The Dr. Hyman Show - How To Overcome Sugar Addiction with Keegan Allen and Tom Hopper

Episode Date: July 1, 2020

How To Overcome Sugar Addiction with Keegan Allen and Tom Hopper | This episode is brought to you by ButcherBox and chili I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard someone say they wish they had more willpower to be able to quit sugar. But here’s the thing: it’s an actual physical addiction and the food industry strives to get us hooked on sugar. So, it’s not about willpower, it’s about biochemistry. The great news is that we can reset our biochemistry and those sugar cravings and take back our health. The more you avoid sugar and refined carbohydrates (which just turn into sugar in your body) the more your body recognizes the natural sweetness in healthy foods like blueberries or even a red bell pepper.  My guests on this episode of The Doctor’s Farmacy, Keegan Allen and Tom Hopper, have both been through the sugar struggle, and they’re here to share their inspiring stories of overcoming the addiction to discover their most vibrant health.  Keegan is an American actor, musician, photographer, and author. He’s known for his main role as Toby Cavanaugh on the Freeform series Pretty Little Liars. Allen's passion in his younger years tended towards photography, cinematography, and other roles behind the camera. Tom is an English actor. He has appeared as Sir Percival in Merlin, Billy Bones in Black Sails, Dickon Tarly in Game of Thrones, and Luther Hargreeves in Netflix’s new show The Umbrella Academy. This episode is brought to you by ButcherBox and chili. ButcherBox makes it super easy to get humanely raised meat that you can trust by delivering it right to your doorstep. ButcherBox is committed to humanely raised animals that are never given antibiotics or added hormones and since they take out the middleman you get extra savings. ButcherBox is now gradually welcoming new customers due to increased demand, but only if you’re on the waitlist! So reserve your spot today at ButcherBox.com/FARMACY, and you’ll get an email when they’re ready to take your order.  With the summer heat creeping up this is the perfect time to improve your sleep with a cooler bed and support your overall wellness routine at the same time. Right now, chili is celebrating Christmas in July with the gift of 20% off any sleep system. Just go to chilitechnology.com and enter code HYMAN20 at checkout to get 20% off any chili sleep system until July 8th. Here are more of the details from our interview: The health scare that led Tom to cut out sugar and start to view food as medicine (3:58) Keegan’s health journey from being pre-diabetic to understanding that his diet was making him unwell (12:42) Lactose intolerance, infertility, and sugar (17:10) Food labeling and ingredient lists (25:56) The first step to take to improve your diet (32:43) The science of sugar and how sugar affects your immune system (35:53) Keegan’s experience resetting his diet and improving his health (43:43) Sugar, cancer, and the ketogenic diet (48:07) The 10-Reset available at getfarmacy.com or getfarmacy.com/free (51:26) Worsening health metrics among children (58:08) Follow Keegan Allen on Instagram @keeoone and on Twitter @KeeganAllen Follow Tom Hopper on Instagram @tom.hopperhops and on Twitter @Tomhopperhops

Coming up on this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. That addiction to that kind of food doesn't just disappear. I didn't do it overnight. Yeah. My wife always says this to me. She was like, you know, when I'm talking to people saying, you just do this, you just do that. She's like, Tom, you have to remember that you took two years probably to just not eat any of this stuff anymore. Yeah. So your taste buds have to change. You have to give your taste buds time to to make that change hey everyone it's dr hyman did you know that not

all beef labeled grass-fed is really grass-fed it's not actually a federally regulated claim and there's definitely some imposters out there and a lot of beef labeled as grass-fed is only partially pasture-raised and then finished on. You have to read the fine print. Since cows raised completely on pasture tends to produce meat that's higher in anti-inflammatory omega-3 fats and antioxidants and even phytonutrients because they eat all the plants and it's better for the environment, I'm always careful to make sure I buy my beef from a source I can trust. And that's why I love ButcherBox. They have strict values and quality control when it comes to their meat. They deliver 100% grass fed and grass finished

beef right to my doorstep. They also offer wild caught Alaskan salmon that are perfect for getting some variety in your weekly meal plans. Now, I honestly love knowing that I can just hop online to order clean protein from ButcherBox without having to sort through the labels at the market to know what I'm getting, and their prices are way better too. One of my favorite ways to make grass-fed ground beef is the eggplant moussaka recipe in my last cookbook. It's so good layered with sweet potatoes, eggplant, tons of fresh herbs and spices for a super comforting base dish. And my wife makes me keep making it. We've had to make it three or four times. So I think I might

begin too much of eggplant. Anyway, ButcherBox is gradually welcoming new customers to this increased demand, but only if you're on the wait list. So reserve your spot today at butcherbox.com forward slash pharmacy, and you'll get an email when they're ready to take your order. That's ButcherBox.com forward slash pharmacy to preserve your spot today. Now, let's dive into today's show. Welcome to the doctor's pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman and that's pharmacy with an F. F-A-R-M-A-C-Y. And if you've ever struggled with sugar, this conversation is going to matter to you because

it's with two extraordinary young men who are going to tell us about their journey. You might know them. Keegan Allen is an American actor, musician, photographer, and author. He's known for his main role as Toby Cavanaugh on the Freedom series, Pretty Little Liars. His passion in his younger years tended toward photography, cinematography, and lots of other roles. He's published two photography books and he's going to tell us about his journey with sugar which you all know i care a lot about uh well having less of it that is although i love it and we're

also have tom hopper who's an english actor you might recognize him as um the guy who got flamed with his father because he didn't bend the knee to Daenerys. In the Game of Thrones, he's appeared as Sir Percival in Merlin, Billy Bones in Black Sails, Dick and Tarly, like I said, in the Game of Thrones, and Luther Hargraves in Netflix's new show, The Umbrella Academy. Those are all like English names. Yeah, they all are. So welcome. Thanks for being here.

It's a pleasure to be here. So you guys have been on a health journey the last few years. I wonder how you understood the connection between what you're eating and how you feel. And how did you sort of find my work and get connected to processed food being bad and sugar affecting you? And how did you connect those dots? Because most young guys just eat whatever they want and they just like push through and they're like, I'm Superman. I'm never going to die. I can eat whatever I want and they just like push through and they're like i'm superman i'm never gonna die i can eat whatever i want but you guys seem to have a different experience well yeah i mean what you just said there about being feeling invincible

was exactly the journey that i was on actually and um i was training a lot so i was really into my fitness and it was actually for training for the show for that show you mentioned black sails that this whole journey kind of happened for me and we went on quite an extreme diet to to get into shape for that show and during that process um i started to get uh stomach problems a lot of stomach problems um because i was what i was doing was going from being a sugar addict a major one actually i would do that and then do these extreme diets of cutting out all my carbohydrates and i'd be like oh i can eat whatever i want now and i when i'm not on the show i would just so i'd binge yeah and these two extremes kept happening and um what what happened i think this is a similar thing for for many people

who make this extreme change is i had a health scare a major health scare where my stomach um i got an extreme case of gastritis and i felt like i was going to die it was it was so extreme yeah like extreme stomach pain um bedridden just felt awful um and i thought i've got to i've got to look what's causing this and i'd been taking various bits of medication because i was getting like acid reflux problems and stuff and i realized that the NSAIDs and stuff i was taking had really ripped up my stomach so you're taking anti-inflammatories yeah yeah so i was taking yeah yeah so basically i was taking anti-inflammatories for pain from working out? Yeah, so basically I was taking anti-inflammatories because I had two herniated discs.

And I went to a doctor who I thought was supposed to be helping me and he was just going, yeah, your back's going to feel like it's gone on holiday if you have these. So I was taking all these painkillers and stuff, not thinking anything of it. And I think so many people are guilty of that. It's just going, I want to be free of the pain yeah and i think what happened was i had this premonition of my friend who who lives a very similar life to us now my friend said to me he goes it's funny isn't

it when you feel that ill when you feel that sick you'll do anything to feel better again yeah you'll do anything to feel just good and i said yeah that's true because i felt so ill and i was like yeah that's true i would right now i'll do anything and he was like well why not take every precaution to make sure you never feel like this again and that was a big moment for me it was a kind of a light bulb moment and that sort of started my journey of going right i'm going to look at the diet because he he was a big moment for me. It was a kind of a light bulb moment. And that sort of started my journey of going, right, I'm going to look at the diet. Because he was a bit like, you know, when we talk about how our link up was, which you'll hear about from Keegan in a moment. But he was a huge influence for me.

And seeing that he's always so healthy, he never gets sick. There's never any problems. So I started looking at what he did. And he just didn't eat processed food. He didn't eat sugar. Didn't eat anything that would cause any kind of inflammatory response in his body. And also through trial and error, you know, you find what works for you, what doesn't. And just being aware of that.

And I started surrounding myself with people who were on the same journey. And I think that's very important. Yes, totally. Because otherwise you're overweight overweight and unhealthy you're likely to also be and if your friends are all drinking green juice and doing yoga you're probably going to be healthier absolutely yeah and it's that influence of it's uh peer pressure right you might have times i get because i don't drink now either and i every time i go out is have a drink go and have a drink and i'm like well i don't especially the english culture right oh big time culture yeah pub culture yeah you go in the local pub it's like you're expected if i go in and go just a mineral water please it's not it's not going down well so um yeah the

peer pressure thing is huge so like surrounding myself like my aunt was a big influence for me who's also a big fan of yours um and she introduced me to to you and to your to your podcast and um that was a a huge stepping stone for me because you know it was it was just about looking at medicine and food being medicine and having that mindset and going you know what i don't if i look at the way people fuel their car yeah you know if someone has their pride and joy is their car, you know, like an item, a thing, a solid thing. And they'll put their pride and joy into it, you know. And they're going to fuel it with the best fuel. I mean, even if you have a pet, I mean, we feed our kids stuff.

We would never feed our pet. Would you give your pet a cheeseburger, fries and a Coke? I mean, no. Yeah, absolutely. I see people giving their dogs this like gourmet food. never feed our pet would you give your pet a cheeseburger fries and a coke i mean no yeah absolutely i see people giving their dogs this like gourmet food yeah like this yeah right exactly and they're eating down a cheeseburger um i don't use this analogy i was talking to him yesterday about this i used analogy when i was shooting in toronto recently and uh every morning i would see this guy who was cleaning his shop front,

like meticulous cleaning with a steam cleaner to make his shop look amazing. And he stood there with this sprayer thing with a cigarette in one hand and a big can of Coke in the other and with a huge gut and just looking not healthy. And I'm like, he's putting so much effort into making his shop look that good, but has no care in the world about what he's doing to his body. And I think that's a thing that, you know, a lot of people have fallen into now is that this, that kind of aesthetic of what things look like or what an item looks like, what you look like on the outside,

but not actually taking into account we're put on this earth in these vessels that we're actually supposed to take care of yeah you know we got the owner's manual we never got the manual yeah yeah and uh well yeah unfortunately the government and society has driven us into a place where the manual is oh just eat this just eat that and it's what's available yeah um so it's only through self-education that you can break that mold because the government's not going to do it. No. The world we live in isn't going to do it. It's just, it's our own, it's our own journey. And I think it's that thing, like I say, people who have an extreme health scare or change where they go, I've got to take control.

Yeah, it's powerful. So you have that personal experience that kind of wakes you up. I mean, I think that's the case for got to take control. Yeah, it's powerful. So that personal experience, it kind of wakes you up. I mean, I think that's the case for a lot of people. They don't sort of wake up until something bad happens, which is unfortunate because most people are, even when they don't have something terrible going on, don't feel the best they could feel. And they don't know how bad they feel

until they start feeling better. That's it. That's it. They go, this is just normal know i'm supposed to have aches and pains or my nose is supposed to be tired all the time tired or groggy or my digestion isn't great i got headaches or i don't sleep i guess these are just sort of quote normal things we think we have to suffer from and they're not and you know and i a number of years ago i wrote a book called the 10-day detox which is basically a sugar addict detox. And, uh, you know, I talked about FLC syndrome, which is when you feel like crap, you know?

And there's a questionnaire. I'm like, how many of these symptoms you have? And if you get a high score, you have a bad FLC syndrome. And people just think it's normal. And that was one of the most. That's the thing. Majority of people, I think. They think it's genetic. They think it think it's like oh i'm just genetically yeah uh i i process food this way or i i can't process food this way yeah yeah i'm just tired generically tired now i've got headaches because i'm stressed or which i mean they are all factors but i do believe it all does start with food i mean people will argue this point with me but i

do believe that if you get what you're being fueled with right things start to fall into place yeah then you make better decisions your brain is working better you're not tired i mean if you're not sleeping if you're not exercising if you're you know just uh stressed all the time yeah you're going to make poor decisions and then the food that you choose is bad and then that kind of perpetuates that vicious cycle it's interesting you're saying about the about exercise and stuff because people say, oh, I haven't got the energy to exercise. I haven't got the energy.

And what's amazing, I think, about exercise is that if you get up and you do exercise, you get more energy. It's true. It's not like you become more tired. No, no, it's true. I mean, last night I spent out late night with a congressman in Washington, and then I had to fly from New York to LA and then I was kind of tired, I didn't get enough sleep and I was kind of

tired towards the end of the day, got here, had to do some podcasts and went to yoga and I was feeling kind of punky when I got there and by the time I left I just felt so much better. So yeah, it's really true. It is, yeah. Yeah, it does. There's something it does to the brain, whether it's really true it is yeah yeah yeah it does it there's something it does the brain whether it's the dopamine or something that just uh balances you out and gets you ready

for you know we were talking about getting up early like yeah if you've had a good night's sleep get up early and and start the day with some kind of exercise yeah it sets you up for the day you know mentally for sure so keegan you you had your own struggle with sugar and kind of knocked you to your knees and you did very much so yeah i mean i i i met tom actually in a very interesting way um where i was at the point that i had met you i was pre-diabetic i was very healthy you looked good on the outside i was i was on television, six pack felt really good about myself. All the boxes were checked on. I was able to go to the gym workout, you know, but I always didn't feel right.

I never felt good. And I would go to, I'd go to work. I'd be on set, be chewing like gummy bears. I'd be eating like, you know, whatever was around at craft service, by the way, for actors is really, really not the best place to eat yeah um because they just have a whatever's around yeah most of it's very high in sugar and uh additives lots of corn lots of corn chips lots of corn things sugar and coffee just keep people the world goes around you gotta have the energy and uh we you know for book tour i was always really

afraid you know when you've you've probably been on book tour multiple times now at this point but like i was always afraid of getting sick and i would always get sick and i and people would be like it's because you're thinking about getting sick i'm like no there's got to be something going on here and uh when we went to do a convention a big comic-con convention um one of the things especially now with coronavirus you don't want to touch people but um i would always be like i can't i am so sorry like i'm sorry i can't i can't touch you because i'm i'm my immunity so my immune system's really like compromised all the time when i travel must be something in the air but the reality was i was slamming something in your mouth and cookies and treats that fans would be bringing us

and uh we were there with jason momoa and and and like all these people would bring us all gifts and i and i would be like to momo i'd be like are you gonna eat those tim tams because i don't want to like yeah you eat them i don't want them and to tom i'd be like hey man can i have those gummies and he'd be like i'm not gonna eat them so i'm eating all these things at this convention and i had just met tom and tom's you know tom's like physically looks ripped like i'm like oh man we should go work out together in the in the in between times of the convention and uh i get really sick immediately i have like this australian flu almost yeah which i which was just because my immune system was so compromised as you know and uh what was pivotal in my entire journey at the start of my first step in this journey was when i was really sick tom comes over and he's like mate you gotta come out we're gonna not

you can't be sitting in the hotel room the whole time and i'm like i'm like well i'm like really sick man he's like we got this food we have to eat and all those things and you can't be sitting in here and i'm like oh man i'm really sick you're gonna get sick don't come in and he's like man i don't get sick i never get sick i don't i don't eat sugar i don't eat processed foods i just work out i just eat clean you should come out and like come onto this train with me essentially and so i uh i i and so i kind of i mean i'm sick as a dog 103 temperature running around brisbane with with with him and i feel like a lunatic yeah but i start we started i look like your carer or something like he was like shaking around like come on man yeah and he's like come on but the interesting thing was

i slowly just in that week, I slowly started to realize little things. For example, sweet potatoes. Why do you need to add anything to them? Just put them with olive oil. They're naturally sweet. But we were hanging out and I'm like, hmm, these are really great. And he's like, excuse me, what's in this?

And they're like, well, it know sweet potato and uh and a little bit of yeah a little bit of sugar or rapeseed oil or or we were talking about this like canola oil or you know any of these things and people do not know about this because i was completely baffled by this i i never stepped into this realm of what's in this what's inside of the food yeah and when you have whole foods and you think you're eating healthy oh i'm having fresh salmon uh caught fresh but what what's in the marinade what's how is it prepared yeah and so hanging out with him and seeing that just in that week we kept in contact and throughout the next three months i went you know what there's something in

this there's something to this way of living. And I was familiar with you before this because I'm lactose intolerant. I'm just going to admit it here on the air. No, but... So you and about 70% of the rest of the world. Yeah. And so I remember...

It's actually normal to be lactose intolerant. Yeah, you're not supposed to be drinking. Like Northern Europe, maybe it gets tolerated or you're a Maasai woman. It is a quality of the milk difference there as well. It is. And also, yes, it's so different when you look at the effect of pasteurization. Yeah. I just going to interrupt you for a sec.

No, I love this. There's an incredible study that was done in the 30s by this guy, Dr. Pottinger, who took cats and wanted to show the effective processing of foods versus not. And it wasn't even the worst stuff that we're eating now. It was just like regular raw milk, which is what we ate for centuries, versus pasteurized homogenized milk and a few other different kind of processing. And after three generations on this, the cats couldn't reproduce in the fourth generation. Their health dramatically declined.

They got sick and they looked terrible. And when they switched them back to whole, like unprocessed milk, for example, raw milk, they actually had profoundly dramatic improvements in their health. So infertility was a big factor there. Yeah, infertility. And that's one in seven couples now.

One in seven. And what's fascinating is that if you look at the effect, for example, even on cholesterol or your blood lipids, when you have raw milk versus pasteurized, homogenized milk, it's profoundly different on your fats and your blood and your cholesterol. So it's not only like what we eat. I'm having milk.

That's a whole food. It's how that food has been manipulated or processed. Yeah. Great. Another thing for infertility, plastic and now milk. Oh, maybe this was in cats,

but it was really, but it is interesting that the infertility thing, because I mean, like you say, the, the rate of infertility of, of young people, you know,

that should be in that prime for reproducing is is going up one in seven couples yeah it's crazy that a lot of you know a lot of it has to do with sugar yeah yeah i mean yeah just the modern diet right i think well there's a book written by a harvard professor called the fertility diet and it's all about how sugar causes insulin resistance which is when you make too much insulin and your body resisted because it's sort of like the boy who cried wolf and the insulin levels go up and it makes you store belly fat it makes you hungry makes you tired it makes you not want to exercise and and it actually sort of drives you into this visceral fat but when that happens particularly in women it causes their testosterone to go up

it causes them to not ovulate and so their whole hormones get screwed up and they get infertility from eating sugar which most people don't realize yeah wow unbelievable yeah that's that that's another profound thing about sugar there because it's people i think a lot of people just think oh it's about gaining weight it's about no you know there is so many knock-on effects like actually the future of the planet has something to do with it you know if it's our species yeah our species and it's actually you know slowing down the i mean we are overpopulated as opposed to the planet so that's maybe one good thing about it but apart from that yeah that's that's not good no it's not and it's and you know and it goes all the way back to the farm and how we grow you know corn which corn, which gets turned into high fructose corn syrup and how it's processed and put in all processed food.

Yeah. But Keegan, you were saying about how you then figured out you were pre-diabetic. Yeah, yeah. So I had found you actually through just going on, it wasn't even through YouTube at that point, some weird third party site and you're a doctor. And what you were saying was not radical within itself but what was radical was that you were a doctor saying you shouldn't be drinking milk because you shouldn't be drinking baby cows like formula and that all these things happen like any kind of lactose is lactose or just sugar anyway but the idea then is that i was able to use what you use you as a reference to then show people that were enabling like trying to enable me to

drink milk and this huge elucidation from your uh catalog of work became right in front of me this is true i mean you know the the school, you can't actually have a school lunch unless you serve milk with every school lunch. It's absurd. And often it's chocolate milk, which is a little bit better than Coke, but not much. Yeah. And a friend of mine, David Ludwig, recently wrote an article, I think it was called Milk, in the New England Journal of Medicine, where they went through all the research and showed how our thinking about milk is so flawed that it's not nature's perfect food, that it can cause increases in cancer, for example, increases in prostate disease, increases in type 1 diabetes, allergies, eczema, asthma.

And for some people, they tolerate it, but it is a big driver of issues. And as a doctor seeing patients for, you know, 30 years, it's one of the big things that I see as a lever I have is just try a holiday from dairy for a few weeks and see how much better you feel. Acne is a huge cause of acne. Yeah, so this is interesting. Sugar and milk, you want acne, you want pimples, just have sugar and milk. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark. Now I know I talk a lot about diet, but there are so many moving pieces that need to come together for our health to really thrive.

So no matter how well we eat, how often we exercise or how connected we feel to our friends, there's one piece of our health routine that we just can't make up for in other ways. And that is sleep. Sleep is when our body gets to finally rest and recover. It's when our brain detoxes through something called the glymphatic system. It's when cellular renewal happens to fight aging and disease, and it's when our muscles repair. We won't feel great in our daily lives if we aren't sleeping great at night, and even all the coffee in the world can't make up for a lack of sleep. And that's why I'm all about creating an optimal sleep environment to help myself get the deepest rest possible. And a big part of that is temperature. Sleeping in a cooler environment reduces core body temperature

and is the proven way to flip your sleep switch to help your body wind down to get high quality sleep. And that is why I love cooling sleep systems from Chili. Chili makes several products that help lower your temperature for better sleep. They have the Chili Pad and the Uhler Cooling Mattress Toppers and the Chili Blanket, which is a weighted temperature control blanket. And they're all hydro-powered and cooled using water. I've used the Chili Pad and the Uhler, and I can't stress enough how much I love them. I run hot, but they keep my side of the bed nice and cold so I can get a really amazing night's sleep. My wife used to joke that she needed a parka to sleep in the same room as me, but now

she can sleep on her side of the bed warmer with Chili's dual zone feature. With the summer heat creeping up, this is the perfect time to improve your sleep with a cooler bed and support your overall wellness routine at the same time. Right now, Chili is celebrating Christmas in July with the gift of 20% off any sleep system. Just go to chilitechnology.com and enter the code HYMAN20 at checkout to get 20% any chili sleep system until july 8th you'll be amazed at the difference a cooler bed can make to help you get deeper more restful sleep i know you're gonna love the chili products as much as i do so let's get back to this week's episode so a lot of a lot of a lot of our followers are younger and and i when we do these conventions and we meet all these

fans and people uh i've noticed that a lot of people will ask me, hey, like, what is your regimen? Like, what do you do? Like, how do you keep your skin clear? How do you like how do you like stay in shape and all these things? unhealthy studying for finals thinking oh i'm just gonna eat m&ms and study for finals candy like junk food to think that that's gonna help my brain and all it did was the opposite and i would have i had really bad acne i was really insecure i had like already being a teenager is stressful enough but then had to have the anxieties that were food related yeah 100% because you I could not understand what was wrong with me and going through life I thought that that was just part of a

healthy diet like the the difference between an apple and a cupcake was nothing in my mind like you can't even have a good background and family yeah you know worse it is for people who come from communities where they don't have that education yeah and where they don't have that education. Yeah. Where they don't have the access. You probably live in a community where you had access to food that was okay. Yeah. There are communities where they just don't. Right.

And I think, and they don't even know that they don't know. Yeah. Right. And I had a prejudice. I mentioned this before in a podcast, but I had a prejudice that I thought, you know, well, you know, I always said it's not people's fault if they're overweight because of the food system so bad. But, you know, most people kind of know it's just hard because of the biology. But when I went down to film for this movie Fed Up, I was shocked that, you know, these people just didn't know what was in their food. They weren't aware of what they were doing.

Yeah, that's the thing. We were talking about this about labels weren't we how how few people take the step to just go well what's what's in this you know they're just just a simple thing it's all written on the back not the front of the label but yeah the back right yeah actually have a look what's in it nutritional yeah because ingredients because that's the that's the most basic form of educating yourself of what is going in your mouth yeah it's it's tough though because even like you know ingredient lists in europe they list percentages yeah uh here they're flavoring they'll put like natural flavoring or which can be another list of a whole other things that's true it's covered in natural vanilla flavor is actually uh coming from beaver's anal glands so is it really serious wow well that's what i'm looking out for now you So I didn't know that. Wow.

Well, that's what I'm looking out for. You know, what's really striking. And I had a friend who was the, uh, worked in the Obama administration in charge of the food programs and the food labeling. And he's like the, the, the food companies don't want to have sugar listed as the number one ingredient on the label. Yeah. So they'll put five different kinds of sugar because the list of ingredients is in order of the amount yeah right but if you if you have let's say you know wheat as the first

ingredient and then you have like five kinds of sugar actually sugar is the most predominant ingredient they just because they don't call it you know sugar yeah or they don't have the same kind of sugar it's just that it's just a loophole in the law that allows the food companies to get away with right bamboozling us yeah and it's it's it's pretty bad and then i was i was uh shopping the other day i was in cbs and getting something i don't know what and i looked over and i saw this this big freezer of haagen-dazs ice cream and i have a weakness for haagen-dazs ice cream but i don't eat that often and and uh and they said it's non-dairy haagen-dazs i'm like oh cool and i walked over and I pull it out.

It says plant-based, gluten-free, dairy-free. And I'm like, oh, this is health food, right? Turn the label over and it's like high fructose corn syrup and processed ingredients. And I'm like, what is this? Well, this is the other movement, actually, which is quite interesting to talk about. Because we know, I'm sure we've all heard of this, the documentary that came out and it's really pushed this whole vegan movement. Game changers. Game changers, yeah.

So with that coming out and I mean, I'm seeing so many adverts now in the UK. I'm not sure if it's the same here. I think it probably is for plant-based, vegan, plant-based, vegan, be healthy, plant-based, vegan. And there's a picture of some processed burger or some processed piece of meat or something. And for me, I think the biggest thing I have a problem with, again, is that lack of wanting to go and actually educate yourself. People are taking this thing at face value. And I have to say, Game Changers does make some very valid points about the industry the meat industry

and certainly i think with regards to like processed meat they absolutely have a point but when we're talking about you know you're saying a lot of the stuff at the moment about regenerative farming yeah and the difference that that makes on on the meat and on the planet. And I think that is something we need to look at more. But people are using this blanket thing of meat is bad. And it's just not the case, in my opinion, if it's eaten responsibly and it's the right kind of meat. But what this vegan movement is, the wrong side of it is it's actually encouraging more eating of processed foods yes yeah i mean all these new plant-based burgers sound great and they're billion dollar businesses but they are highly processed food with you know different

novel ingredients and if you go into watch them be made they're made in a basic factory on an assembly line with all kinds of strange things that i, you know, aren't a whole food. So, you know, if you want to be a vegan, great, but eat whole foods and be aware of what you're doing because you can be a chips and soda vegan like you were a vegan and you, and what happened to you? Diabetic and pre-diabetic went in and I was like, what's wrong with me? Like, why do I feel so tired all the time? But this is the one thing I wanted to ask you then as a doctor, as someone that does this as an advocate goes around and travels and talks to everybody what would you say to the younger generation if they want to start somewhere what's the first step to really recognizing not just like reading labels but what is the real first step that can be a tangible first step for someone who

maybe lives in rural america i mean lennox i, I've been to Lenox before. I've been there. I know what that place is like. I'm surprised that you came out of Lenox and you're like, you know what, I'm going to do this and bring it to the world. What was it in your journey that was the first step? Well, I used to be vegetarian too. And I, uh, and I loved sugar and starch and bread and pasta. You know, I i i bought into the whole low fat and you were doing it for health reasons you were vegetarian because you thought it was healthier health reasons yes um and i thought this was the way to go and and you know it's interesting now that i've sort of cleaned up my diet and got rid of the the starch and the sugar for the most part

you know if i look at pictures of myself without a shirt when i'm 30 i'm like way scrawnier and like kind of flabbier than i was than i am today at 60 right yeah and i don't do that much exercise you know like if i'm in the gym like five times a month weightlifting that's a lot right now i do yoga i'll do other stuff but i just you know just because i'm busy i'm planning on doing more yeah it's tough yeah i'll get you to help me but you look like you know what just because I'm busy. I'm planning on doing more. Yeah, it's tough. Maybe I'll get you to help me. You look like you know what you're doing. And then I got very sick, and I started to sort of look at what I was doing

and had to sort of shift. And as the science changed, I began to sort of look at, you know, because I think ideology is so problematic in nutrition. There are all these diet wars. There are all these people in conflict with each other, paleo, vegan, this, that. And it's kind of crazy. A lot of little religions, aren't they?

It is. But, you know, I say, let's get away from that. Because, you know, I came up with this term, pegan, which is a joke. It was like paleo, vegan. And I just published this book, Food Fix, and it was number one in paleo and number one in vegan books. Yeah. There you go. fix and it was number one in paleo and number one in vegan books yeah and because we have far more in common with each other than with the standard american process diet so you can be a chips and

soda vegan right or you can be a cheeseburger whatever bacon paleo but that's not necessarily either of them are good right it's more going towards whole food so your question was what would i say to people i i think you know it's really easy to just sort of start simply you know if if you're eating industrial food like stop doing that right if you look at the ingredients and you see refined flour soybean oil or high fructose corn syrup, just don't eat it. If you can, the next step would be look for non-GMO certified foods, right? Not because GMO, we know, is that bad for you. It may be, it may not be. There's a lot of controversy about that. But it's a form of agriculture that's destructive to the environment.

And there's often other things in there like glyphosate, which is Roundup, which they spray on 70 different crops from canola to corn to wheat to soy. And that is definitely harmful for our microbiome. It destroys our gut bacteria, which affects everything. And it's linked to cancer. And there is a $2 billion lawsuit that got a settlement, a judgment about Roundup or glyphosate or weed killer uh and

so so just be aware that if you just stop those things you're the quality you're already making yeah i mean yeah whatever you do and so those are really simple things we can do and then if you can try to you know look at what you're eating is it is it whole food i mean is it something you can recognize like an almond or almond butter it's like not that many steps of processing because most food gets processed in some way we cook it or yeah it's all got some kind of man intervention yeah yeah but if you know most of the time i just eat stuff that looks like what it is you know broccoli is a broccoli you know it's a fish piece of fish grass-fed meat well i always call it what i said to him when we first started, when he was a pretty diabetic vegan,

sick man in Australia. I call it the of the earth diet. Yeah. So if you're eating stuff that the earth naturally provides, then you're never really in harm's way. Right. You know, if it's not- How many steps did it take to get from the field to the fork?

Yeah, exactly. If you can trace them all, okay. But if you don't know how it got like that yeah and yeah we got a problem yeah um the ingredients list is your ingredient right a sweet potato is a sweet potato a piece of chicken breast is a piece of chicken breast there's no ingredient list on that yeah exactly right it is what it is right and and i think the the other thing i found as well which is important thing to talk about i think is how people who do make the shift they have to go through a process themselves like i know went through a process where i kept going back i kept going oh i want that i still that addiction to that kind of food doesn't just disappear i didn't do it overnight yeah my wife

always says this to me she was like you know when i'm talking to people saying you just do this you just do that she's like tom you have to remember that you took two years probably to just not eat any of this stuff anymore yeah so your taste buds have to change you have to give your taste buds time to to make that change and really know what things taste like again like broccoli can taste freaking awesome right it's so true when people get off that for a week even and then they have blueberries they go my god this is you know like candy right and i i think people don't understand how how hard it is because of the biology of sugar yeah it's not a moral failing right it's not that you're weak-willed but you cannot overcome your biology with willpower it will fail every

time yeah so you have to use science and the science of sugar is fascinating because it it not only drives uh mechanisms that make you gain weight because it produces more insulin so it stores belly fat yeah it makes you hungry it slows your metabolism and it locks the fat in the fat cell so it can't get out it's like a one-way turnstile like in a subway can't get out and and when you look at the biology on the brain it's even scarier so in really well-controlled studies they've shown that by looking at brain imaging and blood tests eating the exact amount of calories protein fat carbs and fiber in a shake like a milkshake they just swapped out the level of the kind of carbohydrate so that one raises your blood sugar a lot and one doesn't it's like a slowly digested starch when they did that they found that the brain imaging showed that the

addiction center which is stimulated by heroin or cocaine or whatever gets lit up like crazy by the sugar and their insulin goes up their blood sugar goes up their adrenaline goes up so sugar causes your adrenaline to go up your cortisol which is the stress hormone so it literally creates a biologic stress and for those worried about coronavirus one of the most important things you can do is cut out junk food and sugar because it suppresses your immune system yeah so keegan you were eating a lot of sugar yeah and you were getting sick all the time it wasn't a coincidence yeah and i don't know if you're

familiar with dr raymond francis but dr raymond francis there was like this video circulating about how he he pretty much just he he immediately was on like a news show and he talks about that sugar even even just a small what is it even? Even like a tablespoon? It was like a teaspoon of sugar. It reduces it by 50%. 50%, your immunity goes down by 50%. And like, that's the other thing is like, some people will go, well, there's no science in that. Maybe that's how we're gonna get rid of coronavirus.

We're gonna like. Yeah, yeah, just don't eat sugar and you will probably not get coronavirus. But the interesting thing that i wanted to add to volley this back to you then with with your immune system sugar is not the only culprit to lowering your immune system there's these are there are canola oils there are what what other lifestyle as well like i find you know like stress and stuff stress and fatigue and lack of sleep are ones that can that can drop it for sure that's that's that's that cycle is that like if you eat sugar if you eat processed foods then you don't

really sleep that well they don't really move that well and it's just uh well the other part about eating a diet of processed food and sugar is it depletes your nutrients right it actually doesn't have the vitamins and minerals and nutrients you need to metabolize stuff so the people who are often the most nutritionally deficient are the most obese, which is kind of surprising because how can you be malnourished and obese at the same time? The nutritional density of our food is so important and processed food sure just doesn't have it and sugar depletes our nutrients like B vitamins.

And so when you have low levels of zinc and you have low levels of vitamin D and low levels of omega-3 fats and low levels of iron and vitamin A, your immune system can't function. So in the developing world, we know very clearly that the kids who die from diarrhea or respiratory infections or measles, it's because they're malnourished. If a kid gets measles who's well-nourished in america they're not going to die from it usually right but in the developing world these kids die all the time from basic disease because they're so malnourished yeah and i think we are a malnourished country 90 of us are deficient and so the best way to build your immune system is to eat whole food yeah cut out the sugar make sure you take your vitamins get enough sleep like you said

deal with stress as a huge factor and i think you know i i i think something simple like just meditation yeah so powerful yeah it's a thing that i think be woo woo but it works we just don't talk about that enough i think and you as a functional medicine doctor i'm sure you you speak to your patients about how important this can be because it really is powerful and um my wife went through this whole process like she didn't do a lot of the hypnobirthing thing when she was pregnant with my with my son freddie and then with truly my daughter she went through this whole process of just making sure she was really really relaxed all the time and do a lot of hypnobirthing meditation yeah and truly my

daughter came out the most chilled baby i mean it unbelievable. I don't know if there was a link there with that, but she certainly thinks that was my wife. I mean, there's a link. And epigenetics are so powerful. So whatever the mother eats, her level of exposure to stress, toxins, all these things have huge effects on the baby. And if studies are so clear, if the mother's eating a lot of sugar and processed food,

the baby's more likely to get obese, to have heart disease get setting them up for that down the road i mean the data is so clear on this and i think people just understand and the fact that we eat about 152 pounds of sugar per person yeah that's almost half a pound a day yeah it's sugar well it's hidden in every single thing that you could pick up when we were at the gym yeah we go to the the bar the bar at the gym they have like a smoothie or something yeah oh my god yeah everything that is laid out that says healthy organic gluten-free it's so counterproductive at the gym and you know that all everything you see in there there's like signs for for coca-cola in some gyms and stuff and there's like awful you go to those like smoothie things. And you look at the label,

it has more sugar than a can of Coke. Yeah. I mean, that's just insane. Yeah. And then people become addicted to it because they're like, well, I'm eating healthy.

I'm drinking this healthy juice. But what they're doing is they're spiking their insulin levels. They're, they're becoming addicted to this fruit, fructose. Almost. I'm sure that some of it may be even as a hidden, there's so many different

names for hidden sugars now um it's like there's like 200 names for sugar if you google names for sugar you'll see it'll come on the list of like 200 different things that you don't even know are sugar yeah that's i mean that's one of the things that started me on on the journey of like i'm just not going to eat anything that isn't whole food because i remember thinking well there's all this other stuff in there now like i started off just being trying to avoid sugar yeah and then i looked at everything else i was like what is that i can't even pronounce that let alone like put it in my body and think it's actually going to do anything good so i just i started to just go no i can't i can't put that in anymore i mean the average american eats three to five pounds of additives every year yeah i mean

unbelievable and i know i know that what's what's even more interesting too is i'm looking at your bookshelf right here and i see you have uh the surrender experiment by michael a singer untethered soul that's this is important too is that like like, along with your eating, uh, the reason I bring up Michael Eisinger, that and Tethered Soul was amazing. And Understanding Meditation, Wim Hof is amazing. Oh yeah. I don't know if you follow. I do.

I know him very well. Oh, he's amazing. And Cold Showers is a huge one. Cold Showers. Cold Showers is great. Yeah. It helps so much with anti-inflammatory. There's so many anti-inflammatory.

If I have any aches or pains, I take a steam and I jump in an ice bath yeah i'm like i'm better yeah right amazing i did a thing for a while doing uh like contrast showers with like going in the sauna in my in my apartment i was staying in toronto and i was shooting recently i uh they had a sauna downstairs and i was oh amazing great so i started doing contrast uh like hot cold yeah hot cold man i felt so good yeah yeah i try and do it in the morning and then before i do it like half an hour pre going to bed yeah and you feel amazing sleep so well yeah huge mental clarity more energy levels in the morning to get up and go and train you feel good for the day like it's it's brilliant like those little things that you don't think would make a huge difference. They really do. It's so true.

So Keegan, how, how did you then feel after you started to reset your diet? Yeah, it took about three months. I, like Tom was saying, and I'm sure you understand this, anybody that goes on this journey for themselves where they go,

okay, now I'm going to be accountable. I'm fully aware of my diet. I'm going to look at everything. I'm going to read the labels. I'm going to do some research. I'm going to follow health professionals like, like like yourself like Dr. Mark Hyman and start to not just do the research but put in the work and I would even with all of that and having this extraordinary world around

me in Los Angeles of healthy places that I could eat, it still was difficult. I would still regress back to, okay, I'm gonna go and have a cupcake or I'm gonna go and eat. Like one little chocolate chip won't mess me up. And I immediately was sometimes caught in that. And Max Lugavere talks about this, that these are highly palatable foods.

And hyper palatable, it's, these are highly palatable foods and hyper palatable. It's like porn for your mouth and you eat these things and then you're just like, I can't, I actually physically cannot stop myself. And my, my girlfriend, she's a very healthy person. She does not eat anything, any processed foods, no sugar, no nothing. She's very healthy, but she will tell me I can't even take a bite of that because I will never be able to stop and I never understood that

until I was doing this right and so going through that understanding that it is an addiction and that the people that were enabling me and saying well come like we'd go out like an alcoholic just have one drink yeah yeah and you have to see yourself as the next addict as an addict yeah but then you start to recognize that almost everyone around you is completely bonkers addiction yeah like addiction wise with sugar or with these processed foods and they would they'll nudge you they'll be like it's not gonna kill you like one bite of this you know what those are called? Food pushers. Yeah.

Yeah. And everywhere. You got to get rid of the food pushers in your life. But I went through all that and I finally came out on the other side, recognizing that I felt I was a completely different person. And I was a person that I wanted to be. I felt good all the time. And then I started getting deeper into it. So microbiome, understanding that, understanding probiotics, not getting like junk, like actual real good probiotics.

Understanding how like my gut and the certain foods that I was eating maybe weren't responding to me. Like I can't have a cauliflower. And cauliflower is great for other people. And understanding that my mother was went through a crazy uh amount of health issues and it happened right at the time where i was very deeply into this and uh one of the health issues was that she had a um you know she was she was battling cancer for the last 11 years she had stage five metastasized breast cancer into her spine they put her on eye brands all of these things um but

then we discovered a neuroendocrinomatic tumor on her pancreas and a neuroendocrine yeah and we went okay i went okay there's gotta be there's gotta be a way that there's gotta be something about this what is your diet what are you eating she said well i eat very healthy i know wait wait hold on a lot of people think they eat healthy yes but they actually don't they do not and my own mother was it was under my radar because i didn't you know i didn't see her every day i didn't know what she was putting her mouth every single second and i went okay well let's go through exactly what you're actually ingesting. Moment to moment. And if you're eating out, you got to know what you're eating. And we went through and I realized her diet was really, really poor.

Like bad, bad. And we shifted a bunch of it. Sugar feeds cancer. Yeah. And your body naturally creates glucose on its own, right? So we don't need all these extra sugars from sugar but she was eating a lot of highly rich flour gluten things that were very hyper inflammatory hmm so we cut all that out for about four months yeah and we recognized that it went away this

really's tumor went away in her pancreas in her pancreas she still has other cancers but it has totally taken down a lot of that um most people don't realize that sugar is a big driver of cancer and the mechanisms are really understood now of how that works yeah the common cancers particularly breast colon pancreatic prostate all of them are driven in large part by by sugar yeah do you think that's just because it's an inflammatory thing for our bodies to consistently process in chaos? Insulin promotes something like insulin-like growth factor,

which actually in high levels can be carcinogenic. So that's part of the problem. And I think sugar is the main fuel for cancer. So we're like hybrids. Humans are hybrids. We can run on fat or on carbs or sugar, right? We can run on ketones or glucose. Cancer can't.

So a lot of exciting research now around cancer is using ketogenic diets to help treat cancer and to actually accentuate the benefits of chemotherapy. Yeah. Seeing a lot of research on this keto. A lot of research. And this is not wacky, you know, crazy people on the fringe. Yeah, well, there's people, like I said,

I've come across them that are like literally turning their cancer around from doing this. It's amazing. A friend of mine had, you know, throat cancer. And, you know, he was a little overweight and he ended up doing ketogenic diet during the chemo. And he said they never seen anybody with better outcomes, less side effects from radiation, from chemo, and sailed through it. And it's been clear of cancer, which is amazing.

And you were saying before about the addictive properties of it. This is not an accident. And there's a great book, Michael Mastro, who was on the podcast here called salt sugar and fat yeah and talks about 300 interviews he did with top executives and scientists in the food industry and what their tactics are and I remember having dinner with the vice chairman of big soda company and I'm like how's it going we you know we had a little bit of a bad would have been an interesting it was interesting yeah i was like but he said mark you know we have an

incredible research facility in new york you should come visit i'm like why he says well we've harvested taste buds from humans and then we grow them in the petri dish and then we can stimulate them and see which foods and things will actually activate the taste buds. And they have something called taste institutes where they hire craving experts and they manipulate the ingredients and the mouthfeel and the taste of food and the sugar to create what we call the bliss point of food, which is that maximum thing.

It's like you get that hit, like a cocaine hit. And then they actually look for how to sell that more to what we call heavy what they call heavy users. These are their own internal corporate terms. So it's hard to get you or me to start drinking a two-liter bottle of soda a day. But if someone's drinking a can of soda, then pushing more soda is easier on them. And so they have this whole category of people who are really heavy users, and they target them. And they're usually the poor, minorities, people on food stamps.

And it's really deliberate. And the biology of addiction in the food, it's not like an emotional response. It's not because you have no willpower. It really is hijacking your brain chemistry and your metabolism in ways that we don't really understand. And so I've seen people within a very short time really transform that. I mean, we've created something called the 10-Day Reset, which essentially is a way to reset your brain chemistry and your metabolism, your hormones very quickly.

And people don't get how powerful it is. And it gets rid of all the inflammatory foods, puts on lots of whole foods, and people can learn about it. They can learn how to do the whole program at getpharmacy.com. That's G--t pharmacy with an f-f-a-r-m-a-c-y and it's there's a free program on how to do that if you want to upgrade to using the supplements and the shakes you can but it's it's a very powerful way for people to go wow like you did holy crap what i'm eating makes me feel like crap yeah and i didn't really realize it you know i'm sick all the time my immune system not working you know i foggy i have no energy you know i look good but i feel like crap yeah yeah you know yeah the the food is medicine theory there's so much in that and i think people can

really take the the the steps forward in terms of a mindset because that's the thing changing mindset is the is the first thing like you you saying mindset because that's the thing changing mindset is the is the first thing like you you saying this you know like you took a while from you and me chatting back and forth to really go no there is actually something in this and changing that mindset so once you change that mindset and and just keep driving that through of food is medicine food is medicine you'll see the difference simple as that it's so easy really when you when you get down the road but you've got to put the steps in place to actually get there yeah it's not easy yeah something I teach all the time is that food

isn't just calories it's information yeah so are you upgrading your biology or downgrading it with every bite and it affects everything your hormones your brain chemistry your immune system your microbiome uh and every aspect of your health is controlled by what you're eating and it's it's literally like code so it's like you're putting in malware into your biology yeah that's what it is you know and people just don't get it do you think that also as well i mean what i find sometimes is that people don't care enough about their own body to do that. They're literally, you know, it's that mentality of I'm here for a good time, not a long time. And that's all good and well until I think about those people. I think you've not been in severe pain or been really sick.

You've not been in a position where you've had that that opportunity to have that light bulb and the the last thing you want for that person is to have something when it's too late and it's something that you can't reverse or it's true you know and what's good about you guys is you're you're not just doing this for yourselves you actually said we're gonna try to educate the world about this you're creating a documentary about sugar yeah and food tell us about it yeah it came well it came about because um i mean it it originally started about us being like why is everything impossible why does why does the why does the food industry make it impossible to eat healthy it really it doesn't make it impossible sorry almost impossible it makes it almost impossible and i and i said i felt so bad going to these to meeting fans meeting friends

seeing my family go through chronic illness go through things that could be fixed so simply by a change in diet understanding and exercise any kind of fitness anything it could be changed just moving going for a walk anything anything and how atrophied most of the generation before us and after us is becoming this it's like a machine and it's driven by unfortunately big corporations like you're saying it's so sad to hear that they're putting in all the science and technology into essentially making people drug addicts to their foods instead of taking the time to see what is the best way that we can say, use, you know, our, what's already destroyed with climate change. What,

how we can make the world a better place if we really make it a better place make our species healthy keep people better and there's something strange in in all of this so we both were talking and i'm like why don't we just from our standpoint i feel like we have a very interesting both sides of the street i i mean i've seen pictures of you before this, and I can't believe the change. Oh, yeah. I mean, it's like he's a regular John Candy.

Yeah, exactly. That's what he used to say. John Candy, mate. Yeah, yeah. I used to eat like 12 Krispy Kreme donuts in one sitting. You know, like I was fully... Wow, that's impressive. Yeah, exactly.

He's like, dude, don't talk about that right now. Oh, yeah, no, it's good. Well, it's actually real. Yeah, well, I think it's important. Yeah, exactly. He's like, dude, don't talk about that right now. Oh, yeah, no, it's good. Well, it's actually real. Yeah, well, I think it's important. The struggle was real. Yeah, it's real. I think it's really important that people understand that we weren't born feeling this way about food.

You know, we were victim of the system and victim of sugar and all those things. And we went on our own journey. And it's just and all those things and we we went on our own journey and it's just that that realizing those things called like getting sick all the time all those sort of things and you think it's normal to just get sick all the time it's normal to get an illness every winter you know because it's flu season and you're supposed to get the flu yeah it's a holiday i've never had the flu wow wow that's really That's really good. Yeah. But all these fad diets, all these things that are always circulating. Yeah.

I mean, there were times where I must have WhatsApp'd you a million messages being like, Hey man, what do you think about this diet? Or, and you'd be like, dude, don't even, it doesn't matter. It's about, it's not, it's not, it's not that hard. It's not that hard. It's, you don't need a fad diet. Now, what you do is you simplify all of the, you've cherry picked the best things as a physician. You've cherry picked the best things and put them into a very coherent, small little construct that people can use and apply to their own life in whatever way they see fit.

And what I find really difficult is throughout our journey, I'm sure you went through this as well, you will try and figure it out on your own and you have so much trial and error that you end up just going back to the original way that you were eating because you go, well, it doesn't matter anyway, but it does. And that's the thing that we are very passionate about is bringing this to people that when you're driving in your car and you're listening to this because you go, well, it doesn't matter anyway, but it does. And that's the thing that we are very passionate about

is bringing this to people that when you're driving in your car and you're listening to this, or you're sitting at home on YouTube watching this or on our social media platforms that you go, okay, I'm gonna be a little bit more aware, maybe a lot more aware of what I'm putting in my body. Am I- And our family's bodies as well.

And our family's bodies, our children, our children are like victims. 40% of kids overweight, one in 10 have ADD. I mean, it's, I mean, that must be that the increase of that over the last 20, 30 years, I imagine is ridiculous. I don't know what the figures are, but I mean, now I graduated from medical school in 1987. There, there wasn't anything called type two diabetes. It was called adult onset diabetes right exactly and juvenile diabetes and i had to change the names because two-year-olds

were getting adult onset diabetes unbelievable some two-year-olds are so fat they can't even walk yeah you know because their parents are giving them soda in the bottle yeah i mean it's a big part of the documentary that we're making is is the future right and and changing the mindset of the children and and trying to reach out to parents to say you are responsible solely responsible from when that child comes out of the mother you are solely responsible of what goes in that child's mouth and we have a responsibility to make sure that that child has the best life possible yeah so we obviously there's a big argument here about as we've already said like certain places in america it's the same in the uk people just do not have access to that food and that's down to the food

system so we have to we have to go on a bigger scale we have to do kind of the same sort of thing that game changers has done and create a a shock factor we have to go and see these these children in in their state and use technology available to us potentially to be able to see what's going on there and and show these parents the difference in their child that could be if they just change the way they eat sure there are there are teenagers in america who are on the waiting list for liver transplants from drinking soda yeah that's unbelievable i mean that is just i mean i met a guy at a conference who's a pediatrician and it was a conference on uh obesity and i said what's your specialty he says well i'm a pediatric gastroenterologist and i focus on you know liver disease i said why are you here at this conference

he says well we're seeing so much fatty liver in even five-year-olds, which is crazy, and it's one of the most prevalent problems, and it leads to inflammation in the body and diabetes and heart disease. And it's terrifying. If kids are overweight, their life expectancy is 13 years less. They're less likely to have productive lives, to have good jobs, graduate from school, go to college yeah be productive and and it's it people just don't understand what we're doing to the future generation and then

their minds are affected by it too it's not just their bodies yeah they have trouble focusing concentrating add poor academic performance less likely to succeed in life and it's it's it's so important you guys are doing this documentary because it's going to tell a story that people need to hear and the fact that you guys have doing this documentary because it's going to tell a story that people need to hear. And the fact that you guys have voices and have big communities and fans, telling a story is so important. And I think the more people are out there talking about it, the more we can come together and actually share what's actually happening. We'll sort of wake people up. And it's happening.

It's pushing the food industry. I mean, Danone, which is a big company, just announced they were, and they own like Ben and Jerry's and they they own all these ice cream they're not going to advertise ice cream to kids anymore oh wow that's amazing yeah that's huge this is this is the thing too is that we want to also educate the children we want it to come through the kids because at the end of the day the parents can and will put down an iron fist when they realize that they are essentially doing terrible things to their kids by giving them these treats and things that they think, well, when I was a kid, I had ice cream and it was summer days that I enjoyed that so much. They don't, there's a nostalgia to these terrible things. There's a tradition to these foods on holiday um and what what has happened is that our like you said dessert has become now this normal thing whereas before it

was only for a certain day and now what what i'm worried about is parents can do that they can stop it they can stop it i would say make your home a safe zone but then kids will go out and they'll have it on their own if they are not they're going to be exposed to it you know in the outside well that's what i think i always think it's about taking control in your own life so like you know my kids don't eat sugar and i think you know they're going to go out there at some point they're going to go to kids parties they're going to be exposed and they're going to be offered these things but i think if as long as i can control it in our home and you know i probably sound like it to certain people i

probably sound like a really unfun dad like i don't give them any trees they get no fun at all but no i mean i think for the for the purpose of their health i think you know is that the majority of the time they're spending in in my home and they they can eat whole foods you know and that's right um and that's important you know that's the future for us if we don't do that i i always have you seen that movie the pixar movie warly oh yeah about the little robot yeah we need a disney movie about this yeah well that in in the that's the story about the future and we we see the humans are all now completely obese and they're all in these little zoomie pod things they go around just digital fodder being fed to their eyes and eating things and just watching tv these little ipad things and they just go, move around.

And I'm like, that's a vision of the distant future. Not so much distant. It's here. That's the basis. We're about there. And I think things like that, you see it and you think, I don't want that future for my kids or their kids. And that's where we're heading.

And I think we have to make a change now. And using platforms and you know the media and things like that that's the only way to do it yeah I'm so glad you have a name for it yet well we've had it we've gone over a few few things we were one of them is called what's in this was a big one when is it coming out well we're still making it we both have TV it and we both have uh tv shows that we work day jobs yeah it's tough to get the footage when we want it but it's about making the plans and just getting the footage whenever we can and um putting the word out well i can't i

can't wait for it to come out you guys are amazing and an inspiration to people and i think uh the more younger audiences that can hear this before they get into trouble and be inspired by role models like you guys who said, look, you know, I was sick. I had a crappy diet and I kind of woke up and now I have a more engaged, happy, fulfilled life where I don't feel like crap all the time.

It's a great thing. So thank you so much both for the work you're doing, for the awareness you're creating and for being on the doctor's pharmacy. It's a pleasure. Thanks for having us. And if you've been listening to the podcast and you love it, please leave a comment. We'd love to hear from you. Share with your friends on social media.

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