EP 176 WTH?!?: Brain Power & Longevity with Dr. Joel Fuhrman's Nutritarian Diet

Foreign.

Welcome back everybody. Dr. Greg Eckel. And our topic today is Brain Health and Longevity. Living Longer with a healthy brain. My esteemed guest is Joel Fuhrman, M.D. he's a board certified family physician, seven time New York Times best selling author and internationally recognized expert on nutrition and natural natural healing. He specializes in preventing and reversing disease through nutritional methods. Dr. Fman is the president of the Nutritional Research foundation and on the faculty of Northern Arizona University Health Sciences Division. He coined the term nutritarian to describe a nutrient dense eating style designed to prevent cancer, slow aging and extend lifespan for over 30 years. Dr. Furman has shown that it is possible to achieve sustainable weight loss and reverse heart disease, diabetes and many other illnesses using smart nutrition. In his medical practice and through his books and television specials, he continues to bring his life saving message to hundreds of thousands of people around the world. Dr. Fuhrman also operates Eat to Live Retreat in San Diego. At this residential facility, people from all over the world come to stay for one to three months to recover from conditions ranging from cardiovascular disease to autoimmune conditions, food addiction and more. They also gain the skills and knowledge to make these changes permanent when they leave the retreat. Dr. Furman, welcome aboard.

Hey, great to be here.

I love it. I saw you speak recently here in Park City at Aubergine New Restaurant just opened their, I think it was number 10 in their chain of awesome restaurants. And I knew I had to have you on the podcast to share with our listeners and viewers. And I wanted to talk about what is a nutritarian diet. You had such compelling lecture and slides and you've been at it for so long. As the world renowned expert with nutrition therapies for disease, this is something you know is near and dear to you. You've banked your whole career on we eat our way to the grave with our fork. So I'm just going to lob that over. The Nutritarian diet, Where does this concept come from? How did you arrive there?

Well, right. What I'm saying right now is I coined that term nutritarian to represent a term for the healthiest way to eat to slow aging and prevent cancer and prevent heart attacks and strokes and dementia. And what I'm saying is the dietary portfolio that's most effective at extending lifespan and slowing aging can be utilized therapeutically to reverse disease when people who have ill and like with headaches or asthma or psoriasis or multiple sclerosis or diabetes. By applying this degree of nutritional excellence, these diseases melt away. And scientists call this gene Silencing it says that with good enough, with excellent, with sufficiently excellent nutrition, even weak genes that would predispose you to an autoimmune disease or a cancer do not have the power to cause damage. When your nutrient density of your cells are so nutritionally concentrated and diverse have this full spectrum of nutrients. So a nutritarian diet talks about the optimal nutrient exposure in our diet leading to the optimal nutrient concentration and nutrient diversity in the cells themselves. Now, in order to get that nutritional concentration in the cell, you not only have to eat healthfully, but you also have to not be overweight. You have to combine eating ideally with being at a favorable weight because body fat dilutes the nutritional density of your tissues, of your organs and skeleton cells. But it also is pro inflammatory tissues that cause more inflammation and buildup of metabolic waste in the body because fat cells get a poor blood supply and it's chronically inflamed tissue. So we're saying not any body fat, but we're saying that there's no such thing as a healthy overweight person. It's just can't be chemically, can't biochemically occur because fat makes you insulin resistant. It activates the aromatase enzyme system causing increased estrogen production and it also spews out cytokines and lipokines and reactive oxygen species and other pro inflammatory molecules. So that we need for good health, there has to be a degree of moderate caloric restriction to maintain a male's body fat below 15% and a female's body fat below 25%. I'm 70 and my body fat's around 10 and a half, sometimes 11% when I check it. So certainly even 15% body fat is achievable. So we're talking about having this degree of, you know, not overeating, moderate caloric restriction in the context of micronutrient excellence. And I'm saying here that the American diet is too high in calories. Americans are consuming over 3000 calories a day and we probably need only about half that. But the reason why people become so addicted and so uncomfortably needy for so many calories is because their diet doesn't have enough micronutrient concentration and content. And the body just then craves more food and also processed foods. And these designer foods have stimulatory effect on the addictive centers in the brain and the hypothalamus illness. So this will end in the cerebral. But in any case, the question is what is a nutritarian diet? And the answer is a diet designed to be optimally healthful. And also, of course, based on some principles which have to do with nutritional concentration, avoiding toxins and things that are chemically poisonous, having the diet being hormonally favorable and having the diet be nutritionally complete, simultaneously making sure there are no deficiencies. And as we move and adopt a plant based diet, because we know that animal products in the diet in proportion to their use makes the diet hormonally unfavorable, it drives more reproductive hormones that age us faster. And there's a dose dependent relationship in the scientific literature between increased consumption of animal protein and premature death and shorter lifespan. Just like there's a dose dependent relationship between the consumption of processed foods, including commercial baked goods, fast food, fried foods, all these things, and white flour, even white bread, sugar, honey. These things accelerate aging. They're calorically concentrated foods without a significant micronutrient load. And I'm also saying a piece of chicken is like a bagel because they're both sources of calories or macronutrients. The bagel gives us carbohydrate and the chicken gives us protein mostly. But neither one contains a significant load of micronutrients and it doesn't contain a high vitamin and mineral content. But neither one contains almost any phytochemicals and antioxidants. Had you consumed some a plant product that was higher in phytochem, a plant pro product that was higher in protein. Now there are five categories of plant foods and four of them are rich in protein and one is not rich in protein. Out of natural plants, the four categories are vegetables, which are protein adequate, intact whole grains like steel cut oats and amaranth, which is protein adequate, not white flour and processed grains. But the whole grain is pro is relatively contains adequate protein. Beans or legumes, which are really high in protein, even more so many of them than more animal than some meat products and nuts and seeds, which are high in protein. And then the last one meaning is fruit. Fruit is the one that's relatively low in protein. And so the nutritarian diet is using a full variety of different types of plant foods to give us the right amount of protein without getting the excessive amount of biological protein you get from animal products, which drives cellular replication, allow cancer cells to replicate as measured by the higher levels of IGF1 that age US faster. While we're also looking for the hormonal favorability of keeping high glycemic carbohydrates like french fries and croissants and bagels and you know, and soda and sugar and white flour, which is a sugar equivalent. Those things drive insulin, drive glucose excursion into the bloodstream and drive insulin levels to be too high and promote fat storage. And the nutritarian diet is also unique because the more standard diets, and even the Mediterranean diet gets its fats, the fat intake from animal fats and oils. And the nutritarian diet gets its fats predominantly from nuts and seeds and avocado, not from animal fats or oils. And when you get your fats from nuts and seeds and avocados as opposed to animal fats or oils, the fat calories enter the bloodstream very slowly, like one calorie a minute. Whereas you get your fat from animal fats or oils. The calories enter about 50 calories per minute. So with the slow entry of fat calories into the bloodstream, the body is not inducing fat storage, it's burning them for energy. Whereas when you're eating fat from other sources, it turns on fat storage mechanisms. Because we don't tolerate those calories in the blood, we have to store them out of the blood and then stop burning that. So we stop break breaking down fat for energy. So we're saying here that, that additionally this high caloric rush, the high concentration of calories that can flood the bloodstream with the consumption of processed foods or oils and animal fats, that high caloric load has a stimulatory effect on the dopamine centers in the brain, leading to us to become dopamine insensitive. The same thing as if you'd taken heroin or cocaine or opiates. They are addicting because of that caloric rush. And people get habit habituated to over consuming calories and they don't feel satisfied anymore unless they eat huge amounts of food, leading to the growing waistlines of Americans, which then further facilitates the premature death. So I'm just giving you a little overview of a lot of the principles.

When you see, I'll say little with a capital L. So unpacking that was a tremendous amount of information in a short period of time. Dr. Furman, let's talk about the first step of over the years. So you've been in practice 30 plus years.

35 years.

35 years. So what kind of changes have you seen just in the landscape for people's health overall? You feel like, are people healthier now or less healthy now? And as to why? And I'm, you know, we know the stats on girth and obesity, all of that seems to be rising and younger and younger ages as well. I'M wondering if what your comments are on that.

Well, among people that I care for, that I've cared for for many years, from, you know, 20, 30 years, I've seen their health transform from people with diabetes or asthma or psoriasis to people that are now, you know, living life and enjoying their life to the fullest in great health and living longer without chronic illnesses and medical dependencies. So that's what I've seen in my personal sphere of influence. Sure. Among the major population, we know that the lifespan of Americans has been slowly and steadily going down. And that, and the, and the shortening of lifespan has increased in the last two years. So we've had additional increase in the rate of which our lifespan has diminishing, which is somewhat related, as you just mentioned, to the growing waistlines of Americans.

Yes.

You think, you would think with COVID right. You would think that with all this media attention that being overweight or obese with comorbidities of high blood pressure and heart disease and diabetes leads to such a higher rate of COVID related deaths, you'd think that people would say, oh, I better eat healthier and lose some weight or Covid is going to kill me. But what happened is people ate more and gained more weight and now we have, and now when Covid is winded down to lower risk, now we still have higher risks of the underlying heart attacks, cancers, diabetes, amputations, kidney failure, brain damage, dementia, all the things that we have. That's needless. All these tragic medical problems due to nutritional stupidity are now increasing, have increased, not decreased, and people are dying even younger. So we have terrible lifespan and healthy life expectancy scores in the United States. And it's one of the worst of any country in the world.

Yeah, it's, you know, almost criminal what is happening out there for folks being treated as like products. And that that goes into this comment that you made around the food additives and the addiction or the addictive qualities almost engineered into the foods that people are eating that then get them hooked on a sensation or the dopamine train for, you know, releasing those neurotransmitters. So, you know, the deck is definitely stacked against the lay consumer. Unless you come across a podcast like this or a book like yours. I know that, you know, it's been your campaign and mission to get this information out. So, you know what, what recommendations do you have? If this is totally news, new news to somebody, where would you recommend they start for themselves?

Well, I've written like 13, 14 books, but I always, when people Ask me that question. I say, why don't you just read my latest book, the one I wrote recently, and that's Eat for Life. That's a good starting point because in each chapter I give case histories of reversal. I give, you know, diet plans and menus for people with, who have. Think they have cancer or autoimmune conditions. I give a lot. So it's, it's one book. And then if a person has a specific illness, they can read, you know, Superimmunity, the End of Diabetes, the End of Heart Disease, you know, other. Other books.

Specific. Got it.

Yeah. But I think the overview book, which takes the place of my initial. One of my earlier books was called Eat to Live, which sold multiple millions of copies, which was on the number one on the New York Times bestsellers for over a year. So it's really. But and then. But the best place to start is Eat for Life because it's more updated with more updated references. And it's also good for medical professionals and health and health coaches and health professionals because there's more than 2,000 scientific references in the book which are curated by me to have that are the best out of the 30,000 references that I reviewed. The 2,000 that are called to utilize in that book are really valuable references to demonstrate to people that there's an overwhelming amount of evidence for these recommendations. They're not just. They're not just based on some person's opinions. They're based on an overwhelming and careful review of the scientific literature.

What are some of the most dramatic turnarounds you've witnessed with your patients?

Well, I think it's not. I don't think that a person, you know, in the hospital with cardiac arrhythmias and can't come out of the ICU with heart problems and coming out and getting well and off the medications and getting their injection fraction back to normal, normal again after thinking they're going to be in heart failure and cardiac arrhythmias the rest of their life. That's pretty radical, seeing people get better from advanced heart disease cases. But most people accept the fact that diabetes and obesity and heart disease and high blood pressure is reversible to excellent nutrition because you even see people going through lap band who get rid of their diabetes and their high blood pressure goes down, they lose weight. But I don't think people recognize and see autoimmune conditions like multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis and psoriatic arthritis and lupus and asthma, which is not an autoimmune disease, but it's similar. They don't see those things as being predictably reversible as I see in my practice. And you asked me for a couple of cases. A good example is a young woman who was on the national renal transplant list waiting for a new kidney with her creatinine of 4.2, which represents loss of maybe 90% of kidney function. And all she did is follow this program. The drugs were not working for her. She stopped all the medications, followed this pro, was weaned off medication slowly. Of course, we don't stop them suddenly. But this enabled her to wean off the medications and have her kidney function come back to normal. And creatinine came down from 4.2 to 0.8.

Wow.

Perfectly. Which is perfectly normal. Shocking even me. You know what I mean?

Yeah.

No, this person's as. She's on and waiting for a new kidney, if she can. So my feeling, as a result of multiple cases like that and so many people recovering from multiple sclerosis and psoriatic arthritis, is that people should be able to follow the road they choose. If they want to be on medications that cause cancer for the rest of their life to cultivate for their treatment their autoimmune disease. They have that right. And they don't want to eat this healthily. They don't have to. But at least they should be given the opportunity and told and told about this possibility. So that's my mission, is to really make sure people are aware that everybody knows that you don't have to go the medical route to taking drugs that cause cancer the rest of your life and suffering. You can, through excellent nutrition. And we make it taste great, too. You're not living. You know, we're giving. We're enjoying food, but we're enjoying the rest of our life more with it without. With being fearless and confident in our own body's natural tendencies to heal and keep ourselves well. And so most of these people who made these recoveries, I'm talking about, from Jody, who got rid of her psoriatic arthritis, you know, to Pam, who got rid of her. Pam, who had metastatic ovarian cancer, a dramatic case causing 4 liters of metastatic fluid from a collapsed lung, who then underwent chemotherapy, given, you know, six months to live, is now alive, like. And doing well, like, 25 years later. Wow. So we're talking about her or. Or Irene with. With lymph. With. She had nine Hodgkin's lymphoma, which just melted away on the program. No Treatment just the lymphoma just went away completely.

Wow.

So my experience has been, you know, giving me tremendous satisfaction and reward from watching these people make these tremendous recoveries. But also the degree of frustration is that you want people to aware. Be aware of this possibility so they can avail themselves, should they of. If they should they choose to be. But of course, keep in mind, as one of the founding members of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine, we do now have thousands more doctors who embrace these methodologies today than we did 30 years ago when it was just like five of us, you know? Yeah.

How. I mean, that frustration component, as a kindred soul and naturopathic Chinese medicine and addressing diets with people for 25 years, how do you keep your head in a positive space around that? Because, I mean, it's not. This is not new news. And it's really hard to get it in out into people's minds, into their hearts, to just show them, like, look just like you. Pam reversed her, you know, stage four ovarian cancer. You know, what do you think? What's the resistance or what? How is this not more common knowledge?

I don't know. You know, don't forget, there are billions, if not millions of dollars spent to oppose this message, but billions of dollars spent by big pharma and big food and, you know, the meat industry, the dairy industry, the processed food industry, the sugar industry, the smoke, whether, you know, the smoker smoking industry, spent a lot of money to resist the change about smoking. But, you know, us, our us little doctors and nutritional gurus who are, you know, giving this information out is a much smaller voice than the larger voice of conventional society with billions of dollars to support the conventional way of life. Yeah. So I don't know. I'm not. I haven't threatened this powers the status quo yet. I haven't been murdered yet. Yeah, I may. Maybe I should have some. One of those people hang around with you and guard you like a security force.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

But this is a lot of money behind the not who that don't like this message, you know.

Right.

This is threatening to their livelihood, you know.

Yeah. How do you keep your mindset in a positive spot? I mean, obviously it's the patience and those success stories that. That do it. But I'm wondering if you have any other. For clinicians out there that are kind of, you know, fighting the good fight and are taking a stand for people's health, you know, how do you keep Joel in good, good spirit?

Well, our own emotional health, whether you're A doctor, whether you're a librarian or an architect or a singer or a painter or whatever. You know, whether you're a gardener, right? Or whatever you're doing. Your own emotional health is based on your ability to have to appreciate the world around you to get your own ego out of it and have creative goodwill when the opportunity arrives for other people. You feel good about yourself from these intrinsic qualities of your efforts to and your mission to be useful to others and to make the world a better place. And you don't need to be a big shot. You don't need to look pretty, you don't need to have a lot of money. You don't need to be have other people look up to you. You only have to feel good about your life because you're doing something. You're taking advantage of the opportunities you have to interact with people with your purpose of trying to have goodwill for them. And you don't have to manifest in actually helping them. You only have to have that purpose of having that. In other words, if somebody says to you, you know.

If I had to.

Eat like you're telling me to eat, I'd rather be dead, who could live on carrot sticks and celery the rest of my life? You know, like what, somebody says something to you or. So the question is, is your ego involved? Do you want to like better them? You know, a comeback to feel you're superior, more knowledgeable, or are you utilizing that as an opportunity to show them love, care about them, interest in their life and perhaps the ability to better them in some way. And then you have this interest in them and the availability this opportunity to converse with them with the potential of being able, that they could benefit or you could benefit them in some way. And in the majority of cases they're not going to benefit from your interaction. But it wasn't that they benefited, it was that your intent to attempt to offer them some, some positive effect and not to try to elevate your own ego to feel like you're a big shot. So we have different motives that people have. And in our conventional society a lot of our motives are based on feeling like we're powerful or more important or superior or glorifying our own ego. And I'm saying to you that that does, that's like junk food for the soul. It doesn't lead to ultimate happiness. We get so much reward and self satisfaction for trying to be useful to other people. And it doesn't matter whether you're help. When I'm helping a hundred thousand people Or I'm helping two people. Yeah, same feeling of what your intent is and what your purpose is and what you. And you don't have to be a doctor to feel good about caring for people and being of some assistance to them. Your assistance could be in helping them show them how to plant bok choy in their garden, for example. I'm just saying. So how we do it is we, we feel grateful and for the opportunities we're given and we feel happy for seeing the world in a, in a way that we appreciate reality around us. We're looking to light things. See, it's this negativity bias of trying to put things down and make less of them that's aligned with poor emotional health for people wanting to be superior. This idea of trying to be superior goes along with trying to be negative and have a negative outlook to the world around you and make, make less of things. People come off a food at when they're, when they're addict, an addict and they become more narcissistically consumed with their needing their addictive needs. They become less appreciative of the world around them and less respectful and knowledgeable about how to get joy and passion from living life. So teaching people how to live healthily but also how to have the robust emotional health that helps them be able to follow a diet that makes you different than other people in the modern world. Because if you're a person that's going after having other people wanting to like you, trying to have them approve of you for your own self, self esteem, that's what you're going after. You're not going to have a good time eating differently than other people because you know you're not going to be looked on favorably. But if you're going to see yourself as internally generate self esteem, then you don't need people to approve of you and you want to be a good role model of healthy eating because it increases your power to have a good effect on other people. Should they be, should they need you in some way? You know, it's kind of like a, a different concept, but it works.

No, that's great. You know, that's kind of what I teach my children on too. It's like you don't need that approval from out there when you're fulfilling, you know, when you know in your heart what you're doing is, is right and true for you. So that's, that's lovely. Thank you for shar. I know it's a little bit off, off the topic, but I, you Know, just having you in the field for so long and you know, with your research and your books, etc, I clearly thought you would have an answer of such truth. So thank you.

My pleasure.

The coming back on to the food component and in particular around brain health. You don't hear a lot about diets effects on brain health. Maybe you know, sugar blues we've heard for depression, but you know, we have this epidemic of dementia, just this tidal wave coming at us. And I know a lot of our viewers, listeners are really interested in regenerating their brains. Parkinson's, dementia, mild cognitive impairment, traumatic brain injuries, depression, anxiety. How, how does the diet affect brain health?

Well, absolutely that, and that's one of my main points here, is that the diet doesn't deteriorate your body exclusively and leave the brain intact. It diminishes the structure and function and neuroplasticity of your brain as it, as it ages your body prematurely. And it's natural for the muscles and bones to shrink. As we age your immune system to shrink and your brain to shrink as well. So the ultimate goal is to retard these processes of aging which shrink the brain and our body's tissues and our immune function because it leads to, eventually leads to death. We don't live forever. Our body, our immune system and our brain shrinks. But we know that this high phytochemical exposure that we're talking about, the high concentration of micronutrients in the cells is critical to maintain the brain function for a, for a 100 year lifespan. And that the omega 3 index is critical to help the brain resist chemical damage and to resist the natural tendency to shrink. What I'm saying right now is that when you're on a standard American diet, there's 20 different factors that are going to shrink, they're going to damage your brain. We could list 20 factors as well as, you know, junk food, chemicals processed, you know, but once you're on it on a, you could say a nutritarian diet or even a whole foods plant based diet, or people eating a lot of fruits and vegetables and beans, right? They're eating really healthfully, that still doesn't give them adequate nutrients to resist brain shrinkage. Because DHA deficiency, EPA and DHA deficiency, which are commonly called fish oils, which people can get from seafood, we know that can lead to a higher amount of these omega 3 long chain, omega 3 fats on the cell membrane and the higher percentage of omega 3 fats in the cell membrane protects the brain against shrinkage and also protects the brain against toxins that can cause Parkinson's disease. So we have to maintain that omega 3 index at least above 5, preferably above 5.5. And if you're on a vegan diet or a plant based diet, then you can use plant based Omega 3. And to be an, obviously to be, to be open here. And you know, to that I do sell, I do have available my website, I do sell the vegan, the plant based omega 3 fatty acid. So people can buy that if they need it, if they're on plant based diets. Because I keep it refrigerated and have a high quality oil that we people use to keep their Omega 3 index high when they're on vegan diets and not using fish to get their omega 3 fatty acids. Because some people can make enough, they can eat enough flaxseed or walnuts or green vegetables so the body can convert enough of that short chain omega 3 fat into the EPA and then DHA for the long term fat. But that's very genetically determined. And most vegans do not make adequate amounts or people on near vegan diets do not make adequate amounts. And that, and whether you do or you don't, everybody should know their index number so they can make sure that that's optimized for optimal brain health and later life. And we're putting that in context here because people will say, well, why not just have clams and sea fish and things like that? Why we don't. And the reason is because for a few reasons. One is there's thousands of tons of plastic dumped on the continental shelf every hour, not every day, every hour. And the average American has a credit card amount of plastic in their microplastic particles in the body, predominantly exposed from processed foods and from seafood. So we have seafood. Like when you eat a sardine, you're eating the digestive tract that's filled with plastic. It used to be you're eating just a sardine. Now you're eating a sardine, a plastic sandwich. When you have a cup of coffee at Starbucks, you're having a hot liquid poured into a plastic lined cardboard cup and you're drinking down plastic. You know, it's like insane, you know. And then with all the agricultural runoff, we have such an overgrowth of algae bloom leading to infestation of cyanobacteria, leading to a contamination of all the bivalves and the shellfish and the lake fish that we see clusters of ALS and Parkinson's disease around people eating seafood. Like around Chesapeake Bay, we have higher concentration of Parkinson's disease and ALS from people eating more bivalves. Bivalves are oysters, scallops and mussels because they're, because they're bottom feeders and the toxins filter down to the bottom. They get into, they get 50 times higher in these bivalves and shellfish, which otherwise would be a good source of zinc and dha, but now they're a good source of chemicals. So it seems to be in today's environment, we're opting to lowering the amount exposure, elimination of seafood and using more of a clean supplement in the place of utilizing seafood for omega 3 fatty acids. Because of this contamination, weighing the risks and benefits, it leads to us nutritarians to be, to be even more plant food advocates as well as better for the environment and the climate. It also makes better sense for our own survival too. And so I'm saying Parkinson's is caused by toxins, chemicals, but the low Omega 3 index makes the brain more susceptible to chemicals people should be aware of. The number one chemical that's well established to cause Parkinson's disease are people who have their clothing dry cleaned or people who work in dry cleaning facilities because those dry cleaning chemicals cause Parkinson's disease.

Right.

So that's one thing people should be very careful about. But we know of course they're using that. We have a lot of other chemicals we're exposed to besides that, but at least we should be not have our clothing dry cleaned and not go to dry cleaners, you know.

Right, yeah, that.

And if you eat fish, you know, eat, you know, with the bigger fish like the tuna fish and those things are full of top metals and PCBs and the smaller fish are linked to plastic. So it's hard to get clean seafood unless you're in a very tropical environment off. You know, in other words, the point they're making here is that that most the seafood that's available to people in the United States is already contaminated.

Right. On that omega 3 component of the vegan sources, vegetarian sources, flaxseed, you know, there's a number that we've got is 3,000 milligrams of omega 3 fatty acids a day or a lot of the research. But when you get it from flaxseed component, you're not really converting that into dha, EPA effectively. I mean you are, but in much smaller percentage.

Small amounts. Yeah, small amounts and, and a tremendous different amount from one individual to another. Yeah, you have to really. So I'm saying you should know your number. It's like you know your cholesterol level? Yeah, cholesterol level. You could, you know, but, but you should also know your omega 3 index level if we're talking about brain health. Because obviously I'm, I'm, I'm showing 12 separate studies that are all corroborate each other that show that brain shrinkage occurs with lower omega 3 index.

Yeah.

So you both see increased brain shrinkage and increase cognitive impairments with lower amounts of omega 3 index, which is very well established in the scientific literature and should not be controversial at all. Yeah, you achieve that adequate level with flax seeds and walnuts or with Omega 3 with. Just make sure you know your level because if it's not. So whatever you're doing isn't working, you pump up the supplement a little more.

Yeah, perfect. And what, what else do you see on, on that front, let's talk about your scientific studies because you're, you're really extensively published. Do you have some just like ones that you're super proud of?

Well, yeah, I mean, I have a lot of studies that I'm proud of. One that I'm proud of is published in 2010 called the Changing Perceptions of Hunger on a High Nutrient Density Diet. It's been referenced by scientists all over the world. They're using it as a foundational study to support their work to show that what people think feel is hunger is really withdrawal from a poor diet and real hunger is felt differently and achieving. And that these people were able to reduce their drive for calories and the addictive drive to overeat by the quality of what they ate, not by trying to reduce quantity. They try to improve the quality of their diet which then has them desire less calories as opposed to willy nilly trying to cut back on calories which just leaves you unsatisfied, craving more food. So that's one study. Very proud about that 2010 study. And then I, then I published another study that had more than 450 people showing that there was systolic blood pressure dropped more than 26 points and their advanced heart diseases melted away when people adopted this type of nutritarian program. And I've published that and I've also written pieces in the International Journal of Disease Prevention reversal showing the impact of utilizing nuts and seeds as a source of fat even for reversal of cardiovascular disease, that you don't want to take out all the fat out of your diet. You go to a cardiologist or a doctor, they'll say stop you if you have heart disease, don't eat a Low fat diet. And I'm saying, well, it all depends what you're calling a low fat diet. We don't want to take all the fat out of the diet. We want to have some beneficial fats from nuts and seeds because they stabilize the heart against arrhythmia, they satiate you to be satisfied with less calories, and they help you absorb phytochemicals that are needed for your immune function and your heart and your heart health that are absorbed 50 times more effectively if you have a little bit of fat with the meal. So we're talking about, I've showed in that study, I have 50 references demonstrating the benefits of utilizing nuts and seeds as a source of fat, even olive oil. Olive oil may be better than butter and other sources of fat, but walnuts are better than walnut oil. And the studies show that using nuts and seeds, a source of fat, particularly when you're using hemp seeds, walnuts, sesame seeds, flaxseeds, seeds and nuts, then you still get better protection against cardiovascular death and better protection against all cause mortality, which includes cancer deaths.

Wow, that's awesome. How many articles have you, how many studies have you published?

I think I've published about 15 studies.

Wow, that's. Yeah, that is, that's awesome. As a clinician and author, etc. The, the component. How about on bad oils? Is there, is that a. Where, where are you with that concept?

Well, don't forget my position is exceptionally unique. Yes, I think all oil is bad. Okay. I think olive oil is bad even though it was better than other oils. I'd rather people eat the whole food and not have the extracted oil. Because it's fattening.

Yeah.

Not because it's a dangerous oil per se, but when you heat it, it becomes, you know, it still can become rancid and have, you know, genotoxic changes. But the point is, is that even extra virgin unheated olive oil is still fattening. It's 120 calories per tablespoon. It's absorbed instantaneously and it halts your body's ability to lose fat. It makes it so people can't lose weight. So in the oil out of it. So. And weight on the body is a cancer promoter. So that if so because. So that, that I'm saying by inference, I'm saying that olive oil causes cancer, even though how ridiculous as that sounds. If it's keeping you overweight and preventing you from losing those 20 pounds of extra body fat you have in your body, that's increasing your risk of cancer. When you took the oil out and instead ate some sesame seeds and pine nuts and walnuts in place, you drop 15 pounds and you lower your risk of cancer. So the oil is, is that's perpetuating the. And also I'm saying that the flood, the caloric rush, oil is absorbed so rapidly in the bloodstream, it also stimulates. It's an appetite stimulant. Stimulant. So we're saying that a nutritarian diet ideally is SOS free. SOS free means sugar, salt and oil free. It's got the sodium from the natural foods, but it's no added salt or added so it's not fat free, but it's oil free. So sugar, oil, SOS free because those foods, sugar, salt and oil, and don't forget white flour is a sugar equivalent. It enters the bloodstream as sugar and those foods are addictive, drive excessive consumption of calories and are important factors making people, white people overeat and why they're overweight.

Love it. I love it. I just served that one right up to you, Joel. The what's one, what's one actionable item for folks here at the end of our interview that you would recommend to get going on this nutritarian diet. Besides reading the books, what's one thing they could start with today?

Well, I have them memorize these dozen words and these words are raw vegetables have the most consistent and powerful association with a reduction of cancers of all types. They memorize that line. And then every day at lunch they have a large salad with raw vegetables in it and a dressing made from nuts and seeds. Their lunch is a big salad, a bowl of vegetable bean soup with mushrooms in it and some fresh fruit for dessert. And lunch is the most important meal of the day. And if everybody in America changed their lunch to a big salad, a bowl of soup and some fruit for dessert, we'd see more increased longevity, lower healthcare costs and tremendous transformation of the health of Americans.

I love it. Well, thank you, Dr. Joel Fuhrman for coming on what the Health. If you all got anything out of here, I'm sure this was action packed with amazing actionable steps. Please put that out there, give us a five star review and tell people what you learned here because this is where it's coming to you. It's coming from the interwebs. It's not coming from the propaganda box, the tv. These are real doctors out here making a difference in your lives. So Again, thank you, Dr. Fuhrman, for coming on what the health.

My pleasure. Thanks for all the great work you're doing, and good luck to everybody listening. Take care.