All Episodes
Previous Next
Aug. 2, 2018 - Dr. Oz Podcast
43:26
The Best Disease-Fighting Superfoods According to a Natural Healer

He’s an internationally recognized expert on nutrition and natural healing. In this interview, Dr. Oz sat down with New York Times best-selling author Dr. Joel Fuhrman to discuss his favorite disease-fighting superfoods that not only keep you healthy, but slim your waistline too. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
About 80 years ago, scientists discovered about 14 vitamins and 25 minerals that are necessary for normal cell function.
And we said, wow, incredible!
We can give people vitamin pulls.
We can put thiamin and riboflavin into cocoa puffs.
And we can have people be healthier than ever before.
And then we saw cancer rates after that point go up every year for 75 years in a row.
And then about 18 years ago, scientists recognized that there was a third class of micronutrients called phytochemicals.
Hey, everyone.
I'm Dr. Oz, and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
Although any of you may not believe it, I actually went to medical school, and I had an enjoyable four years at the University of Pennsylvania.
And during that process, I got to meet a lot of great people.
But I got to say, most of them I never spoke to again after I graduated.
And it wasn't because I disliked them.
We just get busy, and you go off in your own world.
And particularly if you move cities, as I did, to go up to New York, you don't travel in the same circles with these folks, so you don't run into them that often, unless you go into a reunion.
But one fellow I'd known in medical school resurfaced when I started looking for an advisor for children who are overweight.
And I asked around, I wanted to know, who do you respect the most?
Who's got the most provocative ideas?
Who's got the insights we need to have to talk about kids who are overweight?
Who actually is clinically active, seeing patients?
I don't want someone just writing books about stuff.
I'm talking about someone who's got frontline experience doing this.
And this guy, Joel Fuhrman, came up over and over and over again.
It's the same Joel Fuhrman, because how many guys are named Joel Fuhrman?
That I went to medical school with.
So I hooked up with him by phone and we talked and talked and talked and regenerated a friendship that's continued to this day.
Joel, thanks for joining us.
Great to be here.
Joel's well accomplished and many of you know his work, especially those of you who pride yourself in your knowledge of food science and how food affects our behavior.
His book, Eat to Live, the revolutionary formula for fast and sustained weight loss is spectacular.
He advocates for programs that are not just medically sound, but sensible.
And you could actually imagine it working on you.
And part of the reason for that is because they do work and because he uses them on patients day in and day out.
And as a clinician, if you're taking care of patients and you're busy, you're doing something right.
So it speaks volumes to the effect of the programs that he's advocating for.
He's a board certified family physician who specializes in preventive disease, but also in reversing ailments primarily through nutritional and natural methods.
And his practices in Flemington, New Jersey, a very pretty part of this country.
Joel, let me just start off with your own background.
You're a world-class figure skater.
Which I didn't actually know when we were in medical school because you didn't figure skate much in our classes.
But at that young age, you probably were already instilled with an awareness of how important nutrition was in your own life.
Absolutely.
I mean, that's really, I think, what got me interested in nutrition to begin with, is we were always trying to better our stamina, better our conditioning, and we realized as an athlete, if you get sick and you're out of, like, training even for a couple of weeks, your whole year of work is down the drain.
And actually, right now, I have world-class skiers, Olympic skiers, and tennis players, and top athletes who come to me for nutritional advice.
And the reason they come to me is not really to better their performance as much.
They don't want to get ill.
They want to stay well through their competitive season.
And they want to know how to eat when people are coughing in their face, shaking their hands.
Like, for example, Eric Schlapp, he's been in four Olympics.
He gets all the ski manufacturers and people wanting him to subsidize their products.
But if he's not able to come in the top ten in the world, let's say, he could lose all his income.
And if he gets a cold, a flu, right during the competitive season, his whole chances are shot.
So these people, we talk about that your immune system is based on, of course, the exposure to virus and the virulence of the virus and the load, but also the body's resistance to disease.
And that's where nutrition plays a phenomenal role, not just in reversing heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, autoimmune disease, migraines, asthma, and allergies, but also just generally not getting sick and bouncing back fast if you do get sick.
And we see that all the time.
I mean, some people just never, ever get ill.
Others are sick all the time.
And of course, there's some other constitutional issues, immune function and the like, but the nutritional foundation that you feed the furnace of your body is important as well.
Now, you were part of the U.S. World Figure Skating team when you were younger.
And through that process, as you say, you realized the importance of nutrition.
But who taught you?
My father was interested in nutrition a lot.
You know, when he used to talk about nutrition and how important it was when I was a kid, I used to think he was crazy.
You know what, are you crazy, Dad?
Nobody eats this way.
Nobody eats healthy like that.
Was he?
What's that?
Was he?
He wasn't crazy.
The rest of society was crazy, I found out.
As I got older, I said, wow, this stuff is really sensible.
I mean, people are like...
Who taught him?
I'm curious about this.
I'll tell you a quick story.
I got called by Sidney Poitier probably about a year ago.
And he's just the most polite guy in the world.
And he was asking me about some other issue.
It wasn't a health issue of his.
It was completely unrelated.
But he, towards the very end, very politely said, you know, Dr. Oz, I watch you on the Oprah show a lot, and I've got your books, and I've read them.
No offense, but I'm going to tell you that I've actually been doing everything you've been saying, but since 1960. And I said, Mr. Portia, I was born in 1960. I mean, how did you know this?
I mean, this must have all been out there.
He said, well, you know, I was in Europe, and this nutritionist that I met, a very eccentric woman, He told me just about every single thing that you've been proving, quote unquote, in your books, that medical science has finally come around to actually demonstrate to be effective.
And I thought it made sense to me, so I started doing it.
I tell you, look at that man.
I was in Africa with him.
He was one of the invitees at the opening of Oprah's School in South Africa.
He looks like he's 60, younger even, and he's so vital, so much energy.
And you realize that, in fact, living that way for the last 46 years has done him pretty good.
There's a lot of people like that, too.
I mean, you're right.
I mean, you're asking me.
I remember that my father heard Jack Duntrop on the radio in 1955 for a book he wrote called You Don't Have to Be Sick.
Now, I got to know Jack when I flew my writings later on, and Jack had two heart attacks before the age of 50. And he lived to be, he passed away of, I think, of prostate cancer.
He died when he was 96. Oh.
But I played him singles tennis when he was in his 90s.
I was playing him singles on a tennis court, and he was a great tennis player.
Joel, by the way, is a great tennis player, as is his whole family, so that's seen quite a lot.
So the point is that nutrition plays such a huge role in having a healthy life expectancy.
Once you pass 65, Then your life goes downhill if you're living the American diet style.
But between 65 and 85 or 75 and 95, that's where the quality of your life comes in.
Having the enjoyment and the pleasure of being fit, having your mental faculties intact, not being in pain, and not being a medical cripple.
And that's what we see with these people who've really taken good care of their health when they were younger.
They have this much better later life.
So we got so much to cover with Joel Fuhrman.
I'm just going to dive right into it.
His book, Eat to Live, the revolutionary formula for fast and sustained weight loss.
So number one, let's talk a little bit about some of the basic assumptions that we've made in our current diet.
And you teach us it in many different ways.
But let's start with this whole concept of toxic hunger.
Sounds good to me.
What is it?
Well, I'm claiming that diets are going to fail because people are driven to overeat.
Now, we all know Americans eat too many calories.
We know Americans don't eat a healthy enough diet.
But my point is that they can't stop eating too many calories because they're driven to overeat by the nutrients that are lacking in their diet.
Let me explain.
Let's say you're drinking 10 cups of coffee a day and you stop drinking coffee.
Well, then you start to feel sickly.
You start to feel headachy and shaky and weak from the caffeine withdrawal.
But when we eat a diet where our nutrient needs aren't met, we build up toxic waste products like AGEs, advanced glycation end products, and free radicals in our tissues from the lack of antioxidants and phytochemicals in our diet.
And when those toxic metabolites build up in our tissues, and we stop eating even for a few hours, we start to feel the same shakiness, the headaches, the stomach cramping, the abdominal spasm, the weakness, the fatigue, and people mistakenly think that's hunger.
And I'm saying that real hunger...
Is a mouth and throat sensation.
And when you feel this sensation in your throat, you start salivating and food tastes good.
And it's so incredibly pleasurable to eat when you're really hungry.
And that once we start meeting people's nutritional needs, they lose that detox hunger that some people even call hypoglycemia.
That goes away.
And now they don't have to stuff their face with food every couple of hours.
So I'm explaining the fact that when your glucose level goes down after a meal, and you're living off the glycogen now in your liver, right?
Because you're living, it's called glycolysis.
You shouldn't be hungry while the glycogen reserve in your liver is still adequate to maintain your glucose curve.
You shouldn't be hungry.
But when you're not digesting food, that's when the body most effectively detoxifies, repairs, heals, and tries to fix things that you've been doing wrong.
And people feel ill, and they don't see that feeling ill is actually a right-directed or healing function of the body.
That feeling bad can mean you're getting better from the toxicity from getting off caffeine, getting off...
Smoking, snorting cocaine or something.
You give a couple examples in the book.
There's an overfed yet malnourished syndrome that you're sort of describing.
And just to recount them, 62% of us don't have enough zinc, 72% magnesium, 95% deficient in vitamin E, 50% deficient in folic acid.
These are the kinds of foods that we eat compared to having whole wheat pasta, typical pasta, those kinds of comparisons.
Is that accurate?
Are those the kinds of deficiencies we're talking about in our diet?
Yes and no.
I mean, clearly, you know, about 80 years ago, scientists discovered about 14 vitamins and 25 minerals that are necessary for normal cell function.
And we said, wow, incredible!
We can give people vitamin pulls.
We can put thiamine and riboflavin into cocoa puffs.
And we can have people be healthier than ever before.
And then we saw cancer rates after that point go up every year for 75 years in a row.
What?
I mean, how could it go up every single year for 75 years in a row?
It didn't even go down one year.
And then about 18 years ago, scientists recognized that there was a third class of micronutrients called phytochemicals.
And there are more than 10,000 of them discovered.
And by weight and diversity, the nutritional contribution of phytochemicals is just as important and just as much as vitamins and minerals.
And now we've realized and we take our vitamins and minerals from, you know, adding them to foods that don't have them in them as compared to eating high-nutrient foods that have a full symphony of phytonutrients.
There's a huge difference.
So here's what I'm saying.
I'm saying that the foods that are naturally vitamin and mineral rich are the same foods that are so rich in those undiscovered nutrients.
And when we isolate and we identify the foods that are naturally nutrient rich and we eat lots of those foods, we have a completely different body function.
Now our body functions normally and it literally becomes almost disease proof.
The body can repair broken DNA cross links that lead to dysplasia and cancer.
It can detoxify compounds that cause migraine headaches.
It can repair the immune, the suppressor cells in the immune system that cause autoimmune disease.
In other words, without the broad assortment of phytochemicals, we're left with a diet, with a body that's prone to disease.
Joel, do you understand exactly how it is that phytochemicals do that?
I'll give you an example.
I was looking at flavonoids for a recent Oprah show we were doing.
And I read an interesting theory that the reason flavonoids work is not because they are rich antioxidants, because they really aren't.
And I think a lot of the phytochemicals are in that category as well.
But they actually stimulate the body to expel them.
And by doing that, allow the body to expel toxins.
Now, I don't have any proof for this, but I have been searching for what it is exactly that allows phytochemicals to, for example, reduce cancer rates.
And it's not that easy to figure it out.
I think there's got to be hundreds of various mechanisms that can't be understood by scientists today.
And what we're learning is that the more we learn, the more we know we didn't know.
And the bottom line is that we've shifted so far away from a diet that would have been naturally adapted to our species, and we can't live on processed foods and factory-fed, you know, made foods and expect to have normal health.
So I always make the statement that if you lived on Gilligan's Island, right, and you ate the foods that were naturally on the island, natural foods, you couldn't become overweight.
There wouldn't be concentrated oils.
There wouldn't be flour.
There wouldn't be all these cheeses.
You'd have to eat vegetables and fruits and little fish.
Whatever the point is, is that that's how you know that Skipper never really lived on that island.
Right.
That's a good point.
You know, it's so funny to bring that up.
Guess who I met last night again?
I haven't seen you in a long time.
Who?
Ginger.
Really?
Yes.
So Skipper didn't live on Gilgan's Isle.
That's a good place to go.
But let's go back to that point for a second, because there's something very prerogative you mentioned in the book.
We're speaking with Dr. Joel Fuhrman, by the way, his book Eat to Live.
Yet another wonderful treatise in the several he's written on this topic.
Olive oil.
I've been stuck on this because I eat a lot of olive oil.
And you quote Walter Willett, the great Harvard nutritionist, nutrition expert, epidemiologist, as saying that the Mediterranean diet, which many have believed is based on olive oil, really only works for folks whose weight is normal.
Is that true?
Did I say that one more time?
That the Mediterranean diet makes those people's weight be normal?
No, it's only viable for people who are close to their ideal body weight.
Oh, I understand what you're saying.
Right, yeah.
I mean, do you believe...
Actually, forget.
What am I leading you on?
What do you think about olive oil?
Well, I think all oil, every oil, including olive oil, is 120 calories per tablespoon.
And olive oil is 14% saturated fat, by the way.
So it's clearly not a health food.
If you replace more saturated fats and trans fats and butter and cheese with olive oil, you're doing something beneficial.
You're eating something that's less harmful.
But olive oil isn't a health food, and the average American is eating over...
300 calories from oil per day, those 300 calories a week adds up to pounds on their tissues.
So the point is, if you're behind a plow in a field eight hours a day, burning 3,500 to 4,000 calories a day, you can put a little oil on your salad.
But if you're working a desk job on a computer all day and you're not doing a lot of activity, how are you going to burn off those excess calories by pouring oil over everything you eat?
In other words...
We recognize two things in human nutrition.
Actually, before you give me those two things, we're going to go off for a second.
I want to hear those two things, but I also want to challenge you on olive oil.
There's last more to come after the break.
If we're going to do this intelligently, we ought to find options and alternatives.
So before you give me the two things we've learned about nutrition, what are the alternatives to olive oil?
Well, here, one important factor is that a fascinating aspect of nutritional science in the last 20 years was that eating nuts and seeds have dramatic effects to make people live longer, reduce both cancer and heart attack rates.
And the fascinating part about heart attack rates is that it just about wipes out sudden cardiac death.
Sudden cardiac death drops by 70-80% when people eat nuts and seeds regularly.
And by sudden cardiac death, we don't mean a heart attack, we mean mostly the arrhythmias, going into VTAC, going into arrhythmias that cause, right?
And the point is that in nuts and seeds are various chemicals like sesame and sesame seeds that don't just supply us with vitamin E in eight different forms, but actually increase the biological activity of the vitamin E in the body.
And it increased the absorption of other nutrients that we eat in the same meal as the sesame seeds, for example.
That's just one example.
The point here is that when we extract and use the sesame oil in the salad dressing or the olive oil or the almond oil instead of the whole nut or seed, we lose some of those beneficial anti-cancer and longevity-enhancing effects of the whole nut and seed.
So one of the unique aspects of my diet style and my cooking style Is I make delicious tasting dressings.
Instead of pouring oil in them and wasting all those good nutrients, we actually put sesame seeds, almonds, you know, cashews, pecans in the salad dressing.
Got it.
So I might make, for example, a garlicky tomato paste with some fig vinegar and some almonds or almond butter in.
And it's an incredibly great tasting dressing, a fig almond tomato dressing.
Or I'll take, let's say...
Hey, write that down for the next book.
Stolen.
I got it already.
Stolen.
It's gone.
Lisa's fake almond tomato dressing.
I can see the postscript in the book in small letters.
Thank you for technical support, Dr. Joel Fuhrman.
You know, in medicine, we always want to give a guy a hard time.
You're always adamant at the very back, you know, thank you for technical support.
Right.
Yeah, so I have a full, in my office, I have a dietician who analyzes nutrient density, does research for me.
I have a full-time chef, and I have a full kitchen where I see patients.
When people walk out from seeing me, they get recipe books, they get DVD, we have a video now where people can get a cooking video.
They actually can taste things in my office.
They walk out of my office and they're tasting a shake when they leave my office made out of a whole bag of spinach blended with an orange, a slice of dried pineapple, and a little splash of orange vinegar in there.
And they'll taste this spinach shake and they'll go, unbelievable, this is delicious, give me another one of those.
I have three more for the road.
I'm just showing you how healthy foods can taste great and you don't have to take...
It's not like you're melting away your diabetes or getting rid of your headaches by suffering with the nerves of steel living on lettuce the whole time.
You're actually eating good tasting food.
And this is back to the oil thing.
We're taking the low-nutrient calories out and substituting high-nutrient calories.
And that's the point.
So I'm not saying to people, this is very different from giving people a low-fat diet or a high-protein diet or a low-protein diet.
I'm actually saying the relationship between fat, protein, and carbohydrate isn't as important as the relationship between total micronutrients and calories.
In other words, Americans eat too much fat, we have to eat less fat.
We eat too much carbohydrate, we have to eat less carbohydrate.
And we eat too much protein, we have to eat less protein.
That's less of everything.
We have to eat less of everything.
It's not the ratio, but the calories we do eat have to be nutrient rich.
That's the secret.
Got it.
Now, you said there are two major insights.
Was that one of them?
The thing about, yes, the one point here is calories, is that when you put oil on your food, you're going over your caloric requirements for the day without realizing it.
Right.
And number two, you're using low nutrient calories instead of high nutrient calories, so you're lowering the total nutrient quality of your whole diet.
Those are my two points.
I've heard, although it is hard to validate this, that half of the calories that a young woman gets in her life are from the salad dressing.
Do you think that could be true?
Yeah, can you...
You know, it's another thing I tell people.
I say, you know, you put...
You have this big salad.
It's about...
You know, 70 calories a pound.
So people put this big giant half a pound salad together.
It's about 35 calories.
And they throw two or three tablespoons of dressing on top at 120 calories a tablespoon.
That's 390 calories of dressing on 35 calories of salad.
So I tell them, forget the salad then.
Just drink the dressing straight from the bottle.
You know?
Now, the next part of Eat to Live, and we're here with Dr. Joel Fuhrman, is a topic that Lisa is very anxious to talk about.
It's based on some of the work that came out of the China Project and the China Study, the dark side of animal protein.
So what do you recommend to Americans about animal protein?
I recommend that as you switch from less animal protein to more vegetable protein, we increase the phytochemical density and diversity of our diet.
Because animal products supply us with calories, but they don't contain any antioxidant nutrients or phytochemicals or fibers.
So in other words, what I'm saying here is like, a piece of chicken is just like a bagel.
Because neither the chicken nor the bagel, they contain macronutrients, of course, calorie-containing nutrients, which are protein, carbohydrate, and fat.
But Americans aren't deficient in those things.
But they don't give us those vitamin E, vitamin C, vitamin K, folate, bioflavonoids, lignins, phytochemicals, fibers.
In other words, those are low-nutrient foods in general.
we have to dramatically reduce our risk of animal products and dramatically reduce our risks of processed foods simultaneously and in their place substitute a much higher amount of these plant foods that are rich in protein.
Most people don't even know that green vegetables, for example, are very high in protein.
You know, like, for example, most green vegetables are between 35 and 50 percent of calories from protein.
They are high-protein foods.
So we're talking about eating more high-protein foods, more high-protein vegetable products, like beans and greens and nuts and seeds, like sunflower seeds are 23 percent of calories from protein, and less protein from animal-source foods as a mechanism or as this strategy to increase the micronutrient density in your diet, and that gives and less protein from animal-source foods as a mechanism or as this strategy to increase
So we're talking here about the fact that excess animal protein in relationship to plant protein is one of the features of the American diet and modern Western diets, leading us to develop the degenerative diseases that Americans see in this country.
Do you eat meat?
I eat a very, very small amount of outer products, maybe two servings, three servings a month.
Why do you even do that?
Mostly because I'm at a wedding or something or at some event or at a holiday and I just want to taste something.
But I'm not saying that people have to be a strict vegetarian.
To have good health, because I don't think that a little bit of animal products in your diet is detrimental.
A matter of fact, one or two servings a week, it could still be on a...
You know, in other words, the American diet is 40% of calories from animal products.
And the Atkins diet, the Zone, all these diets out there are higher in animal products than that.
They're like 60%, and Atkins diet might be 80%.
And I'm saying Americans are already eating 40%.
And we have to cut down to 20% and better yet, 10%.
We've got to get it down there so we have more room for these really healthy vegetation to be a healthier diet.
Now, you can take a vegetarian or vegan diet and make it ideal with supplementing it appropriately to make it an ideal diet, or you can take a diet with a low amount of animal products and make it an ideal diet.
But you can't take a diet with 60, 70, or 80% of animal products, no matter how much supplements you put in, no matter what you do to it, that can't become a disease-proofing, that can't become an ideal diet.
You follow me?
Yeah, I follow that.
Absolutely.
The area that I often get challenged in, and this is how I live my life.
When I see food and I'm hungry, and I think it's a very important point you make, it has to be real hunger.
So you don't eat because it's mealtime.
You don't eat because you have toxic hunger, which is you don't feel good, so you're trying to eat to cover it up.
But if you're truly hungry, I usually listen to my body.
And maybe I don't have the normal taste buds, but I think I'm representative of the population.
And so, for example, if I'm going out and there's a meat product that I enjoy, I'm going to have it.
I don't think my meat intake is anywhere close to what the average American takes in.
But is that approach a better one?
Because you can balance it easier than a vegan diet.
Because Lisa's vegan.
And so I look at what she eats, and a lot of times she's struggling to find food that's acceptable in whatever environment we happen to be in, i.e.
a gala.
You're talking about last night, right?
Last night was great, but you know, in general.
Well, you know what?
People are so nutritionally ignorant that no matter what way they eat, they don't have the basic materials to devise a healthy diet for themselves.
They're not seeking high-nutrient foods.
They have no understanding of nutrition.
So the answer to your question is, most people on vegan diets are eating a really low-nutrient, unhealthy diet, and most people on eating...
Eating animal products are also eating a poor diet.
So my point is that I'm critical of everyone's diet, and whether you eat a little bit of animal products or a vegan diet, both of those diets can be made so that they can be healthy, and they can be tasty, and they can support a long, healthy life.
We just have to understand some of these basic premises to design the diet appropriately.
And yeah, I understand your point that on a vegan diet, it's possible that some people, a certain percent of people, aren't going to have their diet rich enough in omega-3 fatty acids.
That's why it has to be designed to take some flax seeds and walnuts and to have a little maybe DHA added to your diet.
And certainly a vegan diet might be deficient in B12, and we have to design that.
And vitamin D is the sunshine vitamin, and maybe they're a little low in iodine.
If we know exactly how to design that diet, we can make it ideal.
And it might be easier if you're having a little bit of fish in your diet, so you wouldn't have those deficiencies to supplement.
But the problem is...
Is that since fish is such a polluted food, for example, people who eat animal products, most of them eat too many animal products, and they eat a lot of polluted animal products, like too much of the polluted fish.
And there's a relationship between eating larger amounts of fish and breast cancer, for example, because of the toxicity from the pollution, the PCBs, the DDT. So we have to be careful on both types of diets to design it appropriately, is my point.
That's a reasonable one.
What have you learned from looking at populations around the world?
If you had to recommend a diet today that's available in this world right now that folks conventionally eat, which one would you recommend?
Is it the Mediterranean program?
Is it the food they eat in Okinawa?
Gilligan's Island Diet.
Gilligan's Island Diet.
Well, I would say we would call it, you know, of course I'm going to say...
The Flemington, New Jersey Diet.
Exactly.
The Dr. Furman Eat to Live Diet.
Everybody.
300 million people.
When I wrote Eat to Live...
Lines are open now.
Right.
When I wrote Eat to Live, I didn't design that diet for the masses.
It's designed for people who can't lose weight no matter what they do.
It's designed for people who are sick and want to get well.
It's a very aggressive diet for people, not for the masses.
And that's, you know, it's too aggressive for most people.
And it's shocked me how well it's sold.
And it's sold to translate into five foreign languages.
And it's going all over the world like crazy because people get well from it.
It's a great book.
But the point is here is that...
We have to understand the concepts.
What's the best factors of the Mediterranean diet?
What are the best things in that diet?
What are the best things in the Japanese or Okinawan diet?
We don't want to emulate all the white rice and salt in that diet, even though in rural China there's no heart attacks.
But the best diet is probably the Hunza diets, on the top of Tibet, where they live on almonds and sunflower seeds and apricots and green vegetables with a little bit of animal products in their diet, under 10% of total calories.
That's actually what I eat.
You're a Hunza.
Well, it is, Hans.
I actually thought it was always environmental because my genome desired it, but the diet that I end up eating in the hospital, because it's like being in Tibet.
I have no access to food unless I've had leftovers from the prior evening.
If I get home, you know, Lisa has this new program at home that at 7.30 the kitchen closes.
I've had that for 20 years.
It has had no impact.
So if I get home after 7.30 in the evening, I don't get food, which means I don't get leftovers because I have trouble boiling water.
And so the next day I end up eating nuts and whatever I can scrounge around in the refrigerator that's left over from before.
So that's effectively what you eat.
But that doesn't seem very balanced to me.
I'm always concerned that I'm missing some incredibly valuable constituent of green leafy vegetables that the Hunza don't seem to get.
No, the Hunzas have green leafy vegetables in their diet.
They can grow them up there?
Oh, yeah.
You know, there are a lot of different greens and things.
But you're right.
Greens are a superfood, a wonderfood.
And certain greens have such an incredible relationship with lower incidence of chronic diseases worldwide that, in other words...
Cancer rates, for example, colon cancer, drops precipitously when you have populations that are high green vegetables.
The Fiji Islanders, there's a study that shows that the Fiji Islanders who smoke like fiends have one-tenth the lung cancer rate of the Hawaiianers, native Hawaiians, who don't smoke because all the green vegetables they eat.
So even when you take something like smoking cigarettes, so I tell people nutrition plays a role in everything.
Whether you get radiation exposure, your risk of cancer is still affected by the nutrition.
Whether you get smoked cigarettes and have a high risk of lung cancer, that's still affected by your nutrition.
In other words, nutrition affects everything because it enables the body, as you discussed, to detoxify and repair.
Does wheatgrass count as a leafy green?
It counts, but believe it or not, it's not as nutrient-rich as kale and collards and bok choy.
Got a lot more questions to go, but first, let's take a quick break.
I just make this point to emphasize something you said earlier.
Oatmeal, ham, and tomato.
How much protein per calorie do they have?
It's the exact same.
All three of them.
You have to eat 800 tomatoes to get the same number of calories that you get from a piece of ham.
Not really.
And more importantly, and this comes up in many different sequences, you actually think that things have protein in them, have to have meat.
And you actually have very high amounts of protein in many of the other sources.
In fact, forget about all that stuff.
The reality is, I don't know anybody who's protein depleted in America.
No.
I mean, have you seen anyone with any of the protein deficiency ailments who don't have an organic illness, like they have an intestinal problem, etc.?
Right.
Exactly.
That's the point, is that people don't even know that vegetables even have protein, is the point, I think.
Because I tell people, what do you think?
That the cow shove its hoof into the soil and sprout roots to get the protein?
Or do you know the cow?
Of course not.
It ate the grass.
You know, every animal that ever lived in the history of the world got its protein and nitrogen come out from the soil through green plants, and some animal ate the plant, and some animal ate the animal that ate the plant, but plants have to be rich in protein or we wouldn't have any life on the planet.
Right.
The point is that all foods are a mixture of fat, carbohydrate, and protein, and we've accepted the myth That only animal products have protein.
And it led us down the road to dietary suicide, thinking that protein was such a favorable nutrient to be held in such high esteem, and we've got to be seeking out all high-protein foods.
And we've just got to undo that myth.
Without question.
And that, I think, is a myth that we're undoing today.
But let's talk about the disease part now.
So you wrote, you said eat to live for folks who have big weight issues and or have illnesses they think are linked to their food they're eating.
And these can be autoimmune ailments, you know, biomiologias, chronic pain syndromes, whatever it may be.
I walk into your clinic and let's just say I've got some autoimmune problem.
It could be anything across the entire spectrum of potential problems.
How do you start?
What do you do?
I'm excited to have you there.
And I give people the feeling that they're in the right place because I've had, for example, hundreds of people with rheumatoid arthritis, ulcerative colitis, Crohn's disease, psoriasis, who may have made recoveries from their diseases.
And I tell them that nutritional intervention is more therapeutically even...
It's effective as drugs, and in the majority of cases, most people come off the medications and make a recovery.
So I give them that excitement and hope that it's not just a waste of time doing this.
And some patients will say, I'll eat sawdust to get well.
Just tell me what to do.
And I put them on a protocol, and the majority of patients either make a remarkable improvement or they make a partial improvement.
I just got to tell you this one case.
She was 15 years old.
Her name is Julissa.
She was on the National Renal Transplant List waiting for a new kidney with a creatinine of 4.7, and she made a complete recovery.
That by means her kidneys really aren't working at all.
Right.
She's just teetering on the edge.
Teetering on the edge, waiting for a new kidney, blown up from steroids on imuan, prednisone, and CELSEP, not getting better.
And she makes a complete recovery from lupus on high-nutrient eating.
And she wasn't even sure she was going to do it.
She wanted to give up all her junk food eating.
And I wasn't even sure it could work.
And I thought, of course, it couldn't work at this stage.
I said, we have nothing to lose.
Why?
You know, let's see if we can improve your nutrition.
And that's just one example.
One of my patients even wrote a book about it by interviewing all my patients who got well from arthritis and psoriasis, but wrote a book called The Lupus Recovery Diet, you know?
So take lupus as an example.
Give me some really concrete things.
How do you sort of actually break people into new taste buds, to habits, to new ways of buying food, and to a very different way of envisioning what they're going to put in their body?
Absolutely.
I'm going to get very concrete for the listener now, because if you want to do this and you can't fly out to New Jersey to see Joel, how do they actually do it?
Well, first of all, I tell them that taste is a learned phenomenon.
You like what you're used to eating.
And you may not like this diet at the beginning, but I'm going to show you, if you learn the recipes, if you give it a couple of months of trying it, and you work with me, I will guarantee you will like this as much as your old diet.
But you can't judge it in the first couple of weeks.
And forget those myths that you think vegetables don't taste good.
With these recipes, we're going to show you vegetables taste great.
And we actually give them vegetable juices and smoothies, and we even make like sorbets and ice creams for them.
Like I take a bag of frozen strawberries and whip it in the blender with a piece of dried pineapple and a little splash of lemon or something.
Or we take...
Why dried pineapple?
Because instead of adding sugar, we'll add some more unsweetened dried pineapple to give it that little tang and sweetness.
Because the strawberries, the frozen strawberries don't have enough natural sweetness to themselves.
Got it.
Yeah, so you can put regular pineapple in.
It's just going to be a little sweeter with the dried pineapple.
All right.
But I think they follow the protocol, and if they can see they're getting better in a few months, and you know what we also do to motivate them, is I scan their nutrient score.
In other words, I'll scan their skin for phytochemicals and antioxidants through a carotenoid score.
I have a machine that scans them and gives them a number.
And all these autoimmune patients have very low numbers.
Or migraine patients, you know, the chronic headache patients.
They'll come in with a score of like 10,000 or 15,000.
And they'll go, look, how can your body work if it doesn't have nutrients in it?
You can't come off your medications We're not going to taper your methotrexate, your prednisone, until your score is at least 60,000.
So I try to kick you off medications now, you're going to deteriorate and fall back.
This scanner actually looks at the orange-yellow pigment in your skin?
Absolutely.
It looks at the pigment in your skin, and it can give you a skin carotenoid score.
And I can use that carotenoid level to correlate with their overall quality of their diet as a measurement of antioxidants in their tissues.
And I can say, well, if you're not going to have the blended salads, the sorbets, the cruciferous soups, and they have to eat, if they have an autoimmune disease...
They have to eat a little ton of cruciferous vegetables in soups and salads.
The cruciferous is the broccoli and cabbage family.
And we show them how to make great tasting recipes.
And by the way, I have this all information on my website.
People can download a newsletter for no charge.
On November 2004 newsletter is the protocol for autoimmune diseases, by the way.
If people are interested.
What's the website?
It's Dr. Fuhrman.
F-U-H-R-M-A-N. Yeah, D-R-F-U-H-R-M-A-N. All right.
Thanks.
Keep going.
So they follow the protocol.
They take high-level vitamin D. They take the fish oils.
They take the probiotics.
And they follow this diet very rich in green vegetables and phytochemicals.
And we eliminate those factors that trigger the immune system.
And of course...
Autoimmune disease has multiple causes that are interrelated, and we try to attack all the causes.
You know, it's like a witch's cauldron of factors, including genetic factors.
These people, their things leak out of their gut easier.
They excite an immune response.
They can't shut down the immune response.
Vitamin D deficiency can help promote that, too.
You know, we have an epidemic of vitamin D deficiency in this country.
Is that the single biggest deficiency you find in your practice?
Yeah, it's amazing.
I do blood levels when they come in.
First visit on everybody.
So you'll test for everything?
Whether they're B-deficient, D-deficient?
Yeah, I'll test for a lot of stuff.
Not everything, but a lot of stuff.
Do you check levels of these chemicals in the white cells or in the actual serum?
No, in the serum.
I just get a standard 25-hydroxyvitamin D level that every doctor in the country can order in every lab in the country.
It's nothing special.
And amazingly, we find that about 60-70% of people are vitamin D deficient, and most of these people are taking a multivitamin already.
And they're still vitamin D deficient.
Oh, that's amazing.
And you know, vitamin D deficiency is a fascinating nutrient because it's linked to dramatic high rates of cancer rate if you're low in it.
It's not just osteoporosis.
And they find that like a 60% high rate of cancer, even for colon cancer or prostate cancer, for people who are vitamin D deficient.
It's like a magic pill not to be vitamin D deficient.
Right.
I push vitamin D on everybody.
And you also do it in divided doses?
I do it in the dose that makes the blood level come out perfect, which could vary from patient to patient.
Got it.
So whatever they need.
And I also have both types of vitamin D available.
One is D2, which is a vegan form, and one is D3, which is a non-vegan form, which is more effective.
So some of the people on vegan diets don't want to take the vitamin D3. What's it from?
The vitamin D3 is made from lanolin.
They get it from the wool of sheep.
And they don't kill the sheep.
That sounds good.
Sounds tasty.
That's the more effective vitamin D. That's a little weird.
Go lick that sheep.
Mmm, tasty.
But when you use the vitamin D2 in most health food stores, when you buy the little cheap vitamin D in a health food store, the D2, you've got to take a huge dose to be effective.
So if you're taking D2, you've got to take like 2,000, 3,000, 4,000.
If you're taking vitamin D3, the better one, then you've got to take less, like 800 or 100,000.
What's vitamin D2 from?
Do you know?
The vegan one?
The vitamin D2 is just a bacteria product they make in the laboratory.
It's more like a synthetic D. They're in your clinic.
You've seen them.
You understand their medical problems.
You check their serum levels.
You identify the fact that they're nutritionally depleted.
You replace those nutrients, usually with some supplements, but you've advocated for using whole foods when possible anyway.
Oh, they're eating more whole foods in sorbets, salads, smoothies, soups.
We give them whole recipes.
It's a whole cooking style to increase nutrient absorption.
So obviously whole food and high nutrient foods are the key factor here.
So Joel...
And maybe this is the most provocative question I'll ask you.
It doesn't sound like rocket science.
You're taking folks that have seemingly incurable ailments that have a huge cost to the person as well as the society managing them.
They're on cancer therapies, basically, for some of these autoimmune ailments.
It doesn't seem difficult for me to argue that every single person having that problem...
Once they've gotten okay with their physician, ought to be trying a program like this.
Why wouldn't that be happening already?
Forget about you and I talking about here.
Why wouldn't that just be standard care in the medical community?
You know, it's amazing.
It's utterly amazing.
You know, I'm the only doctor doing this in the country, practically.
And they say, well, where's the studies?
Where's the studies?
And there are studies.
You know, they're not great and they're not a huge amount, but there are some studies.
And I should be, you know, we should be involved with a multi-centered study with people following my autoimmune protocol on patients.
There's no interest.
Call the doctors up.
You know, how about you put some of your autoimmune patients on my protocol?
We'll do a multi-centered study.
We'll get some of you on.
How about we do this?
There's no money to fund it.
And I'll fund it now.
I'll...
I'll fund it.
And if we get enough of doctors together, we each give some of our patients in it.
We can just donate our time to a few patients.
The point is that when the result is not something you can sell and make a million dollars on when you get the result, there's no interest with anybody.
Let me just be contrarian on this.
That's one way of seeing it.
The other way of seeing it is doctors don't have confidence that their patients can do it.
And in fairness, what you're advocating for really isn't that easy.
It is easier to take a pill.
It's probably not as good for you.
But it's easier to take a pill than to change everything you've learned about how to feed yourself.
One of the most fundamental things we do day in and day out.
I think a lot of doctors think that's the problem.
You know what?
I've told my patients to eat well and they don't.
Because frankly, that's all we do tell them.
Eat well.
We don't tell them how to do it.
So they don't go home and do it.
A lot of the rheumatologists, when the patient goes back to them well from their disease, some of them get angry.
Yell at the patient.
Throw them out of the office.
Their egos have been upset in some way that they're not on the drug anymore.
But some of the rheumatologists and endocrinologists call me up on the phone and go, I can't believe what you did to my person with grave disease and hyperthyroidism.
They're totally well.
It's so exciting.
We've got to do a study together.
I just had the head surgeon at NYU of gastrointestinal surgery say to the patient, you've got to get Dr. Furman to contact me.
I've got to do a study with him.
Because the person was going to remove their colon from ulcerative colitis and the person got well by me giving them all the juices and the diet and everything.
So doctors are different just like all people and all lawyers are different.
You've got some doctors very excited by it and some doctors angry by it.
But the bottom line is, let's do more research.
But still, you've got to agree that Two things.
Number one, there's no funding or big money pushing studies, and it's very hard for me to do this.
I'm going to do it no matter what.
But number two, it doesn't matter whether the patients want a pill or not.
That's what in medical school I'd be arguing with the PhDs and medical doctors there, and they'd say to me, oh yeah, we know that's true, but people don't want to do that.
They just want a pill.
And I'd say, it doesn't matter what people want.
We've got to inform them.
We've got to teach them exactly what the choices are, fully inform them, and don't decide in advance and not tell them the information.
Let them decide they don't want to do it.
And it doesn't matter what percent wouldn't want it.
Because if it's only 10% that want it, that 10% should have had access to this information to make that choice, based on educated and based on really solid information.
Don't you think?
I'd vote for you.
The question, of course, is how do you actually get it done?
Do you see a change?
Do you see an empowered patient group saying, you know what, I've got a bad problem.
I'm not finding an answer that's curing me.
I've got well-meaning physicians taking good care of me, as far as I can tell, and they do care for me, because I think that's the case across the board.
We can talk generically about how docs don't pay attention to this and that, but the fact is most of us value tremendously the doctors take care of us.
They put their time, their heart, and their soul into managing the folks that they're taking care of.
But we are educated with the limited techniques that are available when we're educated.
And so in our, for example, medical school experience, if you remember, the only reason we got a nutrition class is when I was president of the student body, I started one.
We wouldn't have had one in med school.
The entire medical school program we were on, the only vitamin deficiencies we learned about were the ones you only read about in the textbooks from Africa.
Right?
Berry, berry.
Scurvy.
Things we never actually see in clinical practice.
But you know, back then, that's what they thought was worth teaching us.
They thought it was more valuable for me to learn how to open someone's chest.
And maybe they're right.
Maybe I shouldn't be focusing on nutrition if I'm going to open someone's chest.
But at the end of the day, you're still stuck with the reality that we have that information gap right now.
And the real question is, are we making headway?
I think we're making some headway.
You know why I think we're making headway?
Because how far we've gone down.
Health care costs have skyrocketed.
Cancer rates have increased.
You know, we've had some benefits and some tremendous medical discoveries and things that help people.
But I think that we're saying, you know, we can put men on the moon.
We can do all this.
Why can't we really have an effect on this?
Why can't we win the war against cancer?
And why are health care costs still skyrocketing?
I think there's a backlash now against this.
And people are saying, let's get back to the basics.
Let's not just give more money to drug companies to look for a magic pill to cure cancer.
Let's actually try to see if we can prevent cancer by cleaning up our environment, by eating healthier.
I think we're seeing people starting a movement going back to the basics.
And I'm seeing it.
Corporations are contacting me and getting involved with me training their healthcare workers.
To reduce healthcare costs and improve the quality of their nutrition in their cafeteria.
In other words, I think we're starting to see a movement, and I'm certain to see a lot of interest in people wanting to make some changes.
And I think it's right for what you're saying, is really try to see this as an alternative that people with these diseases can see nutrition as to work part and parcel with conventional medicine.
I don't like to call this alternative medicine.
Because I'm not looking for cures here.
We're looking to establish the body in an optimal healing environment to establish nutritional excellence.
With that note, Dr. Joel Fuhrman, thank you for joining us.
Your book, Eat to Live, The Revolutionary Fuhrman for Fast and Sustained Weight Loss.
Wonderful reading.
▲
Export Selection