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

Foreign. 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 love you guys. I'm a huge fan. I love what you're doing. It's an inspiration and it's truly an honor and a pleasure to be on this show. Show today. I'm so excited.

Well, let's dive in. Tell me like, did your mess become your message? How'd you get into this?

Yeah, well, I, well, let me say first of all, I'm, I'm not a medical conspiracy theorist or anything. I'm, I'm really mainstream medicine. I, you know, spent my whole career in a medical school. I do research, I get money from drug companies, I, you know, do do all the things that the establishment does. But, 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 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 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 the Western medicine.

We gotta 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 health care 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 what I'm focusing on. But to your question, how did I get here? I was minding my own business, being a medical school professor, and then, like so many people in this space, I came down with four chronic diseases that were very common for, like, you're just kind of underachiever.

Right. Sort of a hair. You should do a hair flip. If I came out with four.

Well, we have a criteria here.

We only accept six or above. You have to leave that.

Well, there were probably more. More coming and that' that's part of how my philosophy's changed. So I think they're all coming and we need to think about all of them now because we're all on the path to them. But anyway, I came down with four diseases and I went to my doctor and I was prescribed medicines for them. And I asked, what about lifestyle? I hear about lifestyle. They said, oh, doesn't really work. You need to be on these pills for the rest of your life. Get used to it. And I realized, you know, I had two young daughters. I realized this wasn't going to end well. So it forced me to examine my own beliefs and kind of dive deeply into, you know, some of the work that you guys are doing and others. And there's been a lot of. I realize there's been a lot of controlled studies and a lot of breakthroughs in information that I wasn't aware of. And even my colleagues that, you know, still teach things are missing something important here. And long story short, I was able to reverse these diseases with powerful tools about lifestyle. And I wanted to make this. I wanted to make this information available to everybody so that other people don't make the same mistakes that I made.

That's really cool. Did you have a question? Because I have a question.

Go for it.

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?

Yeah, the obesity is, you know, it's it's exploding the obesity epidemic. It's. 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, 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. 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. Exerc 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 typically, 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 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, I just need to eat fewer things, I can actually eat the same number of calories, but if I shift the types of food I eat, I can actually lose weight. And that can help many people on their obesity challenges.

I mean, okay, so first off, for the listeners, we found out that we both lived in the same town. I don't know how many years you lived in Framingham, but I grew up in Framingham. A total townie. And he lived in Framingham and went to high school there. So the reason I bring that up is I remember in the house I grew up in, my mom still had her wedding gown. I don't know why she had that. I mean, this was 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 I've even seen it. 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 an exposure, lifestyle stress, adrenal gut liver dysfunction issue.

Yeah, absolutely. And there are many obesogens that are drivers of obesity, including toxins that you guys talk about in 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 kale instead of, you know, a pound of meat? Like, what do you, what do you really mean by that?

Yeah, well, like as an example, if you take 140 calories with two hard boiled eggs and 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 there are.

There are drivers secrets. The whole carton of eggs.

Yeah, yeah. So actually you have, you, you have less of a, an urge to eat, eat more. I mean, the carbohydrates drive a lot of, 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 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 something?

Yeah, I mean it's, it's all a matter of degrees. And you know, I, 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, I didn't change what I ate, I just changed the, the 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 drive the factors that drive insulin resistance and inflammation. For me, I cut out carbs, at least refined carbohydrates, which are sugars and starches. And for me that works well, I feel great when I do it. My mind is much clearer. I don't have brain fog 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 somewhat controversial because the American Heart association was funded by the Procter and Gamble when they started Crisco and they still recommend seed oils and canola oil on their website as a heart healthy option. But 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 along with the weed killer glyphosate that's in there.

You said the magic word so far.

Yeah. Well, we got to hit some toxins here. Yeah.

For that reason, I avoid going for mtor.

We're going to come back to. We're definitely going to come back to mtor. But remember when we were sitting, 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 I was pregnant nursing for 12 years. So like, 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, 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 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'd you have for breakfast? Bagel. What'd you have for dinner? Pasta with chicken and broccoli. Right. Like sort of standard meal. So. And then you layer on the glyphosate and you're really nailed. So you're right. I mean, it is a pro Inflammatory state before we get to mtor. I promise we'll get to mtor. Did you, 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 going to 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 that that 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 out. I'm like, I don't know. Let me see if we need ducks. So I looked in the freezer this morning. We have tons of duck. I want to make a duck 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 in those. Yeah, I haven't made duck in a while, but. Okay. You want to talk about mtor?

I don't know. I mean, you're, you're. You're.

I'm good. I'm good. We're good. We can move on. We've minded.

All right, Talk about what's mtor? What is it? Why do we care?

Oh, yeah, I love this molecule. I mean, arguably, first of all, MTOR wasn't discovered till the end of the 20th century, so it's relatively unknown. But arguably, it's one of the single most important signaling molecules in all of biology, as evidenced by the fact that it's conserved over billions of years. In other words, it's present in yeast all the way to human beings. So it's fundamental for the survival of cells and organisms. What does this do? MTOR is a metabolic switch that senses the presence of nutrients, and when nutrients are present, it tells the cell to grow. When nutrients are not present, it tells the cell to hunker down, turn down inflammation, turn on autophagy, or repair, get rid of senescent cells. So Normally an organism will go between states of fast and famine, hunter gatherers, whatever, and MTOR will normally be turned on for periods for growth and then turned off for repair. That's a normal situation. The problem is, and there's an idea not only for chronic diseases, but also for longevity itself, that, that they're driven by a situation in, in the 21st century in human beings where MTOR is turned on too much, so it's sort of stuck in the growth mode. What does that mean? Well, it's MTOR sensitive to glucose primarily and insulin, so it's sensing these carbohydrate type drivers, also sensitive to oxygen and things. And while growth is good, when you're, when you're a child and you're growing up, MTOR growth is healthy. There's very strong arguments that turning on MTOR all the time, like we're seeing now in the population, especially as people get older, not only drives the phenotypes of aging, wrinkles, gray hair, you know, hearing loss, menopause, but it also drives actual, the chronic diseases, obesity, hypertension, diabetes, cancer and Alzheimer's disease. And actually, when you look at longevity itself, MTOR is arguably one of the strongest drivers in longevity animal models. In other words, there's a drug you can give that specifically targets MTOR and turns it into this favorable position, this repair state. And you can also do it with lifestyle. Some of the things I mentioned, like fasting or dietary choices, avoiding toxins in your environment turns MTOR into this favorable bard. But. So I would recommend lifestyle as first order. But having a drug that immediately switches MTOR off allows many, many scientific experiments to be done on all these phenotypes of aging and these chronic diseases and even longevity. And to document in a controlled fashion. Does MTOR really have an effect on, on all this stuff like people think it does? Yes. Question you in the front row with a smile.

Are we trying to turn MTOR on for longevity or are we trying to turn MTOR off for longevity?

Yeah, great question. We want to turn MTOR on, which is growth and hyper function when the organism is maturing, when the long bones are growing, the brain is maturing. But what the theory is that as animals get older, MTOR gets stuck in this on position all the time. This hyperfunction and growth in an older organization organism doesn't result in long bone growth or brain maturation. It results in hyperstimulation, which drives these chronic diseases that, you know, that we're talking about. And actually, and also the phenotypes of aging and also results in decreased longevity. So there's a drug, one drug that targets MTOR specifically and turns it in this off position. And that was how MTOR was discovered, really, as a result of the drug, because the drug was discovered first out in Easter island in the 1960s in Rapa Nui. And it was discovered from bacteria there that make it. And they called the drug rapamycin after rapa Nui. And then later on they figured, wow, this drug is amazing. Its effects on cells. How does it work? And then 40 years later they discovered MTOR. And MTOR, of course, stands for target of rapamycin. Rapamycin is a nice drug that we can use for controlled studies to see what the effect of turning MTOR down is. And when you look at the studies, they're nothing short of mind blowing.

Yeah, that's a lot of Davidson Clear's work and a lot of other people. And, and, and to be clear, some people are taking rapamycin on a regular basis these days.

Yeah, it's, it's FDA approved. It's actually FDA approved for atherosclerosis, It's FDA approved for cancer. It's fda, well, it's under study for Alzheimer's disease and it's FDA approved for many other things. But off label use is for longevity. I take it, I take it for that. And the longevity dose, the first thing MTOR or first thing rapamycin was approved for was renal transplant immune suppression. So that's a daily dose and it's still a frontline drug for that. So you don't want to take it on a daily fashion. And the longevity dose is once a week. And that, that as much as everyone can tell there, there are hundred, you know, tens to hundreds of thousands of people taking rapamycin now as this longevity tool just because it's gotten very popular, sort of like metformin was 10 years ago. But you actually notice.

Do you have like a noticeable difference or is this more of a long term game?

Yeah, with, with mtor. The problem is there, there aren't tests to evaluate MTOR function there like there is with, you know, hemoglobin glycation with A1C or something. So there's no direct measurement, so you have indirect measurements. Some of the studies, they, they took rapamycin cream, a cream of rapamycin. They, and they mix it with, they have a placebo and they did a blinded study with people for eight months. They did once a day they rubbed it on the back of these people's hands. And then at the End of the study, they did punch biopsies of these people, these brave volunteers, but actually they showed once a day application rapamycin dramatically increase the basilar collagen layer and reverse the aging of the skin, which was.

Do we have it in like facial stuff?

Well, the FDA last year approved rapamycin cream as an indication not for wrinkles and aging, but for angiomyolipomatosis, kind of a different condition. But it means it's available as a cream now and many people are using it off label for that. But he's such a vice cow man. Yeah, it's, I mean, it's like every single phenotype of aging. You apply it to wrinkles, gray hair, menopause, it delays menopause in the, in the mouse model, it slows, it increases the, the, the, the number of pups they have and it delays the onset of their menopause. Is now being studied in humans. They also do it for hearing loss, it slows down hearing loss, age related hearing loss, it slows down periodontal disease, hair loss, gray hair. I mean, they're fascinating things with rapamycin. It's like, how can this one drug affect all these different things? And, and it's fascinating, but obviously you say, well, hey, nobody dies of menopause, right? Nobody dies of gray hair or baldness, right? People die of. It's a short list. You, me and all our listeners are probably going to die of one of about five things statistically. Number one is heart attacks. And then you go down. Stroke, cancer, Alzheimer's disease. Well, if rapamycin, MTOR is so fundamental in chronic disease and longevity, in longevity in particular, it should have an effect on these diseases. Right. So what evidence do we have for it? Well, stents are the treatment today for heart attack, which in other words, if I have a heart attack, a stent which is narrowing in the blood vessels to the heart and blood doesn't get there, A stent is a mechanical way to open the blood vessel. And everyone, depending on their anatomy, they're most likely to get a stent today if they have acute infarct or acute heart attack. And the great thing about stents is they may be life saving in the moment. The downside of stents is like many of the surgeries or pills for these chronic diseases, they may save your life in the moment, but they don't have an effect on the long term on the disease. So you talk to a friend, just got a stent and he goes, hey, I'm great, I got a stent. They Cured my heart attack. Wow. I dodged that bullet. Wow. Thank you, modern medicine. Well, actually, what he didn't realize is, and many people don't realize, is that the stent will save your life, but it doesn't do anything to your underlying cardiovascular disease. As you know, it continues on. The rest of your blood vessels clot off, and even the stent will clot off. And that was a problem with stents, is they clawed off with atherosclerosis eventually. So enter MTOR and rapamycin. They began coating the stents with rapamycin, and it's actually now FDA approved as the number one. It stops atherosclerosis from reoccurring in the stents. And for that reason, many people are looking at taking it orally as well for studies that way, too. So atherosclerosis is a hyperfunction. If you think about it, it's not like wearing out of the blood vessel. It's actually hypergrowth proliferation of cells. So slowing that down by turning MTOR down has a beneficial effect there. The other. The other big cause is cancer. And. Go ahead.

Yeah, no, finish your thought and then I have a question for you.

Oh, no, I was going to say the other big killer is cancer. It's completely different from atherosclerosis. Right. They're completely different animals, but they're the number one and number two killers for all of us, statistically, that determine literally our longevity, how long we live in these chronic diseases. Well, what does rapamycin do for cancer, if anything? Well, as it turns out, it does a lot. And there's a human model for cancer is people who have heart transplants. The number one. Something I didn't know, the number one cause of death in a heart transplant patient is not transplant rejection within the first five years of life, but it's actually a cancer, a malignancy due to the immune suppression from the drugs. And rapamycin is one of the common drugs used, but other drugs are used. So what they did was they took these heart transplants patients and they looked at the ones on rapamycin versus the ones on other immunosuppressants, and the ones on rapamycin had a dramatically lower 30%, lower malignant rate, presumably due to the rapamycin. The evidence is so strong, the FDA now has eight FDA indications for cancer. For example, metastatic renal cell cancer. Rapamycin is indicated as adjunctive therap. You know, the number one, kidney cancer, and. And many others. So it also works on cancer. And then. Excuse me, there's Evidence that works on Alzheimer's disease and, and you know, it's just, it's amazing these, these different effects, but somehow they're tied into MTOR and growth and inflammation.

Sorry, just quick. Does have any effect on IGF1?

Pardon me?

Any effect on IGF1 or like growth hormone? It seems like it would be tied in closely.

Absolutely. And you know, it may sound like we understand MTOR and we've got it figured out. Well, we don't. You know, this is the, it's. This stuff is so complex. You know, David Sinclair is a friend. He talks about sirtuins and you know, different NAD supplements. There's Veratrol, there are other people use metformin that affects. AMP kinase is another signaling molecule, very basic one similar to mtor. And MTOR is affected by it, primarily is affected by it senses. Insulin. Insulin like growth factor, like I said, oxygen, all these other things. So, so the things that you mentioned that are, that are anabolic things will tend to tend to turn MTOR on. So the favorable state of MTOR is this essentially a catabolic state where we break things down, we repair things, we repair, we repair ourselves and we especially, we turn inflammation way down when MTOR is turned down. So that seems to be the favorable state. But the short answer is nobody really knows. It's kind of the wild west. But changes are happening really fast. Our understanding is advancing at light speed.

So. Cool. Okay, talk to me about menopause. Do you do any focus. Do you have any focus on menopause? Because sure, some people want to delay it, but once you're in menopause is there and women tend to become almost overnight insulin resistance and start to pack on fat. So between the food choices and the rapamycin, have you seen anything for menopausal women?

Because asking for a friend, menopause is certainly. Yeah, certainly important. And there's growing evidence that, that this metabolically healthy lifestyle, which includes avoiding toxins which damage our metabolism will, will have favorable effects on, on menopause. And this is. I'm not an expert on menopause, but just what the, the animal models with, with MTOR and rapamycin on delaying menopause is really interesting. And, and now rapamycin is being used in, in clinical studies with women who are interested in extending their fertility or delaying menopause and all these things. And we have a fertility crisis that people say well hey, why do you want to live longer? Why do you want to increase your lifespan? Because I grew up in the era when we were all Taught there was a population explosion and that we were going to overpopulate the Earth. And now, sadly, it appears that's not our problem. Our problem is declining birth rates to even serious levels in Europe and Japan and Korea and China. And so increasing fertility and increasing longevity may to some extent make up for fewer births. But it's a new world out there.

Right.

I just want to make sure we're talking longevity means increasing not only lifespan, but health span so that we're actually healthy as we age. Not right now, where the last bit of life is in an ICU or a nursing home. We're talking about a healthy, vibrant life.

Exactly. No. Yeah. Nobody wants 10 extra years if it's in a nursing home. Right. Yeah. So when we say lifespan. Yeah, it's implied a healthy lifespan, and that's what people are finding out. Nir Barzilai is a colleague who's been active with metformin for longevity. And he has a supercentenarian project in New York where he studies 100 year olds and 110 year olds and he looks for how they got to be that age. And sadly, there weren't a lot of genes that did it, which is good news that, that, well, you know, no matter what our parents are like, we can still change our lifespan with longevity. But the other thing he found, to your point, was that these older people that live so much longer, it wasn't that they didn't get chronic disease and it wasn't that they didn't. They got it and got it for a long time. It's just they delayed the onset of it. Once they got their cancer or their heart disease or whatever, they, you know, they went just like the rest of us. You know, it was so. But the point was they were able to delay the onset of these chronic diseases. And that's what the hope is with longevity, with these longevity programs as well.

I've been noticing this in my clinical practice. You know, in med school, we were taught average age of menopause is 51 and perimenopause is 45. And I've noticed a huge uptick in an earlier menopause and an earlier perimenopause. So I'm getting women in my practice who are 38 to 42 and they are clearly perimenopausal and their FSH is on the rise. And then they're hitting menopause at 48 now instead of 50. Like, there's just a. It's like a shift, which is just very interesting to see because it's happened in my career. Literally in my career. I've seen the shift. So we're talking 25 years. I've seen this shift and fertility, too, that I have a couple people who get pregnant with no problem. In fact, one of them is my patient who had breast cancer, recurrent breast cancer, had a mastectomy, had tons of detox work. We spent a year doing detox on her, and she got pregnant no problem. And that so many other people have challenges with either sperm count or conception. And it seems to me much more. It seems to be much more than it used to be. Like, I mean, I grew up with teen people who had teen pregnancies, and it's just, it's a lot less. I don't know, it just seems less now.

Yeah. I mean, I can't wait to pick your brain about microplastics. It's an area that I'm really excited about and I want to get into it. I know you guys are going to come on our podcast. I'd love to talk to you about all this stuff. It is so fascinating. And. Yeah. And you, you guys are the experts on it, so I. I can't be. I'd love to hear your thoughts.

You talk about in your book Changing Subjects. You talk about deprescribing. What is that?

Yeah, de prescribing is something I wasn't familiar with. The. The usual thing is when people go on a prescription, especially for these chronic diseases, they're given a pill, like they told me, you know, the expectation is that you go on it for life and there aren't any options of getting off of it. So what, 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, 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 healthcare 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. Dr.

Yes, absolutely.

Still teaching at medical school?

Yeah. 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, that.

What is the reception when you talk to professors and medical students? What is the reception to this? Because when I, when we went to.

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.

They, there's, 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 American 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 disagree and there's a lot of different opinions at, at you asked about medical school. My colleagues, you know, I think intelligent people can disagree on, you know, know, 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. I'm basically, I'm in, in the book. It's, it's heavily illustrated with pictures and stuff, so it's accessible to lay people. But I also, it's also heavily referenced with about 400 references which are primarily, primarily primary citations of the original controlled study. So, so if, 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, you can show it to your physician if that helps, if they're open minded about it. But that's the nature of, that's the nature of medicine, you know, and science as we all know that it's constantly changing and we just have to be, have to be open minded to, 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. So 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 my doctor's advice, but I also realized 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, 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 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. That, to me, is good news.

I have a question, because you have access to a lot of this, just like we do. We can do stuff on our own. So when someone's just starting this evaluation process and journey, what are the things that, what are the health assessments that you're recommending and why do you recommend them?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's key to be hooked up to a good healthcare provider partner. And what does that mean? Well, in my mind, it means a functional medicine specialist who has this orientation or integrative medicine specialist. They're broad classes like that, but who is open minded to these, these kind of things? And 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 Multisys Multi Symptom questionnaire. 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, and I and we're all talking about and so many people are not aware of them. They go in with a migraine and they get a pill, you know, and they, you know, or they, you know, we're, 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 book and people read it.

Oh, thanks. Yeah. My. Well, my website is Robert lufkinmd.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 going to get you guys on soon.

Awesome. We'll put those links in the show notes for the people who are listening so they can, they can click into it. I mean I think this is amazing that now, now I'm like, I gotta go prescribe rapamycin.

You gotta be careful.

That's right.

We're. Don't try this at home.

So first is food fundamentals.

Everybody.

You gotta get all this other stuff and then maybe we can talk about.

So we can talk about this after. I didn't get up at 3 in the morning. I woke up at 3 in the morning last night, like just awake. I was not happy. Not a happy Wendy. So we'll talk about it when I'm not a 3am Human. 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 LupkinMD, get the chapter, follow you on all the socials 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 joining us. Have an amazing time and Robert, thanks for being here.

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

Ours too. Likewise, Sam.