American Thought Leaders - Why Many Chronic Diseases Are Preventable–And Why No One Tells You This: Dr. Robert Lufkin

Episode Date: March 4, 2024

Dr. Robert Lufkin was once a self-described “product of the medical establishment,” with a fruitful career as a professor of medicine. He’s published hundreds of scientific papers, and has received millions of dollars in government funding.But when, out of the blue, he was diagnosed with four seemingly unrelated chronic diseases—and told that he was going to have to be on medication for life—he started looking elsewhere for answers.“It was through lifestyle changes that I was able to reverse these very serious and potentially fatal diseases, and get off all medications for them,” Dr. Lufkin says.Today, Dr. Lufkin educates people far and wide on how to take charge of their metabolic health, and is in the process of building new healthcare institutions, including a managed care organization and an undergraduate medical school.He is the author of, “Lies I Taught in Medical School: And the Truths That Can Save Your Life.”“The growth in these diseases is unprecedented in our history, and they’re frankly not sustainable. Half the adult population is hypertensive, the growth rate in type 2 diabetes is going to approach 50 percent of the population soon. When that happens, all these chronic diseases are going to explode. And it doesn’t have to be that way, because this disease is reversible with, in most cases, lifestyle,” says Dr. Lufkin.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

There are biases built into our institution. In other words, I'm a doctor in a clinic, right? I have a diabetic patient. I get to spend seven minutes with them. It's much easier to prescribe metformin and insulin and take a couple lab tests than it is to do an entire program about low-carbohydrate diet

and switch over their whole eating structure. Dr. Robert Lufkin was once a self-described product of the medical establishment with a fruitful career as a professor of medicine. He's published hundreds of scientific papers, has received millions of dollars in government funding. But when he was diagnosed with four seemingly unrelated chronic diseases and told he'd be on medication for life, he started looking elsewhere for answers.

It was through lifestyle changes that I was able to reverse these very serious and potentially fatal diseases and get off all medications for them. Lufkin is the author of Lies I Taught in Medical School and the Truths That Can Save Your life. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Dr. Robert Lufkin, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Jan, it's a pleasure to be here. I'm a fan of your program, and it's so much fun to be here. It's a real honor to have you, someone who spent years in medical school apparently teaching lies. Tell me about yourself. I mean, you are an incredibly distinguished medical professional. I'd like to kind of let our audience know what you've done. Sure. I'm basically, I'm a product of the medical establishment. In other words, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, although I acknowledge there are

conspiracies out there, and there are perverse financial incentives and other incentives in our industry. But I'm basically a product of mainstream medicine. I've spent my entire career at two large medical schools with the academic rank of full professor. I've published hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific papers. My laboratory has received millions of dollars from the federal government and NIH as well as from drug companies and equipment manufacturers and so I'm really speaking from from the inside of the medical school academic

establishment. But you had an experience that changed you. Tell me about that. Yeah, well, just a little about my background. I was raised by my parents. My mom was a dietitian, a registered dietitian, so she specialized in nutrition. So growing up, we followed the food pyramid.

We religiously avoided saturated fat. We ate low-fat foods. We avoided butter because of the saturated fat, and we substituted margarine with, at the time, trans fats and industrial seed oils. We ate a lot of grains and junk foods, which we thought were healthy at the time and then fast forward I went to medical school and and and then eventually entered a career in academics where I essentially sent my whole career doing that and everything went fine until about ten years ago I was diagnosed with out of the blue with four chronic diseases that took me completely by surprise.

And I went to specialists to educate myself about these diseases and see how to treat them. And they basically prescribed prescription medicines for each one. And they told me the diseases were more or less unrelated. And the prescription medicines would be necessary to not only treat the symptoms, but also to control the underlying disease. And although they recommended lifestyle changes, they said, you know, sure, it's worth improving your lifestyle, but the reality is you're going to be on these drugs for the rest of your life,

and lifestyle, you know, it doesn't really work for these things. And it basically was a wake-up call for me. So I got my attention very quickly and I began talking to other experts. I began doing research and understanding about these diseases and I eventually began to question the things that they taught me. And I looked closely at some of the breakthroughs that have been made in the last few years and our understanding,

it changed the way I thought about these diseases. And I realized that a lot of what was being taught about these diseases and metabolic health in general was incorrect, what I'd been teaching and what many of my colleagues are still sadly teaching. And when I implemented a program myself with lifestyle changes, I changed some things very radically as a matter of fact with my diet, but also sleep and exercise and stress.

When I went back to my doctors, they couldn't believe it. They thought the labs were broken. They wanted me to retest the labs. But long story short, what happened was all my labs returned to normal. The diseases were essentially reversed and I was off all prescription medicines and that's where I've been ever since then.

What were the diseases? One was an arthritis, a type of arthritis called gout, which is due to urate crystal deposition. Now there was hypertension. You know, I was in good company. Half of adult Americans have hypertension. The third one was diabetes or pre-diabetes, type two diabetes.

My blood sugars were abnormally high. And then the third one was dyslipidemia, which was an abnormality of blood fats. So you think about it, arthritis and hypertension, they're not really related, or blood lipids, blood fat and arthritis, I don't see the association there. But what I came to understand is that these diseases are all fundamentally driven by the same basic mechanisms. And these mechanisms, unfortunately, there's not prescription medicines for them. What works for these diseases to reverse them is lifestyle changes. But the good news is lifestyle is in our control and we get

to make a decision every single day when we wake up what choices what we're going to eat, how we're going to exercise, how we're going to live our lives. So it's really empowering that we can take back control of our health doing lifestyle. But basically you're saying that you changed your diet and some of your habits and that's it. And then you went back and they said, these labs can't be right. That's correct. But out of fairness, my diet, the changes I made in my diet, I was following the standard American diet, the recommended diet, the food pyramid, and I basically turned it upside

down. I began doing things like intermittent fasting and fairly aggressive dietary changes, but I've never felt better. I don't consider it a diet now. I consider it the way I live. Being in ketosis, my brain is clearer than it's ever been. I don't want to, you know, eat carbohydrates anymore in the middle of the day or snack all the time. So, but to answer your question, yeah, it was through lifestyle changes that I was able to reverse these very serious and, you know, potentially fatal diseases and get off all all medications for them and now I'm not recommending that that people of course stop these medications without their doctors approval because that could be

dangerous it's I'm not saying just stop everything and try lifestyle I'm saying begin lifestyle and you'll find that when you go see your doctor, they'll tell you you don't need the medicines anymore if you have the same success that I had. Well, I want to touch on this a little bit because I've kind of been sort of vicariously on this journey with Dr. Paul Merrick. We're here at the FLCCC conference. He's one of the principals here. You know, he started treating COVID in a way that was unorthodox and much more effective. He similarly had this realization that a lot of what he had been taught wasn't entirely right or in many cases incorrect.

And then, you know, embarked on a journey looking at diabetes, looking at now he has this whole cancer monograph, which I find incredibly fascinating. I mean, you know, hundreds of papers of peer-reviewed research showing all sorts of what you would call off-label drugs or vitamins, things like that, profound impacts on reducing the incidence of cancer. I mean, it's just, it's astonishing how much research has been done well that we just don't know about. Yeah, there's a tremendous amount of research being done every day. 7,000 papers are written every day. Because on this lifestyle stuff that you're talking about, people have researched this. It's not just, you know, someone just saying, oh, I'm going to try, you know.

Yeah, and there are peer-reviewed, prospective, controlled studies where, for example, with diabetes, where people can reverse type 2 diabetes with dietary interventions to the point that they go off insulin and they go off all drugs and the results are out there. But I think the medical system is a large institution. There are a lot of institutional drives and factors. I mean, if you look at diabetes and you go to a hospital and you say, hey, I have a program. I can take 90% of your type 2 diabetics off diabetes, off their diabetes meds, and return them to normal blood glucose. I want to do this program.

Well, diabetes is the number one cause of surgical amputations. It drives a lot of surgical business. Type 2 diabetes today is the number one cause of renal failure and renal transplants and dialysis. That's a huge business. Type 2 diabetes is a leading cause of blindness. Type 2 diabetes is a major driver for cardiovascular disease, stroke and heart attack, which is the number one killer that determines statistically most of our longevity. Alzheimer's disease is strongly linked now to glucose metabolism, which is what diabetes is, to the point where many, some

authors are referring to diabetes, to Alzheimer's disease as type three diabetes. And of course, cancer also, diabetics have a much higher rate of cancer as well. So all these diseases are linked and coming up with a program to reverse diabetes is gonna change everything in healthcare. The other problem- But just, if I can jump in, you know, what you're talking about is really kind of unfathomable,

or something that was unfathomable to me even just a few years ago, because you're suggesting that the health system wants to keep people sick. There are things built into the health system. I don't think, you know, any doctor, any human being wants to hurt another human being or wants them to be unhealthy. Maybe subconsciously we tell ourselves things that maybe make us do things, but I believe that people are basically good and they want to do good things. But taking the other side of the argument, there are biases built into our institution.

In other words, I'm a doctor in a clinic, right? I have a diabetic patient. I get to spend seven minutes with them. It's much easier to prescribe metformin and insulin and take a couple lab tests than it is to do an entire program about low-carbohydrate diet and switch over their whole eating structure. I mean, it's been known that carbohydrates drive type 2 diabetes for a long time. It's not a secret, but getting people to avoid the junk foods, avoid the carbohydrates that drive type 2 diabetes is a big ask. And right now, our healthcare system, it's not enough for the doctor just to say, well, stop eating carbohydrates and you won't need this insulin. Sometimes the patient

says, hey, I'd rather have a pill or even a shot than change my whole diet and give up all my junk food and change my way of living. So there are many different factors. There's a lot of pushback from individuals. Junk food itself is addictive and junk food is mainly carbohydrates, it's high in seed oils, all these things drive insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes. I confess I'm a recovering junk food addict. I know how hard it is to give that stuff up and it's not enough for the doctor just to tell me, don't eat junk food. I know not to eat junk food, but there are subconscious drivers that we all have that drive our addictions. And it's not easy to get over them. Patients come to me for their diabetes

and I tell them, well just cut out carbohydrates, they'll go to another doctor. They say they want a pill, they want something that works like that. But this diabetes effect, this insulin resistance, this metabolic abnormality that was driving all four of the diseases that I have, it turns out that it drives not only those diseases

but also all the chronic diseases that essentially determine our longevity. Cardiovascular disease, cancer, Alzheimer's disease are all driven by that. So what happens is if we improve our metabolic health, not only do we lower our risk of getting these chronic diseases, we actually improve our longevity

and change many of the phenotypes or appearances of aging. So it's not just being healthier, but it's actually we live a lot longer. It's dramatic how these things are all tied together. Well, I don't know if you told me this on camera or off camera, but you said the food pyramid is actually inverted. And I think I saw it was a South Park episode about this or something. Maybe we can clip that into the episode. But that exists, right? Or am I imagining this? Yeah, it's on my Twitter feed, if you want, or Instagram too.

Sir, we've got a match. Nutrition is stabilizing. We've got a well-balanced vaccine, sir. Okay. Well, so how is that? Explain that. That's a great question. And one of the prime drivers, I believe, in the metabolic disease state that we're all in and the epidemics of these chronic disease that we're facing in the 2020s had its origin back in the 1960s and 70s when the United States public health got into making policy

for nutritional decisions and basically it was around the idea that the mistaken idea that dietary cholesterol and dietary saturated fat drives heart disease. And heart disease was and is the number one killer. So the United States began a food pyramid plan which emphasized low-fat diets and high-carbohydrate diets, which is basically a junk food diet. And it's a pyramid with carbohydrates and sugars at the bottom, and things like fats at the top of the pyramid, where you eat less of them.

This pyramid was then became public health policy. All the schools use this for kids. I remember being taught something like this. I mean, I'm Canadian, but roughly it was the same structure, exactly like you described, especially saturated fats. That was the enemy, right? Exactly. And cholesterol too in eggs, there's, you know,

to this point, and even today, most people, even the conservative orthodox cardiologists will admit that eggs, dietary cholesterol doesn't really affect serum cholesterol so that you know those egg white omelets at the restaurants you see you don't need to eat those anymore. It's probably the health, in my opinion one of the healthiest things we can eat is an egg. But these dietary changes starting in the 60s and 70s have now swept through society to where we're consuming a large amount of junk food, which means a large amount of carbohydrates and refined carbohydrate sugars, a large amount of seed oils, which are industrial oils, which have the benign sounding name of vegetable oils, but there's no vegetables in them. They were originally developed as a lubricant for German U-boats in World War I with Crisco oil.

But they're unhealthy, and in my opinion, they drive insulin resistance and drive inflammation. We're now seeped in these things. And on top of that, with the fast food revolution, it's not just what we're eating that's bad, but we're eating all the time. When growing up, we used to eat three meals a day, and then basically it became, oh, no, eat six small meals a day. And my kids at school, they have snacks scheduled into their day between their other ones. And so people are eating all the time. Eating itself drives inflammation. Inflammation is our normal response to food being in our in our gut. So anytime I eat something the body normally gets a little inflamed

just as a protection of that foreign protein, that foreign material coming into the body. So if you think about it, if you want to improve your diet and you don't want to change what you're eating, you can still improve your health, improve your diet by just not eating all the time. In other words, narrow your eating window, cut out between meal snacks, maybe even skip breakfast, maybe even skip lunch. I mean, I eat one meal a day and I've never felt better.

I don't get brain fog in the middle of the day and I'm in something called ketosis nearly all the time. And I think that's the, for me, it's the healthy way to be and I love it. So, you know, I started a keto diet years ago. I kind of, you know, I kind of go on and off of it, right? But just simply as a weight loss thing. And it actually worked incredibly well, works incredibly well when you're in that state of ketosis, right? The fat is being burned instead of carbohydrates. There aren't carbohydrates to burn, I guess. And ketosis, I mean, if you think about it,

human beings evolved over hundreds of thousands of years as primarily hunter-gatherers. And at that point, if you're a hunter-gatherer, you eat when you have a kill, and then you may go for a period of a week or so with fasting, at which point you're in ketosis. And it wasn't until, what, 12,000 years ago with the agricultural revolution, which Jared Diamond, who wrote Guns, Germs, and Steel, and even Nuuvol Harari who wrote Sapiens, both of them famously agree that the worst possible thing that the human beings have done was with the development of agriculture. And you can see why, because agriculture made food available nearly constantly. And that was accelerated, of course, with refrigeration and junk foods. But as food became more and more

available, people did not go into ketosis because there wasn't this period of fasting between the hunt and the kill. And the amazing thing about ketosis is, as I researched it more, it doesn't just help diabetes, but ketosis helps cancer. It's a cancer treatment or an adjunct to chemotherapy for patients. In Alzheimer's disease patients, ketosis is, for many of them, helps bring back their memory. So one could argue that ketosis is the natural, healthy state of human beings throughout history until literally the last 12,000 years. And some of the most amazing things about ketosis are in neurodegenerative diseases. You know, we talked a little bit off camera about Guillain-Barre syndrome,

and it's seen with Parkinson's disease and certainly with seizures. Ketosis is fasting, which drives ketosis, is an accepted treatment for seizures. 2,000 years ago, there's a whole work about how junk food drives violence in kids. These are correlation studies, not controlled prospective studies. So causality can't be inferred, but there are certainly some correlations with people eating junk food and being more angry, being more depressed, being more anxious. So it's really exciting, some of the possibilities

that are out there now. Well, there's a couple of things that come to mind. The first one I wanted to mention, you mentioned the agrarian revolution. A couple of people agree that it's, you said the worst thing that happened to humanity. Well, it also arguably, you know, civilization comes from it. So it wasn't like all bad, right? But you're saying in terms of the body, right? In terms of the body. And I certainly,

when I heard that, I thought, well, this can't be true. you know it allowed people to have philosopher classes working classes you know different classes of people with spare time when the food was saved but but interestingly there's you know there's now evidence that there were some relatively advanced civilizations much earlier than we thought like the, Gopekli Tepe and Turkey and similar another site near that. Yeah. In Egypt as well. So, before the agricultural revolution, it may not be that we were all walking around in caves, you know, hunter-gatherers. But you're right, it is a balance. There were benefits of agriculture. Right. Well, you know, and the thing is that it doesn't have to be one or the other either. You know, in a way, we've been conditioned to believe that a pill or some kind of medical

intervention is what's going to solve our problem. Like we've kind of given away our responsibility for our health to the doctors and that is also translated into the use of all sorts of medications, many of which also interact with each other in negative ways. And people, you know, I've heard incredibly bizarre statistics about how many medications some people take. You just think to yourself, my God, they all have side effects, right? And the more you take, the more likely one of those things will come up. And some of them are hidden.

Some of them will come later. We're just like a highly medicalized society. And it's a great point. I think part of it, too, as we talked about, if I go to a doctor, I'd much rather have a pill than get a lecture about I need to exercise more and change my diet. Because I used to believe that lifestyle didn't still believe, that taking the pill will actually not just treat the symptoms of their disease, but will actually control the disease and make them healthier. And that's really not true in many, if not most cases. For example, in diabetes, type 2 diabetes, giving the patient insulin and metformin to control the blood sugar spikes doesn't really control the long-term

effects of the disease. You still continue to progress on your diabetes. You get your foot amputated. You get your renal failure. You get your blindness. You get your heart attack. You get your Alzheimer's. So I think people aren't aware that in many cases, these pills don't really solve the problem. They just treat the symptoms. And the interesting thing is there's no pill for metabolic disease. There's no pill that you can take that will reverse these things. Metabolic disease is driven by lifestyle, and lifestyle is really the secret to it. Well, and the corollary, as we've kind of been touching on, right,

is that you have to be responsible. No one's going to do it for you, right? Like whether it's Congress versus agencies. I mean, these bureaucracies develop in ways to kind of avoid a locus of responsibility at any cost, right? I mean, and just it's almost like a theme in our society where I want some kind of external factor to fix things. Exactly. I love this about your show, questioning the narratives, asking the big questions about science and other things in our society. And to your point, we need to take responsibility. A lot of

medicine over the last, you know, the 20th century had developed a very paternalistic attitude. You know, you let the doctor take care of everything. They're going to take care of anything. And you turn over all responsibility to the doctor. And the problem with that is, as we've seen, that the doctor doesn't control your lifestyle. I control my lifestyle, we all control our lifestyles. So we need to learn that we're in charge of our health, not the doctor. If I recall correctly, like half of what professors in medical school teach their students is wrong, At least, right? I think that's your

that's very disturbing news. One of the greatest physicians of all time, Sir William Osler, famously made one of the greatest comments about medical education when he addressed a group of medical students on the day of their graduation to becoming physicians. He said, gentlemen, and at the time most medical students were male, if not gentlemen at least, he said, gentlemen, I have a confession to make. Half of what we've just taught you is wrong. The problem is we don't know which half. People who understand medical education or even science itself will know this is a process of science. It's all about questioning the existing narrative and throwing out the stuff that's incorrect and learning the new stuff. But Sir William Osler pointed it out beautifully, and that's the theme for my book with the clickbait title,

Lies I Taught in Medical School. But basically, it goes through the half the mistakes that I made and nearly cost me my health and my life. Tell me a little bit about how you are trying to change things. Well, after I was able to reverse my own health conditions, I wanted to get the message out to people. And I'd written many textbooks as part of my academic career. And just to be clear, the message is lifestyle will transform your health, something like this. That's right, that we are in charge of our health and that the chronic diseases that are going to kill us, the medicines that were prescribed for them

really don't treat the underlying disease. And if you want to get the root cause, you need to change your lifestyle and change your metabolism and your metabolic health. That was the message. And I began to look at new ways I could get the message out. I'd never been on Twitter. I wasn't a big Facebook person. But so I embraced social media. I began using Twitter. I just passed 100,000 followers on Twitter and have 250,000 total in social media so far. And I began reaching out to them.

We were publishing this book. A couple weeks ago I was in Costa Rica filming a TV series on longevity and health and wellness and metabolism that just got picked up by PBS and the Discovery Channel that'll be airing in about six months to a year. I realized that it's not enough just to to educate people and get the message out. We need to change things in the health care systems. The next step in my journey, I got together with some friends, some other physicians in Los Angeles, and we've purchased and put together a managed care organization in Southern California. It's over 100,000 patients, 200 physicians,

200 primary care physicians, 600 specialists. So just to be clear, this is an existing provider. Provider. Right, right. Okay, wow. We're acquiring it and it's important to note that these patients are underserved. In other words, they're Medicare, Medicaid, which means they're socioeconomically disadvantaged, which means

generally poor health, generally poor access to health care. And it's our mission to change that. So we're going to bring latest cutting edge technology, some of the things in my book, some of the things we've talked about, these ideas of lifestyle to these people. And the advantage of having a managed care organization like this, instead of an insurance company where you make money by denying claims, with managed care, we make money by making the patients healthier. And we can spend the resources of the organization on anything that works. It can be red light therapy, it can be massage, it can be meditation, it can be movie theater tickets, whatever incentivize the patients to actually be healthier. And that's what we're doing. And

on top of it, we've built an innovation lab where young companies can come up and we incubate their technology, their healthcare technology. We try it on some of the patients who want to try it out, and if it works, we amplify it across the network and help them get started. We're setting up a venture studio fund so that these companies can be funded. And then beyond that, we realized that it's great to do that. It's great to show healthcare change. That's a big step, but we wanted to go one last step and that was in the education process. And the next thing we've done is set up a new graduate medical education program in Southern California at a hospital

there where we've set up new training programs in family medicine, in psychiatry, in transitional medicine. We're just starting a radiology program that'll hopefully start this summer to look and teach some of these newer ideas of medicine. And we're even considering and talking to some people about possibly starting a new undergraduate program, which would be a new medical school as well. Right. I mean, that's absolutely fascinating. I mean, there's just, there's, there's so much that like, this is what I keep coming up against, right? There's so much that's not working right. Yeah. The knowledge is out there and it's just a matter of getting it into the people's hands. But also, I mean, I used to think that I just need to tell my friend who's

a diabetic not to, not to put sugar in his coffee and he'll be fine he's an intelligent person I explained about glucose and he gets it he knows but what happens the next time I see him having coffee he's putting sugar in it it's it's sort of the addiction thing so it's not enough just to tell people sometimes they maybe need to be enrolled in a coaching program with an addiction thing. We're starting to use low-dose naltrexone, which is an addiction medicine that works for other types of substance abuse. We're applying it for patients with junk food addictions,

with carbohydrate addictions, in diabetics and all. I can't help but think of Ozempic, is that how you see the name of it? This is kind of a bit big in the media these days, apparently a lot of people take it, apparently you know it there's problems, right? So what, how do you understand that drug? It's a great drug, I mean it's a great drug in that it helps people with weight loss but the problem is you have to be on the drug long term and when people get off the drug they frequently rebound and also the drug is is fairly expensive so it's a matter of basically taking a pill when lifestyle would do it now for some of these people they're not able to get in a program where

the lifestyle makes a difference. But the interesting thing about things like ketosis, that people say, how do you have the willpower to only have one meal a day? And the answer is, I don't. I'm a junk food addict. But the interesting thing is once we get into ketosis, this metabolic state, the appetite goes away. So I'm not hungry and it's easy. And you can ask yourself, can you eat just one potato chip? Of course not. You have to eat the whole bag. Potato chips are junk food. They're full of carbohydrates they drive insulin they drive our hunger can you eat just one hard-boiled egg or one slice of cheese well of course you can because it doesn't contain the the macronutrients

that drive insulin and drive our appetite. And by eating healthy foods and avoiding the junk foods, our appetite naturally goes away or is maintained in control for many, many people. Not all people, some people need surgery and need these Ozempic and these other drugs, but it's possible to do it without it if the right programs are in place, I believe. Well, right. And we also, you know, there's, again, with any of these drugs, this is always my concern. With any of these drugs, there's always some kind of side effects

for some portion of the population. Whereas what you're talking about is using the body's own systems, right, to deal with the issue, which to me seems like it's always gonna be a better idea if it's indeed possible even the even the longevity drugs you know the rapamycin which turns down mTOR metformin as longevity drugs people say well why don't I just take rapamycin increase my longevity improve my metabolic health well the reason is fine you can take rapamycin. I mean, I take rapamycin, but I also do it with lifestyle because there are things that can benefit from lifestyle that rapamycin probably doesn't provide.

We don't understand the systems well enough to know how any of these drugs really work. But lifestyle is a proven thing that's been developed over tens of thousands of years. We as human beings are prone to accepting orthodoxies. And once we accept them, it's hard to change our minds. But for example, this inverted food pyramid, that's fascinating, incredibly disturbing when you inverted food pyramid, that's, I mean, fascinating, right? Incredibly disturbing when you think about it, when you think about the impacts over generations that this has now had, that in a way it's a kind of, you know, been a kind of indoctrination in the wrong direction. I've talked to, you know, I've talked to people about this and they're like, well, how could that be? Right. I mean, I mean, I just I'm not I mean, I won't accept that.

They won't say this, but they're basically thinking it. I'm not accepting that. Well, I'm saying it's the opposite, but many, many intelligent people disagree with me. And in fact, the recommendations of the Nutrition Council, basically that designs the food pyramid and every few years issues an updated version, continues with the narrative that cereals and grains and carbohydrates should be a significant portion of our diet with a smaller amount of protein and then avoiding saturated fats. And one reason is the council that comes up with these recommendations. There was a fascinating paper that came out. There are a number of conflicts from the council from the major food

manufacturers who basically benefit from manufacturing junk foods. They sell junk foods that the food council then recommends in the food pyramid. And one problem is there's not a lobbying force for lifestyle. You know, there's no lifestyle is free. If I fast during the day, I actually save money because I don't spend it on breakfast or lunch and I have more time. But there's no lobbying group for that so we're up against a number of pernicious financial influences that drive the system even in the face of knowledge to the contrary people are

still getting the information our school lunch programs are still driven by this this food pyramid and these food recommendations. The narrative today is such that if anyone handed a 12 year old child a lit cigarette everyone would be aghast and you know, it just wouldn't happen. But someone can hand a 12 year old child a bowl of sugar cereal and pour chocolate milk on it and nobody thinks anything of it when actually it's very damaging to the child even at that age and it drives now the incidence of type 2 diabetes in children which we didn't used to see at all. So changing the narrative is possible I think and getting it to the point where

you know I used to think drinking orange juice was healthy. Most people think orange juice is healthy. You see it on television and movies as you know a healthy breakfast but it in my opinion it's not. It's basically sugar and it's like eating a candy bar. But changing that narrative so that people think that they instinctively realize what is healthy and what will benefit their lifestyle can have a dramatic effect. It's a big challenge to be able to do that. Yeah, it feels like the challenge of our time, really, right? It does because the chronic diseases that we've been talking about today, the growth in these diseases are unprecedented in our history.

And they're frankly not sustainable. Half the adult population is hypertensive. The growth rate in type 2 diabetes is going to approach 50% of the population soon. When that happens, all these chronic diseases are going to explode and it doesn't have to be that way because this disease is reversible with in most cases with lifestyle. And you know one disease that I've been thinking a lot about because I've been becoming very interested in brain chemistry, the hippocampus, neurological issues, again, where, you know, we hear this is a very common COVID vaccine injury. I think 80% of them are actually neurological.

It's Alzheimer's that I'm referring to. I mean, that is absolutely skyrocketed, right? Absolutely. And this was, I mean, said disease that was kind of almost unheard of, what, 100 years ago, right? Exactly. And Alzheimer's represents, if you think about it, it's sort of the ultimate failure of the medical research establishment. Because for literally decades, there's been unlimited money available to come up with a treatment for Alzheimer's. And to this day, there's no significant treatment, pharmaceutical treatment for Alzheimer's that will have any significant effect on the progression of the disease. But we're learning now that things like lifestyle, guys like Dale Bredesen and others have

come up with innovative techniques where they look at Alzheimer's not as a disease of beta amyloid but actually as a disease of many different things. It may be vitamin D deficiency, it may be a parasitic infection, it may be lead or mercury poisoning, many different factors. But one of the factors is glucose metabolism. It's known that you can diagnose Alzheimer's disease with a PET-CT scan, which looks at brain at brain glucose and hypo low metabolism of brain glucose indicates Alzheimer's disease in certain patients well ketosis as we've talked about is an alternate fuel source for the brain beyond glucose and what happens with Alzheimer's patients when

they go into ketosis and they're put on a ketogenic diet is the brain is able to use ketones instead of glucose. And for some, not all of the patients, but many of the patients,