaters here's a uh examination from western pollute peru this particular skeletal finding is 8 000 years old you can see the teeth there and between the teeth you see the granules these are starch granules anyway our eating of a rich diet a diet for kings and queens is a blip in human history it's only been real popular for the last 50 years and it's only been around for 100 to 150 years otherwise the other million years of human evolution of human existence were almost exclusively starch eaters except in the extremes of the environment why why would we change all of a sudden in the 20th century it makes no sense at all well if you look around you can see the results of giving up starch uh as far as starch and performance uh soldiers know this roman soldiers used to ask their leaders not to feed them meat prior to battle instead feed them grains because they knew they were much better fighters and alexander the great and genghis khan both took armies and conquered the known world with armies that were fueled by corn not maize corn corn is what they referred to various grains like rice and wheat barley that was their fuel that allowed them to conquer the known world the story of the gladiators is one of uh of vegan starch eaters a grave plot unearthed about 30 years ago that was uh present 1800 years ago in ephesus which is a a part of present-day turkey where they once had a lot of coliseums and gladiatorial events they found a grave site there and when they unearthed the grave site they found that there were 22 gladiators in this gravesite and they analyzed the bones of the gladiators and they determined the long-term diet based upon the strontium and calcium ratios that were present they determined that the long-term diet of these gladiators was vegan which fits in with the historical descriptions of gladiators as the barley eaters they lived on a diet of barley and beans why do you think they lived on a diet of barley and beans this was the most unforgiving sport that i can think of some of the skeletons that they unearthed had tried the holes in their heads you know you want to be out there performing you want to have strength you want to have endurance so you can survive and of course those owners who put you up for this contest they wanted you to win also so you ate a diet that gave you the best performance as far as gladiators of today i can't think of any any bigger test of endurance and strength in our marathon and triathlon winners and runners and if you'll notice that the winners and runners of our triathlons have come primarily from ethiopia and kenya you know the chicago marathon the honolulu marathon the boston marathon were all won by kenyans and ethiopians and what's noted about these runners is that they eat a diet where 80 percent of their energy comes from maize you know you call it corn maze eighty percent of their fuel comes from starch from corn uh one brush that we had with with fame when it came to the athletic athletic and performances when carl lewis followed the mcdougall diet and he was a whole article on him following the mcdougal diet in the august 1992 issue of runners world well i met carl lewis in minneapolis when we were ready to go on twin cities live and he came in with his entourage to the green room and he was complaining that he couldn't find a diet that would allow him to lose a couple of ounces which would cause him to be a faster person because every diet he followed he either got weak or got sick and he couldn't perform and i said hey carl i said why don't you try this and so he did and he subsequently set the record for the hundred meter dash he won three long jumps that as far as i know have not been broken yet and he won multiple relays he retired as an old man carl lewis you're going to listen to an interview of carl lewis that i did on my radio show and his story about how the mcdougall diet helped him we have three published studies and respected journals uncontested to date which show the benefits eating a high starch diet a diet of rice corn potatoes breads pastas etc the first study is uh one we did in our participants at our our center it was over a 10-year period of time we looked at 1703 participants that had been through over the last 10 years we excluded no one and we looked at what happened to them over that period of time and that period of time happened to be seven days so what happened to these people in one week is the average weight loss was 3.1 pounds seven days now there are many other things that happen with these people like 90 of them were able to reduce or stop their blood pressure and or diabetic medications and cholesterol came down 22 points and etc the randomized control trial which is the the ultimate in scientific research was done at oregon health and science university in portland and what they did is they looked at the long-term benefits of the mcdougall diet on primarily multiple sclerosis but they studied a lot of other parameters and what they found was they found that 85 percent of people 85 percent people were compliant for 12 months if you take a look at this chart here you see the red line represents the control group they were asked to stay on the western diet this is a randomized control trial you have a control group once you have intervention group so the red dots red line represents the control group they ate a diet of about 40 fat the intervention group where the people who came to our program and they were taught just along with the rest of the people on our program they were taught the mcdougal diet which is a diet based on starches with fruits and vegetables it has a vegan diet and you see the drop in their fat intake overnight but the important thing to look at is what happened to their fat intake over the next 12 months they were compliant with the diet for 12 months we only had an initial interaction with them for 10 days in the beginning but the diet was so effective at causing them good health and the food was so good they stayed on it 85 of people for a year you can't get people to take pills that long the average weight loss over a 12 month period of time was uh nearly 20 pounds they got a drop in cholesterol which was about 20 points we had an independent study and observational study done in new zealand and this was a study of a community-based program that learned the mcdougall diet and this program in new zealand brags that they have the best weight loss of any program on the entire planet earth well they happened to use the mcdougall diet and they lost 25 pounds on average at the end of a year so we've been studied the results are clear let me talk to you about some of the long-term results we don't have scientific studies on these but i know you like to hear about what happens to people over years and decades and so on so i'm going to share this with you some of the the examples i'm not going to say too much about them you just take a look at their pictures but what i want you to understand is that you should expect these results okay with jenny craig weight watchers nutrisystem etc their ads will contain a disclaimer that says this is the best case scenario don't expect these results ladies and gentlemen expect these results if you follow the program that i teach you should expect this will happen to you of course you have to follow the program let's take a look 90 pounds here and you'll notice the people have maintained the weight loss for like 31 years in this case this lady in her initial picture she says that this was a photo of me in january 2007 which she didn't like she dreaded the photo and then she started she changed her diet and she started taking photos of herself after her dietary change said she says now i can't pick one that i like i like them all and she went on a trip with us one of the adventure trips it goes at a pretty steady rate the average weight loss you can expect to be greater if you start out heavier those who are close to trim body weight they're likely not going to lose as fast but the bigger people will get the greatest weight loss initially as you get down to trim body weight the weight losses will occur more slowly but following the diet strictly without any added exercise you can expect 6 8 10 12 14 16 pound weight losses every month and it shouldn't be hard for you to get these kind of results but you know again you must make maintain the kind of diet that we teach you uh this fellow right here he changed his diet because he couldn't play ball with his kids this fellow was a chief financial officer of the dairy state wisconsin lost 40 pounds but the important thing is he's well didn't just lose the weight he he's well now all right so you know i know some of you uh are very interested in losing weight as fast as you can and there's also another group of people i'd like to address and cover both groups together and those are the fat vegans and people are interested in losing weight as quick as possible both of the recommendations i have apply to both groups the fat vegan the fat vegan presents uh an opportunity for me uh these are people who are already convinced that they ought to stop eating animals they're strong people they've stood up against their mother-in-law their doctor their dietitian they're industrious they've taken the trouble to find different foods so that they can be vegan but unfortunately they themselves do not present an appearance of good health i call them the fat vegan i wrote an article in my december 2008 newsletter titled the fat vegan in the book the stark solution is a chapter called the fat vegan you would think i would have offended a lot of people by writing these chapters so titled i didn't notice i offended anybody you know i actually i i hope that what the people that i was talking to would look at what i was trying to do as an effort to get them to be more effective at saving animals and saving the earth you know i want vegan to be synonymous with trim and healthy and active and young and strong and earth-changing but unfortunately too many too many people even though they follow a vegan diet don't make the kind of appearance that other folks can accept and they look at you and they say well you know what if i have to sacrifice my personal appearance and my health to save the planet and the animals i just may not do it well that's not a choice that you have to have the fat vegan let's start by giving up the fake foods these are not part of the mcdougall diet these are isolated concentrated soy products or isolated fat products when it comes to cheese and they provide too many calories and plus they're just concoctions of chemicals they're not real food the next next thing that needs to be corrected and people who are fat vegans are those who want to lose weight as fast as possible you've got to get rid of the nuts and you've got to get rid of the olives and avocados they cottons and seeds i mean these are delicacies i remember when i was growing up and this is my family here when i when i was growing up as a special treat my dad would get a five pound bag of nuts in the shell and the six of us mcdougals we would uh spend the next week with a pick and a and a nutcracker and opening these shells and it would take us a whole week to go through the whole five pounds but that was then i mean now what is it it's just a matter of unscrewing the top and inhaling oh my you know nuts and seeds are probably the biggest defender when it comes to the fat vegan and a lot of these folks are interested in the and the health benefits of certain foods like coconuts well you know they didn't put coconuts in the hardest shell of all for for no reason at all they're supposed to be hard to get at so uh the other thing that you would want to give up if you were a fat vegan or if you want to lose weight as fast as possible if you wanted to give up dried fruits you know i can eat 20 apples dried in the time i can eat one or two apples fresh calories count a juice you don't improve the quality of a fruit or vegetable by hitting a thousand times the steel blade you release simple sugars that's why people like juices because they taste sweeter well that sweetness it comes at a price that raises insulin levels these are sugar calories that do count the body would prefer to burn the sugar and leave the fat in your body fat and another restriction that i place on people who want to lose weight rapidly is i'd restrict their fruit intake and the reason is is because you're so familiar with fruits see you know you can eat 20 fruits a day calories count so losing weight let's cut the fruits even the fresh fruits down to maybe one or two a day maybe none breads breads and bagels they're refined concentrated calories and as a result when you change a wheat berry into a wheat flour you increase the calorie concentration now one saving grace for pasta is it's made with water and so as a result of the added water you decrease the calorie concentration so not as as as calorie dense but for rapid weight loss for people interested in the mcdougall program for maximum weight loss you'll want to give up the breads and bagels and we're going to talk about that in a minute just remember that i said we're going to give up the breads and bagels but i want to qualify that for you in just a moment uh 28 years ago when i was 46 years old i wrote the book the mcdougall program for maximum weight loss it was as a result of demand from you i've always considered myself a medical doctor or you know wanting to help stamp out disease help people with kidney problems diabetes heart trouble cancer etc i never considered myself a diet doctor but because i got so much demand for me to write a weight loss book that i i yielded and in 1994 we published the mcdougall program for maximum weight loss it's still a national bestseller you know and it still gets five star reviews well what the mcdougall program for maximum weight loss told you was this is one way to get more weight loss is to decrease the starches and increase the non-starchy green and yellow vegetables so non-starchy green and yellow vegetables would be things like broccoli and kale and lettuce and celery you know the traditional diet foods typically you'd eat maybe 10 at most 5-10 percent of your meal plan would be these non-starchy fruits or vegetables and maybe five percent would be fruit the other 80 90 would be starch that would be you know the typical mcdougall program well if you want to lose weight faster how about bumping up the non-starchy green yellow vegetables you know more traditional diet foods more broccoli more cauliflower more celery more kale maybe to 25 and only 75 of your diet is now starch you're pushing it you're pushing the weight loss efforts uh by doing that and then you could go as high as 50 50. anything more than 50 50 that means 50 starts 50 percent nine non-starchy vegetables you're getting into an area where you're out of control again you're hungry you're not getting the satisfaction that you need so i would be very careful about pushing this too hard so the maximum weight loss program avoids these soy products the nuts and seeds the avocados if you want to really push the weight loss you can make the food taste less tasty by leaving all the salt off now eating salt will increase your calorie intake because you'll enjoy the food more you avoid dried fruits fruits simple sugars and breads bagels and pastas on the maximum weight loss problem the other thing i must put a special plea out to those of you probably not the fat vegan maybe maybe maybe i'm being come to conclusions that are not correct but but a lot of people eat out and this is your downfall you eat out you you go into the restaurant say i'm vegan or i'm low-fat vegan or if you put oil on my food i'll die and what do they do they put oil in your food you can count out they put oil on your food anyway the principles that i just shared with you are so solid that they always work you know i i don't think i'll ever have to apologize to somebody and say you know i taught you the mcdougal diet with variations of the maximum weight loss and you didn't hate term body weight just like i predicted i haven't seen it yet don't think i'll see it in the future let's take another look at starch eaters skinny people from around the world [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] okay well i hope you are thoroughly indoctrinated into the importance of starch because if you aren't you don't understand this and you're back into the situation you were before the this lecture started well let me just take this to one further extreme you know i've taught you the basic mcdougall diet which is going to solve the weight problems for almost all of you i've taught you some variations and what you may be doing wrong even though your intentions are right by following the maximum weight loss program let me show you the extremes of diet and what it can do for you and i i resort to one of my mentors uh walter kempner from duke university walter kempny showed me with his work how powerful diet therapy can be and he also showed me how difficult it is to cause nutritional deficiencies on simple diets even diets that contain sugar walter kempner has an unprecedented record of curing people severe heart disease diabetes kidney disease amazing work not not even coming close to [Music] the benefits of the drug in the device industries and the surgery industries don't even come close to the results of walter kempn to god he was at duke university for seven decades for two decades he offered the primary financial support for duke university with his rice program the rice diet consists of white rice why'd you use white rice because he felt it would be more acceptable more available certainly brown rice will work just as well fruit fruit juice and table sugar and those people who are losing too much weight he would add as much as 2 000 calories of white sugar to their diet to prevent them from losing excess weight the kepler diet treated all kinds of problems as i mentioned high blood pressure heart disease kidney disease and so on it's it's a diet that i still use but it's the diet for the nearly dead in my practice not for the average person it's a diet that is 94 sugar and yet essentially a hundred percent of the type two diabetics were cured with a diet that was 94 percent sugar morbid obesity he published studies that showed that you could get better results from changing to the rice diet as opposed to having bariatric surgery there's a group of people who lost at least 99 pounds to get into the into the study the average weight loss is 141 pounds anyway out of 106 patients uh 43 achieve normal body weight their blood pressure triglycerides etc all improved greatly walter kempner uses a weight chart that i wanted you to be familiar with and the reason i wanted you to become familiar with kepler's weight chart and here it is and you can find it my november 2015 newsletter is walter kempner offered a height versus weight chart that allows you to at least be comfortable by the fact that you're not losing too much weight it's going to be a big deal for you if you've lost 50 70 80 100 pounds dealing with previous friends and family they're going to think you're sick and you have aids or you have cancer you know they're going to come to some conclusions that aren't right and they will because they have a different opinion of you an impression of you from the past they will um they'll be worried about you but people will meet you new will think you look really good you need some kind of confidence that you're not being becoming too thin and so i would encourage you to look at walter kember's recommendations as to weight versus your height all right you're losing too much weight well we do that is you do the opposite of the maximum weight loss program in this case what you eat is more nuts and seeds and breads and dried fruits etc and you cut down on your starches vegetables and fruits and you put on more weight so the question why am i so fat that's what we started here a few minutes ago why am i so fat it's because of starch deficiency and fat excess just going to show you a couple studies to conclude this is listeners classic work that was published in 1987. what they did in this experiment they housed these people is they fed them diets that you were able to hide the fat in the food like muffins and stews and soups and sandwiches and desserts and so on you're able to hide the butter the mayonnaise the vegetable oil etc in the food so you can control the fat intake without changing the quality of the food and what they did was by spontaneously reducing the fat intake from say 45 percent of the calories 15 percent of the calories is without any conscious thought by just decreasing the amount of fats in the prepared foods that people couldn't tell the difference whether it was a high fat meaning fat or low fat day what they were able to do is just is to reduce the calorie intake by 600 calories why did they do that because they reduce the fat and when you reduce the fat and you let people eat ad libitum then they increase the carbohydrate satisfying the appetite satisfying carbohydrates you don't have to do this with any suffering you don't have to do this in any conscious effort all you have to do is make some simple changes get the fat out get the carbohydrate in about the time that mary and i published the first book which was called making the change because we knew the most difficult thing would be to help people make the change it was back in 1978 i was going to michigan state university at that time i had suffered some major health problems but i lived in this dormitory this is called schneider hall and in this schneider hall they had a cafeteria and you get as much free food as you wanted and believe me i ate as much free food as i wanted plenty of eggs plenty of bacon pork chops etc uh just not to divert too much into it three months into my college stay at uh michigan state university eating that kind of food i had a massive stroke and i know that was just the end of some very unhealthy eating but anyway at this time an experiment was done with uh moderately overweight college-aged men you know like myself and what they did is these men who were living in a college situation eating in the dormitories all they did is they asked them to eat 12 slices of bread a day in addition to whatever else they wanted to eat they didn't tell them to eat less bacon or you know fewer pork chops or drink less milk they just said you have to eat these 12 slices of bread a day and so they did they ate 12 slices of bread a day for two months and at the end of two months those who ate the white bread lost an average of 14 pounds those who ate they brown bread lost an average of 19 pounds and they did this they they they did this by displacing the amount of fat in the total diet reducing it the amount of fat in the total diet because you ate the bread and so you ate less bacon you ate less pork chops you ate fewer less butter and you increased the amount of carbohydrate satisfying calories in the form of bread again this this was made unconsciously spontaneous you don't have to think about this there's no pain there's no sickness there's no suffering there's no surgery there are no pills all you have to do is make some conscious effort to change the composition of your foods all right so i i hopefully i got most of you oriented in the right direction you understand what the basic problem is that's the composition of the food we weed a diet that's too dense in calories has too much fat to wear and not enough carbohydrate to satisfy the hunger drives hopefully you are ready to make a full-blown change to the mcdougall diet but if you're not what i'd like to do is offer you a more starch challenge eat more starch i want you to do just like the overweight men did at michigan state university back when i was in college i want you to add 12 slices of bread a day to your current meal plan well if that doesn't appeal to you how about four cups of boiled spaghetti noodles how about three cups of cooked beans four baked potato i'm not saying and i'm saying or four mashed potatoes four cups of boiled corn four cups of steam just add you pick one of these you love these foods add that to your meal plan every day and what will happen to you is spontaneously without any thought you'll reduce your calorie intake by six to nine hundred calories a day now if that's not sensible weight loss sustainable weight loss to eat more foods that you enjoy i don't know what is that's my challenge if you want some help with that challenge we'll be glad to help you you can go to our website there's a free 12-day program there for you but i encourage uh most of you to seriously think about joining us for a 12-day internet-based telemedicine telehealth program that our team will put together for you which will pretty much guarantee you're going to make some substantial changes in your life and we can help you through it and we have some sports specialists we have all kinds of great education that will help you through this time and that's found at www.mcdougall.com it's the 12-day internet what are you waiting for of good grief you've spent enough years not as happy and healthy as you should be we'll help you get over the tough ones i'm dr john mcdougall thank you very much for listening that was amazing dr mcdougall you put your presentations are incredible your slides and all the audio you really take a lot of time and effort to do this so we appreciate it so much well you know uh what i hope is that people who are interested in weight loss will understand you know just how profound the information is as to why they're in trouble they're not they don't have a they don't have mental problems they don't have physical problems they've got choice problems that's what that's what and what's their once they understand that the only way you can get control of the situation is to eat starch and to get rid of the fat eat carbohydrates get rid of the oils until you understand that you're helpless you know it's just too powerful you're hungry so you eat you eat foods that are so calorie dense so so laden with fat so deficient in carbohydrate that you just keep piling on the pounds you're out of control but you're not going to change your personality you're not going to well i suppose you can change your stomach size by talking to a surgeon but you know you can fix these things just by picking the right foods i showed you populations of millions of people past and present mans who live on starch-based diets none of them are overweight you know they're all active people having children families they're the hard-working athletic competing war fighting living out starch you know you've been you've been unfortunately even even sold a bill of goods by industry that has condemned you to sickness and unfortunately these days it's condemning us to a dead planet yeah well you know i agree with you obviously and i do everything you say but we still have vegans that are so worried about their omega-3 fatty acids and that they'll drop dead if they don't pound down the nuts and seeds every day or take an omega-3 fatty acid supplement and i think it's fine if they're not struggling with their weight but if they are i don't understand why they wouldn't give the low fat diet at least a try i i can you know faced with with solid information i don't understand why people don't do it either it's hard to change i guess and that's why we've you know we've written 13 national best-selling books we've ran all these weekend programs these adventure trips and the resort where we locked people up for 12 days my hospital-based program where we locked them up for 12 days uh and now you know we're entertaining people over the internet it's not easy to change but it's like so many things in life you look back and you say why didn't i do this before why did i wait so long you know well you don't have to wait and uh again the the program's free on the website you can do it esther did it thousands of people have done it hundreds of thousands of people have done it but if you need a little extra help particularly if you're on medications or you have some concerns about your health let dr lim evaluate what's going on give you some instruction on getting off the drugs we get nearly 90 of people off their medications let me put it another way we get we get nearly 90 of the medications for diabetes and high blood pressure to be stopped or reduced but i suppose it'd be the same way 90 of the people would get them off medications i think that's probably fair too you know listen sick people take drugs healthy people don't sick people have one surgery scheduled after another healthy people don't get out of the business the problems of food it's really that simple i know there's no money behind it but it's it's really that simple you if you're if you're going to listen to uh to mcdonald's new air sea and land burger as the ultimate nutrition then you're going to end up with some serious problems if you look at the past history you know i mentioned up there on one of the slides i showed you all those skinny people i ask you to think about your ancestors you know there are a lot of people from all over the world who still have grandmas and grandpas who live on a starch-based diet you know if you happen to be japanese or chinese you have grandma grandpa at home they're still eating rice and vegetables they haven't switched to mcdonald's double cheeseburgers not in most cases you know my hawaiian patients i used to take care of the grandma and grandpa they lived in tarou and breadfruit working in the fields whereas the the hawaiian heritage of people they're some of the fattest sickest most diabetic people on this planet how about how about the native american how about the american indian which we talk so much about these days about native americans is you know what more abused population of people can you think of than these folks you know right now 60 80 percent of them are obese and most have gallbladder disease particularly when they get into middle age they're very ill why because not only not only they have been they've been deprived of their heritage a diet of corn and beans and squash that's the heritage of the native american people but they've been force-fed the rich western diet and all kinds of governmental food supplementation programs you know show show some ethnic pride stand up and say look i'm going to eat like grandma and grandpa did i'm going to live on rice or corn well how many how many hispanic people do we have here who can think back even in their home now grandma and grandpa are living on beans and corn tortillas you can see it i know you can see it i i can't i can't be the only one that sees this you know dr mcdougall i can understand why people want to eat nuts and seeds you know an avocado because they're you know they're really quite delicious although they're calorie dense but we've got like a big debate now even among the plant-based doctors that oil is now all of a sudden this health food that's going to be helpful to losing weight and to reversing heart disease and i don't understand these people i i don't they they don't understand basic science is what the problem is i showed you the studies that show the fatuates the fat you wear you know uh they they just i showed you i showed you a million years of human history you know i i that you have to go through so much denial to come to those kinds of theories that eating oil makes you thin eating oil makes you wear oil that's what happens you wear it on your skin you get oily skin oily hair acne blackheads whiteheads and you wear it under your skin you get you get a sebaceous cysts and big fat thighs and abdomens that hang over your belt i don't care whether it's a health food olive oil or whatever health food whatever oil the fat you eats the fat you wear ladies and gentlemen there's no other way of cutting it that's what the body does with the excess fat calories it stores them away it's the most efficient thing for the body to do again start with the idea that we're the at least one of the best creations of all nature why would we be why would be designed with these kinds of mistakes we're not we're we we can do we can be everything that we ought to be we can preserve the temple so to speak by following the right set of rules you know every religion you look at teaches you a similar thing that i've tried to teach you teaches you that rich foods make people sick and diets based on plant foods causes you to be strong and healthy you know i often talk about the uh the first chapter of daniel in the bible where daniel's men came to a new kingdom and the new kingdom they ate a lot of meat and rich foods there and daniel asked the gatekeeper of the new kingdom can we stay on our diet of pulses and water and you compare our men with your men after 10 days and 10 days later they found them stronger and tremor of better complexions every adjective that you can think of is described in different versions of the bible as to how daniel's men who lived on pulses and water which are vegetables and water the starches and water that's 2 600 years ago this is your religion and we can go to uh other faiths and we could find similar teachings people weren't stupid ten thousand years ago or five thousand years ago they could look around see what's happening so we have this mass blindness today in our society i just don't understand it open your eyes yeah well oil wasn't even a food for throughout most of human history there was no way to process it yeah they used to used to light lamps with it yeah you feel like taking a few questions that were i would love to take some questions okay guys if you submit them in advance you get a greater chance because that's just the way it works so this is from sherry a lot of the high fat low carb people are touting collagen as important for maintaining elasticity of the skin while none of us in this community want to turn to high fat especially if it comes from animal sources i'd be interested in knowing if there's any science at all behind the benefits of collagen for hair nail and skin i i don't you don't need any add extra collagen or eat extra collagen is that is that what the question was is eating extra collagen is going to make your skin better yeah hair nails and skin a lot of people are touting the benefits 15 hair nails and skin i mean good grief you know people think that if you eat muscle cow muscle pig muscle chicken muscle that you get you grow muscles you know people think if you eat fish that's brain food you grow bigger brains what would happen if you ate testicles you become nuts okay no you you you you improve your sex drive aj oh as a matter of fact that's that's not entirely a joke i mean you can from these glandulars you can get hormones uh like from the testicles and adrenals and thyroid glands thyroid glands an excellent example of how you can get hormones from other animals that's what that's what natural thyroid is it's armor thyroid it's made from colic pig thyroid glands so eating these glands is not a good idea in addition they also transfer microbes over to you like mad cow prions and leukemia viruses and things like that so you don't eat these animals even in the form of medicines okay you know i agree this question is from kay i've always wondered what dr mcdougall thinks of donating blood are there any potential obstacles or issues and are there particular foods to eat before or after to help with recovery well i think it's a it's a proper thing to do you know to donate blood you know it helps good grief you know i'm sure it's helped somebody in your family certainly has helped somebody in my family it's the right thing to do as far as harm goes uh i fear that someday i would get a blood transfusion from somebody who just walked out of mcdonald's their blood is so full of grease it you know it's sludging right in the right in the uh in the in the blood bag i can just imagine that you you've got this bla bag of blood cells and this big glob of fat on top and they're pushing that in you oh boy anyway uh no i i think if you're a healthy person the cleanest blood you're going to have is by eating a good diet really if you eat a high fat diet your blood is going to be full fat and in some cases they'll actually reject you because you have so much fat in your blood it's called triglycerides far as taking supplemental iron before or after not necessary get all the iron you want in your vegetable foods iron is a component a mineral component that plants pick up from the ground just like other minerals they dissolve in water solutions the sodium potassium calcium iron magnesium etc are absorbed in the roots of plants they become part of the roots stems leaves flowers and fruits plants and then we eat the plants and we take in the minerals and you always get enough iron uh one of the things you may have heard is that eating ascorbic acid in other words citrus fruits increases your iron utilization that's true it does you may have heard that eating animal foods you get a big source of highly usable iron yeah you do but at a great price why would i do that there's always enough food there's always enough iron in the plant kingdom to meet your needs even if you've donated blood great thank you well if you need any i'll be happy to donate to you what's your blood type dr mcdougall dipole okay you know if i if i looked at was it the domino's book about eat for your blood type then i would i would probably have had a mass another massive stroke and another heart attack and you know bowel cancer and all kinds of things if i believed in that because i'm a type o typos are supposed to eat are supposed to eat a high meat diet right and type a's are supposed to eat a high rice diet and the thinking being that asians eat rice and they have a type a predominance in their blood and caucasians whites eat heavy meat heavy dairy diet and they have a predominance of type o in their populations so the whole theory is you need to eat based on your blood type and i'll tell you what i decided i was going to do a few years back is i was going to really make the popular book popular book scene and what i was going to do is put on a new diet called eat right for your shoe size diet and what you would do is if you if you had little shoes like you know the asians used to have because they had little feet then you eat rice and if you have big shoes then you of course you meet so what do you think of my new diet the shoe size diet well i'm i'm i'm an eight and a half and i'm type b so i'd be i look forward to reading that book and promoting it on the show it's really that silly and people will grasp its straws hopefully the material i presented for you in the last hour will make you stop and think about the fact that you know you're not wrong your body's not your enemy it's just you're following the wrong set of rules and it always works as i told you this is not the best case scenario you will get well right i've seen thousands of patients over my years and i've watched other people take care of their patients i know what's going to happen to you now i don't know whether or not you're going to follow the program but i do know if you eat a starch-based diet in other words you start out in the morning with oatmeal pancakes waffles go on for lunch and dinner you have mushu vegetables over rice and bean burritos and last night we had we had a tamale pie mary last night enchiladas yeah we had bean champion enchiladas and the night before we had bean pizza and that was really good anyway but if you eat those kinds of foods you'll like but we can't eat beans dr mcdougall because dr gundry says they could contain lectins yeah well again you know you find somebody who who latches onto a little niche and they try and blow it into a whole big diet and a little particle of information they distort plant foods are good for you lectins are part of plant foods they're a natural defense system of plants and you know i'm uh i i know what people are supposed to eat it's what they've always eaten it's what 99.99 of people that walk this earth have eaten i'm sure 99.99 percent of people have not avoided lectins or beans etc but uh you you have enough basic information every one of you does so that you should be able to come to similar conclusions especially you folks who have been listening to aj for so long you know you you you've got to see it it's so obvious but i guess that's the way life is is the some of the most honest obvious things are are lied about yeah so here's a question from richard somebody who's a type 2 diabetic that has gastroparesis can that be reversed i guess both the diabetes i take care of people with gastroparesis and it's often because gastroparesis is where the intestinal tract is is the muscles don't work okay and you get problems with the food flowing through the bowels and gastric of course implies that's the stomach but the paresis occurs throughout the entire intestine and yeah i've taken care of quite a few people you just put them on a starch-based diet with fruits and vegetables and they straighten right out so not that it would happen every time but what risk do you have to try it you know i explain to you it works it works if it's going to work it's going to work in four months it's going to cut your food bill by 60 to 80 percent you know what where's the downside of eating a good diet where's the downside of getting off your pills you know sick people take pills healthy people don't the only way i know to to be safe and to get all the benefits you're looking are to fix the problem and the problems the food well speaking of dr gundry there's a question not about him but about beans from cheryl and she says what is your position on the consumption of beans should we be eating them at every meal three times a day if we eat three meals a day how much is your recommendation of them and are they a good protein source for aging vegans brenda davis says senior vegans need more protein since i love dr mcdougall please ask him about beans tofu tempeh vegan proteins and what he thinks of them for those of us following his program well the first book i wrote that became a national bestseller a new york times national bestseller was called the mcdougall plan and again i wrote this from the point of view of being a doctor i wasn't interested in weight loss at all and in the recipe section of that book i put little pictures one representing beans peas and lentils another representing sugar another representing salt etc i put these little pictures in to identify what the recipes that you might want to particularly avoid and i wanted people who had liver disease kidney disease osteoporosis and or kidney stones to eat less fewer beans and the reason is is beans are 28 protein and protein has to be metabolized by the liver and kidneys and it puts extra work on the kidneys so if you have failing kidneys and liver you're going to have trouble digesting that extra protein extra protein also causes the body to lose bone material so kidney stones and which is the result of losing bone material and osteoporosis which is the result of losing bone material that's another case where you should limit your beans peas and lentils i i as a general recommendation i still feel it's reasonable for me to suggest that you eat on average a cup of cooked beans a day if you're in good health now if you have kidney disease or liver disease or osteoporosis kidney stones but that's a lot it's like that's a cup of cooked beans on average a day i mean some days you won't have any beans at all so i don't think you're going to run into any problem about having too many beans but it's actually it's it's a protein-rich food for sure but they're tasty aren't they and they're filling easy to grow easy to easy for people to relate to to beans and this is again not as good as potatoes so people are wondering what your favorite potato is i don't i like them all i like that i like the dark purple ones that you sent up here aj they were good we had the more orange ones a couple nights ago i i went to fred meyer last week and i found i found sweet potatoes so big that i couldn't eat a whole sweet potato a meal it was just a huge anyway yeah i like potatoes i like beans too i you know i like to i like to eat i don't blame you let's see if there's any i think those are all the ones that submitted let me see if there's any questions in the chat that we can ask uh of you right now uh you know the fruit thing keeps coming up you know you talk about dr kempner and he used fruit juice and sugar but yet sometimes people think uh that you don't want them to eat as much fruit well i i yeah you know the kempner diet as i've described for you as the diet for the desperate the diet for the nearly dead and i offer you that as an extreme not that i would expect you to follow it but i just want you to know about it for a couple of reasons one so you can see how powerful dietary therapy is if you look at walter kemper's work i start talking about in my december 2013 newsletter and i have all of his original papers for free for you thousand pages are up on my website of kepner's work you know he takes care of people who have lost all but 10 percent of their kidneys all the 10 percent of their heart and he restores their health on the kind of diet that i'm talking about white rice fruit fruit juice and simple sugar but that's to show you you know i'm trying to show you where you could go as far as how this kind of thinking could take you and still be safe and effective and uh you know we went through various stages like the basic mcdougall diet trimmed it up a little bit for the fat vegan and those who want to have maximum weight loss help those who are losing too much weight by adding back the things that you take off to help you lose weight and then take you to the extreme which is kepler's work kempner's work is powerful it's uncontested it is true and you know you have you mentioned some of the new diet doctors who are recommending this health food oil or that healthy oil or making other comments about you know about the the doctors of the past excuse me unless you understand the work of walter kempner and the worth of nathan work of nathan pritikin i don't even want to give you the time of day you don't deserve the time of day you know because you're looking at you're looking at research that's published well beyond what these pioneers published and it's you know sometimes they get off track and distorted what they have to say but you need to learn the basic science first provided for you it's on my website it's free i got 500 pages of nathan pritikin's original research which was almost lost forever but i happen to have it transferred to a digital copy it's on the website same thing with walter kempner's work i've got two volumes that you can have for free and it was almost lost to almost lost a time because nobody appreciated the real value of these pioneers which i have does he have any descendants uh well pritikin has lots of descendants you know in fact one of his uh his sons robert pritikin and i actually i got him interested in windsurfing and he's a surfer a very interesting guy tried to work in his dad's business for a while but you know he had his own calling and he has a brother who i know a little bit but walter kempner never married uh if you read if you want to read a little bit of walt kempner you might want to look at my december 2013 newsletter because a couple of his mentors talk about him uh robert rosati and frank nealon worked for kepner for 30 years and they give some interviews about walter kepner who he was what he was like and so on really an interesting man and of course he he lived on on you know on the edge of excitement of disaster so he wasn't perfect well speaking of kempner sylvan says do you agree with his weight chart yeah i do i for one reason one is if you find yourself losing too much weight and that should reassure you that you're not mary and i both weigh below the web kept our recommendations but you know i i think that for me to weigh what walter kevin recommends i should weigh would be okay but we just have to weigh a little less than that so uh yeah i i want you to look at that i don't want you to look at it as a as a desirable weight where you where you want to go as your goal i just want you to look at it and understand that you're not too thin even when those around you are calling you too thin those are people who knew you as a overweight person as a rotund person or any one of those other adjectives that i gave you in the beginning they they they're not comfortable with the way you look now but people will meet you new i say you look you look really good you look healthy you look trim yeah anyway that's why the chart's there and yeah i i i would say that probably all of my staff fits the weight of walter kepner's charts mary and i both do wow i i don't i don't quite make it almost but you know it's funny dr goldhamer once said to me that the people that call the people too thin are never as thin as them whatever yeah so the nice thing is you can always just add more nuts and seeds and avocados and gain weight you know you could do that you you have once you understand the principles it's a matter of just balancing never being hungry you can't be hungry it doesn't work you can't be sick all the time it doesn't work once you balance the starch versus the non-starchy vegetables and you know you push the fats in the forms of nuts seeds and avocados you're in control you can look however you want to look you want to be 50 pounds overweight i can make you 50 pounds overweight i could do that i understand the food i feed you avocados which are 90 fat nuts and seeds which are 90 fat i can do it you know it's not hard you know it's not hard you've done it so many times yourself yeah absolutely well laura says is there a place for nuts and seeds and eric says unless you are overweight do whole food plant fats like nut seeds avocado tofu raise insulin resistance with a high starch diet or are plant fats safe and high amounts if somebody isn't overweight no i i as far i have to work on the principle that they're not i know as free oils that they you know they cause sludge into the blood they cause they cause you to require more insulin create insulin resistance i know that from the study on free oils i'm pretty sure that you'll see the same thing by eating nuts and seeds and avocados if you do to a large extent but the studies for example there's one on my diabetic lecture i gave you a couple of months ago there's a study of type 2 diabetics where they gave them fish oil supplements and they increased their blood sugars like 34 milligrams per deciliter in this in a similar study or a study that i quote in the same slide i talk about type 1 diabetics who are given supplemental oil and they increase their need of insulin overnight by recreating insulin resistance due to this vegetable oil but i haven't done the studies and just like i haven't done the studies on sludge in the blood if you were to eat nuts and seeds and avocados maybe i should do that now i'm actually thinking about i'm actually thinking of taking some of our research money and and doing studies of sludging into the blood and doing studies of uh plant fats yeah i would love to see that actually because uh there's just always such a point of contention between vegans you know about how much fat we're supposed to eat do you want to go on for a little bit more if you do i'll have mary come over here yeah i mean i i never like to say goodbye let me let me and then i want to show you a little bit about the website so let me have you talk to mary for just a minute yeah hey esther wally's getting her you want to come back on for a second because it's just so it's not just me i see that you're still in the waiting room esther you've been watching what did you think of dr mcdougall's talk you have to unmute yourself though if you're going to talk there we go all right well which is wonderful it was wonderful i loved his presentation i love the pictures of the people i thought back i had just posted a picture of my grandparents back in you know early 1900s and they too were slim and later they did get full of our grandmother got a little bit heavier but not too much but i've been just sitting here enjoying it and eating my potatoes i'm on my fifth one i didn't join the potatoes yeah it was it was wonderful to hear him talk and really he's so organized and all the presentations all the graphics i know i love his presentations hey is mary mcdougall in the house now yeah i'm here how are you i'm good good nice how are you nice to see you what you just finished a program didn't you um about a week ago yeah yeah do you enjoy that i do i do we have these great um i don't know john calls them fireside chats but they're uh morning meetups so every morning at eight o'clock we get together on zoom with all the people in the program and it's just their time to talk to us ask us questions and we talk about food and we talk about their the problems they might be having um although each of them has their own special support specialist to ask questions of this is their time along with us for every day that they're in the program yeah i bet that's probably some of the most popular yeah it's really fun it's really fun yeah that's good um somebody's saying they made your golden gravy probably it must be one of your most popular recipes because everybody's mentioning it i'm probably gonna have that tonight i'm probably gonna make mashed potatoes with golden gravy and i have some um probably some snap beans in the refrigerator i think i need to use up for some cauliflower and broccoli and we'll have that with it when's the last time you actually created new recipes because you have like four thousand i'm not that you need to do anymore but do you remember when you kind of figured you know i've written enough books this is enough recipes um it's really funny because um there's so many recipes now that are vegan and um no fat and you know hardly any salt or sugar that i hear i really don't feel like i need to create anymore because there's so many out there and i look um through magazines and things like that and i always find something different but it always um sort of goes back to something i've already made before and you're kind of like the mother of low-fat cooking in a way i mean you're really kind of i think if there were people before you i sure don't know who they were that were i don't either i don't either i think probably i started it because there wasn't anything else out there well that's pretty impressive you should get some kind of a word for that because that's that's amazing i'm curious what was your process back then did you just try to take recipes you already enjoyed and just try to make them first vegan and then vegan and low-fat i did i did i took recipes that that john and i really liked to eat and i just took the oil out or the butter or something else and i um you know learned how to make vegetable broth instead of using chicken broth and i used vegetables or tofu let me move a little bit in place of um in place of the the meats that i used to use and so um that's how it started out and then um we had friends when we lived in hawaii that had um one of the first health food stores in in um kalua hawaii where he lived it was called earth seed and it was filled with bins just bins of beans and grains and flakes and all these things that i had didn't know what they were and so i just bought things and put them in bags and i experimented with them and came up with new things that way do you think dr mcdougall would have been successful if it wasn't for you yeah i thought you know i i would have been i've been like my mentors my mentors being uh royce wank nathan pritikin walter kevner and um this guy from africa oh fiberman dennis burkett dr dennis burkett dennis burkett and and i i got to know these these men pretty well and i got to go through you know some of the trials and tribulations they had in providing good foods for their followers and the one secret that i have that none of them had was was mary you know i knew their wives or you know some of their wives and and they weren't oriented towards their husbands business and weren't oriented towards the kitchen i i remember one particular important night when we had uh nathan and eileen pritikin over to uh to visit us in hawaii and we belonged to a yacht club the kaneoh yacht club at that time so we we took over their facility and we had a potluck dinner there and uh we had about 250 people who followed us at this particular yacht club potluck dinner and you know nathan pritikin he just he said dude boy this is some of the tastiest food i've ever had and uh when we were walking out to the car mary and i walked he and his wife out to their car and uh mary said you know i'd like to give you something i i'd like to give you these recipes to use and so he gave she gave him nathan pritikin 100 recipes in his new book called the pritikin promise the acknowledgements are the first acknowledgments are to john and mary mcdougall that's not right they should be to mary mcdougall because the recipes in his book were mary's and the food the food for the pregnant program maybe it was a coincidence i don't think so dramatically improved as far as enjoyment and participant acceptance after that particular evening now mary knows how to make the food taste good she had to she had to make a family and enjoy this kind of eating i remember another article that uh was published in the honolulu or the san francisco chronicle it would compare dean ornish's uh cookbook to one that mary put out at that time and uh dean ornish it was described that his recipes were great if you were a professional chef in a professional kitchen and mary's recipes are described as homey you know because this is real food i mean this is what we really eat and it's not something you get in a fancy restaurant or you have to have somebody prepare all day long in the kitchen it's just oh yeah most people don't want to spend all day cooking their dinner for that night um so you know i try and keep it simple and there are some of my recipes that are more elaborate which i still make you know when we're having guests over but for john and myself i try to keep it as simple as possible things that are going to take me you know 15 to 20 minutes to prepare and about that long to eat plus i like the beans cooked beans like three nights ago yeah you know if the beans for the first night i expected i'd have a bowl of beans with rice and you know we didn't have any tomatoes in the house but you know we have avocados avocados you know bowl of beans a little sauce on it or maybe how to slip this over a tortilla shell that's what i expected the first night but we didn't do that so instead she went right to one of my favorites which was the bean pizza and then we had bean enchiladas last night when the kids came over we had we had our son and his kids over last night for dinner so anyway the beans made my point being is that not only does mary keep it simple she makes sure that when she cooks one meal you know she at least has leftovers for lunch and maybe even two or three days worth of leftovers like i'm going to probably have you're going to have bean and swallows for lunch because all the rest of the beans are gone how about the pizza the pizza oh there's some pizza left yes i like that anyway well tonight i think we're gonna have mashed potatoes in that's good and creamy golden gravy one of my favorites well a week from today is valentine's day and people are wondering mary if you have a special meal plan for your valentine i don't i don't you know every day is special aj i'm just asking the questions we uh we used to celebrate valentine's day but i guess it's not a long time it's not one of the best we had our 50th wedding anniversary a few weeks ago and that was you know a bigger deal than valentine's day oh did you make did you go out or did you make a special meal we um we went to craig's house um mickey made dinner we had lasagna that's amazing 50 years how did you put up with him i've told you this before it's only because of mary and those of you who know me just like with you and charles i i know it's the same kind of relationship goes on or similar in the opposite direction if it wasn't for charles patience for its tolerance for his forgiven forgiveness and you and i have been kicked out of our homes a long time ago aj true yep you got it that's hilarious so so i married a happy person and that was that was one of the big things and i fell in love i felt desperately in love never happened to me before you know it's only happened to me once so it was okay that's why i hear it's supposed to happen nice so here's a question from linda who's watching live does the mcdougall diet can it prevent or reverse skin cancer you know actually there's there's an article it was published in the new england journal of medicine it was on the use of a low-fat diet to help with actinic keratoses basal cells in the cell carcinomas so you'll look you'll find this uh and i know i know you can find it if you can't just write me i'll find it for you it's uh you just write put in new england journal medicine put in low-fat diet and put in actinic keratoses which are pre-cancerous lesions and what they found is in the group that at the late the low-fat diet they like had one-sixth the amount of recurrences or half the amount of recurrences or you know somewhere in that range depending upon the group you looked at so yeah they can make a big difference as far as pre-cancers activity keratosis changes and i i believe they also addressed squamous and basal cell that's been a while since i've looked at the artery it's easy to find nice so you're gonna love this question because you you you really like salt and people are asking about it i just wanted to tell you i i found this product and it is has sodium but it's made out of a vegetable if you want i'll get the guy to send you some so it it has in one quarter teaspoon 135 milligrams but it's made out of sea asparagus and it actually tastes exactly like salt maybe even better that sounds good yeah i'll get the guy to send me some i love to try it yeah it's green in color but it it really tastes just like salt so i'm gonna get you some but i know you you you like salt dr mcdougall aj he's changed though he does it looks like a duck it quacks like a duck it's probably a duck [Laughter] i think that what you got in the bag is salt it's a seaweed salt it is salt but it's lower sodium than salt you're right it is so it's it's not if they're not like trying to pretend to be no salt but it is it's it's about 50 percent less sodium so ostensibly somebody would use less because well plus from seaweed there are other minerals in that concoction too you know the tongue tastes minerals it doesn't taste necessarily table salt sodium chloride it takes minerals of many different varieties so in a product that had other kinds of minerals they're going to have potassium chloride magnesium chloride et cetera et cetera in a product like that that has different minerals you would uh you naturally reduce the sodium yeah it does it has a lot of magnesium actually it says so well there's a uh article that i'm a lecturer that might give sometime in the future it's about how i treat high blood pressure if you were my patient and uh it actually the reducing there's there's an argument that reducing the sodium doesn't make much difference the real difference in blood pressure comes from reducing the chloride anyway this is an argument that went up in the fires five years ago that i'll have to wake up again that's nice let's see what else we've got well you know one of the things that wasn't in your powerpoint was alcohol does that affect weight loss it does uh serious drinkers if you know them i mean alcoholics are still thin okay i mean think about it for a minute they're really really thin they're malnourished too casual drinkers moderate drinkers sensible drinkers reasonable drinkers i'm not alcoholic drinkers but pretty close those kind of drinkers what happens is the body prefers to burn alcohol over fat so it'll use the alcohol molecule to supply the energy of the cell and leave the fat in the fat cell the body will not convert alcohol into fat it's just too expensive just like i showed you that the body doesn't convert sugar into fat the body does not convert alcohol into fat either but it will spare the fat because it prefers to burn sugar and alcohol over body fat just leaves the fat in there the other thing uh you know this this is a lot of calories uh alcohol the calories do count but the main thing is that has to do with what causes us to do our behavior you know instead of just eating one potato chip we eat two bags and uh you know you of course got to have a burger along with a beer i don't know but if you're just gonna drink and you wouldn't wouldn't result in some some indiscriminate abusive behavior then you'd probably be okay nice mary lou says does a high fat diet increase skin cancer or i would wonder any cancer well i just told you about the experiment done in the new england journal medicine and uh yeah it does i would have to look at other research done but i mean that one article will tell you that a high fat diet promotes the recurrence of actinic keratosis which are pre-cancerous lesions so it's just like it's just like in smokers if you look at smokers from japan the male smoker sixty percent of the males in japan smoke the male smoker has one-fourth the chance of getting lung cancer as the american smoker same number of cigarettes smoked why because the japanese smoker eats a diet that is relatively low in fat low in animals high in carbohydrates rice so you smoke you damage the lungs the body defends and repairs based upon its own strengths and that depends upon what you eat so you should figure naturally even though smoking causes lung cancer the diet would have a big influence on whether you would get it or not and how fast it would progress same thing with with skin cancer yeah diet diet affects everything it has to it's your food it's your fuel yeah people are saying is it okay to put things on your skin or is that will it get absorbed the fat the oils the oils absorbed on your skin yeah we we had in fact there's a lecture that i'm going to give someday on fats and oils but it talks about how when i first started medicine we didn't have a way to to give fat by intravenous give sugar and protein by you know an iv bottle you could give fat and so what we would do is we'd take and would smear sapphire oil on the patient's skin and just that little fat distributed over an area of the skin supplied all the essential fatty acid needs that the patient had and that's how we delivered fat losses they couldn't eat yeah they could you could you know their intestines didn't work and so they had to be on iv limitation i guess i left that part out but anyway that's that's why they were in the hospitals because their intestine didn't work say they had extensive crohn's disease or you know they'd had i don't know some kind of injury car accident or something their bowel was damaged and that you couldn't put food through the intestinal tract we used to feed them iv intravenous feedings but you couldn't give fat by the intravenous feedings back then so we had to give it through the skin that's interesting well i know the answer to this what does mary eat for breakfast lunch and dinner i know it's oatmeal for breakfast and dr mcdougle makes it and i think you put blueberries on it and then lunch is leftovers from the night before and dinner all the wonderful things you've been mentioning that's right i keep it really simple yeah you i can't emphasize that enough it's the simpler you make this you know the more monotonous you make this the better it will go in your life you won't have to think about what you're going to mix make you know fried rice dishes yeah so i make you know i make brown rice and um frozen vegetable mix and um i found this really great fat free teriyaki sauce and we add that to it and what else do i put in rice vegetables it's really good um oh baked baked tofu squares well that's just recently that's new she's been spoiling me lately we used to leave the tofu in the refrigerator for months but recently we've discovered that if we if we utilize it we cut it up and make little tiny squares out of it and put it in some soy sauce some marinade soy sauce and rice vinegar goes really nicely and um agave and yum you just bake it in the oven until the squares get kind of crispy and all the liquid is absorbed and you know there's actually a recipe for that i believe online and in the app cookbook but there's one in the the last book we did the healthiest diet on the plan that was your that was your your last book right mary yeah that's probably the last book we'll ever do i'm done i'm done writing books so yeah anyway i did i did uh i i if you'd like i'll just take a minute and introduce you to the website oh please oh yeah i might be doing i might be doing some new recipes for the website now and then so um we'll keep i'll keep thinking about it you know all right well you know it's kind of interesting uh the website comes out it's supposed to be launched today but unfortunately it's going to be a couple more days but uh not that i'm comparing our work to albert einstein but it's kind of interesting that a hundred years has passed and still we have the same plea and that is to save our planet with a good diet albert einstein said nothing will benefit human health or increased chances for survival of life on earth i mean how did he know a hundred years ago as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet and one of the statements that i make in this website is diet is the most powerful and the most neglected tool we have for mitigating climate change anyway uh this is this is some some of the pages from the website and i'll let you know hopefully this week it'll be launched but here are some of the pages we'll put an announcement out there oh yeah we'll put it now i don't know what happened you see anything aging i know i just see black dr mcdougall well me too i better do this again you could tell us if you can't get it to work yeah oh you know what let's see uh you know what i i know what i need to do sorry there you go okay so anyway there's some of the pages uh there's a short introduction that mary and i do to get people's attention and it starts out we're going to redo this video it starts out with a video that asks is there something one person can do you know besides driving a hybrid or an electric car and recycling what is there one one one thing another a person could do that will make a difference and mary and i of course come back and tell you yes you know you can reduce your output of global warming gases by 80 overnight and that half the half the greenhouse gases are due to the agricultural industry animal agriculture and then this website talks about four dietary deceptions four deadly dietary receptions that not only have been killing people but are killing our planet and that's the belief that we need to have protein and calcium as primary nutrients in our diet we don't need this emphasis this is just to sell meat and dairy products and then it discusses fish oil too another deadly dietary deception and those are all really negative things that occur as a consequence of bad food choices and the other deception is the idea that that starches somehow are bad foods they've been maligned by so many people so the four dietary deceptions are discussed there in this particular website i talk about not a vegan diet not the mcdougall diet even though i i have to tell you as i've worked through this project i i have to say that you know there's no other diet there that will reach the goals of planet saving more than what we've put together over the last 50 years every other diet has some kind of compromise that i object to like add a little seafood or etcetera so anyway what i decided to do instead of calling the mcdougall diet of the vegan diet i've decided to call it a traditional diet just like i presented for you in this lecture i showed you that these are diets of everybody everybody has walked this earth except for a few crazies over the last 50 to 100 years and then we offer a free program uh which is based on of course the original website and there are a bunch of lectures that i've done and uh i'll be doing more just recently i did a lecture with dan buettner the blue zone guy and with dean ornish and i'll be doing a whole bunch of other experts but one thing this tone of this website is going to have is a tone of optimism there are so many people out there saying that we're in huge trouble but they don't offer us any solutions on getting out of trouble except for the obvious you know take care of big oil etc this whole website is dedicated to what we can do i i can't give up you know i'm not gonna i'm not gonna sit back and say we're done you know the planet's a big trouble but we still aren't done i still have some fight in me and so do you and uh experts around the world who are really studying this issue they've clearly said you know taking care of the fossil fuel problems are not going to do it for us we're too far beyond that we have to fix the food we have to fix the diet of the entire planet so there are people besides me who know this the question is is will the population of planet earth listen to us well this is why i put this website up it's taken us a year to develop it is i it's a way of me sticking my hand up above the crowd and saying look at me look at look at what we have we have the kind of approach that we need to get the planet healthy again who knows you know it was just a year of my time and small amount of investment from our foundation but if we get noticed wow wouldn't that be something anyway i think you'll like to come and visit this website on occasion uh it's certainly going to appreciate your support but the whole goal is going to be to bring an optimistic point of view as far as saving ourselves and i'll leave it to the other guys to tell you how much trouble we're in well who's going to fill your shoes so i'm not going any place oh good that's good hey people are asking what annual exams you both get no none not even dental you don't even go to the dentist yeah well i don't know why are your teeth cleaned probably our teeth cleaned yeah we have um you know well we don't have x-rays every time we go to the dentist yeah there's uh there's the whole article i did under working with mds it's on the website under hot topics and it talks to you about the annual physical examination and how every every organization including the american medical association recommends against getting an annual physical because all you're doing is you're finding problems that would have never troubled the person you're costing the person money you're sending them off to further tests and treatments they never would have needed to do more harm than good by these annual exams and that's why every organization that i'm aware of has told the general public not to get an annual physical examination now what you should have checked is you should have your hearing your sight your teeth checked when you get into your older years to see how they're doing and maybe to have a little help in those areas like glasses and uh anyway pap smears i recommend pap smears and sexually active women between the ages of say 28 and 50. and i explained to you why and well no maybe i need to give you a lecture on early detection tests and i also recommend one colon exam around age 60 just one either a sigmoid exam or a series of stool tests for blood or genetic material i don't recommend sigma i don't recommend colonoscopies too dangerous and let's see anything else you don't recommend mammograms no no stay away from psa testing mammograms breastfeeding what do you think dr mcdougall to the person you know because i don't i don't get any of that but i don't tell other people what to do because they have a right to do what they want but the person that didn't get the mammogram and then got cancer and then gets upset because they listened to the doctors that said don't get them well you know you of course want to believe that you're going to be saved you know in in studies like the cochrane collaboration and the studies that they did and they said that out of 2 000 women screened one of them would have her life saved but 10 would have their lives destroyed because of over diagnosis that had never come down with cancer and 200 would have to go for further testing and treatment so more harm than good is done uh that doesn't reassure the person who says yeah but i i'm the one in ten thousand that it saved well yeah okay you can look at it that way but looking at it from a general health point of view i don't think this is well spent money however if we took all that money which is you know 20 billion dollars a year at least on just the mammograms not not the the follow-up business of further testing and treatment just for mammograms what if we took that 20 billion dollars and we would put on morning cartoons for the kids teaching them how to eat or you know regulating industry so that they can't put out foods like i just showed you in this presentation without a serious serious warning from the surgeon general they just to sell you things that have 1200 1300 calories a meal half fat in a meal that should have a warning i would think anyway we could better spend our money uh aj if we were really interested in the health of people but for a whole bunch of reasons it doesn't work out that way cheryl wants to know have you ever talked to senator cory booker or now the new york city mayor eric adams no i sure would like to though we sure would like i mean you know mayor adams of course he's a fellow who was very very sick with western diseases and he got better because he was influenced by the kind of thinking that we try and teach you i think it was neil bernard and esselstyn that got to him and uh yeah but occasionally there's a blip out there amongst all this craziness you know like bill clinton saved himself some heart disease that was good and now we have uh we have adams who saved himself from diabetes very very sick man so he'll stand up there in the crowd for a while but how long you know when it when is it going to be enough that people are going to make serious changes so far i have to tell you i've been disappointed uh when i discovered this i told you back in 1977 1976 i thought i'd be the most popular doctor in the world i mean i know how to cure heart disease and diabetes believe me you know there's there's not there's not a huge line outside my office door still but uh it's becoming better and more and more people are listening and it's word of mouth you get better you tell your friends and relatives that they have the same option all they have to do is change what they eat here it's free on this website or you can buy this book for 50 cents at the store or you could come to our our 12 day program and we'll help you through it we will help you through it we'll get you off the drugs get your health back get you learning and liking the food we'll do that we're real good we've been doing this for all for more than 44 years we've been doing this so people want to know where they can get the bean pizza recipe oh actually i don't think there is one um do i have a yeah there must be will you buy the pizza crust yeah you look for a pizza crust that's all already pre-made um there are several brands out there that are are um do you want me to try and get some other cover no there aren't any in there okay they have to buy some new ones um or you can make your own pizza crust way recipes online for making your own pizza crust which is really easy um and then i just spread uh refried beans that i make which are not refried of course they're just mashed pinto beans over there slow cooker cooked in my slow cooker but you could cook them on the stove or in an instant pot or you could use canned beans or you could use the um santa fe bean flakes that are fat-free already mashed beans that's simple i have really really simple to make and you just mix some bean flakes with water and you have refried beans that are fat free and you can season them the way you like to but i just keep them plain and then i put um a can of [Music] roasted um dice green pep um jalapenos on the top of it and some black olives and um some salsa tomatoes a lot of them do that until after that i put it in the oven and bake it and then when it comes out of the oven i add shredded lettuce and some avocado and tomatoes that sounds delicious and hot sauce i'll tell you it's it's it's amazing it's one of the best pizzas you ever had too that sounds amazing i love my food well you couldn't have done it this long if you didn't i don't think it's you know it's not it's not about suffering i and i think most people even those who are heavy heavy into the western diet can see that they get great enjoyment of certain things that we recommend and that's the things you need to keep in your diet you may be a rice lover or potato lover a bread lover or pasta lover you know you like some of these foods i i don't believe they've perverted your taste so much maybe they have that you don't even recognize what food tastes like maybe that's something i have recipes that that are based on you know traditional foods like lasagna and um you know the tofu tacos that i make that are based off of a fish taco and the macaroni and cheese that i make with the the potato cheese type dressing or sauce and so there's a lot of recipes that are familiar and you say you just look for those things that you already like and you make the healthy version and that becomes your new favorite yeah i've never heard this question been asked before dr mcdougall people are asking about your foundation can you talk about it and the work of it well it was we established it in 2003 and uh we've been it's a 501c3 and we've done you know some pretty interesting work we did the study at ohsu out of the foundation we also did our in-house study out of the foundation we've donated a few dollars here and there like to dr clapper and his movement of educating people across the country back when he was doing that and we also uh had a program where we paid for the travel and housing expenses for medical students from any place in the world that they wanted to come and train with us now that has and we've not restarted that even though i've restarted my association with the medical school or one that i work with pretty closely but so far we've not been able to build in a medical training program with the telemedicine option i don't know why because to me this is what young doctors ought to be learning is telemedicine and that's the kind of practice that i think they ought to be building for themselves it's much better than having to go to an office or a hospital every day but anyway we will be taking more students so we educate students we educate the public we do some scientific research and now this new project is is that we're educating the public about the importance of diet and saving the planet the planet is our new patient so hopefully you'll all jump on board and say this is really worthwhile i'm afraid that if you don't you will learn that it is worthwhile as time goes on i hate to say it but it's climate change is going to become more relevant every every day every week every month that we continue on the course that we're on i'm not going to give up you know we can make a difference even if it seems overwhelming if there's just one chance in a billion that we could help i'm gonna try wouldn't you i bet you would uh people want to know if you both exercised on a daily basis we walk that's about all we do every day every day we walk you want to see you want to see my exercise bike we got one over here in the corner that's for the days we don't walk but usually we like to walk we have a really great park and a wonderful walkway just outside our condo and so you know friends about a mile every day and a really nice walk in the summer we do more yeah a couple miles every day more walking explore the city nice that's great let's see oh i don't know why judy wants to know if you're o positive or o negative dr mcdougall so you're you're the universal donor right so you can give to everybody that's what they say yeah and i've given blood before i you know i've unfortunate i've received blood before too mary do you know your blood type hey hey you probably have little feet you should be nice i should be eating meat i knew it that's a foot and mouth diet that is hilarious i love that let's see if there's any other questions just a lot of nice comments for you guys oh well we know the i know the i could almost tell a lot of these stories but how did you two meet i think i remember wasn't it in an operating room and all you could see was her eyes yeah i was i was working on pinning a hip which you know it was on the orthopedic surface of course when i say i was working on it i probably was holding a retractor i was a medical student and uh mary was our surgical nurse and uh yeah i don't know what hit me but i haven't recovered since that day and yeah we met in an operating room it took me three weeks to get a date she wouldn't go out with me finally she why wouldn't you at first mary i mean he was obviously very good looking he showed a picture of with a cat actually i had a different boyfriend at the time she had a social calendar that didn't fit me and now so i was um a little hesitant and then finally i decided well i really didn't didn't see a future with this other guy you know wasn't my one true love so i decided to go out with him and then um [Music] broke the news to my other boyfriend and um stayed with john for the rest of my life do you know what happened to him by any chance no i don't i don't oh you know there were so many boyfriends in the past she can't remember them all that's a problem i was busy working and learning how to be a doctor nose to the grindstone you know and she was out there having fun here this this is a fun question from gloria when you guys are out walking do you tell anybody um if they're eating badly no no no we sometimes are tempted we sometimes make comments particularly if it's a child you know or you can see the pain that comes you know some people but we don't make comments no just to ourselves ourselves we don't make comments to the mother or the child i i i'm tempted at times and uh but i've learned not to do that well we do talk amongst ourselves about the people we see because everywhere you go that's what you see yeah it's just really really sad to see so many overweight sickly people although i have to admit here in portland we have this great running track around the park that's in front of our condo and so there are a lot of thin people here um that [Music] we don't see when we go into the grocery store or some of the other places here but we do see a lot we do meet a lot of thin people out walking nice a question from diana will you ever join heather on her instagram lives well probably not right now when i go to i go to instagram once in a while but i don't know what to do when i get there and so um it's just one of those things that you know we're this that age has passed we're past that age you know for us learning the computer world was a big deal now all these other things these facebooks and instagrams you know the twitters and this is way beyond i know anything i really want to learn i i wouldn't even know how to do twitter i agree with you i wish i wish it would go away and i wish there was i just of course i'm i'm on social media but i love youtube it's a little different but the other ones hey so ridwana says would you be interested if someone wanted to make a movie about your life i would love to read both of your autobiographies and dr mcdougall if there was a movie about your life who would play you well i know i don't either anyway uh i have to tell you that it would be interesting it would be it would be very interesting we we've had we've had a very blessed life uh just put it that way we've had great fortune uh i don't mean in terms of gathering money but we've had great fortune in so many ways wonderful children and we did everything that we wanted to do we don't have to look back and say i wish i would have you know there was a time when mary's dad wanted me to pay off the house and i wanted to buy an airplane well i bought an airplane you know i mean i finally got the house paid off but you know that took years but if you know that was the time in life when i felt like i wanted to fly an airplane marriage and when our two oldest kids were younger we had a big sailboat yeah and we sailed between the hawaiian islands so we didn't leave anything behind even if we had to go tremendously in debt we did pretty much everything that we should have been doing at that time traveling you know we started the adventure business we traveled all over central and south america in hawaii so we had a chance to show our family i could share the world and yeah so you know we would have an interesting story to tell you not all of it was good either there'd be a few chapters in there there you probably realize that we're just like you are we had some tough times too i'm asking people in the chat who they think should play you guys it's uh um i'm getting i've never heard of an actor named christopher waltz but people are saying christopher waltz leonardo dicaprio richard gare meryl streep for mary harrison ford yeah you guys are you also coming now that would be amazing yeah i vote for meryl streep why not and you may as well have the best right marilyn says what kind of oatmeal do you eat in the morning is it rolled out steel cut oats oat growths instant oats bob's red mill if i buy it in the 40 pound bag then we scoop it out and keep it in a um a sealed container that's how often we have oatmeal as i get the i think it's 40 pounds or maybe it's 20. it was just a great big bag and you know that lasts us for lasts for a couple of months not that long so we remember we buy two two of those bags at a time yeah we buy we buy a lot of food that we eat all the time we buy it from a from us a restaurant supply house because that way we don't have to carry so many things home for the grocery store helps that way and it will probably save a little money that way too but we buy well it helps in packaging too you don't have to yeah you don't waste all those packages so you might consider doing that you might consider find some warehouse store this is where we go to the one called western webster restaurant that's pretty good store cool linda wants to know if you're going to be doing your mcdougall advanced study weekends anymore maybe no we we we all we have the desire like everybody else to get back to normal and uh we will never change the telemedicine program i don't think we'll ever run a live-in program again just just too ineffective but somehow getting together with people we really miss and we used to gather together quite often 300 people from around the world that would get together with us in santa rosa california we'd invite a whole bunch of guests speakers and entertainment that was fun but maybe even more fun would be to go on another adventure trip but if we how about if we ran the ship will you guys come we used to do that we used to put you know 75 100 000 on the ship and hope you showed up and you did luckily but that was you know we have been risk takers to say the least oh i like this one clint eastwood for you dr mcdougall that's a good that's a good one we actually had a chance to meet him at one of dean orange's weddings wow that's that's cool he's thin too i'll tell you he's really thin yeah but he's probably not vegan i think he is actually i think he is oh that's amazing i would you know being good friends with dean i i would find it you i don't i don't know for a fact that he is but you know they're good friends and and i thought we'd think dean would have as good as he looks i mean good grief he's little older guy he looks good yeah question if you were a smoker but quit can any of that damage be reversed well tons of it has been you know i'm talking from personal experience i have 20 pack years in me so you know how do i count pacquiao pacquiao's well i had ten years two packs a day that's 20 pack years oh okay 20 pack here so if i smoke 10 years two packs a day sometimes three that's tempting my lungs see how much like abuse they can survive do you guys ever test your body i mean really have you ever tested it that you have it's tough so yeah yeah we recover yeah you know the more damage the more permanent damage you have the less your ability to recover but the body is amazing its ability to recover thank goodness you could do the advanced study weekend online if you didn't want to do it in person you think so i don't know well maybe maybe we've talked about it well you did everything you're doing everything else great online what would be the interest i mean how how would you appeal to somebody to tune in you'd have different guests yeah you'd get people like get cory booker you know people that aren't maybe as easy to get well that would be really nice if we get people that you know al gore and bill clinton and michelle obama and cory booker michelle obama's vegan by the way i think her husband is too but i wouldn't say it publicly you just did i did i wouldn't want to hurt his career yeah but michelle i have a tape of her being on jay leno's show feeding jay a vegan meal you still have that oh yeah i'll show it sometimes you'd like it was really interesting yeah that that is interesting well yeah well thank you guys so much for the work you do and for never uh retiring we appreciate that what are you going to do look for it i i find it mary dr mcdougall always talks about how he only sleeps like four or five hours a night do you do you sleep a little bit longer i sleep a little bit longer yes i sleep probably um seven hours tonight i'll have to get it for you some other time what do you do with all that extra time if you don't sleep he gets up and works yeah he reads journals everything's online these days so he can read all of his journals online yeah you know mail all the journals just to come in the mail and i'd have piles of journals sitting around the house and now everything's online so he can just in the morning just read journals wow chelsea says is the mcdougall diet good for pregnancy dr mcdougall wrote an entire book about that a book about women's health women's health right january 2011 newsletter did you hear that january 2011 newsletter is about a pregnancy and the mcdougall lie and how to feed yourself um when i was when i was pregnant with craig our last child i gained 15 pounds and when i left the hospital i weighed less than i did before i got pregnant and my car was littered with rice cakes i ate rice cakes all the time when i was hungry while there weren't that many um vegan snacks or things easy to carry around um you know 39 years ago and so i had rice rice cakes all the time and my car and they when they when you eat them they crumble and so my car was always littered with rice cake crumbs that's funny that is funny really easy pregnancy so the way dr mcdougall remembers states maybe has he ever thought about going on jeopardy oh no he wouldn't he he's good at dates but he's not good at the trivia stuff i'm good at things that i've written yeah i can tell you where i'm telling where every period paragraph is can you influence hospitals to serve good food where do you start every time that questions come up the doctors have said that hospitals get ratings and if the patients don't like the food they give them bad ratings well i changed two hospitals both of them were adventist hospitals one was castle in kailua hawaii the other was saint helena in the napa valley and we had actually community support and they would serve a mcdougal entree or two or three mcdougall entrees depending upon which what time it was and you know which cafeteria we're talking about but it actually was quite popular so you know seventh-day adventist hospitals are they have a religion that promotes good health and vegetarian eating and by the way i'm not a seventh-day adventist i know nothing about their religion i just happen to be a very acceptable doctor in their hospitals so yeah you could i had uh you know when i when i first brought my program to saint lina and introduced the diet you know it was no fat no oil no dairy no meat you know and uh pretty pretty soon they had a meeting over my my program and the diet that i served and they wanted me to take all the spice and all the pepper out of the food all the spices of all kinds because adventists don't believe in you know in spicy and they wanted to take the vinegar don't believe in spoiled food or they're spicy so they came to me and they insisted that i take all the vinegar and all the spicing out of the food and i said i got nothing left so we had a meeting and i explained to them that first of all that i got to make the food taste decent so we need to put a little salt and pepper and spice and vinegar etc on the food to make it i've given up everything and then what i did is i really fixed them i said you know what i said i can go up to the doctor's lounge here i can find coffee in the doctor's lounge that's against your religion i said i can go to the next cafeteria over to the employee's cafeteria i can find tabasco sauce which is pepper and vinegar together that you serve to the employees and i went down the line by the time i got done they gave up but what happened was kind of interesting during the the next four programs you couldn't eat the potatoes because the amount of pepper they put in them they sure showed me anyway uh well the food at the flamingo was much better when we did our live-in program at the flamingo hotel because they used my recipes yeah mary and heather went in and taught him for 11 months yeah but we at the same way the hospital you have to realize this is a hospital cafeteria hospital kitchen i even brought in professional chefs to try and get them to learn how to make the food right you know i paid for it and it was always hospital food no matter what you did to it it was hospital food did any of them change like i know when you taught them that did any of the chefs at the hospital at the hotel like change their diet because of what they learned well yeah we had a lot of the staff you know lost a hundred pounds we we used to parade the staff in almost every program and so and so that served them you know the meals had lost 60 pounds or 100 pounds had diabetes yeah it happened all the time we i even had doctors at st lina hospital and castle hospital follow my program even though they wouldn't recommend their patients to it i was i was at st hospital for 16 years i i got not a single referral from fellow doctors in 16 years i took care of them i took care of their spouses i took care of their children somehow or another they never found it worthwhile to send their patients to me so and i gave a couple of conferences where i explained all the benefits that we had to offer and uh each conference i said you know it's rather unique that this is a community that doesn't have any dietary diseases and you know how i know that you haven't referred me a single patient in 16 years you can imagine how much fun i am at a conference are you in touch with anyone you went to medical school with did they see what we're having our 50th year reunion this year 50 years we're meeting in east lansing michigan or at least those of us willing to travel are going to meet there do any of them know what came of you yeah some of them do quite a few though we're a real close school we only had 28 students and uh you were the first class right first class at michigan state i think only because of michigan state was i uh would i be a doctor today if i'd have gone to a more traditional medical school you know one that had a reputation to defend and so on it had thrown me out so fast uh i i you know you think i'm challenging today i've been this way my whole life you know and the professors would say something i knew was wrong you know i wasn't politically correct when i pointed it out and you're still not which is why we love you i got in trouble we you know it's it's uh that's just kind of my personalities i see a problem i've got an answer for it that i think should be expressed and i do it's just like when mary and i first went to uh to hong kong on the big island hawaii and we had our first two children at honokaa hospital where you know i was one of the very few doctors and and uh when we saw what the the situation was for the birthing and how terrible the women and the children and the families were treated we got we got things changed the hospital i was at honokaa hospital was the first hospital to allow husbands in the delivery room and it was the first hospital that allowed the babies to be with the mothers after birth they used to take the babies and stick them in a separate cold dreary room with no pictures and and they all bring the babies to see the mothers at feeding time that's the way they used to treat him i i said this has got to stop and so we made it so the mothers would have their babies from the time of birth until the time they went home the third thing i got changed was was i got women to go home right after their childbirth in other words it used to be a woman i have to stay well my mother used to stay a week after the birth of a child but it was oh you know at least a couple of days at that time and women wanted to go home they said we're not sick so you know i got anyway i it was the first hospital to have husbands in the living room to have uh to have the baby situation fixed and to have uh and to have women go home immediately after delivery which is what mary did after her deliveries she's not not sick i just had a baby let's get out of here that's funny oh certainly they would they would worry about me i said i'm getting up i'm gonna go take a shower and they'd stand by the shower door worried i was going to fall down or something and they'll say are you all right oh yeah i said i'm fine i'm just taking the shower and i'm going to go home that's hilarious the birth of heather we had to get clearance from a pediatrician from our obstetrician otherwise they wouldn't let us go home i don't know how they thought they were going to keep me but but anyway we finally went home with their permission about an hour or two after the delivery but it's it's you know it's it's just my personality it's not going to change i'm going to be a real foreign wherever i think needs to be properly pricked i suppose that's the right way to save them i'm sure you've gotten this question before but eric says dr mcdougall do you recommend some nuts alongside with salads or cruciferous vegetables to aid absorption not necessary you know the idea that you need to uh and i actually wrote about this you can find it in on my website under hot topics i think under uh under fats and oils it's under the section about fats files under nutrition hot topics and there's an article which uh which shows that uh when you eat oil along with your tomatoes and avocados and so on you absorb more nutrients but it's not necessary because you absorb all the nutrients you need without the oil you know once you've taken enough nutrients how would more help you once you once you've filled all the requirements how would more help you you know it's like hey taking a car that has uh has six cylinders 12 spark plugs once you've filled up all the holes in the the cylinders with spark plugs what what is what's 14 smartphones going to do for you or 22. put them on put them on the dashboard you know throw them in the trunk and once you've supplied all your needs why do you need more more is better right no that's not the case people are always worried about deficiencies when the true cause of most disease is excess yeah and again that's one of those obvious things that aj that people should be able to see is you have no friends with protein deficiency no friends with calcium deficiency no friends with scurvy no friends with barry berry you don't have any you got problems you got prob people close enough for you to touch or dying of obesity diabetes heart disease cancer suffering with constipation headaches arthritis right in front of you you can you know i've never seen any of the problems i just mentioned about in terms of deficiency disease i've never seen protein deficients i've never seen scurvy i've never seen berry berry so karen says why do all the brain doctors recommend nuts and seeds and some even oils now you can't use doctors as an excuse for recommending good nutrition the average the average number of hours spent in nutrition education in four years of medical school is three and my medical school training i got one hour of nutritional education it was on how to choose between different infant formulas you know the joke goes that a a secretary and a doctor know as much about nutrition unless the secretary happens to be on a diet then she knows more you know it's just a joke we're taught biochemical formula still to this day there's no dietary therapy taught in other words what what i practice in other words fixing the food so i can help you get well is not taught you know it just they know a little bit about the biochemistry the pathways et cetera but as far as applying a bean to a kidney problem they have no idea still to this day well there are some doctors out there that are not money married no i can't i can't you know who who practices this way maybe neil brenner yeah yeah he's a practicing doctor uh clapper does yeah but these are my friends well there are some other ones that we've heard about oh not many not many a few well if they are they're rebels and they don't always do it in the right way and somewhere else they're prescribing a bunch of health food olive oils oils but you know they rebelled against the standard what i'm talking about is the standard education that goes on doctors know nothing about nutrition unless they are self-educated or in some way got exposed but not through their medical training three percent of the board questions had anything to do with nutrition dr mcdougall where do you stand on things like beyond meat impossible burger and even lab-grown meat not interested it says first of all it's not going to solve the problem you're never going to you're never going to produce enough grown meat or plant-based meat to supply the calorie needs of the people on this planet you can only do that with starch potatoes rice corn etc so it's not going to solve the problem and plus you know it it reaffirms that meat eating is normal and natural to tell you that if you're not going to get the real dead animal we're going to make one that looks and tastes and smells just like the dead animal you're used to so the dead animal must be proper nutrition there's a problem here but i look at okay so i i look at it from a cruelty standpoint and if people aren't going to stop eating meat wouldn't it be better if there was lab grown meat than to keep torturing the animals the way we are that's that's the excuse but it's not going to solve the problem i'm interested in the big problems solving the i'm not interested in fixing the dinner plate of some rich folk that can afford fake meat as opposed to as opposed to real meat those are just for the privileged few not for the masses i'm interested in the masses yeah linda says why do you think there aren't more doctors furthering their education by learning about plant-based nutrition because they can't make a living doing it the the the medical practice is based on a seven-minute office visit that is is consummated by the signing of a prescription pad next that that's that's what the medical practice is based on a general practice of medicine you can't sit down and talk to your people properly educate them in that kind of payment system i get paid same amount for a visit where i write you a prescription of the same amount for a visit where i spend three hours with you trying to teach you about good food so we have to change the payment system for people to become interested and not only would that help doctors become interested but patients would say hey this must be important my insurance company is paying for it you know whereas you know seldom do you find insurance companies paying for education and if if they do it's a lot of rigmarole you have to go through to get what i would consider very ineffective education dr ornish his program is now covered by medicare it is yeah it is and so is the pritikin program i believe but dean dean started all that with uh but he says that he went through many many years of hard work to get medicare to approve it we're not interested uh it's not something that we've decided to get involved in it's the we don't have enough time left no no no what what are you talking about to get us to get our program approved by an instructor many years ago we probably could i mean we have scientific studies that support our program so i think it's just a matter of a small application we've been covered but right now we don't the program is so inexpensive yeah it's well that i had dr dexter sherney on last week he was a past president of the american college of lifestyle medicine he said the same thing he's a good man yeah he said you have to change the payment structure yeah yeah well you know he he along with a few other people know the difference as far as i remember dexter does not put this into much practice so he but he does know an awful lot i've i've worked with him a bit yeah so what's next on the agenda either for you or for uh when you come back well i don't know what would you like to talk would owe you a lecture on autoimmune diseases and i owe you a lecture on high blood pressure and uh whatever probably all your lecture on bowel problems but it's pretty hard to top the ball lecture i've already done yeah well people love people uh gi tract especially now with all the interest in the microbiome people really are interested in gi stuff that just shows how basic we are to be interested in playing with poop go figure i'd i'd rather deal with the the part that you put in thank you very much that's much much more much more palatable that's for sure well you guys are just so fun talking to this is like this is like an extended fireside chat yeah well thank you aj well now you guys are always welcome and it's just such an honor to host you and as long as you'd like to come on you will have a place on my dance card that's for sure anybody impressing you guys lately is there anybody up and coming that you're saying oh thank goodness you know they're like any of the younger plant-based doctors or influencers that you have your eye on nothing i can think of no and that's what we're worried about yeah well what about what about craig like he doesn't want to step into the limelight no craig craig craig well he did this for a while and it was it was kind of hard for him considering who he had for a dad and uh so he kept the enthusiasm up for oh maybe 10 years actually went to kaiser and established the first dietary rules or they don't know how far they went as far as feeding a healthy diet to kaiser patients but you know and he gave lectures around town he gave lectures sure he did a nice job it wasn't his you know what he really wanted to do right now he works for ohsu he's a full professor there and you know we're talking talking about things like what releasing you're going to do in the next part of his life and things like maybe become a hospital administrator you know he's that's the kind of thing he's interested in he's smart he's personable really easy to get along with and and good looking i might add you know he's not he's not a good grief at his age i was just getting started that's amazing well thank you guys so much it's just so fun talking to you and i look forward to whatever you decide to bring back but i know all those topics are good a lot of people do have autoimmune disease and it seems to be increasing well we can talk about that i'll give you a kind of a short lecture this lecture today was um there was an awful lot of material to cover i know because i always have to re-watch it and then what we do afterwards is we we edit out just the lecture part and put that up with some people maybe just want to see that and that's that's that and we'll always be happy to give that to you all right well that's the intention uh aj that's why i really appreciate you giving me the time to talk to your audience because it's much more real for me than to sit and just talk to a computer and what i've done is i've put into put together a series of lectures of what i would tell you if i was your doctor and someday i won't have that luxury but we'll have it on film this is what i want you to know about breast cancer heart disease weight and usually i start out with a uh with a underlying crucial principle for you to understand so that you can follow you understand the whole rest of the story about about medical care like for example when i gave you the lecture on heart disease a couple of weeks ago i told you that heart attacks are caused by these volatile plaques that rupture not by the hard fibrous scars now once you know that you understand why heart surgery doesn't save lives you know you understand why you have to deal with it in the point of view of food you know in the lecture on diabetes i explained to you about insulin receptors and insulin and you know how the food affects whether or not your body is able to to deal with blood sugar and you know a normal adaption to excess calories is you become a type 2 diabetic and insulin resistance you know once you understand that that basic fundamental information then it all makes sense to you same thing with breast cancer once i told you that it's a 10 year old disease by the time you find it aha i see why mammography and early detection doesn't work it's already been grown 10 years and in this lecture today i tried to share with you the basic issues of calorie density the fat you eat is the fat you wear and carbohydrate satisfies the hunger drive once you understand that everything else makes sense anyway that's how i'm trying to start structuring these lectures is to give you the give you the aha the really important part in the beginning and then let the rest kind of flow and for sure that you understand why things are the way they are well it's going to let you go but this question appeared twice how do you feel about bone density tests unreliable bone density tests are unreliable they measure the mineral in the bone and if you go to my hot topics under osteoporosis you'll find the first article is a discussion about how by age 70 almost 70 percent of women flunk their bone mineral density test this is normal you're supposed to have an extra two pounds of mineral during your reproductive years to grow the baby and to nurse the baby after your reproductive years in other words you go through menopause you don't need to carry this extra two pounds of mineral along so you dump it out of your system and you naturally normally probably preferably you end up with a lower bone mineral density test and that's why that's why two-thirds of women flunk the test when they get in their 70s either have osteoporosis or osteopenia so no i i would not rely upon that test and this that test just leads you to a bunch of drugs when you should be getting a good diet low protein diet low acid diet walking around getting some sunshine that's what you should be doing maybe maybe you should use a little hormone replacement therapy or a little anti-acid that might be reasonable too that's as far as i'll go as being a real doctor because these osteoporosis drugs they're they're they're pretty darn useless yeah you know they're a little bit useful but not much and quite dangerous and costly so anyway get out of the business just just go home and eat walk around get a little sunshine stay away from doctors you know i have something like a broken record to me you knew yeah eat a damn potato that's what i say right well you know just to just to end this thing it says 100 years ago einstein told us that saving the planet will depend upon change into a vegan diet it's the same message that i'm carrying today with the website and the reason that you ought to stop and listen you ought to listen to what i have to say and they're trying to tell you truth don't change the truth don't change you know if you have it right if you have it correct it's correct so you find people out there changing their mind being progressive something new you know like i really question what's going on albert einstein knew 100 years ago that this planet was going to be in big trouble and the only way we're going to fix it with is with a vegetarian diet and i'm trying to tell you that today that's why i hope you'll you'll get involved in the website and i hope the website develops into something that you'd you'll be uh you'll find very educational very helpful well and thank you for making almost everything you do available for free great yeah well you guys have a great lunch it sounds like you're having leftovers we're having leftovers yeah and i have i've had the same thing dr mcdougall you said years ago you could have sweet potatoes and broccoli every day so basically i do and that's just still my favorite meal so that's what i'll be having that sounds good aj well thank you again for the opportunity to talk to all these nice folks thanks and we'll see you very soon and thanks all of you for watching another episode of chef aj live please come back in about a half hour i have another show today at 2 p.m we're going to be talking beans with chili smith take care

Channel: CHEF AJ

Views: 157,344

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

Id: P8eZkLVJEJw

Length: 198min 46sec (11926 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 07 2022