Dr. Joel Fuhrman on Preventing and Reversing Disease with a Nutritarian Diet

September 20, 2018

Dr. Hotze visits with world-renowned physician, micronutrient expert and New York Times Best-Selling Author, Dr. Joel Fuhrman. His practice is based on his nutrition-based approach to heart disease, obesity and chronic disease, with a nutritarian diet.

Podcast Transcription:

Stacey: Welcome to Dr. Hotze’s Wellness Revolution. This is Stacey Bandfield here with Dr. Steven Hotze, founder of the Hotze Health & Wellness Center, and if you have not downloaded our podcasts yet, please do so. All you have to do is go to hotzepodcast.com, that’s H-O-T-Z-E podcast.com.

I am so excited about this show, Dr. Hotze. You finally have Dr. Joel Fuhrman on the program, and not only do we recommend his book all the time to our guests, isn’t that right…

Dr. Hotze: Right, Eat To Live.

Stacey: …one of his famous books, Eat To Live, but he’s come out with another book recently, as well. He’s very passionate about natural approaches to health. Can’t wait to get his perspective on how he can help our audience.

Dr. Hotze: Thank you so much, Stacey, and thank you for joining us today on Wellness Revolution. I told you many times that I believe that you and every individual needs a doctor who can coach them, who has the know-how to coach them onto a path of health and wellness naturally, without using pharmaceutical drugs, so that as you mature, you’ve got energy, you’ve got vim and vigor, you’ve got get-up-and-go, and you’ve got enthusiasm for life.

If that makes sense to you, you’re listening to the right program, because today we have an interview with a tremendous leader in natural approaches to health, particularly in regards to nutritional approaches to health, and it’s Dr. Joel Fuhrman. You have probably, if you’re at all interested in your health, and I presume you are or you wouldn’t be watching this podcast, you know that Dr. Fuhrman is the author of six New York Times bestsellers: Eat To Live, which we use in our practice and give to our guests, Super Immunity, The End of Diabetes …the end of diabetes, imagine that…Eat To Live Cookbook, The End of Dieting, and a book I just read last night, The End of Heart Disease, which Dr. Fuhrman promotes as being completely preventable.

He advocates, he tells his audiences, his patients, his colleagues, both in the conventional and natural realm, heart disease is preventable, and I believe this wholeheartedly. I appreciate Dr. Fuhrman’s strong stand on this. He’s a physician who currently has a practice in New Jersey. He’s the president of the Nutritional Research Foundation, and we’re going to learn about his nutritional approaches to health. He’s been in practice for over 25 years, using nutritional approaches to health, as opposed to pharmaceutical approaches to health, to help his patients with diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, kidney disorders, obesity, degenerative arthritis, a host and slew of diseases, bowel disorders…

He’s helped them get well by eating correctly. Now, what a novel idea. Oh, by the way, there was somebody who said that early on in the history of medicine. His name was Hippocrates. Guess who he was? He was the Father of Medicine, and he said, “Let food be your medicine and let medicine be your food,” and if any physician in the country exemplifies that philosophy, it’s Dr. Joel Fuhrman.

Dr. Fuhrman, thank you for joining us today on Wellness Revolution.

Joel Fuhrman: Well, thank you so much, and thanks for that warm and complimentary introduction. Really appreciate it.

If I could just make one clarification that I don’t practice at Northern Arizona University. We just have a research office there that’s…

Dr. Hotze: I got you.

Joel Fuhrman: …has some researchers, PhDs, doing research projects. I actually live in Flemington, New Jersey now…

Dr. Hotze: New Jersey, right.

Joel Fuhrman: …and I practice here in New Jersey, and I also have a retreat in San Diego, California, so I’m all over the country, but I don’t practice in Arizona. But I do go to Arizona a lot and work with the research team there.

Dr. Hotze: Right. I apologize for making that error. I did remember reading that you were in New Jersey. I guess it’s hard for a guy who grew up in the Bronx to get too far away from home, huh?

Well listen, okay. Dr. Fuhrman, how in the world did you go through medical school… you graduated the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine back in ’88. I went through medical school here at the University of Texas. I don’t think we had a class on vitamins and minerals, and I don’t think we had a class on nutrition. I don’t believe we…if we did, I can’t remember it, so tell me how in the world, coming out of a conventional background, an allopathic background like you did, how did you get interested in nutrition?

Joel Fuhrman: Well, I actually went to medical school because of my interest in nutrition. I was on the World Figure Skating team in the 1970s, and I was always reading nutrition books to produce better stamina, not get sick for competing internationally. My father was overweight and sickly, and he brought a lot of books into the house on nutrition, so I just read a lot of nutrition books as a teenager, and when I finished that career as an athlete and I was working, I first entered my family’s shoe business. We had a chain of 10 shoe stores, and I realized that my passion was in using nutrition therapeutically.

I realized that it wasn’t going to be popular, but I knew it would be a niche and people would be very interested in getting well naturally, so I actually decided to go to medical school specifically to pursue the career that I eventually cultivated. It’s been tremendously rewarding, and it’s just so exciting to watch people get well from what most people consider irreversible conditions, like psoriasis, ulcerative colitis, or reversing diabetes, or getting rid of chronic headaches, or resolving fibromyalgia.

I’ve been doing this right from the start for the last 27 years. While in medical school, I was still going to the conventional approach for the purpose of doing my… do you follow me?

Dr. Hotze: Right, I got you. You earned the degree so you could do what you wanted to do, and really didn’t adopt their philosophy of practice.

Joel Fuhrman: Right.

Dr. Hotze: Nor did I. The night I graduated from medical school, Dr. Fuhrman, my father had a banquet for me at The Houston Club downtown, and I was married. My wife was there and my brothers, I have six brothers and a sister, and other friends. He turned to me over dinner, and he looked at me in the eye, and he said, “Son?” I said, “Yes, Sir?” He said, “Don’t poison your patients like all the other doctors do.” And he planted that seed in my brain that ultimately, 12 or 14 years later, gave birth to the Hotze Health & Wellness Center, where we do natural approaches to health like you do, and are totally opposed to the pharmaceutical approach, which we believe is killing Americans.

It’s just so bad, what’s happening out there in the world today, and reading your book, it just made me all the more livid about what’s happening, because you have adopted an approach to treating a plethora of health problems with food. What a novel idea. Oh, I wonder why the drug companies and the doctors don’t teach that. I wonder.

Stacey: Maybe because you can’t slap a patent on it.

Dr. Hotze: You can’t slap a patent and you can’t charge huge fees for doing this. Most physicians treat the disease with either surgery or drugs, and Dr. Fuhrman treats the problems with food. Let’s talk about that. Tell us about your approach to food, your approach to health, common health problems people see as they get older. They get overweight, the vast majority of Americans are overweight, 70%. They have  diabetes or pre-diabetic syndromes. They’re on Metformin or Avandia, a host of other drugs.

They have high blood pressure. They have developing or they have coronary artery disease. They have kidney disorders, poor function of the kidneys. They have  degenerative arthritis. They’re having strokes. They’re getting Alzheimer’s disease. They’re getting recurring and chronic illnesses. They have  bowel disorders. They have  Crohn’s Disease. They have a host of problems. They have  skin disorders, How do you handle a patient that comes in? How can you help them with food?

Joel Fuhrman: Well, that’s really the crux of all this is that, when you’re sick with obesity and diabetes and heart disease and all those issues you mentioned, it’s aging your body prematurely, but it’s also aging your brain, and your brain may even be the worst thing here, because there’s a relationship between, not just losing your intelligence and your memory, but also losing your excitement about life, your creativity, and having a mild form of depression called dysthymia.

What I’m saying right now is that processed foods and fake foods and the conventional way of eating leads to depression, but it also leads to people to being sad and not being happy with their life, so they’re sick, they can’t think straight, they can’t do the things they used to do. They have a poor quality of life, and people are suffering needlessly. And then doctors, they go to doctors and they add medications which we know cause cancer on top of their underlying illnesses.

It’s barbaric, and what I’m saying right now is I give people hope, and what we’re talking about right now is letting people know that they don’t have to be diabetic, they don’t have to have strokes, they don’t have to be on high blood pressure medication the rest of their life. They can normalize their blood pressure in a few months, and they can protect themselves from cancer and heart disease and dementia and strokes, but also what goes along with that is maintaining your memory, your intelligence, your creativity, and your happiness, your ability to enjoy, truly enjoy the golden years.

And that’s why all the people that have really learned the techniques that I teach, which is all about making healthy food taste fantastic, and you’re not losing enjoyment in life, but the point I’m making right now is it’s so rewarding to see these people turn their health around, and it’s so tragic to see what happens in conventional medical circles when people are just given a pill, and they…see these people almost like they’re in prison to their food addiction. They’re prisoners to medical care, and they’re prisoners to the medical problems they suffer with as they get older, and their quality of life is very poor.

Dr. Hotze: You mentioned something in the book that I thought was very telling. You talked about the law of cause and effect, and I want our guests and patients and listeners right now to listen to Dr. Fuhrman explain what he just talked about in terms of cause and effect. There’s a law: For every effect, something caused that to occur. Tell them about… Tell our listeners, tell them, if they have  these disorders, what’s causing the problem?

Joel Fuhrman: The underlying theme of what we’re talking about today is that these diseases that afflict Americans are not natural. They’re not predominantly genetic. They’re not the inevitable consequence of aging. We’re supposed to be living a life from birth to a later death of 100 years old, in great health, being able to be fully physical and fully active, and what we’ve accepted as normal is so sickly that people after the age of 60 are so unable to do anything in their lives. They’re just now couch potatoes, and they start to lose their intelligence by age 70.

The point I’m making right now is that excellent nutrition just puts back our body’s natural miraculous self-healing and self-protecting immune system. We’re not supposed to be getting sicknesses, and when we eat poorly, and the American diet by the way is 55% of calories…processed foods, 33% from animal products, and about 5% from colorful plant foods with all those phytochemicals and antioxidants.

What I’m saying is that there’s an acronym, GBOMBS, G-B-O-M-B-S, greens, beans, onions, mushrooms, berries, seeds, that when we eat this cornucopia and we fill our body with antioxidants…phytochemicals, and there’s thousands of them in natural food, then it protects our brain against aging. We maintain our memory and our intelligence through our whole life.

Our brain is made to go more than 100 years. Your heart is made to go more than 100 years. You could take it out of your body and put it in a younger person who could live another 50 years, who could live to be 150 or 200 years on your heart if you didn’t clog it up with plaque. What I’m saying right now is that these diseases don’t have to happen, and with nutritional excellence, we can have our average life span be so much longer, around 100 years old, and have excellent health, very excellent health between 80-100 to really enjoy our life.

It’s not that hard to do, and you enjoy life more, and you enjoy eating more. The food, you actually taste and smell, improves so the food tastes better. People deaden their taste buds with the American diet, the overly salting, overly sugaring, overly flavoring things, and they can’t even taste the natural food anymore. It has no flavor, and they’re listening to me talk, they’re listening to this show, and they’re thinking, “I might want to improve my health and eat a little better, but no way am I going to give up the things I love to eat. I’d rather die younger than give up the things I love to eat.”

And they don’t realize that their enjoyment of food enhances, it gets better when you’re eating a healthy diet, because your taste gets better and your smell gets better, and you lose taste as you age. You lose taste as your health ages and your medical problems start to multiply. Your taste goes too, so you can’t taste or smell food very well, so people are not enjoying their life more by living on the American dangerous diet. They’re enjoying their life less, and I wanted to make that clear.

I’m telling people that, not only are these diseases preventable, but they’re reversible. Your diabetes goes away within a few months, you’re off your blood pressure medications, your heart disease melts away, your chronic headaches, your skin clears, your thought processing improves, and nutritional excellence is powerfully therapeutic, and much more powerfully therapeutic than medications are.

Dr. Hotze: That is well-stated.

Stacey: Very powerful.

Dr. Hotze: You call yourself a “nutritarian.” Explain that.

Joel Fuhrman: That’s right. A nutritarian, the word nutritarian means eating a diet rich in all the nutrients that humans need to have good health, because most Americans, they’re actually ubiquitously deficient in micronutrients from not eating sufficient high-nutrient foods. I just want to say, the foundational principle in a nutritarian diet is the only proven methodology to slow aging and expand lifespan, is moderate caloric restriction in an environment of micronutrient excellence.

To say that the other way around, as I’m saying right now, that when your diet is very rich in antioxidants and phytochemicals, when it has that full symphony nutrients are supposed to have, it naturally suppresses your appetite so you no longer want to overeat, and when you eat a diet that’s nutritionally poor, you become a food craving machine, and you can’t possibly, you can’t stop eating and you feel fatigued and weak and shaky and headachy if you don’t keep overeating calories.

I’m saying that those three things go together. In other words, you can comfortably moderately restrict and lose your desire to overeat when you improve the nutritional quality of your diet. When you don’t, and you eat the way most Americans eat, you can’t control your calories and you can’t maintain a normal weight, so diets don’t work because people just can’t cut back on calories. You have to eat better quality to do that comfortably.

I’m saying that all the pieces mesh together, and when you eat high-nutrient foods, they naturally contain less calories, but they fill you up. They satiate you and turn down the appetite, so people can successfully restore themselves to their ideal weight, they can comfortably keep themselves their ideal weight for the rest of their life, and they can enjoy eating high-nutrient, good-tasting foods prepared in delicious ways. It’s a technique and a knowledge base that people have to learn, and when they learn it, it’s like setting them free. They can control their health destiny.

Dr. Hotze: Now this is, Dr. Fuhrman’s written about this in his latest book, The End of Heart Disease, and he has a table in the book, and it’s called the ANDI Score. That would be the aggregate nutrient density index of various foods, and the way they get the score is they divide the number of nutrients in a food over calories in a certain portion of food.

They measure all the various vitamins and minerals that are in these foods, and then they divide it by the calories to see which foods provide the most nutrition for every calorie you eat. It was very interesting. I’m a big guy on broccoli and on spinach. I eat that every day. I have a broccoli and spinach salad every day, or I have it in a smoothie every day, and I really had never thought of anything in terms of the aggregate nutrient density index, never seen it before, really.

I don’t know if this is your first book you put it in, or maybe you put it in the others. I didn’t see it. Anyway, the score, nutrition over calories. I’ll start at the bottom of the list. Coca Cola, for every calorie you get, it has a score of one nutritionally. An apple pie as a score of four. You go, “I don’t know. Is that good or bad?” Let’s turn over here, the top, the top most nutritional green vegetable you can eat, guess what it is.

Stacey: Well, I already read it.

Dr. Hotze: Have a look.

Stacey: If I can have a look.

Dr. Hotze: It’s collard greens. It has a score of 1,000. Kale’s 1,000. Mustard greens, 1,000, watercress, 1,000. Spinach is 707, that’s not bad. Broccoli’s down there at 384, not bad but not good. I switched this morning based upon what I read in your book. Instead of having broccoli and spinach juice this morning, I had a kale and spinach juice this morning, and I’m feeling better already, guys. I really am.

This is, it’s important to get this, because-

Joel Fuhrman: I don’t want people to eat less broccoli.

Dr. Hotze: You don’t know how people eat broccoli?

Joel Fuhrman: No, I’m saying I don’t want people to eat less broccoli. Broccoli’s superfood, such a…

Dr. Hotze: Broccoli, broccoli’s…I know it’s good, it’s good for you, but I was just talking about the nutrition, and obviously broccoli’s got some other benefits too. It’s interesting to look at this, and you can see what foods are nutritionally beneficial and what foods aren’t.

Doctor, I know you’re very…Let me ask you this: Would you agree with me that sugar and simple carbohydrates, your pizza, pastas, your tortillas, your cookies, your cakes, your white bread, your potatoes and rice, have a detrimental effect on your overall health?

Joel Fuhrman:  They not only increase risk of diabetes and obesity, but they also increase risk of cancer and dementia. The high levels of sugar that flood to the bloodstream after you eat a processed carbohydrate like pizza or croissants or bagels, those high sugars and the high insulin levels that accompany them, destroy brain cells with every flux of sugar rising up in your system, so the high insulin also promotes angiogenesis, which means it promotes both cellular replication and the ability of cells to get a new blood supply to feed them, which is essentially the mechanism via which cancer is spread.

Yes, I’m saying that pizza and bagels and croissants and donuts and honey and maple syrup as well, that we should get our sweeteners from fresh fruit and sun-dried fruits, because the way nature designed it, it slows the absorption of glucose and you don’t need as much of a insulin response. It seems like a peach might be very sweet or a berry might be sweet, because it’s a different biological effect when eating a piece of fruit than when you have those high simple carbohydrates, as you mentioned.

There’s also that, as you become more overweight, those foods become more dangerous, because the insulin response gets magnified because the fat on the body blocks the uptake of insulin, so your pancreas has to create a lot more insulin. With every extra pound you put on your body, then that high-glycemic carbohydrate becomes more cancer causing, and just to finish the point, these foods cause depression in a dose-dependent manner.

Two servings a week of commercial baked goods or fast foods are linked to doubling the risk of depression, and it goes up from there, three servings, four servings, five servings, in a dose-dependent manner, because people admit and they understand that these foods damage the heart, the blood vessels, and they damage the body, but they don’t see how effective these foods are at damaging the brain and damaging your emotions and causing mental illness as well.

Dr. Hotze: Let’s go back to the inflammation in these simple carbohydrates, which by the way folks, a simple carbohydrate is a starch. What is a starch? A starch is a series of glucose or sugar molecules put together, so as you put them in your body, your body begins to digest them, starting in the mouth with amylase enzyme and all the way into your stomach. Whenever you eat a potato, a bowl of rice, or you eat several pieces of bread, white bread, you’re eating rolls and these sort of things, you’re immediately raising your sugar level.

And that burns up pretty quickly and you get a sugar high, feel good for a little while, and then all of a sudden, you’re starved again. You’ve got to go back for seconds and thirds, and the next thing you know, as Dr. Fuhrman talked about, over time, this increases your sugar level in your blood and it increases the insulin production from your pancreas, which is trying to drive the sugar into the cells to burn it up, but it gets resisted.

Insulin doesn’t want sugar floating around, so the next thing it does, it takes that insulin, it drives it into fat, and it makes you fat. You get high insulin levels when you eat a high carbohydrate, simple carbohydrate like this, and drink a lot of sugary drinks, particularly fructose. That’s doubly bad for you when you drink products that have fructose corn…what do they call it? High fructose-

Stacey: Corn syrup.

Dr. Hotze: …corn syrup and all that. This is doubly bad for you, folks, and it makes you…it will make you sick and it will kill you over time. The inflammation that’s caused by the sugar causes an inflammatory process that affects the body, and it oftentimes settles most commonly in your arteries, primarily your coronary arteries.

And that’s where I’d like to go with this next discussion, is this whole concept of coronary artery disease, and what the conventional doctors do to treat coronary artery disease, which by the way is not caused by cholesterol. Don’t let anybody tell you that you have to get your cholesterol lowered to get healthy and well, and you have to be on a cholesterol drug. Those cholesterol drugs increase your overall mortality.

They’re bad for you. They destroy coenzyme Q10, which makes your heart not beat well, your muscles don’t do well. They’re bad drugs and they’re dangerous drugs. You don’t, in order to prevent heart disease, you’ve got to prevent the inflammation that causes the heart disease, and so as Dr. Fuhrman would tell you, that starts with changing your eating habits. And guess what? Guess who has a choice to do that? You. You make the choice on what you’re going to put in your mouth.

The cause of the heart disease is the inflammation that’s caused by the food that you’re eating, so if you want to have heart disease, let me recommend that you go down and get a Shipley’s Do-Nut or Dunkin’ Donut every day, and have several Cokes during the day. Make sure you got some pizza for dinner and you have pastas, and you’re eating rolls at night and snacking, have a bowl, a dish of ice cream.

You keep doing that long enough, I’ll guarantee you you’re going to get coronary artery disease. You’re going to get obesity. You’re going to get diabetes. You’re going to get strokes. You’re going to be a sick puppy dog, and then you’re going to end up going to the doctor, your conventional doctor, and he says, “Well, I’ll tell you what we’re going to do, we’re going to get you on some drugs.”

He’s going to put you on a diuretic, and you’re going to pee off magnesium, and your pressure’s going to go higher, so he’s going to add a beta blocker or a calcium channel blocker or an ACE inhibitor, and then he’s going to give you something for your sleep, and maybe he thinks you’re depressed, you’re on an antidepressant. Your joints hurt, you’re on anti-inflammatories, which cause increased coronary artery disease, and he’s going to make you sicker quicker.

And then when you get really sick, he’s going to send you to his partner, who’s a cardiovascular surgeon. He’s going to put stents in your heart and do bypass surgery, and they never will address the underlying cause, none of that, the drugs nor the surgery ever address the underlying problem, which is the inflammation caused by the poor nutrition. Dr. Fuhrman says this in his book, and I thought it was interesting: “Every physician has the responsibility to tell his patients basically a risk/benefit of what they’re doing, what the risks are, what the benefits are, what alternatives there are that could solve the problem.”

And I’ll just tell you, having dealt with some cardiovascular surgeons, I don’t know one of them that’s said, “Look, before we go in there and put the knife to you or put a stent in you and do an angiogram, why don’t we put you on a good healthy eating program, Dr. Fuhrman’s program, and we’re going to get you healthy and well on a nutritarian eating program. We’re going to get you eating vegetables and fruits. We’re going to get you to exercise. You’re going to lose weight.” That’s what they really have, they have a moral obligation to do that, because they’re required to do that, and they don’t do that. Why don’t they do that, doc?

Joel Fuhrman: Right. It’s really…Dr. Hotze: Why don’t they do that? Why don’t they do that, Dr. Fuhrman?

Joel Fuhrman: There’s obviously a lot of reasons why. They don’t spend time with patients. They don’t feel they’re effective. They’d be effective…people will listen to them. They do what other doctors do. They do what’s quick and makes the most money for them. They do what’s easiest. They do what you want to…the point here is that, on the one hand, as medical care has evolved over the last 55 decades, it’s such that now what happens is what you just described, people get medications and procedures while the cause continues to allow the disease to progress.

Dr. Hotze: Well that’s…

Joel Fuhrman: What people aren’t told is that, when you put that stent in, you didn’t reduce the person’s risk of having a heart attack. You increased it, because you only treated a small area of the heart, the area that wasn’t the most vulnerable spot that’s going to cause the heart attack, and now you put a foreign body in the heart that can cause new inflammation for a new clot to form.

Now the person has to be on clot-busting drugs the rest of their life, because you put that stent in without getting a benefit, so you gave them a quick fix. We give people what makes them temporarily feel good, even if it damages their long-term health. Whereas I’m saying, and what you’re saying right now, too, is if people got true informed consent, if the doctor sat down with them and just spent 15 minutes explaining how dangerous these procedures were, and how you don’t increase life span or reduce risk of future heart attacks, and the only way to do that is with aggressive dietary change, and if you did the aggressive dietary change, then you wouldn’t need the stent or the bypass surgery. If all that information was explained to the patient, nobody would choose a stent anymore.

Dr. Hotze: That’s right.

Joel Fuhrman: The fact that people are doing it left and right just demonstrates the fact that we’re not informing the patients of what they need to know to make a decision.

Dr. Hotze: It’s the, we’ll call it the medical industrial complex, pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, insurance companies, and the government control it. Most of these doctors have sold out to these various groups. They’re either owned by a hospital or they’re owned by the insurance company, and they’re working for the government, and they don’t have a choice. If they don’t do what the insurance companies require, they’re off the program. They don’t have a way to make a living.

They don’t know how to make a living, because they weren’t taught in medical school how to help people get healthy and well. It’s funny, when you help people get healthy and well, they compensate you handsomely, and you can make a mighty good living helping people get well. They want you to do that. They don’t want this standard care that they get from the medical field.

Now look, we’ve talked about the dangers of sugar. We’ve talked about the benefits of fresh green vegetables and fruits. The dangers of meat, and your plus and minus on fats. I’ll tell you, we have been very interested and advocated a ketogenic diet in many of our patients. I’m even on a ketogenic eating program, and we’ve had great benefits with that. I’m wondering what your thoughts are on a ketogenic eating program.

Joel Fuhrman: First of all, when we compare people eating sesame oil to sesame seeds or walnut oil to walnuts or pecans to pecan oil, we always see that eating the whole nut or seed has dramatic benefits for life span and disease protection. Even in the PREDIMED study, which showed that people who ate more olive oil had lower coronary artery disease risk, when they switched from olive oil to nuts, their heart disease risk went down by another 60%.

In other words, it’s not the fats that we’re talking about. It’s whether you’re getting the fat from a whole food like a nut or a seed, versus a processed food like an oil, and when you use that whole seed, it’s like the whole food. It’s like eating an apple versus apple juice or apple sugar, or coconut sugar versus the coconut. The point is there are fibers, bioflavonoids, sterols, stanols.

We have to get people to make salad dressings, not by putting oil and vinegar, but by blending nuts and seeds with the vinegar and the other flavorings. It makes a completely different biological outcome, so I think what we’re talking about here is that, even when we’re talking about here is that, even we’re talking about…that beans are linked in all the blue zones to longer life. Beans are linked in all the massive studies, like the Physicians and Nurses Health study, to dramatically lower rates of cancer and longer life span.

That we give more credence to a study that has large, thousands of people, many thousands of people, that go on for decades and look at hard end points like death or heart attack rates or cancer diagnoses, and we look at hard end points, the more serious end points, we always see that a diet richer in these natural foods lives longer, and diets higher in meat and chicken live shorter lives.

We’re trying to get people to reduce their oil consumption, to reduce processed foods, and also to reduce animal products to much lower levels. I think that whether your diet is ketogenic or not is less important than whether your source of calories comes from a source of processed foods or a source of natural foods. Are you getting your fat from a natural source, or are you getting it from a processed food source? Are you getting your carbohydrate from a natural food source like a bean, or are you getting it from a processed food source like a bread?

Are you getting your protein from…and we also know that in larger studies like the Adventist Health study, too, that the more plant protein you get, the high-protein plant foods like nuts and seeds and beans, heart disease deaths and cancer rates go down versus more meat proteins and animal proteins, heart disease deaths go up. With that ratio of fat, carbohydrate and protein, I’m less stringent and I’m not focusing on the macro nutrient balance as much as I’m focusing on the micro nutrient quality and the overall level of wholeness and nutrition in your total dietary choices.

Dr. Hotze: I got you. Very good. Dr. Fuhrman, I want to commend you again on just doing an outstanding job in leading a wellness revolution in the nutritional field, and helping physicians like myself and my colleagues here at the Hotze Health & Wellness Center understand better the importance, and the ultimate importance and the primary importance, of a healthy eating program over everything else.

We know this in our center, and I’m not sure whether you do this at all, if you do strictly nutrition. We do replenish with natural hormones. As people age, their hormone levels decline. Women’s hormones get imbalanced, so we use natural bioidentical hormones, natural desiccated thyroid when indicated, and sex hormones, both males and females. We support the adrenal gland with cortisol and other things, and use pregnenolone and DHEA and these hormones as an adjunctive therapy to the eating program.

We know that those people that best follow our healthy eating lifestyle always do better than the people who don’t, and we can give them the same things. The point I want to leave with our listeners, and I want to underscore what Dr. Fuhrman has said, is the ultimate importance of what you put in your mouth is going to determine who you are as a physical person. It’s going to determine your overall health.

If you make that a priority, then you’re going to have a much better life, and you’re going to have much less disease. You’re going to have more energy, and you’re going to have more enjoyment of your life, and you’re going to live a longer life. All you have to do is eat right, this is not rocket science. It’s cheap. It’s the cheapest thing you can do is eat right. In fact, it costs more money to eat unhealthy. You’ve got to go buy unhealthy food, and it’s always more expensive than fresh fruits, fresh vegetables, good meats or good oils.

Dr. Fuhrman, I really appreciate you being here. Would you like to make one last comment and one charge to our listeners?

Joel Fuhrman: Yes, I’d like to say that this is all about taking control of your health, and don’t be satisfied with being sick. You can get well. Whether it’s an autoimmune disease like rheumatoid arthritis or psoriasis, or it’s asthmatic, people can totally get well and they shouldn’t be satisfied just going to doctors and taking drugs. For people seriously ill with diabetes or heart disease, instead of going to the hospital to have your chest cut open, I have a retreat where people can come for two to three months, and we can feed them impeccably well with foods we grow on the premises.

We get them totally well again, and we discharge them with no heart disease, with no more cholesterol, with no more high blood pressure, with no more diabetes, and they learn how to make the food. In other words, even the most sick people can get well. Even the people with advanced conditions can reverse their conditions, so I’m saying to people, don’t think this is not for you. Don’t think it’s too late for you. Don’t think you’re too old, too sick, or you just can’t eat this way. You can learn to love it, and it’s so effective you will…you’re going to love it if you get into it.

I’m just being encouraging and hopeful to let people know they can get better if they want to.

Dr. Hotze: Let’s talk about your retreat, your facility. Where is it located where people come and live? Where is that located?

Joel Fuhrman: It’s located in San Diego, California, outside of San Diego.

Dr. Hotze: And what’s the name of it?

Joel Fuhrman: The Eat To Live Retreat.

Dr. Hotze: The what? Eat To Live Retreat, okay great.

Joel Fuhrman: Eat To Live, Eat To Live Retreat.

Dr. Hotze: Right. Now, they can go on www.drfuhrman.com and find out about this?

Joel Fuhrman: Absolutely.

Dr. Hotze: Or you can go to Eat To Live Retreat, I presume, on Google, right?

Joel Fuhrman: To drfuhrman.com right now. It’ll be there on our page.

Dr. Hotze: Okay, that’s dr, D-R, F as in Frank, U-H-R, M as in Mary, A-N .com, drfuhrman.com, and you can find about his books. If you want to purchase his books, you can probably get them online at his location, or you can go to Amazon, I’m sure, and get them as well. And you can find out about his medical retreat facility, where you can go if you need some care, more than just coming in to our center for a day. You want to go and spend several weeks or a month getting yourself healthy, Dr. Fuhrman provides that. He’s done a tremendous job.

Dr. Fuhrman, I’m going to have one other quick question. It popped into my mind. Give me a quick comment on nightshades.

Joel Fuhrman: It only affects one in 20 people, and out of the one in 20, some can eat moderate levels of them and some can be doing none, but it’s not a major factor for the vast majority of people. It’s only people who are more sensitive to it.

Dr. Hotze: Right. Just to let you all know, nightshades would be tomatoes and-

Stacey: Tomatoes.

Joel Fuhrman: Peppers.

Dr. Hotze: Peppers and those sorts of things.

Right, so anyway, thank you for that. Again Doctor, thank you so very much for your leadership and all you’ve done. It’s been a privilege to have you on our program today, and I’ve learned a lot and been challenged by your confidence and your excitement in what you do. It’s recharged my batteries. Thank you, sir.

Stacey: Yes, thank you.

Joel Fuhrman: Thank you. Good luck to you, and best of health to you guys and all your listeners.

Dr. Hotze: Okay, God bless you now.

Stacey: If you  want to find out more information about doing a 180, taking charge of your health, if you’re sick and tired of being sick and tired, we’d love to have a conversation with you. All you have to do is pick up the phone and call us: (281) 698-8698, that’s (281) 698-8698. Thank you for joining us here today at Dr. Hotze’s Wellness Revolution.

Categories: Blog, Blog English, Health and Wellness, Healthy Living

Tags: Dr. Joel Fuhrman, eat to live, nutritarian diet, preventing and reversing disease, reversing heart disease

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