00:00:00
This is the most effective treatment that's ever been shown in treating the leading cause of death and disability,
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which is high blood pressure. It also reduces insulin resistance. It can enhance cognitive capacities. And you
00:00:11
also see it affecting things like depression and anxiety. It's called fasting. And there's more. Fasting
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introduces not just a chance to lose weight. It also mobilizes visceral fat, which is the fat around the belly and
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the organs, which is giving off inflammatory products that's causing heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and
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many people are maintaining higher visceral fat than what they should be. So, I've spent 40 years helping people
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get healthy. And I can tell you that I think you should be fasting every day. So, tell me about that then. But also,
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isn't the game here just to not eat as much? Well, here's the problem. Dr. Dr. Alan Goldhammer is a pioneering
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physician who spent his life helping thousands of people reverse chronic disease, eliminate medication,
00:00:50
and reclaim their health using one of the most ancient healing tools known to humanity. Today, we live in a world designed to
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make you fat, sick, and miserable, where 76% of people are overweight or obese, and where people think that health comes
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from pills, potions, and powders. And yet, most of us are ignorant of the proven health benefits of fasting. In
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fact, if you look at all the chemical changes that happen with exercise, they also happen with fasting. Things like
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increasing BDNF, a neurochemical protect in the brain from Alzheimer's disease. And what about water fasting?
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So, people that have not been successful resolving their conditions with medications, including patients with polycystic ovarian syndrome, have been
00:01:28
profoundly affected by water fasting. And we'll go through fabulous research. But one thing you want to realize is that all human beings have the capacity
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to fast. Okay. So, let's run through the unique selling points versus any other diet or
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intervention. Let's do it. I see messages all the time in the
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comment section that some of you didn't realize you didn't subscribe. So, if you could do me a favor and double check if you're a subscriber to this channel,
00:01:52
that would be tremendously appreciated. It's the simple, it's the free thing that anybody that watches this show frequently can do to help us here to
00:01:59
keep everything going in this show in the trajectory it's on. So please do double check if you've subscribed and uh
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thank you so much because in a strange way you are you're part of our history and you're on this journey with us and I
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appreciate you for that. So yeah, thank you
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Dr. Alan Goldhammer. My first question is who are you and what have you spent the last four
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decades of your life doing and why? you I've spent my entire life really focused
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on one topic and that's this idea that you know health results from healthful
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living. I got interested really young. I was a uh in elementary school and I had
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decided that I wanted to pursue this as a career and when I finished training in the United States I had an opportunity
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to go to Australia and I studied with a guy named Alec Burton who was the world's leading expert in the use of medically supervised water only fasting
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and I saw things there that weren't supposed to be happening. People were getting better. I saw people with
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chronic diseases like high blood pressure resolving their hypertension getting off the medications. And so we
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began to carefully evaluate patients with hypertension. In this study, 174 consecutive patients
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with high blood pressure and 174 people normalize their blood pressure without the need for medication. After we
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published that paper, we went on and we've published a couple dozen papers now uh on the use of diet and fasting in
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the literature and we've written a book. It's called can fasting save your life which summarizes our work and other people's work on this use of fasting to
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help uh the body do what it really does best and which is heal itself if you get out of the way.
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So fasting the the word has become incredibly popular but there's a variety of different types of fasting. So what
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what is the type of fasting that you spend most of your time doing working on administering to patients?
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Right. Well, fasting is the complete abstinence of all substances in an environment of complete rest.
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So, what does that mean? That means that means that you're actually resting while you're fasting in order to get
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therapeutic fasting to be most effective. And the reason is if you're very active when you're fasting, your
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body has to produce more glucose in order to carry on the extramuscular and brain activity. And the only way that it
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does that after glycogen reserves are depleted is through a process called gluconneogenesis where the body breaks
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down lean tissue. So when you're fasting, if your goal is to maximize fat loss and minimize lean tissue loss, it's
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important that resting be a part of the protocol. Um it's true if people are more active
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when they're fasting, they'll lose more weight, but that extra weight won't be fat. It'll be lean tissue. So, so what
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happens to the body when someone fasts and can you give me like an hour by hour
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or a playbyplay in terms of what actually is the sort of physiological sequence of events that are beneficial
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for one's health? So, it's a really interesting fairly wellstudied and complex physiological
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adaptation that human beings make to fasting. Normally your brain burns glucose
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which is what I get if I have a piece of bread or a a bar of chocolate or if you uh break down protein uh which
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can also break down into glucose which is what happens after 24 hours of fasting you've depleted your glycogen
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stores your the sugar stores in your muscles and so then the body in order to get the glucose it needs has to either
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convert to burning fat or break down muscle in order to form glucose. What the human being does is it converts its
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main burner of glucose, which is the brain, from burning sugar to burning
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fat. Now, if it didn't do that, you could fast about a week. You'd enter
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starvation, deplete your protein stores, and you'd starve to death. Because you can convert your brain to burning fat
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instead of sugar, a 70 kg male can fast about 70 days.
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Now, that doesn't mean they should fast 70 days, but they could fast up to 70 days because your main burner of
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glucose, your brain, um, will convert to burning a completely different fuel, which is fat. So, let me see if I've got
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this correct. So, if I'm t on a typical American diet, I'm going to be eating lots of things and my body's going to be
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breaking that down into this fuel source called glucose. If I stop eating the glucose, my body has this sort of
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evolutionary switch where it's going to start burning my fat and turning that into this thing called ketones, which my
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brain can run on as well. That's correct. And you have about 24 hours of glycogen stores or sugar stores in your
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in your muscles in your liver. So when you stop eating, for the first 24 hours, you're still able to produce glucose
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from your glycogen stores. But once you've depleted your glycogen stores, now you're you're stuck. You either burn
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fat or you break down lean tissue. Now, because the human brain is so ridiculously large, I mean, it's two and
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a half times a chimp's brain. Just it's a huge glucose burning machine, you had
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to have a way of being able to use some kind of other fuel for that brain. Otherwise, the first time spring comes
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late, all the human beings would have died. Mhm. And so this biological adaptation
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was clearly important for our survival in large part because we have disproportionately large brains that
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burn, you know, ridiculous amounts of glucose. Just because the body does it as a survival mechanism doesn't posit
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that it's necessarily healthy, though, right? Absolutely. Uh and what we've done though is we've taken this biological
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adaptation which by definition would be you know something the body's capable of doing safely and efficiently and
00:07:33
utilizing it in a very unusual situation and that's where people have consistently been exposed to dietary
00:07:39
excess. You know in the world of our ancient ancestors getting enough to eat and not getting eaten was the biological
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imperative of life. It was difficult to get enough to eat. In fact, most human beings that were born, modern humans,
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probably didn't live to reproduce. They didn't pass on their DNA. We're the results of the winners. You know, most
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people, starvation, predation, had all kinds of challenges that would prevent people from reaching reproductive age.
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Taking a biological adaptation, something that's natural to the body, and applying it in a situation where people had consistent exposure to
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dietary excess. When you say dietary excess, you mean too much calories. Too much calories. In fact, the diseases
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that we suffer today, the heart disease, the diabetes, the autoimmune diseases, some of the cancer, these used to be
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rare conditions that were called the diseases of kings, it was the wealthy elite kings that could consistently
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overeat, that would get the gout, that would get the heart disease. These weren't common conditions that were
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present for the peasants. These were uh rarified conditions. They've become common conditions because now people are
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consistently being exposed to dietary excess. And more importantly, we're fooling our brain satiety mechanisms
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into overeating by putting chemicals in our food. And as a consequence, we have
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a situation today where 76% of people are overweight or obese. And the extra
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fat comes with something called visceral fat. It's the fat that tends to accumulate around the belly and the organs. And it's pro-inflammatory, hyper
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metabolic, hypertrophic. It acts like a tumor. You have people walking around there, maybe they have 20 pounds of
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extra atapost tissue. They have 2 lbs of visceral fat and that visceral fat is giving off inflammatory products that's
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causing heart disease, cancer, diabetes, autoimmune diseases. And what's weird is these conditions are treated as if
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they're completely independent, unrelated conditions. You have to go to a different kind of doctor to be even
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diagnosed and treated with these conditions. And yet, they all seem to be associated with dietary excess, excess
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fat, excess visceral fat, and the inflammation that's associated with that visceral fat. Let's run through what
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happens inside the body when I start fasting. And then I want to I want to talk about fasting in a little bit more
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specifics, but what's what's going on in the body? So you said in the first sort of 24 hours, 48 hours, my body is going to switch from using glucose as a fuel
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source to ketones. It's going to predominantly shift the brain and liver
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muscles are going to begin shifting. There's it's a progression depending on your glycogen stores.
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So that you know within 16 hours, 24 hours, up to 48 hours in that transition, you'll be going from burning
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almost exclusively glucose in the brain to burning uh predominantly uh byproducts of fat metabolism, ketones,
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and specifically beta hydroxybutic acid. Is that basically ketones? Ketones break down into different
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components. Beta hydroxybuturic acid becomes the predominant fuel of the brain. It's a byproduct of fat
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metabolism. Okay. And the higher your beta hydroxybutic acid is, the more BDNF is
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produced. BDNF, brain drive neurotrphic factor is neurochemical that's thought to be protective in the brain from
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oxidative damage. So that can result in things like Alzheimer's disease and dementia. You know, when they do rat
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studies, rats in a cage, 30 rats, both cages, everything's identical. They give half the rats a wheel. The rats with the
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wheel will run on the wheel and they don't get Alzheimer's disease. And they said, "Why? What is it about the
00:11:00
exercise that's preventing these rats from getting oxidative damage in their brain that results in dementia or Alzheimer's type disease?" And they
00:11:07
found it was BDNF. It's dramatically higher with exercise. It also goes up with fasting. In fact, it's interesting
00:11:14
if you look at all the cardabolic improvements that happen with exercise, the chemical changes that they they also
00:11:20
happen with fasting. And that's not intuitively obvious because in fasting, you know, you're resting in exercise,
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you're vigorous. You might say, "What do these two seemingly unrelated uh phenomena have in common?" And what I
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think is going on is that both exercise and fasting undo the consequences of
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dietary excess. They reduce the fat, specifically the visceral fat and the inflammation that leads to all these
00:11:45
different diseases. And so, every time you look at the benefits of exercise, you often times see these corollaries
00:11:51
with fasting. And at some point in this fasting process, your brain your body
00:11:56
moves into a state of autophagy. I've heard that word a few times. Yeah. What is that? So autophasia or autophagy is how the
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body gets rid of scinsesscent cells and and waste products and cancer cells and
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you know it kind of eats up that debris and does the housekeeping. And there's some things that increase autophagy and
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one of those things is fasting. Um you know if you take uh rodents for example and you let them eat ad libbitum they
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live as much as they want. They they will uh live to a certain amount of
00:12:29
time. If you take those rats and you periodically fast them you can increase
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their lifespan from 30% to 100%. Even though the diet's the same, just with
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periodic fasting or with systematic underfeeding, if you limit instead of giving them as much to eat as they want,
00:12:46
you feed them at 60% of what they would eat if they ate unlimited amounts and you can dramatically increase their
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lifespan. It's and it's an interesting way of looking at it. From my viewpoint,
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though, they're looking at it wrong. It's not that fasting doubles your lifespan. It's overfeeding cuts it in
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half. Mhm. By overfeeding the rodents, they're developing fat, visceral fat. They get
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the inflammation and you cut their lifespan in half. So what fasting is doing is allowing them live their full
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span by getting rid of the consequences of dietary excess. So isn't the game here then just to not
00:13:21
eat as much versus fasting? Absolutely. The idea is to avoid excess
00:13:27
intake that results in excess fat that results in excess visceral fat. The problem is it's very difficult to do
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that when they are putting chemicals in your feed that fool your satiety mechanisms and lead to overeating.
00:13:39
Satiety mechanisms being mechanisms that tell you whether you're hungry or not, right? Whether your brain signals you
00:13:44
accurately that the amount of calories you have. If you, for example, just sit down and and eat your fill of whole
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plant foods, you eat a certain amount and then you feel full. But if you put certain chemicals in the feed, you'll
00:13:58
eat significantly more before you trigger those satiety mechanisms and feel full. Those chemicals that we put
00:14:03
in our food are salt, oil, and sugar. Salt, oil, and sugar are not food. They're hyperconentrated components
00:14:10
derived from food that are put back into food. And we put them into food to make food taste better. And what tasting
00:14:16
better actually means is it results in more stimulation of dopamine in your brain. Dopamine is the neurochemical
00:14:23
associated with pleasure. The more dopamine, the more pleasure, the more you like it. And so it turns out that
00:14:29
higher caloric density foods or foods that have chemicals like salt, oil, and sugar in the food will stimulate more
00:14:35
dopamine in the brain. And that's because your brain evolved in an environment of scarcity. It involved
00:14:40
where it was difficult to get enough to eat and avoid being eaten. And so richer foods had more value. And so that people
00:14:46
that recognized the value of more concentrated foods tend to live to reproduce and pass on their DNA. Today
00:14:53
we live in a world where we've um corrupted the whole system. And so now we have unlimited amounts of
00:14:59
hyperconentrated foods with these chemicals like salt, oil, and sugar. So when you eat those foods, you will
00:15:05
overeat. The only question is how much and what are the consequences? Should we be intermittent fasting or
00:15:11
should we just be restricting our calories? Are they the same thing? Well, there's different tools available to
00:15:17
allow for us to eat ad libbitum but still meet optimum nutritional intake.
00:15:24
One tool is intermittent fasting. That is or timerestricted feeding which we've practiced for 40 years which is
00:15:30
basically don't eat 3 to 4 hours before you go to bed at night. So instead of eating right up till the time you go to
00:15:36
sleep, you withhold calories after the last meal so that you have 3 to four hours of fasting um every day. That
00:15:43
gives you a 12-hour fast every day. And if you're trying to lose weight, some people believe you could extend that
00:15:49
fasting period another 4 hours in the morning, do some exercise in the morning, preferentially burning fat. And
00:15:55
so that would give you a 16- hour fast and limit your feeding window to 8 hours. And what's the benefit of that?
00:16:00
Some people find by limiting the feeding window, um, they can limit some of the overeating that a lot of eating is being
00:16:06
done for reasons other than being hungry. Sometimes people at night, you know, they've had a big dinner and now they're eating additional food, not
00:16:12
necessarily because they're hungry, but because they're bored, they're tired or they're fatigued. And sometimes when they're fatigued and they eat and they
00:16:19
feel stimulated, they think, "Oh, they must have been hungry." When in reality, they were tired. Our suggestion is when you're tired, go to sleep. And uh when
00:16:26
you're bored, you know, engage in productive activities. And when you're hungry, then you eat. And if you limit
00:16:31
your feeding window to 8 hours, some people find that it's a helpful tool at minimizing some of the overeating. Now,
00:16:37
it's not going to work for everybody. If you have very high caloric needs, you know, you're a competitive athlete, 8
00:16:43
hours uh feeding window, particularly on high nutrient density, low caloric density foods, may not give you enough
00:16:49
feeding window in order to get the calories that you need. When you're trying to burn 3500, 4,000 calories a day on very low caloric density foods,
00:16:56
you may need to have a 12-h hour feeding window in order to be able to get the calorie density need. But for most of us
00:17:02
that are trying to maintain or lose weight, having a narrow feeding window uh may prove to be of of some benefit.
00:17:09
When I'm in a ketogenic diet, or when I guess I'm fasted, which is very rare,
00:17:14
why is it that my cognitive performance seems to be significantly better? Because when I people have heard me say
00:17:20
this so many times, but it's so true. When I'm eating, you know, a normal western diet,
00:17:26
my ability to articulate myself and think and be creative seems to be diminished. Whereas when I'm avoiding
00:17:32
carbohydrates um and sugar, I seem to be able to think
00:17:37
and talk better. I think again it may not be that the ketones are helping you think better. It
00:17:43
may be that the sugar vacasillations are are interfering with your cognitive function. For example, when people eat
00:17:49
particularly refined carbohydrates, their insulin levels go up, drive the sugar down. they end up with low blood
00:17:54
sugar levels which can interfere with cognitive function as a consequence of this vacasillation that's taking place
00:17:59
with their blood sugar levels between insulin and glucose. When you go on a ketogenic type of an approach or you're
00:18:04
in a fasting state, you're everything's very stable as far as glucose is concerned and insulin is concerned.
00:18:10
Okay. So, you don't want to be on the sugar roller coaster if you you're doing important work. Being stable seems to help uh uh people
00:18:15
in their cognitive function. So, but people talk a lot about juice fasting. And I don't know, there's something
00:18:21
about when people say that they're on a juice fast, I always think, god, you're going to be missing important nutrients.
00:18:26
You're not going to be getting the same quantity of protein necessarily. Maybe, I don't know, your gut microbiome is
00:18:31
going to pay the price if you're restricting yourself from having certain things. Is juice fasting
00:18:39
advisable? Is it a healthy approach? So juice fasting isn't technically fasting because fasting is the complete
00:18:45
abstinence of all substances. It's a it's a modified form of eating. So it's a diet that's high in sugar, very low in
00:18:52
fiber, virtually no fiber on on these juices. Where it can be helpful is
00:18:57
people that are trying to make dietary changes and they're addicted to the artificial stimulation of dopamine in their brain that comes from the use of
00:19:04
their highly refined diets. They're trying to make a change. They're trying to make a break. And because it's sweet and very appealing, they'll drink the
00:19:11
juices, they'll get their 6 or 800 calories, they'll feel relatively satiated, and it allows them to avoid
00:19:17
the greasy, fatty, processed foods that sometimes they're trying to get away from. Um, personally, I think that water
00:19:23
fasting has advantages over juice fasting in terms of the magnitude of the detoxifying effect, the impact that it
00:19:30
has. But the advantages to juice fasting or what they call juice fasting is that it can be done without modifying
00:19:36
medications. you're still in a feeding physiology. It could be done safely by people without having to be in a
00:19:41
controlled setting like you would for water fasting. So there's advantages to the intermittent or modified fasting
00:19:47
approaches. It's not the basis of the research that we've published which is actually water only fasting. We're
00:19:53
fasting people on water only from 5 to 40 days. 5 to 40 days. So tell me about that
00:19:58
then. So who exactly would you prescribe a 40-day water fast to? And presumably in those 40 days they have nothing but
00:20:05
water. Right? Patients that are fasting in our facility are on uh fractionally steamed
00:20:11
distilled water only. That's the only thing they take. They're not taking supplements, medications. What is that fractionally?
00:20:17
Well, you know uh distilled water. So it's purified water, highly purified water. So in our case, we're using distillation. Some people use reverse
00:20:23
osmosis, different ways of getting all the hydrogenated hocarbons and the chlorine and everything out of the water. So just essentially what rain
00:20:30
water would be if the environment wasn't polluted. Okay. Now in in in fairness, not everybody's a
00:20:35
good candidate for that type of uh fasting. In order to determine if you're a good candidate, obviously you have to
00:20:41
review the medical history and make take a look at what people are doing in terms of their medical treatment, particularly
00:20:47
in terms of medications, basic laboratory testing to make sure kidney and liver function are intact or capable
00:20:52
of adapting to fasting. And when people fast, they need to rest. If people are active, we've already mentioned they'll
00:20:58
increase their weight loss, but that weight will be derived from breaking down lean tissue. We want to minimize
00:21:03
lean tissue, maximize fat, particularly visceral fat. It's also important that
00:21:08
they be monitored because people do have issues that can be aggravated by fasting. Fasting presents a dehydration
00:21:15
response. There's a physiological dehydration that occurs with fasting. There's uh changes in electrolytes. So,
00:21:22
you need to make sure that people are being monitored appropriately. And then the most important part probably is they
00:21:28
need to be reffred uh progressively reed. Yeah. So when when they're eating after
00:21:33
the fast if they go back to too rapid a refeeding you can get into problem with post-fasting edema. You can get
00:21:38
refeeding syndrome. That could be a very serious or even potentially you know fatal problem that can be completely
00:21:44
avoided by following a reasonable protocol of a realmentation after fasting which we is is the reason why we
00:21:51
encourage patients that are doing fasting to do it either in a controlled setting or under some supervision so
00:21:57
that they don't make u catastrophic errors in terms of how they do it when it's that length when it's long.
00:22:03
Well uh water fasting we're doing fasting anywhere from 5 to 40 days. So anywhere in that range, you want to make
00:22:09
sure the person's a good candidate that they're fasting in a controlled setting, that they rest and they refeed properly.
00:22:15
So a person that has say a 20-day fast would have 10 days of controlled refeeding. It'll take about half the
00:22:20
length of the fast to properly reallament after the fast so that you're ready to go back to hopefully a whole
00:22:26
plant food SOS free type diet. And when you say SOS, you mean sugar, salt, and oil for context.
00:22:31
Yeah. SOS is the international symbol of danger, but it also stands for the chemicals added to food that make people
00:22:37
fat, sick, and miserable. And those are salt, oil, and sugar. What kind of candidate would come to
00:22:42
your clinic to do a 5 to 40day water fast? What are the symptoms they have? What are the diseases, illnesses that
00:22:48
they're suffering with? Well, we get a variety of people and ages. Um, the conditions we see are are
00:22:54
often the conditions that we've published papers on because those that's what people know us for. So one of the
00:22:59
most common conditions is high blood pressure. We did a study uh with our colleague T. Colin Campbell as I
00:23:05
mentioned 174 people in a row were able to achieve normal blood pressure without medication. We also did a prospective
00:23:11
study recently with a colleague from the Mayo Clinic recently that did 20 uh seven people completed fasting with
00:23:18
hypertension. 26 were able to achieve normal blood pressure without any medication. One required half their dose
00:23:23
of medication. And we had six week follow-ups where they did well. And then we followed them at a year and we found
00:23:29
that 76% of those people a year later had maintained their weight loss and the majority were still normal blood
00:23:35
pressure without medication. Were they still fasting after a year? No, of course they were fasting while they were at the center. They were back
00:23:41
eating a healthy diet and they maintained a healthy enough diet for a year that they were able to maintain their
00:23:47
blood pressure and their weight loss. And that's very unusual because you don't find good long-term follow-up
00:23:53
showing that people are not only able to get well but sustain those behavioral changes. So it was more of it's more of an
00:23:59
intervention in that regard. And how and how long were they fasted for those people? So the people in that study ranged uh
00:24:06
the average fasting was about two weeks. So they had two weeks of fasting that normalized their blood pressure, a week
00:24:12
of refeeding, and then even a year later they the majority were able to sustain the behavioral changes such that they
00:24:19
were able to keep their weight off and they were able to keep their blood pressure down without the need for medication. And and what's going on there? Because
00:24:24
there's physiological changes that take place. If I went and did a 40-day water fast with you, there's some physiological things that can happen. Of
00:24:30
course, I'm going to go into ketosis. my my fat's going to start to become my primary fuel source, but there's also
00:24:35
going to be a physiocsychological relationship. There's going to be
00:24:41
something that happens in my psychology. I mean, you talked about dopamine. There's going to my brain is going to change in some respect. My relationship
00:24:47
with food is going to shift in some respect. Absolutely. If you look at the um
00:24:52
outcome data, for example, we've got studies we've done with DEXA scanners that look at body composition changes
00:24:58
during fasting. And so people that would lo say fast for two weeks would lose 10%
00:25:04
of their total body weight, 20% of their total fat, but 40% of their visceral
00:25:10
fat. Visceral fat being the bad fat inside the Yeah. the 10% of fat that produces the inflammation that's thought to
00:25:15
contribute to disease. Those same people would have only lost 6% of their lean tissue. Now what's interesting like
00:25:21
muscle, water, you know, nonfat tissue. Yeah. So the lean tissue mass at 6 weeks
00:25:28
was fully recovered. So that the percentage of their lean mass was actually higher at 6 weeks than it was
00:25:34
at baseline, but the fat loss continues. So even though they're gaining weight after fasting because they're putting
00:25:40
their glycogen back in their muscles, which is about 2 lbs, they're rehydrating, they're putting fluid in, they're putting fiber back in the gut.
00:25:46
So the scale is going up, but the fat loss even with that weight gain is continuing down. And so what h what you
00:25:53
look at is their whole body composition begins to change and also their brain composition too probably in terms of
00:26:00
their functional relationship to themselves. For one thing a lot of people feel that any kind of pain is a
00:26:06
bad thing. Any kind of pain is a bad thing and pain must always be avoided. If they have a pain they have to take a
00:26:11
pill. They have to do something because pain's the evil you know issue there.
00:26:17
Athletes learn that pain isn't always bad. that sometimes discomfort can be associated with a positive response. We
00:26:23
find it's easier working sometimes with athletes than people that have not been athletic because they they've learned to
00:26:28
push their body a little bit and the and fasting creates a hormatic effect as
00:26:34
well. Whereas there is some physiological stress that's introduced that stress is associated with a healing response. Would it not just be healthier
00:26:41
if it were simple to take those people and remove all the processed food from
00:26:48
their diet and then keep them on like a Mediterranean diet with like high protein, high fiber? Would that not be a
00:26:55
more healthy intervention? Because at least then I'm not going to lose, you mentioned there I'd lose 6% of my lean tissue. At least then I wouldn't lose
00:27:01
any muscle necessarily. Well, I would agree that if your only goal is weight loss, diet and exercise
00:27:07
are the key. Fasting introduces not just a chance to lose weight, but specifically to mobilize visceral fat.
00:27:12
You will eventually uh mobilize that visceral fat with uh exercise alone.
00:27:18
There's an advantage to getting rid of that sooner rather than later. Particularly for people that have high blood pressure, diabetes, autoimmune
00:27:23
disease, because the sooner you get rid of the visceral fat and the inflammation, the sooner you can get them off the medications. The
00:27:29
medications themselves present their own problems. And people don't understand if
00:27:34
you have high blood pressure, you're being medicated not for your high blood pressure, but for the diet that causes
00:27:39
the high blood pressure. Literally, the day you change the diet to a healthpromoting diet, the need for
00:27:44
medication begins to reduce. And if you don't reduce the medication adequately, you can actually shut people down from,
00:27:51
you know, consequences of excess medication. Is there a different advantage between me doing the fast, the
00:27:56
water fast, versus just going on the ketogenic diet if I was trying to reduce my visceral fat, which is that sort of
00:28:02
stubbing fat around your organs? Yes, water fasting is a more efficient method of mobilizing specifically
00:28:08
visceral fat. And the other problem with a when we talk about a ketogenic diet, remember there's a lot of different ways
00:28:13
of getting into ketosis. You can do it with a highfat, high protein diet, which is commonly advocated, you know, the
00:28:18
dead Dr. Atkins diet, miss file rest in peace or those kind of programs. those have some disadvantages. High protein,
00:28:24
particularly high animal protein, is actually thought to be one of the major contributing factors to many of these
00:28:30
health compromises, including cardiovascular disease and cancer and inflammation and the rest of it. So, we
00:28:35
need protein. It's an essential nutrient. You need about 10% of your calories from protein. When you get
00:28:40
excess protein, you put your risk yourself at risk for kidney disease, cardiovascular disease, and other
00:28:46
problems. We need fat. Essential fatty acids are a critical part of our ability to be healthy. And you also need
00:28:53
carbohydrates. You're designed as a carbohydrate burning machine. But you get all the fat, all the protein, and
00:28:59
all the carbohydrates you need from a whole plant food diet. You don't need to eat large amounts of animal foods. You
00:29:04
don't need to eat oils. You don't need to eat refined carbohydrates to get the foods you need. And in fact, a whole
00:29:11
plant food SOS-free diet gives you the quantity and quality of nutrients you need without some of the negative consequences or the risks of dietary
00:29:18
excess that come from these uh more processed uh modern diets. So, if if you
00:29:23
were to pitch to me the unique selling points of a water fast at your clinic
00:29:29
versus any other intervention, medical or lifestyle, it would be the speed in
00:29:35
which you're able to burn visceral fat and the speed in which you're able to
00:29:41
lower blood pressure is unlike anything else. It also reduces uh insulin resistance.
00:29:47
There is no drug that reduces insulin resistance, but um fasting does. And a significant percentage of our type two
00:29:53
diabetics will achieve normal blood sugar levels without the need for medication with fasting. Again, if you do diet and exercise consistently
00:30:00
enough, long enough, you're likely to get many of the same benefits. There are
00:30:05
some things though that seem to change in fasting that don't change as well with with these modified feeding
00:30:11
regimes. For example, fasting, you know, when you have a computer and it gets corrupted and you turn it off and you
00:30:17
turn it back on and you don't know why, but now it works. You know, you've kind of reboot or flashed the memory,
00:30:23
whatever it is. Fasting does a similar thing in humans, it appears, and particularly when it comes to the gut
00:30:29
microbiome. So you've got a trillion creatures, well trillions of creatures living just in your intestinal tract,
00:30:35
particularly bacteria, but all kinds of organisms. They're an important part of your digestive mechanisms, your immune
00:30:42
response, and they're different depending on what you eat. So if you're eating animal-based
00:30:49
diet, you have different organisms than if you're on a plant-based diet. If you're on a high sugar diet, even fruit sugars and things, you get different
00:30:56
organisms flourishing than you would if you're in a fasting state. In a fasting state, there's a big drop off in total
00:31:03
organisms. And then when you refeed, depending on how you refeed, you can actually regrow those organisms and
00:31:09
repopulate that. I'm right in thinking if you do a water fast, you're going to wipe out a lot of the bacteria in your gut, um, including
00:31:16
the bad ones, but also some good ones, right? And then you can reintroduce certain
00:31:21
foods that will bring back the good bacteria. That's why refeeding after fasting is so important. If you refeed carefully,
00:31:28
you're have a chance to reestablish that normal microflloral balance. And that may be why we see such good response in
00:31:34
many of these GI related conditions like ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease and chronic constipation, irritable
00:31:40
bowel syndrome. But you also see it affecting things like depression and anxiety and probably they say 90 95% of
00:31:48
the dopamine and serotonin that's produced by the body is actually produced in the gut. And so the balance in your gut microbiome may be critically
00:31:54
involved in cognitive function as well as what's going on in the digestive system itself. So we're just now
00:32:02
learning uh the impact that you know fasting has and the effect that microbiome has and the relationship that
00:32:08
those two things have together. There was a 2024 study that found after a 7-day water only fast levels of
00:32:14
harmful fuzo bacteria dropped by more than 80% and the gut microbiome shifted
00:32:20
to a healthier balance. So it's clearly doing some of the work to wipe out some
00:32:25
of the bad um unhealthy gut microbiome bacteria which gives you an opportunity
00:32:31
to I guess reset the gut microbiome which is really interesting especially if you as you say you have some of those
00:32:36
sort of gut centric diseases. Is there a
00:32:42
gender component to this between sort of men and women because obviously women have menstrual cycles and yes
00:32:48
certain hormone fluctuations that men don't have. So, do you have to think about gender when you're thinking about fasting? Well, we know that women have
00:32:54
complicated uh systems uh in different ways than men and they have different diseases too that show up. Fibrocystic
00:33:01
breast disease, dysmenoria, menorasia, polycystic ovarian syndrome, all of these conditions that males don't know
00:33:07
anything about. Um seem to be associated with excess estradiol uh hormones. When
00:33:13
estradile is high, there's a higher association with many of these conditions. Estradile normally breaks
00:33:19
down to something called estriol. It's excreted in the urine. And what breaks it down is the gut microbiome and liver
00:33:26
function. And the gut microbiome and liver function are both profoundly affected by fasting. For example, we've
00:33:31
got in studies we've done looking at fatty liver disease. We show significant changes and reversal of fatty liver
00:33:37
disease with fasting. Uh and as I mentioned, the gut microbiome goes through a whole kind of rebooting. And
00:33:43
that may be why patients that come in with those symptoms, the fibrocystic breast disease, the dismenoras, the menorasia, etc. often get profound
00:33:50
short-term improvement and long-term benefit post-fasting. Now, all of these
00:33:55
things I'd have to say fasting is great, but unless it's a motivating factor to
00:34:00
make the diet and lifestyle changes, I wouldn't be optimistic about long-term outcomes. When we use fasting, we're
00:34:06
also providing intense education to try to get people motivated to adopt healthy diet and lifestyle habits. And it's
00:34:13
those diet and lifestyle habits that are going to be necessary to sustain the benefits. I mean, I'll give you an example uh in lymphoma, which is a type
00:34:20
of cancer. Uh we published a paper in uh the British Medical Journal uh case reports on a young woman who had
00:34:28
flicular lymphoma had progressed for a couple years. And interestingly enough,
00:34:33
her doctor, her oncologist told her that diet didn't matter. The diet wasn't related to, you
00:34:40
know, this particular type of cancer. She could eat whatever she wanted to. But nonetheless, she decided to come in
00:34:46
uh rather than go through chemotherapy and underwent fasting. And we did 3 weeks of fasting during which time you
00:34:51
could literally feel these tumors disappearing. um she had her follow-up CT scan uh and at a year we we submitted
00:34:58
this case report and it was interesting because BMJ said well maybe she got lucky and yes it progressed for 2 years
00:35:04
yes it went away in 21 days of fasting but maybe you know it was just naturally the time for it to go into remission a
00:35:10
small percentage of lymphoma patients do go through spontaneous remission so they said why don't you follow her for three years and see whether she can sustain
00:35:17
that because we can treat lymphoma with drugs and the tumors will go down but they tend to come back and that's the problem it doesn't really reduce
00:35:24
necessarily all-c causeed mortality because the condition isn't actually resolved. So, we followed her for 3
00:35:29
years and I told her that she had to stick strictly to the dietary protocol or it would be fatal because I'd track
00:35:35
her down and kill her. And she did stick to the diet and at 3 years we have uh CT evidence that she was cancer-free. And
00:35:42
we submitted that uh to BMJ. And interesting enough, at first they rejected the followup that they invited.
00:35:48
And uh we kind of appealed that and eventually they did decide to to publish the follow-up and then we followed her
00:35:55
for 10 years and she continues to be cancer-free and she continues to follow a whole plant food SOS-free diet and she
00:36:03
went public with her story. She told uh uh some podcasts about what her experience was. And so we got a lot of
00:36:09
lymphoma patients coming to True North Health. And now we've published a case series which is a series of lymphoma
00:36:15
patients including one particular gentleman was even more progressive. It was a stage 4 already metastasized into
00:36:20
the bones. He had failed chemotherapy. He also did well and we did a 3-we fast
00:36:27
with him. Interestingly enough, his oncologist was quite antagonistic because he was concerned the fasting would make him too weak for treatment.
00:36:33
But he came in, he did the treatment, did well, went back to the oncologist who said, "Wow, that's really
00:36:38
impressive. Why don't you go back and do some more of that?" He came back, we did another 39-day fast, and he was able to
00:36:44
get dramatic improvement. And again, those those uh studies have been published in peer-review journals. The
00:36:49
But he didn't go into remission with uh lymphoma. Uh it would be considered remission, but it's not a
00:36:55
cure. It's just like you can't cure lymphoma anymore than you can cure obesity. You can lose the weight and
00:37:02
keep it off, but you if you go back to doing the things that cause it, it's coming back. You can't cure high blood pressure. You can normalize the
00:37:08
pressure. I've got people who have been normal pressure for decades now. But if they go back to eating the greasy, fatty, slimy, salty, processed food,
00:37:15
it'll come back because you're managing it. You're not curing it. The whole concept of a cure is a little bit of a
00:37:21
misnomer. In medicine, you know, cure just means you're alive 5 years after treatment. Doesn't mean that you've
00:37:26
actually resolved the underlying cause of the condition. interesting.
00:37:32
And we have um 120 plates here, which is how much food someone would be passing
00:37:39
up if they did a 40day diet. So that's how many meals that they would miss on a
00:37:46
40-day water fast, which is a lot of food. Staggering when you see it.
00:37:53
Yeah. And it's a lot of work for the body to digest that food. And when you take that work away, uh, those energies
00:37:58
are able to be diverted to dealing with some of the accumulator problems that people have built up, whether it's excess fat and visceral fat, it's
00:38:05
diabetes, it's autoimmune diseases where the body's actually attacking itself. I don't know if most people realize that,
00:38:11
but in autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis or ulcerative colitis, ankylosing spondylitis, these conditions, it's actually your immune
00:38:18
system that's attacking your tissues. And the theory is that a lot of that is because you have the immune system being
00:38:25
compromised by gut leakage where people have uh leaky tight junctions in their intestinal tract. They're absorbing
00:38:31
materials and then genetically vulnerable people, the immune system becomes uh hyperreactive and begins to
00:38:37
attack its its own tissues. You know, if it attacks your thyroid, we call it Hashimoto's thyroiditis. If it attacks
00:38:43
your joints, you might call it rheumatoid or osteoarthritis. different names for different inflammatory
00:38:48
conditions all triggered by leaking of materials into the intestinal tract.
00:38:53
When you go on a fast, first of all, you're not eating and so there's not the inflammatory uh oxidative damage and
00:38:59
free radicals that are causing the leaking to begin with. And second of all, the body's healing comp uh
00:39:04
processes are able to be accentuated and so the gut leakage is able to heal. after you heal the gut and go back to
00:39:11
eating diet that's not full of free radicals. You're not smoking, you're not drinking alcohol with all of the free
00:39:17
radicals from peroxidation of alcohol, you're not eating highfat foods and and particularly heated fat fat foods and
00:39:23
fried foods etc. There's not the onslaught of oxidative damage and now you can manage those conditions with a
00:39:30
whole plant food SOS-free diet. Now that doesn't mean they're cured. If they go back to eating the other foods, they're
00:39:36
going to flare up their condition. But to the degree they're willing to eat healthfully, they can manage their condition without the medications uh
00:39:43
often times that are very powerful and have often long-term side effects. When someone does a a water fast with you, if
00:39:49
they're doing a 40-day water fast, do you make sure that they get electrolytes and vitamins and other things? Are there
00:39:56
are there other things that you have to give them? No, we're just giving them water, but we are monitoring their their electrolytes
00:40:02
and their blood levels to make sure that their reserves are being recycled adequately and they're normal. If if for
00:40:07
example potassium gets below a certain point or sodium gets a below a certain point then we go back into a refeeding
00:40:13
mode. We're given broths and juices and other materials in order to re uh to refeed them. We don't allow them to
00:40:20
develop symptoms secondary to deficiency. Now what's interesting is potassium for example norm potassium
00:40:26
might be 3.5. Uh fasting tolerances would be 3.0. If it goes below 3.0 then
00:40:31
we're going to we're going to terminate the fast. But generally people are so efficient at recycling their nutrients
00:40:36
during fasting that they stay within normal limits without us having to do premature termination. And when you finish a long fast like a
00:40:43
40-day fast, what are the or even a shorter fast like a 5day fast? What is the protocol for
00:40:51
refeeding them? Mhm. What what what do you give them? What do you avoid? What's the speed in which you
00:40:56
give them calories again? They get a day of fresh fruit and vegetable juices for every week of fasting, more or less. So,
00:41:03
they're going to get about 600 calories of fresh fruit and vegetable juices if they had a three-week fast for about 3
00:41:09
days. What's the thinking here? Like, what's the underlying thought? Mhm. The idea is that we want to introduce initially food without fiber.
00:41:16
So, if there's any digestive challenges, that's short-lived. Uh we want to introduce food starting in the morning
00:41:21
rather than at night. So, if there's any challenges, it doesn't disrupt their sleep. uh we want to make sure that
00:41:26
they're rehydrating and uh getting some glucose without necessarily overloading their capacities once they've acclimated
00:41:34
to the juices which are relatively easy to absorb and bring up blood sugars relatively quickly moving them out of
00:41:40
the uh fasting phase into more of a feeding phase. Then we'll introduce raw fruits and vegetables which introduce
00:41:46
some fiber. And then we'll introduce more concentrated foods like steamed and starchy vegetables until by the length
00:41:52
half the length of the fast refeeding they're back to a whole plant food SOS free diet. The kind of diet that we want them to sustain uh forever. If you're
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There's no safe like simply safe. And what about healthy people? Healthy people come to you as well and do
00:44:14
fasting. It's not just people that have these sort of severe health predicaments. I think I'm pretty
00:44:19
healthy. Is there a reason or a benefit to someone like me fasting? You know, we
00:44:24
did a study actually on this very question about what happens to healthy people that fast. And although there's
00:44:31
tremendous improvements in sick people, it turns out when you look at the cardiumabolic risk factors, when you
00:44:36
look at even things like weight and uh percent body fat and visceral fat on
00:44:42
healthy people, people that are within healthy limits, there's additional improvement. Their blood cholesterol drops even lower, their blood pressures
00:44:49
drop lower, their percent fat drops even lower. In fact, proportionally, the people that get the most benefit of
00:44:55
fasting are healthy people that are doing it preventatively, but they tend to need short fasts, not long fast.
00:45:01
You're not necessarily taking a healthy person doing a 40-day fast. These are 5 to 10 day periods of time rather than
00:45:08
the very longer fasts. They're usually because there's a condition that takes that long to resolve. We want to fast as
00:45:14
short as possible, but long enough to resolve the problem. If you come to me with blood pressure that's 210 over 100
00:45:19
capped on on five medications, you're likely going to need a longer fast than a person that's 140 over 90 without
00:45:25
medication. If I'm a healthy person, how frequently and for what length should I be thinking
00:45:30
about fasting, if at all? I think you should be fasting every day for 12 hours.
00:45:36
Okay. And then, you know, we don't know what the ideal is. That's one of the things
00:45:41
we're going to be doing in this in this study is trying to figure that out. But what we do in practice is we have people fast once a year for a week. If they're
00:45:48
clinically stable, they don't have any healing crisis, their numbers all good, that's it. We move on. And even that
00:45:53
week of fasting though has a profound effect on healthy people. I might mentioned though that most people that
00:45:58
think they're healthy, when you actually objectively look at their biomarkers, aren't as healthy as they think. Many
00:46:04
people are maintaining higher visceral fat, higher inflammatory markers, higher lipid levels than what they probably
00:46:09
ideally should be, even though they're asymptomatic. They say somewhere around 2 to 2 and a half% of people are
00:46:15
actually objectively measuring out as healthy. Some studies say as much as 12% depending on the standards that you're
00:46:21
using to define health. So speaking directly to the viewer now who sat at home and there's a reason why they clicked on this conversation. They
00:46:27
they found the subject matter in the title or the thumbnail somewhat compelling.
00:46:32
If you were speaking directly to the different personas of people listening. So you've got maybe someone who is healthy, someone who is maybe got a
00:46:38
little bit of weight on that they might want to shift, someone that's got specific diseases and has been given diagnosis and maybe is given pills.
00:46:45
Going through these different personas one at a time, how would you prescribe
00:46:50
water fasting to them and what would you sort of tell them the benefits for them would be if we're thinking about these
00:46:57
different personas? So starting with the the person on the left side of the spectrum who is largely healthy but is
00:47:05
interested in maybe how it will make them feel or whatever. So for the healthy person the main benefit that I
00:47:10
see of fasting is it's a forced period of rest and introspection. You get a certain clearing of the pallet. We've
00:47:16
actually done a study like this. It's on our site where we looked at the sensitivity to sugar, the sensitivity to
00:47:22
salt. It's actually enhanced during fasting. And so by fasting once a year, people kind of recalibrate their pallet
00:47:28
and it makes it easier for them to make better choices. Sometimes there's been some slipping and sliding along the dietary regime as people go along during
00:47:35
the course of the year. It reboots the gut microbiome. It tends to uh enhance
00:47:40
cognitive capacities as well as probably brain serotonin and dopamine levels. It can affect people's mood states and just
00:47:47
how they feel about themselves and the world around them. It's obviously not as dramatic as when you take a person
00:47:53
that's in agonizing pain or dability and you see those dramatic changes. What about then if I want to just lose
00:47:58
some weight? What protocol should I use for water fasting and what kind of results would I expect to see in what
00:48:05
time frame? We never know exactly how long a patient's going to fast until we see how
00:48:10
they respond to fasting because fasting itself is as much diagnostic as it is therapeutic. But usually we can get a
00:48:17
pretty good idea. Like for example, I always like to try to get people as close to their optimum weight as
00:48:22
possible, whether it's with diet and exercise or with fasting. We don't think maintaining extra fat is a good thing.
00:48:28
We think for every pound of excess fat you have on your body, there's all kinds of downstream consequences. And so if a
00:48:34
person's say for example 20 pounds overweight, they think I they feel best at say 150 pounds, but they're 170
00:48:40
pounds. We know that they could it will take them about 3 weeks to to lose that weight because people lose an average of
00:48:47
about a pound a day. So I wouldn't have any concern assuming everything else looks okay fasting that person for 3
00:48:53
weeks. I'd be concerned about fasting them into an emaciated state. I don't want to get them very weak. I don't want
00:48:59
to have them debilitated. I don't want to get them depleted. And so we're going to monitor them carefully to make sure that we're well within their their
00:49:06
reserves. But, you know, a person that's that's a bit overweight that has maybe their blood pressure is a little bit
00:49:11
higher, their blood sugar is a little bit higher, maybe they have some joint pain, maybe they have some various symptoms. We want those things to
00:49:18
resolve. So, we're going to estimate how long do we think this person's going to need to fast to get to the point when
00:49:24
they feed they'll keep getting healthier rather than sicker. Can you explain these four graphs to me
00:49:29
here? There's some four graphs that come from work you've done. Okay. Well, this is outcome data that
00:49:35
comes from um studies that we've published and this basically is looking at the percent body weight change. And
00:49:42
if you look at the bottom graph, you'll notice it's over time. Yeah. Okay. So, we're looking at the
00:49:49
percentage body weight change during fasting. And you notice during refeeding, it actually comes down a
00:49:54
little bit more even though people are re-elementating. They're losing fat. They're regaining water and muscle. And
00:50:01
then they're able to maintain that percent body change. This is 65day follow-up. So, on that for people that aren't
00:50:06
watching the video right now and are just listening to audio, what what is it essentially saying happens and in what
00:50:11
period of time with what protocol? So in this particular uh study, these people
00:50:17
lost about 10% of their body weight over an average of uh two weeks of fasting.
00:50:23
They refed for a week at the facility and then they were followed up 65 days later and at 65 days later you'll notice
00:50:30
they'd maintained their total body weight change and then just a little bit more and now they'd been back to eating
00:50:36
and exercising. In the next uh graph, percent body weight. This is the visceral fat mass.
00:50:42
And visceral fat, again, visceral fat is the 10% of the fat that makes up the fat that typically
00:50:48
accumulates around the belly and in many organs. It's the fat that's hypertrophic, hyper metabolic, hyper. It
00:50:53
it produces inflammation. It acts like a tumor. So, there's two types there. There's subcutaneous, which is on the
00:50:59
outside, right? And then there's visceral, which is in the inside. And the stuff in the inside is the worst. It's fat that wouldn't normally be
00:51:06
there. Here's the problem. You evolved in an environment of scarcity. Storing fat is so critical to survival in a
00:51:13
world of uh deficiency of or of defic depletion that the body does everything
00:51:18
it can to store fat because the people that store fat in a natural setting, they live to reproduce. In the modern
00:51:25
world, it's become a disadvantage because we live in this very unnatural environment where you can get dietary excess. And so even though the body is
00:51:31
designed for an environment of deficiency, it's responding with that genetic programming. And so it stores
00:51:37
fat even though it's not healthful for you. As far as the body's concerned, spring might come late. The more fat you
00:51:43
store, the better. And as a consequence, that visceral fat is associated with these diseases of dietary excess. In
00:51:49
fasting, the body preferentially mobilizes that visceral fat. It gets rid of it. Just like if you go on a fast and
00:51:54
have a breast tumor, you lose 10% of your body fat. You don't necessarily lose 10% of the tumor. You might lose
00:52:00
50% of the tumor. you might lose the entire tumor because the body's has some intelligence to it in terms of how it's
00:52:06
mobilizing these tissues. You can take a person, an animal for example, and starve it to death. Um, and if you
00:52:12
measure its nervous system, you'll find the nervous system isn't depleted even when it's starved to death, it will
00:52:18
preserve those tissues in preference to the uh the visceral fat or the fat
00:52:23
tissues. And so this graph is showing that visceral fat not only comes down during fasting but it keeps coming down
00:52:29
and it continues to come down with refeeding. And this particular graph here this is blood pressure. So again
00:52:36
blood pressure comes down is during fasting. It comes down even lower with refeeding. And people are a that are
00:52:42
following diet and lifestyle changes are able to maintain that pressure without medication. So if you look at our study,
00:52:49
people that started with stage three hypertension, so they're 180 or higher systolic blood pressure, they lost an
00:52:55
average of 60 points uh on systolic blood pressure, not counting the fact
00:53:00
that the baselines were often taken on medication. Um and the final graph here that you've
00:53:05
got uh is percent in lean mass. So lean mass also go down in fasting because lean mass again,
00:53:11
lean mass is your your fluids, your muscle. Lean mass goes down but then it recovers during refeeding and
00:53:17
re-elementation and the percentage of lean mass which includes your muscle mass at six week followup was actually
00:53:23
higher in those patients than it was at baseline. Are they exercising there during recovery? They are not during
00:53:29
fasting. Okay. And you mentioned PCOS earlier on when we were talking about the implications for women. Have you ever
00:53:35
done any studies or had patients come to your fasting clinic that have symptoms of PCOS? Yes, we treat uh we've had, you
00:53:41
know, dozens and dozens of patients with polycystic ovarian syndrome and it's a condition that responds consistently to
00:53:47
fasting. It also responds to diet and lifestyle change, but understand many of the people that have made the diet
00:53:52
changes but are not been successful are then referred to us for fasting. We always want to try the diet first
00:53:59
because a lot of things resolve just by getting a person on a good diet and exercise program. and PCOS for people that don't know. I'm sure a lot of men
00:54:05
don't know about PCOS, but some of them will because they might have fertility problems with their partner. My partner's been very public that she has
00:54:12
PCOS. Um, and she's found that the ketogenic diet, removing sugar from her
00:54:19
diet, has had a profound impact on recalibrating her menstrual cycle. Her menstrual cycle was very um
00:54:25
inconsistent, irregular, could be up to 60 days or longer or not at all. And then when she removed sugar from her
00:54:32
diet and um carbohydrates, it's now perfect, right? So it's like every 28 whatever days it
00:54:38
is. And so I was wondering if you know there's lots of women that suff suffering with a variety of different hormonal challenges or things like PCOS
00:54:45
if you have any case studies from your clinic of that resetting their menstrual
00:54:51
cycles or you know reversing the symptoms of PCOS. Right. It's not uncommon for us to have
00:54:57
women that, for example, have their plumbing's good in terms of their tubes and whatnot, but they're having
00:55:02
difficulty initiating pregnancy. They fast, they reboot, and sure enough, within a cycle or two, you know, they're
00:55:08
able to achieve pregnancy. And it's not unusual to have people that have uh disrupted uh dysmenoria, menorasia, etc.
00:55:16
within usually not the very first cycle, but the second cycle will normalize uh function. And I think the reason for
00:55:22
that is the hormones and stuff that for the next cycle are already kind of set up and where you see the change is often
00:55:28
you know at that 6 week follow-up. So let's be clear because if you fast it it is a form of stress on the body isn't
00:55:34
it? From everything I know about sort of evolution. If you're fasting your menstrual cycle is probably going to
00:55:40
stop if you're doing an extended fast because your body sends a signal to say listen we don't have the resources in
00:55:45
here to to give a kid life so we're going to shut down. If you take yourself
00:55:50
below optimum weight or below optimum fat, yes, that's true. Disre, you know, uh, disruption of menstrual cycle
00:55:56
happens with excess weight loss of any kind or rapid weight loss. Um, but for the patients that were fasting, often
00:56:02
times it's quite the opposite. They're able to actually normalize their hormonal cycle. And as I mentioned, it
00:56:07
may be the conversion of estradiol to estriol because of improvement in the gut microbiome that's responsible for
00:56:12
normalization of that and other hormonal issues that maybe we haven't even been able to measure yet. Because your your
00:56:18
body needs energy to do to perform its menstrual cycle. That's like it's am I right my thinking there that if the body
00:56:25
senses you don't have the energy to have a baby it's going to shut down your menstrual cycle because having a baby
00:56:32
would I think if it doesn't have the reserves. So if you're in the thing is many
00:56:37
patients though even though they're fasting they aren't in a depleted state and so you don't see universal disruption of menstrual uh function
00:56:44
because people are fasting. Um, but you know, athletes often times see it when their percent body fat goes too low,
00:56:50
they will become a minoric. Do you see when someone comes to your clinic and does one of these extended
00:56:56
fasts that there's other areas of their life that also improve that are completely sort of like unrelated to
00:57:03
the benefits from the fast and I'm talking about willpower here and their ability to motivate themselves and be
00:57:09
disciplined and persistent. And there's I don't think there's any question that those factors are
00:57:15
involved. You know, it's also just education and fear. People think if they get on a plane in New York and they flew
00:57:20
to California, they would die of starvation over Colorado, they think the pretzels that they ate saved their life.
00:57:25
And once people have fasted for 5 days or 10 days or 40 days, the idea of having to skip a meal doesn't seem quite
00:57:32
so terrifying. You know, if there's not something that they that's healthful eating, they just skip the meal until
00:57:38
the next one. and they're not afraid of the of the that they're going to die or that they're going to enter starvation
00:57:43
or they're going to have depletion. A lot of people have a lot of fear in their head that's completely uh illogical, unnecessary,
00:57:50
and harmful. It's so true. When you tell me that someone can actually fast for how what's the longest a person could fast for?
00:57:56
Well, without severe consequences. They say that a 70 kg male could fast about 70 days, but the longest we fast
00:58:03
people is 40 days. And what happens is you get beyond 40 days, everything gets a little bit more delicate. You have to
00:58:09
be a lot more careful with electrolyte balance and other things. And so 40 days, understand is only 1% of our
00:58:14
patients. The vast majority are fasting between 2 weeks and 4 weeks. So it's,
00:58:20
you know, it's 10 days or 14 days or 20 days. That's where the big bell curve is. You have a a small uh number of
00:58:27
people that need to fast longer than that. And you see this as a medical intervention. You don't see this as
00:58:32
something that these people should be doing on a frequent monthly basis. You see this as a medical intervention for
00:58:38
people with specific issues predominantly. I think that everybody should fast every day for 12 hours. I think that everybody
00:58:45
including healthy people would probably cons should at least consider fasting once a year for a week and that anybody
00:58:51
that has a condition where it's appropriate to fast should fast however long it takes to resolve the condition, however frequently it takes to get well.
00:58:58
So we do have some patients that were fasting two or three times during a year because they can't fast long enough the
00:59:03
first fast to to resolve the condition. Uh but you know they don't have enough reserves to be able to do you know a
00:59:09
longer fast. So we will we will do it periodically until the condition resolves. And what are the safety concerns with
00:59:15
water fasts? Yeah. Well, the biggest uh and most obvious concerns are orthostatic
00:59:23
hypotension. When people are used to having high blood pressure and you lower their pressure, their brain's used to
00:59:28
higher profusion levels. So, when you drop the pressure, they can get dizzy dizzy at first until they get used to having normal blood pressure. And you
00:59:35
don't want people falling over and fainting and, you know, breaking something or having a problem. Dehydration is an ametic effect of
00:59:42
fasting and it's important part of stimulating the healing crisis. But you also don't want to get somebody so
00:59:47
depleted that they get into, you know, cardiac dysriythmia or they have, you know, problems. And that's why we
00:59:53
monitor people twice a day and we make sure that, you know, they maintain uh balance. You know, one of the things we
00:59:59
did in can fasting save your life is we laid out all the protocols of fasting so a person could really understand what's
01:00:05
going on in fasting. You know, what the benefits are, but we also wrote it so that their physicians would stop
01:00:10
thinking they're crazy because they're interested in doing something like that. Because at first blush, this sounds like
01:00:16
kind of crazy that you're going to have a person do take nothing but water for a
01:00:22
prolonged period of time and somehow that's going to be a good thing. But when you really look at the science and
01:00:27
you look at the experience we've had, you found that when it's done according to protocol, it is a safe and it can be
01:00:33
an effective intervention at giving the body a chance to heal itself. What are the big misconceptions about
01:00:38
fasting that you encounter consistently? Well, one thing is people think that you're going to become depleted because
01:00:45
they don't understand the recycling capacity of the body when fasting is done properly and that they're going to
01:00:51
deplete their muscles and that the weight they lose in fasting is immediately regained after fasting. So
01:00:56
there's no, you know, beneficial reproportioning of the body composition.
01:01:01
And they're driven by the fear, uh, and I think instinctive fear that, you know, we're designed to be intimately
01:01:08
concerned about getting enough to eat because in a natural setting, that's a constant biological imperative. You're
01:01:13
always struggling. Try to get enough to eat. And because we live in a constant state of deprivation in a natural
01:01:18
setting, the use of fasting was never anything other than a survival tool, some an adaption the body could make
01:01:24
only under force, not by choice. But it is interesting that every major
01:01:30
religion, the Jews, the James, the Hindus, the Muslims, the Christians, the Buddhist, all have a deep respect and
01:01:37
tradition about fasting. There's a reason because it changes the way you feel about yourself and the world around
01:01:42
you. It's so linked to spiritual traditions like meditation and clarity of mind and
01:01:48
spiritual experiences and I think because it is difficult to do that you know some of the benefits
01:01:54
you mentioned earlier maybe part of the you know part that are hard for us to quantify. Yeah. What is the most important thing
01:02:01
we haven't talked about as it pertains to fasting that we should have talked about? We haven't talked about the different
01:02:07
kinds of mechanisms which might be going on in fasting uh that sometimes people are interested. We talked about weight
01:02:13
loss. You know, that that's kind of an obvious one. If you don't eat, you're going to lose weight. But there's also a
01:02:18
naturicetic effect. The body gets rid of the excess sodium accumulated in the body. Uh and that has a profound effect
01:02:25
because literally people will lose several pounds of fluid a day early on in fasting just because the body's been
01:02:31
holding on uh to this in order to buffer the effect of sodium. Sodium, you know, you think about it. You take a tablespoon of it's a medic. It'll make
01:02:38
you throw up. If you take enough of it, it'll kill you. it'll actually have there's an LD50 with it even though it's
01:02:43
an essential nutrient in small amounts in excess quantity it's associated with hypertension and not to mention obesity
01:02:50
and you might say well why would sodium which has no calories make people fat
01:02:57
and it's because sodium stimulates what's called passive overeating so if you eat till you're full of anything say
01:03:03
brown rice you just eat till you reach your satiety you don't want anymore everything else being equal salt that
01:03:08
rice up and eat till you're you'll eat more before you feel satisfied. And people say, "Yeah, cuz it tastes
01:03:14
better." But that's what tasting better means. It means it results in more dopamine stimulation in the brain. So
01:03:20
your brain is going to get fooled with salt. And if you take some foods, like for example, bread, the staff of life,
01:03:26
1500 calories a pound before you turn it into a butterboat and spread coagulated cowpas all over it. And you remove the
01:03:32
salt, oil, sugar, and yeast. What do you get? It's called matzah. And it's punishment on Passover. Nobody's getting
01:03:38
fat eaten matzah. But they're certainly having trouble with bread and bread related products. And it's because the
01:03:44
the the wheat and the water become a carrier agent for these chemicals. Take
01:03:50
beef, boil it, and gnaw on it. Do you like plain boiled beef? Not so much. It's a carrier agent for the sauces, the
01:03:56
salt, the the things that that it's carrying to the pallet. So, we're using ultrarocessed foods as carrier agents
01:04:03
for these chemicals. And that's why we're in trouble. 70% of the calorie of the average person is ultrarocessed
01:04:08
foods. And we haven't even talked about the chemicals and other things besides the salt, oil and sugar, the emulsifiers, the other things that are
01:04:14
thought to affect gut gut microbiome etc. So the naturetic effect of fasting is a kind of rebooting effect that gets
01:04:21
rid of the sodium. We haven't talked about detoxification. If you take a fat bopsy of human beings,
01:04:26
a what? A a fat bopsy, a biopsy, you take a a piece of fat or a piece of tissue and
01:04:31
you analyze it, what you find is there's hundreds of different chemicals, PCB, dioxin, pesticide residues, heavy metals
01:04:38
in everybody to varying degrees. People have different degrees of vulnerability to that. In fasting, the body rapidly
01:04:44
mobilizes those materials and eliminates them. In fact, that some people have said, "Oh, it's so does it so efficiently, you shouldn't fast." that
01:04:50
the body doesn't know what it's doing and it would put it out too quickly and it overload your system and so don't do
01:04:56
it. But the reality is the body this is a biological adaptation. It does a good job of mobilizing the materials and
01:05:01
eliminating them. If you take that fat biopsy and you say what where did all those fats come where did all those
01:05:06
toxins come from? As much as 90% of some of those toxins came from eating animal foods which biologically concentrate
01:05:13
those pollution in their environment. And then when you eat the animal food you get its entire lifetime accumulation of toxins. And so when you fast, you
01:05:21
kick in the system you use to get rid of that stuff. And every time you do it, it gets better. And so these are things
01:05:28
that don't necessarily happen to the same degree with our juice fasting or our modified feeding regimes. We talked
01:05:34
about the autonomic nervous system. This is the part of the nervous system that controls all the stuff you don't think
01:05:39
about. Like for example, um if you were to go out running and your heart didn't speed up, you would be in big trouble
01:05:46
and potentially die. But it doesn't it doesn't happen because your heart automatically speeds up and pumps more
01:05:53
blood that you need. And that's controlled by the autonomic or automatic nervous system. It has two parts, the
01:05:59
sympathetic and the parasympathetic. They have to be in balance. And we've invented hundreds of healing systems to
01:06:05
try to rebalance the autonomic nervous system. Massage, bio feedback, homeopathy, chiropractic manipulation,
01:06:11
osteopathic manipulation, acupuncture, relaxation, bof feedback. How do you
01:06:16
think all these things make people feel better? At least to some degree, it's to the degree they help rebalance the
01:06:22
autonomic nervous system. The most powerful way to rebalance the autonomic nervous system in my experience is
01:06:28
fasting. Fasting is a profound impact on this autonomic sympathetic
01:06:34
parasympathetic balance. And I think one of the most profound effects honestly is effect on taste neur
01:06:41
adaptation. As I mentioned, we did a study on your how you taste things. And
01:06:46
when you go on a fast, good foods start to taste good. When you first come off a
01:06:51
conventional diet, this kind of food is disgusting, tasteless, schwill. People have no interest in it. They can't imagine how anybody could choke it down.
01:06:58
What kind of food? Well, whole fruits, vegetables, you know, simple foods without salt, oil,
01:07:03
and sugar added to it. They just can't even imagine how anybody could eat that. But after fasting, whole plant foods
01:07:08
start to taste good. And the longer you eat them, the better they taste. you get to the point where you actually would
01:07:14
prefer to eat whole plant foods rather than the salty, greasy, fatty, processed foods that everybody else is eating.
01:07:21
So, these are these are big changes that occur in fasting that are not necessarily as easily objectified from a
01:07:27
research standpoint, but have a profound difference on how people feel and how they live their lives. Yeah, I noticed
01:07:33
that as well when I when I was on the ketogenic diet, I noticed that um the things that I would usually get cravings
01:07:38
for, suddenly there was no no cravings at all. And funny enough, when you're
01:07:44
talking about taste changing when I was on a ketogenic diet, things tasted sweeter. And I don't mean I actually
01:07:50
don't mean because obviously I wasn't really eating much sugar. It was actually some sugar-free drinks just tasted significantly sweeter. They were
01:07:56
zero sugar drinks, but clearly because of some of the sweetness in there, they I almost couldn't drink them. But when I
01:08:02
came off the ketogenic diet and I started having carbohydrates again, those drinks didn't taste so sweet
01:08:07
anymore. But it's your pallet that changes. The ketogenic diet is a fasting mimicking diet. It mimics some of the effects of
01:08:13
fasting, not the least of which is changes in taste, what's called taste, neurotration, or sensitivity. And it's not carbohydrates that
01:08:19
desensitize you. It's refined carbohydrates. Mhm. And so if you get people on a whole plant food diet, you know, fruits and
01:08:26
vegetables, whole whole simple foods, they they maintain that acuity of taste. But as soon as you put them back on
01:08:32
refined carbohydrates, the processed carbohydrates, then they begin to go back into the dietary pleasure trap.
01:08:38
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01:09:42
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01:09:49
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01:10:02
try to point them in the right direction. If they're really interested, they can read our book, Can Fasting Save Your Life, and it will tell you and your
01:10:09
doctor everything you need to know about what it takes to safely get into a fast through a fast and what the benefits of
01:10:15
fasting are thought to be. I'll link all of that below for anybody that is curious and wants to learn more.
01:10:24
Um if and just as a sort of a disclaimer if people are doing
01:10:30
water fasting they should seek medical advice and medical um support. They
01:10:36
should see seek a consultation from someone who knows what they're doing before just trying to do this at home. They want to make sure they're a good
01:10:41
candidate with history exam and lab. They want to make sure if they do fast they're fasting in a restful state, staying hydrated properly and that they
01:10:48
refeed carefully because it can be a serious problem if you don't do it properly. Is there a particular case study that
01:10:54
comes to mind when you think about the power of fasting? I know you talked a little bit about the lady that had
01:10:59
lymphoma which I read about in the British Medical Journal in I think it was 2015 was published. I I think even more powerful than
01:11:05
individual case reports are these studies that we've done involving dozens and in some cases uh almost 200 people
01:11:13
uh and the consistency of the data. this works is the most effective treatment
01:11:19
that's ever been shown in treating the leading cause of death and disability, which is high blood pressure and its consequences. If a person has essential
01:11:26
hypertension and they fast long enough, they're going to normalize their blood pressure. And if they're willing to do
01:11:31
dangerous and radical things like eat well, exercise, and get to bed on time, they can sustain those results.
01:11:39
We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question left for you is quite a tricky
01:11:45
one, but it's interesting. It is, what is the biggest lie that you think is ruining most people's life?
01:11:53
I think one of the biggest mistakes is that people think that health comes from pills, potions, powders, and treatments
01:12:00
instead of healthful living. Health is the direct result of healthful living, and that means diet, sleep, exercise.
01:12:07
But they're hard, especially in the world we live in where, you know, everything I see is trying to play with
01:12:13
the neurotrans chemicals in in my brain to get me to be addicted and to
01:12:18
Well, people are trying to sell the pleasure trap. They're trying to tell you what you want to hear, not what you need to know. What you want to hear is
01:12:24
that there's a way to not do hard things, but still get good benefits. And what you need to know is how to do hard
01:12:29
things so you can be successful. I think that's like the defining trait of the 21st century is like your ability
01:12:35
to do what you know you should for long-term benefits, not short-term benefits. I
01:12:40
think like delayed gratification is maybe the defining trait of the like the 21st century. I mean, we we've all heard
01:12:46
of like the those cookie experiments they did on those kids to see which kids would take the cookie and which ones would wait for two cookies later. But
01:12:53
it's I think the further in my life I've gone, the more I've realized that actually like every self-help book ever written could be one page and it could
01:13:00
just say like delay gratification. Like do the thing that is in the best interest of long-term you versus
01:13:07
short-term you. I think that there's three characteristics that everybody uh should
01:13:12
aspire for. Whether it's a mate, whether it's a employee, or whether it's a
01:13:18
friend, what you really are looking for is honesty, integrity, and intelligence.
01:13:24
So honesty means they're going to tell the truth. Mhm. Integrity is they're going to do the
01:13:30
right thing. And intelligence means they're going to do things right.
01:13:35
Mhm. And that applies for ourselves, right, as well. Would it be honest and
01:13:40
have high integrity and be intelligent with your own decisioning? I think those are the characteristics
01:13:46
that determine uh both uh success but more importantly happiness.
01:13:52
The people that I meet that are happy have uh high degrees of all three of those things. Some people are very
01:13:57
intelligent but they don't necessarily do the right thing. Some people are honest but you know they'll tell the
01:14:03
truth but they won't necessarily tell the whole truth. So, you know, you have to have all three, I think, to have a
01:14:11
high degree of uh probability to success. And what are you working on at the moment? What's keeping you busy at this
01:14:16
moment in time? We're uh in the process of getting ready to launch a major study. We're going to
01:14:21
enroll between 2 and 3,000 people for the rest of their life. And we're going to track them and try to see if we can
01:14:27
avoid the average 16 years of dabbility that that greet people at the end of their life. We believe with diet, sleep,
01:14:33
exercise, and periodic fasting, we can avoid the dability that's so common and that make the last 20 years of people's
01:14:40
lives the best years of their life instead of the worst. You know, you said at your clinic you 1%
01:14:47
of patients do the 40-day fast. What who are those patients? What are
01:14:53
they suffering with? What are they struggling with? Because that's pretty extreme. One woman was a dentist who'd had a
01:14:59
traumatic brain injury secondary to getting hit by a t a pole, an outdoor pole at a at a, ironically enough, a
01:15:05
continuing education conference. And she developed a headache. And she'd had constant daily head pain from 8 to 10
01:15:12
every minute of every day for 16 years. And she came in and fasted for 41 days
01:15:18
during which time she resolved to a large extent her headaches. She refed. She had some prodal symptoms, minor, you
01:15:24
know, symptoms. and then did a second 40-day fast six months later. And now it's been 12 years. She has no
01:15:30
headaches. So in her case, she was motivated by like a lot of our patients, pain, dability, and fear of death. And
01:15:36
they were willing to do anything in order to be able to get well, including, you know, a long period of fasting.
01:15:41
Um, so the people that fast a long time often times are very motivated individuals, mostly motivated by, you
01:15:49
know, physical health goals. Not always. Some people are are doing fasting for spiritual or other types of practices.
01:15:55
But most of the people we have are just people that have not been successful resolving their conditions with diet and
01:16:01
lifestyle change with medications and drugs. And you know there they say that it should be the true north health
01:16:06
center the last resort. One of my uh colleagues uh may he rest in peace John
01:16:11
McDougall used to say we were the punishment. And if he had a patient that he would do the dietary changes with,
01:16:17
but it wasn't successful at fully resolving the problem, he would apologize to them and say, "I'm so sorry, but you need to go to
01:16:23
Goldhammer's place. Good luck to you." Cuz he thought that was one of the more difficult things that people were ever
01:16:28
asked to do. I think it is the most difficult thing you ask people to do. Not the fasting. That's not that
01:16:34
difficult. What's difficult is to go back and live in a world designed to make you fat, sick, and miserable and
01:16:40
try to live healthfully and live with integrity and deal with the social outflux of being successful.
01:16:46
And as I said, a lot of times the people that I see that have the easiest time are the ones that aren't necessarily the most sociable kind of people.
01:16:53
Thank you so much for the work that you do because it's it's it's fascinating and you you're providing another alternative treatment to people who are
01:17:01
very often out of out of choice. Before I came here today, my wife said, "Don't
01:17:06
be nervous to talk to him because it's just like, you know, I speak a hundred times a year to 50 to 100 people."
01:17:13
And I and I said, "Yeah, Jennifer, it's just like talking to 50 to 100 people except doing it every day for 400
01:17:19
years." Thanks for getting the word out. Well, no, my my audience are
01:17:25
open-minded. They're smart. They're savvy. They're curious, I hope, as well. So it's it's really fascinating and I
01:17:32
think you know when we think about these longer fasts we often focus on the
01:17:37
physiological changes that are going to take place like we talked about the glycogen reserves being depleted and the
01:17:43
ketone bodies and all these things and the betham mah hydroyate or whatever that big word was but I actually think
01:17:49
there's the really unappreciated part of all of this is the psychological change that takes place when you realize that you can accomplish something but also as
01:17:56
you said when you're you sort of rebalance and reset your your dopamine levels and um when you your your chain
01:18:05
your taste adapts to the fasted state
01:18:10
and how that can act as an intervention, a psychological and physiological intervention just to
01:18:16
reset you a little bit. Every year I I I do ketosis at least once, maybe sometimes twice or three times. I have a
01:18:21
ke ketogenic diet and it is it's like a it's like a tremendous reset of my habits. So like resets my habits. It
01:18:28
resets my urges, my cravings. So think about when a patient goes to a medical doctor and they say, "Oh, I have
01:18:34
high blood pressure." And they say, "Listen, we promise you if you do exactly what we tell you, we guarantee
01:18:39
you you'll never get well. You'll be sick the rest of your life and you'll be on these drugs forever." And there's not
01:18:46
a one I've had so far that that turns out to be true for. It changes their entire paradigm
01:18:53
when they get overcome the problem that supposedly is helpless and hopeless and nothing can be done.
01:18:59
Changes their it changes their view of reality. Of course. And I mean what you're speaking to there is learned
01:19:05
helplessness where if someone tells you there's nothing you can do then you do fall into I mean the studies show this you fall into a state of learned
01:19:10
helplessness where you actually stop trying to help yourself and you submit. I was reading I was actually reading a
01:19:16
study the other day about rats who who fell into a state of learned helplessness because uh Oh, and they won't even
01:19:21
they won't even try anymore. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's a really good example. Yeah. The same happens with humans. If you if
01:19:27
someone tells you something something can't change, you're stuck. You're [Â __Â ] When you're ready to have a life-changing experience, we'd love you
01:19:34
to be our guest. Come to the center. Do a bit of a fast. I'm telling you, you're a great candidate. You'll have a intense but,
01:19:40
you know, positive experience, okay? And uh we'll make sure that if you walk in, you walk out.
01:19:46
Okay, good. That's a prerequisite of my visit. Thank you so much, Dr. Coleman. Keep doing what you're doing.
01:19:51
Thank you. Thank you. Make sure you keep what I'm about to say to yourself. I'm inviting 10,000 of you
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I will speak to you there. [Music]
01:21:04
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