Leveraging Plant-Based Nutrition to Treat, Prevent & Reverse Disease

A few weeks back I had the pleasure of being a keynote speaker & instructor on the Holistic Holiday at Sea — 1500 people cohabiting for 7 days on a Caribbean cruise ship for the specific purpose of learning more about health. How to eat better. And live more fully. When I agreed to participate, I had no idea the magnitude of this event. The incredible scale of this thing. I’m not a cruise ship kind of guy. Quite honestly, I prefer a shack on a deserted beach to a floating mall housing 2200. I was leery. In the aftermath, I can't say the experience converted me to cruising as a lifestyle. But I will say it ended up being an extraordinary experience — an event I highly recommend to those out there looking for something different to kick things into a new gear. I got to meet and spend time with some of the leading minds in the plant-based wellness Universe. Some I already knew, like legends T. Colin Campbell, author of The China Study* and Whole* (podcast coming soon!), PCRM founder Neal Barnard, Chef AJ ( RRP Episode 56 ), bodybuilder Robert Cheeke, fitness impresario Koya Webb and many others. But what made the experience so memorable was meeting and spending time with people I had never before met. Presenters like today's guest of course, but mostly just normal people interested in learning more about getting better — and sharing their intimate stories. And so – despite my preconceived notions of what this experience would hold – I left rather inspired. By the lives and experiences and struggles and obstacles people face. And the success stories of overcoming everything from obesity to cancer, diabetes, heart disease, arthritis, food addictions and more to live happier, healthier and more fulfilling lives. Leeriness transformed. A win-win. Today’s guest is one of the guys I met on the cruise. I guy who I’ve admired from afar for some time, but had yet to meet. Dr. Michael Klaper. A rare bird this one. A physician who actually really cares about the patient. Before you get angry and defensive about docs — I’m not saying that doctors don’t care about their patients. I am saying that this insane institutionalized system of medicine we have created basically forces well intentioned docs from getting too invested in their patients. They just can’t. Economics prevents this kind of time and emotional investment. Well, Dr. Klaper is a guy who got fed up with that system – like Peter Finch’s epic famous lament in Paddy Chayefsky’s Network — I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore! – and started treating patients the way he felt they should be treated. It wasn’t exactly the best business plan – there was the time he went broke trying to make it work. It’s that hard to do. But his story, his message. and how he now makes it all work, is educational. And inspirational. Enjoy! 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?

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• 0:44Rich Roll?

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• 1:06Rich Roll?

  Welcome to the Rich Roll Podcast, episode 77, with Dr. Michael Klapper.

• 1:24Speaker 01

  Hey, everybody. Welcome to the show. We're back. I'm back. I'm the guy behind the avatar, behind the microphone, the guy holding the pen, typing on the keyboard, the guy tweeting out the tweets. But I do exist outside the virtual world. At least, I think I do. I need to go back and watch The Matrix. Anyway, my name is Rich Roll. Each week, I bring to you the best, most forward-thinking paradigm-busting minds in health, fitness, wellness, diet, nutrition, spirituality, creativity, entrepreneurship, and life transformation. The people who make stuff happen, everybody. And the goal, the goal is simple, but the goal is powerful, to motivate and inspire you to take your life to the next level, to help you.

• 2:07Speaker 01

  Discover, unlock, and unleash your best, most authentic self. Yeah, dude. Today's guest, well, actually, let me backtrack a bit. A few weeks ago, I had the distinct pleasure of being a keynote speaker on this doodad called "The Holistic Holiday at Sea," which was quite something. It was 1,500 people on a gargantuan cruise ship. I think there were like 2,200 people total, but 1,500 of them were here for this specific purpose of participating in this holistic holiday at sea in the Caribbean. All there to learn more about health, how to eat better, and be happier.

• 2:52Speaker 01

  And when I agreed to do the cruise, I'd only been on one cruise in my life quite some time ago. Julie, my wife, had produced a yoga retreat on a cruise. That was my only experience. And I have to say, I'm not like a cruising kind of guy. And at the time that I signed up for this thing, I had no idea the magnitude of this event, the scale of this thing, the pure scale. Like I said, I'm not really a cruise ship kind of guy. I'm more a guy who would prefer to just be in a shack on the beach, quite honestly. So I wasn't really sure how this was going to go. But I thought at a minimum, it might be a fun holiday for the kids and an opportunity

• 3:34Speaker 01

  to, you know, be of service. And, you know, I can deal with being in a giant floating mall in the ocean. But I guess you could say I was leery. And I can't say that the experience converted me to the cruising lifestyle, but I can say that it ended up being an amazing experience. I mean, 1,500 people there to get healthier. I gave my keynote in an auditorium that was like the size of a Broadway theater on this boat. It was ridiculous. And I got to meet and spend time with a lot of the pioneers in this whole plant-based wellness thing. A lot of people that I already knew are

• 4:17Speaker 01

  Or had met, but also lots of new people. I mean, people, we're talking about people like T. Colin Campbell, the author of The China Study and Whole, Neil Barnard, the guy behind PCRM, Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. I mean, these guys are legends. But more than that, much more than that, actually, it was amazing to meet and spend time with and connect with so many people who are interested in learning more about, about getting healthier, about eating better. And so despite my preconceived notions of what this whole experience would be like, I have to say that I left very inspired by the whole thing. And today's guest is one of the guys that I met on the cruise. He's

• 4:59Speaker 01

  a guy who I've admired afar from some time, but a guy that I had yet to meet in person. And his name is Dr. Michael Clapper. He's a rare bird, this guy. He's a doc who actually really cares about the patient. So before you get angry and defensive about doctors in general, I am not saying that doctors don't care about their patients. Of course they do. I'm just saying that this modern institutionalized system of medicine, of healthcare that we've created, basically forces well-intentioned doctors from getting invested in their patients. They just can't. The economics of it all simply prevents this

• 5:42Speaker 01

  kind of time and emotional investment, patient, doctor, doctor, patient. Well, Dr. Clapper is a guy who got fed up with that system. He's like Peter Finch in Patty Shajewski's epic movie, Network. I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore. And Dr. Clapper started treating patients the way he felt that they should be treated. And it wasn't exactly the best business plan. There was the time he went broke trying to make it all work. It's that hard to do. But I think you will find his story, his message, and how he now makes it all work, not only educational, but quite inspirational. So,

• 6:23Speaker 01

  all right, who is he? He's a plant-based guy, longtime plant-based eater, advocate, physician, clinician, who practices preventative and nutrition-based medicine and teaches his patients that health comes from healthy living. Simple, right? Preventative medicine. Now there's a concept. As an acute care physician for many, many years, decades, he began to realize that many of the diseases his patients were consistently bringing to his office, in other words, clogged arteries, arthrosclerosis, high blood pressure, hypertension, obesity,

• 7:04Speaker 01

  adult onset diabetes, and even some forms of asthma, arthritis, and many other significant illnesses were made worse or were actually caused by the high fat, high sugar, overly processed, standard American diet. So, sort of akin to Dr. Lippman, who I brought to you guys in episode 72, Dr. Clapper really came to understand how crucial proper nutrition and a balanced lifestyle are essential for health. And in many cases, it's what makes a difference between healing an illness, preventing an illness, and even reversing an illness, yes, reversing, versus merely treating symptoms

• 7:45Speaker 01

  or masking them with drugs and pharmaceuticals that have zero impact on dealing with the actual cause of the malady. So, he began to just treat his patients accordingly, and the results have been astounding. He's practiced medicine in Canada, Hawaii, New Zealand, and now he currently resides in Northern California where he's a staff physician at True North Health Center in Santa Rosa. And True North is a really cool place. If you listen to my interview with Chef AJ, she talks about her experience being a patient there and how it transformed her life. But, basically, it's a nutritionally-based medical clinic that specializes in therapeutic

• 8:27Speaker 01

  fasting and health improvement through a whole foods, plant-based diet. Oh yeah, he's also a pilot, he's a teacher, he's an author. And, basically, he's a great, very kind and giving, affable guy. He's sort of a throwback to the friendly family docs of the bygone era. The guy who would make house calls, which he did in his past, the kind of guy who would sit and have tea with your mom while you are upstairs in your bedroom as a child with a thermometer in your mouth, kind of like you see in the period piece movies. Actually, mental note, develop an app like Uber that with one click will send a doctor to your

• 9:07Speaker 01

  house. Make millions. Good idea. Okay. Anyway, also, and like Asher Gunsberg, last week's guest, Dr. Clapper is a radio host. So his acumen behind the microphone, once again, makes me look good and my job easy. Anyway, we sat down together in his little cabin on this huge boat and gave it a whirl in the Bermuda Triangle. So let's see how we make out. For the listener out there, we're sitting on a cruise ship locked in a cabin when we

• 9:48Speaker 01

  could be outside enjoying the sunshine, the ocean breeze, but we're gonna bring a podcast to you today. The thing that's funny, there seems to be this epidemic of plant-based focused doctors who are raised on dairy farms, and you're not an exception to that rule.

• 10:08Speaker 02

  Really?

• 10:09Speaker 01

  So you grew up in Wisconsin, yeah?

• 10:11Speaker 02

  I didn't. I spent my first 16 summers on my uncle's dairy farm in northern Wisconsin. And I went to school in Chicago during the winter time. During the summers, back in the 50s and 60s, 50s, actually, the polio epidemics would come through the big cities, through Chicago, Detroit, et cetera. And as I said, my uncle had a dairy farm up in northern Wisconsin, so my parents would... And the first day, as soon as school was out, the next day, we were up on the farm and spent my first 16 summers driving tractors and milking cows and slinging hay bales and living on a farm and getting exposed to the natural world.

• 10:48Speaker 01

  How does that, how did that experience inform your perspective on nutrition and health today?

• 10:53Speaker 02

  Oh, I'm, you know, again, this, I was from my young years to mid teens, what it really did was...

• 11:05Speaker 02

  Expose me and imbue me with the realities of the natural world. My summers were filled with nature, with, with, uh, early dawn, working on, with the morning dew on your boots, uh, thunderstorms, uh, rolling, uh, clouds coming in, uh, uh, full of animals, uh, hawks and frogs and deer and, and of course, all the animals on the farm. And the life force was so vital and full. I got to see it in all its complexity, uh, everything from the animal, birds eating, you know, the, the snakes to, uh, to the birth of the various animals on the farm.

• 11:46Speaker 02

  And, uh, the, the rhythm became so natural and, uh, plus the, the solace, the healing when I was upset or needed to think, uh, boy, I knew just where the path through the forest was. And, uh, I spent hours walking through our lovely Beech and Maple Forests up in northern Wisconsin. And I very, became very at home in the forest and it was a place I would go for, for comfort. And so, everything made just inherent sense to me, the way the waters ran, the way the winds blew. And it might be in our, my genes a little bit. My father was a dentist, my brother's a biology teacher. We had the affinity for the national, natural world. But it was there that, um, you know, tried to say, you know, I became a natural man,

• 12:30Speaker 02

  but I guess in a way that happened as opposed to spending my time in, in, under stainless steel rooms and fluorescent lights. So, um, nutrition came way down, uh, the, the, down the road there, uh, the awareness of that. But, uh, but the biological forces have been in my awareness, uh, since I can remember.

• 12:50Speaker 01

  Right. This connection to the natural world that we seem to be moving towards a state of being ever so disconnected from that and the importance and how that makes us feel and how that informs our perspective and how we relate to other people and how we connect with the environment around us.

• 13:08Speaker 02

  Absolutely. You, you must on your long runs, you're, you, when you're out there alone in the desert there, you, your nature shows yourself to you as well.

• 13:15Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, there's no, there's no, uh, replacement for that healing force.

• 13:20Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 13:21Speaker 01

  So, so because of the family lineage, this drives you or not drives you, but sort of interests you in the medical profession. I mean, is that what?

• 13:30Speaker 02

  Yes, I knew I was going to be a physician since I was a little kid.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  It was your destiny.

• 13:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. When any of the animals on the farm would be hurt. If there were, we had a sheep that broke its leg and I was 12 or so and I made up a splint and splintered its broken leg and it seemed to heal okay. But the various, anyone who is hurt, I just wanted them to be okay and whether it was an animal or one of the other kids there. And as far as becoming an actual doctor of medicine, my father, as I said, was a dentist and during the rest of the year when we weren't on the farm, we were living in Chicago, I was going to school and I'd watch my dad come home after 12, 14 hours standing at

• 14:16Speaker 02

  that dental chair and I loved him dearly, but I knew I did not want to be a dentist. And it just became so natural to become a physician and I identified with the doctors on TV there from Dr. Kildare to Doc Adams on Gunsmoke. I wanted to be the doctor, not the gunslinger. I wanted to be the guy who made everything okay, that had everybody.

• 14:39Speaker 01

  Right. And you took a pretty traditional route. I mean, you ended up specializing or doing residencies in surgery and in anesthesiology. So it wasn't like you came out of the gate as some kind of alternative doctor practicing, you know, strange modalities or anything like that. You're very much traditional in that regard.

• 15:01Speaker 02

  Oh, absolutely. I am a physician. I'm a doctor of medicine and will be till my last breath and I rely on the fundamentals that I learned. The physicians are seekers of truth in the literal sense, not being self-aggrandizing, but when a person's in front of you with a fever or a mass or a fracture or a pain, the question is, what is the truth of this situation? What is happening in this person's body? And whatever it takes to discern that truth, then I start there and it comes down to the fundamentals. Take a good history, do a physical exam, order your labs, you usually know what's happening. And that's what I still practice to this day. If you don't do that, you're not a physician. That's what being a doctor is about.

• 15:46Speaker 02

  And so, and people come to me these days with various issues, mostly stemming from what they're eating. And again,

• 15:57Speaker 02

  I had a patient, I had a very wise professor in medical school at the University of Illinois in Chicago. I said, you know, if you just shut up and listen to the patient, ninety percent of the time, they're telling you the diagnosis.

• 16:11Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 16:12Speaker 02

  And if you keep listening, they'll tell you what treatment they need very often as well. But doctors don't listen, you know, what is it now, the average eighteen seconds into a visit, the doctor's already pulling out his prescription pen. If you just be quiet, just listening to the patient is healing in itself. I mean, it's one of the major affronts to the human spirit these days. Nobody listens to me, I ain't got no respect, you know. The very fact that the physician put the book down, leaned across the table and say, tell me, what do you feel, what is this, what's happening? What can I want to help with? When did this start? Tell me what you're feeling about this. That alone, the patient walks out of the room, the doctor listened to me, he heard what I was saying.

• 16:55Speaker 02

  That alone is a gift to the patient and it starts the healing. Plus, from the physician's point of view, they tell, yes, I lay down at night, I get short of breath, I have to sit up. Well, I know that they've got fluid overload and they're probably in congestive heart failure. I mean, there's medical reasons why you want to listen, they are telling you important stories. But again, as I said, it's the first way to show respect for someone, to show love for someone, is just to listen to what they're saying. And, and again, you make the diagnosis by listening to what they're saying.

• 17:24Speaker 01

  And it seems like that's, that's the obvious, natural, initial point of inquiry, and yet that seems like that's not really going on. And, and that's not to say that, you know, doctors are not aware of that being sort of the appropriate place to start. Is it just the economics of the medical profession? Or what is driving the practice, the sort of traditional practice of medicine, away from that type of patient care?

• 17:50Speaker 02

  Sure. And of course, perspicacious fellow as you are, you certainly, you know, right on it.

• 18:00Speaker 02

  It's now, I'll be turning sixty seven this year. So I've been in medicine for forty years and I've seen American medicine over the past forty years turn into what started as a very intimate and collaborative enterprise.

• 18:15Speaker 01

  The house call and the family doctor.

• 18:17Speaker 02

  Yes, I made lots of house calls, absolutely. And in the seventies and eighties, in comes the insurance companies and the bottom line of the HMOs, et cetera. And I watched a hardness set in on the practice of medicine, the flow between the doctor and patients. It got computerized in a way. And then there's time limits and there's money limits and there's pressure on the doctor and you better see one patient every eight minutes. And assembly line medicine set in. And it's been dehumanizing for everybody, the doctor, the patient, the nurses, the lab techs, everyone's under the pressure here. And so that's been really disheartening.

• 18:58Speaker 02

  And I feel so badly for my colleagues, especially as a primary care physician. My colleagues in primary care, the emergency room doctors, the family doctors, they want to communicate with their patients.

• 19:15Speaker 01

  Right. I would imagine this is why they get into it. They don't get into it for the paperwork.

• 19:20Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Nor really for the money. And so many of them are, they feel like they're on an assembly line and it's so dispiriting, so disheartening. I've been fortunate enough to disengage from a lot of the aspects of that type of medicine because I don't have a need or desire to make huge amounts of money. And Medicare says, good, I'm glad you don't because you're going to spend an hour with a patient, we're going to pay you sixty two bucks for that. So I'm glad you're not attached to making a lot of money.

• 19:50Speaker 01

  Which if it was nineteen forty-eight would be okay.

• 19:53Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 19:54Speaker 01

  Not so much.

• 19:55Speaker 02

  Exactly. And the...

• 20:00Speaker 02

  At the clinic where I'm working at, Tornor Health Center, I'm privileged enough to be able to have that kind of time to spend with an hour with each patient. But again, it's not my colleagues' fault in any way. The, I've had a nice little general practice in Hawaii, in the island of Maui, and, and, not telling out of school, but what's the diplomatic distinguished way to say I went broke? Because, again, you spend all this time with patients, and the insurance companies pay you a pittance, you can't keep the lights on for there. And I realized that, that I've become an anachronism in the system. This system is now geared

• 20:40Speaker 02

  for, for large, multi-specialty, multi-physician, family practice clinics, what, 20 family doctors, you're seeing 40 patients in a day, this is high-volume medicine, and, oh, the insurance companies, oh, you'll earn thousands of dollars a week doing that. But as I said, I find it really dehumanizing. I'll take my few hundred bucks and be able to connect with my patients

• 21:02Speaker 01

  and be with them. Right, so to actually practice medicine the way it sort of was traditionally set up for appropriate patient care, and to be able to listen, actually led you to be broke, and that compelled you to go back into urgent care, right?

• 21:16Speaker 02

  Yes, yes. You know, my heart is in nutritional medicine and lifestyle counseling, but I pay the rent doing blood and guts, urgent care, suturing, and some fracture setting at a local urgent care school centers. And, and it's an honorable craft, and I sewed up a good laceration, and I set a good wrist fracture. But, you know, I said, I've said frequently, you know, patients come into the urgent care clinic, fat, sick, and bleeding. They leave not bleeding, but they're still fat and sick. And nobody's really connected with these folks about what's going on.

• 21:46Speaker 01

  Right, and so as the course of sort of practicing medicine in urgent care, and seeing so many people come through, obviously, you're starting to see trends in what's really going on with people. I mean, is this what catalyzes this interest in nutritional medicine? Or where does that kind of start to come into play?

• 22:01Speaker 02

  Sure. Well, a variation of that, absolutely. From the purely medical point of view, the...

• 22:10Speaker 02

  The light went on in the late, I don't know, early to mid 1980s. And the, um, the, the patients that I used to dread coming through the door, God love them all, were these middle aged men, 40 pounds overweight, high blood pressure, taking metformin for their diabetes, they had gout, and I never knew what to tell them. I've been in acute medicine for 10 years and gee Joe, you ought to lose some weight, you ought to change your dosage of your metformin. I didn't know what to tell them. Well, then, due to my personal evolution, I decided, um, I wanted to get the violence out of my life. So I've, for ethical, non-violence reasons, I stopped eating animals, I stopped wearing leather,

• 22:55Speaker 02

  I just, I didn't want to pay for any violence to this earth, to the animals, to other people in any way, shape or form. So, um...

• 23:02Speaker 01

  What, was there a moment that catalyzed that decision?

• 23:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:06Speaker 01

  I mean, what happened?

• 23:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, there were, there were a couple. It was a culmination of a number of factors. I did much of my, um, surgical training, uh, over at Big Bad Old Cook County Hospital in Chicago, up in the trauma unit. And it was almost world famous, or at least nationwide famous, uh, for being one of the roughest, toughest, bloodiest emergency rooms going through Cook County Trauma Unit on a Saturday night was just a scene of carnage, just constant gunshot wounds and shotgun blasts and knife wounds. And, and I saw the violence, I saw the family fabric rendered apart. I saw the, um, the personal suffering, the huge expense, just a, that's a disconnection from humanity. And I knew I wanted to get that out of my

• 23:52Speaker 02

  life. And I was reading Gandhi and Sachin Nanda and, and people saying violence is not necessary. Talk and love and talk and love and work it out. And so I took that to heart and I'm the kind of guy that if there's a spider in the room, I'll put a little cup over the spider and slide a little paper under the thunder and then take him outside and let him go in the grass there. I'm that kind of guy. And so one evening in Vancouver, where I'd gone into practice, I was pontificating out over to a friend over a steak dinner about my desire to eliminate the violence out of my life.

• 24:28Speaker 01

  While you're eating your sirloin.

• 24:30Speaker 02

  Well, I'm eating my sirloin. And he said, well, that's all very nice, Michael, but if you really want to get the violence out of your life, you might want to start with that piece of dead flesh on your plate. Because the truth is, your desire for that piece of meat in your mouth, you are paying for the death of that animal. You are paying the butcher. Yes, kill another one. You are doing that. And as much as I wanted to object and negate that, I couldn't. And I heard a little voice in my shoulder saying, you know, he's right. Truth is, you're paying for the death of that animal. You're paying to keep that scene of violence and carnage going. And at that point, I could not do that any longer. The act of taking my wallet out of my pocket and taking dollar bills out and paying for that became

• 25:15Speaker 02

  a soiled act. It became an act of complicity in violence. And I just couldn't. So I became a de facto vegan for ethical reasons. It wasn't long after I stopped eating meat that I looked at my leather shoes, my leather wallet.

• 25:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't want to put those in my body. But it's interesting, being a doctor, that you didn't come into it initially for health reasons. That was almost a byproduct of spiritual exploration, I suppose.

• 25:41Speaker 02

  Absolutely. But what that did was then open the door to, it reframed what I was seeing. Because at the same time, I was, I had gone back to finish my residency in anesthesiology in Vancouver General.

• 25:58Speaker 02

  And day after day, I'm in the operating room, especially on the cardiovascular anesthesia service, and day after day, I'm putting patients to sleep, opening up, watching the surgeons open their chest, and from their arteries, they're pulling out this yellow, greasy gunk called atherosclerosis. And I'm looking down in there, this is what's causing their heart attacks and their strokes, and their blue feet, and renal failure, lack of blood flow. And it's a stunning thing to see, it's so clear, you seldom see the cause of a disease so evident as when it's pulled out of an artery. And one day, I was looking, and this particular fellow, his fatty deposits had a bit of a

• 26:40Speaker 02

  yellow cast to it, and I remember my mother making chicken soup, and I said, "You know, that stuff looks like chicken fat." And a little voice again said, "There's good reason why, doctor."

• 26:51Speaker 01

  Essentially the same thing.

• 26:52Speaker 02

  "It looks like chicken fat." It is chicken fat, and cow fat, and pig fat, and all the fat of any of the slow animals that was walking past his table when he had a fork in his hand. And I realized it's from what these people are eating, and they're paying for the death of those animals, and they are eating the flesh of those animals, and without being outrageously symbolic here, you know, we kill the animals, but in a way, they get revenge, they kill us from the inside.

• 27:19Speaker 01

  I never thought of it that way.

• 27:20Speaker 02

  No, it goes around and around, and I just had to disconnect from that in all forms. And so I did. I left anesthesia, I couldn't be part of the assembly line, next, next, because nobody's talking to these patients about what's going, why they're laying on that operating table with that stroke.

• 27:39Speaker 01

  Right, you're one cog in the assembly line. You see them for that one specific purpose, and there's no follow-up or any other kind of connection with that individual.

• 27:46Speaker 02

  Exactly, as much as I loved anesthesia, and the surgery seems is a wonderful, magical place to work, I just felt that that's not for me, that I needed to go out and start helping my patients stay off that operating table, stay out of that hospital. So I left anesthesia, I had six months to go in my residency, I had paid my money for my National Board exams, but I knew I did not want to be an anesthesiologist any longer, and so, much to my parents' consternation, I withdrew from the residency, and I went back to general practice. But in this time, things had changed. I had changed, in that...

• 28:25Speaker 02

  When I adopted a vegan diet, a totally plant-based diet, um, within six weeks, a twenty-pound spare tire of fat around my waist melted melted away. My borderline high blood pressure slipped down to one ten seventy. That was like two fifty. Oh, it was. It was officially high. And I felt great waking up in a nice, light, lean body. And I was, I found myself a healthy man. So then the wheel goes full circle. I find myself in my general practice office. I'd moved to Florida by that time. And who walks in my office but those middle-aged, overweight, high-blood-pressure diabetic

• 29:05Speaker 02

  guys that I had dreaded coming in to see me before? Now, I knew what to tell them. I knew why. I knew what they were doing to their bloodstream. After every bacon and egg breakfast, every cheeseburger lunch, every fried chicken dinner, they send wave after wave of this fat and sugar and animal protein through their bloodstream, and it hurts their arteries and they clog up. And so I said, you know, I had a professor in med school said, you know, medicine is ten percent science and ninety percent common sense. You know, and if you're doing, if I have a patient complaining of headaches, I say, when do you get headaches? Oh, every time I hit myself in the head with a hammer. I said, well, maybe

• 29:48Speaker 02

  you don't want to do that. Well, same thing. A doctor, I keep running all this fat and then further my bloodstream. I keep putting on this weight. My diabetes getting worse. What do you think I should do? Well, why don't you stop doing that? And I, I had a colleague that gave cooking lessons. I sent my patients to her and we got them going on a lean, clean, plant-based diet. Got them walking every day. And the magic happens. You put a nice, clean fuel through the body, as you well know, and the engine hums along and they started losing weight and, and things that I never thought I would see in medicine started happening.

• 30:26Speaker 02

  When I went to med school back in the seventies, the the adage carved in stone was if you put someone on high blood pressure pills, they will take these medications the rest of their life. No one gets off high blood pressure pills. Well, I had this overweight fellow who was eating lots of salt and cranking his blood pressure up, changed his diet, started eating a whole food, plant-based diet, take a good walk every day, fifty pounds melted away over the course of six months. And with that much less flesh, you need a lower pressure to to send blood through the tissues there.

• 31:00Speaker 01

  Right, the the blood pressure drops.

• 31:02Speaker 02

  Blood pressure drops and those arteries open up. And and I've got him on two powerful medications to lower his blood pressure, ones that he's going to take the rest of his life, right? And he's calling me saying, Doc, I'm standing up, I'm getting lightheaded and darn, you're passed out yesterday.

• 31:16Speaker 01

  It's too low.

• 31:16Speaker 02

  And my blood pressure's too low. I said, well, at this point, I said the words I was told never to say, stop your blood pressure medications. Now you no longer have high blood pressure. Stop taking medications for a disease you do not any longer have. And they did. And guess what? They they did die. They didn't have a stroke. And I half expected a puff of smoke and the ghost of my internal medicine professor would, you know, appear saying, you told them then go get off their pills. But they did fine. And now I routinely get people off their blood pressure medications. The folks with diabetes, you know, once on insulin, always on insulin, nonsense. Get them off their insulin, get them off their metformin.

• 31:54Speaker 01

  And same with, same with the cholesterol, the statin meds as well.

• 31:59Speaker 02

  Absolutely. The statins, absolutely. Talk about the.

• 32:02Speaker 01

  I mean, the statin thing with the the new recommendations that essentially everybody should be taking.

• 32:08Speaker 02

  Stunning, stunning.

• 32:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. So talk a little bit about that and the body's ability to kind of address and reverse that scenario.

• 32:17Speaker 02

  You know, I guess after forty plus years in medicine, you get a little philosophical, I suppose, but it's a real head scratcher for me to work in a profession whose technology is so powerful and so precise that the smart guys and girls in the white coats in a laboratory can identify the most subtle genetic malfunctions on gene number A21 on chromosome 13 that puts an enzyme defect on this amino, this they can identify. But the cause of childhood obesity, the cause of type 2 diabetes, the cause of carotid arteries.

• 33:02Speaker 02

  Let's spend another hundred billion in the NHS to find the cause of childhood obesity, the cause of carotid arteries. It makes me want to get the biggest soapbox I can find, go down to Washington DC, stand on it and yell as loudly as I can, you want the cause of childhood obesity? It's the food! They're reading, it's the food! Well, the cause of high blood pressure and the carotid arteries. It's the food! It's the burgers and the fries and the fried chicken and the pizza and the olive oil and the chicken and the cheese. All this tsunami of fat and animal proteins that are sent through their bloodstream and vegetable oils, day after day, hour after hour. That's what's going on. How can you not see that? And yet, my colleagues, oh, they want to look at that. Oh, I don't know anything about nutrition. Oh, people will never change their diet.

• 33:47Speaker 02

  Oh, it's none of my business to talk to them about that. And they don't. And, but, oh, but, but, but statins will pound down their cholesterol, so it's easy to give them a pill. And that's what's happening.

• 34:02Speaker 01

  And they'll take it, but they may not take my dietary advice.

• 34:05Speaker 02

  Oh, they won't take my dietary advice.

• 34:06Speaker 01

  So why bother?

• 34:07Speaker 02

  Exactly. And the reason that they don't, and human nature is human nature. And I'm not clucking my tongue or wagging my finger, because I, when I was eating animal flesh, I didn't see it either. If you don't want, until you see it, you don't see it. But there's a lot of resistance. One, you know, we weren't trained in it as physicians, but also, I hope it's not casting any aspersions, but the truth is, most doctors, they don't want to tell their patient to adopt a plant-based diet, because that means they've got to stop eating their filet mignon and their lobster thermidor and their brie cheeses. And they don't want to do that themselves, so they so they'd rather just not open that doors. It's easier to give them a prescription for statins.

• 34:47Speaker 01

  That dissonance brings up a really interesting issue because I think that there is a lot of dissonance out there. Like, we're in this really fascinating time where we've never had more access to information than we have now. Because of technology and the internet, we can access all kinds of crazy, amazing information when it comes to our health. And yet, there is this, you know, sort of crazy level of confusion because there's so many conflicting opinions out there. The truth is, you know, one thing we can't dispute is this epidemic healthcare crisis that we're in the midst of. You know, we're the most prosperous nation on earth, but we've never been more sick or more obese. Heart disease, cancer, diabetes, obesity, these problems are insane, right? And so, the sort of educated

• 35:31Speaker 01

  consumer goes online, let me, let me try to get to the bottom of this. Well, the Dr. Clapper says this, but, you know, kind of some of the, some of the noise, or I don't know if it's fair to say noise, but some of the information that's out there that kind of is taking center stage right now, especially with young people and like technologically savvy young people who are into like biohacking and life hacking and all of this, is this, is this low carb kind of high fat craze. So you have all these people out there who are professing the benefits of a ketogenic diet. You have Peter Attia, you have Dave Asprey, you have Dr. Gary Taubes, you have Professor Tim Noakes, and these people have

• 36:12Speaker 01

  large followings. They have big audiences. People are listening to them. And they're, they're sort of advising something very, very different than what you're saying. And so this creates this dissonance that we're talking about. And that confusion leads to paralysis, right? People don't know what to do. So while these guys can't even agree, these guys are saying one thing, these guys are saying another thing, so I'm just going to keep eating the way that I'm eating.

• 36:37Speaker 02

  Hmm. Yes, that seems to be what's happening, and it's causes me great dismay. And

• 36:44Speaker 02

  Again, and I don't know these men and women and I can't, I don't want to cause, cast personal aspersions and I'm sure they're trying to do the best they can. But unless they've read a different physiology book than I did when I was in med school, a state of ketosis is not a natural state of being for your physiology. That is, it's, it's, you're driving your car and the red light comes on the dashboard, you know, there's distress happening in that engine. Well, the same thing in ketosis. You have run out of glucose, of muscle fuel, and you are now dipping into your emergency fat stores as emergency fueled, you know, the red lights come on.

• 37:28Speaker 02

  And as burning that emergency fuel, you're in a state of ketosis. And the body can handle that for a day or two or three or five, I suppose. But in no way is this the natural state of human beings. We've always been grazing on carbohydrate-containing foods. That's why we have taste buds for sweet on our tongue because we like to go for those fruits and high-calorie plant foods. To say that we've got a natural taste for animal flesh and that we want to stay in the state of ketosis, it's stunning to me that medical physicians can say this is a good and natural state to keep the body.

• 38:09Speaker 01

  It's a crisis state.

• 38:10Speaker 02

  Absolutely, absolutely. It's like being at the stoplight in your car and at a red light and you put the car in neutral and you put, hold the accelerator down on the engine and down to the floor. And you run it on, you know, on a high-octane fuel, you know, you're going to overheat the engine. I mean, it's not gentle with the metabolic years.

• 38:33Speaker 01

  So, yeah, so what would happen if somebody is in a persistent state of ketosis or in this, you know, sort of on this ketogenic diet? I mean, what are the long-term ramifications of that? Or have you seen any result? Have you dealt with patients that are experimenting with this?

• 38:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, oh, I'm sure there are many and they don't come to me though because they know what they're going to hear. But...

• 38:56Speaker 02

  The beautiful thing about running on plant foods, from the biochemical point of view, is that when you metabolize sugars, it breaks down basically to carbon dioxide and water. And you breathe off the carbon dioxide and you eliminate the water through your kidneys. And that's a clean burning fuel, doesn't follow the metabolic spark plug, so to speak. But when you run on animal flesh as your, excuse me, primary fuel, these are dirty fuels, in a way, they're metabolically dirty, and that, they leave residue. While you burn fats, you're gonna generate ketones. And ketones, by their nature, are acidic. We're talking about acetone, beta hydroxybutyric acid, these are acidic molecules.

• 39:38Speaker 02

  And to keep yourself in a state of low-grade metabolic acidosis, day after day, week after week, this is not a healthy state to be in.

• 39:49Speaker 01

  That's gonna create chronic inflammation, is it not? Which is going to lead to these diseases that we're talking about.

• 39:54Speaker 02

  It's certainly not gonna be general with any inflammatory state in your body. But also, to neutralize that acid, you're gonna have to give up either some calcium out of your bones, or make your kidneys work extra hard in order to excrete extra electrolytes. It's a stress state for the body. But you lose weight. Yeah, well, sure, you lose weight on that, but you're ill. Because your appetite is, when you're sick, people lose their appetite. And when you're in ketosis, yeah, you don't feel like eating, you only feel like almost got the flu. And so, you know, you can lose weight on cancer chemotherapy, but it doesn't mean it's a healthy way to do it. And so, the issue is not weight loss, the issue is health. And I just cannot see that being a healthy diet.

• 40:38Speaker 02

  Plus, we're not carnivorous apes. And that's really what they're trying to turn us into. We are carnivorous, we eat flesh three times a day. Well, you know, not even mountain lions eat flesh three times a day, you know, official carnivores don't eat flesh three times a day. It's only because we're wealthy enough and have subverted the whole food system. So we kill them, they'll eat chickens an hour, and we've got all that flesh floating around us here. But there's nothing natural about eating animal flesh on a daily basis, let alone two or three times a day.

• 41:09Speaker 01

  I mean, I think this this group would say, and one of the kind of common arguments that comes up when you start talking about the link between eating animal, animal flesh, animal protein, and the connection between that and a variety of diseases is, well, look at the Inuits. You know, the Inuits, they're basically eating meat all the time. They seem to not have heart disease, and it creates this inconsistency.

• 41:30Speaker 02

  Well, one, they do have heart disease. And second, these people are living, they used to be living, in extreme weather conditions, you know, many degrees below zero, doing stunning amounts of physical labor, pulling their sleds across ice floes and paddling their kayaks on the ocean. They're burning four, 5,000 calories a day. And, and that's, there are a little asterisk on the side of, you know, of humanity here. And they may have adapted that in some way, but in no way can you extrapolate that, that Joe American ought to be, you know, eating whale blubber, you know, three times a day. Well, if he's, if he's burning, you know, if he's burning

• 42:14Speaker 02

  5,000 calories, then, then Joe Sixpack, get off your couch and go start burning 5,000 calories a day, and we'll see how your arteries do there. But it's a silly analogy to make and to use that as a justification that that's the natural diet of humans, when nothing like that is, you know, spread across the planet in any form.

• 42:34Speaker 01

  Right. And when we're talking about eating a plant-based diet, and, you know, I, my experience and my strong belief is that this is the optimal diet for long-term sustainable health, and as well as a potential solution to the environmental disasters that we're facing. I mean, it's sort of a win-win across the board. And one of the arguments that kind of comes up... Is well, if you're on a plant-based diet, like you've got to take vitamin B12, or you're going to have this deficiency. So how can it be the optimal diet? And, you know, my perspective is, I believe in supplementation. I think humans need supplementation, whether you're on the standard American diet, or you're on the paleo diet,

• 43:17Speaker 01

  especially with the progressive depletion of the nutritional quality of our soils. There's all sorts of things going on that can lead to deficiencies, the stress in our life, etc. I think that you should always be trying to get your nutrition from your food, but the food isn't always going to suffice. So whether it's vitamin B12, vitamin D, all, you know, DHA, omega-3, these sorts of things. And this is something that you speak at length about, right? So I'm interested in your perspective on supplementation.

• 43:58Speaker 02

  The vitamin B12 issue, and I've heard that canard, you know, expressed many times, that how can a plant-based diet be natural? It takes supplements. But wait a minute, that reflects an insufficient understanding of basic biochemistry. Vitamin B12 is absolutely essential for normal nerve function, brain function, blood function. It absolutely is essential. And people think, well, that's why I need my red meat. And that subsumes that cows make vitamin B12 and pigs make vitamin B12, when the truth is, they don't. No animal makes vitamin B12. The only place vitamin B12 comes from is from bacteria that live in the soil. And those animals have B12 in their muscles because they're eating grass all day.

• 44:40Speaker 02

  And they're pulling up clumps of grass that have B12, that have soil particles clinging to the roots. And in those soil particles are bacteria that make B12. And the cow and the pig and the chicken swallow these organisms that then produce B12 in their own gut, winds up in their muscles. And yes, you can kill the animal, shoot it in the head, strip the flesh off its bones and eat the flesh for your B12. But the truth is, that's bacterial B12 in the cow's muscles. The cow did not make it. And that same bacterial B12 used to be running through our systems as well, 10,000 years ago, even a few hundred years ago.

• 45:15Speaker 01

  Because we were eating the dirt, or?

• 45:16Speaker 02

  Well, we were connected to the natural world when... Absolutely, we would, we would, we spent our days foraging. There's nothing romantic about survival. You're either killing animals or pulling roots out of the ground and eating them. And, and those roots pull out of the ground would have soil with B12-producing organisms clinging to it. Every rainstorm, those organisms and the B12 they produce washed into the streams and rivers. And when it came time to drink, you'd lay down at the nearest stream and drink, you're filled, and you'd get B12 in the stream water. When we were connected with the natural world, the B12 used to flow through our bodies

• 45:58Speaker 02

  just like it does the deer and the antelope and the buffalo. And no supplements were necessary when we were living earth-connected lives. And the Baalio folks seemed to overlook that. Now, what we're, what's we're running into now is that that link to the earth has been broken. Nobody's drinking out of streams anymore. Nobody's just pulling vegetables out of their garden and eating it without washing it. And modern sanitation has intervened here, which is okay with me. I don't want to be treating cases of cholera and typhoid fever. It's okay to chlorinate their drinking water supply, but it kills the B12-producing bacteria. And so in this trade-off that we've made for, for clean water, the price for

• 46:40Speaker 02

  civilized man is going to cost you your natural B12 supply. And so that got taken away from us. So it's this artifact of modern quote civilization that has made the plant-based folks now, well, we gotta get some B12 somewhere. And it still comes from bacteria, but nowadays they culture those bacteria in big vats of, of closer medium, and they produce the B12. And the B12 is separated off and put into little pills and potions. And it's the same bacterial B12, but now we get it out of a bottle. But it's just because of modern sanitation, not because the plant-based diet is inherently deficient.

• 47:13Speaker 01

  And what are the other deficiencies that you commonly see when you're seeing your patients that require supplementation? What kind of supplements should we be looking at and why?

• 47:22Speaker 02

  Right. Interesting point.

• 47:26Speaker 02

  So before I get into the specifics, I just have to say that the majority of folks who generated deficiency in anything, whether it be a vitamin, a mineral, anything, it's because of things that you know well, and that is, we are consuming products, whether they be breads, or soups, or whatever, that are processed. And in the processing, the vitamins and minerals are stripped out, they're replaced with a bunch of fat and sugar and salt. If people really eat the kind of diet that you and I and others in the field are prescribing, and it's, the words just flow together, people don't even think about, oh, whole food, plant-based diet, but stop.

• 48:09Speaker 02

  We're talking about a whole food, plant-based diet. Nothing, like Michael Pollan says, eat food, not edible food-like substances out of brightly colored packages and boxes, which is what most people eat out of convenience, eat food. Eat big hearty salads, colorful salads, hearty, rich vegetable stews and soups, big plates of steamed greens, handfuls of walnuts, oatmeal and fruit in the morning. You run that through your body, day after day after day. Now stop the oils and the cheese and the dairy and the processed stuff, and eat food. And I'm talking about big helpings, as I said, fresh, whole, plant foods, and big salads,

• 48:50Speaker 02

  hearty vegetable soups, healthy lentil stews, and healthy bean burritos, you know, hearty food. These deficiencies don't happen, you know, we'll talk about a little fine tuning, by and large, protein takes care of itself, carbohydrates take care of itself, the essential fats take care of themselves, the vitamins and minerals, they take care of themselves. It's in the green, it's in the green and yellow vegetables, it's in the fruits, it's in the root vegetables, it's there, and nature puts, it gives it to us, like she always has. And it's not, we're not suddenly, you know, awoke in this wilderness of what do we eat, but eat food, like we always have done. So with that said, if I presuppose that, listen, eat a really healthy plant-based diet, whole foods like I mentioned, you're not going to run into these kind of deficiencies

• 49:33Speaker 02

  by and large. Yes, you gotta deal with the B12 thing because we're not drinking stream water. Other than that, that's about the only official supplement that a purely plant-based eater requires. In the real world, because we're away from, we're out of the sunshine, we, you know, we used to spend our days out in the African veldar with, uh, naked in the sun, running away from lions and tigers, and, and all that sun on our skin made plenty of vitamin D. Uh, our skins look like old suitcases by age forty, but you got eaten by a lion at forty-two and, and nobody cared about skin cancer the way we looked in. But now, we're all, we've huddled away from the sun now. We're all cowering in our rooms in front of our computers. We're out, we're not in the sun anymore. So sunlight is not

• 50:17Speaker 02

  falling on our skin. So vitamin D deficiency has become rampant. And so I check my patients' vitamin D levels, and if it's way below forty, I, I will get them on oral supplement for that, or else don't get a half hour morning sun. Right. Every day is the best, of course. So vitamin D is something I do have to look out for. Same thing with, um, iodine is an issue for purely plant-based folks. Again, you know, ancient times, as you, as you're hunting, as you're gathering by the seashore, you know, there's lots of edible seaweeds, and we used to get lots of iodine that way. And the soils near, uh, near the oceans, uh, as the, as the tides go in and out, the soils have lots of iodine, and then, so the root vegetables that grow in those soils, the carrots and the beets and the turnip. Are absorbing that.

• 51:01Speaker 02

  Were very rich in iodine. Well, that's, that's receding into the dim past. So, um, vitamin D and iodine are the two, are the two main minerals, uh, or two main nutrients that I'll occasionally consider, um, patients, uh, supplementing if they're showing any signs of especially hypothyroid, um, symptoms. And, um, the last one, I just want to make sure my, my folks get enough of these lawn chain fatty acids, the, um, uh, DHA and EPA, the omega-three fats. And you can make them in your body, but you gotta eat the foods that contain the forerunners of those molecules. So I want all my folks to have a handful of almond, a handful of walnuts a day. And again, those

• 51:41Speaker 01

  So these, we're talking about the omega threes.

• 51:43Speaker 02

  The omega threes, yeah. And, but if they, despite doing that, you know, there's omega three fats in dark green, leafy vegetables. So again, I'm talking about big helpings of kale and broccoli and chard and collard. If you do that and have your ground flaxseeds on the oatmeal in the morning and take your handful of walnuts and eat lots of greens, you should make enough of the omega threes. But if not, if they've got dry skin or they're, they just can't keep up with that, I'll have them get some algae derived DHA at the health food store. Those are about the only three, the DHA, the vitamin D and the iodine, the only three that I concern, plus the B12.

• 52:15Speaker 01

  Right. On the, on the subject of, of omega three supplementation, there's a lot of talk about fish oil and, you know, what's wrong with fish oil? Fish oil's the best source of omega three. And why would you tell somebody not to eat fish oil? Are you just holding on to this idea of plant-based for no reason? Right? So, I mean, my, correct me if I'm wrong, my understanding is that even fish oils that are labeled toxin-free still have been found to be rife with toxins. And I think Dr. Michael Greger did a video on that, that there were some studies on that. And, and that the algae-based omega three supplements are just as good and you can be sure that they're toxin-free. I mean,

• 52:59Speaker 01

  is that really, is that, is that correct? Is that the argument?

• 53:02Speaker 02

  Oh, that's certainly my understanding. And it's almost exactly analogous to the B12 situation where, you know, there's B12 in the cow's muscles, but the cow didn't make it. It's bacterial B12. Well, the same thing, fish oil, omega threes, people, fish do not make DHA. Fish don't make it. It's made by plants, just like dark green leaf vegetables make it, so do the the vegetables in the sea. Basically, DHA, this long-chain fatty acid, is made by algae cells, most of it's floating free in the ocean. And fish live in the ocean and they swim with their mouths open all day swallowing algae. And it's it's the algol DHA that winds

• 53:42Speaker 02

  up in the fish's muscle. And you can kill the fish and crush its flesh and squeeze out the fish oil, but the truth is, it's algol DHA, it's from the algae. Well, if you haven't heard, we are clear-cutting the oceans. We are strip-mining the oceans. And and to to advocate it's good to scoop up the fish, grind up them for the oil, when it's coming from the algae in the first place, it's it's just unconscionable to me to do that on an ecological level. But also, you know, as you said, it's hard to believe that their purification processes are so good and so efficient that every last little atom of mercury and every last little molecule of pesticides really comes out of that fish

• 54:24Speaker 02

  oil. Really, really hard to believe that they can still do that and sell it for sell it for cheap. There's no reason to be eating fish oil. Plus, there's some medical reasons why you don't. It's got an anticoagulant property to it. People, you've got a lot of fish oil, a little is good, more must be better. And they get a nosebleed and they don't stop bleeding. They fall and they hit their head and they bleed in their skull. It suppresses your immune system. And we're now seeing, if you if you Google fish oil and cancers, you're now seeing that the fish oil seems to suppress the part of the immune system that eats up the cancer cells that form in our body every day.

• 55:00Speaker 01

  Oh, interesting. I hadn't heard that.

• 55:01Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, you know, you can't do one thing in the body, you know, you can't do one thing. And I'm taking fish oil for my inflammation. Well, that's what you think you're doing.

• 55:13Speaker 01

  Right. This goes back to those beta-carotene studies, right? This idea that, well, we're driven by our sort of scientific protocol is to isolate out these things and make conclusions about them without sort of in the in the T. Colin, he addresses this in his book, whole, like, we have to look at this in a macro sense and how this matrix of how all of these things interact on multiple levels, doing many, many things at the same time.

• 55:35Speaker 02

  Oh, absolutely. And to say that, you know, this fish oil is going to create X, Y effect in my body. Well, it may do that, but it also correct, creates, you know, X, Z and and for number 1405 in your body. Oh gee, you didn't realize it also did that. Oh, I didn't think about it. Stopping my blood clotting and increasing my cancer risk. I thought I was just doing it for my, exactly.

• 56:01Speaker 01

  Right. It seems like the common theme in all of this throughout this whole conversation, or maybe even throughout this whole movement, is the idea of eating low on the food chain. When in doubt, like always eat, try to derive that, that, that nutrient, or whatever it is you're looking to get from the lowest possible level in the food chain, as opposed to higher up, where it becomes maybe contaminated, or just convoluted with many other things that have different impacts and effects on the body.

• 56:28Speaker 02

  Absolutely. I mean, it's still a natural world. And the biggest animals on the planet, elephants, buffaloes, giraffes, stallions, they create thousands of pounds of mammalian muscle without ever eating cheeseburgers and pepperoni pizzas. They get the protein and the minerals that's in the plants. And that's, it's there for our taking. That's what we're supposed to be doing is foraging and getting the harvest of the earth, period. And to turn ourselves into carnivorous apes and supplement takers is a grotesque distortion of the natural reality, as far as I can see.

• 57:06Speaker 01

  Right. Interesting. One of the things that I've noticed in kind of traversing this plant-based world over the past couple of years is, is getting back to this idea of macro and micro. Like on a macro level, I think all of the people like yourself that are at the top of the field, agree on the basics. But then when we start to kind of... Get into the nitty gritty or the details, there's lots of differing differing opinions on certain aspects of how to do this right. And I think with that comes this sort of losing the forest for the trees and and that that's sort of those these minor little disagreements over certain tiny aspects of this become arguments to sort of rebut this altogether.

• 57:51Speaker 01

  So I'm interested in your thoughts on this.

• 57:53Speaker 02

  Oh, well, you know, the answer is in the question. I see that happening again and again. And they'll get, you know, two experts that basically agree on everything. We want to be eating a whole plant based diet. But this one has a little different viewing about where nuts fits in or whether oils fits in. Ah, see, you guys disagree.

• 58:09Speaker 01

  Right. If we get you and McDougal and Dr. Resselstine and T. Colin Campbell and Dr. Michael Greger and Jeff. No, you get all these guys in a room, they're going to agree on 99% of everything. And then there's going to be 1%. But all the focus is going to go on that 1% that you guys are quibbling over.

• 58:26Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Exactly. It's a cynical, you know, it's it's us versus them. And there's no need for that. It's all us, you know. And speaking of all us, it's becoming in my viewpoint, their intention might be good. But the truth is, it's becoming unconscionable to recommend a flesh based diet on a planet of nine billion people to serve animal flesh for nine billion people. It is absolutely physically or ecologically impossible to do that. We do not have the soil, the water, the resources in any way imaginable. And so to be to be advocating this for everybody in the world want to be eating like this

• 59:07Speaker 02

  is talk about head in the bucket. There's a cynical disregard of the reality of this planet of world hunger. It's time to get real, folks. We grew up eating plants. We better get back to that and start creating sustainable food systems that makes the soil richer, which a plant based agriculture does, than to them just sucking all the nutrients out of the ecosystem and be surprised when the famine hits. We've got to start a restorative food production system and it starts. With plant-based foods and then plowing their plant material back into the soils and and keeping the cycles going. But burgers for nine billion is a recipe for ecological suicide.

• 59:50Speaker 01

  Beautifully put.

• 1:00:04Speaker 01

  That would be a great place to end it, but I can't let you go without asking you two quick questions. I know we have limited time with you today, but I did want to sort of inquire a little bit about the process when a patient comes to you at True North, right? I mean, if they're coming up to see you and to be, to participate in this clinic, I would presume that they're probably in a relatively poor state of health and need some significant help. What do you commonly see? What is the typical protocol, if you could make a generalization? And what kind of results do you see? I mean, maybe an anecdote or a story to help kind of paint the picture?

• 1:00:44Speaker 02

  Sure. When I graduated med school in 1972, I thought I was going to see six cases of leprosy every week, four cases of smallpox, and three of Tuzukamuchi fever. Forty years, I've seen zero cases of smallpox, thank God, zero of Tuzukamuchi fever, one leprosy I did see.

• 1:01:02Speaker 01

  Leprosy?

• 1:01:03Speaker 02

  I walked into my clinic in

• 1:01:06Speaker 01

  Was that in Hawaii?

• 1:01:07Speaker 02

  In Hawaii, yeah. He came in off a ship from Vietnam. But that's not what kills people. Americans are sick and dying from what they are eating. It's that high-fat, toxic food stream. And it's more than just fat. It's all the animal protein, hydrogenated oils, all the vegetable, all the toxic components of that food stream is clogging us up and creating the diseases, the high blood pressure, the obesity, the diabetes. It's all the same disease. It's running too rich a mixture through an engine that wasn't designed to run us, like running diesel fuel through your Volkswagen car engine.

• 1:01:47Speaker 02

  It's too rich a fuel and it's clogging us up. So as soon as they walk in the door, if they're forty pounds overweight and on metformin for their diabetes and on lisonpro for their blood pressure, I knew just, I know just by looking at their medication list what they're going to look like before they come in the door. And so I sit down with them and I listen. And I said, when, when's the last time you felt really good? When's the last time you were at a really ideal body weight? And I listen, and I know, that was 10 years ago. What happened 10 years ago? Oh, I got divorced, I lost my job, I got that. Okay, fair enough. And, and what happened with your food? Oh, I had no time to cook, I was suddenly has bachelor's, living on fast foods. Mm-hmm, there's a story. If you listen, they'll tell you the story, what's wrong with them.

• 1:02:29Speaker 02

  And so I open up my computer and I show them what happens to their blood. When they eat a cheeseburger, I show them how their blood turns fatty and there's more than just fat in that blood. All the carnitine metabolites and the, and the contaminants, all the things that injure their arteries. And I say, man, you, you have bacon and eggs for breakfast, cheeseburger for lunch, fried chicken for dinner, every five hours, you're sending a tide of fat and contaminants to your bloodstream. This is why you're sitting in front of me, 50 pounds overweight with high blood pressure and diabetes. You gotta stop doing this to your bloodstream, man. Here's what to eat. And we talk about a healthy diet, fruit and oatmeal for breakfast, and big soups and salads and steamed greens, all the good things we said, take a walk every day. And do a little fine tuning, depending, you know, as far as their medications go. And I see them back every two weeks.

• 1:03:12Speaker 02

  And if they're able to follow anywhere near this, the progress is stunning. It's beautiful to see these people trim down, they get off their pills. So it comes down to listening and then being, getting real with them. They're not paying me to be an enabler. Oh, a little bit of chicken and cheese is okay, Joe. No, it's not okay. That's what's keeping you fat and diabetic hypertensive. Stop doing that to your bloodstream. Stop. If, if you can't do that, you know, help you taper it off a little bit. If I have a little piece of, you know, flesh once a week, I guess that's okay. But, man, either get on board or you really need to find a doctor who will enable you in your bad habits. I can't be that doctor. If you want to work with me, you want to get healthier, uh, you're gonna get on to a whole food, plant-based diet and stop the cigarette smoking, et cetera.

• 1:03:56Speaker 02

  And, and there's lots of help available. I send them to our dietitian and the cooking classes and the psychology support. They're entitled to all the support they can get. But it's get real time in my office. This is what you're doing and you want to get healthy. Clean up the show and everything gets better from there.

• 1:04:11Speaker 01

  Right. And in terms of the success stories, it's one thing to talk about prevention or even damage control, like this guy's headed for a disaster. Let's, let's try to reduce the risk of that. But it's another thing altogether to talk about reversal. But I know that, you know, reversal is well within the realm of possibility when people are sort of adopting the protocol, you know, whole cloth, from what you're saying.

• 1:04:34Speaker 02

  Oh, absolutely. The reversals I've seen, the recoveries are stunning. These people who are headed for the ICU or the morbidly obese, all these medications, lean, clean, plant-based diet, a walk every day, boy, they trimmed down. It's, we don't take before and after pictures in my office, but boy, I wish we did, because so many times.

• 1:04:54Speaker 01

  Why not?

• 1:04:55Speaker 02

  Because when they first come in, they're sick and they're, they don't want a camera in front of their face, you know, recording it. But so often, they, when they stop eating the dairy alone, you see the bloat leave their face, you see their bull neck melt away, you see their jawline emerge, see their walk change, you see the expression on their face when they get out of the chair in the waiting room to come to my office. You can see they don't grimace anymore, they don't grunt, they're off their pills, their bowels are moving for the first time in years, they've not even felt this good in years. It just warms every cockle in this old doctor's heart. And so, you know, that's what makes it worthwhile. And it's, and it's, everybody can do it. Inside every fat, sick person there, there's

• 1:05:36Speaker 02

  a lean, healthy person who just needs to make better decisions. And, and the, the art and the joy in medicine now is helping people do that. I, I was relating to a friend of mine that when I was a young doc, oh, the excitement, oh, let's get him on these beta blockers for his heart rhythm and his ACE inhibitor for his blood pressure and the statin for his, and let's put this pill and this pill. Now, the fun of medicine, after we get him on a healthy plant-based diet, oh, we can stop that pill, oh, get him off that one, oh, we can just continue that one, doesn't need that one anymore. Now, now the fun's getting them off their pills and getting, turning them back into normal, healthy people. And that's, it's the greatest, most satisfying type of medicine I know how to practice. And that's what I'm going to finish my career with, no doubt.

• 1:06:19Speaker 01

  Beautiful. Thank you so much.

• 1:06:21Speaker 02

  You're so welcome.

• 1:06:22Speaker 01

  You're an inspiration. I hope that you continue for many, many years speaking the good word and helping people.

• 1:06:30Speaker 02

  And to you, keep running, man. We need the example you set, boy. Every time, it's early in the morning and I don't want to get up and do my workout, I think of you. Out on the road, as I say, if Rich can do it, clever, get out of bed and put on those running shoes and get moving, man.

• 1:06:46Speaker 01

  All right.

• 1:06:47Speaker 02

  So you help me more than you doubt.

• 1:06:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, we were joking at the Q and A session I did with Robert Cheek the other day. You were in the audience and I was like, oh no, Dr. Clapper's here. People are asking me nutrition questions. I was like so intimidated. I felt like you should be up there answering them, not me.

• 1:07:01Speaker 02

  You guys did very well. You guys know the feel very well.

• 1:07:05Speaker 01

  All right, great. Fantastic. Thanks for taking the time. If you want to learn more about Dr. Clapper, the best way to find out about him is drclapper.com, right?

• 1:07:16Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 1:07:16Speaker 01

  One P K L A P E R.

• 1:07:18Speaker 02

  Right. It's all spelled out. D O C T O R K L A P E R dot com.

• 1:07:23Speaker 01

  And you have a retreat in Maui coming up.

• 1:07:25Speaker 02

  We do. At the end of March, we have a seven day retreat, beautiful retreat center on Maui, drinking lots of fresh juices, some beautiful yoga, relaxation, a little life coaching. It's just gonna be a wonderful renewal cleanse to get you started in the spring.

• 1:07:41Speaker 01

  Awesome. And all the information about that's on your site.

• 1:07:43Speaker 02

  It's all on the website.

• 1:07:44Speaker 01

  And you have a Facebook page.

• 1:07:46Speaker 02

  No, I don't.

• 1:07:47Speaker 01

  Oh, you don't?

• 1:07:48Speaker 02

  No, I don't.

• 1:07:48Speaker 01

  Really?

• 1:07:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:49Speaker 01

  So just your website.

• 1:07:50Speaker 02

  Just my website.

• 1:07:51Speaker 01

  We gotta get you on Twitter. You'd be great on Twitter.

• 1:07:54Speaker 02

  I can't even get my emails answered. Every time I open my inbox.

• 1:07:58Speaker 01

  We gotta get a podcast up and running for you. I'll start a network. You can join my network.

• 1:08:02Speaker 02

  Thank you. I'll take you up on that one.

• 1:08:04Speaker 01

  All right. Very good.

• 1:08:05Speaker 02

  Great.

• 1:08:05Speaker 01

  And you got a couple of books out there. You have a book called Vegan Nutrition.

• 1:08:09Speaker 02

  That one's out of date. I do have four DVDs. That one's out of print. I have four DVDs and they're available for download on my website, on how to do a fast, on how your digestive system works, sense and nonsense nutrition, and understanding what your laboratory tests mean, as well as good talk on salts, fat, and sugar.

• 1:08:29Speaker 01

  Excellent.

• 1:08:30Speaker 02

  The good, the bad, and the ugly.

• 1:08:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a whole. I mean, I have so many other things I want to talk to you about.

• 1:08:33Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:08:34Speaker 01

  So you're gonna have to come on. Hopefully, we will cross paths at another event coming up. Do you have other speaking engagements?

• 1:08:39Speaker 02

  Oh, I'm sure there's spigels through the calendar, but I'm available to you anytime I want to connect. I'll be glad to talk with you anytime, Rich.

• 1:08:45Speaker 01

  All right. Excellent. Thanks so much.

• 1:08:47Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 1:08:48Speaker 01

  All right. Peace. Plants.

• 1:08:54Speaker 01

  All right, everybody. That's our show this week. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you enjoyed Dr. Michael Clapper. We made it out of the Bermuda Triangle intact, alive, unless this is all some kind of waking dream like Lost. I'll have to think about that this week. Anyway, if you dug what you heard and you want to learn more about Dr. Michael Clapper, check out his goods, what he has to offer and all of his resources. I'm going to list them out on my website at richworld.com on the episode page for this episode, obviously. So go there, read up, do it up. Want to support

• 1:09:35Speaker 01

  the show? The main thing is just tell a friend. Spread the word. This is all about viral, everybody. So for those of you who have been doing that, we appreciate it. If you want to take it to the next level, the best way to do that is to use the Amazon banner at richworld.com. Just click it. It's on the homepage. It's on every page, I think. Anyway, it'll take you to Amazon. You're going to buy something there anyway. So why not use the Amazon banner at richworld.com? It will not cost you a penny extra. And Amazon kicks us some loose commission change and that helps us pay our bills. Again, it helps me pay Tyler, my son, to produce this show. And he's been doing a bang up job. If you

• 1:10:16Speaker 01

  enjoy the music on the show, he produced, arranged, recorded, performed, all of it, all on his own. So give him a shout out in the comments. You can also donate to the show. You can subscribe on a weekly, monthly basis, pay one time if that feels right to you, that resonates with you, you want to contribute. We love it. So you don't have to. The show's free. It'll always be free. But if you're so inclined, we greatly, greatly appreciate you supporting the Plant Power Revolution, this mission. That we're on, so thanks. And also, review on iTunes. That's really important for keeping us kind of visible on iTunes.

• 1:10:59Speaker 01

  The more reviews we get, it just keeps us up there on the Health homepage and all that kind of good stuff. So it helps us out. So if you have an extra 10 seconds, just go to the iTunes page for the show and write a comment. Give it as many stars as you feel is appropriate and write what you want to write. I'm not telling you what to do, just that you do it. We would greatly appreciate that as well. If you're inspired by Dr. Clapper and you want to learn more about how to get more plant-based, you're plant curious, you can check out our online course at MindBodyGreen.com, The Ultimate Guide to Plant-Based Nutrition. Three and a half hours of streaming video content and online community, downloadable tools, all kinds of good stuff.

• 1:11:43Speaker 01

  And it kind of answers a lot of the questions that I get via email about what to eat, when to eat it, what to eat before a workout, after a workout, how do you do it with kids, how do you do it when you travel? All that good stuff is contained in this program, of which I am quite proud. Of course, for all your Plant Power provisions, go to RichRoll.com. We've got some cool Plant Power t-shirts up there, a couple nutritional products, our J C D Cookbook, and lots of fun stuff. So, anyway, that's it. And if you want to read some more of my thoughts, go to RichRoll.com on my blog, follow me on Instagram and on Twitter and on Facebook. I'm @RichRoll in most places. That's it. I'm out of here. Thanks, you guys.

• 1:12:28Speaker 01

  I hope you have a great week, a healthy week, a fit week. I hope you take time to invest in yourself this week, to do the inside work and the outside work. Let's all make our lives better together. All right, everybody, I'll be back with you next week. And until then, I bid you adieu. Thanks, you guys. Peace. Plants.