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March 21, 2019 - Dr. Oz Podcast

38:25

America's Diabetes Crisis

Julian Whitaker of the Whitaker Wellness Institute sits down with Dr. Oz to talk about the right way to eat in order to avoid what is being considered an epidemic in this country: Diabetes. Julian also reveals which fats can help people actually lose weight, and how knocking certain starches out of our diet can prevent illness and obesity. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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	The general business of medicine is to keep it pharmaceutical, hospital-based, high-tech, and surgery.
	That's medicine.
	That's trillions of dollars of income following that model.
	But if you use natural therapies and people begin getting better and begin falling out of the general realm, then you can generate a lot of animosity.
	And it's basically economic.
	The Turf War.
	Hey, everyone. everyone.
	I'm Dr. Oz, and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
	We'll see you next time.
	Our guest is none other than Julian Whitaker.
	Many of you know of Dr. Whitaker's work.
	He's got a newsletter that's very, very widely read and very influential.
	He's written countless books.
	I think, Julian, 13 books, is that right?
	That's about right.
	They range on topics from From weight loss, which we'll talk a little bit about today, to reversing diabetes, which is related to weight loss, to the one I loved a lot was reversing heart disease.
	There was another one, I'm looking for the title here, I can only see it, but it was something like, why you should never have heart surgery, which a lot of my patients brought to me, which actually makes some very good points about why we do too much of the interventions in America to treat coronary disease.
	Dr. Whitaker graduated from Dartmouth College.
	Now, Dartmouth College, not to pry too deeply, but that's where they wrote Animal House, isn't it?
	It may have been.
	I was a member of a fraternity that we called an animal house, but I'm not sure if Dartmouth was the setting.
	Actually, you know, it was written by Harvard Boys, which is where I went to school, about Dartmouth.
	Received his medical degree from Emory University in 1970. That's where my dad trained, in part.
	Completed a surgical internship at Grady Memorial, which I only knew of when I was a little boy.
	My father was training there, and this is a tough city hospital.
	It was, right.
	They gave just a wonderful education to the folks who went through there.
	And then you went out to a very different environment, the University of California in San Francisco.
	And you're, I think, going to become an orthopedic surgeon.
	That's what I heard, anyway.
	That's correct.
	And then one day, and I was curious how this happened, you decided that you were going to go work with Mr. Pritikin at the Longevity Center, and subsequently in 1979 opened the Whitaker Wellness Institute.
	Now, what happened there?
	Was there some break that caused you to think, hey, you know, this is not, am I getting the right answers for the people that I want to help through orthodox medical training?
	Well, a very short synopsis of the story.
	I did not finish the orthopedic residency program.
	I just wasn't Happy with the idea of doing surgery the rest of my life, so I dropped out of the residency program.
	Then I was working in an emergency room trying to figure out what I was going to do, and a lady, about 30 I guess, came in with a sprained ankle.
	And Dr. Oz, this is the first time I'd ever looked in someone's face and saw twinkling eyes.
	You know, you hear about people whose eyes twinkle.
	Well, hers did, and I noticed that she was very healthy.
	And it dawned on me.
	It was like an epiphany.
	It dawned on me that as physicians, we never study or try to understand health.
	We only learn and dwell in disease.
	And so she happened to be a vitamin salesman for Shackley, very reputable vitamin company, and knew of a doctor in Pasadena that was using what we now call orthomolecular medicine or alternative medicine.
	I went and interviewed with him, worked with him.
	Then I read some books about Nathan Pritikin, and I went to Santa Barbara and got on his staff for about six months, and that's where I decided That I was going to run an institute where people came and were educated in their diet, had good, solid medical care, but had an alternative wellness approach to their diseases.
	Because I saw people get well at Pritikin, and I had never seen anybody get well when I was in regular conventional medicine.
	Because you're always going from one other drug to another drug to more drugs.
	And you get on this disease caravan, and you never really get well.
	And in 1979, I opened up the Whitaker Wellness Institute, and we've been chugging along ever since with people coming in, staying for a week, staying for two weeks or three weeks.
	But now we have a lot of alternative therapies here.
	We have hyperbaric oxygen.
	We probably have the largest hyperbaric oxygen treatment center in North America in terms of numbers of people treated.
	Simply because not many people do it.
	It's such a valuable therapy, but there's so many constrictions on what we do at Whitaker Wellness that it's rare to find everything that we do under one roof.
	So I'm going to walk, if we can, through some of these specific therapies, including hyperbaric oxygen.
	But let me just start off.
	How do you get the ideas for some of these things?
	I mean, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, which you can use for the bends, I guess, is not something that the average person would have thought would be helpful for tissue healing or many of the other...
	The purposes that it's been argued to be beneficial for.
	Where do you get a lot of these ideas for the newsletter, for your radio program, and the like?
	Well, I think the ideas are pretty common, and hyperbaric oxygen has been around 100 years.
	The interesting thing, and I think you can attest to this as well, is that often very effective, natural, low-tech therapies Are scorned by most medical schools and by most medical practitioners.
	And they scorn these activities not because they don't work, but just because they're not part of what they've been taught in medical school and not because of what they use in hospitals.
	That's the definition of alternative medicine.
	We have two acupuncturists at our clinic.
	Well, you never use acupuncture in the hospital.
	You've never learned acupuncture in medical school.
	It's not so much that I come up with ideas, it's just that I'm open to ideas.
	Because when you're open to the rationale of these holistic treatments, and you put them together, you find that they work, and they work exceptionally well.
	In patients with degenerative disease, because degenerative disease, they're a lifestyle problem.
	You know, you don't have some kind of bacteria that's causing you to have heart disease.
	It's a lifestyle problem.
	Same with diabetes.
	Same with obesity.
	So we bring people in.
	We address their lifestyle.
	We address their nutritional supplements.
	I think nutritional supplements, Dr. Oz, was the greatest medical breakthrough of last century.
	It dwarfs everything.
	It dwarfs antibiotics.
	It dwarfs surgery.
	It dwarfs everything.
	Because for the first time, In human civilization, you can take the active molecules of metabolic life, put them in a capsule, and swallow them.
	You've never been able to do that prior to the 1950s.
	This is a brand new development in human civilization to be able to take these orthomolecular particles that are necessary for life and dose them, take them in at varying and larger and smaller doses, you know, depending upon the need and how much you need to facilitate.
	So, Doctor, let me get concrete on a couple of these things.
	And just to emphasize, Understandably, you have a large clinical practice.
	You take care of folks, and you get an idea of what works and doesn't work within a clinic.
	It has always amazed me how little peer-reviewed research has done a lot of these things, in part because they're not as lucrative as, for example, pharmaceutical products.
	I'll tell you something, Dr. Austin.
	The peer-reviewed literature on nutritional supplements is huge.
	It's just you never hear about it.
	I do a lecture on diabetes where I go through all of the elements that you can take in the treatment of diabetes, and I quote from the peer-reviewed literature.
	Diabetes, diabetes care, Annals of Internal Medicine, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
	I quote all of these subjects that are there.
	They're in the literature.
	But they are totally ignored.
	They're ignored by physicians.
	There's one study I quote where a hundred adult onset diabetics were either given a multiple vitamin or given a placebo.
	Those that had the placebo, 93% of them had a disease during the year, an infectious disease of some kind.
	So only 17% You know, with a very high statistical relevancy had a disease.
	50% of those who were taking the placebo had 50% more time off due to illness than those that did not.
	Now, we've got 60 million diabetics.
	How much could we save in money if we just gave them a multiple vitamin every day and cut their interim disease for a year from 93% to 17%?
	That was in the peer-reviewed literature.
	Nobody responded.
	They don't in part because I think there's, within a year, some other study comes out saying the exact opposite.
	Take, for example, my specialty area, cardiovascular disease.
	We have a lot of literature, Mike Roizen and I, I'm going to have Mike ask you some questions as well in a sec, have both look at that literature, both feel very comfortable with the role of micronutrients, orthomolecular medicine as you describe it, And yet, you know, there's a paper that comes out every once in a while saying, hey, you know what, they gave multivitamins, in particular C and E, to folks who are suffering from atherosclerotic disease, and they die more frequently.
	And then you sort of tease into the details of it.
	The other thing is you've got to take the sum total.
	If you used a negative study...
	To throw out the baby with the bathwater and not looking at the totality of the scientific picture, we wouldn't have a single bypass operation done.
	We would not be allowed to put in a stent.
	We would sure not be allowed to put in a medicated stent.
	We would throw out virtually everything we're doing from a conventional point of view.
	You can't even find supportive scientific data that bypass surgery and angioplasty save lives.
	It's not even there to support the premise.
	Virtually all of the longevity studies on what we do most in cardiovascular disease, and that is put in stents and do bypass, virtually all the studies show that there is no longevity benefit.
	So, it's idiotic.
	To simply dwell on a negative null study, which shows that no, they didn't get better, when we're looking at all of this stuff in conventional medicine and can't even justify what we're doing from the positive study.
	Well, I think that what happens a lot of times with the interventions is you have a quick-fix mindset, but you also have a quick-fix solution.
	Now, you're right.
	Longevity is an example where stents have never been shown to prolong life.
	Cardiac surgery has been shown to reduce life.
	Well, again, it depends what study we pick, but Dr. Whitaker, you're hitting close to him.
	That's the point I'm talking about.
	We will accept the study and throw it out.
	Okay, we had one study that said they reduced life.
	But when that happens to vitamins, the whole country goes nuts.
	You see, it's a different mindset.
	They march to different drummers because the physicians love to jump on vitamins and say, don't take them, they might cause prostate cancer.
	One of the stupidest studies ever to come out.
	But when they have a valid study that shows that medicated stents increase heart attacks and increase death rate, Then they say, well, that's only one study.
	But they don't have the studies to show that it worked.
	So, the...
	Dr. Winick, again, I'm just going to point this out, and then we're going to take a quick break and come back and talk about some of the specific therapies.
	But part of, I think, what happens is that patients come in, they have some chest pain, and then someone says, you know, we can put a stent in there and get rid of the pain.
	And in fact, for that, it actually works very well.
	What it doesn't do...
	Is address the underlying corrosive chemicals in our blood that lead to the disease to begin with.
	That's the real solution.
	I think we're all in agreement on that.
	The part of the problem is that we, in America, polarize it.
	We say, is it going to be a stent or is it going to be vitamins?
	And in fairness, there are times when you want to have one or the other or both.
	Actually, I think you need to always have nutritional elements no matter what.
	That has to be the foundation therapy.
	There are times, and there's been good data on people who have weak heart muscles, that bypass surgery is life-saving.
	There's never been data, you're right, on stents preserving longevity, but both have been very effective at relief of symptoms.
	Now, that is a problem because for a lot of Americans, they figure no symptoms, no problem.
	And as we both know, that's not the case.
	When we come back, we're going to talk to Dr. Julian Whitaker, one of the nation's leaders in alternative and integrative medicine, about hyperbaric oxygen, a little bit more about nutrients, and we'll talk about his diet book as well.
	There's less more to come after the break.
	Dr. Whitaker, let me ask you, if I can, to talk a little bit about hyperbaric oxygen.
	You mentioned it earlier.
	And then after that, Mike Roizen, who's at the Cleveland Clinic, is going to pepper you with a bunch of questions that we've come up with.
	Dr. Whitaker, why don't you start off with hyperbaric oxygen?
	Thoughts on that?
	What's the data that it works and what kind of problems do you use it for?
	Well, Heisenberg oxygen gives the individual 100% oxygen.
	That is a huge step.
	Right now, we are breathing atmosphere.
	The atmosphere contains 20% oxygen.
	When you look at the little oxygen mask in the TVs and you go to the hospital and get oxygen, you're only getting a slight enhancement.
	You're going from 20% to 28%.
	But when you're breathing 100%, that's a five-fold increase in oxygen.
	Then when you get under pressure, and you're under pressure of, say, one atmosphere pressure, that's like scuba diving down to 33 feet.
	Now you're breathing 10 times the amount of available oxygen.
	Now in areas that are present and are getting worse because of low oxygen tension, such as wounds, strokes, Let's see, autism, infections, certain forms of cancer, Alzheimer's disease.
	When the disease area is flooded with oxygen, It stimulates the oxidation and the oxygen delivery system increases, and just dramatic improvements occur, particularly in such things as wounds.
	For instance, some burn centers use hyperbaric oxygen, and some burn centers do not.
	We had a close friend of ours who had a flash burn of her face, and she was looking at plastic surgery and scarring for the rest of her life, and she was in her 20s.
	We put her in the oxygen chamber.
	She had 21 treatments.
	She'd go back.
	She did not have a single scar after her treatment of hyperbaric oxygen.
	And her docs said, well, we didn't tell you to get into hyperbaric oxygen.
	She said, I know.
	Well, we don't want you to.
	That's okay.
	You don't have to.
	I'm going to do it anyway.
	And now she does.
	What's it worth to have flash burns of your face, treat with oxygen, and have no scar?
	What is that worth?
	Because the first people she saw when she got to the ER, when she was put up in the intensive care unit, were plastic surgeons as to how they want to reconstruct and cover up the damage.
	But now she has no damage.
	Dr. Whitaker?
	That's not fair to oxygen.
	Dr. Whitaker, let me switch topics now and go to one that's very common to everyone, which is obesity.
	Okay.
	And your new book, which I think is called The Whitaker Wellness Weight Loss Program.
	That's correct.
	You admit you were, in the book, you say you were once wrong about fat.
	How did you change your practice, and do you think other doctors, or most other doctors, still have the same misconceptions?
	Well, first, let's look at what happened to the American diet.
	Back in the 1970s, the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition, headed by Senator George McGovern, came out with the first federal government recommendations for diet.
	And they vilified fat.
	They said we need to really restrict fat because there was this belief that fat was the single most important cause of cardiovascular disease.
	And we need to glorify carbohydrates.
	So we need to eat whole grains, pastas, breads, cereals.
	Well, the country did that.
	And carbohydrate intake actually went up about 6% or 7%.
	It didn't go to what they recommended, but it went up 6% or 7%.
	And fat intake actually reduced.
	Of course, you remember back in the 60s, we had all this, you know, in the 70s, all of a sudden, everything was nonfat, low fat, reduced fat, everything.
	You know, you used to need to have a prescription to get skim milk back in the 60s.
	Not in the 70s and 80s.
	Everything was nonfat or low fat.
	So we reduced fat intake by about 4 or 5%.
	Now, had that been right, then the country would have gradually lost some weight.
	The changes weren't significant.
	But when you make those kinds of changes in 300 million people, that is huge.
	But the recommendations were not right.
	Because now obesity just exploded in America and in America only.
	And the reason is, by shifting to more carbohydrates, by shifting to more starches, we simply turn the country into a feedlot.
	And fattened everybody up.
	Now we can talk about fast foods, we can talk about portion control, we can talk about video games, we can talk about lack of exercise, but the one thing that we did do that was significant was that we measurably reduced our intake of fat and we measurably increased our intake of starch.
	And we exploded.
	We now have 50% of the population with obesity.
	And it's gone up in the last 20 years.
	Now, point to anything else you want to.
	Frankly, I think Americans are more active today than they used to be.
	Because you need to get a lottery ticket to get into the New York Marathon.
	And also the Boston Marathon.
	You have sports clubs all over the place.
	Yes, people join them and don't use them.
	So how should we change it to now?
	What should we be doing differently?
	Just knock out the starch.
	Don't eat bread.
	Don't eat sugar desserts and don't eat sugar food.
	You're a little more rational than that because at least you also have that carbs, some carbs are good, such as fruits and vegetables, correct?
	Absolutely.
	You see, if you look at your carbs and eliminate starch and sugar, then first you've eliminated some very popular foods, breads.
	Cookies, cakes, those are very popular foods, but you can't eat substantial quantities of those and expect to lose weight.
	Virtually every study that has compared a reduction in carbohydrate and particularly a reduction in starch to a diet that reduces calories only but keeps the starch will find that the more you reduce the carbohydrates and the more you reduce the starch, the substantially more weight you will lose.
	It's just clear.
	It always comes out that way.
	Even if you're eating healthy carbs, You will lose weight if you reduce the carbs.
	But I'm not like an advocate that says don't eat any fruit, don't eat any tomatoes, don't eat any vegetables.
	I say go ahead and keep those healthy foods in your program.
	And simply take out the starch and what will happen then is that your body will reset, the metabolism will reset, because you're not constantly throwing in the carbohydrates that cause the fluctuations in the blood sugar, which then cause the cravings, which then cause the overeating, which then cause the obesity and it's a vicious cycle.
	You take the carbs out, you take the starches out, and then you take out all the blood sugar swings, and you do just fine.
	And you lose weight.
	Now, do you think we have to watch what kind of fat?
	In other words, should we be eating more omega-3 than omega-6?
	Absolutely.
	You know, what is the value of lard?
	None.
	So what your fat should be would be primarily in the unsaturated fats, the non-trans fats, you don't like to stay away from trans fats, and also the omega-3 fatty acids.
	There are so many studies on the multiplicity of value of omega-3 fatty acids.
	It goes from eliminating ADHD in children To help fully prevention of thyroid cancer.
	I mean, omega-3 fatty acids just do seem to do everything.
	And I believe the reason they seem to do everything is because in this country, we don't get any.
	There is no primary source of omega-3 fatty acids in food in this country unless you eat fish two to three times a week.
	We just don't get the omega-3 fatty acids.
	And in countries where they do get the omega-3 fatty acids, particularly places like Alaska, which is part of the United States, but the Alaskan Eskimos, they're eating a lot of fish and a lot of seal.
	They're getting all the omega-3 fatty acids.
	That's where the information was discovered.
	So if you eat the omega-3 fatty acids and supplement the omega-3 fatty acids, you're taking in some of the best fats.
	And people have got to understand that there is a reason that the word essential is used before the omega-3 fatty acids.
	It's not a luxury to take in additional omega-3 fatty acids.
	They are essential.
	And when you don't have them, you do get sick.
	It's that simple.
	So it's not just to reduce the starches, but you take in and eat the good fat.
	I personally will eat salmon about two or three times a week.
	Very high in omega-3 fatty acids.
	Now, nobody does that.
	You're not going to go into a restaurant and find people that say, yeah, I eat salmon three times a week.
	Now, Julian, you also have another point that I think that Mehmet and I truly believe in, so we want you to bring it out also, which is making an out loud commitment to losing weight makes a difference.
	Hey, that chapter is a chapter in the book.
	It's the Whitaker Wellness Weight Loss Program.
	The chapter in the book is entitled, Instant Discipline.
	Because everybody makes commitments.
	Look at New Year's resolutions.
	They're worthless.
	Absolutely worthless.
	Nobody, or essentially nobody, unmeasurable small statistic, actually follows through a New Year's resolution.
	Why?
	Because there's no downside.
	There's no punishment.
	So we have a mechanism of instant discipline by making yourself accountable and making it costly not to follow through on your commitments.
	It's very simple.
	Let's say you're going to want to walk three days a week, and you're going to walk a half an hour for three days a week, and you're going to want to do this for two months.
	So that's eight weeks.
	That's not a big commitment.
	You can pull that off.
	You can do that.
	So you write out a piece of paper.
	I, Julian Whitaker, am going to walk Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for one half hour for four weeks, starting today and going through for four weeks.
	If I finish a week without walking one of the seven days, three of the seven days as I committed to, I agreed to send $1,000 to my least favorite charity.
	If you're a Democrat, put down the Republican National Committee.
	If you're a Republican, put down the Democrat National Committee.
	And then you sign it, you have someone witness it, and then you take it to your bulletin board at work, and you put it up on the bulletin board.
	And guess what?
	Over that eight-week period, you're going to walk three days a week.
	It will be so easy to do because the difficulty, the pain, and the embarrassment of not doing it is far greater than the discomfort or inconvenience of doing it.
	It's very simple.
	If you have a job and you're supposed to be there at 8 o'clock, you know, 99 out of 100 times you're going to show up at 8 o'clock.
	But if you start saying, well, I don't feel like it, I'm going to go in at 10, you're going to get fired.
	So you don't do that.
	That's absolutely right.
	I'm going to turn it back to Mehmet.
	There's a lot of part where that came from, but first, a quick break.
	You're pretty outspoken in your criticism of Orthodox medicine.
	Oh, um...
	Oh, I try to keep a very reasonable profile.
	I don't do anything that I can't defend and I'm very careful with records.
	But, you know, the establishment, as you may know, really is very irritated by physicians like me who do use natural therapies and advocate them.
	And if you look over the landscape, most physicians don't, and they are terrified too because their consequences with peer review, their consequences with medical boards, their consequences with Medicare.
	I'm in a big fight with Medicare right now because the general business of medicine is to keep it pharmaceutical, hospital-based, high-tech, and surgery.
	That's medicine.
	That's trillions of dollars of income following that model.
	But if you use natural therapies and people begin getting better and begin falling out of the general realm, then you can generate a lot of animosity.
	And it's basically economic.
	It's a turf war.
	And they will come after you.
	It's a turf war.
	So I have to be not only thick-skinned, But I have to really do be very careful at how I keep records, very careful at how we treat patients, because, you know, just do the math.
	Do the economy.
	Do the economics of it.
	This is a huge turf war.
	Dr. Whitaker, let me push, if I could, a little bit on chelation.
	Part of the issue, I think, for a lot of practitioners is that, and we've talked about data and how it can be deconstructed and deconstructed in different ways, but you look at data, for example, on people who might have life-threatening problems with heart blockages, and they say, okay, in those situations, we definitely want to operate.
	But then there's this huge swath of patients who have primarily biochemical problems, who present with Blockages of arteries.
	And then you're sort of stuck thinking, okay, do I trust this patient to actually be proactive on their own?
	And you say, my goodness, I understand why in peripheral vascular disease it might be so effective, but then again, so does walking and stopping smoking.
	It's pretty rare to have such significant peripheral vascular disease with leg pain that folks aren't in part responsible for themselves because they were smokers.
	And so there's that tug of war that always goes on between lifestyles, alternative medicine, and the much more invasive conventional medicine.
	And that's why I spend a lot of my life trying to navigate.
	Because in fairness, and I think you've sort of said this a couple times, the biggest decisions and the biggest impacts we're going to have are things we're going to do ourselves.
	That's exactly right.
	We don't have to pay anybody for it.
	Absolutely.
	And, you know, there's studies that I quote all the time Where they say 75% of the people that have cardiovascular disease now would improve with the best therapy being a lifestyle change.
	75% decrease in death with a lifestyle change.
	The numbers are huge.
	At the power of the natural therapies.
	But the general thrust is for surgical.
	And that's money.
	That's economics.
	But we do EECP. We do hyperbaric oxygen.
	We do intravenous vitamins, like high dose vitamin C. Dr. Whitaker, you mentioned EECP. Now, just for everybody that's listening, EECP is a process where they put blood pressure cuffs on your legs, and they sequentially inflate them.
	Now, this seems crazy, but that actually is FDA-approved, as you know, and it works by stimulating extra blood to go back into the heart, which then gets the heart to grow new pathways.
	Exactly, yeah.
	So how do you actually do it in practice?
	How many times do people get treated?
	What's been your experience, especially for folks who have angina, chest pain, related to blockages of their arteries?
	Oh, it's the most predictably beneficial therapy we have.
	Predictably beneficial.
	For instance, you have angina, you go through 20 ECPs, your angina is going to be substantially less, if not completely gone.
	It is predictable and it's a large inflating and with each heartbeat it compresses so it's sending an additional pulse wave.
	It's an enhanced external pulse wave of counter pulsation and what it's doing is opening up the collaterals.
	It is making the arteries more flexible.
	It is generating collateral circulation by the body.
	It is doing all of these things.
	So with vascular disease, either in the legs or in the cardiovascular system, this therapy, which is about one-tenth the cost of bypass, is extremely effective.
	And they know it's effective.
	And so to protect the bypass industry, Medicare will not pay for it unless a cardiologist states that this individual is not a candidate for bypass surgery.
	It's insane.
	What about the fact that the patient would like to have EECP instead of bypass surgery?
	Well, that doesn't enter the equation.
	The equation has to be some doc has to say this patient is not a candidate for this, so therefore Medicare will pay for this as a treatment for angina or cardiovascular disease, but we do it with all patients who want to have treatment with EECP because it simply works, it's safer, it's less expensive, and you're not going to hurt anybody with it.
	You'll hurt everybody with the surgery.
	Dr. Whitaker, let's talk about vitamins now.
	The question I get asked the most on the program, and by the way, everyone out there listening, we're here with Dr. Julian Whitaker, well-known to many of you, the Whitaker Newsletter, Whitaker Radio, his wellness program in San Diego.
	Isn't it the wellness program?
	No, it's in Newport Beach, California.
	Oh, Newport Beach.
	That's close to L.A. Oh, that's great.
	The reality is that vitamins are something that a lot of folks get a ton of information on, and it's often conflicting, although there's some fundamental areas where most folks agree on.
	So I just turned 47. I'm healthy.
	I have no medical problems.
	What vitamins should I be taking?
	And then Lisa is three and a half years younger than I am, and she's...
	Also healthy, what should you be taking?
	So these are two 40-year-old people.
	Basically, you're at good health, you need to eat a good diet, and you need to exercise.
	And then you just need to take a multiple vitamin, which has all the B-complex in it.
	And I would look for, like, look at B6 and make sure it has about 50 to 100 milligrams of B6. Take one that has some punch to it.
	Don't take vitamins that has 6 milligrams of B6. I mean, it doesn't make any sense.
	It's like peeing in the ocean.
	It's not going to make a difference.
	So you take multiple vitamins with about 50 to 100 milligrams of B6 as a marker, look at the trace minerals, and when you're looking at trace minerals, you know, look at chromium or selenium and take about 100 to 200 micrograms of chromium.
	And also make sure it has about the same amount of selenium.
	And then you look at the antioxidants.
	And you take about 400 to 800 units of vitamin E. You take the beta carotene, you know, the beta carotene, about 4 to 6,000 units of beta carotene.
	You take the, let's see, what are the other antioxidants?
	How much C do you give people?
	Now, vitamin C, you need about 1,000 to 5,000 milligrams a day.
	If we look at vitamin C that is produced in the bodies of other mammals, you see human beings and monkeys are the only mammals that don't produce vitamin C. Dogs, cows, sheep, goats, they all are churning out vitamin C. And they're producing what would be equivalent in us of about 5,000 milligrams of vitamin C a day.
	That would be the target where you would take about that because that's what the other animals are producing.
	And these are animals that are eating vitamin C as well.
	Cows and sheep, they're grazers.
	They're eating vitamin C in the vegetables.
	But they still produce it.
	And when they get ill, they produce more.
	So if they...
	I look at somewhere between 2 and 5 grams a day would be what I would take.
	And that's, to some people, particularly the uninitiated, particularly those that haven't studied the area of vitamin C and made these connections, that's a huge dose.
	But it's not that big a dose.
	Alright, so we've got vitamin C, E, and A. These are all antioxidants.
	Selenium, chromium, and vitamin B. What else?
	Essential fatty acids, how much of that do you take?
	Especially, the next one would be right up there with them, and that's the omega-3 fatty acids.
	And with the omega-3 fatty acids, you get a high quality omega-3 fatty acid, and it doesn't have to be concentrated, just the regular fish oil, and take about 10 capsules per day.
	Because with that, the amount matters.
	One or two a day, it will help.
	So 10 capsules is 10 grams of essential fatty acids?
	10 grams, right.
	Yes.
	That's a lot.
	If you don't do that, take five.
	But don't think that just taking one or two capsules a week is going to give you anywhere near the optimum amount of the omega-3 fatty acids.
	You know, this is one of the areas where you really aren't getting it in your food because it's just not there.
	You just covered the basic territories.
	Is there anything else besides those that you think are pretty important to give the folks?
	Well, as people get older, You know, and this is one of the areas where it's very exciting to me about the new product.
	There are now supplemental resveratrol, which is the active ingredient red wine, which is kind of responsible for what we know as the French paradox.
	They're eating all this high-fat food over in France, yet France has more individuals that are centurions than any country in the world.
	There are sections in Europe and Italy.
	There's a very tall story we've told a bit about, and I think that's actually a very promising area.
	Dr. Whitaker, I appreciate so much for joining us today on the program.
	My pleasure.
	It was fun.
	As always, provocative, inspirational, argumentative at times, which is good.
	You can get all the stuff on the table.
	That's what my mother said.
	That's right.
	Well, she raised you right.
	Dr. Julian Whitaker, thank you so much for joining us.
	If everyone's interested, a lot more to hear about with Dr. Whitaker in his newsletter.

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