Dr. Allen Goldhammer is the author of the book, The Pleasure Trap and his expertise is helping people who are stuck in self-destructive cycles. If you ve got any kind of self destructive cycles, hopefully Dr. Goldhammer can help you.
00:00:51.260I'm 42 years old and I look at my skin and I'm looking at your skin. You look like a baby.
00:00:55.760You don't look 61 years old. That's insane to be thinking about that.
00:00:59.740What are you going to have for Thanksgiving? I mean, what happens to the turkey?
00:01:02.160Honestly, once people adapt, they really don't miss the greasy, fatty, slimy, dead-decaned flesh processed foods that make other people feel so compromised.
00:01:09.120I hope you're happy with yourself because you ruined everyone's Thanksgiving.
00:01:12.140You've got this fat turkey sitting there and are you going to be thinking about Dr. Allen?
00:01:16.200And it is really difficult to live healthy in our society today because the society is designed to give you what you want, not necessarily what you need.
00:01:24.120My guest today is the author of the book called The Pleasure Trap, as well as his expertise is helping people who are stuck in self-destructive cycles.
00:01:38.720What a thing to be able to help, right?
00:01:39.880If you've got any kind of self-destructive cycles, hopefully we're going to be able to fix that today.
00:03:13.820And when you wake up in the morning, you break that fast with something we call break fast or breakfast.
00:03:18.900And so the question is, what's the ideal period of time for that intermittent fasting period to be?
00:03:25.940In our practice, we encourage patients to fast every day for 16 hours so that they have an eight-hour feeding window.
00:03:34.080And what that means practically is that you stop eating at least three hours before your normal bedtime, and then you defer your morning meal until you've had a period of around 16 hours of fasting.
00:03:48.260And it's thought that that cumulative benefit from intermittent fasting over long periods of time may have some significant health benefits.
00:03:58.300In our practice, we have another type of fasting that we utilize, which is long-term water-only fasting.
00:04:04.560And this is fasting that's done under medical supervision in a controlled setting where patients go from anywhere from five to 40 days.
00:04:12.380So although intermittent fasting can be done safely by virtually everybody and may be a healthy practice for everybody, long-term water-only fasting does need to be done in a controlled setting in order to ensure that it's safe and effective.
00:04:25.840So there's a history, exam, laboratory monitoring, medical management that's done.
00:04:30.600And that's how we're able to do this safely and effectively.
00:04:32.760And we have done this over 20,000 times with patients over the past 36 years.
00:04:37.940So we have a lot of experience, and it's used mostly in helping people overcome specific health problems.
00:04:45.520Now, there are certain people that you don't put through this fast, and I think it's five criteria, if you don't mind sharing that with the audience.
00:04:52.560Well, yeah, certainly there's many people that would not be good candidates for long-term fasting, unlike intermittent fasting, which can be done by virtually everybody.
00:05:00.840Long-term fasting, you have to actually have the appropriate reserves, capacity, and adaptive situation in order to be able to safely adjust to it.
00:05:12.320There's also patients, for example, that are on medications.
00:05:15.580Medications that can't be arbitrarily discontinued without serious consequences wouldn't be candidates for water-only fasting.
00:05:22.500Water fasting is done when patients are stable off their medications.
00:05:27.120Patients that have problems with kidney disease or cardiac instability or have other contraindications to fasting wouldn't be good candidates.
00:05:35.320And actually, people that are afraid of fasting probably are not good candidates for fasting.
00:05:40.280Fear itself is a pretty expensive emotional response.
00:05:43.580And so that's why it's important for us to educate people about fasting safety and efficacy before we try to get them to undergo this process.
00:05:51.440Now, you said 36 years, over 20,000 people.
00:05:56.440What have you learned after going through 20,000?
00:05:59.420And is it still new findings that you're getting?
00:06:01.680Or have you pretty much realized what works, what doesn't work, what results we're getting, what people go through after day one, day two, day three, day four, day five?
00:06:10.640What is the biggest challenge when you hit a wall?
00:06:12.700You know how it's kind of like when you're running the 26.2 mile, I bet there's probably got to be a wall, people, maybe multiple walls.
00:06:19.700What have you found over the last 36 years?
00:06:22.020Yeah, well, one of the really interesting things and exciting things about using fasting is that it's really different every time you use it because the people that are fasting are different.
00:06:31.260And even the same patient, one fast to another fast can be entirely different.
00:06:37.720One thing I have learned is that if you do good preparation before fasting and you are very careful about selecting appropriate patients for fasting, it is a whole lot less stressful because you can have very predictable results with certain conditions.
00:06:54.100Other situations may be less predictable.
00:06:56.340So we get really good at cherry picking out the people we expect to have really good results.
00:07:01.300And we focus on those conditions and those patients that are going to make us look good.
00:07:15.940Yeah, you know, the fact is it looks like what we're doing sometimes looks miraculous.
00:07:20.240And of course, it's not at all because all we're doing is getting the body to do what it does best.
00:07:24.660And that's heal itself when you get out of the way.
00:07:26.560We actually don't do anything when you think about it other than carefully select and monitor patients to go through this very natural process.
00:07:34.760And what's interesting and what I've learned in response to your question is that the people that respond the best to fasting are the patients that have problems that were brought about by dietary excess.
00:07:46.640So, you know, when you think about it, it's not shocking that conditions like obesity and cardiovascular disease, including high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, autoimmune diseases, and conditions like lymphoma, these conditions we know from experience are made worse by poor dietary choices.
00:08:02.380It's not shocking that they would get well faster with fasting than they would perhaps in other circumstances because the reason they're sick to begin with is because they haven't taken the ability to control what they're putting in their mouth and they're developing diseases of dietary excess.
00:08:18.480These diseases used to be called the diseases of kings because it was the wealthy elite kings that used to get these conditions.
00:08:25.320Now they've become ubiquitous because even poor people in our modern world are living as only kings used to live in the past.
00:08:35.060That is eating highly concentrated, highly refined foods.
00:08:39.080What do you mean by these diseases are named after kings?
00:08:41.580For example, cardiovascular disease and high blood pressure used to be very rare.
00:08:45.000The only people that used to develop cardiovascular disease, coronary artery disease, were the wealthy elite that could afford to eat like we all eat today.
00:08:53.660You know, in the world of our ancient ancestors, getting enough to eat and not getting eaten was the imperative of life.
00:09:00.280In fact, most humans, according to the anthropologists, never lived to reproduce.
00:09:25.720And the problem is our brains that allowed us to do that were designed, evolved in the environment of scarcity.
00:09:33.640And now we've changed the environment because humans are so innovative and so creative.
00:09:37.800We've been able to change our environment.
00:09:39.280And now we live in an environment of abundance.
00:09:41.880And as a consequence of those changes, our brain doesn't serve us well unless we become very conscious of the vulnerability to the pleasure trap.
00:09:51.480So now you're saying 90% is, you pretty much lock on to the people that are the ideal candidates for you to work on, not the impossible cases.
00:10:00.960What is an ideal candidate to go on a potential 10, 20, 30, even a 40-day fast?
00:10:06.380So I find what appropriately motivated patients have better long-term success.
00:10:12.340And the most effective motivation in my experience are pain, debility, and fear of death.
00:10:18.520So we tend to see a lot of people that are kind of, they call us True North Health Center, the last resort.
00:10:23.820Because many of the people, they've tried all the pills and potions, powders, the surgeries, all the magic bullets, all the easy fixes, and now they have to get down and dirty and do the hard work.
00:10:34.660And it is really difficult to live healthy in our society today.
00:10:38.500Because the society is designed to give you what you want, not necessarily what you need.
00:10:43.980And what we want is to live without having to limit any of our behaviors.
00:10:49.740And what we need is to figure out a way to escape the dietary pleasure trap and actually give the body a chance to heal itself.
00:10:59.620So we teach people about the fact that health results from healthful living.
00:11:03.020And from our viewpoint, healthful living involves diet, sleep, and exercise.
00:11:07.300So we teach people how to make sure they prioritize their sleep, that they get appropriate activity, and that they control what they put in their mouth.
00:11:15.180And from our viewpoint, that diet is a whole plant food diet that's SOS-free.
00:11:19.660And as you know, SOS is the international symbol of danger.
00:11:22.460It also stands for chemicals that we add to food that fool the satiety mechanisms in our brain, lead to systematic overeating, and lead to the metabolic syndrome that's epidemic today.
00:11:33.600And that metabolic syndrome is responsible for contributing to the diabetes, the high blood pressure, the autoimmune disease, and some forms of cancer.
00:11:41.360So when people are educated about that, they can make a decision to make sure they're sleeping, exercising, eating properly.
00:11:50.500And that's where we have an inpatient facility where people can come in and live in a controlled setting so that they can go through fasting if necessary safely, they can make the dietary changes, and they can get educated about what it's going to take to actually get well.
00:12:05.440And once people experience getting well, sometimes they're motivated to comply.
00:12:14.200Those are the chemicals that we put in the food that make us fat, sick, and miserable.
00:12:18.040So those are the words, salts, oil, and sugar.
00:12:21.260Yeah, so these are not actually food, but they're fractionated food byproducts that we put into the food to stimulate the dopamine in our brain.
00:12:31.380So you were talking about healthy diet, healthy sleep, healthy exercise.
00:12:37.760And, you know, when you look at these things, you look at, you know, in bodybuilding, they'll say 80% of bodybuilding is diet, 20% is actually training because you've got to eat right.
00:12:47.020And if you don't eat right, there's no way in the world you can compete because 80% is diet, right?
00:12:51.980How much of us staying healthy has to do with, if you were to rank them, diet, sleep, exercise, sex, how much of a healthy living has to do with those four things?
00:13:03.440So the fact is that we know that a lot of health is involved in things you don't have control over.
00:13:11.260And genetics are a dominant component in that.
00:13:13.260But of the things that you can do something about, it's my estimation that about 80% of the effect size is from what you put in your mouth.
00:13:20.600And the balance comes from your sleep, your activity, and the psychological variables, which certainly would include your interpersonal relations and all the things that go along with that.
00:13:29.940The reality, though, is you can take an individual and limit their exercise, you can limit their sleep, or you can limit their diet, any one of which can compromise their health.
00:13:41.280If you want to get and keep people healthy, you have to really control all three.
00:13:47.300So you're not even putting one ahead of the other one?
00:13:49.900What I'm saying is that the largest effect size is in fact-
00:14:26.560What inspired you want to write this book?
00:14:28.880Well, you know, we've been in practice a long time before we started writing The Pleasure Trap.
00:14:32.280And the idea was to try to explain how it was these patients that we were seeing get well were actually getting well.
00:14:38.680Trying to come up with an explanation that made sense, that was consistent with our experience, and the facts as we could determine them.
00:14:46.120And so, you know, in our mind, the pleasure trap, that is the artificial stimulation of dopamine in your brain, that dopamine is what's associated with pleasure.
00:14:58.740The more dopamine, the better the food tastes.
00:15:00.900The more, the better the experience is perceived.
00:15:03.860The reason why your brain gives you dopamine is to reinforce behaviors that favor survival and reproduction.
00:15:10.500So it's not surprising that the only natural, normal stimulants of dopamine are food and sex.
00:15:15.560Food and sex are the only natural, normal, intense stimulants of dopamine.
00:15:20.020As you'd expect, because if you didn't engage in enough feeding behavior, you wouldn't survive.
00:15:24.100If you didn't engage in enough sexual behavior, you wouldn't survive.
00:15:27.500And so it's logical that the body would, the brain would reward the body by engaging in these positive behaviors.
00:15:34.780The problem was humans got really clever.
00:15:37.060And we learned to short circuit this very natural system with the use of certain chemicals.
00:15:41.720And one of the most obvious are drugs, alcohol, cocaine, methamphetamines.
00:15:46.920These chemicals all stimulate dopamine production and make people feel good.
00:15:51.360The problem is it's an unnatural stimulation and so it can lead to addiction.
00:15:55.520I mean, that's the hallmark of addiction where you're having to do something to continue not only to feel good, but to avoid feeling very bad, you know, the withdrawal effect.
00:16:03.400And the same thing happens when you add these chemicals into the diet.
00:16:08.480They make foods taste good because they result in dopamine stimulation in the brain, just like drugs do.
00:16:12.800But it's an artificial stimulation and you can literally develop an addiction, if you will, to the artificial stimulation of these chemicals.
00:16:20.780And now you have to keep eating these chemicals to avoid feeling very bad.
00:16:24.480And people don't like to think of themselves as addicts because they're eating a sugar, salt and oil rich diet.
00:16:30.420But the reality is when they try to stop it, it's very difficult.
00:16:33.740And that's why today two thirds of people are overweight or obese.
00:16:36.540You know, the majority of people are developing these chronic degenerative diseases and people are dying and becoming debilitated, which was maybe even a bigger issue, years before they pass.
00:16:48.060You know, life expectancy up until recently had continued to increase.
00:16:51.580The last few years, it's actually starting to decrease.
00:16:54.020And even perhaps more important or urgent to people than life expectancy, that is how long they're going to live on average, is healthy life expectancy, how well they're going to live when they're alive.
00:17:05.300The reality is 9.6 years of debility is average now.
00:17:09.520So people are not living a good life and then having a good death where they go to bed and don't wake up.
00:17:15.260They're spending years or decades unable to talk or move, lying in nursing home beds, waiting for people to come and change their diaper because they've had strokes or heart attacks or preventable debilitating illnesses.
00:17:26.600And that's what we're interested in helping our patients prevent.
00:17:29.360We know they're not going to live forever.
00:17:31.200Look, you have 109 billion modern humans that have been born on the planet.
00:17:35.180There's about 7.7 billion of us alive today.
00:17:38.280But we only have good documentation of five people living past 117.
00:17:45.060You have a 1 in 20 billion chance of living past 117 currently.
00:17:50.140So you know you're not living forever.
00:17:51.880But what you don't want to do is give up what could be the richest, most valuable years of your life, the last 10 or 20 years of your life.
00:18:00.260Give them up, essentially, because of short-term pleasure-seeking, self-indulgent behavior that leads you into becoming debilitated unnecessarily.
00:18:09.120So we want people to live their full life potential and take advantage of that.
00:18:15.280Let me ask you, SOS, salt, oil, sugar, versus cocaine, pot, ecstasy, Vicodin, heroin, special – I mean, you can go on with all the other addictions that people – alcohol, cigarettes, whatever else we want to add to that.
00:18:31.740What is more addicting, SOS or all the other drugs?
00:18:35.560Well, the other drugs are more powerful, and so they're more – it's easier to get addicted.
00:18:43.220But the SOS is much more insidious because at least when people are snorting cocaine or shooting heroin, they're usually not in denial of the fact that they're utilizing a drug that has negative consequences.
00:18:54.680They may not be able to choose to stop or control it easily, but they're not deluded into thinking that there's not a problem.
00:19:00.940Most smokers know the smoking is going to kill them.
00:19:04.780With the salt, oil, and sugar, people think this is a normal thing, that everybody eats salt, oil, and sugar, that it's normal to be overweight, to be obese, to develop.
00:19:13.660Everybody has heart disease and diabetes, and so in some ways it's more insidious, even though it's certainly not as powerful as some of the drugs are, and it works on the same neurochemical cascade of the same pathway.
00:19:28.140And so it's not that sugar is as bad as cocaine.
00:19:32.240But over the long run, it can be even more devastating in the sense that you don't have to take drugs, but you do have to eat.
00:19:41.880And if you don't understand the difference between a health-promoting diet and a conventional diet, it's even worse than that because we're teaching people they need to eat meat, fish, fowl, eggs, dairy products, that everybody needs milk.
00:19:54.820There's all kinds of forces at play convincing people that if they don't use these animal-based products or these highly processed foods, they're going to be deficient in things.
00:20:03.460They're actually going to develop problems.
00:20:04.940People literally worry about adopting a healthier whole plant food diet because they think they're going to be missing out on some critical issue, and that's in part because we've done a really effective job marketing and advertising these products.
00:20:19.240So, I mean, you've really got to admire the people that have sold people this concept that these highly processed fractionated food products are actually necessary and even important to sustain health.
00:20:31.660It doesn't mean it's true, but it's certainly been an effective campaign.
00:20:48.980So either they can't do what they want to do, they can't tolerate the pain, or for whatever reason, they've decided they want to stay alive.
00:20:58.180I mean, it's a good reason to want to stay alive and maybe see your grandkids grow up and the kids grow up.
00:21:02.900But what gets people to a level, from your experience, 36 years, 20,000-plus patients, fasting all the way up to 40 days,
00:21:13.300what gets people to the point of saying, you know what, Doc, I got to tell you, I know those three things you talked about.
00:21:19.260Is that the breaking point where somebody says, I'm willing to change and figure out a way to drop some of these SOSs and change my lifestyle?
00:21:27.860Is it anything more than those three things that you see where somebody just says, I want to make a change in my life?
00:21:32.840Yeah, I think sometimes the experience of people they know or trust, and they see them having had an experience, that's very motivating.
00:21:39.260So, you know, they know somebody that had problems like they had, and then they see them go through what appears to be a relatively straightforward process.
00:21:48.660You know, you adopt a healthy diet, you get enough rest, you do your exercise, and the body heals itself.
00:21:52.880And if you want to speed it up, we do this fasting business.
00:21:56.700You know, there is no pill, potion, powder, product.
00:23:40.500I started reading and I read these books and they said that doctors that use this approach had the best job in the whole world because the body did all the healing.
00:23:48.180And the patient had to do all the work and all you had to do as a doctor was take credit for the good results.
00:24:15.020And, of course, I would always give him, you know, a hard time.
00:24:18.440And, yeah, he didn't want to hear about it.
00:24:20.140At one point, my sister-in-law, his wife gets ill, comes to our facility, does a fast, recovers, avoids surgery, does great, adopts a health-promoting diet.
00:24:41.400So he's, you know, one of his buddies from Boeing.
00:24:44.380Actually, unbeknownst to him, comes to our facility, recovers his health, quits smoking, overcomes his blood pressure, gets off the drugs, goes home and starts to tell my brother, you should go to this place, true north.
00:26:12.640And the reason why I wanted to bring up your brother's story is because of you saying the types of people that come to you as pain, debilitating where they can't do certain things, or fear of death.
00:26:23.700They finally say, listen, you know, I may want to do something about my life.
00:26:30.380So isn't another word for fasting starving myself?
00:26:35.680I mean, isn't that the same exact thing?
00:26:37.880If I'm fasting, you know, you hear these stats where they say – you see these kids that grow up and they're adults and their bones and their joints are so weak because they grew up in the bad parts of town and their family didn't feed them well.
00:26:51.660And because of that, they're so – they break down easier.
00:26:56.020If that is something we hear about 20 years later when a kid becomes an adult, why would we fast ourselves?
00:27:02.000Aren't there certain nutritions that we can't get outside of water?
00:27:04.680Yeah, that's, of course, a very common idea.
00:27:07.900The reality is that fasting is a physiological state when the body still has labile reserves.
00:27:12.540If you keep fasting long enough, eventually you deplete your labile reserves and you enter a process called starvation.
00:27:18.460And starvation is very dangerous and will result in death.
00:27:22.420So, yeah, you can't fast a person beyond their reserves.
00:27:26.000That's one of the things we do when we assess a patient is to determine if they have adequate macro and micronutrient reserves in order to undergo the process.
00:27:33.480And then we continue to monitor them, including things like potassium and electrolytes, kidney function, et cetera, to make sure that we're still in that window where they're going to get benefit.
00:27:45.040It's a question of how long should they fast, and that's determined by their reserves and their adaptive capacity to adjust to the fasting state.
00:27:52.420The patients we fast for 40 days are still in the fasting state.
00:28:06.320No, in fact, we actually have done a fasting safety study where it's been published in peer-reviewed journals looking at this very issue of fasting safety and adverse events.
00:28:14.880And, you know, people that are interested can go to our website, and they can download those articles, and they can see for themselves exactly what happens in fasting.
00:28:23.940And the conclusion is that fasting is, in fact, a biologically natural, safe, and effective experience as long as it's done according to a reasonable protocol.
00:28:32.180I might mention of the 20,000 patients that we've had come to the center for fasting, 20,000 people that walked in, 20,000 people were able to walk out.
00:29:12.040So water fasting is just that, water only.
00:29:15.300In fact, it's distilled water only, fractionally steamed, distilled water.
00:29:18.900So the only thing they're getting during this fasting experience of 5 to 40 days is water only.
00:29:25.020Now, there is juice fast and other modified programs that people can do, and they can be very helpful, but they're not water fasting.
00:29:31.720Water fasting induces a unique biological adaptation that's really unique to water fasting.
00:29:36.220So for the conditions that we're treating, there's nothing that works quite as well as doing water only fasting.
00:29:42.420If you're trying to normalize blood pressure, overcome type 2 diabetes by reducing insulin resistance, breakdown, lymphoma tumors, dealing with these autoimmune diseases, water fasting is a really unique biological adaptation.
00:30:33.840First, there's a review of history, exam, and laboratory baseline.
00:30:37.480So we know from the history, the physical examination, the laboratory testing, that the person is a good candidate, that they have the reserves, that they have adequate kidney function, that they've got cardiac stability, that we've gotten them weaned off their medication safely beforehand.
00:30:49.960And they've done a good lead-in program.
00:30:51.940So they've eaten fruit, salad, and steamed vegetables only for a couple days.
00:30:55.080There's no meat, fish, fowl, eggs, dairy products, oil, salt, sugar, or highly processed foods being used.
00:31:00.340That makes the transition to fasting much easier.
00:31:03.240And as I said, they've been stabilized off any medications.
00:31:12.880We even have little classes and things that they do.
00:31:15.060But basically, they're not doing vigorous exercise or intense stressful activities.
00:31:21.560And the reason for that is if you are extending a water fast and you continue to say exercise, what you would do is you'd force the body to generate more glucose to provide use for the muscle in the brain.
00:31:33.620And the only place that it can get that glucose after the glycogen reserves, after the first, say, 48 hours, is through a process called gluconeogenesis, which is a breakdown of protein.
00:31:42.980So we don't want to deplete a patient's protein reserves.
00:31:47.760And what's really exciting is we have actually recently acquired a DEXA scanner.
00:31:53.520And we've been able to do really detailed whole body composition changes.
00:31:56.860And what we've done in this study that we're publishing is we've been able to show that visceral fat is preferentially mobilized during fasting, not just fat.
00:32:07.920Fat is preferentially mobilized, but specifically visceral fat.
00:32:11.600So, for example, a person might lose 20% of their total body fat during fasting, but they may lose 40% to 60% of their visceral fat.
00:32:18.100So the body's actually going in and mobilizing this fat that tends to accumulate around the core and around the organs that's thought to be most associated with compromised health.
00:32:28.280It'll mobilize visceral fat first and preferentially.
00:32:32.040And then it'll mobilize adipose tissue.
00:32:38.180So that when you look at the weight that's lost during fasting, let's say a person loses, say, 20 pounds, some of that's fat, some of it's protein, some of it's glycogen, some of it's fiber that was in the gut, some of it's fluids.
00:32:51.180And then when they come off the fast, they regain weight.
00:32:53.720But the weight that's regained during recovery is almost exclusively protein, water, fiber, and glycogen, and not fat.
00:33:04.080In fact, the fat loss continues during refeeding.
00:33:08.800And so what we found with water-only fasting is it's a unique way of mobilizing visceral fat, which helps open up blood vessels, gets rid of the health-compromising components, much more so than, say, going on a high-protein, high-fat, keto-type diet.
00:33:22.840You know, the fasting-mimicking diets, which can blunt hunger and facilitate weight loss, that may have some short-term benefit, may have some long-term serious consequences.
00:33:31.420Just like with water fasting, you wouldn't water fast forever.
00:33:34.200You water fast for a period of time, and then you go back to eating a health-promoting diet.
00:33:38.560But the net effect on the body is to reverse visceral fat, normalize blood pressure.
00:33:44.800It reduces insulin resistance, which allows diabetics to normalize their blood sugar levels.
00:33:50.560For example, a person might lose 10% of their body weight, but they won't lose 10% of their tumor.
00:33:55.400They may lose 50% or 100% of their mass because the body is preferentially mobilizing tissues in inverse proportion to their need.
00:34:02.860And that's why visceral fat, tumors, growth, other things sometimes go away in fasting, disproportionate to the percentage of weight that the body loses.
00:34:11.040So 36 years you've been doing this, how much of this stuff do you apply to your own life on what you do?
00:34:19.680What's your daily regimen of sleep exercise look like?
00:34:22.380Well, I decided at 16 that I was going to do a 50-year experiment and adopt this whole plant food diet to see if I could beat Dr. Lyle in basketball.
00:35:22.580So as far as, you know, exercise, you know, I like basketball.
00:35:30.260So, you know, my routine up until COVID was 10 hours a week of full court basketball with a group of, I must say, much younger gentlemen.
00:35:39.000And I, that's, other than all the deaths and problems, that's really been the hardest thing for me with this current COVID situation is that, you know, public basketball gyms have been closed.
00:35:48.780It's been a real, what I consider a tragedy.
00:35:51.160So I've been still playing basketball, but it's not the same when you're playing on your court, you know, and not engaging in the mock worker.
00:36:17.200So there's definitely a price that's paid to do fasting properly.
00:36:20.580But in addition to 16 hours a day, I do a week or so every year.
00:36:25.760If I fast a patient for a week and there's no symptoms and they're healthy, there's no other issues, then usually that's the end of that and we move on.
00:36:32.320The only reason we go longer is because we're trying to achieve an end goal in terms of, you know, people have health issues that we're trying to normalize.
00:36:46.380Well, however long it takes to normalize the blood pressure.
00:36:49.160Now, if we get to 40 days and we still have a problem, we may have to break it, re-aliment somebody, build them back up, and then bring them back and do it again until we get the problem solved.
00:36:58.380So it's not that every problem solves first pass.
00:37:01.400But if you look at our data, we had 174 consecutive patients in the study we did on high blood pressure.
00:37:08.100174 people were able to normalize blood pressure without medication.
00:37:11.900And we have the largest effect size that's ever been shown in treating high blood pressure in humans with an average effect size of 60 points in stage 3 hypertension.
00:37:19.560So people who started off with blood pressures of 180 or more, average blood pressure drop was 60 points.
00:37:25.520That's the largest effect that's ever been shown.
00:38:11.200Well, we celebrate every day as if it was Thanksgiving and Christmas.
00:38:14.500We celebrate every day with wonderful fresh fruits and vegetables, grains, legumes, nuts, and seeds.
00:38:21.020So every day is a holiday and a celebration for us.
00:38:23.600We don't reserve certain days of the year where we compromise our health by loading ourselves up with highly concentrated processed foods or other things.
00:38:30.940So every day, healthy diet, every day, celebration.
00:38:35.080What are you going to have for Thanksgiving?
00:38:38.080Well, yeah, somebody else will have to have the turkey.
00:38:40.680But we, you know, on Thanksgiving, we do seasonal rotation with food.
00:38:43.720So there's things like wild rice and yams and sweet potatoes.
00:38:46.420And there's, you know, greens and chard.
00:38:48.580And there's all kinds of wonderful things that rotate with the season.
00:38:51.360And certainly, you know, some of those Thanksgiving foods, traditional foods, can be very health-promoting.
00:38:57.440So there would be no harm in doing those.
00:38:59.420And honestly, once people adapt to eating a whole plant food diet, they really don't miss the greasy, fatty, slimy, dead, decaying, flesh-processed foods that make other people feel so compromised.
00:39:08.760And, you know, what I ask patients to do is think about the long-term, not just the short-term.
00:39:13.420You know, what you don't want to do is find yourself unable to talk or move lying in that nursing home bed waiting for people to change your diaper.
00:39:19.160So one of the things they can do is get a little magnet and put an adult diaper up on your refrigerator as a little subtle reminder every time you go in to choose what you're going to eat, you know, of how you want the last years of your life to be.
00:39:29.940You want to be enjoying your grandkids, not asking them to come in and, you know, and care for you.
00:39:35.180I hope you're happy with yourself because you ruined everyone's Thanksgiving.
00:39:39.060But you can have a fabulous Thanksgiving.
00:39:46.900You want to take that one leg and just take that bite like a caveman, and you're going to be thinking about Dr. Allen.
00:39:53.960Well, what you want to do is first have a big salad, a lot of steamed vegetables, have the potatoes, rice, and beans.
00:39:58.500If you eat enough of that, there's not that much room left for the more processed foods.
00:40:02.880You have not partied with Middle Easterns before because we like to break records, and we like to really, you know, do things that's never been done before when it comes down to food.
00:40:13.480But you are making a lot of sense when it comes down to this.
00:40:16.180So have you ever yourself done a 40-day or no?
00:41:05.620And I ended up having to do a longer fast in order to get that infection to clear because I was, you know, stubbornly not wanting to use antibiotics in that particular case.
00:41:15.640But with that exception, I've never really had any problems.
00:41:18.660I've been so fortunate to get started so young that I haven't had the health issues.
00:41:23.480And so when I fast for a week, if everything's clinically stable, just like with patients, I'll terminate the fast and move back to healthy eating.
00:41:29.460And always great relief because when you're fasting, you have to rest.
00:41:51.440Yeah, usually it's usually towards the end of the year, November, December, just because the way we do our staffing, it's easier for me to take that time off with less disruption.
00:42:01.040I was just waiting for you to say I do it during Thanksgiving or Christmas.
00:42:24.120We're not, although we have a lot of LDS patients.
00:42:27.440And we have, you know, I speak a lot to those organizations and those churches because they're very supportive of fasting and the whole idea of diet playing an important role in vegetarian diets and this type of thing.
00:42:40.420So what's your, is there a denomination you are or no?
00:42:45.040So I was raised with the K-foods, you know, the Kugel, the Kreplau, the Knishes, the Blintzes.
00:42:49.780And boy, it wasn't a shock to my parents when they had to make these changes themselves and give up their own traditional diets because of the need to regain their health.
00:42:59.160And I was very fortunate that both my mother and my father ended up actively embracing this style of life and did very well.
00:43:08.520My mother actually, when she was 92 years old, had outlived all 50 of her lifelong friends.
00:43:15.400And she told me that, you know, many of them used to make terrible fun of her because she wouldn't, you know, her son's crazy diet and all that stuff.
00:43:22.520But at 92, she realized the last of her lifelong friends had passed away and she was alone in terms of her lifelong friendships.
00:43:28.960And she said to me, she said, Alan, you need to warn your patients that if they're going to adopt these diet and lifestyle habits, make younger friends.
00:43:39.100And she said, much younger, because, you know, even the people a few years younger, they were still dying and they still couldn't engage.
00:43:46.600So I warn patients now, make younger friends. It's never too soon to start making younger friends.
00:43:52.660It's very good advice that she's giving. I mean, some men in their 50s, 60s may even take you that advice in a whole different way.
00:44:00.940But, but, but, but I heard you made, I heard you made 48 out of 50 shots. I mean, free throw wise. I mean, it's, that's pretty impressive. That's like Walt Williams type of a statistics.
00:44:09.980Well, I'll tell you something. I wanted it so badly to beat Dr. Lyle that I decided that I couldn't really beat him on the court. He's just too good.
00:44:17.120So I thought I can beat him in free throws because we know free throw shooting is really just practice.
00:44:21.880And I shot, you know, 500 free throws a day for six months thinking, okay, I'm going to get this down. I took some coaching. I got some help.
00:44:29.680And I, you know, casually one day he hasn't played for like a week. Right. And I say, Hey, Doug, why don't we have a free throw shooting contest?
00:44:37.640He's like, okay, whatever. So I go out there 48 out of 50. I'm so pleased with myself thinking I've got him. I mean, you know, 48 out of 50, you know, he hits 19, misses one.
00:44:52.600And of course I call him a choke. Cause you know, if you can hit 99 out of a hundred, why don't you just hit, just hit the hundred, you know?
00:45:00.840And so, you know, like I said, what can I do? I'm still working on it. I've never hit 80 in a row in my life. He hits 80 in a row.
00:45:10.640Well, you do kind of look like Mark price. So you, you, you, you, you, you know, he had a good free throw. I don't know if you remember Mark price or not.
00:45:15.900Oh yeah. Yeah. He was a 92, 94% guy. I think one season he even did 96. Okay. So, so we've talked about a lot of different things here with guys. Let me kind of take you to a different place. You know, I'll go to dinner with friends and we'll sit down and we'll talk and they'll say, I follow this diet. I follow that diet.
00:45:32.440And then, and then the wives will typically start with what we all ought to do. And then the guys will gladly debate any topic just to debate because we have nothing better to do than debate and see who's right and who's wrong.
00:45:46.400And then you kind of see, well, no, that's not how I do it. I mean, you first have to do the right thing. First get the blood. And then after you take your blood and then when the blood that's going to tell you what kind of food you should eat, because it's different for a and O and B and C and D and all this technical stuff. And I'm just sitting there saying, Oh, this is so complex.
00:46:00.200And then you look at families and tell me, tell me what you've seen here with 20,000 people that have come to you. You know, most people take up the religion that their parents had. If your parents are Jewish, you're probably Jewish. If your parents are Christian, you're Christian. If your parents are Republican, you'll typically end up being a Republican. They're Democrats. You'll be Democrat. Every once in a while, you'll see somebody says, you know what? I don't know if I believe in the person you believe in. I'm going to go do my own research and then I become something else. I don't know if I believe in being a Democrat. I want to be Republican. I want to be a Republican. I want to be a Republican.
00:46:30.200Democrat or whatever, maybe. Right. But do you see a similar trends with that being with how we eat based on how our parents ate and how often you see that cycle being broken and what causes for that to happen?
00:46:43.200Yeah, it's worse than that. It's not only what we've been taught, but diet is a hugely important cultural phenomenon. And so if you decide to step outside the norm on diet, it's very disturbing to people.
00:46:58.000You know, many of them are well-intentioned, misguided people that are genuinely concerned for your well-being. They think if you don't adopt the diet that they adopted, you're going to be, you know, it'll compromise your health and traditions.
00:47:10.180You know, I had that experience myself. You know, when I adopted this at 16, my mother was very concerned. I had adopted this, you know, whole plant food diet. And my uncle, who was a physician, actually was invited over.
00:47:22.400I remember because it was my 16th birthday and she wanted him to talk some sense into me. And he said, oh, you know, don't worry, Phil. These kids go through various diet fads and stuff.
00:47:33.320And as long as he eats plenty of gefilte fish and, you know, he'll be fine. And I explained to my uncle, I said, no, uncle, it's called being a vegan and, you know, no animal foods at all.
00:47:42.140He said, it's called being a mashugana. You'll stop it right this minute. Anyway, it's also, I decided that, that I decided at that point what career I wanted to pursue.
00:47:50.580I wanted to get into this alternative medicine. So I told the family, I decided on my career choice and he was really upset. He was screaming and yelling. I thought I was going to witness my first stroke.
00:47:59.060He said, nobody in this family would go to that kind of a doctor, let alone become that kind of a doctor. He says, better. You should be a communist spy.
00:48:07.080And he's screaming and yelling. And finally they get rid of him. He goes away. My dad, who's a really serious guy, takes me aside. He says, son, I don't know anything about this alternative medicine business.
00:48:16.580He says, but anything that makes him that angry and mad, it can't be bad. So you stick to your guns and good luck to you.
00:48:24.480But my father later, when I was in school, I was just coming out of school, began to have transient ischemic attacks.
00:48:32.260He had lived a conventional diet, you know, the traditional foods, was having essentially mini strokes, had lost his cognitive capacity where he couldn't remember his grandkids names.
00:48:42.460He had to retire from teaching. He was a mess. Comes into the center. We just started up, undergoes 26 days of fasting, recovers, has helped make a long story short.
00:48:51.240But 20 years later, he helped edit the pleasure trap because he had made such a fabulous recovery.
00:48:56.700So he ended up being a really fabulous outcome in terms of, you know, doing much, much better as a consequence of dietary change and remained compliant.
00:49:07.060Interestingly enough, my uncle, who, when I'm in school and we're doing this original work on blood pressure, I'm trying to get him interested in looking at our data.
00:49:16.180He won't look at our data. I says, uncle, there's a blood pressure. They're getting well. He says, they're not getting well.
00:49:20.260I said, they're getting well. He says, no, they're not getting well. So I've been in practice 50 years. They never get well.
00:49:25.800I said, no, they're getting well. He says, you don't know how to take blood pressure. Okay.
00:49:29.560So anyway, he says, he won't look at our data until it's published in a peer review journal.
00:49:35.180Two months before our article finally comes out, we get it accepted for publication.
00:49:40.180Two months before he dies of a massive heart attack.
00:49:42.760My mother swore to the day she died. He died just so he wouldn't have to admit he was wrong.
00:49:49.980I think it was the kugel, the kreplek, the knishes, the, you know, but who knows?
00:49:54.120Did he die April of 01? What month did he die?
00:49:57.240Because the paper is a June of 01, right? When he came out. Is that, is that the time?