How To REVERSE YOUR AGE In 40 Days With WATER FASTING | Dr. Alan Goldhamer

And they all say the same thing, including my mother who at 92 had outlived all 50 of her lifelong friends. Every one of her friends was dead. She was alone. And she said, "Allan, you need to warn your patients if they're going to do this diet. Make younger friends." Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of Health Theory. I'm here today with Dr. Alan Goldhammer, who is the founder of True North Health Center, a leader in the field of plant-based nutrition. I'm super excited to talk to you because I come from um I won't say an entirely meat-based approach, but I am no stranger to meat. Um so, first of all, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. I was very intrigued by um something that I've heard you talk about and this was really the thing that sucked me into your world, which is that if you go to a doctor today, they don't actually expect you to get better. And I that gave me the chills just saying it now. And when I heard it the first time, I was like, "Oh my god, that is so true. That's not the paradigm." Um why is that not the paradigm? Well, you know, in medicine, particularly for uh conditions like high blood pressure, diabetes, autoimmune diseases, certain forms of cancer like lymphoma that make up, you know, a significant percentage of the problems that people have. Medical management is just that. It's management. They'll say, "Take these drugs and you'll be on these drugs the rest of your life because they'll guarantee you that you'll never get well." So, uh, the reason for that is that the drugs have nothing to do with the reason why you got sick and they're strictly trying to manage the consequences of your illness. And today, for example, with conditions like high blood pressure, you're not even being treated for your condition. You're being treated for your diet. You're being treated for the diet that causes hypertension. the diet that causes uh 40% of people over 25 and 63% of pe people over 60 to have high blood pressure to have the leading contributing cause of death and disability. The major justification for prescription medications. It's a huge multi-billion dollar business. And what's uh really ironic about it is that it's completely treatable in the vast majority of cases through diet and lifestyle intervention. You know, we did a study uh medically supervised water only fasting in the treatment of hypertension. 174 consecutive patients. 174 people achieve low enough pressure to eliminate the need for medication. We have the largest effect size ever shown in treating high blood pressure in humans with an average effect size of 60 points in stage 3 hypertension. Not taking into account the fact that most of these people are medicated when they start. None of them are medicated when we're done. And it's sustainable to the degree that they're willing to adopt a whole plant food SOS free diet. Okay? So, you know, SOS is that international symbol of danger or it also stands for salt, oil, and sugar. The chemicals added to food that make people fat, sick, and miserable and give them conditions like high blood pressure. Given my proclivity for um meat from how it makes me feel and a health standpoint, I would say the fact that your diet is so hardcore, I never would have thought you'd be the one to draw me in. um with your stance on this. So I wanna I want to take things sort of one piece at a time. So first I want to talk about True North. The things that you see in the clinic are what really pulled me in. So one, tell people when you founded it. I was startled by how long you've had this going on and talk to me just about the the number of people you've put through your clinic. Right. Well, so my wife Dr. Moreno and I started Two North Health in 1984. So we've been doing uh medically supervised water only fasting for 36 years. We've had over 20,000 patients undergo fasting. Uh so one thing that I find crazy just to give people some context is when you started you had to retain a defense attorney because of how fasting was perceived. Walk us through that because we're we're in a weird moment now where I think fasting is sort of catching on but people don't understand just how far we've come. Well, yeah. I mean, when I uh was starting fasting, the California Board of Medical Quality Assurance at that time determined that recommending fasting to a patient constituted such a gross violation of the standard of medical practice that it rose to the level of criminal negligence. So now in fairness uh now we've gone from being criminal quacks uh to cutting edge researchers because you know fasting's gained some notoriety and our 501c3 true north health uh foundation is doing original research uh with uh fasting and and looking at some of these exotic biomarkers. There's other people like uh Walter Longo who's been publishing some really fabulous work in major impact journals talking about intermittent fasting and and and fasting mimicking approaches. And uh so you know now this has kind of come full circle and so the idea that people are sick from dietary excess and that reversing the consequences of dietary excess may be a key to stimulating everything from autophagy to uh uh you know reducing acute phase reactor proteins associated with inflammation to increasing brain derived neurotrphic factor in the brain to prevent Alzheimer's disease. All of these mechanisms that fasting induces, interestingly enough, many of them are the same biomarkers that change with exercise. Exercise and fasting both tend to impact these health promotion disease uh reversal uh biomarkers. And it may be because both fasting and exercise reverse the consequences of dietary excess. It is dietary excess particularly refined foods whether it's refined carbohydrates the sugars the oils the salt or refined meat foods you know animal foods that have been highly refined either one of those these high animal protein high refined carbohydrate diets these are the things that cause people to be fat sick and miserable. This is why we have this epidemic of chronic degenerative disease because of what we're putting in our mouth. You know it's interesting just like you know meat would be considered a whole food processed meat products and processed animal food products dairy products etc are have completely different effects on the body. Same thing with you know complex carbohydrates whole plant foods have a certain effect but you refine them into sugars and flowers now you get a completely different response. I want to get into the specifics of the diet and stuff but first I want to revolve around fasting a little bit more. So, do you have a sense of Okay, we've got the saying it's incredibly good for you. We've got the saying that's a part of religious tradition going back god knows how long. Like it seems like if I'm not mistaken, virtually every major religion has some sort of fasting application to it. So, there's obviously a spiritual understanding of it and yet becomes a thing that once we're talking medically becomes so grossly misunderstood, maligned, attacked. Is it just that the feeling of being hungry triggers this like sense of urgency of like, yo, I've got to eat that causes people to have what I'll call a a sort of deranged response to it. Is there something else like people are people are very afraid that uh not eating they're not sure exactly how much period of time would would result in their demise? And it feels that way because you know you're programmed to make sure that you overcome deprivation. In a world of our ancient ancestors, it was scarcity that was the dominant rule. Uh most humans didn't live long enough to reproduce and that was because of deprivation and and scarcity. People didn't get enough to eat or couldn't avoid being eaten. So your basic instincts are eat as much as you can whenever you can of the most concentrated foods available and if you're lucky maybe you'll live long enough to reproduce. And so that's your instincts. Now we live in a very natural environment of of abundance of excess. It just doesn't ever really happen in nature except when uh human you know food stuffs become available. Animals don't suffer obesity. Even animals you think of as being fat like whales are really 9% body fat. So they're lean mean machines. And again you know survival is get enough to eat and don't get eaten. That's that's true for all animals. We because of our innovative capacities created a situation. We invented agriculture and we figured out how to get food and then we figured out how to refine it and concentrate it and then we figured out how to do animal husbandry so we could raise lots of very rich uh food processing machines essentially in the form of animals. And so now we're in a situation where we can get enough to eat and not even get off the couch. We don't have to exercise. We pay other people to do it. We call it the NFL. We sit in a couch, drink high caloric beer, and engage in mock warfare pretending we're part of the winning coalition. I love the way you describe stuff is is pretty amazing. And I think over the course of the interview, people are going to realize you are not afraid to contradict people or uh to say what you think is right or to carry a little fan in your pocket so if somebody starts smoking near you that you can actually blow the smoke back in their face. There are so many things about your personality that make you perfectly suited to um focus on what works. And so one, I want to know why are people seeing the profound effects of that? And then two, why you you're so careful to always say medically supervised. Why does that matter? Well, what what we we recommend there's two types of fasting. There's there's short-term intermittent fasting, which we recommend people do every day. That everybody fast every day for between 12 and 16 hours, depending on what your target is. And that means that you don't eat at least 3 hours before you go to sleep. Hopefully going to sleep at a reasonable hour. And so that gives you 12 to 16 hours of fasting, an 8 hour feeding window. We recommend that that in that 8 hour feeding window that the, you know, whole natural food diet that you eat excludes all the chemicals and the processed foods and the other stuff. And in doing that, you get the quantity and quality of nutrients you need. And you give yourself a 16 hour period of fasting every day. And cumitively, that's thought to induce changes and and stimulate factors that are that promote healing. It also helps minimize overeating. And so, you know, the net effect of that intermittent fasting, which virtually everybody can do safely on their own, is something we recommend. And then periodically we recommend people take a longer period of time to do water only fasting. In our clinic we fast people from 5 to 40 days. And so typically fasts are 2 3 4 weeks of time. That needs to be done in a medical only for people that are obese. No. No. Not at all. In fact, most of our patients uh it's high blood pressure, diabetes, autoimmune diseases, lymphoma uh and we have also healthy people that are just coming in for a shorter period of time like a week. The reason we talk about supervision in that regard is number one, not everybody's a good candidate for fasting. Some people should not be fasting. Give me some candidates. Well, if people have for example cranium levels over 2.0, their kidney function isn't adequate. putting them on a fast could shut their kidneys down, result in kidney failure and death. Um, if they have cardio, sorry, why? I've never heard that, but why would your kidney shut down? Because when you go on a fast, you massively mobilize a detoxification response, and the kidneys can only process so much material. And if you overload the kidneys, you end up with a um a kidney failure situation. And that's, you know, you've heard recently there's been people that have tried dry fasting. And dry fasting particularly puts a heavy load on the kidney. And there was a death associated with one of its proponents just because you know you have to have a solute in order for the kidneys to function. You have to have a way of getting the material that's mobilized out of the system. Why does fasting trigger detoxification? Well, if you think about it, when you're going on a fast, there's nothing for the body to do except mobilize its reserves. And in water fasting, particularly in a resting state, those reserves are predominantly fat. In fact, we've done a study recently at the Trin North Health Center where we've used a DEXA scanner with uh software that allows us to do whole body composition. We've determined not only is mostly fat mobilized during water only fasting, but specifically and preferentially visceral fat. So a person might lose say for example 20% of their atapost tissue but they'll lose 50 60% of their of their visceral fat which is really exciting much faster than for example being on a a low carbohydrate diet in terms of the ratio of visceral fat mobilization to uh subcutaneous fat and in that fat contains a lot of fat soluble materials and it's where a lot of toxins are stored when those fats are mobilized you get a increasing load PCBs dioxin pesticide residues etc all these fats soluble nutrients are rapidly mobilized, processed and eliminated, but you need to have the capacity to actually eliminate materials. And most of those materials are eliminated in the urine. That's the blood being processed by the kidneys. And if you do a fat bopsy on any person, you'll find hundreds of different chemicals in various concentrations. And if you track back how did those chemicals get in the body, where did they come from? Obviously, if people take drugs or they smoke and they drink alcohol and they uh eat foods from the environment that are polluted, that's a potential source. But about 90% according to some researchers got there from one behavior, and that's eating animal foods. Animals biologically concentrate the toxins from their environment. So, a a calorie of animal food could have two to a thousand times the concentration of a given chemical compared to say a plant-based food calorie. And so the consumption of large amounts of animal food uh potentially expose people to proportionally higher ratios of these materials. And it's also why people on very high animal food diets often have a much more difficult time adapting to the fasting state initially because there's just literally more to process and eliminate. But it does. And so that's particularly I might mention true of refined animal products just like refined plant products have particular problems. So, I think we need to be clear that it's actually these highly processed foods of any kind that seem to be the biggest sources of concentration uh of of chemicals. It's not necessarily the brown rice that's the main problem. It might be the rice syrup or it's the products that the highly concentrated products that result in the the largest concentrations of uh materials undesirable materials. When you fast though, the body rapidly mobilizes these materials. If you fast and exercise though once you've depleted your glycogen stores after say 24 48 hours the only way the body would get the needed glucose to maintain muscle activity or excess brain activity would be through glucanogenesis. You'd have to break down proteins in order to get that. So what happens is if you fast and exercise you actually lose more weight but more of its lean tissue. That's if you fast and rest you you mobilize predominantly fat and specifically and preferentially visceral fat. So in addition to making sure a person's a good candidate for fasting with a history exam and lab, we also need to make sure they rest during fasting. Now there's modified fasting where you take a certain amount of calories, therefore you have more glucose available, you're able to, you know, minimize glucanogenesis. That's a different process. Water only fasting though needs to be done resting if you're going to maximize detox, preserve lean tissue, and maximize fat loss. And that we've been able to prove now in a we've actually done this and we've done you know before during after fasting six week follow-ups. So we've got the data and so we can put a lot of the old wives tales to rest. That paper will be published um uh later this year and and I think that'll really make people aware of just why this rest which is so counterintuitive to people trying to maximize weight loss is important with fasting. And you know, if the goal is to really detoxify, the best way to do it is prep properly before fasting. Really important. People that try to say quit coffee at the same time they're going on a fast really undermine themselves because the caffeine withdrawal is actually quite difficult. Fasting isn't so difficult. If you prep well, all of a sudden fasting doesn't even look that hard. People go to cooking classes, they're interact, they go down to the dining room, they interact with people even on these long fasts, two, three, four, five weeks and they're do they do fine, but they are resting. And so resting in some ways is a little bit harder, but it's more effective. I say it's harder because you'll detox more. You'll feel worse. But we don't care how you feel. We care how well you get. So if you feel bad in fasting, doesn't bother me. As long as you get well, you'll totally forgive us. And so next time you fast, you want to make sure you rest during. Now it doesn't mean you can't do some stretching, you can't do meditation. There's things you can do, but they're more passive. And then you look at how your recovery is post fasting. You'll find it's really quite fabulous because not only do you get rid of the inflammation and the joint pain and some of the chronic injuries, but then you recover quickly. And we and we're able to demonstrate that quantitatively now. As as lean tissue recovers, fat continues to go down after fasting. So, you're losing fat, you're losing fat, you continue to lose fat even though you're regaining quote weight because glycogen, water, fiber, and muscle come back after fasting. Fat does not. What's interesting is you have 2 L pounds of glycogen. So, you know, you're going to get that 2 lb back. You got fiber that has to go back in the gut. Unless you're eating an all meat diet, then there is no fiber. Uh and there's also um hydration. There's a physiological dehydration with fasting. Now, that's more when you're exercising. you dehydrate more. So, it looks like you're losing more weight, but all you're doing is dehydrating. Why are you dehydrating if you're drinking water? It doesn't matter if you're drinking water, if it's you hold it in the cells. There's a physiological adaptation to fasting where there's a natural dehydration state. It's probably part of the conservation mechanism. There's a lot of weird things that happen very counterintuitive during fasting. Like for example, you know, we talked about exercise increasing BD brain drive neurotrphic factor that preserves the brain and protects the nervous system. It also increases in fasting. You think about exercise, you're vigorously active. Fasting, you're laying on your ground and not doing much. They both are changing these same things in the same way. It's it's really really um non-intuitive. But when we look at the science, if we look at the data, and then we look at the clinical outcomes, it's really apparent. And now we're tracking people 30, 35 years. I've got people now that are in their 80s that we started off in their 50s. And they all say the same thing, including my mother who at 92 had outlived all 50 of her lifelong friends. Every one of her friends was dead. She was alone. And she said, "Allan, you need to warn your patients if they're going to do this diet. Make younger friends." So I'm telling people starting right now, make younger friends. So when you're older and you're still around, you know, they'll you'll have people to interact with that. I mean, you know, still heartbreaking, but good problem to have. So talk to me about the longer duration fast. So I know that the longest fast is like 280 days. I mean, just something absolutely absurd. So I knew that it was physiologically possible, but I imagined it was more proportional to the amount of body fat that you have. But like somebody with a normal BMI um maybe will peg them at something like 15% body fat. How long can they fast water only? So an a 155 lb 70 kg male okay could go 70 days. The problem is once you get through fasting you enter a process called starvation. And now once you enter starvation there's a relatively short period of time and then you die. We don't do that because it would really be bad for our outcome data. So, we're very careful to avoid that. We've had 20,000 people walk in, 20,000 people walk out. We are experts at not letting people enter into starvation. The other thing with fasting, while we're talking about risks, is the refeeding period. If you have a long period of fasting and you refeed inappropriately, you can get a condition called refeeding syndrome, which can be fatal. It's a very serious problem where electrolyte balances and all kinds of stuff can occur. We've never seen that because we have a very specific refeeding protocol that's followed. and we refeed for a period of no less than half the length of the fast in a controlled setting. So it is it is important. You can also get a condition called post-fasting edema. When you get off all the greasy, salty, processed crap that people are living on and you do a fast, all that gets flushed out of the body. If you then expose a person to very high concentrations of sodium like in commercial soups or something like that, the body will suck that material and fluid up to protect itself from it and that can result in posting edema. If you do it slowly, you can get back to whatever your normal diet was without that problem. But it has to happen over a period of time. So, there's a refeeding period that's important, particularly in this long-term fasting. You know, in the 3-day, the 5day fast for most people, that's not going to result in, you know, as much of a of an issue. They may get a belly ache if they eat eat too much food, but they're not going to get the very serious consequences as you can see in very long-term fasting. Now, the other concern here is, of course, medications. Some medications you don't want to rapidly discontinue. Uh anti-coagulant medications, steroid medications, anti psychotic medications. The rapid withdrawal of those medications can induce a very serious uh or life-threatening response. Um some medications you want to get off as soon as possible. Uh but you don't want to be taking those medications during fasting. So medications that might not do you that much damage feeding can be very serious fasting. Even non-sterily anti-inflammatories and common overthe-c counter medications in the fasting state strongly contraindicated result in all kinds of downstream consequences. Um supplementation is included lots of complications in the fasting state whereas you wouldn't necessarily see any problem in the feeding state. That's one of the reasons we talk about making sure before a person undertakes a long-term fast they have appropriate history exam and lab. Remember 99% of patients have no complications uh with fasting but 1% can have very serious complications. Important that percentage be identified, monitored and so you don't end up with bad outcomes because that's what gives fasting a bad name is people doing it inappropriately. They continue to work. They get dehydrated which is one of the main issues with fasting is maintaining adequate hydration and drinking water itself won't assure that. In fact, drinking too much water can flush your electrolytes out and result in um water intoxication. So, if we don't solve the problem drinking water, how do we solve the problem? Right? We solve it by resting, maintaining appropriate hydration and allow the natural recycling mechanisms in the body to maintain nutritional status and monitoring people so that we don't get into a depleted state. That's why we're monitoring electrolytes. That's why we do twice daily examinations on patients. So it is a safe and natural adaptation. If you remember fasting is a biological adaptation. You notice everybody, every human can fast. We have to be able to fast. Every human that couldn't fast died because every time spring came late, there's no way to sustain this bulbous neuronal net, our massively oversized brain, two and a half times the vass of say a chimp. Chimps don't fast. You don't feed a chimp in a week or so. They're dead. They That's why you'll never see chimps wandering away from the tropics. They live with a constant year round supply of food because their brain doesn't change to burning uh ketones. Your brain is a bif fuel brain. It changes completely. The normal per fuel is glucose and that's your main burner of glucose is your brain. That's the biggest thing. And when the brain goes into fasting state, it changes to burning ketone bodies, particularly beta hydroxybuturic acid. And it becomes preferentially burning. It just burns a tiny little bit of glucose. And that's the little bit of glucanogenesis that continues during fasting unless you're active. Then of course your muscles burn glucose and now you really start breaking muscle down. So um the brain being a bofuel brain had to be that way because otherwise humans when spring came late because we burned so much glucose in our brain we wouldn't have been able to make it. And this is the mechanism by which fasting mimicking diets and keto diets play. If you go on a very highfat diet or a highfat, high protein diet, which some people do, and you don't eat carbohydrates, this fasting mechanism kicks in. So, your brain changes over to burning ketones. You go into ketosis, and it has a hunger blunting effect. When you're in a ketoic state, you don't feel hunger, and as a consequence, it helps people that are trying to do short-term weight loss. The problem is what's good for short-term weight loss isn't necessarily the same thing that's best for long-term health stability. So in our clinic, we're not a weight loss clinic. We're not looking to maximize gross weight on the scale over a short period of time. We're interested in fat loss and improving health. So we're looking at what does it take not only to live a long life, everybody wants to live their full potential, but more importantly, how do you avoid dabbility? How do you avoid spending the last 9.6 years in dility, 16 years in poor health that the average person is doing? How do you avoid finding yourself unable to talk or move lying in some nursing home bed waiting for people to change your diaper for the last years or decades of your life? How do you increase healthy life expectancy, not just life expectancy, the years you live fully functional? How do you ensure a good death? That means you live your life to your full potential. one day you go to sleep, you don't wake up because you reached your genetic potential and not become a debilitated uh individual for years and decades where we spend most of our money in effectively trying to manage illnesses that were caused by poor diet and lifestyle choices. That's what we're using fasting to do is try to help healthy life expectancy and then a whole plant food SOS free diet to sustain it. Yeah. So I think now now's the time to get into that. So the whole idea of no salt, no sugar, no oil. Um, this was the thing that really pulled me in. So, we used to joke, my last company was a nutrition company and we used to joke if it tastes good, spit it out. And it was just like it's so many things that taste good are just absolutely terrible for you. And but you know, that's because people are addicted to the artificial stimulation of these chemicals. We've done a study, a taste adaptation study. We've shown with fasting, your actual uh ability to detect salt and sugar, your hydonic response to food actually changes and you can taste vegetables that are naturally high in sodium. But most people don't like they don't notice it after fasting. Oh my gosh, you think, wow, this is really amazing. And so good food starts to taste good again. And sometimes the stuff you used to like is too spicy, too salty cuz your actual pallet is now it can adapt back. Go back to eating that jerky and stuff. eventually you'll get back to, you know, craving the salt. But the point is, it's not as hard as people think it's going to be long term because you get to the point you actually would prefer, you know, the the beans and grains and nuts and seeds and these kind of things. It's not just discipline, you know, that drives it except initially. And that's where fasting can be helpful. It makes that transition quicker. You asked about how long do people have to fast. Well, sometimes it only takes a few days of fasting to induce these really in healthy people to induce these changes. That's why people that maybe do a yearly fast of three to five days or seven days find it can be very helpful. Not just the detoxifying the three days, five days, but the effect that it has on how they feel. They can overcome their hypertension, their diabetes, their autoimmune diseases. You know, glucose and insulin. Everybody's interested in glucose and particularly insulin. It's profoundly affected by fasting. Fasting is one of the few things you can do to actually reverse insulin resistance. You know what? Another thing that helps with insulin resistance is exercise. That's why diabetics, you got to get them eating right. Now, is the smile because you're seeing another place where those two things line up? It constantly repeats itself. In fact, one of the things we did to save time was identify the markers that improve with exercise and then test them in fasting. It's like it just saves a whole bunch of time because you know like for example IGF-1 insulin growth factor one, the lower the IGF-1 the longer the animals live. Periodic fasting in rats for example, you can double their lifespan just by doing periodic fasting by what duration like just 16 well and and remember rats are completely different than people. So with rats you can only fast about 4 days is their potential not like humans which go 70 days or more. Uh rats are very short. So it's it's proportionally different time. You don't compare days to days. But the process of doing say for example every other day eating at liidum will add you know significantly to the lifespan of the rat. Why? Well they measured biomarkers and they found out that insulin growth factor goes down and that's associated with both fasting and exercise. Another one um leptin which is the the lower the leptin levels is associated with reduced inflammation. And now the general theories are that inflammation largely responsible for all kinds of things, not just the joint pain, but also your heart disease and cancer possibly and kidney issues. And so lower leptin levels seem to be good. Leptin levels go down uh with fasting. Blood pressure and heart rate. I already told you largest effect size ever shown treating hypertension in with with fasting. We have very dramatic and consistent results with that. We're doing a study right now with the Mayo Clinic looking. It's a phase one clinical trial of the treatment of high blood pressure using fasting instead of medication. The microbial load, you have what, five pounds of bacteria living in your intestinal tract. A a thousand strains of different bacteria, living creatures eating and pooing inside you right now. And what those bacteria poo in you depends on what you feed them. And so if you feed um your bacteria soluble fibers, which is their from our viewpoint natural food, you get vitamin K and fertilizer. Um, but if you feed them animal-based foods, you get completely different byproducts, they're associated with increased inflammation. So, that's why we want to be careful about how much quantity, particularly animal protein. Um, the inflammation markers, like if you look at IL6 and TNF and all these different markers they've identified that associate with inflammation, they go down with exercise and fasting. People that exercise regularly, people that fast periodically have lower levels of these inflammatory markers. But fasting doesn't just reduce things, it also increases things. So there's all kinds of markers now that have been identified going up with fasting. Um things that improve and reduce inflammation. Grein and and adiponectin. Adapon. I would never adopone. What is that? Yeah. uh it's it's one of these markers that's associated with insulin sensitivity and and inflammation. Um EMPK downregulates something else called PGC1 alpha which is associated with increasing mitochondrial biogenesis. So the actual energy producing guys that live in your cells go up with fasting. Now if we were going to build out the ultimate fasting protocol and in fact what do you do annually? I know you're doing the the narrowed eating window. So maybe a 168 or something like that. But when do you do a multi-day fast? Yeah. So I I um I hate fasting. Yeah. It's awful because you can't exercise, you can't, you know, play basketball. You can't you have to rest. It's really awful. But it's also very helpful. So I do it every year. I fast for a week. Our basic protocol is in healthy people, you know, that are on healthy diets uh generally have almost no downward symptoms during fasting. They don't have hunger. They don't have terrible healing crisis. They don't get a lot of it's pretty boring, frankly. So, we meditate and we relax and we rest and try to do all the right things. And I do it for a week. And if at the end of a week, perfectly stable, no symptoms, that's it. Back to refeeding carefully, takes half the length of faster refeed. Back to the whole plant food SOS free diet. And we do that every year. And I I just did mine in in November. Very uneventful, very helpful on many levels, but not exciting. Patients much more entertaining because they're coming off animal products, they're coming off coffee, they're coming off alcohol, they're coming off medications. They'll have active healing crisis, inflammation, uh mucus discharge, they'll have skin elimination. You'll see the lumps and bumps falling off. You'll see low back uh discomfort. You'll see headaches. You'll see sleep disruption. And it can be very what I call entertaining. Uh and that you just keep going until that resolves. Are are they getting those symptoms though because of the release of toxins? Like why on earth would your lower back hurt? Oh, because the kidneys are processing most of these metabolic products and you get what's called viscosatic referral pain for 3 to 5 days and then it goes away. The other thing that happens is things um mobilize in inverse proportion. So in other words, you can lose 50% of your visceral fat, but you only lose 20% of your atapost tissue and only 4% of lean tissue. And then the lean tissue comes back with refeeding, but the fat doesn't. The fat continues to drop if you're doing the SOS diet, right? So if you went back to your normal eating, you have you can't go back to greasy, fatty, slimy, processed crap. That's not work. And I want to talk more about that program. Part of the program is to educate people about how to eat. We do cooking demos. We do lectures. We have a whole Roku channel. We've got, you know, we do all kinds of stuff to what I call brainwash people so that they're prepared to go home and efficiently apply a whole natural foods diet. Uh get lots of we particularly like vegetable materials. So both raw and cooked vegetable materials and these starchy like covered squash and butternut squash and kombucha. We're not talking about uh t you know tater tots and flour products and sugary things and all kinds of artificial processed crap. We're talking about whole foods, okay? So, your fruits, vegetables, um, non-glutenous grains. We don't use glutenous grains at all. We don't we're using more like when we talk about grains, we're talking about quinoa and millet and rice and, you know, like you cook. Let's let's dip into a few things specifically that as somebody who's um dabbled in sort of a a plant first approach, but never gone vegetarian or vegan. Um, one, I've always told people that fruit is nature's candy bar. Um, what what is it about like can I take an unlimited amount of fruit? Because like if you told me I could eat watermelon, apples, bananas, oranges all day, I'm in, homie. Like I don't need anything else. That's not going to work. See, the problem is today's hybridized fruits are very high in sugar and very low in fiber. So they're not like the wild apples in Hawaii where they look more like vegetables. I mean, these are and they're perfectly good foods if they're used appropriately. So, we use whole fruit, not fruit juices, not dried fruits, not processed, you know, artificial sugars. We're talking about your berries, your melons. And we usually have one meal that might have some fruit and two meals that are really more vegetable dominated. So, they might, let's say, for example, somebody has oatmeal in the morning with some blueberries and maybe some flax seeds ground or some walnuts. They have a huge salad with big steamed vegetables at lunch and dinner with enough complex carbohydrates so they don't get too skinny. And so the idea is we're looking about 10% of calories from protein, about 15 to 18% of calories from fat with the balance coming from whole plant food carbohydrate. Now, there's a problem. In order to get enough calories on this kind of a diet, you have to eat a lot of volume. You're talking about several pounds of food a day because, you know, potatoes, rice, and beans all have 500 calories a pound, not, you know, 2,000 calories a pound from, say, nuts or seeds or even higher from animal products. So, you have to eat or 4,000 calories a pound from oil. So you we're not pouring olive oil over anything. We're just eating whole foods. There's no salt, oil, or sugar. It's just the salt, oil, and sugar are naturally containing in these whole food diets. Why is salt bad? Well, salt has a couple problems. Salt's not bad. Sodium chloride is an unnecessary nutrient without which you die. You have to have enough sodium in your diet. It happens to be that you get all the sodium you need from large volumes of these whole natural foods. Just like you get enough carbohydrate, you don't have to add sugar and you get enough essential fatty acids including docosexonic acid etc that you form from your DHA you form from your omega-3 by eating whole plant foods. But the problem with added salt is that it stimulates what's called passive overeating. So if you just give an animal its fill till it feels satiated, say rice, whatever, it'll eat a certain amount and then it feels satiated. You salt it, they'll eat significantly more. People say, "Yeah, it tastes better. You're eating more cuz you like it better, but you're eating more because the salt, the the chemical salt, the sodium chloride in higher concentration stimulates dopamine in the brain, results in increased intake. It affects satiety. And so the problem for people trying to lose weight, if they're eating salted foods, usually too, the salted foods are things like flour products that are turned into breads or crackers or cookies that are also hyperconentrated in calories, but the salt will allow them to eat more. Think about bread. If you take the salt out of bread, it's and and you take out the the sugar, it's called matzah. Well, you know, it's they have to eat it once a year and on Passover and that's it because that's the only time you'll talk. Nobody's running out and buying big boxes of matzah as a routine cuz it's flour and water. It doesn't taste good because any highly fractionated food needs salt, oil, and sugar or combinations in order to increase flavor. That's what chefs are is people that take hyperconentrated foods and add salt, oil, and sugar to it and deliver it to the pallet so it stimulates the brain in the most intense way possible. We're saying get away from all that. Let's um your addict analogy I think is very apt and I want people to burn that into their soul that there are some people that can get away with having some of this stuff and it doesn't become a huge problem though they would almost certainly be better off from a longevity perspective from a feel-good perspective if they went to a totally plant-based SOS diet. Um but so for someone like me, I don't struggle with my weight. I don't have an addictive personality. I can fast if I want just because I think it's better for me. Um, but I when I think about going to a full plant-based diet, sort of forgetting about a pure SOS diet for a second, but one of the things that I already eat that I know that I would eat is an avocado, like literally the avocado, mash it, um, nothing else added to it. I take a raw baby carrot and then I put salt on the avocado. It is delicious. Is it still bad for me though if I am I'm not overweight? I don't have a problem overeating it. Um at that point does salt still have such a problem that I should be cutting it out of my diet or am I only cutting it out to stop me from passive overeating? Well, I think it's not just passive overeating because salt also is a very powerful preservative which is why it's used, you know, throughout history to before we had refrigeration and stuff that helped food not go bad. So people to get sick from eating spoiled meats and other foods. And so it is an effective preservative. But when you think about the five pounds of bacteria that live in your gut, it may not be too good an idea to put too much of a preservative into that gut because it will alter the microfllora. Part of the reason people on meat-based diets have completely different micrllora than plant-based diets. May in part be because of the higher salt intake that's oftentimes associated with it. Now let's be clear. You know, vegan diets can be total crap. soda pop, uh, potato chips, and other generic terms for highly processed fractionated foods can all be vegan. You know, Oreo cookies are vegan. That doesn't make them healthy. It just makes them not have animal food in it. So, I'm not arguing uh that that uh vegan foods can't be crappy foods. They certainly can. I get in trouble speaking at national vegan conferences, explaining to people that is as challenging as meat products can be, the vegan processed food products may be worse and that they'd be better off eating the the meat. And that just gets them all upset because they're being driven from, you know, moral, ethical, and spiritual viewpoints and saving the planet and all that stuff. I'm not arguing that. I'm just arguing. I just want patients to live a long and healthy life and not be debilitated. And we know that too much animal protein is definitely a detriment. So people that are eating large amounts of animal protein have higher problems with kidney disease and cardiovascular disease. There's definitely at some point there's too much that needs to be reduced. Even for people that are going to advocate animal foods as a whole natural food. Now you might ask me, can people eat meat and still maintain optimum weight? Absolutely. Because meat isn't a highly fractionated pleasure trap food. It's a whole natural. The problem with meat is it's very concentrated. If you eat too much of it, you can have problems. But it's not the same thing, for example, as dairy products, which are a highly processed animal food that has all the challenges of animal foods, but now it has the problems of the salt. Like try eating your cheese without salt and see what it tastes like. It's the salt that people really like about it. Absolutely. So that that's why this gets very clouded and confusing is that because it's not just meat or it's not just uh plants. It's it's really a question of how processed foods are and how do we get away from having so much processed foods. And frankly meat itself without salt, you know, just boil some meat and chew on it a bit and see if that's how appealing it is to you. You know what I'm saying? It's like Yeah. Now, I think people get sugar and I think a lot of people so associate salt with heart disease or high blood pressure that they're they can buy those two. The one that trips me out and that I'm super interested to get your take on is not bad oils, things that everybody considers bad like um you know uh vegetable oil, you know, French fries, fried oil, like that kind of thing, but like olive oil on a salad, like that's the one I want to talk about. So, olive oil is way less bad than the other oils. It's omega-9 fatty acid, has a different ratio of fatty acids. It can be less processed. You know, theoretically, you can squish those olives and extract the oil. Uh the thing is it's still 9 calories a gram of highly processed fat that begins to peroxidize as you break it down. So, there's still challenges even with olive oil. Now, would you would I agree that olive oil is less bad than the others? Oh, no question. And particularly if it's not heated at high temperature, which is the other problem with fats when you you do fried foods and I mean that's a whole another cascade of problems. I don't think most people are arguing that that's good though. Most people know that's not but they're going to want to try to preserve. Well, like McDougall says, John McDougall says that people love good news about their bad habits. And so the arguments are that this is so much less bad that now it makes it good. Well, that's not really true. Less bad just means less bad. It doesn't make it good. You don't need to fractionate or process your oils down. You can get all the essential fats you need by using your avocado or and minimally processing it. Okay, you mush it or you you chew it up, but you don't have to extract the oil out of the cells and increase its uh concentration, remove the fiber, remove a lot of the other benefits. Um the problem with um too much fat in the diet though is that fat is very efficient. Uh and so as a consequence, it's really easy, particularly if you're eating refined oils, to overeat. You know, that one tablespoon of olive oil has more calories than the salad. So we we aren't really we just drink a put a little drier getting the proportion here. That pound of salad has 100 100 calories, whereas you know, you've got 100, you know, uh more than 100 calories in that in that dressing serving. So it's it's more than you think. And if you really literally just put a few drops on, what you find is you can't taste it. There's no reason for it to even be there. So if I would say have your your avocado and your carrots, just leave leave the salt alone. You don't need the extra uh added salt that and you know, then you'll be back to a whole natural food diet that's SOS free. Talk to me about variety because honestly I could eat avocados, carrots, kale, um a really small handful of things, a banana, maybe an apple, you know, a couple times a week, whatever I get that we can't overdo the, you know, now sort of bastardized fruit. Um, but how much variety do I need to not be malnutritioned on a vegetarian diet? Well, surprisingly small amount. Uh, and particularly if it rotates with the season. For example, if you ate just 2,000 calories, we'll just assume for a second that you were the average, you you need more than that. But if you were the average guy, weren't working out, didn't use your brain that much, and you only needed 2,000 calories a day, just which is the RDA average. Um, my guess is you probably burn 3,000 calories a day or more. But at 2,000 calories a day, if you ate um 2,000 calories of just say brown rice and broccoli, that was it. Your entire diet, you would get all the vitamins, minerals, uh protein, essential amino acids. You get about 80 grams of protein out of that. And uh you know, three cups of rice, uh four cups of broccoli, they it would be a boring diet, but you would get everything except B12 that you need, you know, and that is one thing on these plant-based diets. If you really aren't getting the fecal contamination associated with animal foods, you do need to get a source of B12. It only comes from bacteria and we use recommend 1,000 micrograms of methylcobalamine a day and that'll meet virtually everybody's needs. So that is an issue. You have to get out in the sun to get enough vitamin D because you're not drinking your vitamin D fortified milk cuz you have to actually make it in the sun or supplement it if necessary. So um fortunately uh you can avoid most of the other pills and potions and powders because these large volumes of plant-based foods have high degree of nutrition and particularly when you emphasize the green vegetable materials, the raw and cooked greens and your broccoli and chard and kale. These are really nutrient-rich foods, very low in chloric density, but you do have to eat a lot. And so that's that's one of the downsides. A lot more eating and chewing. The good news is though, you have normal microfllora to feed your gut. So you're not getting TMA which becomes TMAO uh which is so dominant in the meat uh gut flora. Um you're getting uh all of the micronutrients that you need. You get the fiber, you have satiety, you're getting enough hydration because you get a lot of water content from these water contentrich foods in addition to whatever water you're drinking. Uh but you do you and you don't have the chronic constipation which means you don't get the fissures and the uh uh hemorrhoids and you're not having the varicose veins and the prolapsed uteruses and the tossis and the diverticulitis and all the other conditions that come from a very low fiber diet. And this is one of the challenges for people even they're trying to eat healthy but using an animal-rich diet unless they get enough fiber in they're not feeding the microfllora in their gut. That's why colitis patients have so much trouble. Literally that micrflur ends up having to eat the the coating of the intestinal tract, you know, cuz it's it's going to survive just like you want to survive. You feed it soluble fibers, you get a different balance. So, even if you're going to do a meat in the diet, you better get enough vegetables in addition so that you know you you get the fiber and the nutrients and the materials that you need. Talk to me really fast about rice. Brown rice. Can I have white rice? I get no salt, no oil. Um, but if I could just shovel my face full of white rice, um, I would be a pretty happy camper. I love adding that to other things. Like, it's just such a cool base. Um, yeah. Not a fan of white rice, uh, because you eliminate the fiber, the the micronutrients that are so, you know, so beneficial to rice. All you're doing is basically getting that that carbohydrate. Now, granted, it may not be as refined as sugar and white flour and stuff. There's another problem with rice. Rice is one of those bioaccumulator foods because of the ways it's grown. So if you buy rice that's been raised on land that they raise cotton on, they used arsenic pesticides on those cotton fields and there's still arsenic in those soils and it sucks up into rice more so than it might other people. And so arsenic concentrations in rice, particularly white rice grown uh on fields that were sprayed with arsenic pesticides, can be a a potential bioaccumulation threat. Now, there are some places like California where they never raised cotton, didn't use as much arsenic pesticides. And so, like we buy Lunberg Farms organic rice and they are very public about posting their arsenic concentration. There's some of all this kind of stuff in virtually everything. Actually, the people that should be most concerned are big chicken eaters because chickens tend to be really high because of the feed that they get and other stuff. But anyway, um so if you're going to use rice, there's things you can do to reduce the concentration of arsic. is cook it like you would pasta, which is five water, five parts water, one part rice. That'll reduce the the buy rice that's, you know, like I said, grown by companies that are growing on land that they don't use arsenic pest and it's organically grown, so they're not spraying it with crap today. Um, there's other grains though like quinoa and millet and other grains that are also alkaline forming and, you know, uh, don't have that kind of bio accumulation problem. So I I would say you would use a variety of those, but I would prefer whole grains, not the refined grains. Right. What about glyphosate for somebody taking so much vegetable matter? That's got to be on your radar. It is an issue uh for people. Fortunately, now there's um a higher and higher percentage of organically grown fruits and vegetables available. In fact, do you know who the largest seller of organic produce in the country is now? No. It's Costco foods. Wow. Okay. Costco Foods is the largest producer or seller of organic produce. Do you know who number two is? No. It's Walmart. Ah, I should have guessed. So, what's happened now is they've said, "Oh, I don't think these companies sat down and said, well, we really want to help the health of our clients." They said, "Oh, people will pay a premium for food that doesn't use glyphosate or doesn't use chemicals. Well, why don't we sell them that food?" And now it's become a dominant source of their uh produce sales because people spoke with their dollars and they said, "We would prefer to have our vegetable material grown without this." And they're doing the same thing with meat. You know, they're trying to buy freerange meat that doesn't have all the antibiotics and the chemicals because they know that animals biologically accumulate and concentrate these materials. And I don't always think it's an andor, too. Even if you're going to, for example, include animal foods in your diet. If you eat a dominant amount of vegetable materials in addition to that, your likelihood that your negative consequences from the animal food will be minimized and then the health benefits of eating a healthy diet are going to be maximized. I think it's a question of proportion and quantity that's the major issue. Um I don't think that there's any evidence that the 100% vegan necessarily has any advantage over the person that's mostly vegan and uses a small amount of other products in their diet. I don't know that we can demonstrate that difference. Not from a health standpoint. Yeah, that makes sense. Dr. Goldhammer, dude, you are a lot of fun. There is something about the twinkle in your eye when you get going on this stuff that I find just absolutely amazing. You've made me question things that, you know, up until this point I had never um stopped to really look at the way that you present. I think it's extraordinary. Where can people engage with you if they want to come to True North? Like what's how do they do it? Well, we have a service for your uh viewers that if they would like a free phone conversation with me about whether their particular issues would be benefited by anything like we're talking about here with diet and fasting, they can go to our website at trueorthalth.com and complete what are called the registration forms, which is just their medical history. Basically, I'll review that. They can call me at no cost and I'll be happy to talk to them. And if there is something that's relevant, I'll be happy to refer them to who if they want to do fasting to the closest place to them that does fasting or to we have a a dozen doctors that do phone coaching and tele medicine that are available remotely. And we've got medical doctors, chiropractor, psychologist, all those people that are available. And our website has um True North uh TV which is uh and there's also a Roku channel, True North uh on Roku that has all of our video content, educational materials. Everything's freely available. They can go to the site, they can look at our studies, our articles. We even have a a fasting.org site that's just fasting site. So, it's our and other people's research on fasting. Again, all freely available to people. They just go online and uh if they have any questions, give me a call. That's amazing, dude. I hopefully you and I will cross paths again. Um this has been really really incredible and researching you was beyond enlightening. Guys, if you haven't, by the way, um gone into his world, I highly highly encourage it. This is somebody who is a lifelong devote of meat. Um, and he's really got me thinking about things that I'm going to be experimenting with and trying. You know, look, you know, my thing. I want to live as long as humanly possible and in good health. Uh, and this is the man that that has it. He's putting it to the test. You know, check out our book, The Pleasure Trap. It'll bend your mind. No, for sure. Um, the concepts in that book are extraordinary. Definitely. That's in fact we should bring you back for round two to talk about the psychological problems that people go through when they try to do this. And uh that's a whole interview unto itself. All right guys, and speaking of things that are unto themselves, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Thank you guys so much for watching and being a part of this community. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. You're going to get weekly videos on building a growth mindset, cultivating grit, and unlocking your full potential.