The Rich Roll Podcast - Our Misplaced Obsession With Protein: Garth Davis, MD On High Fat, Low Carb Diets, Bad Science & How To Separate Nutritional Fact From Popular Fiction

Episode Date: June 1, 2015

This week marks the return of Garth Davis, MD — a veteran weight loss surgeon who took it upon himself to determine exactly why so many people are plagued by obesity. A quest that led him down a deep research hole to identify the ultimate human diet to maximize and maintain weight loss; optimize human health; and prevent (and even reverse) lifestyle disease — both for himself and his patients (tune in to RRP 50 for our first conversation). About 7 years ago, the good doctor became his own patient. At the time, he was suffering from high cholesterol, high blood pressure and a fatty liver. In other words, he was downright sick; headed towards a future plagued by obesity and chronic illness. Ironic, yes. But not surprising given the demanding hours of the surgeon lifestyle, lack of exercise, a preference for salty, fatty foods, and the convenience of fast food options in the hospital cafeteria. In fact, there was a Wendy's in the University of Michigan hospital where Garth did his internship and residency, resulting in a daily dose of double cheeseburgers — a habit he maintained for years. Let's just say I can relate. Current conventional wisdom in his field is that overweight patients should adopt a very low carb, low to no fruit, high protein diet — hop on board the ketosis bandwagon. Like many, and without inquiring further, Garth simply bought into this idea as truth. He even wrote a book in 2007 advocating this approach to food, called The Experts Guide To Weight Loss Surgery*. The only problem? This approach to diet failed him and many other friends, colleagues and patients. He knew there had to be a better solution. And his patients needed help beyond knee-jerk surgery. Finally ready for a personal change, he took it upon himself to research — truly research — nutrition for the first time. His study became an obsession. The more he delved into the peer reviewed work, the more convinced he became that there is absolutely no legitimate science to back the long-term health claims surrounding the strongly held belief that if we want to be thin and healthy we should eat a high protein low carbohydrate diet. What did he find? If we want to prevent obesity and disease; attain and maintain ideal weight management; and achieve true optimal health and long-term wellness, we need to embrace our inner herbivore. Sound far-fetched? Before you balk, understand that (much like me) adopting a plant-based lifestyle absolutely revolutionized Garth's health beyond what he could have imagined. Not only did he drop the weight that plagued him for years, all of his blood markers suddenly and quite magically normalized. His allergies vanished. His sleep improved, his energy levels skyrocketed and he got off his statin medications. In short, he finally began to walk his talk. As his life began to turn around, he wanted to be an example to his patients. For the first time in his life, he began exercising. Then he did the extraordinary. Despite never having been an athlete, in 2011 he completed Ironman Texas in 12 hours and 6 minutes.

It's almost impossible not to get enough protein no matter what you're eating. That's number one. Number two, eating more protein will make you sick eventually. And number three, eating more plants is really like finding the fountain of youth. That's Dr. Garth Davis, this to the show or welcome back. I'm so glad you dropped by. My name is Rich Roll. I'm the host guy. I'm back at it again with another awesome episode of the RRP, I'm back at it again with another awesome episode of the RRP, where each week I mine the minds of the best and the brightest in health, wellness, and excellence to help you live and be better. To grow, because let's face it, come on, that's what we're here to do, right?

To educate, to inform, and to inspire you to unlock and unleash the best, most authentic version of yourself. So thanks for dropping by. I appreciate you subscribing to the show on iTunes, for spreading the word, and for clicking through the Amazon banner ad at richroll.com for all your Amazon purchases. I got the good Dr. Garth on the show today. I'm so excited. I love this guy. In case you missed it, he first appeared on the show back in the day, episode 50. So I

strongly recommend you check that out if you haven't already. You can find it on my mobile app or on my website. It's pretty awesome. We go into his backstory, his evolution from being that couch potato guy to being an Ironman athlete and what he does as a doctor. And today we're going to mine the depths of nutrition with a little bit more diligence and specificity. But let's face it, most docs out there, they're kind of boring. They're not the most dynamic personalities. And they may have tons of great information, but they're not always the best at inspiring, at catalyzing action or change. And on the other side of the coin, there are plenty of people out there that do a

really good job of inspiring people, of lighting that spark that gets you off your butt. But often these people aren't always the most informed. And that's what's great about Garth, because he's like this perfect amalgam of both. On the intellectual side, he really knows his stuff from both an experiential firsthand perspective, because he went from an overweight couch potato kind of guy to being an Ironman athlete and a marathon runner, but also from an academic and medical practitioner perspective. And his basic thesis is that Western medicine has been failing us when it comes to the most crucial aspect of maintaining health, nutrition. And that if we want to achieve ideal weight management, if we want to achieve ideal weight management,

if we want to achieve optimal health, long-term wellness, and disease prevention, we really need to turn conventional wisdom on its head. And what's cool is that Garth has now become somewhat of a crusader to teach people real nutrition, how to read scientific literature, and how the internet pseudo-experts are manipulating the science to push these high-protein, high-fat diets that are out there. And this is a guy who has buried himself in the science of nutrition, weight loss, and health.

And not only has he read all the studies, he knows how to read them. He knows how to interpret them. And he understands the distinction between truth and misdirection. At his Davis Clinic in Houston, he's also on the front lines where he treats patients as a weight loss surgeon. And he sees people every day that struggle with weight and health and disease. And he's helped thousands achieve and sustain, that's the important thing, sustain healthier lifestyles.

But what really distinguishes Garth in my mind from the fray is that he has this ability to communicate his knowledge with passion and charisma, not only so everyone can understand it, but in a way that actually creates positive, long-lasting change. And that, my friends, is rare. So this is an exploration of all the questions that seemingly confuse people daily, and questions I personally get almost every day. Questions about plant-based versus paleo, what's behind low-carb, high-fat diets, the health implications of ketosis-based diets, the relationship between saturated fat and dietary cholesterol and heart disease, and exploration of the validity of studies like the China study, the Epic study, the Framingham study, and the current relevance of the work of people like Drs. Esselstyn and Ornish in the face of our high-fat, high-protein

craze. So in a nutshell, my goal with this podcast is that I wanted this to be the one podcast that I could point people towards who are confused about all of these issues and to set the record straight so that when I get these questions, I can just say, listen to this and let me clear the air. And Garth Davis delivers. So let's meet Garth. Let's see what he has to say, shall we? Yes, we shall. Enjoy. Second time on the show. The first time we went into, you know, all about kind of like your story and your evolution into what you do.

And for listeners that want to kind of probe that in more depth, they can go back and listen to that episode. I'll put the link up in the show notes. But I kind of wanted today to delve into a couple issues with more specificity and detail, if we could. Over the last couple weeks, I've been a guest on like a bazillion podcasts because, you know, trying to get the book out and doing all these interviews and the like. And I just did one the other day and the guy kind of, you know, basically like a paleo slant podcast. And the guy kind of with a smile on his face ambushed me a little bit.

You know, he had spent a whole day preparing for the interview and he got he had all these studies in front of him. And it was a Skype call. And he's like, well, what about this study? And what about that study? And I felt completely ill equipped to respond spontaneously in the moment because I didn't have all my, you know, counterpoint studies in front of me. And I felt like a little bit like, not unprepared, but a little bit like, I guess ambushed is the best way of doing it. That's their modus. Yeah. And so I got off the call and I was like, I just didn't feel that great about it, you know?

And it's like, I'm not a guy who's spending all my time mired in the research and reading all these studies like you are. So I thought it would be a good opportunity to kind of delve into that a little bit. And I just got an email that I wanted to read that came in from a follower, this guy, Alex. And he said, hey, Rich, I really enjoy your podcasts. I've been roughly following the Bulletproof diet for years now and appreciate the critical analysis of some of the new high fat, high meat trends. However, I'm not convinced that these are misguided. In reference to your discussion with Joel Kahn, and there's a hyperlink to something, blah, blah, blah. Much of the data Kahn cited seemed to be correlational as well. And his discussion seemed to involve a methodological critique of the pro-fat studies, co-founding variables, reliable subjects, et cetera,

not granted to the anti-fat research. The discussion was very level-headed and reasonable, but, and I'm referencing myself here too, it seems very difficult to get away from the, my team versus yours, unquote, mentality. Beyond the advice to stop eating Twinkies and playing Starcraft. It doesn't quite seem like a quote objective roadmap exists for nutritional choices. And I think, you know, it's a fair, it's a, it's a fair observation for him to make. And I think we are in this kind of scenario where there's teams, you know, beating up on each other. And, and, you know, I'm always trying to just get to the objective truth. Like

I'm much less interested in being a member of a team than truly having an in-depth comprehensive understanding of the nutritional landscape when it comes to plant-based, paleo, ketosis, low fat, high fat, you know, all these sorts of ideas that are floating around right now with varying degrees of popularity. Yeah. The modus out there right now, you've got to understand a few things about science. First of all, maybe pull your mic up a little bit closer to you. Sorry about that. Okay.

Is that better? Yeah, it's better. It's a little echoey. The first thing you've got to understand about science, there's all kinds of researchers out there, and they live in this world of publish or perish. That's their job. If they don't publish, they get fired. And because of that, there is a lot of really bad research that comes out, a lot of it that's

very sloppily done. There is a journal for every kind of thought process you could have. A lot of these journals are really poorly done. They're not well peer-reviewed. And yet what happens in this day and age in these arguments about nutrition is someone will be like, okay, Rich Roll said this. I'm going to prove him wrong. I'm going to go on to PubMed, and I'm going to find an article.

First article comes up, that's the article that they use. They never read the full article. They don't have a statistics background, so they don't know how to analyze statistics. They don't know the people that are publishing it. They don't know the confounding factors that may have been involved. And yet they use it as fact. And so what happens is they pigeonhole you saying, well, you say this, but I've got an article that says that, and it makes those two articles seem equal when in fact they're not. And when you say, well, your article's wrong, they say, oh, now you're just jumping from one thing to the other. I call these guys denialists. And so denialists do several things. First of all, they try to take down authority. So I hear people all the time saying, oh, Dean Ornish, you know, Dean Ornish has been debunked time saying, oh, Dean Ornish, you know,

Dean Ornish has been debunked. What do you mean Dean Ornish has been debunked? Right. Well, the cousin to that is the China study has been debunked. Yeah, China study. That gets thrown around like crazy. Right. And if you say it hasn't, then you're an insane person. Yeah, you're an insane person. And look, I could actually, there are things with the China study that I can find fault with, but Dean Orn there are things with the China study that I can find fault with, but teen owners definitely not. But this idea that even if you found fault with some parts of the China study, Colin Campbell spent his whole life studying nutrition. He's

done benchtop research, he's done randomized controlled trial research, and he's done really huge epidemiologic research. You should at least respect his opinion. This idea that he's been debunked is absolutely ridiculous. The other thing that they tend to do is that you will hear them say this all the time, correlation does not equal causation. And this is true. Like for instance, there's more chocolate eaten in Switzerland and Switzerland has more Nobel Prize winners. So somehow chocolate really does. Now, that is called a univariate analysis, meaning you're just taking two variables, and that's the only kind of thing that you're going to measure.

It's chocolate and it's Nobel Prizes. To do a scientific study, though, we do what's called multivariate regression analysis, meaning we find everything that could possibly be a confounding factor. meaning we find everything that could possibly be a confounding factor, you know. And we remove that out of the study so that there's no confounding factor, so that if we get a statistical significance, it may not mean causation, but where there's smoke, there's fire. And then if you take huge numbers of people studying them many years in many different countries and you start doing these multivariate analyses on them,

and you come up with the same answer in all these different studies, you better start listening to that. It's really good science. The last thing that these people do is they try to hold up that the only, without a doubt, the best study you could do on someone is a randomized, controlled, placebo-blinded study. But you can't do that with food. Right.

You know, I can't do a study where I'm going to follow 20 people for 20 years on, you know, three different diets. It's not going to happen. People don't live their lives like that, and they don't just eat one thing. Right. And they don't just eat one thing. Right. And they all have varying degrees of the way in which they live their life brings up a bazillion variables that you couldn't possibly begin to account for. I mean, so many variables. Look at there's, you know, I often refer to the EPIC trials, which is one of the largest studies ever done on nutrition, much bigger than China study or any of that.

And what they looked at is 500,000 people over, I think, 10 to 12 countries in Europe. They followed it now 12 to 14 years, and they're looking at different correlations between what you eat, how much of it you eat, and disease processes that you get. And the extent to which they go to eliminate confounding factors is incredible. But they've got vegans that they look at, vegans that are in Oxford. But those vegans aren't necessarily healthy vegans. Like you look at those vegans and they're only eating 18 grams of fiber a day. How does a vegan

only get 18 grams of fiber a day? And they weren't eating their B12. So there's so many variables that it's very hard to say vegan is a good diet or bad diet based on these. But what people miss is there's a huge, huge literature about plant-based diets and about eating meat. And a person who's experienced in reading this literature, understanding it, can make pretty good conclusions. And it is not as relative as people make it out to be. So what would be, in the most general sense, some of those conclusions, based on the studies and the research that you've kind of immersed yourself in? Oh, yeah. Without a doubt, processed meat is horrible for you. You can't get away from that

fact. So processed meat, bacon, the Subway sandwich, cold cuts, horrible for you. Related with diabetes, cancer, life expectancy, heart disease, horrible for you. Red meat, for the most part, looks like it is not good for you. Definitely associated with diabetes. Definitely associated with diabetes. I'm not quite sure you could be vegan and be diabetic. I know there's about a 2% incidence of this, but I don't understand it. I like to see those people more clearly.

And there's a lot of studies that go on with that. Animal products in general seem to be leading to premature aging in many of the studies. Definitely a link with cancer. Different meats with different cancers. For instance, chicken is strongly related with lymphoma and leukemia, whereas meat is strongly related with colon cancers and some of the other reproductive cancers. Prostate is very, very strongly linked with dairy, eggs, and meat. Definitely a heavy animal protein diet is associated with heart disease, definitely is associated with high

blood pressure, and it's definitely associated with a shorter length of life. And the interesting thing about the longevity studies is we talked about taking out confounding factors. If you take out a lot of confounding factors, you get to the point where you're almost taking away a correlation. And yet, after really rigorous statistical analysis, there's still a finding that if you eat a plant-based diet or if you eat less meat, you live longer. Interesting. Well, I mean, those are some pretty, you know, bold statements that fly in the face of what seems to be quite popular right now,

which is, you know, we can go through them, you know, in a bullet point way, but why don't we just start with saturated fat, right? There's this sort of populist notion at the moment backed by certain studies that basically says everything you ever heard about saturated fat is wrong. Saturated fat is not your enemy and it's not linked to the incidence of heart disease. Is that a fair characterization of kind of where a certain

school of thought is coming from? Actually, the school of thought has gone worse. They now say saturated fat is good for you, right? So you'll see the things, you know, bacon is good. And the funny how I saw an article, bacon is good for you. And it wasn't about any testing of bacon being good for you. It was about saturated fat being good for you. Now, the studies that you mentioned that called to question saturated fat, they never said saturated fat is good for you. That's not their comment.

They questioned whether it was as strongly correlated with heart disease as we previously thought. Now, the main study, a study called Siri Torino, is a perfect example of over-adjusting your statistical analysis. Keep in mind, every author on that article was paid for or receives payment from either meat, milk, or dairy. What's that study called? It's the Siri Tarino study, S-I-R-I-T-A-R-I-N-O. That is the study that really started it all. That's the study that all these journalists like Taubes and the other one in New York Times. Yeah, that's the one they just jumped on and went with it.

And was that the basis of the Time Magazine Butters Back article? Absolutely, yeah. It's the basis of every article that ever comes out. And so what did that study say? So they looked at a bunch of studies, and they said basically that saturated fat is not correlated with heart disease. But here's the problem. not correlated with heart disease. But here's the problem. First of all, you hear this term thrown around a lot called cherry picking, where they cherry picked articles that would basically give their answer. Because I could have done that same study and brought a whole

different group of articles and gotten a completely different analysis. But we'll put cherry picking aside. The problem is a lot of the studies that they picked did something called over-adjustment. So what they did, it's just like we talked about before. If we're going to do a study and we're going to remove confounding variables, meaning variables that might affect, independently affect the result. So we're trying to see if saturated fat causes heart disease. So we want to take out other things that may affect heart disease. So for instance, if you're diabetic, we're taking you out. You're not in the study. And we'll look at our population. We'll say, well, if you're morbidly obese, we know that independently affects that. So we're going to take you out. Now, funny, the more you take out, the more you're taking out away from people that, you know, like plant-based diet

benefits and stuff like that. But here's the key. They took out people that had high cholesterol because high cholesterol is an independent cause of heart disease. But saturated fat causes heart disease by raising cholesterol in part. So by removing those people from there, you're removing the people that actually are affected by the saturated fat. You're leaving for the study people that have a genetic predisposition where they could eat saturated fat, not raise their cholesterol, and therefore won't get heart disease. It's ridiculous. Now, the second study that came along was a study by Child Artery. And it was in, I think it was in the British Journal of Medicine. And that study did the same kind of things as the Seri Torino study did. But on top of it, there were people that were on Lipitor while doing the study so they're taking a drug that's supposed to get rid of the effects of

saturated fat and then they're eating saturated fat and not getting heart disease that wasn't taken into account no into the that's interesting yeah so all right so then that begs the question of the impact of cholesterol on heart disease. And I, and I guess that means you have to talk about the difference between, um, you know, sort of serum cholesterol and dietary cholesterol, right? The difference between eating cholesterol laden foods and the impact of that on cholesterol and what that causes in terms of health. Yeah. I mean, eating cholesterol does raise cholesterol. The only place we get cholesterol is from animal products. Cholesterol definitely is associated with heart disease. Now, the problem is we've gotten a little bit more scientific nowadays so that we don't just

look at cholesterol per se. However, the largest study that's been done looking at cholesterol in America in a population was the Framingham study. And Dr. Castelli himself said that possibly the problem we have is that we set what we call a normal cholesterol too high. And that a normal cholesterol should actually be lower. And he noted that under a total cholesterol of 150, they never, in all the years they studied Framingham, saw anybody with heart disease. If you keep your total cholesterol under 150, you're not going to get heart disease. We're more specific now. When I see someone with a high cholesterol, I want to know their LDL particle size, their ApoB protein. I mean, there's a specific type of cholesterol that's dangerous.

And if you have that specific type of cholesterol that needs to be addressed, then you need to be on, you know, seriously low fat. And what is the impact of ingesting cholesterol, dietary cholesterol on your cholesterol levels? Because isn't part of this idea or this argument that dietary cholesterol is not impactful on those cholesterol levels? Yeah. And it's just silly. Without a doubt, if you eat cholesterol, but here's the problem. And it's a big problem with our nutrition in general. We get down into what's called reductionist food science. We're trying to take one part of a food away. It's like, nothing bothers me more than when I'm ordering a salad

and the waiter says, would you like a protein with that salad? Cause I, and then I always, yeah, I always have to pick on them and you know, don't, poor guy had to get me at the table. And you know, then I'm always like, well, you know, what do you mean? He's like, well, do you want chicken or steak? And I'm like, well, there's more calories from fat and chicken. So are you really just asking me if I want some fat with my salad? And the guy's like, uh, you know. You're going to get into a nutrition debate with the waiter. Right, exactly.

But I think it's interesting that now I have noticed that they'll say, you know, what would you like for your protein as opposed to what meat? You know,

like that's a weird vernacular shift that didn't exist a couple years ago. My son got into a debate at Chipotle the other day when they, he was,

they were going down the line and building the burrito. And the guy says, what would you like for meat? And Tyler said, I'm not going to have meat. And he's like, but I'll have this sofritas, which is basically their meat analog tofu thing. And he's like, well, that's meat. And Tyler's like, no, that's not meat. And he's like, yeah, that's meat.

And I'm like, come on, let's just keep moving. This is not going to go anywhere. You're not going to teach this guy right here. Yeah, but the point being that we're in this reductionist food science where we're trying to tease away parts of food that stick together. So there's no time that you're ever going to just eat cholesterol. The cholesterol is always going to be tied with fat. It's part of the fat. And so it's very hard to measure. The same with just, for years,

I tried to sift through studies looking at animal protein, but it's really hard to sift the fact that animal protein's got saturated fat connected to it and has cholesterol connected to it. So is it the cholesterol? Is it the saturated fat? Is it the animal protein? We can make some judgment as to what it is. But really, it's the whole package. And really, we should be talking about the whole package. I mean, the studies would be a lot easier if the study just looked at meat and stopped talking about saturated fat and cholesterol. Right, because if somebody says, well, I need that animal protein, well, that comes with a lot of other things that don't get looked at. And it's tricky because the reductionist approach is inherently flawed in that regard,

as you pointed out, but there really isn't a better way to look at it. So what else are you supposed to do? Otherwise, you'll get lost in a morass of data that's meaningless. Yeah. There's been a change in the actual science. And when I say actual science, everybody's online reading nonsense. They're not reading the actual journals. When they debate with you, their reference is another person's blog, which always makes me laugh. In fact, one guy was like, oh yeah, he put up an article that was actually against what he was saying, but people don't know how to read the science. So when you actually read the science, there's been a move now in a lot of

these big epidemiologic studies to not try to tease away saturated fat or, or any of that stuff. And just look at what are the quintiles of meat consumption? In other words, there's the lowest quintile, the second quintile, third quintile, fourth, fifth, and let's compare them together and see if we see a change. And so what are the studies that you look at and find most objective and informative and instructional with respect to how you devise your treatment protocols for your patients? Sure. And someone asked me this once before, a paleo guy,

and he said, because I was complaining about, and there's so much of this, the involvement of industry in science. Because the industry, they know, just like with tobacco, if they could put a seed of doubt in someone's mind, they can make them say, well, I don't know if meat's good. I don't know if it's bad, so I'm going to eat it. Right. And confusion plays into their head. Confusion is exactly what they want. And so they love this confusion going on. And so I don't like these bias in a lot of the articles.

So if I read an article and I see that there's bias in it, that immediately doesn't discredit the article, but, you know, raises eyebrows. And a lot of times it's not the data that they're doing that's bad. It's the interpretation that the people read. So I'll go through the data, you know, and look at the charts and stuff and say, well, you know, their conclusion is not exactly what I read. I'll give you an example of that later. But so someone said to me, well, they might have bias, but don't you have your own bias? I mean, aren't you vegan? And I had to think about that for a while because yeah, I am biased in that regard. I'm worried about the environment. I'm worried about

the senseless slaughter of animals for no reason or the way they're killed. But there's two sides to me, I really think. If an article came out and said there's no benefit to a plant-based diet whatsoever, I would stop recommending that to patients, and I didn't recommend it until I got the science. And I would be vegan and say, look, don't kill animals because it's mean to kill animals. I started this without the vegans component of it. I started this based on pure health. And as the more and more I've learned, I've really, really started looking at the health. And what really convinced me were several studies. So the EPIC study I talked about is as unbiased as possible. I mean, this is really a conglomerate of the European Union. These are some of the top epidemiological scientists that if you read a

paper, there's like a hundred authors for each paper. They looked at their food questionnaires that they use. They made sure that they were culture specific. They tested them to make sure that they were accurate. This is a really good science. And the data is not absolutely clear with it. The data does not say go vegan, but it definitely points towards the fact that animal protein is associated with weight gain, diabetes, heart disease, and longevity problems. And I like it because it's many different societies

and it's a long-term study and there's just so many people, 500,000 people, it's huge. When was that study conducted? It's still going on. It started in the early 2000s and still going on. So they're building this gigantic database. Is there a good link online where people can see that or at least find information about that? If you just look up EPIC, E-P-I-C, EPIC Panacea. They've got their central website, which kind of explains it.

There are so many articles on PubMed. They had an international consortium kind of going over all the data they've had so far last year, where they made strong reference to the fact that protein was associated with diabetes. And strong reference to the fact that protein was associated with diabetes. And a strong reference to the fact that protein causes weight gain. Both were in there. But there's many different articles that go through there. One of the head authors of your PubMed searching is Vergnaud, V-E-R-G-N-A-U-D. And he's done some really good science.

I don't know if it's him, it's his team, but yeah. And they have a certain group of Epic, so you could go into the Epic data and they've looked specifically at Epic Oxford because Oxford's kind of interesting because there they have healthy meat eaters. So they don't eat meat nearly as much as the rest of the country. And they live a healthy lifestyle and they wanted to compare them to vegans to see if there was benefit. Now, again, I told you those vegans were not healthy vegans. Yeah, there's this idea that a vegan is a vegan. Right.

You know what I mean? That's a whole spectrum of ways of eating. Yeah. Like I told you, I was telling you, I went to a vegan junk food restaurant, because when you're in L, you do those things. And I had a bacon cheeseburger. Oh, my God. It tastes just like what I remember bacon cheeseburgers taste like, but felt so sick afterwards.

And that's definitely not healthy. So if you're eating that, you're not a healthy vegan. Yeah, there's so many. I mean, now you can get so much vegan junk food. So much vegan junk food. Which is like great and terrible at the same time. Exactly. But still, when they look at the epic Oxford,

the vegans tend to do better than the meat eaters. The one spot they didn't was colon cancer, which is bizarre because vegans always do better in colon cancer, but it may just be that these vegans were not eating much fiber and probably a lot of processed food. Other studies I love, the Harvard studies are really good. They're following, the Harvard studies, they followed nurses for many years now, I think 20, 30 years, the Nurses' Health Study, and they've done the same with health professionals,

men that were doctors, health professionals. And they've followed them for many years, and they've looked at diet patterns. The only problem with that study is there's hard to find a difference if everyone's eating the same thing. In other words, if you've got a group that's eating meat three times a day and another group that's eating meat two times a day, can you really make a correlation or really make a judgment pattern? That's a little bit of a problem with hers, but it's pretty good. My favorite studies are the Adventist health study.

Because I said you can't do a long-term study where you make someone vegan and you make someone a meat eater. But that's happening in Loma Linda, California. Because the Seventh-day Adventists believe that the body is the temple of the soul and it should be treated as such, so the whole group is healthy. They have very similar exercise patterns. They live in the same environment, exposed to the same toxins, but some of them are vegan. Some will do milk and dairy. Some will eat fish and some will eat meat. And they've got low meat eaters and high meat eaters. So they've got this already

partitioned off group of people that have a different level of consumption of these meats. And their data is very, very convincing. And that's probably my favorite study. So the Adventist Health Study. And that data suggests what? It definitely suggests that a plant-based diet is better for you. I mean, they have got very strong data showing a plant-based diet prevents diabetes. Very strong data that it prevents heart disease.

Very strong data that it prevents cancer. Fish does well in that group, but in the other ones, not as much. And then just length of life. The vegans live longer than the other groups. Yeah, there's that cardiologist, Dr. Ellsworth. Yeah, I saw him the other day. Oh, you did? Yeah, yeah. He's 95 or something? I think he's 100, isn't he?ologist, Dr. Ellsworth. Yeah, I saw him the other day. Oh, you did? Yeah, yeah.

He's 95 or something? I think he's 100, isn't he? Oh, is he 100 now? The surgeon? Yeah, yeah. But he practiced until just recently. That's right, he practiced until he was 95. Right, exactly.

That guy's amazing. I got to get that guy on the podcast. Oh, you got to get him on. He just seems like such a nice guy, sweet guy. Yeah, amazing. All right, so, you know, that's all interesting, you know, and I'm just thinking, you know, how does that, like, how does it happen that you see these studies, you understand them, you're convinced,

and yet at the same time, you know, right now, we're all being told that, you told that we need to eat more protein. We're in this massive protein push. Plant protein is not as superior to the human condition and health as animal protein. Yeah, look at you and me wasting away without our protein. And that saturated fat is not a problem meanwhile uh is it the usda that is suggesting that we shouldn't worry about cholesterol anymore i think that the usda is kind of like look we're going to tell you to eat less meat we're going to tell you to eat less fat and that'll take care of

the cholesterol but in order you know the the lobbyists are on them oh yeah so i think this is a little flag hey we'll give you back your cholesterol because they're not going to be able to eat it anyway because they're not supposed to be eating meat. Well, the politics behind that are pretty extraordinary. I mean, for the listener right now, the USDA, is it every four years, has to come up with their dietary guidelines. And they impanel like a group of advisors to help suggest how they might make changes to, you know, that nutrition sort of pyramid or plate or whatever it is these days. And for the first time ever, they're suggesting eating less meat for health reasons, but also for sustainability reasons. And this has caused quite the stir amongst the meat and dairy lobby people who are up in arms that sustainability or environmental

concerns should even play a part at all in dietary recommendations. And so there's all these congressmen and senators who have constituencies in, you know, the heartland of America who are petitioning the USDA that they've overstepped their boundaries and that this is, you know, this is not their job. Right. I mean, we asked the question, how are we also confused? And it's because of the industry. I mean, it's not a conspiracy theory. It's a fact. I mean, they're everywhere there. You could go back to the seventies when they had the Senate select commission, the McGovern commission that got together to find out why we were getting more and more heart disease. And they did huge rounds

of research and came up with the idea that we need to eat less meat. And that was completely, the meat industry jumped on it, got McGovern voted out, got the committee disbanded. And it was all, you could watch it in place. You could watch it happening. And it still happens now. But the other problem is the medical profession in general, because the medical profession is not designed to treat a whole person. For, you know, the GI doctor treats the stomach, the heart doctor treats the heart. And when we were in residency and there was a patient, we didn't even call them by their name. It was like, you know, the colon cancer in room two. And, you know, I'd go in and examine the patient, you know, and would dive right for their stomach, you know. I'm not asking them how they're feeling,

what are they eating? We do these like complex history and physicals. And yet I never ask them what they eat, you know. I got, you know, all this obscure stuff, but I don't ask them probably the most important question, what are you eating? And so it's very hard for a doctor, we don't learn any nutrition, I mean, any nutrition in medical school. So it's very hard for a doctor to even think about nutrition. And I've talked to doctors about this many times. Number one, they're reading journals that have to do with their specialty. They're not reading the nutrition journals.

Number one, they're reading journals that have to do with their specialty. They're not reading the nutrition journals. Number two, even if they thought, like I gave a talk to this endocrine society, and I've got so much data showing the correlation between meat and diabetes, it's crazy. It's very hard to argue with. And so the endocrinologists were like, okay, that's probably true. But listen, my patients aren't going to change. They're not going to do it. They're not going to do it.

So why do I even worry about that? Instead, I'm just going to give them a medicine. In addition. That's a terrible mindset. It's a terrible mindset, but that's what they're built with. And you know what? It's easy to sit and say that's a terrible mindset. It's much harder when you're sitting across from a patient and you've

got 20 minutes with a patient and you got to tell them to change their whole lifestyle and how they eat. It's not so easy and patients don't do it. I mean, I experience this all the time. Now, I'm in a little bit of an advantage because I've got this big office with dieticians and psychologists and I spend more time with them. But for an endocrinologist to sit there and like, let me tell you about plant-based diet, very difficult. Not impossible, but very difficult. The other thing is that as a doctor, you know, I hear people say, oh, doctors just want to keep you sick. That's not the reason.

It's not like doctors are in this conspiracy to keep people sick. That's really nonsense. But the system is set up to diagnose and prescribe. That's exactly it. There is an economy around that, that in order for it to sustain itself and for everybody to profit off of it, it has to work a certain way. Right, but the doctor's not thinking, I need to write this script because I need to profit off it. The doctor's thinking, my job is to write a script. Like a patient comes in, there's a problem. I got to do something about it.

You know how they say men always have to fix something. Well, doctors always have to fix something too. It's this notion that it's broken. I've got to do something to fix it, so I'm going to throw this. And they'll put medicines on there that will give a temporary fix, but you know aren't going to have a long-term fix. Now, on the flip side, the scientists, they really do miss the forest for the trees, so to speak.

So they just don't have any clinical realm to understand how their data fits in. So I was at a scientific meeting, and this lady was giving this excellent review of her research that showed that heme iron, which is the iron that's in animal protein, is very damaging to the islet cells of the pancreas that secrete insulin. very damaging to the islet cells of the pancreas that secrete insulin. And the data was very convincing. And at the end, you know, there's question sessions, and someone got up and they asked her, and they said,

okay, well, with all you've learned, what kind of diet do you follow? And she was kind of taken aback. She goes, oh, well, I do a high-protein, low-carb diet. And, I mean, I almost wanted to fall out of the chair. I'm like, you just told us that heme iron is bad for your pancreas. She's overweight. She also talked about heme iron and its oxidative problems and how it can make you overweight and things like that. And then you say that you eat a high protein diet, which is high heme diet. She might as well have said, I eat exactly the opposite of my clinical findings. Right. And for the listener, the iron that's found in plants is

non-heme. It's a different type of iron. And that's also often pointed towards as a reason to not adopt a plant-based diet, particularly if you're an athlete, that the non-heme variety of iron is sort of insufficient, I suppose, in terms of carrying oxygen to your blood or whatever it is that it's supposed to do. It doesn't do it as well as the heme variety. Which is unfounded and not true. There's so many things that are said that are just like so completely untrue. I just wonder where it starts. I think what happens is some blogger just says it and then they tell two people and they tell two people and then all of a sudden... people and they tell two people and then all of a sudden there it is true that um vegans tend to be have a little bit lower iron but not anemic they don't have any higher incidence of anemia yeah i

heard that the the incidence of anemia is pretty much uniform across you know vegan and meat eaters very which is surprising because i think that is one of the ideas that if you're going to be vegan you got to watch out for your iron and you might become anemic. I mean, I have so many meat eating anemic patients. It's unbelievable. And the funny thing- You become anemic if you're eating a high protein animal-based diet. Well, I mean, there's many different reasons. You could develop gastritis, you could have diverticulitis, you can have pernicious anemia where your stomach has a problem producing factors that help you absorb different vitamins that help you make blood cells. There's many different ways. The funny thing to me though, is that if someone's on a vegan diet, that is the answer to any problem that they have

when they see another doctor. You know, patients will come to me and they'll be like, my doctor says, you know, I'm anemic, so I need to go off my vegan diet. I'm like, what does he tell his meat eaters that are anemic? Or they'll say, I'm hypothyroid. My doctor says it's because of my vegan diet. I'm like, what about the millions of hypothyroid meat eaters? It's because it's a mystery, I think, to most doctors. And it's an easy thing to point out that distinguishes you from the typical patient that they're going to see. Exactly. And because they don't fully understand it, you can just identify it as it must be the culprit.

Yeah. And I find a lot of doctors find it offensive somehow. Like they feel like I'm going to tell you what's right for you. I didn't tell you to go on the vegan diet, so that's got to be wrong for you. They almost don't want to be proved wrong. That's interesting. Well, it's so bizarre because when you look at a whole food plant-based diet, I mean, you know, unless I'm missing something, it pretty much seems to be the ultimate way to prevent and reverse chronic lifestyle disease,

no matter what form or shape that may take. And so to the extent that it could be identified as the problem that's leading towards your malady, just seems ironic. Yeah, and sometimes this is crazy to me. I mean, I gave a talk recently to a bunch of bariatric doctors. I mean, these are doctors that are dealing with people with weight issues. And what we're finding out now in weight loss surgery is people start to regain the weight after a while. And so they're in this conference talking about people that are regaining weight,

and they're talking about what other surgery can we do for their regaining weight. And no one is mentioning food at all. So I was one of the speakers, and I got up there and I said, how many of you have heard of the EPIC study? I mean, this is the biggest study ever on food and nutrition. Not a single person raised their hand. How many of you? The bariatric surgeons?

Yeah. How many of you have studied the Nurses' Health Study? Zero hands. Anybody know about the Adventist Health Study? Zero hands. So there's just so uneducated about this stuff. And the thing that kills me is there's studies... But it's not because they're lazy.

It's not even their fault. Like, they're just busy living their lives and trying to do what they do. Yeah. I mean, bariatric surgery, you know, the act of cutting the stomach, making it smaller, bypassing it, it works. They get their results. So they think that's all I need. You know, in the surgeon world, a chance to cut is a chance to cure. And that's all that's going through their mind. But that's a display of the problem. You know, for the heart doctor, it's a chance to give someone Lipitor as a chance to save a life, a chance to... Yeah, but these are addressing symptoms, not the underlying cause that's

leading that patient to get to that place. Because that's what medical school does. It teaches you to treat symptoms. It doesn't treat you to teach a larger cause. It doesn't teach food as medicine. And that's one of the central things that we have to deal with. That's really one of the biggest problems. And it kills me because, look, you get someone like Dean Ornish. You put it all together, right? There's no one study that puts it all together. But Dean did some really interesting stuff recently. So there was a lot of epidemiologic data that shows that meat consumption correlates with prostate cancer. If you look at parts of the world where they don't have a lot of prostate cancer, they don't eat a lot of meat. Now, some people said, well, that might be because they're just

not testing. They're not testing for prostate cancer. Okay, that's possible. But they look specifically at Japan, where they did a very strong testing testing protocol where they had very low rates of prostate cancer. And then they looked at migration studies where Japanese men moved to America. Boom, they're getting prostate cancer. So there's not going to be any genetic protection. So Dean took a group of people that had a high PSA, diagnosed prostate cancer, but had refused therapy. They didn't want any therapy. And so he put one group into his lifestyle medicine, which is meditation, exercise,

and a vegan diet. I wish he would just, I wish he would separate that up a bit. Yeah, because I think that's a, it opens him up to criticism. People say, well, he gets people to quit smoking and he gets them to start exercising. And so how can you really say what it is that's impacting them? Yeah. I believe a lot in meditation, but I don't think meditation stopped the prostate cancer cells here. That's as much as I'll say. The other group just did a conventional stuff. They did, as I remember, I go through so many studies, but as I remember, there was not a lot of smokers. And I think the smoking groups were pretty equal.

And then you follow them for six months. So at six months, the group on the plant-based diet had a dramatic drop in their PSA, whereas the group not on the plant-based diet had an actual increase in their PSA, and more of them had to go towards conventional therapy. But then he took that one step further. He took the serum, their blood serum. He took prostate cancer cells and put them in a dish, dripped the blood serum of the plant-based eater versus just the regular person.

And the plant-based eaters, their serum was eight times more effective at killing pancreas cell, at killing prostate cancer cells. So there's something in the serum. Then he took it a step further. He took their hormone, their, not their hormones,

their chromosomes. And he worked with a Nobel prize winner who had studied what's called telomeres. Telomeres are like the caps on chromosomes. Think of them as like the cap on the end of your shoelace to prevent the shoelace from unraveling. And it has been shown that the longer the telomere, the less likely you are to get genetic damage. And in fact, they found that the plant-based eating group had a longer telomere. They lengthened their telomere over time. That's amazing. I think telomere research is the next thing. You know how it's

all about the gut biome right now? I think it's telomere. Because when you start looking into that, it's pretty fascinating, the link between extending telomere length and cell life longevity and aging. It's quite fascinating. It's amazing. So why wasn't the nightly news like groundbreaking study coming out of the University of California, San Francisco? It just kind of comes out and goes away. Why do you think that is? I think it goes back to this, you know, we're telling people they need to change their lifestyle.

People don't want to change their lifestyle. And the industry is providing them all kinds of reasons to believe that whatever the study is, it is just a side, you know, study that really isn't anything to be worried about. Well, it's a lot easier to get people to pay attention to something that affirms that there's good news about your bad habits. Of course. You know, there's a big study of butter and saying butter is good for you and everybody's so excited, which is so bizarre because we're the most unhealthy country in the world, right? We have the highest obesity, highest diabetes, highest cancer, one of the lowest longevity rates. And yet we try, we eat more protein than any other country in the world. And yet we want to eat more protein.

And I keep asking my patients, how's it working for you? Oh, I've been on this protein diet. I've been on that protein diet. And I'm like, well, you got to stop eating that much protein. What do you mean? I got to eat protein. How's it working for you? It's not working. It's not working for the country. Why aren't we looking at the countries that are the healthiest and what they're doing? And there was a great project done in North Corellia where they really did an excellent job in cardiac morbidity and mortality by getting people to stop eating butter. That was their big project is getting people to stop eating butter. And here we big project, is getting people to stop eating butter. And here we are saying butter is good for you.

It's just, it blows my mind. Well, you look at the statistics and how unhealthy we are, and then you compare that to our obsession with health, because there's no other country that's also as obsessed with weight loss and health as we are. And then when you study these cultures that have the longest incidence of longevity

and are the most disease-free, and I don't think they really think about health and dieting and they're not going to the gym. They're not taking supplements. Yeah, so it's this weird mashup of being unhealthy and yet being obsessed with health at the same time, but pursuing a track that is not solving the problem. Right, right.

And sometimes I just feel like I'm in the twilight zone with it. It's like people just think about it. It's just so obvious. So on that note, like a couple things. I mean, the first thing is I'm sure that people come up to you all the time and say, you know, when you start spouting your Garth Davis plant-based diatribe, they go, well, listen, Garth, don't you know that the China study was debunked? Everybody knows that it was debunked. I mean, what is your response to that? I never mentioned the China study anywhere in any of my talks. It's kind of older data.

And Colin did a lot of study on rats, and I'm not a big fan of rat studies. So it's just, you know, I don't, Colin has certainly not been debunked by anybody. I mean, the big thing was that Denise Minger debunked him, and she put up a rant where she took some of his raw data and did what we talked about earlier, did a univariate analysis, said, look at this group, they're eating more wheat, and they have more heart disease and but what she didn't do is look at the fact that they were also eating more meat

i mean it's she didn't she didn't do a good scientific study now interestingly so she's sort of guilty of what she was accusing him of doing oh yeah absolutely and that that happens all the time a lot of these paleoo people and high protein people and everything like that, they will criticize any study unless it's their study. Epidemiology is terrible, but if you come out with an epidemiology study that says meat is good, all of a sudden that's the greatest study that ever lived. So yeah, we see that a lot from them. Now, interesting, Denise has come out recently saying, you know what? Vegan diet might actually be the right diet. What she's come down to is now that there's two extremes that seem to work, either an extreme high-fat, high-protein, low-carb diet or an extreme vegan diet, and everything in the middle is wrong.

What about that? Let's talk about the extreme high-fat, high-protein, low-carb diet. Because that is in vogue right now. It's in vogue. A lot of the studies come out from a guy named Noakes who was studying this in athletes. The idea was if I could get an athlete on a bike for a long distance and not needing any food during that time, just using fat. Fat adapted. Fat adapted. That would be a superior situation. Fact of the matter is Noakes was successful. You can do that. You can fat adapt,

and then you can go on a long bike ride using your fat. Does that correlate to more weight loss than any of the other diets? No. Does it correlate to better times for the athlete? No. And so it really didn't amount to anything then to say, yes, you can fat adapt, but is fat adapt better? Not necessarily. Now, the problem has come where you've taken data on well-trained athletes and try to apply it to the population as a whole.

And the problem comes several ways. So people hear, oh, I lost weight on a high-protein diet. Now, the reason people lose weight on a high-protein diet is they go into ketosis. What happens is they basically deplete their body of glycogen. Glycogen is the storage of carbs in the muscles. The muscles are stored with water, so you definitely lose water. And the ketones that are formed make you diurese more. So you pee off some water and so you lose weight. But every study done on these high protein diets is that you will lose weight for a while, then you'll slowly start to gain it back. What happens is people then think, okay, on this extreme diet, people lost

weight with protein. So it must be that protein, if I eat it, even not in an extreme situation, it's going to make me lose weight. And that's nonsense. I can't tell you, there are so many studies, I got tired reading it, that if you take a person and you put them on an 1800 calorie diet, it doesn't matter how much protein they've done studies where they've done really high protein and low protein and middle protein. It doesn't matter. The macronutrient combination does not affect the weight loss. So long as reading 1800, there was a professor out of Kentucky who ate nothing but Twinkies and Oreos and junk food, but he kept his calories under 1,800.

He lost weight. His LDL cholesterol went down, even though he's eating Twinkies. And the funny thing is, as soon as he started eating meat, it all came back on. Interesting. Because he didn't eat any meat during that time. He was just eating. He ate one salad and then junk food the rest of the time. So macronutrient combinations, everyone's counting macros.

That's the big thing now, counting macros. It makes no difference in weight loss. The calorie count does. Now, here's the thing. The calorie count is so important, but people do a terrible job counting calories because they just totally mess up how many calories are in fat. I mean, they oil up their pan. You know, Pam cooking spray, it says low-fat cooking.

Well, it says like zero grams. Yeah. One says like zero grams of fat on the front because you'd have to have a microgram, you know, for that serving size. One fourth a second of a spray. But people are just spraying it all on there and you go out to eat and you get a calorie count on the food that you're eating, but that doesn't count the grease that's on the... So I find people do a really bad job calorie counting. But here's the thing, when you eat meat, let's go away from the weight loss because that's all anybody seems to care about, weight loss and muscles. No one seems to really care about the heart disease until they have it. But every time you eat meat, a few things happen.

You put acid into your body because meat is heavy in amino acids. And those acids that have sulfa definitely increase the acid content in the body. Now, your body has to buffer that acid. And in buffering the acid, that's where you get a lot of problems. So it steals a lot of calcium from muscles. So I think a lot of the problems with the bodybuilding population is I think they're asking the wrong question. They're looking at how much protein do I need to eat to gain muscle? Instead, they should be asking, what do I need to eat to maintain muscle? The second thing you're doing is you're eating heterocyclic amines, which are known carcinogens,

but every time you cook a steak, that burned muscle turns into a chemical that can cause cancer. You're developing N-nitroso compounds, another carcinogen. You are getting advanced glycolated N products. I mean, I could go on and on. The list goes on and on of all these terrible toxins and stuff that you're putting into your body every time you eat a steak. And we have all this data that long-term, it's not good for you. So I just don't understand why, if it's not going to help you lose weight, if it's not going to help you lose weight, and if it's not going to help you live longer, why people are doing it. And the answer is the industry is out there. They'll sell you those protein shakes. They sell those protein shakes. I have protein shakes in my office. Simply, I tell my patients not to drink them, except

we need them around the time of surgery. They sell that protein shake to lose weight. It's the exact same product that's being sold for other people to gain weight. Bodybuilders to gain weight. Yeah. Yeah. it's the exact same product that's being sold for other people to bodybuilders to gain weight yeah yeah it's the exact same product interesting uh well isn't that they're on the slow carb diet i think it's the idea is that you're supposed to start your day with a you know 25 grams of protein and a shake and that somehow this has sets you up for you know i don't know better metabolism throughout the day that will lead to weight loss. Right. And there are some data that do show some good satiety, but the problem with the data is they're never, they're always comparing shake to shake. So they're taking a shake and they're varying the carbohydrate and the protein and then testing it and see who's hungrier later. The plant-based diet wins because of fiber. That's what is the satiating factor.

And so I don't really care if a low-fat, high-carb shake makes you hungrier if it doesn't have fiber in it because that's not what I'm eating and not what I'm telling my patients to eat. They did a really good study where they had people sit down and eat different meals and then check how hungry they were the next meal and the meal after. And the most satiating food you could possibly eat was a potato interesting yeah so i think in one of your i think it was in your talk that i saw recently you said something like uh you know only three percent of the population is protein deficient and but no i would say less than but like but like 97 of the population is fiber deficient. And what we should be talking about is fiber and not protein. Right.

When you look at, they came out with the new NHANES data and what do we actually eat in this country? No one's protein deficient. You got to understand the RDA. Well, a protein deficiency would be starvation. It would be starvation. Like core sugars. Yeah, exactly. You'd have to not be eating, you'd have to be eating less than 1,000 calories to probably get it.

And so we just don't see that. So the RDA, when they set up their recommendation for protein requirements, they based it on some nitrogen balance studies and all this kind of stuff. And they came up with a figure, like for men, 56 grams, and for women, 44 grams or 42 grams. And that figure is actually an optimal amount. It's not a minimal amount. I think people think that's the lowest amount that I should get. It's actually the optimal amount. Based on those studies, probably you would do fine with 30 grams of protein, but they just want to make sure that everybody's covered. Now, we eat 70 to 100, sometimes 130 grams of protein a day. So we're way over

the optimal amount. We're, we're way in excess. And when all these studies where they've gone and interview people, the one thing everyone's looking for is even more protein. I mean, it's crazy. Yet we eat unbelievably low amounts of fiber and there, there are not a lot of good studies that show that there's long-term health and eating a lot of protein. There's tons of good studies, tons and tons, showing eating a lot of fiber is good for you long-term. And we are unbelievable. We're in a mass deficit of fiber, and yet no one's talking about that. Well, don't you know that we shouldn't be eating fruit, that this is terrible? Yeah, and that really makes me want to jump off a building.

A sugar is a sugar. Yeah, a sugar is a sugar is ridiculous. A sugar is not true if Yeah. Sugars is sugars. It was ridiculous. A sugar, a sugar is not true. If a sugar is combined with fiber, um, that fiber makes sugar into a slow release pill. What people don't understand,

it is almost impossible. And this is true of sugar too. It's almost impossible for a sugar, for a carb to return to fat. That's called de novo lipogenesis and your body will not turn sugar or carbs to fat until you have completely saturated all the glycogen in your body which is about 1500 grams of glycogen and then if you once you've saturated glycogen it'll still give you some leeway where you eat more carb is going to try to burn them more it actually ups

the metabolism to try to burn them people say It actually ups the metabolism to try to burn them. People say that protein ups the metabolism. Carbs don't at the regular intake, but if you overeat carbs, it actually ups your metabolism to try to burn them. And so it's very difficult to turn carbs to fat. Now, simple sugars will make you hungry because it'll make your blood sugar rise and then drop, and then you're going to want more sugar, and you'll get these sweets, cravings, et cetera, et cetera. So I definitely don't tell people to eat sugar, but for the love of God, eat fruit. It's just, it's made that we are fruit eaters.

Everything about our body, about our anatomy, you look at comparative science. I was watching Naked and Afraid. You ever watch Naked and Afraid? Uh-uh. It's this great show where they drop people off naked in the middle of the wilderness, and they almost die, and then they pick them up 21 days later. But I'm watching them and there's this one scene where this lady's like, she's just dying. And every show they're talking about how they need to get protein.

They're like, we need to get some protein. I need to get protein now. I'm going to die. And yeah, they do need to probably get some protein because they're eating zero calories. But in this one scene, this monkey's kind of just sitting down eating a branch, eating some leaves, looking at them just like, you idiots. And I'm thinking to myself, eat what the monkey's eating because we are made to eat what the monkey's eating. I would follow that monkey around and eat that monkey's food. But don't volunteer me.

I don't want to do that show. But the point being, we are perfectly created to eat fruit. We could live long, healthy lives just eating fruit. You and I both know fruititarians who eat the majority of their calories from fruit and they're unbelievably healthy people. Yeah. Interesting. I mean, as a marathoner and an Ironman athlete yourself, is there any argument to be made that when you're training really hard, if you want to get as strong as possible, if you want to build lean muscle mass, et cetera, that you should eat protein in excess of your RDA? That's a tough question. And in my

book, I kind of go into this a bit. It's so much harder to study this than it is the other stuff. And there's good data, but then every time I see a good paper, it's always industry-sponsored. And I've talked with the scientists. They're like, look, we couldn't get anything done if the industry doesn't sponsor us. It doesn't mean that it's good science. If you're just an average person, no. And everyone thinks they're more than an average person, but no one's doing the workouts that we know it takes to be in that above-average field. So for them, absolutely not.

Now, for real athletes, there has been some increased, they look at muscle protein synthesis, and there is some increased muscle protein synthesis with about 20 grams of protein after a workout. The studies are hard to look at because there's many confounding factors. They have people, they're fasted when they do their workout, so they're already going on the deficient, then they get the protein. So there's other studies that argue it doesn't matter when you eat the protein

as long as you have protein all day long. I would say probably a modest increase in protein would be fine, but plant-based protein is fine. I personally never count, ever, never count. I never think to myself I need to get protein. I'll make a post-workout shake where I will throw in some hemp seeds and I'll get some protein there. I eat nuts during the day. I'll get protein there.

I eat a lot of beans. And I'm only getting stronger and faster. I mean, every year I just seem to be growing. So for me, it doesn't seem to be a fact. In the vegan bodybuilding world, I've interviewed a bunch of people. A lot of them say they don't do extra protein. They do the same thing I do. At the end of a workout, they'll go and eat a meal with beans in it,

which to me is the healthy thing to do. But I don't know. I can't vouch for the truth. I don't know if they're doing steroids or anything like that. They look great. Yeah, interesting. I mean, is there an argument to be made that the protein from animal flesh is qualitatively different from the protein from plants? In other words, is an amino acid an amino acid irrespective of where it comes from?

Or is the matrix in which it's delivered to your body does that make a difference in terms of how you metabolize it the bioavailability and all of that yeah you know um you bring up a good point but um the studies that have shown that bioavailability of plant-based proteins is excellent. The problem is more like the actual amino acid array in each protein. So meat-based proteins are a little bit, I hate the term complete because that makes people think that they're better, but they've got higher of certain proteins. Like for instance, plant-based proteins are much higher in glutamic acid. Now, glutamic acid is fantastic for lowering blood pressure, which might be part of the reason plants are so good with lowering blood pressure.

Meat-based proteins are higher in branched-chain amino acids. Now, if you're a bodybuilder, this is good for several reasons. It increases IGF-1. IGF-1 is a growth hormone. So it's a growth hormone. You're going to grow your muscles. Number two, there are definitely things like leucine definitely stimulate muscle protein synthesis. And so if you're a bodybuilder, you want to stimulate muscle protein synthesis. But here's the catch. We know from aging studies and from cancer studies that having a high IGF-1 and high leucine actually leads to premature aging and cellular death and cancer. So what I'm seeing from these bodybuilding protocols that may in fact make a bodybuilder have more muscle may make them unhealthier in the longterm. I mean, it's impossible to do a good study on it, but if you look at old bodybuilders, they all have

a scar down the middle of their chest. They've all had heart surgery. Now, is it the high protein diets or is it the steroids? I can't differentiate that and tell you that. Right. But it's that argument of the difference between a performance-oriented diet, like a short-term performance-oriented diet versus long-term longevity, maximum wellness diet. Yeah. I mean, it's hard to say. I mean, look at Scott Jurek, look at Dave Scott when he was competing at his peak. I mean, these athletes were the top of their game, and they were eating plant-based diets and not concentrating on protein.

And I find a lot of these, there's more and more athletes coming out of the woodworks now that are following a plant-based diet and say that they feel better than ever now. Like I told you before, they obviously have less acid in their body, so they're not trying to buffer the acid with calcium from the muscle. And so maybe you do a study, they look at muscle protein synthesis, and there's a slight advantage if you're getting more protein. But what we're not studying is what's muscle breakdown over the long term. And I think that's a lot of these bodybuilders that you talk to that are vegan bodybuilders. Every year, they seem to be consistently big. They don't seem to go through these fluxes that other people go to, but this is a field that is wrought with, I could tell you very confidently about the cancer and the

longevity. I can't tell you that confidently about building muscle and performance. Well, I noticed on your Facebook page, you shared that picture of that dude who was like the butcher. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the dude is absolutely ripped. Yeah, Fraser Bailey. He's a great guy because he has totally changed his whole life. Like this guy just like a light bulb went on. He used to be a butcher. Now, he gained his muscle back when he was a meat eater,

but he's honed it now that he's a plant-based eater. Swears he doesn't do steroids. Everybody on my thing is steroids, steroids, steroids. I've never tested him, so I can't test. I would say absolutely he doesn't because he swears he doesn't. But after Lance Armstrong, I've given up swearing for other people. But my point on that picture was not steroids or how he looks or anything. It was his story of transformation, how great he feels now. Interesting. Yeah. I want to get back to

this idea of fat adaptation and ketosis and the like. And as an endurance athlete, becoming fat adapted, that's something that's very interesting. The more fat adapted I can become, the longer I can go without relying on nutrition, the more efficient I am in whether it's cycling or swimming or running or what have you. And I've worked on my fat adaptation predominantly through training protocols that focus on,

you know, enhancing my aerobic zone capacity by training, yeah, by training in that zone. And it's my experience, and it's completely anecdotal has been that I'm able to do that through how I train. It's less about, you know, it's less about the diet aspect of it than it is what, what does my training look like? So, you know, I'm sure that, that, you know, when you go out and you do those fasted workouts, that it has some impact on that. Um, but it, but if I do that, then I pay for it the next day or the day after, like I can't train every single day consistently if I'm depriving my body of nutrients when I go out to train. So when I'm looking at like the course of a season, you know, I'm focusing on that Z2 work,

which really allows me to really enhance my ability that go all day speed, which is really fat adaptation, but I'm just doing it through the training as opposed to trying to achieve that through what I'm putting in my mouth. Yeah. I mean, there's certainly data to say that if you're going at zone two, you are burning fat. If you do it in a fasted state, you're going to start fat adapting. But the literature has been really weak on any kind of performance advantage to that. And so it may be, and it's certainly weak on everyone's like, oh, I want to burn fat, thinking that they're going to have a six-pack abs by doing that. That doesn't tend to turn out to be the case.

There's multiple variables we've got to think about. And that is what about the acid load you're taking in and how does that affect your performance? So while you're burning your fat, you've also got a lot of acid in your body, and that might be detrimental. You're missing out on the phytonutrients and nutrients and things that you would typically be eating in a high carb diet, which may be affecting your performance. And the one thing that you will always hear from plant-based athletes that I think you really mess up when you start trying to do fat adaption is recovery. It just seems that high fruit smoothie you make after that workout really helps you recover for the next day's workout. And so I see the science in the fat adaptation, but I don't see the benefit.

Interesting. I was on the Joe Rogan podcast recently, and the topic came up about ketosis. And I made, I don't know exactly what I said, but I said something like, you know, I'm just not, I'm not sure that it's really the healthiest thing to do for you long-term. Like it's sort of a critical state and it's sort of an emergency state of your body. Right. And I didn't go really much further beyond that. And then I got beat up for not knowing what I was talking about and misunderstanding what ketosis is. Joe Rogan beat you? No, he didn't, but sort of the comments and the feedback that kind of, that swirled around that as a result of that, like, you know, he was cool. We didn't,

we didn't really get into some huge debate about it. So, you know, educate me about what ketosis is. Like, am I, was I mischaracterizing it or what is your understanding of what it means to be in ketosis because i feel like there's this movement whereby uh you know ketosis has become this aspirational lifestyle for people that they're they're always trying to be in ketosis that on some level this the argument is made that this is a natural state of man and and we should be you know trying to be in this state and that we can be healthy doing this. Yeah, and that is with zero evidence whatsoever. I mean, all the ketosis studies are so short-term, they are ridiculous.

I mean, really short-term. Secondly, it is an emergency state for our bodies to live in. We don't want to be in ketosis. Our bodies thrive. I mean, if you look at the Krebs cycle, which is the cycle that generates energy, the input is glucose. That's the input. Now, there are other places where we can input in emergency situations, and that's where the ketones come in from. But our primary fuel for our body comes from glucose and certainly from our brain.

So our body can... I made that point too and was told that I didn't know what I was talking about. No, it's absolutely true. The brain actually can't live off our fat, but it can live off only glucose. Now, the ketones do cross the blood-brain barrier, so it can get some food through the ketones. But when you're in serious ketosis, you're not a happy camper. The side effects are huge, nausea, vomiting. Bad breath.

Terrible breath. And just constipation like crazy. And Atkins had to deal with all this with his patients. So he had all kinds of supplements and stuff to give them in these situations. Really bad uric acid stones. So gout would flare a lot. I've had so many patients come to me with gout when they're on an Atkins diet. And kidney stones, like crazy. Kidney stones. It's just not a natural way. Our bodies are not very good at handling acid. Not like a carnivore. So a carnivore is perfectly created. You could put a lion on a ketotic diet and they'd be fine, but they don't need the fiber. They got a short intestinal tract. They don't need vitamin C.

They don't need any of these things. But a plant-based eater, like we're designed to be, like a frugivore, like a monkey, is meant to be eating fruits. And that's what our mouth, that's what our digestive tract, we have amylase in our saliva. You go on and on and on. We are made to be eating these foods that are primary to make us live a healthy life. The ketosis is an emergency situation should there be a famine or a freeze and we can't get our food. But when food's aplenty, we're eating fruit. That's what we're supposed to be doing. and we can't get our food.

But when food's a plenty, we're eating fruit. That's what we're supposed to be doing. When you look at the fruitarians, like whether it's somebody like Fully Raw Christina, who's a mutual friend of ours, or Michael Arnstein, or some of these people out there that, you know, I know these people.

They're like vibrating health. They have like, their skin looks amazing. They have positive energy. You know, they look you in the eye. They're very present. There's something about that lifestyle that seems to really agree with the people that adapt it. And they become so passionate about it. It's almost, you know, it's like they're just exuding enthusiasm for this lifestyle. But what is like, you know, I've never been a fruitarian. I've never gone that far down, you know, down the road that way. I mean, what is your, you know, I've never been a fruitarian. I've never gone that far down the road that way.

I mean, what is your opinion on kind of the long-term impacts of eating that way? Do you suggest that for your patients? No, I don't suggest it. I don't suggest it because, you know, I don't suggest anything where I don't have good data to support it. My gut feeling is it's very healthy, but I just don't have data to support it. People say, well, where's the protein come from? There's amino acids in fruit. And the other thing you got to understand is our body recycles our amino acids very effectively. So we break down our protein into amino acids and then retake them up and reuse them again. So we have a built-in

amino acid store. And the ones that I've met are just, you know, top of the sports amino acid. They don't care about, they don't read, they're never taking supplements. They don't think about it. They don't do anything. They don't. They're just eating their bananas and doing great. And so I think there's something real to it. I don't know that I'm, you know, I need more science before I would give it to my patients.

But I told Christina I'm willing to give it a shot. So she's going to put me on her... Oh, you're going to do it? I'm going to do her raw 21 day diet. And it's weird for me because I say I don't ever count protein or think about protein, but I eat a lot of beans. I love beans. Beans and rice are like my go-to meal. And I think someone who's really... I've really... Of all the gurus that have come out on plant-based dieting, I think I've probably tended more towards McDougal in a starch-based diet. I really feel like we are starch eaters and do very well on starch diets, and that's what I really get my patients to do. But I could see the benefit with the raw food diet. I just, I'd like to prove it to myself and get them more studies before I did it with patients.

Interesting. So let's talk about the book, man. How close are you to being done? It is done. Oh, it's done. Yeah, that was a—I don't want to ever do it again. It's a lot of work. Oh, my God.

I mean, you just lived in the research. I lived in the research. How many years have you been working on it? Three years. Uh-huh. Yeah. What's it called, the protein meth? It's called the proteinaholic, our obsession with protein working on it? Three years. Uh-huh. Yeah. And is it going to, is it called, what's it called? The protein meth? It's called the proteinaholic. The proteinaholic. Our obsession with protein and how it's killing us. Uh-huh. Yeah. My general

point, like I don't want to get into reductionist scientists. I don't want to be a fear monger. Actually, I probably should be a fear monger because we're dying. Sell more books. I want to be a fear monger because, you know, we're the most unhealthy people in the world and no one fears their double cheeseburger. But, um, but yeah, I mean, I started this, you know, years ago I was talking with, uh, my editor at Harper one, Gideon Weil, and he's like, what is the central problem out there? And he was, he was great with me because I just had this general view of people are eating like crap. That's the, you know, they're not eating enough, uh, fruit, vegetables, nuts, beans, and seeds. He's like, that's too

general. Why aren't they eating that? And it kind of gelled down. I was like, you know what? I just started getting this view of every patient that comes in my office. And I go over their diet. What diets have you done before? We've done Atkins, I've done South Beach, I've done Zone, currently on Atkins right now. So you believe in high protein diets? Yes. Then why are you sitting in my office? And so that's when he really got me thinking, maybe it's the protein, it's this idea. And I hate this reductionist science, I really do. But the only way I'm going to fight the reductionist science is to become a reductionist myself and prove it wrong.

And so I did research. I think there's 1,000 papers referenced in the articles. And I really go into really good depth tying them all together. So it's not like, oh, here's one PubMed article that says this. It's like, let's look at all these together. Let's look at the good and the bad and show you that this desire to get huge amounts of protein is completely unnecessary and that carbs are certainly not bad for you. So that's the basic thesis of the book. Basic thesis, yeah.

Right. And so do you have case studies throughout that or is it like your own experience or is it just, is it very research-based or? It's very, I start out with kind of my story, you know, talking a lot about what we've just talked here about. Right. Let's recap that again. If somebody's listening to this and they haven't gone back and listened to the first time that we chatted. Yeah. I mean, I was, you know, here I was, you know, go to medical school, study everything you could ever want to know about a cell, but never once studied nutrition. Get into residency, start developing a belly, go on the Atkins diet and get sick.

Think, forget it, I'm just going to be a busy surgeon. Get into practice and I'm seeing people with cancer and diabetes and heart disease and I'm treating this obesity and I'm looking at everybody's diet plan and everybody's eating the same damn thing. And it's exactly and I'm treating this obesity. And I'm looking at everybody's diet plan and everybody's eating the same damn thing. And it's exactly what I'm eating. Eggs for breakfast, Subway sandwich for lunch, chicken for dinner, hamburgers here and there. And I stop and think, God, I'm operating on people, but I'm not telling them what to eat. In fact, I wrote a book that said, eat high protein. And everyone's coming in, well, I followed your advice. I'm eating high protein.

I'm gaining back weight. And so I started to really think, gosh, this is bad. And then I got my life insurance policy because when I was having a kid and my cholesterol was sky high, my liver function tests were high. I was hypertensive and they denied me from my life insurance policy. And then, of course, my friend, a medical doctor, was like, oh, no problem. We'll put you on Lipitor. We'll put you on a beta block. But I knew, you know, I know what happens.

You get worse and worse and worse. You're going to have a heart attack at 50, 60. And so I said, there's got to be a different way. And then that's when I really started studying these other cultures and how it works. And the more I studied, the more research. I said, my patients could benefit this, not just me. The more I started incorporating my patients and it totally changed my practice. And now I've got, you know, the healthiest patients and it makes me a busy doctor.

You're super active on Facebook. You write these long articles and rants and you share your patients' success stories. And there's some pretty amazing before and after pictures and anecdotes about some of the people that have passed through your practice. Yeah. Yeah, they're great. I mean, I have some patients that have just been diet. Now, I'm known for the surgery.

My patients are not your typical patients. They come in 400 pounds. These are big patients. So we do do surgery, but we, I've changed the paradigm where there's diet instruction from the get-go. Some of the people decide not to do surgery. Those that do surgery definitely go, I don't really tell vegetarian or vegan. I just say, I want you more plant-based. Don't do what Americans do. Don't let chicken be the star of the plate. Actually flip the plate around and I give them, we do cooking classes. We do, you know, a lot of

nutrition, which my colleagues are not doing. And that has made my surgery patients so successful. So, but you're losing money. Yeah. Well, those ones I operate on, but there are some that I lose money. And I saw a lady the other day, she's, uh, you know, body mass census 36. She barely qualifies for surgery. So listen, I will pay you cash to do it. And I said, listen, I went over her diet plan. I was like, you can lose this weight easily, but I'm eating a lot of protein. That's the problem. You know, change the protein. I don't know if you saw, I had a great story the other day about a lady comes in. She wants, um, she's from Ghana and she wants surgery and she's been living in the United States for 10 years. And

at that time she's gotten really heavy and she's very educated. She's an engineer and she's been living in the United States for 10 years, and at that time she's gotten really heavy. And she's very educated. She's an engineer, and she's doing everything. She comes in, she's on weight loss pills, and she's currently on Atkins. She's done Atkins several times. She's done South Beach. She's done Zone, done all these diets. And so we're going over her diet plan. What do you eat for breakfast?

Eggs. What do you eat for lunch? Chicken. I just have a chicken breast. What do you eat for dinner? And it's going on. I'm like, okay, so you obviously believe in all this protein and everything. Why do you think it's failing?

What's not working? She goes, well, I'm from Ghana and I've got friends from Ghana. And they come over and we have a typical Ghana meal. And I think that's what's making me gain weight because it's too many carbs. I'm like, what is your Ghana meal? She's like, oh, it's really bad. It's like potatoes and sweet potatoes. And we do sweet potato stew and we use cassava and all this stuff. And I'm like, that's the best meal you've had all day. And I said, okay, well,

do you ever go to Ghana? She goes, yes. I was like, okay, how many people are overweight in Ghana? Oh, nobody. I'm the biggest person when I'm there by far. All right. And when you're there, what do you eat? Well, I eat the food that my family eats there. And well, you know, now that you mentioned it, I lose weight every time I go there. I'm like, you see my point. But it's sometimes it's that people are just so addicted to this idea that protein is what makes you lose weight. And so there's stuff in there itself filled with food that we know does not make you lose weight. Well, we're being inundated with this message everywhere we turn. I mean, I love when you go to these conferences and you speak at these conferences and you take pictures of what the breakfast is

and kind of like the nutritional recommendations that are being proposed by some of the doctors with whom you share the podium. Yeah. I mean, I was at the American Society of Bariatric Medicine. This is a society that is, it's the medical doctors dealing with weight. Again, you go to these meetings, not a lot of talk about diet. Everything's high protein. It's sponsored by Atkins. The chairperson of the committee is from Duke, Eric Westerman. And he gets money from Atkins and he runs these high protein diets.

And he put up his typical day's diet for the patients. And it was, I saw that thing and I wanted to run up on stage and attack him because I can't imagine telling a patient to eat cheeseburgers and, and, um, his diet, I put it on my Facebook. It was just almost anything bad you could possibly think of. It was like the, his diet that he recommends for his patients is the diet my patients come in on, you know, at 400 pounds. And I just think it is unbelievable disservice. What he's getting is a quick weight loss because these people are going into ketosis, but they

always put it back on. They always land back up in my office. And it's sad. So if you, like, if you could uh the audience with like a couple things that they could just think about that might be uh contrary to what they might imagine about diet or a couple things that they could just implement into their life to start to make a shift yeah what are some of those things well there was a great study recently where they showed that if you just tell people to eat 35 grams of fiber a day and don't give them anything else more complicated don't weigh this don't weigh that just eat 35

grams of fiber a day people get really good weight loss people that are eating tons of fiber don't really get sick they don't get sick they they i mean it you know because it's not just the fiber it's what the fiber is you know there's no fiber in the animal products there's only fiber in the plant right but if you forget just forget about protein and let's shift all of that focus that you had on protein and put it on fiber and then see what would happen. Yeah, my message would be it's almost impossible not to get enough protein no matter what you're eating. That's number one. Number two, eating more protein will make you sick eventually. And number three, eating more plants is really like finding the fountain of youth.

It's not just because people say, well, I don't care if I live 10 years longer if I have to eat that crap. The food's delicious. It's nutritious. Your whole taste buds change. That's the thing I think people miss or don't get. They don't get that. And they can't imagine that they'll actually get to a place where they will desire or crave healthy foods. Yeah, I have patients say to me, I wish I had your willpower. To me, it's not willpower.

It's not willpower for me to eat a kale salad. I crave a kale salad. But I used to crave a double cheeseburger. And you could change that. I could talk about how I'd change that with patients, but you could change this thought process, and you could change your taste. And everybody who goes through it, I get this blessing. All these people online yakking about this and that, and they've never treated a patient.

I get to sit across from a patient and actually see these changes. And the changes are amazing, the way people feel, the way they look, what they're doing in their life. It's really rewarding. look what they're doing in their life. It's really rewarding. And when I think about how many people in this world could benefit if we just got rid of this idea of protein and went to the idea of whole foods, fruits, vegetables, beans, it would really change the health of the country, the health of the environment, and have so many other benefits out there. Where do you come down on grains? I mean, you're kind of a McDougal guy.

I love grains. But there's this idea that today's wheat is not your grandmother's wheat. It's highly hybridized. Most wheat is stripped of its nutritional value and higher in gluten than it ever has been, and we're seeing allergies and all kinds of things. And you have the Wheat Belly and the Grain Brain books out there that are influencing a lot of people. Yeah, the Wheat Belly, I mean, God, that book. The science is so bad in those books. And, of course, the layperson doesn't know how to read the science

and understand that there's something being put over on them. They did a great study recently because everybody's such a placebo effect. Everyone now is so affected by grain. They were eating it 10 years ago without a complaint about it, but now everybody's got gluten sensitivity. So they took a group of people and they put them in three groups. One, they were all going to give them the food. They're all getting food given to them. One group is going to be, they're all told, you don't know what your gluten levels. This, this may, you may be getting a low gluten, you may be getting a high gluten, but you're all gluten sensitive. So the one group gets a really high gluten level.

Another group gets a medium gluten level. One group gets no gluten level, absolutely no difference in the symptoms. The low gluten group has the exact same symptom as a high gluten. They're like, Oh my God, I feel terrible. This gluten is terrible. So are you, are you saying that gluten is not a thing? Gluten is not a thing. Gluten's not, the gluten sensitivity is imagined. Absolutely imagined. Really?

It's imagined. Now, what might not be imagined. I mean, I can tell you that if I eat like a lot of processed wheat, like bread or whatever, that I feel like the skin around my eyes inflames. Like there's a whole thing that happens. I feel lousy. I get tired. There's a sensitivity to FODMAPs. FODMAPs are fructooligo polysaccharides. A lot of the times when people are having these symptoms to different foods, it's our gut bacteria and the way our gut bacteria interplays with those. And I think that has a lot more to do with it.

So all three groups were having symptoms. Now, were those symptoms faking in their head? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe what they're reacting to is not the gluten, but the fact that these grains have FODMAPs, these different oligosaccharides, which are certain carbohydrates that their bacteria just can't handle, and that might be a big part of the problem.

But people that have, okay, I get inflamed when I eat wheat. If I take you to a lab and then draw your blood and look for all the factors that show inflammation, zero will come out positive. There will be no inflammation. Unless you have SPRU, celiac disease. You actually have celiac, that's a different story. But that's the thing about this gluten sensitivity that's out there right now. Everybody thinks they're in inflammation, but it doesn't show up in any of their labs.

There's no lab value for gluten sensitivity. It's a symptomatology without any clinical findings in it. And it may not be the gluten. Now, it would be fine to just drop the grains, except that the grains are fantastic for you. So if you look at the long-term studies, grains are unbelievably good for diabetes. They're unbelievably good for heart disease, and they're a big source of our fiber as well as a lot of the B vitamins. So what we're doing is taking away this, you know, group of food that's actually extremely good for you. There's even studies that show that grain is good for your brain. But when we're talking about grains, I mean, you know, we're not talking about eating, you know, Triscuit crackers. No, we're not. That's i mean there's a there's a difference between eating

you know uh you know a processed pasta you know grain-based pasta and maybe you know a really like an heirloom millet or something like that those are qualitatively very different right because the processing like just take oatmeal for instance because they've done a lot of studies on oatmeal where you take a steel cut a rolled oat or where you take a steel cut, a rolled oat, or if you take a quick oat, or an instant oat, what they're doing is basically shucking off more of the germ fiber, so that it cooks easier and it cooks quicker. But the problem is, then you eat, like, let's you take that instant oatmeal, you eat it, you get a big blood sugar surge, a big blood sugar drop, and you're hungrier again sooner, because there's less fiber in it. But if you take the whole oat, and even if there's the same amount of fiber in it,

the whole oat takes longer to break down and digest, so you're not going to get this blood sugar surge. You'll have a longer, slower blood sugar release, which provides energy without problems. So, yeah, I mean, I think most of the problems with wheat in general probably have to do with our gut microbiome and the way we process it. How does GMO fit in that? I don't know.

There may be something with GMO in that. But, boy, that research is hard to go through because industry is all over it. I mean, when somebody says, what should I think about GMOs, how do you respond to that generally? I generally respond that I would be careful. My general thought is they say it's good for you. They haven't done the studies to show that it's good for you. They just haven't. And it would take a lot of studies and it would be a difficult study.

But my general question is why GMO? I mean, why would you want something where they're messing with the genetic structure of the food? The other thing that bothers me about GMOs is not even the GMO. It's the result of having a GMO product, which is you're growing a huge monocultural crop. That huge monocultural crop is terrible for the environment. The soil is devoid of nutrient. So that's just not the food I want to put in my body. I think we're going to find out that GMO is extremely bad for you.

But I don't have the science behind it that I do with saying that meat causes diabetes. Yeah, caution. Yeah, caution for sure. Yeah. I mean, it's not just... I mean, there's all different kinds of GMOs too. It's not one thing. I mean, there's all different kinds of GMOs too. It's not one thing. But if you're dealing with sort of a strain of food that has been bred to be pestilent resistant and deal well with glyphosate,

that means that it's laden with all sorts of chemicals on top of it that are in the soil and absorbed into the roots and all of that. So there's more going on. Right. And there was a very biased study that was done by Stanford looking at organics versus inorganics. And they said that there's no difference in the nutrient level. And there's been other studies that said, oh, they didn't do it right. There are differences. But this group that was getting money from biotech and stuff did say, without a doubt,

the GMO group had higher pesticides. So why do you want to eat pesticides? These people are like, oh, we got to have GMOs. I don't understand it. I don't want pesticides in my food. I mean, glyphosate has just been labeled as a carcinogen. And that's just the tip of the ice cap of what's going on. I mean, you know, the FDA is supposed to do trials anytime they're, or the USDA is supposed to do trials. No, I'm sorry. FDA is supposed to do trials anytime a new product comes out, like that's a GMO, to make sure it's safe. Well, they had a GMO alfalfa come out.

And the FDA just said, no, let's go ahead and use it. And there weren't any testing done. So the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Committee of Concerned Scientists, took this up and they fought a battle. And it went all the way up to the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court said, yeah, the FDA can do whatever they want. The head of the FDA that was pushing this used to work for Monsanto. Clarence Thomas used to work for Monsanto. I mean, it's just such a – and it's like people say, oh, this is conspiracy theory.

It's so in your face, it's beyond conspiracy. It's obvious. And we're relying as consumers on these regulatory bodies to be holding out for our best interest. Right. And it's in the USDA bylaws that they have to look out both for the safety of the consumer, but also for the safety of the productivity of the company. And you better bet when it becomes a – Yeah, that really shouldn't be part of the manifest. Shouldn't the productivity of the company. And you better bet when it becomes a... Yeah, that really shouldn't be part of the manifest. Shouldn't be part of the manifest.

That should be all about the person and not about the company. Yeah, we've really just divested ourselves of so much control. And the average consumer is just, what are you supposed to do? We trust and rely on these organizations to basically tell us what's safe and what's not. And when you realize that they're compromised or they're heavily influenced by, you know, profit motive and business, and it's all this, you know, cabal of rotating chairs, you know, from one organization to the next, that's very disconcerting. Yeah, it's strange. But I tell my patients patients, like we've been talking about science and all this time, this whole time, but just try to use a little common sense. I mean, look at the food,

look at an orange, peel an orange. It's like created for you. Tastes great. It's perfectly packaged, you know, who needs, but you know, better packaging than an apple. And then think about, and I have my patients do journaling where they journal and have them journal. How do you feel after a meal? So they, after a high fruit, high vegetable diet, they feel fantastic afterwards. And the more they notice how fantastic it is, the more they will instinctually go towards that food. Whereas think about how you feel when you eat a double cheeseburger. Everyone does it. Everyone feels like crap afterwards. They laugh about how they feel like crap, and they go back for more. Right.

And I try to appeal to my patients on this kind of instinctual level about what do you think your body's supposed to eat. Journaling is really powerful, too, because most people will tell you that they eat pretty healthy. You know, like, yeah, I'm healthy. I eat pretty healthy. But when you actually write down and you're honest with yourself about what you're doing, generally it tells a pretty different picture of what you're doing. And that can be really revealing and empowering for somebody to go, oh, my gosh, I really thought I was doing this.

And I now can see what I am doing is very different. I need to make that change. Yeah, it's a very powerful tool. And you start to notice food patterns that you might have not thought of before. You notice how you feel. You notice if you're overeating. You tend not to pick bad foods because you say, I've got to write that down in my journal. And Dr. Davis is going to look at it.

How am I going to do it? And so I have found it a very big part of my practice. that holds your patients back or the people that you treat from grasping this idea of a healthy lifestyle trajectory? Or what is the big impediment that prevents them from taking that leap? Protein. I think it's protein. I think it's this belief that we need high doses of protein and that therefore chicken and meat are good for you. So in other words, that's preventing them from embracing a more plant-centric approach to their diet because they're afraid that they're going to be missing out on something that they need to survive.

Yeah, look, I use these journals. A patient will come back to me two months later. We've talked about eating more fruits, more vegetables. I've given them packets about what to do for snack time, eat an apple. And I look at their log, and see, you know, eggs for breakfast, beef jerky for a snack, lean chicken. They always put lean next to the chicken, which, you know, kind of nonsense. And I'm like, what happened to all the fruits and vegetables? Like, well, I was going to do it, but I mean, I thought, you know, beef jerky would be better for me than

an apple because I need protein. That's protein is it. I mean, to me, that's the one big problem. It's what's driving everybody. If everybody could just relax about protein, they could start enjoying fruits and vegetables. Because who doesn't enjoy fruits? They taste great. I told in that EPIC trial I talked about earlier, one big part of it is they studied 500,000 people for 12 years looking at their diets and looking at weight gain. They definitely saw an increase in weight with meat eaters. Most specifically, the most weight was gained with chicken eaters. Chicken was the biggest cause of weight gain.

I tell my patients that and they're in shock because to them, chicken is the health food. That's the lean alternative. That's the lean alternative. But it's not as lean as people think. It's not as lean as people think. And we eat more chicken than any other country in the world. How's it working for us? Use common sense.

We probably overeat it because we think it's healthier, so then we eat more of it, right? Yeah. All right, last question for you. If you woke up and suddenly you had been appointed to be Surgeon General, what kind of changes are you making? Oh, man, I would be so happy. I would be so happy. There would be so many things that I want to do some of them I'm working on right now

but they would have to be nutrition education and medical school classrooms I would work very hard in nutritional education in high school and junior high and right from the get go including growing foods and farming

I would do my I mean the farm bill would be something I would go crazy on, handing subsidies to agribusinesses, supporting small farmers. I would be, you know, working very hard at farmers that do multicultural crops instead of monocultural crops so we have a more dependable food source that's richer in environments um i would be very big into different cities doing community farming and community growth projects like that um i've um working right now on our hospital system changing the food and hospital systems i mean is it how crazy is it when you go to a hospital there's a mcdonald's

that just drives me up the wall and And it sends a very important message that, you know, Wendell Berry said we live in a, you know, the problem with the system we live in is we live in a food system that doesn't care about health and a health system that doesn't care about food. And as a surgeon general, that would be my topic, try to make the health system concerned about food and the food system concerned about health. And what about these regulatory bodies, the FDA, the USDA? Yeah, I mean, the USDA needs to split where it's just being concerned with health, or the FDA just needs to be concerned with health. Lobbyists need to be taken.

I mean, this goes into a much deeper, you know, now we're getting into politics. Yeah, well, it's systemic. The whole way the system operates. Yeah, I mean, campaign finance reform and term limitations and stuff like that. So you don't get these guys that are in there that are paid by big business. I mean, we've got Republicans saying that there's no such thing as global warming. It's so anti-intellectual and they get away with it and they get away with it because they get paid for it. So there would have to be so much changes.

But I think education would be the big starting point. The focus for you. Good, man. I think we did it. That's crazy. I feel like we could go on forever sometimes. We could. I mean, if you lived here, you'd be on the show all the time.

Hey, I'd love to live here. Yeah, well, we got a room for you, man. I might move. You have a room for a Great Dane and two screaming daughters. We do, actually. We've got plenty of room. Come any time, man. I loved it.

Yeah, this is great. Thank you. So the book is coming out. Is it coming out in the fall, in October or something? It's coming out in October. October. That's great, man. It's exciting.

Yeah, and they're doing pre-sales now on Amazon. Oh, it's already up on Amazon. It's already up on Amazon. All right, man. Well, everybody go pre-order the book. Check it out. Use the Amazon banner at richroll.com so we can both wet our beaks on this. That sounds good.

Support the good Dr. Garth. Are you training for anything right now? I am going to start. I'm worried about book tours and stuff like that, so I didn't want to get too into training. But I'm going to do another Ironman. I got my eye on November too into training. But I'm going to do another Ironman. I got my eye on November 2016. Cool.

Yeah. And are you going to be doing a big book tour? Yeah, I think I am going to be doing quite a bit of one, yeah. That's exciting. Yeah. I'm excited for you. Yeah, go preach the word. Excellent, man.

Right on. Well, best way to connect with you, for those that are digging on on Garth is the door just mysteriously opened. Facebook's probably the best place, right? Yeah, I'm on Facebook and Twitter, but Dr. Garth on Facebook is where I do most of, I'll print recent articles and things like that and pictures of my patients and stuff. And you're Dr. Garth Davis on Twitter? Yes. And the website is? TheDavisClinic.com. That's more

for patients than when I have weight loss surgery. In Houston. So, all right, man. Thanks for coming by. Thanks for having me. Right on. All right. Peace. Peace out. Plants. All right. I think we did it. Good stuff. I totally love that guy. Let me know what you thought of the episode in the comments section on the episode page at richroll.com. Thank you for sharing this podcast and for using the Amazon banner ad at richroll.com for all your purchases. Keep sending your questions in for future Q&A podcasts to info at richroll.com. We got more of those coming up soon. For all the information, education, products, tools, resources, and inspiration you need to take your health, wellness, fitness, and self-actualization to the next level,

go to richroll.com, peruse our nutrition products, our education products, and our garments, all made with 100% organic cotton. We've got new garments coming soon, pretty excited about that. If you're into online courses, I've got two of those at mindbodygreen.com, The Art of Living with Purpose, and The Ultimate Guide to Plant-Based Nutrition, which is a great sort of cousin piece to The Plant Power Way. So thank you for checking those out. We're really proud of those courses. They're 99 bucks each, well worth it. Hours and hours and hours of streaming video content and an online community that's very helpful. Again, you can find those at mindbodygreen.com. Thanks for supporting the show, for telling a friend and for sharing it on social media.

Yes, I love that. Thank you so much. I'll see you in a few. Have a great week, everybody. I'm out. Peace. Plants. plants.