Doctor Reveals How Water Fasting Unlocks Secret Healing Powers | Dr. Alan Goldhamer on Health Theory

and they all say the same thing, including my mother, who at 92 had outlived her 50 lifelong friends, every one of her friends was dead, she was alone and she said,

alan

, you need to warn your patients if they're going to do this diet. make younger friends Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of

health

theory

. I'm here today with Dr. Alan Goldhamer, founder of True North Health Center, a leader in the field of plant-based nutrition. I'm really excited to talk to you because I come from a um, I won't say completely meat-based approach, but I'm no stranger to knowing it, so first of all, welcome to the show, thank you for having me.

I was very intrigued by something I heard you talk about. and this was really what drew me into your world, which is that if you go to the

doctor

today, they don't really expect you to get better and that gave me chills just saying it now and when I first heard it. At that moment I thought, "Oh my God, that's so true, that's not the paradigm, why isn't it the paradigm? Well, you know in medicine, especially for conditions like high blood pressure, diabetes, autoimmune diseases." , certain forms of cancer, such as lymphoma, which make up a significant percentage of the problems that people have, medical management is just that it is management, they will tell you to take these medications and you will take them for the rest of your life because you they will guarantee that you will never get better, then the reason why that is because the medications have nothing to do with the reason you got sick and they are strictly trying to control the consequences of your illness and today, for example, conditions like blood pressure high you are not even being treated for your condition. you are being treated for your diet you are being treated for the diet that causes hypertension the diet that causes 40 percent of people over 25 and 63 percent of people over 60 to have high blood pressure. high blood pressure to be the leading cause of death and disability the main justification for prescription drugs is a huge multi-million dollar business and what is really ironic is that it is completely treatable in the vast majority of cases through diet and intervention in the Lifestyle.

You know, we did a study, with medical supervision,

water

-only

fasting

. the treatment of hypertension 174 consecutive patients 174 people achieved a pressure low enough to eliminate the need for medication we have the largest effect size ever demonstrated in the treatment of high blood pressure in humans with an average effect size of 60 points in stage 3 hypertension without taking into account the The fact that most of these people are medicated when they start, none of them are medicated when we finish and it is sustainable as long as they are willing to adopt a food-free diet whole vegetables, okay, so sos is that international symbol of danger. or it also means salt, oil and sugar, the chemicals added to food that make people fat and miserable and give them conditions like high blood pressure, given my propensity for meat from the point of view of how it makes me feel and from a

health

point of view, I would say the fact that Your diet is so harsh that I would never have thought that it would be you who would attract me with your stance on this, so I want, I want to take things piece by piece, like this First I want to talk about the truth.

Up north, the things you see at the clinic are what really attracted me, so I tell people when you founded it. I was surprised how long you've been like this and you talk to me about how many people you've been with. I had a good time at your clinic, so my wife, Dr. Moreno, and I started True North Health in 1984, so we've been doing

doctor

-supervised

water

-only fasts for 36 years. We've fasted over 20,000 patients, so one thing I find is crazy just to give people a little context. When you started, you had to hire a defense attorney because of how

fasting

was perceived.

Explain it to us because we're in a weird time right now where I think fasting is catching on, but people aren't. I don't understand how far we've come, yeah, I mean, when I started fasting, the California medical quality control board at the time determined that recommending fasting to a patient constituted such a serious violation of the standard of medical practice that it went as far as to the level of criminal negligence so now to be fair we have gone from criminal charlatans to cutting edge researchers because you know fasting has gained some notoriety and our 501 c 3 true north health foundation is doing original research on the fasting and looking at some of these exotic biomarkers, there are other people like Walter Longo, who has been publishing some really fabulous work in high-impact journals talking about intermittent fasting and approaches that mimic fasting, and now you know that this has closed the door. circle and therefore the idea that people are sick. of dietary excess and that reversing the consequences of dietary excess may be the key to stimulating everything from autophagy to, you know, reducing acute phase reactive proteins associated with inflammation and increasing brain-derived neurotrophic factor in the brain to prevent Alzheimer's disease, all of these mechanisms that Fasting induces, many of them are the same biomarkers that change with exercise.

Exercise and fasting tend to impact these health-promoting disease reversal biomarkers and may be because both fasting and exercise reverse the consequences of dietary excess. It is a particularly refined dietary excess. foods, whether they are refined carbohydrates, sugars, oils, salt or refined meat, foods of animal origin that have been highly refined, any of them, these diets high in animal proteins and high in refined carbohydrates, these are the things that make people sick and miserable during this period. That's why we have this epidemic of chronic degenerative diseases because of what we put in our mouths. You know, it's interesting, just like you know, meat would be considered a whole food.

Processed meat products and processed animal food products, dairy products, etc., are completely different. effects on the body the same goes for complex carbohydrates, whole plant foods have a certain effect, but you refine them into sugars and flowers, now you get a completely different response. I want to get into the specifics of the diet and stuff, but first I want to revolve around fasting a little bit more, so do you have a sense of, okay, we've got this, it's incredibly good for you, we've got this that's part of it. of religious tradition that goes back to God knows how long it would seem if I'm not mistaken, virtually every major religion has some kind of application of fasting, so obviously there is a spiritual understanding of it and yet it becomes something that, once we talk about it medically, becomes so grossly misunderstood, maligned, attacked, is it just that the feeling of being hungry triggers this sense of urgency of "I have to eat", which makes people have what they want?

I'll call it a kind of deranged response. Is there anything else why people are very afraid of not eating? You are not sure exactly how long a period of time would result in its demise and you feel that way because you know that you are programmed to ensure that you overcome deprivation in a world of our ancient ancestors, scarcity was the dominant rule for most humans. didn't live long enough to reproduce and that was due to deprivation and scarcity, people didn't eat enough or couldn't avoid being eaten, so their basic instincts are to eat as much as they can, whenever they can, of the richest foods. concentrates. available and if you're lucky you might live long enough to reproduce, and those are your instincts.

We now live in a very natural environment of abundance and excess, but it never really happens in nature, except when you are human. We know that food is available. Animals don't suffer from obesity, even animals you think of as fat, like whales, actually have nine percent body fat, so they are lean, mean machines, and again you know that survival is eating enough and not they eat you that's true for all animals, because of our innovative capabilities we created a situation where we invented agriculture and we figured out how to get food and then we figured out how to refine and concentrate it and then we figured out how to raise animals, so we could raise a lot of food processing machines very rich essentially in the form of animals, so now we are in a situation where we can eat enough without even leaving the couch, we don't have to exercise, we pay other people to do it.

Do it, we call it the NFL, we sit on a couch, drink high-calorie beer, and participate in war games pretending we're part of the winning coalition. I love the way he describes things, it's quite surprising and I think over the course of the interview. people will notice that you're not afraid to contradict people or say what you think is right or carry a small fan in your pocket so that if someone starts smoking near you, you can blow the smoke back at them. face. There are many things about your personality that make you perfectly suited to focusing on what works and that's why I want to know why people see the profound effects of that and then two why you're so careful to always say under medical supervision why you do that .

No matter what we actually recommend, there are two types of fasting, there is short-term intermittent fasting that we recommend that people do every day, that everyone fasts every day for between 12 and 16 hours, depending on what their goal is, and that means don't eat at least three hours before you go to sleep, hopefully you go to sleep at a reasonable hour and that will give you 12 to 16 hours of fasting and an eight hour eating window, we recommend that in that eight-hour feeding window know that it is completely natural. The food diet that you consume excludes all chemicals, processed foods and other things, and by doing so, you get the quantity and quality of nutrients that you need and give yourself a 16-hour fasting period every day and, Cumulatively, this is believed to induce changes. and stimulates factors that promote

healing

, it also helps minimize overeating, so you know the net effect of that intermittent fasting that virtually everyone can do safely on their own is something that we recommend and then We periodically recommend that people take a longer period of time.

To do water only fasting in our clinic, we fast people for five to forty days and usually faster, two three four weeks, the time that should be done in one minute is only for obese people, no, no , not at all, in fact, most of them. of our patients is high blood pressure diabetes autoimmune diseases lymphoma and we also have healthy people who come for a shorter period of time like a week the reason we talk about supervision in that sense is number one, not everyone is a good candidate for fasting some people should not fast, give me something good, if people have, for example, cranial levels greater than 2.0, kidney function is inadequate, putting them on fast can cause their kidneys to stop working, which can lead to failure kidney and death, um, if they have cardiovascular problems, why have I never done it?

I heard that, but why would your kidney shoot up? Because when you fast you massively mobilize a detoxification response and the kidneys can only process a limited amount of material and if you overload the kidneys you end up with a situation of kidney failure and you already know that. I've heard recently that there have been people who have tried dry fasting and dry fasting particularly puts a heavy load on the kidney and there was a death associated with one of its proponents just because you know you have to have a solute for the kidneys to function.

You have to have a way to get the material that is moved out of the system. Why does fasting trigger detoxification? Well, if you think about it, when you are fasting, the body has nothing to do except mobilize its reserves and fast on water. particularly in a resting state, those reserves are predominantly fat. In fact, we recently did a study at True North Health Center where we used a dexa scanner with software that allows us to do full body composition which we have determined is not only Most of the fat is mobilized during fasting alone. water, but specifically in preferably visceral fat, so a person can lose, for example, 20 of their adipose tissue, but they will lose 50 to 60 percent of their visceral fat, which is really exciting much faster that, for example, being on a low carbohydrate diet in terms of the ratio of mobilization of visceral fat and subcutaneous fat and that fat contains a lot of fat-soluble materials and is where they are storedmany toxins when those fats are mobilized, you get an increasing load of PCBs and dioxin. pesticide residues, etc., all these fat-soluble nutrients are quickly mobilized, processed and eliminated, but it is necessary to have the ability to eliminate materials and most of those mature nutrients are eliminated in the urine, which is the blood that kidneys process and if a fat biopsy is performed. in any person you will find hundreds of different chemicals in various concentrations and if you trace how those chemicals got into the body, where they come from, obviously, if people take drugs or smoke, drink alcohol and eat food from contaminated environments are a potential source , but around 90%, according to some researchers, got there because of one behavior and that is to eat food of animal origin.

Animals biologically concentrate toxins from their environment, so a calorie of animal food could have two to a thousand times the concentration of a given chemical compared to, say, a plant-based food, calories and therefore , consuming large amounts of animal foods potentially exposes people to proportionately higher proportions of these materials and is also why people with diets very rich in animal foods often have much more difficulty adapt. to the fasted state initially because there is literally more to process and eliminate, but it does it, and that is particular. I might mention that refined animal products, like refined plant products, have particular problems, so I think we need to be clear that these are really highly processed foods of any kind.

Those seem to be the biggest sources of chemical concentrations, it's not necessarily the brown rice that's the main problem, it could be the rice syrup or it's the highly concentrated products that result in the highest concentrations of undesirable materials when fasting. The body quickly mobilizes these materials if you fast and exercise them once you have depleted your glycogen stores after, say, 24 to 48 hours. The only way the body would obtain the glucose needed to maintain muscle activity or excess brain activity would be through gluconeogenesis. You would have to break down protein to get that, so what happens is if you fast and exercise, you actually lose more weight, but more lean tissue.

If you fast and rest, you predominantly mobilize fat and, specifically and preferably, visceral fat, so in addition to making sure a person is a good candidate for fasting with a history exam and lab, we also need to make sure they rest for fasting. Now there is a modified fast when you eat a certain amount of calories, therefore you have more glucose available. You know, minimizing gluconeogenesis, which is a different process, just water on an empty stomach, although it is necessary to do it at rest if you are going to maximize detoxification, preserve lean tissue and maximize fat loss and we have been able to demonstrate that now, already You know, we've really done this. and we have done it before, after fasting, six week follow-ups, we have the data, so we can put aside a lot of the old wives' tales, that article will be published later this year and I think it will really make people You realize why this rest, which is so contraindicated for people trying to maximize weight loss, is important with fasting and you know that if the goal is to truly detoxify, the best way to do it is to prepare properly before fasting, really important people.

Those who try to tell you to quit coffee at the same time you are fasting are really undermining themselves because caffeine withdrawal is hard enough, fasting isn't that hard if you prepare well, suddenly fasting doesn't even seem that hard. difficult people go to cooking classes they are interactive they go to the dining room they interact with people even in these long fasts two three four five weeks and they are doing well but they are resting and resting in some way is a little bit more difficult but it is more effective I say it's harder because you'll detox the more you'll feel worse but we don't care how you feel, we care how good you feel, so if you feel bad on an empty stomach it doesn't bother me for long.

As you get better you'll forgive us completely, so next time you fast you'll want to make sure you rest. That doesn't mean you can't do some stretching, you can't do meditation, there are things you can do, but if you're more passive and then look at what your recovery is like after fasting, you'll find that it's really fabulous because you're not just getting rid of the inflammation. and joint pain and some of the chronic injuries, but then you recover quickly and we and we can show that quantitatively now, as lean tissue recovers, fat continues to decrease after fasting, so you are losing fat, you're losing fat, you continue to lose fat even though you're regaining weight because glycogen, water, fiber and muscle comes back after fasting fat doesn't the interesting thing is you have two pounds of glycogen so You know that you are going to regain those two pounds you have fiber that has to return to the intestine unless you are eating an all meat diet then there is no fiber and there is also hydration there is a physiological dehydration with fasting now that is more so when you exercise you become more dehydrated so it seems like you are losing more weight but all you are doing is getting dehydrated why do you get dehydrated if you drink water it doesn't matter if you drink water if you retain it in your cells there is a physiological adaptation to fasting where there is a state of natural dehydration it is probably part of the preservation mechanism there are a lot of weird things that happen very counterintuitively during fasting, like for example, you know, we talk about exercise that increases brain-derived neurotrophic factor that preserves the brain and protects the nervous system.

It also increases during fasting. You think about exercise. You are vigorously active on an empty stomach. You are lying down. and they don't do much, they're both changing these same things in the same way, it's really non-intuitive, but when we look at the science, if we look at the data and then we look at the clinical outcomes, it's really evident and now we're tracking people 30 to 35 years. Now I have people in their 80s who started when they were 50 and they all say the same thing, including my mother, who at 92 had outlived her 50 lifelong friends, every one of them.

Her friends were dead, she was alone and she said, Alan, you need to warn your patients if they're going to do this diet, make younger friends, so I tell people to start right now, make younger friends, so when Even if you're older and still around, you know they'll have people to interact with. I mean, it's still heartbreaking, but it's a good problem to have, so tell me about the longest fast so I know the longest fast is 280 days or I. I mean something absolutely absurd, so I knew it was physiologically possible, but I figured it was more proportional to how much body fat you have, but as someone with a normal BMI, maybe I set them at something like 15 body fat , how long can it?

They fast on water, so a 155-pound, 70-kilogram male could last 70 days. The problem is that once you break the fast you enter a process called starvation and now once you enter starvation there is a relatively short period of time and then you die. I don't do that because it would be really bad for our results data, so we're very careful to avoid having 20,000 people walking for every 20,000 people leaving. We are experts in not letting people go hungry and the other thing is fasting. While we are talking about risks is the refeeding period, if you have a prolonged period of fasting and refeed inappropriately, you can contract a condition called refeeding syndrome which can be fatal, it is a very serious problem in the b

alan

ce of electrolytes. and all kinds of things can happen that we've never seen before because we have a very specific refeeding protocol that is followed and we refeed for a period of no less than half the duration of the fast in a controlled environment, so it's important You can also get a condition called post-fasting edema when you get rid of all the salty, fatty processed crap that people live on and go on a fast, all of that is washed out of the body if you then expose a person to very high concentrations. of sodium. like in commercial soups or something, the body will suck up that material and blow it up to protect itself from it and that can result in post-fasting edema.

If you do it slowly, you can return to your normal diet without that problem. but it has to happen over a period of time, so there is a refeeding period that is important, particularly in this long-term fast, which is the three or five day fast for most people, which will not result in what you know as Largely a problem, they may have a tummy ache if they eat too much food, but it will not have very serious consequences, as can be seen in very long-term fasting. The other concern here is, of course, the medications. some medications that you do not want to stop quickly anticoagulant medications steroid medications any psychotic medications rapid withdrawal of those medications can induce a very serious or life-threatening response some medications that you want to stop as soon as possible but do not want to take those medications while fasting, for example What medications might not cause as much harm, diet can be very serious.

Fasting, even non-sterile anti-inflammatories and common over-the-counter medications in the fasting state, are strongly contraindicated, resulting in all kinds of subsequent disorders. consequences, supplementation includes many complications in the fasting state, while you will not necessarily see any problems in the fed state, that is one of the reasons why we talk about making sure that before a person goes on a prolonged fast Have a proper background exam and lab. Remember that 99 of patients have no complications with fasting, but one percent can have very serious complications. It is important that this percentage be identified and monitored so that it does not end with bad results because that is what gives fasting a bad name: people who do it inappropriately continue. to work they become dehydrated, which is one of the main problems with fasting is maintaining adequate hydration and drinking water in itself does not guarantee that, in fact, drinking too much water can eliminate electrolytes and cause water intoxication, so if you do not we solve the problem by drinking water, how do we solve the problem correctly?

We solve this by resting, maintaining adequate hydration and allowing the body's natural recycling mechanisms to maintain nutritional status and monitoring people so that we do not reach a state of exhaustion, that is why we are monitoring electrolytes, that is why we do tests twice a day to patients, making it a safe and natural adaptation. Remember that fasting is a biological adaptation. Note that everyone, all humans, can fast. We have to be able to fast. All the humans who couldn't fast died because every time spring comes late there's no way to sustain this bulbous neural network our massively oversized brain two and a half times the size of, say, a chimpanzee chimpanzees don't fast you don't feed a chip in a week or so they are dead that is why you will never see chimpanzees wandering far from the tropics they live on a constant supply of food all year round because their brain does not switch to burning ketones your brain is a bi-fuel brain it completely switches to normal fuel en Glucose and that is your main glucose burner is your brain, which is the largest and when the brain enters a fasting state it changes to burning ketone bodies, particularly beta-hydroxybutyric acid and it burns preferentially, it only brings a little bit of glucose and that is the small part of gluconeogenesis that continues during fasting unless you are active, then of course your muscles burn glucose and now you really start to break down the muscles, so the brain, being a bi-fuel brain , it had to be like this because, otherwise, humans when spring came. late because we burn so much glucose in our brain that we would not have been able to produce it and this is the mechanism by which diets that imitate fasting and keto diets play because if you follow a very high-fat diet or a high-fat, high-fat diet proteins Diet that some people do and you don't eat carbohydrates, this fasting mechanism is activated, so your brain starts burning ketones, you enter ketosis and it has a hunger mitigation effect.

When you are in a ketotic state, you do not feel hungry. and as a consequence, that helps people who are trying to lose weight in the short term, the problem is that what is good for short term weight loss is not necessarily whatwhich is better for long-term health stability, which is why at our clinic we are not a weight loss clinic. We are not looking to maximize the gross weight on the scale over a short period of time. We're interested in losing fat and improving health, so we look at what it takes to not only live a long life.

Everyone wants to live their full potential, but more importantly, how do you avoid weakness? How do you avoid spending the last 79.6 years with weakness? 16 years old in poor health, what does the average person do? How do you avoid finding yourself unable to speak or move while lying down? a bed in a nursing home waiting for people to change its diaper during the last years or decades of its life. How can you increase healthy life expectancy, not just life expectancy? The years you live in full functionality. How do you ensure a good death that means living your life? to your full potential, one day you go to sleep, you don't wake up because you reached your genetic potential and you don't get weak, eh, individual for years and decades in which we spend most of our money and try to effectively control the diseases caused for the poor. dietary lifestyle choices, that's what we're using fasting for is to try to help a healthy lifespan and then a whole food plant free diet to maintain it, yeah, so I think now is the time to address that, so that the idea of ​​no salt no sugar no oil this was what really appealed to me so we used to joke that my last company was a nutrition company and we used to joke if it tastes good spit it out and it was like there were so many things that They taste good.

It's absolutely terrible for you, but you know that's because people are addicted to the artificial stimulation of these chemicals. We've done a study, a taste adaptation study, that we've shown with fasting, your actual ability to detect salt and sugar, your hedonic response to food. It actually changes and you can taste vegetables that are naturally high in sodium, but most people don't know it, they don't notice it after fasting. Oh my gosh, you think, wow, this is really amazing, so good food starts to taste good again and sometimes the things you used to like are too spicy, too salty because your current polish can't adapt, go back to eating that jerky. and those things you will eventually crave salt again, but the point is that it is not as difficult as people.

I think it's going to be long term because you get to the point where you would actually do it. I'd rather you know beans and grains and nuts and seeds and this kind of stuff, it's not just discipline, you know it dries it up, except initially , and that's where fasting can be helpful, it makes the transition faster. You asked how long people have to fast. Well, sometimes it only takes a few days of fasting to induce these real changes in healthy people, which is why people who maybe do an annual fast of three to five days or seven days find that it can be very helpful, not only as a detox for three days five days but the effect it has and how you feel can you overcome your hypertension your diabetes your autoimmune diseases you already know glucose and insulin everyone is interested in glucose and particularly insulin is seen deeply affected by fasting fasting is one of the few things you can do to reverse insulin resistance you know what else that helps with insulin resistance exercise that's why diabetics you have to make them eat right now is smiling because you're seeing another place where those two things align, in fact it's constantly repeated.

One of the things we did to save time was identify the markers that improve with exercise and then test fasting. It's like it saves a lot of time because you know, for example, insulin growth factor igf-1, the lower the igf-1. The longer the animals live, periodic fasting in rats, for example, can double their lifespan simply by doing a periodic fast lasting just 16. Well, and remember, rats are completely different from people, so that with rats you can only fast about four days as their potential, not like that of humans, which lasts 70 days or more. Rats are very short, so it is a proportionally different time.

Days are not compared to days, but the process of, for example, eating every other day while living, will significantly increase life expectancy. of the rat why they measured the biomarkers well and discovered that insulin growth factor decreases and that is associated with both fasting and exercise, another leptin, which is the lower the leptin levels, is associated with a reduction in inflammation and now the general theories are that inflammation is largely responsible for all sorts of things, not just joint pain, but also heart disease and cancer, possibly, and kidney problems, so that lower leptin levels seem to be good.

Leptin levels decrease with fasting blood pressure and heart rate. I already told you that the effect is the greatest that has ever existed. It has been shown that the treatment of hypertension is done with fasting. We have very dramatic and consistent results. We are doing a study right now with the Mayo Clinic looking at the phase one clinical trial. Treating high blood pressure using fasting instead of medications. The microbial load it has. what five pounds of bacteria live in your intestinal tract, a thousand strains of different bacteria, living creatures that eat and poop inside you right now and what those bacteria poop on you depends on what you feed them, so if It gives your bacteria soluble fibers, which one is it?

From our point of view, natural foods get vitamin K and fertilizer, but if you feed them animal foods, you get completely different byproducts that are associated with increased inflammation, so we want to be careful with the amount, particularly of animal protein. , that contain. markers of inflammation like if you look at il-6 and tn alpha and all of these different markers that they've identified that are associated with inflammation decrease with exercise and fasting people who exercise regularly people who fast regularly have lower levels of these inflammatory markers but fasting not only reduces things, it also increases them, so now all kinds of markers have been identified that increase with fasting, things that improve and reduce inflammation, ghrelin and ato, yes, it's one of these markers that are associated with insulin sensitivity and inflammation. ampk down regulates something else called pgc1 alpha which is associated with increasing mitochondrial biogenesis, so the energy producing guys that live in the cells increase rapidly now if we were to develop the ultimate fasting protocol and in fact, would What is done annually?

I know you're doing a reduced eating window, so maybe a 16-8 or something, but when do you do a multi-day fast? Yeah, so I hate fasting, it's horrible because you can't exercise, you can't. You know how to play basketball, you can't, you have to rest, it's really horrible but it's also very useful, so I do it every year, fast for a week, our basic protocol is in healthy people, you know, who follow healthy diets, usually almost they do not have. descending symptoms during fasting they are not hungry they are not having terrible

healing

crises they are not getting much frankly it is quite boring so we meditate and we relax and rest and we try to do all the right things and I do it for a week and yes at the end of a week he is perfectly stable and there are no symptoms, that is going back to refeeding carefully, it takes half the time faster, we go back to feeding whole plant foods and we do that every year and I just did mine. in November without incident very useful on many levels but does not excite patients much more entertaining because they are quitting animal products they are quitting coffee they are quitting alcohol they are quitting medications they will have an active healing crisis inflammation

secret

ion of mucus they will have elimination of skin you'll see lumps and bumps falling off you'll see lower back discomfort you'll see headaches you'll see sleep disruption it can be very what I call entertaining uh and that just keep going until that resolves.

Are you having those symptoms due to the release of toxins? Why on earth would your lower back hurt? Oh, because the kidneys are processing most of these metabolic products and you feel what's called visceral somatic baseline pain for three to five. days and then it disappears, the other thing that happens is that things move in inverse proportion, in other words, you can lose fifty percent of your visceral fat but you only lose twenty percent of your adipose tissue and only four percent percent of your lean tissue and then the Lean tissue comes back with refeeding, but the fat doesn't, the fat continues to go down if you're doing the SOS diet right, so if you educate people about how to eat, we do cooking demonstrations, we give conferences, we have a whole program.

We have the Roku channel, you know, we do all kinds of things to what I call brainwashing people so that they're prepared to go home and efficiently apply an all-natural foods diet. We especially like plant materials, both raw and cooked. plant materials and these starches like cupboard squash and butternut squash and kombucha that we're not talking about, you know, tater tots and flour products and sugary things and all kinds of artificially processed garbage, kind of whole foods, okay, so your fruits, vegetables, um, gluten free. grains we don't use glutinous grains at all we don't, we're using more like when we talk about grains, we're talking about quinoa, millet and rice, and you know, we're kind of going to dive into some things specifically that, as someone who's dabbled in a species of plant, is approaching for the first time but has never become vegetarian or vegan.

I've always told people that fruit is nature's candy bar. What is it about? Can I have an unlimited amount of fruit because? If you told me I can eat watermelons, apples, bananas, oranges all day, I'm at home like I don't need anything else that's not going to work, then the problem is that today's hybridized fruits are high in sugar and low in fiber, so... They're not like crab apples in Hawaii where they're more like vegetables, I mean, they're perfectly good foods if used properly, so we use whole fruits, not fruit juices , not dried fruits, not processed, you know, artificial sugars.

We're talking about berries, melons, and we generally have one meal that might have some fruit and two meals that are more vegetable-dominated, so you might say, for example, someone has oatmeal in the morning with some blueberries and maybe some ground flax seeds or some walnuts make a huge salad with big steamed vegetables at lunch and dinner with enough complex carbohydrates so you don't lose too much weight, so the idea is that about 10 percent of the calories come from protein, between 15 and 18 percent of calories. of fat and the rest comes from carbohydrates from whole plant foods, now there is a problem with getting enough calories on this type of diet, you have to eat a lot of volume, you are talking about several kilos of food a day, because you know, potatoes. rice and beans have 500 calories per pound, don't you know, 2000 calories per pound from nuts or seeds, or even more from animal products, so you have to eat, or 4000 calories per pound from oil, so we're not pouring olive oil.

Above all, we only eat whole foods, there is no salt, oil or sugar, it is just salt, oil and sugar that these whole foods naturally contain. Why is salt bad? Well, salt has a couple of problems. Salts are not bad. Sodium chloride is an unnecessary nutrient without which to die, you must have enough sodium in your diet. It turns out that you get all the sodium you need from the large volumes of these natural whole foods, just like you get enough carbohydrates, you don't have to add sugar and then you get enough. Essential fatty acids, including decosaxonic acid, etc., which are formed from your dha, are formed from omega-3 by eating whole plant foods, but the problem with added salt is that it stimulates what is called passive overeating, so if you only give it to one animal, it gets satiated until it feels satiated it says rice whatever it will eat a certain amount then it feels satiated you put salt on it they will eat a lot more people say yes, it tastes better you are eating more because you like it more but you are eating more because salt, chemical salt, sodium chloride in higher concentration stimulates dopamine in the brain, resulting in increased intake, affects satiety and therefore the problem for people trying to lose weight if they eat salty foods, usually salty foods are also thingssuch as flour products that are made into breads, crackers or cookies that are also hyper-concentrated in calories, but the salt will allow them to eat more.

Think about bread, if you take the salt out of the bread and you take out the sugar, it's called matzah, well, you know. They have to eat it once a year and at Easter and that's it because it's the only time they talk about it. No one buys large boxes of batches as a routine because it's flour and water. It doesn't taste good because any very fractionated food needs salt, oil and sugar or combinations to increase flavor, that's what chefs are, they are people who take hyper-concentrated foods and add salt, oil and sugar and deliver them to the palate so that it stimulates the brain in the most intense way possible.

I'm saying stay away from all that. Let's use your analogy with the addict, I think it's very apt and I want people to engrave that in their soul that there are some people who can get away with having some of these things and it doesn't become a big problem, although they would almost certainly be better off from a longevity perspective from a wellness perspective if they followed an entirely plant-based sos diet, um, but for someone like me, I don't struggle with my weight, I don't have an addictive personality. I can fast if I want just because I think it's better for me, but when I think about eating a complete plant-based diet I forget about a pure diet for a second, but one of the things I already ate that I know I would eat is a avocado like literally mashed avocado, um, nothing else is added, I take a raw baby carrot and then I add salt to the avocado, it's delicious, is it still bad for me, although if I do?

Am I not overweight? I have no problem overeating it at that time. Is salt still such a problem that I should eliminate it from my diet or am I just eliminating it to avoid passive overeating? I think it's not just about passive overeating because salt is also a very powerful preservative, which is why it's used throughout history before we had refrigeration and things that helped food not spoil for that people got sick from eating spoiled meats and other foods, etc. It's an effective preservative, but when you think about the five pounds of bacteria that live in your gut, it may not be a good idea to put too much preservative in that gut because it will disrupt the microflora, part of the reason people go on diets.

Meat-based diets have a completely different microflora than plant-based diets, which may be due in part to the higher salt intake often associated with them. Now let's make it clear that you know that vegan diets can be complete rubbish. All fractionated processed foods can be vegan. You know, Oreo cookies are vegan, which doesn't make them healthy, it just makes them free from animal foods, so I'm not arguing that vegan foods can't be poor quality foods, they certainly can. I get in trouble by speaking at national vegan conferences and explaining to people that, as challenging as meat products can be, processed vegan food products can be worse and that they would be better off eating the meat, and it upsets them. to everyone because We are being expelled from moral, ethical and spiritual points of view and saving the planet and all that.

I'm not arguing that I'm just arguing that I just want patients to live long, healthy lives and not get weak and we know that too. Too much animal protein is definitely a detriment, so people who eat large amounts of animal protein have greater problems with kidney and cardiovascular diseases. Definitely, at some point there are too many things that need to be reduced even for people, they are going to defend animal foods as an all-natural food. Now you might ask me: can people eat meat and still maintain an optimal weight? Because meat is not a highly fractionated pleasure trap food, the problem with it is completely natural.

Meat is very concentrated, if you eat too much you can have problems, but it is not the same, for example, as dairy products, which are a food highly processed animal that has all the challenges of animal foods, but now it has the salt problems, try eating unsalted cheese, see what it tastes like, it's the salt that people really like, that's why this gets very confusing and confusing because it's not just meat or it's not just plants, it's really a question of what processed foods are like and how can we avoid having so many processed foods and, frankly, meat without salt, you know, just boil a bit of meat and chew it a little and see if it's that attractive to you, you know what I'm saying. it's like yeah, now I think people consume sugar and I think a lot of people associate salt with heart disease or high blood pressure that you can buy those two, the one that trips me up and then I'm really interested in getting it. your opinion is not bad oils, things that everyone considers bad like, you know, vegetable oil, you know, French fries, fried oil like that kind of thing, but like olive oil on a salad, that's what I want to talk about, so olive oil is much less bad than the others.

Its omega-9 fatty acid has a different ratio of fatty acids. It can be less processed. In

theory

, you can crush those olives and extract the oil. The thing is, it still has nine calories per gram of highly processed fat. which starts to peroxidize as it breaks down, so there are still challenges even with olive oil now. Would you agree that olive oil is less bad than the others? Oh, there's no doubt about it, and especially if it's not heated to high temperatures, which is the other problem with fats when you're doing fried foods and I mean it's another cascade of problems.

I don't think most people are arguing that that's a good thing, although most people know it's not, but they will want to try to preserve them well, as John McDougall says. mcdougall says that people love good news about their bad habits and so the arguments are that this is much less bad which now makes it good, that's not really true, less bad just means less bad, it doesn't make it good , No? There is no need to fractionate or process the oils, you can get all the essential fats you need by using avocado or by minimally processing it.

You can crush it or chew it, but there is no need to extract the oil from the cells. and increase your concentration eliminate the fiber eliminate many of the other benefits, the problem with too much fat in the diet is that fat is very efficient and as a consequence it is very easy, especially to eat refined oils, to overeat, you know? a tablespoon of olive oil has more calories than salad, so we're not really, I just drink a little, put a little drip in it, but it's so good we just don't get the ratio here, that pound of salad has 100 100 calories, while you know. you have 100, you know, over 100 calories in that serving of dressing, so it's more than you think and if you really, literally, just put a few drops on it and find that you can't taste it, there's no reason it should even be there, so if I told you to eat your avocado and your carrots, just leave it, leave the salt alone, you don't need the extra salt added and you know, then you'll go back to an all natural foods diet, that's sos. free, talk to me about variety because honestly, I could eat avocados, carrots, kale, a very small handful of things, a banana, maybe an apple, you know, a couple of times a week, whatever I can get my hands on, We can't overdo it, you know, kind of a bastard fruit.

But how much variety do I need to not be malnourished on a vegetarian diet? How much is surprisingly small and, importantly, varies seasonally? For example, if you ate only 2,000 calories, we'll assume for a second that you're average. You need more than that, but if you were the average man, you didn't exercise, you wouldn't use your brain much and you would only need 2000 calories a day, which is the average rda. I'm guessing you'd probably burn 3000 calories a day. day or more, but at 2000 calories a day, if you ate two thousand cards of, say, brown rice and broccoli, that would be your entire diet, you would get all the vitamins, minerals, proteins, essential amino acids, of which you would get about 80 grams of protein. that and you know, three cups of rice, four cups of broccoli, it would be a boring diet, but you would get everything except b12 that you need, you know, and that's one thing on these plant-based diets if you're not really getting the fecal contamination. associated with animal foods, you need to get a source of vitamin B12, it only comes from bacteria and we recommend a thousand micrograms of methylcobalamin a day and that will meet pretty much everyone's needs, so it's an issue that you need to address. in the sun to get enough vitamin D because you are not drinking vitamin D fortified milk because you actually have to make it in the sun or supplement if necessary, so luckily you can avoid most other pills, potions and powders because these large large volumes of plant-based foods are high in nutrition and, especially when you emphasize green plant materials, raw and cooked vegetables, broccoli, chard and kale, these are really nutrient-dense, calorie-dense foods. very low, but you have to eat a large amount. a lot, and that's one of the downsides to eating and chewing a lot more.

The good news is that although you have normal microflora to feed your gut, you don't get tma, which is converted to tmao, which is so dominant in the gut flora of meat. you're getting all the micronutrients you need you're getting the fiber you're full you're getting enough hydration because you're getting a lot of water content from these high water content foods in addition to the water you're drinking, but you do it and you don't get chronic constipation, which which means you have no fissures or hemorrhoids, no varicose veins, no prolapsed uterus, no ptosis, no diverticulitis, and all the other conditions that arise from a very low level.

Fiber diet and this is one of the challenges for people, even when they try to eat healthy, but they use a high animal diet, unless they get enough fiber, they are not feeding the microflora in their intestines, that is why Colitis patients literally have so many problems. that microflora ends up having to eat the layer of the intestinal tract, you know, because it's going to survive just the way you want to survive, if you feed it soluble fibers, you get a different balance, so even if you're going to eat meat in the diet , you'd better get enough vegetables too so you know you're getting the fiber, nutrients, and materials you need.

Tell me real quick about rice. Integral rice. Can I eat white rice? I don't have salt or oil, um, but yes I could just stuff my face with a scoop of white rice. I would be a very happy camper. I love adding that to other things like it's a cool base. Yeah, I'm not a fan of white rice because you eliminate the fiber and micronutrients that are so. you know, it's so beneficial to rice that all you're doing is basically getting those carbs, since they may not be as refined as sugar and white flour and stuff.

There is another problem with rice. Rice is one of those bioaccumulator foods due to the way it is grown. So if you buy rice that has been grown on land where they grew cotton, they used arsenic pesticides in those cotton fields and there is still arsenic in those soils and the rice absorbs it more than other people, so the arsenic concentrations in the rice particularly White rice grown in fields that were sprayed with arsenic pesticides may be a potential bioaccumulation threat. Now there are some places like California where they never grew cotton and didn't use as many arsenic pesticides, so we buy organic rice from Lundberg farms and they are very public about publishing their arsenic concentration, there is some of this kind of stuff in pretty much everything.

In fact, the people who should be most worried are big chicken eaters because chickens tend to be very tall because of the feed they get and other things, but anyway, um, so if you're going to use rice, there are things What you can do to reduce our patient's concentration: cook it as you would with pasta, which is five parts water, five parts water and one part rice, that will reduce the purchase of rice. I said it's grown by companies that farm on land that doesn't use arsenic pests and is grown organically, so they don't spray it on crops today.

There are other grains like quinoa and millet and other grains that are also alkaline and You know, you don't have that kind of bioaccumulation problem, so I would say you would use a variety of those, but I would prefer whole grains, not refined grains. What happens to glyphosate for someone who eliminates so much plant matter? It has to be on your radar, right, it's a problem, uh, for people, fortunately, there is now an increasing percentage of organically grown fruits and vegetables available. In fact, do you know whoIs it the best-selling organic product in the country? No, it's Costco foods.

Wow, okay, Costco Foods is the largest producer or seller of organic products, you know who is number two, no, it's Walmart, ah, I should have guessed, so what happened now is they said, "Oh, no I think these companies will sit down and say, well, we." I really want to help our customers' health, they said, "Oh, people will pay a premium for foods that don't use glyphosate or don't use chemicals well, why don't we sell them those foods? Now it's become a dominant source." of their food." they produce sales because people spoke with their dollars and said we would prefer our plant material to grow without this and they are doing the same thing with meat, you know, they are trying to buy free-range meat that doesn't have all the antibiotics and chemicals because they know that animals biologically accumulate and concentrate these materials and I don't always think it's an either or too much, even if, for example, you're going to include animal foods in your diet if you eat a dominant amount of plant materials, on top of that, the probability that the negative consequences of foods of animal origin are minimized and then the health benefits of eating a healthy diet are maximized.

I think it's a question of proportion in quantity, that's the main problem that I don't think there's evidence that 100 vegans necessarily have any advantage over the person who is mostly vegan and uses a small amount of other products in their diet. I don't know if we can prove that difference, not from a health point of view, yeah, that makes sense. Dr. Goldhamer, man, you're so funny. There's something about the sparkle in your eyes when you start doing these things that I find absolutely incredible. You have made me question things that until this moment I knew and that I had never stopped doing.

Really look at the way you present, I think it's extraordinary. Where can people interact with you if they want to get to true north? How do they do it well? We have a service for your viewers, if they want a free phone conversation. If you're asking me if your particular problems would benefit from something like what we're talking about here, diet and fasting, you can go to our website at truenorthhealth.com and fill out what's called the registration forms, which are just your medical history. , basically. Check that they can call me toll-free and I will be happy to talk to them and if there is anything that is relevant I will be happy to refer them to who if they want to fast to the place closest to them that does it. fasting or two, we have a dozen doctors that do telephone counseling and telemedicine that are available remotely and we have doctors, chiropractors, psychologists, all of those people that are available and our website has True North TV, which is uh, and There's also a Roku True channel. north on roku which has all of our video content and educational materials, it's all available for free, you can go to the site, you can see our studies, our articles, we even have a fasting.org site which is just fascinating, so it's our and other people's research on fasting again, all freely available to people, just go online and if you have any questions, give me a call, that's awesome buddy, I hope you and I cross paths again.

This has been truly amazing and researching them was more than enlightening guys, yes By the way, I haven't entered your world. I highly recommend it. This is someone who is a lifelong meat devotee and he really has me thinking about things that I'm going to experiment with and try, you know, look, you know. Mine I want to live as long as humanly possible and in good health uh and this is the man who has it he's putting it to the test look at our book the pleasure trap will bend your mind I'm not sure um the concepts in That book is extraordinary, definitely, in fact, we should bring them back for the second round to talk about the psychological problems that people go through when they try to do this and that's a whole interview in itself, all right guys, and talking about things that are their own.

If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe and until next time, my friends will be legendary, take care. Thank you all very much for watching and being part of this community. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. Get weekly videos on how to develop a growth mindset, cultivate determination, and unlock your full potential.