Disease-Proof Your Child with Joel Fuhrman, M.D.

Welcome to Mama Goddess. I'm your host, Alexandra J. Johnson. This podcast is all about rocking your goddess life, creating vibrant health and celebrating motherhood and family life. It's about living an authentically awesome life. Let's have some fun.

Hello and welcome. I'm Alexandra J. Johnson and Today's guest is Dr. Joel Fuhrman. Dr. Fuhrman is a board family physician who specializes in preventing and reversing disease through nutritional and natural methods. His best selling books include Eat to Live, Eat for Health, Superimmunity and Disease Proof youf child. Welcome, Dr. Fuhrman.

Hi. Great to be here.

It is so great to be with you. And as you know, my husband Brian and I have been so inspired by your work and I know our future children are going to greatly benefit from it as well. So I am excited to dive into your wisdom around how disease proof our children. Pretty exciting.

Well, it's important information that not only everybody in America should know. This information. In other words, we go to elementary school and we graduate from high school, colleges, professional schools, and the most critical information people should have learned to protect their bone bodies, their health, their children. To not get cancer, to not get autoimmune diseases. The benefit to not get sick and get serious infections. The most primary integral intimation to our lives, we learn nothing about. And people are totally misinformed and confused about.

Yeah, totally. And I love in your book. It just popped up when your 5 year old daughter, I think had said, don't parents love their children? Why are they feeding them this food? Like you said, we just don't have the education.

Right? My daughter Kara, when she was 5, we were walking out of the gym, we were working out and she was taking a class, an exercise class called Kids Boot Camp. Boot Camp. She called it Boo Boo Camp. Boo Boot Camp. And I never knew what it was. What the hell is Boo Boot Camp? Until I finally found out it was boot camp. And she said to me, don't these parents love their children? I said, well, what are you talking about, Kara? Of course they love their children. She said, well, all the kids are just eating nothing but junk and all kinds of bad, unhealthy foods. And I said, well, they don't know what we know. They don't know that what you eat makes your body and controls your health in the future. And she looked at me like I was crazy and said, how could they be so stupid that what you eat doesn't make your body? She was five years old, you know, and I said, kara, it's like it's that they don't, you know, it's like if you woke up in the morning and you went over to the people, the kids in the bus stop waiting to get picked up for school and everyone was smoking a cigarette, all the kids were smoking, all the parents were smoking. The parents were waving by on the porches of their house, the kids in the swing set were smoking. You would just think it's not because everybody does it. They don't put any thought behind it. They just think everybody does it, so it must be normal. They don't even think. They're just followers like sheep committing suicide with food and damaging their children. Not even aware, consciously aware of what they're doing. She could never figure that out. But by the way, I remember that story like it was yesterday. But Now Kara is 18 years old and in college.

Wow.

She's my youngest daughter, you know. Yeah.

And you have four children, so you definitely right, isn't it? Four children?

I have four. My oldest is 25. I have a 21 year old daughter and I have an 18 year old daughter's carriage. She used to be my youngest, she was a 5 year old. And now I also have a 10 year old son.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

That's so great. So I'm curious from the start, when a family is looking to kind of disease proof their children, what do you recommend a woman, a couple, do, to do nutritionally before they conceive? Do you have recommendations for that?

Yes. The number one thing is that they have to live a healthy life. Let's go over that because what that means and why. But in other words, you can't ask your child to be healthy if you're not eating healthy. There's no rules for the children in the house. The rules have got to be the same for everybody. The pattern, the diet style the kids wind up eating, the way that the pattern and the modeling of the diet the parents eat, that the most important thing you can do for your child is live healthfully, remain healthy, stay healthy and be an example of good health. And what healthy eating and healthy living is, that's the most important thing. Now, getting specifically to your question, it's that your child's health is dependent on not only what a woman eats when she's pregnant, but what she ate even two years prior to conception and maybe even before that as well. Let me say this, that, that for example, women who eat hot dogs or bacon, pastrami, luncheon meats and less vegetables have children with higher rates of childhood cancers. The number one Cause of death in children, other than accidents, of course, is acute blastocytic leukemia or acute lymphocytic leukemia. And that is related to the mother's diet during pregnancy and up to two years prior to consumption if she's eating these foods and not eating the right foods. You know, I also teach women and totally advocate and on a mission to teach everybody that folic acid fortification of food, folic acid supplementation, and folic acid supplementation during pregnancy is a large contributor to the development of childhood cancer. It's cancer causing. We already know that folic acid. Well, we know that, of course, the medical authorities, and how should I say, the governmental authorities recommend folic acid supplementation to reduce the risk and occurrence of neural tube defects in children born. And they think it's a major health, you know, a major health success accomplishment. They've done that. And in reality, you know, what we, you know, folic acid is not what's contained in food. Vegetables and greens and beans contain folate. Folate is not folic acid. Folic acid is a synthetic form that we add to supplements. It behaves in the body differently than folic acid than folate does. It's absorbed too readily. You can't control its activity. It blocks folate receptors. It creates almost an abnormal degree of folate metabolism, resulting in a higher rate of breast cancer and a higher rate of cancer in general in people who take folic acid. There's even studies that show a higher rate of breast cancer in women 20, 30, 40 years down the line after they took folic acid during their pregnancy. And so the question is, well, what's, you know, so it increases breast cancer in women, but maybe it's still needed for children. But my point is that giving women folic acid is saying to them, you don't have to pay attention to eat vegetables. You don't have to eat your greens and beans. You don't have to eat mushrooms and onions. You don't have to eat healthy vegetables. You just could just take a pill and still live at McDonald's and eat potato chips and French fries and burgers, drink soda, put any kind of garbage you want in your body. It's okay, because you can take a folic acid pill not to have a neural tube defect. That just gives people the emotional and intellectual support to continue to eat unhealthily, thinking that children are protected. If we didn't have the ability to give, if we didn't have folic acid pills and everybody wasn't pushing them on pregnant women, then women would have Towe'd have to teach them. Instead, you have to eat vegetables to get sufficient folate to prevent birth defects and to eat. And you have to eat at least a raw salad every day and a serving of cooked greens every day. And you should eat some beans every day. And then you'll be. Then your body will be adequately filled with all the nutrients, because if you're deficient in folate, you're deficient in more than 1,000 other nutrients simultaneously that come along for the ride in vegetables, number one. And the lack of green vegetables in the diet is linked to childhood cancers anyway, not just neural tube defects. So by giving them the folic acid pill, we've just created a vicious cycle of further damage to our children. But so it was an opportunity to be able to educate women of why eating vegetables are so important. Instead, we give them a pill. Same thing with everything the medical profession does. We turn everything into a pill solution, whether it's diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol. We have a pill for this, we have a pill for that. We absolve people of personal responsibility. We give them the false sense of security, that doctors have the answer for them and that the medical care is going to take care of them and is going to be their, you know, what's the word? Their answer for a long, happy life. And it just leads to, obviously, tragedy, disease, suffering and death. Needless deaths.

Right. Amazing. So I'm very curious, because this is obviously a very hot topic. So the folic acid, what about some of the supplements or the prenatals that have folate from whole food, is that better than the folic acid supplements?

Yes, if there was such a supplement. In any case, what I'm suggesting is when the supplement says folate, it's still not folate, it's folic acid. It has to be real folate from food. And if you were eating healthfully already and you're getting the phyto. And the reason why the lack of the greens are linked to cancer is because it's not just giving you folate. It's because there are isothiocyanides and polyphenols and anthrocyadins, and there's a whole bunch of other sterile. There's thousands of other nutrients that are important in vegetables we have to be consuming. And if you're doing all that and you're getting high levels of folate already, then even excess folate is probably not even great for you. Why would you be looking for folate even? Why would you even be trying to find that because you're not going to getyou're going to get tons of it anyway. When you eat healthily and you're not, and you don't just need that anyway is the whole point. You got to eat your green vegetables and whether you take adequate levels of folate or not. And if you were so, if you're a doctor or you were so concerned, draw a blood level for folate before you start taking folic acid. When my patients draw their blood for folate, it usually comes back abnormally high. They say, is there something wrong with me? It came back 23 to 25 and the normal range is 12 to 20. And I say, no, that's normal to be 23 to 25, just because the American norm on the blood test is considered much lower. All my nutritarian patients on healthy diets come back with the blood levels so high in folate. In other words, their levels are so high from eating a healthy diet, they're going to worry about taking a supplement of folate. But nevertheless, most of the supplements out there that say folate on them are just using the word folate instead of folic acid. They're just being inaccurate in their description of what they have in it.

Interesting. So then a woman does not be like you said, you have your raw salad, you have steamed vegetables. A woman doesn't need to be concerned at all about this as long as they're having a nutrient dense diet.

Well, even if they're eating anywhere near what would be considered a healthy diet, there's no concern about this. The concern about folic acid deficiency is just about people who don't eat any vegetables. Look at what they do when babies are born. They give them a shot of vitamin K within minutes of coming out through the birth canal. Do you know that? And why do you do that?

Yeah, I read that in your book too. Please tell us. That's one of my questions.

Well, where do you get vitamin K from? You get it from green vegetables, of course. So women don't eat vegetables, they don't get folate, vitamin K. And when women are deficient in vitamin K, when the head is compressed, the baby's head is compressed as it comes through the birth canal. There's a certain small percent. Like 1 in 1000 babies can develop a cerebral hemorrhage which is bleeding into the brain from the head being compressed because of vitamin K deficiency in the mother because the blood can't clot. So automatically, to prevent 1 in 1,000 or 1 in 10,000 of these cases happening they just give every baby that comes out a shot in their thigh immediately after birth of vitamin K. Now, that's totally needless. Another opportunity to educate women why it's important to eat vegetables. And then we stop people from getting childhood cancers if they ate vegetables. But of course, we can't tell women they can't eat pastrami and bologna and bacon and chitin. You know what I mean? We can't tell them that. We have to just give them vitamin. We have to just let kids get childhood cancer. Then we could market to them more cancer therapies for their kids or whatever. You know, the conventional way of practicing and looking at medicine, you know, which is supported by the drug industry, is tremendously powerful, you know, and it affects, you know, government and pays money to lobbyists and, you know, and politicians. But the, you know, and the food industry is all geared to having people being as sick as they possibly can, not dying. We want them to survive so they can continue to eat unhealthily and utilize medications. We want them to spend money on medications. We want them to keep eating of fast foods and unhealthy food. But it's all geared on keeping people sick as possible, not fixing their health, not preventing disease. It's insane. Absolutely insane.

It is insane. Then we have amazing people like you who are literally heroes out there educating all of us. Thank you, doctor.

Thank you. Thank you. I haven't been attacked by anybody yet, but I may have to get a bodyguard.

I know you definitely have some controversial topics.

You know what it is? The stuff I'm talking about is certainly getting out there more now this year. You know what I mean? So now that people are starting to know who I am, I maybe have to fear for my life.

Women really want their hot dogs.

Yeah, right?

That's awesome. Speaking of hot dogs, I'm very curious on the protein for a pregnant woman, because there's the two topics that a lot of pregnant women are advised. Make sure you're getting plenty of protein, and usually it's in animal products, their calcium, make sure they're drinking their milk. So can you talk about those two things?

Yeah. It's like we're living in the dark ages of human nutrition, and the dark ages got us into the troubles we're into now. Even though about 40% of Americans die of heart attacks and strokes, Even though about 30% die of cancer, almost all Americans develop heart disease, atherosclerosis. And just because some of them die of cancer before the heart disease kills them, and almost every American who's living after the age of 70 has cancer in their body in some form or another. You know, the reason why mammograms are not really protective and do not stop women from dying is because they're, you know, because they only can detect cancer after it's been there in your body for more than 10 years. For the cancer cells to replicate to the point where they can be visible to the human eye to be seen in a mammogram, it's sometimes it's more than, you know, 10, 15 years already. The point is that we're reliant on these things that's just based on a belief system that's not based on fact, that's not based on careful scrutiny of the evidence. It's a belief system that's really fabricated and accepted by people. It's all based on money, advertising, myths. You know, you asked me about protein and calcium. Well, the studies on calcium show that women who take more calcium actually have weaker bones, more hip fractures, more heart disease, more calcifications in their hearts, more damage. You know, when we take a calcium a huge amount at one time in a pill, it has negative effects. It deactivates the vitamin D, which are people. So it's really. And if you're eating a healthy diet to begin with, with seeds and beans and greens, you'll be getting tons of calcium. Where does the cow get the calcium from? You know, where they eat it from the grass. In other words, where does the. Every animal gets calcium from? Green. The primary source of calcium, the primary source of protein, which is vegetables. How does the hippopotamus, rhinoceros, elephant, giraffe or gorilla get so big they just eat mostly green vegetables. Well, greens are high in prot and high in calcium. They eat a lot of greens. But the idea that, you know, you have to eat the animal to get the protein, you can't get it from where the animal got it from. You know, the grass. I always say the grass made the lion because the lion ate the antelope or the zebra that ate the grass. The grass had the protein to make the antelope with a zebra. And the lion ate the zebra, the antelope who got the protein from the grass. But when you get more of your protein from the grass, in other words, when you eat seeds and beans and greens, which are high protein foods by the way, then you're getting a primary protein source that's cleaner, that's not full of antibiotics and growth hormone. It doesn't raise IGF1 when you get the Concentrated biological protein, which has always been promoted by the nutritional establishment. It's cancer causing. We don't want to have most of our protein come from a high biological source eating animal products. We want to have protein coming more from vegetation, so it doesn't have as high a biological value, so it doesn't raise growth hormone and promote cancer. And the body, of course, can put together the amino acids it needs over a 24 to 48 hour period. You don't have to eat all the amino acids in the right proportion of every food you eat. So the point here is that a diet that's predominantly vegetarian, which I'm not saying you have to eat, I am saying you have to eat a diet that's low in animal products. Certainly I want animal products to be less than 10% of total calories for sure. But even if you're 100% vegan, protein is not what's missing or is not something that's hard to find on a vegetarian or vegan diet. And neither is calcium. On the other hand, it's the high protein intake that's linked to toxemia of pregnancy, high blood pressure, diabetes, gestational diabetes. Because it's not just glucose that raises insulin, it's that during pregnancy extra weight gain and extra animal products are also linked to diabetes of pregnancy, gestational diabetes and toxemia of pregnancy. And of course excessive weight gain in extra large children, so leading to more C sections. So we have a whole vicious cycle of poor nutritional advice creating more further degenerative and more further medical problems in people.

Wow, that's amazing. And that's fascinating on the high protein, with all of the issues that pregnant women now are having at their diets and everyone's telling them to eat the high protein and that it's causing all of these crazy diseases. That's amazing.

Geez, right? Like in Korea, even in 1978, in 1950s, they had one tenth of breast cancer in Korea compared to the United States. Of course, in 1978 they had about one fifth of breast cancer in Korea compared to the United States at that time. In the early 1980s, 1978, going into 1980s, the fast food manufacturers had already permeated the United States, but started to go international. And then since the 1980s to the mid-1990s in Korea, they started eating more animal products. Back in 1968, they were only eating 9% of calories from animal products. In Korea, we're eating 27%. But now they're up to after the fast food manufacturer, they're eating up to 18%. Their sugar intake increased. Their oil increased tremendously, almost. I think their oil increased almost tenfold in the last 20 years. So they're eating more animal products and more oil and about double the amount of sugar they did in 1978. And now they had. Their breast cancer rates went up, tripled in the last 20 years in Korea. These are recent phenomenon in human history. Just to make this clear that these diseases are not genetic. They're the phenomenon of recent, you know, of the recent diet styles we're eating that these diseases. Breast cancer was virtually unknown in most of the world. It still only affects one inch. I think it's only one in 100 people in some of the more smaller areas and more not Western industrialized countries where it affects such a large number of people in our countries. But still it's not. This is not rocket science here. We know that a more natural, primitive diet in a cleaner environment is going to prevent breast cancer. We know that eating plastics and fast food and processed foods and we know what, what causes it and we know how to remove it. And you're not going to have come up with a magic pill. They're not going to give more money to breast cancer this and breast cancer that and all of a sudden we're going to come up with magic. We're going to cure breast cancer. That's just ridiculous. Ridiculous dream. We're not living in a fairy tale world here of magic monsters and goblins here. We have to stop cancer and heart disease by living healthy. By living a healthy life. Yeah.

And then it's in you being a pediatrician and a doctor as well that you rarely give any sort of drugs. Right. If any.

Right. I'm a board certified family physician and what I do write prescriptions to get people off drugs. In other words, they're on high blood pressure medications. They follow my approach. They get less and less medications, they're on diabetic medications. We wean them down. They're on antidepressants. We get them well without needing these drugs that can cause dependency and actually further their condition if they get addicted to the them. So we want people not to be drug dependent but to search to ascertain and remove the cause. Because in almost all cases the body can heal itself. And the miraculous self healing body of a well nourished body in a well is just amazing. The body is already a disease proof, self healing machine. And of course that's the title of my book, Disease Proof youf Child, which is about kids not having asthma Ear infections, allergies, future disease, future cancer. And that we feed our kids right, we protect them against cancer down the road. And that's where I think disease proof your child is the only, I think it's the only book out there that gives the science that I think every scientist, nutritionist, dietician, doctor in the world should read the book whether they have kids or not. Because you have to understand the science of how when you feed your kids wrong, you cause cellular damage that sets the stage for early puberty, a higher rate of estrogen and testosterone, and higher rates of breast cancer and prostate cancer down the road. And those first five years of life, those nutrit errors and ignorance that you, you know and bad health practices, when you have this opportunity to raise your kid healthy in the first five years of life, you don't take advantage of that. You've, you know, you're destining them to a higher rate of cancer down when they're adults or autoimmune disease like lupus or scleroderma or psoriasis because of the bad choices you made when they were young and parents, this should be like, this should be required reading before they get a license to have a kid.

You totally, totally. I agree. I love it. And it's going to be a huge resource for me always. So I'm really curious on and I know you get this a lot, but the parents are like, oh, genetics, like I don't know if I can really disease prove my child. It's just genetics. They have a genetic disposition to diabetes or whatever. Can you address genetics?

Sure. I mean genetics play a role, but these diseases never occurred in human history. Our genetic bodies didn't totally change. But of course we're saying here that most of the damage even in genetic diseases, even with diseases that are predominantly are caused by what the mother ate or you know, don't forget, when you have a child and that child is born, do you think that child's alive for nine months before they were living inside you? Born for nine months? Well, actually, the egg that made that child was formed when your nails were formed in your mother's womb just after a few years of when she conceived you. So the eggs that made your child was formed when your body was being formed when your mother was born. So your child that is not when is born is not nine months old. They're 26 years old because they were living for 25 years in your body before you got pregnant as an egg. And that egg could be damaged genetically by what you eat and by the chemicals you expose yourself to, by your bad food choices you make, and by the bad health habits you have. That egg could be damaged. That's considered genetic damage. But it's really, you know, it's not like just destiny. It's because you didn't eat, you didn't take good care of your body, and the egg is part of your body, part of your cells in you that you didn't take good care of of. And the woman has to take good care of her body her whole life. We have to change this whole thinking about disease. And these diseases are not predominantly genetic. In other words, nutrition overwhelms genetic. Even people with autoimmune diseases like that are predisposed with lupus, psoriasis, rheumatoid arthritis, they get better. And kids with asthma, their asthma goes away. Nutrition is very powerful. So we can't underestimate the ability of the body to repair and regenerate and heal. Priority damage. But some of that prior damage that's considered genetic occurs in the womb or before you even conceive.

Right. So for most things we can over, like you said, the nutrition overwhelms genetics. And then there's some things that we've just done that there's kind of. It is what it is. We've done it for 25 years.

And the amount of diseases that are truly genetic or predominantly genetic, then there are genetic defects and things that are never going to go away in kids that are genetic. Genetic defects that can't be fixed, but those are extremely rare. We're talking here about 99% of the regular illnesses that afflict their kids that don't have such a strong genetic. That are not so genetically influenced.

Right. So like you talk about in your book, which is awesome, so many babies and children have. You're saying the asthma, the ear infections, the strep throat, the allergies, the rashes, all of that is not part of being a child. Right. I mean, those aren't necessary.

I hear you. You're saying like that so many people are used to kids being sick all the time that they think it's just like part of childhood now. Yeah. Like it's normal. You bring kids to doctors, normal for them to be sick every couple of weeks. You're giving them drugs, you're doing. You're putting poisons in their body. Their doctors are shooting them with vaccines every, you know, 26 vaccines in the first year of life. And you just think it's normal because everybody else is doing. And the reality is that the treatment, when the kid gets the first viral infection, when they're in the first six to 10 months of life, they go to a doctor and the doctor gives them the antibiotic, which he shouldn't be. And that antibiotic prescription predisposes them to future ear infections by killing out the good bacteria. Because this was a viral infection. They had a viral otitis media, not a bacterial infection. And even if there's bacterial overgrowth, kids get well or shown to get well without antibiotics. But you start giving them antibiotics and of course we start creating more asthma, more ear infections, more allergies. We start damaging children very young and poisoning them. And the most, and the biggest way we poisoning poison them is by besides feeding them wrong and not breastfeeding them, is taking them to doctors and putting drugs in their bodies. Boy, those little baby bodies, those little fragile bodies are damaged by those drugs and sometimes permanently damaged by those drugs.

Right. So how does a parent know, like when they should take their baby, their child to the doctor, when an antibiotic is appropriate? How do they kind of navigate that terrain?

Well, I covered that in the book Disease Proof youf Child. Hopefully they'll read the book. But of course, basically it's that the only thing we're really concerned about with children is their lungs, is breathing difficulty. They don't die of heart attacks. So the main concern with children are dehydration because they're vomiting or have diarrhea and can't get water in. And that's a concern. And that's when you have to see a doctor. And the other concern is when their respiratory rate gets very high, when they can't breathe well because there could be a pneumonia or some breathing problem which can be like bronchiolitis or respiratory synthesis, why they may need some oxygen or breathing tent or something. So they should be looked at. Then if their breathing rate goes above 50aminute, that's a concern. And then if they have a fever's not really a concern. A fever is the way the body fights infection. But if they have a prolonged fever fever when the kid is sick for more than, you know, having a high fever for more than three days, certainly not getting better. You know, viral infections have a diet, have a fluxional diurnal pattern, they get higher at night and lower in the morning. So if you're still seeing improvement after three days and it's getting lower in the morning, higher at night, then it's okay. But if it's high in the morning, if the fever is higher in the morning and it's staying high for a few days. The concern is that a bacterial infection and the doctor should be at. Could you be consulted? And I go through this a little more clearly in disease proof your child, obviously. But certainly people bring their babies in to see doctors too often and get too many treatments they don't need.

Right. And so there's an appropriate time, if they have a bacterial infection, to take an antibiotic. But that's very rare, right?

Bacterial infections are very, very rare. And just keep in mind, I have four kids and I have hundreds of patients with kids. I should say thousands of patients with kids. And I've never taken an antibiotic in the last 30 years. My kids from the ages of 10 to 25 have never taken an antibiotic for any kind of infection like that. Never had infections needing antibiotics. My wife used to have some urinary tract infections before, when we were just meeting, when we started to date. But once we were engaged and started following them, eating healthily, she never had the urinary tract infection in her whole life. We've married 30 years.

That's so great. And I love that example, too, because I know some people are going to be listening to this and be like, what? You've never. You haven't taken antibiotic? Your children haven't taken antibiotics? I mean, for most of us, we've been stocked up with antibiotics at a very young age.

And do people know that women who've taken more than 10 antibiotic dosages through their life have double the risk of breast cancer? I mean, I think. I'm not. I got to get the statistic here. I think it's. I got to get the exact statistic. I think it's 15 dosage. Have double the risk of breast cancer. I can check it out, but I mean. But the point is, these things cause cancer, is the point. I don't have to remember the exact number here, but the point is you want to overcome, avoid this as much as you possibly can. Wow.

It's so amazing. I mean, I definitely had plenty of antibiotics. And just to hear that, you know, like, your parents think they're doing the best that they can do, as you're saying, but then the detriments and the harmful things that happen from having so many antibiotics is just. It's crazy. Literally. Wow.

Right? Right.

It's amazing.

And the more you feed your child to get bigger and bigger, bigger, the more they get higher the rate of prostate cancer. In other words, we want the kids to be as big as possible and be the linebacker on football teams. The whole thing is really a formula for disaster.

So what do you recommend? Breastfeeding, obviously, is absolutely necessary. And then what do you recommend for an ideal diet for a baby after they're breastfeeding? What foods do they introduce and things like that?

Well, don't forget, they're not eating food after they're breastfeeding. They're eating food while they're breastfeeding. In other words, it's that I'm recommending women breastfeed for two years of life, and they're eating food from six months on. So the majority of that time, from age six month to two years, when I had one child, one of my middle daughter, Janet, I think after like 16 months, she just told my wife, pushed away from the breast and said, I don't want to breastfeed anymore. The child did it, you know, but most of my other kids, you know, wanted to breastfeed two years or more. You know what I mean? So Jen has always been so independent. Always. Never needed any help with school, always knew what she wanted to do in life, and always, like, didn't have any help with anything. You know, it's like, kind of like she's always like an adult. When she was a kid, practically, it was one of those things she like, nope, I want to feed myself. I can take care of myself right now when I'm 16 months old. You know, it's like, funny.

That's awesome.

But the point I'm making here is that the foods we give the kids, whether it's frozen peas or fresh freeze or baby mill or mashed banana and avocado, or whether it's sweet potato or squashes, or whether it's broccoli and bean dishes and nut dishes, and it's the same foods we eat ourselves. You just feed the same healthy food to the children. And the idea that it's a myth to think that you avoid nuts, we used to think you don't feed nuts to cause allergies, but now we realize we want to introduce these foods while the child is breastfeeding. But it's stopping breastfeeding, introducing them at a later date, that increases allergies more. And also you reduce the allergies. When the mother eats the same food that you're feeding the child, the child's protected against those foods with allergies. So you want the mother to eat pecans and walnuts and sesame seeds and actually be nursing during that time. And then when you feed it to the baby, the baby doesn't get allergies to it. Because the mother was eating it and had the right kind of antibodies transmitted through the breast milk.

Right. That's so amazing.

So there's no special diet for the kid. We just got to puree it and make it smooth when they don't have teeth, of course. But the kids eat food. They eat black rice cereal and they have oats and they have apples and they have whatever usually meal we're making for the adults, we throw in the bowl and make it for the dog and we mush it up and give it to the. The kid.

Right. And I love in your book too, you say kids naturally like fruits and vegetables. And for so many people, they're like, oh, my kids just don't like fruits and vegetables. Can you talk about that?

Yeah, that's absolutely impossible. That's impossible to happen. That's because the parent fed the kid. In other words, there are a whole bunch of fruits and vegetables and starches and grains and nuts and seeds and foods that you would eat if you were shipwrecked on a desert island. Right. And you would eat these foods and you would not die. And if you had a baby on a desert island, you'd feed the kid papaya, paella and banana and vegetables chewed up or whatever it is you would give him avocado, whatever it is you give the kid and he wouldn't die. He'd survive. And then you go and you give the kid white bread and white flour and rice cereal and corn flakes and sugary drinks and Egg McMuffins and pizza. And they don't eat vegetables anymore. Well, that's because they're an animal. You give those foods to a monkey, the animal is going to seek out the foods with the highest amount of salt, the highest amount of sugar, the highest amount of caloric concentration, the oil, the fried foods. You're going to, you're making, you know, you're going to give the kid more concentrated calories with higher amounts of stimulation. They're going to choose those foods and stop eating the vegetables. Well, it's because you gave them those foods that are not natural foods, that there was a man made foods cultivated to attract people to them so that you eat fast food instead of real food. So now you're committing suicide yourself and now you're putting, now you're creating a little food addict out of your kid. The only way to undo that is take those foods out of the. Go back to the desert island again, shipwreck your family on a desert island where there's nothing to eat except natural Foods. And nobody starves themselves. It's funny, I had this one patient who came to me years ago. The kid would only eat potato chips and chocolate chip cookies. That's it. And the mother was frantic. That's all she would eat. So I said to the mother, well, let's not have any potato chips and chocolate chip cookies available. They're no longer available. The only things there are pineapple, corn and the cob, peas and carrots, nuts and seeds, bean dishes, bean burger. You have all these foods, string beans, broccoli. You have all these foods available. The kid can choose with them, when they're hungry, can eat, but don't have those kids around, so there's no option to eat those foods. He's going to starve himself to death. He'll die if I just do that. He won't eat. She calls me, you know, I say, well, you know, I never had a kid die yet, you know, but in any case, she calls me up two days later, he's starving himself. He's going to die. You're going to kill my child. He's eating nothing. And I said, he's not going to eat nothing. You know, it's normal to go out with the food for a few days. He's going to be super hungry. You're going to see. He's going to. By the next day, of course, he was devouring everything. I'd taste the pineapple, he'd take the whole corn, the cob. He ate a whole bowl of peas the next day, you know, by day three, was going crazy eating this stuff, you know what I mean? But it's like these parents, they think that they make the mistake with their kids, they blow their kids desire for healthy foods and ability to eat vegetables because they had this assumption that being bigger and eating, but the kid wasn't eating any calories. They thought the kid should be the help of their pediatrician or family physician or their family or themselves. They believed that bigger is better and the child should put more weight. And eating natural foods wasn't causing enough weight. And the child wasn't big enough to connect to his peers. And they want to have the kid gain weight, so they're going to feed him more fat and foods. So they start to give him more calorically dense, more conventional foods, more whatever, French fries or ice cream or cheese, whatever they'd given the kid. And the kid stops eating vegetables, of course. And then they have a problem on their hands. It's all based on the fact they thought the kid wanted that Bigger was better. Bigger is not better. The whole thing is just so a.

Kid will naturally regulate their weight. If they are eating nutrient dense foods, fruits and vegetables, like we don't have to be concerned about them gaining enough weight.

Right. The kid won't be overweight and they won't be underweight. Their natural hunger will direct them to eat the exact amount of food like every animal does in nature. When they're afforded the opportunity to choose natural foods and when kids aren't hungry, they're not going to eat. And it's very hard to have an obese or overweight child. That's the main problem here. The main problem is we have an epidemic of diabetes in children. When I started As a doctor 20 years ago, diabetes in children was unheard of. Now we have high blood pressure in children today. You know, we're developing these diseases that we didn't even believe happened in kids. When I started, I was in medical profession and now it's rampant. And kids, you know, now everybody, everybody gets put on medications and eats a disease causing diet and develops the consequences. And the parents are to blame. Kids are just thrust into this world as little harmless creatures and you have a child with a problem, it's the parent that was to blame and the parents are the blame. Even when you teach kids nutrition in school, the parents sabotage the results because they're addicts and they're addicted to their unhealthy diet. And they're looking and they're making rationalizations why they're why it's not right or why something, you know, they don't want to give up their. What they see that they don't see that they could make these changes too stress provoking. And addicts do that. Addicts look for rationalizations and excuses. The primitive brain wants to protect their addictive behaviors.

Wow, that's amazing.

Parents sabotage any kind, you know, they sabotage any kind of good you do. When the children comes home and says, how do I get my parents to feed me healthy? How do my parents make these recipes taste so good? How do I get my parents to learn this information about not getting cancer? You know, and the parents are like against the information. You know, they're the worst sabotagees of this because they've been so brainwashed with wrong information and so addicted and used to eating unhealthy diets their whole lives. It's like why we have such an old, we have an obese and sickly pop adult population.

Right? Yeah. The parents don't want to take the junk food out, right?

Right, because it means they have to take it out. Because they can't take it out of the kids and they eat them. That means they have to give it up themselves.

Totally. Wow, that's so amazing.

What's the thing about Halloween? Why don't they just give out cocaine and cigarettes and cigars when you go house door to door giving our kids poison. Why are we celebrating poisoning our children with candy? It's ridiculous.

What did you do on Halloween? I'm just curious because it's such a popular.

Isn't it incredible? How do people go into this stuff? We give away. I think we go to Oriental trading. We buy these light up necklaces or little Ryo's or some kind of cheap toys we give away at the front door as opposed to giving away candy. You know what I mean?

And then your kids. I'd love to hear just about you parenting your kids as well and just instilling these healthy behaviors and habits because it's so amazing the stories that you tell just how awesome your kids are. So can you give us some tips on how we. Obviously we need to be healthy, but some just tips that you've learned along the way of how to educate them so that they are empowered to make the healthy choices.

Well, this is empowering information. And kids aren't stupid. They're much smarter than you think. And they can understand this information and they can understand the idea that the rest of society is making errors and suffering tragically because of it. And they sometimes my kids always felt sorry for other kids, you know, and they bring their friends over to the house to taste their delicious smoothies and bean brownies and desserts made with frozen strawberries and stuff. And the other kids would say, wow, can't you ever teach my parents how? My parents can make this great? My parents will come to my house and show the way. It's like it's always. My kids were proud of the way they ate and felt good about sharing it with their friends and things. But the point is that when you realize when you educate yourself and you educate your children talk about it, your kids become a living example of it. It's great. The kids want to be healthy. Even when I speak to schools at all ages, even kindergartens and elementary school, and they hear this information, they're talked to in a respectful way about how we know society went wrong and we're eating the wrong type of diet, it causes people to suffer. And some parents may smoke cigarettes and that's very dangerous. And some parents may eat fast food and Eat junk food and sugary foods and candy and desserts all the time and get overweight. And overweight is dangerous. And fat on your body is dangerous. And most parents are overweight. They're not exercised, they're not Thanksgiving, they're not eating mostly vegetables and beans and onions and mushrooms. They're not staying the foods that keep fat from storing in your body and there's increasing them and you don't want to. When parents bring their kids into my office with disease diseases like ADHD and asthma and I look the kid in the face, that five year old or eight year old kid and I say I need your help because your parents are eating away that's going to kill them. I know you love your parents and we got to have your help in getting your parents to eat better because your parents are addicted to this diet style that they were raised on that's killing them. And I know you don't want your father to have high cholesterol, high blood pressure, your mother to get breast cancer and have these problems. And I got to have you as a child supervise this eating and make sure they eat enough vegetables and make sure they're eating this food and that food and make sure they're not eating this food and that food. And just like I want you not to be an enabler of getting your of bringing cigarettes into your parents house. And the minute the child starts to understand what's going on and how their illness is really caused by their parents habits that they instilled in them, the child, it's not like telling the kid you've got to make it a diet for you that your parents got to force you to eat the opposite. I'm giving you a plan for the family that you got to force your parents to eat eat. And you've got to be the kid who makes sure your parents does it. It's right because they've screwed up until this point what they've done it for you wasn't great. They you were this problem they caused you because they're feeding you the food that they were that that's hurting them. And you want you love your parents, don't you? You know, you know a family that loves each other sees eating right as a form of love. My I remember once my once said to my son, I think it was, I sat down and I said to him, you know, what would you do if you were the parent and you had a child that you loved as much as I love you? What would you want the kid to do and what Would you say to your kid, in this case.

And a.

Kid at the age of five understands that perfectly, that when you're giving them some advice and want them to do something, it's not because you're against them, it's because you love them so much and want the best for them. And they, and one of the kids, then my son hugged me and said, I would do the same thing you would do, dad, because I, you know, and I love you too. Aw. Then they understand. They understand. You know, it's not like I never thought I'm forcing them not to eat anything, but they understand, you know, it's your choice, but, you know, you'd want to raise the, you know, why does your friend have pizza and you don't have, you know, why are you doing this? Why that? Well, what would you do if you were the parent? You knew what I knew. And this is what if, you know, and you, well, how would you raise your child? What would you want them to do? And why would you. And they get it. They get it and they appreciate it, actually. And when they're older, they appreciate it even more. Because now I have kids in their 20s, I have a 25 year old and 21 year old and they look back and say, well, thank God, dad, that you took care of me and I ate healthy when I was younger because so appreciate that now that I'm older. They appreciate it and they appreciate it was done in a loving way.

Wow. And they're just empowered and they make their own healthy choices. There's no forcing, there's no manipulation. They're just educated. That's, I love it.

It's just education. They're not stupid, they're smart people, you know, and they ended, you know, but anyway, it's, you know, the point is, is that we have to, and I always say we got to educate the children and the parents simultaneously, you know, because then there's no problem if they both learn it and, you know, and they could have meetings among the family. You know, we don't like the mother going and change everybody's diet. They got to go in and study the information together as a family, family and talk about it. And any changes that are made as a family unit, the whole family changes little by little as they learn the information together, which is fun to do, right.

And you get them in the kitchen and helping with the meals and they're.

Like, and working in the garden if possible, things like that. Going to a farm and picking berries in the summertime, buying them at a lower rate per pound. Storing the berries in the freezer for the winter, packing them in the bags for the store in the freezer. All that stuff is fun to do and going, finding and connecting yourself with the earth and the fact that this stuff comes off from the ground and not seeing food out of a silver pack or something you buy in a fast food restaurant.

Yeah, that's amazing. So awesome. I love it. I love your enthusiasm. I love your wisdom and your knowledge. Thank you so much for sharing all of your incredible study and research with us. It's so inspiring. Like you said, it's common sense, but for so many people, they just don't know. I really, really appreciate your work and I know I've been impacted and I'm very excited for our children to have been influenced by you as well. So thank you.

Thanks. Thank you. Okay, terrific. Thanks for the interview and I hope a lot of people enjoy it. Yes.

Thank you so much. Have a wonderful day.

Okay.

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