Michael Klaper, MD Is Educating The Next Generation of Doctors

Today we honor this long-standing tradition with one of my favorite medical minds. Meet Michael Klaper, MD. For the past 40 years, Dr. Klaper has distinguished himself as a gifted general practitioner, internationally recognized teacher, and sought-after speaker on diet, health, applied plant-based nutrition and integrative medicine. I became acquainted with Dr. Klaper during his eight-year term at the TrueNorth Health Center in Santa Rosa, California. A nutrition-based medical clinic specializing in therapeutic fasting and health improvement through a whole-food, plant-based diet, TrueNorth is renowned for successfully navigating people to better well-being through non-intervention lifestyle protocols. In addition, Dr. Klaper served as an advisor to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) project on nutrition for long-term space colonists on the moon and Mars. He was also a member of the Nutrition Task Force of the American Medical Student Association and served as the Director of the non-profit Institute of Nutrition Education and Research. Diet is key to reversing many of the most feared degenerative diseases known to medicine. And yet, applied nutrition is not typically integral to medical school curriculums. To solve this problem, Dr. Klaper partnered with PlantPure Communities to form Moving Medicine Forward, a medical school nutrition education initiative designed to change the way future doctors treat their patients through improved nutrition and lifestyle education. The most important work of his career, Dr. Klaper lectures at medical schools nationwide, educating students on using plant-predominant nutrition and positive lifestyle changes to truly heal their patients -- and ultimately improve the health of future generations. Early in his career, Dr. Klaper realized that many of the diseases his patients brought to his office were made worse, or actually caused by the high-fat, high sugar, overly processed Standard American Diet. When he began treating his patients not with pharmaceuticals and surgical interventions but instead with diet and lifestyle protocols -- specifically a whole-food, plant-based diet and active lifestyle -- he started getting unprecedented results. Over time, he observed his patients miraculously reverse a litany of chronic ailments, including atherosclerosis, high blood pressure, hypertension, obesity, adult onset diabetes, and even some forms of arthritis, asthma, and autoimmune disease. Today Dr. Klaper shares his wisdom and experience, picking up where we left off in our first podcast conversation, published six years ago to the day (RRP #77). We discuss his mission to help empower the next generation of doctors to better heal their patients. And we explore his dream of eradicating the chronic lifestyle epidemics that unnecessarily afflict millions of people every single year. The visually inclined can watch it all go down on YouTube. And as always, the audio version streams wild and free on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. The most energetic and youthful 72-year old I've ever met, I aspire to this beautiful and gentle man's enthusiasm for life and commitment to service. I sincerely hope you enjoy the exchange. In the meantime, stay safe everyone. We're in this together. Peace + Plants, Rich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Rich Roll?

  Eating well rarely falls apart because of one big failure. It's the daily question that wears you down. Like, what am I actually gonna make tonight? What's in the fridge? And it's exactly why we built the Plant Power Meal Planner. It's a personalized, plant-based meal planning program that matches you with recipes based on your taste, your allergies, your cooking skills, and how much time you actually have. You build, through this program, a balanced, nutrient-dense plan for your entire household in a few minutes. Then, it generates a grocery list for you with one click that plugs right into our delivery partners. All the recipes in the program are built by dietitians with culinary training. Plus, you get your own food coach to help you problem-solve along the way.

• 0:44Rich Roll?

  It's kind of an amazing thing. For listeners of the show, all you special people, we're offering an exclusive $20 off an annual subscription right now. To get it, go to meals.richroll.com, take your quick personalization quiz, and enter promo code RICHROLL20 at checkout.

• 1:05Speaker 01

  It's inevitable that the current edifice of just paying doctors to do things to patients after the disease has already started, to do these very expensive Band-Aid procedures, quarter-million-dollar operation, and the patient limps out of the hospital to go eat more cheeseburgers and pizzas and clog up their grafts so they can come back in and have another one done. That's bankrupt medicine. And the phrase "do no harm" applies to dietary advice as well. And you can really hurt somebody with the wrong diet. And I think a lot of wrong advice is being given. We're not homo carnivorous. We're not flesh-eating apes. And our simian ancestors have been on this planet for 20 million years, eating leaves and fruits. Our bonobo and gorilla cousins are up in the trees today, eating leaves and fruits. Basically, we're plant-eating creatures.

• 1:49Speaker 01

  As long as we eat a plant-predominant diet, whole-plant foods, leaves and greens and fruits and vegetables, your body's gonna thrive on that. And we talk about disease reversal. I was a physician 45 years before anybody even put those two words in the same sentence for me, that these are reversible diseases. The diabetes and the high blood pressure and the inflammatory arthritis, these diseases go away with a healthy diet.

• 2:16Rich Roll?

  That's Dr. Michael Klaper, this week, on the Rich Roll Podcast.

• 2:31Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast. How's everybody holding up? Strange times indeed. All I can say is that I hope this finds you well in this surreal and solemn moment of sequestration and social distancing. And I think it's important to acknowledge the reality of what we're currently facing, and that emotions like fear and anxiety and uncertainty are normal human responses. But I also think it's equally important to not allow these feelings to overwhelm us or to commandeering our emotional state, because there's very little that we can control

• 3:16Rich Roll?

  about what's happening. But what we do have is agency, agency over how we decide to use this time, what we decide to consume, the thoughts that we entertain, the behaviors we indulge in, and the choices that we make about how to respond, not react, but respond to that which we can't control. So do all the things. Stay home if you can. I hope you're staying home if you're capable of doing so. Get lots of sleep, eat healthy, move your bodies. Endeavor to create a routine and a sense of normalcy in your day. I think that's very important. And of course, pay close attention to your information diet.

• 4:01Rich Roll?

  I think it's critical that you ask yourself if and what you're consuming informationally is serving you, and when it acts as a distraction, or worse, a means of keeping you afraid and paralyzed. I also think it's important to echo my conversation with Julie from the other day, to embrace this moment of isolation as an opportunity.

• 4:26Rich Roll?

  Because we're required to quite literally stop, it really is a once in a lifetime opportunity to invest in self-inquiry, to put mindfulness to the test, a rare moment to put distance between you and the choices that you have historically made about how you live your life, so that we can objectively reassess what is working and what is not, what is serving you and what must go. And I think through these lens, and without, of course, minimizing the seriousness and the severity, the extreme severity of what is occurring, I do think it's possible to process this event as a gift

• 5:09Rich Roll?

  and to navigate it with a little bit more grace and gratitude. And for all of you out there who are still in the world, shipping our packages, treating the unwell, maintaining our food supply and our healthcare system, making sure we all maintain access to essential goods, your selflessness is truly, truly laudable. And I think I speak for everybody in saying thank you and that we are very much in your debt. And to everybody out there who's experiencing extreme hardship right now, those of you who perhaps have contracted the illness or are close to somebody who has,

• 5:52Rich Roll?

  and to those of you who have been laid off or find yourselves on sudden unpaid leave without a savings buffer, and to everybody who finds themselves lonely and disconnected amidst this isolating moment, my heart goes out to you, it really does. And I don't have answers for you. I wish I had solutions, I don't. But what I can do is create a space for you with this show, whether it be informational or just a welcome distraction. And towards that end, I've been putting a considerable amount of thought into how to best leverage this

• 6:32Rich Roll?

  platform to be of maximum service. Pre-pandemic, I was able to compile a library of 14, I think 14, relatively evergreen conversations, which I'm now extremely grateful for. And my current thinking is that I will continue to publish those episodes every Sunday night, as usual. So even in the event of an extended sequestration and inability to host in-person podcasts going forward, I will be able to maintain the normal integrity of the show in both audio and video formats for at least the next couple of months. However, it strikes

• 7:12Rich Roll?

  me as utterly tone deaf, and I think on some level even irresponsible, to not also use this platform to address what we are experiencing in real time. And towards that end, my current thinking is that I'll be putting up a show every Thursday directed at contemporaneously speaking to our collective crisis with the idea of providing not just information but perspective and comfort in this precarious moment. My last episode with Julie was the first instance of this. It seems to have been well received. And so despite my severe allergy to remote podcasting, it's just not what I do. I'm not a huge fan of it,

• 7:56Rich Roll?

  but times are strange and we all have to adapt. So I'm actively scheduling some interesting people to engage remotely while also endeavoring how to best maintain some semblance of adequate audio quality. My first attempt will be a conversation with Dr. Zach Bush, who is currently en route from Fiji to Oahu. That conversation is scheduled for Monday, and assuming that I can figure out the technology piece and all goes well, my intention is to publish that conversation on Thursday, March 26.

• 8:33Rich Roll?

  Meanwhile, today's episode exemplifies a momentary return to my normal programming, a conversation that was recorded in late January, pre-coronavirus, with an OG legend of all things plant-based, my good friend, Dr. Michael Klaper. He's a beautiful man. It's a great conversation, and you're going to hear it all go down in a couple of minutes. But first.

• 9:06Rich Roll?

  Okay, so, fair to say, evidence-based conversations with leading clinicians at the intersection of nutrition and functional health are at the very core of this show, and have been since the inception of this podcast. And today, we honor this longstanding tradition with one of my very favorite medical minds, Dr. Michael Klaper. For the past 40 years, Dr. Klaper has distinguished himself as a gifted general practitioner, an internationally recognized teacher, and sought-after speaker on diet, health, applied plant-based nutrition, and integrative medicine. Now, in sort of a career third act, Dr. K is now doing what

• 9:51Rich Roll?

  he considers the most important work of his life: lecturing at medical schools nationwide, educating students on using plant-predominant nutrition and positive lifestyle changes to literally change the way future doctors treat their patients and ultimately improve the health of future generations to come. Today, Dr. Klaper and I pick things up where we left off in our first podcast conversation, published six years ago, almost to the very day, just one day off. That was RRP 77, if you missed it back in the day. And today, we discuss his decades of experience reversing patients' chronic ailments through whole-food,

• 10:33Rich Roll?

  plant-based nutrition, and active lifestyle protocols. We talk about his mission to help empower the next generation of doctors to better heal their patients. And we explore his dream of eradicating the chronic lifestyle epidemics that unnecessarily afflict millions of people every single year. The most energetic and youthful 72-year-old I have ever met. I aspire to this beautiful and gentle man's enthusiasm for life and commitment to service, and I'm delighted to share his message with all of you guys today. Final thought, the world today is very different than it was a month or two ago, and things are indeed evolving rapidly. And it's disorienting, it's confusing.

• 11:18Rich Roll?

  So to everyone who finds themselves scared, or anxious, or lonely, or disconnected amidst the isolation, I just want to reiterate that we truly are all in this together. And although we are admittedly geographically separated, we need not be socially disconnected. And so I encourage all of you to take advantage of the powerful digital tools that we have to maintain and even strengthen your connection to your respective communities and loved ones. Because the more united we can be, the more connected, the better off we will find ourselves, no matter how this crisis unfolds.

• 12:02Rich Roll?

  I hope this podcast helps serve that end for you. And with that, I give you Dr. Michael Clapper. It's great to see you, my friend. I don't see you often enough, and it's a gift and an honor to be able to reprise a conversation that we started, I think it was six years ago. Sitting in the cabin of a cruise ship in the Bermuda Triangle. Seems appropriate, doesn't it? It does. In the early days of the show, we've come a long way since then, but your message has remained consistent. You've done so many amazing things over the course of your career. You really are a gift to health and humanity. So first of all, I just want to say that publicly.

• 12:47Rich Roll?

  Thank you. Thank you. And I'm really interested in hearing more about this next chapter that you've been on, going around to medical schools and lecturing to...

• 12:59Rich Roll?

  Medical students about nutrition, which seems to be, you know, a much needed thing and quite overdue. So how did this whole thing come about?

• 13:07Speaker 01

  Oh, my. Well, Anne Rich, thank you so much for the invitation. It's great to see your smiling face across the table here and commend you for all your wonderful work. You've been an inspiration steadily for me. And every time I hear one of your good interviews, I think I'm getting back on that show again.

• 13:24Rich Roll?

  Yeah, well, here we are.

• 13:26Speaker 01

  I say, here we are. Great. So such an important question that you asked. Modern medicine, and I've been a physician now 47 years, and I entered medicine in the late 60s, early 70s, and seen lots of wonderful changes. And it's become powerful on a level that none of us have been able to conceive of. But there's been this glaring grotesque absence, this black hole. And it comes to true causes of disease, the true powerful healing techniques. And of course, we're talking about what our patients are eating.

• 14:07Speaker 01

  And Western medicine has evolved, or devolved to the point where we practice medicine, we take histories, we order all these tests, do physical exams, and never once ask the patient, what do you eat? Take me through yesterday's eating day. And it's such a huge oversight, because that's by and large, the reason why the patient is sitting in front of us overweight and hypertensive and diabetic and clogged up and inflamed because of what they're running through their bloodstream every few hours. And yet, we just blow right past, as far from the medical point of view, it doesn't even enter the equation of what's

• 14:45Speaker 01

  happening. And that leads to such, not only inefficiency, but everything from wrong diagnosis to wrong treatment, to real patients dying on real operating tables from operations they don't need. So at this point in my medical career, I had to say, seeing another

• 15:06Speaker 01

  Elderly person with constipation is not the best use of my energies. You gotta do something about this. So the campaign, our Moving Medicine Forward Initiative, came from there.

• 15:18Rich Roll?

  And you're doing this with Plant Pure Foundation, right? It's like a 501(c)(3)?

• 15:23Speaker 01

  Yes, I'm very appreciative to the folks at Plant Pure Communities. They entered into an agreement where if people want to support our work, getting me in front of medical school audiences, if they give a donation to Plant Pure Communities, it finds its way to our nonprofit account here. So they've kind of extended their umbrella over us a bit, and it certainly has made a big difference as far as getting some support.

• 15:51Rich Roll?

  So how many medical schools have you lectured?

• 15:54Speaker 01

  So far, we've been to just about 20, and we've got another foray lined up here. I'm going to be going to University of Texas in Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, then University of Arkansas, then we've got to swing through the Northeast, going to be going to Rutgers, University of Massachusetts. We're just up at University of Washington in Seattle, University of Florida in Gainesville. All medical audiences are the folks, are my friends at this point. I want to reach as many first-year students as I can before pharmacosclerosis sets into their brain.

• 16:34Rich Roll?

  I like that. I'd never heard that before. I like that.

• 16:36Speaker 01

  Indeed. The only treatment's drugs. No doctors. There's a better, more elegant way to approach the condition here.

• 16:44Rich Roll?

  So give me a synopsis or like a truncated version of what it is that you speak about when you get in front of these students.

• 16:52Speaker 01

  Well, as I step up to the microphone, I tell them, listen, I'm going to give you the lecture. I wish somebody had given me 50 years ago, 50 friggin' years, as it's been since I was a first-year medical student, 1968. But if somebody had told me, now, what I tell a student, listen, you're going to be learning about these weird and wonderful diseases from smallpox to leprosy.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  But the reality is when you open the door of your waiting room of your clinic or the emergency department or surgical outpatient, you're not going to be seeing patients with leprosy and smallpox, thank God. It's going to be obesity and diabetes and clogged arteries and inflammatory diseases from what your patients are eating. And unless you get real with that, then you're going to miss the diagnosis about what's really staring you in the face and your treatment's going to be inappropriate. It's going to be Band-Aid medicine. If the patient's making themselves sick with what they're eating every few hours, then you're just there to raise their statin dosage or raise their metformin dosage. It's bankrupt medicine. You're not helping that patient. You're perpetuating their problems.

• 17:56Rich Roll?

  Right. So in terms of unpacking the nutrition side of this, I mean, you're coming from a whole food plant-based perspective. I'm interested in how that's received from the medical school community. I mean, obviously, you know, even in the period since we first did this podcast, the movement has grown tremendously. It's incredible what's happening now even versus then. But as somebody who's been in this, I mean, you graduated med school in like 72, right? And then went vegan, I think about 10 years later. So you've been doing this for a long time. You've been treating patients forever. I'm sure there were decades in there where you were this crazy maverick, you know, fighting the system. And, you know, perhaps on some level, you're still doing that, although I would imagine the reception is a little bit more welcoming.

• 18:41Speaker 01

  Correct. Very perceptive on your part.

• 18:45Speaker 01

  The first part of my lecture, and I want to talk science to these young students. And so I've got, it's a two-pronged attack here. One is to convince them that food has anything to do with these diseases. Again, it's using ideology unknown. The autoimmune, we don't know why the body attacks itself, but the smart guys at NIH are working 24/7. And when they come up with the answer, they'll design a mesocillin and give it to us to restore patients to perfect health. Well, it's not going to happen. And so I showed them slides of what happens to their blood after they eat rice and beans and greens and what happens to their blood after they eat a cheeseburger and a milkshake.

• 19:28Speaker 01

  And I show them all the fat in the blood and all the inflammatory proteins, all the things that that percolate through the system hour after hour, not only that, but month after month, year after year. They tell them, then we're shocked when inflammation appears in the body. We're puzzled when the arteries start placking up with atherosclerosis. We can't figure out why the guy's joints erupted with autoimmune arthritis. And certainly that colon cancer that popped out of the colon, gee, that was just bad luck, bad genes. Well, nonsense. It's the food. It's the food. It's what they're eating. These diseases are not supposed to happen spontaneously. It's the fuel we're putting through the system.

• 20:11Speaker 01

  It's we've been putting diesel fuel through a gasoline burning engine. And we get all these, all this dysfunction. So my first task is just to make the connection between food and disease and health, if you do it right. And then we move delicately into the issue of animal-based foods versus plant-based foods and how fundamentally the diet changes. When you put a piece of animal flesh into the intestinal tract two, three times a day, you're going to change everything from the flora, from the bacteria that live in the gut, to the chemistry of the blood, to what you're smearing on the colon wall, to the leakiness that you, of the intestinal wall that you create that leads to autoimmune disease.

• 20:56Speaker 01

  It changes everything. And it's, you know, politically dicey. A lot of folks are, a lot of the students and their professors are into paleo diets, et cetera. But I said, listen, we're basically plant-eating creatures. Our simian ancestors have been on this planet for 20 million years, eating leaves and fruits. Our bonobo and gorilla cousins are up in the trees today, eating leaves and fruits. Basically, we're plant-eating creatures. And as long as we eat a plant-predominant diet, you don't have to be 100% vegan, but if the majority of what goes down your gullet is whole plant foods, leaves and greens and fruits and vegetables, your body's going to thrive on that. And we talk about disease reversal.

• 21:39Speaker 01

  And I put that concept up on the slide, disease reversal. I was a physician forty-five years before anybody even put those two words in the same sentence for me, that these are reversible diseases, these are the diabetes and the high blood pressure and the inflammatory arthritis, these diseases go away with a healthy diet. And so towards the end, I put up a fairly controversial set of slides where I showed them the list of the classic diseases, diabetes, hypertension, et cetera. And I, with another click of the slide, the words reversible comes, these are all reversible diseases. And then the most controversial slide I put up, I click it and I said, I want to heal

• 22:22Speaker 01

  these patients here, don't you? I mean, really, why did you go into medicine? Want to heal these people? They get real about what they're eating, because that's why they're sitting in front of you. We've been, we've been treating the patient's diet like in the Harry Potter movies, Voldemort, you know, the name that must not be spoken, ooh, don't ask what the patient's eating. We're Americans, we can eat whatever we want. Yeah, but your arteries got something to say about that, your prostate gland's got something to say about that, your intestinal tract's got something to say about it, your doctor's got something to say about it, because he's gonna or she's gonna be dealing with the consequences of that. And so let's get real about what the patient's eating, because it's such a powerful factor.

• 23:05Speaker 01

  So, so I've got these powerful concepts to wheel in during the course of my slide presentation, but it's a bit easier, as you implied, because in, now we're in 2020, and in every first, second, third year medical school class now, there's twenty or thirty students, they've seen movies like Forks Over Knives, they've seen What the Health, they've seen Cowspiracy, the light's on, they get that there's something to this nutrition thing.

• 23:33Rich Roll?

  They caught you in, in probably the most memeable quotable scene in all of, was it What the Health or Cowspiracy where you said? What dairy is.

• 23:46Speaker 01

  Cow's milk is baby calf growth fluid. That's what this stuff is.

• 23:51Rich Roll?

  That has traveled far and wide across the internet.

• 23:53Speaker 01

  Indeed, I'm going to have a T-shirt made up with that.

• 23:56Rich Roll?

  Here's the guy who said it.

• 23:57Speaker 01

  Indeed.

• 23:58Rich Roll?

  Right in front of us.

• 23:59Speaker 01

  And so in that way, it's a little easier. There's often allies in the audience among the students. But there's always a bunch of professors in the back of the room with their arms folded and their tongues going cluck cluck. But they'll either get on board or they'll be pushed aside. This wave is breaking and there's no stopping it. Food is really where it's at as far as healing goes and modern medicine has to.

• 24:26Rich Roll?

  Right, so essentially the student body, these younger people are much more receptive to it than the institution.

• 24:33Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 24:34Rich Roll?

  But the institution, you know, is the one that greenlights you to come and speak in the first place, so there has to be some amenability to what you have to share.

• 24:42Speaker 01

  Yes, although you brought up an interesting point that the administration of these medicals, they don't want to hear from Dr. Clapper. The message is disruptive.

• 24:52Rich Roll?

  A lot of eye rolling.

• 24:54Speaker 01

  It breaks their models. And so we go right to the students.

• 24:58Rich Roll?

  They're the ones that get you wrong.

• 24:59Speaker 01

  They invite me in, they arrange, they reserve the lecture hall, they arrange for the Indian restaurant to bring over the samosas for lunchtime rounds. And so we're dealing right with the students. And we ask them to form a nutrition interest group. So after I leave, it's not a one-time drive-by lecture. They start a nutrition interest group. And once a month, I'll Skype in, we'll talk about nutrition-based cases. We'll keep the light on as far as their awareness, how important nutrition is in their patients.

• 25:32Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's crucial. I mean, that was my next question. It's great for you to pop in for a couple hours, but what is the legacy of that? You know, unless they create a curriculum around it or there's some kind of follow-up to, you know, create some momentum around this, then, you know, how impactful can it possibly be? I mean, how far away are we from? From really kind of canonizing nutrition studies in medical schools so that we can create a new generation of people who are well versed in what is so important in terms of treating patients.

• 26:02Speaker 01

  Oh, Rich, you put your finger right on it, of course. And I gave a lecture up in Seattle and Professor Surgery came down afterwards and said, "Nice lecture, Doc, very important, good stuff, but I'll tell you, until the National Board of Medical Examiners starts asking questions on the National Board about nutrition, we're not going to be teaching this stuff. It's enough for us to get in surgery and biochemistry and physiology. Nutrition is just not on the radar screen." And when he said that, I think, you know, he's right. And so from that has come a real initiative, largely spearheaded by the American College

• 26:45Speaker 01

  of Lifestyle Medicine, to get questions about nutrition on the National Board exams. And so we went to the National Board of Medical Examiners and we told them that and they say, "Okay," very begrudgingly, "but we don't know anything about nutrition and lifestyle medicine. You guys make up the questions and we'll put a few of them on the exam." So they put the ball back in the court of American College of Lifestyle Medicine, where I am a member. And so we are now engaged in a process of creating a pool of 1,000 questions to give to the National Board of Medical Examiners and have them take a sample of them to put on the exam.

• 27:29Speaker 01

  So then we can start going to the medical schools and say, "This is going to be on the National Board of..."

• 27:33Rich Roll?

  You're going to get tested on this.

• 27:34Speaker 01

  They're going to get tested on this.

• 27:35Rich Roll?

  So now, it's real.

• 27:36Speaker 01

  Now you got their attention. Oh, no. It's sad, really, because they don't realize the jewel is in front of them. This is the key to the healing again, and they're going to begrudgingly give it a little bit of energy on the test. And I'm afraid, knowing the reality of this, going to be a question about olive oil and another one about getting enough sleep. And they'll give a token recognition, but as far as really getting into plant-based nutrition, I'm going to have to keep working at the coalface for a while to get that reality.

• 28:08Rich Roll?

  Over the course of your many decade career, I'm sure you've seen diet trends and fads come and go. And, you know, it's interesting to see what sticks and what doesn't and what passes. I'm sure you've seen it all. And right now, we're in a moment where we are seeing, you know, the explosion of interest in plant-based diets and the science that backs it up. In lockstep with that, though, there's also a very, you know, strident, growing movement around low-carb eating and the keto diet. And so I'm sure these questions come up all the time, especially with these students and just in general. So how do you kind of

• 28:48Rich Roll?

  think about that? And how do you communicate around those other protocols? And what is your perspective on that?

• 28:55Speaker 01

  Oh, my. There's another show in itself.

• 28:58Rich Roll?

  We got time. We've got plenty of time.

• 29:00Speaker 01

  Great. Okay. Well.

• 29:02Rich Roll?

  I mean, this is like, you know, listen, there's a lot of plant-based people that listen to the show, but there's people that are on different kinds of diets.

• 29:07Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 29:07Rich Roll?

  And I think the reason I'm asking you this question is, you know, for even a very well-educated, motivated listener, or just consumer in general, they go online or they, you know, read whatever's happening and they see the stuff about plant-based, but they also see the stuff about keto and low carb. And it's confusing, even if you're, you know, going to PubMed and, and reading abstracts, which almost no one does, it's still confusing, right? There's science to support different perspectives and it's all very disorienting. And so I'm always trying to drive people towards, you know, what is common sense here? Where, you know, what are the facts really say? What does the science really say? And what are some principles that we can hang our hat on that

• 29:49Rich Roll?

  can guide us in a trajectory that's doable in the context of our busy lives?

• 29:55Speaker 01

  Very important, of course. So we'll put on our miners cap here and

• 30:00Rich Roll?

  We're going to dig in.

• 30:02Speaker 01

  Drill that out. I've heard of. And it starts with a recognition on everyone's part, how toxic the standard Western diet has become. And if you're especially even dabbling in fast foods at all. Every piece of meat you eat is gonna be, come with, with white bread and sugary ketchup and hydrogenated oils and, and the toxic load that comes with, whether it's the peaches or the burgers or the buffalo wings, etc. And all the diets who are serious about getting people healthier, whether it's paleo or keto

• 30:41Speaker 01

  or plant-based, whatever, all of us, we all, we strip away that, that outer hull of toxic foods.

• 30:50Rich Roll?

  We can all, we can all agree that

• 30:51Speaker 01

  We all agree.

• 30:52Rich Roll?

  Standard American diet, the fast food diet is bad.

• 30:54Speaker 01

  Indeed. And once you do that, that, that step alone is a quantum leap, is a huge improvement. And you reduce a huge load of refined sugars and, and fats and foods that are grossly obesogenic. And as a result, people, especially the, the paleo folks, strip out the dairy products as well, and, as well as the oils. And when you take out the dairy, the oils and, and junk flour products, people are gonna lose weight. And the very act of losing weight does good things in most people's bodies. And their lipid profiles get better, their diabetes gets better, they feel better, their

• 31:39Speaker 01

  energy level goes up. And so you see this, this initial improvement in health in, in most all of these dietary styles. And it's enough to provide very powerful reinforcement. I went paleo, boy, I lost weight, felt good, man, that's the diet for me. And, and I hear that with, with the keto folks as well. But as a physician and as a person who respects the biology of this, this body that we have, I mean, no gorilla packs its intestines full of meat two, three times a day like, like we do. And having been in the medical game for so long, I have to say, wait a minute.

• 32:20Speaker 01

  Granted, you see this initial improvement, but I urge you not be seduced by this improvement that you're seeing. Now, what the reality is, you pack that colon full of meat two, three times a day, and you send this surge of cholesterol and saturated fat and oxidized meat proteins through the tissues, day after day after day. As the months go by, as the years go by, this is a recipe for colon cancer, this is a recipe for artery disease, this is a recipe for strokes, recipe for dementia, recipe for autoimmune disease from leaky gut. And the problem, and I put this in my slideshow, so medicines become very segmented, medical

• 33:03Speaker 01

  care has become very fractionated, very segmented. And the odds of you seeing the same doctor when you go back to the clinic are small, doctors move away, patients move away. And the point is, people, especially these young docs make these recommendations, oh, you ought to eat paleo, you ought to eat keto, and then you never see them again. And I ask those young docs, you make these recommendations, you're gonna be around in 10 years when this guy passes his first bloody stool from that colon cancer that your diet spawned? You won't even be around to see it. You're gonna be around in 12 years, this lady's joints light up from the autoimmune arthritis that your diet, this leaky gut gave her? You won't be around to see it. You think you've done something good for her.

• 33:45Speaker 01

  But are you gonna be around in 15 years when this guy has a stroke from that carotid plaque that your diet stirred up in his arteries? You're gonna be around to see that. And that's my concern, as a seasoned physician, who's been in this game a while. Now, what are you really brewing up in these patients' colons? What are you really brewing up in their arteries? What are you really brewing up in their joints? What are you brewing up in their immune systems, in their prostate glands, in their colon, in their breast tissue? And, and the folks who are making these initial recommendations, don't, I say, do you really know what you're doing, doctor? You know, the Fred, do no harm applies to dietary advice as well. And you can really hurt somebody with the wrong diet. And I think a lot of wrong advice is being given.

• 34:30Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 34:31Speaker 01

  We're plant eating creatures. We need to be true to that. You have a little piece of flesh once or twice a week. Yeah, I'd probably get away with it. But, but we're not homo carnivorous. We're not flesh eating apes. And we're meant to run on whole plant foods. And when we do that, the body gets lean and healthy and arteries open up. Inflammation subsides.

• 34:50Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 34:50Speaker 01

  The body has the, has the final word on that.

• 34:53Rich Roll?

  So you are 71 right now?

• 34:55Speaker 01

  Seventy two.

• 34:56Rich Roll?

  Seventy two. I can only aspire to be as vibrant and as healthy and as handsome as you at 72. So for me, it's like, the proof is in the pudding. I mean, you obviously, you know, have been living this lifestyle for a very long time. And you're an incredible living example of the benefits of it. I mean, you're not, you're no medications, right?

• 35:16Speaker 01

  No medications, no.

• 35:16Rich Roll?

  I mean, you know, it's, to me, it's like, there you go. Right? Um, so I look at you, I hear what you're saying. And then I log on to Twitter and I see the debates and the kind of tribalism and the silos and the, you know, unhealth, talk about disease. You know, there's a disease of communication happening right now. And it's become really kind of, I mean, acrimonious is too gentle a word. Uh, of, of people infighting. And you see this even within the vegan community. There was a flare up, you know, this week that we don't need to get into. But, um, but, you know, I, I, I think often, and I don't really participate in that, but

• 35:59Rich Roll?

  I observe it, you know, sort of take a forensic, you know, look at what's happening. And it's deeply concerning to me because the people that are consuming that are just, like I said earlier, the average consumer. And I think it foments more confusion than clarity. Um, and I'm, I'm interested in your thoughts on how we can, you know, create a healthier dialogue and flow of information about these important ideas. Because truly, as you mentioned earlier, people's lives really are hanging in the balance here.

• 36:27Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And you, you touched on, on the, the major points that, that often get lost here. Especially the folks in the plant-based community here. We're a small community and we've got a big idea that we're trying to widely promulgate. And all this petty infighting certainly doesn't help. The public looks at it, "These guys don't have their act together." It certainly doesn't help the larger mission. So, one thing to do is for everybody to take a step back and say, "What are we trying to accomplish here?" We're trying to get plant-based eating widely accepted. And the least we can do is talk civilly to each other and realize that we all are in the same boat, row, and in the same direction

• 37:11Speaker 01

  here. And we're all learning. We're all on the same journey together here. And to have respect for each other's journeys. And if something goes by that you have scientific disagreement with it, then express it civilly, professionally, and back up your reasoning, why. And it doesn't have to be done in public. You can write someone a private email, say, "You know, I saw something you published and you might want to consider point A, B, and C about that, and you want to talk about this." There's a way to communicate civilly and professionally. And that's been one of the casualties here. And we need to, everybody, take a step back. And because we're all friends, we all like each other, it's time to treat

• 37:53Speaker 01

  each other as such, as well as fellow professionals, and get our communications on a level that are not injurious.

• 38:02Rich Roll?

  It's super important. What's your take on this sort of explosion of the carnivore diet that suddenly came out of nowhere and is capturing people's fascination?

• 38:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, like my friend John McDougal says, "People love to hear good news about bad habits. They like that taste of steak in their mouth, so if a little is good, let's do more, it's better." But again...

• 38:22Rich Roll?

  Not even just more, like 100%, you know?

• 38:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, we're not carnivorous apes. This is a recipe for colon cancer and strokes and autoimmune disease. And they're going to learn the hard way. I've already seen the studies showing up in the journals that the folks who eat all the meat have lots of this TMAO molecule in their bloodstream from the carnitine metabolism that these microbes spawn. This is not a karma-free diet, to say the least. And that pendulum's going to swing back hard. And you're going to see the studies start showing out carnivore diet associated with colon cancer, carnivore diet associated with Alzheimer's, carnivore diet associated with... And my left eyebrow won't go up this much when I read that.

• 39:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know. Yep, I kind of expected those headlines, and that's what they're gonna see.

• 39:11Rich Roll?

  In the pantheon of harm,

• 39:15Rich Roll?

  how do you differentiate or distinguish between meat, or chicken and beef and pork, versus oils versus dairy? Like, how do you kind of...

• 39:27Speaker 01

  There's a choice.

• 39:32Speaker 01

  And again, as the toxicologists say, the dose makes the poison. And a teaspoon of oil is probably not gonna hurt anybody. And a small little bite of cheese probably not gonna hurt anybody, and a little piece of meat ain't gonna hurt anyone. It's building your diet around these. Staples is where the problem comes in. And they each have their adverse effects, unique to them. And the very act of cooking meat oxidizes cholesterol, which is atherogenic. It creates carcinogens. It does all these things that the oils don't, and the dairy doesn't. But the oils injure the artery walls,

• 40:12Speaker 01

  and they increase the risk of atherosclerosis formation. The dairy products are loaded with everything from estrogens to leukemia viruses.

• 40:26Speaker 01

  Would you rather be shot or hung? So, they're all pretty evil. If in a survival situation,

• 40:38Speaker 01

  probably the meat would, you know, small amounts would be less injurious. But again, we're talking about tiny, but just small amounts, not making your diet around it.

• 40:49Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 40:58Rich Roll?

  So you grew up on a dairy farm?

• 41:00Speaker 01

  I did.

• 41:00Rich Roll?

  There is, I think maybe we talked about this last time, but there seems to be a high percentage of plant-based doctors that grew up on dairy farms or just farms in general. I don't know what that's about, but maybe it's just seeing up close. I mean, I'm sure that, you know, the dairy farm you grew up bears no resemblance to the dairy farms of today. But nonetheless, how did that kind of, you know, how did that impact like how you think about dairy products?

• 41:26Speaker 01

  Oh, my.

• 41:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 41:31Speaker 01

  It's very profound. And so much of what we're learning about dairy now brings back echoes of the things that I saw again. And this is my uncle's dairy farm in the 50s. And I was a little kid. But a couple of things still are burned into my memory. I remember the air of sadness in the dairy barn. The cows, they were unhappy standing there. And they often had tears. These female cows had tears go from their beautiful eyes. And I realize now today, these are all mothers who've had their babies taken away from them. Every one of them, no wonder they are sad. And they, and they're just standing there getting the baby's milk stripped from them

• 42:16Speaker 01

  as their infant's been taken away. And well, I'm anthropomorphizing. Well, the other remember, other memory that I have is the sound of a mother cow locked up in the stanchion in the barn with her calf that my uncle just took away in the veal pen 10 yards away. And this mother cow is bellowing hour after hour, day after day, the most heartrending, soul-tearing bellows and cries you can imagine because her infant's been taken away. And this goes on for days, three, four, five days and nights. You, these haunting cries are coming.

• 43:00Speaker 01

  And that's the truth of dairy. You cannot get that milk flowing without taking that calf away from the mother. It's a cruel, cruel industry from forcibly impregnating the female cows to taking their babies away to. To killing the male calves reveal to killing the mothers after a few years, they all wind up as hamburger. The dairy barn is a slaughter industry. So the dairy barns are short stopping off place on the way to the slaughterhouse for a few years of calves and milk. And I didn't understand that when I was eight, but I should understand it now. And the memories of those, the tears running down the mom's cheek and their cries against their babies taken away, still haunt me to this day. It's a cruel, cruel industry.

• 43:46Rich Roll?

  So you go vegan in like 1981.

• 43:50Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 43:51Rich Roll?

  And, and from what I understand, I mean, that was, it seems like that was motivated mostly from kind of a ethical, moral compunction initially.

• 44:00Speaker 01

  Actually, there, it was the conjunction of two very powerful forces. In 1981, I was a resident in anesthesiology in Vancouver and I'm on the cardiovascular service. And day after day, I'm putting people to sleep and I'm watching surgeons open up their chest and open up the arteries in their heart. And from their coronary arteries, they're pulling this yellow greasy gut called atherosclerosis out of their arteries. And, and I knew what that stuff was. There was already studies in the journals and talking about what this stuff is. And I realized that I should pay attention. My dad is already showing signs of clogged arteries. It would eventually kill him. And, and I'm, as I'm watching the surgeon

• 44:45Speaker 01

  one day pull a particularly rubbery, slithery piece of material out of an artery, I thought to myself, man, that stuff looks like chicken fat. And a little voice on my shoulder said, it's good reason why it looks like chicken fat, doctor. It is chicken fat and cow fat and pig fat and the fat of the animals this man was eating. So from the operating room, I'm getting this message that if I don't change my diet, that's going to be me on that table, that striker saw going up my sternum. And I really don't want that to happen. I saw those folks and they wake up, they're very uncomfortable. So from the medical side, I was getting the. A very strong message.

• 45:26Speaker 01

  But then, as you mentioned, when I was a fourth year med student at University of Illinois in Chicago, I'd spend my Saturday nights in the trauma unit at big, bad old Cook County Hospital. And, and all night, I would see the worst that humans inflicted on each other, the physical violence, the sexual violence, and the psychological violence. I would be shaking by Sunday morning when I walked out of there. And I vowed, if I couldn't rid the world of violence, to at least get out of my own life, to become a man of nonviolence. And I made a serious study of it. And I got the books on from the Indian Saints and Mahatma Gandhi about leading a life of ahimsa, of nonviolence.

• 46:11Speaker 01

  And so I really started trying to institute these in my life. And so I'm up in Vancouver, and on the cardiovascular service, and one night, I'm out for dinner with a friend of mine, and I'm pontificating about living a life of nonviolence, while I'm polishing off a porterhouse steak at the local Kagan Cleaver. And, and John looks at me with great compassion, says, "That's all very nice, Michael, but if you want to get the violence out of your life, you might want to start with that piece of meat on your plate, because in satisfying your desire for the taste of flesh in your mouth, you are paying for the death of the animal, and for the next one in line, that's a slaughterhouse." Well, soon as he said that, in my head, all the rationales, you know, "Oh, well, that's

• 46:56Speaker 01

  what they raised them for, and the animal's dead already," you know? But before the words could come out of my lips, the, that little voice said, you know, "He's right. He's right." And when I went out to pay for the meal, I felt complicit in a crime, because I remembered the cows on the farm, and that, and no wonder she was crying, you know, because they all going to wind up. I remember the bulls being shot in the head, and when a dairy cow stopped giving milk, my uncle would call the farm, the slaughterhouse guy, and he would come with his truck and load her up. I knew the reality of it, and here I was paying for that system to work. And so between what I was seeing in the operating room, and what I knew in my heart from that night in the steakhouse, that was the end of the meal. That was it.

• 47:41Speaker 01

  That was it. The line in the sand was drawn. The line in the sand. And so I adopted a plant-based diet, lots of lentil stews and bean chilies. And my body loved it. Boy, within 12 weeks, the 20-pound spare tire of fat melted off my waist, my high blood pressure went to normal, my cholesterol went to normal. I felt great waking up in a nice lean body every day. And I said, something to this. And at that point, I realized I didn't want to be an anesthesiologist and spend my time putting people to sleep. I'd rather go back to general practice and help them wake up. So I did.

• 48:16Rich Roll?

  When that happened, and you had that kind of, you know, epiphany with respect to, you know, how it impacted your health positively, positively, did you then turn to the medical literature to find support for that? I mean, what, what was the kind of state of the canon of literature at that time?

• 48:33Speaker 01

  There was not much of it, to say the least. Dr. Frey Ellis, a physician in England, had published studies of a fellow with bad angina that was destined for the operating table, went on a vegan diet, and within six months, he's hiking up the mountains in the Lake District in England. And Frank Sacks, another physician, published studies showing that vegetarians have lower blood pressure, they have lower cholesterol. They were already little flickers. And within a year or two, Dr. Dean Orner, who had published his initial studies, and as soon as I saw his studies, I said, yep, that's right. And that's exactly

• 49:15Speaker 01

  what should happen. And so I was getting in just on the early breadcrumb

• 49:19Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 49:19Speaker 01

  stage of

• 49:20Rich Roll?

  Maverick.

• 49:21Speaker 01

  Indeed, yeah.

• 49:23Rich Roll?

  And what did your fellow general practitioner, practitioners in your community think of all this?

• 49:28Speaker 01

  Oh, my. Didn't have a lot of

• 49:33Rich Roll?

  Not much support.

• 49:34Speaker 01

  Didn't have a lot of support. And I knew that.

• 49:37Rich Roll?

  Michael's lost the thread.

• 49:38Speaker 01

  Indeed. Yes. But my patients were getting healthy. That's the point. I found someone in the area to give plant-based cooking lessons. I would send them to my friends. They would give them the cooking lessons. And the same thing started happening with them. And, and it really pushed my medical management to a

• 49:59Speaker 01

  Into the wall in that I had a patient with high blood pressure. I had him on two medications. And I get a call from him and said, "Dy, every time I stand up, I'm getting so lightheaded. I'm almost gonna pass out." And my heart's really thumping away there. And he says, "Well, my wife took my blood pressure and it was 70 over 40." And so I urged those, I said those faithful words that I was urged never to say, "Stop your blood pressure medication, man. You got, that's low blood pressure. You gotta stop your friggin' pills." Well, as soon as I said those words, I thought there'd be a puff of smoke and the ghost of my internal medicine professor would show up.

• 50:41Speaker 01

  "What did you say? Stop his medication? These are lifetime medications. Nobody gets off these pills." Man, not only can you get them off their medication, you gotta get them off. They'll stand up and pass out on you. And so, and so, wow. High blood pressure is reversible and you can, this is not lifetime medication. You can get, get these patients off the, off their medications. Well, once that happened, that broke the old model. And now the door was open. And well, it wasn't long before one of my diabetic patients called me. And they were on 20 units of insulin and on metformin. Type 2? Type 2. And, "Dy, my, I woke up with a blood pressure, with a blood sugar of 30 today. I have a pounding headache."

• 51:25Speaker 01

  And I said, "Well, cut your insulin in half." He calls me two mornings later, he's still running low blood sugars. So I said those faithful words, "Stop your insulin. You don't need insulin anymore." So I expected the puff of smoke. Malpractice lawsuit dropping on your head. Exactly. But got him off his medication. He's now lean, healthy guy, doesn't have diabetes. And so these two patients, once I had this experience, there's no turning back. There's no, there's no denying what I just saw. These, these people are getting healthier right in front of my eyes. And they're so grateful. They're so happy to be off their pills. That people don't wanna be sick. And then people, you know, my other doc friends will say, ah, people, people won't change their,

• 52:08Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 52:08Speaker 01

  diet. They will change. They're tired of being fat and sick.

• 52:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that was the thing I was gonna ask. I, I, I think we're, you know, on this subject of patient care, there is this sense, A, that, you know, people are not gonna change their lifestyle habits, so just give them the pill. That's kind of the conventional approach here. And second to that, we're now kind of in a, an interesting, you know, different type of culture and social climate where it's not exactly encouraged to confront people with the fact that they're overweight or obese, or, you know, it's like fat shaming or whatever, like, you know, don't, you can't tell them the truth about that, or like, you know, you're beautiful and perfect exactly the way that you are. And the, the combination of those two things, I think, you

• 52:53Rich Roll?

  know, makes it more difficult to do exactly what you just explained.

• 52:58Speaker 01

  Yes, and I run into that, but I don't let it stop me. In fact, in my slide presentation, I've got a picture, a plastic model of an obese abdomen. And, and I, and I, along with some obese people saying, well, that's the way I am, and accept me how I am. And fair enough, and psychologically, I've got nothing but compassion for these people. And there's all sorts of reasons why they're carrying this extra weight for the way they were raised, and abuse, and their view of food, etc. There's no aspersions on the person. But from a, but I say from a completely physical point of view, we're talking physiology here, here's what's going on inside that abdomen. And I got a bit, we sliced that obese abdomen

• 53:40Speaker 01

  in half, and so there are two kinds of fat in the abdomen. One is right under the skin, the subcutaneous fat is metabolically active. It produces estrogen. It's the largest estrogen secreting tissue in the body. And if, and you do not want it to be obese with 30 pounds of estrogen secreting tissue pumping out these powerful hormones plastered on your abdomen. If you're a woman, that's a great way to get breast lumps, and, and fibroids, and bleeding, and, and possibly increased risk of breast cancer. Estrogens make the prostate gland unstable. It's a, if you're a guy, it's a great way to wind up with man boobs and prostate cancer. You, you, you don't want the subcutaneous fat pumping out all these estrogens.

• 54:23Speaker 01

  And inside the abdomen, the interabdominal fat that wraps around the intestines, that's a different metabolic cat, and that puts out these molecules called inflammatory cytokines that fan inflammatory reactions throughout the body. And they not only make inflammation worse in joints and arteries, but they also interfere with the action of insulin, and they make type 2 diabetes worse. And people can get all defensive they want, but again, your body doesn't care. The obesity is not a state of health. It's a state of inflammation and estrogen excess, and this leads to shortened lives. So I delicately try and put that across, but to the docs, you guys got to know this. This is really the reality of this.

• 55:07Rich Roll?

  So the subcutaneous fat is producing all of this estrogen, but people are afraid to eat soy.

• 55:14Speaker 01

  Isn't it so sad? And it's a real casualty of this modern internet age. Ooh, soy, who got fight questions, gonna give you man boobs and turn your son gay. Don't eat tofu. Oh, I've heard all that stuff. And it's sad, not only because it's not true, but as you probably aware, the phytoestrogens in soy are actually protective. They actually block the receptor sites that the cancer-causing estrogens are trying to occupy. In the countries where they eat the most soy, they have the lowest rate of breast cancer. And the women with breast cancer who eat soy do better. Their cancers grow more slowly.

• 55:55Speaker 01

  So it's one of these unfortunate media inversions of the truth.

• 56:01Rich Roll?

  Well, it's so strange how certain foods get conflated with gender identity and perhaps diet protocols as well. Like, oh, if you're vegan, you're a soy boy, you know, you're gonna be a whatever. You know, whatever gets associated with that culturally. And it's so strange.

• 56:18Speaker 01

  Oh, it is.

• 56:18Rich Roll?

  If you're eating meat and you're barbecuing, even if you're just buying it in cellophane wrappers at the supermarket, that somehow makes you more of a man in the traditional sense.

• 56:28Speaker 01

  And that's why I was so glad to see the film The Game Changers come out. Hopefully will blow that stereotype out of the water that.

• 56:38Rich Roll?

  It certainly made an impact.

• 56:39Speaker 01

  Oh, it certainly has. Curious to see what you, what kind of feedback you've gotten about that.

• 56:44Rich Roll?

  I was just, I was with Louis Sahoyas the other day, the director of the film, working on some PSAs with, you know, Dotsey Bausch.

• 56:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know that.

• 56:52Rich Roll?

  Working on some commercials with him.

• 56:54Speaker 01

  And I'm, I'm, I'm not part of The Game Changers and I'd never met Louis before, but it was a pleasure to meet him and to talk to him.

• 57:00Rich Roll?

  And, and just to, you know, congratulate him on the impact of that movie. I mean, it's really, you know, it's made a, it's made a gigantic impact. It's undeniable.

• 57:08Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And hopefully it'll start dismantling that stereotype that vegetarians are, are feminine, feminine wimps.

• 57:16Rich Roll?

  But it goes back to the siloing and the confirmation bias and all that kind of stuff. It was amazing to kind of watch, you know, again, from a forensic point of view, all the, um, all the rebuttals and the, the deconstruction pieces and that came out in the wake of that, you know, trying to hold their ground. And, you know, combat the, the, the science and the perspective of that movie. You know, because people want to believe what they want to believe. And, and we are in a very strange time in which it doesn't matter how much science, in fact, you put in front of somebody. They're going to dig in on whatever their, their perspective is. And, and listen, you know, the vegan plant-based community isn't immune from that as well. I see it going on on both sides.

• 57:58Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 57:59Rich Roll?

  And, you know, it's concerning about the health of our culture in general, whether it's happening in the health conversation or in the political conversation. And all the social problems that we're, you know, facing right now. I think it's a real, it's a real problem and I'm not sure how we're going to solve that with the way that tech, technology is headed.

• 58:16Speaker 01

  Really? I agree.

• 58:19Speaker 01

  You know, you have to have faith in the truth.

• 58:20Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 58:21Speaker 01

  And they say you can't keep a hat pin in a cloth bag for very long. Now the point comes out. And the truth is we're plant eating creatures. And when you look at the environmental cost of creating a flesh based diet, it's destroying this planet.

• 58:35Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, that's the other big thing that's kind of occurred in the, in the decade since you began this. Now, there's a whole environmental conversation around the impact of diet on the health of our planet that didn't exist when you began this. And I think it just is another, you know, everybody, you know, has different things that motivate them or that concern them. And now it's just another on ramp into why this is a good idea.

• 59:00Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely. And to the folks who are advocating, you know, paleo diets or keto diets, you know, if they're, I said, wait a minute, if you, everybody already eaten paleo, really are you truly advocating a flesh based meal three times a day for eight billion people? What are you talking about? That is, that's just, you take.

• 59:23Rich Roll?

  We just don't have the land or the resources to do it. Like I'm, I'm in support of, you know, regenerating our soil and the impact that regenerative methods of agriculture can have. And, you know, I had the, did you see that movie, The Biggest Little Farm? That documentary is, you know, some, some, some local farmers here, husband and wife couple, who took a barren plot of land and turned it into a thriving ecosystem through these kind of principles of regeneration. And I think that's great. There's something kind of, you know, beautiful, but also bucolic about that. And, and I think that that is, you know, that's a, that's a move in the right direction, certainly away from, you know, industrial animal agriculture, which is, you know, basically

• 1:00:05Rich Roll?

  the, the motivating force behind our, our Western diet. But I don't think that that model can scale to feed eight billion people. That's the problem. And most people, they'll look at a regenerative farm and say, well, I'm eating this way. But most people, you know, it's like. That's producing very little of the food that people are eating. It's really a pipe dream to think that that's going to be the solution here.

• 1:00:27Speaker 01

  That's the point. And with 350 million Americans clamoring for meat, the steak or the burger that would come off that farm, people would be paying $120 for a first day. And that's just what it really should cost.

• 1:00:42Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's what it should be. And if that's, if we got rid of all these industrial farms and we just had these regenerative farms, meat would be incredibly expensive.

• 1:00:49Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:00:50Rich Roll?

  We could dispense with the subsidies and the like.

• 1:00:53Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:00:53Rich Roll?

  It would create greater balance. And I think it would, it would make people, you know, more mindful, but also, you know, the economic incentives are out of whack right now. They would be in line with what it actually is and the impact that that these industries are creating. I think we could right this ship.

• 1:01:10Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely. People could only afford to eat that stuff once a month. And that'd be fine. People got their meat eating down to one burger once a month. I'd be a happy doc. Yeah, that would, that would change everything.

• 1:01:20Rich Roll?

  Wasn't that the way that it traditionally always was? That meat was a delicacy? These things were, you know, these things were hard to come by.

• 1:01:26Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:01:27Rich Roll?

  So it was a garnish or something special. It didn't, you know, predominate our plate three times a day.

• 1:01:32Speaker 01

  Exactly. $2 burgers are, you know, an obscenity on every level economically as well as ecologically.

• 1:01:39Rich Roll?

  And, you know, sort of likewise, I celebrate the, the innovation that we're seeing with the plant-based meats, with the Impossible Burgers and the Beyond Burgers. But I think, you know, it's becoming more incumbent upon the consumer to be more educated about these foods. Yes, they're vegan, but, you know, they're still coming with the bun and the ketchup and the all the other, I mean, you know, there's, it's like, this is not whole food, plant-based. This is a move away from industrialized animal agriculture, and that's great. And I think there are arguments to be made about. The positive health impacts of these products versus their animal, you know, counterparts, but let's not be confused here.

• 1:02:21Speaker 01

  You're here.

• 1:02:22Rich Roll?

  So, you know, how do you think about that? Because, listen, in 1981, you go to the health food market, it was slim pickings, right?

• 1:02:30Speaker 01

  A bag of powdered soy milk.

• 1:02:31Rich Roll?

  You can get, you know, vegan alternative to every delicacy that you can imagine. And they all, they figured out how to make these things taste good, to sate you in a certain way.

• 1:02:41Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:02:42Rich Roll?

  And it's very easy, and I found myself doing this, I will plead guilty to this, like diluting myself into thinking like, this is an okay choice.

• 1:02:49Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:02:49Rich Roll?

  Maybe it is once in a while, but I can't make this, you know, front and center.

• 1:02:52Speaker 01

  Exactly. I'm a hundred percent in agreement with you. I'm, I'm so grateful to see these meat like burgers are wonderful. And if it gets Joe six pack meat potato guy off his beef burger onto that, I'm all for it. But yeah, but again, these are novelty foods. You eat them once a month or twice, so they're a treat and they're a transition food for these folks who need to tiptoe into the plant based world. And I'm very grateful for them, but no one's advocating them as a staple of the diet by a long shot. We agree.

• 1:03:23Rich Roll?

  One of the things that's amazing about, you know, the work that you've done, it's, it's one thing to talk about prevention, like let's prevent people from getting heart disease or diabetes or high blood pressure and the like. It's another thing to talk about reversal. That's where people start to get real prickly here.

• 1:03:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:40Rich Roll?

  But you've seen, you know, amazing results in, you know, I had, we were talking earlier, I had Robbie Babaro and Cyrus Kambada in here talking about all these case studies of people that they work with, where they have reversed their type two diabetes and type one, they've, they've been able to ameliorate, you know, the symptomology of that. And it's really, you know, really quite something, but this is, this is nothing new for you. You've been doing this for a long time.

• 1:04:06Speaker 01

  Indeed, I was on the medical staff at True North Health Center in Santa Rosa, California for eight years and we saw. Plant-based nutrition done right in its most effective, pure setting. And, and what I saw there, just, it was stunning. Every, every medical student, every physician should see these diseases go away, to see lupus go away, rheumatoid arthritis go into remission, and high blood pressure disappear, type 2 diabetes. These are reversible diseases. Yeah, I wish somebody had told me that when I was a medical student, and as part of the lecture that I'm, that I'm giving to the students, that these are eminently reversible diseases. And when, you know, if you, if you have a gasoline burning engine, and you've been putting

• 1:04:50Speaker 01

  diesel fuel in it, and it's running rough, and black smoke is coming out of it, and then you switch to high-tech gasoline, you're like, "Hey, hmm, boy, the car runs great. Oh, it's a miracle." No, it's not. You just put the right fuel in the car, and the, the problems go away. And it's the same thing with our food. So many of these conditions are just a result of what we're eating.

• 1:05:19Rich Roll?

  Well, one of the big, interesting protocols at True North is the fasting, that kind of protocol that you put patients under. And this is another area that I think for a long time was considered, you know, very fringe.

• 1:05:33Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:05:34Rich Roll?

  I know that, you know, the staff, yourself included, have taken hits for, you know, kind of putting people under this, this, you know, regimen. But, you know, interestingly, now suddenly fasting is all the vogue, right?

• 1:05:47Speaker 01

  Really?

• 1:05:48Rich Roll?

  And it's, it's weird how these trends happen. Like, nobody said any, said boo about the microbiome, and then suddenly it's all about the micro, you know, like, I don't know how these things percolate up, but right now, we're, we're in a moment where people are not only paying attention to the benefits of fasting and intermittent fasting, you know, there's science that's starting to show up to back it up, and, and, you know, the average person now is, "Oh, I, you know, I fast 18 hours a day, three times a month," or whatever it is. Like, this is something that nobody was talking about even five years ago.

• 1:06:21Speaker 01

  Remarkable. Whatever is new is, whatever's old is new again, you know, right? And the wheel keeps going around and around. But I'm in amazement, as you are, to see these things now becoming far more widely accepted. The human body and fasting is, we could spend a whole program on that. The... And when we take a step back, we realize that, you know, a million years ago on the African savanna, it was probably pretty common that four or five days would go by before you found the next berry bush of fruit on it, or the next carcass rotting in the sun. And these enforced four or five day fasts were probably the rule, and our body learned how to deal with that. And in fact, after 48 hours without carbohydrates coming

• 1:07:06Speaker 01

  in, which is our preferred fuel, the body switches into burning stored body fat and goes into the state of ketosis. And wonderful things happen in the early stages of ketosis. And the body starts cleaning itself out, it suppresses inflammation, it protects the stem cells, so when they revive after the fast, it's a healthier immune system. These wonderful things happen. And we would use that at True North, we would put people on water fast. But again, this is medically supervised, this is medical fasting. These are people with runaway high blood pressure, runaway rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, these

• 1:07:43Speaker 01

  are official medical problems in these people. And a fast is a wonderful initial step to suppress the symptoms and start the person on the road to recovery. But as I tell the patients and the med students who would rotate through True North, you know, the fasting is wonderful, it's powerful, it's great, but on the screen of their life, it's a little blip on the screen. What matters is what you eat after the fast. It's the food stream day after day, month after month, that makes for a healthy body. Because if they go on a water fast for three weeks, and they get this great improvement, but if they go back to cheeseburger and pizza land, the Cinderella turns back into a pumpkin within days. The

• 1:08:27Speaker 01

  joints are sore, the blood pressure's back up. The water fasting is a step to a whole food, plant-based diet. And while they're water fasting, we would give them cooking lessons and show them videos and food demonstrations. So when they left, they would know what to eat so the symptoms don't come back. So the fasting is a powerful tool, but it's just a tool in the chest. The issue is the food.

• 1:08:50Rich Roll?

  So, patient comes to True North, meets with you, how do you decide? Whether or not to put them on a fast and if so, how long to do it? And what is it that you're kind of monitoring while they're doing it? Cause that three weeks, three week water fast, that's, this is not intermittent fasting. This is like, this is a whole different thing. Like why, how did this begin as a procedure or a protocol? And you know, what is actually happening with this person while they're undergoing that? I mean, three weeks.

• 1:09:20Speaker 01

  Yes, right. Such an important question.

• 1:09:22Rich Roll?

  It sounds crazy.

• 1:09:23Speaker 01

  It, it does, but first of all, it's easier than you think. By day three, hunger is gone. The, one of the blessings of ketosis, it pretty much turns off hunger. And by day three, four, the, you're not thinking about food. It's God's gift to fasters. You don't spend three weeks hungry. And in fact, all the energy that would usually be devoted to digesting your food on a water fast is freed up. No food to digest and people feel that energy and they stop me in the courtyard, doc, I haven't felt this good in years. I got energy, I haven't eaten in three weeks, but I feel wonderful. It's counterintuitive.

• 1:09:59Rich Roll?

  Just keep going. Like there's me, my alcoholic mind would be like, this is, this is no more food forever.

• 1:10:05Speaker 01

  Really? Yeah, we just don't eat together.

• 1:10:07Rich Roll?

  Feel high.

• 1:10:08Speaker 01

  Right, exactly. And there's a good reason for this and, and the body's using this energy to heal and to readjust itself. It's a, it's a, it's a blessed state, but you, but you don't do a lot of physical activity here. You don't want to drop your blood sugar. It's a, it's a special state. It's a good time to get some meditation done and some contemplation, work on your novel. It's, it's a time to be physically quiet during that time. But, but as far, it's not three weeks of hunger. People aren't even hungry after, after a few days, the vast majority of them. Every once in a while I'll get somebody, I was hungry all the way through, but it is rare. Most people, they're not hungry. And during this time, wonderful things are happening as far as there are the, the underlying

• 1:10:51Speaker 01

  disease process that brought them there in the first place. Their diabetes usually getting better, their high blood pressure's coming down, their arteries opening up, the angina's going away. But there are absolute contraindications. You don't fast type one, people with type one diabetes, people who are way underweight, that they're not good candidates for water fasting for whatever reason. People with a lot of emotional problems, probably not a good idea. Children, you don't fast. There are some contraindications as far as determining who does the fast. And then, as far as monitoring the fast, that's a good word. We watch these people like a hawk.

• 1:11:35Speaker 01

  The intern knocks on the door twice a day. How you doing? Checks your vital signs, checks your blood pressure, the pulse. Any nausea, any headache? You getting lightheaded when you stand up? And if we get positive answers to any of those questions, yeah, I think I'm gonna throw up, I'm getting lightheaded. That's the end of the fast. It's time for some juice and to get them onto some light foods. So most every healthy person can, you can do a three-day fast at home. Five at the most. After that, you better be in a place where people know what they're looking at if you get lightheaded or nauseated or whatever. So monitoring by an experienced person is really key to doing these long fasts safely. But at home, if people just on a weekend,

• 1:12:19Speaker 01

  I've got patients who just do water from Friday to Monday. Absolutely reasonable thing to do. I think good things happen in their body. I've got people who don't eat till noon. I think that that extra six hours in the morning of no food does good things for them. That's intermittent fasting. So there, people can put their toe in the water and get the benefits without doing these long medically supervised fasts.

• 1:12:42Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it seems like science is still very much emerging in this area. I mean, you have Walter Longo, who's kind of, you know, at the forefront of this, who's studying this, and he's come up with his fasting mimicking diet, which allows you to eat, but still kind of produces that same physiological effect. You have Sachin Panda. They all have a little bit of different opinions on this. I had David Sinclair in here the other day.

• 1:13:06Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 1:13:07Rich Roll?

  Who was talking at length about, you know, what's happening. And when you fast, how that's impacting longevity and anti-aging. Like, I think it's a very cool, interesting.

• 1:13:19Rich Roll?

  Field and perhaps much more, you know, needs to be studied here. And I'm wondering whether there's any wisdom in like, why do the three week fast when you could do perhaps the fasting mimicking diet? And, you know, is there a reason why you, you've, you know, this institute where you used to work kind of settled on this as being the best way of dealing with this? And I, and, you know, as a, as an important caveat, you're dealing with people who are very ill that are coming to you.

• 1:13:45Speaker 01

  Right, exactly. And as you already mentioned, the, these folks are kind of self selective. They, they've come there.

• 1:13:53Rich Roll?

  And they're willing.

• 1:13:53Speaker 01

  They're, they're willing.

• 1:13:54Rich Roll?

  Yeah, they're ready to, they're ready to go.

• 1:13:56Speaker 01

  It is. And it's also, you know, the, the big league heavy artillery of, of nutritional therapy. Um, a full on water fast is very effective. And if I've got a guy, we've had a fellow of blood pressure of two 20 over 130 and he was on four medications and just nothing was bringing him down. And it took him 27 days on a water fast, but finally that pressure came down. And so those are the kind of folks that, that that kind of fasting works the best for.

• 1:14:23Rich Roll?

  I would imagine also psychologically, it's got to be incredibly empowering. Because you're bringing somebody in who's, you know, kind of feeble bodied at the moment. And you're putting in front of them something that is seemingly impossible to do. And then they do it. It's got to make them, you know, in addition to whatever, you know, spikes in vitality and, you know, reduction in their, you know, disease markers are, just knowing like, hey, I did something incredibly hard. I would imagine makes them more motivated and excited about making the changes that follow and, and kind of taking an insurance policy out on making sure that they stick.

• 1:14:57Speaker 01

  Oh, it's huge. That's so perceptive of you, Rich. Um, I tell them it's like, you know, on the outward bound courses where they, they throw a rope over the kid, you're going over the kid. No, I can't do that. Yes, you can. And they strap you up and they, you're on the rope there and you're going across and you look down and you see your own death out there. You keep on going and you make it across. You're now someone who did that. You can't say, "I can't do that." You just saw yourself do that and push yourself past your limits. Well, a prolonged water fast doesn't say, "Oh, I can't do that." Well, you just did it. And you'll never be upset about missing

• 1:15:36Speaker 01

  lunch again. You've just went three weeks without food. And you're right, it's tremendously empowering. And it's a real investment that people want to stick with.

• 1:15:46Rich Roll?

  What are some of the craziest turnarounds that you've seen in your career?

• 1:15:51Speaker 01

  Oh, my. We had two patients with lymphomas come in. Rebecca was an older woman, had a mast the size of a grapefruit in her abdomen. She did a prolonged water and juice cleanse, and that just melted right away. Her lymphoma disappeared. This was validated at University of California, San Francisco. They biopsied it.

• 1:16:19Rich Roll?

  Completely disappeared?

• 1:16:20Speaker 01

  Completely disappeared.

• 1:16:21Rich Roll?

  Wow, without traditional chemo and all of that?

• 1:16:24Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And then Yvonne was another one. She came in, she also had lymphoma. She had lymph nodes the size of hen's eggs in her groin and her armpit. She did a 26-day fast. Tumor just melted right away. And she's been cancer-free. Now, lymphomas are a special kind of cancers. They're watery, and they respond well to fasting, to the biochemical changes. So, not all cancers are created equal. I can't say it's the definitive cure for cancers. But to see that happen was just stunning to me. Another one of these things that we're told, "No, that never happens." Well, I just saw it happen twice. So, those

• 1:17:08Speaker 01

  are two of the most dramatic. And, you know, Dr. McDougal's got a big wastebasket of pills that people, you know, throw in there. And that's so gratifying. People come in with these bags full of pills, and they leave normal, healthy people. And as they're walking out the door, you go, "Yes, that's what medicine should be."

• 1:17:29Rich Roll?

  We've seen the growth of lifestyle medicine practitioners. This is another trend in the right direction. It would be great if there were more people doing this. We're in a healthcare system that makes it, I think, kind of too difficult for a lot of practitioners, physicians to make that choice. And back to that issue of empowering people to make these lifestyle changes. So much of it is the follow-up. Like, how connected are these people to the practitioners? You were talking about the doctors. That doctor's not going to be around to see that person when this happens. But to create that relationship where there's accountability and there's check-ins

• 1:18:09Rich Roll?

  and there's support and all of that, I think is critical in terms of making sure that these things stick long-term. And if you've had some of these doctors, Robert Osfeldt or Michelle McMac, like, there are Michelle McMac and there are doctors that are doing this very effectively. So I'm interested in your, and obviously True North being an incredible example of this. But how can we create better incentives for physicians to craft practices like this and create those communities to promote this in light of a system that is giving these

• 1:18:50Rich Roll?

  doctors 15 minutes, prescribe, get them out the door, churn and burn? The way that it's all set up right now just seems wrong-headed.

• 1:18:59Speaker 01

  Oh, it's absolutely wrong-headed. And its days are numbered. I think it's inevitable that the current edifice of just paying doctors to do things to patients, to do bypass grafts, to do colonoscopies, et cetera, after the disease has already started, to do these Band-Aid procedures, very expensive Band-Aid procedures. And you do a quarter-million-dollar operation and the patient limps out of the hospital to go eat more cheeseburgers and pizzas and clog up their grafts so they can come back in and have another one done. That's bankrupt medicine and it's totally not sustainable. I ran into at a American College Lifestyle Medicine meeting, a nice-looking lean fellow, Ken Beckman, thought he was a doctor.

• 1:19:44Speaker 01

  He said, "No, I'm not a physician. I'm a plant-based insurance actuary." Wow. I said, oh, he said, oh, yeah. I said, well, a bunch of us realize that the vegans require a lot less medical care. And he said, the insurance companies need to take advantage of this. The entire model has to, has to collapse down in this way. Mm hmm. He says, there is value for every CEO that doesn't go down with a heart attack. There's value to the community for every young breadwinner who doesn't develop a colon cancer. There, there's value to the community. And we can quantitate that.

• 1:20:27Speaker 01

  We know that someone, a diabetic person with a hemoglobin A1C of nine, which is out of control diabetes, we are going to pay $15,000 a year for, for, for his medical care. If you can get his hemoglobin A1C down to eight, that lowers our cost down to 12,500. We can quantitate every one point improvement. We, we, we can tell you how much money we're going to save off that. You can quantitate a lot of these diseases. Says, and that gives us a way to do value assessment for the patient. He says, the numbers go like this.

• 1:21:07Speaker 01

  Every time we pay for a coronary bypass, by the time we pay the surgeon, anesthesia, recovery room, the rehab, etc., costs us quarter million dollars, 250,000. For every, if, in a 10 year period, we expect to create, to pay for 10 of those with 100 executives here, and none of them have their MI, and none of them wind up needing the procedure. We're sitting on that money. We'll be happy to pay the doctor 20,000, we'll pay the patient 20,000, we'll pay the clinic 20,000. We're still sitting on almost $200,000 profit here. There's money in the system. We've just got to rejigger the way the beans are flowing.

• 1:21:48Speaker 01

  The bean counters have to start paying the doctors for keeping people healthy and, and the patients as well. It can be done. And it there would it would free up so much money, all these scans not done, procedures not done, we could send kids to college, we could put internet in everybody's houses, we could fix the roads. There's such wealth there. We just need to restructure.

• 1:22:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:10Speaker 01

  How we're seeing the way medicine's practiced.

• 1:22:11Rich Roll?

  I think that has to go hand in hand with education as well.

• 1:22:15Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:22:15Rich Roll?

  And perhaps an overhaul of our litigious society. I mean, so many of these tests and scans are driven by a fear of getting sued, right?

• 1:22:22Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:22:23Rich Roll?

  Like, well, I got this disease and they could have given me this and they didn't. You know?

• 1:22:26Speaker 01

  Yes, but I predict that we're gonna see a 180 on that. I think it's just a matter of time before an angry widow walks into the office of a cardiologist or a cardiothoracic surgeon. Says, "My husband died on that operating table last month during a four-vessel coronary artery bypass and nobody told us? He could have melted those plaques away from the inside with a plant-based diet. Why didn't somebody tell us this? Why was this information withheld from us? When did you people know this? How long has this been in the medical literature? 25 years." And she will lodge a wrongful death suit. And I think she should win that suit, because this was a wrongful death. That that someone, when she's signing the,

• 1:23:08Speaker 01

  when the patient signed the in certain form consent form, it should say, "And I've been instructed that this this these plaques could be melted away with a with a whole food plant-based diet. Someone should have told him that." And and there's gonna be a couple of lawsuits and that hopefully will will move us in the direction we need to go to.

• 1:23:26Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that would be a very interesting test case.

• 1:23:29Speaker 01

  Oh, it sure would. It sure would. They'll say, "Well, it's not standard of care." Well, darn well it should be, and we've got to get that dietary counseling as part of standard of care.

• 1:23:40Rich Roll?

  If you could craft the perfect healthcare system, what would that look like compared to what we have right now?

• 1:23:49Speaker 01

  Well, I think the ancient Chinese had it, had it right for twenty five thousand years, twenty five hundred years ago. You pay the doctor as long as you're healthy, for keeping healthy. And as soon as you get sick, the doctor stops getting paid. And it motivates the doctor to keep you healthy. What are you eating? You know, and he's very interested in how you're living your life, because his income stops if you get sick. And some variation on that.

• 1:24:11Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:24:12Speaker 01

  Um, the, there's so many ways we could do this. Uh, and the, the federal government could help when it comes tax time. Um, and before you fill out your taxes, you go down to the local pharmacy where the nurse in the urgent care booth is sitting there. And she takes your blood pressure, puts you on the scale, and, and takes a urine specimen and sticks your finger for cholesterol. And if you're no more than five pounds over your ideal body weight, take five percent off your taxes. If your blood pressure's one, one thirty over eighty or below, take another five percent off your taxes. If there's no codeine in your urine from cigarette smoking, take another five percent off your taxes. Um, if your cholesterol's below one, one fifty, take another five percent off. And, and

• 1:24:56Speaker 01

  she'll write it up and give you a little ticket that you submit with your tax return. Whoa, the government's paying me for staying healthy.

• 1:25:02Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:03Speaker 01

  There's so many ways we could do this, and we would all be better off for it.

• 1:25:07Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Where was it? I saw, I might have this wrong, but I saw a little video, I think it was in, might have been in Russia or China, where you could get a free, like subway token if you're, you run on a treadmill.

• 1:25:21Speaker 01

  Yes, right. Yes, right.

• 1:25:23Rich Roll?

  Something like that.

• 1:25:23Speaker 01

  Something like that.

• 1:25:24Rich Roll?

  It was something similar to that, I know.

• 1:25:25Speaker 01

  There's ways to.

• 1:25:26Rich Roll?

  Or the idea of like, setting up a gym, like reversing the gym membership thing. Like, the gym's free as long as you're going. The minute you stop going, like you sign up for a year, if you don't, you pay when you don't go.

• 1:25:36Speaker 01

  Yes, brilliant. Absolutely. The tools are all around us. We just click our thinking a little bit, get creative.

• 1:25:43Rich Roll?

  Yeah, sure. I mean, we certainly need to make changes.

• 1:25:47Speaker 01

  We sure do.

• 1:25:47Rich Roll?

  It's not working so well right now.

• 1:25:49Speaker 01

  It is not. It's a disease care system and the disease is winning at this point.

• 1:25:53Rich Roll?

  So if somebody's listening to this and they're like, I'm on board, conceptually, I understand this. But what is this? You know, I don't really, what does this mean? Like, I wake up in the morning, okay, so what do I eat? And how does this work? Like, walk me through an ideal, you know, day in the life of food and activity and lifestyle in the world of Michael Klaper.

• 1:26:13Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Okay, well, as long as you're eating food that grew out of the ground and has been minimally processed, you're gonna be okay, basically. In fact, I'm gonna have another T-shirt made up. Eat plants and get on with it, you know, at this point, because that's what it comes down to.

• 1:26:30Rich Roll?

  The human brain loves to overcomplicate this.

• 1:26:32Speaker 01

  Oh, we do.

• 1:26:32Rich Roll?

  There must be some velvet rope and I need this secret VIP thing.

• 1:26:37Speaker 01

  Really, but again, this body's been around for 30 million years. We are plant-eating creatures. So in the morning, if you're not hungry, don't eat. Just drink water till you get hungry. That's a perfectly legitimate thing to do. And there's reasons why that makes sense. You've been fasting all night, it's okay to extend that into the morning hours. So if you're not hungry, don't eat, just drink water. If you are hungry, either have some fruit, have a cantaloupe, have a grapefruit, etc., or something more substantial, some oatmeal and some fruit with it. A little hemp milk or rice milk on top of that. So that's breakfast. Lunches and dinners, I said, put them on the 4S clothesline here. Salad, soup, steamed veggies, and starches. And so have a big salad at least once a day.

• 1:27:21Speaker 01

  You gotta have that fresh live, fresh green stuff. So have a big salad once a day, twice a day is even better. I'm a big fan of these hearty vegetable soups. You can make up a big pot of soup in a crock pot or a slow cooker and eat off of it for three days. Pour a bunch into Tupperware freezer containers, let them cool, put lids on, put it in the freezer. So you got a bunch of frozen soup portions, bring them out, heat them, eat them. Make life simple for yourself. So I'm a big fan of these hearty vegetable soups. I could live on soup and salad and steamed greens. In fact, that's largely what we eat. You need to, favorite colors should be green and yellow, green and yellow. You have something dark and green every day, whether it's kale, chard, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, etc. And something yellow, carrots, squash, sweet potatoes, yams. You need something

• 1:28:06Speaker 01

  for the carotenes. So salad, soup, steamed veggies, and you need some calories in the form of healthy starches. So I'm a big fan of sweet potatoes and potatoes of all sorts. But quinoa, millet, and all these lovely whole grains. And we make a little bow to the legumes as far as proteins go. Have something leguminous at least every other day, a scoop of lentil stew, a bean burrito, bean chili, a hummus sandwich, something that has some legumes in it. If you do that and have some food for dessert, man, you're gonna, the body will know what to do with that. You're gonna have a fine food stream there.

• 1:28:44Rich Roll?

  But Dr. Kay.

• 1:28:45Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:28:46Rich Roll?

  What about protein?

• 1:28:46Speaker 01

  Protein, right. And there's protein in everything. If you are eating 2,000 calories, enough to keep your weight up, of whole plant foods that grew out of the garden, out of the ground, you're going to be getting 50, 60, 70 grams of high-grade protein. It's in the rice and the beans and the greens and the fruits. Everything's got protein. In 45 years of medicine, I've never written the diagnosis protein deficiency on the chart. It just does not happen. So, but again, whole foods are really important. You gotta be able to identify, oh, that's a cucumber, that's a carrot, that's a green pepper over there. It's when the hand of man processes it into all sorts of flakes and processed through, that's when you get in trouble.

• 1:29:30Rich Roll?

  Whole grains are very much a part of this as well. What have you learned or what's your perspective on gluten and gluten sensitivity?

• 1:29:38Speaker 01

  Right. It's an issue, but it's this much of an issue. It's not that much of an issue. There's probably more of it than we, it's a fairly rare phenomenon from a strictly medical point of view, in the classic sense where we docs learn that someone who's gluten sensitive, they eat some bread and they spend the next six hours on the toilet or bloody diarrhea. That's fairly rare, but there's probably a little low, it's a continuum. There's probably a lot of folks with a low-grade gluten sensitivity. They may not even be aware of it and they get this bloating and the gas and the livestools. If there's any question, just stop all gluten for a month. And if your symptoms clear up, then have three slices of whole wheat bread one day and see how you feel the next day.

• 1:30:21Speaker 01

  Do you, you know, it's the cheapest, best lab test going. And see if, see if you're gluten sensitive or not. You can test yourself. Um, I wouldn't rely on the, on the blood test at this point.

• 1:30:32Rich Roll?

  I know that when I eat, like if I eat a, you know, refined bread or pizza crust or things like that, if I overdo it with that, like the next day, my eyes are all puffy. You know, so I was like, well, clearly there's some inflammation happening here. I don't know what's happening in my joints or the rest of my body, but there's, this can't be a good thing. Something is happening that's somewhat awry in my body. So I wish I could tell you I was perfect about that. I'm definitely not, but, um,

• 1:30:58Speaker 01

  But at least you're tuned in.

• 1:30:59Rich Roll?

  There must be something to that, though.

• 1:31:01Speaker 01

  Oh, there is, absolutely. And you did the right thing and you're tuned in enough to know that when I eat this next morning, my body is not hit. But so all you need to know, you're probably someone who should eat gluten very sparingly. And, and you've already gotten that message. And so the lightning doesn't come out of the sky and strike you dead, but your body lets you know in one way or the other.

• 1:31:20Rich Roll?

  What about organic versus non-organic?

• 1:31:23Speaker 01

  Um, in this day and age, it's becoming more and more, um, significant. Um, the, for a number of reasons, um, the, um, you know, the less pesticides and herbicides we eat, the better. I feel much better about paying those organic farmers to take care of the soils and to take care of, of the earth. So I'm, I've got nothing better to do with my pennies than, than buy organic produce. And, uh, and, and as we've heard from our friend, Dr. Zach Bush, um, hopefully, uh, the organic produce will have much less in the way of glyphosate and Roundup, et cetera, uh, and lessed, uh, by definition of the genetically modified organism.

• 1:32:04Speaker 01

  So all the way around, I'm a big fan of organic produce and I don't mind paying the extra nickel for the broccoli.

• 1:32:11Rich Roll?

  What about that person who's listening to this who's thinking, "This all sounds great, but like I got, I work two jobs and I'm, you know, "I'm barely making ends meet and you're talking about, you know, "making all these foods. It just sounds like a lot of work "and the learning curve is really high, time consuming, perhaps expensive. "Like, how do you work with somebody who is sort of cost and time restricted?"

• 1:32:32Speaker 01

  So important. Great. Please, I would urge them, "go to websites like Forks Over Knives and click on their transition program. "Click on their recipes. They will walk you through how to make this happen in your life. "There's books, Virgin Vegan, and there's lots of books to help you get started. "The Engine 2 website has some excellent programs to transition. "So go to the websites and take advantage of their transition programs. "And also this idea, well, that's all, it's an expensive way to eat "and takes a lot of time and work. Actually not. "Rice and beans are cheap. You can buy a 20-pound bag of rice for six bucks.

• 1:33:17Speaker 01

  "You can buy 15 pounds of lentils for $8. "The staples are cheap. "And if you're not spending your money on meat and ice cream and cheeses, "you've got pennies to spend on the organic produce. "And you can certainly save yourself a lot of time, "as I mentioned, by using your freezer, make up these big batch soups, "make up on a Saturday morning, make up 30 veggie burgers "and put them in your freezer. Now you've got a freezer full of burgers. "Bring them out, heat them and eat them. "So these batch cooking helps. "And at the store, you can buy bags of frozen organic vegetables already cut up. "So in your soup pot, just open a bag of frozen veg,

• 1:34:00Speaker 01

  "throw it in the pot and done. You don't have to spend any time cooking or chopping. So there's ways around it these days. People die of their excuses. They die of their excuses. And I don't want to see that happen any longer. So at this point, choose the bean chili over the beef chili.

• 1:34:17Rich Roll?

  Well, the money's going one of two places. It's either going towards the food that's going to make you healthy, or it's going to the healthcare provider.

• 1:34:25Speaker 01

  Pay the grocer now or the doctor later.

• 1:34:27Rich Roll?

  I know. Unfortunately, that's, it's not great at motivating people. You know, we're not, we're not so good at, you know, forecasting into the future and making better decisions now for some reason, but that is the truth. And there is something interesting about, like, like, it's counterintuitive to me to buy frozen fruits and vegetables. Like, I want to go to the farmer's market and I want it really fresh. But there is something to be said for those products that are frozen immediately after picking. They're, you know, so they're, they're basically, they're locking in those nutrients. There's no, you know, sort of degrading process that happens in the, you know, however many days it takes between picking and ending up in your grocery store.

• 1:35:06Speaker 01

  Absolutely. The flash frozen vegetables are the busy person's friend. Absolutely. You're absolutely right. And in the mornings, we'll, the night before we go to bed, if we're having oatmeal the next morning, we take out the frozen mangoes and cherries from the freezer, let them thaw overnight, and we put them in the cereal the next morning.

• 1:35:23Rich Roll?

  Yeah. What is your, what's your exercise routine look like these days? You're, you're a runner.

• 1:35:28Speaker 01

  Yes, I used to be a runner. I've had, I had back surgery too many hours at the operating table and now I'm a cyclist. And so either do, I love going out for these 50 mile bike rides. But I've got a, an exercise bike, a recumbent bike in my, out on our patio where I can watch. I've got a couple of bird feeders. So I'm a birder. So I'm like watching the birds as I'm pedaling.

• 1:35:52Rich Roll?

  I could see that. You got the big lens and the whole binoculars and stuff.

• 1:35:57Speaker 01

  Straight out on the side there. But very importantly, I'll get on the bike, crank up the resistance and start pedaling. But then I grab two 12 pound hand weights and as I'm pedaling, I'm doing an upper body workout. And so I do 40 minutes of, of upper body while I'm pedaling and work up a good sweat doing that. And I do that every other morning. And, and so that's my cardio strength program. And my wife's a yoga teacher, so the mornings I'm not sweating, she's got me on the mat and doing salutations to the sun.

• 1:36:30Rich Roll?

  My grandparents retired to West Palm Beach. They've since passed away, but you know, my youth was marked by going to West Palm Beach, you know, once a year to visit them in the wintertime. I mean, that is a community. It's it's much more cosmopolitan now than it was then, but it's certainly, you know, a very large retirement community. So it must be interesting for you to be so vital at your age and to be surrounded by a lot of elderly people who are much less so, to put it bluntly.

• 1:36:57Speaker 01

  It is, and you ought to run up and shake them. Of course, you don't, you can't. But yeah, it's sad, but it motivates me to to help people not wind up in that position.

• 1:37:10Rich Roll?

  You're seeing more and more plant-based restaurants in the Miami area as well.

• 1:37:14Speaker 01

  Really remarkable. I've got a I've got a folder on my my computer, things I never thought I would see. And and every week, two or three goes in there of McDonald's serving plant-based burgers and the California schools and the hospitals now serving plant-based meals and all these amazing restaurants that are showing up. It's really exciting. There's really hopeful signs.

• 1:37:39Rich Roll?

  Have you been to Love Life Cafe in Miami?

• 1:37:42Speaker 01

  No, not in that one, yeah.

• 1:37:43Rich Roll?

  I gotta hook you up.

• 1:37:44Speaker 01

  Really?

• 1:37:44Rich Roll?

  Yeah, our good friends, Diego and Veronica, run this amazing plant-based restaurant. It's in it's in the Wynwood District in Miami, which isn't too far from where you are. And they serve amazing food. They're just they're beautiful people, too, and cyclists.

• 1:38:00Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 1:38:00Rich Roll?

  Avid cyclists, so I'm gonna I'm gonna connect you.

• 1:38:03Speaker 01

  Okay, please do.

• 1:38:05Rich Roll?

  One of the questions that I always ask the doctors that I have on the show is, what would be like your number one agenda? Like, imagine a parallel universe where suddenly you found yourself as Surgeon General. What are the changes? If you had that kind of power that with broad strokes, you could really, you know, change policy on a grand level, like, you know, how would you get to work? If you rolled up your sleeves, like, what's what's priority number one?

• 1:38:33Speaker 01

  Well, I would end agricultural subsidies to the meat and dairy industry and let the market really dictate what these things sold for, for what they cost to produce. And if any subsidies are done, I would give it to the broccoli farmers. I would make healthy produce really cheap where it's just you couldn't pass it up. And then I would institute a number of incentives that I mentioned as far as giving people tax breaks for being healthy, helping with their daily health practices to reward them in various ways. So it becomes fun. I would start in the schools. I would get physical education back into the schools.

• 1:39:16Speaker 01

  I would make exercise and healthy eating healthy for kids and bring the kids out to the gardens and the farms and show how their food is grown and reconnect them. They are suffering from nature deficit disorder. And I would connect, especially the young people with the reality of food production. So it's basically an educational process as well as financial rejiggering of the system. So rewards people for staying healthy and eating healthy.

• 1:39:46Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it seems elementary to me that we should build into elementary education the principles of nutrition so that young people at a very early age, you know, can grok these principles. That's just fundamental to how they make decisions about how to live.

• 1:40:03Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Where does food come from? It comes from the supermarket. No one does. It grows out trees. You need to know that.

• 1:40:09Rich Roll?

  Instead, we get we get these subsidy subsidized, you know, milk advertisements in high school gymnasiums.

• 1:40:16Speaker 01

  Oh, my, really? And we've got to stop lying to our students and lying to each other.

• 1:40:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Final thing, if if somebody's listening to this and, you know, perhaps their health has gone somewhat awry, but they go to their doctor and their doctor is basically telling them, you know, what you already recounted, like the typical, like, you got to be on these drugs and anybody who tells you otherwise is insane. And there isn't, they don't feel like they, you know, have a community of like minded people who are saying things similar to what you're saying and they don't know where to turn. Is there? You know, short of going to True North, what are some resources? You know, is there a directory of plant-based doctors where people could find somebody who's kind of speaking your language in their area? Like, where do you point these people?

• 1:41:03Speaker 01

  Absolutely. The websites people should know about are two of them. One is called plantbaseddoctors.org, plantbaseddoctors.org, and plantbaseddocs.com. Between those two, the odds are you'll find somebody near you. Educate yourself. Get books by Dr. McDougal, Dr. Furman, Dr. Ethelston. And all of them are laying out the basic truths here, basically, it's eating plants. And so if you do those two things, educate yourself and find a nearby plant-based physician, you'll get all the good advice you need. And I would urge people to go to my, our website.

• 1:41:45Speaker 01

  I've got a YouTube channel, Dr. Klaper, all spelled out, D-O-C-T-O-R-K-L-A-P-E-R. It's not D-R. And I've got all sorts of instructional videos there. We're adding more and more to that. So check out my YouTube channel, Dr. Klaper.

• 1:41:58Rich Roll?

  I love that you're on YouTube. It's great.

• 1:42:01Speaker 01

  And if people want to help our efforts to get me in front of medical school audiences, because we've got to change Western medicine, go to my website, drklapper.com, all spelled out, D-O-C-T-O-R-K-L-A-P-E-R.com, and click on Moving Medicine Forward, and you'll see what we're doing. Not only how you can help us, we could sure use the support. Plane tickets are expensive. But also, there's a little box to check. If you know a medical student at a medical school or someone on the faculty you'd like us to connect with them, please give us their name. And we will follow up and connect with that. So that's on my website, drklapper.com. People go to Moving Medicine Forward. They'll see the work we're doing.

• 1:42:44Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And they can follow you on Instagram, too.

• 1:42:47Speaker 01

  They can follow me on Instagram, too. Yes, they will. Where to do it?

• 1:42:50Rich Roll?

  That's fantastic. I mean, I think there is no worthy, more worthy cause than trying to, you know, take all of this experience that you have to try to create, you know, the next generation of doctors, because this is where the rubber meets the road, right? If we can... If we can create a situation in which this next crop of medical practitioners has the tools, you know, that are required to treat these things and nip them in the bud, we don't even need to get into reversing because we're all about prevention at that point.

• 1:43:20Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:43:21Rich Roll?

  And we're in a much better place.

• 1:43:22Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I tell you, Susan, before you order another $1,000 scan, another $500 set of blood tests, ask your patients what they ate yesterday. And if it's full of burgers and buffalo wings, that's why they're sitting in front of you. Send them to the plant-based dietitian, let her do the counseling, let her show on the movies, let her take up shopping. You see them back in a month and see if they're healthier and they will be. So it's time for the era of nutritional medicine to dawn.

• 1:43:46Rich Roll?

  Boom. All right. I love it. You are a gift to humanity, my friend. You're a beautiful guy and your message is super powerful. So it's an honor to help amplify your wisdom.

• 1:44:00Speaker 01

  Well, you do that beautifully. Thank you so much for helping get the message out.

• 1:44:03Rich Roll?

  All right. Well, come back and talk to me again sometime.

• 1:44:06Speaker 01

  I'd be honored to. Hopefully we'll meet on the trail out there.

• 1:44:08Rich Roll?

  Absolutely. And just to echo what you said previously, if you are in medical school or you know medical school faculty, like, please reach out to Dr. K.

• 1:44:17Speaker 01

  Yes, go to my website.

• 1:44:19Rich Roll?

  And let's try to, let's try to get him full-time on the road.

• 1:44:22Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 1:44:23Rich Roll?

  Going to these medical schools, right?

• 1:44:24Speaker 01

  Got nothing better to do.

• 1:44:25Rich Roll?

  All right, cool.

• 1:44:26Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:44:27Rich Roll?

  Thanks.

• 1:44:28Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:44:29Rich Roll?

  Peace.

• 1:44:30Speaker 01

  Peace.

• 1:44:31Rich Roll?

  What a lovely and amazing human and public servant that Dr. Clapper is. I love that man. I'm so grateful for the work that he is doing. If his message hits home with you, I encourage you to visit the show notes on the episode page at richroll.com for plenty of links and resources to go down the rabbit hole of Dr. K. You can also find him on Instagram at Dr. Clapper and at Michael Clapper M.D. on Twitter. Meanwhile. Hang in there, everybody. I wish you well, and I am sending you all the love vibes. Let's just take this day by day. If you'd like to support our work here on the show, subscribe, rate, and comment on it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. Share the

• 1:45:14Rich Roll?

  show or your favorite episodes with friends or on social media, and you can support us, as always, on Patreon at richroll.com/donate. I want to thank my team for working hard to put on today's show. Jason Camiolo for audio engineering, production, show notes, and interstitial music. Blake Curtis and Margot Lubin for videoing the show. Jessica Miranda for graphics. Ally Rogers for portraits. Georgia Whaley for help with copywriting. DK for advertiser relationships and theme music, as always, by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Hari Mathis. Thanks for the love, you guys. I will see you back here shortly. Until then, be safe, stay safe, practice physical distancing but social connection.

• 1:45:56Rich Roll?

  Go inward and leverage this moment to grow, because we need all of you to be healthy, and more importantly, to be more of who you really are now more than ever. Much love, peace, plants, namaste.