How Not To Diet With Michael Greger, MD

When it comes to reliable nutrition information, the internet is a warn-torn, metastasizing mushroom cloud of toxic half-truths and misinformation. How do we sort through the tribal wars? How do we separate fact from fiction? Let's start with seeking out the experts. And the best, most objective science available. This is the life’s work of today’s guest and my friend, Dr. Michael Greger. Long time listeners are well acquainted with Dr. Greger, one of my very first guests back in 2012 (RRP #007). But it's been almost five years since his second appearance in 2015 (RRP #199). So let's put matters to rights. A graduate of Cornell and Tufts University School of Medicine as well as a founding member and Fellow of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine, Dr. Greger is a nutrition science wizard who with a library of scientific journal publications to his name. He has testified before Congress; lectured at countless symposiums and institutions; and was an expert witness in the infamous Oprah Winfrey meat defamation lawsuit. Appearing everywhere from the Dr. Oz show to The Colbert Report, his books: How Not to Die, the How Not To Die Cookbook, and How Not To Diet — the focus of today's conversation — all became instant New York Times Best Sellers. When Dr. Greger isn’t speaking, crafting high-level policy initiatives or penning bestsellers, he scours thousands of medical journals in search of the world’s best, most objective nutrition research to bring you free videos and articles every single day at NutritionFacts.org — the world’s most authoritative, non-profit, science-based public service destination for all things nutrition, health and disease prevention. Finally, it’s worth noting that 100% of all fees and proceeds he receives from speaking and book sales are donated to charity — his effort to avoid all conflicts of interest. Today’s conversation pivots on the optimal criteria to enable weight loss — and the actionable steps required to create and sustain healthy lifestyle practices. In addition, we explore how commercial influence corrodes nutrition science. How to parse the incredibly conflicting information we are spoon-fed daily by the media and celebrities alike. And finally, it’s about separating evidence-based science from confirmation bias. Note: This conversation was recorded in February, so it's coronavirus free zone. For Dr. G’s take on our current state of affairs, check out his new audiobook released this week, How To Survive A Pandemic — a breakdown on the origins of zoonotic disease, how to protect ourselves, and what we must rectify to reduce the likelihood of future catastrophes. Dr. Greger is truly one of the most delightful, relentless, passionate, and service-minded humans I have ever met. It's an honor to share this conversation. My hope is that it catalyzes a new perspective on nutrition for yourself and your loved ones. 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?

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• 0:44Rich Roll?

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• 1:05Michael Greger?

  The most important decision we make is what we put in our mouth. And so if there's any decision that should be built based on evidence, and we should demand evidence, there's only one diet ever proven to reverse heart disease, the majority of patients, plant-based diet. If there's one thing you need to know, number-one killer men and women, only diet ever proven reverse in the majority of patients, plant-based diet. So the only way that wouldn't argue for it being the default diet for everyone is if it so dramatically increased your risk of killers 2 through 15 or something, such that it would overwhelm the heart disease benefit, and instead you tend to see a benefit of neutral effects across the board. It's just the whole system is rigged kind of against us.

• 1:49Michael Greger?

  You know, the CEOs of junk food companies aren't sitting around trying to think of creative ways to contribute to the childhood obesity epidemic. They just need to make money for their shareholders. How do you do that? You don't do that selling something that goes bad, like produce, that you can't brand. You want a snack cake that's just on the shelf, right? I mean, the system is just set up to reward these behaviors that make people sick.

• 2:10Rich Roll?

  That's Dr. Michael Greger, and this is the Rich Roll Podcast.

• 2:25Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, everybody. What's good? I'm Rich Roll. This is my podcast. Welcome to it. I can almost promise that today's episode is going to leave you ready to ramp up your plant-based intake. So to help you form a new routine, we created an online platform that makes going, and most importantly, staying plant-forward, easy and delicious. It's called the Plant Power Meal Planner, and it provides you with access to thousands, literally thousands, of delicious, nutritious, easy-to-prepare, plant-based recipes thoroughly customized to your specific preferences, with access to a team of experienced nutrition coaches seven days a week.

• 3:09Rich Roll?

  It also automatically creates simple grocery lists based on selected recipes, and even integrates with grocery delivery in most urban areas. So everything you need to eat the way that you deserve magically arrives at your doorstep. To learn more and sign up, visit meals.richroll.com, or click Meal Planner on the top of any page on my website, richroll.com, because one of the most important decisions we make every day, multiple times a day, is what we put in our mouths. But here's the unfortunate thing: the discussion, the information that's swirling around the internet about nutrition tends to be a toxic stew, a hotly debated, metastasizing mushroom

• 3:53Rich Roll?

  cloud of half-truths and misinformation. So how do we sort through the tribal wars? How do we separate fact from fiction? Well, we can start with seeking out the experts, and how about we default to the best, most objective science available, to arrive at the facts that live beyond dispute? Well, this is the life's work of today's guest, my friend, Dr. Michael Greger. Longtime listeners are well acquainted with this beautiful man, one of the OG guests on the show, all the way back to episode seven. And he also graced us again on RRP 199. But I can't believe it's been five years since I've talked to this treasure of a man.

• 4:37Rich Roll?

  That's just not right. So today, we're going to put matters to rights. A graduate of Cornell and Tufts University School of Medicine, as well as a founding member and fellow of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine, Dr. Gregor is a globally lauded nutrition science wizard. He's the guy behind nutritionfacts.org, the world's most authoritative nonprofit, science-based, public service destination for all things nutrition, health, and disease prevention. He's appeared everywhere, from the Dr. Oz Show to the Colbert Report. And his books, How Not to Die, The How Not to Die Cookbook, and How Not to Diet, which is the focus of today's conversation, all became instant

• 5:21Rich Roll?

  New York Times bestsellers. And I think it's worth noting that in an effort for him to remain completely free of conflicts of interest, 100% of all fees and proceeds that he receives from his many speaking engagements and all of his book sales are completely donated to charity. There's a bunch more I want to say about the good Dr. G and the conversation to come, but first.

• 5:53Rich Roll?

  Okay, Dr. Michael Greger. So today's conversation is about first and foremost, how not to diet, the optimal criteria to enable weight loss, and the actionable steps required to replace constant weight loss struggles with simple and sustainable lifestyle practices. But it's also about the corrosive corruption of commercial influences within the nutrition space. It's about how to digest the incredibly conflicting information we're spoon-fed every day by the media and celebrities alike. And it's about separating evidence-based science from confirmation bias.

• 6:40Rich Roll?

  I should note that this was recorded pre-COVID back in February, so this is a coronavirus-free conversation. However, if you would like Dr. G's take on our current situation, you are in luck, as this week, just a couple of days ago, he released a new audiobook entitled, "How to Survive a Pandemic," which is all about the origins of these types of diseases, how to protect ourselves, and what we must rectify to reduce the likelihood of future catastrophes. So, check that out. Dr. G is truly one of the most delightful, relentless, passionate, and service-minded humans I've ever met. I think you guys are gonna really

• 7:22Rich Roll?

  dig this one, so without further ado, please meet the inimitable and amazing Michael Greger, M.D.

• 7:34Rich Roll?

  So good to see you. It's been a couple of years. But I think about you all the time, man. You're just, you're out there. You have more energy. You are more relentless than almost anybody I've ever met. It's crazy. You were just saying that you're doing, how many lectures?

• 7:51Michael Greger?

  I got 200 cities, and sometimes more than one lecture per city.

• 7:55Rich Roll?

  200 cities?

• 7:56Michael Greger?

  Sometimes, you know, different cities in the same day, you know, over 10 months. Yeah, yeah.

• 8:01Rich Roll?

  So when people say, you know, "Yeah, I'd really like to eat better, but I travel too much."

• 8:06Michael Greger?

  Right, right.

• 8:07Rich Roll?

  Nobody travels as much as you do. I don't think I've ever met anybody who travels as much as you do.

• 8:11Michael Greger?

  Well, but it's just, I'm on like a three-year book cycle, so it's only one out of three years. So I write a book a year, then I'm on the road for a year, but then I got, you know, then I gotta write three years' worth of videos for Nutrition Facts, then I write the next book.

• 8:21Rich Roll?

  So do you whiteboard that all out in advance, so you know what your books are down the line and all of that?

• 8:27Michael Greger?

  Yeah, till like 2042 or something like that.

• 8:29Rich Roll?

  Right. And when do you, how do you apportion that? So you have all the videos coming out on Nutrition Facts.

• 8:34Michael Greger?

  Right.

• 8:35Rich Roll?

  You got the books, you got the lectures, you're never home, and when you are home, you're on a walking desk. Like, how does this work?

• 8:41Michael Greger?

  Yeah, yeah. No, no. So people were like, "Well, I love the video. Like, how'd you do the video today? You were in a plane," as if, you know, I'm like, you know, it's like real.

• 8:50Rich Roll?

  I did that video a year ago, right?

• 8:51Michael Greger?

  Literally, right? So I do, I script three years' worth of videos every three years.

• 8:56Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 8:57Michael Greger?

  And so you just hope and pray that broccoli's still good for you next year, because, you know, it's set in stone.

• 9:02Rich Roll?

  Has that ever happened, where the science has changed and you had to pull the video?

• 9:05Michael Greger?

  Yeah, pull the video. Yeah. I mean, usually in, in, in fact, there's even stronger evidence or, or, you know, in the same kind of direction, but now there's, we finally have something that really clinches it.

• 9:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 9:17Michael Greger?

  Uh, more than, more than anything else, but yeah.

• 9:20Rich Roll?

  Well, you were one of my very first guests on this show, episode seven, I think, going all the way back. Then we did a second one where there was a technical snafu. We were at some conference and we did it and it didn't record. That's only happened like three or four times in seven years, but you were, you, you fell victim to that.

• 9:38Michael Greger?

  Another trend setter. I know, I tell you.

• 9:40Rich Roll?

  And then, uh, the last time that we did this, I think was four years ago. So it seems like yesterday. Cause you're in my heart all the time.

• 9:50Rich Roll?

  What is the, uh, the current lecture all about? Cause I know you, you're constantly up. Do you change it for every audience or you have kind of a lockdown thing that you do every year?

• 10:00Michael Greger?

  Yeah. So, uh, so now, so I used to do a new talk every year because I was, I was traveling every year, but now I'm only traveling, you know, after the new book. So I just have the new book talk. And so for new audiences, they get the last book talk. But for audiences who've already seen it, the how not to die talk, I give the how not to diet, the weight loss talk. That's what I'm doing now.

• 10:19Rich Roll?

  So this is the new book?

• 10:21Michael Greger?

  I actually like the old one. I mean, so my, uh, the last talk, how not to die talks is my favorite talk. I mean, it just has more humor than any other, I mean, so my preference, and it's like perfectly memorized. Like I can like, you know, think about my grocery list while I'm giving it like, I mean, it's just like completely. Right. And but it's so, but, and, and the, the new, you know, I'm, I'm reading off of notes on a podium and it's, you know, it's going to be a while before, and just when I get really good at it, you know, I never give it a go.

• 10:48Rich Roll?

  It's like, like a standup comedian. You gotta do, you tape your special and then you gotta retire the material.

• 10:54Michael Greger?

  It's all over.

• 10:55Rich Roll?

  But in your case, this material, it has a longer shelf life though. This stuff doesn't, doesn't necessarily age.

• 11:02Michael Greger?

  You know, it's crazy. So how not to die, um, is selling better now than it did the month after release back in like 2016. I mean, that's just insane.

• 11:12Rich Roll?

  Over three quarter of a million copies, right?

• 11:14Michael Greger?

  Yeah, about, about that.

• 11:15Rich Roll?

  And a hundred percent of all proceeds go to charity.

• 11:18Michael Greger?

  Go to charity for all my books. Yeah.

• 11:20Rich Roll?

  We're talking a lot of money.

• 11:22Michael Greger?

  Yeah, yeah. This last one, I, I donated more than a million dollars this year.

• 11:26Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 11:26Michael Greger?

  Yeah. Very, very cool.

• 11:27Rich Roll?

  And I would suspect that, that a big part of that, other than just being, you know, Compassionate in your heart is to basically rebut the argument that you're conflicted. You have, you're selling a book, so you're, you're, you're anchored in this position. And no matter what the evidence says, you've got to toe this line because you're financially incentivized.

• 11:49Michael Greger?

  Right. Although there's still the ideological kind of conflicts of interest. So even, even people that aren't necessarily profiting over their work, I mean, they still may be wedded to some idea. So it doesn't completely divorce me from the, you know, you know, concern over bias. But, but yeah, I mean, with so much, the corrosive corruption of, of, of commercial influences.

• 12:15Rich Roll?

  Well, let's talk about that.

• 12:16Michael Greger?

  Within, I mean, medicine in general, but nutrition in particular, where, you know, this, I mean, the, you know, the confirmation bias is just so extreme. In no other field have I ever seen such a thing.

• 12:28Rich Roll?

  It's pretty bananas right now. I feel like there's a mushroom cloud of information. Like if you're in the Twitter sphere, it's just, it's insane. The siloed, you know, kind of tribal wars that are going on right now are so emotional and acerbic. It's, it's quite toxic. So how do you, I mean, you post your stuff. I've noticed like you don't engage in any of that. You kind of just stay above the fray.

• 12:52Michael Greger?

  Yeah. No, that, yeah. And that was a conscious decision to be like, well, this is all the science that I could find on this. And so there's, unless, I mean, and so the only, you'll notice on Nutrition Facts, the only comments I respond to is, what about this study? Or, you know, what about this study? You know, and be because it very possible, I maybe I missed that study. I mean, you know, I mean, we got a huge research staff now, but, you know, I want to make sure that, that I put that into the, into the calculus when I came out with what I considered the best available balance of evidence. And so it's like, this is the science. So there's really nothing anyone can say.

• 13:29Michael Greger?

  You know, I mean, and so, and it's really not like. You know, most of my videos, I try really hard to be like, this is not, I have no opinion on this. Here's the science. Make up your own mind. I mean, it convinced me to do X, Y, and Z, but if you're not convinced by the evidence, you know, wait till, you know, something else drops.

• 13:47Rich Roll?

  Well, you must, you must get the criticism that you're cherry picking studies. Like, you have to make a decision about what studies you're going to highlight in these videos, right?

• 13:55Michael Greger?

  So that's why, that's why it takes me forever to write the videos. Cause I have to make sure. So not just some new study, but where that new study exists in the context of every other study that's ever been published, ever. Right?

• 14:08Rich Roll?

  How many studies get published a year?

• 14:10Michael Greger?

  Well, I mean, so just

• 14:12Rich Roll?

  Like legitimate?

• 14:13Michael Greger?

  So, well, so in the, in obesity, just, just in the field of obesity, um, there's over a hundred thousand studies every, so that's like, you know, I mean, so it's like, you know, I go to sleep and I'm already like, you know, I'm way behind.

• 14:29Rich Roll?

  You do sleep.

• 14:30Michael Greger?

  I, uh, well, I'm working on it.

• 14:32Rich Roll?

  You talk about that in the new book.

• 14:34Michael Greger?

  I know.

• 14:35Rich Roll?

  Do you practice that?

• 14:35Michael Greger?

  It is so depressing to look at the sleep medicine literature because I just realized, oh, oh, that's, oh, I'm gonna, that horrible thing's gonna happen to me. Oh, that's

• 14:44Rich Roll?

  This is the one blind spot in your regimen.

• 14:47Michael Greger?

  That's, yeah, yeah. But, I mean, I just, I find myself, I'm so much less productive when I'm unconscious.

• 14:53Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 14:53Michael Greger?

  That, uh, you know.

• 14:55Rich Roll?

  So, thousand studies a year on obesity alone?

• 14:58Michael Greger?

  Hundred thousand.

• 14:59Rich Roll?

  A hundred thousand. Oh, my God. So how do you even wade through this and figure out, you know, what's, what's worth looking at and, you know, what's really worth exploring and digging into and, and, and ultimately I would imagine deconstructing at times to figure out what's, you know, what, what holds up to your standards and what doesn't?

• 15:17Michael Greger?

  Yeah. So there was over, so we have over a hundred research volunteers that churn through. That's how we can get through tens of thousands of studies every year. Um, just because we have, you know, all these like retired docs that are just sitting around and just have a hobby of helping me out, basically. Um, and so any one time, we have nearly 200 active, uh, volunteers. And so, I mean, we can just, we can just churn through so much and, you know, I have access, I have people in libraries, in every major library anywhere who will pull any study from any, you know, so I have someone that will just go to the NIH, you know, largest medical library in the world and pull any old study that isn't even online. So I have access to everything and just in this incredibly privileged position to be able to, you know, but.

• 16:02Michael Greger?

  That's assuming the literature all says one thing. Right. The reason why this new obesity book, the weight loss book, was such a bear. The hardest thing I've ever taken on in my life was because it's incredibly conflicting. And so if, you know, 100 studies say one thing, the other 100 studies say another thing. You have to say, well, what is it about the way they did the studies? The populations, the exclusion criteria, like what was it that you could arrive at such despair conclusions using very similar kind of methods? And that took forever. So, simple questions like skip breakfast or not skip breakfast? Exercise before or after meal?

• 16:45Michael Greger?

  Or, I mean, these like, really, like, these are thousand article research questions. There's a thousand articles on, and you're just like, wait a second. This is two pages of the book. Maybe one, maybe it's a little sidebar. And it's all. And people just want to know, should I eat breakfast or should I not? And, you know, I get a lot of. Should I fast? I get a lot of that feedback. I get, that's, that's what, everyone's like, okay. I don't care. Just give me the thing. I know. Right. Be my guru, right? Um, and that, but that, but, you know, anyone fall, I mean, that's, that's the antithesis of what I want to, you know? That's the problem is people just, you know, just follow what someone says.

• 17:24Michael Greger?

  And as if we were born with this knowledge, I mean, we, I mean, when it comes to something as life and death important, as what feed yourself and your family, then if there's anything we should, any decision we should make best based on evidence, it should be something like that. If you're online buying a toaster, then the random opinions of strangers may actually be really useful. Like, oh, I like this one. Okay. But when it, but you know, when I was, when I was in practice, and someone came to me, I say, you know, why are you eating this particular? Ah, someone at the gym told me to, you know, eat this with it. Right. I'm like, really? I mean, you're, you, the checkout aisle magazine is the reason that you're feeding your kids?

• 18:06Michael Greger?

  That, I mean, you realize that what we eat is the number one cause of death and disability. In the United States, I mean, the most important decision we make is what we put in our mouths. And so if there's any decision. That should be built based on evidence and we should demand evidence and not just a citation, but show me the evidence. I want to see it for myself to make sure you didn't take it out of context. I mean, that, this is, this is, and so that's,

• 18:32Rich Roll?

  But you and I both know well that even the most well-intentioned consumer who begins to explore this, whether online or whatever, they're going to find conflicting information out there. And it appears to have equal merit. It's like, it's like when you turn on the news and there's 10 people yelling at each other at the same time, even if one of them is completely looney tunes, it appears that they're standing on equal footing, right? So, you know, you can find studies that will support whatever perspective or confirmation bias that you have, and it becomes very difficult for that well-meaning, you know, intelligent person to separate, you know, the chaff from, you know, the cream when

• 19:14Rich Roll?

  it comes to this. So this is where you come in, but even then, it's like, all right, well, you're sifting through thousands and thousands of these studies and realizing, well, this is complicated and even, even good science seems to conflict. You know, how do you make heads or tails of that? I can't judge somebody who's like, you know, Dr. Gregor, just like, what is it? Tell me, give me the thing.

• 19:34Michael Greger?

  Yeah, no, you want to check, you know, it's like that, and there's lots of problems with the, you know, peer-reviewed medical literature. Um, you know, it's like that, uh, I don't know if Winston Churchill after, actually said it, but attributed to Winston Churchill, you know, a democracy worst form of government, except for all the others, right? And it's the same thing. I mean, it's like the peer-reviewed scientific literature, it's the best we have. I mean, it's the worst we have, except for all the others. I mean, that's, what else can we do but abide by, um, you know, what's been, you know, published in, in, in the medical literature, but there's lots of problems with industry bias and, you know, funding effects. And, and so that's why you really need, um, first thing I do when I look at a study, who paid for the study? Where is it coming from? Just so you

• 20:17Michael Greger?

  can read it with that lens. Doesn't mean it's necessarily a bad study.

• 20:21Rich Roll?

  Exactly. Still be a good study.

• 20:22Michael Greger?

  Still be a good study. Um, but you want to read it with that, you know, you want to, you know, take it with extra special grain of salt and look at the materials, methods, really make sure they didn't. Create this, they didn't produce the study in a way to get some desired result. They were actually coming into it really, you know, looking to, to, to learn something.

• 20:41Rich Roll?

  And despite the fact that you've read countless thousands of these studies, you know, you've been on board with the whole food plant-based diet for decades at this point. Do you ever come across a study that contravenes some long-held truth that you've held? Like, have you ever had to mature, update your thoughts on things? Like, how, how has that evolution been?

• 21:03Michael Greger?

  Yeah, no, look, I mean, anyone who's saying the same thing about nutrition that they were saying a few years ago, obviously hasn't been keeping track of literature. I mean, the reason I can do new, I could do new videos every day forever is just because there's this tremendous wealth of information out there. Now, usually it's just kind of nibbling at the edges. Like, after How Not to Die came out, I realized that, oh, and I was telling people, oh, you gotta toast your walnuts and sesame seeds, it makes your kitchen smell so wonderful, and that's great, and they taste wonderful. Then, this paper came out, talked about these AGEs, these advanced glycation improxies, glyco toxins found in high-fat, high-protein foods exposed to high dry heat temperatures. Traditionally, it's like frankfurters and stuff, and chicken McNuggets, but nuts, you

• 21:45Michael Greger?

  put them at those temperatures and they create these nasty, and so now I tell people to eat the raw nuts. But that's the nice thing about a video, where if I could update, I suppose, the book, which is already out, but, you know, reprints, we can get it. But, I mean, just little things like that.

• 21:58Rich Roll?

  But these are like details.

• 22:00Michael Greger?

  But, but, I mean, there, you can find studies all the time saying, you know, bacon and butter is good for you, just like the tobacco lobby would come literally with piles of studies to these congressional hearings, say, this is not, this is not the research that says smoking is neutral, this is the literature saying smoking is good for you. It helps with Parkinson's disease and ulcerative colitis. And, and a lot of this is true, because it's immunosuppressive, it's autoimmune disease, you smoke, you kill your immune system, your, your autoimmune disease gets better, inflammatory bowel disease gets better. But, I mean, these are legit studies showing smoking beneficial. Now, of course, that's not the best available balance of evidence, because you're gonna

• 22:41Michael Greger?

  die horrific death from lung cancer, but you can, but those studies exist, and you can cherry pick them out. And that's why, um, I mean, that's why, you know, every single, every, every day a video comes out, I send the video to every single principal investigator of every article I cite and be like, excited, here's your research, you know, um, in hopes that one will be like, you, you, you misinterpreted or whatever, and I can immediately, you know, kind of.

• 23:10Rich Roll?

  Right. So when you, when you get like, what is your response when somebody criticizes you and says, he's just, you know, he's a plant-based guy, he's always going to be a plant-based guy. He's got his own confirmation bias. This is a guy who's really just an animal rights activist who's, who's shrouded himself in a, in a medical frock.

• 23:29Michael Greger?

  I mean, it's like, uh, I mean, it's like, uh, you know, some, some, uh, you know, pulmonologist saying, oh, you're just an anti-cigarette guy. I mean, your only reason you're telling people not to smoke is because, you know, you have a well-known record of you were against cigarettes 10 years ago before this study comes out. Oh, a new study comes out saying smoking is bad for you. Mr. Anti-Cigarettes is there it again. Um, I mean, the science is the science. Um, and you know, the, the charges of cherry picking. So for example, there's only one diet ever proven to reverse heart disease. The majority of patients, plant-based diet, number one killer of men and women. Like, shouldn't that be the default diet and proven otherwise? Only one. So it's hard to cherry pick when

• 24:14Michael Greger?

  there's only one cherry. Like, there's no other. Now, in the future, maybe some new diet will be shown to, but I mean, until that happens, and this happens over and over again, with multiple sclerosis and Crohn's disease and on down the list, nothing's been shown to work better. And there's just, I mean, you know, so.

• 24:32Rich Roll?

  Right. Right. I mean, listen, you said it, but the fact that heart disease, you know, basically kills more people than anything else. And this is the one protocol that actually will not only prevent it, but reverse it if you have it. Like, why are we even exploring anything further? And so it's amazing that it's so controversial.

• 24:53Michael Greger?

  And the fact that can also help prevent arrest or reverse other leading killers, type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure. We seem to make the case for plant-based eating just like simply overwhelming at this point. Right? I mean, if there's, right, if there's one thing you need to know. Number one killer men and women, only diet ever proven aversion in the majority of patients, plant-based diet. So, the only way that wouldn't argue for it being the default diet for everyone is if it so dramatically increased your risk of killers two through 15 or something such that it would overwhelm the heart disease benefit. And instead, you just see, you tend to see a benefit, neutral effects across the board.

• 25:29Rich Roll?

  Right. Well, you've got to be thrilled to see this movement, this way of eating and living, you know, kind of explode over recent years. I mean, never before in your career, you know, have we seen such a crazy adoption rate, which is super exciting. But there's also a lot of pushback now. And we have these sort of other diets that are rising to the surface and, you know, challenging for their moment in the sun. And it makes me realize, or I guess appreciate, just how emotional all of this is. It's not, it's really not

• 26:08Rich Roll?

  an information war as much as it is a psychological war. You know what I mean? Like, because you've spent decades putting information out. I mean, nobody puts out more information about this than you do. And if somebody's resistant to that, that's their choice. But I feel like the battle really needs to be waged on how to win hearts and minds, not just the minds, but the hearts. You know what I mean? Like, what is, what, and I'm interested in, you know, whether you have thought about this, you know, with respect to the newest book. It's like, weight loss, like, everybody wants to lose weight, right? But often, it's not, it's not the information, it's the implementation of the information. And what gets in the way

• 26:48Rich Roll?

  of people taking that information and putting it into action has to do with their own psychological makeup and, you know, the emotional landscape and, you know, the social construct in which they live their lives.

• 27:01Michael Greger?

  You know, when I, you know, at some of these, you know, amazing plant-based nutrition healthcare conferences now, which now attract thousands of, I mean, it's just amazing. You know, the number one question I have for everyone is like, how did you come across? Like, obviously, they didn't learn about it in medical school, none of us did. Like, how did you? And most frequently, the answer I get is because a patient taught them. Like, so they've had these patients forever, and they've known their whole families, and they've had diabetes, and, you know, they're just trying to slow the rate at which they go blind, and lose their kidney function, and lower limbs. And then, all of a sudden, they come in, they're 20 pounds lighter, they're dramatically overmedicated, all of a sudden, they have to pull back all the drugs, and the doctor's like, "What happened?"

• 27:46Michael Greger?

  And the patient says, "Oh, I saw folks over knives," or, you know, game changer, something. And then, all of a sudden, and the doctor, in the back of their mind, doctor's saying, "I've got like 2,000 patients just like you. What is going on?" And that's so, and so... It's great, but it's upside down. Oh, my God. And so, it drives me crazy. And so, I'm like, wait a second. I've got a stack this big of peer-reviewed scientific research, randomized controlled trials, proving reversal of these diseases, yet it was one little anecdote? One person comes to you, and then, all of a sudden? But it's, but it's, but it's that human connection. We're like storied creatures, like, all the data in the world, you know, all, you know, it'll, you know, some people are open to that, but other people, they just need to

• 28:31Michael Greger?

  see it in front of their face, or, and so, I don't know. So, that's, that's why I think the more popular it gets, the easier it'll be when they see their friends and family, the transformations, then it'll click that, and, of course, I'll be in the background, banging my head against the wall, saying, Right, hello. "This is the 70s, right? Pitocin was reversing heart disease in the 70s. How many people have died since then? Needlessly. Over 100,000 people every year, heart disease, in the United States alone." That much suffering, it should anger people, right? I mean, the, the, the, the reaction to someone who, who just doesn't have to go through, you know, open heart surgery anymore, isn't, shouldn't be relief, oh my God, I don't have to get my chest cracked open, and now I get to live a long, happy life and see my grandkids

• 29:15Michael Greger?

  grow up, should be like, how, why didn't anyone tell me this before?

• 29:19Rich Roll?

  Right, outrage.

• 29:20Michael Greger?

  Outrage, it's, yeah.

• 29:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Of these 200 cities that you visit, all the speeches that you give, how many of them are at medical schools or hospitals? Because I, obviously, like, the way to get to the root of this is to, is to educate medical students and create a better ecosystem around care.

• 29:40Michael Greger?

  Yeah, train the trainers. That's really what I'm doing now, is mostly talking to professional audiences, I'm talking tonight, um, at a medical center, the, and lots of medical schools now, but, and that's how actually started out, my kind of speaking career is going. In fact, that was my goal, was to speak to every single medical school every two years, to hit every single new grad coming out, and have a whole new generation of docs learning this, but I realized, like, that's too slow. Like, they're not, they're still gonna be in training for another five years, then they gotta get out, and then they, I mean, so, like, people are dying now. When it comes to safe, simple, side effect free solutions like, stop smoking, eat healthier, you don't need your doctor to tell you to do that, we can take this directly to the people with this kind of democratization of information now, available, um, and so,

• 30:25Michael Greger?

  I, you know, so then, that's how nutritionfacts.org got born. Instead of, forget the doctors, you know, let them come around eventually, we gotta, right, people are dying right now, people need to know. And then, of course, it's up to you, it's your body, your choice, you wanna go smoke cigarettes, go bungee jumping, do whatever you want, but, you know, there, at least you should be, you know, educated about the predictable consequences of your actions.

• 30:48Rich Roll?

  Other than your unbridled enthusiasm for this, one of the things that's, that, that I like about you, and that's interesting about you, is that you really... Strive to stand outside of dogma and you're not telling people what to do. You're just, you're, you're, you're basically in a very objective way presenting the information and allowing people to do with it as they will.

• 31:08Michael Greger?

  Yeah, I mean, that's always been really important to me is, and look, and for whatever reason, I mean, there's no judgment, but I mean, I happen to have the background that enabled me to do this work and to be who I am. I mean, there are people struggling with all sorts of things that you don't know about and the fact that they're still eating, you know, crap on their home, you know, way home from work. I mean, you have no idea what's going on in their lives that led them to whatever. But should they have the opportunity to really, you know, whether it's a health scare or whatever, to be like, I really need to clean out my act, at least there should be a place they can go where here's the information. This is what I wish I learned in medical school and, you know, do with it.

• 31:50Rich Roll?

  Geek out on nutrition. I mean, how many hours of videos do you have on there now?

• 31:54Michael Greger?

  We have thousands, thousands, so we have over 2,000 videos now.

• 31:58Rich Roll?

  Basically, you go to the site and you could just search whatever food or whatever ailments and you've got it covered.

• 32:04Michael Greger?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 32:06Rich Roll?

  You ever run out of like?

• 32:07Michael Greger?

  No, but it's.

• 32:08Rich Roll?

  What's the new video gonna be?

• 32:10Michael Greger?

  Oh, there's always new stuff. I'm constantly, I mean, there's just always new, you know? And, you know, so I do it two ways. One through, I run through all the topics, actually alphabetically. Anyone who's keeping real close attention will be like, oh, so the olive oil came after the, the nuts, which came after the, you know?

• 32:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 32:30Michael Greger?

  But, and then I just go through and read all the, every issue of every single English and English nutrition journal in the world. See, because there may be topics I don't even know to look up. There's this, yeah, I mean, all sorts of new hormones and new receptors and new, I was just working on the plane on this CD36 receptor. Whoa, blew my mind.

• 32:51Michael Greger?

  Videos to be cut, videos to come, right?

• 32:54Rich Roll?

  We get sidetracked on that. It sounds like an air, it sounds like a airplane to me, like a C-130. I don't even know what that is.

• 33:00Michael Greger?

  Oh my God, amazing.

• 33:01Rich Roll?

  In terms of, of taking it to the people, what you've been doing, the real needle mover, I think, has been this slew of documentaries that has, that have come out over the last decade.

• 33:11Michael Greger?

  Amazing.

• 33:12Rich Roll?

  The, the most recent of which is, of course, Game Changers. And you were the scientific, technical advisor on that movie, right? So what did that look like? What, what was your involvement?

• 33:21Michael Greger?

  I mean, that, well, I mean, just, I mean, certainly, uh, to take that first point, when I go around and speak and ask people on these, you know, four hour book signing lines, how did, it's what the hell, it's Forks Over Knives, it's these, these documentaries are now just really, yeah, yeah, tremendous, oversized effects.

• 33:39Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 33:39Michael Greger?

  And so if people, if they're funders interested in getting this, you know, movement off the, off the ground, I think that's a decent way to go.

• 33:46Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Well, they're probably good investments. These movies do very well.

• 33:49Michael Greger?

  They do. And they, yeah, they do. So, yeah, no. So, uh, so, yeah. So I was approached by James Wilks, oh God, like seven years ago, you know, when it was just, you know, an idea and, and, you know, interviewed me for the, for the film and some like, you know, on some highway in Santa Rosa or something in this noisy, like a little whatever, you know, like a little camcorder-y kind of thing in a hotel. Um, and it was just an idea, but you can't say no to any opportunity, right? So like, poor Dean Ornish still kicking himself for not being in Forks Over Knives because he was taking some time off or whatever. You've just got to be in everything and hope something helps. Um, and, uh, and so, uh, so then he actually, um, started to get some momentum for the film and, and invited me back, said, sorry, we got to throw all that

• 34:31Michael Greger?

  footage away. It was crappy footage, but now we actually have real cameras and, you know, all right.

• 34:35Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 34:35Michael Greger?

  So then we, you know, do another thing. And that actually happened once or twice more. And then they're like, okay, now we really have money. Now we have like the fancy. So I went through like, and then of course, I get cut out completely from the film, which is fine. I wouldn't replace a second of it. Um, I think it's so perfect. Um, but hopefully I'll be in some DVD extra or something, uh, down the road. But, um, so, but the role I could play instead was to fact check the film.

• 35:00Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 35:01Michael Greger?

  Because I have an army. I mean, that, that's what we do.

• 35:05Rich Roll?

  You're the perfect person for that.

• 35:06Michael Greger?

  Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and we actually behind the scene and, and I, open invitation to anyone writing a book. Producing a film, TV show, anything, come to me, I'll do it for free, our whole team. I mean, it's so important to me that we don't say ridiculous stuff and people throw the baby out with the bathwater. I mean, the movement has said just ridiculous, crazy stuff, exaggerated stuff. I mean, why, I mean.

• 35:32Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it doesn't help the movement to do that.

• 35:34Michael Greger?

  Right.

• 35:35Rich Roll?

  Because it imperils the credibility.

• 35:37Michael Greger?

  And if you have, and as if we have to exaggerate anything, we should use the industry estimates for everything. The most low ball, you know, oh, oh, yeah, it's only 1,500 gallons per pound of beef, whatever water, you know, according to the National Academy of Beef Association or whatever. I mean, that's what I mean. Yeah, it boggles the mind. So, yeah, that's so critical that so a lot of the books that, that, you know, I are written up and as long as, as long, and we will do it as long as they're willing to actually.

• 36:08Rich Roll?

  Right. So your, your job was really vetting all the science so that there was no exaggerations and that everything that was said in every scene kind of, you know, met the, met the scientific muster.

• 36:18Michael Greger?

  In fact, conservative. So not just sticking to the consensus, but like on the conservative side of anything, let's not say anything. The science is so strong, we don't need to exaggerate. We don't need to go anywhere but beyond the solid ground.

• 36:32Rich Roll?

  Right. And the, the whole erectile dysfunction sequence was your brainchild.

• 36:37Michael Greger?

  I was.

• 36:39Rich Roll?

  Walk us through that.

• 36:40Michael Greger?

  Oh, well, so we need, so I had the data, I had the science, but again, you need to make the science relatable. You know, I could show, you know, a graph, a table, an amazing table with a statistical significance that alone would give you an erection, but that's, that's not going to move a visual audience.

• 37:03Rich Roll?

  Cinematic.

• 37:04Michael Greger?

  It's not cinematic. And so they kept asking me, how do we make it, how do we make it visual? How do we make it alive? And so, so I said, well, let's do the lactostans, the, you know, the, the cloudiness of fat after eating a meal in the, in the serum. And I knew just from reading the, the literature on, on, on blood flow, on endothelial function, that they had these ridge scan machines with a name like ridge scan, it's got to be good. And so, and so, and now it's actually being done legit, I mean, in a, in a real study. In fact, I think by Osfeld. Dr. Osfeld is now has the funding. He's actually going to put it to the test in a really, you know, tightly controlled randomized fashion with

• 37:47Michael Greger?

  a, you know, a cadre of folks. But again, it was just, they wanted to show the example to, you know, anyway.

• 37:54Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 38:03Rich Roll?

  So latest book, How Not to Diet. How dare you write a book about weight loss? I can't believe this, right? So How Not to Die is really about sort of tackling, preventing, reversing the, you know, the sort of top ailments, chronic ailments that people suffer from. But of course, obesity is an ailment in and of itself, or a contributor to a variety of ailments, right? So without sort of confronting obesity head on, you're not really getting, you know, you're not going to move the needle for people, right? So you gotta, you gotta get them to lose weight.

• 38:37Michael Greger?

  So I did, yeah, yeah. So How Not to Die, 15 leading causes of death. Just went through one through 15, chapter on each, talking about the role diet may play in preventive resting reversing. So there's a type 2 diabetes chapter, obviously, but never took obesity on directly. And, and it really required its own thing. So that, I mean, yeah.

• 38:55Rich Roll?

  So you have to then turn your focus into how to help people lose weight, right? Like, what is the science of weight loss? And I would imagine, you know, you had to confront like, a lot of things that we sort of assume or take for granted that perhaps maybe didn't turn out to be true, like, like, oh, calorie in, calorie out, or, you know, three meals a day, or what, you know, what, there's so much conventional wisdom around like, here's how you lose weight, A, B, C. So by immersing yourself in all of this research, like, what surprised you the most? Or what did you discover that perhaps, you know, you didn't expect?

• 39:34Michael Greger?

  Yeah, so in both ways, some of the conventional wisdom actually has a real scientific basis, and only recently does it have a real scientific basis. So for years, we've just been saying, talking out of our butt, but now, oh, it's actually true. We should, you know, breakfast like a king, you know, lunch like a prince, dinner like a popper kind of thing. Um, some of this, or, you know, drink water before a meal, very common kind of thing. Oh, now we actually have signs, it really does, um, show beneficial effects. But I think the biggest, uh, the biggest challenge for me, just because this is not my field. I mean, I, you know, I just know from what I learned in med school, um, and this concept that a calorie is a calorie, right? A calorie from one source is just as fattening as a calorie from any other source. I mean, this is kind of a trope broadcast by the food industry to kind of absolve itself of culpability,

• 40:19Michael Greger?

  but it's just not true. Like, you know, 100 calories of chickpeas has a different effect on body weight than 100 calories of chicken or chicklets, based on absorption, based on fiber content, based on all sorts. And even if you absorb the same amount, even a calorie may still not be a calorie. It depends when you eat it, in what context you eat it, how fast you eat it, all sorts. I mean, so, I mean, that just kind of exploded, like, uh, my concepts of kind of what we had learned in, in, in med school. So like this chronobiology, I have a whole chapter on.

• 40:51Rich Roll?

  Right. Walk us through this, because this is, I had never heard anything about this.

• 40:55Michael Greger?

  Well, so what I had known, um, what we learned about in, in medical training is, it's called chronotherapeutics, where if you give chemotherapy at the right time of day, you actually have fewer side effects, and it's more effective than giving it at a different time of day. Same dose, same drug, um, which, uh, which is fascinating. Um, but I hadn't taken it to the logical conclusion, what about, uh, chronic prevention? Might, exercise and, and, and, and, and, you know, sleep patterns and meal patterns also play a role if it has such a dramatic effect. And indeed, calories eaten in the morning are less fattening.

• 41:32Michael Greger?

  The exact same food eaten at night, fewer calories after sundown, the better. So they do these studies. How is it? The exact same snacks. Well, it's because, um, so for example, uh, uh, in the morning, your body, body has to, uh, to make glycogen stores for the, for the rest of the day. And in make, instead of just using the energy, um, if you, uh, if you take the little, the chains of sugars and starches and, and make them the glycogen in your muscles and liver, um, that's an energy intensive process and then you break it back down to be used later on. And so the fact that you're using energy to basically get the energy right back is kind of energy intensive process. That's one of the small reasons why, um, eating in the morning when your, when your body's, it, you know, knows it's got a whole day ahead of it.

• 42:18Michael Greger?

  Um, uh, where you, you, you have that, uh, the glycogen building signal earlier in the day. Um, but you know, a lot of the chronobiology stuff, we just don't know, um, in terms of what exactly is going on, but everything from body temperature to, uh, you know, testosterone to cortisol levels, everything, um, you know, goes on this, this wild daily cycle. And then there's seasonal cycles. Weight loss, you know, it's the, the, the weight you put on in the kind of winter months for, for the, for the holidays, uh, may have a role. Depends upon how far the earth is from the sun. Crazy, right? The, the, the rotation. Um, so that was, I mean, that, that, that, yeah, that just blew me away. So you can put people on 2000 calories, exact same 2000 calories as one meal at breakfast or one meal at supper.

• 43:03Michael Greger?

  The army did this, um, and one, and, uh, the evening group, same calories gains weight and the, um, breakfast, uh, group loses weight. That's such a trip. It's crazy. Um, and so then that really opened my eye, like, okay, well now anything's possible. And so then really kind of dug deep and, you know, came up just, you know, what are the criteria for, uh, for optimal weight loss? Like what would a, what would the optimal weight loss diet look like from, kind of from the ground up? Just because. Originally, How Not to Diet, it was gonna be a chapter on each of the latest diet trends. And just, you know, going through what's the science behind each, but I realized the book's gonna be out of date before it even comes out. You know, I'm part of the US News and World Report, you know, diet panel, you know, and so we get dozens of new diets I've

• 43:45Michael Greger?

  never heard about every year that we have to go through. And I just realized, well, wait a second, that's not the, right, it's like whack a mole. So instead, let's just, here's the criteria against which you can look at any future diet and see kind of where it would fall among this range. And then, and then the second half of the book is regardless of what you eat, there are, you know, kind of tips and tricks that can, and tweaks that can get you to accelerate.

• 44:12Rich Roll?

  Right, like the water thing and focusing on nutritional density and caloric dilution, things like that.

• 44:19Michael Greger?

  So yeah, nutritional density, that's really the first part. I mean, that's part of a good weight loss diet. It's a weight loss techniques, but like the water, right? Water preloading. So if you drink two cups of water before eating a Whopper, you'll gain less weight than, I mean, so I mean, so it's regardless of what you eat. That's the whole second half. And the hope is people won't just kind of jump to the second half. And they'll actually do a safe, sustainable, nutritious, healthy diet, but.

• 44:40Rich Roll?

  In terms of the foods to eat, though, I mean, it hearkens back to the previous book and it kind of orients around the Daily Dozen.

• 44:48Michael Greger?

  It ended up, I mean, it ended up that way, based on those criteria, like you want to be fiber rich and, you know, low in added sugars and low in added fat and, you know, you know, water rich and all they say, and the same, you know, vegetables and kind of on down the list. And that was the, that was the, the, you know, the criticism we got from the Daily Diet, the Daily Dozen app that we released. It's, you know, had a million downloads and there's two camps of criticism. One is, oh my God, it's too much food. I can't eat it all. And which gets, I'm like, look, too mu, oh my God, I can't go through all this stuff.

• 45:23Rich Roll?

  You gotta make sure you get all of that in a day.

• 45:25Michael Greger?

  Well, I mean, but as a look, it's aspirational. Like, you know, it's just, and you can, you know, make a game and see how many you can get. And if you know, do good one day, you can try better the next day. And that was actually this, I mean, I'm hoping to, you know, after you checked off those boxes, there's only so much room for pepperoni pizza at the end of the day. I mean, it's, it's this kind of, it's this kind of eat more approach, but it's really hoping to kind of push out some of the less healthy options. But the other group of criticisms came in, it's just not enough calories. It's like, look, I'm training. There's no way I'm getting enough calories eating this kind of stuff. I was like, well, look, this is the minimum. You can eat more food. I'm not saying this is all you can eat. This is, I just want people to hit this. But then I realized, well, wait a second. Oh, too much food, too few calories. That sounds like a good weight loss diet.

• 46:07Michael Greger?

  And the fact that these are some of the healthiest foods on the planet is a good bonus as well.

• 46:12Rich Roll?

  Right. Did you come across some interesting research on intermittent fasting? Because that seems to be the thing that, that, you know, a lot of people are talking about and thinking about and practicing right now. And I've had a couple of people on the podcast speak to it.

• 46:25Michael Greger?

  That's the biggest chapter is the fasting chapter. So much information. I remember looking into fasting because there's been a, you know, common interest for, for years. People ask me about it and anytime, I only want to say, I don't know once ever, even if it's the most esoteric question in the world. I want it the next time someone asks me that, I'm going to know an answer to it. And so people could ask me about fasting and there just was no data. And so that's why if there's, if there's, if there's a condition or food that you can't find on nutritionfacts.org, the number one reason is probably because there's just no good data out there. I mean, it's not like, you know, I'm trying to ignore. It's just like, we don't know.

• 47:02Michael Greger?

  And so, but just in the last few years, there's been an explosion of research into intermittent fasting, water-only fasting, you know, 5:2, 25:5, time-restricted feeding, all these. And so tremendous literature. And what was interesting about the intermittent fasting literature? Well, so in terms of intermittent fasting, no benefit in terms of compliance or lean mass conservation or weight loss compared to continuous cholestatic restriction. And the longest, largest studies to date shows increasing cholesterol for people that have the same cholestatic restriction doing alternate day modified fasting. And so I would encourage people not to do it or at least get their cholesterol checked.

• 47:46Michael Greger?

  But the time-restricted feeding, where you try to narrow your eating window to 12 hours or less. And so you're fasting at least half the day. What was, that's, this was one of the research areas where there was diametrically opposed. Some studies show it's great for you. Other studies show it's terrible for you. It has all these negative metabolic consequences. And so it was my job to like, what is going on here? And it turns out it's timing. Early versus late. So

• 48:16Rich Roll?

  when you break the fast, you mean?

• 48:18Michael Greger?

  So your window. Right. So if your window is late, you get the negative biological consequences of eating at night and shifting your calories towards later in the day. And so people that skip breakfast had these negative metabolic effects of time restricted feeding. Whereas people that did early time restrictive feeding not only got the chronobiological benefits of shifting their calories towards the beginning of the day, they also got the time restricted feeding benefits. And so that is really the, that's, that's, that's one of the things in the book that actually changed the way my family eats.

• 48:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you just rocked me with that because I do it where I eat at night.

• 48:55Michael Greger?

  If you're

• 48:56Rich Roll?

  and I don't eat during the day.

• 48:57Michael Greger?

  If you miss any meal, it should be, it should be supper, not breakfast.

• 49:01Rich Roll?

  Right. Breakfast is called break fast for a reason.

• 49:04Michael Greger?

  Yeah. I mean, and, and, and, yeah. I mean, and, and, and that actually may be one of the reasons that the seven day Adventist vegetarians live the longest living population in the world, right? Okinawa Japanese was the number two and they're done. They, now they're eating KFC. There's really only one blue zone that continues to this day. It's in Loma Linda, California. The seven day Adventist vegetarians, longest living formally stopped, studied population in the world, but it may, but one of the reasons may be because they practice this early time restricted feeding, often skipping supper. The teachings of the church are, you know, like two meals a day and, you know, make lunch the biggest meal of the day. It hasn't been put to the test, but given all this short-term data.

• 49:46Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's super interesting.

• 49:47Michael Greger?

  That may be, I don't know. That'll be the next book, How Not to Age. I'll look deep into that.

• 49:51Rich Roll?

  Is it? Is that the name? It is?

• 49:53Michael Greger?

  Uh, starting, uh, yeah, uh, January 25th, it'll be out December 22.

• 49:59Rich Roll?

  What's the book after that?

• 50:01Michael Greger?

  Um, I think it's gonna be a how not to die from cancer for cancer survivors. Unfortunately, you know, the advice people with cancer diagnosis get is eat whatever you want, or just keep weight on, or whatever terrible advice. I mean, now we actually have some decent data on cancer survival, not just prevent. I mean, so how not to die, how to prevent cancer? What if you already have cancer? What can we do to slow down, stop, reverse? So that'll, that'll break the next. And then I'm gonna do one on mental health after that.

• 50:30Rich Roll?

  How not to age, though? That's a, that's a good one. I just had David Sinclair in here the other day.

• 50:35Michael Greger?

  Oh, great, great.

• 50:36Rich Roll?

  I got Dan Buettner coming back here tomorrow.

• 50:38Michael Greger?

  Oh, nice.

• 50:39Rich Roll?

  So I'm all about the longevity, aging stuff. That's super interesting. I mean, I think the work that David is doing, obviously, that's in the genetic field. It's not nutrition per se, but I think there's so much emerging science that's happening right there. It's pretty fascinating.

• 50:54Michael Greger?

  You know, in fact, there was this one seminal paper that really inspired me to write the whole book. And that was basically the big pharma got together, the top researchers in the world, flew them to some luxury resorts somewhere. And so Sinclair was there and Walter Longo and everybody who's anyone in the field got paid enough money to all come together to list the most potentially, the, the, the most drugable longevity pathways in the body. Like, if we wanted to make a, you know, a longevity drug, how would we do it?

• 51:26Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 51:26Michael Greger?

  So they all sat down, they came up with these five biochemical pathways for longevity. And I looked at these and I said, wait a second. Every single one of these we can modify with diet. You know, so we're talking about like mTOR and IGF-1 and all the, wait a second, we could all do, you know, so I was like, oh, it's like, that's the whole book, like one chapter on each, we can, yeah. And so I'm really excited about digging in.

• 51:47Rich Roll?

  Wow, that's cool.

• 51:48Michael Greger?

  Yeah, very cool.

• 51:48Rich Roll?

  So I imagine you probably get this from time to time. Dr. Greger, love the new book, but I gotta tell you, I've been on the keto diet, I've lost all this weight, I feel good, or I'm on the carnivore diet, I'm on this diet, I'm on that diet. So, you know, like, you can't tell me that your way is better than my way.

• 52:11Michael Greger?

  Right, and I mean, I can say, let's see your lab work, or let me see your arteries, let me see your calcium score, let me see, I mean, you know.

• 52:19Rich Roll?

  Blood work doesn't mean anything. That's, that's a sort of common retort from the low-carb carnivore camp that these, the blood work is misleading because it doesn't necessarily mean what it says.

• 52:32Michael Greger?

  Uh, well, I mean, if you have science to support that, but that's not what the, I mean, the science shows, I mean, I mean, so, you know, there's, you know, the presidential advisory from the American Heart Association came out, you know, for, to, because of these crazy myths out there, that they have to write these papers saying, yes, saturated fat is bad for you, yes, coconut oil is bad for you, um, and, I mean, and, and yes, LDL is a leading predictor of heart disease, I mean, you know, I mean, things that have been settled science for decades, but in the internet age of flat-earthers, we have to come out and explicitly, explicitly say.

• 53:08Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 53:09Michael Greger?

  And so, I mean, yeah, so, and, and we don't just have, you know, short-term biomarkers, we have, you know, large populations of people who follow diets, even, even trending in that direction, um, living significantly shorter lives.

• 53:22Rich Roll?

  It is interesting that the carnivore diet has, has caught the attention of so many people and seems to be like a, like a trending thing right now.

• 53:31Michael Greger?

  It's like a, yeah, it's, it's like a, it's like if an internet troll were a diet, it would be the, right, I mean, it's just like the, right, um, but, I mean, look, you can imagine some with food intolerance, whether it's celiac disease or anything.

• 53:47Rich Roll?

  Right, it's the ultimate elimination diet.

• 53:48Michael Greger?

  It's an elimination diet, right, and so people go on elimination diets, I mean, typically you put someone on like, you know, water, sweet potatoes and tapioca, like three things no one's allergic to, and then, all of a sudden, their joints feel better, they have more energy, all of a sudden their chronic indigestion goes away, okay, and then you add back, what was it, what was it about your diet that, you know, was causing a problem? Um, and so, I mean, it's the same thing, I mean, you're just basically, you know, excluding, um, and so if you did have some kind of intolerance, well then, you know, but obviously, then you'd wanna add healthy foods back into your diet to find out what it is, and so you can actually have a, live a long, healthy life.

• 54:22Rich Roll?

  One of the things that I've been contending with in the last couple of years, I mean, I've been plant-based for 13 years now. Is the fact that now there is this proliferation of amazing tasting, tasting plant-based analogues to every food imaginable, right? And it all tastes great. And I'll find myself indulging in that a little bit more than I should and kind of, you know, selling the lie to myself like, oh, it's, it's plant-based, it's cool, you know, knowing, of course, like, this isn't the healthiest thing. This is not Dr. Gregor's Daily Dozen, you know?

• 54:57Michael Greger?

  Right, right.

• 54:57Rich Roll?

  And then I follow that up with, with another kind of layer of denial, which is that because I'm an athlete, that I can kind of outrun it.

• 55:07Michael Greger?

  Burn it off.

• 55:07Rich Roll?

  I can burn it off. And as long as I'm trim and I feel good, that, that I'm not, I'm not necessarily paying the same toll that somebody else is. And I know that's not true. And, and so there's always like, yeah, I'm plant-based, but I can, I can certainly iterate and evolve, you know, to do better than, than I'm doing.

• 55:28Michael Greger?

  Yeah, yeah. No, and that, right, it's a process and it's harder. I mean, but I mean, what I see, you know, when I see an ad from Burger King bragging that it's 100% wafer, it's 0% beef. They're bragging that there's no beef in their new burger. I mean, that just speaks to me to the tremendous surge in interest in plant-based eating.

• 55:47Rich Roll?

  Of course, I'm not, I don't mean to be.

• 55:48Michael Greger?

  Right. No, so that, I mean, so when I say, right, but nutritionally, right? If you look at these things, often more sodium, usually coconut oil base, so may have as much or more saturated fat even sometimes. So these are right, not healthy foods, step in the right direction, stepping stone foods, I like to call them, you know, you know, not everyone could go, you know, kale chemo overnight. But transition foods to get people in the direction of eating healthier. So I see it as a tremendously kind of optimistic social phenomenon, but my concern is that people will stop there. People will just kind of switch over their milkshakes, their cheeseburgers and milkshakes, and then stall there and not

• 56:30Michael Greger?

  capture the full benefits of, of plant-based eating.

• 56:35Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's never been easier to, to, to eat. You can go, you can get your, you can go to Burger King and get, get fries and a burger and you can then go get coconut ice cream and knock yourself out and then wonder, how come I'm not losing weight? How come I'm getting fatter?

• 56:49Michael Greger?

  Yeah, I just, yeah, I moved to Philly recently. There are multiple all vegan doughnut shops. Like, oh, which all vegan doughnut shop do you want to go? You know, I mean, I mean, that's right. And so, right. I mean, you can be, you can have a terrible, terrible vegan diet.

• 57:05Rich Roll?

  I know that if I'm eating whole food, plant-based, and I'm adhering to that pretty strictly, that I don't really have to, like, the idea of needing to diet, it just doesn't, it just, I don't have to worry about it, right? So.

• 57:18Michael Greger?

  How not to diet?

• 57:19Rich Roll?

  How not, I know, that's tricky, right?

• 57:23Rich Roll?

  How to diet not, as Yoda would say, would have retitled it. So, knowing that, then, it is, it is how not to diet, and yet, it is a program that extends beyond just eat these foods. Like, you have these strategies and things to kind of accelerate that aspect of it.

• 57:42Michael Greger?

  Right. And because I wanted to, I mean, with so much kind of nutritional noise and nonsense out there, I just wanted there to finally be not only an evidence-based diet book, but, you know, I cite thousands of studies, digging up every possible, you know, tip, trick, tweak, technique, proven to accelerate the loss of body fat, to give people every possible advantage, and kind of, you know, build them an optimal weight loss solution from the ground up. Basically, my criteria is if, I mean, if it's been proven to cause weight loss, and it's not, I mean, I had a low bar, but like, I don't have a chapter on which cigarettes are best to smoke. And we know nicotine is, is, I mean, proven, you know, but so, I say, look, we can eat nicotine-containing foods and maybe get some of benefits.

• 58:26Michael Greger?

  But, and there were some, some things I actually cut out, like, there was a licorice root chapter I took out, because the therapeutic index of you could get too much licorice really easily and hurt yourself. But so were some things, there was some base level of safety. But beyond that, if it caused weight loss in a randomized control trial, it's in the book, and I want to give people every possible kind of advantage. And so that's where I came this kind of 21 tweaks thing to add on to their daily dozen. Now, they've got like. Forty checkmarks every day, you know, if you really wanted to go all out.

• 58:56Rich Roll?

  So if somebody comes to you and says, listen, I'm 50, 60 pounds overweight, I gotta, I gotta drop this weight, my life hangs in the balance, like, how do you kickstart that person? Like, walk me through, like, if you had, you know, five or 10 minutes to speak to this person, how do you kind of get them sorted and on their way?

• 59:13Michael Greger?

  Yeah, so get them the right information, right? I mean, so, yeah, so, you know, I could share them the app, Dr. Veris Daily does, and free app, obviously, everything I do, everything I produce is available free. And then, you know, tell them about something like 21 Day Kickstart Program from PCRM, Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, first of every month, it's totally free, bunch of different languages, hundreds of thousands of people have done it, you do this kind of social media group together, and, you know, you get daily advice and tips and things like that. Again, just to stick with it long enough so you can see the benefits yourself, and then it's no longer some doctor wagging their finger at you, but you have that internal motivation to stick with it because you feel so much better, your digestion's better, your sleep's better, your energy's better, oh, and you're losing weight, and, you know, without thinking about it.

• 59:56Rich Roll?

  What are some of the crazier turnaround stories that you've heard or experienced?

• 1:00:01Michael Greger?

  Oh, well, I mean, the most exciting things is diseases for which there's nothing in the literature that suggests it's possible. So people come to me, say, I have Hashimoto's thyroiditis, hypothyroidism, and I tell them, you're going to be on thyroid hormone replacement the rest of your life, your thyroid's all scarred up, it's over, and we can help prevent it, but, you know, and they say, no, no, I had it, I was diagnosed, I was on this for years, and then I went plant-based, and all of a sudden, I'm off my thyroid medication, here's my TSH, here's my lab values, and I tell them, your doctor has to write you up as a case study. I want to see this published, and I'll do a video about it. I mean, so, you know, someone comes to me with ankylosing spondylitis, or some, one of these, you know, horrible inflammatory autoimmune diseases, I'm like, look, we have

• 1:00:45Michael Greger?

  great data on Crohn's, and multiple sclerosis, and ulcerative colic, and other similar rheumatoid arthritis, similar inflammatory, I'm not surprised, it helps with your Disease, but there hasn't been anything published yet. And so, quick, we gotta get you, we have, we have to, you know, it doesn't exist in the scientific world unless this published in peer reviewed scientific literature. And so I encouraged them to get it out there. And actually, there was just a case here of an end glowing spondylitis, I'm excited to say.

• 1:01:12Rich Roll?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:01:13Michael Greger?

  I mean, those, I mean, you expect that you, you, I no longer have diabetes, I no longer have heart disease. I mean, all these things and, you know, teary eyed and, you know, I mean, it's, you know, they're out of their wheelchair. They're walking again. It's, they have their lives back and they have a future again. That, you know, old hat, that's what I've been seeing for years. But what some of these new, you know, where someone says, you know, I have some, you know, some disease I have to look up. I mean, help with that too. And he said, wait a second, it's a little snake oily panacea, right? I mean, that's, that's a red flag when someone says my thing can help with X, Y, and Z. But you realize, look, we're talking about a diet that improves arterial health. Every single one of our organs needs blood flow to get rid of waste products, get oxygen, nutrients.

• 1:01:58Michael Greger?

  And so the, no wonder that a heart healthy diet is a brain healthy diet, is a liver healthy diet, is a kidney healthy diet. Right? And a plant based diet is, a whole food plant based diet is basically synonymous with an anti inflammatory diet. And since inflammation plays a role in so many chronic diseases, no wonder an anti inflammatory diet is gonna help kind of across the board with all these things. And so, I mean, there's these kind of underlying, you know, mechanisms by which, you know, you can imagine, and look, even if someone will ask me, what, does it work for a disease, you know, Z that, you know, and I say, well, I don't know, but healthy diet can only help, right? I mean, look, probably people with disease D, Z probably still die of heart disease, number one, right?

• 1:02:42Michael Greger?

  So for, for example, breast cancer, postmenopausal breast cancer, number one killer of women with, older women with breast cancer, heart disease, still kills them more than breast cancer. And so whether or not a whole food plant based diet reverses breast cancer, you're still, you're still more likely to die from heart disease and we know we can reverse heart disease. So of course, everyone with breast cancer, of course, everyone should be on this healthy diet. Um, and then if there's side benefits, well, then great. I mean, you know, as we've seen with prostate cancer and some other conditions.

• 1:03:13Rich Roll?

  Well, when you look at, yeah, like what you, like what you said, I mean, what's killing people? Heart disease, stroke.

• 1:03:19Rich Roll?

  Obesity, you know, in terms of brain health, Alzheimer's is exploding right now. And to the extent that you're eating in a way that's improving arterial function and reducing inflammation.

• 1:03:29Michael Greger?

  Right.

• 1:03:30Rich Roll?

  The downstream domino impact of that, you know, has all kinds of positive consequences.

• 1:03:35Michael Greger?

  Even if it doesn't help, it helps, right? Even if it doesn't help that particular thing.

• 1:03:40Rich Roll?

  That's like that meme of, what if it turned out that, that, that global warming is a hoax? We just improve the planet for no reason, you know?

• 1:03:48Michael Greger?

  There we go, right? Right? I mean, like, well, does stopping smoking help this disease? I don't know, but it's probably a good idea to stop smoking, right? I mean, it's just, I mean, it's just kind of.

• 1:03:58Rich Roll?

  What is a day in your personal life with food? Like, how do you make it work?

• 1:04:02Michael Greger?

  Well, on the, well, yeah.

• 1:04:05Rich Roll?

  Knowing that you're on planes. And how do you deal with the airports and all of that?

• 1:04:09Michael Greger?

  Yeah, airport food courts. Yeah, well, look, it's getting easier. Now you can get like brown rice in an airport. I mean, that's great. Like, you see, like, you know, fast casual places, like, you know, things you never expect to see before. And look, there's, you know, I've grown better, you know, if I can, you know, land someplace and find Whole Foods and have a hot bar and I can grab some food and, you know, first few days I have snacks and then slowly it's all gone. You know what I've been doing recently is I, we tell the organizers, you gotta bring me food. You know, I mean, there's only so many.

• 1:04:36Rich Roll?

  Put it in the rider.

• 1:04:37Michael Greger?

  There's only so many sweet potatoes I can get on my plane.

• 1:04:40Rich Roll?

  Here comes Craig, he's the guy with the crazy rider.

• 1:04:41Michael Greger?

  Right, right.

• 1:04:42Rich Roll?

  Who does he think he is, Van Halen?

• 1:04:43Michael Greger?

  Not only no green M&M's, no M&M's, period! It's all, right. And so, right, and so, look, I, you know, I need to, I, yeah. And typically, I don't even have time, even if I could, I mean, right, even if there's healthy food around, here I am, Southern California, I can get healthy food, but I don't have time. I mean, it's just.

• 1:05:01Rich Roll?

  And on the rare days that you're at home.

• 1:05:02Michael Greger?

  Oh, now then, once I have control over my life.

• 1:05:06Rich Roll?

  I love how excited you are.

• 1:05:07Michael Greger?

  And no, that's a beautiful thing. I, well, I mean, I just, yeah, this is my first day of this, this few week stint. And so I'm feeling the, the leaving home thing. It was, it was, it was hard to get up this morning, but, um, yeah, then I can eat this beautiful diet.

• 1:05:24Michael Greger?

  Oh my, and it's like, it's like a, it's like a, it's like a game, like how healthy can I get? I mean, it's really, um, and, uh, and you know what helps? So I do a lot of food delivery, like Whole Foods delivery, and then, then you're not even tempted to buy junk because it's not in front of you grabbing. And so it's like everything I eat. So my house just has healthy food. And so if you get hungry enough, you're gonna eat an apple, right? I mean, there's nothing, you will eventually eat that apple, right? And so with only healthy stuff, you know, I can, I can build up my, my healthy immune system.

• 1:05:55Rich Roll?

  Always making the healthy choice the, uh, the most convenient.

• 1:05:58Michael Greger?

  Right. Oh yeah. I could go out in a, in a, in a Philadelphia winter and bike someplace to get something, to bike to the donut shop, but so much easier when I have a fridge full of yummy food.

• 1:06:11Rich Roll?

  And do you prepare stuff ahead of time?

• 1:06:13Michael Greger?

  Uh, I do a lot of batch cooking.

• 1:06:15Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:15Michael Greger?

  Yeah, yeah. Um, particularly now I'm doing a lot of this, this prebiotic mix. I talked about my, uh, when I, in studying the, improving your, uh, microbiome, for the new, big microbiome chapter in the, in the diet book. Um, and just learning how, again, how important microbiome is and where are the most concentrated sources of prebiotics. And so I, I discovered sorghum for the first time, discovered all these weird millet's that I had no idea, that have poorly digested starch, and so they are fed to animals. But poorly digested starch is exactly what we want because it's poorly digested in our small intestine, makes it down to our lower intestine where our good gut bugs can have a bounty of prebiotics and then has all those knock on benefits. And so that's the kind of thing where I just insta bought a huge amount and just, you know,

• 1:07:00Michael Greger?

  Tupperware in the fridge, um, and, you know, take out one every day as soon as it's over. And, you know, so I always have, uh, always have my intact grains and a whole bunch of wonderful black lentils. And then it's a matter of just getting greens in the house.

• 1:07:22Rich Roll?

  What else did you learn about the gut biome in prepping for this book?

• 1:07:25Michael Greger?

  What's neat is now we have these interventional trials. So we've always known you, you can, so flashback a few years ago, it was a black hole, almost no pun intended, where, because most gut bugs are actually unculturable in laboratory conditions. Like, we can't grow them outside of the human colon. We don't know without gas, we don't know. And so, it was a black bug. We had no idea what was going on there until we had genetic fingerprinting techniques. And all of a sudden, for the first time, we'd be like, oh, okay, we can actually track people's microbiome over time, compare people's different microbiomes, and we can correlate diseases with, with different bugs in our gut, and change people's diets, change the microbiome, see the beneficial or adverse

• 1:08:08Michael Greger?

  effects. But, that's the problem. If you improve someone's diet, all of a sudden, you give people lots of whole grains and legumes, beans, split peas, chickpeas, and lentils, lots of prebiotics, they get these beneficial changes in their microbiome, and all of a sudden, they have amazing health benefits. Uh, yeah, but you just fed them a whole bunch of healthy food. How do we know microbiome has anything to do with it? That's where fecal transplants come along, right? Then we can prove it's the microbiome, because we can take those gut bugs and put it into somebody who's continuously the crappy diet, and see if we can get those same metabolic benefits. And that's what we're seeing. So we're seeing, um, yeah, so, you know, someone gets a fecal transplant from someone who's overweight, all of a sudden, they start packing on pounds, eating the same food. Um, or there's-

• 1:08:53Rich Roll?

  That's crazy.

• 1:08:54Michael Greger?

  -mental health changes, um, all sorts of crazy things. Um, and then we can prove it's the gut bug. Now, what happens is, of course, it's temporary, because, right, you, you infuse the gut bugs, but then you keep starving them by not eating any fiber, and then they die away. But you see, initially, those same benefits. Of course, you gotta feed those gut bugs, or they're gonna die off. But, but, so, so what went from a, from a correlation science, now we have a causation science. Um, and it's just fascinating that we can transfer the benefits of healthy diet. So, so, I mean, so the, the black market rich rollstool, you could, I mean, you know, the, the, the, the, the, I mean, yeah-

• 1:09:37Rich Roll?

  Start selling that shit.

• 1:09:38Michael Greger?

  Exactly. I mean, who wouldn't pay?

• 1:09:41Rich Roll?

  It is, it is fascinating. I mean- The links to cravings as well, like

• 1:09:46Michael Greger?

  Oh, great, yeah.

• 1:09:47Rich Roll?

  The nature of the gut flora impacts the foods that you crave.

• 1:09:50Michael Greger?

  Immunity, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:09:52Rich Roll?

  And it also, I think, is, is because it's so complex that it's ripe for confusion and people kind of making claims about what you should and you shouldn't do, that we don't necessarily have the ability to really back up at this point.

• 1:10:09Michael Greger?

  Particularly this kind of personalized nutrition. Like, people all the time are sending me things. I sent my stool sample in to this company and gave me back a thing and said, "I should be eating this, and I shouldn't be eating this." We don't have that kind of granularity. The science doesn't back that up. It does not. Same thing with DNA testing, right? People that get back their genome and say, "Oh, well, I, you know, I'm whatever. I shouldn't be eating the X, Y, and Z." We don't have that kind of, um...

• 1:10:32Rich Roll?

  But is it true we should be eating fermented foods? And we should be eating, you know, nutritionally, a variety of nutritionally dense foods to be kind of seeding that gut flora with a diversity of bacteria?

• 1:10:45Michael Greger?

  So it's the three, right? It's prebiotics, probiotics, and polyphenols, which are these kind of tend to be brightly colored pigments in fruits and vegetables. These are kind of the three, uh, the three things that benefit a good microbiome. And you can use all three of them or just two of them. I mean, the problem with probiotics is you take them and then they just die off. You don't continue to eat healthy. And so if you just have, like, antibiotic-associated diarrhea or something, you wipe out your gut bugs, then I see a therapeutic role of something like probiotics. But otherwise, taking probiotics is useless because they'll just die off. If you put them in the same environment that didn't grow good gut bugs in the first place, putting in some good acidophus, they're just gonna die off because you're not feeding the acidophus. Because good gut bugs are, by definition, fiber feeders, resistant starch eaters.

• 1:11:28Michael Greger?

  These are, I mean, that's what makes good gut bugs grow. And so what we really need is we just need to feed our good gut bugs. Prebiotics. And people are like, "Oh, I eat so many fruits and vegetables." But must realize, fruits and vegetables are almost all water. Like, you know, uh, fruits are like 80% water or some water-rich vegetables, 90, 95% water. They're water in vegetable form, not actually a lot of fiber. You can actually have a pretty deficient, fiber-deficient diet if you're not including whole grains and legumes, some of these drier foods into your daily diet.

• 1:12:00Rich Roll?

  Wow. That's good to know, because I just thought, well, as long as I'm eating a lot of high fiber foods, like I'm basically taking care of my prebiotic needs.

• 1:12:10Michael Greger?

  All right, but it's actually not, so the fruits and vegetables are not high, I mean, they're high fiber foods compared to what 99% of the population eats. But if you're really trying to build, you know, 70 grams a day, you know, 80 grams a day, or like 120 grams, which is how we probably evolved, you know, based on human copolytes, you know, fossilized feces, then, I mean, if you, and you do the math, you, people don't even close. So, you know, Ornish, you know, really healthy, you know, whole food plant based diet, you got like 60, which is, you know, average is about 15, recommended minimum is about 30, and so getting 60, but I mean, that's, I mean, that's a remarkably healthy diet to shoot up there.

• 1:12:52Michael Greger?

  And then these population studies where they have no, essentially no heart disease, no diabetes, no breast cancer, no, you know, like Sub-Saharan Africa, half century ago, they were getting, you know, the, the triple digit fiber consumption every day. And so part of that benefit may actually have been the microbiome, and that, that was the benefit of the fiber as opposed to, you know, dropping one's cholesterol or something.

• 1:13:18Rich Roll?

  Right. More will be revealed, though. Like, there's, there's, there's gotta be, like, lots of crazy studies being performed right now.

• 1:13:24Michael Greger?

  Oh, fascinating. No, and so there, there are vegan fecal transplant studies. What can we, will you give someone a, you know, you know, you know, they do it through tubes, they do it through capsules, I, you know, you just don't want to burp after that, you know, that kind of thing.

• 1:13:38Rich Roll?

  Do you know, Robin Shookan, Dr. Robin Shookan? She's a DC, DC physician who specializes in, in the microbiome, and she was, she was on the show a long time ago, but she was predicting not only fecal transplants becoming like a booming business, but actual spas, like high-end spas where you could go and have your, you know, your artisanal.

• 1:14:04Michael Greger?

  Right, right. What you want them to eat for the week before you show up?

• 1:14:07Rich Roll?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:14:08Michael Greger?

  Right, right. I want that right. That's funny. Oh, that's great.

• 1:14:10Rich Roll?

  Well, let's, let's shift gears. I want to talk about, um, sitting for a minute. Cause you did some interesting stuff here in the book around that. I know you're, we're sitting now, but sitting is, unless you're on an airplane or in a, in a car.

• 1:14:23Michael Greger?

  Yeah, yeah. I'm stuck, yeah. Stuck in my butt all day in a plane typically. Um, but, uh, yeah. So, I mean, I, there, there's this myth that sitting's new smoking, not by any stretch of the imagination, at least 10 times more deadly to smoke than to sit. But prolonged sitting, um, defined typically over six hours a day is associated with increased mortality, even if you then go out to the gym and work out hard for an hour a day after work. And so it does, I mean, and that, that helps, but doesn't completely counterbalance the fact that you're sitting all day. And we think a lot of that, it has to do with the venous stasis, um, the, the, the, the coagulability of your blood, the fact that you're not actually having movement of blood through your, um, veins in your lower legs,

• 1:15:06Michael Greger?

  um, affects endothelofunction and affects kind of your, kind of systemic arterial tree. But even something like, you know, bobbing your knee up and down, um, has been shown to completely, uh, eliminate those effects.

• 1:15:20Rich Roll?

  That's wild.

• 1:15:21Michael Greger?

  Um, and so, and they, and they have someone just bobbed one knee up and down versus the other. And you can measure the differences, um, and what's going on in their legs. And that is what's correlated with this, um, increased, uh, you know, cardiovascular disease, uh, morbidity and mortality. So there's a way, so even if you're a truck driver, even if you're stuck inside all day, sitting down, there are things you can do. Um, and so, yeah, and there's all sorts of, I go through all the, the various different like little bars and things they can put under your desk and which ones work, which ones are just fads. And so there are ways you can, um, counterbalance the effect, but, or you can, you know, do a standing desk, walking desk. I love getting back to my walking desk. I'm addicted to the thing.

• 1:16:00Rich Roll?

  Wasn't there a study that you looked at where they put people on basically, you know, a standardized amount of calories every day and said, you can exercise this much. And there was a difference in between, you know, some of them lost weight, some of them didn't. And it came down to how much they were sitting. And then there was this realization that there are certain people that are walking around all the time, kind of casually throughout the day. And they were having amazing benefits that the people who were just eating the same and working out the same, who were sitting more, weren't able to realize.

• 1:16:31Michael Greger?

  Yeah, these neat benefits, right? These non-exercise thermogenesis. So, so what they, yeah, so what they realized is that we typically, you know, this whole calories in, calories out, and you ask people what matters and people actually either say they're the same or calories out matters more, and that's completely not true. We have almost total control of calories in. In fact, we could eat nothing. Although in calories out, typical exercise, like casual exerciser, that's only like 5% of calories out. Most of our calories out are our energy intensive brains. Most wild animals, movement is their number one calories out. For us, it's our brains. We could lie down in bed, chained to a bed all day,

• 1:17:12Michael Greger?

  still burn over a thousand calories. The most of the, and so that's why it's so hard to outrun a bad diet. Because, you know, even a moderately exercise, moderately obese person, moderately intensely exercising for an hour, burns 350 calories. I mean, most snacks, drinks, processed foods have like 70, are consumed at 70 calories a minute. So five minutes eating just wiped out a whole hour of exercise. That's why it's so difficult. But what they learned is because, and so there's a, there's a, you know, like a 60% slice is just like, you know, basal metabolic, you know, activity, keeping your breathing, your heart pumping, your brain going. And then there's a small sliver, unless you're a mountain climber, an army ranger,

• 1:17:55Michael Greger?

  or something really doing intense exercise, you just have a small fraction of voluntary exercise. But then there's this non-exercise thermogenesis, which is

• 1:18:06Michael Greger?

  Fidgeting, which is just moving around, walking around, you know, standing rather than sitting. And so they, now we have these accelerometers we can put on people. And so really revolutionized our understanding of where these calories are going. And why you put people on the same kind of same calorie diet, the same enforced exercise schedule, and some people lose vastly more amounts of weight than others. And most of that had to do, it's not like some people just, you know, had metabolic slowing, or there's some biochemical thing going on. No, it was the amount of the, of this, this, this, you know, non, you know, typical kind of exercise, you know, where you're setting out a half

• 1:18:48Michael Greger?

  an hour to do any kind of exercise. It was just that they're just moving around more during the day. And so how can we enforce that? Well, being at a standing desk, you have postural muscles, otherwise you collapse to your floor. You know, anything you can do to get you to just move yourself more and, you know, bouncing your knees, that kind of stuff.

• 1:19:06Rich Roll?

  I mean, that dovetails pretty perfectly with the Blue Zones findings, right? That these people that live so long and live so healthy are people that are just kind of in constant low-grade motion throughout the day.

• 1:19:19Michael Greger?

  Right, they're not going to the gym. Right, because their whole life is just, we were built to move. And so, yeah, and so, I mean, that's what some of that sitting data suggests.

• 1:19:28Rich Roll?

  What about the person who has struggled to lose weight their whole life, and no matter what they do, they just continue to gain, or they can't, you know, they stay at a certain point? Is there, is there validity to this being hormonal or an endocrine problem? You know, hear people say like, oh, it's my genetic makeup, or, you know, I just have a slow metabolism.

• 1:19:51Michael Greger?

  Right. So there are some conditions. So for example, hypothyroidism, meaning where it does slow down your metabolism by about 15%. And indeed, it's just, it's harder for them to lose weight. But

• 1:20:05Michael Greger?

  There's no such thing as someone who's basically obesity resistant. There used to be, there are people who claim, no matter what, even if I don't eat anything, I gain weight or don't lose weight. And so scientists locked them in a lab. And when you do that, everybody, everybody, everybody, there's never been a single published case, they lose weight, in fact, exactly as they should in terms of body fat. Some of them, and this is where this comes from, start retaining water, such that they lose no weight after not eating for four days. And so the bathroom scale says they haven't lost a pound. But if you actually do CT scans, DEXA scans, actually see what's going on inside their body, they're losing body fat exactly as predicted, but they're retaining all this water. And then

• 1:20:48Michael Greger?

  finally, when the diuresis happens, all of a sudden, they plunge down and match exactly onto the curve. But it can take days for you to reach that. And so you can imagine people who are like, I'm starving myself for literally days not losing a pound. There's something wrong with me. No, you're actually losing body fat every single day. It's just your scale doesn't tell you the, you know, the, what compartments you're losing that weight from.

• 1:21:10Rich Roll?

  Wow. That's interesting, because I feel like that, that does come up quite a bit. People, you know, will say, just, you know, there's something different about my genetic makeup that makes me immune from these positive experiences that other people have.

• 1:21:24Michael Greger?

  So they just have to get enough time?

• 1:21:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah. One of the things that I hear quite frequently is, Rich, you know, I've been listening to you, I read your book, blah, blah, blah, whatever. I saw the movies. I went plant-based for a while, and now I'm, you know, I'm pretty much there, but I went back to some fish and a little bit of, you know, a little bit of meat here and there. So I'm kind of 90% in your direction. Like, is that good? Like, how do you, how does, how does the evidence and the science break down in terms of somebody who's predominantly plant-based? I guess the word plant-based, I mean, how do you define that? If you're plant-based, it doesn't mean you're, you're plant-perfect, or you're plant 100%. What is the difference between somebody who is, you know, adhering to, you know, your optimal

• 1:22:09Rich Roll?

  protocol versus the person who is indulging in a little bit of meat and dairy products on the side?

• 1:22:15Michael Greger?

  I think the body has a remarkable ability to bounce back from insults. In fact, that's what this kind of, this heart disease reversal data shows. Is that you can have, you can eat a lifetime of this horrible food and then even, I mean, the average age is like in the sixties, some of these reversal studies. And even after a lifetime of that, you can clean out there is the body was just waiting for you to stop, you know, attacking your arteries with these foods and you could rapidly on reversal and you get more reversal, the more compliance you get. But, but these, the compliance wasn't perfect in most of these studies. And so people were eating those kind of 90% type diets and seeing the remarkable benefits. You know, it's like, there's no study in the world that suggests someone with, who's

• 1:22:57Michael Greger?

  like a social smoker, picks up a few cigarettes at a party once a year is going to have any greater, you know, lung cancer risk than, than someone who doesn't smoke at all. Of course, we tell people, don't smoke at all because we're afraid this is going to kind of, you know, lead down that path. And some people are easier or ironically more compliant with strict rules, black and white rules. So if you're like, there's no cheese in the house versus a little cheese in there, I'm just going to have a little bit. The concern, I think, with a lot of these plant-based physicians who are like absolutely be strict, zero, you know, we don't want you to eat any of this. It's not that they think, it's not that the science supports, we need that level of compliance to get the benefits, but the concern is you won't, is that you'll slip back down to your old ways.

• 1:23:41Michael Greger?

  Right. So it's a psychological, you know, you know, it's easier for, for, for an alcoholic to completely be a teetotaler than it is.

• 1:23:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, trust me. I mean, a couple of observations on that. I mean, I certainly fall into that camp. Like I have to have ardent, strict rules around this stuff because if I, you know, partake a little bit, that just opens the door for more, like I just know myself well enough to know, like if, if I could have a little bit of cheese here and, here and there, that I could maintain that for a little while, but six months later, there, there'd probably be a lot more cheese happening.

• 1:24:15Michael Greger?

  Like that would be, right, that would be the harm. It wouldn't be that cheese once in a while. That wouldn't be the harm.

• 1:24:20Rich Roll?

  It's that, it's that it triggers, it, it, it basically keeps that craving alive.

• 1:24:24Michael Greger?

  Right.

• 1:24:25Rich Roll?

  Rather than allowing me to transcend it.

• 1:24:26Michael Greger?

  And it doesn't allow your taste buds to adapt, right? I mean, so, I mean, we, our taste buds have been so deadened by this, deadened by the hyper- Salty, hyper sweet, hyper fatty foods such that natural foods don't taste any good. And so then you feel like some kind of aesthetic monk where you're just eating it. But give it a few weeks and all of a sudden, you know, the soup salted to taste weeks ago. We have these great studies. So it's actually too salty. You prefer lower salt soup. Um, and the same thing happens with, you know, but look, the ripest peach in the world tastes sour after a bowl of Fruit Loops. Like natural food, but all of a sudden you get to a point where if you start, if you get rid of all that crap, then all of a sudden, you know, uh, corn on the cob, no butter, no salt, tastes delicious, like natural, healthy, whole food. Then you get the best of both worlds. Wait a second. Taste delicious and you get to live longer.

• 1:25:09Michael Greger?

  That's what plant-based eating is all about, but you may never get there if you, you know, well, have a little cheese here, a little cheese there. You maintain that.

• 1:25:15Rich Roll?

  Cause you can't make that. Yeah, exactly.

• 1:25:17Michael Greger?

  And then, then, then, okay, I'm going to be good. Eat that salad and the salad doesn't taste like cardboard. Because you know, it doesn't have the same kind of, yeah.

• 1:25:24Rich Roll?

  Right. I, uh, I know that to be true because I've experienced that in my life, but I think people hearing that think it's bullshit. Like they're like, they can't believe, they can't believe that that's true. They're like, that sounds great, but there's no way.

• 1:25:35Michael Greger?

  Yeah, no, yeah, it's got to have the face.

• 1:25:38Rich Roll?

  And the other observation I have about this is that I don't think people are very good, objective. Uh, they're, they're not objective about, about what they're truly doing. Like when they say, oh, having a little bit of this, or I have a moderate amount of this. I think their, their perception of that moderation is, is generally in my experience, completely out of whack.

• 1:25:59Michael Greger?

  No, in fact, um, there's a great study that I talked about in, in the new book where, and, and this is the reason why moderation, why food industry loves moderation. They asked people what they thought a moderate amount of chocolate would be, moderate amount of, you know, processed meat, moderate amount. They go through all these foods, right? And what was the definition moderate? Exactly how much they themselves were eating. No matter how much they're eating, that was defined as moderate based on their own intake. They're eating a chocolate bar every day. That's moderate intake. And so, so when the food industry says every, in moderation, that's, that's, that's basically giving people license to do exactly what they were doing before. Because they all, everyone thinks that they're eating moderate amounts of bad food. Amazing.

• 1:26:42Rich Roll?

  And it goes back to the psychology of all of this. It really isn't about the information. It's about, it's about people's emotional, you know, baggage around all of this stuff. And I, I really think that that is the biggest barrier. Like when somebody says, I can't lose weight or whatever. There's, there's a whole, you know, Package there that needs to be, you know, really deconstructed in order to get that person, you know, acclimated towards a new way of living and eating.

• 1:27:09Michael Greger?

  And I have a chapter in the book talking about those psychological, we have these glitches, right? So I talk about in psychology literature, they call it the what the hell effect. That's the, you eat one cookie and you eat the whole bag because of why I already screwed up, which makes absolutely no sense. Just take a step back, wait a second. So I made one step away from what my plan, so I'm just gonna go out. That makes absolutely no sense. In fact, you eat that one, then you definitely shouldn't eat the whole, but, but our psychology goes in the absolute wrong direction. And the same thing, then there's the flip side is making progress towards a goal, actually gives people license to, you know, so losing weight one week is correlated with gaining weight the next way, right? You, but just the understanding of that, knowing that that's a glitch, that the hope is that you can catch

• 1:27:54Michael Greger?

  yourself, right? And so, you know, I find myself, you know, after some four hour book signing, you know, the, you know, jet lag to heck, you know, staring at whatever goodies are in my hotel minibar, right? And have this, my first reaction is like, I deserve this. Like, oh my God, Ben, what I went through today. But then I really, I just, what the hell? You know, I just, the self licensing. And I say, no, what I deserve, of course, is to be healthy. And so, yeah.

• 1:28:25Rich Roll?

  I think, I think momentum is underrated too. Once people get a little practice with this and they're starting to see even the smallest amount of result, positive result, then it really like enforces, you know, that drive to keep going. And it's almost like an insurance policy or a barrier against those kinds of slips. There's something mystical about that.

• 1:28:46Michael Greger?

  And, and that does argue towards the more If you're gonna try it, go all in. As opposed to the eighty, ninety percent, right? If you're gonna try like a free sample, right? That's what I used to tell my patients. I try like if you look, you can eat anything for a few weeks. You can eat nothing for a few weeks. I mean, let's just, let's try it. Let's go all in just for, you know, and because people can't stomach the thought of I'm never gonna eat another pepperoni pizza the rest of my life. Like, this is unthinkable. But like, no, no, no, just a couple of weeks and we can go right back to eating whatever you want, you know, just give it a try. I'm in the, but, but the hope is that they go all in, they start to feel the benefits, right? So they're, they're less painful periods, or they're, they're chronic migraines, whatever it is, such that then have that internal motivation, even if they don't take advantage, and they do slip back to their old ways.

• 1:29:31Michael Greger?

  They know, at least in the back of their mind, they know how good they could feel at any time if they just moved in that direction. But you don't know how good you're gonna feel till you give it a try.

• 1:29:39Rich Roll?

  What changes would you make to our system of healthcare if you were in charge? I mean, you know, listen, nobody goes into medicine to, you know, just be a vehicle for, for diagnosis and prescription, you know? But the system is set up to create a dynamic that forces medical practitioners into this kind of practice that, you know, isn't really necessarily, I would imagine, what they thought they were signing up for.

• 1:30:07Michael Greger?

  Yeah, I mean, it's really, they, I mean, in fact, if you look at the mental health statistics of practitioners these days, particularly in the United States, this is not what we kind of signed up for, because most of what comes in our door, about eighty percent in primary care, are these chronic diseases for which we have very little to offer our patients in kind of the traditional medical model, right? We can slow down the rate at which you go blind, at which you lose your kidney function. We can slow down the rate at which, you know, your arteries clog off by, you know, prescribing these drugs, and we'll have a little time, so we give these prescriptions. But instead of giving fully informed consent that, well, here's your other options that I don't have time to tell you about and are may work better and less side effects. But, I mean, the, the system is set up to kind of reward bad behavior.

• 1:30:49Michael Greger?

  The most profitable doctor visit in North America is a blood pressure check. Doctors love it, everybody loves it, you can bill for it, they come in, they're on a blood pressure medication, they come in every, and then you tweak the drug a little bit and they come back. It's the easiest, you know, if you fit it in a few minutes, you get to bill for it. And, and it's the most common primary care visit, and...

• 1:31:13Michael Greger?

  For a condition that need not happen at all, it's a lifestyle disease. High blood pressure is a lifestyle disease. But that entire sector of the field would be gone. Both big pharma and, and big medicine. I mean, no one benefits from people eating healthier. I mean, if you go down the list like the junk food industry, the, name one industry that would, that would benefit from people eating healthier. And you say, well, what about the health insurance industry? Don't they benefit from people eating, because they have to pay for it all? No, they get a slice of the pie. And the bigger the pie, the bigger the slice. I mean, you know, when I, when I get to talk to these, you know, healthcare executives at these conferences, first of all, they'll say, well, you know, they're only going to be on my insurance for a few years. And I switch, people switch insurance so frequently.

• 1:31:58Michael Greger?

  Why am I going to prevent their diabetes and have some other company benefit from my preventing their diabetes? And it's the pie, I mean, it's just so expensive. And, and they, they get their cut. And the more expensive it is, the bigger the cut. And it's just, the whole system is rigged kind of against us. You know, the, the CEOs of junk food companies aren't sitting around trying to think of way, creative ways to contribute to the childhood obesity epidemic. They just need to make money for their shareholders. How do you do that? You don't do that selling something that goes bad, like produce, that you can't brand, you can't make it. You want a snack cake that's just on the shelf, right? I mean, I mean, the system is just set up to, to, you know, reward these behaviors that make people sick.

• 1:32:39Rich Roll?

  Yeah. So how do we change the incentivization so that we get more Robert Osfolds and Michelle McMackens, who are, who, you know, have created practices where they have follow-up and accountability? And they're, they're, you know, providing that kind of extra level of care to help people make these lifestyle shifts? Like, there has to be an economic structure that, that, that, you know, makes it attractive for young doctors to enter into this.

• 1:33:06Michael Greger?

  Yeah. So, I mean, it's reimbursement. I mean, that's, you know, Dean Ornish had this famous quote saying that, you know, he thought it was the research, but no, it's all about reimbursement. You know, so he proved back in 1990, right? Decades ago, you could reverse heart disease, number one killer. And, you know, as, you know, hundreds of thousands of people continue to die every year needlessly. Because it's the the lifestyle purchase isn't reimbursed. And so, yes, some people can fight against the buck the trend and find creative ways to like these shared medical visits where you can bill insurance. There's actually no technical maximum for the number of people you can get. You can get 30 people in a room and you can bill insurance for each of those 30 people and

• 1:33:46Michael Greger?

  give the same little speech that you'd give for a group of diabetics or a group of people with obesity. And so that's one of the kind of ways that within the system, doctors would be able to get reimbursed. But yeah, I mean, we just need to change the incentives. Like, why do do US taxpayers subsidize by the billions, the the sugar industry, the corn syrup industry, the make cheap livestock feed for dollar menu burgers? Why? Why? Why are we paying a quarter billion dollars to the sorghum industry? I'm buying some sorghum now because I love it, but I didn't even know about it a few months ago. Right? No, it's all fed to livestock. And so, I mean, now, you can argue we shouldn't be subsidized, the government shouldn't be subsidizing foods,

• 1:34:28Michael Greger?

  but if you're going to subsidize foods, how about subsidizing fruits and vegetables, making them cheaper, even free? And because then they'll have all sorts of knock on benefits in terms of lower costs across the board.

• 1:34:39Rich Roll?

  Yeah, or taking those subsidies and channeling them into improving healthcare or creating those incentives.

• 1:34:45Michael Greger?

  But the the controversy is who's going to pay for healthcare, not what the fundamental healthcare is going to be.

• 1:34:51Rich Roll?

  Right. I think Ornish did create a reimbursable program.

• 1:34:55Michael Greger?

  Absolutely. Paid, right, paid for, reimbursed by Medicare. There's two programs now, HIM and Prynnican. And and I speak at hospitals, I speak at Ornish programs across the country. That's often my in into a medical system to kind of promote the program, saying that this option exists.

• 1:35:14Rich Roll?

  Speaking of Pritikin, Pritikin, you know, your, your entry point to this whole thing begins with Pritikin.

• 1:35:20Michael Greger?

  Yeah, yeah, amazing, right? And not a doctor, right? People always think Dr. Pritikin, no, he's an engineer. Came from the outside, diagnosed with, with serious heart disease in his early 40s. And was, and was basically told, you go home and die, there's nothing we can do about it. Back then, we didn't have drugs for, I mean, couldn't even put anybody on anything. And people just go work for a first and you die. Heart disease reversible? No. But then he looked around the world, found these population, he was a data guy, he just went and said, there's population of the world that don't suffer from epidemic heart disease. Like it's unknown, people just don't have heart attacks in rural China, Sub-Saharan Africa. Wait a second, what was it about these populations? He figured, oh, maybe it's cholesterol and started experimenting around how we can lower people cholesterol, came plant-based diet.

• 1:36:01Michael Greger?

  And reversed, you know, heart disease by the thousands, but back then we didn't have angiography. We didn't have this ability to visualize inside what the arteries were looking like. And so it was a clinical diagnosis. They had angina, they had such bad heart disease, they couldn't walk up the steps. But you just had to trust that the patient had angina and all of a sudden they go on a plant-based diet. And all of a sudden they're, they're running marathons. And the response, the medical community is, well, you never had heart disease in the first place. If you had heart disease, you wouldn't be running marathons. Well, but it's because it was simple, but all of a sudden, what Ornish brought to the table is we could prove with some quantitative angiography. Oh, we can actually see the arteries open up, get bigger, improve blood flow reversal. Proof in black and white pubs in some of those prestigious medical journals in the world.

• 1:36:44Michael Greger?

  And but one of those people that Pritikin reversed their heart disease was Frances Gregor, my grandmother. Who, you know, in a wheelchair after so many bypass surgeries, basically run out of plumbing. And there she was and saw about Pritikin on 60 Minutes. Pritikin was featured on 60 Minutes, somehow made the cross-country trek, one of his earliest patients. She's featured in Pritikin's biography. And she, you know, they wheeled her in and she walked out within a few weeks. She was walking 10 miles a day, went on to live another 31 years to age 96 after her medical death sentence at age 65. And that's what, that's what changed her whole family. I mean, now as a kid, this was all happened when I was, I, I mean, I just, well, yeah, duh, you go to the doctor, you get better. That's what doctors do, right? Little did I know

• 1:37:27Michael Greger?

  what revolution back then, the thought that heart disease was reversible, completely revolutionary. Only later in life did I realize what had happened, what my grandma was part of.

• 1:37:37Rich Roll?

  Was Priggin kind of perceived as a quack in his time?

• 1:37:40Michael Greger?

  Well, he was, he was putting doctors in shame because he knew the science. I mean, because he had, he had read, read all the, the, the primary literature. Um, and so would just demolish, there's actually some old YouTube of his debates. He would just demolish opponents because they thought they knew what they're talking about. Of course they, I mean, they were just, they're doctors. They weren't taught anything about nutrition. Um, and so, I, so, I mean, he was just kind of untouchable when, when, when he was actually presenting the science. Um, but they didn't believe his results. His results were too miraculous and he couldn't prove it beyond these amazing patient testimonials. But, you know, how far does that really go? It doesn't, um, until, you know, we have good data to back it up.

• 1:38:21Rich Roll?

  And he inspired everything that you've done.

• 1:38:23Michael Greger?

  And then that's, that's how, that's why I went to medicine.

• 1:38:26Rich Roll?

  It was like your trigger.

• 1:38:26Michael Greger?

  That's why I, I started Nutrition Facts. That's why I wrote How Not to Die. That's why all the proceeds I received from all my books are done into charity. I just want to do what everyone, for everyone's family, what Priggin did for my family.

• 1:38:37Rich Roll?

  Right. Well, let's round this down. Um, maybe, uh, provide a few starting points for somebody that's listening to this. This, this information is totally new to that person. They're overweight, they're ready for a change. What's the first thing they do?

• 1:38:54Michael Greger?

  Go to your local public library, grab How Not to Diet, check it out. Um, and NutritionFacts.org. All my, uh, work is free there. No ads, no corporate sponsorship, strictly non-commercial, not sell anything, just put it up as a public service, as a labor of love, as a tribute to my grandmother.

• 1:39:11Rich Roll?

  I like how you mentioned the library and not the bookstore.

• 1:39:14Michael Greger?

  Free! Books are free! Literally in your neighborhood. They're just sitting there.

• 1:39:20Rich Roll?

  But if you had to tell them, like, look, I'm staring at my next meal. Like, what should I focus on? What are a couple foods or some thumbnail, you know, rules that I can wrap my head around?

• 1:39:33Michael Greger?

  Yeah, so there's the 17 criteria, which make for the first part of the book, like being rich in fiber, water-rich vegetables, things like that, that through calorie density mechanisms and improving microbiome health, et cetera, can, you know, can achieve that satiety without calorie restriction or portion control. I mean, that's the magic of plant-based eating, as opposed to traditional weight loss approaches, is that, you know, people are told to eat ad libitum, meaning eat as much as you want. And that's because, you know, you take people, put people on a whole food plant-based diet, and you can slash 1,000 calories out of their daily diet, cut their caloric intake in half, they don't notice. Because, I mean, they have these crazy, put people healthy enough to actually, you just

• 1:40:18Michael Greger?

  could, some foods are impossible to overeat, 2,000 calories of strawberries, 44 cups of strawberries, you couldn't fit them all in your stomach. Like, you know, I mean, that, you know, that's just, you know, there's, you know me, I go on and on.

• 1:40:31Rich Roll?

  Listen, man, I love you. I, you know, I can go out and run really far distances, but I aspire to your level of energy. You know what I mean? Whatever you got, I want it. And you've been so inspiring to me in my journey. And I just, I love the impact that you're having on the world. And it's massive. It's no small thing. You've devoted your life to this cause, and you've changed so many other people's lives, and it's to be commended. It's an honor to talk to you today, my friend.

• 1:41:02Michael Greger?

  Well, you know what? I hear, beyond just documentaries, I heard you on the Rich Roll Podcast, and that's why I changed my life, and that's why I'm here.

• 1:41:12Rich Roll?

  Good, man. Come back again sometime. And you're going to speak at a hospital tonight?

• 1:41:17Michael Greger?

  That's right. Where am I going?

• 1:41:18Rich Roll?

  What's the pitch? You don't even know. Do you know what state you're in?

• 1:41:22Michael Greger?

  I just looked down at my phone, like, oh, I'm going to the airport. Oh, I'm going to work.

• 1:41:26Rich Roll?

  What's the pitch at the hospital tonight?

• 1:41:28Michael Greger?

  We're gonna do weight loss. We're gonna do weight loss.

• 1:41:30Rich Roll?

  Good. All right, my friend. Let's get you out of here. Peace.

• 1:41:37Rich Roll?

  Mind blowing stuff. Am I right? Hope you guys enjoyed that. If you have any questions or feedback for Dr. G, you can shoot them his way on Instagram @MichaelGregorMD and @nutrition_facts on Twitter. Pick up How Not to Diet and his newest audiobook, How to Survive a Pandemic, which are of course, all linked up in the show notes on the episode page at richroll.com. If you'd like to support our work here on the show, subscribe, rate and comment on it on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify and on YouTube. Share the show or your favorite episodes with friends or on social media. And you can support us on Patreon at richroll.com/donate. Thank you to everybody who helped put on this show today. Jason Camiello for

• 1:42:21Rich Roll?

  audio engineering, production, show notes and interstitial music. Blake Curtis and Margot Lubin for videoing today's show and creating all the social media clips that I share. Jessica Miranda for graphics. Ally Rogers for portraits. Georgia Whaley for copywriting and DK for advertiser relationships. Dean Music, as always, by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt and Mahari Mathis. Thanks for the love, you guys. See you back here in a couple days with another cool episode. To be determined. Until then, peace. Plants. Namaste.