American Thought Leaders - Is Your Diet Making You Sick? | Dr. Berg
Episode Date: February 2, 2025Eric Berg, popularly known as Dr. Berg or “The Knowledge Doc,” is a nutritionist and chiropractor specializing in weight loss and alternative health care. He has published more than 6,000 videos a...nd amassed 13 million followers on YouTube, and has trained more than 2,500 doctors and health care practitioners in how diet can impact your health.“When you reduce carbohydrates, it then forces your body to go after your own fat as fuel. So for weight loss, it’s great. And for other things, it’s good too,” says Dr. Berg.In this episode, we discuss Dr. Berg’s approach to health, why he advocates for a keto diet and intermittent fasting, and his thoughts on Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Health and Human Services secretary.“If we are going to make some changes, we have to, first of all, make people aware of these hidden ingredients and start to get them out of your diet,” he says. “They find these loopholes and they try to cheat the system. And it’s called ‘organic,’ but is it really organic?”Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
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They find these loopholes and they try to cheat the system and it's called organic, but is it really organic?
Eric Berg, popularly known as Dr. Berg and the Knowledge Doc,
is a nutritionist and chiropractor specializing in healthy eating and alternative health care more broadly.
He has published over 6,000 videos and amassed 13 million followers on YouTube
and has trained over 2,500 doctors and health healthcare practitioners in how diet can impact your health. When you reduce carbohydrates it then forces your
body to go after your own fat as fuel. So for weight loss it's great and for other
things it's good too. In this episode we discuss his approach to health from
superfoods to intermittent fasting and get his thoughts on Bobby Kennedy as HHS
secretary. I think if we are gonna to make some changes, we have to, first of all,
make people aware of these hidden ingredients and start to get them out of your diet.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek.
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65532. Eric Berg, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Well, I'm really happy to be here. I've watched your show for many years, and so thank you for having me on.
Well, so let's talk about disease and health in America.
We spend here in America an incredible amount per capita on health care, but the outcomes compared to the amount that's
actually being spent seem pretty low. Now, why is that? Yeah, you're right, because we spend $4.5
trillion and we have the worst health. So I think that I'd like to just kind of give everyone a
bird's eye view of what I think the situation is, because it's really kind of simple when you step back and look at it. It's like on one side,
you have big pharma. They're helping provide the solutions to our medical problems. And then on the
other side, we have big food or the junk food, and they're both kind of funneling down this way.
And right in the middle, you have the medical establishment, the system that we're operating
off right now. And the paradigm shift or the system that we're operating off right now.
And the paradigm shift or the paradigm that we're operating off of is basically, if you
want to get healthy, you just take this pill for your symptom.
But if we look at the chronic disease, most of that comes from our diet and ultra processed food calories.
It's the junk food, right?
That's the majority of the root cause of most of this problem.
So when you look at it, these medications are basically treating the symptom of the
junk food.
We don't really bring up the diet in that consultation with the doctor.
When the doctor evaluates someone, they're not really diving into what they eat. When I was in practice in Alexander, Virginia for 30 years, I would,
I would all day long, the first question I would ask is, what are you eating? Someone came in with
a problem, whatever it is, when did it start? What did you eat just before that? I had a patient who
went to several doctors, including the emergency rooms, spent out of
pocket $40,000 for her heart problem.
She had angina.
And no one asked her, like, what did you eat just before you had the symptoms?
It was a series of really bad banana splits, right?
And like every day for like three days in a row.
And all I had to do is just change her diet
and all that angina went away.
They couldn't find anything on the test.
And define for me junk food,
because I actually think that might mean
different things for different people.
In order to define junk food,
you really have to define what food is first to compare it,
because it's kind of hard to talk about junk food
without knowing what food is.
Food is that which is eaten to sustain
energy, the growth and repair of tissue, nourishment. That's what the Latin word for
food means. Then if we compare that to other things that we're eating, like junk food,
can junk food actually sustain life? Can it repair our bodies? Can it help us grow? And the answer is no,
because you're taking a food that's so refined, so processed, so dead, there's nothing else in it.
They take all the nutrients out of it. They put a couple of synthetic vitamins in there. You have a
lot of byproduct and chemicals. It's so refined. It has no shelf life. It just can sit on the shelf for a long time.
So is that food? I don't think it is. So the definition of junk food is not food. It's
something else. And it's composed of mainly three things. We have the refined sugars,
the refined seed oils, and the refined starches, which is basically hidden sugars.
And of course, that's like the main three ingredients, but then there's food coloring,
and then there's flavorings that you add onto it, and you have preservatives. So if you look at the
ingredients of a lot of these foods, it's the same ingredients with the different flavors,
different colorings, different packaging. So if over 50% of the population is consuming junk food,
adults, and over 63% of teenagers are consuming these ultra processed foods, then how are we
going to be able to create health? You can't. So this is really at the root of chronic disease.
We're not eating things to sustain life. and this is why we have the chronic illness
let's talk a little bit about these 30 years that you were in practice i understand you were a
chiropractor uh primarily but then of course you uh sort of branched out from there um can you give
me a picture of that please i had no intention of kind of getting into what I am to now because I was like the worst
patient you ever could imagine as far as diet.
I would literally eat pure junk food all the way up until I was like 28 years old.
And I got away with it for so many years, but then it caught up with me.
But the only thing green that I ate, I think was pistachio ice cream and
lime green jello. But other than that, I never ate a vegetable, never ate anything healthy.
And so I was going along and getting away with it until I started getting in my twenties. And
all of a sudden I was like arthritic in my fingers and my back. I had chronic fatigue syndrome. I was
just, I couldn't sleep. I started going downhill. In fact, my wife was like, you don't look too good.
You look kind of gray and almost greenish.
And I was going downhill.
So of course, it was a good and bad thing.
The good thing was it kind of woke me up to eating healthily and figuring out things because
I stumbled on what to do to correct things. But if I never had that experience,
I never would have got into health at all. I stumbled on a book called Mastering the Zone.
And I didn't even read the whole book. I just read the introduction and it said
something about insulin and avoid carbs and eat high quality protein. So the next morning I had a buffalo burger instead of my cereal,
like red meat, which I thought was really bad for you at the time because it causes cancer,
which is totally a lie. So I ate that and it was almost like someone just literally took a helmet
off my head and I could actually think clearly. I was like, oh my goodness, this is amazing.
The way I was trying to solve my problems back then, instead of changing my diet,
I would just be taking supplements, taking this supplement. I would be doing colon cleanses and
detoxes. And we'd be driving down the street. I would tell my wife, hey, there's the health house.
Let's go in there and then come back with a whole bunch of vitamins. And it wasn't working because
the foundation wasn't there. So tell me about the ketogenic diet. There's some people that, even medical professionals who say it can become dangerous.
Explain to me how this works.
Yeah, in real simple terms, you're basically just eliminating the massive amount of carbs
that people eat.
And so because when you reduce carbohydrates, it then forces your body to go after your own fat as fuel.
And so for weight loss, it's great.
And for other things, it's good too.
The average person that's not overweight has literally 100,000 calories of fat on their body.
So they have a lot more stored energy for running on fat than they do from the dietary source of calories. So if you don't tap
into your own fat, then you're going to be dependent on the next meal. You're not going
to be able to go long before you're hungry. So when you start shifting off to the ketogenic diet,
which is basically, it's the breakdown of fat into ketones as an alternative fuel,
then you can go a lot longer because you're
running off these calories that are just stored.
And that allows you to get rid of your cravings and your hunger and produce a whole bunch
of health effects, especially for your brain and your heart that you never could do if
you're not in ketosis, there is a certain condition, but that's only with like advanced
diabetes type one, which you have to inject the person with insulin, that if they forget their
medication and they don't take insulin and their blood sugars go too high, then the body can
develop a different type of ketosis, which is like a dangerous type
of ketosis. So that's a completely different thing. But since it has the word ketones in it,
or ketosis, people mix them together and say all of ketosis is bad, which is not true.
Our bodies were designed to not have to eat every hour and a half. So our bodies were designed to be in ketosis.
Even when we're born, we're going through the ketosis. So there's going to be some vested
interest against that. And they're going to put out all sorts of things about ketosis. Mainly,
they'll say something like, well, yes, ketosis does work and it does help you lose weight,
but we don't know what's going to happen long term. Well, just a little bit of doubt in people's mind.
And then they just, they're discouraged.
Bottom line is anyone can jump on the keto diet and do it.
And there's no health risk, really.
Like this is what you're saying here, right?
The risk is not doing it, especially since most people have what's called insulin resistance. That's a condition where you've eaten carbs for so long
chronically that your body is now having a, it's almost like a pre-diabetic situation where you
can't use insulin as well. It's not working. And so then you get all sorts of problems like a fatty
liver and you're overweight in your midsection and you get start swelling and the
heart suffers, the brain suffers. So I think the dangers of not doing it are great. I think,
you know, there's a, I think there's also a dirty keto people go on. They kind of like go to
McDonald's and they'll just eat the meat without the bun. And that's fine as a step up. But the way that I teach people to do it is to do it the
healthy version. And it's okay if someone goes off the ketogenic diet, it's actually sometimes
good to remind themselves of what they feel like. Like for me, it took me a long time to change my
diet because I love junk food, especially Doritos and chips. And so I had to go back and forth and back and forth to the point where I'm like, you
know what?
I don't want to feel bad anymore.
I'm just going to keep it consistent.
And, you know, rarely do I ever go off just because I like the way I feel without it.
Why is a McDonald's burger with no bun dirty keto?
What does that even mean?
That means like you're using the lower quality of calories on the ketogenic diet. For example, you know, keto diet is not necessarily high fat.
Like people think they can eat more fat and go into ketosis.
No, no.
The way you get into ketosis is by lowering your carbohydrate.
Okay. So now,
of course, you have to replace those carbohydrates with something. So that's fat. Now, when people do like seed oils and like you can go and fry something in like corn oil and it's still keto
because it's low carb, but is it the healthy version? Maybe not. So there's different levels of
quality of ingredients. Like you look at the Atkins bars, right? It's just filled with
soy protein isolates. That's like pretty low quality protein. And yeah, it's keto,
but is it healthy? I wouldn't think so. So to your point here about getting the healthy carbohydrates, you actually live on a farm,
right?
And so you're growing these, I guess, carbohydrates and non-carbohydrates.
So just tell me about that.
I have the fortunate option to live on a farm.
I lived in Bethesda for, and actually Alexandra for many
years. And after a while, after 30 years, I was like, you know what? We need to kind of move into
a location where there's more space. We actually live off the land. I have gardens. I have animals.
We eat the meat. So that's, I'm lucky in that way. I can actually have a freezer full of
meat from my farm and control that. But you don't necessarily have to live on a farm to be healthy.
You could get this high quality protein anywhere. But that's basically where I live. And I have a
little studio that I'm in right now. I do my videos and I do basically one video every single day and we have like 5,700
videos that I've done. So yeah, that's pretty much what I'm up to lately.
How is it that we got to this place where I guess we forgot what good food was?
You know, I interviewed, I released a video today. I interviewed my father who who's 87 years old. And I started interviewing him.
I'm like, what did they eat back then?
And how can we compare that to now?
Did they have food allergies?
No.
Did they have autism?
No.
Was there anyone that was overweight?
No.
Was there any diabetes?
No.
Like you didn't even have these problems.
And so one of the conclusions that I came up with is there has been a new category of food that was
invented or created or manufactured by the food industry called the snack food and snack foods.
So we have the crackers, the chips, the little bars, the snack bars. I mean,
back then your parents would tell you not to ruin your appetite. And if they did have a snack, it was like an apple or something out of the garden.
Now, we snack not on that.
We snack on ultra-processed food calories.
So we're dealing with highly refined things that are just going to raise our insulin between the meals.
So now we have three meals, and then we add the snacks. Now
we get these spikes all day long and we're creating a chronic insulin situation, which is literally
destroying our health at a very early age. I remember asking my father, I says, what kind
of cereal did you have? Oatmeal with milk. That was it. There wasn't these cereals that they have now.
How is it that this actually happened? Because it's not just the reality of the junk food, but it's the actual guidance to some extent too, right?
You remember when tobacco was healthy? I mean, people smoked. And so that went over a period
of time. And then there was a shift where smoking was bad.
Cigarette manufacturing companies shifted gears and they bought up some of the junk food industry.
And then they started producing more food that was very profitable. If you take, for example,
one ingredient, corn, okay? The type of corn they use in junk food is not sweet corn. They use what's
called dent corn or field corn. It's inedible. You can't even eat it. But that's the corn that's in
the chips. It's in most of the products. Because of the subsidies, they basically can buy a cubic
ton of this corn for $198. Now think about how many boxes of cornflakes you can
make for under 200 bucks. So you have a super cheap food that gives you a lot of pleasure
at the expense of no nutrition, very little protein. So it's going to keep you eating it.
My problem was the doritos
like i could just start and i would down the whole bag i mean the large bag in one sitting
without even thinking twice so we created this industry and it's created addictions and uh
you know 40 50 years later here we are you know with the problem. And unfortunately, you as a taxpayer pays for most
of the raw material in this junk food unknowingly through the subsidies. And that's something that
has to be cleaned up by this new administration. Let's talk about this new administration. But
before we go there, just to finish off the first question, somehow a high-carbohydrate diet became kind of what we
were supposed to do. And so is that just pure lobbying, or how did that happen?
It's pure profit, because you have to make profit on things that have no shelf life. I mean,
let's just take beef, for example. The margins on beef is like 3%. So why would you want to get into the beef
business, right? If you look at junk food, if you take a look at Just Profit, they make about $260
billion a year just on the starches. And an average person consumes about 250 to 300 pounds
of starch every single year. Whereas the sugars, it's like 10 billion. It doesn't even
compare. Yet people consume about 150 pounds of sugar a year. But starches are like, that's
something that people don't talk about. So I think if we are going to make some changes, we have to,
first of all, make people aware of these hidden ingredients and start to get them out of your diet.
The other thing I noticed is that if there's these hidden, basically farm subsidies, right,
in the system, if you're going to start taking apart the system, you're actually going to impact
America's farmers. You know, those farmers, I think, played a big role in getting this
administration elected. I think what we should big role in getting this administration elected.
I think what we should do is reward the small farmer because they're being put out of business
and support them and maybe subsidize the farmers that are doing it right with healthier foods,
rather than the large industrial farms that are just, producing the lowest quality food you could imagine.
What about large farms that produce higher quality food? Because there must be a range.
Yeah, there is a total range. And Cornucopia is a great activist group that I support. And they
have a food scoring system that they'll look at these farms and like they talk about who's doing right,
who's not doing it right, because they find these loopholes and they try to cheat the system and
it's called organic, but is it really organic? So they're really trying to keep the integrity
in at least in the organic sphere. There's going to have to be a lot more transparency because the largest privately owned company
in the United States, I won't even say the name, that's the company that makes most of the starches
in the seed oils and some of the sugars too. And they're a privately owned company. And so
they don't have to disclose
certain things. So there's all sorts of mysteries in this area that, you know, I'm really interested
in. And maybe someday we'll really find out what's going on. What is the promise of this
new administration from you in your view? RFK is, he's a non politician, he's going to be a really
good person to get in there to cut the umbilical cords between the cozy relationships and the conflict of interest between industry and the government. strongest lobbyist. And so there's too much influence from industry in our food system,
in our medical system, in the research of drugs. He's going to clean that up. And of course,
they're going to attack him for this, but it's going to be a really vital change to remove
this conflict of interest and have more transparency so we can actually focus more
on the root causes of health and support the smaller farmer and make it possible for our
generation to be healthy. Because right now, it's getting worse. I mean, we're not getting
our product. The food guidelines is so important because it trickles down into the school system, the nursing home,
the hospitals, the assisted living home. So there's an individual I know who has,
he's in Arizona. He owns four assisted living homes. Okay. And what's really interesting
about him is he changes the diet.
He doesn't allow junk food.
And these people are coming in from places like hospice and his rate of reducing medications through the help of their online doctor or their doctor that's on site, it's like 47%.
So you go in there with certain medications and then you're coming out with almost half
of those medications, lesser than half medications.
So he told me this, and this is really fascinating, that the software that he uses to coordinate between the medical doctor and the medications is to contact the CEO. And I want to know, on average, what's the average number of medications that these patients are on?
So he did that for me.
And you're not going to believe what he said.
He took 100 people, random people, out of his database.
And he works with people all over the United States in these assisted living homes.
And he found a range between 91 medications to 42 medications
with an average of 48 medications he sent me a document with one patient on 48 medications okay
i looked through this i almost vomited because i'm like you got to be kidding me an average person
going to an assisted living home is on 48
medications. I mean, this is like outrageous. This is insane. So why wouldn't we want someone
like Bobby Kennedy to go in there and straighten this up to improve this, to get people to start
eating real food all over the place, not just in schools, but assisting living homes, hospitals, in the military.
I remember thinking that too in the past,
that it's so bizarre that the food you get in hospitals
isn't really a very high quality.
You would think nutritionally you might want that, right?
I lived in Thailand for a couple of years
where medical tourism is a popular thing,
except that it's sort of like a five-star hotel
experience, right? That's part of what you pay for is doing whatever the medical procedure you want.
And they just, they feed you really well. And I thought, man, this is very different from the
hospital food I've seen, right? I know. I went in for surgery and
I was like, do you have any protein? No, we have Jell-O Crocs.
I'm like, I need protein.
I mean, it's sickening,
especially with before surgery and after the surgery.
You need actual food.
It does seem crazy on the face of it
that there's the average number across 100 random people
in elder care facilities. An average person
would be on 48 medications. That seems astonishingly high. However, presumably they need
some of those medications. So you're arguing there's an over-prescription scenario happening here.
I mean, just like the question is, did you bring up food?
Are you using food in your equation when you're diagnosing?
How do you know what is causing what?
I mean, are you looking at the side effects from the medications?
Maybe you're just treating the side effects of the medication with another medication and we go round and round.
When you treat symptoms and not real causes, you don't really improve the health.
So like even your blood sugars, right?
You take a medication to lower your blood sugars.
Where do you think that's going?
Where do you think that sugar is going?
Is it evaporating?
You're just changing one problem.
You're shifting it to another part of the body.
Especially there's something called iatrogenic disease. don't know if you ever heard of that that's medication caused disease that's like number three as far as on the top leading causes
of death is iotrogenic is number third so or number three so the question is um i think
especially with the antibiotics and steroids and things like that, it should
be reevaluated.
The system is unworkable.
So there are medical doctors, I guess the bottom line is, that do look at causes and
not just symptoms.
But basically, the default is to look at the symptoms.
Is that a right way to characterize it?
There's more and more doctors are looking at the whole body, even endocrinologists that I know
that I'm friends with that are looking at the diet, because there's just a kind of a disconnect.
They refer anything related to food to the dietician, but then they don't have control
of that. So I think the new trend is going to be
looking at the whole body. And so they're not just stuck in this managing the symptom model,
just like if you take an engineer and an engineer looks at this logically, like they're going to go,
wait, what's wrong with this? No, what's the mechanism? What's underneath it? Like,
do we ever take people off the medication? What's the plan? What's underneath it? Do we ever take people off the
medication? What's the plan? What's the long-term plan? There's a lot of people that are interested
in weight loss right now, and there's these very popular new drugs which a lot of people are going
on. They're actually working for people. If someone is interested in weight loss, where
should people look first? Well, I think if we look at just weight
loss by itself, there's just one thing you need to know about how the body stores fat. And that
has to do with the hormone insulin. So if you want to lose weight, you've got to keep that insulin
low. So there's two ways to do it. One is to lower your carbohydrates and that would be the sugars and starches. But the other way too, is you can also do a different thing, which is do intermittent fasting,
start skipping your breakfast and having like two meals and, and not the snacks. So if you go longer
without the snacks, what you're going to find is you'll go into ketosis, your appetite will go down.
And we're not even talking about lowering
calories. We're just talking about not eating so frequently. You can lose a lot of weight like that
because every time you eat, you raise insulin regardless of what you eat. So it's very important
to know that. And the other thing I think that people don't know about is that all it takes is
a little bit of carbohydrate to bump you out of ketosis
for a longer period of time, like sometimes up to 48 hours. So that half a glass of wine or that
toast, you kind of have to now wait for a day and a half to two days before you get back in the
ketosis. So a lot of people are saying, well, I'm trying it, but it's not working. Well, then you ask them what they're doing. They're like, well, yeah,
I do have a little bit of something in between the meals. I'm like, okay, so just do intermittent
fasting, watch what happens. And it finally works for them. Because if you try to do a diet with
higher in carbs, it's torture because you're trying to lose weight with hunger and cravings.
I mean, that's, that's hard. You're going to, at night you're like to lose weight with hunger and cravings. That's hard. At night,
you're looking at the cupboard and like, oh my gosh, I need some carbs. So it will make it
easier. Yes, it does take discipline, but I think the best thing to do is don't have it in the house
or it can tempt you. I want to touch on a few things which you recommend. I don't know how broadly,
but one of the things that we've discussed before privately is vitamin D. I discovered it really as
such an important thing during the COVID-19 pandemic where people with higher levels of
vitamin D just had a lot better outcomes on average. Vitamin D is the most important vitamin because it's involved in
10% of all of our genes. That's like over 2,500 genes. Think about how vast that is, right?
Everything from the immune system to the brain to inflammation to your bones. So it's not just
about bones, absorbing calcium for bones. It's about
a lot of different things. The question is, can you get enough vitamin D from the diet? No,
you can't. It's impossible. So you can get it from the sun. But think about what happened in the
80s. We or someone had this idea that we should stay out of the sun because sun causes skin cancer and we should be,
it became sun phobic. And even nowadays, it's hard to find even kids outside. What we really need as
a maintenance dosage on a daily basis to maintain all of the systems in the body with just as a
maintenance dose is 10,000 IUs of vitamin D3. Very few people know that and very few people
are doing that. They're using the outdated information that was only researched about
with your bones preventing rickets, which is like soft bones in children. And they're not looking at
all this amazing research. And I think because the amount of competition with medications is
very high, because if you take a look at vitamin D, what it can do for inflammation,
what it can do for autoimmune, what it can do for respiratory infections, what it can do for
insulin issues. It's literally amazing when you dive into the research. I think I have over 280 videos
on vitamin D. So I am very interested in this topic because it's the lowest hanging fruit if
you want to get someone healthy, really. It's like, if you just give them vitamin D for so
many issues, they can actually improve. And it's inexpensive. You could use the sun if it's summer, but
if not, it's not that expensive as a modality, a treatment.
What about turmeric?
Okay. So turmeric has this active ingredient called curcumin. Out of all of the herbal remedies,
that one is the most researched.
It has the most broad spectrum effects of anything.
So that is probably on the scale of importance.
That's like a really top herb that can literally do so many things.
And I think because it can grow in very dehydrated environments.
And so that plant has adapted for hundreds of thousands of years to create these amazing
defense mechanisms and these properties of survival that we can then consume and it helps
our bodies in many different ways, especially as an anti-inflammatory.
I would highly recommend including that in your diet
on a regular basis. You can do it through curries or the teas.
Curiously, in Polish, the word for turmeric is kurkumas. I'm a native speaker. That's what I
keep thinking as you say it. And I might add, it's delicious. It's just a wonderful thing.
You know, one thing that I made a mistake about, I'm always the kind of guy that if it's delicious it's it's just a you know a wonderful thing you know one thing that i i made
a mistake about you know i'm always the kind of guy that if it's a little as good a lot is better
no not with not with yeah there's there's definitely a limit and you don't want to get
it on your shirt oh yes i i i grew it and then i i dried it out and i started to eat it through
the day like for several days in a row i was was just eating it constantly. Got sick. You don't need much. Just have a little bit.
You know, you help people with like basically fatigue and so forth. I mean, what is your,
you must have like a broad approach to dealing with that.
When you take a symptom like fatigue,
that can come from a lot of different things.
So the first question I always ask is like,
what are you eating?
But as far as nutrients go,
there's a really important nutrient
that people know about,
but they don't really connect it to fatigue.
But if you go into the cells,
the energy factory of the cell,
the mitochondria, which is a the energy factory of the cell, the mitochondria, which is
a very important part of the cell, in order to make energy, the last little,
on the assembly line, the last little part of that requires magnesium. And it's a little motor
that spins. It's an enzyme that spins like 400 times a second. It's like the most
amazing little motor and it's in your body and it's working to make what's called ATP and it
requires magnesium. So yes, magnesium people take for leg cramps and to sleep and for stress,
but energy, you should take a magnesium for energy because if you take vitamin D,
that's the most important.
The second one is magnesium.
Magnesium is almost impossible to test
because most of the magnesium is inside the tissues.
It's not in the blood.
I mean, only 1% of it's in the blood.
So you have to have a special test and no one gets that.
It's something that's also very commonly deficient.
And the one that I would recommend
is something like a magnesium glycinate because that's the one that won't cause diarrhea. And it gets absorbed 80%. And
you take it right before bed. And great for muscle stuff, sleeping. Apparently, it's good for
sleeping, but then it's also good for energy. Yeah, right. Well, you know what? It takes energy
to sleep, which is interesting. Some people are too tired to actually rest. So they're laying down, they're restless, and they just can't get
into a relaxed state. What about the superfoods? What is the top superfood in your mind?
I think this is going to surprise you because when people think superfoods, they drink the green drinks, right? But there's a much
higher level of superfood that has virtually every nutrient and it's very bioavailable and it's
actually red meat. People are going to say, oh my gosh, I thought that was like, it's just like
processed meat. No, I'm talking about grass-fed red meat red meat whether it's b4 it's a lamb i mean it has
so many nutrients iron and b12 and and plus the protein is the the highest quality it's even
better than eggs because it has better omega-3 ratios and um so it's really a good healing food because I think people have gone on to the
plant proteins and they're not going to feel as good. So it's high quality protein. Most of our
body is protein. And that would be something that a person would notice immediately a difference.
Eric, final thought as we finish? I think my final thought on this would be
instead of this huge focus on treating disease and focusing on getting rid of disease, let's
start to focus on creating our health. It's a different question. It's a different model.
Instead of waiting till you get a disease and treating it, let's prevent that by looking at common, simple things that you can do to, you know, lifestyle
changes that involve, at the real essence of it, eating real food. That's the most important thing
you can do. Well, Eric Berg, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Thank you so much. I really
appreciate it. Thank you all for joining Eric have had you on. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.
Thank you all for joining Eric Berg and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.
I'm your host, Jan Jekielek. you