Ditch the Meds with Lifestyle Changes, with Dr. Robert Lufkin

Deprescribing is something I wasn't familiar with. The usual thing is when people go on a prescription, especially for these chronic diseases, they're given a pill. The expectation is that you go on it for life. And these lifestyle changes can actually change the need for prescription medicines to the point that in some cases, like in my case, I was able to go off them.

If you want to live like you matter, ditch the pills, look great, and feel Freaking amazing. You're in the right place. I'm Dr. Wendy Trubo.

And I'm Dr. Ed Levitan. Welcome to the Feel Freaking Amazing podcast.

Where we empower you to live a vibrant and healthy life by optimizing your structural, chemical, emotional, social, and spiritual lives.

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Hello and welcome to the Feel Freaking Amazing podcast. I'm Wendy Trubo. This is Ed Levitan. I said to him before the show started that it was like a rare animal sighting in the wild that we have Ed with us today, so enjoy the ride. We have an amazing guest today. We have Robert Lovekin, M.D. he's a physician medical school professor at UCLA and USC and he focuses on the applied science of health, longevity, and consciousness. He's the author of over 200 peer reviewed scientific papers and 14 books that are available in six languages. And after reversing his own chronic disease and transforming his life, he's making it his mission to help others do the same. So, Robert, welcome. We love you to pieces. He's one of our colleagues and friends and we're so happy to have you on the show. Thanks for coming on.

Oh, thanks, Wendy and I. I love you guys. I'm a huge fan. I love what you're doing. It's an inspiration and, and it's truly an honor and a pleasure to be on the show today. I'm so excited.

Well, let's dive in. I know you focus a lot on obesity and artificial sweeteners, so. So I know you referenced something called the obesity lie. So can you talk about what is that? Like, what is that where to come from and what do we do about it?

Well, let me say, first of all, I'm not a medical conspiracy theorist or anything. I'm really mainstream medicine. I spent my whole career in a medical school. I do research, I get money from drug companies. I do all the things that the establishment does. And one other thing, I'm going to be critical of the medical care system, but I want to go on record in saying that I think the western health care system is, you know, unequaled for the benefits it's given for mankind really in the 20th century. Public health, infectious diseases, many, many things Western medicine is good for. If I, if I get a renal stone, a calculus, or if I, if I get hit by a bus outside and I need a blood transfusion and a splenectomy, I may think about lifestyle and different things like that, which may help me recover. But what will save my life is, you know, the western medicine.

So wait, we got to talk about this because you're really highlighting something that I say to patients, and I'm assuming you say to patients all the time, which is let's use the right tool for the problem. So if you need emergency care, obstetric care, surgery, if you have a life threatening thing, yeah, you don't want to be in the functional medicine world. You want to be in the traditional system. But then if you want to live long, be well and thrive, then you want to go outside the system because the system is designed for reactive care and we're looking for proactive, feel, freaking amazing care. So I think you're really highlighting the use the right tool, not the wrong tool.

Totally. Yeah. And in the 21st century, 80% of healthcare is on what are called chronic diseases that don't necessarily respond to the same pills and surgery that are applied to the acute conditions that you mentioned. And that's, that's what, that's what I'm focusing on. But the obesity is, you know, it's exploding, the obesity epidemic. There are more obese people, even corrected for population than there ever have been in history. And in fact, in the United States, I think most people are either overweight or obese now. And it's, you know, and this has really only happened in the last about 30 years. So it's, it's a, it's a problem. And then obesity, of course, is a driver, a risk factor for all the other chronic diseases that, that we'll talk about, probably. But the obesity lie. One thing that struck me about obesity is what's. If you go to my institutions, my medical schools or other, other school, other health organizations, if I'm obese, I will be given the recommendations that to exercise more and eat less and that just eat less because a calorie is just a calorie. And I don't think that's right. I think it's getting it, it's wrong, it's obviously not working for people. Exercise has many, many health benefits, but weight loss is not one of them. Just because if you look at the math, doing the calories the number of calories you burn on a marathon versus eating a muffin, it's difficult to burn those calories. And secondly, exercising increases one's appetite, so it actually makes it worse. And then just the idea that a calorie is a calorie and it's just a matter of eating less food overlooks the important concept that our body looks at macronutrients very differently. And so that a fat and protein calorie, which is essential for life is very different from a carbohydrate calorie, which is non essential for life and also spikes insulin, which is the fat storage hormone. So rather than just looking at, you know, I just need to eat fewer things, I can actually eat the same number of calories, but if I, if I shift the types of food I eat, I can actually lose weight. And that, that can help many people on their obesity challenges.

In the house I grew up in, my mom still had her wedding gown. I don't know why she had that. I mean, it was just like long divorce. I don't know why she had her wedding gown. But one time I was a teenager and I was like, oh, I'm going to try on your wedding gown. Because, you know, I was a teenager apparently, and so I couldn't get into, was too small and I was a little bit bigger than I am now. I was sort of a, not round, but I was healthy, shall we say. And I couldn't fit into her wedding dress. And so we started to talk about how people are actually bigger now than they were even, you know, when she got married 50 years ago, 55 years ago. And, and I've even seen it, you know, so this is where it comes back to toxins, that these toxins sit in your fat and your bones and your brain and your organs and if you can't get rid of them, you can't get rid of your fat. So you're now like, it isn't a calorie in, calorie out issue. It's, it's an exposure, lifestyle, stress, adrenal gut, liver dysfunction issue.

Yeah, absolutely. And there are, you know, many obesogens that are drivers of obesity, including, you know, toxins that, that you guys talk book and your work that, you know, even controlling what we eat isn't always enough if there, if there are toxins in our lives and other factors, even things like stress or sleep abnormalities or other things that can drive obesity above and beyond just what we put in our mouth. So it's very complex.

I'm curious about food I'm sorry. Feel free to jump in at any time. If a married man has an opinion, how does he want to express? Feel free to jump in. So you mentioned, you know, you could simply switch your calories to. Same calories, different input. What are you referring to when you say that? Are you saying like 10 pounds of tomatoes and, and kale instead of, you know, a pound of meat? Like what, what do you, what do you really mean by that?

Yeah, well, like as an example, if you take a 140 calories with two hard boiled, eg, you, you also, you can have it as two hard boiled eggs which are largely fat and protein, or you can have 140 calories which is just a handful of potato chips. Most people will, when they eat the potato chips, like me, I'm unable to stop and will consume the whole bag. But most people when they eat two eggs, will stop at two eggs and they won't necessarily consume the whole carton of hard boiled eggs because you have less of an urge to eat, eat more. I mean the carbohydrates drive a lot of satiety factors and they make us eat more. Plus by driving insulin, the energy that we consume is stored as fat, so it's not available for our metabolism. So it's actually as if we, we ate less. Whereas when we consume the fat and protein in the eggs, most of that energy is available from metabolism. In other words, it's not stored as fat typically.

So are you, is your general recommendation to do like a ketogenic diet or which is like no next to no carbs or is it just to really moderate the carbs and focus on or.

The type of carb even not keto, but, but not potato chip, but just a potato or a sweet potato or.

Yeah, I mean it's, it's all a matter of degrees. And you know, I recognize that everybody's different and we all, you know, we all have different things. What worked for me, I think way to start is I didn't change what I ate, I just changed when I ate. So instead of eating all day long and all night long, snacking between meals and many small meals, I stopped eating after dinner and stopped eating between meal snacks. And that improves one's health, improves their insulin resistance, improves your glucose sensitivity. Then I began, you know, I even experimented with eliminating breakfast and lunch. And I, you know, sometimes I just have one meal a day with my kids when they get home from school, you know, and have a dinner meal. So that intermittent fasting works for many people and it has Beneficial metabolic effects by turning down MTOR and turning on autophagy as well. Then as far as to your point, what you asked, as far as actually what I eat carbohydrates because they drive insulin and they, you know, they drive the factors that drive insulin resistance and inflammation. For me I, I cut out carbs, at least refined carbohydrates which are sugars and starches. And for me that works well. I, I feel great when I do it. My mind is much clearer. I don't have brain fog and, and my hemoglobin A1C markers dropped, which was. One of the conditions that I had was pre diabetes with a high A1C. So avoiding carbs helped reverse that. And then I avoid other types of food. Two other things I avoid are industrial seed oils which are processed oils that have pro. Inflammatory effect and they're, they're somewhat controversial because the American Heart association was funded by the Procter and Gamble that, that when they started Crisco and they still recommend seed oils and canola oil on, on their website as a heart healthy option. But I, I disagree with that and avoid seed oils in my diet. And then the last thing I do is, and this was a challenge, but I avoid grains also. I love baked goods. But for me the evidence is pretty strong. I don't have gluten, I don't have a gluten allergy, I don't have celiac disease. But many experts and there's evidence showing that a large percentage of people have allergies, low grade allergies to proteins in grains. And that can drive inflammation and, and along with the weed killer glyphosate that's in there.

He said the magic word so far in this talk. I gotta jump on that.

Yes. Yeah. Well, you gotta hit some toxins here. Yeah. For that reason I avoid greens too.

We sat in a lecture, we saw Fasano and Perlmutter in a lecture. This has to be 15 years ago because I was in some various stage of pregnant or nursing. I remember that it, I was pregnant nursing for 12 years. So like who just pick a time. So basically I remember. So it was just hysterical because Perlmutter's a neurologist and Fasano is a gastroenterologist. And Fasano was talking all about brain health and Perlmutter was talking all about gut health. So it was just sort of this ironic crossover. But I remember one of them talking very clearly about that when you eat gluten, whether or not you have gluten sensitivity, when you eat Gluten, if you don't have the genes, you open up your tight junctions in the gut for 15 minutes every time you eat gluten. And if you have a gluten sensitivity, meaning you have one of the genes for promoting celiac DQ2 or DQ8, when you eat gluten, you open up your tight junctions for four hours. So you're right. Right. Like, even without. And 40% of the population has one or two of the genes, so. But even without the genes, if you eat gluten, you're opening up your tight junctions and exposing your inside world to the outside world, which means you're in a pro inflammatory state because you've got leaky gut right there. So, yeah, if you love your baked goods and you eat them. Morning. You know what you have for breakfast? Bagel. What'd you have for dinner? Pasta with chicken and broccoli. Right. Like this sort of standard meal. So. And then you layer on the glyphosate and you're really nailed. So you're right. I mean, you. It is a pro inflammatory state. Did you get the app Seed Oil Scout, which allows you to search for restaurants that don't use seed oils?

I'm a fan of Seed Oil Scout. I follow them on Twitter. And I'm looking. I found a restaurant that uses a tallow fryer near me where I live, and I'm gonna go try them out. And, you know, I think that just by doing that movement, you know, get. Get the fast food companies to switch their fryers back to tallow, you know, like. Like they did like they originally had before they switched to seed oils in the. What, in the 90s, I guess in itself, I think could be a big benefit for people.

We use duck fat. We. We. I was just saying to our oldest, she said, oh, I'm going to the store. Do we need anything from the store we buy our ducks at? I'm like, I don't know. Let me see if we need duck. So I looked in the freezer this morning. We have tons of duck. I want to make a duck. But when you make duck, it has all this fat, and so we collect it and then filter it just because it has a little bit of particulate matter from cooking. And then we use it to cook food. So we actually render our own duck fat, which is nice. It's. It's kind of cool, you know, it's.

Like, okay, good old days.

Yeah, I haven't made dechiel. But you talk about in your book Changing Subjects, you talk about deprescribing what is that?

Yeah, deprescribing is something I wasn't familiar with. The usual thing is when people go on a prescription, especially for these chronic diseases, they're given a pill. The expectation is that you go on it for life and there aren't any options of getting off of it. So what's happening is with these, these dramatic lifestyle changes that I talk about in the book and that, that helped me so much and that others are doing as well, these lifestyle changes can actually change the need for prescription medicines to the point that in some cases, like in my case, I was able to go off them and certainly not recommending anyone change their prescriptions without involving their healthcare provider. But this is done in concert with the health care provider as you go through the lifestyle changes. And it's not unusual for deprescribing to occur with a lot of things that we can do. So a lot of these pills can be replaced by just removing toxins or having an appropriate lifestyle.

So don't try this at home. That's doctor speak for don't try this at home. Try it with your functional medicine doctor.

So, Robert, are you still teaching at medical school?

Yeah, I haven't. I have an appointment at usc, which is my primary appointment now in, in radiology, which is medical imaging. But I, you know, I. I'm mainly. Now I'm focused on kind of reaching out to regular people and getting the message out through, you know, social media, books and different things like that.

What is the reset when you talk to professors and medical students? What is the reception to this? Because when I. When we went through medical school in.

The dark ages, there was electricity.

Dark ages when they were still using ether, right?

Yep, yep.

There was just no reception to anything like this. This is, this was complete nonsense, basically. Put it lightly.

You know, there's still a lot of. A lot of resistance. You know, the calorie lie, the obesity just eat less and exercise more. The Diabetes association still posts, you know, high sugar recipes on their website, and they say just cover it with insulin. You know, while they're. One of their biggest sponsors is DaVita, which makes dialysis units. And the number one cost of needing a dialysis unit is. Is of course type 2 diabetes, which in my opinion is made worse by eating sugar, even if you cover it with insulin.

I'm not sure that's just your opinion. Just, just to be clear, just.

Yeah, no, I mean, many people disag. And there's a lot of different opinions. You asked about medical school, my colleagues, I Think intelligent people can disagree on, can agree to disagree. And I just hope that everyone is open minded and they take a look at the evidence. And to be clear, this is not my research. It's not something I discovered basically in the book. It's heavily illustrated with pictures and stuff, so it's accessible to lay people. But it's also heavily referenced with about 400 references which are primarily primary, primary citations of the original controlled studies. So if you want to dive deeply and look at the evidence, you'll see the evidence at least. That changed my mind in the book. And you can show it to your physician if that helps, if they're open minded about it. But that's the nature of medicine and science as we all know that it's constantly changing and we just have to be, have to be open minded to new ideas. And what I'm seeing is people aren't open minded as they could be. And a lot of these ideas I think are not getting out and harm is being done to patients as a result of that.

We're certainly grateful that you're part of that message because there's just not enough people to bring that message out. Super grateful to you to help him bring that out.

Oh, thanks. Yeah, I mean, I think it, people ask me, you know, are you depressed writing this book? You know, it's like actually I'm, I'm, I'm hopeful and inspired because I think it's a, it's a new era of medicine where I as a patient finally get to take control of my life. I'm the CEO of my own life. And sure, I, you know, I take, take my doctor's advice, but I also realize that for most of these chronic diseases, the most powerful medicine that I will ever get access to is lifestyle. And that's something that's in my control. A doctor won't make me healthy. A doctor will just make me less sick. If I want to be healthy, I have to do it myself. And the way I do it, with lifestyle. And by lifestyle I mean broadly cleaning up toxins also and the whole thing. But that's lifestyle is empowering. It gives me agency. And I wake up every morning and I can think, wow, this is a new day. I'm going to, you know, clean up my environment. I'm going to decide what I eat, I'm going to decide when I exercise, when I sleep, and I'm going to make my health better. And that, that to me is good news.

So I have a question, because when someone's just starting this journey what are the health assessments that you're recommending and why do you recommend them?

Yeah, I mean, I think the, it's key to be hooked up to a good, a good healthcare provider partner. And what does that mean? Well, in my mind it means a functional medicine specialist who, who has this orientation or integrative medicine specialist. They're the broad classes like that, but who is open minded to these, these kind of things. And that, that, and that's key. And, and then it's, it's possible to. There are tests you can do for metabolic health. We talk about in the book simple things like measuring your, your waist and then there's some simple blood tests you can do for markers and your, your height and your weight and things like that, how you feel. There's a Mark Hyman's Functional Medicine Symptoms multisystem, multi symptom questionnaire.

Msq.

Yeah, yeah, we, we include that in there also that people can look at. And because it's just so many of these diseases, whether it's, you know, migraine headaches, polycystic ovary disease, irritable bowel syndrome. It just blew me away that they have common causes that are linked to, you know, the things that you and, and I and we're all talking about and that so many people are not aware of. Then they go in with a migraine and they get a pill, you know, and they, you know, or they, you know. We're missing an opportunity to help a lot of people.

So how do people find you? Because like you've got so much information. I pointed to the book because it's amazing and get it, read it. People are going to want to know more.

Oh thanks. Yeah, my, well, My website is robertlufkinmd.com and actually I have a sample chapters you could download if you want to try the book out without buying it or, and it'll be in your library as well. And I'm active on social media and those links are on my website as well also. And I have a podcast that gonna get you guys on soon.

Awesome.

Awesome. We'll put those links in the show notes for the people who are listening so they can, they can click into it. Okay. So Robert, thank you for being here. This is awesome. I'd encourage everyone to get the book, read the book, go to your site Robert Lovekin MD get the chapter, follow you on, on all the socials and, and subscribe to your podcast. What's the name of your podcast?

It's called Health Longevity Secrets.

Awesome.

All right, well, you've heard it from Robert Levkin, MD. Thank you for joining us on this episode of the Feel Freaking Amazing Podcast. And to the listeners, we hope this was inspiring, educational and empowering for you. So thanks for join. Have an amazing time. And Robert, thanks for being here.

Thanks Ed. Thanks Wendy. It's been a real pleasure.

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