Dr Michael Greger - How Not To Die

Full transcript: Dr Michael Greger on London Real

3:44 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Dr. Michael Greger, the physician, best-selling author and speaker who advocates a plant-based whole foods diet to reverse and prevent fatal disease and illness. You’re a graduate of Cornell University and the Tufts University School of Medicine, and your New York Times bestselling book How Not to Die examines the 15 top causes of death in America.

4:57 You’ve appeared in numerous documentary films including What the Health, Prescription Nutrition and Eating You Alive, and your website nutritionfacts.org has thousands of videos giving research-based advice about specific foods and health-related issues. Dr. Greger, welcome to London Real. I’m so excited to be here. I am excited to have you. I was wondering, before we get into all this good stuff and we got a lot to talk about, when you’re about to land in London Heathrow and you’re thinking, okay, I’m going back to see the Brits, how do we rank in the world when it comes to our diets compared to, say, the Yanks or third world countries or anything?

5:32 How are we doing here? Well, like the U.S. The, no, according to the Global Burden of Disease Study, which is the largest study of disease risk factors in human history, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the number one cause of death and disability among Britons is the British diet. And the same thing the United States, the American diet, number one cause of death, bumping tobacco smoking to number two. Now cigarettes only kill a half million Americans every year, whereas our diet kills hundreds of thousands more.

6:02 So when you think about, you know, physical inactivity, not getting enough exercise, smoking, all that ranks below diet, both in the UK and in the US. But that’s great news, that means we have tremendous control over our health destiny, longevity. The vast majority of our premature death and disability is preventable with the plant-based diet and other healthy lifestyle behaviors. So that’s great. Okay.

6:24 And so most G20 countries are suffering from the same problem, they’ve got an abundance of foods, they’re making the wrong choices, that is, that usually what’s happening? Yeah. And so infectious diseases, so I mean you said people used to die of infections, they go back 100 years ago, right, the leading cause of death are things like pneumonia, that was before antibiotics. So now, and modern medicine is great with those kind of acute conditions. You have an infection, antibiotics and cure you.

6:49 You have a broken leg, we can set it. There’s all sorts of neat surgeries that you can do. But for chronic disease, and that’s really what’s, uh, th, these are the plagues, these are the kind of pandemics of diabetes and obesity, heart disease and hypertension, the, that’s what’s killing us now, and unfortunately medicine has little to offer, right? We can kind of slow down the rate at which you die from diabetes, we can slow down the rate at which you go blind, at which you lose your kidney function, go on dialysis, slow down the rate at which you, you know, get lower limb amputations.

7:24 But in terms of stopping the disease, preventing disease in the first place or reversing the disease, unfortunately mainstream medicine has very little to offer because these are lifestyle diseases, right? So yeah, you can treat the symptoms, you can artificially lower people’s blood pressures with blood pressure medications, but why not treat the cause in the first place, which is these inflamed, crippled arteries, because primarily what reading, although certainly cigarette smoke plays a role too. So I mean, but lifestyle diseases, if that’s what causes it, you can’t eat the same foods that cause the disease if you expect to stop and reverse it.

8:01 But that’s the exciting thing, is that many of the leading killers. So here, heart disease is number two killer of Brits, preventable, arrestable, reversible with a plant-based diet. And we’ve known this, I mean, this is the shocking, right? So The Lancet, probably the most prestigious medical journal in the world, published here in the UK, July 23, 1990, published Dr. Dean Ornish’s Lifestyle Heart Trial. I mean, this was real, that was really the landmark trial that proved for the first time ever, using something called quantitative angiography, that indeed heart disease could be reversed, arteries opened up without drugs, without surgery, just a plant-based diet and lifestyle program.

8:40 Since that day, no one else should have died in this or any other country from heart disease. We had the cure, yet hundreds of thousands of people continue to die from this preventable, arrestable, reversible condition. Right, number 11 killer, Brits, type 2 diabetes, number 12 killer, Brits, high blood pressure. These are diseases that can be reversed, cured through diet and lifestyle changes alone. So why do people continue to die?

9:06 I mean, people should be upset, should be angry that, wait a second, are you telling me my, you know, father didn’t have to die? He had type 2 diabetes, got worse, worse, worse, and died, right? I mean, unfortunately doctors aren’t taught nutrition, right? There’s this, uh, you know, doctors suffer from a severe nutrition deficiency in education. We just weren’t taught about this, and so we kind of graduate without this powerful tool in our medical toolbox, and so that’s why I’ve kind of made it my mission to get out there and show physicians that they have a broader array of tools and go directly to the patients themselves when it comes to safe, side-effect-free, simple solutions like stopping smoking, eat healthy.

9:53 You don’t need your doctor to tell you to do that. You can, you know, take control of your own life and your family’s health. And you are on a mission, and like the titles of the chapters of this book are pretty plain and simple: How Not to Die from Heart Disease, How Not to Die from Lung Disease, How Not to Die from Brain Diseases, How Not to Die from Diabetes. And it’s all about advocating this plant-based diet, is that correct? Oh, plant-based diet and lifestyle.

10:15 So I talk about exercise, talk about the important smoking cessation, talk about, you know, sleep, other, but certainly diet is the number one most powerful thing we can do in terms of modulating our risk for chronic disease. Okay. I look across the Atlantic, Americans more obese than ever, on their way to death, more information than ever, more money than ever. Why aren’t people listening? Is it because they ultimately don’t want to be told what to eat, they don’t like their pleasures, or they’re just not educated?

10:46 What is it? Because you’re beating your head against a wall, right? It seems like it’s bloody, but you’re still doing it, getting your message out there. What ultimately do you think is it keeps people from, from, from just taking, taking those changes, right? Well, they’re just confused, they don’t know, and the industry wants it that way.

11:01 This is a, this is a standard tobacco industry tactic: muddy the water, misinformation, right, such that, you know, so one day coffee is good for you, one day coffee bad for you. You know, Time magazine put “Butter Is Back” on the cover, shows you how desperate they are for dwindling print sales, right? Sells a lot of copies but sells the public short, right? Um, and so people love hearing good news about bad habits, right? If someone comes out with a diet book saying, you know, broccoli is really good for you, how many books is that going to sell?

11:30 Right? Someone comes out and says bacon and butter is really good for you, ah, that’s, you got a best seller on your hands. I mean, you know, um, and so, and the media loves those kind of stories, right? I mean, and so there’s just these conflicting, and so the, the processed food industry is a trillion dollar industry. Um, you know, they just hope to confuse people so they’ll throw up their hands, eat whatever’s put in front of them.

11:50 I mean, that’s good for business, um, but not so good for people, whereas if you look at the science, there’s a remarkable, remarkable global scientific consensus as to the core elements of healthy living going back decades. So I mean, the scientific record isn’t confused, just the way it’s translated out to the public by these money, commercial interests, um, that the message is lost along the way. Is it a conspiracy by these industries, or are they just, we’re looking in their best interests because they’re just trying to maximize profits?

12:22 That’s just the way the system works. I mean, the CEO of Coca-Cola doesn’t say, how do I make kids fat today? Right? It’s like, no, it’s how do I make my shareholders happy in this quarter, right? Short-term profits for shareholders, right?

12:37 Even if that CEO said, you know, I care about my kids, I’m not going to do this anymore, they’d be kicked out. I mean, that’s the whole purpose of a corporation: maximize, you know, return for their shareholders. How do you do that? Okay, well, you take something with dirt cheap ingredients, right? It’s sugar water, in fact sugar that’s subsidized by U.S. taxpayers in the States, right?

12:56 So it’s artificially cheap sugar, and it’s what, so it’s what, a few pennies to make, and then you sell for a few bucks a bottle. That’s how you make money, right? But something like produce, fruits and vegetables, it’s perishable, it goes bad, it rots on the shelf. You put a Twinkie, it can be on the shelf for a couple weeks, but, but I mean, you can’t make money, it’s not a branded product, there’s no markup. So the healthiest foods, the system is just set up to reward companies selling people junk.

13:23 And unfortunately, and even at the government level, we’re subsidizing the worst foods, we’re subsidizing sugar, subsidizing feed crops so we can have dollar menu burgers, whereas why are we subsidizing fruits and vegetables, right? Um, I mean, so unfortunately the system, so that’s why we need to take control over our lives, over our family’s health, and really kind of take it back. So the information is there but unfortunately lost in this cloud of commercial influence.

13:49 Talk to me about the life of Michael Greger. You are kind of a one-man crusader going around, constantly speaking on this. You’ve been doing this for what, near 20 years, uh, and you’re constantly on the road, even though you told me earlier, I hate traveling, but you’re still doing this. You refuse to accept sponsorships. You have the site.org, it’s all about free information.

14:09 Sure. Wow. What makes this man tick and why are you doing this? Right, right, right, there’s no ads, no commercials, no corporate response, strictly not commissioners, not selling anything, just put it up as a public service. It’s kind of a labor of love, and I do it as a tribute to my grandmother, whose own life was saved through evidence-based nutrition.

14:28 So I mean, when I was a kid growing up, my grandmother, um, Frances Greger, was diagnosed with end-stage heart disease. She already had so many bypass surgeries, you basically run out of plumbing at some point. Nothing more they could do, all right, confined to a wheelchair, crushing chest pain, her life was over. How old was she at this point? Age 65.

14:47 65. Age 65. Pretty young. Then she heard about this guy Nathan Pritikin, one of our early lifestyle medicine pioneers, and what happened next is actually detailed in Pritikin’s biography called The Man Who Healed America’s Heart, and it talks about the death’s door people that showed up, like Frances Greger, talked about, who arrived in a wheelchair, said angina, claudication. She, she couldn’t walk without great pain in her chest and legs.

15:12 Within three weeks though, she’s not only out of her wheelchair, she was walking 10 miles a day. She was one of his great early success stories, right? Where it’s a live-in program, they put people on plant-based diet, graded exercise program, she was up walking around, and thanks to a healthy diet she was given her medical death sentence at age 65, thanks to a healthy diet was able to enjoy another 31 years on this planet until age 96, to enjoy her six grandkids, including me.

15:38 That’s why I went to medicine, and that’s why I practiced the type of medicine and practice today, lifestyle medicine. That was it, you saw Grandma get better and you were like, wow, how can this happen? Right. I mean, at the time I just assumed, well, yeah, you go to your doctor and you get better. I mean, that’s just, I mean, it was just like, oh yeah, okay, um, I mean, it didn’t occur to me how radical that was, and at that time they didn’t even think heart disease was reversible, period.

16:01 They thought it was just a, you know, this, this inexorable, you know, spiral to death, but Pritikin was showing back in the ’70s that, no, this disease could be reversed. It’s a lifestyle disease, that’s what causes it, change the lifestyle. Now the hope, so there were populations where this, where did Pritikin get this idea from? Right, well, there were populations around the world, for example in rural Africa, there’s a network of missionary hospitals set up through actually UK physicians like Dr. Denis Burkitt, right, who’s one of the most preeminent medical figures of the 20th century, um, uh, who went down, started this, this network of missionary hospitals, and they were seeing millions of people, um, and they did not suffer from heart disease.

16:48 So they didn’t see any heart disease, they didn’t see colon cancer, they didn’t see breast cancer, they didn’t see, I mean, whereas, and these were Western-trained doctors, not like they didn’t know what to look for. I mean, the only people they saw is, you know, if they had some, some foreigner there and all, you know, um, this is before they had westernized their diet. Um, same thing we saw in rural China, for example, where people are eating these plant-based diets.

17:12 And you say rural China, rural Africa, what’s the, the connect, the common, common Venn diagram? Very different diets. Is that they were plant-based on a day-to-day basis, meat only eaten on special occasions. So wait, how do we know it’s the plant-based nature of their diets that was so effective? Because in the Western world, the only folks with such low rates of these chronic diseases are those eating these strictly plant-based diets, and so you can see the same kind of cholesterol, low cholesterol levels and low blood pressures among those eating healthy.

17:38 And so, ah, and so the hope was, let’s take people with heart disease, put them on the same kind of plant-based diet followed by populations that do not get epidemic heart disease, and hope maybe we can slow the disease down, perhaps even stop it. But instead something miraculous happened: as soon as people stopped eating artery-clogging diets, their bodies were able to start dissolving some of that plaque away, opening up arteries without drugs, without surgery, suggesting their bodies want to be healthy all along but just never given the chance. So you can actually reverse this stuff.

18:09 I mean, this is, look, if you, I mean, it’s like I talk about, there’s actually a paper in the medical literature talking about the best kept secret in science, what’s medicine, what’s the best kept secret in medicine is that sometimes the body, under the right conditions, can heal itself. You know, if you, you know, whack your shin really hard on a coffee table or something, right, you can get all red, hot, painful, swollen, inflamed, but will heal naturally if you just stand back, let your body work its magic, right? Okay.

18:35 What if you whack your shin in the same place day after day, in fact three times a day, breakfast, lunch and dinner, right? You’d never heal, right? You go to your doctor and be like, oh, my shin hurts. The doctor’s like, no problem, whip out their pad, write your prescription for painkillers. You’re still whacking your shin three times a day, still really hurts, like, ah, but all feels so much better, those pain pills on board, thank heavens for modern medicine, right?

18:59 I mean, it’s, it’s like when people take nitroglycerin for crushing chest pain, right, tremendous relief, but you’re not doing anything to treat the underlying cause of the disease. Our body wants to come back to health if we let it, but if we keep re-damaging ourselves three times a day, we may never heal. It’s like smoking. One of the most amazing things I learned in all my medical training was that within about 15 years of stopping smoking, your lung cancer risk approaches that of a lifelong non-smoker.

19:26 15 years, you’re amazing, your lungs get cleaned out, your lungs, your lungs can clear out all that tar and eventually it’s almost as if you never started smoking at all. And every morning of our smoking life, that healing process starting to, wham, for a cigarette of the day, re-injuring our lungs with every puff, just like we can re-injure our arteries with every bite, when all we had to do all along, the miracle cure, is just stand back, right, let our bodies, you know, get out of the way, let our bodies’ natural healing processes bring us back towards health. The human body is a self-healing machine.

20:03 Sure, you can choose moderation and hit yourself with a smaller hammer, but why beat yourself up at all? Talking about the parallels you see between tobacco and this whole, you know, crisis we went through in the 50s, 60s, 70s in America and diet. I mean, are we going to look back at this in 50 years and say this is just a similar lack of knowledge when it comes to dieting? Right, so the parallel is not that there was a lack of knowledge but the knowledge was there but just knowing it, knew about it, right?

20:33 And so there were decades of solid science starting back in the ’30s um, linking lung cancer and smoking. In fact, actually the, the, the seminal paper that put it all together, with this British doctors’ study, right, with Doll and Peto, that they were the ones that actually finally clinched the deal. Um, and uh, and so it was this kind of epidemiological study that proved this, that, you know, um, so uh, you know, for 1958 there’s a paper, Adventist study out of California, showing non-smokers 90% less lung cancer than smokers.

21:06 All right, but no one knew about it because back then there wasn’t this democratization of information. You couldn’t go on the internet, right? If the industry could control the doctors, they could control the message, right? And so the AMA, the American Medical Association, actually went on record saying smoking was good for you, not neutral but actually good for you, beneficial for your health. When the Surgeon General came out with their, with a famous report against smoking in 1964, the AMA actually came out opposed, actually refused to endorse the Surgeon General’s report.

21:36 Why? Couldn’t have been because they were just handed a 10 million dollar check from the tobacco industry, maybe? Did that actually happen? That actually happened. Okay, say, okay, so we know why the AMA was sucking up to the tobacco industry, but why weren’t more individual doctors speaking out?

21:49 Well, there were a few ahead of their time speaking up against industries killing millions, but why not more? Maybe it’s because the majority of physicians themselves smoke, just like the majority of physicians today continue to eat foods that are distributed to our epidemics of dietary disease. What was the AMA’s rallying cry back then? Everything in moderation. They said, extensive scientific studies have proven smoking and moderation, oh, that’s fine, right?

22:17 Sound familiar? Food industry used the same misinformation, twisting the science, right? Are the same scientists for hire that downplay the risk of secondhand smoke and toxic chemicals are the same hired by the National Confectioners Association to downplay the risk of candy, same hired by the meat industry to downplay the risk of meat. But the best estimates we have is that processed foods, animal foods contribute to at least 14 million deaths every year.

22:43 So those of us involved in this evidence-based nutrition revolution, we’re talking about 14 million lives in the balance every year. If I’m supposed to eat a plant-based diet, how come milk and eggs and red meat and chicken taste so good? Well, look, the food industry, why does candy taste so good? Why does cotton candy taste so good? Well, look, it must be good for me if it tastes, I mean, the industry has found a way, right, to kind of subvert your natural biological drive.

23:13 So if you go back a few million years, right, um, we basically evolved in a state of famine, right? I mean, during the winter months, right, there’s not a lot, not a lot of this before agriculture, we couldn’t store grain, right? So we evolved, and so that’s why we evolved this insatiable taste for sweet, right, and for fatty, right, because that’s where the calories are, the calories, right, concentrated calories, concentrated calories, um, and, and salt, right?

23:41 There’s no salt shakers, right, there was no, you know, potato chips out on the savannah, right? And so we had this desperate need for salt, sugar, fat, and so those are natural biological drives. So back then, oh, that, you know, our sweet sensation made us eat a lot of blueberries off the bush, right, that was a good thing for our bites, but now, right, now we’re not in a state of, of caloric deficiency, right? In fact, in most of the, you know, industrialized world we actually get too many calories.

24:09 Now it’s a matter of the industry has taken those same drives, turned it against us. Oh, you like sweet? How about some soda pop? Oh, you like salty? How about some chips?

24:19 How, you like, you know, fatty? Well, you know, and so before it was a survival mechanism, you know, cracking open bones and scavenging for brains and bone marrow that got us to the, that got us just a reproductive age to pass along our genes, right? Now, right, in fact, you could have, if you air time machine airdropped some Twinkies back then, those Neanderthal, the Twinkie Neanderthals would go on, conquer everybody else. It was a calorie deficiency, calories through any means necessary, right?

24:49 But now we don’t just want to live to reproductive age, right? Now we’ve evolved enough to actually start suffering from chronic diseases, and chronic diseases, well, then, you know, those fatty foods, those salty foods aren’t, are working against us, but of course that’s what sells. But the good news is, so am I saying, what? Oh, so I’m going to eat healthy, nothing, God, tastes good at first. That’s true, right?

25:14 I mean, so no, the, the ripest peach in the world will taste sour after a bowl of Froot Loops. I mean, it’ll just, because your, your taste buds are just overwhelmed, right? Uh, you also didn’t go on a low salt diet, your doctor puts you on the low salt, everything for the first week tastes like cardboard, right? But what you show, I mean, you can do these kind of metabolic ward studies, a lot of people in the room actually, you know, very tightly control what people eat.

25:36 So you have people salt soup to their liking, and you measure how much salt they put in, and then you put them in a low-salt diet, a few weeks later they actually prefer less salt. And so you give them the soup that originally tasted the best, oh, it’s too salty, you don’t like it, right? And so your taste buds naturally evolve. In fact, with sugar can happen as few as five days. You cut out these super sweet foods, within five days also natural whole healthy foods taste good.

26:01 I mean, people see me eat a sweet potato, baked sweet potato with a little cinnamon sprinkled on top, and they’re like, oh, you know, I could never live that kind of ascetic life, but they don’t realize, no, that actually tastes good to me, and in five days of not eating candy bars it would actually taste good to them too. Win, actually I enjoy. So you get the best of both worlds. Wait a second, it tastes good and you get to live longer, right? But you got to give it a chance to, uh, to, to, to take back your taste buds from the industry that’s trying to kind of super saturate them.

26:31 Okay. Were you always completely plant-based, or at one point did you ever say, well, maybe some fish protein is okay, or maybe some game bird protein is okay, you know, was there any a time where you were like, ah, this might work, or would you look, it doesn’t matter what you eat on your birthday or holiday, special occasions, it’s the day-to-day stuff that really adds up, right? It’s just like the, it’s like the whacked shin analogy, right? Your body has this remarkable capacity to heal, it’s just when you jab it with a fork three times a day every day and it just doesn’t have the chance to heal, right?

27:03 I mean, there’s no science in the world that you can show me that suggests that social smokers, these people, there are some people, they can pick up a few cigarettes at a party a year and they never get hooked, then, right? Um, no one’s gonna tell me that a few cigarettes a year is going to have any, you know, measurable increase in lung cancer risk, right, over the lifetime. But the reason the doctor says no smoking at all is they’re afraid that one cigarette’s gonna turn to two, then it’s gonna turn into a pack-a-day habit, so we just tell people no smoking at all, but that’s out of a recognition that’s not the one cigarette that’s gonna do it, right?

27:34 Um, and so the same thing, right? I mean, so, so but on a day-to-day basis we really should try to eat healthier. Now I didn’t grow up, so, you know, here I was as a kid seeing my, this, this remarkable transformation from my grandmother. Where’d you grow up? Um, well, um, so born in Miami.

27:48 Okay. Um, then grew up out, out West, moved around. Okay. She was like a little Southern accent sometimes. Really?

27:54 No. Well, I know myself, my mom was Brooklyn, Dad was Queens, and so if anything maybe I got a little Brooklyn. In fact, I just spoke in Brooklyn, it’s so nice to go back, and I showed pictures of my mom, um, and she was part of Brooklyn CORE, the Congress on Racial Equality, and all these pictures of her getting dragged away and arrested during the civil rights movement. It was once it’s in the family though? No, no, right, we are just kind of mission-driven folks, I guess.

28:17 I mean, we just see an injustice, right, and we want to make it better. Okay. And so you said you grew up not having this stuff? Yeah, no, so, so I mean for me it was like, oh yeah, Grandma has to eat that way because she’s sick, it’s a treatment for sickness. I’m young and healthy, I don’t need a treatment first, right?

28:35 It was just, um, and not realizing, so it really wasn’t until ’90 when Ornish’s paper came out showing the way he can reverse heart disease with, in the, which in the States is the number one killer of men and women. Here in the UK it’s the number two killer after cancer, uh, but so the number one killer of men and women can be reversed. I was like, all right, that’s it. I mean, my family had seen it with their own eyes, but here it was published in black and white in some of the most prestigious medical journals in the world.

29:02 Like, the evidence at that point was just overwhelming, that I couldn’t ignore it, and so then started myself eating that way and with the recognition I should have been in this way all along, but it just didn’t kind of click that, oh, yeah, duh, I mean, if that’s all a plant-based diet could do, reverse the number one or two killer of men and women, shouldn’t that kind of be the default diet? Improvement, otherwise, in the fact they could also prevent, arrest and reverse other leading killers like type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure, which seemed to make the case for plant-based eating simply overwhelming. What’d you eat today?

29:37 Oh my God, I actually really, so on the road it’s not so easy. I find myself on an airport food court, and you know, there’s, there’s not much to eat, so uh, but uh, because there’s animal proteins everywhere, I mean it’s just so, no, no, but no, in the, the hotel that we stayed in by, by Heathrow here had a vegetarian breakfast thing, and, and breakfast in the UK is what I tell everyone, eat beans for breakfast. Beans and tomatoes, mushrooms, kind of traditional, kind of British breakfast, just without the sausage, without the processed meat.

30:07 Um, in fact I tell everyone, you know, so I encourage people to eat legumes, beans, split peas, chickpeas and lentils, three times a day. And so I say beans, eat like the Brits. So you hear me, I say eat like beans for eggs, but that’s not, you know, in Japan they have miso soup and they have Italy, in India, I mean, having legumes for breakfast is not so crazy, but in the U.S. like, beans for breakfast? What are you talking about? But so here I can eat, I can finally follow my own advice and eat like a Brit.

30:30 Okay. Um, so yeah, so a great, um, great breakfast, and then at lunch, so I come here for the interview, um, and, and just pull out my phone and look for restaurants within the, like, one mile radius while I’m waiting around, and poof, two places show up, one this restaurant called Redemption, whole food plant-based, in fact there’s a sign out front that says, you know, sugar free, plant-based, you know, it goes on, it free, free, free, free. So what do we serve?

30:58 Like, question mark, like what’s in this? It’s just like, what? Yeah, water. But no, of course it’s just a bit. So I had this amazing dish with purple sweet potatoes and mushrooms and, and greens and, uh, and, and this yellow cauliflower and black sesame seeds and a peanut sauce.

31:16 It was absolutely fantastic, and so ever checked off all my boxes. Have this free app, Dr. Greger’s Daily Dozen, where I, uh, on Android and iPhone, everything of course is free, um, where, uh, you know, it includes, you know, how many servings of all the foods I encourage people to get into their daily diet. So beans every day, berries every day, the healthiest foods, greens every day, the healthiest vegetables, tablespoon of ground flax seeds, quarter teaspoon of turmeric, the best beverages, best sweetener, how much exercise, blah, blah, blah, and you can take off the boxes and chart your daily project wherever.

31:43 So here I am, I could have ticked off half my boxes for the day at one lunch, and then how about this for, for dessert? There’s this place called Nana Bar, right, um, where it is a nice cream bar, so it’s an ice cream made from frozen bananas, one ingredient, frozen bananas, put through like some juicer or food processor, something, comes out like soft serve ice cream, and then they just have, um, whole food, you know, toppings. Um, and, and the guy behind the counter gets his mom made the granola, like, how cool is that?

32:13 Okay, so I’m having his mom’s granola on, on, on, on frozen banana ice cream. So whole plant food, plant-based dessert and meal, and totally random. Like, I didn’t have to, like, do my homework, I just showed up, and where was I going to eat? Now this doesn’t happen everywhere. Sometimes I’m in Arkansas or something and I’m, you know, living off of Taco Bell bean burritos or something, but when I’m blessed to be in a great metropolitan city like London, I can eat healthy.

32:40 You can make it happy, easy. I mean, I didn’t even, without a second thought. Yeah. Now you say that you’re in a plant-based diet but you don’t use the V word, the vegan word. Um, is there a reason not to do that?

32:52 And also because, you know, I’ve had vegans on here and I love it, but also they have a specific culture that’s also a lot of times quite combative when it comes to meat eaters and things like that, and there’s the old joke, you know, how do you know, well, when you met a vegan, give them a few minutes and they’ll tell you. And so are you trying to kind of disassociate from that, or what’s your read on the whole, well, I mean, so as a physician, um, the, I mean the words vegetarian, vegan, they don’t tell me what you eat. I mean there’s, it tells me what you don’t eat, right?

33:20 But there’s lots of really garbage vegetarian food. You could live off of chips and soda and, you know, I mean, um, and, uh, yeah, and you know, I go speak at these college campuses, they live off of, you know, chips and beer basically, right? These, these college beans that, you know, don’t care about their health, but they’re doing it for, like, global warming reasons or whatever, and they’re, you can eat a miserable diet, right? Whereas whole food plant-based, that tells me actually what you’re doing.

33:45 Oh, you actually eat your vegetables, aha, now we can, right? Um, and so unfortunately it doesn’t, it’s just not as informative. Plus there is this kind of baggage that comes along with it. Um, whereas, like, for your health it doesn’t matter whether you have a leather belt on or not, right? I mean, they have other things that come along with it.

34:04 Um, and so it’s like an ident, identity, as opposed to, like, so if you’re going to talk about vegan, I would prefer talking about vegan eating or a vegan meal as opposed to vegan, the noun, identity, because that sets up this kind of barrier, like, well, I don’t want to be a vegan necessarily, but, oh yeah, I want to see my kids grow up and I want to be healthy, and, oh okay. So the more and more, you know, whole plant foods one can center their diets around, right, the better, and so it’s a spectrum, right? Um, so the largest study of plant-based injuries in the world actually used to be here in the UK until Adventist II took over, this massive study, um, in the States, particularly California and in Canada, um, so following, uh, tens of thousands of people eating plant-based diets and shows this kind of stuff.

34:52 So they compared non-vegetarians to so-called, uh, semi-vegetarians or flexitarians, people eating meat more like a once a week basis rather than a daily basis, compared to pescetarians, those are, you know, meat except fish, created over lacto-vegetarianism, so we nominated all compared to vegans, we know meat, eggs, are dairy, and shows this kind of stepwise drop where each level is significantly lower disease risk for type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure and obesity, um, such that even lacto-ovo vegetarians, at least in the States, are on average overweight, their BMI is actually over 25. The only dietary group actually fitting ideal weight with those eating more strictly plant-based diets. But so it’s not black and white, it’s not all or nothing, any movement we can make along this spectrum towards eating healthy can accrue significant benefits.

35:36 I think that’s an important message. Okay. You’re a scientist, you’re a doctor, so that makes sense, you’re like, what you put in your mouth, that’s going to make you live longer and healthier as opposed to what belt you wear, as opposed to what you wear. So you care about the facts and the science, right? I went on a low salt diet, actually I was doing an ayahuasca ceremony so I had to not eat a lot of foods, and I found that once I came back on it I didn’t really want the salt, and I didn’t really want some of those foods.

36:03 And the other thing that’s happened to me with me lately is I’ve been doing a lot of body weight exercises, less of the lifting weights, and I found that I’m just, I’m trending toward more of a vegetable-based diet, and also I’m listening to my gut a little bit more, like if it hurts a little when I first eat it, why do I keep eating it? Um, I don’t know, do these things, are these just other symptoms, do you think about this stuff or do you go back to this? No, there’s really nice feedback loops.

36:26 I mean it is all the, sign, I mean so I mean that’s what, that’s why I encourage people to, you know, give it a try, right? Try it as a, like a free sample, right? Anyone can eat anything for a few weeks, right? In fact you need nothing for a few weeks. I mean, I mean so look, it’s just, um, and so the thought of, wait a second, I can’t eat pepperoni pizza for the rest of my life?

36:43 Like, that’s just mind-blowing, people can’t even consider that. And of course that’s not what I’m saying, you know, but I did, they basically want to eat healthy, but um, but I said, no, no, no, give me three weeks. So three weeks, let’s eat healthy, and I’ll give you all these tips, and you know, um, in fact there’s this great, uh, 21 Day Kickstart program run by an organization, a non-profit called Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, starts the first of every month, hundreds of thousands of people done through, it’s a bunch of different languages, sign up, it’s all completely free, you do it as kind of a social media group, you all sign up together and you share recipes and you get daily tips and stuff.

37:11 Um, and first of every month, 21 Day Kickstart, so I think it’s 21daykickstart.org, something like that. So again, just giving people the house to actually do it. Oh, but again, just 21, just give it me, and the thought is, look, between when there’s also your taste buds are changing, the food is tasting better and you’re feeling better, right? And so all of a sudden, oh, your sleep is better, you know, people like, oh, you’re doing, oh, I’m fine, I’m young, healthy and have no symptoms.

37:33 Then they thought they didn’t have symptoms, they’re like, oh, my chronic indigestion went away, like, I just thought that was normal to just always feel bloated and gross after me, like this just but no, now you know, so my, you know, bowel regulate, my, my periods are less painful, I mean just like they just feel so much better, and so then they have this internal motivation. No longer is it like, oh yeah, a few decades down the road you’re not gonna have a stroke or something, but it’s this internal, wow, I feel so much better. In fact it’s funny, you know, when they do these studies, talk about science, um, often they do what’s called an ABA design, where you put people, I switch people to a diet, so you have a before and after, and then you switch them back to make sure it was actually the diet.

38:11 So you switch people from their regular diet to a, a special diet and then you see changes, and then you want to say, wait a second, was that just coincidence that that happened? So you switch them back to their original diet to see if, to see if indeed everything went back to normal. And so, so there’s been these studies done, um, where they switch people to a plant-based diet, right, so for, it’s been done for like migraines and a bunch of different medical, rheumatoid arthritis, so switch people, um, for a couple weeks and then part of the study protocol they have to go back to the recent night because, then you know your joints feel better, we want to make sure your joints actually feel worse, then we, and they refuse to do it, and so many study subjects refused to go back to their original diet, screws up the study.

38:48 In fact we have to throw out those people from the study because they violated the protocol, and so actually the science comes out and actually underestimates the fact, right? It’s so powerful we can’t even show it because they won’t even finish the darn study, um, because he just feels so much better, they’re like, well, I’m not going back, wait, I feel so much my way, you’re crazy, couldn’t pay me to go back to the original diet. And so that, but you don’t know until you give it a try, right?

39:11 You don’t know how good you can feel, to give it a try, and then you have the internal movement, like, I feel better, look, I feel better, like, I don’t care. So, you know, and then all the science in the world, you know, it’s like, I know how my body feels and I feel better eating this way, and yeah, it’s great that science shows it’s going to reduce my risk of all this other stuff, but, but again, you don’t know until you give it a try. So that’s really what I encourage my patients to do.

39:34 I’m American and growing up in America, I’m just wondering how we break this cycle of eating, you know, I still remember, you know, how big is your steak, you know, uh, all these foods that almost seem like an American right, to have my fries and to have my deep-fried this and to have my this and to have my that. And you know, I watched this movie Cowspiracy, I know you were in the sequel to that movie, and um, you know, when they asked them, they said, wait a second, you want me to, uh, reduce my shower volume of the water to save water, and they said, but what about not eating meat to save water? And everyone’s like, well, we can’t ask people to change their diet, or they’ll, they’ll revolt, and it, because it’s such a personal thing to ask maybe an American to, or maybe anybody, um, but how do we change the cycle?

40:18 And then on top of that, when my heart gets diseased I go to my doctor, he writes a prescription for a statin that he basically, you know, is promoted to do, it’s, it funds the medical industry, they put out a beautiful 90-second ad on TV about how it’s going to make me happy. I mean, there’s a crazy vicious cycle going on here, how do we break, I mean it’s, it’s a very personal thing. I mean, talking about dying, it’s like talking about religion, talking about politics, I mean it’s really deeply personal.

40:44 It’s like, basically I’m saying, wait a second, you’re telling me what my mother fed me was bad for me? You know, hey, don’t get, no, let’s not go talk about my money, don’t talk about my mic, bro. Um, and uh, so yeah, so you know, oftentimes, so what, you know, what I’ve done in my own practice is I start out not taking anything away, I just encourage to eat more healthy food, so I, you know, so I’m, I’m not taking anything away, it’s like, okay, I want you to eat this every day, you have a salad, you know, and add these foods to your diet, I want you eat this much fruit every day, and um, and then they feel, oh, they’re not having, feeling deprived, now they’ve got too much food, in hopes that you’re kind of, you know, there’s only so much you can find, it’s not only so many calories you get in a day, and so you’re hoping by, you know, eating some of the healthiest foods, inspiring people, something, they just don’t have enough room for some of the less healthy options at the end of the day, and so they can kind of start down that path.

41:31 Um, and then they start feeling healthy and they start getting a taste for these foods, they start experimenting with new foods, you know, people have the sense that, um, you know, like, what am I gonna eat? Like it’s like it would constrict my diet, whereas many people actually, if you ask them, people tend to only eat eight or nine, on surveys the average people only tend to eat about eight or nine dinner meals, they just kind of rotate, they’re really kind of a boring, restricted, um, kind of reservoir of, of me, and when actually you discover that there’s this whole ocean of other possibilities out there, all sorts of neat ethnic cuisines, foods you’ve never tried that you know you might actually like more than just the standard kind of, you know, regular, but you know, I don’t know, just different, you know, flavors for preparing, for preparing, you know, a lot of people, you know, grew up never knew what hummus was or never, it’s like, wow, this stuff is really good, and you know, I mean, and so it often ends up expanding people’s repertoire.

42:25 They’re actually eating more interesting, more diverse diets than they ever were before, eating just kind of the standard American diet, or the standard British Western diet. So you try to encourage them to try some new foods and see, right, right, and do it at whatever pace is necessary to stick with it. It doesn’t matter what you eat today or tomorrow or next week, it’s what you’re eating, what are you going to be eating 10 years from now, right? And so go with whatever pace it has to be.

42:48 Affordable, it has to be delicious, it has to be convenient for you and your life, right? I mean, anyone can hold their nose and eat something they don’t like for a couple days or a couple weeks. You’re right, but then they’re just, it’s not going to be lifelong assistant, right? This is a lifestyle, it’s a whole different way for you. So for the rest of your life, can you eat this way?

43:05 If the answer is no, you got to keep trying foods, and then all of a sudden you find a breakfast, you’re like, oh, I never had steel-cut oats before, wow, these are really good with berries and nuts, and, oh wow, okay, I could see myself eating this way, you know, um, this variety of really good food. Okay, so then you got, like a, you know, you ticked off a box for I got a really good go-to breakfast, okay, and then you’re like, what are some lunch options that fit into my workplace or whatever? And so, and look, if this takes weeks, if this takes months, we’re talking about, you know, your longevity, we’re talking about adding years to your life, we’re talking about adding healthy years to life so you actually be productive to society, enjoy life, right?

43:40 Healthy people have more fun, that’s the message I want to give. Healthy people have more fun, right? For people, particularly young people, a lot of people, they may not have a close relative that’s actually been really sick, we’re actually seeing somebody die, but see, we physicians, we’re in the hospitals, right? We see how horrible the diseases, right? I mean, I take all my diabetics to a dialysis ward.

44:05 Unless you’ve been to a dialysis ward, you don’t know what it’s like to lose your kidney function. What’s it look like? Oh, I mean, so first of all there’s this stench of urine you just can’t get away from, the, because basically that’s what you’re doing, you’re filtering out the urine because they no longer have kidney function, right? And, and, and so, you know, people have to go there and it’s literally hours hooked up to this machine that cycles throughout their blood, and it’s the most depressed, soul-crushing, in fact the, the turnover at this place in terms of the employees, the staff is so great just because it’s just, it’s just because everybody dies so quickly.

44:38 In fact the average life expectancy once you start dialysis is very short, um, though most diabetics actually don’t make a dialysis because they die of heart disease first, because dialysis, so increase your research, you have a hard time before your kidneys function, but if kidney fail, but um, people don’t like the loss of independence, like, hospitals are horrible places to be. I mean, if you’ve never experienced that yourself, you just don’t realize that whatever dreams you have, whatever you want to do with your life, I mean, you don’t realize how cut short that would be by a disability, that all of a sudden, like if you couldn’t see, like, what would that mean for your life and your family, and like, you know, and so, yeah, the vegans talk about global warming and animal welfare, all these kind of other external, kind of altruistic, whatever, but no, I’m talking tangible benefits, your life, what do you want to do?

45:29 Like, what are your goals, and you know how you’re going to get there, and how can I, look, it’s your body, your choice. You want to smoke cigarettes, want to go bungee jumping, it’s your body, your choice, do whatever you want. As a physician, all I can do is share with you what the predictable consequences of your actions are. If you continue to smoke, this is what’s likely to happen, people in your circumstance, you know, and so that’s all I can do, is share that information.

45:50 Then what people do with it is completely up to them. As far as I’m concerned, look, as soon as everybody knows the truth, I’m retiring, that’s it, right? Let other people have cooking shows, tell people how to do it, make it convenient, make it fun, that’s fine, as long as people know, get to make that choice, an informed consent, say, yeah, I know smoking’s not good for me, but my continued, okay, right, looks, you’re bi, I’m not gonna do it, but right, as long as people know the power they have over their health and longevity through what is on the end of their fork, as long as people know that, then my job is done, and I’m at the beach with my, you know, little little kale cocktail, kicking back.

46:29 But your job is never ending, and you are out there preaching this stuff, but the numbers and the are telling us that it’s still going the other way in America. And so is there going to be this, I still worry, and I’m sure you do, that there’s going to be this crisis moment, and what is it, when medical care becomes 25 percent of GDP, what is it when everyone just literally starts dying in front of our eyes? I mean, when is the message really going to get through, because, you know, you’re doing amazing work, but it’s going in one ear, out the other day.

46:57 So last year was the first year, kind of a record, where the life expectancy, um, actually declined in the U.S. for the first time basically since our nation’s founding, um, once we got out of the British yoke, that was ever since then. Um, just business, so life, you know, expects being going, I mean generally, and but then for the first time, right, so we’re looking at the first generation of children in the United States living shorter lives than their parents, and why? It’s because obesity, diabetes, um, and so there is work to be done, right?

47:31 And but I mean it’s like, how many more calories, I mean it’s like, no, like why is there an obesity epidemic? Oh, how much calories are people eating now compared to the ’70s, and it literally tracks one, like, whoa, yeah, this is how much weight you put on eating this many more calories a day, this is how much weight people put on. I mean there’s no mystery, people are eating more. For why? Because, you know, the, the, the junk food industry is getting people to eat garbage all day and they’re making off like bandits, but leaving, you know, the, this, this health care bill, not it for the government, for all society, and this tremendous human cause.

48:06 Um, but look, you know, so I’m hoping people will be able to take back their health, you know, just like this, um, you know, the, in smoking, um, the peak year of smoking, so it used to be, back in the ’50s, uh, fourth, the average per capita cigarette consumption in the States, four thousand cigarettes a year per average, so that means the average person walking around smoked half a pack a day on average, right? That’s crazy. Okay, like this is why in Mad Men they’re always smoking.

48:30 Oh yeah, media was telling people to smoke, the government, the medical profession, right? Um, someone on one hand you had all the medical profession, the, the government, media telling your mother, all, you had the science if you were even aware of that body of research, and many people weren’t. So what, that peak 1964, then basically went down every year since in terms of smoking. He’s like, wait a second, what happened in 1964? The Surgeon General’s report against smoking came out.

48:54 Now at that point it took 7,000 studies, so the, so the Surgeon General’s report ’64 referenced 7,000 studies linking smoking with the disease. You’d think after the first 6,000 it could give people a little heads up or something. No, 7,000 studies, right, that’s what it took before the powers that be officially recognized, again we had, we had evidence going back to the ’30s, right, that smoking wasn’t good for you, but again it didn’t hit, it wasn’t until the powers that be actually came out and said it.

49:23 So I believe we’re in a similar situation today, where having very similar, bombarded with messages, the science is clear, yet the message we get about what we eat. And so how long is it going to take before, you know, we get the next kind of Surgeon General’s report about diet? You know, so when I was speaking 20 years, well, so I was speaking last year before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, um, their chronic disease unit, and that was actually the first question I got, was, okay, what do you want us to do about it?

49:51 All right, I mean about, you know, the power of diet. No one questions the science, like if I go around, you know, so if you go around talk about Dean Ornish’s work, for example, um, uh, you know, I go to these big medical conferences, no one says, oh, that’s, that’s, I mean, no one can say that. I mean it is, you know, these are randomized controlled trials published in the best journals. What they say is, oh, my patients won’t do it, right? They have this patronizing attitude: I’m not even, I can’t even get my patient to stop smoking, I’m not even going to bring this up, right?

50:17 They’re making their mind up for the patients, right, rather than giving, you know, patients the right to decide for themselves. Anyway, so, but I mean, so, but the science isn’t in context, but just this sense of, you know, people might not do it. Um, and so when CDC, I said, look, you know, in 1964, certain, you just have to, you know, just to acknowledge the fact. So for example, last year the World Health Organization, the IARC, the, the official body that determines what is and is not cancer causing, bumped up processed meat to category one carcinogen.

50:47 So that’s bacon and ham, hot dogs, you know, sausages, lunch meat, right? So a category, meaning we are as certain processed meat causes cancer in human beings than we are that plutonium causes cancer, in cigarette smoke and asbestos, right? We are, it is a proven human carcinogen, right? Yet we send our kids to school with it. It’s, it’s, I mean it’s like, you know, school lunch trays get, like, a carton of milk, carton of cigarettes.

51:11 I mean that’s the equivalent of what we’re doing. And so why isn’t it on the CDC website, you know, the World Health Organization says processed meat is a category one carcinogen, right? You know, processed meat causes cancer, if there’s just this public acknowledgement of the settled science. That’s all, again, and then look, then people can do whatever they want, I’m not saying ban the stuff, right? You want to smoke, smoke.

51:33 You want to eat meat, eat meat, but recognize, as long as you have an understanding of what this might be doing to your family, how powerful these industries, milk, dairy, meats, processed foods, there’s, uh, you know, one of my favorite examples of the power of, well, there’s, there’s lots of, so I was involved in the Oprah Winfrey case, the meat defamation trial, and if you remember that. So you don’t want to tell it, to bring us up to speed? Yeah, so uh, this rancher, this, uh, named Howard Lyman was on the Oprah Winfrey show in the, probably, um, during the mad cow scare here, bovine spongiform encephalopathy, right, and you, it really didn’t, it was surprising, you know, back then, I mean, it was of course all the fury here, um, understandably so given the uncertainties, but it never really made it across the Atlantic, like people, it wasn’t kind of in the public consciousness over there that, that, that people were dealing with, uh, this problem over here in Europe, right?

52:27 And just break down mad cow, these real quick for people. I mean, so, oh wow, here in Britain I gotta talk about, so yeah, bovine spongiform, so it, uh, this, this prions, this disease that arose from the, the practice of feeding um, animal protein decals, so feeding cows to cows, sheep to sheep, goes to those, and so this kind of protein recycling, um, uh, enabled this brain pathogen to be spread, um, through the food chain. Now normally cows be herbivores, they’d never eat the brains of their, they’d never be cannibals, right?

52:59 We kind of made them into, and that spread this disease that otherwise couldn’t spread. In fact, the only equivalent was this cannibal disease called kuru in Papua New Guinea, where there actually was the same spongiform encephalopathy because they ate the brains, right, dead. So as long as you don’t eat the brains, you did, you’re fine, but you know, in Great Britain they said, I got this great money-saving, why feed them corn and soybeans that cost money?

53:19 Let’s feed them brains, let’s feed them, you know, slaughterhouse byproducts, meat meal, and then they thought this disease might actually transfer to humans, and then the concern was, ah, what if it, what if it, what if it transfers to humans, and so, and these horrible graphic images of these kids, and we’re talking, and we’re talking basically an entire generation here in Britain exposed to this meat, right, because we didn’t know about, and so the question is, and has a long incubation period, so how many people are incubating this disease, and thankfully humanity dodged a bullet, and that it was actually extremely unlikely, that it was very rare, there’s been a few cases, very rare, um, that, that, that, that transmission, that zoonotic animal to human transmission.

53:58 Okay, but at the time we didn’t know that. And so Howard Lyman ray said, you know, we feed cows to cows in this, in the States as well, and it was such a shocking, not only have we made cows, you know, that on the Oprah show said that on the Oprah show, and Oprah said, that’s it, I’ve never eaten another burger again, right? By the way, Oprah was the internet back in the ’90s. She was right, she really was right, right. So right, probably the most popular rides is this billionaire, this, right, so it’s very powerful, and that’s, that’s important for the story associated, never going to eat a burger again.

54:27 Okay, so cattle futures on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange tumbled at weeks, right, and this Texas cattle rancher, um, lost a lot of money and sued Oprah under what I call food libel laws or food disparagement laws, where you cannot make unfounded comments against perishable food items, right? Um, and so my role in the defense was arguing that, no, these were indeed founded comments on, that there actually was, uh, this was a risky practice to kind of recycle cattle protein, um, in cattle feed. Um, and so people, what people remember is, oh yeah, didn’t Oprah win?

55:06 What’s the big, okay, with the big deals? No, yes, Oprah did win after eight years of appeals. I mean back if, oh, and ruined her life, she had to move the show to Texas because she had to have cat, right, um, of Chicago, cost millions of dollars. And so basically, so technically she won, but in terms of the silencing effect, if the meat industry can take on one of the most powerful people in the world, drag her through the courts, you’ve got no chance. And so it had this silencing effect on, you know, what other media outlet is going to raise?

55:45 There, same thing happened with the pink slime debate, the ABC News, and so in the States there’s this pink slime, of this, this, this a type of meat that they were, um, that, that was dubbed by USDA scientists as pink slime, which is getting into hamburgers, and they called it pink slime, and they were sued because you can’t call it pink slime, it’s, it’s derogatory to our business, costs a lot of money. Anyway, they won the lawsuit against ABC News, again the silencing effect, no one’s going to bring this up. Um, and so, so the industry really, in the, in the grand scheme of things, industry really won in terms of, um, its messaging that you take on us, we will, you know, we will destroy you.

56:26 And do they control politicians through funding campaigns? Oh, so in the Beltway where I live in Washington, DC, um, the two most powerful industries, the pharmaceutical industry and the, and animal agriculture, and the fact work both together. It’s the pharmaceutical industry that sells the antibiotics that are used as feed additives, illegal here, and, um, and but still practiced in the U.S. And so no wonder that even though all public health and human medical authorities have come out against such a risky practice, continues, and I think a good example of the kind of political might of the meat industry was uh, this was recently, a few years ago, in an internal USA, U.S.

57:06 Department of Agriculture, a internal employee newsletter that just goes out, wasn’t for public consumption, had suggested as one little blurb in the, you know, newsletter, try Meatless Mondays, and it was under some environmental, like, you know, it saves this much carbon and this much water, you know, one day a week, try, you know, try eating some meatless meals, have a bean burrito instead of beefery. Okay, that was the extent, right, and it created such a political firestorm that it was down off the internet within hours. Nothing happens in DC within hours, that happened in DC within hours.

57:41 They had, you know, the, you know, the Dakota senator talking, you know, slamming the USDA for daring to suggest that people eat me, and it wasn’t even a public message, but, but that shows how how, how sense, politically sensitive that kind of message is. And so the whole, uh, the whole mission of the U.S. Department of Agriculture is to promote agricultural products, at the same time they’re the ones we put in charge of food safety and coming up with the dietary guidelines, right?

58:11 So that’s a very similar reason why, you know, MAFF here was disbanded, right, because this conflict of interest within cultures, right? It continues in the States where, and so when it comes for, so for the, for the dietary guidelines, when it comes to eating more messaging, well then their mission is fine, they want to promote cold projects, products, and want to protect public health, so when they, when it comes to eating more fruits and vegetables they’re very clear. You look at the USDA, you know, dietary recommendations: eat more fruits and vegetables.

58:41 All right, okay, but eat less messaging, then there’s a conflict, right? They want to protect public health, but all of a sudden, okay, so then what do they do? Then they coach it in kind of biochemical lingo, so they eat more fruits and vegetables and then cut down unsaturated and trans fatty acids. What does that mean? Cut down on meat, dairy, junk food, right?

59:00 But they can’t say that. You drink less soda, they can’t say that, right? But they could, so, so I mean, but it just gives you a sense of the kind of tiptoeing around these powerful industries we have to do, and if there weren’t millions of lives in the balance, it wouldn’t be a bit, right, it wouldn’t be a big deal, but the fact that these are literally life and death decisions that we’re dealing with, um, makes it all the more important to get the truth out, and that’s why I’m a man on a mission.

59:30 Okay. Well, we’re speaking on that, talking about the pharmaceutical industry, because let alone supplying some of the antibiotics for the, for the animals, they are the ones that kind of enjoy the back end of this diet, those statins, and I remember talking to my dad about 10 years ago, and I’ve been in Britain for, you know, five or six years, and he’s, I’m on all these cholesterol drugs, and my, this, on this cholesterol, and I’m like, what do you do? I don’t know anybody in London on cholesterol drugs, you know, and, and it was just like there was this massive over-prescription of things in the States.

59:56 I mean it’s a huge industry, but of course that kind of feeds on these unhealthy diet choices, so, um, what do you see there, and then do you ever see us breaking through that, because that, because arguably a more powerful lobby? Yeah, so the most profitable industry in the States is the pharmaceutical industry, and the best-selling drugs in human history, number one, Lipitor, so this multi-billion dollar drug is a cholesterol-lowering statin drug, right? So if you look at all the top-selling drugs, right, they’re not the drugs have the most, like, antibiotics, problem with antibiotics?

1:00:25 Yeah, a lot of save lives and stuff, you think for ten days, what, that you can’t make money, but take a drug for every day for the rest of your life, cholesterol lowering, a chronic disease lifestyle drug, if you’re going to eat the same crap you got to take this blood pressure medication every day for the rest of your life, this cholesterol lowering drug every day for the rest of your life, ah, now that’s a money maker, right? I mean that’s something. Okay, so that’s right, in some diabetes drugs.

1:00:45 Oh right, so this is where the money is, this is where the profits is for the shareholders again. It’s not some, like, they’re not sitting around trying to think how we can make people sick or how we can, right, not help people, it’s just, this is not a conspiracy, it’s just when they’re profit-driven it happens, this is the system that we live in. Okay, particularly in the States where we have this profit-driven healthcare, and even for the doctors, right, the most common doctor visit in the States, and actually throughout North America, in Canada as well, is what’s called a blood pressure check, where, um, you know, you’re on blood pressure medications, we want people to come in every few months, make sure we don’t need to tweak, oh, blood pressure is even higher, we need to increase your dose, add on a second or third or fourth drug.

1:01:25 Okay, it’s the easiest doctor visit in the world, you come in, your blood pressure church, you tweak, you’re right, I do it in five minutes, right, right. Um, so that is the most common, and you sell a few hundred dollars, and so, and so it makes the, so for someone to say, no, no, no, no, you change your diet and you get off these blood pressure medications, right, um, you can cure, you can have normal blood pressure on no blood pressure medications, and so the, so that’s the cash cow, not only for the pharmaceutical industry but also for the medical industry as well. I mean it’s just, I mean the system runs off of chronic disease, that’s how hospitals make the money, that’s how everybody makes their money, um, and so there’s just no incentive, right?

1:02:06 I mean there’s just, the system isn’t set up. In fact it’s funny when, uh, there was a just a few months ago in, uh, in Bloomberg, was like a business news outlet, um, in the States, came out with saying how many billions of dollars corporations are going to save because life expectancy is dropping for the first time in the States, because they don’t have to pay pensioners, right? They’re going to save so much money because people are dying so much earlier, they’re going to save billions of dollars, like Lockheed Martin, one company was going to make a vote, was going to save over a billion dollars because their retirees were going to die earlier because they had all these obligations for the, for their workers, right?

1:02:45 I mean, so talk about perverse financial incentives. So basically, right, companies want to keep, keep people healthy and productive until 64, right, and then quickly drop down, right? I mean, so yeah, it’s just the system is not set up. Okay, but as a doctor, if I prescribe you Lipitor and you come in on a regular basis, I don’t actually make more money on that, do I? So why would I continue doing it?

1:03:05 Oh well, so well, so, um, first of all our education, I mean we are basically a pharma-educated, I mean that’s, that, I mean medical school is, you know, basically funded by, you know, Big Pharma infusion, like continuing medical education. All doctors need to get a certain number of hours to kind of keep up with registration. Who provides that? For free, in fact, they throw on meals and fancy dinners. Of course it’s the drug industry, and they’ll tell you that this is their drug, and they’re happy to, and they fund a lot of the studies, that the studies they fund, they, you have to have to be relevant, they, I mean, I mean this, I mean the system is set up.

1:03:40 The public would not know what you’re talking about, they would be like, what are you talking about? It’s one of the most treasured institutions, it’s like, you know, heaven going to medical school, and it’s all pure, and but when you talk about this, most people would be like, what, the pharmaceutical industry is involved there? I mean from, from day one in, in medical education, postgraduate medical education, and then as physicians, continuing professional medical education, they, you know, they have their fingers in the pie all along the way, and you can see these big shifts as soon as a, you know, drug goes off patent, and all sudden they, they then all of a sudden they switch it, you know, and instead of Prilosec or another, now the prostate is off patent, we’re going to change you to the other purple pill, right, right.

1:04:21 Um, the margins there, because all of a sudden the margin is there, and so there’s this massive push, and that, so in the States it’s thousands of dollars per physician, that’s what, in, in terms of their outreach. So there’s a thousand dollars for every physician in terms of changing their prescription habits, and doctors will say, oh yeah, all the freebies that I get and all the meals, everything, you know, doesn’t affect my decisions. But then one would have to think, oh, the drug industry just likes wasting money for nothing, right?

1:04:51 They, they’re just like, they’re just, they’re just so sweet and they just love giving gifts for nothing? No, presumably they know that they’re, they’re that they’re gonna shift prescription habits, and it’s very rare these days, where I mean, used to be you got a certain number of prescriptions or a certain expensive drug, you’d like get a vacation, literally. I mean there was this really explicit print quid pro quo, now it’s much more subtle, so a lot of those excesses have been removed.

1:05:15 In fact now there’s a transparency, the Open Payments Act, which was passed, and now drug companies have to tell how much money they gave to each doctor, so you can look in the States, you can look up your doctor and see how much money they got from which drug company in dinners and expenses and everything. Okay, right, and so, and it’s really, and it’s shocking to be like, to see how much doctors are on the take, and it’s unfortunate because presumably you went into medicine because you want to help people, who want to take care of sick people. Look, if you want to make money you go to the stock market or something, right?

1:05:49 Presumably people going into medicine have this kind of humanistic urge, but unfortunately this somehow translates, um, maybe medical training just kind of beats it out of you, and you come out kind of demanding reparations for your tough time that you have, the money you spend, right? But you go in with this, like, idealistic, you want to open up a homeless clinic or something, but then on the other side you’re getting that next BMW, and it’s, it’s a sad transformation, and you’re back to just doing Lipitor prescriptions. Exactly.

1:06:15 Look, it’s the easiest thing in the world, but I mean and it’s quick, I mean so, and your patients come in saying, I saw this, uh, three minute ad where everyone looks so happy, can you give me this drug, right? And what, four hour erection? That doesn’t sound bad to me, right? Okay, so, and look, I can see six patients an hour if I’m just writing prescriptions, right? I mean, and you know, a lot of, a lot of docs have capitated payments where they’re paid by, by the number of patients they can see, they get more money if they see more patients.

1:06:42 How do you see more patients? It’s the quickest thing in the world to write it, write it, write a script for somebody, right? Okay, but having a conversation about someone’s life, what they’re eating, you know, what kind of, you know, social situation they’re in, I mean that’s, that, and they’re not getting reimbursed, you don’t get paid, there’s no, there’s no, you know, Medicare box you can check off and get paid, get reimbursed for educating people about healthy eating, even though that may be one of the most powerful interventions.

1:07:08 It’s not paid for, it’s not reimbursed, so the system is set up to reward pills and procedures, but that’s not getting at the underlying cause. You know, you got a lot of industries that are looking out for you, the meat industry, the dairy industry, the egg industry, the pharmaceutical industry, how are you still walking around? Why, why am I not, am I, should I be worried? So when I found a ditch somewhere, you’ll know it wasn’t, uh, right, right, wasn’t that soybean you ate?

1:07:37 Right, right, um, so I, I mean it’s, it’s, um, yeah, the more pushback I get, then the more I know I’m making a difference, right? If I’m being ignored, then, you know, I don’t feel I’m having an impact, and so the more kind of, you know, attacks I get, the better. But you get, but I do, but I don’t get it from the medical community. So when I stand up and give grand rounds at a hospital, um, you know, people are desperate for this information, it really kind of, I think, reignites that spark, that idealistic spark while I wanted medicine in the first place.

1:08:10 Treating chronic disease in primary care is just a soul-draining, I mean it’s just, your patients don’t get better. I mean the only happy doctor, like, obstetricians get to give birth to baby, you know, it’s like new baby, everybody else is miserable, right? It’s because, well, maybe the emergency care physicians, they can patch people up, but in primary care, GPs, right, these people don’t get better, they get worse, worse, worse, and you’re trying to slow down, they’ll, you’ll have more medications, you had an extra medication to counteract the side effects of the last medication you get, and you just try to, you know, keep people afloat and slow down the rate at which they, you know, they, they lose their function, and uh, whereas all of a sudden there’s a tool, wait a second, I’ve got something actually make your patients get better.

1:08:51 In fact when I go to these, um, conferences, in fact there’s a conference going on right now, uh, the International Plant-Based Healthcare Nutrition Company, plant-based nutrition healthcare conference, right, in California, I’d be there if I wasn’t here. Um, and there’s thousands of, of plant-based practitioners practicing come together every year, and when I talk to them, like, how did you come to this, right? I mean, where did you learn that? You obviously weren’t taught this in medical school, right?

1:09:14 So why are you practicing this way? Very often it’s a patient that taught them, so a patient saw some documentary like Forks Over Knives or What the Health or whatever, or read a book, and then they changed their own diet, unbeknownst to their practitioner, right? All of a sudden got, and then go back to the, and all of a sudden they lost all this weight and their blood pressure, their, their cholesterol is better, the doctor’s like, what did you do? I’ve been following you and your family for years and, you know, you’ve, it’s just been kind of, you know, and they said, oh, I got to hear, let me show you this book, or, you know, and they share this, and they’re like, oh my God, wait a second, I’ve got 100 patients just like you, 100 patients with diabetes, they were doing this, not getting any better, wait a second, and then all of a sudden they’re like, I could, I can actually help people, there’s this tool that I wasn’t given.

1:09:56 And so that’s what, so it’s often the patient we’re educating the doctor, and so that’s so frustrating for me because I go to these doctors like, wait a second, I’ve been, I got a mountain of evidence this high, I’ve been shooting out, churning out videos every day, right, showing that the peer-reviewed scientific medical, you know, hundreds, thousands of studies. Oh, but one little anecdote, one person comes to your office, but we’re like storied creatures, like that’s just like how we interact with the world is that through, you know, personal interactions, and somehow the science just doesn’t, I don’t know, it’s not as quite as concrete as one person that they’ve known face to face, and all of a sudden they’re feeling better. It’s that human interest story that really can change their whole lives, and they start new practices and also in helping other people, and meanwhile I’m sitting here going, we’ve done for decades, I’ve been showing you the science, they’re like, yeah, but did you see, look how look great they look, ugh.

1:10:51 Yeah, that’s why some of these documentary films are so powerful, because they, they weave in a personal narrative, and whether it’s, um, you know, uh, King Corn and these kinds of things that show these are very powerful. So, uh, yeah, that’s true. Some of your critics say you overemphasize the benefits of plant-based diet and some say that the research isn’t there, there’s not a randomized, sir, you know, uh, there’s no test studies, uh, randomized based on plant-based, uh, diets.

1:11:16 What do you say? So but there are, so I mean that, that’s why Lifestyle Heart Trial was so important. It was Ornish, and so Pritikin, for example, was, you know, curing heart disease by the thousands, but, you know, wasn’t publishing, publishing very little, wasn’t doing randomized studies. And in fact, in fact this goes back to Kempner, back at Duke in the ’40s, was doing these amazing studies and refused to randomize patients because basically he was randomizing from their, them to their death, so basically he was putting people on a very strict plant-based diet to cure malignant hypertension, we didn’t have high blood pressure medications people’s blood pressures got way high and then they died.

1:11:49 They had these horrible strokes and literally had a few months to live, and he would, he wouldn’t bran, and he was curing them with his, with his rice diet. It was this plant-based diet, um, and so to randomize people to a control group was to randomize people to their death. Um, and so there’s been a real hesitancy, so people that realize this, they often don’t want to put people in control group who are really interested. But Ornish was the first one to say, look, the, the, the, the public, the, the scientific community is not going to take this seriously unless we do a proper, proper study.

1:12:16 So that’s what was the real, that was the game changer, was not that the science was different but all of a sudden we have randomized controlled trials, and there’s, and he followed people up for four years, and there’s been subsequent trials. He also did smoking cessation, exercise and, like, stress management in the ’90s, so this is, right, so this has been, nice, and since then, and so since then there, there’s been more trials, and then, um, people have done studies just on the dietary components, so we know it’s not actually just the stress management, these other things, it is indeed just changing people’s diet, randomized people into different groups, and we can, uh, reverse diabetes, we can, so the studies have been done, um, people don’t recognize themselves, so so I mean, well, so see that is a very, so the, the not big enough comes from this as an experience.

1:13:01 So most doctors are used to seeing studies on thousands of people, right? Why? Because they’re funded by drug companies, and the drugs are so ineffective you need literally thousands of people to show a statistically significant benefit. So if you drop people’s blood pressure two millimeters mercury, from like 140 to 138, right, um, now there’s a random flux, you get your blood pressure every day, you know, it goes up and down a little bit, so to actually prove that the drug really does work, right, you have to have 10,000 people.

1:13:32 These studies on blood pressure medications said randomized 10,000 people have, and so then you can show statistically significant that, yes, indeed there’s actually a two millimeter drop, and so that’s what we’re using, the effects are so small you need these massive studies. However, the bigger the, the effect is, the fewer people you need to show it. So when Louis Pasteur invented the rabies vaccine, um, and some kid, I forget the kid’s name, came to him with rabies, um, it’s at, at that point in history no one had ever survived rabies, the fatality rate was a hundred percent.

1:14:05 He gave the kid whose rabies vaccine and didn’t die, first person in history not to die of rabies, went from 100 fatality rate to a zero percent fatality, right? All right, change face of medicine, one study subject, that was an end of one. How big was that study? One person, all of medicine changed. You gonna randomize people to, no, no, you don’t get the rabies vaccine and you get the rabies vaccine, we’re gonna split you up, the next 10 people come to the office, five this way, five this way, knowing that those five are gonna die?

1:14:31 Right, no, change to face medicine, one person, right? So when you have, so if you, you know, if you, uh, claim to have a magic wand and you wave it over a, a few, three pigs and they sprout wings and fly away, right, um, and someone says, yeah, yeah, okay, if you had 100 pigs, fine, I believe you have a magic wand, but three pigs, how do you think just flew away? What are you cra, right? When the effect is that large, you can show these dramatic results with very few people, and we’re talking about not just uh, treating disease, we’re reversing disease.

1:15:08 You can see these, what’s called angiography, we actually see the, the lumen of the arteries actually get bigger, you inject a dye, you see the atherosclerotic plaque that’s squeezing off the blood flow, the eyes actually dissolve away, opening up arteries without drugs or that, so you can see it black and white right in front of you. The, the standard, the control group, which was randomized to do whatever your, your doctor tells you, that was the control group, right? Whatever your doctor’s telling you, whatever they tell you to eat, whatever drugs you take, that’s your control group, and then or you’re randomized to, here, eat this way, and the control group got worse, just that’s what you do with crime sees, get worse, worse, worse, you die, and the, and 82% of the, of the interventional trial, the plant-based, uh, diet and lifestyle group got better.

1:15:51 Um, okay, so you don’t need the numbers because it’s plain and simple, and the numbers are funded by companies that it’s not in their interest to go with the plant-based diet, so that’s what you’re saying. Okay, and so, right, how big of a study do you need, and what are the size, and the reason we want to be absolute, the reason the bar is super high, because pills and procedures kill people. So in the States, 106,000 Americans die from adverse side effects from drugs.

1:16:15 This is not, um, mistakes or over-prescriptions or overdoses, um, we’re talking as prescribed, 106,000 Americans lose their lives. That’s the sixth leading cause of death is doctors in the States. All right, so when, when we know that drugs kill people, we want the benefits to outweigh the risks, you, you want, we want massive studies proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that the benefits actually outweigh the risk. Okay, but when I come and say, eat some broccoli, what kind of evidence, I mean what, what’s the bar?

1:16:46 Okay, what if, you know, yeah, the study, um, you know, you know, wasn’t randomized, probably, maybe the benefits of broccoli really aren’t as high as the, as the science shows, right? Okay, what’s the downside, right? I mean it’s like, oh well, yeah, if people all of a sudden started eating broccoli, what would happen? They’d just get healthier for some other, I mean even if it did not. Some people come to me with some disease I’ve never heard about or something, you know, rare genetic, and they say, does the plant-based diet help with this?

1:17:15 I say, I don’t know, I, I don’t know, but look, if you have one disease, the last thing you want is two diseases, right? You still want to eat healthy. It’s like, does stopping smoking help with this weird disease X? I don’t know, but you still want to stop eating, Dr., stop smoking, you don’t want lung cancer and disease X, right? I mean we’re talking about healthy, simple, safe, side-effect-free solutions, and so people should just do it.

1:17:39 Now, having said that, the risk is if you are on blood sugar lowering medications or blood pressure lowering medications, and you all of a sudden treat the cause by dramatically improving your diet, you can become over-treated very fast. So you’re also in, your blood sugars can drop too low, your blood pressure can drop too low. I mean you can’t have normal blood pressures on blood pressure medications, you’ll drop your, but, you know, you’ll get dizzy, fall over or hit your head, I mean it can be serious, so you have to do this under medical supervision, your doctor has to wean you off these medications as your body gets better, as your, as your diabetes goes away, you need less and less and less and less insulin until, um, ideally you’re off insulin altogether.

1:18:22 That’s the broccoli disclaimer. We just got that, that’s the broccoli disclaimer. Okay, fair enough. Now tell me, you put out thousands and thousands of videos, you’ve got your dot org site, you, you tour the world putting on that suit and tie and, and speaking of other stuff, you’re obviously super passionate. Um, it’s really hard to get this message to people.

1:18:40 What makes Michael tick? It’s my, it’s, look, if my grandma didn’t have to die like that, no one’s grandma has to die like that, right? It’s just like, it’s, it’s the, it’s the, it’s the injustice, right? It’s like, and, and that’s often what I get from patients who realize, so you know, I, you know, they’re skeptical at first. Okay, I’ll try this crazy diet you’re telling me to put on, then all of a sudden, um, you know, they call me from the ER because their blood pressures have dropped too rapidly and I have to kind of, we, and all of a sudden they’re off their medication they thought be up beyond for the rest of their life, they were losing sensation their feet, all, you know, they saw some horrible things happen to their relatives dying diabetes, and all of a sudden they don’t have diabetes anymore, and then, and at first there’s this tremendous relief, I’m going to live this long happy life, I’m not going to end up on dialysis, I’m going to see my kids grow up, and then the anger sets in, and then it’s like, why didn’t anyone tell me about this?

1:19:31 Why didn’t my doctor tell me that? Is, are you saying that my aunt didn’t have to die? Are you saying that, and that, I mean, and that’s, that’s the anger I’ve felt since I learned. I mean, so 1990, here it is, publishing the best medical journals in the world, yet, so I thought that was it, there it is, my family knew about it, but here it is now, everybody will change, nothing should wait 30 years almost if the cure to our number one, number two killer could get lost down some rabbit hole in the Nord, what else might there be in the medical industry that could help my patients but just didn’t have a corporate budget to make it to, to drive its promotion?

1:20:06 That’s why I do what I do, that’s why I’m into medicine, and that’s why I practice the type of medicine I do. Okay, before we started we were talking about this television show called The Knick, which was, uh, produced by Steven Soderbergh, you know, very famous to vector, and it’s 1900, it’s in New York City, and The Knick is the Knickerbocker of this hospital, and they’re practicing medicine, which I think is a time there was quite a boost in technology when it came to anesthetics and drugs and, but at the same time people didn’t know a lot of information, and the doctors would probably really like, God complexes, and people would go and trust, and we saw amazing breakthroughs but we also saw them doing really crazy things too, and when I look at that show I think, oh, what a bunch of twisted people they were, right?

1:20:46 And then when I look and listen to you, I think we must all be as twisted as, in not recognizing some facts in front of us and still going on with these, uh, antiquated assumptions, and I’m wondering what you think. No, so there’s, you know, there is this revolution in medicine called evidence-based medicine. I mean there’s this, within, there’s a real push towards evidence-based medicine, and I think that he takes a step back and say, wait, what was it before?

1:21:12 Like, wait a second, why isn’t there, why does there not have to be an evidence-based chemistry or an evidence-based architecture or an evidence base where one person says anything, we should make bridges out of Styrofoam, and someone else says, I think we should make bridges out of what? No, there’s actual science, there’s actually, we can actually make our decisions based on, you know, experimental proof, and the fact that there needs to be something called evidence-based medicine says everything you need to know about the sorry state of medical care. For centuries we were bloodletting, we were bleeding people, giving people leeches, giving people mercury, give me these horrible things.

1:21:47 Why? Because some, some famous, some Galen or some famous doctor in history said, oh, we should do this for people, and so everyone said, I mean in fact crazy, we didn’t even know basics of anatomy because some strong person said, oh yeah, the heart pumps air throughout the body, and we say, okay, instead of actually, you know, doing an autopsy, be like, you know, guess what? Um, and so, and we’re talking about the healing profession, we’re talking about the most, if we want anything to be based on evidence, right, I mean shouldn’t it be health care?

1:22:18 I mean shouldn’t it be literally life and death decisions? Um, and so there’s this realization that much of what doctors do really doesn’t have an evidence base. In fact, you, so what you do is you do these practice surveys, and so your risk of getting, so your likelihood of having a, um, a cesarean section birth, for example, dramatically, if you have a, if you’re, if you’re having a kid in Connecticut, it’s kind of dramatically different than, and it’s just based on that’s what doctors did in that area, that’s what doctors, yeah, the hospital, this is what we do, do a lot of cesarean sections, or we do this kind of surgery versus this kind of surgery, or, yeah, and so you see these hundred-fold rates in, you know, in various surgeries and medications, and it’s just because, well, that’s just kind of local tradition, or that it’s like, well, wait a second, I mean what should we be doing, and what’s the evidence, and then shouldn’t we be somehow disseminating this evidence so we can actually make these decisions?

1:23:09 So there’s this revolution in medicine at slowly saying, no, no, let’s actually see, not just, um, you know, give whatever medication that the drug company wants to say, but let’s actually do a comparison study between this new drug with the best leading drug today. Drug companies don’t do that, they compare their new drug to placebo. That’s all you have to do to get FDA approval, you have to show your drug works better than nothing. You do not have to show your work, your drug works better than the drug already on the market, right, that may be safer, has a better track record of safety, right?

1:23:40 So, and so there’s, so now there’s, there’s, there’s NIH, there’s, there’s taxpayer funding of head-to-head trials, okay, let’s look at your new fancy drug compared to the drug that we’ve known for decades has a certain level of safety, um, and that’s, you know, and actually see if it works. So that’s this push for evidence-based medicine, and I’m hoping that same push will start, you know, flowing into the, you know, lifestyle medicine field as well. There is now an American College of Lifestyle Medicine, proud to be a founding member and fellow, um, the first board certification, I, in one month’s time I may be board-certified in lifestyle medicine as the first cohort of doctors, um, going through the board certification testing process, and so as a new medical specialty, as a recognized, um, right, medical specialty, I think that’s a big change.

1:24:28 There used to, there’s always been preventive medicine, we’re not just talking about lifestyle interventions like diet and exercise to prevent disease but also to treat, arrest and potentially reverse it as well. That’s the big sea change we’re starting to see in medicine, um, and certainly as costs, health care costs, continue to skyrocket in the States, they’ll be more and more pushed to take these, um, these safe, simple, side-effect-free solutions. Okay, good.

1:24:50 Can I ask you some rapid fire questions, kind of a minute response on different foods, diseases and diet lifestyles? Whip it out, you’re good for this. All right. Um, paleo diet, right, big and popular, guys going caveman, eating the bacon and this and that, you’ll read on it. Yeah, bacon.

1:25:07 Yeah, there’s a, there’s a caveman, there’s something that was around two million years ago, um, right, so it’s, it’s often used as, as an excuse to just eat all sorts of crap. I mean it has, but look at saying cut out junk food, cut out dairy, doesn’t make sense. Did milk is for babies, why would anyone drink milk after weaning and then drink milk of another species, just doesn’t make any sense. Great, junk food, that doesn’t make, that’s not, those are all great things unfortunately.

1:25:33 Um, so if people actually follow the Paleolithic diet, we actually look at, like, coprolites, like petrified human feces from long time ago, we actually estimate that, um, human beings had over 100 grams of fiber a day, but that’s like six times what the British, average British diet gets, the, I mean that’s just, and you know, hundreds of milligrams of vitamin C. We eat these incredibly plant-based diets like all our fellow great apes did for millions of years, that’s our biochemistry, we lost the ability to make vitamin C, why would we need to, we’re eating all these plants every day. If people actually ate a paleo diet, eight, you know, plants and bugs, and okay, that’s great, unfortunately instead of people eating bugs, right, they’re eating bacon as an excuse, and they think they’re doing something good for their health, and they maybe, but, and if you actually do surveys, if people claim to be paleo, the biggest difference between them and everybody else is actually more vegetables.

1:26:18 Isn’t that interesting? If you think that they eat a lot more meat, now everyone eats so much meat, they actually don’t eat that much more meat, what they do is eat more vegetables. So if that’s what a paleo diet means to you, more vegetables, I’m all for, you’re happy. Okay, there’s probably very few paleoethic men that had their choice of meats wherever they were at the time. Yeah, a lot of other things.

1:26:35 Okay, fair enough. Um, Atkins diet, you went after them with one of your early books. Yeah, apparently I think they were suing you before they went out of business. Your read on that Atkins diet, because that was like the earlier version of, you know, hopefully something like Duke and died and all these videos, right? No, talk to me.

1:26:50 Yeah, well, no, no, look, getting rid of refined carb junk food, right, yeah, any diet that says don’t eat donuts is going to make the, the populous health better, absolutely, right. Um, and so great, but unfortunately then they say, okay, so instead of donuts, a lot bacon and butter and, you know, all these other things aren’t healthy for us, um, but yeah, no, anything that tells people to, to cut down and junk, I’m home. Okay, but the animal proteins, you’re like, look, this isn’t going to help us, so this is healthier sources, so yes.

1:27:15 Okay, you know, uh, you know, pork has protein, beef has iron, dairy has calcium, but what, what’s the bad? Food is a package deal. Yeah, Burger King says, yeah, have it your way, but you can’t be like, yeah, can’t get the burger, hold the saturated fat, cholesterol, hormones, like, no, it comes all together, right? Where’s the baggage that comes along with the calcium in dark green leafy vegetables, for example? Um, so with the dairy you get the saturated butter fat and the cholesterol.

1:27:37 Okay, but what do you get? The fiber and the folate and the iron and the potassium, all this stuff that you may be missing from getting. So you, the baggage that comes along with, you know, the same, uh, components in whole healthy plant foods is the bonus rather than the baggage, and so as a protein package, right, the healthiest sources are obviously the ones where you get all the good stuff, rather bad stuff. So thinking food’s not in terms of components, the industry loves components, that’s why they can take a, a box of Sugar Smacks and put now with vitamin D or now with fiber or whatever, right, because we think nutrients, right?

1:28:09 We can think, no, no, what about the whole food, you know, there’s actually a healthier way to get that fiber than in the, this box, right? Okay, good. Uh, soya, soya milk, all that stuff, do you encourage it, do you not, what do you reckon? So, uh, the healthiest is whole foods sources of soya, so edamame, the actual imagery, immature green soybeans themselves, fantastic, healthy as any of the legumes, beans, split peas, chickpeas and little, some of the healthiest foods we can possibly eat every day.

1:28:35 Some of the longest living populations on earth, like the Okinawa Japanese, have eat a lot of soy protein. In fact Japan, the country with the longest life expectancy, has the highest soy consumption in the world. Um, but rather than eating the soy protein isolates, kind of the fake meats which often have the same kind of sodium content, so and some of the things, I’d rather people eat more whole soy foods like the tempeh, like edamame, like the miso, um, rather than, again, just getting away from processed foods.

1:29:00 Okay, um, Alzheimer’s and dementia, as far as foods that reverse it, your thoughts on just, no reversal, there’s no reversal that we know of in terms of, uh, diet or, or, or anything we know of, medicine, but we do have slowing the progression. So, um, so for the first time ever, so no drugs has ever been able to show progression, there’s drugs can help with some of the symptoms, but no drug ever actually showed a slowing of the core symptoms, um, until this, um, lifestyle medicine practice study was published, hundreds of, of Alzheimer’s victims randomized two groups, one had their cardiovascular risk factors treated, such as high blood pressure and high cholesterol, the other half didn’t, and saw a significant slowing of the progression of the disease, um, and so that is the best we can hope for.

1:29:48 And in fact with that disease, do you want to have it slowed? I mean if, I mean if you’re at a point where you can no longer recognize yourself or a loved one in the mirror, is that a state you want to prolong? I mean these are, bottom line is that’s the perfect disease to show that an ounce of prevention is way more than a pound of cure, right? Because it may, there is no cure for dead, I mean, you know, many of these, these diseases are a death sentence, there’s nothing we do, so that’s why we need to prevent these diseases in the first place.

1:30:16 Latest dietary recommendations for the prevention of Alzheimer’s dementia, you know, cut down on basically meat bearing junk, cut down session fat, boost the intake of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, and this is based on data going back decades. Now the first Adventist study showing that those who eat meat, red meat, white meat, didn’t matter, two to three times the likelihood, greater likelihood of becoming demented later in life. That’s a combination of both vascular dementia and Alzheimer’s dementia, but, um, the longer one ate healthy, the lower one’s risk of dementia.

1:30:44 That is a disease all about prevention. Okay, diabetes, we spoke about it earlier, but a lot of people suffering from pre-diabetes, etc., etc., for people that are listening, your take on it. In general, diet, everything, it can be reversed, something we’ve known since the 1970s. Now we’ve known that, look, any weight loss can slow or even reverse diabetes, in fact bariatric surgery, jaw wiring, you can actually reverse diabetes just by basically artificially forcing people to live starvation diets so they can lose weight and reverse the insulin resistance that causes diabetes, but, and so that’s why, so there’s the studies going back to the 1920s showing that plant-based diets can reverse diabetes, but is that just because they lost so much weight, these are healthier diets, lower calories in general?

1:31:25 Um, so even without carb, calorie, portion control, any of that counting, you just tend to lose weight because you’re eating healthier foods which are less calorically dense. And so is it just yet another way to lose weight? The point of weight loss is not to fit into a skinnier casket. Lots of things you can do to lose weight: tuberculosis, a good cocaine habit, chemotherapy. No, it’s how you’re going to eat to lose weight and actually make yourself live longer and healthy, and so that was the critical study done in the ’70s, done by Pritikin’s group, that showed that you can put people with plant-based diet and force them to eat so much food that they don’t lose any weight.

1:31:57 That’s the critical study, randomized people in two groups, have put people on a plant-based diet but force them to eat so much food they don’t lose any weight, so zero weight loss, um, despite restricting meat, eggs, dairy and junk. In fact some people have problems eating it all, they’re like, oh, not another salad. I mean you can, but no, they force people, so zero weight loss despite restricting me, so did plant-based diets still help within, um, so insulin needs were cut 60, half the diabetics off all their insulin altogether after 16 days, 16 days later, so people who had diabetes literally four decades off of all insulin in a matter of about two weeks, right?

1:32:33 Diabetes for 20 years, enough, all this in two weeks, diabetes for 20 years because no one had told them about a plant-based diet for decades. They were 13 days away from being free but they didn’t know. And so that, and so it shows the diet, plant-based diet, can reverse diet even without weight loss, and so that’s really the critical point. Again, we’ve known this for decades, it is just a scandal that that isn’t more widely known. Amen.

1:32:58 Depression and suicide. Yeah, so you know, when I was doing this book and realizing that mental health was one of the leading killers, it was the tenth leading killer, cause of death in the United States. In fact I’m speaking in Sweden, it’s actually higher, um, in Sweden. Yeah, so something I’m going to talk about, long winters there, lack of daylight, I don’t know what it is, um, Swedish meatballs, that’s what. No, um, no, so uh, so uh, so I, I did a deep dive not thinking I’d necessarily find anything, but it turns out, so we’ve known for a long time that those who eat healthier tend to feel healthier, so people eating plant-based diets tend about less, about half the depression, anxiety and stress scores compared to those eating more conventional diets, but you don’t know which comes first, there’s a cross-sectional study, so it was finally put to the test by the University of Arizona, where they thought it was this arachidonic acid, this long-chain inflammatory omega-6 fatty acid found in animal foods, particularly chicken and eggs, also found in other animal foods, but so they removed eggs, chicken and other meat from people’s diet, got a significant improvement mood within just two weeks, right?

1:33:54 And so again, randomized control studies, remove those foods and significant improvement in mood within two weeks. So I think that, uh, that, that, that arachidonic acid was impairing people’s mental health via neural inflammation, brain inflammation, but we may be able to clear that inflammation from our brains in as few as two weeks by cutting down our intake of eggs, chicken and other meat. And say, wait a second, am I just cherry picking here? What about all the other diets have been proven to improve mood?

1:34:18 There aren’t any. So there’s recent meta-analysis saying no, only that plant-based dietary intervention, the only study using this rigorous randomized controlled study, um, trial pattern, was the only study ever to show, under any duration of time, significant boost in mood from a dietary intervention. So will there be studies in the future showing a different diamond proceed? Maybe, but right now the best evidence we have, um, is that lifestyle interventions like exercise, for example, can boost mood.

1:34:48 In terms of diet, plant-based diets have the biggest evidence base. Okay, how do you feel about gluten, um? For the two percent of people that either have celiac disease or non-celiac gluten sensitivity or wheat allergy, they need to stay away from it, but the other 98, the other 49 out of 50 people, um, no problem with gluten. Of course if the gluten is found in doughnuts, right, in refined carb junk food, but whole wheat, barley, rye, these are healthy foods for 98% of people.

1:35:13 Okay, sugar and then fruit sugars on the back of that. Okay, so sugar, bet, so refined industrial sugar, so sucrose, table sugar, high fructose corn syrup, bad, increases liver fat, increases high blood pressure, metabolic disease, all sorts of bad stuff, and so we should cut out all refined sugars. However, the opposite happens when we eat a lot of fruit. In fact there’s studies done, we give people literally dozens of servings of fruit a day, in fact the amount of fructose they’d get, literally liters of soda, but actually had the opposite effect.

1:35:41 Their blood pressure actually got better, less liver fat, so they had the opposite effects, and that’s because the fiber, so sugar comes in nature prepackaged in fiber form, there’s fiber, there’s these polyphenol foundations that actually block the absorption of sugar in the small intestine, slow the absorption of sugar throughout the small intestine, so you don’t get that big sugar spike, you don’t get that surge of triglycerides or fat into the blood, um, and so you don’t get the adverse effects, you just have positive effects. In fact Global Burden of Disease Study suggests the greatest dietary risk factor for death in the world, it’s not soda, it’s not processed meat, it’s inadequate fruit consumption that’s killing more people in terms of diet than anything else.

1:36:17 We need to eat more fruit, but stay away from added sugars. Interesting, um, you always think, you know, fructose, sucrose, they’re very similar, but you’re saying it brings so many other things to the table when you have that piece of fruit, in the fruit, right, in fruit form? Yeah, right, it’s completely different. Chicken, why can’t I eat chicken? You can eat anything you want.

1:36:36 I know I can, Michael, but come on, why shouldn’t I eat, okay. So, so when you say, wait, is, is chicken or is anything is X bad for you, the answer is, well, compared to what? Like, are eggs bad for you? Well, compared to the breakfast sausage next to it, absolutely. Compared to oatmeal, not even close, right?

1:36:53 Compared to pores, not even close, right? So, right, every bite of food has an opportunity cost, it’s a lost opportunity to put something even healthier in our mouth, right? So every time we eat a banana, we just lost opportunity to eat berries, we’re actually healthier than bananas, healthiest of fruit, all right. I’m, am I saying bananas aren’t good for you? No, but I’m saying, look, if you have a choice, the berry would be better to put the berries on your cereal than to put the bananas.

1:37:17 Oh, you know, okay. Um, and so the same thing with it, so is chicken good compared to bacon? Absolutely, chicken is good. I’d rather you have a chicken sandwich than a, you know, a ham sandwich, right? This is processed meat, right?

1:37:29 Um, but are there healthier options still? Absolutely, right. So instead of chicken, families have some vegetable feeders, I mean then, then, um, then you’re getting away from the disease-promoting compounds in chicken like saturated fat and cholesterol, and, um, getting all the disease-preventing components, right? And what are people really lacking in this society? So in the States, 97% of Americans don’t even reach the recommended minimum daily intake of fiber, 98% of Americans don’t even recommend a minimum daily intake of potassium, because 98% of Americans don’t eat enough plants, right?

1:38:00 So we’re eating potassium deficient diets, fiber deficient diets, you know, vitamin C deficient diets, and some people say, where do you get your protein, like, where did you get your fiber? We’re actually getting probably about twice the amount of protein we actually need, but I mean the real deficiencies, we’re not getting enough of what’s found in these whole healthy plant foods, and so that combination, there’s some foods that are healthier than others, again it’s a matter of quantity, right? If you go and eat something like chicken, use it as a condiment, as a flavoring, right, not as like the big center hunk, right?

1:38:26 So when a, the traditional Asian diet, right, meat is used more as kind of a flavoring condiment, not as the kind of the big chunk in the middle of the plate, and in fact if you look at, well, I mean the, the USDA, uh, you know, the latest recommendations, certainly getting better, where they say half your plate should be fruits and vegetables, um, and then the other half split, um, between whole grains and, and in the protein group, which includes beans, and talk about how beans actually belong both to the vegetable and the protein group because they have all the stuff they’d like to see from meat, like the iron and the zinc and the protein, blood has all this great stuff found in the, in the vegetable kingdom, like the potassium and the fiber, so you get the most, both, best of both worlds when you eat beans, like beans for breakfast, I’ve had today, amazing, right?

1:39:10 Go British. Um, ketogenic diet, it’s all the rage, everyone’s talking about it, uh, how do you feel about that? Yeah, so I mean if you think about it, it’s like the, the opposite of what one would propose for a healthy diet, right? It’s removing all the healthiest foods from your diet, eating some of the unhealthy foods. I mean not completely, like so some, like an avocado would be a healthy, nuts, or high fat foods are healthy, but almost every, anything else someone’s eating on a ketogenic diet would be, I mean it’s just, it’s among the worst possible diets.

1:39:40 Now, you know, people say, well, wait a second, doesn’t, you know, I read a study that, you know, they took these case series where pediatric brain tumors, put these kids on a, on a ketogenic diet and their brain tumors, you know, okay, and that’s actually Lyme disease, it seems to have some things there’s, well, the thing but just because it’s good, so it’s like that’s like saying, you know, chemotherapy can be good for cancer, so even though I don’t have cancer, I’m just gonna have some chemotherapy every day, you know, why not? Just because good for treating disease doesn’t mean it’s good for healthy people, right? So ketogenic diet does have a role to play in intractable and pediatric epilepsy, some various, I mean it can really screw it, you know, just like electro, thought therapy can help sometimes in suicidal depression, electroshock therapy can be beneficial, terrible algae.

1:40:21 No, no, it actually helps people, it is a therapeutic thing, so therefore I’m gonna just ECT every day just for the heck of it, right? All right, that doesn’t make any sense. So ketogenic, you know, like, because a lot of times they’re consuming and bend back to those bad animal proteins, it’s just gonna hurt, they’re just eating houses, and they might be confused by some short-term benefits of that ketosis, lose weight, they lose huge amount of water weight at the beginning because you lose all your glycogen, which carries a lot of water, so you see this amazing weight loss, you’re like, oh, this is awesome, but again, goal is not to fit in your skinny or casket.

1:40:51 Okay, not the skinnier casket, I love it. Um, let me ask you some questions about Dr. Greger, uh, I want to know some of your own personal success secrets, because you know, you’ve been doing this for a while, you seem to have an abundance of energy, uh, you’re pretty damn good on social media, you just did a YouTube live here, which is great as well, but uh, just some questions for you. First of all, just about success, when you think about the word success and who is successful in your mind, alive or dead, what’s that person that comes to mind?

1:41:39 If I asked your friends, what is Michael’s superpower, duh, what allows him to do what he does best, what would they say it is? Well, look, I’m privileged, I mean I, I, I don’t want to, I’m privileged to be able to do this full-time, um, not everybody, do I mean, you know, when people say, wow, how can you just dedicate your entire life to this, and it’s because I’m able to do that, and so I mean now I’m supported by the nonprofit that keeps NutritionFacts going, so people that donate, you know, make a tax-deductible donation, NutritionFacts are supporting my kale habit, right?

1:42:20 I’m kind of, um, but now I don’t have to worry about it, some nine to five, I have the luxury of being able to do what I love every minute of every day, um, and so not everyone has that luxury. So yeah, I work, but I love what I’m doing. Um, but you engineered this because you, you created the site, um, I mean now you’ve got books and things like that. Yeah, you know, so you know, it’s so, it’s funny when I, so people that know me long enough, right, that people, it’s way before the doctor, before, before, after Oprah, right, right, was, you know, so just to kind of, so I don’t get a big head, put me in my place, you know, so I like to think that I’m doing what I’m doing out of compassion, out of, you know, helping my fellow human being, reducing suffering in the world, you know, and just fighting injustice like my mom did in the civil rights movement.

1:43:12 Then people remind me, yeah, I knew you in high school and before you even heard of, you know, before Dean Ornish came out and stuff like that, you were obsessing, I used to do math, math, math puzzles and I get absolutely obsessed and stay up all day working on math puzzles, and, and, and so this obsessive, kind of workaholic, work all day solving problems, oh come on, that was not out of compassion, that was, I mean so it’s just kind of, I think my part of my personality, part of my, and I was like, oh yeah, I guess I was, right, so it’s not like some, but now I just happen to like use that obsessiveness in a, in a something that actually benefits humanity. Okay, so it started as maybe an obsession to solve problems? Yeah, it’s a problem-solving, loving, yeah, loving to, yeah, I love, yeah, I’ve always been, been drawn to that.

1:44:04 In fact if I, in in the same world I would be a biomedical researcher, I mean I love this research so much, I want to be in it, but you know, to do research is, you know, 40 years in some basement laboratory characterizing one little enzyme and you’re one little thing, and right now not a single more dollar, not another pound has to be sent, spent on research, we already know enough to save hundreds of thousands, lives, if we really cared about saving lives, if we really did, then we have what we know, I mean right now we could save millions of lives with this science we know now, and then once everybody’s lives, say, okay, then we’ll find cures for all sorts of these diseases, but right now so much we don’t need any more science, so that was my, so I was recently in an MD-PhD program, medical science training program, to do biomedical research, thinking I’d kind of do it all, you know, I’d have a practice, I’d do research, and, but then I realized, no, I mean the, the world is burning, I mean people are dying from these preventable, arrestable, reversible diseases, people just have to know, and I have to get out and I gotta tell them, and so it started out going around to all the medical schools in the country saying, not another doctor is going to graduate without this tool, nerve toolbox, and I would literally, I was on the road full time, living out of my car, one key in my keychain, like that was my life for years.

1:45:20 I gave, you know, over a thousand presentations all over the world, and that was just not sustainable, and, and, and divorce. I, it was, yeah, and, no, so I lost a marriage over it. Um, it was, I mean it was, it was just, it was, but, but I was just so driven, and then so, but look, in the clinic, you know, how many people I could help, hundreds of people. On the road, I could help thousands of people. What, but with this, deserve this, literally life or death information deserved to be reached by the millions, so that’s how nutritionfacts.org got born, is this really has to get out there.

1:45:51 So now I’m reaching more people in my pajamas every day, right, at home on my treadmill than I was traveling around the world. I mean, so millions of people are now, um, able to get access to this, and so now, so, so now my personal life is so much better, um, and I can reach more people, which is what it’s all about. What can you teach us about spreading information on the internet, whether it’s on your org site or YouTube, you’ve got a huge YouTube channel, what have you learned about how to get the information out there?

1:46:19 What’s the best way? It’s just new, compelling content all the time. I mean really good, I mean there’s just so much kind of recycling of garbage online that you’re just coming up with new, I mean if they’re the secret, if there is one, it’s a new video, an article every single day for the last six years on nutritionfacts.org. New video and article, or article, or article that you write or you curate? That I know that I, well, I have a whole research team, but I’m fine, I’m, I’m the one to script the videos, uh, but now we have a video design team, I used to design too and now we don’t do that anymore, but you film them, and so but, but I mean just, and so it’s like every, you know, so there’s every day there’s something new that didn’t exist in the world, so I can go to bed at night and the feeling that I’ve created something that did not exist this morning.

1:47:08 If I had gotten up and watched TV all day, this thing would not be in the world right now. I mean that’s what keeps me going, that’s what drives me, um, and I think that’s what we should all strive for, is being able to make a unique contribution in the world. Like anybody, you know, can stuff envelopes and hand out pamphlets or whatever they’re passionate about, right, but someone else could do that. You have to find out what you can uniquely offer the world that would not exist if you weren’t doing it.

1:47:36 That’s what I’ve shown out for my own life, um, and so then that, that’s where the passion comes from. So now I can’t take a vacation, maybe if I take a vacation, I got videos to, you know, um, that would not exist, this information wouldn’t get out there. It’s not that the information, I’m doing the research, it’s there, and the credit really goes to the people that toiled away in the research labs coming up with this research, but it’s just their research gets lost into some dusty stack in the basement of some medical library, never sees the light of day because there’s no corporate budget driving its promotion.

1:48:10 Some new study comes out how broccoli is good for you, there’s no, there’s no press release going on, no one ever hears about this information. In fact every day I email every single person that I cite, that every single researcher that I say, so not only do I actually show all the research, um, but, and give links to all the PDFs of people who read the original research themselves, I, I informed the researchers. Originally it was done really just to, as quality control, want to make sure they didn’t misquote their research or, you know, but, um, but what it’s become is this, I mean people are just so, and often it’s like stuff they did, you know, decades ago, right?

1:48:46 I mean they’re just, to see their baby out in the world, it’s the light of day, like they did this amazing research, got some amazing result, and then it just kind of, it’s out there, but no, not really, it’s not out there to the public, it’s not out there where it can actually make a difference. And so they’re just so, it’s just the, the positive feedback I get from this, like, thank you for sharing this, you know, oh no, sure, I got these all this other cool stuff I’m working on, and that’s been a neat something that I didn’t expect going into it, is this kind of the, uh, this kind of research community that has come up to kind of support this, and often they don’t, they can’t get enough money to do this research because no one’s going to fund, you know, they’ll get drug company research to keep their lab going but then they’ll kind of fund this on the side.

1:49:30 Well, what if you give people, you know, kiwi fruit, you know, you know, I had someone came to me and they said kiwi fruit helped them sleep, I don’t know, well, let’s give it to, let’s get, you know, 50 people, half people eat kiwi fruits, other people eat a banana before they go to bed, let’s just see. Oh my God, kiwi fruits actually have, so two kiwis in a, an hour before going to bed, you know, I mean that’s, that’s cool, and so they just do it on their own side and it’s kind of this little, like, pet project they do, but then it gets published and then it just kind of disappears until all of a sudden I dig it up and they’re like, okay. Maybe you’re the voice now of this.

1:50:02 That’s right, it’s just to translate out, but, but it’s what, but it’s there, there’s this mountain of research sitting there and just hasn’t gotten out to the public, and so that’s, I’m just like the conduit, I’m just like to translate this in some kind of entertaining manner just to, so people will, you know, I don’t know, fall in love with science like I do. Yeah, and you are a media channel now, you, you now have the benefit of magnifying these messages like a major network, which but I mean that’s also the, the burden, I mean I look at some of the stuff I’ve done, did years ago and it’s embarrassing, like I can’t even see some, oh my God, um, just because, look, I didn’t have this research staff now, I mean, you know, we’ve had last year we had, like, 19 researchers, um, and, and so, well of course when I started there were only 20,000 articles published in the English language nutrition journals every year, now it’s 90,000, right?

1:50:54 So just to keep up, I mean it’s just tremendous load, but even back at 20,000, um, uh, you know, I mean I just, you know, I want it to be to put in perfect context and not just talk about the latest study. Yeah, but is that an outlier? You know, I want to put that in context of all the other studies ever been done that, um, and, and so I just feel this burden of responsibility because if I say, if I come out tomorrow and say, yeah, don’t eat artichokes, like, whatever you do, then people are going to, like, you know, throw out their artichokes, right?

1:51:26 Right, responsibility now, right? And so I have to get it right. Is salt really bad for you? Like, I got to get that really right because I could hurt people if I write, tell people, um, the wrong thing. I’m trying to think if there’s ever, oh, there’s examples of me telling people things that could hurt them.

1:51:44 Okay, for example, um, so green tea, fantastic, one of my three, so water, green tea, hibiscus tea, these are the healthiest beverages, um, and look, green tea so good I encourage people to throw it in their smoothies, right, actually the leaves, right? So why just brew the tea and throw away the chilies, how wasteful. You wouldn’t make collard greens, right, drink the water, throw away the collard greens, look all the nutrition you’re, you’re wasting, right?

1:52:08 So might as well, hey, get it all, right, like process, you’re throwing away fiber, you’re just throwing three things in your smoothie, right? And so I was showing people how to make movies, one of my videos is like, I know, my favorite breakfast, and I make some smoothie with green tea. Okay, ah, well, it turns out in China, China only recently got rid of their leaded gasoline, and so along the tea plantations, particularly along the road, the amount of lead in the soil is actually taken up by the, by the tea leaves themselves, and so, um, tea from China, actually, so there’s lead in the leaves but it doesn’t leach out into the water, so you can make tea with Chinese tea and you don’t get lead in the water, it stays in the leaves, you throw it away, but if you put it in a smoothie, then you’re actually absorbing the lead, so for pregnant women, for small children, it can be real, so I encourage, so now if you’re doing matcha tea, for example, powdered green tea, or you’re actually drinking tea or adding to a smoothie, you have to use Japanese tea, and I talk about all that, right?

1:53:03 But it’s like that’s something that was advice that I gave that was, that could have hurt people, um, and so it’s things like that which just makes me cringe, to, I have to make absolutely sure, so the right, the greater media presence I have is just the greater burden of responsibility to make sure I get it right. Do you take vacations? No, no, no, no, never, no, but no, no, but my life is a vacation. What’s a vacation? A vacation is you get to get away and do whatever you want, right?

1:53:29 Guess what, I get to get up every day and do whatever I want, and that is to help people and solve problems, and it’s just, I get to sit down and read, like I used to read the medical literature just for the fun of it before I started the website, and also it’s like I used to go every month and read all the new journals at Countway, Harvard’s medical library, when I was in Boston. I would go read, and it’s like, well, wait a second, if I’m reading through all this, I might as well get it out in the world, and I think I started, like, an email newsletter, actually started a little email, anyone who’s interested, send her out, well this is what I found out this month in the literature, it’s just, and so it’s basically that same thing, she’s like, look, I’d be doing this even if it didn’t help people, that’s not great for my ego, right?

1:54:04 But it’s just because I selfishly enjoy it so much, um, the, the, the process of science, right, we have a question, you actually measure it, right, actually get real answers, um, as opposed to something like philosophy where it’s a little more, you know, but no, you can actually, is it true or not? Let’s put it to the test and find out, and we can actually get right, um, and so I, so I just, I enjoy it so much and it gets to help people. Yeah, what a great combination.

1:54:32 Why would I want to go to the beach? You found this beautiful sweet spot where you can broadcast out messages you’re passionate about, and now you’ve got the feedback from people that say they love it and they want more of it, and you’re needed. So it sounds a lot like our situation here, and it’s addictive, and I can think you’re going to be doing it the rest of your life, and I’ll be doing this the rest of my life. Right. 2022, you come back here, sit in that chair, we both have a little bit more gray hair, possibly, uh, what are you doing then?

1:54:55 What are you telling me about what’s going on with you? Um, oh well, that’s not too far away. No, five years. Wow, doesn’t, doesn’t 2022 sound like way in the future? And then you’re like, whoa.

1:55:07 Um, no, so uh, so there’s a series of four more books I want to do. So I didn’t want to even write this book, How Not to Die, like I was like, why write a book? So the publisher came to me, so you got to write a book. I said, it’s all free, all my work is free online, why would anyone buy a book? Like it doesn’t, right?

1:55:21 Who buys books anymore? Like what? Um, but, oh, thankfully they, uh, um, they, they made an offer I couldn’t refuse. All the money goes completely to charity, I don’t see a penny from any books, any speaking engagements, any DVDs, anything I sell, all those, charity. Um, why did you do that?

1:55:38 Um, because there’s such a corrupting commercial influence in the field of nutrition, in medicine in general but particularly nutrition, where people, where someone comes out and says, take this Dr. Greger’s wonder snake oil supplement, right, and you don’t know, is the doctor telling you that because they found something that they’re so excited that really helps people, or because they’re profiting from it? You don’t know, are they doing it because they’re making money from it and they put anything out there, or they’re doing because they really believe in it? You just don’t know, there’s these conflicts of interest.

1:56:08 So if I’m getting, you know, broccoli lobby money and I say broccoli is good for you, like, oh sure, it’s good for you, mister own, uh, you know, sports car with a broccoli license plate, uh-huh. No, it’s, it’s just this, you need to divorce yourself from any kind of impropriety, even imagined impropriety, like I think I could get broccoli money and still, but, you know, you don’t even want the whiff, it’s just discipline, but you don’t know if you can trust yourself, so you’re like, I’m putting all this charity that way, I’m always gonna, right, right. So anyway, so the book had, had, would was just blew away my expectations, right?

1:56:46 So yeah, New York Times, but so in fact it’s great, 20 months after publication still on the New York Times bestsellers, it was just like number seven or something, like, what? Uh, 23 languages now, just the, the Mandarin edition finally came out, in fact just last week, so finally we got another billion people, another billion people. Oh yeah, hopefully that, yeah, they don’t get mad at the tea leaf chapter. No, but it’s funny, no, there’s actually political, I was just doing something, oh, like something, oh, because I have, like, a hundred thousand followers that are in China and the Taiwan book came out and I was afraid of because there’s like political, I was afraid if I, um, if I advertise the Taiwan book with my Chinese followers, I said, I’m just going to do it, but I mean but it’s interesting to have those gun in the back of your mind.

1:57:29 So 23 languages, it’s just been, and so many people have come to me and said they changed, that changed their lives. Um, there’s just something about a book, magic about, anyway, so, um, that was huge news to me, and so now I’m like, oh my God, there’s so many more books I want to write, so, um, so the next, so that’s what I’m going to work on next. Titles of the next book, so how catchy titles? How Not to Diet is the next one, talk about weight loss. Um, and then, um, the one after this is How Not to Age, I’m gonna do a book on lung eating for longevity.

1:57:59 Okay. Um, it’s just all sorts of really cool new science about that, um, and then eating to starve cancer, so what about what to eat after a cancer diagnosis, actually very little out there. So if you had cancer diagnosis, you go to your doctor, say, what should I do, how should I change my life, you’ll have doctors be like, eat ice cream, do whatever you want, keep on weight, I mean giving no advice at all, whereas there’s actually a rich literature that actually tossed has real survival data, randomizing, uh, cancer survivors, particularly breast cancer, prostate cancer, two groups, half eat one diet, half of the other, and have significant lower, you know, cancer recurrence rates, significant prolonged survival.

1:58:34 It says there’s good data post cancer, so post cancer, so what do you, once you already have cancer, and then I want to do a book on specifically on diet, mental health, um, because again this ritual issue, particularly with microbiome, we’re finding out that the bugs in your gut can actually affect mental, I mean absolutely amazing stuff. Every time I see this kind of revolution, and I was like, wow, there needs to be a book on this, and so what I need to do to be able to sit down and write those books is to buffer out enough video, so we’re currently trying to hire some more people to basically do what I do to get the research done, so, so we can buffer out enough videos so I keep having new videos every day but also, um, have time to get these books out.

1:59:12 So hopefully by then, so it’s probably gonna be a three-year cycle, so one year to buffer out a year of videos, to write the book, the next you’re writing the book, and then the next year on the road traveling around speaking about the book, and then back to the research cycle. So probably a new book every three years, then I may only have one, one, one more, maybe a couple cookbooks. I have a new cookbook coming out, The How Not to Die Cookbook comes out this December.

1:59:35 Okay, that’s pretty exciting, that’s fun. So publishing is the way, that’s what we learned. Well, I, to my, and I, I didn’t believe it, but books are still really powerful, they’re almost like totems. Yeah, it’s like a business card in a way too as well, it gets a lot of credibility as well. You know, yeah, whatever it is, it, I was so glad I did it, and looking forward to, I mean, and another thing, I mean, I mean there’s thousands of videos on the website and you just get lost, it’s the breadth of information, it’s like, where do you even start?

2:00:04 Whereas the book is like, okay, it’s like cut down chapters, and it’s a little more, I think, manageable for people than to just, like, I’m just gonna click on some random video about persimmons. We missed talking about cancer. Can you starve cancer while you have it? What should people know about that process? So after, you know, Dean Ornish and colleagues reversed killer number one in the States, heart disease, they moved on to killer number two, cancer, which is actually the number one killer here in Britain, where they took men with early stage prostate cancer, put them on the same kind of plant-based lifestyle program that reversed heart disease, and saw for the first time ever a reversal of the progression of cancer.

2:00:41 First time ever a diet has been shown, that randomized controlled trial, the, um, people in the control group that didn’t do anything special, continuing their regular diet, they gave that contributed to cancer in the first place, their cancer continued to grow. You can follow a biomarker called PSA, which roughly translates to tumor volume, which gets worse, worse, worse until you get a point where you got to do radical prostatectomy and radiation and chemo and all the other things, but in early stage it’s watch your weight, because it’s the, the damage done by the radical surgery in terms of impotence and incontinence and things, it’s so bad you want to wait till absolute last point, last ditch, you know, say that at the last resort, and you can track the progression of cancer, you can, so you wait, wait, wait until absolutely last and then you, you, you know, move on to the radical stages.

2:01:23 Okay, so if you’re just watching and waiting, why not try diet, why not try diet and lifestyle, why not try things that can only offer benefits? So that was the, and so that’s what they did, control group community get worse, worse, worse, and more went off to had to go after surgery, whereas on average, um, there’s actually, um, PSA trended down, so actually went down as opposed to up, um, suggesting that tumor volume was decreasing, and you can see PET scans actually see tumor volume decrease. But that is really exciting, again blockbuster, should have been front page headlines everywhere in the world, but it just got kind of lost to the world.

2:01:58 Okay, and that was one case. We don’t know if it does all the answers, no, right, and you’re saying since you have the time right now, but there have been so, if there have been studies on breast cancer, have been studied on advanced, uh, stage prostate cancer too, and saw better outcomes, um, uh, colon cancer in terms of polyps we can, uh, in fact single foods, um, like turmeric, curcum, one of the reasons I encourage people to eat turmeric, the yellow spice and curry powder, is you can actually see, um, a reversal of these colon polyps which turn into cancer. Yeah, you can actually call polyps disappear when you randomize groups to eating turmeric, not these kind of things, there’s individual foods that can help with blood pressure, etc., and so that’s why the book is not just every chapter be like, oh how to help with this disease, plant-based diet, I don’t know, but this isn’t plant-based diet, no, plant-based diet with these particular foods that happen to have the best benefits, ground flax seeds for high blood pressure or whatever.

2:02:46 Okay, and that’s all in the book, etc. Yeah, a couple more questions about you. Um, best day of your life and worst day of your life? Oh, you know, the You know, I think the best, the best day of my life was was the, um, was the day that I got back the feedback from my first year teaching at Cornell. So I got like, you know, the, the student, kind, you know, they they pull this, how, what, you know, what do you think of the course, that and, um, and, and I got the, and I get from my first kind of teaching gig and, and the, the wash of appreciation I got, my students, and how much, and that was my realization that I loved teaching.

2:03:32 Like that was my, like, like even as a kid, like when I would, like, make something in the kitchen, just like a little whatever you’re making as a kid, I would, like, pretend I’m on, like, a cooking show, I’d be like, oh, and so then you race it up, and I’m talking to nobody, right, but it was just like I just, this, if I found out something I want to share with her, like I found it, like, dinosaurs do X, right? I want to tell all of my friends, every, did you know, die, like, it seems selfish for me to have knowledge that other people, and if you had something I didn’t know, I want to, you know, and so I always wanted to share, so this whole kind of, and so that day I remember I just broke down into tears reading those comments, comment after comment, oh, it changed my life, I’m on it, do you know, you know, I mean just like, yeah, and it was a teaching intro biology, like I mean it’s not like you’re in your 20s, right, right, I mean so, yeah, and, and I was just like, this is what I want to do for the rest of my life.

2:04:25 And so actually I was thinking I’d go into academia, you know, I, I teach, and then instead of me traveling around the world, people come to me, 500 people in big classroom, right, you come to me instead of me having to travel around, right, get jet lagged everywhere. Um, but 500 people isn’t enough, right? It’s not 500 people a day, same 500 people the next day, and, and I can give the most important message maybe 20 minutes, I can get people down the path of, you know, and so it’s really just exposing as many people as possible for this message.

2:04:52 So instead of going that kind of typical academic route, I, uh, I’m, I’m online spreading the good work. So that was that liable moment. Worst day. Oh, what is the, what is the worst day? Uh, I had a recent very bad day, I would call it the worst day, but it’s, it’s kind of ironically funny.

2:05:15 Um, hmm, so Mr. Eating Healthy, so we had, we, um, my, uh, the love of my life, uh, is a big, uh, loves, uh, native plants, um, and so she, she, she, she makes all these plants that makes the birds and bees happy, and I just want to eat everything. I’m like, can I eat it, you know, right, grow some more kale, I don’t want to see the butterfly bush. Um, but, uh, grew the, so but I thought this was the, this was the, the best of both worlds, elderberry bush, we grew this black elderly turd, it’s bigger than me, it’s like 10 foot, massive bush with these huge clusters of these gorgeous black berries.

2:05:48 I was so excited, so I read about elderberry is like a flu remedy, and you hear about elderberry jam and, and, you know, the anthocyanins, they, these, these deep purplish black compounds are some of the healthiest things in black raspberries and blueberries, so I was like, wow, I’m gonna have this, talk about local, it’s like right in my yard, right? And so I was like, I’m gonna have, like, I’m br every day, and so I could, so it finally, it turned, right, a couple weeks ago, um, and so ta-da, and I was waiting, they’d been green, and so finally, right, and you just get clusters buried, and so I made myself, um, uh, a smoothie, right? I made this, like, massive, with just, like, handfuls of berries.

2:06:26 Okay, turned out, um, elderberries are poisonous. I did not know that. Um, see, raw elderberries are poisonous, you have to cook them. Now cooktail bears are perfectly fine, you make elderberry jam and all the things that I heard about, right, um, but they, there’s actually they’re, they’re, they’re, they, you cyanide, so there’s a compound that produces cyanide which is totally destroyed by cooking, so you can eat all the elderberry jam you want, but in a smoothie form, and so I drunk, I drank down this thing.

2:06:59 Here I am feeling all righteous, I’m eating local, organic, obviously freshly picked, super duper healthy, my, all right, and, and so, um, so then I’m back to work, you know, and I don’t know, must have been maybe, I don’t know, 40 minutes later or something, all of a sudden I start drooling, like literally, like, dripping on the keyboard, drooling, and I’m like, what is going on? And I didn’t immediately, like, I made no connection, like all of a sudden, and I’m like, what’s going on? Um, and then, then all of a sudden the pain started, and I started to projectile, it was, it was a very bad scene.

2:07:51 Um, and thankfully my body violently rejected every last bit in my body, and so, so of course I’m online, and you look at CDC website, Centers for Disease Control, and there’s all these people having to be airlifted away from picnics because someone tried to make elderberry tea by putting, right, right, like you could, people ending up in comas and being intubated. You’re doing this while you’re throwing up, it’s around, so I’m like, oh my God, I didn’t make it to the bath, it was a horrible mess, and, and so here I am now, they’re healthy, right, and, you know, and the irony, it didn’t taste very good, the smoothie did not taste very, like, elderberry, just didn’t every, but I was like forcing myself to because I was just so righteous, I’m like, super healthy, and, right, and I offered to my, to my beloved, you want some?

2:08:41 Thankfully I couldn’t poison her as well. Oh my God. So I did not end up having to go to the hospital, but I know all about the cyanide remedies now. But how funny, and wouldn’t that be the ironic, author of How Not to Die, here’s his gravestone, because he ate berries, which is just the irony. Anyway, that was, that was, that was a bad day.

2:09:06 Were you all right? Was it, no, it was totally fine, I mean if you’re out, but, and it was just because my body was so smart, too, to just completely eject 100% of everything that I’d eaten. Um, wow, wow, okay, that’s a bad day. Revenge of the plants. But again, again, like you said, but we’re in 2017 when all this information should be out there, and even you didn’t have that, so it’s all right, goes to show you, right, Google it before you eat it is the, is the, the message for the day.

2:09:39 How funny. Um, I just wanted to get any thoughts about, uh, plant intelligence, plant medicines, you know, there’s plant medicines like ayahuasca and mushrooms, all these kinds of things that, that, and there’s things called plant intelligence where we can learn from these plants, uh, have you ever thought about that stuff? I mean, like psychedelics? Yeah, correct. Um, oh, I don’t know about the literature, I mean so there is a literature now about, there’s some old LSD studies and now there’s psilocybin studies.

2:10:04 Yeah. Um, and, um, and it’s just not something I’ve looked into. Okay. Yeah, I do have a big cannabis series coming out. You do?

2:10:12 Okay. Um, but that was my kind of first toe dip into, uh, into, uh, I mean into that kind of platinum since. Okay, and but, but, and unfortunately what you find out is that there’s just like so many, like nutrition, it’s field, nutrition, where it’s just like there’s a sea of misinformation on the internet, you don’t know who to believe, and in terms of cannabis, now there’s this multi-billion dollar, you know, now there’s the cannabis industry, which is corrupting influence, and there’s, and so that’s kind of my perfect kind of subject to get into, where there’s billions of dollars on both side, corrupting, corrupt influences, huge amounts of literature, where is the truth?

2:10:52 Same thing with the sodium literature, same thing, it’s like those are, that’s what I love diving into, it’s because to do another video on how broccoli good for you, yeah, okay, now it’s not a big surprise, but I love being like, you know, get people at the truth, because who can you really trust anymore? Who can you believe? You just want to know the science, and so that’s what I pride myself. Well, I’m here to tell you, after your cannabis series, definitely look into the ayahuasca series and the psilocybin series, because there’s a lot of research being done here in London, Professor David Nutt, Imperial College, and doing a lot of this, you know, studies as far as these drugs.

2:11:22 Again, pharmaceutical interest has no interest in them, they can’t be patentable, etc., and yet they seem to really have some, uh, life-transforming effects, and again back to your plant allies, as we have so, uh, very important here, not all good though, they’re not all good obviously, elder, elderflower, stay away from those. Um, last question for you, what keeps you awake at night? Um, it’s, it’s, it’s all the people that aren’t being reached. I mean it’s just like they’re, until everybody knows this information, um, you know, as far as, as long as everybody knows, then, you know, my job is done, but, but, you know, but all the people that would change if they knew.

2:12:02 Now there’s lots of people even if they knew they wouldn’t do anything different, right? Oh, they’re a smoker, they also know all the time smoking is bad for you, they don’t care, okay, that’s fine, but there are people who the next day, it’s a very small percentage of people, I mean most people actually make change in their diet for health, but there are some people that are like, they learn something like this and that’s it, the next day they’re, look like, my whatever, my taste buds are, my health is more important. my family’s more, but that’s it, right?

2:12:27 And it’s those people who, literally, if they knew this the next day they’d be eating radically different and transform their lives, particularly they’re already stricken with some chronic disease. Until I reach every single one of those people, there’s those people that, like, maybe if I, uh, tweaked the video different, or you know, like we’ve never done a promotion, like paid promotion or anything, it’s all kind of word of mouth, but like maybe we should be, you know, paying for ads on YouTube or something, just because until everyone who, if they had this information, would make a positive change, until they’ve all heard this information, I had this drive to get it out, and the thought that there’s someone out there who would if they just knew about it, um, that, that, that’s what, that’s what, that’s what keeps me restless.

2:13:11 Um, I was eating a piece of cheese last night and I was like, goddammit, why am I eating this? Because I always been, why I’ve been watching you, and I had a hard-boiled egg before you got here and I was like, god damn it, I was thinking about it again, like, why am I making this choice? Do I mean, it was in a salad, but still, you know, it got me thinking a little bit more about these choices I’m making, so about, you know, what it’s all about. And that’s how it starts, right?

2:13:34 And then, you know, I mean that’s, you know, you just slowly but surely starting, hey, you know, instead of that I could have this, and then, you know, oh, I could have chickpeas instead of my whatever. Yeah, we do Meatless Mondays in my house, and now I’m starting to love the, the lentils, and so yeah, it’s a slightly trans, and then you see how do I feel, I felt pretty good that day. Okay, so what happens, um, you don’t make money from the book, how do you fund your lifestyle?

2:13:55 Oh yeah, so now, so I used to have a day job, I’m doing kind of infectious disease work, and this was kind of nights and weekends and stuff, but now I am the research director at NutritionFacts.org, which is a non-profit charitable organization, and so I do draw salary from the organization, so that’s how I’m able to keep it going, and we, now we have a staff over a dozen people who are working on this full time, we have social media people and we have, you know, I mean so now it’s this whole kind of juggernaut of getting this information out there, comes from individual donations from the site, it’s, and what’s amazing is I feel like we’re like the Bernie Sanders in nutrition, the average donation is like 20 or something, but we just reach so many millions of people that if 1,000 people kicks in a few bucks, then the site pays for itself.

2:14:39 I mean then all the server costs, everybody’s salaries, everything, I mean it’s just amazing, and it’s like the Wikipedia model, like everything’s totally free, but if you just appreciate it, you want to kick in a few bucks, you don’t have to, there’s no, like, special, like, member-only site where we give you life-saving information for your kids if you pay some more money or something, no, it’s all free for everybody, but if you just appreciate it and just want to, like, tip, you know, whatever, there’s a little donate button and that page that keeps the whole thing going and has, and we’ve never at any time had any problems with doing what, everyone, I mean, you know, it’s just, we just keep growing and it’s, it’s a, it’s a beautiful thing that the community just really supports.

2:15:17 We have, like, monthly donors that just, every month they just, because they so appreciate this, whether it’s affected them or they have this kind of, you know, they want to help other people, um, they just appreciate having a source of kind of objective, something they can trust in this field of kind of misinformation. Yeah, because the funding is everything, really, the funding is the message. Uh, Michael, I always ask everyone here a few questions at the end.

2:15:41 I’m going to ask you, um, if you could pick up your phone and make a call to the 20-year-old Michael Greger, uh, I guess he would be in Ithaca, New York, oh yeah, I’m walking by one of those caverns, hopefully not, you know, yeah, those kind of things, uh, and give that young man a bit of advice, what would you tell him? Oh, oh, uh, well, one of the things I tell them is, is take care of yourself, get enough sleep. I mean there have been times in my life where I’ve been so, kind of obsessed with productivity, with efficiency, that I mean there was a period which I’m not proud of and don’t recommend, but I was doing, I was sleeping three hours a night, so bed at 11:30, up at 2:30, just because, you know, I’m found myself less effective when I was unconscious, I just wasn’t getting enough done when I was, uh, during my sleeping hours, so, um, and, and that was just a really bad decision and it was not sustainable and I was miserable, and, um, and so the part of the advice was really take care of yourself, and everyone hears that but it’s like, it’s the marathon, not the sprint, it’s like you need to be doing this for the rest of your life, so however you can, you know, it’s just like healthy eating, however you can fit it in, in a way that’s sustainable, that’s what makes the difference, whether you’re going on a life of helping people or going a life of eating healthier, you have to be doing and thinking about it in the long term, and I think back then I just wasn’t, you know, just kind of thinking I was invulnerable, and got to take care of yourself.

2:17:14 I would have told them about the treadmill. Oh, you got to get on the treadmill, don’t be sitting down all day at the library. Oh, that too. Yeah, second part of that question, best advice you’ve ever received, could it come from a professor or, uh, someone in the medical practice or not, maybe someone else where something just clicked? You know, it was actually really just a practical piece of advice, um, from a friend of mine who told me about, uh, Getting Things Done, uh, a book, um, we’ve had them here.

2:17:41 Oh well, you know, that book was, I mean because my whole life is about, it’s about, you know, being able to best kind of engineer my life to, to do what I want to do, and that book just really just helped kind of organize my schedule and, you know, juggle the various competing priorities, and I’m just so, I’m, like, and it was, we were like some dinner party or something and just talking to the person next to me was, like, oh yeah, have you read this book, and it’s like, wow, if I didn’t go to that dinner party, right, like, if I didn’t, it’s like, wait a second, what are all the other books I don’t know about? Like, what are all the, like, you know, that, you know, and so it’s all these, like, these are the ones I got to go back, tell the 20-year-old, oh you got to read this, this, this and this, don’t read this, don’t waste your time, you know, and, you know, so that was really transformative in my kind of day-to-day schedule because I was always, like, you know, just brewing the back of my mind, I got all these millions of things I need to do and juggling, and now it’s just like everything’s in there, it’s own little niche, and now I can just fully immerse myself into whatever research topic is at hand, knowing everything else is going to be taken care of.

2:18:40 That’s what the Allen’s book gave me. Probably could have doubled or tripled your output, right? It was, I mean, I, I don’t know how much, it certainly, it’s enabled me to have that kind of focus that’s necessary. I mean for some of these topics they’re really confusing, I mean even, even there’s, you know, there’s whenever there’s a device in this, in the scientific community itself that’s not tied to corporate interests, all right, it’s not that one person’s being paid off, but there’s actually legitimate scientific debate about particular findings, that’s when you really got to deepen, do a deep dive, look at the primary literature, go all the way back, and to do that you need total focus.

2:19:15 It’s not something you can pick up and, you know, you know, be on a call and then go back to, you really gotta come and to do that, you have to basically clear the slate, and that’s what that helped me. Yeah, I’m a big fan of, everybody should pick up, something easy, he’s great, he’s great too as well. Um, last part of that question, to that 20-year-old that’s out there listening to us, watching right now in Taiwan or in China or South America or, you know, in Brazil, the New York Times just did an article on the front page about how they’re just consuming so much sugar these days, and all the companies are down there, or someone in the middle of America who’s just eating this diet and don’t know why, um, what advice do you give to them?

2:19:50 What is the thing that they can do to, to kind of get into this lifestyle, to experiment with it, to try these things out? Um, what do you tell them? So, you know, I’d give them two, so it depends on where they were in kind of this pre-contemplative stage. I mean if they had no idea even about what they’re doing as anything, as anything wrong, right, they have some smoking habit, they don’t know something, well then it’s all about dispelling ignorance and sharing them some of this information.

2:20:17 So I talk about, you know, I mean this is what the science shows, there’s tremendous power over your health and longevity if you do X, Y and Z. So give them that, and then if they’re actually interested then it’s a matter of what tools, like the 21 Day Kickstart, like, you know, various you know, resources I give them to help them make that transition, whether it’s recipe sites or whatever. I’m excited to finally have the cookbook, I can be like, ah, here’s some, here’s some Dr. Greger-approved, all green light ingredient, you know, these are some of the healthiest foods, how to make them actually tastes good and stuff.

2:20:47 Happy to have those tools to actually make it easier, because that’s really, it’s not that the, the science is there, but, but actually putting it into practice, we’re not set up as a society, right? I mean it’s like, it’s like, it’s like every party at school, everyone’s bringing in cupcakes, and it’s just the whole culture is about undercutting people’s ability, you know, like M&Ms on the desk at work, and like the whole system is set up to kind of undercut our ability to take care of ourselves, and it’s like, how do you deal with social situations, and that’s some of the kind of the toughest stuff, and it’s just like, yeah, science is one way, but how do I actually make it work? And so that, I think, is the, um, so, giving people tools to kind of, you know, kind of maneuver in that kind of space, it’s like particularly at home, like if you’re eating the diet but everywhere else your family seems, that’s really difficult, very difficult to make that sustainable even if it’s some kind of life and death decision.

2:21:40 It’s just, you know, what do you do, you know, holidays, and it’s just, you know, those are the kind of tools that people need to actually put it into practice, particularly for younger people who don’t have control over what they eat, you know, how can you, you know, until they finally go off on their own, and then how do you, you know, how do you prepare this food, how do you make it, you know, affordable? I mean those are kind of the, the, the how questions that often I don’t get, in, you know, I’m stuck on the why, I’m stuck on a getting this people getting this information to the hands as many people as possible, and then hopefully others can come along and provide those tools. Yeah, Dr. Greger, thank you so much for being here.

2:22:17 Um, I’ve tremendously enjoyed this and learning more about you, and for some reason, you know, you weren’t massively on my radar in the last couple months, and and I’ve learned more and more about you, um, you know, the fact that you know you have this set up as an org and you have this as a non-profit makes a huge difference because your message is purely driven by this obsessed man in the blue tie and the green tie who, um, you know, goes around the world. I know you’re not taking vacation because one of my students from my business accelerator emailed me on Friday and said, I’m interviewing, you know, Dr. Greger in Washington, DC, and then you were coming here. We’re doing this on a Sunday because your schedule is so busy, and so I know you’re a workaholic, and I’ll also be very honest, I’m not a vegan, my grandfather ran a feedlot in Arizona, I remember going to the feedlot as a kid, smelling, you know, 5,000 head of cattle, wondering, this doesn’t smell right, and yet in the past five years or so my diet has become more plant-based because it just feels right and it seems more intelligent, and we have Meatless Mondays and I find, like I said, lately I’m drawn to a lot more plant-based foods and I’m like, well, there’s something here, something feels right, and the plant medicine seemed to also be telling me that in some way, that’s why maybe you should check those guys out.

2:23:27 And so, um, look, this is a super important message, uh, and again all the time I’m sitting with people like you here telling me messages that are obvious that people should listen to, and yet we still don’t because we’re caught up in these old ways of thinking, and like you said, Halloween, let’s give these little kids candy, why don’t you punch him in the face, right, or Christmas or birthday, you give him a cake, exactly. And so, uh, and I’m even guilty of that, on Friday I brought, I went out and bought, you know, ice creams for everybody, I brought back and I’m like, what am I doing? And so people, and actually half the people here said no because we got vegans in the house, we got smart people in the house, and I’m like, what am I doing?

2:24:03 So you know, even I know better and I still have these bad habits. So, um, and I also know what it’s like to run a media company and it’s a lot of hard work, but you also, you’re doing great work and I can tell that you’re feeling this kind of human feedback that lets you know you’re doing the right thing, so I just want to acknowledge you for all the great work you’re doing out there and there’s these tireless efforts that you’re doing, um, because it’s an important message, so, so much, you know, so thank you for doing that, keep up the good work. Yourself, that’s our plan here.

2:24:29 And so, uh, anyways, thank you for being here. As we say on London Real, it’s about the journey. Uh, I wish you well on yours, and please come back and see us and let us know about these, these books that are coming. This one, how to die, how not to die, there’s a great book, uh, How Not to Die, it’s coming out soon, and the other one sounds fascinating, but this is it’s a really great meaty read, so people should grab a copy. So glad, thank you so much.

2:24:51 Thanks for having me on.