The Rich Roll Podcast - The Crazy Benefits of Water-Only Fasting With Dr. Alan Goldhamer

Episode Date: August 24, 2020

When you hear the word ‘addiction’, our attention typically turns to mind-altering substances -- illicit drugs, alcohol, and prescription medications. Typically overlooked in this conversation? Food. But food addiction isn't just real, it just might be our biggest problem. In fact, the hyper-industrialized western world is firmly entrenched in an epidemic of dysfunctional eating, fueled by an outsized appetite for an ever-increasing array of highly processed foods that are scientifically designed -- with just the right amount of sugar, salt and fat -- to hijack our nervous system. Enslave us to compulsive habits that lead to illness. And ultimately render us wards of the pharmaceutical industry. So how does one effectively transition to a healthy diet sustained over time?  According to Dr. Alan Goldhamer, a great place to start is by fasting.  I'm not talking about a couple days of drinking juice. I'm talking about nothing but water for upwards of 40 days. Even with strict medical supervision it sounds like scary quackery. But over the last few decades, Dr. Goldhamer has successfully supervised over 20,000 patient fasts. Along the way, he has seen lives transformed wholesale. Unhealthy eating habit addictions broken. Medications ditched. And countless illnesses overcome. An iconoclastic pioneer in his field, Dr. Goldhamer is the founder of True North Health Center, one of the first (and largest) facilities in the world that specializes in medically supervised water-only fasting, along with medical and chiropractic services, psychotherapy and counseling, and more. Today he joins the podcast to walk us through all things fasting, food addiction, and the power of a whole plant diet to prevent and reverse the many chronic lifestyle ailments that unnecessarily impair millions of people across the world. We explore all things water fasting, from it's origins dating back thousands of years across many cultures and religious traditions to the protocol Dr. Goldhamer administers today. We discuss how fasting can create the foundation to transition to a sustainable, healthy whole food plant diet. And we explore why he advocates an 'SOS' (very low salt oil and sugar) version of that diet. But more than anything, this is a powerful discourse on our uncomfortable relationship with food. How most of us don’t realize we are killing ourselves with our fork and knife. How our food, and our food culture, is making us fat, sick, and frankly miserable. And how almost all of us, despite weight and health, use food as an emotional crutch.  I'm well aware that Dr. Goldhamer is controversial in certain circles. His approach represents a radical departure from our traditional western medical paradigm. But he also makes a lot of sense. And his results speak for themselves (I have several personal friends who have undergone his protocol). Final Note: Under no circumstances should anyone undertake a water fast of any length without the medical supervision of a trained professional. In other words, please do not try this at home. The visually inclined can watch it all go down on YouTube. And as always, the podcast streams wild and free on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. My hope is that Dr. Goldhamer will inspire you to think more deeply about the body's profound ability to heal itself when treated properly. That food freedom is possible. And that none of us need fall prey to chronic food-borne illness. Peace + Plants, Rich

We live in an environment of abundance, and it's responsible for the systematic overeating that people do that leads to the obesity, that leads to the metabolic syndrome, that leads to the vulnerability to infectious disease and the chronic degenerative diseases, the cardiovascular disease, and many of the cancers. Two-thirds of people in industrialized societies are overweight or obese. If you're not fat, you're abnormal. If a person's overweight and wants to lose weight, if a person has heart disease, diabetes, if they've got cancer, or if they're healthy and their goal is to live the maximum healthy life possible, I believe the evidence supports the idea of an exclusively whole plant food diet that's free of SOS. SOS is the International Symbol of Danger,

and it stands for salt, oil, and sugar. How long you're going to live in life may be largely dependent on genetics and life, but how well you're going to live in the time you have left may be dependent on what you put in your mouth and the diet and lifestyle choices that you make. Healthy life expectancy, to me, is even more important than life expectancy. And interesting, life expectancy for the first time is actually starting to drop. Healthy life expectancy, the number of years you spend fully functional, that should be, I believe, the target. And that's what I believe where fasting can have the greatest

good is in healthy people that use it preventatively to stay healthy in conjunction with a diet, sleep, and exercise regime that's health-promoting. That's Dr. Alan Goldhammer, and this is The Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, what's up, people? How goes it? It is I, Rich Roll. Welcome. When you hear the word addiction, what typically comes to mind? I don't know about you, but when I think about that, I think about mind-altering substances, things like drugs, prescriptions, alcohol, sometimes behavior like gambling. in this conversation around addiction is food. But the reality is our hyper-industrialized culture is entrenched in an epidemic of food addiction. And it's something that I think is fueled

by this ever-increasing array of highly processed foods that are scientifically designed with just the right amount of sugar, salt, and fat to hijack our nervous system, our hormonal response, to hook us, to enslave us, and ultimately, over time, make us sick and subsequently a ward of the pharmaceutical industry. Meanwhile, we've completely normalized this so much so that right now in the United States, more than two thirds of adults are overweight or obese, which is absolutely insane. It's bananas. including COVID, and yet for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the highly addictive nature of these foods that are driving compulsivity, millions of people find it extremely difficult,

if not downright impossible to change their habits to just stop. So how do we do that? How do we stop? How do we transition to a healthy diet in a sustainable way? How do we modify behavior to eat only to satiation? Well, according to today's guest, a great place to start, perhaps the best way to start is with a fast.

Now, I'm not talking about intermittent fasting. I'm not talking about Walter Longo's fasting mimicking diet. I'm talking about what I think everyone would agree would be classified as pretty hardcore fasting. A pioneer as well as an iconoclast in his field, Dr. Alan Goldhammer is the founder of True North Health Center, one of the first and largest facilities in the world that specializes in medically supervised water-only fasting, among many other health services. And when I say fasting, again, I'm not talking about a day or a couple days. I'm talking about nothing but water for 28 days and often upwards of 40 days. It sounds nuts.

Even with medical supervision, this is something that sounds like scary quackery. But here's the crazy thing. Over the last couple decades, Dr. Goldhammer has successfully supervised the fast of thousands of patients, something like 20,000 people, and has really helped them radically transform their lives from ditching medication to overcoming common diseases, such as hypertension, diabetes, autoimmune diseases, and many others, not to mention breaking these addictions to unhealthy eating habits.

This guy is a true paradigm breaker. This is a fascinating and also a challenging conversation that I think is going to leave you questioning and rethinking the power of the body to restore itself and the incredible power of healthy whole plant foods to heal. So if you're struggling with upping your game in this department, I would be remiss in not reminding you

that we have created an incredibly powerful digital platform to make your plant-forward food habits switch convenient, affordable, and delicious. It's called the Plant Power Meal Planner, and it is a game changer. You get unlimited access to thousands of delicious, nutritious, easy-to-prepare plant-based recipes. Everything's thoroughly customized based on your specific preferences, with access to our team of experienced nutrition coaches seven days a week.

It also automatically creates simple grocery lists based on selected recipes, and it even integrates with grocery delivery in most urban areas. So basically everything you need to eat the way you deserve magically arrives at your doorstep. So to learn more and sign up, visit meals.richroll.com or click meal planner on the top of any page on my website, richroll.com.

Because as you will soon hear with Dr. Goldhammer who confirms this, one of the most important decisions we make every day is what we put in our mouths. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find

treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because, unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem. who created an online support portal designed to guide, to support, and empower you to find the ideal level of care tailored to your personal needs. They've partnered with the best global behavioral health providers to cover the full spectrum of behavioral health disorders, including substance use disorders, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, gambling addictions, and more. Navigating their site is simple. Search by insurance coverage, location, treatment type, you name it. Plus, you can read reviews from former patients to help you decide. Whether you're a busy exec, a parent of a struggling teen, or battling addiction yourself, I feel you. I empathize with you. I really do.

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His work and studies have appeared in countless medical journals, including the International Journal of Disease Reversal and Prevention and many more. You might've caught him in the documentary, What the Health. Some of his patients were depicted in that film, getting off their meds. Or maybe you stumbled across his book, The Pleasure Trap,

which is a really great, powerful primer on why unhealthy eating habits are so hard to break. He coauthored that book with Dr. Doug Lyle. I highly suggest checking that out if you haven't already. So today's conversation is of course about water fasting, everything water fasting, specifically medically supervised water fasting and its mind-blowing whole body systemic benefits

and the power it has to stop, reverse, and even prevent disease. We talk about the origins of fasting, a practice that dates back thousands of years across many cultures and religious traditions. We talk about how fasting can create a foundation, a tabula rasa, to then make the transition to a sustainable, healthy, whole food plant diet. And why Dr. Goldhammer advocates what he calls an SOS, or very low salt, oil, and sugar version of that diet. But more than anything, this is about our overall uncomfortable relationship with food, how most of us don't realize we're killing ourselves with our fork and our knife, how our

food and our food culture is making us fat, sick, and frankly, miserable, and how almost all of us, despite weight and health, use on some level food as a powerful emotional crutch. I understand full well that Dr. Goldhammer is controversial. What he advocates is a radical departure from our traditional Western industrial medical paradigm. But he also makes a lot of sense. And his patient results, I have several friends who have undergone his protocol, speak for themselves. Final note, please, please, people, do not attempt a water fast or any fast for that matter without medical supervision. That said, I give you Dr.

Alan Goldhammer. Nice to see you. Thank you for coming out here to do this. It's my pleasure. It's been a long time in the coming. I'm excited to talk to you. We're going to talk about fasting. We're going to talk about a whole food plant-based diet, particularly your specific bent on it, the SOS version of a whole food plant-based diet. But before we do that, I think what would be really interesting and something about your work specifically that I find fascinating and that I appreciate

is that it's very much rooted in as much in psychology as it is in nutrition science and physiology. And beneath all of that, again, which I appreciate, is the fact that there are some uncomfortable truths about our relationship to food that is premised in this vernacular around addiction. And as somebody who is a long time in recovery, this is the lens that I kind of approach all of these things. around addiction. And as somebody who is long time in recovery, this is the lens that I kind of approach

all of these things. And it's something that I think is under addressed in this conversation about not just a healthy diet, but how we transition to a healthy diet. Because people, we're emotional beings and it's less about the information than it is about trying to help people figure out how to traverse that tricky sort of tightrope

between old habits and new habits. And by kind of couching all of this in those uncomfortable truths about our addictive relationship with food, I think is really powerful. Well, the reality is, you know, humans evolved in a very different environment than the one we live in today.

We lived in an environment of scarcity. So most humans actually didn't live to reproduce. They didn't pass on their genes. They died from predation. They died from starvation. A few survived, our ancestors. Our ancestors were the winners. They got enough to eat.

They didn't get eaten. They lived long enough to reproduce. And our bodies and our minds were perfectly designed for that environment of scarcity. So now human beings being the innovative creatures we are, we change everything. We change the environment we live in dramatically. And now we don't live in that environment of scarcity. At least most of us don't. We live in an environment of abundance.

And although we're perfectly designed for that environment of scarcity, this environment of abundance can trip us up and it does. And it's responsible for the systematic overeating that people do that leads to the obesity, that leads to the metabolic syndrome, that leads to the vulnerability to infectious disease and the chronic degenerative diseases, the cardiovascular disease and many of the cancers. And so that reality is why it's so difficult

for people to adjust to the idea that they just can't eat as much of whatever they want and get away with it. Yeah, it's almost as if you're a heroin addict or an alcoholic everywhere you go, everybody is a heroin addict or an alcoholic. There is no safe space, right? We've normalized our behavior

and our respective relationships with food to such an extent that the radical notion is to step outside of that and do something different. Two thirds of people in industrialized societies are overweight or obese. If you're not fat, you're abnormal. Right. And if you go to a physician

and you say you're significantly overweight and you've lost a bunch of weight, the physician doesn't immediately think, oh, you must have adopted a whole plant food diet and become an exercise program. Their differential diagnosis is, uh-oh, this could be colon cancer, eating disorder, or drug addiction. They pathologize a healthy choice. Well, the only experience they have of people losing weight and keeping it off is when they've got cancer, they've developed an eating disorder or they're a drug addict.

And so it's not even in their expectation that people are gonna actually get well. You go to a physician with most of the diseases of dietary excess, the high blood pressure, the diabetes, and they're gonna tell you, look, you're gonna be on drugs the rest of your life. If you do what I tell you, I promise you, you'll never get well, you'll be sick forever. Because it's not in their expectation

that people are gonna actually recover their health. Because they're not addressing the actual reasons why they're developing the problem to begin with. They're not addressing the causes of the problem. I think in tandem with that, there's also this pessimism from the typical general practitioner that any advice or kind of advised protocols

about healthy lifestyle change fall on deaf ears. It's like, yeah, I could tell this person they should go to the gym or they should eat better. And maybe I'll say that, but there isn't a real expectation that that's gonna move the needle or that that person is gonna be able to adhere to any kind of prescribed lifestyle change.

And that's because we're dealing with people that are addicts. Yes, so talk about that, expound upon that idea because I think it's really important. You don't just say to an alcoholic, oh, you know how your life sucks? It's because you're a drunk, stop drinking. And the alcoholic would say- I've been told that.

Oh, it's the alcohol? I had no idea. Thank you so much, I won't drink again. Right. It doesn't quite work that way. We don't currently lie to alcoholics the same way we do lie to people, for example, that are overweight.

We tell alcoholics, look, you have a particular vulnerability. You can't drink. You need to come up with a strategy each and every day that allows you to not drink. And if you can figure out how to do that, you win. But if you don't, you're going to be in trouble. So the same thing is actually true in many degrees to people that are overweight. But what we tell the overweight person is, oh, just put your food on a smaller plate. Here, cut your food with a knife and put your fork down between each bite

and you won't be overweight anymore. You just need to learn to eat moderately and just eat a little bit less. It's the analog in addiction is, quit the whiskey and just drink beer or put your beer in a smaller, you know, quit the whiskey and just drink beer or put your beer in a smaller or only binge on the weekends and maybe don't get behind the wheel of a car. And it's not real.

We know with alcohol, the answer is don't drink. And the truth is for people that are suffering with obesity, for people that are suffering with these diseases of dietary excess, it would be better to avoid the chemicals that are fooling your brain into allowing you to systematically overconsume than it would be to pretend that you can just have a little bit. If you could have just had a little bit, you would have just had a little bit and you would have had the thing under control.

You can't, you don't. If you're an alcoholic, you're not the person that can have an occasional drink. And if you're the person that's suffering with these diseases, you may find it's easier to just adopt a strategy that eliminates these chemicals that fool the brain. We talk about this pleasure trap, the artificial stimulation of dopamine in the brain that results from chemicals that we put in our food that fool our brain. The chemicals we put in our food are things like salt, oil, and sugar. These are highly fractionated food byproducts, not food, and they stimulate the dopamine cascade in the brain,

they make food taste better, they make food more interesting to us, and as a consequence, we will systematically overeat. Now, just like some people can occasionally have a drink and not become a drunk, some people can have bits of this without it becoming a health compromising problem. But if you're the overweight person, if you're the person with the heart disease, the cancer, the diabetes, it's not you.

You're the person that would be better off saying, let me avoid those chemicals. I'll stop fooling my brain. I'll eliminate the systematic overeating. I'll reverse the disease and pathology. And I'll adapt a strategy that doesn't include continually beating myself up with these things that I'm not capable of regulating.

People have an easy time understanding that alcohol is a powerful drug, that heroin is something that is going to kill you. The addictive nature of these substances is well understood. But when it comes to food, that's a leap of faith for a lot of people. It's a bridge too far to say, I understand alcoholism and drug addiction, but when you start talking about food as addictive, you're starting to lose me. Yeah, well, the reality is that the neural cascade that's associated with addiction of any kind is very similar. Now, I'm not arguing that alcohol or cocaine or heroin might be even more potent than say the sugar or the oil or the salt or the combination, but the net effect of salt, oil and sugar in the diet is actually obvious and devastating around us. It's why you see obesity and the disease of dietary excess. That's what's making people fat. It is the hidden force

that undermines health and happiness. It is a pleasure trap. And because people don't recognize it, it's very difficult for them to take action to eliminate it. At least with alcohol, most people know, oh, if you're an alcoholic, you probably shouldn't drink. If you go to a party and they say, oh, here, have some alcohol. And you say, well, I can't because I have an alcohol problem. Most people at least will be tolerant of you because, okay, you got an issue. But if you go in and you say, you got an issue you don't have to. But if you go in and you say, oh no, I don't wanna eat. You're gonna really upset people.

Oh, what's wrong with this? My doctor says this a little bit won't hurt. Yeah, so it's complicated. It's complicated in terms of the internal psychology in trying to reframe our relationship with food. But there's also all of these social constructs that create even additional complexity that make it very difficult to modify behavior.

There's no question. In fact, the social roadblocks to health are probably some of the limiting factors. I think that's probably true in all addiction though. You know, one of the challenges for people with alcohol is oftentimes the social consequences of not participating. And this is definitely true with food. We've built so much of our social interaction around food

that even if you're looking to just modify the type of food you eat, it can be very upsetting for people and they can get really defensive about it. Right, so let's talk a little bit more about the pleasure trap specifically, what that is, you co-authored this book, seminal work with Doug Lyle, I've seen his TED Talk,

I've seen him give his presentation many times on this subject. And that really elucidates this dysfunctional relationship with food and why it is from an evolutionary and psychological perspective. Well, there's this idea of dopamine is a neurochemical associated with pleasure. And there's two behaviors critical for human

being survival. And that is food and sex. You have to get enough to eat in order to be able to sustain yourself. And you have to engage in enough sexual behavior so that you can pass on your genes and the whole process can start over again. So it's not surprising that food and sex are heavily reinforced. And the way the brain reinforces the body's behavior is by rewarding us with dopamine, which is the neurochemical associate with pleasure. So the more dopamine, the more pleasure. The more dopamine, the better the food tastes. And so you react to food in response to largely chloric density.

The higher the chloric density, the more valuable it is in this environment of scarcity in which we evolved. And so the higher caloric density foods tend to be more reinforced, more dopamine, better tasting. So what we've done as humans, we're innovative creatures. We said, oh, if a little good, a lot's better, let's figure out a way to make the food taste even more special by increasing its caloric density.

And we do that by adding things like oil and sugar to the food. And as a consequence we like it better. And if that's what you get used to eating, that's all you like. And eventually people get to the point they really don't like the taste of simple whole natural foods anymore because this hyper drug-like stimulating effect of the more concentrated foods is more appealing. So, we literally become addicted.

For example, if you want to neuroadapt to a lower salt or lower fat diet, it actually takes time in order for the body to go through that adaptation. We can speed it up with fasting, but the bottom line is there's a period of adaptation where food doesn't taste good. If you eat whole foods and you're used to eating highly processed foods, it's not that appealing. Now, over time you adapt and then the body gets to the point where you like the simpler foods again. Yeah, people have a hard time believing that you adapt.

There's this baked in assumption that you're staring down the pipeline of a lifetime of drab foods that are unappealing and you're just gonna have to tolerate it. We know there's a literature on this though, with for example sodium, people use high sodium diet, it takes about a month on a low sodium diet for the average person to neuroadapt to a lower salt diet. You know, with fat, it takes almost three months. It takes three months on a lower fat diet before that satiety mechanism that's used to being kicked in

by the higher caloric density fat begins to adapt and you will feel satisfied on a lower density food. So the fruits, the vegetables, the grains, the goons, you will now feel satisfied. Whereas initially you don't because you're used to being satiated with this high fat intake and that can take months. And so it's a problem if you say to a person, well, look, you're gonna eat this new diet,

you're gonna feel like crap and you're not gonna like it, but it'll only be a few months, adherence may be lagging. Whereas if you can make that process happen more quickly, the ability to get people to make dietary changes speeds up and that's what we found with fasting and sometimes that's a way of getting people to the point where good food tastes good more quickly. Yeah, there does seem to be something about preparing people

for that stage of acclimation. And there also seems to be something magical about the 90 day window in, you know, with drugs and alcohol, that's sort of the typical window that people say it takes, you know, it takes about that much time to kind of wean yourself off these cravings and reset your system. A lot of people just wanna, they wanna,

they're not willing to weather that period of discomfort. And perhaps there's a lack of belief that they'll reset and be able to reframe so that, you know, what they once cra- Like to get over the craving, you have to deprive yourself and then you reboot. And then those things that have held you hostage for so long suddenly hold less and less power over time.

And the fact that it can happen more quickly with fasting is really an interesting thing. For example, smokers, it's not easy to quit smoking once you're addicted to nicotine. But most smokers by somewhere between day two and day four of fasting no longer report withdrawal effects from cigarettes. Now, some people say, yeah, there's some miserable fasting, they don't even think about them, you know, cigarettes,

but the reality is that that whole adaptive process just is sped up dramatically. Now, that doesn't mean you don't have psychological and social challenges afterwards that you still have to address in order to sustain good behavior patterns. But just getting rid of that first phase of a physical withdrawal and just feeling so crappy and feeling like, you know, you're wondering why you're putting the effort out,

getting that behind you quickly really does enhance a person's ability to make the transition to being drug-free. I understand the, you know, when you were talking about caloric density, fat and sugar, these are things that are evolutionarily, we're wired to seek out and to maximize. The salt thing though, that's different. Like why is it that salt is such a trigger for people?

Yeah, this one is probably the most controversial recommendation that we make. People have come around as you said with oil, they realize a highly fractionated food product like oil, high caloric density, little satiety feedback, you know, they can understand that sugar, pretty well accepted that refined carbohydrates, they cause your blood insulin levels to rise and then it drives your sugars lower and it fools the brain

and now you got cravings and that's what a lot of the binging and craving and stuff comes around is because of physiological alterations of refined carbohydrates. But salt also is a really important part of this. And let's talk about a few reasons why that might be. Number one, salt is an essential nutrient, that is sodium. It is an essential nutrient without which you die. Fortunately, you get all of the sodium you need in a whole natural food diet, just like you get all the sugar you need and all the oil you need.

You don't have to add a fraction to the concentrated food to get the amount of sodium, the milligrams of sodium that's needed to sustain optimum health. Salt also has a powerful effect on passive overeating. And you can do an experiment yourself. If you just sit down and figure out how much brown rice you'd eat until you feel satisfied, until you don't want any more. And on a different day, everything else being equal,

salt it up and see you'll eat significantly more before you feel satisfied. Now, some people say, yeah, it tastes better. Well, what do you think tasting better means? It means it's stimulating more dopamine in the brain as a result of this artificial type response. And you will systematically eat more on heavily salted foods when you're adapted to that than you will whole natural foods. The other thing is salt has a preservative effect, doesn't it?

When they salt foods, it's to keep bugs from being able to affect it. Well, you have five pounds of bacteria living in your intestinal tract right now, a trillion creatures, a thousand strains, very important to your immune system to protect you from infectious disease and other problems. And these thousand creatures are living, eating and pooing inside you right now. So if you have five pounds of organisms pooing inside you, you might be concerned about what they're pooing in you, because they might be pooing some nasty toxic waste,

chemicals like TMA, which becomes TMAO and irritates the vessels and creates a problem if you're eating animal foods, if that's what you're feeding your bacteria. You're feeding your bacteria soluble fibers, you're getting fertilizer, you're getting vitamin K, you're getting a lot of other good stuff. So if you want your bacteria pooing fertilizer into you, you want to make sure you're feeding them a healthy diet. If salt is a powerful preservative, let's just imagine what happens when we put a high-sodium diet

into this bacterial-rich environment. It can alter the gut microbiome. And so sugar can affect it, oil can affect it, and so can salt. So it's been our experience that salt in the diet is an important part of obesity for many people, that it's an important part for causing fluid retention which increases blood volume which is associated with not just high blood pressure, but also the joint pain, the congestion, a lot of the aches and pains that people have oftentimes

is because of this fluid that the body retains to protect itself from the consequences of salt. So it has many downstream effects even though it doesn't have any calories per se. It can still be an important part of the dietary excess profile. And by eliminating the sodium from the diet, you also eliminate a lot of the highly fractionated foods that you just can't eat without salt. Even products like bread and cookies and crackers and a lot of this stuff without the salt really doesn't taste that good

because they've refined out most of the natural flavors of the food. And what they do is they take these federally subsidized grains like wheat and soy and corn and they add oil, salt and sugar to it, process it into various looking foods and call that the diet. Go into a grocery store and walk around and you'll see a lot of those foods are really nothing more than one grain or the other with various concentrations of sugar, oil, and salt. Right. Which basically allows you to make anything taste good. And you strip away those things and there's something completely unpalatable and nutritionally

deficient underneath it. And so what we're encouraging people to do is a really radical departure from what they're currently doing, but that's to adopt a whole plant food diet that's free of this added chemicals, free of the salt, oil and sugar. And what you're left with is things like fruits and vegetables, raw or cooked, minimally processed greens, beans, nuts and seeds. But you don't have the meat, fish, fowl, eggs, dairy products, oil, salt, sugar and highly processed fractionated foods that make up the majority of the people's diet in industrialized society. And it's that diet that makes them fat and sick and develop

the disease of dietary excess. And that's what makes you vulnerable to infectious disease. You know, when you look at what are the vulnerabilities about why does some people get an influenza or a COVID or an infectious disease and they recover, they survive, they have minimal consequence. Other people, it's devastating or deadly. Well, if you look at the risk factors associated with what makes people vulnerable to these diseases, as well as the disease, the chronic diseases, the heart disease, the cancer, the stroke, it's the same metabolic syndrome and all of its associations. It's the same obesity and diabetes and high blood pressure and all the consequences of dietary excess.

These are reversible and preventable conditions. People don't have to have these conditions. And even if they have them, they can largely reverse them by taking responsibility to control what they put in their mouth. So this is the underlying premise that drives True North, which you've founded what like 30 years ago at this point, 35? In 1984.

Wow. Was when my wife, Dr. Moran and I started True North Health. I can't imagine what it must have been like to basically open the doors to this medically supervised water fasting clinic back in that time. I mean, now it's all the rage. We have Walter Longo and all kinds of scientists

studying the phenomenon of fasting deeply. It's part of the public awareness. Everybody's, it's very cool to be out there, sort of experimenting with intermittent fasting. This was not the case back then. Like, I mean, potentially criminal, right? Well, at one point, the California Board of Medical Quality Assurance

had rendered an opinion that recommending fasting to a patient constitutes such a gross violation of the standard of medical practice that it rose to the level of criminal negligence. I was actually the first person in my family that required the services of a criminal defense attorney. My father was so proud. Wow, what happened there?

They ultimately decided that recommending fasting was not criminal negligence, that in fact, there was even a provision at that time in Medicare to pay for fasting, but as long as it was for rapid weight loss necessary for urgent surgery. If you got well, unfortunately, it wasn't a covered benefit. There was also every hospital today in this country will use versions of fasting for treating conditions like acute pancreatitis.

We were able to demonstrate that this was not criminally negligent behavior, but was actually a rather innovative look at trying to help sick people get well. We've gone from being criminal quacks to cutting edge researchers. As you said, there's been some wonderful people like Walter Longo and Matson and Fontana and others that have published in major impact journals. This idea that fasting or some modification

of intermittent fasting or modified fasting could be a helpful tool. In fact, it was interesting. Longo did some research that I think really was pivotal. He looked at cancer treatment. And he took 30 rats with cancer and gave them enough chemotherapy to resolve all the cancer cells. You have to kind of kill all the cancer cells or they grow back. The problem is all the rats died.

So that wasn't a really good outcome. But he took the same rats with the same cancer and the same chemotherapy, but he used fasting before, during and after the treatment. And not only did all 30 rats survive, but dramatically enhanced cancer-free survival. And so what he found was that there was these things like differential stress sensitization and differential stress resistance that cancer cells were more vulnerable to the effects of chemotherapy in the fasting states,

probably because of their higher metabolic rate, they don't adapt to the environment without glucose as well, there's lots of differences in cancer cells to healthy cells. And in the fasting states, the cancer cells were put at a selective disadvantage. And not only that, healthy cells appeared to be protected during the fasting state from the effects of chemotherapy. And at that point, people went, particularly pharmaceutically oriented people went, oh, so fasting could make the drugs work better.

Oh, well, maybe it's not quackery after all. And so there was a lot better tolerance and acceptance of this idea that perhaps fasting may have a role in enhancing conventional treatment. It was interesting to note too that many of the biomarkers that predict cancer and disease turn off whether you use chemotherapy or not. So the act of fasting itself puts the body in a selective environment that may be more conducive to healing. And so this type of research of course now is taking off

and there's been a lot more interest and including the work that we're doing at the True North Health Center. Yeah. You have this study and this experience working with a patient who had stage three follicular lymphoma, right? Where you had like this tremendous result. Yeah. We had a young woman with stage three follicular lymphoma that had been well documented, excisional biopsy, the whole bit, and had progressed over a period of a couple of years. And she had asked her family physician along the way, was there anything she could do conservatively in terms of diet and lifestyle? And he had assured her that diet had nothing to do with follicular lymphoma,

that she could eat whatever she wanted to eat. He had assured her that diet had nothing to do with follicular lymphoma, that she could eat whatever she wanted to eat. And when she inquired about fasting, he informed her that fasting was criminal quackery. Nonetheless, she decided that she didn't want to undergo conventional chemotherapy because with this particular condition, it's not really effective. It doesn't affect all-cause mortality. There's a lot of side effects. And so often it's not unusual for them to defer treatment until the condition is quite progressed.

In this case, it progressed enough that he referred her to the medical school, talked to an oncologist. Oncologist also reinforced the idea that diet was irrelevant to this condition, that fasting was unproven. And even with that advice, she decided to come to True North Health Center, underwent 21 days of water-only fasting, during which time her tumors that were previously externally palpated,

palpable disappeared. So we fasted her for three weeks, fed her for 10 days, sent her back to the oncologist and he examined her, couldn't find any evidence of the lesions, expressed some surprise. She explained, he said, what did you do? And she said, I went to the criminal co-accident. evidence of the lesions, expressed some surprise. She explained, he said, you know, what did you do? And she said, I went to the criminal quacks

and I did the fasting and the tumors went away. And he said, well, that's very impressive. Suggested he'd give me a call and talk to me about it. She asked to have the follow-up CT scan that we requested. And we had warned her that they might be a little reluctant since she didn't have any obvious evidence of symptoms. And he said, well, she didn't really need a CT scan, but she said, well, she'd really like to objectify the changes that had occurred.

He got a little nervous, but ultimately he did agree to order the studies. And he mentioned that because she was still a little bit neutropenic, maybe some gentle chemotherapy might still be a consideration. Nonetheless, she refused. After a couple of months, her white counts had normalized. By a year, she's doing great. Sent her back, got a whole follow-up evaluations. And at that point, we decided that it was time to try to write up the report.

So we wrote up this case report. We submitted it to a British Medical Journal. And after some back and forth, they eventually did publish the report. So we wrote up this case report and we submitted it to a British medical journal. And after some back and forth, they eventually did publish the paper. They'd asked us if we could get the oncologist to sign on. And so we wrote him a letter and thanked him so much for all the confidence he had shown in referring the patient to us for fasting. Which he didn't. Well, in spirit. But unfortunately he hasn't gotten around to responding to us yet. So we didn't-

How long ago was this? Well, what happens, we published that paper and then they asked us to do a follow-up. Cause they said, you know, about 10% of lymphoma patients will go through periods of remissive state, but sustaining it would be impressive. So we followed this patient for three years and she continued, she had lost a substantial weight. She had we followed this patient for three years. And she continued, she had lost substantial weight,

she had maintained that weight loss for three years. I think in part because I explained to her that she had to stick to the diet or it could be fatal because I'd track her down and kill her. And I think she believed me because she stuck to the diet. And at three years, we got a whole body CT, follow-up with the oncologist and she's completely cancer-free. we got a whole body CT follow-up with the oncologist and she's completely cancer-free. At that point, we submitted back to the British Medical Journal,

which had invited us to do the follow-up. They actually refused the article the first time we appealed and resubmitted and then they did decide to publish the follow-up. One of the reviewers felt like, well, maybe she just got lucky. But anyway, so she resolved her problem, she maintained it for three years. We now have a four-year and now we're working on a five-year follow-up. She continues to do well. Now, since then and since the publication of that article, we've managed to treat a number of patients with various stages,

including stage four lymphoma. And so far the results look very promising. We have some follow-up data now. We're in the process of submitting another case report with long-term follow-up on a stage 4 follicular lymphoma. And ultimately, we're hoping to publish enough case reports that we can do a clinical trial. That's amazing. And justify a clinical trial, because I think we're going to do very well with this condition.

And highly motivated self-selected patients that are willing to do dangerous and radical things like eat well and exercise and go to bed on time, the results seem to be promising. What led you back in the 80s to basically open this clinic that's premised upon fasting? Like what was it about your education or your experience that you found this protocol and what led you to believe in it, in its efficacy? Well, yeah, it was deep frustration being constantly beaten by Dr. Lyle in basketball. I grew up with Dr. Lyle since fourth grade and we played basketball and he would beat me and I-

You've known him your whole life? Oh, my whole life. Oh, I didn't know that. Wow. Whole life. And it was really frustrating because he's really good. So, and he's just naturally got tremendous talent. So I just thought, well, I've got to be able to beat him somehow. And so I started reading some books.

I came across a book by Herbert Shelton and it made sense. The idea that health was a result of healthful living and that diet played a role. So I thought, well, I'll get an edge. And I adopted this diet vigorously and lifestyle vigorously thinking this was gonna allow me to be, of course it failed miserably

because he adopted the same kind of eating pattern. He still beats me to this day. Here we are 61 years old playing basketball. I still can't manage to be. Your whole life is basically a result of you trying to beat Dr. Lange. And it's frustrating, I picked the wrong guy. I didn't realize that the person I'm trying to be just. This book And it's frustrating. I picked the wrong guy. I didn't realize that, you know,

the person I'm trying to beat just, you know. This bookish Stanford psychologist, how hard could it be? You know, I thought, finally, I was getting desperate. I thought, well, you know, he's too quick. He's got, I can't, but maybe I can beat him in a free throw shooting contest. Cause I thought, you know,

free throws is just practice, right? So for six months, I go out, I'm shooting 500 free throws a day, really working on my form. And I just casually one day say, hey, Doug, why don't we do a free throw shooting contest? And he says, okay. You know, he hasn't even played for a week.

Well, he strikes me as like a world-class sandbagger. Like the guy who's always gonna tell you that he's no good, right? He's always downplaying, right? That's his whole strategy for all of this. I go out and hit 48 out of 50. And I'm thinking, I got it. He hits 19, misses one, and then hits 80 in a row. 80 free throws in a row.

In a row, 99 out of, of course, I'm telling him, well, what a choke, if you can hit 99, why don't you just hit 100? I mean, yeah. So the point is, total failure, got involved trying to be a better basketball player. But what I would say is that we're both still playing. And so, you know, how good you can become in a sport may largely be dependent on genetics and luck.

How long you're going to live in life may be largely dependent on genetics and luck. But how well you're going to live in the time you have left may be dependent on what you put in your mouth and the diet and lifestyle choices that you make. And so what we're trying to explain to patients is you're not gonna live forever, you're gonna die. There's been over 100 billion modern humans born on the planet. There's 7.3 or 4 billion alive today,

but there's only been five well-documented people that have lived past 117. So the thing is, you're not gonna live forever, but you don't have to spend the average 9.6 years of debility or 17 years in poor health that the average American is spending, giving up compromise in the last decades of life that could be your richest decades of life

because of chronic degenerative diseases, because we haven't taken control of our diet, sleep and exercise patterns. And that's what we're trying to point is you may not be able to live forever, but you can reduce dramatically the years of debility that you have, your vulnerability to infectious disease,

your likelihood of developing heart attack, stroke and other debilitating conditions. That's where the big payoff is. Not living forever, but living well until you die, having a good life and then having a good death. All right, so how does the fasting come in though as a pathway towards that? So fasting is interesting because you're dealing with people

that are oftentimes addicted to the artificial stimulation of dopamine in their brain, whether it's to drugs or dietary issues. Fasting is a great way of breaking that cycle. It can be a very effective way of getting the person to the point where good foods taste good. It's a great way of lowering the blood pressure if you can eliminate the medications, along with the chronic cough, fatigue,

the impotence and premature death that's associated with them. Normalizing the blood sugar levels so your insulin levels normalize, so you don't have the cravings and the binging and all the other stuff that sometimes go along with it. Or in autoimmune diseases, oftentimes pain is significant, inflammation and swelling. People can't be active, they can't dissipate their tension, they aren't able to engage effectively.

And so when you get people out of pain, it's like an epiphany experience. And now the motivation goes up. It's hard to be motivated to make diet and lifestyle changes when you feel like crap all the time. But when you get a taste of feeling good again, it's very motivating. And now oftentimes that's enough motivation to help people overcome their addictions and their tendencies. The reality is I found the most effective patients

are those are most motivated. And motivations that are the most powerful is pain, debility, and fear of death. Yeah, 100%. The only problem is, you know, a lot of these people that get out of pain and they're not fearing death anymore, and then they might slip slide a little bit

because they think I'm better now, I don't have to work quite so hard. So, you know, there's challenges on both sides. But you guys have had a tremendous success with keeping people on the path. Like the recidivism rate for you is pretty low compared to other. In fairness though,

we have highly motivated self-selected people. People are willing to fast. People are coming to you in really bad shape. Well, they're motivated. Yeah, it's one thing to talk about intermittent fasting highly motivated, self-selected people. People are willing to fast. People are coming to you in really bad shape. Well, they're motivated by people. Yeah, it's one thing to talk about intermittent fasting or a fasting mimicking protocol. It's another thing altogether

to talk about a 40-day water fast. That is a very extreme thing. Moses, David, Elijah, Jesus, and our patients do fasting. It is interesting that fasting shows up in all these various religious traditions. Isn't it interesting? The Jews, the Jains, the Hindus, the Muslims, the Buddhists, the Christians, all these religions that's diametrically opposed on so many things that are killing each other in the street over disagreements. They have one thing in common, and that's a tradition about fasting.

Because fasting changes how you feel about yourself and the world around you. It can't help it. And so True North Health Center is not coming from a spiritual orientation. We're coming from a very much of a health orientation. We have different doctors with different backgrounds and we don't try to impose our beliefs on anybody because we're not the experts in how you get into heaven or any of that stuff. Our focus is health and healthful living. But virtually every major religion has a tradition.

I mentioned not just about fasting, but also about the value of a whole plant food diet. These traditions resonate throughout history. And the reality is perhaps it's because that's what works. How dare you? All right, so walk me through... All right, well, first, let me say this. So in the decades that you've been doing this, you and Doug have taken and your staff. I mean, I've had Chef AJ in here

explain to me her experience of being at, she goes to True North like for vacation when she wants to get out of town. I mean, she's got to be your most regular customer. But I've had Dr. Longo talking about fasting. Who else have I had in here? I've had, you know, True North comes up all the time on the podcast. So I've heard about it anecdotally. And over the years, you've taken what, like 20,000 people through this fasting procedure, you know, and had tremendous success. So I wanna understand the process that is entailed here. Somebody comes to you, they're in bad shape,

they're overweight, they have hypertension, diabetes, obese, cardiovascular disease, whatever, you know, this is the kind of person that's arriving in your doorstep. So the first step is that they usually go to our website. So they go to truenorthealth.com and they fill out the registration forms, which gets us their medical history. And we get their previous laboratory work that comes in and they get a free phone conversation with me. So we offer people free. You still do that, right? Like people can call up and you'll

give them a free consult. I still do that. So I talk to them as a screening about whether or not fasting might be appropriate. If anything that we do or we recommend might be helpful. For many people, they may not even need or be ready for fasting, but they may just need to talk to a doctor that's not a complete idiot. And so we have a phone coaching service where our attendings are available. They go online through the website. We have all their medical records put together, they can schedule a formal phone consultation with one of our attending physicians, they can discuss, get a second opinion, they can

do whatever they want to do, where they talk to a doctor that can look at their history objectively and give them advice. If there are appropriate candidates for fasting, then I schedule them into the center for a stay. I give them an idea about what we expect as a reasonable period of time. They come to the center, they go through with one of our attending physicians, a history exam, laboratory monitoring, we initiate them into a fasting protocol if that's appropriate. And then after fasting they go through a refeeding process.

Now while they're there fasting, they're seen twice a day by our staff doctors. We make sure it's done safely and effectively. They're monitored carefully. We have detailed educational classes, what I call brainwashing, where they're able to go through all in detail, the process about what they're going to need to do, why they're going to need to do it. There's some social dynamics because they're there with other people

from around the world that are getting a chance to do this. Our facility has about 70 patients staying at it. So they're interacting with those other people plus the staff and the educators. And so it's a pretty like immersion type of an experience. They go through fasting, they go through refeeding. If they have specific health problems, we have chiropractors, naturopaths, body workers, all that kind of stuff that they can get the kind of attention that they need.

And then when they're going home, they have very specific recommendations that we expect them to follow and we try to provide follow-up support. And then because of the phone coaching, they're able to continue to access these attending doctors affordably without necessarily... Because half our people are out of state, 15% are foreign, they're not all living locally where they can pop in

and see our doctors or use our deli business or any of that kind of stuff. What are the important vectors or variables that determine the appropriateness for somebody to do one of these protocols? Like not everybody is suitable for this. No, the biggest one is that they have a condition that is appropriate for fasting.

So there's many people that are not good candidates for fasting and we can talk about that. There are some things that are particularly amenable to fasting and for example the conditions that are caused by dietary excess are particularly responsive to fasting. It makes sense, obesity, cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, autoimmune diseases, certain forms of cancer, these conditions we know are made much worse by poor dietary choices. So it's not shocking to find out that fasting kind of the

ultimate in undoing the consequence of excess would facilitate the recovery of those patients. And it does. And we've been able to prove that. We've been publishing papers looking at these conditions like high blood pressure, looking at diabetes, looking at autoimmune diseases. And the fact is we can in highly motivated patients generate safe and effective responses with fasting. In fact, we've actually published a fasting safety study, the first comprehensive look at long-term water-only fasting

and what the risks are and aren't in response to this process. So we've been able to show it is a safe process when it's done according to protocol. In fact, Dr. Longo, who cautions people in his book about long-term water fasting and its safety, makes an exception. And that's if people fast at the True North Health Center because he's familiar with our safety data.

Now, I evaluate other scientists' intelligence based on how much they agree with me. Right, of course. So I consider him a genius. I'm glad to know your biases is intact here. If somebody has anorexia nervosa, or if somebody is, you know, on the other side of chemotherapy

where they're maintaining their weight is an issue, I would suspect that that's probably not a great candidate. What about somebody who's coming in and they're on a battery of medications? You would have to wean them off of that, I would presume on some level before they can undergo this. Yeah, most medications you do not water fast while you're taking medications.

Those have to be weaned down beforehand. But we have physicians that are experts at helping people unwind the consequences of their medical treatment. And most medications, interestingly enough, the day you change the diet, you have to begin changing the medication profile. Right.

Because most people- The medications are treating the diet. Most people are being treated that is medicated for their diet. When you change their diet, the need for medication dramatically responds. You have to reduce the blood pressure medication. You start crashing these patients because they're not going to be hypertensive once you eliminate the reasons why they're hypertensive. And they're not going to be needing the same level of medication once you

normalize their dietary intake as far as their diabetes or getting them off their pain medication. Once they don't have the pain, they don't need to be on all that oxy because now the pain is being reduced because the inflammation is being reduced because of the dietary change and then ultimately the fasting. So that's one of the reasons why fasting does need to be done in a controlled medically supervised setting. It's not the kind of thing that you do long-term fasting at home. At home, right.

So you do that in a controlled setting where there's been a proper history, exam, lab and daily monitoring. So we're seeing each of these patients twice a day and that's how we're able to ensure that this is a safe and effective experience. So they may withdraw their medication with careful feeding, initiate the fasting, normalize the condition and then after we're done, most of the time there's no need for medication because their blood pressure... You know, they've gone from 220 over 120 cap that on five meds

to being 120 over 70 off medication. And so there's no reason for anybody to wanna put them back on drugs that cause chronic cough, fatigue, impotence and premature death if the condition is actually normalized. Now, the side problem is you have to keep on the healthy diet and lifestyle

because you're not curing anything. You're just managing it. But you've rebooted this operating system and wiped the slate clean so you can build a new foundation. It's very much like treating, when your computer becomes corrupted and you don't know exactly what's wrong,

but you turn the thing off, you turn it on, you can't explain, but now it's working. Right. And it seems to be that way. When in doubt, reboot. And we're trying to figure out exactly what those changes are that's occurring in fasting. I know the pharmaceutical industry

is very interested in what's happening because they wanna come up with what are called fasting mimicking drugs. They want drugs that'll do just what fasting does to you, but without that nasty fasting and something that they can sell in a pill. So a lot of the research of interest is trying to figure out

what exactly is it that's happening in fasting that's allowing the body to get well so that we can try to reproduce that without having to go through the process. Right, I mean, that's my next series of questions. Like, does it have to be water only? What is it about that deprivation protocol that is so special physiologically that is causing this cascade of positive impacts. Like what would happen if you were eating a little bit? I mean, I know Longo has his fasting mimicking protocol where he is allowing people to eat something like,

I don't know, 600 calories a day. And he's able to reap some of the benefits of what you're experiencing without having to go on a complete water fast, but what is happening to the body when you're depriving it of food in such a comprehensive way? Yeah, the intermittent fasting protocols

are just that fasting mimicking diets or fasting mimicking programs, trying to reproduce some of the changes that we know occur with fasting without the risk profile or the complications of long-term water-only fasting. And I think they can be very effective as they've demonstrated. However, long-term water-only fasting

has a much more profound impact on these mechanisms that are associated with fasting. For example, just the most obvious is weight loss. You know, when you're water fasting, you're gonna lose an average of a pound a day. Now, some people say, well, you lose weight, but then you gain it back afterwards. Now, interestingly, we've done a study. We have now recently acquired a Hologix DEXA scanner

with the new software that allows you to do a whole body detail composition that looks not just at percent body fat, but how much visceral fat there is. And we have a paper that will be coming out that looks at the fact that, yes, you lose a bunch of weight fasting and you regain some weight after fasting, but how much visceral fat there is. And we have a paper that'll be coming out that looks at the fact that, yes, you lose a bunch of weight fasting and you regain some weight after fasting, but it turns out the weight you regain after fasting when you're eating a whole plant food diet is exclusively water, fiber, glycogen, and protein.

There is no fat. In fact, the fat profile continues to drop during refeeding, even though the scale weight obviously goes up as you rehydrate, put some fiber back into that. As long as you adopt. As long as you continue adopt the whole plant food healthy, you know, dietary style. But the point that the old wives tale was,

well, you lose fat and you just gain the fat right back. Well, that might be true if you go back to eating greasy, fatty, slimy, dead, decaying, flesh processed foods, but that's not what's happening in these patients that we're refeeding appropriately. And so weight goes up, but what the weight that goes up is re-alimenting your glycogen stores and muscle stores,

which is really exciting. So preferentially, not just do you lose fat, but you preferentially lose visceral fat, that the ratio of visceral fat to adipose tissue loss is 3.0. In other words, there's a significant preferential mobilization of this very type of fat that we think is most compromising to health. The fat, the abdominal fat, the fat that stores around the organs. So now we have what may turn out to be an effective strategy of specifically mobilizing visceral fat. Now we've done some preliminary work. We're actually enrolling

patients in a study starting in August August looking specifically at body composition changes long-term with follow-up. So, we'll be able to speak more definitively about it by the end of the year. There's also a process that happens in water fasting that you don't see as profoundly influenced in juice diets or modified diets and that's naturesis. There's a selective mobilization elimination of excess sodium from the body and water fasting that happens right away. It's very powerful, more powerful than say taking hydrochlorothiazide or a diuretic

and it's responsible for the big dump in fluids that happens initially on fasting that drops blood pressure so dramatically, gets rid of the congestive heart failure symptoms that eliminate some of the arthritic symptoms and joint swelling and the non-healing wounds. And this body selectively getting rid of this excess sodium that's accumulated that the body's having to deal with because of the dietary choices. The traditional justification for fasting was the idea of detoxification.

This idea that there's toxins in the body. And now we know that's true. They've actually been able to... That's controversial. Well, it's actually not controversial in the sense that you can take a fat bobsy of a human and break it down and you'll find there's hundreds of different chemicals there at various concentrations, PCB, dioxin, pesticide residues, mercury. And the only thing that's controversial is they say, oh, well, it doesn't matter.

Well, it turns out it does matter. It just matters at different thresholds to different people. And so this idea of rapidly mobilizing toxins during fasting has been so well accepted by some that they say that's the reason not to fast. The body would rapidly mobilize these fat-soluble nutrients too quickly and your body wouldn't know what it's doing and it would overload your system. Unless you take their proprietary products, then apparently it's okay. But what our experience has been that there is a rapid detoxification.

We know that there's some studies looking at... They've even done total body load measurements before and after fasting and showed that PCB levels would drop. Clinically... So you're not taking any chemicals into your body and you're allowing the liver and the kidneys to just do what they do, right? But it's more than just what you would calculate through burning 2,000 calories of internal fluids.

There's a selective and rapid mobilization. For example, with tumors, let's say you have a breast tumor and you lose 10% of your body weight. You would assume that you'd probably lose 10% of your tumor weight. But what happens in the... For example, in lymphoma, you lose 100% of the tumor. So the body's preferentially mobilizing some nutrient stores versus others. And it seems to

be able to do that in inverse proportion to the value of those tissues to the body. So it's getting the visceral fat, which we think isn't probably healthful fat before it's mobilizing adipose fat or certainly before it's getting to critical nerve tissues and other things that are preserved. The body has an intelligence where it's unwinding itself. And what we're suggesting is it appears that both endogenous and exogenous toxins are preferentially mobilized in water-only fasting at a much more powerful rate than they are when you're going on a healthy diet and lifestyle. And that may be a justification for trying to facilitate and speed this process.

There's also the effect on enzymatic induction. Think about athletes. One of the things of being a trained athlete is you induce, for example, glycogenolytic enzyme systems, you get better at mobilizing glycogen stores. And this whole business of carb loading and trying to increase glycogen storage so you have more to pull on so that you don't hit the wall so quickly when you're running that marathon or whatever,

you get through that process. That is induced with persistent exercise. The same enzymatic production for glycogen, for lipolytic enzymes, for protein, for gluconeogenesis enzyme systems is induced during fasting because you have to mobilize all your glycogen stores. You're emptying the chamber, you're taking that battery and draining it all the way down. And it suggested that not only do you induce improved efficiency of enzyme systems, but they persist after fasting, which is just like you get better and better at exercising

every time you do it, you get better and better at fasting every time you do it, which is perhaps one of the justifications for intermittent fasting. If you fast 16 hours every day and you limit your feeding window to an eight-hour window, you may be inducing some changes in that, even that limited fast, that 16-hour fast, day after day, after week, after month, cumulatively, that may have a very profound effect on body physiology.

And that's one of the suggestions that's being made by those advocating intermittent fasting or short periods of fasting, cumulatively maybe. Well, when you do a long-term fast, this is a huge impact. And now this is some of the stuff we're working with people like Luigi Fontana from Washington University where they're looking at changes in microbiome, changes in whole body composition,

changes in these various exotic biomarkers and what happens in short-term and long-term fasting. Nobody knows yet because we're really the only people doing and monitoring long-term water and leaf fasting and its physiological effects. So this is all virgin data and very exciting. But what we can see clinically is that when you induce changes with exercise or you induce changes with fasting, they're often the same changes. If you look, for example, exercise, people that exercise two rats in a cage,

genetically identical, give one rat an exercise wheel and the other not, everything else is equal. The rats with the exercise wheel, one, they'll use it, and number two, they don't get Alzheimer's disease and dementia. And they said, well, why? Why does exercise prevent? How does exercise prevent dementia? And they look at those rats and they find out that BDNF,

brain-derived neurotrophic factor, is dramatically higher in rats that get their exercise, lower in those that don't, the ones that don't much more vulnerable to Alzheimer's. Well, BDNF, it turns out the precursor to that is beta-hydroxybutyric acid, which is the fatty acid that your brain is preferentially mobilizing during water-only fasting. BDNF goes up with water fasting just like it does in exercise.

Glycogen-mobilizing enzymes go up in exercise just like they do in fasting. In fact, all of the biomarkers that we've been able to look at that are improved with exercise improve with fasting, which is weird because you think, wait a second, exercise you're up vigorously running around inducing all these changes. Fasting, you're sitting around, we don't even let you exercise much. You maybe could do a little yoga. How is it that they would do the same thing to the body? But when you think about it, exercise and fasting are both reversing the consequences of dietary excess.

When you exercise vigorously, when you fast, you're undoing the consequence of dietary excess. When you exercise vigorously, when you fast, you're undoing the consequence of dietary excess. I'm not surprised at all that fasting induces the same kind of biochanges that we see with exercise. In fact, for us, it's saving a lot of time because we just look at all that fast exercise literature and start looking for the things they've discovered and seeing how much of it's mimicked with fasting. I think that both of these processes, fasting and exercise, share a common biological benefit. And that's why we're seeing the biomarkers changing with both. That is crazy. Wild.

The other thing that happens is insulin. Insulin is the hormone that drives sugar from the bloodstream into the cells where it's needed to burn. So if you look at type 2 diabetics, you might assume mistakenly that they don't have enough insulin. They have plenty of insulin. They have more insulin. It doesn't work because there's insulin resistance. There's resistance to the insulin carrying out its function. So what drug can you take that reverses insulin resistance? There isn't any.

There's drugs that will force sugar on the cell and they have all kinds of side effects. What can you do to reduce insulin resistance? Well, you could exercise, you know, that helps, weight loss, healthy diet. You can fast. Fasting has a profound effect on insulin resistance. In fact, as much as 80% of our type 2 diabetics can achieve normal blood sugar levels without medication.

And if they're willing to continue to do the diet and the exercise, they can often sustain those results. Now, you might say, well, couldn't they do that with just diet and exercise? Absolutely, many diabetics that are able to make aggressive diet and lifestyle changes over enough time are successful at resolving and reversing their diabetes, but it's difficult for people that aren't able to do it on their own, that's where we would use the next level of support and intervention, which is fasting. It can also be a little tricky unwinding the medications and all that kind of stuff.

So, you know, doing whatever it is, whether it's feeding or fasting in conjunction with doctors that are able to be supportive and that have an expectation of you getting well is important. Now, think about it. If you go to a doctor and you've lost weight, does the doctor assume you've adopted a healthy diet? No, they assume you've got an eating disorder,

you're a drug addict or you're dying of cancer. You know, that's the differential. Colon cancer, eating disorder, drug addiction. Because many doctors have never had an experience of a diabetic getting well. I gave a lecture this year in Texas at a medical conference for physicians who specialize in diabetes.

So there's 250 people there. What are they serving them? Pulled pork sandwiches, chocolate cake. Most of them are overweight or obese. I do my presentation. I explain our results. Afterwards, one of the docs comes up. He's about maybe 70, 80 pounds overweight.

He says, you know, I've been in practice 25 years treating diabetics. I've never seen one get well. I've been in practice 25 years treating diabetics. I've never seen one get well. He's never had the experience of a single patient recovering, stabilizing their blood sugar, taking off medication. It's not part of the paradigm. Well, how likely is he gonna give meaningful diet

and lifestyle advice to a patient when he doesn't do it himself, doesn't believe, doesn't even know that it would work. Or even if he thought it would work, knows the patient's not gonna do it because people don't make diet lifestyle change. He's seen the literature, 93% recidivism rate. That, you know, to ask people to make diet lifestyle change

is very difficult. So when you get up and you give a presentation like that to that type of audience, what is the receptivity to what you're saying? Well, in the past, it was aggressively negative. Now, it's actually becoming where at least a percentage of the audience is actually interested. The way that we made that contact was one of the doctors that runs the residency training program came in, had his own experience, wanted it for his students,

and now those second and third year residents can rotate as part of their training at the True North Health Center so they can get the experience of actually doing something that some of them have never done before, which is see these patients get well. Because under a conventional treatment, you don't get to do that. And it turns out there's some doctors that rings their bell. They like the idea of patients getting well. And so they're willing to put the extra time and energy and effort in.

But if you're in a traditional system, if you're in an HMO system and you're a physician and you have to see 26 patient contacts a day, do you think you have time to review their history, do an exam, write the prescriptions and then sit and chit chat about them, why they've got to give up everything that they eat? No, the system isn't set up for that.

No. It's not set up for that. It's not set up for the accountability that's required to get somebody to maintain any kind of lifestyle change protocol anyway. And I'm not sure many of them even realize that it's actually worth their time because they've never actually seen it happen before.

And of course, the criticism is, well, yeah, but you're working with special patients. Well, that's true. We're working with the people that are highly motivated, self-selected, willing to make diet and lifestyle changes. It is a self, I'm not saying you can take our advice, give it to everybody and everybody's just gonna go,

oh, great, a whole plant food diet, just what I wanted. That's not the reality. But for people that are willing and interested, they should at least have the right. Somebody that should at least say, well, you could go on this diet and lifestyle, but it's a lot of work. Or you can just take these pills and you'll be sick forever.

What do you want to do? But they don't even know that. I can guarantee this physician I was talking to never tells his patients, well, if you did radical and diet lifestyle changes, you could get well. I'll give you an example. My brother, my brother's six years older.

So we're raised together. He's slowly gaining weight. His wife adopts our diet, comes in and fast overcomes her own health issues. It's on a vegan program. 15 years later, my brother's still eating chicken and doing stuff and getting fatter. And he's got, he can't play volleyball anymore.

His legs all swollen up. I, you know, I'm poking him, but he won't do anything. Finally, he calls me from the hospital. He says, Alan, I'm in the hospital. I had a heart attack. I said, that's great. He goes, no, no, no. You don't hear, I had a heart attack.

I said, I heard you. Best thing that could have happened. So he said, oh, they want to do a quadruple bypass. And I said, well, talk to your surgeon. He asked the surgeon, he says, if you do a bypass, won't they plug up again? And the surgeon said, yeah, eventually, but it lasts longer than Stenson. He says, what if I made radical diet and lifestyle change?

He said, the surgeon laughed at him. He said, Mark, you're not gonna make diet and lifestyle changes, come on. Checked himself out, got on a whole plant food SOS-free diet, lost the 50 pounds, back to playing volleyball, passed his stress test, still has his vessels. But my own brother, it took pain, ability and fear of death. It's just like in 12 step.

It's like, it's all about willingness and pain is the fulcrum for that, right? When people are in a desperate state or they've suffered a severe medical trauma like that, right? When people are in a desperate state or they've suffered a severe medical trauma like that, then they're ready to actually implement those kinds of changes. Short of that, it's very difficult. And I think that speaks to the pessimism that most practitioners have about the viability of advising somebody to change their lifestyle habits. Absolutely. I completely understand.

This is amongst the most difficult thing you can ask a patient to do. Adopt a health promoting diet in a world designed to make you fat, sick and miserable, not an easy task, certainly not for sissies. And in my brother's case, he had the advantage, his wife, my sister-in-law already doing the work of providing support to the family

with healthy food and stuff, but still difficult. Now, I just saw him a few days ago, looks great. Completely different person. Do you think he's gonna like, oh, no, it wasn't worth it? I mean, no, no, it's the best thing he's ever done. Fabulous. So you approach fasting from a perspective of weight management and also disease prevention and reversal, but there's also all this emerging science around longevity and anti-aging. Of

course, that's Longo's specific lens on this, but by dint of autophagy and all these other biomechanical systems that are affected by fasting, there's now this whole world of research opening up around prolonging life as a result of this. I actually think the people that are gonna turn out to get the most benefit from fasting, this one in two week fast that we do with healthy people

is healthy people. Healthy people that are looking to stay healthy. For example, to avoid vulnerability of infectious disease, to avoid the problems that... not waiting like my brother did till he has a heart attack, but the people that are willing to use it to prevent the problems from beginning. And interestingly enough, I've been communicating with Walter Longo recently about doing a joint study,

where we're gonna use his expertise and access and our facility to do some look not just at intermittent fasting, but long-term fasting and compare and contrast and see what the very best bang for the buck, so to speak, is in terms of taking healthy people and helping them stay that way. We've got a study that's planned for next year looking specifically exotic biomarker changes with these dietary changes with fasting and then trying to differentiate how much fasting, how frequently,

what's the right combination. That's all relatively new territory. You know, there's other impacts of fasting that are not as well recognized. For example, the gut. You have a tunnel through your body that starts at your mouth and it goes down your esophagus and then your stomach and your intestinal tract and gets to the rectum. You've got a hole at one end and another hole at the other end. And digestion is essentially shoving

things in one hole, trying to push it out the other hole. But it's only the stuff that gets absorbed through the intestinal mucosa that enters the body. And that intestinal mucosa acts like a screen keeping flies out. If the screen becomes inflamed, things can leak through. That's essentially what gut leakage is. And the things that cause inflammation of the gut, we believe are free radicals that come from not just smoking or drinking alcohol. You know, smoking, it's obvious. You see smoker's face, cross-link collagen tissues.

We know that's cross-linkaging from the free radicals from smoking. It also affects the animal lining of the blood vessels. It's my contention that cigarette smoking may protect people from getting lung cancer. Actually protects people. That's a radical statement. Well, think about it. 80% of smokers- How can you say that? Come on. 80% of smokers never get lung cancer and 20% of smokers get cancer. And I believe it's because smoking kills people from heart attacks before they live long enough to grow their tumors.

Because of the damage to the animal lining of vessels, cardiovascular disease may occur slightly quicker than the inevitable lung cancer would have. And so if you could make smoking more dangerous and kill everybody from heart disease, perhaps they could advertise it as cancer safe. Okay, now I understand. Well, they say statistics don't lie, but liars use statistics. And the fact is you can look at this data and twist it around in a way that sounds good, even though it's completely ridiculous. Smoking damages animal lining. It causes lung cancer. Alcohol, peroxidation of alcohol leads to cirrhosis of the liver. Why do you think people that drink a lot of alcohol get fatty liver?

It's a scar tissue that comes from the detoxifying effect of that nasty alcohol. But today they're trying to tell you that alcohol is health food. If you don't drink, you should start. That resveratrol, the little bit of powerful antioxidant from this great skin is some justification for drinking alcohol. They're trying to tell you, oh, it thins the blood like aspirin does. So if you're on a greasy, fatty, slimy, dead, decaying flesh diet and risk of clotting stroke, that thinning effect is gonna reduce your risk of dying from a clotting stroke, which might be true, but you're gonna increase your risk from a hemorrhagic stroke.

You're not gonna reduce your all-cause mortality. So the only reason to drink alcohol is if you'd rather die of a bleeding stroke than a clotting stroke, maybe that's a justification. You're a passionate man, Dr. Goldhammer. Why is it that, why 40 days or 21 days? Like, what is it about that extended period that's so important?

Well, what we do is we wanna fast as short as possible, but long enough to get the problem resolved. And so it's not like we're setting out to try to beat Jesus in fasting duration. We don't go over 40 days generally, because if you keep the fast under 40 days, there's few metabolic complications. As you start getting into the really long fast, the 60 days, the 80 if you keep the fast under 40 days, there's few metabolic complications. As you start getting into the really long fast,

the 60 days, the 80 days, the longer fast that were done in the past, it's a much more delicate balance in terms of electrolyte balance and other things. And so, the guy that I trained with Alec Burton in Australia used to do fast as long as 100 days or longer. And I asked him, by the time I got there, that was 36 years ago, he was no longer doing over 40 days as a routine, just very occasionally. And I said, why? And he said, well, because of the sleep deprivation.

I said, oh, I didn't know that patients had any more trouble sleeping on long-term fast. He goes, oh, no, not the patients, me. He had sleep deprivation. He was just worried too much. Yeah, he worried too much about it. So he decided to keep it to 40 days because we knew from experience that that was the period of time you could go

without getting into more of the complications. So we- And there's no electrolytes supplementation or vitamin and mineral supplementation during this period? You're looking at me like I'm crazy. Water only fasting is the complete abstinence of all substances except pure water in an environment of complete rest. Is there a particular kind of water?

We use fractionally steamed distilled water just because it's pure water. Patients that are fasting get really sensitive. They won't tolerate municipal contamination and other stuff. They just want pure water. It's H2O. It's just what rainwater would be if the environment wasn't polluted. And so anytime you start supplementing, like for example, there were some long-term fasts done by medical authorities that killed people.

And the reason why is because they supplemented. What they would do is they would supplement potassium if potassium got low. But if you don't allow something to be the rate-limiting nutrient and you're not measuring obviously everything that's possible to be measured, you can get into depletion of something else and they did. And you see evidence in the literature of myocardial fibro breakdown or other problems that you'll not see if you don't let the rate-limiting nutrients be rate-limiting.

For example, potassium is pretty sensitive. If you don't supplement potassium and you use potassium as a rate-limiting mineral, all the downstream things that you might not necessarily know to measure are not likely to become an issue. So we use 3.0 potassium as an arbitrary termination. If it gets below that, then we modify the protocol. Now, it's not necessary to do that. You could push people further,

but if you use that as a protocol, we've proven you can do it safely and effectively over 20,000 consecutive times. The reason why we've been able to do this so consistently is we have strict protocols that we follow that are time tested and proven. And supplementation of electrolytes, although you might think, well, potassium is low, we'll just give them some potassium.

But that's an example of letting arrogance exceed your ignorance because you don't know what the downturn consequences of that is. And so we're using a protocol that we've been able to test. Now, it may be there's a better way to do it and that's why we do research and that's why we look at these things. But until that's done, I exercise caution because the fact is this is a, you're in a physiologically vulnerable state, particularly in a person that's coming off medications and has a health history. And you want to make sure that everybody that walks in walks out. And that's why we use the

protocol we do. I would suspect also a psychologically delicate state. Walk me through the experience of this journey that you see with the typical patient. I mean, you're demanding a lot of them. They're going through something they've never done before. Like what is the, you know, what is that like for that individual when they're on day three, day 10, day 30? Yeah, so the first few days of fasting are actually the most difficult

because you're adapting off a glucose metabolism into a fat metabolism. So the brain is changing fuels from burning sugar to burning largely beta-hydroxybutyric acid, which comes from the ketone bodies from the fat breakdown. So there's an adjustment there. You're detoxing oftentimes a lot, although we've learned to minimize the effect of detoxification by getting people to eat a fruit, vegetable only diet for a few days before we start fasting.

That's made a huge difference. So they're not coming off caffeine addiction at the same moment that they're trying to adapt to the fast. They've already gotten that stuff out of their system. And that's actually the most difficult stuff, getting the cigarettes, the caffeine, the alcohol, all the meat, fish, fowl, eggs, dairy products, processed foods, all the host of chemicals that people are putting into their body

with over-the-counter prescription medications. So we've gone through a wean-down process and then we start fasting. And their mouth may coat up and taste like something crawled in there and died. And they may have some skin rashes or elimination. They may get mucus discharge. They may get some vivid dreams they may have aches and pains and they may have difficulties with all kinds of adaptive process but they go away and then something else comes along and then it goes away and then it becomes very empowering because they realize that they're able to get

through this process that just because they had a headache doesn't mean they have to rush out and try to suppress those symptoms with a pill it goes away the body's able to get through this process, that just because they had a headache doesn't mean they have to rush out and try to suppress those symptoms with a pill, it goes away, the body is able to heal itself. And then once you get into four or five days of fasting, the body is pretty well acclimated to the fasting, at this point there's no hunger. People are going to cooking demonstrations, they're coming to lectures, they're going to the dining room to socialize with people,

they're five days, ten days into a fast, you think, oh my God, you haven't eaten for ten days? No, I just enjoy being there, it's not a problem. So then depending on the patient, sometimes they start getting relief, their pain maybe for the first time in years, the pain that they've been suffering with is going away and they may find that some people have these chronic debilitating problems, start resolving, things start falling off, tumors start shrinking,

they start getting excited like, oh, maybe there's something to this idea of the body healing itself. And, you know, we're monitoring these patients to go through the process and then at some point you get to the point where there's a limiting factor, maybe their electrolytes start to drop a little bit or their energy is not acceptable, they're not able to maintain accurate ambulation or maybe that's how much time they've got.

Cause you know, some people have jobs and lives and responsibilities. So we only have so much time. I'm here for 40 days. So my life completely craters on the outside. But for many people, this is an intense epiphany experience because they've got this intense education

that they're really open to. They've seen these other people, sometimes what looks to them like miracles going on. Cause they're seeing people that they have no expectation that that could get well, getting well, they're experiencing themselves sometimes for the first time, you know, a sense of empowerment because they're able to actually reverse these processes that they're told

nothing could be done, learn to live with it. What do they expect at their age? That's just how it is. And now they're thinking, wow, if they were wrong about that, maybe they're wrong about other things too. They start looking at all aspects of their life. The empowerment aspect of it has gotta be huge. Like even if you set aside all of these physical benefits

that are a result of this, simply the fact that they did something that seems impossible, very, very difficult and get to the other side of it has to, you know, sort of make them feel like, okay, now nothing is impossible. Like I just did this thing that almost nobody does. Now, what's the next challenge that I can tackle? You know, the idea is that many people think that if you fast, you die. They believe if they got on a plane in New York and they were to fly all the way to California, they would die over Colorado, is that many people think that if you fast, you die. They believe if they got on a plane in New York

and they were to fly all the way to California, they would die over Colorado, except they ate the peanuts, you know, that the pretzels saved their life. What do you eat when you fly? And somehow if you fasted for 10 days or 20 days, sometimes the idea that you might have to skip a meal because there was nothing healthy to eat,

doesn't seem quite so overwhelming. There's definitely empowerment. And I think that the other thing that happens is when you start feeling what it feels like to be you instead of what you'd become, that's very powerful. I think the same thing happens to athletes. When people first start exercising at first, it's not pleasant. They got aches, they got pains, they're fatigued, they're not getting the success, they can't do what they want.

But as they do it, they get to the point where not only do they tolerate, they're not just doing it because they want to maintain the weight or get the figure or whatever it is, they're doing it because they start realizing they're getting real intrinsic benefit from engaging in this consistent activity. And now they don't want to give it up. And I think the same thing happens when people really get into a healthy lifestyle. They don't want to go give it up and feel like everybody else feels

because of some greasy, slimy, convenient food. They're willing to pay the price of trying to do the planning and do what it takes to try to ensure that they can get their needs met. Just like I think people that get into a regular exercise regime realize that now this is so beneficial. They will literally structure their schedules around

making sure that that's an important part of their activity. And the same thing happens with sleep. When you realize how important sleep is to health and maintenance and energy, you start prioritizing that and you don't compromise your sleep, you don't compromise your exercise, and hopefully you learn to not compromise your diet and lifestyle. I tell people, here's what you need to do. First, get enough sleep because it's your most critical activity.

Then engage in regular exercise so you can dissipate the tension, you can build fitness and have the time to prepare and eat healthy food. If there happens to be any time left, well, fine, you go to work. Let's talk about the food part of all of this. So, well, first of all, is anybody freak out in the middle of this and flee? Like I can't handle it. Like there has to be some people that just psychologically can't handle it. You'd be surprised by the time people come to the True North Health Center, they're pretty well vetted.

They've gone through some screening. We've evaluated their history. They're usually pretty motivated. Most of the time, the only way they find out about us is some doctor or somebody they know is referring to us to begin with. And you know, it's like you're not gonna refer somebody that if you know what's going on there, that's not gonna be a good candidate. So, there's a lot of filtration that goes on.

And so, the exceptions that I've seen, I've had some patients that are coming off drugs like cocaine and other stuff that don't last 12 hours, you know, because they're not really ready to make the change. But as far as fleeing because of diet, no, because the True North Health Center is set up to meet people where they're at. Not everybody is ready to do vigorous water-only fasting, or would it even be appropriate?

So for those individuals, maybe we just do a healthy eating regime. And just eating the diet, doing the classes, doing the yoga, the meditation is enough to induce significant changes. Sometimes after they've been a while, they might say, well, you know, maybe I'll try a little intermittent fast. Or maybe I'll try a little bit of a fast and see how I do with that. And that's fine. So it's not like everybody comes in and we lock them up and that's it. In fact, you know, I tell a story. When we first moved to the new facility, one day, a really large police officer showed up at the door and he said he wanted to interview one of my patients.

And I asked him, what did they do? And they said, well, you know, I don't need to know. And I said, well, if you want me to tell you if they're here or not, I need to know, you know, what the issue is. And he said, okay, we got a complaint. And the complaint was from this patient's relatives. And they said that the patient was being held against their will by religious cultists and being starved to death to go to be with Jesus.

And I thought, I'm saying, look, the person's not here involuntarily. And he got interviewed. I said, fine, I'll let you interview him. But first, would you like a nice tall cup of Kool-Aid? Right. And Dr. Lyle says that when a police officer puts his hand on his hip. Like relishing your role as a cult leader. He is not comfortable

and I'm not to speak to authorities anymore, but that's, you know, I'm thinking it's an obvious joke because Kool-Aid is full of sugar. We wouldn't serve that at the True North Health Center. Well, I know, it's funny. The reality is that today it's not as much of an issue because now the idea of fasting doesn't seem quite so.

It's in the culture now. It's not the Jim Jones kind of, you know, perception. Right. So it's not as entertaining. Are you still the only medically supervised clinic that's doing this? Well, I'm really excited because I just visited yesterday. One of our doctors that trained with us, Nathan Gershfeld, is running a facility here in the Los Angeles area.

And it's beautiful. I went to see his facility and it's absolutely beautiful. And for anybody that... And also we have another doctor, Dr. Ewan in Ohio, that's opened up a small facility, is doing really well. I've gotten excellent feedback from people. We have other doctors that we train. We have an intern residency training program.

And those schools, I mentioned Texas A&M, there's other medical schools, the naturopathic professions graduates can come and spend a year as a resident doing a rotation at the True North Health Center. The chiropractors often come and spend three months as part of their training at the True North Health Center. And those doctors, we're hoping to open up more facilities around the country.

And we make people that contact our website can get access to whoever the local fasting supervisors are. And we're happy to provide that information. And it's really exciting to see these guys, not only learning how to do it, but actually figuring out how to get these places open and offer affordable care to people. And the thing that it's always gratifying to see the clinical results that they're seeing, because it's really a hard thing to do in an outpatient practice. Unless you can control a person's environment, it's hard to really induce these kinds of profound changes.

It's gotta be incredibly gratifying as a medical practitioner to see such dramatic results. Well, I think that's one of the reasons we've been successful. We have a dozen clinicians now at the True North House and we have five medical doctors. We've got osteopathy, chiropractic, naturopathy, all represented. And these doctors, once they come, they often are with us their entire career.

In fact, Dr. Clapper just retired after nine years at Trinidad Health Center. We joke that we're like the firm, you know, once they start. But it's because they like the low patient intensity, in other words, they're not having to see high volumes of patients, so they're spending a lot of time with a few people instead of a little time with a lot. They like the center setup where the doctor is able actually to get all that intense education done without it coming out of the visit time, that they can spend the visit time really working with the patient's specific needs

and they like the idea that people get well. And so the combination of that allows us to keep the doctors, even though they probably work harder for less with us than they would if they went off and worked for the local HMO or whatever it is, that it's enough gratification, enough benefit that those doctors really like working at True North Health. What is the kind of current relationship that you have with the conventional medical establishment?

Like how are they perceiving what you're doing now? Well, it's been a revolution, actually. It's been amazing change because when Dr. Sultana, who's been with us now about 20 years, came, the first thing we did is we got him to take a job with the local hospital as an urgent care doctor. And so he became known to the medical staff there and the nurses, and he's such a wonderful doctor, they loved him.

And so that allowed us to have a good relationship with the immediate... We have a trauma center just a mile away. And so some of their nurses are patients of ours, we provide chiropractic support to the nurses at that hospital. Some of the hospitalists purchase their food through our outpatient deli. So we have a good working relationship. And now that they're seeing some of our referral patients that we're doing for diagnostic workups and people getting well,

that's really helped too, because they're not used to seeing people actually recover. And so today it's completely different than it was 20 years ago, where we were seen as some kind of crazy people. Now, I think they see it as a little bit odd and different, but at least for people that have whatever it is they see get well, acceptable. And they know we're well-intentioned. The other thing that's made a big difference

is we've published a number of papers in peer-reviewed medical literature, including on the safety of fasting, the effect of fasting on high blood pressure. We've recently finished a study with the Mayo Clinic looking at primary prevention of stroke. That's in review right now at a major journal. We're hoping that we'll get positive publication of that here in the next couple of weeks. We've done a study with Luigi Fontana from Washington University

looking at biomarker changes in the gut microbiome before and after fasting. We have a couple other studies that we're enrolling in right now. So now we're getting some affiliations with some of these major players like Walter Longo, which is gonna allow us to get into journals that we might not otherwise have been able to access because of the power that these guys bring.

Yeah, his credibility and his pedigree, I would imagine is very helpful. Oh, he's done unbelievable, just fabulous work. And he's a wonderful guy. We're so fortunate that we've got these kinds of people out there trailblazing into the scientific and medical literature. Cause as clinicians

and particularly alternative health clinicians, we're not always viewed with the most open mindedness from much of the medical profession. Yeah. Well, the other big piece here is the diet and nutrition piece. I would suspect that a lot of people come to True North because they saw you and they saw those case studies

portrayed in What the Health, the documentary. We all saw those individuals, their kind of before and after stories that were very dramatic. And a big part of that- And heavily criticized. And heavily, yeah, controversial, for sure. We have people telling us,

I see there's stuff on the internet that says those people were all paid actors. Oh, really? Reverse Photoshop. And I've seen some unbelievable- I think Kip and Keegan just kind of grabbed them randomly, right? Like how did that happen?

They showed up and wanted to do the films. We did some interviews. And then they came back and they said, well, they've decided they wanted a little more. Can we just interview some of your patients? And they went out to the courtyard. Whoever happened to be standing around. Yeah, I wish we could have cherry picked it and stuff.

Well, there was that one guy had all his pills, he went through all of his medications and all that kind of stuff. That type of experience is pretty routine. Yeah. We see what looks like miracles. It's not miracles at all. It's just getting rid of the crappy diet,

instituting a whole plant food, SOS free diet and using fasting effectively. You know, that's the reality. And I know they've got a new movie coming out and I know they've done a bit of filming with us as well. Also, I'm very excited that I think it's September, Netflix decided to do a special on wellness. Oh, they did?

And one of their six shows was filmed at the True North Health Center. Oh, wow. And it's on fasting. Who's behind that, do you know? I can't, I don't recall who the producer and what else, but I know it's purchased by Netflix. It's a Netflix original.

Oh, that's cool. So I know it's gonna get pushed out. I had John Lewis in here a couple of weeks ago, who's working with Keegan on the Hungry for Justice project. And so I've been behind the scenes kind of looking at what they're doing. That's gonna be a really big one. I imagine it'll be very controversial

and probably piss a lot of people off. I'm really excited to see it. Keegan, that's Keegan's specialty. Yeah. But all right, so the food part, the protocol that you recommend and that you apply with your patients owes its debt of legacy to Caldwell Esselstyn and a whole legion of those pioneering doctors who have put the whole food plant-based diet onto the forefront of public awareness. We've seen it grow in adoption and recognition and we're seeing the benefits of

that. I think it's still, you know, somewhat controversial. There's all these diet wars with the low-carb people and now ketosis and all of that. So, that's kind of all kind of going on in the background here, but maybe, you know, you can just speak to why you believe so strongly in a whole food plant-based diet. Well, the exclusively whole plant food diet I think has a lot of support, whether it's John McDougall or Esselstyn or you mentioned one of my heroes, T. Colin Campbell, just a brilliant guy. So, they all make a very compelling case that people should eat a whole plant food diet. Essentially you call it a whole plant food diet,

I noticed that you always do that instead of calling it a whole food plant-based diet. What's the reason for that? So I want a whole plant food diet because a plant-based diet implies that, you know, it's based on plants, but it allows flexibility. And so I think that Dr. McDougall and Dr. Campbell would argue that we want to have as broad a diet as possible to attract as many people as possible. Because remember, most people in the vegan vegetarian movement are not just interested only in health, but actually dominantly in animal rights, moral, ethical and spiritual reasons, environmental impact. And so their argument is, well, maybe it doesn't have to be Mr. Perfect diet. If it encompasses a broader range of people, we'll get more people doing it,

we'll save the planet, we'll save the animals, we'll go to heaven, whatever it is. And I don't disagree with any of that, that's great. But when it comes to maximizing health, if a person's overweight wants to lose weight, if a person has heart disease, diabetes, if they've got cancer, or if they're healthy and their goal is to live the maximum healthy life possible, I believe the evidence supports the idea of an exclusively whole plant food diet that's free of SOS. SOS is the international symbol of danger and it stands for salt, oil, and sugar. Now, can you have a little salt and still be healthy? Yes. Just like

sometimes people can have a beer and not be a drunk. But for my patient population, which is either sick people that want to get well or the healthy people that really want to maximize their health, a whole plant food SOS-free diet, I believe, will prove to be the most health-promoting diet out there. Now, is it the best diet for society to add? No, I'm not arguing that. I'm so grateful that people like Dr. Campbell and Dr. Esselstyn and Dr. McDougall are out there educating the world.

I'm not that nice of a person. I'm only interested in my patient and the maximizing the people that's in front of me. And the people that I see are often sick or healthy and wanna stay that way. And so I believe that is the best advice for them. Now, does that mean somebody can't have a more flexible diet and still be healthy?

Of course they can. And if it's working for you, that's great. I'm not gonna argue with it. But if you're struggling, Of course they can. And if it's working for you, that's great. I'm not going to argue with it. But if you're struggling, don't pretend that there's not another level of compliance that's possible. And I suggest people try it this way because they might find out, you know, they don't miss all that salty, sugary stuff anyway. And they may be just as happy.

And if not, that's fine. If you can modify the diet, maintain the numbers, not screw up our outcome data. I'm not a policeman. I'm just trying to give you the best advice I can. But I do believe I'm right. Now, if it turns out I'm wrong, and the evidence supports that you're better off having more than 1500 milligrams of sodium a day, because that's an important reason for some reason, then I'll change my recommendation. Okay, I'm recommending what I'm recommending based on the combination of 36 years of clinical experience watching people get well, and my ability to interpret the scientific literature and the staff that we have at the True North Health Foundation that are doing the same. And up till now, a lot of the stuff that we used to advocate was criticized heavily. Most of the stuff that we've been advocating, if you go back for 36 years, has been accepted as reasonable.

The two things that we do that are still controversial is recommend a lower sodium intake than some of our colleagues. By this type of diet ends up having about a gram of sodium in it naturally and water only fasting. And I believe in both cases, the data is gonna prove we're right. What do you say to the low carb proponent

who tells you, listen, we need some of these oils in our diet. Healthy olive oil has its place. We've seen that in the Mediterranean diet. We've had tremendous results with people losing weight and maintaining their weight and reversing a whole litany of conditions. So why not just go that route?

Like when you have to measure those two protocols against each other, how do you think about that? Well, there's a number of protocols you're actually covering there. Yeah. Like for example- But these things get conflated in this conversation that's going on. The dead Dr. Atkins diet, the high protein, high fat diets, they'll argue, well, we got weight loss.

I don't disagree. And a lot of times what's really good for short-term benefit isn't necessarily the same thing that's good for long-term outcome. Same thing in athletics. You can inject anabolic steroids and you can get some pretty powerful short-term effects, but then you get the testicular atrophy and you get cancer and die and it's not so good in the long run. So what's good for short-term weight loss isn't necessarily the same thing

as what's good for long-term health support. And I don't disagree that a lot of these programs are effective for weight loss. Heck, you can cut the hip off at the leg and lose 40 pounds overnight. Now, it may not be a net benefit to you, but just because you want instant weight loss, there's lots of things you can do. As far as the other alternatives, which is maybe a higher fat, low protein diet inducing a ketogenic state,

that may very well have some short-term benefits. It may even have some long-term benefits. But when you compare the results that we see clinically in the conditions that we treat, there's nothing I've seen that's worked better than an exclusively whole plant food SOS-free diet. And I have the luxury of having patients living with me sometimes for a period of a year or more.

So we're able to really test the diet and see what it takes for them to actually recover their health. That's one of the downsides of living with your patients, because if they don't get well, who can you blame? Right. They've been with you for a year. Wow, you have people stay with you for a whole year.

Sometimes longer than a year. I've got people that are now longer. Well, sometimes we've had people checked in that were being sent to the nursing home and we came as the alternative and then they get well and go home. And it was, you know, 2000 a month less staying with us than at the nursing home. So, you know, for those individuals, it was an economic benefit. Other people come in because they're going to do long-term fasting, long-term recovery. They've got serious health problems. Sometimes it takes a couple of months just to get people off all their drugs. Some people come in because they

don't feel comfortable living freely because they've got some issues with food and eating. They want to live in a controlled setting until they really get it down. So't feel comfortable living freely because they've got some issues with food and eating. They want to live in a controlled setting until they really get it down. So they feel comfortable going out there. And same thing true with alcoholics. Some people you say, quit drinking and they quit. Some people go to outpatient treatment, they do great. Some people do 30 day programs.

Some people do 90 day programs. Some people have to do longer. So you have to make it to meet the patient's need. So I'll tell you a funny thing. We have this phone coaching thing I told you about. And so one of our doctors, Dr. Chila Verest, does a lot of phone coaching with people. And so people call up on me and we decide, okay, they need to come in fast, but it's a couple of months before we have an opening. So I say, why don't you work with Dr. Verest in the meantime? And when you come in, you won't have to be here so

long. And then they go and get well. And it's happening a lot. I'm giving her a hard time. I say, you got them well before we could come here. We screwed up our study, our documentation. They're all well. But it's okay. How many beds do you have though? You probably are at capacity most of the time. Yeah, we can handle about 70 people.

So we're gonna run about two months or so out. You know, it was interesting after the COVID thing, all of our foreign people had to cancel. And that's 15% of our people. We had 50 people that couldn't get in. But we had so many more local people because now people can work from home. So some people that wanted to come in,

but they couldn't afford to miss work during the full time. So they're working while they're... Some people are able to come in, do a fast, but then they can, during recovery, they can go back to working remotely because we have excellent wifi bandwidth and all that stuff. So, you know, those patients are able to actually function,

you know, in a controlled setting, but not necessarily miss work. Sometimes we have situations where they've got kids. Well, now we have like suites that people book family units. So they may come into fast, but they can have their family there. And so the family learns to eat good food and there's no cooking. And so there's lots of different ways to adapt to people's needs

depending on what it is they're really wanting to accomplish. Our limiting factor is we have to have highly motivated people that really wanna pay the price to get well. Yeah. And if they do- That's the determining factor in success. I mean, it's so similar to the recovery community. I mean, you have outpatient situations, you have inpatient.

I mean, I did inpatient for a hundred days and now I think I should have stayed longer. Like it had such a dramatic, I mean, it saved my life and it gave me a new life, but I needed that much time. And then, a lot of people from that experience and I work with people today who are in halfway houses or, you know, sober living facilities, there are all of

these transitionary scenarios that are available to people to help them not just create these new habits and, you know, build a new foundation for their life, but you need that support system in place in order for it to really lock in so that they can carry it out in the world in a permanent way. Because we're a 501 nonprofit research driven organization, our price is quite modest. Our price is the same as they were 12 years ago, 149 a night. That's why Chef AJ goes through, she's like, it's cheaper for me to go to True North than go to a hotel. We actually have businessmen sometimes they'll choose to stay with us when they're on the road

because they get their meals and it's cheaper than the Devil Tree. You know what I mean? You need to charge more. Well, no, the idea is- Or you need more beds or I don't know what you need. We want to keep the price point as low as possible. There's a reason we haven't raised rates in the last 12 years is because people need to stay long enough to get well.

They need to be able to come back if they need support. And by keeping as low rate as possible, it broadens the number of people that can actually afford to do the insurance. Does insurance cover it? Insurance will cover their medical exam, all the traditional medical management things, not the part where you get well, that of course wouldn't be part of health insurance,

the daily rate at the center, the 149. But if to seeing the medical doctor getting any scan or lab, that would be treated just like it would any insurance. What is interesting though, people that have medical savings accounts, that covers the state at the center fully because you are temporarily disabled, you are under direct medical supervision, you are being treated in an inpatient basis.

It seems like with the explosion in the rates of obesity and diabetes and all of these chronic lifestyle ailments that are debilitating millions of people every year and escalating at a shocking rate, that there would be clinics like this in every city available to people because it really is an opportunity for you to reboot and reframe your relationship to the habits

and the foods that you're eating that are creating these problems in the first place. Otherwise you just become a ward of the pharmaceutical industry. Well, I hope you're correct. I hope you're predicting just exactly what we're starting to see new facilities opening. But you also have to remember any place

that makes you give up coffee, alcohol, tobacco, meat, fish, fowl, eggs, dairy products, oil, salt, sugar, and maybe consider fasting. I mean, that's a tough, yeah. I have patients that their friends say, well, what do you go there to fast? Just come, you can come to my garage, I'll give you the hose, I won't charge you anything.

Yeah, that is true. Although, I think when people are looking at that quadruple bypass, those options don't seem so onerous anymore. And I think the thing is, we've arrived at this cultural moment where anything uncomfortable is seen as, optional in our lives, right?

We're so disconnected from challenge and stepping outside of our comfort zones. And to tell somebody, look, you've got to overhaul everything that you're doing is a difficult message. It's a very undigestible message. But at the same time, like I know in my own experience, and look, you've done this with 20,000 people to get those people through those uncomfortable weeks and have them arrive on the other side where, you know, you can pull the curtains open and the sun shines in. And suddenly those foods they thought were unpalatable

actually tastes good. Their cravings have changed. They actually look forward to their meals with these, you know, plant foods. I mean, that's a miraculous thing that I just wish more people could discover in their lives. Yeah, it's a miraculous thing that I just wish more people could discover in their lives. Yeah, it is a miraculous thing. And I think for the specific highly motivated

self-selected people that we treat, we have a really high satisfaction ratio and we're still here, which is kind of a miracle in itself. Just the idea that- And then you do have a really high rate of people that maintain these practices. You know, we're interested- How closely do you tap, tabs really high rate of people that maintain these practices. You know, we're interested- How closely do you tap, tabs do you keep on people?

We're doing a adherence study starting in January of next year, which is designed to do long-term tracking of, very carefully in terms of patient, actual dietary compliance. It's actually difficult research to do in terms of monitoring specifically what people are consuming and not consuming.

But we've actually designed a study that's going to let us do some really long-term tracking of people. Because what we're trying to find out is how strict do you have to be to get the best ratio of return? Do you have to be as strict as we say, or could you be more flexible? Like many of our colleagues recommend programs. The problem we have with them is their recidivism rates. Their theory is that by being more flexible with the diet, you'll get more people in. Our theory is by being stricter with the diet, you can keep more people in.

I can't prove that yet because that data hasn't been done. We did just recently though, do a retrospective analysis of 1100 people that had been to the center and that had experienced 10% or more of weight loss, looking at what people had sustained that magnitude of weight loss over a period of a year and it was over 30%. And so, although that means a lot of people didn't maintain the full magnitude of weight loss,

that doesn't mean that they haven't improved their overall health, but just the fact that people can do that and sustain that and as much as a third of those people apparently are able to... That's to me very encouraging, because under a conventional treatment weight loss, it's around 93 to 97% failure rate, no matter what. Wow. Gastric bypass, when you look at who sustains long-term weight loss, what kind of health benefits, very poor.

It's so poor that most physicians say, ah, it's not even worth worrying about, just let them be fat, forget about it. Right. What is the study that you'd like to see done, whether with respect to fasting or eating a whole plant food diet? Like where's the gap right now? Well, the real gap is looking at what effect

on healthy people does healthy living have and what effect on healthy people does periodic fasting have in terms of preventing them from ultimately getting debility. And that's why we're doing what we call this Navigator study, where we're gonna enroll a large number of people and track them the rest getting debility. And that's why we're doing what we call this navigator study, where we're going to enroll a large number of people and track them the rest of their life. And so the goal is to be able to demonstrate.

Now, it'll take us a while until they reach that point. And it's particularly a problem because once people adopt this diet and lifestyle habits, they tend to live a lot longer. My mother, when she turned 92 years old, she used to get all kinds of trouble from her friends because her son's crazy diet that she's following. But at 92, she realized she had outlived

all 52 of her lifelong friends. They were all dead. And she said, she realized here she was 92 years old, everybody was gone. And she said, Alan, you need to warn your patients. If they're gonna eat this kind of diet, make younger friends, much younger. because she said, even the people 10 years younger, didn't want to play bridge and do stuff. They're too busy suffering with

their consequences. So the bottom line is that it's likely that if you avoid the causes of premature death, you know, you're still going to die, you're going to reach your genetic potential someday, but the period of debility may be dramatically reduced. So you have to be prepared to live a fully functional life up until you reach your genetic potential and not count on vegetating in some nursing home waiting for people to change your diaper for the last 10 years of your life. I like that you got your mom on board. Well, my mom and my father, my father actually, when I just started practice was having transient ischemic attacks, had to retire from teaching because of cognitive decline. And he was really suffering. He came in and was probably one of my

most diligent patients, did the fasting, recovered his health. And 20 years later, he helped edit the pleasure trap. So, you know, he was really good to see. Both my mother and father, you know, got it started later in life because I didn't know early enough, and both ended up doing really well. So that was good. And good lives and good deaths. Deaths in close proximity to the end of their life where they didn't go through. That's what it's about. Yeah. I think it's an important issue. It's oftentimes not really addressed, that how valuable it is to spend the last eight years of your life, however long that's going to be fully functional and capable of taking care of yourself. And what

percentage of healthcare do we expend on treating people where we don't affect their all cause mortality? And we may not even be improving the quality of their life, but we're basically just fostering the consequences of poor dietary choices. And oftentimes because people don't even realize that what they're doing is killing themselves with their fork and knife. Yeah, and warehousing them through those later years where they're so debilitated that the quality of life is de minimis at that point. So we talk a lot about longevity,

how many years are you gonna live? But it's really about the quality of those years. Yeah, healthy life expectancy to me is even more important than life expectancy. And interesting life expectancy for the first time is actually starting to drop. Healthy life expectancy, the number of years you spend fully functional,

that should be, I believe, the target. And that's what I believe that where fasting can have the greatest good is in healthy people that use it preventatively to stay healthy in conjunction with a diet, sleep and exercise regime that's health promoting. Are there other cultures overseas where fasting is more a part of the kind of mainstream? Well, if you look in Germany, modified fasting, at least the Buchenheuer Clinic and others are covered by the system. And I think there's a little bit

more acceptance of it. Water only fasting is still pretty extreme. And I think it's up to us to actually demonstrate that what we're doing is not only safe, which we've done, but it's effective. And I can't say that that's been done. There's not enough research done. But that's why the True North Health Foundation is excited. We have a laboratory now. We have an affiliated IRB.

So human subjects can be approved by people that actually know stuff about fasting. In fact, Dr. Clapper is one of the professional members of the IRB. And we have a research team, Dr. Myers, our director of research, and others that we've now hired to be able to actually conduct these trials. We've got these affiliations with researchers around the world, some of these big impact researchers like Walter Longo. So hopefully we'll be able to do some meaningful research in the next couple of years. We have a great human subjects laboratory at the True North Health Center. We admit a thousand people a year for fasting already. We already have all the mechanisms in place to conduct the trial, to collect the data.

You know, it's happening. And so for me, it's 36 years waiting to get to this point to where we can actually start doing meaningful prospective studies. We're there now and we're ready to do it. And the proceeds from the True North Health Center fund the True North Health Foundation. And so we're not dependent on exogenous grants in order to be, thank goodness, in order to be able to fund our research because we can do it internally.

And that's perhaps one of our greatest successes is really pulling that off. That's why you don't see, I don't think a lot of clinical research being done by other than university-based facilities with all their politics. We're really a freestanding independent research facility that isn't dependent or beholden to anybody. And you need to educate the next generation of medical practitioners, which is exactly what Dr. Clapper, treasure to humanity, is doing in this like third act of his career, going around and lecturing to young

medical students. Absolutely. It's cool. And that's what our internship and residency training is all about. Yeah. So you only have 70 some odd beds, right? Not everybody can go to True North. So what is the recommendation? Like how do you talk to the person who's listening to this or watching this, who's looking to make some lifestyle changes, but isn't ready to get in their car and drive up to Northern California and stay with you for 40 days. The True North phone coaching service is really great. They can go onto our website

and get access to a doctor right where they sit. For under $100, they can do a phone consultation where all of their records have been reviewed and work with a doctor in detail on an ongoing basis. They can talk to me for free. They can call and I'll help at least point them in the right direction, send them to a place that's closest to them, hook them up with the appropriate doctor, whatever it is they need to do.

Or they can read the books now. Get Dr. Campbell's whole book and read it or China's study. Look at Dr. McDougall's excellent books. The Start Solution. The Start Solution is fabulous. Dr. Esselstyn's book, wonderful. I mean, we've got so many great resources now from people that are out there doing a really good job

representing the scientific literature accurately, but in a way that people can understand and they're meaningful and useful. Our website, everything we do is freely available on our website at truenorthhealth.com. So they can go on there, there's video. In fact, we're just about to launch our own Roku channel where all of our content is gonna be available

including our lecture program, our live lecture program at the center. So people have access to that kind of education and support. Obviously, nobody should do a water only fast without medical supervision. But if somebody does want to start experimenting with some intermittent fasting or some things that they could do at home, like how do you, what's the kind of advice that you give to that person? The first advice, it's really important that

history exam and lab they looked at just because the medications particularly can really be complicated. Even with intermittent fasting, unless you take care of the medication complications, you know, you can get yourself into a little bit of trouble. So whoever's prescribing that medication at least needs to be discussed with a lot of times they don't know anything about diet. They don't even know how to get people off drugs. And so that's why I would suggest find a local plant-based doctor or use one of our phone coaches to at least make sure, am I a good candidate for this? And then they can tell you, look, you'd be a good candidate. You might wanna do Valter Longo's program

and you might wanna do, here's something you can do on your own. These are things that are reasonable. The problem is people are so screwed up from long-term dietary abuse and medication complications that even simple things like, well, just eat a good diet. Yes, that's great. Anybody can do that,

but you still may need to keep into account that you might have to modify the pharmaceutical preparations that you've been given inappropriately. And what about people that are moving in the direction of eating a more whole plant-based diet? What are some of the sort of psychological tools that they can rely on that would be helpful in making them successful in that switch? Well, one thing I'd say is keep it to yourself. Don't become a born-again hygienist where you're trying to shove down your beliefs

and other people's because it doesn't work very well. You're just going to antagonize everybody around you and make a lot of stress. So you can set a good example, but my advice is only answer questions that are asked directly. Don't be going around and trying to shove your belief systems in everybody else's face. But support is also important, right? Having some accountability to somebody seems to be effective. Yeah, and that's why I always encourage people to take advantage of, you know, around the country now,

there are doctors that aren't complete idiots that are trying to encourage and advocate support, the plant-based physicians, et cetera. So there are resources available. That's one of the reasons I'm excited about this phone coaching business because we can expand that broad all across the world. Automated systems are highly efficient. We're adding more doctors to the list as the demand increases so that there will be people and resources available to people

that are serious about making these diet and lifestyle changes. Honestly, for relatively healthy people, all they got to do is start eating a whole plant food diet and stop the rest of it. For those of you that struggle making those changes, then you have to find the appropriate support that you need. And if you can have even one friend that they don't even have to do it, they could just tolerate you doing it, that does make a difference. So right now, you I'm sure know the

statistics better than I do, but something like 70% of Americans are obese or overweight. Childhood obesity rates are through the roof. Type two diabetes epidemic is what 30% of Americans. Whatever it is, it's going to be more tomorrow. Right, these things are escalating astronomically. And this really is, COVID pandemic aside, like this is a health pandemic epidemic of a different nature that needs to be addressed in new and different ways. What we're doing right now certainly is not working.

And the path forward and what you have so beautifully demonstrated through a lifetime of work is to show that agency plays a huge part here and that we can take better control of our health by making some pretty basic, simple lifestyle changes that are rooted in evidence-based medicine and science that are proven to work.

I mean, 20,000 patients over the years, a level of success that you've experienced, the long-term success of these patients speaks for itself. And it's powerful, man. And so for somebody who's listening or watching who feels stuck, who feels like they can't make that change, who is mired in the vicious cycle of the pleasure trap to be able to give people a lifeline and say, it doesn't have to be this way, that there is hope and there is a

way out, I think is, you know, that's God's work that you're doing. Yeah, we're having fun. You know, and, you know, it's interesting. The feedback from The Pleasure Trap has been interesting because that book came out more than a decade ago. It's been out a long time. But actually the sales of The Pleasure Trap now are actually increasing. So it's taken, that message is a message maybe been a little bit of ahead of its time, but now it seems like it's resonating with a broader audience. And that's been really interesting to see. We have a new book that we're working on right now

on fasting that'll be out or be done by the end of the year. So we're excited about that. Actually, Dr. Lyle is finally coming towards the end of his book that he's been working on for a number of years. Is he in Hawaii right now? He's on a writing sequestration in Hawaii right now. And he's not to come home until he finishes the book. I had Dr. Gregor in here the other day

and I think he is now out there with they're all out there writing books together. Yeah, so I'm really excited. I've heard 20 of the chapters off Dr. Lowe's book and it's brilliant. And I'm really excited to have him put that out there. Cause I think that's gonna be a whole nother message and another angle that's gonna be really necessary

and very useful. Cool. Final question that I ask all of my medical professional guests. If you were suddenly in the position of being the surgeon general in charge of making policy decisions and regulatory decisions about health in America,

where do you start? Well, what I would say right now, the most important thing is recognizing that we need to make our people less vulnerable to the various diseases, whether it's chronic diseases like heart disease and diabetes, or the acute diseases like COVID-19. We need to make them less vulnerable. So we have to start educating people that health results from healthful living. So we need to fight to improve the diet and lifestyle habits of people, because honestly, you're not going to completely avoid exposure to every infectious agent that comes along. And we're not going to be able to escape heart disease, cancer, and diabetes unless we adopt healthful habits. So we should be incentivizing, encouraging, intimidating, whatever it takes people to adopt a health-promoting diet and lifestyle.

My opinion is that is close to a whole plant food SOS-free diet with regular exercise and prioritized sleep as you can get, that that's what's going to result in healthy living. Diet, sleep, exercise. You do that, you'll do more than all the other job boning that's taking place right now. Powerful Dr. Goldhammer, thank you. My pleasure, thank you for having me.

Yeah, of course, I appreciate it. Thank you for sharing your powerful testimony today. If you wanna learn more about Dr. Goldhammer and his works, pick up the pleasure trap book that he co-wrote with Doug Lyle. And where is the best place to direct people online to learn more about what you're doing? Well, if you go to www.truenorthhealth.com, you'll get access to everything you need.

If you wanna learn specifically about fasting, there's a website called fasting.org, which is a fasting compendium website. Cool, and I'll link all that up in the show notes and your phone's gonna start ringing. All right. Come back and talk to me again. Peace.

Plats. Okay. Mind officially blown, right? I don't know how this one landed for you, but that was quite a bit to take in. Again, don't feel like I have to say this, but I should, and I kind of have to say it. Please do not try a water fast at home.

If you're interested, please seek out medical guidance and supervision under somebody specifically trained in this kind of thing. Dr. G isn't much for social media, but if you wanna learn more about him and his work, go to the True North website at healthpromoting.com. Check out his book, The Pleasure Trap, which expands on much of what we talked about today and will not disappoint. Finally, check out the episode page at richroll.com where we have tons of show notes where you can dig deeper into everything

that we talked about today. If you'd like to support the work we do here on the show, subscribe, rate, and comment on it on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Hit that subscribe button on YouTube and also hit that little notification bell so you're always apprised when a new video hits. This one is on video. You're going to want to see it. Go to youtube.com slash richroll to check that out. You can share the show or your favorite episodes with friends on social media. We create all these beautiful assets and quote images and video clips that seem to percolate across the internet. I love seeing that stuff show up. And you can support us on Patreon at richroll.com slash donate. I appreciate my team who works very hard to help me put on the show every week.

Jason Camiello for audio engineering, production, show notes, and interstitial music. Blake Curtis and Margo Lubin for videoing today's show. Jessica Miranda for graphics. Allie Rogers for today's portraits. DK for advertiser relationships and theme music by my boys, Tyler, Trapper, and Hari. I appreciate you guys. I love you. You guys give me the gift of being able to do this and share this information with you. I don't take it for granted. So thank you for tuning in today. And we will be back here soon with another cool episode, TBD. Until then, treat your bodies right.

Be kind, be compassionate. Talk soon. Peace. Namaste. Thank you.