Our Misplaced Obsession With Protein: Garth Davis, MD On High Fat, Low Carb Diets, Bad Science & How To Separate Nutritional Fact From Popular Fiction

This week marks the return of Garth Davis, MD — a veteran weight loss surgeon who took it upon himself to determine exactly why so many people are plagued by obesity. A quest that led him down a deep research hole to identify the ultimate human diet to maximize and maintain weight loss; optimize human health; and prevent (and even reverse) lifestyle disease — both for himself and his patients (tune in to RRP 50 for our first conversation). About 7 years ago, the good doctor became his own patient. At the time, he was suffering from high cholesterol, high blood pressure and a fatty liver. In other words, he was downright sick; headed towards a future plagued by obesity and chronic illness. Ironic, yes. But not surprising given the demanding hours of the surgeon lifestyle, lack of exercise, a preference for salty, fatty foods, and the convenience of fast food options in the hospital cafeteria. In fact, there was a Wendy's in the University of Michigan hospital where Garth did his internship and residency, resulting in a daily dose of double cheeseburgers — a habit he maintained for years. Let's just say I can relate. Current conventional wisdom in his field is that overweight patients should adopt a very low carb, low to no fruit, high protein diet — hop on board the ketosis bandwagon. Like many, and without inquiring further, Garth simply bought into this idea as truth. He even wrote a book in 2007 advocating this approach to food, called The Experts Guide To Weight Loss Surgery*. The only problem? This approach to diet failed him and many other friends, colleagues and patients. He knew there had to be a better solution. And his patients needed help beyond knee-jerk surgery. Finally ready for a personal change, he took it upon himself to research — truly research — nutrition for the first time. His study became an obsession. The more he delved into the peer reviewed work, the more convinced he became that there is absolutely no legitimate science to back the long-term health claims surrounding the strongly held belief that if we want to be thin and healthy we should eat a high protein low carbohydrate diet. What did he find? If we want to prevent obesity and disease; attain and maintain ideal weight management; and achieve true optimal health and long-term wellness, we need to embrace our inner herbivore. Sound far-fetched? Before you balk, understand that (much like me) adopting a plant-based lifestyle absolutely revolutionized Garth's health beyond what he could have imagined. Not only did he drop the weight that plagued him for years, all of his blood markers suddenly and quite magically normalized. His allergies vanished. His sleep improved, his energy levels skyrocketed and he got off his statin medications. In short, he finally began to walk his talk. As his life began to turn around, he wanted to be an example to his patients. For the first time in his life, he began exercising. Then he did the extraordinary. Despite never having been an athlete, in 2011 he completed Ironman Texas in 12 hours and 6 minutes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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

• 0:44Rich Roll?

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• 1:04Speaker 01

  It's almost impossible not to get enough protein, no matter what you're eating. That's number one. Number two, eating more protein will make you sick eventually. And number three, eating more plants is really like finding the fountain of youth.

• 1:20Rich Roll?

  That's Dr. Garth Davis, this week, on the Rich Roll Podcast.

• 1:37Rich Roll?

  Hey, everybody. Welcome to the show, or welcome back. I'm so glad you dropped by. My name is Rich Roll. I'm the host guy. I'm back at it again with another awesome episode of the RRP, where each week I mine the minds of the best and the brightest in health, wellness, and excellence to help you live and be better. To grow, because let's face it, come on, that's what we're here to do, right? To educate, to inform, and to inspire you to unlock and unleash the best, most authentic version of yourself. So, thanks for dropping by, I appreciate you subscribing to the show on iTunes, for spreading the word, and for clicking through the Amazon banner ad at richroll.com for all your Amazon purchases. I've got the good Dr.

• 2:21Rich Roll?

  Garth on the show today, I'm so excited, I love this guy. In case you missed it, he first appeared on the show back in the day, episode 50, so I strongly recommend you check that out if you haven't already. You can find it on my mobile app or on my website, it's pretty awesome. We go into his backstory, his evolution from being that couch potato guy to being an Ironman athlete, and what he does as a doctor. And today, we're going to mine the depths of nutrition with a little bit more diligence and specificity. But let's face it, most docs out there, they're kind of boring. They're not the most dynamic personalities, and they may have tons of great information, but they're not always the best at inspiring, at catalyzing action or change.

• 3:05Rich Roll?

  And on the other side of the coin, there are plenty of people out there that do a really good job of inspiring people, of lighting that spark that gets you off your butt, but often, these people aren't always the most informed. And that's what's great about Garth, because he's like this perfect amalgam of both. On the intellectual side, he really knows his stuff from both an experiential firsthand perspective, because he went from an overweight couch potato kind of guy to being an Ironman athlete and a marathon runner, but also from an academic and medical practitioner perspective. And his basic thesis is that Western medicine has been failing us when it comes to the most crucial aspect of maintaining health: nutrition.

• 3:46Rich Roll?

  And that if we want to achieve ideal weight management, if we want to achieve optimal health, long-term wellness, and disease prevention, we really need to turn conventional wisdom on its head. And what's cool is that Garth has now become somewhat of a crusader to teach people real nutrition, how to read scientific literature, and how the internet pseudo-experts are manipulating the science to push these high-protein, high-fat diets that are out there. And this is a guy who has buried himself in the science of nutrition, weight loss, and health, and not only has he read all the studies, he knows how to read them, he knows how to interpret them, and he understands... The distinction between truth and misdirection.

• 4:30Rich Roll?

  At his Davis Clinic in Houston, he's also on the front lines where he treats patients as a weight loss surgeon. And he sees people every day that struggle with weight and health and disease. And he's helped thousands achieve and sustain, that's the important thing, sustain healthier lifestyles. But what really distinguishes Garth, in my mind, from the fray is that he has this ability to communicate his knowledge with passion and charisma, not only so everyone can understand it, but in a way that actually creates positive, long-lasting change. And that, my friends, is rare. So this is an exploration of all the questions that seemingly confuse people daily, and questions I personally get almost every day.

• 5:14Rich Roll?

  Questions about plant-based versus paleo, what's behind low-carb, high-fat diets, the health implications of ketosis-based diets, the relationship between saturated fat and dietary cholesterol and heart disease, and exploration of the validity of studies like the China Study, the Epic Study, the Framingham Study, and the current relevance of the work of people like Doctors Esselstyn and Ornish in the face of our high-fat, high-protein craze. So in a nutshell, my goal with this podcast is that I wanted this to be the one podcast that I could point people towards who are confused about all of these issues and to set the record straight, so that when I get these questions, I can just say, "Listen to this and let me clear the air."

• 5:59Rich Roll?

  And Garth Davis delivers.

• 6:09Rich Roll?

  So let's meet Garth. Let's see what he has to say, shall we? Yes, we shall. Enjoy.

• 6:19Rich Roll?

  Second time on the show. The first time, we went into all about your story and your evolution into what you do. And for listeners that want to probe that in more depth, they can go back and listen to that episode. I'll put the link up in the show notes. But I wanted today to delve into a couple of issues with more specificity and detail, if we could. Over the last couple of weeks, I've been a guest on a bazillion podcasts, trying to get the book out and doing all these interviews and the like. And I just did one the other

• 6:56Rich Roll?

  day. And the guy, basically like a paleo slant podcast, and the guy, with a smile on his face, ambushed me a little bit. He had spent a whole day preparing for the interview, and he had all these studies in front of him, and it was a Skype call. And he's like, "Well, what about this study? And what about that study?" And I felt completely ill-equipped to respond spontaneously in the moment, because I didn't have all my counterpoint studies in front of me. And I felt a little bit, not unprepared, but a little bit, I guess ambush is the best way of doing it.

• 7:35Speaker 01

  That's their modus.

• 7:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And so, I got off the call, and I was like, I just didn't feel that great about it. And it's like, I'm not a guy who's spending all my time mired in the research and reading all these studies like you are. So I thought it would be a good opportunity to delve into that a little bit. And I just got an email that I wanted to read that came in from a follower, this guy Alex. And he said, "Hey, Rich, I really enjoy your podcasts. I've been roughly following the Bulletproof Diet for years now, and appreciate the critical analysis of some of the new high-fat, high-meat trends. However, I'm not convinced that these are misguided. In reference to your discussion with Joel Kahn," and there's a hyperlink to something, blah, blah, blah, "much of the data Kahn cited seemed to be correlational

• 8:20Rich Roll?

  as well, and his discussion seemed to involve a methodological..."

• 8:25Rich Roll?

  Critique of the pro-fat studies, cofounding variables, reliable subjects, et cetera, not granted to the anti-fat research. The discussion was very level-headed and reasonable, but, and I'm referencing myself here too, it seems very difficult to get away from the "my team versus yours" mentality. Beyond the advice to stop eating Twinkies and playing Starcraft, it doesn't quite seem like a "objective roadmap" exists for nutritional choices. And I think, you know, it's a fair observation for him to make, and I think we are in this kind of scenario where there's teams, you know, beating up on each other. And I'm always trying to just get to the objective truth.

• 9:08Rich Roll?

  Like, I'm much less interested in being a member of a team than truly having an in-depth, comprehensive understanding of the nutritional landscape when it comes to plant-based, paleo, ketosis, low-fat, high-fat, you know, all these sorts of ideas that are floating around right now with varying degrees of popularity.

• 9:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, and look, the modus out there right now, you've got to understand a few things about science. First of all...

• 9:37Rich Roll?

  Pull your mic up a little bit closer to you. Sorry about that.

• 9:40Speaker 01

  Okay. Is that better?

• 9:42Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's better.

• 9:43Speaker 01

  It's a little echoey. The first thing you've got to understand about science, there's all kinds of researchers out there, and they live in this world of publish or perish. That's their job. If they don't publish, they get fired. And because of that, there is a lot of really bad research that comes out, a lot of it that's very sloppily done. There is a journal for every kind of thought process you could have. You know, a lot of these journals are really poorly done, they're not well-peer-reviewed. And yet, what happens in this day and age, in these arguments about nutrition, is someone will be... They'll be like, okay, Rich Roll said this. I'm going to prove him wrong. I'm going to go onto PubMed and I'm going to find an article. First article comes up, that's the article that they use.

• 10:29Speaker 01

  They never read the full article. They don't have a statistics background, so they don't know how to analyze statistics. They don't know the people that are publishing it. They don't know the confounding factors that may have been involved. And yet, they use it as fact. And so, what happens is they pigeonhole you, saying, well, you say this, but I've got an article that says that, and it makes those two articles seem equal, when in fact they're not. And when you say, well, your article's wrong, they say, oh, now you're just jumping from one thing to the other. I call these guys denialists. And so, denialists do several things. First of all, they try to take down authority. So, I hear people all the time saying, oh, Dean Ornish, you know, Dean Ornish has been debunked. What do you mean, Dean Ornish?

• 11:12Rich Roll?

  Right. Well, the cousin to that is the China study has been debunked. That gets thrown around like crazy.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  Right. Right.

• 11:20Rich Roll?

  And if you say it hasn't, then you're an insane person.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're an insane person. And look, I could actually, there are things with the China study that I can find fault with, but Dean Ornish, definitely not. But this idea that even if you found fault with some parts of the China study, Colin Campbell's spent his whole life studying nutrition. He's done benchtop research, he's done randomized controlled trial research, and he's done really huge epidemiologic research. You should at least respect his opinion. This idea that he's been debunked is absolutely ridiculous. The other thing that they tend to do is that you will hear them say this all the time, correlation does not equal causation. And this is true, like, for instance, there's more chocolate eaten in Switzerland, and Switzerland has more Nobel Prize winners. So,

• 12:08Speaker 01

  somehow, chocolate really... Now, that is called a univariate analysis, meaning you're just taking two variables, and that's the only kind of thing that you're going to measure. It's chocolate and it's Nobel prizes. To do a scientific study, though, we do what's called multivariate regression analysis, meaning we find everything that could possibly be a confounding factor, you know? And we remove that out of the study, so that there's no confounding factor, so that if we get a statistical significance, it may not mean causation, but where there's smoke, there's fire. And then, if you take... Huge numbers of people studying them many years in many different countries and you start doing these retro, these multivariate analyses on them and you come up with the

• 12:53Speaker 01

  same answer in all these different studies, you better start listening to that, it's really good science.

• 12:58Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 12:59Speaker 01

  The last thing that these people do is they try to hold up that the only, without a doubt, the best study you could do on someone is a randomized controlled placebo blinded study, but you can't do that with food.

• 13:12Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 13:12Speaker 01

  You know, I can't, I can't do a study where I'm gonna follow 20 people for 20 years on, you know, three different diets, it's just not gonna happen.

• 13:19Rich Roll?

  People don't, people don't live their lives like that and, and, and, and they don't just eat one thing.

• 13:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 13:25Rich Roll?

  And they all have, you know, varying degrees of, of, the way in which they live their life brings up, you know, a bazillion variables that you couldn't possibly begin to account for.

• 13:36Speaker 01

  I mean, so many variables, look at there's, you know, I often refer to the Epic Trials, which is one of the largest studies ever done on nutrition, much bigger than China study or any of that, and what they looked at is 500,000 people over, I think, 10 to 12 countries in Europe, they followed it now 12 to 14 years and they're looking at different correlations between what you eat, how much of it you eat and disease processes that you get. And, and the, the extent to which they go to eliminate confounding factors is incredible. But they're still, like, they, they've got vegans that they look at, vegans that are in Oxford, but those vegans aren't necessarily healthy vegans, like, you look at those vegans and they're only eating 18 grams of fiber a day, how does a vegan only get 18 grams of fiber a day?

• 14:21Speaker 01

  So, and they weren't eating their B12, so there's so many variables that it's very hard to say vegan is a good diet or bad diet based on, on these, but there is, what people miss is there's a huge Huge literature about plant-based diets and about eating meat. And a person who's experienced in reading this literature, understanding it, can make pretty good conclusions. And it is not as relative as people make it out to be.

• 14:49Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm. So what would be, in the most general sense, some of those conclusions? Based on the studies and the research that you've kind of immersed yourself in?

• 14:58Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Without a doubt, processed meat is horrible for you. You can't get away from that fact. So processed meat, bacon, you know, the Subway sandwich, you know, cold cuts, horrible for you. Related with diabetes, cancer, life expectancy, heart disease, horrible for you. Red meat, for the most part, looks like it is not good for you. Definitely associated with diabetes. Definitely associated with diabetes. I'm not quite sure you could be vegan and be diabetic. I know there's about a 2% incidence of this, but I don't understand it. I like to see those people more clearly. And there's a lot of studies that go on with that.

• 15:40Speaker 01

  Animal products in general seem to be leading to premature aging in many of the studies. Definitely a link with cancer. Different meats with different cancers. For instance, chicken is strongly related with lymphoma and leukemia, whereas meat is strongly related with colon cancers and some of the other reproductive cancers. Prostate is very, very strongly linked with dairy, eggs, and meat. Definitely a heavy animal protein diet is associated with heart disease. Definitely is associated with high blood pressure. And it's definitely associated with a shorter length of life.

• 16:22Speaker 01

  And the interesting thing about the longevity studies is, we talked about taking out confounding factors. If you take out a lot of confounding factors, you get to the point where you're almost taking away a correlation. And yet, after really rigorous statistical analysis, there's still a finding that if you eat a plant-based diet, or if you eat less meat, you live longer.

• 16:46Rich Roll?

  Interesting. Well, I mean, those are some pretty, you know, bold statements that fly in the face of what seems to be quite popular right now, which is, you know, we can go through them, you know, in a bullet point way, but why don't we just start with saturated fat, right? There's this sort of populist notion at the moment, backed by certain studies, that basically says, everything you ever heard about saturated fat is wrong, saturated fat is not your enemy, and it's not linked to the incidence of heart disease. Is that a fair characterization of kind of where a certain school of thought is coming from?

• 17:22Speaker 01

  Actually, the school of thought has gone worse. They now say saturated fat is good for you, right? So you'll see those things, you know, bacon is good. Funny how I saw an article, bacon is good for you, and it wasn't about any testing of bacon being good for you, it was about saturated fat being good for you. Now, the studies that you mentioned that called to question saturated fat, they never said saturated fat is good for you. That's not their comment. They questioned whether it was as strongly correlated with heart disease as we previously thought. Now, the main study, a study called Siri Torino, is a perfect example of over-adjusting your statistical analysis. Keep in mind, every author on that article was paid for, or receives payment from either

• 18:06Speaker 01

  meat, milk, or dairy.

• 18:08Rich Roll?

  What's that study called?

• 18:10Speaker 01

  It's the Siri Torino study, S-I-R-I-T-A-R-I-N-O. That is the study that really started it all. That's the study that all these, you know, journalists like Tobbs and the other one in New York Times.

• 18:23Rich Roll?

  Gary Tobbs.

• 18:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the one they just jumped on and went with it.

• 18:26Rich Roll?

  And was that the basis of the Time Magazine Buttersback article?

• 18:30Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Yeah. It's the basis of every article that ever comes out.

• 18:34Rich Roll?

  And so what did that study say?

• 18:36Speaker 01

  So they looked at a bunch of studies, and they said, basically, that saturated fat is not correlated with heart disease. But here's the problem. First of all, You hear this term thrown around a lot called cherry picking, where they cherry picked articles that would basically give their answer. Because I could have done that same study and brought a whole different group of articles and gotten a completely different analysis. But we'll put cherry picking aside. The problem is, a lot of the studies that they picked did something called over-adjustment. So what they did, it's just like we talked about before. If we're going to do a study and we're going to remove confounding variables, meaning variables that might affect, independently affect, the result. So we're trying to see if saturated fat causes heart disease.

• 19:21Speaker 01

  So we want to take out other things that may affect heart disease. So for instance, if you're diabetic, we're taking you out. You're not in the study. And we'll look at our population and we'll say, well, if you're morbidly obese, we know that independently affects that, so we're going to take you out. Now, funny, the more you take out, the more you're taking out away from people that, you know, like plant-based diet benefits and stuff like that. But here's the key. They took out people that had high cholesterol. Because high cholesterol is an independent cause of heart disease. But saturated fat causes heart disease by raising cholesterol, in part. So by removing those people from there, you're removing the people that actually are affected by the saturated fat. You're leaving for the study people that have a genetic predisposition

• 20:06Speaker 01

  where they could eat saturated fat, not raise their cholesterol, and therefore won't get heart disease. It's ridiculous. Now, the second study that came along was a study by Child registry. And it was in, I think it was in the British Journal of Medicine. And that study did the same kind of things as the Siri Torino study did. But on top of it, there were people that were on Lipitor while doing the study. So they're taking a drug that's supposed to get rid of the effects of saturated fat. And then they're eating saturated fat and not getting heart disease.

• 20:38Rich Roll?

  But that wasn't taken into account?

• 20:39Speaker 01

  No.

• 20:40Rich Roll?

  Into the, that's interesting.

• 20:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:42Rich Roll?

  So, all right, so then that begs the question of the impact of cholesterol on heart disease. And I guess that means you have to talk about the difference between, you know, sort of serum cholesterol and dietary cholesterol, right? The difference between eating cholesterol-laden foods and the impact of that on cholesterol and what that causes in terms of health.

• 21:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, eating cholesterol does raise cholesterol. The only place we get cholesterol is from animal products.

• 21:13Speaker 01

  And cholesterol definitely is associated with heart disease. Now, the problem is we've gotten a little bit more scientific nowadays, so that we don't just look at cholesterol per se. However, the largest study that's been done looking at cholesterol in America in a population was the Framingham Study. And Dr. Costelli himself said that possibly the problem we have is that we set what we call a normal cholesterol too high.

• 21:38Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 21:39Speaker 01

  And that a normal cholesterol should actually be lower. And he noted that under a total cholesterol of 150, they never, in all the years they studied Framingham, saw anybody with heart disease. He said, "If you keep your total cholesterol under 150, you're not going to get heart disease."

• 21:52Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 21:53Speaker 01

  We're more specific now. When I see someone with a high cholesterol, I want to know their LDL particle size, their ApoB protein. I mean, there's a, there's a specific type of cholesterol that's dangerous. And if you have that specific type of cholesterol, that needs to be addressed. Then you need to be on, you know, seriously low-fat.

• 22:11Rich Roll?

  And, and, and what is the impact of ingesting cholesterol, dietary cholesterol, on your cholesterol levels? Because isn't part of this idea or this argument that, that dietary cholesterol is not impactful on those cholesterol levels?

• 22:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's, and it's just silly. Without a doubt, if you eat cholesterol. But here's the problem. And it's a big problem with our nutrition in general. We get down into what's called reductionist food science. We try to take, you know, one part of a food away. It's like, nothing bothers me more than when I'm ordering a salad and the waiter says, "Would you like a protein with that salad?"

• 22:47Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 22:48Speaker 01

  Because I, and then I always-

• 22:49Rich Roll?

  That's your protein?

• 22:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I always have to pick on them. And, you know, don't, poor guy had to get me at the table. And, you know, then I'm always like, "Well, you know, what do you mean?" He's like, "Well, do you want chicken or steak?" And I'm like, "Well, there's more calories from fat than chicken. So are you really just asking me if I want some fat with my salad?"

• 23:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 23:05Speaker 01

  And the guy's like, "Uh, I, you know..."

• 23:07Rich Roll?

  We're going to get into a nutrition debate with the waiter.

• 23:10Speaker 01

  Right, exactly.

• 23:11Rich Roll?

  You know, but I think it's interesting that now I have noticed that they'll say, you know, "What would you like for your protein?" as opposed to, "What meat?" You know, like, that's a weird vernacular shift that didn't exist a couple of years ago.

• 23:22Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 23:23Rich Roll?

  My son got into a debate at Chipotle the other day when they, he was, they were going down the line and building the burrito. And the guy says, "What would you like for, for meat?" And Todd was like, I'm not gonna have meat. And, uh, and he's like, but I'll have, uh, I'll have this sofritis, which is the, basically their meat analog.

• 23:42Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 23:42Rich Roll?

  Tofu thing. And, uh, and he's like, well, that's meat. And Todd was like, no, that's not meat. And he's like, yeah, that's meat. And I'm like, come on, let's just keep moving. This is not gonna go anywhere.

• 23:51Speaker 01

  You're not gonna teach this guy right here. Yeah, but, but the point being, you know, that we're in this reductionist food science where we try to, we're trying to tease away parts of food that stick together. So there's no time that you're ever gonna just eat cholesterol. You know, the cholesterol is always gonna be tied with fat. You know, it's part of the fat. And so it's very hard to measure, the same with just, you know, I, for years, I tried to sift through studies looking at animal protein, but it's really hard to sift the fact that, you know, animal proteins got saturated fat connected to it and has cholesterol connected to it. So is it the cholesterol? Is it the saturated fat? Is it the animal protein? We can make some judgment as to what it is. But really, it's the whole package. And really, we should be talking about the whole package.

• 24:36Speaker 01

  I mean, the studies would be a lot easier if the study just looked at, you know, meat and stopped talking about saturated fat and cholesterol.

• 24:42Rich Roll?

  Right. Because if somebody says, well, I need that animal protein, well, that comes with a lot of other things.

• 24:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 24:47Rich Roll?

  That, that don't get looked at. And it's tricky because, you know, the reductionist approach is inherently flawed in that regard, as you pointed out, but there really isn't a better way to look at it. So what else are you supposed to do? Otherwise, you'll get lost in a morass of, of data that's meaningless.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, you know, I, the, there's been a change in the actual science. And when I say actual science, everybody's online reading nonsense. Okay. They're not reading the actual journals. You know, when they debate with you, their reference is another person's blog, uh, which always makes me laugh. In fact, one guy was like, oh yeah, this art, he put up an article that was actually against what he was saying, but people don't know how to read the science. Okay. So when, when you actually read the science, there's been a move now in a lot of these big epidemiologic studies to not try to tease away saturated fat or, or any of that stuff. And just look at what are the quintiles of meat consumption? In other words, there's the lowest quintile, the second quintile, third quintile, fourth, fifth. And let's compare them together and see if we see a change.

• 25:46Rich Roll?

  And so in the study, like, what are the studies that that you look at and and find most, you know, objective and informative and instructional with respect to how you devise your treatment protocols for your patients?

• 26:02Speaker 01

  Sure. And someone asked me this once before, a paleo guy, and he said, because I was complaining about, and there's so much of this, the involvement of industry and science, because the industry, they know, just like with tobacco, if they could put a seed of doubt in someone's mind, they can make them say, well, I don't know if meat's good, I don't know if it's bad, so I'm gonna eat it.

• 26:23Rich Roll?

  Right. And that's what confusion plays into their hands.

• 26:25Speaker 01

  Confusion is exactly what they want. And so they love this confusion going on. And so I don't like these bias in a lot of the articles. So if I read an article and I see that there's bias in it, that immediately doesn't discredit the article, but, you know, raises eyebrows. And a lot of times, it's not the data that they're doing that's bad, it's the interpretation that the people read. So I'll go through the data, you know, and look at the charts and stuff and say, well, you know, their conclusion is not exactly what I read. I'll give you an example of that later. But so someone said to me, well, they might have bias, but don't you have your own bias? I mean, aren't you vegan? And I had to think about that for a while, because, yeah, I am biased in that regard. I'm worried about the environment. I'm worried about the senseless slaughter of animals

• 27:08Speaker 01

  for no reason, or the way they're killed. But there's two sides to me, I really think, like, if we came, if an article came out and said, there's no benefit to a plant-based diet whatsoever, I would stop recommending that to patients. And I didn't recommend it until I got the science. And I would be vegan and say, look, don't kill animals, because it's mean to kill animals. That's, I started this without the vegans component of it. I started this based on on pure health. And as the more and more I've learned, I've really, really started looking at the health. And what really convinced me were several studies. So.

• 27:42Speaker 01

  The EPIC study I talked about is as unbiased as possible. I mean, this is really a conglomerate of the European Union. These are some of the top epidemiological scientists. If you read a paper, there's like 100 authors for each paper. They looked at their food questionnaires that they used. They made sure that they were culture-specific. They tested them to make sure that they were accurate. This is really good science. And the data is not absolutely clear with it. The data does not say, "Go vegan," but it definitely points towards the fact that animal protein is associated with weight gain, diabetes, heart disease, and longevity problems. And I like it because it's many different societies,

• 28:23Speaker 01

  and it's a long-term study, and there's just so many people, 500,000 people. It's huge.

• 28:28Rich Roll?

  When was that study conducted?

• 28:30Speaker 01

  It's still going on. It started in the early 2000s and is still going on. So they're building this gigantic database.

• 28:35Rich Roll?

  Is there like a good link online where people can see that, or at least find information about that?

• 28:42Speaker 01

  If you just look up EPIC, E-P-I-C, Epic Panacea, they've got their central website, which kind of explains it. There are so many articles on PubMed. They had an international consortium kind of going over all the data they've had so far last year, where they made strong reference to the fact that protein was associated with diabetes. And strong fact to the... strong reference to the fact that protein causes weight gain. Both were in there. But there's many different articles that go through there. One of the head authors of your PubMed searching is Vergnoud, V-E-R-G-N-A-U-D, and he's done some really good science.

• 29:27Speaker 01

  I don't know if it's him, it's his team, but yeah.

• 29:32Speaker 01

  And you know, there's, they have a certain group of epic, so you could go into the epic data and they've looked specifically at epic Oxford because Oxford's kind of interesting because there they have healthy meat eaters. So they don't eat meat nearly as much as the rest of the country. And they live a healthy lifestyle. And they wanted to compare them to vegans to see if there's benefit now. Again, I told you those vegans were not healthy vegans.

• 29:54Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's, it's, there's this idea that a vegan is a vegan.

• 29:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 29:57Rich Roll?

  You know what I mean? That's a whole, you know, spectrum of ways of eating.

• 30:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. Like I told you, I was telling you, I went to a vegan junk food restaurant because when you're in LA, you do those things.

• 30:08Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 30:09Speaker 01

  And I had a bacon cheeseburger. Oh my God. It tastes just like what I remember bacon cheeseburgers taste like, but felt so sick afterwards. And that's definitely not healthy. So if you're eating that, you're not a healthy vegan.

• 30:20Rich Roll?

  Yeah, there's so many, I mean, now you can get so much vegan junk food.

• 30:25Speaker 01

  So much vegan junk.

• 30:26Rich Roll?

  Which is like great and terrible at the same time.

• 30:28Speaker 01

  Exactly. But still, when they look at the epic Oxford, the vegans tend to do better than the meat eaters. The one spot they didn't was colon cancer, which is bizarre because vegans always do better in colon cancer, but it may just be that these vegans were not eating much fiber. Probably a lot of processed food.

• 30:49Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 30:49Speaker 01

  Other studies I love, the Harvard studies are really good. They're following the, with the Harvard studies, they followed nurses for many years now, I think 20, 30 years, the nurses health study, and they've done the same with health professionals, men that were doctors, health professionals. And they've followed them for many years and they've looked at diet patterns. The only problem with that study is there's not, there's hard to find a difference if everyone's eating the same thing. In other words, if you've got a group that's eating meat three times a day and another group that's eating meat two times a day, can you really make a correlation?

• 31:25Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 31:25Speaker 01

  Or really make a judgment pattern? That's, that's a little bit of a problem with theirs, but it's pretty good. My favorite studies are the Adventist Health Study. Because I said, you can't do a long-term study where you make someone vegan and you make someone a meat eater. But that's happening in Loma Linda, California.

• 31:40Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  Because the Seventh Day Adventists believe that the body is the temple of the soul and it should be treated as such. So the whole group is healthy. They have very similar exercise patterns. They live in the same environment, exposed to the same toxins. But some of them are vegan, some will do milk and dairy. Some will eat fish and some will eat meat. And they've got low meat eaters and high meat eaters. So they've got this already partitioned off group of people that have a different level of consumption of these meats. And their data is very, very convincing. And that's probably my favorite studies of the Menace Health two studies.

• 32:15Rich Roll?

  And that, and that data suggests what?

• 32:17Speaker 01

  It definitely suggests that a plant-based diet is better for you. I mean, they have got very strong data showing a plant-based diet prevents diabetes, very strong data that it prevents heart disease, very strong data that it prevents cancer. Fish does well in that group, but in the other ones, not as much. And then just length of life, the vegans live like, live longer than the other groups.

• 32:43Rich Roll?

  Yeah, there's that, that cardiologist, Dr. Ellsworth.

• 32:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I saw him the other day.

• 32:48Rich Roll?

  Oh, you did?

• 32:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 32:49Rich Roll?

  He's 95 or something?

• 32:51Speaker 01

  I think he's 100, isn't he?

• 32:52Rich Roll?

  Oh, is he 100 now?

• 32:53Speaker 01

  The surgeon?

• 32:54Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah. But he practiced until just recently.

• 32:57Speaker 01

  That's right. He practiced until he was 95.

• 32:59Rich Roll?

  Right, exactly. That guy's amazing. I gotta get that guy on the podcast.

• 33:02Speaker 01

  Oh, you gotta get him on. He just seems like such a nice guy, sweet guy.

• 33:05Rich Roll?

  Yeah, amazing. All right, so, you know, that's all interesting, you know, and I'm, I'm just thinking, you know, how does that, like, how does it, how does it happen that you see these studies, you understand them, you're convinced, and yet, at the same time, you know, right now, we're all being told that, you know, we need to eat more protein. We're in this massive, you know, protein push.

• 33:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 33:32Rich Roll?

  Uh, plant protein is, is, is, uh, not as superior to the human condition and health as animal protein.

• 33:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, look at you and me wasting away without our protein.

• 33:44Rich Roll?

  And, and that saturated fat is not a problem. Meanwhile, is it the USDA that is suggesting that we shouldn't worry about cholesterol anymore?

• 33:54Speaker 01

  I think that the USDA is kind of like, look, we're gonna tell you to eat less meat. We're gonna tell you to eat less fat. And that'll take care of their cholesterol, but in order, you know, the lobbyists are on them all the time.

• 34:06Rich Roll?

  Oh, yeah.

• 34:07Speaker 01

  So I think this is a little flag, hey, we'll give you back your cholesterol because they're not gonna be able to eat it anyway because they're not supposed to be eating meat.

• 34:13Rich Roll?

  Well, the politics behind that are pretty extraordinary. I mean, for the listener right now, the USDA is it every four years has to come up with their dietary guidelines and they impanel like a group of advisors to help suggest how they might make changes to, you know, that nutrition sort of pyramid or plate or whatever it is these days. And for the first time ever, they're suggesting eating less meat for health reasons, but also for sustainability reasons. And this has caused quite the stir amongst the meat and dairy lobby people who are up in arms that sustainability or environmental concerns should even play a part at all in dietary recommendations. And so there's all these congressmen and senators who have constituencies in, you

• 34:58Rich Roll?

  know, the heartland of America who are petitioning the USDA that they've overstepped their boundaries and that this is, you know, this is not their job.

• 35:07Speaker 01

  Right. I mean, we asked the question, how are we also confused because of the industry? I mean, it's not a conspiracy theory, it's a fact. I mean, they're everywhere. They're, you could go back to the seventies when they had the Senate Select Commission, the McGovern Commission that got together to find out why we are getting more and more heart disease. And they did huge rounds of research and came up with the idea that we need to eat less meat. And that was completely, the meat industry jumped on it, got McGovern voted out, got the committee disbanded. It was all, you could watch it in place, you could watch it happening. And it still happens now.

• 35:46Speaker 01

  But the other problem is the medical profession in general because the medical profession is not designed to treat a whole person. For, you know, the GI doctor treats the stomach, the heart doctor treats the heart. And when we were in residency and there was a patient, we didn't even call them by their name. It was like, you know, the colon cancer in room two. And, you know, I'd go in to examine the patient, you know, and would dive right for their stomach, you know? I'm not asking them how they're feeling, what are they eating? We do these like complex history and physicals and yet I never ask them what they eat, you know? I got, you know, all this obscure stuff, but I don't ask them probably the most important question, what are you eating?

• 36:29Speaker 01

  And so it's very hard for a doctor, we don't learn any nutrition, I mean, any nutrition in medical school, so it's very hard for a doctor to even think about nutrition. And I've talked to doctors about this many times. Number one, they're reading journals that have to do with their specialty. They're not reading the nutrition journals. Number two, even if they thought, like, I gave a talk to this endocrine society, and I've got so much data showing the correlation between meat and diabetes, it's crazy, it's very hard to argue with. And so the endocrinologists were like, okay, that's probably true, but listen, my patients aren't going to change.

• 37:09Rich Roll?

  They're not going to do it.

• 37:10Speaker 01

  They're not going to do it. So why do I even worry about that? Instead, I'm just going to give them a medicine.

• 37:14Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 37:15Speaker 01

  In addition-

• 37:16Rich Roll?

  That's a terrible mindset.

• 37:18Speaker 01

  It's a terrible mindset, but that's what they're built with. And you know what? It's easy to sit and say, that's a terrible mindset. It's much harder when you're sitting across from a patient, and you've got 20 minutes with a patient, and you've got to tell them to change their whole lifestyle and how they eat. It's not so easy, and patients don't do it. I mean, I experience this all the time. Now, I'm in a little bit of an advantage, because I've got this big office with dieticians and psychologists, and I spend more time with them. But for an endocrinologist to sit there and like, let me tell you about plant-based diet, very difficult, not impossible, but very difficult. The other thing is that as a doctor, you know, I hear people say, oh, doctors just want to keep you sick. That's not the reason. It's not like doctors are in this conspiracy to keep people sick. That's really nonsense.

• 38:01Rich Roll?

  But the system is set up to diagnose and prescribe, and-

• 38:06Speaker 01

  That's exactly it.

• 38:07Rich Roll?

  There is an economy around that, that in order for it to sustain itself, and for everybody to, you know, profit off of it, it has to work a certain way.

• 38:16Speaker 01

  Right, but the doctor's not thinking, I need to write this script because I need to profit off it. The doctor's thinking, my job is to write a script. Like, a patient comes in, there's a problem, I've got to do something about it. You know how they say men always have to fix something? Well, doctors always have to fix something, too. It's this notion that it's broken, I've got to do something to fix it, so I'm going to throw this, and they'll put medicines on there that will give a temporary fix, but you know aren't going to have a long-term fix. Now, on the flip side, the scientists- They really do miss the forest for the trees, so to speak. So they, they just don't have any clinical realm to understand how their data fits in. So I was at a scientific meeting and this lady was giving this excellent review of her research that showed that heme

• 38:59Speaker 01

  iron, which is the iron that's in animal protein, is very damaging to the islet cells of the pancreas that secrete insulin. Hmm. And the data was very convincing. And at the end, you know, there's question sessions and someone got up and they asked her and they said, "Okay, well, with all you've learned, what kind of diet do you follow?" And she was kind of taken aback. She goes, "Oh, well, I do a high protein, low carb diet." [laughing] And I mean, I, I almost wanted to fall out of the chair. I'm like, "You just told us that heme iron is bad for your pancreas. She's overweight." She also talked about heme iron and its oxidative problems and how it could make you overweight and things like that. And then you say that you eat a high protein diet, which is a high heme diet. She might as well have said, "I just, I eat exactly the opposite of my clinical

• 39:44Speaker 01

  findings."

• 39:45Rich Roll?

  Right. And, and for the listener, the pro, the iron that's found in plants is non-heme. It's a different type of iron. And that's also often pointed towards as a reason to not adopt a plant-based diet, particularly if you're an athlete, that the non-heme variety of iron is, is sort of insufficient, I suppose, in terms of carrying oxygen to your blood or whatever it is that it's supposed to do. It doesn't do it as well as the heme variety.

• 40:13Speaker 01

  Which is unfounded and not true. There's so many things that are said that are just like so completely untrue. I just wonder where it starts. I think what happens is some blogger just says it and then, you know, they tell two people and they tell two people and then all of a sudden, there, it is true that vegans tend to be, have a little bit lower iron, but not anemic. They don't have any higher incidence of anemic.

• 40:35Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I heard that the incidence of anemia is pretty much uniform across vegan and meat eaters.

• 40:42Speaker 01

  Very uniform.

• 40:43Rich Roll?

  Which is surprising because I think that is one of the ideas, that if you're going to be vegan, you've got to watch out for your iron and you might become anemic.

• 40:49Speaker 01

  I mean, I have so many meat-eating anemic patients, it's unbelievable.

• 40:53Rich Roll?

  How can you become anemic if you're eating a high-protein, animal-based diet?

• 40:57Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, there's many different reasons. You could develop gastritis, you could have diverticulitis, you can have pernicious anemia, where your stomach has a problem producing factors that help you absorb different vitamins that help you make blood cells, many different ways. The funny thing to me, though, is that if someone's on a vegan diet, that is the answer to any problem that they have when they see another doctor. You know, patients will come to me, they'll be like, "My doctor says, you know, I'm anemic, so I need to go off my vegan diet." I'm like, "What does he tell his meat eaters that are anemic?" Or they'll say, "I'm hypothyroid, my doctor says it's because of my vegan diet." I'm like, "What about the millions of hypothyroid meat eaters?"

• 41:39Rich Roll?

  It's because it's a mystery, I think, to most doctors, and it's an easy thing to point out that distinguishes you from the typical patient that they're going to see, right?

• 41:49Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 41:50Rich Roll?

  And because they don't fully understand it, you can just identify it as it must be the culprit.

• 41:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I find a lot of doctors find it offensive somehow, like, they feel like, "I'm going to tell you what's right for you, you know, I didn't tell you to go on the vegan diet, so it's got to be wrong for you." They almost don't want to be proved wrong, you know?

• 42:07Rich Roll?

  That's interesting. Well, it's so bizarre, because when you look at a whole-food, plant-based diet, I mean, unless I'm missing something, it pretty much seems to be the ultimate way to prevent and reverse chronic lifestyle disease, no matter what form or shape that may take. And so, to the extent that it could be identified as the problem that's leading towards your malady, it just seems ironic.

• 42:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, and sometimes this is crazy to me. I mean, I gave a talk recently to a bunch of bariatric doctors. I mean, these are doctors that are dealing with people with weight issues. And what we're feeling, what we're finding out now with in weight loss surgeries, people start to regain the weight after a while. And so they're in this conference talking about people that are regaining weight and they're talking about what other surgery can we do for their regain of weight? And no one is mentioning food at all. So I was one of the speakers and I got up there and I said, how many of you have heard of the EPIC study? And this is the biggest study ever on food and nutrition. Not a single person raised their hand. How many of you-

• 43:05Rich Roll?

  Bariatric surgeons?

• 43:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. How many of you have studied the Nurses' Health Study? Zero hands. Anybody know about the Adventist Health Study? Zero hands. So there's just so uneducated about this stuff. And the thing that kills me is there's-

• 43:19Rich Roll?

  But it's not because they're lazy. It's not even their fault. Like, they're just busy living their lives and trying to do what they do.

• 43:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, bariatric surgery, you know, the act of cutting the stomach, making it smaller, bypassing it, it works. They get their results, so they think that's all they need. In the surgeon world, a chance to cut is a chance to cure. And that's all that's going through their mind. That's, but that's a display of the problem. You know, for the heart doctor, it's a chance to give someone lipitors, a chance to save a life, a chance to-

• 43:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but these are, these are, these are addressing symptoms.

• 43:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 43:52Rich Roll?

  Not the underlying cause that's leading that patient to get to that place.

• 43:56Speaker 01

  Because that's what medical school does. It teaches you to treat symptoms. It doesn't treat you to teach a larger cause. It doesn't teach food as medicine. And that's one of the central things that we have to deal with. It's really one of the biggest problems. And it kills me because, look, you get someone like Dean Orner. You put it all together, right? You have to, you can't, there's no one study that puts it all together. But like, Dean did some really interesting stuff recently. So there was a lot of epidemiologic data that shows that meat consumption correlates with prostate cancer. If you look at parts of the world where they don't have a lot of prostate cancer, they don't eat a lot of meat. Now, some people said, well, that might be because they're just not testing.

• 44:41Speaker 01

  They're not testing for prostate cancer. Okay, that's possible, but they looked specifically at Japan where they did a very strong testing protocol, where they had very low rates of prostate cancer. And then they looked at migration studies where Japanese men moved to America, boom, they're getting prostate cancer. So there's not gonna be any genetic protection. So Dean took a group of people that had a high PSA, diagnosed prostate cancer, but had refused therapy. They didn't want any therapy. And so he put one group into his lifestyle medicine, which is meditation, exercise, and a vegan diet. I wish he would just, I wish he would separate that up a bit.

• 45:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah, because I think that's a, it opens him up to criticism. People say, well, he gets people to quit smoking, and he gets them to start exercising. And so how can you really say what it is that's impacting that?

• 45:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, I believe a lot in meditation, but I don't think meditation stopped the prostate cancer cells here. That's as much as I'll say. The other group just did a conventional stuff. They did, as I remember, I go through so many studies, but as I remember, there was not a lot of smokers, and I think the smoking groups were pretty equal. And then he followed them for six months. So at six months, the group on the plant-based diet had a dramatic drop in their PSA, whereas the group not on the plant-based diet had an actual increase in their PSA, and more of them had to go towards conventional therapy. But then he took that one step further. He took the serum, their blood serum, he took prostate cancer cells and put them in a dish, dripped the blood serum of the plant-based eater versus just the regular person. And the plant-based eaters, their serum was eight

• 46:12Speaker 01

  times more effective at killing pancreas cell, at killing prostate cancer cells. So there's something in the serum. Then he took it a step further. He took their hormone, their, not their hormones, their chromosomes. And he worked with a Nobel Prize winner who had studied what's called telomeres. Telomeres are like the caps on chromosomes. Think of them as like the cap of a, on the end of your shoelace to prevent the shoelace from unraveling. And it has been shown that the longer the telomere, the less likely you are to get genetic damage. And in fact, they found that the plant-based eating group had a longer telomere. They lengthened their telomere over time.

• 46:49Rich Roll?

  That's amazing. I think telomere research is the next thing. You know how like it's all about like the gut biome right now? I think it's telomere, because the, it's when you start looking into that, it's pretty fascinating, the link between, you know, sort of extending telomere length and, and cell life longevity and aging. It's quite fascinating.

• 47:11Speaker 01

  It's amazing. So why wasn't the nightly news like groundbreaking study coming out, you know, of University of California, San Francisco? It just kind of comes out and goes away.

• 47:22Rich Roll?

  Why do you think that is?

• 47:24Speaker 01

  I think it goes back to this, you know, we're telling people they need to change their lifestyle. People don't want to change their lifestyle and the industry is providing them all kinds of reasons to believe that whatever the study is, it is just a side, you know, study that really isn't anything to be worried about.

• 47:44Rich Roll?

  Well, it's a lot easier to get people to pay attention to something that affirms that there is good news about your bad habits.

• 47:52Speaker 01

  Of course. You know, there's a big, a big study of butter and saying butter is good for you and everybody's so excited, which is so bizarre because we're the most unhealthy country in the world, right? We have the highest obesity, highest diabetes, highest cancer, one of the lowest longevity rates, and yet we try, we eat more protein than any other country in the world, and yet we want to eat more protein. And I keep asking my patients, how's it working for you? You know, oh, I've been on this protein diet, I've been on that protein diet. And I'm like, well, you gotta stop eating that much protein. Like, what do you mean? I gotta eat protein. How's it working for you? It's not working, it's not working for the country. Why aren't we looking at the countries that are the healthiest and what they're doing? And there was a great project done in North

• 48:36Speaker 01

  Carillion where they really did an excellent job in cardiac morbidity and mortality by getting people to stop eating butter. That was their big project, is getting people to stop eating butter. And here we are saying butter is good for you. It's just, it blows my mind.

• 48:52Rich Roll?

  Well, you look at the statistics and how unhealthy we are, and then you compare that to our obsession with health, because there's no other country that's also as obsessed with weight loss and health as we are. And then when you study these cultures that have, you know, the longest incidence of longevity and are the most disease-free, and they don't, I don't think they really think about health and dieting and, you know, they're not going to the gym.

• 49:17Speaker 01

  Right. They're not taking supplements.

• 49:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah, so it's, it's this weird mashup of, of being unhealthy and yet being obsessed with health at the same time, but pursuing a track that is not solving the problem.

• 49:31Speaker 01

  Right, right. And sometimes I just feel like I'm in the twilight zone with it. It's like people, just think about it. It's just so obvious, but um...

• 49:39Rich Roll?

  So, on that note, like a couple things. I mean, the first thing is, I'm sure that... People come up to you all the time and say, you know, when you start, when you start spouting your Garth Davis plant-based diatribe, you know, they go, well, listen, Garth, don't you know that the China study was debunked? Everybody knows that it was debunked. I mean, what is your response to that?

• 49:57Speaker 01

  You know, I never mentioned the China study anywhere in any of my talks. It's kind of older data, and Colin did a lot of study on rats, and I'm not a big fan of rat studies. So it's just, you know, I don't, I don't, Colin has certainly not been debunked by anybody. I mean, the big thing was that Denise Minger debunked him, and she put up a rant where she took some of his raw data and did what we talked about earlier, did a univariate analysis, said, look at this group, they're eating more wheat, and they have more heart disease. And, but what she didn't do is look at the fact that they were also eating more meat. I mean, it's, she didn't, she didn't do a good scientific study. Now, interestingly-

• 50:38Rich Roll?

  So she's sort of guilty of what she was accusing him of doing?

• 50:42Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, absolutely. And that, that happens all the time. A lot of these paleo people and, and high protein people and everything like that, they, they will criticize any study unless it's their study. Like, you know, epidemiology is terrible, but if you come out with an epidemiology study that says meat is good, all of a sudden, that's the greatest study that ever lived. So, yeah, we see that a lot from them. Now, interesting, Denise has come out recently saying, you know what, vegan diet might actually be the right diet. What she's come down to is now that there's two extremes that seem to work, either an extreme high-fat, high-protein, low-carb diet, or an extreme vegan diet, and everything in the middle is, is wrong.

• 51:26Rich Roll?

  Well, what about that? What about, let's talk about the extreme, you know, high-fat, high-protein, low-carb diet. Because that is, you know, that is, you know, that is in vogue right now.

• 51:38Speaker 01

  It's in vogue. A lot of the studies were coming out from a guy named Noakes, who was studying this in athletes. The idea was, if I could get an athlete on a bike for a long distance, not needing any food during that time, just using fat-

• 51:52Rich Roll?

  Fat-adapted.

• 51:53Speaker 01

  Fat-adapted, that that would, that would- Be a superior situation. Fact of the matter is NOX was successful. You can do that. You can fat adapt and then you can go on a long bike ride using your fat. Does that correlate to more weight loss than any of the other diets? No. Does it correlate to better times for the athlete? Nope.

• 52:16Speaker 01

  And so it really didn't amount to anything than to say, yes, you can fat adapt, but is fat adapt better? Not necessarily. Now, the problem has come where you've taken data on well-trained athletes and tried to apply it to the population as a whole. And the problem comes several ways. So people hear, "I lost weight on a high protein diet." Now, the reason people lose weight on a high protein diet is they go into ketosis. What happens is they basically deplete their body of glycogen. Glycogen is the storage of carbs in the muscles. The muscles are stored with water, so you definitely lose water.

• 52:56Speaker 01

  And the ketones that are formed make you diuresis more, so you pee off some water and so you lose weight. But every study done on these high protein diets is that you will lose weight for a while, then you'll slowly start to gain it back. What happens is people then think, okay, on this extreme diet, people lost weight with protein, so it must be that protein, if I eat it, even not in an extreme situation, it's going to make me lose weight. And that's nonsense. I can't tell you, there are so many studies, I got tired reading it, that if you take a person and you put them on an 1,800 calorie diet, it doesn't matter how much protein. They've done studies where they've done really high protein and low protein and middle protein. It doesn't matter. The macronutrient combination does not affect the weight loss, so long as you're eating 1,800.

• 53:41Speaker 01

  There was a professor out of Kentucky who ate nothing but Twinkies and Oreos and junk food, but he kept his calories under 1,800. He lost weight. He lost, his LDL cholesterol went down, even though he's eating Twinkies. And the funny thing is, as soon as he started eating meat, it all came back on. Interesting. Because he didn't eat any meat during that time. He was just eating, he ate one salad today and then junk food the rest of the time. So macronutrient combinations, everyone's counting macros. That's the big thing now, counting macros. It makes no difference in weight loss. The calorie count does. Now, here's the thing. The calorie count is so important, but people do a terrible job counting calories because they just totally mess up how many calories are in fat.

• 54:22Speaker 01

  I mean, they oil up their pan, you know, Pam cooking spray, it says low fat cooking.

• 54:27Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 54:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:28Rich Roll?

  Well, it says like zero grams of fat on the front because you'd have to have a microgram.

• 54:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:33Rich Roll?

  For that serving size.

• 54:35Speaker 01

  One fourth a second of a spray. But people are just spraying it all in there and you go out to eat and you get a calorie count on the food that you're eating, but that doesn't count the grease that's on the... So I find people do a really bad job, um, calorie counting. But, but here's the thing, when you eat meat, let's go away from the weight loss, because that's all anybody seems to care about, weight loss and muscles. No one seems to really care about the heart disease until they have it. But every time you eat meat, a few things happen. You put acid into your body because meat is heavy in amino acids, uh, and those acids that have sulfa definitely increase the acid content in the body. Now, your body has to buffer that acid and in buffering the acid, that's where you get a lot of problems. So it steals a lot of calcium from muscles.

• 55:18Speaker 01

  So I think a lot of the problems that with the, with the bodybuilding population is I think they're asking the wrong question. They're looking at how much protein do I need to eat to gain muscle? Instead, they should be asking, what do I need to eat to maintain muscle? The second thing you're doing is you're eating heterocyclic amines, which are known carcinogens, but every time you cook a steak, that burned muscle turns into a chemical that can, uh, cause cancer. Uh, you're, uh, developing N-nitrosa compounds, another carcinogen. You are, uh, getting advanced glycolated end products. I mean, I could go on and on. The list goes on and on of all these terrible toxins and stuff that you're putting into your body every time you eat a steak.

• 56:00Speaker 01

  And we have all this data that, you know, long-term, it's not good for you. So I just don't understand, you know, why, if it's not going to help you lose weight and if it's not going to help you live longer, why people are doing it? And the answer is the industry is out there. I mean, they'll sell you those protein shakes, they sell those protein shakes. I have protein shakes in my office. Simply, I tell my patients not to drink them, except we need them around the time of surgery.

• 56:23Speaker 01

  They sell that protein shake to lose weight. It's the exact same product that's being sold for other people to gain weight.

• 56:29Rich Roll?

  Bodybuilders to gain weight.

• 56:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:30Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 56:31Speaker 01

  It's the exact same product.

• 56:32Rich Roll?

  Interesting. Uh, well, isn't there on the slow carb diet, I think it's the idea is that you're supposed to start your day with a, you know, 25 grams of protein in a shake and that somehow this has sets you up for, you know, I don't know, better metabolism throughout the day that will lead to weight loss.

• 56:49Speaker 01

  Right. And there are some data that that do show some good satiety, but the, the problem with the data is they're never, they're always comparing shake to shake. So they're taking a shake and they're varying the carbohydrate and the protein and then testing it and see who's hunger later, hungrier later. The plant-based diet wins because of fiber. That's what is the satiating factor. And so I, I don't really care if a low-fat, high-carb shake makes you hungrier if it doesn't have fiber in it, because that's not what I'm eating and not what I'm telling my patients to eat. They did a really good study where they had people sit down and eat different meals and then check how hungry they were the next meal and the meal after. And the most satiating food you could possibly eat was a potato.

• 57:30Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm. Interesting. Yeah. So I think in one of your, I think it was in your talk that I saw recently, you said something like, uh, you know, only 3% of the population is protein deficient and but...

• 57:44Speaker 01

  No, I would say less than that.

• 57:45Rich Roll?

  But like, but like 97% of the population is fiber deficient. And what we should be talking about is fiber and not protein.

• 57:52Speaker 01

  Right. Right. When you look at, they came out the new N Haines data and what do we actually eat in this country? No one's protein deficient. You gotta understand the RDA.

• 58:00Rich Roll?

  Well, protein deficiency would be starvation.

• 58:03Speaker 01

  It would be starvation.

• 58:04Rich Roll?

  Like corn sugars.

• 58:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. You'd have to, you would have to not be eating, you'd have to be eating less than a thousand calories to probably get it. Um, and so we just don't see that. Um, so the RDA, when they set up their recommendation for protein requirements, they based it on some nitrogen balance studies and all this kind of stuff. And they came up with a figure, like for men, 56 grams and for women, 44 grams or 42 grams. And that figure is actually an optimal amount. It's not a minimal amount. I think people think that's the lowest amount that I should get. It's actually the optimal amount. Based on those studies, probably you would do fine with 30 grams of protein, but they just wanted to make sure that everybody was covered. Now, we eat seventy to a hundred, sometimes a hundred and thirty grams of protein a day.

• 58:49Speaker 01

  So, we're way over the optimal amount. We're way in excess. And all these studies where they've gone and interviewed people, the one thing everyone's looking for is even more protein. It's crazy. Yet, we eat unbelievably low amounts of fiber. And there are not a lot of good studies that show that there's long-term health in eating a lot of protein. There's tons of good studies, tons and tons, showing eating a lot of fiber is good for you long-term. And we are unbeliev-- we're in a mass deficit of fiber, and yet, no one's talking about that.

• 59:18Rich Roll?

  Well, don't you know that we shouldn't be eating fruit? That this is terrible?

• 59:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that really makes me want to jump off.

• 59:25Rich Roll?

  A sugar is a sugar.

• 59:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, a sugar is a sugar. It's ridiculous. A sugar, a sugar is not true if a sugar is combined with fiber. That fiber makes sugar into a slow-release pill. What people don't understand, it is almost impossible, and this is true of sugar too, it's almost impossible for a sugar, for a carb, to be turned to fat. It's called de novo lipogenesis. And your body will not turn sugar or carbs to fat until you have completely saturated all of the glycogen in your body, which is about one thousand five hundred grams of glycogen. And then, if you, once you've saturated glycogen, it'll still give you some leeway where you eat more carbs, it's gonna try to burn them more. It actually ups the metabolism to try to burn them. People say that protein ups the metabolism.

• 1:00:11Speaker 01

  Carbs don't at the regular intake, but if you overeat carbs, it actually ups your metabolism to try to burn them. And so, it's very difficult to turn carbs to fat. Now, simple sugars will make you hungry, because it'll make your blood sugar rise and then drop, and then you're gonna want more sugar, and you'll get these sweets cravings, et cetera, et cetera. So, I definitely don't tell people to eat sugar, but for the love of God, eat fruit. It's just, it's made that we are fruit eaters. Everything about our body, about our anatomy. You look at comparative science. Yeah, I was watching Naked and Afraid. You ever watch Naked and Afraid? There's this great show where they drop people off naked in the middle of the wilderness, and they almost die, and then they pick them up twenty-one days later. But I'm watching them, and there's this one scene where this lady's like, she's just dying.

• 1:00:54Speaker 01

  And she's, the whole, every show, they're talking about how they need to get protein. Like, we need to get some protein. I need to get protein now, I'm gonna die. And yeah, they do need to probably get some protein, because they're eating zero calories. But in this one scene, this monkey's kind of just sitting down, eating a branch, eating some leaves, looking at them, just like, "You idiots." And I'm thinking to myself, "Eat what the monkey's eating," because we are made to eat what the monkey's eating. I would follow that monkey around and eat that monkey's food. But don't volunteer me, I don't want to do that show. But the point being, we are perfectly created to eat fruit. We could live long, healthy lives just eating fruit. You and I both know fruititarians who eat the majority of their calories from fruit, and they're unbelievably healthy people.

• 1:01:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah, interesting. I mean, as a marathoner and an Ironman athlete yourself, is there any argument to be made that when you're training really hard, if you want to get as strong as possible, if you want to build lean muscle mass, et cetera, that you should eat protein in excess of your RDA?

• 1:01:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a tough question. And in my book, I kind of go into this a bit. It's so much harder to study this than it is the other stuff. And there's good data, but then every time I see a good paper, it's always industry-sponsored. And I've talked with the scientists, they're like, "Look, we couldn't get anything done if the industry doesn't sponsor this, it doesn't mean that it's good science." If you're just an average person, no. And everyone thinks they're more than an average person, but no one's doing the workouts that we know it takes to be in that above-average field. So for them, absolutely not. Now, for real athletes, there has been some increased...

• 1:02:36Speaker 01

  They look at muscle protein synthesis, and there is some increased muscle protein synthesis with about 20 grams of protein after a workout. The studies are hard to look at because there's many confounding factors. They have people... They're fasted when they do their workout, so they're already going on the deficient, then they get the protein. So there's other studies that argue, you know, it doesn't matter when you eat the protein, as long as you have protein all day long. I I would say probably a modest increase in protein would be fine, but plant-based protein is fine. I personally never count, ever never count. I never think to myself, I need to get protein. I'll make a post-workout shake where I will throw in some hemp seeds and I'll get

• 1:03:19Speaker 01

  some protein there. I eat nuts during the day, I'll get protein there, I eat a lot of beans. And I'm only getting stronger and faster. I mean, every year I just seem to be growing. So for me, I I it doesn't seem to be affect. In the, you know, vegan bodybuilding world, I've interviewed a bunch of people. A lot of them say they don't do extra protein. They do the same thing I do. You know, at the end of a workout, they'll go and eat a meal with beans in it, which to me is the healthy thing to do. But I I don't know, I can't vouch for the truth, you know, and I don't know if they're doing steroids or anything like that. They look great.

• 1:03:51Rich Roll?

  Yeah, interesting. I mean, is there an argument to be made that uh that the protein from animal flesh is qualitatively different from the protein from plants? In other words, is an amino acid an amino acid irrespective of where it comes from? Or is the matrix in which it which it's delivered to your body, does that make a difference in terms of how you metabolize it, the bioavailability and all of that?

• 1:04:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, um, you bring up a good point, but um, the studies that have shown that bioavailability of plant-based proteins is excellent. The problem is more like the the actual amino acid array in each protein. So meat-based proteins are a little bit, I hate the term complete because that makes people think that they're better, but they've got higher of certain proteins. Like, for instance, plant-based proteins are much higher in glutamic acid. Now, glutamic acid is fantastic for lowering blood pressure, which might be part of the reason plants are so good with lowering pressure. Meat-based proteins are higher in branched-chain amino acids. Now, if you're a bodybuilder, this is good for

• 1:04:57Speaker 01

  several reasons. It increases IGF-1. IGF-1 is a growth hormone. So it's a growth hormone, you're going to grow your muscles. Number two,

• 1:05:08Speaker 01

  There are definitely, uh, things like leucine definitely stimulate muscle protein synthesis. And so if you're a bodybuilder, you want to stimulate muscle protein synthesis. But here's the catch. We know from aging studies and from cancer studies that having a high IGF-1 and high leucine actually leads to premature aging and cellular death and cancer.

• 1:05:27Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:05:28Speaker 01

  So what I'm seeing from these bodybuilding protocols that may in fact make a bodybuilder have more muscle, may make them unhealthier in the long term. I mean, it's impossible to do a good study on it, but if you look at old bodybuilders, they all have a scar down the middle of their chest. They've all had heart surgery. Now, is it the high protein diets? Or is it the steroids? Uh, you know, I can't differentiate that and tell you that.

• 1:05:49Rich Roll?

  Right, but it's that argument of, uh, the difference between a performance oriented diet, like a short-term performance oriented diet versus long-term longevity, maximum wellness diet.

• 1:06:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, it's hard to say. I mean, look at, look at Scott Jurek, look at, um, um, Dave Scott when he was competing at his peak. I mean, these athletes were the top of their game and they were eating plant-based diets and not concentrating on protein. And I, I find a lot of these, there's more and more athletes coming out of the woodworks now that are following a plant-based diet and say that they feel better than ever now. Like I told you before, they obviously have less acid in their bodies, so they're not trying to buffer the acid with calcium from the muscle. And so maybe you do a study, they look at muscle protein synthesis and there's a slight advantage if you're getting more protein, but what we're not studying is what's muscle breakdown over the long term. And I think that's, you know, a lot of these, um, bodybuilders that you talk to that are vegan bodybuilders, every year they seem to be consistently big.

• 1:06:45Speaker 01

  They don't seem to go through these fluxes that other people go through. But this is a field that is wrought with, I, I could tell you very confidently about the cancer and the longevity. I, I can't tell you that confidently about building muscle and performance.

• 1:06:58Rich Roll?

  Well, I noticed on your Facebook page, you shared that picture of that dude who was like the butcher.

• 1:07:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:07:04Rich Roll?

  And the dude is-

• 1:07:04Speaker 01

  Fraser.

• 1:07:05Rich Roll?

  Absolutely ripped.

• 1:07:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, Fraser Baryley, yeah. He's, and he's a great guy because he has totally changed his whole life. Like this guy just like a light bulb went on. He used to be a butcher.

• 1:07:15Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:07:16Speaker 01

  Now, he gained his muscle back when he was a meat eater, but he's honed it now that he's a plant-based eater. Swears he doesn't do steroids. Everybody in my thing is steroids, steroids, steroids. Uh, I've never tested him, so I can't test. I would say absolutely he doesn't because he swears he doesn't, but after Lance Armstrong, I've given up swearing to other people. But my point on that picture was not-

• 1:07:36Speaker 01

  Steroids or how he looks or anything, was this his story of transformation, how great he feels now?

• 1:07:40Rich Roll?

  Interesting. Yeah, I want to get back to this idea of fat adaptation and ketosis and the like. And, you know, as an endurance athlete, becoming fat adapted, that's something that's very interesting. The more fat adapted I can become, the longer I can go without relying on nutrition, the more efficient I am in whether it's cycling, or swimming, or running, or what have you. And I've worked on my fat adaptation predominantly through training protocols that focus on, you know, enhancing my aerobic zone capacity by training.

• 1:08:15Speaker 01

  Fasted running.

• 1:08:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah, by training in that zone. And it's, my experience, and it's completely anecdotal, has been that I'm able to do that through how I train. It's less about, you know, it's less about the diet aspect of it than it is what does my training look like? So, you know, I'm sure that, you know, when you go out and you do those fasted workouts, that it has some impact on that. But if I do that, then I pay for it the next day or the day after. Like, I can't train every single day consistently if I'm depriving my body of nutrients when I go out to train. So when I'm looking at like the course of a season, you know, I'm focusing on that Z2 work, which really allows me to really enhance my ability that go all day speed, which is

• 1:09:00Rich Roll?

  really fat adaptation. But I'm just doing it through the training as opposed to trying to achieve that through what I'm putting in my mouth.

• 1:09:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, there's certainly data to say that if you're going at zone two, you are burning fat. If you do it in a fasted state, you're gonna, you know, start fat adapting. But the literature's been really weak on any kind of performance advantage to that. And so it may be, and it's certainly weak on, everyone's like, oh, I want to burn fat, thinking that they're gonna have a six-pack abs by doing that. That doesn't tend to turn out to be the case. There's multiple variables we gotta think about. And that is, what about the acid load you're taking in? And how does that affect your performance? So while you're burning your fat, you're also got a lot of acid in your body, and that might be detrimental. You're missing out on the phytonutrients and nutrients and things that you would typically

• 1:09:49Speaker 01

  be eating in a high carb diet, which may be affecting your performance. And the one thing that you will always hear from plant-based athletes, that I think you really mess up when you start trying to do fat adaptation, is recovery. It just seems that that high fruit, you know, smoothie you make after that workout really helps you recover for the next day's workout. And so I just, I, I, I see the science in the fat adaptation, but I don't see the benefit.

• 1:10:17Rich Roll?

  Interesting. I, I was on the Joe Rogan podcast recently and the question, the topic came up about ketosis. And I made, I don't know exactly what I said, but I said something like, you know, I'm just not, I'm not sure that it's really the healthiest thing to do for you long-term. Like, it's sort of a critical state. You know, it's sort of a, um, an emergency state.

• 1:10:39Speaker 01

  It's an emergency.

• 1:10:40Rich Roll?

  Of your body, right? And I didn't go really much further beyond that. And then I got beat up for not knowing what I was talking about and misunderstanding what ketosis is.

• 1:10:49Speaker 01

  Joe Rogan teach you?

• 1:10:50Rich Roll?

  No, he didn't. But sort of the comments and the feedback that kind of, that swirled around that as a result of that, like, you know, he was cool. We didn't, we didn't really get into some huge debate about it. So, you know, educate me about what ketosis is. Like, am I, was I mischaracterizing it? Or what is your understanding of what it means to be in ketosis? Because I feel like there's this movement whereby, uh, you know, ketosis has become this aspirational lifestyle for people, that they're, they're always trying to be in ketosis, that on some level, this, the argument is made that this is a natural state of man and, and we should be, you know, trying to be in this state and that we can and, and can be healthy doing this.

• 1:11:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, the, and that is with zero evidence whatsoever. I mean, all the ketosis studies are so short-term, they're ridiculous. I mean, really short-term. Secondly, it is, it is an emergency state for our bodies to live in. We don't want to be in ketosis. Our bodies thrive. I mean, if you look at the Kreb cycle, which is the cycle that generates energy, the input is glucose. That's the input. Now, there are other places where we can input in emergency situations and that's where the ketones come in from, but our primary... I've heard more fuel for our body comes from glucose and certainly from our brain. So our body can.

• 1:12:09Rich Roll?

  That's I need that point too. And was told that I didn't know what I was talking about.

• 1:12:13Speaker 01

  No, it's absolutely true. The brain actually can't live off our fat, but it can live off only glucose. Now, the ketones do cross the blood brain barrier. So it can get some food through the ketones. But when you're in serious ketosis, you're not a happy camper. The side effects are huge nausea, vomiting.

• 1:12:35Rich Roll?

  Bad breath.

• 1:12:37Speaker 01

  Bad, terrible breath and, and just constipation like crazy. And Atkins had to deal with all this with his patients. So he had all kinds of supplements and stuff to give them in these situations. Really bad uric acid stones. So gout would flare a lot. I see, I've had so many patients come to me with gout when they're on an Atkins diet. And kidney stones like crazy kidney stones. It's just not a natural way. Our bodies are not very good at handling acid and not like a carnivore. So a carnivore is perfectly created. You could put a lion on a ketogenic diet and they do fine. But, but they don't need the fiber. They got a short intestinal tract. They don't need vitamin C. They don't need

• 1:13:19Speaker 01

  any of these things. But a plant based eater, like we're designed to be like a fruitivore, like a monkey is meant to be eating fruits. And that's what our mouth, that's what our digestive tract, we have amylase in our saliva. You go on and on and on. We are made to be eating these foods that are primary to make us live a healthy life. The ketosis is an emergency situation. Should there be a famine or a freeze and we can't get our food. But when foods are plenty, we're eating fruit. That's what we're supposed to be doing.

• 1:13:49Rich Roll?

  When you look at the fruitarians, like whether it's somebody like fully raw Christina, who's a mutual friend of ours, or Michael Ornstein, or some of these people out there that, that, you know, I know these people. They're like vibrating health. They have like their skin looks amazing. They have positive energy. You know, they look you in the eye. They're very present. There's something about that lifestyle that seems to really agree with the people. That adapt it and they become so passionate about it. It's almost, you know, it's like they're just exuding enthusiasm for this lifestyle. But what is like, you know, I've never been a fruitarian. I've never gone that far down, you know, down the road that way.

• 1:14:31Rich Roll?

  I mean, what is your opinion on kind of the long term impacts of eating that way?

• 1:14:35Speaker 01

  There's

• 1:14:36Rich Roll?

  Do you suggest that for your patients?

• 1:14:38Speaker 01

  Or I don't suggest it. I don't suggest it because, you know, I don't suggest anything where I don't have good data to support it. My gut feeling is it's very healthy, but I just don't have data to support it. People say, well, where's the protein come from? There's amino acids in fruit. And the other thing you got to understand is our body recycles our amino acids very effectively. So we break down our protein into amino acids and then retake them up and reuse them again. So we have a built in amino acid store. And the ones that I've met are just, you know, top of the sports amino acid. They don't care about, they don't read, they're never taking

• 1:15:16Rich Roll?

  They don't do anything.

• 1:15:17Speaker 01

  They don't, they're just eating their bananas and doing great. And so I think there's something real to it. I don't know that I'm, you know, I need more science before I would give it to my patients. But I told Christina, I'm willing to give it a shot. So she's going to put me on her.

• 1:15:30Rich Roll?

  Oh, you're going to do it?

• 1:15:31Speaker 01

  I'm going to do her raw 21 day diet. And it's weird for me because I say I don't ever count protein or think about protein, but I ate a lot of beans. I love beans and beans and rice are like my go to meal. And I think someone who's really, I really, you know, all the gurus that have come out on plant based dieting. I think I've probably tended towards more towards McDougal in a starch based diet. I really feel like we are starch eaters and, and do very well on starch diets. And that's what I really get my patients to do.

• 1:15:59Speaker 01

  But I could see the benefit with the, with the raw food diet. I just, I'd like to prove it to myself and get them more, more studies before I did it with patients.

• 1:16:08Rich Roll?

  Interesting. So let's talk about the book, man. How close are you to being?

• 1:16:13Speaker 01

  It is done.

• 1:16:15Rich Roll?

  Oh, it's done.

• 1:16:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was a, I don't want to ever do it again.

• 1:16:19Rich Roll?

  It's a lot of work.

• 1:16:20Speaker 01

  Oh, my God. My, um,

• 1:16:21Rich Roll?

  I mean, you just lived in the research for

• 1:16:23Speaker 01

  I lived in the

• 1:16:24Rich Roll?

  Years you've been working on it?

• 1:16:25Speaker 01

  Three years.

• 1:16:26Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:16:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:27Rich Roll?

  Is it called, what's it called, a protein myth?

• 1:16:29Speaker 01

  It's called a proteinaholic, our obsession with protein, how it's killing us.

• 1:16:32Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:16:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, my general point, like, I don't want to get into reductionist scientist. I don't want to be a fear monger. Actually, I probably should be a fear monger because we're dying.

• 1:16:39Rich Roll?

  Sell more books.

• 1:16:40Speaker 01

  I want to be a fear monger because, you know, we're the most unhealthy people in the world and no one fears their double cheeseburger. But, um, but yeah, I mean, I started this, you know, years ago. I was talking with my editor, Harper One, Gideon Wile, and he's like, what is the central problem out there? And he was, he was great with me because I just had this general view of people are eating like crap. That's, you know, they're not eating enough fruit, vegetables, nuts, beans and seeds. He's like, that's too general. Why aren't they eating that? And it kind of gelled down. I was like, you know what? I just started getting this view of every patient that comes in my office. And I go over their diet. What diets have you done before? I've done Atkins, I've done South Beach, I've done Zone, currently on Atkins right now. So you believe in high protein diets? Yes, then why are you sitting in my office? You know?

• 1:17:26Speaker 01

  And so that's when he really got me thinking, man, maybe it's the protein, it's this idea. And I hate this reductionist science, I really do. But the only way I'm going to fight the reductionist science is, is to become a reductionist myself and prove it wrong. And so I did research, I mean, I think there's a thousand papers and referenced in the articles. And I really go into really good depth tying them all together. So it's not like, oh, here's one PubMed article that says this. It's like, let's look at all these together. Let's look at the good and the bad and show you that this desire to get huge amounts of protein is completely unnecessary and that carbs are certainly not bad for you.

• 1:18:02Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm. So that's the basic thesis of the book.

• 1:18:04Speaker 01

  Basic thesis, yeah.

• 1:18:05Rich Roll?

  Right. And so do you have case studies throughout that? Or is it like your own experience? Or is it just, is it very research based?

• 1:18:12Speaker 01

  It's very, I start out with kind of my story, you know? Talking a lot about what we've just talked here about.

• 1:18:17Rich Roll?

  Right, well, let's recap that again. If somebody's listening to this and they haven't gone back and listened to the first time that we chatted.

• 1:18:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I was, you know, here I was, you know, go to medical school, study everything you could ever want to know about a cell, but never once studied nutrition. Get into residency, start developing a belly, go on the Atkins diet and get sick, think, eh, forget it, I'm just going to be a busy surgeon. Get into practice and, you know, I'm seeing people with cancer and, and diabetes and heart disease and I'm treating this obesity. And I'm looking at everybody's diet plan and everybody's eating the same damn thing and it's exactly what I'm eating, you know, eggs for breakfast, Subway sandwich for lunch, chicken for dinner, hamburgers here and there. And, um, and I stop and think, God, I'm operating on people, but I'm not telling them what to eat. In fact, I wrote a book that said eat high protein and everyone's coming in, you know,

• 1:19:06Speaker 01

  well, I followed your advice, I'm eating high protein, I'm gaining back weight. And so I started to really think, gosh, this is bad. And then I got my life insurance policy because I was having a kid and my cholesterol was high, my liver function tests were high, I was hypertensive and they denied me for my life insurance policy. And then of course, my friend, uh, medical doctor was like, oh, no problem. We'll put you on Lipitor, we'll put you on a beta block, but I knew, you know, I know what happens, you get worse and worse and worse, you're gonna have a heart attack at 50, 60. And so I said, there's gotta be a different way. And then that's when I really started studying these other cultures and how it works. And the more I studied, the more research, I said, my patients could benefit this, not just me. The more I started incorporating my patients and, you know, totally changed my practice.

• 1:19:48Speaker 01

  And now I've got, you know, the healthiest patients and makes me a, um, busy doctor.

• 1:19:59Rich Roll?

  You're, you're super active on Facebook. You write these long articles and rants and you know, and you share your, your patients' success stories and there's some pretty amazing like before and after pictures and anecdotes about some of the people that have passed through your practice.

• 1:20:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, they're great. I mean, I have some patients that have just been diet now, you know, I'm known for the surgery and my, my patients are not your typical patients, you know, they come in 400 pounds, you know, this is, these are big patients. So we do do surgery, but we, I've changed the paradigm where there's diet instruction from the get-go. Some of the people decide not to do surgery, those that do surgery definitely go and, I don't really tell vegetarian or vegan, I just say, I want you more plant-based. Turn, don't do what Americans do. Don't let chicken be the star of the plate. Actually flip the plate around and I give them, we do cooking classes, we do, you know, a lot of nutrition, which my colleagues are not doing. And that has made my surgery patients so successful.

• 1:20:54Rich Roll?

  But you're losing money.

• 1:20:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, those ones I operate on, but there are some that I lose money. And I saw a lady the other day, she's, you know, her body mass sense is 36, she barely qualifies for surgery, she said, listen, I will pay you cash to do it. And I said, listen, I went over her diet plan, I was like, you can lose this weight easily. But I'm eating a lot of protein. That's the problem, you know, change the protein. I don't know if you saw, I had a great story the other day about a lady comes in, she wants, she's from Ghana and she wants surgery. And she's been living in the United States for 10 years and at that time she's gotten really heavy and she's very educated, she's an engineer. And she's doing everything, she comes in, she's on weight loss pills and she's currently on Atkins, she's done Atkins several times, she's done South Beach, she's done Zoned, done all these diets.

• 1:21:41Speaker 01

  And so we're going over her diet plan, what do you eat for breakfast? Eggs. What do you eat for lunch? Chicken, I just have a chicken breast. What do you eat for dinner? And it's going on, I'm like, okay, so you obviously believe in all this protein and everything. Why do you think it's failing? What's not working? She goes, well, I'm from Ghana and I've got friends from Ghana and they come over and we have a typical Ghana meal. And I think that's what's making me gain weight because it's too many carbs. I'm like, what is your Ghana meal? She's like, oh, it's really bad. It's like potatoes and sweet potatoes and we do sweet potato stew and we use cassava and all this stuff. And I'm like, that's the best meal you've had all day? And I said, okay, well, do you ever go to Ghana? She goes, yes. I was like, okay, how many people are overweight in Ghana? Oh, nobody, I'm the biggest person when I'm there by far.

• 1:22:26Speaker 01

  All right, and when you're there, what do you eat? Well, I eat the food that my family eats there. And? Well, you know, now that you mention it, I lose weight every time I go there. I'm like, you see my point? But it's sometimes it's a people are just so addicted to this idea that protein is what makes you lose weight. And so there's stuff in there themselves filled with food that we know does not make you lose.

• 1:22:48Rich Roll?

  We're being inundated with this message everywhere we turn. I mean, I love when you go to these conferences and you speak at these conferences and you take pictures of what the breakfast is and, you know, kind of like the nutritional recommendations that are being proposed by some of the doctors with whom you share the podium.

• 1:23:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I was at the American Society of Bariatric Medicine. This is a society that is, it's the medical doctors dealing with weight. Again, you go to these meetings, not a lot of talk about diet, everything's high protein, it's sponsored by Atkins. The chairperson of the committee is from Duke, Eric Westerman. And he gets money from Atkins and he runs these high protein diets and he put up his typical day's diet for the patients. And it was, I saw that thing and I wanted to run up on stage and attack him because I can't imagine telling a patient to eat.

• 1:23:36Speaker 01

  Cheeseburgers and, and um, his diet, I, I put it on my Facebook, it was just the most, anything bad you could possibly think of. It was like the, his diet that he recommends for his patients is the diet my patients come in on, uh, you know, at 400 pounds. And I just think it is unbelievable disservice. What he's getting is a quick weight loss because these people are going into ketosis, but they always put it back on. They always land back up in my office.

• 1:24:02Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 1:24:03Speaker 01

  It's sad.

• 1:24:04Rich Roll?

  So if you, like, if you could leave, uh, the audience with like a couple of things that they could just think about that might be, uh, contrary to what they might imagine about diet, or a couple of things that they could just implement into their life to start to make a shift.

• 1:24:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:21Rich Roll?

  You know, what are, what are some of those things?

• 1:24:22Speaker 01

  Well, there was a, there was a great study recently where they showed that if you just tell people to eat 35 grams of fiber a day, and don't give them anything else more complicated, don't weigh this, don't weigh that, just eat 35 grams of fiber a day, people get really good weight loss.

• 1:24:34Rich Roll?

  People that are eating tons of fiber don't really get sick.

• 1:24:37Speaker 01

  They don't get sick. They, they, I mean, it, you know, because it's not just the fiber, it's what the fiber is, you know, there's no fiber in the animal products, there's only fiber in the plant.

• 1:24:46Rich Roll?

  Right, but if you forget, just forget about protein and let's shift all of that focus that you had on protein and put it on fiber and then see what would happen.

• 1:24:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, my message would be, it's almost impossible not to get enough protein, no matter what you're eating. That's number one. Number two, eating more protein will make you sick eventually. Um, and number three, eating more plants is really like finding the fountain of youth. Um, makes you, it's not just, because people say, well, I don't care if I live, you know, 10 years longer, if, you know, I have to eat that crap. The food's delicious, it's nutritious, your whole taste buds change.

• 1:25:25Rich Roll?

  That's the thing I think people miss or don't get.

• 1:25:27Speaker 01

  They don't get that.

• 1:25:28Rich Roll?

  And they can't imagine that they'll actually get to a place where they will desire or crave healthy foods.

• 1:25:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I have patients say to me, I wish I had your willpower. To me, it's not willpower, it's not willpower for me to eat a kale salad, I crave a kale salad, uh, but I used to crave a double cheeseburger and. You could change that. I could talk about how I change that with patients, but you could change this thought process and you could change your taste. And everybody who goes through it, I get this blessing, you know, all these people online yakking about this and that, and they've never treated a patient. I get to sit across from a patient and actually see these changes. And the changes are amazing, the way people feel, the way they look, what they're doing in their life. It's really rewarding. And when I think about how many people in this world could benefit if we just got rid of this idea of protein, I went

• 1:26:14Speaker 01

  to the idea of, you know, whole foods, fruits, vegetables, beans, it would really change the health of the country, the health of the environment, and have so many other benefits out there.

• 1:26:26Rich Roll?

  Where do you come down on grains? I mean, you're kind of a McDougal guy.

• 1:26:30Speaker 01

  I love grains.

• 1:26:31Rich Roll?

  You know, but there's this idea that, you know, today's wheat is not your grandmother's wheat. It's highly hybridized. You know, most wheat is stripped of its nutritional value and higher in gluten than it ever has been. And we're seeing allergies and all kinds of things. So, and you have the Wheat Belly and the Grain Brain books out there that are influencing a lot of people.

• 1:26:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, the Wheat Belly, I mean, God, that book, there's just no, the science is so bad in those books. It's just, and of course, the layperson doesn't know how to read the science and understand that there's something being put over on them. They did a great study recently, because everybody's, it's such a placebo effect. Everyone now is so affected by grain. They were eating it 10 years ago without a complaint about it, but now everybody's got gluten sensitivity. So they took a group of people, and they put them in three groups. One, they were all going to give them the food, okay? They're all getting food given to them. One group is going to be, they're all told, you don't know what your gluten level is. You may be getting a low gluten, you may be getting

• 1:27:31Speaker 01

  a high gluten, but you're all gluten sensitive. So, one group gets a really high gluten level. Another gets a medium gluten level. One group gets no gluten level. Absolutely no difference in the symptoms. The low gluten group has the exact same symptom as the high gluten group. They're like, oh my God, I feel terrible, this gluten.

• 1:27:47Rich Roll?

  So are you saying that gluten is not a thing?

• 1:27:50Speaker 01

  Gluten is not a thing.

• 1:27:51Rich Roll?

  Gluten's not, the gluten sensitivity is imagined?

• 1:27:53Speaker 01

  Absolutely imagined.

• 1:27:54Rich Roll?

  Really?

• 1:27:55Speaker 01

  It's imagined. Now, what might not be

• 1:27:56Rich Roll?

  I mean, I can tell you that if I eat like a lot of processed wheat, like bread or whatever, that I feel like my, the skin around my eyes inflames, like there's a whole thing that happens. There's a I feel lousy, I get tired.

• 1:28:11Speaker 01

  There's a sensitivity to FODMAPs. You know, FODMAPs are fructose, oligosaccharides. A lot of the times when people are having these symptoms to different foods, it's our gut bacteria in a way, our gut bacteria interplays with those. And, and I think that is a lot more to do with it. So these people that, so all three groups were having symptoms. Now, were those symptoms faking in their head? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe what they're reacting to is not the gluten, but the fact that these grains have FODMAPs, these different oligosaccharides, which are certain carbohydrates that their body just, their, their bacteria just can't handle. And that might be a big part of the problem.

• 1:28:56Speaker 01

  But the people that have, okay, I get inflamed when I eat wheat. If I take you to a lab and then draw your blood and look for all the factors that show inflammation, zero will come out positive. There will be no inflammation. Unless you have sprue, celiac disease. You actually have celiac, that's a different story. Then I will, but that's the thing about this gluten insensitivity, this gluten sensitivity that's out there right now. Everybody thinks they're in inflammation, but it doesn't show up in any of their labs. There's no lab value for gluten sensitivity. It's a symptomatology without any clinical findings in it. And it may not be the gluten. Now, it would be fine to just drop the grains, except that the grains are fantastic for you.

• 1:29:40Speaker 01

  So if you look at the long-term studies, grains are unbelievably good for diabetes. They're unbelievably good for heart disease and they're a big source of our fiber as well as a lot of the B vitamins. So what we're doing is taking away this, you know, group of food that's actually extremely good for you. There's even studies that show that grain's good for your brain.

• 1:29:58Rich Roll?

  But when we're talking about grains, I mean, you know, we're not talking about eating, you know, Triscuit crackers.

• 1:30:04Speaker 01

  No, we're not. That's processed.

• 1:30:06Rich Roll?

  I mean, there's a, there's a difference between eating, you know, uh, you know, a processed pasta, you know, grain-based pasta. And maybe, you know, a really like an heirloom millet or something like that. Those are qualitatively very different.

• 1:30:21Speaker 01

  Right, because the processing, like, just take oatmeal, for instance, because they've done a lot of studies on oatmeal. Where you take a steel cut, a rolled oat, or if you take a quick oat, or an instant oat. What they're doing is basically shucking off more of the germ fiber, so that it cooks easier and it cooks quicker. But the problem is, then you eat, like, let's, you take that instant oatmeal, you eat it, you get a big blood sugar surge, with a big blood sugar drop, and you're hungrier again sooner, because there's less fiber in it. Um, but if you take the whole oat, um, and even if there's the same amount of fiber in it, the whole oat takes longer to break down and digest, so you're not going to get this blood sugar surge. You'll have a longer, slower blood sugar release, which provides energy without problems.

• 1:31:02Speaker 01

  So, yeah, I mean, I think most of the, the problems with, with wheat are, in general, probably have to do with our gut microbiome, and the way we process it. How does GMO fit in that? I don't know. There may be something with GMO in that, but boy, that, that research is hard to go through, because industry is all over it.

• 1:31:23Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm. I mean, when somebody says, "What should I think about GMOs?", whether you, how do you respond to that, generally?

• 1:31:28Speaker 01

  I generally respond that I would be careful. My general thought is, they say it's good for you. They haven't done the studies to show that it's good for you. They just haven't. And it would take a lot of studies, and it'd be a difficult study, but my general question is, why GMO? I mean, why would you, why would you want something that, you know, where they're messing with the genetic structure of the food? The other thing that bothers me about GMOs is not even the GMO, it's the result of having a GMO product, which is, you're growing a huge monocultural crop. That huge monocultural crop is terrible for the environment. The soil is devoid of nutrient. And so that's just not the food I want, I want to put in my body. I, I think we're gonna find out that GMO is, is extremely bad for you, but I, you know, I can't,

• 1:32:13Speaker 01

  I don't have the science behind it that I do with saying that meat causes diabetes.

• 1:32:17Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm. Yeah, caution.

• 1:32:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, caution for sure.

• 1:32:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I mean, it's not just, I mean, when you're deal, there's all different kinds of GMOs too.

• 1:32:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:27Rich Roll?

  It's not one thing. But if you're dealing with, you know, sort of a strain of food that has been bred to be pestilent resistant and deal well with glyphosate, that means that it's laden with all sorts of chemicals on top of it that are in the soil and absorbed into the roots and, and all of that. So there's more, there's more going on.

• 1:32:46Speaker 01

  Right. And there was a very biased study that was done by Stanford, looking at, um, at organics versus inorganics. And they said that there's no difference in the nutrient level. And there's been other studies that said, oh, they didn't do it right. There are differences. But this very, you know, this group that was getting money from biotech and stuff, did say without a doubt the GMO group had higher pesticides. So why do you want to eat pesticide? These people are like, oh, we gotta have GMOs. I don't understand it. Um, I don't want pesticides in my food. I mean, glyphosate has just been, um, labeled as a carcinogen. And that's just the tip of the ice cap of what's going on. I mean, you know, the FDA is supposed to do trials anytime there, or the USDA is supposed to do trials.

• 1:33:31Speaker 01

  No, I'm sorry. FDA is supposed to do trials anytime a new product comes out, like that's a GMO, to make sure it's safe. Well, they had a GMO alfalfa come out and the FDA just said, now, let's go ahead and use it. And there weren't any testing done. So the, um, Union of Concerned Scientists, the Committee of Concerned Scientists, took this up and they, they fought a battle and it went all the way up to Supreme Court and Supreme Court said, yeah, the FDA could do whatever they want.

• 1:33:55Speaker 01

  The head of the FDA that was pushing this used to work for Monsanto.

• 1:33:58Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:33:59Speaker 01

  Clarence Thomas used to work for Monsanto. I mean, it's just such a, and it's like, people say, oh, this is conspiracy theorists. It's so in your face, it's beyond conspiracy. It's obvious.

• 1:34:09Rich Roll?

  And we're relying as consumers on these regulatory bodies to be holding out for our, our best interest.

• 1:34:17Speaker 01

  Right. And it's, and it's in there, I mean, it's in the USDA bylaws that they have to look out both for the safety of the consumer, but also for the safety of the productivity of the company. And you could, you better bet when it becomes a-

• 1:34:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that really shouldn't be part of the manifest.

• 1:34:31Speaker 01

  Shouldn't be part of the manifest. That should be all about the, the person and not about the company.

• 1:34:36Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm. Yeah, we've really just divested ourselves of so much control, you know? And the average consumer is just, you know, what are you supposed to do?

• 1:34:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:47Rich Roll?

  We, we trust and rely on these organizations to basically tell us what's safe and what's not. And when you realize that they're compromised, or they're heavily influenced by, you know, profit motive and, and business, and it's all this, you know, cabal of rotating chairs, you know, from one organization to the next, it's, that's very disconcerting.

• 1:35:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's strange, but I, I tell my patients, like, we've been talking about science and all this time, this whole time, but just try to use a little common sense. I mean, look at the food. Look at an orange. Peel an orange. It's like created for you. Tastes great. It's perfectly packaged, you know? Who needs, but you know, better packaging than an apple? And then think about, and I have my patients do journaling, where they journal, and have them journal, how do you feel after a meal?

• 1:35:33Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:35:33Speaker 01

  So they, after, you know, a high fruit, high vegetable diet, they feel fantastic afterwards. And the more they notice how fantastic it is, the more they will instinctually go towards that food. Whereas, think about how you feel when you eat a double cheeseburger. Everyone does it. Everyone feels like crap afterwards. They laugh about how they feel like crap, and they go back for more.

• 1:35:50Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:35:51Speaker 01

  And I, I try to appeal to my patients on this kind of instinctual level, about what do you think your body's supposed to eat?

• 1:35:58Rich Roll?

  Journaling is really powerful, too, because most people will tell you that they eat pretty healthy. You know, like, yeah, I'm healthy, I eat pretty healthy. But when you actually write down and you're honest with yourself about what you're doing, generally, it tells a pretty different picture, different picture of what you're doing.

• 1:36:14Speaker 01

  And it holds you accountable.

• 1:36:15Rich Roll?

  And that can be really revealing and empowering for somebody to go, oh, my gosh, you know, I really thought I was doing this, and I now can see what I am doing is very different. Like, I need to make that change.

• 1:36:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a very powerful tool. And you start to notice food patterns that you might have not thought of before. You notice how you feel. You notice if you're overeating. You tend not to pick bad foods because you say, I gotta write that down in my journal, and Dr. Davis is gonna look at it. How am I gonna do it? And so, and so, I have found it a very big part of my practice.

• 1:36:41Rich Roll?

  What do you think is the number one thing that, that holds your patients back, or the people that you treat, from grasping, you know, this idea of a healthy lifestyle trajectory? Or what is the big impediment that prevents them from taking that leap?

• 1:36:57Speaker 01

  Protein. I think it's protein. I think it's this belief that we need high doses of protein, and that therefore, chicken and meat are good for you.

• 1:37:05Rich Roll?

  So, in other words, that's preventing them from embracing a more plant-centric approach to their diet, because they're afraid that they're gonna be missing out on something that they need to survive?

• 1:37:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, look, well, you know, I use these journals. And the patient will come back to me, and two months later, we've talked about eating more fruits, more vegetables. I've given them packets about what to do for snack time, eating apple. And I look at their, their log, and I see, you know, eggs for breakfast, beef jerky for snack, lean chicken. And they always put lean next to the chicken, which, you know, kind of nonsense. And I'm like, what happened to all the fruits and vegetables? Like, well, I was gonna do it, but I mean, I thought, you know, beef jerky'd be better for me than an apple, because I need protein. That's, protein is it. I mean, to me, it's, that's the one big problem. It's what's driving everybody. If everybody could just relax about protein, they could start enjoying fruits and vegetables, because who doesn't enjoy fruits? They taste great. I, you know, I told, in that epic trial I talked about earlier, one big part of it is

• 1:38:00Speaker 01

  they studied 500,000 people for 12 years, looking at their diets and looking at weight gain. They definitely saw an increase in weight with meat eaters. Most specifically, the most weight was gained with chicken eaters. Chicken was the biggest cause of weight gain. I tell my patients that and they're in shock because to them, chicken is the health food.

• 1:38:18Rich Roll?

  That's the lean alternative.

• 1:38:19Speaker 01

  That's the lean alternative.

• 1:38:20Rich Roll?

  But it's not as lean as people think.

• 1:38:22Speaker 01

  It's not as lean as people think. And, we eat more chicken than any other country in the world. How's it working for us?

• 1:38:26Rich Roll?

  Yeah, well, we probably overeat it because we think it's healthier, so then we eat more of it, right?

• 1:38:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:33Rich Roll?

  All right, last question for you. If you were, if you woke up and suddenly you had been appointed to be surgeon general, what kind of changes are you making?

• 1:38:42Speaker 01

  Oh man, I would be so happy. I would be so happy. There would be, there would be so many things that I'd want to do. Some of them I'm working on right now. But there would have to be nutrition education and medical school classrooms. I would work very hard in nutritional education in high school and junior high and right from the get-go, including growing foods and farming. I would do my, I mean, the farm bill would be something I would go crazy on. Handing subsidies to agribusinesses, supporting small farmers. I would be, you know, working very hard at farmers that do multicultural

• 1:39:24Speaker 01

  crops instead of monocultural crops, so we have a more dependable food source that's richer in environment. I would be very big into different cities doing community farming and community growth projects like that. I've, working right now on our hospital system, changing the food in hospital systems. I mean, how crazy is it when you go into a hospital and there's a McDonald's? That just drives me up the wall. And it sends a very important message that, you know, Wendell Berry said, we live in a, in a... You know, the problem with the system we live in is we live in a food system that doesn't care about health and a health system that doesn't care about food. And as a surgeon general, that would be my topic. Try to make the health system concerned about food and

• 1:40:08Speaker 01

  the food system concerned about health.

• 1:40:10Rich Roll?

  And what about these regulatory bodies? The FDA, the USDA?

• 1:40:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, the USDA needs to split where it's just being concerned with health, or the FDA just needs to be concerned with health. Lobbyists need to be taken. I mean, this is a, this goes into a much deeper, you know, now we're getting into politics.

• 1:40:26Rich Roll?

  Yeah, well, systemic, the whole way this system operates.

• 1:40:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, campaign finance reform and term limitations and stuff like that. So you don't get these guys that are in there that are paid by big business. I mean, we've got Republicans saying that there's no such thing as global warming. It's just, it's so anti-intellectual and they get away with it. And they get away with it because they get paid for it. And so there would have to be so much changes. But I think education would be the big starting point.

• 1:40:52Rich Roll?

  The focus for you. Good, man. I think we did it.

• 1:40:56Speaker 01

  That's crazy. I feel like we go on forever sometimes.

• 1:40:59Rich Roll?

  We could. I mean, you could, like, if you lived here, you'd be on the show all the time, man.

• 1:41:03Speaker 01

  Hey, I'd love to live here.

• 1:41:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah, well, we got a room for you, man.

• 1:41:06Speaker 01

  I might move. You have a room for Great Dane and two screaming daughters?

• 1:41:10Rich Roll?

  We do, actually. We got plenty of room. Come anytime, man.

• 1:41:14Speaker 01

  I loved it.

• 1:41:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah, this is great. Thank you. So the book is coming out, is it coming out in the fall, in October or something?

• 1:41:20Speaker 01

  It's coming out in October.

• 1:41:21Rich Roll?

  October, that's great, man. Exciting.

• 1:41:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, and they're doing pre-sales now on Amazon and it'll...

• 1:41:25Rich Roll?

  Oh, it's already up on Amazon?

• 1:41:26Speaker 01

  It's already up on Amazon.

• 1:41:27Rich Roll?

  All right, man. Well, everybody go preorder the book, check it out, use the Amazon banner ad at richroll.com so we can both wet our beaks on this.

• 1:41:36Speaker 01

  That sounds good.

• 1:41:37Rich Roll?

  And support the good Dr. Garth. Are you training for anything right now?

• 1:41:41Speaker 01

  I am gonna start, I'm worried about book tours and stuff like that, so I didn't want to get too into training. But I'm gonna do another Ironman. I got my eye on November 16, uh, November 2016.

• 1:41:52Rich Roll?

  Cool.

• 1:41:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:54Rich Roll?

  And are you gonna be doing a big book tour?

• 1:41:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think I am going to be doing quite a bit of one, yeah.

• 1:41:58Rich Roll?

  That's exciting.

• 1:41:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:00Rich Roll?

  I'm excited for you.

• 1:42:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, go preach the word.

• 1:42:02Rich Roll?

  Check it out. Excellent, man. Right on. Well, best way to connect with you, for those that are digging on Garth, is, the door just mysteriously opened. Facebook's probably the best place, right?

• 1:42:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm on Facebook and Twitter, but Dr. Garth on Facebook is where I do most of, you know, I'll print, you know, recent articles and things like that, and pictures of my patients and stuff.

• 1:42:22Rich Roll?

  And you're Dr. Garth Davis on Twitter?

• 1:42:24Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:42:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and the website is?

• 1:42:27Speaker 01

  TheDavisClinic.com. That's more for patients than when I have weight loss surgery.

• 1:42:31Rich Roll?

  In Houston, so, all right, man, thanks for coming by.

• 1:42:33Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:42:34Rich Roll?

  Right on.

• 1:42:35Speaker 01

  All right.

• 1:42:36Rich Roll?

  Peace.

• 1:42:37Speaker 01

  Peace out.

• 1:42:38Rich Roll?

  Plants.

• 1:42:42Rich Roll?

  All right, I think we did it. Good stuff. I totally love that guy. Let me know what you thought of the episode in the comments section on the episode page at richroll.com. Thank you for sharing this podcast and for using the Amazon banner ad at richroll.com for all your purchases. Keep sending your questions in for future Q and A podcasts to [email protected]. We've got more of those coming up soon. For all the information, education products, tools, resources, and inspiration you need to take your health, wellness, fitness, and self-actualization to the next level, go to richroll.com, peruse our nutrition products, our education products, and our garments, all made with 100% organic cotton. We've got new garments coming soon, pretty excited about that. If you're into

• 1:43:25Rich Roll?

  online courses, I've got two of those at mindbodygreen.com, The Art of Living with Purpose, and The Ultimate Guide to Plant-Based Nutrition, which is a great, sort of, cousin piece to The Plant Power Way. So, thank you for checking those out. We're really proud of those courses. They're 99 bucks each, well worth it, hours and hours and hours of streaming video content, and an online community that's very helpful. Again, you can find those at mindbodygreen.com. Thanks for supporting the show, for telling a friend, and for sharing it on social media. Yes, I love that. Thank you so much. I'll see you in a few. Have a great week, everybody. I'm out. Peace. Plants.