Chef AJ: Hi, Dr. Ifland, and welcome to the Truth about Weight Loss Summit, thanks so much for being here.

Dr. Joan Ifland: Oh hi, chef. Thank you for having me.

Chef AJ: It’s always a pleasure because I consider you, if not the world’s leading expert, certainly one of them on processed food addiction, something that a lot still don’t believe exists.

Dr. Joan Ifland: Well, it’s a little bit late for that. We have an entire textbook, 240000 words built on two thousand studies. The obesity researchers are actually eliminating aspects of the addiction all the time. It’s over. The debate is over.

Chef AJ: So processed food addiction is real?

Dr. Joan Ifland: It’s real, and it’s harming hundreds of millions of people around the world unknowingly.

Chef AJ: How would you define processed food addiction?

Dr. Joan Ifland: So there are two ways to define it. One is by the behaviors, and the most common addictive behaviors are you have tried to cut back and you’ve failed. You have a plan not to use and you eat it anyway. You eat it in spite of knowing that you shouldn’t. You’re eating more of it now than you used to. It takes up a lot of time thinking, planning and getting recovering, and cravings. So those are six out of the 11 signs if you have those. It only takes six out of 11 to have a severe case. The other way you define addiction is by what’s going on in the brain. If you have a hyperactive reward system, brain cells, hyperactive stress, hyperactive movement. And hypoactive, not enough activity in the frontal lobe, then that’s the brain structure of addiction.

Chef AJ: Wow. Yeah. How long has this disease existed?

Dr. Joan Ifland: Well, where it really got pulled is in the early 1800s when steel rollers were introduced into flour mills and then you could pulverize the grains fine enough that the body absorbs it quickly enough that you get high. And once you have refined a plant to the point where it can get you high, then you have an addiction potential because it’s followed by a crash. The crash is painful, and people will be using compulsively to get out of the crash.

Chef AJ: I first became aware of your work many years ago because of your book Sugars and Flours, How They Make US Crazy Sick and fat, and a lot of people, whether they use sugar or not, to any degree, just can’t imagine that flour could be a problem.

Dr. Joan Ifland: Yes, but it really is especially gluten-containing flours. In the book Wheat Belly by William Davis, he describes Rockefeller getting interested in creating a wheat plant that would be more productive. So as they did the hybridization of that plant, more kernels, shorter, thicker stock to hold the kernels, I don’t think they realized that they were vastly increasing the gluten content. And gluten is natural morphine. Gluten has glutemorphine in it. And as they increased the gluten content of the wheat in the 1930s and 40s, it became addictive.

Chef AJ: Right, so there’s a big difference between eating a whole grain like millet than eating flour.

Dr. Joan Ifland: Totally, totally. You cook the grain as little as possible. It takes a while for it to break down and be digested. Millet is a gluten-free grain. It’s a completely different experience.

Chef AJ: I think people have problems with that because they think no bread, no pasta. I mean, bread is the staff of life.

Dr. Joan Ifland: Yeah. So bread, the stuff of life became a phrase in biblical times. So we’re talking in 2000 and before, and I’ll tell you, they did not have powdered flour. Some poor person had to sit there with a stone and grind that wheat until it would break apart enough that they could add some water and put it on a hot stone and make something that could be carried, it is a portable food that’s a far cry from the highly refined products that are in the stores today.

Chef AJ: It seems like the more highly refined the product, the more potential for the addiction.

Dr. Joan Ifland: Yes, this is. This is very true. So particularly refined carbohydrates, the key measure of addiction is how fast does that substance reach the brain? We know, for example, that sugar reaches the brain sugar, fat and salt reach the brain faster than any addictive drug. Half a second and this is compared to cocaine, which might be 10 seconds, or alcohol, which might be 20 minutes. The faster the substance reaches the brain, the more addictive it is. So these are highly addictive substances. We have a lot of research showing that sugar is more addictive than cocaine, even artificial sugars, artificial sweeteners. Rats will choose an artificial sweetener over cocaine or heroin.

Chef AJ: I appreciate that you understand that it’s not just sugar, that it’s sugar, fat, salt, caffeine, artificial sweeteners, dairy.

Dr. Joan Ifland: Dairy has four different casomorphemes. It’s designed to put a 100-pound baby cow to sleep so that the baby cow will absorb the nutrients from the mother’s milk. It’s not designed for humans. It’s a narcotic, basically. And I just saw, I’m glad you brought up dairy. We’re talking about dairy. Just as I was doing research for something else, I have now found study number two showing that dairy is associated with a shorter life. The greater the dairy consumption, the shorter the life. Two different studies, one in Sweden, where it was a survey. And you know, how much dairy do you eat and then how long did that person live? But the second one is from Iran, and it’s also of schoolchildren. How much dairy do you eat? And then they go in and measure the telomeres at the end of their DNA. The more dairy, the shorter the telomere. Two completely different studies. Same conclusion. Dairy is associated with a shorter life

Chef AJ: I do not think people realize dairy is processed food. People aren’t milking the cow, and drinking dairy is a highly processed food.

Dr. Joan Ifland: It’s highly processed because it’s homogenized and all that. But the cow processes it. The cow is processing grass or whatever horrible things they feed dairy cows into breast milk. Yeah, it’s processed food right out of the cow, raw, right out of the cow. It’s a processed food

Chef AJ: And like you said, it’s meant to put a baby cow to sleep. It’s also meant for that cow’s baby. Human beings are the only species that drink milk from another species because you can drink milk after weaning.

Dr. Joan Ifland: Bizzare and there is this wonderful researcher in Germany whose name is Udo Melnick, and he has done work on what genes does dairy turn on, its breast cancer, it’s prostate cancer, its acne, its weight gain of course, as you might imagine, it’s just not a fit for humans.

Chef AJ: Thank you so much for saying that because many of the people in the food addiction space basically are just bashing sugar. But I love how you take all the addictive substances.

Dr. Joan Ifland: Yes, yes. I know that when I got off of sugar and flour twenty-six years ago, nineteen ninety-six there was dairy on my food plan, my recovery food plan, two servings a day and it made me sick. It made me brain foggy and tired and depressed. And now it’s just like, I think it’s worse than sugar.

Chef AJ: Yeah. Well, it has milk, sugar in it, lactose.

Dr. Joan Ifland: So it has lactose. It has a little bit of salt in it. It has fat, of course. And when you take the fat out and you make skim milk, you’re speeding up the absorption of the lactose. So you’re actually making it more addictive.

Chef AJ: That’s really interesting. Who is most vulnerable to the effects of processed food addiction?

Dr. Joan Ifland: It’s people who watch television. It’s people who have watched television as small children. It’s people who caught the addiction in childhood, which is most people. Because when tobacco big tobacco bought products in the big processed food processors in the mid-1980s, Big Tobacco bought Kraft, Nabisco, General Foods in the space of three years. They brought their addiction business model with them. And this is the five days they call it the five days. You know, I have an MBA way back in my past. I’m very interested in business models. The five days of the addiction business model. The first one is attack at a young age. The younger the child, the more different substances, the less likely it is that that person will be able to beat the addiction. So young age of onset and when you see tobacco coming into processed foods, you see the number of Saturday morning cartoon commercials for these highly addictive substances go from already one hundred and fifty in one Saturday morning to like five hundred and fifty in the space of seven years. And you see Nickelodeon carrying those commercials to 65 million American households. It’s like duh within 10 years childhood obesity has increased by 15 percent, from 10 percent to 15 percent of children. And then you add on the advertising, you lay on the availability, you make it very affordable and then you hire somebody like Howard Moskowitz to hide massive amounts of addictive substances in the food. That’s what he went around to all the corporations to do is to put the maximum amount of sugar, fat salt into the food before the consumer could detect it and reject the product. So that’s a business model. And I just hope that all of your viewers. Well, just feel that guilt lifting, just lift about guilt right off, if you were manipulated by a master addiction merchants, they perfected this model in tobacco. They brought it straight over to children. That’s why juice boxes are the same shape and color as cigarette packs. It’s diabolical.

Chef AJ: It’s incredible because we know that people used to use sugar back in the day, you know, a teaspoon here or there, kind of as a condiment. But now, as you said, they hide it in places they don’t even need sugar. Salad dressing, ketchup, bread, things that historically can be and have been made without half a cup of sugar.

Dr. Joan Ifland: It’s so clear what the strategy was and the ruthlessness with which the processed food manufacturers put it into place.

Chef AJ: Well, I hope one day they’ll be held accountable just the way the tobacco industry. Well, the tobacco industry.

Dr. Joan Ifland: I hope so.

Chef AJ: But in a way, they are the tobacco industry.

Dr. Joan Ifland: It is just an extension of the tobacco industry.

Chef AJ: So they knew what they were doing?

Dr. Joan Ifland: The one thing that I think is so interesting about the timing on this is that high fructose corn syrup came into the market in the 19th in about 1980. So that solved the problem of affordability because, before that, they had to depend on another group of drug dealers. The sugar cartel in Florida. So once they got out from under that, the next thing that happened was the dietary guidelines. In there they are. They must have just fallen out of their chairs. They probably engineered it when they saw that the federal government not only was not going to be prosecuting them in court, but they were actually going to be advertising these refined carbohydrates. Oh, it must have been like they couldn’t raise their bankers fast enough to start buying these processed food manufacturers.

Chef AJ: It’s interesting that you said high fructose corn syrup was about 1980 because that’s when the obesity rates really started rising and from some of the other doctors on this summit is that the sugar is not great, but fructose is even worse.

Dr. Joan Ifland: It converts to fat two and a half times more efficiently than sugar. And so you’ve got fatty liver, you’ve got fatty pancreas, and then your body can’t filter anymore and can’t regulate insulin. It’s just we’re being killed from the inside out. A million Americans, every two years die.

Chef AJ: And it’s put in baby formula, and if a mother can’t breastfeed, it’s basically her child becomes addicted day one.

Dr. Joan Ifland: Yes. And I hope that you will cover this, I think you’re planning to cover this. But in the 1980s, the World Health Organization got regulation of baby formula passed. And it’s these corporations are so powerful that these regulations are not being enforced. So we do have really heinous things like the baby formula manufacturer will give free samples to mothers in the hospital in Third World countries. And so the mother is told, Oh, this is more healthy than breast milk. She uses it and her milk doesn’t come in. Her own milk dries up before she’s even left the hospital. So now she is too poor to buy baby formula, and there she is stuck buying baby formula. It’s heinous,

Chef AJ: And she herself might have had a problem with sugar even before giving birth in some cases, right, the mother?

Dr. Joan Ifland: We do have very startling evidence that if a mother is eating processed foods while pregnant, the baby will be born with metabolic syndrome because the blood that is reaching a fetus has too much sugar in it. And so the baby will already have a hyperactive pancreas, for example.

Chef AJ: That’s incredible. So many people feel like that you can’t say that food is addictive because we have to eat. One of the things I once heard you say, which I remembered, was that when you’re eating for reasons outside of hunger that is not eating, that’s drug use.

Dr. Joan Ifland: That is drug use. Yes. So if you’re eating because you’re tired, because you’re irritable because you’re anxious, because you’re depressed, if you’re eating, because you are afraid, you’re going to hit something, which happens and that’s not eating, that’s not food use. Yes, that’s consuming a drug orally. Yeah. It’s one of the criteria, which is why are you doing that? You’re facing withdrawal. So withdrawal is one of the 11 signs that you’re addicted to something. And what you’re doing is you’re avoiding withdrawal. If you’re eating for reasons other than hunger, you’re putting off withdrawal, maybe you have a headache. And you know, if you eat, if you drink caffeine or something, it’ll stop the headache. That’s withdrawal avoidance.

Chef AJ: That’s such an interesting way to phrase it because it’s never arugula, you know.

Dr. Joan Ifland: No.

Chef AJ: That is really something. So how do we recover?

Dr. Joan Ifland: Well, if you would like, we can go through what it takes to recover from not just severe addiction, but a very complicated addiction in a very oppressive environment. The government is just standing by and letting all this happen. Really, there’s so much wheat and corn grown in the United States, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture is charged with making sure that it all gets sold. Americans are eating almost twice the number of calories they need and the part they do. You know, the double is sugar and gluten-containing flour. So there’s the U.S. government charged with making sure it all gets sold. Well, the only way you can sell that much extra food is through addiction. So now you know, Rob Lustig just said it in his book Metabolical. OK, so maybe the USDA isn’t killing us, but they’re standing by while we die.

Chef AJ: That’s something. I’d love to know what might help people.

Dr. Joan Ifland: All right, so let’s do the slides. Chef AJ, I just can’t tell you how grateful I am to you for covering this topic. So before we begin this slide, could I just say that I put together these slides for the primary purpose of relieving the people from the guilt of failing in other programs? Other programs that don’t recognize the addiction are not going to work. They’re broken from conception and you’re about to see why. So just feel that guilt lifting from your shoulders. Here we go. So these are the 20 must-haves, I have had an online recovery community now for four years. We are celebrating our 4th anniversary and this is what I have learned. These are all the things that I’ve added over those four years, and I am going to say that if you are missing any one of them, your program could suffer. So it’s complete support, processed food addiction is highly complex, requires a lot of skills, and incomplete support, incomplete training is just going to prolong the suffering. It’s not your fault.

Dr. Joan Ifland: So here’s what you need. This is what you need to be looking for. So five basic categories: knowledge of research. There’s a ton of research on processed food addiction. These researchers think they’re looking at obesity or eating disorders or drug addiction, but they’re actually describing addiction to processed foods. How to manage a food supply? How to manage lapsing? Because we’ve got the food industry constantly provoking us into lapsing. How do you recover from that? How do you create a stress-free environment? Because stress is a big addiction trigger. And how do you identify leadership? We all need somebody to follow. We need a well-educated leader. OK, so what am I talking about, research based? You’ve got to know the story of Big Tobacco because that explains then what we need to do to protect ourselves. We have to understand how conformance drive works, and we have to know why we’re doing this for a lifetime. So why do I say research-based? You’ve got to avoid whimsical advice for people out there who don’t have a good grounding and they just make things up. They write scripts, they teach other people their scripts. They’re not the right thing. You’ve got to be able to look at a study. You’ve got to be able to say these are the results that we’re working from. Science shows us what is real and this is how you get guidance that actually works. So this is a quote, this is a colleague of mine. Her name is Jamie Morgan, and she’s in a leadership position in a hospital system. And I said, Well, Jamie, if you didn’t know the research, how would it affect your recovery? She said I’d be lost. I’d be lost in blame, shame and guilt. And that’s what my doctors have always told me that it’s my fault and I didn’t know the research. I’d be stuck there. OK, so you got to know the story of big tobacco. Because this is how you focus your defense, this is how you focus and organize your protection. There are corporations out there that know how to bombard us with messaging that actually wires our brain cells to crave and control behavior. So if you know that if you know how those corporations work, then you know how to avoid their messaging and keep yourself from craving. So this is yet another route to relieving yourself from blame. This overeating is something that was done to you deliberately by the big tobacco corporations as they came in and bought processed food in the mid-1980s.

Dr. Joan Ifland: So again, Jamie says, if I didn’t know about these corporate business practices, I would go on assuming it was my laziness or lack of willpower. It’s none of those things. The program must engage conformance drive. You must be on-screen with healthy people long enough to get a part of your brain called mirror neurons to copy the people on that screen because the frontal lobe is not working too well in an addicted brain. The addictive brains are being dominated by the reward systems. You’ve got to go to your mirror neurons. To control behavior, to stop the addicted brain cells from controlling behavior. If you’re around members who are struggling, I have to say I was in a meeting once where there were 20 people struggling and one person who was successful. I would not have been successful in that program. So Jamie says if I didn’t have successful people to copy, I wouldn’t be able to develop new routines and mindsets on my own. This is just basic brain functions just the way the brain works. And we have to know that this is for a lifetime. Whatever program you go into, it’s going to be priced so that you can join it for a lifetime and it’s got to be available so easily available that you can access it for a lifetime. Why? Because as soon as you stop the messaging from your recovery program, you’re going to be exposed to the food industry messaging and you’ll be right back where you started. So look for long-term programs, Jamie says if my program came to an end, everything I had built would come to an end too. I’d feel isolated and alone, and that’s highly stressful. So you just fall right back into the grip of the addiction.

Dr. Joan Ifland: Let’s talk about meal management. This is getting worse over time. The likelihood that you’re going to find clean, non-addictive food out there in the environment is growing weaker and weaker. Give yourself lots of time. If the program says, Oh, you’ve got to be doing this immediately or you’re not a good citizen, they don’t understand how long it could take a couple of years to build a meal production routine. You need the freedom to talk about it. No forced foods and celebrate all the victories of this food plan. So time and training, it does take a long time to organize meals. And because we are withdrawing from so many different substances. Sugar, all the sweeteners, flour, gluten, salt, dairy, processed fats, caffeine, and food additives. You could take a couple of years to withdraw from all of those substances. They’re violently addictive, and you need a lot of time to do a lot of rotation to find out what the plan is going to work for you best and to make sure that you’re in an environment that really supports unprocessed foods. So there are programs out there that traumatize members who don’t get their meals organized according to their program’s time schedule, and you just got to avoid that like the plague and make sure that you’re in a program which has all the addictive substances out.

Dr. Joan Ifland: So Jamie says if I were in a program that required me to organize my meals too quickly, I would quit. I wouldn’t be able to do it, and I couldn’t stand the thought of failing in front of all those people and just quitting. It’s important that you have all the time in the world to get your food routine, organized members need to be able to talk, talk, talk, talk and be cherished and respected. No matter what is going on with them, this is detailed. It’s a lot, a lot of moving parts. It takes time and lapsing is painful. Everything that you say should be met with understanding and compassion. You must have understanding and compassion. So if you’re in a program where you actually can’t talk, that’s damaging. That’s not going to work. Silencing a member is humiliating, and you need to be able to talk about everything, not just the food. The food is just the tail of the dog. The dog has to be happy. Your relationships, your media, your messaging, your exercise, all of that has to be going well. And then the food will take care of itself and that tail will wag. So Jamie says what would have happened if I had been in a program that silenced me when I lapsed? I would be the darkest, saddest version of myself separated, ashamed to just be forced back into the food. You have to be in a program that does not force you to eat any food. Food allergies are rampant. They’re very closely associated with processed foods. You have to have control over your food. You have to be in a program that gives you a method for figuring out your best food plan. You have to be respected for what you choose for your process and where you are in your process. And then you get the training you have to have training and how to pull together because you’re going to be pulling a lot of meals together.

Dr. Joan Ifland: So Jamie says, if I was forced to eat foods I didn’t like or that I was allergic to. I might do it for a few days, or I might even hang on longer and white knuckle it but I would be miserable and I would quit. So the only way to stay safe from processed foods for a lifetime is to stay in your uplifting program for a lifetime. Now, this is something that makes me crazy. These programs that only celebrate weight loss. You’re getting your brain to work, you’re getting all the organs in your body to work. Your energy is coming back, your mental clarity, there’s so many cool things happening and you need to be able to talk about them all. Weak programs only reward your abstinence, or they ignore the fact that processed foods are harming us and over a hundred ways you have to be motivated. By these just daily, sometimes hourly victories, like you notice that you’re more energetic, are you noticed that you stay calm while somebody else gets upset? The number of just very amazing, wonderful things is endless. This is a way to keep us lifted up and moving forward. So I asked Jamie, I said, what if the only thing that you ever talked about was abstinence and weight loss? She would say I would begin to define myself that way. It would be depressing and I would quit.

Dr. Joan Ifland: So lapse management, when we understand how severe the addiction is and how much training we need to fend off the food industry. We also know we need training and how to get back after a lapse. We need realistic expectations about how long it’s going to take for lapsing to stop. We need training and queue management, trigger management before we can expect to stop lapsing. We need to stop the self-blame. So realistic expectations. It could take years. Research on drug addiction recovery, which is not really drug addiction recovery, it’s really drug addiction, transference to processed foods five years, five years before you have a year of abstinence. So you need compassion for lapsing, never judgment and when you get compassion, the emotional impact of relapse is reduced and you’re much more likely to be able to come back out of it. We’ve developed a method in our program where we attach the pain of the lapse right to the lapse so that as soon as you start thinking about lapsing, the pain will come up and it’s a pretty effective deterrent. So we just take the upset out of the lapse. No more upsetting than a mosquito bite. Just move on and just remember the pain so that you’re less likely to lapse again. So Jamie says if I were expected to stop lapsing on some weirdo, unrealistic schedule, I would lapse more often. It would just be too stressful.

Dr. Joan Ifland: Cue management, this is just almost all programs are missing this. This is the reason we lapse. There’s a tremendous amount of research showing that a queue, a trigger, a message stimulation reminder could be a smell, a sound, a sight, even an associative queue. I used to binge with that person. I see that person. Now I feel like binging. It’s where the lapse starts. It’s not in your childhood issues as painful as they may be. It’s not because you lack willpower, and it’s not because you’re self-sabotaging. It’s because the food industry has stimulated you in some way. So it takes a long time to get the hang of that and to start to measure how much queuing can I tolerate before I’m going to lapse? And that’s um any training in that and someplace to talk about it. Cueing is very mysterious unless you hear other people talking about their responses to it. Plenty of time and plenty of time for this training. And it’s skill-based training. It’s the skill of avoiding cueing. And also, you’ve got to give your household members time to learn how to stop triggering you. And yes, that is their responsibility if you want to quit smoking. No, the household members don’t get to keep smoking in the house. It’s a respect thing. OK, so Jamie says if I didn’t know how to manage cues, I would be blaming myself for the wrong things and I’d be doing the wrong things to make myself stop. OK, and then stop the self-blame. This is so important. If you’re blaming yourself it is painful and the pain will drive you right back into lapsing. So the science is really important here. The science tells you what’s going on in your brain, and it’s not because you have some kind of weakness. It’s because the food industry was allowed to give you an addiction. OK, and then all the time in the world. You just need to be able to take this very, very slowly. So Jamie says if I blamed myself for lapses, I would give up. Because I would be lapsing and thinking, I’m a failure, so why should I keep trying?

Dr. Joan Ifland: Stress-free environments are important. Stress, along with cueing, is a leading cause of lapsing. If you are in a program that stresses you out in any way, the program is making you worse. So we feel like because this starts in childhood, it means that all 100 billion brain cells in our head were formed in an addicted brain. The addicted, the addiction can start. And at the moment of conception, if the parents are using processed foods, that very first DNA duplication will happen in an addictive way. So how are you going to reprogram 100 billion brain cells? It’s immersion. You’ve got to be able to reach somebody and release stress between meetings, talk about any problems and have to have your own control over time, pacing, etc. So frequent meetings release a wonderful chemical called oxytocin. Your feel-good pathways in your brain might not be working too well. But oxytocin will come on and actually regulate dopamine release. It’s very, very cool. So this is a great way to stop cravings. It’s a great way to feel better being online all the time. And the more exposure you get to healthy people, the more your mirror neurons are going to drive you to do healthy things. So get into a program where you can get into meetings all the time. We have right now 15 hours a day, 365 days a year of meetings, and then we have a big library of workshops that can fill in the blanks. This is much better than residential treatment. Residential treatment, you associate recovery with the treatment facility, you’re around sick people, so you’re learning how to be a sick person. You come home, your home is the biggest relapse trigger. You come home and within days you’re lapsing again. A resident away residential treatment does not work. Residential treatment inside your home works great.

Dr. Joan Ifland: So Jamie says if I didn’t have lots of meetings whenever something happened, I would find an excuse not to be there. It’s got to be easy to connect between meetings, and you can’t wait for a meeting to resolve a stressful situation. The cravings will just overtake you. And Jamie says if I didn’t have someone to talk to, I’d be left to my own devices. Thoughts, rationalizations. In other words, I’d be in the grips of the addiction.

Dr. Joan Ifland: Craving prevention. So craving prevention. How do you calm a craving brain? You are around people who know how to do it. Who have thought control, thought control. This is how you stop an addiction. So if I didn’t have a personal craving management program, I would think that if I were craving, I was failing and then I would quit. So you have to be in a program that does not have any deadlines. They just can’t be in a program where you have to do things as soon as somebody tells you, you have to do something and you have to do it by a certain time. Your stress, fear of failure will kick in and you’ll be lapsing. So you have to be in a program where you have control over what you choose to do next and when you’re going to do it. So we say, wait until your own voice of wisdom comes on in your head and says, You know what? I think I’m ready to try that. That is the way to move forward. We have a big problem, an eating disorder recovery in that the practitioners will no longer tell their clients to get off these bad foods. I said, well, as soon as I tell them, they start binging on it. So you need to be honest, absolutely clear. You’re going to have a clean food plan. You’ve got to have the whole list because otherwise, they are going to spend the rest of their lives transferring the addiction from one substance to the next. That is, on the one hand, as you give them that list, you just been begging my members and begging you, just take your time. You never have to give up a food. Wait until your own voice says that you’re ready to try this because I know that if they get the idea that they have to give up those foods, they will binge. It’s got to be so respectful. We have to really understand what’s going on.

Dr. Joan Ifland: So Jamie says if I didn’t feel, if I didn’t have control, I’d feel forced, rushed, stressed and I’d be lapsing. So the leadership, you’ve got to look at the leadership of the program, do they have expertise? Are they strength-building? Is it are they stress-free? Are they offering vision and not goals? And have they focused also on restoring brain function? The kind of expertise I’m talking about is research and compassion. Do they know how to speak with pure compassion? You just can’t have this amateur advice. Well, I did it this way, so you should know with the way you did, it will not work for anybody else, but you. So it’s a lot of training. This is a very, very complex addiction. So if I depend on amateur leaders, I’d be confused, skeptical, misled. I’d be failing and blaming myself. So this is very important. The leaders have to be. This is just for me. This is my observation, totally focused on the member’s strengths. How strong are you? How well you did that, that was so powerful. You are a true warrior for wellness. I really admire you. That was impressive what you did. So the leader’s going to be able to recognize the victories and pull them out and show the number. You are strong. You are in control. You are powerful. You have agency. This is very opposite of the character defect approach to the building of somebody. It just it’s so sad. And I had somebody say to me recently I was taught to hate myself into recovery. But now what’s successful is I am loving myself into recovery. You will take care of somebody that you love, somebody that you like. So self-loving, self liking is the core. It turns out self-kindness is the pathway to control because you like yourself and you want to take care of yourself.

Dr. Joan Ifland: So you’ve got to have leaders who can see your strengths and describe them to you. The culture is all about denying us our strengths so that we pay attention to advertisers. All right. So if I were required to dwell on my character defects, I would just be depressed. I would define myself as defective. Everybody’s telling me I’m defective, OK, I’m a detective. It’s not a nice life to be dwelling on your defects all the time. So stress-free environments, if people are criticizing you, if they’re judging you, if they’re telling you you’re a failure that will lead you straight back to the food. It’s got to be stress-free. OK, so Jamie says if my recovery program were stressful, I’d be trying to fit in, but the stress would be leading me back to the addiction.

Dr. Joan Ifland: Visioning, this is something that’s so important people can develop visions of how they would like to be. This is very, very different from goal setting. You set a goal, you’re bringing on the stress, the anticipation of disappointment, of failure and shame. But if you gently create, you’re just creating a vision, you’re answering this question what kind of person would I rather be? Then it comes up from the foundations of your soul, and you can do this. You’ve got to be in a program that does not have deadlines. So Jamie says if I had deadlines, it would detract from my peace of mind and I would be failing. I can make progress as long as I can do it at my own pace. 

Cognitive restoration: We know the frontal lobe has been deprived of blood flow, and there are ways to bring that back on line memory, learning, decision-making, attention span, impulse control. Those are all frontal lobe and you can do exercises to stimulate that part of the brain and get your cognitive function back. You got to be in a program that knows how to do that. OK, so Jamie says if I didn’t have cognitive function, I would be overwhelmed and I would be quitting. So here they are all 20 of the must-haves and you need each one of them. This is a highly complex addiction. It’s taken me twenty-six years to realize how important each one of these is. This is where you can get more information on our program. Processed food addiction dot com or get help at food addiction reset dotcom. Oh, Chef AJ, thank you so much for letting me share that.

Chef AJ: Thank you. I took a few notes and one of the things that really stood out because one of the other speakers talked about this, about self-love, is that you can’t hate yourself into recovery.

Dr. Joan Ifland: No, ma’am. If you’re in a program that is teaching you that you are, you’re failing, you’ll never get this. What’s wrong with you? That program is trying to get you to hate yourself and to recovery. It is sad, because not only does it not work, but gosh, it’s painful.

Chef AJ: You know, so many people, Dr. Ifland, are wanting to go on a diet, they’re looking for a quick fix. But if I understand you correctly, addiction doesn’t respond to quick fixes.

Dr. Joan Ifland: It makes it worse. So if you are on a diet and you don’t have enough calories, for example, you’re waking up another part of your brain, you’re waking up the fear of famine brewing in that now you have a double whammy, you have a hyperactive fear of famine, food-seeking brain and you’ve got the addiction. It’s not nice. You have to eat full meals.

Chef AJ: But I love how you said that you have to have a recovery plan that doesn’t include addictive substances for you. I see so many plans, like you say, that allow dairy, that allow stevia, that allow caffeine. Yes, it’s great to take out sugar and it’s great to take out sugar and flour, but they’re still drinking alcohol. And I don’t think people really fully understand the addiction model the way you describe it.

Dr. Joan Ifland: Yeah, it’s so easy to transfer an addiction. And even if you’re coming off the processed foods, your leadership should be expert enough to be watching for relationship addiction or porno addiction or gambling addiction or shopping addiction. It’s very easy to transfer an addiction, and the corporations are out there with their addiction scientists promoting this all the time.

Chef AJ: I love how you said that households should respect those in recovery because this is what I see as one of the biggest problems. And as you talked about cues in the environment, you mentioned how if somebody was quitting smoking, you wouldn’t necessarily tell the family members they had to quit smoking, but they can’t smoke in the house. But with the processed foods I see so many, it’s usually the woman, sometimes it’s the man, but it’s usually the woman who will. My husband won’t eat this way and my kid won’t eat this way, and they still have to go out and buy this hyper-palatable crap and make food with it. And then they wonder why they can never recover because they’re living in a 7-Eleven.

Dr. Joan Ifland: Yes, and this is something that I think is really important that you let you know the truth about these processed ingredients. I am working on a presentation right now, it’s based on some material from rob Lustig’s metabolic book, the eight ways that processed foods attack cell function, how they immobilize cells, how they paralyze cells, how they cause cell death. This is these are not substances that you would ever give somebody, no

Chef AJ: I love how you said that in many of the eating recovery programs, they’re trying to teach people to moderate these, and then they blame themselves for failing. We have a binge expert on this summit who says, No, you can’t moderate those foods.

Dr. Joan Ifland: No, no, you can’t. And you don’t want to you. It would be like saying, OK, good, you’ve gone from a pack of cigarettes to half a pack. That’s great. Let’s just stop right there. Oh, no, no, no. You would want to keep whittling that down until they were safe. It’s very because there are so many different substances and the industries are so good at deception, these are the same people that tried to successfully persuade us that cigarettes were sexy. Can you imagine anything more repulsive than a cigarette?

Chef AJ: I’m just shocked. Every time I see somebody smoke, I’m like, Really? That’s the thing, it shocks me. You know, so many people say that the reason that they’re overweight today is they had childhood trauma or abuse. And again, we’re not trying to diminish that in any way. But you said it’s not your childhood issues. Could you please elaborate on that?

Dr. Joan Ifland: Well, suppose you are a heavy drinker and you’re an alcoholic and you go into therapy. Therapists will not work with an alcoholic while they’re still drinking. And it’s because you don’t know what behavior is being driven by the alcohol versus the childhood trauma. But yet they go in and they treat people with processed food addiction without getting their diets cleaned up. So how in the world can that therapist know whether that person is sobbing in their office because they’re crashing off of a sugar high or because they’ve uncovered a childhood trauma that is not a fair fight? You’ve got to really work with that patient and are our message to the therapists, to doctors, to dietitians, to nutritionists, to physical therapists, to nurses is simple. You need a surround support system for that patient. Yes, we want to work with you on food plans, we want to work with you on prescriptions. But the idea that you’re going to take a severely addicted person and get them to a safe place with a once-a-week appointment or a once-a-month appointment. No, that is. It’s going to leave the practitioner frustrated. My heart breaks for practitioners who are being trained to believe that they can medicate or surgically alter a person. No, it’s a hundred billion brain cells that need reprogramming, rewiring ,remessaging, and you’re not going to do that in a once a week office and you’re not going to do that with surgery,

Chef AJ: right. It’s interesting how you said at the beginning how when people are using these hyper-palatable foods as drugs, it’s almost not to feel good anymore, but just to avoid the pain of the withdrawal.

Dr. Joan Ifland: Yes, that’s the progression of addiction. You’re not drinking anymore because you really enjoy it. It’s because you’re we’ll get the details and withdrawal. The pleasure has gone out of it. The liking has gone out of it and wanting has come in to take its place. It’s a miserable life.

Chef AJ: Yeah. How long does it take for someone to detox or withdraw from processed food and to have these cravings go away? And I know they can always be reignited by cues.

Dr. Joan Ifland: Yes.

Chef AJ: But If they’re in a clean environment and in a program, how long does that serious detox where they’re really miserable take?

Dr. Joan Ifland: It’s four to eight days, sometimes 10, and sometimes you might have a resurgence of strong emotions day 14, days 23. But as long as you’re in a program and you can go in and talk about it, it will take the agony of it away. And this year, actually, I’ve learned about supplementation to reduce the agony of withdrawal. The agony when I’m talking about typically is a bad headache. So there is supplementation. There are kind of recipes for supplements online. I’m not a nutritionist. I’m not licensed to recommend things. But there are three specific minerals that, as I understand it, this is outside of my area of expertise, the kidney will release those three minerals, to get a deficit of those three minerals, and you can you could just take them. And you’ll avoid quite a bit of the worst of it.

Chef AJ: That’s great. So is it important to have a clean environment if one is recovering from an addiction?

Dr. Joan Ifland: We have excellent research showing that if your brain, your addictive brain, knows that food is available, it will be pumping out. So for me, you can’t pay attention because your brain is filling, filling, filling with dopamine until finally there’s so much dopamine in your head that you’re doing what I call the zombie walk. You’re going to get it. Your brain is screaming, No, no, no. But your body is moving forward. It’s because so much dopamine has built up from availability alone, that can get control of your behavior. That’s not you. It’s not your frontal lobe. The frontal lobe is going offline. It’s a mechanical chemical reaction to availability. So a clean home environment, even if you start getting triggered out in the real world, you can just like get home and then all this is our peaceful place. This is where we have absolute control. All of that part of your brain will be triggered. You’ve got to have a kind of a sanctuary somewhere, a refuge.

Chef AJ: I couldn’t agree with you more. And the amount of time that people complain about how they can’t get a clean environment, they could maybe learn techniques to negotiate that because I think that it can be negotiated. Maybe it would take therapy or a counselor or something. But until one has had the benefit of a clean environment, I don’t think they know how peaceful one can be. You always have that calm, stable brain. I think if I had to live among processed food, I wouldn’t have been able to manage my food addiction and keep the weight off.

Dr. Joan Ifland: No, no. And I love this topic because we are asking ourselves what is reasonable? What is realistic? It’s not realistic to stop lapsing of processed foods are piled up everywhere in your home. So you is it’s one of the things when we should go at your own pace and talk about what your voice the wisdom was to talk about, it may be that that person has got to stand up to an emotionally abusive household member before they can even start thinking about a food plan. It may be that they have to work with their physician to get off some medications before they’re going to be successful on a food plan. Yeah, so getting your food in order is just kind of on the list of things that need to be built up, and you need to build skills to execute those things over time. I’ve been in my recovery program now for four years, I’m still throwing off mean things that my parents said to me. And the more I throw those off, the more I like myself, the easier it is to maintain a clean food plan.

Chef AJ: Thank you. The words conformance drive and mirror neurons might be new to some of our viewers. Could you kind of give a down and dirty definition of this?

Dr. Joan Ifland: Yes, this is this. This is something that’s very, very surprising. I worked very hard for 22 years to find a way to reliably get people off of processed foods. It took me all those years to realize how severe the addiction is and then January 1st, 2018. I said, OK, I know you know what Zoom is. We’re going to have it all day long program seven days in a row on Zoom. And I don’t know, I got 10 volunteers, I had a daily phone call, I got 10 volunteers from that program and they had all been struggling. I had the daily phone call for maybe a year and a half wasn’t enough. And there we were that very first day. On Zoom, we came to the end of the day and I went around the room, I said, How did you do with your food today? I ate clean, I ate clean. I didn’t think I could do it, but I did it. I’ve been trying to eat clean for 20 years all the way around the room. Everybody have eaten clean that day and I was shocked. I didn’t know about mirror neurons. They’re not in the textbook, but I went looking, I went looking for some explanation why all of those people were able to eat clean on that very first day. It was conformance drive. Conformance drive, as it turns out, is the second most powerful system in the brain, the most powerful system is making our blood pump, our breathing, but right next to it is conformance drive. But what would that be? It is because if you believe in human evolution, not everyone does. But even if you think of it as an creationist terms, it still makes sense. If you were in a tribe. And you conform to that tribe’s way of doing things. You would live long enough to pass on your genes to have children pass on your genes. Why? Because it was the tribe that far off predators and found food and found shelter and watched over children. If you were the kind of person who went off on your own, those hyenas were waiting for you. You would not survive long enough to have your own children. So the people wandering off those dunes did not get passed on the people who would conform to a tribe. Their genes got passed on. This is hard-core survival wiring in the brain, so the food industry just exploits this mercilessly. That’s why you see commercials that have somebody sitting on the sofa eating bad food. You’re confirming signs and said, Oh, we should sit on this set of bad food. It’s it’s diabolical. This is what I really like the way I think about mirror neurons. They will either kill you or they will cause you to thrive. And it depends on 100 percent on who you are around. So if you’re around people who are eating processed foods and you’re beating yourself up because you can’t stop, it’s not your fault. Nobody’s ever given you an alternative group of people to conform to. It doesn’t mean you love those people any less. It just means that you’ve managed your mirror neuron, your conformance drive compulsion in a safe way. I eat what these people eat. I love these people over there in my household, but I eat the way these people eat. And that’s crucial. And so how does your conformist tribe decide who to conform to? It is who you see most often and how well you know them.

Chef AJ: We had one of the experts on the summit, Dr. Scott Stoll, talk about the obesity contagion that you are your friends behaviors basically.

Dr. Joan Ifland: We do. There’s really strong in this relatively new research. I have a workshop called tattooing processed food addiction from social circles. This researcher went so far as to say that if you’re a social circle is not losing weight, you cannot lose weight.

Chef AJ: Wow, that’s profound. You know, this summit is called the truth about weight loss and in addition to excess weight, what other effects do these processed and ultra-processed foods have on the brain in the body?

Dr. Joan Ifland: Oh gosh, they will be. They impair cell function. So every cell in the body is being impaired. Brain-wise, you will get the good, the addiction that we talked about before intense cravings, loss of control over behavior. You will also get that cognitive impairment, poor attention span learning, decision making, impulse control and memory. And you do see epidemics of all these things that Americans are eating over a pound per person per day of these highly toxic, fattening substances. So you see epidemics of these things. It could be any organ, skin, heart, lungs, stomach. It could be any muscle group. It could be any endocrine. It could be the thyroid. It could be the pancreas. It could be all your reproductive organs. It could be your skeleton. You know it causes it. They’re highly acidic. The stomach will neutralize the acidity by pulling calcium alkaline from the bone. So osteoporosis, it erodes cartilage, the cells in cartilage. This is why we have these epidemics of hip and knee replacement, and it accelerates aging, so it creates something called a glycated end product. And those build up inside our cells and they make the cells inflexible. They prevent the mitochondria in the cell from functioning. So you’re touching on what’s so fun. I mean, people say what? This is not fun. This is incredibly fun. You know, all these things that your health professional told you are never going to go away. They go away. All these things that you didn’t know you had. And people might have told you that you were slow or you had a low IQ or you were not a good learner. Boom, all of a sudden you have this terrific IQ. You learn like crazy and you can pay attention for hours on end and your memory is sharp, sharp, sharp and you’re making great decisions. Oh my gosh. Oh, the pain goes away. The inflammation, the leaky gut, the stomach aches, asthma. There are a hundred and forty-four diseases associated with processed foods, and the basic foundation for that is processed foods. Gradually and painfully destroys cell function. They are that deep.

Chef AJ: I believe you. Is there like an addiction severity index?

Dr. Joan Ifland: Yes. So the way the American Psychiatric Association has defined this is there are those 11 signs. We talked about six, six or seven of them. The more of those you have, the more severe the addiction we have a self-quiz. It’s not a diagnostic tool, but it’ll give you an idea of whether you’re experiencing the signs. And that self- quiz is right at the top of the services we offer at processed food addiction dot com, six or more out of the 11 is considered to be a severe addiction.

Chef AJ: Right, thank you. You know, you mentioned in one of your talks that I heard about waking up the food-seeking part of the brain. Obviously, a lot of people with processed food addiction do have excess weight that they need to lose. So how do they do that without waking up that part of the brain?

Dr. Joan Ifland: Well, you eat a lot of non-fattening foods. So you had another guest whom I just really admire, Barbara rolls in she I didn’t really believe this when I was switching to a circus, I tried it out for myself. If you’re eating a lot of like a leafy green, this is a big volume on your plate. This is really fun to try out. You will see that you are less hungry and it’s not a matter of calories. That’s not how the brain computes whether you’ve had enough food. It’s literally by the volume of it. So the way to have to lose weight and avoid it. So how do you wake up that brain not eating enough? So it is the one situation in which the conformist tribe becomes the third most powerful part of the brain, and it’s if you’ve woken up to food-seeking fear of famine, brain. So famine is a leading cause of death on the planet, like a volcano could erupt and block out the sun for a couple of years. You would have tens of thousands of people dying of famine. Now, today, famine is used by political leaders. Mao used it to quell presence in China. Stalin used it to quell peasants in Russia. It’s horrible, and it’s done. But fear for famines hardwired into the brain. If you’re in a famine situation and you find food. This is where you would break away from your tribe. You would not share that food. That’s no longer the best survival strategy. You wouldn’t eat it all as fast as you could because you don’t want your tribe to discover you eating it and you don’t want the predators who are gathering around to get you before you’ve finished eating it. And so you would eat it as far as you could, and then you would run away and hide. That’s the description of binge eating disorder. Binge eating disorder is just a woken up fear of famine brain and brain. It’s very sad, and you do that by dieting, not enough calories, and by fasting. We do have good research showing that after even just twenty-four hours of fasting, the addictive part of the brain is hyperactived. Fasting is not for people with processed food addiction.

Chef AJ: Right. So Dr. Ifland, what’s the real truth about weight loss?

Dr. Joan Ifland: The real truth about weight loss is that it is a severe, complicated addiction. And when you treat the addiction, the weight loss issue goes away.

Chef AJ: Amen. Thank you so much, Dr. Ifland.

Dr. Joan Ifland: Thank you, Chef AJ., you were a light in the world. You are a light in a very great dim world and I appreciate you so much

Chef AJ: And the feeling is mutual. Thank you.

Dr. Joan Ifland: Thanks.

Dr. Robert Lustig: Hello. I’m Robert Lustig. I’m a pediatric endocrinologist and obesity researcher, and I am going to talk to you today about all of the diseases listed here. This is a very long list of chronic diseases, but they all have one thing in common, they are all made worse by sugar. So we’re going to talk about the role of sugar in chronic disease today. I do have these disclosures. I did write these books for the general public. Most recent of which is metabolically the law in the lives of processed food, nutrition, and modern medicine. And I am also the chief medical officer of four companies and a paid adviser to four other companies. I will not be discussing any of these companies or products during this discussion today. It starts here, starts with this fiction. This was a video that was displayed in 2013 on every football game in America, sponsored by Coca-Cola, called Coming Together. And this is a direct quote from that video. Beating obesity will take action by all of us based on one simple, common-sense fact, all calories count no matter where they come from, including Coca-Cola and everything else with calories. So you can get your calories from carrots, you can get your calories from kumquats, you can get your calories from Coca-Cola. You can get your calories from cheesecake. It doesn’t matter because of its energy balance, therefore it’s calories in and calories out, therefore these two behaviors are gluttony and sloth. Therefore, any calorie can be part of a balanced diet because of its diet and exercise therefore don’t pick on our calories. Pick on somebody else’s calories. All of this comes from the notion that calories are fungible. That is, it doesn’t matter where they come from. The problem is, the science says something else entirely because the science says that some calories cause disease more than others, depending on which foods they are in because different calories are metabolized differently, because a calorie is not a calorie, and sugar turns out to be the most egregious of all calories. So you know that this is true. The question is, is this true as well? And we now have the data to demonstrate that indeed, this is the case.

Dr. Robert Lustig: Now, the public health community says that in order to regulate a substance, it has to meet four separate criteria, unavoidability or ubiquity, toxicity, abuse, and negative impact on society known as externalities. In other words, how does your smoking affect me, or how does your alcohol use affect me? So that’s the question for today with sugar, does sugar meet these four criteria? So we’re going to go through each of these one at a time. So from an unavoidable military standpoint, well it’s in all of our food now, our ancestors back in 1820, getting fruits and vegetables and the occasional honey, you know, consumed about five pounds of sugar per year, which is virtually nothing. And there’s the growth of the sugar industry during the late 19th century, CNH and Domino, etc. Texas, Louisiana, Hawaii, which reached stabilization there at the beginning of the 20th century, when price equal demand. The rationing of World War Two came back up to the same level,l and then we had the advent of processed food in the mid-1960s. And then we had the switch of high fructose corn syrup for sucrose, and we also had the dietary guidelines, which caused an increase yet again.

Dr. Robert Lustig: So if you look at our diet, it turns out that 56 percent of the food sold in America is currently ultra-processed. That means different nutrients, different ingredients that are taken out of other foods and put into virtually newly created foods. This accounts for 62 percent of the sugar in the American diet and 67 percent of the sugar in kids’ diets. And as you can see, it’s in virtually all foodstuffs, not just the obvious candy cakes, desserts. All right, so ubiquity solved, now how about toxicity? Now, this article, you may have seen in the New York Times magazine. Now, over 10 years ago from Gary Taubes, sugar is toxic and our response in 2012 in nature, my colleagues Laura Schmidt, Clare Rendus, and I wrote this article in Nature called The Toxic Truth about Sugar. And the question is, were we guilty of hyperbole? Did we really mean it? Well, the definition of toxicity is the degree to which a substance can damage an organism. Now notice it does not distinguish acute toxicity from chronic toxicity. So we have acute toxins like sarin and ricin and VX gas, cyanide, you know, parts per billion keel over and die on the spot. We also have chronic toxins like benzene, carbon tetrachloride, tobacco smoke pollution, etc. there’s still toxins. They just don’t kill you immediately. So one cigarette won’t kill you, but 10000 might. And that’s what we’re talking about with sugar. We’re talking about chronic toxicity. Now, in order for me to demonstrate this, I must show that sugar is an independent risk factor and that it is exclusive of its calories. Otherwise, calories are toxic and that’s not true. And it has to be exclusive of weight gain and obesity otherwise, obesity is toxic, and it turns out that’s not true.

Dr. Robert Lustig: The first thing to understand is that fructose, the sweet molecule in the sugar molecule we seek, the molecule that makes it sweet is not glucose. Glucose is the energy of life. Every cell on the planet burns glucose for energy. Glucose is so important that if you don’t consume it, your body makes it, right? Fructose is another story. Fructose is completely vestigial to all vertebrate life. There is no animal cell on the planet that requires dietary fructose for any purpose. It turns out fructose has some very specific properties that are not shared with glucose. Fructose is seven times more likely than glucose to form what we call advanced glycation end products. This is the browning or the measured reaction. And this causes chronic disease. Fructose does not suppress the hunger hormone ghrelin. So if you take a child and you pretreat them with a soda and then you let them loose at the fast-food restaurant, they don’t eat less. They eat more because the 150 calories in the soda didn’t register. Acute fructose does not stimulate insulin, and therefore it doesn’t stimulate leptin, except it causes insulin resistance, which is even worse. And hepatic liver fructose metabolism is completely different from that of glucose, and chronic fructose exposure alone causes all the diseases of metabolic syndrome.

Dr. Robert Lustig: And that can be seen here. This is a liver cell, and you can see what happens to glucose when it enters the cell. Pretty much all of it ends up with that big arrow going to glycogen or liver starch. This is what your liver wants to do with excess energy. This is why marathoners’ carb load before a race is to increase their stores of liver, glycogen, and glycogen, for the most part, is good. Very little of the glucose will actually make it down to the mitochondria, where it will be burned by the Krebs cycle or the TCA cycle to create ATP and carbon dioxide. And even less of it will get thrown off via a process called the citrate shuttle here, where citrate will ultimately be turned into fat VLDL by these three enzymes right here, ACL, ACC, and FAS. This orange pathway here is known as de novo life lipogenesis, new fat making. This is what happens to excess carbohydrate that enters the liver that the liver can’t handle well. Turns out, only a little bit of glucose will make it too fat. Conversely, fructose you’ll notice no glycogen. All of it ends up down at the mitochondria. Therefore, there’s an overwhelming of your mitochondria. The citrate leaves the mitochondria through the citrate shuttle, and then there’s plenty of substrate in order to form the VLDL. Some of it will make it out, and that will ultimately lead to either cardiovascular disease or obesity. Some of it will precipitate as a lipid droplet, and that causes liver dysfunction, causes insulin resistance. As you can see here, hepatic insulin resistance and that hepatic insulin resistance drives excess insulin, which drives hypertension and drives the brain to not be able to see its leptin signal, which would tell it to stop eating. And so this accounts for the overeating and the chronic diseases associated with sugar consumption. But that’s not all. There is a second problem. And I mentioned it before. Here are five pictures of food they all share one thing in common, they’re all brown. Now the common link is this browning reaction or the mired reaction where there is non-enzymatic glycation. So here’s the way to think about it. You can roast your meat for an hour at 375 degrees, or you can roast your meat at 98.6 degrees for 75 years. All of us are browning all the time, and the question is how fast? Because the faster you browned, the quicker you die and I will prove to you, you are browning right now because here we see newborn rib cartilage nice and white, and here’s 88-year-old rib cartilage nice and brown. We are browning as we speak. It is part of life. The only way to stop the browning reaction is to be dead. You can’t stop it, but you can slow it. And the way you slow it is by providing substrates that don’t engage in it as fast. It turns out glucose engages in it relatively fast, and this is the biochemical reaction itself. This is the aldehyde portion of a glucose molecule binding to the amino group of a hemoglobin molecule, and ultimately leading to this covalent linkage, which we call hemoglobin A1C. This is what diabetics measure in their blood. And the more they make, the higher their blood sugar is and also the quicker they die. Well, turns out, fructose does it seven times faster, and every time it does it, you get cell dysfunction and death. You release a reactive oxygen species and oxygen radical, which can damage the cell even further.

Dr. Robert Lustig: We have shown that increasing sugar availability within any country increases diabetes prevalence. So every extra 150 calories per person per day that’s available within any country’s borders increases the diabetes prevalence of that country only by 0.1 percent. But if those 150 calories happen to be a can of soda, then diabetes prevalence has increased by 11 fold, one point one percent and we’re not consuming one can of sodas worth of sugar. We’re consuming two and a half cans. So take that up to two point four percent. These data actually meet the criteria for causal medical inference, the same level of proof we have for tobacco and lung cancer today because we’ve shown dose. The higher the dose, the quicker the diabetes duration, the longer the exposure, the quicker the diabetes directionality. Those countries where sugar went up, more diabetes, those countries where sugar went down, less diabetes. And finally, precedents. Whenever sugar changed in a country, diabetes changed in the same direction. Three years later, we have demonstrated that approximately 25 percent of diabetes worldwide and 29 percent of diabetes in America is explained by sugar and sugar alone. We’ve also done a placebo-controlled trial to demonstrate that sugar is toxic, unrelated to its calories. What we did was we took 43 children from our own clinic at UCSF and we took the sugar out of their diet. We studied them on their home diet first and showed that they were making lots of fat in their liver and lots of VLDL. And then we put them on an isocaloric that is, same number of calories, sugar restricted diet. Now, if you take the sugar out of somebody’s diet, you have to put something else back in in order to keep it isocaloric. We gave them starch. So it was a starch for sugar exchange. And what we showed was that in 10 days, we were able to reduce liver fat by 22 percent. We were able to reduce that de nova lipogenesis by 46 percent. We reduced their VLDL by 49 percent and their insulin started being released appropriately and normally from their pancreas. In other words, we reversed their metabolic syndrome in 10 days with no change in calories and no change in weight. This has now been independently confirmed by another group from Emory University in UC San Diego. Also, this fatty liver disease is a huge problem, as you can see, adolescent fatty liver disease increases the risk for type two diabetes over control by 2.6 fold. So if you have fatty liver, currently today 25 percent of adolescents have it and 45 percent of adults have it, you’re at risk for type two diabetes because your liver is sick. 

Dr. Robert Lustig: This brings us now to the question of. Well, the sugars in ultra-processed food, but the sugar and therefore the ultra-processed food is making us sick. But it’s food, right? Well, is it? Is ultra-processed food actually food? So the question I’m asking is, well, what’s the definition of food? Well, if you go to the dictionary, here’s the definition. Substrate that contributes to the growth or burning of an organism. Does sugar meet this definition? Well, let’s look at burning first. All right. This is a study done at Joslin Diabetes Center, where they showed that glucose, the energy of life, that stimulates the enzyme that tells mitochondria to work, and it also stimulates one of the enzymes in the mitochondria called hydroxyacyl-CoA dehydrogenase. So beta-oxidation of mitochondria is increased by glucose. OK, glucose is food, and it causes burning. But fructose, on the other hand, that sweet molecule in sugar, suppresses these genes. It suppresses AMP Kinase, it suppresses this enzyme here, called ACADL, Acyl-CoA Dehydrogenase Long Chain. It suppresses this enzyme here, Carnitine palmitoyltransferase 1a, which is necessary to get fatty acids into the mitochondria for beta-oxidation. Fructose actually reduces burning. Well, if it reduces burning, is it food?

Dr. Robert Lustig: Ron Kohn, the head of Joslin Diabetes Center, said about this study, the most important takeaway of the study is that high fructose in the diet is bad. It’s not bad because it’s more calories, but because it has effects on liver metabolism to make it worse at burning fat. As a result, adding fructose to the diet makes the liver store more fat, fatty liver disease. And this is bad for the liver and bad for whole-body metabolism. Another study done by Dr. Kevin Hall at NIH looked at patients who were in a room calorimeter where they lived there for a month and were fed either an unprocessed diet or an ultra-processed food diet that was matched for all the different components of food. And what they found was that when they were eating the ultra-processed food, they were eating 500 calories a day more and gaining weight compared to the unprocessed where they were actually losing weight because their mitochondria were not working. They were not burning. So burning was a problem.

Dr. Robert Lustig: How about growth? Remember, you need growth or burning? Well, this is a study done by my colleague, Dr. Efrat Monsonego Ornan from Hebrew University of Jerusalem showing that cortical bone is being laid down appropriately in the control situation. But look what happens with an ultra-processed food and sugar diet And you can see that all the bone has been washed away compared to the control and it’s being thinned as well. And in fact, what ultra-processed food does, is it actually hijacks the growth paradigm to increase cancer formation. Every 10 percent increase in ultra-processed food consumption increases risk of cancer by 12 percent. So not only are you inhibiting growth, you’re actually hijacking it. Thus, in fact, sugar and thereby by proxy processed food is not food because it doesn’t meet the criteria for either growth or burning. In fact, processed food is toxic, as demonstrated by this Newsweek article. How about abuse? Well. National Geographic summed it up very nicely why we can’t resist it. In fact, sugar is addictive because it works on the reward center of the brain, the nucleus accumbens. In the same way that cocaine, heroin, nicotine, and alcohol do it, now, there are people who say that no, there is no such thing as food addiction. There was a great debate this past year in the American American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. On the European side, they said evidence that specific food ingredients are key determinants of addictive life eating behavior is lacking, whereas, on the American side, highly processed foods are complex substances developed through engineering by combining reinforcing ingredients, refined carbohydrates, fat, and additives, salt, et cetera, to deliver unnaturally heightened levels of reward.

Dr. Robert Lustig: In fact, we actually know that sugar is, in fact, addictive, and it works on the nucleus accumbens to reduce pain because this stuff right here, is something you find in the neonatal intensive care unit, as a pediatrician, I’m very familiar with this. It is called Sweeties. And what is it? It is a super-concentrated sucrose solution, a 24 percent sucrose solution that you dip the pacifier in and then stick in the newborn boy’s mouth before the circumcision because it releases endogenous opioids in that reward center to reduce pain, even in neonates. The Jews have wine. Everyone else has sweeties. In fact, this has been shown that fructose and glucose act on different parts of the brain. To cause changes in fullness, satiety, and hunger because fructose is addictive. And we actually have an economic version of this, it’s called price elasticity. So price elasticity says, how much does food consumption change when the price goes up? And it turns out that if it’s price inelastic, that is a sign of addiction. And the three most price-inelastic items that we consume are fast food, soft drinks, and juice. And comparison eggs, which are not addictive, are the most price elastic. So when the price goes up, people stop eating eggs. But when the price goes up on these guys, they don’t stop. And the reason is that they are addictive. How about in humans? Well, in humans, the American Psychiatric Association has given us different definitions for addiction, either tolerance, and withdrawal or tolerance and dependence. And here are the criteria for dependence. And if you read through them real quick, what you’ll notice is that sugar satisfies all nine of them.

Dr. Robert Lustig: And finally, now negative impacts on society. We’ve shown that if we could get the sugar out of people’s diets at a rate of 20 percent reduction, which would be like the tax, fatty liver disease, heart disease, type two diabetes, and obesity would all get better. A 50 percent reduction would do even more. In fact, Harvard just published a paper showing that reducing the sugar in packaged foods could improve the health of millions of people and thereby reduce insurance costs and reduce health care problems in hospitals. In fact, the International Diabetes Federation went to the G-20 several years ago and told them to tax sugar to save lives and money. Because this was breaking the medical bank of virtually every developed and developing country around the world. Finally, if you take a look at that same graph I showed you before showing the increase in sugar. Now I’m going to superimpose on this the percent of GDP spent on health care spending for the same period of time. What do you see when processed food enters our world? That’s when health care costs started to climb out of control.

Dr. Robert Lustig: So, is sugar public enemy number one, well trans fats used to be, but we now know that and we got trans fats out of our food back in 2013. Sugar is now public enemy number one. And appropriately so because sugar does not meet the criteria for food. In fact, it meets the criteria for poison and addictive poison just like tobacco and alcohol. And for that reason, sugar needs to come down in all of our foods, and people need to be wary of the sugar consumption that they are engaging in in order to be able to mitigate chronic disease. With that, I want to thank my collaborators at UCSF. We affectionately refer to ourselves as the Sugar Hill Gang. My colleagues at UCSF Hastings College of Law and UCLA Resnick Center for Food Policy and Obesity. Thank you so much for your attention.

Chef AJ: Hi, Dr. Fuhrman, and welcome to the Truth about Weight Loss Summit, thank you so much for being here.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: My pleasure. Looking forward to our discussion today.

Chef AJ: Well, you are one of my favorite people to interview Dr. Fuhrman. You’ve been a guest on every single summit that I’ve hosted, and I really appreciate your work because you are really one of the few people that not only believe in food addiction but actually treat it. So thank you for that.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: Yes, it’s been a thorn in the side of enabling people to achieve excellent health is the fact that they know they should be healthier. They know they should take better care of their health. So why don’t they? You know, and so obviously, addiction and the addictive nature of processed foods plays a huge role here and the difficulty people have in changing to a healthy diet.

Chef AJ: And you’ve written a whole book about it.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: So yes, I have written multiple books that discuss that. I think The End of Dieting. I try to focus on addictive eating and emotional overeating the most. But of course, in all my books, I’ve talked about it and especially talked a lot about it in my most recent book, it relates to. But I do have a lot of them, and I’ve obviously published scientific studies on it too. And I think my study on food addiction that was published in Nutrition Journal in 2010 has been referenced by nutritional scientists and weight loss experts and people publishing scientific studies all over the world thousands of times. So I have a core of knowledge that’s been utilized all over the world that I’ve published on, so I’m proud of the fact that I’ve been contributing to this field of food addiction to enable people to get better control of their eating behaviors

Chef AJ: Because you really do understand it. And the book I was actually referring to is Fast Food Genocide, where you really talk about how harmful it is?

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: Who wrote that one?

Chef AJ: Was that you? Okay, I forgot you have a good sense of humor in your teeth. You know, of course, you wrote that. So Dr. Fuhrman, a lot of experts that I’ve talked to, they feel in terms of like, especially where weight is concerned that animal products and oils are what is most detrimental and that the refined carbohydrates, sugar, flour and alcohol, while not really health-promoting, aren’t that bad. And then we have another group of so-called experts who think that animal products and oils are fine, especially if you weigh and measure them. But it’s sugar and flour. That’s the problem. So are they both a little bit right and maybe a little bit wrong?

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: Yes. I mean, because you know what my feeling in my niches is that I don’t go with any of those. I don’t agree with anybody because my goal is to give people what’s the most effective anti-cancer diet and longevity-promoting diet and anti-dementia diets. So, therefore, if you could get a little better weight loss by your diet being unhealthy, it is going to cut your short your life, I’m not into that. Do you know what I mean? I want to give people what’s best for their long-term health. And then, of course, their optimal weight will fund will follow as a result of eating for excellent health because obviously there are lots of unhealthy things you can do to lose weight. I mean smoking cigarettes help with weight loss and snorting cocaine helps with weight loss and drinking alcohol could help with weight loss. You know, whatever it is that you’re doing, there are lots of ways of eating too, that are better than the American diet that people get results with, but they’re not. If they’re not ideal, they’re not the pinnacle of nutritional excellence, it’s not my thing because I’m trying to go for that full push all the way to, you know, push human longevity, to push that envelope of human longevity and then, of course, all the other beneficial effects happen. And I’m also suggesting that the most longevity-promoting diet is most effective for disease reversal. So the and most effective for the prevention of cancer is most effective for preventing recurrence and increasing longevity in people who already have cancer. So all these things obviously work together. So I’m considering that and wanting to include that full cornucopia of foods with powerful anti-cancer effects. And neither processed carbohydrates nor animal products and oils or longevity-promoting foods. And they are foods that should be either eliminated or minimized to very low levels. So the whole argument is kind of moot.

Chef AJ: Even if they were healthy, they’re not really Weight-Loss foods.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: Yeah, for sure. You know, it’s funny because I’m always saying, you know, why do people consume things that are not in their best interest? You only get one body and you would think people would try to eat a diet, sure you want to make it taste good and enjoyable, but you want to eat foods that are going to protect you against disease, prolong your life and prevent tragedies from befalling yourself and your family. But people do the opposite. They’re busy trying to do the worst that you want to do, the worst they can, and try to come up with some rationale. Asian, why it’s OK not to eat healthfully, and it shows you the nature of the human mind and how you couldn’t take it over and how it can be twisted, and how the ability to perform and to act on your own behalf can be taken away from you by the addictive nature of processed foods, and particularly the danger of obviously high glycemic carbohydrates like sugar, honey, maple syrup and white flour. Do you mind if I open the door and let in my dog?

Chef AJ: Not at all. We love having them.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: Because otherwise, she’s going to be bugging us, you know.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: You know, she’s a big dog now.

Chef AJ: She really loves you. She is a sweetheart.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: Oh, OK, that’s enough.

Chef AJ: So doctor, for me, what is the culprit, at least in terms of food addiction and obesity? Is it the process of carbohydrates? Is it the animal products in oil or is it just all the crap that people are eating?

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: Yes. You know, I divide food into three categories. And of course, we have processed foods that are also low in nutrients and animal products that are low in nutrients, too. What I’m saying right now nutrients don’t include only vitamins minerals. It includes antioxidants and phytochemicals. And when people don’t achieve micronutrient adequacy, including sufficient amounts of phytochemicals and antioxidants, they build up more free radicals and advanced glycation end products and other toxins build up in their tissues. So what I’m saying right now is that we have to pay attention to the toxic load in the body because the toxic load in the body drives your appetite. So let me just explain, there are three categories of foods produce, processed foods, and animal products. And I’m saying a piece of chicken is like a bagel. The piece of chicken is like a bagel because there are sources of macronutrients. The chicken gives us protein in the bagel gives us carbohydrates, but neither one contains a large neutral micronutrient load and the other one contains sufficient fiber. Your appetite that is controlled by fiber and fiber breakdown products know and also the fact that you’re not supplying phytochemicals and antioxidants means you’re in the processing that food as you metabolize that food for energy. Then you’re producing free radicals and other toxins. What I’m. And then that’s OK that you’re producing free radicals and toxins when you metabolize those foods for energy. Because the body, because the food contains the antioxidants and the nutrients, we’re able to metabolize that food. So, therefore, you’re not going to be seeking extra calories to get the micronutrient needs met because the foods you’re eating that contain calories contain micronutrients.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: I was explaining that the that here’s what happens with the body is the body needs nutrients to metabolize food. And when the body utilizes nutrients in the mitochondria, it uses cofactors, vitamins, minerals, magnesium, you know, types of other types of minerals, and electrolytes. But in the process of using nutrients to metabolize food, it put your body produces free radicals from the energy generation process. That is okay to produce free radicals because in the food that we eat, there are things that prevent free radicals from leaving their confines within the right places, within the cell and free radicals, and getting to too much proliferation of free radicals that can cause cell damage. So we have the antioxidants that are supplied to digest an apple. You have the antioxidants in the apple that prevent the excess production of free radicals from eating the apple. Now, when you eat sugar in white rice, of course, white flour products, then you take menus. Everybody tries to make energy from that sugar. And now it’s utilizing nutrients, vitamins, minerals, and phytochemicals, and it’s producing free radicals. Since the sugar and the white rice and white flour products don’t supply sufficient micronutrients for the energy production in the mitochondria and the cell. Therefore, you’re not going to get full energy out of them. You’re going to be eating a lot of food and still be fatigued. And also, it’s going to strip the body of its nutrient reserves in the process, making you marginally nutritionally deficient and then eventually severely nutritionally deficient, which then makes you into a calorie-consuming monster because you can’t. Your body is just striving for nutrients and you have to overeat and the foods you really aren’t giving you adequate energy. They’re still converted into fat and you’ve not put as much energy from them. So the more readily produced into fat and now you have more free radical production from eating those foods that can’t be checked, creating inflammation and create. Exposing you to cancer. Now, in the process of eating too much of those low nutrient calories, including we’re talking here about low nutrient carbohydrates in particular. Now you get deposition of interim male cellular lipid. In other words, your muscles now get coated with fat impregnated with fat and you develop more muscle weakness and you have muscle atrophy. So the more you eat, you get your carbohydrate from eating sugar, honey, maple, srup or white flour, the more you’re weakening your muscle tissues. And now you’re going to feel lethargic, lethargic and not feel like exercising. And you’re weaker in response to exercise and you continually get more nutrient deficient, immunosuppressed, more predisposed to infection and more predisposed to cancer in the process. And that’s before it even affects the brain. We’re just talking about how it affects muscle tissue.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: Furthermore, there’s one extra thing to consider here because those things weaken muscle tissue and impregnate fat with into the muscle tissue. It leads to shrinking of muscle tissue, which then shrinks your bones because your bones grow in response to muscle density. So we increase bone growth by lifting weights and lifting heavy objects and keeping our bones dense. So our muscles, because of the electrical stimulation that the muscles place on the bones, grows the bones and keeps the bones dense. When the muscles are dense, the bones stay dense. When the muscles get weaker and impregnated with fat, the bones get more porous and we can develop osteoporosis. The word for weakening the muscles with aging is called sarcopenia. I’m saying this vicious cycle of sugar, white flour, white rice and honey on all these sweeteners with, of course, we’re talking about inflammation, increased risk of infectious death, increased risk of cancer, besides the fact that it’s going to blow your weight loss, but also the fact that it’s going to know you’re going to feel lethargic and dysthymic and we can develop sarcopenia, osteoporosis and eventually dementia, because then you’re not going to get the nutrients for the brain as well. So, I went fast and bumpy, but to give you the overall pattern of how really serious these foods are.

Chef AJ: Most speakers, when I listen to them, I have to speed it up for you. I have to slow it down. So if I understand you correctly, it’s eating a diet that’s low in micronutrients, low in fiber that makes us become, as you say, these calorie consuming monsters. And then when we eat adequate amounts of these micronutrients, it sort of turns off our epistemic for this unhealthy stuff.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: Yes, there is. There’s a lot of mechanisms involved. And that’s what I was discussing earlier with. The research I’ve done is describing some of those mechanisms and the one such an important mechanism that that I’ve discussed in and published research on was the mechanism that as the these toxins like free radicals, advanced glycation end products, urea, ammonia, the perfusion as as toxins build up in the tissues, you get a more uncomfortable sensation when you’re not constantly digesting food so that you’re using food now as a drug. And so what I’m saying is that when you finished eating and you finished digesting, that’s when the body’s enters the catabolic phase of the digestive cycle, when the liver’s not storing, building glycogen and storing energy. It can more effectively detoxify, remove free radicals, the conjugate toxins so they can be excreted in the urine or sweat it out through the skin or breathed out to your lungs. So the liver is an actively is a detoxification center from organ that’s centrally involved in detoxification. And what happens is, is that while you’re eating, it doesn’t really do its job for detoxification. It really in effect works more effectively in cycles, and it cycles in and out of detoxification modes that are enhanced when you’re not digesting food. So the person that’s toxic and malnourished now is going to feel more fatigued when they’re not digesting food as they as the detox stress is elevated. So they’re going to feel may be shaky, maybe head aching, maybe anxiety, agitated, withdrawal, depression. But the major feeling they feel is fatigue and wiped out stomach cramping, headaches. Whatever it is, they’re feeling, they’ll feel better if they keep eating, so they’re forced to overeat to keep their energy up because they’re starting to go into a phase of weakness and feeling wiped out in fatigue. When they’re not digesting food and they think in their mind that they need those calories for energy. And they think the reason their energy is dropping and they feel fatigued is because they’re hungry and they got to keep eating before they go to the gym. They’ve got to eat, they feeling fatigued, they’ve got to eat. So they’re overeating, they’re overweight and they’re still eating to get more energy. Now, how is that possible? How can a person be overweight and think they have to eat more calories for energy? Why can he just not eat anything and live off the energy of the body, live off the fat just on their body, unless they were too thin, what would they think they would have to eat for energy?

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: But the human mind always rationalizes things to protect. Its human mind doesn’t want to create cognitive dissonance, which means it doesn’t want to put itself in, like competing and fighting with itself. So when you’re overweight, you learn to accept being overweight. You don’t see yourself as overweight. You don’t see what you’re doing as harm harming yourself. You try to put it into a different compartments so your body is not. Your mind is not focused on it. And you make rationalizations and excuses when you think you just need to eat that much food to keep, you know. But when in reality, it’s the quality of their diet and their low exposure to these beneficial nutrients that allowed the increased toxins to cause their fatigue? And then, of course, the fatigue causes desire to eat more calories, and a lot of people think they’ve got to eat before they exercise. I’ve got to eat or have enough energy for the gym. No, I’ve got to eat that. They don’t understand it. Well, what about the fat, anyway? What can just run the fat off your body? We all have some fat about even as people have fat on it, but they don’t need to eat to get it off. But in any case, they’re they constantly think they need food for energy and they do, because obviously, they’ve got a vicious cycle of nutrient and micronutrient deficiencies and the body is seeking micronutrients. And of course, it’s trying to lift their energy, the extra eating, because the foods they’re eating are inefficiently supplying them with energy. So all these things work hand in hand. And then you have, of course, the stimulation of the central nervous system with the pleasure centers in the central nervous system, the dopamine centers which further complicate addiction. Then you have leptins and all these other issues, that are all intertwined. So hunger and a desire for calories has about 20 different factors that controls it, and then you try to control it with a drug or a pill or side medication after it never works because there’s so many different factors involved in the creation of hunger and creation of your caloric drive, including emotional where you deal with food emotionally. And so unless you wish to address the basics, you’re never going to solve the issue. It’s like when people come in to me complaining of like knee and back pain, and I usually start with the feet and work that way up. Unless you get the feet in alignment and get them, then get the calves stretched out and without and without and get is the spasm in your lower part. It works its way up, and with each step you have the knee going in the hip going. So we got to start somewhere and try to fix things along the way. And you’ve got to start with the things that are most important to basic things. And the basic has to be you can’t lose weight in the long run and keep it off unless you’re eating behind, unless you’re eating a diet that’s nutritionally adequate and supplying you with an excellent level of nutrients. And of course, that means comprehensively across the board. We want all those nutrients to be present that humans need to maximize immune function and good health and good mental function. Because when you have good health, physical health, you have good mental health. And when you have good mental health, you can be able to follow your diet better and be better, attuned with eating for health and eating for longevity and sticking with something long term.

Chef AJ: It almost sounds like many people continue with this addictive eating, not so much to feel good, but just so they don’t have to go through the detox.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: Exactly. That’s right. They’re doing it because they they continue to eat poorly, but just to make them feel OK, feel OK. Because if they don’t eat, hopefully they feel too sick because then they go through detox and it’s like coming off cigarettes of cocaine. And when people switch from an unhealthy diet to a really healthy diet, they temporarily feel worse for the first week. So unless they’re willing to feel poorly for a week, they can never get to healthy eating. They always go back and say, Well, I feel better on my old diet and then they’re dry, you know? And then if they are losing weight and doing it and doing what they’re supposed to be doing, then they’re dropping, you know, subcutaneous fat and visceral fat and saturated fat stores are going down. And all those things are burning more fat for energy and you’re burning fat for energy. It’s animal fat that you’re burning for energy because you’re an animal, it’s fat on your body. And when you’re burning animal fat for energy, you’re still not in great health and you’re still not going to see maximum cholesterol and maximum anti-inflammatory effects because you are still circulating and burning too much fat. You know?

Chef AJ: It sounds like if they’re willing to get through that discomfort and stick with it, eating this high micronutrient diet will actually help them fight cravings and then not overeat.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: Yes, that’s exactly right. You have to like, go through the difficult parts and and, you know, I always say, you know, take the initiative, dedication, repetition, you know? And, you know, perseverance, dedication, all those things are important to get there. And then eventually, you like eating this way better than any than your old diet. I always give the example of like, look at the way Roger Federer plays tennis. If you know anything about tennis, because us tennis players, if you’ve taken tennis lessons. If they haveshowed you, Roger Federer maybe swinging on a slow-motion camera, you know? And the fact that he has these things perfected where his where he like his wrist goes back 30 degrees, his arm straightens, it doesn’t bend to his elbow, gets across and then his body turns to the shot. His belly button like a laser turns at the aiming spot. He keeps his head on the ball contact point of the ball. Even when the ball leaves the racket, his head is staying, looking at the point where he’s connected. The point I’m making right now is that he had to take years of practice to dedicate himself to form, and even if he couldn’t have form and function, he was learning. He had a coach that was a such a nit-picker that tried to make him have perfect style, not concerned with winning a match. And he probably had to have the dedication and the and the perseverance to have to not do well while he was constantly being focused on getting good style and good form. And then eventually everything comes together and becomes perfectly easy, just plays it just automatic and easy to do. It’s the same thing here. When people start out, I tell him the first months, you know, don’t think about what you think you should eat, what you like to eat, what you think you have to eat, what you know what you thought you should know. In other words, just do what you’re supposed to do. Listen, I often tell people, you know, I’m going to write out what you eat for breakfast, lunch, for dinner. You make no decisions. Just do it, just eat it. And then we’ll evaluate how you did with it, and you’re not giving it a scientific test. We’re not evaluating how much weight you lost and how you feel doing it unless you’ve done it for a month. Anyway, we can’t say you don’t like it if you haven’t done it long enough. And then eventually, I promise you you’re going to love it and you’re going to like it as much or better than your old diet. If you stick with it long enough so your taste buds can change and taste buds can get healthier and stronger so you can taste the sweetness of romaine lettuce and the flavor of a strawberry and the creaminess of a avocado or a cashew nut. The point I’m making is that people aren’t even can evaluate if you don’t like it or not, because their taste buds are being distorted and weakened and jaded and perverted. So the fact that they don’t like it is irrelevant until they are doing this long enough. So it’s hard for people because they don’t really have the dedication and the knowledge to know if they persevere, persevere with this, they’re going to get such great results and they’re going to like, really like it. And that’s my job is to motivate them and educate them.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: So to let them know that I promised them they’re going to love this way of eating if they stay with it long enough and then that’s the most important thing that’s going to get their full mental faculties back. The brain fog is going to live in the sea. More clearly, they’re going to be able to reason more accurately, see more clearly and most importantly, have a better and happier attitude towards life and not be easily agitated or angered. And they’re going to have their brain function better and be happier and feel better about themselves. All those things are mostly going to happen, but not in the first week. These things take time. But when that does happen and they lose their dysthymia sensations because I’m saying something that’s very important here is that when you eat a conventional diet with all these processed foods in them, it makes the nutrient deficiencies that affect the brain makes most people dysthymic, which means they don’t have major depression, but they’re not excited about their life and are passionate about their life.theyd don’t wake up excited about the day and able to enjoy all the beauty in the world around them and being really so they’re they’re kind of just working, getting the work done so they can go and buy drugs and take their pills and drink their coffee and drink their alcohol and eat their burgers and pizza. And whether they’re just, you know, working so they can continue to sustain their addictive behaviors and self-destructive behaviors and because they think that’s what gives them pleasure. So in other words, they’re getting most of the pleasure in life, in their life, from addictive behaviors and unhealthy ways of eating and there. And because of that, the rest of the world loses their interest, and they really don’t have an exciting or interesting or passionate life.

Chef AJ: You mentioned that they have to have dedication and knowledge. I’ve met a few people that had both, but they live in an unclean environment or have social pressures or live with family members that don’t eat this way. How can we help them?

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: Well, it’s true that, you know, the compassion that we have for people makes us feel saddened when people know what they should do and then they can’t do what, they don’t do it because people aren’t perfect and they can’t be perfect, but we want to help them as much as we can. So obviously, that’s what some that’s what I do in my career, to a degree, is, you know, coach people and I have part of my staff or, you know, have have them training and food addiction and give people coaching and connectivity and of course, you know that on my website, we have all kinds of communications and forums. And then I eventually set up a treat here, a retreat in San Diego, where we’re open every month of the year, where people who have those difficult, their food addictions are so significant that they don’t think they can break the cycle of addiction or eat healthily on their own. They have to be in a protected environment. It’s the same as cocaine addiction, people with cocaine addiction reall shouldn’t have cocaine, but until it’s really enforced and they have the cocaine taken away from them, they have to be away from it for about a few months. Then they have a better shot at staying off cocaine, less chance of recidivism, the longer they’re off it. What I find the same thing is true with food addiction and with people who have this problem with chronic obesity and yo-yo dieting that a lot of them, they know they should eat healthier and they have the Iona good idea of what they’re supposed to do. But they keep bouncing on and off a diet and they can’t stick with it and they don’t fit and they so they’re not succeeding. And if they go to a health, you know, a health form, a health retreat and they stay there a couple of weeks, it doesn’t help them because they lose weight and they feel better. But they go back, they go back home again and they gain the weight back again. And temporary weight loss is of no benefit actually is worse than not losing weight to begin with. It’s like so so going on and off these diets isn’t beneficial for them. So as part of my practice and my passion and mission is to have a place where people are safe places. People come and stay a long time like two to three months. So I really have this dream of mine so that these people who I couldn’t help before and I felt like I’m saddened that I couldn’t help them. At least now I feel that I can help them by putting them in such a safe environment while I’m educating and training them and teaching them and having their personalities change and they get happier and get and learn how to do so. And then it’s amazingly effective because we’ve seen when they go home now, their chance of recidivism and gaining weight back is has been reduced so greatly.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: And also, they get excited about doing this and their personalities change and they continue to lose weight after they go home. For example, I had a young woman who came in weighing three hundred eighty pounds and she lost about 100 pounds when she was here, but she went from 380 to 280. She started to lose more weight, but when she came here, she didn’t want to be here. She was like forced into it by a family, and she said no way she can live with is going to stay. Eating like this would do this, we thought. But then, of course, when she was here a long time, she not only did it, she loved it. She learned to love it, and she went home and continued not doing it and changed her whole life, her whole personality, her whole perspective on her future life. And that’s just one example multiple people like that who who failed so many times until they so I’m doing this, I enjoy doing this kind of work. It’s really fun for me and very rewarding, and I guess I always am. That’s why I went into this field. I think because even though you know, I’ve written a lot of books and done a lot of public speaking, it’s still the biggest thrill is actually working with people individually and transforming their lives and knowing that their life is now protected and better because of your interactions, because you know them and have this relationship with them and you’ve had a good effect in their life and and they’re actually dealing with these people individually is very rewarding because you get to know people and you have a feeling for them, you know, when you care about them. And of course, that makes is a Win-Win for them and for us helping them. You know what I mean?

Chef AJ: It must be very rewarding. I’d love to hear from some of those people, that is amazing. You mentioned that temporary weight loss is actually worse. Could you please elaborate on what you meant by that?

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: Yes. And it’s very important to understand this because people don’t. Even though it seems so logical and simple, how could a person think that losing weight temporarily is going to benefit them? But still they don’t get it out it, they can’t stop. They don’t do it. They don’t. They still go after temporary weight loss. That just makes things worse. Number one, there’s a lot of things it’s that makes it worse, but we’ll talk about a few of these things. Number one, when you lose weight as your weight drops, you’re slowing your metabolism down to a degree as you reduce your caloric intake. And that’s favorable to slow your metabolism down because a slow metabolism is aging slower. But if you try to do something like fasting or juice fasting or or the caloric reduction is so extreme, then your metabolism could make you then regain weight when you go back to normal eating again, and you’re hardly eating that much. So in other words, after the extreme weight loss, it makes it harder to stay on a diet and keep losing weight, and most likely you gain weight. Let’s say you went on a fast to lose weight. Right? And you fasted and you lost 20 pounds in 20 days. Well, now your metabolism to stay really low for three months. Super low from the fasting. And most likely, even if you’re eating carefully, you’re still going to gain all that weight back and more. But if you’re not eating absolutely perfectly carefully, you’re going to overshoot the 20 pounds you lost because your metabolism so slow and you wind up getting to 20 pounds, you lost even more weight, so your weight will be even higher. So what I’m saying right now here you have this person who hasn’t even perfected their diet yet, and they’re just starting to lose a little weight, and they’re because they haven’t perfected the diet and haven’t done it long term. They’re not even certain, and you’re not even sure they’re going to stay with eating this healthfully for the rest of their life. And then you put them on a fast and they lose a lot of weight, and then they go back to this way of eating that may not be so perfect. They’re going to gain the weight back again from that fast. But again, they don’t know because they slow the metabolic rate down, and it takes so long for the metabolism to come back again. They’re going to actually put on more weight, and it’s the regaining of weight where the fat gets stored more viscerally because you can only put subcutaneous fat on so fast. And whenever there’s a rapid regain of weight, you’re putting on subcutaneous fat and more visceral fat. Because the limit on the speed of subcutaneous fat growth. And visceral fat is more saturated more internally and it’s called visceral because it’s in the viscera. It’s on the other side of the stomach muscle. It’s in internally, around your heart, around your liver, your kidney, around blood vessels, more effect on blood pressure, more raising of cholesterol, more metabolically unfavorable for insulin resistance and making you more diabetic. So when you have this, when you regain weight, you have more detrimental. Biological events happen, so it’s more dangerous. The fat is more dangerous when the rates coming on you. Like, for example, let’s say a person loses. 30, let’s say lose 30 pounds. Then they say, Oh, great, I’m 30 pounds lighter, I can afford to gain 10 pounds back again now and I going on a cruise and I have all the buffets and I am going to Vegas. So that’s when their heart attack occurs. They gain about 10 pounds. They have a heart attack. They’re still 20 pounds. There’s still 20 pounds down because we lost 30 gained by 10. But it’s the rapid regain of weight that’s more dangerous than the overall body weight. Because when you’re regaining the weight and you put that and you’re putting back more visceral fat, that’s when you’re laying down more cholesterol. And it’s the newly laid down plaque, not the old plaque. Because the old plaque in your heart is calcified, it’s invaded with scar tissue, smooth muscle. You have a bigger, you could say, demarcation zone between the lumen, the way the blood flows and the lipid or soft part of the plaque is separated by a band of calcification and smooth muscle and scar tissue. So there’s not going to form a clot that’s going to cause a heart attack. But when the newly plaque is newly laid down, the cholesterol is very closely close to the calcified cap abutting the lumen. And if that came with the movement of blood vessels of that cap cracks exposing the cholesterol to the internal of the internal blood vessel, then it stimulates platelet clotting and inflammation and a clot forms and you have a stroke or a heart attack. What I’m saying right now is most heart attacks occur around the holidays when people go on parties and binge eat and they gain weight, even five pounds of weight gain can precipitate a heart attack and going away on vacation and gaining five or ten pounds could be they could be precipitate a heart attack or something dangerous. So losing weight and then gaining it back again is putting your self in a dangerous position. While you’re losing weight, you’re lowering your risk of heart attack but when you put the weight back on again, you’re increasing your risk again, even if you’re at a lower weight than you were originally and you’re regaining weight due to the higher danger point from the speed of fat coming on the body. Did you follow that?

Chef AJ: I did. If I heard you correctly, it sounds like you don’t recommend things like water fasting or juice fasting for rapid weight loss.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: First of all, of course. Yes, that’s right. I mean, I may utilize tools like water fasting in cases where I have an asthma patient and they’re coming off their inhaled steroids. And I don’t want them to flare up with an asthma attack. So I’ll use the anti-inflammatory effects of fasting. But I’m not doing it for weight loss. I’m doing it because they already eat healthy to get to a good weight and now I’m trying to help them remove the anti-inflammatory effects of their story inhalers. I’m trying to suppress lupus nephropathy. I’m trying to help a person with inflammatory bowel disease rest their bowel, or I’m so trying. In other words, the reason why I might be fasting people and if I am fasting them, it’s usually because they’re already eating healthy for a long time, and I’m convinced I know them. They’re going to eat healthy after the best. When you take a person with weight loss, you have a person who has not consistently proven they’re going to be sticking with this healthy diet for the rest of their life. When if you interested in putting it on a fast now you sabotaged their ability, make them more into a food addict and they constantly think about food and think about eating food, and it makes them have a bad or worse relationship with food. Instead of trying to get them to develop these behaviors of sort of repetition and consistency, and staying with a salad and soup and a piece of one piece of fruit for lunch and vegetable croutons with a dip and cooked vegetables for dinner and a frozen fruit instead of trying to build up consistency and getting rid of their addictions. Now you’ve interceded it with something so aggressive that’s going to make their addictions actually get worse when you’re done with that in many cases. So my experience and I probably have a huge amount of experience with this is that the amount of people that keep the weight off that they achieved through fasting is minuscule. Very small percent of people. The majority of people undergo these aggressive measures, like fasting or juice fasting, gain the weight back and don’t keep it up. and for many people, it could stimulate their food addictions, tendencies and emotional reading and make their would be worse because now they felt so deprived after the fast. So it’s usually not something I’d want to do initially with people, and I’m honest with you. I certainly do not want a food addict to think about that. I’m not going to fast people who are food addicts. It doesn’t make them better. I’m going to fast people who are maybe have some serious illness who are not food addicts, but that’s a different subject, a different interview, how we can utilize fasting as a therapeutic tool in some cases. But it’s not the same thing as using it for weight loss. It’s not a good idea to do it for weight loss.

Chef AJ: I really appreciate that perspective because everybody I know that has fasted to lose weight or juice fasted to lose weight has gained it all back eventually and then some. And the people that specialize in treating eating disorders, say anybody with disordered eating, like that has a history of anorexia or bulimia shouldn’t be fasting anyway.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: Yeah, of course, they shouldn’t be fasting with bulemia and anorexia but I’m saying even the history of obesity, yo-yo dieting and weight gain and hard to control their appetite, that it is not good for them too fast. It’s not going to help them get rid of their addiction cravings. And, you know, people say, retrain them their taste buds and get them acclimated back to eating there so they can taste the flavor of natural foods. There’s too many emotional issues that intercede and interfere with this, and it usually doesn’t work. It’s better to have them regain their taste more gradually and regroup and develop this with repetition and deal with their emotional issues and try to have them change their attitude about life. And you’re not going to change a person’s attitude about life, whether fasting, which it’s too narrowly focused. It’s a narcissistic, kind of self-involved thing. You have to treat people to change the way that their attitude and relationship with food. They have to change the relationship and attitude with the outside world. And they have to go through pleasure, get to pleasure with different, with different methods, and they have to learn how to appreciate the esthetic structure of the universe and beauty and and their own passion in aiding the world and aiding other people that have to go up to new things that give them pleasure and their ability to remote and care for other people. Because when you are an addict, you because your world becomes more narcissistically consumed with your own needs and other things that outside of you, where your fingertips end, matters less and less. And the more you’re an addict and the more severe your addiction, the more you’re separating yourself from other people and the less ability you have to emote and care and feel and for and relate to other people. the more you get into your own self and you have to get these people to change that way and the combination of feeling the body with nutrients, with the type of emotional counseling to have them not concerned how they’re seen by other people, they have to feel that they generate their own feeling good about themselves in their own way of seeing things not familiar to people see them. And because what happens is when they’re like you said about a half an hour ago, you said people go back to their house, their social network, their family, they’re made fun of.They’re not supported, right? If they have a negative home environment, they don’t seem to be able to do it well. And that’s going to. Unless the person has changed the way they’re seeing the world, those things are going to affect them. But once they’ve learned the the emotional component to their overeating, then they can solve. Then those things don’t bother them as much or don’t bother them really at all. So I’m saying that the solution has to be more comprehensive and has to involve going to have to reach that solution while they’re continually learning how to eat properly, not what you do something extreme like fasting.

Chef AJ: Right, because I once heard you say that if what you’re doing, you can’t do permanently, the results won’t be sustainable and nobody can last forever.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: Right I mean, that’s so simple, but it’s not the way people think. Let me explain that or just embellish on that, because that’s is so important what you just said, and that is anything you do in the short term is not going to stabilize your weight because it’s only short term. It’s only what you do in a long term. Eventually, your weight is going to gravitate and remain to what you stick with long term. So if you’re doing something short term, that’s not going to sustain that habit, it’s not going to benefit your weight because eventually, when you don’t go off that way of eating the way it’s going to come back, I’m going to achieve the weight that’s adapted to the diet you are eventually eating. So so what we’re saying here is there’s no advantage to short-term weight loss, and there’s no advantage to speeding up your weight loss using methodologies that you can’t maintain long term because not going to work. And so it’s only stabilizing your weight at a favorable weight for decades that makes you live a long life. Yo yo, so you’re trying to lose weight and then keep it downad gains it back and lose weight again and keep it down. Yo yoing your way to successful weight loss is not great health.The best and most longest of people are people who get to their favorable BMI and stay there for many, many, many decades. So we and it’s ideally you shouldn’t be at the same BMI from the oil when you’re 20 years old, when you’re 95 years old, you should be a BMI between nineteen and, let’s say, nineteen and twenty-two, for example. And whatever your best BMI was, you should be there forever and you so you have to learn how to live and eat to maintain that and stay with that long term. And so any salute, you shouldn’t be doing anything that you’re not going to be prepared to do for the rest of your life. And that’s what we’re teaching people, we’re teaching people how to enjoy healthy eating. And we’re teaching people that why not be your own best advocate? Why not strive for it to be in your own best version of yourself? Why not take the best care of yourself? You can. Why should you be your own enemy? Why should you work against your own best interests? And of course you are if you’re an addict, they keep going up against their own best interests but once they get rid of their addiction, every day counts, every meal counts and every mouthful counts. Because with every mouthful, you’re either helping your health or you’re hurting your health. And why would you want to hurt your health with anything you eat? Because healthy things taste great and you can learn how to make them taste great.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: You don’t have to be damaging your health to get pleasure because you know how people think they say. Shoot me right now and I’ll die if I have to eat that way because there’s no pleasure in life If I have to live on carrots and celery the rest of my life. Now that’s a food addict talking right? They don’t enjoy eating healthy food. They don’t know how to prepare and make healthy food. Their taste buds are jaded and they are food addicts and they and the food addict comes up with the rationalization as illogical as it may be. We always say an excuse is no excuse because the excuses generated from the primitive part of the brain that wants to maintain their addictions and thy are their own worst enemy. Their own brain is their own worst enemy, and they develop that way of thinking by being an addict, and it affects their way of seeing the whole world. It affects their way of their, you know, the lack of compassion for others with their lack of compassion for themselves are mixed together, you know, so it affects the way of thinking. I always say, you can’t change your health until you change the way you think.

Chef AJ: Great. You mentioned about not even doing methodologies you can’t do forever or sustain. So I’m wondering, what do you think about these very popular weighing and measuring programs? People seem to do very well as long as they’re willing to weigh and measure their food forever.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: You know, that’s right. And really, I really prefer people not to weigh and measure food and to try to use and try to learn to be instinctually in touch with their own hunger signals and try to get so healthy. So the amount of food they desire is the right amount that they require. So we talk about this a lot, that how much do I eat? Well, I eat what I feel like eating. But what I feel like eating is the right amount. It’s the right amount because I mean, the right can be in the right type of food. And so when you’re in the right type of food, you’re naturally, moderately calorically restricting. Because the human stomach can only hold a liter of food, the fiber fills you up. You get nutrient fulfillment. There’s a lot of different methodology, where the appestat in the hypothalamus is controlled and made satisfied by this substance called butyrate. That’s a breakdown product of short-chain fatty acid that comes from the degradation of fiber and with the right type of assortment of fibers, right. Then you have maximum production of the biofilm that covers the villi and the best production of short-chain fatty acids and the most expression of the appestat in the central nervous system. So in other words. And then when you eat healthily and you lose that toxic hunger, that’s the fatigue from eating poorly between meals. It’s replaced with true hunger. Hunger exists, but no one knows what hunger feels like. But once you eat healthy enough for a long enough period of time, you start to feel hunger in your mouth and throat. And one of the symptoms of hunger is that it makes food taste better. So you actually prefer to eat when you’re hungry and then so you desire of the right amount of calories and you’re not desirous of excess calories and snacking. You wouldn’t want to snack because you know you’re not going to have maximum ability to taste it unless you’re until you’re hungry. You prefer to eat. You know, if somebody comes up and says, Hey, Joel, you want to this delicious soup I made and I’ll say, Well, you know, let me have it. Thanks for putting it away from me in the refrigerator. I’ll heated up and have it later. I’d rather eat it when I’m hungry, you know, with dinner, when I get hungry later. I’m not hungry right now because I want to eat to get full enjoyment out of it. You are not just eating all day for recreation, but obviously what I’m seeing right now is that nutritional excellence and caloric control come hand in hand, because when you achieve nutritional excellence, you lose your desire to chronically overeat and emotionally overeat and you don’t feel like overeating, you feel satisfied with the right amount of calories and you don’t need to calorie count. The calorie counting may be okay for some people or even necessary for some people who are emotional readers. But unless you’re dealing with the reasons for their emotional reading, the reason they need to snack, the reason they need to snuff down a bag of nuts while watching television or something. Unless we’ve dealt with that, then you’re still not fixing the person you’re keeping them. It”s like using medication on a person with high blood pressure instead of getting the salt and the oils out of their diet. It’s like we want to get to the basic cause. Then calorie counting and measuring food is not thr long-term solution for them. It could be a short-term solution, but you really want to get to the reason why they’re overeating both biochemically, physiologically and emotionally. And I’m saying those restrictive ways that restricting food by weighing and measuring is not adequately getting to the reason people overeat biologically and emotionally. So there’s some failure there if they need to have to weigh in everything. And you didn’t get this person quite emotionally whole because we don’t want to have to worry about food. We want to be able to worry about our life and worry about our happiness and our pleasure in life and being and being productive. And then, of course, food adds to that pleasure but you’re not thinking, but you’re not a food addict anymore, so you don’t need to measure and weigh, you just naturally eat the right amount.

Chef AJ: What I never understood is why they limit vegetables, non-starchy vegetables to seven ounces, that that does not make sense to me.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: Right. Yeah, of course not. You know, and I’m saying something, I’m saying something quite opposite to that. I’m saying that we want people to eat a nine inch salad bowl every day of raw vegetables. We want to eat a pound of raw vegetables each day, a minimum, whether having those salad, leafy vegetables with scallion, onion on the with mixture of different type of leafy greens. To get that full cornucopia of anti-cancer effects with the lettuces. And by the way, lettuce contains a lot of substances that benefit the microbiome and fuel the growth of good bacteria and suppress appetite. Don’t minimize the value of lettuce, and then you have, of course, you know, care when collards and bok choy and regular and scowling and red green onions and you have a salad and you’re so far from the tomatoes and all of those dressing and all the healthy salad, maybe the soup you had for lunch and the fruit we had for dessert. So you don’t have room for eating raw carrot sticks and raw peppers and raw snow pods or broccoli florets. So I have another serving of raw vegetables with a dip as part of dinner, and then you have your cooked vegetable part of the meal. So as the cooked vegetables alone with the cabbage and mushrooms and onions and peppers and all the things you’re eating, it’s it could be quite a lot of weight and volume of food. But it’s very low calorically, obviously. But you’re getting a bit for that volume, getting a huge nutrient exposure. And it’s that combination of volume, nutrient exposure, and fiber exposure that really controls you control your appetite. So I’m saying that on my nutratarian program, I’m not summing it up by saying it’s a diet with a favorable caloric density because caloric density doesn’t explain everything. It’s not just a favorable nutrient-density, so it’s not just glycemically favorable. In other words, it is not just because it’s high in phytochemicals. We’re looking at every single factor that makes a diet excellent, sustainable, and protective against cancer, dementia, heart disease, strokes, long life, slow the aging process. And then you put that together and make that taste good addressing all the factors. So it’s a little more comprehensive than just saying, you know, a low glycemic diet or a low-calorie density diet or so. In other words, it’s we’re trying to encompass all the elements that are important for human lifespan, to maximize human lifespan.

Chef AJ: Right. And that’s more than eating seven ounces of vegetables I’m sure

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: That’s correct.

Chef AJ: Right. Dr. Fuhrman, many of the people that are teaching food addiction, they have no clue about how wonderful plan- based diets are. So they’re obviously promoting animal products in oils. And one of the things they say, which I’m hoping you can debunk, is that you can’t heal brain neurotransmitters if you don’t include animal protein.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: I have never heard anything so ridiculuos.

Chef AJ: Thank you so much.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: Well, look, animal protein is concentrated calories that raise a hormone called IGF1, which is growth0promoting. And we know that animal protein and animal products are linked to thicker, heavier weights and higher BMIs, and more trouble. It’s not just increasing heart attack and cancer risk, it’s also making it more difficult for people to lose weight. So when people cut back on animal products and they lose weight is easier. Now that said, you know, we know that protein is important and we know that the most, how could I say, surprising, shocking research coming out of the last decade on nutrition and nutritional science and longevity has shown that increases in animal protein shorten lifespan, but increases in plant protein lengthen lifespan. Let me say that one more time. That this has not been coming out of one study, but this is now come out of many studies right now with high credence, meaning they followed people long term looking at hard endpoints like death. And that is when we’re designing plant-based diets, there is a reduction in protein bioavailability and the assimilation of amino acids with aging. And there’s more deterioration with aging when people are on low protein plant based diets. And when you pay attention to protein content from plants, you extend human lifespan and having protein adequacy is important, but it works better and prolongs lifespan when you achieve protein adequacy with plants, not with animal products and protein adequacy achieved with plants, meaning you include high protein plant foods in your diet. That includes seeds and nuts and beans and green vegetables, which are the highest protein plant foods. And they’re also the lowest glycemic. among all centenarians till we find that they have a higher insulin sensitivity, lower circulating glucose levels, hemoglobin A1C and the lack of insulin resistance and the beta cells in the pancreas are burned out by the chronic exposure to high levels of white rice, white potato, white bread. Another way high glycaemic carbohydrates that not only keeps the protein content too low, which keeps their insulin use of the pancreas too high, that that shortens their lifespan and stops them from achieving great health between the ages of 90 and 100. So you can be in good health to beat out the American diet, a diet that is not ideal. It’s better than most Americans eating these plant-based diets that are not so perfectly designed. The average American dies between 70- 80 years old, let’s say, and the average people in the blue zone are living to be 85 to 88, let’s say. And I’m saying a nutritarian diet is not trying to emulate a blue zone. It’s not a blues zone diet. We think we can do much better than a blue zone. We can have the lifespan be 95 to 105, not 85 to 90. And if you feel that’s good enough, then all you want to achieve in 85 to 90, or 80 to 80, 85 or 85 to 87. The blue zones don’t, number one, they’re not mostly plant-based. They’re there. It’s a myth to think they’re all less than 10 percent of calories from animal products, they are not. Some of them are up to 20-25 percent of calories from animalproducts. And number two, they’re eating what’s culturally in their ancestors, what’s culturally available and the locale of what they’re eating and how they learn to eat, it’s not designed by science to maximize the human lifespan. We know so much more. We have so much information today on anti-cancer foods and what foods promote longevity. So we can design a diet to do much better than blue zones can do. So I’m saying what we’re finding out that protein does matter. And these animal product people advocating protein adequacy have a point because there is a problem with many plant based diets that have enough protein for the midlife people. And you can even be on a fruitarian diet and feel good in your 20s and 30s but as the ability to assimilate and digest protein with aging goes down, the diet can be too low in protein to maximize human lifespan, to reach that limit of human life and then paying attention to eating edamame and hemp seeds and broccoli florets and bok choy stems all become more important.

Chef AJ: Thank you. I once heard you say, Dr. Fuhrman, that you can’t be overweight and healthy, and there’s a movement health at every size. So why can’t a person be healthy if they have excess fat on their body?

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: Isn’t that crazy? It’s that the reason why they can say the person is overweight and healthy is because most people in America that are out of normal weight with a BMI below 22 are people who smoke cigarettes or who are alcoholics, drug addicts, or they have some medical condition keeping them sickly. That keeps them thin. So there’s only 2.4 percent of Americans have a normal weight because they eat healthily and exercise regularly. The other 10 or 15 percent that are of normal weight or sick people. So it looks like people that are moderately overweight might have a better life span than people that have a normal BMI but that’s because they didn’t exclude medical conditions and cigarette smoking. They look at the 2.4 percent that eat healthfully, you know what I mean? So in any case, what we’re what I’m saying very clearly is there’s no such thing as an overweight, healthy person. But even 10 pounds of extra weight on your body causes an increase in insulin resistance, which shortens lifespan. In other words, fat cells or make you insulin resistanant. Your beta cells in your pancreas have to do more insulin. If you’re producing more insulins keeping sugars better controlled, then you’re actually aging at a faster rate than you would have if you had to produce less sugar and the fat cells. So what I’m saying right now is that all overweight people are pre-diabetic in my viewpoint because you’re not just pre-diabetic when your glucose level rises, you are prediabetic before the glucose rises, before you have any apps going up while you have a higher insulin production from the beta cells because insulin is a pro fat hormone and promote, say, a replication in ages you faster. Plus the fact that fat cells get a poor blood supply and they spew out free radicals and they excite aromatase, which produces estrogen, increasing the risk of prostate and breast cancer, and also leave the right kinds. The cytokines, the free radicals coming out of the fat supplies is increasing the risk of COVID death due to cytokine storm because your body has higher circulating white blood cells. Immune system that’s always overworking in an excessively stimulated. And now you overly react with too much excitation when you are, get it when you get a virus like that. And of course, before COVID came out, the World Health Organization stated infectious deaths were increasing each year to do a dangerous point. If COVID leaves were still going to see infectious deaths on the rise due to so much processed foods and poor health of the population. And nobody’s talking about the fact that obviously that eating for longevity protects you against these tragedies that could before people all along the way. So, yes, this is critically important information. And there’s no such thing as a healthy, overweight person. They are at an increased risk of cancer, the increased risk of infectious death, the increased risk of heart attack and they shorten their lifespan compared to a person that’s truly healthy.

Chef AJ: Right, you know, I interviewed Chris Wark of Chris beat cancer and he had mentioned that being overweight increases your risk of so many cancers. How does that do that?

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: There’s lots of different mechanisms, some of which we explain, but. But of course, we’re talking here about the combination of keeping the body keeping hormones elevated, particularly at elevated estrogen and your estrogen testosterone ratio for a male on your estrogen, progesterone ratio for a female, is it a skewed and also become fat cells in the body? Or a chronic source of excess inflammation and of course, fat cells in the body? Raise your exposure to exposure to insulin and so high glycemic diets are those with high risk of different types of cancer, like colorectal cancer and breast cancer. People in high glycemic diets have an 87 percent increased risk of dying of breast cancer. And we’re talking about, let’s say, for example, you have an overweight person who was eating more white rice and white bread and white potato, which are high glycemic foods. This overweight person now is going to have a higher circling level of insulin compared to a thin person eating white rice and white potato. So there’ll be a higher glycemic response to those hypoglycemic carbohydrates, and therefore we see a higher risk of cancer in the overweight when they have more high glycemic foods like that. So the point is is that in response to the same carbohydrate load as a thin person, they’ll have a higher insulin level circulating, which then increase the risk of cancer. Because insulin is a hormone that promotes angiogenesis and angiogenesis allows fat cells to grow because fat cells need blood vessels to grow into the fat to allow it to grow. So insulin promotes the fat cell growth by promoting the growth of blood vessels. And in doing so, it allows abnormal cells in the body to replicate and clean a blood supply and eventually metastasize. And I’m saying right now, in fact, that cancer cells can’t grow and metastasize without angiogenesis promotion, and these processed foods and animal products are also angiogenesis-promoting and saturated fat also mixes into that because saturated fat makes you more resistant too. So when you have more animal products, fats, and saturated fats, it distorts the instant receptors. It makes your glycemic response to a carbohydrate higher. And also, the saturated fat hit that CD36 receptor on cells that enable cancer cells to replicate. So if you really want to get cancer, then you have high levels of animal fats with high levels of Klyce hypoglycemic carbohydrates. Then you really have the witch’s cauldron of causation that increases cancer risk. What I’m saying right now is that high glycemic carbohydrates become more cancer, promoting the more fat you have on your body and the less fat you have on the body, the less the less damaging they become. Not that you shouldn’t pay attention to that, because over time, even a person with normal weight is not going to live as long in those foods because they’re not as nutritionally rich. They don’t contain anti-cancer phytochemicals. They’re not the foods linked to longevity. But in a person that’s overweight, they become more and more damaging and even cancer-causing where they wouldn’t be even cancer-causing overweight people because of the relationship with insulin.

Chef AJ: Thank you for explaining that, because I always wonder and animal products and processed food are what most people eat most of their calories from.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: Do you know that Americans only two percent of calories from vegetables? Two percent.

Chef AJ: And ketchup is a vegetable now.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: And we’re a green vegetable-dependent animal. And there’s also an ergophene receptor on the outer portion of most our cells, which makes us mushroom dependent for adequate DNA protection. So we are I could say that much of the green leafy vegetables and mushrooms and onions and scallions were foods that were primary foods for the human species. Maybe the pre-human species, maybe Neanderthal man and other species that have developed into Homo sapiens. the point is, is that in the development of human genealogy, we develop a dependency on these foods for normalcy. And you can’t really have a normal immune function if you’re not eating a high amount of green vegetables and onions and mushrooms and things like that because our cells are dependent on them. I always say, if you don’t like vegetables and you better live close to a hospital. You know, not that it makes any sense. It’s just a joke. But I mean, that’s is not going to help you anyway, living close to a hospital, but you going to be in the hospital a lot anyway. You can use the blood of a lot of gasoline trying to get to hospitals all the time.

Chef AJ: I love it. That is the hardest thing, though, to get people to eat vegetables. So if I hear you correctly, it’s not just the excess weight that’s the problem, but the food that the person ate to cause the excess weight.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: Absolutely. You know, the shortest lifespan of any occupation in North America, the linebackers and football teams, because they push themselves to such a high weight, their weigh between two hundred and twenty five and three and two hundred seventy five pounds on the average, the point is is that what they have to eat to get that big, you know, they’re mostly muscle, not mostly fat. But even though they had to eat a lot of animal products to get that much muscle in the body. I mean, I work out with weights my whole life as an athlete, and I’m not going to get to be too super big because my diet’s going to limit my size. But I wanted to weigh 200 pounds of muscle. I’d have to eat a lot, a hell of a lot of animal products to get there, you know? And so what I’m saying is these guys, these power lifters and big guys in the gym want to get bigger. Yeah, they can get bigger with more animal products. They’re not going to live longer. They’re going to live shorter. How should you say, inhibit your capacity for largeness, including muscle growth by not going to that level of animal protein, which means this diet gets very good for sports like basketball and tennis and skiing and running. But not it’s not going to make you an optimal football player if you need to get that big, you know.

Chef AJ: Wow. Dr. Fuhrman, can you please explain what dopamine insensitivity is, how it occurs, why it occurs, and why it might be important to some people?

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: Yes, it’s very important for people because I’m saying here the key factor is fast food and what is fast food? I’m saying fast food means the calories rush into the bloodstream rapidly and they enter a large amount of calories into at once. And the medical profession calls that a bolus. It means when you inject a medication all at once into the bloodstream, so dropping it in slowly. So when you have sugar and white flour, and by the way, I’m saying white flour is sugar. I’m saying this is no biological difference in white flour and sugar. Bagels and pastry and donuts and cookies and pizza. And these foods are cake. They’re candy, and they’re not food. I should have made a mistake. So these foods, they’re not food, because food is a substance that supplies nutrients to sustain human life. And white flour and sugar are drugs that take away the sustain the nutrients to sustain human life and strip them out of the body. So white flour and sugar and honey and maple syrup should not be called food. They really should be considered a drug and an addictive, addictive substance that shortens human lifespan. So I call it doof, which is, you know, what is do foods spelled backwards?

Chef AJ: You’re very good with acronyms, g bombs.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: Anyway, getting back to this idea of what we’re talking about. What what are we talking about?

Chef AJ: A dopamine insensitivity.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: OK, so what I’m saying is the caloric rush, stimulates dopamine receptors in the brain, the same area, the narcotic stimulant and the dopamine rush. Over time, it makes these centers the brain dependent on dopamine stimulation. And it and then you require dopamine just to feel okay because you don’t feel well when you’re not stimulating dopamine. So now an oil does the same thing as sugar because oil enters the bloodstream so rapidly and the word is a bolus. When you have a, you know, an almond of the calories may come in two calories a minute. But when you have almond oil, it comes in. The whole thing comes in. In the first three to five minutes, they say, from the hips to the lips, the hips in five minutes flat because you have a huge amount of calories from the bloodstream all at once. So a high caloric stimulation from candy or fried foods are most powerfully addicting because the calories into the bloodstream all at once was such a high level and a high concentration of calories. Flooding the bloodstream stimulates you like a drug and makes and then makes people become dopamine insensitive over time. And the dopamine insensitive gives people cravings and make them feel no longer well unless they chronically overeat and seek substances that are that have this dopamine rush capacity. Like ice cream and candy and sugar and donuts and pizza and burgers and bacon and fried foods, you know, so you become so it adds to the whole process of food addiction with withdrawal and feeling fatigued, and the lack of nutrients is being weak and the sergeant and now you got to go after. Now you’ve got to crave concentrated calories, and that’s why you there’s no way to get over that to get well again, except for abstinence. When you’re a cocaine addict, you’re not going to get over that cutting back on cocaine. If you’re an alcoholic, you’re not going to probably do well when you’re just reducing your alcohol consumption, when you’re overweight. You’re not going to probably succeed if you just try to cut back in baby, step your way to good health and you’re not when you’re constantly going off and having bread and croissant some pieces of pizza because you had a good week. Eight Healthy himself as you’ve never worked yourself with the pizza, it just makes you want that food more. And it just keeps the documents, keeps you dopamine insensitive and make you think and continues and magnifies your cravings. They really need time even years away from these stimulating substances for the brain to come back to normal again. So the people are fragile and you could say they’re these people with addictive sensations are certainly fragile in the first three months, but that doesn’t mean after three months, they’re not still fragile and can integrate themselves with the consumption of addictive substances. That’s absolutely imperative to stay away from oils and high glycemic carbohydrates because of their effect on dopamine and dopamine centers could take a long time to come back to normal, even years.

Chef AJ: Right. I mean, I completely agree with you on abstinence. The problem is not everybody’s able to do it.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: That is sad but still, you know, the other way doesn’t work.

Chef AJ: I agree with you, Dr. Fuhrman.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: That is why so many people fail on diets. You know, we all, you know, there’s always people that succeed and you can always brag about how many people succeeded. But the majority of people fail. And that’s what I’m trying to do. And that’s what I’m grateful for. What you’re doing to in this interview and what you’re talking about here is give people more information, more education and more motivation to increase the probability that they can do this and making it so we’re not going to be able to help everybody. Some people can’t be helped. And every person doesn’t quit smoking either or every person doesn’t get off of cocaine. And most people who are smokers and cocaine and heroin addicts and alcoholics, they don’t come off their addictive substances. They switch from alcohol to donuts. They switch from cocaine to alcohol and sugar. They move from too fast. They move from one addiction to another. They don’t really come off. They’re still become our American society has been so addicted as addiction has become such a central and an instant intertwined like of like the fabric of American society. Almost everybody is addicted to something or living on, whether with addictions driving their behaviors. And it’s really sad and we can’t help everybody, but we don’t give up and we hope the people we can help and we feel good about what we can, who we can help. And the more people you help, the more they can help other people. And the mass, the mass of people being helped can increase and grow from the few that we do help from. You know what I’m saying? So proportionately. But for me, I have. I’ve raised $70 million for public television, you know, for. So that means that a huge amount of people have watched those shows and bought those tapes and books like some. That’s like, Wow. And I’ve sold millions of books, you know, so all these millions of books I’ve sold, that means I’ve exposed millions of people to this way of doing it. But it’s not millions people doing it, you know? But but the more people doing it and the more people you expose, it grows like a snowball because the more people who do it and you say, Oh yeah, I know about that. I heard that about, Oh, you look so great. And so and the people who are doing it can have a better effect on the people in their community and their family and their local area, you know, so so it snowballs by the more people that are successful and you have more chance of the hope of moving society, nudging society in the right direction. Now we all just can do the best we can, but it’s tough. It’s an uphill battle.

Chef AJ: Right? Well, maybe each one can teach one. You know that for many, many people watching have already bought into this idea of a whole food plant-based diet and understand what you’re saying about oils and refined carbohydrates like sugar and flour not being good for health, especially not being good for weight loss. But where a sticking point is for many people is salt. And I’m wondering how you feel about it in terms of appetite and weight loss, because a lot of people just say, well, I’ll do everything you say, but I’m not giving up my salt.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: You know, people can do whatever they want, and I can’t I can’t get too upset with people what they choose to do. I try to just advocate what’s best for people because they used to say to me when I wrote Eat to Live back like 15, 20 years ago, they’d say, make it less strict, make it better soup more acceptable for more people to do. And you’ll make more money. And I’m saying I don’t want to do that. I’d rather have I don’t want to sell out those people who want to know what to want to do, what’s best. You want to get the most disease reversal, the most longest life, the most protection. If I try to sell more books than I sold out, those people looking for what is optimal by telling them it’s OK to do things they shouldn’t be doing. So let me just say something about that sold me. But when you’re on a plant-based diet, you can still die of a hemorrhagic stroke. Because SALT does not just raise blood pressure, it also causes microvascular hemorrhaging. It weakens the endothelial lining of blood vessels and as it chronically inflames the blood vessels over the years so that it makes the blood vessels with a higher propensity for rupture or breakage. And a hemorrhagic stroke as opposed to embolic or ischemic stroke, is increased with lower cholesterol levels. It appears that so the is like in rural China or South Korea or Japan have 10 times the risk of hemorrhagic stroke that we have in this country. We don’t have so much the risk of hemorrhagic stroke because we have so much atherosclerosis and heart disease that the plaque that surrounds the entire interior wall and the actual blood vessels stabilizes the fragile blood vessels in the brain against hemorrhaging. So you’re eating more bacon and cheeseburgers. You have a higher risk of heart attack and ischemic stroke at a lower risk of hemorrhagic stroke. What I’m saying right now is that plant-based eaters vegans are still at risk of stroke if they eat salt in their diet, and it’s more hemorrhagic stroke inducing when you’re on when your cholesterol is lower and you don’t have atherosclerosis because your native blood vessels are not coated with a coating of fat. And so you can you age your blood vessels more rapidly and create more inflammation and fragility with aging from a high salt diet, therefore increasing the risk of hemorrhaging as you age? So they’re saying to them, so this person then has to say, I like salt so much and I’m so addicted that rather have a better way and I will enjoy my diet more. But I’m going to take my risks with a shorter lifespan for my use of salt. And that would be OK. Except when you take the salt in, it doesn’t make you enjoy the food more. It makes you enjoy the food less because it deadens your taste for salt. And now natural flavors don’t appeal to you as much. Lettuce has no flavor. Avocado has no flavor. An artichoke is not flavorful. Celery is not salty. In other words, you haven’t made yourself taste better if you’ve dumbed down your taste buds and now you just need salt. It’s like the person who dumbed down their taste buds with all the sweets they’re eating, and they can’t enjoy what a strawberry or an apple tastes like anymore. They can’t enjoy the pleasure of eating a mango because they don’t. They don’t. They don’t have the ability to taste the richness of these foods and the subtle flavors and the dancing on your tongue. When you have health, the ability to taste. It’s absolutely a vicious cycle where people think they’re getting more pleasure in using salt, and they’re not getting any more pleasure than us who are advocating lower salt intake. And just to be clear, I’m not saying a person can’t use any salt and their diet. I’m saying they should keep their levels below a thousand, which is not more than two or 300 additional salt over what the food contained.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: The American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology, say those people with heart disease should get the could should cut their salt back to a maximum fifteen hundred milligrams a day. And I say, how stupid is that? Because that’s like telling a person those people with COPD who or who have lung cancer should stop smoking cigarettess. In other words, you wait till a person has heart disease and then you advise them to cut back on sodium that if you’re admitting that this person with heart disease would have been better with a lower sodium intake, then why don’t you advise the whole population on a lower sodium intake while you wait to advise people just heart disease to have that? It makes absolutely zero sense. And also, the studies done that shows that decrease cardiovascular death from lowering sodium continued to show reduced risk of death as you move from 1400 down to 1000. You see reduced risk of blood pressure problems and reduced risk of cardiovascular death and stroke. So clearly, there they are. When you ask them, I look at the data of how 1500 was picked. It was picked because they knew a thousand was ideal based on the studies, but they realized most people wouldn’t be willing to do what. So they just arbitrarily picked that. And I’m saying you’re better off going with what’s not what the site with the science and keeping himself below a thousand because now you’re going to have a better taste buds. And for me personally, I don’t even go near it. So I don’t even go up to a thousand because when I even have 200 and 300 milligrams of sodium, I get increased need for water. I don’t feel as good,I get a pasty taste in my mouth, and I don’t enjoy it as much. I can taste the sodium. My ability to sense sodium is so sensitive that the food tastes too salty. So we’re sometimes using an Ezekiel Zeke, which has a little sodium or some mustard or tomato sauce, or some that has a little bit of sodium. Not going to be so fanatic that I can’t have anything, any condiment has a little bit of sodium. But of course, you’re still watching that and being doing what’s what I consider reasonable is smart and just thinking it doesn’t have to watch that would be that careful with it is foolish in the long term. But vegans and plant-based eaters do a lot of things that are false in the long term. They play, play with dementia, and they think that there are a lot of philosophical. Vegans want to believe things about a vegan diet that are not true. Like, for example, we’re talking here about the Omega three index and the need for omega three fatty acid balance and adequacy because of the cumulative effect of studies on this has shown that the low omega three index is not only linked to cognitive impairment and brain shrinkage. It’s also linked to increased mortality from cardiovascular death and cancer death and paying attention to omega-three adequacy is important on a plant-based diet. So people are so like a lot of people are in what’s they’re in denial and OK, but they’re they’ll still be OK, but my feeling is what good is living longer if you’re going to be demented and shrink your brain? I’m trying to be conservatively responsible for the people that follow my advice and to make sure don’t mess them up in any way. You know, the device, the advice I give them might be considered radical by dimensional standards, but I’m going to make damn sure that I didn’t create some disease in people and have some people go down the tubes with dementia, Parkinson’s and some other neurologic defect because they thought this diet was good enough or they thought it was OK. I want to make sure that they’re doing the right thing and paying attention to all these small little points.

Chef AJ: Thank you. You mentioned that salt can dummy down the taste buds to zero-calorie sweeteners like stevia, aspartame also dummy down our taste buds.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: Yes, definitely. That’s right. You know, it’s amazing because our chefs here at the retreat make such incredible desserts that melt in your mouth taste, but they’re not that sweet, you know? And the ones that are less sweet are even more enjoyable. You know I have this what is it called panna cotta made with orcello made with a little agar agar for like a gel-like consistency with a little soy milk and then a real vanilla bean powder and maybe a little banana in there. But I’m saying we make it so it’s like it’s only subtly sweet, but it’s so creamy and delicious that you don’t need it to be sweet and you enjoy it more, not less. But anyway, I’m saying that we have that absolutely that you enjoy that, that the low calorie sweeteners keep people desirous of concentrated sweeteners and trying to that bliss point of sugar that’s too high and keeps them addicted to sugar, which then drives them to want to eat more calories and eat more sweets and eat more and overeat dates and eat more, you know, eat more because they have because they are keeping their level of bliss point too high, even though it’s not putting the calories in the body.

Chef AJ: That makes sense. You know, a lot of women come to mean they want to lose weight, but they don’t want to give up their daily or nightly glass of wine. How does alcohol play in this subject of weight loss?

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: I don’t know. You know, I’m not sure. I haven’t done a lot of studies on that. I have done a lot of studies on alcohol and breast cancer and reviewed all the data on that. Alcohol is carcinogenic. So I’m not, I don’t know. I haven’t. No camp, perhaps for the fingertip right now. I remember a lot of studies on alcohol and weight loss, so I’m not sure how one glass of wine would affect that. But I know one glass of wine certainly increases risk of breast cancer significantly, so becomes a moot point anyway because it’s carcinogenic and people say, yeah, but but we’re having the red wine and yeah, we can eat. We’re eating healthy food and the phytochemicals are balance the alcohol. But that’s just not a real. That’s not the way the body works. It doesn’t say it’s OK to do things that are bad for you. If you do things that are good for, you know, you get more benefit from things that are good for you and you get longer life span when you do the things that are good for you and you don’t do the things that are bad for you, you don’t justify it. It’s OK to smoke cigarets because you’re eating kale and you don’t justify it’s OK to drink alcohol because you’re eating some grape skins or something, you know. So I think that this is what people don’t like to hear, but this is the facts that a healthier diet is healthier than when it’s less healthy. That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard, but everyone wants to think the diet they’re following and their guru who advocates a diet that’s not so perfect is good enough. And I’m saying, Well, it may be good enough if that’s all you want to achieve, but you can’t deny the fact that a diet that’s healthier is healthier, then the one that is less healthy.

Chef AJ: Just gave me a great idea, maybe we could talk to the tobacco industry and actually have them start putting kale in the cigarettes and then people won’t have to eat it.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: Yes, reminds me of people wanting to take a powdered supplement of kale and strawberries and bok choy and blackberries and now I can go eat pizza and hot dogs, but it’s not gonna work that way because obviously you still got to eat the healthy stuff.

Chef AJ: I believe you said good health is earned.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: That’s right.

Chef AJ: This is been so wonderful. Dr. Fuhrman. Just to wrap it up, if you could, please answer one more question. What’s the real truth about weight loss?

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: The real truth about weight loss is that if you don’t pay attention to the nutritional quality of what you’re eating, then it’s impossible to eat a diet that sustains your ideal weight for the rest of your life. The real truth about weight loss is you have to focus on your health, which means you have to know what to eat to protect yourself against cancer and heart disease and dementia and that’s the safest and most sustainable way to lose weight.

Chef AJ: Thank you so much, Dr. Fuhrman. I really appreciate all that you do.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: Thank you. My pleasure.

Chef AJ: Hi, Dr. Diehl. And welcome to the Truth about Weight Loss Summit. Thank you so much for being here.

Dr. Hans Diehl: I’m just delighted to be here. When I looked at the speakers that had been brought together to this nine-day symposium, I had the impression that this was the Parthenon of experts and leaders put together to broaden our understanding and to give us more clarity of how we should live. So I’m delighted to be here. I’m also humbled to be part of this symposium as we increasingly realize that what we need more than anything else in winning the battle for a healthier weight is better education, more inspiration, and a higher level of motivation. I mean, think about this. Americans this year, again, spent more than $75 billion in support of its Slimming down industry to manage a condition that is largely self-made and culturally promoted, excess weight. It’s a condition that shortens their lives and is a major contributor to most chronic diseases. And what is so amazing, it’s a condition that barely existed until the 1970s, but then progressively in merchant America, where now only one out of four adults have a normal weight. That means three out of four, or about 75% of the American adults are overweight or obese. And from the American continent, it rapidly is spreading around the world. The answer to this obesity epidemic is not found in pills and procedures. No, the answer is found in a fail-safe success formula of five better choices that would help people to find a lasting answer to their weight issues. All I can do today in the next hour is to give you just a slim view of a broad subject because obesity is a very complex issue. But I would boil it down for you to five basic lifestyle principles, what you can do to become a winner in a losing game.

Dr. Hans Diehl: Now, if you follow these five guidelines, you have an exceptional chance of not becoming drained by all the propaganda that is out there, where all kinds of things are being offered to us when the answers are oftentimes much simpler. In 1913, a very powerful, well-researched book was published by Random House. It was written by a Pulitzer award-winning author, Michael Moss. And it starts like this. In the spring of 1099, the heads of the world’s largest processed food companies, from Coca-Cola to Nabisco, gathered in Minneapolis for a secret meeting. On the agenda, the emerging epidemic of obesity and what to do about it. Increasingly, many foods laden with salt, sugar and fat produced by these companies were being linked to obesity. And a concerned craft executive took the stage to issue a warning. At that time, the craft foods company had just been acquired by Philip Morris, the tobacco giant. And this craft executive was concerned with his company now belonging to the tobacco industry. He was concerned that potential lawsuits could emerge because the tobacco industry was known to know how to habituate and addict people to their products. Would they do the same with their newly acquired food line? Eleven of the most powerful CEOs in the processed food industry had come to meet. They had come in with their private jets, taking care of 700,000 employees with revenues of over $300 billion. These were powerful men, tycoons of the food processing industry. They wanted to have a secret meeting to decide what should be done. Asked to give the keynote address, this executive had a very clear and direct message. He said there would be a day of reckoning unless changes were made in the industry. This executive then launched into a damning PowerPoint presentation, making the case that processed food companies could not afford to sit by idle as children grew sick and class-action lawyers lurked on the sidelines. When he was done with his presentation, the most powerful person in the room, the CEO of General Mills, stood up to speak. He was clearly annoyed. He was very upset. And by the time he sat down, the meeting was canceled. The meeting was over, and eleven powerful executives got into their private jets and flew home. What do you think this man said to his powerful colleagues in the business? I’ll give you the answer later, so stay tuned.

Dr. Hans Diehl: So let’s take a closer look at the obesity epidemic, three chairs representing the years 1900 to 1970. The size of the chairs during that time hardly changed. But then something happened more recently when, unexpectedly, the size of the chair expanded and almost exploded. And people told me later, well, you don’t understand. The reason for this enlargement is a surplus lumber in the Northwest that needed to be used up. That’s it. Don’t you get it? It’s business, really. I showed the picture of the chairs at a convention some time ago when a man raised his hand and asked, sir, my wife is an antique collector. Would you object if I left the auditorium and called my wife because I want her to check out and measure some antique chairs that we have in our attic? I said that was perfectly fine with me. But when he came back, he told the audience, My wife said it was a 140-year-old chair but what about the measurement?” All she said is that it measured 29 inches. That undermines everything I was trying to illustrate. And then he said, no, the chair is a loveseat. It’s a seat for two. Well, I, of course, felt relieved. He made exactly the point that I had hoped for. Well, I got close to despairing, actually, when he said 29 inches, but it was for two seats. Well, let me tell you another story. I was on an airplane at 7:37. Every seat was taken except the one right next to mine. And I was kind of happy about that. This was going to be a long ride, and I could spread out some of my reading materials, my study materials, and it would be a great way to go. But then they opened the door once more and a large man entered the airplane. And I knew I was in trouble. Now, don’t misunderstand me, I have nothing against people that struggle with being overweight. Actually, I deeply care about these people but at that moment, I had to adjust my attitude. My expectations had changed. I had to make a quick mental shift. I no longer had that extra space. Okay? And I knew that one side of my body was guaranteed to be warmed more than was needed. As a gentleman, I got out of my seat. I even lifted the armrests so that this man could get in and find his seat right next to my seat. And as he wedged himself into his seat under his breath, he said, isn’t it terrible? They’re making these seats smaller every year. And I didn’t say anything. I was very nice about it. And we became friends in the process of the flight. Now, over the years, and especially since the 80s, our bodies and weights have changed big time. Let me show you some slides that some of you may have seen before, how obesity has crept up in our society.

Dr. Hans Diehl: Here you see the obesity trends among adults in five-year increments in the various States of the United States. Look at the change in color over time. 1985, very few States have an obesity rate of about 12%. The number of States has markedly increased. 1995, half of all the States are now averaging 17% of their adults to be obese. And then 2000, a new color has now been added. Half of the States are now averaging 22% of the adults are being obese. And then in 2005, another color was added. Many States are now averaging 27% of all their adults being obese. And in 2010, another color was added. Many States are now averaging more than 30% of the adults are obese. Obesity. The latest data suggests that 35% of the adult population in America is no obese and close to 40% of the population is overweight. That means that only one normal weight person can be found amidst four American adults. Three out of four or 75% are carrying excess weight. But how do we define excess weight? What really is a desirable weight? There are several ways to do this. There’s actuarial data generated by life insurance companies like the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company that go back as far as 1959. Obviously, life insurance companies are interested in knowing how weight relates to life expectancy so they can define their premiums for their customers.

Dr. Hans Diehl: In their studies, they found height and weight relationships for men and women impacted by frame and bone size. The taller you are and the larger the frame, the more weight is allowed. They boiled desirable weight down to this man was allowed 100 pounds for his 5ft in height plus 6 pounds for every additional inch. Therefore, the desirable weight of a large 5ft, ten inches tall would be 100 pounds plus ten inches times 6 pounds per inch. That’s an additional 60 pounds, or a total of 160 pounds plus 10% for large bone size. For such a man, the desirable weight for health and longevity, then, would be 176 pounds for a woman. The formula was similar, 100 pounds for her 5ft and then only 5 pounds for every additional inch. However, she was given an extra inch for high heels. So a woman 5ft two would therefore be accorded a height of 5ft, three inches. The 5ft then would be 100 pounds plus three inches times 5 pounds. That would be an additional 15 pounds. So at five-two, she would actually check at five-three. That’s giving her 115 pounds for the large bones, 10% would be added, totaling 125 pounds. But when you apply this formula, there are always some people that protest, oh, no, that’s impossible. I mean, I would look like a Scarecrow. No, but could it be that we have become so large in this country that we have developed larger reference points? We are overweight, and yet we think we have a normal weight because it seems everybody’s overweight.

Dr. Hans Diehl: We know from research studies that when we have many overweight friends, when danger becomes overweight ourselves, because we are sharing the habits of our overweight friends. So be careful how you pick your friends, because there may be some consequences to it. Now, since most of our excess waste is subcutaneous adipose tissue, we can do a simple skin fold test to do this. You can actually use a caliper to measure the skin foldl thickness or you can just do a simple pinch test on the skin over your lower rib, grab the skin fold between your thumb and index finger. And if it’s more than one inch, you just have to pinch harder. And then we have a third way of measuring and determining our weight levels. That’s the body mass index. The BMI is a sort of a new concept where we have certain relationships between, again, height and weight. I mean, you can look up the defining numbers on special tables. If a person has a BMI under 18.5, that person is considered to be underweight. If it’s between 18.5 and 24.9, that person is considered to be a desirable weight or normal weight. If it’s above 25, that’s considered to be overweight. And if it’s over 30, that’s considered to be obese. So you get some of these defining points and you can look up your definition of your weight.

Dr. Hans Diehl: Why are we so concerned about excess weight? I mean, some people are large, some people are small. Do we have to worry about this? Is it just for cosmetic reasons or is there more to this? Well, actually, excess weight is often directly related to our lifespan. The longer the girth line, the shorter the lifeline. Harvard studies have determined that on average, every pound of excess weight actually shortens the life expectancy by about one month. Get this one. Every pound of excess weight costs you one month of life. So let’s take an example. If you are 60 pounds overweight, that may cost you 60 months or five years. So there’s a real relationship between our growth line and our lifeline. Now, in addition, any form of obesity is actually associated with markedly increasing medical complications and then also chronic diseases. For instance, a BMI over 40 would increase the risk of diabetes by seven times, high blood pressure by six times, and heart disease by five times. And the risk increases also for arthritis, asthma, sleep apnea, and various adult cancers. And of course, people with excess weight often find themselves under the scrutiny of a society that often looks and scans at them. And these people with heightened sensitivity often internalize this, which may contribute to depression.

Dr. Hans Diehl: So, to summarize, obesity can have well-documented consequences in terms of life expectancy, illness and medical complications. But by the way, what about the role of genetics in determining weight? Sometimes people come to me and say, look, my grandparents were obese, my parents were obese, and I’m obese. Obesity runs in my family. It’s obviously a genetic thing, isn’t it? Well, it’s a good point, but I would argue that it’s not only genes that are being passed on from one generation to the next, but it’s also the favorite recipes in the family, isn’t it? Furthermore, the American obesity epidemic has emerged largely during the last 40 years. We also understand now that it takes some 300 to 400 years to change the genetics in a society. Our obesity epidemic, however, has evolved in a much shorter time span. So this is not genetics. There are some other issues involved here. Therefore, whatever role genetics may play, it’s a minor part, especially since we have recently learned that our epigenetic system can actually overwrite genetic predispositions and suppress the expression of a genetic code. If it’s not genetics, who and what then is responsible for obesity in our society? And here is some good news for you today. Let me assure you that you are not responsible for your excess weight. You don’t believe me? Am I setting a trap for you? Okay then, since you don’t take me seriously, let me rephrase my point. You are not exclusively responsible for your weight. Can you live with that? Are you agreeing with that statement? Well, then, who are the players that are contributing to our obesity epidemic? Just help me give me some ideas. What about the reduction in physical activity nowadays? What about LSD, labor-saving devices? What role does upbringing play or thyroid problems? Because, after all, despite best efforts, an under-functioning thyroid gland may account for 2% of the overweight problem in our society. So therefore, if you are unsuccessfully losing weight and you’ve done all your very best, be sure you get your thyroid checks.

Dr. Hans Diehl: Now, what about watching television? Does it have a relationship to overweight what happens when the commercial comes on? Have you noticed when the commercial comes on, the volume automatically goes up and millions of feet begin to shuffle in the direction of the kitchen towards the refrigerator to pick up their carrot and celery sticks right? Or is it some ice cream or Oreos or chips or some hot dog? And with that, for many television watchers, the commercial break becomes the pause that reflects us. Or have we simply gained weight because we are consuming more calories today than 40 years ago? But why do people actually eat? Is it just because of hunger or is it just a clock that tells them it’s time to eat? Or is it the socialization with friends who will do their best to make you feel special with some special foods? What about advertising? What about marketing? Look at these huge budgets. Advertising budgets are some of the largest corporations that are involved in food production. Their advertising budgets are huge. For instance, Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes, that’s just one brand, has an advertising budget of $40 million. That’s just for one brand of the many cereal brands. And the dairy industry is spending close to $200 million to sell its message that unless you get your daily three servings of milk, ice cream or cheese, your bones will fracture and you’ll fall apart. But, you know, the scientific evidence is just the opposite. The scientific evidence says that the opposite is true. Countries with the highest dairy consumption actually have the highest rates of Osteopathic fractures. And then you have McDonald’s. That giant is spending one point $62 billion in the United States alone to sell it’s fast food. On the other hand, the National Cancer Institute is barely able to spend $1 million to encourage the population to eat more health-promoting fruits and vegetables. Guess who is winning out? And of course, there are many aspects of why we are what we are.

Dr. Hans Diehl: Some of it relates to our upbringing. If you’re breastfeed, for instance, chances are that we have less obesity to worry about than if we had the bottle. Bottle-fed babies may often get more calories than needed. That’s leading to the development of billions of excess fat cells that throughout life, we’ll always crave for being fed and nurtured. In contrast, when it comes to breastfeeding, listen to this. There’s always the right amount of food. There are always the right nutrients that change from week to week to accommodate the needs of the growing baby. So the amount of food and the nutritional aspects of the food are always right and the temperature will always be right, too. And the packaging is just exquisite and great. Yes. What about early upbringing? What about conditioning in early life? When I grew up and I didn’t want to finish the food on my plate, my mother would always be there. If you don’t eat your food, son, if you don’t clean your plate, all the children in Ethiopia will be dying. And since I didn’t want to be responsible for that, I began to clean my plate. And then 30 to 40 years later. Well, in the meantime, I should have learned a few things, now I’m sitting at the table and I’m somewhat overweight. I’ve just about finished my meal when the dessert comes around and suddenly something pushes the button and I can hear my mother’s voice. All the children in Ethiopia would be dying. You better not waste this food. And so I finish it, adding more calories to my overweight frame. Early conditioning, right? Exactly.

Dr. Hans Diehl: So why do people eat? What about emotions? What about emotional eating, like feeling happy attending a wedding or getting a job promotion? Or feeling sad attending a funeral? Or feeling angry over a missed yet deserved job promotion? Or feeling bored or stressed or depressed and lonely? Isn’t food coming in to be a nice pacifier to come into our rescue? Emotional eating big time. So why do we eat? Many reasons, some of them emotions, feelings big time. I mean, we celebrate with food. We take care of our disappointments with food. We overdose on food. We celebrate the most important high days of our lives, from the baptism of a child to weddings, all the way to funerals. And it’s always the worst possible food that we could choose. And something else. When you go shopping, remember what you bring home. You’re going to eat in the house, in the mouth. Therefore, be careful of what you put into your shopping cart. Be in full possession of your emotions and your mental well being when you go shopping. It’s actually best to have a full stomach when you go shopping. Yeah. Furthermore, the best way is to know what you want to get before you go. As a matter of fact, when I go shopping, I’ll do it sometimes by myself or sometimes with my wife. We get our shopping done for the whole week and 30 minutes flat because we know exactly where to go and what to get. Even though there are some 50,000 food items in a large supermarket to seduce us, we know exactly what we want. We regularly get our fresh produce, like lots of fruits and vegetables, whole grains like red mill seven-grain cereal or barley, quinoa and millet, and plenty of beans, peas and lentils, a few nuts and almonds, and perhaps some avocados. Shopping like this is efficient and economical. Actually, it will lower your food bill by 35% to 45% and you will get healthy and you lose weight and you enjoy the ride and your taste buds will adjust. After 30 days, you will love this new emphasis on foods as grown. You will discover new flavors and nuances of foods that used to be covered and neutralized by excessive salt, sugar and pepper.

Dr. Hans Diehl: And here’s my tip for ladies. Don’t try to live up to those seductive, slim models you see on front covers of magazines. Leave the beautiful people alone. They create an artificial world. You know, some structural, luxurious forms that most of them could not have achieved without some special interventions. But tragically, many ladies in our society internalized these images, and men do too. And many feel the pressure and an effort to relieve those pressures. Many become vulnerable and all often fall into the hands of these merchants of misery who promise you an artificial world with all kinds of diets, nostrums and devices. Don’t listen to them. Don’t fall for it. Instead, know who you are. Accept yourself the way you are. Develop those inner values of kindness and generosity and loving concerns for others. Know and foster these higher values and you will not run out of friends. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that unless I have the right shape, nobody will love me. And worse, you may not even love yourself because you cannot live up to what you may have internalized you are supposed to look like. Become aware that you are in charge. Find your own self. You are most valuable as a person, even if you have those 20 inches of extra adipose tissue that may separate us when we meet. And when somebody puts you down because of your weight, don’t internalize it. Don’t accept it. Instead, begin to do something about it. Here’s a powerful suggestion. Make changes for the sake of your health. When you begin to eat and live with health as your priority, then the scale will take care of itself. Don’t ever get on a diet. Diets have no place in a rational weight control program. If you want to be healthy, you become lean automatically because you begin to eat the right foods. You get into an exercise program, you get your seven or 8 hours of sleep at night and things will begin to happen. So please don’t let the scale terrorize you. Eat for health and the scale will take care of itself.

Dr. Hans Diehl: Obviously, obesity is a very complex issue. But there are some answers that I will outline for you in this presentation. I will give you the magic five of better choices. If you fall and integrate them into your life, you have an outstanding chance that you’re going to be what you want to be. Following this program, you’ll be losing one and a half to 2 pounds a week while eating more. But of the right foods, you will do it for life, where the body will make the adjustments once you have reached your desirable weight. Let me ask you a question. What are you doing? Do you have a family Union coming up? Or a wedding or a class reunion? What do you do? How do you get this weight down? You just plan ahead. If you look for a quick answer in losing weight, it will betray you every time. So let all diets die. No crash diets. If you want to be a winner in the losing game, you have to go for the long haul and that is one and a half to 2 pounds a week and you have to plan it. Gaining weight happens when you eat more calories than you expend and burn. The difference then between the consumed and the burned calories will be deposited, usually into your central fat bank right in your midsection here. Now, once that central fat bank is full, it will then set up branch offices in various parts of your body. Much to your embarrassment, you see a comfortable and convenient lifestyle, with its many labor-saving devices, will deprive us of the calories we used to burn because of the range and intensity of our activities.

Dr. Hans Diehl: Today, many of us are sitting six, seven, 8 hours at our computers with a health risk that has been compared to the risk generated by smoking. But it’s not just the calories that we no longer burn. It’s also the obesogenic environment of foods, the ready availability and the hyper palatability with those tastes available. Who can resist? It’s surrounding us everywhere. And it all started some 40, 50 years ago with the emergence of fast food products sold to us as convenience foods. These convenience foods made it easier for women who wanted to join the workforce, and these foods became an instant success. But take a careful look at my next slide. It explains the foundational dietary changes that took place in the 1970s and 1980s and their effect on our health and body contours. That was a diet revolution that became the game changer for our society, for our culture. It has to do with a macronutrient distribution of our diet. It refers to the distribution of fat, protein, sugar and starch. Developing countries, where our Western chronic diseases are difficult to find, most predominantly rely on foods as grown. They rely basically on corn and beans, on potatoes and yams, on wheat and rice, and plenty of fruits and vegetables. These inexpensive yet very nutritionally rich fruits provide more than enough protein, modest amounts of fat and sugar and plenty of unrefined complex carbohydrates, the body’s preferred and clean burning fuel to meet energy requirements. As the gross domestic product, our national income increases, however, dietary sources can change dramatically. Developing countries rely mostly on unrefined natural, complex carbohydrate foods high in starch, which accounts for 70% of their total calories that you can see here on the graph in the green color. In those cultures, very few calories are coming from fats, oils, sugars, and animal products. On the other hand, the diet of affluent countries is largely composed of fats, and oils, and sugars, shown in red and yellow on the graph here. And their complex carbohydrates are usually refined white flour products that you find in pies, pastries, pasta and pizzas that’s crowding out the nutritionally rich, unrefined carbohydrate foods now accounting for only 6% of calories consumed. Diets that incorporate foods as grown as they come in nature are naturally very low in fat. They are very low in oil, very low in sugar, and usually very low in animal protein. Thus, they are almost devoid of cholesterol, saturated fat, and hydrogenate oils, yet they are very high in fiber and nutritional density. However, as these developing countries follow the American diet, their foods turn into industrialized products. They turned potatoes into Pringles. They turned corn into Doritos and wheat into zingers and oats into Oreos and beans and grains into burgers, and sirloin steaks and water into soft drinks. And lean people turn into large people with food technology able to create these new taste sensations on one hand, and with advertising able to create a mass market on the other hand, the diet composition undergoes a dramatic and major overhaul. The largely unrefined complex carbohydrate foods become a minority player in their state. Calorie rich, processed foods, usually high in sugar and fat, as well as meats, sausages, eggs and cheese, all high in fat, calories and cholesterol and devoid of fiber become the dominant energy carriers. The change is taking place among people and populations that follow the diet composition on the left side of the graph. It is difficult to find obesity or arthritis or diabetes or heart disease. It’s difficult to find hypertension and strokes and gout, all are common chronic diseases. With prosperity, however, we change from a slow food culture to a fast-food culture, which changed from home-cooked meals to eating out meals. And with those changes, the consumption of oil, fats and sugar increased dramatically. At the same time, our protein consumption increased as plant protein became largely replaced by animal protein. You can see the diet composition on the right side of the graph. That’s the standard American diet. It’s a diet with plenty of animal products and processed foods. It’s a diet high in calories, high in salt and cholesterol, yet low in fiber nutrition. And it becomes the perfect seed bed for common modern killer diseases. And then, on the next slide, take a look. More than 50% of our calories now come from processed and engineered foods. As concerned, people are increasingly moving towards a plant-based diet that does not overlook the large preponderance of processed and engineered foods in our diet.

Dr. Hans Diehl: For an airplane to fly, it needs to have two wings, right? Well, similarly, a good diet also needs to have two wings. Lots of plant-based foods and lots of whole foods, lots of vegetarian foods and lots of foods and they come in nature. And please note that some 35% of today’s calories come from animal products. More than 50% of the calories now come from processed foods. Here’s the point, I want to make only 14% of the calories that we consume come from foods grown as Nature designed them. This includes fruits and vegetables, whole grains and legumes, plus some nuts and some avocados. They only represent 14% of the calories that we eat in America. And have you noticed something? These foods, as they come in nature, don’t carry nutrition labels. Have you seen a nutrition label on mangoes? No. But can you find nutrition labels on mango puree and sauces? Yes. Do tomatoes carry nutrition labels? No. What about tomato ketchup? Yes. You see, foods coming out of the hands of a master designer don’t need nutrition labels to be the best of health and to manage your weight well. Eat more foods that don’t have nutrition labels. But you say, but there are no nutrition labels on meat either. True, because the industry has resisted that. They don’t want you to know that when you have a sirloin steak, up to 75% of the calories in that steak may come from fat. You thought you were eating protein. No, it’s fat. When you have that pork chop, up to 80% of the calories may come from fat and you thought you had some protein. No, it’s fat. At the same time, you will find a warning label on chicken advising you how to prepare it because of all too common bacterial contamination. So I have enlarged my definition of what I recommend people to eat. I now recommend eat more foods that don’t have nutrition labels or warning labels. Okay, that covers it, doesn’t it? We all know that weight gain is largely determined by having more calories coming into the body than leaving it. This difference then is deposited in the adipose tissues as body fat. So remember, every time you have accumulated 3500 calories, you would have deposited very effectively, 1 pound of fat. Let me give you an example. If you take one slice of Apple pie in excess to the calories that you should have that day, you will have deposited an extra 500 calories for that day. If you do this seven times a week, at the end of that week, you would have accumulated 500 calories times seven. That’s 3500 calories, you have deposited 1 pound of fat. Amazing, isn’t it? One innocent-looking slice of Apple pie, those extra 500 calories that you really didn’t need for that day. Well, seven times a week. In one week, you have gained 1 pound of fat, 1 pound of weight.

Dr. Hans Diehl: As you begin to recognize a gradual loss of agility, as it becomes harder for you to see your toes, as it takes more energy to bend down, you begin to realize that you need to do something about that extra weight. Now, at the checkout stand of your food market, you see the answer to your overweight dilemma. The magazines are all there offering the latest diets, 7 pounds in seven days, 14 pounds in two weeks. Well, first it was the Grapenut diet. Then, enhancing its credibility, they offered it as the male Grapenut diet. And on this diet program, you eat grape nuts and grape nuts and more grape nuts. And guess what? They’re coming out of your ears and you lose weight. And after four weeks, after having lost 25 pounds, you put all your large clothes on one side of the closet because you figure you won’t need them anymore because you will have a slender and svelte body. And then five weeks later, it’s all back again. Well, you say this diet really didn’t work so well. But desperate to get rid of those extra pounds because you have a family reunion coming up, you fall into the hands of those merchants of misery and you buy another magazine, this time advertising the UCLA Grapefruit Diet. And what you do next. You eat grapefruits and grapefruits and more grapefruits and they’re coming out of your ears. And guess what? After four weeks, you have lost 30 pounds. You are ecstatic and you’re glad at the same time that you can get off this crazy monotonous diet. You begin to realize that these diets are only a temporary answer. These diets will fall by the wayside until a new diet comes in. Right now this time it’s the Green Grape diet. It’s highly recommended by many physicians, among them Doctor Oz. And when they discuss it on The Oprah Winfrey Show, you say to yourself, that’s it. At last, I found the answer. And what do you do then? You eat grapes and grapes and grapes and more grapes until they come out of your ears and you’re losing weight. But as you look back on that diet, what did you really get out of it? Just sour grapes. You become a psychological wreck. And then you ask yourself, Is there something wrong with me that I can’t shake these polons? It must be my glands. Well, maybe it’s a salivary gland. Right. When she saw me, I asked her, do you love to eat? Oh, I don’t eat very much. I can’t understand how I’m gaining weight. There must be something in the air. It just doesn’t seem to work for me. I mean, I just eat like a bird and I’m gaining weight. Well, I ask her, what kind of bird are you? Are you a voucher? Well, I do all this exercise, but nothing is working for me. At last, she recognized that these diets were just a Yoyo syndrome that undermined her shaky self-esteem even further. These diets don’t last and they don’t offer good nutrition.

Dr. Hans Diehl: Now she decided to eat less. That’s her latest strategy. Now she counts calories. She practices portion control with this semi-starvation diet. Her hunger pangs made her feel miserable and she felt deprived. And after three months, she threw in the towel. It’s not worth it. I don’t care anymore. I don’t want to live this way anymore. I don’t know what to do. And then somebody says, oh, what you need to do is you need to exercise. Haven’t you seen the Biggest Loser programs on television? And so she joins these exercise programs. But what she doesn’t realize is that these big losers exercise some 10 hours a day because they want to win the trophy as Biggest Loser in the series. Given how much you have to walk to walk off one Krispy Kreme doughnut, do you know that it would take a walk of 4 miles? Is that doughnut really worth it? And just think, if you wanted to have a Big Mac, not just a doughnut, but a Big Mac with fries and a Supersize Coke, you would have to walk 7 hours to burn out the calories. To do this, I mean, you have to be unemployed or take some vacation time. Walking is not the way to lose weight. Walking is something that you do because it empowers you. It gives you vitality. It’s the right thing to do. Do it, but don’t do it primarily for losing weight. It won’t work. If you want to lose weight effectively and permanently, you need to embrace a new paradigm. And that is eat more and exercise more for good health. Are you open to considering this and to take a closer look at my five magic suggestions for better choices? And when you eat for health, the scale will take care of itself.

Dr. Hans Diehl: Let us recognize two major shifts in the food supply. The first one took place in the 19s, 70s, and 80s when we shifted from foods to industrialized products. This may be a novel thought. We’re no longer eating food. Yes, we’re mostly eating industrialized products that are made in factories. They’re made in laboratory plants. They don’t come out of the soil anymore. We don’t pick them up from the trees. We have shifted from eating foods predominantly to eating processed foods. Industrialized products. Here’s the first of the magic five of better choices. Number one, reduce empty calories. These are foods without nutritional value. They’re usually calories emptied of nutrition. One of the big factors here is refined sugar. Most people consume about 30 teaspoons of sugar a day. And one-third of this comes from soda pop. Look at the number of cans of soda pop that an average family of four consumes in one week. 32 cans, 12oz in each can. And every can has ten teaspoons of sugar. How about fruit juices? Well, even though they’re unsweetened, they are not in your best interest if you want to lose weight because they’re still high in sugar. Now, how about a doughnut? Look at this doughnut from an anatomical perspective. Examine it closely and then always opt for the center. The hole that won’t do you any harm. Now, look, just one small piece of German chocolate cake, 15 teaspoons of sugar, a banana split, 25 teaspoons of sugar. And look at these fruit loops. Are these really cereals or is that candy? Where 48% of the calories come from sugar. Please note, 16% of all the calories we eat a day come from sugar and another 20% comes from fats and oils. Now, these are not the fats that you have in meat because at least there, you have some nutritional value. But these are refined and extracted oils and fats devoid almost totally of any nutritional value. These are empty calories. Now, imagine it takes 14 years of corn to produce one tablespoon of corn oil. Now, if you wouldn’t have these industrial processes that extract the oil from the corn, could you eat one tablespoon of corn oil in the form of its original source, the corn? How long would it take you to eat those 14 ears of corn? Isn’t it amazing how nature excels as a master in packaging its products? But then we come along and we extract the oil from the corn for human consumption while feeding all the good stuff with its nutrition value to our pigs? Brilliant, isn’t it? And then look what we do with the extracted oil. We use it to make corn chips. We’re turning the original low calorie corn into a nine-ounce bag calorie bomb of 1440 calories. That’s enough to meet the caloric requirements of a five-foot woman for the whole day, plus 19 grams of fat. And we probably shouldn’t have more than 45 grams for the whole day. Now, what about Pringles, an engineering Marvel and a nutritional disaster. A seven-ounce tube has 1000 calories. Have you eaten those 1000 calories in the form of potatoes? Imagine you would have to eat eleven potatoes or ten times that weight. Well, the fat content of potatoes is only 3%. The fat content of Pringles is 63%. This is the classic example of how food processing concentrates calories. It increases the caloric density.

Dr. Hans Diehl: Now, let me ask you a question. Could you eat just one Pringle? And then people come to me and say, well, come on, don’t be so hard on those Pringles. I mean, I just eat one or two of those. Really? Have you ever tried to eat just one Pringle? Even the manufacturer tells you these Pringles are habit forming. Once you pop it, you can’t stop it, right? And again, nature excels as a master in packaging, but we are not. Now, how about this milkshake, granted, it’s a large one, but look at the calories, over 2000 calories. My wife needs about 1000 calories for the whole day. Just one milkshake. Taking it as an innocent snack would exceed that allowance for the whole day. Look at it, 40 teaspoons of sugar in one milkshake plus half a cup of fat. So when you add up the percentages of refined sugar, refined fats and oils and alcohol in the American diet, you begin to recognize that 44% of the calories we eat have little or no nutritional value. There are empty calories. We are overfed and undernourished. Now, before we go to number two of the Magic Five, let me fill you in on the book of Michael Moss and that sacred meeting that was canceled after the craft executive gave the damning PowerPoint presentation. Remember we talked about how when the tobacco industry took over some of the processed food companies they hired brain research companies to determine how much sugar, how much fat and how much salt was needed in their products to create those kinds of special bliss points. They learned, for instance, how much sugar was needed to reach those 100 taste receptor cells in your tongue to send within nanoseconds a message to the pressure center of the brain that says, give me more, take more, take two.

Dr. Hans Diehl: Some thoughtful people have said that this book by Michael Moss tells the chilling story of how the processed food industry is making a fortune by slowly poisoning an unwitting population. It suggests that the fat and salt and sugar in excess may be purposefully used by the processed food manufacturers to create brain activation of the pleasure centers. And with that, the allure and the habituation, if not the addiction to these products. Now, you see, that’s why you must have that second M and M’s. That’s why you must have that second Oreo. That’s why you must have that second pringle. And that’s why America runs on Duncan Donuts. So we talked about principle number one, reduce empty calories. They’re habit-forming, high in calories and price, low in nutrition and fiber and high in caloric density. But now comes principle number two of our magic five of better choices reduce animal products. We have seen the gradual rise in the per capita consumption of meat from 124 pounds before World War One to 200 pounds today. In a lifetime, would you have guessed that an American meat-eater processes twelve cows, 25 hogs and 2400 chickens, and they’re all very high in fat and the main sources of saturated fat and cholesterol. And they account with dairy products for 50% of the fat eaten in America. Well, let me show you some slides here. You see the protein and fat content as a percentage of total calories in different animal products. Looking at meats, sirloin steak, 26% protein and 74% fat. Similarly, pork has 20% protein and 80% fat. Looking at processed meats like sausages, like Salami, 17% protein, 83% fat, and similarly, an American hot dog, the sausages are listed at 15% protein and 85% fat. Now, while the milk consumption has dropped precipitously over the last 30 years, the cheese consumption has soared, going from an annual capital consumption of 3.8 pounds in 1910 to now 32.8 pounds. More recently, however, cheese is a product that is high in fat, very high in fat. 71% of its calories are from fat. And most of these calories are from the more dangerous saturated fat, which has an influence in shaping the production of cholesterol by the liver. At the same time, cheese has no fiber and plenty of salt, and many consider it addictive. Hard to break the habit, isn’t it?

Dr. Hans Diehl: Let me share some powerful information from the famous Adventist Health Study, headquartered in Loma Linda. Now, the US government spent some $35 million over the last few years on the study of these people. These are people that are in the blue zone of the world population per capita, they have the highest number of centenarians. These are the people that are living a very similar lifestyle, and you find them all over the world. They don’t smoke, they don’t use alcohol, they attend Church regularly, but they have different dietary patterns. About 10% of these people are vegans, no animal products at all. Some of them are lactose, ovo vegetarians. They’re vegetarians, but they use dairy products and eggs. And 10% are vegetarians who eat fish. And the remaining 50% of these adventures are meat eaters. Now, the researchers looked at about 1000 Adventist people in North America and followed them for seven years, while the vegans clearly had the lowest rates of diabetes, cholesterol and high blood pressure. I want to focus on the results of their study on how different dietary patterns can influence the weight status of men and women. I mean, that’s what we’re interested in today, right? They found that the meat eating Adventist women weighed about 180 pounds. Now, the groups eating progressively fewer animal products have progressively also lower weights, with the vegan women weighing the least averaging 141 pounds, or about 40 pounds less than their meat-eating Church members. And the results were very similar for men. The meat-eating Adventist men on average weighed 193 pounds. Those on the plant based diet, the vegans weighed 161 pounds. That’s a difference of 32 pounds. So what’s the take home lesson here? If you want to manage your overweight more effectively, may I suggest that you move towards a more plant-based lifestyle. Reduce those animal products instead, eat more whole foods. They’re filling because of the high fiber content, the high in nutrients, yet low in calories and fat, and low in caloric density.

Dr. Hans Diehl: So summarizing principle number two, reduce animal products. You want to drastically reduce them because they’re high-calorie products with a high caloric density. They contain no fiber, and they are the major carriers of saturated fat and cholesterol in the American diet. And this then brings us to principle number three of the magic five are better choices. Eat more whole foods. When you turn into a person that settles for eating more plant-based whole foods, you will reduce your food budget by 35% to 45%. It’s good for your wallet. Furthermore, you will settle for foods that have a superior nutrient profile. These foods are very high in nutrients, particularly the phytonutrients. These are the micronutrients that are only found in plant foods. And we believe that there are probably over 1000 of these important micronutrients that will help you to experience superior health and a longer life. So eat more fruits, vegetables, whole grains and legumes. These foods are all very low in calories because they’re very low in fat, except for nuts and seeds. Yeah, it’s true. Nuts are very nutritious, but they are also very high in fat. Just look, one small can of mixed nuts, that’s 1700 calories or half a pound of fat. Therefore, use nuts very sparingly. The same is true for avocados. Now it’s true again. Their fiber content is one of the best of any food. Yet again, avocados are high in fat. Use them sparingly. So we need to go back to the basic foods, to food as grown. You know the mantra now, right? We need to reach out for more foods like fruits and vegetables and whole grains and legumes. These are foods that are all very low in fat and calories, but high in fiber and fiber is essential and magical when it comes to better health and especially when it comes to successful weight management. Now, when you have fiber-rich foods, then you can easily fill your stomach and enjoy the feeling of satiety without all those calories. And you wonder, how does it work? What’s the mechanism? Now, as your stomach is filling up, there’s a special sensory mechanism located on the inside of your stomach lining that is triggered to send a message to your brain. And that signals fullness. I am full. I had enough. On the other hand, a fiber-depleted food supply requires more food and calories to trigger that sensor mechanism.

Dr. Hans Diehl: So to understand dietary fiber, you want to be aware that the standard American diet, with its emphasis on processed foods and animal products, supplies only ten, maybe 12 grams of fiber a day. That’s a measly amount, ten to 12 grams a day. We would be much better off aiming for at least 40 or 50 grams of fiber that you find very conveniently in a more plant food and whole food center lifestyle. So to highlight principle number three of the Magic Five of better choices, eat more whole foods. They’re filling. They’re very high in nutrients and fiber. They’re very low in calories, in fat and salt. They are very economical and they’re low in caloric density. And your taste buds, they will adjust. Just give it a few weeks and you’ll be just fine and you will just love these foods.

Dr. Hans Diehl: In summary, we have learned that the principal cause of overweight is not overeating, but the reliance on heavily marketed foods with little fiber but with plenty of calories. So the main culprit in overweight, then, is not food volume but caloric density. So if you want to be a winner in the losing game, eat more whole foods. Simply prepared without all that sugar and salt and fat. And when it comes to these foods, there are no restrictions in type or volume of food except, as you know, for nuts and seeds. And for your review, here are the four principles out of the Magic Five or better choices for a successful weight loss program. Number one, reduce empty calories. Do you remember? Restrict sugars, refined oils and alcohol. Principle number two, reduce animal products because they’re not in your best interest because of the high-calorie content coming from fat. Instead, practice number three, move towards a diet that is plant-based and whole-food center, right? Yes, but many people may not always be in a position where they’re ready to make those big changes. For those, we recommend a gradual change. If you’re used to a lot of meat, a lot of dairy and eggs and plenty of processed foods, I’ll call it caffeine that you see on the left side of the red triangle, then begin to leverage that move progressively to the right-hand side of the green triangle. Eat less and less of those foods in the red triangle and more and more progressively of fruits and vegetables, lots of legumes, whole grains and with plenty of water. And then there is principle number four out of the Magic Five of Better choices. May I recommend that you get into a regular exercise program and not because you want to lose weight? No, but because it’s for the many benefits that come with exercise. But there’s one more guideline, one more principle to complete the Magic Five of better choices when you have a very, very big person, I mean, a person that is, let’s say over 350 pounds, do not share principles. One to four of the Magic Five don’t share them with them because obesity for these people, especially for very large women, who often have been abused, to them, obesity is a solution to that problem. They’re often deeply wounded and hurt people. And to them, these guidelines don’t make much sense because their overriding concern is to find relief from the deep pain that has settled deep inside, which needs to be handled first. What many of them need is to tie into professional, social and emotional resources for long-term success. And here, group therapy may just be the right thing to do. And so when it comes to understanding obesity, it becomes very important that above all else, we exercise loving care, that we accept people the way they are, that we model our lifestyle for them in kindness. Remember, we are not the food police. We don’t tell people what to do. We don’t tell people what happens to them if they don’t eat the right foods. Those choices must come from within. And you have to give people time to do that. We can only extend to these people our loving care, our understanding and our help to begin to accept ourselves for who and what they are. They are valuable human beings. And when we succeed in doing this, then they might have that aha moment where they begin to realize, Yay, my current lifestyle may not be in my best interest, but I can and I will change.

Chef AJ: Dr. Diehl, that was a fabulous presentation. I especially love when you said that the gland that we have the most problem with was the salivary gland. Yeah, so many gems. And the bigger the waistline, the shorter the lifeline.

Dr. Hans Diehl: That’s true, isn’t it? Every extra pound is one month of life.

Chef AJ: That was really, really unbelievable. I have one more question for you though, doctor Dale, what is the real truth about weight loss?

Dr. Hans Diehl: Well, I think we have to make better choices in the food that we choose and nothing comes in better and stronger in a successful way program than using unprocessed plant foods. That’s your line, isn’t it?

Chef AJ: Amen. Well said, Dr. Diehl. Thank you so much for being here.

Dr. Hans Diehl: Thank you.

Chef AJ: Hi, Jill and Jeffrey, and welcome to the Truth about Weight Loss Summit, thanks so much for being here.

Jill Dalton: Hi, A.J. glad to be here.

Chef AJ: Well, you know, I know you guys from your wonderful cookbook plant-based cooking made easy and from your wonderful YouTube show. But until I actually heard you won another summit, I had no idea you had an incredible story of weight loss and transformation, and I would love to hear about it.

Jill Dalton: Sure. Yeah, I didn’t lose as much weight as Jeff, but we both had a lot of other improvements on our health from doing what we did. You want to go ahead and start? You can start.

jeffrey Dalton: Yeah, we started. We used Dr. Fuhrman’s book Eat to Live, and I had just turned 40 and actually hurt my back. We just moved. So we kind of dove into doing this, and all I could do was walk couldn’t really do any kind of exercise. So it was just eating and walking, and I lost 70 pounds in about three months. So we were living in New Zealand at the time, and we’re on a visa and their visa system can be very strict with health issues. So if you are on a visa there and you get sick and you’re seen as a burden on the health care system, they can actually not renew your visa. If you have a home, invite you to back to back to your whole country. So there was a lot of pressure on us because we had had physicals for our visa. So in getting the physical, I actually found out that I was stage one obese. So I was like just my BMI where I was at and I was pre-diabetic. So I had all the indicators that I was just turning 40 where, you know, I think people are age like 40 is the new 50. It’s like we’re having those have friends that are my age, that are facing heart conditions and that typically were later. And I think it’s because we grew up eating the typical American diet from childhood. So we made the switch together and we kind of dove in headfirst, and it was really remarkable how quickly I was losing weight. It just seemed like I was melting and we were just walking. So we were very strict. So we were using oil and all that stuff like we do on our show and we were eating out, which is kind of our weakness when our weight does fluctuate it’s from eating out, all the olive oil and stuff they use in the food. But it was remarkable how fast it just seemed like kind of the weight melted off. I think we both felt because Jill lost the good 25 pounds and she is pretty tiny already.

Jill Dalton: Yeah, we felt amazing even after the first couple of days, really. I mean, I think we were surprised and we were shocked because we were eating so much. I mean, was your favorite pastime. We love to eat, you know, we’re food, but it gets you in trouble if you’re not eating the right things. So we were eating obviously all of the right things because, yeah, the weight loss was effortless. You know, I started out, I was just having aches and pains and just waking up feeling terrible. Every morning I was having heart palpitations, migraines. I grew up, you know, probably a majority of my life with headaches every third day and a migraine every couple of weeks. That’s just been my life. And since day one, I think it wasn’t until we were in for a few months that I realized I hadn’t had a headache since we started, which is just unheard of for me. So I was happy to swap that. You know, the weight loss was great, of course.

Chef AJ: So you’re living in New Zealand and Dr. Fuhrman Is one of the experts on the summit. How did you even hear about his work and what made you decide to try it?

jeffrey Dalton: It’s actually there’s kind of a karmic thing. I had given a book probably 10 years prior to a friend of mine that I worked with on whole bread and water fasting because I was in water fasting at the time. So all these years later, just out of the blue, I got an email from him and he said, Hey, you know, you gave me this book on fasting 10 years ago and it started me down this journey of health and food. And then I recently found this book Eat Live. He had lost. I think he lost like a hundred pounds. It was remarkable. And then his mom had lost a bunch of weight. She had gotten off her medication. She was diabetic. She got off the insulin and he’s like, I just wanted to pass along to you, send this back to you. So that was it was just like, you know, it fell from the sky.

Jill Dalton: Yeah. And we both read it and just it just clicked because we struggled with weight for many years. Just, you know, the regular yoyoing, you know, we had we tried all these different ways of eating, but we hadn’t really been. Come out of an issue until then, until after we were 40 really, and once we read the book, it just clicked. We were like, wow, we’ve been doing all of the wrong things. We thought we were doing all the right things. We were living on a farm. We, you know, we raised chickens and ducks and we had our own eggs. The neighbor had grass-fed beef. He ran them on our land. So we got half of beef for the year. You know, it was all grass-fed, organic. We were drinking raw milk, all of these things. We didn’t know that we were actually killing ourselves.

jeffrey Dalton: So we were very much like back to the land local. We were trying to implement all that stuff and, you know, the grass made of grass-fed animals somehow being healthy. We just kept gaining weight just over the course of time. And we did. It’s worth saying we did Furman’s book. We mostly followed it except for eggs. The first time we did it.

Jill Dalton: Don’t know why we did that.

jeffrey Dalton: So we both lost some weight initially. Just like losing 20 pounds, I lost. But then we kind of went back. We started going out to eat again and we didn’t really stay with it. And when we finally did go back because we had gained all the weight that we lost back when we went back and did it when I turned 40, that’s when we stayed with it. And that’s when we lost. I lost significant right in those things happen. So it was kind of something that we hear a lot from our audience as well. It’s like people try something, have a little bit of success, but then they go back to what they were doing before, right? And then the weight comes back on, usually with more right. You do that whole yo yo thing.

Jill Dalton: Yeah, you really have to stick with it. And like he said, we were really strict in the beginning, and I think we’re a lot looser now, but we know when we’re overdoing it will gain a little bit back. But we’re like, Oh, you know, I know where I’m overdoing it in this one area, I’m eating too much, you know, that’s what we do, and we have a cooking show, right? So I’m always experimenting and making cakes and baked goods and our two daughters have moved out now. So it’s just us. It’s a lot of food to eat. And I hate throwing things out, so we end up eating too much. So you still have to be careful, you know.

jeffrey Dalton: in all honesty toI I think our we know it’s really packaged food and restaurant foods like if we just ate where we show on our show all the time, which is probably like 90 percent of what we eat. But during the pandemic in that it’s like, you know, we’ll get chips, we’ll get food delivered, and it’s really easy for that to start creeping back in. And you know, some way to create that concept. But the nice thing is, we know, we know. No, except that I do care of that. Yeah, your body responds, it’s good.

Chef AJ: And I’m guessing you don’t let yourself backslide too much before you. You tighten the screws again,

jeffrey Dalton: Usually 10 pounds.

Jill Dalton: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, five to 10 pounds for me. And you just feel it. I just feel sluggish and I just don’t feel well. I’m like, Gosh, I know I’m doing this to myself.

jeffrey Dalton: I think for anyone watching anyone who has been really heavy to the point that it scared them. And then if you ever lost that weight, the idea of going back is not something you want to do with, you know, how you feel and how you feel about yourself, all of that stuff. So we are waiting for you. So.

Chef AJ: Did either of you try to lose weight and had other points in your life in how did you try to do that?

jeffrey Dalton: We did. It was interesting. You wrote our cookbook. I had to go back in kind of research our life among us, like what books we’d read. And we did kind of everything from South Beach Diet to the zone to the. And that was just over the years of being parents and working.

Jill Dalton: Ans through pregnancies and pregnancies you know trying to lose the weight.

jeffrey Dalton: I think I gained like seventy five pounds when Joe got pregnant with our first daughter and she had a baby, and I just didn’t think so. But we had tried all this stuff over the years and this was pre-internet. So it’s like, we remember that phase well, where you hear about something.

Jill Dalton: In the library looking for. All the different weight loss books. It was so confusing.

jeffrey Dalton: And we know now, so many of those are just the same repackaged garbage which you see like in Quito and paleo, it’s like they take the same information and just keep repackaging it. So it’s all kind of the same story. It’s like, hey, you can eat as much bacon-wrapped pork chop as you want and you’re going to be healthy.

Jill Dalton: Well, it’s-the media, too. I mean, it’s really a struggle. I really feel for people because It’s like information overload. There’s too much out there and the media feeds into that. Like, you know, I, my parents like to watch the local news, so they watch it morning and evening. And I hadn’t watched it for a few years and I went back to their house and I was just listening to them. And it’s this thing like, I think on Time magazine at one point they showed a picture of butter and they’re like, Oh, butter is good now or bacon is good now and then the next week, bacon’s bad or butter is bad. So these poor people are out there and they’re trying to trust what these news anchors are telling them or some random doctor is telling them. But then the next week, it’ll be completely opposite. So I think it’s just confusion, and I really feel for people because that’s got to be really difficult too. Who do you trust?

Chef AJ: You trust Jeffrey and Jill from the whole food plant-based cooking show. That is who I trust. Why do you think that the whole food plant-based diet without using oil and sugar was so successful for you guys, whereas other types of weight loss programs that you did, didn’t work long term?

Jill Dalton: I know why it is for me.

jeffrey Dalton: I mean ultimately it is just because our bodies are designed to eat this way. So we talk about this a lot on the show when we do interviews, but when you find something that’s true, that thing is a multiplier in your life if you implement it. So learning about plant-based and removing oil from our food, and as you do that, you see multiple of the benefits because it’s actually true. It’s not just some theory that only works in certain circumstances. And we’ve seen this in our audience from people all over the world, all different cultures, all kinds of people write us and say that I just want plant-based. A few months ago. I can’t believe how I feel. I’m off my medication. So that kind of truth, I think, has a lot of power in your life. And once you sort of touch that and realize that, that’s why you want to share, that’s why we make the show.

Jill Dalton: I think for me, it’s the taste. I’m such a food junkie. It has to taste good. So, you know, when we started out, we focused on our favorite foods because those are the things that when you start out, they’re going to be in your head and it’s going to make you backslide if you start delving into those again or you have a cheat day or something. It’s way too tempting to just backslide into those things. So we really focused on getting those down pat for the foods that we know, our favorite vice foods, the recipes and get a recipe and just nail it so that we know if you’re really craving something will make that. We will make that thing and it takes care of that craving. So for me, it has to taste delicious. You know, eating is three parts, four parts of our day.

jeffrey Dalton: We recommend to folks on our show, I think Dr. Gregor at one point one of his videos said that most people make between five and seven recipes at all. They learn a handful of things to make if they’re not cooks. And that’s what they make. And if you focus on your five or six or seven favorite foods and get a good, healthy plant-based replacement for that, then the foods that were your stumbling block in the foods that caused you to backslide can become the foundation of being plant feeling like I can have my pizza, I have my cheesecake or whatever it is, and it’s going to make me feel better instead of making me sick again.

Chef AJ: So I think one of the things that added to your huge success on YouTube is that you make not only delicious food, but familiar foods and comfort foods. You make hummingbird cake, you make hot dogs, you make macaroni and cheese. These are things that people love.

Jill Dalton: Exactly, exactly.

jeffrey Dalton: And in a lot of those things, the difference between whole food plant-based and vegan is that they’re vegan options for a lot of those things, but they’re usually for oil and a lot of times processed vegan food. So you’re not eating animals, and that’s possible, but you’re still eating something that’s not necessarily making you healthy to get that straight and have totally plant-based options for those things that really becomes the foundation.

Chef AJ: How long ago did you take this journey together?

jeffrey Dalton: I think the show, in January will be seven years.

Jill Dalton: Almost seven years,

jeffrey Dalton: yeah, and we started the show not too long after we did this because it hit us so hard. You don’t join teaching classes in the Public Library in New Zealand for free, and it was just a handful of people. And then we actually try to do stuff in our home, which was really strange because we put it on meet up and we had a lot of strange people coming to our house.

Jill Dalton: Yeah, one funny thing because we started out doing raw food and I advertised it as raw food because it was through meat up and meet up is a little bit different in New Zealand than it is here. You know, there’s a lot of people that like to surf meet up groups, so they just pick random ones and just show up just to see what it’s about. But this older man came and he came with a big bowl full of raw fish, and he said, this is the raw food. I was like, Oh wow, I need to be way more specific.

Chef AJ: But what did you do? Did you send them away?

Jill Dalton: Oh, we were just like Oh, come on in. I’m like, You know anybody that, you know, if you want, I’m not going to judge anyone for eating that, you know, just whatever. But I was like, Yeah, this raw food, It’s plant food.

Chef AJ: That’s hilarious. That is hilarious. I mean, like, was it sushi or was it just uncooked fish?

Jill Dalton: What’s the dish with this like lime juice?

Chef AJ: Sashimi maybe?

Jill Dalton: Ceviche.

Chef AJ: Oh boy, that is funny. Do you expect that you did it together made a difference? Because so many people watching it, it’s usually the woman who wants to lose weight wants to get healthier. But often the spouse, which is often the husband, will not be supportive.

jeffrey Dalton: We hear that in the comments on our show.

Jill Dalton: All the time, all the time.

jeffrey Dalton: Yeah, definitely us doing it together and doing the show together. Like it. What we’re doing right now uses so many of our life experiences between the two of us, between all the technology and the stuff I did in the past and Jill’s family history with the cooking and baking. And she had all this experience, even though it had all reality she didn’t like to cook.

Jill Dalton: I don’t like to cook.

jeffrey Dalton: It’s kind of funny.

Jill Dalton: I love to bake. I love to bake.

jeffrey Dalton: But you know, doing it together like having that support and being able to cook together and go through the experience together. We really feel for the folks who watch the show that are doing it. And we hear that a lot. We always tell people like, just if you can stick with it, even for a few weeks, your spouse is probably going to notice because you going to feel better.

Jill Dalton: They’re going to see the change in you and want that too. But there’s also things that I encourage people to do like, like the spinach thing, adding it to to the dish. I love to hide vegetables in the meal. Even though our meals are all vegetables. But if they’re making something that they are still trying to comply with their spouse and putting meat in something. If you’re making the like the tomato sauce or some like stews or anything, chop vegetables, greens, anything mushrooms up really, really small and cook them into the things so they’ll be getting all of those nutrients and they won’t even know it. And their taste buds will start to change and they won’t even know it. And eventually, they’ll start trying a little bit of your dishes and they’ll really like that one. So I say focus on that one to make more of that. And then because they’re going to start to trust those flavors, oh, well, that other thing you made was really good. Maybe I will try a little bit of your nice cream or your, you know, whatever you’re making. So it’s just a slower, gradual process for people that are struggling with, you know, a spouse that doesn’t want to do it.

jeffrey Dalton: But wWe have a few recipes like the mushroom stroganoff. There’s some things that people write and say. They’re like, Hey, my family doesn’t eat plant-based, but they asked me to make this to get it right. So we try to encourage folks to do that too. It’s like, take some of these ones that we know are familiar sort of meat dishes and try them out on your family or just make some and let them try it because a lot of times they’ll ask

Jill Dalton: for it and even don’t tell them. I know I told this story a while ago about I went home for a Thanksgiving, and you know, my the rest of my family is not plant-based, so the holidays are tough. I really struggle to find anything that I can eat, so I always go with the intent of I’m going to make as much stuff as I can, so I know I can have something to eat. So my mom asked me or I said, You know what? Let me take the scalp potatoes and I’ll make the scalp potatoes. And she was like, Well, how do you make that vegan? It’s like, Oh, there’s ways. So I made it. And that was the first thing on the whole big spread of table. That was the first thing that was completely gone, and no one knew I didn’t label it vegan. No one knew. So there’s a lot of things I don’t think people can tell

Jill Dalton: I love your idea of the stealth method of cutting vegetables small, but that’s also a great way to get children to eat vegetables, even if they’re already vegan and maybe don’t like them. And also what that does is lowers the overall thought density of the dish.

Chef AJ: Exactly, exactly. Yeah, that’s so cool. So, Jeffrey, you’re a tall guy. You’re sitting down now, but I know you’re really tall. So did the 70 pounds that you had on you. You said you were obese. Did it show or did it come on so gradually and really didn’t even notice?

jeffrey Dalton: I think when you know, anyone who’s gained weight, you kind of know internally. I definitely carried it relatively well. But seeing myself for people seeing me after I lost weight, I think that’s where it became really obvious here. If you lose that much weight, no matter how tall you, it’s pretty clear. I mean, even just in my face and my neck, but I just kind of swelled up over time.

Jill Dalton: But it’s true. Nobody, nobody really knew that he weighed that much. They were actually surprised when we said it was because he’s six-five. That’s a lot of hype, and there’s a lot of weight you can hold in those legs without knowing because you wear baggy jeans and baggy t-shirts and stuff. So yeah. It is not so easy to hide when you are short, I’m five four. Definitely not easy to hide five extra pounds or 10 extra pounds.

Chef AJ: are there before and after. As if you guys were anywhere. I maybe should have asked you to bring them. But I’m just curious because you guys look amazing.

jeffrey Dalton: You could send them to you. It’s actually funny, when we first were doing this, I went the jars like, you know, we need to do your fat picture. And she was just mortified. We’re looking through all our pictures for the best one, which is the one which kind of makes you

Jill Dalton: Which one makes you look the fatest.

jeffrey Dalton: In mine, I’m wearing a wetsuit and I just look like an overstuffed sausage or something like it’s not pretty, but those are the ones when you lose weight. It’s like you feel good showing because you show people like and we didn’t kill ourselves trying to lose the weight, which was the other thing like. Just walking. And we encourage the folks who watch our show. Walking is such a powerful thing. Walk three miles a day. If you can’t do anything else to do that because it’ll help you maintain weight.

Chef AJ: Absolutely. You mentioned you were pre-diabetic up until you had to have that physical. Did you know? Did you have any symptoms?

jeffrey Dalton: I just crashed. I crashed during the day, and I think that you convince yourself a lot of people do with food. I think like you eat and then you crash. And that’s like the post-lunch crash in the post-dinner crash and the holiday food crash. You don’t realize really what’s happening could be as it becomes a pattern. It’s like every day at four o’clock, I’m zonked, you know, have lunch and I crash. And when that stopped happening, that in itself a surprise just to feel sort of consistent. You know, I still have a little energy tip in the afternoon, but depending on what time are going to bed. But a difference of eating and feeling good or eating and crashing or getting a headache, or I think those things just kind of built over time. And I was pre-diabetic, so my body was still functioning. It was just struggling. So I’ve been having that just completely reverse and go away for my blood sugar levels. And I did a fast. I went to Dr. Goldhamer’s Clinic at True North and I had such an amazing experience and my daughter and I stayed there for 30 days. I did a lot of fasts with her. She fasted for 14 or 15 days. I think I did 17 days and being there that long, there is nothing do like you have to stay. You can’t leave because they don’t want you to wander off and pass out or something. So you’re just there. So we were there for 30 days, so we just made it a point to meet everyone so we would sit in the lobby and meet people as they came in and we’d meet the people or see the people we had met as they left because we were there long enough to see people come and go. It was remarkable to see in such a short time how much people would lose weight. They would get off all of their medications. People in their 80s, like the thing that I saw there was so profound. I used to joke with them, mostly just set up a camera and the door people coming in because it’s such a remarkable change, such a short time. So when you add water to fasting, the whole food, plant-based diet, that’s like a whole other level of what it can do.

Chef AJ: Well, Dr. Goldhammer is an expert on this summit. I agree with you that a documentary on True North would be amazing. Did you water fast before you lost the weight, after, during? At what point in your journey?

jeffrey Dalton: I had done water fasts on my own over the years. I had gotten up to about 10 days, and I was kind of scared to go any longer without supervision. And the more I learned about fasting, I realized you really want to have medical supervision. But I did. The fast after I lost had lost the weight and been plant-based for like four years, and it was interesting because they take your blood and do all this when you check in. And they came back with my results and I took your blood. Work is what we want to see when someone’s leaving here and you’re coming in the door that way. And so she was so young, our daughter, and they’re like, we don’t normally have young people here, typically as older people. So they were really interested to see someone who’s coming in with really good blood work. And it was fascinating because they took my blood over three weeks, just water fasting and my blood work basically remained the same. So to see that without eating at all, just drinking water for four 17 days to my cells and. The nutrition that was stored in my cells in my body’s ability to manage that was so incredibly consistent. So looking at my blood work over these weeks, they come and we do the review and they’re like, Yeah, everything still looks great, which you don’t normally hear from a doctor when you’re getting blood work.

Chef AJ: That is incredible, even though you are already eating wonderfully before the fast. Did anything happen like in your taste preference or taste change after the fast?

jeffrey Dalton: Oh, definitely. It was funny. When you come off a water fast, that long you first start on juice just like very, very fine water down juice. And as you come back, everything you eat tastes so amazingly good. I there was a grocery store right behind you. Just like a small bodega grocery store, and they had a huge basket of heirloom tomatoes that someone locally was growing and selling in the store. And I would go in there once I could do solid food, I would go on there every day and just fill a grocery bag with them. And they also had these little beautiful mangoes. So we get two bags of these and go down the street. There’s a 100-year-old cemetery. It’s a beautiful cemetery. Since my daughter and I would go down there, we just sit on the bench and eat this bag of tomatoes. They were so delicious and so something that simple could taste that amazingly good. And you know, as you get away from the fast, if you start eating like a lot of salt or processed food, you kind of lose that sensitivity. But in a very short time water fasting, you can, you can definitely increase your sensitivity to enjoyment of simple fruits. An apple.

Chef AJ: Right. That’s why Dr. Goldhammer does it not to lose weight, but to get that that those taste buds, you know, are reborn so that you can appreciate the taste of whole natural food.

jeffrey Dalton: Yeah,I think people don’t really believe you when they hear someone say that the thought of eating meat kind of grosses me out. And I used the brisket and I actually carried a liver directly from a cow. We had to slaughter it in our yard, they do home slaughtering in New Zealand. I carry this giant liver down the hill and sliced it up and put in the pan. I was all in meat, and even the smell of meat cooking now will make me somewhat nauseous. And that that change that happens where your body notes like that aren’t something that I want. A lot of people don’t believe that until we experience it, right?

Jill Dalton: It’s a surprise. Yeah, it’s a surprise when you first see it, because I know cheese. I think we went to, it was some live concert in the park or something, and they had a bunch of food trucks and we have to walk past all these food trucks to get to the music venue. And we walked by, you know, of course, there wasn’t anything vegan. There was all this like meat stuff, and the smell was so overwhelming. I was just like, Oh oh, I feel like I’m going to throw up like, Wow, I’ve never experienced that before. Just the smell of meat cooking that, yeah, it’s bizarre.

Chef AJ: Like, was there anything from your previous way of eating that you miss that was difficult at first when you adopted a whole food plant-based diet or that you haven’t been able to recreate yet on your whole food plant-based cooking show.

jeffrey Dalton: Sugar.

Jill Dalton: That is a good one.

jeffrey Dalton: I mean, we have sweets and stuff on our show, but I’ve definitely still, if I allow myself to eat processed food with sugar in it, it sets me off. I start craving sugar. It’s very quickly where I’m craving know throughout the day. So if we’re doing dates and doing the stuff from our show, it doesn’t happen. But if we go out somewhere to have a dessert, a vegan dessert or something with sugar that by far has been the most challenging thing for me.

Speaker 2: I don’t know what mine would be.

Chef AJ: Chips.

Jill Dalton: Oh yeah, for sure. I still have not been able to crack that one. I think that I’m a cornbread. You know, I’m a Nebraska corn fed person so that corn just speaks to my soul.

jeffrey Dalton: Hilarious. You know, I don’t know if most of your viewers are women, but I mean, Jeffrey story is so compelling. I wish more men would see this and give this a chance, or at least support their wives it for a short period of time and give them a chance to succeed.

Jill Dalton: Absolutely.

jeffrey Dalton: I have a circle of friends, guys that are are that, you know, it’s interesting because they’ve approached me for help to go plant-based, but it’s only after they’ve gotten sick. They’ve gone to the doctor and had their blood work done. They’ve had some kind of cardiac scare or their blood pressure. So, my one friend, the doctor is like you, you are literally going to pop. Your blood pressure is so high. And then they get serious whether or not they stay with it. That’s the another story

Jill Dalton: But that’s completely flip-flopped because they’re their wives don’t support eating that way. It’s such a surprise that both of these guys came to it first.

Chef AJ: And I think addiction is very powerful, and it doesn’t matter what the sex of the person is. People have a hard time letting go of, you know, sugar, fat and salt and animal products.

jeffrey Dalton: I do think, too for men that there’s an added element of just like weightlifting. If you watch plant-based stuff online or vegan stuff online, there tends when the men are involved, it tends to always be the extra layer. So you’ve got to be pumping iron and be, you know, jacked. And I think my story is somewhat different in that way. You know, I do yoga and we do exercise, but I’m not sugar jacked, all into the protein, how much pea protein do I need to pound into my body every day? That was never. It was never about that for me, but I do see that in the plant-based world, and I think there is definitely space for just sort of a normal guy. It’s like, I just want to be healthy.

Jill Dalton: Well, I think the one thing to do with a spouse is most people that watch our show, I feel like whole food plant-based because they already have a health issue when they’re sick. And, you know, even I mean what he said before that the ’40s are the new 50’s. Yeah, but I say that backwards. We’re starting to have these health conditions earlier and earlier, but I think it’s not until those things hit. That most people make it to the whole, you know, they may become vegan before that because, you know, it’s a little more trendy or it’s a younger crowd because there’s all this vegan junk food available and stuff. But it’s not until you get older that you start having the health issues that are really life-changing type of health issues that you know you have to make a change. There’s no choice

jeffrey Dalton: And the same is true with many of the people that that do come whole food plant-based, especially when they’re older. It’s because they’re so sick. And Ternate was the perfect example of what people were facing quadruple bypass surgery. And they’re like, I’m going to go do this fast thing and just see if it’s going to help my last because I’m so scared of surgery. So it’s like all that pressure just to get that extra step to change and the young people I think that we see in our show in particular, they tend to have been ill or known someone. We’ve been close to someone who was really sick and based could change their life in some way.

Chef AJ: And that does seem to be the norm, and it’s unfortunate that people wait until they’re there’s something happens a diagnosis. It’s sort of like, imagine if you waited until you went bankrupt to start saving money.

Jill Dalton: Exactly.

jeffrey Dalton: Which is also what we do.

Jill Dalton: But luckily, it’s so simple and it can change so quickly.

jeffrey Dalton: We try to help folks like when we do interviews on the show that if you go off the plant list for real, like we’re talking about, you actually need to talk to your doctor if you’re on medication in particular, like blood pressure, medication and metformin, because you’ll end up with too much medication very quick. You’ll be overmedicating yourself because your blood pressure drops from what you’re eating. So a lot of folks are just like, I’m going to do this and I’ll get off my medication. It’s that you really have to be careful and step down, have someone help you step down and get off.

Chef AJ: I don’t think people realize that results are pretty typical on a whole food plant-based diet.

jeffrey Dalton: As my doctor Goldhamer used to joke, it’s like obesity, high blood pressure, heart disease. Give me something hard.

Chef AJ: I appreciate what you said about restaurant eating. Because if you just eat your own food, which I know is delicious, I’ve made some of your recipes and you can eat as much as you want. You don’t have to worry. You mentioned that it’s always the restaurants that packs on the pounds, and I don’t think people realize how much oil and sugar and salt restaurants use as opposed to what you would use at home.

Jill Dalton: Yeah, I think you’re right. The oil, mainly the oil and the sodium, you know, if you saw how much salt gets added, I mean, I watch other cooking shows and stuff and I watch them do the fancy sprinkle with the salt and I’m estimating how much, they do that in the beginning when they were cooking the onions and or whatever. And then in the end, they do it again and I’m like, Wow, that was lot of salt. And on top of some of the ingredients already having salt in that. But yeah, the oil too. Yeah.

jeffrey Dalton: Oh, for some reason, the vegan food movement. There’s not a lot of options where we live here. But when they come in, it’s we’ll see an announcement. There’s a new vegan joint. You go there and it is just coated with. It’s all deep-fried, greasy and they say it’s vegan comfort food. And it’s always that the idea of doing

Jill Dalton: You definitely don’t feel good after eating it. You still feel terrible.

Chef AJ: That’s a misnomer. Comfort food, because it doesn’t really make you all that comfortable.

Speaker 2: But I think I mean, I remember because the way I used to eat, you know, in our family, in the Midwest, it’s a very heavy substance to the food. I think maybe part of it is just weight, and I grew up in a lot of baked goods. So I miss that feeling of the brick that you have in your stomach. It’s like you get really full and it’s just like that heavy kind of makes you a little bit groggy. But I never related that to feeling terrible until we changed our diet and I realized I didn’t have. I had this light, energetic feeling I never crashed over. Eating was like, Oh, oh okay, I get it, I get it.

Speaker 3: I’d say sugar, too. I know restaurants tend to use a lot of sugar and anything that they’re making in particular. I think in America, .

Chef AJ: That’s right, sugar, fat and salt that I call the evil Trinity. Would you guys say to somebody that’s given up hope that they could ever be successful at losing weight?

jeffrey Dalton: That has given up hope. We actually started doing interviews on our show instead of just the cooking show because of people’s testimonials. What we found is anyone who has done this, no matter what they’re doing, has such an extraordinary story. We were interviewing Terry and Angel. They started a cooking show because they weren’t plant-based and angels saved his life through his heart to heart disease. Now he’s reversing his heart disease and documenting his story. I think to watch some of that kind of interviews because you see, I’ve seen people who are in their 80s and people who are in their 70s and people who are in their 30s and like this huge range of all kinds of people. It works to make these changes. It works for everyone. I have yet to see someone that actually implements these things, that it doesn’t have that kind of impact.

Jill Dalton: And I think, too, because this is such a different method. Like, say, you’re trying South Beach or you’re trying zone or paleo, it’s the kind of the same foods that you’re used to eating. They implement, which is part of the problem. This is so different. You’re changing almost everything about the way you eat. And I think once people really get into it and find foods that they absolutely love, they don’t want to go back. Yeah, like the desire goes away because you’re feeling so good. So, yeah, I think it’s easier to stay on the path of the whole food, plant-based and even friends of super creating something. And you’re not finding that City is in the whole food, plant-based stuff. You still have the vegan option. Like, if you’re really missing ice cream, you can have ice cream occasionally. You know, if you’re just if you just can’t get past it in your head, it’s okay to have a little bit of that. Do you have vegan ice cream? Yeah. And know that it’s not cheating.

jeffrey Dalton: I would say, too, and this is just from personal experience. You have to know that you’re going to need to learn how to cook a little. And it’s funny. I started cooking my way through our cookbook because I’d always filmed the show. You know, I do other stuff, but Jill’s always doing the recipes. And I had a few things that I would make, but I’m just eating. I’m enjoying on the street, and I saw there was a guitar. I play guitar and I was taking lessons from online. And this guy had been teaching for like twenty-five years. And he said, you know, I had forgotten how hard it is to learn guitar. So in his course, he actually flipped the guitar over and learned to play guitar with the opposition and filmed himself so that he could remember, like, this is what people go through. Your fingers hurt and your coordination. And that really struck me like, I should do that. You know, here we are making the show, but Jill’s doing all the cooking, and it’s been such a cool experience to realize that I can walk into the kitchen and think of something of all the stuff we make that I like and make it and every single time so far I’ve done. It’s just come out amazing. I measure like I follow the recipe. It must have started being used on me. Just doesn’t measure all that. And then, like I went and stayed with a friend of mine and I cooked for him for like five days. We got a hotel to the kitchen and stuff because he was having some real serious health issues. And after five days, he was losing a pound a day and it completely. We just watched documentaries and we cooked that taught him how to make these basic things. I would definitely say if someone is struggling or having that feeling like this is going to work for me, you have to get your head around the fact that we’re going to need to learn how to cook because there isn’t anybody making this stuff right? They’re not going to bring it to you. You have to do it.

Jill Dalton: We’re hoping for those companies. I mean, there are some plant-based companies out there that are they’re getting close to getting close. There’s still oil and salt. But yeah, the splendid spoon is pretty decent. There’s a couple of others. I just can’t think of the names of them right now.

Chef AJ: They deliver food to people. Mama says has a pretty good line because it’s oil-free and there’s one that’s even sugar and salt-free.

jeffrey Dalton: Oh, that’s nice. And then they play a few folks, they have some stuff, right? But you can’t eat that all the time. So you’re going to have to learn how to cook. But it doesn’t have to be incredibly difficult. Like Instant Pot, you just chop a bunch of stuff and throw it in the Instapot and you have this amazing, super nice broth.

Jill Dalton: And that’s part of our focus with the show, too, is to focus more on familiar foods with ingredients that most people, even if they haven’t switched over to plant-based yet but they already have in their cupboard, they can throw something together, and it’s going to be delicious. So, yeah.

Chef AJ: You guys definitely accomplished that with your book and your show, so I hope people will check it out. And one more question for you, Jeffrey and Jill. What’s the real truth about weight loss?

jeffrey Dalton: It’s really if you get the oil and the sugar and the processed foods out and you eat Whole Foods, you can cook them, you don’t have to do raw and all that, but it’s like eating Whole Foods and getting those added ingredients out and walking I think, some form of basic exercise.

Jill Dalton: Yeah, you have to have a little both. You can’t just do one or the other. They really go hand in hand. Yeah.

Chef AJ: Thank you so much. Would you mind showing us how to make one of your delicious recipes?

Jill Dalton: Absolutely. Boy, you’re in for a treat. This is so yummy.

Chef AJ: All right. Well, let’s head over to the kitchen.

Jill Dalton: All right, chef A.J. So we’re just going to get started. This is one of my newest recipes and actually just went out on the show not that long ago. So this is an Italian tofu bake and it’s loosely based on there’s this fad that was going around for a while, and I think it was like a feta bake and it was like a big chunk of feta in the middle and they surrounded it with all of these, the sauce and these vegetables and stuff, and it just looks so good. But, you know, shut us out. So I’m like, What can I do in places that I’m like, Let’s just try tofu, and it works. So while we’ve eaten this so many times because we are in love with it, so that’s what we’re making.

Chef AJ: It sounds delicious.

Jill Dalton: Well, we’re just going to jump right in starting a burger using this, you know, table-top burner. They not the greatest, but we’re just going to grow with it here. So I’m going to start with a whole onion, just a red onion that I’ve diced pretty small. And I’ve got just a package of sliced and sliced mushrooms and a whole red bell pepper slice. And I like to cook them together because we don’t use oil and we’re still trying. I hope you can still hear me over the spoons so we don’t use oil. But when you cook mushrooms as I’ll be probably put mushrooms before as they put some of that liquid starts leaching out of it. So that is what keeps the onions from sticking or the red peppers from sticking. But if they do sarcastic, I always have a little container of water supply. All you have to do is to sprinkle a couple tablespoons of water in there and it and it comes right off. And that’s good to be blazing with me into its surface. And it’s also better for washing dishes without any of those oils. When you cook without oil, the stuff is trying to write off and soak it a little bit maybe and it comes right off.

Chef AJ: All right. Not only save calories and time, but it is so much easier to do the dishes when you go oil-free and maybe you could talk a little bit about that Jill because a lot of people still don’t understand calorie density and why one of the biggest secrets to weight loss is just ditching the oil.

Jill Dalton: Absolutely. And I can really attest to this because I still have a chip addiction. I love corn chips. I just can’t. And I know that you can make them in the oven or in the dehydrate or with just regular corn tortillas, but I know I’d never have them on hand. Or when you want chips, it’s like it’s a quick thing. It’s not something you want to go and prepare. I just never think that far ahead. But oil? Yeah, well, it’s I think it’s something like one hundred and twenty or 190 calories per tablespoon. So you think about how much oil you put in that pan before you even start cooking? Usually two tablespoons, at least. And while you’re cooking, sometimes people add more because stuff gets stuck. So that’s a lot of extra calories. And you know, I like how Dr. Klapper explains it. He said you would have to drink like a gallon of olive oil to give any of the nutrients, really. And because so many people are like, Oh, well, what about coconut oil? What about olive oil? There’s so many nutrients and trace minerals in there that you’re going to get, but they’re so, so small for all of that calorie load. So it’s just not necessary, get those those minerals and vitamins in from your food, not from your oil.

Chef AJ: And people think that it tastes good, but it really has no taste and it makes you just need so much more salt.

Jill Dalton: Right, right. I mean, I use I used to like the taste of olive oil a little bit, you know, when they put it on the top of hummus and stuff. But now I taste it and I’m like, All I taste is that coating. It just puts your whole mouth with that flavor and your teeth. And it’s like, You know what? That’s really not necessary. I’d rather have an olive, you know, just throw some olives on top. Cut the olive oil out.

Chef AJ: You know, I’m learning something from you because I was always taught like, you saute the onion first and then you add the other things. But I love what you said about how the mushrooms just release so much water. And that’s such a great takeaway in this.

Jill Dalton: This dish is also going in the oven, so it’s going to continue to cook. It’s in there for quite a while. Well, yeah, I’ve been doing this for a long time and it really does so well. It saves a lot of time. I need to do this. Sorry, spinach. All right. So it isn’t working out, so we have an extra clock. So here is the full package. And what I like to do is I like to cut it. If you’re seeing it like this, I like to cut it in half this way. So top-down. So you’re going to see two slabs of that in your pan. And to get it to soak even better. I like to poke holes in it with a fork. On both sides, so that the source, because we’re doing a tomato-based source that it’s going to be thinking in so that it can soak up as much of that as possible. And there’s also a tip to you, if you really like more firm tofu, you can freeze this the day ahead. And what happens is tofu has water in it, right? So when it freezes, those little pockets of water crystallize, and when you throw it out, that water seeps out and leaves all of those little holes where the water was for other marinades to seep into and it makes the tofu a little bit more firm. So if you like that, you know you can do that or you can use, I usually use the extra firm like the high protein tofu. All right, that looks like it’s about ready. OK. Yep. Got that? So what I like to do to at this point, because the vegetables are all still really thought. I love using frozen spinach in a lot of dishes. I feel like it’s a great way to add a ton of greens in there. And it’s perfect because they’re frozen. If you buy fresh spinach from a store, it doesn’t last very long in the refrigerator. It gets really wet and gross and smelly and you end up. I mean, I know I end up throwing away a lot of spinach, but that’s the secret to this too. Is most frozen vegetables are flash frozen or peaked and then flash-frozen when they’re ripe when they’re right. So all of those nutrients get it like held in that vegetable rather than most vegetables that you find at the store or greens. They’ve been picked and they may have been on that show before or in a freezer container for up to a week before you get it. So it’s already some of the nutrients have already been lost. So because there’s so much residual heat here left, I’m going to use I use a package that’s eight ounces of frozen spinach. In Chennai, you’re not going to be getting more and that residual heat will fall out with spinach the rest of the way Our tofu is already. we already did that. And let’s see. So this needs to be this big block where I usually have it up on the counter. Or the rest of the things in there. So I have a can of crushed tomatoes. And this is a no-salt tomato. Like to buy with no salt added, because that just lets you be the one in control of the sodium level in your food. Now I know a lot of you out there are salt-free. We’re almost salt-free. We still use a little bit. I use a little bit of liquid aminos or tomato sauce sometimes, but you still want to keep your foods a little bit lower in sodium and with the canned stuff, there’s a lot of hidden sodium in there. So it’s a lot of extra sodium that you don’t need.

Chef AJ: And you do not taste it. That’s the thing when you’re cooking with it, I totally agree with you if people want to use salt, let them added at the table where they can really taste it.

Jill Dalton: It ends up being because you have multiple things that have added salt, it ends up being way too salty and you can’t do anything about that. Once that salt is all there, you can’t take it out. All right. So I have a six-ounce can of tomato paste, and I love using tomato paste and dishes. I think it’s just such a because it’s tomato concentrate. It just adds so much flavor to a dish. I just absolutely love it. And, you know, it’s all. OK, so our spices here, I have half a teaspoon of tarragon, and if you haven’t used tarragon, I would encourage you to experiment with it. I think it’s such an unusual flavor. It usually is in Italian foods. Yeah, I can’t even describe the flavor. It’s just really unique. But if you don’t have it, it’s not necessary. It just adds a little bit of something different. We have a half teaspoon of time. A teaspoon of oregano and a teaspoon of basil, and I forgot my garlic is still sitting here, I was going to throw that in there, but there’s three cloves of garlic and a fourth of a cup of Kalamata olives that are diced up really fine. So I’m just going to throw that in there. I’m not going to worry about the garlic because it’s going in the oven. It’s cooked up the rest of the way. But it would have been better to cook a little bit first. But we’ll survive. We’ll survive. Then I have half a cup of vegetable broth, and this is a low sodium vegetable broth also. And then a half a cup of red wine. And the reason why I like to use red wine in my red sauce is just for another depth of flavor as it cooks because as it cooks in the oven, it’s going to bake off any of that alcohol. So you don’t have to worry about the alcohol part. But if you don’t cook this red wine, you can always just use a little bit more vegetable broth. Never works just the same. OK, so this doesn’t have to cook on your burner. I’m just using this pen to kind of get everything mixed up, ready to go into stirring it together. And I already have my own preheated to 400 degrees. OK. And I have a plan. We prepped here a baking dish. A nine by 13 casserole dish. We’re going to put this in, so we’re going to skip a little bit of that sauce first into the bottom so that the tofu has something to sit on. So it can be soaking up those juices from the bottom two and then we’re going to ignore tofu slabs on that. That’s one down there, bit. And then the rest of us just goes on top. Boy, I tell you, you have to have some strong arms to do this stuff. Some of these pansies, the stainless steel pan, and sometimes they are heavy. I don’t know how people do it or cast iron. I love my cast iron.

Chef AJ: Is stainless steel, your favorite kind of cookware because a lot of people that are new to this idea of not using while wonder what’s the best kind of pan to satay with?

Jill Dalton: Absolutely. Yeah, I don’t. I don’t use nonstick at all. I have a nonstick griddle for making pancakes occasionally, but we really don’t use it that much. I do prefer stainless steel. These are all clad, which is a great, great brand. They are a little bit more expensive, but we’ve had these for. I don’t know. Five, almost six years, and they’re still amazing. There’s hardly anywhere on them, and I feel like by using just a little bit of the water sorting. Nothing sticks to these guys, really. You can’t make pancakes or pancakes are tough unless you’re yeah, you got really got to use a nonstick or I don’t know a lot of oil when to cancer. I don’t know. I’ve never had any luck with that at all. OK, so I’m going to set this aside for a second. I’m going to move some stuff out of the way because there’s another creamy sauce that’s going to go on here. That is super delicious. That’s right. Can I do the show I always I can edit this out, right? And I can move stuff around and I’m like, Oh, now I need my blender, so I just move everything around. So this, it is a creamy type of sauce. Typically the creamy sauces and vegan or plant based foods are made with nuts, especially cashews. Well, we’re not going to do that today. We’re going to try to keep this pretty low fat so that, you know, it’s a good thing if you’re just starting out on your weight loss journey. This one is pretty low fat, I mean, the tofu still has some fat to it, but you’re not going to be eating a whole bunch of tofu in one serving. So my cream sauce, if you’re trying to avoid nuts, oats are a great alternative because they have like a natural thickener in them. When you grind them up and blend them up as it sits, it’s going to start to thicken. And it’s great for thickening like gravies or hotter sauces that, you know, like, like alfredo sauces and things like that. If you want to cut back on the nuts, you can always replace half nuts and half oats. It works wonderfully. It’s not a quarter of a cup of oats, just regular rolled oats. Quarter of a cup of nutritional yeast. Two teaspoons of Dijon mustard. Three-quarters of a cup of this is unsweetened soy milk, but you can use whatever plant milk you like. But I would just stress that you look at the labels and you get the unsweetened kind or the kinds that have as few ingredients as possible because a lot of the plant milks today, if you look on those ingredient labels. They’re loaded with all kinds of extra fillers and stabilizers and all kinds of things, so really just to see what’s in there, you know, and compare the different things to pure the calories to their cups. It’s it’s really a good educational thing to do, and a lot of a lot of them have added oils too. And that’s what keeps them thick and creamy and it keeps them from separating. OK, and then I have a tablespoon of white wine vinegar. But you can also use apple cider vinegar. I just prefer the flavor of white wine vinegar. Then I’m sorry, one teaspoon of Greg’s liquid aminos. I’m just going to guesstimate here. Okay, now we’re just going to blend this up. I’m just using my NutriBullet today because it’s such a small amount or regular blender sometimes says issues with that small of an amount. So it’s really better if you have a smaller type of blender.

Jill Dalton: This, I really love this church because it’s, you know, it’s getting colder outside for almost everybody in this country. And you really want something comforting and warm other than a suit. I love suits, but I get tired. So this is a good thing that you can have. We’re still over the top. And I’m just going to kind of stir it in just a little bit. Which you don’t have to do if you don’t, the chap gets a little brown and it forms a little bit of a skin on the top, and it’s not always quite so appealing. So I just kind of stirred in just a little bit just so it can soak in more of that maybe flavor. And then we’re going to pop it in the oven. So like I said before, I went on for hundreds and normally I would put this in for 20 minutes and then I would put the creamy sauce on the top. But you can do it either way. So I’m going to put it in for 30 minutes or 10. All right, guys, it is out of the oven, I can see that. I wish you could smell it because I know what we’re having for dinner smells so good and it tastes amazing to you. I absolutely love and I and I had Jeff go check for me. I found some of our our fat pictures. Maybe before pictures is a better, better word. This is me before I. Yeah, I think it was right before, actually. And then Jeff’s in his wetsuit. No, you see that.

Chef AJ: Yeah, I mean, he even though he carried it, well, it’s like it was all like right around his abdomen,

Jill Dalton: all around his stomach. But you know, he’s 6’5, I am 5’4, so I can’t hide it as well. Jeff was 6’5, so he can hide it until you put on a wetsuit.

Chef AJ: And it’s just you guys have such an incredible story. Now that makes a lot. You’re two people. Would you be able to free some of it?

Jill Dalton: I haven’t tried freezing it, but we love leftovers because this reheat so well and it’s so delicious. You know this will be dinner for one night and then probably two days of lunch leftovers. So because I don’t love being in the kitchen all the time. So having stuff that’s already ready in the fridge, or if you know, if you’re working out of the home, this is a great thing to pack into your lunch.

Chef AJ: Can you maybe serve it with a salad or some vegetables?

Jill Dalton: Yeah, we actually eat this. You can eat it over pasta or baked potato or rice. Even I love wild rice. That’s my favorite way to eat it, is over wild rice.

Chef AJ: But will there be some green?

Jill Dalton: Yeah or you could have a side of greens or a salad.

Chef AJ: Yeah, that looks absolutely amazing. Do you do any batch cooking yourself or just because of you having the show, you’re always cooking anyway?

Jill Dalton: Yeah, there’s always stuff cooking in here, so I don’t do a whole lot of batch cooking.

Chef AJ: Yeah, but you have the tools to do it if you want to. I’m sure you have an Instant Pot in an air fryer.

Jill Dalton: Yeah. Well, I guess maybe. I mean, we we try to make a soup in the beginning of the week. So, you know, a big pot of soup and usually a portion, not half of it, and freeze it. So I guess that’s kind of batch cooking and something then, you know, two or three evenings or for lunches during the week, right?

Chef AJ: Any advice just to get people to inspire them to just start cooking some of your delicious recipes?

Jill Dalton: Let’s see. Yeah, I mean, just jump in. I would say some of our favorite meals are the peanut tofu sauce. It’s a peanut sauce, or the West African peanut sauce. It is just phenomenal. Like I’ve said this to so many people, whether they’re plant-based or not, and they just fall in love with it. And of course, any of my baked goods are true when the thin mint cake is delicious and the Oreo cake, even though there’s no Oreos in it, there’s no cinnamon in it, but it tastes like that. And then Jeff is saying the mushroom stroganoff. It’s absolutely delicious, and we probably had more people that weren’t plant based comment on it. Were that just are absolutely in love with it. So just try a couple. What do you got to lose?

Chef AJ: Well, thank you, Jill and Jeffrey, for making whole food plant based cooking not only easy, delicious, but weight loss friendly.

Jill Dalton: Great. Thank you AJ.

Chef AJ: Take care.

Chef AJ

Hi, Dr. Rolls. And welcome to the Truth About Weight Loss Summit. Thank you so much for being here.

Dr. Barbara Rolls

Well, thank you for having me back. It’s always a pleasure.

Chef AJ

I’m such a fan of your work so much. It worked for me. I followed your advice, and for ten years now, I’ve been in an ideal body weight. So thank you so much and also congratulations because your approach to diet, volumetrics has been voted by US News and World Report the number one most effective diet for weight loss. Why do you think that is?

Dr. Barbara Rolls

Well, I think that we know now there are a lot of studies and a lot of evidence that using calorie density or energy density for making food choices really can help to keep you satisfied. It can fit in with numerous diet plans. It’s really now the basis of most of the big weight management programs, whether they call it that or not, that’s basically what they’re doing. And today I’m going to give you the scientific basis for why this is. I’m really going to explain what it is about volumetrics and calorie density that affects weight management.

Chef AJ

I can’t wait to see that because to me, like you say, it’s not only a flexible approach, but your approach is the only diet or dietary style I’ve ever encountered that leaves a person not hungry. And if you’re hungry, you can’t maintain that state for very long.

Dr. Barbara Rolls

Well, it’s good to have you say that. And that’s what we find in our studies. And of course, what my lab does is we study eating behavior, the science of satiety, or how full you feel, what really fills you up. So we have the scientific basis for what you’re claiming, that you find that it’s very satisfying and filling. It’s great.

Chef AJ

That’s right. And that’s why people can maintain that approach, really, for the rest of their life.

Dr. Barbara Rolls

Yeah. Because feeling deprived and thinking that you have to eat tiny portions and avoid your favorite foods is never going to be sustainable. You really have to find a pattern of eating that you enjoy that you want to keep doing. I mean, we spend such a huge proportion of our lives eating. It needs to be pleasurable.

Chef AJ

Exactly. And you know, what I don’t really understand is I understand that for some people, they have difficulty moderating high fat, high-calorie foods. There are people that fall into that category. But when I look at some of these dietary styles that force people to count calories, carbs, points, weigh and measure their food on a plate, and limit non-starchy vegetables to 7oz, I mean, that’s crazy. They obviously have never read your book.

Dr. Barbara Rolls

Right. What I want people to understand is where the calories are in foods, to understand the basis of properties of foods that affect how much you eat and how full you feel so you don’t have to count calories long-term. I think that’s really not sustainable behavior, right.

Chef AJ

So what is sustainable?

Dr. Barbara Rolls

Well, we’ll see. Shall we go on the adventure of some data?

Chef AJ

I love the science.

Dr. Barbara Rolls

I’m going to show some interesting slides, some data, some recent studies, and then we can talk some more about it and people can reach their own conclusions.

Chef AJ

Great. I can’t wait.

Dr. Barbara Rolls

Okay, here we go. A flexible approach to weight management. And I hope by the end you’ll understand why I’m saying that. 

So starting off, what is the optimal diet for weight management? Obviously, there’s no one diet. People need to find what fits with their eating habits. But many strategies that are out there are stressing varying the ratios of the macronutrients to fat, carbon, protein. That is still very prevalent but really, in recent years, the focus has shifted towards eating with a healthy balance of nutrients, dietary patterns, lifestyle approaches. So we’ll get into that. 

But first of all, let’s just talk a little bit about the macronutrients and why they’ve dominated the weight management scene for so long. Obviously, macronutrients have been suggested to have different metabolic effects, but they also are thought to have different effects on satiety or how full you are, with protein being the most satisfying and fat the least. And obviously, that’s a gross oversimplification because just think about carbohydrates. Within the carbohydrate category, you have fiber, which can enhance satiety, and sucrose, which is very easy to overeat and to eat too much. So clearly, this satiety cascade, which has dominated our field for years, is not very nuanced, and it’s not a complete explanation of what’s going on but let’s think about whether the macronutrients differ in how they affect body weight and weight loss. So we’ve been talking about satiety.

Let’s think about weight loss. I’m going to have you revisit this older study from 2009, the Pounds Lost Study, because it’s one of the longest and most comprehensive of the clinical trials that have looked at varying the proportions of macronutrients. So in this trial, they had four different ratios going on with the carbohydrate, protein, and fat, which are shown down here. So from a high carb 65% to a low-carb 35%, with varying ratios of the other macronutrients. And here are the changes in weight from baseline over two full years. And you can see that typically the peak weight loss was around six to twelve months. Then there’s some gradual regain. But it’s pretty clear there are no significant differences between these four dietary patterns. 

Last year, 2020, we got a systematic review of 14 popular dietary programs that vary the proportions of macronutrients. And this just shows you they had a low carb category. You know what those diets are. Most of the diets they evaluated were in the moderate macronutrient category, and there were a couple that were classified as low fat. This visual abstract is pretty overwhelming, but it tells the story of what we had in this trial. They had 121 random trials that they evaluated almost 22,000 participants in these trials, and this just shows the number of studies for each comparison. I love this picture of the comparator diet. If that’s your usual diet, I don’t know how you could help but lose weight on that. It’s a very strange picture. 

Anyway, here’s the main conclusion from this large systematic review. Most macronutrient diets over six months resulted in modest weight loss and improved blood pressure. So at twelve months, weight reduction diminished. That’s the main message, and it’s shown down here. Here are the changes in weight loss, dietary advice, no change for six months. And then the other three approaches, moderate macronutrients, low fat, low carb did not differ significantly in effects on weight loss or blood pressure. So in this very large systematic review, there was really no difference between these different types of diets. 

But the macronutrients shouldn’t be ignored. They have different calorie densities, or I’ll be calling it energy density most of the time, because that’s the scientific term. Same thing. Calorie density, energy density. So fat packs nine calories into each gram, so it’s very calorie or energy-dense. And alcohol is also pretty energy-dense, but it’s usually diluted down with water. Carbohydrates and proteins are less than half of the energy density of fat, so not as dense. Fiber is pretty low in energy density, but you just can’t eat enough of it to really have a major effect on overall dietary energy density. And here’s what is often ignored in a lot of the weight loss literature and in the trials, the water content of the diet, particularly of foods which has no calories but add a lot of bulk and weight to foods. And indeed, it’s the largest component of the foods that we most typically eat.

So what does water do to foods? When I’m talking to a live audience, I like to have people raise their hands and pick which of these 1oz portions contains the most energy. And you probably will guess that most people pick cheese because they see that it’s higher fat than the pretzels. But it’s actually a trick question because they both have the same number of calories. They’re both 100 calories. And this is where even colleagues of mine don’t grasp the importance of water. 

So fat and water don’t necessarily mix normally, but you put them together in food, you put equal portions of fat and water together and you are going to end up with a food that has calorie density of 4.5 instead of the 9 with fat. So when you’re considering dietary calorie density, you have to take into account the water content. 

So how can energy density be reduced in diets? It’s quite straightforward. Fat reduction can have a large effect, obviously, because it is so energy-dense. Sugar reduction can have a moderate influence. But really the two main players are fat and water. As I’ve already said, it has the biggest impact on calorie density, and indeed of course, in practice, involves adding a lot of fruits and vegetables and water-rich foods to your diet. So I really like this line because I think this really hammers it home that if you just focus on total calories and the proportions of macronutrients, you don’t necessarily know much about what people are actually eating. 

Both of these trays have 470 calories and the same proportions of macronutrients but look at the difference in what you can actually eat for that 470 calories. Here, with the lower energy density choices, you have 700 grams of food, you have a lot of fruits, vegetables, soups, and a lot of food. Here, with the higher energy density options, you have by weight less than half the amount and fewer nutrients, lower nutrient density foods. So this is why we need to move beyond just this focus on calories and the proportion of macronutrients.

Dr. Barbara Rolls

So this is the first controlled study that we conducted looking at the effects of energy density on food intake over two days. And so what we did and we really were pioneering this, we didn’t really know the food formulation in this study was very difficult because nobody had done this before. We reduced the energy density without changing the proportions of macronutrients. In all of the main dishes that people were eating for two days, we had three different levels of energy density. And clearly the way we could do this was by increasing the proportion of water-rich foods in mixed dishes. 

So here you can see this has got a lot of vegetables, which we could vary in terms of the proportion. So here’s what we found. And this was really pretty surprising back then. It’s been confirmed in many labs since, that this is the weight of food that people ate over the meals across two days cumulatively. And we had these three levels of energy density. And you can see that people ate the same weight of food across these two days. 

Once you understand that people are actually eating by weight, you can understand that the density of calories in that way is very important. So here we varied the energy density by about 30%. And when we compared the lower energy density foods to the higher energy density, people automatically, when they can have as much food as they liked, ate about 30% fewer calories and they didn’t feel any hungrier or less full. They’re judging the amount they should be eating by their learned experience, by visual cues, and they’re eating for weight. This has been replicated many times. We’ve replicated it in three to five-year-olds multiple times. So this is something that is very inherent in humans and occurs from an early age. So does this actually then translate to longer-term and in weight management trials, can you look at the effects of energy density. So this was the first trial that we conducted varying energy density, and we actually did it two ways.

Our control group was the standard reduced-fat advice that was very prevalent back when we conducted this study. So the people in that group were told to reduce fat intake and to eat smaller portions, standard advice. And then our other group was told to eat more. They were given positive messaging, to eat more water-rich, high-fiber foods, more vegetables, fruits, and soups. They were told only to manage portions for energy-dense foods, those high-fat foods, and those that are dry. And neither group counts in calories or fat grams. They were just given advice about the types of foods to eat. This was a year-long trial, and here’s what we found. 

Both groups lost significant amounts of weight. They did as well. As you see in most weight loss trials. They lost about the fruit and vegetable group about 9 kg. They lost significantly more than the low-fat group. Both groups kept the weight off well over the next six months. The group that was given the positive messaging about fruits and vegetables ended up eating more food by weight than this group, and they felt less hunger and Fuller so that was really encouraging that this approach is very promising for long-term weight loss. 

A few years after that, we had the opportunity to do a secondary analysis of a large scale multi center trial that had been conducted really testing the Dash diet’s effects on weight loss. You will probably know the Dash diet wasn’t developed necessarily for weight loss. It was developed to control hypertension but in this study, they wanted to see if it actually affected body weight. So they had three groups in this trial and advice group, they just got one counseling session that’s their control. They had another group that had 18 contacts decreased fat and portions similar to our groups here. And then a group that also was taught about the Dash diet, which encourages the consumption of more vegetables and fruits. Well, when they analyze the data comparing these three groups, they didn’t see any difference in weight loss between the three groups. So they were really pretty surprised. And so were we because it didn’t seem to agree with what we had found in the trial I just showed you. So they collaborated with us. And what we found was that across all treatment groups, some people reduce the energy density of their diets. And across all treatment groups, some didn’t.

So what we did is we pulled all of the participants in this large trial. So there were 658 people, and we looked at the change in energy density and the change in body weight over the first six months of this year-long trial. And so here are the bigger changes in energy density going this way, bigger change in weight that way. So the larger the change in energy density over the first six months, the larger the greater weight loss. Just to show you this another way, we’ve it divided the 658 people into three groups based on the change in energy density over the first six months. So some people actually increased energy density or showed a little decrease, and then there were some in the middle and some with a large decrease in energy density. And here’s the change in the food weight over the first six months. The individuals who had a large decrease in energy density were eating almost a pound more of food a day than those who didn’t change their energy density. They had a 500 calorie difference or decrease in their energy intake compared to the group that didn’t change, and they lost significantly more weight. 

So this was very encouraging. This is a large multi-center trial that I think shows clearly that changing your pattern of eating towards a lower energy density approach can be very effective.

Dr. Barbara Rolls

So I wanted to also tell you about a recent study that had a lot of attention. This is from Kevin Hall at NIH, and what he’s doing here in their sophisticated, expensive living facility is looking over 14-day periods at the effects of an animal-based low carbohydrate diet compared to a plant-based, low-fat diet. So on the low carb diet, people were eating 75% of their calories from fat, and low-fat diet, 75% carb. So these are really very extreme. They’re pushing how far they can go on this really to test the glucose theory and the ketogenic theories of weight management. 

But here’s where it gets interesting and more complicated. The plant-based diet had an energy density of zero 92, and the animal-based 1.8. So twice is energy-dense. So they did not control for the food energy density. If you have a difference of just point one, these are little numbers, but little differences make a huge difference. The difference of point one in the energy density of the diet means 100K cal difference if you’re eating 1000 calories a day. These people on this diet, to get to the same total energy intake, would have to eat twice as much food by weight as these people. So not controlling for that is interesting, but it means really to me, they’re testing the energy density theory of weight management and how it affects intake. I just thought you’d be interested to see examples of some of the foods that they served on these two diets. 

This is your Keto higher energy density, 75% fat diet, and here’s your plant-based, lower energy density diet. Obviously, a lot more food. So what did this end up doing to energy intake? Well, remember, they’re living in a controlled environment. And so this is obviously accurately measured intake, which is hard to get in our field. And you can see that on the lower energy-dense, plant-based diet, they’re consistently eating fewer calories each day. They did say that these two diets were rated as similar in palatability, but I find that surprising. 

Here’s where it gets really quite complicated, and I don’t think there’s a full explanation for this. I actually found greater weight loss over the 14 days with the Ketogenic animal-based diet, but this was related to fat-free mass. Only the plant-based low energy density diet reduced fat mass. So I’m assuming the Keto diet, there was water loss, but they say they don’t have a full explanation for what was going on.

So in order to translate how to eat a low calorie dense, low energy-dense diet, starting in 2000, I’ve written three different books on volumetrics. They’re all a little bit different. The first one is really a lot of the basic science. This one is a very concise plan, and then the last one is a twelve-week plan. And the basics, are in a very visual way and I want to say this is when people say, oh, energy density is too hard to explain to patients or to other people. If they see these pictures, they can get it right away. So I don’t think it’s too complicated for anybody. 

Here you have 1600 calories over a day, starting at breakfast, lunch, and then dinner. For a high energy-dense diet, which is really pretty high, most people on average eat an energy density between about 1.4 to 1.8. And then here’s the low energy density, which is really very low but it shows you that if you eat in a pretty typical way, you don’t get much food. You only get 590 grams. You don’t get even a whole cheeseburger. You get a half cheeseburger. If you eat the volumetric way, the low energy-dense way, you get a lot more food and it’s much more nutrient and it’s much healthier. It’s very colorful and very satisfying. 

So just a quick basics that we divide foods into four categories. Obviously, portion size, the amount you get to eat depends on the calorie density of the foods you’re choosing. So if you eat very low-calorie density foods, you can eat a lot of food and you really don’t need to limit them. Category two, where you get into lean protein and starchy vegetables, you still can eat pretty large portions and make your meals very satisfying as you get up into the next category. This is a broad category, from one five to four, including a lot of mixed dishes, dry snack foods, bread, cheese and eggs. You really have to start being mindful of portion size and manage the portions you eat. 

Volumetrics doesn’t say there are any foods you mustn’t ever eat, because that restrictive thinking is not good for some people who as soon as you say you can’t have something wanting more but there are some foods you need to manage more carefully than others, that’s for sure. So up in this high category, you need to be managing portions carefully. And some people object to this. Nuts obviously have healthy fats, so do some other higher energy-dense oils, olive oil and avocados. And it’s not that you can’t eat those. It’s just you need to know that they’re easy to overeat. So you need to keep that in mind

So just in summary, I want to emphasize that volumetrics, I’m a professor of nutrition, fits with the dietary guidance from virtually every health organization and the government. And the principles are simple. You want to increase the availability of nutrient-rich foods that are low in calorie density. So you need to keep them on hand. We need to work publicly to make them affordable to as many people as possible. We have to emphasize the intake of high-water, high-fiber foods. You know what they are? Vegetables, fruit, soups, whole grains, legumes. And then emphasize portion control for calorie-dense foods that are low in nutrient density. So these will be foods high in unhealthy fats and foods with low moisture content. 

So fairly basic principles. And then here’s what we started with, Chef AJ. This is the weight loss US News and World Reports rankings for 2022 and there were three diets. The Weight Watchers is not showing up. So there was a tie for the top three with volumetrics included. So I’m excited about that because volumetrics really is flexible. These principles can fit with a variety of different weight management plans. And I think that’s what we need for people to understand why they’re making particular food choices for weight management and not having to cut out all of their favorite foods and feel deprived and restricted. So that’s it. I’m happy to just have a chat now.

Chef AJ

Oh, wow. This was just incredible. Incredible. I love this presentation so much. I can’t tell you and I agree with you that when you see, a picture is worth 1000 words, because when I found your book, it was as simple as seeing that a certain amount of grapes versus a certain amount of raisins had the same amount of calories, it was a no brainer, because with your approach, you can actually eat more food with less calories and you don’t have to feel hungry.

Dr. Barbara Rolls

Yeah. The frustration for us is that most of the large weight management clinical trials still don’t look at energy density. It’s very frustrating. So they’re missing one of the main factors that might be influencing what’s happening in their trial.

Chef AJ

I might argue that it might be the most important factor. And what I was noticing when I was looking at your slides is, and maybe this isn’t an accident, but the foods that you kept mentioning that were lowest in calorie density or energy density, these also seem to be the foods that are highest in nutrient density. These are foods that are actually good for us.

Dr. Barbara Rolls

Absolutely. Well, that’s the really pleasing thing for me, as I say, as a professor of nutrition, that you can actually end up giving advice for weight management that fits with optimal healthy eating. That’s really what people need to be thinking about a lot of people when they decide to lose weight, go on a diet, and they make up their minds that they’re going to eat in a very restrictive way, and there’s going to be some magic that’s going to happen. 

But they are not thinking about how am I going to do this in the long term? How am I going to sustain this? It’s never going to happen. So that’s what we try to avoid. Weight loss is easier than weight loss maintenance.

Chef AJ

But not if you eat in the way you prescribe, because then it’s the same thing all the time. Every day is Christmas, you get to eat huge volumes of delicious food.

Dr. Barbara Rolls

Well, one of the things that volumetrics gets criticized for is it’s too much work. You actually have to cook. Well, of course, I think cooking is one of the most important strategies for healthy eating for weight management. But we need to pressure the people who are providing food to give us more nutrient-rich, low-calorie density foods that are affordable. And if people demand that, then we’ll get it. 

So it’s this cycle that people go for the inexpensive sugar, fat, salt combinations. And if that’s what they’re buying, that’s what they like, then that’s what food providers are going to give us. So we need as consumers to demand food that fits with healthy eating and eating that makes weight management just second nature. It just happens because you’re eating plenty of food, you’re not feeling hungry.

Chef AJ

Well, I mean, good luck with that. But you’re really talking about eating a diet. It’s pretty much consistent with our species natural history because our ancestors were eating a fairly low-energy-dense diet throughout most of human history.

Dr. Barbara Rolls

Right and not all of them. There are some that weren’t. You think about the Inuit. People have adapted to different types of eating plans. I think now people can change their habitual enjoyment of foods, too. You’re an example of that. You’ve changed the way you eat dramatically and kept it up. And now could you go back to the way you used to eat? Probably not. 

So I think that kids are exposed to a lot of foods that are very high calorie density and nutrient-poor. And so they learn early on those foods are highly palatable. They play to our real love of sugar, fat, and salt. So then do we give up and say, well, that’s the way they’re going to eat for the rest of life? No, I think we need to figure out ways to shift toward lower energy-dense eating patterns. And there’s a lot of ongoing research on this. It’s complicated, once you give people highly palatable foods, trying to get them to move away from that stuff.

Chef AJ

And that’s why at least wait a little bit with your kids before you give them to them.

Dr. Barbara Rolls

Well, yes, that’s easier said than done. I think a lot of parents would say.

Chef AJ

Well, we can help you mention that you study human eating behavior in your laboratory at Penn State University and that you’ve actually studied children. Is there anything you learned when studying children that could help adults?

Dr. Barbara Rolls

Well, the findings that I’ve shown you in adults are very similar in three to five-year-olds. And we’ve just published over the last couple of years three studies where we’ve gone into child care centers and fed the kids all of their foods for five day periods, either varying the portion size, the energy density, or the proportion of fruits and vegetables they’re served, because it’s thought that kids of that age self regulate and that no matter what you give them, they’re going to end up eating the same. No, they’re just like adults. You give them bigger portions, they have a sustained, effective portion size over the whole five-day period. They particularly overeat things like dry crackers. They’ll pretty much eat any amount of those you give. 

And we did find in our portion size five-day study that the heavier kids were even more responsive to portion size than the lighter kids, and the same with calorie density or even at that early age weight status is affecting how they respond to foods. In a study we just published on increasing the proportion of fruits and vegetables. By doing that, we did get the kids to eat more fruits and vegetables. We were testing the My Plate method, and it works to some extent, but just increasing the amount on the plate is probably not enough. I think using some of the cooking strategies where you incorporate more vegetables and fruits into your cooking style is going to help kids to get the intake of produce up. 

Now we get shouted at for that, suggesting that this stealth approach is okay because you’re not exposing the kids to the fruits and vegetables, but you can do both. You can encourage them and give them more fruits, vegetables, particularly when they’re hungry for snacks. But incorporating more into recipes is kind of a win-win. It adds on. It doesn’t take away from what they’re eating of the fruits and veggies on their own.

Chef AJ

Yeah, that’s interesting what you said that kids and adults both over ate on dried snacks. Do you think it’s because of the lack of water? They don’t experience satiety?

Dr. Barbara Rolls

I just think they’re so energy-dense and moorish. And with the kids probably they’re not usually given really large quantities of them. And so suddenly when they are, they tend to eat most of what they’re given. 

One of the things that we find in the childcare setting is that we’ll have parents say, oh, you can never test my child with that food. They’re never going to eat it. They don’t eat it at home. What they eat in childcare where they don’t get any other choices, if they don’t eat it, they don’t get anything else is very different from what their parents tell us they’ll eat often.

Chef AJ

That is so funny. One of the things I loved in one of your slides, you said those who changed the energy density of the diet were eating more than a pound of food per day and yet lost more weight.

Chef AJ

More than a pound extra than than when they started, right.

Dr. Barbara Rolls

Yeah. Well, that’s because they’re eating all of these water-rich foods that don’t add any calories. If you want a magic ingredient in foods, water is really it because it’s adding the bulk of the weight, giving you the perception that you’re getting a full plate, that you’re getting satisfying portions, which is so important. A lot of what we do in relation to food is happening here. And with our eyes and the chewing, the swallowing, you’re getting more nutrients. You’re eating the way we should be eating if you choose the lower energy-dense options.

Chef AJ

When you showed the photo of the keto meal versus the plant-based, there was a huge difference in the amount of food. And I feel like when you see large volumes of food, you more expect that you’re going to be satisfied.

Dr. Barbara Rolls

Absolutely. Yeah. We’ve tested that in some of our studies. We’ve done studies where just aerating a milkshake is more satisfying than a less aerated or more aerated snacks, people eat fewer when they can eat as much as they want because they’ve got this visual perception. Even the size of the flakes in a cereal affects how much cereal you take, the ones that crash down and fill the bowl easily, you’re going to pour more and eat more of that than a big flaky voluminous cereal.

Chef AJ

That’s probably why I like granola so much, because it’s more energy-dense.

Dr. Barbara Rolls

Yeah. Well, but you have to really manage your portions with that.

Chef AJ

Can you get like an air compressor and just start adding air to our food? It has no calories.

Dr. Barbara Rolls

Well, actually, it could work. Another thing that’s been studied quite a bit now is the viscosity of the amount of chewing, the thickness of foods has some effects on satiety. So there’s a lot of ongoing research on that aspect of food. Really. This whole notion of what can make foods fill you up with fewer calories is something, as you can imagine, of great interest, not only to consumers, but to people who sell us food because they want to make claims around satiety and weight loss.

Chef AJ

That’s interesting. I never knew that viscosity was a factor. Can you give some examples of foods that have more viscosity and foods that have less viscosity?

Dr. Barbara Rolls

Well, just yogurt, for example. You can vary the viscosity a lot with the kinds of stabilizers things you put into it. The thing about satiety is the more changes you make across all the foods that you’re eating that would enhance satiety, the likelihood that you’re going to be able to design a high satiety overall diet apart from energy density. Energy density is such a huge effect. These other effects of things like viscosity I think are smaller. But if you really are trying to make the maximum high fatty diet, then you want to think about all these different properties of foods that can enhance how you feel after you eat a particular meal or diet.

Chef AJ

I just find your work is so interesting. I cannot tell you. I just love hearing from you. One of the slides I loved in your slide deck because you are such a wonderful person with the photos. I’ve never really seen energy density explain like this. You had dice and you had dots. And that really woke up for me because water had no dots on it. Fiber had two dots on it. And when I think about water and fiber together, that’s what they’re in fruits and vegetables and two dots.

Dr. Barbara Rolls

Yes. I like the slide too, where I’m showing that with the same proportion of macronutrients and calories you can eat completely different foods. That I think is very surprising even to nutrition professionals. I think it must be because they’re not looking at energy density in some of their studies. And if they actually paid attention to that, they would have to be looking at energy density because just telling you calories and proportions of macronutrients doesn’t get you to understanding what’s going on with diets.

Chef AJ

Indeed, you said that if you wanted a magic bullet would be water. If you wanted a second magic bullet, would it not be fiber?

Dr. Barbara Rolls

Yeah. Fiber enhances satiety, the effects of being more elusive than those of energy density. And most people just are not eating a lot of fiber. And even if they’re eating a lot, then you can’t just add more and more like you can with water, with fruits and vegetables. And the thing is that the high water foods and the high fiber foods, they hang out together. So usually choosing foods that are both high in water and high in fiber. 

Of course, the other aspect of food, the other component that is thought to be important for satiety is protein. Some people think, well, okay then the more the better. The point about protein is you need adequate protein. We can’t make protein in our bodies. So if you go on an energy restricted diet, you need to make sure that you are getting adequate protein, that you’re not decreasing across the board. If you’re not getting adequate protein, then there’s this protein leverage theory where you need to get the protein you need. I’m not sure it’s 100% proven, but adequate protein is certainly an important part of an overall balanced diet. Beans, legumes are much ignored in this other lean protein sources.

Chef AJ

I remember correctly, you’ve even done studies with changing the amount of protein and people, they didn’t feel more satisfied.

Dr. Barbara Rolls

It’s complicated. We did a study. It was only over one day. The data on protein are very mixed and some of the clinical trials looking at the effects of protein are confounded by the fact that the protein was substituted for fat and therefore the diet was lower in energy density. So you can’t ignore the energy density when you’re doing these kinds of trade-offs. Plus, there are all kinds of proteins, and they might have very different effects. There’s still a lot to be done in this field. I always say to the young scientists, when I’m talking to them, you’ve got plenty to do. There are still many questions that need to be answered on why we eat, what we eat and how to manage the amounts we eat.

Chef AJ

If I had my life to live over or was younger, I would love to come to work for you in your lab. I think that would be just the most fascinating thing to study this. I love how you recently said that water and fiber tend to hang out together. And you’re right, unless we do something to remove it, like in the case of Juicing, where we’re moving the fiber or dehydrating or drying fruit to make dried fruit. If we leave it alone, the water and fiber will be together.

Dr. Barbara Rolls

Yeah. That’s usually the natural way.

Chef AJ

Why is water so important in the food? Because as we talked a minute ago, I really do have to moderate how much granola I eat. Why can’t I just eat a lot of granola and drink a lot of water? Doesn’t work that way, does it?

Dr. Barbara Rolls

No. We did a study where we compared incorporating water into a casserole to make a soup versus drinking it along with the casserole. And drinking the water did not reduce subsequent intake. It didn’t enhance satiety the same way that actually incorporating it into the food if it’s incorporated into the food. 

First of all, the food looks bigger, you’ve got the bigger portion. Hunger and thirst are controlled by completely different mechanisms. So you’re drinking water that’s going to affect your thirst mechanisms. If you incorporate water in food, you’re going to get more sensory stimulation in the mouth. It’s a greater amount of food you’re going to affect. Stomach empty. There have been studies that show that drinking water, the water empties very rapidly out of the stomach. When it’s bound into the food, it slows gastric empty. So there are a lot of reasons why you should eat your water and not just drink it for satiety.

Chef AJ

Yeah. So don’t expect to eat a pound of candy with a gallon of water, it is not going to work guys. But soup does work, and you’re not the only expert on the summit. Dr. Joel Fuhrman says the same thing, but there’s just something magical about soup.

Dr. Barbara Rolls

Yeah. It’s obviously low energy density, high water, and I think there’s a cognitive component, too. I think we’re conditioned to have soup as a satisfying, comforting, filling food right from the get-go. We did some studies. We’ve done a lot of studies on soup and it does really work very well. We did some studies where we changed the temperature. We thought maybe it’s because it’s warm. 

So we compared hot V8 to cold V8 because they both were equally palatable. No difference with temperature. We thought maybe it was because of the way you take it. So we had them drinking from a cup or eating with a spoon, and that didn’t make any difference. The mystery of soup is still not completely solved, but there are a lot of studies that show that soup is highly satiating and really does help to fill you up.

Chef AJ

Yeah, but in general, people love soup.

Dr. Barbara Rolls

They do. But there are then some soups that are a little bit overindulgent. We know that some of those are really heavy cream-based soups and such don’t really quite fit into this category of something that you should use for weight loss. So we’re talking about broth-based soups high in vegetables, lean protein, fiber that really can give you very high satiety would fit well with the weight. 

What they fit with is the filling up first. If you have a good bowl of broth-based soup at the start of a meal, we’ve shown in some of our studies, you end up eating fewer calories overall. You get an extra course and you end up eating less because you’re already full by the time you get to the next course.

Chef AJ

Speaking of extra courses, I’m always reminded of your time in Italy when you went to that special meal. You remember that story.

Dr. Barbara Rolls

The one with the 14 courses of pasta? Yes. Well, variety stimulates intake. We’ve done a lot of studies on that. You tire of one particular food or type of food but still like other food. So it’s like, why do you always have room for dessert? Because you’re tired of salty, savory foods. Do you still like sweet foods? Sensory-specific satiety. 

So the Italians played a joke on the attendees at a meeting some years ago and served us 14 courses of pasta. And they kept pitching. Oh, well, this was made by this premier car designer, and this one nobody else has ever tasted, but nobody after the first few courses wanted pasta anymore. So they’re all up wandering around, talking. And as soon as the dulce, the dessert came, everybody was back at the table eating again. So it was a wonderful real-life portrayal of the studies that we’ve done on sensory-specific satiety.

Chef AJ

That could be helpful to some people that are trying to lose weight, to maybe not limit variety, to just eating the same thing every day, but maybe not having a buffet at every meal.

Dr. Barbara Rolls

Well, in volumetrics, we give advice on how to deal with these kinds of environmental challenges. And what you want to do is you want to keep a good variety of low energy, dense, nutrient-rich foods on hand that you enjoy, that you’re going to reach for instead of keeping multiple types of cookies or candies. It’s strategic environmental control. If you like to help you eat the foods that you hopefully will end up enjoy eating.

Chef AJ

I’ve heard you mention that people are more consistent with how much they eat than how many calories they eat. How can that be useful for our viewers that are trying to lose weight?

Dr. Barbara Rolls

Well, this is where the volumetrics giving you a full plate at every meal really can be helpful when you sit down to a meal. Suppose you’re in a Chinese restaurant. You don’t know if the chef has decided to dump a bunch of oil into the dish because he thinks it makes it taste better, or if instead he’s decided to water it down because he doesn’t have enough. So you don’t know what the energy density is, what the calorie content of that dish is, and what people do in that situation is they tend to eat the amount of food that they’ve learned from their previous experiences, is the right amount of food, the appropriate amount, if you like. So that’s what is influencing how much we’re eating on the whole. 

Now, obviously, Thanksgiving, Christmas, other occasions, we don’t do that. But when you look at the consistency from massive population-based data, the amount of food people eat by weight or volume is more consistent from day to day than their energy intake. So you can trick your system. This is the whole thing with energy density, you fill your plate with foods that are lower in calorie density. You have a full plate, you have satisfying portions, you generally are going to get more nutrients. And if you keep doing that over time, then you should successfully manage your weight.

Chef AJ

I agree. But people that have been dieting their whole lives and weighing and measuring their food, they probably have portion distortion because they don’t realize how much food you actually get to eat on this plan. Sometimes it’s even too much.

Dr. Barbara Rolls

Well, right. If you go really low energy density, you were talking about some people trying to eat 14 pounds of food a day. That would be a challenge, I think.

Speaker 1

Absolutely. Well, yeah. Some of the people I know that are raw foodists and I’m like, wow, I ate about five, so that’s like three times as much. They’re probably doing a lot of chewing.

Dr. Barbara Rolls

Yeah. On average, most people eat around 2 pounds of food a day. That’s the beverages. So you’re eating a lot more.

Chef AJ

Yeah, I’m eating about five and I’m very happy with that. I love that feeling of full. Doesn’t chewing also increase satiety? I mean, that’s why liquid calories are not really that satisfying or even favorable for weight loss. Are they? Like milkshake?

Dr. Barbara Rolls

Right, yeah. That’s true that chewing, swallowing, all of these sensory aspects of eating play into it. That’s part of why the soup is so mysterious, because it’s a liquid food, which you would expect to be lower in satiety, but it’s very high in satiety. As I say, we still have a lot to figure out, but in general, eat a low energy, dense diet and you’re going to be on safe territory both for weight management and your health.

Chef AJ

Absolutely. I heard you say that the more calories per bite of food, the more likely we are to overeat.

Dr. Barbara Rolls

Well, that’s the calorie density message. So more calories per bite is another way of explaining to people the concept of calorie density or energy density, which is calories per gram or calories per bite, however you want to position it to communicate with patients. I do it both ways. Generally, when I’m talking to science professionals, I’ll call it energy density and talk about calories per gram. But if I’m talking to consumers, it’ll be calorie density and calories per bite.

Chef AJ

Because people need to know this isn’t counting calories. You don’t even have to know how many calories are in a half a cup of rice. You just have to know, like the average calorie density of the food groups, right?

Dr. Barbara Rolls

Yes. And I want to say in our lab, we have successfully lowered the calorie density of the dishes that we use in our studies by 30% without our subjects noticing. So when you’re saying that the food industry could do this, they can. They can do it without changing the acceptability or palatability of foods. But I think they’re timid about it. They’re afraid if they reduce the fat content, that will somehow be noticed by the consumers and it will affect sales. But it can be done and it can be done really successfully.

Chef AJ

I agree with you because when I lived in Los Angeles, I worked with restaurants on this concept. They didn’t tell their clientele, but I don’t know if I can say the name of the restaurant, but they basically took the oil out of their soups. Nobody noticed. They didn’t even notice.

Dr. Barbara Rolls

Well, the LA Times was a few years ago, we had surveyed chefs about what they think about portion size and calorie density. The LA Times went into some upscale restaurants and had the chefs see if they could reduce the calorie density by 25%, which is what in the survey, the chef said they thought they could without people noticing. 

And all these restaurants did successfully, they got even lower than 25%. But then when they were asked, well, would you do this in your restaurant? No. Because they were afraid it would affect customer satisfaction. So it played out. Yes. What we’re saying they can do it. They don’t have the motivation and are afraid to try it.

Chef AJ

I almost never eat at restaurants because I can’t get enough food because for them, a serving of asparagus is like three.

Dr. Barbara Rolls

It’s a garnish.

Chef AJ

It’s just ridiculous. If I remember correctly, in 2020, you published a paper on the properties of unprocessed foods that can drive excess intake. Could you share some of those findings with us?

Dr. Barbara Rolls

Ultra-processed foods

Chef AJ

Ultra-processed foods, excuse me.

Dr. Barbara Rolls

Well, the ultra-processed foods literature is really booming right now. There are masses of papers coming out basically saying that it’s ultra-processed foods that are driving obesity, that are driving a lot of the health problems that we have. And that paper that we wrote was basically explaining that ultra-processed foods really pretty much by definition, are higher in sugar, fat, and salt. They’re also very high in energy density. They’re often low viscosity. They are very easy to eat quickly. 

And that’s part of the explanation for why they’re overeating. It’s not the processing per se. It’s that the ultra-processed foods often are energy-dense and easy to overeat and hyper-palatable. Hyperpalatability is part of the definition of the ultra-processed foods. Most of the food that we eat has some sort of processing. So you ask people what’s an ultra processed food, they really don’t know. They’re just confused by that terminology. 

So that was a commentary just trying to explain to people that it’s these other properties of foods, the energy density, the palatability, the ability to eat them really quickly. That’s driving what these people that are talking about ultra-processing really mean. And there’s some studies going on in the Netherlands now testing this out. They’ve been presented at some recent meetings where they’ve fed people the same foods, but some ultra-processed and some unprocessed, and looked at effects on intake. And there were no differences. So it wasn’t the processing, it’s the types of foods, the energy density, et cetera.

Chef AJ

That’s really interesting. Some children, myself included, when they grow up, we’re told we have to finish our plates or eat everything on our plate if we’re going to get dessert. Does that kind of upbringing affect how a person will respond to portion sizes later on?

Dr. Barbara Rolls

Well, probably, but I don’t think anybody has really proven that yet. In our studies on portion size, we ask people about their childhood experiences, whether they were encouraged to clean their plates. And we haven’t found a relationship, but that’s relying on their memory. And I think you would really need to do it longitudinally and get kids and follow them over years. And that kind of study just hasn’t been done. 

But demanding that kids clean their plates or eat all their vegetables is being shown by Leanne Birch, who was a colleague of mine here at Penn State, actually makes the kids like them less in their minds. They’re figuring if she or he makes me have to eat it, it must not be very good. And I’m shocked, some TV ads that food companies put out have kids being horrified about vegetables and parents encouraging and trying to figure out ways to get them to eat them. And the kids are watching this, and that’s just reinforcing to the kids that the vegetables must be something that is not very good. It’s a matter of attitude right from the get-go. If you make something seem like it’s not very good, it’s going to end up not very good.

Chef AJ

That is very interesting because one of the experts on the summit, Dr. Alan Goldhamer, raised his son, saying if you’re a good boy, you get brussels sprouts. And guess what his favorite food is?

Dr. Barbara Rolls

Yeah. Leanne did some studies like that. She was the first, really, to show that she used moderately light healthy foods to reinforce the kids and they increased in preference. So he’s really playing off of her early studies.

Chef AJ

What makes us stop eating? Is it a certain number of calories? Is it a volume of food? How do people stop eating? What makes people decide they’ve had enough?

Dr. Barbara Rolls

It’s all of those. In this questionnaire, we’ve just developed reasons people stop eating. Some of it is the physiology, the biology, you’re full. It could be sensory-specific satiety that you’ve tired of that particular type of food. It could be self-consciousness. It could be you simply have something else to do. It could be that the plate is empty. 

So that’s why we developed this questionnaire, to try to see what people say and then relate it to weight status and other characteristics. So the questionnaire has only just been published, and actually, this week of a follow-up validation and a short 15 item questionnaire. It’s called the Rise-Q, Reasons Individual Stop Eating questionnaire. The validation and the short version just came out this last week.

Chef AJ

Some people, they stopped eating when the program is ending.

Dr. Barbara Rolls

Right. Absolutely. It’s a very complex set of reasons, and often people are not aware of it, which is why with this questionnaire trying to probe and get them to think about it. And it’s going to vary by context. If you’re in a group of friends, it’s going to be different reasons than when you’re sitting eating alone in front of the TV and nobody’s really dug into that much. 

As I say, there’s still much to be done in our field. So it’ll be exciting times. Sometimes my students complain that I’ve done all the easy studies. They haven’t seemed easy. It’s just there’s still plenty to do. And I hope we get really excellent young students coming along in this field. It’s really exciting and gratifying and a lot of public interest.

Chef AJ

What a fascinating job you have. Should we be looking at a certain calorie density, average calorie density, that we should try to keep our diet, too, if we’re trying to lose weight or maintain our weight loss or just eat as many fruits and vegetables as possible to dilute the average calorie density of all of our meals and snacks?

Dr. Barbara Rolls

Yeah. It’s on average, it would be really hard to try to calculate the energy density or calorie density of your diet. I wouldn’t advocate that. I think knowing where the calories are and where they’re packed in tightly and where they’re not so much is what you need to know. 

That’s what I’m trying to explain to people. You understand which foods you can eat in large quantities and which ones you need to manage portions for. So that’s the basis and then figure out how to do it so that you have a diet that you love. So make small tweaks, you’re making a sandwich substitute mustard for the mayo, put a whole grain bread, add more lettuce and other favorite vegetables, cut back on fatty meats, use other low-fat protein centers for the sandwich. All these little things can add up and can make a big difference over your day but it’s not major to give up your favorite foods. It’s figuring out how to fit your favorite foods that you’ve modified into a healthy meal.

Chef AJ

Even maybe find new favorite foods.

Dr. Barbara Rolls

Absolutely well yeah, I mean cooking is still a really good strategy for weight management if you can do it because then you’re in control, you know what you’re eating and you can automatically adjust the recipes to fit your taste.

Chef AJ

Absolutely. As a chef, I agree with you, Dr. Rolls. So Dr. Rolls, what’s the real truth about weight loss?

Dr. Barbara Rolls

Well, the truth is that you can eat an enjoyable healthy diet that is going to make weight management really automatic. If you choose to eat a low-calorie density diet it doesn’t matter if you’re otherwise emphasizing a particular type of diet plan. This can fit with whatever you’re doing. You can add vegetables, fruits, soups to any diet plan and make it work and you’re going to get more satisfying portions and hopefully find a way to eat that you enjoy, that you can sustain.

Chef AJ

Thank you so much Dr. Rolls and without finding your work I might still be obese but you really were the magic bullet for me. Once I found your book in that bookstore, everything fell into place for me so thank you for the work you do.

Dr. Barbara Rolls

Well, that’s so good to hear. That’s why we do it.

Chef AJ: Hi, Dr. Goldhamer, and welcome to The Truth About Weight Loss Summit, thank you so much for being here.

Dr. Alan Goldhamer: My pleasure.

Chef AJ: Dr. Goldhamer, you’re the co-author of a wonderful book called The Pleasure Trap, and I’m wondering if you could please tell the viewers, what role does the pleasure trap have in this ever-increasing epidemic of obesity?

Dr. Alan Goldhamer: Well, from my viewpoint, the pleasure trap is actually the hidden force that actually is undermining people’s health and happiness. It’s the reason why people are overweight. It’s the essence about what the difficulty actually is. And it involves the artificial stimulation of the neurochemical in your brain called dopamine and dopamine is associated with something you and I know of as pleasure. More dopamine, the more pleasure. And you know, humans were designed to get a lot of pleasure when they engaged in behaviors that favored survival and reproduction. And the things that you have to do to survive and reproduce is you have to eat and you have to have sex. And so it’s not surprising that feeding and sexual behavior are both the normal natural stimulants of dopamine. 

The problem is, humans are pretty clever, and we figured out there’s ways to artificially stimulate dopamine with things besides food and sex like drugs. So people learn to use drugs, and they identified each and every chemical that would artificially stimulate dopamine, and they would get into trouble with addiction to things like alcohol and caffeine and cocaine and whatnot. But it turned out there were also chemicals that you can add into the food that would stimulate dopamine production just like other drugs do. And then what happened is if, for example, you put that those chemicals in the feed of rats or mice, they get overweight. They gained forty-nine percent of their body weight in 60 days because it fuels the satiety mechanisms in the brain and overeating. 

It turns out the same thing happens in humans. If you put these chemicals into the feed of humans, they gain weight very predictably, and then they develop the disease of dietary excess. If you get overweight, you develop metabolic syndrome and then you get cancer of the breast, prostate, lung, colon, heart disease, diabetes, etc. The chemicals that you can put in the feed that make you overweight, that make you overeat are salt oil, and sugar. 

So, S.O.S. The international, a symbol of danger also stands for assault, will ensure that these are chemicals added to the food. They’re not actually food, they’re highly processed food byproducts. When you put them in the food, people really like it because it makes it taste good. What makes tasting good means is stimulating that dopamine cascade in the brain. So the more you like it normally, the more the higher the caloric density. The more these chemicals are added, the more you’re likely to overeat. When you overeat, you develop metabolic syndrome and you die prematurely. 

So I think the pleasure trap is the reason people are overweight, because if it wasn’t for this artificial stimulation of dopamine, they wouldn’t overeat any foods and they wouldn’t be vulnerable to overeating the highly processed foods that are the reason why people are overweight and develop diseases.

Chef AJ: I like that, they would never overeat if their food wasn’t being-

Dr. Alan Goldhamer: Well, look at all the animals, AJ. There’s no fat animals. Even whales are only nine percent body fat. There are lean mean machines because they’re eating their fill of whole natural foods and the brain and the animals, all the animals including humans, automatically regulates how much they’re eating and whether they’re overeating. It works perfectly in humans, too, but only if humans are eating the foods we’re designed to eat. So a whole plant food SOS-free diet. 

As soon as you start putting artificially concentrated food in the diet, the sugars, the oils, the processed flour products, the animal foods, then the tendency is to overeat. And particularly some people are a little more sensitive than others, depending on how sensitive their satiation mechanisms are. They will overeat enough that they can gain substantial weight, not just a pound or two, but five pounds, 10 pounds, 50 pounds, 200 pounds. You know, some people will just get huge because they have a little bit less satiation sensitivity. And so the vulnerability is if you eat just whole foods, you can eat to you’re full, you’ll be fine. There’s not going to be obesity. 

But if you eat these highly processed foods, the only question is how fat are you going to get? And it’ll depend on your satiation and which of those processed food you’re eating. If you don’t happen to have naturally sensitive satiation mechanisms, you have to do it consciously — avoid eating salt, oil, and sugar-based food. It’s just like if you’re not an alcoholic, you might be able to have a drink or two and not become a drunk. But if you’re a drunk, you can’t have alcohol, because if you do, you end up in deep trouble.

If you’re not overweight and you have relatively sensitive satiation mechanism, you may be able to occasionally have a little of this, little of that and not become overweight. But if you’re overweight, it’s not you. It’s not like people don’t try to regulate what they’re eating. They can’t. Just like in alcohol, it can’t effectively regulate alcohol intake. An elderly person can’t necessarily regulate all these different chemicals that are added in the food. So if you’re sensitive to salt, oil and sugar and you stop eating salt, oil and sugar, you’ll lose your weight. If you don’t, then it’s a question of how much do you eat and how big are you going to be? It’s not like rocket science. It’s pretty simple to understand. It’s just hard to implement, right?

Chef AJ: Absolutely. So what is your down and dirty, quick definition of the pleasure trap? If that’s a concept that people aren’t familiar with,

Dr. Alan Goldhamer: The pleasure trap is what happens when you artificially stimulate dopamine in the brain. So you get pleasure, but you pay a big price.

Chef AJ: Got it. So you talk about whole foods. How do you define a whole food?

Dr. Alan Goldhamer: Well, whole foods are foods that have been minimally processed, so fruits, vegetables, non-glutinous grains, beans, nuts and seeds. Those are the categories of foods. Now, some of those foods can just be eaten whole, which is great like fruits, you know, banana peel and eat… lettuce, carrots, celery. 

Some of them people like to process. They might grate them or chop them or cook them, or they might want to blend them or juicerize them. They might want to high process them into highly concocted processed food products. The closer you stick to whole foods, the less tendency there is to overeat. So eating carrots, you’re not going to overeat. Carrot juice, you know, still might be healthy, but you have to be a little bit more careful. 

So the farther you process foods, the more you increase caloric density, the more tendency there is to be vulnerable to overconsumption. So if you want to be absolutely safe, just eat fruits and vegetables as they grow. Eat your fill. You’re not going to run any problems if you’re going to process foods, whether it’s juicing, chopping, heating, beating, realize that as you increase caloric density, you have to be a little bit more conscious about portion control in the sense of you wouldn’t want to take foods, highly process them, and then even though they might be healthy foods, you still may over consume them. So the more simple it is, the more as they grow they are, the less tendency there is to get into trouble with them.

Chef AJ: So if I understand you correctly, the more a food is processed, the worse it is for weight loss?

Dr. Alan Goldhamer: The harder it is to regulate weight when you’re eating highly processed foods. It doesn’t mean you couldn’t eat an entirely highly processed food diet and still maintain weight, but it might be a lot more difficult, require a lot more discipline than it would be. If you just eat fruits and vegetables, you pretty much eat until you can’t eat anymore, and you’re still going to be able to be thin. 

As you get farther into the processing, it may be possible to sustain extra weight by fooling satiety mechanisms. So what a good rule of thumb is get people to eat as much minimally processed foods as possible, so there’s not that much room left for the more concentrated foods. And the way you tell if you’re winning or not is if you’re able to maintain your health and your weight, then you know you’ve gotten into some reasonable kind of balance.

Chef AJ: And you mention, if you just eat fruits and vegetables, you can eat your fill and you won’t be overweight, but you don’t recommend people just eat fruits and vegetables. Is that correct?

Dr. Alan Goldhamer: Well, I don’t know that a raw fruit and vegetable only diet is necessarily the most successful to sustain over the long run because one when you look at the salad, it has 100 calories a pound, so you’d have to eat 20 pounds a day just to maintain weight. Well, you can’t do that. There’s not enough time in the day. Even if you start at six in the morning and go to midnight, you’re still not going to get 20 pounds in. Fruit has 300 calories a pound, so you could get enough fruit in to sustain weight, but you’d be on a very high sugar diet. And that’s not going to be conducive to health. 

So if you were going to eat fruit and vegetables only, you’d have to eat quite a bit of vegetable to neutralize the more calorically dense fruits. Yeah, I imagine you could do it, but it’s a lot easier and I think a lot healthier for most people to eat fruits and vegetables in quantity, and they need enough steamed and starchy vegetables to meet their caloric needs. Humans have a huge bulbous [inaudible] at the end of their brain or at the end of their spine, called the brain. And that’s our biggest burner of glucose. And so in order to keep the brain working properly, we have to get a certain amount of calories in. And the best source of calories for that brain is complex carbohydrates. 

So but I would say is eating salad and fruit in quantity every day, along with steamed and starchy vegetables. And then if you’re going to use really concentrated food like nuts, seeds, grains, be conscious of the portion that you’re consuming of those and you won’t be getting into trouble with weight maintenance or support.

Chef AJ: Right. When you say in quantity that will vary from person to person, you’re not suggesting that we actually weigh and measure how much?

Dr. Alan Goldhamer: No, no. You don’t need to weigh or measure anything. You just eat your fill of raw fruits and vegetables first, then eat some steamed and starchy vegetables. The only thing you might want to be careful about in terms of the actual quantity. If you’re using things like nuts or seeds, we generally recommend that that’s about it. And once a day, it might be a small handful of almonds. It’s possible and quite easy actually to overeat on these very concentrated high-fat foods. And even though they’re healthy and natural and may be perfectly fine for many people to include in their diets, they’re really easy to overeat. And in fact, some people are so vulnerable that they’re really better off not eating those foods just because they have trouble regulating quantity. So if you’re somebody that can’t regulate the quantity, then maybe you would go to a different source of food than those really concentrated.

Chef AJ: And we don’t have to worry that we’re going to drop dead of heart disease if we don’t get that one ounce a day in?

Dr. Alan Goldhamer: And no, there’s all kinds of different options you have to get all the quantity and quality nutrients you need. There is no one food that everybody has to have in order to be healthy. Now it is true that some foods are very concentrated in nutrition, so it makes it very convenient to get a whole lot of nutrition in this. All volume and all that kind of stuff. And for people that are having trouble with being too thin, sometimes we will purposely try to include a little bit more of those, either more concentrated food sources or process the foods a little bit more in order to allow us to get more calories in. 

For example, if somebody is having trouble maintaining weight instead of eating as much brown rice, maybe they even have a little brown rice pasta. Maybe instead of having all salads, we might include some blended salads in there where instead of having just potatoes, we might make some potato soup so that we process the food a little bit more. They can get a little bit more in for those people trying to gain weight. Honestly, gaining weight can be more difficult than losing weight. For people trying to lose weight, it doesn’t seem that way. 

But the reality is people that get heavy easily, it’s usually because of two factors. One, they have a healthy system, they absorb what they eat. They’ve got good plumbing and they eat too concentrated of foods, so they fool their satiety mechanisms. A person that’s having trouble gaining weight. Sometimes it’s because their plumbing isn’t any good. And that’s tough, you know, to get absorption through. 

So if you gain weight easily, you should be on one level thinking, well, biologically, that means I absorb what I eat easily. And if I was in a natural setting where there was nothing to eat but whole natural foods, I’d be the winner because I’d get enough out of that. Somebody that can eat whatever they want, never get any weight. They wouldn’t necessarily be able to thrive in a natural setting. Your ancestors, if you’re alive today, we’re usually the ones that got enough to eat didn’t get eaten, made good use of what they ate. They were the winners. And so from a biological viewpoint, gaining weight easily isn’t a bad thing. It’s only a bad thing in the modern world where we get exposed to artificially concentrated foods you really shouldn’t be eating anyway. And so it doesn’t seem that we’re living in the modern world, but I’d say that people do gain weight easily are the biologically superior species.

Chef AJ: Well, that’s good to hear. Thank you. You mentioned whole foods, fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, nuts, seeds and avocado. What are animal products? Because some people feel that that is animal products, dairy, meat, fish, these are whole foods.

Dr. Alan Goldhamer: Well, I would agree that not dairy, because dairy is highly processed animal food products, but meat, fish, chicken, beef, these are whole foods. The problem is, though, even though they may be whole foods and they may not be principally responsible for the obesity issues, they can’t absolutely be responsible for the health-compromising consequences of overconsumption of them, the excess fat and protein and its association with heart disease, cancer, kidney disease, et cetera. 

And the other thing is that most animal foods are not eaten as whole foods. People don’t like, kill the cow and start chewing on the beef. They’re highly processed. And in fact, if you take boiled animal products, I’m told they’re not very flavorful. A lot of what adds the flavor to animal foods are all the salt, oil, and sugar that’s used in its preparation, the sauces and the other things that the meat itself isn’t necessarily where the inherent appeal is coming from. 

And so I suppose that if you put aside the moral, ethical, spiritual, and long-term health consequences, you wouldn’t argue that whole natural meat consumption would have anything to do with weight maintenance issues. I wouldn’t expect that that would be a major problem. On the other hand, dairy products are perhaps one of the most notorious foods for contributing to excess weight. And especially foods like cheese with their saturated fat, salt, highly concentrated caloric density, highly processed foods, probably one of the worst foods, in my opinion, that people would include if their goal was to try to sustain optimum weight and health.

Chef AJ: Thank you. So far, several times during the course of this conversation, you’ve mentioned “fool the brain” satiety mechanisms, and I think a lot of the viewers are not familiar with that mechanism.

Dr. Alan Goldhamer: Okay. Well, so when any animal, including humans, eat food, there is very sensitive feedback loops that are engaged and the brain has an ability to tell you, okay, you’ve had enough — satiation, you’re satisfied. And you know yourself, like if you sit down and just say you start eating apples. After a few apples, you don’t want apples anymore, you know, your desire for apples turns off. And if you keep eating apples beyond that, you’ll get like a bellyache. You know, kids that had too many apples, the next day they know that wasn’t a good thing to do. They’ll never do that again. 

That doesn’t happen when you’ve got that pile of ice cream. If you ate 1,500 calories of apples once, it would be the last time you ever did that. But you can have 1,500 calories of ice cream, and you’ll just be banging your spoon into the bottom of the pint container, wondering where the rest of it is. Because it’s an artificially concentrated food that bypasses that normal feedback mechanism that the brain gets that keeps you from overeating. 

That’s why you don’t see fat animals in nature. They’re not overweight because they’re eating to their fill of whole natural foods. Unless you give those animals access to our highly processed foods, then they get huge. The birds get so big they can’t fly. Rats will gain forty nine percent of their body weight in 60 days, the animals that become obese, just like we will if you give them access to our kinds of food because they’re not immune from the pleasure trap anymore than we are.

Chef AJ: And you know somebody once told me, whenever there’s a problem, look to nature and you’re right, there are no overweight or obese animals in nature. It’s always the domesticated ones.

Dr. Alan Goldhamer: Yeah, even whales are only nine percent body fat, so you know, they wear their fat on the outside of their body, but they’re still not obese.

Chef AJ: So you said sugar, oil, and salt aren’t foods, they’re chemicals we add to food that fools the brain’s satiety mechanism. Does flour or alcohol do the same thing?

Dr. Alan Goldhamer: Well, when we process foods like flour, like if you take wheat berries and you boil them and eat them, they’re 500 calories a pound. And wheat berries boiled and eaten, I think few people would have trouble with overeating. They’d eat their wheat berries boiled and they feel fine. But if you take those wheat berries, you grind them into a flour. So you’re dehydrating them, essentially hyper concentrating them. Add your salt, oil and sugar and whatever else you do, and turn it into bread. Now you have something that instead of 500 calories a pound has 1500 calories a pound and definitely lends itself to overeating and obesity. 

So again, nobody that I know of is getting overweight eating boiled wheat berries if they particular like them but they definitely can get overweight eating bread. In fact, bread is is a notorious food because it’s quick, fast, easy, and simple. And then they turn it into a butter boat and they spray coagulated counterparts all over, increasing caloric density even further. So I think bread and flour, cookies, crackers, these highly processed fractionated foods are really one of the major reasons why people are developing overweight. The other is fried foods like potato chips, french fries, and, of course, refined carbohydrates. 

Perhaps the most hidden one of all is salt. You know, and people say, well, wait a second. Salt has no calories, so you should be able to eat whatever you want, right? Well, no, because it turns out salt stimulates passive overeating. So if you just eat your fill of whatever the food is, at a certain point, you reach satiation. If everything else being equal, you salt that food, you’ll eat more before you feel satisfied, before you reach satiation. So if you’re always eating salted foods, what’s going to happen is you’re always going to be eating a little bit more than you would normally have eaten, whatever the food is, healthy food or not healthy food. And as a consequence, it’s harder to maintain weight if you’re eating a salted diet than if you’re eating a diet where all of your sodium comes from within the food itself, from the actual whole food, not from the salt that’s added to the food. 

And that’s why I think that salt is actually one of the keys to weight loss. For example, a lot of the products people eat that they get overweight on, the bread products, would not be very appealing without salt. Even cheese, it’s kind of disgusting, I’m told without salt. It’s such an important part of the response to cheese. So if we get rid of the salt, we get rid of the appeal of a lot of these highly fractionated foods that people are eating and sustaining their obesity on. 

And also, you neuro adapt to a low salt diet. So the longer you’re eating a low salt diet, the better those whole foods taste. Since whole natural foods have very low sodium intake, comparatively, at first, when you’re used to the salty diet, good foods don’t taste good. But if you adapt, neuro adapt over time and it takes about a month on a low salt diet. People adapt to the low salt diet, they actually like the lower salt foods. The higher salt foods that you’re seeing are too salty. They actually burn their mouth, they don’t like it. One of the advantages of when we use fasting is that it can change that palate a little quicker. And so people can get to the point where good foods taste good again

Chef AJ: Is the reason people overeat when they salt their food because it tastes better?

Dr. Alan Goldhamer: Of course, that’s what tasting better means. It means it results in more dopamine stimulation in your brain. It’s a chemical-type response. So as far as your brain is concerned, that’s a better substance, more valuable substance, more consistent with survival. Because your brain is worried about one thing and only one thing, get enough to eat, don’t get eaten. Get enough to eat, you’re in an environment of scarcity. You eat as much as you can whenever you can, store as much fat as you can whenever you can. Spring is going to come late. If you don’t have enough reserves, you’re going to die. 

And so now you move into an environment where there’s an abundance of food, there is no shortage of food. And of course, your brain is still whenever you can’t eat as much as you can, as often as you can, as concentrated food as you can. The more concentrated, the more dopamine, the better it is. Your brain just wants to keep you alive, but your brain doesn’t realize that we’ve changed the environment so dramatically that now those very mechanisms that help you in a natural setting are actually trapping you in a pleasure trap.

Chef AJ: Well, Dr. Goldhamer, a lot of people have said that it’s not that hard for them to stop the oil or even the sugar, but that the food just doesn’t taste good without even a little raw coconut aminos or miso, they just can’t eat the vegetables

Dr. Alan Goldhamer: And they can’t. It takes, as they said, it takes about a month without fasting to adapt to a lower salt diet. So you have to be patient enough to give your body a chance to make that neuro adaptation.

Chef AJ: Is it a problem, though, if you’re using a little of it on foods of a very low caloric density?

Dr. Alan Goldhamer: Well obviously it’s less of a problem on a diet with low density as far as weight is concerned but it’s not just the weight we’re concerned about. We also want to have people live a long and healthy life. We don’t want them finding themselves unable to talk or move lying in a nursing home bed, waiting for people to come and change their diaper because they’ve stroked out from hypertension, which is caused by salt. And excess salt in the diet contributes to hypertension, whether it’s salty, low-density foods or high-density foods. The advantage to salting high density food is you not only develop high blood pressure, but you can also gain weight as well and so you can be obese as well as hypertensive.

Chef AJ: Wow. Well, a lot of people are worried that they won’t get their minerals or become iodine deficient if they don’t use salt.

Dr. Alan Goldhamer: Right, because the salt has been supplemented with iodine but fortunately, there’s many options for getting minerals in your diet. The best ones are called vegetables. And vegetables, both raw and cooked, are rich sources of not just iodine, but also all of our other minerals, including sodium. 

However, if you want to supplement, you could use some sea vegetable material and get really abundant amounts of iron and other trace minerals. You just need to be careful not to get too aggressive because there’s also can be a lot of sodium with them. Sometimes you can use vegetables like nori or things that have iodine but don’t have a high sodium concentration. And that might be a way of supplementing the diet to ensure trace minerals, including iodine. 

But again, green vegetable matures when they’re eaten in quantity. You know, most people don’t count the vegetables very much in terms of what they contribute because they don’t eat much. But when you’re on this kind of a diet, you’re usually eating large volumes of raw and cooked vegetables, big, huge compared to what other people are eating. And as a consequence, the small amount of nutrients that are present in a small amount of vegetables, there’s quite a bit present in a large amount of vegetables.

Chef AJ: Well, thank you. Some people say, though, they have low blood pressure and they’re worried that they could faint if they don’t salt their food.

Dr. Alan Goldhamer: Well, there are very rare people that have hypothyroidism where they don’t produce liquids, and they might need to add some exogenous sodium in their diet. I’ve seen a couple in my thirty-nine years of practice. Most people do far better, including regulating orthostatic hypotension by getting on a whole plant food diet and eliminate the added salt of the diet. 

Now, I’m not saying there’s not a transition for days or weeks sometimes when people are going from high salt to low salt where, you know, any time you make radical dietary changes, you can have issues. For example, when people first adopt plant-based diets after being on too much greasy, slimy fatty processed foods, they don’t have the bacteria flora to digest vegetables properly, so they have a lot of gas and distention that eventually gets better as the microbiome changes in the gut. 

The problem is, many people that adopt plant-based diets are still eating a lot of sugary processed foods, and so they don’t give their microbiome a chance to really adapt to eating the foods and digesting the foods in a way that are going to eliminate some of those distressing symptoms.

Chef AJ: Dr. Goldhamer, do you recommend that everyone avoid sugar, oil and salt or just people that are trying to lose weight?

Dr. Alan Goldhamer: No, the only people that probably would want to eliminate S.O.S. would only be those people that either wants to get healthy or that want to stay healthy. Everybody else should be able to eat whatever they want to eat. But if your goal is to get healthy, which would include losing weight or staying healthy, which is to keep your weight off and avoid premature death and disability, then you’d want to be on a whole plant food S.O.S.-free diet.

Chef AJ: Thank you. Can you do a little bit deeper into this concept that you mentioned a little bit ago about neuro adaptation? What is it? What is happening in our bodies when we experience that?

Dr. Alan Goldhamer: I’ll give you an example. If you were walking from a bright lit into a dark theater, you know, at first you can’t see that well. You know, you might be stepping on people as you’re walking. Eventually the rods and the cones in your eyes neuro adapt to the limited light and then you can start to see. It’s not that there’s any more light, it’s just you can make use of limited light that’s there because… it’s an example of neuro, nerve, adaptation, adjusting. 

Well, the same thing happens to taste.

So if you’re on a salty, fatty, greasy, slimy, dead, decaying flesh diet, you’re going to get adapted to these high salt, high sugar taste. And so when you then go to eat whole natural foods, it’s not that appealing. You don’t stimulate that cascade in the brain as much, but as you do it, your brain adjusts. And now you can make more and more use out of the limited amount. 

For example, sodium intake in Swiss chard. So a person on a regular diet may not be able to taste how salty Swiss chard is just naturally. But once you’re adapted, then you can detect what’s always been there, and it makes it easier to adopt a health-promoting diet. So you either eat the diet for a while to adjust, or if you get the benefit of fasting, it can happen a little quicker.

Chef AJ: Well, how long does it take for healthy food to start tasting good?

Dr. Alan Goldhamer: It depends on the person, the average person to adapt to a low salt diet is about 30 days. Unfortunately, it takes people as long as three months to adapt to a low-fat diet. So when people are used to eating high amounts of fat in the diet and they go to a low-fat diet first, they don’t feel satiated. They don’t feel satisfied. So they eat a meal might have plenty of calories, but there’s something missing and they want that ice cream or peanut brittle or something, preferably with high-fat concentration, so they can reach satiety. 

Once you’ve been on a lower-fat diet for a period, it takes about 12 weeks, then people start feeling satisfied… even with brown rice and the broccoli and the whole natural foods. They don’t need to have all these highly fatty, greasy, processed foods in order to feel satisfied. But during that couple three months, it can be very distressing because people are feeling like they’re hungry or they’re not getting what they want or what they need. And that’s I think one of the tricks in the problems is that if people don’t feel good enough, quick enough, it’s hard for them to stick with the program until they can be successful. 

Once you’ve done it long enough, you no longer have that struggle. I mean, you would, I think, be the first to admit, AJ,  that now it’s not so much discipline that keeps you in line. It’s, you know, desire to feel good and preserve the health and the feeling and the looks and all of the stuff that goes along with it. 

In the beginning, it’s really hard because your brain is saying, oh no, you’re dying. And think about what people are doing. They take sugar, which drives their insulin up, which drives the sugar down. Now the brain thinks you’re starving. And so they get cravings for sugary stuff to drive their blood sugars back up because they’ve literally created a drug-like effect with the refined carbohydrates. And they wonder why they have all the bingeing and the craving, and they can’t sleep… because their brain thinks they’re dying. And it’s, you know, hey, do something. 

But once you’ve got your blood sugar level stable and you’re not poisoning yourself with these highly processed food products, your blood sugar levels don’t bounce as much and you’re not getting the cravings, you’re not waking up and having to fight with the bingeing and all the other stuff. In fact, a lot of the stuff that used to appeal actually has… it’s not even calling your name as much anymore. Because you’d really just as soon have the whole natural foods that you get your appropriate feedback off of. You don’t need that artificial drug-like stimulation that people are getting from their highly processed foods.

Chef AJ: Do you know what people can do when they experience cravings for high fat, high sugar, high salt foods?

Dr. Alan Goldhamer: Well, they have a couple of choices. They can indulge in those cravings and then pay the price, or they can try to do displacement. You know, a lot of times when they get the cravings it’s because again, their blood sugar levels, their insulin levels. So if you eat whole natural foods, you can try to dissipate some of the reasons why people are eating besides food cravings. 

Sometimes people are eating because they’re angry. I’ve had women tell me they never eat chocolate, except if your husband makes them angry, then they find themselves craving chocolate. I tell them, “Well, listen, next time your husband makes you angry, make him eat the chocolate. Why should you suffer? He’s the one that made you mad. You sit him down and you make don’t leave until he’s eaten all the chocolate.”

Chef AJ: Dr. Goldhamer a lot of people say when they start eating clean, they actually feel worse. Are they detoxing?

Dr. Alan Goldhamer: Well, they might be detoxing. People have a large accumulation of intermediary products metabolism, but sometimes it’s because their blood sugar levels are being vacillated. Sometimes they’re mobilizing accumulated materials inside their cells. Sometimes they’re having psychological consequences because they’re giving up one of their sources of emotional nourishment, which is their highly processed foods. Sometimes there are social consequences because, as you know, not everybody’s going to treat you nicely when you start losing weight and getting healthy. A lot of times they will be mean and cruel. Especially women have challenges those issues, with social consequences of stepping outside the norm. Oh my goodness, it makes people very upset.

Chef AJ: I’m sure you’re familiar with a television commercial from a long time ago for Lay’s potato chips. Bet you can’t eat just one.

Dr. Alan Goldhamer: Yeah, well, they’re not kidding. What they’ve done is they’ve taken potatoes that are 500 calories a pound and changed it to potato chips that are 1500 calories a pound. And so now it’s so appealing because it’s all that concentrated fat, high the caloric density that is a much bigger dopamine stimulation and so it’s very difficult for people to just have one.

Chef AJ: So where do you stand on the continuum of abstinence versus moderation?

Dr. Alan Goldhamer: Well, I think personally, it’s a lot easier to take a look at the things and say, :Well, these are health-promoting things. I want to indulge in those generously. And these are health-compromising things, I’d like to avoid those as much as possible.” So it’s not a moral judgment issue. It’s a question of it’s just easier to focus on doing all the health-promoting behaviors and not have to constantly be dealing with, you know, teasing yourself over stimulating a little bit of dopamine and then trying to withdraw it. 

It’s just like telling an alcoholic it’s easier to not drink than it is to drink beer and wine and think you’re going to regulate your behavior. And so it’s easier for me to not eat salt and sugar than try to figure out, well, how much can I get away with without it compromising my health? And then there’s more, obviously, than just weight involved. People that adopt health-promoting diets oftentimes feel really much better, both mentally and physically. And so a lot of things you just really don’t want to give that edge up. You don’t want to give up your cognitive capacities. You don’t want to give up your athletic performance. You don’t want to give up the aesthetics that go along with it. So I think there’s a lot of motivation to just do it right. 

Now having said that, some people’s psychology is different than mine. And they feel if they could just have a little bit, then they don’t feel such as social outcasts or they may be able to, you know, they don’t piss everybody off as much. Some people, when they piss everybody off, they find that entertaining. I think you and I are kind of, you know, in that category. But most normal human beings don’t like seeing other people upset. And as a consequence, they feel like if they can just participate a little bit, then they can be part of the group and people don’t have to notice that they’re different. And that if you’re one of the people that can do that without it compromising your health and sustain your weight and maybe that’s a strategy for you. 

And I know Dr. Lisle talks about, you know, trying to develop different strategies for different people’s psychology. I personally see a lot of that as an invitation to failure because it’s just like alcoholics that try to tell themselves they can occasionally have a beer. Well, you know, before long one becomes two, becomes four, and then they’re out of control again. Alcoholics that don’t drink don’t get out of control with alcohol. So for me, that’s a better strategy. That’s the goal. 

Does that mean if you indulge in something, you’re a bad person, you’re doomed if you’re not at all? Again, you have to be honest with yourself, though, about what you can and you can’t do and what the consequences of those actions are actually going to be.

Chef AJ: Thank you. You’ve mentioned alcohol several times, and I’m wondering where you stand on alcohol in a health- promoting diet in general and specifically for somebody that wants to or needs to lose weight?

Dr. Alan Goldhamer: Well, you know, alcohol has seven calories per gram. It’s almost as much as pure fat, which is nine calories per gram. Alcohol causes men to get those really attractive beer bellies they call them because they help them put so much abdominal and visceral fat on, and it helps women gain weight as well. There’s almost no satiety feedback to alcohol because there’s no fiber. So in terms of weight gaining goals, it’s probably one of the most effective ways to put weight on. 

On the other hand, it’s also one of the most effective ways to lose weight by just stopping drinking. That’s enough to have sometimes a profound effect, not just on the caloric intake because of the alcohol, but because of the disinhibition that alcohol tends to have on people’s psychology. So people have a few drinks so they can relax, and then they’re less inhibited and they’re willing to engage in health compromising behaviors. When you stop drinking, you tend to have less of those types of disinhibitions and you’re more able to stick to your programs and your discipline. 

So I think alcohol has multiple reasons why it’s extremely dangerous when it comes to trying to maintain optimum weight and not to mention optimum health. You know, people that drink alcohol get cirrhosis of the liver because fatty infiltration that occurs is like scar tissue from the free radical and [inaudible] of alcohol. Just like, you know, people that smoke cigarettes get prematurely wrinkled face, the smokers face, people that get drink alcohol tend to get quite a bit of the substance has to be prostration of alcohol yields, the oxidative damage that’s associated in liver dysfunction. So I think alcohol should be excluded for everybody.

Chef AJ: Thank you. I’m guessing whether it’s alcohol or pleasure trap food, you’re probably not a fan of this popular notion of having cheat days.

Dr. Alan Goldhamer: Well, no, I don’t think cheat days make a lot of sense. You don’t tell alcoholics to just drink on Sundays because that is somehow going to make them good? I think that the goal should be is to try to eat so much good, healthy foods that there’s really just not that much room left for anything else and to focus our reward systems on our activities and our friends and family and loved ones, rather than short term, pleasure-seeking, self-indulgent behavior of inducing drug-like chemicals to get an artificial dopamine high.

Chef AJ: Thank you, Dr. Fuhrman, who’s also an expert on this summit, mentioned that salt dummies down our tastebuds. Are there other foods or substances that dummy down or numb our taste buds in other foods that can maybe make them more sensitive?

Dr. Alan Goldhamer: Well, I think salt, oil and sugar all tend to have a desensitizing effect and so that you end up craving them more. And the other whole natural flavors less.

Chef AJ: What are cravings? Are they psychological? Are they physiological? Biological?

Dr. Alan Goldhamer: I think they’re all that. I mean, there is a psychological component, you know, repeated behavioral reinforcement and all that stuff. And then there’s the biological cravings and then you’re basically designed to respond to dopamine. You’re designed to respond to pleasure. That’s how your brain tells your body that you’re doing the right thing. And in a natural setting, it works great. It’s only in the modern world that we get fooled. And that’s why we call it the pleasure trap, because we’re trapped by this natural, very positive feedback system, because we’re being fooled by these chemicals that we’re adding in the food or the processing that we’re doing in foods.

Chef AJ: So is it only processed food that can create a pleasure trap, or is it possible for whole natural food to do that as well?

Dr. Alan Goldhamer: Well, I think it’s always a magnet to a degree of magnitude. You know, if you have whole oranges, that’s one thing, you have orange juice, It’s another thing, you dehydrate it into sugar, it’s another thing, you know, it’s just the magnitude of concentration.

Chef AJ: Thank you. Are there other factors that make people overeat other than the pleasure trap?

Dr. Alan Goldhamer: Yeah, I think there are other factors. I mean, it’s indirectly the pleasure trap. People when they feel bad, they want to feel good. Feeling bad is your brain’s way of telling you something’s out of balance. And so some people will try to use food as a drug-like effect to make them feel better. And if you have a lot of pain in your life, you have to do a lot of eating in order to overcome that pain. And it turns out you can’t really do enough because no matter how much you do, it’s never enough. 

So I think there’s better effective strategies at figuring out how to deal with the other issues in our life. But food, unfortunately, is often used to try to manage stress and to manage deficits. And so we have to be strong enough to say, Okay, I have a deficit. I’m going to go try to deal with the actual reason I have the deficit rather than try to cover it up with drugs, promiscuous sexual activity, gambling or highly processed foods. You know, banging on the pleasure trap might be powerful short-term, but it’s not a good long-term strategy if you’re trying to get healthy and happy.

Chef AJ: Do you think, for some people, food in general or particular foods can be addictive?

Dr. Alan Goldhamer: Well, I think salt, oil and sugar definitely stimulate the addictive response. So I believe that that’s exactly what you’re looking at is behavior that’s a result of the artificial stimulation of dopamine. Granted, cocaine and alcohol may be more powerful. But food can be much more insidious, particularly if you’re not aware of it and it’s consumed. 

You know you don’t have to drink, but you do have to eat. And so unfortunately, if you go to a party and say, “I don’t drink”, people first, they get upset. And he said, “well, I’m an alcoholic.” It’s like they might be willing to give you permission to not drink and not give you too much trouble. But you can’t tell people, “Oh, no, I don’t want to eat that food” because they are like “oh, my doctor says, that’s good for you. Where are you going to get your protein from?” They are going to be nothing but nutrition experts telling you why you should indulge in all these short-term pleasure-seeking behaviors that they’re indulging in because it’s OK and they won’t like you if you’re not doing it, because they’re going to immediately feel like you’re passing judgment on them. Especially you and your thin body and your perky smile, you make them sick.

Chef AJ: How can somebody tell if they’re addicted, or maybe a victim of the pleasure trap?

Dr. Alan Goldhamer: Well, here’s a real simple experiment. Go on a whole plant food SOS-free diet for two weeks. And if you’re overweight, you’re going to lose weight, if you’re sick, you’re going to start feeling better. And then if you don’t have any trouble, probably that’s not an issue. Now that doesn’t mean you necessarily need to go back to doing the things that are compromising your health. 

But most people find out really quickly that they are a lot more dependent on the stuff than they thought. They don’t have coffee for a day, and they’re having a drug addiction, withdrawal headaches, and they’re having really acute symptoms. If they don’t have that sugary fatty snack at night, they’re waking up at night with cravings and low blood sugar levels and all kinds of problems wondering, “what the heck’s going on?” They get grumpy, they get mean and angry, and.. it’s just like any addict. You withdraw the thing that people are addicted to, they can get pretty aggressive. And that’s true with dietary pleasure trap as well as drugs-like chemicals.

Chef AJ: Well, you mentioned coffee. Many of the doctors, including plant-based doctors, are promoting several cups a day for heart health or prevention of Alzheimer’s. Is coffee really that good for us? And does it play a role in weight loss at all?

Dr. Alan Goldhamer: Yeah. No, they’re wrong. And that’s good because I mean, if we agreed on everything, why would they need us around? So coffee has caffeine, which is a highly addictive nervous system stimulant as a 17-hour half-life. It affects the quality of your sleep, even the coffee you’re taking in the morning can have an impact on your sleep quality. It affects the microbiome. Ask anybody with gastritis whether they think coffee is good for them. The bottom line is it’s a nasty, highly processed substance. 

Now, it is from a plant which means there’s going to be inevitably some natural substances that are still redeeming. But just the fact that there are still some antioxidants or something else of benefit in there doesn’t make it offset all the health-compromising components that go along with it now. There’s no calories of significance per se in the coffee itself, but the effect that it has on the microbiome, the fact that it has an effect on appetite, the effect on energy, metabolism, et cetera, all, in the long run, is, in my opinion, compromised. 

So I don’t think that it’s healthy… you know, in the short run, you can do all kinds of things and that doesn’t show up immediately. But in the long run, coffee is certainly not health food. I wouldn’t recommend it.

Chef AJ: Thank you. Can a person overeat and still be undernourished?

Dr. Alan Goldhamer: Yeah, you can absolutely overeat and become obese, but still be undernourished. I mean, in fact, most people, in my opinion, that are obese actually are undernourished.

Chef AJ: There is a movement “health at every size”, and we don’t want to shame people or blame people, we know this is a big problem. But can you be overweight and truly healthy in your opinion?

Dr. Alan Goldhamer: Well, you’re not going to be functioning at your full potential. It doesn’t mean you might at all be overweight and much healthier than a person that’s underweight. As I mentioned before, being underweight and not being able to gain weight oftentimes represents problems with, you know, the whole digestive system, plumbing, and everything else. So that can actually be a really serious problem. 

So it’s not a comparison game, but if you take any individual and put twenty-five extra pounds on them, they are not going to be as healthy as they would be if they adopted the health promoting diet that allowed them to lose that weight down to their optimum weight. Right. It’s not the weight per se, that’s the main problem. It’s the diet that you eat that allows you to maintain that extra weight. That’s the problem. 

In the moment you change that diet, the weight naturally starts going away. Now, some people lose weight much easier. Those people are called, well, males and some people. It’s much harder to lose weight and call those people females because females have estrogen, which is a fat storage hormone. So it’s going to be much harder for a woman to lose weight, everything else being equal than a male. That’s why women on average lose two pounds a week, males 50 percent more three pounds a week. 

So it doesn’t mean men can’t be overweight, but they would require more indiscretion in order to be able to achieve obesity than a woman would be. It’s easier for women because women are designed to store fat. Essentially, biologically speaking, women are energy conserving fat storage devices. They’re designed to store fat to survive a period of biological variability called pregnancy. You know, women have these biological differences for a reason. So when it comes to weight loss, it definitely makes it harder for women and it does… everything else being equal for it.

Chef AJ: You know, you mentioned two pounds a week and I don’t want to guarantee that to people because my weight loss story was it took me 27 months to lose almost 50 pounds.

Dr. Alan Goldhamer: What we’re saying is if a person is overweight and they adopt a whole plant food SOS-free diet, moderate exercise, and plenty of sleep, the average is going to be two pounds. With some women, it’s going to be half a pound a week. For some people it’s going to be one pound. For some people it might be three pounds a week. 

When you’re talking about large, it depends on their age, their activity level. There’s a lot of variables, but it’s important for women to know it’s not 10 pounds a week. So if you go on a diet and you’re thinking, “well, I got 50 pounds, I’ll give it five weeks of good effort”, you’re going to be really disappointed that you didn’t lose 50 pounds. But if you know that the average target, maybe more or less for you, but is maybe more of a 10 pounds in five weeks or 8 pounds in five weeks, then you’re going to be less likely to be disappointed when you’ve made a good faith effort and didn’t achieve all the weight loss that you know that you have expectations for.

Chef AJ: Well, some people go on these keto diets and they do lose 10 pounds in a week.

Dr. Alan Goldhamer: Absolutely. And some people cut the leg off at the hip and you lose 40 pounds overnight, but it doesn’t make it healthy. And what’s good for short term weight loss is not necessarily good for long-term health. So there’s all kinds of things people do that result in short-term weight loss that’s, you know, quick, fast, whatever. But I’m not concerned about that. I’m concerned about long-term health and long-term health isn’t going to be going on some of that Dr. Atkins diet.

Chef AJ: I would say that, you know, you’ve run this wonderful True North Health Center for almost 40 years. You’ve seen tens of thousands of patients and everyone that has gone there has gotten healthy. But how can you help people stay healthy? How can you help them avoid the pleasure trap?

Dr. Alan Goldhamer: Well, it’s no question when people are at True North Health, it’s easier. There’s no shopping or chopping, the foods made from there in a supportive environment. Nobody’s telling them that they’re not going to get enough protein because they didn’t eat their animals, whatever. When they go home, there’s challenges. Sometimes you go home to environments that are not health-supporting or conducive. They’re going to jobs that there may not be happy with. And so it’s a huge challenge. 

So here’s the things that we do at True North to try to encourage people. Number one, there are programs out there like ones you operate that encourage people, support people, provide them emotional support as well as education. They’re tremendously helpful. There’s companies like Momma Says, Leaf Side, Well Your World that make SOS-free option foods available that it can help people when they don’t have maybe as much time to make a variety of things, that they’re trying to interest their relatives and they’re trying to cope with their jobs and their kids and all the other things. So, you know, convenience in that regard. 

We have fabulous doctors at the True North Health Center and offer phone coaching services that are available through our telemedicine practice, which can be very helpful for people that need specific advice or encouragement. We have the True North Health Center, where we can use fasting in conjunction with a protective environment to help get people well and feeling good and stabilize off their meds, et cetera. 

And we encourage people, as I told you this before… my mom when she was 92, she realized she had outlived all of her friends. She was alone. She had outlived all fifty two of her lifelong friends, and she said that, you know, it was really hard when she was in her 90s to make friends because even the younger people 10 years younger were still too old and too sick to engage in the behaviors that she wanted to do. And so she said that she realized that she had made an error and that she said, “You need to warn your patients, Alan, that if these people are going to do this diet, make younger friends.” And she said much younger, not just a little bit younger, or at least find a few friends that are health conscious so that maybe there’ll be people around when you get to the advanced age and don’t have your premature heart attack and stroke and all the rest of it because you’ve adopted health-promoting habits. 

So I don’t think anything about this is easy. We’re living in a world designed to make us fat and sick and designed to give us what we want, not what we need. There’s very little encouragement, and I think that the more encouragement, the more support, the easier it’s going to be. But because it’s such a small percentage of people are even talking about it or thinking about it, this is a really rarefied audience that we’re addressing. And so until it gets a chance to kind of become more common, I think it’s going to be an ongoing challenge for people that are struggling with weight-related issues.

Chef AJ: Wow. Thanks. Is weight loss of any benefit if it’s not permanent because a lot of people are serial yo-yo dieters?

Dr. Alan Goldhamer: Well, some people would just go up five pounds every year. So after one year, it’s five pounds and another five pounds, another five pounds, another five pounds, another five pounds. That is really bad. Some people go up five pounds, go down five pounds, go up five pounds. You know, that’s not as ideal is just getting and staying your optimum weight. But I’d rather have people, you know, continuing to fight the fight than to just give up.

Chef AJ: Well, talking about fighting the fight, you know, you’ve seen so many patients. Do you have, obviously not the name, but maybe a success story that you could share with us of somebody that maybe lost quite a bit of weight that you could share with us?

Dr. Alan Goldhamer: Yeah. Well, I mean, I have hundreds of people that have lost, you know, a hundred pounds or more and have kept that weight off. But I think more importantly, we’re doing a study now where we use the DEXA scanner where we were able to do a whole body composition. And what we discovered was that when people in our case went on a period of fasting, they lost fat. They also lost visceral fat. And visceral fat is that abdominal fat, that organ fat that’s most associated with inflammation and disease.

 And one of the things we discovered in water fasting was that the body not only lost fat, but it preferentially mobilized visceral fat. And so first of all, it was 20 percent of their adipose tissue, but 50 percent of their visceral fat. And now we’re doing some follow-up data because we know that in a controlled setting, that’s what happens. But now we’re getting 12 month follow-ups on those same subjects that we did this analysis on, and we’re going to be able to determine whether or not they were able to sustain those results with the advice and coaching and all the services that we’ve talked about earlier. 

And so far, the preliminary data looks really good. The paper hasn’t been published yet, so I won’t get into the details of it. But it is definitely my experience that highly motivated people are able to sustain these diet and lifestyle changes. Now, the most motivated people are people driven by pain, debility, and fear of death — nothing like agonizing pain and debility to motivate people to make dietary changes. The problem is when they get better and they don’t have pain and debility driving them, you can have a vulnerability to backsliding. 

And that’s why I think education and support becomes so important because you don’t just educate and support when they’re at the center, they need ongoing support. That’s where the phone coaching and the and the services and the support groups like you’re involved with, I think are so critical to sustain long term success. But even then, it’s still really difficult because this world is not at all… It’s not just not supportive, it’s specifically designed to undermine people’s success. 

And there’s people are also under stress. You know, I don’t think that helps much with weight loss, either when people have constant stress. Like if you would take steroids, right? You know, everybody knows how you blow it up and you gain weight. One of the side effects from taking steroid medications. Well, when you’re under constant stress in driving and news, watching and dealing with nasty people, you’re under constantly bathing yourself with these stress hormones. That’s probably not health-promoting, and it probably doesn’t make it any easier to lose weight.

Chef AJ: Well, it sounds to me like the social factors can play a role in either direction, either supporting people or bringing them down.

Dr. Alan Goldhamer: Well, that’s what Dr. Lisle says, and he’s a psychologist, so I’m not going to challenge him.

Chef AJ: Great. But you’re not recommending that people water fast just to lose weight, are you?

Dr. Alan Goldhamer: I don’t think you need to water fast to lose weight. All you have to do as adopt the whole plant food diet and get exercise, and that’s something you can do each and every day. Intermittent fast for 16 hours every day. Eat in an eight hour window, a whole plant food diet. 

And if you’re a female, you can expect to lose an average of two pounds a week. That’s a hundred pounds a year. How much weight you need and how fast do you need to lose it? It is true with fasting, it happens a little quicker. That wouldn’t be my principal motivation for fasting, though. 

The thing about fasting is useful is if you’re not able to make the diet lifestyle changes because you’re an addict, then sometimes fasting is helpful. Not so much because you lost a few pounds fasting but because you adapted your taste to where good food tastes good. Or you overcame your arthritis and you get up and start walking again. Or you were able to deal with the other health modifications that allowed you to get off the medications, like the steroids that were keeping you from losing weight. 

So there’s a lot of reasons to use fasting, and oftentimes it results in weight loss. But if weight loss was really the only issue, it’s diet, sleep and exercise is the focus.

Chef AJ: Right, thank you. So speaking of sleep and exercise, we’ve talked about diet a lot. We know they’re important to health, but what role specifically would sleep and exercise play for somebody that’s looking to lose weight?

Dr. Alan Goldhamer: You know, if people are active, it does two things. Number one, you burn more calories, which is always good, increasing activity. More importantly, you regulate blood sugar levels so you don’t have as much as the cravings and the binging. And I think psychologically when you exercise, you dissipate some of the effects of tension. And instead of eating to deal with your stress, you exercise and it dissipates the effect of stress. So I think exercise is very important for both health and also to assist with weight maintenance. We know, though, that the largest effect size is diet. So you can’t exercise the fat away and keep it away. You have to combine exercise with diet. 

I think also sleep is critical to sustaining weight loss. I think a lot of people that struggle with weight loss, it’s because of sleep deprivation. When you don’t get enough sleep, the metabolic rate tends to drop. It’s hard for you to have good energy without good energy. You feel fatigued. You’re not inclined to want to exercise or put the extra effort to eat well. You may not be able to cope with the stresses of your life as well. 

I think diet, sleep and exercise are all critically important. And when it comes to diet, a whole plant food SOS-free diet works so well. Even in people that aren’t controlling their stress as well or aren’t getting exercise, they still are successful. But if you combine it all together? Oh my gosh. The combination is really the most gratifying.

Chef AJ: I couldn’t agree with you more. You mentioned eating within an eight hour window intermittent fasting. Does it matter when those eight hours are?

Dr. Alan Goldhamer: That’s a really good question. You know, I haven’t given that a tremendous amount of thought — it probably does. And I think there may even be some variation from individual to individual, but with their normal, you know, sleep cycle. 

Here’s what the rules are, though, is don’t eat three to four hours before you go to bed. Try to get as close to eight hours of high-quality sleep as you can and keep that feeding window, whatever it’s going to be in that eight hour window. And if you do that, I don’t know if it matters so much. If you’re going to bed at six p.m., eight p.m. 10 p.m.. I don’t know how much difference that might make, and I haven’t really seen much literature on that. 

I do know that night shifting is a problem. You know, when people work at nights, there’s a lot of downsides. So there’s probably a natural circadian rhythm that can be disrupted when people have to work work nights. But I just don’t know enough to know whether or not like the difference between eight pm or 10 p.m. or whatever, how much difference that makes.

Chef AJ: We have a couple of experts on this, some dealing with anorexia and binge eating disorder, and they said these people should not do a water fast.

Dr. Alan Goldhamer: Well, first of all, these are completely different conditions. Binge eating is not the same thing as anorexia nervosa. And I would agree that a patient that’s properly diagnosed with anorexia nervosa, water fasting, as much as they might want to do that, that would probably not be an appropriate intervention, at least until that condition itself has been contained and managed. 

And even then, you have to be very careful with fasting as a trigger for people to have, whether it’s anorexia nervosa or bulimia and binge eating disorders. It can in fact be used successfully in patients with eating-related issues. You have to be cognizant of the fact that that’s a risk factor and you need to have adequate refitting. You have to have good supervision, you have to have the right patient. So definitely caution with these patients is absolutely warranted. 

But I wouldn’t necessarily assume that no person with an eating disorder illness would ever potentially benefit from fasting. You wouldn’t necessarily be using the fasting to treat their eating-related disordered. Eating disorders atients have tremendous number of problems that can interfere with their success. [inaudible] and sometimes fasting can be an important tool in that. But then that would be done in a medically supervised setting under direct supervision and appropriately screened and managed patients.

Chef AJ: Thank you. You know, a lot of people are afraid to eat carbs, especially even complex carbs, potatoes, they say they gain weight. How do you help these people because they say, “Oh, I eat, you know, my blood sugar went up, I gained weight”?

Dr. Alan Goldhamer: Yeah, well, the problem is really just differentiating refined carbohydrates, which are, I think, foods that need to be concerned and avoided and whole natural starches that are what we’re designed to eat, which is a whole plant foods with all the fiber and all the other stuff that goes along with it. 

So people in complex carbohydrate diets… remember 86 percent of carbohydrates, according to one paper I saw, that people eat are refined carbohydrates, flour, sugar. Well, I think we all agree all those foods need to be eliminated, so we’re limiting almost all of the carbs from almost all the people. 

What’s left are the fruits, vegetables, the starchy vegetables. These are the basis of the diet, and that is the diet that is the long-term, sustainable, health-promoting, weight-managing diet that people need to eat. Over the short run, some people, if they eat any carbs, they’re still thinking potato chips or french fries and breads and sugars and all that stuff. No disagreement. 

That’s nobody that adopts the whole plant food diet that are using sweet potatoes and squashes and green vegetables that has the magnitude of difficulties that they do with what’s commonly referred to as carbohydrates. So if we’re talking refined carbohydrates, I don’t disagree with them. Avoid them all. If we’re talking about eating a whole natural, plant-based diet, that’s a mistake. And they can find from their own personal experience that they’re able to sustain blood sugar levels, sustain weight and sustain weight loss. Even though the diet might be 10 to 12 percent of calories from protein, 15 to 18 percent of calories from fat, and the balance coming from complex carbohydrates.

Chef AJ: And as healthy as these starchy vegetables are and even whole grains and legumes. We want people to eat fruits and vegetables, right?

Dr. Alan Goldhamer: Absolutely, in quantity.

Chef AJ: That’s a problem because a lot of people say they don’t like vegetables.

Dr. Alan Goldhamer: Well, of course they don’t, because they’re addicted to the artificial stimulation — that dopamine in the brain that comes from the foods that they’ve been fed. So they have to allow themselves to neuro adapt. And that’s an example where sometimes a bit of a fast can be helpful because after fasting, sometimes good foods taste better. If you can get them disciplined to eat the food for a while, they’ll neuro adapt anyway, whether they’re fast or not. But it can take some time and time… and patience are not something that people have unlimited supplies of.

Chef AJ: That’s true. Dr. Goldhamer, what would you say to somebody that’s maybe struggled with weight for a very long time and has given up hope that they could ever be successful?

Dr. Alan Goldhamer: Well, the fact is, I don’t care how long you struggle with it, the principles will always the same. I like people who have struggled a long time because they’re that much more impressive when they come good and then that much more inspiring to people because people have, you know, they’ve had trouble all their life and all of a sudden they figured out a way to solve a problem. And that really stirs the muck up a lot better than maybe somebody that never had any difficulties. You know, they may never have any challenges. So I like to work with patients that think it’s hopeless and all that because, you know, it’s that much more impressive, that much more dramatic when they’re able to make the turnaround.

Statistically, the best predictor of future behavior is past performance. So if you’ve struggled in the past, you’re going to struggle in the future unless you change the approach you’re taking to do it. So if you keep doing the same things, which is like trying to be disciplined and eat a little less and whatever? Good luck. But if you’re willing to make a wholesale renovation, change the nature of the food that you’re eating, to eliminate the salt, oil and sugar, and focus on a whole plant food SOS-free diet… I challenge you to do that for a period of a few weeks and see what happens. People don’t come back and say, “Oh, I did all that. It doesn’t work.” They say, “that’s the best thing I’ve ever done.”

Chef AJ: You’ve probably never seen it not work, I’m guessing.

Dr. Alan Goldhamer: Well, in a controlled setting, it’s easy because, you know, we can control it. I definitely seen people that have made a good faith, effort and struggle. But usually it’s because, you know, they’re overcoming not just their own internal biology, but the biology of their spouses and teenage kids and and relatives. And there’s a lot of forces, sometimes more forces, than they can resist. 

I always remember I was for some reason, this woman stands out. She had come in, she was overweight, came in and did a fast, lost weight, went home, immediately regained her weight. And the next time she came in, she came in and her husband brought her in. And it turned out he was a grossly overweight, local internal medicine specialist. Really awful man. He was just nasty and you could just see it. And he was like, very uncomfortable, and I could just see he was uncomfortable. So of course, I went over and started poking him a little bit. And I said. You look uncomfortable and he goes, Oh, well, you know, it’s just a waste of time, these women are never going to, you know, change their diet or whatever. 

And anyway, this time the woman had come with her friend. They both fasted, they lost weight, they went home. She immediately started getting into trouble and then something happened that completely changed everything. Her husband had a massive heart attack and died. And the most amazing coincidence happened. Ever since then, she’s not had any trouble with dietary compliance, she’s maintained her weight. She’s done great. So,I think the stress in her life, actually, I think was her husband because as soon as he was out of the picture, all of a sudden principles seem to… you know, sometimes you have to identify the stresses and then figure out how to manipulate them.

Chef AJ: I have several stories just like that actually with people that I’ve worked with. Could you give us an idea what a day’s worth of food might look like on the health-promoting diet? Also, how much?

Dr. Alan Goldhamer: Well, I mean, it depends on who you’re talking about. If you’re talking about a 92-year-old woman who’s relatively not too active and only consumes 1500 calories a day, it might be different than a young male laborer that burns 3500 calories a day. So keep in mind, some people are going to literally eat twice as much as somebody else, depending on their metabolic rate, their activity level, their sex, et cetera. 

But what I can tell you is what we do at True North Health. People get up. They have maybe fruit and greens or oatmeal and greens, or they may have squash and greens at lunch and dinner. We have big salad bars. We encourage you to have massive salads. We can always tell if you have enough salad because anybody, if you took one of our salads and you put it down at work, people will walk in the room and just react with shock and awe. They would be like, Oh my God, you’re not going to eat all that, are you? And then we give them a big platter, steamed vegetables and then one serving of some kind of complex carbohydrates, maybe potatoes, rice, beans, whatever is appropriate for that person. If they’re really trying to lose weight, maybe we just have salad and steam vegetables, one meal a day and we only have carbohydrates. You know, one meal instead of two meals.Some women find even on a whole plant food diet, it’s still hard to lose that weight if they’re getting too aggressive with the amount of complex carbohydrates in the potatoes, the rice. These things that we know are very healthy. And so maybe they still eat them, but they have a little bit less of that, a little bit more of the steamed vegetables. 

On the other hand, let’s say we’re trying to put weight on somebody because they’re having trouble getting weight. Maybe a little less salad, a little bit more steamed vegetables. Maybe we blend that steamed vegetables in the soup. Maybe we have a little bit more of the more concentrated foods so that they’re able to absorb with their limitations. If you gain weight easily, you don’t have a limitation. So you just eat lots of salad, lots of steamed vegetables, not too much the other. 

And how do you tell if you’re doing it right? Well, if you’re losing your a couple of pounds a week, you’re doing it right. And if you’re only losing a pound, maybe you have to eat a little bit less of the carbohydrate, a little bit more of the salad, maybe a little bit more exercise, maybe a little bit more sleep, maybe a little bit less stress. I really think that one of the big problems with weight loss is people don’t eat enough. If they ate more low density food, they eat less, by volume, high density food. And if they sweat more, they have more energy and they wouldn’t be awake as many hours eating. So I think that’s key to weight loss, maybe eating more and sleeping more

Chef AJ: And by low-density food, you mean foods alone, caloric density like fruits and vegetables.

Dr. Alan Goldhamer: Yeah. In particular, your vegetables, your salads, your steamed vegetables. These are the foods that are very low in caloric density, very high in nutrient density, lots of fiber, and they are actually delicious, flavorful and you can use them in a variety of ways.

Chef AJ: You may not remember this, but I once heard you say, show me an overweight person and I’ll show you someone who is unwilling to eat enough raw salad and steamed vegetables.

Dr. Alan Goldhamer: Right. People aren’t eating enough. That’s what it is.

Chef AJ: Well, Dr. Goldhamer, what is the real truth about weight loss?

Dr. Alan Goldhamer: The real truth about weight loss is it’s really hard to overcome both the biological and the psychological roadblocks, and it’s almost impossible to do if you don’t understand what’s driving it. So education becomes really important, but then inspiration becomes necessary to sustain it. 

So what I would suggest to patients is number one read The Pleasure Trap. Or if you don’t like to read it, listen to it because AJ did a really good job professionally recording an audio version. And take to heart the fact that those principles, as much as you don’t want to hear that, are in fact the truth. And then challenge yourself to adopt a whole plant food SOS-free diet and diligently apply those principles. And then honestly evaluate whether or not the results are worth the effort. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

Chef AJ: Thank you so much, Dr. Goldhamer.

Dr. Alan Goldhamer: Thank you, AJ.

Chef AJ

Hi, Dr. Davis. And welcome to The Truth about Weight Loss Summit. Thanks so much for being here.

Dr. Niki Davis

Thank you so much, AJ. It’s so good to be here. I’m super excited.

Chef AJ

I can’t wait to talk to you because I know that you know so much about nutrition, especially when it comes to weight loss. And so many doctors, including plant-based doctors, count oil as a health food with all these purported properties. And I’m wondering how you feel about it in general, but also as a weight loss tool.

Dr. Niki Davis

Such a good question. Oil is one of those things that I just absolutely love to talk about. I think there definitely seems to be some controversy between some plant-based doctors about oil. And I would love to tell you all about it. And I actually have some slides that I can share, so I’ll pull those up right now.

Chef AJ

That would be great. Thank you.

Dr. Niki Davis

Okay, so I titled this The Problem with Oil. You can tell that I’m definitely leaning one way, but there is a problem with oil. So before we get into talking about oil and how that relates to weight loss, I wanted to just give you a little bit of a background about me and how I got to where I am today as a plant-based doctor. And when it got to getting my job, my first job out of college was as a mechanical engineer or systems engineer at a company called ATK Launch Systems. And in fact, they are a contractor to NASA and they at the time were contractors that were working on the space shuttle program. But that was about the same time that I really started delving into the research of plant-based. And it was also fun because I was seeing changes in myself and I was seeing changes in my family members who were going more plant-based. And that’s what really got me to decide that someday that I decided, I wanted to just quit my job as an engineer and do something in the plant-based world. 

Around that time, I was talking to my husband, well, now that I’m not an engineer anymore, what am I going to do? And he said, you’d be a really good doctor. And I thought, there’s no way I’m going to go back to school. I’ve already been to way too much schooling in my life. I don’t need anymore. But once he mentioned it and he kind of gave me a good spiel, he said, you can really help a lot of people. You can be someone who when you speak, people will trust you and people will listen. That’s what really started the idea in my mind. And although I had never planned on going and doing more schooling, it was one of those things when I thought, well, okay, this is really what I want to do with my life. 

So I went and applied for the University of Utah Medicine and luckily got in. I was able to work as a medical student with Dr. John McDougall while I was in my third year of medical school. And this was before he retired. So he had a 10-day program going on in Santa Rosa, California, that I was able to go and be a part of. I was able to see the patients. I actually myself was able to eat the food and get my lab work done, and I even had a drop in my LDL cholesterol, the bad cholesterol over the ten days by 20 points. And I mean, I’m in my 30s. So this was really amazing for me to see for myself. And then also seeing all these patients that he was helping and the big changes they were having in those ten days, whether it was decreasing their blood pressure medications or improving their diabetes or losing weight, it was really amazing. And it really kind of cinched that desire that I had to do this kind of medicine.

Now, I mentioned lifestyle medicine. So I want to just let you know a little bit about that and how that relates to conventional medicine, because although I practiced both and I was trained in conventional medicine, lifestyle medicine is definitely I feel like where things are moving. Now when I was in medical school, we were told if you have someone who comes to you and they are recently diagnosed with diabetes or high blood pressure, maybe they’re obese, the first thing you want to do is talk to them about making sure that they eat a healthy diet and get exercise. 

But when you’re in medical school, they don’t tell you what a healthy diet looks like. That’s all they tell you. And in fact, they don’t even tell you. How do you help your patients make those changes? How do you talk to them about that, and how do you support them through that? And so there’s not much training that you get in nutrition or in just helping people make dietary or lifestyle changes. So that’s where lifestyle medicine comes in. 

So lifestyle medicine started in 2004 with the American College of Lifestyle Medicine, and then they opened up to where they have now the American Board of Lifestyle Medicine and then the International Board of Lifestyle Medicine. You can become board certified in lifestyle medicine. And the difference really is between how it functions. So conventional medicine is really focused on you have a patient who comes to you, you diagnose the disease, and then you write a prescription or let them know that they need to have a certain surgery for that disease process. Really, it’s the doctor who’s in charge and says, here’s what I recommend you do. Go pick up these pills and start doing it. Whereas lifestyle medicine, although is also evidence-based and based in research, really looks at where does this disease come from. How can we reverse it? By stopping the things that are causing it to continue. And a lot of that has to do with lifestyle and especially diet. 

So if we can help people change their lifestyles and then make it to where those diseases no longer exist, that’s lifestyle medicine. We help people get off medications. Now, this approach is a little bit more difficult for the patient because it’s not as easy as picking up a prescription. You are changing your lifestyle, and that takes a lot because there’s a lot of social influence. There are traditions. It’s just the way that you’ve been your entire life, you’ve grown up this way, and this is the way that you live. And so making that change is pretty big for a lot of people. But that’s where lifestyle medicine allows us to learn how to go about helping people through that transition.

Dr. Niki Davis

Now, the six pillars of lifestyle medicine I kind of mentioned already, but number one, absolutely a whole food plant-based diet. And I think we know that already. That is definitely with the research that we have the best way to live your longest healthiest life. In addition to that, physical activity, stress management, emotional wellness, getting enough sleep, getting quality sleep, so important, avoiding risky substances like tobacco and even alcohol, and then positive psychology and social connectedness. And I know with social connectedness, we’re all lacking on that with things with the pandemic. So this is what I wanted to mention that I’m going to be talking about today. 

So it’s so important that when you are going to be eating, when you are looking at weight loss, that you look at a whole food plant-based diet. Okay, first thing I want to talk about is what is a healthy goal weight. So some people will say, I know I need to lose some weight, but we need to make sure that it is done in a healthy way. The other thing I want to talk about is just what does obesity look like in America today? Is it getting better? Is it getting worse? And then we’ll talk about oils. And that inevitably lets us talk about calorie density and nutrient density. We’ll talk about that. I’m going to talk a little bit about carbs versus fats, because right now it seems that there’s a lot of controversy about a low carb diet or low fat diet. What does the evidence really show? So we’ll talk about that. 

And then I’m going to finish off with kind of some tips and tricks on how to make this way of eating a little bit easier, how to deal without having oil. And then at the end, I really wanted to just mention how to go about, if you’re making this transition and you’re trying to either transition to a whole food plant-based diet or if you’re already eating a vegan diet and you’re trying to get rid of oils, how to plan for periods in which you have a hard time sticking to it. So we’ll talk about that. All right, so now I want to just talk about a healthy goal weight. So you might already know that you might be someone who’s looking at losing weight, but to know what your true goal should really be and then how fast you should be losing the weight.

So when we talk about BMI, you’ll hear that thrown around a lot. We’re talking about body mass index and I have the actual calculation that looks at your weight and height and gives you a number. Now, a BMI is not a perfect way to measure your weight. It’s not great for short people or people who have a lot of muscle mass, but for the most part, it does a pretty good job. So what we do know is that when we’re looking at a BMI, if you have a BMI between about 19 and 25, that’s considered normal, 25 to about 30 is overweight, and then over 30, you’d be considered obese. Now what we know is that the lower your BMI in that normal range, the better. So it seems that you have lower risk of chronic disease or disease in general when you have a lower body mass index between 19 and 22. So when I first talked to people who are looking to lose weight, I’ll say our goal really is we want to get you under 25 into that normal range. But ultimately, if we can get you below 22, that’s even better. 

Now, having said that, we have to be careful because we don’t want to lose weight too quickly. So losing weight too quickly can do a couple of things. It can cause you to have loose skin because your body just can’t keep up with that weight loss and you can get a lot of loose skin from that. The other thing that it does is sometimes you can reach a plateau where you have a hard time losing weight, because if you’re losing weight too quickly, your body reacts to that and your body is thinking, what is going on in my environment that’s causing you to lose weight so quickly? There must be something going on. I’m starving, there’s no access to food, something like that, to where your body says, hold on, we need to prepare for the worst, and let’s hang on to this weight. So sometimes you can get some weight plateau if you are trying to lose weight too quickly, too fast. 

So I tell people a healthy weight loss goal is about one to 2 pounds per week. And I don’t really like when people are weighing themselves too much. I think weighing yourself every day can be detrimental unless you really don’t mind looking at the numbers. And you love looking at the numbers all the time, but your weight goes up and down and so the most I would want people to weigh would be about once a week. And I think that gives you a good view of where you’re going. And if you have a goal of one to 2 pounds a week, then you can just check every week if you’re trying to lose weight that way.

Now, why do we care about being overweight or obese? Well, we care because it increases your risk of a lot of different things, like high blood pressure, heart disease, colon cancer, strokes. You can have hyperlipidemia, which is high cholesterol, diabetes. Just by being overweight or obese, it increases your likelihood of dying from cancer, infertility kidney disease, mood disorders, sleep apnea, even dementia. So we do care about people who are overweight and obese because it increases your risk of all these other things. So it’s just not a healthy state of being. 

Now, obesity in America, unfortunately, is getting worse. We can see that since the 1960s, it’s steadily increasing. It used to be that only about one in every ten adults were obese and now we’re almost one in two. So it’s definitely getting worse. And I don’t see it improving anytime soon unless we can keep talking to people about what we’re talking about today and keep sharing this information. So why are people becoming more and more obese and more and more overweight? Well, the standard American diet. Not only is it full of animal products that are full of cholesterol, saturated fat, devoid of fiber, and really devoid of nutrients, we’re talking about a diet that’s also really heavy and high fat, high oil. That is the problem. And we’ve seen this, over the years, people are eating more and more meat, they’re eating more and more cheese. And this is trending right along with our obesity epidemic. Right now, the average American gets about 33 pounds of cheese per year, which is about 60,000 calories per year.

Dr. Niki Davis

So let’s talk about macronutrients. So if you don’t know what macronutrients are, there are three main macronutrients that humans need. We all need carbohydrates, we all need fat and we all need protein. Problem is, we seem to be getting different levels of these than what we evolved to need. So carbohydrates is usually found in plant foods. You get complex carbohydrates or simple carbohydrates if you’re looking at more of a processed carbohydrate. Fat, so fat is something that is something we need. It’s in all plants, we need to get fat, but you just need so little. And unfortunately, we found a way to put a lot of fat into a lot of our meals in America. So we’re getting way, way too much fat. I mean, a lot of Americans are getting 30%, 40%, 50% of their calories from fat, where if you eat a predominantly whole food, plant-based diet, you really should only be getting about 10%. 

Protein is another thing. So you’ll notice that when people go vegan, if someone doesn’t really know a lot about the diet, they’re going to ask immediately, where are you getting the protein? Well, protein is found in all living things, and that includes all plants. So you’re getting protein every time you eat a plant. And most Americans are probably even getting too much protein. People are really worried about getting enough protein, but the World Health Organization even says that we only need .5 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight. Now, if you’re an endurance athlete, you’re doing a lot of weight training, you’re going to need to probably double or triple that. But for most people, that’s a very small amount and most plant eaters get about two times the recommended daily. So you’re getting plenty of protein. 

So what we need to find is the balance between how much carbohydrates, how much fat, and how much protein that we’re getting. And I would say that most people need way more carbohydrates, way more fiber, a lot less fat, and probably a little bit less protein. This is a very common graphic that Forks Over Knives put out. And this just is kind of a good way to look at what does 500 calories looks like. So we’re talking about calorie density, which calorie density is really just a measure of the amount of calories in a given weight of food. And they express that in calories per pound.

So this is really helpful because you can see that if you are eating a huge plate of vegetables, 500 calories worth, you’re going to fill up your entire stomach, whereas you take that same amount of calories in oil, you’re not filling up your stomach at all. You’re not helping satiate. You’re not helping curb your appetite. You’re basically just getting calories for really no benefit. And as you see, cheese, so high in fat, it’s also very calorie-dense. And you’re not going to get very much as far as filling up your stomach with that. Meat products are very similar. Now as you start getting more into the plant-based foods, you’re going to get more and more bulk, more nutrition. You’re going to fill up your stomach more with much fewer calories. And this is just kind of a weight loss key where you can look at calorie density of a lot of typical foods. 

So, for instance, we’re talking about vegetables. So about 100 calories per pound in just non starchy vegetables. So if you’re looking above this green line, you’re saying, oh, these are all plant foods. Plant foods are very calorie dilute. Whereas if you’re looking below the red line, much more calorie dense. And that includes some higher fat plant foods like avocados that are a little bit more calorically dense. Lean meats even are going to be in the 1000 calories per pound range. Higher fat animal foods, more like 1500 calories per pound. 

And then if you look at the very bottom, all oils. So oil is 4000 calories per pound, the most calorie dense food on the planet. So you might be someone who’s convinced that, okay, eating a whole food plant-based diet really makes sense for weight loss, definitely. But are oils is really that bad? I heard that oils can be healthy. They’re good for your heart. But if you look at this, just looking at calorie density alone, oil is right there at the bottom, the most calorie dense food on the planet. So it’s not going to be helping weight loss, definitely.

So what is the ugly truth about oils? So when I talk about oils, yes, I’m talking about the olive oil that you get in a jar. But I’m also talking about things that are mostly oil, like margarine and butters that are made out of oil and basically solidified, even animal lard. It’s basically oil, it’s fat from an animal. There are all kinds of oils out there. Olive oil, corn oil, hemp seed oil, flax oil. I’ve actually been asked this before, if you had to choose an oil, which one would be the best? And there’s no answer. None of these oils are going to be health promoting. 

They are processed, first of all, highly processed. In order to get oil, you have to strip it out of a whole plant food. So what are you doing when you strip the oil out? Well, you’re just taking just the fat out, right. And you’re leaving all the good stuff behind. You’re leaving the fiber, the nutrients, minerals, all of those good things. There’s a reason why nature packages things perfectly. So if you really want to get the benefits from a certain oil, like an avocado oil, just eat the avocado. Right? Because then you’re getting the oil and you are getting that avocado fat that is in there. But you’re also getting those other things that you are meant to get with that kind of a food that helps buffer the oil. 

If the oil is just going straight into your bloodstream, that’s really pro inflammatory, whereas if it’s buffered with all the other things that it’s meant to have with it, like fiber, it’s a lot easier on the system to be able to take in that fat. As I said, oil is 100% pure liquid fat. 100% of the calories come from fat. There are different kinds of fats that come in oils like saturated, you get monounsaturated, polyunsaturated, really harmful to your arteries, like I mentioned, and no nutrients.

Dr. Niki Davis

Now one thing that’s interesting is there has been some research done where they were able to see what a high-fat meal does to the dilation of your blood vessels. So your blood vessels are moving in and out all the time. So for instance, if you’re being chased by a bear and you need more blood to get down to your muscles so that you can run faster and get that oxygen to your muscles, your arteries are going to dilate really big. What happens when you have a high-fat meal, especially if you’re having a lot of oil in that meal? We now know that your ability to dilate those vessels goes down and it reduces your blood flow, the blood flow mediated dilation, which I was just mentioning by over 30% for 4 hours. So it lasts a long time. So even having that one meal, if you start your day with eggs and toast with some butter, even vegan butter on it, now, you’ve caused your arteries, your vessels to not be able to dilate for 4 hours. That’s a big deal. And if you keep doing it for every single meal, your body is in a constant state of not being able to work in its best form until you’re sleeping basically. 

We do know that oils also suppress the immune system. They contribute to insulin resistance. So that’s something where we know now that with diabetes, people who are insulin resistant, meaning the insulin that your pancreas creates and puts through your blood system, your cells are not able to use that insulin. And we know that a lot of that has to do with the amount of fat that is in your cells. And it’s called intramyocellular lipids. So it just makes it more difficult for yourself to recognize the insulin that would allow the glucose out of your blood system into the cells. And that’s what is really behind the type two epidemic and people developing type two diabetes. 

This is a small video. I’m not sure if this is going to work, but let’s just see if this might work. I’m not sure if it’s going to, but I’m just going to tell you what this video is, and you can copy it down and do it on YouTube. But basically what this video is, unfortunately is on mouse models, but looking at a high fat meal and how that affects blood flow. And so they looked at the capillaries of mice and fed them a high fat meal. And they were able to look to see before they were fed the high fat meal how quickly the red blood cells were moving through the capillaries. And you can see them just moving through very quickly like they’re supposed to, rushing through there very easily. And then once the mice was at a high fat meal, now you’re seeing the same red blood cells trudging along very slowly trying to get through the capillaries. And in this specific study that was done, they found that it didn’t go back to normal for another 8 hours. So your red blood cells are slowing down. Your arteries aren’t able to dilate. So all these different things that we’re starting to see that if you’re eating a high fat meal, it’s not doing your body any good. And certainly oil is, like you said, one of the highest fat foods on the planet.

Now why do people think that olive oil is healthy? First of all, it’s mostly monounsaturated fats, which are not essential. That just means that you do not need to get those through the diet. Your body has that already. So it’s not something that you need to eat. Now there are two types of fatty acids that you do need to get from your diet that you cannot create in your body, and that’s Omega Three and Omega Six. Now, these fats are interesting because when I say Omega Three, most of you are going to say, well, Omega Three has come from fish. Have some fish oil or eat some fish, but really where the Omega Threes come from are the algae, the leafy grains that the fish are eating. So the fish are not creating their own Omega Three. They cannot do that either. They are eating it and then you’re eating the fish with fish oil to get those omegas. So it makes more sense to get your omegas through a plant source just like the fish do. 

Now, omegas are very important. They contribute to brain function and the need of omega is actually quite small. What I tell my patients is one tablespoon of ground flax a day give you your daily amount. You don’t need a whole lot. It’s really difficult to become fatty acid deficient in the general population unless you’re already calorie deficient and malnourished. 

Now just to give you a little comparison… so to get your daily Omega Three from, say, olive oil, you’d have to drink one cup of olive oil a day. That’s 1900 calories or 30 grams of fat. Or you could have one tablespoon of ground flaxseeds. Now one other thing that people will say about oils or olive oils is that you’re going to get these polyphenols, these antioxidants, but those are also found in plant foods. You do not need to get the oils in order to get those beautiful antioxidants. They exist in the plant foods and whatever’s in the oil is just something that luckily, once they strip that oil out, stays with the oil a little bit. 

But you’re going to get so many more by eating that whole food. By eating that whole plant food, you’re going to get more nutrients, fewer calories and less fat, as opposed to just having the oil from that plant. For instance, the same amount of polyphenols are found in four lettuce Leafs, which gives you about twelve calories or one tablespoon of olive oil, which is about 120 calories. So ten times the amount of calories. If you’re looking for those antioxidants, you do not need to be drowning your arteries and oil.

Dr. Niki Davis

So the question now is how do we get rid of oil in our diet? A lot of people are used to cooking with oil, using oil in recipes. So I would say the number one thing is you just got to get it out of your house. Don’t even have it available. If you want to give it to a neighbor who you don’t like, I wouldn’t say give it to family members who you love because it’s not going to do anything good for them. But get it out of your house so that you don’t even have the ability to use it in your cooking anymore. 

Cooking without oil is actually really easy, so there are different ways that you can go about it. I personally like to use really good nonstick pans, ceramic pans, pots and pans so that things just don’t stick. I have had no problem making hash browns that are really nice and crispy and brown up perfectly on a nonstick pan. And I don’t need to use any oil. 

Another thing that I’ve heard that people will do is use a stainless steel pan. If you heat it up enough to where water becomes kind of like a little ball and rolls around on the top of it, then you can cook on that without worrying about things sticking. Instead of oil, so if you want to saute vegetables, using vegetable broth or water works great. If you’re wanting to do some baking, like making a plant-based muffin or something like that, instead of oil, you can use applesauce. And the great thing is nowadays this is becoming something that a lot of people are doing. And it’s really easy to find recipes that do not call for oil that are also plant-based.

The other thing that I love is air frying. I have an air fryer, and one of the things that I love to make our french fries. So I cut up potatoes, pop them in there, and they’re just nice and crispy and delicious. And you’re not drowning them in oil and increasing the caloric density of those gorgeous potatoes. 

One thing you have to be careful is eating out. So I started my journey, as you know, as someone who is more of a comfort food vegan. And man, was it great when these vegan restaurants started coming out and finally go and eat somewhere. But unfortunately, most vegan restaurants, they use a lot of oil, they use a lot of sugar, a lot of salt. So they’re not health food restaurants. It’s more difficult to find a restaurant where it’s not only plant-based, whole food, plant-based, but also oil-free. So you just have to be careful of that. 

However, a lot of restaurants you’ll find do have some options. One of my favorite things to do is just get steamed to veggies with rice. A lot of restaurants will do that, especially Asian restaurants, they will do brown rice, steamed veggies, and that’s really all you need. As long as you’ve got your own sauce that you can either bring or take your food home and use that. Even like a baked potato, you can get a baked potato as long as they don’t put any butter on it right? You don’t need all the sour cream or the butter, topping it with salsa and cut up onions and tomatoes can be delicious. 

One of the things that I will even say to people when I go into a restaurant is that my doctor put me on 100% no oil diet. I can’t even have a drop. I can’t have any. So please don’t put that in my food. And I’ve told my patients you can say that so that people take a little bit more seriously because inevitably you can order a meal without oil and come back and it looks a little bit shiny and it makes you wonder if they actually made it the way that you want it to be. I put a list on here of people who either have websites, books, cooking demos, YouTube shows that are whole food plant-based and also oil-free recipes. So this is just one that I would say that if you can copy these down, these would be really good places to go. Of course, Chef AJ is included. Kathy Fisher has a great book, Dr. McDougall, of course, oil-free. So these are just some places that you could go to find some good oil-free plant-based recipes and things.

Dr. Niki Davis

We talked a little bit about calorie density, so I just wanted to mention nutrient density and what that really means. So inevitably, foods that are lower in calories, calorie dilute are also the foods that are higher in nutrients. So that’s the great thing is when you’re looking at trying to eat foods that do not have as many calories, you get more bulk with fewer calories. You’re also getting a lot more nutrients. So you’re just automatically going to get more nutrients when you’re eating a more calorie dilute diet. 

So what are the best things that are really high nutrients? Well, starchy vegetables, potatoes, corn, beans, rice grains, non starchy vegetables, fruits and legumes. Now if you are eating all of these things, there is no reason that you need to be counting calories. You don’t need to be weighing your food. Portion control. I still have some patients that will come to me and say, I just feel like I’m eating too much. I’m worried that it’s going to make me gain weight again. And I know it’s a hard thing to get over because a lot of us for most of our lives have been worried about this. How many calories am I taking in? Am I eating too much? I shouldn’t have a snack right now. And really at the end of the day, if you are eating the right foods, the beauty is you don’t need to worry about that anymore. When you’re hungry, you eat you eat a lot of food, a lot of delicious food, and then you stop when you’re full. And that’s really all you have to worry about. And it’s really a great way to live.

So I want to talk a little bit about carbs versus fats because so many people are doing low carb diets. And I wanted to just mention so it’s very difficult for your body to convert carbs or sugars into fat. Your carbs that you take in that are in excess of what you need, your daily energy needs are usually stored in your muscles and liver, about two to 3 pounds worth. And really, your body does not like to store carbohydrate or sugar at fat. It is very metabolically inefficient, so it’s about 30% of calories consumed. So if the amount of calories you’re consuming of, say, those carbohydrates, it would take about 30% of those calories that you just consumed to make that sugar turn into fat. 

So your body does not like to be inefficient. That is one thing that your body tries to do is be as efficient as possible, use those calories as needed. So what happens when you get too many calories or too much carbohydrate than your daily energy needs? Well, usually it’s just burned off as heat, so that just happens naturally throughout the day. Your body does have the ability to transition sugar into fat. Some animals can do this more efficiently, like cows. Humans just aren’t that good at it. Now, the interesting thing, the flip of that is that when you have dietary fat, so fat in your diet, your body really easily stores that it very easily takes that fat and stores it’s only about 3% of the calories it consumes that it takes to just take that food, that fat from your mouth to just put it into your body. So your body would much prefer to take the fat and store it on your body because it’s more efficient than to take sugar and try to change it into fat.

This is a study that was done between 2002 and 2006, and it was the Adventist Health Study 2. And the reason I bring this up is because it really ultimately is looking at different vegan diets. So vegan diet, vegetarian diet, meat diet. But ultimately it’s also looking at low fat versus high fat, because when you are eating a fully vegan diet, most of the time you’re eating a lower fat, higher carbohydrate diet than someone who’s eating a very high animal food diet, they’re getting a lot more fat. So what we found was that out of the 60,000 participants that were aged around 30 and above that their body mass index, like we talked about earlier, just tends to be lower in people who eat more vegan, more plant foods, less animal foods, lower fat, higher carbohydrates. 

A couple of other really interesting studies. So this first one, the National Institute of Health study that was in 2015. So this is one where they took people who were the average age was about 35 and the average BMI was about 36. They did not have diabetes. And what they did was they took these people and actually took them into a center where they stayed, so that these researchers were able to see exactly what they were eating, how much energy they were expending. And what they did was they took each of these participants and they had them come for two weeks at a time and they had them do that twice. So two weeks, some time in between. And then they came back for another two weeks. And for each of these two weeks, what they did was in the beginning, they had them eat what they call the balanced diet. And then at the end of the two weeks, the last half of it, they would have them decrease the amount of calories that they were eating by 30% on one of the two wheat stents. What they did was they decreased that 30% by either decreasing only by carbohydrate, and the other two weeks was decreasing only by fat. So they either decreased the amount of calories by 30% fat or 30% carbohydrate. 

And it was an interesting study because what they found was that people did lose weight when they decreased their caloric intake by 30%. But the people who decreased it by decreasing those calories from fat, they ended up losing 60% more weight. And this was a really interesting study because even though it was small, it was only about 20 people. It was one where they actually could have people in a facility and watch them as opposed to trusting people’s records from home of what they’re eating, what they’re consuming, what they’re doing. So it’s really interesting to see this true comparison between fat intake and carb intake. 

The other study is the Veterans Administration study. And that one was really interesting because what they did was they took veterans and they had them record what kinds of fat they were eating. So whether those fats came mostly from animal foods, maybe fish foods, plant foods, even plant oils, and then every four months they would take a sample of fat from their behind and they would look at it and they would see what kind of fats are in there. 

And sure enough, the types of fats that they were eating, whether that was more saturated fat, more polyunsaturated fat, that’s the type of fat that they were seeing in their cells. So it just truly shows that the type of fat you’re eating, your body very easily takes that fat and stores it on your body, it doesn’t really change much.

Dr. Niki Davis

We also know based on research that for satiety just feeling full, feeling satisfied with what you’ve eaten, that carbohydrates tend to lead to more long term satiety. So if you think about a big bowl of mashed potatoes, right, they’re very satiating. They last you, help you stay full for a very long amount of time. Whereas it seems that fats in a meal really have little impact on satiety, you just don’t feel fat or sorry, you don’t feel full for long. 

This was another study. So this was the McDougall program where he published a study where they looked at a low fat diet, which they do during their ten day programs that they used to do in person in Santa Rosa. And their fat percentage was less than 10% because it’s all whole plant foods and they do not allow for any oils in the program. And they also very high carbohydrates, so it’s starch based, so you’re getting at least 80% of your calories from carbohydrates, so 80% carbohydrate about 10% from fat, so another 10% of protein. And that’s about the ratio that I think works best for most people who are whole food, plant-based, very moderate sodium, all you can eat. 

And believe me, I’ve been there, I’ve done the program and people are going back for seconds and thirds. And the median weight loss over those ten days is 3 pounds. So they do really well with eating a huge amount of food that is very low in fat, with weight loss

One thing that helps me kind of continue eating this way is really keeping things simple. I don’t make a lot of complicated recipes. I honestly just don’t have the time. And I really enjoy eating simple meals. Something like what I have pictured here is a very typical meal that we will have. It’s just barley and broccoli that’s been steamed. And we will either do some no oil seasoning over the top, some low sodium soy sauce. There are so many sauces out there that are available now that are plant-based and low and fat, you can choose a starch. So here it’s the barley, veggie, broccoli and then just the dressing over the top. And it’s nice because it’s something that’s really easy to put together and you can eat it over and over again. You really don’t need to get too complicated. 

Some other tips and tricks, so if you’re looking at weight loss, I’ll tell people, start your meal with a salad. So it’s really important to try to get as many greens as you can every day, all day. So however you can get those greens in. And if you can start your meals with a green salad, you’re actually going to take in fewer calories. So if you preload your meal, let’s say 100 calories of low fat greens, you can actually decrease the total caloric intake of your main meal by 200 calories. So you’re eating 100 calories before your meal, but then you’re taking in 200 calories less of the main meal, which means that you’re actually taking in 100 calories fewer in total. So you’re getting a net negative effect by just starting your meals with a salad. 

You want to make sure that your label reading. So calories from fat, if you’re looking at a label, should not be more than 20% and 20% is actually quite high. I would prefer people to stay down below 15% and of course 10% would be great. Limiting salt, so studies do show that you will eat more food if you have salt on your food, it tastes a little bit better and you’re going to eat more. So if you’re looking at not trying to overdo it and stuff yourself and not feel good and get bloated, maybe limiting salt is a good idea.

So the last thing I wanted to talk about is just planning. So when you’re eating this way, no one is perfect. And you’ve got a kind of plan for when you fall off the wagon when you have a meal that made you feel crappy that you just wish that you hadn’t done. So knowing that you’re human, right, you are going to have things that come up and you’re going to eat something that you wish you hadn’t, and that’s okay. But if you have a plan in place for when that happens, you know that’s going to happen, then you’re much more likely to continue this way of eating in the long term. 

So I am using a couple of different terms here. So a lapse, a lapse is really a short term period when an action sign is not followed. That just means, okay, you’re whole food plant-based, no oil. And then you went to a party and someone had a vegan dip that had oil in it and you had some of that. And that is just a short lapse. And maybe for you, you did okay, and you didn’t fall back off the wagon after doing that. That’s usually really easy to address because you’re still continuing the way that you’re eating. It’s just a small lapse. And for a lot of people, that’s okay, you can do that occasionally. 

A relapse really is where it’s sustained period, where you’ve really just said, all right, you know what? The holidays were horrible. I just ended up eating whatever all my family was eating. And I’m done. I’m not doing this anymore. Now. That’s really important because that absolutely can happen. Making a plan for when might that happen? Does this happen when I’m around certain people? Does this happen when I’m at certain places? How will I notice when a lapse becomes a relapse when I’m starting to go into that? And who do I turn to? So this almost kind of sounds like what you talk to people about, like quitting smoking or quitting drinking. 

But it is true, you’re making such a big change with your lifestyle that it’s not always easy in the beginning. And so having a plan forward sometimes helps with that. And I’ll even have people write out a list of answering some of these questions so that they kind of have it in their mind as to what they will do when they are faced in certain situations, like when they are invited to go to a party that they know is not going to have food for them. Well, maybe their plan involves, I’m always going to bring something to share that I know I can have. Or maybe it involves bringing a friend with you who is plant-based, who will help you stay in line. So things like that, there are also some other tools that you can use. So there’s a really good support group called the Plant-based Nutrition Support Group, that if you don’t have a lot of people who are supportive of your way of eating, finding those people online might be a really great way to kind of stick with this. If you have any family or friends that are eating this way, really reaching out to them and staying in contact with them so you have that support. 

I put on here to establish a relapse reminder and backup plan. So, for instance, maybe it’s just checking in with a certain person. I have some people who will send every week to a friend of theirs, hey this is how I did this week, this is what I at and I’m feeling great and I lost a pound and really just like having kind of that back up with that person so that you have good support that way. And so that’s really what I think can be helpful when you’re trying to make this transition. 

Ultimately, I want you to be patient with yourself. It’s not easy. Making a huge change in your lifestyle isn’t easy. Losing weight isn’t easy, but a lot of us have been through that, and it is something that’s possible. Voltaire has a good quote that says, perfect is the enemy of good. So if you’re trying for perfection, sometimes that can hinder just good enough. And for some people, transitioning slowly makes a lot of sense for them. I’ll have people who are eating a standard American diet, and I say, why don’t we just start with breakfast? Just have a plant-based breakfast and see how you do for a couple of weeks. And if that goes well, maybe try to do a plant-based lunch and transition more slowly. For some people, that works really well.

Dr. Niki Davis

Now remember that this way of eating is meant to be a way of living. It’s not a diet. It’s meant to be you are actually changing your lifestyle to a new lifestyle so that it becomes second nature. But it’s not something that you have to worry about every day. But ultimately, when you get into the groove of the typical foods that you enjoy, the people that you associate with and hang out with and once you get into that position, it really becomes a lot easier when you’ve gotten through that. And remember, just eating the right foods, you don’t have to portion control, calorie count. Carbs are definitely not the enemy. We know that most people are just not getting enough carbohydrates. Carbohydrates are not the bad guy. And ultimately, it’s just so important to find your support system in your community, which is why I love that we’re doing this today. 

So this is my information. You’ve got my website there. I am available for telehealth appointments@plantbasedtlehealth.com, and then on social media, you can find me at Nikki Davis, MD. So thank you so much.

Chef AJ

Wow. Thank you so much, Dr. Davis. I took a bunch of notes and one of the things that I just want to clarify, and if you’d like, you can stop screen sharing so that we can see your beautiful face.

Dr. Niki Davis

Yeah, absolutely.

Chef AJ

Is it really true that four lettuce Leafs, which have twelve calories, have the same amount of Omega Three or the fatty acids as one tablespoon of olive oil?

Dr. Niki Davis

Well, we were talking about the antioxidants. Yeah. So absolutely. The polyphenols. A lot of people are interested in getting antioxidants. And the reason I brought that up is because some people will say, well, don’t I need to get some oil so that I can get those healthy antioxidants? And that’s where I say, no, you don’t need that. You can get that from a very calorie diluted food, such as a lettuce leaf. You don’t need to have a tablespoon of olive oil to get that.

Chef AJ

Wow. People say, well, what about for my skin? I have dry skin, but you don’t eat oil because you have dry skin. Right?

Dr. Niki Davis

Right. Yeah. And I would say that for the most part, when people come to me because they have dry skin, it’s because they’re not hydrated enough. It comes down to water. We need to drink water more and more water.

Chef AJ

Right. Speaking of drinking water, what about alcohol? Does that play a role in a healthy diet, especially if one is desirous of weight loss?

Dr. Niki Davis

Yeah, I’m one of those that I don’t think that any amount of alcohol is healthy. It is not something that grows on a tree. It’s not something you can dig out of the ground. It’s something that is made. It’s something that is processed. And we just know too much about it. Now you’re increasing your risk of breast cancer. Even if you have one glass of wine a day, it’s just not worth it. So that’s where I like, you know, you can find things that when you’re out and you are in a social situation in which people are drinking alcohol and you can find other things, have a fun glass, put in some sparkling apple cider, something else that doesn’t have alcohol in it, because really any amount just isn’t healthy.

Chef AJ

It seems like the social aspect might be the hardest thing for people when it comes to changing their lifestyle.

Dr. Niki Davis

Yes, absolutely. That is definitely one of the things that is the most difficult. And I think finding that support group however you can, whether it’s in your own house, whether it’s your neighbor or whether it’s online, really finding that community is really helpful in continuing to eat this way and do well with this lifestyle.

Chef AJ

I think people have a hard time believing a lot of people understand the oil being I don’t even know why we call it a food, honestly, because when you take the fiber out in the water out and the nutrients out, to me, we shouldn’t be calling it a food. But a lot of people understand that oil is not a health food. And at least I’m sure they understand it’s calorically dense but then they’re still worried, oh well a low fat diet, you know I need a lot of nuts and seeds but you’re saying a tablespoon of flaxseed is sufficient for most people.

Dr. Niki Davis

Yeah. Yeah. You definitely do not need to be getting the extra oils. The nuts and seeds, if you think about it, we didn’t used to have access to all these high fat plant foods all the time. You’d be lucky if you found a nut tree that you could go and spend a couple of hours and get three nuts out of. Right? And so finding these huge jars from Costco that are just these nuts that have been deshelled are covered in salt, covered in oil. It’s just not natural. It’s not good for you. 

And yes, we do need to get those omegas, but you can get those a lot of different ways, not just in nuts and seeds. Like I said, you can eat a lot of really good leafy greens and you’re going to get a lot of omegas that way, even if you’re not getting any leafy greens at all. Like I said. Yeah. One tablespoon of ground flax a day is going to get you plenty.

Chef AJ

Have you or any of your colleagues at plant-based telehealth ever seen a patient that was fatty acid deficient?

Dr. Niki Davis

Never.

Chef AJ

Dr. McDougall said the same thing.

Dr. Niki Davis

It’s really difficult. It really is. So, yeah, it’s not something that you need to really be concerned with.

Chef AJ

Right. What about coconut? Because that’s been the rage for a while, coconut oil.

Dr. Niki Davis

Coconut oil, oh my gosh. Well, if I had to raise oils from worst to best, that might be on more of the worst side. And you think, well, how can it be the worst? It’s a plant, right? But coconut is so high in saturated fat, it’s about 90% saturated fat, which is normally the kind of fat that you find in animal products. And that’s why eating a plant-based diet is so healthful, because you’re not getting all that saturated fat that you normally are getting from meat and dairy and eggs. Yeah, absolutely.

Chef AJ

I know Dr. McDougall says they came in hard shells for a reason. I remember in culinary school just learning how to open one, I mean it takes a herculean effort. So you mentioned to be patient and that weight loss may be one or 2 pounds a week, but a lot of people are looking for faster weight loss. So they’ll do something like a keto diet where they’ll lose. I don’t think they’re losing fat, but the scale seems to go down quicker. Could you maybe address why that’s not really a healthful way to lose weight?

Dr. Niki Davis

Yeah. So a keto diet, you’re going to be losing some of that glycogen that we’re talking about, that is stored your liver and your muscles, it is two to three pounds worth. So that’s one of the first things you’re going to lose. So you’ll quickly lose some weight there. You’re also going to lose some water weight and you might actually lose some weight. But what we find is that it seems to increase people’s risks of having problems down the road of chronic disease still, even if you’re losing the weight. I have had some patients come to me saying I tried the keto diet, and although I did lose some weight, my cholesterol either didn’t budge or it got worse. So we know that the keto diet, although, yes, can be used for weight loss, everything else that you get from weight loss by eating a plant-based diet you’re not getting. 

So with the keto diet yet, you’re losing weight, but you’re still increasing your risk of heart disease, you’re still increasing your risk of having high cholesterol, diabetes, high blood pressure. Although it can be a tool used for weight loss, it’s just not a healthy tool. Eating plants is just so much easier and so much nicer, so much more fun. I heard patients just saying how horrible it is being on a keto diet that gets disgusting at some point, it gets repulsive.

Chef AJ

And you wonder really, how sustainable is it because they always seem to have to have cheat days. We don’t have to have cheap days because our diet every day is a treat day.

Dr. Niki Davis

Yes, I agree.

Chef AJ

Yeah. You know the people that are really fans of these processed oils, that coconut oil or olive oil, what I don’t understand is if there is something that’s really beneficial in the olive oil, in the flax oil, in the coconut oil, wouldn’t it also be in the whole food from which it came from?

Dr. Niki Davis

Yeah, absolutely. Basically, what you’re doing is not only you’re stripping away all the good stuff, the fiber, the nutrients and everything. But if you think about it, in order to get the small amount of oil, so let’s say it’s an olive oil, you’ve got this gigantic amount of olives that you have to now process into this small amount of oil. Why not just eat an olive or two? If you really think that you’re getting those benefits, you’re still going to get that oil. You’re just going to get a much smaller amount. And it’s going to be in that beautiful package that has all the other good things.

Chef AJ

And olives tastes a lot better than olive oil.

Dr. Niki Davis

Oh, yeah. I remember my husband had like a physical trainer one time that was saying you should drink an ounce of oil every morning. And he said it was just so disgusting. Well, there’s a reason that you find it disgusting. It’s not a human food. It just doesn’t make sense.

Chef AJ

I don’t think it’s a food for any species.

Dr. Niki Davis

No, definitely not for any species. I agree.

Chef AJ

And I have to say, the people I’ve worked with and I bet in your patients, too, even if people didn’t want to go all the way when they just stopped oil, the weight loss really starts to happen. And I couldn’t believe you said in the NIH study, the people lost 60% more weight.

Dr. Niki Davis

With just the same amount of calories, right? And so we hear that calories in calories out, but we know that the type of calories really does matter. It really does.

Chef AJ

I’d love to get a link to that study to share it with viewers because maybe seeing will be believing.

Dr. Niki Davis

Yes. Absolutely.

Chef AJ

So, Dr. Davis, what is the real truth about weight loss?

Dr. Niki Davis

The truth about weight loss, I would say, is a healthy lifestyle which includes a whole food food plant-based diet free of processed oils.

Chef AJ

That is well said. Thank you so much, Dr. Davis.

Dr. Niki Davis

Absolutely happy to be here.

Chef AJ

Hi, Dr. Li. And welcome to The Truth About Weight Loss Summit. Thank you so much for being here. I’m so excited to talk to you.

Dr. William Li

Thanks, Chef AJ, always a pleasure to speak to you.

Chef AJ

Dr. Li, you wrote a wonderful bestselling book called Eat to Beat Disease. But I think a lot of people, when they eat, they’re not even thinking about beating disease, but they’re actually eating in a way that’s causing them to gain weight. And I’m wondering if you could maybe address what foods we need to eat to beat obesity.

Dr. William Li

That is such a great question. And it’s something that I’ve been very actively researching for the last few years. In fact, since my last book, because when I wrote my book, Eat To Beat Disease. What I was writing about is how the body actually responds positively to the foods that we put inside it. And this really comes from my background as a doctor, as a researcher, and also really as somebody who has been working at the forefront of biotechnologies to find better ways to conquer disease. 

And so really hence the idea of cancer, heart disease, diabetes, many of these other chronic conditions being the targets for pharmaceuticals. What I wound up doing is sort of reeling things back to say rather than treat disease, is there a way we can use the same science used for drug development to be able to study foods that could tackle those diseases as well? 

So literally, food is medicine. Now, I did not write my book with the intent of helping people lose weight, but in the back of my mind, I actually had this recurring thought that maybe I should be, since eating to beat disease doesn’t tell people that they might not gain weight. Right? You eat food, you gain weight. And especially because I have a sort of a liberating way of looking at healthy eating, which is adding more to your system rather than taking it away. And when you think about weight loss, you’re normally thinking about taking away calories, removing foods from your diet.

What happened after I launched my book is I started getting hundreds of emails and social posts telling me not only did my readers feel great, they felt more fit. And I was happy to hear that because that’s what it’s all about. But I was actually stunned when I started to realize people were telling me that they were losing weight as well. 

And so how can you eat and lose weight at the same time? That seems to be a contradiction of terms. But in fact, and that’s what I’m working on now, it’s going to be the topic of my next book that makes total sense. It’s actually in line. You can eat stuff that you love, you can eat the food, and you can actually lose weight at the same time. And so the idea of eating to reduce body fat is actually really kind of a revolution in science right now. So everything that I do is really coming from the perspective of physicians. As doctors, we always need researchers, we always need data. And as a researcher, we’re always asking new questions. And so what’s really quite remarkable is the revision that’s happening in the scientific community about body fat itself. So, yes, we can actually eat to fight our body fat.

Chef AJ

Well, that is certainly good news. And I can’t wait until your book comes out. Let me tell you, I know you’ve done a lot of research since the Covid pandemic started, and it seems that with the pandemic, we’ve seen an increased risk for people with obesity. What do we know about the link between our health defense systems and weight?

Dr. William Li

Right. Well, let’s take a look first at what the health defense systems are. So that really goes back to defining what health actually is. Right? When I was in medical school, I was taught about disease. Define cancer, define heart disease, define diabetes, define Alzheimer’s. You can define everything, and in fact, you can define obesity. 

But then the question that is really vexing is, how do you define health? Most people think, as I used to, that health is the absence of disease. If I’m not sick, I’m healthy. But the reason that I found that to be such a problem, and this is what partly sparked my research, is that if health is the absence of something, you can’t operationally do very much about it. You can’t do something actively to the absence of something else. Right? So the thing that I went into the research on is really figuring out all right, if that’s not true, if you were to turn that inside out, how would you define health? And that’s really where the big surprises were for me. 

Health is not merely the absence of death. It is the result of our bodies health defense systems. It’s the product of that. These are defenses that are actually hardwired in our body, and they formed when we were in our mum’s womb. So when day one, when we were born, these five health defense systems were firing on all cylinders, and they’re going to continue to fire on all cylinders until our very last breath.

What are these five defenses? Number one, it’s called angiogenesis. It’s how our body grows blood vessels, circulation absolutely critical for our health. Number two, our stem cells. That’s right. We actually do regenerate from the inside out, and that helps defend our body even as we age. Number three is our microbiome. Now, much has been made about gut health and the gut microbiome. This system is so powerful, it not only controls our health, our physical health, it controls our emotional and mental health as well. Fourth one is our DNA. Much more than a genetic code. Our DNA is hardwired to protect us from the harms of the environment. Think about the radiation that comes from the sun. Think about the off-gassing from the carpet. Think about the radon that comes from our basement. Our DNA is hardwired to protect us from all those harms. And then, of course, our last and perhaps most timely one is our immune system, because I think every human on the planet has spent the last two and a half years thinking about their immune health. I mean, people that couldn’t even pronounce immunity are now able to talk about Tcells and antibodies as if they were schooled in it. And so these five health defense systems, angiogenesis stem cells, microbiome DNA in our immune system protects us as we go through the journey of life from all kinds of ailments. And they are connected to our body fat.

Chef AJ

That’s incredible. So are all five of these systems correlate with weight in some way?

Dr. William Li

Yes. I’ll give you a couple of examples. So the angiogenesis system is blood vessels. And it turns out that blood vessels are critical for fat to grow. And I used to work in a cancer research lab, and my work involves taking a look at blood vessels that are growing, that tumors hijack in order to get a blood supply for themselves. Without a blood supply, cancer cells are essentially harmless, microscopic. They’re like pimples. Eventually they’ll go away. Our immune system takes care of them. 

But what happens is when these microscopic cancer cells are able to recruit and hijack their own private blood supply, once they’re fed, they will explode in their growth up to 16,000 times in size in only two weeks. So that tells you something about feeding a cancer cell. Now, what’s really interesting is that research has also looked at tumors and say, well, tumors and fat cells actually behave very similarly because they crave a circulation. So anybody who went to medical school, any doctor, can tell you when they were doing their surgical rounds or they were learning their rotations and surgery. And any surgeon can tell you is that when you actually cut into an or cut into a patient, you have to cut through body fat, the fat on the outside, the rind. And once you cut through that and it opens up, it’s got a kind of a yellowish color. But that fat bleeds like you can’t believe. 

And that’s why, as a medical student, we’re always asked to hold the bovie. That’s the kind of the sizzle gun. And we’re actually there trying to cauterize all the blood vessels that are bleeding from the fat. Now, turns out that fat, adipose mass. So a fat cell is an adipocyte. Lots of fat cells, we call them adipose tissue. Lots of adipose tissue is a mass of adipose. So think about an ice flow, a glacier of fat cells. That’s what we want to be able to fight. When people want to do weight loss, they’re often thinking about getting rid of that glacier of fat.

So how do you get to be a glacier of fat? Well, all fat starts as a thin layer, and as we grow up as kids, it’s pretty thin. But actually, that fat gets fed. And when angiogenesis contacts fat and fat stimulates more blood vessels. Those vessels feed the fat cells, and they can start to billow out, balloon, until you wind up getting this iceberg. Now, studies have shown that if you actually inhibit or cut off the blood supply to cancer, you can starve the cancer, and it can’t grow. You can also similarly cut off the blood supply to fat and adipose cells, and you can prevent that iceberg from growing, that glacier from growing, and you can actually even shrink the fat mass. So that’s how one of those health defense systems connected. 

Number two, let’s talk about stem cells. That glacier I was talking about, some of them are actually made out of adipocytes, the glaciers are mostly adipocytes, but inside that keeps it growing. The gift that keeps on giving within this glacier of fat actually are little baby priodipocytes or fat stem cells. Now, stem cells actually come from our body as well. They’re normal. They’re used for repair until they actually go off wild on their own to start dividing and doing all kinds of things, multiplying in ways that we don’t want them to grow. 

So when we actually have fat stem cells that are growing out of control, we got to yoke them back in. We’ve got to get that horse back in the barn. Now, what’s really interesting is you can take a fat stem cell, and you can actually redirect it from becoming grown up fat, which is what you don’t want to tire around the belly. You can redirect it so that it actually becomes something else. And that’s something else, brown fat. So brown fat is good body fat, and brown fat will burn down the bad body fat. 

So stem cells are another one of these triggers. It can go one way or the other. It’s like a train track, right? And the locomotive is coming down the train track. The engineer can switch the train in one direction or switch it to go in the other direction. And that’s what stem cells can actually do.

Microbiome, people who are obese have a different makeup of their microbiome. It looks different. So think about a colony of ants, okay? That’s what the microbiome is like in our gut. Bacteria growing like a colony of ants. Right? Most ants are actually pretty good for the planet, good for the soil. They do a good job. They are part of the ecosystem. And it turns out that the ant colony, the bacteria colony, the ecosystem in our gut looks different if you are obese versus if you are slim. So there is a phenotype or kind of a look, a neighborhood that looks different if you’re obese versus slim. 

We’re trying to figure this out now because it would be great to actually be able to get somebody who has too much weight to have a different ecosystem, a skinnier ecosystem, a slender ecosystem. In fact, here’s an interesting experiment. If you were in a lab and you had an obese mouse, you will actually see that the gut bacteria is very classically the microbiome. On the other hand, if you look at a skinny mouse, slender mouse, you actually can take a look at the gut microbiome, and you actually see that it’s a different ecosystem. 

Here’s what’s crazy. If you were to do a gut microbiome transplant, not a kidney transplant, not a liver transplant, but actually a gut microbiome transplant, what do you do? You go in there and you get a little thimble full of the skinny mouse’s gut bacteria, and you transplant it into the obese mouse. Guess what? That obese mouse will start shedding pounds, not pounds, shedding grams. It’ll start losing weight, and it will start to become skinny. 

Microbiome plays a gigantic role in actually managing weight in ways that we hardly understand. But we now know if you mess up your microbiome, you get further and further and further away from that slender ecosystem.

Dr. William Li

DNA. We know actually when fat cells grow out of control, partly it’s because the DNA is also damaged. It’s kind of like mutant fat. That’s not something we want. And also fat itself a big glacier of fat. All right. Releases a lot of inflammation in the body, which then damages your healthy DNA. That’s the last thing in the world you want. So if you want one good reason to try to get rid of and fight harmful body fat, it’s to protect your own DNA. You wear sunscreen, right? So that does prevent the sun from damaging your DNA. But if you’re wearing basically a wetsuit of body fat that is actually damaging your DNA inside your body, that’s not good. So you won’t actually be able to prevent that. 

And then finally, the immune system is really interesting because, number one, excess body fat is filled with inflammatory cells. So think about, like, a normal beehive being, like, peaceful bees, all kind of getting the honey and feeding the Queen and making little baby bees. So that’s a healthy hive. Not a lot of disruption in there, but actually, when you get inflammatory cells in there, it’s like adding murder wasps inside your peaceful beehive. And all of a sudden, that inflammation makes everything worse, causes mutations, causes angiogenesis, wakes up those stem cells to go in to do bad things, we would need to lower inflammation. So that’s part of our immune system. 

Now, here’s another component to it is that our fat, healthy fat, actually contains good immune cells as well. So this isn’t just simply about pouring kerosene on body fat and burning it all down. No, we want to, like everything else that’s related to health, get things into balance. You want to prevent having overage – too much is not good, too little isn’t good either. By the way, you know that people who are super low in body fat. When you take a look at their outcome in a hospital after they have surgery, people with almost no body fat as a kind of bodybuilder type, they don’t do well. Actually, after surgery, they tend to have more complications. 

So just like Goldilocks, and I call it the Goldilocks, you don’t want to have too much or too little. You want to have just right. And you just have to take a look at these Renaissance artists who are drawing figures to know that at different points in history, we all had our own version of what beautiful actually means. And from a health perspective, we know that we need to have just enough body fat. Not too much, not too little, but just the right amount.

Chef AJ

This is fascinating what you’re saying about the microbiome transplant and mice and the tumors and fat cells behave similarly. That is really interesting. How do we know if we have the brown fat that you said is the good fat? Is there a way to tell?

Dr. William Li

Yes. So that is super interesting. So the history of brown fat is absolutely amazing. It actually was discovered, I think, in the 1800s by a biologist studying ground squirrels in the Alps in the mountains of Europe, where he was noticing that there were these big squirrels. They’re like big squirrels, okay? They’re like the size of rabbits, and they’d be skinny in the summer. And then, just like most animals that hibernate, they would eat a lot of food. They’d store up their body fat. They would turn into these mounds of fat, and then they would hide in their cave. 

One of the things that was interesting is the question was, how did these animals actually stay alive? So you’re talking about the 1800s. And so they were studying, doing their research on these big ground squirrels, and they realized that when they cut them open, it wasn’t just regular fat that they were seeing, but a different kind of fat. It didn’t look like chubby fat. The fat actually was the kind that was brown fat, and it was like a nuclear reactor. These brown fats actually generate heat, which is how these little ground squirrels actually could stay warm in the winter. 

So it wasn’t just that they were building up fat for energy stores. They were also building up fat for active warmth. So it’s not just putting on a parka. It was actually putting on a space heater, a parka with a space heater in it so they can actually stay warm. Anyway. So that’s where the origin of brown fat was discovered. And by the way, where was the origin of this brown fat in these squirrels? Between the shoulder blades. That’s where it started. Okay, so years later, this is like in the 1970s, people were speculating. They revisited this old, ancient discovery in squirrels. Right. 

So when would a doctor even think about squirrel research? Well, this is why we can’t forget about the science of the past. Sometimes it has incredibly important clues. And actually, they realize that children when they’re born, think about it, when a baby’s born, we don’t criticize a baby when they’re pudgy and chubby. We think they’re cute. Right. Like, look at those cheeks. But it turns out if you take a look at a baby, the part of the baby we don’t spend a lot of time looking at if you’re not a parent, behind their neck and down between your shoulder blades is a big chunk brown fat. 

So actually, brown fat was discovered in babies. And then when a baby grows, gets larger, toddler, adolescent, young adult, there’s almost nothing between your shoulder blades. I mean, we know this. Take a look at a high school athlete of either sex and you take a look between your shoulder blades. It’s pretty empty. And so the theory was for many years, you know what? The babies run on some brown fat, then they lose it. And the explanation was that babies have brown fat because like a squirrel, when they’re born, they’re going to be cold. So they need to be able to generate their own stay and have their own space heater. And then when you get older, you don’t need it anymore. And so it goes away. That’s what was thought.

Now we know that’s not true because in 2009, other researchers went back and say, well, wait a minute, how does that make sense? There’s no reason that our organs just don’t go away because fat is an organ, by the way, our organs actually stick around. And so they actually did something special. They had now imaging tools and they could actually see that in adults, we all have brown fat. It is distributed over the front of our chest like a breastplate. It’s under our arms. And that sort of fatty part under arms, not under the arm itself, but actually kind of just below the underarm. And it’s around our shoulder place. It’s just spread out more diffusely. 

So we’ve got this kind of like crop top of brown fat that adults actually wear. And depending on what we eat, we can make more of it or less of it depending on what actually happens to our lives. So that’s a little scientific history that actually sets the stage for us to understand even more about how we can actually eat to beat our fat.

Chef AJ

That’s incredible. Well, you mentioned we don’t want too little and we don’t want too much. But is there a certain threshold when excess body fat actually becomes harmful? And what’s the mechanism by which the excess body fat impacts our health?

Dr. William Li

Yeah. All right. So body fat, let’s think about what most people think about it. Right. It’s not good. You wake up in the morning, you wake up and take a shower. When you’re out of the shower, you step on the scale that number is not what you want to see either. Right? Fat, visual or on the scale is actually not what we need to be caring about, because, in fact, every individual has their own threshold for how much fat is good for them and how much fat tips them over the edge. Right. Some people are tall, some people are short, some people are big bones and stocky. Some people are. And we all have a different makeup. So every individual is going to be different. 

And so we need to look at biomarkers. So these are measurements that are not direct on how much fat or how much weight we have, but how we actually handle and process energy. So when we start seeing our blood sugars rise, we probably have too much body fat. When we actually start feeling fatigued, it could be that our body fat is in excess. These are all these subtle signs. When our hormones kind of go out of balance. You can see that threshold when things start going awry, a little bit of wind on the plains of Kansas, not a big deal. It makes wind chimes tingle. Too much more wind and now things start blowing over. A lot of wind… all of a sudden. You don’t have to measure the wind to know that you have a problem. 

And I think that’s really how people need to be thinking about their own individual personalized needs. That said, it was a discovery last year that was groundbreaking, which is to show that most people blame their metabolism on their body fat. Right? So how many people go, look at my sister. She’s so lucky. She had the genetics to have a good metabolism, good metabolism, and that’s why she’s so skinny. Me, I drew the short end of the stick, and so my metabolism is slow, and that’s why I’m actually overweight. And then, of course, that leads to the kind of the mental state where you’re like, you know what? I can’t do anything about it. It’s my fate. Right? Well, actually, that’s not true.

So the new discovery, and this is amazing. This is like studying, like, 20 people in 20 countries from day 2 of life to 90 years old. What they found was that, in fact, all humans, regardless of your body size, go through only four stages of metabolism and you got to adjust it to body size. From the time we’re born, we have this exact same metabolism, like our moms. And that makes sense. It’s kind of like syncing menstrual cycles. We were inside our mom, our metabolism were synced up together. That makes total sense. 

But from the time of birth to one year old, our metabolism skyrockets. Okay? It’s more than double what an adult’s metabolism is. So that’s when you’re still tiny. And that’s why what we feed infants is so incredibly important. We need to be thinking about nutrition for infants because their metabolic needs are so necessary. And then from one year old to teenage years, the metabolism kind of starts to decline. Now that’s completely the opposite of what we used to think. Right? Because you get the teenagers that’s sprouting out and eating three dinners, and you’re like, wow, look at that guy’s metabolism. It’s now taken off, right? That’s the urban legend. We were all taught this. The teenagers and their metabolism is going up. They’re going to be eating a lot. Please feed them more. That’s not true. Their metabolism is actually going down. 

And then from the age 20 all the way to age 60, everybody’s metabolism the same. So you can’t blame college, actually, for your freshman poundage is not due to some weird metabolism. And when you actually hit your 30s, that’s not your metabolism working against you. In fact, the metabolism is exactly the same until you’re 60. And then from 60 onwards, there’s a slow, slight decline. 

Those four stages. That is true for human beings, like, as a species. So what that means is that what we thought is completely the opposite. It’s not your metabolism that makes you fat. It’s fat that slows your metabolism. So if you want to get back to who you are, to be all you want to be, to be the perfect human that Mother Nature created you to be, you need to actually slim down, and you need to control your body fat to unleash the metabolism that’s hiding underneath. 

Michelangelo had this great quote, I don’t know if you’ve heard about this, about sculpting. And he basically said, I take a block of marble and I see the angel inside it. I just need to chisel away all the extra pieces to release the angel. And so that’s kind of how we’re now thinking about the revisionist, thinking from a science perspective about body fat metabolism.

Chef AJ

So if I understand you correctly, it’s not our metabolism that makes us fat, but fat slows down our metabolism. If we get rid of the excess fat, we can actually normalize our metabolism. That sounds like great news.

Dr. William Li

That’s right. And the science is telling us that many of the struggles that we’ve actually had in controlling fat and blaming metabolism really is not up to a doctor to write a prescription or having to do some crazy things. But really, it’s really a sort of common sense. The more adipose mass we have, the bigger the load on our metabolism. Right.

So think about, like, taking your car, taking your SUV, and you’re helping somebody move their house, and you put some boxes in there and it’s fine. And you keep on piling boxes. Now the engine’s having a little harder time. Now you put stuff on the roof, okay? And now you’re loading the seats up with stuff. The tires are sinking down. Now the engine has a much harder time to go. 

That’s the best analogy to actually how body fat actually slows down our metabolism. So it’s time to take some of those suitcases out, unpack the boxes, figure out how to actually redistribute the weight, so to speak. You want to move so you don’t want to get rid of everything. The whole point is to be able to have some of the weight with you. You just don’t want to overload the system.

Chef AJ

Makes sense. Some people actually have a lot of weight to lose, so it can be a slow process. But in terms of disease, how fast can they expect to see changes occur in their health?

Dr. William Li

This is actually the most amazing thing, is that small changes can actually make big differences. So if you’re trying to actually fit into a completely different-sized dress, well, that’s a different issue, right? If you want to look in the mirror and you want your six-pack, you want your teenage six-pack or whatever, that actually is going to take a little bit of work. And which is why, by the way, actors who actually have to get into shape for a film role, first of all, in real life, they never look like that because they have to train like crazy. It’s a body sculpt to look just the right way and you have a little special effects on there, and then they look perfect. 

But the reality is that you don’t need it from a health perspective, which is, to me, as a physician, that’s the most important thing. We want to actually… the truth about weight loss is that you’re doing it not for the mirror, okay? You’re doing it for your inner health. The inner health is the hands down, the most important thing. All right? So to get inner health, you don’t need to shed 20 pounds in two weeks. That’s the stuff that you see on television. You just need to have some steady weight loss.

Let me give you some interesting facts. And you don’t need to lose very much to get a big benefit. There was a study that was actually done that showed that just for women, just losing 5 pounds and keeping it off reduced the risk of breast cancer in women who are 50 years old or older by 18%. So almost a 20% reduced risk of breast cancer by losing just 5 pounds. Almost anybody can do that, right? It doesn’t require a great deal of effort. And you don’t have to lose it in a couple of days. You can lose it in a couple of weeks and feel good about it. The bikini might still not look right. But think about that, you’ve actually taken off some of your risk for a disease that you definitely don’t want to have. That, to me, is really amazing. 

Here’s another study that’s even more dramatic. And this is, by the way, all intentional weight loss. You can have unintentional weight loss, right? If you have a parasite in your body, if you got cancer, you could lose a lot of weight. And that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about intentional mindful weight loss. That requires a commitment. You have to be purposeful about weight loss. Intentional weight loss is a good thing. 

So here is another study that looked at 36,000 women. That’s a lot of women. It’s in the Women’s Health Initiative, which is a big research study. And it showed that those women who had intentional weight loss by 10 pounds, by at least 10 pounds, all right so that’s double the amount than 5 pounds but it lowered the risk of endometrial cancer, cancer of the lining of the uterus by 39%. 5 pounds will get you decreased 18% of breast cancer. 10 pounds will get you 39% in your other reproductive organs. 

These are the reasons that I really think these are the messages that women need to hear, because not only will you feel better when you’re losing pounds little by little over a period of time, but you’re going to be a lot less likely to develop some of the diseases that you fear the most. Right. And by the way, there’s an implication to this, which is to think about that. It just shows you that 5 pounds, gaining 5 pounds can have a tremendous increase in risk as well. Gaining 10 pounds can have a tremendous increase as well. So the benefits you get from losing the weight and the harms that you get from gaining the weight, they’re just two sides of the same point. That’s the reason they actually have purposeful, intentional weight loss.

Chef AJ

This is so encouraging. And I love what you said. It almost should be a bumper stick or weight loss, you’re not doing it for the mirror.

Dr. William Li

Right.

Chef AJ

With so many people, the aesthetic is the number one goal. But I’d like you to talk a little bit about the underlying process of diseases in our body that are linked to what we eat and what those diseases are.

Dr. William Li

All right. So our health defenses, those five health defense systems, they’re functioning regardless of what we’re doing. Okay. And when it comes to food and health or disease, it’s not just about the food. Right. So people criticize a can of soda or a cake and people idolize a piece of kale. But it’s not just about the food. It’s about how our body responds to what you put inside it. 

And this is really my background in having developed new treatments like breakthrough treatments for cancer and diabetes and vision loss. The fact of the matter is that it’s just like when a doctor writes a prescription, the pill isn’t necessarily good or bad. It’s what happens when it goes into your body that it’s going to have those consequences, the effects or side effects. 

So this is how nutrition actually is morphing transforming beyond what it used to be. So think about a caterpillar transforming into a butterfly. In the old days, nutrition, the caterpillar was just about fats and proteins and essential nutrients and carbohydrates. Right. Energetics, it gives you energy. You need to eat so you get enough energy. That’s what grandmothers used to always tell their kids. Well, the modern view of molecular nutrition is you get all that stuff. But even more importantly are the bioactives, the fiber, the natural chemicals that are present in the thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands in a typical food that we eat. 

And if you take a look at something that’s not so good for us, like ultra-processed foods and look at the ingredients and all those chemicals on the side, you’re pouring that into your body. That’s like putting the worst kind of oil into your car engine, right? Like, why would you do that? If you really want your car to run in a good way over time, we take care of our cars many times better than we take care of our bodies. On the other hand, if you’re actually eating something good, fresh, healthy, mostly plant-based, It’s actually like putting really good oil into your engine, the engine of your body and your body thanks you for it. It actually performs better. It’s going to last longer. It’s going to drive better. And that’s basically what it is, how food actually responds.

So let’s talk a little bit about some of the diseases that can occur if we damage our angiogenesis system. So we know, for example, that ultra-processed foods contain a lot of synthetic chemicals. Those synthetic chemicals can help cancers trigger those blood vessels that are growing to feed it and that’s not a good thing, right? 

On the other hand, you can choose another food. Let’s take a couple of examples. Green tea contains a natural polyphenol called EGCG. It’s a catechin. It’s a natural chemical. And that’s been studied in the lab, in people, in humans to be a powerful angiogenesis inhibitor. So it doesn’t get rid of good blood vessels. It only gets rid of bad blood vessels. It’s kind of like a landscaper coming to your yard and mowing down all those extra tall weeds are going to a golf course. Some of the grass are growing taller. You want to mow it down. So you get this perfect level on the golf course. That’s basically what green tea, for example, does. And so does soy. There are some in broccoli. The sulforaphane will do the same thing. They’ll mow down extra, the overage of vessels, Goldilocks zone, the just right zone of blood vessels. 

So you can make your health defense systems worse, weaker, and make them more vulnerable disease or you can right size your health defense system So it protects you a little bit better. And you can kind of go from system after system to find different foods that can harm or help.

Chef AJ

Well, you mentioned we don’t want to vilify cake and idolize kale, but are all foods created equal, or are there maybe certain foods that are more powerful than others when it comes to beating disease and losing weight?

Dr. William Li

Yeah, my whole philosophy has been to focus on people and doing the research on what you should add to your diet, particularly things that taste great and people really enjoy. There are plenty of groups out there, and there’s plenty of wisdom out there about what you shouldn’t eat and what’s not good for you. So I’m sort of on the ship going into the open ocean trying to figure out, like, okay, so what should we be eating as opposed to what should we be cutting out? 

That said, I will tell you, there are some foods that are really clearly bad for our health defenses and therefore harmful to our ability to be able to fight body fat. So those things are added sugar. So many processed foods, especially soda, actually is laden with extra sugar. Now, our body can handle some sugar. In fact, our brain uses sugar to be able to function. But the bottom line is that it’s not a lot of sugar. And when you actually take a can of soda and you see how many tablespoons of sugar added to it, I think it’s like ten tablespoons in a can of soda, that floods your body’s ability to handle that .And all of that extra sugar damages your stem cells, makes it harder for your body to control its circulation, damages the lining of your circulation, upsets your gut microbiome. 

By the way, artificial sweeteners will also damage the gut microbiome. Think about it with artificial sweeteners. What’s the reason that you have an artificial sweetener? You don’t want to gain weight. You don’t want to get those calories. So you drink a lot of diet soda. I know people that drink ten cans of diet soda a day. It’s crazy, all right? And they’re like, well, I like the taste of it, and I want to stay hydrated, but I don’t want to gain weight. I don’t need those extra calories. 

Well, guess what happens? They gain weight. You know why? Because those artificial sweeteners actually poison the gut microbiome. It changes that ecosystem. Like, you know how the Great Barrier Reef, which is a world’s greatest ecosystem that we can visually see. The Amazon might be bigger, except you can’t see everything there. But the Great Barrier Reef. We just put on a pair of goggles, and you go down and it’s like, amazing. It’s being poisoned. 

If you actually start disrupting and destroying your ecosystem with artificial sweeteners, guess what? Your gut microbiome can’t control your blood cholesterol, can’t control your lipids, can’t control your body fat, can’t control the hunger hormones. And now you start to gain weight. So ironically, people who drink a lot of diet soda actually gain weight because you’re messing with the gut microbiome.

The inflammation. You don’t want inflammation to be happening in any of these foods that actually spark inflammation, make whatever inflammation in your fat a lot worse. Okay? And that actually impacts on the immune system as well. Added sugars, artificial sweeteners, red meat, which contains a lot of saturated fat and it is also not that good for your microbiome. 

Processed meats, especially, by the way, processed meats are a class one carcinogen, according to the World Health Organization. Not every country recognizes that, but it’s something that you should just know about. Look, it’s a free world, right? So we can make our own decisions. But if you knew that something was a class one carcinogen, you’d think twice about eating a ton of it. And then ultra-processed foods, anything in the box that’s got like 20 ingredients, something your grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food, as I say, or something that contains chemicals that you can’t pronounce. I always tell people when you buy something in a box or a can or jar, pick it up and take that time to turn to the label and read the ingredients. You need to know what you’re actually purchasing. You may be purchasing a lot of the stuff that you think you want, the food, but you’re also purchasing all these extra chemicals. 

Is that a good investment? Particularly since that’s going to be something you’re going to be putting into your body that can damage your health defenses, that can make it harder for you to actually fight body fat. I would say the answer is no. So those are the things that aren’t so good for you.

What are the general categorical things that are good for you? Because we can sit and talk about 200 foods that are right about [inaudible]… but more simply, plant-based foods fruits, vegetables, legumes, tree nuts, seeds, tubers, root vegetables. Those are generally really good for you because they’re packed with Mother Nature’s pharmacy with an F, not a PH. All those have natural chemicals that actually light up our health defenses. They not only support your health defenses, they activate them. 

So it’s like not just putting a space heater in a house, but it’s like turning on your central heating. And so now your entire body is lit up with health defenses. That’s what we want throughout our lives. We can’t take that for granted. It takes an effort to be able to actually do that. Now, beyond that, healthy oils, healthy fats, seafood is actually a good source of Omega three fatty acids. But guess what? A lot of people don’t appreciate this. First of all, a lot of people don’t like seafood or they haven’t experienced it. But actually, it turns out the Omega threes in seafood in fish and shellfish actually come from a plant, comes from plankton. Okay, so at the end of the day, it’s still a plant-based benefit as well. And then beverages, which are all plant-based, all the good ones are plant-based anyway. But if you take a look at coffee, it’s got chlorogenic acid, among other bioactives. Which, by the way, activates your good fat to fight your bad fat. You look at tea, EGCG, the polyphenol that actually activates your brown fat. If you look at chamomile tea, herbal tea, that relaxes you, it helps your microbiome be a little healthier, relaxation, stress reduction actually lowers inflammation in your body. So whatever body fat you have, you can actually combat some of the inflammation in your body fat that way as well. 

So that’s sort of categorically sort of the general good ways of actually eating. And there’s so many ways to put those good ingredients into your body in tasty ways that you can find, frankly, on the Internet. Pick a food. What I do with people, I tell them, open my book, take a look at the list of 200 foods. Take a Sharpie. Okay, here’s a Sharpie. And literally circle all the foods that you already like. That you know you like, all right. And I have not met a single person that couldn’t circle at least ten foods. And then I say, look, you’re already at the end of the game because you’ve already identified foods you like that are good for you. Start with those. And then every week, pick another food that you haven’t tried before that you would be willing to explore and experiment with and try. This is like the Food Channel. Go out there and try a new secret ingredient that you haven’t done before. And then people go, well, what do I do with this ingredient? This is where we can actually just go on the Internet and actually type in the food and type recipe and literally watch somebody prepare something tasty and tell us how.

Chef AJ

That is fantastic. I really appreciate you mentioning artificial sweeteners because so many people think that they’re a panacea for health and weight loss, and clearly they’re not.

Dr. William Li

Right. Again, we have to respect the food industry because compared to 100 years ago, where hunger and the inability to access food at scale was a really big problem. And the food industry came out of that. And they pretty much do what they set up to do. They make food widely available cheaply, and they fortify it and they add lots of stuff to it to sell it, and they market it. And so we’re not really taking a look at a devil. This isn’t a religious war. This isn’t the crusades. This is really about big business doing its job and us as individuals being able to be more informed and then make our own choices. Because at the end of the day, we will make the choices that are good for us and good for our community. And then the businesses are going to have to respond that way. 

That’s why more companies are veering towards plant-based. That’s why more companies are veering towards organic. That’s why more companies are trying to make healthier offerings because the consumer is demanding it. And what you’re doing with this program, what I’m doing with my work is not only doing the heavy lifting of figuring out what needs to be done, but communicating it to people so they can make better choices as well.

Chef AJ

Right. Absolutely. You mentioned inflammation a few times. Is excess body fat itself inflammatory?

Dr. William Li

Absolutely. Our body tolerates and welcomes normal levels of tissue wherever it might be. That is the body sculpting whenever there’s overage excess. It’s trying to get rid of it. Right. And the way it tries to get rid of it is with inflammation, inflammatory cells. Part of that, part of our immune system is designed to kind of like scavenge, chew up. They’re like a garbage crew that goes out to try to clean up the mess, the debris and remove it. 

And so that’s why when you’ve got huge amounts of body fat, it always starts out a little bit, then a little bit gets a little more. A little more gets a little bit more until you wind up getting these, as I talked about, glaciers. Okay. And those glaciers are highly inflammatory, and they spark more inflammation because of their existence. And that’s why if you’re somebody who has been struggling with your weight and you probably have extra body fat now, don’t worry. It’s possible to actually get rid of and slim down that body fat like your body wants to do it. 

It’s got a lot of inflammation. So help it out and prevent more from actually more damage from happening by having some anti-inflammatory foods. That’s just something that is good for yourself. What’s a good example of that? Well, foods containing Vitamin C, red bell peppers, strawberries, guava, tomatoes, they’re all great sources of Vitamin C. Those foods with Vitamin C have been shown to reduce the flares of an autoimmune disease characterized by inflammation called lupus. All right. So if you can use foods to fight lupus, you certainly can use it to fight inflammation in your body fat.

Chef AJ

You mention strawberries. It’s pretty much my favorite food, so I’m so glad it’s on the list. What does your research shown as far as exercise as a tool to help people lose weight?

Dr. William Li

All right, exercise, physical activity. Let’s talk about physical activity because it’s on a spectrum. Right. This is really important. This is what I tell patients. There’s a spectrum of physical activity that starts from getting up off your butt, from being a couch potato to moving. You don’t have to be a marathon runner. But even if you walk around the house and then do take it one step further, walk outside of the house. Now walk around the block. Don’t walk for ten minutes, walk for 30 minutes. Don’t just take a slow, meander walk with intent and purpose. Try to make it a little more cardio and aerobic. Swing your arms, lift your legs, test your balance, and then go for a jog. You can start to go a little bit faster. 

It’s all on that spectrum. Whatever you feel you’re comfortable with, you don’t have to join a gym. You don’t have to have a trainer. You don’t actually have to undergo crazy amounts of exercise. You got to get started. That’s what I always tell people, a lot of people who are battling with their weight, the toughest mile is the first mile. Just getting started. Once you get them started, they will start to lose some weight. The physical activity burns fat. It happens. That’s just how we’re wired. 

And by the way, there’s no amount of dieting, if I use that in air quotes, you can do that’s going to work without physical activity. So you can’t just sit there like Jabba of the Hut and get tube fed, but not with a diet and don’t move. You’re going to get bigger no matter what. And so physical activity is the bedrock for an effective intentional weight loss program. 

By the way, there’s another opposite of physical activity, which is sleeping. Sleeping is also important because if you don’t get good sleep, your whole body, your defenses, your metabolism isn’t actually going to be in good shape to be able to help you lose weight. So in addition to getting up off your butt and moving is also getting down on your back and sleeping. 

And a lot of people don’t sleep well. Now/, people who are really overweight, sometimes they have sleep apnea, right. And so they’re not sleeping well. They’re not getting deep-quality sleep. And now there are these physical wearables where you can actually see how much sleep you’re getting that’s worthwhile doing, because if you actually have sleep apnea and you’re not getting enough sleep, your metabolism is going to be off-kilter.

Chef AJ

So, Dr. Li, statistics show that something like over 90% of people that go on a diet actually regain the weight and then some. Do you have any strategies to stop that from happening?

Dr. William Li

You know, it’s completely natural to have fluctuation in our weight over the course of our lives. What we don’t want to have are these huge swings in weight that really are yo-yo dieting. And usually the kind of regain of weight is measured in people who have gone on to something extreme. Then they go way down in their weight and then they slingshot right back up. That’s not healthy for your body. And so it’s better to actually have sort of like small measured amounts of weight loss, finding ways that you can actually live with and might even enjoy in terms of eating healthy, good foods that activate your brown fat and combine it with exercise, get good sleep. These things are all really important.  So it’s not just about going on some plan, a food plan. A lot of times people also regain the weight because they stop moving or something else happens emotionally and they’re not sleeping well. 

So you’ve got these sort of three legs of the stool – the food you eat, the physical activity, the sleep. And actually, you know what? I think there’s four legs. And that’s stressed because when you’re emotionally stressed out, you’re more likely to binge eat, you’re less likely to exercise bn a regular basis, and you’re definitely not going to be sleeping as well. And so I think that people need to think about weight loss as really a function of how the rest of our lives are. Can have a little bit of discipline, but it should really be moderate. 

Now, I’ll tell you, there’s a study that’s worthwhile mentioning as well that actually shows that even in people who are losing weight and regaining it. So this is the study called the AARP Diet and Health Study. They studied 161,000 people. And what they actually found is that even trying to lose 5 pounds over time, and even if you gain it back, if you keep on losing at least 5 pounds, if you circle like small amounts, you have a 14% reduction in the risk of cancer mortality. So even five or six attempts at losing weight, even only 5 pounds, helps you dodge a bullet. 

And so this is what I try to encourage people. You shouldn’t be yo-yoing. You shouldn’t go way down and swing way back up, overshoot, then swing back down. That’s definitely not healthy. It’s not healthy emotionally, psychologically. It’s not healthy for your body either. I mean, your heart and your brain, they don’t want that kind of swing. Remember that Goldilocks I mentioned? Not too hot, not too cold, not too extreme, not too heavy. Weight loss shouldn’t be to gain too much or lose too much, you’ve got to find that happy medium. And I think that we live in a society sometimes where we look for extremes and what we really want to be able to look for that medium.

I think getting a good coach can be helpful to you, a good life coach, a good nutrition coach, somebody who is an expert like you and weight loss, that can be really helpful. It’s hard to do it by yourself. Hard to do anything by yourself, honestly. And so getting a team around you, getting support people to support what you’re trying to do. And don’t make it too hard on yourself. Don’t make it impossible. You’re not looking for 20 pounds of weight loss over a couple of weeks. That’s a promise that can’t be achieved. Guarantee you. It’s not a promise that can be kept. So go for the small amounts over a period of time. Get people to help you recognize it’s not just the food alone, it’s your exercise, it’s your diet, it’s your mindset and really feel good about the efforts that you’re trying to make. It’s just another part of your life. 

And obviously, if you have serious health conditions associated often with obesity, whether it’s diabetes or cardiovascular disease or cancer or some of these others, you need to work with your doctor as well. Just realize that although there are FDA-approved weight loss drugs, they’re not magic bullets. There’s no such thing. We are working, our body is working to fight and right size its weight from the time we are born. And you just have to sort of help it along and do what you can and your body will try to right size itself. That’s kind of the reassuring thing that I try to get people to understand. 

And by the way, when you eat the right foods that can help your health defenses, always look for the foods that you already love to eat. Find ways to cook them in healthy ways. And then by the way, besides weight, besides adipose tissue, besides the glacier of fat, you’re also going to lower your risk of cancer and diabetes and Alzheimer’s and all these other conditions that we want to dodge anyway. And that’s why at the end of the day, you’re not losing weight for the mirror, you’re losing it for yourself.

Chef AJ

That’s fantastic. Thank you so much for saying that. So many people that have excess body weight also have chronic lifestyle diseases and they’ve been prescribed medication that they’re probably going to have to take the rest of their life. But how is it that food can be just as effective in some of these cases for not only preventing these diseases, but actually reversing them?

Dr. William Li

You know, what’s amazing is that we know that, for example, if you eat high fiber foods, even if you’ve been on statins, which lower blood cholesterol, those high fiber foods help feed and restore that ecosystem of our gut microbiome, which is responsible for lipid control in our body. And so people have been able to come off of statins by eating high fiber foods, by helping their gut microbiome. That’s one simple example. 

And by the way, like the statins, they’re quite effective medicines in many cases, not all cases, but many cases, but they got side effects. Eating high-fiber food, like a pear, never had a side effect that a statin has. So this is a much more natural, holistic and pleasurable way of actually doing that. 

Another example really with diet is by controlling the amount of food you eat by cutting down on processed foods and sugars and adding more of those plant-based foods. You can take people who have type two diabetes or insulin insensitivity or people who are glucose intolerant, they’re on the verge of developing type two diabetes. And you can reverse that. You can make sure that people are headed back off that course. So they go from rocketing towards diabetes, to literally getting pulled back from the brink, and then they are actually also eating healthier food.

Chef AJ

That’s fantastic. So, Dr. Li, what’s the real truth about weight loss?

Dr. William Li

The real truth about weight loss is that your body is set up to do it. Your body wants to actually get to its own natural set point, whatever that may be, it’s going to be different for everybody. And all you have to do is to take that intentional first step to do something that’s good for you. Stay physically active, get started by eating a better diet. Those are the incredible first steps that anyone can do and what I would say the truth is that you can eat foods that you enjoy to be able to lose the fat that you don’t.

Chef AJ

I love it. Thank you so much, Dr. Li and thank you for your work.

Dr. William Li

Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be on.

Chef AJ

Hi, Shayda, and welcome to The Truth about Weight Loss Summit, thank you so much for being here.

Shayda Soleymani

Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here with you and your audience.

Chef AJ

Well, Shayla, I know that you have lost one hundred and twenty pounds and have kept it off for over ten years now. Now, for people that aren’t familiar with your story, tell us what that was like.

Shayda Soleymani

Well, first of all, I can’t even believe that it’s been 10 years because back in the day, I always had a yo-yo diet kind of going on. And, you know, it was always easy to lose weight because I did so many different programs. The hard part was keeping it off for any duration of time, which I think the longest time I would be able to keep it off was like maybe six months to a year. So for me to hear you say that I kept it off for 10 years now is just im a lot of ways that’s mind-boggling. And because really, these last 10 years have not felt like a diet. It’s been just the way that I’ve been eating and it’s been a lifestyle, and I think that’s a huge key to it. 

So for people that don’t really know me, I have always exercised all my life. I was on the swim team. I did a lot of sports. I exercised, no matter what weight I was or what condition I was. You know, I typically, later on, started to get bigger and bigger and bigger, and it got to the point where I went to a metabolic doctor and he told me that, and believe it or not, he wrote this in a letter, and he said that it would take a herculean effort for me to ever lose weight. And when he said that emotionally, it did a lot of numbers on me because sometimes you just say, well, the hell with it, if I’m not going to lose weight, I might as well just do what I what I’m doing. But what they neglected to teach me, because they would have me having these powdered foods or powdered drinks and all this stuff, is to really teach me about how to eat the right foods in order to lose weight. 

And I wish that he was around or I could find him… not to say, haha, I told you so, here I am, let me show you. But just to teach him, and let’s say look, one, you should never write that letter or put that in anybody’s file. Two, you really need to go get some classes in nutrition. And it wasn’t until I stumbled upon you and John Pierre, where you guys taught me all about the pleasure trap, calorie density, sequencing your meals. And that was just like a light bulb that went off. 

And one of the main things that I loved about this was the foods that you were promoting or the foods that this plant-based environment is all about is whole natural foods, like all the starches, the squashes, the rice, the fruit. It’s all foods that I absolutely love. So I totally embraced this, and I have got that type of personality, once I decide to do something, I decide 100 percent and I’m not about to put one foot in and one foot out. Because that leaves you open to slide. What I mean by that is, you know, you have to be all in, you have to be all in, then you have to have that laser beam focus and because if not, it’s going to send you down that rabbit hole. 

And I just could not believe when I met you and JP and you guys were teaching… I remember the first time I ever took your class, John Pierre was sitting there, and I don’t know if you remember this, but I actually had a boot on my leg because I could not exercise. And I always said, how the hell am I going to lose weight if I can’t exercise? Because that’s what I associated with? And I remember the last night of graduation, you had this chocolate peanut butter cheesecake that to this day, I don’t think I have had it. I don’t think I’ve had it, no because I told you I wanted you to make it for me, for my birthday. But I still don’t really care to have it. And I remember you came around and it’s not that it was bad. It was higher in calorie density and you know, you were passing it around as at that moment when it came to me, I caught eyes with John Pierre and we just looked at each other. The next thing I know is I took that plate and I just passed it to that person. 

It was at that moment that I realized that that was a huge thing that I did by passing it because that set the tone for the rest of the years to come down the road. That really set the tone because I had it in my head that, you know what, I have once and for all going to do everything and anything that you and JP tell me to do, and I’m going to follow that. And from there, I remember going to a few conferences. I went to True North, I did the McDougall program, I did a few other expos that you guys had in the Valley and that set the tone that really did a lot of reinforcement. And taking a lot of your classes, which was even more reinforcement to stick to this group. 

The food was delicious. By going to McDougal’s program, I remember John McDougall took me off of my medications and because at that point I was taking cholesterol medication, diabetes medication, triglycerides medication, the same things that my mother was on. I’m not sure about my father’s side of the family but on my mother’s side of the family, heart disease ran rampant. So we have to do everything we could to make sure that we were going to be OK. And I noticed that by eating this way, all my numbers were starting to change, which was great. And when McDougall took me off of all my medications, I said, oh my God, what am I going to tell my doctor because he’s going to think that the meds are working. And he said, don’t worry about it. I’ll teach you everything that there is to know. 

So then three months later, we went to the doctor’s office mom and I have the same cardiologist and we went there and he walked in. He was happy because mom and I both had started to lose weight and our numbers had started to fall. And he goes, I told you guys that the medication is working, and that’s exciting. And I said, well, honestly, I’ve got something to tell you. He goes, what. I said, I’m not taking any of the medications that you that you gave me. And he couldn’t believe it. He goes, what do you mean you’re not taking any of the medication? And my mom says, well, I’m not taking any, either. He just looked at her like, what the heck is going on with you two? And we’re like, we’re not taking it but our numbers are right, right? 

And he goes, absolutely. I said, the cholesterol is down, the triglycerides down, the A1C goes down. Everything was coming down and he goes, well, okay, what are you guys doing? And my mom’s like, we’re eating a lot of potatoes. He goes, what are you talking about? What do you mean you’re eating a lot of potatoes? And she’s like, well, hold on, we’re not eating white potatoes. We’re eating sweet potatoes. And I said, with all due respect, there’s nothing wrong with eating a sweet potato. Now we’re not putting any sour cream, butter, bacon or all of that other crap. So we’re just eating the potato all by itself and it’s delicious. 

He goes, really? And I said, yeah. So he started to do some digging. He started to asking me a lot of questions, which was great because he was you wanted to learn more because obviously we were proof that something was going on. And he goes, OK, I’ll give you three more months, but I want you guys to come back and I want to keep a close eye on you and I want you to show me everything. So we said, fine. Mom, and I go back three months later and the weight is continuing to come down. The medications were still completely off. He’s just baffled.

So at that point, I gave him John McDougall’s number, Dr. Esselstyn’s number, Dr. Fuhrman’s book. I give him all the books because I knew that he would read it and he would find it interesting, especially because he is a cardiologist. And this went on for about a year, and he could not be more excited about what he was seeing transform in front of his eyes. It got to the point where him and I would sit and we would exchange recipes and I would be teaching him things. And he started to fall in love with Dr. Esselstyn and started following him and wanting to know more about him, his lectures and this and that. 

So there’s really a lot of times I think we need to take control of our bodies and we need to take control of… Maybe it is us that needs to teach the doctor as long as the doctor is willing and wanting to listen. We still, my mom and I see him about once a year. He’s not vegan, but I would say 90 percent of his diet is probably like us. So he’s implementing a lot of the stuff that we’re doing, which is great. And he’s got the book there and he is talking to his patients about it if they will listen to him. Now, he says, a lot of them don’t want to do it but there are people that do want to do it. So why not give them the resources? 

So this is kind of a win-win situation for all of us. And that’s why when I sometimes read that stupid letter that says it’s going to take a Herculean effort or something, I feel like saying something to him and I’m like, You haven’t met AJ and John Pierre to know that this can be done and everything is possible.

Chef AJ

That is such an incredibly inspiring story that’s hilarious that he thought the medications were finally working.

Shayda Soleymani

Yeah, well, but I never took those. It’s been 10 years since I took that last pill.

Chef AJ

And how many medications were you on and what were they for?

Shayda Soleymani

Well, I was on three medications. It was metformin, a cholesterol medication, and triglycerides medication. Both my mom and I, we were both on those medications. And the day that Dr. McDougall took me off of my medications, I called her up and I said, you’re getting off with yours, too. So since that day, neither one of us has ever looked back, and we’ve never been on it and the numbers have been perfect.

Chef AJ

Yeah, that’s incredible. Shayda, were you overweight as a child? And if not, when did you first remember becoming overweight?

Shayda Soleymani

You know, as a child, I was not. I think I started to gain some weight in high school, but then I nipped that in the bud and I got my weight back off. And then in college, when I used to be on this one team, I competed in swimming all through high school and in college. When college ended, that’s when I started gaining weight because I used to swim six hours a day. So swimming and competing and doing all that, I could eat whatever I wanted, but not really – there was a fine line of finding what you can and can’t. But after that is when really the weight started setting in. 

I did become vegan, but I was your typical junk food vegan. I would have french fries. I would have Diet Coke. I would have, like one of my downfalls, is dried fruit. I haven’t had dried fruit, and I can’t even tell you how long. But that’s one of my biggest downfalls. My other downfall is nuts and seeds, especially hazelnuts and pistachios and stuff like that. You know, being from the Middle East, we have the best pistachios that there is, and our friends that come from Iran used to bring us a lot of the pistachios. And thank goodness nobody’s bringing us pistachios anymore because it’s just really hard to resist. 

But I’ve always been that person that, you know, I can’t have just one pistachio or just one piece of dried fruit or one square of the chocolate. I have to finish the entire damn bag before I go to bed because if not, it’s going to be knocking on my head and I’m going to be thinking about it 24/7. But I do have friends that they can just eat two or three pistachios and they’re good with it. So that’s why I don’t even ever want to get started because I know myself that even maybe after 10 years, if I start, it’s going to be really hard for me to stop. So I don’t even want to go there.

Chef AJ

When did you become vegan and why?

Shayda Soleymani

Why did I become vegan? I became vegan, probably in 2006, and the reason was I started breaking out in like severe hives all over my body. I mean, they were like welts, they were huge welts. So we went to my allergy doctor and he goes, let’s do a food allergy test and see what is going on with you. And I told him, I said, I don’t have any food allergies, and he goes, well, you never know as we get older, you know, allergies can set in and especially to certain foods. And it turned out that I became allergic to dairy and egg products. 

Now, me, I never liked red meat, so every time I used to eat red meat, I would be sicker than a dog. I used to love fish and I didn’t like chicken. So there is a place here in Orange County, in San Diego, and it’s called Optimum Health Institute. I don’t know if you’re familiar with it or not. OK, so I had found that place that you could go there and get a detox. You would go through this whole program because I had to get myself off of dairy. Dairy, as you know, is extremely, extremely addictive. Again, being from the Middle East, one of my favorite favorite favorite things to eat in the whole world was feta cheese. I mean, I still remember as a kid, we used to have the lavish spread of cheese, the fresh mint, the walnuts, all of that. You roll it up and I could eat that three or four times a day.

So I knew I had to go someplace that would help me to stop eating dairy. So I found this place and I went to my doctor and I said, Dr. Stevenson, what do you think about this place? He goes well hold on, so he picks up the phone and he calls them. He actually called the place and wanted more information about what they were doing. He literally spoke to them for like 30 minutes. And he goes, hold up, Shayda, they want your credit card, you’re going there for a month. And I said, what? He says, you’re going there. That was the best thing he ever did for me. 

And you know, it was all about drinking wheatgrass and doing a lot of raw foods. And it worked wonders because it really helped me to detox and get away from the dairy. It’s been 10 years that I could look at cheese now, and it doesn’t really bother me because now I look at it and I’m like, oh, you’re going to make me sick, and you’re going to make me sick and you’re going to cause this. It was the best thing that could have happened. But that’s that was the reason why I went vegan, was because of that.

Chef AJ

But you stayed overweight as a vegan because of vegan junk food.

Shayda Soleymani

Absolutely, because just because you’re vegan doesn’t mean that you’re going to be healthy and thin. Because Oreo cookies are vegan, french fries are vegan, and Diet Coke is vegan. All those nuts and seeds, all the dried fruit. And you know with the raw foods. I did raw foods for two years, and it was not sustainable for me. I couldn’t do it. I did lose weight at the beginning, but it was really hard because I did have oil and I did have the nuts and seeds, and I did have the dried, and I just couldn’t do it. And plus I missed my Persian food, which, yeah, I just I couldn’t do it. But this way of eating, it’s just so easy and it’s so doable and it’s so delicious that you’re not deprived of anything. So, yeah, vegan junk food. I was the queen of vegan junk food.

Chef AJ

Before becoming a junk food vegan, were you a junk food standard American diet eater?

Shayda Soleymani

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. You know who doesn’t like to go In N Out and get a hamburger? Or get their french fries with the onions…

Chef AJ

Animal style.

Shayda Soleymani

Exactly. Absolutely. Who doesn’t like that? You know, in Iran, my mom was saying that in Iran, they didn’t have fast food like here. Even growing up, I lived in Iran until I was about seven or eight. And I remember grandma, we would only have meat once a week, and that was for the Shabbat dinner. And that was it. Aside from that, in the house, they always have lots of fresh fruits and vegetables, and we have potatoes, rice and a lot of beans, lentils. And even back then, my grandmother never liked the oil. And she rarely rarely cooked with oil, which I always wonder why is it that we go to other people’s house and the rice would be more greasy because they put the butter and the oil on top? But our rice at home was always on the dry side because grandma did not like that, so she was onto something. 

Even when they moved to the United States, she still kept cooking the same way. My grandfather, if you ever went to his house, he always had cooked red potatoes. He loved his potatoes. He loved his lentils. He loved his beans. So it was when we came to the United States that our food changed because it was all about fast and convenience. And oh, you want something? Just drive to Del Taco, just drive to McDonald’s, just drive to there. So that’s when things changed. But now it seems like the last 10 years, mom and I have gone back to the old way of eating, which is familiar. So I kind of wish my grandparents were alive because they would love this food, they would absolutely love this food.

Chef AJ

What’s your first memory of going on a diet?

Shayda Soleymani

It was probably when I was in high school and I started to gain weight. And I remember crying my eyes out and I went to one of our friends and she was a doctor. And I remember her sitting me down and talking and she was telling me what to eat. And I remember her telling me to have like lean fish that’s baked or broiled with salad or with fresh fruit. That was what I was taught. 

And then after that is when I went to Lynn Dora. Then I went to Jenny Craig. Jenny Craig, went to Weight Watchers, Weight Watchers, went on to other stuff. So it was just, you know, I was always in and out of these stupid programs. But I’m so glad because if you told to eat that goop now, there’s no way I could do it. No way.

Chef AJ

Did any of those programs work?

Shayda Soleymani

Well, they did work at the time I was doing them. Like Nutrisystem, it did work at the time that I did it. Even Lynn Dora worked at the time that I did it. But the minute I stopped eating their foods or doing anything, no, the weight came back on because they never taught you how to eat correctly.  What are the right foods to eat? They make it convenient for you that they, you know, they have all these frozen packages and they have all these powdered drinks. And then you say, well, you have this at lunchtime to serve breakfast and dinner, but you don’t learn how to eat. And then they tell you, well, go ahead and make a chopped salad and add a salad to your meals. 

That’s not teaching you anything,  you’re not learning. You’re not learning anything, nobody ever taught me. I never knew anything about calorie density. I never knew anything about the pleasure trap that I was stuck in, apparently for many, many years. I didn’t know anything about sequencing your meals. I didn’t know any of that until I came to you and JP. That’s when I learned it.

Chef AJ

Were you hungry on those programs?

Shayda Soleymani

Was I hungry? No, I was OK, but I missed eating mangoes, I miss eating a banana. I miss eating a potato. I miss eating rice. I miss eating beans. The things that I was brought up on. They told me I couldn’t have because all those were carbs and carbs are bad for you and you’re going to gain weight eating carbs. Who the hell gets fat from eating carbs? I mean, who? 

What amazes me is that there’s people nowadays that ask me, how did you lose your weight? And I tell them, I need a lot of potatoes and I eat a lot of beans. And they are like no, no, no, no. I couldn’t eat rice and potatoes because it’s going to make me fat. OK, but I’ve done it, and I know a lot of people that have done it. And you don’t gain weight by eating carbs. Yes, if you eat the bad carbs, you’re definitely going to gain weight. But with these complex carbs, you’re not going to gain weight. And the other thing that they’re lacking is they’re not eating vegetables. They’re just not eating vegetables.

Chef AJ

Did you spend a lot of money on these various programs?

Shayda Soleymani

Yes. I’m so sorry that I did, because all that money could be going towards better things. And it’s not just spending money on the programs, AJ. But it’s also all the money that was spent on those medications. And those medications have side effects, and maybe when I was younger of those side effects didn’t show. But who’s to say, like a lot of those medications, those side effects are not going to show up later on down the road? And those fluids, those packaged foods that we were eating and drinking was just, I don’t know what was in that stuff. And who’s to say that that’s not going to cause problems, let’s say, 10, 20, 30 years from now? Everything has its cause and effect. So they were not healthy what we were eating. We were not eating real food like we should be.

Chef AJ

How many years were you on the medications?

Shayda Soleymani

I probably. Fifteen years.

Chef AJ

Wow.

Shayda Soleymani

15 years too long.

Chef AJ

Yeah, so it sounds like the programs you went on were not only not sustainable, but they weren’t really very satisfying.

Shayda Soleymani

No, they were not satisfying at all. Not at all. Not at all.

Chef AJ

And so what was different a little over 10 years ago that caused you to make what turned out to be your final dietary attempt?

Shayda Soleymani

Well, I remember I was living in L.A. and I had really hit my highest point. I’m laughing because my mom’s in the other room and she’s laughing. I was shopping in a size 1X, 2X, never in my life was I shopping in a size 1X and 2X and I was just watching and I would come home and I’d cry because I want to wear cute things, I want to buy cute stuff. They weren’t making cute stuff or heavy, overweight people. But I specifically remember one morning getting up and I look in the mirror and I could not stop crying. I just could not stop crying because I felt so miserable and so sad, and I felt so defeated and these feelings were just all coming up. So I was going home to visit Mom for the weekend, and I came home and I had my computer or my laptop open, and she loves listening to PBS and guess who it happened to be that she was listening to?

Chef AJ

Joel Fuhrman, one of the experts on this summit.

Shayda Soleymani

Exactly. Dr. Joel Fuhrman. And my mom, she was like a little scared to tell me, hey, watch this. There’s a fine line. She doesn’t want to upset me. And so she said, you know, I think you need to listen to this guy because he sounds right up your alley. And I said, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever you say. And so I have my laptop and I’m listening to him as I’m doing my work and I’m like, oh my God, everything he says, it just resonated with me. Like, it just made sense. 

So I started Googling him, and then I came to find out that in a month or two months, he was having this excursion in Utah. And I’m like, oh, I got to find out more about this excursion. But everything he said, it just made sense and it was like, oh my goodness, there’s hope, after all. So I went home, and the next morning I called and I told my mom, I said, mom, if we can get in and go to this excursion, do you want to go? She said, absolutely not. You and your crazy stuff, you go. You come back and tell me about it. And I said, fine. So I called and I said, I’d like to make two reservations for this excursion. And they’re like, we’re completely sold out. I said, do you have a wait-list? And they said, absolutely. I said, well put my name on the wait-list and call me. The next day they called me because they had opened up a whole new wing. So I reserve a room for both my mother and myself, even though she told me not to. I reserve our airline tickets. And then I called her and I said, pack your bags, we’re leaving, this is where we’re going. 

And it was the best decision of my life, best decision. And I’ve always said this when you’re ready to make a change, everything will start happening because it was actually at that excursion that I met a lot of people. And on the bus to the place, we met this couple and apparently they used to go to a lot of these excursions. And so my mom asked, do you know of other places to go to to learn more about this lifestyle? She goes, oh, absolutely, where do you live? And my mom said, well, my daughter lives in Los Angeles, I’m in Orange County. And she goes, well, there’s one coming up in L.A., something expo, Jack Nelson’s program that he used to have. And I forget the name right now.

Chef AJ

Healthy Lifestyle Expo.

Shayda Soleymani

Healthy Lifestyle Expo. Exactly. So that’s when we signed up for that. By signing up for that, I met Kenny Malcolm at that conference. Kenny Malcolm led me to you, you led me to JP. I mean, it was like this whole chain of events that just started happening, was like a domino effect. And I think, OK, somebody is hitting me over the head with all this information, I cannot and will not pass this up. And it has really been a blessing. So I say, when the student is ready, the teacher will appear, but you damn well better recognize it when it happens. And that’s if you remember, I held on to you and JP with both hands and wouldn’t let you guys go.

Chef AJ

Your success is incredible. You must feel very proud.

Shayda Soleymani 

I do feel proud and I’m happy and I’m glad that I can pay it forward to others and to be an inspiration to others. I’m just happy that my mom went along this journey with me. My aunt went along with it and it’s just wonderful to see that everybody’s thriving and getting healthy.

Chef AJ

When you stop dairy, you said, you went to OHI, kind of as a detox. Was it difficult to embrace the way you’re eating now and have the last ten years? Talk a little bit about the transition.

Shayda Soleymani

Well, first of all, giving up dairy was not easy at all. And whoever says that it’s easy, I applaud them because, for me, it was not easy. And Dr. Stevenson was right to tell me to stay there for a month, to really detox out of it and to make a conscious effort. But the best way for me that happened was eating a lot of vegetables, eating a lot of green juices, eating just a healthy, healthy plant-based diet. 

But you also have to wrap your mind around how to do this. You have to have that laser beam focus tha John Pierre always talks about. Because if you take your eye off the ball, anything can happen. And one other thing that I think was really important for me was… I have to find out why I wanted to do this. Because I think that if you don’t know why you’re doing it and you’re doing it for the wrong reasons, you’re not going to be successful. It wasn’t about me fitting into a dress. It wasn’t about me going to a wedding. My why was very personal because I lost my uncle to gastric bypass surgery. And I will never, ever, ever, ever want anyone to go through that and the heartache that I went through of losing him three weeks after his surgery at the age of 57. So my motivation and my reason for doing this was truly based on him because I wish to God that he was alive today because I know he will embrace this lifestyle and that I could teach him. So you need to know your reason, why you’re doing it. And I think that’s huge. Don’t do it for anyone else but yourself. Don’t do it because you want to fit into a dress because of a party or a wedding coming up. That’s not good enough. You really have to focus and find your reason why. You don’t have to tell anybody, it’s just for you personally. 

And the other thing I would say is, if you’re going to do this, commit to doing it 100 percent – if not 100 percent, 200 percent. You can’t have one foot on this side, one foot on that side. I can’t eat this way for five days. And then a day or two, I’m going to have a little bit of cheese. No, that neuro adaptation needs to happen. You need to completely neuro adapt. And I tell you guys, once you neuro adapt to this way of eating, oh my god, you guys won’t go back. But I also know that if one day, if I have that stupid piece of cheese, all hell could break loose. And guess what, I have worked too damn hard and come way too far to ever do that or to jeopardize my own health ever again. I won’t do it.

Chef AJ

I really like what you said about having a foot in both worlds because I find that with cheat days, people are just cheating themselves. But like you mentioned with neuroadaptation, people that dabble in both worlds, they never fully enjoy either diet.

Shayda Soleymani

I agree with you and Dr. Klapper always says your body’s never not looking. That’s always in the back of my head. He’s 100 percent right.

Chef AJ

So Shayda, if this is too personal, don’t answer. But what is your why?

Shayda Soleymani

My why is my uncle. My why is because he died of gastric bypass surgery. He died because of needless surgery. If we had only just known about this way of eating and this lifestyle, I could have saved his life. And like I said, that is my personal why and I don’t ever want to go back to the other way of eating.

Chef AJ

Wow, that’s beautiful. Well, I’m sure he’s looking down at you smiling.

Shayda Soleymani

I hope so.

Chef AJ

Now, you know, one thing that’s really interesting about you to me is you’re very much an extrovert, at least compared to me. You love to travel. And this is before COVID, of course, and you were able to be successful taking all these vacations.

Shayda Soleymani

Yeah, yeah. Because I am not going to let anyone or anything deter me. And road travels are really easy. I will always pack up my food if I travel out of the country, it’s fine because I will always take prepared foods with me. And when we used to go to Mexico or go to Vegas and all this, I will take my Instant Pot pressure cooker. I always cooked food ahead of time and I would always find out where is the Whole Foods that’s near to our hotel. And it’s all about prepping, prepping, prepping and being prepped. That’s all it is. 

This lifestyle can be doable. And there’s, you know, the first time I went to a Healthy Lifestyle Expo. Do you remember that night, Dr. Joel Fuhrman was the keynote speaker, and I got up during dinner because I had to go to the ladies room and as I got outside, I saw Dr. Fuhrman walking in and he had two big bags, large bags from Whole Foods. And I said, Dr. Fuhrman, what you got there? Being nosy as I am and he said, oh, this is my dinner. And I said, but they’re serving dinner for us. And he goes, no, no, no, no, no, no. And you know what he had inside his grocery? He had so much fruit, so much vegetable. He had all of that. And that that right there, that taught me a lesson. And I thought if someone like him as prominent as him can do this and take his food everywhere he goes, why can’t I do it? And that set the tone. 

So, yes, I do travel. I do go out with my friends. Even back in the days when I was in the weightloss mode, you remember I used to go out to dinner with my friends, but the key was I would pre-eat before I go. And a lot of times my friends would love to eat late at night. I am not eating after six o’clock typically. I just want to be done by five, five-thirty, if I can. And I’m better off by pre-eating and brushing my teeth and flossing… well I sure as hell do not want to eat anything after that because I am too lazy to want to brush and floss again. And I will just go and get a cup of hot water, and I would just sit and I would enjoy my time with my friends. And if your friends really love and adore you, they’re going to understand what you’re doing. They’re going to respect you for what you’re doing. Now did I lose some friends over to transitioning to this way of eating? Yes, I did. But you know what, if I’m going to lose friends because of the way that I’m eating, then they’re not my friends to begin with. Because I had gained a whole lot of wonderful, beautiful friends that truly [inaudible] from the plant-based movement that I consider family right now. 

So traveling is not easy. You just have to be prepared if you go to a resort. You just need to talk to the food and beverage guy and you tell them… And you know, when I started this with John Perrie, he used to have me do a fruit and vegetable day. I never understood why he had me doing those once a week. But then later, I learned that he was working on my head because he always said, if you can’t fix this, you’re not going to fix your stomach. And he was right. So by eating fruits and vegetables, it taught me that no matter what situation I could be in, I could always find fruits and I could always find vegetables, and I’m not going to go hungry. 

I have gone places where for three days, five days, even up to seven days, that all I’ve eaten was fruits and vegetables. And look, guys, I survived. And if you guys are going to miss a meal, well, that’s not a big deal. Missing a meal is not the end of the world, and in fact, it might do us good to skip a meal every now and again and go to bed on those empty stomach. There is nothing wrong with that. So it’s just again, you have to work on your mind and you have to be focused, focused, focused and know why you’re doing this and don’t take your eyes off of the end result. Because once you get to that, then it’s a beautiful place to be. It really is.

Chef AJ

Did you have support during your journey? Because I know probably most of your friends don’t eat this way.

Shayda Soleymani

Most of my friends don’t eat this way, but I tell you what, I’ve had great, great support from them. But like I told you, I did lose some friends, which was OK. But the friends that I gained and the friends that supported me through this journey, they’re all still with me and they’re all still supporting. They love this food, and I couldn’t be more proud of my mom. She has been my inspiration, my support, my rock, everything. No one encouraged me more than my mom did. And it’s nice because we live together, and it would have been really, really hard to make a meal for myself and then to make something else for mom. And from the first day that I started eating this way, she was on board one hundred percent, one hundred and twenty percent and would always tell me, hey, whatever you need, I’m here for you. Let’s do this together. So, yes, I’ve had a tremendous amount of support.

Chef AJ

But didn’t she also have improvements in her health and weight because of living with you?

Shayda Soleymani

Absolutely. She lost weight. She got off her medications and then my aunt is the same thing. My aunt lives two blocks from us, so she’s doing well. So, yeah, it had a domino effect to everybody else. So it’s been wonderful.

Chef AJ

Tell me what your environment is like.

Shayda Soleymani

My environment is pretty clean. You’ve been to my house many times and I’ve caught you going through my cupboards, my refrigerator and my freezer. And thank goodness you did not find anything. And I think your environment has to be clean. So in order for you to to stand out or to win, this environment needs to be clean. You need to surround yourself and support yourself with foods that are going to support you and make you healthy. So you guys can come to my house at any time, you’re not really going to find… What’s the worst thing you might find, maybe dates, but you don’t even find that in the house that much anymore. We used to have dates because when we have company come over, most Middle Easterns, when we serve tea, traditionally everybody has it with a date and that’s when they would have dates. But we don’t even do that much anymore. But you’re going to find a lot of potatoes and squashes and lots of fruits and vegetables. 

So the environment is clean because like I mentioned before, if you put something bad in the fridge, it’s going to knock on my head. And I just can’t. So it’s better that nothing comes in. And I’ve had people that came and they said, can we just leave this in your fridge? And I’m like, no, I really don’t want anything in my fridge or they’ll come and they’re like, can’t you just make x y z? And I said, no. From day one, I refuse to make anything from the past. And whoever came to our house had to eat what we were eating. And I don’t make a lot of fancy… Yes, I will make fancier foods if we have company, but there are still within the same parameter of plant-based healthy eating. But for the most part, I eat so simple. And you taught me that by eating simply, that’s how you’re going to win this. It’s not the fancy foods, it’s the simplicity, the sequencing, and eating your vegetables.

Chef AJ

Shayda, do you think you would have had this level of success if you didn’t have a clean environment? What advice do you have for people that just can’t seem to negotiate one?

Shayda Soleymani

And for me personally, I do not think that I would have been successful had I not had a clear, clean environment. That’s just me. I know there’s some people out there that because of their husbands or their kids and all that, they claim that they can’t. Well, then I would… First of all, if it was my husband or my children, I would have a serious talk with them and say, look, I have to do this and try to get their support. I would have two refrigerators. They can keep their stuff in the garage, in that room straight out of my sight. I don’t want to see it. Or just if you’re going to eat something, eat it away from me, don’t do it in the house. 

I get it, it’s got to be really, really tough for your spouse or your children not to support you and to be in an unhealthy environment. I feel sorry for those people, and I wish there was a way that they could work it out, but they’re going to have to negotiate something for them. Like in the garage, just keep it out there… at least within the house and the four walls, make sure that everything stays clean. It’s not easy. It’s not easy.

Chef AJ

Right? Well, one of the experts on the summit, Dr. Doug Lisle, can actually do private consultations to help them navigate these situations.

Shayda Soleymani

Yeah, Doug Lisle is great.

Chef AJ

So Shayda had a couple of times as we were talking, you mentioned this idea of eating simply and sequencing. Could you elaborate on that a little bit? What that means and how that’s helped you?

Shayda Soleymani

Sure. So what I mean by that, by eating simple and my breakfast typically used to be, still is just steamed vegetables. And literally, I go to Costco or Trader Joe’s and I get a bag of broccoli, frozen broccoli, cauliflower, the cruciferous crunch, the frozen bell peppers and all that. And I will steam it in the microwave, or I’ll steam it in the Instant Pot. And when you eat a pound and a half to two pounds of that in the morning, it doesn’t seem like a lot, but it does fill you up. 

So sequencing basically means to start out with the lowest calorie-dense foods and then work your way up. But you want to completely fill up your stomach with the lowest calorie-dense foods, which means all the vegetables… all the vegetables whether they’re carrots, celery, Swiss chard, kale, spinach, whatever it is that you like. I love broccoli and cauliflower and zucchini, all those, so I would start with them. Once I filled up with that, then I may add the potato to that, or I may add some lentils to that, but I always try to eat a lot of vegetables first. I want to fill myself up. 

So if I make a salad for lunch, like, let’s say this is my salad bowl for lunch, this whole thing is going to be mostly all vegetables and lettuce and carrots and cucumbers and and shredded zucchini and whatnot. And then maybe about four or five cups of vegetables, I may add a cup of okra. I may add a cup of lentils. Either or but my ratio is always three to one, three being the vegetables and one being the starch or the potatoes. That’s what seemed to work for me. My lunches are basically… if you go to my Instagram page, you’ll see I post my food there, you’ll see how simple it is. Like three quarters of my plate will be vegetables and one quarter will be starch. Or maybe half of my plate, which Dr. McDougall recommends half of your plate to be your vegetables and then half of your plate to starch – whatever is going to work for you. 

But if I am still hungry after eating my starch, guess what? I go back to eating vegetables again. But it’s that simple. And I will add my fruit to my salad because once you start neuro adapting to this, sometimes you don’t even need salad dressing. I find that the fresh fruit that’s in the salad has enough juice so that I might just squeeze a little bit of fresh lime in there and call that a day, and it’s nice and easy. 

So that’s what I mean by simple meals. Your meals could be a whole plate of zucchini with a potato. The whole plate of zucchini with some rice, a whole plate of squash and some brussels sprouts. That’s what I mean by simple, don’t get into complicated recipes. You know, it amazes me how much people want recipe after recipe after recipe, when in reality recipes I think are great for when you have company coming over so you could make something more. But for me, in order to get successful, what worked for me was the simplicity of just grabbing a potato, grabbing some salad, and that was it. That’s how I did. 

Or having soup, I still do. I make a lot of soups in the instant pot. And what I would do is have a lot of, you know, I would have my salad because you always want to have a raw salad. At least one of your meals should be a raw salad. Then I would go to my steamed vegetables. Then from there, I would go to a bowl of soup. And believe me, by the time I get to the soup, I’m not even hungry anymore, so I may only eat half of that soup. So there’s just so much you can eat. So that’s what I mean by simple eating and sequencing. You start out with the lowest calorie-dense food and then work your way up.

Chef AJ

Nice. That is terrific, and you love your food, right?

Shayda Soleymani

I absolutely love my food, and I think that’s the key to being successful because if you don’t love your food, you’re not going to enjoy, you’re not going to eat that, you’re not going to stick to it. And nothing tastes better to me than a purple sweet potato, my salad. Like if I’m out of town, I literally crave my salads, my steamed vegetables, and I’ll take stuff with me. So like right now to dinner tonight, I’ve got the asparagus ready to go. We’re going to show you two salads. We’re going to have that ready to go. And I’m going to have soup. And so that way mom and I can take whatever we want, but you got to keep it simple.

Once or twice a week, make a soup for yourself. Keep it in the freezer so you can rotate so you don’t get bored eating the same soup. Get your potatoes. Get your rice. Okra, I have fallen absolutely in love with okra, and the way we make okra is we take the okra with lentils and mix the two, and it is absolutely delicious. Beans. I don’t like canned beans anymore. I make them in the Instant Pot, super easy. You can go to my YouTube channel, Healthy Cooking with Shayda, and I’ve got tons of recipes that you can find how to make them in the instant pot or for different types of recipes. But yeah I love my food. You know I love my food.

Chef AJ

So do you do batch cooking?

Shayda Soleymani

I don’t do a lot of batch cooking. I’m not like Tammy who does a lot of batch cooking. I will make a soup for the week and potatoes. So I guess I kind of do batch cooking but the salad, I’ll probably make it every day because we go through it so much. And so I buy a lot of frozen vegetables because at night I love having the frozen vegetables is convenient. 

So I don’t do a lot of batch cooking because I don’t have two refrigerators. I only have the one. And it’s just hard to do. And I’m a real estate agent. So on the weekends, that’s when I do a lot of my work. I’m out showing property or doing open houses, so I don’t really have time on the weekends. But it’s easy enough for me to once a week at least make the soup. Put the potatoes in the oven. So that’s as far as I go about batch cooking. Everything else is so easy. Again, if you keep it simple, it really is that easy to throw it together that even if you don’t batch cook.

Chef AJ

Well, speaking of cooking, you have some beautiful looking vegetables in front of you.

Shayda Soleymani

Well, yes, I wanted to share with you guys two recipes that have helped me in my weight loss transition, and both of these recipes are on my website and there are also on my YouTube channel, Healthy Cooking with Shayda dotcom, where you can find these. In the Middle East growing up, my grandmother used to make a salad. I know in the Middle East, if you go to Israel or if you go to any of those countries, they basically have this salad and that is why they call it Israeli salad, and it’s super simple. 

It’s real Roma tomatoes that you chop up. And I’ve already gone ahead and chopped it up. And then you take cucumbers again. Look, we’re using low-calorie-dense foods. You’ve got chopped cucumbers, and I typically make this with Persian cucumbers. But if you don’t have Persian cucumbers, then you can make it with an English cucumber. A purple raw onion, we’re going to have that in here. Herbs, I’m a big, big fan of incorporating herbs into your salad, and you need to add like cilantro, basil, mint, parsley, fresh dill, whatever you like. So this has about three or four different types, and you just add all that in here. And then we’re going to mix all this together. You have had this salad before, no?

Chef AJ

It’s delicious. Any time you put mint in anything, I’m going to love it.

Shayda Soleymani

Yeah, yep. And the salad is really versatile because if you wanted to, you could add chickpeas to that. You can have black beans to this. You could add wild rice to this. You could add brown rice, you could add lentils to this. So this salad, you could eat it on its own or you could add all the other grains and the starches. The dressing is even easier. And we’re going to take fresh lime. You always want to do the zest, it just adds a whole lot of flavor. And the dressing on this is literally just lime juice, there is nothing else in here. Oh, and then the other thing I add is cayenne pepper just because, or jalapeno pepper. Because I like a little kick in here. And if you wanted to add a bell pepper in here or if you wanted to add fresh jalapeno in here, you certainly can add that as well.

And this would last in the refrigerator, I would say, probably about three days. But we eat it so quickly that, you know… How much lime you put in here is really to taste. Typically about two to three, we mix this really well. And voila, you’ve got a beautiful salad that’s low in calories and it’s absolutely delicious and it’s filling. 

The other salad that we’re going to make today is also really easy. It’s a garbanzo beans salad. I told you I don’t like canned garbanzo beans, so I’ve gone ahead to make those in the Instant Pot, I’ve got a YouTube showing you how to make those. And they are absolutely delicious made in the Instant Pot, the flavor is so different. So this needs some purple cabbage. We’ve got some sliced, simmered zucchini. We’ve got cucumbers going on in here. Everything from that. We’ve got mangoes. Now if you don’t want to put mango in here, you certainly can put pineapple, you could put grapes in here, and you could put actually whatever you like. You know, to me, a recipe is just a road map, you guys. You can really substitute whatever it is that you like in there. Add some carrots.

Chef AJ

I like that a recipe is just a roadmap and you’ve always said, don’t go chasing recipes.

Shayda Soleymani

Make it your own. Bell peppers, I got a yellow and orange. I always get a comment from my viewers that my salads are really colorful and I agree, I want my food to be colorful because we eat with our eyes. So if the food doesn’t look good, it doesn’t look appetizing, we’re not going to eat it. So make it as colorful and as beautiful as possible. A couple of weeks ago, I went out with some friends and I really don’t pay attention to what they’re eating. But for some reason that night I turned around. I was looking at one of my friend’s as I was eating. I looked at his plate and I felt so sorry for him because my plate, I asked for steamed vegetables. They brought me a plate this big. It was beautifully plated. It had asparagus. It had cauliflower, it had broccoli and it had artichoke. It was beautiful and it was just steamed, and just nothing on it. And his had a piece of dead flesh and I’m telling you when I saw that it just turned my stomach, but it was nothing green about it. There was nothing pretty about it. It was just so bland. It was just like, why? 

Then we’re going to add some chopped onions. Again, we’re going to put in our fresh mint. And then we are going to add our garbanzo beans. And then we’ve got to mix all this together, and again, this will last probably about three to four days. I know some people don’t like garbanzo beans, I know there are some people that don’t, change out the beans.How many different types of beans do we have, like over 100 or 200?

Chef AJ

I don’t know. I heard Dr. Kerry Saunders once say there’s 18000 different kinds of legumes

Shayda Soleymani

Well, then there you go. So you’ve got a lot of choices. Now again, dressings. You don’t need to make fancy dressings. But I always have fresh lime in the refrigerator. We’re just going to pour that on top. And then for this, I’m going to use white balsamic vinegar. I don’t want to use dark balsamic vinegar because I want to see the pretty colors of all the vegetables and everything that’s in here. 

I know people always ask me how much, how much of this is, how much of that? I don’t know. I just, I just throw in in there, I just taste it. Mix everything together really well. And I don’t know if you’re using black seed or not. Lately, I’ve started to use it, so I will take the black seed cumin and grind that on top. Yeah, look at that. And again, this is a low-calorie dense meal, and it’s delicious and it’s healthy. And look at the colors that’s in there. How could you not like this salad? I mean, it’s delicious.

Chef AJ

And you don’t have to portion control it.

Shayda Soleymani

1. That’s the best thing about this way of eating. I have not had to portion control a damn thing. If I have to look at a food scale… I hear my friends say, oh, I can only have a quarter of this and a half of that and whatever of this. I am like, what is wrong with you people? Not having to portion control anything has been a blessing in disguise. Well, both of these salads are my go to, you know, they’re just delicious.

Chef AJ

You know, I probably should have asked you this at the beginning of the interview, but do you have any before photos you could show the viewers?

Shayda Soleymani

Yes, absolutely. So let’s start out. Well, you’re going to make a comment, I know you. But it’s OK because I’m holding an alcoholic beverage. Those are the before. But I don’t drink anymore.

Chef AJ

Wow, you’re like literally half the person you used to be.

Shayda Soleymani

Oh yeah, and if you go to my website, you’ll see more before and after pictures. I’m telling you, I I don’t understand how some people… It’s just so freeing. And it’s so exciting to be able to eat healthy, fresh foods and not have to worry about how much you’re eating. And I don’t have to worry that all my clothes from two years ago are going to fit me. Like I know I can pull things from three years ago, and I put it on in and oh, they fit. And it’s actually really nice to be able to shop in smaller clothes and not have to go to the big women’s store and buy cute things. So it’s exciting. I’m extremely grateful to you and to JP and to all the other plant-based doctors who are showing me the way. For you guys to promote it and to teach it and to show us there are healthier options and there is a way to get healthy. Absolutely.

Chef AJ

You know, it’s funny because some of the other success stories on the summit, when asked what the best part of losing weight was other than reversing their diseases, said just being able to buy clothes off the rack and to go from two x to a size four is incredible.

Shayda Soleymani

When I go shopping, when I come home, I buy a size small or a size four and I’m thinking, am I dreaming? Like it’s still, it’s been 10 years and I still got that same size. And it’s just mind boggling. And I don’t have any of my old fat clothes. I got rid of all of them because I knew I would never go back. So no reason to keep it.

Chef AJ: What would you say to someone who has given up hope that they could lose weight?

Shayda Soleymani: Oh God. Never, never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever give up. There is hope there is. You can’t do this. You just have to set your mind to doing it. You just have to have that laser beam focus. You just need to… no, don’t ever give up. That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.

Chef AJ: So Shayda, what’s the real truth about weight loss?

Shayda Soleymani: Well, the real truth about weight loss is that you can have the ideal weight that you want and the body that you want. Yes, it is hard work. And yes, you need to be extremely focused on what you’re doing. But more importantly, you need to eat your vegetables. You just need to do it. And just be focused and know your reason for why you’re doing it. Because honest to God guys, this feels so good. It may be hard work at the beginning… but I tell you what, the reward that you get at the end is just phenomenal. It’s just absolutely wonderful.

Chef AJ: Well, said, just eat your damn vegetables. Congratulations, Shayda, on your 10 year anniversary.

Shayda Soleymani: Thank you. I couldn’t have done it without you and JP, and I am forever grateful to you both. Thank you so much.

Chef AJ: Hi, Dr. Hellerstein and welcome to the Truth about Weight Loss Summit, thanks so much for being here.

Dr Marc Hellerstein: It’s always fun to be with you.

Chef AJ: Dr. Hellerstein many people lose weight, but why is it so hard for most people to keep it off?

Dr Marc Hellerstein: I think that’s the most important question in the biology of obesity. It’s actually pretty easy to lose weight for a little while. You can go on all kinds of diets and they work. The trick is to keep it up, and the reason it’s so difficult is the body is not our friend. The body is it has programs to defend itself from losing weight. So let me show a few slides and I’ll put this on properly, that will hopefully explain why it’s so hard to keep weight off, and the role of exercise is going to be the punch line to it for several reasons. So people often say that just to give you a background that we’re in a state of imbalance if we’re overweight or obese, and that’s not really right at all. In fact, our body is very good at matching intake to expenditure without really even a clear understanding of why that works. For example, if you just eat, let’s say, 3000 calories a day, that’s a million calories a year. If on average January 1st you weighed yourself and you gained five pounds, you probably wouldn’t be happy. Most people, but five pounds is two kilograms. That’s like a fat ten thousand calories. That’s one percent of a million. And when most things in life, if you’re within one percent, you’re doing pretty well. So our body, even when we’re not perfect and if someone who’s maintaining their exact weight is extremely good at balancing what you eat, how much calories you spend, so how does this happen? We don’t think that there’s like a thermostat that does this, but there’s some mechanism a little bit like that. And the best way to understand this in my experience is to think about is to do a thought experiment. Let’s do this. Just pretend you got sick of this whole business and you just every night you had a little refrigerator in your closet. Nobody looked. You opened the refrigerator and you ate a cup of ice cream. Let’s say 500 calories every night. So the hell with it. I’m just going to. I like ice cream, let’s say. So would you gain? 500 calories a day, and you did everything else, the same 3500 calories a week. That’s a pound. Would you gain 50 pounds a year? Would you be in 500 pounds in 10 years? Of course not. Yet there are obviously are people who are eating 500 extra calories a day. So what prevents us from gaining 500 pounds in 10 years? What if you did the opposite? Would you lose a pound a week? Would you lose 50 pounds a year? Of course not. You wouldn’t even be alive if you are 50 pounds a year after a year or two. So what prevents it and there’s there was a there have been studies to just do this exact. Thought experiment. My favorite one is Rockefeller University and what they showed, and I’ll show this and I’ll show to date data slides in this whole thing. Real data slides, because I think they’re worth it. Nice. And there’s this data slide shows that if you gain weight, your energy expenditure, the amount of calories you burn goes up. And if you lose weight, the amount of calories you burn goes down. The body just does that. This is a famous study twenty-five years ago.

Dr Marc Hellerstein: Here’s what they did. It took either or obese people are not obese people, and they overfed them or underfed them. And I keep it simple. An obese person weighed 130 kilograms on average, which is like 270 pounds or a lean person, 150 pounds. And if they fed him a jelly, they overfed them under like a rock and a metabolic ward, which means they never left the place for six months. So they knew what they ate, they knew what they did, and if they gained 12 kg or 25 pounds. Most of it was that some of it was laying tissue and they spent eight hundred and seventy extra calories a day just to walk around. If you’re lean, you gain 10 percent, which is 15 pounds or so, and you spend 630 extra calories a day just to walk around and be alive, which means that, if you’re a lean person and you want to and you want to eat 600 calories more a day, all you have to do is gain 15 pounds. But that’s the price you’ll pay. You can either exercise or do something else that burns off 600 calories or you can gain 15 pounds, most of which is fat. In the reverse direction. So that’s kind of a joke of trade here, gain 15 pounds or exercise. That’s what people do in actual life to allow themselves to eat. But what would happen is the other point is that after they gain 15 pounds, they would spend 600 calories more or 900 calories more and they’d stop gaining weight. Now you can eat more and not gain weight. Well, the exact flip side happens when you lose weight. So if you start off and you lose 10 percent, most of it is vapid, but some are resilient tissue. And now if you start off spending about three thousand, you spent five hundred and fifty fewer calories every day just to be alive. So let’s say you start used to eat 3100 calories. Now you’re 2500. And you say, Hey, I’m doing great, I mean, I’m not eating, I mean, 2500 calories. You won’t lose any more weight. You’re done. You’re back at a new balance. Your body has economized. Same thing with a non-obese person, for some reason, they try to lose weight, they’ll lose, you know, 15 pounds and now they spend 400 calories fewer and they’ll stop losing weight. This, to me, is one of the most important physiology experiments of the last 50 years, and I teach it to students all the time, which is to say that energy expenditure is not constant. It adapts to your weight. And one of the reasons for that, but not the only reason, is that you do lose or gain muscle mass. This is there’s any, many figures like this, but this is a figure showing that you’re fat-free. Mass, which is mostly muscle, correlates very well with your resting energy expenditure in thousands and thousands of people. The more muscle you have, the more expensive it is, which in our world is good. We want to burn calories, the more expensive it to live, to have more money. And this is how many calories per kilogram is about the same, no matter how big you are, in terms of fat-free mass. So this what I call this, this dynamic energy balance equation, that energy expenditure changes as you change. And sort of like if you made more money, suddenly you’d spend more. Or if you made less money, you’d spend less. I’d be like if you were really that smart in life, you would do that, perhaps. But our body does that. So this tells who’s going to gain weight. For example, there are studies that if there are two siblings, one of whom spends twenty-five hundred calories at rest, one instance twenty one hundred and one who spends twenty one, it will gain weight until they equal their sibling. And amazing and sort of predict who is going to gain weight. It also says that as we started this conversation, why most diets fail.

Dr Marc Hellerstein: It’s easy to lose weight, but then your body fights you. And how frustrating is it in many, many people in the audience will experience will feel this, we will know this. How frustrating is it to eat the same? And adhere to the same diet and stop losing weight. So then what do you have to do with it even less? And then you get your new balance. Of course, it becomes impossible. You’re starving, you’re not right, and you’re not even losing weight. And by the way, this explains why a lot of people do bad habits. For example, women have not smoked, stopped smoking in the same way that men have in the last 50 years. Men have smoked half as much, and there’s half as much lung cancer, exactly the same ratio. Women have not smoked half as much. One of the reasons is that nicotine increases the adrenaline in the blood a little bit and women who or people who smoke maybe weigh two or three kilograms less than if they don’t smoke. So for five pounds people, it’s an easy way to lose five pounds or five pounds off. Of course, 20 percent of smokers die from smoking. It’s a bad trade health-wise, but it’s easier than exercise because it burns about 100 calories a day. OK, so then what does work for long-term weight loss? I think that’s the question, and the truth is we’re very bad at it. I think probably five percent of people who go on a diet lose 30 pounds for five years, which is the definition of a truly successful weight loss. 30 pounds five years.

Dr Marc Hellerstein: So the two main factors in the report, and I don’t think these are the only things, but this is a nice summary. For people who successfully lose weight, 30 pounds five years is one, the most important is that they voluntarily do activities, exercise, about 400 calories a day or 500 calories a day. That’s not being a marathon runner. You can walk to the train station and back a lot of people that you live in the city, or you can take an hour, 15-minute walk after work. That’s 400 or 500 calories if you did it. And that allows you if you think about it, to eat 500 calories more, not feel deprived. And we’ll see. It also increases your muscle mass, which is good too. And thereby not be dominated by your body’s reduction of calorie expenditure. The other thing that correlates is people tend to have a less energy-dense diet. Now, what’s energy-dense sugar and fat? So I mean, I think that makes sense, but it’s hard, it’s hard by itself that often doesn’t work without the exercise. So the way I phrased it, I like to keep this simple and dramatic. Our body fat stores remember being fat. Remember being full and their harsh masters with a long memory. We are programmed to defend our body weight by reducing calories burned. We also increase our appetite, but everybody’s aware of that. That’s why we try to pick foods carefully that don’t keep us hungry. But even if we do that, we’re going to burn fewer calories. Our bodies are working against us, they’re designed to prevent starvation, not to prevent obesity. It’s clear that’s the case and this can be defended for years. So this is not helpful to most, many people alive now. But I think in the big picture if you never become overweight and your body fat never expands, it’s probably easier. Or maybe not, never many, but maybe it takes a few years for your fat cells to get used to it something like that, but prevention would, as in most of these, be actually more effective than reversal. OK, so I think we can we can stop and talk about some other things, if you like.

Chef AJ: Well, it sounds to me like when we lose weight, our body works against us

Dr Marc Hellerstein: Completely and it makes sense. Think about it in nature. Do you think the biggest problem with overeating? I mean, do you think animals out there, that’s their problem, they have too much food?

Chef AJ: Quite the opposite, historically.

Dr Marc Hellerstein: Quite the opposite and indeed, so our bodies are brilliant at not starving. Brilliant. We have. I teach classes on the genius of our starvation response. We drop our thyroid hormone, we drop leptin, we drop insulin needs, we lose growth hormones or we don’t grow. Women stop having periods so they don’t have babies if they’re starving. Everything is designed when girls have their first menstrual periods when they have enough body fat. To make to support reproduction, that’s actually the way leptin is a hormone that comes from the adipose tissue and it goes up when a girl hits a certain body, fatness at age 10, 11, 12, 13 whenever in the old days and Romeo and Juliet time, they would be 14 years old before they got fat enough and had their periods. Now it’s much younger. So fatness is really sensed by our bodies.

Chef AJ: Do you think that the reason the age of monarchy has gotten younger is because people are just getting fatter?

Dr Marc Hellerstein: I think that’s pretty clear. Yeah, it correlates with body mass, which is generally in young people, but by fatness. Yeah, monarchy is starting it now about 11 and he used to be, I mean, really. And I love this Romeo and Juliet story because she was 13 or 14 in that story and she was a rich girl. She was wealthy, so she might have had her periods but peasant girls were having their periods 16 and then they’d meet Romeo and if they didn’t kill themselves in the play, they would have their babies right away and they’d have periods late and babies early.

Chef AJ: Well, you said a fat cell is a harsh master with a long memory. It was that is that to protect us. I mean, from an evolutionary perspective, do you think?

Dr Marc Hellerstein: Yeah, I don’t. I don’t love that idea but I think it’s true. I think you probably had fat cells just to protect yourself against harsh winters. And, you know, if you think about it, there’d be evolutionary roadblocks or get narrower wings were a lot of people, a lot of people way back would have died during some harsh drought or winter. And the people whose fat cells could keep them alive would make it. And so we got good at that.

Chef AJ: So the more muscle mass you have, the more calories you burn?

Dr Marc Hellerstein: OK, that’s another really important point. And that this brings me into the whole emphasis on exercise because I know there’s a lot of kind of arithmetic that people use against exercise and I think they are exactly wrong. They really got it upside down. So there are three good reasons to exercise. When you when it comes to especially in the context of weight loss, the first reason is what I just said is that if you just burn 500 calories a day, you can eat those 500 calories and that’s more food in your body. So you can be sitting at the table and everyone else is eating a cookie after dinner or putting sugar in their coffee or whatever. And you can do it and you just get sick of that, and maybe you’re hungry. Whereas if you’re exercising, you can have the same calorie intake that you had before you lost weight. So a lot of people say, well, I have to exercise, you know, I have to run a mile walk a mile and a half to eat two apples, just not the way to think about it. It is if you do exercise four or five hours, you can eat that extra. You can eat whatever you spent your life eating. You don’t have to deprive yourself from a kind of textural or sensual feeling of food. Just eat what you always ate. But now you’re burning 400 calories and your body drops seven kilograms, which is not trivial. Fifteen pounds, twenty pounds, I mean, that’s just. Or even more. Twenty-five pounds if you started off overweight. So that’s the first reason. It’s just an arithmetic reason. The second reason? Is it gives you muscle? Muscle is through activity now, men have more muscle than women from testosterone or androgen, but the main factors for muscle are dietary protein, androgens, and activity. So if someone walks five miles a day, they will have more lean body mass, more muscle mass, and even if they don’t lose weight. This is a key point. They have a difference in muscle versus fat, they are a different person, a completely different person in terms of risk factors for diabetes, heart disease, all that fatty liver, Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, they’re completely different. They’re not as insulin resistant and so on. But that’s not the only reason. They also are they burn more calories. If you put on know Formula X kilograms of muscle, you burn x times a certain numbers of calories every day. So, people who actually not only burn the calories from exercising but their muscle burns calories, just sleeping at night, just walking around it cost to have muscle, you’re like, I showed that figure your fat, your lean body mass or your muscle mass is very correlated in everybody. With how many calories you burn at rest, you can look at some people and say, Hey, they weigh 150 pounds, that one person is fat fatter, one person is lean and muscular, that person was lean will burn way more calories. People say, Oh, they have a high metabolism. It’s not like it’s necessarily some genetic thing. They just have more muscle. Relatively speaking. So that’s the second reason. Muscle burns, calories. There was a book called Strong Women stay lean, and I kind of liked that title. I like that idea. That strength is what you eat and keeps it in muscle, not in fat. But then the third reason and this is a little less well understood, is that there’s this whole thing about fitness versus fatness. So if you like, I can go into that a little bit?

Chef AJ: I would love to. This is fascinating because so many people just don’t exercise.

Dr Marc Hellerstein: Exactly. I think they get a lot of bad information about that, you know, because if you look at before I talk about fitness and we look at what’s different now than, you know, 50 years ago. People are way, way fatter than they were 70 years ago. I saw a picture of John Kennedy in West Virginia talking know in the election of 1960. He’s campaigning and you look outside and there are thousands of people standing out listening to him. They’re all wearing suits and they’re all skinny. Go to West Virginia now, it is not so. And so what is different? Well, there’s diet and there’s activity, and it’s easier to talk about diet, but I think it’s more at least as important, I would say more important, but I don’t want to minimize that. Then the diet, the exercise part. And here’s the other reason. And this matters in terms of health, not just in terms of how you look. Is that fitness, maybe more important than how much body fat you want. So let’s talk about that for a minute. First of all, what is fitness? Fitness, often people say, Hey, you look fit, what they’re really saying is you don’t like overweight. That’s not what Fit means. It’s your ability to do aerobic work to exercise. Metabolic fitness is the capacity of your tissues, particularly your muscle, your heart, your lungs, all that to do work to walk, run, carry, you know do things that demand work over time. So then you say, well. You can’t be fat and fit, right? Well, you can. There are some great examples of that. And if there are basketball fans out there, there was Charles Barkley, who’s famous now as an announcer, he was when he was very young. He was very big and fat early in his career and he was incredibly fit. He could run like crazy. So he was an unusual person. He was overweight and he was fit. But there’s a whole group of people called just who are sumo wrestlers in Japan, mostly also in places like that where they are. These are people who are like American football players. They have to hit each other, knock them back. So mass times acceleration means that you need to be bigger. So these guys weigh 400 pounds to shoot. But they also are very disciplined. They work out eight hours a day. They eat a very special diet. They are extremely fit. And if you measure them, they have low rates, they have high HDL, low insulins, they’re not diabetic. Glucose is good and they have low visceral fat, which is something I won’t get into, but they don’t have fat in their around their intestine. They have it subcutaneous. These are fit that people and then these sumo wrestlers, when they get all they get to be 40 and they retire, they think they can eat the same way and suddenly they’re diabetic, getting heart disease because they’re no longer. I mean, I think that’s one of the best examples. Same body in-person stops exercising, still weighs 400 pounds, and now he’s at risk like any 400 pounds. To American football players, you look at a lot of these guys, actually these big linemen, they get to be forty-five, fifty years old and they’re dying of strokes and heart attacks. It’s incredible. They were playing football, you know, seven, eight years ago. But there’s not many people who are fat and fit. There are some, but not that many, you can do it. It’s just a little unusual.

Dr Marc Hellerstein: Now, are there people who are thin but unfit? You’ve probably heard of that idea too, right? I’ve heard people call it skinny fat people or something like that. I don’t think that’s the right way to think about it. I think it’s thin, unfit people. There are some people who just lie around all day. They don’t eat, evidently, and they don’t exercise. They have very atrophied muscles. They may even be fat. They may have 30 percent body fat, but they don’t weigh a lot. So they look thin. I’ll show you that there are people like this and they are not metabolically healthy. So here’s why we should care about fitness. Is it a big study that correlates better with health and death rates than how fat you are? And I show you this is my favorite slide on this, I could show you many papers on this, but this is a striking one. This is about, I don’t know, 10 to five or ten thousand men studied in Texas, in Dallas, and they look they measure their fitness, which is hard to do. You have to get people on a treadmill. I mean, it’s not a routine test the doctors do. And then they measure their body fatness. And so they group people into fitness categories. And fat. So they either call them unfit, which is this dark bar, or fit, which is the open bar and this is the risk of dying. And the bottom part of the graph is the risk of dying from a heart attack, these are bad things. We can all agree that dying from a heart attack is not something you want. So that outcome is, I think, pretty clear. So then they have lean, normal, and obese, which is the middle of the third, third, third, and then they have unfit versus fit. So here’s what’s amazing. This group here is the unfit obese people, sorry, this group here with the number 40 above it is the unfit lean people. They have a relative risk of two times above the baseline. This fit here. This group here with seventy-five above it is the fit. Obese people. They have a much lower disease risk of dying than unfit skinny people. Same thing with dying from a heart attack, the unfit send people. Have a higher death rate than fit obese people. Now you can see there’s far you can if you saw the whole neighborhood, there are far fewer fit obese people and far more fit lean people. But if you happen to be in those odd categories, it just shows what the real thing is so unfit. Obese people have a very high rate, but the key point here is. If you maintain fitness, it can mitigate a lot of other bad things. And fitness is about activities, all about exercise is about, you know, aerobic walking, working in the garden. There are studies that just working in the garden three times a week for a half-hour that is from Korea, from Scandinavia, from California, from other parts of the United States. Working in the garden three or four times a week reduces the diabetes rate by 50 percent to 60 percent just by maintaining a little bit of fitness because many people don’t do much at all. I would say most people don’t watch football these days. I wouldn’t think, I think that many of it might not be wrong. I think that even kids. Don’t walk to school because they’re afraid their parents are afraid of what could happen. They don’t play at school, know they don’t have recess, they come home, they sit on their social media, they do their computer watch TV, they go to sleep.

Chef AJ: When I was in high school actually know when I was in junior high, they got rid of physical education in school.

Dr Marc Hellerstein: In California, they barely do it at all, and people don’t walk to school, you use to, of course, just walk back and forth to school, play in the playground. I just, you don’t see that. So anyway, to get back to, I can summarize this why is exercise key? And I think maintaining weight loss and maintaining health if you’re concerned about being overweight, first of all, does replace the last calories. That you would use to burn, but you no longer burn because you lost weight because your body is mad at you for losing weight and it’s reducing its make you hungry and reducing how many calories you burn, your body is defending its own health. It thinks that you’re not. You don’t agree. So food intake does not need to keep dropping. If you maintain activity, it doesn’t have to be running or swimming. It can just be anything that burns calories. I think walking is very good. It’s not boring if you go with a friend if you go someplace nice if you are outside. It’s not boring at all. It’s relaxing to have a dog. Get a dog just to walk. I always work with my dog so I can replace large calories. It maintains your muscle memory burns more calories even when you’re not exercising your muscles, doing work for you. And finally, and maybe most importantly, although maybe not the way you look, it maintains your fitness. Fitness is all about activity. There’s a little genetics, but not so much for fitness. Mostly, it’s about activity, and that correlates big time with health outcomes, even when you’re overweight. So if you were if you exercise, just change your muscle mass and change your fitness, even if you don’t lose weight, your doctor should give you a golden gold star because you’ve done great for your health.

Chef AJ: No, I was going to say that this is really interesting because, you know, I think about some kids, I know, friends children and they’re not overweight, but they literally have never exercised at all their whole life. This is their only form of exercise.

Dr Marc Hellerstein: It’s amazing. Actually, I have run for decades or had run for decades as San Francisco General Hospital Diabetes Clinic, which means if you don’t have insurance, you know, private insurance in the county of San Francisco and you have diabetes, I know you. And it has changed over the years. We have a very multiethnic clinic. Twenty-five percent Caucasian, 25 percent African-American, 25 percent Latino, and twenty-five or so percent Asian-American. And there’s different body demographics of body composition. And there’s some demographics where people are not overweight, but they’re sedentary and fat. They don’t weigh more, but they have very little muscle and they actually are technically obese. They have 30 percent to five percent body fat and they have diabetes. Twenty-five year old. We see that and we never used to see that. Because they’re so sedentary now.

Chef AJ: Is there a percent body fat that we should be aiming for?

Dr Marc Hellerstein: Yeah, that’s a nice question. I think it’s different for women and then for men. I think 20 percent is usually thought to be okay. That’s more abnormal, maybe. I think very fit males are 10 or 15 percent. And I think that’s asking a lot. I think more than about 30 or 40 percent is 30 percent certainly is starting to be obese. If I would measure body weight personally, to do this rationally, I measure muscle and fat. I mean, I’ll talk about that a little bit, but I think muscle and fat are the keys is the ratio of muscle to fat. So to speak, something like that really determines the risk for diabetes and all the insulin-related complications, which are many which include cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, fatty liver disease, all kinds of things.

Chef AJ: How do we assess that ratio of muscle to fat? Is this a test we can get at the doctor’s office or how do we figure out what our percentages are?

Dr Marc Hellerstein: Really good question. You can calculate how much fat you have by a bioelectrical test. You saw those statues down on the scale and they put an electrode on your arm. That’s pretty accurate. Doesn’t tell you how much muscle you have accurately, though, because it tells you all the body water, which you’re not being muscle. It can be an intestine. It could be edema, could be anything else. There’s a lot. So that’s not it. But so actually my laboratory developed a test of muscle. We’ve done it thousands of people, and it’s a very easy job. So I think I think a test like ours is going to be it should be very, very commonly used with this. But right now you can test how much lean tissue and how much fat you have quite easily by doing a bioelectrical impedance or Toback or any of those a lot of dietitians offices, they have that pretty routinely. Some doctors do not most, but some do. And that’s accurate four percent fat present in the muscle. As I said, we have a new test, and maybe I’ll show you a little bit of that, but I don’t want to make this about myself. So I but I think you need we need a muscle test. That’s it’s like measuring cholesterol. Glucose, I think in obesity world, its body composition world, there are two main things to a muscle is 40 percent of your body weight 30 to five to 40, depending, and lean people. Fat is 15 or 20, and if you get obese, it’s 40 or 50 is not much present left after that is there. Those are the two main compartments of your body.

Chef AJ: You know, it’s interesting what you said about food intake does not have to keep dropping if you maintain activity. One of the speakers on this summit is Dr. Barbara, who does a lot of research in the field of calorie density at Penn State. And I think that if people don’t get enough food, eventually they’re going to feel hungry and go off their diet.

Dr Marc Hellerstein: Well, I think that’s a key point, and I often feel is how hard it is to lose weight just by reducing calories, everybody has stress in their life. I mean, there are times when there’s a family tragedy when things aren’t going well at work or when your car breaks down and your kids are having trouble, whatever it is, but you’re having problems with your spouse. There’s lots of stress in this world. And when you to be hungry on top of that, it just is often too much that people just say the heck with it and they get off their diet. Whereas exercise, when and when, when they’re stressed, sometimes it even makes you run better exercise more so. And it comes as it is. It’s distressing in a similar way. So I totally agree with that. I think fighting your hunger is a is difficult for a life a whole lifetime

Chef AJ: familiar with the show the biggest loser, because that really did emphasize exercise. Yet most of the people on that show still gain their weight back.

Dr Marc Hellerstein: Yeah, yeah, I don’t know. I didn’t watch it. I don’t watch most diets is hard. I think the body’s is a harsh master. I think we’re not good at it. I think I think people who do lose weight not saying it’s easy. They do tend to exercise.

Chef AJ: But how do we get people to start? Because honestly, there’ll be people watching this summit that have literally lived their whole lives sedentary.

Dr Marc Hellerstein: I think walking is the best way. Well, anybody can walk unless you have really bad arthritis or worse or you’re very, very overweight and you’re very, very overweight so that you can’t walk, I think you’re in trouble. I really have to say that. I’ve watched people walk a lot and I’ve watched people walk around slowly, and I watched this guy in front of my house when I was in Boston. He went from probably 320 pounds to about one hundred and forty pounds over five years. Would come by every day. He’d be walking a very slow jog. And you can. And if you have a long-time friend and you’re not impatient and you like what you want to do it, you can measure your fatness or your weight or even your muscle. It’s very positive feedback, and you will continue his way if you do it.

Chef AJ: For people that have trouble walking, do you think something like walking in a pool just to get started could be beneficial?

Dr Marc Hellerstein: Swimming is great if you have access to swimming, swimming is fantastic and swimming is great aerobic. I had a patient in my diabetes is going to who had been neutered, needed 200 units of insulin a day. We got so tired of it that we figured out a way for her to get to a swimming pool in the middle of San Francisco. She swam three times a week for 20 minutes. This was not Mark Mark Spitz swimming. This was just paddling around it, and she heard her insulin requirements fell to 50 a day just by that kind of exercise. That swimming is great.

Chef AJ: And so the thing is, is that people just need to start doing something.

Dr Marc Hellerstein: They need something and it can’t. And then some people sit on an exercise bike and don’t have resistance. It doesn’t do it, honestly. Exercise bikes, unless you’re a real athlete, don’t do much because you can’t, you know, carry your weight. And if you can carry your weight around and then it kind of works for you. Treat it like exercise, walk for an hour and a half. The long time you can do it, everybody can do it and then take a shower and you’ll feel great.

Chef AJ: What about a spin bike, though? That’s a little bit different than a recumbent bike?

Dr Marc Hellerstein: Well, I think an athlete on a spin bike who’s really sweating is one thing. I think I see a lot of people on spin bikes, very low resistance, and I don’t think they’re burning calories.

Chef AJ: But if you’re like maybe standing at a higher level.

Dr Marc Hellerstein: Oh, yeah, yeah, that’s great.

Chef AJ: Is how much you sweat a determinant of how hard you worked?

Dr Marc Hellerstein: Not a bad one. It depends. It’s one way.

Chef AJ: Yeah. You know, one of the things you talked about before and in some of the talks I’ve heard you give is about carbohydrates. Carbohydrates and fat. And I’m wondering if you can touch on that because there’s such a debate about that in the world in general, but especially people wanting to lose weight. They often go on a keto diet, which many of the experts on the summit believe actually mortgages their health in the long term from short-term results. But when people go on these low-carb diets, are they really losing body fat?

Dr Marc Hellerstein: You know, we’ve I’ve done studies on keto diet and on high carb, high carb, low carb or high carb fat. I don’t think that’s the key determinant. For some people, it works in different ways. Some people really like carbs. Some people find carbs totally not satiating. Some people say that if they pass, it doesn’t matter if you just keep eating it. There are still a hundred other people like me. If I don’t eat pork bread and pasta, I’ll be hungry no matter how much else I ate. So I think if there’s individual differences, but I don’t think that’s the key. So personally, I’m a little bit agnostic about how you would eat fewer calories. I think it’s how many calories you’re about. You can’t convince your body to eat and not feel hungry with. That’s the trick. And people I know who are so athletic tend to eat high fiber, carbon protein-heavy foods. And it fills them up, and they’re not hungry, but they’re not eating that many calories. But I think to get to your question about carbs here, here’s the confusing part is a little bit confusing. We’ve done a lot of studies and show that if you eat carbs, they mostly are not converted into fat. That’s the process called de novo or new life of Gen.. Very little of that in the human body. Other animals do a lot of new fat overfeed a cow and pigs, They make fat. That’s how they feed them grain and slop, which is carbs. A honeybee makes wax, that’s oil. That’s fat. And what do they eat? They eat pollen, that kind of this the stuff that is converted into honey, so there’s a lot of animals that can make fat from carbs. We don’t. Very seldom do we. So some people have misinterpreted and we publish a lot on that. And some people misinterpret that to say that you cannot get fat from carbs, that’s totally wrong because what happens when you eat carbs are low. The carbs themselves don’t become fat molecules. The carbs. Replace fat in your fuel mixture. It’s as though you had two bank accounts, if you put money into one account, you spend from that and the other account will grow. So if you expand from your car when there’s a hierarchy of fuel selection in the body, carbs replace fat if you have both. So you’ll eat extra card. You won’t burn fat and your fat will go to your fast. If a lot of people make the joke of I eat this ice cream, it’ll go right to my hips. It’s kind of right if they’re eating sugar and fat with that, fat won’t get consumed. So eating carbs is not free. It’s a big mistake.

Chef AJ: But isn’t sugar and fat a particularly deadly combination?

Dr Marc Hellerstein: I think sugar fat is terrible. I think that’s I think fried foods are the worst because they’re so dense with calories, and I think sugar and fat foods are right behind them because they taste so good and they’re so non-satiating. You can eat a lot of chocolate and a lot of ice cream cheesecake. Very funny stuff. So hard to stop. So that combination is the most calorically dense and satiating at the same time. I mean, I’m not satiating of center, but eating carbs and fat will not make you fat or make you help you store fat because the carb will keep you from burning the fat. Sugar and sugar is particularly bad. Now we just did a study published yesterday, actually in a very good journal, the Journal of Clinical Investigation. We took adolescent boys in Atlanta with fatty liver disease. A big new problem. Liver disease in kids. Very common now the kids are getting overweight and insulin resistant, and we in the study, they removed all sugar from their diet for eight weeks or something. We did this by taking the olive sugar out of the whole family, had to eat a sugar-free diet for eight weeks, and there are two things happening there. Their liver fat fell by a third and their new fat sentences fell by a third. So although new fat synthesis doesn’t make you fat of the person, usually. It can lead to fat deposits in your shirt and your liver, particularly fructose and simple sugars. So I think sugars are actually like sugar personally, but I think it’s bad for you.

Chef AJ: Dr. Hellerstein, isn’t there a difference? All carbs are not created equal, so isn’t there a difference between ingesting things like fruits, beans, whole grains and potatoes versus sugar, flour and alcohol?

Dr Marc Hellerstein: Oh, completely. Well, of course, a different thing. But simple sugars, especially liquid, simple sugars and especially fructose, which is present in sucrose, but with table sugar and high fructose corn syrup, which is kind of everywhere in fast foods. No sugar gets right into your body, they don’t satiate very much. You can drink a liter of coke and there’s a ton of calories in that liter of Sprite or whatever and. And they have adverse effects like insulin resistance, fatty liver. They’re just there’s no doubt that sugar is it has adverse metabolic effects compared to complex carbs, so it’s really totally dependent carbs. I think carbs are tremendous food. Complex carbs. Natural carbs. You can’t eat 10 apples but you can drink a liter of coke. It’s hard because fruits are not the problem with fructose and sugar.

Chef AJ: Right. When you said alcohol was different. Is that a problematic food for people wanting to be healthy and lose weight?

Dr Marc Hellerstein: Alcohol is is a source of calories. People who drink a lot will burn those calories. In fact, alcohol, if there’s a hierarchy of foods, I said carbs come about fat, alcohol comes above everybody. If you eat alcohol, you won’t burn anything else until the alcohol is gone. I’ll be your first, and so that’ll keep you from burning carbs, intent on any carbs, the hierarchy goes, you will gain weight, you’ll gain fat from giving up trivia.

Chef AJ: Wow, that is. That’s really interesting. I would think, though, if exercise is that important, wouldn’t a higher complex carbohydrate diet be better to fuel workouts?

Dr Marc Hellerstein: OK, that’s a nice question, a lot. I think that’s right. I think people who work out tend to eat the old days people eat a steak meal before a game, and that was totally wrong. What you really want is glycogen and carbs in your system, too, especially to do aerobic exercise, which is many sports. You know, any sports about running for extended periods of time is aerobic. So or swimming or biking, hiking, climbing, those are very aerobic, so complex carbs are very good for that, but if you’re doing that much exercise, it’s probably unlikely that you are metabolically unfit or overweight. Actually. So it’s a different thing. I think there’s really there’s athletes and there’s people who aren’t and there’s a big difference in how they are and there’s people in the middle too. But activity changes everything. In a lot of our bodies, we’re people there, some data that people ran more than 10 miles a day, early hunter-gatherers. Our bodies were really designed and very efficient, long, slow exercise.

Chef AJ: How much exercise a day do you recommend people get, whether they’re wanting to lose weight or overweight or not, just to be healthy?

Dr Marc Hellerstein: Yeah, for fitness, I mean think about it as fitness. We had a test for fitness. We would be in great shape if we had a test for muscle mass, which I think we do know we would be in great shape if we had a test for how many calories you burn a day. A simple test. Everybody should have that. We don’t have those tests, we have a difficult test right now for them, except for this muscle mass test that I just talked about. But so the goal of exercise is not just. Well, it’s fitness, that’s the real goal, but it also is burning calories and increasing muscle mass that to me, you really want to be checking, you want a robot. What did you want to do from exercise if you were that had the calculation capacity of a robot? That’s what you would do. You exercise in order to become more fit, have more muscle and burn more calories. So fitness is well understood if you exercise 30 minutes, 20 to 30 minutes. And a pulse of a certain fraction of your maximal pulse, and you can. I don’t want to get too technical if you exercise so that your pulse is up if you’re doing it continuously for 20 to 30 minutes. And you do that every other day, three or four times a week. Your fitness will improve. You don’t have to exercise every day. You don’t have to exercise an hour and a half a day and you don’t have to exercise to exhaustion. You should exercise 20 to 30 minutes at an elevated pulse, continuously not taking too many breaks. Take a lot of breaks, it’s not as good. Keep your pulse up and do that three or four times a week.

Chef AJ: And that’s advice for everyone.

Dr Marc Hellerstein: I think everybody should do that, that’s a very modest thing in terms of evolutionary human beings. Most people in the history of mankind give a lot more than that.

Chef AJ: Yeah. What about this idea of doing like 10 minutes meant 10 minutes and then ten minutes, is that not a good idea, it’s better just to kind of do it all at the same time?

Dr Marc Hellerstein: I have not seen great studies on that, I know that there are studies where I have people who work as, let’s say, nightwatchmen. And they’ll walk, you know, for 10 minutes and sit for two hours and 10 minutes. And that is not exercised. That’s not as good as walking for an hour. That’s clear because they come into my clinic and they’re not doing well. So but intermittent exercise might be OK. I’m not so sure about that.

Chef AJ: So any time you create a calorie deficit, you’re going to lose weight. But could you lose weight on a very high-fat diet as long as you’re in a caloric deficit?

Dr Marc Hellerstein: Absolutely, absolutely. That’s what the whole Atkins and certainly those diets are about that they say that you will get into a new state like the ketogenic diet. And then there’s been a lot of beliefs that some of these are kind of magical. If you get an individual fat, which is very unnatural if your body then switch to what’s called ketogenic, it doesn’t even use carbs barely even the brain, which normally uses sugar, glucose, carbs learn how to not do that. And some people say that they don’t get hungry. I don’t buy it personally. I think maybe for a while, they get hungry. But I help put together a study. We really tested a ketogenic diet. Very well done study by first author Kevin Hall was published recently. And it was OK. It wasn’t magic. People lost, you know, a tiny bit more than they lost on a non-ketogenic diet. Not much was not some miracle and it’s hard. Keto diet has some nice things about it. For example, children with epilepsy for unknown reasons do way better on a ketogenic diet. It’s incredible, but that’s different than the average person. So I think the kidney diet needs a lot of study, but I don’t think it’s a miracle.

Chef AJ: Were these people satisfied with their food plan and were they able to keep it off? And were they healthy, like from a cardio-vascular standpoint?

Dr Marc Hellerstein: Yeah, that’s a good question. And a lot of people, I don’t think they’re that unhealthy from a cardiovascular standpoint. If they’re losing weight on a ketogenic diet. If you’re on a high-fat diet and gaining weight, it’s a totally different ballgame. If you’re on a high-fat diet and you can lose weight, it’s probably like losing weight for most other things. I don’t think the lipids are worse, but if you don’t lose weight, and so if you’re on a high-fat diet and you don’t lose weight, it’s probably worse than being on a standard fat or low-fat diet and not losing weight. So that’s the trouble to me, that whole line of approach and maybe is, OK, while you’re losing weight, your body’s in a negative. I think what you’re indirectly or implying is, I think the key thing you need to get on a diet that you can maintain. This is why I talk about maintaining weight loss. I mean, in the old days, there were things like a grapefruit diet or banana. That’s crazy, who can sustain grapefruit for the rest of their life? That’s just silly. I’m a great believer that when I try to if I want to change my diet, I make sure that it’s something I think I could stick with. And then if I can modulate it so that it’s the right number of calories, fine, if I can’t do it, then that’s not the right time. This is not going to go away. Did you do this for three months and get sick of it? You’re going to be back where you work because your body will drive back to the Earth with it. This is a long-term plan.

Chef AJ: As from what I understand from you, our bodies are always working against us when we lose weight.

Dr Marc Hellerstein: I think so, and I don’t understand when that stops. I think this is a great gap in modern knowledge, is it? OK, so let’s say you’re overweight for five years and then you lose weight, so now it’s five years now, it’s 10 years now. Are you still remembering your own weight? There are some data that you are. I just don’t understand that it’s like our fat cells remember for decades, but I don’t know if we really know that. I think this is the next part of the next generation of research to understand when and how we can overcome our body’s memory of being overweight.

Chef AJ: So fat cells are like a woman’s scorn, they have a very long memory

Dr Marc Hellerstein: Fat cells are like T cells in your body after a germ, you get infected, your T-cells remember for 50 years. They have a very long memory. Yes.

Chef AJ: Well, not everybody wants to eat a high-fat diet, but a lot of people would like to be able to eat more carbs, more complex carbohydrates, fruit, whole grains, legumes, sweet potatoes. A lot of people are afraid to eat carbs, thinking that is what makes people fat.

Dr Marc Hellerstein: I think that’s a modern medicine to drive the kind of drives me crazy. I mean, I hear people on TV saying, Oh, he’s got to eat a little bit more carbs is going to gain some weight or something, but a football player. It’s not how good carbs are, not the problem actually in general. Generally speaking, if you look at countries, which is not the most accurate way to look at the countries that eat higher fat, they are fatter. Now, there’s other confounding factors, too, but if you look at northern Europe versus southern Europe, they’re fatter in northern Europe and they eat more fat, more animals. Look in America, the states that have the highest fat and have the highest rates of obesity. But there’s other confounding factors, too, so I don’t want to overdo that. In general, the amount of fat people eat has not correlated that well with how fast they are outside of these big clusters. So I think you can do either. But it’s surely not the case that high carb diets statistically are more associated with obesity completely accurate. Now, people might think carb is like going and eating Twinkies or eating a bun at McDonald’s, which are full of sugar and are white bread. And don’t fill you up at all with complex carbs, whole grains, rice with a hole on it, brown rice, wheat grains those fill you up quite nicely and they don’t. They’re not that calorically dense and they can taste great. You can put all kinds of stuff. Plus that process can be delicious. You know, and without being that many challenges how you can make them high calories by putting sweet and fat stuff on them.

Chef AJ: Right, exactly. Well, a lot of people that I’ve talked to are diabetic or pre-diabetic and say, but when they eat carbs, even the complex carbs, their blood sugar goes up. So that’s why they’re afraid.

Dr Marc Hellerstein: You know, interesting. I run a diabetes clinic for decades, and the statistics on that are not even correct. Generally speaking, people can eat carbs and do just fine with diabetes. It’s not as simple as sugar that most people should avoid eating drinking. You know, soda is really problematic for matching your insulin if you’re on it, but currently actually are not a problem you can eat. There are all kinds of studies higher accomplished. Our diets tend to stabilize. Glucose doesn’t bounce around as much. And so I think that’s a little state you may have to take. You may have to take more insulin acting, but maybe not. So I think that’s not correct as a diabetologist.

Chef AJ: Are you familiar with the work of Dr. Walter Kepner?

Dr Marc Hellerstein: Tell me more.

Chef AJ: Where he said his patients a diet of white rice, fruit juice, sugar and fruit and reverse all their diabetes?

Dr Marc Hellerstein: No, I’m not familiar with that. There’s a lot of weight loss involved?

Chef AJ: I believe so.

Dr Marc Hellerstein: So if you lose weight, It’s like I said, if you lose weight, your body goes into this adaptation. The thing about weight loss is your insulin needs go down. This is part of the whole starvation response. You met your energy expenditure goes down, but while you’re losing weight, your insulin sensitivity is much better. We did studies where we put people for five days on very low carbohydrate diet, depleted their liver, glycogen and these are type two diabetics. Their blood sugar fell dramatically and the liver’s production of glucose, which is what fuels fasting high blood sugar, fell dramatically in five days. Even before there were 300000 people before they lost two pounds, so it wasn’t the weight in that case, it was that it was the glucose insulin sensitivity. So that’s a very separate thing than just the average person who wants to maintain a healthy weight the rest of their life.

Chef AJ: Can you get insulin sensitivity improved by a high carb diet?

Dr Marc Hellerstein: Absolutely. The main thing is we’re instant sensitivity, our weight or losing weight if you’re a bit overweight and fitness. So fit people who exercise where far more isn’t sensitive than people who don’t exercise, and the studies of exercise in type two diabetes are not as impressive because by the time you have type two diabetes, it’s rather to wait for exercise to help but to prevent diabetes, exercise is by far the most effective thing, even modest exercise. As I said, working in the garden, walking 30 minutes three times a week can reduce diabetes in pre-diabetic by 60 percent. So it’s when it’s early is when you really want to do this stuff.

Chef AJ: I heard you once say that the best time to treat diabetes is before you have diabetes.

I say this all the time as a joke in my diabetes clinic, I would say I’ll only be happy when clinics like this are put out of business because again, not to be too dramatic and I had some slides about this, but I don’t need to show those, diseases get stronger a while as they age. While we get weaker, more advanced diseases, the worse it is. It’s true for cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease early is better. The time to treat a disease is before it’s a disease. That’s when we’re in our disease going into cycles will get worse and worse with time. So it’s easier to prevent diabetes than to treat it if you start early.

Chef AJ: Then probably the same with cancer and heart disease and obesity.

Dr Marc Hellerstein: It’s totally true and obviously I don’t know, but I think it’s true. I think if we could prevent obesity, we get trapped in trying to reverse it, but it’s certainly true for cancer. My favorite story about cancer is cervical cancer, where if you had cervical cancer, the clinical cervical cancer. The outlook is terrible. It’s no better than it was seven years ago. And yet we’ve reduced the incidence of cervical cancer by 80 to 90 percent, totally through the pap smear, which detects pre-cancer. No woman should ever get cervical cancer, they just need to get a pap smear because that detects early cancer and you can do something about it. The same is true for every disease if you can detect it in its pre disease form. There’s lots you can do in diabetes, that is also the case before your beta cell and your insulin wears out before you’re profoundly resistant. That’s the time to treat.

Chef AJ: How do we detect obesity in this form before it exists?

Dr Marc Hellerstein: Let me show you this. I can show you a couple of slides. We have little or no progress in disease where we have no marker of early disease. So obesity prevention, I would like to be able to measure how many calories you’re burning. Which are fitness is and how much muscle you have. If I could measure those and young people and I can sort of measure a couple of those, I could probably predict who’s going to who’s about who’s on their path to obesity, whether or not pretty enough calories, they’re not fit and they don’t have enough muscle. And those people would say, Here, you’ve got to do this, you’ve got to work on this. Or here’s a medicine which we don’t have yet, but those were those were not what medicines would target one of these three events.

Chef AJ: Wow. Yeah. So are you going to have these tests available for us soon?

Dr Marc Hellerstein: Well, we do have a massive mass that’s just because of that. This is a test that we published. My colleague Bill Evans and his muscle mass chest is just from a urine test, and it correlates with the whole body MRI, which costs $3000, and this test cost $50 $100. So we did it. We did a study here in a in 13 year old men. We looked at their muscle mass with this test and we see as you get older, really hold 80 90 years old, you have very little muscle. But before that, there’s a lot of variability. Seventy-five-year-olds, some people have a lot of muscle and some don’t. We found this is a complicated side, but very important because it tells you how important measurement is for the people with the most muscle. And old people started to build these muscles, had by far the worst rate of falling down or becoming disabled or other experienced weakness. So sometimes 10 times if you have less muscle versus more muscle, you can predict they’re 10 times more likely or five times more likely to be weak to be hospitalized or institutionalized. Because they have mobility, they can’t move around or fall down and break their hip. And so this is, again, a test that we now use in old people to predict the risk of sarcopenia or frailty.

Chef AJ: What do you consider old people, because I feel like I’m almost one.

Dr Marc Hellerstein: You might be but I don’t think it’s actually, you don’t act like one. So I don’t think it’s age. It’s really things like it’s someone who is older and has muscle mass is not that old. At least from the point of view of a lot of their biology.

Chef AJ: Well, the tests that you have with the drop of urine, is that something that’s going to be available to the public?

Dr Marc Hellerstein: So it’s available in a range of research tests. We’ve done it on thousands of people and yeah, we’re going to try to make it available.

Chef AJ: that is just fascinating. So Dr. Hellerstein, what’s the real truth about weight loss?

Dr Marc Hellerstein: Well, if I had to summarize it, I’d say the real truth is it’s almost impossible to maintain long-term weight loss and health without some form of physical, voluntary physical activity. Again, everybody talks about diet. It’s so much easier to tell people what to eat than to actually, eat less. So telling people what to eat in my experience is not been a profound result because it doesn’t necessarily make them eat less. But you can tell people to exercise, that is a proactive, volitional thing. I don’t control my appetite, my appetite controls me. I can try to modulate, but I do control my activity. So I think if I were to focus public health, I would focus on activity because even if you’re overweight, if you’re fit, you have a better outcome, even if it doesn’t work for obesity, which it might. It works for health. And it does help obesity because it burns more calories means you’re not as miserable, eating less the rest of your life as if you didn’t exercise. It keeps you fit and improves your muscle mass. These are three very good things.

Chef AJ: I can’t control my appetite, but I can control my activity that is very well said,

Dr Marc Hellerstein: I believe in that. I mean, I believe in. It’s frustrating to be told to do things that you can’t control. Your autonomic nervous and is not really under your control, but your activity is.

Chef AJ: Beautifully said, thank you so much, Dr. Hellerstein.

Dr Marc Hellerstein: Thank you. It’s always fun.

Chef AJ: Hi, Dr. McDougall, and welcome to the Truth about Weight Loss Summit, thanks so much for being here.

Dr. John McDougall: Well, any time I have a chance to be with you, AJ, it’s an opportunity for me. So thank you very much and I’m sure you’ve gathered a great audience that’s really interested in my points of view.

Chef AJ: We sure have. And Dr. McDougall, I know that over the years you’ve taken care of over 12000 patients and putting them on the McDougall diet, they reverse their heart disease and diabetes, and autoimmune disease. I’m curious why the McDougall diet, which helped these patients reverse their chronic diseases of lifestyle, is also unparalleled for weight loss.

Dr. John McDougall: Well, it’s because the human being is designed to be trim and agile. You know, it’s a survival disadvantage to be overweight. And this is an important thing to understand is the body is designed to survive. And so we make all kinds of adaptations to survive. And one of the adaptations we make is that we store up extra fat to get ready for the famine for the winter. Now we only store maybe, maybe 20, 30, 40 pounds, but then it becomes a disadvantage to survival when you store 100 pounds or 200 pounds or 500 pounds, like some people do. The reason people develop adult-type diabetes is because of this adaptation that occurs. After you gauge, say, 30 or 40 pounds. The body develops insulin resistance and as a result, the blood sugar goes up, but you stop gaining fat. Now most people do. There’s an occasional person that I run into, and these are people that are three, four or five six hundred pounds overweight. They don’t develop insulin resistance. That insulin keeps shoving fat into fat cells. That’s what insulin does. So like I say, the body is not making a mistake to be overweight, at least as far as 20, 30, 40 pounds. But, you know, the famine never comes. That’s the problem. And the next season does arrive and you try and gain a little bit more weight and more weight and more weight. And it’s just a downhill slope.

Chef AJ: Wow. Well, how can the McDougall diet help?

Dr. John McDougall: Well, the McDougall diet, and that’s what I think you should call it, but just to just to help people not be offended by what I have to say. We could call it a traditional diet. A traditional diet would be a diet that people have followed traditionally throughout human history, for example, you have the people from Central America, the Aztecs and the Mayans. These were known as the people of the corn. They lived on corn. Actually, I have a coin. In fact, I have it right here. It’s called the three sisters is the dollar coin. And what it depicts is, it depicts the three sisters, which are beans, corn and squash, which is the diet of Native Americans. I mean, if you want to be American, you want to follow what Native Americans used to eat it’s beans, corn and squash. If you go a little further south, you go to the Andes, you find people are potato eaters. That’s what they lived on was potatoes. The Incas, for example, they lived on potatoes except for them when they went to battle, and then they switched to quinoa because it was easier to carry, it is lighter in weight. If you look at Egypt, Iraq, and Iran, that part of the world, they used to be known as the breadbasket of the world. Bread. And of course, most people can relate to the Far East. Now, people in the Far East and Asia, what you think about is rice. Rice is the diet. So where it all boils down to our various starches that have fueled the human being throughout all of our existence, except for the last 50 to 150 years. And then what’s happened is we had the industrial revolution. We had the harnessing of fossil fuels and what were once a few rich people, a few kings and queens, and aristocrats who were overweight. They were sickly. They had gotten their feet. They had diabetes. Once these diseases were reserved for just a few aristocrats because the wealth is accumulated worldwide. At least half the population has been able to afford it and they do eat like kings and queens. Burger King, Dairy Queen, Imperial Margarine, they don’t even try to disguise it. And as a result, people are sick because of a diet that has just been a blip in human history. Whereas the other 750000 years or longer than the Homo sapiens has been around, we have lived primarily on starches, except in the extremes of the environment, for example, the Inuit Eskimo. In that extreme of the environment, they can’t live on a starch-based diet. They have to eat from their lands, they have to eat animals and fish and so on. But those are rare exceptions.

Dr. John McDougall: So I guess what it comes down to is we have to look at the human being in terms of our history, in terms of the current living situation. If you look around the world and I ask you to identify shrimp populations of people, you immediately pick on the Asians, 90 percent of their food was rice before 1980. You would immediately pick that if you started getting into the anatomy and physiology of the human being, you realize that we’re starch eaters. We’ll get into some of that in a minute with a slide presentation I have to offer you. But you know, we have teeth designed to grind various grains and tubers. We have hands to pick up various grains and tubers we don’t have. We don’t have claws like my cat does to tear up the flesh. You know, that’s the diet of our cat is a flesh-based diet. We have an intestinal tract, is perfectly designed to metabolize a starch-based diet. What it boils down to is the human being. It’s not a carnivore. It’s not an omnivore, the human being is more of an herbivore, but that doesn’t really convey in simple language to people for them to understand what they ought to put on their dinner plate. The human being is a starch eater corn, rice, potatoes, sweet potatoes, beans, bread, pastas that should be 90 percent of what you see on your plate is starch. The rest should be fruits and vegetables, which are interesting. They provide color, some nutrients. They should be part of your meal plan, too. But you’ve got to get that starch for a whole bunch of reasons that I like to talk to you about.

Chef AJ: Why do you say starches, Dr. McDougall, instead of plants?

Dr. John McDougall: Well, when you say a plant-based diet, a lot of people talk about a plant food-based diet. Too many people immediately go to nutrient-dense foods. They think, Oh, I’ve got to live on kale, lettuce, cauliflower, broccoli, and I can’t do that or nobody can do that. But I’d have to eat somewhere between 11 and 20 pounds of broccoli to get all the calories that I need in a day or cabbage, you know, 11 to 20 pounds of cabbage. I don’t have that time kind of time. I don’t have that kind of interest. And besides, it wouldn’t be satisfying if not like potatoes, sweet potatoes, rice, bread, pasta. I mean, when I mentioned those foods, you think comfort food? Why? Because that’s what you’re supposed to be eating. So anyway, and every aspect, you need to come down to some simple words to communicate with people. And say this to say a whole food plant-based diet or vegan diet or vegetarian diet. It leaves open all kinds of possibilities. You know, I like to communicate very accurately to people, and that’s why I call it a starch-based diet, even though I realize that starch is a dirty word. It is the proper word for the foods that we should be eating. I mean, your great-grandmother. When she invited the family over for dinner, she identify a starch for dinner. We’re going to be having potatoes for dinner or we’re going to be having bean soup for dinner. Nowadays, of course, when you invite somebody over for dinner, you say I’m having chicken or beefsteak or ham hock or whatever starch is the proper word. There’s even a journal in its a German publication, a medical scientific journal where if you have research on health, on chemistry, on industry and you want to publish this research, you publish it in a journal called Starch. Yeah, you know, it’s the correct word. I can, you know, I can’t help the fact that people have maligned this word because they don’t understand it. We’ve got to put it back in the vocabulary so that when you look at your dinner plate, you don’t say, Oh, I’m having a high, complex carbohydrate meal. Excuse me. How do you grow high, complex carbohydrates? What you do is you look at your dinner plate or your garden, you say, Well, I’m growing various starches, just like the Native Americans, just like the three sisters, beans, corn, and squash. Or Rice in the Asian diet? We’ve got to put that back into the center of the meal plan again, when you look, you don’t have to measure, you don’t have to weigh. You don’t have to have a dietetics handbook. When you look at your dinner plate by eyeball, you notice that 90 percent of the food on my plate is starch. Then you’re in control. Plus, you’ll love the food. You love starches. There’s a reason for that.

Chef AJ: Why are so many people afraid to eat them? They’ll say things like, I can’t eat potatoes, my blood sugar goes up, they’ll make me fat. This is what a lot of people still believe.

Dr. John McDougall: They have an incomplete understanding. Yes, the blood sugar goes up after eating starches. The purpose of eating is for the blood sugar to go up. It’s supposed to. But eventually, and when I talk about eventually, I’m talking about within hours. What happens is the body adapts to a starch-based diet, and as a result, the insulin works efficiently and the blood sugar doesn’t go up to abnormal levels. In other words, type two diabetes is 100 percent curable with a starch-based diet and associated weight loss. Yeah. So keep that in mind. Keep in mind the long-term results. Don’t look at the blood sugar right after you have a baked potato on your dinner plate. Look at your blood sugars a week a month a year. 10 years later, you’re no longer diabetic. If you’re a type two diabetic. So it’s short-sightedness4. It’s incomplete information that causes people to continue to make bad decisions, not just the lay-people, but also well-educated people, scientists, doctors and so on. The message has been so widespread that it’s very difficult to find the truth. The truth is, and you know, it is the human being as starchy or I just gave you a whole bunch of evidence. And I’d like to give you more evidence in a short slide presentation that I have, AJ, I know you have a lot of questions for me and we’ll get into them. But let me share some of the basic information with you.

Dr. John McDougall: So the McDougall program, which is what I call it, you know, it’s different than other diets out there in the sense that it’s pure vegan. It’s made of Whole Foods. It is centered around starch. That’s the unique quality of the McDougall, either no compromise. I don’t compromise and say well, but I had a little bit of fish or, you know, a little bit of low fat cheese or, you know, there’s no compromise in what I teach. And I feel that’s my obligation AJ. is, you know, I’m a medical doctor and people come to me with all kinds of serious problems, you know, cancer, diabetes, heart disease, autoimmune diseases, not just weight loss. And I asked Dr. McDougall how to get, Well, how do I get over this? And I promised myself and I promised my patients no more than 40 years ago. I promised them that I would give them the best answer possible so that they would never come back to me and say, Dr. McDougall, I did what you said. It didn’t work. Of course, many people do, and rightly so. They come back to me and they said, I understand what you’ve said, I just couldn’t do it. It was too much of a change for me. I understand that. But for me to teach you a compromise makes no sense at all. And remember, I’m a medical doctor. I’m not just trying to treat relatively minor issues like losing five or 10 pounds. I’m treating people who have serious problems, but the same information applies to those of you who are relatively healthy and only need to lose five, ten or fifteen pounds. Why would I teach you a compromise? Makes no sense at all. All right, well, let’s see. Let me talk to you a little bit about a starch-based diet. And I’m going to do it with this demo. This demo represents the size of the stomach. It’s one of those glass speakers to support what a stomach looks like and about the size of a stomach, and it contains 500 calories per beaker.

Dr. John McDougall: Let’s first take a look at the filling power the physical filling power of 500 calories of various foods. You can see that butter margarine, salad dressing olive oil just fills the bottom of the stomach, which is on the left-hand side of your screen. you are ravenously hungry. You feel like you haven’t eaten at all. You could eat the paint off the refrigerator. Well, just move over to cheese, you see that cheese, 500 calories, so it’s about a third of the stomach, and that’s not enough. You’re still hungry, you’re still looking for food. And to the next speaker you go, is meat still again, about the third of the stomach is filled, so you’re left without being full. I mean, physically, for now, let’s move over to starches. You see the beaker that contains the rice, you know, it almost fills the entire stomach. You know, that’s why so much nonsense to say don’t eat rice is fattening, excuse me, it’s very full of filling and move over to the next stomach. You look at the corn, it fills the entire stomach. And there are so few calories in potatoes that I couldn’t get 500 calories in a single stomach. I had to put one potato on the top. So the first principle that you need to understand is that when you switch the American diet to the kind of diet, I recommend you go from calorie-dense to calorie-dilute foods. The next important principle for us to discuss is. What happens to the calories that you eat, they’re destined to be distributed most efficiently. And when it comes to fat, the most efficient thing to do with extra fat is to store it. Fat is a metabolic dollar for that day when no food is available. That’s the purpose of the fat to get you through the famine. The fat you eat is the fat you wear. In fact, the body is so efficient that storing fat that it doesn’t even change the chemical structure of the fats. Let me explain this to you is I can tell what you like to eat based upon biopsy with a needle in your abdomen, your buttocks, your thigh, the fat in these particular tissues. If you happen to like cold more marine fish full of omega-three fats, guess what your body fat will be filled with? It’ll be filled with omega-three fats. If you like margins in shamanism, which are full of trans fats, your body fat will be filled with trans fats. If you like olive oil, monounsaturated is destined to fill your body fat, dairy products have a characteristic fat is called C15 C17 fat. That’s where the double bonds are. And people who are high consumers of dairy. If you biopsy their body fat, you’ll find the C15 C17 fats that are present. The fat you eat is the fat you wear. The body moves it effortlessly from your fork and spoon. To your fat tissues, you’ve heard the saying from my lips to my hips. That’s what happens to body fat. Let’s take a look at the fat content of some of the foods in the stomachs about butter, margarine, olive oil. Most of your salad dressings are 100 percent fat. Dairy products are 50, 60, 70 percent fat. Your meats against 60 to 80 percent fat. There’s a lot of fat to wear. Go over to the rice and you’re looking at a food that contains only five percent of the calories as fat. Corn would be about nine percent fat and potatoes are about one percent fat. There’s hardly any fat aware present in your starchy foods. So the first principle is one of calorie dilution. You go from calorie-dense to calorie dilute foods. The second principle is you go from high fat to low-fat foods, and the fat you eat is the fat you wear. Now the third principle is really important, particularly for those who who think there might be something mentally or emotionally wrong with you. I mean, you think about yourself, you go, Look, I ate. I just ate ravenously hungry. You know, I had two or three plates of food and I still am seeking food. And you come to the conclusion there must be something wrong with me. I must be an obsessive-compulsive overeater. Or you go to the psychiatrist. You’re told you have an eating disorder. There’s nothing wrong with you. What’s wrong is what’s on your dinner plate. What satisfies the hunger drive is carbohydrate sugar starch, which is basically the same, just a different molecular makeup of these various carbohydrates.

Dr. John McDougall: Carbohydrates satisfy a hunger drive. We do experiments with people where we feed them various meals. We’re fat and carbohydrate is disguised and we ask them to rate their satiety, their satisfaction. They receive almost no satisfaction from eating fat, whereas they receive abundant satisfaction from eating starches. The carbohydrate, your diet are essential to curing you of these emotional and mental disorders. So that’s the third principle is that carbohydrates satisfy the hunger drive, not you, you’re not going to be able to change these basic metabolic principles. What you need to do is to understand them and to make proper changes. The last thing I want to say about these stomachs is that not only do you lose weight effortlessly enjoying the food when you eat a starch-based diet, the same foods that make you fat make you sick. They’re full of cholesterol, they’re full of environmental contaminants. They’re deficient in fiber and nutrients. Those would be your animal products, your oils, the same foods that cause you to be permanently trim and satisfied. Our high fiber, no cholesterol, low fat, filled with an array of vitamins and minerals. This is your diet. You’re a star cheater. The fact is the fact where this is so important, AJ. because there are a lot of people out there teaching people about good fats, even to the point where they say or these particular good fats, they don’t get stored, they don’t make you fat. That’s that’s dishonest. That’s contrary to what the science shows the fat you eat most of your body fat effortlessly. This study I have presented on the right-hand side is studies of the adipose tissue. And man, this is where they did. The biopsies of various fatty tissues and people had different diets. And they found what I explained to you. If you eat a diet high in fish, you’re going to be filled with omega-three fats. If you eat a diet high in margarine and Crisco’s, you would be full of trans fats. The fat you eat is the fat you wear. You know this idea misunderstood idea about how the fat you eat is the patchwork is so troubling to me that I put together all of the basic studies that explain to people that the fact you eat is the fat you where you can take a screenshot of this, you can look up the the the different studies. You will see that the literature is absolutely consistent in this principle. I’ve been trying to teach you the factory, it is the fat you wear.

Dr. John McDougall: Carbohydrate does not get converted to fat, this is important for people to understand. People think if I eat rice, it turns to sugar and sugar turns to fat, and that’s how you get fat. That’s how you become overweight, that’s how you become obese. That’s not true. There’s an experiment that I cited in my book, The Starch Solution, where they took women, overweight women, obese women, and they fed them 50 percent more calories than they usually ate. Now, the particular diets that they fed them contain an extra three and a half ounces of refined white sugar. In other words, they overfed these people extra carbohydrates, even pure sugar calories. And what they found is that overfeeding this extra sugar for four months resulted in only four grams. A fat accumulation. The conclusion of the study is DiNovo Life of Genesis, which is the new production of fat from carbohydrates increases after overfeeding of glucose and so close to the same stress that in obese and lean women but does not contribute greatly to total fat balance. And that’s what all the research says. It’s consistent. You won’t find any basic studies of human beings that show otherwise. Now, the human being is unique in the fact that we’re very inefficient at converting carbohydrates into fat. Other animals, they do a pretty good job of it, like cows and pigs. They have a very efficient system of de novo lipogenesis, but not people. So what happens to those extra calories when you eat the extra calories of sugar, starch, et cetera? Where do they go? Well, they’re burnt off in respiratory heat. In other words, breathing in body heat and fidgety motions because it’s too inefficient for the body to change sugar into fat. If you remember your biochemistry, your sugars are ring structures very stable, whereas fat is a chain of carbohydrates. This metabolic conversion is expensive. The body does not do it.

Dr. John McDougall: We started talking about the anatomy and physiology of the human being, and I talk to you about how hands are meant for picking up things, not for tearing flesh apart in the teeth are for grinding starches, not for consuming and tearing apart flesh, and the whole intestinal tract is set up to properly do it properly digest our starch. But we have in our saliva, we have alpha-amylase and in our intestinal tract, we have alpha-amylase. Its purpose is to digest starch. That’s what it does. But let’s start at the beginning of the intestinal tract, and that would be the mouth. We have a sensory organ that helps guide us to food selection. We have on the tip of our tongue taste buds that cause us to be attracted to substances that we need for good health. And these would be minerals, which happen to be supplied most commonly with table salt. We’re seekers of minerals because we need these minerals to stay alive, and our primary calorie source is carbohydrates. So on the very tip of the tongue, we have sweet-tasting taste buds. As you go back into the tongue, you find taste buds that are designed so that you don’t poison yourself. These are sour, bitter taste buds, which have you identify at best medicinal substances, at worst serious poison. So those are the four classic taste buds sweet salt, bitter and sour. Since then, we have had the taste, but your mommy discovered it, which is a sensitivity to MSG. I know a lot of people will tell you this is the taste the causes you to be attracted to animal products. Not so. It’s an attraction of flavor that’s produced by MSG monosodium glutamate. The next taste bud that were discovered was a fat-sensitive taste bud. But this one works the opposite of salt and sugar. This one, if you taste it. You could taste fat. You have a repulsive reaction, you want to stay away from it. And so people who have the fat, tasty taste buds are lean people.

Dr. John McDougall: The last tastebud to be discovered was about eight years ago at Oregon State University and the researchers there, what they did is they blocked the sweet-tasting taste buds with a chemical substance so that they were no longer active and then they fed various foods to their subjects. And what they found is they found a separate, distinct, powerful taste bud for starch. Independent of the ones that so abundantly taste sugars, in fact, the starchy taste buds were as strong as the sugar tasted taste buds. This proves beyond a doubt that we are also seekers of bread and pasta and beans and rice and potatoes. AJ. We are starch eaters. And until you understand that you will be out of control. You’ll be a victim of the food industry you’ll never permanently solve in a comfortable way. You’ll never permanently solve in a comfortable way. Your problem physical, your physical appearance. Now when I say it a comfortable way, I mean, now you’re eating foods that you love that respond and everybody positively with your body. There are other ways to lose weight, that are uncomfortable. In fact, they’re downright unpleasant. And these are dietary approaches that cause you to be hungry. These are portion control. These are typical diets where you limit the amount of food you eat and you’re hungry all day long. You’re suffering from the pain of hunger. And then the other way, the people try and trick their body metabolism as they eat diets that make them sick. These are your low carbohydrate diets like the Atkins diet. They are so low in carbohydrates that the body converts its energy metabolism to the burning of fat and a byproduct of fat metabolism is ketones. Ketones suppress the hunger drive. And so initially, when you were one on these low carbohydrate diets, you lose a lot of water weight because you metabolize your glycogen. You have about six or eight pounds of glycogen stored in your muscles and liver. And that’s gotten rid of immediately as you make a switch to a low carbohydrate diet. And along with that, glycogen is a whole bunch of water. So you know, the net result is you may lose eight pounds and you’re thrilled. And then what happens is you go into a state of ketosis. In other words, a state of sickness, and you’re just too darn sick to eat, but you can’t stay sick for a long period of time. So unless you until you understand the importance of starch in terms of your life. It terms of your family, in terms of your community, in terms of the world. Until you understand the importance of a starch-based diet that you are a starch eater, starchavore or a starchitarian terrine, you only got two choices are to be overweight or to be hungry in pain or sick. It’s got to be another option.

Dr. John McDougall: So applying the principles that I have over the last forty-four years and we did scientific studies have been done three scientific studies. In fact, we’ve done two of them, somebody else did another. One fact we only really did one of the studies ourselves and Oregon Health and Science University, the medical school in Portland, Oregon, did. The second study in the third study was done by a small group of doctors in New Zealand. So we have three studies published on the weight-loss benefits from the McDougall diet. And what they show clearly is that you get immediate weight loss. What we’re talking about studying one thousand seven hundred three people. Nobody was excluded. You get an immediate weight loss in the first seven days on average of three-point one pounds. And the second and third study, they were done over a year. And they found. After a year, people had lost an average of 20 pounds action in a New Zealand study. They brag about them having the greatest amount of weight loss of any diet. Of course, they use the McDougall diet and they claim a 25-pound weight loss sustained. They maintained over a one-year period of time. And the people studied, at least in the Oregon Health and Science University Medical School in Portland. They weren’t interested in weight loss. They were younger than the average group of people. And still, at the end of a year, they lost on average 20 pounds. So, AJ, what kind of questions do you have after my short demonstration?

Chef AJ: Well, that was fantastic. I took a bunch of notes. I guess the first question would be you. The truth is easy to understand, but people still seem to be confused, Dr. McDougall. And if potatoes are only one percent fat and less than one calorie per gram, there’s no way potatoes can make people fat.

Dr. John McDougall: That’s correct. I’ve had people come to my office. They claim they have eating disorders and that they’re going to get fat eating a potato-based diet. And I challenged him over the last almost half a century. I’ve challenged them. I say, look,we’ll make available to you a bushel basket full potatoes, and you just live on the potatoes and see what happens. They’re never going to be able to gain access. I don’t care how obsessive-compulsive they are. It’ll never happen. Now if, of course, if you add the butter and the bacon and the sour cream to the baked potato, you’re going to have a real problem because these are high-fat foods, high-fat foods. The fat you eat is the fat you where, they is low carbohydrate so you don’t get satisfaction in the hunger drive and they’re calorie-dense. That’s right, the toppings. That’s where you get into trouble.

Chef AJ: Right. But wouldn’t it be better, especially for people that are struggling to eat the whole starches versus things like sugar and flour?

Dr. John McDougall: Yeah, that would be better. It’s a matter of fact. I have a version of the McDougall diet called the McDougall Maximum Weight Loss Program, and it’s a book that was published about 25 years ago. It’s still a national bestseller, the McDougall program for maximum weight loss. And in that book, I presented ways to lose weight more efficiently. And by the way, I was kind of forced into writing this book. As I explained to you, I’m a doctor and a medical doctor. I’m treated. I’m treating people who are desperate to get well, and I never wanted to be known as a diet doctor. I never want to write a diet book, but am I following said, You know, why don’t you? Why don’t you address the issues of weight loss in detail? Because that’s what we’re really interested in. And I eventually began to understand that it was really important to people. And so I wrote this book McDougall Program for Maximum Weight Loss, and it makes changes in the starch-based diet that I recommend, which make weight loss even more efficient. The first thing you have to realize is you don’t eat refined food when you refine food. What happens is you make more accessible the calories. So if you say convert an apple into applesauce and then apple juice, you make the calories more available. And not only do you consume more calories, but you raise the insulin levels to remember insulin stuffs fat into fat cells. So bread is another issue. You’re going to lose more weight on the wheat berry as opposed to the whole wheat flour. So that is again, a recommendation I would make for you if you want to lose weight more efficiently. You stay with the whole grain. You don’t eat the flour products. Now, most people don’t have to to apply this extra restriction. The other thing that I recommended in the program for maximum weight loss is I told people that they ought to increase the amount of traditional diet foods. Traditional diet foods would be celery, lettuce, kale and broccoli, and cauliflower. So these non-starchy, green, and yellow vegetables, what were you would do is you increase them out from, say, 10 percent, which is what I propose to you at the beginning of this talk. You agrees that maybe twenty-five percent of the diet, and that’s still 75 percent starch, that would be 75 percent still being corn, rice, potatoes, and or sweet potatoes bread and or pasta. Well, we’re going to reduce those because they’re refined grains, aren’t they? By the way, saving grace of pasta is that is filled with water. So as a result, its calorie concentration is really quite low compared to bread, which doesn’t have the extra water.

Dr. John McDougall: So the first the next step in getting maximum weight loss would be to increase the traditional diet foods say, toward up to 25 percent of your intake. And then I go to an approach called a hasty approach, which I don’t recommend, and that’s where you eat half the diet or more as non-starchy, green-yellow vegetables. The risk you have there is not being satisfied. Remember, starch satisfies the hunger drive, and when you don’t have to give a massive starch, you end up hungry, dissatisfied, looking for other foods. And it doesn’t. It doesn’t work out so well. Of course, there are other important things that are stressed in the maximum weight loss program, such as exercise. Exercise course, very good at losing weight, but it requires an awful lot of exercise to end up being trim. It’s really hard to fight those calories in hamburgers. I mean, a burger is going to be 500 calories, it’s going to take you an hour, hour and a half, maybe two hours to burn off those five hundred calories. Be much easier not to eat the hamburger wouldn’t it?

Chef AJ: Excellent. What about fruit Dr. McDougall, because it’s technically lower in calorie density than the starches?

Dr. John McDougall: Say again. What about fruit?

Chef AJ: Because fruits are higher calorie density than vegetables, but lower than most of the starches?

Dr. John McDougall: Well, actually, the calorie density is pretty similar in fruit because it’s lots of water. What fruit has is this has simple sugars. And as a result of being made up mostly of simple sugars, you have a higher rise in insulin levels. And that being so what I recommended in the maximum weight loss program instead of an average of, say, three or four fruits a day is that you cut your fruit intake down to say one or no fruits at all. You don’t really have to eat any fruit to have a healthy diet. So, yes, that’s an important thing that you brought up. And it’s important for people who want to lose weight and a lot of people who want to lose weight and are on to a natural approach, they’re going into juicing. And when you take in and damage your food by hitting a thousand times on the steel blade. In other words, turning an apple into applesauce and an apple juice, you change its physical properties. Not only do you make the calories more accessible. But you also raise the insulin levels and fruit does that, of course, as you refine the fruit, it does it even more. But you need to minimize the fruit. Again, you’re really pushing things as far as every, every, every tiny aspect of a maximum weight loss when you get around to cutting your fruits from three to one a day or fewer.

Chef AJ: What will the nice thing is if for some reason people feel like the starch solution isn’t enough, I still think the maximum weight loss diet is delicious. I mean, that’s what I eat to this day, and I love it.

Dr. John McDougall: That’s why you’re trim permanently too A.J. I mean, it should be no secret to people who have known you for a long time that you struggled. With your weight. Even if we needed a vegetarian or vegan diet, when you continue to add nuts and seeds and various kinds of nut butter and maybe even a little oil to your diet is just too powerful, the weight gain an aspect of this fat. You know, fat again, is the metabolic dollar it’s stored for the day when no food is available. It’s a survival thing. And if you include the fatty foods, the high-fat vegetable foods, which are nuts and seeds and avocados, and maybe some soy products and certainly some of the more processed soy products you’re dealing with relatively high-fat foods. And of course, vegetable oil is just pure poison. Not only is it pure poison from the point of view of weight gain. But as far as causing cancer and damage in the arteries and causing diabetes. And it’s just toxic, greasy skin pimples. You know, it never ends when you eat a high-fat diet. And many people need to limit the intake of nuts and seeds in our homes. But you know, I have people on the other end of the spectrum that I take care of, who have energy needs that require them to get in extra calories.

Dr. John McDougall: And so I have a whole section written about if you lose too much weight on the McDougall diet, what do you do? What it talks about is doing the opposite of what you do to lose more weight. In other words, you’d eat more refined foods, more bread, and pasta. More fruit, fruit juice, fruit sauces. You would increase your intake relative proportion of starches. Maybe you increase your simple sugar intake and simple sugar is not health food, white sugar is not health, food, honey, molasses. You know there’s concentrated calories, but we use them. And there’s a purpose for us using the simple sugars in our diet. So if people want to gain weight, you should add maybe a tablespoon or so of brown sugar to your oatmeal. You know, it’s really it’s not a big deal, it makes the food taste better, so you’re going to eat more of the oatmeal and that is, by the way, why we use simple suga. And salt on the surface of the foods is to get you to eat it. Remember the Mary Poppins movie? One of these famous quotes in there is a little bit of sugar that makes the medicine go down. Yeah. You know, you can consider a starch-based diet, the medicine, if I put a little bit of sugar with it so that you eat it. It’s worth the trouble because the important thing is you get off their fat, you get the carbohydrate, even the simple sugar, into your diet.

Dr. John McDougall: One of the best examples of a high sugar diet comes from Duke University comes from Walter Kempner, he was one of my heroes is in fact the most important medical doctor in my entire career, walter Kempner. Walter Kempner ran the internal medicine department at Duke University for many years. His diet, which is called the rice diet, was the main source of income of Duke University for two decades. It was always a very famous diet at Duke for seven decades. The rice diet consists of white rice, fruit, fruit juice, and table sugar. It’s 93 percent sugar, you know, carbohydrate and refined sugar. 93 percent of the calories and yet the program results in serious weight loss even for people who are morbidly obese. You know, this is a dietary approach that can be put up against. Bariatric surgery and get better results. This is a diet that cures essentially 100 percent of type two diabetics. This is a diet that takes people who are in severe kidney and heart failure and gives them life again. You have to spend some time researching Walter Kempner and the rice diet. It’ll make you understand why sugar, really? It’s not the evilest thing in your diet plan, again, white sugar is simple, sugar is not healthy food, but it’s a darn good way to get you to eat a basic meal plan. And again, we put the simple sugars in the assault on the surface of the food, so you get a maximum taste because it’ll contact your tongue. We don’t take and mix it up in the food where the taste is lost, so you get a maximum taste for a minimum amount of simple sugar, a minimum amount of calories, a minimal amount of insulin stimulation, insulin stuffs fat into the fat cells. That’s one of the reasons that diabetics gain on average, 20 pounds in a year. When they go on medication that raises internal levels. So anything that raises your insulin levels is going to cause you to gain more weight taking diabetic pills, insulin shots, eating refined food, eating more sugars are going to raise your insulin levels. Exercise will lower your Insulin levels, eating frequently lowers your insulin levels, so grazers and nibblers, they do better at weight loss than gorgers. If you eat 14 times a day, you’ll do better than somebody who eats one, two, or three times a day. Another principle of the maximum weight loss program is the frequency of your meals.

Chef AJ: Dr. McDougall, there are people who believe that a low-fat diet is dangerous and that we need to have nuts and seeds every day for omega-three fatty acids and brain health and preventing heart disease. What how do you feel about that?

Dr. John McDougall: These are misguided people who really don’t understand the science. You know, you think about it for a minute. There are populations of people who are terrestrial, but they didn’t live in coastal areas. They didn’t have access to high intakes of omega-three fats from, say, fish. They did. They live in a terrestrial setting with none of these concentrated sources of omega-three. And they grew they had babies. They fought battles, they competed in athletics. You’re on a diet that some people claim is deficient in omega-three fats. They didn’t have the concentrated omega-three fats in fish, nor did they have the concentrated many kinds of fats that are present in, nuts, seeds,, and avocados. At best, nuts and seeds and avocados come in bloom once a year. The reason they put nuts in hard shells is to make them hard to get at. Of course, the coconut has the hardest shell of all, doesn’t it? Avocados these days are in bloom every day of the year at Whole Foods Market. But an avocado tree really only produces one or two weeks a year. So, you know, we have a misguided abundance of these rich foods available in our society today, which makes it difficult unless you understand that not only do you not need these concentrated sources of calories, but they can cause you problems, and the least of the problems would be you’re going to gain weight. This is what this whole topic is about is how to lose weight efficiently.

Chef AJ: I’ve heard you say that the truth is not aligned with the profit of the industry.

Dr. John McDougall: No, it isn’t. And of course, we have the tip of the tongue, which is which has set you up to be a sugar seeker. And, you know, that was in a day when simple sugars were quite rare. But nowadays, of course, it’s very easy with a supermarket variety to overfill your shopping basket with simple sugar foods.

Chef AJ: Why is it that starch starches so satisfying, because you said starch is to the hunger drive like oxygen is to the breathing dry? Why no starch, no satiety?

Dr. John McDougall: Well, you know, that’s the way the drives were set up. You have the breathing drive, which is satisfied, not by air. There could be any mixture of gases satisfied by oxygen, and you have the thirst drive, which is not satisfied by any and all liquids. Only one liquid satisfies thirst, right? I know you’re thinking beer and orange juice, right? No, it’s the water, only water satisfies the thirst drive, and the human being was designed by our creator, so to speak, to be a starch eater. And you know, we had to go through some evolutionary processes to become star cheaters, which gave us worldwide advantages. We’re descended from various lesser primates, chimpanzees, great apes, etc. These particular primates are confined to equatorial zones, and they eat a relatively low starch diet, a star, a diet primarily of fruits and perishable vegetables, which are available all year long at the equator. So that’s their diet. They’re stuck at the equatorial part of the Earth. Now, as the primate developed, we developed an efficiency in metabolism in the use of calories that allowed us to migrate all over the planet Earth. What happened is when we left the equatorial zones where there were fruits and perishable vegetables available to everybody, as we left these particular zones, they went north and south and latitude. They were no longer abundant. In fact, in fall and wintertime, they lack completely. So what did the human primates do? It dug under the ground and found tubers that were starches? And of course, cooking became an important issue in human development. Cooking starches make, of course, makes more of them more available. And so it was an adaptation of the primate species that allowed us to have an efficient metabolism that allowed us to take over the entire planet for good or bad.

Chef AJ: That’s wonderful. What about alcohol?

Dr. John McDougall: Well, first of all, I think it’s irresponsible for a medical doctor to in any way claim alcohol as health food but a lot of my colleagues have done that and drinking alcohol has been mixed up with a lower incidence of many diseases, including heart disease, particularly wines. Now this might be okay for nine out of ten people who drink socially, drink for tastten but one out of these 10 people has a disease. And if a medical professional claims it’s good, it’s okay. You should consume alcohol, that person, known as alcoholic, it causes tremendous destruction all around him or her. Auto accidents, physical abuse, murders, etc. You know, no doctors should be recommending alcohol in any terms of health. Now, what does alcohol do? Well, alcohol is a molecule that does not convert into fat. OK, we just can’t do it. We don’t have the metabolic processes to turn alcohol into fat. Now, alcohol does make people gain weight, not serious alcohol. Let me stop for a minute and think about serious alcoholics that you know, they’re sickly thin. But what I’m talking about is moderate, reasonably sociable drinkers. Alcohol will cause you to gain weight by the following the body prefers to burn alcohol is energy as opposed to fat, it utilizes the alcohol molecules to run your machinery throughout the day and leaves the fat in your body fat. The alcohol molecule raises insulin levels, so there’s another way insulin stops fat into fat cells, but the primary way that alcohol causes people would be out of control is that they lose inhibitions. And instead of one potato chip, it becomes two bags of potato chips. And as a result, moderate drinker has a serious problem not only with their weight but also their health. So you certainly shouldn’t include that in your weight loss program.

Chef AJ: Great. Thank you. Are you familiar with the work of Dr. Susannah Holt, who created the satiety index?

Dr. John McDougall: Very much so. Very much so.

Chef AJ: Do you know what the number one food is?

Dr. John McDougall: She taught us by feeding various subjects different foods that the potato was seven times more satisfying than a croissant. A potato would be three or four times more satisfying than meat orcheese. And what she did is, she said, various foods to people and ask them, How do you feel? How satisfied are you? But there are other classic experiments out there in line with Holtzberg, which were done, like listener. Listener did an important study, one in particular that everybody should understand that should be taught in kindergarten to grade school is a listener took a group of people, put them in a metabolic ward situation where he controlled everything that they ate and what he did as he made foods where he could disguise the amount of fat in the food like soups and stews and breads and muffins and so on, so that he could feed these various foods to people. And they wouldn’t know whether there were high fat or low fat when he put fat in the muffins and the soups, etc. Even though they couldn’t tell it was a hig- fat version, they ended up consuming an extra six to eight hundred calories as he lowered the fat intake in the meal plan that dropped down from 45 percent fat to about 15 percent fat. And people eventually lost weight, and they consumed based on scientific metabolic research. Somewhere between six and 800 fewer calories, just with that invisible manipulation. You know, people enjoyed the soups and stews and the muffins just as much, when they ate them low fat as high-fat.

Chef AJ: That’s really interesting, I’ll have to check that out. You know, diets like keto and low-carb, they stillare popular today. They’re even recommended by medical doctors for people with diabetes, for example. And yet they do result in weight loss. But it’s not really fat loss, is it?

Dr. John McDougall: Well, initially it’s water loss, and, you know, that’s the first eight, 10 pounds during the first week of dieting. And what happens is the body prefers to burn sugar, so it burns its stored sugar, which is glycogen. It’s stored in the muscles and in the liver. The body stores about two pounds of glycogen, but associated with that, glycogen is four molecules of water. So for when you lose two pounds of glycogen along with that, you lose an extra four pounds of water. So the initial weight loss is caused by water loss by the body doing what it does, preferably naturally, which is to burn carbohydrates. It burns the stores of carbohydrates. Then when the glycogen is gone, what’s left to burn is the fat in the body fat or the fat that you eat. And the diets, low carb diets are very high fat, very high protein, no fiber, nutritionally imbalanced, and pro cancer and heart disease. Just to name a few. Clean diabetes. So. So what happens is you go into a state of ketosis and ketones suppress the hunger drive without ketosis is a normal natural state that occurs under certain circumstances that are related to survival. For example, if you are sick for a long period of time, say more than a few days your body goes into ketosis. Why? Because. There’s no reason there’s every reason not to have a strong appetite at that time, you’re supposed to be recovery recuperating. You’re not supposed to be finding and cooking food. When you’re sick. So the Atkins diet, the low carb diets, they simulate sickness. The other time that ketosis occurs naturally, is when people are starved to death. The first two or three days of starvation are accompanied by a terrible hunger. Incapacitating hunger, that’s all you could think about is food, and after the first two or three days, you go into a state of ketosis, which relieves this obsession with getting food so you can start thinking about other ways like ways to get yourself out of trouble. So, you know, these diets, they simulate sickness and they simulate famine. But they have nothing to do with good health.

Chef AJ: You mentioned that these low-carb diets are basically fabulous. The McDougall diet is high in fiber. Is that also one of the secrets that it’s so wonderful for weight loss?

Dr. John McDougall: Well, fiber is a non-digestible carbohydrate. These are sugars that are linked in long chains. These sugar molecules are linked in long chains, some of those, some of the linkages are digestible. And then you call it starch. But some of the linkages are not digestible. In other words, the sugar, the multi, the multiple chains of simple sugars are put into chains. They go through the intestinal tract and we don’t have enzymes to break apart into simple sugars that can be utilized. And so they persevere through the intestinal tract and that’s what you call dietary fiber. That’s all it is. It’s just sugar with non-digestible linkages, the same sugar that’s in starch. And because it has no calories, it provides a way of making the food more calorie dilute the first principle. But I talk to you about a calorie diet. And there are other other other beneficial aspects of these dietary fibers, too, besides the fact that they bulk up the food, they are so complex while they’re complex a lot of things, including toxins in your food. So fibers important part of fibers only present in plants. No animal food has fiber at all, not a speck.

Chef AJ: Have you ever heard people say that when they followed a starch-based diet, they couldn’t lose weight? And if so, what do you say to them?

Dr. John McDougall: Well, you know, I hate to be unkind but Walter Kempner, who I talked to you about, who did the rice diet, it’s been said that he said all dieters are liars. I’m not going to repeat that, but it brings home to a point that, you know, sometimes people are dishonest with themselves and they force themselves into thinking that they’re doing the right thing. And then that, of course, extends to dishonesty. Towards people that surround them, you’re not doing it. Ladies and gentlemen, you’re not doing it. So I’m sorry, you know, I have to I won’t argue with you. You know, if you sat across my desk as a patient and you told me that you eat a starch-based diet and you couldn’t lose weight, you know, I wouldn’t argue with you. I just sit back and try and figure out ways to get you to understand how solid the principles are. Think about it for a minute. In populations where people eat starch-based diets, there are no fat people. Now there are two billion Asians. Nobody was overweight, except for the sumo wrestlers, and of course, they didn’t need a starch-based diet. They had a special diet to make them so big. I come from a time when we had the Vietnamese conflict and I remember watching newsreels. Of places in Asia, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, where they’d be filming one hundred thousand people in a town square. Nobody was overweight. Excuse me, you can even relate to this yourself if you think about populations, people like the I think the Asians are a great example. Before 1980, obesity was rare, type two diabetes was almost nonexistent among two billion people after 1980. What happened is they switched from a diet that was 90 percent rice to be white rice, 90 percent rice. They watch CNN news and other cable networks. They said, Oh, we’d like to be just like Americans. And, of course, they switch to the Western diet and you’ve seen what happens. We have changed in the last 30 years from a population that suffered from undernutrition to a worldwide population that suffers from overnutrition. And it’s just a matter of change of foods. It’s not a change of your genes or your psychological makeup. You know, stress, et cetera. It’s changing the food. So if you can change the food in the wrong direction, you can change it in the right direction. If you wanted to be trim and healthy-looking, wouldn’t you want to emulate the diet of people who are trim and healthy? When you think of the term healthy people, what comes to mind? Fewer and fewer people of our generation, but there’s still evidence that people who eat starch-based diets like, for example, in the Middle East, we watch the news in the evening. You see their population of people very few or. Are overweight. I know the kings and the queens and the business owners, they’re overweight, but the general population, because they still primarily a diet of wheat and barley. Or I think the Asian population is again easy to relate to, 90 percent of the diet before 1980 was white rice, no overweight people. You go to Peru, for example, in Peru today they have the same health problems and weight problems that we had 100 years ago. Now, of course, the people in Peru are changing their diet to a more Western diet, and it won’t take 100 years for them to be sick and unhealthy and overweight like Americans. You know you can look back through history. What do you see? You know, the people who built the pyramids, people who toiled in the fields, they were healthy. They were strong. They were trim, but the people who were overlords, the aristocrats, the kings, and queens. Do you know what they look like? You know what they look like. They look like Americans.

Chef AJ: So, Dr. McDougall, what do you think it is that was driving the obesity epidemic? Is that the refining of the carbohydrates, the increase in animal products and oils are for all of it?

Dr. John McDougall: Yeah, it’s all those things, A.J. I think if I had to give particular weight to those different ingredients, which I think is unfair because it’s all those things, the lack of fiber is the increase in sugars. It’s the oil. If I am going to fix one ingredient in the diet, what would it be? It would be to get the fats and vegetable oils and fish oils out of your diet? That is the primary driving force to obesity, the fat you eat, come on now, the fat you eat.

Chef AJ: Is the fat you wear.

Dr. John McDougall: All right.

Chef AJ: I know this.

Dr. John McDougall: When you sit down to a salad and you put a tablespoon of salad dressing on your salad. Where do you think that table of tablespoon of salad dressing goes? You think it evaporates out your ears? I know you see some of it in the toilet. But it’s worn, it’s worn on the skin. Greasy skin and greasy hair are unattractive or it’s worn under the skin. She’s overweight, overfat, I think over fat is probably the right term.

Chef AJ: How do you feel about moderation?

Dr. John McDougall: It’s a killer. Moderation is a killer. In my personal life, I don’t moderate. I can’t know I and I don’t mind telling you about it. I have a particular addiction. I used to be addicted to tobacco for 20. 20 plus years of tobacco use, back when I was a teenager and early twenties, I quit October 20th, 1972 at seven a.m. in the morning. Haven’t had a cigarette since. But if I did, I have one today and three tomorrow, I’d be up to two packs a day by next week. You know, these these these habituation, these addictions are so strong that once you reintroduce them into your life. You’re out of control. You know, very few people can be alcoholics, know that they have to stop 100 percent. They can’t switch to beer and wine and solve their problems. Nancy Reagan, our first lady. What did you say to the drug? The drug industry or drug dependent use? Back in. What did she say? Just say no, just say no, she didn’t say just shut down because you can’t do it. And it’s the same way for many of you with food. You know, it’s one piece of chocolate cake and then looking for every buffet in town after that. If you realize your limitations, your limitations as a human being. Then you realize that you cannot allow these addictive, habituating powerful substances back even a little bit. You know, there are people who can deal with moderation now, for example. You know, I’m pretty moderate when it comes to food. I can have a piece of chocolate cake on, you know, family birthdays and I’m not in control, but you can’t. There are other things you can’t put in my life like tobacco or, you know, you see a person on a control. And you must recognize your your particular attributes. You must recognize where your shortfalls are and you must guard against it. If you want to change your life, you have to be that serious.

Chef AJ: Right, so, Dr. McDougall, what’s the real truth about weight loss?

Dr. John McDougall: The real truth about weight loss boils down to something I’ve said over and over again. I’ll say it one last time you are a starch eater, a starchivore, a starchitarian. And once you understand that you put starch back on your dinner plate, you’ll have the personal appearance and the health that you deserve.

Chef AJ: Thank you, Dr. McDougall, for making potatoes great again.

Chef AJ: Hi, Dr. Goran, and welcome to the Truth about Weight loss Summit, thanks so much for being here.

Dr. Michael Goran: Great to be here. Lovely to meet you and talk with you.

Chef AJ: Oh, I’m so excited to talk to you, Dr. Goran. What is the cause of childhood obesity?

Dr. Michael Goran: There’s probably a dozen, maybe hundreds of different causes, I would say. It could be so individual all the way from individual genetics and physiology to, you know, macro-level things in our food environment can be involved as multifactorial, really I would say.

Chef AJ: Do you think that our ever-increasing consumption of sugar plays any role in it?

Dr. Michael Goran: Yeah, I have to say that if I had to pick one factor and this is not just my opinion, it’s just based on my 30 plus years of research on childhood nutrition and obesity that if I had to pick one factor, it would be sugar. Not just that kids are consuming more sugar today than ever before, but different types of sugar. Over 200 different names of sugar in different and different and in different formats. So liquid sugar. It’s a thing. It’s a problem. It’s very different. You know, kids historically, from an evolutionary perspective, were drinking milk and drinking water and either get a major amount of sugar juice from beverages, and that’s that liquid sugar that has a stronger impact on the body.

Chef AJ: Wow. Yeah. I mean, I was one of those kids drinking lots of soda and not diet, regular soda, Dr. Pepper, Coke slurpees. And probably, I would guess about a thousand of my calories a day came from liquid sugar.

Dr. Michael Goran: Well, yeah, that’s substantial.

Chef AJ: Yeah. So what are the consequences of all that sugar? I know what they were for me and my body, but people want to hear from the doctor, I’m sure.

Dr. Michael Goran: Yeah, sugar can really. I mean, I can slide a salad on that if you like. Because the effects really run from head to toe. So like when met slide here we’re seeing, you know, multiple effects of sugar. And we talk about this in my book Sugar Proof about how sugar affects the growing body from the brain. Its effect on learning ability, mood, behavior. Academic test scores, skin teeth, dental disease. The most obvious example of the effects of sugar and just about any organ in the body can be affected by sugar. Fatty liver disease Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease was not even a disease 10 or 15 years ago. Most fatty liver disease was related to alcohol, now it’s nonalcohol. That nonalcoholic sources sugar and more specifically, fructose, diabetes, obesity itself, and then the whole range of GI issues and now cardiovascular disease. We don’t see a lot of cardiovascular disease per se, and in children, thankfully, but the is a chronic disease. It’s seeded in childhood and it’s related to diet and sugar. That’s what we’ve learned is that sugar can be just as much, if not more, of a factor in cardiovascular disease than dietary fat because of the way sugars are metabolized.

Chef AJ: Wow. You know, we think of sugar as causing cavities or, you know, dental disease, tooth decay. But these are 10 other serious consequences.

Dr. Michael Goran: Yeah, it goes well well beyond those things. Most parents are just looking at kids and they can see dental decay, or they can see weight gain or they can see skin problems. But a lot of these other conditions are what we call below the skin, and they’re slowly evolving chronic diseases, meaning they’re established early in life and they’re proceeding at a very slow pace. They don’t just wake up at 45 or 50 years of age with diabetes or cardiovascular disease. These things can be progressing throughout life.

Chef AJ: You know, I was born in 1960 and there was one fat kid in every class and that was me. But now there’s many more children that are suffering from will be seeing. How have the rates increased?

Dr. Michael Goran: The rates for childhood obesity have increased quite substantially in the country. And they also vary in different segments of the population. So another thing to keep in mind is there’s a huge economic disparity here and a huge ethnic disparity. So, for example, in Los Angeles County, where you live for most of your life and where I’ve lived for 22 years, there is over 100 different cities in Los Angeles. And so we published a paper about almost 10 years ago looking at different neighborhoods in Los Angeles and found there’s no epidemic of childhood obesity in affluent neighborhoods like Beverly Hills or Malibu. The real epidemic is in low-income neighborhoods and neighborhoods of color. And that’s what we need to understand more about is why that’s happening.

Chef AJ: Now, what are the long term consequences of childhood obesity?

Dr. Michael Goran: But all those conditions in that graphic, you and I figured I showed you. So, you know, the same, the same outcomes of adulthood. Type two diabetes, cardiovascular disease, primary liver disease, but could be earlier onset. So we’re seeing increases in child and childhood-onset type two diabetes, for example, increases in fatty liver disease that I mentioned cardiovascular disease and long term. There’s obesity-related cancers as well, which are very hard to kind of put a direct finger on in terms of cause and effect. But there is something there in terms of the connection.

Chef AJ: When I grew up, children didn’t get type two diabetes, right?

Dr. Michael Goran: Yeah, that really didn’t start to appear documented in the literature till around the late 1990s, early 2000s. That’s when the first documentation of type two diabetes used to be called adult-onset diabetes rate because differentiated from childhood-onset type one diabetes, which is lack of beta cell production of insulin. Type two diabetes is a gradual deterioration of beta-cell function, which can occur earlier and early in life. And now we’re seeing pretty rapid increases during the childhood of type two diabetes,

Chef AJ: How young our children that are getting type two diabetes?

Dr. Michael Goran: It seems young has probably seven, eight, nine, 10 that would be extreme, but the most significant critical window appears to be during puberty. That’s when there’s major shifts in hormones, and insulin resistance is a natural phenomenon of of of of puberty. So that exacerbates the problem. Same with fatty liver disease. Now we’re seeing that nonalcoholic fatty liver disease in children as young as six or seven. And again, that’s a lifelong problem that ultimately can result in liver failure and the need for a liver transplant.

Chef AJ: Is anyone trying this to sugar consumption other than you?

Dr. Michael Goran: Yeah, there’s a couple of research groups that are studying this one study from a few years ago. For example, they took kids with obesity, and they just put them on a fructose elimination diet for nine days, just nine days. And even after just nine days of no sugar, they were able to significantly reduce liver fat to almost all clinical levels. So clearly, there is a proven mechanistic link.

Chef AJ: Why is the fat in the liver particularly dangerous?

Dr. Michael Goran: Fat in the liver is to back up a little bit to deliver its job, it’s to filter everything that comes through in the blood. So everything that you eat is absorbed in the gut, goes from the gut to the liver, delivers this giant filtration process and it filters everything out of the blood that it doesn’t want to get to other organs, toxins, drugs, alcohol, fructose. So over 90 percent of fructose is taken up by the liver because the liver puts it in the same category as alcohol and toxins. That’s metabolic. I mean, that’s you can argue with is sugar toxin. According to the liver, fructose is toxic in the same way that alcohol is.

Chef AJ: And we didn’t use to have fructose as we are having it now.

Dr. Michael Goran: Yeah, I mean, it’s in very different forms now. So, I mean, and kids, we’re talking about I consumption of fruit juice, fruit juice, apple juice, the most common is more than 70 percent fructose. So that’s more than high fructose corn syrup, which many parents know to avoid. But apple juice is actually higher in fructose than high fructose corn syrup. So start to avoid that, too if you’re concerned about fruit juice.

Chef AJ: A lot of people think of fruit juices as healthy.

Dr. Michael Goran: Yeah, yeah, totally. Because, you know, it’s from fruit to delivers micronutrients. But the thing is it’s it concentrates the sugars. So if you take a glass of apple juice fruit, probably concentrating the juice from three or four apples, right? Nobody’s eating three or four apples all at once, but you can drink the juice of three or four apples all at once. And it’s not just the amount of fructose that hits the liver, but metabolically. It’s how fast it hits the liver. And that’s the problem with liquid sugar. It’s rapid bolus infusion of fructose that hits the liver, and that’s metabolically very problematic. And it’s very different than eating an apple where you get, first of all, less fructose to begin with. But second of all, you also get the fiber and the fiber slows down the release of the fructose. And in fact, when it’s slowly released, the gut can convert some of the fructose into glucose. This is all straight metabolism of the body that’s defending itself against high amounts of fructose.

Chef AJ: You call it a bolus. It sounds like a drug.

Dr. Michael Goran: Yeah. Well, you know, Is it a drug? That’s, you know, that’s a lightning rod topic. It’s a bolus infusion of fructose. That’s what it is. You can add whatever descriptor you want on to that, but you can’t argue with the fact it’s a bullish consumption of a highly concentrated liquid that’s highly concentrated with fructose

Chef AJ: And a lot of parents are putting it in sippy cups, and I learned from your book that sippy cups aren’t a good thing. I liked sippy cups because they didn’t spill, but they’re not so good, are they?

Dr. Michael Goran: Well, the American Academy of Pediatrics has pretty strict guidelines on the amount of fruit juice they can consume, so you can minimize it. You can also dilute it. That’s a very simple strategy. I can use that. That will reduce the sweetness, which will reduce the sippy cup issue is the way that it concentrates sugars in the mouth and that leads to dental caries. And that’s a really good example of why babies and kids are more susceptible to the adverse effects of sugar. So why is it that just babies, infants and kids are getting dental caries from too much sugar? And it’s not the sugar. The sugar promotes bacterial growth in the mouth. Those bacteria produce acid, and the issue is that when teeth erupt, they don’t have all the enamel, so they’re not protected. From all the acid. So it’s a clear-cut example of why. Young children are more susceptible to the adverse effects of too much sugar because their organs are yet protected enough or their organs are still developing.

Chef AJ: Makes sense. Is it true that the earlier a child is introduced to sugar, the more likely they are to become overweight or obese?

Dr. Michael Goran: Yeah, that’s that is true. I was delighted. You show you that too. That’s pretty clear-cut data on that. It’s a longitudinal study. This is the data here. Three groups of children. This is a CDC studies which are nationwide, nationally representative study of almost 2100 children. They were characterized based on when sugar was introduced, when sugary beverages were introduced during infancy, never consumed, introduced after six months in yellow and then before six months in the red. And the bar is the prevalence of obesity in those children at six years of age. So you can see by far there’s a stepwise increase. Yeah. So there’s a stepwise increase in the prevalence of obesity in the children at six years of age, who had the earliest introduction of sugary beverages before six months compared to sugary beverages introduced after six months of age or no consumption. So nine percent of kids were obese at six years of age if they didn’t consume any sugary beverages as an infant versus 20 percent if they were introduced before six months of age.

Chef AJ: Wow. And you know, I go to Costco and I see parents buying that special deal where they get, I think it’s a dollar fifty for pizza and soda, and then they take their soda and put it in a sippy cup for their kid and then they get their free refill. And these are young kids, by the way. Very young.

Dr. Michael Goran: Yeah. that’s I mean, sugar proof is on a mission to try and help let parents know that it’s not such a good idea.

Chef AJ: So kids are born with an innate preference or we all are humans are born with an innate preference for sweet, but it’s even more so in a younger child, correct?

Dr. Michael Goran: Yeah, so this is an evolutionary thing. It’s supposed to be protective because from an evolutionary perspective, it favored liking of breast milk. It favored seeking out of six, sticking out of good calories and avoiding food that might have spoiled. But nowadays, those things aren’t relevant in a world where 70 percent of processed foods contain added sugar. And kids are reaching for food not in the forest floor, but in the grocery store, where the vast majority have added sugars. And so that’s why it’s there, but it’s there to be protective. But the problem is in today’s food environment, it’s amped up. Today’s food environment is exacerbating that protective mechanism. The earlier kids get introduced to sugar, the more that preference gets and took, which really just means they’re creating more sugar.

Chef AJ: And that can happen even in utero from what I understand,

Dr. Michael Goran: that’s right, that’s so hard to show specifically in humans. That’s very difficult studies to do that. But look, some evidence from animal models show that that is the case, that if you feed a pregnant animal high sugar, their offspring are born with an even higher preference for sweetness.

Chef AJ: Sounds like the story of my life. It sounds like too much sugar. We could argue how much is too much isn’t good for anyone, but that kids are uniquely vulnerable to the effects of consuming too much sugar.

Dr. Michael Goran: That’s the central tenet of the Book of Sugar proof is that kids are uniquely vulnerable to too much sugar because they’re evolving. I’ll give you another example. Gut microbiome Clearly, what you eat affects your gut microbiome, right? Nobody would argue with that. Nobody would argue with the fact that the gut microbiome is evolving in the first two years of life. So obviously, what infants are exposed to in the first two years of life through food is going to shape their gut microbiome. And once that gut microbiome is shaped, it’s there for life. It’s very hard to change. So that’s again, that’s a unique vulnerability, whereby if things get modified during those critical windows, you’re pretty much stuck with it for a long time.

Chef AJ: So you’re saying it’s really forming from age zero to two, which interestingly enough, one of the other experts on the summit, Dr. Nicole Avena, said no sugar should be given to any children during those critical years.

Dr. Michael Goran: Yeah, we wrote that in the book, which was published two years ago. That’s been our abstract concept for a while and that’s now endorsed by the new U.S. Dietary Guidelines from 2021, which for the first time recommended zero added sugars between zero and two years of age. Now, which is fantastic, although I had an argument with the USDA because they say things like formula are protected from added sugars, which is kind of crazy and ridiculous because if you have corn sirup solids in a formula, the USDA say that’s not added sugars. And I say, why not? It’s still an added sugar.

Chef AJ: But that doesn’t sound quite fair to me because, you know, I feel for people who can’t breastfeed like my mother. I mean, you’re getting sugar as your primary food from these formulas. Can they make them any other way?

Dr. Michael Goran: Well, most formula are made with lactose, which is a carbohydrate source from breast milk. I don’t have a problem with that, and I think formula has a lot of benefits if it’s done right. But there’s some formula that are made without lactose because they think babies might be lactose intolerant, which I don’t think that’s true, but that’s the strategy. And so the strategy of the formula makers is to use corn syrup solids. So there is certainly some formulas with lactose that are made with alternative carbohydrates, which in my opinion, is an added sugar.

Chef AJ: But the breast is best.

Dr. Michael Goran: Ultimately, yes, breast and longer, the longer you can do it, the better. In fact, I can show you another slide from our work that so that’s the data I already showed you a short while ago. No, I didn’t show you this. This is a new study. This is in children in Los Angeles who are studied at two to four years of age, right? Three groups never consuming sugary beverages, one serving per day or two servings per day. But we found was that kids at two years of age with more sugary beverages had more were more likely to be obese. But these kids were never breastfed or breastfed for less than 12 months. This is just in this subgroup. These were kids who were breastfed for more than 12 months long, long term, not necessarily exclusive. And the prevalence of obesity in these children at two to four years of age was always lower, even if they were consuming high amounts of sugary beverages. In fact, the lowest prevalence of obesity was seen in this group of kids who were consuming high amounts of sugary beverages but had been breastfed. So longer-term, breast breastfeeding is protected b the longer term, the better. So there’s a dose-response effect to the breastfeeding. And the second thing I would say is, again, based on our research. Breastfeeding is protective. Longer-term, yes. But what you eat well as your boss, you’re breastfeeding is also important because our research was the first to show a direct transmission of sugars from what mother might be consuming to enter the milk and therefore into the baby. So look out for what you’re consuming as a mom. Whilst you’re breastfeeding because sugars can be transmitted, especially fructose for some reason gets a passage from the mom into the milk into the baby.

Chef AJ: That’s encouraging. You mentioned that 70 percent of the products in the grocery store, and I don’t want to call them food because I don’t think they’re food, but products have added sugar.

Dr. Michael Goran: Yeah, and it’s higher, it’s higher for foods, packaged foods, processed foods that are targeted towards children. So 80 percent of those have some type of added sugar

Chef AJ: Because much of it is hidden, though, because like I can understand, if you have a cupcake, you expect it to be sweet and have sugar. But they put sugar in everything tomato sauce. They hide it in bread, so they’re hiding it and things that aren’t even inherently sweet.

Dr. Michael Goran: Yeah, and that’s those hidden sugars or something to look out for, for sure. And, you know, the food companies. It’s called hidden sugars, are they hiding it or they’re just using it to mask flavor, I still don’t know why there would be sugar in tomato sauce or ketchup, because we all know that you can get tomato sauce or ketchup or peanut butter or salad dressing without sugar that tastes just great. So my guess is. They’re using it in products that have a lot of preservatives, a lot of other chemicals, and it’s just masking the flavor or. Trying to sell it more. And there’s just this concept that we’ve raised that because food companies know that kids prefer things that are sweeter, that they’re using this sweetness to basically catch kids, to hook kids on their products, to get them to like it more.

Chef AJ: And they aggressively market these products to children, too.

Dr. Michael Goran: Correct. Yeah. So it’s a pretty, pretty clear strategy that we need to look out for.

Chef AJ: When is somebody going to do something about it?

Dr. Michael Goran: Well, I don’t know the answer to that. You know, I wrote sugar proof because I couldn’t wait any longer for somebody to do anything about it. And I think that ultimately it’s up to people like you and me to kind of help spread the message and try to get parents to be more aware of these issues and do something about it because I don’t really see a large-scale solution to this problem. There may be small adjustments here or there. There may be some recommendations. Food companies may or may not follow them, but ultimately they found loopholes to them. So it’s really up to consumers and parents to make these adjustments.

Chef AJ: What are the environmental elements that contribute to the overconsumption of sugar in children? I think you mentioned five of them in your book.

Dr. Michael Goran: Well, let’s see if I have to jog my memory here, so five elements environment. We’re talking about more sugar and different types of sugar, right?

Chef AJ: That you said that we have more than ever before, 200 names. And I mean, a kid, even if a kid can read, they’re not going to necessarily recognize all 200 names.

Dr. Michael Goran: So there’s over 200 names, which is another way to hide sugar. Because what it used to be, if you just look at the ingredient list and see sugar number one. And you know, if you’re in a supermarket in a rush, you would know that it contains sugar. But nowadays, since there’s 200 names, food companies will put five six seven different types of sugar in that product so they can hide it, bury it down the ingredient list, so it’s not as obvious. So that’s an issue, and that’s another way to hide sugar in the food environment.

Chef AJ: What effect does viewing television commercials for all these like products that they have to have, have on the children?

Dr. Michael Goran: Yeah. So I think there are clear strategies at play there, which companies are pretty smart at marketing in terms of using phony characters that implanting those commercials during peak hours. Some countries have actually regulated against that because the evidence is pretty clear that these strategies promote unhealthy eating, so countries like Chile and the United Kingdom have strategies to prevent that. But what the studies show is that they can promote what we call mindless eating or not just promoting products, but kids end up just consuming more because they’re, you know, glued to the TV. And it’s not just kids, obviously, that we’re all familiar with that behavior.

Chef AJ: What effects does sugar consumption have on memory and learning, especially in children?

Dr. Michael Goran: Yeah. So in chapter four of sugar proof is called smarter without sugar, which basically talks about the evidence of how the earlier introduction of sugar again can have long-term effects. So it’s short term effects and long term effects of that, short term effects would be, you know, sending your kid out on a high sugar breakfast or going to go out the door to school feeling energetic and ready for the day. But an hour later, will crash and burn. Parents may be familiar with that concept of sugar crashing or hangry kids falling apart quickly after eating. And that’s to do with how rapidly sugar is absorbed out of the bloodstream. And kids going hypoglycemic and then craving more sugar. And so that can affect just kids’ stability and energy levels. But then in the longer term, studies have also shown impacts of high sugar consumption on performance on academic test scores for things like learning, reading, math. That evidence exists. And again, that can be. That effect can be transmitted in utero as well, so high consumption of sugars during pregnancy has also been shown to have that effect on kids’ memory and in kids’ brain performance. And keep in mind, you know, 90 percent of brain development occurs before age, five years of age. And again, it’s the same principles of what that built what that brain is exposed to nutritionally during those five years is going to have an impact. And sugar appears to have a negative impact. On that brain development, not to say that kids can never have sugar, but certainly higher amounts of sugar are going to have an impact.

Chef AJ: It’s like, you know, they say the poison is in the dose and so many kids are having such high doses of it from day one.

Dr. Michael Goran: Day negative one, start again, it can start in neutral. But yeah, there’s this kind of sugar land sugar environment that we’re living in. Kids are just being bombarded not by their choice, always. It’s just the environment in which they’re being brought up. Overwhelming amounts of sugar right, left and center. And so sugar proof really is about helping families right size the sugar and protect those kids from all the sugar in the same way that you would protect the baby from electrical sockets and sharp knives and other dangers. Sugar proof is helping families protect those kids from the dangers of too much sugar.

Chef AJ: When you were a little sugar addict, you grow up to be an adult sugar addict. It doesn’t get easier.

Dr. Michael Goran: It doesn’t get easier. It’s sugar begets sugar and becomes very problematic.

Chef AJ: Can early and prolonged sugar consumption have long-term effects on the brain leading to cognitive decline, or maybe even Alzheimer’s later in life?

Dr. Michael Goran: Yeah. So there’s emerging evidence for that. There’s one or two studies that show that long-term sugar consumption in adulthood is associated, and it’s not like, is it mechanistic? Is a cause and effect? I don’t know. We don’t have that degree of evidence yet, but clearly there are studies that show an association between longer-term consumption of sugars and brain development. Brain shrinkage That study has been shown that long-term consumption of sugar beverages leads to smaller brain and earlier onset of Alzheimer’s disease and cognitive decline. There’s that evidence does exist.

Chef AJ: And all these deleterious effects of sugar, you would think it would have to come with a warning label.

Dr. Michael Goran: Yes, you would. I was involved for a while in California, the state of California introduced a bill some years ago to put a warning label on soda, which I was proud to be a part of that strategy. We had a very came up with a strategy that made a lot of sense, but of course it didn’t make it. It didn’t even make it to the floor for a vote. I don’t think it just becomes very problematic politically.

Chef AJ: Thank you for trying and thank you for your passion on that. Are the effects of sugar as pronounced in a child that isn’t yet overweight, or does the added excess adiposity make a difference?

Dr. Michael Goran: Does it really make a big difference, I think it just is just an hourly sign. I think it could accelerate things like type two diabetes because overweight children are already insulin resistance already kind of tending towards beta-cell function because of the excess adiposity. So it certainly could exacerbate the situation. But for a lot of things, you might not even have to be overweight or overweight might not yet be a parent, but type two diabetes is still the emerging liver disease is truly emerging, right?

Chef AJ: What about sugar that is found in things like Pedialyte, toothpaste, mouthwash, medications? Does it have to be there?

Dr. Michael Goran: No, I don’t think so, I think that can be problematic in many, in many cases, then in dental products is used because the product there is silos. And silos do not lead to bacteria. Bacteria don’t feed on silos in the same way they feed on regular sugar. But the problem is that those sugar alcohols are not well digested and can lead to fermentation in the gut. And then you get gut problems. So you just kind of trading one problem for another.

Chef AJ: In your book, you talked about MIFF enzyme in the brain in high circulating glucose. Why is this significant?

Dr. Michael Goran: That’s the study. I mean, this is from an animal studies, I don’t think we’ve shown this, shown this in humans. As far as I know, it’s kind of turned on and high sugar consumption is really related to cognitive decline later in life.

Chef AJ: Well, you know, it’s funny. And of course, this isn’t a study, but before I became a chef, my job was working in retirement homes with seniors, and the ones that were heavy sugar users seemed to have much more cognitive problems than the ones that ate super healthy. At least that’s what I noticed in the years that I did that.

Dr. Michael Goran: Yeah. I don’t know if you noticed also this could be a good kind of segue way into talking about sweeteners because also diet beverages, diet sodas are also being associated with cognitive decline, accelerated cognitive decline in the elderly.

Chef AJ: You know, there are so many different alternative sweeteners now, there the ones that have zero calories like stevia, resveratrol, xylitol, all the sugar alcohols. And then there’s low-calorie sweeteners. And you know, the thing is is they’re mixing them in products now. So I heard about this concept called nutritive mismatch that when the calories don’t match what you think there’s going to be, it’s problematic and it’s problematic for the gut. But maybe you can talk about why they’re deleterious in general and specifically for children.

Dr. Michael Goran: Yeah. So you’re exactly right, so we’re seeing not just single sweeteners, but multiple different sweeteners, sometimes proprietary blends of sweeteners, so don’t even know what it is. And that’s because different sweeteners have different taste profiles. Some are short-lasting, somewhere long-lasting, some are metabolized, some aren’t metabolized. Food. Companies are using them in different proportions to meet certain criteria. But the problem issue is the. They all seem to introduce their own set of problems. It’s very hard to know exactly if they’re all the same because they’re all different products chemically. But in general, they are problematic for a number of different reasons, the least of which is they don’t taste great, for most people, they don’t taste great. But the big issue is they’re meant designed to cut calories. We’re not really cutting calories is not the issue here. The only situation in which they’ve been found to be useful is in individuals who are trying to lose weight or calories. But for most people, replacing caloric sugar with non-caloric sugar, you don’t. You don’t address the craving of sweetness. Number one So you may assume a high calorie, high sweetener product may be a false sense of security. Maybe you’ll eat three cookies instead of one because you think you’re doing the right thing is lower in calories is low in sugars. You end up eating more studies in children, and adults have shown that to be true. So in the large scale studies. Individuals who habitually consume sweeteners end up eating more calories and more sugar during the day.

Chef AJ: Yeah, that’s what I’ve heard, too. And in their detrimental for pregnant women to the low-calorie sweeteners, correct?

Dr. Michael Goran: Absolutely. And in fact, well for the mom and for the offspring. Several studies have shown that low-calorie sweetener consumption during pregnancy can disrupt the pregnancy can lead to pregnancy complications number one and number two, many studies now, including from us and other collaborators, have shown that offspring who are opposed to low-calorie sweeteners are more obese starting at one year of age.

Chef AJ: I see so many people just as addicted to their little drop full bottles of stevia or arithmetical as sugar.

Dr. Michael Goran: Yeah, I don’t think they’re really doing their bodies much favor, even if it is a naturally occurring sweetener. Let me show you this other slide. So stevia and monkfruit sweeteners, for example, are used more and more today. So we summarize the pros and cons. Here’s the pros. Yes, it has sweetness without the calories. I hear a lot of people say, Oh, it doesn’t spike my glucose. That’s true because in spike glucose is it’s derived from nature. It’s not. It’s not like we’re dipping stevia leaves into a. Water or eating monks, we were eating a product that’s purified out of the monk fruit. If you’re on a ketogenic diet, then it’ll work for you. But these are the negatives. Doesn’t taste good. It may not cause a glucose spike, but it may speak your insulin and lead to a glucose dip and that might be why you get hungry quicker. Because of that glucose dip, and that’s really because. You’re tricking your body. Into thinking that calories are coming in when they’re not. If your body thinks there’s calories arriving, which it will if you consume one of these sweeteners because you get the receptor gets activated and that has downstream effects goes downstream effects are to draw energy out of the blood sugar glucose. Blood glucose gets drawn down hypoglycemic. You know what it’s like when you get hypoglycemic, right? Doesn’t feel great for a child who goes hypoglycemic. They’re probably not doing well, they’re rolling around on the floor, they’re crying for more food. They’re unhappy. They’re hypoglycemic. And as you mentioned, the effect got help. The reason they don’t provide calories is because they’re not absorbed with the nor absorbed. They’re stuck in the gut being fermented by a gut bacteria. Yeah.

Chef AJ: One of the things you said in the book was that the earlier you introduced sugar to the child, the greater risk for their health, but that fructose was especially deleterious because it turns on a gene for the increased growth of fat mass. Why is that significant?

Dr. Michael Goran: Well, we’ve found that to be significant, because that can occur at very low concentrations of produce. And so I think. I think it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that if you are a developing infant. It’s very different to if you an adult because your cells are rapidly evolving. So for example, what the study showed was that you exposed stem cells and babies and babies in utero when they’re born. They have a lot of stem cell development because they’re still developing. Their brains are still developing. They all originate from stem cells. And what the study showed was that even very low concentrations of fructose. Altered the fate of those developing cells and made those developing cells more likely to become fat cells and brain cells or skin cells or gut cells, whatever it was they were originally intending to be.

Chef AJ: You mentioned circulating uric acid levels. What is that about? Why is that important?

Dr. Michael Goran: That’s important because uric acid is a byproduct of fructose metabolism. So that pathway that I described where fructose is taken up by the liver. Actually, I didn’t get that far in the story, so maybe I could so when fructose is taken up by the liver, the liver converts that fructose into fat, that fat can get stuck in the liver, and that’s where we get fatty liver disease build up of fat in the liver, which eventually disrupts the ability of the liver to do its job of filtering blood. Those fats either get stuck in the liver or get sent back out into the blood as lipids, which is the hallmark of dyslipidemia high cholesterol, which is what you measure when you’re measuring your risk of heart disease. So that’s where the high cholesterol can come from. But that whole metabolic pathway of converting the fructose into fat. Producers as a byproduct, uric acid. So uric acid in the blood is an inflammatory molecule that causes many problems around the body. Most famous of which is gout because the uric acid can crystallize in the joints and cause severe joint pain, but can also be pro-inflammatory. In other situations?

Chef AJ: Wow. Wow. Can daily sugar consumption shape a child’s behavior or personality?

Dr. Michael Goran: Yes, we can. I would say. And certainly what we’ve found is the reverse, so I can use the reverse scenario to demonstrate that to me in sugar proof, we talk about a seven-day, no added sugar challenge and we have worked with hundreds of families now who have children where added sugar is problematic. And what are the seven-day sugar challenge? No added sugar challenges. OK? What would it be? What would it be like to take your family off of added sugars for a week? And by far, the biggest benefit that we’ve heard from that is kids who are a bit more composed, better, more stable behavior, less emotional turmoil, and able to concentrate stay awake in class. These are some of the jobs, some of the outcomes that we hear a lot about when families take their kids off of added sugar for just one week.

Chef AJ: You mentioned in your book there’s even a correlation between sugar consumption and test scores. No wonder I get so bad on the SAT.

Dr. Michael Goran: Yeah, it’s a very large study that was done many years ago in Australia, so it’s showing worse performance on academic test scores in children who habitually were consuming high amounts of sugary beverages.

Chef AJ: Wow. Is there a link between asthma and sugar consumption?

Dr. Michael Goran: There is a link again is hard mechanistically to show it’s there, but it may be to do again with this whole pathway of fructose metabolism because that pathway is pro-inflammatory. And so the concept is that pro-inflammatory molecules that are produced from that cause disruption in the airways, in the lungs to to to to cause asthma

Chef AJ: That was another one of my things that I came out with. So I just have to wonder if everything that was wrong with me can’t be traced back to sugar. So what is the effect of sugar on a child’s hunger and appetite?

Dr. Michael Goran: Well, again, there can be kind of short and long-term effects, so what we’re seeing is that sugar is often used. When I went through China, added sugars are given that you can have a short-term resolution of appetite which craving. But the higher is an added sugar, the shorter that that lasts. So because sugar is rapidly metabolized, there is no limited protein and fiber. And so what we recommend is taking the added sugars out or replacing it, putting in more fiber or more protein. And you can basically get more sustained appetite regulation with less added sugar and more fiber.

Chef AJ: That makes sense. You know, when I grew up, in order to get dessert, we’d have to clean our plate even if we were full. Do you think sugar should be used as a bribe like that or as a reward as many parents do?

Dr. Michael Goran: That can be really problematic, and it’s something we really try to avoid doing because sugar as a reward is not a great idea. It’s not the right type of message to say, and it could lead to it could backfire in the long run in terms of kids sneaking sugar or rebelling against it. I think it’s much better to help try and get kids to understand what a healthy amount of sugar would be.

Chef AJ: What is a healthy amount, though, because in my world, it’s none. I mean, do you feel that different children are maybe more susceptible to the dose?

Dr. Michael Goran: Well, the recommendations are, as we mentioned, four, zero to two years of age are zero added sugars. And that’s that remember, that’s added sugars, we’re not talking about whole fruit or the sugar in milk or dairy products. After that, it starts to increase slope congratulated as kids get older, but it’s still not a lot. In fact, I can show you what that is. On another slide. Here’s the recommendations for added sugars based on five percent of energy. So the dietary guidelines say less than 10 percent of energy is sugars, so this is based on five percent. So no added sugars less than two years of age four teaspoons two to five five, five, six and then increasing to six to eight teaspoons. And of course, the problem is you can easily overwhelm that daily amount by these types of products that are loaded with added sugars where you can you, for example, in a yogurt, you can easily get to almost the daily allotment of added sugars or an apple juice and so on.

Chef AJ: Do you think kids have the ability to self-regulate the amount of sugar they consume?

Dr. Michael Goran: Yes, I think they do.

Chef AJ: Because I know a lot of adults that do not do that

Dr. Michael Goran: It’s not easy. Again, there’s no added sugar challenge is designed to help parents and kids better regulate. And so I think it’s it’s easier to get there if you can feel what it’s like to be without added sugar. If you can appreciate what it’s like to give up added sugar for a while and it is going to be difficult for the first couple of days. And many parents struggle with that. But after that first few days, many parents report almost new kids, brand new kids.

Chef AJ: You talked about brand new kids about 30 years ago. I had a job. When I was going to college, I would drive kids home from school, and some of the parents would give the kids money and allowed me to stop at 7-Eleven. And they could buy what they wanted. And I could see a change in behavior like almost immediately after they had their Red Bull or Slurpee and flaming Cheetos. I mean, it was that quick.

Dr. Michael Goran: Yeah, it’s because especially with the more added sugars in those snacks or carbohydrates, they’re rapidly converted two sugars. Kids metabolize very rapidly. Sugar spikes very quickly in the blood for kids because they’re growing, they need the energy so they can break those things down pretty rapidly unless you get rapid glucose spikes and then rapid crashes 30 minutes later often.

Chef AJ: And what effect does another drug that is often paired with sugar have on children? And I’m talking about caffeine. It’s in the sodas. It’s in Red Bulls.

Dr. Michael Goran: Yeah, really problematic. Energy drinks can have really high doses of caffeine well beyond a cup of coffee. And we don’t really know the mechanism of why it’s in there. But the idea is that it makes the sugar more addictive, makes the product more addictive. I think it’s really, really problematic. And there have been anecdotal reports of kids having energy drinks and then having cardiac complications, cardiac events because of the high amounts of caffeine.

Chef AJ: Wow. What effects does sugar consumption have on our telomeres?

Dr. Michael Goran: Yeah, so there is growing evidence that high sugar diets can shrink telomeres and therefore have ultimate effects on longevity and long-term health. So that can evidence is not exactly clear cut cause and effect, but there is cross-sectional evidence to show relationships.

Chef AJ: Do you think that part of the problem isn’t just the overconsumption of sugar in our kids, but that they’re just really not eating enough healthy food like fruits and especially vegetables?

Dr. Michael Goran: Yeah, I think it’s definitely a combination of the two. I think there’s been this move because towards processed foods, packaged foods and their high, higher in sugar and lower in those are healthy things and sugar proof is trying to not just cut sugar, but. Reverse that pattern to move away from processed foods and move towards more whole, whole-based foods that then introduced natural flavors and all the natural vitamins and phytochemicals that you get from those products.

Chef AJ: Well, you mentioned something in the book about kids that ate actually ate vegetables for dinner.

Dr. Michael Goran: Which bit was that?

Chef AJ: I think that they did better on tests or something, there was something significant about kids that actually ate vegetables at dinnertime.

Dr. Michael Goran: Yeah. The study that I mentioned in Australia, that showed an association between high sugary beverage consumption and academic test performance. They also showed that kids who were getting a lot of vegetables in their own time did better.

Chef AJ: And yes, go ahead, I’m sorry.

Dr. Michael Goran: No, no, it’s finished, yeah.

Chef AJ: So you also talked about this idea, which I love because I work with a lot of people that are sugar addicts and also they’re trying to lose weight. This idea of savory breakfast. And I always say, if you’re a sugar addict, start your day in a savory way.

Dr. Michael Goran: Yeah, that’s a great tagline.

Chef AJ: You can have it.

Dr. Michael Goran: Yeah, we have a lot of ideas about that in the book because, you know, breakfast, great breakfast for kids is an important meal. You know, we can debate about whether breakfast is an important meal, but for young kids, it is really important but breakfast today tends to be a bit of a sugar fest. And there’s ways to do it. Mean, you don’t have to go all the way savory, but you can do pancakes without a lot of sugar. You can. Put more fiber in the batter, you can top it with yogurt instead of maple syrup. You don’t have to put jam on toast, you have to put Maple sirup on French toast, there’s lots of ways to do traditional breakfasts with less sugar. Or you can go savory. Yeah. The key is less sugar, more fiber and more protein.

Chef AJ: Great. Well, whether we’re a kid or an adult, whether we’re overweight or not, how do we get off this sugar roller coaster? And. You know, become sugar-proof in this candy-coated world.

Dr. Michael Goran: I think there’s multiple ways to do that, like the seven-day innovated sugar challenge is a way to do that structured as a family. It works really well, and it’s a way to put together different tools, but it doesn’t work for all families. And you know, I think this can be a major can be a very intimidating, overwhelming issue for many families. But I think no matter where you start. You can make a difference, so, you know, if you’re cooking something this weekend, just use a bit less sugar. If you’re thinking about buying soda. Don’t. If you’re serving apple juice to your kids, dilute it. There’s lots of ways to and you can read about them in the book. There’s lots of little ways you can make small adjustments towards less sugar, and then you can find all those hidden sugars in your pantry. Go right now into your pantry. Look at your peanut butter, your tomato sauce as your salad dressings. Your yogurt, your bread. Does it have added sugar if it does find a brand that doesn’t? And chances are, not only will it not have added sugar, it’ll have other healthier things in there too. And you’ll make small a series of small adjustments.

Chef AJ: If a parent wanted to do this so they could raise their kid without sugar. I mean, there’s no harm in that, is there other than maybe the social aspect

Dr. Michael Goran: where I think it’ll become social and eventually peer pressure kicks in and it does become socially very difficult. But I think there’s a happy medium in between.

Chef AJ: Right, how do we get the grandparents to stop giving the kids so much?

Dr. Michael Goran: Buy them a copy of sugar proof, but you know, sometimes it’s the other way around. I have had just as many grandparents come and ask me the other question, which is, how do I get my kids to stop giving their kids so much sugar?

Chef AJ: Yeah, well, I’ll start with the grocery store.

Dr. Michael Goran: Yeah. What you buy in a grocery store is critically important. What you bring into the house is critically important.

Chef AJ: That’s why I always tell people that’s in your house, it’s in your mouth. And I’m not saying you can never have a treat, but don’t keep the stuff in your house.

Dr. Michael Goran: Yeah, or if you do you know, you can reduce the portion size in our house, we have something called many, so many d as many deserts. So you know, we can still enjoy a dessert, but it doesn’t have to be a huge portion of cake or pie. It can be a small piece. We can enjoy it together as a family and talk about our day and make it a fun event. It doesn’t have to be, you know, an overwhelming portion.

Chef AJ: Right, so, Dr. Goran, what is the real truth about weight loss?

Dr. Michael Goran: The real truth about weight loss, well for kids, we don’t talk too much about. For kids, we’re talking about growing into a healthy weight, which could be a more valuable message for kids. And I think it has to be slow. It has to be gradual. I think there’s no there’s no magic bullet fix. I think it’s it’s probably a life, a lifelong process. And I think the advantages can be, you know, more than just losing weight. I think we have to think about long-term effects on long-term health. Like we talked about diabetes, fatty liver disease, cardiovascular disease. So think about those four kids again, we have to. We have to find something that’s motivating for kids, so the magic for kids might now be about weight loss, it might be about. Something that’s true internally motivating for them to do better in school, run faster at soccer, fit into a new pair of jeans. So for kids, think about something that’s motivating and rewarding for kids.

Chef AJ: If I understood you correctly, drastically decreasing the child’s sugar consumption can really help them not become overweight in the first place.

Dr. Michael Goran: Yeah, and it can be drastic or it could be a gradual reduction as well.

Chef AJ: Right? Well, thank you so much for your work, Dr. Goran.

Dr. Michael Goran: Oh, thank you. Thank you for your lifelong passion. Continuing your energy is amazing, and I love what you’re doing and thank you for talking today.

Chef AJ: It is my pleasure

Chef AJ: Hi, Lissa, and welcome to the Truth about Weight Loss Summit, thanks so much for being here.

Lissa Maris: Thank you so much for inviting me. This is such an honor. I’m excited to chat today.

Chef AJ: Well, I can’t wait to hear your story because you really do have a wonderful story of losing weight and keeping it off.

Lissa Maris: Thank you. Yeah, it’s been a really long journey, so it started a long time ago. It’s quite an interesting one. I began, obviously in 2001, is when I actually kind of started working in the natural health industry. And I would say when I was around 19, that’s when I started to have health issues, which is interesting. I was my mother was actually pretty healthy for the most part, and I really looked up to her and how she ate. But I was not eating the same way I was eating a lot of junk. And once I moved out, I was eating whatever I wanted and it was affecting my health negatively. And I went on this yo yo life journey through the years and working at the natural health food store, I was exposed to a lot of stuff. I was exposed to diet culture. I was exposed to restriction, I was exposed to supplements and quick fixes and you name it, all of the stuff. And I would go on these diets. And UN actually was dealing with severe gut dysbiosis and Candida for 15 years of my life and from the age of about 19 to thirty. So during that time, I tried all kinds of different diets and supplements, and I was really stuck in this kind of a restrictive mindset. I was scared of fruit. I didn’t want to eat vegetables. I would follow a lot of keto-style diets or animal product-based diets, and I would over-exercise. I would restrict and I would do all of it right. I mean, the stuff that classic diet culture tells us that we should do. And I wasn’t changing the foundation of what I was eating, and I wasn’t changing my relationship with food either, which I feel is like one of the biggest things. I would always do something to lose weight that was like my goal was to lose weight. But I wasn’t changing my relationship with food and how I viewed food and actually learning about what I was putting into my body. I was just following what everyone else was telling me to do. And it wasn’t until about 2004 is when I discovered the raw diet, and it really resonated with me. But I was still stuck in diet culture ideas like high fat, natural products, protein, protein, protein and restriction. So I was trying to be raw and do those things at the same time. And it just wasn’t working. I would feel tired or lethargic. My joint pain would be inflamed and stuff. I was just not having the best time with it. Of course, I was feeling a little bit better because I had gotten rid of some junk food, but it just wasn’t what I thought it would be. So I would go on and off, on and off, on, off for like 10 years, from 2004 to 2014. And then in 2014, in those 10 years, I had never done an actual vegan diet like a whole food plant-based or anything that had anything to do with veganism because I never had the connection like the ethical connection.

Lissa Maris: So in 2014, I was I just come off of a weight loss challenge that I had done at the gym. I had hired a personal trainer and she had me write my food journals. Obviously, it was not plant-based. It wasn’t Low-Fat. It was high fat and low calorie. Again, the same thing that I had been taught my whole life to do. And I did this for two months straight with my personal trainer. I was in the gym three times a week with her and then on my own on the opposite days with a rest day, I was trying to sleep properly. You don’t try to do all the things. But I was also severely undereating. She had me eating between eight hundred and twelve hundred calories a day, and it was mostly high-fat items and I was just struggling to get to the gym. And she even sent me home twice during that challenge because I just had no energy to do this. And she’s like, Well, what are you eating? And I’m like, Well, you see my journals and you check them off and you say, it’s great. So I’m just going to keep doing it. And eventually, at the end of the challenge, I think I had lost about 20 pounds, but I was like, If it’s going to be this difficult to do this, I don’t want to do this. This and that is kind of like the catalyst of the next part of my journey, which after about a year of that was maybe eight months after that change. And I had restricted myself so much to the point that I started eating everything and anything because my body was just like, give me some stuff and obviously going to fall back to what was habit. What I enjoyed, what worked for me in the past, and I started eating a lot of stuff that I know obviously wouldn’t eat, but it was causing me to gain weight. And I gained up to almost 200 pounds after that challenge, and I have had the lowest self-esteem and I was I just had a really bad relationship with myself and food. So in 2014, I was eating the worst of my life. I was eating a whole bag of Doritos chips for breakfast. I was eating fried chicken and potato wedges for lunch and candy for snack. I was drinking sometimes one or two energy drinks a day with coffees. I drank a lot of alcohol. I was just 34 and I was just at my lowest.

Lissa Maris: Most nights in towards the end of this period of my life, I would wake up in the middle of the night with heart flutters like I would feel like my heart was fluttering and it would feel like I was having a heart attack. So I’d wake up in the middle of the night and it would just be so scary that I would think that I was dying and then I wouldn’t be able to go to sleep for another hour because I would be thinking of this. And it just was almost every night, like at least every second night. And so this one night I woke up and I was like, That’s that I have to do something. And I always resonated with Raw. So I was thinking, How do I go back to raw without, like, struggling again? Like, what? Why was it that I was struggling so hard? So I started watching a lot of YouTube videos, gathering a lot of information, reading back on my old journals to see if I could find something that might have been doing wrong. And this time I decided to give the Low-Fat version a try and eat more fruit, eat more vegetables and just really focus on abundance because I was not doing this for weight loss. That’s the interesting thing about my journey is that it was not for weight loss. The weight loss was a side effect. It was a bonus. It was the outward expression of how I was treating my body. And people can lose weight in many ways. There’s like, I mean, I’ve done a lot of them and you can lose weight with a healthy mindset and healthy and healthy choices, or you can do it with an unhealthy mindset and unhealthy behaviors. So I woke up and I was like, I am watching these videos and deciding to go low fat. I was on someone’s YouTube channel and a scrolling through the comments, and they said one of the comments was if you want to go vegan overnight or in six hours or something. Watch conspiracy earthlings and forks over knives. And I was like, OK, I’m up for some more information. Give me some more information on.

Lissa Maris: After I watched all three of those, I was crying. I was changed and in a second I understood why veganism, so I was vegan right there and right then and there, and because I had never had any other connection with a vegan diet, I chose to go rock because I felt I honestly thought most. Biggins ate mostly raw anyways. And so I just decided to go raw and eating lots of fruit, lots of veggies, lots of green salads, sprouts, microgreens, you name it fresh herbs. I eat it all, and I went on to lose 70 pounds over the next 14 months. It was low fat. That was probably the key, and I was eating abundantly from my body. I was eating around 20, 120, 300 calories a day and the weight just came off and I wasn’t even focused on the weight, and that was probably the most enjoyable part of it was the fact that I wasn’t even focused on it. I was focused on health. I was focused on the abundance and the colorful food and the fun that I was having, and I was really enjoying it. And all of a sudden, one day I’m like, Oh, I guess I’m losing weight. Like, I totally didn’t realize that I was, and it made it easy. I didn’t have to struggle for the first time in my life. I didn’t have to struggle with losing weight because it wasn’t my main reason. My main reason for going vegan was the animals. The main reason for going wrong was because I resonated with it and I wanted to eat an abundance of fresh Whole Foods. And so that’s what I did. And yeah, 14 to 16 months later, I had lost my 70 pounds, and that was just the outward expression of my body. I had healed cystic acne that I had for my whole adult life and my menstrual cycles. They were three to nine months apart after I went raw for about eight months. They were. They’ve been monthly at. Every month for the last six to seven years and my joint pain went away, my brain fog went away. My gut dysbiosis went away. My candidate to finally cleared after 15 years of doing fasts and detoxes and quick fixes and all that I had. All I have to do is change the foundation of what I was eating, and it was so easy, so easy. So yeah, that’s my story in a nutshell.

Chef AJ: Doritos for breakfast. That’s a new one.

Lissa Maris: Yeah, I know. As embarrassing as it is, I mean, I was that was where I was that time, and I was working at the health food store when I started falling into this kind of junk food lifestyle and I would just go to the grocery store next door. Well, it wasn’t really a grocery store, it was like a convenience store style. And I would just buy the bag of chips there and eat them in my office because no one was in my office. I could just do whatever, but also when I quit my health food store job and then I started working for myself. That’s when things I feel started to get worse because now I was. I had the kitchen and I was at home, so I was really comfortable and I just was. I wasn’t focused, really, because it’s all in your focus. Like, What is your goal? What are you trying to achieve? And if you want to choose healthy foods throughout the day, it’s just a desire. It’s just a choice. And I just wasn’t choosing those things that just made it easy for me to fall back into my old habits. Just grab whatever, whenever.

Chef AJ: That’s what happened to a lot of people during the pandemic.

Lissa Maris: Yes. Yes, it’s so true. And without the planning, it’s easy because when you’re home, like a lot of people who were staying home a lot of the time, it feels kind of weekend. Even if they have work, they’re at home in their own comfortable place where they tend to make different choices. So a lot of people will say like, Well, listen, you work from home. It’s so easy for you to choose healthy, like, like, for example, this is our salad. One of our salads this needs and this is mine. So we’ve got our salads ready to go. But it yes, it might seem easier, but if it’s not a habit, then it’s not going to be easier, right?

Chef AJ: That makes sense. If it’s not a habit, it’s not going to be easier. Were you overweight as a child, Lisa?

Lissa Maris: I wasn’t actually, I was pretty lean up until around age 19. That’s when things started to change for me, and I moved out when I was 21, and I’m in the way most people do. They move out and then they just they’re eating whatever that they want that they can buy. Because you have a job, you have your own place, you can buy whatever. And I just started to balloon up. It was potato chips for me, packaged dinners, a lot of animal products because again, I believed that we needed animal products sold like all this protein. And my mom was really into protein as well. But the unfortunate thing is she like she was always lean as well. She was very conscious of what she put in her body. Unfortunately, she was eating a lot of animal products and she got colon cancer. I can’t remember how she was fifty fifty-eight or something like that. She’s still alive. She’s vegan now. Yeah, but she’s a whole food, plant-based, high raw. And she kind of I mean, she’s sad that she didn’t know. But it’s not anyone’s fault because we’re taught these things and we’re taught diet culture and we’re taught to restrict and we think it’s just the way of life. So we follow along or we’re scared of carbs, we’re scared of eating low fat as well. Like, I was actually one of my biggest fears when moving over to this lifestyle was the low fat because I was taught in the natural health industry that we needed fish oils and coconut oil and olive oil. And all these oils like oils are great, right? And then I would eat those oils and have a sluggish insulin function right and feel tired and gain weight. So I was scared to do the low fat because I was taught how important oils were, not realizing that I personally did not consider them processed food. So extracting all the fiber and everything. If I want olives, I’ll eat olives, Paul. I want an avocado. I’ll eat and overclockable a coconut. I’ll just use coconut in addressing or something. So it’s not Fabolous. And that’s the thing that I feel has been one of the most important aspects of my journey is the fiber variety and just releasing and trusting whole food because it’s it’s made that way and it’s beautiful for us to do.

Chef AJ: We love that release and trust whole food. I don’t know why anyone would ever think there’s a benefit of eating processed food over whole food. You know, as you say, it’s the olive, not the olive oil flaxseed, not the flax oil.

Lissa Maris: Exactly. Yeah. So I was scared in the beginning. Was also scared of fruit. Fruit freaked me out because of the sugar scare, right, and I didn’t realize that. We shouldn’t be putting fruit in the same basket of refined sugar because they’re just not the same thing at all, and I started eating a lot more fruit and I felt way better because I was eating low fat. So my insulin was working top notch and I was eating plenty of salads, lots of greens, lots of variety. And it was so easy for me to lose weight without even focusing on the weight loss because I was focusing on my health and abundance instead. So, yeah, but I

Chef AJ: think it’s so neat about eating low fat. If people can do it is, then you don’t have to restrict the amount.

Lissa Maris: Yeah, like I know people look at these salads and they’re like, That’s a massive salad. It’s pretty big. It’s hard to see on camera, but it’s a decent size. And I love eating. And of course, we need to make sure that we eat enough because people are notorious. We eat, eat, don’t eat enough on a raw diet, and then they have other issues because people trying so hard to lose weight without actually nourishing their body or eating enough. I mean, yeah, you can lose weight. But what is the long term issues that come from undereating right? You’re only eating like a thousand calories of twelve calories a day and you’re burning all these other calories. I mean, your body is going to eventually have some questions for you.

Chef AJ: Talk about how your trainer sent you home twice from the gym because you weren’t you obviously weren’t eating enough. And to I mean, that’s just so weird to me to eat high fat and low calorie at the same time. That doesn’t sound like a lot of food.

Lissa Maris: No, it wasn’t a lot of food. And that’s why I feel like the calorie restriction is such a thing when people are eating high fat. Because if you were eating an abundance with high fat, then your calorie count would be so high, right? And you’re just not. I mean, there’s a lot of different factors that come into play, but 2400 calories of low fat, high raw, whole food, plant-based is a lot different than 2400 calories of high fat, high protein diet, right? A lot of people can’t do twenty-four hundred calories and maintain their weight. They have to restrict their calories, and that’s where the diet culture thing comes into play. And I like if I just release those foods, I can release the diet culture and I can release all of that and the need to be perfect in the need to count everything and blah blah blah. It’s like I can just eat abundantly. And of course, make sure you eat enough. Like a lot of people say, they don’t want to count the calories, but in the beginning to really learn what your body needs, you kind of have to count a little bit to see what. What does a 600 calorie salad look like with low fat? What does a low-fat day look like? Like, we’re not taught these things, so it’s really hard to guess when you were first starting out. A lot of people will just guess and they typically underguess. They typically Unger guess because again, they’re applying all these old beliefs onto a low fat, whole food diet, and it’s just it’s not going to work that way.

Chef AJ: Right? Because fruits and vegetables are so naturally low in calorie density, if you’re not adding a bunch of fat to them, you’ve got to eat more food.

Lissa Maris: Exactly. Yeah. And you got to eat more. And of course, you can add a little bit fat like 10 percent fats from 2400 calories is a decent amount of fat. It’s not like I’m completely restricting and going zero fat or anything like that. I’m still enjoying the omega 3s, and I really love hemp seeds and chia, flax, and walnut. I like those as well as the other stuff too. But I like to balance it out because as we know, we need both. But yeah, just 2400 calories at 10 percent is something like twenty-seven or twenty-eight grams of fat. Whereas if you’re restricting and you’re only 1200 calories a day, that’s only like 13 grams. So a 10 percent right, or if you’re doing 15 percent or whatever percentage you’re doing, the more calories you eat from everything else. More fat, calories you can eat while still staying in the low-fat range and still getting the nutrition that you do get from your fat sources. So finding that balance can be challenging for a lot of people because again, we’re not taught this stuff.

Chef AJ: No, absolutely not. What was the low point on your journey?

Lissa Maris: I had two low points. Actually, the first low point would definitely be the day I changed. The day I changed was when I was feeling the worst in my body and I had almost the lowest self-esteem. I would say the second time that I had the biggest challenge was after I lost all my weight, which is interesting because it had nothing to do with the weight loss. I had the lowest self-esteem, probably of my entire life after I lost all the weight because I was in a relationship where I felt like I wasn’t good enough. So right if I lost the weight or if I was a perfect vegan or all of these things, I just felt like I wasn’t good enough, I wasn’t good enough. I wasn’t a good enough vegan. I wasn’t a good enough raw vegan and I was doing things right. I was not cleaning the house properly. I was not a good business person. I wasn’t a good photographer. Like, I just felt like I was not good enough for anything. Even though I had accomplished over a year of raw food and I’d lost all the weight and I cleared up my acne and I was feeling really good in my body, but I wasn’t feeling good about who I was in general. So my relationship with myself had tanked and I had to get out of that relationship and be on my own and really focus on my relationship with who I was and what I was eating and really realized that I am enough no matter what I weigh, right? Obviously, we’re going to be eating clean. We’re going to naturally lose weight and just get out of that mindset of I wasn’t good enough and really working on that because it’s a tough one, a lot. Most people feel that way because of the pressures of society and everything. So those would probably be the two lowest points of my life. But definitely, the lowest physically was the day that I changed. I was like, It was horrible. I couldn’t even do squats. I remember doing trying to do squats and lunges, and my toes were so inflamed that I couldn’t get down to do a lunge. And it hurts so bad. I’m like, Why? I’m eating clean, right? But it really was all the inflammation that I was feeding my body and not changing the foundation of what I was eating or feeding my gut and all right?

Chef AJ: You know, it makes sense that if you don’t love yourself now, you’re not going to love yourself just automatically because you’ve lost weight.

Lissa Maris: Exactly. And that’s very, very true. I remember reading this one blog post, but I can’t even remember who it was from. But she was talking about how people want a mansion, for example, or a better spouse, and they wished for these things. They wished for the better mansion, they wished for, the better body, they wished for, the better spouse or whatever. But instead of wishing for what you want, I mean, yeah, obviously we can wish for these things and have goals and everything but instead of wishing for what we want and kind of like not really loving what we have, why don’t we love what we have? And that will naturally get us to what we want, right? She said. If you live in a cardboard box, a little tiny one-bedroom apartment, but you don’t take care of it, how do you expect to take care of a mansion if you don’t love your spouse the way they are, right? Having another one is going to make it any different because if you’re not treating them with the respect that they deserve as your spouse, right, how are you going to treat the next one after you’ve been in that relationship? And the same goes for our bodies. If we don’t treat ourselves with love where we are, how do we know we’re going to treat ourselves with love when we get to our goals? So it really is. That’s the whole, like the body positive thing, like, love yourself, no matter where you’re at. But if you do love yourself, you’re going to make good choices because you love yourself. Right? So it’s kind of like they’re both intertwined. Obviously, the mindset and the food, the food aren’t going to heal the mindset. We got to heal the mindset first.

Chef AJ: Any advice on how to do that.

Lissa Maris: Oh, that’s a tough one. That’s a tough one. I feel like the best is to focus on the abundance and focus on the variety and focus on why you love the foods that you’re going to be eating and not trying to fight the old. Because when we’re we’re building a new habit, right? Say you’re trying to not be lazy and watch Netflix, right? We’ll just these out as an example. If you’re trying really hard to not watch Netflix and you constantly think, I can’t watch Netflix tonight, I’m not going to do it. Blah blah blah. You’re constantly focused on that. You’re fighting the old habit. Instead of building a new habit, build the new habit and focus on the new habit. Instead of fighting the old habit, then you’ll build that new habit and it’ll naturally replace the old habit. So if you’re trying to stop watching Netflix instead of trying to stop watching Netflix, maybe try going to bed at nine o’clock. Right, and then you’re focused on going to bed at nine o’clock, you’re naturally not going to watch Netflix past nine because you’re going to go to bed instead. And same goes for diet. Right? We’re so focused on being pure and perfect or choosing the right thing or worried about all these little things, or I can’t have this and I can’t have that and I should do this and I shouldn’t do that right. We’re so focused on all these things, instead of focusing on the abundance and just enjoying the meal as it is. And obviously, there are lots of low-fat, whole food plant-based recipes that you can just make and be confident in just enjoying and focusing on building those new habits instead of fighting the old habits. Because that’s going to be I feel like that’s the key for me, especially with building new habits instead of fighting those old ones because that’s where it gets just uncomfortable, right? And painful to us because there are habits and they’ve been built over years, it’s really challenging to fight an old one instead of building a new one. So that’s what I would say.

Chef AJ: That makes sense. What about when it comes to our mindset, though? How did you change that?

Lissa Maris: I had to stop focusing on what I didn’t like about myself. I had to stop focusing on what I felt I needed to do in order to be accepted by society. Right? I had to change the way I viewed food and viewed it as nourishment instead of, I have to eat this or I should eat this. I focus just on fueling my body and giving my body what it deserved and what it. Because after feeling like, I’m good enough and it took a while to get there, I had to really do inner work and tell myself that I’m good enough, and whenever I would make a salad, I would be like, I’m making this as a gift to myself. And it just took a lot of affirmations and constant positivity and constantly telling myself that I’m good enough and it’s hard to remember to do that when we’re stuck in these other patterns, right? And we have to kind of remind ourselves or set alarms or do constant help like good self-work at night, maybe in meditation or something. But really working on that relationship, whatever it looks like to you, and focusing on the positive stuff of your life and what you love about yourself because once you find that self-love, you naturally make better choices because you love yourself. So it’s like a cycle. It’s like a circle. If you don’t love yourself, you make bad choices. And that just and then you don’t love yourself because you made the bad choices and then you just keep in that circle. But if you love yourself, you make good choices and it makes you feel good and then you love yourself more and then keep making these good choices and then that creates a circle. So it’s like, which circle do you want to be in?

Chef AJ: Right? Well, that makes sense. Feeding yourself well is an act of self-love.

Lissa Maris: It really is. Yeah.

Chef AJ: So if you were having Doritos for breakfast, did you have any cravings when you started eating healthier?

Lissa Maris: You know, that’s a really good question. I get that one a lot. Like, when do the cravings go away Lissa, I’m trying to do this. When do the cravings go away? And after seven years of doing this, I can safely say the cravings go away when you eat. That’s the magic key. You don’t need willpower. You don’t need a magic program or anything. You just need to eat, eat something. And obviously, you need to choose something healthy, have some fruit, make a salad, make a smoothie, have your super whatever that you’re going to have, that’s healthy and abundant, and fuel yourself up. Because I feel of all the people I’ve coached with and talked to the number one reason that people have challenges on raw or high raw or even vegan is they’re just not eating enough. They’re under-eating. And then their body is like, Hey, everything looks good, let’s have something right, and we’re going to fall back on our habits. It always boils down to our habits. We’re creatures of habit. So we’re going to choose what makes us feel good and what’s convenient and tasty and what our friends are eating and all of this stuff, because we’re hungry. That’s the root. The root is because we’re hungry. If we are full up like, say, you just had. So you just think this big salad and you went to the grocery store to pick up some cilantro and zucchini for tomorrow? You’re probably just going to pick up cilantro once a kidney and maybe a couple of other things if you see them. But if you went on a completely empty stomach after work, after you haven’t eaten for six hours, everything in the grocery store is going to look good, right? And same goes for restaurants. If you go on an empty stomach after work, everything’s going to look good and it really boils down to that. So when I first started, I didn’t have a lot of cravings. I would have a few here and there just based on habit. And I remember one night I had this. It was like 11:30 at night. I was laying in bed and I kind of was. I was craving some Chinese food the mall of all places, and I wanted that. But I just imagined myself eating it because it was really just the habit that I was stuck in. And it would pop up, and it wasn’t a craving because I needed the food, it was craving because it was a habit. So that’s really all it was. But in the beginning, I immediately started eating enough. So I was constantly full up and I was making great choices. I was feeling good, I was feeling hydrated and I just really loved what I was eating and I didn’t have as many cravings as I thought I would. When I went raw between 2004 and 2014, however, I had a lot of cravings in that period because I wasn’t eating enough. I was eating way too high fat and my insulin wasn’t working properly, and I just was not doing it right. And that was causing the cravings under eating is so key. Also, variety, a lot of people will eat only a small because they want simple ingredients. They like things that have three ingredients or whatever to keep it simple. But if you’re limiting the amount of variety that you’re eating, then you’re kind of limiting the amount of nutrition you can get and the fiber for your gut microbiome and all that. So increasing my variety really helps as well because I was getting a broad range of nutrition and different fiber sources that my body was just like, so happy that I was doing that. So, yeah, cravings, definitely. You just eat something. It’s a fruit make a smoothie. And yeah, we’re taught to distract ourselves if we have a craving, right? We’re taught to distract ourselves, or we’ll take a nap or take a walk or call a friend or ignore it. Wait 10 minutes. It’s like it’s just going to get worse because your body just wants few rules.

Chef AJ: So if people don’t understand calorie density and they try to apply the diet culture, they learned to this new way of eating and it doesn’t work.

Lissa Maris: Yeah. The calorie density thing is another thing that’s really important, too, because people are used to eating small salads. They’re used to eating small amounts of vegetables and then the bulk of their calories are coming from animal products, oils, high fat, dense stuff, right? Or even like really dense, you could get dense vegetables you can cook with oils and make them even denser and all of that stuff. The bulk of their calories are coming from that. So when they go over to a raw or high raw diet, they’re eating the same size salads that they were before, and they’re just eliminating everything else. So then they’re only eating like a 200 calorie salad, and they wonder why they’re hungry all the time and why they have cravings. It’s just because the calorie density is so low that you have to eat more in order to avoid having those cravings for the dense stuff. Because we’re naturally just drawn to the density and we’re drawn to the fat oil or the oil, salt and sugar thing combo, because that is the most tasty and it’s the most dense. So we’re drawn to it because of a state of restriction. So the binge restrict cycle is causing a lot of the cravings for these dense things because we’re restricting too much, trying to lose weight, restricting your calories, not eating enough. Skipping meals. Going too long without eating. This can all cause cravings, which makes us want to eat those other things that are dense and just the stuff that we’re habitually used to, and we love the taste of.

Chef AJ: Absolutely, so do you remember some of the different diets you went to?

Lissa Maris: Yeah, I did. I did Atkin’s at one point, I did a nourishing traditions, there was raw animal products in that one.

Chef AJ: That sounds terrible, actually.

Lissa Maris: Yeah, it was a really big thing in the health food store that I was working at, like raw dairy because Weston Price had done the dental studies or whatever and how cultures would start eating standard North American foods or canned foods or off their traditional diets. And they would start to have dental issues. So you were saying we need to eat more traditionally, which included a lot of raw animal products for a lot of those cultures. And so obviously it was a thing. I had raw milk and I had raw cheese, and I didn’t feel any better, like I did feel better because I wasn’t eating the junk food when I would do those diets because I was eating more whole food. But I wasn’t feeling this amazing level of energy and health, and I wasn’t losing weight either for me. And so but I also tried Raw at least 100 times in those 10 years. I would try like every month or whatever and go raw, and I would only last for like three days. I think the longest I went raw for two months. But again, I was under eating every single time. I just wasn’t eating enough and I wasn’t able to sustain it, just like falling back on peer pressure as well, that was a big one. They would be like, What are you doing? Whatever, you’re not doing it right. And so I would be like okay I’ll have a little bit of your food. And yeah, it just really wasn’t a click until I went vegan. As soon as I went vegan, it was like my whole world entirely changed in that moment because now I wanted to care not only for the animals, but I wanted to care for myself as well.

Chef AJ: So, yeah, that’s so cool because you had said earlier that you always needed to do something to lose.

Lissa Maris: Mm-Hmm. Yeah, I always needed to do to do something. And I’ve done like a lot of cleanses, too. I’ve done a lot of cleanses like the herbal kits and the fast and the master cleanse and, you know, fast to lose weight. But what happens after that? What happens when you start eating again and you’re not changing the foundation of what you’re eating? If you are already eating junk food and then you go on a fast, what are you going to do when you’re done? You’re probably going to fall back to your old habits because you haven’t changed your habits. So that’s kind of one of the issues that people need to be aware of, I think, is change the foundation of what you’re doing every day, change your habits. And when you change your habits and you start eating different foods and you become habituated to those foods, you really don’t even need to do anything else because you’re just going to be choosing those every day. And it’s going to be easy. You’re not going to have to force your body into anything because your body’s going to respond to what you’re giving it.

Chef AJ: Do you think that what helps you lose weight with the raw diet this time was the fact that it was low fat? Because high fat raw diet, while I’m sure healthier than the standard American diet, I don’t know if would lead to weight loss for many people.

Lissa Maris: No, I don’t think so. The only thing is, if you’re eating high fat, you have to calorie restrict because otherwise you would be eating avocados in your smoothies and creamy dressings for lunches and high fat gourmet stuff for dinner. Yeah, you’re probably going to eat way over the amount of calories that you need to burn. So for me, I feel like the low fat was by far key and eating abundantly. So eating a lot of fresh food and eating low fat, that was kind of the the twin flame of raw is eating abundantly and eating low fat. Those are my two keys for for how it worked for me.

Chef AJ: Not everybody will probably be able to 100 percent adopt a raw food diet, but are there are there levels? So I mean, high, raw. I mean, does everybody have to go 100 percent right feel and experience the wonderful benefits in health and weight loss that you experience or could they just be adding a lot more raw food to their diet?

Lissa Maris: Yeah, that’s my ultimate message is just to add more raw foods because I’m all about no perfectionism, no food rules. None of that, or I just eat abundantly and enjoy more raw foods. Have a salad with your dinner, make a salad for lunch, add more vegetables to your sandwich, or add more vegetables to your stir fry. Have a smoothie for breakfast, have a fruit bowl for breakfast, or just add more raw food with what you’re eating. And eventually, maybe all you’re having is like this big salad with a little cup of quinoa in it. Maybe that’s what feels good for you, and everyone’s going to try to make choices based on where they’re at. Not everyone can go fully raw either because of the gut microbiome. If you’re currently on a really low fiber diet and a low variety diet like you’re not getting a lot of plant based diversity, then eating a big salad like this might really irritate someone’s gut because it just isn’t ready. To digest that amount of fiber in that amount of variety. So not everybody can do it, but everybody can add more raw food to their to their diet. We all know this. It’s not rocket science, right? But we can all add more raw foods to our diets, and that’s my main message. Add more raw food and lower your fat down. Because really, I mean, it’s not about restricting fats, it’s about eating an appropriate amount of fats, the appropriate amount for the human body because we do not need the amounts that they’re saying that we do.

Chef AJ: And certainly not in the forms that people are eating it, like olive oil, coconut oil, flax oil.

Lissa Maris: Certainly not. Yeah. And I feel like a lot of that stuff is because it’s still concentrated. A lot of the oils like, especially in fish oil, is kind of a byproduct of the fishing industry. They kind of found a way to sell it in supplement form because it has omega three in it. But we really just need to focus on eating more omega 3s and less omega 6s so our body can convert the omega 3 by itself into EPA. And like, we don’t need to rely on fish or oils. We don’t need those things, in my opinion. Yeah, like I said, I consider the processed food.

Chef AJ: It’s interesting. Some of the I’m going to say crazy things you learned working at a health food store.

Lissa Maris: Oh my gosh. I was, you know, looking back now I am blown away with the stuff that I was taught in there because even though they have like this desire to help people and it’s more natural, obviously, but it’s still stuck in diet culture. Pills, quick fixes, cleanses detox is all of the stuff. They’re still stuck in that mindset. And even though you’re choosing possibly healthier options, obviously right, choosing this oil over an animal product is probably going to be better. But all in all, overall, it’s not as healthy as I thought that it was, and I thought I was doing amazing good like learning what I was learning. But once I dove even deeper into it and seeing really like when they say like insulin resistance, right? Lower your sugar so you don’t have insulin issues. But is it really the sugars fault? Is it really carbs fault? It’s not. Carbs are like, the innocent bystander, I always say to people, I imagine there’s a crime scene and sugar is on the crime scene, but fat ran away because fats like fat did it, but they ran away. And when the police come, they apprehend sugar or carbs and they’re like, You did the murder or whatever and fruits like, no, it wasn’t me. Potatoes are like, it wasn’t me. But they get taken into custody and because of diet culture, they’ve created such a huge case against carbs that fats just sitting at home, eating popcorn, watching the whole thing go undone. And it’s like, Oh, it was my fault. Sorry, but it’s not carbs, but we’re taught that it is. And when people just lower the fat percentage, they can eat more carbs and be satiated and actually eat enough and get the nutrition and variety in. And it’s a beautiful thing. But society is scared, and we really need to refocus our relationship with ourselves and with food because we do have broken relationship with food.

Chef AJ: Tell me about it. I mean, their obesity rates are over 70 percent now overweight and obese, and it’s just getting worse. I love that you said car for the innocent bystander. That’s great. And you said that you learned that the health food store, whether it was healthy or not, it’s not sustainable to take some product that’s going to that. That claims it’s going to boost your metabolism. Which, by the way, one of the experts on the summit is Dr. Herman Pontzer, who said it’s not even possible to do that.

Lissa Maris: One interesting yeah, you just really I mean, your BMR, if you want to increase your BMR, just lift some weights or you like build more muscles so that you burn more calories at a sitting rate and just enjoy your food. Enjoy eating food plant-based. Good stuff. Low fat. And it’s really easy because when you like I said earlier, when you step out of that, I have to lose weight or I’m not good enough or whatever. When you step out of that and you just focus on your health because you love yourself, it’s so much easier.

Chef AJ: So can you take us through like what a typical day of food might look like for you now?

Lissa Maris: For sure. So when I first started losing weight, I was doing. I actually really eat the same that I did back then. I just prepare things differently. I have new recipes, but I use the same stuff. I just kind of mix it up. So while I was losing weight, I was eating twenty-one hundred to twenty-three hundred calories a day give or take. And those days looked like fruit in the morning, so I would make a giant fruit smoothie full of variety, bananas, dates, berries. Sometimes I would add greens not often, but I would sometimes, and I would just aim to get a lot of my calories first thing in the morning. That was my main goal in the day, and I felt so much better throughout the day. All my snacks are fruit, apples, grapes, whatever I have around bananas, whatever. And I’ll eat those between breakfast and lunch. And then lunch is typically a giant salad like this with a low-fat dressing. So I created a dressing that I want to share today because I have to make dressing for the salad. Sometimes I’ll do it on your show, right? So this dressing is my French dressing and this dressing I came up with because my ex was kind of following along with what I was eating like, I just make extra for him too. And he really wanted an oily like vinaigrette, and I’m like, Well, I’m not doing it well, so what do I do instead? And I was thinking about it, and one day I made this like date paste kind of thing for a cinnamon banana roll that I was making. I was like, This is kind of like it had a little viscosity to it. I wonder if that would work as a base for a dressing. So I blended dates with a little apple cider vinegar, some lemon juice, some garlic, smoked paprika and a little to play. And I blended that without any fats, and it was mind-blowing to me. I was just sitting there eating my salad, and I remember getting kind of emotional over it because I was so happy that I found something that tasted so good like a vinaigrette, but it had no oil in it and no fats at all. So I was like, This is amazing.

Lissa Maris: Now I do add like a teaspoon or two of chia seeds for omega three to that one or I’ll add maybe a tablespoon of hemp seeds or something to get a little creamy while still getting the omega 3s, because I do believe that those are very important for us. But in small amounts, obviously is totally fine. And so, yeah, that’s the recipe that I’ll make for lunch. Normally a low-fat, fruit-based dressing, mangoes, garlic again, apple cider vinegar, lemon juice, right? You got your sweet, your sour, your savory, your fat, possibly if you’re going to get a little fat in it and your umami. So I like to use miso paste or celery sticks are really good. Maybe some mushroom powder? seaweed. Right, like something like that to give it a little bit more grounding. Got those five angles and you’re good to go for addressing. So that’s what I do for lunch and then dinner is typically something similar, another salad. But the dinner salad is where I will have my darker leafy greens, more like the veggies, like the broccoli or cauliflower or I’ll make like sushi. I will make burgers like raw burgers, raw soups like, well, kind of get creative with dinner, but most of the time it’s just another salad with a creamier dressing. Put like two or three tablespoons of seeds in addressing, and they’ll use that or maybe coconut-based. Or we’ll do a low-fat dressing with a little avocado on it, but that’s dinner. And typically it ends up right now I need a little more than I did when I was losing weight just to maintain I eat around twenty-four hundred calories, and if I’m doing a lot of workouts like I’m really active, we’re doing a lot of hiking and stuff. Sometimes it’s around twenty-six to twenty-seven hundred a day. Just depends on how I’m feeling and if I feel hungry, I will eat more. I don’t restrict myself just because I’m feeling hungry, so it’s just a sign that my body needs more fuel, so I’ll just eat more. Are you tracking your calories every day? No, I’m not. The reason why is because I have done it so many times that now I know what what a five or 700 calorie salad looks like. I know what an 800 calorie smoothie looks like. I know what 10 percent fat looks like. But in the beginning I did track. I would say every second day I would track just to make sure and to learn about what I was eating and to see. Like what? What kind of stuff am I putting in my body? What kind of nutrition am I getting? And I used it as a learning tool because I know a lot of people steer away from counting calories because of diet culture. They’re like, No, no, no break free, whatever you want. But we have to learn about the food that we’re putting in our bodies. And the only way to learn is to track and to learn about the foods. We kind of have to do that. So I did that in the beginning, and it really taught me a lot about what I was putting in my body. And it taught me a lot about what low fat really looks like. Because when I first started, I was like, Wow, I’m eating like 40 percent fat, and it’s so easy to eat a higher percentage of fat. It’s so easy to eat more nuts and seeds and have them as snacks and everything. And and then you overeat, and it’s just you feel more sluggish and whatever. So I learned about what 10 percent, 15 percent looks like. And once you learn you don’t really have to track, I do track if I’m doing a YouTube video and people are going to be interested to know what is in there. So I’ll track to the day and I’ll be like, Oh, I might need to eat more bok choy because my calcium is a little low, right or what I earn, just like random things like that, I just I observe, I observe. I don’t put any rules on myself or any half-truths. I just observe what I’m putting in my body and how we react to it, and then I just go from there.

Chef AJ: I’m curious what takes longer, Lissa to make a salad that big or to eat it?

Lissa Maris: I would say to eat it, to eat it definitely takes more time. But real. I mean, it takes maybe 10 minutes to chop the salad and maybe like three minutes to blend the dressing. It’s pretty fast if I’m like zone focused, obviously, and I’m like, just mosey in around to take 15 or 20 minutes to get get on social media and like, answer a few questions while I’m chopping. It’ll be 20 minutes easy, but it doesn’t take long. We chopped the lettuce like we rinse stuff if we need to. Yeah, these salads really only took me about about eight minutes to make for the show. So it’s pretty easy to chop stuff. It would take longer to eat

Chef AJ: About 30 minutes.

Lissa Maris: Yeah, about 30 minutes. But I mean, Nate and I will watch a show or we’ll play chess or something like that. And it really doesn’t seem like it’s that much time and we enjoy it too. It’s so tasty. And sometimes I’ll be eating a salad. I’m like, I don’t want this to be over. So good.

Chef AJ: That’s funny. You know, one of the things we teach for people just in healthy habits, especially for weight loss, is to always be prepared. Do some kind of batch prep. Is that possible in raw?

Lissa Maris: That is possible on raw. We have done it multiple times because we like to go camping and we like to go hiking. And we also do like to have stuff done for the next day because if we’re making a dressing, we can make. I mean, we’re going to make a quad batch because we need a double batch for lunch and then another double batch because there’s two of us. So we’ll make a quad batch of dressings and then we just make enough for our lunch and then we have extra for tomorrow. So we don’t even have to worry about dressing for tomorrow. One of the best things one of the best days that we love is if we wake up in the morning and we make our breakfast, our smoothie in the morning and we blend our lunch dressing with blender ginger dressing, and then we chop all the vegetables that we need for the day we’re done in like 45 to 60 minutes done for the. Day, we just put them in containers and then we have it ready to go, we just dump it into a salad bowl, pour the dressing and we’re good to go. So planning is key. Another thing that works really well is using a vacuum blender. We got this the bio chef vacuum attachment to work on our Vitamix. And if you vacuum, blend your dressings or your smoothie, you’re not blending air into your smoothie, so you’re not oxidizing it as fast and it lasts a lot longer, then you can actually vacuum seal your source or smoothie in a vacuum seal with a mason jar using that vacuum, and it can last up to five days. So you could technically blend enough dressings for the entire week and not have to worry about it if you use the vacuum blender and the vacuum seal. It’s pretty amazing stuff.

Chef AJ: Well, I’ll have to look into that. I would say I always learned at least one new thing from every interview. Did you exercise a lot when you were losing weight?

Lissa Maris: I didn’t. Actually, that was something that was quite surprising. I am not a regular exerciser. Definitely not by a long shot. I do like to hike and I like to go on adventures and we do go for walks. We try to go for a walk every night, but it’s not like strenuous or anything like that. But while I was losing weight, I didn’t work out a lot. I would try. I would go through spurts just like most people do. I would do like three weeks of exercise and go to the gym, maybe for a week or two, and then I wouldn’t do anything for months or I’d go for a hike here and there. And then I wouldn’t do anything for three weeks or I would sit at my all my couch and lift weights with the TV for a couple of days, and then I wouldn’t do it for like two weeks. So it was really sporadic. I didn’t feel anything specifically at all. As for exercise, I do wish I did more exercise, but not for the weight loss, but for the health benefits of the exercise but I just have too much to do. That is a bad excuse but yeah.

Chef AJ: No, but that’s what we’re learning from the experts. Exercise is important, but it’s not really necessary for weight loss.

Lissa Maris: Yeah, exactly. And I feel like exercise is used too much as a weight loss tool when that’s not its main purpose. Its main purpose is improving your overall health, improving your sleep, improving your mood, improving your circulation, improving your digestion and moving your body and improving your muscle tone and your strength and bone density. You like all this other stuff, right? But society has us believing to exercise to lose weight. And that’s again, the diet culture like we should be eating to maintain our body weight and exercising for health. And that’s my yeah, that’s another mind shift that we have to get out of as a society.

Chef AJ: Do you ever worry that you could gain the weight back?

Lissa Maris: I don’t worry about it because I love my body the way it is and everybody is going to fluctuate even throughout the day, right? It depends on your stress level. You heat your environment where if you’re a woman, where you are in your hormonal cycle, there’s so many factors that can come into play. And if I gain a little bit of weight, it’s not something that I concern myself with because I know what to eat, what makes me feel my best, and I can just keep sticking to what works and what has worked for me in the past and just love my body at every stage because we’re not going to be the exact same weight for the rest of our lives. After we lose the weight, we’re fluctuate a little bit by 10 pounds, whatever. But just to recognize and observe your body and what you’re putting in your body and just take a step back and look at things logically and say, Oh, I see what happened and this is what I did before, and just to gradually get yourself back on there if there is something, but to never feel guilty. That’s a big thing. Not to feel guilty. If you do happen to go through a period of stress, I mean, stress makes you gain weight, too. It can like that’s a big one or not sleeping right, right? You’re going to bed at like three in the morning. Every morning, your hormones are all out of whack. Because of that, that can contribute as well. But to be gentle with yourself and really work with where you’re at.

Chef AJ: Do you weigh yourself?

Lissa Maris: I do weigh myself, but it’s like whenever I feel like it, I don’t really have a daily ritual. It’s just like, it’s there. I’m like, Oh, how much do I weigh? OK, well, whatever.

Chef AJ: Well, you really did sound like you really did change your mindset.

Lissa Maris: Yeah, I’m definitely in a different place than where I was originally, and I just I love my body where it is and whatever it does, because this is the only vehicle. I mean, we’re given this gift for free. It’s free, right? People are are buy like $100000 vehicles, and they treat them with the utmost respect, but they don’t do it with their own body that they got for free. They got it for free. It’s like we don’t value things that we get for free. And our body was like the biggest thing that we got for free. So the reason we’re here. So, yeah, I have definitely changed my mindset a lot over the years.

Chef AJ: What would you say to somebody who’s given up hope that they could ever lose weight?

Lissa Maris: Oh, that’s a big one I had given up hope to when I first went raw, and I feel like the biggest thing I could say is to just give it up and focus on health. Focus on choosing these foods because you love yourself and you value yourself where you are, and it will be uncomfortable because of diet culture. We’re taught that we need to lose weight in order to feel beautiful, but if we feel beautiful, then we’ll naturally want to eat healthy and will naturally lose weight. It just comes with the mindset shift and really caring for ourselves. The best way that we can. So if someone has lost hope, there is hope. We just need to change our our perspective over it. And instead of forcing ourselves into that, because that’s what a lot of the problem that got me to where I was because I was constantly fighting that I need to lose weight and I need to look a certain way. And it kept me in that cycle. So when I broke free from that and I just started focusing on health and learning about what a body needs to be an appropriate weight, that’s when the freedom came because I was now freed from needing to be what I thought I needed to be and just being me and loving myself and learning. There’s so much information out there that we can learn from to apply to our life that we, we really need to change.

Chef AJ: I’m sure your example is an inspiration to so many people. I’m dying to see this dressing recipe, to be able to share the ingredients and

Lissa Maris: the measurements with our viewers. Yes, I would love to. So this salad dressing or this salad is a typical lunch salad for date night and typical dinner as well. Sometimes we’ll add some darker leafy greens, but there’s romaine lettuce, cucumber, tomato, bell pepper, purple cabbage and green onion. Oh, and there’s radish in there, too. So we try to keep as much variety as possible. So that is our salad and we’re going to make this dressing. So this is the dressing that I ate almost every day when I was losing weight. It was my staple. I was eating it all the time and it was my favorite. So we’re starting off with a brand new box of dates. It’s a brand new one, so those are all alone here. Got to get it open. Oh my goodness. So that’s the reason why I use dates is because I’m trying to get that calorie density while staying raw, because the salad itself is is not very high calorie. It’s I mean, there’s probably like 200, 200, 300 calories in that whole salad. That’s all is not. If I just eat it like that with a little lemon juice on it, it wouldn’t sustain me. So I need to have a really good, low fat dense dressing to add to the salad, and that will satiate me. So we’re going to use these dates. I’ve got Medjool dates and I’m going to start with five dates. So make sure that they’re pitted for where you’re going to wreck your blade. So five days and this is what’s going to be the bulk of the dressing. And you could add fruit to this, too, you could add mango or peach or plum or apricot or whatever you wanted to add to it to give it a little bit of a different flavor. So that’s the first ingredient. There’s only five ingredients in here. So are sips, I think. So five dates. Then we’re going to do the juice of a lemon. So grab a lemon and I need to grab a knife. All right, here’s my life, so I’ll just cut that and you can use a juicer, but I’m just going to squeeze it into here because I don’t care if their seeds, I just leave the seeds in there. The blender blends it all in real good anyway. So there’s one and two.

Chef AJ: That lemon has a lot of juice. Sometimes I get lemons and nothing comes out.

Lissa Maris: I know I’m like that with limes too, sometimes limes are like, what, I got like quarter teaspoon of that. So we got lemon juice, and then I really like adding, this is what gives it the vinaigrette flavor is a little bit of apple cider vinegar and I can maybe add like two teaspoons or a tablespoon or less. It depends on your taste. So we’ve got the dates five dates juice of lemon, a little apple cider vinegar, garlic that is one of the key ingredients. And then then we’ve got two spices. I’ve got smoked paprika. I like to add about a half a teaspoon of smoked paprika. You can add more if you want it. It depends. If you have a sweet, sweet paprika, you could add a little bit more. And then I always like to add a little bit of poultry, like maybe an eighth of a teaspoon to that. And that’s it. So easy. So here’s here’s what’s in the blender. And if you wanted to like right now in where we are, we like to add a little bit of fat. So we’re just going to add maybe like. Maybe it’s a tablespoon or so of hemp seeds, so it’s just a small, small amount can leave it out. I didn’t have the hemp seeds in it the whole first year of my raw, and then I started adding a little bit

Chef AJ: You could use hemp if you wanted to.

Lissa Maris: Yes. Yes, you could use Chia instead. I like Chia because it’s so high fiber. It’s like almost more fiber than it is fats.

Chef AJ: It makes things makes a nice viscosity.

Lissa Maris: It does. It does, especially if you grind it first and then put the powder in. It gives it the kind of a gel like texture. Then we’re going to add about half or so of water now for the water, if you use. Like about a cup of water, it’s actually going to make it more like a vinaigrette because it’ll thin it out, so it’s a really thin dressing. But you could use less water and make it a thicker, creamier dressing if you use less water. So we’re going to blend this. With our vacuum blender, we’ve got this lid that kind of goes on here and we’ve got the little vacuum seal top. This is the biochip it attaches to the top of the Vitamix space. And then we use the vacuum, the vacuum seal on top and you just push the button and it starts to suck the air out of the blender. So you’re not going to be blending and blending a whole bunch of air into your sauce. And this is so good for people who are eating more plant foods because if their digestion is off a little bit, they might feel extra gassy because they’re just drinking smoothies that have a ton of air in them. Like, you know, when your bonus smoothie and it’s like this time after you blend it, it’s like this time you haven’t made food, you’ve just blended air into your smoothie and you just made it from here. So it gets bigger right and that you’re swallowing, that gets in your colon. And then all of a sudden you get like lots of gas because that air has got to go somewhere. So if you blend it in, it’s going to get better. So I highly recommend getting it back and wonder if people are having issues with gas and bloating. So it takes like 20 seconds. And it depends too. Like if you have a lot of air space in your vacuum, it’s going to take a little extra time to suck all the air out. But this BioShock we got from John Poehler’s website Scout Juicers. That is really cool. Yeah, it’s really cool, I really like it. Just got to go. There we go. It’s all done. So now we can just do a quick blend. And. And that’s that’s super easy news to get split off because it’s vacuum sealed in. Have you ever frozen the dressing? I haven’t actually, I haven’t tried freezing the dressing. We like to take the the vacuum seal is the best way to start to get that off sometimes. But then we don’t. There’s the dressing, and then we’ll pour that on our salad and enjoy a lot of tasty, tasty dressing.

Chef AJ: I’m definitely going to try that because smoked paprika is my favorite spice in the whole world.

Lissa Maris: Oh my gosh, my two sisters.

Chef AJ: Well, this has been really wonderful. Listen, one more question what’s the real truth about weight loss?

Lissa Maris: The real truth about weight loss, I would have to say is, like we’ve been talking about is to just release the need to be and focus on yourself and health. Focus on the positive things that you can do for your body. Focus on how amazing it is to go. Have a workout. Focus on how much you love eating whole food, plant-based focus on the abundance, the variety, the joy and really ask yourself why you’re choosing healthy things. Is it because you love it and you love your body? Or is it because you’re worried that you won’t lose weight if you don’t do it? The mind shift is so big and so powerful. We tend to discount the mind and the relationship that we have with our food. So I feel like the secret is to not even focus on it. Focus on the health and it’ll come. It’ll come without you even trying.

Chef AJ: That’s well said. Thank you so much.

Lissa Maris: Thanks so much.

Chef AJ: Hi, Dr. Khambatta, and welcome to the Truth about Weight Loss Summit, thanks so much for being here.

Cyrus Khambatta: Thank you, Chef AJ. it’s always a pleasure to be here with you.

Chef AJ: Well, thank you. Dr. Khambatta, is there any connection between a person’s blood glucose and attaining their ideal body weight?

Cyrus Khambatta: I’m glad you asked. The answer is absolutely. There’s actually a very strong connection between your blood glucose values and many aspects of your metabolic health, including, but not limited to, weight loss. Number two, your risk for developing prediabetes and type two diabetes. Number three, your risk for developing cancer. Number four, your risk for developing heart disease. And all of the manifestations of heart disease, including high cholesterol, high blood pressure, atherosclerosis, coronary artery disease, and beyond. So I like to think of your blood glucose control or maintaining ideal blood glucose control as being one of the most important aspects of your overall health because it’s connected to so many different conditions, so many different chronic diseases that are affecting the majority of Americans today. So we can go into a lot of detail about why blood glucose is so important. And most importantly, we can talk about this concept known as insulin resistance, because insulin resistance is really the is the condition that is most closely related to practically every chronic disease that you can think of.

Chef AJ: Wow. I’d love to learn more.

Cyrus Khambatta: All right, so I can share my screen and we can do a little presentation, how you feel about that?

Chef AJ: That sounds great.

Cyrus Khambatta: So today we’re going to be talking about, you know, how to master diabetes, but also how to just attain ideal blood glucose control. So give you a quick background. This is me. I was diagnosed with not one, not two, but three autoimmune conditions in my senior year of college. So it was the year 2002 and I was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s hypothyroidism plus alopecia universality, which is why, as you can see on screen, I have no, I have no hair, no eyebrows, no eyelashes, no ear hair and no nose hair. I have no chest hair. I have no hair on my body at all. So alopecia is basically just me a scientific way of just describing complete hair loss. And then I was also diagnosed with type one diabetes. So I got all three of those in my senior year of college at Stanford University, and my life changed very quickly. So at that time, my doctors told me to eat a low carbohydrate diet because a low carbohydrate diet was at that time and still is today considered the most effective way to keep your blood glucose controlled. And as a result of that, for somebody living with type one diabetes would also be a very effective way to keep my insulin use from continuing to go up over the course of time. So I adopted a low carbohydrate diet as you see on the screen here, and I ate a lot of things like cheese and eggs and red meat and white meat and turkey burgers and butter under the promise that this would keep my glucose controlled and my insulin use low. But that did not happen. In fact, my blood glucose became so erratic that it felt like my blood glucose meter was a random number generator, and it didn’t matter what time of the day it was, it didn’t matter how much exercise I did, it didn’t matter how much food I ate. It didn’t matter how stressed I was or how relaxed I was. My glucose was unpredictable. I had no idea what it was going to be. It was bouncing between dangerously low and dangerously high values multiple times per day.

Cyrus Khambatta: And as a result of that, I became pretty upset. I suffered from low energy. I became mildly depressed and I knew that I needed to change. So I started looking for more information and I stumbled. I literally stumbled into this idea of eating a plant-based diet. So at that time, I said, You know what? I’ll do whatever. It doesn’t matter, I just want to feel better. And so I started to eat foods as you see on a screen here. And I worked with a gentleman named Dr. Doug Graham, who went on to write a book called The Eighty ten ten diet, which is all about eating a Roth who died in particular. And he showed me how to eat foods as you see on the screen here lots of fruits, lots of vegetables and lots of colors. And so I, within a short period of time, you can see that my carbohydrate intake is right here show in green went up from being approximately a hundred grams a day all the way upwards of 600 grams per day, and that happened within a few weeks. And my total fat intake actually came down from being approximately 80 grams per day, all the way down to somewhere between 10 and 20 grams. So I was effectively trading carbohydrates for fat and eating more carbohydrates and eating less fat. And what I was worried about was that because I was eating so much carbohydrate energy that my insulin use would go up and my blood glucose would become out of control because that’s what the doctors had told me. But what ended up happening was the exact opposite. My insulin use actually came down and it came down dramatically, it came down by 43 percent in the first three weeks. And what was incredible here was that if you kind of graph carbohydrate intake in insulin use together, what you’ll find is that their divergent meaning, as my carbohydrate intake went higher and higher, my insulin use became lower and lower. So the two of these were moving in opposite directions, but that literally went against everything that the diabetes world had told me. It went. Everything I went, went against everything I read on the internet. It went against what my doctor said. It went against what my nutritionist said. It went against what I saw on YouTube. There was literally only one human being on the planet that could describe what was happening here, and his name was Doug Graham, and that’s why I chose to work with him. So I was so excited by what was happening inside of my body, because not only was my insulin use down, not only was my blood glucose more controllable, but I had more energy and I could exercise more. And I felt like a million bucks.

Cyrus Khambatta: So I decided to enroll in Ph.D. programs around the country, and I ended up going to UC Berkeley to get a Ph.D. in nutritional biochemistry so that I could understand the actual science. And while I was there, I studied insulin resistance inside and out. So we’ll talk a lot about what insulin resistance is and why it’s important. It’s specifically important for weight loss as well. And I went there with one question which is this, the question I literally had was, am I a freak of nature? Because I’d never heard about this happening to anyone else. I had never read about this happening to anyone else. I thought that maybe I was a genetic anomaly and that this phenomenon of eating more carbohydrates for less insulin was just kind of unique to me. But it turns out that in fact, what I was experiencing was a very well described biological phenomenon, and it has happened to thousands and thousands and thousands of people over the course of time. So here I am today, quick rundown of my stats. I produce my insulin use by 40 percent. I eat a boatload of carbohydrates on a daily basis. More than 700 grams, which you know, for most people living with any form of diabetes, this is almost this is a week’s worth of carbohydrate, energy, or a month. And I do this every 24 hours. I inject approximately twenty-five units of insulin per day, which is a physiologically normal amount of insulin. And my A1C values are currently between points four, five, and seven, which is considered non-diabetic right here. So, you know, I’m a happy camper, and I’m pretty excited that this system has worked not only in my favor but also helped thousands of people since my time through our coaching program.

Cyrus Khambatta: So, you know, we wrote a book it’s called Mastering Diabetes, it became a New York Times bestseller in the beginning of 2020, and I’m actually going to read you some information from this book directly in this presentation in a little bit, because there’s some very important information specifically about calorie density and about how you can use that to your advantage in order to keep your body weight low while eating plenty of food to keep you satiated. And so we’re going to be delving into this book to really get a good idea of how this is even possible in the first place. When it comes to understanding carbohydrate metabolism, this is the thing that a lot of people get confused about the traditional diabetes world with additional blood sugar, a world, if you will, tells you that they say, well if you eat anything that’s carbohydrate-rich like bananas or potatoes or white rice even refined carbohydrates like cookies and crackers and chips and pasta and sodas, regardless of what type of carbohydrate you eat, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter because all of those foods are just going to turn into this stuff called sugar. And then this sugar is going to make your insulin use go up. Whether you inject insulin from a vial like me, or whether your insulin comes from your endogenous pancreas. Right? So is the anti carbohydrate or the low carbohydrate methodology. Carbohydrates lead to sugar. Sugar causes excess insulin production or excess insulin use. So what lots of people do is they go, well I don’t I don’t want to stress out my pancreas. I don’t want to inject more insulin, so I’m going to have less sugar in my blood. Therefore, I’m going to eliminate carbohydrates or get rid of or lower them to a very low amount. Here’s the problem. This is a single variable relationship that gets as. Do less of this and end up with less of this. Here’s the problem. If you take a look at biology and you study biochemical pathways and you really delve into biochemistry, what you find is that there’s no such thing as a single variable relationship in a human being. I literally cannot think of a single variable relationship in all of human biochemistry. It just doesn’t exist. And the way that biochemistry is actually organized inside of organisms inside of all mammals, including humans, is that reactions are grouped into what are called biochemical pathways. And these biochemical pathways are very, very complex, and they involve many different, many different intracellular and extracellular players. They involve nutrients in your blood. They involve cell surface receptors. They involve intracellular proteins. They involve specific enzymes. They involve different organelles. They involve the mitochondria. They involve the nucleus. They involve DNA or they involve RNA. And before you know it, you have a very complex puzzle that has many different players associated with each other. You can think of it as a game of dominoes where you tip one domino and then you end up tipping, you know, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 other dominoes. And some of these dominoes feedback on the original domino and so on and so forth.

Cyrus Khambatta: So they’re somewhat circular pathways, and these pathways are organized into a very complex what looks like a ridiculously complex subway map that says, Oh, this little complex over here is also related to this other pathway that’s also related to this pathway. And before you know it, you take a look at this, this this collection of pathways and you think, Oh my gosh. Biochemistry is complicated. There’s nothing about the system that’s linear, so you can’t just say, you know, eat more sugar and all or eat more carbohydrates, and that turns into sugar because it’s just too simplistic and it’s just not biologically accurate. So. In the world of diabetes and blood glucose, this is what people are told over and over and over again. They say you can get autoimmune diabetes, either type one or 1.5. You can get prediabetes or type two diabetes, which is considered lifestyle diabetes. Or you can get versions of diabetes or blood glucose imbalance that affect women, which is gestational diabetes that happens during pregnancy, or polycystic ovarian syndrome, which is not a version of diabetes but involves results in erratic blood glucose control. All of these types of diabetes are actually related to each other. But the modern medical world does not want to believe that they do not. They do not talk about them and treat them as if they’re related conditions. The thing that connects all of them is this thing called insulin resistance and insulin resistance is actually, like I said earlier, one of the most important concepts in all of biology. And here’s the reason. Insulin resistance is it touches every single chronic disease that you and I can think of today. So before we get to this slide, I’m actually going to fast forward. This is what insulin resistance does as your level of insulin resistance grows. Not only can you negatively affect and increase your risk for many forms of diabetes shown in the top right quadrant here. But in addition to that, as insulin resistance becomes more prevalent inside of your body, inside of your liver and inside of your muscle in particular, your risk for cancer can go up. Your risk for coronary artery disease, hypertension, atherosclerosis, and high cholesterol can also go up to your risk for obesity or weight gain. Unwanted weight gain can also go up, and we’re going to delve into this in a lot of detail. Your risk for fatty liver, polycystic ovarian syndrome, and Alzheimer’s disease goes up, and also your risk for things like neuropathy, blindness, kidney failure, neuropathy, erectile dysfunction. All of these are exacerbated when insulin resistance becomes a bigger deal inside of your body.

Cyrus Khambatta: So the next logical question is, all right. Well, what is this insulin resistance thing they keep talking about, right? The simple way to think about it is that insulin resistance is not caused by carbohydrate intake. That’s what most people believe. Insulin resistance is actually caused by the accumulation of excess saturated fat in tissues that are not designed to store large quantities of fat. One more time. Insulin resistance is caused by the excess accumulation of saturated fat in tissues that are not designed to store large quantities of fat. And we know that this is the case. We know it. This is not my opinion. This is not a theory. This is not a guess. This is a fact. And the reason we know that is because there are many scientific papers that have already described this insignificant detail. And you can see here that paper after paper after paper in the medical literature clearly connects lipid metabolism, which is fatty acids and fat soluble components in your diet with. It says here the pathogenesis of beans and resistance, meaning the creation of insulin resistance in other papers say how free fatty acids inhibit glucose utilization inhibit the glucose metabolic pathway. Other papers say the role of fatty acids in the pathogenesis of insulin resistance and non-insulin-dependent diabetes. So it’s everywhere. The mechanism of free fatty acid-induced insulin resistance in humans like this is very well described in the medical literature, but yet people don’t know this. So if you think about internal resistance, what you do is you can you primarily think about two different tissues your muscle in your liver. Those are the two issues that are negatively affected and impacted the most. In addition to that, your pancreas and your brain can also become insulin resistant over the course of time. But for the purposes of this discussion, let’s focus on the muscle and the liver because these are the two tissues that are affected first, and then these are the two tissues that are affected secondly, or secondary. Now the sequence of events of insulin resistance happens like this. The first thing that happens is that lipids enter your blood before glucose. So what does that mean?

Cyrus Khambatta: Suppose you eat a hamburger or you had a cheeseburger actually, the cheeseburger is right up here. This is a fat-rich meal. And the reason it’s fat-rich is that it has got red meat, it’s also got cheese. And both of those are high in saturated fat. But then, in addition to that, it also has some carbohydrate energy that comes from the bun. So we’re looking at a meal that is rich in saturated fat and rich in refined carbohydrates. In other words, this meal, which is what a lot of people eat on a daily basis, which is a cornerstone of the standard American diet, is a metabolic disaster. And I’ll show you exactly why. You eat the cheeseburger. These yellow circles are depictions of lipid or fatty acids, so saturated fat from the meat and from the cheese basically end up in your small intestine where they are absorbed by these things called microvilli. These microvilli structures basically absorb the fatty acids, and then they transfer them to your lymph system, which then goes into your blood. And this happens relatively quickly within 15, 20, 30 minutes of eating the cheeseburger. So within a short period of time now, the amount of lipid or the amount of fat inside of your blood increases because your digestive system does a good job of absorbing them relatively quickly. Now, when that happens, the lipid actually slows down everything else about the way that your meal is processed. So as that lipid gets inside of your blood and as it gets inside of your intestine, your intestine actually slows down the rate at which your stomach empties. And that’s important because the rest there can be a kind of a temporary traffic jam that’s built up inside of your stomach that that gives you a sensation of being full. So you may have felt this before where you eat a fat-rich meal and you don’t even have to eat that much. And before you know it, all of a sudden you’re like, Oh, wow, like, I’m pretty full. I don’t really want to eat anymore, right? And the thing is, is that you don’t actually have to have a very large amount of material inside of your stomach in order for that to happen because it’s the presence of the saturated fat that’s actually causing that signal. So the next thing that happens? Is that fatty acids enter your liver and your muscle, so inside of your blood, these fatty acids, you know, they’re you, they’re using your blood as an as a highway, as a conduit to get to tissues. And one of the tissues, two of the tissues that they get to include your, excuse me, your liver and your muscle. So these fatty acids end up making their way inside of your liver and making their way inside of your muscle. Now, your liver and muscle have the ability to absorb fatty acids from the blood. They have the mechanism to be able to do it, except both your liver and muscle are only designed to store small amounts of, these fatty acids. But when you have a saturated fat-rich meal or you have a lot of saturated fat in your diet, in particular on a daily basis, whether it’s breakfast, lunch, or dinner, you know you do it again tomorrow, the next day, the next day. If there’s just a lot of fat in your diet, then without knowing it, you end up storing an excess quantity inside of your liver and muscle, which kind of overwhelms their physiological design. So in this scenario, the presence of these fatty acid molecules inside of your liver and muscle actually slows down the action of insulin. They inhibit the action of insulin. And so as a result of that, when insulin tries to say, Hey, knock, knock muscle, knock, knock liver, there’s some glucose in the blood you want to take it up. Both of those tissues respond by saying, Yes, no, I can’t. I can’t pay attention to you right now. And the reason is because these fatty acids actually are causing a break and they’re slowing down the ability of insulin to get glucose inside of your blood.

Cyrus Khambatta: So you saw earlier in that in that carbohydrate, I’m sorry in the cheeseburger that there was carbohydrate inside of the bun. So whether there was carbohydrate inside of the bun or whether you have any, just eat a single banana to come along with the meal or whether you ate a banana a few hours afterward, a small amount of carbohydrate can result in an over-accumulation or a traffic jam of glucose pooling inside of your blood. As a result of that, because this glucose is trying to get inside of your liver and muscle, but it can’t do it very effectively because the fatty acids effectively beat it there and they cause a traffic jam, and they inhibited the ability of insulin to get glucose out of your blood. So as a result of this, you now are in a situation where you ate a saturated fat-rich meal and that fat-rich meal is now causing alterations to the way that you would normally absorb glucose so your liver. I’m sorry, your pancreas basically gets involved and says, whatever, I can solve this problem. Let me just make more insulin. So that’s what it does. It just creates more insulin. It puts more insulin side of your blood. And then this insulin is designed to overpower the liver and muscle to try and force the glucose inside of both of those issues. And it works. But the problem is that in this state, this is called insulin resistance classic insulin resistance, where there’s excess lipid inside of your blood called hyperlipidemia. Then the hyperlipidemia causes excess glucose called hypoglycemia, and then the excess glucose causes extra insulin, which is called hyperinsulinemia. So hyperlipidemia, hypoglycemia, hyperinsulinemia, one two three at the same time. That’s the problem. So this is why eating the standard American diet that is both fat-rich and carbohydrate-rich at the same time causes a metabolic traffic jam that causes multiple metabolic traffic jams at the same time. Now, another thing to pay attention to is inside of your adipose tissue, which is your fat tissue. There can also be another traffic jam that is caused over the course of time. And the way that this traffic jam happens, it is simple. This happens mainly in people who are overweight and people who are obese.

Cyrus Khambatta: So you eat a fat rich diet and fatty acids end up going inside of your adipose tissue because that’s where they’re supposed to be deposited. And they do. They end up inside of your adipose tissue, but they also get inside of your liver and muscle like we just talked about. So these fatty acids end up going inside of your adipose tissue. Adipose tissue grows just a little bit, and that means that you start to gain a little bit of weight and then you eat some more fat. And then now these adipose tissue cells get just a little bit bigger, and all of a sudden now the cells inside of the adipose tissue are just a little bit larger, and you adipose tissue mass is now grown and this continues over the course of time. So now the adipose tissue says, Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, hold on. Every cell inside of me is getting larger because I’m storing more cargo, if you will. And that cargo basically starts to cause the entire tissue to grow now at a certain point, your adipose tissue can actually have cells that break open. And when this happens, these cells become what’s called this state that you’re looking at right here is called hyperplasia, which means basically excess accumulation, the swelling of the fatty acid cells. So you have adipose site hyperplasia, in other words, fatty acids, cells or fat cells that are getting too large. And then when they over accumulate fatty acids, they break open and they end up spilling the contents of their of the inside of the cell into the extracellular material. And this is a huge, huge, huge problem because you have what’s normally supposed to be intracellular material now becomes extracellular material, and that’s not good in this situation. Your adipose tissue starts to become inflamed immediately, so your adipose tissue actually starts to secrete these things called cytokines.These cytokines, you can think of them as like a 9-1-1 emergency phone call. So your adipose tissue literally starts to manufacture these cytokines and send them out into the blood. That’s basically like hold on, hold on, hold on. We got an emergency. Come fix this right now. So these cytokines basically pick up the phone and they basically call your immune system and they’re like, Hey, we got a problem over here. We need some help. And the person that they call her, the the cell type that they’re calling is actually called macrophages. So they say, hey, macrophages, can you get over here? Get over here now because we had some stuff inside of the tissue fluid that’s not supposed to be here. So these macrophages come to the rescue. You can think these macrophages as being like, you know, biological Pac-Man, if you will, or their ambulances, their fire trucks and they come and they go, we see the there’s like extra material in here. We got to get rid of this stuff. So these macrophages literally eat the material that’s inside of the extracellular fluid. And so this problem, what this is called right here is called a macrophage infiltration. It’s called adipose tissue macrophage infiltration. And that is a what this causes is an inflammatory state inside of your adipose tissue. And this inflammatory state inside of your adipose tissue is very problematic because as soon as this happens now, insulin can’t even communicate with this tissue anymore because this tissue is now defacto insulin resistance. So your liver’s insulin resistant, your muscles are insulin resistant, your adipose tissue is insulin resistant. The adipose tissue is now leaking contents into the blood. It’s inflamed. Now you have a system wide problem. OK, so this has been very well described in the literature. You see it all over the place. Adipose tissue insulin resistance is just everywhere, and this is this is a very important concept that I think most people don’t really fully understand. So. I’m going to stop the screen share here, because that’s the last part of this equation that I wanted to show. When it comes to understanding what to eat. We also want to think about, you know, what is it that you could do as an individual to try and prevent this actual process from unfolding in your body, right?

Chef AJ: It’s incredible, though, no matter how much you teach this people still believe that carbohydrate is the villain.

Cyrus Khambatta: Yeah, it’s I understand. I understand why. I mean, the messaging about, you know, carbo phobia, it’s strong. You’re going to YouTube, you go on to Google, you know, everywhere you go, people are saying carbs are bad for you. Don’t eat carbs. Carbs turn into sugar and like, the truth is that there is two sorts of fundamental classes of carbohydrate. There’s a refined carbohydrate that comes from manufactured products cookies, crackers, chips, pasta, sodas, waffles, pastries, sugar-sweetened beverages like that stuff is napalm. Don’t eat that stuff, right? That is the stuff that can absolutely set into motion a whole collection of metabolic problems, including diabetes. There’s no question about that. We know this. But. There’s also a class of carbohydrates called the whole carbohydrate, whole carbohydrate-rich foods that come from whole foods, such as fruits and starchy vegetables and legumes and whole grains. And when you eat those foods, those are the foods that actually help you lose weight and actually reverse insulin resistance and reverse metabolic dysfunction. So you can see on the screen here that the foods in the green light category, these foods are carbohydrate-rich, and that’s okay. In fact, there’s purposefully carbohydrate-rich because it’s a fuel that your liver and muscle, and brain require in order to operate. So what sort of cornerstone of this entire approach here? That’s been documented in over 100 years of evidence-based research is that the more of these foods that you can eat, the better your metabolic health is going to be and the easier it’s going to be for you to attain your ideal body weight, so we haven’t really talked to too much about body weight yet, but I’m going to go into that in one second here. These are the green light foods, as you see on the screen here. The yellow light foods are the foods that are just a little bit higher in their fat content. I’m not saying don’t eat these foods, I’m saying just pay attention to how much you eat and try and minimize your intake of these foods. That is seeds, avocados, coconuts. All of these are fat-rich, plant-based foods, right? And again, you can eat these foods. Just not I’m not saying you can’t, but a little bit goes a long way. We also put pasta and bread in this category because they tend to be a little bit more refined, even though they’re not necessarily as bad as many of the foods that are in the red-light category. The foods in a red light category of foods that are saturated fat rich like we talked about dairy, eggs, red and white meat, fish, and shellfish oils. It doesn’t matter what type of oil, whether it’s canola oil or vegetable oil. It can be the most virgin olive oil. It could be coconut oil, MCT oil. It doesn’t matter. All of those oils are saturated fat-rich. And then in addition to that, refined sugars and pastries, and bread fall into this category. So all we’re suggesting is to migrate away from the red, towards the yellow, and towards the green if you can literally just execute that. You are likely to find a dramatic improvement in your overall metabolic health. You are likely to reverse any preexisting chronic disease that you currently have and you are likely to lose weight and keep that weight off permanently. Just like you’ve done, Chef AJ, right? Just like thousands of other people have done. But just like, you know, it’s possible because you’ve actually done it in your own life, is that right?

Chef AJ: Well, absolutely, because what you’re showing is the foods that happen to improve insulin sensitivity are also the foods lowest in caloric density.

Cyrus Khambatta: Yeah, exactly right. You nailed it. There’s no question about that. So. So on the caloric density side of things. Let’s talk about that because this can be sort of a confusing topic that I think a lot of people don’t fully grasp. And it’s really important to understand what calorie density really means because it’s the one food. It’s the one tool that will enable you to truly eat more food and weigh less. So before we go into this, one thing that I want to say here is that the weight loss industry has worked a number on, you know, people for the past 20, 30, 40, 50 years. The weight loss industry has brainwashed all of us to believe that in order to lose weight. You have to eat less food. In order to lose weight, you have to go on a weight watcher’s. And order to lose weight, you have to count your points in order to lose weight, you have to go by these tiny little Tupperware containers and fill your food into the Tupperware containers and eat absolutely no more of this, no more than that. In order to lose weight, you got to eat these little tiny granola bars and you have to pretend like they’re satiating and that they taste great. And then that’s the only way to actually lose weight. Now here’s the thing. That system works. It does work if you do Weight Watchers, maybe some of you have done this before, you probably lose weight. If you restrict yourself, you’ll probably lose weight. Right? I’m not refuting that. What I’m suggesting and what she is suggesting here is that that’s not a recipe for sustainability. That’s not how you lose weight and keep the weight off and achieve your ideal body weight permanently. Right. That’s what you do if you’re trying to fit into a wedding dress and you find that you’re 30 pounds overweight and you only have two months to lose it. That’s what you do when.

Cyrus Khambatta: You want to be able to go to the beach in the middle of the summer and knock off 15 pounds because you haven’t been paying attention to your health for the last six months. That’s not what you do if you actually want to create a healthful approach that’s going to dramatically improve your overall health into the future permanently. So if you want to do that instead, which I’m a huge fan of, obviously we’ve got a better solution. Here’s how I recommend doing this. All right. What’s the best way to describe this? We have basically three different categories of foods as you as we talked about earlier, we got the green light, the yellow light and the red light foods. Now the green light foods. 10 what you see here in parentheses next to or what is the number that you see next to the food is the number of calories per pound. So if you had a pound of that food? You could expect to get about 60 calories out of a pound of butter lettuce, you can get about 150 calories out of a pound of broccoli. You get about 400 calories out of a pound of bananas. 410 are sweet potatoes and so on and so forth. So if you take a look at the foods in this category, you basically see that the calories per pound, the number is relatively low. It’s somewhere between, I don’t know, call it 50 and 600, that’s about in that ballpark. Now, if you go to the yellow light category, these numbers just get a little bit better. These numbers range from, you know, for brown rice pasta, five hundred and fifty, and then it can go all the way up to seven-thirty for avocados. A thousand for dates. Eleven hundred for gluten-free bread. So on and so forth. So nuts and seeds tend to be pretty high on the scale. And these numbers in general, if we had to take an average of these numbers, the average would probably be let’s go down here. The average is going to be somewhere right here in the like fifteen hundred categories. When it comes to the red light foods, the red light foods are by far the most calorie-dense yet a pound of shrimp that’s equal to 540 calories. You kind of salmon that’s 830 cabbage. You have a pound of olive oil that’s 4000 calories. You get a pound of Oreos. That’s twenty-one hundred and forty calories. So these numbers are much higher than they are over here. So again, what I told you earlier is that we’re trying to migrate away from the red light foods and move towards the yellow and then more towards the green. And just so it turns out that when you do that, you will dramatically improve your blood glucose control, you will reverse insulin resistance. And both of those are phenomenal because it’ll help you reverse many chronic diseases. But in addition to that, you actually eat less calories without knowing it. And that’s the mind-blowing trick, if you will.

Cyrus Khambatta: You’re not trying to eat less calories. I’m not trying to make you starve. I’m not trying to make you feel hungry all the time. In fact, I’m trying to do the opposite. I’m trying to teach you how you can eat the foods in the green light category. And not only will you enjoy it, what are you likely to enjoy them, but you’re actually likely to stay very full. A lot of the time, there’s this common misconception that if you eat a more plant-based diet that you’re going to get hungrier. And that’s only true if you’re eating meals like lettuce and banana and tomatoes and carrots but if you’re eating, you know, hearty thick soups and stews and potatoes and whole grains and bean dishes. Trust me, you’re not going to feel you’re not going to feel hungry all the time. So here’s a simple way to think about it. Calories per pound right here, shown on the x-axis, the green light foods, the very condensed, very low-calorie density yellow light foods tend to have a wider range, and the red light foods tend to have the biggest range, and they’re the ones that have the highest calorie density of the three different categories. All right. So if we scroll down what I’m reading, you passages from the Mastering Diabetes book right here, this is what I want to sort of drive home right now, which is that if you wanted to eat a meal and you came to me and you said, Hey, I want to, I want to. I want to feel full Cyrus. I want to eat a meal and I want to feel full. I’m going to give you an option. I’m going to say, all right, you can do one of two things OK, you can either have three and a half tablespoons of olive oil and you can have that as your meal. Or I can give you one serving of hearty sweet potato and squash soup. And the recipes later in the book, Right, it’s your choice. Which one are you going to take? Chef A.J. If I gave you a choice, which one of these would you choose?

Chef AJ: The soup.

Cyrus Khambatta: The soup. Why wouldn’t you take the olive oil?

Chef AJ: Because there’s no volume. There’s no way I’m going to feel full. And first of all, I think it would taste terrible but also there’s just such a small amount of food.

Cyrus Khambatta: Exactly, right? Yep. Even if you liked oil, and even if you thought that olive oil was your favorite food on the planet, three and a half tablespoons wouldn’t really change your hunger. You’re going to drink that is going to go inside of your stomach. And then within three minutes, you’re going to be like, Huh? What else is there? I’m still hungry. Right? So the beauty here is that you can get the same number of calories from these three tablespoons of olive oil is if you were to eat a much larger bowl of soup containing green light ingredients like we talked about earlier. And these green light ingredients and this volume of food is likely to help you stay fuller for a longer period of time. the same number of calories literally the exact same number of calories, but this one keeps you fuller for a longer period of time. Do that. Next one Oreos versus cantaloupe OK. Both of these contain approximately 110 calories. You can have two Oreos. Right. That’s not going to keep you full. You’re going to need to worry and you’re going to be hungry in about two minutes, or you can eat two cups of cubed cantaloupe, right? You might still be hungry after eating that. That’s fine. But this is a lot more volume, and it’s likely to keep you fuller for a longer period of time. So that’s a good thing. OK, here’s another option. What if I were to give you an option of eating either three tablespoons of peanut butter, trust me, that would probably be very tasty. Or one large baked potato. OK, which one of those would you take?

Chef AJ: I was going to laugh and say i will put the peanut butter on the baked potato.

Cyrus Khambatta: It’s tempting, isn’t it?

Chef AJ: Big potato, that’s for sure.

Cyrus Khambatta: The baked potato. Exactly right. So both of these again, they contain approximately 110 calories. So the point here is that the baked potato is going to keep you fuller for a longer of time because there’s literally more mass, there’s more volume, there’s more material that gets inside of your digestive system. And then the last comparison here is either a cup of a half a cup of dried apricots. You can see here a very small amount, or you can eat nine entire whole apricots. Which one are you going to take?

Chef AJ: I’m going to take the one with more.

Cyrus Khambatta: The one with more, right? Because again, our goal is to eat food and feel full or feel somewhat full, feel satiated. And you can do that by eating foods that actually have a higher volume. And again, these are green like foods. They will help reverse chronic diseases, and they will help you take on less calories while being full at the same time.

Chef AJ: So I agree with you. Let me just say one thing, and this is what I hear from people all the time, because anytime somebody comes to me with any level of diabetes or insulin sensitivity, I say, check out mastering diabetes. They go well, any time I eat carbohydrates, even the whole complex one like the beans, the sweet potatoes, they say, my blood sugar goes up. I can’t eat those.

Cyrus Khambatta: Yeah. So the reason that that happens actually is because if you have already developed insulin resistance via the standard American diet, via a ketogenic diet, via a low carbohydrate diet, if you already have preexisting insulin resistance and then you just try and add carbohydrate energy on top of that, good luck your glucose is going to go through the roof. And I mean, I’ve proved that to myself about a thousand times over the past 20 years. If I’m insulin resistant for whatever reason, like, let’s say, I just had too much peanut butter one day or, you know, I ate a bunch of nuts and seeds. And then the next day I try and eat some bananas or try and eat some fruit. Good luck. My glucose is going to go way, way, way higher than I want it to go right? And that’s because what you’re doing is you’re taking the foundation of insulin resistance and you’re literally just adding carbohydrate to the top. What I’m suggesting is that you take the foundation of insulin resistance that’s caused by saturated fat-rich foods and you displace you. Don’t add, you displace. So what you have to do is you have to take that combination of foods that are saturated fat-rich and you have to eat less of them while increasing your carbohydrate intake. OK. So when you do it that way, you’re having less dietary fat and you’re increasing your carbohydrate intake to make up for the fat-rich meals that you’re no longer eating. OK, so what we tell people is like, Hey, listen, I don’t want you to make a dietary transition in three days. I don’t. I have no vested interest in you making very quick moves in a very short, creative time. If you try to win a contest, go for it. But if you’re trying to actually establish optimal health, I would rather it takes you three months to transition your diet, at least, if not more and so if you have that mindset, then what you say is, if I’m going to transition my diet and it’s going to be, you know, slower than the way I’m going to achieve it is by reducing my saturated fat intake in my total fat intake over the course of weeks. First, I want to change my breakfast and only my breakfast, and that’s it. So I’m going to reduce my fat intake at breakfast and then substitute it with things like fruits and potatoes, or, you know, a bean casserole, whatever you want to eat, then. The next week, I would recommend decreasing your fat intake a little bit more by reducing your fat intake at lunch and then eat a little bit more carbohydrate at lunch and then the next week you would do dinner. I need a little bit more dinner. And over the course of time, you end up displacing the fat for the carbohydrate. And when you do it that way, the glucose becomes much more stable.

Chef AJ: That’s important that people know this about excess weight and insulin sensitivity often go hand-in-hand. And if they do, does losing weight improve people’s insulin sensitivity?

Cyrus Khambatta: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So it’s it’s interesting if you look at the scientific research, what you would assume as you would say the more weight you have on your body in order to work, in other words, the more excess weight you have or the the closer you are to being obese, you would assume that that every single person who gains weight and or becomes obese would also be insulin resistant based off of what we talked about. And that if you were to lose weight, that you would increase or reverse insulin resistance. Right. And the truth is that yes, there’s a strong relationship between the two of us. The more weight you have on your body, the more insulin resistant you become, the less weight you have on your body, the less insulin resistant you are. It’s just not a one for one relationship. So there are there’s a whole cohort of the population. There’s like, I think it’s some number of like 40 percent of all people who are obese are insulin sensitive. And you’d be like, Wait, what? How’s that possible, right? You have 50 extra pounds on your body, but yet your glucose metabolism isn’t that effective? Right? And part of the reason for that is because there’s a whole bunch of genetic. There’s a thousand reasons why people who are obese can actually maintain their insulin sensitivity, and a lot of it has to do with where the fat is stored. If it’s stored inside of your visceral deep, inside of your, your your abdomen, then the chances are you’re going to become insulin resistance. If that fat is stored elsewhere and you’re subcutaneous depots, then the chances are you’re going to become more insulin sensitive. But. So my point is that the two of them are related to each other. But. You can be obese and in some sensitive or vice versa. You can be insulin sensitive and obese. That makes sense.

Chef AJ: Absolutely. I think what Dr. Fuhrman, who’s one of the other experts on this summit, talked about visceral fat and subcutaneous fat. So I’m wondering, is that have something to do with the diabetes risk where the fat is store?

Cyrus Khambatta: Absolutely. Yeah. The more the more visceral fat you can take. So, so the term visceral. It’s one of those weird scientific words, right? And visceral comes from visceral viscera refers to your digestive organs like your organs that are in your abdomen. So we’re talking about your stomach, your large intestine, your small intestine, your spleen, your kidney, your liver, everything that’s right here in your abdomen and your viscera. If you have fat that’s surrounding those tissues, you can talk about as visceral fat or you not going to as abdominal fat. That is a dangerous place to keep excess fat. That is a very dangerous place because the more fat that you keep in your viscera or surrounding your viscera, the higher risk for many metabolic diseases from many metabolic conditions, including diabetes, including cancer, including heart disease. So you don’t want excess fat to be stored inside of your visceral depot, which you would prefer is for that fat to be stored elsewhere. You get it out of that deep or just put it elsewhere on my body. Where’s that elsewhere? Well, that elsewhere could be in your butt. It could be in your quadriceps or surrounding your quadriceps muscle. It could be literally in your shoulders. It could be right here in your tricep. It could be sort of surrounding. You could be up in your chest. That’s OK. So if you were to take the same, call it like 30 pounds of excess fat that’s inside of your viscera and you were to just sort of take pieces off and say, you get start over here and you can start over here. You can start over here, just displace it. In other places, your risk for chronic disease would actually go down dramatically. So the location definitely matters, and you want to try and get rid of as much visceral fat as possible, because that’s the stuff that’s actually most closely related to chronic disease.

Chef AJ: If somebody is not overweight, they’ll how do they know how much visceral fat they have?

Cyrus Khambatta: So if you’re not overweight and you want to know how much visceral fat you have, I think the way to do it would be to do it DEXA scan so you can go to your doctor, you say, Hey, I want to get a DEXA scan, and I usually use that for like bone mineral density and Beyonce. You rely on a table that kind of looks like an MRI scans over you and it gives you a result. You can also do another scan called an in-body scan, which is like a scale that you can. Sometimes they have it at your gym or the YMCA, and you stand on it and you put your hands on it. And then it puts an electrical current through your body. And it can basically tell you how much fat and how much muscle you have in your left arm versus your right arm versus your right leg, and so on and so forth. So that could also be another helpful way to determine where you know how much fat you have stored in particular regions inside of your body.

Chef AJ: Because the people that I’ve met that weren’t overweight, that were diagnosed with diabetes were like, they were shocked, like, how could I have diabetes? I’m not overweight.

Cyrus Khambatta: Yeah, exactly right. And you know, going back to what we were saying earlier, there’s a lot there’s many different forms of diabetes. There’s type one one point five prediabetes, type two gestational, and there’s a lot of people who are not overweight. In other words, they are, you know, they’re at their ideal body weight. Some people are even underweight and they develop diabetes. And those people, a lot of those people actually are living with an autoimmune version of diabetes called type one point five. You can think of it as basically being adult onset type one diabetes, and it’s sort of a very misunderstood form of diabetes that most medical professionals are not educated about. And again, yeah, it relates to the fact that you know your normal weight. You don’t have excess body weight, but yet your blood glucose is hard to control.

Chef AJ: How long does it take for insulin resistance to develop and how long does it take for insulin resistance to have negative consequences?

Cyrus Khambatta: Asked a question if the resistance can develop, can the beginnings of insulin resistance can develop within an hour? Literally, you can go and eat a fat rich meal right now, and you will display the symptomology of having insulin resistance within an hour. And the reason for that is because, like we showed earlier, those saturated fat molecules are going to get inside of your blood and then they’re going to cause a traffic jam, which can increase your blood glucose values and then that can increase your body or bloody insulin value. So all of that physiology can be seen if you know exactly how to measure it within hours of eating a single meal. Right? If you continue doing that for breakfast today and then maybe dinner tomorrow and then, you know, a couple of meals the next day and so on and so forth, and your overall fat content in your diet is high. Then what that means is that you can your level of insulin resistance is likely to grow and it’s likely to become chronic. And when you develop chronic insulin resistance, that’s when you end up increasing your risk. For many forms of chronic disease, including, like we talked about, all of the versions of cardiovascular disease and cancer and beyond. To answer your question about how long does it take to to cause problems? Well, it’s variable. The human body is an absolute master of masking the symptoms of metabolic dysfunction. So in an ideal world, if I had to redesign humans. One of the things that I would do is that every time you eat a fat rich meal, I would make it painful. I would literally make it painful. I would make it such that you would eat that food and then it would travel down your esophagus. It gets out of your stomach and boom. All of a sudden, you would start to feel physical pain because that physical pain would stop you in your tracks and be like, Wait a minute, wait a minute. Why am I feeling this? Maybe I shouldn’t do what I just did, right? But that doesn’t happen for most people. What ends up happening is that you eat a fat-rich meal today. You know, you eat more animal products the next day. You it’s very you eat some refined carbohydrate and you continue to do that for days, weeks, months, years, decades. And over the course of time, metabolic dysfunction and diseases can manifest themselves and demonstrate and show many years down the road. Some of the research here also demonstrates that people who who who develop prediabetes. Have had elevated blood glucose for up to five years before their blood glucose even becomes slightly elevated. So just think about that your your liver, your muscle, your pancreas are literally just getting insulted day after day, meal after meal for five years. Before it becomes detectable at the doctor’s office. Right. So the human body is amazing, don’t destroy it. It’s your best friend.

Chef AJ: You know, I’ve heard people mention that insulin is a fat-storage hormone or it’s responsible for driving fat into the cells. If that’s true, how does it work with diabetes?

Cyrus Khambatta: So the truth is that insulin is a fat-storage hormone, right? But that’s not its primary job.Insulin is a fat-storage hormone, but more prominently and it’s actual biological design is that insulin is a glucose storing hormone. Is it necessary? Is glucose delivering hormone. It’s a glucose uptake hormone that is his primary responsibility. And so the the the blogosphere and people on Instagram and people on YouTube like to refer to insulin as your fat storage hormone because it’s a convenient scapegoat. And it’s a simple thing that they believe is the true answer. But the truth is that insulin is actually more effective at storing glucose way more effective at promoting glucose uptake than it is at promoting fat uptake so the point is that what we are trying to avoid what you are trying to avoid and what what is ideal for optimal metabolic health is to operate in an ecosystem where the amount of insulin inside of your blood is low. You do not want very much insulin floating in your blood. You do not want it. You don’t want it in the fasting state. You don’t want it in the post-meal state. You don’t want it chronically. You don’t want it in the middle of the night. You don’t want it while you’re exercising. You don’t want it. Why you’re taking a shower. You want the amount of insulin inside of your blood to remain low, as low as possible, as much as possible because that is what is associated with ideal metabolic health over the course of time when you end up secreting excess insulin because you’re forcing your pancreas to work in overdrive. And when you force your pancreas to do that day in and day out for days, weeks, months, and years, that’s when you end up increasing your risk for heart disease. That’s when your vasculature starts to take starts to accumulate a lot of damage. That’s when you end up causing problems inside of your brain and your brain starts to migrate towards more cognitive decline over the course of time. All right. So the idea here is that, yeah. Insulin can store fat. It’s not his primary job. Insulin can store fat. It is not its primary job. Insulins primary job is to get glucose out of your blood. And if you think about it from that respect and if you understand the biology, then what you will realize is that when you become insulin sensitive. Very small amounts of insulin can transport very large quantities of glucose. Just like I used, you heard in my personal story, which is just one of thousands of thousands of stories, I ate more carbohydrate energy for less glucose. I’m sorry for less insulin, right? I pulled my carbohydrate intake and I decreased my insulin use by 40 percent. The only way you can describe that is because. When you make insulin powerful, a small amount of insulin can do a lot of work, and that’s what you’re looking for.

Chef AJ: That is so great. But you know, many doctors will tell you, at least for type two diabetes is concerned it’s you have to manage it for the rest of their life. Is there any evidence that type two could be reversed?

Cyrus Khambatta: Yes, absolutely. Type two is a very reversible condition. There’s no there’s no research that basically says, you know, type two diabetes is reversible and this percentage of all cases. But if I had to hazard a guess based off all the reading I’ve done and all the work that I’ve done, I would hazard a guess to say that approximately 80 to 85 percent of all cases of type two diabetes are fully reversible, fully reversible using the strategies that we mentioned here. The other 15 to 20 percent of all diabetes cases that are not reversible and type two that’s not reversible is related to people’s pancreas is basically being burned out, if you will. They’ve worked too hard over the longer period of time, and as a result of that, they just cannot manufacture sufficient amount of insulin anymore. So for people that are being told. That you’re going to live with diabetes the rest of your life, if you are being told that, I would recommend you not. Not considering that to be a factual statement. Instead, you have the opportunity to attempt to reverse insulin resistance and reverse diabetes in your body, and only once you’ve given it a true shot, the exact way that we describe and the exact way that the medical literature has described for over 100 years. And that doesn’t work. Then you can come to that conclusion, but until you’ve tried it, until you dramatically dropped your fat intake and migrated over towards a ship plant, strong diet, that is a erroneous conclusion without enough information.

Chef AJ: What’s your take on the glycemic index for people that have diabetes, especially those that are trying to lose weight?

Cyrus Khambatta: The glycemic index can be helpful, can certainly be helpful, but we’re not a huge fan of it because there’s actually many foods that are high on the glycemic index like. Watermelon and pineapple as an example. And even things like grapes, they all tend to be sort of like watery, juicy fruits that get a bad rap. And it turns out that those foods are actually insulin sensitizing foods, and they can actually help improve your overall metabolic health. But if you’re eating by the glycemic index, then you won’t eat those foods ever. The glycemic index prioritizes foods that have a a slow release of glucose into your blood, and usually that coincides with either having a higher protein or higher fat content so if you eat by the glycemic index, then as a de facto, you’re probably going to be eating more protein and more fat. And that’s probably going to make you more insulin resistant. So instead of doing that, what I would recommend, as I would say, don’t worry about the glycemic index at the beginning. Eat carbohydrate rich foods, whether they come from fruits or starchy vegetables or legumes or whole grains, I don’t care makes them as much as you want, do and whatever fancy combinations you want and come up with delicious tasting recipes. And when you do that and you decrease your total saturated fat content and your overall fat content, you’re likely to see a significant improvement in your blood glucose and your body weight simultaneously.

Chef AJ: Additionally, when you talk about low carb diets are animal based diets, but I hear of people now doing a vegan or plant based version of a ketogenic diet. Could that be useful for somebody with diabetes or who wants to lose weight?

Cyrus Khambatta: Yeah, it’s a great question. Actually, the ketogenic diet does not necessarily only pertain to eating animal based foods. You can definitely eat plant based ketogenic diet by eating things like avocados, nuts, seeds, coconuts, olives and having that be the sort of primary calories that you’re eating on a daily basis. So if you were to do that, you would likely keep your blood glucose very low. Your blood glucose might get nice and flat. If you’re injecting insulin, you might reduce your insulin use a lot. You could probably lose a lot of weight doing that as well. But the problem is that you what you’re doing is you’re trading carbohydrate again for and you’re increasing your level of insulin resistance again at all costs. We want to limit the amount of insulin resistance that accumulates inside of your liver and muscle. So no matter how you slice it, whether you’re eating fat from animals or whether you’re eating fat from plants. Too much is going to increase and exacerbate insulin resistance. And too much of that can cause metabolic dysfunction to your arteries and to your kidneys and to your brain over the course of time. So am I saying that eating a plant based ketogenic diet is going to cause Alzheimer’s disease now? Am I saying that it’s going to cause, you know, stage for chronic kidney disease? No, I’m not saying that, but what I am saying is that there’s nothing that you can gain from eating a plant based ketogenic diet that you can’t also gain from eating a low fat, plant based Whole Foods that. You’re going to gain zero advantages for meeting a ketogenic diet. Then you would for meeting a low fat, plant based whole food diet. And the beauty is that when you eat a low fat, plant based whole food that you will also gain insulin sensitivity and that is associated with a dramatic improvement in your overall metabolic health.

Chef AJ: And lose weight if you want to as well.

Cyrus Khambatta: Plenty of weight loss,

Chef AJ: so if I understand you correctly for improved insulin sensitivity, a low fat, hopefully plant based diet is better than one that is low in carb?

Cyrus Khambatta: There’s no question about it. You’ve been listening very good

Chef AJ: and we take you. I actually have been taking notes. My grandmother in the 1960s was called a diabetic. There wasn’t a number because there was an onset of adults and onset of children, and it was which now type one. But now they call it type two because children are getting what is an adult disease. So how do we protect our children from this?

Cyrus Khambatta: Yeah, it’s a great question. So you can protect your children from this in many different ways. If you, I mean, your children basically will mimic whatever you do for the most part, right? If you are a model and you show your kids how you take care of your ideal health and you get them involved in the kitchen and you get them shopping for food with you at the grocery store and going to the farmer’s market and really educate them about what specific foods do. They’re going to take an interest and they’re probably going to mimic exactly what you do. So if you go to the grocery store with them as an example and you buy a bunch of potatoes and you buy some garbanzo beans and you go to the fruit section and you get a bunch of fruits and vegetables, and then they see that pattern over and over and over again, and they recognize that you’re not going to the dairy section, you’re not buying cheese, you’re not buying chicken, you’re not buying red meat, then. Well, guess what? They’re probably gonna ask you a thousand questions. You can answer those questions to the best of your ability. But over the course of time when they start grocery shopping for themselves without you, they’re going to do the exact same thing and they’re going to go buy fruits, vegetables and beans and legumes and whole grains. They’re not going to go to the dairy section. They’re not going to go buy some meat, right? Because you’ve set an example for them and you’ve given them the true gift of health from a young age. And as a result of that, they’re just going to continue in that behavioral pattern, most likely, and they’re going to have exceptional health as a result.

Chef AJ: It’s great. Thank you. So a lot of the experts on this summit have talked about exercise. How it’s not really all that important for weight loss becomes more important for weight management. But with somebody with diabetes or insulin sensitivity, exercise is also pretty important, isn’t it?

Cyrus Khambatta: Yeah. So it’s it’s a double edged sword because the answer is yes. Exercise is phenomenal. I exercise every single day. I love it. It’s like one of my addictions in life. And there’s actually a chapter in our book All About Exercise that teaches you the sort of like insulin sensitivity benefits of exercise. The main question becomes. Is exercise required, is exercise required to gain insulin sensitivity, and the answer is no. So in other words, if you told me you’re like, Hey, Cyrus, I’m not going to move my body for three months because I’m doing an experiment. I’m not going to. I’m not going to be my body for three months because I broke my elbow and I can’t and I’ll be like, well, if you simply just eat a low fat plant based off of diet, you’re going to become healthier, you’re going to gain insulin sensitivity, you’re going to get better control of your blood glucose despite the fact that you can’t move your body. okay? The gold standard would be to eat a low fat plant based off of diet and move your body on a daily basis. If you can do the two of those, then you have to insulin sensitizing mechanisms that are working on each other and that are adding to your overall insulin sensitivity. But if you can’t exercise, it’s not the end of the world right now. There’s a whole collection of people with diabetes that do the exact opposite, and they exercise all the time, but they eat a high fat diet, or they exercise all the time and they eat a low carb diet. And those people get frustrated over the course of time because they can’t control their body weight. Their blood glucose is still very hard to control, their insulin use is still very high, and they go, Oh, I thought exercise was supposed to help. And my answer is exercise does help, but you’re basically exercising. And then every time you open your mouth, you’re negating the fact that the effects of the exercise that you just did, right? So stop doing something good and then causing insulin resistance at the same time. Stop sensitizing yourself and then becoming more resistant. Right? I want you to sensitize yourself through exercise and then sensitize yourself through diet and do the two of those all day long, every single day. And when you do it that way, your health becomes very noticeably improved

Chef AJ: You have the keys to the kingdom as they say.

Cyrus Khambatta: There you go, that’s right.

Chef AJ: You’ve mentioned several times a low fat, whole food plant based diet. And I think a lot of people understand by now that oil is not on the menu. It Is very, very high fat, the highest fat, highest calorie food there is. Where do nuts, seeds and avocado fit in for both losing weight and reversing insulin resistance? Is it a certain percentage that you recommend?

Cyrus Khambatta: Yeah, so the simplest way to think about it is you. I’m not the food police, and I’m not going to sit there and tell you that you’re eating too much avocado or that you can’t have those nuts and seeds like none of that. What is the simplest way to think about it is that we recommend consuming approximately 15 percent of your total calories as fat. Approximately 15 that could be as low as 10, somewhere 10 to 15 range. So the way that you would figure that out is you would use a diet tracking app that’s all over the App Store. We use a thing called a chronometer. Just download that app. Start using it. And start logging all the food that you’re eating and just do that for five days in a row. Every day, the app will basically tell you approximately how much fat you’re eating, and it all reports back to say, Hey chef AJ did you know that on Tuesday your total fat intake was 24 percent? Hey, chef AJ, did you know that on Wednesday, your total fat intake was twenty-nine percent and you would look at those numbers like, oh, looks like looks like I’m eating too much of this stuff. Where do I? Where is it coming from? And it’ll also tell you that right? So if you log your food for five days, then you can basically try and target a total fat intake of approximately 15 percent as low as 10 percent of the baseline. And then if you are in that range, then all of a sudden boom now you have dramatically improved your insulin sensitivity defacto. And if you can try and integrate as many plants as possible, then you’re likely to also feel the effects, feel more energy and hopefully start to lose a little bit of weight if you are overweight as well.

Chef AJ: So, Dr. Khambatta, what’s the real truth about weight loss?

Cyrus Khambatta: The real truth about weight loss is that it’s actually not that hard. If you just eat according to science and not according to marketing. You are likely to get incredible results. Try and put the internet away and try and follow evidence. When you do it that way. You’re likely to lose weight and keep it off and feel fantastic.

Chef AJ: I love it. Eat according to science, not according to marketing. Thank you so much, Dr. Khambatta.

Cyrus Khambatta: Thank you, chef. It’s always a pleasure. Really appreciate it.

Chef AJ: Hi Dr. McDonald, and welcome to the Truth about Weight Loss Summit, I’m so excited to talk to you. Thank you so much for being here.

Dr. Edwin McDonald: Hey, what’s up, chef AJ? It’s always a pleasure coming on, so thanks for inviting me. I’m excited to be here, excited to have an opportunity to talk about the truth about weight loss. Let’s get into it

Chef AJ: I can’t wait. Can you talk a little bit about food, diet and fatty liver disease?

Dr. Edwin McDonald: Oh, I’m so honored to talk about food and fatty liver disease. In fact, I have an excellent presentation I would like to get into. So if we can, I’d like to share my slides. So listeners bear with me. So chef A.J, we’re going to be talking about what’s on your plate food diet and fatty liver disease. Fatty liver disease is important. I mean, I feel like this is something that in health care, we don’t talk about enough, but I am going to dedicate a whole section to talking about this, OK? So as far as disclosures, when I give talks at medical conferences, I always like to give some disclosure. So I am on some medical advisory boards. So my role on most of these boards is really just advocating for a health equity as opposed to advocating for any prescription and pharma, you know, drugs and stuff like that. And then I also focus on nutritional aspects. So I’m really trying to keep these companies focused on not only prescribing medications but really help them understand that if they’re patients, the people are using, the medications are not eating healthily, healthily or eating in a healthy fashion, that those medications are probably not going to be very effective because the foundation for what we’re doing really comes down to the foods that were put in our bodies to some degree. So I am a doctor and a chef, and I’m nutrition-focused. And oftentimes when I tell people that I do all of those things, people ask me like, Well, why as a doctor would you ever get trained as a chef and why are you nutrition-focused as a physician? Thankfully, we have a lot of people nowadays, a lot of my other nutrition-focused and focused colleagues. But when I first got into nutrition, believe it or not, many people thought it was weird for me as a physician to care about what foods people were eating.

Dr. Edwin McDonald: So I oftentimes give people three reasons as to why I decided to go down this nutrition-focused pathway. One reason is that I love to cook, and I was raised by wonderful matriarchs who passed on the joy of cooking, not only including my mother, but also my grandmother. So my grandmothers, excuse me. So this is a picture of myself. Some years ago, when I graduated medical school, I was a young, young whippersnapper, as they say, and this is my grandparents. So my grandparents, specifically my grandmothers, taught me the joy of cooking. If anything, my grandfathers taught me the joy of eating, but the joy of cooking that I learned from my grandmothers, really. It showed me how you could be passionate about food, passionate about using food to bring joy to people. But they also taught me a little bit of lessons early on when I was a kid about how food can play a role in your health? Because at some point my grandfather developed diabetes and they had to change the way they cooked in order to cook. So my grandfather’s diabetes would not worsen. And for me, as a kid, you know, this is the first time I really got exposed to the connection between food and disease. And so it was invaluable. Another reason after developing my passion for cooking as the high school, I decided to work at McDonald’s not necessarily because of that past and really mostly because I needed some extra money. But I ended up working in McDonald’s and I became a manager at some point, so I started off in the kitchen, on the grill. Then eventually I went to drive-thru and then eventually I was working the front desk and eventually became a shift manager. And what I started doing at McDonald’s, I actually started making stuff that was off-menu because of my passion for cooking. So I noticed that there would be families who would come in every single day for breakfast or for lunch and dinner. And if I saw these families every day for breakfast, I was always shocked. I’m like, Why are people coming to McDonald’s every single day for breakfast? So I started making stuff off menu. I mean, I’m talking about making omelets, frittatas, using the McDonald’s ingredients, but getting creative with them now, you know, that’s not what you should be doing. But I was 16 years old when I was a manager. You know, who knows? I thought I could do anything I wanted to do, and what I wanted to do was eventually cook good food. So that was one of the reasons why I was inspired to eventually go on to culinary school. Another funny story about that. A lot of police officers would come in and they would come to my McDonald’s and they would ask for my little secret menu and I didn’t think anything of it until I actually got pulled over by one of those police officers who was routinely getting my secret menu and I did not get a speeding ticket. So that showed me the power of food. Not only does food have the power to keep people healthy, but it may keep you out of trouble.

Dr. Edwin McDonald: Another reason why I got into cooking and got into nutrition is that I grew up going to churches here on the south side of Chicago and going to church for me was a very fascinating and even sometimes scary place. And why I say scary, is primarily because I notice that not a lot of people, a lot of people at the church would get sick and shut-in with various conditions and the pastor would always encourage us to pray for people. And what the pastor would do would describe what people were going through. So they would say such and such became blind from diabetes. Let’s pray for them or such and such who lost their leg from diabetes, let’s pray for them or such and such, you know, their kidneys no longer work and they’re on dialysis. Let’s pray now for me as a kid, I would ask my parents, I’m like, Wait, wait, wait, would they just they can’t see anymore? And I asked my dad, I’m like, Why can’t they see? And my father would be like, Oh, it’s the foods that they’re eating. They had diabetes or, you know, this person is in a wheelchair and I can’t move my dad. Why? Why can’t they move there? You know this is scary. Oh, well, they had a stroke because they’re eating too much salt and stuff. And for me, hearing that had a profound impact because what I was exposed to is really bearing witness to the negative, consequences of eating an unhealthy diet. And you know, for me, I definitely believe in the power of prayer. But as a kid, I once made the mistake of asking the pastor to pray that we eat differently. The pastor was a little frustrated by that, but I stand by that question, because at the same time, we were praying for people to get better. We were also serving food that was contributing to the sickness in the first place. So those are some of the reasons why I decided to go to culinary school.

And in addition, growing up here in Chicago, I bore witness to stark disparities and health care and also health outcomes. So I mentioned diabetes previously just to give you a frame of reference. Chicago’s almost a tale of two cities to some degree, and if you look at the differences in life expectancy between certain neighborhoods. One notable study found that in life expectancy, Chicago has the largest gap within any city between neighborhoods and life expectancy. So in Inglewood, on the south side of Chicago, the life expectancy for an average person born there is 60 years whereas in a street-level neighborhood in downtown Chicago, the average life expectancy is 90 years. So that’s 30 years difference in life expectancy in these neighborhoods that are only eight miles apart. But they’re worlds apart when it comes to life expectancy and also worlds apart when it comes to diabetes. And for me, growing up here, I bore witness to those differences. And just to give you a frame of reference, the rate of death associated with diabetes in Inglewood is about 101 people per 100000 people, whereas in Lakeview, a neighborhood on the north side, it’s only about thirty-five now. I would argue 35 is still too much., so at thirty-five, I want to see these rates be zero and both neighborhoods. Nevertheless, the disparity still speaks for itself.

Dr. Edwin McDonald: So what does any of this have to do with nonalcoholic fatty liver disease and weight gain and obesity? Well, it’s not a nonalcoholic fatty liver disease really is a condition that demonstrates the connection between cooking, food disease, and also weight. So it’s a connection that for me and nowadays, it’s something that I really am passionate about, and it’s one of the reasons that I cook. And one of the reasons that I teach cooking classes is so other people can experience the joy of cooking. So in this picture, this is me teaching a cooking class at a Montessori school in Inglewood. So I’m teaching some junior high school kids healthy, eating some plant-based options. These are all plant-based classes. And also, we’re teaching knife skills in this picture. So my goal for the rest of the Typekit, primarily to focus on the connection between food and eating and fatty liver disease, is I want to talk about the prevalence of fatty liver disease, which is also called nonalcoholic fatty liver disease. So this is different than liver disease from people who are drinking too much alcohol, which many people are aware of. This is really a fatty liver disease that comes from eating too much food that’s not healthy for us, I want to talk about the dietary risk for nonalcoholic fatty liver disease. So what foods are contributing to this? But then I also want to talk about strategies, because there’s hope this is a condition that there’s no medication for how ever-changing your food can reverse the fatty liver disease that can come along from eating an unhealthy. And maybe if we have some time, we could even talk about some recipe ideas because it’s one thing to just talk about food. It’s another thing to talk about food within the context of recipes and dishes because that’s what people are eating. So is nonalcoholic fatty liver disease a problem? It is. It really is. I mean, I’ve seen people get liver transplants because of nonalcoholic fatty liver disease and know cirrhosis, which is scarring of the liver. This is something that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. I would not because it’s a condition that’s very difficult to go through and ideally even in the context of my worst enemy, I would like to see that condition prevented.

Dr. Edwin McDonald: So as far as fatty liver disease, it is the second leading indication for liver transplant in the United States. So, I mean, we literally live in a country where people have to get brand new livers because of the foods that they’re eating because of the impact of the foods on their bodies. I think we should be in a position to prevent this from happening as opposed to figuring out how do we get people more livers, which is where health care is going. Let’s figure out how to get more livers and figure out better medication to prevent the immune system from attacking the new liver. And I’m not saying that’s not important, but I also want to focus on, well, how do we get people to eat in a different way where we don’t need to give everyone a new liver? Why? We should be able to live our life with one liver for the most part, especially if we’re talking about a condition that’s driven by diet. So nonalcoholic fatty liver disease affects 80 million individuals in the United States. So 80 million is it’s pretty prevalent. So at this point, I don’t even know if COVID has impacted 80 million people in the United States. So 80 million is a lot of people To give you a frame of reference. You know, there are only about three million people in Chicago where I live in Chicago is, I believe, the third or fourth-largest city in the United States. I say three to four. Sometimes we go back and forth with Houston nowadays.

Dr. Edwin McDonald: So why is a nonalcoholic fatty liver disease so common? That is a good question, and the answer is simple. It is our standard American diet. Our standard American diet promotes disease, not only just fatty liver disease, but heart disease, diabetes, et cetera. So this is more or less a symptom of the dietary practices that we are at risk for within the United States or other westernized countries. So in terms of diet, I say our diet promotes disease, not in a jokingly fashion, but in an evidence-based fashion. So this is a study that was done in the Journal of the American Medical Association, and they looked at risk factors associated with death, and they rank those risk factors from highest to lowest. And what I like about this, this is very, very helpful, so there’s a lot of slides that look at the leading causes of death where they put, you know, cardiovascular diseases, number one, they’ll put cancer at number two, lung disease, et cetera. What I like about this, this really shows the connection between behavior and mortality as opposed to just disease and mortality, so it’s not like cardiovascular disease pops up out of nowhere. It’s those risk factors that create it, So I like focusing on the risk factors because oftentimes these are the ways to prevent those conditions from happening in the first place and definitely ways to decrease mortality associated with those conditions. So what they found was in this study, the behavior or the risk that was associated with the highest number of deaths was a dietary risk. It was the foods that we eat. So our diet was more responsible for us dying early than smoking cigarettes. Now that I’m an advocate for smoking cigarettes, I’m just saying in terms of the impact on our health, food had more of a negative impact than tobacco use by itself and also had more of a negative impact than having high blood pressure, more of a negative impact than having a high body mass index and a higher negative impact than air pollution and not exercising. So food is one of the primary risk factors that we need to focus on if our goal is to live longer and also have a population of people who live longer and they’re studying the. The authors pointed out that 83 percent of the people who are dying because of dietary risk had heart disease, now our standard American diet, it’s not a coincidence that it looks the way it looks, so according to the USDA, from 1970- 2003, for the average American, the amount of calories available for us to consume increased by five. Twenty-three calories, so we live in a country where there are just more extra calories and and and and those calories are cheaper, so it’s easy to eat more because more food is available to us. And as far as an increase in calories that occurred over the past 30, 40 years, a majority of those calories come from ultra-processed foods.

Dr. Edwin McDonald: Okay, so there was a study that looked at Heinz, which is a big population-based study that looked at a large number of populations and a large number, a large population of people here in the United States. And they as various questionnaires that go into what foods people are eating, what conditions they have, what their weights are, and it’s updated every so often. And what they found was for the average American, regardless, if you’re black or white, 60 percent of the calories come from ultra-processed foods. The only groups in America that ate less ultra-processed foods were folks who came from immigrant backgrounds, so if you were closer to immigration, you had a higher likelihood of eating more fruits and vegetables and less ultra-processed foods. Now I want to show this slide so we can compare the consumption of ultra-processed foods the United States to other countries.

Dr. Edwin McDonald: So in France, ultra-processed food consumption is only 36 percent of the calories for the average French person. Very different than our 60 percent calories. And as one reason, some of the conditions that we see here in the United States, such as rates of diabetes, weight, of having rates, of having higher weight or having obesity are less in France and other similar countries where they’re consuming less ultra-processed foods, now in the U.S., why are people eating ultra-processed foods? Now if I’m trying to figure out ways to get people to eat less ultra-processed foods and in order to decrease the rates of fatty liver disease, I have to understand why people are doing this in the first place, so there was a good research study that asked this question. And what they found was 43 percent of people said they were doing ultra-processed foods because they were affordable. Another 41 said they were easy. Another 20 percent said they taste good. And I think 20 percent is pretty low, so a lot of people don’t even think they really taste good. But 61 percent said they were convenient, so it really comes down to ease convenience, and affordability for the sake of argument. It’s good to be aware that there are four classifications ultra-processed foods or processed foods in general, and we call this the nova classification. So one category is your unprocessed or minimally processed foods. So this is like your fresh fruits or fruits and vegetables, and this is where our diet needs to shift towards. So if we are trying to access optimal health or be healthy or even optimize our health, we have to eat more unprocessed foods, more fruits, and vegetables. At the end of the day, your processed culinary ingredients, these are your cells and your fats. And you know the things we use to flavor food fall on their processed coloring ingredients category. Then you have your processed foods, Sometimes ultra-processed foods and processed foods is a term we confuse but processed foods specifically refer to your canned foods, your dried fruits, so processed foods seem very reminiscent of their unprocessed or minimally processed forms, so if I look at some canned, you know, a can of corn is going to look like corn to some degree. Is this and it can. So it’s processed. Whereas if I look at candy corn, candy corn has nothing to do with actual corn. So that’s ultra-processed form, so another example of ultra-processed foods your soft drinks. So again, cherry, if I look at a cherry, just plain cherry that’s unprocessed. Whereas cherry soda is ultra-processed, cherry soda has nothing to do with an actual cherry. Just to give you a frame of reference.

Dr. Edwin McDonald: Now, one of the reasons why I’m spending so much time talking about ultra-processed foods is because it’s a major contributor to weight gain and the way it contributes to weight was recently identified in a study that was published a couple of years ago in a journal called Cell Metabolism and what the researchers did in the study, they asked the question Can ultra-processed foods increase the number of calories that we’re taking?  So what they did was they took people to the NIH. They have kind of like a research area, which is almost like a hotel. People can stay there and you can control the foods that people are eating and monitor them and everything. And what they did was they put the participants in a study in this environment and they gave them. Two weeks of ultra-processed foods where your diet was all processed and you can snack on as many ultra-processed foods as you would like. You do that for two weeks. And I also had people cross over to doing unprocessed meals with unlimited, unprocessed snacks for two weeks. And then they compared and contrasted how much people ate when they were eating these different types of foods. And they also looked at hormone levels and weighed in various other markers, so they tried to match the unprocessed and the ultra-processed meals perfectly for calorie calories, energy macronutrients as your carbs and protein and stuff, and then sugar, sodium, and fiber.So they tried to make it as equal as possible, here’s an example of one of the ultra-processed meals now at face value. At face value, this doesn’t look too bad. And that’s how these ultra-processed meals are. Sneaky. Sneaky, so here is canned chili, and you got some cheese that obviously came from a bag. Then you have some canned peaches, some tortilla chips, some salsa from a jar and some sour cream, some apple juice. Here is one of the unprocessed meals they gave to the participants. And I would argue that they probably could even get a little bit better. And with on the unprocessed side of things. But, you know, obviously, you see some pecans, you got some clementines, you got a nice little salad with tomatoes and cucumbers and sunflower seeds. I presume this is a balsamic vinaigrette. Then, you know, it looks like some jasmine rice or so with probably some vegetables in there probably would have had brown rice because your white rice is processed. But you know this is why you need chefs helping out with some of these studies. We pay attention to those little fine details or even some dietitians. Then they also had broccoli, and I would have probably kept the red meat out of it. But this is what they included in the study. And even with the red meat, even with the white rice, what they found was after two weeks of doing the ultra-processed foods and also snacking on ultra-processed snacks, people ate about 500 calories extra on average. And they also gained a significant amount of weight during that two weeks, OK? And they checked hunger hormones. What they found was the levels of hunger. Hormones, specifically a hormone called ghrelin, was higher in people who were doing ultra-processed foods. So what that means is even though you’re taking in more calories while you were doing ultra-processed foods, even though you were gaining weight, you also were hungrier and they put people on this whole unprocessed diet where they’re doing more fruits and vegetables, more natural whole foods. And what they found was their weight went down, their hunger hormones decreased and they ate less calories. So it is something about the ingredients with ultra-processed foods that’s promoting weight gain.

Dr. Edwin McDonald: And again, Part of the American diet is 60 percent of it for the average person is ultra-processed. OK, so that’s what needs to change. And this is also one of the reasons why in America, about 40 percent of people want to have a body mass index greater than 30, which is one of the ways we define obesity. So, you know, we can talk about body mass index and how that could be controversial. There’s it’s definitely not a perfect measure, but it is one of the measures that we use to define what having extra weight looks like or what the categories of having extra weight are. So basically, our diet is a setup. So what can we do with this ultra-processed foods and food in general and in our diet to prevent nonalcoholic fatty liver disease? So let’s start with drinks, this is what we even get into the food. Let’s start with what people are drinking,, so obviously cutting out the ultra-processed drinks. So that is the foundation. So avoiding your processed juices, avoiding your processed teas. I’ve seen a lot of patients say, Oh, I’m drinking green tea, but then they’re getting the green tea that’s already pre-made in a bottle and it has a whole bunch of high fructose corn syrup. Like, I think I tell people to just get to the basics. If you want to do tea, just brew it yourself. Sample of that. You’re in control on that situation now, specifically with fatty liver disease. There were some studies that demonstrated that coffee consumption was associated with a 33 percent decrease in fatty liver disease. Now, when I say coffee, I don’t mean the super sweet latte that has. Sugar and cream and, you know, an extra flavoring in it. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about plain filtered coffee and one with no sugar, no cream, just simple coffee. And bear in mind, you know, coffee at the end of the day is a plant-based drink. So coffee is, you know, comes from the, you know, we have coffee beans, so this is these come from plants. So we’re just talking about simple filter coffee. I don’t mean unfiltered coffee, which if you use some of the like stovetop espresso makers as an example of unfiltered or the French press would be unfiltered, the unfiltered coffee, the oils within the coffee that never get filtered out and in some people that actually can raise our cholesterol level. So I’m specifically talking about filtered coffee, and obviously, decreasing your alcohol intake is one of the ways and one of strategies to help decrease your risk of fatty liver disease. So decreasing your alcohol intake. I like to tell people that there’s no difference between light and dark liquor, so a lot of my patients, you know, here in Chicago, I tell people we got to, you know, drink less and people respond like, Oh, you know, I stopped drinking cognac and I just drink vodka. And their response, they want me to suggest that vodka is better. It’s not better. It’s all the same. It’s all alcohol.  So from a weight gain perspective, both of those can contribute to weight gain, so I’ve seen people try to transition from darker liquors to light liquor, thinking that it’s going to help them with weight loss. That is not a successful strategy for weight loss, nor is it a successful strategy for decreasing fatty liver disease.

Dr. Edwin McDonald: Now what about dietary patterns? So this is really what I want to emphasize because it’s one thing to eat these little one-offs or drink coffee here and there. That is not the foundation. The foundation is the pattern of eating that you do on a weekly basis, monthly basis, et cetera. So the majority of the studies have indicated that Whole Foods plant-based diets are associated with reversing or decreasing the risk of fatty liver disease. Now, the good thing about the liver up until a certain point, a lot of damage can be reversed. Now, if you tip this point where you get into cirrhosis and whatnot, where the liver is scarred, it’s hard to reverse that. You may be able to halt it, but it’s hard to reverse it completely. But in general, in terms of organs that are associated with reverse reversing disease, the liver is definitely an organ that has a higher likelihood of being able to reverse disease if we reverse our dietary patterns or liver lifestyle that’s associated with the disease reversal. Whole Foods plant-based diet, I do not mean shopping at Whole Foods all the time. I mean, I enjoy Whole Foods as much as the next person. But what I mean is eating foods in their whole form. So as minimally processed or unprocessed compared to ultra-processed, so what I mean in their whole form, instead of doing ketchup, eat tomatoes. So if you look at some of the guidelines for what counts as a vegetable, especially in a public school system, there’s always been a bunch of uproars that ketchup is considered tomato like it’s not. Ketchup is not, you know, nowhere near close to having the nutritional benefits as eating a tomato. And same with like, you know, apple juice. Apple juice is not the same as eating an apple. So stick with the whole food form as much as you can. Now, in general, this is one of the areas in which we struggle within America. So not only is our diet rich and ultra-processed foods, it’s notoriously low for vegetables. So only about nine points three percent of Americans, according to Heinz. Again, a large population database that we use for studying only about nine but three percent of the average American meets the guidelines for vegetable intake. And the guidelines are pretty low. So the guidelines only recommend per day about a cup and a half of vegetables. OK, that’s not a whole lot. If you transition to a plant diet or a plant-based diet, you’re going to eat way more vegetables on that given day. So a cup and a half of vegetables, you know, the average person on a plant-based diet may eat that in a meal, let alone an entire day. Now, the Mediterranean diet has also been associated with decreasing fatty liver disease, not only decreasing the risk but also reversing fatty liver disease and decreasing the risk of developing liver cancer. So what I fail to mention is that fatty liver disease not only can lead to scarring of the liver, which we call cirrhosis, which is in some people indication for a liver transplant. It also can lead to liver cancer, which is bad. I actually had an uncle who passed from liver cancer, so liver cancer is something that I, unfortunately, I’m all too familiar with, and it’s something that I do not want to see other people be at risk for. So a Mediterranean diet is slightly different than a plant-based diet, but it’s still a plant for die. So it’s more or less a plant-based diet where fish is a plant-based diet with seafood more or less, and maybe a significant emphasis on olive oil. But at the end of the day, the Mediterranean diet, I think the benefits of the Mediterranean diet are really mediated by the increased consumption of plant-based foods. So it’s not the fish that’s the sole thing that’s doing it. It’s really avoiding a bunch of red meat, avoiding a bunch of processed foods and increasing in and take of fruits and vegetables. So if there are any questions, I think we should get into it now chef AJ or people can check out my website, The Doc’s Kitchen dot com, where I write about food and nutrition and everything.

Chef AJ: Great. Wow. Thank you so much. You know, I just had no idea that 80 million people suffered from nonalcoholic fatty liver disease.

Dr. Edwin McDonald: Yes, unfortunately, it’s very common, and I feel like it’s one of the reasons why I wanted to talk about this topic because I don’t think it gets the justice it deserves. And ultimately, you know, I’ve seen people get liver transplants from this. So a lot of times with liver disease, everyone assumes in order to get liver disease, it’s alcohol where everyone assumes people have liver disease, have hepatitis like hepatitis C or hepatitis B with hepatitis C. We have a cure for hepatitis C, so the medications work well for hepatitis C. Hepatitis C is essential, you know, at some point probably going to be eradicated from the United States as long as people have access to the medications that we have. Now fatty liver disease could be eradicated, but we have to dramatically change the way we’re eating. And if we don’t, that 80 million is going to that number is going to increase. So easily can be projected as being 150 million. And it parallels the numbers expected that we’re going to see for people who have extra weight in terms of obesity. So, you know, by 2030, they expect, you know, almost half the United States are going to officially fall into the category of obesity. So not being overweight, but I mean, having obesity. So, you know, this is really an opportunity for us to think about, you know, not only individual strategies to help us lose weight and help us prevent weight gain, but really to think about public health strategies. And even, you know, I know you have done a lot with YouTube. So before listeners, before we got on the show, I was talking to chef AJ about one of my patients who saw a video I did on her platform, and that made her decide to become my patient. So I think strategies like this are important because what you’re doing really, in my opinion, as a public health strategy, getting that information out to the public and doing in a way that’s relatable and accessible is important. And I feel like more platforms like this, especially when the information is reliable and factual, we need to figure out ways to elevate that and not only to. Evaded for public access, but hospitals. I mean, this is the stuff that should be on the hospital TV show. So when you log into the when you go into the hospital and you’re walking around like we should have Chef AJ show on the hospital TV.

Chef AJ: Well, that would be great.

Dr. Edwin McDonald: You know, on a side note, I’ve made a lot of significant strides at the University of Chicago. So if you walk into the university of Chicago nowadays on the TV, you will see me cooking.

Chef AJ: That is so cool. You know, one of the experts on Summit, Dr. Fuhrman, was talking about how excess body fat can increase your risk of all cancers. So are you saying that people with the nonalcoholic fatty liver disease actually have an increased risk for liver cancer?

Dr. Edwin McDonald: Definitely, definitely. And as a gastroenterologist, having excess weight can increase your risk for all of the cancers that idea with his gastroenterologist. So not only liver cancer, but colon cancer, which I really spent a lot of time trying to prevent colon cancer by doing colonoscopies in addition to educating people about the role diet has and colon cancer. But it also increases the risk of pancreatic cancer. And in gastric cancer and maybe even esophageal cancer. So I hate cancer. I really do. And unfortunately, as a nutrition person, I not only focus on helping people lose weight, but I also focus on people who can’t gain weight, who can’t eat. And a significant portion of my patient population are folks who have cancer. And the reason why they can’t eat is that cancer may have affected their organs or they’ve had surgery that’s left them with an inability to eat or they’re actively on chemotherapy and chemotherapy. And, you know, do the side effects may impact their ability to eat? So, you know, these are situations that I don’t want to see anyone in. And it is one of the reasons why I emphasize really trying to adopt a healthier diet early on, especially one that is plant-forward, a plant-based because these are the foods that have ingredients that may have anti-cancer properties. So they may decrease your risk of developing cancer and even if you do develop cancer, there may be a role for those foods. So I’m not saying that the foods by themselves would get rid of cancer we had. We have to do more studies to make those statements, but they may play a role in helping with your overall recovery. I feel comfortable in saying that.

Chef AJ: you know, I was blown away by what you said. Only 9.3 percent of Americans meet the daily guidelines for vegetable intake. Well, first of all the percentage was so low, but that what they thought was a serving one point five cups a day, i.e. probably two pounds of non-starchy vegetables a day. That’s very dismal.

Dr. Edwin McDonald: Yeah, no, it’s very dismal. I mean, like I said in my smoothie this morning, like I already got a day’s worth just in that smoothie, probably more than that. So it’s not for a lot of people who are overwhelmed about, you know, eating vegetables. You just got to do it. You just have to do it. And another thing that was interesting. They stratify that for income. So they let that maybe poor people are eating less vegetables because it’s hard to avoid vegetables. Let’s look at rich people and see what people in the highest income bracket were doing. So what they found was even in people in the highest income bracket, that number went from nine point three percent to 11 percent. So even people who are making money are not eating enough fruits and vegetables. And I think in the lowest income bracket, the average was seven point three percent or so of people in the lowest income bracket we’re actually meeting those guidelines. So this is something that is problematic for everyone, not just people who may not have enough resources. OK. And yes, we need to make make sure everyone has access to fruits and vegetables and a healthy diet. So I’m a big fan of identifying reasons why people don’t have those resources and figuring out how to get those resources. But regardless, even people who have the resources we need to do better.

Chef AJ: Well, that’s why it blew me away when my parents are from Inglewood, actually, and they passed away, but still to think that nine miles can make such a difference.

Dr. Edwin McDonald: Huge difference, a huge difference. And you know, it’s something if you drive to Inglewood right now and you drive through downtown Chicago, the neighborhood that had a life expectancy of 90 years. It is, you know, that difference is tangible. Like, you see it, you feel it. You know, downtown, you can’t walk around without tripping over Whole Foods. Whereas Inglewood, you can’t walk around while tripping over junk food places.

Chef AJ: You know, it’s such a disparity. You know, when you said, I believe it was in 1970, we started increasing our caloric intake by 523 calories. Was that because of the increase in the amount of ultra-processed food? Because I think about the study, you talked about where the people were given ultra-processed food for two weeks and they gained weight. And you’re saying that 60 percent of the calories of most people are from ultra-processed food. So do you think there is a coincidence there?

Dr. Edwin McDonald: It’s not a coincidence. And I mean the increase of availability of available calories. There’s a long, complicated back story. Some of it has to do with farming practices, subsidies, and the farm bill. So case in point in the 1970s that is where we shifted to using more high fructose corn syrup and whatnot. So a lot of that was due to certain entitlements that farmers were given to, you know, meet production standards, but and also, you know, of technology. So farmers were able to make more food. We figured out ways to process the food a little bit better, so it lasts on the shelf a little bit longer. And now we have more calories available to us. So it’s a problem that we need to learn how to navigate. And even we also need to figure out how to better or equitably distribute the food that we have here across the globe. So, you know, on the one hand, it’s very odd that we’re dealing with this global weight gain epidemic, but we still have starvation and starvation not only in foreign countries but starvation in the United States. So similar in Inglewood, you have people who are simultaneously eating a whole bunch of junk food and gaining weight. But then you also people have people who can’t afford food and who are food insecure. Food insecurity. So tackling some of these issues simultaneously, it’s complicated, but I think we can do it. I’m a man of hope.

Chef AJ: You know, I thought it was so interesting when you said that when they surveyed people, why they eat ultra-processed food, that affordability, ease and convenience was the main reason, not even taste.

Dr. Edwin McDonald: Yeah. You know, certain foods when I think about it. So after transitioning to a healthier diet? Myself, you know, I’ve been, you know, doing, you know, plant-based or vegan vegetarian plant for, you know, having one say it for years and I’ve gone through multiple iterations of what that looks like. But after transitioning to, you know, really thinking more about how food can impact my own health. Certain, you know, processed foods that I grew up, ultra-processed foods that I grew up with in Chicago, if I try to taste those nowadays, they taste terrible. I can’t do it. Somebody gave me some flaming hots, and once upon a time when I was a kid, I’m like flaming hots are amazing and I’m tasting one as an adult or, you know after I transition to a healthier diet and I can’t do it. And the same thing with certain pops like, you know, it’s 15 years ago, I probably bled ginger ale. But if I did ginger ale right now, it just doesn’t taste the same. I look forward to just a glass of water. There’s nothing tastier to me than a cold glass of water when you’re really thirsty, and that’s all I really need. But I say all that to say that the taste may not be driving. Some of the foods are tasty. So I get it, you know, french fries, delicious potato chips, delicious. But ultimately in that survey, it wasn’t the taste. It was the convenience.

Chef AJ: If only we could find a way to make whole food as convenient and as affordable as ultra-processed food. That would solve a lot.

Dr. Edwin McDonald: Yeah, and we can. I mean, and there’s you know, there one a lot of politicians who are thinking about how to do that. So I had the opportunity at some point to meet with Cory Booker before the farm bill was passed and Cory Booker was here in Chicago. And we briefly got the chit-chat about the farm bill and how to make foods more affordable and accessible. So I think we do have politicians who are fighting for that. But you know, unfortunately, that fight is not the fight that’s elevated in the media. So what’s elevated in media is the fight and especially in the era of COVID is, you know, who’s wearing masks? Who’s not wearing masks. What’s being taught in schools, which I know I get it. It’s all important stuff. But you know, when we live in a world where 80 million people have fatty liver disease and are potentially at risk for needing a transplant, which one we don’t have enough livers for that 80 80 million people, this is a problem. And we also live in a world where you know, people are dying from heart attacks and having cancers, and we’re spending billions and billions of dollars on health care when yet we’re not simultaneously having a real conversation about, you know, how do we prevent these Can-Do conditions that you know, honestly, our country can’t afford? We talk about the national debt. We don’t have money like. I don’t say not pay for this stuff. Yes, we need to pay for health care, but let’s figure out how to decrease the need for health care. And that’s, you know, getting more access to fruits and vegetables. So, you know, their strategies. And there’s honestly, there’s a lot of entrepreneurs are trying to do this. So in Chicago, a good example of an entrepreneur, there’s this concept what’s known as the love fridge. So love the fridge, small little fridges that are public that are popping up in corners, in areas of need and just fruits and vegetables. And you know, people can come in and get food from the love fridge.

Chef AJ: I love that. I’ve never heard of that. That’s amazing.

Dr. Edwin McDonald: Yeah, that’s totally amazing. Like, I actually want to start doing some cooking demonstrations with the organization that started it. And where would we use just minimal foods from the love fridge and show people what they can do with them.

Chef AJ: I love that. You know, when you talked about how in the study where they gave people only ultra-processed food for two weeks, yeah, that it increased the hunger hormone ghrelin. Yeah, I’m thinking that maybe that accounts for the caloric increase because of eating these foods keeps making them hungry because of the lack of fiber and micronutrients, they’re going to have to eat more to feel satisfied.

Dr. Edwin McDonald: Yeah, no, definitely. And it’s not only the ghrelin going up, and it probably also has something to do with dopamine release. And so a lot of these foods may trigger dopamine release that makes them a little bit pleasurable to eat. So this has been demonstrated, especially in mouse studies. So say you give like mice a whole bunch of potato chips and whatnot and do an MRI on the mice. The area of the brain that are associated with dopamine, which is the pleasure neurotransmitter or the pleasure center of the brain, like all that lights up when the mice eat potato chips, they have done similar studies where they go to bed like mice eating Oreo cookies and cocaine. So cocaine, you know, lights up the pleasure center, but also the Oreo cookies do. And it’s funny in some studies when the mice have access to both cocaine Oreo cookies, the mice would freely go back to the Oreo cookies and not so the cocaine. Yale has done some good studies on food addiction, and they’ve come up with their Yale food addiction scale. So for my patients who have fatty liver disease, who have obesity, who are trying to figure out dietary strategies, and they’re trying to figure out how to eat less of the foods that they may possibly be addicted to. I like to talk about the Yale for Addiction scale, so chef AJ, what is the number one food that’s the most addictive food on the Yale food addiction? I want you to throw it out there.

Chef AJ: I’m going to guess it’s either pizza or chocolate. I just don’t know which of the two.

Dr. Edwin McDonald: Pizza, It is pizza. Pizza is I don’t know, to the human brain. It was something magical about pizza.

Chef AJ: It’s got everything. It’s got flour and sugar and salt and cheese.

Dr. Edwin McDonald: And fat and cheese. It will make the strongest person weak in their knees. OK, so pizza is addictive. Your chocolate and sweet threw off their potato chips and your french fries are out there. So I like to even give my patients, a list of the foods that are most addictive, and when people see that it makes it a little bit more tangible to help them identify the foods that they need to avoid to some degree. And when I say avoid, if you really are trying to do it the way, that’s easiest. Don’t buy it. Just don’t bring it into your home. And a lot of people have had to learn that lesson the hard way. We’re like, you know, you buy your favorite chips and we’re not like, Oh, I’m only going to eat a little bit like this stuff has the ability to override our sensibilities. And that’s not a willpower issue or anything like that. This is really just how these foods impact the human brain.

Chef AJ: Absolutely. You know, one of the most profound things I heard you say was how when you went to church, they would pray for people to get better yet serve them the food that made them sick in the first place. And I immediately thought of hospitals. Hospitals do interventions to get people better, but they continue to serve them the same food that made them sick.

Dr. Edwin McDonald: Yeah, you know, something that is very odd and it’s something that I’m actively working on at the University of Chicago. But I noticed that when I was a resident or maybe a medical student, and I was on my cardiac ICU rotation. OK, so a lot of people come to the hospital with severe heart attacks like on the verge of dying. And you know, we’ll put stents in their arteries to open up the arteries to allow blood to flow. And this is, you know, really lifesaving stuff. And then afterward, you know, I see the hospital cafeteria bringing people hamburgers and french fries. You just had a heart attack and we’re giving you french fries. I mean, that’s almost as ridiculous as me as a physician, giving someone a cigarette after they had a heart attack. At one point in time they were, they were doing that in the hospital, and we now know that’s ridiculous. But it’s just as ridiculous to give somebody a hamburger after a heart attack, and that is what’s happening in hospitals across the country. And what I have not seen, at least in mass, I’ve not seen a lot of people leaving the hospital with tools for plant-based diets. And in a perfect world, you know, somebody had a heart attack. They need to see, you know, your YouTube channel like that should be part of the prescription.

Chef AJ: It’s unthinkable. I don’t know, even know what to say about it. Dr. McDonald, what do you say to your patients that maybe have given up hope that they could ever lose weight?

Dr. Edwin McDonald: Well, I tell people that weight loss is a journey. And as a lifelong journey, it’s not necessarily a soul destination. Even when you lose weight, you have to maintain the weight loss and it requires effort. So for people who’ve given up hope, oftentimes I addressed the reasons why they gave up hope and give them encouragement, so journeys are not necessarily easy, and there’s always wrong turns on the journeys. There are always setbacks on the journey. But just because you experience a setback or you experience a wrong turn, it is not a reason to give up. And I tell also tell people there’s no such thing as failure when it comes to this. To this, it’s really just learning opportunities. So if you change your day in such a way that it doesn’t generate the weight loss that you’re looking for, then that’s a learning opportunity. It’s not a reason to give up. It’s not a failure. It just means we have to modify what you’re doing, what you’re eating, and figure out something that works and that, you know, there’s some general stuff that may work for everybody. And then there are some nuances that vary from individual to individual. But ultimately, I would say, and when it comes to weight loss, don’t look for failures. Look for learning opportunities.

Chef AJ: I love that. So, Dr. McDonald, what’s the real truth about weight loss?

Dr. Edwin McDonald: The real truth is that it is not easy, but it’s feasible, but it’s doable. I’ve done it. I know you told me your story. You’ve done it. I’ve seen countless people do it, but it does take effort. And I feel like for most people, if you have the expectation that the way it is is going to fall off by itself or with a pill or with a supplement that may not necessarily be the realistic expectation you have to really look at your lifestyle, including your dietary patterns and your physical activity patterns as the foundation.

Chef AJ: Right. Thank you so much, Dr. McDonald.

Dr. Edwin McDonald: Thank you, Chef AJ always good seeing you.

Chef AJ: Hi, Dr. B. And welcome to the Truth About Weight Loss Summit. Thank you so much for being here.

Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: Chef AJ, it is a great pleasure to be here with you today. Always great to connect with you, with your audience. And I’m excited to talk about my personal weight loss journey and what I think some of the things are that we’re underneath that, that can help people in their personal journey as well.

Chef AJ: Well, I’m always so excited to talk to you. And as a gastrologist and a New York Times best-selling author of the wonderful book Fiber Fuel. What does our gut have to do with our weight?

Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: Well, that’s exactly what we’re going to dig into today. So many times we think about weight in terms of calories in, calories out. You may think of it in terms of your metabolism, but I want to go even beyond that. And I want to talk about the connection between our gut and our metabolism to help you unpack and understand why working through your gut can be the solution to recalibrating your metabolism and achieving your weight loss goals.

Chef AJ: Fantastic. This is something really important for our viewers to learn.

Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: Excellent. So before I begin, I just want to say hello to everyone and I thank you for being here with me today and hope that this is something that will be helpful and useful to you as you move forward in your life. I think it’s important to frame how we think about these things to begin with. It frustrates me. It frustrates me as a doctor to see that you are being sold things that I don’t believe in, things that I don’t think actually work. Diet culture tells us that the way that we can accomplish our weight loss goals is by restricting, by removing by reducing, contracting our diet, less. And in some ways, this is actually very harmful, very dangerous. This is an approach that puts us in a position where we become separated from our food and we develop fear of our food. We no longer find joy, pleasure, love in our food, yet we’re human. We’re supposed to love our food. We’re supposed to find joy and pleasure there. And I think that the solution is actually the polar opposite. That’s what I want to talk to you about today. I think the solution is actually radical abundance, but of the right food. And so that’s what we’re going to talk about today. I’m going to pull up my slides here for everyone to see.

Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: The title of my talk is Fiber Fueled Weight Loss. And thank you again, everyone for having me. This is me. I don’t love looking at photos of myself from the past. I never have. Part of it is that I can look at this person right here. This is me in 2012. I’m 32 years old. I am a highly accomplished medical doctor, Med school at Georgetown, a residency in Northwestern, chief medical resident, won the highest award in my residency in Northwestern, even paid for me to get a degree, a master’s degree in clinical investigation, which was very nice to them. But anyway, here I am at the University of North Carolina, finishing my GI fellowship. And yet I’m a miserable 50 pounds over my high school weight. Digestive issues. I could not tolerate legumes or whole grains, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, extreme fatigue. I mean, to the point of not just enjoying a cup of coffee, but being completely dependent on coffee and energy drinks just to sustain myself during the day. Tons of anxiety. And part of why I don’t like looking back at these photos is there was such a severe level of low self esteem, low confidence. And I was blessed. I had someone come into my life who opened my mind, opened my eyes, changed me. I met my wife and after I met her, I started to dabble and experiment with plants, and started bringing them more into my diet. I mean, I can assure you at this time, I was literally two fast-food meals per day and less than 5% plant-based. And I started to expand the plants. I started to drink smoothies. And then over the course of time I came across this study. It was 2014. Diet rapidly and reproducibly alters the human gut microbiome. This is by Lawrence David, who’s at Duke. This was published in Nature, the top Journal on the planet. And he basically took people and gave them five days of a completely plant-based diet versus five days of a completely animal-based diet, meaning meat, dairy and eggs. And this is not him trying to prove, like, what’s better, carnivore or vegan? That’s not the issue. The issue is that in 2014, we actually did not have a clear indication yet that you could change your microbiome with your diet. So the idea was, let’s just give polar opposite diets and show that you can change your diet in between. So that’s what they did. And here’s what I saw when I read this paper, and I would encourage each of you to check it out. Five days, literally five days on a plant-based diet. Your gut microbiome is changing and it is changing for the better. You are enhancing good microbes. And these microbes, they get basically charged up with fiber, and then they turn that fiber into what are called short-chain fatty acids, which are the most anti-inflammatory molecules that I’ve ever come across. And we’re going to be talking more about those today. But then on the flip side, you look at the five days of the animal-based diet. Again, you’re changing your microbiome, but in this case, it’s actually kind of disturbing. What we see is that you’re getting more inflammatory microbes. These microbes are not helping to heal. They’re actually contributing to inflammation. You’re actually getting antibiotic resistance showing up in just five days of eating this way and you get a burst not of short-chain fatty acids. Actually, you get less short-chain fatty acids, but instead, you get a burst of secondary bile salts, which are carcinogens associated with cancer. So when I saw this man, I was motivated. I need more plants. What am I doing? Why would I eat meat? So let me move toward these plants. I started doing this more, and I also started to treat my patients with a plant-based diet. They’re getting amazing results in my gastroenterology practice. Then I came across another study. This came out in 2018. I was actually in 2017, in the front row of digestive disease week in Chicago. And there stands the lead author of the study, Rob Knight. He is the organizer of the American gut project, the largest study that exists. It’s actually a global study, not just Americans. The largest study that exists that allows us to make connections between our gut microbiome and our dietary choices. Now, let me tell you something. I doubt that Rob Knight is vegan. I don’t think that he has any agenda. I think that he’s a scientist and he’s trying to find the truths of biology that exist. And this is what they found. That there was a clear number one most important factor in terms of predicting a healthy gut microbiome. Perhaps you’ve heard me say this before. If you’ve read my book, then you know what I’m about to say. The single greatest predictor of a healthy gut microbiome is the diversity of plants in our diet.

Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: So I started eating more plants, but this time, more in abundance, in diversity, without restrictions, without limits, no calorie counting, just plant counting. And here’s what happens. This is me in my 40s, never feeling better, never feeling more energized, accomplishing all my goals. I have no clue where I get my protein from. I’m kidding. All plants have protein, but accomplishing my fitness goals. I’ve never been stronger. I’ve never been more fit. I’ve never felt younger, and I’m in my 40s. This is defying all of the expectations that I had for how I would feel at this point in my life. I believe that healing my gut was key to my transformation. That’s what I want to talk to you about today. So let’s talk about these gut microbes inside our gut, living inside you, particularly in your colon, the large intestine. There are an insane number of these invisible species, these invisible microorganisms, and they are as alive as you and I are. 38 trillion gut microbes, mostly bacteria, also some fungi, archaea, in some cases, parasites and viruses. The number of gut microbes actually outnumbers our human cells, and they account for 99.5% of our genetic code. Like, literally 200 times more of our genes come from gut microbes than from ourselves. And we each have a diverse, abundant mix of different species of these gut microbes between 300 and 1000 and they’re connected to the things that are really the crucial parts of human health. They are absolutely critical for our digestion. This is why people who have damage to their microbiome come to see me. They have digestive disorders, right? They allow us to unpack and get access to the nutrients in our food. What’s more organic and necessary for a healthy life than that? They’re connected to our immune system. 70% of our immune system is right there in our gut talking to them. They’re literally talking to thm right now while we sit here connected to our brain, our mood, our cognition, the way we think, our metabolism, our hormonal balance, and even our genetic expression, they are powerful.

Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: Today we’re going to focus on this, the connection between our gut microbes and our metabolism. Now when you look at damage to the gut microbiome, we call this Dysbiosis. I’m going to show you what Dysbiosis looks like in a moment, but just know that this is a loss of balance within the gut when a person has Dysbiosis. Here’s a list that I showed in chapter one of fiber fuel of the metabolic conditions. These are just the metabolic conditions associated with a damaged gut microbiome. Obesity, type two diabetes, coronary artery disease, high cholesterol, chronic kidney disease, gouts, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. You go down the line. On this page, I have listed several of the top ten causes of death in the United States or things that contribute to our most dangerous medical conditions. So what is Dysbiosis? Well, let’s take a look at this picture here. This is straight out of a medical Journal. So forgive me for being a bit nerdy, but on the left is homeostasis. This is a balanced gut. This is where we want to be. On the right is Dysbiosis. This is the gut that’s fallen out of balance. So with homeostasis, what you see up here, the blue microbes are the good guys. The red microbes are the bad guys. You have a mix. There’s some blue guys, there’s some red guys. Okay, it’s fine. They’re living in harmony. They’re living in balance. It’s okay. Everything is good. And you have these short-chain fatty acids, which are these molecules created by these microbes hard at work right there in the colon. 70% of the energy of your colon cells comes from these short chain fatty acids. How could you have a healthy colon without adequate short chain fatty acids? On the flip side, Dysbiosis, this is a damaged gut. On the Internet, you see, people refer to this as a leaky gut. Be a little careful what you read on the Internet. I don’t think you need me to tell you that, but Dysbiosis is when there’s a loss of balance. And what you see here is that there’s way less of the good guys. And the bad guys have kind of like taking over. They’re running the show now. And where are the short chain fatty acids? They’re nowhere to be seen. And as a result, this loss of balance Affects the ability of the gut to function the way that it’s supposed to. When the gut doesn’t function the way that it’s supposed to, all these different things, digestion, immunity, metabolism, mood, Our brain health, hormones, they all fall out of balance.

Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: So here’s some sort of evidence that I would use to support these things. If you give antibiotics to a pig, It will gain 16% more weight. Even when you feed it the exact same number of calories. If you give antibiotics to a child, the child is more likely to be overweight or obese. Each course or round of antibiotics is associated with a 7% increased risk of being overweight and a 6% risk of being obese later in life. And you can actually, in a lab, and they’ve done this a million times, this is not hard to do. You can transfer a person’s body type to an animal using just the gut microbes. So they do these studies Where they will take these mice that are called germ free. They don’t have a microbiome. They’re raised in unique conditions. They don’t have a microbiome. And we are going to donate from a human, in this case, a normal-sized human, an obese human, and an underweight human. So a human is basically giving a stool specimen, and that stool specimen is basically transferring microbes into these mice that don’t have a microbiome yet. They receive a new microbiome. And then what happens? You feed these three mice the exact same calories, the exact same amount of food. What do you find? The mouse with the normal microbiome becomes normal size. The mouse with the obese microbiome becomes obese. The mouse with the underweight microbiome becomes underweight. Same food, same calorie consumption, different results. In terms of body habitus, the microbiome is powerful.

Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: So today I want to talk about three ways that my metabolism was corrected by consuming fiber and healing my gut. And we’re going to play a little game of Where’s Waldo? Keep your eyes peeled for Waldo. Waldo loves fiber. He’s going to show up when there’s fiber. So, number one, you want a healthy metabolism. I want you to feel satisfied and full after you eat a meal. This is important Because if you don’t feel satisfied, you’re going to feel either deprived or inclined to consume more. So they did an experiment, and they fed a group of people, both a tofu burger and a pork and cheeseburger. Everyone received these two burgers. Okay? And let’s look at the characteristics of these burgers that people were eating. So the plant burger and the meat and cheese burger had the exact same number of calories and the exact same macros. There was a difference in terms of saturated fat. The meat and cheeseburger was high in saturated fat. There was a difference in fiber. No surprise. The plant’s burger was high in fiber. In fact, the fiber that you find in the meat and cheeseburger Is not from the meat and cheese. There is no fiber in meat and cheese. Zero. The fiber that you find in the meat and cheeseburger is the bun. That’s your 2.2 grams of fiber. There you go. Okay, so difference in fiber, difference in saturated fat, but same calories, same macros. You guys have been told it’s calories in calories out. What happens? So we’re looking here at the meat and cheeseburger in blue and the plant burger in Orange. And they had three groups within the study. One group had diabetes, one group was obese, and one group was healthy controls. What do we find? This is a satiety hormone. When this hormone goes up, you feel satisfied, you feel full, right? We want more of these hormones so that we can appropriately feel that satisfaction after a meal. This GOP one was higher in all three groups after consuming the plant-based burger. Same calories, same macros, different results in terms of your ability to feel satisfied. More satisfaction from the plants, peptide YY again, satiety hormone. What happens once again, higher levels of peptide YY among the plants versus the meat and cheeseburger? Once again, you get a higher level of satisfaction from eating something with the same number of calories coming from a plant. And no surprise, these hormones are higher. So what happens? How satisfied are these people after the meal? Did they feel like they had enough? The answer was in all three cases, diabetes, obesity and healthy controls. When they ate the tofu burger, they felt satisfied. When they ate the meat and cheeseburger, they didn’t get there. Disappointing. Same calories, same macros, more satiety with the plants. All right, let’s talk about one of my most favorite metabolism studies, perhaps my most favorite metabolism study. This is conducted by Kevin Hall, who is a researcher at the National Institutes of Health. He’s a metabolism researcher, and he decided to make a comparison between a plant-based diet and an animal-based ketogenic diet. Okay, so now, Kevin Hall is interesting because his approach to dieting to doing these studies is that he actually takes complete control. So what that means is that we’re not doing a survey. Hey, what did you eat this past week? Those things are really hard to have confidence in but instead he has people come and live with him on the campus of the NIH. They have a special what they call metabolic Ward where people actually come into the space and they take up residence, they stay there. And Kevin Hall’s team is basically delivering meals. All right, so they’re delivering meals. And in this study, what they said to these people is they said, we want you to eat until you’re full. We’ll bring you the food. Eat until you’re full. You want more food, we’ll bring you more. You want snacks, we’ll bring you snacks. Just eat until you’re full. So they have 20 adults body mass index of 27.8, that is considered overweight, not obese. Average age of 30. Among these 20 adults, all 20 did both diets. They did two weeks each and they crossed over. Now, which one they did first was randomized.

Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: Let’s look at the makeup of these diets a little bit. So on the left, we have the ketogenic diet, the animal-based ketogenic diet. On the right, we have the plant-based low-fat diet. And what you find is that the big difference was in terms of carbs versus fat. So the protein was pretty much the same. But the animal-based ketogenic diet, to be a ketogenic diet, you have to be low carb, 10% carbs, 76% fat, plant-based low fat diet, 75% carbs, 10% fat. Here’s the thing. Fiber is a carb. So if you go by carb, you’re chopping out the fiber, which is exactly what we see in this study. On the animal-based ketogenic diet, the average fiber intake was 8. 5 grams per 1000 kilocalories, whereas on a plant-based diet, standardized again to a thousand kilocalories, you’re getting 31.4. Now let me try to frame where this sits. Okay. The recommendation is for each of us to get 14 grams of fiber per 1000 kilocalories consumed. 14 grams is the goal at a minimum. So on the animal-based ketogenic diet, they are fiber deficient. On the plant-based diet, they’re in a great spot. They’re getting plenty of fiber. What happens? Well, in this graph, we’re looking at the time points from day zero to 14. Again, everyone did both diets. So every single day we see, step on the scale, how much do you weigh? And we’re looking at what happened to their body weight. Alright, so don’t be mad at me, but I’m going to share some bad news with you. But don’t worry, I got more to talk about with this. The bad news is this, the animal-based ketogenic diet led to increased weight loss.So you can see they rapidly lost weight for about nine days, and then it plateaued and leveled up. On the flip side, the plant-based diet took a little time to get started, but once it got started, it was very consistent. No leveling out is just coming down. But at the end of the day, after 14 days, people did lose more weight on a ketogenic diet. The facts are the facts. But hold on. Let’s look a little more closely at weight loss. Not all weight loss is the same.

Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: Let’s start with what is described as fat-free mass. Fat-free mass means you’re not losing fat, which is what we’re trying to lose when we lose weight. Fat-free mass means you are losing water and muscle. Now, before I show you this graph, I want you to ask yourself, do you want to lose water and muscle? Okay. So when we look at the fat-free mass, the water and muscle loss. Man, ketogenic diet, rocking, tons of loss of water and muscle on the ketogenic diet. A plant-based diet, pretty much a straight line across. People are not losing muscle mass on the plant-based diet. How about actual fat loss? That’s what we’re here for. What happens? People are burning fat on a plant-based diet. Ketogenic diet, actually not losing weight in the first seven days at all, not losing fat at all in the first seven days. And then they did lose some. That’s a head-scratcher. What’s going on here? Well, let’s break it down. They were told to eat until they were full. So they did. They achieved the same level of satiety, the same level of feeling full and satisfaction after their meals on both diets. Right? That’s what they were told to do. But hold up. Even though they have the exact same levels of satisfaction of satiety, literally every single person consumed less calories per day on the plant-based diet. In this column here, you can see how many calories they were consuming per day on the animal-based ketogenic diet. In this column here, you can see how many calories they were consuming per day on the plant-based diet. And in all cases, the line moves down, they’re consuming less calories. And if you look at this over the course of the 14 days, every single day of the 14 days when people were eating plant-based, they were consuming substantially less calories. And you averaged this out over the course of the two-week experiment and for every day that they were plant-based, they were consuming 689 kilocalories less per day. This adds up. 700 calories of deficit per day is a pound of weight loss in five days. This adds up the same level of satisfaction, same level of fullness, better results if you want to burn fat. So the bottom line is that when they were eating until they were full, people consumed less calories and they lost fat but not muscle on a plant-based diet. If you want to lose muscle and water, I would suggest the alternative.

Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: Am I surprised? No, I am not. Because there is something special that takes place when the fiber that you saw in the study comes into contact with the microbes that exist in our gut by themselves. By themselves, they’re not that great. Just being honest. Fiber without the microbes, not the special thing that I would be writing books about. But fiber with the microbes is so special, it’s worth celebrating because they release these microbes, consume the fiber for us, and release these short-chain fatty acids, the most anti-inflammatory molecule that exists. And Waldo seems to be very happy in the corner there. He’s very pleased with the short-chain fatty acids. Anytime you see me talk about short-chain fatty acids, bear in mind you can’t have short-chain fatty acids without involving the gut bugs. So if I talk about short-chain fatty acids, I’m talking about your gut, your gut’s at the heart of it. And if you look at short-chain fatty acids, which come from fiber consumption, right? We saw the tofu burger high in fiber. We saw the plant-based diet high in fiber. We saw how this affected satiety. How this affected satiety hormones. Guess what? Short-chain fatty acids that come from when fiber meets microbes stimulate the release of satiety hormones peptide yy and GOP one to activate satiety hormones in the hypothalamus. The gut is the key. 

Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: Another thing when it comes to metabolism, we want insulin sensitivity. It’s very important. So insulin resistance is when a person requires increased levels of insulin to achieve the same level of blood sugar balance. Problem is that insulin is a growth hormone. So, like, to me, insulin resistance is a measure of metabolic imbalance. When we have insulin resistance, we don’t have metabolic balance. And insulin resistance has been connected to a number of different things. High blood sugar, high blood pressure, altered blood lipids, visceral fat, high uric acid, high inflammatory markers, altered blood vessel function, increased blood clotting, can progress to type two diabetes, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, which, by the way, is soon to become the number one cause of cirrhosis in the United States. Metabolic syndrome, cardiovascular disease, or number one killer polycystic ovary syndrome. These are all connected.

Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: It’s an interesting study. So, like, does insulin resistance, with an unbalanced metabolism, affect our weight balance? Does insulin resistance contribute to obesity? So Han et Al, in the Journal of Pediatrics took a group of 95 non-diabetic overweight children, and they inserted them into a buffet, and they said, okay, guys, here’s your buffet, go ahead and eat, and we’ll see what happens. And here’s what they found. Insulin resistance, if there was an independent predictor of increased energy intake, insulin resistance may be part of what’s driving this flip side. Obesity causes insulin resistance. This is through something called lipotoxicity. If you’ve ever read Mastering diabetes, then you know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t read Mastering Diabetes, you should read Mastering Diabetes. Lipotoxicity is an oversupply of free fatty acids. Okay? Now, this oversupply can come from our diet, specifically when we consume saturated fats. Remember, I showed you the saturated fat intake on the tofu burger versus the animal-based burger. Saturated fats and trans fats in particular, contributes to this. But also, it can be an unequal capacity to store lipids. Or it can be that our adipose tissue is so stretched and swollen with free fatty acids that it starts to actually spill into the bloodstream. So the problem is, when these free fatty acids are showing up in the bloodstream, they start to look for places to disappear. They don’t want to be in the blood. So they basically start popping into our muscles, into our liver, into our pancreas.

Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: It turns out that when fat starts showing up in muscle, liver, and pancreas, this is how you create insulin resistance. Let me show you how. So you get cellular dysfunction in each one of these tissues. When we eat a meal, our blood sugar goes up. Skeletal muscle, our muscle accounts for 80% of our ability to basically bring our glucose level back down after a meal. If you have fat stuck in there, you are disrupting our ability to bring the glucose in the liver. Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease is an example of what happens when we start to deposit fat into the liver. And this can contribute to insulin resistance. And then finally in the pancreas, the fat deposition in the pancreas causes injury to the beta cells. This is problematic. Beta cells produce insulin, so you impair your ability to control your blood sugar because you can’t produce enough insulin because the fat is overtaking your pancreas. This creates a vicious cycle of insulin resistance and obesity. So I mentioned before, insulin resistance, these kids at the buffet causes an energy excess which leads to obesity. But obesity leads to this village of these free fatty acids, which is lipotoxicity, contributing back to insulin resistance and we can make it worse with the food that we eat. More saturated fat creates more free fatty acids, which basically feeds into the vicious cycle.

Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: So let’s think about the Kevin Hall study that I showed you a minute ago. Right. The NIH metabolism study, 20 people, plant-based versus keto-based. If this is true, then saturated fat intake should cause insulin resistance. Did it? Well, let’s go back. All right, so I showed you the animal-based, low in fiber, plant-based, high in fiber. But how about saturated fat? Animal-based. Look at the saturated fat content. 24.8 plant-based, a fraction, 2.1 grams. I mean, plants do contain saturated fat, but we’re talking about a fractional thing here compared to consuming an animal-based diet. And when they looked at this, they first measured free fatty acids. Remember, high free fatty acids are associated with lipotoxicity, which causes insulin resistance. On the animal-based ketogenic diet, as you can see, there were substantially higher levels of free fatty acids during the time after a meal. So eat your meal. Boom. Spiking free fatty acids, plant-based, not so much. And did it cause insulin resistance? Yes. They gave people a 75 grams of oral glucose tolerance test. This is the gold standard for testing a person for insulin resistance. And when a person has insulin resistance, what you’ll see is that when you give them sugar, they spike their sugar, they spike their glucose in their bloodstream. And that’s exactly what you see on the animal-based ketogenic diet. Both of these people receive 75 grams of glucose. One of them is spiking their sugar up to 175. The other one is going up to 140. It’s a big difference. Insulin sensitivity with greater satiety, reduced Cork intake, and fat loss occurred on the plant-based diet. And let’s bring it back to the gut. Remember, I told you, I think the gut is at the heart of this. Anytime we see short chain fatty acids, we know the gut is involved because you can’t create short chain fatty acids without our gut microbes. And there are studies that show that short chain fatty acids bind the receptors on our liver or pancreas, our fat cells and our muscle. This is what I’ve shown you, is exactly where the question of insulin sensitivity is being determined. All four places short-chain fatty acids. They go there, they leave the gut, they go there, and they decrease lipid overflow, reduce fatty acid deposition in these tissues, enhance fat breakdown and enhance insulin sensitivity. We’ve just fixed the problem. And the solution is short-chain fatty acids that come from fiber.

Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: Lastly, we want to avoid metabolic endotoxemia. So if you haven’t heard of metabolic endotoxemia, I’m going to introduce you. So it turns out that living inside of us, we have these microbes that are called gram negative microbes. And it’s based upon how they look when you stain and look under the microscope. These gram negative microbes, they have something in their cell wall that’s called bacterial endotoxin, sometimes called LPS. And they can enter your bloodstream when you have an infection. And it can spike so hard that you end up with a person like this. I’ve seen this so many times as a medical doctor, I’ve taken care of these people. They get an infection. The infection causes a spike in metabolic endotoxin, which basically causes them to have rapid heart rate drop in their blood pressure. They start breathing about 30 or 35 times a minute. They become confused. Eventually they just shut down. Their brain shuts down. They can’t function anymore and this is life threatening. This is what you see in a life threatening infection. Now, that’s not the only form of metabolic endotoxemia, though, right? That is a spike in these endotoxins. But I want to talk about a chronic, persistent, low grade release of bacterial endotoxin. And that’s what we see in people who have damage to their gut microbiome. You get the release of this metabolic of this bacterial endotoxin at levels that are 1.5 or ten times higher than baseline, and it causes inflammation. Here’s what we know. If you feed a mouse a high fat diet, it will develop increased endotoxin levels. And with that increased fat deposition, higher inflammation, higher inflammation in the muscles, the liver, the fat. Muscles, liver and fat, that’s where the insulin resistance is. You get insulin resistance. It leads to a cascade of events that disrupt the metabolism. If you inject bacterial endotoxin into a mouse, you see all this as well. It’s the bacterial endotoxin. This is what’s causing trouble. And these endotoxin levels in humans have been found to be twice as high in those with obesity, type two diabetes, and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.

Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: Now let’s zoom in on the gut for a moment. Here. Let’s look first at a healthy gut. A healthy gut is lined by cells, and these cells are basically fused together with things called tight junctions. And these tight junctions help to make these cells into a barrier, a wall. Imagine a medieval fortress, and that wall is intact, and it’s helping to protect the Castle. That’s what we have inside of a healthy gut. And as a result of that, although this right here is bacterial endotoxin, although bacterial endotoxin does exist inside of our colon, It is not causing trouble because we have an intact barrier that is protecting us and keeping it out of our bloodstream. But on the flip side, when a person develops a leaky gut with increased intestinal permeability, where these tight junctions that are holding these cells together, they get popped open. As A result of that, there are literally gaps between these cells. There’s holes. It’s like punching a hole into the wall of our medieval fortress. And now the invading army has a clear path to the Citadel. So easy. Come on in, guys. We’ve opened it up for you. And what you see is that the bacterial endotoxin that used to stay just inside the movement of the intestine is now creeping through and entering into our bloodstream, and that’s how you get endotoxemia.

Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: So how does diet affect endotoxin levels? Well, they did a study with eight healthy subjects, again in a metabolic ward, and they did one month of a Western diet, which is high in fat, low in carbs, high in saturated fat, low in fiber, versus one month of a prudent diet. This was not a vegan diet, but it was a health-based diet that was very high in plants, equal calories, lower in fat, higher in carbs, the exact same protein, but it’s low in saturated fat and it’s very high in fiber. What happens, what you see is that when people ate a Western diet for a month, they increased their bacterial endotoxin levels by 71%. Every single person in image A, saw an increase. Every single person who ate this way had metabolic endotoxemia. Flipside, the prudent diet. What we see is that every single person consuming the prudent diet had a decrease in their bacterial endotoxin levels. They are protecting themselves from metabolic endotoxemia, and there was a decline of 31%. Actually, I should correct that. I made one mistake. There is one person that appears who did go up in terms of their bacteria endotoxin levels. So that would be an outlier, but on average, a decrease of 31% of bacterial endotoxin.

Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: How about if we add fiber to a high-fat meal? That’s what they went to find out. By the way, Waldo’s popping up again. He loves fiber. Ten subjects, and these subjects, they did a high-fat meal with an egg muffin and a sausage muffin and two hash browns. But they did this meal either with or without 30 grams of fiber from cereal. Okay, calories are the same, same number of calories. The difference here is one contains a higher amount of fiber and the other one contains almost none. And what you see if you measure a person’s endotoxin levels after this meal is that when they eat the diet without fiber, it is ramping up for 3 hours. Your bacterial endotoxin levels are rising for 3 hours. Flipside, you have fiber. Guess what? You don’t nearly achieve the same levels of bacterial endotoxin. It peaks at 1 hour and immediately starts to decline. We have blunted the response. So they’re eating a bad meal either way. But at least if they get the fiber in there, they’re creating some protection because the fiber is in there. But what if the fat wasn’t there? A high-fat diet, specifically saturated fat, drives metabolic endotoxemia. And you can attenuate this, you can attenuate some of the injury by adding fiber and it all comes back to the gut, right? I’ve been saying this. It all comes back to the gut. Fiber connects with gut microbes. Got microbes in our gut. Really? Short-chain fatty acids. And the short-chain fatty acids have been shown to enhance the growth of the good gut bugs, suppress the growth of the negative bugs, repair the tight junctions, bring them back together, restore competence to the barrier, and reduce endotoxin release. And because of this, they even directly modulate the immune system for an anti-inflammatory effect. Everything that we’re looking for is there because we consume fiber, because fiber connects with gut bugs to produce short-chain fatty acids.

Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: So here’s the bottom line from my talk today. Short-chain fatty acids from dietary fiber connect with gut bugs. And what we get as a result of the short-chain fatty acids are enhanced satiety, insulin sensitivity, and reduced metabolic endotoxemia. And these are three pathways that help to optimize and balance our metabolism so that we can have the weight balance that we ultimately want. This is not just theoretical and this is not just the anecdote of, hey, Dr. B changed his diet and then lost a lot of weight. It’s not just that. Okay, let’s look at the Adventist two studies and what we see. Vegan, vegetarian, pescetarian, semi-vegetarian and not vegetarian. And what you see is watch as the fiber is rising, as you move towards veganism. And guess what? The body mass index is declining. In fact, if you look at the Adventist two studies, there’s only one group that has a normal body mass index, and that is the vegan group. Each of the other four groups is considered overweight.

Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: I can’t talk about fiber without bringing in my absolute favorite fiber study of all time, Andrew Reynolds. He’s from New Zealand. This was published in The Lancet on February 2, 2019. This is the largest, most powerful study ever to allow us to look at the effects of fiber, like literally 120,000,000 person years of data, which is absurd. And specifically, when looking at fiber and weight balance, they did a review of 27 randomized controlled intervention trials and they involved 2495 study participants. Here’s what they found. When people increased their dietary fiber, they lost weight. The quality of the evidence was graded as high. Now, that wasn’t the only benefit. See, in this study. This is again the largest study to date, allowing us to look at the connection between dietary fiber and human health. People who consumed more fiber lived longer with less heart disease. They were less likely to die from heart disease. That’s our number one killer. They were less likely to be diagnosed with colon esophageal, breast cancer. They were less likely to die from cancer. That’s our number two killer. They were less likely to have a stroke. That’s our number five killer. They were less likely to be diagnosed with diabetes or number seven killer. And by the way, in interventional randomized control trials, they have lower blood pressure and lower cholesterol by simply consuming more fiber. So to be clear, I’m not saying that fiber is the only thing that matters. There are polyphenols, there are phytonutrients, there’s the food matrix. They’re all very important. There’s also sustainability and consistency. These things are very important. You need to find a diet that works for you. And there are other approaches to weight loss that are important as well. It’s not just what you eat. It can be exercise, time restricted eating, sleep, stress management. These are important factors. So there are many different mechanisms for weight loss. But what I am saying is that a diverse, abundant, plant-based diet is the optimal choice for energy balance, metabolic health, and gut health. You’ve been sold a bill of goods with restrictions, with reduction, with removal, when in fact, the solution is adding, abundance and counting plants instead of calories and finding joy in your food, finding pleasure in your food, eating until you’re full, and allowing your body to fall into balance the way that it was supposed to. And this will translate into fiber fueled weight loss for those of you who want it.

Dr. Will Bulsiewicz:  For those of you who haven’t heard yet, I am very excited. I have a new book coming up. So I’ve had a lot of people who reached out to me after the success of fiber fuels. And they wanted more. They wanted more recipes. Guess what? You’ll have them. They wanted delicious food. Guess what, Alex Caspero is back. You’ll have delicious food. But there was one thing that I wanted and I put it into this book. I wanted to offer a tool that would help people who have food intolerances. I sit in a room with people who suffer with food intolerances. It’s hard for them to find joy in their food. Their food hurts them. And because we need food to live, they repeatedly are traumatized by their relationship with their food on a daily basis. And I wanted to find a way to break that cycle. And I wanted to use my platform and this opportunity to write a book to actually create a tool that could transform a person’s life who suffers with food intolerances. This is what some of the recipes look like. The recipes were photographed by Ashley McLaughlin. Complete full-color cookbook, 125 recipes. But in addition, eleven chapters. I wrote a new book. This is literally an entire book that also happens to include 125 recipes and full-color photos. I teach about the growth strategy. This is the approach to fixing food intolerances. I have two protocols, well, low FODMAP and low histamine. I also, by the way, teach you how to sprout, how to ferment, how to make sourdough bread. These are important things in my kitchen. These are important things for gut health. And I want them to be in your kitchen. So I thank you, everyone, for allowing me to come and speak to you today. Thank you, Chef AJ, for inviting me. You can find more at this website, theplantfedgut.com/cookbook. And if you’re not following me on social media, please do. I would love to connect with you guys and hear more.

Chef AJ: Wow. This was amazing. I’ve heard it said by many gastroenterologists that all disease begins and ends in the gut but what I’m learning from your presentation, Dr. Will, is that weight loss also begins and ends in the gut.

Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: I think that what it comes back to Chef AJ, is that I said in the beginning, our gut is connected to our digestion, immune system, metabolism, hormones, our mood, and our brain health. Okay, this talk, we lifted up the hood on the gut metabolism connection. We’re zooming in, we’re taking a look, and I’m showing you the specific reasons. These three specific ways because your gut can produce short-chain fatty acids. When you eat plants, you have the ability to rebalance your metabolism, and you will derive the results of this without restriction, without removing, without putting yourself in a position where you are fearful of your food. You can gravitate towards food that you love. You can eat it in abundance with joy and diversity, and you can accomplish your weight loss goals in that process.

Chef AJ: I love that because so many people come from a background of restricting food, counting calories, carbs, points where they’re weighing and measuring their food on a plate. They’re restricted to, like, 7oz of vegetables. And how are they ever going to get the diversity of plants eating 7oz of vegetables?

Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: They’re not. And those diets are not sustainable. And there’s a reason why we’re all fed up with the fad diets that perhaps give us weight loss in the very beginning. And then we rebound and we bounce right back up and we end up less healthy than the way that we began. You all saw in my presentation. This is not me speculating. This is high quality research from the National Institute of Health, from one of our leading metabolism researchers, showing us that, yes, you will lose weight on a ketogenic diet. That’s water and muscle mass, that’s not fat. If we want fat loss, then what we do is we should lean into something that is sustainable, that does not require restriction, that does not require you to go to bed hungry, but instead eating until you’re full, but making it the right food and then you win.

Chef AJ: That was mind-blowing in the study, how by eating the same amount of satiety, they ate something like almost 700 less calories.

Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: Yeah. And the beauty of that is that this is a demonstration of biology and the way that our body works when we consume fiber. Fiber connects with microbes. Microbes release short-chain fatty acids. Short chain fatty acids go to our hypothalamus by producing these satiety hormones, and we feel full.

Chef AJ: I mean, I knew from your book how important fiber was to pretty much all bodily processes, but I had no idea how important they were to increasing these satiety hormones. It’s just going to make it so much easier for people to lose weight.

Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: Yeah.This is why, as I sat there in 2018, my book Journey started in 2018. And as I sat there in 2018 and looked at the medical literature and I said, everyone is talking about this and that, restrictive diets and whatnot. The solutions that they’re proposing for gut health are the opposite of what the medical literature is showing us. Let’s allow science to be our Compass and that Compass is going to guide us to better results when we just lean into that.

Chef AJ: I’m wondering if you feel that maybe some people need to fix their gut before even attempting to, quote, reduce weight, because so many people that watch this summit the last four years say, well, I’ve tried to eat more plants, but I get gassy, I get bloated, and I give up.

Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: Yeah. So this is a great point. How can you be successful in balancing your metabolism and eating a diverse, abundant diet if you are suffering because of the food that you’re trying to eat? And again, the solution is not to withdraw these foods that are causing gas and bloating. The solution is to rise above, to train your gut to make it stronger, to restore function, and to find yourself with the ability to consume these foods without restriction. And that is entirely possible. And that is exactly what my new book is about. The fiber filled cookbook is again, you want recipes? I got recipes. Delicious food. I got delicious food. But you know what? If you suffer with food intolerances, if you’re one of these people who are like, I don’t think I can eat that way, doctor B. That’s why I created this book for you. We have to level the playing field. I wanted a book where every single person can show up in the same book, and we can all find joy together in eating delicious food in general.

Chef AJ: Do you recommend people get their calories from whole plants versus processed plants? Because, for example, olive oil has become very controversial in general. And I’m wondering how you feel about weight loss.

Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: Yeah. So all dietary choices end up falling on a totem pole where you can always make healthier choices and you can always make less healthy choices. And for each one of us, it’s about finding balance where we feel very comfortable and it is sustainable and we’re happy with our dietary choices. All right. So with regards to this specific question, though, I feel that the consumption of oil, so there is no more calorie-dense food that exists on the planet. And I’ve just given you a talk that heralded the benefits of consuming fiber in your diet. And I can tell you what the fiber content of any oil is. It doesn’t matter what the oil is. It’s all the same. The fiber content is zero. So if the goal is weight loss, I don’t see the value in consuming olive oil. Now, that being said, there is this part where it’s like, this is about sustainability. And so at the end of the day, you have to find what works for you. And there can be an entry point into a plant-based lifestyle where you find joy and happiness that begins with the consumption of oil and as you move towards accomplishing your weight loss goals, you remove it. That’s okay. And you are more than welcome here. I want you here.

Chef AJ: That’s great. I don’t know if people even realize that there’s no fiber in oil, just like in the slides you showed versus the plant burger versus the meat burger. I think a lot of people don’t even realize that there’s no fiber in animal products, that any fiber on that slide came from the bun.

Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: There are three major classes of prebiotics, Chef AJ. There are three major classes. Prebiotics, by the way, are the food for our gut microbes. This is what they consume. And the three major classes are fiber, resistant starches and polyphenols. Polyphenols are antioxidant compounds. Well, guess what? All three of these are exclusive to plants. You will not find them anywhere else, with the exception of mushrooms. I should add mushrooms because they’re fungi. So technically, they’re not plants, and they do contain these. But plants and mushrooms. That’s it.

Chef AJ:Well, the other thing, I’ve had Dr. Barbara Rolls as one of the experts on the Summit, and there’s something about fiber that is just so filling.

Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: Yeah. And we saw that in the tofu burger versus the animal-based burger, where same calories, same macros. Yet the tofu burger, because it was high in fiber, activated the peptide YY, the GP one. These two satiety hormones. And so even though these people were consuming the exact same number of calories, the exact same macros. They felt greater satisfaction when they ate the plant-based burger. They felt full.

Chef AJ: I don’t know if you’ve ever dealt with this, but how does someone who’s had gastric bypass surgery, how does that affect their microbiome? Because aren’t they actually cutting some of it out?

Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: There is a clear shift. So there’s multiple different types of bypass surgeries. There’s the traditional gastric bypass surgery, which is probably referring to Chef AJ. But then there’s other ones, like, for example, a sleeve gastrectomy. And each one of these, when they look it’s actually quite fascinating because the body starts to have changes to the metabolism that occur almost immediately within the first few days. And one of the things that’s taking place is that there is a shift in the gut microbiome as a result. So to look at the gut microbiome in these cases, you have to look at each individual surgery and what they found. But the point is that regardless, what we do know is that in each of these cases, the gut microbiome is a part of the equation of what’s happening there.

Chef AJ: So interesting. I’m thinking that if the diet industry could market a pill with short-chain fatty acids, they’d make billions of dollars.

Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: Well, they will. They will. That will happen. Anything that becomes hot. So there was a period of time, Chef AJ, where we saw people getting good results on a gluten-free diet. Why would people get good results on a gluten-free diet? Because they’re not eating processed food. They’re eating real food. And so when people started saying, oh, they’re getting good results on a gluten-free diet, guess what happened? The food industry said, let’s make gluten-free junk food. So is that a healthy diet? Heck no. That’s the point. I believe that we have to be very cautious and aware of that in the plant-based world, which is that we call things plant-based, plant-based means it’s coming from whole plant foods. Vegan means that it is the absence of animal products. There’s a difference between vegan and plant-based. And there are also different motivations. To me, plant-based means that you are motivated by human health, your health. Veganism is motivated by ethical considerations in the environment, which are beautiful things. But you can be a junk food vegan, and that’s not a healthy diet. And you can eat plant-based and not necessarily be exclusively plant-based. That is a pathway that exists for people who are looking to make this transition. So it’s like to me, it comes back to this. My transition was over years. I didn’t wake up one day and eat 100% plant-based. This took time. And I want to connect with the person who’s out there, who’s the version of me from 2012 and say, you’re 10% plant-based. Cool. I was five. Let’s move it to 20. You’re going to feel better. And then you’re going to want 30 and 40 and 50 and you’re just going to keep going but do it in a way that’s sustainable and that you can actually manage to do in a way that you’re comfortable with because I think that’s important too.

Chef AJ: Well, I love it. At the beginning, you called it radical abundance. That could almost be the name for your third book Because that’s really what you’re talking about and I’m so grateful to your wife for introducing you to this way of eating because we certainly need your voice in the world and I just have to comment on that before and after the photo of you. You look amazing and I mean you look younger now than you did ten years ago.

Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: I know. Is that crazy? I mean I look at that myself and I’m just like. I mean a picture is worth 1000 words. There it is.

Chef AJ: Absolutely so Dr. Will, what’s the real truth about weight loss?

Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: The real truth about weight loss is that if you want to heal your gut it’s not through restriction, it’s not through reduction, it’s not by counting calories. It’s through abundance. It’s through gravitating to healthy food. It’s about counting plants. And when you do that you are empowering your gut microbiome. By fueling it with fiber and by fueling it with fiber you are creating short chain fatty acids. And those short chain fatty acids I’ve shown you today will work right there in your colon and also spread throughout the body and provide you with the healing benefits that you search for as you try to rebalance your metabolism and achieve your weight balance goals.

Chef AJ: I love that. Count plants, not calories. Thank you so much.

Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: Thank you so much, Chef AJ. Thank you everyone for hanging out today.

Chef AJ: Hi, Kiki, and welcome to the Truth about Weight Loss Summit, thanks so much for being here.

Plantiful Kiki: Thank you so much for having me.

Chef AJ: I can’t wait to talk to you. Your story is such an inspiration because you not only lost 70 pounds eating potatoes, but you’ve been able to keep it off now. Tell us what the secret sauce is

Plantiful Kiki: So really, it boils down to building momentum and then maintaining that momentum. And of course, knowing what foods to eat is very important. But once you know what foods to eat, you have to build and maintain momentum to be able to do this long-term and be successful all the way to the end of your life.

Chef AJ: That’s great. Before you tell us that, maybe tell us how you first lost the weight and why.

Plantiful Kiki: Yeah, so I had struggled for a really long time. I’m a small person. I’m barely five-four, and I was that nearly 200 pounds for the better part of a decade, and I just could not get any significant amount of weight off and keep it off. I did the low carb, I did extreme exercise routines and just nothing ever fixed it. Not only my weight issues, but I was also having blood pressure cholesterol issues. I was pre-diabetic, so I had somebody mention to me, hey, there’s this guy, there’s this doctor that helps people lose weight and heal their bodies eating potatoes. And my first response was, there’s no way I’m going to be able to eat carbs and lose weight. I am Latina. I always say this like diabetes is real for my people. I was absolutely terrified of carbs, but I was at a point where I had tried everything. So I was like, whatever. So I went that same day to Barnes and Noble. I picked up his book, The Starch Solution by Dr. John McDougall, who is my absolute favorite doctor on the planet. And I read that book in one day, and I was just completely stunned by everything I had read in his book about, you know, a high carb, low fat, plant-based diet, how you could lose weight easily and maintain a healthy weight and get your health back eating this way. So I just pretty much told my husband and kids that this is what we were going to do. And thankfully, I have a supportive husband and we just did it. The next day, I was throwing everything out of the cupboards in the fridge, and we just jumped in and I started eating loads of starch in the form of potatoes, rice and beans. I ate a lot of whole-grain pasta and started watching my fat intake, and it was like magic. My weight started falling off and I did come to some plateaus like everybody does. And I would just go back to my book, go back to his other books, and I started doing the things that Dr. McDougall teaches. And that’s the magic. You just got to understand the information and how to implement it.

Chef AJ: That’s incredible. One of the things I wrote down that you said is you read the book and you told your family, we’re going to do this. Some people struggle because they say, Well, my spouse isn’t on board. My kids won’t eat that way. How did you get to do that? That’s what people want to know.

Plantiful Kiki: Yeah. Well, I’m not the type of person to take no for an answer in any area of my life. So I didn’t give them an option. Obviously, they couldn’t control what my husband was going to eat, but I also knew that my husband wasn’t going to make dinner so he could fend for himself or he could eat what I was going to eat. But he had seen how hard I had struggled over the years, and he wanted to be supportive. He did give me a timeframe. He was like, I will give you four months, I will commit to this. But after that, I’m probably going to go back to my meat and bacon. And I was like, That’s fine. I will take that challenge for months. Let’s see. Let’s do this. Let’s give it our everything. And I jumped in. We did it and I lost like 35 pounds in by the end of those four months. And he had lost, I think, the same amount or more. And he’s never looked back. He’s like, nope, I feel better. His mystery joint pain had disappeared. He looked fantastic. He wasn’t interested in going back to how we were eating before.

Chef AJ: I love that you didn’t give him a choice. That’s what my mom used to say. You always have two choices for dinner. Take it or leave or leave it.

Plantiful Kiki: Exactly. Yeah. Do you want me to pop up my before and after?

Chef AJ: I absolutely do, because looking at you now, this gorgeous girl, I don’t think anybody realizes you are quite overweight.

Plantiful Kiki: Yeah, I was like almost 200 pounds, it was crazy.

Chef AJ: And you’re like five, two, five four, you’re not tall

Plantiful Kiki: And I’m like five, three and three quarters on a good day after good chiropractic care. So yeah, so I’m little and I have my weight teetered for years between 189 and 194. And I just thought it was my hormones. I thought it was my thyroid. I had all of these reasons why I couldn’t lose weight. So then to hear that, you know, Dr. McDougall says, the fat you eat is the fat you wear. I was like, well, I’ll give it a try and well, here I am.

Chef AJ: That is such a difficult concept for people to grasp, and it works. A lot of our colleagues know it works, it worked for me, and they don’t even seem to want to give it a try when I had never not seen it work.

Plantiful Kiki: I haven’t either, and I have now worked with thousands of people. And any time they come to me, they’re in a plateau or they’re not seeing weight loss, but they’re telling me they’re doing everything right. When we actually sit back and we look at it, there’s things in there that they’re not following that they’re not doing. This works. It works for people in menopause. It works for people with thyroid disorders. It works.

Chef AJ: I couldn’t agree with you more. What kind of things were you eating before you started eating a high stratch, low fat diet?

Plantiful Kiki: So I was victim to all of the mass marketing out there. You know, all the CrossFit marketing, all the paleo, everything you hear in the gym, you’ve got to reduce your carbs, increase your protein. So I was trying to eat healthy. I was eating chicken every day. We were having salmon. You know, breakfast was always, you know, a couple of eggs and like turkey sausage, on weekends we would have bacon. And now, like, it sounds just absolutely horrendous. And to know that all I was eating was fat, you know, in these animal products, we ate cheese, but we tried to eat vegetables. But everything you’re sold is, you know, they need to be in healthy fats like grass-fed butter and coconut oil. And so like, I was roasting all of our vegetables in all of this fat, and I could not for the life of me, figure out why I wasn’t losing weight. We also, you know, with frequent pizza places and Taco Bell runs like on the weekend thinking, you know, we were really healthy all week. So it was really I was so brainwashed to believe all the marketing out there that if I’m eating lean proteins and fish and having lots of grass-fed butter and vegetables and coconut oil and staying away from carbs that I was going to be able to have optimal health in my body was telling me the exact opposite. But I was genuinely confused about why I was doing everything I was reading and being told to do but my health was just getting worse.

Chef AJ: I think a lot of people don’t realize that when they’re eating high protein like animal products like salmon, they’re really eating high fat.

Plantiful Kiki: You’re just eating high fat. Yeah, exactly.

Chef AJ: Well, how satisfied are you now eating the way you eat versus how you eat before?

Plantiful Kiki: I am completely satisfied. We definitely went through a transition of letting go of the the junk food, but we have found healthy ways to incorporate the foods that we love in cleaned up versions. What’s not satisfying about a plate of fries, you know, that are out of the air fryer and crispy and steamed broccoli smothered in cheese sauce? Like, there’s nothing not satisfying about that.

Chef AJ: And your kids, are they on board now? Because I’m guessing they do not have weight to lose but maybe they were a little bit worried at first when some of their favorite foods were taken away.

Plantiful Kiki: You know they were, but they were young enough. Well, here’s the thing, I won’t negotiate with my kids. I’m in charge of their health and their well-being while they’re in my home. I am in charge once they leave my home, I have no control over the choices that they make. But I have control over the options I make available to them. So it was a transition for them, but I found plant-based ways of making them macaroni and cheese with low fat cheese sauce. You know, they loved spaghetti and it didn’t have meatballs, but it had mushrooms or lentil meatballs. You know, you just find ways to make the transition easier for them. But now we’re such simple eaters that they’ll go heat up a bowl of rice and beans and throw greens and some sauce on it and they’re good to go. So we made it.

Chef AJ: I love that you say that you won’t negotiate with them because so many people, especially the women that I work with, their struggle is that they don’t do what you do. They just try to still eat the way they want to eat and then buy all the hyper-palatable things, make them for their family. And then they always fall off plan because their house is like a 7-Eleven.

Plantiful Kiki: Yeah, I mean, it would be. It’s so impossible. Your brain is wired to want those calorie-dense, super palatable foods, like it is, that makes it very difficult, and I hear from moms all the time that feel bad, you know, their kids complain about their food. I’m like, Well, why are you taking it personally? we shouldn’t take the whining of our children personally. We need to remove ourselves emotionally from it and stay in control of the fact that we are in charge of their well-being. We know better and we have the emotional maturity to be able to look in the future and say, okay this is for your long term well-being. Whereas children don’t have that and you need to empathize with that. You know, I’m not like a dictator in my house. I definitely empathize with my children and how they’re feeling. And I’m sorry you feel this way, but these are your choices. So, you know, and there’s creative ways to get your kids involved in grocery shopping and food prep and giving them some choices, but I don’t personally believe that children should have free rein to make their own choices because they’re not mature enough to do that right.

Chef AJ: One of the experts on the summit, Dr. Esser, said you have to be the parent and not right on these things because it’s hard for them having the food in the house. And also they don’t realize they struggle so much with their weight and food addiction. They’re just setting their kids up for a life of that.

Plantiful Kiki: Yeah, absolutely. And I didn’t want my kids to grow up dieting. You know, I started dieting when I was like 13 started, you know, seeing that my weight was coming on and that’s too young. I don’t want my kids doing that, you can save them a lot of pain.

Chef AJ: I love that. You absolutely can. That is fantastic. I’m so, I’m so happy for you, and I’m sure you’re very proud of your success as well.

Plantiful Kiki: Thank you. It’s been life-changing. You know, I’m very happy. It’s very rewarding to be able to share my journey and help others, as I’m sure you know, it’s just there’s nothing better than to be able to give back.

Chef AJ: Do you keep a clean environment or do you have some of these hyper-palatable treats?

Plantiful Kiki: No, we keep a clean environment for sure, because it’s just too hard, because if there’s, you know, chips and cookies in the cabinet, you know, even plantiful Kiki, is going to want to get into that bag. So we keep a very clean environment and like I said, I want my children to grow up eating real food. Now, holidays and birthday parties at other people’s houses or travel. We still do the best we can, but there’s definitely more leniency. But day to day? No, I keep our environment very clean. So my kids snacks are a fridge full of fresh fruits and vegetables because that’s where they should be eating.

Chef AJ: How do you manage to travel?

Plantiful Kiki: So travel, you know, I haven’t had a hard time yet. When we go overseas, there’s always somewhere you can get steamed potatoes. There’s always somewhere you can buy fresh fruits. There’s always a market. There’s always ways to get it done. And traveling to Mexico is so easy. We do that a lot. And again, vegan places are popping up everywhere. But you can get rice and beans anywhere in Latin America. That’s never been an issue when we travel around the United States. We enjoy staying at Airbnbs where we have our own kitchen and we’ll go get our groceries and, you know, eat at home. We will go out to eat once or twice that time, you know, enjoy that. But I haven’t had any trouble.

Chef AJ: That’s fantastic. Do you ever worry that you’ll gain the weight back?

Plantiful Kiki: No, I mean, I can be honest and say, like the first few years, like I gained and lost the same five pounds so many times because I would experiment with, well but I want to have peanut butter, you know, on my toast every day. And that would usually result in. Okay, well, I can’t do that. So I’m going to find other ways to enjoy toast or whatever.

Chef AJ: That’s so. I mean, I’m just so glad that you experimented with that because I find so many people do one thing to lose weight and then they try to do a different thing to maintain their weight loss. And it doesn’t seem to work.

Plantiful Kiki: Yeah, that’s a huge question I get along a lot and you know, they’re on their weight loss journey and then they’re getting close to where they want to be and then they’re like, OK, well, now what can I eat? How do I maintain my weight? I’m like, Well, you keep doing what you’re doing. This is it, you keep eating real food and you keep an eye on your fat intake.

Chef AJ: Yes. Is that the question you get asked the most by your fans?

Plantiful Kiki: I get asked that a ton. I get asked about plateaus like why am I not losing weight? And how do I eat to maintain it?

Chef AJ: You eat to maintain it the way you eat a lose it.

Plantiful Kiki: Exactly.

Chef AJ: Exactly when we know that. Exactly how many years has it been now since you had this gorgeous figure?

Plantiful Kiki: How long has it been? I think it’s been, I don’t know if it’ll be four or five years. I think it’ll be five years that I lost 70 pounds, that I have kept it off. Yeah.

Chef AJ: How long did it take to lose 70 pounds?

Plantiful Kiki: So it took me about 14 months before I was officially weight stable, but again, it would have gone faster had I not had the major transition and all the experimenting and hitting plateaus and trying to figure out what to do next. So even though it took me 14 months to get that off, which I still think is a great time frame, generally the people that I have worked with, they go faster because I’m saving them the learning process I went through.

Chef AJ: Did you ever try other diets throughout your life and were they ever successful?

Plantiful Kiki: Yeah, I mean, I was in high school and that’s when Atkins was a huge thing. So I did Atkins. And it was so gross. You know, you had like the ketosis strips, that whole thing. I did, low carb. I did oh, what is it called? I can’t remember. It’s something where you’re eating, i think it’s like nourishing traditions or something where you’re eating Whole Foods, but it’s very high fat. So I feel like every diet I’ve done is high fat coupled with extreme exercise, and that equals no results or like a five pound weight loss that took five months. And then I was only to be able to maintain it for two weeks. 

Chef AJ: And so why do people keep going back to what doesn’t work, you think?

Plantiful Kiki: I think, like Dr. McDougall says, people like to hear good news about their bad habits, and people love to hear you can eat all of this bacon and cheese and, you know, high fat food and lose weight. I also think there’s just really good marketing out there, and we’re all victim to the mass marketing on TV, on social media, in the gym. It’s everywhere in the doctor’s office.

Chef AJ: And the doctors don’t know.

Plantiful Kiki: Correct

Chef AJ: Did you ever just feel like giving up?

Plantiful Kiki: Oh yeah. I was so frustrated, so frustrated. I was the point of desperation the day that I went and bought Dr. McDougal’s book. I was completely at a desperate point. I didn’t know what to do. I had spent two days crying and feeling frustrated because when I do something, I do it both feet in all the way. I had done everything. When I say I had done everything, I had exhausted my options. That’s exactly what I had done. I had exhausted my options. I didn’t know what to do.

Chef AJ: Well, would you mind sharing a photo, a before photo? Because I think people don’t realize you really were overweight?

Plantiful Kiki: Yeah. The first one I’ll show is the progression. All right, so this is me, I think I was like 194 in black when I’m wearing that black sweater. And I had lost about 20 or 30 pounds in the middle picture, and then here I am, that was at Christmas just a few weeks ago. So and you can see in the bottom picture how my weight loss just continued. So it’s pretty appearance.

Chef AJ: But you know what, even the middle one, just even on the way you were looking fantastic. I always talk about this with my clients, there’s your lowest sustainable weight and your lowest attainable weight but even if people lose some weight, I mean, you still looked amazing, in my opinion, in the middle photos.

Plantiful Kiki: Thank you. I’ve never been shy, so it’s like, Well, you got it, so I might as well work with it.

Chef AJ: Yeah, so what I am saying is that people need to know, like you say, it is a progression and if they can’t lose 70 pounds, they probably could lose something and still start to feel better.

Plantiful Kiki: Absolutely. My goodness. Are you kidding? I had lost 10 pounds so easily eating potatoes that I thought I’d lost 50.

Chef AJ: So, yeah, so what do you say to persons that are like just on the edge of diving in but they’re still they still have that low carb mentality? 

Plantiful Kiki: what do you have to lose? Because anybody who’s done low carb has done it for a while and has been frustrated and has gotten to the point where you just can’t take it anymore. Your brain needs the sugar and you binge on carbs. So I always say, what do you have to lose? You know, the proof is, if anything, go to Dr. McDougal’s website and look at the testimony after testimony of why it’s changed by simply changing what you’re eating.

Chef AJ: So what kind of things are you eating now and did you eat to lose weight?

Plantiful Kiki: Yeah.I eat a lot better than when I did in the beginning when we first transitioned. You know, there was still, there’s a lot of plant-based cereal and plant-based food products just to help us through the transition with our goal being Whole Foods. You know, at the end, so once I started eating more Whole Foods like potatoes and rice and beans, lots of greens, those sorts of things, that’s when I was able to push through that last plateau and get to where I am today, and I eat the same way. I still arrange my plate the same way for every meal. Even if I am going to go out to dinner, I always order huge side of vegetables and a steamed potato or steamed rice. So, yeah, I try to eat the same foods I eat to lose weight so that I can sustain my weight.

Chef AJ: So when you say arranged your food, you, it’s visually not by weight or volume.

Plantiful Kiki: Yes. That was like the major thing that helped me get through that last plateau, which is really the most frustrating for people. Before you get to your lowest attainable weight is that last push and the 50-50 plate, you know, learning to dilute your calories this way is the magic sauce, it really is, and if you are consistent with this and you do it at every meal. You will get to where you need to be.

Chef AJ: I agree calorie density is the magic sauce at every meal, even breakfast.

Plantiful Kiki: Even at breakfast and for seconds and thirds.

Chef AJ: Right, every time you eat food. Exactly. It seems like such a simple concept, but people are just so vegetable adverse, right?

Plantiful Kiki: You know, and I was it first too because I was used to having things, you know, coated in fat, but you really do develop a taste for it. You develop a real enjoyment of vegetables. And if I’m ever stuck traveling and I haven’t been able to have enough vegetables in a day, I just feel like, Oh, I can’t wait to just eat a bunch of vegetables.

Chef AJ: I feel the same way. After not eating, I didn’t eat vegetables for 43 years, but now when I can’t get them, it feels off, you know?

Plantiful Kiki: Yeah, totally. Yeah.

Chef AJ: Did it take a while for either you or anyone in your family to really start enjoying the food? Was there a transition period where they really didn’t like anything at first?

Plantiful Kiki: Yeah. I mean, I think at first, like, I’ll be honest, like, I don’t like cooking and now here I am. But I struggled with making food taste good. Just because you don’t know what you’re doing. So they didn’t like the food at first. It was either bland or it was weird because I was using different things. So there was a little transition. But now everybody’s happy and healthy and we’ve found our groove.

Chef AJ: Yeah. You don’t like cooking, but you do some kind of prep to have the healthy food ready, right?

Plantiful Kiki: Yes. And so that is like one of my biggest tips other than you needing to understand calorie density and how to eat is being prepared. That is the best way to build momentum and maintain momentum. If you’re not prepared, then it’s very hard to be successful because you’re always busier than you think you’re going to be and more tired than you think you’re going to be during the week, so it pays off to be prepared. Actually, have I can show you, I have my chickpea curry here. I’ve got my lentils. Actually, that’s your lean, full chili. There, I prep all of my sources on Sunday. This is my fat cream cheese sauce and my low-fat ranch. But every Sunday, and now that my kids are old enough to help, they have their regular Sunday foods that they have to prep to contribute to the household. So everybody just knows. Sunday we spend an hour or two, we prep all our food and then the week is just coasting. All we have to do is heat up and go.

Chef AJ: I love that and it can really be that simple. People just don’t understand that those of us, I can’t speak for everyone, but most of the people I know that have been successful long term have some kind of either batch cooking or batch prep system in place.

Plantiful Kiki: It’s the only way, it’s the only way to be successful. There’s a lot of neuroscience behind it. You have to one understand what your goal is. You’ve got to make a plan. So I plan, OK, this week, these are the meals we’re going to have available to us, and then you have to prepare, you know those steps. One, they build neural connections in your brain to reinforce this new lifestyle, this new way of eating this new belief that you are a healthy person. You know, it’s all part of the process. And taking the time to prep is crucial.

Chef AJ: One thing I’ve heard you talk about is self-love. Where does that fit in to this journey?

Plantiful Kiki: I think self-love is huge. I think when we try to change our bodies from a place of disgust and hate, it puts us in an adversarial relationship with ourselves, and I think it just takes realizing that you are in a relationship with yourself. Would you tolerate an abusive negative relationship from somebody else with you? No, I wouldn’t allow anybody else to talk down to me, to criticize me, to say how disgusting I am. So once I started really addressing my own beliefs about myself and started believing in my self-worth in that I was beautiful at any size. It empowered me to make the changes that I wanted to to make. And I think the thing for people when they hear self-love, people think, Oh, that means I have to love the body I’m in right now. That’s absolutely not what it means, like self-love means that you are loving yourself, supporting yourself and being compassionate with yourself while you make the changes you want to make. It empowers change.

Chef AJ: Wow. But but how does one do that? 

Plantiful Kiki: So I have like so and actually, I have a blog on self-love on my website that I give people, you know, the process and a couple of things you can do to start really tackling self-love. So I always tell people to start with a list, write down a list of the things that you love or appreciate about themselves. Now, when I started, I didn’t love my body. I just I couldn’t. It was really hard to think of things that I loved about myself. That’s how low my self-worth was. So I started with things that I could appreciate. I can appreciate that I was able to deliver healthy babies into this world. I could appreciate that my body has done its best. It has stuck with me through every sickness, through every crazy diet or exercise routine I put it through. So that’s the first thing I have people do, is to make a list, put a few things on there that you can appreciate about your body. If you can’t think of anything, call your mom. Call your best friend. Have them help you. The next step is to every morning. Start your day with reviewing that list and reminding yourself of the things that are that you can appreciate about yourself because it starts changing the way you view yourself in the way you think about yourself. And it sets you up for the rest of the day, do that every morning and then in the evening before you go to sleep, spend a few minutes going over again the things that you appreciate about yourself. I love neuroscience. I’m such a nerd about this. There’s a lot of science behind this that when you even if you had a crappy day and you thought a lot of negative things about yourself, if you end your day going back to your list and being grateful for the things that you appreciate about yourself, you’re actually changing the memory of that day and you are rewiring your brain to be positive and to start believing that you are these things. So those two, just being consistent with that, you will start seeing a change.

Chef AJ: That’s fantastic. Thank you. What is your family said about your success? Have they said anything and have any of them adopted this way of eating?

Plantiful Kiki: Yeah so my extended family, of course, thought I was crazy. And the first year after I had lost weight, like I had been telling everybody in my family, all my friends, my neighbors, like, you got to read this doctor’s book, and everybody just was kind of like, yeah, yeah. But once they saw me in a different body, then then they were like, What? What was that book that you read? You know what? What was that again? And so, yeah, so we have several family members that have embraced the lifestyle that have had their own success. So that’s really great. I think I wore out everybody around me, which is why I started my YouTube channel in the first place because everybody around me was so sick of hearing me talk to them about it, but it worked out well.

Chef AJ: You’ve certainly helped to inspire so many people this way. So maybe it’s a good thing that they dissed you.

Plantiful Kiki: Yeah, yeah. No, I’m so honored and grateful for the position I am in these days.

Chef AJ: What’s been the best part about being in this new body,

Plantiful Kiki: Just feeling in control again. It’s very scary to feel out of control, to feel like your health is slipping away and you don’t have the power to change it. That was a very, very scary place for me to live in because my numbers kept getting worse. My cholesterol, everything was getting worse and I was too young. I was like 30 something in my early 30s to be in that position. So the best part has really been feeling like I have control, I have. It’s not genetics, it’s not thyroid, it’s not hormones. It’s not my age. I am in control of my health and just feeling so good and having so much energy has been the best part of all of this.

Chef AJ: Yeah, that is fantastic. Did you ever have cravings? Do you still have cravings? And what advice do you give people that have cravings?

Plantiful Kiki: Yeah, so I definitely had intense cravings for, I want to say six to eight months after the transition, but it’s all a mind game and you can retrain your mind to think differently, and I really take Dr. McDougal’s, I sound like I am a Doctor McDougall superfan. I listen to his lectures. I basically brainwashed myself, you know, through the whole transition so that I would learn to think correctly. But he said, you know, when you encounter cravings, remind yourself that that’s not food. Remind yourself that keeps you in the place you’re trying to get out of. And so I basically just started talking to myself differently when it came to cravings. I didn’t keep those foods in my house and I found cleaner ways of having something. If I wanted a brownie, I would make some chocolate oats or make a little chocolate mud cake that is fat-free and, you know, refined sugar-free. I just found other ways to meet those needs. But the biggest thing was to change the way you thought or the way I thought about those foods and just really training yourself to not view those as foods or health-promoting, right?

Chef AJ: And yeah, like you say, having substitute recipes.

Plantiful Kiki: Yeah, yeah.

Chef AJ: So many people believe if they don’t eat nuts, they’re going to drop dead. I mean but you seem to understand that you don’t need all that fat.

Plantiful Kiki: No, I have been totally fine. I do enjoy a little bit of nuts in my ranch because it’s so good, but I have to be very moderate. I will just start gaining weight if I start going in on the nuts and that information that you don’t need the overt fat. It was really foreign to me because, you know, all of the marketing and all of the social media out there, all you hear is that you need this for brain health. Well, I can tell you 100 percent, my brain health is drastically different today than it was when I was having all of those healthy fats, and I am in a much healthier, clearer, happier place than I was then.

Chef AJ: Great. Thank you. What role did exercise, if any, play in your journey or in your health today?

Plantiful Kiki: This is actually another one of my favorite questions. It didn’t play a huge role, really. So I was so burnt out on all of these extreme exercises that when I started my weight loss journey with, you know, this way of eating, I stopped doing gym. I was like I’m just going to walk for 30 to 40 minutes every day. I think I heard Dr. Neal Barnard say, you know, 30 to 40-minute brisk walk a day is great. Aim for that. So that was easy for me. So that’s all I did, no crazy crossfit, you know. And that’s the question. That’s another question I get, A lot of people are like, you got to eat well, but how much do you have to exercise? And I am like, not very much.

Chef AJ: Same here. That’s fantastic. Had you ever heard of a plant-based diet before finding Dr. McDougal’s book?

Plantiful Kiki: Yeah. So I had experimented actually with veganism when I was, I want to say, 20 or 21 because back then, and that was like almost 20 years ago, the internet was still like barely getting going. There was no resources or social media. So I was like on a little island and I didn’t last very long because it was all like nuts there too. You need all these nuts for protein. And it was unsustainable and super expensive.

Chef AJ: So nice. You know, you have a beautiful kitchen. I’m wondering if there are any kitchen appliances that you could suggest that would make this way of eating easier.

Plantiful Kiki: So a high-speed blender is number one for me to be able to make like cheese sauce and any other dressings. So I love a high-speed blender and my air fryer, and I love my Breville because it’s big. And it’s just amazing, I used that more than I used my oven now, but those two are my absolute. If I could only take two, it’d be those.

Chef AJ: If you could take three would an Instant Pot be up there?

Plantiful Kiki: It would because it steams my potatoes every week. Like the thought of having to steam them on a pot in a pot over the stove is just exhausting. Like I said, I don’t like to cook.

Chef AJ: Right, no, I think it’s fantastic that you don’t like to cook because you still show that even for somebody that doesn’t like to cook, there are simple recipes that you can prep that are delicious and learning to eat. I think learning to eat simply is a huge help.

Plantiful Kiki: Huge, huge and actually that to me is one of the most important things, like if you can learn to just be a simple eater, this will be sustainable. When it gets unsustainable is when you’re trying to make lasagna one night and enchiladas the next. It’s just a lot of cooking. And especially if you’re like me, I don’t like to say that I’m a lazy cook. I like to call it efficient, but we’ll call it what it is. It’s I’m lazy, I don’t enjoy cooking, so learning to eat simple is absolutely key.

Chef AJ: I am right there with you. If people really saw what I really ate at home, like I know chef, I mean, they would have said this is what I chef eats? I’m like, Yeah, this is a formerly obsese chef.

Plantiful Kiki: Yeah. That’s the same. It’s like I have these cookbooks and it’s like, No, I don’t eat that. I eat this every day because it’s my favorite.

Chef AJ: And would that be like one lunch for you or would you go back for seconds?

Plantiful Kiki: I’m always told that I eat a ton. When I was losing weight and I was heavier, I would have to plates like this. But at this weight, this keeps me full forever. But I’m still told like, this is a ton of food. I’m like, well, I don’t know, I’m very active. I live out in the mountains. There’s property to maintain, some people that are less active probably would not need to eat this much, but I do great with this.

Chef AJ: That looks right to me.

Plantiful Kiki: right? OK, see, I’m like,what?

Chef AJ: And you put like, like, maybe some cheese sauce over either the fries or the broccoli, or maybe both?

Plantiful Kiki: Yep, my fat-free cheese sauce over that. And I like to mix a little hot sauce in here and then put that over.

Chef AJ: Do you ever like when you’re doing your batch prep on Sunday? Do you ever freeze some of the things to pull out later?

Plantiful Kiki: Yeah, actually. So if I go through the effort of making this easy curry or making chili, I will make an enormous amount in this one. I just pulled out of the freezer this morning and I’ll put a bunch in there. So weekends that we’re really busy like this. Last weekend, we just got back from skiing, so I didn’t have the time or the energy to do a ton of prep. So it’s nice to be able to pull things out of the freezer and then only have to prep my sauces.

Chef AJ: I love that. What kind of meals do you normally have for breakfast and dinner? Because that looks like it could be a lunch, that could actually be breakfast too really.

Plantiful Kiki: Yeah, it totally could. This is actually newer to me. I’ve been an oatmeal for breakfast person forever, and then I’d have like a side of veggies. I had so many followers telling me, have you tried cauliflower in your oatmeal? No, I have not tried cauliflower on my oatmeal. That sounds awful. I don’t love cauliflower, I’ll be honest, but I was like, OK, I’m going to give it a try. So I actually did my 50-50 plate in my oatmeal. So now I’m like obsessed with, I’ll do, you know, my three-quarters of a cup of oats, and then I’ll put in the same equal amount of rice cauliflower, some apples and some cinnamon. I’ll cook that up now is like my go-to breakfast.

Chef AJ: That actually sounds good. I’ve even heard people sometimes put shredded zucchini in there.

Plantiful Kiki: Yeah, that one I’ve tried, and that makes sense to me because of like zucchini bread but cauliflower just sounded so horrible. But once I try, I’m like, Oh my gosh, like, you cannot taste the cauliflower.

Chef AJ: It’s very neutral. Do you use rice cauliflower?

Plantiful Kiki: I use the rice frozen cauliflower because again, we’re about efficiency in this kitchen.

Chef AJ: You know, what’s interesting is like, I find that you were talking about plateaus in a lot of times, if people are doing the starch solution and Dr. McDougall like you, he’s one of my heroes and favorite people in the whole world. If they’re doing the starch solution and they’re not quite getting the results if they go to his other book, The McDougall Program for Maximum Weight Loss, just tighten the screws a little bit, then you start seeing the results. Did you happen to ever read that book as well?

Plantiful Kiki: That’s exactly what I did because I read the starch solution lost my first big chunk of weight, really lost most of it with just what he says to do in the starch solutions. It is amazing what real food all do. But then, yeah, I hit my weight loss plateau and I was not in a healthy weight range yet, so I had seen on one of the pages in there he talked about the 50-50 play in there, so then I went and got his other book, and then it all clicked for me. I was like, okay, I need to be arranging my plate this way every single time and I am going to be really good. I was still eating quite a bit of, I wasn’t eating nut butters, but I was still having quite a bit of like nuts and breads, I was making her still eating a lot of bread and he says to, you know, try to eat less bread, more whole foods. Really watch the fat and dilute your calories this way. So once I did that, boom. Another big chunk of weight loss. And then when I hit the plateau again, I went back to that same book, the maximum weight loss one where he talks about preloading with super salad, then you’re 50 50 plates. And the YouTube video that I share all the time that Jeff Novick did on calorie density makes absolutely brilliant. Yeah. If you don’t understand calorie density, that video will change your life.

Chef AJ: That is fantastic. Do you tend to keep the flour products low, like the breads?

Plantiful Kiki: Yeah, so I have I keep like, we’re gluten-free, so I’ll have like a little bit of flour like right now on my counter, I have some banana oat muffins for my kids, for them to be able to pop in their lunches for school. But other than that, I don’t really make anything. With flour, I think my most refined product is probably bread crumbs because I love cauliflower wings on the weekend. But breads and stuff. I just keep to a minimum.

Chef AJ: And what about things like sugar and salt? Do you tend to keep those a little bit on the lower side?

Plantiful Kiki: I definitely keep those low, in like a double batch of the muffins I put there, like two tablespoons of coconut sugar because the bananas are so sweet. And once you get off of all of the refined processed foods your palate adjusts and you don’t need all of that sugar, so we keep that very minimal in our house. If my kids want to sweeten their tea, they’ll use a little teaspoon of maple syrup. And salt is very minimal. My kids, I don’t know if it’s laziness or they just prefer their vegetables unsalted, but it’s very minimal.

Chef AJ: Yeah, that’s wonderful. I can eat at your house. You can eat in my house.

Plantiful Kiki: Yeah.

Chef AJ: There’s two beverages. I find that a lot of people struggle with either eliminating or reducing coffee and alcohol.

Plantiful Kiki: Yeah. And those are both things, like alcohol, I got out of my freshman year in college, got it out of my system. Didn’t want to touch this stuff again. And coffee is something I’ve never done either, so I don’t truly understand how difficult getting off the coffee can be for people. But I do just encourage them to try to reduce it as much as possible and really evaluate how much their goals mean to them versus how much that social drink where that cup of coffee in the morning means to them

Chef AJ: I love that, evaluate how much your goals mean. It’s very good.

Plantiful Kiki: Yeah.

Chef AJ: What do you say to somebody that’s maybe Yo-Yo dieted for years and has given up hope that they could ever lose weight?

Plantiful Kiki: Just to take a look at my journey because I have literally lived that life. I have Yo-Yo dieted since I was a teenager. I have struggled to maintain my weight. I have tried everything. If you’re at that point, if you’ve tried everything, you’re ready to give up. Then you’ve got nothing to lose. So try this.

Chef AJ: So, Kiki, what’s the real truth about weight loss?

Plantiful Kiki: The real truth about weight loss is that it’s simple and it’s sustainable. You just have to understand what to eat, and that comes with understanding the principles of calorie density. If you understand the principles of calorie density, you’ll understand what to eat. And that’s it, there’s no magic pill, it is that simple.

Chef AJ: I love it, so calorie density, some kind of batch prep and self-love.

Plantiful Kiki: Yeah, pretty much. Thank you. You said it beautifully.

Chef AJ: Well, thank you so much. You’re such an inspiration.

Plantiful Kiki: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Dr. Rosane Oliveira

Hello, everyone. I am so excited to be here with you today in a new edition of the Truth About Weight Loss Summit. Today, I’d like to talk to you about how to override bad genes with good habits. And any discussion about genes, good or bad, needs to start with the definition about what genetics is and the difference between genetic and epigenetic regulation, because that’s what I want to be talking to you about today.

Dr. Rosane Oliveira

So genetics is the study of single genes and the role that they play in the way the traits and conditions are passed from one generation to the next. But you know that when we discuss diseases, chronic diseases like type two diabetes, cancer or high blood pressure or cardiovascular disease, but specifically for our topic in the summit, which is weight loss or our risk of being overweight or being obese, and we discuss whether or not this predisposition can be genetic. We’re discussing about changes in DNA, and one such change is what we call SNP, so SNP, pronounced SNP, or this is a single nucleotide polymorphism which represents substitutions that we have in a DNA sequence from one base to another. You may remember from biology class that we have four different bases that we have in a DNA sequence. It could be A, C, G, and T. So when we have a specific DNA sequence and we have one of these bases that has two or three or four different variants, that’s what we call SNPs. But one thing that I wanted to remember from today’s class is that SNPs are not the same as disease-causing mutations. And the reason for that is that SNPs are fairly common in our DNA. And to be called a SNP, we need to have a variation where we have two or more base pairs that are different in population. And two or more variations need to be present in at least 1% of the population and no disease-causing mutation is that common. But another thing that helps us understand what is the difference between a SNP or a single nucleotide polymorphism and a disease-causing mutation or a mutation that increases the risk of developing a certain condition is this. There’s two types of SNPs. There’s linked SNPs and Causative SNPs. So linked SNPs are those changes in the base pairs that occur outside of the gene. So they have no effect on protein production and no effect on how a protein functions. And then we have causative SNPs and they occur either inside the gene or in the regulatory sequence of the gene. So those could be coding SNPs, where it changes the amount a protein produce. So it’s outside of the gene but it is a part of the DNA sequence that can regulate how a gene is expressed. Or it can be a coding SNP or when we have a change in an amino acid sequence, meaning when we change the base pair, we change the amino acid that is going to be part of the final protein that’s going to be produced with the information that comes from that particular DNA sequence.

Dr. Rosane Oliveira

What I want us to focus today is on what epigenetic means. Genetics, when you talk about genetic mutations is when we have a change in the DNA sequence. Epigenetics is the study of how your behaviors, including our habits and the environment around us, can cause changes that affect the way our genes work but those changes do not change our DNA sequence. And the good news is that they are reversible. So the way we behave and the habits, the lifestyle habits that we choose to adopt and follow every single day will have an effect on how genes are going to be expressed, how genes are going to be turned on or off. And this has everything to do with the choices we make every single day. So today and for the rest of today’s presentation, that’s where we’re going to be discussing certain genetic SNPs, certain variants that may increase the likelihood that we can become overweight or obese or develop certain diseases like type two diabetes. But how our environment and how a daily choices will have an effect on the outcomes or these types of phenotypes, whether or not we develop certain diseases. And I wanted to remember there’s three types of epigenetic regulation and we’re going to be discussing all three of them in the example that I’m going to be giving you today. The first one is DNA methylation. So this happens when there’s a chemical group that is added to a DNA sequence. And when this chemical group is added to the DNA sequence, it turns the gene off. And when the chemical group is removed, it turns the gene back on. Histone modifications is also an addition of chemical groups but instead of the DNA sequence, we add to something we call histone tails. And then if we add those chemical groups, then what happens is, histones are proteins where the DNA wraps around, and if the DNA is wrapped around a histone, then the gene is silent so it’s not being read. And then if the gene is unwrapped from the DNA, then it’s open to be read. So this is what we would call histone modification, whether or not the gene is wrapped around histone and stays there, or if the gene can then unwrap itself and then be read to produce certain proteins. The third way that we have epigenetic regulation is when we have no coding RNA sequences and there’s no coding RNA attaches to messenger RNA.

Dr. Rosane Oliveira

So if you don’t remember from biology class, what happens is the DNA sequence is the message right? Is the information for us to be able to produce a protein because all DNA does is either produce protein that is going to have a certain function in our body or is going to produce molecules that are going to control how those proteins are being produced. So one or the other, for this to happen, we have a DNA sequence but it needs to be translated into a messenger RNA, which is something in between the DNA and the protein. And then this messenger translated into protein. So what happens with a no code RNA is that it attaches to this messenger RNA and degrades it. So even though the DNA is producing the messenger RNA, the protein is not being produced because a no coding RNA degrades the messenger RNA. You don’t have the message to then produce the protein. I know it sounds a little complicated, but it’s not. And I’m going to give you plenty of examples for you to understand how this works, for us to have a visual of how epigenetic regulation works. So this, as you can see, the chromosome in the top left, and then the chromatin, which is our DNA sequence, curled upright as a coil. And then if the chromatin start opening up, that’s when we have the DNA sequence, which is what we’re going to be discussing. And as I mentioned in the previous slide, we have DNA methylation, which is when we add a methyl group or a chemical tag, so to speak. Right. We can tag the DNA and either activate or repress genes. When we add this tag, the gene is silenced. So the gene is turned off. When we remove the gene is turned on. And then we also mentioned his stone modifications. Remember I said his stone are these blue proteins that you can see. And when the gene is wrapped around as it shows in pink and the smaller circle, you can see that gene is silenced. And then when the DNA unwraps and it’s not so tightly wrapped around the DNA, then the portion the gene can be read and can then produce a protein. And then I don’t have a visual for how right now for how no coding RNA works. But one of the examples that we have today down the line in this presentation is going to make it possible for you to understand how that works. Okay. So we’re going to discuss three genes today.

Dr. Rosane Oliveira

The first one is what we call the FTO, or the fat mass and obesity-associated gene. This is the gene that is most strongly linked to obesity. And this gene or there’s a specific SNP or a specific change in a base pair that makes us respond differently to physical activity or the amount of fat in the diet or the amount of protein in the diet. And I’m going to discuss all three examples, all three examples linked to one gene and one specific SNP, single nucleotide polymorphism. So if you have the variant specifically FTO, the variant TT. Those are the two base pairs that you have, then your response to physical activity when it comes to exercising for weight loss, is typical. But if you have a different variant, the AA variant, what it means is that you have an enhanced weight loss response when you participate in higher levels of physical activity, which means that being physically active for you is even more important, so to speak, than somebody else that has a typical response. In other words, the good news is that if you engage in physical activity or higher levels of physical activity, you’re going to see the change on the scale. This very same change or this very same SNP also changes how we respond to the amount of saturated fat in our diet. So again, if you have the TT variant, which is what I have, this is a personal example, means that my response to the amount of saturated fat is typical to the rest of the population. But if you have the a eight variant, the one that says that the more physical activity that you engage or the higher levels, the higher the chances that you’re going to lose weight. This variant also says that you have enhanced weight loss when you limit the consumption of saturated fat to less than 10% of the total energy on any given day. And I just wanted to pay attention to that. When researchers do genetic studies, of course, they use the threshold of 10% because this is something that is recommended. 10% threshold for saturated fat intake is the one that is recommended by the American Heart Association, for example. But when you think about the World Health Organization recommendations, then the recommendation is a little lower. It’s 5% or less. 10% to me sounds big, but it’s the way or high, but this is how the study was made and the 10% saturated fat was the store I showed you. That’s why I’m repeating that. I would personally prefer that it would be a lot lower than 10%. But that would mean if you’re consuming more than 10% of your total calories from saturated fat, then you won’t see weight loss, especially if your variant is the AA. But this variant also will have an effect on weight, depending on the amount of protein on a diet. If you have the variant TT, then the amount of protein or how you lose weight, your weight loss depending on the amount of protein in the diet is going to be typical, which again is my genotype. Those are my results. But then if you have the AA variant, the variant that says that if you engage in higher levels of physical activity, you can lose weight. If you maintain your consumption of saturated fat below 10%, you will lose more weight and your weight loss is enhanced or your weight loss response is enhanced when you consume a moderate to high protein diet.

Dr. Rosane Oliveira

But wait a second, the type of protein in the diet will make a difference, because if we’re bringing animal protein to your diet, we are also bringing what higher levels of saturated fat. And here we are showing that we want to increase the amount of protein, but also decreasing the amount of saturated fat in a diet all regulated through the same SNP or the same single nucleotide polymorphism. And that’s the beautiful thing about plant proteins, because plant proteins are going to be high in the amino acids we need, but also going to be naturally lower in saturated fat. That is something else that is beautiful about eating protein from plant-based sources and is the fact that plant proteins or plant-based foods in general are naturally lower in energy density and they are also naturally lower in a specific amino acid or a brain chain amino acid called Leucine. And why is that important? Because both brain chain amino and specially leucine and the amount of energy in our diets or number of calories we eat every single day, will have a direct effect whether or not we stimulating or we are repressing or down-regulating a specific metabolic pathway called mTOR pathway. So the amount of leucine in the diet and the amount of energy in the diet will be activating this pathway. And this pathway is naturally stimulated through milk, breast milk that a baby receives from the mother. So naturally in milk, mTOR is usually restricted only to the postnatal growth of mammals, meaning that when we have babies and any mammal species and that includes human beings. Right? So if the babies are being fed milk, You are simulating mTOR because mTOR stimulates growth. But once we are eating solid food and once we reach our reproduction age, then we don’t want mTOR to be continually stimulated because it’s not going to be a driver of growth anymore, but rather a driver of aging. We’re going to be aging fast, and we’re also going to be stimulating the development of many different diseases, which we’re going to see in the next few slides.

Dr. Rosane Oliveira

And what happens is that the regulation of mTOR is directly related to this gene we are just discussing now, FTO, fat mass and obesity-associated gene. And how does that happen? So this is the first of two sort of complicated slides that I have for you today, but I think this one is the most complicated, or at least is the one that if you look now, you say, oh, my gosh, how can I make sense of this image? And we’re going to go through each element of the image so you can understand this. It looks worse than it is. Remember from the beginning of the presentation where I said there’s three types of epigenetic regulation, right? There is DNA methylation, and there’s this histone modification. And also we talked about no coding RNA. So this is an example. We have two of these mechanisms in play, and it’s how our body responds to certain molecules that are produced in breast milk. So let’s pay attention to this part of the slide. First, there’s a protein or an enzyme called DNA methyltransferase. So it’s DNA methyltransferase because it has the capacity to do it, to transfer methyl groups to DNA. So what DNMT does is adding the chemical group to DNA sequence and when it does that, it silences the gene. It turns the gene off. And certain genes, we want it off or down-regulated. So this would be the example of FTO. So in breast milk, we produce microRNA. So microRNA would be there is no coding RNA sequence that it attaches to messenger RNA or a message that it was going to produce a DNA meteor transferase enzymes for us to be able to silence the FTO gene. But now we have this microRNA that connects to the messenger RNA and degrades it. So we don’t have the message anymore. We cannot produce DNA methyltransferase. We cannot then make sure that a methyl group or a tag is added to the FTO gene. So the FTO gene, instead of being silenced now can be read, can be expressed. So it’s turned on. And when FTO is turned on, what happens is going to have an effect on many different genes. It’s going to have an effect on ghrelin. We’re going to see what ghrelin does in a second but ghrelin stimulates appetite, is going to make us want to eat more. It’s also going to have an effect on the dopamine receptor three,the gene is going to produce more of it and it’s going to increase our feeding rewards. So we want to eat more. It’s also going to have an effect on the runx1t1 gene, which increases adipogenesis or increases our fat productions.

Dr. Rosane Oliveira

And think about it from a biological standpoint, this makes sense. Evolutionary speaking, that’s what we want to see in babies. We want the FTO not to be silenced because we want the baby to have increased appetite, to also increase the baby’s feeding rewards, so the baby wants to eat even more. And we want the baby to do what? To accumulate fat. That’s what makes babies very cute. They accumulate fat. And then we also have other genes that are being stimulated through FTO expression. And one such gene is mTOR. And when we look at all of the pathways that are connected to specific chronic diseases, we see that increased FTO expression is linked to obesity, type two diabetes, prostate and breast cancer, and neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease. So FTOexpression something we need to look at. But now, based on everything we discussed, right, even if you don’t have the FTO mutations that increase your risk of overweight or obesity, depending on the amount of fat or the amount of protein in your diet, you can still change the expression of the FTO gene just by having dairy in your diet. Continuing to eat dairy is like we’re being breastfed for an entire life. We continually stimulate the production or the expression of FTO which is not something we want to have.

Dr. Rosane Oliveira

So this is a beautiful figure that summarizes what it’s normal and what shouldn’t be happening. So normal would be for us to have a physiological transfer or this no coding RNA, this microRNA that is going to do an appropriate postnatal epigenetic programming of the baby producing FTO in the amounts they are required. And then we have these babies or adults later on with reduced risk of diseases of civilization but we also may have babies that have a deficient transfer of microRNA. They are also going to be having disturbed postnatal genetic regulation. Again, this microRNA is coming from the mother’s milk. If a baby is receiving artificial formula, it’s not going to have the micro RNA that is going to be stimulating FTO expression in a way that is appropriate. And then we have what happens with the majority of the population. Let’s see if we can get that to show up, which is a persistent microRNA transfer. We have persistent epigenetic disturbances or epigenomic disturbances because it’s going to affect more than one gene and we have increased risk of diseases of civilization. We have persistent plus increased microRNA transit transfer, which happens because we are drinking milk from dairy cows. They have increased lactation performance, and then we have exaggerated risk for diseases of civilization.

Dr. Rosane Oliveira

Let’s talk about another gene. This is the TCF7L2, transcription Factor 7 Like 2. A transcription factor 7 Like 2 is another type of gene that when it’s expressed, it has the capacity to influence many other genes downstream. So that’s why it’s very important for us to understand how it affects us. So if you have a certain variant, that’s my variant again. And by the way, the TCF, or transcription Factor 7 Like 2 gene is one of the most consistent predictors of the likelihood of developing type two diabetes, as is linked to a consumption of whole grains versus refined grains or grains without fiber.So you can see that my variance is the GG variant. So my risk is typical depending on my consumption of whole grains. But there are people that have a different variant, the GT or the TT variant that makes them or that increase the risk of them developing type two diabetes if their whole grain consumption is low. And this is very important. Something else, surprising or not, now that we discussed the FTO, is that your variant also is going to be connected to enhanced response to weight loss depending on the total fat in your diet and more specifically, the amount of saturated fat in your diet. So two genes and two genes responding to what? To the amount of saturated fat in the diet. And then if you have a typical response, then you enhance your weight loss by limiting saturated fat intake to less than 10% of your total energy on any given day.

Dr. Rosane Oliveira

And then this is the third. And last gene I’m going to discuss with you today is the APOA2 or Apolipoprotein A2 gene. And again, you may have the variant that is going to give you a typical response when it comes to risk for higher BMI or obesity or you may have the variance that elevates your risk so you can have an increased risk of obesity if you consume a diet that is high in saturated fat. So you can see that many different genes will have an effect on our capacity to lose weight or increase the risk to overweight our obesity. And it’s all linked to the foods we choose to eat every single day. So when we speak about following a diet that is predominantly based on plant-based foods, there are whole foods, foods that are intact and includes the consumption of whole grains. And it’s also a diet that has no oil. It’s because we want also to decrease the amount of saturated fat that is coming in the diet. If the diet is whole food plant-based, we already decreasing the amount of saturated fat dramatically. But if you’re bringing oils into the diet and specifically the tropical oils are so used and vegan or plant based cooking like coconut oil or palm crunch oil, we are bringing sources. We are bringing a great amount of saturated fat in our diet that we do not want. So it’s not enough to just follow a whole food plant-based diet. We need to also pay attention to the addition of oils because as I showed you, like the foods that we choose to eat every single day, they are going to be changing our gene expression even if we don’t have certain genetic mutations that increase the risk for overweight or obesity.

Dr. Rosane Oliveira

When we talk about whole food plant-based, what is the biggest difference between plant-based foods versus animal foods? And that’s the presence of fiber.When we eat animal protein, we get zero fiber. When we plant protein, we got all the fiber that we need, plus whole grains and legumes, which is a great source of plant based protein, and vegetables and fruits and also seeds and nuts. And what is the importance of following a high fiber diet, which is going to be mostly plant-based diet is because fiber does magic in our guts. It helps our gut microbes or gut microbiota to produce molecules called short chain fatty acids. There’s just three of them, their acetate, propionate, and butyrate. And what does shortchain fatty acids do? Among some other things, they regulate two hormones that send signals to our brain and tell our brain whether or not we saciated or if you want to eat more so it can chose appetite. Those hormones are ghrelin and leptin. Remember when we were discussing the FTO gene and how when the FTO gene is being expressed, it increases the production of ghrelin. That is because ghrelin is produced in our stomach and before we eat, ghrelin is high, meaning it’s stimulating hunger and leptin, which is produced by adipose tissue or a fat cells, is low. And then after we eat, when we associate it, then ghrelin goes down and leptin goes up. And this is what we’re want to see, ghrelin down and leptin up means we are saciated. And when we follow a plant-based diet, this is exactly what we have because of short chain fatty acids. So the more fiber in the diet, the more short chain fatty acids we are producing. And we are making sure that leptin stays high and ghrelin down. When we follow a diet where we only focus on how much we are eating, so we are counting calories. What happens is the reverse ghrelin is high and leptin is low because we’re not bringing what quality of food. We are only focusing on quantity. When you start focusing on the quality of food, specifically the amount of fiber in our diet, that’s when the magic happens. This is one of the reasons, or one of the main reasons why a plant-based diet will help you. A whole food, plant based diet will help you lose weight and maintain the weight loss, because as long as you’re bringing fiber into your diet, you produce short chain fatty acids and you’re satiated so you’re not constantly being reminded that you want to eat, which happens when you are restricting your calories alone.

Dr. Rosane Oliveira

Now let’s go back to high fat diet. We discussed three genes that respond to the amount of fat in your diet but the amount of fat in the diet is also going to have an effect on our gut health, on how healthy our gut microbiota is going to be. So when we follow a diet, it’s high in fat, specifically high saturated fatty acids and low in fiber. What we see is we develop something called dysbiosis. Dysbiosis is when our gut microbiota, it’s not in harmony, or it’s imbalanced. And this imbalance now means that we have more of the bad guys than the good guys. And the bad guys now are in charge. And that’s not what we want to happen, because if we have more bad guys, then the good guys, the good guys are not using the fiber. Remember, if the diet is high in fiber and low saturated fatty acids, we are producing short chain fatty acids specifically butyrate, that is what helps us maintain what we call these healthy tight junctions. This tight junction proteins make sure that our cells and intestines are really tightly connected with one another so there’s no space for anything to go in between them. We also have some mucus that produce any particles from not entering and going through our intestine cells and into a bloodstream. But when we eat high fat, specifically high saturated fat and low fiber diet, this is what is going to happen. We’re not producing, butyrate which is one of the short chain fatty acids and then bad bacteria, some toxins, viruses can go through the gaps and leak into your bloodstream. This is what we call leaky gut and that leads to inflammation. And I want to mention something else that happens depending on the amount of branched chain amino acid or the amount of saturated fat.So the amount of animal protein or saturated fat that can come from animal foods or tropical oils in our diet. So this is a cell and this is one of the cells that has a glucose channel that is closed and is preventing the cell from receiving glucose. And the glucose is the main source of energy from most of the cells in our body. But then we have bodies produce insulin that when it attached to the insulin receptor, opens the glucose channel and allows the glucose to come in. But there are two things in a diet that is going to prevent insulin from binding into the receptor. And that’s the amount of branched chain amino acids. Remember, we discussed this branched in amino acid specific leucine is the one that is driving and tour pathway and also the amount of saturated fat those will going to interfere with the signaling in the specific pathway. And then the glucose channel is going to remain closed. And if it’s remain closed and we start to accumulate glucose in the bloodstream, your sugar levels are going to go up and your body is going to start producing more and more insulin to try and clear the blood from excess glucose. And then we may believe that our glucose or sugar goes up in our bloodstream because we are eating too much carbohydrates but the fact is that we are eating too much amino acids, brain chain amino acids that are higher in animal foods and too much saturated fat. This is the reason why we are having high glucose.

Dr. Rosane Oliveira

Something I want to mention is specifically, we always think again that we can develop insulin resistance or we can become glucose tolerant because of the amount of carbohydrates in the diet. But two studies show us that that’s not the case. One such study was done just by looking at branch chain amino acids or protein that is coming from a diet and whether or not it’s going to have an effect on insulin sensitivity. This was done with eight vegans and matched controls, meaning eight people, they ate a standard diet and the vegans were supplemented with branched chain amino acids for three months. And what they saw is that why they were receiving extra amino acids or amounts that we would find in a traditional diet, then these people became more insulin resistant. And as soon as they stopped the supplementation with amino acids, then the vegans again became insulin sensitive, just showing that we have an effect. And this is another study that showed that the fact that brain amino acids have a metabolic Health was a randomized control trial with 38 overweight men. And they were eating more or less about 112 grams of animal protein every single day and half of the group was asked to start eating half of the amount. And they noticed that throughout the study, while they are eating what they would consider a low protein diet, that the metabolic markers improved and they were also able to lose weight. But wait a second, so what is the effect the protein will have on our weight or everything that I explained to you? So now chronic inflammation that is happening as a result of leaky gut, leaky gut that’s resulting from us eating a high saturated fat, low fiber diet and also the effect it’s going to have on insulin production. So all of that is to bring us to a point where we become insulin resistant. And this is the second slide that I mentioned that could be a little not challenging but scary to look at at first but I wanted to understand, so this is what happens in the hypothalamus. We have the center of appetite and satiety. You don’t have to understand the details but just so you know what we are seeing right here.

Dr. Rosane Oliveira

In practical terms, everything that I’m explaining to you up until now or when we consume a diet that is high in saturated fat and low in fiber or a diet that is not whole food, plant based with no oil added, we come to a point where we are insulin resistant and we develop chronic low grade inflammation. And when we have the two combined, we come to a place where we become leptin resistant. Remember, the leptin that is produced by fat cells are the ones that send signal to our brain to tell we’ve had enough to eat. We don’t need to eat anymore. So now leptin, instead of having an effect and decreasing food intake or stimulate the neurons that want us to eat less and blocking the neurons that want us to eat more, we don’t have that happening anymore. And that’s when we develop overweight and obesity. And unless we change what we are eating, the quality of our food instead of the quantity, we cannot reverse this leptin resistance. And we have people trying to do what eating less and less. But at the same the hypothalamus is still responding as if they’re not producing enough leptin. So they are eating less and less, but they’re getting hungrier and hungrier. And that’s why just counting calories will never lead you to lose weight and keep the weight off in the long run.

Dr. Rosane Oliveira

I want to talk to you about two more things, the two slides about gut microbiota. And now I want to bring a little bit of epigenetics into play.So we know from studies that the richness of our gut microbiota is directly linked to our weight and our health. This is a study that was done in Denmark with 123 known obese people compared to 169 obese people. And what I noticed is that Obese people had less richness, less diversity and the gut microbiota. And in the Danish population, they could predict that about 23% of the population had decreased richness in the genes and microbial genes that they could find when they sequenced the gut microbiome. And they linked this decreased richness to more addiposity, to insulin resistance, to dislipidemia or having higher lipids or high cholesterol, high triglyceride, maybe also and higher inflammation. And they’ve also noticed that people with less richness or less diversity in gust microbiota are the ones that are also going to be gaining more weight over time. And then this last study that I want to mention today is a study that was done to see exactly how the diet microbiota epigenetics works. And what they were able to show is that, again, going back to our short chain fatty acids that we can only produce if we are eating a high fiber diet that is giving our gut microbiota the opportunity to produce them and how short chain fatty acids are going to be controlling our epigenetics or controlling our genes with two different epigenetic mechanism, DNA methylation that we discussed at the beginning of the class and histone acetylation. And what the study showed is that the consumption of a Western type diet prevents many of the microbiotapendent chromatin changes that occur in a polysaccharide rich diet. I know it sounds a little complicated, but what they’re saying is that if you’re eating a Western type diet, you’re not producing short chain fatty acids that you’re going to see in a polysaccharide rich diet, which is a diet that is rich in carbohydrates. Right. And you’re not going to see those short chain fatty acids having a capacity to epigenetically change gene expression. And the genes that were differentially expressed, whether or not you had short chain fatty acids or not in your diet were genes associated with hosting unity and inflammation. The less short chain fatty acids, the higher the chance that we can develop inflammation and lower our immunity.

Dr. Rosane Oliveira

So here we are, today we discussed weight loss, and we focused a lot on our diet or the foods we choose to eat every single day. And how they will either help us lose weight and keep the weight off or not. But weight loss and health go beyond what we choose to eat and whether or not we are physically active. We also need to pay attention to at least two other things that I want to mention briefly before we finish our lecture today. One is stress in our lives, whether or not we manage and how well we manage this stress because stress has an effect on our immunity. When we are stressed, our immunity goes down, and we also have a greater chance of developing inflammation. And we also know that stress has a direct impact on the types of food you choose to eat. So we need to pay attention to emotions, too. And emotions are also behind our behaviors. So managing stress should be a very important part of everybody’s life because it’s going to have a direct effect on whether or not you will be able to lose weight and keep the weight off in the long run. And the second thing that most people don’t pay attention to is how well you sleep. Studies have shown that if you sleep less than five, 6 hours every single day, you also have decreased in your immunity. And now we see how the diet that we choose to eat, if it has less fiber or if you have stress in your life and if you’re not sleeping enough, all three are going to decrease our immunity and increase inflammation and also have an effect on the types of food we eat and whether or not we feel saciated. Sleep, specifically, studies have shown that when they compared people that were sleeping for five days, about 5 hours per night, versus those people that could sleep eight and a half hours, those that slept less had an increase in the production of ghrelin. And we know that ghrelin makes us what? What want to eat more.

Dr. Rosane Oliveira

You may be asking, what is then the truth about weight loss? The truth is that everything is connected. Eating well is just one piece of the puzzle. Of course, choosing to eat a whole food, plant based diet with no added oil that is going to help us avoid the tropical oils that are going to be higher in saturated fat is essential for us to be able to lose weight, keeping the weight off and being healthy. But we also need to learn to unwind stress. We need to move joyfully. We need to be physically active, and we need to learn to sleep deeply. All of these habits, all of these behaviors are connected. Then I want you to remember this, that for you to be able to change your life, to be able to lose weight and keep the weight off, you need to change your habits. It’s not just a matter of knowing what you eat and knowing what you should be doing. You actually need to be doing it every single day. And again, it’s not just what you eat, it’s how physically active you are, how well you sleeping, and how you’re managing stress. And once you learn to change your habits, then you’re able to change your life forever.

I want to leave you with this thought. I know many of you have heard this in the past. The genetics loads the gun and lifestyle pulls the trigger. What is lifestyle? Lifestyle is all of the behaviors that we adopt and we are able to keep every single day. But you see, what you’ve learned today with me too is that it’s not just genetics. Even if you don’t have certain mutations that may increase the risk to develop overweight or obesity or cancer type two diabetes, you name it that epigenetics have the capacity to load the gun and lifestyle pulls the trigger. But wait a second, epigenetics is what? Remember, it is how our behaviors and how our environment can change gene expression. The old saying can be more frightening or it can be more hopeful and optimistic because lifestyle itself, our behaviors have the capacity to load the gun and our behaviors will put the trigger. So our behaviors, everything that we choose to do every single day has the capacity to change gene expression because not only loads again but also pulls the trigger. To me I choose to see it as a very optimistic message. We have control over our genes mostly at least the ones that are related to most of the chronic diseases because when we control our behaviors when we control our habits we are at the same time controlling our genes whether they are being turned on and off. So we have the capacity to create our own destiny. Because of everything that I’ve just told you in March 2021 we started a new foundation called the plant-based life foundation and our mission is to empower you to be able to live a happy and healthy life through the adoption of positive habit change. We know that it’s not just enough for us to be talking about yeah, eat plant-based. We also need to help you change your habits and those habits include the adoption of a plant-based diet but it’s not enough to just eat plant-based. You also remember need to see or learn or adopt new habits related to sleep, managing your stress and your physical activity. All of that together is going to lead to the happy and healthy life that you s want and deserve. Thank you so much for having me here. I thank AJ, I thank Tobi and I wish you all an amazing summit. Bye.

Chef AJ: Hi, Dr. Lawenda, and welcome to the Truth about Weight Loss Summit, thank you so much for being here.

Dr. Steve Lawenda: Hi, AJ, so good to see you. So good to be here. I’m so honored. Thank you so much and I’m excited as well.

Chef AJ: Well, it wouldn’t be a summit without you. You know, Dr. Lawenda, when I asked you what you wanted to talk about this year, you mentioned exercise and I’m curious, why?

Dr. Steve Lawenda: Great question. You know, as a physician who’s very passionate about health and wellness, and part of that, of course, is weight loss or weight management. You know, I know, I recognize, of course, this is what the summit is all about. And I recognize that to be honest, it can be a pretty sensitive topic for people, but nonetheless, you know, it’s something that has to come up at one point or another or it should come up, at least for many people. And a lot of my patients went when it did come up. It’s so interesting, AJ. because you know, you and I both know that weight loss is primarily about the food. I mean, we say it sometimes we say it’s all about the food, but that’s true. It’s absolutely true. Nevertheless, it’s so interesting because so many of my patients and not only patients but friends and family and even colleagues, doctors, bring up exercise as the main way to lose weight. I don’t know if that’s their assumption if they have a misconception about weight loss, but I hear it time and time again. You know, I’ll bring up weight loss. We’ll be discussing it. And patients say, You know, Dr. Lawenda, I’m having trouble with my weight right now because, you know, my gym is closed and I haven’t been able to exercise or I hurt my knee or I hurt my back. And then the other thing too is there’s a lot of myths or misconceptions around weight loss and exercise particularly, on the other hand, a lot of people are unfamiliar with or maybe they don’t appreciate the real benefits of exercise. And there are so many of them. And I think it’s so important that the public knows, that our patients, and that my colleagues know what the real benefits are. I mean, weight loss, don’t get me wrong, it’s a relatively minor benefit. Exercise doesn’t work all that well for weight loss. As we discussed earlier, a little bit before we went online. It’s excellent for weight loss maintenance, but not so good for weight loss. So I wanted to spend some time to discuss and dispel some of the myths around exercise, especially when it comes to weight loss. But also, I want to talk about some of the benefits that are underappreciated and are recognized and also a lot of times too people think that they can’t exercise for various reasons. I guess a lot of that boils down to quote-unquote excuses, but I want to talk about those as well. And so there’s a lot around it. It’s a whole big, exciting topic. And so I’m very excited to talk about it, because I talk most mostly about food all the time and very often and I don’t talk enough about exercise and it’s something that a lot of us don’t, especially in the plant-based movement.

Chef AJ: Yeah, I know. I agree with you. You know, I remember Jack Lalanne saying, exercise is king, nutritionist, queen, and together you have the keys to the kingdom. And I think you’re right that we tend to focus at least in the plant-based world on food. Absolutely.

Dr. Steve Lawenda: So if you don’t mind, I do have some slides, is it okay if I start sharing?

Chef AJ: I love slides. I learn so well when there are slides because it takes my focus right to the slide.

Dr. Steve Lawenda: Excellent. All right. So here we go again. I’m Dr. Lawenda. I’m board-certified in family medicine and lifestyle medicine, and I love what I do. I’m very passionate about it. So without further ado, let’s get started with actually first a disclaimer. If you’re at home watching this and you’re considering starting an exercise regimen, I do have to mention that the safest thing is to check with your doctor first, just to make sure that you have no restrictions because some of us do have, you know, preexisting medical conditions, and we do have to be careful when we start an exercise regimen. So I’ll need to put that out there. So myth number one, and I’m kind of joking here when I say this, but honestly, AJ, if I had a quarter for every time a patient mentioned to me exercise in the context of weight loss, I’d be so rich. But a lot of people do believe that exercise is necessary for weight loss, and I’m here to say that is absolutely not necessary. I have a little cartoon here. These are two fish, obviously, and one is saying to the other I lost 10 pounds in two weeks, mostly by swimming. No, I don’t know about you, A.J. But It’s cute, isn’t it? But you know, there is something fishy about this. Pun intended I guess. But that is simply not true. First of all, fish, in general, are not they don’t really get overweight. It’s really about the food, as we know. But exercise does not really lead to weight loss, and it’s not necessary. And we’ll talk about some of the reasons why it doesn’t work so well. But I want to share a story, a real story of one of our real patients in our program. And we have a lifestyle medicine program that myself and a nurse practitioner named Maureen Watson co-created about six years ago. And this is one of our patients. Her name is Janet. And this is just a great story to kind of illustrate this point. That exercise is not necessary for weight loss. Janet, as you can see, she’s in a scooter and she has oxygen tubing. She’s a former smoker. She suffered from COPD, and she could barely walk. When she’s not using her scooter, she sometimes uses or was using her walker to go very short distances. But honestly, just going across a room, she’d be out of breath. Well, I don’t know about you, AJ, but when I see someone like Janet, I think most of us, when we see someone like Janet, we kind of tend to assume that she’s more or less stuck in this situation, that she’s not going to all of a sudden be miraculously cured and no longer need her oxygen and no longer need her scooter or her walker and be able to walk around and run around as if she were young again and healthy again. Well, especially if you believe that exercise is necessary for weight loss because you probably say, my goodness. You know, Janet here could barely walk across the room. How is she going to exercise to take this weight off? And the other thing you might be thinking is, well, maybe she might qualify for weight loss surgery. But to be honest, she was not really interested in weight loss surgery, and I’m not sure that she would have been a good candidate given her preexisting conditions and being that she’s a bit older. So in any case, Janet came to our program and she ate from what we call the magical buffet. And I think you know what that is, AJ. But all you can eat, no counting, no measuring, no going hungry. And lo and behold, Janet lost nearly 100 pounds. But more amazing than that, I mean, that’s amazing, I think on the surface, but more amazing than that, she lost the need for her oxygen. She lost the need for her scooter and her walker. She walks all over the place. No shortness of breath. In fact, she says she feels twenty-five years younger now and I have. This is just a screenshot on the right of her. This is before the pandemic started. She was in a karaoke bar in Las Vegas. Actually, she was literally jumping up and down dancing like a teenager. It’s truly, truly an amazing story. So inspiring. And she did this all with food and not by eating less food, but by eating as much as she wanted. No counting, no measuring, no going hungry. You and I know how this works, AJ. In fact, I think you should do a whole summit on this. I’m kidding but being a little sarcastic because you are doing a summit and I’m part of it and again, so honored to be part of it. So she didn’t do this with exercise. That being said, what’s so great about this story is that she didn’t do this with exercise, but now she’s so much more active. Now she’s essentially exercising because of the weight loss from the diet change.

Dr. Steve Lawenda: So a lot of times people don’t realize that you have to change your diet first and then once you start feeling better, then you get to move more and you enjoy moving more. And of course, you and I know this, A.J., but it comes down to calorie density in terms of the diet. I always teach our patients that fiber and water are your best friends because they’re bulky, they’re heavy fiber and water, and so they take up space in your stomach, but they both have zero calories. So if you eat a lot of whole plant foods, which are rich in both fiber and water, you’re going to lose a lot of weight because you’re filling up your stomach with far fewer calories than if you eat other foods other than Whole Plant Foods. So I’m not going to go into this in too much detail. I know you’re an expert at this A.J., and I’m sure there’ll be plenty of other speakers talking about this. But I just wanted to mention that that’s how Janet lost the weight. And so that being said, even though exercise doesn’t isn’t necessary for weight loss, there are so many benefits. And I found this quite interesting. I found many studies that show that exercise may boost self-esteem, and I think that alone psychologically is very important because when we’re making lifestyle changes, especially around diet and exercise, the higher the self-esteem, I think the more likely we are to be successful. Because if for feel good about ourselves, we’re more likely to continue to be motivated, et cetera, et cetera, to maintain the motivation. Another really interesting study about exercise, especially when it comes to diet, is that I found a really interesting study where they took young adults and they put them on an exercise program, and they found that they looked at their diet before and after, and they found that after the exercise program, the young people were eating better, but not because they were told to do so. They just changed. In other words, the studies suggest that by exercising, we’re feeling good psychologically and physically, and we have perhaps higher self-esteem and we want to nourish our bodies better, you know, without people telling us what to do. There’s an expression: get fit in the gym, lose weight in the kitchen. I love this and it’s absolutely true. There’s so many benefits to exercise. Getting fit is one of them. I’m going to talk about so many of them in just a moment. But really, we lose weight in the kitchen. I wanted to talk about this because studies have been done looking at exercise for weight loss. And they, you know, it is true that exercise does help with weight loss, but the effect is very, very small.

Dr. Steve Lawenda: So this was a review where they looked at 43 studies, over three thousand patients, and what they looked at studies where exercise was added to, to diet, to a diet change. And they found that the addition of exercise only amounted to about two additional pounds lost. So in other words, it does work, but it’s very small. And there’s a lot of thinking behind why you know why? Why does exercise only work so little? What’s the limit? What’s the limitation here? What’s going on? And on one hand, it seems like when people do exercise, they don’t burn enough calories. No one. In other words, if you go for a brisk walk every day, which is fantastic for your health, you’re probably burning one hundred and fifty calories, maybe two hundred. And that’s good. Don’t get me wrong, but it may not be enough for weight loss. The other thing is that exercise tends to stimulate appetite. So sometimes people are exercising and they’re actually eating a little bit more, not with and oftentimes not without realizing it, to be honest. So it’s kind of unintentional and unconscious even. So again, I mean, I apologize if I kind of got out of order in any case. Let’s go-to myth number two. Myth number two is that a lot of people feel that the only reason to exercise is weight loss, that there’s no other benefits, in other words. And a lot of people get depressed. They say, Well, gee, Dr. Lawenda, if exercise doesn’t really help weight loss, why exercise at all? And this is a huge one, A.J. There are so many amazing benefits to exercise. And you know, when you think about a lot of the benefits, a lot of the benefits are in common with the benefits that we see from the diet. But if you do both together, I love that quote that you shared earlier about diet queen or king, but one is king and queen and the other is the other and together you have keys to the kingdom. Is that what you say? But that’s absolutely true. Albert Einstein once said life is like riding a bicycle, to keep your balance you must keep moving. I mean, I think it’s just so, so much a part of human nature to be moving. And unfortunately, in our modern society now we’re so sedentary. There are so many conveniences that it’s just become, unfortunately, the case that we don’t move enough, but it’s been such a fundamental part of our human history.

Dr. Steve Lawenda: So here’s kind of an overview of some of the benefits, besides weight loss and if you look at some of these benefits, I mean, really head to toe on the inside of our bodies on the outside, everybody’s I mean, I’m not going to read these all right now, but they’re really just like so extensive. And again, whether it’s metabolism, whether it’s physical fitness, diabetes, heart disease, mortality, our brain, our well-being, our mood, dementia, I mean on and on and on and on. Here’s one that I mean, if we could just stop right here up to this one because you exercise, you live longer. By the way, the benefit of a moderate amount of exercise, which is about half an hour to an hour a day of brisk walking it’s about a 40 percent drop. It amounts to about a 40 percent drop in the risk of death. They adjusted for things like age and sex and smoking and BMI, all these things that you see. So in other words, you take the same exact person or twins. Let’s say they’re the same weight, the same height, the same age. Everything’s the same except exercise. The one who exercises is going to live longer, 40 percent less risk of dying, roughly. We see benefits with heart disease, about a 30 to 50 percent drop in the risk of heart disease for both men and women. We also have a really cool study where they took people with heart disease. We talk about reversing heart disease with diet all the time. But here’s a study where they looked at it with exercise and what they found was they compared. They did. It was a randomized trial, so they randomized people, these are people with chest pain, with blocked arteries. They randomized them to either a stent or an exercise program. And those people who did the exercise program actually had less risk of dying from heart disease than people who got the stent. And the researchers noted in the paper, they said, You know, we think the reason for this is because the stent only opens up one small section, one small blockage. But what about the whole vascular, the whole circulation? But what about all the arteries? Well, exercise works everywhere across all the arteries, just like food does, of course. So it’s a more holistic approach. And by the way, it’s so crazy because as a doctor, we never hear about studies like this. Unfortunately, it’s sad. You know, there’s so much in our training, about medications and procedures and not enough about natural remedies, lifestyle remedies, et cetera.

Dr. Steve Lawenda: Cancers are the number two cause of death. Heart disease is number one. We see a 20 percent reduction in risk of many cancers and about a 40 percent reduction in survival from many cancers as well. And there’s many mechanisms proposed as to why that would be the case. With diabetes, we see about half the risk of diabetes with moderate amounts of exercise. If you already have diabetes, we see that exercise is roughly equivalent to the effectiveness of one medication. So just by exercising, you could probably get rid of one of your medications just by exercising alone. And if you’re following a plant-based diet and you’re stuck and you’re going, Gosh, I’ve made some benefits, but I’m stuck. I have one less medication to get rid of. If you’re not exercising, go ahead and start that, and that might be the answer right there. Fatty liver disease is a very common and increasingly common disease, and it’s affecting just so many people these days. And this is amazing because there are studies now showing that exercise improves fatty liver. It reverses it even if your weight doesn’t change. So if your weight is stuck but you’re exercising, you’re going to improve your fatty liver. Now, of course, if you lose weight, that’s even better for men. Erectile dysfunction now we’ve talked before. I mean, it’s a common sort of knowledge that a plant-based diet, at least within the plant-based movement, that a plant-based diet can reverse erectile dysfunction, but exercise can help with that as well. So if you’re a man and you have this problem, you should eat plants and exercise. You get the best bang for your buck. No pun intended there, I think. I don’t know. But I didn’t mean it to come out that way. But in any case, I could talk like that around you. I know right. If you’re a woman who’s menopausal and you’re having hot flashes, there’s studies showing that there’s benefits to hot flashes and overall quality of life during menopause. Osteoporosis is a major concern that we all should have as we get older. We don’t want to fall and break a hip or break our back, et cetera, et cetera. Studies show that exercise, especially weight-bearing, in other words, on your feet type exercises, but even all exercises really lower the risk of fractures. In fact, some studies show that the benefit may be just as good as osteoporosis medication, although the actual effect is kind of mixed as far as the studies, I don’t want to get the message out there that, you know, don’t take medication. I don’t want that to be the message, but it really should be a decision you make between you and your doctor. But that being said, what’s really interesting as well, speaking of medication, is that if you do take medication, you should still exercise because this study showed that if you take medication for osteoporosis and exercise, you have additional benefits, especially if it’s weight-bearing exercise. And just, you know, falling. You know, as we get older, A.J., you know, it’s so sad how many people fall and they’re doing really well. They’re healthy, they’re happy. They have this terrible fall. They’re in the hospital, they have broken bones and and and they’re miserable and regular exercise would have significantly reduced his risk of falling up to probably up to 40 percent. And the other thing, too, is that if you’re elderly, especially elderly, and you’re worried about falls, you should not only exercise, but you should include balance exercises and if you’re not sure, talk to a physical therapist or read up on that. There’s a lot of information on the internet about balance exercises and depression. Studies show that exercise may be just as effective as medication when it comes to depression. And also, of course, you can imagine doing both, I’m sure, would be better than one alone. Cognitive decline, our mind, we don’t want to lose our mind, we don’t want to become demented exercise helps prevent that or at least slow that down.

Dr. Steve Lawenda: And it’s so interesting because, you know, I have my original degree as an undergraduate in chemistry, so I took a lot of physics and chemistry and all this kind of stuff. You know, nerdy type science, but what’s interesting is exercise. It’s not, obviously, it’s not a chemical, but it has all these microscopic benefits that are basically chemical benefits. It’s fascinating and we’re learning that when we exercise, it helps to rewire the brain in a beneficial way. That’s called neuroplasticity. Rewiring of the brain. And the other thing too is there’s this other term called epigenetics, which is not that our genes are changing, but it’s how the genes are expressed. So the genes aren’t changing, but it’s how the genes are expressed and that’s being benefited. In other words, in a beneficial, healthful way by exercise and diet does that as well. So we may not be able to change our genes, but we can change how our genes are expressed. And that’s a hot topic, a hot field. I don’t know if you recognize him, A.J. This is Dick van Dyke from the Mary Poppins classic movie from I don’t know how many years ago now Burt Wright, and he has this quote about exercise. He says, In my 30s, I exercise to look good in my 40s, exercise to stay fit. Then in my 70s, I exercised to stay ambulatory. In my 80s, I exercised to stay out of assisted living. In my 90s I’m exercising out of pure defiance. I love this quote. It’s kind of cute. It’s funny, but at the same time, there’s a lot of truth to it. There’s a lot of wisdom in there. And the interesting thing is he doesn’t really mention the term weight loss. And of course, as we talked about, it does help somewhat. It helps, especially with the maintenance of weight loss. But really, these are benefits that he’s describing of vitality, of well-being, of function. So there’s a lot of truth to that.

Dr. Steve Lawenda: Here’s another myth I hear all the time A.J., and I think it’s more of an excuse than a myth. But a lot of people feel like, Well, gosh, if I’ve got a bad knee or a bad or a bad shoulder or a bad back, that I can’t exercise at all. I mean, there’s all these wonderful benefits, Dr. Lawenda, that you’re mentioning, but I can’t do it or my gym is closed. It’s because of COVID or something. And you know, I think a lot of times what it is is just a matter of readjusting our expectations and working around our limitations. Maybe we can’t stand. Maybe we can’t even walk, but maybe we can do exercises. Sitting here are a bunch of seniors. I’m sure this is before COVID, but they’re exercising and they’re trying. You know, anyone could go onto YouTube today and find wonderful chair exercises that anybody can do. And you know what? It’s much better than doing nothing. You’ll feel better. Of course, a swimming pool. Of course, there are low-impact machines like exercise bikes, elliptical machines, and you know, a lot of times people worry about the expense involved in purchasing equipment. But you know, if you do the math, I don’t know if you’ve ever thought of this, but people pay a lot of money to belong to a gym and the amount of money that people pay for a gym membership for one or two or maybe three years can definitely pay for for a good amount of home equipment. We’ve kind of taken that approach here in our home recently, our house, our family, and we’re really, really happy about our talk about it a little bit about that later. The other thing too to consider if you have a lot of pain and pain is limiting your ability to do what you want to do in terms of exercise. Keep in mind with a plant-based diet like Janet, the story I mentioned earlier at the beginning, you can lose a lot of weight from exercise, and as a result, a lot of times people have much less pain after losing a lot of the weight. The other thing, though, too, is that plant-based diets are anti-inflammatory, so you probably will have a lot less pain from the anti-inflammatory effects as well from a plant-based diet. Now here’s another myth A.J. I don’t know if you’ve heard this or thought about this, but a lot of people either haven’t heard about it, or maybe they’ve heard about it, but just haven’t taken action on this yet.

Dr. Steve Lawenda: I don’t know whether you can tell A.J., but I’ve been standing the entire time, and during this presentation, I am not sitting and I’m doing it on purpose. I don’t always do this for presentations, but I figured I would do it for this one especially because of myth number four, which is if I exercise, I can sit the rest of the day. And actually, studies are showing that that’s not the case. I mean, you can do whatever you want to do, of course. But studies show that when people sit too much, there’s an increased risk of death, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and a whole bunch of terrible things in spite of exercise. So here’s an example of a study where they took over 4000 adults and they looked at people who basically watched TV or screen. They grouped them into two less than two hours and more than four hours a day. And what they found was that the group that sat in front of a screen more than four hours a day had a 52 percent higher risk of overall death. Two hundred and thirty percent increase in cardiovascular events, in other words, being hospitalized for a heart problem. And what’s really interesting here is that these findings, these concerns held true even when exercise was taken into account, so even in people who were exercising, they were still at higher risk. So what we’ve got to do like this as a society, we are of course, dependent a lot on technology, but we do have to think about things like standing desks. We have to think about getting up and stretching and taking breaks, walking around. Maybe if you’re watching a show and you can pause it and get up during commercials or whatever it is, or maybe put an exercise machine in front of your TV. We’ve done that. I’ll share my personal approach here and a little bit. Here’s actually a picture of my office, A.J. and at work. And initially, I didn’t have a standing desk at my work, but I thought it would be great, especially as I was doing this research a few years ago on sitting and the dangers of sitting. I thought, Boy, I think I should get one of these at work. And I asked about my work. I said, Look, I don’t know if I really needed to make an excuse, but I told them this is true. I actually do have a bit of a back problem. I said, look, I have a back problem. I’d like to be able to get up once in a while. Can it? Is it possible we can get me a standing desk at work? And sure enough, they provided me with one, and so I will go from sitting to standing back and forth, and I’m so happy I’m doing that. At least I’m not as worried about the dangers of too much sitting.

Dr. Steve Lawenda: Here’s another myth OK, doctor, I’ll exercise, but can I really eat plants and exercise? I mean, plant-based diets not going to be adequate for exercise. I’m going to need so much more protein, right? Well, I know this is a big, big one, A.J. Couple thoughts. First of all, in terms of the animal kingdom, the largest and strongest animals on land are plant-based. Pound for pound, the gorilla is considered the strongest animal on land. The gorillas are plant-based. They also happen to be, I mean, the apes happen to be closest to us in terms of DNA. The elephants also are considered to be the strongest animals on land period, not just pound for pound, but overall they can actually uproot trees with their trunk. I mean, they’re amazing. Now you might be thinking, OK, Doctor Lawenda, that’s great. But these are animals, we are humans, we are different. But here’s the thing actually, human athletes can excel on plants. In fact, some of our top athletes in the world currently are of all different kinds of sports, are plant-based, and we can go on and on. And for those of you who haven’t watched the movie, the game changers, it’s a wonderful documentary. I highly recommend you see it now. If you’re wondering, how much protein do we need? Do we need to count protein? Well, here’s the thing. This is a weight loss summit. So for most of us, I mean, if you’re not, if you’re not an elite athlete, you really don’t need to worry about protein. In fact, even elite athletes probably don’t need to worry as much as they think they do. But so in terms of weight loss, don’t worry. Honestly, I know probably you’ve heard this a million times before, but I have not seen a case of protein deficiency in a plant-based patient. I have not had to send a patient to the hospital because they’re protein deficient because they ate too many plants. It just doesn’t occur. But if you really are into numbers, I mean, here are some numbers on the screen of what’s recommended for protein. Because a lot of people do have these questions, and the American College of Sports Medicine says that if you’re trying to be a competitive athlete and build lots of muscle, then you should have a little bit more. You can see the numbers again on your screen 1.2 to 1.7. But here’s the thing, though a lot of people still believe that the more protein, the better or the healthier, and an animal protein is the superior protein. But here’s the thing. Many studies show that actually the more protein, the sicker we are. The earlier we die, the more cancer we have. And this particular study found that high amounts of animal protein in the diet led to a four times higher rate of death from cancer. Seventy-five percent overall higher risk of death and the risks were only associated with animal protein in the study, not with plant protein.

Dr. Steve Lawenda: This is a fascinating study that came out this past year in twenty twenty-one, where they took 19 vegan men, habitual vegan men. They didn’t make them vegan in a study. They were already vegan and 19 habitual omnivores and they put them on an exercise program to build muscle, specifically to build muscle. And they said, Well, OK, you know, American College of Sports Medicine says they need to have so much protein, so they actually counted or measured how much protein they were eating, and they actually supplemented with protein powder to make sure they were getting a really high amount of protein intake so that they wanted to make sure that their vegans and the omnivores got the same amount of protein. Because the whole idea of the study was to compare the court, you know, that does plant-based protein not work as well for building muscle? Right. So we’re just so anyway. So that’s what they did and what they found was really fascinating and but not that surprising to me, which was that the two groups. Both of them got stronger and their muscles grew by about the same. In other words, there was no there were no differences between the groups of plant-based protein that seem to work just as well as animal protein at building muscle. Now, if you’re somebody who happens to be a competitive athlete and you want to build muscle, or perhaps you attend this weight loss summit, you lose all this weight and now you want to put muscle on for whatever reason. You know, here’s a list of high protein plant foods. But for most of us, especially if it’s if you’re just concerned about weight loss, you really don’t need to worry about this, in any case, I’m just leaving this up on the screen for those of you who are interested.

Dr. Steve Lawenda: So a summary so far AJ. get fit in the gym, lose weight in the kitchen, exercise, you know, for weight loss maintenance, of course, but mainly for health reasons, for well-being, for longevity. Anybody can do it Aj, anybody, No matter what your limitations. You can customize a plan. And as you lose weight from eating more plants, you may want to customize your program or adjust your program as time goes on. Like Janet, Janet was in the scooter and using a walker all the time, and now she’s running around, although she definitely customized her approach or adjusted as time went on. And the last thing is, you know, don’t sit too much, so stand once in a while, maybe consider a standing desk, take breaks, et cetera, et cetera. What about some official guidelines? Are there official guidelines on exercise? There absolutely are. The Department of Health and Human Services puts these out every so often, I think every 10 years or so. They just updated about three. I think it was 2018. It’s available online. But basically, what’s recommended for most Americans is half an hour to an hour of brisk walking or more per day, or at least most days, at least five days a week. And we should also include some resistance training in the major muscle groups at least two days a week. And if you’re elderly, you should include balance exercises as well. The other thing that gets a little bit tricky here is I mentioned half an hour to an hour of brisk walking or more per day but if the exercise is more intense, what’s called vigorous-intensity exercise like running, you can actually cut down the amount of times instead of 30 minutes to an hour, it could be 15 minutes to half an hour. Now, if you’re wondering what exactly is moderate activity versus vigorous, I mentioned walking briskly. But one quick test, as you can if you’re doing moderate activity intensity activity, you can talk, but you can’t sing. OK, so that’s how you know. And here’s a list of activities that are considered moderate to vigorous. It’s more like running-type intensity. You can say a few words, but you can’t really hold a decent conversation. So that’s how you know you’re doing vigorous activity. Now, if you’re wondering, you know, what about the difference between cardio and resistance training? What if I have diabetes? Should I do both? Because a lot of people, a lot of my patients, especially patients in our program and especially patients who have a lot of weight to lose, they’re worried about diabetes, either getting it or they already have it. Well, it turns out that both cardio exercise and strength training or resistance training work for diabetes, but the combination of the two is actually even more effective. So many studies show that both cardio exercise, and resistance training are good not only for diabetes but for so many other benefits. Now, if you don’t have access to a gym, especially during COVID, there’s so many things you could do at home. There’s so many YouTube videos, there’s apps on your smartphone, you don’t even really need any equipment whatsoever. That being said, you could buy some dumbbells, you could buy resistance bands. They’re really cheap and easy. You can buy some equipment again. I feel like the cost is justified because a gym membership, you’ll save money on the gym membership and within a year or two, that’ll cover the costs of gym equipment.

Dr. Steve Lawenda: What about this guy here? This guy, AJ. He’s going to the gym, but he’s going to take the elevator to the gym. You know, we do this all the time. We’re always looking for shortcuts, parking our car close to the, you know, getting a good parking spot, you know, not taking the stairs. But little things like that do make a difference. You know, in the olden days before we lived in modern society, we. You know, we sort of had to move more. We didn’t have elevators or cars or anything like that. So do what you can do the little things every day to make, you know, give yourself a little bit more of a challenge. Walk your dog, clean your house, cook garden, things like that and enjoy it. You know, I say this with my patients all the time, and you know you should enjoy your food, but you should also enjoy your movement and your lifestyle. And you can see these people are smiling. And you know, they’re dancing. They’re gardening. You know, one thing, one tip I have, I share this with a lot of my patients, too. I say, Look, if you’re going to eat healthier, that means cooking. Well, guess what? Cooking also burns calories. A lot of people don’t realize that, but one hundred and thirty-seven calories are burned per hour. So A.J., with what you do in your cooking, I mean, maybe you don’t even need to exercise. That might be enough right there. But the other thing is dancing. Dancing actually burns double or more than double the amount that cooking does. So if you put some music on while you’re cooking and you dance a little and cook at the same time, you could really burn a lot of calories and have a lot of fun because you really should enjoy this. And speaking of enjoying it. Studies show that we enjoy it more when we’re doing it with a partner. We’re also more accountable. We perform better. We’re more motivated when we have a partner or some sort of accountability system. So with that in mind, I want to share one final story and then I’ll wrap up and see if you have any other thoughts or questions for me or comments. This was a an obese male six foot two. He was 38 years old and he had pre-diabetes, fatty liver disease, acid reflux, everyday symptoms of sleep apnea. He was yo-yo dieting and felt like a failure. He worried he could die suddenly because his father had a heart attack at age 45 and his grandfather at age 38, which is exactly the age he was when this story is taking place. In any case this man learned about the magical buffet that we’re referring to earlier. And he lost 75 pounds in eight months. He’s maintained the weight loss for eight years as BMI is normal. He is. Pre-Diabetes went away and everything went away. The fatty liver, the acid reflux, the blood pressure dropped 20 points. He feels fantastic. I have a before and after picture. I don’t know if you recognize this man aJ. Does he look familiar to you? It is me. I was going to say it’s my twin brother, but no, it’s me. And so, you know, I say this with my patients. I joke and say, Look, you’re probably thinking I’m going to say, if I can do it, you can. Absolutely. That’s exactly what I’m thinking because honestly, I was a horrible eater. I was inconsistent with exercise as well. But I will say this. I don’t know if you knew this age, but when I first started my weight loss journey, my transformation, I had heard claims that exercise is not necessary for weight loss, especially if you’re following a plant-based diet, you can lose so much weight. I said, Yeah, right, no way. I mean, everything I’ve heard up until that point in my life has been that exercise is critical to weight loss. I mean, you can’t lose weight without exercising. And so I thought to myself, I’m going to prove them wrong. I’m going to prove them wrong. I’m intentionally not going to exercise because I’m going to prove them wrong, that I’m not going to be able to lose weight. Well, I intentionally didn’t exercise and I lost all this weight. So in eight months, I didn’t exercise on purpose. And then after I lost all the weight, I said, You know what? Oh my gosh, I couldn’t believe the benefits. I couldn’t believe that this had happened. But at the same time, I felt so much better. I felt younger, more energetic because of my weight loss and my plant-based diet. And then I felt like I wanted to exercise because I loved my new body, my new self. I had all this self-esteem, higher self-esteem from this whole transformation.

Dr. Steve Lawenda: So then I started exercising. And to be honest, I’m not perfect in anything. I’m not. I haven’t been perfect with exercise, but I’ve gotten a lot better recently. A couple of tips I’ll share. I used to eat out every day, my old self before going plant-based. I used to go out to eat every day for convenience. And also I was probably addicted to fast food, of course. In any case, I used to think it was saving me time. But then once I became plant-based and started bringing my lunch to work, I realized, You know what? You bring your lunch to work. You save a lot of time because walking to my car and driving somewhere is five minutes to walk to my car, 10 minutes to drive to a, you know, a takeout fast food place. Then I had to wait in line for five or 10 minutes to get my food. Then I got to drive back. It’s another 10 minutes and I’m going to walk back to my office. The whole drive is walking, driving, waiting. The whole thing’s probably 30 minutes, maybe 40 minutes. Well, now what I’ve learned from this by bringing lunch to work is that now that 30 or 40 minutes I used to spend getting my food, I can now go outside and take a walk. So a lot of times if the weather’s nice, which a lot of times it is, I’ll go outside during lunch and take a walk. So that’s a tip right there for people. And even if you’re working from home, you can do that as well. And you should. And by the way, the 30 minutes of exercise a brisk walking a day or more and doesn’t have to be walking in, does that level moderate intensity that can be broken up into chunks, ten minutes or more. So you can take maybe if you only have 10 minutes to take a walk during lunch, do 10 minutes and then when you get home or after work, do the additional 20 or more. But the other tip I have, AJ, is that I was struggling not only to exercise consistently, but I was also struggling as a busy doctor to balance everything in my life. We have two young girls and oftentimes it makes me very sad, but oftentimes I don’t spend enough time with them. And one of the things that my oldest daughter, Gabby, likes to do with me is there are certain shows that she loves and she likes to watch them with me. One of them happens to be Gilmore Girls. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of it or seen it, AJ. But in any case, I actually happen to enjoy it, believe it or not. But in any case, we were watching it together, but we weren’t exercising or anything like that. And then I’d say, Well, gosh, I don’t have time to exercise and watch shows with Gabby. So we decided that I already had this elliptical in the garage and I was actually doing well with that. It really helps me to have the equipment at home because it’s just so much more convenient. But we decided to get a treadmill for either Gabby or Emmy, our youngest, or Patti, my wife, so that now when we watch shows together and we’re exercising together and it’s just a win-win all around because we’re being entertained, we’re spending time together, we’re bonding, we’re motivating each other to exercise or supporting each other, holding each other accountable. And yes, yes, this equipment did cost some money. But again, you know, we’re not paying for gym membership, so it really pays for itself over two or three years or so. So that’s kind of my story here.

Dr. Steve Lawenda: You know, people ask me if I exercise and how do I feel about it when it comes to being plant-based. And I came up with this quote recently, and this is absolutely, absolutely true about how I feel. I feel great when I eat plants. I really do, but I feel amazing when I eat plants and exercise. I really do. The combination of the two it’s like a wonder drug. It really is. And I just feel better. And by the way, I don’t just do cardio. I should mention people are wondering what I was doing. I have resistance bands, I have dumbbells. I happen to have a bad shoulder. Believe it or not, I had an injury a few years ago and so there are certain things I can’t do, but I’ve customized a workout plan with the resistance bands and the dumbbells kind of work around my shoulder problems. So I’m trying to do a little bit of everything here, the cardio and the resistance, but I feel I feel stronger physically. I feel like I have more pep, more energy. My mood is better. I feel like my mind is a little bit better. And in terms of not just mood, but just my thinking is a little more clear and I feel younger and I know that. I think you said earlier, A.J., that before we got on live here that you, you feel great when you exercise just in so many ways. I think we all do, and I want to end with a few quotes. And then if there are any comments or questions of AJ., please let me know. This says if you don’t take the time to work on creating the life you want, you’re eventually going to be forced to spend a lot of time dealing with the life you don’t want. That is so true. Yeah, you know, eating well and exercising is not just going to come to us. You have to go for it. You have to plan it. You have to work at it. It’s not going to be easy. In fact, I think that’s the next quote I have. Now it’s coming up here. It may not be easier, but it will be worth it, absolutely, because the benefits of doing this are just priceless. There’s no medicine, no drug I’ve seen that can accomplish the benefits that either diet or exercise can by themselves. And if you combine the two, like you said, it’s just the most powerful medicine that we have. Here’s another one. Don’t wait for the perfect. You know, a lot of times people think, Well, you know, I can’t do enough exercise, I can’t do half an hour. I can only do 20 minutes or can’t do the exercise I want to do. Studies show that every little bit counts. So even if you can’t do what you consider to be perfect, just do it. Start small. Start now. Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be. But what will happen in all the other days that ever come can depend on what you do today? Today can be the beginning of the rest of your life. The next chapter in your life. So why not start now and make yourself a better future? I think that’s the end of my slides. Here we go. Oh, thank you. Thank you, of course. And I just want to say to everybody watching, you guys got this. You really do. You don’t have to be perfect. Start where you are now. Make steps towards progress, progress over perfection, and you will start to feel better. And the better you feel, the better. Hopefully, the more you do, the better you’ll feel. Thanks, everybody. Thanks, AJ. OK, go for it.

Chef AJ: This is so inspiring, Dr. Lawanda and I love that final quote. If you don’t make the time to create the life you want, you’ll be forced to spend a lot of time dealing with the life you don’t want. That is so good. Did you come up with that?

Dr. Steve Lawenda: No, I found it. I found it. It was someone named Kevin Go. I think he’s a motivational type of author.

Chef AJ: That’s brilliant. If you’d like, you could stop your screen share, and then we can see more of you.

Dr. Steve Lawenda: Sure.

Chef AJ: Do you find that when you’re working with your patients on helping them change their lifestyle, they’re more resistant to exercising than they are even to eating plants?

Dr. Steve Lawenda: You know, it really depends on the person. I have some patients who love exercise, but they really eat poorly and I have other people who are more open to eating better. So I think there’s a mix. But what’s interesting though, again, and I said, this kind of, you know at the beginning is that I think so many actually, to be honest with you, I think people, I think it’s harder for some people to change their diet than to start moving. You know, I really do. I mean, a lot of people walk their dog. You know, I think what’s interesting, though, again and I know I’ve already said this before, but when it comes to weight loss, there are just so many misconceptions on the food side too, but also on the exercise side. So I think with this summit, I’m sure it’s going to be fantastic. Of course, I haven’t seen all the talks yet, but I think it’s so important that people are clear on what food can do and what exercise can do and how to incorporate these changes and how to get started. And sometimes honestly, the biggest enemy we have is ourselves. We have all the information, but we just don’t have the knowledge or the motivation. So hopefully this will inspire people to get started and sometimes we need a friend or a family member to nudge us too.

Chef AJ: So that helps. I think it’s wonderful what you’re doing with your daughters because you’re modeling exercise and you’re doing it in a really fun way.

Dr. Steve Lawenda: Thanks, A.J. yeah, You know, growing up. We watch so much TV. I don’t know about you, AJ., but as a family, we never exercised. Not really, to be honest. And it was kind of sad. I mean, growing up I learned a lot of bad eating habits from my family. I love my family to death. Don’t get me wrong, I learned about a lot of bad eating habits and I didn’t really learn the importance of exercise from my family, either. Although we love sports and everything, I’m trying to do that with our kids and it seems to be helping. And it’s sad to me that, you know, it’s sad to see what’s going on in modern society with all the sedentary lifestyles, the TV, binge-watching, the video games and so on and so forth. And we used to play outside all the time, though I don’t know about you, but we used to play outside as kids and we just don’t see that as often anymore.

Chef AJ: This is how people play today.

Dr. Steve Lawenda: Exactly, exactly. Yeah, at least we were doing the best we can.

Chef AJ: I think that people that are lifelong exercisers are usually those that it was modeled when they were children.

Dr. Steve Lawenda: Yeah, no, I think so. I think with kids, honestly, they may not necessarily change right away. They may not copy or model what their parents are doing. But I think as they grow up especially, it impacts them. And we’re seeing that with our kids. They’re they’re talking a lot more about healthy eating and the importance of it and exercise. And so it is having that effect on them. But at the same time, we’re trying not to force, you know, force it down their throats either, because I think sometimes the psychology of kids is such that they always want to do the opposite of what their parents tell them to do. So I think it’s better to be an example than to be an enforcer.

Chef AJ: But I think it’s great, that’s when I have my guilty Netflix show is when I’m on the spin bike. This is the number one reason people I hear don’t exercise. They don’t have time, but they always have time to watch whatever number one is on Netflix. So combine them.

Dr. Steve Lawenda: Absolutely. No, it’s so true. You know, the average person A.J. I’ve found this statistic spends about four hours on a screen of some sort recreationally like it could be the internet, it could be TV, it could be anything. And so it could be their phone. So they do have the time they just have to make it.

Chef AJ: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I love what you said about depression because I do remember reading some of those studies hearing about them that it is as effective as antidepressants. And the people I know that are on medication, and of course, this is very low, but almost everybody I know that are taking psych meds, they do not exercise.

Dr. Steve Lawenda: Yeah, it’s true. No, it’s true. And even diet too can help with depression as well. And it’s sad that we just live in a society or in a time where we look for the easy, quick pill and in the medical profession. Unfortunately, we’re guilty about that too, and there’s just so much more that can be done naturally. And yes, exercise is so powerful.

Chef AJ: There is no pill that can replace what exercise does. Nobody’s ever been able to discover one. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. I think it’s for people that it’s the momentum. It’s getting started. Because once you make it a habit, you realize you feel worse when you don’t do it. But because I didn’t listen, I’m not shaming or blaming anybody. I didn’t exercise till I was fifty two. But now it’s a non-negotiable. And on the days that I don’t exercise, let’s say, on an early morning flight, I feel terrible.

Dr. Steve Lawenda: Right, right. I do, too. Psychologically and physically. Yeah.

Chef AJ: You are meant to move. You know what? No other species doesn’t move.

Dr. Steve Lawenda: Right. Oh, except Goldie, I’m kidding. She’s sleeping right now.

Chef AJ: But I’m sure when you take her outside, she likes to run around.

Dr. Steve Lawenda: You know she does. I’m just joking.

Chef AJ: Yeah, well, I love that you’re doing the standing desk thing that you’re standing now. You know, anytime you interview Dr. Gregor, one of the experts on the summit, you get seasick because he’s not standing, but he’s on a treadmill at the same time.

Dr. Steve Lawenda: And I know, I know. I don’t think I’m going to go there yet.

Chef AJ: Yeah. We need to find ways to incorporate movement in our life, and I love how you said you can chunk it up. It doesn’t have to be all in one fell swoop if people don’t have the time.

Dr. Steve Lawenda: Absolutely.

Chef AJ: I hope this inspires people to get started. What do you do with your patients, you say, just take a walk. That’s how we start?

Dr. Steve Lawenda: Yeah, well, no, that works. I ask them what they like to do or what they have available to them. Do they have any equipment? Do they have a dog? Do they feel safe in their neighborhood? You know, that kind of thing. And we kind of go from there. But yeah, everybody can do something.

Chef AJ: I agree, you know, because Jean-Pierre, who’s been on this summit before, he’s even worked with people in wheelchairs. So I agree that there’s something that everybody at every level of ability or disability can do. And if people have a pool nearby, that’s a great way to start.

Dr. Steve Lawenda: Absolutely have a patient in a wheelchair. I don’t know whether people do this anymore with the pandemic, but people go to the mall and they walk around the mall. He would go in his wheelchair and just do laps around the mall, just like the Walkers and in fact, I have a neighbor who is always out in his wheelchair, going all over the place, all over the neighborhood.

Chef AJ: I think that getting a buddy can really help with exercise.

Dr. Steve Lawenda: Absolutely. No, I totally agree. Sometimes, yeah, you know, I remember as a kid growing up, one of my best friends, I’d see him almost every day during summer break and everything. And a lot of times I’d feel like not doing much and just kind of hanging around the house and maybe watching TV, and he’d come over and say, come on, get up, you know, whatever and get up, Steve, let’s go do this. Let’s go do that. And you know, it works.

Chef AJ: You know, you said that like when you were little, you went outside and played. A lot of us did. But I remember it was just when I started high school, they stopped physical education. It used to be that we didn’t just go outside and play at recess, but there was one hour a day dedicated to P.E. they called it. And right when I got into high school, they got rid of it.

Dr. Steve Lawenda: Wow, you know, I remember I think in high school we had a little bit of P.E., but then they cut it off at some point, like maybe we had it for ninth or 10th grade, but then not in 11th and 12th or something. Yeah, and it’s really sad.

Chef AJ: That’s not a good idea.

Dr. Steve Lawenda: I think I think we should have, this is just a little off topic, I’m not saying this should be a law, but I think this should be part of our culture that every workplace should have a break for people to take a walk. A lot of them have lunch breaks, but they don’t have walk breaks or exercise breaks. I just think people need to get up and move around or even just standing breaks. I mean, if you’re sitting on a desk, you say, OK, every hour, I want you to get up for five or 10 minutes and walk around and stretch. I think people would function and perform better. They feel better and they work better, be healthier.

Chef AJ: yeah, Ye were meant to move. That’s what we did historically. Did you ever seen that movie WALL-E?

Dr. Steve Lawenda: Oh, yes. Oh gosh, yes.

Chef AJ: I think that’s our future if we don’t make some changes.

Dr. Steve Lawenda: Unfortunately, I agree. It’s a very depressing movie, but, well, well-made, of course.

Chef AJ: Yeah. So, Dr. Lawenda, what is the real truth about weight loss?

Dr. Steve Lawenda: Well, the real truth, honestly, AJ it it primarily about the food. It’s primarily about food and, of course, plant-based foods. We talked about, you know, our low and calorie density. So there’s your Big Bang for the buck right there. But I wanted to bring up today the importance of exercise not only to help with weight loss, even though it’s a little bit of a benefit, but it does also help to maintain weight loss once you do lose it. And secondly, I wanted to bring up the importance, the numerous extensive benefits of exercise, because I don’t want people to think that well, if weight loss is just about the food, then why exercise at all? So I wanted to make sure that people got that today from my talk. So thanks so much for having me and thanks so much for all you do.

Chef AJ: You’re so welcome. It was very inspiring. Thank you so much, Dr. Lawenda.

Chef AJ: Hi, Dr. Pai, and welcome to the Truth about Weight Loss Summit, thank you so much for being here.

Dr. Sunil Pai: Thank you for inviting me.

Chef AJ: Dr. Pai, we have an obesity epidemic. Can you shed some light on it?

Dr. Sunil Pai: Yes. Obesity is actually a true epidemic, and in the presentation I’ll show you is the actual details of why it’s an epidemic and what we can do actually to help reduce this epidemic of obesity by looking at it from an inflammatory perspective.

Chef AJ: That sounds amazing.

Dr. Sunil Pai: OK, so today I’m going to talk about an anti-inflammatory diet and other secrets to losing weight and importantly, keeping it off. So my name is Dr. Sunil Pai. You might have seen me, here before it, chef AJ. so thank you for attending the summit, which I think is going to have profound benefits for your ongoing health. So the weight epidemic, the question that you just asked me, well, it is out of control. You know, 75 percent of the population now are over 20 is overweight. So this is a huge problem. You know, obesity and morbid obesity wasn’t something, you know, twenty-five, 30 years ago, when you look at the obesity maps and you know, this actually used to be all this map used to be actually a lighter color used to be blue and white and blue. And now, as you can see, it’s turning red and dark, red and orange. And so we actually look at 35 percent, 36 percent of people in the United States are obese and nine percent are morbidly obese. That means having a BMI of greater than 40. So when you put that in perspective, that’s 30 million people, and a lot of times people have difficulty. Well, how much is 30 million people I like to put in population in terms of cities because coming from New Mexico, like when I go to New York to go Wow, to Big City. So it’s three and a half times the size of New York City population. That’s how many people are walking around the United States with a BMI of over 40, which means you basically have over about 100 pounds or more on top of the upper normal limit of your normal body weight. And unfortunately, women have 40 percent obesity, forty point five percent obesity, and then 35 percent obesity. And in my book, I actually detail this quite significantly is that you know, people of color and certain ethnic minorities and socioeconomic areas and all we call it now, the food apartheid. You know, there are food deserts and there’s a lot of marketing that goes into this corporate marketing. Unfortunately, that actually keeps certain populations targeted to have more and more, unfortunately, no access to healthy food, but access more to unhealthy food like fast food. So African-Americans and Hispanics, Latinos, and Mexicans actually have higher obesity rates than whites. And increasingly we are starting seeing now, which is kind of unheard of. But we’re also seeing the increase of Asian are having obesity because it’s just the standard American diet and foods that we’re all getting marketed to eat.

Dr. Sunil Pai: Now, the interesting thing and the sad thing is that obesity is linked to the now 60 diseases. So we really have to look at it’s not just, Oh, I weigh, you know, more than I should is that is how we’re risking ourselves to having an entourage, just tons and tons of different conditions. Obesity costs hundred and forty-seven billion dollars in health care. The average person spends almost about fifteen hundred dollars more per year just on their normal health expenditures. And they miss 56 percent more workdays. So it’s costing us in our pocket, our health in, you know, health insurance. It’s costing us at our workplace and it’s costing the overall system. And more importantly, one in six children under the age of 19 are obese. That’s about twelve point seven million people, which is the population of New York and L.A. together. And why this is important is because there’s actually a study that just came out this morning. There’s a big article and then we’re looking at different things of obesity because this is an epidemic. So it’s funny. Today’s the discussion and it came up in the news. And they’re looking at a small percentage of genetics and, you know, epigenetics, the lifestyle that we’re eating a standard American diet. But importantly, childhood obesity is key because if we could control a child’s weight before they get older, that really seems to set in a really kind of a detrimental challenge. Because when we have these twelve point seven million children now who are obese is that they have a higher likelihood of maintaining that obesity as they get older. And so we can actually target, you know, school programs a lot of times looking at, you know, making children in a healthier diet and lifestyle, then we can actually pretty much stave off some of these long term problems that we’re seeing in the future with this population that will be eventually in adult. Now dieting trends in America. Forty-five million people died a year, spending $333 billion in weight loss products. That’s a huge industry as you because you probably if you type on the internet, probably weight loss pills and weight loss programs, weight loss franchise centers. The average person tries one hundred and twenty-six diets in their lifetime. A hundred and twenty-six. So it’s really when I look at this data, I was like, wow, because I always thought I was like, You know, it’s so many, but that’s quite a lot. Two per year is on an average what a person does. And the sad thing is, they abandoned it after about six days on average. There is some programs that people, you know, when they pay and they buy like food that’s being delivered, you know, they usually have like retention about three months, sometimes six months because the people prepaid. So they kind of keep them a little bit longer. But most of them are really short-lived. Ninety-five percent of these diets actually fail people, and they actually, as most people know, they regain weight more than they had before. And again, they’re back on this kind of this yo-yo of doing another diet every year.

Dr. Sunil Pai: So the biggest challenge that we see in the last 24 months is obesity and COVID, because when we have higher co-morbidities, then we have actually a higher risk of getting sick from something simple as this virus, which is devastating and killing many Americans right now. You know, when I spoke to you earlier in July, it was about 600000 Americans who were lost to this virus, and now it’s over eight hundred and five thousand as today. And so the higher the risk of hypertension, heart disease, diabetes, lung disease, kidney disease, autoimmune and obesity, these are comorbid risk factors. So if you have any of these risk factors, your risk of having COVID is higher. But the interesting thing is when we look at the age of 19 to 49 and this data was actually on the early part of the pandemic. So this is not looking at the new variant. It’s not looking at other spin-offs. But the general trend that we’re seeing is that obesity is the largest contributing factor for hospitalization in people under forty-nine. So key, you know, as we get older, yes, we get diabetes, heart disease, and obesity and hypertension, for example, lung disease. But we have to look at that. This is a major contributing factor. And that’s why when we look at, you know, the westernized country of the United States have the highest rate of deaths more than any other country is that some of these things cofactors have comorbidities, particularly obesity is one of the major major contributing factors. So what is inflammation as inflammation is the triggering mechanism of all diseases? It’s the underlying mechanism that makes its kind of like the fuel to the fire. And obesity can be added to this list because now we know what obesity is or what it consider the sponge of inflammation. Now, inflammation is like the fire within the body, and most people can actually, you know, a test of this picture because they can feel it. So, you know, sometimes pain is what most people kind of associate with inflammation. But inflammation is derived from the word flame, fire or itis. And your body has you know this cascade of hundreds of signals, right? There are some main switches and some minor switches. But just think of your kitchen, think of your living room in your bedroom. You know, there’s main electricity that goes in and then there’s electricity and certain components that go to your microwave, your stove, your oven, you know, and the fireplace and the thermostat in your room. These are controlling the temperatures. Controlling the food is keeping its balanced. You don’t want to have too hot, too cold, just right, and inflammation does that. So a lot of people think of just pain as like, Oh, I hurt. And that’s inflammation. But it’s no, it’s a variety of things. Cell receptors, you know, cytokines and enzymes and proteins and apoptosis regulators and gene expression modifiers. And there’s hundreds and hundreds of cascading signals that inflammation plays a role in. So it’s not only just bad. There’s also good things that inflammation as we have to have this delicate balance. The problem is, most of those right now in the United States and worldwide are having uncontrolled inflammation. So the kitchen, our house, and our bed are burning. And when we look at this idea of inflammation, most of us understand this idea of acute right. So we sprained ankle, for example, or we get the flu and you get this acute inflammatory immune response of having fever, which is usually a good thing. But what we’re really concerned about is this chronic inflammation that’s chronic inflammation that has tons and tons of just chronic diseases.

Dr. Sunil Pai: And obesity, again, as I call it, is the master sponge because it kind of consumes a lot of these other diseases along with it. Now, chronic inflammation leads to chronic diseases. So, for example, remember I said the word itis. This means inflammation of whatever word we put in front of it. So someone has a healthy knee and we have inflammation of the knee. We call it arthritis. Someone has a healthy colon. They get inflammation. They call it colitis, right? Heart disease. Still, the number one killer is caused by cholesterol. We’ll talk about it in a minute. High pro-inflammatory foods and other aspects here. This change in the vascular system actually is caused also by an inflammatory response and, more importantly, brain disorders. So a study just came out also yesterday looking at obesity and the rate and the risk of having Alzheimer’s dementia and due to this vascular flow problem, right? Because they have high levels of cholesterol, higher rates of and they’ll feel you’ll damage and dysfunctions that the vascular flow in the brain and people that have obesity is higher and therefore they have actually higher rates of getting dementia. So our goal is not just to fit in our our our swimsuits and, you know, and fit in our clothes better, but actually try to preserve our morbidity and mortality and enjoying our golden years of having, you know, a great memory function. So now there are 200 different items, right? So itis means inflammation of that area. So dermatitis, conjunctivitis, rhinitis, sinusitis, gingivitis, thyroiditis, bronchitis, esophagitis gastritis, colitis, prostatic dermatitis, arthritis. So you get the idea, right? So we always want to look at what’s the underlying triggering mechanism and where is that coming from? And how does this also then contribute to our obesity or our trouble with weight? And then what can we do as an anti-inflammatory? Diet lifestyle that we can then help reverse this progression of inflammation and weight gain. So the worst thing about inflammation is also that over time it causes not just damage and degeneration, but actually a higher risk of the worst type of health condition, which is cancer. So people that have to see ulcerative colitis after 25, 30, five years, 43 percent will get colon cancer. Rheumatoid arthritis can turn into, you know, after 10 years, a 71 times higher rate of getting lymphoma and even certain viruses like that HPV to the cervical tissue. And many women and 10 to 20 years can turn into cervical cancer. So why this is important? Because when we look at, this picture here, it’s again on when I said the sponge of inflammation is that this inflammation due to both. It’s like a circle. It’s a vicious cycle. It creates hyperquaggability. So that’s why we have risks of clotting, right? They have endothelial problems, vascular blood flows, chronic kidney disease.

Dr. Sunil Pai: Right now, there are 37 million Americans that have chronic kidney disease and growing heart disease, the number one cause of death, three people every minute still having a heart attack in the United States. You know, chronic lung conditions and all these things create this suppression to your immune system and your immune system is your army, navy, air force, marines. It’s the soldiers that are fighting, fixing, and repairing your body. So then you become more susceptible to getting sick again. Hypertension, diabetes, and high cholesterol again. So this is just this picture of like when we have one of these issues, then we can lead to multiple issues. And this all becomes what I call the perfect storm of this side over here is that cancers now are increased with obesity. And so when we see and a metro, ovarian, colon, pancreatic, gallbladder, liver, breast, thyroid, for example, if we have more weight. Although all these cancers, unfortunately, are kind of, you know, growing in the society, we know that the rates of cancer one in two men and one in three women in their lifetime will have cancer, unfortunately now. But that’s even higher when we look at those patients that have obesity. So it’s important that we’re actually improving all this. So it’s not just like, how do I feel better? How do I lower my rates of all the chronic common diseases? And that’s through lowering your risk of inflammation and losing weight is a byproduct of lowering that inflammatory response. But what does this tell us is this tells us that we are an inflammation nation in general, right from everything that we’re eating now to even how we think. You know how we’ve been acting spiritually, emotionally, environmentally, everything’s kind of on fire and away. And so we want to look at how do we actually bring this back to balance again? So when you look at chronic diseases and cancer, but chronic diseases, you can see that it’s very preventable. You know, diet is 35 percent. So diet is the largest contributing factor, right? And when we talk about tobacco, you know, there’s a certain population that grew up in smoking, but now there’s another generation. And I write about this in my book about vaping and the dangers of now, the new addictions of nicotine and other those vaping products. It’s not very healthy. But as you can see here, obesity is here. Number three. So if we can get the diet under control, it’s not smoke and then start working on ourour obesity. And more importantly, increasing our immune system, which prevents infections and trying to eat more organic non-GMO, less toxins and chemicals that we use in our body.

Dr. Sunil Pai: Genes are only two to three percent now. So we want to focus on the 97 percent. So a lot of people worry about oh, genes, genes, genes. In fact, this article today shows that genetics in terms of weight, you know, weight traveling in families is still a very small percentage, writes the epigenetics. The diet, the lifestyle, the environment, and the belief system actually modify the expression of genes in real-time. So we don’t want to worry about, Oh my God, I have a gene in my end that runs in my family. What you have to look at, what’s running in the family is all these other aspects which are common so we can change that. And then we actually can change how your expression of your genes actually shows. So animal protein and saturated fats and plant protein. So if this will be, you know, something that will actually give out, probably as a slide. Pro-inflammatory foods and anti-inflammatory foods, if you understand this slide, although it looks like a lot. I’m going to go through each one kind of simply but if you understand why you want to be eating an anti-inflammatory diet, what that includes your weight loss will occur. But not only that, you will take long. Heart disease will be slowly eliminated and diabetes will slowly eliminate and blood pressure will get a and your aches and pains will get, you know, microbiome will get fixed. I’ll explain all of this in an instant in a minute, but we want to look at inflammation, cholesterol, antioxidants and phytonutrients, fiber dysbiosis, you know, pro-inflammatory pro carcinogenic and more importantly, for weight issues here. It’s this is the aspect of intramural cellular lipid. So let’s get started and I’ll come back to this.

Dr. Sunil Pai: So we will look at animal proteins and animal proteins and refined vegetable oils, right, are high in omega-six. So just as food itself, it’s pro-inflammatory. So when we’re saying, Hey, you know, I want to be eating an anti-inflammatory diet, that means you basically should not be eating animal protein, right? And even if people are like, Well, I’m trying to eat less animal protein, I’ll talk about that. In the end, even less is not good enough, really. At the end of the day, you want to be completely on as much of an anti-inflammatory diet, also refined vegetable oil. So I have to be careful because people do plant-based diets and I like eating french fries all day. That’s also not very healthy for them, and that also triggers inflammatory responses. But what all this does is it produces something called arachidonic acid. Now, all this fancy term is that it creates this master switch that creates these two pro-inflammatory enzymes, Cox and Lox. And so when people take anti-inflammatories like non-steroidal anti-inflammatories, like ibuprofen and naproxen, which I won’t recommend, those we give back to America starts something natural. But when we’re looking at these things that we, we take for pain and inflammation that’s just coming from arachidonic acid and again, the average person consuming tons of this animal product per day and highly refined vegetable oils. So we want to cut down on these foods as much as possible. Now, cholesterol, as I mentioned before, it is produced. Your body does produce some cholesterol, so you can have zero. Well, what happens is the exogenous cholesterol that we’re eating from the diet, which only comes from animal protein, which means that anything that has a mother or a face has cholesterol. I tell my patients that’s easy to remember. I think as a mother of face, try to avoid eating those things because that increases your risk of having this cardiovascular disease. So as we can see here, as people have heart disease, as the number one killer still in America, three people every minute against heart attacks here. But as they go to a plant-based diet and completely to a plant-based diet right from vegetarian or vegan, we actually can reverse this coronary plaque within six months, most people a year. But in our clinic, we do a little bit of other things as well. We work on their epigenetics. Six months, we can change somebody’s angiogram results to actually looking like this. So remember, plant proteins are cholesterol-free.

Dr. Sunil Pai: Now, when we look at things like phytonutrients and antioxidants, these are all the things that help with improving and lowering inflammation and improving your immune system’s functioning right. And so when we think of all these things, they only come from plants. So tomatoes, you know, have lycopene and look at their carrots and yams and potatoes having and mangoes and pumpkins having beta carotene C, vitamin C and flavonoids inflates in animals and owls and anthocyanins. And these are all the things you know. All these things are coming in fiber, only coming from plant foods. So remember when someone’s telling you to eat an animal protein diet and why keep on picking on that? Because right now that trend is still very popular with people trying to go to a ketogenic diet, try to eat high amounts of animal fat and and and no, basically super low carbohydrates. But what they’re missing is all these things that actually help prevent diseases and, more importantly, lower inflammation. And so when we look at antioxidants and phytonutrients, if I don’t remember being a plant, then none of these things are found in animal proteins. And so you’ll see a lot of these people will tell you to eat these other kinds of trendy diets. But then they’re selling you tons and tons of antioxidants, vitamins and minerals, and green drinks and fiber because they don’t understand nutrition and they’re just trying to say you bad. So remember finding Egypt’s antioxidants from plants are anti-inflammatory in the goal, remember, is to reduce inflammation to help you lose weight and lower your risk of other comorbid conditions. Fibers are only found, believe it or not, in plant foods. And in fact, the study showed that 50 percent of people, when asked, believe that steak has fiber in it. So this is a big misperception out because people think, Well, I’m getting my fiber from eating my meat. No, you’re not. No, the cow did, but not the person is ingesting it. Interesting thing is that fibers are important because fiber is what removes toxins. It helps feed your microbiome. We actually analyze these things with our patients, and we’re able to actually look at, you know, the amount of short-chain fatty acids in their absorption issues and looking at how, you know, how do we change that microbiome by eating more of the foods that have fiber, which is coming from plants, gallbladder releases, bile, bile binds to the toxins.

Dr. Sunil Pai: Now we have toxins just from our normal food. Like, we create waste that’s normal, that we have to create waste. But we also get environmental toxins, right, zino estrogens, and there’s tons of things that come in our water, which we all evaluate for our patients, and tons of toxicity that come in our environment living in the United States or living worldwide. We’re all getting exposure. But the idea is that when we eat the fiber, the fiber binds this and then we excrete it out. But when we don’t have a kind of fiber diet, we’re trying to get to 35 grams or more a day by eating with the fiber plant-based diet, but that if you don’t have that, it’s called intrahepatic recirculation. So these pro-inflammatory, these hormones are trying to get rid of all these toxins. They just recycle so that person gets higher and higher rates of exposure. So people that have breast cancer, for example, if you have two to three well-formed bowel movements a day, as shouldn’t positive breast cancer women have the least amount of recurrence. Those people who are more constipated every day or every other day or every couple of days had the highest rate of recurrence wise is because of the hormones that they’re getting not only from their body but more importantly from the environment and even from food, for example, is not being eliminated. So we want to know the fiber that we’re not constipated. We’re not kind of compacting inflammation and we want to lower overall our risk. A lot of people do colon cleanses. Unfortunately, they think like, OK, I just want to cleanse myself, lose a little bit of weight. But if you’re eating correctly, there’s no such thing as a cleanse. Eating correctly is detoxifying normal by eating a healthy diet. So, you know, just to put this in perspective, anything here in white is an animal protein. OK, so someone has some eggs, some bacon, some ham for breakfast, maybe a piece of steak or salmon at lunch. You know all these things.

Dr. Sunil Pai: All animal protein only has cholesterol. You can see plants don’t have any cholesterol, as you can see over here. So plants in here are zero. So that’s why we can reverse heart disease. But more importantly, animal protein has no fiber, right? So how are we going to help with lowering glucose? How are we going to help with, you know, feeding your microbiome and keeping the bowels regular, and lowering inflammation? So these are the things. And remember, everything that you eat has protein. There’s no protein deficiency in America since the Great Depression. So we have nutrient deficiencies right now, right? So what is eating, you know, empty calories in America? So this is in my book because I always want to have people reference the idea. They think that they need to get more and more protein, but you get tons and tons of protein, 50 grams for women. I usually recommend 60 grams for a male plant-based protein. Now, interesting thing is, the research now on the microbiome is we know we’re touching the tip of the iceberg, but the last five years we’re starting to understand what is causing this disruption to the microbiome and what we’re understanding is one of the main factors aside of like and nsaids and you know, alcohol and tobacco and you know, certain things like GMOs and other antibiotics. It’s actually the endotoxins in animal proteins. And these endotoxins, believe it or not, are not destroyed. Even when we cook it, we boil it or treat it with stomach acid. And that actually creates this increases as intestinal permeability, which then which is called leaky gut, you know, its intestinal permeability. And this then triggers all these factors of again, getting obesity diabetes by having this onslaught of all these pro-inflammatory signals coming through the body. So now we need to repair this is by eating all the plant foods in the fiber that does that. Now, this is not a discussion on cancer, but you know, when I always hear people like, I’m eating clean food, Dr. Pine eating organic grass-fed, et cetera, et cetera. Well, even if it’s organic, what we’re missing is that animal protein also stimulates cancer growth. So heterocyclicamines, TMAO, insulin growth factor, these things actually increase your weight. So the IGF one, the highest found is in dairy products and animal protein. So when people cut down on dairy products, you know, remember dairy supposed to make the small baby animal grow very quickly. So just by cutting down on dairy, starting on the first things, your weight will start coming down. Other things are here, like even heme iron. You know, when people are anemic, they would say, Oh, you need to have a steak, know that actually atherogenic and actually now been shown to be carcinogenic and now animal protein that it’s actually processed. So like, you know, pepperoni, sausages, bacon and those kind of things, like the hot dogs. Now that’s been classified as a Group one carcinogen by W.H.O., which is similar on the same level as asbestos, which we wouldn’t want to have asbestos in our house. So why would we want to put this in our kitchen?

Dr. Sunil Pai: The real clean food, however, is plants. Plants do not have those things that trigger cancer growth, and actually, the data now shows that obviously, we can use all these things to help lower our risk for cancer. But when it comes to weight, the interesting thing the more recent research is looking at that animal protein and saturated fats coming from animal protein. It increases what thy call intramyocellular lipids. And what that is is that we have these little muscle cells and, you know, sometimes it happens. We used to think when people just got older. But what understanding is that the animal protein and the saturated fat through its pro-inflammatory mechanisms actually increase the fat deposition into the muscle tissue. And when it does, that increases insulin resistance and diabetes, meaning the muscle cells cannot eat, you know, take up the glucose that we need that we get from our foods. And so it becomes insulin resistance when then the blood sugar starts to rise. It’s not getting absorbed into the tissue. And then hence we get this metabolic programming problem and diabetes. We also have something called advanced glycation end products. And that’s like what we call the perfect storm. If you have animal protein, saturated fats and you add sugar, then you increase what they call age. And that causes even more dysfunction and disruption of this, this insulin resistance and pro-inflammatory factors, vascular problems, and other risk factors. And one of the interesting things that more recently in the research is showing us that the animal protein is high in branch chain amino acids and need to see all these people like, you know, taking protein powders and trying to try to increase, you know, I need to come in and increase my branch chain amino acids. But when we find out with the studies, which are fantastic is that it actually shows that it decreases their metabolic resting rate so they have trouble losing weight when they’re doing this high, high animal protein diet. Right. And so they try to cut more carbs, they try to work out more. And that’s it’s a mismatch. And when we look at, you know, plant-based diets, the interesting thing is it’s just the opposite that decreases in mild cellular lipids. It decreases insulin resistance, it decreases the east. And since they’re they’re less branched-chain amino acids. The data shows that you actually have an increased resting metabolic rate of 16 percent. So there are people who are plant-based actually just doing nothing, have a higher metabolic rate activity, which means that you’re more efficient, your energy efficiency, and therefore you’re able to actually increase your weight loss more effectively. So other things about animal proteins again, as the bioaccumulation of pesticides, herbicides, toxins, you know, antibiotics and hormones. And the interesting thing is, you know, the more animal proteins that you get, the more of this is bioaccumulate. Not only that, but it also bioaccumulates in bone broth and collagen broth. And so we avoid all of those things that are patients I recommend nobody take. That’s because those things don’t have any phytonutrients. They have no fiber. They have little to no antioxidants, and they’re pro-inflammatory. But they contain these kinds of chemicals and the why? It’s important because where does this stuff also store in our body is to place bones and fat. And so our fat cells actually accumulate this. And so one of the things that people should understand is that when they do a crazy weight loss program, a lot of people like they starve themselves or they take some kind of product and they lose, you know, 15, 20 pounds in a couple of days. They actually can release these things and they actually don’t feel really well. And it’s this because of the excess hormones and other things that they’re getting from the foods.

Dr. Sunil Pai: And so again, plant proteins is the wash organic. It doesn’t have any antibiotics and have the hormones, and it’s alkaline. You know, plant-based diets put people on an alkaline state, which again moves you to an anti-inflammatory where acidic is a pro-inflammatory state. Remember, prevention, treatment or reversing of disease has only been shown to be for plant protein. There’s no studies to show that animal protein will prevent, reverse or treat a disease. Now there’s always studies to compare and one animal protein in the next thing, while this one might be better than that one. But the gold standard is still untouchable, which is eating plant-based foods. Now, going further, what I’ve done in my 22 years of practicing integrative medicine that we’ve been looking with, the researchers and scientists are looking at, well, what a site of eating the anti-inflammatory diet and the side of what we do is testing which foods people might have food sensitivities to is that we look at, well, what are the things that in other cultures, like traditional Chinese medicine, are? My favorite more cultural aspect is using a lot of diabetic medicine in my practice and looking at the spices that chefs might use in our kitchen. What are all these things and how do they actually play a role more specifically? Not just in general, but how can we look at the molecules and look at the biochemistry and saying these are the things that are kind of the superstars of these foods. That’s why we should be eating whole food plant-based as much as possible. But now we understand that these specific items have even more targeted anti-inflammatory effects.

Dr. Sunil Pai: And so what you know, when we look at the clinical studies now, there’s tons and tons of products out for weight loss, right? So we can say diet diet diet. And then when you evaluate, well, what actually has like randomized controlled studies and not just like something that’s, you know, sold by a product company. These are the ingredients, believe it or not, that have really good data. And one of the things that we see like with curcumin, for example, which is my area of expertise and I have a whole chapter written on it. You know what forms and how to grow it, even when you’re looking at it, when you look at it from a food standpoint, believe it or not, it’s not much that we need every day in the weight loss studies. It’s about a fourth of a teaspoon, a fourth of a teaspoon, right? So a forth of a a teaspoon of cumin,, ginger, a little bit of black pepper drinking some green tea. You know, you can crush some black cumin seeds or, you know, cinnamon and rosemary. Rosemary grows great and we grow in our backyard. Know, crushing that and putting that on roasted vegetables. It’s fantastic. The only thing here, you know, apple cider vinegar is about two tablespoons. You can put that in, say, for example, a salad dressing, or you can put a little bit in the beverage. I would prefer for people not to just take it as the shot, but it can have some issues with people’s dental work. But, you know, goji berries and garlic powder are just a kind of, you know, it’s not that much saffron. You know, one of the most expensive spices in the world, when you take the little, the little segments of the saffron stems. What you want is you put in a mortar and pestle and you want to grind it. You don’t just throw it in your rice or throw your food as you kind of sometimes see in restaurants, they’re actually using a cheaper form. That’s not kind of not really real saffron. But you want to grind it up until like a little bit of a powder. Add the water and then you put you can put that in your food or put that in beverages. But these are all things that when you look at the data, it has been shown to help lower not only the weight, the fat, but you’re also looking at visceral fat like this is the fat that’s in between the organs, which is very damaging. The research shows with curcumin specifically, we’re looking at lowering NF Kappa beta tumor necrosis factor MCP one PAi1. These are things that affect the cell, the added kinds meaning that the cell signals from the fat tissue to actually make them kind of regenerate and produce more. So we’re trying to cut down these pro-inflammatory signals. Same thing with ginger. The interesting thing with black pepper. What we found out more recently is black pepper actually inhibits fatty acts of fatty acid absorption, and it actually improves the tight junctions. Those little, you know, when you talked about leaky gut intestinal permeability and actually make it closed, it actually heals the leaky gut. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of misinformation on the internet right now by a lot of companies, a lot of non-health care providers who will say, you know, black pepper is a disruptor just because I’ve kind of worried about spiciness of foods. But remember, black pepper is on every, you know, it’s probably in your house right now on your table and it’s in every restaurant. It’s almost every culture. We use it. It’s a bioavailable nutrient enhancer. It actually absorbs the food better and actually has direct anti-inflammatory effects, things like green tea. You know, we’re not talking about the caffeine. We’re talking about the polyphenols in the EGCG, right? So yes, can you drink green tea? Yes, it should. All of these things be organic as much as possible? Yes. And when you buy, for example, cinnamon, when you buy tumeric or even coming as powders, we recommend people to buy smaller batches. I like to support small farms, single origin, fair trade organic because then I know I’m pairing someone in another country a good wage, but also when a lot of people go to the big box stores and they buy, they say like cinnamon and they come like in a pound, you know, they might use it for baking, but we’re trying to use it for the health benefits. And so the smaller the batch, the fresher it is. Those constituents are actually kept and retained, but they lose their efficacy over time. So by the time someone goes to big-box stores, they have this thing like, Oh yeah, that’s been in my cabinet for a year or two or three, then it’s not going to have the clinical benefits of what we’re looking at when we’re using food as medicine. So these are things that people can take easily from their diet.

Dr. Sunil Pai: Now what I’ve done in my practice, which I’m known for, you know, looking at the right forms of curriculum and the right forms of the ginger and putting it in the right form by opening with baseball, just frankincense in three parts of it, and we put in a bilayer sustained release. Kaplan Right. So it has a 20-minute onset of action and an eight-hour sustained release. Now, this is not for weight loss directly. We’re looking at is can we lower inflammation overall? I want everybody to avoid using non-steroidal anti-inflammatory. So although I talk about an anti-inflammatory diet and you want to be taking anti-inflammatories. We want to avoid ibuprofen, and those kinds of things like that. Advils and those kinds of things because they all have a black box warning. And if you don’t know what a black box warning is, that definitely you want to read my book because you’ll open your eyes to understanding pharmaceutical drugs, even over-the-counter pharmaceutical drugs that can. Detrimental effects on your health. Now, looking at the diet further, when we actually analyze, you know, quite a diet versus Mediterranean diet versus plant-based, so. The interesting thing is there was just a recent article published in July, and they actually looked at about one hundred twenty-four ketogenic studies and it was the meta-analysis of that and it again, which we’ve already known, but it just showed that there is a little bit of short term weight loss. Obviously, people are not eating the highly refined carbohydrates that they can lose weight, but it wasn’t sustainable for a long term, and it increases inflammation and all other comorbidity factors. In fact, actually, cancer growth is worse in the kitchen, a diet contrary to the belief of what is being marketed. But my biggest question is that when we see people selling keto is that they also sell your green supplements, right, supplements, antioxidants, fibers, and probiotics because you’re not eating those foods. So it’s very interesting. People like, oh, I’m following this doctor on this program, on the internet, trying to get healthy, lose weight and all this guy might be a cardiologist or this. My person might be some kind of chiropractor, but then they’re telling you to take all these other products, which are not necessarily needed because you should be actually eating them from your food.

Dr. Sunil Pai: Mediterranean diet did do better than keto, but not better than a plant-based diet. And when you do a comparison, studies direct Plant-Based wins on reducing fat, body weight, and visceral fat, which is the most important kind of fat to lose insulin sensitivity, fatty liver, blood pressure, and cholesterol. An interesting thing is when people aren’t ketogenic diet for losing weight. One of the false understandings is false police is that they’re losing a lot of weight. But what the studies actually show when they actually measure it compared to a plant-based diet is plant-based diet. They actually lose fat matched. But in the ketogenic diet, they actually use muscle mass. And that’s why there’s a larger weight loss on the initial part of something going on the keto diet. But that’s not what you want to do. You want to increase your lean muscle mass, right? You won’t increase the metabolic tissue in your body. And even the studies show that plant-based meat substitutes are still better than eating organic lean meat. So I always tell patients, you know, start eating plant-based first, then go to Whole Foods plant-based because we want to just first get them to start changing their lifestyle. Start from that and we can help people with that. You still have to be careful of saturated fat. You still have to be careful of salt. You still have to be careful of, you know, trying to get more fiber if you have choices. But that’s one place to start very easily, is just moving in that direction now when they actually analyze, you know, the side of dairy. What other animal proteins increase weight? And the studies show that chicken is the worst. In fact, one ounce a day, which is about one nugget or one chicken breast every ten days, is associated with significant weight gain compared to no chicken at all. So in my city here in Albuquerque, I mean, we have places that have double drive thru for chicken sandwiches going on twenty four seven almost. And you know, it’s like they’re eating that multiple times a week or some people are eating a bucket of chicken. So you can imagine this one nugget a day. And people are like, it’s going to contribute to weight loss, a weight gain. And then now we’re just compounding that. And there’s a study that will show it’s very interesting here chicken and rice. So people are saying maybe they’re not eating the fried stuff. So maybe have some baked chicken, some rice, right? Sounds like a healthy lunch. And when they measure four and a half later, hours later, those people eat 18 percent more of a dinner buffet when they’re actually calculating it. And if they actually have the same amount of chicken free chicken, meaning maybe a plant-based chicken and rice. So they’re just comparing the fat and the same amount of protein. So the taste is the same. The interesting thing is that they actually don’t. The fiber and the stronger satiating qualities of antiques and phytonutrients actually prevent them from eating more.

Dr. Sunil Pai: So this is where I am going to talking about substitutes, I’m OK in my practice because I like to move people to where they’re at. And most of my patients right now, especially here, that are local where, you know, 50th poorest state in the country, we have to look at, someone who’s you know where you know, the economy is tough. Covid has been tough. A lot of people lost their jobs. A lot of people do nothave time to cook. So can I just transition them in the beginning? Yes. Can we give better options than that transitioning? Yes. But just showing them something like this, like, you know, people say, Well, I’m just having a small piece of baked chicken and rice that they’re still going to eat more. And also, the data shows you that, you know, if you eat a little bit more fiber, which is plant food, right? Obviously, for dinner, right? You cut your calorie intake more than 12 hours later at lunch. And why is that? Is because the microbiome, which is all the probiotics, the 100 trillion over a thousand different species that weighs about four pounds in your gut, these might. The microbiome is still feeding on the short-chain fatty acids, which is fiber, which is then creating its energy molecules. And those energy molecules actually decrease appetite. And that’s why when we eat these other foods that don’t have the fiber, we’re still hungry. That’s why you can eat no cheeseburger french fries on the coke and go back and still get dessert. So some of the secrets I always want. What I want to finish with today is the following is that you want to be having, you know, Plan B style is great because it’s low caloric density fits.

Dr. Sunil Pai: So when you eat a Whole Foods plant-based diet, there is no need to count calories. You’re not the count carbs or points. And I think all this concept that was designed by food companies and by dietary companies that have reinvented themselves every franchise in most places again 196 of their lifetime is that you know, you’re destined to fail like them because they’re making food complicated. They’re making it where you have to call it. You have to, you know, get points. You put on app idea. When you’re plant-based, you just eat. In fact, you can eat all you want healthy choices of being plant-based, but then it makes food fun and makes food nourishing and makes food social rather than a challenge. Fibers are important to remember, because fiber slows down blood glucose absorption and feeds the microbiome, so we help with our healthy appetite. So 35 grams a day, wherever you’re at. You want to get to 35 or more. So I was all my patients, you know, the average Americans having seven to 10 grams of fiber a day in their diet, seven to 12, depending on the data. So I had them go by five grams per week. So it’s not just the go from, say, a 10 to a 35 tomorrow. No, that will make your gut feel terrible. Your bell bubble is bloated and gassy. What you want to do is slowly just add a little bit more legumes, a little bit more vegetables, a little bit more fruits, a little bit more grains slowly. And I’ll show you a slide of the recommendations of what we should be eating. But you want to do that by five grams per week to finally get to thirty-five or more, the higher, even the better. Dark greens, Interesting enough, the research is showing something called Thylakoids. And this molecule that’s in dark grains actually slows down absorption of fats, binds to lipase. So dark green leafy vegetables, you know, kale, spinach, chard, you know, any of the dark green foods try to add that to eat more, as well as aside of the vitamin K and all these other phytonutrients, now we’re actually looking at other compounds.

Dr. Sunil Pai: And then for those people who have really a lot of weight to lose, they’re looking at, you know, gosh, I’m 150 pounds overweight. Then I would say, like, try to eat more foods that are dressed up like water. All right. We call them water-containing foods like cucumber, celery, turnips, bok choy, zucchini bean sprouts, summer squash because they’re 95 percent water. So if you eat a lot of those things, you can feel full and you actually get even lesser calories, which they’re already lesser calories, to begin with since their plant-based on foods. And for those people who need a little extra help. Drinking one or two glasses of warm water. Now, why is it warm? Because you know, when we have to ice cold drinks, ice-cold drinks actually turned down the stomach acid? Right. So that’s why, you know, Americans, we’re exported this concept of like, you know, big iced tea glasses. But the rest of the world, you can go anywhere around the world. You know, it wasn’t until Americans were asking for it, they they would just give you warm, you know, lukewarm water or room temperature water because that maintains the stomach. But when we have cold water, that actually decreases our digestive function, and therefore we tend to eat a little bit more and have the trouble with our digestion. Drinking a little bit of warm water or having a veggie soup or salad, particularly with more veggies and fruits. Even better, because again, you can load up prior to your meet your meal. And these are just simple ways that you can get more nutrition without feeling like you have to restrict your amount of eating. Now, one of the other speakers on this panel on the summit actually probably spoke about this from PCRM, dr. Hanna, and she showed wonderful studies on this, but current nutrition is quite interesting and we, you know, we all kind of understand this, you know, in breakfast, like a king lunch, like a prince dinner, like a pauper. And the interesting thing is because if we eat a larger breakfast. Then you actually have a lower BMI because you’re actually consuming all your energy at the beginning and then you’re actually expanding it throughout the day. But the challenge is right now is our whole western diets kind of flip right when most people skip breakfast or have something kind of on-the-go donut bagel toast or even skipping breakfast, and they have some moderate lunch. And then we come home, we’re starving after this long workday and then we eat a large dinner and we sleep, and then we have a tendency, the large the dinner. Do you actually increase your fat deposition? So the timing of the meals is, you know, what they call protein nutrition is important. So even if people are just eating two meals, you know, having breakfast and lunch is better than eating smaller six smaller meals. So this is something that when people are looking at losing weight, then try to go at this timing aspect of breakfast, like a king lunch, like a prince and dinner like a pauper.

Dr. Sunil Pai: Now, one of the things I’d like to finish with before I give you the food guide is this study, and it’s called the broad study. And why this is important because this is going to reflect what the summit is really doing and helping everybody. There’s a study called Blood Study. It was a three-month study in his randomized control, and it was in the poorest region of New Zealand that had the highest obesity rates. Okay, so they had these two groups. One group was standard medical care. Go and see their doctor, and the other one had just had some weekly classes. The classes were just telling them about healthy eating information. So the information they weren’t giving any kind of food, they didn’t give them any kind of, you know, here’s any kind of tools or anything like that. They just told them to eat a plant-based diet, low fat, eat more vegetables, fruits, grains, legumes to as much as they want till they’re satiated. You can eat as muscle, no calories counting, no point, you know, not even that count. You just eat as much until you are full and satisfied. But what the educational classes did was tell them what the dangers or the, you know, the bad parts of eating, you know, avoiding animal proteins. What were the dangers of saturated fats? You know, what’s the problem with sugar? While we should minimize sugar, salt and caffeine as much as possible, so that’s all it was, was education. No other lifestyle changes were recommended, not even increasing, and exercise was discussed. This is why I like this program because we know, you know, exercise is important. I actually have a whole section in my book talking about yoga, tai chi chi gong and the role of exercise, and all the studies, the data on that. But here was looking at just the diet alone. Can we just tell, can we to see any kind of changes with just the food intake, rather than adding one extra thing that somebody might have an excuse or stress or to say, Well, now I need to eat this and now exercise that might be too stressful from the beginning. But here’s the cool thing. At the end of three months of the study, the plant-based group lost control lost 19 pounds.

Dr. Sunil Pai: Now the study finished, and then three months later, the researchers came back and said, Well, let’s just go see because usually what happens is people revert back, right? Like if you have a control program or you have some kind of encouragement or you have some kind of, you know, a program, you feel like, OK, I can do this because it is kind of going to the gym and having a trainer, some kind of with you, so you’re more likely to exercise. But usually, people revert after that. So usually they go back and gain weight. But the interesting thing is, after six months when they went back to the group, they lost twenty-seven pounds, so they lost even more weight. And then when they checked back six months later, so a year after, they kept off the wait, which is unheard of. Usually, it’s like, oh, people usually revert back, and some go yo-yoing and all those things. But there were no changes in the control group. So if you just want to see the Doctor, the Doctor says, hey, maybe should lose some weight. That’s about it, you know? So you see the next visit. But if you had someone just telling you, you know, this information, so the key to weight loss is really empowerment with knowledge. And that’s what I really want to impress on everybody. Because, yes, you know, all these speakers have wonderful information and they have data, and some of us will talk about inflammation. Some will talk about fasting. Some will talk about, you know, phytonutrients, antioxidants and nutrition and exercise and meditation, yoga and all the wonderful things. But it’s taking that knowledge. So once you have that knowledge, then you know, really, it’s pretty simple. The idea is that there’s a lot of disinformation that’s out there that makes people try to spin out and try to make them kind of sabotage you of not doing what you need to do. But I think what you will learn and hopefully with everybody will do with the summit is when they listen to each of these speakers is listen to it once taken the information and then listen to it again later on. Like when I have patients read my book and they come to me is what I tell them is like, do those 10 steps? I said, do one step a little bit, then go to two and go to three. You don’t have to be perfect at each step. You got to go through all the epigenetic changes and then go back to the, you know, no one. And you work on that. You’re working. It’s creating the change of your epigenetic diet. Last all the at least them. So knowledge is key because once you understand that you can work, OK, maybe I’ll eat a little bit more this. Maybe I’ll eat a little bit less of this. Maybe I’ll exercise more. Maybe I’ll work on my stress reduction that’s doing a little bit of all these things improves your overall outcome.

Dr. Sunil Pai: I think there’s too much stress right now where a lot of people like you need to do high intensity this type of exercise, or you need to only eat this one thing, or you need to only take this pill, or you need to drink this water. And that just makes the stress wears like that’s just trying to cheat the system. You can’t go hack the system. You know, biohacking is a big trend. Now there’s conferences all around the country now in the world talking about biohacking, but biohacking is, in my opinion, a big failure. And the way that the ideas, because we are not following the laws of nature, if you follow the laws of nature, then nature rewards in kind. If you biohacker the body, you get this temporary weight loss, you get a temporary improvement in something here, but it’s never sustainable. And then again, they’re on to the next dietary aspect. So empowerment with knowledge is key. And so hopefully you take all this information and take that with you. This is a guy that I’ll probably provide for those who sign up, but this is going to be according to the latest conference I was at in international nutrition in D.C. I’m looking at how many servings of fruits, legumes, seeds, herbs, nuts, vegetables and whole grains a day. And some examples. And so I just always give this to my patients because I want them to understand like these are the things that you should be looking at. So every day, you know, kind of add a little bit more over here, a little bit to add a little book. Maybe I’ll have a little bit of, you know, sprinkle some walnuts to get my negatives. Okay, I’m going to have some beans and I’ll have some lentils. But oh, I forgot about peas and I forgot about, you know, other types of beans like, you know, red beans, garbanzo beans, kidney beans. So there’s a variety of things like with fruits, what other type of fruits and every culture in every country has different types of those things as well. And remember, don’t forget to add the spices because the spices are where we’re going to get a lot of this turmeric and black pepper and ginger and cinnamon and all these things. I can help with improving and lowering your overall weight.

Dr. Sunil Pai: So in summary, the recommendations I’m going to recommend is, you know, eat a plant-based diet and then move towards a whole food plant-based diet. I think sometimes we talk about Whole Foods, you know, a chef and like me, you know, we have a little bit more culinary skill. So it’s easy for us. But some people don’t even have tools in their hands. They don’t like how they only have, you know, pans yet, you know, so when you start really slowly, like, what can they slowly do? I tell them, you know, if you need to use a plant substitute, start with that. But eventually, we want to get even away from those as much as we can and be focusing on Whole Foods as much as possible. Read or listen to my book because it’s key. If you can understand inflammation, then yes, now I’m going to help you with weight loss. It’s going to also help you reduce all your other comorbid risk factors that I mentioned at the beginning. So the nice thing is that weight loss just comes along with getting healthy. A lot of people put too much stress like, I just want to lose weight. I’m like, No, you want to get healthy if you become healthy. Everything, whether it’s cancer, whether its heart disease with diabetes was depression, those things gets better. So that’s what we do, and you can make an appointment. You contact our office. We do Zoom consultations all over the country and all over the world. But this is what I like to tell everybody if they can’t come to see me. But if you find a good integrative medicine practitioner that has that skill, you want to look at it further. How do you know when patients come and go plant-based and there are still having some trouble with weight loss and they’re like, Well, gosh, what’s going on? So we want to look at food sensitivities. We want o look at what foods are coming in even in the plant-based world, no vegetable grain, legume or fruit can still becoming. And that’s triggering an inflammatory response in IGF and IGF response, a delayed response up to four days later, for example. And so these are. Things that I’m specializing in, so you’ll read my story if you get my book and in it or you come to see me, it’s because it’s all about food like we want people to be on a completely anti-inflammatory diet. And we also want to bioindividualize everybody because we’re all unique. So what might be good for me may not be good for you or certain foods or certain products may not be good for anybody. So putting now. More of these things in our smoothie are more things that are vegan taco and they have a sensitivity, they might have a little bit of trouble with getting to the outcome that they’re looking for.

Dr. Sunil Pai: We’d like to test the microbiome we want to look at, you know, are they absorbing their proteins fats? Is there any kind of leaky gut or inflammation? The amount of fiber they’re consuming? Is there any kind of overgrowth dysbiosis, Candida yeast, parasites and, you know, the good and bad probiotics? Because if there are imbalances? Guess what? When we fix that, can accelerate their ability to lose weight because now their absorption of the nutrients is their digestion. Assimilation excretion is key. And if we get that fixed, when we do that correctly, if there are any imbalances, then we correct those things. Then food becomes medicine and even the patient’s medicines work better. And even the dietary supplements that we offer work better. But if the gut is off, then everything is off. And there’s a lot of frustration. A lot of people say I’m doing this, I’m doing this, doing this, and then when we test them like, Oh my God, you have this problem, it’s really simple to fix. We fix it, and then everything just starts to fall into place. Lastly, we’d like to test for nutritional deficiencies because just because we’re plant-based doesn’t mean that we just need to look at fully B12 levels, which a lot of doctors do. We look at everything because our microbiomes are different, right? So we can all eat the same food. We can all eat the same supplements or have the same whole food, plant-based diet. Our nutrition test, which could be different because we’re again, we’re not robots. So we like to look at all the antioxidants, the B vitamins and minerals and omega three, six, and nine ratios, but they have detoxification issues. You know, I can help patients eat tons of omega 3s. But if you have a deficiency of, say, zinc or B vitamins or magnesium, how do they actually convert that omega-three from their diet? So I have a lot of patients already come into my office already understand, you know, flaxseed and chia seeds and hemp seed and those kinds of things like that walnuts. But they’re not with the deficiency, they’re not converting enough DHEA. So they’re still having issues of not getting enough anti-inflammatory response for heart health or DHEA for their brain health. So sometimes it’s like fixing these subtle nuances are important because it’s not just eating more of this or take this product, it’s like, hey, let us just rebalance some of these imbalances and looking at toxicities, heavy metals, et cetera, that also can be stored in tissue that can cause further dysfunction.

Dr. Sunil Pai: And for everybody, they should also have their primary or their doctors just checked for other metabolic aspects that can that affect your trouble with weight or weight loss, that your A1C, which is a three-month blood sugar adverse average looking at. Is there any kind of blood sugar problem, even if you know most people like either have they had it checked or not have it checked? But I recommend everybody because we have to see is blood sugar number one a problem in your weight or weight gain issue? Looking at for thyroid function is important because a lot of people can have low CMP . They’re not checking, we want to make sure that thyroid is metabolically working well. Looking at lipids and the metabolic panel, looking at kidney liver function. When I see those things, it also tells me other aspects of inflammation and other things like fatty liver. It also tells me, like, are they having trouble with detoxification, looking at CRP, inflammatory markers and vitamin D for the immune system? These are really, really simple things that I think everybody should ask are primary. If you’re having a weight issue and you’re looking at, well, I want to make sure that none of these things are out of balance because then we need to balance that as well as doing all the recommendations that I’ve mentioned before and finally taking an anti-inflammatory, taking things like glucan 300 and vitamin D. These are good for your immune system that’s mentioned in my book and also making sure that if your plant-based that you are taking some B12, I give usually all the B’s because most people are low with that in their absorption in general. So these are the general recommendations, and I thank you for listening to this quick introduction on an anti-inflammatory diet and how you can lose weight by following some of these recommendations.

Chef AJ: Well, thank you, Dr. Pai. That was amazing. Believe it or not, I don’t think it was as quick as you think because I was able to take six pages of notes from this, and I got to say that one of my very favorite things of all the things you said was, there’s no such thing as a cleanse if you’re eating correctly.

Dr. Sunil Pai: Right. So, so it’s very interesting. You know, in our Vedic medicine, we talk about punch of karma. That’s one of the specialties our clinic does that we’ve been doing for for for many years. And, you know, traditionally that talks about detoxification, but it’s a whole it’s a program, right? But for some reason, you know, since the 60s, really in the United States, this concept of like cleansing has become like, you know, go to a colon cleanse or do a colonic. And in fact, that all those things are disruptive to the microbiome. True detoxification is just having two to three well-formed volumes a day, eating thirty, thirty five grams or more fiber per day. That’s your body’s ability to take what you know, all the toxins that it gets spouse. Because when we do our testing, for example, we find people that have high levels of heavy metals or high levels of exposure to occupational or environmental. And people are like, Well, what? I’m going to find this well, yes, get a water filter. We can help with certain things that we can look at the water reports and see what we can kind of minimize. But the other thing we want to do is strengthen the body’s ability to actually get rid of these things. And so it’s not just like a weekend thing or people like, Oh, I just went and I flushed and I did this program, which you have to look at, is how do you actually lower your inflammation and how do we get the body to do what it needs to do? Detoxification is just eating correctly.

Chef AJ: You know, I love how you reinforce what a few of the other speakers have already said, such as two large meals a day have been shown to be better than six small ones, at least for weight loss is concerned.

Dr. Sunil Pai: Yeah, for weight loss. correct

Chef AJ: Yeah and the people that eat a plant-based diet have a 16 percent higher resting metabolic rate.

Dr. Sunil Pai: Right. And in fact, sometimes they get to eat more. Right. So sometimes you feel like I feel like I’m losing a lot of weight. I’m like, Well, because you got your actually metabolic activities higher. So yes, the nice thing is that if you like to eat, then you get to eat. Iit’s not a restriction thing, it’s like, you know, food. That’s why I tell people, once you get it, then it’s like, Wow, it’s not like that, because most people with weight loss, it’s like the whole stress is like, I can’t eat, I can’t eat, I can’t eat. And here it’s like you actually got to eat as much as you can or as much as you want. Even in that broad study, which showed us that the empowerment of understanding like just eating healthy will start changing all your epigenetics.

Chef AJ: Well, Dr. Robert Rowles is one of the experts on the summit, and once I learned about calorie density every day for me was Christmas.

Dr. Sunil Pai: Yeah, because you know, then you’re not stressed about looking at packages and counting calories. You know, when I have patients who actually eat processed foods and even splashes. What I’m having them look at is the saturated fat content, the calorie content and mainly the salt content as well. And so that we can kind of reduce some of those things when we got more Whole Foods.

Chef AJ: You said that ninety-five percent of people that go on diets ultimately fail and then they gain more weight back. It seems like that to guarantee that you’re going to gain weight, go on a diet.

Dr. Sunil Pai: Yeah and so I always tell people, you know, twenty-two years ago when we opened our practice, we’re in a Sanjivani integrative medicine, health, and lifestyle center. And that time a lot of people made fun of us. Or like, first of all, they didn’t know what integrative medicine was. They said, Why are you putting the word health in your business? Because it’s a disease model. You know medicine and then lifestyle and people are like joking all the time and now there is lifestyle medicine. And there are all these other things because it is lifestyle lifestyles are very important. I saw that you know, twenty-two years ago, like understanding that you have to change lifestyle and, you know, otherwise healthy lifestyle becomes death styles, we call it, you know, so it’s like your lifestyle determines your death style. And so you have to be careful of following trends and you want to look at is, can you just do something that is evidence-based, that simple? That’s natural and effective, and that’s lifestyle. But when people read my book, It will explain, like, why is it so difficult to do this? You know, every single industry, every food product, every insurance company, it will go through all that detail because a lot of people feel like they’re stuck here for something that they did inappropriately. I don’t have strong will. I don’t have, you know, I eat too much. But the idea is that it’s not. I always say it’s not by default, it’s by design. Americans aren’t unhealthy by, you know, mishap. And this is direct corporate marketing, this is just this is the changing of the food guidelines. This is the corporate lobbying and marketing for everybody now, and that keeps us in this, you know, 4.1 trillion dollars of health care spending as our richest country in the world. Yet where the sickest country in the world. You know, again again, 46 out of 48 industrial nations in terms of outcomes of disease. So we spent the most, but we’re at the bottom of the barrel.

Dr. Sunil Pai: Incredible. The richest countries, also the sickest country. You know, so many people don’t eat all day thinking they’re being good, only to end up bingeing at night. And you mentioned that larger dinners lead to increased fat deposit.

Dr. Sunil Pai: Right? And you know, a lot of people don’t realize that even when we wake up, you know, within the first hour of rising, there’s an insulin cycle that starts to start up. And so a lot of people like, I’m not really hungry when I wake up, they will say, but we are actually trying to change that. You know, you have slowly start to learn to eat a little bit more. I remember when I was in Mexico, and there was this famous place that made these famous bowls. It is a vegan restaurant, they make these bowls for breakfast. I remember when I first went, there is this look like so much stuff they put in this bowl, you know? And I was like, Wow, that’s so much fruit and so much of this and seeds. And it’s like, there’s no way to be able to eat that. And then after the second or third day, it’s like, Oh my God, I had so much energy for the rest of the day. I mean, now eat this all the time, but you’re so used to like, you know, like people like donut and coffee or something on the go and skipping the breakfast. But then, you know, then they eat this big lunch in a bigger dinner. You want to be eating less or towards the evening if possible, especially for losing weight.

Chef AJ: Yes. For losing weight. Absolutely. And I love how you mentioned with the fiber. The ultimate goal is to have at least thirty-five grams a day, but to only increase by five grams per week, because that’s the reason we started doing the GI Health Summit, which you’re going to be perfect for next time we do. It is because people were going too quickly.

Dr. Sunil Pai: Yeah, I mean, it’s funny because people go, Oh, you know, I watch the game-changers. I watch Forks over knives and, you know, I got all excited, you know, I read your book and all. And so then, you know, they count, they’re doing about 10 grams a day and they’re like, OK, let me make this smoothie of this power salad or let me have this soup or something has tons of vegetables, have tons of fiber. You know, let me have some a big being burrito, for example, and then they get horrible’s GI symptoms. So it is improving the function, the microbiome, however, once you get to that level. The interesting thing is the data shows is that if someone does eat animal protein after they’ve been on the diet for, say, six months, it doesn’t cause the TMAO production, and some of these pro carcinogenic exposures that is created when people are constantly eating animal protein. So the benefit is I tell people,especially since it’s holidays and you know, there’s other things like that coming around the corner is that sometimes like people like, I had to eat this or, you know, socially or religiously or whatever it is, the idea is that it’s not going to throw them back. In fact, you just don’t want to make that again, a regular thing. But we still want to reduce those things as much as possible. But the microbiome can change very quickly within two weeks, the data will show. And so when we flip those characters and we measure that in our stool testing, we actually can look at this pro-inflammatory, anti-inflammatory ratios of microbiome phylum. And when we flip that, it changes the whole state of the inflammatory proinflammatory response. If not, I can tell people coming in and say, Oh, I think I’m doing this or and I can tell by this their microbiome, like they’re not. It’s like, we have the truth is that your microbes will tell us whether you’re doing the right thing or not, and your body will tell us based on how many itis conditions that you have or not as well.

Dr. Sunil Pai: I appreciate you talking about one of my favorite things, Thylakoids, which I wrote about in my book because they really not only do they block fat absorption, they really cut cravings. That’s why I tell people to eat vegetables as part of their breakfast, especially grains.

Dr. Sunil Pai: I put tons of greens. Any time I make like a scramble, a vegan scramble, I mean, people like like, as you put it, like so much spinach. I’m like, I love it. And when I eat that, I feel better throughout the day, which is very interesting. And you know, it’s not until I read all the research. I think that’s the reasoning for it. But it’s interesting, like how I’m trying to tell people that to pair their foods differently because, you know, we were taught the standard American diet. I mentioned in my book like, here’s the Grand Slam Breakfast and that was sold the farmer’s breakfast to everybody. But we have to understand, like the rest of the world doesn’t eat like that. And then again, they’re much healthier than we are.

Chef AJ: While we never want to blame or shame anyone for being overweight or obese, for a long time, there’s been this movement called health at every size. But when I heard you talk about COVID, I’m wondering if we have to rethink that and that maybe it isn’t possible to be truly healthy. Is it because body fat itself is so inflammatory?

Dr. Sunil Pai: Yes. I mean, you know, we’re not fat-shaming, by the way, right? But if you go back and you just look back 30 years ago where we were as children or as children, our younger, younger adults would say, you know, we didn’t see the rate of obesity, right? So we didn’t see childhood obesity. So it is a problem, you know, but the idea is it’s not saying that it’s their right to be that way, but it’s also it’s not their right to be trapped in that way. And what people have to understand is that again, it’s by design, not by default. There’s a lot of things socioeconomics access marketing, you know, you know, good and bad that that actually puts people in this position. But we now see this as exponential. You saw the map every almost every state is. It’s got this growing and growing and growing, and it’s not sustainable, you know, because now we’re looking at, you know, not heart disease going up, diabetes, going up, dementia, going up, cancer, going up, which those itself are already bankrupting our health care system. So I always look at it this way is that we have to get healthier. And COVID was a wake up call to say that we need to have this discussion. It’s not easy. All of us can lose weight. I can lose a couple of pounds. I mean, yes, even COVID made us gain about 20 pounds on average in states. So understandably, we have to. But it’s a group. As a collective, we have to understand like we’re not here to fat shame or say that it’s our right to be this because we’re Americans, not because as Americans, your parents or your grandparents weren’t like this either. Right. So the rates of diseases weren’t as high as they are. So if you look at what a society doing because it’s not our genetics, right, because we’re all a melting pot, we’re all coming from different places. But now everybody with the start of lifestyle, epigenetics is all the same now. Right. So we have to change that epigenetics to go back to a healthier lifestyle.

Chef AJ: So I understand you correctly. Animal products and processed food, which is what most Americans eat the majority of their calories from are inflammatory.

Dr. Sunil Pai: Yes, and saturated fats correct as well

Chef AJ: And saturated fat and whole plant foods are anti-inflammatory. Is there a hierarchy in inflammation when it comes to animal products versus processed foods? Say dairy more so than meat or sugar and flour more so than oils? Or is it all just bad?

Dr. Sunil Pai: They’re all bad. But you know, when I talked about the AGE’s, we call them the advanced glycation end products. Is that when you have animal protein, saturated fat and sugar, it actually becomes the trifecta in that and that actually spins off other things that are worse. And so if you dig deep in some of those, some of the research, you know, one of the things we’re looking at even now with obesity, even this morning, I was reading that there’s even other they’re discovering new hormones that fat cells produce that actually trigger inflammation even more and trigger cardiovascular disease more. That’s not just the cholesterol that we’re eating. So there’s all these like inner cycles of dysfunction that are occurring. So we really have to stop this domino effect because all of a sudden, it’s like one thing after the other. Next thing, that’s the next thing. Remember, conventional medicine is really good at treating symptoms. But what we do with integrative medicine is we want to find, why do you have the imbalance, fix and restore and rejuvenate? And that’s a whole different thing than just say, here’s a diabetic pill. Here’s a cholesterol pill. Here’s a blood pressure pill. Why are we taking pills? We’re not, you know, you don’t have a statin deficiency in know metformin. If you know, a lot of people are treated like that with drugs as if their deficiencies, you know, you have depression. So you have a Zoloft deficiency. No, you don’t. We don’t look at what’s the inflammation or what’s the imbalance that’s causing this person to have those symptoms. And you know, all these diseases are lifestyle diseases and lifestyle diseases are reversible. So, you know, we can reverse diabetes, heart disease, and all. But the weight is an issue because it compounds right so you can get more depression. You hurt more. You know, you don’t want to exercise, your guts not feeling good. So then it’s like they have 10 different problems. So the weight is just the physical thing that we can see, but they actually have most of these other co-morbidities. Sometimes they don’t even know that those have that comorbidity. One of the sad things I read about this recently is that with the rates of cancer in obese patients, is that one of the partial reasons, aside of just the physical problem of obesity is that there’s a lack of the patient who’s obese getting health care because of the shame and the guilt of going forward, the health care. Right. So there’s so we have to make it like, no, you should go in to make sure that, you know, because you can. There is still healthy obesity. There is there are patients there, but not the percentage of the whole country, right? So that’s the misnomer. There was always going to be someone who’s larger is always going to someone who’s smaller on the scale, right? The bell-shaped curve. But the problem is that we’ve now moved this whole standard deviation over too much. And so we can’t just attribute that, but we can we should be offering and saying, Hey, don’t feel ashamed or don’t feel guilty. You want to actually be proactive. The sooner, the better. You know, I always tell people I never should have woulda coulda. We have to look at, where are we now? And let’s work on moving again and doing can step slowly, like in my book. It’s very simple. You don’t want to be an expert tomorrow. And, you know, even when people listen to all these summits and all these speakers, it’s like they’re going to get one piece of one and one piece of that and then go back and let us do it again. That’s how you do it. It’s a lifestyle change. It’s not again a race, but it’s actually getting in the race and eventually completing it over time.

Chef AJ: I love how you pointed out that on Aquino Day, they may more weight more quickly, but it’s not fat loss, it’s muscle loss. And they’re eating basically a pro-inflammatory diet,

Dr. Sunil Pai: hugely pro-inflammatory diet. And I think some of your speakers actually going to talk about that specifically. But the high amounts of saturated fat, you know, because that’s what they’re putting a lot more fat in the diet. We now show that even with cancer studies at that, the high saturated fat will actually trigger certain cellular receptors that actually spin-off metastasis even. More, there’s also I mean, so like it’s just one bad idea after the other. But you know that initial weight loss of a highly reduced, you know, refined carbohydrates, everybody likes the sell that, we call it the honeymoon period. Like, anybody can lose weight. You stopeating in a foot long subway sandwiches and all you can eat breadsticks. You’ll lose weight, stop eating because you’ll lose weight on a certain level, right? But then that’s not what we have to look at, are you eating healthy or not? Right? So again, that’s not a biohacking idea. Everybody wants to be like, kind of cheat the system. They want to put in the long-term effort. But that long-term effort is actually very easy. People need to understand it’s not complicated. What you do every day is very easy. It looks complicated for the average person because of the marketing and the pressure in society and what are preconceived notions of what we think we should be eating. But at the end of the day, when you go to every other country and say, if I go to Africa, a rural part of India, they don’t have any of these ideas, right? Because they’re super healthy, right? Because what their diet is predominantly eating is a plant-based diet. If you look at blue zones, what are the people that live the longest doing? They’re not eating a ketogenic diet, they’re not drinking alkaline water, they’re not doing some kind of fat, you know, think they’re just like, you know, we’re going to predominantly plant-based. We’re looking at all these epigenetic factors, still having community exercise, social awareness, and cognitive support. And you know, those are simple things that people end up having longer longevity.

Chef AJ: I love how you pointed out that weight loss comes along with the process.

Dr. Sunil Pai: It comes along and that a lot of people come to me, believe it or not. And that’s the first thing, you know, especially if that’s on their list. Like, I want to lose weight and I’m like, No, you want to get healthy. Weight loss will come with it and everything else comes with. It’s like, Well, my sex drive is better. My cognition is better. My skin is better. You know, all these things that come along with it and people don’t realize I have had no idea all these things get better because that’s what health is, that you have to always have that foundation before, you know, it is like always worried about like, you know, what’s the paint on the house? But I’m like, Let’s start with the engine. You have to start with building the frame, and if that’s solid, then you can paint it whatever color you want when you get there.

Chef AJ: So, Dr. Pai, what’s the real truth about weight loss?

Dr. Sunil Pai: The real truth about weight loss, I’ll say that it has to do with epigenetics, right? Diet, lifestyle, environment. What we do at San Giovanni, I work with my patients. You know what, Maureen and I and everybody here at our center does is that we work on that epigenetics with you. So it’s not as complicated. It’s not a quick fix. It’s us, but it’s simply this changing each of these little parameters, like the ten steps of my book, and that actually makes weight loss a lot easier. It’s a lot easier than people think, but I think the system, again, like 126 diets per person per their lifetime, is destined to fail because again, there’s a bowel hack. They’re trying to do something that’s so extreme on one level like there’s only one thing you need to do in life. If it sounds too good to be true, it’s not necessarily true. But we will be able to look as one of the things that the average person can grasp, that’s not expensive, that they can do anywhere in the country or anywhere in the world. These are things that you can implement today and once you start doing those things, Life is good.

Chef AJ: Thank you so much, Dr. Pai

Dr. Sunil Pai: Thank you.

Chef AJ: Hi, Will and Faith and welcome to The Truth About Weight Loss Summit. Thanks so much for being here.

Faith Scott: Thank you.

Will Scott: Hey, chef. Thank you for having us.

Chef AJ: Thank you.

Faith Scott: Oh, my God.

Will Scott: The pleasure is all mine. I would love for you to tell the viewers your story, your weight loss journey.

Faith Scott: Sure. Well, mine started over probably about ten years ago. Found myself very overweight, very sluggish, tired, getting sick on and off and ear infections. Just the standard American person, just overweight. You’re okay with being overweight, but you really feel bad. And my husband was like, Queen, let’s try this diet. Let’s try that diet. And he’s never really had an issue. Will never really had an issue with his weight. And so we tried every diet you could think of, and we never did them long term. We’d have lost weight and we gained that weight back and then some. Let me see, in 2015, again, I was just sick and tired of being sick and tired. And I stumbled across a book called the 21 Day Revolution by Marco Borges. And I read it and it was talking about living a plant-based lifestyle. And I had heard of veganism before because actually over 20 years ago, we had vegan friends, but truth be told they were overweight vegan friends. And at that time, I was following the standard American diet lifestyle. And I was like, okay, you have your vegan food and I’m going to eat my chicken wing, okay. Because at that time, I wasn’t that heavy, but they were morbidly obese.

Will Scott: But they were vegan.

Faith Scott: And I was like, well, no, thank you. And so fast forward, ten years later, I found myself very overweight. And stumbled across this book called the 21 Day Revolution. So I read about it because they were using the word whole food, plant-based. And I was like, okay, that sounds like something that may interest me. And before I could finish reading the book, I stopped on page 20, and I went out and got all of the ingredients because it has all these recipes in there. And I called my husband. I was like, look, we’re going to do this whole food plant-based challenge here for 21 days, and we’re going to eat the food. And the food was amazing. And we both lost weight. I think I lost like eight or nine pounds and Will lost like 15 pounds. We dropped weight really fast. And the food was amazing. I mean, it was so good. I said we can do this. I can eat like this every day, eating plants. And the rest was history. We didn’t look back. And the last paragraph of that book changed my life forever because Mr. Borges just thanked Dr. Cardwell Esselstyn, Dr Colin Campbell and Dr. John McDougall for their work in the plant-based world.

So I finished reading the book, and I immediately went and got their books, How to Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease by Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn, because that ran in my family. The China Study by Dr. Colin Campbell, which talks about cancer, that ran in my family. And Dr. John McDougall about the starch solution. And I tell you, I haven’t looked back. I read all three of the books. My eyes were just open to like, really? This is more about losing weight. It’s about gaining my overall health. And not just my health, but my family’s health. Right. I haven’t looked back. And that’s been almost seven years now. And I’m just super excited about this lifestyle. And for my husband, I’ll let him share his story, but he was okay with his weight where he was. But when we went plant-based, you want to tell them what you told me when we went plant-based?

Will Scott: Yeah, definitely. And I call Faith Queen. I told Queen, I said, hey, I don’t mind making the change, making the transition, the transformation. As long as you can do dessert, right? Because I love desserts. I mean, I just love desserts. So I told her, as long as you can still make my desserts Queen, I’m 100% in because we like doing things together. Definitely. Like doing things together as a family. So when Queen said, no problem, I’ll make sure we get some dessert. And I say, Good, I’m in. Count me in, 100%, definitely. I didn’t really have a problem, I thought, with weight. And we’re going to show you some before and after pictures, Chef AJ. But I found out that I had high blood pressure when I went to the dentist. And I went to the dentist and he said, you know, your pressure is mighty high. And I said, well, he said, Let me take it again. He took it again, it was still high. Took it again and it was still high. He took it the third time. I think the third time he was like, you really need to go get this checked. So that’s when I found out that I had high blood pressure. I was 235 pounds at that time and I looked buff, so I didn’t look like I was morbidly obese, right.

Will Scott: I can remember one day I was at work and I was standing up and I was in the back room and I got very dizzy and I just grabbed the table because I could not get myself balanced. I didn’t know what was going on. It really scared me because I had no control over how I felt. It was just a very dizzy feeling. But I never told Queen because I know she would have said, you need to go to the doctor. So when I did go to the doctor, they gave me these meds for high blood pressure. And I took the meds and it didn’t do anything because I didn’t change my eating. I didn’t get to the root of the problem, which was the food. I didn’t change my eating. I just kept eating the same thing, taking the pills. And the pressure did not drop. So he increased the dosage. Pressure did not drop. Once we made our transition and transformation, I went back to the doctor. He said, wow, the medication is working. And I said, no, medication is not working because I’m not taking it. He said, well, what are you doing? I said, well, my family, we’re a whole food plant-based. And he said, wow, incredible. And it was like I told him something brand new. He was all shocked. He was like, really? And I said, yes, sir. That’s what I did doc. But you know what? One thing I want to say, they never asked me about what I was eating. They never said anything to me about my lifestyle or anything like that. They just felt because I walked in the door, I looked fit that it wasn’t an issue. And because everyone else ate that way, they didn’t associate my high blood pressure with what I was putting in my mouth. So anyway, but desserts for me. So that was my trigger.

Faith Scott: Yeah, that’s how I won my husband over. But even with that being said, the weight just fell off of him. And I lost over two years. Lost over 100 pounds. Right. And it was just an amazing journey. And I’m going to say, in the beginning, I was a little nervous because I was concerned about our kids not getting the nutrients they need. But I began to just research, and I read Dr. McDougall’s book, and I love Dr. John McDougall. But anyway, found out that kids can live a plant-based lifestyle and get all the nutrients they need and they can thrive. And so I was like, hey, we’re all in. And I transitioned my kids, it took me about six months to get them fully transitioned to a plant-based lifestyle. But now, almost seven years later, our entire family is whole food plant-based, and we will have it no other way. So I’m just super excited about this lifestyle, and I’m forever grateful. About a year into my journey, I found chef AJ. I learned about calorie density. So I’m grateful for you Chef AJ and all the work that you’re doing and just sharing the good news about we don’t have to settle for less than health and being overweight and accepting that well nothing else we can do because my Mama was big, my dad was big. It was running in my family. Oh, my family, we used to say, by the way, we’re big boned women. Once I became plant-based and lost all that weight, I was like, well, my bones are not big. I was just fat. People love hearing good news about their bad habits as Dr McDougall says and that is so true. So, yeah, I had to get uncomfortable a little bit and change my lifestyle so that I can be comfortable today. Right. And not be running back and forth to the doctor. My kids hardly ever get sick. And if they do, they recover within two days with no medicine. Right. Because I believe that our bodies were designed to heal, repair and restore ourselves. But we have to set the atmosphere right on the inside.

Will Scott: That’s right.

Faith Scott: And the only way we can do that is through eating more plants. That’s what I believe with all of my heart. And I believe that because I’m a walking testimony of it. Yeah. Like I said, I’m just forever grateful for having found this lifestyle.

Will Scott: After 35 years. Chef AJ, I served in the military for 35 years. And I can remember right at the end when I was given it to retire because I retired at 60. So right at the end when I was giving it to retire, I was still running 2 miles in about 13 minutes. And some of the younger guys were still asking me, hey, Sir, how are you able to do that? I mean, you’re an old guy. He said, how are you able to run 2 miles in 13 minutes? I said, do you really want to know? And they were like, yeah, tell us. And I said, Well, I mean, I’m a whole-food, plant-based eater. I don’t eat any meat, eggs, cheese, dairy, none of that whatsoever. And they were like, really? And I was like, yes. They said, it must be working. I said, Absolutely. I said, Because you’re 30 years old, I’m 60 years old and I can outrun you. So they always were like, man, it has to be working, man. I love that. And I told them, I said, hey, it’s all about the food. I said, It’s no different than putting gas in your car. I said, Would you put watered down gas in your car? And if you did do that, how long would it operate efficiently? So the same thing that happens with us in our bodies, if you put bad food in your body, it’s going to perform inefficiently. So you have to put good quality food in your body, whole food, plant-based food in your body, and it will reward you the same. So I love it. I love it. Absolutely.

Faith Scott: So we wanted to share before and after pictures with you Chef AJ. Yeah. Again, I was 229. Will was like 235. So here are our before and after pictures. And you will have the buff look. I like to call it the buff look, but he was really fat, but he didn’t look too bad. But he was really fat. And of course, I had the Mama look. No offense to no any moms out there, wherever you are in life, it’s okay. But, yeah, I was very overweight and I felt bad. And these pictures were taken about a year and a half or so after we transitioned to plant-based. This was when I was at my lowest, which was 129 pounds.

Will Scott: No surgery, no stomach surgery, no liposuction, none of that.

Faith Scott: Will had gotten down to 145. I was so ecstatic because I was like, my goodness, let me tell you, the first six months, I did not exercise.

Will Scott: Right.

Faith Scott: Because I’m never going to exercise. But I was like, you know what I got to eat? So let me eat this plant-based food. And the weight just fell off. I mean, it was just coming off. Coming off, coming off. And I think the first year I lost like 60 pounds. The second year, I lost about another 30 or 40 pounds. And then six months into the third year, I met Chef AJ, found out about calorie density, and I dropped another 10 pounds. Okay. So it truly is the food. Now we’re saying that, Chef AJ, this is a weight loss summit, right? Yes. So, something that I think we have to hold on to and remember, it is a journey.

Will Scott: Yes, it is.

Faith Scott: And the same thing you did to lose the weight is the same thing you’re going to have to do to keep the weight off. So if it’s not sustainable. Right. You’re not going to keep the weight off. With that being said, there’s also a wide range of plant-based eating. Some people can afford to eat more rich calorie food, like your peanuts and avocados and things like that. But if you’re trying to lose weight, we sort of refrain from the avocados and the nuts and things like that. At least minimize them. I say that right. Minimize them. But when we were at our lowest, we were minimizing or really omitting the higher calorie-dense food. Right. Now, that’s a choice, right. Because nuts are healthy, avocados are healthy, pasta is okay if you can afford to eat them. So I like to call it wanting to live a lavish plant-based life.

Will Scott: Right.: 

Faith Scott: There’s a range. You can gain a little weight being plant-based. Right. You can gain weight depending on how much you eat. You can gain a whole lot of weight. But we found because this is a journey that for us, it’s about a 20 to 25 pound range that we can find ourselves in if we choose to add the more decadent plant-based food. Right. And so over the past year, year and a half, for me, it’s been one of those years. And you already know all those homeschooling kids. So I have chosen to include some of those more definite foods back on my plate. But it’s okay because I’m okay with where I’m at. So I want to share with you the range, which our range is for us is about a 15 to 20 pound window. Okay. So here, you see, as we were at 129, my husband 145 plant-based, no flours, no added sugars, no salt, no oil, none of that. Just we had really tightened down the screws.

Will Scott: Yes.

Faith Scott: Well, we took this picture here today, right?

Will Scott: Yes.

Faith Scott: So we’re about 20 pounds heavier and still 20-25 pounds heavier.

Will Scott: Right.

Faith Scott: Still look lean, look healthy, feel good. Right. I’m okay with where I’m at. Right. So I just wanted to share that with individuals that say oh I go Plant-based to lose weight and keep it off, this, that and the other. If you don’t do what you did right to lose it, lose it, you will gain some back. And that’s all about energy density. And that’s a good thing. Once you understand energy density. And for me, it makes it really simple. Right. So based on your goals, love yourself where you are. Sure. Love yourself where you are and understand. It’s a journey in my book, if you’re eating more plants, if you’re eating 100% plants, you’re on my A list. Right. But yeah, it is a range. And like I said, the past year, year and a half, for me, it’s been a little bit of a trying time, and I might be telling too much information, Chef AJ. But if I may, since that’s the only way I can do is keep it real, the menopause thing going on.

Will Scott

Yeah.

Faith Scott: So that’s another equation to add to the equation here that I’m trying to learn about how my body has changed in this stage of my life. But I guarantee you this, for me and my house, we are 100% whole food plant-based.

Will Scott: That’s right.

Faith Scott: Okay. That’s right. And to me, that means no vegan, highly vegan, processed foods bought in the store. If it’s being processed, it’s being processed in my house. Right. But yeah, the vegan, highly vegan foods we do not consume, we don’t bring it in our home. Right. But yes, I’m just loving this lifestyle. I’m just so grateful, as I said, and I will not turn back. We’re raising our three children whole food plant-based. And I’m more excited for them because at 46, when I found out about this lifestyle, I was actually 44. I’m sorry. I was scared to death because all I knew was the way my mom had taught me, you know, just the culture of how we were raised to eat. And I know my mother did the best she could with what she knew. But when you know better, you do better. Right. And there was no way that I was exposed to this information about the benefits of living a plant-based lifestyle, that I could allow my kids to eat the way I ate when I was growing up. I do not want them to deal with the side effects of that lifestyle, which is sickness and obesity. Now you have children that are diabetic and things like that. So this is so important to me that I’m raising them this way. So when they grow up and they become adults, if they choose, which I hope they do continue this lifestyle, they have the foundation of what is healthy eating.

Will Scott: Correct.

Faith Scott: And healthy eating in my book, is eating more plants. So that’s our journey, Chef AJ and it is a journey we haven’t arrived yet, I believe as long as we keep living, you learn something every day. You grow more. You live and learn. But again, as long as you keep eating plants, you’re going to be okay.

Will Scott: Last thing I want to say about that, too, Queen, is that when we initially started on this journey, our initial starting on this journey was to lose weight.

Faith Scott: Right. Okay.

Will Scott: But throughout our journey and throughout our learning and education and experience, we now know that it’s more important than just losing weight. It’s all about gaining health. Okay. So we now look at the holistic approach of, hey, we’re having better health. We look at lifestyle medicine for quadrants, healthy weight, active living, emotional resilience. And we look at those things now. Those are the things that are focused for us now and then also a healthy diet, which is whole food, plant-based. So those four quadrants are what we live by in our home. And we teach our children that as well. So it’s about your goals, though. Whatever your goal is for you, as long as it’s your goal, then you’ll be happy with it. This is our goal. So we’re happy with it. Okay. And we are healthy with it.

Faith Scott: Right. We’ll say you don’t look like you’re 61.

Will Scott: Oh, thank you.

Faith Scott: But I definitely tossed it up to just healthy living. And it’s not too late. Let me say that, AJ, because some people are like I’ve been like this all my life, it is never too late to do better. Okay. When you find out about something better, you owe it to yourself. That’s right. To do better. And you can do better. So, yeah, I just wanted to say that because it is never too late. As long as you’re breathing and you have breath in your body, you can get up. It’s never too late to grab a banana and eat that instead of a doughnut, you know what I’m saying? So, yeah, it’s just about making a choice to do better. Right. And if you slip and fall, get back up, get back in the next bite. Let it be a plant. Okay. That’s it.

Chef AJ: Well, first of all, Congratulations. You guys look incredible. And you look great in both pictures, Faith. But the before picture, you look older.

Faith Scott: Yes, I did look older. Let me pull that back up for you. Yeah. And I was oh, my goodness. I was in my 30s there. Yes, I was like in my 30s there, like 36. So, yeah, I was in my late 30s, early 40s. And both of us looked older. And now when I tell people, yeah, I have grandkids, they’re like, what? Yeah, you’re too young to have grandkids. I’m like, yes. So, yes, ma’am. I believe the food really does make a difference. The more plants you eat, the more it just brings a youthfulness back and the vibrancy back. It’s the food. Dr. Michael Klaper will say it’s the food and nothing but the food.

Will Scott: That’s right.

Faith Scott: Yeah.

Chef AJ: So did you struggle with weight your entire life, Faith? Were you overweight as a child or was that something that happened more as an adult?

Faith Scott: More as an adult. But I kept eating the same food that I ate when I was a kid. Right. But you keep doing it over a period of time. And that’s the deception of not living a full, healthy lifestyle, because when you’re younger, you’re a lot more active. At least when I was growing up, we went outside and played with these kids in the house, so they’re not moving as much. But I was an active kid, ran outside, played, jumped trees and all that. And then the older I get, I think by the time I graduated from high school, I wasn’t overweight. But you could see the inflammation. And I don’t have any pictures from high school, but you can see my face was all sort of puffy and I wasn’t overweight, but I had that big bone look, you know what I’m saying? And just accepted it. That’s how I was supposed to look. And I can remember going to the doctor probably at 20. And I remember the doctor telling me, your bad cholesterol is high. You need to sort of watch what you’re eating because I don’t know if that’s the LDL, the HDL or whatever, but the bad one, she was like, it’s really high. And you know you’re young. You let that stuff go in one end or the other until something bad happens. Yeah, but I wasn’t overweight as a young lady the older I got. And then definitely I had my daughter. The weight really came on, but I wasn’t overweight. I can remember when I was in the Air Force, they had put me on the fat man program, and I was weighing about right at 200, maybe 195. But yeah, they had me on the fat man program, but I’ve never really looked my weight. People would say, oh, you know, look like you’re overweight. So I will play off of that. And plus, I was big bone. Remember I told you that earlier? I was like, I’m not really that heavy. But then as I got older, in my 30s and definitely like, I had my daughter, the weight just was like, okay, I’m here to stay. Yeah, I had gotten up to like 229.

Chef AJ: I have to ask, what’s the fat man program?

Faith Scott: Okay, well, I was in the Air Force and they put you on the fat man program, and that’s when you were overweight and you had to go exercise every day. They never addressed what you were eating.

Will Scott: Right.

Faith Scott: They just will tell you you’re overweight and you need to go exercise. And so I did that. I run around the track and I do the Dooma and all this kind of stuff. And I did that. And never once did I think about what I was putting in my mouth. Now, that was over 25, 28 years ago. Now I think they talk about nutrition more and Will, he just retired. So I think they bring that nutrition aspect then. But back then it was like, you don’t expect me to program, you got to lose some weight and they would tape you, they give you a certain amount of time to reach a goal and they will tape you and you could possibly be thrown out of the military to lose the weight. Of course, I dropped the weight. I think I started myself and did whatever I needed to do at that time. Yeah, I went drastic measures to drop the weight, but then it just came right back again.

Chef AJ: What diets have you tried? What’s your first recollection of dieting?

Faith Scott: Okay, well, I did the Scarsdale Diet and I think that was. I don’t know who wrote the book, but you had to eat a lot of vegetables. Yeah, eat a lot of vegetables and then you can eat some meat as long as it wasn’t fried and all of that. And I did that to get into the military. Right. It was called the Scarsdale Diet. And I don’t know if that was a piggyback off of the ketogenic, I’m not sure, but it was called the Scarsdale Diet. So I remember doing that. And then I remember when I got with Will. Oh, my God, I was like, well, let me say this. When we first got together, within the first 90 days, we both gained like 30 pounds because we were eating out, wining and dining with each other. I was cooking pork chops and biscuits with cheese. Come on. I was trying to say the way to a man’s heart is through the belly, right? So I will cook all this food and everything. And we just blew up. And so Will was like Queen, let’s do the ketogenic diet. Was it ketogenic?

Chef AJ: Yeah, I think it was like the antibiotic diet, which is a form of keto.

Faith Scott: It was a lot of meat. Oh, my God, Chef, I felt so bad. It was like I felt this heaviness in my chest. And I said, Will, I can’t do this. I can’t do this. I don’t feel good, I cannot do this. And then what else do we do? 50 million man challenge. Yeah, that’s sort of just healthy eating. Yes, something like that. Just a healthy eating type thing. But, yeah, I remember eating a whole lot of meat and Will was like, yeah, that’s supposed to shift your antibiotic and you’re going to burn fat. They call it keto. Now I can’t do it. I can’t do it. So those are basically the ones we did, like the keto and then just eating healthy, lean meats and all those kinds of things and, yeah, that was basically what we did.

Will Scott: We didn’t understand. We didn’t understand what really healthy eating was. We thought we were eating healthy. That was just based on society and what they were saying. Because, like, when Queen wasn’t overweight, when she came out of high school, I wasn’t either. I came out of high school, I was 127 pounds, had a 27 inch waist. So I was very fit, very. But I was eating everything and anything. The one thing that we found out in this journey is that what happens is it is a slight edge philosophy. It comes on, it creeps on you over a period of time. So it doesn’t hit you all at once. Because if it did, most people probably would back off. But they didn’t do that with us. It was a little bit at a time. So we thought everything was okay. And we never associated it with food. We always do things like, oh, well, I’m not exercising anymore. I’m not doing this anymore. I’m not as active anymore. But you got to understand, it’s a compounded effort over a period of 10, 15, 20 years of doing the same thing over and over. The food actually is getting worse during that period of time.

Will Scott: And it’s just after a while, your body is like, I’m done. I can no longer keep you at this weight. You’re going to gain it. And here it is, along with the chronic illnesses and diseases.

Faith Scott: Then you wake up like how in the world did I get here.

Will Scott: Yes, exactly.

Chef AJ: I’m guessing on those diets, like the Scarsdale or the fat man program, you gained the weight back?

Faith Scott: Oh, yeah, we did, definitely.

Will Scott: Oh, Chef AJ, this is awesome right here. I can remember. Queen and I both did the Scarsdale the first time, dropped a little weight, the weight came off. It was like, oh, yeah, this is great. So we gained the weight back. So that’s all right, Queen. Let’s just go back to Scarsdale again. So we did the scarsdale again. But this is so funny. This time, instead of losing weight on the scarsdale, we gained weight because we ate so much more food. It was the same type of food, which was bad, but we ate so much more. And we were like, man, the first time we did it, we lost weight. This time we gained about 5 to 10 pounds. I’m like, well, that ain’t working either. It was so funny.

Chef AJ: That’s incredible. When you first transitioned to a healthy, whole-food, plant-based diet, did you experience any challenges?

Faith Scott: I think the biggest challenge for me was and I won’t say learning the recipes. But what was the biggest challenge? I guess food preparation was a huge one. Yes, especially when you used to eat out conveniently and now go from net to now have to prepare your food. And I used to hate it, every Saturday I will plan all my meals. Then I will go through and write down all the inventory, what I needed, and then I would go through and mark out what I had. And then I would go to the store, and that would take me hours on end. But I did it. I was like, I got to do this. I don’t know how to cook this way. So I had to get the recipes. I had to make my menu. I had to go through. And I used to hate it, chef AJ. It was hard, but over a period of time, it got quicker and quicker and quicker. Now, I know the main staples to have in the house are beans, potatoes, rice, fruit, vegetables, just those simple staples in the house. But the learning curve of going from just grabbing a box, throwing in a microwave, the convenience or the pleasure trap, that was hard, because now I’m preparing everything right and learning all these recipes but I did it because I was like, my health is worth it. It was worth the investment. It’s either I go to the store, get all these plants, eat it, or I’m going to keep going down the same road I went down and getting sicker and sicker. So to me, the investment upfront was worth the learning curve.

Will Scott: I’m sorry. We had no one in this area that we could go to to talk to about it. We were the only couple. Matter of fact, let me rephrase that we were the only family that was living a whole-food, plant-based lifestyle in our area in Kentucky. It was very tough for us. However we looked at the outcome, we knew, based on what we had been reading, that this was the best option for our family longevity. So that’s why we continue to journey. And it was tough. I used to watch Queen sit there for hours on Saturday, that was tiring, and then have to go to the grocery store to purchase the food, then to come home and put up the food. But after we did that, of course, we got to pull out the food because we got to prepare the food. So it was like, all day long. It was tough.

Faith Scott:I would say that’s the hardest part. But now, seven years later, oh, my goodness. There’s so many resources out there, like your channel, all the bloggers but seven years ago, it was just hard. And not to mention not seeing someone that looked like myself, okay. And not to be racial or anything like that. But I was scared to death because I’m like, I don’t see any black people eating like this but I knew that we had to do something different in order to get something different. I knew that we had to break the mold and do something different. So now is a beautiful time because there’s so many resources out there. You see more and more, all walks of life embracing even more plants. It’s just a wonderful time. But seven years ago, I was scared to death because I didn’t know Chef AJ, or no Dr. McDougall. But because I was speaking truth, truth came and found me. Right. And I’m here today, seven years later.

Will Scott: Absolutely.

Faith Scott: Yes, ma’am.

Chef AJ: I love how you said that food is being processed. It’s being processed by me,

Faith Scott: Right? Definitely. Yeah. That way I know what went into making it. And you know what I found in this walk? The more you process food, the more you have to add stuff to it. I don’t know, just say a banana. I don’t know. I’m just using that and just eating a banana. A ripe banana. Oh, God, it’s so good. But then you blend the banana. Now you got to like, wait a minute. I need to add something else to it to make it even sweeter. You know what I’m saying? I’m just using it as an example or you take some corn or oatmeal. Yeah, just eat some oatmeal. Oat groats are amazing. They are amazing. But take the oatmeal and then now turn it into flour. Now it doesn’t taste good anymore. Now you got to add sugar. You got to add sweeteners, you got to add spice. There’s nothing wrong with processing your food, but I like to process my food at home. That way I know if it’s an added sugar. And what kind of sugar is it? Is it processed sugar or is it fruit? If it’s in the added salt. Well, how much salt is added? Right. And if it’s in the added oil, we don’t Cook, because you know it’s not good for our heart. So, yeah, it’s best that you process your own food because I’m telling you, the moment is processed and put in the package. Guess what? You’re going to have three big ones in there, in some kind of way, salt, oil and fat. So, yeah, I have just learned. Now in my journey, chef ain’t been a journey. I would in the beginning buy some process stuff. But now, through educating and learning that, hey, if you want optimal health, you need to buy it whole, bring it home and process it yourself. That way you can control how much added sugar is in there and what type of added sugar, how much salt, if you’re using salt and oils. Well, we don’t use any oils, but some people do. But we don’t. So you can control those things, those substances, as Dr. Goldhamer was saying, not food. They’re just added substances that’s added to food to make it taste better.

Chef AJ: I know exactly what he would say. They fool your brain satiety mechanism that causes you to exponentially overeat.

Faith Scott: That is so true.

Chef AJ: Is there anything you guys missed from your previous lifestyle food-wise? Do you ever experience cravings or did you early on? And if so, what did you do about them?

Faith Scott: Okay, in the beginning for me, I was a seafood person. I used to love some crab legs, I just love seafood. But when I started learning about what animal products do to my body. Right. In my mind, it was a struggle the first six months, but I stayed out of the restaurants that would have them but I stayed away, and I kept feeding my mind with the information to remind myself why I don’t need to be eating seafood. It’s causing harm to my body. So I’m not going to sit there and normally eat rat poison if I know it’s poison for my body. And so for me, in my mind, just how I think everybody’s different. I had to transition from no longer seeing that as the food for my body, because we eat food to nourish our bodies. Right. But the first six, seven months, it was extremely hard because I love seafood. And we used to go to this Chinese restaurant that had seafood there, and I could just sit and eat crab legs all day long. But once I learn what all animal-based foods do to our bodies.

Will Scot: Which includes fish and seafood.

Faith Scott: That’s right. I’m like, I’m not eating that anymore. So, yeah, that was a hard one for me with seafood. But other than that, I can truly say I don’t miss anything because everything I have is good. And then some of those dishes that I used to eat, standard American diet, like Mac and cheese, an example. There is a plant-based version of that, right. So we’re not being deprived of Mac and cheese. Like my kids, they love Mac and cheese. So if there’s anything that I used to have in the standard American diet, I always try to make it a plant-based version. And if there’s a will, there’s a way, honey, that’s what I say. And so everything that I’ve thought of, like, over the holidays, I came up, as a kid, we used to eat candy yams during the holidays. And candy yams are full of butter and white sugar and all kinds of stuff you just put in there and make them taste like candy. And so this holiday, and I hadn’t had candy yams anyway in oh, my God, a long time. Five, six, seven years, especially since going plant-based. No, you’re putting butter in there, we don’t do butter. Not even a vegan butter. Okay. Butter is butter. All right. We’re not doing that. So over the holiday, I came up with a candied yam that we used. I took out all the bad stuff, the oils and the white sugar, and we added in all the good stuff. And that was fruit. We sweetened it with fruit and nothing but the fruit, and my kids swore up and down that it was candy. Right. So there’s no deprivation living a plant-based lifestyle. And again, I don’t miss eating meat. Even when we first went plant-based, chef AJ, what do they call it? The faux meat. So the transitional, like the bacon and the fake meat.

Will Scott: Yeah. Fake stuff. Yeah.

Faith Scott: In my head, I saw this fake food. I’m like, if I’m not going to eat meat. I’m not going to eat fake meat. Just in my head, I couldn’t bring myself to eat it. And I bought it one or two times for the bacon, for the kids. And then I saw all the ingredients and I said, well, I got all the ingredients here in the house. I can make it, of course, I never did but I just sort of stopped buying those types of meats because I saw them as, well first of all, if I’m not going to eat meat, I don’t need fake meat. And I know some people need that early in their transition to help them transition. But for me and my thinking, I was like, if I’m not going to eat meat, I’m not going to sit here and eat meat that looks like meat, you know what I’m saying? And that was just for me. Now everybody is different. There’s nothing wrong with transitional meat. Some people need that, and that’s okay. But you still can’t live off of highly processed, even vegan food because if you want optimal health. That’s right. So, yeah, for me, it was the seafood. And still to this day, I can tell you, I can remember what they taste like, but I no longer see it as food for my body. And now that I’m learning about the environment and how the environment is being destroyed through the seafood industry and the meat industry and all of that, then, yeah, I don’t even miss it. I don’t miss it. So I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to take up all of the time. Do you miss anything from it?

Will Scott: Well, I don’t necessarily miss anything because I said in the beginning that I’ll make the transition if you do what can make some dessert. So I’m the dessert guy, so I never missed anything. That was really cool for me. And then when we initially transitioned to a whole food plant-based lifestyle, we didn’t go out to any restaurants, so I didn’t have anything to eat but what was in the house and what Mama did in the house and what Mama cooked in the house, dad ate. So I was good to go. I have my desserts, I have my good food. I was straight. Every now and then, it’s funny because you sit back and say, wow, how does that chicken taste? Once I learned that it wasn’t really the taste of the chicken, it was the seasoning of the chicken that was the key for me. I said, oh, so it’s not really the chicken. It’s what’s on the chicken, what they cook it with. So that did for me. So the desserts, I never had to worry about that.

Chef AJ: Yeah, that is fantastic. I love what you said Faith about it, if I wasn’t going to eat it when it was meat, why am I going to eat fake meat? I couldn’t agree more. How old were your children when they transitioned to this?

Faith Scott: Wow. Okay, so Destiny is 14, so she was seven. Dwayne was 3 and Jeremiahi was two.

Chef AJ: Wow. So two, three and seven.

Faith Scott: Yeah.

Chef AJ: Amazing. I remember hearing you speak at a conference in Las Vegas once and people ask, well, how do you do it because your kids eat really healthy. They eat vegetables. They eat as healthy as Dr. Goldhammer. And people said, well, how do you get them to eat healthy? And I remember you said something like, well, that’s what I feed them. They don’t have a job or a car. So many parents just feel like they have to give their kids sugar and unhealthy food or they’ll feel deprived. Your kids don’t look or seem deprived to me at all.

Faith Scott: No, but different strokes of different folks. You have AJ. Like I said once I learned and maybe for some parents, they haven’t been educated enough. Right. But for me, I had very early in our walk, like the first 90 days and got all this information and I said, there’s no way in heck I can allow my kids to sit here and eat this stuff and I know it’s killing them. And so for me, it was a no-brainer. Now, I did take time and I worked with them to transition them, but I had the end goal in mind. And like I said, six. It took me about six months to fully transition them to a plant-based lifestyle. But yeah, it’s a no-brainer. In my house, they do have options. You want broccoli or cauliflower, right? You want beans or rice, you know what I’m saying? So they have plenty of choices. It’s just not the choices that most people will consider your allow kids to have. Right. I mean, they have cookies and cakes and pie. I fix all that form. It’s just plant-based. So your choices are plant-based choices. All right. And that’s basically it. And they’re not deprived. Kids do what we do. They do what we do. And if you keep the house clean. Right. And provide this is what we’re having for dinner. This is what we have for breakfast. If they get hungry enough.

Will Scott: Yeah, they’ll eat it.

Faith Scott: They’ll eat it. And if they don’t, well, we don’t have that problem now, but early on and there were some days Chef AJ, I cried. I went into the room and cried but I kept a firm face here. One night I was like, go to bed. You don’t want it, go to bed. And the next morning they woke up, I had the same place in front of them and they got hungry enough and they ate it. And now guess what? They love those foods. My kids eat brussel sprouts at breakfast. You know what I’m saying? But no doesn’t mean never. Right. And I think a lot of parents feel like if they say no one time, oh, well, I guess that we can’t have that no more. There you go, Johnny. No, it doesn’t mean never. It just means I haven’t been exposed enough. And I believe research shows that it takes about 15 tries to at least consider it and accept it.

Will Scott: Then about 15 to like it.

Faith Scott: Right, so it’s just a series of exposures. Just keep and then find out what they didn’t like about the dish and what they would like to have added and add it to it if that’s going to help them eat it. Right, so that’s just my philosophy and how I think and how I parent my kids and everybody parents differently. Some parents want to be their friends, but I’m mom. And I do give my kids choices, but it’s just within my parameters of what I feel is best for them because I’m the parent. We’re the parents. We know what’s best for them. And all the time they’re not going to understand but over time, they do. So, yeah, they don’t work a job. They ain’t paying no bills. You’re going to eat what’s provided. That’s basically my mindset.

Chef AJ: I love the example you’re setting in. I love what you said. No doesn’t mean never, because so many people try to do this and eat healthier for themselves but continue to feed the kids crap. And I’m not making a judgment about it, but I’m just saying it has to be difficult because could you imagine keeping the weight off if you had to have all those previous foods in your house for them?

Faith Scott: Yeah, it’s extremely hard. It is extremely hard. And like I said, I know for me what I did with my kids, like the junk or the meat or whatever, especially at dinner time, I would start putting more vegetables and starch on their plate and put the meat there. And I always had a deck and a dessert. And I said, I said some table rows. I said some table rows. I said, before you eat the meat or the dairy or whatever it was or the processed food, you have to eat your vegetables, your fruit, so on and so forth, your potatoes, whatever it is, you have to eat that first or your oatmeal. We’re trying to do the cereal thing. You gotta eat that first before you can get this. Over a period of time, I just began to increase their veggies and I would sprinkle little brags on there. That’s what they needed to make it taste good or make some plant-based cheese or do you want some ketchup? Okay, put a little ketchup on there and do whatever I have to do to get them to eat it. And then over a period of time, I will start increasing the veggies and the starches and they will have to eat those items first or they will eat the meat or the dessert. And over a period of time, my kids were like, Mom, I don’t want the meat but I got to eat. I want dessert. I said, okay, well, and I just started throwing meat away, but it had to be their decision to throw the meat away and not eat it. And that’s how I was able to transition them. And I just started making a portion smaller, smaller, smaller, meat or dairy, whatever the junk food I was trying to get out of them and increase the volume of the good, tasty, plant-based food and table rule, you have to eat them first before you eat them. And they will be so full over a period of time, from the veggies and the potatoes, the beans or the oatmeal or whatever that they wouldn’t even want the junkie stuff. And that’s how I transitioned them. And then over a period of time, I’m like, I’m throwing money on the money. I’m not buying anymore. And that’s how I was able to transition them.

Will Scott: And we talked to our kids, too. We explained to them, even at two and three, they understood. And definitely Destiny at seven, she understood. So they understood. They said, mom and dad are eating healthy like this and we want you to be healthy. So we explained to them it wasn’t like we just went out and said, oh, this is what you’re going to eat. Because we knew that they were going to have to deal with their peers. And when their peers say, hey, you want a hot dog? They say no or we don’t eat like that, but why don’t you eat like that? We knew that they were going to be going through some type of peer pressure, so we had to prepare them, even at an early age to be able to sustain themselves when they weren’t around us throughout the day.

Faith Scott: Yeah. So it’s a journey even for the kids and 95-99%, they are good to go. Every now and again, they’ll come home and say mom at school so and so . And then I explained to them and I said why did you choose that or whatever? And we just try to talk it through.

Will Scott: Educate them

Faith Scott: Yeah, educate them. But kids do what we do. They model our behaviors. Whatever we do as parents, that’s what they do.

Chef AJ: Well, considering your 14-year-old daughter is six foot one, I don’t think they stunted her growth at all.

Will Scott: That’s the truth, Chef AJ.

Faith Scott: All of the kids are growing straight up. And most of the time, all my kids are the tallest in their class for their group.

Will Scott: That’s right.

Faith Scott: Destiny is the tallest on the basketball team and in her school and my grandkids, they’re the tallest in their school leading team and all the football, and it’s the food. And I look at the other kids and my heart just go out to them because children are products of their environment, right? Yes. I look at the kids and I look at the parents. And most of the time, if the kids are heavyset, the parent are heavyset and I say, it’s not the kids fault. It’s not even the parents fault. We just all have to be educated. And I think, again, I don’t know no parent. Once you find out the information about the effects of dairy on our bodies and young girls starting to cycle early and breast cancer, there was no way Chef AJ, I could sit and let my kids consume that food. There was no way. And let me backup, maybe because I believe what I read, because some people don’t believe the information they’ve been exposed to but I have read too much truth already from the China Study, prevent reverse heart disease, and Dr. McDougall, the starch solution. I had just read too much truth already, and I could not within my heart allow my kids to continue down that path. I just couldn’t do it.

Chef AJ: Good for you. And I know that will sit at the beginning. He was willing to do this as long as he had delicious desserts. Are you able to tell us or show us one of the delicious desserts that you make?

Faith Scott: Yes, ma’am. I actually had two recipes I wanted to share with you today. I don’t know. You want me to do dessert first?

Chef AJ: It doesn’t matter. I just love to see you Cook. Will is saying as long as there’s dessert.

Faith Scott: Exactly. Well, I want to share a hearty vegetable lentil stew, and then we’ll end with dessert. But, you know, being plant-based, you can eat your dessert first, right? Okay. But I already have the lentil stew ready. But I’m going to demonstrate how to throw that together. And literally we’re going to throw it together.

Will Scott: Yeah, literally.

Faith Scott: Okay. And then we’ll do the dessert last. Okay. Would that be okay?

Chef AJ: All right. It sounds great.

Faith Scott: Okay, great. So I will be sharing with you today a hearty vegetable lentil stew that we normally eat on a regular Chef AJ, especially when it’s cold. So we’re going to be sharing with you today how we make our hearty red lentil stew.

Will Scott: Yes.

Faith Scott: And it is very easy. Very easy when you have an instant pot. Now, I don’t know. You have an instant pot, right Chef AJ?

Chef AJ: I’m down to three at one point. I had seven when I was teaching a lot of cooking classes. But yes, I have every size three, six and eight.

Faith Scott: I do too. I have one for every hour on the stove. When I found out about the instant pot, I think I started with the eight quart, the six quart, and then I got too minis. So I can’t live without my instant pot. So we’re going to put this on saute for right now. And this is red lentil soup. So we’re going to begin with some minced garlic, and we’re going to get some frozen mushrooms out of the freezer. You can dump everything, you can do everything from the freezer practically. Okay. So like, I buy these veggies from Walmart and we’re just going to dump them into the instant pot. This mushroom, we have the seasoning blend and it has some green peppers, onions, celery and some parsley in there and we are going to dump that into the instant pot. We’re going to add some carrots. These are all frozen vegetables straight from the freezer.

Chef AJ: That makes it so easy when you use frozen vegetables.

Faith Scott: It is. I tell you, I’m in the pleasure trap when it comes to buying those frozen veggies because it’s so convenient. Okay, so what else do we need? The mixed garlic, the mushrooms, the season blend, the carrots. Okay, I’ll add that last.

Will Scott: Okay.

Faith Scott: All right. So I like to put my instant pot on the saute mode so they can start cooking the onions and the celery and all that. And we’re going to add our spices in. And here I have some Rosemary, some thyme, some Mrs. Dash table blend, and ancho chopped pepper. So we’re going to pour that in. We’re also going to put some curry in here. And this is smoked paprika and curry and AJ, I really do try to at all cost not to add any sodium to our dishes. Okay. And I’m super excited because I found out about this new spice called sumac. Well, it’s not new, but it’s new to me, actually. As a matter of fact, let me show you what the packaging looks like. So this sumac has been a life-saver.

Chef AJ: Sumac, but yeah, I hear it tastes a lot like salt.

Faith Scott: It does. It really does. Now, you have to be careful because when you buy it, there is some with some added sodium, but this one is straight-up sumac. There’s no added sodium, but it is very salty. Okay. So we’re going to add some sumac to our stew. And let me see what else we got. Did I put the bay leaves in here? I think I did.

Will Scott: Yes.

Faith Scott: Okay, cool. And next, normally, this begins to saute and I stir it up. That’s okay. We are going to add cauliflower and again, this is frozen cauliflower. We’re going to add some corn. I have some Yukon Gold potatoes. We’re just going to dump it here. Any foreign food yet? No. Everything we can pronounce? Yes. Okay, so we’re good. We have some red lentils. This is also good with the yellow split peas. Sometimes I’ll do half and half, but today I only had the red lentils, so that’s fine. But it’s really good. And then we’re going to dump in some veggie stock. Now, I like to use the kitchen basics, unsalted veggie stock. So we’re going to pour that in just a whole container, just jumping in.

Chef AJ: And people have to understand it’s not like you live near a Sprout, Whole Foods or Trader Joe. Do you shop at regular grocery stores?

Faith Scott: Walmart, and Kroger, my whole whole food store is an hour away from me. And when we first went plant-based, we actually traveled a couple of times, and it was just too laborious for some. Right. And I’m like, wait a minute. Why am I making this difficult? Walmart, go to my local grocery store to make this happen. We’re going to add two cups. I’m sorry, this is reduced balsamic vinegar. Okay. I just added. I’m sorry. And we’ll add two cups of water and what we’re going to do, Chef AJ, is just give this all a quick stir. We make this work with Walmart, our local store, and then the Asian markets. Oh, my goodness. The Asian markets have, like, the Japanese sweet potatoes. Sometimes they have Okinawan sweet potatoes. So the Asian markets are hidden jewels. So if you have an Asian market in your local area, you can find a lot of plant-based options there, too, as well. That’s good. All right, so I had rinsed the red lentils so they got a little hard but normally I just give everything a quick stir-through. Just a quick stir-through. My lentils got a little hard, but that’s okay. We got hard from being rinsed. That’s okay. And then we’re going to lid our instant pot.

Will Scott: All right.

Faith Scott: You want to make sure that the valve is closed, and we’re going to put it on the manual for 15 minutes. We let it Cook for 15 minutes. I like to do natural relief. You can do the quick release, but I like doing the natural release. And then once it’s done, we take the lid off and we stir it up and we’re going to dip out some stew. So we’re going to transfer this pot, baby, give me the other pot. And that’s just how simple that is. You just dump, turn on the instant pot. Let it Cook. And you got dinner.

Chef AJ: That looks amazing. And your kids love it.

Faith Scott: Oh, yeah. We eat this a lot during the winter. Lentil stew. It’s amazing. I love it. It’s really good. The kids love it. They actually request it, especially when it’s really cold. So I made up some stew, it thickened a little bit so let me stir it up.

Chef AJ: You can’t even tell that there’s vegetables in it once it’s cooked.

Faith Scott: Yeah, that’s true. Everything sort of cooked down. I don’t know if you can see that or not. Okay. So I’m just going to give us a quick stir-through. That’s the beauty of having two instant pots, you can batch prep.

Chef AJ” Are you able to freeze any of this Faith?

Faith Scott: Sure. You can definitely freeze this. Now I will be honest. I don’t do a lot because food doesn’t last that long around here. But you can freeze this stew if you want. I’m going to dip something out. But you see that you got the corn and the cauliflower and the peas and the carrots and everything in here. I’m going to wipe this bowl off AJ.

Chef AJ: That looks so thick and rich and delicious.

Faith Scott: It is amazing. Let me wipe this bowl off. I don’t like ugly plates. So you see that, chef AJ, that’s lentil stew, and it is hearty. I mean, very filling. Sometimes the kids may like to have little vegetables on the side, but that’s the hearty lentil stew, and it is amazing. Look at that. It’s just thick and rich.

Chef AJ: Good thing your name is Queen because it’s fit for a Queen.

Faith Scott: Oh, you got that right. that is a hearty lentil stew. The main course, by the way. Now we’re going to make room for some dessert.

Chef AJ: Some people that might be new to this summit that like, oh, but there’s starch. I can’t eat starch.

Faith Scott: I feel sorry for you. That’s all I got to say, honey, because vegetables are great, but they don’t keep you full long, right? It’s very nutrient-rich and dense and all of that. But I swear, you eat a plate of Kale, and next hour, you could be wanting to eat again because they’re very low in calories. So if you’re avoiding starch, honey, you’re not going to have a very happy plant-based life, because starch is King and veggies are Queen. I mean, you just got to have your starches.

Chef AJ: McDougall would love that. Starch is King, veggies are Queen. And together you have the keys to the Kingdom.

Faith Scott:Yeah, you got to have the starch. Okay, so let’s switch. And next, we’re going to make a yam Sunday. Now, when Will and I had dropped down to 129, we were really avoiding all processed starches, flour products and all of that. And like I said, my husband, he loves desserts. Any kind of baked good. He’s a cake man. But at that point in our journey, we were avoiding all flour products. And so he was like, Queen, I want some cake. I want some cake. Well, thanks heaven for the Japanese sweet potato. Okay. Yeah, the Japanese sweet potato, if you have not had that, is like cake. Let me get something to see what it looks like.

Will Scott: It is awesome.

Faith Scott: Okay. So these are Japanese sweet potatoes. And you see, they’re red on the outside, but they are creamy on the inside, and they are so good. So we’re going to use the Japanese sweet potato as our cake. You know, the little cake you have when you have a sundae, and we’re going to use that for the cake. And then we’re going to make some nice cream, also using the Japanese sweet potato. So we’re going to start with the nice cream first. And it’s going to be really simple to make. Chef AJ.

Will Scott: Can’t wait to see it. And you’re making it in a food processor?

Faith Scott: Yes. I found out about this way probably about four months ago on YouTube. And I don’t even know who it was I was watching. And they use the food processor to make their nice cream. And it was so much easier because sometimes your blender gets blocked down and you got to sit there and use a tamper and all of that. And if you don’t have a high-speed blender, it could really overwork your blender. And then if you use the blender, sometimes you have to wait 10 to 15 minutes, letting the banana fall out. Well, with the food processor, you don’t have to wait. You can just add your bananas, your milk and start blending. And it’ll break it down. It takes about three to four minutes, depending on your food processor. But it’ll break down the banana so easily. Okay. So we’re going to use our food processor today to make our nice cream and the nice cream is going to be some milk. And these are like six tablespoons of milk. So we’re going to add some milk. And then we’re going to add one-half cup of actually, let me put the bananas in first. So we’re going to take four large bananas and put them into the food processors. And they’re frozen. Very ripe. Always keep frozen bananas in the freezer. Every well stock, plant-based kitchen. Keep frozen bananas. Okay. That equates to four frozen bananas. This is a Japanese sweet potato, look at that, that is butter. Okay.

Chef AJ: To me, they taste like cake.

Faith Scott: They actually have a vanilla taste to them. I mean, these are amazing. These are like they’re just amazing. Yes. So I thought I had lived just having an Orange sweet potato. But honey, once I was introduced to these Japanese sweet potatoes. Oh, my God. You haven’t lived until you had a Japanese sweet potato and an Okinawan sweet potato. So. Okay, so we have our frozen bananas here. We’re going to go with some vanilla bean powder. You see that? And we’re going to go with one, two teaspoons of vanilla bean powder. Just drop that in there and one half cup of the Japanese sweet potato. And basically, Chef AJ. Okay, we’re just going to basically let this blend in the food processor. Now, you may have to use it. I like to use my spatula to move some of the bananas around if they stay up at the top. But it’ll blend in no time. So you ready? It’s going to get noisy. Okay.

Chef AJ: How many minutes would you say you process that for?

Faith Scott: About three to four minutes probably. I mean, Look at that.

Will Scott:It’s creamy.

Faith Scott: Look at how creamy this is. It’s amazing. Chef AJ. The monitors don’t even do it justice. Okay. And I love seeing the vanilla bean there. But, yes, we use the sweet potatoes here. And someone would say, why would you put sweet potatoes in your nice cream? Well, the traditional banana ice cream, often you put, like, nut butter in there to give it the creaminess or just the extra profile flavor that you’re looking for. Well, the Japanese sweet potato does that without adding the fat. So this is another way you can make your ice cream creamy and just have that decadent feel and taste in your mouth without all of the extra calories and added fat. So we’re going to make a yam sundae using yam or sweet potatoes. Okay. So we have our Japanese sweet potatoes, and I just cut them, like in a little disk. Okay. We’re going to put that on the plate like this, and I’m going to take my ice cream scooper. I’m going to dip some nice cream on top, and then we’ll go with another disk. Now, if you want, we can go with however many stacks you want. Can you see that? Sort of like two stacks of. Now, if you want to get real fancy, you can go with one more whatever floats your boat. Okay. All right. It’s all good because it’s all plant-based and it’s low fat. All right. And you top it with one more scoop.

Chef AJ: Oh, my God, that looks unbelievable.

Faith Scott: And then we have some strawberries that’s been, what’s the fancy word, Chef AJ?

Chef AJ: Macerated

Faith Scott: Macerated in some chocolate balsamic vinegar.

Will Scott: Yes.

Faith Scott: Now you’re talking about something amazing. Oh, my God. This is amazing. So we have some strawberries and you just put it on however much you want, however little you want. Whatever makes you feel good about yourself. All right. And then we’re going to put a couple of blueberries up here, I guess if that’s what makes you happy, too, right? And then if you’re okay with the extra nuts, you can add some walnuts if you want. All plant-based, all plant. Let’s go to the front. Look, no deprivation. I don’t know if you can see that or not, but it is. Can I say it is on our website?

Chef AJ: Of course you can. We can link to the recipes.

Faith Scott: Yes, definitely. So this is a yam sundae, honey. And it doesn’t get any better than this. Sweet potatoes, bananas, berries, walnuts, and chocolate balsamic vinegar. Oh, my Lord.

Chef AJ: I bet you the kids love it, too.

Faith Scott: Oh, yes, honey. So there you have it. The yam sundae and lentil vegetable stew. And that’s how we eat here. We just eat plants.

Chef AJ: So Will and faith. I have one final question for you. What’s the real truth? What’s the real truth about weight loss?

Faith Scott: The real truth about weight loss is whether or not you are eating majority plants. All plants. Okay. If you want optimal health that’s the real truth about weight loss. It is the food. More specifically, it is about eating more plants.

Chef AJ: Amen. Thank you so much.

Faith Scott: Thank you Chef AJ for having us. Take care.

Will Scott: Thank you so much.

Chef AJ

Hi, Dr Lisle. And welcome to The Truth About Weight Loss Summit. Thanks so much for being here.

Dr. Doug Lisle

My pleasure, AJ. Thanks for having me.

Chef AJ

Always. It wouldn’t be a summit without you. You know, Dr. Lisle, when it comes to weight loss, so many people are looking for a quick fix in the form of a pill, a potion, or a procedure. Is there a better way? And if so, what are the fundamentals of weight loss?

Dr. Doug Lisle

The fundamentals are to listen to every huckster out there, do it all, find out that every shortcut that you’ve heard is wrong, and then find us. That’s the right way to do it. I don’t know if anybody else has ever did this when they were a kid or something. At some point in my life I can’t remember specifically, but I probably planned on cheating on an exam and you figure out you could put a little card up your sleeve or some such thing. And finally, by the time you get down with it, you’re like, you know what? Just study, forget it. You know what I mean? All of this is way too much trouble, and that’s how this is too. So, of course, everybody desperately wants a shortcut, everybody wants something to be easy. But the truth is that there is one fundamental way to do this, and it’s made up of sub-fundamentals. And if we skip those steps or try to step around them, then we are already sort of cheating the process and we’re going to wind up with a house that might be a halfway decent house, but it’s got one of its four pillars of its foundation is shaky and so in a big rain, it’s going to sink and then what’s going to happen? We’re going to gain 30 pounds before we know it. So that’s why we want to put things on an extremely solid foundation. I tell people we are in no rush to lose weight because we’re only going to do it once. So that’s the idea here. So we’re going to do this one time and we’re going to do it right. And we may struggle with the steps, with any foundation, with any fundamental process, there’s a learning curve. You can really see this in physical skill development. You watch a little kid learning to play the piano or learning to shoot a basketball, and you watch them struggle and fumble and make all kinds of mistakes. And then you watch them respond to coaching and then they have to practice and during practice, they make all kinds of mistakes. And so if we had time-lapse, photography or video, it would look seamless and like, it was pretty easy. But if we actually had all of the videos of some kid struggling to be a good piano player, we will find out that they went through really quite a process. They became 100 times better and I don’t just pull that out of the sky. It turns out that when you go through the process of skill development, you literally are wrapping myelin sheath around neurons, and you are creating an insulated neural circuit. And that neural circuit will then make the capability of that motor skill, for example, be 100 times faster than it might have otherwise been. And so it can be both very fast and very accurate. That’s going to be true with you, I don’t know, chopping carrots or putting dinner together. So if you’ve ever seen a real Cook in the kitchen, it’s actually remarkable to watch a real Cook work. They’ve got an amazing amount of stuff going on in their head. They’ve got a little clock going on in their head with five different things that they’ve got on the fire. And it’s really a complicated procedure. So they weren’t born with that. They had to go through a tremendous learning curve, learning one fundamental at a time and slowly putting that thing together in order for them to pull that off. What we need to do is we’re not going to start with my friend Justina’s Fancy, Doug Lisle’s carrot cake. We’re going to start out with Oatmeal.

Dr. Doug Lisle

Believe it or not, embarrassing as this is to tell you, I didn’t actually know how to cook oatmeal till my late 30s. I had never eaten oatmeal in the morning. I’d always eaten granola. And when I went to live in my late 30s with Alan Goldhamers, I lived in his basement. When we were working on the pleasure trap, I watched Jennifer cook oatmeal, and I was sort of fascinated by this, like it’s really that simple. And then one day I did it myself, and then it became like it really boosted my self confidence and independence that I didn’t have to go to some restaurant and have them bring me Oatmeal that I could actually do it myself. I know that sounds absurd, but I’m just telling you the truth. So the truth is it’s never too late to learn. And it’s also true that without the learning, we’re not going to get there. Weight loss has many fundamental components to it to do this right. It’s an unnatural problem, and therefore, a lot of the sub-fundamentals or the little pieces to this don’t come easily for people, so if they put any effort in, people are much better at learning to dance than they would ever be at learning to diet, because dancing is something that is inherently fun. And also you’ve got natural neural circuits for it. And if you could stand to actually listen to an instructor and you got people who are enthusiastic about learning, you will learn to be a very good dancer pretty quickly because it comes natural. You won’t learn to be good at defending yourself from the lure of the pleasure trap. All the social pressure of everybody in the world trying to shove you into the pleasure trap from the intimidation of the ego trap of your own expectations and everybody else’s being that if you try to do this, you should be able to do this. And from a sort of punishing internal audience that gets disgusted with you when you fail and the very high expectations that are generally unrealistic about how quickly and easily this problem will be solved. So these things are there’s a host of unnatural looking and unnatural sub components that aren’t part of human natural history. You’re not going to learn to do this the way you learn to dance. You’re going to learn to do this. I don’t know. I’m trying to think of something that is kind of an unnatural thing to do. I think to some extent riding a bicycle is somewhat unnatural. You’ve got to move the steering wheel to catch yourself for balancing, losing your balance, etc. Or you have to push forward when that’s very scary. When you’re just learning this and you’re feeling out of balance, you don’t want to push forward, you want to stop. So there are some things about that that learning to ride a bicycle is actually tricky. You also will learn usually the hard way. But when you go through a puddle, you gotta not go through at an angle, because if there’s been some algae forming in that little puddle for a while, the concrete underneath it can be very slick and down you’re going to go with the slightest provocation of any angle on that wheel.

Dr. Doug Lisle

So little by little you learn the mistakes, you learn where it is that you’ve got vulnerabilities. You have to put things together, but with some time after a year or two, an eight-year-old, nine-year-old kid is pretty good at riding a bike and they’ll get better and by the time they are 14, they’re ridiculously good. So you give a kid five or six years on a bike and they’re going to be really good. You give somebody five or six years into this program and you’ll get to be really good, but it’s a process. You will be pretty darn good in a year, but you’re not going to be as good as you’re going to be in five years. And that’s because there’s a lot of little points to it. I’ve had people that have lost a lot of weight in this program, and they have been approached by others telling them, wow, you should have a TV show or you should write a book about your experience. I’ve had this happen on a number of occasions, and my advice to these people has always been the same. Don’t even think about it until you’ve reached a goal weight and sat there for at least three years. As much as you might pine for the limelight, as much as you might feel like this tremendous relief and desire to share this with the world. The truth of the matter is you’ve got a lot of learning to do.

Dr. Doug Lisle

Just because you’ve been up on that bicycle and haven’t fallen off it for a while doesn’t mean that you’re a good rider. And if you bring a bunch of attention to yourself and try to take on the world and have hot lights on you and you’re going to tell your big story. You have no idea how hard life is going to get. And pretty soon you’re going to be pinched for time and energy and organization. Then you’re going to have emotional upset pushing you around. And now pretty soon we’re in trouble. Now, how many times does Oprah have to face this? So don’t even think about doing anything other than getting to be an intermediate skilled bike rider for the first two, three, four years. Then if you burn to share your story, please share your story. There’s no end of the different personalities and ways that people have been successful. And so this is a kind of story that needs to be told many times by many different people. They’ll speak to different listeners. So as my dad said, Doug, nobody wants to hear about weight loss strategies from a borderline anorexic like you.

Dr. Doug Lisle

This was his way of letting me know when he was 70 years old, he could easily whip me in a fight. That is true. So, yeah, we’re all different. We come to this journey differently. I didn’t come to this journey as a client. I came to this journey as a counselor at True Health Center and with the McDougall program, facing with each individual an individual set of problems for that individual, but also a similar set of problems from person to person to where we could slowly start to put together what we recognize as the fundamentals of all. So, we could talk about some of those fundamentals, AJ.

Chef AJ

I would love to because, where does someone start?

Dr. Doug Lisle

Yes, I think we start with some important fundamental understanding of what is involved here. I think the main fundamental, well there are a few, but the most fundamental thing that we need to understand is the principle of calorie density. And the most fundamental thing about calorie density is that there’s been two things that have been removed from the food, and those two things are fiber and water. So when you’re looking at corn oil or somebody’s got olive oil and they’re pouring it all over their hand, they’re going to fry up a bunch of eggplant in it, and it’s going to come out with little sponges that they think are healthy and vegan but really, it’s a little olive oil sponge. What they’re missing is understanding that in the processing of what used to be a very unpalatable fruit, I guess it is called an olive. It went through a process by which the pure fat was extracted away from the water, the fiber, the vitamins and the minerals and the carbohydrate that was in there and any protein. And what got isolated out was the most concentrated caloric source in that fruit, which was the fat. That’s what all oils are, they are pure fat. And pure fat, there’s really four sources of calories for human beings in the world. There’s protein, fat, carbohydrate, and alcohol. And those are four different types of chemicals. And each of those has a different amount of calorie density or how many calories there are per cubic inch or teaspoon or however you want to measure it, essentially, if we toss out alcohol, because not a lot of people eating alcohol, and even people that drink a glass of wine at night are really not eating very much alcohol. So the vast majority of the calories that anybody ever eats are going to be coming from protein, fat, and carbohydrates. These are your caloric macronutrients. There are two other macronutrients, fiber, and water. So your natural diet consists of all five. And obviously, the first three are protein, carbohydrates, and fat. Those three things have calories in them. The fiber and the water are things that go along with the life that was necessary to make the food. So you’re going to have to have water inside a stock of broccoli or broccoli would have died, and you have to have fiber as part of the fibrous matrix that holds that plant together.

Dr. Doug Lisle

So in animals, they don’t have fiber, but they have water. And so there’s a difference between eating steak and eating beef jerky, which all the water is now out of it. And the beef jerky is much higher calorie density than a piece of steak. So our ancestors ate diets that were very high in water and very high in fiber. There was no processing of the food with machines or through some unnatural process by which the fiber and the water were removed. And as a result of that were altered. There was no machines that had steel teeth that could grind, I don’t know, seeds into powder, no possibility to do such a thing. So as a result, the food, the fiber was intact until you chewed it and your stomach would break it apart and the water was intact in terms of you weren’t eating foods that were dried. Now, our ancestors could have dried some food, and occasionally they would, but not very much. And it would have been dangerous to do so. If you lay food out there, I don’t know, on a walk somewhere and let the sun dry it, don’t expect the birds to ignore it. So that’s not going to be a very smart move. So our ancestors didn’t do very much of that. And so as a result, the food that they ate was full of water that would have naturally come with the food and full of fiber that was intact wasn’t ground up. We’ve all seen pictures of Native American women with stones in their hand and a little stone bowl and grinding up some grain. And when they got done grinding that grain, it probably wasn’t ground up that well in the fine powder, it was half ground up. So if you made anything that remotely resembled bread with it, it would be pretty tough and you’d be chewing through that fiber. That would feel like very healthy food, because the fiber would largely be intact. So the foods that we eat today, two big things have been removed from them, which is fiber and water. And in doing so, the diets have become more concentrated because there’s no calories in water and there’s no calories in the fiber. If we take, if we have food that has five parts in it and we take out two parts or we reduce those two parts, then the remaining three parts are going to need to be increased because the satiation mechanisms of how the organism is going to work, it’s largely going to work on the process of what we call stretch reception, which is essentially an assessment of did we eat about the right amount of food? And so if we pulled away two parts of the food that have no calories in them, then we are going to fill in the digestive system until it feels satisfied with other food that has calories in it. And that’s how we wind up with the calorie density of the food rising above natural levels. Reasonable speculation as to what the natural level of calorie density for humans has been, it’s probably been somewhere between five and 700 calories a pound, typically throughout the natural history of humans.

Dr. Doug Lisle

So in different places where people had to rely more on animal food and had less plant food around natives of Alaska, for example, their food might have been higher in calorie density and probably was than most of the people that were living near the equator. However, we can tell that the vast majority of humans on planet Earth have lived in temperate environments where there’s been a great deal of plant food and they ate a huge amount of plant food and plant food dominated typically, the caloric intake of humans. It didn’t completely. People ate animal food and they ate as much animal food as they could get. They had run a cost benefit analysis on getting that animal food and it wasn’t easy. Obviously, it’s easy now, but it hasn’t been easy. It’s been a hassle. And so as a result, a lot of effort has gone into human beings securing large amounts of plant food for them to eat, to be consistent, to eat that every day, because hunts are chancy. And so as a result, the plant food that we’re going to be eating isn’t going to be processed, it’s not going to have the oil squeezed out of it and concentrated. They’re not going to be frying carrots in oil. It’s not going to happen. They’re not going to be frying noodles, bean noodles you’re like, well, why would anybody ever fry carrots in oil? Well, just go to your local Chinese restaurant and look for all the little vegetables in there and then a bunch of Chow Mein and that Chow Mein, the sprouts are little noodles or little sponges. The noodles are obviously been extruded through the process of grinding up a cereal grain, like weed or whatever they make out of it and they’ve made it into essentially a spaghetti. And then when they cook that, they can soak up a tremendous amount of oil. What do we do when we do that? We vastly increase the calorie density of the food.

Dr. Doug Lisle

So if we were to look just generally across foods, we would find the following type of thing. We would find that raw salad, vegetables are about 100 calories a pound, things like lettuce and bell peppers and things like that. As we go to vegetables, things like broccoli and cauliflower and carrots and so forth, those are roughly about 200 calories a pound. We go to fruits, they’re about 300 calories a pound. And then we’re going to go to between three and 500 calories a pound, we’re going to go to what we’re going to call the wet starches. I put that word in there in a way that Dr. McDougall hasn’t, him not emphasizing just because he just didn’t happen to pay attention to that problem or just considered it to be not worthy of mentioning. By him not mentioning that, I still get a thousand phone calls. I still get 1000 phone calls because people say I’m eating a starch-based diet and yet I’m 25 pounds overweight, what’s going on? And I know everything. I’ve read all the books. If there’s one thing I know about Chef AJ’s people, they’ve read a lot of books and they’ve listened to a lot of stuff. And I’m amazed at how many times when I say wet starts, it’s like, ah first time they heard that. It’s like, well, you’ve been listening to Dr. McDougall, but you haven’t listened to me because I’ve mentioned it many times. Wet starch. The starches that our ancestors ate were wet. So baked potato is wet. When you cook it, open it up, it’s steaming. Beans, you’re not going to eat them dry, you’re going to eat them wet, you’re going to cook them, they’re going to absorb water, they’re wet. Rice wet. So rice, beans, potatoes, oats. You’re not going to eat these things dry. If you eat rice cakes, you ate something that was wet and then we dried it out. And what happens when we dry it out? We reduce the natural amount of water that would have been in that food and we wind up with a food that’s now 14, 15,16, 1700 calories a pound, depending upon just how dry it is and what else they’ve added to it. But just straight old rice cakes are going to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 1500 or 1600 calories a pound.

Dr. Doug Lisle

Now, remember I said that our ancestors ate a diet, on average, about 500 to 700 calories a pound, something in that range. So anything that is significantly higher than that should raise your eyebrow. Wild game typically is probably 800 calories a pound or maybe a bit less. That’s kind of interesting. It’s not that far out of line with the average calorie density of the human diet, so it’s a little higher. So I would say not a bad guess for the average calorie density of the human diet might have been 600 calories a pound. So if you had a wild game up there at 800 calories a pound and it was 25% of your calories, then that meant that the rest of your diet could be safely down to around 500 calories a pound. So that’s kind of interesting. Obviously a bunch of your starches, rice, for example, 500 calories a pound, beans, 400 calories a pound. So if we’re going to be eating a bunch of rice and beans and potatoes and let’s suppose we’re modern-day vegans and we understand we don’t have to eat meat. How on Earth are we going to get our calorie density up as high as 600 calories a pound, if we’re also eating fruit at 300, some vegetables at 200 and some solid vegetables at 100? We’re going to be drifting down. And so you can kind of sniff this, because if we try to eat a diet that is exclusively an ultimate true north diet, it’s going to be basically fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains and nuts and seeds, whole grains of starches and nuts and seeds. So Alan throws that in at the end, the nuts and seeds. The nets and seeds are going to comprise of extremely high-calorie density food at 2500 calories a pound, that is going to slightly spike up the average. If we eat a little bit of it, it’s going to move us back into 500 to 600 calories a pound.

Dr. Doug Lisle

Now weight loss. So now that we see sort of the huge range of calorie densities, we go up through animal flesh at 800, the next stop on the chain, there isn’t any natural food until we’re going to get all the way to honey. So honey is going to be 1800 calories a pound. And then the next stop after that’s going to be nuts and seeds that are going to be about 2500. Processed food, folks, almost all of it starts at around 1000 calories a pound and moves its way past 3000. So one processed food after the next, for example, the oatmeal that you would eat naturally would be wet. It would be 325 calories a pound. If we make bread with it, that bread is going to be about 1600 calories a pound. So we’re going to increase the calorie density of the oatmeal by a factor of four or five by drying it out. That’s how that’s going to work. If we eat crackers cookies, all that sort of stuff, all of that is going to take a wet starch and it’s going to dry it out. If you take animal products like milk, which is obviously not a natural food that human beings can eat, that’s going to be a super-rich food. And if we have a dried-out version of that, a lot of cheese, it’s going to be 1700 calories a pound. So as we do things to make foods unnatural, they’re going to get very high in calorie density. As they get very high in calorie density, you can see that we’re going to be moving from 500 calories a pound, 600 calories a pound on average to 700 calories a pound and then pretty soon we’re going to be at 800 calories a pound. It’s not going to be hard to get to 800 calories a pound when we start adding frito’s to the food and string cheese. So if I’m walking someplace and I’m seeing a bunch of school children and I’m seeing them eat fritos and string cheese, and I know their mothers think that they’re doing a good job because they think that those are healthy snacks. Those are essentially 1700 calories a pound of food. So it’s no surprise that these kids are overweight. Why? Because they were designed to eat a diet of between five, six, maybe 700 hours a pound, and instead their lunch, a peanut butter sandwich. The bread is 1700 calories a pound or so. The peanut butter is 2500 calories a pound. The jelly is 2000 calories a pound, 1700 calories a pound. And the Fritos are 2000 calories a pound. And the string cheese is 1700 calories a pound. And then there’s some apple slices in there mercifully down at 300 cuz a pound. By the time we’re done with that peanut butter sandwich, string cheese Fritos, look where we are. We’re at 1500 calories, 1800 calories a pound. We are two times the calorie density or three times the calorie density that that organism was designed for.

Dr. Doug Lisle

Quite frankly, it’s a miracle. It is a miracle that human beings aren’t fatter than they are. When I see what people eat, when I see the calorie density of what they eat, I am astounded that they are not in worse shape. Now, does that mean I’m disgusted with them? No. These are just creatures that are designed by nature to eat the richest food in the environment, which is marking another major shift now in our discussion. So the first fundamental that we see, and we can look at it, and it’s relatively simple, but there’s a lot of knowledge in there. It’s the understanding of calorie density, understanding that our nervous system essentially knows how much the right amount to eat through satiation mechanisms that are largely dependent upon what is the physical size and weight of the food and the physical size and weight of the food needs to average something that remotely resembles a big scoop of rice. So some of the food is going to be richer than that rice, and some of the food is going to be less rich than that rice.

Dr. Doug Lisle

So if you had a big scoop of rice and you had some toasted almonds on top of it, and then you also have some vegetables cut up in it, then you would, on average, be right in the middle. And so it’d be like, okay, well, a little bit of the diet is richer, some of the diets less rich, and that’s sort of in the middle. And there we are. That’s the kind of diet that our ancestors ate. Nowhere in the natural history of this species was that rice fried nowhere. So there’s nowhere where that’s happening. If that rice is fried in oil, that oil is pure fat, which is the most concentrated calories that there are. Fat being 4000 calories a pound. Notice that’s about eight times more concentrated than the diet that a human should be aiming at. Pure protein and pure carbohydrates are about 1800 calories a pound each. So they’re extremely similar chemically. So you can see that in their pure form, the calories that human beings eat, the macronutrients are designed obviously to be heavily diluted by water and fiber. If you had one part fat and a third of a pound of fat and a third of a pound of protein and a third of a pound of carbohydrates, and that was your 1 pound of food that you ate, there was equal parts of each of those foods, a pound of fat would be 1333 calories. The pound of carbohydrate and a pound of protein would each be 600. And so you’d have 2500 calories in that meal, whatever it looks like, and you’d have 1 pound of food and the organism is not going to be the slightest bit happy with 1 pound of food a day. It’s going to be happy with three or four or 5 throughout the day. Very typically might be on the order of 4 pounds. A little bit bigger person might be five to 6 pounds, a little bit smaller person might be three to four pounds. But you can see that no way would a human being eat a diet that would be one third protein and one third carbohydrate and one third fat. No way. Those being the three macronutrients, if you made it even just mostly protein and mostly carbohydrate and a little bit of fat doesn’t matter if you made it 80%, 40% protein, 40% carbohydrate and 20% fat, it’s still a disaster. So we’re still going to be over 2000 calories and we only ate 1 pound of food and you’re not going to eat 1 pounds of food. So we see that the vast majority of what the materials are designed to be, its fiber and water.

Dr. Doug Lisle

So people are always looking for the deficiencies in the human diet. They’re looking for vitamin, this mineral, that phytochemical, this the importance of eating this or that thing for this or that health problem. Yeah, you’re missing the point. There are two primary deficiencies that are at the root of almost all preventable health problems, fiber and water. Problems that are fundamental to excess weight and therefore type two diabetes, and all kinds of associated problems with human health, obesity, type two diabetes, and then everything else that follows along that chain. This is as a result of dietary excesses. Dietary excesses take place not because people are gluttons, but it’s taking place because their diets are deficient. They have dietary deficiencies. And if I were to tell them that, oh, your diet, you are deficient of this or that macronutrient is purple and you’ve got to get it in this blueberries, then everybody be all excited. Everybody’s all excited looking around for some nutrient deficiency that’s causing me to eat more than I should be eating because I’m trying to find my way to solve that deficiency. Yeah, nice concept. Beautiful. Artistic, very palatable psychologically, no pun intended, but it’s BS. That is not what’s going on. Your nervous system is not searching for some magic thing. It’s searching for satiation behind the physical weight inside your body when you eat and you’re going to eat repeatedly throughout the day. And it’s going to be seeking a set of neurological activity that takes place when there’s been a sufficient amount of food by weight and volume.

Dr. Doug Lisle

If your diet is desiccated, if it has been dried out and we have oil in the diet, that is essentially corn, minus the water, the fiber, the vitamins, the minerals, the carbohydrate and the protein, and we’ve taken that corn and we’ve isolated it down into the oil. We now essentially, however it is that we’ve done this, we’ve got a cracker. So we had what was once a wet carbohydrate, and now it’s a dried carbohydrate. So now the cracker is a cracker. Why? It’s also at its fiber damage. And so now it’s coming in a form that that carbohydrate wasn’t ever supposed to come in, not to mention it was salted up to make it hyperpalatable. So what we do with the diet is we remove two of the three macronutrients or we reduce them dramatically, we remove the fiber in the water.And when you remove the fiber in the water, you make it inevitable that that organism is going to systematically overeat. When people come to me and they’re trying to figure out why am I just eating so much? I sabotage myself. I know that I eat too much. I just can’t seem to stop myself. Well, the truth is that you do stop yourself or you wouldn’t have stopped to pick up the phone to call me. So of course you stop yourself. You don’t need so much that you then go to the toilet and have to throw up half of it 20 minutes later. That doesn’t happen. So, in fact, you eat a very reasonable amount of food. Oh, no, Doctor Lisle, you should see how much I eat. I don’t really care. I know it’s not too much. The problem is what are you eating? So what are you eating becomes the issue. How many calories are you eating? And now it comes down to, are we eating foods that have been fundamentally unnaturally altered? If we do, then that becomes the fundamental root of the problem that we have. So essentially, for all intents and purposes, all weight problems other than a few minor unusual physiological damage or genetically bizarre situations, they come down to a very simple issue that people are eating a diet that is missing a full complement of two macronutrients, water and fiber. That’s it.

Dr. Doug Lisle

So when I ask a person, what are you eating? By the way, for those of you that call me at which there have been thousands, I can tell that I know when you’re lying and when you’re telling the truth, people don’t know I’m looking at chef AJ, so we have our own eye contact and fun going on while this is happening. Yes, I know when you’re lying and you’re telling the truth. And now I’ll tell you. Remember that thing I said about cheating on an exam? I’m going to now tell you how to cheat, how to fool me. But in learning how to fool me, you’ll learn that you may not need to call because then you’ll learn the lesson because you’ll know what I’m going to say. So this is how I know when people are lying and when they’re telling the truth. When I say, tell me what it is that you eat say, over the last month, just tell me all the kinds of things that you eat real typically, everything, I want to hear the whole story. I hear Hmming and huhing as their mind goes through their memories, and they’re remembering the pizza that they just ate, and they’re remembering the crackers and the cookies, and they can’t say those. And their mind sifts through trying to find what the story is, they leak out little things that they know that are legal. That’s how I know. Okay, let me tell you what it sounds like when I’m talking to somebody that’s doing a really good job. Well, what I do in the morning is I do this and I do this and I do this. And then at lunch, I do this and this and this and this. And then at dinner, I do this and this and this. And then my problem is I cram a bunch of rich food that’s in the pantry at night. Got it. We know what the problem is. The first person we have a much bigger problem. Why? Because they’re a rookie. They’re just learning how to ride the bicycle. They haven’t done a lot of homework and gone through a lot of the steps. My second person is an advanced player. They’re a pretty good bike rider, but they’re still running into situations where they fall off the bike. That’s okay. It’s a tougher course. So they get through a lot of the obstacle course all day long. But then they run into trouble at the end. And we’re going to wind up now with a final look at some fundamentals.

Dr. Doug Lisle

People are searching for why it is once they even learn this, why do I do this? Why do I sabotage myself? I know what to do, but why am I not doing it? There are pieces to this. There are several pieces of it, and some of them are pretty complicated. So on this summit, one of the things that I’m happy about is a colleague of mine, Justina Froese, is going to do a very complicated and you may hear her before you hear me, but her presentation is a terrific presentation of going through some of the deeper psychological dilemmas that go through the pleasure trap and the ego trap and navigating those problems. So that’s a more advanced level sort of examination of the problems that are really never discussed anywhere outside of esteeem dynamics. So these are not concepts that are well understood in the outside world. So this is sort of Chef AJ territory and esteem dynamics, Jen Howk and I, this is sort of advanced pleasure trap analysis. But there are other fundamentals. There are fundamentals that essentially we need to understand that you are not designed to be in the world as it exists. You are not designed for trying to consistently go against the instincts that are embedded in you. They’re encouraging you and evaluating the food environment by essentially the caloric density. Remember that you have two constraints really, on your life as a biological entity. Those two constraints are time and energy. Each creature, each organism that’s alive, whether it’s a Redwood tree or it’s a fruit plot, they have a limited lifespan. And in that limited lifespan, what they do is there’s processes of life that require time and energy to accomplish them.

Dr. Doug Lisle

We’re not going to be worried too much about plants. We’re going to be worried now. We’re going to put plants aside for the moment and just look at animals. What animals have to do is they have to make choices. They have to make decisions. And what they’re trying to do is they’re essentially trying to utilize the two things that they have been gifted, which is time and energy. They can transform energy into movement, which will put them in a position biologically to put them at a biological advantage for survival and reproduction. That’s what they do. So all life is, is the expenditure of time and energy. That’s it. That’s what it is. And so you can imagine that animals get very good at figuring out how to spend their time and energy for biological success. So, for example, you’re going to find that throughout nature, predators are not going to go after healthy, strong prey. Why? Because it’s a waste of time and energy. Don’t do it. Okay. Go after the weak, the slow, the isolated, the injured, the young. That’s the right way to do it, because otherwise you are wasting precious time and energy. So if you’re wasteful of your time and energy, you may be like a person who’s in the middle of a construction project and you decide, like MC Hammer, to build a really fancy wall and entrance way and the fountains and everything else, and it turns out a quarter of the way through, you’re broke, you’re out of business. You got to walk away from the whole thing. If you’re an animal and you squander your time and energy by as a predator chasing around the healthiest gazelle on the Savannah, you’re going to be a dead Cheetah before too long. You’re only going to get a quarter of the time that you would have gotten because you made a terrible mistake by not taking the easiest, low hanging fruit that there was. Your job is to save time and energy. Well, what do you think the food environment that you have is? The food environment is all about saving you time and energy. It’s about fast food driving through things. It’s about opening up a bag of chips. And so suddenly we got ten inch bag of chips there that’s been fried in oil and it’s crispy and it’s salty and it tastes really good and it’s 2500 calories a pound. So in this bag of chips, we got 1200 or 1300 calories. And it takes almost no energy to get to it. And it only took a couple of bucks, so we were able to earn it in almost no time. And it’s like, oh, my God. And the crispiness tells our brain, our stone age brain, that it’s fresh and the way that a crisp apple would. So the whole thing has been brilliantly engineered to get us to consume it. Why would we push that away when it’s 2000 calories a pound and reach for the carrots that are 200? Why would we do that? That would be biologically suicide, you have no neural circuits that would do that. And yet, that’s exactly what this program involves.

Dr. Doug Lisle

This program involves getting on top of that, essentially this delusion that the richest food is actually the best thing for you. That has been true for more than a billion years. And now suddenly it’s no longer true. So obviously, commercial interest in the competition in the food environment has led them to try to essentially experiment and figure out the motivational structure of animals if they’re selling pet food or humans if they’re selling human food. And what that has meant is do what? Get the food more concentrated. And how are we going to do that? We’re going to get rid of the fiber and the water. That’s what a grocery store is, folks, by the way, that’s just rack after rack after rack of food where the fiber and water is gone. That’s what the grocery store is. The only fiber and water that’s in the food anywhere is in the produce department. So God knows that’s not very much of the stuff that people buy there.

Dr. Doug Lisle

So the fundamentals of your biology are pushing you towards the easiest movements possible, the least time expenditure in preparing the food, and also the highest calorie density that you’re going to get out of it.That’s going to be a modern American cheeseburger and a chocolate shake and French fries. You’re going to see some other things about that. But a lot of that food is going to be processed to the point where you don’t have to chew. It’s going to be really easy to eat. That’s going to be because you don’t like to spend the energy of any significant chewing. Allan and I, when a new employee would come to True North Health Center and we’d take them out to lunch and we take them out to the salad bar restaurant, and we would watch them eat. These poor young people, they’re like so enthusiastic and they believed and they were coming to spend part of their life with us to learn from us. And of course, like normal, reasonable people, they weren’t necessarily the healthiest eaters. Sometimes they were, but usually they weren’t. And we could tell that in one solid bar lunch, and that is even though we put them in line first, so they cannot copy what we do. The point is that chewing through a big salad, if you’re not used to chewing through a big salad, it’s not something that most people want to do. They don’t want to work their jaws out. Energy conservation. It would be tiring to a lot of people because their jaws aren’t in very good shape, because they’re not used to chewing the way our ancestors did. This is going to circle back around to the most important fundamental that we’ve identified in this whole thing. So the first fundamental is obviously whole natural food has its intact water and fiber in it and therefore doesn’t create the deficiency of water and fiber that leads inexorably to the overconsumption of calories in the diet, which causes excess weight to be gained. That’s true whether we’re goldfish or human. The second thing, the second fundamental is you are designed by nature for an environment where this rich food didn’t exist. So therefore, the solution is to put yourself back in the environment for which you were designed.

Dr. Doug Lisle

If you try to override your own biology, you’re asking for trouble. It’s very difficult to do that. So the most important fundamental that we have identified over the years is you have to have a clean environment. If you don’t have a clean environment, your nervous system is going to be in cognitive dissonance because neural circuits are going to be firing telling you, go save a bunch of time and energy. It’s right there in the Pop Tarts. They’re right there on the second shelf in the pantry. There they are, 2000 calories a pound. That is a way better deal than whatever dream you’re trying to dream up. It’s down there at 300 or 400 calories a pound. What are you trying to sell me on that for? A little bean and potato soup with some corn in there and some nice seasoning that we had last night and that it saved and it’s in the refrigerator. Don’t need to try to sell me on that. That’s 400 calories a pound. What do I want with that when I’ve got 2000 calories a pound pop tarts, it’s five to one. Yeah. So that’s the fundamental problem. So the most important fundamental is getting disciplined about getting your environment clean. I don’t expect anybody that is beginning the journey or even early in the journey to do this well. They’ve got negotiations with family members. That’s a whole other problem. They have their own memory systems that remind them when they’re in the store of what it is that they want to buy. And then it leads them over to the grocery where it’s 2000 calories a pound, and we put it in the cart and we wind up toting at home. And it’s not because it’s a habit. It’s because it’s a cost benefit analysis, which is all a habit is.

Dr. Doug Lisle

Habits have a dream like analysis in modern psychology that defies all logic. It’s as if it’s something magical, that if we just started it’ll keep going. No, all a habit is that we run a cost benefit analysis and arrive at a certain course of action. It’s sufficiently profitable. It’s the best option that we have. And so we do it over and over. And guess what? When we do things that are healthily, supportive over and over, we get better at them because we go up the learning curves and therefore the cost of doing them drops. That’s why now I have oatmeal in the morning, because now I’m good at it. I know I don’t measure it out. I can do it with my eyeballs and I put it in a tall enough cup. I put it in there and I put the white amount of water in and I hit the button and I know that it’s going to be done in a minute 45. So it takes me a minute 40. I’m super lazy. So I’m going to use a microwave and it’s done. I didn’t do that 20 years ago, but now I know how to do it. And so I’m up the learning curve. And by being up the learning curve, the cost of me producing that is less and therefore it continues in my behavioral repertoire, it keeps getting selected.

Dr. Doug Lisle

So cleaning up your environment, understanding that we’re not searching for magic components to food, that we are searching to get rid of things that have been processed, that are unnatural. Therefore, they have been laden with oil or they’re laden with dry foods of some kind. Foods that have been dried out, whether they’re oil or cheese or crackers or beef jerky. Or whatever process has unnaturally led to destruction of fiber or the removal of water. Those two things will drive the calorie density of the diet to be too high for the organism in order to appropriately balance its intake. And the creature, whether it’s a goldfish or lizard or Komodo Dragon or a horse or a human, will start to systematically overeat and have excess vestors. The solution is not to give it a lobotomy. The solution is not to give it a drug. The solution is not to cut out half of its stomach. The solution is not to have it run on a little exercise wheel till it dies. No. The solution is to reintroduce into its environment the natural foods that it was designed for and make it very difficult and a tremendous hassle to get over to the foods that are unnaturally rich. That is the story. And if you set those things up as well as you can, don’t expect them to be easy. Don’t expect yourself not to fall and stumble 100 times, because of course, you will. That’s not a problem. Every kid learning to play the piano or riding a bike has had to make many mistakes in order to get these skills together, and so will we all, but if you do this, this is the story.

Dr. Doug Lisle

Anybody that’s telling you that there’s some shortcut, quick and easy way around this is somebody that doesn’t have any success with their clients. They’re not telling the truth. Doing this properly is a journey, it’s a journey that can really use a lot of community. If you’re somebody that can really use support, it requires experiments and discipline, telling ourselves, we’re going to give this thing a try and see how it looks, give us the experience of experiencing the fact that cost benefit analysis turned out pretty well. It wasn’t as bad or tough or difficult or self-denying as we thought. We managed to get through the night without cramming a bunch of crap, and we could do it the next day and then the next day. So this process of getting these it’s a little bit like learning to juggle. Learning to juggle. By the time you juggle three, it’s a little tricky. After you’ve done it for a while, it’s easy. And then even when you get stressed, you don’t lose it, and that becomes the skills of a more intermediate player. So these are some of the big stories and the other things that people can look out for. There’s many other nuances of all of these things that we can look at. But the fundamental issues are that our environment is not what we were designed for, and it requires a relentless focus on understanding what the fundamental change has been and to make sure that we keep focus there.

Dr. Doug Lisle

As I tell people, if you are looking at your breakfast, lunch or dinner and you don’t see a pile of wet starch there somewhere, you’re in trouble. When I go into a restaurant, I’m thinking, where is there a pile of wet storage in here? Because if there’s no pile of wet storage, I’m walking out of here. There has to be a pile of wet starch in there somewhere or it’s no place for us to be and that was always the case. Okay, AJ, that’s good for now.

Chef AJ

Dr. Lisle, would you mind if I ask you a few questions on some of the things you said? I took eight pages of notes, literally, but there’s a few things, would you mind clarifying?

Dr. Doug Lisle

Sure. Absolutely.

Chef AJ

Okay. Now, the first one is probably going to sound like a stupid question, but I have been asked this before, so I’d like you to answer it. And I totally understand what you said about fiber and water. They have zero calories. But if they have zero calories, how come when they’re removed from the food, the food increases in caloric density?

Dr. Doug Lisle

I would say that the following is the case. Remember, we’ve all had Coca Cola in our lives and we’ve all had Coca Cola with a straw. And we know at some point we sat talking to our friends at some place where they had Coca Cola in the glass and we had a straw in it, and there was ice on the top and the ice was melting and it was putting water into the drink. And in fact, I believe because probably the sugar and the dye in the Coca Cola makes that water more dense. I think the clear water is floating on the top sitting under that ice. And we know what it’s like to take the straw and take it down at an angle to where if you take some of that, it doesn’t have very much Coke syrup in it, and therefore it doesn’t taste very good because it doesn’t have very much sugar. And we know what it feels like to dip it down deeper into where there’s higher concentration of sugar and now it tastes much sweeter. We know what that’s like. That is what rich food is. Rich food is like rich Coke syrup. It’s laden with calories. We know what happens as we put more water and less Coke syrup in it. The density of how much sugar is in that fluid is reduced. The natural food supply was very diluted in terms of its calories. That’s what potatoes taste like. That’s what apples taste like. Apples don’t taste like chocolate. They just don’t. They have some similar characteristics. They’re both sweet, but one of them is 3000 calories a pound and one of them is 300. And the most fundamental difference between those two being a factor of ten in energy concentration, is that you don’t see any water in that chocolate. There’s no water in there and there’s no fiber in there. So you’re not crunching through anything. It’s just pure fat and sugar. So if we were to pull the water and fiber out of the apple AJ, what we have left is actually a tiny bit of fat in it. Believe it or not, you can synthesize apple oil. I don’t know that anybody has probably had it, but you could, but more importantly, you could pull sugar out of it. And so if you pulled the sugar out of the Apple and dried it out, it would crystallize. It would just be like table sugar, would have a little scent to it. It would be like an apple. But that apple sugar that could sit in a jar would be about 1800 calories a pound where the Apple is only 300 calories a pound because we’ve removed the fiber and the water. Okay. So essentially, the sugar that is the calories in the apple is being diluted. If we take the sugar and we add the water back in and we add the fiber back in, we would mix it up and we would have something. We’d have something of the consistency kind of theapple. It would be mildly wet. It would be small if there was one Apple, and it would taste sweet, but it wouldn’t be as sweet now because we’ve added the fiber in the water and we’ve added some of the peel back in. So as a result, the removal of the fiber and water will intensify the taste as it intensifies the calorie density. So that’s how that works.

Chef AJ

I like that. Intensifies the taste as it intensifies the calorie density. So we were designed for an environment of scarcity where we always sought out the richest food in the environment, and we’re still doing that today. My question, Doctor Lisle, is did the processed food industry know this about us when they created their hyperpalatable products?

Dr. Doug Lisle

No, they had no idea. So people have been creating hyperpalatable products for at least 10,000 years, and so all they’ve been doing is that they’ve been fiddling around, and then they put it on their tongue and they’re like, wow, that’s better. So just by experimenting, they realized that as they essentially pulled water and fiber out of food, they made the food taste better, and that’s what they’ve been doing. So now in this last century, finally they have, now they do know. So in the last 20 or 25 years, the food industry has figured out that that’s precisely what is happening and that they are consciously and deliberately concentrating the sugar, fat, and salt is basically as concentrated as you can stand it. That’s actually what it is. So if they could sell 1% more product by concentrating the food anymore, they would. But pretty much there’s almost no water and fiber in food today. It’s pretty much all just sugar, fat, salt, just enough. So they don’t have dried out French fries. It’s fine with them. If you have a little bit of water and a French Fry and a bunch of oil. So now we’ve got something that I don’t know, 2000 calories a pound or whatever the heck that is. So it doesn’t do them any good to dry it out and make it 2400 calories a pound. It’s surprising. It’s kind of interesting that we were so much designed for 500 calories a pound that people don’t literally pick up a bottle of olive oil and drink it. The closest they will come is to take a piece of dried bread which is 1600 calories a pound and dip it in a bunch of olive oil at an Italian restaurant. So they’ll soak up 4000 calories a pound pure fat and put that on top of their dried white bread that has had a huge amount of the fiber removed and had the water removed from the carbohydrate. And so they’ve got something that by the time they do that they got probably a 2500 calorie pound product that people are slurping it up and no surprise with that.

Chef AJ

You mentioned sugar,fat and salt and pretty much all processed food and all restaurant food is some kind of hyperpalatable combination of sugar, fat and salt. But in our natural environment we didn’t eat those three components and food together. So is that a problem for us now?

Dr. Doug Lisle

You bet it is. So you weren’t designed to be eating sugar and fat at the same moment. They’re not supposed to be in your mouth at the same time. You’ll see these in the mouths of young mammals as they drink their mother’s milk. So there’ll be high fat, high sugar in their mouth at the same time. But as we age and get away from our mother’s breasts, there’s going to be no situation where sugar and fat are going to be in your mouth at the same time. So if you’re eating something fatty like some animal food or nuts or avocado, none of those things are sweet. Okay. And if you eat something sweet like fruit, there’s no fat in there. There’s a few fruits that have some fat concentration in them. Surprisingly enough they’re not particularly sweet. So acai and I guess duran, there’s a few things but they’re not particularly tasty but you can doctor them up and then you can add sweet things to them and then you can make them more palatable in that way. But essentially those are like hen’s teeth. They just don’t exist. They’re just super rare in nature.

Dr. Doug Lisle

Our ancestors were eating fruits that for all intents and purposes had no fat. So when they were eating something sweet they were not eating any fat. When they were eating something fat, they were not eating anything sweet. Notice a phenomenal concentration of the food that people eat today are combinations of sugar, sweet and fat. I have had at least 1000 phone calls in my career where people would say doctor Lisle, I’m a sugar addict. And my first words out of my mouth is no, you’re not. Why waste time getting to the point? No, you’re not a sugar addict. You’re a sugar and fat addict. I don’t have people that say, oh, well, I just sit down with pineapple. I can’t stop eating it, or I eat sorbet and I can’t stop eating it. Oh, no, it’s not. Sorbet it’s some kind of soy ice cream. It’s some kind of chocolate. What are we getting into that we can’t get ourselves out of? A combination of sugar and fat. Why is that so problematic? Because those are two areas of the brain, they’re two different independent pathways to the dopamine centers and as a result, the dopamine or reward pathway, two different neural circuits being activated at the same time that were not designed to be simultaneously activated makes for a really unnatural and extremely seductive experience. And that is now the common experience of industrialized humanity. So throw salt in there while we’re at it, and we’ve got the whole thing. So that hot dog is sweet. They put sugar in it. It’s super high fat, and it’s also salty. The hamburger has the carbohydrate of the bread. It will add sweet ketchup, and then it’s going to have high fat, and it’s also going to have sugars in the cheese that are going to be sweet. So it’s going to have sugar, fat, and very salty. Look at a French Fry. A French Fry has the sugar that will come with the ketchup. It will sweeten it. It will have the salt, and it will have the fat. So literally, something as simple and innocent looking as a French Fry is literally a totally unnatural combination of three different neural circuits being activated at the same time that are not supposed to be simultaneously activated.

Dr. Doug Lisle

So it is no wonder that people are trapped under this. This is like that feeling of if you’ve ever going to go lift something out of your grandmother’s basement and you go over there and you try to lift it, you’re like, Whoa, that is way heavier than I thought it was. It’s like, I don’t know that I can move that. That’s what the pleasure trap is actually like. We were not designed to be moving this problem. If you are here and you’re listening to this, you are one of the rare human beings on Earth that actually understands that. Okay. Just understanding it, however, as exciting and fascinating and intimidating and enlightening as that is, that doesn’t give us a pass. That gives you a chance to have a principal course of action which can get you out of the trap. Just knowing it. People will say, well, I know all that. How can I do it anyway? Well, the truth is that knowing and executing on it are two entirely different things. So that’s why we have to keep coming back, keep getting reminded, keep listening to new perspectives, and then go into our workshop, which is your kitchen and work at it and plan, execute, and then hopefully get yourself in a nice group.

Chef AJ

Dr. Lisle, if you had to pinpoint the cause of the obesity epidemic, was it when the processed food industry started removing fiber and water and concentrating food, specifically the refined carbohydrates?

Dr. Doug Lisle

It would be refined carbs. Remember oils also. So oil has gotten real cheap with the processing genius of the 20th century. So we’re finding carbohydrate and drowning food and oil, as well as being able to refrigerate and keep things cheeses and milk, et cetera, this high calorie animal products, all this comes together AJ in essentially a never ending conveyor belt of a really creepy movie that is a little bit kind of funny and bizarre. I can’t even believe they made it. It’s a movie called Wall E and where the human beings really don’t get out of their chairs and all they do is they suck shakes, they don’t eat food anymore. They don’t use their Forks. And I remember watching this, I thought, these people listen to me, who made this movie? It’s like you’re watching the extrapolation of the pleasure trap to the point where the hero, the leader of humans, barely gets out of his chair and struggles to walk in order to accomplish something. Whatever it is, that is a very jaded and very creative human being or set of them that made that movie. But also insightful, because we are a lot more like Wall E today than we were 60 years ago, that’s for sure.

Chef AJ

Yeah. It was prophetic, I know.

Dr. Doug Lisle

Yeah.

Chef AJ

Dr. Lisle, you had said earlier that your nervous system is searching for satiation from a specific amount of food by weight and volume. If that’s the case, then if somebody was counting calories or points or weighing and measuring their food, they would not reach satiation, I would imagine.

Dr. Doug Lisle

Yeah. They’re sort of dancing around the problem, trying to solve a problem with a top down solution. This is kind of like, I don’t know, the dictator of Russia saying, well, I think we need like 9 million pairs of shoes this year. Like, really genius, what sizes and who’s to say that it should be 9 million, not 9.1? It may be 10.5. How do you know? How do you know that the people this year are going to want more or less of something? You have one with the gold stripe on it. In other words, trying to do it top down, trying to decide top down is laden with errors. You want to do it bottom up. You want to let the freedom of your body tell you what it is. So if we don’t weigh and measure and people say, well, I don’t know when to quit, well, you’ll quit sooner or later or maybe it’s too much. No. When you’re eating whole natural food, there isn’t too much because all that’s going to happen is that instead of being hungry 4 hours from now, you’ll be hungry 5 hours from now. As long as it’s all natural food you won’t be systematically overeating because you’re going to be eating the nature of the food that you were designed for. It’s when you are eating foods that are unnaturally concentrated that your nervous system will get fooled and you will systematically overeat. So the nervous system has within it the ability to do that calorie counting by doing a chemical analysis of the food that you eat. But it’s limited in its ability to do that. That’s why you cannot eat chocolate, cheesecake, a drink, Coca Cola and wind up being fine because you’d say well fine, it’s 3000 calories a pound. I’ll just eat two thirds of a pound of food today. I’ll eat my 2000 calories and that’s what I’m going to eat. It will know that you didn’t eat 600 calories. In fact it’ll know that you didn’t eat 1000. It’ll know that you ate a lot of calories if you ate that super rich food, but it will probably think that you ate 1500. It won’t know that you ate 2000 because that’s so far out over the edge it can’t scale it. And so as a result, when people eat a rich diet that’s too far past what their nervous system can do to detect it, they will systematically overeat and that winds up being I guess one final fundamental and that is that each of us has a difference in how sensitive and how accurate that nervous system is when we start wandering into overly rich territory.

Dr. Doug Lisle

So I have people that will call me and they will have lost 50 pounds on this program and they’ll still have 50 to lose and I’ll listen to them and I’ll say you know what, you’re doing a really good job. In fact they’re doing a really good job but they might eat just a little too much rich treats, and they might be up at 750 calories a pound and literally the difference between 750 calories a pound and 650 calories a pound. A small difference could be 50 pounds on that person. Somebody else, all they have to do is get reasonably close. I’ve had people that were 60-70 pounds overweight. They did not need to get all the way down to 500 calories a pound. They just needed to get from 1000 calories per pound down to 750. They just needed to give themselves a chance by getting some fiber and water back into the diet. And now the system we regulate itself. So each individual is different in terms of how sensitive that sort of calorie counting equipment is. My attitude is we let the system do the counting. I don’t know how strict we are going to need to be with a given individual to get them down to wherever it is that they want to be. If you’re unfortunate, you have an unbelievably sophisticated thick system and you’re going to need to eat basically a whole natural food diet. That’s not most people. Most people need to do a pretty darn good job to have a lot of success. They don’t have to do what Chef AJ does. They don’t have to do what my friend James Lennon does. They don’t have to do what Alan Goldhamer does. They don’t have to be that good. Some people do. Okay. There are people that need to be that good. If you want to get an A in this, you got to bring an A game. A lot of people can get an A by bringing a B game. A B game doesn’t mean sloppy and lousy B game. And this is an A plus game for your doctor. Your doctor has never seen anybody that is a B player out of our arena. So that means you’re eating the vast majority of your calories from whole natural, unprocessed food. But you eat a few things. You have a little vegan pizza that you Bake or whatever it is. So we take some dry carbohydrate in there from time to time, something like that. That’s still an awfully good job, but it’s the majority of your calories. When I look at your diet over a week, am I seeing pile after pile of wet stretches? Yeah, that’s still a B player. But sometimes those B players are carrying around extra weight and really frustrated, and I tell them sorry for you. If you want an A, you’re going to have to do A work. So those are the individual differences. But the fundamental principle is always the same. But the solution comes from driving down the average calorie density by essentially putting back in the natural concentrations of water and fiber.

Chef AJ

So I guess the important thing is people need to know where they lie.

Dr. Doug Lisle

Yes. And they have to experiment, and sometimes they find out. Sometimes they think it’s an interesting myth out there that people when they want to rush and lose the weight and then they’re going to go defend it, and then once I can only get down to 140, then I’ll defend it. I guess then it’ll be worth it to defend it or something. This is a cockamamie way of looking at this problem. We simply eat properly and well and do a good job, and we find out where it goes. And we don’t have any idea where it’s going. We don’t know where it’s going to stop. Okay. So we’re going to pick a path that makes sense for us. And if it turns out that that path over a period of time doesn’t get us to where we want to go and we got to reevaluate, we’re going to have to up our game. It may turn out that it takes us better than what we thought we were going to go for. We don’t know these are individual differences, but I do know that if it doesn’t take you where you want to go, then we simply modify what it is that we’re doing. We’re not going to try to trick the system. So I’m completely uninterested in any short term tricks to get you down to a goal weight and then somehow miraculously, you’re going to defend it. No, we want to naturally get there so that once we’re there, we just keep doing what we’re doing. We’re not tricking anything. We’re trying to discover a pattern that will work for us, and we just don’t know how fastidious that’s going to be when we start.

Chef AJ

I’m glad you said that, because I have so many people that would come to me and say, well, I need to get the weight up quickly. So I’m going to do keto, and then when I get to my goal weight, then I’ll do your diet.

Dr. Doug Lisle

That is a classic example of the cart in front of the horse. That makes absolutely no sense at all, because if you quote, do our diet, if it’s going to keep your weight at 125, like let’s suppose you’re at 175, and you say, well, I’m going to do keto and get down to 125, and then I’ll do this diet. Well, when you get down to 125, if you’re still alive, if you do that, and then you eat, quote, this diet, whatever version of it is that you think, I can almost guarantee you that whatever version you eat is not going to have you at 125. It may have you at 120, it may have you at 140. Whatever it is that you do. I don’t have any idea where it’s going, and neither do you. So now what are you going to do? So instead we are going to do this diet in some version that you say, I think I can do this indefinitely. This is my plan to do this indefinitely. We do it until it stops. If it stops, you are 175 and now you become 145. It’s like and you’re like, why should be 125. Well, then we’re going to have to look at where the calorie density of the diet is still too high. That’s what we’re going to look at. We’re going to find out what are we missing here in this and what are we going to modify next? And so I’ll go through this. There’s success of approximations. So some people will go from their conventional diet to a standard McDougall diet, and they’ll go from a standard McDougall diet to a maximum weight loss type diet. In other words, they may go through successive approximations and they watch their body change in response. But what we’re not going to do is we’re not going to trick our way to the goal and try to defend it. If this makes any sense at all. Remember, we’re not in a rush. You may be in a rush, but I’m not because I’m out for you to have a lifetime of success. And so we’re going to get there by doing the fundamentals by putting down the stepping stones that are firmly there so we can walk this path easily and well for the rest of your life. That is the plan. We’re not skipping steps. We’re going to go right through this process, do it right, do it once and never have to do it again because once we’ve arrived, we just keep doing what it is that brought us there.

Chef AJ

I love that. I’ve heard you say before, I think it was a sports analogy. The people that are successful simply learn the fundamentals and they practice them better than anybody else.

Dr. Doug Lisle

Yeah, that’s what it is. There’s nothing fancy about success with most things. In fact, when you see very fancy things in anything, whether it’s the arts or sports or anything else, all you’re watching is combinations of very simple things. That’s all it is. I recently went back and watched E. T. I hadn’t seen E.T since I was a very young person. And it was interesting to watch a young Stephen Spielberg to watch his work and thinking he was a very young guy at the time he did this and realizing he was learning I was watching some of his movies, he borrows certain things. i see him do a trick in one movie and he’ll try it again in the next one, he’ll find a place for the same kind of an idea. He said, incidentally, that when Schindler’s List came along, he said he had the script for a long time and he wasn’t ready. Wasn’t ready. He knew, he wanted to be at the height of his powers, before he took on something that complicated and that’s you. So before you have a vegan dinner for all of your friends and family and you’re ready to put up with all the crap behind everybody bitching about it, just spend a few years. You’ve got a lot of fundamentals before we take that on, just start real close to home with the fundamentals that you need for your own success. We start there first. That’s a tough job, but it’s the most important thing you’ll ever do for yourself.

Chef AJ

Dr. Lisle, if you don’t mind, I have two more quick questions because there will be people watching this summit. This might be the first time they’re ever seeing you. And you said breakfast, lunch and dinner, big pile of wet starch. There are still people that are trying to lose weight and think, I can’t eat potatoes, I can’t eat rice, I can’t eat starch, I’ll gain weight.

Dr. Doug Lisle

Keep in mind that in our natural history, the best estimates are that our ancestor’s average calorie density was about 500 to 700 calories a pound. The starches have calorie densities as follows. Squashes are down, sometimes under 300 calories a pound, oatmeal is 325, potatoes are 375, beans are about 400, and rice is about 500. So the starches run a gamut from the high twos to five and they average, call it 400. So you can see that the starches are actually less in calorie density than the average calorie density of our natural history. That means every bite of starch is actually a win. You’re actually going under what it takes for you to actually be super lean and healthy. So if anybody ever saw anybody gain weight eating potatoes, careful, look and see what’s on the potato. That is where the problem was. The problem lies in the shredded cheese and the sour cream and the bacon bits. It isn’t the potato. So when you’re looking to it’s your breakfast, lunch or dinner, hopefully we are looking at food that is wet and that is based around carbohydrates. We don’t want it based around protein. So we don’t want a bunch of meat that has a whole host of attentive problems. We certainly don’t want it based around fat. So we don’t want a bunch of super high fat foods like cheese or something like that. So obviously we’re going to base the food around carbohydrates, but we don’t want to base it around dried carbohydrates because carbohydrates are artificially very dense. So what are our options? The vegetarian diet is not a diet of vegetables and fruit. That is not what a vegetarian diet is. A healthy vegetarian or vegan diet is a diet that’s based around wet starches in addition to fruits and vegetables. That’s what it is. And as Alan says, the variable addition of nuts and seeds. Depends on your personal biology, how much you want to eat and how much you can get away with. Just remember the nuts and seeds are going to drive up the average car density of your diet. So you handfuls of cashews don’t come to complain to me that you’re having trouble losing weight. So the center of the diet is the wet starch. If we aim there, we’re going to be fine.

Chef AJ

Thank you so much, Doctor Lisle. And the last question, what is the real truth about weight loss?

Dr. Doug Lisle

The real truth, AJ, is that it’s more difficult and more complicated than it’s generally appreciated. And so therefore, it takes some process of study and some real personal experimentation and determination to find our way home. If we do that, we’ll find it right here. This is the right path and this will take you to where you want to go.

Chef AJ

Thank you so much, Dr. Lisle.

Dr. Doug Lisle

My great pleasure. Thanks for having me, AJ.

Chef AJ: Hi, Dr. Scott, welcome to the Truth about Weight Loss Summit, thank you so much for being here.

Dr. Scott Stoll: Thank you, Chef AJ, it’s always such an honor to join you. I am just delighted to be a part of this year’s summit and I just want to applaud you and all the amazing work that you’re doing to help so many people all over the world.

Chef AJ: Well, thank you. And I could say the same about you, Dr. Stoll. So, Dr. Stoll, many people when it comes to weight loss, talk about diet and exercise, which we know are important. But there’s other things that are equally important. Isn’t that true?

Dr. Scott Stoll: Well, you are absolutely correct. You know, when we look at, you know, the weight loss journey for someone, it’s, you know, like you and I have talked about calorie density is so important. Understanding the calorie density of food, knowing which foods to choose a whole food plant-based diet and activity. But I’ve learned through the years that, you know, often the outward releasing of weight really starts with an internal journey, kind of putting things in place and resetting some of those foundations in our life that allow us to succeed in applying a whole food plant-based diet and exercise and, you know, utilizing some of these amazing tools. And so I really do believe, as I know you do as well, that internal journey is just as critical to this weight loss journey.

Chef AJ: What aspects of the internal journey are most important?

Dr. Scott Stoll: Well, you know, I have a few slides I’ll share in just a moment, one that I just want to bring up in anticipation of the slides because I think it’s so important nobody talks about it, it is imagination. And that may surprise some people to hear a doctor talking about imagination, but it really is so important because our imaginations have been stolen by so many outside forces today. You know, when we’re young, we imagine beautiful bright futures. We imagine ourselves in different places and we can see in technicolor. I guess it would be 6K today. You know, we can see ourselves in these different places and it actually begins inspiring and some hope and moving us towards that, that future self that we’re envisioning. But through life and challenges or education, we lose that power to imagine a better future self. And I’ve learned through the years, you know, working with patients that, you know, in trying to acquire motivational interviewing techniques and understand the readiness for change. You know, I’ve missed out on the idea that, you know, if people can’t imagine themselves healthy, if they can’t imagine themselves changed in the future, no matter how much support I bring around them, the journey is going to be very difficult. But if they can capture a new vision of themselves one year, two years, five years and begin to see what their future self looks like, you know, thin, strong, healthy, vibrant living, pursuing dreams, achieving things, working with their grandchildren, serving in their community, if they can begin to see that vision, it inspires hope. And we know that high hope people are actually motivated people and they begin taking strategic action steps toward the accomplishment of that vision. In fact, the research on hope shows that when someone grabs a hold of hope, it activates the centers of their brain that are involved in strategic planning, decision making, and overcoming obstacles. And so when someone has hope, they actually begin seeing a pathway to achieve that newly imagined vision for themselves. So I think that’s really a critical aspect. I have a few slides around that idea of changing the way that we think and believe about ourselves and our future.

Chef AJ: I love that because a lot of times, especially when it comes to weight loss, people have tried so many times and failed that they’ve actually given up hope that they could be successful.

Dr. Scott Stoll: That’s exactly right. The weight loss industry has stolen hope from so many people because as you and I know, the weight loss industry is really not about helping people achieve a healthy body and optimal weight. It’s really about selling supplements and diet plans and never really inspiring people and helping them to work through some of the challenges that are necessary. And so that is one of the places where hope is stolen.

Chef AJ: I love the way you phrased that, and I never thought about that or hope stealers those culprits.

Dr. Scott Stoll: That’s right. All right. So I’ll just walk through these slides. And so, you know what? I really wanted to impress. As you know, we’re stepping into another year. We’ve had so many challenges with COVID. So much confusion, so much bad news. Sometimes we need to step back and reset, renew and restore. And what I’m hoping to do with this, you know, I have some science in here. Obviously, as a doctor, it’s hard for me not to have some science, but I really wanted to also take an opportunity for all of us to just reset, renew and restore our mindsets, our belief systems, our vision, and our hope because those are critical elements for all of us. You know, if it’s weight loss that we’re pursuing, if it’s a reversal of diabetes or heart disease, if it’s improvement in our health, if it’s training for a marathon, we all need to reset, renew and restore our mindsets. One of my favorite quotes is by Maya Angelou. And I think it just really helps to put things in perspective and take away some of the power of the past. She said: I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better. And it’s so powerful because so often our past can drag guilt into the present and steal the future. But you know, this quote helps us to understand that for most of us, you know, we grew up in a culture that was unhealthy. We grew up in families that maybe didn’t appreciate healthy habits or had traditions and cultures around food that led to unhealthy eating patterns or even promoted emotional eating. And so we grew up in those patterns and we did what we knew how to do. But now that we’re learning more, we know better and it’s easier for us to do better. And so I just really want to use this opportunity to just try and remove guilt from the past decisions, things that we may have done, choices that we’ve made, as you’re just saying, AJ failures from the diet industry. And just to say that, you know, we’re getting a fresh start, and now that we’re learning and we know better, we’re going to be able to do better. And it’s never perfect, you know, the process is never perfect. The process of change and transformation is riddled with challenges, successes. Some days we’re not so successful, but we’re constantly learning and doing better and in the doing better part of the process, we actually become successful.

Dr. Scott Stoll: And it’s also important to just look at the process of weight loss and the journey towards healing as a gardener. When we garden, there are several parts of the process of growing a healthy garden. You know, we first have to clean the garden out in the spring. dead weeds, rocks, we have to till the soil is cleaned up and get it ready to plant seeds. And so, you know, if you’re starting a brand new journey of weight loss, the brand new journey of releasing weight or overcoming type two diabetes, reversing heart disease, you know, we have to clean up the body from the past decisions, not with guilt, but just recognizing that we have some work to do, and it takes a little bit of effort to roll up our sleeves there, some sweat involved in just cleaning up and cleaning out. But then we’ve prepared the field to plant the seeds. And, you know, a core foundation in life is that you know, we harvest from the seeds that we plant. So if we want a garden of kale, we would obviously plant seeds. But sometimes we don’t realize this and we plant seeds that are providing things that we don’t want in our life. Sometimes we mistakenly plant weeds. And, you know, these can be through patterns and habits that we’ve learned growing up in the patterns of this world that we’re not aware that we’re planting. But when we see a harvest and if we see things that we are not happy with and our harvest, we just have to go back and say, Well, where did those seeds come from? We pull out those parts of the harvest and we replant better seeds. And so through this process, we are continually learning to plant better and better seeds to improve the harvest that we’re getting every season. And the good news is that we can improve our harvest every year. The harvest is our health. Obviously, the seeds are places that we’re making. What am I going to eat today? How much am I going to sleep? Am I going to be active and move around? Am I going to sit today? Am I? How am I going to manage my stress? Am I going to release my stress? Am I going to hold that stress is not going to work on some inner healing and emotional healing so that trauma no longer has a place inside of me? How am I going to build the relationships of the people around me? Which communities am I going to connect to and who are the coaches and the accountability sources that I’m going to bring into my life this year to help me succeed? Those are a few of the seeds that we can begin planting in January. And we know that by six months, you know, gardens grow very quickly. You’ll have an abundant harvest from the season you’re playing in January. It does not take long to see an abundant harvest.

Dr. Scott Stoll: This is evident in a friend of mine, Emily Bowler. I think she’s been on your show, Chef AJ. She’s an amazing person, and it just shows how quickly a harvest can be manifested in summer when someone’s like. This is Emily. In 2009, Emily was a mother homeschooling her children who had grown up with a very challenging past that included some emotional wounding that led to emotional eating, some eating disorders, and significant challenges physically that come from making those choices, including obesity, type two diabetes, hypertension, depression, et cetera. And so this is Emily. But Emily caught an inspired, hope-filled vision of herself in the future and realized that change was achievable, the transformation was possible and it didn’t have to take that long. And she began to plant seeds after finding Dr. Fuhrman’s book, Eat to live. That’s all she did. She found the book, read the book, caught a newly imagined vision of herself, started changing what she ate, didn’t even have the ability to exercise. Just changed what she ate. And literally in 12 months radically changed her life. And this is one of these stories that inspire hope for all of us that, you know, we can make unhealthy choices for decades, but our body has this resilience and ability to respond very quickly when we plant better seeds. And so you can see Emily on the left here, July of 2008. One year later, July of 2009. Not only has she released weight, but she is vibrantly alive. She has changed in every way. She went on to work with Dr. Fuhrman for several years, writing blogs, coaching people. She’s written books. She has an amazing book. I want to look that up online, and she has become a force of change for people all around her. She even ran a 5K, and so it’s, you know, these are the possibilities when we plant better seeds.

Dr. Scott Stoll: So some of this is linked back to our reward centers, which have been hijacked by our culture today and we have reward centers, as you’ve talked about many times, that respond naturally to activities and to accomplishments. I know when you were acting Chef AJ, your reward centers were activated when their crowds applauded your amazing performances, as they do even with your stand-up comedy today. And they also respond to sugar, fat, and salt. Naturally, they respond when we eat fruits when we get a little bit of hits. But sugar, fat, and salt are hyper-stimulatory of the reward centers, and so normally we get a little bit of pleasure when we do these things. However, addictive substances, these refined foods, refined substances cause a hyper-stimulation of the system. And as we can see on the right, you know, as this progresses, the addictive substances release more dopamine. But over time, we develop tolerance. We’ll talk about this in just a minute, but as we become more, our brains become more tolerant of that level of stimulation. It takes more of the substance, more sugar, fat, and salt to stimulate the brain to get the same effect. And there are other consequences of the reward centers being hyper-stimulated by the sugar, fat, and salt in our culture today, including reducing serotonin, which reduces our mood, causing us to feel more depressed. Those foods also cause inflammation of the brain, resulting in more anxiety and more depression. They also activate the hunger centers in the hypothalamus, causing us to be hungry. There’s inflammation that is activated inside of the appetite centers. And so those foods, they hijacked so many centers in our brain that leave us craving more but feeling unfulfilled and feeling flat and depressed. It’s a perfect setup for stealing the vision that we might have ourselves in the future.

Dr. Scott Stoll: What’s happened? Why are so many people struggling with these addictive foods and emotional eating? Dr. David Kessler, in his book The End of Overeating, helps us to understand this. He said food manufacturers have long been using focus groups to test for cravings and then designing their product for irresistibly and cravability. Isn’t that amazing? Food scientists are creating foods that are irresistible and craveable. He goes on when a food scientist at Frito-Lay analyzed what determined irresistibly. They identified five key influences calories, more calories, calorie density, flavor hits. That’s why we see all of these different components and things like Doritos, ease of eating and meltdown, an early hit so that it doesn’t take that many bites and chewing and it melts down quickly in your mouth. And because of that, it’s absorbed into the system quickly and gives you a hit. And then he ends with this, companies know this and use this. And so this is an important awareness for all of us that the companies today understand the power of our brains to drive choices around foods. And so they’ve designed foods purposely to hijack our brain to get us to the place of being dependent upon these foods that we don’t feel. Well, we’re looking for a hit to feel better. And we remember that I ate those chips or that cake, and I felt better. And so we began exchanging our money for these foods that ultimately leave us bankrupt in every way. And we can see what’s happened in our culture as we have shifted this direction of the creation of addictive foods. You know, over the course of 100 years or so, we’ve added one hundred and thirty-five pounds of sweeteners to our food and it’s everywhere today because again, companies know this and use this. We’ve added 70 pounds of oil, more than 100 pounds of meat, 15 pounds of fish, 30 pounds of cheese, 500 calories and 53 gallons of soft drinks to our lives in an average year for an average person in America. And it’s no wonder we have individual health problems and a health crisis, not only in the United States and globally with non-communicable diseases, the number being the number one cause of death in the world, accounting for almost 80 percent of all the deaths in the world are related to lifestyle diseases. And so, yes, companies have designed these foods. But there are significant consequences for the individual consuming those foods. But the good news is there’s freedom. And that’s why Chef AJ is doing what she’s doing, to help set people free. So essentially, the food system is like this donut on a hook. You know, it looks attractive. It tastes attractive. But there’s a sharp hook inside. And so many people today unsuspectingly have become hooked by the food system, and it has resulted in significant injury to their bodies. Injury to their minds. Injury to their soul. And as Chef AJ said, it’s stealing hope away from people. It is stealing their life.

Dr. Scott Stoll: Yale has put together a very nice food addiction scale that helps us understand the power of these foods. And there are a couple of things I just want to highlight here that, you know, as we look through the studies that have been done using the food addiction scale, we see on average that about 20 percent of people between 15 and 20 percent of people have a tendency towards food addiction. But we also see in the chart here that it’s not just people that are overweight or obese, but it can also be underweight and even normal-weight people. And so we just, you know, I put this up for a couple of reasons just to help all of us understand that if somebody is overweight, it doesn’t mean they don’t necessarily have a food addiction issue. And if somebody is underweight that they actually may be struggling with food addiction, but they just have a higher metabolism in those same foods in an underweight or normal weight person can also cause disease, including type two diabetes, heart disease, and even cancer. And so the foods themselves are destructive whether or not you are heavy. Some people have genetics that predisposes them to gain more weight than others by eating the same amount of food but food addiction is very real. It’s validated and it is, you know, it’s the same receptor sensitivity that people would have if they were addicted to cigarettes or alcohol or other issues. And it also has some of the same underlying drivers, not every time, but oftentimes there’s history, some emotional trauma, rejection, emotional challenges, stress that can start the process of addiction to food. But the good news is, like so many other elements, there’s freedom. And the freedom is not only freedom from food, but it leads to a solution because it resolves disease, it resolves the inflammation in the brain, it improves mood, and really fills someone with energy and a new inspired hope for their life.

Dr. Scott Stoll: I oftentimes will ask my children questions just to bring clarity, and one day we were around the table and we were talking about sugar. And I said to them, Did you know that sugar is a poison? they said, what, there’s no way dad. Sugar is not a poison. How? Why would they sell it? I said, Well, let’s look up Merriam Webster’s definition. And so this is the definition of a poison, a substance that through its chemical reaction, usually kills, injures or impairs an organism something destructive or harmful. And when we look at sugar, refined foods and we see the science behind them that within two to four hours of eating these foods, there is impaired endothelium, the inner lining of blood vessels that causes the blood vessels to narrow down. There is inflammation, measurable inflammation in the body. There’s a progression of insulin resistance. There’s measurable inflammation in the brain. There’s an alteration of the microbiome. And over time, with repeated exposure, we know that these substances, like sugar, contribute to disease and even increase the risks of cancer that lead to death. So if we’re honest, sugar is a poison. If we’re honest, these chemical-filled, hyper-palatable foods that have been produced by companies today are also a poison. And so I think, you know, sometimes those types of discussions really help to clarify for us that these are not really foods. We call them foods. But when we eat them, they actually cause harm to our bodies and cause inflammation in the progression of the disease. So when we eat those foods, it stimulates our brain and we know it stimulates the dopamine reward centers. And so that doesn’t mean it causes us to want, desire to seek out, and search. And that’s its primary driver. So as the dopamine reward system gets stimulated, we want more. But our opioid system and the opioid system are the receptors in our brain where pain and pleasure are kind of situated. And that’s a secondary system. So the opioid system would be morphine or pain medications like vicodin. So we have the primary driver of dopamine with a secondary driver of opioids. We have what we desire and then pleasure. And so the result of the balance of these two systems is that we end up seeking more than we’re actually satisfied. So when we eat unhealthy foods, when someone chooses to eat, you know, chips or sweet cakes and sugars, then we’re driven to get them by our dopamine reward system. We eat them and we don’t get as much pleasure as we thought. And so we’re left with this kind of unfulfilled wanting. We want more. We eat more, but we’re not fulfilled. And it just drives this kind of setup for unfulfilled wanting, which is really at the heart of emotional eating our food addiction. And we have to just step back and, you know, realize food is never going to fulfill us. Food is never going to fully satisfy us. Food was never intended to be that; it’s intended to bring us some pleasure. It’s intended to bring us in the right relationship that’s intended to bring healing into our body. But it’s not the source of our fulfillment in life.

Dr. Scott Stoll: And as we continue with these foods, we develop tolerance. And so think of tolerance as taking the brakes off. So we have the downregulation of receptors, the dopamine receptors that end up leading to lower amounts of pleasure and a lower ability to say no, which makes it really difficult. We also, as I mentioned, have a disruption of serotonin leading to just a depressed mood. We have disrupted areas of the brain that are associated with willpower, so we have lower amounts of willpower as we’re consuming these unhealthy foods. And so it’s a very slippery slope once we get started on those foods. You know, I often tell my patients that the power of food is much greater than our willpower. And if we’re engaging in these foods on a regular basis, we have to understand they’re very powerful, they’re very dangerous, and they will supersede our willpower. They will take the brakes off and we’ll end up in a situation where we’re eating food. We have lower amounts of pleasure and a lower ability to even say no to those, even though we don’t want to. And we can see in these images that the brain is changed by our choices, and we’re going to see more of that in a minute, if we look here, we can see a normal brain kind of bottom center. And if we look above, we see the brain of someone that is struggling with food addiction, with being overweight. We also see, you know, similar cocaine and alcoholic brains where those reward centers are just not lighting up. They’re not active and we see some atrophy in those areas as well. And on the right, we see a comparison of sugar and cocaine. You know, we have similar brain changes, similar activity reductions, and alterations in people consuming sugar and cocaine. And so these foods have a very real effect. And I want people to understand that, you know, when you eat food, it’s not a delay in food that changes your body within two to four hours. It’s causing your brain to get inflamed within two hours. It’s suppressing serotonin in two hours. Alternatively, when you eat healthy food, it’s reducing inflammation in your brain in two hours. It’s increasing blood flow to your brain in two hours. It’s normalizing receptors in two hours. So there’s a real-time impact of our food choices. And, you know, our brains are flexible, much more so than we ever realized.

Dr. Scott Stoll: There’s resiliency and agility in our brains that it’s this real-time interaction with what we think, what we believe, what we hear, what we see, and what we eat. And so, you know, we hear things oftentimes about ourselves. Some of it is self-talk. In fact, most of our self-talk is negative, we often hear words from other people. The media that we’re taking in it all goes into our brain. And again, it is doing something to the structure of our brain in several hours time. And so I use these two pictures just to show that repeated thoughts and repeated actions create superhighways in our brain. You know, if we’re doing something occasionally, it’s like a footpath. But the more repeatedly that we think those things, the more we repeat those things to ourselves or do those things. You know, eating donuts, stopping at the donut shop, keeping chocolate in the glove box. You know, anything that we do, if we do it regularly and we repeat it often, our brain lays down superhighways, which become automatic highways of action in our subconscious, almost becoming subconscious actions that we just do. And we never stop to ask ourselves, why am I doing this anymore? But the good news is that just like, you know, our body responds to healthy food by rebuilding and regenerating itself. The brain also responds when we begin changing, and we can actually begin tearing up those super highways in rebuilding new roads and new pathways with new thoughts, new belief systems, and new actions that will ultimately become automatic pathways that lead to success.

Dr. Scott Stoll: So how do we do this? You know, we’ve learned something in our lives. And maybe some of those things have not been the best patterns for health patterns, for success. We’ve been impacted by our culture as we saw we’ve been impacted by a food system. It’s designed to separate us from our money, but not give us any health. We are impacted by unhealthy foods and addictive foods. The good news is we can simply work to unlearn some of those patterns and belief systems and relearn and lay out new highways, new thoughts, new pathways that lead to successful lives, healthy, successful lives for decades. And this is how it works the inside of your brain. If you imagine your brain is like this grove of aspen trees, I grew up in Colorado, and so I love the beautiful fall aspens. And you know, if we look at the aspen trees, it’s much like how your brain looks. You know, we have these connections that reach out and touch all of the other trees around them, and it becomes a network of communication inside of your brain. And so as we grow, these connections from repeated activities are repeated thoughts, we grow mindsets and beliefs.

Dr. Scott Stoll: It’s important to understand that we can change mindsets and beliefs, we can change and most emotional responses we can change the way that we’ve always done things just because we’ve done something one way our entire lives doesn’t mean that we have to continue doing it that way for the rest of our lives. We can actually begin changing that. And how do we do that? We begin repeatedly doing something different, thinking something different. We change the experience. And so the way you know, I like to imagine this is going on in my brain is like pruning. So if we took up pruning shears and we just began pruning off some of the old thoughts, the lies that we used to believe about ourselves, the lies from the diet industry that tell you, you can’t do it, you don’t have enough willpower, you fail. We cut those out and we say, I’m not going to believe those things anymore. I understand the system hijacked me. The system took advantage of me, and I’m going to release that. You know, I did that, but now that I’m learning better, I’m going to do better. So I’m going to change what I think. I’m going to change what I believe, and I’m going to begin repeatedly doing positive things, thinking positive things, changing the internal conversation that I have with myself, making different choices for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, or shopping at different places, joining different communities, connecting with different people. As we begin doing that, we grow new connections and we grow this kind of new plasticity in the brain where it actually changes the shape and the weight of your brain, your body. As you’re thinking, as you’re doing these activities, your brain is laying down like little bricks, proteins, and it’s putting brick by brick into these new pathways to establish new connections and new thought centers. And so what’s amazing is you are actually changing the structure of your brain when you’re making these new decisions.

Dr. Scott Stoll: One of the things that you know, so many people need to overcome and get out of that pattern is stressing, you know, I love that stressed is desserts spelled backward. Anyway, and again, you know, the emotional eating for so many people has been wired in throughout a lifetime. You know, some of it begins unknowingly in school, in families where we eat because we’re stressed or eat, because we have to pacify pain, we’re really relieving anxiety. Maybe we’re reliving events or we’re eating because that’s the place where we have control in life. And so it becomes this repetitive pattern laid down these pathways so that when stress enters in, we think to ourselves, Oh, food, that’s my way of getting out. And so we eat, we get a little bit of pleasure from the opioid reward system. We get a little bit of reduction in anxiety from the benzodiazepine receptors. And it does feel better temporarily, but we still have not dealt with the issue. And so it always comes back and we don’t realize that we’ve laid down pathways that are constantly repeating, leading us to the same painful outcomes and not giving us true freedom. But that’s where the good news is that we can change and overcome that by laying down those new systems. One way to do this, and this is from the research of Dr. Judd Brewer and I highly suggest if you are not familiar with, download this app on mindfulness, it’s a tremendous resource that helps to break some of the cycles. There’s reminders in our lives, stress, anxiety, relational challenges, and financial challenges, that’s the trigger. And we’ve trained our brains through those pathways to step into this routine or behavior. I’m going to eat, I’m going to drink, I’m going to smoke when I do something that takes away that momentary stress. We get a little bit of reward, the dopamine reward system, the opioid reward system, the benzodiazepine reward system gives us a brief reward. We have escaped, momentarily we feel better, but the circumstances have not changed. Our thoughts and our actions have not changed. We’re believing the same things we believed. We may not have an imagined vision of our future. So when the reward, a reminder comes up again, the trigger, we’re right back into the routine behavior and it’s an automatic cycle. We don’t even know sometimes that we’re involved in these cycles. So Dr. Brewer likes to point out that if we can inject right into that space between the trigger and the behavior, some simple, curious questions. Why am I eating this right now? What emotions am I feeling? Why am I reaching for it? You can fill in the blank. And does this line up with my vision of my future self? That simple, curious question gives enough pause. It puts the brakes on for us to begin working out of the automatic routine behavior. And it gives your brain space enough to begin processing and through the repeated curious questions we become. It gives us the ability to make those decisions and start breaking the cycle and discover what the underlying drivers might be.

Dr. Scott Stoll: Some of this also goes back to exploring our own identity. You know, so many things shape our identity. And it can be all the way back to our childhood, our work environment, school, et cetera. But in front of breaking these cycles is rediscovering who you really are. Now the world’s told you you are not who the education system may be told you are not who the diet industry actually said you are but rediscovering who you are as an amazing, talented, valuable person with something to contribute to this world. Sometimes it’s kind of painful and difficult to actually go back to those places. But if we can rediscover our true identity, it empowers us with meaningful ways in life. You know, a wine, a purpose behind eating healthy wine, a purpose behind exercising and living our life. And then we can actually get to what in the hell what am I? You know, what are the skill sets that I need to make a change? How do I do this? How do I use a knife? How do I prepare breakfast, lunch, and dinner? And so in my experience, you know, we often over talk about the what and the how we talk a little bit about the why, but we rarely get back to the identity, and true transformational change begins with the identity. That’s what we saw when, you know, when we look at so many people that those that are reimagining their future are discovering their identity and beginning to work out of that empowered place, their whys become strong motivators. And then the what and the how become strategic methods for them to achieve the rediscovered identity of themselves. So this is also really important for everyone to remember that no matter how far you travel down one road, you’re only one step away from choosing a new direction. A lifestyle change can seem overwhelming but it’s really just a simple turning and stepping in that direction and continuing to take the next step and knowing you don’t have to be perfect, but you’re working in process, doing better as you travel along that pathway and health will find you most certainly.

Dr. Scott Stoll: Briefly on imagination, as we kind of already talked about this at the beginning. It’s so important to learn to imagine and dream once again. In fact, Einstein said imagination is more important than knowledge. And Gloria Steinem here says without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning. One of the ways that we can plan to succeed is by imagining and dreaming about a different future. Dreaming about a healthy self and what you’re able and capable of doing. When we imagine or begin dreaming a different future, it activates the planning centers of the brain, those frontal parts of your brain that are involved in strategic planning. It naturally cultivates enthusiasm and hope. And when people have high hope, when they have hope empowered. As I said earlier, they will actually begin seeing the steps in order to get to that goal. We see the benefits of imagination through studies of visualization and sports and music as people visualize themselves being successful. They are naturally more successful in their sport or music or activity. And so I would encourage all of you as we move into a new year to spend some time imagining your future healthy self getting a very clear vision of who you want to become and why. That’s important, and I believe that it will inspire renewed hope in you for a better, more possible life.

Dr. Scott Stoll: Finally, I just want to touch on a healthy environment that, you know, there’s research around change architecture that’s so important that even in light of some of the changes that are necessary in our brain if we simply change our environment, it naturally forces us through change architecture to make different decisions. They did a research study in a hospital where they did not introduce the concept of health and diet and drinking water to hospital staff. They simply changed the environment inside of the cafeteria, and so they repositioned water at checkouts. They made the unhealthy foods less easy to get to, and they positioned fruits and vegetables and healthy foods and easier access places throughout the cafeteria. And they found that water sales went up 30 percent, as did fruit and vegetable intake, simply because they were positioned in the right place. And so one, while you’re waiting for your brain to change while you’re working on establishing new patterns and habits, simply changing your environment can really help fuel your success. Some of those things can be, you know, changing the visibility of healthy foods, putting a beautiful basket of vegetables and fruits out on your counter, positioning your food inside of your refrigerator like this where things are ready to go, you can grab a salad and take it and go. Getting rid of all the junk out of your house. Batch cooking for the future. Having water available or having glasses on your counter to remind you to drink more water. There are just a few examples of how to begin changing your environment. Similarly, we can change the environment of people around us through support and community. Doctors are establishing beautiful communities of people around healthy food, and I know Chef AJ has an amazing community with accountability, support and encouragement. So plug into those communities because those are also environmental shifts that lead to success.

Dr. Scott Stoll: And finally, gratitude is far more important than I think I ever realized I was doing some research this year on the power of gratitude. You know, we often talk about gratitude around Thanksgiving time. We may give lip service to gratitude, but a life of gratitude is extremely powerful in the way that it transforms your brain and your life. And it also enables you to make different choices. The research on gratitude shows that gratitude activates the reward centers of your brain and increases the release of dopamine and serotonin, improving neural coupling in the bliss centers of the brain? So one way to heal from unhealthy foods, from the sugar that’s poison, from the hyper-palatable processed foods is actually to begin walking in a consistent attitude of gratitude. And it restores that center of your brain, the dopamine serotonin areas, and normalizes them. It enhances the brain and restructures the brain’s positive thoughts and naturally reduces fear and anxiety and mitigates the effects of stress, reducing cortisol by 23 percent. So you partner gratitude with deep breathing and you can cut the effect of cortisol in half. It lowers blood pressure, lowers inflammation and lowers your lifetime risk of depression. It facilitates improved sleep patterns and improves heart rate variability and enables people to be more likely to exercise, eat healthier diets, less likely to smoke and have higher turnout rates to medication and healthy lifestyles. It improves relational trust, loyalty and sustainability, and it increases the areas of the brain that result in reduced guilt, shame and even violence. Incredibly powerful. So how do we cultivate a life of gratitude? Again, it’s intentional because we’re rebuilding centers in our brain. We’re laying down new bricks, so things that we do at home, oftentimes just around the dinner table. I’ll ask the children, You know, what are you thankful for today? Breakfast, lunch, dinner as we’re walking around. I’m always trying to activate their minds to look for the things that they’re grateful for. And similarly, we consciously work in our house to avoid speaking negatively or limiting the negative media that would come into our home. Constantly looking for opportunities to be grateful for those things around us. So I would encourage you just to, in the next year, really work on implementing a lifestyle of gratitude because it will help to transform your life in so many powerful ways. A few resources from our not-for-profit, that we started to educate health care providers, including our annual conference. We have a free journal if you’re interested in more information IJDRP dot org and if you’re looking for a healthcare provider, we have a free resource plantsbaseddocs dot com And so right there, I’ll stop and turn it back over to you Chef AJ.

Chef AJ: Wow, this is amazing. Thank you so much. I took a bunch of notes and one of the things I was thinking about when you were talking about gratitude with all the wonderful things that you said is it’s also free.

Dr. Scott Stoll: That’s right, it is totally free, it just takes the effort to change what we think and what we’re looking for.

Chef AJ: And there’s no side effects.

Dr. Scott Stoll: No side effects at all. That’s exactly right.

Chef AJ: Well, I love this whole talk doctor Stoll, because one of the things I’ve always done, and we actually do this at least once a year on New Year’s Eve, instead of going out, drinking and driving are we’ve always done something called a vision board, which to me is what you were talking about, about imagination or imagining your future. And we’ve been doing that for as long as I can remember.

Dr. Scott Stoll: We’re doing that Thursday night with our whole family. We’ve been doing it for years, so all of our children, we get all of our magazines out and start laying down our vision for the next year. And it’s amazing the things that you put on there actually come true. It is incredible.

Chef AJ: Years ago, all I wanted to do was speak at the McDougall conference and I just kept putting pictures of me and him up there. And then, you know, he invited me. What can I tell you? I think it works and it is so inspiring because I have mine right here and I look at it every single day.

Dr. Scott Stoll: Yeah, that’s a great recommendation, and yeah, we do. We’ve been doing that for years, too. I love that.

Chef AJ: I’ve seen people that I’ve worked with where they’ll take a body that they’re desiring a more slender body or a very fit body, and they’ll cut it out the picture and they’ll put their face on it and they’ll just look at that and they’ll imagine the future self.

Dr. Scott Stoll: That’s exactly right. That is so powerful because you see it and you’re beginning to reprogram your brain. And we don’t understand, you know, all of the complexities of the brain. But when we see things and begin imagining things, we begin to see solutions, we move out of tunnel vision and we see the broader scope of all the services that have always been around us. And we begin tapping into those resources then change becomes inevitable.

Chef AJ: In addition to eating yourself thin, think yourself thin.

Dr. Scott Stoll: That’s exactly right, that’s right. We often say you are what you eat, but I like to say it all begins with, you are what you think.

Chef AJ: This is so important. You know, the one visual that’s still in my brain that would have been a great cover for Michael Moss’ book hook. But the donut with the fish hook, completely explains the problem, doesn’t it?

Dr. Scott Stoll: It certainly does. And, you know, for so many people today, they don’t know that it’s just like, you know, a fish that’s looking for that juicy worm. It looks so good. Doesn’t seem like there’s any negative, but there’s a hidden hook and the same thing with our food system today, there are hidden hooks that people don’t understand the power of these foods and how they actually grab a hold of your brain and it’s difficult to break free. You know, it gets hooked in there and it is hard to shake it. Food is very powerful

Chef AJ: in this incredible that even today there are still doctors, medical doctors that don’t even believe in this notion of food addiction. And I know that food itself can’t be addictive. We’re talking about these hyper-palatable manufacturers.

Dr. Scott Stoll: That’s. That’s exactly right, yeah. These are, you know, manipulated chemically altered foods that become substances that really are the addictive component. It’s not food. You know, we can’t become addicted to blueberries or strawberries or kale. We’re going to eat them and enjoy them. And that’s it. But it’s the manipulation of a substance that makes that hyper-stimulatory, just like cocaine or opioid opium. You know, they’re naturally occurring substances that are manipulated to become hyper stimulatory, and that’s what we’re talking about.

Chef AJ: I love that you used the definition of poison and talked about sugar because you could almost say the same thing about alcohol. That it is a poison based on that definition.

Dr. Scott Stoll: Absolutely, yeah, and tobacco and all of these other substances, they’re hyper stimulatory. They harm the body and they are a poison. Yeah, that’s exactly right.

Chef AJ: And I don’t find them very favorable for weight loss, at least not for most people.

Dr. Scott Stoll: No, he’s not at all. Not at all, and you know, once we end up in that unfulfilled wanting place of food, when we’re grabbed by these foods, you know, it drives us to make choices we would never make otherwise, you know, buying office paper at the Office Depot and, you know, walking out with two bags of chocolate-covered almonds because we’re stuck on a hook to buy food. And so it causes us to unknowingly make unhealthy decisions.

Chef AJ: You mentioned that up to 20 percent of people actually struggle with food addiction. That’s pretty significant.

Dr. Scott Stoll: Yeah, that’s that’s very significant, and I was surprised by those numbers, you wouldn’t imagine that it would be that high, but that’s a large number of people that are struggling. And you know, I think it happens for a number of reasons that you’ve laid out so well in your books and on your podcast that you know, it’s the availability, it’s the acceptability, it’s the culture that is bathed in these foods and it’s acceptable to eat them. And we’ve moved from having dessert once or a couple of times a month to, you know, a couple of times a day eating these sugary foods and so there’s this cultural norm that has shifted around our food, too. And it just makes it so difficult because it’s embedded in our culture everywhere around us.

Chef AJ: Right. Emotional eating and food addiction, do they intersect or are they different, are they similar, opposite sides of the same coin? How do you feel about that?

Dr. Scott Stoll: Yeah, that’s a really good question. And, yeah, I mean, they’re definitely interrelated. And, you know, typically somebody that is struggling with addiction, I’m not going to generalize, but typically, you know, they’ve had some kind of stress or emotional pain or trauma in their life that, you know, the substance is helping to pacify some of the pain or serving as a means for them to escape from some of the pain. And so in that way, you know, emotional eating would lead to food addiction because you’re eating substances in those foods that are hyper stimulating your dopamine and your opioid and your benzodiazepine receptors to give you some temporary pain relief. It’s possible to not have an emotional eating issue and still get hooked by food, you know, unknowingly just growing up in America or the world today because of their westernized diet, a food that’s everywhere. You can get hooked and not even be eating emotionally so they can be independent, but they’re often interrelated.

Chef AJ: Right. You know, one of my favorite things in your talk was about the environment, how just changing the environment affected behavioral change, just by changing the environment.

Dr. Scott Stoll: Yeah, it’s really freeing for people, you know, as somebody is making a lifestyle change. You know, it’s not easy to change your lifestyle. It’s not easy to change your diet. And we don’t ever tell people that it’s easy. It’s worth it. It’s worth the challenge. But it’s not easy. But as you’re making those changes, if you change your environment, even in the beginning, it’s going to greatly increase your ability to make healthy choices. And every week that you get into a healthy lifestyle, it becomes easier and easier. So changing the environment is a simple first step that can really empower and fuel a healthy lifestyle transformation. It’s not that hard, you know, it’s hard to actually go home and throw things out and pull those things out of the hidden spots because your brain says, Well, what am I going to do when I want or what you know? So that’s the difficult part. But if you can clean out your house and make it a safe zone at home and then begin positioning foods and batch cooking places where it’s going to help you succeed, that’s a significant first step towards success.

Chef AJ: But so many people don’t do it, Dr Stoll, because they live in households where the family members won’t support them. And so they’re always being bombarded by the smell, the sight, the sound of these hyper-palatable foods.

Dr. Scott Stoll: Yes, you’re right. That is a real, very real challenge that I know both you and I and anybody else that’s coaching or working with patients and toddlers is that, you know, an individual living in a home trying to make a lifestyle change. The environment that’s unhealthy has to work that much harder. And this is where community support and accountability come in because they can really come alongside an individual that may feel alone in their home and provide enough support to get them over the hump and strategies even inside of their home to create an area where they can control a healthy environment.

Chef AJ: You know, you mentioned changing the home environment, the food environment, which I think is the easiest way to accomplish managing addictions. But don’t we sometimes have to change our social environment as well? Isn’t there a social dynamic involved in the spread of obesity?

Dr. Scott Stoll: Absolutely. You know, it’s very interesting in the research around obesity that, you know, if this happens in every part of life, whether it’s finances your microbiome or your weight, that you become like the people closest to you and they’ve even found in obesity research that you become like your friend’s friends. And so it’s there is a social, almost a social contagion that spreads because of mindsets, beliefs and then the patterns that follow. And so yes, we do have to sometimes change our social settings. You know, if our social setting was Friday night beer and wings, Wednesday night or Monday Night Football or beer and wings, we have to change some of those social settings. And that can be difficult because, you know, then we’re stepping into that very uncomfortable place of rejection and acceptance. And, you know, as humans, we don’t like rejection. We prefer acceptance. And so again, you know, that’s where these healthy communities are so important that we can begin finding people that have a similar vision or like-minded are going to be encouraging. Invite us out for smoothies instead of beer and wings. You know, I’ve had patients and I know that you’ve had these as well where they’ve made a lifestyle change and actually some of their friends are no longer friends because they’re not engaged in the same social activities. And then I asked them, were they really friends if they’re going to walk away from you because you’re not going to eat beer and wings? So they say, Well, I guess not. It was just a common bond around some kind of substance and meeting, but they weren’t true friends. And so that’s another challenge. You’re absolutely right, and it’s so important to find good people

Chef AJ: Addicts love company.

Dr. Scott Stoll: Yes, that’s right. Yes. We love the validation.

Chef AJ: They don’t feel so bad about it if everybody else is doing it I guess.

Dr. Scott Stoll: That’s right.

Chef AJ: And also moderate moderation. I don’t think it works. But abstinence is very hard for people. Where do you stand on the moderation versus abstinence continuum, at least where food addiction or addiction is concerned?

Dr. Scott Stoll: Yeah, you know, that’s a really good question, and I think sometimes it gets confused because when we talk about making changes, you know, not everybody can go 100 percent from day one. And so sometimes we’re making changes in process and it’s not perfect or 100 percent, and that’s OK. We can expect everyone to be perfect or 100 percent. None of us, you know, can live under that burden. So we’re not talking about that. We’re talking about just consistent choices. And you know, if we look at the power of these foods, as we just talked about and their impact on our reward system and knowing that within two to four hours of eating food, it has some kind of profound impact on our body, either positive for healthy foods or negative hijacking or reward system causing inflammation in our body. And with the understanding that at least 20 percent of people have a tendency towards food addiction moderation and cannot be recommended as a reasonable method for living, you know, if you are susceptible to food addiction. Moderation is going to send you right back down that road of complete addiction. If you’re struggling with emotional eating and you’re adding in moderation, it’s only going to fuel more emotional eating. If you’re struggling with heart disease or type two diabetes and you add in moderation, I can promise you you will not reverse your disease. You may see some slight improvements, but you will not reverse your disease. You’re trying to lose weight and you’re adding in moderation. Both you and I can tell people that you will eat more than you ever expected and more frequently than you ever imagined, and you will rarely lose weight if you’re trying to live with moderation. And then finally, you know, I always position this way with my children. I want them to do their best in school, so I don’t tell my children, I want you to just give me your moderate best in school because that doesn’t lead to success. You know, if we want success, we have to live above moderation. If we want above-average lives, if we want above average health, it takes above-average effort. And that’s not moderation.

Chef AJ: Much like if you’re choosing a doctor for surgery, and hey say I will do a moderately good job, but you know.

Dr. Scott Stoll: That’s right. That’s right.

Chef AJ: You know, you mentioned that it’s definitely worth it when people change their diet and that it’s not easy. But I would argue that if somebody’s struggling with excess weight. Food addiction, a lifestyle disease, that’s not easy either.

Dr. Scott Stoll: You’re absolutely right, and I have said that to many of my patients. When you are suffering from pain, going to see the doctor, coming to see me, waiting in the waiting room, waiting for prescriptions, waiting for tests, side effects from medications, surgery, six or eight weeks of downtime, complications, infections, feeling bad every day, that is not easy, either. You know, our brains don’t like uncertainty, so people more often choose the certainty of their current position of disease over the uncertainty of a lifestyle change in health. And what I try to help my patients understand, as you do as well, is that your certainty is misery right now, and I can guarantee you that the uncertainty is certain benefit and health and vitality and improvement. And so I try to get their brains to begin switching over to understand that their current situation, while it is certain, it is certainly misery that’s only going to get worse. But the certainty of improving their lifestyle has incredible benefits. And sometimes we have to actually get a piece of paper out and write down those things for people so that they can see it and have a tangible experience with where they are and what that leads to versus what they can achieve in a very short period of time.

Chef AJ: I think sometimes until they at least do an experiment like Dr. Lisle says for a few weeks, they don’t even know how bad they felt until they start feeling better.

Dr. Scott Stoll: That’s right in our immersion. You know, people look to come and it’s only a week. And by the end of the immersion, one week later, they often say, I haven’t felt this good since I was 18 years old. I’ve not had this much mental clarity in 20 years. I can’t believe how good I feel. And so you’re right. You know, that’s why it’s happened so slowly. We just don’t understand how bad we feel. And then on the opposite side, we don’t understand what it actually feels like to feel good again, to wake up and feel good, not the energy. And so that little bit of contrast that, you know, just in a week or two.

Chef AJ: It’s like the frog in the boiling water analogy. Well, a lot of people that change their diet, what I hear, at least at the beginning and maybe you could address some strategies to deal with this, is that at first they still are having cravings for the junk is really hard and or they don’t like the taste of the whole foods.

Dr. Scott Stoll: Right. Yeah, that’s you know, it’s very common because our taste buds have been hijacked by these hypersensitive foods, just like our brain adapts, our taste buds adapt. It’s called neural adaptation. So we end up having taste preferences for sweet and thoughts that have been driven by the food industry, as Dr. Kessler said. As I mentioned in my presentation. So the good news is that in a relatively short period of time, from two weeks to three months, our taste buds really began changing. And so I encourage my patients, just keep exposing your taste buds to good whole foods, and I promise you, in three months you’re going to begin craving broccoli and carrots and all kinds of foods that you never imagined possible. And I also tell them, it’s really important that you not stimulate your taste buds with these other unhealthy foods because it just resets that expectation for sweet and salt. And so, you know, it’s a work in progress. But you know, some things that I encourage people to do is to use lots of additional spices and herbs, makes the food really delicious, compensates for some of the loss of the sweet and salt. And it’s also really beneficial for their health. I encourage them to hyper nourish their body, you know, dark green smoothies, lots of dark, steamed greens. I found that the more they hyper nourish with those dark colored vegetables and fruits, the quicker they get through that kind of detox reset of their taste buds. And so I think through that process that, you know, it makes that transition easier and they begin enjoying some of those foods again. And then like, you’re so good at, you know, having some alternative desserts is really beneficial in those first few months, something that satisfies some of that sweet craving with Whole Foods sweeteners really makes a difference.

Chef AJ: Absolutely. Anyone that’s attended any of your conferences or immersions, knows that the food is absolutely delicious and certainly not lacking in flavor.

Dr. Scott Stoll: Yeah, thank you. That’s what we want, We want people to see that healthy food is absolutely delicious and you’re not giving up anything.

Chef AJ: Absolutely. So, Dr. Stoll, what’s the real truth about weight loss?

Dr. Scott Stoll: The real truth about weight loss is that it’s possible. That it’s achievable to live a healthy, vibrant life in a body that is normal weight. It’s possible and achievable if you can imagine a different future. It’s possible, conceivable for everyone, especially when you’re surrounded by such an empowered community like your community. And so I just want to encourage people that don’t give up. Don’t take on shame or guilt. Step into the possibility with a new imagined future, future self. And let Chef AJ and her amazing community support you along the way.

Chef AJ: Imagine yourself healthy. I love that. Thanks so much, Dr. Stoll.

Dr. Scott Stoll: Thank you so much. Thank you. It’s been such an honor being with you today.

Chef AJ: Hi, Dr. Batiste, and welcome to the truth about weight loss summit, thanks so much for being here.

Dr Columbus Batiste: It is good to see you. How are you?

Chef AJ: Oh, I am fine, thank you so much. It’s such a pleasure to talk to you. You know, Dr. Batiste as a cardiologist. I’m curious, how does the obesity epidemic affect your practice and your patients?

Dr Columbus Batiste: Well, you know, obesity is, as we all know, it’s a marker. It’s a symptom of an underlying condition that’s going on. And I think that what we’ve observed over the past year is we’ve seen an increased heightened sense of obesity. We’ve seen weight gain take off astronomically. And I think that that ultimately is a reflection of what’s going on inside individuals’ lives and their eating patterns as well.

Chef AJ: And what eating patterns do you think are causing this?

Dr Columbus Batiste: Well, I mean, you know, all of us have come through this challenging time, this crazy period of time and this sort of pandemic where we were sequestered in space. And what studies have shown is that many people turn to like these old childhood style eating patterns, you know, of highly processed refined foods, the childhood favorites. Unfortunately, packaged, highly refined, high carbohydrate-rich, ultra-processed foods. And I think this is what spurred on the epidemic of weight gain. This continuation, I should say, of the epidemic

Chef AJ: What effect does that have in general on the heart?

Dr Columbus Batiste: Well, you know, I mean, we see the effects inside and out. I mean, so we know that going along with obesity oftentimes is high blood pressure and high cholesterol. And so these markers, these things here in this inflammatory cascade that there seems to be heightened. And we know that that increases the propensity towards things like the COVID virus and having ill outcomes and hospitalizations from those who are obese and have increased inflammatory markers. But here’s the thing that’s interesting is that as a cardiologist, sometimes what I see based on individual studies, whether or not it’s a cardiac MRI or if it’s an echocardiogram, is that we will see fat layering the heart in the organs. And I’ll tell you, as an aside, I recently had a birthday back in September, and so I decided that I was going to go ahead and get something called the DEXA scan because I wanted to get a sense of, did I have internal organ fat? And also, I was very pleasantly surprised to see that the fruits of my labor, so to speak, have really paid off and I didn’t have any there. But you can have what’s called visceral fat. And that’s a layering effect that covers your organs and it’s metabolically active in this. Metabolic activity increases the risk of diabetes, high blood pressure, cardiovascular events. And that’s one of the greatest detriments from obesity inside and out.

Chef AJ: And some people could have that not even know it.

Dr Columbus Batiste: Oh, absolutely. I mean, your outward appearance doesn’t necessarily reflect, in all instances, the burden of disease that you could have on the inside in terms of visceral fat. And just like the same as people walk around, oftentimes you hear them say, I’ve been healthy every single day of my life. I never had any medical problems really. It’s just you were unaware of it. And so that’s oftentimes the situation as it pertains to visceral fat in this obesity on the inside.

Chef AJ: Yeah, what do we do?

Dr Columbus Batiste: Well, you know, I mean, I think one of the biggest triggers for all of this stuff, to be honest with you and I think, you know, I think everything is going to be B.C and A.C, before COVID and after COVID. Right. And so that’s going to be earmarked, I think, in all of our minds forever as 2020. And so I think one of the things that 2020 demonstrated for all of Americans all over the world was this heightened sense of stress, this level of stress that all of us seemed to become across the aware of whether or not it was financial from loss of jobs, whether or not it was from an issue of being forced into sequestration because of this, this illness that was going on or whether or not it was any other particular situation from family or social dynamics. And as a result of this stress, we know in all situations that an acute stress is needed. So, you know, when we’re running away from a dog, we need this heightened state of stress. You know, we need this. But unfortunately, we see research has shown us that weight gain is tied to stress. And about one fourth of Americans really say that their stress is at an all-time high, some as high as eight on a ten-point scale. And so this is really the problem because in a chronic state, what ends up happening is that we have continual ongoing bouts of stress. We generate cortisol and it goes on and on and on that when this happens, all of a sudden it increases our appetite. All of a sudden, it increased our motivation to eat. All of a sudden, these are all the things that when cortisol levels are at a high. And so in the short term state, these cortisol levels. All their life, the stress doesn’t go away. It’s every single day from your job, it’s every single day from the politics of it’s every single day from your relationship, then all of a sudden they get stuck in this sort of positioning. And we just crave these high fat foods that are there on a repeated basis. And that’s one of the things that leads to a detriment that these increase. And that’s why oftentimes I’ll joke, not my statement, but say stress equals dessert spelled backwards and because desserts are filled with ultra-refined, highly processed foods that’s what ends up happening.

Chef AJ: So that’s interesting. That stress makes us crave these fatty foods. I did not know that.

Dr Columbus Batiste: Yeah, yeah. You know, I mean, that’s the crazy part. It’s almost like which came first. The proverbial chicken or the egg or the dog chasing its tail is that we see that we crave these types of foods, these highly high fat foods, but also blue ends up happening to us. What was that? Now this distress that’s inside of our body and we have this intake, then the insulin levels become high and then your hormone levels get thrown off our ghrelin and in leptin right the left hand says that we’re satisfied. We don’t have to stop. We can’t stop eating. Whereas the ghrelin is the hunger hormone, leptin is the satisfying hormone. And so these things begin to cycle. And then what ends up happening as a result is that the fat and sugar-filled foods within it feeds this whole cascade that dampens the stress hormones. So you actually feel as if you’re comforted. It’s like a drug. So we begin to eat them more and more and more. We crave it. We eat it. The body takes it up quickly and then we eat more. And it’s a vicious cycle that leads to weight gain and some might say addiction.

Dr Columbus Batiste: I would believe that, it’s like once you pop, you just can’t stop.

Dr Columbus Batiste: That’s right. That’s right.

Chef AJ: And the food was engineered to be that way.

Dr Columbus Batiste: It was. It is, you know, and that’s the persistence issue with is that we see this more and more and more inside the foods that we can’t pronounce the ingredients. And this is the thing that is the substance of our culture that’s there at every single turn that you become an outlier if you choose not to. And so how do you resist this ongoing onslaught of temptation that’s around you?

Chef AJ: Well, that’s a good question, and I’d like you to answer it. And also, I mean, people have had stress throughout human history, but we didn’t have this obesity epidemic. So what’s changed?

Dr Columbus Batiste: I mean, I believe our food has changed, but not so much, just our food. Everything has changed, right? Bombarded with advertisements. We live inside of these food deserts and food swamps, the food deserts being an absence of health, promoting foods, that foods swamp being situations in environments where you have an overabundance of highly refined, ultra-processed foods. And so what? Every turn you’re bombarded with these advertisements, from TV commercials to radio commercials, to print ads to billboards to your famous celebrities. And so now all of a sudden, you start to crave these things. Now the markets are situated just in the way. So in that way, it taps into your, your psyche. I never forget, like early on and you know, I met you early on in my journey. All right. In transition, I remember I had all this stuff. I’m on the checkout line. I have been waiting there for a long time, a long time, you know, choosing the wrong line. And what’s surrounding you when you’re inside this checkout line? All those temptations, those favorite candy bars and everything else, they’re right there. I remember all these vegetables on there. At the last minute, I grabbed the candy bar and I put it on the conveyor belt and the checkout clerk. I’ll never forget him saying this to me. He said, Man, I thought you were the healthiest person I’ve ever seen in my life until I realized you were just like me. Right? That we are all subject to this kind of guilty pleasure that’s there. And so how do you overcome it? How do you overcome it? And so I think the sum total, in all honesty, it really starts with my sister. I would say a patient, observing my own sister and her journey throughout here, the journey, I realized and I developed this catchphrase. I don’t know if it’s mine or not, but it’s one in which I develop called, you have to get selfish. And I remember the story with my sister. I remember, you know, my sister knew about nutrition. She could speak to you about all of the ins and outs of everything. She’s not a physician, but she is a health care provider. And, you know, her weight has ballooned up and her actions don’t always follow what she knows. And so throughout the years after having three daughters, home schooling the daughters and so forth, she had a moment in time. You know, she ran a business from home at the same point in time, a very successful business from home. Home schooled, all successfully got scholarships to college, and her weight ballooned astronomically as I would tell her, Listen, you have to get yourself together. And she would say, I know, I know, I know. Apparently, she took her daughter to an amusement park and realized that she couldn’t ride the ride with her daughter. And so that was the moment that really spearheaded her into making a change. And all of a sudden she started making changes. She started moving towards a whole food plant-based diet, she started exercise and she started drinking her water and she dropped over 100 pounds. She was looking incredible and was moving and some of you out there were listening. You have you’ve you’ve heard this story. You’ve seen this story. You’ve lived this story. And then all of a sudden she hit a bump in life and got rear-ended in a more vehicle accident that stymied her ability to exercise. That weighed heavily on her mental aspect and got a little bit depressed. And all of a sudden the weight began to increase again. As she looked at me, it was just like, You know, where am I supposed to do? And they just came to me just spell out it just fell out of my mouth and I said, You have to get selfish. You have to get selfish, and she looked at me, it was like, who are you talking about? I said, You have to get selfish. You’re always giving to your family, for your business. You’re giving to others. You have to get selfish.

Dr Columbus Batiste: I remember, I listen a lot to Kobe Bryant now after he passed, right? And I remember him giving a Hall of Fame speech or something a reflection of that. He talked about that. It’s a sacrifice. It’s a degree of selfishness to achieve the greatness that you want to get that you have to you have to miss out on certain things in order to achieve the goal you want to achieve. And so that’s where I crafted the idea of selfish and I told you, you have to get selfish and we’re selfish. Mean, it’s not selfish in the standpoint of proverbial you. You’re just withholding from others. But S stands for spiritual. The E stands for exercise. The L stands for love. The F stands for food, real food, whole food. The I stands for intimacy. The S stands for sleep. In the H stands for humor. LAUGHTER. Right. And so as I began to explore all those avenues, what I realized is that it’s so applicable to weight loss is so applicable to what I do in the field of cardiology in terms of when you want to achieve real health, true health, complete health, total health, you have to get selfish.

Chef AJ: Can we take each letter and talk about it?

Dr Columbus Batiste: Yeah, I would love to. So you know what spiritual will stand for? So, you know, we all have come from different backgrounds and different belief systems and so spiritual does it have to mean that particular religious practice, spiritual could mean just simply taking moments to breathe. That’s moments of meditation. That’s moments of mindfulness. And what seas have shown is that when you begin to partake as far as in meditation, when you begin to stop and breathe and take deep breaths in and out, when you breathe out, you’re heightening your parasympathetic tone. That’s the yang to the yin. That’s the thing that suppresses the sympathetic drive, that stress hormone cascade that when you begin to do these things in that mindfulness, you strengthen the prefrontal cortex, you strengthen the area of the reasoning part of your brain, that area of the brain that allows you to make decisions. That area of the brain that some call your willpower. Right. And so when you begin to do this all of a sudden now you’re able to stop and think, why is it that I’m craving what I’m craving that when you set your intention out for the day, stays are shown, you’re more inclined to follow through with that. So what do I encourage my patients to do? I tell them to start off first. Simply just do 30 seconds. Right? I’m just going to stop and I’m going to be right. So there’s no weirdness to it or anything of that sort. And you’re going to breathe and it stays. It has shown it relaxes the blood vessels. It does all. It helps with diabetes, too as well. They’re more inclined with diabetics. So there’s so much power in just this moment of taking it from the spiritual standpoint that it can be helpful for you. That’s a start. We want to start outside the kitchen. When you’re looking on your journey towards true weight loss to true health, start outside the kitchen. So something simple that sets the foundation for your day. It’s also called a keystone habit. That keystone habit sets the foundation that is the buttress for success in your journey. So that’s a first step, first step.

Chef AJ: So just breathe for 30 seconds, any special type of breathing?

Dr Columbus Batiste: Yeah, I mean, well, there’s all sorts. You know, you can do box breathing. There’s different types that are there. But I mean, just make it simple, don’t make it hard or complex. The great thing is that many of your watches, many of the smart watches in the smart phones all have apps that can help you with the breathing and just do a minute meditation, they may call it. And it’s not as if you’re having to adopt a new religion, but it’s more of just you’re trying to clear your thoughts because we live in such an environment right where we’re bombarded by so many things at once and we call it multitasking, which is something that’s brand new since 1960s. It’s not anything that’s long term. It’s and this was meant to describe computers working, you know, we don’t multitask. Well, whether you’re a man or a woman, I want to tell you, you know, oftentimes they’ll joke and say, Oh, women can multitask. Men cannot do more than one thing. None of us can do anything very well when we do multiple. So being able to stop and focus is really the intention and focus of what our goals are before us.

Chef AJ: Somebody once told me the definition of multitasking is doing several things poorly.

Dr Columbus Batiste: Absolutely. Absolutely. I agree. So that’s the S. So once you do that, you start to get in tune with your body. You start to get in tune with the environment, with others, with the Earth and with your connection. And so that becomes extremely empowered from a spiritual standpoint. The E is the part that always the exercise is the part that always makes everyone a little bit kind of nervous. Talk about exercise. You know, it’s and I always tell folks, I’m not big. I’m not. I’m not a big proponent of exercise, although I do it every single day. I’m a big proponent of moving more than sitting. I’m a big proponent of doing something called neat – non exercise activity thermogenesis. That means, you know, just getting up and walking. Moving around. This is another keystone habit that simply this idea of moving that you burn calories, that you’re moving around on a constant basis, that this is helpful for your body. Now, I’ll tell you, many people think, Oh, if I exercise, that’s the key towards losing weight. No, really. Not at all, actually. Exercise is good for your cardiovascular system. I’ll tell you that exercise is great for your outlook, for giving you a sense of euphoria, for giving you a sense of happiness, that’s important. It’s a great way in terms of increasing your muscular tone, which is helpful as we all grow older in years lived. So exercise is extremely important. And yes, it does burn calories, but that’s not the amount of calories that you burn. You have to understand that your body is going to conspire against you. Your body will conspire against you. And what does that mean? That means that you think you’re exercising and burn up all these calories. So now you can afford to eat whatever it is that you want to eat. You are wrong because your body’s going to take you there and beyond. You’re going to see all your weight loss goals thwarted right in place. So exercise is not for that, but exercise is for your total health because as you begin to exercise and tone up, you start to feel better and all of a sudden you’re getting this reciprocal type of encouragement. Well, good as you stop and you’re looking at yourself in the mirror and you’re seeing that all of a sudden it’s slimmer here or more muscular here. If you’re a man, whatever it is or a woman or whatever your particular goals are. And that’s one of the main goals where it becomes important.

Dr Columbus Batiste: We can’t be confused, right? We do not want to get stuck into an idea of thinking that exercise alone is going to spur on all of the effects that we want. It’s going to have a positive effect on our appetite. You know, it’s going to reduce the ghrelin hormone, which is the hunger hormone level increases something called your peptide YY hormone that’s released in the gut, which gives you like a sense of being satisfied and full, and that it also is helpful against metabolic impairments like like insulin and other issues hoping to improve that control. So there’s tons of benefits from exercise. And so that’s the thing that we see as a cardiologist, people always ask me, Doc, what’s the best kind of exercise for me to do? And I always say the one that you enjoy the most that you’ll keep up doing. So I tell people, dance if you like dancing, dance, if you like playing tennis, play tennis. If you like going for walks with your dog, go for walks with your dog. My mom is now 80 and something shocks me every time I say her age, but she looks great, so I don’t even mind. And so she has a wonderful dog that she loves so much. And some days she doesn’t feel like getting out of bed, but she’s like, the pressure makes me get up and take her out for a walk. She makes me engage and she meets people. Everything as a result of pressures. And so having animals is extremely beneficial for your activity and in general for your goals towards being selfish.

Chef AJ: Well, you know, we started this conversation talking about stress, and I would imagine exercise is also a stress reliever, as is having pets.

Dr Columbus Batiste: Absolutely. It absolutely is. I mean, that’s one of the great parts about exercise that it does indeed help alleviate stress. I can tell you firsthand. Recently, I had an experience where I got upset and so I’m human. Like everyone else, I got upset and I just stopped and I felt myself going there. I felt my body kind of cringing with the stress hormones cascading and I said I need to go work out. I went outside, went for a run, came back in, did some weights and I felt good. Endorphins start surging. I felt great. Then you have. Now imagine you do that with an animal that’s looking at you and laughing and trying to show you love as well and this reciprocating passion. There is so much power to that.

Chef AJ: Yeah, nice. So SE followed by L

Dr. Columbus Batiste: Love, love, love a thing that we don’t have enough of. And with L, I’ll say first, you have to love yourself, right? I mean, oftentimes when people, why are you wanting to lose weight? Is it because you think you’re unworthy? Is it because you think you’re unhealthy? Is it because you’re trying to get love from others? I think one of the first key things is loving yourself. You have to love yourself, and as you begin to love yourself, accepting yourself for who you are. All right. And so, you know, as we begin to exhibit love to ourselves and exhibit love to others, what happens is that you release this hormone called oxytocin, the love hormone, the anti-stress hormone that causes your vessels to dilate that heals the heart that lowers the blood pressure that there’s power. Indeed, within this right helps you to you and find your base once again, because if you’re doing it because of a special event, because you want to look a certain way for an anniversary or for or for a party or you’re doing it because your significant other is demanding it of you, that’s not the reason to do it. You have to love yourself first. You have to. You need healing first to happen. Within you before you can move on to ever achieve that mental health and satisfaction that you’re yearning for. And so that’s why I love it. It’s one of the central components of this. Our love to others, but also our love to ourselves becomes important in this process.

Chef AJ: So how do we love ourselves?

Dr. Columbus Batiste: It’s hard. It’s not easy. It’s not easy. You know, we live with constant negative thoughts. Right? I mean, I think studies have validated this over and over again. We don’t need others to say negative things about this because we somehow pick up things that we’re not worthy of. We’re not good enough. We didn’t do this and that, Oh, I don’t look good in this dress or this suit or I have this or that wrong with myself. And we have to stop and we have to force ourselves to say positive things. That’s one thing I give credit to my wife. She was always every single day when we took the kids to school, she would say, make them say positive affirmations to themselves, speak it out loud, positive affirmations about I’m smart, I’m handsome or I’m pretty. I’m successful, I’m going to do well and I can write, not that I can’t, but that I can in positive affirmations. And so we have to begin this process of the journey of drowning out all of the people who like to comment, the commentators in your life and focus their energy inside in terms of once again recognizing that you are beautifully and wonderfully made just the way that you are.

Chef AJ: Easier said than done, though, right?

Dr. Columbus Batiste: It is. It is extremely easier said than done. Listen, I can tell you, I can tell you a thousand things negative about myself or things I want to improve that there’s no way I can because it’s not the way I was made, right? But I have to. Everyday I try my best to focus on what I do, have positive attributes and to try and improve and be better than a better tomorrow than I am today. As much as possible for me, not for anyone else, but for me,

Chef AJ: It seems that social media has made it worse.

Dr. Columbus Batiste: Absolutely. Absolutely. That’s why studies have shown for every positive aspect of social media, there is a flip side negative aspect in terms of depression in terms of feeling isolated in terms of this whole drive, that a cycle that’s there. I’ve seen others inside of their alleged best light. Right. And you look and you’re like, well, they’re achieving this. They’re doing this well, how they look so great. And that’s why, to some degree, I’ve seen some things for people, and it’s probably happened for a number of years now that where they are going on and they are showing themselves when they are not sucking their stomach and they’re not flexing their muscles when they are all dolled up or or glammed up that they’re looking themselves. And I think there’s power in that. There’s power in that because guess what? There’s beauty in who we are. I mean, that’s why I tell my wife she doesn’t have any wrinkles. I don’t and get me out there, get in trouble. So if she had wrinkles, I would love every single wrinkle that she had on her because what they tell me is they tell me that these are all the things that created her beautifully, the way that she is in the person that I love in the character that she is, right. That doesn’t come with anything but time. Like fine wine. So it’s important.

Chef AJ: Wonderful. SEL. This reminds me of the Nat King Cole song.

Dr. Columbus Batiste: That’s right. Yes. Now I can just hand this one over to you because you know this one. Food, real food.

Chef AJ: Food, right? Not fake. Now we’re going to the kitchen.

Dr. Columbus Batiste: Come on. Now we’re going to the kitchen. Now we want to go and have something that’s real that’s not made in the plant, but made from plants. We want food that is of substance, food that’s alive, food that will lie in well-being. I tell people all the time, you know, it’s about eating foods that are health promoting. All right. You know, I love the calorie density scale. I love all the simple aspects of making eating easy because eating is culture. Eating is who we are. And so it’s been transformed. But here’s the thing about culture, right? Culture, the culture of. I hate to call out name brands, but let’s say processed packaged sugar, sweetened beverages, and pop and chips, and cakes that can survive a nuclear Holocaust. That’s not culture, right? That’s something that was created that now we became adapted to inside of our environments. And so we need to go back to all of our true state, our true culture. And we go back in heritage, which means we ate of the Earth. We eat the food of the Earth. It’s what we did. It doesn’t matter where you hail from in terms of ethnicity. That is the bulk of what you ate and that was demonstrated in blue zones. That’s what’s demonstrated around the world. That’s what’s been reflected as a means of health and longevity. We want to eat like a pauper so we can live like a king. That’s where it becomes important.

Chef AJ: Eat like a pauper and live like a king.

Dr. Columbus Batiste: That’s right. That’s right.

Chef AJ: Are there any particular foods you recommend or don’t recommend for health in general and weight loss in particular?

Dr. Columbus Batiste: Well, I mean, I love obviously the higher the water content of foods, the better off that you’re going to be. Right. So your vegetables are extreme, especially your green leafy vegetables are extremely powerful, not only for anti-cancer, for dietary nitrates that are going to help strengthen your cardiovascular system. We know as well that your berries, rich in antioxidants. I mean, I love it very simplistically. If your fruit basically doesn’t turn brown, it’s rich in antioxidants. It’s an easy way to go, right. So your blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, blackberries, those are going to be the things that you want to engage in as well. Your mushrooms are going to be powerful, having your onions and then going into your beans and all these things for resistant carbohydrates, that will add the protein source. For those of you who still believe that may be a component of protein deficiency out there. There’s more than enough to give you all of the macronutrients that you need and desire to achieve your weight, your weight goals. But I think the most important thing is that we cannot be deceived. Our greatest enemy is still the standard American diet. It infiltrates every single aspect we see plant-based littered across every single package. Now we see vegan, all these different things and many times. Sorry about this, I may hurt the feelings of any of you out there, but it’s just standard American diet and style standard American diet, plant-based, our standard American diet, gluten-free, paleo, whatever you want to call it. That’s the detriment. That’s the thing that metabolic syndrome is made up of high end salt, fat and sugar. Right? Those are the things that disease is made of. That’s the things that spur on your weight gain from an entirely different system. The fried foods, right, that you say oh but it is vegan. I went to this vegan fair and I had it. We know it can still stimulate the advanced glycation end products which independently have been associated with weight gain and metabolic syndrome. And so we have to be very careful in terms or, I should say, be very intentional. Let me rephrase. Be intentional. And this goes back to the first asset, spiritual mindset, that mental mindfulness of what I’m choosing to eat, that you’re going in with a plan ahead of time. And that’s where there’s power in your journey towards making sure that your food is ideal.

Chef AJ: OK, so you mentioned advanced glycation end products are associated with weight gain and metabolic syndrome in case our viewers are new to these terms, could you tell us what advanced glycation end products are and what metabolic syndrome is?

Dr. Columbus Batiste: Yeah, so advanced glycation end product is really the kind of like this binding of your proteins and the sugars. And oftentimes what ends up happening is you have a larger reaction to the fancy term that basically for those of you out there who cook, it’s kind of like when you’re making your brew, you’re making your gravy and you put the flour inside the pan and you have the oil or you had the whatever, and you’re getting that brown color in texture or you’re toast or even when you’re going, you’re grilling and you put those brown marks on there. That reaction is the same thing that happens inside of your arteries. It’s the same thing that happens in your body. And so one of the things, of course, is to try and prevent that as much as possible. And so we know that this advanced glycation process occurs more predominantly inside processed foods, animal-rich foods. It can occur inside all foods, but more so exponentially inside those. And that’s what leads to a lot of ailments. So we look at metabolic syndrome. This is a matter of saying that, let’s forget about being big boned, or whether or not you’re heavy or not. It’s looking at your waist circumference for women, bigger than 35 for men greater than 40, that we see that your waist circumference has increased. We see that your triglycerides, which require you to go and get a checkup with your doctor. Right. That your triglycerides are elevated. That’s your blood sugar. It’s not exactly normal, even whether or not you have a quote unquote touch of diabetes or not that when you look at the cascade of all these things with elevated blood pressure, that this is the stuff that disease is made of that increases your risk towards Alzheimer’s, increases your risk towards heart disease and heart failure and stroke. And this is where it’s concerning overall. So the combination of oxidative stress, physical location, all these things are a manifestation. They’re all around us, but our food can add to it. That’s why in many instances, I’ll talk about how our health equals our resiliency divided by our stress. And so what that means is that our food can add to our resiliency, or it can add to our stress. You choose by what you put in your body. So the food you eat if you eat certain foods, it adds to the stress, oxidative stress, advanced glycation end products. Some small studies have suggested an increase in salivary cortisol levels with animal proteins and so forth. And so as we begin this whole process, this journey that we see that this indeed happens, it leads to trimethylamine, oxide and atherosclerosis from your gut microbiome. And so the food we eat plays such a substantial role not only in our weight, but once again giving at the core the root cause analysis, right? Is that is it a disease state that we’re living in when we’re over obese or overweight? We have to look at that. Is there something that is brewing underneath the surface? And once again, 2020 demonstrated that because of the burden of those who suffered in this account, for those who have poor dietary habits, those who have a higher propensity towards chronic disease. And so this becomes important.

Chef AJ: So let’s talk about some particular foods, if you don’t mind, because you mentioned ultra processed food, processed food, I think most people know it’s not healthy. What about animal products in terms of both health and weight?

Dr. Columbus Batiste: Yeah. So I mean, first of all, animal products we know are going to be number one in calories, right? We know what’s going to be high in fat. We know that it is. Studies have shown that animal protein too, as well as an isolate, is connected with lower longevity, a higher rate or mortality, increased risk of cardiovascular events, as well as cancers. So we look at red meat specifically starting there. So where’s red meat? We’re talking about beef. We’re talking about lamb. We’re talking about pork. We’re talking about all these aspects there, especially processed meats. These are the things that have definitively, defensively beyond a shadow of a doubt. There’s no argument that they are a carcinogen, that they are associated with cardiovascular events. Right now, it’s like when you’re looking around for friends to kind of tell you, you go friend to friend to friend until someone gives you the information you want to hear. So what people do, they search around until someone tells them what? You can have a little bit, a little bit won’t hurt you. But the reality of it is, is the fact that study after study really, truly confirms the detrimental effects of it. So what about things like chicken and eggs and so forth? Well, what we see with these is we see that they increase the inflammatory process. The same thing markers of inflammation that they increase this the transition of the gut microbiome, which is for those of you out there who may not be aware of what that is, where more bacterial DNA than we are human DNA. And so we live in a symbiotic relationship with bacteria in our body. And so every action that we do is either feeding the good bacteria or the bad bacteria. And so as we feed the bad bacteria, it can promote kidney disease, high blood pressure, heart disease, and stroke, and on and on and on. And so these foods have been associated with increasing that risk. So when we look in general about it, are these health promoting foods? The answer clearly is no, they can’t be health promoting foods based on the sum total of the studies out there. And so that’s one of the reasons why I don’t recommend it on top of the fact that most people are not going to eat the meat raw. That means that they’re frying. Yet they’re doing all sorts of things that now increase all those other processes that I mentioned to you, grilling it, adding sauces, and so forth to it. And all of these things add to the detriment, increase the burden as far as weight gain.

Chef AJ: What about dairy products?

Dr. Columbus Batiste: Well, obviously dairy obviously is going to be high in fat too as well, oftentimes. And even when you say low fat or no fat, it’s just a matter of volume as it relates to the amount of water that’s added to it. So these things trigger an association with prostate cancer increase in breast cancer, too as well. And so we have to be very much so aware when you look at cheese and the amount of saturated fat in the calorie and the sodium that’s there. With cheese, the hardest thing for folks to kind of give up oftentimes is cheese. No matter how it smells, they still have trouble with that. And here’s the thing with cheese and dairy is that many populations across the United States in the world are lactose intolerant, that they have the inability. So for years, I ate cheese and I went and I stayed in the bathroom. You know, not knowing, you know, and then try to minimize the cheese. But still, my stomach will go inside of just rollercoasters, lactose intolerant that you’re causing a detriment to yourself, that there’s a problem that’s there. And yet there are mandates that require inside of our school system to give milk products to our children unless they have a special notation saying that they can’t have it. So I mean, there is a great travesty in terms of our country, in terms of the health and health promotion that needs to happen.

Chef AJ: Well, I remember interviewing Dr. Mills once and said there’s a racial bias in the USDA guidelines.

Dr. Columbus Batiste: Well, I mean, when you ignore that a large segment of the population who happens to be those of people of color who are lactose intolerant, it’s not just people of color, it’s other ethnic groups and there’s a portion of Caucasians that are lactose intolerant as well. But when you look at the predominance of people of color, that’s problematic, right? And that now when you have subsidies and you have other things that that move people in that direction towards dairy products and on the food substances that are not health-promoting, you know, one of the things that if you eat the foods that the FDA recommended, the increased burden of obesity and chronic disease is through the roof high from a stage in Journal of American Medical Association. So, you know, it’s almost one of these old sayings of do as I say, not as I do and I demonstrate. So they are saying one thing: eat healthfully, have a healthy plate. But yet the subsidies go elsewhere. And that’s where it’s problematic. And that’s where education and the work that you’re doing to educate people out there is so important because we have to educate people. So there’s awareness because when we see these symbols of approved by the FDA or even the American Heart Association, which I’m a big supporter of in general, that we see some of these labels of this is heart-healthy and everything else. That’s not true. If your food has to have a label on it, promoting its healthy aspects is probably problematic. All right. I haven’t seen a label on broccoli or kale, and I tell people all the time, Listen, we all know who Madonna is. We know who J.Lo is. We know who Michael Jordan is. We knew who Michael was, right? Singular names. Celebrities. So I want you to eat the celebrities of food, broccoli, kale, corn. I mean, I want you to have the celebrities of food that have singular ingredients, a singular name, apples, oranges, carrots. Those are the things that you want to partake of on a regular basis.

Chef AJ: Speaking of foods that are being promoted as heart healthy, we hear that red wine is very good for us and I’m not sure it is, especially for people that are trying to lose weight.

Dr. Columbus Batiste: Yeah. You know, I think it’s problematic when we talk about why from a characterization of a health promoting food, there is enough evidence to really speak to the serious effects of worrying about whether or not it’s cancer. We know from a caloric standpoint that folks have way more than what is even quote-unquote recommended and that we know that part of the benefit, the alleged benefits, are the same things that are found in grapes that are found in some seeds and that’s and so forth. And so that’s what we need to partake of, not be highly concentrated form from a fermented grape. We don’t need the fermented, concentrated form that we all know is an extrapolation right now that’s going to have higher fructose and everything like that there. That’s going to in the words of some authors out there harm the liver, right, and spur on metabolic disease. We want to be very cautious in our approach and eat the whole fruit, the real food, and that’s what we’re going to benefit from. You know, when I get the question about alcohol, I always ask people, Why is it that you’re drinking alcohol? Is it because you’re waiting to unwind from the day, the stresses of life? Is it because you feel as if you need it in order to have a good time? Because now we need to go back to step one, our mindfulness and really look at why am I? Am I using this as a drug? You know, because when we say stress equals demands minus resources, then we feel the demands of life are high. And so we don’t have adequate resources. So we’re trying to fill this gap with something with a crutch. For some it’s drugs, some it is food, some it is alcohol, right? And so we have to ask ourselves, why are we engaging in this? Why are we engaging in this?

Chef AJ: And what about S.O.S, sugar, oil, salt?

Dr. Columbus Batiste: Oh, my goodness. I mean, sugar first, let’s start first with sugar and its harmful effects on the heart. We know study after study has shown whether it’s sugar sweetened beverages, added sweeteners to your food substances and sugar is basically ubiquitous. It’s everywhere. It’s in everything that’s processed, it’s in everything that’s packaged. But once again, if you’re eating whole foods, then you have control because in nature, sugar is bound to fiber. It’s never seen in isolation like this. You’re never going to have it by itself where it can drive up the whole metabolic profile once again, raising the insulin and raising the storage of fat and so forth, that’s there. And so sugar has been associated with harmful outcomes for the heart and longevity in general and for weight gain, obviously from a caloric standpoint. And so that’s where I have a major problem with added sugar. And so understanding and people say, Well, what about this type of sugar? What about that type of sugar? You know, I always say the same thing. You know, if aliens were coming from outer space and they’re like, we want to get all the humans. Well, there’s a bunch of humans and look all different, right, but we’re all humans. And so there are a bunch of different things that are mislabeled as sugar. Different forms of sugar. But it’s all sugar at the end of the day. If it ends in “ose”, it is a form of sugar, and that’s really the problem in general.

Chef AJ: A lot of people are turning to aspartame, low-calorie sweeteners, stevia, that kind of thing.

Dr. Columbus Batiste: Yeah. You know, I mean, there’s growing data as it relates to artificial sweeteners and the harmful effects of artificial sweeteners. And so we have to be very, very careful. Not only do they increase the sweeten level, right, our sugar, you look at all these added sugars in processed and refined and compared to what’s found in nature, and it’s through the roof. It’s a lot higher. And so our level of addictiveness and our taste buds get changed and transformed. And so we have to be very careful and sensitive to that, that effect.

Chef AJ: Yeah. So we did sugar. Now, how about oil?

Dr. Columbus Batiste: Well, I mean, listen, oil, what? What else can be said about oil with the amount of calories in oil? Right from just one tablespoon, a half of an ounce. And we’re looking at the amount of oil, 250 calories, we’re looking at the gross amount that’s there, that is added, not just dimension. As far as we look at this from a strict caloric standpoint, let’s not think about anything else, just a calorie standpoint. It’s so easy if you’re soaking your bread and you’re saying, I’m just going to have the dip inside of the oil that’s there now with too many people using it for frying. So what do they do? They’re changing the boiling point and they’re raising the temperature there, which means it’s in the morning. So people oftentimes like to say, Hey, doc, well, you know the predominant studies show that the olive oil and extra virgin olive oil was really good. So I bought a big bag of olive oil there. I’m using it to fry up all my stuff. Or do you realize that you’re changing the configuration of that oil that’s making it harmful for your body? And that’s that among many reasons, not just the caloric standpoint, but all of these is what ends up leading to problems inside the body with the endothelium, one of the key areas there of the body, as well as perpetuating this whole idea of metabolic syndrome.

Chef AJ: Wow. Yeah. Like you said, just based on caloric density, it’s not going to be easy for people to lose weight if they’re still including in any discernible amount, I would imagine.

Dr. Columbus Batiste: Yeah, I mean, that’s a simple way. You know, everyone has an opinion about everything, but we look at just face value. It’s high calorie, it’s a high-calorie food. So if you’re eating a high-calorie food that oftentimes we don’t, we’re not very conscious of the amount, we aren’t conscious of the amount. And so what ends up happening when we have oil and we do, we end up increasing the salt now the salt goes that right because we’re trying to draw the flavor out. And so we increase the salt and our salt levels are extremely high on top of the processed foods, which are the biggest culprit for salt and sodium. This is our system. And that’s been shown to be associated with a number of different ailments inside the body, most specifically the heart. It’s what we’re kind of looking at heart failure. We’re looking at high blood pressure, we’re looking at a stroke and heart attacks. We’re seeing all these things. But what’s interesting is that it also impairs the endothelium, which is that line of the vessels. So the Salt Alone study was an objective American College of Cardiology really showing the detrimental effects of salt in all of the body organs. Right. We think of it only as, OK, what’s going to cost for retention? And maybe that’s the reason why hypotheses. That’s why my blood pressure went up. It’s deeper. It’s layered in terms of like, really the impact of it. So at the end of the day, everything falls into one another. And so what we have to understand is that the food we eat plays a role in our mindset, and our mindset plays a role in the food that we eat. And it’s a circular process that happens.

Chef AJ: I completely agree with you as a chef. When you use oil, you need to use way more salt than you would have if you hadn’t. And you know, I love this idea of density because I once saw a visual that for the same amount of calories in one tablespoon of any kind of oil, which is not very much, you could have two pounds of zucchini. That’s a lot more food.

Dr. Columbus Batiste: Absolutely. Absolutely. And you know, you think about really what is it really accomplishing? I mean, I’ll tell you, my family’s from New Orleans, and so we do greens and bread, beans and rice and all this other business like that like an awful lot. And I’ll never forget when I transitioned this way now about nearly 15 years ago and started being aggressive, we will cook greens without oil. And I’ll never forget one Thanksgiving. A family member brought greens over that had oil, which is the norm. And my wife, she came to me, she was like, Oh, I hate you. I say, No, that’s not a nice thing to say to me on Thanksgiving. Well, what are you talking about? She was like, I can’t stand these now. I used to love such and such as greens, you know, and I can’t stand it because it coats your mouth and it’s there and it sits and there is zero reason for it. So fast forward. This past Thanksgiving, you were down deep south from my wife’s family and my wife specifically told my mother in law, she said, Listen, do not cook with any oil inside of the Greens when you make the greens for Columbus and for me, you know, no oil. She was like, but I always use oil, do not use any oil. And they came out great with no oil.

Chef AJ: Yeah, it’s once you get used to it, it really is hard to go back to having it. That’s amazing. So we got to SELFI

Dr. Columbus Batiste: Intimacy, intimacy. I mean, what do we what’s so important? What’s one of the hallmarks of your program, right? It’s the interaction. It’s companionship. It’s someone that you can have a relationship with. I always kind of tell the story when we talk about intimacy, it’s not a sexual way but once again, referring to my mom and her dog. You know, she lives with me now. I live with my mom. As I tell folks, she lives with me just for clarity, right? And so she’ll say oftentimes, Oh, precious is my best friend. Like, what am I chopped liver? Precious knows when she said she knows where she’s happy. She knows when she’s in pain any of those things that are there. And so they have an intimate relationship. And so when you’re on this journey towards weight loss, you need a companion, you need someone that can go with you along this journey that can hold you accountable, that you can look to and you can express your challenges and your successes. And that’s what’s important. And so those who are going to be successful, oftentimes you’re going whether or not it’s a program like the one page it has, whether or not it’s a program that you find elsewhere, whether or not it’s a close friend. It’s so important to develop a relationship, a group of people that you can trust and that you can engage in.

Chef AJ: Yeah, that’s wonderful that your mom has a wonderful animal companion.

Dr. Columbus Batiste: Yes, yes, yes. So that is the I for intimacy. The S the second is sleep. So I’m going to put you on the spot. So do you choose if you have more than four hours of sleep, just raise your hand, raise your hand, just put your finger up if you have more for four hours sleep, OK? If you have more than six hours of sleep, leave your finger at more than eight hours of sleep. Leave your finger up. Great. Now you’re a rarity, right? Because most people do not. Most people are sleep-deprived. Most people are sleep-deprived inside of our society. And sleep plays an astronomical role in your weight journey. It plays a role in your health. It plays a role in your stress. That’s their stage show that what happens when you’re sleep deprived is it increases the stress hormones. Right? You know, when you sleep later, you get hungrier. Once they found that people who kind of sleep, I think it was somewhere around five and a half or five hours a night over a couple of week period of time when they were on a calorie restricted diet. They had a less fat loss when compared to those who slept eight or more hours a night just by sleeping more. They increased the burden of their weight loss and their sleep also, which shows that it adjusts those two hormones. You remember ghrelin as a hunger. I always remember grilling because those are for hunger, you know, versus leptin satisfied. And so where does it influence those? And so once again, leptin is decreased. Your appetite to left and levels are high. We feel fuller when ghrelin levels are high, they stimulate our appetite. We’re hungry. And so sleep restriction weight as it increases the ghrelin levels. We all know you get the munchies when you’re up late at night right and it decreases leptin, which means that sense of feeling full. And that’s where it really can be problematic in general as we’re looking at sleep and this impact of sleep on our bodies.

Chef AJ: Yeah. You know, it wasn’t until I was a little older that I really put sleep up there is as important as food and exercise, and you can’t function if you don’t have good sleep.

Dr. Columbus Batiste: No, you really can’t. I mean, most of us think we could. I mean, I train back in the day before they put the importance on sleep. And so I remember working 40 hours a day like straight up, and I had to keep everything written down. If I didn’t, I would forget everything. And I thought, Oh, this is the stuff. This is what makes your bones. This is what you know, you’re a better doctor by doing it. And that was horrible. Horrible because you’re not able to process your neighbor to learn that you need sleep in order to prepare to learn any sleep in order to click the save button. Sleeping is like clicking the save button after you’ve learned you have to go ahead and click save inside when you’re drying your notes up, and that’s what sleep does for us. It’s so important. It also alters your reward system that’s there, and it becomes more active in response to food after sleep loss. So we have to be very much aware of our sleep because of the role that plays.

Chef AJ: It seems like many of these principles are intertwined because if somebody practices self-love and puts themselves first, they’re going to prioritize things like exercise and sleep and food preparation and review. If you don’t have enough sleep, you’re never going to feel like exercising in the morning, that’s for sure.

Dr. Columbus Batiste: Absolutely. Absolutely. It’s a great way of describing. It’s all intertwined. They’re all connected. You have to be selfish. But that is the reality of being selfish. It’s true because guess what happens? That means that you may have to put off something else the demand that’s put upon you because you’re prioritizing who? Yourself, you’re prioritizing yourself to get sleep, you’re prioritizing yourself to eat healthily, you’re prioritizing yourself, to love yourself right and to move and things of that nature. And so it becomes extremely important. Here’s the one key thing, too as well. Study after study after study has confirmed that when you have a lack of sleep, your judgment is put off, your judgment is put off. So multiple studies have really validated this. This is one thing that above all else, I got into trouble with. I’m not proud of this, but I say it because I’m not proud of it. I should have handled this quite differently. But when my daughter, I believe, was a newborn and my wife was up. And this doesn’t speak favorably of me. But, you know, she said, Oh, you know, can you stay up with the baby? I said I have to go and do procedures the next day. I said, if I don’t get sleep, people literally can die, not figuratively, but literally can die. You know, and so it may have come across a little bit insensitive in that moment. But the truth of it was, is that it was a reality that my judgment when I’m there doing procedures and taking care of patients becomes impaired because of lack of sleep that can result in a horrible outcome for someone. And so we have to learn to prioritize that it doesn’t matter what your job is or profession rather.

Chef AJ: Absolutely. And you know, there’s so many substances. That people consume on a daily basis, like alcohol, like coffee that affects their sleep.

Dr. Columbus Batiste: Absolutely. You know, the coffee can linger in your system. Caffeine lingers in your system about six or seven hours after you ingest a cup of coffee, which can be problematic and they impair your sleep not only with the fact that it makes you urinate, too as well. So the later you’re having this, the more likely you’re going to wake up having to urinate. And we know that although alcohol may subjectively help you fall asleep faster, your sleep is broken and you have less deep REM sleep, which is extremely important for your health and well-being in general. So we definitely don’t want to take an alcoholic toddy, as they say at night before you go to bed,

Chef AJ: Have a kale today.

Dr. Columbus Batiste: That’s right.

Chef AJ: If there was such a thing, well, we’re down to our seventh and final principle.

Speaker 2: That’s right. Well, this is one that once again should be close to your heart. And this is really going to be about humor. It’s laughter. LAUGHTER is indeed medicine. And so the one thing about laughter that’s important in humor is the fact that it really has been shown to alter the stress hormone cascade, right? And we know stress hormones can really cause fat accumulation in the midsection more so than others. So people who are chronically stressed, are known to have a heightened amount of abdominal and visceral fat. And so there was a study that was done some years ago where basically they showed people just the idea that they were going to show them their favorite movie, right? That was going to make them laugh. Then they measured their hormonal levels and they found that they had a drop in their cortisol and adrenaline levels, just with the anticipation of the funny show that they were going to watch just for the anticipation. And there was even a further drop when they watched it. So I don’t care what you laugh at, if it’s a dirty joke, I’m a comedian. Anything of that sort. LAUGHTER is the best medicine. It’s powerful. So it starts. It’s not just weight, it’s also chronic disease. And so there’s so much power inside of laughter.

Chef AJ: These are great. So we have to get selfish if we want to be healthy and lose weight.

Dr. Columbus Batiste: We have to get selfish, get selfish out there. I’m telling you guys right now, get selfish.

Chef AJ: I see a T-shirt in your future.

Dr. Columbus Batiste: Yeah. Hashtag selfish, get selfish, right? You think about right. You want to get selfish. But here’s the thing: getting selfish isn’t just about you. You want to get selfish. Your goal is to achieve this helpful state. Not just so you can be like, show off in your bikini or your little briefs or whatever it is at the beach. But you can live a life of purpose so you can help others. You can change society and be a part of things, right? That you have. This newfound energy is not for you, just to keep it contained to yourself. Hey, it’s do something with it right to live a life of purpose. That’s why you won’t get selfish, get selfish. Change your life and change your environment. Get selfish and change your life and change your family. Get selfish and change your life and change your friends, your coworkers, and everyone inside your community.

Chef AJ: I know a lot of people feel a lot of stress and overwhelm, and you said, don’t start in the kitchen. So which of the seven principles would you recommend people start with?

Dr. Columbus Batiste: I start at the beginning with the spiritual, with the whether or not you focus on breathing meditation now through another little curveball in their gratitude. Gratitude, focus on what you’re grateful for amidst every single little store, there’s something to be grateful for. You know, when I was traveling out to Atlanta recently for Thanksgiving, the airport was shut down because of a gunman inside the airport. There was mass chaos that we were there for over three and a half hours waiting for our luggage to come out. Very stressful. And as I walked out of the area, I thought to myself, Man, I’m thankful. There could have been like an act of someone where my family could have gotten killed. There could have been something where there was trampling that there was a mass riot that happened because of fear. There’s so much still to be grateful that we got our bags and we headed out without being harmed. And so in that moment, it’s so easy to be overwhelmed with anger and with frustration. But taking a moment to say, what am I thankful for inside this situation? And it may be hard. It may take you 30 minutes an hour. Sometimes to figure it out, what have you to be thankful for? I would start with gratitude. I would start with breathing and mindfulness, and those things become important, enrich and empower this thing called the prefrontal cortex. I got a big one right here. I got a big prefrontal cortex. So when you start there now, everything else becomes easy because the keystone habit

Chef AJ: Keystone habit, I like that. I don’t know if I’ve heard that word before.

Dr. Columbus Batiste: Oh, I wish I can take credit for that. But no, but yeah, it’s Charles Duhigg described that in one of his habit books that are there, but you know it’s one of the foundational key stones. And so there’s multiple of which I ascribe meditation as one of those.

Chef AJ: Now I just want to be clear on one thing because you are a cardiologist, so I want to pick your brain about this, when you have a patient that’s overweight or obese that has heart disease. Is there something about the state of having excess fat that causes this or the food that they ate to get that excess weight? Or maybe a little bit of both?

Dr. Columbus Batiste: I think it becomes a little bit of both in time. Right. So the food, oftentimes it gets the increased weight and the increased adipose tissue or the fat cells, the fat cells become metabolically active secreting in the state of increased inflammation. That stay of Increased inflammation is what is the birth place, oftentimes for many of the other ailments. And so it becomes a vicious cycle that we have to kind of cool down and extinguish the fire and the flames of this inflammation. And that’s going to start by once again going back to our food, not just our level of activity, but really, truly, our food becomes the key, it is so important.

Chef AJ: When somebody has heart disease. Can losing weight help?

Dr. Columbus Batiste: Well, yes, certainly losing weight is going to help decrease the stress and strain of the heart. You know, especially if they separate with heart failure or if they have coronary artery disease. And so we know whether or not it’s the weight. Remember, weight is a byproduct. So weight is a symptom, oftentimes not always, but probably the vast majority. It’s a symptom of something else going on inside the body that’s there. And so we have to get to the symptom, and it’s really the detriment. Part is going to be the food that leads to this. And so that is the trigger for coronary disease. That’s a trigger for diabetes, the trigger for high blood pressure. And so I always tell people, let’s focus our attention on a root cause analysis, right? The root cause analysis is it falls back on the food and the food quality. Right. And as we take care of that now, we’re addressing each of the areas there. Obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol. And then if there’s still residual after we refined this completely, then we need to look a little bit more aggressively. Oftentimes when folks say, Hey, doc, I’m doing everything I’m supposed to. The question really falls to really, are you? Let’s take a closer look. You know, what about those mindless snacking? What about the little piece won’t matter? What about the little piece that ends up being a big slice that you just somehow didn’t really calculate in your brain? And so we have to become very intentional in our efforts and really set a priority once again, going back to the mental mindfulness set our priorities of what we’re looking to accomplish.

Chef AJ: So, Dr. Batiste, what’s the real truth about weight loss?

Dr. Columbus Batiste: I got to be selfish. The truth is you will not achieve weight loss until you get selfish. Get selfish.

Chef AJ: I love it. Get selfish, hashtag. Thanks so much, Dr. Batiste.

Dr. Columbus Batiste: Always a pleasure. Thank you.

Chef AJ: Hi, Chef Darshana, and welcome to the Truth about Weight Loss Summit, thanks so much for being here.

Chef Darshana Thacker: Hi, Chef AJ. Thank you again for inviting me. I always enjoy these summit episodes with you and I look forward to them.

Chef AJ: But we love having you because your recipes are so easy, healthy, delicious and weight loss friendly. So, chef Darshana, what’s the secret recipe for weight loss?

Chef Darshana Thacker: Well, the secret recipe is water for me, water, vegetable stock, something that kind of makes the food, it does in bulk it up, but is lighter but it still makes you feel full. And that’s my secret. I love stews and soups. Those are the perfect weight loss dishes. Simplicity is my secret.

Chef AJ: You’re so right about water because one of the experts on the summit is Dr Barbara Rolls, who’s done a lot of research with calorie density. She always talks about that, and so does Dr Fuhrman. Soups are especially good for weight loss because, like you said, water has no calories, but it can add a great deal of volume and weight to the food. So you feel fuller.

Chef Darshana Thacker: Yes, exactly. And you can always, you know, flavor it with the different vegetables, spices and once in a while, it’s with some grains or some high-density vegetables like potatoes, sweet potatoes or yucca or other root vegetables.

Chef AJ: I don’t think I’ve ever had yucca. Is it yucca or yucca?

Chef Darshana Thacker: I call it yucca, and it’s also called cassava in different places, like in India, it’s called cassava. And I didn’t know about this root vegetable till I think a few years ago, four or five years ago, and the first time I had it, I felt like this is heaven. And there’s something about this root vegetable. It’s been around for thousands of years, and I feel like this was our first food and that’s how I feel. I have a lot of reverence for it somehow. And I love it, and I’ve discovered that it’s not that difficult to cook with it. Initially, I thought that it takes a long time to cook, but it doesn’t. It’s really just like potatoes. And it gives you that satisfaction, just like the potatoes.

Chef AJ: What does it look like and where do people get it?

Chef Darshana Thacker: I wish I had saved a piece of the whole yucca to show the audience that you would get it in. Most grocery stores would carry it. Probably not Whole Foods, or maybe Sprouts and all those kind of stores, but regular stores do carry it, especially stores that carry Mexican ingredients or Latin American ingredients or Caribbean ingredients. Those would definitely have it, and there is a technique to using yucca. The outside skin is a little thick. So you need to slice it off instead of like you don’t peel it. You would slice it off using a knife and then the inside of the yucca you need to remove the core because it’s got strings in this in the core of it all through. And it’s like an elongated sweet potato that’s dark brown in color, and then it has a waxy texture on the outside. So, yeah, you just remove the core and then you just cut it like potatoes and you can use it in any recipe. And it’s also gives that thickness to the stew.

Chef AJ: That’s neat. I’ve never tried it. I’ll be honest.

Chef Darshana Thacker: Yes, you have to try it. If you like potatoes, you definitely like your yucca.

Chef AJ: Who doesn’t like potatoes? So many people are afraid to eat potatoes. But we’re learning from experts like Dr. John McDougall, that’s the perfect food if you’re trying to lose weight.

Chef Darshana Thacker: Exactly. Yeah. That’s a staple in our house. We always have steamed potatoes, baked potatoes, ready for lunch or snack.

Chef AJ: Did you ever struggle with your weight at all?

Chef Darshana Thacker: You know, when I was in my teens, I could tell that I was putting on weight and it was more like around my waist and hips. It felt like something was like heavy on me and I’m really grateful that I have this kind of signal that tells me that, you know, something is not right and putting on more weight than I normally should. Something’s not right, and I’m able to pull back. Once I sense that I’m able to pull back from eating things that, you know, make you put on weight. And also, in my teens, I would have fried food like, you know, regular Indian diet. So I would cut back on anything like that. I would go back to the basics, which is like steamed daal and steamed vegetables and know steamed rice with it. And immediately I was able to bring it back to normal just by tweaking these. And I did this intuitively. You know, it just happened that I’m like, OK, these foods make me feel full, but they don’t make me feel like I’m putting on weight and I like it helps me to maintain my weight. And that’s how I ate all through my teens and my adulthood. Up to now, I have been able to maintain my weight to the same number, all through it. So yeah, I think that simple diet was the secret for me.

Chef AJ: So in Indian food, it’s often very high in fat, not just fried, but a lot of oil is generally used. Isn’t that true?

Chef Darshana Thacker: Yes. So Indian food, every dish is tempered with spices, and oil is used, oil or ghee or butter is used in the spices. So, you know, like if you calculate every dish, I think in any other cuisine too, you know, you saute the onions or you make the sofrito or something you use oil, like in Italian, you would use oil to saute the garlic, right? So same thing with Indian food. And but there are so many dishes that are like really fried, know Indian dishes, lot of vegetables are also fried before they are added to the dish. So that, I think, adds up. And you don’t realize that. But how much a little one teaspoon of oil, how it just changes the whole fat content of the whole meal. Little, little in every dish. Right?

Chef AJ: Was it hard for you to learn to cook without oil, either from the standpoint of understanding why or in terms of flavor? You actually have a book called Flavor where you don’t use oil.

Chef Darshana Thacker: Yes. No. I was so surprised. No, I don’t think I was surprised, I was happy that without oil, you could still get such flavorful dishes using the same technique of like what you would do with oil, you eliminate the oil part, but just roast the spices or saute the onions in water. These simple tweaks, secrets to switching to oil-free was enough and to maintain the flavor, the texture. And it was easy actually, and I am really surprised and not surprised, I would say I’m really impressed and happy to see that there are chefs in India, you know home cooks and hired helps who, once you explain to them the techniques, they make such fantastic food oil-free. Because the spicing is the secret basically to the food, and that does something I’m not asking them to pull back on. I’m just telling them to pull back on just one ingredient. And they can still maintain the quality of the food is excellent. And I am really happy to see that because I feel like the more and more people understand about the oil in the diet, what it does to you, the more they will try to switch, and they will be surprised to find that it’s not that difficult. So for me that’s very encouraging and it makes me very happy.

Chef AJ: In culinary school, though, you had to use oil, right?

Chef Darshana Thacker: Yes, we did. It was difficult at that time because I had to use oil. I had to taste the food with oil and like every day, so many dishes. So you know, I could tell the difference in how I felt inside, like how heavy it makes you feel and how lethargic and sluggish. But because I already knew the technique of cooking without oil, While I am learning, I knew how I’m going to switch around with this dish and the way they’re teaching in school and how I’m going to make it my own without oil.

Chef AJ: Can we get the culinary schools to at least offer some of this training? Because, you know, there would be people like me that would go to somebody’s restaurant if I could get a dish cooked without oil, but chefs don’t learn that in culinary school.

Chef Darshana Thacker: Yeah, that’s why we have our forks or knives online cooking school that teaches you how to cook without oil, all of the different techniques of salting and braising, and all the different ways to make really nice, great gourmet food without oil and using whole food plant-based ingredients. So, yeah, I think that is that was there out now, too, and I’ll offer it, you know, eventually, maybe cooking schools will also add these into the program, but you do have some options like us, and I think the plant-strong, they have like Engine two or Esselstyn has one program to teach oil-free. So there are a few around, online courses.

Chef AJ: Would you say that the most difference in the caloric density of the food is removing the oil?

Chef Darshana Thacker: Yes, the first step is removing the oil and then there could be the other ingredients that are calorie-dense, like bread or pasta. Yeah. And nuts and seeds.

Chef AJ: Do you find that when chefs use oil, they also have to use more salt?

Chef Darshana Thacker: Yes, I do, they all go together. They both are so stimulating, and it gives you that high I feel and also that the more you use, the more you want to use. Well, it has that addictive feature to it. I feel like it will once you get used to a certain amount of oil or salt, it is work to pull back and to go back to less and less. You know, you get used to it, your palate gets used to it and it’s difficult. So, yeah, definitely, you know, pulling off one could be the first step, but then gradually, you know, it’s like a journey. Eating healthy has become a journey. Now we’ve gone so far into eating overstimulated food.

Chef AJ: So, you know, do you do a lot of cooking in the Instant Pot?

Chef Darshana Thacker: I do. Mostly I do grains and soups, I make my daals, my soups in the instant pot. And once in a while for texture, I use the air fryer feature, which is actually a gift from you. I use that once in a while to get the crunchy texture. But yeah, I love my instant pot for stews and also for steaming potatoes that make them such nice creamy potatoes.

Chef AJ: Yeah. So what are you going to make for us today?

Chef Darshana Thacker: So I’m going to make a Jamaican spiced yucca soup. I will talk about the ingredients first. So in this stew, Jamaican foods use a different blend of spices and herbs that are a little unfamiliar, little familiar, little unfamiliar for me. So it uses thyme, all-spice and they use Scotch bonnet, which is one of the spiciest fresh peppers. And it’s like orangish color, reddish-orange in color. And sometimes you find it in specialty stores, but if you can’t, you always find habaneros. So I like to replace habanero with it. And for me, that is the best part about the dish is that it’s got that little bit of kick and it’s perfect for a day like this in L.A. today. It’s really rainy outside. It’s really cold. So I like this because of that, the heartiness of the yucca and the little bit of kick from the Scotch bonnet or habanero peppers. And my favorite, ginger. I love ginger in my stew. And that’s it. The simplicity of this soup, I love that it’s so simple. So basically, it’s just the yucca and then for a little bit more color I am adding carrots. You can add any other vegetable that you like. If you keep the flavors, if the spices are the same, you can switch around and make this with just plain potatoes. Yukon potatoes or you can make it a sweet potato so you can switch it with any vegetables you want as long as you just keep the spices the same. So I start with sauteing the onion and garlic. In this dish, I am adding everything at the same time, onions, green peppers, carrots, and even the yucca, so the yucca looks almost like potatoes. It’s just a little more dense. So I am adding everything together with Ginger.

Chef AJ: So you don’t necessarily have to saute the onions first?

Chef Darshana Thacker: No, no. In this case, what I’m going to do is I’m just going to add a little bit of water and then that little bit of water it will saute. Before I add the whole, you know, the four or five cups of water that the dish needs, it’s just a little bit of water right now, so it’s got two teaspoons of garlic. This is one of the dishes that I don’t use too much garlic in and I like it. Normally I do use a lot of garlic in my dishes but in this one, I like my ginger.

Chef AJ: Do you always use fresh ginger as opposed to powdered ginger?

Chef Darshana Thacker: Yes, I do. I do. There’s something about the fresh ginger, the powder ginger, it has the heat, but it loses some of its other flavors. You know, the more like floral flavors.

Chef AJ: Do you ever cook with black, cumin seed?

Chef Darshana Thacker: Black, cumin seed? I think that is nigella?

Chef AJ: I believe that’s what it’s called. Just that. One of the other experts on the summit, Dr. Gregor, says it’s good for weight loss.

Chef Darshana Thacker: It’s used in Indian cooking, I have not used it, but it is used in Indian cooking and I have it in my kitchen church. I just forget to use it. I think in India it’s called onion seeds, right?

Chef AJ: I’ve never had it. I know when Dr Gregor wrote about it in his book, a lot of people were buying it and using it.

Chef Darshana Thacker: Yeah, it’s great in chickpeas like the Chana. Have you heard of that?

Chef AJ: Like in a daal?

Chef Darshana Thacker: Yes. A certain kind of chana daal, which has a brown sauce and you use that in there. So I’m just sauteing it lightly and again I am going to add a little water to keep it going. I let the onions saute for a little bit and it gets the yucca started, it starts to cook already and that saves time. So about 10 minutes of sauteing with a little bit of water and then we’re going to add the rest of the ingredients and let this cook for 20 more minutes. And it’s done and you can let it cook till it reaches the texture you like, like how soft you want the yucca to be. But it’s a pretty simple and easy recipe. And the flavor it all wants. They all come together like the thyme and the nutmeg and the tumeric, and then it’s the whole house smells so good, so delicious. I’ve had neighbors tell me that whenever they pass by my house, they can smell something cooking, something that pulls them to my house.

Chef AJ: that is cool. Are there any special pans you recommend for sauteing without oil?

Chef Darshana Thacker: No. You don’t need to, but if you have a pan that has a thick bottom, a good quality band that has a thick bottom that just has because we don’t use so much oil, we don’t use oil. So it helps with sauteing the vegetables and it doesn’t burn the bottom.

Chef AJ: Like maybe stainless steel, for example.

Chef Darshana Thacker: Yeah, stainless steel. And if you need to use nonstick pans for some things like pancakes or making some crepes or something, then I would use spanpan. Which is a good-quality nonstick pan for sauteing and making hash browns.

Chef AJ: Yeah. Do you think that many of the people that find their way to forks over knives are looking for weight loss?

Chef Darshana Thacker: I think often it is, and people are curious to learn more, especially if they’ve come across our magazine or if it’s come across a documentary somebody mentions often there are doctors who speak on their patients to check out the documentary. And so when they discover and they want to learn more about the diet and see if they know how to tweak the recipes. And we do develop our recipes with that in mind, of course, that these recipes are for people who want to lose weight, or who have certain health issues. So that is always the main focus in our recipes, to make them friendly for people who want to lose weight

Chef AJ: Right, because even the recipes in the annual Forks over Knives Meal Planner or the magazine or even the foods that are sold now, for example, sprouts they all tend to be lower in fat, right?

Chef Darshana Thacker: Absolutely. That is our main focus. We want to be. We want to provide that service where, you know, you can trust that if it is a forks over knives recipe. We do keep a range of sorts of recipes which would be considered a treat or for festivals or holidays. But most of our recipes are weight loss friendly.

Chef AJ: And they’re delicious. I mean, even people that don’t need to lose weight can enjoy them.

Chef Darshana Thacker: Oh yes. Yeah. So the journey to weight loss is also the journey to creating a life so that you can meditate all through. As you start looking this way, it’s not just for a certain time period, it’s forever. And for that reason, the food that we like to make is pleasurable and at the same time, it’s healthy.

Chef AJ: It’s amazing how delicious is, do you think that people sometimes at first need a little bit of time to adjust to it if they’ve been eating a much higher fat diet, for example?

Chef Darshana Thacker: Yes, I think some things that need to change comes from inside. And sometimes it comes from being exposed to this kind of diet. If there is somebody of your family who makes plant-based food and you get to taste it and you like it and you realize how good it makes you feel. And then you get on this journey and you discover the benefits of it. And sometimes it’s like an inner need to change. You know, something’s not working. If you want to change and you lose weight and you adopt this diet like on online research or through experts that you’ve listened to. So it takes a little bit of a desire to explore. But I think it comes with a lot of benefits and a lot of surprises on the way and how easy it gets as we keep on on this path. How easy it is to maintain it and to enjoy it, there is pleasure in this food.

Chef AJ: Could you possibly tilt the camera a little bit so we could see the pot inside?

Chef Darshana Thacker: OK. Yes. Let’s see. Can you see?

Chef AJ: Perfect, I can see the inside now. Thanks. I am trying to think like how I would convert that to Instant Pot because for me, I got to throw everything in the Instant Pot.

Chef Darshana Thacker: So this is a very Instant Pot friendly recipe because what I did here, is that I am sauteing it in here. You could do this saute feature in the Instant Pot and then as soon I put the stock and the other ingredients, you just turn it on to manual or you can just use the steam feature or the soup feature for about five minutes or so. And I think it should work. I think most of my soups eventually turned out to be the way one would do it in an instant pot even if it is on the stove. I just like to play with the food. So sometimes with an instant pot, it’s like I’ve moved away from my baby. You know, I can’t see the dish because it is closed.

Chef AJ: Somebody should invent a see-through Instant pot.

Chef Darshana Thacker: Yes, that’s true. That would be so much fun

Chef AJ: Because they have air fryers now that you can see inside of, why on an Instant Pot?

Chef Darshana Thacker: Right, exactly. Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, because you use the same lid as the air fryer. But yeah, it’s definitely it is possible. OK, so it’s about time to add the other ingredients. In this case, I am adding a quart of water. You could even use stock, vegetable stock, but I like to keep it simple and just use water in most of my recipes, so I’m using some tomatoes. And now comes habanera and turmeric, about half a teaspoon of turmeric,

Chef AJ: Have you ever used the fresh turmeric root?

Chef Darshana Thacker: I don’t just because it’s too much trouble, and I have to keep going in my garden, but I still don’t use it.

Chef AJ: That’s funny, that’s how I feel about ginger sometimes it’s just too much trouble, so I sometimes use the powdered ginger.

Chef Darshana Thacker: Yes. So for me, I love the flavor of ginger and garlic, and I have my system there. I prepare them once a month, so I buy in bulk at Costco organic garlic and ginger. Pretty reasonably priced and I process them in the food processor and then I put them in containers in the freezer. And so this would last me a week or maybe, you know, four days. So this way, you know, I always have some fresh ginger and fresh garlic always in my in my kitchen. But it makes so it makes it so easy to make food If I have this all the time. And I’m using fresh ingredients, but I don’t have to do it every time I’m making something, I don’t have to chop my garlic and ginger.

Chef AJ: Those are great tips for kind of like batch preparation. So what do you do? Do you take the whole bulb of garlic and then just get the individual cloves out of it and then freeze it?

Chef Darshana Thacker: I buy a package of peeled garlic. You get them in more stores now, get peeled garlic. So I just pulse them in my processor and just portion them out in these containers. I portion them out in these containers because I am constantly developing recipes. I use a lot of the ingredients, but initially I would, you know, I would just put them in small ice cube trays, so smaller portions like one tablespoon portions. So that would be like I would just take one cube and just throw it in my stew, and I wouldn’t have to put it in a container or anything. It’s just goes straight from the freezer into the stew. It can go into the students. And I do the onion. I even do the onion garlic sauteed. I can show you. This is how I do it.

Chef AJ: That it’s such a great time-saving tip to have the onion and garlic sauteed and then frozen.

Chef Darshana Thacker: Yeah, sauteed and frozen in these containers. So this much is enough for an eight cup stew. And so you just throw this in the pot with your vegetable stock. But the vegetable stock starts boiling, at the same time this starts throwing. You are saving time and then you add whatever the main ingredients are for your soup. So you can make quick soups. I make ten minutes Thai soup or Indian curry or Mexican tortilla soup, just because I’ve cut down so much of time in prepping and cooking the aromatics.

Chef AJ: That is such a great idea.

Chef Darshana Thacker: And the other thingo I do is I get big bags of lemons and limes, and I squeeze them in my citrus juicer and I bottle them like this and put them in the freezer. So I have four or five bottles at that time, so I just have to do it once, once in a month, once in two months. So that’s another thing, we use citrus like lemons and lines in our food a lot because it helps to cut down on the salt intake. It replaces the salt very easily. So to have this ready and not to have to squeeze that each time is such a time saver.

Chef AJ: And that’s a great idea. How do you batch prep your ginger? Do you peel it first?

Chef Darshana Thacker: If it’s organic that I don’t peel it, but I do wash it very, very well, like to get all this soil out so thoroughly wash it and then I grate it with the skin.

Chef AJ: Oh, you grate it with the skin if it’s organic?

Chef Darshana Thacker: Yeah. So this is so colorful, we just have to add thyme. And time. I have to refer to my recipe. I like to use fresh herbs whenever I can because I have a garden and I grow herbs in my garden. I like to use fresh, but I think dried is as good, so my recipes that easily be switched from fresh to dried.

Chef AJ: Is there a ratio you use like one to three years when I heard before? If you use like like a tablespoon of fresh herbs, it’s one teaspoon of dried herbs. Is that about right?

Chef Darshana Thacker: Yes. And of course, sometimes if your spice is a little older, then I would double that up, instead of one to three, I would do two. I check on my herbs, my dried spices but I’m not very diligent about it. I use up my spices a lot also but if it’s a little older then, it loses its potency, so you may need to add more. You just don’t need to throw it away.

Chef AJ: Yeah, that’s good advice. You make your own spice blends, don’t you?

Chef Darshana Thacker: I do. I love to create instant spice bleds, for example, this, I got the idea because of Indian cooking. In Indian cooking, you sometimes use spices in one dish in a regular everyday dish like a daal or a vegetable. So for me, I would think, instead of bringing ten jars from the pantry out, how can I make this simpler? And that’s how I decided to make spice blends for different cuisines like Mexican or Creole spice. And to make them my own also, because I like the control. Sometimes they have salt in them, the blends that you get outside in the stores. And the second thing is, I like to control the amount of heat,sometimes I want more heat than you get in the some of the sometimes I want less heat, for example, In hive sauces and blends. The heat is too much for my taste, so I like to make my own that I can control it. And like Indian Spice, too. And these really, really help me in making my dishes quickly. So first is the onion and garlic saute that helps me. Second is these blends, and because of these two things that I prepped beforehand, cooking is not as much of an issue at all. Eating at home is not a pain. It’s a joy, you know, because everything is there and it’s all prepped in it. And it’s become part of a routine. You learn to make this a part of your routine. Like you have a little thyme and you have some ingredients that you just chop them up and freeze them or you saute them and freeze them. Then you can use them to make a quick meal later on. So this is like on the go. You can kind of prep for a future meal and it’ll make it easier for you and you’re not putting in too much effort all the time, every day.

Chef AJ: Then I think it’s the biggest secret to healthy eating is is doing some kind of batch cooking. D you also batch prep beans and grains and maybe potatoes or sweet potatoes, and either freeze some or refrigerate?

Chef Darshana Thacker: Yeah,now. It’s become a weekly routine, and I just love it. The routine is grocery shopping or farmer’s market shopping on the weekends and then on Mondays cooking a batch of grains for the week. Prepping the salad for the week, prepping vegetables and big fat, big big batches of potatoes. And so this would last us for three or four days, we just take a combination of what we want. Sometimes we just have potatoes for lunch or dinner with a salad or just a salad with some quinoa thrown in or soups. Lots of soups, for breakfast or lunch for dinner. So repeating it, repeating the meals, repeating the ingredients. Somehow, the simplicity of it is also it also helps you from it triggering your craving. if you have something ready in the fridge, it’s delicious and it’s satisfying. It helps keep your triggers or your temptations at bay.

Chef AJ: I agree. You know, a lot of people that are new to plant-based eating think it’s so expensive. But I remember you actually did a story about that. You want to talk about your discovery?

Chef Darshana Thacker: Yes. So if you see the basic ingredients of a plant-based diet, it’s potatoes, beans, rice. And then I would hear people say, Oh, it’s too expensive, being vegan is too expensive. Being plant-based, it’s too expensive and time-consuming. For me, it’s just like, no, it’s not. I want to share with you how easy it is. It’s the opposite. It’s one of the cheapest diets, you know? You know, if you know what the right side is so cheap. And so I decided to do this. It’ll take five days and seven day challenges that I limited the amount of money I use on my meals. And there was one challenge that I took up a 2012. It was for a dollar fifty a day. And I went to the local discount store and I bought a big bag of potatoes, cans of tomatoes for a dollar. Or two bags of beans and rice. And these are my basic ingredients and I fed myself such hearty meals out of this. And I created recipes that I have on my website, and it’s also on forks over knives website. And I also was able to, you know, feed my boyfriend at that time, my husband now I could even share my food with him. And this is like a dollar, like seven dollars, and it just so much food, it was like about 600 calories a day each each day I was consuming, and I think that was plenty.

Chef AJ: That is incredible.

Chef Darshana Thacker: Yes. And I did that again a few years later. I don’t remember that maybe four or five years later. I I did a challenge of $5 a day and the difference between the first one and the second one was the first one I went out with, I think, forty-nine dollars and shopped for the whole week. And so I had a lot more money to shop. The second time I did a challenge, it was I just took five dollars every day to the grocery store and I bought something for that five dollars. I came home and I cooked it and that was all I had for the day. Even then, I was able to eat 1600 to 2000 calories a day. I was making really nice heavy meals. And I cooked it in such a way that I could have it for my dinner and then the next day leftover for my lunch or breakfast and lunch, and I could repeat that every day. I have always leftover, and at the end of the five days, I had to spend fifty dollars in those 10 days. I had so much of items still saved in the pantry once I finished my challenge so I could have gone on. I had enough food left over. So this whole idea of that eating healthy is expensive, it doesn’t bear out if you really try and know how it’s done, if you know what the right ingredients are to keep you healthy. It’s one of the cheapest way, you would save money.

Chef AJ: And I think when you said heavy meals, I think you meant like, like satisfying meals.

Chef Darshana Thacker: Yeah, I’m sorry.

Chef AJ: No, I just don’t want people to think oh I am going to feel heavy because you’re actually going to feel lighter and probably lose weight, but you’re going to have satiation, I think is what you meant.

Chef Darshana Thacker: Yes, that’s the word. I’m sorry.

Chef AJ: No, no. It’s OK. I just wanted to clarify because I don’t want to have a heavy meal. I think people think it’s just vegetables that we eat and it’s not true.

Chef Darshana Thacker: Yeah, it’s not true. You can eat grains, grains, and beans, which give you so much energy and they last for so long like a meal. You eat and you can go on for hours without feeling the need to eat again to munch again. You don’t need snacks. If you eat something that is really giving you a good energy and it’s really satisfying and nourishing you, I think it helps in keeping the cravings down. The cravings are more of a habit. You know, your taste buds are like craving something. So I think if the body is satisfied, I think it helps to curb the cravings.

Chef AJ: What do you say to people that are afraid to eat starch, potatoes, rice? They say, Oh, it’s fattening.

Chef Darshana Thacker: I think they have to check, normally the starches or the potatoes and rice and all these, what do they come with in conventional food, they come with a lot oil or cheese or cream, or it’s accompanied by fat. But once you remove the fat and you just eat these food in their natural form, like steamed potatoes or baked potatoes or rice, you realize how light they are. They help you to lose weight instead of putting on weight because you remove that an element that was actually put on the weight. So that secret, you know, it’s just so simple but, you know, it has been decades of misinformation and decades of a certain way of eating that has created this myth or misconception. And it’s really sad because these foods are the most satisfying and they make you feel good and then make your body feel good and make you lose weight and achieve achieving optimum health.

Chef AJ: Couldn’t agree more. Have you had any experience with any friends or family that adopted this way of eating and either improve their health or lost weight?

Chef Darshana Thacker: No, not in my family. I may have extended family that may have tried it, but not in my immediate family and faith. The good thing is my mom was a good cook, so she would always, you know, make food with a lot of vegetables. A lot of healthy ingredients, like beans and rice and daal, like lentils and a variety of vegetables. So my family’s pretty used to eating a lot of vegetables, and I think that helps them. We don’t have a big problem of being overweight in my immediate family. And yeah, so I guess they’ve not had that need do, although I know people don’t associate, being slim and on this diet doesn’t really mean that you are healthy, like being on a high fat diet. So my family doesn’t see the benefit yet of this because they have not had the experience of excess weight but yeah. I’m grateful to my mother for exposing everybody to a lot of their ideal foods. You know, grains and beans and vegetables.

Chef AJ: But even if someone doesn’t want to lose weight, we still encourage them to be this way and then if they want to add a little bit more of the more calorically dense things like nuts and seeds and avocado, not the oil, but you know the little higher caloric density foods, the breads, things like that.

Chef Darshana Thacker: Yes. Yeah. And so if you really are on a path to weight loss, understanding these foods, you can put on weight, you can put on weight on certain plant-based foods, like excess of pasta and bread. You nnow they may be in that same realm, but they are high calorie foods and eliminating them or cutting them out or making use of a little bit in your food. You know, like those are the ways you can tweak and come to a place that whatever you eat satisfies your tastebuds and is good for weight loss. I feel like it’s understanding a little bit of which of these ingredients is avoidable or if it is a little less of.

Chef AJ: And don’t be afraid of fruit, we forgot to mention fruit, but that’s part of the plan too.

Chef Darshana Thacker: I know, that’s another misconception that fruits make you put on weight, and that is so not true. As we know even making a meal out of fruit, is great. It’s better than having a pancake with maple syrup or something like that. The amount of sugar, as you say, in fruit compared to that. The the fruit comes with a lot of fiber, a lot of water. Those are all the ingredients that you want to have in your diet if you want to lose weight as opposed to standard American breakfasts or snacks. The secret is fiber and water, basically.

Chef AJ: I couldn’t agree more. That’s calorie density 101

Chef Darshana Thacker: if you want to know what food is. And exactly that’s what applies why pasta or bread, you would want it why? because that’s those are the two things that are missing in processed food and that water and fiber.

Chef AJ: And how’s that soup coming?

Chef Darshana Thacker: It is almost there. So the yucca is almost cooked now. And at this point, I like to add, just to balance out the heat from the spice, I’m going to add just a little bit of plant-based milk, you don’t need to do that. You can avoid it. I just add a little bit, about one full cup of plant-based milk. At the end, I add the citrus, in this case I’m using lemon juice, but traditionally you would use lime juice and that’s about it in this dish. And I want to show you. How it looks, it is smelling, so good, I wish I could make you smell it.

Chef AJ: We need Smell-O-Vision, taste-O-Vision, right?

Chef Darshana Thacker: Okay, I’m going to I’ve had to improvise with my iPad today, and I’m going to show you. So that’s the stew and this is how you would serve it. this, too.

Chef AJ: That’s a beautiful bowl.

Chef Darshana Thacker: Thank You. This is the one stew that I would not need anything with. Sometimes I like my grains with my stew but in this case, nothing. The yucca is such a magical ingredient.

Chef AJ: Wow, that looks like a beautiful heartyy bowl of delicious soup and looks like you garished maybe with a little Italian parsley.

Chef Darshana Thacker: It’s scallions.

Chef AJ: oh, even better. That is so cool. And, you know, we’ve heard this from so many of the experts on the summit, like Dr. Barbara Rolls and Dr. Joel Furhman, that if you want to lose weight, eat soup, start your meals with soups.

Chef Darshana Thacker: Yeah, keep a pot of soup in your fridge all the time, and it’s the best food for weight loss.

Chef AJ: What advice do you have for people for salad dressings? Because, you know, traditionally salad dressings, they have a lot of oil.

Chef Darshana Thacker: Yes, so I like to make it fat-free or low-fat salad dressings with herbs, spices and I would use like potato or zucchini to thicken it up. Bell peppers, carrots or just use balsamic vinegar. So there are ways to flavor your salads with these simple dressings and they taste flavorful. And the more you have this kind of food, the more you enjoy, you appreciate the natural flavors of the salads themselves. So it’s not coated with oil or anything. You really enjoy the lettuce, the flavor of the lettuce, of the fresh tomatoes, the cherry tomatoes and summer or carrots.

Chef AJ: So what about people with a serious sweet tooth? You know, sugar is pretty high in caloric density.

Chef Darshana Thacker: Well, the best sweet treat would be fruits. a good persimmons right now or oranges and dates. If you want to have a treat would be like a date. Fruits are really like the best pleasure you can get once you’ve overcome the highly stimulating deserts and be used to in the past, if you replac them with fruits, you realize that all this nothing more flavorful than that because it’s not just the sugar. There are so many other flavors involved in it, and they really go make you happy.

Chef AJ: Ther is nothing like that. That’s true. The fruit, the whole fruit, and nothing but the whole fruit. So chef Darshana what’s the real truth about weight loss?

Chef Darshana Thacker: That it is a journey and the journey can be really pleasurable eating food that is high in fiber and water and a variety of vegetables, fresh vegetables, fruits and root vegetables that make you feel satisfied and yet keep you feeling so light and energized.

Chef AJ: Beautifully said and thank you for making delicious recipes that help people achieve this goal.

Chef Darshana Thacker: You’re welcome. Thank you so much.

Chef AJ: Hi, Dr. Tarman, and welcome to the Truth about Weight Loss Summit, thanks so much for being here.

Dr. Vera Tarman: Thank you again for asking me. I’m always delighted to come on.

Chef AJ: Always. You’re one of my favorite people to talk to, especially about the subject of food addiction. I really consider you really, you know, the leading or one of the leading experts. And I was wondering if you could explain to the viewers what food addiction is and why it might be important in our ever-increasing obesity epidemic?

Dr. Vera Tarman: Yeah, OK. So, you know, when people talk about the obesity epidemic, which is, you know, ever-present and of course, the diabetic epidemic that sort of follows with the obesity epidemic, we don’t really think that behind that is actually the food addiction epidemic. And I’m so delighted to be able to speak on venues like yours because I really want us to stop focusing on obesity. It’s kind of like blaming the victim. It’s the symptom of the larger problem, which is food addiction and food addiction continues to this day, like 2021, 2022. I mean, I’m hoping by the end of that, to continue to struggle to be acknowledged as a viable, real condition. You know, when we look at people struggling with their eating, we’re still calling it just poor willpower or we’re calling it an eating disorder, but we’re not calling it food addiction, which I believe it is. So the definition of food addiction is really basically a compulsive sort of uncontrollable focus on eating and food, specific foods, trigger foods with the inability to control, that’s the compulsive piece, despite adverse consequences. So even though you’re diabetic, even though your weight is far more than you want it to be, even though you’re now not just diabetic but your high cholesterol, et cetera, et cetera, and you’re trying your hardest to stop, you can’t stop. So if there’s an element of lack of control, even though the consequences are dire. And it is a mental health diagnosis, just like anxiety, just like borderline, just like anything else and it should be acknowledged. And, you know, we continue to struggle with this. So anyway, that’s the definition of it. And in terms of the obesity epidemic, I don’t think we’re going to get very far because most of the people probably listening to this weight loss summit have already experienced yo yo dieting. They lost the weight, now they’re gaining it back. They’ve lost it and gained it back. And I’m convinced that until we introduce and get wedged into the door, there might be food addiction happening, the obesity it’s going to continue or the yo yo dieting will continue and it just gets worse. So thank you for having me be able to speak in the weight loss summit because I really think that this has got to be one piece.

Chef AJ: Well, I agree with you and I love that. I wrote down obesity is a symptom of the larger problem, which is food addiction, and I couldn’t agree more because I was obese until my 50s. And it wasn’t until I learned about food addiction as a concept and then I became abstinent specifically of sugar and flour, that I was able for the first time to not only control my weight but do it easily. And It’s been 10 years and I’ve never looked back.

Dr. Vera Tarman: Yeah, exactly. And that’s the thing. You know, so we’re going to talk about this later. But you know, and I hope to end with this. But the idea that, you know, not only will you resolve the problem with obesity, but you will never look back. It’s not like it’s an ongoing problem and it’s not like you’re going to be deprived either. We’re talking here about mental and physical release of the heaviness of obesity and depression, etc., etc. There’s a solution here.

Chef AJ: Yeah. I know that you run an inpatient addiction center in Canada. And again, when we say food, we shouldn’t even call processed food or ultra processed food, but that’s what we’re talking about.

Dr. Vera Tarman: Exactly.

Chef AJ: We’re not talking about brussel sprouts.

Dr. Vera Tarman: No.

Chef AJ: Are there similarities between ultra-processed food and processed food and other addictive substances like drugs and alcohol?

Dr. Vera Tarman: Yeah. Can I just say something about what you introduce and then I’m going to answer that question? You know what, when we talk about food addiction, what do we actually mean besides the compulsiveness, it’s specific foods, it’s trigger foods. And, you know, it’s not necessarily the carbs, it’s the processed refined sugar and flour. But, you know, like if we’re eating real food, we wouldn’t be talking about food addiction. It’s only because the processed food industry has come onto the scene, like when in the 1940s, 50s and onwards that we’ve started to see an increase in diabetes and metabolic syndrome and also food addiction because I think they go hand in hand. So we’re talking about not real foods, food products basically. If you guys are eating real food, you don’t have to listen. You probably are not worried about your weight because it’s not so much of an issue. So anyway, now that we’ve got that, what are we talking about? We’re talking about addiction to food products. So these used to be food in the same way that a cigarette used to be tobacco, in the same way that alcohol used to be grapes. So when you eat grapes, you’re not going to, you know, become addicted to grapes. If we make grape juice or grapes something grape drink, yes, we’ll become addicted. And of course, if we make it, which is what we’re doing is we’re taking a real food product and engineering, industrializing, producing it into a highly potent substance product, either it be alcohol, tobacco, cocaine, marijuana, whatever it is and sugar. Sugar follows the same type of industrialized process, as do all of these other drugs. So if a person were using cocaine in the natural form that it is the cocoa leaf, you know, munching on it when they’re climbing mountains for the intent to be able to withstand high altitude, they’re not going to become cocaine addicts. But you take that substance and take the highly potent piece out of that and make a lot of it and ingest it in the way that we do cocaine, you’ve got a drug. Same thing with sugar. And as a result, we see the same type of behavior, which is obsessive. I mean, it’s a plus. It’s nice. You know, folks, if you take grapes that have fallen from the ground and and let them ferment over a period of days, they will actually become a very mild form of alcohol, about a five percent buzz. You’re not going to get addicted to that but we take it and make it, you know, 12 percent, or 40 or whatever it is, and similarly, with sugar. So we see the same type of difficulty stopping and the consequences afterwards, like withdrawal. And you can talk about what you know, what addiction looks like, but it’s the same thing because it’s the same type of process.

Chef AJ: Right, so if I understand you correctly, the whole food is not addictive. It’s what’s been done to it. The process.

Dr. Vera Tarman: Exactly, yes. Yes. Now, later, later on. And this is where because I’m an addiction doctor and you know, a lot of people who talk about it, because I think that the idea of food being addictive or at least processed food being addictive, highly processed food is now becoming more acceptable. And but I want to suggest that we can push the envelope further and say that for some of us, not all of us, probably maybe 20 percent, 30 percent of the population. If you continue to have that processed thing, you will then develop a syndrome, which we call an addiction syndrome. Just like a person who drinks alcohol. Not everybody becomes an alcoholic. But about 20 or 15 percent become alcoholics. So what is it about them? Well, we can talk about what that is. But if you actually become addicted to something, you’ve got that syndrome, then even real foods, some of them can become a problem. So that’s where we talk about how some people can really do well with eating lots of fruit, like the super sugary foods like bananas and cherries and other people can’t. They have to stick with the berries and the lower glycemic type, or that some people can eat tons of yam and potatoes and other people can’t, because they’ve already developed a sensitivity because of the exposure of this ultra processed food.

Chef AJ: But I’m guessing if people were only raised with whole food and never exposed to sugar and flour, they probably could eat cherries and yam and it would not be a problem

Dr. Vera Tarman: Exactly, exactly. Yeah, it wouldn’t be a problem, and our body doesn’t have a natural, you know, check and balance system like, seriously, if you eat a clump of dates, what’s going to happen to you the next thing you know, you’re going to be sitting on the toilet. You know, if you eat a clump of cherries, this is what we all do. Cherries are in season and everyone goes crazy. And, you know, after a day or two, they’re not eating all those cherries anymore. They’re now able to moderate. We have checks and balances in place with real food but when we have to take out the whole well, we basically process it and industrialize it. All those checks and balances are ticked off. We lose them.

Chef AJ: Absolutely. Do you think people vary in how vulnerable they are to these processed foods, where maybe some people can get away with a little or a lot, and some people not at all?

Dr. Vera Tarman: Absolutely, yes. I believe that that’s absolutely true. And that’s a genetic predisposition. And by the way, that’s a genetic predisposition with the addiction pathway. Just like what we discovered is that people who are alcoholics often have a history of obesity in their background, which let’s just call that food addiction is, I think that’s what it is. So addiction is genetic, whether it be food or alcohol or cocaine or whatever. So yes, a person is more predisposed. They may be more predisposed, I believe if they’ve been exposed. You know, I am. I mean, I identify myself as a food addict, but I grew up in the 60s and 70s where the abundance of industrialized food is not what it is today. And so even though I consider myself a food addict, if I were growing up today, I’d be way worse because there would have been so much more exposure. I’m talking about these food products. So there’s genetics, there is how much exposure you touch. There’s even the potential of what about mom? You know, in vitro basically, the mother is pregnant. What is she eating? Is she predisposing her child to becoming more food addicted? We’re beginning to see what this actual research that suggests that that’s true. So there are lots of and I think actually just one more thing I’m going to say. I actually think that there is some ethnic or sort of cultural, not cultural, but I don’t know what that’s called biological ethnic peace, too, that some people just don’t tolerate as well as others.

Chef AJ: Yeah. And you see that in their obesity rates and their diabetes, which I love what you’re saying. Looking in the wrong place.

Dr. Vera Tarman: Yeah. Yeah, I think we are. And you know, we talk about how obesity is chronic and progressive. It absolutely is. But something is basically feeding it and fueling it. And I think it’s the foods that we’re eating because so many people. And Chef Aj, you’re an example. I’m an example. We see it all over the place when they get off of that stuff. That’s one of the first things that gets resolved fairly quickly is obesity and diabetes. I think they’re all related.

Chef AJ: Absolutely. What is it about the processing? We really should probably say refining because like if you look at a can of chickpeas and put it in the food processor to make hummus, you’re technically processing it, but you’re not making a refined food product. But what happens in the refining of a whole natural food that makes it so addictive because I don’t see people going to carrot anonymous because they can’t stop eating carrots? But then, you know, carrot cake, that’s another story.

Dr. Vera Tarman: Exactly. So you know, it’s part of that checks and balances. So, you know, if you think about it, there’s only so many carrots or apples that you can eat because there’s the fiber in the water and the skin. And at a certain point, I’m just going to get too full. And like I said, I’ll feel sick the next day. So there’s checks and balances that you remove, and it’s the same as if I were to eat fermenting grapes. You know, people get grapes and they fermented and then they have some kind of concoction that they make. I mean, you don’t even need that much fancy stuff. But if you take the rotting grapes or the fermenting grain, you’re going to get sick. Like, we feel nauseous, like there’s only so much and then it’s like, you know, I can’t take anymore. But when you refine something, you’ve taken out all those kinds of safety elements and you’ve taken what is this five percent buzz of those grapes and which is a nice, pleasant little buzz. It’s enough for the fox and the flies, the animals that are eating the rotten grapes on the ground to just get buzzed out. And then they’re happy and they’re sleepy and they’re not going to jump in and eat the grapes that are still alive. But when you refined something, you take out, like I said, all the fiber and you’re also accumulating instead of a five percent. You get to have more because I’m now I’m having not just one or two apples, but 10 apples and apple juice or a cider drink. And I’m magnifying the potency of that five percent into a fire, and especially if I can distill it even more so. And that’s what the food industry does. I mean, we don’t call it making alcohol, but it is a kind of alcohol like making substances. We’re taking that sugar that’s that little burst of, Oh, that’s nice, I like that to a buzz. And it’s not quite the same buzz of an alcohol buzz, but it is a buzz and you ask any food at it. I just ask yourself when we’re happy and we call it comfort eating like it’s giving comfort, it’s actually giving something a soothing effect. That’s what food does. It’s what sugar does. Probably equivalent to a couple of glasses of wine. And I know lots of people who have put down there, believe it or not, put down their bottle of wine at night or their Percocets or their drugs and heroin, and instead pick up their tub of ice cream. It’s basically just a replacement, and they say, Well, it’s comfort eating. I’m eating for emotional, actually, they’re feeding their addiction.

Chef AJ: Over time, though, it becomes quite uncomfortable for most people

Dr. Vera Tarman: To get off of it you mean?

Chef AJ: No, comfort eating over time, it becomes very uncomfortable.

Dr. Vera Tarman: It certainly does. Just like any other addiction. And, you know, and that’s the thing, too, that addiction is always there’s always this honeymoon effect initially. I think one of the questions that you wanted to ask me at some point was why it’s so hard to stay on a diet or something. I mean, these things work, the honeymoon, it works really well. And then the more you use it, the less it works. And so eventually people end up drinking or using drugs or eating, but not because they’re going to feel better, but just so that they don’t feel awful. If I don’t have this, I won’t be able to sleep at all tonight and won’t be able to function. I’ve had so many people say, What would I do without this? How would I survive it? And that’s the type of questioning an addict asks.

Chef AJ: You know, if I understand you correctly in toxicology, they often say the poison is in the dose, but with the depth and the addiction is in the refining of the product.

Dr. Vera Tarman: Yes, that’s right. Well, it’s the dose. Nature gives a perfect dose. And we make it a poison by giving us more of that dose. Just as a great analogy that you’ve given, nature is the dose, and the refining makes it a poison because it’s too much. I guess they used to say that arsenic helped mild mild cases, and of course it kills you. So yeah,

Chef AJ: Yeah. You know, when I think about smoking, I mean, I’m shocked that in 2022, whenever I see a person smoking, I am like really, they didn’t get the memo. But my understanding from people that are honest, the people that I know, the smoke, they don’t really smoke to feel good. It doesn’t really do anything for them, but not smoking makes them feel bad. Do you think that with people that suffer from food addiction and sugar addiction, it’s the same thing, but absolutely not making them feel so good anymore but stopping feels terrible?

Dr. Vera Tarman: Absolutely. Because the whole piece about addiction is that there’s kind of like two dynamics that are happening. There’s the initial, which is the Oh, I like this. It makes me feel better. It gives me comfort. And that’s a neurobiological process that’s like using the neurochemical called dopamine, which I’ve talked about in the past. And whenever we talk to addiction, we’re talking about dopamine. And I like to say addiction is basically a dopamine impairment phenomena or syndrome. And that’s the first piece. And then the second piece, the longer this is that condition that I was talking about, you know, we talk about eating a lot of food and it’s addictive and we see the dopamine on the scans and we see that there’s an addictive piece. That condition of food addiction is when there’s the extra piece that’s added in, which is if I don’t have the substance, the stress response will actually kick in and I will now feel uncomfortable. It’s not that I’m using it to feel good. I don’t want to feel anxious, uncomfortable. So it’s actually feeding to dynamics and together it’s just so powerful. And it’s and because food is, it’s like cigars. It’s not huge, I mean, if you’re a smoker, you smoke 20 times a day if you’re an eater. I mean, you may be doing super big binges in a day, but chances are it’s a kind of grazing of a light frequently over the day and so you don’t notice the big ups and downs because you’re constantly in an up and down, which feels normal. And that adds to the stress response. Anyway, I think the point I’m trying to get to here is taking those two dynamics the dopamine and the stress response and adding them together will overpower willpower. And this is why we’re going to talk about the whole idea about is it possible to just have a little bit versus do you just have to stop completely when you’re battling the syndrome of addiction, you’re full blown into the addiction piece. Willpower is just overpowered. It’s not even part of the picture anymore.

Dr. Vera Tarman: Now you mentioned binging, and I’m wondering, just like obesity, if binging even existed before processed food existed because people don’t go to a arugula anonymous, I don’t have anybody not able to moderate vegetables.

Dr. Vera Tarman: Absolutely. I think that there probably was some, but much less, and that might be where the whole concept of eating disorders came in. And I actually think that probably what happened is we didn’t see so much bulimia. We saw just a lot more anorexia. So the idea of restricting foods? You mean that’s, you know, fasting that’s been around for centuries, like it’s been around a long time. And many people, especially if you do it like even a drugs like hallucinogenic drugs, if they’re used in the context of how they were like a spiritual thing was a guide. And it’s all part of a sort of ritualistic thing that’s different than the way that we use it now, we just go out and do it. If fasting is used in a very cautious, careful way, it has its functions. However, if you’re using it to lose weight or for some other reason, like for anorexia, you want to get thin or, you know, the whole concept like that in the 60s. I think it really started with the whole Twiggy thing. The concept of being slim is beautiful. I think that even restricting becomes an addictive process, and unless it’s done carefully and cautiously, I’m really worried actually, to tell you the truth about this whole intermittent fasting fad done without the caution and care that it should require. So I think it’s just going to feed this concept of addiction.

Chef AJ: Absolutely. Where do you stand on weight loss surgery, especially if people have this underlying food addiction? I mean, just making the stomach surgically smaller doesn’t address it.

Dr. Vera Tarman: Yeah. I think this is it. So, you know, weight loss surgery is effective to a point. And the thing about weight loss surgery, personally, I would say, if you can get away without doing it, do it because you don’t want to have surgery that’s going to cause potentially big consequences like side effects, negative consequences. But it is true that if you may not have the time to wait because, you know, weight loss will happen, but over time, you know, over like two to five years. If you do weight loss surgery, it’s quick. You can lose quite a lot of weight within one to two years, and that might motivate you. It might save your life because if you’ve got severe diabetes and metabolic syndrome, it might. It might save your life. But if you don’t get the concept of food addiction, this, it’s just it’s heartbreaking to see somebody lose a tremendous amount of weight, only to see the creeping back, and that’s what will happen. I’ve had many people who have had weight loss surgery say they just figured out how to have the processed, refined stuff in liquid form that they get around it. You can’t have as much. Your stomach is this big now instead of, you know, the size of a grapefruit or something like that now, so this big. Ice cream fits in a lot, anyway people become more like they’re actually more likely to become alcoholic because alcohol is fluid. It’s liquid, it’s basically a refined sugar, refined carbs anyway. And so with sugar, so it’s it’s. Weight loss surgery is fine, I think. I don’t know if it’s always necessary, but I wouldn’t say no, I wouldn’t say don’t do it, but I would say, don’t bother doing it if you’re not going to change your diet.

Chef AJ: Absolutely. Because it’s what you do, you can’t continue to do, it’s not going to be successful long term.

Dr. Vera Tarman: It won’t. And lots of people gain back their weight gain and then they go for a second surgery and a third surgery. And it’s like, No, don’t don’t. Just change the food. And you know, one of the points of a talk like ours today is to say, here’s the importance of food addiction. But there’s a good message that’s coming out of this, which is not only will you maintain that weight loss that you got through your weight loss surgery or just by dieting, I guess if you want to call it that, I don’t like that word, but you’re actually going to feel better mentally. We’re not preaching a program of deprivation here. Yeah. You know, you have a question on your list. You’ve got some great questions.

Chef AJ: Well, yeah, I mean, I really could talk to you for more than one hour because I really think you know so much about this. And one of the things that I think the viewers want to know, though, is what have you seen as the most effective strategy helping people with food addiction? And can you actually overcome food addiction or is it just something you manage for the rest of your life?

Dr. Vera Tarman: OK, so that’s a great question. If you’ve been exposed to the toxic food environment and you’re not too badly damaged, then it’s a bit like asking a person who’s diabetic with their pre-diabetic or I like to use. It’s a very similar analogy. We’re looking at glucose or insulin resistance, and addiction is dopamine resistance. It’s just a different part of the brain. And you know, if your sugars are starting to go bad, if you stop you might be fine and then you’re OK. But once you become a diabetic, you basically now have to learn to manage it. Similarly, with addiction, if you’re exposed to addictive foods and you’re not too far gone, you might be able to learn what are my trigger foods? And I’m going to avoid those. But I can still have a few once in a while because especially if it’s in a natural form, you know, like I can have cherries and bananas and somebody else can’t or I can have rice and more more simple carbs than other people can’t. But if you’ve reached it if you move beyond that point and there’s enough damage done, I do believe that there’s then you have to just manage it. It’s not like you can go back. You have to just say, OK, here I am. I’m diabetic, I’m a food addict. Whatever it is, what can I do to maintain my peace of mind or my mental and physical health? And I’m just going to avoid those foods, but I’ll be fine. Otherwise, I mean, really, we’re just going to say you’re going to be as clean as possible. You’re going to eat as real food as possible. It’s even possible, you know, if you try to just do raw food, it doesn’t. I don’t really know what the picture would look like. You just want to get away from refined foods. So did I answer that question?

Chef AJ: Yeah, we did. Thank you. You know, we had mentioned this weird trigger food a few times. Maybe we could see what your definition of trigger food is and is it similar to gateway food?

Dr. Vera Tarman: Yeah, that would be yes. So in the language of addiction, we identify that there are some foods that will spark off that dopamine response. And dopamine is the neurochemical of what I want. I want. I want more. You know, I’m going to have a couple of chips. I was fine before, but there’s the chips and I want a couple and now I want more because what’s happened is I’ve eaten that refined food product. And by the way, that does not happen with chickpeas. It happens with chips. And once I have a few of those, I want more that dopamine is inspired and and now I’m off and running. And oh my gosh, what was I answering? Can you ask that question again?

Chef AJ: I said gateway food.

Dr. Vera Tarman: Yes, chips are a great gateway. Actually, there was a study done to show what are the gateway foods? What are the most triggering foods? And we found out in number one on the list of course, is chocolate. Chocolate, of course, it was. And we’re talking about chocolate with the sugar in it. Pizza was another one. Chips was another one. Hamburgers was another one. It’s not just the sweet stuff, it’s also the savory stuff. And it’s not necessarily the meat, and it’s the stuff that’s been put on it. It’s not necessarily the potato and the chips, it’s the stuff. Anyway. So you identify what foods are that make you want more. That’s the trigger. And what are the trigger foods? They’re almost always something sweet and floury stuff. So that would be like cakes and muffins and pasta and all that kind of stuff. You have a little bit you want more. That’s a trigger food. So we already know basically anything that’s energy dense, sugary. If there’s fat added with the sugar that will make it more fat itself is probably not addictive, but add sugar and fat then it is. And if you add salt, well we’ve got the triangle, the Golden Triangle sugar salt fat.

Chef AJ: Absolutely. Because, you know, in nature, sugar, fat and salt are never in any one product.

Dr. Vera Tarman: Exactly. Yes, this is what we’ve done. We’ve done this to sell more food. But what we’re doing is we’re making ourselves sicker. I mean, this is a classic example of we’re making something that basically sells itself because it’s addictive and it’s making us sick. It’s giving profit to some at the expense of actually mainly our young young people gateway. And you know, when we use that word gateway in the addiction world, the thing that I really worry about here is that it’s not just a gateway to eating more food later. It’s a gateway to where I’m going to smoke. I’m going to smoke pot, I’m going to vape, I’m going to maybe use drugs because now I want to lose that weight that I’ve gained.You know, it’s a gateway to other drugs as well because it’s the same part of the brain that’s getting impacted.

Chef AJ: Absolutely. You know, you notice you never see okra on that list of gateway foods,

Dr. Vera Tarman: Oprah.

Chef AJ: Okra.

Dr. Vera Tarman: Okra, right, yes

Chef AJ: You never see it. Dr. Tarman, what is a craving? Is it physiological, psychological, biological, all of the above?

Dr. Vera Tarman: Yeah. So craving is, you know, again, it’s an addiction terminology. And this is why I think that adopting the whole concept of food addiction is so useful because then we actually use words that are useful and then we start to get tools and we’re using the tools of the addiction toolbox. And one of them is this concept of craving. So when you have a sense of craving, that means that you want something, you open up the fridge and go, What do I want? Well, that’s a verbal expression of a dopamine in action. I go into a store or it’s Christmas time, and I think, OK, what do I want for Christmas? I’m basically exercising or experiencing dopamine, which is my motivation, my excitement, my looking forward to it. And this is how shopping can become an addiction and how, you know, internet shopping and whatnot can become an addiction, too. But in terms of food, whenever you crave something, that means it’s probably a trigger because, like you said, I don’t crave okra. However, if I know I’m going to an Indian restaurant, I’m going to have a really nice okra dish. I’m looking forward to it, but not like, you know, I want it right now. I can wait until the plate comes and I’ll eat what I want and then I can push my plate away. But if you’re in a circumstance where you can’t wait for that thing and you know, you start to adopt all sorts of behaviors like secret eating and planning ahead and hiding the food and obsessing about it, that’s basically obsession is just a craving on steroids.

Chef AJ: I love that obsession is a craving. Very good. You know, so many people talk about being absent from sugar and flour, and yet they still include what I would consider drugs in their meal plan, like caffeine multiple times a day alcohol. Yeah, that fits in the food addiction equation because to me, those are both addictive substances, just because people can’t give them up.

Dr. Vera Tarman: Yeah. Well, you know, so this is why I think that it’s important to have conversations like this where we say there is an addiction and we have to take this seriously. You know, if people just cut back, it helps. But if they don’t, if they don’t realize that it’s actually a drug that they’re introducing, which will then promote the craving. One one of the things that they talk about in the addiction terminology is if you do use a substance that provokes the phenomena of craving, then that’s a trigger. And if you. So anyway, if you’re eating a food that does that, it’s become addictive. I’m sorry, I lost the game because I’m trying, you know, it’s OK. I mean, I was just saying, where does caffeine? And alcohol is great? OK, I don’t see how they’re really part of an abstinent food plan for somebody.

Dr. Vera Tarman: So, it doesn’t help, then to put aside the sugar. If you’re then going to just and this is what we see happening all the time is people end up smoking more. You know, they’re on a diet and others are smoking more, or they’re drinking a lot more coffee. I mean, you’re just moving your addiction to something else. And then when you try to quit smoking, what happens? You start eating the sugar to quit smoking. And similarly, with alcohol, a lot of times when people stop drinking, they end up eating more. And in fact, it’s part of the canon of literature that it says when you have a craving for alcohol, proper sugar and it works like a candy. And you know, those of us who know better will say, No, no, no, no, don’t do that either, either, because it is. It’s a gateway one to the other, to the other. And so if you are seriously wanting to address your addiction, I’m sorry, but you’re probably going to have to stop the alcohol. And you know, a lot of people are saying, No, I can’t stop the alcohol. Well, it’s a bit like saying, you know, the cocaine user, Well, you know, if you have suffered the devastation that a cocaine or crack addiction will do to you, it will be worth your while not to pick up alcohol or crack on a weekend. You’re just going to say, I can’t do it. And similarly, if you have been in a situation of food addiction where your weight has been 100 pounds, 200 pounds, 200 pounds more than then, then that is good for your health. Isn’t that worth dropping the alcohol, the glass of wine every night or every other night or on a Saturday? It’s just going to say yes, it’s worth it. So similarly, with caffeine, it would depend on how bad off you are. But if you’re serious about wanting to stop your addiction and a lot of people will even stop sweeteners, just all of these things are triggers that will induce that phenomenon of craving right. And the craving is not specific. It’ll be okay, I’m not having sugar anymore, but now I want carbs instead like flour, like muffins. Like, I used to think muffins were healthy. Oh, my god, was I ever wrong? So, you know, anyway, even some people will find that if they eat dairy, it becomes addictive. And so if a person says, that’s my trigger, you’ve got to be willing to let that one go.

Chef AJ: Absolutely. Well, maybe we can rewrite that book. And instead of popping candy, we can tell with a pop a brussel sprout.

Dr. Vera Tarman: Yes, exactly.

Chef AJ: You know, Dr. Tarman is like people that smoke one cigarette and don’t get lung cancer right after smoking it or become an alcoholic after their first beer. And with food addiction, isn’t it like, over time, it’s just it’s progressive.

Dr. Vera Tarman: Yes, yes. But that’s because of the food environment of today. So, you know, I mean, we were always like one hundred years ago, there was always a grandma who made a cake, you know, but it was on a birthday and it was once, or Christmas time, or we would give, you know, kids a super, super strong fruit. I mean, like highly sugarized fruits. But you know, it wasn’t that often, and we could manage that. It’s the abundance today where, you know, basically cereal is a form of dessert and then they have bread for lunch or pizza. A lot of people live on pizza, like this stuff is highly processed food and it’s the exposure and the amount of it. That’s what’s causing the damage.

Chef AJ: Right, well, should we withhold all sugar and flour? And I hope people are withholding alcohol from children, from all children should we be raising our children in a sugar and flour free environment. I mean, kids are drinking Red Bulls now.

Dr. Vera Tarman: I know, I know they are. This is it. So if you’re asking me as an addiction doctor and if I could have a wish list, I would say yes. Can we actually just get rid of the food industry? Because kids are relying on us to tell them what is healthy? And I have so many, even people who are writing about it, and they’re trying to be nice and your kids can have a little bit. They probably can have a little bit. Sure, they probably can. But you know, we have this thing, we don’t want to deprive our kids. They’re depending on us and Chef A.J, you and I both know that if we get a plate of roasted Brussels sprouts, I do not feel deprived. I am not sitting there going, oh man, I want that cheesecake. I only want the cheesecake if that’s what I’ve been around. You know, it used to be my favorite item. I don’t even want to look at a cheesecake anymore. There’s no sense of deprivation at all. And our kids are relying on us. And so I think that if you could control the environment, which I think is very hard to do so that the kid doesn’t have that kind of exposure, that would be the best thing you could do. Just like you don’t want a kid to smoke pot too early. You know, we’re actually encouraging people if they are going to smoke, can you make it 18 19? Because when they get exposed is very much going to dictate whether they’re going to become chronic users later. Similarly, with sugar, can you put it off? Can you limit it? I’d like to see it gone completely, but.

Chef AJ: We don’t want people to necessarily smoke pot at all. Right? I mean.

Dr. Vera Tarman: I know, I know, I know.

Chef AJ: It almost sounds like, well, if it’s 18, it’s alright

Dr. Vera Tarman: I know. I know. But from an addiction point of view.

Chef AJ: I understand what you’re saying. I mean, you know, one of the experts, Dr. Joel Furman, who wrote Fast Food Genocide, completely agrees that, you know, it’s like the first ten years of life are critical.

Dr. Vera Tarman: It is, and it is genocide. But that’s, you know, it’s not a it’s not an exaggeration. It is genocide. I keep thinking if climate change doesn’t get us, our food will like, for God sakes. Right?

Chef AJ: You know, you say, you know, it’s funny because I wish my mom was alive today because I’m sure she thought she was doing the right thing by giving us all the treats and showing love the way she did with food. She was also a food addict and morbidly obese, but all parents really are depriving their children of a lifetime of suffering.

Dr. Vera Tarman: Yes, exactly. And kids are, you know, it’s true that when we’re born, we have a sort of sweet tooth as it were, because that’s energy dense but we can get introduced to other foods and we do get introduced to other foods. It’s the parent who knows better, that should be teaching the kids where I don’t want to sound old fashioned here, but I want to say we’re letting our kids get away with too much. But it’s not that, it’s the food industry that’s feeding the kids, pushing them to make them want something.

Chef AJ: And we know just the way the advertising is taught to children specifically, that should actually be illegal. You know, I’ve met a few people that were raised without eating any sugar and flour like Dr. Goldhammer’s son. And I mean, he grew up fine. And, you know, he has no food cravings, no weight issues. Brussels Sprouts happen to be his favorite food, and it’s so refreshing to see somebody that has never struggled with that. You know, people knew that that was possible. Maybe they would think twice about giving these one year old kids a smash cake, because Dr. Nicole Levine is an expert on this summit, and she says the same thing, at least not in the first two years of life people, they don’t need a smash cake. You can have a shaving cream, you can have mashed potatoes. A kid doesn’t need sugar on his or her first birthday.

Dr. Vera Tarman: Absolutely, absolutely. They don’t need it. Absolutely. Yeah.

Chef AJ: What do you think is the reason this is so, I mean, there’s multiple reasons that it’s hard. Like you mentioned, the food environment, which is very hard for people to control. But do you think that for some people, it’s just that they can’t experience detox symptoms? They just give up because if the detox is too great for them?

Dr. Vera Tarman: Yeah. And you know what? This is the thing that happens, this is why diets don’t work. What often people do is they think I just have to restrict the amount, you know, cut the cards or cut the calories, you know, work out more and then they’re hungry. And then what happens is that when you’re hungry, you start craving sweets because sweets are energy dense. And the most important thing about a diet is do not restrict, you want to be full. And you know, A.J., you and I both we eat a ton of vegetables at our at our meals. I am not hungry when I’m on a diet or a food plan. A healthy food plan, not hungry at all. You don’t want to be hungry. You want. It’s not the amount. It’s the choice of foods that you’re eating. And if you do, people will respond. So they’ll eat too little and then they’ll choose to eat the stuff that they really want to eat, so they’re going through that sense of deprivation. They’re not going to have the sugar they know they can eat, you know, too much bread or whatever it is. So then if you don’t understand addiction, you’re not going to acknowledge that you’re going to go through withdrawal and withdrawal is a phenomenon that exists. It lasts for about seven to 10 days, maybe two weeks. If you’re unlucky, maybe only three days if you’re lucky. And that’s that. That’s when you’re going to feel deprived. That’s when you’re going to feel like, Oh, how can I live this way, the rest of my life? And that’s when people say, I can’t do it. So that’s the time when you want to have a support system, you want to have all sorts of things in place. I mean, you know, the treatment center where I work, we actually had for a couple of years a food addiction program, and we had these people in with everybody, all the alcoholics and the cocaine addiction and heroin addicts, they were all in the same place. We lock everybody up for a month, what I mean by that is you can’t go out at night unless you’re with somebody else and you know, you’re monitored all the time because we know that it is so hard to stop. And similarly, with the food addict, because we knew they would sneak out and try to get their chocolate bars or whatever. So when they came in, we would look in their purses to make sure they didn’t have any secret stash just like the drugs. And if you can get past that month knowing or not months, whatever long it is, knowing that you’re going to suffer once you get over it. In the addiction world, we call it waiting until the miracle happens. It does happen. Get over the hump and then you’re going to go, Oh my God. Everybody who left that program after a month said, I have no desire to eat that stuff. It happens. It really happens. The problem is, the moment you get out in the end, you know, the patterns of behavior you’re used to going out, you’re used to having a meal and then dessert. And once that happens, then you start to slip back into the old way. But that’s why I don’t think you can moderate. I think you have to stop.

Chef AJ: Right, And we’re going to talk about that. But first, I want to see what are the symptoms of detox or withdrawal from refined carbohydrates? Are there physiological, emotional, psychological? What would a person expect to experience?

Dr. Vera Tarman: Definitely emotional and psychological that feeling of deprivation. It’s that feeling it would basically anxiety like, how will I do without this substance? I mean, people said, Oh, I won’t be able to sleep. They’re used to using the food to moderate emotions, so they’re going to feel more emotional. And that was often the reason why people would leave. Literally, I can’t do it and they would leave the program because they just couldn’t do it. So the more emotional, more sort of sense of irrationality and feeling of deprivation,and that would lead to things like insomnia. There would be some maybe sometimes people had a sense of symptoms of anxiety like diarrhea and just what I think is even more than that. Those, that’s probably the main stuff. It’s mainly more emotional. However, it is a physiological phenomenon. It’s the dopamine flatlining. It’s you’re stopping something and you have to kind of re-calibrate the whole neurochemistry to get back on board. And that takes a couple of weeks. So It is a real physical thing, sugar withdrawal.

Chef AJ: I mean, you know, it is because I remember the day that I went off sugar. Finally, July six, 2003, it was a Sunday. I mean, for about six days nauseous, diarrhea, headaches, and crying. And the reason I am able to stay abstinent is because I don’t want to have to go through that again, frankly.

Dr. Vera Tarman: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I forgot about the headache, headache and fatigue and irritability. Yeah, that’s right. But the good news is, it passes, it passes.

Chef AJ: So if food or processed food is addictive, at least for some people, if it’s truly an addiction, what is the gold standard of treatment, then total abstinence?

Dr. Vera Tarman: Yes, that’s right. Yes, it is. And I think that only people who have not gone over the line. There’s a line just like the alcoholic or just like the person who has a few cigarettes here and there doesn’t actually call themselves a smoker because they could then go away and not have a cigarette for a whole year and not think about it. So there does appear to be a level of maybe time that you can get away with stuff. But once the body starts to, the brain starts to become tolerant to it. It starts to register that there is a substance that’s there, that it has to actually respond to, in other words, develop a tolerance to, now you’re moving into the whole addiction pattern. And I don’t think it takes that long like an opiate user. It’s three days, four days, and now they’re using, they’re going to be sick if they don’t use them. How long is it for sugar on a regular daily basis or how long is it if you’re smoking cigarettes until you need a cigarette? I don’t know. It’s not actually that long, but it’s probably depending on the person. But once you cross that line, it is. If this is an addiction, any trigger will inspire or induce that phenomenon of craving. And then and then you’re back. In other words, you don’t want to have anything that’s going to fire up that trigger. It’s kind of in the addiction where we call it kindling. It’s like it’s once the fireplace is kindled, you just need the flame and you’re gone. But if you haven’t reached that point where the kindling hasn’t developed, you still have some, you know, put a flame in a dose out and no problem. But once you’ve reached that food addiction piece, it’s a Kindle. It just takes one flame. In other words, just one bite of something, now maybe not a bite, but one cake or one something. And then you’re off and running. 

Chef AJ: How do we know? How does a person differentiate, whether they need total abstinence, or if they could just do harm reduction or maybe cut back? How would they know?

Dr. Vera Tarman: I think people know. I really do think people know. Some more intuitively. If you can say to yourself, it’s easier to not have this than to have just a little bit, then you know, you know, and so most people know. They think, well, it’ll be hard, but I’ll still be able to stop. But if you’re already telling yourself, no, no, no, no, there’s something about this that I’m just getting too excited. I’m just, it’s not like okra, you know, it’s a pleasant thought, but well, if it’s not there, I’ll have something else. Once you have an attachment to something. And how about this? Maybe the line would be if you have something and then find out you can’t have it and you have a reaction to that. That’s more than just, oh, OK. There’s probably something going on.

Chef AJ: All right. When you work with people, do you tell them to start cutting down or to give abstinence a try for a period of time?

Dr. Vera Tarman: But I think that cutting down only prolongs the agony, but this is a debate in the field. You know, should we do something like a sort of slow harm reduction? Just eat something that’s not as bad as something else. So that would be an example of sweeteners. Okay I won’t have sugar, but can I have sweeteners? And you know, that’s what still causes cravings. But you know, people can get away with that, and that might work. But truthfully, if you’re thinking, OK, I’m used to having three desserts a day, can I just have one a day? Chances are you’re just prolonging the agony because when you’re not having the dessert to be like, let’s say you decide you’re just going to have it at night. You’re going to be thinking about the meals that you’re not having, you’re going to be thinking about the dessert. We call that white knuckling it. You’re still obsessing about it, even if you’re not having it. I think it’s much better if you just get the damn 10 days over with and then you’re on the other side. Otherwise, it’s like, are you trying to quit smoking and you’re used to 10 and now you’re on six? We still want those other four. And if you’re doing it, you know you’re going to do it over a month instead of 10 days. That’s a month of white knuckling it.

Chef AJ: I love how you say that cutting down only prolongs the agony because those of us that are able to embrace abstinence, we find that it’s actually a lot easier than doing that moderation dance.

Dr. Vera Tarman: Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. And if you have any sense, somebody who’s listening, that sense of it’s easier just not to have it than to have a little bit, then stay away from that substance. That’s telling you.

Chef AJ: But a lot of people say. It’s just too hard that if they give up the substance, they’ll want it more. But isn’t that because they’re an addict?

Dr. Vera Tarman: Yes, and they’re experiencing withdrawal. This is the piece where you have to say to them, Yes, this is withdrawal and it will pass in 10 days.

Chef AJ: Yeah, absolutely. And that’s why It should be in a supportive group or even at a place like the TrueNorth Health Center or your place could be so helpful for people that are not able to do it on their own.

Dr. Vera Tarman: Yeah. And you know, we have this thing where, you know, I have a hard time believing it, but if I have a coach or I have somebody that I talk to who I trust, they’re going to say it doesn’t feel right. It feels bad, but it is going to pass. And I know it’s going to pass because it did with me and it did with all my patients. And it’s just the way it works. That’s how the brain works. It’s just withdrawal. And then once you’re on the other side, you’re going to go, Oh my God. It’s much easier than I thought.

Chef AJ: Until people experience a period of absence, I think they don’t really have any idea of what we’re talking about.

Dr. Vera Tarman: You’re just going, how am I going to do this? And that is exactly how the addict thinks. I mean, you know, the character, the crack addict who’s sitting there, they are not going, I want this life. They’re thinking, I hate this life, but I do not know how I’m going to get through the next 24 hours and then and then in 10 days, they’re like, because they’re in treatment. They go, Holy cow, you know, how can I not go back there because I didn’t? I see people discovering that once they get past this cloud of fear, they go, Oh my God, this is not that bad. It’s actually OK. It’s part of that whole, like I said, the stress and the dopamine response, it will recalibrate itself. It will. You just have to get through it.

Chef AJ: Some people say to me, Oh, Chef AJ, I can’t be perfect like you and I don’t see myself as perfect. I see myself as abstinent and I think you’re different.

Dr. Vera Tarman: Yes, they are. Yeah, it does. It’s not perfection. That’s just the person thinking that they just cannot possibly imagine not using it. But what they don’t realize is, is that you’re, you have none of that stress that they’re going through. It’s easy for you. I mean, I’m assuming it is. It’s easy for me. I used to love, like I said, cheesecake. And you know, I used to love rum and eggnog at Christmas time. And I have to admit at Christmas time, I still think, Oh, I’m not having that rum and eggnog and, you know, whatever. But then I think, you know what? That’s OK. I don’t need it. I used to smoke cigarettes and I loved them then but I don’t need them now, and thank God I’m not doing them. It’s a memory, but it’s not a painful one. It’s like whatever. It’s easy. It’s easy. It’s not perfection. It’s easy. It’s it’s it’s. We’ve actually chosen an easier way because you have to get through those first ten days.

Chef AJ: Right. You know, once I discovered food addiction was a real phenomenon and I worked on treating it or managing it. I didn’t have to go on a diet. The weight took care of itself, and the weight was a symptom of the food addiction, not the other way around.

Dr. Vera Tarman: Exactly. And if you focus too much on your weight, you’re going to get caught up in the whole, you know, how many carbs? How many calories? Should I get out there and work out more? Should I just not eat very much? You’re going to focus on all the stuff that doesn’t work. It’s actually going to make the addiction worse because just the hunger and the anxiety, all that stuff is going to make it worse. But if you just addressed that head on all that other stuff, just, yeah, it just takes care of itself.

Chef AJ: It is emotional eating and food addiction similar to the same thing or opposite sides of the same coin.

Dr. Vera Tarman: I actually think emotional eating is stage one. It’s the beginning because, you know, we we eat food for comfort. It does cause comfort, but it’s like the grapes. It’s a five percent buzz, but there’s a pleasure of eating and there’s meant to be so that I make sure I eat so that I stay alive. Otherwise, I would bother eating too much trouble to eat and whatever. But when we start to rely on that and rather than deal with our emotions in a different way and then start to use food as a drug, then it moves into addiction itself. So I think it’s the beginning.

Chef AJ: What about stress? We can’t always manage all of our stresses, but the pandemic, for example, was a source of stress, and we’ll use that time to actually clean up their diet and start exercising. Other people gained what they’re calling the COVID 20 or things like that.

Dr. Vera Tarman: I know. And yeah, and that’s been partly business, too. That has pushed for that, you know, like that. I mean, they’ve actually used that as a, you know, learn how to bake or, you know, start ordering and keeping our bakeries and our restaurants alive by ordering stuff. Stress, it’s like the comfort thing. It’s go ahead and use food for stress as long as it’s real food, because if I’m having a stressful day, I will enjoy my meal and it does actually give me a, you know, a half an hour or an hour break from the stresses of the day. And that’s fine. But it’s Brussels sprouts. I’m just using that as an example, and then I’m done, and then I have to go back to my life, which is dealing with the stress. Use real food and with the pleasure that it allows you because I love the food that I eat and I love my meal times and I’m sure Chef AJ you do as well. We can delight in menus and in recipes and in the joy of eating. But then at the end of that meal, we push the plate away and we move on and do something else. So if you can use food for comfort, for pleasure, for excitement. But let nature take care of itself by eating real food.

Chef AJ: Because we’re still getting dopamine from our food, but we’re not having these exaggerated responses.

Dr. Vera Tarman: Exactly. And then therefore, we’re not going to get addicted.

Chef AJ: Right. Absolutely. Does trauma play a role in addiction and if so, what?

Dr. Vera Tarman: Well, trauma is another one of those things that predisposes a person so their ability to live with, I guess, because they’ve lost their ability to manage emotion because they’ve had some sort of huge stress that’s overwhelmed, you know, sort of our natural ability to cope. And so we end up needing help. And so people use food and again a person with trauma is not eating too much okra or Brussels sprouts. They’re eating junk food because of that extra effect. Or they’re using drugs or they’re using prescription medication, they’re using something to basically self-medicate. So yes, I think that having a trauma background will predispose a person for sure. I’d actually say, for somebody like that, be extra careful with your food, be super clean with your food because you are more predisposed.

Chef AJ: You know, they say with smoking, very few people quit on the first try. It takes maybe six or seven tries. What hope could you give to people that have struggled with trying to do an absent food plan free of sugar and flour and lose weight? Can you maybe give them some hope that there is a light at the end of the tunnel and they should try again?

Dr. Vera Tarman: Absolutely. You should try again. I mean, absolutely. I mean, one of the things you say about the addiction world is it’s always one day at a time. You just have to be clean for today. So, you know, I mean, the thought of how will I ever live without my bread, without my pasta, without my, how will I do this? What can you do today? If for this meal, can you have this next meal where you’re only going to have your veggies and your fruit and your legume, or whatever it is that you’re going to have. Can you do that? Yes, I can. OK, so then don’t think about anything else and then at dinnertime or the next day, can you do that? So we’re doing it one day at a time. I guess that would be the main thing.

Chef AJ: That’s what I say to people. The day at a time is too much. Do it a meal at a time. If that’s too much to do with a bite at a time,

Dr. Vera Tarman: Exactly. Yeah, because your mind is going to jump ahead and make you afraid. And I mean, we’re responding to this manufactured fear.

Chef AJ: So before I ask you the final question, is there anything else you want to add to this discussion that perhaps I didn’t cover?

Dr. Vera Tarman: You had so many good questions there.

Chef AJ: That’s why we have back every year because we got so many…

Dr. Vera Tarman: I think the message that I really wanted to make sure that I thought was really valuable was, you know, do we have to be abstinent or have to quit completely? And no, you don’t have to quit completely. But if you want peace of mind, if you want to have weight that is stable, then probably yes. And if you’re at the point where you’re listening to a summit about weight loss, that tells me. Because the statistics for people who are classified as obese, 50 to 60 percent are food addicted, and that’s only because they’re living in this environment of today. It’s not your fault, it’s a product of the food environment that we’re in and it is, if that’s the case, quit, but one day at a time.

Chef AJ: Speaking of the environment, so many people I know are living in an unclean environment that they say they can’t control with people that not only don’t support them, but sabotage them.

Dr. Vera Tarman: Yeah, I know that’s a whole other topic. Absolutely.

Chef AJ: Maybe we can talk about that next.

Dr. Vera Tarman: And that’s partly because they’re probably food addicts themselves. I mean, and it’s also that we have to change our societal expectations, like we just laugh about this. But I would never tell somebody to quit smoking. Great, have a cigar and let’s celebrate. We just wouldn’t do that.

Chef AJ: They only do that with food. So I’m so thankful for your place in the world and how you’re really enlightening people, because before you people just really thought I was crazy because I’m not an M.D. like you, and to hear people of your caliber talk about this has just been enormously helpful.

Dr. Vera Tarman: Thank you, A.J.

Chef AJ: I’ve got one more question, though, Dr. Tarman. What is the real truth about weight loss?

Dr. Vera Tarman: The real truth is that it’s that weight loss or weight is just a symptom of another problem. And weight loss is a phenomena that nature will do. You have to do nothing about it. Just let it go and look at the food. It’s the food that you’re eating, change your food, make it clean and the weight loss will take care of itself.

Chef AJ: That’s right, the more you eat clean, the more you’ll be lean. Thank you so much, Dr. Tarman.

Chef AJ: Hi, Dr. Avena, and welcome to the Truth about Weight Loss Summit, thanks so much for being here.

Dr. Nicole Avena: Oh, thanks so much for having me. I’m really excited to talk with you.

Chef AJ: Well, I love this subject and you are such an expert on food addiction. You make the research so applicable and so relatable, and I really appreciate your work.

Dr. Nicole Avena: Oh, thank you. Yeah, I’ve been doing this for a long time now. Back when I first started, food addiction was really something that people were not really talking about in the medical community. But I like to think that we’ve been able to make a lot of advancement in that

Chef AJ: Right, and some people still aren’t talking about it in that they don’t even believe it’s real. But those of us that have had it and those of us like you that work with people that suffer from it know that it really is. So I really appreciate you bringing this research to the forefront. And as an expert on food addiction, do you think there is some correlation with food addiction and the current obesity epidemic?

Dr. Nicole Avena: Oh, absolutely. That’s how I actually got interested in this topic. Let me pull up a couple of slides just to kind of walk us through some of this, because there’s really an interesting story behind this. So basically, when I first started doing research on this topic, I was a grad student at Princeton and I was interested in the obesity epidemic, and it seemed really curious to me as my advisor why so many people were struggling to lose weight. Despite the fact that there was all these public health concerns and all these warnings about how dangerous it is to be overweight or obese. And we started to toy with this idea. Well, maybe it’s not something that’s wrong with the people who are overweight or obese. Maybe it’s something wrong with the foods that they’re eating. And we started toying with this idea that maybe some of the foods that are in our modern food environment are designed to just taste so delicious that they actually end up becoming something very different. And could there be something that is related to the ingredients or the way those are developed that could be leading people to become dependent on them? And so we know that our food acquisition has changed over time. We we’ve gone from hunters and gatherers to now people who can buy highly processed foods in stores and we can store them in our homes and we can even order food from our phone. You don’t even need to leave the house. And that’s a very different type of atmosphere than what was happening from our ancestors, who used to have to chase an animal for miles and miles if they were hunting or find a berry bush and maybe walk through the forest for hours or days until they found one. So we used to have to work really hard to get our food. And it was very delicious and rewarding when we got it. But that’s changed a bit. And now we have this food environment where it’s much easier to acquire foods. And I think that this can be part of the situation that we’re seeing now with obesity and overeating. Also, if you look at the types of foods that we eat, they tend to be foods that are highly processed and so they contain lots of added sugars and sweeteners. And this is something that we’ve seen in our research can contribute to this addiction like change in the brain that we’ve been observing. And so to go back to your original question about, is it related to obesity? I think there’s been so much research that’s come out over the past several years that does point to the fact that we can develop an addiction to these highly palatable foods, highly processed foods, particularly those that contain a lot of added sugar. And then also, I’ll just go on a little bit to share a little bit more about that until you get to the next question you have for me.

Dr. Nicole Avena: Portion sizes, I think that’s an important point of this. We know that portion sizes have gone up dramatically over time. And so if we take a look at the CDC data, this is data that shows what the typical fast-food type of meal look like back in the 1950s compared to what it looks like. You know, now, and maybe in the future, you can see that the average size of not only the sandwiches but also the drinks have gone up in size, and as a result of that, so have the calories. And so our calorie needs have not gone up over time. We need the same amount of calories, if not fewer than our ancestors did, because if you think about it, we’re eating much more sedentary lives. We are not necessarily, you know, working in the fields or having to, you know, walk miles to get to work or to school or to things that our ancestors had to do. But yet we’re consuming a lot more calories and portion sizes. Plays a big role in this because we do know that the amount of food that is put in front of someone is going to dictate how much they eat. So if you give a plate of food to someone and there’s been plenty of studies that have been done on this, if you look at plated restaurants or meals that are given at plated restaurants, people are more likely to eat less when that food is given them on a plate than they are if they go to a buffet type restaurant where there’s unlimited portion sizes available. And so it does play a big role. I do want to point out, though, I think that obesity is an end point and it has multiple contributing factors, so I often talk about how, you know, we’re not really going to find a cure for obesity because there’s multiple causes, and I think food addiction could be one of those. We also know that there’s other things like sedentary lifestyle that we touched on and genetic vulnerability, just the fact that more and more people are obese and they’re having babies. And so more and more babies are going to be born with that genetic predisposition to potentially become obese. Now, that doesn’t mean that they’re destined to become obese. It just means that they’re at greater risk. And if you take a look at our food environment, we have this genetic and environmental crosshairs, if you will. That basically makes it very difficult for someone who has a genetic vulnerability to not become overweight or obese in the modern food environment. There were, and that is so full of processed foods and other types of foods that encourage people to overeat. Also, I talked about food accessibility. There’s also been some interesting social norms about food that I think have changed over time. You know, it’s really one of those things where it’s socially acceptable to eat food wherever you go. You can have a sandwich on the subway if you bring, you know, donuts into work. People think you’re great if you show up at someone’s house with a cake. I mean, it’s almost expected when you go to someone’s home if you’re visiting them to show up with some sort of calories, whether or not it’s, you know, food or wine or something. And so are social norms have changed in the way that we’re basically eating all day, every day. And it seems that that has been something that can contribute to passive calorie consumption. People find that they congregate around food and we always have. That’s how humans have evolved. But it seems to have come at a cost in many cases now because we’re finding that so many people are struggling with overeating and social situations is certainly one of those cases where people find it difficult to sometimes navigate their way through things. So if you go to a party and people say, Oh hey, have a piece of cake, it’s Susie’s birthday, you look like the bad guy if you say, no, I don’t want any cake. And so these are things that could be difficult for some people to manage. But there are ways in which we can mitigate them and some strategies that we could talk about in a bit helping people to overcome those types of social situations. And then, you know, stress and enduring factors are important. I don’t really think we can go into those right now because there’s just such a vast amount of research on them. But we are high-stress people. I think especially the past two years, most people have been increasing their stress levels significantly for various reasons. And that can have an impact on obesity and that can contribute to overeating and in many cases, eating as a way to self-soothe or to self-medicate. And then we touched on the increases in portion sizes and then also genetic disorders. Like Poddar Willi syndrome, they can sometimes have and often have a side effect of obesity. So the point here is that there are a variety of reasons why people can become overweight or obese. But I do think that food addiction is one of the factors that can contribute to it.

Dr. Nicole Avena: And then I want to walk through the rest of a couple of slides I have here and then we can maybe have some questions and just a discussion about these things. So one of the things that I think is really interesting and I think a lot of people struggle with is how do you know what foods are good to eat or what foods are good to eat? Now what I often say to people in this situation is there aren’t good foods and bad foods. I don’t think it’s a safe or a good idea to categorize foods that way. But I do think we need to come up with a strategy on how do we identify what a food is versus what junk food is, because I think that there are two different things. What are the things that I often hear from people when they kind of give me a little bit of pushback about the whole idea of food being addictive is that, well, we need food to survive. So how are you supposed to go? I’m, you know, give up food. You can’t, it just doesn’t make any sense. And my answer to them is, yes, we need food to survive, but we don’t need highly processed junk food to survive. And so let me give you a couple of examples about what I mean. I think this comes down to the fact that our definition of food needs to change. These foods that are highly processed, foods that are created in laboratories, in my opinion, aren’t the same thing as actual food. And so here you can see this is a nutrition facts label. I’m sure everyone’s familiar with these there on all the food products you’ll see in the grocery store, and they provide us with very important information about the calorie content about how much that carbohydrates, sugars added sugars, protein. We have information about some important vitamins, and this is also an important way for us to understand what the product is. What are the ingredients? And so if you look down at the bottom of these, you typically will see a list of ingredients. And so if you take a look at this label, you can see that this is very obviously whole baby carrots frozen and unprepared. OK, so no surprise there. But let’s look at another label from another quote unquote food and see if it’s so easy to figure out what it is. Now here you see again, we have all this information. We know that there’s 60 calories in one pouch of whatever this is, and there’s fat and there’s no carbohydrates. There are some nutrients, vitamins in it. And when we take a look at the ingredients list to decide whether or not we should eat this thing, it becomes a little bit harder to figure it out because you can see that there’s a whole bunch of words here that the average person doesn’t necessarily know what it means. And so this is basically a bunch of ingredients that have been put together to create this particular food product. And so you can see there are some good things in here, right? So that food is fortified with vitamin B, which is great because it’s sometimes the case that we don’t get all of our vitamins and the nutrients that we need to occur naturally in foods. So it’s great that some foods are fortified, which means that the food companies add extra vitamins to them. That’s a good thing, but it also contains some things that maybe aren’t so great, like corn sirup or modified corn starch salt dextrose. There’s also some other things in here that really have no purpose of being in here other than to make the food appear a certain way or to allow it to survive on a shelf for a certain amount of time. So things like Red 40 Lake, that’s a color that’s used to die of food. A certain color is one example. Also yellow five lake yellow five blue one. So you can see here there’s a lot of things that are put into this particular product that aren’t exactly in there for a health perspective or for a nutrition perspective. They’re in there for other reasons. So to unveil with this particular product is it is Mini Chris Pop-Tarts. And so the big difference here, as you can see, is that this is a highly processed food. This is very different, in my opinion, from carrots, right? Because there’s no mini Chris Pop-Tart tree out there. You can’t go, you know, plant these in your garden and enjoy them. These are a manmade synthetic product that’s being marketed as a food to people. And because it’s in the grocery store, people just assume that you’re supposed to eat it and it’s safe. And this is where I have a problem because we see that these foods are very different from natural, healthy foods like vegetables, fruits and other things. So what we see to here is that many of these ingredients that I was describing to you are put into this product to make it smell a certain way so that when you open up the wrapper or the pouch, it’s going to retain its shape, it’s going to melt a certain way in your mouth. The mouthfeel associated with foods is very important in our perception of whether or not we like them or not. And so there’s a lot of effort that goes into this.

Dr. Nicole Avena: Food scientists are hired by these companies to develop these products to make sure they’re optimized to taste as good as they can. And often that means that a lot of added sugar gets put into these because in order to make sure that the product is going to be able to stay on the shelf for six months or a year or whatever it is, sometimes they have to add preservatives and ingredients that taste awful. But then you add sugar to mask the taste of those ingredients, and so it becomes this whole, you know, slippery slope of creating this product that will retain its shape and stay beautiful in the pouch and melt a certain way in your mouth. And then, you know, having to add sugar to make it still retain its taste and to taste really good so that people will continue to like it. So the big thing about these foods, I think, is that they’re considered in this category of ultra-processed foods, and this is a term that’s been put out in the scientific community. And I’m really glad and a lot of people are now starting to understand this and look at this as a whole other category of food and ultra-processed foods are essentially foods that have ingredients or formulations of several different ingredients that are not used in culinary preparations. So they’re not necessarily used to enhance flavors like we sometimes would add salt to a recipe or certain oils to a recipe. These are things like flavors, colors, sweeteners or emulsifiers or other things that are basically used to imitate our sensory qualities. And so they’re put in there to make it taste a certain way to make it melt a certain way to make it smell a certain way. And they’re also used to disguise some of these undesirable qualities of the final product that are resulting from adding in all these chemicals together. So my take on this is that if we can really work to minimize the consumption of ultra-processed food, we would find that there would be a lot less obesity. And there’s been some excellent studies that have come out of niche and other places that have shown that it is the processing of the food that is responsible for people overeating. We’ve shown in our laboratory that highly processed foods are more likely to be identified as addictive, and people find that they have a more difficult time restraining their intake. And there’s even been some clinical studies conducted at NIH where when you control for the amount of calories and the nutrients in people who are consuming foods, those that are consuming ultra-processed foods are more likely to gain weight and more likely to want to overeat. And so again, it does make a difference, and these types of foods are becoming really rampant in our food environment. If you think about it, when you go in the grocery store, you hopefully enter into the fresh food section and fruits and vegetables. But the majority of the real estate of the grocery store is shelf-stable products, and many of these are these highly ultra-processed foods. So I think that the fact that these become so popular and have kind of taken over our food environment is the fact that we experience different types of hunger. And there’s two different types of hunger, and I don’t necessarily think people fully grasp this. I think it’s important to talk about it. And so typically, when we talk about hunger, we think about, you know, the kids that are on the left. These are kids that have a feeling of discomfort or weakness that’s caused by a lack of food. They need to eat because they need calories and nutrients. So that’s where the need comes. Now, if you look at the kids on the right, this is another type of hunger that seems to exist in our society pretty frequently these days. And so this is hedonist hunger. This is a type of hunger that has nothing to do with calorie need or nutrient need or vitamin needs.

Dr. Nicole Avena: This is all about the pleasure. This is all about the pleasant sensations that come from eating something. And so we all probably can relate to this. Where you go to a restaurant, you might have a lovely meal, you have more than enough calories, you’re completely full, but the server comes over and says, Oh, would you like dessert? And you might say, Well, yeah, you know what? I could go for some dessert. Yes, I’m hungry for dessert. And so you’re not hungry because you need the calories. You’re hungry because it’s going to taste good. And that’s what is driving you to eat it. And so the pleasant sensations that are associated with the food can actually get people to eat more than the nutrition that’s associated with the food. And so I think this is where we are. We’re fighting this battle of the fact that fortunately, thanks to the fact that we are a developed nation and we’ve advanced in our technology, we don’t have a situation where people are struggling with the kind of hunger in most cases that we see on the left. But we do have a situation where people are still hungry for the pleasure. And that’s the kids on the right. And that’s why I think we see so much overeating and so many people struggling to regulate their intake because they’re eating, not because the calories are needed. They’re eating for the pleasant sensations. And I don’t know if you can get satiated off of pleasure. I think there’s never enough. The sky’s the limit. You can get more and more pleasure. We’re never going to say I’ve had enough pleasure. Whereas with calories, yes, we can say that. But the pleasure part of it seems to be overriding our body’s signal to stop eating. And the fact that we’ve had enough of the calories that we need. And again, I think, you know, it comes down to what I’ve referred to often as the diet mess. We have this whole idea in our culture that, you know, if you want to go on a diet, you can lose weight and maybe bring your cholesterol down, you know, bring your blood pressure down or whatever your health goal may be that it’s this timeframe that if you do something temporarily to get healthy, then you can go back to your kind of old ways. Once you reach your milestone or you maybe tell yourself, OK, I’m going to get to this point and then I’ll keep my good health habits. But when people sometimes get there, they kind of slack and start to go back to their old ways. And so there’s this whole idea that if it’s something you do temporarily and you’ll lose weight. But I think we need to shift the mindset and talk more about the fact that, you know, if you were on a diet, then that means you can go off of a diet. So I don’t really like to refer to it even as a diet. I think diets fail in my book Why Diets Fail talks all about this because basically people are setting themselves up for failure when they think they’re going to temporarily go on a diet. You need to change your life and focus on a new way of eating that is going to be from here on out. If you want to be successful and want to have a healthy diet and have a healthy body and have a healthy mind. And so I think that that is important. I also think there’s another part of this why diets fail is also because people are addicted to sugar and they sometimes don’t even realize it. Sometimes they do realize it, and they just don’t know what to do about it. And they feel like they can’t get help, and they feel like their doctor doesn’t take them seriously. Sometimes they don’t even realize they’re addicted to it because they’ve been consuming it their whole life. And so many products contain it that they just continue to eat it and eat it, and their health problems continue to emerge and they’re not able to maintain a healthy body weight. So just to summarize the research and then I’d love to talk about questions you have and have a discussion about this because I could talk about this for weeks. You know, this is a summary taken from a colleague’s paper from a few years back. We have criteria that we use to diagnose people as having an addiction to drugs and alcohol.

Dr. Nicole Avena: These are special criteria that are developed by the American Psychiatric Association, and they are put in a book called the DSM. This is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. And so this is the book that psychologists and psychiatrists and mental health practitioners refer to when they want to see what criteria need to be met when someone’s diagnosed is having a drug and alcohol problem or substance use disorder. And you can see the criteria are listed on the left tolerance withdrawal using more than intended, trying to cut back, but not being able to, missing important activities due to use, persisted behavior in spite of the fact that you now, it’s causing you harm or causing consequences. And what you can see is that all of these criteria have been met when the substance of abuse is sugar or food. And so this has been shown not only in animal models studies, but also in clinical studies in humans as well. And so I think that when we really start to think about this from a psychiatric perspective, if these sugar rich, highly processed foods can produce the same types of behaviors and meet the same criteria as drugs and alcohol, how can we expect people to just walk away? I mean, if you think about it, you know, drugs are illegal for a reason, right? Because we know that they can harm people. You go to jail if you bring drugs to work. But, you know, like I said earlier, you go to work and you show up with a big tray, donuts and people think you’re great. And so I think we need to shift the mindset around this and start to really think about how food can have an impact on our brains and how it can have an impact on our behavior and how this is being harmful not only to ourselves, but to those around us and others. And that’s all I have for the slides.

Chef AJ: You know, I have taken four pages of notes and one of the things you said that I put a big star on was you can never get satiated from the pleasure. Two of the authors of the book called The Pleasure Trap, Dr. Lisle and Dr. Goldhammer, each are experts on this summit, and that is so true.

Dr. Nicole Avena: It is, it is. And I think that that’s, you know, it’s partly I think I kind of find it there’s a few different ways in which this applies. So I find that many people will say that they overeat because the food tastes good. But then when they think about it, they want to feel good and that’s the way that they could do it right. So they might not have the means to feel good through exercise or have you know, the ability yet to feel good through exercise and they might be maybe anxious or a little depressed and eating can temporarily fix that. It can make people feel better. And people self-soothe. This is why you know the old adage of, you know, the pediatrician giving the little kid a lollipop after they get a vaccine. That’s true because the lollipops going to make them feel better. And so I think that, you know, people are using food in that way. People are using food to self-medicate and also just because it tastes good and it makes them feel good. So why stop?

Chef AJ: Yeah, well, you know one thing about the processed food industry, at least half say they tell the truth because even their slogans basically tell us we’re going to be addicted once you pop, you just can’t stop bet you can’t eat just one. It’s almost like they’ve been warning us it is.

Dr. Nicole Avena: It is. And you know, that’s the thing. And one of the things I’ve been working a lot on lately to try to help educate people about is you have to be very mindful with the marketing strategies that these food companies are using. There is a lot in the psychology of that and the psychology strategies that are used to market these foods to make people think that they’re healthy just because something says it’s all natural or contain natural ingredients. I mean, the pop tarts contain natural ingredients. It doesn’t mean that you know it’s healthy for you. It just means that it might contain one or more ingredients that could potentially come from nature. And so we need to be mindful, you know, just because something says it’s gluten-free or it’s non-GMO, that’s great. But that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily good for you to eat. So you really need to be savvy when looking at those labels and be very critical of them. And what I tell people is, you’re putting this in your body, you’re ingesting this thing, so you should know what’s in it. Don’t just blindly eat things because it’s in the grocery store and just trust that the food industry has your best interests and your health in mind. Because they don’t. They are not there to be your doctor. They’re there to make products, to sell, to make money, to make their business thrive. And so it’s up to us to take care of our bodies, and it’s up to us to educate each other about these issues and be aware of the fact that many of these food companies are marketing things that are unhealthy. But that’s just the way it is.

Chef AJ: Yeah. Well, thanks for shedding a light on this. You know, you showed in that slide that sugar meets the criterion for an addiction, according to the DSM. So I would classify it at least for people that struggle with it as a drug of abuse, yet many people don’t believe in food addiction or sugar addiction, both laypeople and health care professionals.

Dr. Nicole Avena: It’s true. And you know, when I first started doing this research, it was almost 20 years ago, and I remember writing some grants and presenting this topic at some of our earlier data at scientific academic conferences. And people thought it was a joke, people. And these were our colleagues, you know, being honest and they were like, Oh, this is what is this something out of a woman’s magazine like, this is really not science. This is, you know, kind of silly. And we stuck with it, and we were really the first lab to study this from an empirical standpoint. And some of the inspiration that I got to study this was coming from people who had personally struggled with a food addiction or sugar addiction in particular and had written books on the topic books for people to learn about how they could potentially relate so that they could help other people. And that really inspired us to continue to do the research because that’s what we needed to move this forward. It had to move away from being something that people were writing books about, and, you know, people were kind of talking about in women’s magazines to being something that has a scientific basis because that’s how we make advancements. And so we stuck with it. And I’m really happy that over the years, I mean, I’ve published on this topic alone over 100 scientific, peer-reviewed publications on studies looking at whether or not food can be addictive. And now I think this is something that there’s still some resistance on in the medical and the scientific community. But a lot more people are on board with this idea. And as more and more research has come out supporting the idea that food can be addictive, it’s becoming more and more difficult to argue. And I think the next step is to really get the medical community on board with recognizing this as an actual condition. And I’m hoping that maybe at the next iteration of the DSM, when they revise it again, we’ll find food will eventually make it into the criteria as an addictive disorder. We saw some progress in the last iteration because gambling is now considered an addictive disorder. And so we’re moving away from it being just drugs and alcohol to now processes or things beyond just drugs and alcohol. So I think that’s setting the stage for at some point finding ultra-processed foods on that list.

Chef AJ: Well, I think the part of the problem is that we’ve from the beginning called processed food, food, and in my opinion, it isn’t food. And that’s why I think where the confusion lies, because you really can’t be addicted to food or eating. Like I always say, nobody goes to a regular anonymous. I’ve never seen people have a problem, you know, with broccoli sprouts, for example. But the fact that we’ve called it food for so long, I think that’s why people argue, you know about food addiction. Maybe it just needs a different name.

Dr. Nicole Avena: It does need a different name. And for many, many years, people have said to me, Oh, you shouldn’t call it food addiction. You should call it something because it’s not all food. And, you know, my answer is why should I change the name? You change the name, We should change the name of how we define food. I think that would be much easier for people and better for people if they could have some sort of labeling system to help people understand, you know, whether or not this is a food or not. In my opinion, if you have to synthesize it in a laboratory like that to make Pop-Tarts as an example, it shouldn’t be considered a food. And I think that, you know, it’d be one thing if there were a handful of products like this. But when it’s the majority of our food supply, then that becomes a problem. I mean, and it’s finding, you know, I find that every year it seems to get worse and worse and worse in terms of the processed foods, because now it’s not only just foods like, you know, shelf-stable things, but now we’re finding that many of our beverages are highly processed beverages. So it’s not just, you know, you know, milk anymore. Now it’s, you know, oat milk that’s sweetened with five other things, and that can lead people to have this false sense of thinking, Oh, it’s oat milk. It must be healthy for me because dairy supposedly is bad for me. But then what ends up happening is that people don’t necessarily look on the label and see that, Oh wow, that oat milk that you’re consuming. You might as well just had a bowl ice cream because it’s got so much sugar in it. So I think that that’s, you know, where we’re starting to see is that many, many of these products are just loaded with added sugar and people just have this false perception that they’re healthy when in many cases are really not.

Chef AJ: Absolutely. And I’m somebody who’s been vegan for almost forty-five years, but just because it’s vegan doesn’t mean it’s healthy. Twizzlers, Pringles, Oreos, these are all vegan. They’re all highly ultra-processed.

Dr. Nicole Avena: Exactly, exactly. And I think that’s where, you know, people struggle because people think okay, if it falls into this category of what is perceived as being a healthy style of eating like you just said with vegan, there’s so many health benefits being vegan. But if you’re vegan because you eat Doritos all day long, then no, that’s not what they meant when they said it’s healthy to be a vegan. So I think that that part of it, we need to help to educate people about more so that they’re aware of healthier choices that they can make.

Chef AJ: You know, if we took all of the processed and ultra-processed food out of the supermarket, we’d be left basically with the produce section and maybe the bulk bin with some grains and beans.

Dr. Nicole Avena: Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, if you look at the real estate of the layout of the store, I mean, the majority of it these days is just aisles and aisles of shelves. And you know, it’s becoming something where we’re becoming so overly reliant on it that I think that and I think about like little kids, I have little kids at home. And, you know, one of the things that I really try to do with my daughters is to teach them how to cook. I love to cook, I am a recipe developer. I’ve developed all the recipes for my books. And I like it because it’s like a science experiment. It’s like, you know, putting together ingredients and figuring out what combinations work best and creating something healthy. But I really think many people don’t value the joy of cooking and don’t think they have enough time. And I understand I’m a working mom too, and I get it. It’s hard to make the time, but it’s important because you’re teaching a skill set to somebody that they’re not learning in school. I’m old enough to be where we had homework when I was in school and there’s no homework being taught anymore. And so I think it’s good to teach, teach your kids how to cook. And it also enables people to not become so reliant on processed foods. Because I think part of the problem is if you don’t know how to cook or how to put ingredients together in your kitchen, you’re going to be like, Oh, I better just heat up this frozen pizza because I need something to eat. I don’t know how to what to do with these vegetables and the other grains and things that I have on hand. And so I think that’s something we need to get back to is really teaching people the basics and helping people to be able to create their own foods at home.

Chef AJ: And I once heard from one of the experts on the summit that people do take the most fruits and vegetables, have the healthiest body weight and BMI. And I’m wondering if the opposite is true, because whenever I go to the supermarket, I always look at the basket before the person, and I can almost always guess their weight by what’s in the basket. You know what I’m saying?

Dr. Nicole Avena: It’s true. I agree. I think that, you know, one of the other issues that we see with all these highly processed foods is they don’t often contain a lot of fiber. And we know eating lots of fruits and vegetables helps people to have a high fiber diet, which is important to metabolize our food and to make sure that we’re staying healthy. And it helps with weight control too. And you know, I find the same thing when I go to the grocery store. I think the healthiest people are the people who have just a couple of items in their growth. Three baskets, the people who are pushing like a giant cart filled to the brim. Those are the people that are only going once every couple of weeks to the grocery store and they’re stocking up. Which to me is not a great idea because if you’re eating a healthy diet, you can’t stock up on fresh vegetables. I mean, frozen vegetables. Yet it’s obvious so you could stock up on those. But I think that if you want to be eating in a way that is going to be healthy and is going to get you less reliant on the high sugar diet and the highly processed foods, you have to be just shopping like once a week and grabbing the items you need for that week because otherwise, this stuff’s not going to last.

Chef AJ: You’re wondering, I really am not a fan of the processed food industry, but hypothetically, if they were willing to make food healthier, would people even eat it? Because, you know, when I read Michael Moss’s books and they’ve taken out like, say, the salt and cheeses, people don’t like it.

Dr. Nicole Avena: Yeah. So I think about this a lot and we’ve actually, you know, done some studies looking at this and you’re right that it’s these highly processed foods. They taste so good. And you know, how are we going to maybe transition away from having these foods be so delicious tasting and maybe have them be a little less delicious tasting, right? And are people going to accept them? And I think that, you know, we’re really in a tough spot with that because we need the food industry. I don’t think we could survive without them because there’s so many people out there. And I don’t know if you know the way that we’ve given up on our farms. I don’t know if there’s enough farms to support us all. And so we do need the food industry, and I think that we can work with them to make the foods less highly processed and make them healthier. But you’re right, it comes at the cost of people not thinking they taste as delicious and then not wanting to buy them. And so I think it almost has to be a generational change. And I think that if we started off our little ones, our babies on a diet that was not so reliant on these processed foods, if we could work with food companies, this is something that I do. I have done a lot of writing lately about feeding babies, healthy diets and little kids healthy diets, eating a healthy diet during pregnancy. I’ve written a couple of books on this topic and my one book What to Feed Your Baby and Toddler goes over the importance of really trying to minimize exposure to processed foods in our little ones. Because, you know, if you have these kids that are raised on chicken nuggets and macaroni and cheese, then they’re not going to be willing to have, you know, squash as the color in their macaroni that they’re eating and they’re going to expect it to be very salty. They’re going to expect all the added sugars in our foods. And so from a psychological standpoint, it is difficult. It’s actually a phenomenon called negative contrast. And basically, if you have something like, let’s just say I said to you, Hey, chef A.J., you know, I really want to give you a gift. Here’s a new handbag, and it’s like a five thousand dollar designer handbag. You would say, Oh my gosh, Dr. Vena, that’s so nice of you. But if then I said, actually, I want to give you a gift chef A.J., here’s like a used purse that I found in my basement. I don’t want any more. You might be like, Oh, well, that’s not really that. Even though it’s a nice gesture just compared to the $5000 purse I was offering you a few minutes ago is going to seem like not that great. So the same thing happens with our taste, perceptions and food. When you eat something that’s really delicious and then you follow it up with something that’s maybe nice, but not as delicious or not as sweet. You have this negative perception of it. And so it’s just this comparison that we naturally make when we think about things and it happens all the time with food. So that’s why I think it can be a challenge to get people to make this like abrupt shift. And unless there’s a crisis, I think that’s when we’re going to see it. And I don’t know if the problem, what are the problems I think we have is that it’s kind of like smoking cigarettes. You don’t drop dead from lighting up a cigarette and putting it in your mouth. You drop dead from heart disease that you develop for years of smoking cigarettes. And so it’s a cumulative negative effect on your health. And the same thing happens with food. You don’t, you know, bite into a hamburger and then suddenly you have diabetes or heart disease. No, it’s over the years of time where you were abusing your body by not feeding it the right foods that you then develop these chronic health conditions that are very difficult to reverse once they’re put into place. And so I think that that’s where we have the issue is that people don’t necessarily feel like we’re in a crisis or that there’s an immediate need to change the way in which we structure our diets or the way we eat. They’re waiting for the, you know, crisis moment to happen, and we shouldn’t be doing that. We should be working to prevent the crises from ever happening.

Chef AJ: I love that you said that it wasn’t that one Coke Slurpee I had when I was seven years old. It got me to two hundred pounds with the beginning of colon cancer. It was the fact that I was having it every day for breakfast on a Dr. Pepper, every day for lunch and all the other crap that I was having for the first forty-three years of my life.

Dr. Nicole Avena: Yeah, it’s a slippery slope. And you know, I think that some people have the wake-up call, they’ll have their moment. And I’ve worked with people over the years who just suddenly like, Today’s the day. I don’t want to live like this anymore. I want to know what it feels like to live in a different body, to live a different life. And you know, some people get there at different time points than others. Some people never get there. And so I think that’s really the challenge that we all have is helping people at various different stages of this. There’s people who are in denial that they even have a problem. They need to control their food intake. There’s people who are so willing to do whatever it takes. They just don’t have the tools and don’t have the resources or they don’t know what to do. And so I think that’s where we have to work together as a community to help people.

Chef AJ: Well, this idea of people not knowing they have a problem that comes down to that social aspect you talked about at the beginning, you have one of the experts on the summit, Dr. Frank Sabatino talks about how food addiction is the only addiction you can just do in public in front of everybody. You can’t get on and it’s fine because everybody, you know, ultra-processed food is socially acceptable, readily available, easily affordable. And you know, you talk about like bringing donuts to the soccer game. That’s fine if people want to have a community. But what if they brought like a crudity tray instead?

Dr. Nicole Avena: Right? It’s true. And I think it’s funny because I was that mom when my older daughter, I’ll never forget when we were, she was in kindergarten and it was her birthday and she wanted to bring in cupcakes to school because that’s what all the other parents did as they gave cupcakes at the school for their daughter’s or son’s birthday. And I said, You know what Stell we’re going to do something a little bit different. And I made up little individual goodie bags with little toys and little tiny, you know, goodie bag type things. Nothing edible. It was only little toys. And she said, Oh, I’m nervous that these aren’t going to go over well and the kids are going to be disappointed. They didn’t get a cupcake. And wouldn’t you know it? Those kids loved it. And it was like the greatest thing, they were so happy to have something different. And I got so many calls and texts and emails from other parents in the class saying, thank you so much for changing it and making it so that we don’t have to bring in cupcakes. So I really think it needs to just be that one person who’s going to be different and think outside the box and say, You know what? We can still make this fun for the kids, but it doesn’t have to be, you know, sending the message that you celebrate fun things with unhealthy food. Because I think that’s a big problem, too, is that we’ve pared happiness and celebration with eating unhealthy food. I mean, think about it like, you know, birthday cake is a perfect example. Like, why does it have to be cake? Like, you know, why do you put a candle in a cake? I mean, I get it. It’s a tradition. But that tradition started a long, long time ago when we didn’t have 60 percent of the population overweight or obese. And when it was a birthday treat, meaning maybe this was the first time you’ve had cake in six months. Now we’re having cake every single day, so it’s changed its meaning, and I think that we need to change along with it. And I think that it really just is going to take, you know, people to really just say, you know what, I’m doing it differently, and you know, that’s just how it’s going to be.

Chef AJ: Oh, thank you for doing that drives me crazy. Are these smash cakes that they give these one-year-old the kid you could do mashed cauliflower, mashed potatoes. The kid wouldn’t care.

Dr. Nicole Avena: Exactly, exactly. And you know, I get it. People want to have these traditions. They want to celebrate things and you can do them, but just do it a little bit differently. And I think that, you know, people appreciate that. I know I do when I go to events or go to parties and people are doing something a little bit different. I always think like, Oh wow, that that’s so cool that they thought about me a little bit more meaning like their guests. So the people they invited in that I want to make this a little bit healthier for you, a little bit better for you, and I’m putting in that extra effort to do so. And so I really think that, you know, that resonates with people. It makes people feel like they’re cared about also.

Chef AJ: The thing is, is obesity and type two diabetes are no longer adult problems anymore.

Dr. Nicole Avena: Exactly. I mean, they are a lifelong problem. I mean, when you have kids in third grade getting type two diabetes, that’s a problem. I mean, this is something that, you know, I remember when I was younger, I had a friend who had type one diabetes and it was referred to as juvenile diabetes. That’s what the nurse in the school said. Oh, she’s got, you know, juvenile diabetes. That was kind of, you know, everyone knew in case she had a crisis so we could help her. And now we no longer refer to type one diabetes as juvenile diabetes because there’s juveniles that get type two diabetes. And so, you know, we have this distinction now where, you know, we’re seeing so many young people getting diseases and conditions that used to be only seen in older people. And so my concern is, what are those young people’s lives going to look like when they’re in their 40s and 50s, if they already have all these health concerns and health complications? And I think we’re starting to see this. The tip of the iceberg here with this, because we’ve seen this past year was the first year that the life expectancy actually went down. And you know, I think we need to consider the fact that our lifestyle is really creating a situation where many of us are not doing things to promote longevity, to promote living a healthy life for a long time. And I think that that’s going to be something that we’re going to continue to battle.