The PERFECT TREATMENT For Weight Loss & PREVENTING DISEASE! | Dr. Jason Fung & Lewis Howes

Watch your calories, watch your calories, watch your calories. And I think it's a disastrous sort of idea because the thing about calories is that...

I think you gotta have a dream.

The School of Greatness.

Really?

Yeah.

Please welcome Lewis Howes. In your opinion, what is the best way to stay consistent in maintaining weight loss and preventing disease?

Yeah, that's a great question. And I think that it gets to some of the environmental aspects of weight, because the way we look at it is that a lot of people think that it's just about knowledge. It's just about knowing what you're supposed to do. And the thing is that that's probably just the beginning. It's not the end. It's like saying, don't eat cookies. That's good advice. doesn't mean I'm not going to eat cookies, right? Because there's all different reasons why people do it. And so just knowing something, just knowing, oh, I could fast. Well, yes, you could, but will you, right? That's the real key. And you have to realize that there's actually a lot of other things that go into it. And one of them is the environment. So the environment that you find yourself in plays a huge role into how well you're going to do. in this. And that's important because you can change your environment, right? So, you know, I think about two situations, right? 1970s, you're in the meeting at your office and you're bored, but there's nothing to do. So you sit there and listen. You don't eat because what are you going to do? Get up and walk out and get yourself a cookie. Everybody would be like, what the hell are you doing? Right? And compare that to the 2020s where you have a meeting. 10:30, somebody orders bagels and cream cheese, right? And they stick them in front of you at the meeting. So you're not actually hungry, but your boss is going on and on, so you eat that bagel, right? So it's a completely, it's not that you didn't know that the cookies, the bagels, the whatever was good for you. Nobody thought that, but the environment's so different because one of them is so like you're not moving from your seat because you know your whole company is there, your boss is there. The other one, oh, I'm just gonna eat that way, I'm gonna pass the time, right? So the environment plays like a huge role. Same thing, you know, 1970s, it's coffee, you take a coffee break, you go to, you know, the little thing, you get your coffee, There's nothing else. So that's all you got coffee. 2020, you didn't go down, you go to the, you know, local coffee store. There's more than coffee there. Everybody knows that, right?

And all the coffee has, you know, 50 grams of sugar and whipped cream.

Exactly. There's rice crispy treats. Exactly. You got the caramel, this and mocha, this and those all have sugar. And then you got your donuts and your muffins and things. So it's not just coffee. So what was the difference between the two? It certainly wasn't the knowledge and it certainly wasn't the willpower. The difference was the environment is very conducive on one side to weight loss by forcing you to not eat and the on the other side, it's just very easy to, right? And this sort of environment means that you can change it. So if you're an office manager, you can say, guess what? We're not having any food at meetings anymore. It's not allowed. It's not allowed to eat at your desk. If you want to work, you work. If you want to eat, you go into the cafeteria. There's no candy on the bowl. No candy in the office. That's just not what we do because it's not fair to people trying to lose weight. Those are easy rules. But now all of a sudden, you've tilted your odds of success much higher because if you're spending eight hours in the office, you actually have no thing and no more of these office birthday parties with cake that everybody feels obligated to go and have a little bit of cake that you really didn't want in the first place. right? And again, it's the same thing, right? You say, okay, we'll celebrate, but we're just going to have fruit or whatever it is, right? Whatever you want to do. Once you understand that it's the environment that's more important than purely the knowledge, then you can make those changes. Or you can get yourself a Keurig machine and say, okay, we're going to make the coffees here so that you don't have to go down there, right? So there's all different things you can do. the other thing you have to think about is the sort of deeper reasons why people are eating. So if you think about things like emotional eating, right, there's lots of different reasons why people eat. And hunger is really just one of them. You eat because you're bored, you eat because you're stressed, you eat because, you know, some sugar, because you know that it's going to make you feel better. That's what comfort foods are, right? Comfort foods are like, You know, sweets like, you know, cookies, chocolates, ice cream, you know, or starchy foods like mac and cheese and stuff. Right. Nobody is like getting themselves a piece of salmon. Right. That's not comfort food. It's like it's delicious, but it's not comfort food.

Right.

So the point is that if you just say, oh, just don't eat. Well, you're not understanding why people are eating. Right. So maybe the environment is not right for them. maybe they're eating because they're emotional, like they're sad, they're depressed, they're, you know, bored, whatever. Then you can fix that. It's like, oh, if you're bored, let's figure out what you want to do. Or if you're sad, let's figure out something that you can do instead or whatever it is, right? And so that's, you know, that's a couple of things that you really have to think about. And then the third thing you really have to think about is habits. 'Cause habits are huge. And I think this is, you know, people have started to realize how huge habits really are because if you have something that's not fun, then as long as you make it into a habit, then you'll still do it. And you don't have to think about it 'cause once it's a habit, it doesn't require willpower. So if you think about brushing your teeth, for example, We all brush our teeth twice a day. Nobody thinks it's fun. Nobody really wants to brush your teeth. You do it because it's a habit. You feel incomplete if you don't, right? You get up and you don't brush your teeth. You feel a little weird, right? So you go and brush your teeth because that's just what you do. That's the key, right? You make your habits and then the habits make you because then you derive all the benefits of brushing your teeth, that is less cavities late on. But you did it because you created that habit deliberately. So if time-restricted eating, intermittent fasting goes along with those things. If you create that habit that, Hey, you don't eat breakfast or, Hey, you're going to stop eating after dinner. After a while, you're the one that's going to derive the benefits of that because you've, yes, the first two weeks of trying to create that habit, maybe it's a little hard, but after a while, you do that for the rest of your life. You think about the 1970s again, because again, there's a time where there's not a lot of starvation, but there is not a lot of obesity either, right?

What was the obesity metric at in the 70s compared to where is it now?

I think it was probably like 15% sort of thing compared to like 60-70% now.

Wait, 60-70% obesity now?

Is that an American- Overweight and obesity. Overweight and obesity, right?

So, what is overweight and obese mean?

So, we use a body mass index, which is basically, it's a height versus weight sort of calculation. 20 to 25 is considered normal. Now, 25 to 30 is considered overweight, but that actually catches a lot of people who are just on the muscular side. So, it's actually not a great metric, but those are the definitions. And then you go over 30 as obese. and then they've had to add a couple of, they've had to add a few like over 40 is like morbidly obese and stuff because people were going up and up and up on that scale.

So that's, so over 30% body fat is considered obese currently.

It's, no, it's a body mass index, which is like weight over height sort of thing, right? So the higher it is, the higher, the, the, the more your weight, but you have to divide it by your height so that you know, you're comparing apples to apple. Okay. But anyway, it's not a great metric, but it is a standard sort of metric that we use.

But based in the seventies on the same metric, there was only 50% overweight or obese, whereas now it's 60% overweight or obese.

Yeah, it's a lot higher. And then yeah, it's sad and it's especially stark in childhood because of course.

Why is that? I see so many kids walking around now that don't look healthy. They look extremely overweight and obese as 5, 8, 10, 12 year olds. And when, when I was a kid growing up in the 80s, early 90s, there was a lot of sugar available.

Yeah.

And we, and I remember having a lot of sugar, but I also remember being outside, constantly running around, playing sports and activities and being outside. It was less being inside on the phone and less on video games. It was more about playing. Is that one of the main factors or what is the main factor of so much child obesity?

I think there's been a couple of major factors. I think one of the major factors was probably the increase. So it was the increase in sort of processed sugary foods. So if you look at when the obesity epidemic really got going, it was sort of in the late 70s, just as we got the food pyramid, right? That was the big change.

Interesting. so is that, is that Mark, is that marketing then? Is that just sharing marketing ideas and saying, this is what you need to have in your, in your meals and have more breads and more carbs and more cereals?

It was, it was the US, the US Department of Agriculture. So the USDA came out. So what happened was that up before 1977, so the first food pyramid, it was, is the dietary guidelines for Americans was 1977. And before that, it was very much the government wouldn't tell you what to eat. Your mom told you what to eat. Right? The government didn't get involved with that. And 1977 was the first time that they decided, okay, we're going to put out national guidelines. So the problem was they couldn't agree on a lot of stuff because there's this whole anti-fat movement that was going, right? And the reason for that was in the 50s, people were getting heart attacks. So, you know, 50 year olds, they'd get a heart attack and people didn't know why. They said, why are all these people getting heart attacks. And so a couple of researchers said it's because they're eating more fat. And it wasn't actually true. That's the problem. Because if you look at the diets of Americans, they hadn't changed much over the previous 100 years. So they're eating the same amount of fat, but they're having more heart attacks. When you look back, it's actually pretty obvious what was going on. People were smoking like crazy, right? All the way from 1900 through the World Wars, people people were just smoking, smoking, smoking. Of course, nobody knew it was that bad for you. And by the 50s and 60s, people were having the heart attacks. And remember, the cigarette companies were saying, that's not us, right? Everybody smokes. Your doctor smokes, right? So, you know, for, remember, for years, they had just denied everything. So that was all, that all came out in the litigation, you know, years later. But people were smoking. That's why they're having heart attack. But at the time, this is the 60s, nobody knew why they're having heart attacks. So there's this one group of people who said, it's because people are eating fat. Dietary fat causes heart disease. Eat fat, get heart disease. The problem was that if you look at the percentage fat in the American diet in the 50s, it was the same as it was in 1900. So that didn't make any sense at all. But it sort of made, it seemed like it made sense. So that's why there's this whole group of people that said, it's the fat. And so therefore, but there's a lot of debate. But in 1977, the government says, we need to put something down. And the sort of anti-fat movement was like, well, it's the fat. So once they said it's the fat, that was it, right? It was official government policy to go low fat. The problem is that, you know, if you eat less fat, then you're going to eat more carbs because there's only three macronutrients. There's carbohydrates, there's fat, and there's protein. You can't increase protein that much because if you eat pure protein, it's a little bit gross, right? So super lean meat and stuff, it's just not that good, right? so it was hard to eat just protein. So you wind up getting less fat in the diet. You have more carbs, which is fine if you're eating broccoli, but not so fine if you're just eating a lot of white bread. But that's what happened, right? So the original food pyramid was all seven servings of bread and rice and potatoes, right? So then people started to gain weight because, hey, it's a lot of carbs, right? So refined carbs is main problem. So as people started to gain weight, that was the sort of big turning point because now everybody was teaching this in the schools, right? And every the dietician had to sort of toe the line and say eat less fat and eat more protein. And then the government really encouraged processed foods. They spent a lot of money telling food companies to process food so that you can get the fat out of that, right? So you get these low fat foods, right? But they're highly processed, so they took everything out and then they stuffed sugar in to make it taste better. So what happened was that everybody was eating refined carbs and sugar, right? So refined carbs and sugar is basically a cookie, right? That's what- Right, right? It's like cookies and donuts, that's refined sugar and carbs, right?

There's no nutritional value.

Not nutritional and not good for your waistline. So people started gaining weight. And then the other thing that happens when you eat a lot of refined carbs is that it doesn't keep you full. So if you think about it, if you eat steak and eggs at breakfast, you don't really feel like eating something at 10:30 because it really keeps you full. But you eat a couple of slices of white bread and jam and orange juice by 10:30, you're just ravenously hungry. And there's a good reason for that because There's certain things in the diet that make you full. Those are satiety hormones. So if you eat a lot of protein containing foods, you release a peptide YY, which is a hormone that tells you to stop. Same thing with fat. It releases cholecystokinin and it tells you to stop. So you eat a steak, those hormones start going up and then eventually you just can't push through. That's why they have those competitions, you know, eat a 16 ounce steak and we'll give you for free. They don't give out a lot of free steak because it's very hard to push past that. if you eat a lot of unrefined carbs with a lot of fiber, while it stretches your stomach, that tells you stop eating. So all hormones tell you to stop eating. Well, what happens when you eat that highly refined carbs plus sugar, which is the white bread and jam? There's no protein, there's no fat, and there's no fiber. So you don't feel full. You can keep eating that stuff and you just won't get full. Right? It's just like if you have a big buffet, and somebody says, Here, have another pork chop. You go, Right? It's like, I can't do that. But somebody says, Here, drink some Coke. You're like, okay, why? It could have the same number of calories, but it has no satiety signaling. It's pure sugar. So that's the difference, right? So then people started eating all the time. So you had this huge change in the population where all of a sudden you're eating carbs, you're eating sugar because we're all focused on the fat and we're eating constantly because if you eat your white bread and jam at 8 o'clock, 10:30, you're looking for a low-fat muffin. And so you're eating five, six times a day. So before, when people used to say, don't snack, now everybody says, you need to snack because people are saying, I have to eat six times a day, but I'm eating the right foods, the white bread and jam. the low fat white bread and jam, right? Therefore, eating six times a day must be good, but it never was. So that's sort of how that whole thing developed. And then of course, we realized eventually that the low fat thing was just a scam. The whole thing was just wrong.

Is that the government saying this? Is that some other organization?

Yeah, the government, like if you look at the dietary guidelines, they get updated every every five years, and they've completely taken out that stuff about fat. So before they said, oh, you should eat maximum this percentage of fat. So if you remember, so America was super low fat and they were gaining weight like crazy. And the French didn't have that. They're eating their, their, their butter full cream, you know, foie gras, you know, fatty, fatty foods.

Cheeses.

So cheese, yeah. So they're eating all this fat. So in the eighties and they're skinny. and they're skinny.

But everyone was saying, well, they're skinny because they're smoking all day, but they weren't getting heart attacks. So there's something there.

Well, that was the whole French Paradox, right? That was what we called it. There's a whole debate about why aren't these French people getting heart attacks? Because they're eating so much fat. They should be getting heart attacks, but they're getting like a third of the heart attacks that the Americans were. And the answer was that all that fat, you know, the fat in their butter and cheese and stuff, it just wasn't that bad for them. Right. And that's what eventually the study showed. Then you started to realize, we started to realize that, you know, stuff like nuts, which are very high in fat, was not bad. The Mediterranean diet with this olive oil was not bad. Salmon was not bad. Avocados weren't bad. So in the 80s, avocados were completely like, oh my God, how can you eat that? Right. And it goes from that to a superfood, right? So it's full of fat. Avocado is full of fat. Right? And this whole low fat thing, it sort of turned around and then we realized that even stuff like butter, that's not that bad for you, right? So butters come back. We used to get people on margarine. But the whole thing is that by going to these sort of highly refined carbohydrates and sugary foods, that's what sort of, I think, fed the obesity epidemic. on top of that, you were eating foods that basically didn't make you full at all. So therefore you're just eating more because there's nothing to stop you, right? So if you didn't stop, you're just going to eat more and you're eating more often. So it was this perfect sort of, you know, you're eating really fattening foods, you're eating more often than usual, and you're eating more because there's nothing to tell you to stop. So it's like, okay, well, what's going to happen? Well, you're going to gain weight, right? So it was never about willpower. It was all about this sort of thing that was set in motion by the government suddenly decreeing that we should eat processed fat free foods. That was basically what the Dietary Guidelines in 77 said.

I'm curious, Jason, what is the thing in 10 years that we will say we got wrong in this decade? about nutrition, health and fitness, fasting, you know, obesity. What is the thing that we will get wrong? Because it sounds like every decade or two, there's something we, the government says, doctors say, nutritionists say, this is the way. And then up 10, 20 years later, that's not the way. What is the thing in this space right now that people are saying, this is the way the government is preaching this, doctors, institutions are saying this is it. And in 10, 20 years, you think we're going to discover, we jump too quick to that conclusion. And the data is showing now that there's actually really negative effects to this belief. Is there anything you think might come out?

I think that the, I mean, one of the things which is still very prevalent is this idea of sort of calories in, calories out. sort of thing. I think it's actually one of the most destructive ideas in weight loss. I think it's because it's so deceptively sort of simple. If you look at most academic centers, so I was just showing that the America, like a lot of the guidelines are like, you know, watch your calories, watch your calories, watch your calories. And I think it's a disastrous sort of idea because the thing about calories is that calories is a measure food energy, right? That's how much energy is released when you put a piece of food into a sort of measuring device called the bomb calorimeter. And it's like, okay, this cheesecake has 200 calories, because when you burn it, you get this amount of heat generated, right? That's how you measure that, right? And so people say stuff like, oh, you know, it's all about calories in, calories out, right? That's something you hear all the time, or calories is a calorie, and it's really sort of very simplistic and it's actually not very helpful because you can have two foods, right? Think about two foods. You have one which is, you know, cookies, which is 100 calories or 200 calories, and you have, say, salmon, which is 200 calories, so equal amounts of calories. The minute you eat the cookies, you release the hormone insulin. okay? And the insulin is a hormone that tells your body what to do with those calories. So the insulin tells your body to store those calories. It moves it right into the fat stores, right? So the whole thing is that if all that energy moves directly into your fat store, so these highly refined carbohydrates, sugar goes way up, insulin goes way up, when insulin goes way up, It is literally the thing that is telling your body, put those calories into storage. And you store the calories in your body fat. That's all it is. Body fat's just a store of calories. So imagine you take the 200 calories of cookies. Now, the 200 calories of salmon doesn't raise insulin. So you take the 200 calories and your body just burns it. He uses it. That's going to make a huge difference in terms of obesity because in one case, you're just storing the whole damn thing. The other one, you're using it. You've got energy. You're generating body heat. You're feeling good. The other one, you took the 200 calories, you shoved it all into body fat. Your body's like, oh, I have no energy to use. So you're feeling a little bit, oh, I have no energy. I'm a little tired and I'm a little hungry. So let me go eat something. Right? So it wasn't the calories, it wasn't the number of calories. It was the response to the calories, which is related to the hormones that are released. So the strange part is that what we're saying is that food contains not just the food energy, but it also contains instructions as to what your body is supposed to do with those calories. And both of them are very, very important. whereas the calories people say, well, it's just the number of calories. Well, once you get past that, once you put it in your mouth, you can measure the difference in hormones between the two foods. And you have to pretend that that's completely irrelevant. Because if you're eating, if you're told to eat the refined carbs and sugar, which is what we're told, then you're setting yourself up to a situation where insulin is going to go way up. And that insulin is going to tell your body to store fat. That's its job, right? That's literally its job. You told your body to do that with your choice of food. So I don't see why that is considered irrelevant. So not just the amount of calories, but you have to also look at the hormonal response, because our body is completely dependent on hormones to tell us what to do. The other thing that insulin does, of course, it tells you that you need to put energy into storage, right? It's only when insulin falls that you can pull the energy back out, right? So what we say technically is insulin inhibits lipolysis. That is, if insulin is high, you can't burn fat because your instructions are to store fat, right? You can either store fat or you can burn fat. Right? But you can't do both at the same time. So if you want to burn fat, but you're keeping your insulin levels high with the choice of foods, then, hey, it's not going to work because insulin's high, you're not going to be able to move the energy from the fat back out.

What would you say are the top five foods or food groups to support in burning fat faster?

I think you really have to look at the sort of very low carbohydrate foods because of course they're going to provide you the energy. So things like salmon, of course, the fatty fish is very good. Eggs are very good. Avocados are very good. If you want to do carbs, then things like beans are very good because of all the fiber and stuff. They're unrefined, so then they have other things that will work. But those very low carbohydrate foods, a lot of people find very useful to encourage fat burning because if you take salmon and eggs, for example, you're going to get that energy, the calories from that, which is energy, but insulin's not going to go up. So your body's not going to say, okay, well, let's put it into storage. It's just going to burn it. You're going to stay in that sort of fat-burning state. and you're going to be able to use those calories because that's what you've told your body. So you're allowing your body to still access the body fat for energy and it's going to keep you full because again, it's going to release hormones like peptide YY, like polypeptide YY that are keep you full as opposed to the white bread and jam, right? The problem is, you know, people like to eat those. refined carbs are cheap. It tastes good. They're cheap. They're donuts. Right. So the, you know, and, and that sets up a situation. And there's a lot of people who say, well, it's just calories. Right. So you could eat ice cream for dinner. Right. I mean, if you told your grandmother that she'd say, you're stupid. Right. Like, you can't eat ice cream for dinner, even if they're the same number of calories, because, again, one of them is going to go straight into stores, which is body fat. leave you hungry. The other one, you're gonna feel full, you're gonna feel good, you're gonna have energy to do whatever you need to do. So your grandmother was totally right. You can't just say, oh, both are 800 calories. So instead of eating my dinner, I'm gonna have an ice cream sundae. Because that is literally what people have been telling people. It's all about the calories, right? It's like, no, that's like the worst advice you could give.

It's about the quality of calories, it sounds like.

It's about the quality. It's about the choices because, you know, what we're saying is that certain calories are more fattening than other calories. That's all. Like some foods are more fattening than other foods. And that doesn't seem to be that controversial a statement. But by the time you get to the universities and stuff, people are like, oh, it's all calories. It's all calories. It's like, why don't you kind of live in the real world where people are actually trying to this way? Because that advice is horribly wrong.

Now, there's a lot of people talking about fasting, like you said. You've been talking about this for years and it seems like more and more people are learning about the benefits, are practicing fasting in different various ways and are seeing results in their own health or with potential clients they work with teaching about fasting. I'm curious, how does fasting since I've talked to you last in the last year, I think it's been a year and a half now, how does fasting support weight loss in a healthy way? And is there any new research that's come out since we last talked?

Yeah, so there's been a little bit of research and it's been sort of fits and starts, but fasting is very simple. When you don't eat, right, so any period of time you're not eating is fasting. That's just what it is. if you don't eat, your body needs to take the energy out of its body stores. That's all you're trying to do, right? And it's normal, it's natural. That's how we survived as a species because we had the ability to store calories for a time that we weren't eating. Otherwise, you'd die in your sleep, like every single night, right? But you don't because you can store it. So body fat is a store of calories. The reason fasting is so effective is because you're allowing the you know, hormonal insulin to fall. So therefore now you're opening up the floodgates of energy. So you're like, oh, your body might have 100,000, 200,000 calories of energy sitting in its body fat stores, depending on how much weight you're trying to lose. But you can't get at it until you let insulin fall. So if you're nibbling all through the day and keeping your insulin high, you're eating, you know, the crackers because they're low fat, but you're not going to be able to access body fat because you've kept your insulin high. You've basically told your body, store energy, don't burn energy. So once you start to release the, you know, let the insulin fall, then you can start to release energy and that's all you're trying to do with the fasting. So it's a hugely important thing to do and has always been part of a sort of traditional way of eating. So if you think about the 1970s again, you finish dinner at like 6:00 PM, you know, and you may be at breakfast at like 8 a.m. Right. That's a 14 hour period of fasting that people did every single day without even thinking about it. In other words, they have 14 hours that they're dragging calories back out of their body. That doesn't happen anymore because when you do studies of, you know, how people eat now, on average, they eat for I think it was like 6 14 hours and 45 minutes. So if you started eating at 8 A.M. you wouldn't finish until 10 45 p.m. on average. That's the average length of time that people are eating. In other words, you're the only time people are actually fasting is when they went to sleep. Right. That's the only time.

So you mean these people is eating consider consuming liquid drinks also that are non-water?

Yeah, if it's calories, if there's calories then it's considered energy, right? So what of course was happening was that in the past people would be like, you know, if you wanted a bedtime snack, your mom would say, no, you should eat more at dinner, right? There's nothing to eat, right? Now it's like, hey, eat anytime you want, right? There's food everywhere. You can buy food everywhere, you know, stores are everywhere. and that may play a huge role in that. So there have been a few small studies, a few studies of fasting that have come out in the literature. It's a bit of a mixed bag. Some have shown really good success and then others have not because, again, they've sort of done it a bit wrong. They sort of did they mixed fasting. So they'd say fast one day, and then eat more the next day. It's like, that's not really what you're supposed to do. I always think it's like, why would you design a study like that? Like, if you're gonna fast one day, what I'm trying to do is say, you know, if you drop a meal, I want to take that your body to take the calories that you would have eaten in that meal. I want you to take that out of your body fat. that's what I want you to do. So you're pulling that energy back out. You're basically feeding yourself on body fat because body fat is a store of food energy. It came from the food you ate in the past, right? You turned it into fat, now you have to bring it back out. If the next day you overeat, you're simply going to fill up the fat again, right? So why would you do that? But there's a number of studies that alternated fasting with overeating. I'm like thinking, that's crazy. And of course they didn't show any benefits. Like, okay, like come into the real world, please. Like, I never tell people when you're eating, eat extra. Like, why would you do that? And then there's another study that was took a, it was very prominent. And then New York Times said, oh, there's no benefits. But the problem was that is, you know, they look at fasting and they said, okay, we're gonna go you know, increase the amount of fasting. And the problem was they increased it by, like, 14 or something like that. And the number of, and they needed to show almost a 40 increased efficacy with the fasting to be positive, which is a high bar, like increasing fasting by, you know, 15 time wise. Like, I think they went from, like, 14 to 16 hours. So it was a small increase in the fasting time, but they expected this huge massive increase in the effectiveness of weight loss. But it's like, again, welcome to the real world. You can't get a 15% increase in your fasting time, which results in a 40% decrease in weight above what the other people do. It's like if you increase fasting by 15%, the best you should really hope for is a 15% increase in your efficacy. But they showed was a 28% increase in the efficacy, But they needed 40. So they said, it doesn't work. Okay, well, that's not exactly the way I would interpret it. So there's been a few studies.

I'm curious then what, I feel like a lot of people have tried it in the last year, you know, especially people on the, who are consumers of this show who watch on YouTube or listen on audio. They've heard me talk about fasting. They've heard me talk about my experiments. of doing two-day fasts, one-day fasts, three-day fasts, and bring on different experts talking about fasting and the benefits. I'm curious from all the things that you've learned over fasting over the last many years and what you've seen people trying to come out and talk about lately, what are your three best strategies or practices for fasting that people can practice for the next seven days that is sustainable, maintainable and doable. And it will also get added benefits.

Yeah, I mean, I think that the, in terms of fasting, one, make it a habit, right? So habits are what makes it easy, you know, tough stuff, not so tough, right? So if you are, you know, make it a habit to sort of do a 16 hour fast, right? So my eating window is between this and this. Do it consistently so that it feels normal to you. And therefore, when you step outside that, you feel a little bit uncomfortable, just like that day you don't brush your teeth, right? It's like you feel a little bit like something's off here because that's a thing, right? So you do it consistently. And I think that's one of the big big things that happened in the 70s, that is they had that 14 hour period of fasting without thinking about it. So it was never onerous because they just did it. It's not like I have to not eat after dinner, that's just what I do. It's a huge shift in the way you think about things. Two is sort of staying busy so that you don't think about the food and there's certain things that you can do and something that are good and some things that aren't so good. So one of the things, of course, is trying to avoid the triggers. So if you decide, okay, once a week I'm going to do a 24-hour fast, I'm going to eat just one meal that day, that's fine. But then you have to make sure that you schedule something into that period where you would be not eating. so, you know, if, if you're doing something else, you're not going to eat for me, for example, for years, I would just schedule, you know, I would do writing, I would write like my books or I do a podcast or something like that. So it's easy because if I'm, if it's 12 o'clock, I need to go do this podcast. I'm not thinking about lunch because I'm doing this podcast or, like, it was a to the library or somewhere where it's quiet, then I do some writing. I write my blog, right? And it's like, oh, okay, well now I'm not missing it anymore, right? So put it on the schedule and make sure that you have something else that's going to sort of take your mind off. That makes it easier for yourself, right? And that's, you know, that's the key. And then the third thing, I think, is to really plan ahead of time how you're going to deal with the hunger, right? Because if the hunger comes, you have to have like you can't just show up.

What's the best plan that you do or that you recommend for people when they're hungry and they're just like, oh, I'm emotional or I'm having a challenging day or I'm sad or I'm so used to grabbing for the chips, the snacks, the cookies, the crunchies. What's the best practice to keep people's discipline at a high when they feel like all they want to do is munch?

Yeah, there's two things. if you're in a place where you can do it, do something active, especially outside, because of course then you're taking yourself away. So going out for a walk or a run is great because exercise, like it does two things. First of all, you can schedule it. Second of all, when you're actually exercising, you'll almost never be hungry. right? Like think about the last time you played tennis or basketball or soccer. You're so fully into the game, you're not thinking, boy, I'm really hungry. Like almost never. Like almost, you almost can't do it, right? Like you know, you've done plenty of stuff. You never think in the middle of a game, boy, I could really use a burger, right? You're thinking, how am I gonna score? Right? Or whatever you're doing. Right. So putting a pickup game of whatever you like to play, right? Does, does, does wonders. Because you know the hunger is going to go away. You're taking the time where you're, are, you know, you're, in the past, you would have taken something. So lunch hour, for example, you're taking that time. And three, when you make a plan to play a game of tennis with your friend, you're not going to back out. You're not going to just say, ah, forget it, I'm going to go for a pizza because you're going to let your friend down. So that keeps you accountable to yourself. So it's like, okay, so once a week, and this is great when people are kind of, say, lose weight together. It's like, okay, let's figure out what we like to play. Is it, you know, yoga? Is it riding a bicycle? Is it going for a hike? Is it like, whatever it is. Let's do it together and let's do it at a time so that we get through this period. And that's how we help each other. We help each other by doing these sorts of things. And of course, that's sort of the secret of how people fasted in the past. You think about groups of people. Now there's all sorts of religious fasting traditions. So around Lent, for example, around Ramadan, Yom Kippur, whatever it is, there's fasting. well, literally millions of people are doing it. Why? Because they're doing it together. It's just a lot easier. If your family is not eating, you're a lot less likely to eat because it's just the norm. So, you know, doing things together in a supportive group, that's, that's important. Like it's, it's the way we get things done. We're humans. We're, we're social beings, right?

Earlier you talked about environment and willpower. How does someone develop more willpower or discipline when their environment continually challenges them to stay disciplined? Maybe they don't have the ability to remove all the sugary foods or they're working in an office where they can't say, Hey, can we get rid of this stuff? How does someone with a room full of distractions manage to stay disciplined and have willpower.

Yeah, that's a tough one because, you know, I, I don't think, you know, a lot of people think obesity or weight gain is about lack of willpower. But again, I don't think it is. I think it's the change in sort of the Norms. That is, the eating Norms and the environment, which is led in the processed food that has led to that. So if you can't take yourself out of the environment, then you really have to look at alternative ways to, you know, again, you have to plan for it. So if you know that there's going to be something like, you know, in the meeting, there's going to be food, right? And you don't want to eat because you don't want to gain weight, then you have to decide what are you going to do to sort of counteract that. Maybe you're going to get a tea, right? And then that's all you'll have. So at least you'll have something to sip on. put in your mouth because, you know, you need something in there. It's just like the way people used to, when they stopped smoking, they chew gum, right? Because you need something in there to take away the sort of thing. So it's, it still takes willpower, but it takes a little less because you're still getting something, right? Or you have to decide, okay, well, how, you know, you have to decide what am I going to do to sort of minimize and maybe I'll set further away from where things are. You know, if you're sometimes you have these meetings where you're, you know, in the auditorium and the food's at the back, I'll sit at the front so that it's going to be embarrassing for me to get out and get some food because it's going to look so bad, right? Whereas if you're at the back, you just grab it and then go back to your seat, right? So there's ways, but it's really still about trying to figure out how you're going to mitigate those effects of what you're, of what you're trying to do because the temptations are always going to be there. Right. And, and you have to realize the foods are made to be tempting. Like, nobody's trying to make their foods not, not appetizing. So.

Yeah, I feel like it's going to be a chance. I mean, I feel like there's so many emotions that tied towards the discipline of eating with all the marketing messages, with all to the stress that people have, it feels good to eat and consume. It takes away some of the pain. It takes away some of the emotional challenges that people face. And I, you know, I, I can empathize with parents. I'm not a parent, so I can't speak into how it might feel having kids who are, who maybe are a handful, or maybe you have a lot of emotional and energy and it's hard to manage that. It's hard to manage your job and your relationships and your own health. And so I know a lot of parents probably know what's good for their kids, but they maybe give in sometimes because it's just easier to just give them candy and have some peace. So I understand, even though I'm not a parent, but I can see how that challenge could come up. What can parents do? Because it seems like I think parents have a massive control on what their kids eat, you know?

Yeah.

Until a certain age.

Until a certain age. What can they do? I think that parents, on the one hand, there's a lot of challenges there, but on the other hand, they're very motivated. So that's good because they want to do good for their kids. Right. So, and I think that's where a lot of, you know, a lot of parents have actually made those changes. So trying to cut out sugary drinks, cut out some of the snacking because remember back in, you know, not that long ago, it was all about giving snacks. So I had, you know, my kids are older now, but they used to play soccer at night, you know, and, and it was always like for freaking years, it was like, oh, at halftime, we have to give them some juice and cookies. Yeah.

Some oranges, yeah. Slices and stuff.

Why? I was always thinking, I was thinking like I played soccer when I was a kid. I had so much fun and nobody chased me around trying to give me juice and cookies because I probably had water. Yeah. And I probably would have just asked, I probably would have preferred to play truthfully, right? Because it's so much fun, right? All these games are fun for kids. And, and so, so one is limiting the drinks. So, you know, you see water has come back in sort of a big way, sparkling water, still water, like, you know, 15, 20 years ago, it was all juices and pop. Now you see water available everywhere. So that's good. Cutting down the sugar, cutting down the refined food. So making sure they have good choices. And the other thing, of course, is that if you're, again, if you're in a situation where, you know, there's going to be stuff that's tempting is to sort of spoil your appetite, right? Make sure you're eating something good before you go in where there's a lot of stuff that's bad, right? Because if you're full, you're going to be less tempted than eating other stuff. So if you're going into a place where there's just going to be tons of stuff, make sure you have a good dinner first or a good lunch first so that when you're going in, you're not like, oh, cookies, chips, right? And it's like, you know, so I think parents have already made some of those good changes. The thing about the snacks, which I thought was strange, was so this always happens, actually. So my, my, when my kids used to go on these field trips and stuff, you know, you'd get this letter to the parent, and it's like, we're going on a field trip to whatever Museum, you know, they're going to take the bus. Make sure you pack two snacks for them. I'm like, like, why are they not eating lunch or am I not feeding them dinner? Like, which one? Because there's no other reason that they need a snack. And the problem with this, and this was just a few years ago, is that it sort of institutionalizes the fact, right, that you should be eating all the time, right? But you shouldn't because there's no reason to. Why would you want somebody? Remember when you eat, you're going to store energy, which is body fat. There's no way around it, right? It's calories, especially these refined snacks. Snacks are the worst actually because they tend to be refined carbs because like cookies, because they don't spoil, right? Nobody's packing a piece of salmon for a snack, right? It's like a cookie, right? Or a cracker or something, right? So it institutionalizes the fact to parents and to kids that snacking is a good thing. and that you should eat two snacks in between sort of lunch and dinner, and it's healthy for you, but it's not. You really shouldn't because that's the period of time that you should have been using the energy you ate at lunch. Remember, like if you wanted an after-school snack in the past in the 70s, and I grew up in the 70s, your mom would say, no, you're gonna ruin your dinner, right? Want a bedtime snack? No, you should eat more at dinner, right? And dinner, of course, was you know, the fully cooked meal, home cooked meal. It was the, the proteins and the fats and the, you know, the, the good stuff that you're cooking, you know, that you spent time cooking, not the packaged cookie that you put into the, you know, into the snack box. But, yeah, it's, it's, it's trying to get back to those Basics. And I feel like we don't, we're just, we don't have to reinvent the wheel. You just have to look back at what we did in the 70s. and you'll get your blueprint for what you're supposed to be doing. Three snacks, unprocessed foods, cut the sugar, and make sure you have a period of time at night where you're going to use those calories that you took in during the day, right? Because if you don't give your body time to use those calories, how is it going to use those calories, right? So in the 70s, from six o'clock onward, you're using calories. Right now it's like 11:00 p.m. practically before you start using calories. Up until that point, you're taking in calories. So how is that going to work? So realizing that this question of how often you eat, the frequency of eating when you're eating, is almost as important as the foods that you are eating. And that was one of the big things I talked about in the Obesity Code, which people never really thought about was that there's two things in the dot in weight loss weight gain, right? The foods that you're eating, which is the diet, and the period of time that you're not eating, which is your fasting period. And the fasting period doesn't tell you what to eat when you're eating, right? It just tells you how long you should go before the next meal. And that's really important because you can do it with any diet. And so those two things are really important. So not just the quality of the calories, but also this idea that you have to really make sure you're paying attention to the fasting period so that your hormones, your insulin can drop and you can start using those calories. And that's really, really, you know, a underappreciated part of sort of weight loss.

So what's the, you had like a formula in there that you said, about two minutes ago, you said no snacking. You said a few other things. Can you share that formula again?

Yeah. So one, you want to cut down the sugar because sugar is not good. And I think everybody agrees on that, right? Cut down the refined foods. So this actually applies mostly to carbohydrates, but refined other stuff is not good either. So refined fats, for example, are not good for you. So fans, fats were pretty clearly bad refined meat like baloney and hot dogs and stuff are not really good for you either. So you want to eat whole foods, right? So whole foods, you want to eat no sugar, you want to eat, you know, plenty of proteins and fats. And then you want to make sure you have a, you know, cut out the snacks and have a decent period of fasting. And that really just gets you back to 1970 where people were still eating white bread. white bread. I know I grew up in that period, nobody ate whole wheat bread, nobody ate whole wheat pasta. It was white bread, it was white pasta, right? But you didn't eat all the time. That was the big difference, right? And it was the same everywhere you went, you know, and the Irish were eating potatoes, the Chinese were eating rice, the Japanese were eating rice, you know, those are all carbs, refined carbs, right? Bread, rice, potatoes. But they were doing okay because they weren't eating all the time. They have to give their bodies a break from eating, right? Where now we don't give our bodies a break from eating. We think that it's healthy to constantly eat. We've lost the idea that there's that balance between eating and not eating. Like, why wouldn't you think that that's important? Like, balance everything else in life, right? Why wouldn't you want to balance eating and not eating, right? Don't you think that's like fundamentally important. Like I think it is, but up until sort of I wrote the Obesity Code, people just thought fasting was really bad for you, which is sort of odd, you know, because it's like up until then they're everywhere saying, oh, fasting is so bad for you, right? You're gonna do so bad. It's like, you know, we've been doing it for a long time.

So I'm curious then, what effect does fasting have on reducing our chances of getting life-threatening diseases and also which diseases are, are most people at risk if they don't fast and improve their, their diet?

Type two diabetes is probably the biggest one. And the reason is that it's a huge one. It's become an epidemic. So lots of people have it. If you look at pre-diabetes and diabetes, which is sort of and you do big surveys, it's actually about 50% of adult Americans. So it's very common to have pre-diabetes and diabetes. And the problem with it is that it causes all kinds of other problems. It increases your risk of heart attacks, strokes, cancer, it's leading cause of blindness, leading cause of non-traumatic amputations, leading cause of kidney disease, All of those things. And in trying to understand type 2 diabetes, you just have to understand that basically your body has too much sugar. That's it. So if you have too much sugar, remember, excuse me, your body really has two sources of energy it can use. It can use sugar, which is mostly glucose, and it can use fat. and when your body stores energy, it stores it as sugar or stores it as fat. Makes sense, right? So if you have too much fat, then you have obesity. If you have too much sugar, you have type two diabetes.

Interesting.

But the situation, the solution is the same. So think about it. Your body has too much energy. Both situations. Obesity, you have too much energy stored away in type two diabetes, you have too much sugar, which is also too much energy stored away because both fat and sugar are sources of energy for the body. So if you think about trying to reverse type 2 diabetes, because again, I wrote about this in the diabetes code and I said it's a reversible disease because your body doesn't have too little energy. It has too much energy. So think about this situation. Think about your car. Suppose you go to the gas station three times a day, you fill up. Now it's full, but you still keep pumping gas in. So it's spilling out, it's spilling into your back seat and it's now making you sick. But what are you going to do? Well, here's what you wouldn't do, is keep going to that gas station three times a day. It's ridiculous. You do two things. One, stop putting gas in. And two, drive that car around so that you use the gas that's there. That's what you would do. Now think about the gas.

Burn the gas.

Burn the gas. Exactly. Think about your body. Your body has too much energy. What are you going to do? One, stop putting it in. Two, let it run without putting it in for a while. That's intermittent fasting. That's all you have to do. And think about the situation. You've got a disease state which has become an epidemic which contributes to heart attacks, strokes, cancer, but you have a solution which is completely free and has been used for thousands of years, which is not anything more complicated than let your body run off of the fuel that's already sitting on there. Is it fun? No, it's not fun. Is it healthy? Yes, it is in those situations very healthy. And people used to say, well, people won't do it. It's like, my job as a doctor is not to tell people what they will and won't do. My job is to tell them how they should get healthy and I'll help them. So if fasting is a good solution, which I believe it is, then I'll help them. Whether they do it or not is up to them, right? But the point is that it's It's free, it's simple, it's been used for thousands of years. It's available to everybody. You don't need special equipment, you don't need a special diet, you don't need a special anything. Everybody in the world can do this at any time, like literally like today, tomorrow, any time they could do it. It's not like, you know, I have this great drug for people. Yeah, but except it costs $500,000, right? That's crazy. No, fasting is not to do that. You're going to save time, you're going to save money, and you're going to get healthier. So what could be better than that? Like, it's a crazy situation where we have this huge healthcare issue, but the solution is completely free, which explains why there's so few people telling you to do it, because who's going to make money on it, right? And that's not my concern. My concern is telling people, what they need to do to get healthy. Right. Yeah.

What do you think is the biggest mistake people make when it comes to fasting then?

I think the single biggest mistake is sort of overeating afterwards. So you fast for a period of time, then you say, oh, well, I deserve that ice cream. It's like you, you could do it, but you're going to sort of get a lot less benefit. You're gonna, like, you got a great benefit from the fasting. Now, you know, you're, you're, you're losing some of because you're eating the foods that you didn't eat. And that really is a temptation for people to do. And I think it's natural and we've all done it. But the point is that after you fast, you should really just eat as normally as possible. So if you eat a normal breakfast, normal lunch, normal dinner, the next day is your fasting day. You don't eat breakfast, you don't eat lunch. You should eat a normal dinner. Don't try to eat all three meals crammed into one. Right? That's not the point. Like, the point is to drop those meals and let your body take the energy from your body fat. So you drop breakfast, your body normally gets 500 calories from there. You want to take it out of your body fat. Same thing for lunch. If at dinner, instead of taking a thousand calories, you decide to stick in 2000 calories, well, you've negated a lot of the benefits that you should have gotten because that energy is going to go in. right? So the good thing is that it's hard to do that. So when you restrict the time and you don't tell people what to eat or how much to eat, they actually naturally eat less. So it's actually an interesting thing because this gets to the question of hunger. There's, you know, in terms of weight loss, there's sort of two big issues that trip people up. One is metabolic rate, two is hunger. So hunger, people think that hunger will just go up like this with fasting. It's actually not true. So you can actually measure the hunger hormone called ghrelin, which is basically it goes up high and you get hungry. So when you fast, ghrelin is high. So if you normally eat lunch, you're hungry. So ghrelin is high. What happens when you don't eat lunch? You skip your lunch. Well, A couple hours later, your ghrelin level actually falls back to baseline.

So you don't feel hungry anymore?

No, your hunger goes back to baseline level. So if you eat lunch at 12, you're hungry at 12. Now you skip lunch, you're hungry at 12, you're hungry at 1, by 4 it's no different than if you ate or didn't eat. So people are like, what happened? Well, your body took the energy from your body fat stores. You took the 500 calories from body fat. You basically fed yourself off of that body fat. So why would you be hungry? The answer is you're not. And that's why it goes right back to baseline. Same thing happens at dinner. If you do multiple day fasts, it's actually even more interesting because ghrelin actually, after day one to two, it actually starts to go down and down and down. So your hunger actually disappears by like day three, day four. People just aren't hungry anymore. because they're fueling themselves on the body fat. And I think it was a I think it was actually a sort of protective mechanism because if there is a prolonged period where you aren't eating, I think the body evolves so that you wouldn't be constantly distracted. So people on these long fasts do very well because they've gone into the stage of fat burning because they're fueling themselves purely on the fat and their hunger is gone. So they're actually feeling pretty good. and they're losing clear.

They feel productive. They have more energy.

Yeah. Yeah. There comes a point where.

There comes a point where I feel like I did a three-day fast. I think maybe I did three and a half days. And I remember thinking, okay, I'm kind of feeling a little bit tired. Like, I could use some food now.

Yeah.

Maybe it's just because I haven't, you know, pushed it beyond that before. So it's just every day I have.

To learn how to manage it. But it's. It's. It takes a bit of getting. to because most of us are not used to it. And that's probably the biggest obstacle because we're in a culture where the norm is not sort of 14 hours of fasting. The norm is like eat until you go to sleep and eat as soon as you wake up, right? And that was one of those big destructive myths, which was that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, which is fine. If you like breakfast, it's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. But the problem was when people took that to mean that if you weren't hungry in the morning and you didn't really like breakfast because you weren't a breakfast person, you should still eat like fruit loops, right? Because you had breakfast. Okay, now that's not the point. Eating sugar and refined carbs is not a good strategy. You're better off not eating. But then you remember this whole thing where, oh, you have to eat breakfast. has to eat breakfast, has to eat breakfast. Like, no, you don't. Your body knows what to do. If you're, what do you think it's been doing all through the night? It's been taking the energy from your body. So if you don't eat, it will continue to take energy from your stores, your blood sugar or your body fat, one or the other, unless your body fat is so low that it's going to get tripped up. So that was the thing. And then people used to say, you know, eat 10 times a day to keep your metabolism stoked. right? Which is another complete sort of myth. That was the other thing. So hunger is one of the big things that trips people up in weight loss. And fasting provides you a way to sort of get around that. The other one is the metabolic rate, which is the number of calories you burn. And people think it's all about exercise, but in fact, exercise for most people that I deal with, which are older people, it tends to be a very small part of the number of calories they eat in a day because you know, when you exercise, it's just your skeletal muscles as opposed to the, you know, your heart and your liver and your lungs and your brain. They all need energy as well. And the point is that when you, you can do these studies where you measure the metabolic rate of somebody who is fasting. So you take them on day zero, then you give them nothing to eat for four days. Then you measure how many calories they're burning after four days of zero food and they wind up burning 10% more calories per day after the fasting. Really? And it's like, yeah. And the reason is that when insulin goes down, other hormones go up. So in fact, you have a release of noradrenaline and you activate the sympathetic nervous system, which is in fact your fight or flight response. So when you're fasting, your body is not shutting down. Your body is actually powering itself up, but fueling itself on your body fat, which is perfect because everybody thinks you need to eat to get energy. But when you're fasting, you actually have more energy because your hormonal state is primed for that. You think about the lion who just ate, it's just sort of dopey, just wants to sleep. Or you think about the hungry wolf. Hungry wolf is not falling down. Hunger World is zoned in. Sharply. It's sharp and it's because of the sympathetic nervous system because they're zoned in and they've got energy to burn because they're fueling themselves. A human is the same. So, when you fast, in fact, you're actually increasing the sympathetic tone, which means that you have more energy, not less energy. That's why your body is burning 10% more calories. You can also measure the VO2, which is the amount of oxygen that it's using. So it's sort of the same thing. And it's up 10 after 4 day fast.

4 day fast.

Yeah. This was a 40 fast. So it happens, you know, for shorter periods, you also see this increase in, in tone. So it's like people think you're going into starvation mode, but it's the exact opposite. You're actually activating your body. So these were some of the myths that, you know, people used to have about fasting. And it's like, no, this is people. You can do this. It's actually, there's a ton of good stuff that happens when you're fasting. If you're in this sort of category where you have type 2 diabetes, where you have an excess of energy, or you have obesity, which is an excess of energy, you got to use it. Everybody thinks it's about exercise, but in fact, it's sort of a minor, minor, it's a minor effect unless you do a lot of it. So again, keeping in mind that I typically treat like 60 year old, 70 year olds, they're not sort of running eight hours a day sort of thing. Yeah.

When is it a bad time or the worst time to fast?

I don't think there's a bad time. Sometimes people ask me, is it better to fast early or late? So, right, if you're going to skip a meal, should you skip breakfast or should you skip dinner? That's a really interesting question because for the same 16-hour fast or whatever, you're going to have different effects. In fact, so it's better if you're trying to lose weight, it's actually better to drop dinner. The problem, and there's a reason for that because one, dinner tends to be bigger and two, for the food that you eat at dinner time, you're going to get more insulin release, right? So if you eat the same meal at breakfast and at dinner and you measure how much insulin is released, you get more insulin released at dinner time. So your body, I'm not sure why, I think it's because your body I think in the morning, so remember it's a seesaw between insulin and these counter-regulatory hormones like growth hormone and noradrenaline and so on. So it's sort of a seesaw, right? That's why they're called counter-regulatory. So insulin goes up, these go down, insulin goes down, these go up. In the morning, these are already up, right? The counter-regulatory hormones are already up. You get a burst, this part of the circadian rhythm, so you get first that like 4:00 AM. So that's why you don't need to eat breakfast because your body's actually already dragging glucose out of your system. It's pretty burning energy. It's already getting you ready for the day. So this is up. So therefore when you eat, this is a little bit blunted, whereas during the, you know, after that, during the day, these go down. So therefore if you eat, your insulin just spikes up. So you're, but the practical sort of effect of that is that if you eat the exact same meal at breakfast and at dinner, you get more insulin effect, which , which means if you have more insulin effect, there's more instructions to your body to store that energy, which means that you're going to gain more weight, right? So it's actually better to drop dinner. Problem is that it's a lot easier to drop breakfast because, you know, a lot of people aren't hungry at breakfast and nobody misses you at breakfast, right? If you don't eat breakfast, nobody cares, but a lot of people, that's their family. social meal, friends, family, dinner. So it's a lot harder to drop dinner as opposed to breakfast. So therefore you have to balance the two, which is more important, right? You know, should I drop this or that? It's like a long fast. So it's hard to do, not because they're so difficult, but because there's always something that comes up, like, you know, oh, come out and have dinner, right?

Sure.

And it's like, you don't want to be exactly. It's a social thing. So even though I could have skipped dinner, I won't because I want to see my friend, right? It's like, I'm not gonna skip dinner just because, you know, you know, yes, I, you know, there's the meal, but there's, you know, the interaction. Yeah. Yeah.

What would you say is your biggest challenge then? You're, you know, an expert at this. You're a doctor. You've you've been studying this, you've been helping patients at this for many years. Where is your struggle when it comes to fasting, healthy eating, preventing disease and weight loss?

I think the biggest struggle has been this whole COVID thing has been a real disaster on the sort of weight gain, eating thing. because, you know, again, it's, it's the idea that eating has a lot of components. So one of them is enjoyments. Right. So it is delicious. So you enjoy it. That's why it's part of every human celebration. Right. When you take away everything that you enjoy doing except for eating. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, well, you know, you can't travel and you can't go. the gym and you can't go to the park and you can't go here.

See your friends.

See your friends. You can't see your family. Remember, there's that time. Oh, you shouldn't get together for Christmas. No, no Thanksgiving this year, right? It's like, yeah, that's a lot. And so I think what happened, the only thing you can do is get food from the grocery store and, you know, take out. So then what do you do? You eat, that's all. because not because you really wanted to, but because there's nothing else to do and you have nothing to give you pleasure except eating. So it was a disaster because the diets just went terribly wrong. Mine did too.

And you're the expert.

I knew what was happening. I just couldn't stop because it's like, what am I going to do? I have all day sitting here and these , the only thing I can really do is eat, right? Yeah, sure. I can do jigsaw puzzles and stuff. And I did that too. And I read some stuff, but, you know, the, the interaction was, it's, it's big, like the amount of, like, because there was a, there was a huge long period of time where I didn't, like, I didn't see my family, I think, for like a year and a half, like immediate family, yes, but my brothers, my sisters, my nephews, my. It was a long, long time. And I didn't see some of my friends for, like, a year and a half, two years. It was long. Right. And so. And the stuff that, you know, I used to. I used to enjoy, it just shut down. Right. It was. It was crazy. So.

So even you, with. With all the research and all the knowledge and all the expertise and all. And all the willpower. and all the discipline. Even you struggled with it.

It was a struggle. It was a struggle for. Yeah, for, I think everybody. And the weight gain was like, I think my son gained, like, a lot of weight. And luckily, he, you know, then he went away and he's lost it all and stuff. Right. But, you know, I remember some of his friends who are, like, skinny. They think they gained, like, 60 pounds. These are high school kids, right? And they're, like, up 60 pounds and stuff. I whoa, what happened to you? Luckily they're young, right? And so they dropped it very quickly. So, you know, because again, once they found their other things, the hockey and the basketball and stuff, then, yeah, then that's real life. But it took more of a toll. So a lot of my patients just, just were a disaster. Like they're going along fine, going along fine. I was monitoring them. They're doing fine with their diets. And then, poof, every single one was like, the sugars were skyrocketing, their weight was Skyrocketing. It was not a good time. Like, it's, it's better now because a lot of the restrictions have lifted, but it was a good long year and a half, at least March 2020 to at least 2022 in Canada was like, I think the Americans were better in terms of opening stuff. But, yeah, it was, it was, it was rough. So, again, it's, it's, it's the same thing, right? It's easy to predict that because if the only thing you can do is eat, then you eat. I can't help it. And I think a lot of people had a bit of dysthymia, which is sort of mild depression from the social isolation. We know mental health problems, again, skyrocketed. but I think there's a huge number of people that were mildly depressed. Like, and I think I had a bit of that, and I think it affected everybody truthfully. But you get to the point where you're like, what am I like, why wouldn't I eat? That's all I can do to feel good. And who am I seeing anyway? Right? It's like the same three people. Like, I'm not looking good for anything. It was a tough, it was a tough. And I think it's almost indecent for us not to acknowledge how bad it was. Some of these mental health issues, they wind up affecting other things like your diet and therefore you get this. And then you say, oh, it's all about your food and willpower. It's like, no, no, there's so much to go. It's sort of feels wrong not to acknowledge the amount of problems that were caused by this. And I'm not trying to say if it's right or if it's wrong, but there was a lot of problems. I mean, it was very unnatural. That was the thing.

I've got a couple of final questions for you, Jason. I appreciate your time and your advice and wisdom. what advice would you have for someone who's watching or listening that maybe is overweight or obese and feel like they've gone too far? It's too hard to come back. I've gone too far and they don't feel like they can take control of their weight again. What advice would you have for those individuals?

I think one, you're never too far because people have lost a lot of weight. And two, I think that it's important to sort of get some help. Like, you know, everybody thinks you have to do it yourself. You don't have to do it yourself. There's tons of people who will help you. So you can get a coach, you can get a fasting coach, you can get somebody who's gonna like, you know, it's funny because, and then the same thing with mental health, like, there's no shame in getting help for that, whether you need a coach or you need, you know, somebody to talk to or whether there's no shame in that because you can get help. And, you know, you think about something like, you know, Athletics. If you take an analogy, if you take, you know, the greatest player in the world, you know, Michael Jordan, he still has a coach. Yep. Because they do stuff for you. They keep you accountable. They tell you what you're doing right and what to be doing wrong because you don't always necessarily know. Well, if, and, and people have business coaches. So some of the greatest sort of CEOs, they have business coaches. Like, it's a huge industry. Um, so why wouldn't you take advantage of that, right? Nothing like if you don't know what you're doing or you need somebody to keep you on track or you need somebody to give you a decent program. if you want to get in shape, you go get yourself a personal trainer. It's not like you couldn't watch YouTube. You know, you know how many fitness routines are on YouTube. There's probably 10 million of them, right? They're. They're good. And there's a lot of great programs out there. It's not the same because they're not there saying, I'm gonna meet you at the gym on Tuesday. at 9:00 a.m. Now all of a sudden you can't not go, right? Because you've made an appointment, right? As opposed to you watch the YouTube and you decide, okay, well, I'm going to go for a run, but then you're tired on Tuesday at 9:00 a.m. So you're like, I'm just going to sleep in, right? It's totally different. So all of these things is so if you need help, get yourself the help because it exists for weight loss, for all of that stuff. Fasting, you know, we have the fasting method.com where you can get a coach and whether you need group coaching and groups are very good too, because again, it gives you somebody to go through it with you. Um, so we do a lot of group coaching in there, but get yourself to help because it's, there's no shame in it. The best people, like the very, very hot people in the world at whatever it is they do have a coach.

Yeah, right.

So, you should always make yourself available to that.

I agree. I'm a big fan of coaches. I invest in them. I've got lots of them in different areas of my life. And I feel like it's hard to do anything alone. It's hard to get good results or great results on your own at anything, let alone many things. Maybe you're an expert at one thing and you can do that, but then you need help with the finances or the fitness or the the nutrition or the, the mental health. It's like finding support makes you wise by looking for support and seeing that out. It doesn't make you not capable. It makes you.

Exactly.

Exactly. Dr. Fung, I appreciate you for, for being here. I want people to follow you over on social media. Dr. Jason Fung, thefastingmethod.com. also Dr. Jason Fung. www.fasting.com. You've got some incredible books that I want people to get a hold of. The Obesity Code, the Complete Guide to Fasting, the Diabetes Code, the Cancer Code, all these different things that it's all linked up at your website and people can find it there or over on Amazon and things like that. How else can we be of service to you today?

I think just getting the word out is what I'm hoping. for, right, the more people learn about it. And I talk a lot about the science of it so that, you know, there's a lot of practical stuff too, but there's also a lot of sort of trying to understand the disease that you're facing, whether it's obesity, whether it's type 2 diabetes, trying to understand it so you can come up with a sort of rational plan of how it's to deal with it. I think that's, you know, that's the best thing, right? If we can help people, you know, that's its own reward, right? I mean, if people listen and get better, hey, I love it. Love it. It's, you know, and it's privilege, you know, sometimes I get these emails and they say, oh, I listened to you, you know, on the School of Greatness, and started fasting and, you know, I got off all my meds. I'm like, amazing. That is amazing. You don't feel good, right? It's like, wow, this guy really changed around his life and I didn't even know and I didn't have to do anything different, but these guys were able to, you know, you know, they took that advice. So it's great. Like, you just, it's, it's, it's, it's, you know, positive vibes in world. You know, it's like, it's amazing.

That's beautiful. Well, Jason, I want to acknowledge you for how you keep showing up in the world, how you keep learning and researching and serving your, your patients and also the people in the world that watch and listen you into this content. I know a lot of people from our previous interview got incredible benefits and results. If you guys haven't checked that out, make sure to check it out. We'll link it up below and everything and leave a comment if you did. start implementing some of the fasting principles that Jason has talked about and share your results below so that we can see. We'd love to see that. So I acknowledge you for continually showing up and serving people on living healthier lives. And I asked you these two questions before the last time, but I'm curious if they've changed. So this is called the three truths question. So imagine it's your last day on earth, many years away. you get to live as long as you want, but then it's your last day. And you've accomplished everything you want to accomplish, live the full life. But for whatever reason, all of your work, your written material, your videos, your audio content has to go with you to another place. So we don't have access to any of your information anymore. But if you could leave behind three lessons with the world or three truths, what would those be for you?

I think the first one would be, you know, in terms of fasting that there's, it's about balance. It's about making sure that you balance the feeding and the fasting and there's nothing wrong with it. Because that was one of the biggest things I think when I started writing the books was, you know, everybody thought it was such a bad thing. and that was one for one of the first people that said, let's look at the science of this whole thing, because it really, there really is a lot of good stuff here. So, so I think that was one of the things that I really think, you know, if it could be preserved, I really like that. Second one is the type 2 diabetes is a reversible disease, and that, too, is one of the things that I fought really hard against, which was that up until 2021, every major diabetes association said type 2 diabetes was a chronic and progressive disease, which means eventually they would get problems like kidney disease and me as a kidney specialist would wind up seeing them, right? And it breaks my heart, right? If people know that it's a reversible disease, then you're gonna attack this problem differently than if it's a chronic and progressive disease, right? If it's chronic and progressive, you'd be like, well, I can't do anything about it. I'll just do whatever. Whereas if you know it's a reversible disease, then you're going to go, oh, I'm going to do something about this, right? So that was one of the things. And, you know, I think that that's one of the, from a sort of health standpoint, I really think it can make a huge difference. It's such an important problem that you can really move the needle. in terms of that. So those two I would really like to, you know, I hope that it would be preserved. And then, you know, the third one, I mean, you know, I kind of think I just wish this whole idea of, you know, calories in calories out, I just find it so simplistic. I really hope that people try to go past that, because again, it comes down to people who think that obesity is just a willpower problem. It's such a wrong thing because so many people suffer from this disease and then they suffer the ridicule of others because they think that it's all about the personal failing, rather than an environment which allows this to happen. teaching like, oh, you can't skip breakfast, so you, you know, oh, you have to eat 10 times a day. Like, it's, it's, it's we who have failed them, not them who have failed us. Right. And I always think that there's a lot of people out there who are always like, oh, you know, it's all about power, it's all about power. And they're mostly people in academic centers and they, they, they, they pretend they're very, very smart, but they're so disconnected with reality. Right. that it's like, and I always think like think about it this way. If you have 60% of Americans who are overweight and obese, imagine you're a teacher, right? So you're a teacher, you have 100 students, one of them fails, that's probably the student's fault. But what if 60 or 70 kids fail? Is it really the kids fault or is it the teacher's fault? Because I think it's the teacher's fault. So therefore it's not the kids problem. It's the teacher problem. In this situation, I don't think it's the general public's problem. I think it's the problem with the way that we are approaching this disease. And because it affects so many people, you know, and every academic sort of academic center is all focused on calories. It's like there's more than that. There's this whole hormonal piece, there's the emotional side of things. There's the habit side of things. There's the environmental side of things. Like, get off of this. Just eat less. It doesn't work. Like, how are you going to fix the problem if you don't even know what the problem is? You're so focused on this problem. And I think that's where a lot of the fat shaming comes in. And it's like, you can't do that, right? It's. It's just so wrong. And. And there's a lot of doctors. out there who are all into this sort of thing, right? So, you know, I wish that part of things and that's a tough fight. You know, there's a lot of people who push back against, you know, a lot of people push back, all calories, all calories, you could eat ice cream for dinner, right? As long as it's in calories. So there are a lot of people who push back on that, but that was one of the ones that I sort of feel, I hope that, I hope that, that still stays.

That'S great. Final question, what's your definition of greatness?

I think it's to be able to impact people in a positive way. I suspect a lot of people say that, but it's true. You say it because it's true. It gives you something that's just so, you know, you just feel good, right? Like when you help somebody, they feel good, but I feel better, right? It's like, it's, it's hard to, it's hard to get, right? It's, it's, it's why people, you know, contribute to causes and stuff like that. You're part of something bigger than yourself. So even if you pass on, you know, you've contributed to this sort of greater good.

Right.

And I think we need that sort of idea that there's, there's something out there that's greater than ourselves. And we've been able to help people with that. Right. And it gives you more enjoyment, if you will, than, than, for instance, money or Fame or anything else can. Right. It's a different type. And that's why you see a lot of people who make a lot of money. They give away a lot of money because It makes them feel good, right? And it really is. And luckily for us, that's greatness, right? It's anybody can make money. You can make money by being a drug dealer, right? It doesn't make you feel good, right?

Right, right. Jason, thank you so much. I appreciate you for being here.

Thank you so much. It's great being here.

If you enjoyed that interview, then I know you'll love what we have coming up right now. What are the main causes of cancer? As it seems like you hear about it more and more recently that so many people are getting cancer or.

The.

Early stages of cancer, what are the main causes of cancer?

Dr. Yeah, that's a great question and that's something that we've always been trying to deal with. And sometimes some people say, well, we don't know what causes cancer. That's sort of a cop because we actually do know a lot about what causes cancer and these are things that cause cancer are called carcinogens and the World Health Organization maintains a huge list of these carcinogens. But if you want to break it down into what causes cancer in most people, you can look at the sort of a couple of studies have looked at the sort of percentage contribution of these carcinogens to to cancer. And the biggest one, of course, is tobacco smoke. So that's sort of by far and away the biggest contributor to cancer at around 35%. And these estimates were from 2015. So it was higher before when more people are smoking, but as a contributor to a cancer, it's the biggest. Interestingly, the second biggest and almost as big is actually our diet. So it's a huge, huge part of what contributes to cancer in general and far outstrips of those two are way above any other causes of cancer. So when you worry about things such as radiation or, you know, chemicals, sunscreens and pesticides and stuff like that, they do cause cancer. but the contribution in a whole population is very small. So what's interesting about diet is that we know this from our studies, but what part of the diet actually contributes to cancer? And that's where things sort of bogged down a lot. So initially in the 70s, people talked about fiber. So people thought about, oh, hey, well, you know, maybe if you eat a lot of fiber, what you're going to do is have a lot of big bowel movements and that's going to clean out your bowel and you're not going to get cancer. Turns out that wasn't true. Then the next thought was, hey, maybe it's dietary fat. So if you remember the 80s and 90s, there's this huge movement against fat that, you know, all fat is bad for you. It caused heart disease and all this sort of stuff, much of which is sort of been overturned at this point. But there's this thought maybe it causes cancer too. Turns out that wasn't true either. Then people talked about vitamins. So maybe cancer is like a vitamin deficiency. So we did many, many studies, millions of dollars, decades of research, where we would randomize people to say one group that took a certain vitamin and one group that didn't and see if there's any difference in cancer. So we tested vitamin A. didn't work, vitamin D, B didn't work, folic acid didn't work, vitamin C didn't work, vitamin D didn't work, vitamin E didn't work, selenium didn't work, omega-3 fatty acids didn't work. So all of those supplements didn't actually make any difference to the incidence of cancer. And so we're sort of stuck at that point in the mid-2000s saying, oh, no, it's the diet, but what part of the diet? And that's when it became sort of more and more clear that this cancer is actually an obesity related disease. So what happened of course is that in the 70s, 80s and 90s, people didn't really think about it, but then we had this obesity epidemic, so it became a bigger and bigger problem. So obesity in 2003, when they started to look at the studies, that was the first really definitive studies that said, hey, obesity is actually a huge risk factor, as well as type 2 diabetes. And both of those conditions will actually increase your risk of certain types of cancer a lot. So, it really depends on what type of cancer you're talking. If you're talking lung cancer, obesity plays almost no role in it, right? That's smoking. Or, if you have asbestos, which causes mesothelioma, which is a cancer of the lining of the lung. Again, obesity plays no role. But things like breast cancer and colorectal cancer, which are sort of really important cancers, they actually are obesity-related cancers. So that was the sort of big link. And to this, you know, at this point, the World Health Organization considers 13 different types of cancer as obesity-related cancers, which is huge because from 2003, we didn't even know. Like when I went to medical school. Nobody thought obesity caused cancer. It's almost as big as smoking. It's a huge, huge thing. Therefore, if you know that, that's super powerful because if you can maintain a normal weight, you're going to reduce just like stopping smoking, right? You're going to reduce your risk of these types of cancer. Dr.

But aren't there a lot of healthy people out there or non-obese people that also get cancer?

Absolutely, because there's a lot of different things that go on and that's what I spend the first half of the book talking about is how the sort of cancers develop. So it's not just about obesity, just like you can smoke forever and not get lung cancer, but it raises your risk.

So what are the other factors? If you're say you're there's people out there that are super healthy, they're working out, they're eating well, but then they get cancer. They're under 15% body fat, 12% body fat. What are those other factors of people getting cancer? Main factors?

Yeah, the rest of it we actually know very little about. So we need to know more about those because certain things, so smoking and diets are probably your biggest factors. And then there's a whole, there's like a hundred different other risk factors for cancer. These are the other carcinogens that we talked about. but also things such as, you know, background radiation and sun exposure, you know, like if you get too much sun, for example. So there's all sorts of other things and genetics plays a role. But one of the big mistakes I think we made is that we focus so much on the genetics part of it, thinking that, well, this is sort of a random mutation that causes cancer, not sort of which puts the onus on sort of this random luck sort of idea that it's just bad luck.

My parents had this, my grandparents had this gene, so I have this. I'm going to get cancer.

Yeah, exactly. And some people think that that's sort of a death sentence. Like if you take BRCA, which is a certain type of gene, for example. So this is the gene that Angelina Jolie, for example, got diagnosed with. Her mom had cancer, I think, or, you know, an anti-cancer. So if she got tested and she had the gene. And people think, well, for sure you're going to get, you know, cancer. But it turns out that if you look at the incidence of cancer, if you have BRCA, if you have that gene in like, you know, in the 30s and 40s and 50s, that risk of breast cancer was like 30% compared to sort of like 80% in modern day America. So what's the difference? Even though you have the same genes, what's the difference between those two situations and it comes down to the lifestyle. So the point about cancer is that cancer is like a seed. So if you have the genetics, you have the propensity to develop cancer. And this seed of cancer actually exists in all of our cells. And actually not just all our cells, but in all multicellular animals have that sort of seed of cancer. So what's important then is you can't do anything about the seed. But what you can do something about is the soil, which is that if you provide a fertile sort of soil for that seed to germinate, then you are going to increase your risk of developing this cancer. And cancer is not a rare disease. I mean, it affects like one in 10 of us, one in eight of us, something like that. So it's something that we really have to think about as we live longer because it is one of these really important things.

And it sounds you know, in the next 30 to 60 years, if we don't figure out how to reverse this or solve this or, I guess, create bad soil for the seed of cancer by creating healthy habits in other ways, it seems like this is going to accelerate where it was 30%, I guess, 20, 30 years ago or 50 years ago now, and now it's 80%, I guess, it's going to be even more in 20 to 30 years, right?

Oh, absolutely. And the, the trend is very clear because if if you look at the biggest killers of Americans, it's always been heart disease and cancer. So if you go back sort of to the 70s, so 50 years ago, you look at heart disease, number one killer of Americans, that's heart attacks, strokes, that kind of thing. Cancer was a fairly distant second. But the rate of death from heart disease has been improving very, very quickly, and the rate of improvement for cancer has been improving very, very, very slowly.

Why is that?

It's because cancer is a very complex disease and the way we think about cancer, we just don't know what it is. So for such a common disease, it's a total mystery why we get this cancer. Because if you think about it, it doesn't make any sense for cancer to develop because it's actually part of us. That is, if you develop breast cancer or colon cancer, for example, that cancer cell was initially derived from our own natural cells. So why would it want to do this? That is, if you get cancer, then the cancer grows and then it kills you and it kills itself.

It kills it, yeah.

Why would this sort of thing ever develop? It doesn't make any sense. from a sort of that, that looking at it that way. But most diseases want to spread, but.

They want to stay alive. Exactly. Exactly. Like the coronavirus doesn't want to kill you necessarily. It wants to be able to spread.

To affect, infect other people. Exactly. And, and in the, in, you know, if you sort of by standard, it just kills you, you know, along the way. But that's not its primary purpose. So the point about cancer is that we have never sort of understood what this is as a disease. That is, if you look at heart disease, heart disease is caused by blockages in arteries. So we develop all kinds of things. So we develop drugs, we develop blood thinners, we develop, you know, you go in and you use a balloon to open up the artery, you develop new technologies such as imaging technologies, you develop ways to monitor patients. So because you know what causes it. Because if you don't know what causes something, is really hard to fix. Like if you have a car and all you hear is a random plank and you don't know what the clanking is from, it's really hard to fix it. Same thing with diseases. If you have a disease like COVID, for example, and you know it's a virus, well, now at least you have somewhere that you can start. That is, okay, it's a virus. Let's develop vaccine or let's develop some antiviral drug. But if you have no idea what this disease actually is, then you have nowhere to go. So that's what I talk about is how we think about cancer, the paradigm of cancer as a disease, what causes it. You have to first understand what it is. And that's been the real mystery, the medical mystery is what is cancer? And the way we look at cancer has changed significantly over the last 10 years. And most people don't even understand that. So it's a very interesting story from that standpoint.

Yeah, it's interesting you mentioned, you know, the, the heart disease. I saw Dr. Steven Gundry endorsed the Back of youf Cancer Code Book and he's been on my show a few times and he's a guy who did 10,000 heart surgeries and realized that like the things that he was doing on the surface level to create temporary relief, people were coming back in because they weren't solving the root problem, which was a lot of it around diet and lifestyle. And that's what I'm hearing you say is that diet is a massive contributor to cultivating the seed of cancer to grow and flourish with the wrong types of diet. Is it possible in your mind to reverse cancer by the right diet and by fasting, which is something you talk about a lot?

Oh, yeah. Because the thing is that if you like once you have the cancer, it's really hard because that's sort of like, you know, if you if you don't change the oil in your car, then your car breaks down, then you say, oh, I'm going to start changing the oil. I'm like, well, yeah, that's good, but you need a lot more than that. It's the same thing. Once you actually develop the cancer, then it's really hard to fix from a diet standpoint. You really need the drugs that we've spent millions and billions of dollars developing over these last 30 years. But in terms of preventing cancer, there's actually no reason why you couldn't, because you can look at people people who live in a traditional society, for example. So you can take a look at, say, the Innu or the American Indians sort of before they became westernized. Or you can look at the African people before they were sort of assimilated into a Western culture. And interestingly, those peoples were actually considered, some of them were considered immune to cancer. There was so on cancer, that they thought that the Inuit, for example, or what used to be called the Eskimos, actually could not get cancer. So the university, Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, they used to send an expedition up to the Arctic Circle every year to study why these Inuit couldn't get cancer. Of course, as they became westernized and started eating, you know, sugar and white flour, then they started getting all the same cancers that we in Africa, for example, this fellow by the name of Denis Burkitt, who is a sort of missionary and doctor, when he got down there, he's like, wow. He was like, look at the difference. The people who live traditionally in Africa get no cancer, no colon cancer. But the minute they transition to a Western style civilization with their foods, with their you know, the whole thing, they actually start to get cancer. You don't find cancer when that. So it was called actually a disease of civilization. So all of these diseases, obesity, diabetes, and cancer, were not found in people living traditionally. So the point is, not that, you know, one is that they didn't live as long, but the point is that if you can find and understand what makes it protective from them. Why this soil sort of soil, like we all have to seed, but the soil was different. What it is about that, if we can understand that, then you can reduce your risk substantially to the point where your risk is very low. Again, as an example, if you take a Japanese or Chinese woman from Japan or from Shanghai and you move them to San Francisco, go within a couple of generations, the risk of breast cancer approximately tripled.

Crazy.

So it's crazy. Exactly. But that's great hope because you can.

Know the root of it, then you can go back to a different way of living.

Exactly. Because if you can, and remember Shanghai and Japan and so on, they're, you know, modern societies. So if you can understand what it is about the diet, about the lifestyle that's so important. You could actually take that woman in San Francisco and reduce her risk of breast cancer by a third. So that's very, very powerful knowledge. Dr.

So, what would you say are the five foods we must eliminate to support us in preventing cancer? What are those five key things that you're like, and if you can get rid of as much of this as possible, it's going to really support support your chances?

Yeah, I think that's a good question. And it's sort of sugar is probably one of the very, very important things that we really need to lower because that really supports it. And it gets to how cancer develops. A lot of the refined foods and people talk, and the most that we eat, like the one thing we eat more than anything else tends to be refined carbohydrates. So, you know, bread and that kind of thing. That's probably the most important thing is the sugar and refined grains. Refined anything is probably bad for you. So, you know, even if you're not talking about carbohydrates, but refined, say, oils, you should eat natural oils. Like eat, eat foods that are sort of in the natural state and refined meats like, you know, eating bologna, for example. People talk about meat all the time. It's like, There's a big difference between bologna and grass finished beef sort of thing. There's a huge difference because one is jam-packed full of chemicals and other crap and one is just beef, right? And people have been eating beef for thousands of years. So those are fine foods, so refined carb, but also refined fats and refined proteins. Probably those play a decent role, although the evidence is low. lower. And then the other thing that is really important, the fifth thing that's probably very important, is likely the frequency that we eat. That is, eating all the time provides that sort of fertile soil. So to understand why this is, you have to get back to sort of how cancer develops. So you have to understand that cancer almost develops, evolves, almost as a separate species from us. So when you have a breast cancer cell, for example, it originated from a normal breast cell, but after it evolves, it grows or it doesn't grow depending on growth factors. And it's almost a separate species from us. That is, it will grow and it won't. The normal breast cell or a normal lung cell, they will do everything to, you know, play on the team, right? So they're always supporting the body, your part, your team player. Those cancer cells are not team players. Basically, they're out for themselves. They want to attack the enemy.

The enemy coming to attack you.

That's right. It's like the guy who's just trying to pad his stats. It's like, you, should have passed. It's like, yeah, yeah. But that's the point that this cancer cell now is only interested in its own survival, that is, it will grow and it will grow at the expense of its neighbors. So it will keep growing and it will destroy everything around it. So it will move around, for example, so a breast cancer cell will move around the body. And that's not for the good of the whole body, right? It's for the good of itself. It's trying to spread itself around. So you got to realize that the cancer cell responds as a foreign organism. And it sounds very strange to say, okay, we have this for an organism, almost like an infection in us. But that's actually how our body sees that cancer. That is, our immune system actually detects, it's a very powerful, you know, it kills stuff, but it's very powerful. So it has to be reined in because you don't want it destroying, you know, normal parts of the body. So it recognizes certain cells as foreign and certain cells as self, and cancers are actually innately seen as foreign cells. It is a foreign invader almost that has evolved from us. But during the development of this cancer, it will grow or not grow depending on growth signals. Our body has certain nutrient sensors. Nutrient sensors tells our body when food is available. When you eat, certain hormones like insulin and mTOR will go up. That tells our body that food is available, we should grow, right? Because you don't want your cells to grow when there's no food, right? It's just natural. If there's no food, you got to get rid of some of those extraneous cells. So if you have, if you're eating all the time and you're always activating these nutrient sensors, you're actually telling your body, grow, grow, grow, grow. So if you eat six, eight times a day, You're telling your body, your cells in your body, grow, grow, grow, grow, grow. If you eat fewer times, like three times a day or you do intermittent fasting, if you don't eat at all, what you're going to do is shut down those growth signals and this cancer will have a more difficult time to grow. If you grow breast cancer cells in the lab, for example, you can't do it without insulin. It will actually wither up and die. Therefore, if if you know that, then you can say, well, if I, and that's one of the secret.

Insulin comes from eating any food or is this only sugar?

Mostly it's carbohydrates and protein. So, you know, but the nutrient sensors come from different foods. So different foods will activate different nutrient sensors. But the point is that if you don't eat, like fasting, for example, one is you're going to lower your insulin levels, which will lower the growth, overall growth signaling in our body, which is a good thing for adults. And adults' growth is not good. Generally, you'd stay the same size. You don't want to be growing too much because the high growth environment, of course, lets the cancer sort of grow out of control. And that was the secret to why vitamins, for example, was not a good thing because it's basically growth. It supports growth of cells. And what they found in a lot of studies was when they gave people these vitamin supplements, they actually got more cancer. They didn't get less cancer. They got more cancer. So in fact, it's just like if you spray spread fertilizer on an empty field, you want the grass to grow, but what grows are a bunch of weeds because you've put down all this growth signaling stuff. So therefore all you get is the weeds. Same in the body.

So are supplements and vitamins bad for us then?

There's no evidence that it's really bad for you. When you give high doses in these studies, you do get certain ones, so folic acid for example, and beta-carotene which is a precursor to vitamin A. And those two studies, there is actually a suggestion that you actually get more from them because in our current situation in North America, most of us are not vitamin deficient. Most of us actually have too much. You actually want to slow down the growth. Really? And this is why obesity and type 2 diabetes are so intimately linked with cancer is because both conditions are conditions where we have too much insulin in our body.

So we want to lower insulin overall because insulin is is one of the main causes of the fertilizer for cancer to potentially grow.

Exactly. And there's several ways to do that. One is to change either the foods that you eat, and that is the sugar, for example, the refined carbohydrates that make up the bulk of our diet. And the other thing is to change the frequency with which you eat because you can affect both things. So just like if you're, for example, to pay you know, $10 and you pay it every day, it adds up quickly, right? If you have a coffee every day and it's like, you know, five or seven bucks at Starbucks every day, every day, every day, it adds up. So just like that, it's not just the amount that you're paying, which is not much, but it's the frequency, right? Same thing with the foods. It's not just the amount that you eat or what it is that you eat, it's how often you eat it. So if you're eating now six, eight times a day, well, that's a lot worse if you ate once a day. Right? That's just basic math. Like, you can't get around that. And the problem is, of course, that if you look at how people eat today compared to sort of 1970, it's very different. So in 1970, people ate three times a day, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. No snacks. Nobody ate snacks back then.

Snack culture, like snacking all day.

Exactly. And people say it's good for you. People say, oh, you should eat multiple times in the day, six times a day, it's good for you. But nobody in the history of humanity has done that before because we had work to do, right? It's not like your great grandparents, you know, working in the factory, they're taking off every two hours to make themselves a little, you know, ham sandwich or something, right? It was like, there's work to do. You eat when you have time. So, you know, in the 70s, it's funny because I always say you have breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and that If you wanted an after-school snack, your mom said, no, you're going to ruin your dinner. And if you wanted a bedtime snack, she would have said, no, you should have ate more at dinner. Right? You should have finished your meal. Exactly. And that was the point. And nobody ate not a lot of desserts and all that. Nowadays, of course, when you look at the studies, people are eating five, six times a day. You even look at schools. It's like, oh, they're going to have breakfast. Then they're going to have a mid-morning snack, then they're going to have lunch, then they're going to have an after-school snack, then they're going to eat dinner. And then if they play soccer, in.

Between the half of soccer, parents think that you need to feed them like cookies. It's like, hey.

When I'm eating, I'm storing.

I'm not using calories.

Is that right? Every time I eat down, I'm not burning body fat. You're not burning body fat because you're putting in sugar, for example. and that sugar is going to signal that, hey, sugar is coming in, use the sugar that's coming in.

Don't burn anything off my body.

Yeah, exactly.

Keep all that stored fat, keep it. Just keep piling it on, right?

Exactly. So the only way that you can actually use the body fat is to let the insulin fall and not eat. So if you are now eating constantly, so the minute you get up, somebody tells you, oh, you have to eat, you can't skip breakfast, blah, blah, blah. And then you have to snack all day long. So now if you look at studies, the average duration of how long people eat for is about 14 hours and 45 minutes. That's the average. So if you start eating at 8:00 a.m., you don't stop till 10:45 p.m. That's on average. That's the average.

14 hours, you mean a 14-hour span of eating from from the start to finish, right? You may not be eating every moment, but you're eating every few hours within 14 hour window.

It takes about four hours for you to switch over into the fasted state. So the point is that before where you'd eat breakfast, lunch, dinner, and by six o'clock you're done, you know, boom, you're, you know, now you shift into using those calories and your mom would you say, oh, you need time to digest, right? That's what she sort of said. But the point was that you need to start using those calories that you stored up during your meal times. And that was the secret, that they could stay relatively slim. Now, if you're eating constantly, then you never give your body a chance to switch over into that fasted state and start using those calories. The problem, of course, is that insulin stays high, which tends to keep your body storing calories. So, the high insulin, for example, blocks fat burning. You can't burn your fat. stores because your body is like, the instructions that I'm getting is to store energy, not use energy. I want to keep my stored energy for when there's a time that there's no food. The problem, of course, is that there's never a time there's no food, right? Every day is the same thing, right? 14 hours of eating and no time of not eating. And that's the point. So now if you understand the problem, you can say, well, how am I going to change this? well, it's simple. Increase the amount of time that you're not eating. And that's all intermittent fasting is. If you eat one meal a day, for example, or if you within an eight-hour window or a four-hour window or whatever, what you're doing is you're simply allowing your body to use the calories that have been stored, which is body fat predominantly, but that is precisely the reason you carry body fat. Like that body fat is not there for looks. is there for you to use, right? And that's the whole point. What's so bad about using it? If you don't eat, you're gonna burn it. Well, so again, go back to the 70s and everybody says, oh, you can't fast, you can't fast. Well, you know, they're eating breakfast, lunch, dinner. And if you're a naughty boy, you got sent to bed without dinner. So in the town, you went from 12 o'clock to 8 a.m., 20 hours. You look good the next day. you're like a queen.

You got a six-pack it's burning fat.

Exactly. And nobody died. Nothing bad happens, right? There was nothing wrong with that. And hopefully you learned your lesson, too. Right? And. And that's the whole point, is that there's nothing wrong. It's a natural part of our human physiology. If we couldn't survive without eating, like, we would not be here today, because when we were cavemen and cave women. They didn't have food every day. Exactly. They might be a stretch of three, four, five days where there was no food and therefore they had to survive on their own body fat, which they did. And that was the whole point. So let's let our body use it because that's the most natural thing to do.

What's the process for you, your day-to-day life? Do you eat one meal a day, two meals a day. Do you fast every month for a day? Are you always doing intermittent fasting? Is there a downside to intermittent fasting? What's your process?

Yeah, I usually do a lot of sort of. I rarely eat breakfast, and I'll tell you that it didn't come. I mean, I started this in medical school, and that was mostly because I really wanted to just roll out of bed and go, like, you know, I'd wake up literally, like, five minutes. before I left the store. I brushed my teeth, put on some clothes and rolled out the door. It was just the way I was, right? And so I don't eat breakfast now because again, people say you have to eat breakfast, you have to eat, but there's actually nothing magical about breakfast. If you don't eat breakfast, what's going to happen? Well, my body, which is now burning fat because I've had eight hours of sleep, it's gone into sort of fat burning mode. because that's the storage form of calories or it's burning sugar. It's just going to keep doing it, right? There's nothing wrong with it. So a lot of times I try and confine myself to sort of an eating window of sort of six to eight hours. And then once in a while when I get very busy, I will do a 24-hour fast, which is a one meal a day. And then every so often I'll do a longer fast. And the longer fasts are actually not as bad as you might think, but they really disrupt your schedule sort of socially. It's, it's a tough one because a lot of our socialization happens at meals. So I often have dinner with my family, for example, and doing those longer fasts is really, really disruptive to that sort of thing, which is why when you look at traditional societies, like if you look at, say, you know, during major religions, for example, there will be a period of fasting that's sort of universal.

So Everyone's doing it, so no one's.

Feeling stressed when they smell the food. Exactly. Exactly. So if it's like Good Friday or during Lent or during Ramadan for Muslims or during Yom Kippur for Jews or whatever, everybody's fasting. So it's actually terrifically easy because you're not disrupting the sort of social fabric of your life there. Whereas nowadays, if you fast, and I've done this, it's just really hard to do. It's not physically, it's not hard, but it's hard. And I do it mostly, you know, when I, when I've gained a bit of weight, usually after the holidays and after a vacation, I will sort of schedule a longer fast right after because I know that I can lose that weight very quickly. But that means I can enjoy myself. Like a couple years ago, I went on a cruise and really ate too much. That's a lot. I had a lot. and I knew it and I could feel it and my pants were tight and stuff. So I did sort of a three or four day fast. And I'll tell you, by the next week, I was back to my normal weight. Well, that's great because a week and, but I got to enjoy the whole week prior where I really didn't look at what I was eating or how often I was eating or anything. I was like, this is my vacation. I'm doing this. But at the same time, I know, hey, I've got this next, you know, after this week, the week after, you know, very little to eat and, and, and, and, and it It gives you a great tool to use if you need it, right? Yeah.

It's almost like either every day, don't indulge and balance and create a schedule where you're only eating in a certain window of time, whether it be four, six, eight hours, which I'm hearing is kind of the, which would be a great standard to have between four and eight hours of a feeding time, is that right? Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, if you want to lose weight, you can do very well, of course. with a sort of standard 70s style sort of 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. which in a 14 hour fast every single night. Remember, they're doing 12 to 14 hours a day every single night without even thinking about it. Like, that's a secret because they don't even think about that. That's just a period of time that they're not eating, right? But now, of course, the traditions are different. You can eat anywhere you want. You can eat in the theater. You can eat at your desk. speaking in a car, like in the 70s, stuff like that didn't exist. You didn't eat in a meeting in a boardroom, for example. Now you go to a meeting in a boardroom when there's food everywhere. Donuts, donuts and cookies, right? Somebody's ordered a plate of bagels or something like that, right? It's like, well, why? We're having a meeting here, right? So that's the thing. So you could do very well with that kind of, you know, eight hour eating window, 10 hour eating window. You can do very with it. But if you're not doing well, then you can extend it. And that's the beauty of it. You could extend it as much as you want. Right? So if you think about fasting, you could go three days, you could go five days, you could go 30 days. People do that all the time. But-- no food. No food, yeah. So if you think about fasting, so the amount of energy that you need, so a pound of fat has that's 3500 calories roughly. If you need about 1800 calories, so that's for like a regular person, not like an athlete or somebody who's working out a lot. It takes about half a pound of fat per day. So if you're dealing with a lot of obese people, like 100 pounds overweight, you could go 200 days, you know, if you want to lose 100 pounds, you could go 200 days without eating before you get and survive and survive.

And be okay.

Exactly. Be perfectly fine because this is a very efficient fat is an efficient store of calories. Right? It's very efficient. That's why we developed it. It's to keep you alive when there's no food around. Exactly.

So use it. Does it affect your digestive system? Does it mess with your metabolism if you don't eat after a certain amount of time? And what happens when you start eating again? Does that affect your, again, your stomach, your intestines, your choline, your metabolism, what's affected there?

And this is the interesting part is that everybody thinks that fasting is like the worst thing you could do. When you actually look at the science of what happens during fasting, it's actually one of the best things you can do for yourself from both a mental standpoint and a physiologic standpoint. Assuming of course you're not malnourished, right? I mean, I'm assuming if you're the average American who's, you know, 10, 20, 30 pounds overweight, then this is something that actually has a lot of benefits. So there's a lot of sort of myths around it. One is that you're going to burn a lot of muscle. And the truth is that you don't. I mean, when you, you know, if your body, your body stores energy as body fat. So people say, oh, you're going to burn muscle. It's like, well, you've got to think that our body is so stupid that it stores energy as fat. But the minute you need it, it starts burning muscle, right? Like, why would our body be so stupid? And if it were so stupid, how did we survive? Right? And it's like, you know, if you save firewood all winter for the winter, and then as soon as it gets cold, you chop up your sofa and throw it into the fire. It's like, why would you be so stupid? Right? Our body's just the same. It's not that. So, you know, and I know, and everybody knows that the way that you build muscle is that you exercise, right? So if you have, you know, lift heavy weights, then your muscles become stronger. It doesn't become stronger because you eat. Right? That snake does nothing for building muscle. Like, otherwise we'd be, you know, the strongest nation on Earth, right? But we're not. We're the fattest nation on Earth. So that's the whole problem, right? I mean, you're confusing two completely different things. There is a point during fasting where there is a little bit of protein breakdown, and that's where people get very confused and say, well, you're burning muscle, but you're not. Protein is not the same as muscle. So our body has all kinds of protein, including all the connective tissue, like the skin and stuff that holds stuff in place. And some of that is often burned off. So for example, when you look at those shows where people get surgery and they lose 150 pounds, they get all this flappy skin. That's not excess fat, that's excess protein. So that's, you know, it's functional tissue that you've never used up. So we actually see very little of that problem when people fast because there's a small period of time where they're actually using up the protein. Your body will maintain its musculature based on what exercise and stuff you're using. So another big myth, so muscle burning is one thing. The other big, big myth is people talk about as starvation mode or metabolic rate. So metabolic rate is the amount of energy that your body uses in a day, the number of calories you burn in a day. And this is what we see if you simply Cut calories. So this is a standard medical advice. Cut 500 calories a day and you'll lose a pound of fat a week. What happens, of course, is that you cut 500 calories a day and then your body quickly reduces the amount of calories it uses by about 500 calories. So now you're actually not losing any weight. That's what happens all the time.

Why does it stop burning those calories?

Well, it stops burning calories by reducing its metabolic rate. So the metabolic rate is the energy that your body uses to say generate body heat, your liver, your kidney, your heart, and so on. We've known this for 100 years that if you simply restrict the number of calories but keep the foods very similar, what happens is that your body is going to start using less. So because it doesn't like running a deficit, right? It's just like if you normally make $100,000 a year and you spend $100,000 $10,000 a year. Now you make $50,000, you don't keep spending $100, right? It's, it's, you're gonna, you're gonna get thrown into jail. So you reduce your expenditure same as a body. So it's getting less. So it's going to use less. And that's the natural reaction is, it's, it's important because it's a survival response.

It cannot do anything different. So it's almost like, so it's almost like you need to be extreme in your, Yeah. In order for it to burn and kill off these cells that might be harmful to you, but if you just do a little bit, I'm gonna eat a little bit less today. It's not gonna be that much.

It doesn't work. And people assume that if you go to zero, which is fasting, say you fast for a full day, you have zero calories, you don't die, right? Because what happens is completely different. Now you've lowered your insulin, so you're changing the hormonal profile of the body. body. And as you do that, you're now switching fuel sources. So instead of using food as your fuel, you're switching it into body fat, just like those hybrid cars where you go from gas to electric, right? So it's using food and then boom, it goes, okay, I have no food coming in. I need to switch over now into body fat. And then it goes, whoa, I have like 500,000 calories of body fat here. So why do I need to cut it down? And the point is that it doesn't because assuming if you have no body fat, of course it's a problem. But for people who have adequate stores of body fat, which is most of us, and truthfully most people do it for weight loss, too much body fat, then what happens is that there's so much there, why wouldn't you use it? Because it's a fuel source. That's all it is. That's the way you have to look at the body fat. If you're eating all the time, you can never use your body fat because your insulin's here, your insulin's high, you're using food. Then you get hungry, so you eat some more, right? You have a snack, you have a low-fat muffin, you stay here. You can only burn food. All that stuff over there, those 500,000 calories of body fat are completely inaccessible for your body. So if you simply dial it down like this and say, okay, instead of 2,000 calories, I'm going to eat 1,500, but I'm going to eat 10 times a day. keeping myself here. Now you only have 1500 coming in. You can only burn 1500. You can't access that. If you go to zero, you go boom, and then your body burns the full 2000. So they did a study, for example, where they took people and fasted them for four days and measured how many calories they're using. They also measure their VO2, which, as you know, is something that it's a measure of how much cellular work your body is doing. and what they found, so they measured the metabolic rate at time zero, then they measured it at four days of zero food, and they were burning 10% more calories than they were per day than they were when they were eating. The VO2 was 10% higher. You're doing more work. Your body is actually not shutting down. It's revving itself up. And again, there's a good physiologic reason for that, and we know that when insulin goes down when you switch yourself into this sort of, you know, mode that you're burning fat, other hormones go up, including your sympathetic nervous system, which is your noradrenaline. So you're actually pumping your body up. The reason for that is sort of, again, it's a survival response. So imagine again, we're cave man and it's winter and there's no food. So if you don't eat for two days and you get weaker, you're never gonna eat again. you're gonna die because every day is gonna be harder. You're gonna circle the drain. So our body's just not that stupid, right? So what they do is that your body says, okay, there's no food coming in. Boom. I'm gonna switch you over to body fat, and then I'm gonna pump you up so that you have energy.

You go out there, you go kill that woolly mammoth.

You're focused, you're clear, you're in the zone, everything. Exactly. And that's, that's the reason that we actually pump ourselves up and in the constant the mental aspects is actually fascinating because people also say, well, I have to eat because I have to concentrate. It's like your concentration is actually much higher when you don't eat. Think about when you had a huge Thanksgiving meal. Well, were you really sharp or did you really want to just lie down on the sofa and watch some football? You don't have any sort of focus. But if you think about animals, it's the same thing. Lions, they just eat. They just lie louching around. But if you're the hungry wolf, that is a very dangerous animal because he's focused, he's ready to kill you. Same thing for us. Our level of concentration and our mental ability, mental agility, goes up significantly when we're hungry. Like if you think, oh, you're hungry for this, hungry for that, that doesn't mean you're falling down lethargic. It means you're focused. So it's interesting because there is this this book a few years ago called Unbroken, which is a biography of this fellow who went to a prisoner of war camp in World War II Japan. And he was talking about starvation and they were literally starving. They eat almost nothing for the full day. And he's talking about how his other prisoners were doing these incredible mental feats. So one guy was reading a book entirely from memory. Another guy learned all of Norwegian in a week. And he, so the guy says, this is simply the mental clarity of starvation. So it was incredible. It's like, it was so widespread, everybody was starving, and they'd see these incredible feats that nobody else in the world could do all the time, because your mental ability is ramped up to such a high degree. And then, you know, in the ancient Greece, the ancient mathematician Pythagoras, he would require his students to fast in order to come to his class because otherwise he thought they had no mental agility. And so that's what I was interested in because I figured if you could figure out the common denominators of a disease, then you had a shot at pulling the bow back and sending a single arrow through multiple diseases. Now, I looked at angiogenesis, which is how the body grows blood vessels. That's my area as one of those common denominators and.