Master Your Health Through Fasting & Food w/Dr. Alan Goldhamer (PART 2) EP 1125

This is episode number 1125 with Dr. Alan Goldhammer, part two. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, the first wealth is health. And Nathaniel Brandon said, self-discipline is the ability to organize your behavior over time in the service of specific goals. Today's guest is Dr. Alan Goldhammer, who is one of the world's leading experts on medically supervised water only fasting. And in 1984, he founded and became director of True North Health Center in Santa Rosa, California. And since then, he has supervised the fasting and care of more than 20,000 patients. And it's the largest facility in the world specializing in medically supervised water only fasting and one of the premier training facilities for doctors to gain certification in supervision of therapeutic fasting. Dr. Goldhammer is also the author of the Health Promoting Cookbook and co-author of the Pleasure Trap: Mastering the Hidden Forces that Undermines Health and Happiness. And our conversation was so powerful in part one that we had to split it up in two episodes. So if you haven't listened to episode one yet of this, you can find it at lewishouse.com/1024 or just click the previous episode after this one on your podcast app. And in this second episode, we discuss the foods you should never eat ever again, why you should make younger friends before you get into old age, the five foods that Dr. Goldhammer would eat for the rest of his life if he had to choose them, how too much medication can be detrimental to your health, and so much more. Again, if you're enjoying this at any moment, make sure to share this with a friend that you think would be inspired and keep spreading the message of great to more people, to your friends on social media as well. And if this is your first time here, click the subscribe button on Apple Podcast or Spotify right now so you can stay up to date on the latest and greatest on the School of Greatness podcast. Okay, in just a moment, the one and only Dr. Alan Goldhammer.

After someone comes off the fast, what are the five foods you would recommend they never eat again?

Well, number one on my list would be dairy products. I think of all the animal products, dairy products, particularly cheese. Probably number one is cheese. It's like coagulated cow pus. You know, they allow 750,000 pus cells per cc. Might as well find a festering wound, stick a straw in it and suck.

Oh man.

It's also full of salt. Because if you take the salt out of cheese. That's why it tastes so good though. Without the salt, you wouldn't think so. So now you've got the benefit of an animal food, which is biological concentration of all the toxins. They give the cows hormones in order to make them make more milk, make more productive, which passes on. Isn't it interesting you have little girls now that are menstruating at 9 and 10 years old as they reach sexual maturity much earlier. The same hormones that make the cows make more milk also affect humans and particularly you see it.

I'm like a foot taller than everyone in my family, but I used to only drink milk all day long.

Milk protein. Milk protein is also highly antigenic when it comes to type 1 diabetes in children. It's known that in genetically vulnerable kids, exposure to those proteins can stimulate the immune system to attack the islets of Langerhans in the pancreas and may be part of the mechanism in juvenile onset diabetes. We know that people that have eczema and psoriasis and autoimmune diseases find that those proteins can aggravate their condition. We know that cheese, when you think about, talk about saturated fat, calories and salt all in one package, may not be the ideal cheese. Cheese is the worst food, you're saying. I wrote an article that says, The title of it's Nobody Needs Milk. And you can find that on our website. It has about six and a half million downloads. So, I don't think we're getting any funding from the milk industry. No body, yeah. No body needs milk. I would argue milk is probably number one as far as the foods that cause the most problem. And where you see the biggest change is the quickest just by stopping them. Animal foods in general have biological concentration issues where animals accumulate materials day after day after week after month so that when you eat it, you get its entire lifetime accumulation of it. If you look at just toxins, the PCB, dioxin, pesticides, heavy metals, et cetera, if you look at a calorie of animal food compared to a calorie of plant food, you could have two to a thousand times the concentration in animal foods compared to plant foods just because of biological concentration. So animal foods in general, dairy products in particular.

Then I think number three on my list of- so cheese, then milk.

Is that what you're saying? Or is it cheese and milk in one? Or is it just dairy as number one? Is it worth to drown or burn to death? Which are we- so yeah, I would say, I would say cheese, just because it's hyper-concentrated too. It's a highly processed. Cheese is milk. Any of these milk products, dairy products. And then three was? Animal products in general. So meat, fish, fowl, eggs, all of it. Really? Well, any animal food has biological concentration as a concern. So we're advocating a whole plant food diet. So fruits and vegetables, grains, legumes, nuts and seeds. I would argue that next would be refined carbohydrates. So your sugars, your concentrated sweeteners, refined flour products, because these are so helpful at getting people fat and helping them develop the disease of dietary excess.

Got refined carbs.

Then would be oil, including olive oil.

Really?

Yeah, all fractionated highly processed fats in the form of oils.

I hear the cases of olive oil are helping with longevity and all these other things.

Well, what you're seeing is some people arguing that Oil, if it displaces something even more toxic, maybe higher up on our list, maybe less detrimental. I don't think that makes it healthy, in my opinion. Got it. And then the last thing would be additives. All oils. All oils, not all fats. Of course, you're getting fat from whole foods, so you're eating your nuts, your seeds, your avocado, your whole foods. Whole foods.

Which contain all the essential fats you need. Got it, but not the fractionated byproducts of whole foods.

Coconut oils, olive oils, avocado oils, all those you think people should eliminate. Absolutely. And then we also get rid of the added salt. Now sodium is an essential nutrient without which you would die, but you get all of the salt you need from.

Your whole plant food diet. What are the saltiest plants?

Well, some foods are very rich in salt, like your Swiss chard and your tomatoes and your, you know, that naturally have a lot of salt. But the fact is all vegetables and fruit have some level of sodium. And the amount of sodium you need is actually somewhat less than what people are eating on average. we get too much salt, which contributes to high blood pressure, it contributes to edema. And think about this, salt actually has a preservative effect on bacteria. This is why you salt meat to try to keep the bacteria down. When you eat a very high salt diet, it could also potentially affect the microbiome that lives in your gut as well. So people on high salt diets may have different microbiome than people that eat a lower sodium intake in the diet. Now this is where we get some of the most aggressive criticism, particularly from modern advocates on a lot of the podcasts is they understand, okay, oil, maybe there's a problem with too much oil. Okay, sugar, pretty much there's a consensus now sugar may not be good. But salt, oh no, we can't say that because they like their salt. It's pink, it's blessed by the guru, it's special salt. They say, well isn't the special salt better than the other salt? Well, sure, it's compounded with other minerals so it's not as much sodium per volume. It's like saying, isn't honey better than sugar? Honey is twice as sweet per unit of sugar, so you use half as much of it. So it's therefore half as bad. Right, right.

Okay.

Basically, here's how you can do it. Here's a simple tool. If you want to look at something and think, should I eat it or should I not eat it? Is it good for me or not? I have a simple way. You just get really quiet and go inside yourself, close your eyes and think, do I really, really, really Really want whatever it is? And if the answer is truly yes, you know. You can't have it. You get nothing. Because you really, really, really want it. Because it's activating the pleasure trap. It's stimulating the desire. It doesn't mean you won't like your food. Nobody wakes up and says, I think I'll have a carrot. What? We're out of carrots. Call up the grocer. I don't care, wake him up. I can't wait till morning.

We're like, oh, I'm craving the pizza. I'm craving the ice cream. I'm craving the Cheese, the milkshake, whatever it is.

Doesn't mean you don't like eating. Believe me, people that eat a whole plant food diet, they like to eat, they look forward to eating, they enjoy their food. It's just like if you're used to a very loud rock and roll and you go and start maybe listening to classical music. Oh, sorry. It doesn't mean you can't enjoy your music anymore, but you're just not going to lose your hearing participating in it. Okay? So, but there is an adjustment, you know, and there's an adjustment to that, which is why I like fasting. Because after fasting, Good foods taste good. They taste good. People that think it's tasteless, disgusting swill that couldn't choke down the disgusting. Now they eat it, it's like, oh, this tastes pretty good. Yeah, it does. Because the palate changes. We actually did a study. We actually did a taste adaptation study. It's actually going to be coming out this year. We were able to detect minimum threshold to have salt and sugar and show changes after fasting, and also a change in the hedonic likingness. of salty, sugary, and salty fatty foods, the palate actually changes in people after fasting to where the stuff they used to think they really liked, maybe now it doesn't have so much appeal. And the foods that maybe they weren't that interested in now have a stronger appeal because there's actually a change in the palate.

Crazy. And what about the five best foods? If you could only eat five foods for the rest of your life to live an optimal, healthy, you know, give your body what it needs, feel good at the same time in a positive way. What would be those five fruits?

Well, I would say that on the fruit side, I particularly like watermelon. One of the reasons is it tends to be picked ripe, so it tends to be well tolerated by people. It's a high mineral content fruit. We use it a lot to terminate fasting. It's very rarely, as are people allergenically inclined towards watermelon. That's readily available almost all year long. So I'd say watermelon and then berries. so any of the berries, but particularly blueberries and raspberries and blackberries are very nutritious. They have a little bit lower glycemic index than maybe some of the other hybridized high sugar fruits that we commonly eat. On the vegetable side, there are some vegetables that are super nutritious like broccoli, like kale and chard, your greens, the whole class of steamed greens, high, you know, two Cups of steamed broccoli has as much calcium as a cup of milk. Really? Yeah, without all the health compromising components.

And without any pus. Yeah, well don't put butter on it.

Yeah, yeah, don't put butter. Well, you don't need it though. Steamed broccoli is really good. Don't put any salt on it either. You don't need to add any salt. There's enough sodium to meet your needs. It tastes better with the salt. Well, of course it tastes better because tasting better means more dopamine is produced. So you salt it up and your brain goes, oh yeah, that's good. And then you're gonna, exactly.

Your overunity.

So then I would say let's pick some starchy vegetables like a kombucha squash is certainly one of my favorites or hubbard or butternut, some of the squashes. Again, these are low caloric density but easily processed, readily available, organic all year round, very affordable and can be tolerated by most people, even people that maybe can't take grains or beans or other things might be sensitive to lectins or they have problems. Almost everybody can handle starches. Think about what you can feed infants. Most of them can tolerate these fruits or melons. They can feed avocado as a fat-rich food might be on that list. Again, you can overdo anything. And then maybe something like walnuts, flax seeds that are really high in omega-3 fatty acid foods. And I think out of that diet, you could get all of the calories, vitamins, protein, nutrients, except B12. You'd still need to supplement B12 because B12 is only found from bacteria. So if you're eating animal foods, of course, you're getting lots of bacterial contamination. Lots of feces mixed in there. You're going to be 12 in that. But if you're eating plant-based foods and you're washing and peeling because you don't want worms and parasites, you can eventually deplete beach-wolf stores. It might take you years, but eventually you can. So we recommend that vegans supplement a thousand micrograms of methicillin a day. So a small amount of each wolf supplement. That's the only supplement that we recommend routinely using. The other one that commonly comes up, if people don't get outside and they're not getting their exercise, is vitamin D. Sometimes D can be an issue. Best way to get it is the sun, but if you can't get out in the sun enough or you live really far north or whatnot, then that may be another one supplementation may be necessary. Wow.

What about protein powders?

I don't recommend hyper-processed food of any kind, including protein powders. You know, getting enough protein is not the problem. It's getting too much protein that causes the kidney disease and the heart disease. So, especially too much animal protein. so even for vegans that are not eating animal products, we still want to respect these very concentrated protein foods in the sense that you do need protein, essential nutrients, 60-70 grams a day depending on your clerk intake. And if you ate nothing but brown rice and broccoli, you'd get the quantity and quality of protein you need if you got your calories sufficiently provided by your brown rice and your broccoli. You get about 80 grams of calories of protein on 2,000 calories of brown rice and broccoli. So I don't think we have to worry about getting too much. The question is always avoiding excess protein intake. Now, people say, But if I increase my animal food intake, won't I gain muscle faster? And the answer is yes, you probably will. One, higher caloric load because of the fat. Two, more anabolic steroids because of the animal protein that you're eating and it's carrying across. And so just because you get bigger faster doesn't necessarily mean you're getting healthier as a consequence. So I think you can get where.

You need to go athletically without necessarily having to use animal food. I know some people that have been on animal only, like meat only diets because they've said that there have been many complications from fruits and vegetables and they were very sick on more of a plant-based diet. I don't know if this is extreme cases of individuals or what that is. Have you seen this where people are only functioning on meat-based diets only and not vegetables and fruits?

I think people that have had problems eating anything because their microbiome is so screwed up that the only thing that they seem to not get distressed is animal food. But eating an animal food only diet is not, in my opinion, a long-term sustainable health-promoting approach.

So it might be for a period of time.

For a short period of time, people can do just about anything. They can go on a standard American diet for sometimes years before it kills them. Right. Okay. So if people can eat that... You.

Can live 70, 80 years on that.

So what I find is more common is that that you have to correct the microbial imbalance. How do you do that? We do that with fasting. So we'll do fasting and then we'll follow it with a rotational whole plant food diet. We may not be able to use grains and beans and some of the more highly processed foods, but we can usually find foods that people can digest that they can recover their health on. I've never, since we don't use animal foods at all at True North Health and we've managed to treat tens of thousands of patients, I guess it would be pretty rare Or maybe those people wouldn't come to us, but that's not been a problem that we've run into.

Interesting. How much waste in poundage is inside the body like of just food waste?

Well, think about this.

At a time.

If you take the body and you divide it into two stacks, human cells and non-human cells, okay? Protozoa, bacteria, there's actually more non-human cells.

Right.

Than human cells. So, your relationship with human cells. All those related components is really important. And your diet largely determines how they function and what that balance is.

How much, I guess, how much.

So, I guess it will depend on who you're talking about. But, if you think about the typical transit time and what total food is, there can be several pounds of material that accumulate that are passing through the body, but most of the materials that I'm concerned about is inside the cells. And that is the fat cells. Into the blood, is processed by the kidneys and is eliminated in the urine. And that's why it's necessary to maintain adequate hydration and fasting so that you have a solute, which is also why dry fasting could potentially be much more dangerous. What is dry fasting? Dry fasting is where you fast but no water. No water, no food.

No water.

Some people advocate, in fact, one of the general-- How long? Used to advocate that passed away from it recently. But anyway, so they'll go up to a week or more. And the thing is, it can be fatal because you can shut the kidneys down and get dehydrated. We don't advocate dry fasting. We believe it's important that there be a solute available in the form of water so that there's something for the body to put the material in that it's trying to get rid of in a pathway for it to eliminate. So dry fasting is now is advocated online, if you look online and people are utilizing it. But as I said, some people have.

Suffered the consequences already from fasting that way.

Oh, man.

And when you start a water fast, how long does it take until you stop going to the bathroom? Number two.

Well, it would depend on what you've eaten before the fast, your autonomic nervous system that controls your movements. But most people ask- How many bowel.

Movements usually after you stop eating?

Usually once those initial bowel activity after the 48-72 hour stops, you may not see something maybe till day 20 if enough material can you might have another little movement. And then bowel movements start again after a few days once you get function back. So there can be bowel activity even deep into a fast, depending on what's being sloughed off. Just because the toxins are finally coming out, huh? Yeah, there's all kinds of materials that take various times to pass. But if you have people that eat well before the fast and have a bowel movement before fasting, often there won't be bowel activity till recovery time.

And what about your thoughts on Now that I'm thinking about this, what is it called where it's the water, you shoot the water up?

The enema.

Yes, yeah, the water enema.

Turning yourself into a bowel laundry.

What is that, what are the positives and negatives of that before a fast to kind of like get the stuff out?

Yeah, the positives are that if you have some collected material and you flush those out, they don't turn into a brick over the time that they might be sitting around there in fasting. The way to solve that was just eat properly before the fast, which is what we do. And then the residual material would just be some vegetable cellulosic. You're not going to have big chunks of dead decaying flesh turning into bricks. Got it. And so, the disadvantage of doing too much with enemas is that you can debilitate the colon and then the balance becomes sluggish because you're overstimulating the autonomic nervous system. So, we don't advocate routine use of that therapy, although there are circumstances where a post fasting colonic might be necessary because you have somebody that has neurological problems with their colon or whatever. Mostly the idea of flushing yourself out is a misnomer because the toxins aren't in your stool. The toxins are in your blood and they show up in your urine. The stool, there's a tunnel that goes from your mouth down to the throat and there's a hole at the end called the anus. So digestion is shoving stuff in one hole and then pushing it out the other. It's not unless it gets absorbed into the body through the intestinal mucosa that.

It gets in the body.

You swallow something, it's not in your body, it's in a tunnel going through your body.

But these things that are coming out.

Of cells, if it absorbs into the cells, it has to be very small to get through the intestinal mucosa, unless you have gut leakage, which comes from free radicals, which comes from eating oils, really? Or cheese, or smoking, or alcohol. The leakage comes from that. That's what causes the inflammation that causes the leakage, or the widening of those cells that allows proteins to be absorbed that the immune system reacts to, and then your immune system reacts to your own cells. So if you don't have the free radicals, the smoking, the drinking, the cheese, the oil, you tend not to get gut leakage. And so a person like yourself that maybe doesn't drink and smoke, doesn't have much gut leakage, may eat the thing and not notice much of a problem. Give that to a person with a permeable membrane. Oh my gosh, a single meal is enough to flare up their autoimmune condition.

Wow. This is fascinating stuff. What is the the science that you've seen over the last 38 years, what's the newer science you've seen in research that really excites you of what's possible with fasting moving forward?

Well, in the past, the research was really more anecdotal. It was clinical research where patients with sicknesses got well.

Right.

And we saw that and it was exciting, but we couldn't explain why they got well. But now, particularly people like T. Colin Campbell from Cornell University, author of Hole and the China Study. I've done some massive epidemiological studies showing general dietary trends. He has a new book that's out, the Future of Nutrition, which is really a brilliant book. And Dr. Campbell's really one of my heroes because he's really swam against the tide, so to speak. And then most recently, Walter Longo from USC. He's a really brilliant scientist who's done a great job in supporting particularly intermittent fasting and doing research looking both at animal and human studies, kind of what's going on in the body and what's changing in the body. And so that research has been really exciting. And I've talked to Dr. Longo and we're hoping to do some collaborative studies comparing the intermittent and the long-term fasting. And he's just been a wonderful guy and he has colleagues like Mattson and others that have done just fabulous research. We did a project with Luigi Fontana from Washington University. And that hasn't been published yet, but we've been looking at gut microbiome changes in work that we did with him. And the director of research at the True North Health Center is Tasha Meyers, who's originally from Columbia University doing kind of basic science research. He really got excited about human subjects research and she's come in and brought in other researchers that we have at True North. And so we're really excited about this stuff that we've done, that we're doing. We've got a couple papers in the pipeline right now. Next year we'll be doing a phase three clinical trial with one of our colleagues at the Mayo Clinic, looking at not just the treatment of high blood pressure, but long-term follow-up in the biomarkers that change. And so this study we're just completing, it was the first one where we've had formalized follow-up data, showing that people can not only get well in a contained setting, but you can get them free living and they can sustain those and continue to make progress.

That's exciting.

Because we were criticized early on, they said, well, it won't work. And they said, well, it works, but it'll only work as long as you have them in a controlled setting. And now they're gonna have to explain how is it these people can be.

Free of symptoms 5-10 years later.

I'm seeing patients now in my practice that are 35 years later. So I'm seeing people now that are in their 80s that I treated in their 50s. And, you know, in fact, one of my patients, when she was 92, this is my mother, turned 92, she realized she had outlived all 52 of her lifelong friends. So everybody she had known and grown up with, every one of her friends was dead. And she was socially pretty isolated at this point. And she said, Alan, you need to warn your patients. If they do this diet, make younger friends. And she said, much younger, not just a little younger, because even by the time they were in their 80s, most.

Her friends weren't, you know, functionally 20 years, 30 years.

So if you're going to do this, you have to be prepared for the fact that, you know, the people that you know that aren't doing it are going to pay the price. And that's where you see the big differences in the last 20 years of life, because instead of finding yourself unable to talk or move along in that nursing home bed, you can still be functional and vital. You know, Dr. Lyle and I see it. We're in our 60s now playing basketball with people in their 40s. They're already starting to show aging outside. Really? Even when you're running around, you're feeling like you're 25. Well, especially in basketball, you can really see it, you know, it starts to show up earlier. They're winded. Well, they show in terms of capacity to recover. You know, you think about what happens to a guy in his mid-30s in the NBA. He's considered like an old guy. Well, wait a second. Now, you could be in your 30s and still have the skill set, maybe even still have the quickness, but what you don't have is the rapidity of recovery. So the guys that are playing late into their careers, it's because they're able to recover. from injuries. How are they doing that? And that's because usually they live a healthier diet and less on it. If you look at game changers and other movies, they're looking at some of these competitive athletes. Many of these people that are adopting plant-based sets, they may not be the biggest, but they tend to be able to sustain the longest duration because they're able to recover. And I think that's the big difference with aging is people's recovery rates tends to slow. And particularly in a professional sporting environment, we have 82 games a season like in the NBA. or now I guess it's 70 something. That's a really challenging burden is to recover from the inevitable injuries that occur from playing at that level. And I think that if people adopt plant-based diets, not only do they have higher endurance potential, but they have better recovery potential.

And they can be sustainable for much longer.

And it's even more relevant for the weekend warrior that's not necessarily a professional athlete, but that just wants to be able to continue to function. in their 40s, 50s, 60s, and hopefully 70s. Wow.

What's the cost for someone to go to your clinic for a week?

Well, we're a 501c3 nonprofit research facility, so our costs are much lower than most places. It's 159 a night for a private room, share bath. That includes everything we do. So, feeding, fasting, twice daily water, all the water you want. All the water, all the water, so they're going through refeeding and all the things that we do. So, we have a much more affordable model because we don't have the pressures that other people do generate return and stockholders and we don't advertise.

How are you guys making money?

We have staff that work really hard, we're really productive and efficient, we're booked fully several months in advance and we have low cost per patient overhead so we've designed it so that we can keep it affordable.

Wow, do you have people funding or donations or houses?

We do have that fund our research side, we absolutely have some very generous people. A lot of people, like for example, we're one of the charities on Amazon through AmazonSmile. So if they pick us, they donate a half a percent. We have people like Mama says and Leafside and well youl World, where they offer SOS free versions of their food, and they'll make a donation to the foundation for people that identify us as a source of their thing. We have all of the people that stay at True North Health, any proceeds from the operation of True North Health, clinic go to the Trudeau Health Foundation. And so the foundation is largely funded by the fact that we run a really efficient operation and there's a small margin that helps fund the research. And then some patients have been very generous in supporting our research directly.

Where do you see your life being right now if you weren't into fasting? Where would you be?

Well, when I was 16, I met Dr. Gerald Benning and he told me that his job doing this kind of work, he had the best job in the whole world because the patients did all the work, the body did all the healing, and all he had to do is take credit for the good result. And I thought then that's the job for me. And the reason we're focused on this research is because that's the way to compellingly convince people that health really does result from healthful living. And we want to learn how to do it better, how to do it more effectively. I live in the best place in the world. I have the best job in the world. We live in Santa Rosa because we thought that would be the best place to live. We're doing the work that we're doing right now because we thought that would be the most fun, the most challenging. I can't really think of anything I'd.

Rather be doing than what I'm doing right now. Where do you think you would be.

In your body if you weren't practicing what you're preaching? I think I'd be just like everybody else, overweight, developing diseases of dietary excess, probably be working on my first heart attack or first, you know, other thing just like everybody else. You know, I don't think there's anything special about me except that I got started earlier. And so I never developed that habit so it's been easier. And also I live at the True North Health Center where it's really easy to eat healthy every day. We have about 20 of our staff that live at the True North Health Center or in our adjacent apartment building. And I noticed they maintain a high degree of health. They don't have sick time. I'll tell you what, there's nothing better for an employer. I've got 70 employees than having people that aren't sick and debilitated and missing work and not functioning at their full potential. and making healthy food available to our employees, allowing them to fast as part of their benefit package. Guess what? We have people that have been with us 30 years and more working every day. I can show you 30 years history where they're not been out as a consequence of illness because they're staying healthy. Prevention is a lot better than treatment.

It is. Is everyone there plant-based? Who works there?

Well, the only food that we offer is plant-based. So those that live there have no choice. That's the food that's available.

They might have some fish every now and then or something. Who knows? They're sneaking off and hiding.

People that are living and eating at the center, that's what their choices are. So whatever they do in their personal.

Life is their personal life. So every day you have people coming in and also weaning off or eating food as well, or is it they come in for set time and then it's like feeding time.

Well, most patients come in and feed down into the fasting stage. Some people, if they've done a really good job before they get there, can get to work pretty quickly. And everybody goes through a refeeding period of half the length of the fast, but many people are never fasting. They're coming for feeding or therapy or other things too. So we've had 20,000 people undergo fasting. We might have had almost twice that many patients come through the clinic. So we see 1,200 new admissions a year. So we're processing a lot of people. We have a dozen clinicians. You know, one of the things that we have since the pandemic that's been really interesting is we developed a telemedicine practice. So we took our doctors, our attendings, and we made them available online so that people can go through Zoom and call in and ask their questions and have a doctor at their disposal affordably that's not an idiot, that's used to people getting well, that can give them a second opinion. That thing is really taken off. And of course, I like it because the proceeds from that all go to the Turmeric Health Foundation. So it funds our research. But now we're able to service the whole world. So a lot of our particularly foreign patients that we're already working with are able to access us efficiently through our, they just go to our website and they click on the phone coaching service. And so now we can service people with this kind of advice remotely without them even having to come to the center. Because a lot of times it's just they just need good advice.

How much does a call with someone on your team?

It's $95 for a 20-minute consult. And it's all electronic. So they go online, they fill out their registration forms online. We have all their health history information. they email us, their lab, it all can be reviewed, and then we can work with their local doctor if they need something, we can refer them to a place that may be closer. Because you know, True North is in California is great, but not everybody lives in California. There are people that live in all the other states. Of course. And we have doctors that we've trained through our residency training program. We have doctors that come and train with us, like from Texas A&M or from the naturopaths, or the chiropractors will come and train part of our residency program, and then they go into practice. Sure, sure.

We can refer to them, people that.

Maybe you need a local doctor. Right.

And the website is where? Where can do this?

We have two websites. It's healthpromoting.com which is our main website. Healthpromoting.com is a simple way to get there. We also have a site for the foundation. It's called Fasting.org and Fasting.org is just a fasting compendium website of the research on fasting. Ours and other people's readily available. and it's new. So that's a newly launched site, particularly for people interested in fasting. For people interested in our content, our articles, our Roku channel, our TrueNorth.TV, all that. Freely available, everything's easy to get to you. Just go to healthpromoting.com and it's all right there. I love this. You've got a book also that you wrote.

This is about 15 years ago you did this. You're ahead of the time. We were way ahead of the curve.

On the pleasure trap.

The Pleasure Trap, Mastering the Hidden force that undermines health and happiness. And what is that hidden force?

That hidden force is the artificial stimulation of dopamine that comes from, in the case of diet, highly processed foods. And so it's the sugar, oil, and salt that makes people fat, sick, and miserable. And we talk about why it's difficult to make changes. This is a really disturbing book because it doesn't tell you what you want to hear. It tells you what you need to know to get and stay healthy. It tells you why it's hard to make changes and why people are so resistant to it. But it gives you a clear strategy to do so successfully, including the use of fasting. And you have one of the keywords.

On the COVID you have medications, drugs, alcohol, tobacco, but at the top of the list is sex. Is sex a bad thing? Sex is a good thing.

It's necessary for our species to survive. If it wasn't for the ability to engage in sexual reproduction, our species wouldn't have made it. and it's food and sex that are the natural normal stimulants of dopamine. Okay, so that's, and it's only food and sex that naturally cause those powerful stimulation. But the problem is we figured out a way to fool that with drugs, with highly processed foods. So we stimulate dopamine just like you naturally get from sex with things like drugs. For example, if you smoke cocaine, you get 10 times as much dopamine released as if you have an orgasm. No way. 10 times as much dopamine is secreted.

People say, I gotta get on cocaine.

The problem is it's an artificial stimulation and it can lead to addiction. And so the problem is, yes, very powerful, very addictive. The normal stimulation of dopamine, good. The artificial stimulation of dopamine is the pleasure trap.

What is the artificial, if you're getting 10 times the amount of what you're.

Supposed to get, what does that do to the body? Well, what it does is, it's like the hallmark of addiction is you'll continue to do it. to do something not just to feel good but when you stop doing it you feel really bad. The hallmark of withdrawal. Like you said, anytime there's a stimulus there's a depression. We talk a lot about this. There's actually a chart in the book that explains this hyper normal stimulation, whether it's from drug behavior or a drug like behavior which comes from the chemicals added to food. Sugar, salt. Now these concepts that we talked about when we wrote this book are now becoming much more acceptable and you'll find the other books that are coming out talking about the drug like effects of sugar and that. And so I feel really gratified that these ideas that were expressed so clearly by Dr. Lyle, the principal author of this book, are now being reflected more in the mainstream. And we went back through this recently, Chef AJ did a professional audio version of it. And it's great. And so for people that don't like to read, they can listen to it. And I listened to it. And I actually got more out of the same book listening to it because you process information differently. And one of the things that I really got was that this content was really sharply right on, even though it was written, as you mentioned, some years ago. And what's interesting is the sales of the Pleasure Trap now are actually better now than they were back then because now communication is a lot broader. Right. And so what I used to talk to public lectures to 100 people or 500 people, Now these podcasts we're doing, like I did that show with Rich Roll, and I think there's almost 2 million people that have listened to it. That's crazy. So that would have been 500 years of talking yoga.

Right, right, right, exactly.

So now this invention of the podcast, which I think is relatively recent, has changed the way people like me that have really radical concepts can communicate with much broader audiences.

It's beautiful. I love our show and our ability to spread these messages. You also have a pleasure trap test that people can take a number of questions and assess to see how healthy of a lifestyle they have or how duped they are by pleasures of food and all these different things.

Well, it gives them a sense of how hard they're going to have to work. If you were like you, you're going to score quite high because you never got exposed to the drugs and the other things. Those things weigh quite heavily. And the reason they weigh heavily is because they have a major effect on people. And so, people that didn't do that can get away with a whole lot of other things without it necessarily showing up.

So you had-- you- can have some.

Of the cheese and the oils and the-- It may not catch up as much. But also remember a lot of it depends on genetics. How long you're going to live is largely determined by genetics and luck. You know, you were lucky to have good genes. You're lucky to have been exposed to an adverse background that maybe minimized your exposure to some of the evil influences. But how well you're going to live is going to determine what you put in your mouth and how you live your life. And so what we have to focus on is whatever genes you have and whatever use and abuse occurred, from here on out, you have to take responsibility to control your diet and lifestyle. And if you want to have a good chance of having a good life and a good death, now is the time to get focused. And that's what we're trying to share with people, is what can you do to have not just a good life, but to also make the last part of your life an even richer part than the first part. Yeah.

I've heard too many stories and I've seen it. I'm starting to see it more with people that I know and family members who are Extended family members who are struggling and who are unhealthy and there's not really a return point. There's not really a way to go back to healthy. Maybe there is but they're not making the choices and the actions necessary in order to start helping themselves. And it's almost sometimes where it's too late, right? Can you ever reverse something if it's too late?

-In my practice, it's amazing how forgiving the body is.

-Really?

-I see people I remember when I was in Australia, I was going to Osteopathic College and I was studying with Dr. Burton at what was called the Arcadia Health Center. He did a lot of fasting. And I would see people coming in thinking, no way.

I thought, if this one comes good, oh really?

I don't believe it.

I said, like chronic, like chronic, like can't walk, they're stiff, they're obese, all these things.

You see the tumors drop off, the energy come back, the cognitive, I'll give you an example. We published a paper recently recently on a gentleman who was in his 80s that they thought was going through cognitive decline and dementia. He also had atrial fibrillation, hypertension, diabetes, and all we did was unwind his medications, clean up his diet, and he woke up because it turned out he didn't have dementia. He had polypharmacy. What was that? Excess drugs causing cognitive decline.

Causing him to be slower and memory loss.

It looked like Alzheimer's but it was actually an as the medications cleared his system, he was like, oh, woke back up, got normalized his atrial fibrillation, he got off his meds, he normalized his blood pressure. Interesting, one of the reviewers in the case report that we submitted to the medical journal said, wow, what an amazing result, but what made you guys think it was the drugs?

Oh, wow.

So just getting people off their medications appropriately can sometimes make a huge difference because it turns out some people are on too much medication. Some people are on the wrong medications and almost everybody's on medications is a consequence of poor dietary choices. So if you're willing to correct the dietary choices, the need for medications can be mitigated.

What does medication do to the brain.

And the body when you take one medication? It depends on the medication. What is it? If you look at any medication, just go look up the side effects. The three pages in the text or listen to any ad on the television about the side effects.

The whole ad is about the side effects in a loving, beautiful way.

Those are side effects. Those are effects. They're just effects you don't like. Those are what medications do to the body. Sometimes they do it in a more powerful way that you don't find convenient, so we call them side effects. But they're all physiological effects of medications.

You think most people, what's your percentage of people that you think could get off medication if they lived a healthier lifestyle with fasting and proper nutrition.

Well, if we talk about the people that we treat, the people with high blood pressure, diabetes, autoimmune diseases, lymphoma, most of those people are going to be able to achieve levels without the use of medication. But even those people that might require some pharmaceutical medications will function better on a healthy diet and lifestyle. A lot of the side effects from the medications are complicated by the poor diet and lifestyle choices. people to me. And yet, if you go on to the websites of some of the medical societies, they'll tell you we can't cure high blood pressure because we don't know what causes it. So just take the drugs and don't ask too many questions. So, you know, it's not really true. Drugs cause chronic cough fatigue, impotence, and death. That's why they don't give everybody blood pressure medication. 60% of people have high blood pressure by the time they reach retirement age. Why don't they just put it in the public water stream for that? because the negative effects of the medication outweigh the positive effects for everybody except those with the highest levels of hypertension. So don't underestimate the negative effects that medications, including commonly used over-the-counter medications, can have on people. Right. Right.

Any medication. This has been fascinating. I want to make sure people get your book, the Pleasure Trap: Mastering the Hidden Force that Undermines Health and Happiness. I want to make sure they check out your website, health, is it health promoting or healthy promoting?

Health promoting.

Healthpromoting.com and also fasting.org if you want to learn more about fasting, check out True North. Are you getting more on social media now yourself or?

What I've done is gone on people like yourself that have been kind enough to ask me to come on and share my radical message. I really don't know too much about the nuances of social media. But I'm confident that the people that like you that know what they're doing are getting the message out. There you go.

Well, healthpromoting.com, learn more, schedule a call, check out the center. I might send my mom over to your place and send her there for a week or two.

I think you should come experience a short fast and go through that process yourself.

I might think three days, maybe.

Hey, let's take it a day at a time and see how you hold up.

It might be very entertaining for your viewers. I know, maybe I could do three days because then I have to do what, a day and a half of feeding, right? Yeah, a little bit of feeding. Three to five days, maybe I could do that. Could be interesting. I'd be down. I'd be down to test it out. So if you're bringing me in, I'm down to check it out. This is a question I ask everyone at the end called the Three Truths. So I'd like you to imagine you live as long as you want to live, but it's eventually your last day. And you've accomplished all of your wildest dreams. You've lived your life the way you want to live it. You have the relationships. you're helping people, you're educating, everything you want to do, you do it. But for whatever reason, you've got to take all of your messages with you to the next place, wherever you're going next. And no one has access to your book, this interview, content, your information anymore. But you get to leave behind three lessons that you would share with the world. This is all we would have to remember your information by. What would you say are those three truths for you?

So health is the result of healthful living. Healthful living involves diet, sleep and exercise, and fasting can be very helpful at undoing the consequences of dietary excess.

There you go. Say one more time, the first one.

Health is the- The health is the result of healthful living.

Yes.

That healthful living involves a healthy diet, sleep and exercise, and that fasting can help undo the consequences of dietary excess.

I love it. I want to acknowledge you, Dr. Alan Goldhammer, for being radical and taking chances to see these transformations in people that really have nowhere else to go. And for doing it for 38 years now and now showing up and sharing your message online and putting it out there more, I hope you do more content like this. I think more people need to be willing to try things, even if it's a two-day, a three-day, or even just 16 hours. to see the results they get by trying a little bit and then pushing the boundaries for their own health and happiness. So I acknowledge you for showing up for four decades doing this, for being the example, for leading the way, for getting now research that backs these things so people are more educated and can see case studies and results, peer reviewed results, things like that. So I acknowledge you for constantly showing up and being a healing force to the for the world.

Thank you.

It's inspiring. My final question is, what's your definition of greatness?

Where people are doing what they want to do and in the way they want to do it.

There you go. Appreciate you very much. Thank you.

I hope you enjoyed this episode again. If you did make sure to share this with a friend and check out part 1 as well if you haven't already. LewisHowes.com/1024 or you can just scroll back and listen to the previous episode on your podcast app.

It should be right there.

There.

And a big thank you for listening. Make sure to subscribe to this podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify so you can stay up to date on the latest and greatest from the School of Greatness podcast. And I'd love your ratings and reviews over on Apple. If you can, leave us a rating and review. Let us know what you enjoyed most about this episode, what you enjoyed, the information that you got most out of this, or give us some feedback on how we can make it better as well as we're always looking to improve and help you improve the quality of your life. And I want to leave you with this quote from Carolyn Miss, who said, what drains your spirit drains your body. What fuels your spirit fuels your body. And every day we have an opportunity to add things into our mind, into our body that can bring us life or make us feel like we are exhausted. So make sure that you're taking the moments every single day to make the right choices on bringing energy, giving things to your mind and your body and start eliminating some of the things that really are holding you back. I know sometimes these decisions can be hard to make, but you're worth it. And I want to remind you, if no one's told you lately that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And you know what time it is? It's time to go out there and do something great.