The Rich Roll Podcast - Weight Loss Surgeon Turned PlantPower Crusader

Episode Date: September 19, 2013

Today on the show I have the great pleasure of conversing with Dr. Garth Davis — a veteran weight loss surgeon who took it upon himself to determine exactly why so many people are plagued by obesity; a quest that led him down a deep research hole to identify the ultimate human diet to maximize health — both for himself and his patients. About 6 years ago, the good doctor became his own patient. At the time, he was suffering from high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and a fatty liver. In short, he was pretty sick. Not surprising given the demanding hours of the surgeon lifestyle, lack of exercise, a preference for salty, fatty foods, and the convenience of fast food options in the hospital cafeteria. In fact, there was a Wendy's in the University of Michigan hospital where Garth did his internship and residency, resulting in a daily dose of double cheeseburgers – a habit he maintained for years. Let's just say that I can relate. Conventional dogma in his field is that overweight patients should eat nothing but protein — hop on board the low carb ketosis bandwagon. Without inquiring further, Garth simply bought into this idea as truth. He even wrote a book in 2007 advocating this approach to food, called The Experts Guide To Weight Loss Surgery*. The only problem? This approach to diet failed him and many other friends, colleagues and patients. He knew there had to be a better solution. And his patients needed help beyond knee-jerk surgery. Finally ready for a personal change, he took it upon himself to research — truly research — nutrition for the first time, quite ironically given his profession as a weight loss surgeon. Astoundingly, nutrition just wasn't on the medical school curriculum, and almost never came up as all that relevant in the countless weight loss surgery symposiums he regularly attended. His inquiry went deep. And the more he delved into the peer reviewed research, the more convinced he became that there is absolutely no science to back the long-term health claims surrounding the strongly held belief that if we want to be thin and healthy we should eat a high protein low carbohydrate diet. What did he find? First and foremost, that Western Medicine has been failing us when it comes to the most crucial aspect of maintaining health — nutrition. And that if we want to achieve ideal weight management, optimal health and long-term wellness, we need to turn conventional wisdom on it's head and embrace the idea that humans are herbivores.  That's right. Herbivores.  Sound far-fetched? Before you balk, understand that adopting this way of eating absolutely revolutionized Garth's health beyond what he could have imagined. Not only did he drop the weight that plagued him for years, all of his blood markers suddenly and quite magically normalized. His allergies vanished. His sleep improved, his energy levels skyrocketed and he got off his statin medications. In short, he finally began to walk his talk. As his life began to turn around, he wanted to be an example to his patients. For the first time in his life, he began exercising. Then he did the extraordinary. Despite never having been an athlete, in 2011 he nonetheless completed Ironman Texas in 12 hours and 6 minutes. His personal results nothing short of extraordinary, Garth has now become somewhat of a crusader to teach people real nutrition. How to read scientific literature, and how the internet pseudo-experts are manipulating the science to push high protein diet. And now he's in the midst of writing a book on the subject. 

Hey, everybody. Before we begin, I just wanted to thank you. Today will mark our 50th episode of the podcast. And when I started this show back in December, I would have never dreamed that it would have developed the audience that it has. It's all because of you guys. And I just wanted to thank you for all the support. If you've been enjoying the show, the only thing we ask is that you tell a friend. And if you haven't done so already, go to richroll.com and sign up for our newsletter so you can be the first to be apprised of all the great trading and nutrition information I'm going to start sharing, exclusive content, podcast updates, giveaways, product offers, all kinds of good stuff. And if you've been using the Amazon

banner ad at richroll.com for your Amazon purchases, we thank you. Please keep doing so. Thanks for the support and onto the show. The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, everybody. I'm Rich Roll, and this is The Rich Roll Podcast. Welcome to the show. If you're new to the show, who am I? Well, I am an ultra-distance triathlete, multi-sport athlete, avid outdoors person living in beautiful Southern California.

I am a father of four lovely children, married about a little over 10 years, been together about 15. I am an author. I wrote a book called Finding Ultra, which you can find on Amazon, sort of an inspirational memoir of my journey from overweight, unfit, disaffected, depressed, middle-aged guy to being the athlete that I am today and the outspoken advocate of plant-based nutrition, the plant power revolution, which is a big subject on this show.

What else do I do? I'm a public speaker. As a matter of fact, I got a couple gigs coming up. I'm gonna be in Tucson on September 21st as part of the Healthy You Network. If you've been listening to the show, you've heard Dr. Michael Greger. He's gonna be there with me as well.

And Colleen Patrick-Goudreau, I believe, is speaking. So if you wanna learn more about that, go to healthyyounetwork.org, Tucson, September 21st. Then I'm gonna be in DC at the DC VegFest. That is September 28th. I'm speaking on Saturday afternoon. So that's gonna be a good time. I spoke at that one last year. It was a lot of afternoon. So that's going to be a good time. I spoke at that

one last year. It was a lot of fun. Good to be back in my hometown. So I'm really looking forward to that. What else do I do? Well, I guess I'm a lifestyle entrepreneur, whatever that means. I don't even know what that means. That sounds weird, actually. I just like spreading a healthy message. And what do we do here on the podcast? Well, I try to bring to you each week a wide variety of guests, some of which you may have heard of and many, many more, which you may not have, which is part of the fun of the show is introducing new faces and new personalities, people that I find compelling that I think we can all learn from. So I've had world class athletes on, I've had doctors, I've had nutritionists, I've had entrepreneurs, lots of different kinds of athletes in all

different kinds of sports. If you listen to my last episode with Tank Sade, I mean, that's certainly kind of off the mainstream radar, but I found his message to be really interesting and fascinating, particularly when it comes to the sort of spiritual, mental, and emotional aspects of preparing for athletic performance. And what he does as a free diver is so different from the kind of sports that we're generally accustomed to. But I think the principles and how he approaches what he does from a mental, emotional, and spiritual perspective is certainly applicable to whatever sport it is that you are trying to excel at, and more importantly, in your daily life. So I hope you enjoyed that. He was a cool guy. Today we have great guest, Dr. Garth Davis. I've been trying to get him on the show

for quite some time, so I'm glad we hooked it up. This is a Skype call just because Garth lives in the Houston area, and I didn't have any plans on being in Houston anytime soon, and he didn't have any plans on being in L.A. So rather than wait until our paths crossed in person, I figured this was a good guy to hook it up over the Internet. is a really interesting guy, not just because he's a doctor and has medical expertise and has a lot of interesting opinions about plant-based nutrition, but his personal story is also quite fascinating. He's a veteran weight loss surgeon. He manages the Davis Clinic in the Houston area, which is basically a weight loss management clinic. He performs weight loss surgery, like, you know, sort of those surgeries where you have part of your colon taken out or your stomach stitched up and the like. And he's learned a lot from dealing

with many, many thousands of patients that battle with obesity and how to kind of course correct their life. And on a personal level, he was a guy who was treating all these patients for this condition and was talking the talk, but wasn't exactly walking the walk in his own personal life. He had come to a point about six years ago, I believe, where he was overweight. He had elevated cholesterol, elevated blood pressure. He had a fatty liver, but more importantly, he felt lousy. He had elevated cholesterol, elevated blood pressure. He had a fatty liver, but more importantly, he felt lousy. He had terrible GI problems and just was sort of ready to chalk it up to middle age. And this is what a 40-year-old guy just kind of feels like,

and I'll take the prescription medications that everyone else is taking and go on my way. But he decided that that wasn't going to be enough for him. And he took it upon himself to study nutrition for the first time, despite being a medical doctor who was treating obese patients. He had never had the training or the sort of professional inclination to really take the mantle upon himself and read all the scientific literature, study and understand what's really going on with nutrition, what the misconceptions are, and what the best possible diet is to maintain your health and optimize your wellness. And I'll let him get into the details of it, but suffice it to say that after a tremendous amount of time and energy and hard work on his part, he came to the conclusion that a plant-based diet is best.

He implemented it into his own life. He balanced out all of his health issues, which all sort of magically resolved themselves and actually took it to the next level when he competed in Ironman Texas in 2011. So it's quite a transformation story on a personal level, but now it's about how he treats his patients differently based upon this knowledge that he has. And in the interview, it's great to have a real doctor who understands this stuff on and we can put all our propeller hats on and geek out on all the science. And he has some fascinating opinions about, most particularly, at least from my perspective, on this low-carb craze and, you know, what's going

on with all of that. And I guess most specifically, our obsession with protein. And in fact, he's writing a book at the moment about that subject called The Protein Obsession, where he talks about how we got to this place where we're obsessed with protein and we think protein is the solution to obesity and all of these sort of diet crazes that revolve around the high-protein, low-carb diet. And he expresses himself quite vehemently in what his perspective is on this. So he's a great guest to have. I'm really excited to share his wealth of information with you. Before we get to the show, I just want to make a couple really quick announcements. If you haven't checked it out yet, please go to mindbodygreen.com and check out our

Ultimate Guide to Plant-Based Nutrition. It's the course that Julie, my wife, and I put together in partnership with MindBody Green to help kickstart you onto your plant power lifestyle. So essentially what it is, is about three and a half hours of online streaming video broken up into five to 10 minute chunks, streaming video broken up into five to 10 minute chunks, all subject specific that address basically every issue and topic that comes up that revolves around transitioning your diet to eating more plant-based. So whether you're just plant curious, brand new to this idea, want to try out a little bit more fruits and vegetables in your diet, or whether you want to go 100% plant-based right off the bat, or maybe you're even a veteran vegan and just looking to clean things up a little bit or take it to the next level. The course is for everybody.

It's really easy to follow and understand. Also very helpful with a bunch of downloadable PDFs with tools and tips and recipes, et cetera. And we also have an online community there where you can ask your questions or you come up against issues that you need a little bit more extra guidance and advice for. And we chime in there and help you out and the community steps in as well. So we're all supporting each other there. It's great. It's doing really well. We're getting really great feedback from the people that are doing the course or have done the course. really great feedback from the people that are doing the course or have done the course. And I'm really proud of it. So check that out. We also have some products. We're going to be offering a couple different t-shirt designs in the coming weeks. It's taking a little bit of time

because we are reconfiguring the website to turn it into a place where we can create a friendly marketplace to kind of share the wares that we believe in and are behind. And kind of next up are a couple t-shirts that we're really excited to start offering you guys. You might have seen some of the Instagram pictures or Facebook posts or what have you of me wearing the Plant Power t-shirt. I get lots of emails. When can I get it? Where can I get it? How can I get it? How can I get it? Well, it's coming soon. It'll probably be about two weeks and we'll have it up. And then we have another exciting T-shirt design

that I won't divulge right now, but it's pretty awesome. And that will be up for sale soon as well. We also have our Jai Seed digital downloadable PDF cookbook. It's 77 pages of awesome plant power recipes, super easy to prepare and delicious. We have our meditation program, Jai Release, a series of guided MP3 meditation tapes, professionally recorded.

It's a really interesting, different kind of technique that takes all the guesswork and thinking out of meditation and allows you to just focus on focusing, I guess, to get more grounded in what you're doing. I believe in it completely. I use it all the time. I find it to be very helpful. So you can check all that stuff out at richroll.com. And what else? I think that's it. I think we should just get right into the interview. This is a long one. It's a good one. Chalked full of information.

So you're going to want to break out your notepad and start taking notes so you can research further what the good Dr. Garth Davis has to say and take responsibility for your own choices. Because if anything, this podcast is designed to provide you with a ton of information, take what resonates with you, leave the rest, but it's incumbent upon you to take personal responsibility for your decisions, for your diet, for how you move your body. Why? So that you can go on your own journey and we respect you to do so. so that you can go on your own journey. And we respect you to do so. We're not here to tell you what to do or what not to do. It's up to you entirely. I'm just here to share some information. But my goal is that I am providing you with enough quality information so that you can take it upon yourself to unlock and unleash your best, most authentic self. That's my goal. 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 It's a real problem. A problem I'm now happy and proud to share has been solved by the people at recovery.com 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. And they have treatment options for you. Life in recovery is wonderful, and recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery.

To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Garth Davis. So what happened over there? Are you guys having a big storm right now? Or I was all fired up and ready to go, and then I get this email like, the power's out. Yeah. We get these big Texas storms in the afternoons, and it cut out all. I was at home because I figured, gosh, at home it'll be the quietest.

And my whole neighborhood went out. And so I've rushed back over to my office and closed the door, so hopefully we'll be quiet. How does that work when you're performing surgery or at the hospital? I assume they have backup generators and that kind of stuff? Yeah, yeah. The hospital always seems to be intact to this kind of stuff. It's always home. No, the hospital's got backup generators.

They've thought this out before. So everything's good in your office, though, right? Yeah, everything's good in the office. We're good. We're solid. Well, thanks for taking the time to do the podcast. Yeah, no problem. I'm excited about it.

I love your podcast. Oh, thank you, man. I'm trying to remember how you first came across my radar. I know it was Twitter. I can't remember. I think maybe somebody just retweeted something that you had said or something like that, and I looked at your feed and I was like, oh, this guy's this guy's on the game, man. I got to I got to start following this guy. And I've been following you for, I don't know, a couple of years now. But you consistently are putting out great content. And when I started the podcast, I knew I wanted that. I wanted to have you on. So I appreciate it, man. And your story is your story is amazing. I wanted to have you on. So I appreciate it, man. And your story is, uh, your story is amazing. Yeah. Thanks. Uh, well, first of all, much the same with you. I can't remember when you came on my, uh, on my radar, but I, I was like, Oh my God, this is exactly the kind of person I need to,

to hear from. And your, your wife's recipes, I bought your online cookbook there. Uh, it's fantastic. Um, although challenging, I mean, you guys, boy, you eat like a king over there. We try, but some of your – Well, yeah, a lot of that is because my wife is a fabulous cook, so I'm very spoiled and lucky in that regard. But at least with the recipes, I mean, we try to make them really easy to make and quick and simple and no crazy ingredients and stuff like that. So for the most part, I think, you know, most of the recipes in there you can make in 10 or 15 minutes. And we're actually putting together a new cookbook right now, like a real full-fledged, you know, coffee table type thing that we're doing. So we

just have been shooting recipes and coming up with new stuff. So it's going to, it'll be, I don't know, nine months or a year or something like that before it's done. But it's nice to be in the process of putting together more content to put out there. Yeah, it's so important. I mean I really think the future of health, the future of medicine, the future of everything is cooking and how we prepare foods. I mean right now compared to 1970s, I don't know if you know this, we spend about we spend about half our food dollars eating out. Whereas in the 1970s it was less than 20%. And it's this eating out that's, that's really killing us. And so I've been, I actually teach cooking classes to my patients. I do. Yeah. And I try to do the same thing, you know, you do. I try to teach, you know, cheap, quick, easy. I actually use the physician's committee for responsible medicine,

quick, easy. I actually use the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine Food for Life curriculum. Patients love it. You know, people nowadays, they've got no idea. You know, when you say eat vegetables, they're thinking, you know, peas that their mom gave them when they were a kid. They have no idea just how good it could taste and how easy it is to make. So a really important thing. Right, right, right. Yeah. Amazing. I mean, but it wasn't, it wasn't always that way for you though, right? I mean, your story, let's go back to the beginning here and just kind of paint the picture of where you're coming from, because you, you know, I want to start as far back as, as kind of medical school and what you were taught there in terms of preventive medicine and nutrition or more appropriately, I guess I should say, the lack thereof. Right. Yeah, you know, it's funny.

You have to see it. It's so hard to look at someone else and understand what they're thinking without experiencing what they've experienced. In other words, people tend to criticize doctors. But when we're going through medical school, we don't learn nutrition. There was no time where anybody ever said in four years of intensive, intensive study that all of this is because of what we eat. It was just never mentioned. And I never stopped. You know, Hippocrates, the famous quote from him, and we say the Hippocratic Oath, but we leave out the part that says that let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food. That concept is completely foreign to medical school.

At medical school, everything is about – I guess as I went through medical school, I kind of got this image of that we were Delta lemon, that our bodies are inherently broken and inherently messed up. And my body was, my job was to fix these bodies and to fix it through medicines and through surgery. And in all the time that I was in medical school, I only had one hour on nutrition. And that nutrition was not how to prevent disease, but how to give someone nutrition through an IV. Right. And that's very cause and effect. Like here's something that's going on and let's do something as doctors to rectify that.

as doctors to rectify that but it it completely overlooks the cause and effect of how it became so in the first place yeah it completely overlooks it's just not discussed you discuss pathophysiology like you discuss cancer and how it forms but you never discuss the initiating factor for cancer to form you know you never stop and say, cancer may be forming because of high IGF in the body that's related to the meat that you eat or the chronic metabolic acidosis because of lack of fruits and vegetables. That's not discussed. It's simply discussed that cancer begins and here are some chemotherapeutic agents you could use to stop it or the surgery. And that really was my mindset. And you got to understand, it's not just the doctor's mindset. It's also patients' mindsets. I mean, you know, and we could talk about it, but my, my philosophy

has changed so much over the years. But now I got to tell you, when someone comes to me with disease and I first start to approach it with diet, they seem somewhat offended. You know, people, you want to go to doctor and you want a pill. You don't want a doctor to tell you, and you want a pill. You don't want a doctor to tell you, look, this is a lifestyle thing. People want medical silver bullets to treat diseases that are caused by what they're eating. I mean, look at your job, but your job really isn't to give them what they want. It's to give them what they need. Right. Completely true. But, but, you know, it's easier said than done. I mean, with me, with me, people come to me, they know what they're going to get for the most part. But, um, you know, you look like,

I mean, let's take just, you know, the most commonly prescribed drug, a statin. Someone's got high cholesterol. They come to a doctor and the doctor, you know, it'd take forever for the doctor to tell you how to eat properly in order to not need the statin. Number one, doctor to tell you how to eat properly in order to not need the statin, number one. Number two, doctors either don't believe or don't understand that what you eat causes that high cholesterol. Like a lot of them, oh, it's genetic. You know, did your parents have it, et cetera. Number three, they don't believe that even if they knew that diet was going to fix it, if they told you to eat a different diet, that you'd even do it. I mean, doctors just inherently don't believe patients will change and they don't have time. And so the inherent thought is someone's here. They got a problem. I could fix it with this pill. I'm going to fix it with

this pill. And if I didn't fix it with this pill, they'd be pissed off at me. But they like getting the pill and they leave happy. And so everybody's happy. And so, you know, that's the state of medicine. And we're treating diseases caused by what we eat for the most part with pills and surgery. I mean, do you think that's changing at all? You know, there's all this talk about preventive medicine, but, you know, is anything really happening around that other than the kind of outliers like yourself? Yeah, it's mainly happening in outliers. I would say it's edging up because it seems like the younger generation is more likely to be vegetarian. The younger generation is asking questions about nutrition. There is at least a dialogue about nutrition, which was probably somewhat absent many years ago. And I think there's people looking outside of medicine, which is both good and bad.

But in the case of nutrition, it's obviously good. both good and bad, but in the case of nutrition, it's obviously good. You know, I think there is movement towards getting better, but I still see in my colleagues this kind of, you know, it's hard to change dogma, this dogmatic belief that the answer is not in diet, but in, you know, conventional medicine. Right. And like you said, nobody wants to be confronted with or judged, Right. And like you said, nobody wants to be confronted with or judged, you know, based upon their lifestyle choices. But, you know, truly that's the solution to wellness is being able to look in the mirror objectively and course correct where you're going wrong. But that requires work and effort. It's a lot, you know, it's a lot harder than popping a pill or taking a statin and putting your mind at ease and thinking that you've dealt with the problem when actually you're just masking it. Right. And then add to that the confusion about what is the right way to eat. There's that added confusion right there. So, I mean, you can't believe – I'm writing this book right now, and I've been sitting at the library.

I mean, you can take any given topic and there will be articles pro and con for it. And so how do you decide what's right? Well, I could tell you how you decide what's right, but a lot of doctors and all patients don't have the wherewithal to understand how to read these articles and how to decipher what's right and what's wrong in the medical literature, because science can be manipulated. I mean, the manipulation of science is a huge part of what's going on right now. And a lot of it comes from industry. I mean, there was a recent study that showed if you look at articles that were sponsored by dairy in any way, shape or form, 0% of those articles show a problem with dairy. However, if you look at articles about dairy that are not funded by dairy, 50% of them show that dairy has a negative effect.

Right, and there probably aren't that many studies that aren't funded on the impacts of dairy that are not funded by the dairy lobby because who's going to pay for that? that are not funded by the dairy lobby because who's going to pay for that? These, these, these to really do a legitimate study, that's going to stand up and, you know, over time and be legit costs a tremendous amount of money. Exactly. Right. So who's going to, who's going to fund that. And, and you know, I think it is incumbent upon all of us, especially with, you know, that you go on the internet, it's like try to diagnose yourself or learn anything. It's exactly like you said. I mean, you can find any point of view or any study

that's going to support your preconceived notion. Yeah. I mean, I was reading an article the other day. It was in Journal of American Medicine, which is a well-respected journal. I'm reading through it and it's arguing that saturated fat decreased the progression, not stopped, but decreased the progression of coronary artery disease. And this just blew my mind because this is just not true. Every other article I've read. And I'm going through it. I'm looking at their methods and how they do it. And I'm noticing problems with their statistics and stuff.

But still, I'm like, gosh, where did they even come up with this? At the end, I look at financial disclosure. The lead author, this whole salary was funded by Atkins. Right. And who's going to take the time to sift through that, you know, with a microscope and, you know, get to the nitty gritty of what's really going on. I mean, there's an expectation that people are not going to do that. Right. Exactly. You know, a lot of these people, like, I don't know if you know, Gary Taubes and his book, uh, um, yeah, good calorie, bad calorie. Very, very much so. And I, I want to get into the whole, you know, kind of high carb, uh, high fat, you know, paleo obsession and all of that. And,

and when I get into kind of discussions about this you just end up going around the merry-go-round but the name gary taubes gets thrown around quite a bit so yeah why don't you elucidate a little bit more on on where this guy's coming from what his point of view is and kind of you know your perspective on it right sure um well we do you want me to kind of go back through my history is how i got to this and then we could yeah yeah yeah i mean why don't we do that well you know so you you basically go through medical school like every other you know every other medical student you begin your your medical career and kind of you know paint the picture a little bit about where things were

not too long you know i start my residency and the I look back on it now, although it wasn't clear to me at the time, we are in medicine treating a disease. We're not treating a patient. The patient's like a bystander. For instance, we would go on rounds and we would talk about the colon cancer in room one, the gallbladder in room two. It wasn't Mrs. Smith with a colon cancer. And everything, we just didn't, you know, we didn't treat the patient, ask them what they're eating, ask them how their life is. We would go in, it was a colon cancer, we would take it out. And now it was almost like the patient was a complete bystander. Just show up to your appointments, take these pills,

and that's it. And that's, you know, that was all fine with me. That just seemed like that's what medicine was. And that's what I had been trained to do. But I guess there was probably some kind of nagging thought in the background. I mean, as I look back, I could tell that there were, I was having problems with it because at the time I was starting to look into meditation and other forms of medicine and looking at alternative medicines. And, you know, this was very discouraged by my colleagues, but it was an interest of mine. But, you know, I kept doing what I was doing. Now, at the same time, I was getting kind of overweight. You know, in residency, you know, they have, you know, the freshman 15 with college.

Well, it's like the freshman 30 with residency because, you know, we're working 100 hours in the hospital the whole time. And, you know, the ultimate of irony, there is a Wendy's in my hospital that I'm training at. This is at University of Michigan, right? University of Michigan, one of the premier top hospitals, you know, U.S. World News Report, top five, top ten every year. Wendy's in the, you know, I'd line up for a Wendy's, and in that line would be patients with their IV poles, you know, going off to their cardiologist with their double cheeseburgers.

So I would eat double cheeseburgers like crazy. I mean, it was, you know, I love double cheeseburgers and, um, I got, uh, they give us these little Wendy's dollars and I ate tons and tons of this food. And then, um, you know, started getting overweight as did all of my colleagues. And we kind of, you know, boy, we look really bad. Uh, and so we decided to go on a diet. We didn't nothing about diets, you know, like I said, we weren't taught that. So we all went on Atkins because that's the rage. And that seemed pretty easy. I just leave the bun off my cheeseburger. And so we did this. We all got sick on that. Lost some weight, put some weight back on. And then I just thought, ah, forget this dieting. I'm just going to go on with my life. I go start my practice and I'm doing general surgery. And at that time,

the chairman of surgery department kind of calls me in because I'm a young guy and says, what do you think about this obesity problem we're having in the country? I mean, it's getting worse and worse. And look at these studies on surgery. I go and visit a couple of places that are doing the surgery. The results are pretty dramatic. And, you know, this is kind of what I went into medicine for. There's a problem. I can fix it and I could use my hands to do so. Okay, perfect. So I start getting into the field of bariatric surgery, people coming in overweight. Now, funny enough, again, you would think that part of a history and physical, I mean, I'm asking them, you know, you know, are allergic to this, what surgeries have you had, what medicines have you, what do you take? I have never, I never in

the beginning of my bariatric surgery career, did I ever ask someone what they eat on a daily basis. Right, right. And explain what bariatric surgery is. So it's weight loss surgery. So we were doing like lap bands, putting bands around the stomach to prevent weight loss or doing mainly gastric bypass, which is cutting the stomach, making it smaller, dividing the intestine and bringing it up and joining it to this little smaller stomach. And there's some other surgeries, sleeve gastric, we do it in a switch. But anyway, basically, the long and short of it is that we do a surgery to make your stomach smaller so you can eat less. And the results are very good.

I mean, in fact, they're probably too good. good. I mean, in fact, they're probably too good. And I say that because the one thing the bariatric surgery community has done has done a lot of science behind it. And the science is very compelling. People lose weight, their diseases go away. Nowadays, it's done very safely. And there's this kind of movement towards doing more surgery, which you think would make me happy. But there's several problems with this. There's about 15 to 16 million people that would qualify for surgery. That means their body mass index is above 35, making them morbidly obese. But now they're even talking about doing it in people with a body mass index above 30. That's 60% of our country. There's not enough surgeons to do that and not enough money to do surgery on everybody who's overweight. Secondly, as I got into this over years and years, I started

seeing people coming back, starting to gain weight. Now, the numbers are still really good. I mean, far better than any kind of diet, but people are gaining weight. And that, you know, that felt kind of bad. I was all excited. You know, we'd take the one year post-op picture with my patients and everybody's smiling and they've lost weight and they're holding their small jeans. Two years later, they are so upset because they've been shown a glimpse of what life is like being skinny. And for these patients, it's horrible being morbidly obese. You can't imagine how horrible it is. And so they've been given a glimpse.

They get this glimpse of what it's like and now all of a sudden they're going back to it. And what can I do to stop that? Well, I can't do anything anymore. I've done the surgery. What else can be happening? But just to back up a little bit, I mean the effectiveness of these procedures is related to, I guess you could call it like a dampening of the appetite response, right? When you shrink the stomach, there's some sort of physiological impact on your hunger impulse.

Is that fair to say? Yeah, that's exactly right. There's a couple things. So we're making the stomach smaller so you just can't eat as much. You know, you get full a lot faster. Number two, in most of the surgeries, we're excluding part of the stomach,

the greater curve and fundus of the stomach, which has these cells in it that secrete a hormone called ghrelin. And ghrelin feeds back to the hypothalamus in the brain, which is the center that gives us our drive, drive to eat, drive to breathe, et cetera. And it stimulates hunger. And by bypassing or excising that part of the stomach, the hunger reduces considerably. There's also, especially with gastric bypass, a plan, a whole bunch of different hormones. So the one thing we've noticed with gastric bypass is just a tremendous cure of type two diabetes. And that is partly because of several different changes in hormone GLP-1, GIP, kind of boring stuff. but the fact of the matter is you get this very dramatic response to diabetes.

And so, yeah, the surgeries are both mechanical and physiologic in their changes in hormones. Right. And, you know, I know some people that have had, I don't know which procedure exactly they've had, but I've seen it, you know, be effective. I know one guy who had it years ago and he's, he was incredibly obese and has been able to manage his weight and seems to be doing well. Um, and other people, you know, not so good. And I just heard something, uh, a brother or a cousin of somebody that I know had it and, and something went wrong and he ended up in a, they induced a coma, I believe. I don't know what went wrong, but maybe you have a better idea of what that might be. But

you know, for you, it's probably like, well, I do this all the time and there's, you know, from your perspective, it's safe, but you know, not to be mistaken, it's still a surgical procedure. I mean, this is pretty severe for people that are trying to lose weight, right? a surgical procedure. I mean, this is pretty severe for people that are trying to lose weight, right? It is. It's very severe. It's very invasive. There are risks. I mean, nowadays, we've got it in the hands of someone who does a lot of them and who is an expert at it. It's a very safe procedure, but when it goes wrong, it could go really badly wrong. And so it's not to be entered in lightly. Now, of course, with our patients, we go through a risk-benefits analysis.

And I'm dealing with people with diabetes and high blood pressure, morbidly obese. Their knees are shot. And this is really their only chance. And the studies show, quite honestly, that they have more chance of dying if they don't get the surgery than if they get it. So, you know, the surgeries are very effective. Okay. So, so with these sort of recidivists, these people that are coming back or putting the weight back on, what are you starting to notice? Okay. So they're coming back in and I don't know quite what to do with it. So I'm going to our national meetings

and we're bringing it up. And again, our funny thing is that the American Society of Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery is a fantastic society. And here are the brightest minds. I mean, you can't believe how smart these people are. Everybody is studying the disease of obesity from microscopic levels to epidemiologic studies and really, really well done science. And yet when we talk about this recidivism, all we talk about is revision surgery. In other words, what can we do to change what surgery we did before? Can we make the stomach smaller or can we bypass more of the intestine? we did before? Can we make the stomach smaller or can we bypass more of the intestine? In other words, I sit through these week-long conferences and no one is mentioning nutrition. And if they

do mention nutrition, funny enough, it's all high protein. It's all about, well, okay, we just need to put them on more protein, more protein, more protein. And that's based on what? This sort of Atkins perspective or where is that coming from? Exactly. So everything is so well-researched, I decide, well, there must be – they're recommending 100 grams to 120 grams of protein a day for my patients. This must have some scientific backing. So I go to my journals, nothing.

I can find absolutely nothing. How long ago was this? This is like eight years ago or something. Six, 2007. Uh, not, not even 10 years ago. Um, and, uh, I'm looking through this and I, it's just not, you know, it's not adding up. So I started asking, you know, the patients are coming into me. And so I started asking questions I haven't asked before. What are you eating? Take me through a day eating. Everybody's like, I'm doing exactly what you say.

I'm getting 100 grams of protein. I'm having my protein shake in the morning. I'm eating chicken or ham or turkey. I'm doing my eggs. You know, it's just a long list. It's like a slaughterhouse of animals that they're eating on a daily basis. And I started asking patients just coming in, you know, for first-time surgery. It's amazing to me.

You don't realize how amazing it is until you step back and look at it. But in America, meat is the center point of every single meal. And as I've gotten more and more into this, I've started to ask patients, what do you think is making you overweight? And everybody says carbs. It's the carbs I eat because I had a Snickers yesterday or I had an ice cream or I eat pretzels from time to time. But when I look at their diet log, it is absolutely loaded calorie-based. It's always eggs and bacon for breakfast. It just seems like every single one. It's always eggs and bacon for breakfast. It just seems like every single one of my patients has eggs and bacon for breakfast.

Everybody has a sandwich for lunch. Everybody has steak, or if they think they're being healthy, and we could get to this, if you think you're being healthy, you're eating chicken for dinner. And it's remarkable to a T. In 13 years now or 12 years of doing weight loss and weight loss surgery, I've never operated on a vegetarian. No one's ever come in and said, you know, I'm just eating too much. And for that matter, I mean, I guess we know that no one's getting fat on broccoli. But no one's come in and said, man, I'm eating too many grapes or I'm eating too many bananas, which some people think are bad for you. I mean, I guess conceivably, you know, I don't know.

I don't know personally of any morbidly obese vegetarian. But if you ate French fries and drank Coca-Cola all day long, I suppose you could get there. There's no question you could get there. And we certainly do run into carbotarians, I would say, or my little girl who my one daughter decided she's going to become a vegetarian. She's six years old. She's like, I don't want to eat any more animals, daddy. The other one said, well, I'm going to be a canditarian and just eat candy. And so I certainly- I like the commitment. Yeah. And she's committed to it, believe me.

So a tremendous amount of saturated fat and protein essentially, but they're saying, well, it's a Snickers bar, but they're overlooking protein essentially but they're they're saying well it's a snickers bar but they're overlooking like you know everything else that they're kind of putting into their body on a daily basis because they think everything else is good they think the protein shake that they're eating and they bring in these protein shakes and ironically although it wasn't completely ironic to me in the beginning but ironically here they're drinking these protein shakes that i then see at the gym for guys that are trying to gain weight. You know what I mean? It's like, it's just like, yeah, like these companies are, are selling on the one hand for weightless and on the other hand for weight gain. And, uh, and,

you know, which one does it matter for? And so I start, I really start to question stuff. Now, meanwhile, at the same time, two other things are happening. The other kind of minor thing, but, but was in the back of my mind is that some of my patients, I'm amazed at their success. And they tell me how not they just lost weight, but all of a sudden they're eating better. We're not really getting in yet to what they're eating. That's making them eat better. And they feel fantastic. And they're having this complete life change. Like they were this couch potato cheeseburger eating person. Now they're the salad eating, running marathons in Ironman and stuff like that. And this is inspiring to me because I keep

thinking when they tell me this, it'd be like, God, it'd be incredible to just have this midlife change. You know, it just seems, I always thought, you know, you can't teach an old dog new tricks. You know, once you pass 40, that's it. Your life is what it is. And, you know, you're going to be what you're going to be. And then along that same time, I went and got my eyes examined for glasses. And the optometrist was very concerned. And she stopped. She said, you know, you've got a lot of cholesterol in the vessels in your eyes. And I don't usually see this except in really old patients.

And she said, you really need to get your cholesterol levels cholesterol levels checked and kind of took me aback a little bit so essentially like cholesterol deposits in your in in the little the veins in your eye yeah yeah that and you get this thing called arcus senus, which again is senilus meaning like in older people. And that's what I had. And it comes from high cholesterol. And so I go and get my cholesterol checked. Meanwhile, my wife's pregnant with our first child, so I'm going to get a life insurance policy. And so I needed to get this checked anyway.

My cholesterol is sky high. My triglycerides are sky high. And my blood pressure is high. And, you know, of course, I go and see my internal medicine buddy. And he's like, yeah, look, and my blood pressure is high. And, you know, of course I go and see my internal medicine buddy and he's like, yeah, look, no big deal. Uh, I'll put you on a statin. We'll put you on some aspirin and we'll put you on a beta blocker and, uh, everything will be fine. Now, of course, the beta blocker could cause this problem, that problem and that problem. And this time it could cause muscle pain, this problem, that problem and that problem and that problem but uh but no big deal right it's oh you know i kind of went home with my prescriptions and

and you know i tell people this all the time in fact the funny thing to me about a lot of these diseases is that it's become so common in western culture we don't need patients don't even bat an eye you know say to them look you've got hypertension and diabetes and they're like oh boy that's bad all right what do you got for me you me? You know what I mean? It's like, okay. Typical middle-aged American male. Exactly. So for a moment, I kind of accepted my lot in life. I just said, well, that's who I am. That's my genetics or whatever. And I got bad luck, but I'll take care of it with these medicines. And, but it just started to weigh on me like, God, you know, what am I doing? I mean, what am I eating every day? How is this all fitting in? And is this right? And I guess as a doctor who's performing bariatric surgery at the same time, there's this weird kind of disconnect happening between the life that you're leading and kind of, you know, what you're seeing in your patients and what you're advising. and kind of, you know, what you're seeing in your patients and what you're advising.

Right, exactly. Like I felt, I felt, I felt like a hypocrite. Like how, how could I, or who was I to tell a patient to eat better if first of all, I wasn't eating better and not that I thought I was eating badly. I mean, I was having the eggs, you know, at the doctor's lounge for breakfast, a sandwich for lunch and, you know and occasionally steak or chicken for dinner. But I didn't know exactly what the right way to eat was. I usually just sent my patients to a dietician who, funny enough, would tell them the 80 to 120 grams of protein. But I wasn't exercising. I was busy. And so I was starting to feel like a bit of a hypocrite. How could I tell them to exercise if I wasn't exercising? And the funny thing is like this one Houston paper because I had this TV show that came out about me doing weight loss surgery that was a national show. And I was getting a lot of publicity.

And so they wanted to do an expose of me and they wanted to do a picture of me like running stairs. an expose of me and they wanted to do a picture of me like running stairs, you know? Which I think I read that you said, you know, when your patients would say, well, what do you do? And you would tell them that you do that, but not really clarifying that maybe you had done that at one point in the past, but this is not exactly a daily practice of yours. Right. Not exactly daily. And so they had me out there running these stairs and I'm like running them and I am really feeling sick.

And at one point I'm like, I'm going to throw up. Right. And so I'm like, I got to go there. Like one last shot. And the funny thing is the last shot that they got, I still have it hanging and I laugh at it all the time because right after that shot, I actually threw up. And at that point I was just feeling really low. I'd written a book about weight loss surgery, and there was a diet section in it. And that book is extremely well-researched except for the chapter on diet.

I mean of all chapters in a bariatric book, the diet chapters, I just said, hey, do zone diet. That's what they say at our national meetings. We always tell people to eat vegetables vegetables but that's kind of like a you know it's lip service right you know eat your veggies and uh but eat a whole bunch of protein eat protein first etc what all my other doctors were telling their patients and and so at this point in time i said this is this is there's got to be something wrong right at this point in time you're just sort of buying into this high-protein concept without really looking into it yourself or taking the time to do your own inquiry. Exactly.

And you're overweight. You're not like obese or anything like that. But what are you pushing the scales at around this time? Right. I was probably 195 and big belly, skinny arms, skinny legs, the worst possible scenario, you know, he could come up with, um, much like my father who had diabetes. Uh, and so, you know, I'm just, I have fallen in my father's shape. Uh, it's too bad for me. Um, never really thinking I could change it, but I studied everything else in such detail with my patients. I'm going to give them a medicine.

If I'm going to do a surgery, I want to know every possible little research article about it. And so I decided to start doing that with diet. And I guess the thing that got me was I never – I was very defensive of Western medicine. Like no one could ever tell me that western medicine was bad because it you know it just seemed to me like it was the only like uh you know how could you do anything else anywhere else but there was a study that had come out looking at the health of different nations and i was shocked and now it seems so common sense but back then i was absolutely shocked at how poor the longevity was in america uh something like 55 out of civilized countries.

And countries like Okinawa were like number one, Sardinian kind of places. How could that possibly be? How could in Okinawa where they don't, you get a headache, I could get a CAT scan on you in one minute. I mean, they can't do that in Okinawa. How could they possibly have more longevity than we do? one minute. I mean, they can't do that in Okinawa. How could they possibly have more longevity than we do? Yeah, it's an interesting mashup of the kind of God complex syndrome that I assume occurs in, you know, Western medicine doctors and this sort of disinclination to look at something that

ancestrally has been very successful. I mean, I assume these are like the blue zone places, right? Like I think there was a book that came out called Blue Zones, right? Where all these cultures that remain kind of untouched by, you know, the gestalt of modern progress and yet remain so incredibly healthy. And so I read that Blue Zone book. That book had a huge impact on me. It's a small book. It's a short book. There's not a lot of heavy science in it.

There's a lot of speculation, so I didn't take it for its face value exactly. It's observation, right? We went to Okinawa. This is what these guys are doing. They've got a close-knit family. They walk around. They don't smoke. And, oh, they eat a lot ofwa. This is what these guys are doing. They got a close-knit family. They walk around. They don't smoke. And, oh, they eat a lot of vegetables. Same with this.

Same with this. But then they mentioned one blue zone that really got me, and that was the Seventh Day of Venice. I was shocked that there was a blue zone in America. Yeah, that's right. And why the – Outside of Los Angeles, right? Right. Belinda, California.

Why are they so healthy there? And it's because that's where the Seventh-day Adventists are, and the Seventh-day Adventists are vegan. But an interesting population to study because no one is going to follow all the rules. You know, there's going to be people that are vegan, there are people that are not vegan, people that are semi-vegan, et cetera, et cetera. And so as I start looking into the research there, you know, oh, my gosh, there's a million studies on Seventh-day Adventists. These really, really well-done epidemiologic studies comparing meat eaters versus lacto-ovo vegetarians versus pesco-vegetarians versus vegans and studying who gets cancer and who gets heart disease and who lives longer. And this is in a population that's fairly controlled. I mean, they're under the same environmental influences. They are exercising the

same. And the only difference really is what they're eating. And the data is amazing. It doesn't matter what you look at. If you look at heart disease, if you look at diabetes, if you look at longevity, it's all the same. The more meat eating, the more they have those things, the more vegan, the less, I mean, the vegans had almost no diabetes whatsoever, very little heart disease, live longer than all the other groups. And this was amazing. And so I start looking at the other blue zones and really looking into their history and what they're eating. And I look at the Okinawans, they get about 5% of their calories from protein, whereas we get, you know, 20% and we're trying to push people to eat more protein. And so I start looking specifically at protein

and I'm shocked the more protein a country has, uh, or, or consumes the worst their health is on these other studies. Whereas the less the protein that's consumed and the more that the, here's what really got me. It's not just the less protein, the more carbs that are consumed. To me at this point, just following, you know, kind of lay media, lay medicine, carbs are horrible. What could be worse than starchy carbs? And yet the Okinawans are eating mainly yams. I mean, they're mainly eating starch. And so this really set off a huge amount. I mean, They're mainly eating starch. And so this really set off a huge amount.

I mean I've been in – I started going to different national – I joined the American Society of Bariatric Medicine. I started going to all these different nutrition society meetings. I started studying like crazy. And the answer, no matter where I look at it, no matter how I look at it, is that a plant-based diet is the answer to just about all of our problems. It's the reason that we're getting sick and sick and sicker. And I start seeing in my patients that this predominance of meat in their diet. And what if I could change that? And what if I could change it to myself? And so I made a vow, first of all, not to be a hypocrite anymore. And so I'm going to change it to myself. And it was tough in the, first of all, not to be a hypocrite anymore. And so I'm going to change it to myself. And it was tough in the beginning.

I mean I was a big-time meat eater. But a lot of things – we kind of touched on this with the cooking and stuff. But at the same time, I'm trying to get healthy and I'm looking – it was time for a vacation. I decided I'd go to this yoga resort and I would do this like yoga in Costa Rica. And I'm down there and I'm going to learn to meditate because I think maybe that'll help my cholesterol stuff. I'm still not quite into the diet part yet. And I get down there and when I get there, I find out it's a vegetarian place and I'm shocked because at this point, you know, I'm like, I've never eaten a vegetarian meal. I literally had never eaten.

Right. Surprise, we're vegetarian. We can call this a dish for you and it'll be here in two days. And I'm shocked, but the meals there were unbelievable. It was a great start to my vegetarian diet because I'd never eaten so well. In fact, it completely messed up my meditation because I'm sitting there meditating like, oh, I wonder what's for lunch. I became consumed with this food. I went and I talked to the cook, and the cook was this French guy. He's in the kitchen whistling, just like you picture it on this beautiful day. And I go in there like, listen, I've never felt better in my life.

I feel fantastic. This food's incredible. What is it about this food that's so great? Do you have cookbooks? What is it about it? He goes, well, first of all, my most important ingredient is love. This food is made with love. And funny enough, that has rung true to this day. So

when I got back and I decided with my wife that we were going to change our diets, that was part of it. Not only are we going to eat a plant-based diet, but it's going to be a diet made with love. No longer is it going to be grease and oil and food that's been tortured and et cetera, et cetera. I could go on and on. It's going to be food made with love. And that became kind of our model. And it was big, you know, in the beginning, it was really hard. I mean, I was so used to cheeseburgers. So I just went to veggie burgers. You know, I was like, okay, I'm going to be vegetarian, just eat veggie burgers all day. And that's not going to cut it. But slowly we learned how to eat differently. We learned how to cook, which was the most important thing. We learned how to go to farmers markets and shopping.

And I think the important thing is that I try to explain this to patients, to people. You don't understand until you go through it, but your tastes change. In other words, I used to love a cheeseburger. Now, it's not that I don't eat a cheeseburger now because I want my cholesterol to stay low. I don't eat a cheeseburger because it absolutely disgusts me. I mean, the idea of chewing on the flesh of this poor, tortured animal that has all these chemicals in it that was then, you know, being fried by some 17-year-old kid in the back who doesn't care about it, you know what I mean? That changes your taste. You don't want... I mean, a couple things. I mean, first of all, this idea of, you know, sort of only eating foods

that are made with love. I mean, it implies this idea that, you know, sort of only eating foods that are made with love. I mean, it implies this idea that, you know, the vibration that your food carries has an impact on how you feel and your health. And that's certainly, you know, really kind of outside the rubric of the, you know, the Western doctor or the scientist. I mean, that's, you know, that's really going out on a limb for somebody who's coming from your educational background and your experience to kind of embrace that idea, which is really kind of a more of a faith based way of approaching what you're putting into your body. Right. Right. But, you know, I think at this time I'm starting to have some serious doubts about Western medicine.

I'm starting to see its failures everywhere. I mean, every patient that comes into me is, I mean, you know, every single patient that comes in this office has high blood pressure, high cholesterol, more than likely to have diabetes. They're all overweight and they're all eating the same thing. And it's being perpetuated over and over again. And I say that, you know, as I start to change my diet and I start going over with patients what to eat, I tell them, you know, have a grapefruit for breakfast. And I say, well, I can't eat a grapefruit because it interferes with my statin that I'm taking to

treat my cholesterol. And the irony of that, you know, if you were just eating the grapefruit, you wouldn't, it's all starting to come to me now, right? The irony. And I mean, many things are happening at the same time. I'm changing my diet and I'm feeling like I've never felt before. Another thing we didn't talk about, but I had the worst, I mean, it's embarrassing to talk about this kind of stuff. I had the worst GI system in the world. I mean, I had irritable bowel syndrome to the nth degree to the point that it, it really affected my life. Like life was miserable, but I just thought that's how everybody was, you know? That's the deal, right? I mean, and to touch on this cravings thing, and I talk about this on the podcast all the time, but you know, this idea of, of going

from a cheeseburger lover to somebody who, you know, you just don't desire it anymore. Like, it just doesn't come up in your mind as something that you crave. I think as a result of, you know, you really do have to put distance between yourself and that food for a period of time and allow your body to kind of adapt and change. And, you know, I think it's very popular right now, these diet, like the slow carb diet where you get a cheat day. And, you know, if you're going to eat a cheeseburger every Sunday, cause that's what you love and that's your cheat day, you're always going to remain a prisoner to that craving. And you're going to walk

around the other five days of the week, you know, dreaming of your cheat day when you're going to get to eat that. And, and you. And you remain a slave, you know, whereas if you can just break that cycle and start eating the foods that nourish you and change the microbial ecology in your gut and start to get used to these different foods that are actually nourishing you, those cravings will dissipate. You know, you just, you have to weather a little bit of a storm and get to the other side of it. And, you know, I like how you said that you just started off with, with veggie burgers, you know, it's like, you got to start somewhere, you know, and I think for, you know, not everybody's going to be ready to jump in whole hog completely 100% out of the blue and do it perfectly. And it's

that idea of perfection that I think trips people up. You know, you just have to start. You have to start making little choices, little differences, and then, you know, embark on your journey. Yeah, and I do this with my patients now. But I had read – I started reading a lot because I figured, gosh. In fact, when I first – I would describe when I first started reading all these research papers and really looking into it and wondering why I'd never been taught this before. My first thing was fear. Like, oh, my God, I know the answer now, but I don't know if I can actually change. Like, I don't know if I could actually change my habits.

Because I still have this belief that you can't change it. Once you hit 40, that's it. That's you are who you are. But I started reading about behavioral therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy and how to change habits. And I use a lot of these techniques with my patients. And I copied a lot of things. Like I started doing aversion therapy, for instance, which is I would take a picture of myself that I did not like. I've got this one picture.

I just couldn't stand it myself. And I would put a picture of a cheeseburger next to it, you know, and kind of implanted my mind this idea that cheeseburger gets me this both when i look at it consciously and when i look at it subconsciously and then i would take pictures are you gonna email me that picture and uh yeah maybe it'll show up in my book i put it up i was giving a conference to 800 people and i put it up and i i put i switched the slide so fast i don't think anybody saw uh But, um, well, I saw your picture. Like you have a picture like that too, out on the beach. Um, yeah, I mean, it's, yeah, I mean, I'm not looking great, you know what I mean? But it's not, it's kind of like, it's kind of like you, like I never,

some people say to me, well, you weren't that, that bad. Not, and I, and my response to that is, well, that's really more of a, you know, sort of, um, indictment of, sort of indictment of how we perceive obesity. You know what I mean? Like I was 210. I wasn't huge. I was like, oh, yeah, you're a 40-year-old guy who's working 80-hour weeks. That's what you look like. You know what I mean?

Right. It's not abnormal really. Right. And worse yet, and I see this a lot in my patients. My patients will lose weight and their family will get mad at them and say, you look too skinny. And the reason is, you've got to understand, 66% of our country is overweight. The norm now is to have fat on you. And so if you don't have fat on you, people think you're unhealthy.

Yeah, you don't look right. Like go back and look at the Guinness Book of World Records from like 1976 and they have the picture of the fattest man or the fat man. He doesn't look that bad you know where i remember looking at that as a kid thinking that guy's enormous but you know there's so all you have to do is go to the airport now and you see you know 30 people that are equally as heavy as that guy in the guinness book of world records it's our cultural norms have shifted right and then the opposite thing i was doing is i would take a picture of what my goals were you know someone looking really healthy and i would put pictures of fruits and vegetables and Right. And then the opposite thing I was doing is I would take a picture of what my goals were.

You know, someone looking really healthy and I would put pictures of fruits and vegetables and that kind of stuff around that picture. I used journaling. I really started. I felt like the more I threw all this information at myself, the more I devoured the science behind it, the more I would convince myself of it. And it started to become true. I mean, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, I started craving kale salads and craving vegetables. And I tell you, I mean, before 30, I can't remember eating a vegetable. I mean, I really don't. And things started to change. I started to feel completely different. My cholesterol level dropped, like plummeted. Triglycerides plummeted. And I started getting an energy level I hadn't had in years. My GI issues went away completely.

I mean, 100% completely, dramatically so. And I started doing it with my patients and it started happening with them too. So I would see patients gaining weight back after surgery and we'd start changing their diet. And they would say, you know, the first response was like, well, you told me protein, protein. I know I told you protein, protein, but let's change this. Let's say fiber, fiber, fiber, fiber now. And it would work. And they would come back each month and it would be smaller and smaller. And it wasn't the surgery that was failing. It was what we told them to do with the surgery. And we always tell people the surgery is a tool. We just weren't giving them the right tools to use.

And over the years, I have seen just such a dramatic change in my patients, and especially comparing my patients to other patients that have had weight loss surgery. My patients look vibrant. They feel vibrant. I'm not going to say that they're vegetarian, but they're eating a hell of a lot more fruits and vegetables than they used to and a hell of a lot more than what's recommended by my society. And my, I guess my confidence in this diet and this change of diet has just rocketed to absolute certainty about this is the way we're supposed to eat as human beings.

And what else has kind of fueled that certainty? Well, you know, there's so many funny things about it because, you know, in all the time that I was eating nothing but cheeseburgers and eggs and bacon, and I would, you know, talk about any kind of diet with a person. Or we would just go and we'd have a steak. No one ever asked me, first of all, how much protein are you getting? Or would they ask me, you know, are you nutritionally okay, right? And then as soon as I become vegetarian, all of a sudden everybody's concerned. Oh, my God, aren't you going to have – and there's so much irony in it because doctors would tell me this,

and I would say, are you looking at your patient's numbers? Because I would do labs on patients when they came in, and every one of these meat eating people is so unbelievably vitamin deficient. It's such an irony to suggest that a vegetarian would have a vitamin deficiency when a meat eater wouldn't. I've never seen such vitamin deficiency as I see when people, every single patient walks in my office has a vitamin deficiency, 100%. What kind of deficiencies are these? I see everything, vitamin D deficiency, B12. I see thiamine deficiencies, folate deficiencies are these? I see everything. Vitamin D deficiency, B12.

I see thiamine deficiencies, folate deficiencies. I see vitamin A deficiency quite a bit. Vitamin C on the low ends of normal, and I wonder if that number shouldn't be higher. And so my vitamin numbers that I check on people are, you know, now you check my numbers and they're through they're through the roof and I don't take supplements. I take a microalgae to get some omega threes. I'm not positive about the benefit of that, but I do it cause I just stopped really eating fish. And occasionally I'll take vitamin D in the wintertime if I'm not getting down to some, that's it. And then occasionally I'll take B12.

I, my B12 level was fine. Uh, I think this, this is an interesting topic, uh, that needs to be studied because I eat a lot of organic vegetables. Uh, and it might be that I'm getting more B12. This is highly debated because there's actually bacteria. You know, when I get my, I get this organic delivery and there's actually worms on my food that I got to wash off. You know, B12 comes from bacteria. So it's not heavily pesticided food I think because my B12 has actually been okay and that's the one area you can see a deficiency in.

Yeah, that's interesting. I mean I take a B12 supplement but I had Tim Van Orden on the podcast a while ago, who's a raw vegan and a very accomplished runner. And he said he doesn't supplement with B12. He gets his, like you're, like you just mentioned, he gets his produce from an organic farm and he just doesn't wash it off that thoroughly. Like he leaves a little bit of the soil on his, on his food. And he's found that by doing that, he has had no issues. Yeah. I mean, I would much rather find a worm in my apple than get one of those shiny red apples from the grocery store. You know, I want something organic. You know, if a bacteria or a worm won't eat it, I don't want to eat it. This idea of McDonald's french fries.

There's the soundbite for the podcast. Right. I love these people, these pictures these people put up on the web about these McDonald's fries. Like this one lady's been carrying around a fry and a cheeseburger she's had for two years and it hasn't molded. And this idea that if a fungus won't eat it, I don't think we should be eating it. And I've kind of lived my life by that. Interesting. So, you know, you left out one thing, which is that you turned your health around so wholesale that you ended up completing an Ironman in 2011, right? You did Ironman Texas?

I did. It was a huge moment in my life. And, you know, it goes back to, number one, watching the patients that did change and how well they did in this, wow, I would like to have that feeling of this complete life change. And number two, feeling so much more energy than I'd ever had before and really starting to get kind of invigorated by this idea that we don't need medicine to get better in life. We can actually start exercising. I started exercising lightly. And I'm doing exercise. I'm feeling better.

But I'm so excited that I was able to change my diet that I'm looking for new ways to change. Like how else can I change myself? And I started to really kind of bring into question this idea that you can't change. Because I had so strongly held on to this notion that you can't change. Cause I had so strongly held on, held onto this notion that you can't change as a person. And, and so I never had ever run before. I had never swam before. And I'd never biked before. I was not an athlete growing up. I was more of a, I guess a bookworm or a sat on the bench type guy. And, and so I started doing triathlons and you know, I never thought I could do a sprint. And then I finished that sprint. I was like, Oh my God, I could do that. Well, maybe I could do an

Olympic. And then, you know, one day I said, I have the Ironman. It always seemed to me that something that other people did, you know, other crazy people, is there any way that I could possibly do it? And I'll tell you when I crossed that finish line, uh, the first thought to myself was I will never believe there's anything impossible again. Anything is possible. And I'm going to believe that not just for myself, but for my patients. And, you know, I think there's a, it's tied over to my patients so much because I'll tell you, these people come in and I see in them something I saw in myself, but to a worse degree, just a belief that they've been given this lot in life, that there's no way they're going to change it. You mentioned something like a marathon.

There's no way. That's just so far out of their idea of reality. And my goal in life is to show them that that is in fact a reality because there's nothing more rewarding for me and for them when that actually sinks in and they realize that they could do so much more than they ever had and that they're not destined to what they thought they were destined to. Yeah, that's extraordinary, man. Congratulations. I mean, that's really – that's very, very inspiring. Yeah, it's incredible. It's a blessing for me.

No, it's impressive for anybody. you know and to think that it wasn't that long ago I mean it all started with that eye exam right and they're kind of kick-started your journey and look in to look where you are right now and to then be in a position a coveted position where you can turn around and be in direct service to the people that you're seeing on a daily basis coming into your into your office you know there's a there's that direct connection of now matching your talk with your walk and, and, uh, kind of, you know, living authentically the message that you're trying to convey to these patients who desperately need your help. Right. And that's what, you know, that's what happened. I think people started, you know, the patients really started connecting with it. They started

connecting with my story and with, you know, they were like, God, you look really good, Dr. Davis, what are you doing? Well, let me tell you what I'm doing. And, and I started to realize that I'm in this position where I could actually do something. And, and so I've really started to become somewhat of an activist. I've been, you know, working with giving, I give talks to patients all over the country. I give talks to doctors all the time about proper nutrition. And that's gone now on to this Facebook. I've got a Facebook page with close to 15,000 followers on Dr. Garth on Facebook. And then I'm starting to write this book. And the book is really focused on – the one problem I have with the way we look at

nutrition is we look at it in such a deconstructed way. And you can draw back. I mean, you can see where it happened. I mean, in the 1970s, you know, in the early 1950s, we had dietary recommendations to eat a lot of protein because really at that day and age, we were more worried about nutritional deficiencies. But come to the 1970s, and we're starting to see that

the problem is no longer deficiency in any way shape or form but it's actually excess it's obesity it's heart disease and actually nixon put together uh or asked for a committee to be formed to address this problem with you know escalating cardiovascular disease and they had a select committee in the house that was chaired by mcgovern and they did a lot of research into what was the problem. And they came up with a pretty simple solution. We need to eat less animals. We need to eat less meat and we need to eat less dairy. Now that went over horribly, as you can imagine. Right.

The meat and dairy industry come out and say, no, absolutely not. So what do they do? Well, McGovern, poor guy, was from South Dakota, a big ranching industry, and they had him voted out at the next election. They lobbied the government tremendously with a lot of dollars, and they got things changed. And they – you've heard of the food libel laws. You can't say anything bad about meat. You can't look at Oprah. She got sued because she said meat was bad. And they changed the whole vernacular. They changed it from meat is bad to fat is bad.

And that was a huge, big change because we stopped looking at food as food. We started looking at food as fat, carbohydrate, and protein. And how confusing is that? Because all food has fat, protein, and carbohydrate in it. I mean what's broccoli? It's got protein and carbohydrate. But we started looking at food because of their protein content and its heart. Well, oh, we got lean steak.

Well, lean steak is still filled with saturated fat, even if it's lean steak. And this really changed the way we looked at food. And protein – and then we started the wars. Is it carbs or is it fat? And the whole time protein was this bystander. And come now into the 2013 era, and protein is like it has this force field. Evangelical. Yeah.

There was a great Wall Street article in the journal. Like if it says protein, people will buy it. I mean there's vodka with protein in it. I mean we buy – if it says protein, we think it is good for us. And it is the one nutrient that no one seems to question. And yet I have 600 studies showing that too much protein in our diet is extremely bad for our health. And like we mentioned earlier, people that eat a lot of protein tend to die at an earlier age of Western diseases. And, and so I'm writing this book about

protein, not because I want to further confuse people, but I want to show them that there's a lot of, there's a lot of studies. One of my favorite authors is Michael Pollan, and he's got this very simple answer, right? Eat vegetables. He says, what does he say? He says, eat real food, mostly plants, not too much, right? Not too much. Real simple. And It's this call to whole foods. Let's go back to saying eat foods. The problem is you tell someone that and they say, okay, but they'll turn around immediately and say, but where's the protein? Right.

And so I really want to address that issue of where's the protein and show people that this idea that there's protein free for all, there's protein shakes that people are taking. It's all complete junk and extremely bad. And it is a huge part of the reason that we have escalating obesity and health care problems. Yeah, it is amazing how effective the marketing has been in pushing this protein message. I think they – what do they call it? The health halo effect. So if you say it has extra protein in it,

there's literally like it creates a rise in consumer purchases. Like people just instinctively grab for it. There's this inherent idea that it must be better for us or that we need that in order to be healthy. And everyone has this idea that they're an athlete and that they need all this protein because it's going to make them, without doing anything, it's going to give them strong muscles. And where does that come from? What is that about? And it really goes back to these giant lobbying groups and the message that they're pushing

because they have so much to gain by keeping people wed to the meat and the dairy purchases to keep them alive. I mean, it's really palpable. And I was just in a high school gym not that long ago and was marveling at the got milk ads that were hanging all over this public high school gym. And just nobody looks twice at it. And I'm thinking, all right, so students are going to this school. They're in that gym, you know, at least an hour a day over a four-year period. And whether they directly look at those banners hanging and study them or just see it, it's in the back of their mind the whole time, this message that like, oh, if you want to be strong, I'm in the gym, there's a guy on the bench press, he's pressing weight. Like, if I want to be fit like that, then I need to drink milk.

That's, you know, that's the way you do it. And how do you combat that? How do you That's, you know, that's the way you do it. And how do you combat that? How do you overcome that? You know, it's very powerful. Look at that food plate we have. So the government puts out the food plate, right? And it's got, you know, it changed from saying meat to protein, which, okay. It's getting better, but it's still a ways to go. But what in the world is that glass of milk sitting there? Where does that come from?

It's got the plate and it's got a glass of dairy. All of a sudden, with no – I mean really no research to show that there should be that glass of milk in that plate. But it comes from the dairy lobby. And I can't believe just how powerful they are. I mean look what they did to soy. But I mean, first, before you even get into that, I mean, I think most people just assume that that pyramid or the power plate or whatever it's called now, that's the result of

science, that independently minded, objective scientists and doctors got together to figure this out and that's what it is. And they don't realize that it's a political construct. Right. It is a complete political construct. And, you know, the USDA, I mean, they've got this dual role,

which I've really had a problem with. On the one hand, they're supposed to protect the consumer, but the other hand, they're supposed to protect the producer. And how do they do both of that when the two are meeting head to head? Yeah, they're diametrically opposed. Right. And that's what you run into when you start seeing these food plates and things like that. It's a huge problem because the government puts out this food plate, and people are going to gravitate towards that kind of stuff.

All right, soy. I interrupted you. You were going to talk about soy. I'm just going back. One thing I've found as I've started doing more and more of this research and really get into it, and I must have been a little bit of an idealist or just didn't believe in conspiracy theories. I can't believe how much conspiracy theories are actually true. and where they're spent and who's sitting on housing, agricultural committees. Our food bill, the farm bill that they're trying to pass right now, it is humongous and it is so essential to our health and so unbelievably influenced by dollars. And I think soy is one of the kind of byproducts. There's an unbelievable belief in this country that soy is bad for you.

And at first, I just couldn't understand where it came from. Like soy causes breast cancer. Whereas if you read the studies, quite the opposite. Soy prevents breast cancer. Best thing you can do if you've had breast cancer is to eat soy. I mean, there's been really good studies about this. Asian women that eat soy all their life are the least likely to get breast cancer. Kids, that's the time where you really ought to hit them with soy. And in fact, there's been perfect studies showing that meat consumption causes early puberty and increased risk of breast cancer. And yet somehow soy has been defamed and libeled by exactly the dairy industry. They've purposely gone out after soy.

And it's just amazing how influenced we are by what we see on TV and what we read. I mean, I think with soy, you do have to be careful about GMOs, though. I think the proliferation of GMOs in soy is pretty profound. There is a little sort of consumer education that has to come around that. But I was going to say that, I don't know if you heard the podcast that I did with Andy Bilotti. I did. I love Andy. Yeah, he's great. And for people that are maybe new to the show or didn't hear that, go and check out that episode and definitely follow him on Twitter because he's constantly calling out the food industry on these just, I mean, you were talking about conspiracy

theories, but like he'll, you know, he'll just constantly tweet these articles where, you know, Coca-Cola is sponsoring the latest, you know, convention of nutritionists or just stuff that's so outrageous. You can't imagine that it's actually true. He can't believe it's true. He sent me this picture. He was at a nutrition. He was like, you're not going to believe this. And he showed me there was a lecture on how to educate patients on how to eat well at McDonald's. Yeah, I think I saw that. It's like you just can't believe it.

Andy and I had lunch one day and we were just, I mean, we were just dying over the kind of, and he started a group, what's it called? It's like a nutritionists for integrity. Yeah, I forget the exact name of it. I can go back and listen to the episode and put it in the show notes, but. Right. I've gone through so many nutritionists in my office because nutritionists, you know, they're taught, you know, by the American Dietetic Association and sitting on the board of the American Dietetic Association are groups like McDonald's and Dairy and Nabisco and these kind of things. how much the instructions we give to patients about what to eat is actually influenced by the companies for the foods we're telling them to eat. Yeah, that's a very interesting point. And I would say that in my own personal experience, I've had some of the most kind of heated discussions about nutrition with dietitians and nutritionists who really push back on me and tell me what i'm doing is unhealthy and all these sorts of things and and i have to realize and understand and have compassion for them that they're just they're regurgitating a script that they learned in their

school you know and that part of that curriculum is informed just as you said by these groups that are sort of embedding the curriculum with their point of view about, you know, dairy and meat products, et cetera. And again, it sounds like conspiracy theory. It really does. It sounds like you're nuts to even submit that idea, but I'm telling you that it's true. Oh, it happens. I've had people come on my Facebook page telling me how awful I am. And I've like researched them and find out they were biotech lawyers. I mean, one of them was going off on me and I was like, this can't be a patient that this has got to be, there's got to be something going on. Found out she was a biotech lawyer. I mean,

it's just interesting. And then, you know, the sad thing about all of this, the really sad thing is people have gotten so confused out there. They've kind of given up on doctors and dietitians and they've turned to the internet and the internet has some of the worst and i mean worst advice i have ever seen and i can't believe it exists and it exists so vehemently i don't know if you've ever gone into uh gotten into an argument online with a paleo person i try to avoid that but I do want to get into the paleo discussion and, and, you know, where you're coming down on that. So proceed. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's just, so I read this article somewhere. I can't, someone, someone posts somewhere on Facebook, you know, you go through this, this whole interconnected web of stuff that saturated

fat is actually good for you and they're going to have bacon every day. What? That's definitely a big paleo thing right now who, to be clear, they're trying to distance themselves from Atkins. They're very, you know, adamant that what they're doing is not Atkins. And, you know, they are advocating more vegetables and whole foods and all that sort of thing. But there's this weird kind of pride that comes along with like eating bacon every day. Like bacon is, you know, sort of the second coming. It was so bizarre. So, yeah, because here I am,

I'm studying this like crazy. I mean, studying saturated fat like there's no tomorrow. And of course, we get across Gary Taub's book as this all goes on. Because the funny thing about these online people, they never referenced, you know what's happened? The sad thing is PubMed is online, right? So PubMed, you could look up any article.

So the big thing to do in these little internet websites is to reference an article from PubMed, and all you get is the abstract, and that's what people are referencing. So no one has the first clue about how to read an article or how to analyze whether an article is realistic or no. Like for me in the surgery world, I got to know the author to know if I believe the study, you know? And I got to sit in a meeting and question them, you know? They're not doing any of this. They're just like, oh, I searched on PubMed. I found this one article. I'm going to make this argument. But not only am I going to make it, I'm going to make it so vehemently, I'm going to attack you like you're the worst person in the world to tell someone that they need to eat vegetables. You know, God forbid you tell them that saturated fat is bad for you. And at first I want to laugh

it off. Okay. This is funny. I'm just going to ignore these people. And I'll tell you the sad thing is most experts in nutrition do exactly that. They laugh it off. They say, well, this is a stupid little movement. Anybody believes this is ridiculous. I'm not going to do anything about it. The problem is it's really taken hold and people's lives are at stakes. And if no one says anything, if nutritionists are going to say, look, I'm not going to go and argue with an idiot because it is just going to make me look like an idiot. I'm just going to ignore them and just do my science. The problem is that science isn't getting out there. And these people are really getting a foothold. And all of a sudden, people are eating bacon because they think it's actually good for them. So what is this idea that's being proposed by Gary Taubes and others that saturated – because I hear it all the time.

Saturated fat is not the enemy. The enemy is carbs, and that includes fruits. So it's this high-protein message and getting rid of all these carbs, which includes fruits because from this perspective, whether it's an orange or a candy bar, your body doesn't know the difference. That's another big talking point. And we should focus on getting rid of all the grains and the sugars and just start pushing this this sort of higher protein protocol so what's what's going on here and what's

what's the truth from your perspective in this and the research in the studies that you've been pouring over right and of course like you know there's always going to be a middle ground where we should all probably agree uh but everyone's so vehement in their standings. And maybe I'm a bit vehement now because it's gotten to the point where I have a really hard time telling anybody to eat any meat. The science is so strong behind it. So maybe someone will say I'm extreme too. But at least I'm extreme after some serious study in the situation. What Gary Taubes did is he wrote a book. Now, he's a journalist, right? Very good with words. And he took articles.

Boy, did he mash up articles. I mean, he did not. I can't. Each article, he presents what seems to be a very scientific argument. And to read them is to believe them. And doctors believe them. I mean, doctors read this book. I went to American Society of Bariatric Medicine meeting, and Gary Gary Taub's book was at every one of our tables next to an

Atkins book. We all got those two books and he gave the keynote address and these doctors are foaming over him. But I, you know, this just, how could this be true? I mean, how could, first of all, how could carbs be so bad for us if the societies that eat the most carbs are the healthiest? How, how, this doesn't jive with me, number one. Number two, fruit consumption is clearly tied to less diabetes. So how are these assumptions he's saying that, you know, fruits will make you diabetic? How is that possible? Number two, there's a group called the Cochrane Group. And the Cochrane Group, what they do is they've realized that there's just too many research articles out there. And they really can confuse people.

So what they do is they get these big groups together. They have this very big what they call meta-analysis. They put together the best articles and come up with statements on different things. So there's all kinds of this talk about grains being bad for you. Right. So they did a Cochrane analysis of grains and actually grains consumption decreased diabetes. So the science is flying in the face of a lot of what Gary Taubes is saying. But Gary Taubes is saying you should eat nothing but protein and saturated

fat is good for you. And he bases it on these articles. And you can't believe, like if you actually understand science, for instance, there will be an article that says a low-fat diet and these come out all the time a low-fat diet uh versus a high protein low-carb diet the high protein low-carb diet had a better control of coronary disease you're like okay so you know these bloggers are like this study came out here you go it's proof but if you read the article the low-fat group is consuming 38% of their calories from fat. Is that low-fat? That's not low-fat. They didn't prove anything in that study.

Or number two, some of these studies, they make this interesting thing. So we're trying to show that it is exactly saturated fat that's causing heart disease and not some other entity. And so we would take out like, for instance, you have a whole bunch of people. Some of them smoke. Some of them don't. So you take anybody who smokes out of the equation because that could cause heart disease. The problem is they will say, well, high cholesterol could cause heart disease, so we're going to take everybody who has high cholesterol out of the study.

But here's the problem. If they're eating saturated fat, the reason saturated fat causes heart disease is saturated fat raises cholesterol. So you've basically eliminated a whole bunch of people that are, in fact, getting high cholesterol because of saturated fat getting heart disease. It sounds confusing, but what it's called is over-adjustment bias. And it happens all the time in these articles. And so he cherry-picks articles. The funny thing about Gary Taubes is he goes – he was on CNN once on Larry King, and

I wanted to jump through the TV and strangle him, although I hear he's a boxer, so maybe I shouldn't do that. But he sits there and he yells, don't cherry pick articles. And yet that's exactly what he does. He cherry picks articles. He says, don't overread articles, but that's exactly what he does. In fact, some authors of many articles he quotes are pissed off because he came to conclusions that they didn't come to in their articles. And basically he completely dopes people into this idea that saturated fat is not bad for you. It's so infuriating, but it's caught on like wildfire. And there's a group

called the Western Price Foundation. And the sad thing about the Western Price Foundation, it's named after this guy, Western Price, who did a smart thing. He was a dentist. It was in the 1920s, I believe. And he went around and he said, look, in these uncivilized parts of the world, people don't have dental disease. So it must be because of our civilized diet. It must be because of the processed foods and stuff. He never came out and actually said, you should eat nothing but saturated fat and meat. In fact, he did comment on one of the healthiest societies he saw was an Indian society that was vegan. They were the strongest, best-looking – or vegetarian.

I can't remember if they were vegan or vegetarian. But so he was actually very in awe of them. And this Weston Price Foundation has put together such a lot of nonsense on the internet that you can't – I mean it is such utter nonsense. And the funny thing is – so I'm talking to one of my friends, and I was talking to him about Colin Campbell's book, The China Study. And she said, well, I don't want to hear about Dr. Campbell because he's been discredited. That's the other thing that's kind of going on is this idea that not only has this Gary Taubes philosophy really taken hold, philosophy really taken hold, there's this notion that the China study has been discredited because it's not a double blind, I guess is sort of the argument, because it was a population study. But the correlation is so extraordinarily significant that, yeah, you can say, no, it wasn't a double

blind study because it was done on real people living in their natural habitat. But I don't think that that's a valid dismissal of such a comprehensive, well-documented study that in my mind... Well, that's exactly what I said to her. I said, okay, Dr. Campbell was the chair of the nutrition committee, of the Department of Nutrition at Cornell University. He spent his whole life studying nutrition. He did one of the biggest studies ever on nutrition and disease. How was he discredited? So she gives me a reference. And the reference is to a 22-year-old school teacher that writes this article about how Dr. Campbell had his data wrong. So I read her article and it is so blatantly obvious that this girl

doesn't know the first thing about statistics. She's doing what's called a univariate analysis in other words she's looking at one variable she's not taking into account other variables that could be affecting the situation and everybody says oh this 22 year old published this dr campbell's an idiot well dr campbell did a very nice rebuttal and i was glad he did that because people don't do a rebuttal and he really shot her down but anyway uh she's still like she's revered in this little society it's 22 year old doesn't know the first never the thing that gets me these people have never sat down with a patient they've never seen a food log from patients they've never treated people like i have and here's the thing that they constantly do they say number one if you well, doctor this and that said this, they say, well, you can't

say that. That's an argument based on authoritarianism as if these experts that have truly studied these diseases because they're experts shouldn't be listened to. I mean, isn't that completely ludicrous? Yeah, it's really bizarre. Really bizarre. Number two, and you mentioned this, and it's the one thing that really blows my mind, is that anytime you bring up an epidemiologic study, they criticize it with the saying, correlation does not equal causation. And they've all learned the same lingo to argue with. Like they've had some kind of lecture on how to argue. And they come up with this comment, correlation does not equal causation. And to a point, they are somewhat right. Epidemiologic studies are correlation studies. They're not

randomized controlled trials. Now, there are some pretty long-term epidemiologic studies that are a little bit more offensive. But when you've got a whole bunch of epidemiologic studies saying the same thing, and the correlation is very strong, you got to listen to it. In fact, I will tell you that in an epidemiologic study, when we do these multivariate analysis, epidemiologists do so much control of the variables that they almost wipe out any possible correlation. So that if there is a correlation, even a slight correlation, you better take note because they've done every statistical method to try to eliminate that correlation.

And it's almost like these people say, where there's smoke, there's definitely no fire. Right. I mean, I guess the analogy would be something along the lines of if you looked at everybody in the world who drinks five or six or more big gulps a day and look at the diabetes rates and you see a correlation you cannot say that drinking those big gulps caused that diabetes but the correlation is probably so significant that it would be foolish to think that it's not a contributing factor in what's going on, right? I mean – But even worse – go ahead. More so, if we took that population of people and we made sure that they all weighed the same

and we looked at their diet and who ate more of this and who ate more meat, and we really got down into the nitty-gritty and eliminated all kinds of confounding variables, who smoked, who had metabolic acidosis, do all kinds of different variables, really trying to get down to was the big gulp causing the problem. Now we've got an even stronger correlation. So what do you think it is that has created such a strong movement in this low-carb ideology? Is it just that people want to have their bad habits co-signed? Or what do you think is going on? Like, why is it so wildly popular right now? I mean, they really do have the microphone.

Yeah, you know, I think, look, the American pastime is meat. It's always going to be. It's fueled a lot by the meat industry. They definitely will play into it big time. There have been some very poor studies out there that will give them fire that they could burn on to make these arguments. And I think there's this kind of anti-authoritarian online. Look, I read an article the other day that George Bush organized 9-11. I mean, you know, how ridiculous is this? George Bush organized planes to fly in. There's such conspiracy theory out there. Now, realize that with all we've said that's bad about medicine

and medicine's realization of nutrition, it has gotten better. And the American Institute of Cancer Research got together just about every expert on nutrition and cancer. And they came up with a statement that in order to stop the rise in cancer and prevent cancer recurrence, we need to eat more vegetables. The American Heart Association and Eat Less Meat. The American Heart Association got together every kind of expert they could on nutrition and heart disease. And they came up with a statement that said, we need to eat less meat and more fruits and vegetables and avoid fat. The American Dietetic Association and the American Diabetes Association said the same things. If we want to have less diabetes, we need more fruits and vegetables and less meat and less fat.

So all the leading parts of medicine that are studying this, all the real true experts, I mean probably the biggest experts – the biggest studies that have been done in America are the Nurses' Health Study and the Health Professional Study done out of Harvard. And they even said that – in fact, it's pretty funny. They interviewed Dr. Rim, who's one of the head authors at Harvard. And he said, you know, looking at all our data, people should basically eat vegetarian. Well, we can't really tell people to eat vegetarian because that would be extreme. Right. I've heard this before. Yeah. Right. Now you actually said that, you know, that would be extreme as if, you know, having a corner already bypass and isn't extreme. Right. Like here's the solution, but let's just dismiss it because no one's

actually going to do that. I mean, that's just ridiculous. Right. But so all these authoritarian bodies have said this. And so whenever authority says something, people are going to want to counter it. And they counter it so vehemently. It's surprising to me how vehemently they will attack you so personally and with such vigor. It's really impressive. It's something that's just not seen – when we attack each other in science, it's really impressive. It's something that's just not seen. You know, when we attack each other in science, it's much more, you know, respectful. I don't know.

It's very funny. And the funny thing is I go to these conferences where the actual scientists are debating this stuff. And the thing that always gets me, and you've probably seen this too, the pro-protein, Gary Taub's excluded because he is an athlete. So he actually looks okay. Oh, we'll get back to him. Remind me to go back to Taub's. But Gary Taub's excluded because he is an athlete, so he actually looks okay. Oh, we'll get back to him. I mean to go back to Taub's, but Gary Taub's excluded. All the people that are pro-protein, the pro-high-fat group, they're all fat, and they're all overweight, and they all don't look – and, you know, Atkins – Well, Lauren Cordain, you know, yeah, being sort of the top of that, didn't he – did he die of heart disease?

I don't think – No, he's not dead. There was other – the Atkins guy did. Atkins died of heart disease. Yeah, Atkins died of heart disease. Lauren Cordain is definitely overweight. Okay, so here's the PR – I think they lose weight when they have a book coming out and they have to go on a book tour.

But in between, yeah, they tend to gain weight. Yeah, like Robert Lustig is this big anti-sugar guy and he's overweight. And then the PR people, when Atkins died from – and his cardiologist had said he had heart disease. They came out and said he fell because he fell downstairs. That's why he died. It wasn't his heart. He had heart disease. They came out and said he fell because he fell downstairs. That's why he died. It wasn't his heart. He had heart disease. And then one of the biggest proponents of the Western Price Foundation was 45 years old.

And this guy was a vehement, eat as much fat as you can. He died of a stroke at 45. And they came out with some press releases saying he didn't die because he ate fat and had a stroke. It's because he had HIV. Well, HIV really doesn't cause a stroke. I mean full-on AIDS can, but HIV doesn't. So you see these populations. But the funny thing with Gary Taubes is Gary Taubes on his blog wanted to show – because the big debate is if you eat this high-fat diet, is it bad for your lipids?

Look, there are some people out there that have extremely good capabilities of processing lipids. Every study I have seen shows that eating less meat drops your LDL cholesterol, which is your most important factor, at least in men, in deciding whether or not you're going to have heart disease. So he says, I'm going to publish my labs to show you how good my lipids are. So he publishes his labs, and his lipids look good. But the funny thing is he's not a doctor. His bicarb is 17, which is extremely low, meaning he's in metabolic acidosis. And this is what we see in all high-protein, high-fat patients is that they get into metabolic acidosis.

They're eating so much meat. Meat has amino acids in it and sulfur compounds in it. It turns to acid in your body. Chronic metabolic acidosis leads to disease over time. We know that chronic metabolic acidosis leads to bone disease, for instance. Your body tries to buffer the acid by taking calcium from the bone, and that's why people eat more meat. The funny thing thing you mentioned

milk it's good for your body uh countries that drink more milk have more osteoporosis and more hip fractures the more milk you eat the more acidotic you are the more bone disease you'll have and that's hotly debated topic it's doesn't fall perfectly like that but but um but this this state of chronic acidosisis produces a chronic state of inflammation right and this in this inflammatory state really provides this ripe feeding ground for all these sorts of diseases these chronic Western diseases that we suffer from right we're in a chronic state of inflammation and it's a serious problem disease happens from inflammation and so there was a recent

JAMA article looking at high protein versus low fat diet. And they found that their big finding in the media press release was that, in their conclusions, everything was that a high protein diet had better, the high protein and low fat diet, they lost the same amount of weight, but the high protein had better lean body mass preservation as they lost weight. The idea being if you eat a lot of protein, you're going to preserve your muscle, and so you're more likely to keep the weight off, which has never been proven, right? So every long-term study with Atkins, et cetera, people gain back their weight. But this is in New England Journal of Medicine. This is a huge article, and this is the press release. Now, you read the article, and they looked at other stuff too.

It turns out that the high-protein group – oh, and they also said the high-protein group had better HDL control and had better triglyceride control, which is all good. But the low-fat group had better LDL control, and that's a better predictor of heart disease than the other two in men. But here's the interesting thing. They did some other tests that they mentioned in the discussion section, but none of these bloggers are going to go in and read the discussion section. Only nerds like me do that stuff. And in their results section, the high protein group had a much higher C-reactive protein, which is a measure of chronic inflammation. And they also had much higher urine cortisol levels. Now we know from other studies that having high urine cortisol levels leads to heart disease and heart-related mortality because it's a stress. You're in inflammation. Cortisol is our

stress hormone. If you've got cortisol in urine, your body's under stress. So when you're trying to put your body into ketosis and you're eating these high protein diets, you're basically stressing your body, putting it into inflammation and leading it into a chance for cancer and heart disease. Right. That's good because that was really my next kind of follow-up question, which is, you know, what are the potential harms of ketosis? Because there are a lot of people out there that will say there's nothing harmful at all about it. In fact, it's a great—I mean, we all know that it works to lose weight. But what is actually going on?

And is this damaging to you physiologically in the short run or in the long run? Yeah, well, ketosis is our body's kind of emergency mechanism. It's an emergency mechanism. We evolve for times of famine. And it was, what happens is, you know, our Krebs cycle, which interesting, runs on carbs. This is the other funny thing I find all the time. I'll say, I need protein for energy.

And my famous thing is, as soon as someone, I put someone on a vegetarian diet, and the first moment they feel tired, they feel like they need protein for energy. And my famous thing is as soon as someone – I put someone on a vegetarian diet and the first moment they feel tired, they feel like they need protein, which is only because they want to blame the vegetarian diet immediately. Even if they stayed up all night watching TV. But the interesting thing is that protein is really not an energy source. No, it's a terrible energy source. Terrible energy source. In fact, it uses energy to process it. And so the Krebs cycle, our body's energy cycle thrives on glucose. Our brains thrive on glucose. How could sugar, now I'm talking again sugars that come from fruits. We could talk about why processed sugar is bad, but sugar, glucose, is extremely important to our body's function. You don't give the body glucose anymore.

Your body needs to form glucose itself called gluconeogenesis, and it will do that by breaking down fat in the liver. Here's the thing. Ketosis, chronic acidosis, it's bad for your bones. It causes inflammation, et cetera, et cetera. But no one can stay in ketosis for a long period of time because it's an unpleasant situation. You will be, you know, Atkins famously, part of the Atkins diet, you had to take fiber because you got horribly constipated. You had to take all kinds of vitamins because you got vitamin deficiencies. It's just not a, it's not a natural state to be in. And as we see from

all these long-term studies on Atkins, people can't stay on it. They're just not a natural state to be in. And as we see from all these long-term studies on it, people can't stay on it. They're just not going to stay on it for long periods of time. Right, and sort of disease aside, for the athletes out there that may be listening or potentially experimenting with ketosis, so when you're in ketosis, you're creating this chronic state of inflammation and acidosis. Is this correct? Correct, yeah.

So, you know, that's really impeding your body's ability to recover in between workouts. I mean, you're really hamstringing yourself if you want to get stronger, faster, you know, in a short period of time. I mean, you're slowing that process down. Yeah, I can't imagine an athlete deciding that this is good for us. And the athletes have been the most dope by this, of course, with the idea, especially funded by all the supplement companies. And there's so much money that goes into the supplement companies that they need this extraordinary amount of protein. Whereas the studies show that, you know, depending, it can be argued, but we really can't

absorb more than, you know, or utilize more than 15 grams of protein at a time. We're just not developing muscle at a rate that we need to consume these high amounts of protein. So yeah, the athletes have been duped too. I think you've seen it a lot, obviously, in yourself, and I've seen it in mine, but especially when I counsel athletes and get them to change their diet, their performance improvement is really impressive. I wish there was more study on that. The sports area needs to really study this huge performance. They're starting to look at it, like for instance, the big discovery that beets are so amazing for performance. But there's a real performance enhancement in switching to a plant-based diet as far as exercise is concerned. There's no question about it in my mind.

And there are some interesting things happening in that world right now. And I think more is going to get revealed over the next couple of years. But we're still fighting. We still have to fight this fight. But, you know, we're still fighting, you know, we still have to fight this fight. We got to fight, you know, we got to combat this low carb, you know, fanaticism that's going on right now, which leads me to one other question that I had that I'd feel remiss if I didn't ask, which is, you know, a lot of people will say, well, you know, I eat grass fed, you know, I eat grass fed. And so I have my own opinions about that, but I'm interested in what your reaction to hearing something like that would be. Yeah.

Well, somewhat mixed reactions, but the study is pretty clear. So there's been studies looking at eating food and the inflammatory response. And part of this inflammatory response, we talked about metabolic acidosis, but it also has to do with endotoxemia. Endotoxemia means that you eat the meat and the toxins from bacteria that are in meat that get into our body and create an inflammatory response. That happens whether it's grass-fed or corn-fed. That doesn't make a single bit of difference on on what it's doing. Grass-fed meat still has saturated fat saturated fat causes their uh the cells in your um gut to widen open and what's called leaky gut which allows bacteria into your body which causes inflammation the bottom line is a grass-fed cow is still going to create inflammation in your body. And in fact, there was one study that I think I read it through Dr. Greger's site that showed that wild kangaroo meat still created inflammation but not that much inflammation compared to other meat.

And I think probably wild game that's lean, that's running around eating wild grasses might have a little bit less inflammation to it. But it still is, you know, as far as the grass-fed beef that's being served people and the grass-fed bison, those cows are still fat. They're still filled with saturated fat, endotoxins, something called NU5GC. I mean, it's getting kind of complicated, but these antigens that get into our system that our body recognizes as foreign and starts to attack. We are, here's one of the biggest things people think, and I hear this all the time. We are carnivores. And I, and I always wonder where that comes from. What, where's, who looks at us and sees carnivores? Cause look at your dog. I've got a great Dane. So I look at my dog all the time.

I'm very fascinated in the difference between a true carnivore, which it is. And by the way, having a carnivore as a pet and being vegetarian, it's very hard to feed the pet. Nothing worse than buying your dog a trachea of a cow. That just really upsets me. But anyway, a dog, their mouth – first of all, their canines are a hell of a lot different than my canines. We don't really even have canines. Ours are extremely small. They're better for biting into an apple than into a piece of meat.

We don't have claws. We can't tear apart food. In our mouth, in our saliva, we have amylase to break down starches. A dog doesn't have that or a lion doesn't have that. Lions and dogs make their own vitamin C. They don't need vitamin C. We need vitamin C. They have a very short intestinal tract because meat putrefies in the intestine. We have a very long intestinal tract like an herbivore in order to process carbs as they go through our system. Just about every facet of our enzyme production, of our anatomic, the way we grind food, the grinders that we have. It shows that we are herbivores and not carnivores. And this idea, the one thing that

gets me is this paleo idea. We need to eat like the paleo people did. Those were not healthy people many, many thousands of years ago. I think we should evolve. I mean, shouldn't we be evolving? Shouldn't we be getting better? I think we should be eating. I mean, now we're in this beautiful day and age where we can have blueberries and strawberries and apples and kale by the abundance. We should be living to 150. We should be healthier than we've ever been. We should be evolving and not devolving into a primitive-based diet. Who wants to be a caveman?

I want to be a modern, healthy Iron Man. Well, I love that. That was beautifully put. Thank you. But I also think there's a perversion of this paleo concept altogether. I mean, you know, were they really sort of gorging on meat?

You know, they certainly weren't eating, you know, processed bacon or anything like that. I mean, and I think for the most part, and obviously it depends on what part of the world they lived in and what was available and what had to be hunted and how difficult that was. But I would imagine that sort of if you could make a generalization that meat was few and far between

and it was a result of a tremendous amount of effort to track it and capture it and all of that. But on a daily basis that, you know, sort of eating the low-hanging fruit, so to speak, you know, the sort of plant foods that were more readily available and accessible and could be, you know, even in a pre-harvesting culture, at least accessed and stored or eaten on a daily basis would have been the more predominant kind of day in day out diet yeah and i think that's been shown they've done uh they've found uh vessels uh and like uh grinding instruments where they've actually kind of done carbon uh scanning

electron micro i don't really complex stuff where they found that they were eating a lot of vegetables and that they were using these vegetables as their main staple of their diet, what they gathered. And that mainly gathering was actually the main part. But because the men did the hunting and the women did the gathering and the men got all the honor, there was honor in hunting when they did it. But, you know, the other thing is the food that they were eating. I mean, there is, going back to that grass-fed, like for instance, in Iceland, they don't eat a lot of vegetables, but they tend to get a lot of fish. So they get a lot of omega-3 and that seems to protect them somewhat from heart disease. I mean, they're not the healthiest people in the world, but not as unhealthy as we are.

And they eat a lot of lamb and their lamb is really grazing on wild greens and their lamb actually has omega-3 in it. And so it's a little bit better. So going back to the point, these paleo people were eating, they weren't eating cows. I mean, the animals they were eating was nothing like a cow. These were wild, muscular animals without saturated fat, probably high in omegas from eating grasses. And it's totally different. I mean, for a paleo person to think that the bacon they're eating is in the remotely paleo is just ridiculous. And then the other thing they do, I mean, one of the most amazing things to me that I can't believe is that they won't eat beans because they think that beans

are part of the agricultural. Legumes are part of the agricultural revolution. That's what's hurt us. And yet the Blue Zone studies show that the number one food that's held the same in the different Blue Zones is legumes. I mean beans are about the healthiest thing you could possibly put in your body. And yet paleo people don't eat it for this ridiculous concept that it's because it's part of the agriculture. Yeah, I eat tons of beans. But isn't there something – what is this argument about the lectins? Is it how that contributes to leaky gut or something like that? Lectins are – it's kind of a plant defense mechanism, and lectins kind of bind different nutrients.

And so it's called an antinutrient. But there's a few funny things about that. First of all, soak beans overnight and sprout them and you've gotten rid of the lectin. Cook them and the lectin is completely gone. And no one eats raw beans. We sprout them and we cook them. And whatever lectin is there, one thing lectin does bind is iron. And it may be – and this is really coming – this is being fueled a lot actually from the anti-aging medicine. Anti-aging medicine is really starting to kind of merge into nutrition science. But one thing that's been merging to anti-aging is this idea that aging, as they look at cells and the breakdown of cells, that it might be over-mineralization that's causing us to age and causing damage to our cells. And actually iron might be the biggest one of it. So

it may be beneficial to have a little bit of a lower iron level. And the paleo guys miss this. Now, funny enough, some of the paleo guys that are like diehard paleo, they really crack me up. They're very funny. They will actually go and give blood because they diehard paleo, they really crack me up. They're very funny. They will actually go and give blood because they say ancient paleo people were injured all the time and would bleed. And that might be part of why they were healthy. And actually, maybe that was part of the reason they were healthy because they lost iron and iron excess. And this seems to be this like, oh, are you iron deficient? You need to be iron. You better get your iron. It may in fact be that having lower levels of iron is actually better for us.

That's interesting. I've never heard that before. That's fascinating. There's a lot of interest in iron and heart disease, excess iron and heart disease. Yeah, because all you hear about is iron deficiency. And particularly when you're talking about a plant-based diet, people get really freaked out about that. Yeah.

And iron has been related to diabetes too. But I mean, a lot of the concepts, look, I mean, just about every concept, when I counsel patients, I say, take every concept you think you know about diet. Like I say to them, first of all, they did a study. Do you know the Epic Panacea study?

In a general sense. So Epic Panacea study, we were talking about the China study. And the whole online community love to go after the China study and that's fine. The China study was old. The biggest study now, one of the most absolutely comprehensive studies ever done on diet, uh, and health is the epic panacea study. And it was done by the European union. And the idea was let's really follow people and what they eat through many years and see if there's a relation between food and disease and obesity,

because they want to know why are people getting cancer in Europe and why are people becoming obese in Europe? And the study design is complex because it was done all over Europe and they use different food measurements at different parts because different societies had different ways of measuring their food. But anyway, they followed 500,000 people for 10 years. This is a very comprehensive study. And they found an absolute true correlation, an absolute correlation

between meat consumption and weight gain. And the meat that was most correlated with weight gain, chicken. So our diet food, the food that we think is diet in America, is actually the food that may be causing the most weight gain in America. Wow, that's amazing. Yeah, it's amazing. And so I tell my patients, just take everything you think you know about diet. Milk is good for your your bones chicken is a great food to eat uh bacon's okay take all these concepts and throw them out the door and the other concept

that absolutely kills me is this concept that fruit is bad for you i mean if anybody tells you and you know this is populated by trainers it's always by trainers right this is a big thing right now just for people that are listening it's this idea that it doesn't matter where, you know, where the sugar is coming from. It could be a processed sugar. It could be an orange. Like I said earlier, it doesn't matter. Your body doesn't know the difference and it's all evil and you shouldn't have any of it. Right. Which is so strange because nature's design on how it delivers sugar to us with fiber through a slow, gradual process, almost like a slow release. A grape is like a slow release sugar, if you want to think about it like that, like a slow release pill, a perfect medium to give us sugar. Not an ice cream that's going to

dump sugar into you right away, but the slow release type sugar. And in fact, a recent study that just came out, I can't remember the journal, but it just came out, showed that actually fruit consumption is tied to lower rates of diabetes, especially grapes. And people always tell you don't eat grapes because it's the highest in sugar. Grapes were one of the highest correlated with decreased diabetes. Meanwhile, and people don't seem to know this, meat consumption is one of the highest correlations with diabetes there is. You would think it would just be all the processed sugar that was contributing to that. You wouldn't think meat. It's absolutely not. It's meat because the meat consumption creates this inflammation we're talking about. And this

inflammation creates insulin resistance. Chronic metabolic acidosis greatly affects muscles' ability to respond to insulin. And people don't realize this, but meat, everybody says, well, the big enemy is insulin. Like Robert Luster, the big problem in the world is insulin, which is kind of strange. Insulin is a growth hormone. We need insulin. Insulin is important. as insulin, which is kind of strange. Insulin is a growth hormone.

We need insulin. Insulin is important. I could understand that chronically high insulin would be bad, but does he know or has he not studied the fact that meat causes almost as much insulin rise as does fruit, if not more? Meat causes rise in insulin. Alanine, one of the amino acids, actually activates insulin. And so I just can't believe how little people know. And I just want to tell everybody, just stop and listen to the experts or actually do your research. And when I say do your research, don't read a journal article online abstract. I mean, you actually have to go

through the whole body of knowledge that's out there. Yeah. I mean, and the truth is people aren't going to do that. You know what I mean? And they're, they're relying on people like you to guide them straight and, and kind of alluding back to what we were talking about earlier, when you go online and you see so many different points of view and everybody's citing research, it just creates so much confusion. And that's kind of, you know, exactly where the food companies want you to be. It just perpetuates the status quo and, uh, and the problem never gets solved. And it's like you're the rare voice, you're the outlier out there

that we need to hear you and people like yourself who can set us straight and help us cut through all of this confusion to just get down to what's actually going on and what the truth is. Yeah, well, I appreciate you giving me this forum to do so. And I'm going to keep shouting it from the rooftops as long as I can until we start making a difference in this country, because I can't imagine anything more important.

I mean, we talked about, at the very beginning, you were talking about what about the increase in preventative medicine. Western idea of preventative medicine is a mammogram. That's not preventative medicine. It's of preventative medicine is a mammogram. That's not preventative medicine. It's a diagnostic, early diagnosis. We really need to change the whole dictum of what preventative medicine is because, I mean, the changes we could make in our society, not just in our health, but our economy, our environment. I mean, the meat industry is just absolutely destroying our environment. There's just the meat industry is just absolutely destroying our environment.

There's just so much that can happen with the simple concept of understanding that we are herbivores and that we thrive as herbivores. I love it, man. That's a, it's a powerful message. And, and, uh, you know, it starts with personal responsibility. You know, I hope everybody who, who's listening to this can, you know, kind of go home and think a little bit more deeply about the choices that we make on a daily basis and the ramifications and impact of those choices as they kind of ripple out. You know, I always say we vote with our dollar and really, you know, it's easy to say, well, we don't have control over all of these things. So we have to start with what we can control. And that's with what we put into our bodies, how we move our bodies and the information

that we allow in. So on that note, you know, I always refer people to Dr. Greger's site, nutritionfacts.org. Are there any other places that you could tell people, hey, here's a good resource or here's a place that kind of cuts through the nonsense and tells things straight for people that want to kind of take it, you take it up a notch yeah i think there's there's quite a few good ones online right now um first of all on i have a facebook page which is dr garth on facebook uh and i put i try to put every time i find an article or some kind of thing i put a lot on there a lot of information i take pictures of what i'm eating i do some videos of thing. I put a lot on there, a lot of information. I take pictures of what I'm eating. I do some videos of what I'm cooking. Um, and so I'll put a link in the show notes up to that, of course, and your Twitter and all that kind of good stuff. And then, um, there's an interesting

guy who started this, um, website, uh, called plant positive. Oh yeah. Yeah. I've heard of this guy. Some people are bugging me to I've got to get him on the podcast, but I don't know that much about him. He tries to stay anonymous. But his degree of research onto some of these topics is bar none.

I learned a lot from him because there were a lot of articles I had problems with and I actually and I don't even think he's a doctor. I don't know really what his background is, but I emailed him a couple times and said, what's with this article? I can't pick out the problem. And he'd notice it right away. Like one of them was like, like a lot of these problems with the, is cholesterol bad for you? They look at elderly people that are dying. Well, when you're dying and you're really sick and you're older, your cholesterol level naturally drops. And he pointed that out right away and gave me references to that. was like god i missed that and there was another one that showed swedish people that ate meat had lower cholesterol

but these were swedish people that are in a high elevation if you're in a high elevation you naturally blow cholesterol i mean this guy has a phenomenal uh way with uh picking apart these uh paleo groups i mean phenomenal right I think he has a whole series of videos where he goes step-by-step through the whole thing and kind of analyzes paleo and kind of sets the record straight from his perspective. And it's a YouTube channel, but he has a site also, right? Yeah, he's got a site too.

I think it's Google Planet Positive. And there's another one called Healthy Longevity. And I don't know who did Healthy Longevity. It's a great blog site. And the person who did Healthy Longevity does an equally great job of analyzing data in a very thoughtful way. I mean, just an incredible way. Great.

And the book is The Protein Obsession. So how's it coming with the writing? You sent me the first two chapters, which I read. It's great. It goes off like gangbusters, man. It does. Yeah, you're taking it on, on man i love the story and what's that you're the first person to read it so uh you and my wife so yeah my publisher is great i'm uh being published by harper collins harper one and my publisher is this guy gideon wild and i've never met a more patient publisher

uh because he is so he's he just wants to get this message out and I've never met a more patient publisher, uh, because he is so, he's, he just wants to get this message out. Like I've never seen a publisher more interested in a message rather than book sales. And, um, he's just so confident in this message. He's like, are you okay? Is everything all right? Okay. Send me some more. And he's really helped me shape my message. Cause I didn't have a, I didn't know what the message was to begin with. I, he was like, what's the central problem? Gosh, I don't know. The central problem is this, that, and the other. No, no, really what's the central problem. And he really got me down to this. You know, the central problem is our fascination with protein. Uh, and that really has taken it off. So I'm, I'm really appreciative of, uh, Gideon and Harper Collins, and I'm going

to hopefully have a good book for them. Uh I'll have everything into them by the end of the year. I'm taking a lot of time. Are you going to take work off to focus on it? I've been doing that. It's hard to do. It's a big money loss for me, but I feel strongly about this. I've had to do a lot of research and stuff. You should see all the pages of research I got.

I hope to put together a book that will really help answer some questions. Cool, man. Well, I'm excited to read it. So we'll have to have you – I mean I could talk to you all day. So you definitely need to come back on when the book is ready, but maybe even before then. And it would be good to be in the same room too. Yeah, I'd love to come to Malibu. I did the Malibu try once.

Oh, you did? So I'd love to come back out there and have one of your wife's meals. So. Absolutely. Well, the, the, yeah, it's an open invite, man. So let's work that out. I appreciate it. Appreciate it.

All right, cool. So, um, Dr. Garth on Facebook, it's just Dr. Garth, right? It's just Dr. Garth. I think if you just look, search Dr. Garth, you'll find him. And on Twitter, you're at Dr., you're at you're at Dr. Garth Davis on Twitter, right? Yeah, Dr. Garth Davis. Okay, cool. And do you have a website also?

TheDavisClinic.com. Davis Clinic, right. So this is your practice website, right? Yeah, I got it on there in interest for people. Cool, man. All right. Well, hopefully the power is turned back on at your home. Yeah I hope so too You can go home and everything's okay

there. At least some you know tornado didn't blow us away in the middle of this Yeah we're used to it here. Yeah cool Alright man well thank you so much for your time I appreciate it. Your message is powerful you're an inspiration and you gotta keep trudging this

path man. We gottaging this path, man. We got to do this together. Thanks, Rich. Rich, how do I get people to get on the podcast? They just get it off Apple? Yeah, they can get it on iTunes. You can go to my website. When I publish it, I'll send you an email and I'll give you all the links so you can share it with everybody.

But yeah, iTunes. There's a bunch of different places where people get podcasts like Stitcher Radio and kind of everybody has their own like different kind of podcast feeder apps feeds into all of those but the main place where people get it tends to be iTunes okay perfect

alright Rich thank you so much I really enjoyed it alright Dr. Garth take it easy man let's talk soon take care bye peace clients All right, Dr. Garth. Take it easy, man. Let's talk soon. Take care. Bye. All right. Peace. Alliance. Thank you.