#142: Alan Goldhamer, D.C. - Is Water Fasting for You?
Alan Goldhamer, D.C. - founder of True North Health Center
We’ve created a society that makes everything so simple.
With the push of a button, we can have highly-processed food, entertainment, and all of the excess we can handle (and even some we can’t). This has led to unprecedented levels of disease, despair, and death.
We are caught in the pleasure trap.
But there is good news. We DO have the power to override these temptations and allow our bodies to heal.
In November 1984, Dr. Alan Goldhamer opened the True North Health Center. They create a health-promoting environment through an SOS-Free Diet (that’s salt, oil, and sugar) and water-only fasting.
As you can imagine, this monitored approach to healing was once seen as complete quackery. Today? Because of the data, peer-reviewed studies, and astonishing results, fasting, and fasting-mimicking diets are now considered mainstream.
Today, Dr. Goldhamer explains how and why it really is healthy to give your body a chance to rest, reboot, and break some of those physiological addictive behaviors that are keeping us sick.
Episode Timestamps
00:00-06:45 Introduction to Dr. Alan Goldhamer, founder of True North Health Center
09:00 What exactly is intermittent fasting?
12:15 Origins of True North and Dr. Goldhamer's friendship with Dr. Doug Lisle
19:15 Emerging data showing benefits of fasting in healthy people as disease prevention
19:56 What is an SOS-Free diet?
23:10 93% of our food is WHAT???
24:00 What is the pleasure trap, and why were we born to seek pleasure?
29:24 What is The Law of Satiation and how does it affect our eating habits?
36:15 Promising research of fasting implications on tumor growth
37:10 Is there a special type of water consumed when fasting?
37:56 Unique physiological effects of water-only fasting
40:48 The Motivational Triad and how The Pleasure Trap still holds up today
44:30 Why it's vital to rest when fasting
48:00 Dr. Goldhamer's opinion on keto and paleo diets
50:35 What really motivates people to make a change?
53:00 How do you keep people on plan and remain compliant?
58:00 Recommended supplements from Dr. Goldhamer
1:00:48 Organic vs. Conventional foods?
1:03:04 Does Dr. Goldhamer fast?
1:05:18 Fasting impacts on Autoimmune disease
Episode Resources
True North Health Center Website
True North Health Foundation - Advancing knowledge and awareness of therapeutic water-only fasting
PLANTSTRONG Sedona Retreat - October 10th-15th, 2022 - Dr. Doug Lisle - the esteemed evolutionary psychologist and co-author of The Pleasure Trap - is attending our upcoming Sedona Retreat to give three of his paradigm-shifting lectures that help us understand all the forces working against us in our quest to live plantstrong. Once you SEE the system we live in - you can’t UNSEE it. And Dr. Lisle is a master in giving us language and tools to set ourselves on a permanent path to success. And great news! Our Sedona retreat has been approved for 21.5 CME credits for physicians and physician assistants. And 21.5 Nursing Contact Hours for nurses…. And 2.2 CEUs for other healthcare professionals as part of the registration fee for our PLANTSTRONG Retreat.
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Full YouTube Transcript
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
Well, SOS is the international symbol of danger, but it also stands for the chemicals that people add the food that make them fat, sick and miserable, and those chemicals are salt, oil, and sugar. Salt, oil and sugar are not actually food. They're by-products of processed food production. So when you add those chemicals to the food, it stimulates dopamine in the brain, like we talk about in The Pleasure Trap, and that induces a response we know of as pleasure. So the more dopamine, the more pleasure, and the more chemicals, the more dopamine. It's a drug-like effect, and that's why we have the problem with dietary excess and metabolic syndrome and why people are dying from cancer and heart disease and diabetes. And for that matter, COVID-19. The fact is that dietary excess is responsible for immune suppression that leads to a whole host of diseases that people are suffering from.
Rip Esselstyn:
I'm Rip Esselstyn, and welcome to the PLANTSTRONG podcast. The mission at PLANTSTRONG is to further the advancement of all things within the plant-based movement. We advocate for the scientifically proven benefits of plant-based living and envision a world that universally understands, promotes and prescribes plants as a solution to empowering your health, enhancing your performance, restoring the environment, and becoming better guardians to the animals we share this planet with. We welcome you wherever you are on your PLANTSTRONG journey and I hope that you enjoy this show.
Rip Esselstyn:
Hello, my PLANTSTRONG pinto beans. Ugh! I hope you love beans as much as I do. Beans, beans, beans. Speaking of beans, I got to say that it is simply amazing how far the plant-based movement has come, especially in the last 10 plus years, since I've written my first book, The Engine 2 Diet. What was once seen as completely kooky and outlandish and totally out there is now very much mainstream.
Rip Esselstyn:
Now, we still have a long way to go in educating people on what a healthy whole food plant-based diet is, but I just wanted to take a moment to recognize how far we've come in such a relatively short period of time. And I think it's one of the reasons why you'll appreciate today's interview with Dr. Alan Goldhamer, the founder of the TrueNorth Health Center and co-author of The Pleasure Trap with his colleague and lifelong best friend since the age of eight, Dr. Doug Lisle. It was back in November of 1984, that Dr. Goldhamer opened the TrueNorth Health Center in Santa Rosa, California, where they create a health promoting environment, espousing a SOS-free diet, that stands for salt, oil and sugar-free, along with water-only fasting. Now, that was almost 40 years ago. And as I know you can imagine, this monitored approach to healing was once seen as complete quackery.
Rip Esselstyn:
Today, however, because of the data, the peer-reviewed studies, and the astonishing results, fasting and fasting mimicking diets are also now very much mainstream and accepted. When I think about it, we have created a society that makes everything so simple. With the push up the button, we have how they process food. We have entertainment till the cows come home and all of the excess that we can handle, and clearly some that we can't. We are caught in the pleasure trap, but we humans do have the power to override these temptations and allow our bodies to heal.
Rip Esselstyn:
Today, Dr. Goldhamer and I have a conversation on how and why it really is healthy to give our body a chance to rest, reboot, and break some of those physiological addictive behaviors that are keeping so many of us so sick. And speaking of The Pleasure Trap, Dr. Doug Lisle, who you guys are going to love, the esteemed evolutionary psychologist and co-author of The Pleasure Trap, he will be attending our upcoming Sedona Retreat, where he will be giving several of his paradigm shifting lectures that help us understand all of the myriad forces that are working against us and our quest to live PLANTSTRONG.
Rip Esselstyn:
Once you see the system that we live in, you can't unsee it. Dr. Lisle is an absolute genius in giving us language and tools to set ourselves on a permanent path to success. And great news, our Sedona Retreat has been approved for 21 and a half CME credits for physicians and physician assistants, and 21 and a half nursing contact hours for nurses, and 2.2 CEU hours for other healthcare professionals as part of the registration fee for our PLANTSTRONG Retreat. There is no place on the planet like Sedona in the Red Rock mountains in October. I hope to see you as we learn and live together against this stunning backdrop. Visit plantstrong.com/sedona for all the details. Now let's get it on with Dr. Alan Goldhamer. Alan.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
Hey.
Rip Esselstyn:
Hi.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
It's good to be here.
Rip Esselstyn:
It's good to have you here. It's been a long time. I think the last time I saw you was either 2013 or '14, when I did a little flyby there to the TrueNorth Health Center in Santa Rosa. You were very cordial and you let me in and you gave me a great tour and you also fed me some of that vegan SOS fair.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
Excellent.
Rip Esselstyn:
Do you remember?
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
Of course.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah, it was epic. It was awesome. It was great for me because I'd heard so much about TrueNorth, but then to finally land and see what it was all about was really awesome.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
We've made a lot of changes since you were here. We've done a lot of growth and added some more buildings. Fasting itself has gone from being criminal quackery to cutting-edge research. So now there seems to be a little bit more interest and acceptance in some of the work that we've been doing for the last 40 years.
Rip Esselstyn:
Well, that's right. What do you think has allowed this water fasting only to go from being basically quackery to cutting-edge data researchers?
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
Well, I think people like Valter Longo at USC have been really helpful because they've published information in mainstream journals that look at the physiological effects of fasting and have raised issues about where fasting may be helpful, both as a standalone intervention, as well as in conjunction with conventional therapy. They've showed, for example, that when you use fasting in conjunction with chemotherapy, that there's dramatically increased all survival and effectiveness. That fasting creates an environment, for example, where healthy cells can be protected against the damages of some conventional therapy. And then they augment the benefit of therapy. They did a lot of that with animal studies and now more recently in human studies.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
We've also been very productive in terms of publishing articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals, showing both the safety and the efficacy of water-only fasting as a means of helping the body overcome diseases associated with dietary excess. Right now most people that are dying, are dying prematurely from coronary artery disease, heart attacks and strokes, type two diabetes, autoimmune diseases and cancers, including lymphoma. And fasting has been shown to be exceptionally helpful in giving the body a chance to try to heal itself from these conditions where there really isn't effective medical management for many of these problems. That's certainly raised, I think, the bar as far as people's willingness to consider something really radical, like diet and fasting as far as a primary treatment.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Well, I look around me and this term intermittent fasting is part of the lexicon now. It wasn't to me even five years ago.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
So, intermittent fasting where people limit their feeding window, the idea that maybe you shouldn't be eating all day long, all night long, and waking up and eating. So the idea is to limit your feeding window depending on your goals, eight to 12 hours a day. That means you're not eating three to four hours before you go to bed. That you may delay breakfast until you've had a chance to do some exercise in the morning. And in doing this, you may help reduce overeating and increase fat mobilization. Particularly, if in that eight hour feeding window, you stick to a whole plant food SOS-free diet, you're likely to get tremendously good results. And hopefully, that'll be sufficient to resolve people's problems. If it's not, then of course we use fasting as a way of augmenting that healthy diet and lifestyle.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Yeah. But what's interesting to me is that, if somebody, maybe in the past, would've never been interested in doing something as what sounds as extreme as a water-only fasting for days, and in some cases, I know you guys go up to 40 plus days. The fact that this lexicon is now out there, oh, intermittent fasting, or they're not as scared off to me as doing something like that.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
No question. People used to think that if you got on an airplane in New York and you flew all the way to California, you die of starvation over Colorado, unless you ate the peanuts. They think the peanuts of the pretzels is what saved their life. Even if you're just thinking about 16 hours of fasting cumulatively day after day after day after day, just that little bit of fasting is thought to have a long-term beneficial effect. So the idea that a longer period of fasting might have an accentuated benefit is good.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
When they talk about fasting mimicking diets create situations that induce some of the benefits of fasting and introduces the idea that fasting has benefit. So I think you're right. It's just the getting the language out there, getting the ideas out there. And then of course, when you look at the actual outcome data, it's overwhelming. We did a study on high blood pressure. We took 174 consecutive patients with hypertension. We demonstrated the largest effects that have ever been shown in treating high blood pressure in humans with an average effect size of 60 points in systolic blood pressure reduction with nothing other than fasting and a healthy diet.
Rip Esselstyn:
And that's over what period of time?
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
The fasting periods range from five to 40 days. So in that study, I think the longest fasts were actually about 23 days. So the idea is it doesn't take a lot of fancy intervention. You basically get people on a healthy diet, stop eating, give the body a chance to normalize blood pressure. And then it's sustainable to the degrees that people are willing to continue to eat a healthy diet. Now, it's also true, if you can just get people to eat a healthy diet, many people's blood pressure will normalize without fasting.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
But what happens is there are some people that for whatever reason, have difficulty implementing a good diet or they've implemented a good diet, but their problem is severe enough that it persists. I think that's why Dr. McDougall calls us the punishment. So he'll send us a patient with the idea that, "Oh, I'm so sorry to do this to you, but your blood pressure's still high. So you got to go over to Goldhamer's. Good luck to you." It's like, thanks. They call us TrueNorth Health Center, the last resort.
Rip Esselstyn:
That's right. That's right. Well, you've been going down this path for 40 plus years. Is that right?
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
Yeah, 40 years. We opened the TrueNorth Health Center in 1984. So we've been fasting people continuously since then. We've had over 21,000 people actually do water-only fasting at TrueNorth Health. And before that, I was going to osteopathic college in Australia and I worked with Dr. Alec Burton and we did fasting there at his facility. So yeah, we've got about 40 years in so far.
Rip Esselstyn:
Alan, I just want to understand how it is that you landed where you landed. Tell me, were your parents physicians?
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
No, actually not at all. My parents were teachers. But it was really Dr. Lisle that drove this whole process because we grew up together since fourth grade. He was always much, much better than me in basketball and it frustrated me. I wanted to beat him and I tried practicing more. None of that worked and I thought, "Well, maybe if I got healthier, I could beat him." And I read books by Herbert Shelton and others that said that health was the result of healthful living and that it was diet, sleep and exercise that led to health. And that fasting could help undo the consequences of dietary excess.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
And I thought, "Well, I'll implement those diet lifestyle recommendations and then I'll crush him." The problem was it completely failed because he adopted the same diet. And to this day, I'm 63 years old, he still kicks my butt every time we play. So it hasn't worked yet, but I'm hoping that if he ages out just a little faster, maybe by the time we reach our 80s, I'll finally be able to beat him.
Rip Esselstyn:
Well, I have a feeling you probably eat just a little bit cleaner than he does.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
Well, we eat the same diet, but occasionally, he might indulge in a little vegan carrot cake or something. And I'm hoping that little occasional variation will ultimately catch up with it.
Rip Esselstyn:
Well, tell me this, so you guys are friends, and for people that are out there, I'm also good friends with Doug Lisle, not like you, but Doug is a speaker at all of our medical immersion programs. So I've gotten to play a lot of basketball against Doug. I don't know if he's told you. I actually took him down once in horse and I also took him down once in around the world. And that's no small feet because this guy is like a shark.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
Oh, let me tell you something.
Rip Esselstyn:
So it's like Doug Nash.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
I worked for six months on... I thought, I can't beat him once. He's quick. He's a very good basketball player. So I thought, well, I could beat him in free throw because that's just practice. So I'm shooting 500 shots a day. I'm practicing for six months. And then very casually, one day I just said, "Hey, why don't we do a free throw shooting contest?" He said, "Oh, okay. I haven't played in three weeks, whatever." So I get 48 out of 50. And I think, "I got him, I got him." He hits 19, and this one, and then hits 80 in a row.
Rip Esselstyn:
No, no, no, no. I know. It is really crazy.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
Yeah, it's ridiculous. Of course, I'm saying, "Geez, what a choke? If you're going to hit 99 out of 100, why don't you just hit 100?"
Rip Esselstyn:
Exactly. Well, so I just saw Doug a couple weeks ago and he had a bit of a bum knee. So now's your chance to take him down.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
Yeah, but that doesn't really... I don't get any satisfaction of that. I got to wait for him to heal and then we'll go back out there.
Rip Esselstyn:
So how is it that you and Doug both simultaneously found a whole food plant-based nutrition at the same time?
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
Well, it's because I had read that material and I discussed it with him and he thought, "Well, yeah, that makes sense." So he did it.
Rip Esselstyn:
He sure did. Wow!
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
Yeah. If I hadn't mentioned it to him, then maybe I would've gotten enough benefit over him, but what can you do?
Rip Esselstyn:
Well, lot's amazing how you guys have remained friends that long and this experiment has now gone on what, for how long?
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
Well, so 54 years, I guess, so far.
Rip Esselstyn:
54 years and you both look remarkable. You're testaments to what the lifestyle can do now.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
I have to say though, I was also inspired by my uncle who was a physician. My uncle said that this alternative medicine stuff was the worst thing ever. And when I mentioned, when I was 16, I decided to pursue nutritional medicine as a career. He said, "No, no, nobody in this family is to go to somebody like that, let alone become somebody like that." He said, "Better you should be a communist spy." And my father, who was a really serious guy, didn't say much. He took me aside and he said, "Son, I don't know anything about this alternative medicine business." He says, "But anything that makes him that angry and that mad, it can't be bad. So good luck to you and stick to your gun so."
Rip Esselstyn:
Now, is your father and mother still alive?
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
My father and mother have both passed away. Both had good lives and good deaths. My father at 88, my mother at 93. My uncle, interestingly enough, when I came back from Australia, I decided we would do our first study on hypertension. But my uncle wouldn't look at the data. He said, until it's published in peer-reviewed journal, he won't have anything to do with it. And then finally, after we worked with T. Colin Campbell from Cornell to get it published, two months before it comes out, my uncle died of a massive heart attack. Until she died, my mother insisted that he died just so he wouldn't have to admit he was wrong.
Rip Esselstyn:
Oh my goodness gracious. I understand you went down this path. When did you actually open up TrueNorth?
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
We opened TrueNorth in November of 1984. My wife, Dr. Marano and I started TrueNorth and that's been going on since then.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. And you do anywhere from a couple days to 40 days. Water fasting is one of the many things that you offer. What are some of the other things that you offer at TrueNorth?
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
Some people are not candidates for water-only fasting. We may do juice fasting, or we may do just healthy eating programs. Many people come in just to eat healthy food. We have a dozen doctors. So medical doctors, chiropractors, osteopaths, naturopaths, psychologists. So there's other things that may be offered for people in addition to fasting. Although most of the people that we see now are coming for medically supervised water-only fasting. We have a 70 bed facility. Right now I think they're booking November. So we book many months in advance. We have about 100 people on a wait list right now.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
There's a lot more demand than we can provide. But fortunately, we've trained some doctors in our internship and residency programs and there's places now in Ohio and Southern California and in Texas and in Florida. So there's other places that people can go to where doctors have been trained in using fasting to help people overcome these diseases that respond well to fasting. Or for healthy people that are looking to stay that way. We actually have some data out just this last month, not published yet, that shows that these tremendous biomarker changes that occur in sick people, actually in healthy people, in some cases, the biomarker changes are even more profound. That it may actually be the healthy people using fasting preventatively, that may derive actually the most benefit of all.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
We actually have a paper that just came out two weeks ago in nutrients, which is pretty big impact journal. And it looks at the cardio metabolic risk factors associated with coronary artery disease. It's absolutely tremendous because not only have we shown that you can do fasting safely and these changes occur when you're fasting, but now we have six week and now one year follow up data showing that not only can people get well, but they're actually able to stay well by adopting a whole plant food SOS-free diet. SOS is the international symbol of danger, but it also stands for the chemicals that people add the food that make them fat, sick and miserable. And those chemicals are salt, oil, and sugar.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
Salt, oil and sugar are not actually food. They're by-products of process food production. So when you add those chemicals to the food, it stimulates dopamine in the brain, like we talk about in The Pleasure Trap, and that induces a response we know of as pleasure. So the more dopamine, the more pleasure, and the more chemicals, the more dopamine. It's a drug-like effect, and that's why we have the problem with dietary excess and metabolic syndrome and why people are dying from cancer and heart disease and diabetes. And for that matter, COVID-19. The fact is that dietary excess is responsible for immune suppression that leads to a whole host of diseases that people are suffering from.
Rip Esselstyn:
We'll be right back with Alan in a second. We have been talking a lot about those highly refined and highly processed foods that keep us in the pleasure trap. But as you hear Dr. Goldhamer and I discuss, you can break the cycle, and I want to share this quick letter from a couple who did just that.
Rip Esselstyn:
"Hi, my wife and I have been vegetarian for over 30 years. And since January, we have been PLANTSTRONG. We cut out all oils and other fats. We followed your recommendations and I have to thank you. I have been on blood pressure meds for six years with no reduction in my BP. Since being PLANTSTRONG, I now have a healthy blood pressure in just three months. Thank you so much. Tony Bailey."
Rip Esselstyn:
Well, Tony, huge congrats to you and your wife. I love your distinction between being vegetarian and being PLANTSTRONG. Being PLANTSTRONG is just that, eating strong food that is low in fat, no added oils, low in salt, sugar, and all the other addictive junk that is often found in these highly processed foods, even those so-called plant-based foods that you're seeing so much of these days that are littering the grocery store shelves.
Rip Esselstyn:
If you want foods that you can trust, visit plantstrongfoods.com for our brand new assortment of chilies, soups, stews, pizza crus, cereals, guilt-free granolas, and much more. And if you need help in the kitchen, our PLANTSTRONG meal planner is our most powerful tool to save you time and keep you on track. Visit mealplanner.plantstrong.com and save $10 off the annual membership with the code, PLANTSTRONG. Okay, back to the conversation with Alan Goldhamer. So this Western diet that is so widely accepted right now in this culture is responsible for a problem that has the same magnitude as heroin, alcohol and tobacco, is basically just seen as absolutely normal.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
Well, 93% of all the calories consumed by people living in industrialized countries come from either animal foods, which is meat, fish, fowl, eggs, extra dairy products, or highly processed pleasure trap chemicals. So the oil, the flour, the sugar, the refined carbohydrates. So only 7% calories come from fruits and vegetables. And a third of that is potatoes, which are served mostly as French fries and potato chips. Fruits and vegetables are no longer statistically significant percentage of the diet of most people. They're the decoration on the plate. And that's why two thirds of people are now overweight or obese. If you are not obese or overweight, you are abnormal, the average or normal person is now suffering from the diseases of dietary excess.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah, yeah. It's truly sad. So as you talk about in The Pleasure Trap, how are we supposed to fight these millions of years of evolutionary preference for foods that are concentrated in calories?
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
Well, The Pleasure Trap is the hidden force that undermines health and happiness. As I said, it's the reason why people were overweight and developing all these diseases. In a natural setting, it's not a problem. You're designed to get as much to eat as you can, eat the most concentrated foods available. And if you're really lucky, you might live to reproduce. Remember, most humans didn't live to reproduce. They died from predation, starvation. They didn't pass on their genes. They were the losers. Your ancestors were the winners. They're the ones that got enough to eat, didn't get eaten and managed to pass on their DNA. You were designed for an environment of scarcity. For almost all of human history, humans lived in an environment of scarcity, where getting enough to eat and not getting eaten was so difficult that only the fittest survived.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
Now we live in an environment because of processed foods, where you can get enough to eat and not get eaten and never even get off the couch. People are so deconditioned now they can't even get out of their car and walk all the way into McDonald's. They got to go through the drive through because it just would be too exhausting to walk all the way into the store. You can't even get up to get another beer. You got to have a chair with a cooler in the bottom of the chair so you can avoid to have to work. You can't walk up the steps you get on the escalator or the elevator. You don't even exercise anymore. We pay other people to do it. We call it the NFL. You watch other people exercise and pretend that you're part of the winning coalition as they engage in mock warfare.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
We've created a society where getting enough to eat is so simple that you don't have to do anything in terms of exercise or moving. Let's think about it in a natural setting. Why did people move? Because they were hot, they were cold, they were hungry, they were thirstier. They didn't want to get eaten. Well, none of that requires any effort anymore. And because our brain is designed for energy conservation, pleasure seeking and pain avoidance, the motivational triad that we talk about in The Pleasure Trap, it's exactly what you predict would happen.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
IT's exactly what happens to all the other animals if you give them access to highly processed foods. Rats and birds and mice, they'll get so fat they can't even fly. Because if they're given access to the foods we eat, it's exactly what you would expect to happen. Unless you override it consciously. A rat's not going to override it. Every rat that's given access to excessively clerically dense foods will get fat. But humans have the option of overriding it intellectually, but it's really difficult. And that's why most people aren't doing it.
Rip Esselstyn:
So unwittingly, these buttons that are embedded in us from the motivational triad are robbing us of our health and happiness?
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
Absolutely. And you know it obviously with drug addiction. Like for example, if a person's an alcoholic, we know that alcoholism leads to not just compromised physical health, but also emotional health and wellbeing. But if you go up to an alcoholic and say, "Oh, you know how your life, it sucks? It's because you're a drunk." Do they go, "Oh, it's the alcohol? I had no idea. Oh, thank you so much. I won't drink anymore." Or do they tell you to mind your own f***in' business? Because they're caught in the pleasure trap. The same thing can be true with cocaine and with heroin, very difficult to escape the pleasure trap associated with drugs.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
Well, what I'm saying is that the chemicals that we put in our food, the oil, the salt and sugar stimulate the same dopamine cascade in the brain. And although they may not be as powerful short-term, say as cocaine, the neurochemical pathways are the same. So you have two thirds of the population that are addicted to the artificial stimulation of dopamine in their brain, just like drug addicts are addicted to artificial stimulation, they're addicted. So when you tell them, "Oh, you need to stop eating all those refined carbohydrates and the sugars and you need a whole plant food diet." That's one of the most difficult things they're ever going to do in their life. It's so difficult for them because not only are they addicted, but they're also banging on their neurochemistry. They eat the sugar, their insulin goes down, their blood sugar goes down.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
The brain thinks they're starving. And the brain is just trying to keep you alive. And the brain does not want you to lose that fat, by the way. If you're losing fat, your brain is saying, "Oh, you're hemorrhaging your strategic fat reserves. Stop it." Because them skinny ones, when spring comes late, they're not going to make it. The ones that are able to store fat, let's be clear, your ancestors were not the skinny ones. They were the ones that were able to store fat. And when spring came late, they managed to survive. When they went on the long boat ride, they got to the end of the trip. They probably ate everybody else for all we know. But the reality is that your programming is designed for an environment of scarcity. You live in an environment of abundance. The only way you override that, the only chance you have is to understand how it works intellectually and choose to have the discipline to override it. And it's very difficult.
Rip Esselstyn:
And you call that making the decision?
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
You call it whatever you want to call it. Bottom line is, it's diet, sleep, and exercise. That's what you have to do. And our version of diet, just like your version of diet, is a whole plant food diet that doesn't require or rely on these chemicals in order to be able to meet people's needs. So it's whole plant foods. Things like fruits and vegetables, grains of goons, nuts and seeds, the things that only make a tiny percentage of most people's diet.
Rip Esselstyn:
Tell me about the law of satiation, because I think that plays an important part in this whole puzzle.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
So if there was no satiation mechanisms, you would just keep eating. And you see that in some humans that have less sensitive satiety mechanisms that eat the same diets, but they get fatter and fatter. Sometimes they get so big they can't get out of the house. Most people will get to a certain size and then more or less come to some level of bounce because of satiation mechanisms, or your brain tells you've had enough. For example, think about it. If you just sit down and eat apples, you eat a certain number of apples and then you feel full or satiated. And if you try to push that, you'll get really negative feedback, like a belly ache. Any kid that sat in an apple tree and ate too many apples, the next day gets...
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
IF you are sitting and let's say you eat 500 calories of apples, at some point you feel full. But if you, say take ice cream, you can take a 1500 calorie container ice cream. You'll eat the whole container. You'll be banging your spoon in the bottom looking for more wondering where the rest of it is. You don't get that same consistent feedback because it's highly process fractionated food. So when you take foods and increase corn density artificially, for example, like in breads where you have 1500 calories a pound instead of wheat berries, which would be 500 calories a pound.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
When you eat highly concentrated or highly fractionated foods, your so tightly mechanisms don't work as well. So eventually your yellow circuits will kick in, you're overweight, eat less, and they'll keep you to some level. But that level is significantly higher than what it should be healthfully in most cases. Unless you happen to be a person like Dr. Lisle who have really sensitive satiety mechanisms. I can even remember as a kid before we knew anything. You know how some of those things that have two cookies in the package. You would have one cookie and wrap the package up and put it away because he was full. I would've eaten the cookies and the package and everything else that went along with it.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
So depending on your individual satiety mechanisms, it determines how fat you get. The people that are eating conventional diets that are not obese, it's not because they're more disciplined or they're doing a better job. It's just their natural satiety mechanisms are a little more sensitive and even to some of the more concentrated foods. So they'll tend not to be as overweight. What's great though, is if you want a whole plant food diet, you don't have to worry too much about the satiety mechanism because you'll start getting large amounts of low density food. So the fiber is there, the satiation mechanism in the stomach, the satiation mechanisms in the brain are activated.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
So people eating large volumes of low density food find they can maintain optimum weight without having to weigh and measure and have all this hyper discipline. The problem is the more highly processed foods, the easier it is to fool the satiety mechanisms and become obese. Again, it's true in rats and mice. If you take rats and let them eat as much as they want of their normal chow, they get to a certain size. But you put sugar, oil, and salt in the food, they'll gain 49% of their body weight in 60 days.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
This isn't psychological. It's not because the rat was under stress, it's because mommy rat didn't love him enough or daddy rat loved him too much or whatever, it's biological. It's because they're artificially stimulating dopamine in their brain from the chemicals added to their food. So they eat more. The moment you stop fooling the brain, you stop the problem. And if you're a male, you can expect weight loss to average about three pounds a week, a female about two pounds a week.
Rip Esselstyn:
Just to drive this point home, will you share with the audience, if you look at other mammals in their natural environments, you don't see very many overweight.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
There's no obesity unless they get access to highly processed foods. Even whales, which you think of as being blubbery, they're 90% body fat. They just happen to wear their fat on the outside of their body. But they're lean mean machines. On the other hand, if you give any animal access to highly processed refined carbohydrate, they will gain weight. Look at what happens to dogs and cats and any other animal that you have familiarity with. They all become obese and they won't stop. It's like humans at least have the theoretical potential that they could stop because they can velicially override it if they understand how the system works.
Rip Esselstyn:
So you talked about that whale being 9% body fat. Did you check that, a whale out in your DEXA scanner?
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
I didn't get to do the whale on the DEXA scanner. It's really limited to the people more of human size. But we did do some interesting work and I want to talk about that. We got a DEXA scanner in with the new software that allows us to do detailed whole body composition, which not only tells you how much fat you have, but specifically how much visceral fat you have. Visceral fat is the type of fat associate with ill health. And it's getting rid of visceral fat that's critical to preventing and reversing these diseases.
Rip Esselstyn:
Is the visceral the fat that's around the organs.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
Yeah, around the organs in your belly. You think of as belly fat. So what we did is we took these subjects, we put them through fasting. We did DEXA scan before at the end of fasting, at the end of follow-up, and then at six week follow-up. And we said, "What happened to the body composition?" So when you go on a fast, you lose weight, you lose protein, fat, fiber, glycogen and water. And then we said, "Okay, what happens at six week follow up?" Well, what we found was that the lean tissue was actually higher at six week follow-up than it was before they started fasting. Even though they had lost tremendous amounts of weight, but the weight was predominantly fat, and preferentially visceral fat.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
In fact, a person, the fast of two weeks might lose, say for example, 20% of their total body fat, but 54% of their visceral fat. And that the lean tissue that they lost 4% lean tissue during fasting, had already been fully recovered at six weeks and then some. So what you ended up doing was having body transformation where fat and visceral fat was eliminated, protein, water, fiber, and glycogen fully restored. Now, that's assuming they're willing to do dangerous and radical things like eat a whole plant food diet, exercise, get enough sleep.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
If you go back to greasy, fatty, slimy, dead, decaying flesh, alcohol, processed food, you will eventually get your fat and your visceral fat back. But the ratio of visceral fat to adipose mobilization was almost 3.0. And the body was preferentially going in and grabbing this visceral fact that shouldn't even be there and mobilizing that preferentially over even adipose tissue and preserving lean tissue. One of the caveats though is you need to have people resting when they're fasting in order to minimize glucogenesis. So this is not a situation where you're running around exercising and working. And this is done medically supervised in a controlled setting, where people have had history exam lab and they're monitored properly in order to make it safe.
Rip Esselstyn:
I find this utterly fascinating that the body somehow knows when it's in fasting mode and resting mode to heal itself by attacking, first of all, the visceral fat.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
Think about this, tumors. We've done some work that's been published, in fact, in the British Medical Journal on the resolution of lymphoma tumors. So you think, well, if you lose 10% of your body weight, you'd expect to lose 10% of your tumor, but that's not what happens. You might lose 10% of your body weight, but 100% of the tumor. So how is it able to mobilize 100% of the tumor rather than just use it like it would any fuel? It's because the body has some inherent ability to determine which tissues are the least vital and it mobilizes those first. In fact, nervous tissue is never mobilized. You can starve an animal to death, not that we would do that, and when they've done research where they've starved the animal to death and then look at the nervous system, there's no impact from starvation on the nervous system, because it's preserved even to the very end.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
There's an inverse proportional mobilization that happens in fast.
Rip Esselstyn:
So explain to the audience, we get the water fasting. The only thing you're consuming is water. Is it a particular type of water?
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
Well, it's highly purified water. We use laboratory grade steamed, distilled water, because that's the best accepted. But you could use reverse osmosis. There's lots of ways to highly purify water. What you can't do is use municipal water because people will, they can actually get very sensitive and they can detect a lot of the chemicals. They don't like it, they won't drink it. Then they get dehydrated. It's not good. So we want to use some type of highly purified water. You know what would be the most purified water, would be rainwater in a clean environment, that would be distilled water.
Rip Esselstyn:
I'm going to ask you some really basic questions here so we can all get our heads wrapped around this. So we're drinking water and tell me, why is it we're not juicing or just eating kale or just minimal amounts of really clean food? Why is that?
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
Well, there's a unique physiological adaptation that happens with water-only fasting. It's very different. That doesn't mean that juice diets are limited. Diets might not be helpful that we certainly use them. They can be very helpful for people that are trying to lose weight or whatever. But in water fasting, there's a unique physiological adaptation that occurs. So if your goal is to mobilize visceral fat, if your goal is to break the tumor down, if your goal is to normalize blood pressure. For example, changes that would take place in a week or two of water fasting might take us months with an alternative approach. So it's when you want to rapidly make clinical changes, get people off medications.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
Or if you have people, for example, that are addicted to sugar and you can give them fruit juices that are full of sugar and they'll like that and stuff and they might lose weight and stuff, but you're not going to break that physiological addictive response as easily as she would in water fasting. And we've done a study on this. We actually did a study on taste in our adaptation where we looked at minimum threshold to sugar, to salt sensation, before and after fasting. And after fasting, we've proved that those thresholds change. That people's liking of sugary, salty, fatty, salty food changes with fasting. What's bizarre is foods go from being tasteless, swill, disgusting to desirable as a consequence. And now they're willing to eat the whole natural foods, whereas before, ah, they didn't like them.
Rip Esselstyn:
So it's almost like a great way of resetting your pallet.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
It's like rebooting the hard drive in a computer that's been corrupted. You don't know why, but you turn the thing off, you turn it on and now it starts working again. Well, the same thing happens to people. Their gut microbiome is profoundly affected. Taste irritation is affected. Their desire, their willingness, just being out of pain. There's a powerful and an inflammatory effect. So now you get people that are miserable. They can't exercise because they got so much joint pain. And now all of a sudden, they can begin walking and hiking. And then the exercise increases brain gene BDNF, and they can sleep better. They get all the benefit of the exercise and diet that they weren't able to get because you couldn't get them to do it because they were so sick.
Rip Esselstyn:
So this is really probably the most effective way at fighting people who are in the throes of the pleasure trap?
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
If you can't get them to do the diet lifestyle changes, then fasting might help them be able to make the diet lifestyle changes. Many of these changes will occur over time if you can get people to implement the diet lifestyle changes.
Rip Esselstyn:
But when you and Doug decided to write The Pleasure Trap, was it 2005, if I'm not mistaken, or '4, you must have learned so much since founding TrueNorth in 1984 that allowed you to understand, unless this is stuff that's just out there and everybody knows about it, the motivational triad and everything.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
Well, nobody knows about the motivational triad because Dr. Lisle was the one that really originated that conceptually.
Rip Esselstyn:
Really?
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
I argued with him. I tried to argue with him about that because we know that pain avoidance and pleasure seeking were dominant behaviors in human motivation. He kept insisting, "No, but energy conservation is a critical component." I said, "What are you talking about?" "Yeah, yeah." "No, no." And then of course, when I finally understood what he was saying, I realized he was just a really brilliant guy. He had figured that out. In fact, if you go through The Pleasure Trap today, you'll find many of his conceptual insights are now becoming more accepted. The Pleasure Trap itself has been much more accepted. People are writing about different versions, but he's really the one that went back from an evolutionary, psychological viewpoint and figured out how this works. That's original stuff vomiting out of his brain.
Rip Esselstyn:
That's. Yeah go ahead.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
When it comes to conceptual development, you will not find... I have never come across anybody whose brain works like his. It's just phenomenal.
Rip Esselstyn:
Well, I think I remember Doug telling me a story over dinner once, that didn't you two lock yourselves in a house together, and however long it would take for you to finish the book and it was what, six months or something ridiculous?
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
It took two years actually. He came and he lived with us and the idea was that every day, we would try to get him write. He needs a little help getting him organized. Once he actually sits down and starts writing, he's like 800 words an hour. He's unbelievable. He's incredibly productive, but to get him organized. So my job was to get him organized and take care of everything so he didn't have any distraction. And then he would put those couple hours of productivity. And then we would argue conceptually about the concepts. I would challenge him on all the things that he was... The frustrating thing with him, he's almost always right. But what would happen is Jennifer, my wife, would come in at some point, because we'd be screaming and yelling and arguing and carrying on. And she'd say, "Okay, boys, it's time for the green chairs."
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
We had these green chairs in the far end of the house that was hidden behind doors where she couldn't hear us. So she could go to sleep and we would stay up and just really trash all this stuff through. And the thing is, by the time we were done though, The Pleasure Trap was there. And today, we went back at looking at what would we change and how would we do it different? Really, there's nothing in there that we can't defend today. There may be new things that we would add. But I think it still stands the test of time and that it conceptually is in fact an accurate description. And the reason it was based on evolutionary psychology and the understanding that we have from natural hygiene and where we had many years of watching people make these changes and seeing what those struggles were.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
So it was a unique combination of physical and psychological. And it's a bizarre book. I mean, it's a very disturbing book because it doesn't tell you what you want to hear. It tells you what you need to know to get and stay healthy. It's not pleasant in the sense that people don't want to hear that they have to make diet and lifestyle changes. They got to exercise, they got to go bet on time. And that there's no magic bullet that violates the laws of physics or thermodynamics so that they can get what they want without having to pay the price.
Rip Esselstyn:
Well, it's perfect. And the fact that it came from you and Doug, best friends since the fourth grade is so appropriate. I want to go back to a sec to this water-only fasting. So when I was doing my research, I read about how, yes, the water-only fasting is very important for, I think, metabolism and whatnot. But one of the key components is you don't want to be running around exercising. You really want to be resting. And that's the part that was like, really, so I got to chill out?
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
So the big problem here is when you go on a fast, what fasting is, essentially is the brain changing from burning glucose to burning fat. For example, chimpanzees can't fast. They can go about a week and then they die. That's why you'll never find chimps away from the tropics. They have to have a year round supply of food. Because their brain, even though it's not anywhere near ours because ours is two and a half times as big a mass, it still, it's a pretty big brain and it burns a bunch of glucose. So if you don't have food, eventually you break down your muscle because that's the only way you get glucose. You break down muscle glucogenesis to make glucose.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
Okay. Humans had to be able to fast because our brain is so big and it's our biggest point of glucose. If we couldn't fast and we could only live a week, every time spring came late, all the humans that wandered away from the tropics would've died. And they did. All humans can change their brain from burning sugar to burning fat. And that's essentially fasting. So here's the problem. You go on a fast and your brain stops burning as much glucose, everything winds down. And now you only need a little bit of glucose and you get that from labile protein breaking down some protein, but you don't need much.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
As you get farther and farther into the fast, by the end of the second week, 90 plus percent of calories come from fat. But let's say you take that person and make them use their muscles more or even make them use their brain more. What happens is then you have to come up with some extra glucose. And the only place you can get that from consistently is breaking down protein. Well, if you have a little bit, that's okay. But if you need a lot, that's not going to work. You're not going to live very long. Humans, instead of living just seven days, can live 70 days. If we took you and put you in a resting state, we could fast you 70 days before you die.
Rip Esselstyn:
70, really?
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
Yeah. Average 155 pound male can go about 70 days. So, a thin male. A fat guy could go a lot longer if they fast humans as long as a year. But a thin guy like you, that's a lower body fat, high muscle mass could go certainly around 70, not that you should do that, but you could do that.
Rip Esselstyn:
Wow.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
Now, if we put you on a fast, you're going to burn mostly fat. And if you have any visceral fat, you'd burn that. You probably don't have much because you're lean mean machine. But the point is that's where you get your fuel. But if you're exercising, you will burn significantly more protein. And we don't want to deplete your protein stores. We like you to keep your muscles as much as possible. And that means you have to rest. So even though if you're exercising and fasting and you'll lose more weight, it'll be derived a lot much more. So for muscle rather than fat, when you rest, you maximize fat.
Rip Esselstyn:
So you mentioned the brain and what the brain uses, what 500, burns 500 calories a day roughly, and glucose.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
Yeah.
Rip Esselstyn:
So when you're doing this-
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
Unless, you're Dr. Lisle, then it's probably like 700, but yeah,
Rip Esselstyn:
For sure, for sure. So if I'm doing this water-only fast and I'm resting, do you not want me also doing complex mathematical equations or what?
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
It probably is a good idea to kick it easy, but even so, your brain will change fuels and your brain will be burning mostly fat by the time you get into the fast. So yeah, there's a little bit of glucose that's used there, a little bit in the red blood cells, a little bit in the muscles. But if you're resting, it's really the muscle activity that we're looking to maximally conserve.
Rip Esselstyn:
I don't want to spend a lot of time on this, but I do want to get your opinion. Because in the last five years, it seems like we've evolved from the paleo to keto to carnivore and it just keeps getting crazier. So what's your opinion of these things?
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
So the dead Dr. Atkins diet, may his filet of soul rest in peace, it's not a long-term sustainable health promoting diet. Here's the problem. It's true. You get a fasting mimicking effect when you go on a high fat, high protein diet. So just like in fasting, hunger is blunted. And so people can eat the greasy fatty processed foods they've always been eating, get rid of the carbohydrates and lose a little bit of weight for a while. The problem is, it's not a long-term sustainable health promoting diet. It's not a diet that you would put anybody on. A high protein, high fat diets lead to all kinds of health compromise. Shorter term effects with gallbladder and colon issues, longer term effects with heart disease and cancer. So even though, yes, you might be able to lose a little bit of weight because of the hunger blunting effect of high fat diets with low carbohydrate, that's not a health promoting long-term diet.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
I think he died at what, 268 pounds from cardiomyopathy. It wasn't because he fell down in the snow. He was not a hypocrite though. I give him credit. He's stuck to that diet till the day it killed him. So what can you say? As far as long-term, if you want to lose weight quickly, the best way to do it would be to cut your leg off at the hip with a chainsaw, because you could drop 40 pounds overnight. And if you want to drop 80 pounds, just cut them both off, but that's not necessarily a healthy way to do it. If you want to lose weight healthily, you're going to go on a whole plant food SOS-free diet. If you're a male, you can expect to lose about three pounds a week. If you're a female, about two pounds a week.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
Okay, women are going to lose weight about 50% lower than men because they're full of estrogen instead of testosterone. And testosterone is a fat burning hormone. In fact, if you give women enough testosterone, they lose their fat. The problem is they get hairy and get cancer and die. Not a good strategy. If you inject men with estrogen, we get fat, we grow breasts and hips. These are biological differences. So if you're a woman, what does it mean? You work twice as hard to get half the results. Just get used to it. I mean, it's not just in weight loss, it's in everything else too. So that's okay.
Rip Esselstyn:
Alan, I love it. You just don't mince words. Just tell it like it is. I can remember, Doug tells this story about how when somebody says, "Eat a whole food plant based diet without any salt, oil, sugar, I don't think I could do that." You just look at him and say, "Oh you're probably right. You probably can't." It's not like, oh, you sure you could.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
What motivates people? Okay. There's only two things I see that motivate people consistently. One is people have problems. They have pain debility and fear of death. And if they have enough pain, they'll be willing to do anything for a while, even eat well or exercise or go to bed on time. And then sometimes people do it intellectually. For example, I had a gentleman who came in, he was a smoker, drinker and meat eater and he said he wanted to take the cure. He was a mean looking guy, so I didn't ask him too many questions. We put him through the process. At the end though, I said, "How come you did this?" And he said, he did the math. He had just retired, 65 years old, and he said, he realized in order to get his money back from retirement, he had to live to be 82. He knew he wouldn't do it smoking and drinking. And he was going to get every damn penny back from the sons of... That was his motivating factor/.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
Some people do it because they want to stay alive. They value their life. They like their life. So they don't want to find themselves unable to talk or move, lying in a nursing home bed, waiting for people to change their diapers for the last 10 years of their life. So they're willing to do things, sacrifice things, short-term pleasure, seeking self-indulging behavior so that they can live until they die. They know they're going to die, but they want to live right to the end, go to sleep one night, not wake up and not end up being a burden on everybody around him. So if you want to do that, you have to understand what causes health, and that's healthful living. And that's where the diet, the sleep, and the exercise come in. It was interesting why mom, when she turned 92, she had outlives all 50 of her lifelong friends, many of which that used to make fun of her crazy diet and stuff.
Rip Esselstyn:
Oh, she followed yours? She followed-
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
She did. She did, later in life though. She didn't get started till later in life, but she did. And ultimately outlived everybody. She said it was a burden because it was hard to make friends in your 90s because even the people 10 years younger were still so debilitated, they couldn't do the things she wanted to do. And she said, "Alan, you have to warn your patients. If they're going to do this diet, make younger friends." And she said, "Make much younger friends because you need a big buffer or at least find a few friends that are health conscious enough that they'll still be around when you get old enough."
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Yeah. Tell me this, you've had thousands and thousands and thousands of people come through your doors at TrueNorth.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
Yes.
Rip Esselstyn:
The silver bullet, I think, for all of us, whether it's what I'm doing, McDougall, yourself, Doug, is how do we prevent or limit the recidivism to keep people compliant? Do you have any pearls of wisdom for that?
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
Yeah. The thing is, it's exceptionally difficult. I can tell you what the most single effective way of improving compliance is. It's pick people that are willing to make diet lifestyle changes. And find people that are willing to make diet and lifestyle changes that are motivated by pain debility and fear of death. So, people that are really up against it and are psychologically willing to try to make changes are the people that do the very best overall. However, having said that, we've just completed a study that looks at dietary adherence. So we've administered dietary adherence questionnaires before fasting, after fasting, at follow-up in one year. And what we're finding is people are surprisingly effective at making dietary and lifestyle changes.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
Sometimes some people do better over time. Some people do better cold turkey, but ultimately, people need ongoing education and inspiration in order to make it happen. So here's what we've done to improve our adherence. I used to tell Dr. Lisle that he was full of crap with all the psychology stuff. That if people were sick and they got well, they would do what it takes to stay well. They're not going to go back knowing what caused the problem and doing it again. And he said, "Of course they are." As soon as they're out of pain and they're no longer as motivated, they're going to start slip sliding back into the pleasure trap, because it's such a powerful force and they're going to...
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
Other people are going to offer them things, they're not going to want to offend them, they're going to go along and before long they're going to be caught back in the pleasure trap. And I said, "That's ridiculous. They're going to get healthy, they're going to stay healthy, and that's it." And of course, it turns out he was right. They say it was Mark Twain, the famous American philosopher that said, "Denial is not just a river in Egypt." People kid themselves, a little bit won't hurt, and they overestimate their own discipline and resilience. So they get caught back into trouble.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
What we've done is, first of all, we've written some books, The Pleasure Trap, and some cookbooks, The Bravo Bravo Express, The Health Promoting Cookbook that are vegan SOS-free cookbooks. So it makes getting food simpler. We encourage them to take advantage of the commercially available foods like you've pioneered. You can go on the whole foods and get low sodium, low salt, healthier food options. Mama Says, Leaf Side, Well Your World, that make SOS-free food options available. And with the cookbooks, it also makes even people like I can prepare food that tastes good, that's SOS-free. We also have a telemedicine practice with doctors that are available so they can talk to a doctor that's not an idiot and that has experience with people getting well. Whether it's a medical doctor, a naturopath, whatever it is they need, and they can easily access them by going to our website and accessing the telemedicine practitioners.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
We live stream our lectures every day so that people can freely get access to ongoing sources of education and inspiration. We get them to read books that are fabulous, whether it's John McDougall or your pop's books, there's so many good stuff out there now that will convince people that this is what they need to do and can continue to reinfluence and reeducate and inspire them. And then there's people, like yourself, that put on seminars that give them intensive experiences, that can either get new people on board or help people that are established maintain their enthusiasm and vigor. And of course, we locked people up at The Pleasure Trap, create an environment where they have no choice but to experience health. And that often seems to be helpful as well. So the resources available today are dramatically better than they were like when we all started. There was nothing anywhere people could get or do.
Rip Esselstyn:
It's probably about noon-ish there. Can you tell me, what have you had to eat so far today?
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
Well, I had what I always have in the morning, which is some fresh fruits and grains and some oatmeal, and I'll be having salad and steam vegetables at lunch and dinner along with some more complex carbohydrates. For me, it's really easy because I work at the TrueNorth Health Center. So we have fabulous vegan SOS-free food, and that's all it's available. There's no temptations because there's no bowls of anything out there except healthy foods all the time. We eat the same way at home.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
I live on a small farm where we grow food for the center. So we have fresh stuff all the time available. So it's easy when live in immersed and healthy choices. That's a lot easier. I don't work in a place where I have to drive two hours a day to get to some place I hate, to work with people I don't like, to make products I don't believe in, and then have candy bowls and highly processed foods laying around trying to tempt people into the pleasure trap. It's much better to live in a health promoting environment.
Rip Esselstyn:
Well, you've certainly created that and then some. What's your opinion on supplements? Do you take any?
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
Yeah, I do. I think that vegans, because we don't get all that fecal contamination from the dead, decaying flesh and therefore a lot of bacteria and therefore a lot of B12, we don't get a lot of bacterial exposure because we wash and we peel because we don't want worms and parasites and other stuff like that. So over enough years or decades, you can deplete your B12 stores. So we recommend that vegans take 1,000 micrograms of methylcobalamin a day, which is enough to be virtually everybody's need. If you don't get out in the sun, you live so far north that the sun's not hot enough to make vitamin D, there are some people that get low vitamin D easily tested. If it's low, then we want to get them out in the sun. Or if they can't get enough sun exposure, we would supplement that.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
People that live in Minnesota that didn't eat anything but food grown in Minnesota soil would eventually get iodine deficiency. So unless they supplement their diet with some sea vegetables or some iodine, that could be a problem. Some people have specific food sensitivities, like they can't eat nuts or seeds because it's food triggers or something. And maybe they might have to resort in doing some vegan supplementation to DHA. But generally, the pills, the potions, the powders, not only are not necessary, they can actually be detrimental.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
If you look at studies, for example, cancer treatment, where they supplement vitamin A, people die at a higher rate if they're supplemented with A than if they're not. So sometimes the supplements are not only expensive and useless, but may actually be doing harm. So we want to minimize pills, potions and powders as much as possible, but recognize there are some things for either individuals that might benefit from individual therapeutic intervention. And for everybody that's a vegan, I would encourage you to obtain a reliable source of vitamin B12 and you don't need to eat animal feces to get it. You can get it from a simple low cost supplement.
Rip Esselstyn:
Right. Right. I know that there's liquid form that you can put sub-lingually or there's a tablet form. Do you have a preference there?
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
I would go with a major brand that does their own internal testing just to make sure you have... But there's dozens of reliable brands. We happen to use a company called Pure Encapsulations because they're vegan sympathetic. They use vegan capsules for the capsules and they have liquid. The reason I like liquid is when you figure out what your cost per dose is, it's less expensive in the liquid than it is in the capsule because you're probably not paying for the encapsulation or whatever. I like to use the least expensive cost of a reliable thing. So I use the liquid vegan B12 and that's the only supplement that I recommend universally.
Rip Esselstyn:
Wow. You're pretty frugal because I know that for me, a year supply is like 15 bucks.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
I know, but I think you can get it even lower (laughter).
Rip Esselstyn:
You're right.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
And if you get the concentrated liquid, you only need like six drops. You don't even need a full dropper full.
Rip Esselstyn:
I like it. I like it. Let me just ask you a couple more questions and then I know we both have to go. Organic verse conventional, how important is that for you?
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
Well, it's important on two levels. Number one, these chemicals that are sprayed onto plant-based foods are detrimental and they're accumulative. So avoiding them is highly desirable, but it's more important than just that. When you buy certified organically grown food, you're making a political statement to your supporting the organic farmers, whether they're the small farmers or the larger farmers. And you're encouraging what I think is an important shift, both for our own personal health, but also the health of our environment. Do you know who the largest seller of organic produce is right now in the United States?
Rip Esselstyn:
I think I do.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
Yeah. Costco foods. And it's not because-
Rip Esselstyn:
No, I was going to say Walmart. I was going to say Walmart.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
No, no. Costco's actually higher than Walmart by volume, I think, right now. And Walmart's number two, but they didn't do this because of some social responsibility or some philosophical education. They did it because people said, "Oh, I would be willing to pay a premium for organic foods." And so because people are willing to pay a premium, they're willing to sell it. That's been very helpful because when large players get involved, it encourages all the downstream consequences and it makes it more acceptable. It's one of the reasons why we're working so hard at publishing papers and peer-reviewed medical journals, not because we expect that that's going to convince everybody to adopt whole plant food diets and use fasting, but it makes it more acceptable for those people that do want to do that to be able to carry on with it. It makes it less outgroup.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
So from a practical viewpoint, there's this hundredth monkey theory, that if you can get even 1% of the population doing things right, it makes it possible for the five or the 10 of the 15% of the population that would do it if it wasn't outgroup to be able to participate in that. Right now what happens is, the people that have the easiest time adopting these diet and lifestyle changes are the ones that aren't quite as worried about what other people think or feel. We want to make it so people that are normal and do care about what other people think or feel don't have to feel so uncomfortable that they're not willing to do the right thing. I think the same thing happens too with organic. It used to be organic with some hippie thing, and now it's not. It's accepted as a valuable thing enough that people are willing to pay a premium. And people like Walmart and Costco are willing to get serious about making it available to us.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Organic fasting. What are those clog shoes called that everybody's wearing these days? What are they called? You know what I'm talking about? I'm facing on the name right now. I got to close on another fasting question. So when you fast, do you water fast during the year? And if so, like for how long?
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
Well, I fast every single day for 16 hours.
Rip Esselstyn:
Okay.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
I fast once a year for at least a week. And if at the end of the week I have no symptoms, then that's it. And that's what we recommend for healthy people. I hate fasting because you have to rest and you can't play basketball. I don't find it a pleasant experience, but I do it because I find it's exceptionally beneficial. And I think actually it'll turn out to be even more beneficial in healthy people at helping us stay healthy than it is even in the benefit we are proving with sick people and getting them well.
Rip Esselstyn:
But you said something interesting to me. So you'll go for a week and you'll stop there as long as you're not experiencing symptoms. What do you mean by symptoms?
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
Well, when you put a person on a fast, a lot of times they get all kinds of interesting detoxifying symptoms. Their mouth quotes up and tastes like something crawled in there and die, they get skin rashes, nausea, low back pain, headache, irritability. But people on healthy diets typically don't get any of that, or minimal amounts of that. It goes away very quickly. So if by the time you get to a week of fasting, you're asymptomatic and your numbers are good, everything looks good, I don't know that we get tremendous additional benefit pushing it beyond that. So in healthy people, we tend to do shorter fast, use the fast diagnostically, as well as therapeutically and then move on and go back to the healthy diet.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
In a sick person, we'll fast them until their problem is resolved or if necessary, do multiple fasts until their problem is resolved. If you have a person with high blood pressure or that's overweight, I want to fast them as much as possible till their normal pressure, normal weight, normal blood sugar levels, not having joint pain, get rid of the chronic headaches, get rid of the tumor, get rid of the lymphoma, cancer, whatever it is. And if I can't get it all done in a 40-day fast, then I'll bring them back after they recover and do it again and do it again until they get well.
Rip Esselstyn:
Wow. Wow. Well, and do you have people that have been back again and again and again?
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
Yeah. In fact, we've published papers on people that did a 40-day fast, recovered, did another 40-day fast and then resolved problems that have long term duration. For people that are interested, go to our website at fasting.org, which is the fast and convenient website of our foundation. And all of our studies are available. It's mind boggling to see what can happen when you essentially do nothing.
Rip Esselstyn:
What about some of these autoimmune diseases? I mean, lupus. What about multiple sclerosis? I know rheumatoid arthritis and stuff, but what about MS?
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
Autoimmune diseases or diseases where your immune system is actually attacking your own body. So rheumatoid arthritis, it's your immune system that's causing the joint deform. In lupus, it's your immune system that's attacking the kidneys or the skin. In asthma, it's your immune system that's attacking your lungs. In eczema, it's your immune system that's creating the skin lesions. We just published a case of plaque psoriasis, resolving with fasting. Again, autoimmune. And one of the triggers in autoimmune disease is gut leakage.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
People absorb proteins that shouldn't be absorbed through an inflamed gut that's caused by eating greasy, fatty, slimy, dead, decaying flesh and refined carbohydrates and all the rest of it. In fasting, you're not eating anything. The gut leakage heals. And then after fasting, you're on a whole plant food SOS-free diet. Autoimmune diseases respond dramatically to this type of diet and lifestyle change, and fasting can make that response happen even quicker.
Rip Esselstyn:
Wow. And what about multiple sclerosis?
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
In MS, the body's immune system is taking out the myelin sheath. That is a very unfortunate condition because, depending on how much damage has already been done, you may be able to stop progression or slow progression. And Dr. Swank showed that. That people that adopted a healthy diet... Dr. Swank did that research and Dr. McDougall has taken over that practice and has been able to show that you can slow the rate of progression. I don't know how much reversal there is of actually myelin coating, but the body reanalyzes neurological function. That's what it looks like it's healing. I don't know that it's actually healing. I think you're just slowing down that progression most likely. But in the case of even autoimmune disease, like type one diabetes, essentially you have two things that cause juvenile onset diabetes in kids.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
One of them is some kids are unfortunately exposed to milk proteins from cows and in genetically vulnerable kids, the immune system will get confused and react to the islets of langerhans in the pancreas and destroy the islets and that's what causes diabetes in kids. Or also there are viral issues also which may be associated with animal food consumption. But anyway, so a virus or autoimmune response causes your child to now have to be a juvenile diabetic.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
Even the American Pediatric Association, I believe tells you, don't give babies cow's milk because of this problem. And of course, there's other problems with cows milk. Oh my gosh, bovine, leukemia virus, mad cow disease, all the other stuff that used to be pooh-poohed, but now has become more acceptable. In fact, I don't know that there's any food that is probably more detrimental to the average person than eating dairy products. I wrote a book called Nobody Needs Milk, and it was interesting because Colin Campbell ran it on his website, it had 6.5 million downloads. I think it's probably, we can pretty well be sure we won't be getting any funding from the American Dairy Council at the TrueNorth Health Foundation.
Rip Esselstyn:
Nobody needs any milk.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
Needs milk.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yes. Wow. Can I get you, just as we're closing out here, to say that line that I think you said it three times during the interview, but I'd love to hear it one more time? So don't eat greasy, slimy... What is it? Dead, decaying... What is it?
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
Flesh, yeah. I have to tell you a quick, funny story. I made a comment in one of these movies. I think it was, What the Health?
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
Milk being essentially cow pass because they allow 750,000 plus cells per CC. And that, yeah, it's true that the average milk doesn't have that much. It only has 320,000 per cells per CC. It was like taking a cow with a festering wound, sticking a straw on it and sucking. So I talked about milk being essentially cow pass. So anyway, I'm walking along the street. I happen to be in Las Vegas, not giving a talk, I'm just walking along the street and some guy comes at me. He goes, "Hey, you're Dr. Cow pass."
Rip Esselstyn:
So you're Dr. greasy, slimy, dead, decaying flesh...
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
Greasy, fatty slimy, dead, decaying flesh. Well, that's essentially what animal products are.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yes, yes. Yeah. Well, Doug loves to let people know how you describe it. Just not messing around. Oh man. Alan, you are doing such incredible work at TrueNorth, way to stay consistent, keep the pedal to the metal, all the studies you're doing, your 501 C3, the 20 plus thousand patients that have come through since 1984, you are doing... Oh man, thank you.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
If any of your listeners want to know whether fasting might be relevant to them or if they want the name of the closest place to them that does fasting, we have an interesting free service. If they go to our website at healthpromoting.com and fill out the registration forms that gets me their medical history, I'll review that. I'll be happy to have a phone conversation with them at no cost. And I can help them determine, is this something that they should be pursuing? And if so, who might be the best person for them to pursue it with?
Rip Esselstyn:
Beautiful, beautiful. Well, Alan, thank you for being on PLANTSTRONG.
Alan Goldhamer, D.C.:
Thanks for having me.
Rip Esselstyn:
Hey, give me a little bump, all right? Keep it PLANTSTRONG. Diet, sleep, exercise, these are the keys to optimal health. And of course, as Alan says, staying away from all of that greasy, fatty, slimy, dead, decaying flesh. Two key takeaways from today's episode. One, you have the power to break free from the pleasure trap of the SOS world that we live in, that's again, salt, oil, and sugar. And two, adopt a whole plant food diet. Immerse yourself in healthy choices and let the healing begin.
Rip Esselstyn:
We'll link all of the resources from today's episode in the show notes at plantstrongpodcast.com. I hope to see y'all next week. And until then, keep it PLANTSTRONG. The PLANTSTRONG podcast team includes Carrie Barrett, Laurie Kortowich, Ami Mackey, Patrick Gavin and Wade Clark. This season is dedicated to all of those courageous true seekers who weren't afraid to look through the lens with clear vision and hold firm to a higher truth. Most notably, my parents, Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn Jr. and Anne Crile Esselstyn. Thanks for listening.
