#190: Dr. Doug Graham - This Guy Gave Rip a B- on His Diet! What?!
Dr. Doug Graham, author of The 80-10-10 Diet
Imagine someone telling you that they would only give your diet a "B-" when you've been eating whole foods, plant-based for over 35 years?! Well, that was the average grade Rip Esselstyn's diet received from today's guest, Dr. Doug Graham.
Doug is most known for developing and authoring the 80-10-10 Diet Book; which is when 80% of your calories come from carbohydrates in the form of raw fruits and vegetables, 10% comes from plant protein, and the last 10% comes from fat. Not only does he live this way, but he actually wrote the book about it back in 2006.
No doubt, Doug has unconventional opinions and data on topics like whole grains, beans, oats, protein, and even mono-eating, but it was wildly educational and eye-opening.
You'll learn about the history of why we eat what we do, why cooked food may not be all it’s cracked up to be, and how you can level up your own plate each day.
Episode Highlights
10:30 What exactly is 80-10-10?
13:30 isn't that many carbs bad for you? Don’t we need more protein?
22:30 Doug’s Biggest Fans in the plant-based world
23:30 What does he love so much about raw fruit, and why is it so important?
26:05 So THAT’s why they call it a “sweet tooth!”
29:00 What are examples of Doug’s breakfast and lunch?
33:30 The case for eating mono-meals
36:25 Why isn’t he a fan of cooked foods, including beans, and potatoes?
37:45 What do the five GENS have to do with our longevity and health? (Think: CarcinoGENic)
45:15 Are all these GENS being created in beans and potatoes as well?
47:30 “Don’t Eat the Paste.” What in the world is he talking about?
50:10 What did Dr. Nathan Pritikin get wrong?
53:00 Rip gets a B- on his diet?? Are you serious?
57:10 How does he feel about frozen fruit?
57:50 This sounds freaking expensive
1:03:30 Is he a fan of drinking water?
1:04:35 How does he recommend people make this transition?
1:06:30 What’s his take on fiber?
1:12:15 Protein - Why does more not necessarily mean better?
1:23:00 what age should you start 80-10-10?
Learn More About the 80-10-10 Diet
Episode Resources
Doug Graham's Website: https://foodnsport.com
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Full YouTube Transcript
Rip Esselstyn:
How is pizza like sex? Well, when it's good, it is great. And when it's bad, it's still pretty darn good. Today, I am thrilled to share with you a crowd favorite of our whole food plant-based line of products, and that's our PLANTSTRONG Pizza Crust Kit that is great. Our kit is made from organic whole grains with no added oil, very little salt, and a kiss of maple syrup. It's incredibly easy to use. Each kit contains five 11 inch pizza crusts and five pouches of perfectly proportioned pizza sauce. Now, the best part is you can top it with your family's favorite ingredients to create a pizza that's as delicious as it is nutritious.
Whether you're a busy professional looking for a quick and healthy dinner option, a health conscious family seeking a fun and interactive meal activity, or a pizza lover who wants to indulge in a guilt-free way, our PLANTSTRONG Pizza Crust Kit has got you covered. Join us on the PLANTSTRONG journey and experience the strong benefits of a whole food plant-based lifestyle. Order your PLANTSTRONG Pizza Crust Kit by visiting plantstrongfoods.com and let me know how you like it. Thanks so much for listening. And now, let's dive into today's show.
Dr. Doug Graham:
When I talk about Optimum Nutrition, when I want to describe that bullseye, I just use five words. Whole, fresh, ripe, raw, organic plants. So, if you can eat whole, fresh, ripe, raw, organic plants, you're hitting the bullseye.
Rip Esselstyn:
I'm Rep 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 the show. For over 35 years, I have been thriving by living PLANTSTRONG. So, imagine my surprise when someone tells me that my diet is just okay. In fact, he would only give me a B minus on my daily nutrition. What? I wasn't sure if I should be offended or intrigued, but I definitely, definitely was inspired to learn more.
Today, I welcome Dr. Doug Graham to the PLANTSTRONG podcast. If you don't know who Doug is, he is best known for developing and authoring the 80/10/10 way of eating. That's when 80% of your calories are coming from carbohydrates, specifically in the form of raw fruits and vegetables, 10% are coming from protein, and the remaining 10% come from fat. Now, not only does Doug live this way, but he actually wrote the book about it back in 2006.
I have been intrigued by Doug's work and rationale for a long time, especially since my good friends, Robbie Barbaro and Cyrus Kobata of Mastering Diabetes, who have been in the podcast several times, follow and were inspired by his diet protocol and speak so highly of him. I've got to say that this conversation was eye-opening for me, and I learned a bunch about the history of why we eat, how we eat, why cooked food may not be all it's cracked up to be, and how I can level up my own plate each day. The conversation takes some twists and turns, and I love that it got me thinking differently, and I hope it does the same for you two. Enjoy.
Dr. Doug Graham, welcome to the PLANTSTRONG podcast. It's an absolute pleasure to have you. I know you're over in the UK, and it's turning into evening there. Here in Austin, Texas, it's high noon for me.
Dr. Doug Graham:
Well, lucky you.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah, lucky me. But Doug, you are an absolute legend. You have inspired and I think helped so many of us with the information that's required in adapting a whole food plant-based diet. But also, you're intense. You're an intense guy, and I think you like to call it the 8/1/1 or the 80/10/10. You're the 80/10/10 dude. I mean, you truly are. This is your book right here, 80/10/ 10, right?
Dr. Doug Graham:
Wow, I'm honored.
Rip Esselstyn:
And when did you first write this book? Was it early 2000s?
Dr. Doug Graham:
The first time I wrote 80/10/10, the phrase 80/10/10, was 1999. I was in the middle of a lecture, and I was trying to make a specific point because there were some people interviewing about opening up a health retreat in Hawaii, and they wanted it to be something special, different than anything that's already been done. So, I said, "Well, let's make it 80/10/10 intentionally, because that's what I use with athletes. That's what I use with performers of every kind. But anybody who wants to get the maximum performance, whether they're piano players, thinkers, whatever they were." But it was the first time it ever made it onto a board. Now, I'm not the originator of the concept 80/10/10. I have seen other vegan doctors use that phrase, but they used the phrase 80/10/10, and I coined that into the 80/10/10 diet. So, I created that, but I didn't come up with the idea. This is a natural idea.
This is what all of the animals that are anatomically and physiologically like us, that's how they eat. They eat very close to 80/10/10 or within the guidelines of 80/10/10. And then, it turned out that that's how all the long-lived people on the planet eat, and all of the top performance athletes tend to eat. The vast majority of top performance athletes also tend to eat that way. So, I just started thinking if it's working for athletes and it's working for long-lived people, and, golly gee, I can't think of a teacher who didn't tell me, "Eat more fruits and vegetables that are really good for you."
Rip Esselstyn:
Right.
Dr. Doug Graham:
So, I just said, "I wonder what would happen if I eat fruits and vegetables to the exclusion of everything else since everything else isn't as good for me as fruits and vegetables are." I wonder what would happen if. That famous human phrase. So, I tried it on myself first, and the results were just astonishing. I mean, astonishing. Mostly the clarity of mind, which translated into-
Rip Esselstyn:
But let me ask you this. When you say you tried it on yourself-
Dr. Doug Graham:
Yeah.
Rip Esselstyn:
... you tried it on yourself, but how were you eating at the time? Did you have any health scares or anything that inspired you? Or were you just searching for a better way of eating? And I know there was an individual, TC Frye, that really also helped and was a mentor of yours, and you hold him in the highest regard.
Dr. Doug Graham:
I do.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah.
Dr. Doug Graham:
At the time, I was eating as a vegan. I'd been a vegetarian for seven years before that. I was vegan only, though, for about seven months. And then, said, "Gee, I wonder. This vegan thing is really good. I like what it's doing. I feel better for it. My endurance improved as a vegan. But I wonder what happened if I just switched to essentially go from vegan to raw vegan, change starches over for fruits." But that's when the clarity of mind hit. That's when the reduction of need for sleep by about two hours a night, just like night and day. All of a sudden, I don't need anywhere near as much sleep, and I still have just as much energy.
That's when the digestion perfection set in, and that's when my memory improved. I was just shocked by my memory. Wow. Important things. When we're a kid, we do all we can to dull our senses. But as adults, we're doing everything we can to become as aware and as self-aware possible, and the self-awareness that happened just from a diet change, it took me the best part of a decade to accumulate the science to be able to explain what was going on.
Rip Esselstyn:
Now, because all we know right now is that, for the people that are listening that don't know what 80/10/10 is, right? It means absolutely nothing to them. Let's start with 80.
Dr. Doug Graham:
Well, you know-
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Or you tell me how you-
Dr. Doug Graham:
First, I want to say the things I didn't say.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah.
Dr. Doug Graham:
I'm honored to be here on stage with you. I'm honored to be in this meeting. You are a legend. Your whole family is people I look up to. I met your dad back in '94.
Rip Esselstyn:
Wow.
Dr. Doug Graham:
I still remember it and talked to him many times on the phone, and he was always ever so helpful and gracious. And you are just banging it out, making vegans happen, and I'm super proud of you.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah, thanks.
Dr. Doug Graham:
80/10/10 is a very simple concept. We're looking at three macronutrients, as they're known in the world of nutrition, or what I call caloro nutrients because it's the only three nutrients that give us calories, and those are protein, fat, and carbohydrate. But I list them with protein in the middle. So, it's carbohydrate on one end, fat on the other, protein in the middle because like a seesaw-
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah.
Dr. Doug Graham:
... the protein consumption of humans all the way around the world only varies by a point or two. All the way around the world, no matter what diet you're on, unless you're on an extreme western end diet, in which case it might vary by three or four points. The worldwide average is 11% of calories from protein. And if you look at the people who are low, it'll be down to about nine, and the people who are high are up to about 12 or 13. If you're supplementing with protein, obviously, you can boost it way up. But if you're eating food, it's nine to 11 is about what people are eating in terms of protein. So, I just said 10. These numbers aren't set in stone. We're not trying to be exact. We're just trying to give a guideline. And so, what had to happen was we either had to, then, favor fat or favor carbohydrate.
And, as we've seen with vegan diets, as we've seen with most diets around the world, they favor carbohydrate. Carbohydrates are readily available. Fats are hard to come by. In nature, fats are hard to come by unless you're wealthy enough to afford to buy the fats. Poor people don't eat a lot of fats. They eat a lot of starch. So, like I said, I wondered what would happen if I took the starch and replaced it with simple sugars, which is what our body uses for fuel anyway so we don't have to go through that whole digestion process to access the fuel that we're eating.
And what happens is you cut down your effort in digestion, you cut down the calories needed to convert the starch to sugar, because everything we eat gets converted into glucose, as you know. It's all going down to glucose or else it's being stored as fat. So, the 80 was a guideline for how much of your total calories should come from carbohydrate in an ideal world. If we're looking for optimum heart health, optimum cellular health, optimum performance on every level, 80 to 90% of calories want to come from carbohydrate.
Rip Esselstyn:
Now, Doug, Doug, I'm going to interject here because I know you could just go on forever, and I want to ask questions because so many, I think, people hear, "Wait, this guy is saying 80 to 90% of calories coming from carbohydrates? I thought carbohydrates, carbs, were bad." So much of the noise we hear, maybe it's not as loud in the UK, but here in the states is that carbs are bad. We want to eat a high protein diet, and carbs are like 20%. The carnivore diet is huge here, the keto diet, Atkins is by the wayside now, but I think it's paleo, keto, and carnivore are the new kids on the block.
Dr. Doug Graham:
Those are the new kids on the block. And if you study your history a little bit, what you'll find is that the paleo concept, or the Atkins concept, or the Hollywood concept, or whatever you want to call it, the high fat, high protein concept, has come into vogue eight times in the last 140 years. Every 20 years. And it came into vogue in 1880 and 1900 and 1920 and 40 and 60 and 80, and again, and now again. And every time, it failed. When it came into vogue in the 1960s, people started dying because there was a high protein approach that was available on grocery store shelves. And they had to take it off the shelves, made it illegal. The only way you could access it for a while was through a medical prescription, right? But then, some doctor somewhere figured out that when you're in ketosis, you don't tend to have as many seizures.
Rip Esselstyn:
Right.
Dr. Doug Graham:
And they started using keto as a temporary approach to quell the seizures while they looked for other things to do, like get you a dog that tells you you're going to have a seizure-
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah.
Dr. Doug Graham:
... or the other things that could be done. But they knew for a fact that because keto is a failure to thrive diet, you can't live on it, that it had to be a temporary measure, even for seizures. Somehow that mushroomed. That caught on and they started saying, "Oh, it's good for this, it's good for that. It's good for everything." And certainly in an obese society, anything that puts you into failure to thrive will cause you to lose weight. So, for the people whose only concern was weight loss, they said, "The heck with my health. I want to lose weight."
Why does it work? It works really well because you can have all the meat you want, which is what people were already doing. And you can have all the butter you want, but nothing to put it on. So, how much are you going to eat? What are you going to put it on? I says, "How much butter are you going to put on a slice of meat?" So, people didn't really change their diet that much. They just took out carbs, which was, on a standard western diet, that's 45% of their calories. In America, people eat about 45/10/45. So, when you cut out 45 and replace it with nothing, because you're not adding much fat, you're not adding protein, you're just doing what you've always been doing.
Rip Esselstyn:
But Doug, explain to me and the people that are listening that are thinking, "So, okay, if most people are eating 45/10/45-
Dr. Doug Graham:
That's it.
Rip Esselstyn:
But if you're eating all that meat and all that dairy, isn't that protein higher than 10 or 11 or 12?
Dr. Doug Graham:
No.
Rip Esselstyn:
No?
Dr. Doug Graham:
No, not really. I mean, on a really well-to-do American diet, if we'll call it the American diet. On a really well-to-do American diet, an American might be eating 15 or even 16% of their calories from protein. But that's it. It doesn't go much higher than that, not without supplementation.
Rip Esselstyn:
And so, is that because, I think you say it in your book, basically, if you're eating meat, you're basically eating fat. Is that right?
Dr. Doug Graham:
Well, it depends on the cut of meat.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah.
Dr. Doug Graham:
What I said in the book is that we describe, excuse me, if we're going to have to choose what to call a food, is it a protein, a fat, or a carbohydrate, we do that by its predominated nutrient. So, potatoes are predominated by carbohydrate. We call it a carbohydrate.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah.
Dr. Doug Graham:
But bacon is predominated by fat, but we call it a protein. That seems odd to me. Chicken breast is predominated by protein. We should call it a protein. There's not as much fat unless you fry it. But most of the meats are predominated by fat, and we should call them fat, but we don't. We're very funny about our names.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah.
Dr. Doug Graham:
We do a lot of funny stuff by calling things what it really isn't.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So let's go back to your 80. Yeah.
Dr. Doug Graham:
Well, I'll tell you, I can answer a funny part of this question because the 80/10/10 people always ask about the 80. But the 80 is what's left. You can look at any kind of doctor you want from A to Z, or at least to X, and you can look at any kind of doctor you want from the radiologists all the way down, and any disease you can name, and the doctors will recommend three to 10% of your calories coming from protein. And you can look at any kind of sport. You can look at any type of health from cancer, diabetes, heart disease, it doesn't matter what the condition, and doctors recommend three to 10% of your calories from fat. Well, if you're only taking in three to 10, and you're only taking in three to 10, there's got to be at least 80 to 90 left. And so, carbohydrates are really what's left after you have all the protein and all the fat that you possibly can and stay out of that range where you get predictable health decline.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Now, when you say three to 10 on the fat, I would imagine you're referring to doctors like McDougal, my father, Ornish, Clapper. Am I mistaken? Because I think most doctors-
Dr. Doug Graham:
All of them. Certainly, all of them are saying it.
Rip Esselstyn:
Most doctors I know are completely clueless when it comes to nutrition and food.
Dr. Doug Graham:
Well, for certain. For certain. But if we look at cardiologists, specialists who do know a bit more, not just the responsible vegan doctors that we all are familiar with.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah.
Dr. Doug Graham:
But if you want to get into more reliable science than medicine, which, I mean, I think they've dropped the ball enough times now that we're not necessarily listening to them anymore. But if you want to get into some reliable science, look at sports science. Look at sports physiology. Sports physiology has to be reproducible. If somebody gets certain results, and it's in a sports physiology book that this is what's going to happen, when you do the same thing, you are going to get the same results. It's very reliable. It's not tied to the entire cartel of pharmacology, yet anyway. And you can pretty well trust what you read in a sports physiology text when it comes to nutrition.
They're going to tell you fruits and vegetables. They're going to tell you high carbohydrate. They're going to tell you lower your fat. Because when the fat goes up, your ability to bring oxygen to the cells is reduced. In 1959, the Journal of American Medical Association published that when the fat goes up in your diet, it becomes all but impossible to get sugar out of your bloodstream to your cells. They define diabetes by saying all you have to do is lower the fat in your diet, and there is no diabetes, no potential for it, no way for it to happen.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Yeah. It's remarkable.
Dr. Doug Graham:
Type two.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Right. Right. Speaking of which, and the other day, well, two individuals that speak so incredibly high of you, and they've become really close personal friends of mine are Cyrus and Robbie of Mastering Diabetes, and-
Dr. Doug Graham:
Sure.
Rip Esselstyn:
... those two think the world of you, and you have been so helpful, I think, with them and inspiring them with everything they're doing. And whenever they come to my house, they literally will bring a huge 10 pound box of their mangoes, their bananas, their plantains, I mean, fruits that I've never seen in my life. And it is in large part because of what you have taught these guys. And so, let's talk about fruit, because you are a huge proponent of fruit. It's like you should be Dr. Fruit.
Dr. Doug Graham:
What do you mean? What do you mean?
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. And so-
Dr. Doug Graham:
You eat more fruit than anybody alive. I know that for a fact.
Rip Esselstyn:
Wow. Wow. Well, I want to talk about that.
Dr. Doug Graham:
You never thought that would be a claim to fame.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah, yeah. So, what do you love so much about fruit? And why is it so important?
Dr. Doug Graham:
So, I don't know if you've ever tasted mother's milk, but it's sweet and juicy. Okay? It's sweet and juicy.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yep.
Dr. Doug Graham:
And it's got some other qualities, too, right? Everything a baby needs. And those baby teeth, they're called milk teeth. Well, babies can digest mother's milk, but we adults can't because we stop producing lactase in order to digest the lactose. And that happens to kids, that loss of lactase happens in their late single digit years or early double-digit years as their milk teeth start to fall out. The two things happen in concert, and then suddenly mother's milk doesn't taste so good because it gives you an upset tummy every time, and they switch over to whatever their parents eat, which is what every animal in the entire animal kingdom does, is they go from whatever they ate as babies, and they switch over to whatever their parents eat. So, in the world of comparative anatomy where we say that all animals that are anatomically and physiologically similar thrive on similar foods, we can look at the five anthropoid primates. They all-
PART 1 OF 4 ENDS [00:26:04]
Dr. Doug Graham:
We can look at the five Anthropoid primates. They all eat 80, 10, 10. They all eat fruits and vegetables. Their babies are weaned onto fruits and vegetables. We're the only exception, and there's no reason for us to be an exception because there's no exceptions in a rule that starts with all.
When we lose those milk teeth, they are replaced by another set of teeth that the only name I've heard for them other than primary and secondary teeth. All right. When we talk about milk teeth for the kids, I mean, that's just a name. It's not really the official name. And the only unofficial name I've ever heard for your secondary teeth is the name that you've heard too. Sweet Tooth. Because we were raised on mother's milk, sweet and juicy, and it's what we're born for. We are sweet seekers. That's why the first taste buds are most susceptible or most able to taste sweet more than any other taste. It's why kids put things in their mouth to see if it's sweet.
And then we, somehow in our wisdom, we managed to pervert, if I can say that word, we've managed to pervert our sweet tooth, and we have coffee and cake. We have milk and cookies. We have ice cream and soda. We always end up with sweet and juicy no matter how we do it. Brownies and hot chocolate, it always ends up sweet and juicy. This is what we love. We're always looking for sweet and juicy. It sounds good, sweet and juicy. I mean, who wouldn't want a sweet and juicy life? The trick was, could I eat sweet and juicy while not compromising my health?
Well, every health teacher I've ever had told me, eat more fruits and vegetables. Fruits are good for you. You got to eat your vegetables. Eat your fruit and vegetables. So it became a no-brainer for me to say, "Eat more fruit." The only thing was I had no models. I asked every raw food leader in the world, all four of them at the time, what would you do? I'm an athlete. I want to continue to be an athlete. What diet would you put me on? And they all said, "Well, it'd be a raw food diet, not cooked." And then I said, "Okay, so what does that look like?" And all four said, "I have no idea. We've never done that for an athlete. We have only helped sick people get well." Okay, so that's the only experience we have because those are the only people desperate enough at the time. But now we're finding lots of people desperate enough. Lots of people are realizing that their health is a very important thing. And when you don't have it becomes the most important thing.
So for me, eating sweet just became a natural thing. And I started eating fruit for breakfast, and that wasn't a big deal. And then I started eating fruit for breakfast and lunch, and that wasn't a big deal. But it wasn't enough calories from fruit to meet my athletic needs, so I started eating fruit for breakfast and fruit for lunch, and then all the fruit I care for before my giant dinner salad, vegetables, all I care for. So volume wise, I eat about the same amount of fruit as vegetables. In terms of calories, 85% of my calories come from carbohydrates from fruit.
Rip Esselstyn:
Well, so when you say you're eating fruit for breakfast and fruit for lunch, give me an example what that looks like.
Dr. Doug Graham:
Oh, it might be four or five mangoes for breakfast. Could be a dozen bananas for lunch. About 1000 calories. About 1200 calories if I'm training hard. I'm going down to Costa Rica for six weeks, I'm going to be doing some serious training. I'll be eating 4,000 calories a day down there, in which case I'm eating closer to 12, 1300 calories breakfast, again lunch and again dinner. So even my dinner meal's going to start with maybe two, three quarts, two three quarts, no, two quarts maybe of orange juice or orange mango juice or orange pineapple juice or some blend of juicy fruits.
Rip Esselstyn:
That's interesting to me, because I know in your book you talk about how you always prefer the whole food as opposed to juicing, so how much are you juicing throughout the day or.
Dr. Doug Graham:
No. Not much
Rip Esselstyn:
No, okay.
Dr. Doug Graham:
I'll make an exception for citrus because I'm just removing the edible portion of the citrus. We're not really throwing anything away. Even if there's a little pulp left over, it'll go into the salad.
Rip Esselstyn:
Got it.
Dr. Doug Graham:
Kind of like making tomato juice in a juicer, and then what do you do with the pulp? Well, you make salad dressing out of the pulp, or you make something else out of the pulp, so it's not that you can't. But I don't juice as a rule. I don't think juicing is better for me. I'm not saying it's bad. I'm not attacking juicing. I'm not attacking anything. But I don't think it's as good for us as whole food. I'm not going to throw away the whole food concept just because juices are fun to drink.
People ask, how come they get better on juices if juices are so bad? And I'm saying, I'm not saying they're bad. The reason people get better on juices is because they stopped eating crap. You can't juice Twinkies. You can't juice a burger, so it becomes their juice and vegetables and fruits, they get better.
But I also open any nutrition book, and I see that fiber is a nutrient, an important and essential nutrient that we need to get from our food. We need to get fiber. It makes no sense to me to remove the fiber. It's kind of funny, if you go buy breakfast cereal it has fiber added, but then for dinner, you want to have juice with fiber extracted, and both are supposed to be better for you than whole food. And I don't buy it. I'm saying whole food's the best.
So for me, I'll just eat mangoes for... Again, I'm going for performance. And I know my mindset is, I don't compete as a general rule. My competitive years as an athlete ended a long time ago, but I did want to go to nationals once. So as I mentioned to you earlier, I'm going to go to power lifting nationals this year, but I'm not looking to compete. I'm not crazy about my sport, but I still want to be healthy. I still want to be dynamic. I still want to be able to play with anybody who invites me to come out and play with them or do anything with them. Hey, you need to rake leaves all day. Fine. Okay, you need to throw pitchfork all day. Fine. If that's what needs to be done, let's get it done. We're going to move bricks. Great.
I want to be able, I love being able bodied. And I find for myself, and I openly admit that I fought the concept like, no, but mono meals work better. Simple, simple, simple. I mean, when it's persimmon season, eat persimmon. When it's banana season, eat bananas. When it's lychee season, eat lychee.
Rip Esselstyn:
Mono eating, you're fine if you just for lunch, I have 12 bananas, right?
Dr. Doug Graham:
Yeah.
Rip Esselstyn:
Call it good.
Dr. Doug Graham:
Or 12 persimmon or 15 peaches or whatever's in season at the time.
Rip Esselstyn:
Which is a way of thinking that I think most of us... Or a way of eating that most of us have never done, or we think couple-
Dr. Doug Graham:
You know what?
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Yeah.
Dr. Doug Graham:
I'm sorry I cut you off. That was rude.
Rip Esselstyn:
No, no, that's okay. And as you said earlier, what's interesting is if you were to look at the, what, 15 or 20,000 mammals that we share the planet with, they mono eat, don't they?
Dr. Doug Graham:
All of them.
Rip Esselstyn:
All of them. So we're really the only ones that don't.
Dr. Doug Graham:
There's no bear. Bears eat a lot of different food, but there's no bear that goes down to the river, gets a salmon, and then go raids a beehive and spreads some honey on the salmon and then goes, collects some blueberries and puts that on top of the honey because it will stick. And then goes back to the river, gets another salmon, puts it on top and has a big salmonwich. They don't do that. When it's salmon time, they eat salmon.
But the thing is, if we could only just go back in time 140 years, which isn't that many generations, and if you could just go back 140 years when 95% of the people lived rural and only 5% lived urban, that's completely switched now. When 95% of the people lived rural and there was apples falling off the apple tree, you ate apples. And when the peaches fell just before that, you ate peaches. And when the cherries fell just before that, you ate cherries.
Rip Esselstyn:
What about the potato crop?
Dr. Doug Graham:
Well, when the potato crop came in, you ate potatoes, and it was pretty darn simple. So I think it is the way... I know, none of us really, I mean, for me, I felt like I was inventing something, but I knew I really wasn't. I was just going back to the roots of the way humans are designed to eat, simply at every meal, variety through the course of the year because that's what nature provides for us, is phenomenal variety. Most things are only in peak of season for three or four weeks.
Rip Esselstyn:
Doug, there's a lot I want to unpack with you here, because I'm serious. In reading your book, my jaw was on the ground kind of thinking, wow, I can't believe that I didn't know this, or this runs counter to a lot of the information how I currently view things. So I'd love to start to unpack some of that. Let's start with, you've said you're 80, 10, 10 plan is, you're about raw. You're not a fan of cooked. I'd say that I probably eat 40% of my food is 40, 50 is raw, and 40, 50 is cooked.
Dr. Doug Graham:
By what unit?
Rip Esselstyn:
By what unit? I would say by volume.
Dr. Doug Graham:
Okay,
Rip Esselstyn:
By volume.
Dr. Doug Graham:
Not by calorie.
Rip Esselstyn:
Not by calorie. Yeah.
Dr. Doug Graham:
And I'd say it's more than that by calorie.
Rip Esselstyn:
It probably is.
Dr. Doug Graham:
Not by cost.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah.
Dr. Doug Graham:
See, you got to have a unit. Let's always use a unit or we confuse people.
Rip Esselstyn:
Okay. Okay, good. And I know you talk about that very definitively in the book. Why are you not such a fan of, let's say, potatoes, bread, pasta, grains, whole intact grains, rice, beans? I'd love for you to explain that.
Dr. Doug Graham:
Okay. It's easy to do.
Rip Esselstyn:
Okay.
Dr. Doug Graham:
It's easy to do. Two things. One, if we look at the target, the target has a series of rings with a bullseye in the middle. Why we call it the bullseye? Well, that's a separate conversation why we named so many things with animal parts. But we do. I mean, peaches have cheeks and mangoes have shoulders and da, da, da, da, da.
If we look at the bullseye, fruits and vegetables are in the middle of that target. They're the healthiest foods for us. And if I'm looking to take the best care of myself, I'm going to eat the foods that are best for me. And anything else is second best at best, third best, fourth best, whatever. I'm not saying anything's, it's not good, bad or whatever, it's just fruits and vegetables are best. So I can eat fruits and vegetables. Why wouldn't I?
But we can look at it from the downside if you want, instead, and look up from the downside. And the downside is what I call gens. And we understand gens. Gen means the origin of something, like in Genesis or genetics. We're looking at the origin of things. And in the gens, there are five specific gens that are associated with cooked food. And it doesn't matter what kind of cooked food, and it doesn't matter how we cook them, but the longer we cook them and the higher temperature we cook them, the more gens we develop, we create. Now, the gens were first discovered over 100 years ago by a doctor, a French doctor named Maillard.
Rip Esselstyn:
Oh yeah.
Dr. Doug Graham:
And he eventually coined the phrase a Maillard reaction. And that's a little more complicated to go into what happens when we make Maillard reactions. But there's four different chemicals that are formed in Maillard reactions, all of which are carcinogenic, so the gen. And anytime we heat foods, we create carcinogens, so that's the first gen. And it doesn't matter where you look. I don't care whose source you want to go. You heat foods, you create carcinogens, AGEs and PCHs and partially combusted hydrocarbons and-
Rip Esselstyn:
Acrylamides.
Dr. Doug Graham:
... aromatic benzene rings, all sorts of carcinogens. Anyway. But we also create substances that are called tumorigens. They're the origin of tumors and tremorigens. There's lots of different kinds of tremors that humans can have. Their origins lie in, substances created when we cook food.
There's another kind of gen that is called a mutagen. And what a mutagen does is it stops a cell from reproducing itself perfectly. When a cell doesn't reproduce itself perfectly, that's called a mutation, and that is the explanation of aging. That's how aging happens, is cells stop reproducing themselves perfectly. And we get these little changes, and we call them aging. So mutagens are actually what the aging process is all about. And these mutagens are not in existence in raw foods, but they are in cooked, including bread, rice, pasta, corn, potatoes and oats.
The big gen probably the one most people... Well, I don't know which one they're most concerned about, but the big gen to me is called the teratogen. Now, teratogen hasn't made a lot of popularity in the public mind, but if we look up teratogens, what we find out is that they're not that damaging to us in ways we can notice, until we have babies. The damage happens to the babies. If you remember thalidomide from the 1960s, you're not old enough to remember it, but there was a drug called thalidomide, which was used by a bunch of pregnant ladies to help them with their morning sickness. And it helped. They didn't have so much headaches, but the babies were born with no arms and no legs, just hands and feet sticking out of their shoulders and hips. Terrible, terrible teratogen. And we're seeing that same teratogenic effect happen when we heat starches.
We're seeing that carcinogenic effect happen to the point where there are now laws in California and many other states that heating starches in a restaurant or any eating establishment must be accompanied by a sign that says they're doing so, because there's carcinogens being released into the air. And every restaurant in California has that sign on the outside of their door. You're not allowed to enter... Well, you're supposed to see the sign.
There are also signs for the carcinogens that are formed when we heat fats. And again, if you remember the whole deal with trans fats and how cooking with fats became illegal in fast food establishments because of the carcinogens released into the air. So if we look at all those gens, none of them are good for us. They all happen as a result of cooking food. That's before you get into anti-nutrients, which also happen when we cook food, the loss of nutrients that occurs when we cook food. Those are two things. Loss of nutrients is one thing. Anti-nutrients is yet another. Both happen when we cook.
I never had an aspiration to become a raw vegan, trust me. But once I learned this information, I couldn't, man, I just couldn't not see it. I couldn't not at least find out for myself what would happen if I tried it. And I did an interview with a lady, a young lady from college. She was doing a paper, and she talked to me for about 40 minutes. And at the end of it, she goes, "Look, this all sounds great, but it also sounds like a lot of effort on your part to make sure there's food on the table." She goes, "It's just a lot of effort. Socially, you're the outcast and whatever else." And she goes, "Is it really worth it?"
And my response was, "Well, how stupid do you think I am?" And she goes, "What do you mean?" I go, "I've been doing this for more than 40 years, you think If it wasn't worth it, maybe I would've stopped a couple years ago, or maybe 30 or 40 years ago if it wasn't worth it? Of course, it's worth it. That's why I'm still doing it 40 years down the line because it's working so well that I can still go out and play with kids."
I mean, I'm going to be 70 in a couple of weeks and I'm still performing, as I like to say, everything still works just fine. And I'm so glad that it does. And I don't think I'm a genetic freak. It's not just God picked me out of the universe. It works for everybody. I used to tell people, you'll extend your athletic career by five or 10 years. But I was completely wrong. I don't even know how long it is. Pam Boteler on the 80, 10, 10 was 45 years old when she won national championships in sprint canoe. The next oldest competitor was 23. I mean, sprint sports are kid sports, right? And the next oldest competitor was 23. She won it at 45, and there really wasn't even a second place. Second place was so far back, it should have been third or fourth or something. If she'd competed in the men's, she would've took third. I mean, it was unreal.
Rip Esselstyn:
Doug, let me ask you this. You know the work of Dan Buettner in the Blue Zones. The commonality there are really beans, the legumes, between those five different populations. You know of the work... Well, Okinawans, that I think it's 77% of their diet is from carbohydrates from the Okinawan sweet potato. I mean, tell me, are all these gens being created as well in potatoes and beans and legumes?
Dr. Doug Graham:
Absolutely yes.
Rip Esselstyn:
They are.
Dr. Doug Graham:
Absolutely yes. Now, you don't get a browning reaction if you cook stuff in water. You don't get that whole Maillard series of events when you cook stuff in water. When you boil food, it's not quite as harmful. But there was another side to that whole story, right? You remember when you were eight and nine years old? Do you remember going to school back then, or do you blocked all that out?
Rip Esselstyn:
No, I remember.
Dr. Doug Graham:
Well, about once a week or so you'd get to do some art, or at least we did. About once a week we'd get to do some art. And the teacher, maybe one week we'd paint and one week we'd draw or I don't know what. Art was never my thing, but occasionally we'd get a whole bunch of paper and scissors, and we were told not to run around with the scissors, but we'd get a whole bunch of paper, colored paper, scissors, and paste, and you make some kind of layered thing to try to make pictures out of paper and paste. And the teacher had one instruction for you. Don't eat the paste.
Rip Esselstyn:
The glue, yeah.
Dr. Doug Graham:
Not glue. We didn't get glue. That's made from horses hooves. We got paste, white school paste. That's made from flour and water. And we were told, don't eat the paste. And I find it astonishing that every teacher in every school told every child, don't eat the paste, but all these vegan doctors are out there telling people, eat paste. It's good for you. But we'll change the name. We won't call it paste. We'll run it through a press and then strain it out, extrude it, and we'll call it pasta instead. That'll fool them. It won't be paste anymore. It'll be pasta.
Or the French will add sugar and we'll call it pastry. They're not hiding the name all that well. The Spanish will add sugar and eggs and call it pastel. It's all paste, man. We're not designed to eat paste, man. It's got no vitamin C. Basically, 1952, there was a guy won a Nobel Prize for his work with vitamin C. Do you know who that was?
Rip Esselstyn:
Is that Lionel Pauling?
Dr. Doug Graham:
It sure was. He won a Nobel Prize. And what he said is that we need to be eating 10 to 100 times more vitamin C than we are, and the only way he could see to do that was to supplement with pills. And everybody laughed him off the planet and said, "Who's going to eat 100 times as much vitamin C, Linus?" But somebody didn't laugh because they gave him a Nobel prize. I think he's the only guy to win two Nobel prizes in two completely different... Anyway, so he won this thing. And I think he was onto something, because when I analyze the vitamin C content of a diet made up of fruits and vegetables, it's exactly the amount of vitamin C that Linus Pauling said we need to take. So I'm taking in all that vitamin C. It's 1980 since the last time I was seriously ill of any kind of way.
I don't know? What he suggested seems to be working really spot on as far as I can tell. I talked to Dr. Howell before he died. The guy who said, "Well, we need to be taking in all these enzymes. Everybody needs enzymes." I said, Dr. Howell, "Does everybody need them?" He goes, "Well, if you're eating nothing but fruits and vegetables, you wouldn't need them. But who does that?" I said, "Well, you just described my diet." He goes, "Well, then you don't need enzymes. You're getting everything you need out of your food."
Food isn't the answer to all the mankind's problems, I'm first to say. It's not even all the answers to nutrition. You still get your vitamin D from the sun, and you get your B12 from microbes, for goodness sakes. But if we can't cover the very, very...
PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [00:52:04]
Dr. Doug Graham:
... but if we can't cover the very, very basics of eating well, eating at least to the point where your diet is predominated by fruits and vegetables, I think we're missing the boat.
Rip Esselstyn:
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. You mentioned, so for example, you know Nathan Pritikin, who-
Dr. Doug Graham:
Sure.
Rip Esselstyn:
... amazing pioneer. You say that where he got it wrong was that he grouped the natural sugars that were contained in fruit with other sugars, and that was his fatal mistake, even though he was able to reverse heart disease doing that. So your contention is, you can reverse some of these diseases eating this way, but it doesn't necessarily mean that you're healthy.
Dr. Doug Graham:
Well, it certainly doesn't necessarily mean you're healthy. Health is tough to pin down, a definition. But even his biggest supporters, and as you saw, I wrote a big section about it in the book. Even his biggest supporters said he missed the boat entirely, because he, yes, if it was just weight management or it was just heart disease and that was our only concern, and we weren't concerned that while we're stopping heart disease we're causing cancer, well, okay. But if we are trying to not prevent this and prevent that, but instead cause something, the thing we'd be trying to cause would be health.
So, if I'm trying to create health ... What do they call it? The 4-H Society, they run those contests for flower shows and prize hogs and whatnot, and the person who provides the substances, forces, influences, conditions that are optimum for that African violet or for that hog, or for whatever the animal or plant, the person who provides the optimum conditions or the closest to it, for the most time produces the prize-winning plant or animal. And that's what we try to do with our kids. We try to give them the optimum conditions and we tell them, "No, you can't drink alcohol as a three-year-old. No, you can't smoke cigarettes just because grandpa does. And no, you can't have a cup of coffee. It'll stunt your health, it'll stunt your growth, it'll ruin your this, that or the next." And then we turn into teenagers and we see how much can we abuse ourselves and still get to work the next day or whatever.
And then 20 years later we go, "Wow, I was destroying my health. Now my health is really important to me again, I need to start taking better care of..." Mickey Mantle said it best, right? He said, "If I'd known I was going to live this long, I'd have took better care of myself."
Rip Esselstyn:
Yes. Doug, this is so compelling and I'm trying to figure out here the direction I want to go at this point.
Dr. Doug Graham:
You be careful, Rip, talking to me, because I'm going to have you doing a raw food experiment before we're done. Before I finish the show, you'll have done the experiment.
Rip Esselstyn:
Well, and know that my world has been fruits, vegetables, whole intact grains, legumes, limited amounts of nuts and seeds and avocados.
Dr. Doug Graham:
It's got to be the next best thing to what I'm doing.
Rip Esselstyn:
Right, right. So if yours is an A, you would call what I'm eating, what, a B?
Dr. Doug Graham:
Maybe.
Rip Esselstyn:
Maybe. Okay. All right, C, B-?
Dr. Doug Graham:
Yeah.
Rip Esselstyn:
Okay, All right, and know that-
Dr. Doug Graham:
But I know you enough to know that you don't want to a C.
Rip Esselstyn:
Right, right.
Dr. Doug Graham:
I know that you don't want a C.
Rip Esselstyn:
Right. And know that the people that I have held up on a very high pedestal have been the McDougalls and my father and the Ornish's and these people. What's tough for me to reconcile, and I'm taking this in, is that, am I going to stop my rice and my lentils and my black beans and my tacos with corn tortillas? And I think you're saying, yeah, if you don't want to get a C any longer, you might want to think about that. Even though this has reversed heart disease, reversed diabetes, type 2 diabetes and some other things. Right?
Dr. Doug Graham:
Sure.
Rip Esselstyn:
Metabolic Syndrome.
Dr. Doug Graham:
It's the human propensity to get well. Health is the natural state of humans. Your diet is so clean compared to your next door neighbor's diet that you would think that you had an A plus plus plus. Because they're failing.
It's like they say, if you want to look young and healthy and trim and fit, hang around with a bunch of ugly, fat old people. So when you compare yourself to a diet that's an absolute abysmal failure, yours shines like... And it's where I went after I gave up on standard American diet and moved away from macro neurotic diet and then moved away from vegetarian and then eventually became a vegan. Those are all steps in a direction that is improvement. There was improvement every time. The smallest step of all of them is from what you're doing to what I'm doing. That's the tiniest step, but it'll give you the biggest results.
Rip Esselstyn:
Right. Which to me is super exciting. You're much more an advocate of a fruit and vegetable... should I say fruit and some vegetables or fruit and veggie? How do you like to describe that? But fruit and veggie verse low fat, starch based, starch based diet.
Dr. Doug Graham:
Yeah. I don't want to eat starches. There's no vitamin C. It's just paste. Look, I love starch. I'm not going to tell you for a second that I didn't love ribs, spare ribs on a grill. I love that too. I love everything that I ever ate when I was a kid or I didn't eat it. And when I went vegan, it was like, wow, this is the best thing ever. I get to eat all the starch I want, but it didn't serve me in so many ways that I can name if you want, but it didn't serve me in so many ways that I said, "How come I'm meeting all these raw vegans? Why do they keep telling me there's something better out there? I got to find out."
Rip Esselstyn:
But as you say in your book, Doug, most raw vegans don't even get it right, because they're eating 60% of their calories from fat.
Dr. Doug Graham:
Correct. Well, when the book was written that was correct. Eight, oh now it's 10 years ago since I went to Slovenia for a raw food festival in Slovenia. The people who put on that festival also invited a lot of press to come and it was a big deal. It was so different, so wild. And so the press came. One of the interviews that I did, the news lady said, "I don't know anything about raw foods, Dr. Graham. I mean, I don't even know what you're talking about. People keep giving me different terms. When they say raw food, do they mean 80, 10, 10?" And I looked her in the eye and I said, "Not yet."
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah, right.
Dr. Doug Graham:
There was a big raw food movement 20 years ago. I mean, there were seven festivals in the United States during the course of every summer, and it was a big deal. There was San Francisco and Portland and Syracuse, New York and Miami, and Atlanta, Georgia. There was festivals all over the place. But they all self-destructed. I mean, they're eating 70 to 80% of their fat. And people are saying, it doesn't matter what it is, as long as it's raw and supplements and stimulants and condiments and irritants and flushes. And I'm going, how can you be telling me that this program is nutritionally optimum, but it needs all this intervention? It's not.
There was an old T-shirt when I was a kid of a mad, mad chemist, and he's in his lab and things are bubbling over and he's wild. His hair was crazy. And caption said, better living through chemistry. And then the heading across the top of the T-shirt was LSD. LSD, better living through chemistry. Well, we learned that we actually can't improve on Mother Nature, like the old Chiffon commercial. Don't mess with Mother Nature. You can't get better than nature. So to me, I just went back to nature. Call me a nature boy if you want, but I just went back to nature said, fruits and vegetables, just pick it off the tree, eat it. It's from God's hand to yours. It's a spiritual experience to pick fruit off a tree.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Let me ask you this. I was in Wisconsin this summer and the little town called Frederic. The grocery stores, I mean, the closest grocery store was, it's this little grocery store, and the produce in there was so pitiful looking. I mean, I'm like, oh my gosh. How do you feel, because to me, almost every grocery store has an abundance of really, I think freshly ripe picked frozen, frozen fruit from mangoes to tropical blends to berries. Are you okay with frozen?
Dr. Doug Graham:
You know Ralph Cinque, Dr. Ralph Cinque? I heard him give a lecture one time back in 1985. And his speaking was so crystal clear, it was the best presentation I'd ever heard on nutrition. It was just crystal clear, and I loved how he distilled things down. So when I talk about optimum nutrition, when I want to describe that bullseye, I just use five words, whole, fresh, ripe, raw, organic plants. If you can eat whole, fresh, ripe, raw, organic plants, you're hitting the bullseye.
Frozen isn't fresh, but it's the next best thing isn't it? And if you can't access fresh, well, darn it. I mean, right now organic is better than conventional I'm convinced 1000 times over. But two and sometimes three times a year, organic celery becomes very hard for me to access in England, because it's a seasonal crop. And as the season wears out to the very end before the next season kicks in, celery gets abysmal. But conventional celery still, I mean, it's seasonless.
Rip Esselstyn:
I would imagine that one of the objections that you probably get amongst many is, Doug, I mean, this sounds really expensive.
Dr. Doug Graham:
It's not.
Rip Esselstyn:
It's not.
Dr. Doug Graham:
Not at all. I don't spend any more than any of my neighbors spend on their food, except the ones who are living on pure junk. Pure junk is really cheap. And that's designed that way. I'll put my dollar per calorie against your dollar per calorie, and I'm not spending more than you are.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Well, that's interesting. I know Robby Barbaro just moved to Austin, and one of the first things he was asking about, where the good farmer's markets, and he's got a knack for finding produce that's very, very affordable. He'll go to Walmart and go nuts on the produce at Walmart or wherever.
Dr. Doug Graham:
I mean, I just put in my food order. I'm going to go pick up food tomorrow. And I tell my grocer in advance what I want, and he gives me a pretty darn good discount because of that. And I say, "Look, I want three cases of oranges. I want a case of bananas. I want a case of persimmon," whatever it might be. I'm paying about half of what I see grocery store prices to be.
Rip Esselstyn:
Nice. What about apples? Are you a fan of apples?
Dr. Doug Graham:
Me personally?
Rip Esselstyn:
The reason I ask is I can't eat a lot of apples. I find I eat one apple and my stomach is like, okay, that's about all I can handle.
Dr. Doug Graham:
It's a really common thing not to be able to handle apples or pears. It's a really common thing. I will not make a meal of apples. I'm not happy if I have to do that. My wife digests apples perfectly well. My daughter loves them. She can eat them endlessly with no problem. If I try to eat a lot of apples, my stomach, same problem as you. I don't do well.
We are tropical creatures by design. And it's the reason you're wearing a shirt right now, is because you stay in the tropics. We just call it clothing, bedding, heat our house, whatever we do to stay in our own little mini tropical environment. If you leave it for more than a few minutes, you're cold and then you die. In our natural world, we would never see an apple. If you lived within 1000 miles of the equator, which is where people are designed to live, you would never ever see an apple because that's a temperate zone fruit.
Maybe there's something in that. I still like an odd apple now and then. I really like it with raisins, dates, bananas and apple in a food processor, turn it into something with a texture of oatmeal.
Rip Esselstyn:
Speaking of oatmeal, you're not even a fan of oats, are you?
Dr. Doug Graham:
Because I'm eating an oatmeal that's so rich in vitamin C ... no, no starches. For me, I don't want wallpaper paste. It's wallpaper paste. Look, I love bland foods. I love bland foods.
Rip Esselstyn:
It's not bland. I love putting fruit on my oatmeal.
Dr. Doug Graham:
Why?
Rip Esselstyn:
Why?
Dr. Doug Graham:
Yeah.
Rip Esselstyn:
Well, I guess you could say ... Well, actually, oats are 18% carbs, 18% protein... no, I'm wrong about that. 18% fat, 18% protein, and then the rest is carbohydrate. But I find there's a sweetness to oats. But I do like to put fruit on them. Why? I guess, and I know exactly where you're going to go with this, but it's because it-
Dr. Doug Graham:
Because it's sweet and juicy.
Rip Esselstyn:
Sweet and juicy, and I find that the whole combination is very satiating. And I'd have-
Dr. Doug Graham:
You know how they punish people in prison?
Rip Esselstyn:
Give them oatmeal. What?
Dr. Doug Graham:
Bread and water, right? Yeah, oatmeal basically. Give them starch and water. That's called punishment. And there's people choosing to do it. And I'm just shocked. I'm really just shocked that people don't want to eat more fruit. I've never seen people turn down fruit. Nobody ever turns it down. When I offer them fruit, "Oh yeah, I'll have a piece of fruit." Everybody loves fruit. It's our natural inclination to eat fruit. Well, we've been programmed, we've been seriously programmed, to just avoid thinking about vitamin C to avoid thinking about all those Maillard reactions. Let's not even, let's not... Look, I love starchy food. It doesn't love me back. So for me personally, I eat fruit rather than starch. And I find it funny because they're both considered carbohydrate source, but there's no hydration in starchy food. We've cooked all the hydration right out of it.
Rip Esselstyn:
You've cooked it out, but as you said, when you make your pasta or you make your beans or or even potatoes and water, there's some water in there, right?
Dr. Doug Graham:
There's some.
Rip Esselstyn:
Which brings the calorie density down, so it's more like a fruit or a vegetable.
Dr. Doug Graham:
Let me ask you a question. That's a fun interview when I get to ask a question.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah.
Dr. Doug Graham:
How much water do you drink on an average day?
Rip Esselstyn:
Not much. And I don't know if that's good or bad. Okay, let me ask you. Let me ask you this. Because I know that you're not a fan of fragmentation. You like the whole kit and caboodle, your fruits, your vegetables. Are you a fan of drinking water? Because that seems like that's fractionated as well. Or are you a fan of getting all your water from your food?
Dr. Doug Graham:
I'm a fan of not eating things that cause me to be thirsty.
Rip Esselstyn:
Gotcha.
Dr. Doug Graham:
And as a result of that, I get all my water needs met through my fruits and vegetables. But if I go sunbath in the tropics for two hours, or I'm swinging a sledgehammer for all day in summer heat, I definitely need to drink some water to make up for that exertion, because that's water above and beyond what you would just need if you were in the shade, lounging, hanging out in a tree like an orangutan might, just lounging around. If I'm going to be sweating, I'm going to be drinking.
Rip Esselstyn:
With your clients, what do you tell them is the best way to transition? Are you a fan of people diving in this head first or slowly or quickly or depends on your personality?
Dr. Doug Graham:
Partly it depends on their personality type. How would you go into a swimming pool? Would you dive in or would you go in through the shallow end? It's a good question to ask people. Or how would you learn Spanish? If you wanted to learn Spanish, would you want one word a day for the next 10 years or do you just go get a Spanish girlfriend, boyfriend, whatever, and immerse for three or four weeks?
Certainly, the most success happens from total immersion. Most success, total immersion. So if I'm going to guide people, I'm going to go, eating cook food's like banging your head against the wall. How quickly do you want to stop? Most people want to stop right now, banging your head against the wall. What's the best way to quit smoking, drinking, injecting heroin? You're talking about a highly addictive habit that people will come up with endless justifications for continuing to eat cooked food, because they don't want to give it up. I didn't want to give it up either, man. I didn't want to give it up. I just got better results. And I couldn't argue with better results. Who was I going to argue? I'm arguing against myself. I'm getting better results on raw food than I was on cooked. I couldn't go back. And I still went back probably 20 times in 15 years until I finally go, this is stupid. Let me figure this out. And that's when 80, 10, 10 was born.
Rip Esselstyn:
Now, let's talk for a second about fiber.
Dr. Doug Graham:
Tell me it's not the stupidest book title ever though, I mean it tells you-
Rip Esselstyn:
What's that?
Dr. Doug Graham:
80, 10, 10. It tells you nothing.
Rip Esselstyn:
Well, I don't know. I'm not going to say that because I think it creates some curiosity.
Dr. Doug Graham:
It creates mystery.
Rip Esselstyn:
It sure does. But so fiber, Doug. I think latest stats I've seen is 97% of Americans are deficient in fiber. The average American's getting 16 and a half grams a day. I mean, I bet you on your diet, you're getting what, 80 to 120.
Dr. Doug Graham:
I'm getting so much fiber, but a big difference is that almost all of it is soluble fiber.
Rip Esselstyn:
That's the thing I want to talk to you about. Because again, you talk in your book about how you love the soluble fiber that gels up. You're not a fan of the insoluble fiber that's in-
Dr. Doug Graham:
No, that's like ground glass, man. Ground glass is insoluble fiber.
Rip Esselstyn:
Which blew my mind. And it's like really? I mean really? Because I was under the impression that Will Bulsiewicz and Robynne Chutkan, who I've had on the podcast, whole intact grains, beans, great sources of fiber, resistant fiber, build that healthy microbiome that most people are-
Dr. Doug Graham:
Who said that the easiest way to get a man not to see a fact is to make his income reliant upon him not seeing that fact?
Rip Esselstyn:
I can't remember who said it. Maybe Linus Pauling again.
Dr. Doug Graham:
It was more like Aldous Huxley or something. I don't know who said it, but I'll find out as soon as we're done here. But that's what we're dealing with, basically. I'm honored to be surrounded by some of the most brilliant men in the world in the field of vegan nutrition and all the different aspects of it. I'm honored to be included.
Rip Esselstyn:
And women.
Dr. Doug Graham:
And women. Yeah, I meant people. Sorry. And women. In many cases more the women. But most of them have backed themselves into a corner because their income's dependent upon it, and now they can't see. Is there anybody going to argue fruits and vegetables are better for us than starch? Can you make that argument? If we had a platform and it was just you and me, and we were out there for blood and guts, could you actually beat me, that starches are better for us than fruits and vegetables?
Rip Esselstyn:
Well, I haven't staked my whole life and reputation on starch based. McDougall has.
Dr. Doug Graham:
I know. He cannot. He's lost.
Rip Esselstyn:
Have you ever been to John's advanced weekend study or anything like that?
Dr. Doug Graham:
No.
Rip Esselstyn:
No, no, no. Okay.
Dr. Doug Graham:
But I do know that he used to come out in a strong, strong statement that no human being should ever, by any circumstance, no human being should ever consume salt, because it's such a deadly poison. And then he changed his view and he said, "Well, what's the point of promoting the world's healthiest diet if nobody will eat it because it has no taste? So eat a little salt. And I'm going, wait a minute. I've got two different things in print here from this man on the same topic that are diametrically opposed.
No. I haven't been to his stuff. I've read his stuff. I've read a lot of him. I respect him highly, okay? These guys, all of these guys, the ones you know and many, many more. The ones we all know. I mean, around the world, there's some fantastic people creating vegans. So my question to you is, if you need to go to the bathroom and you're at my house and you need to go to the bathroom, or even better, you want to know where the bathroom is. So you ask me where the bathroom is, and I say, "Well, what you do is first you start going to the health food store and buy health store versions of the things you normally buy. And then get so interested in the whole thing that maybe you become a vegetarian. And then when you realize that that's not the answer, that you become a vegan. And then when you realize that's not the answer, you become a raw foodist. And then when you realize that's not the answer, you become a low fat, raw foodist like all of our anthropoid primate cousins are already doing.
It's like, how do you get to Miami from Fort Lauderdale? Well, you go to Houston and then you go to Seattle, and then you go to Portland, Maine, and then you drop down and next thing you know, you're right there. Or you can just go next door. Go from cooked to not cooked. The shortcut is the way to go.
For me, I don't really care. I don't even need to know whether you need the bathroom, whether you are going to run, whether you're going to skip, whether you're going to hop, whether you're going to walk backwards, whether you're going to detour, but you...
PART 3 OF 4 ENDS [01:18:04]
Dr. Doug Graham:
Backwards, whether you're going to detour, but you don't want me to tell you the long cut. You want me to tell you, "Oh, it's the next room on the left. Just turn left. Go out this door, turn left. It's there on your left." You want the shortest route to the bathroom, the most direct route. The most direct route is go from cook to not cooked, and find out if it works. Is it challenging? Yes. I mean, anybody want to argue with me? Health is so much easier to live than sickness. I will always take a healthy day over a sick day. For me, health is so much easier than sickness. It's not whether cooked food is easier than raw food. It's whether health is easier than sickness. For me, I mean-
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Does [inaudible 01:18:57]?
Dr. Doug Graham:
You never have to ask me when we meet, "How are you?"
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah, yeah. Doug, does your whole family eat the way you do? Your wife?
Dr. Doug Graham:
Actually, yes, they do. Yes, they do. By choice, but yes, they do.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Well, they probably see their results with you, and they respect and admire you greatly.
Dr. Doug Graham:
Well, I'm fortunate. My wife actually went raw food before I met her.
Rip Esselstyn:
Wow.
Dr. Doug Graham:
More than 20 years ago. I'm not allowed to say how many more.
Rip Esselstyn:
Got it. In your book, you talk about how, aside from eating a low-fat, raw, plant-based diet, you're also a fan of a holistic approach with what's going on with your life. With fitness and-
Dr. Doug Graham:
Absolutely.
Rip Esselstyn:
... some other things. Can you talk about the whole spectrum that you-
Dr. Doug Graham:
I used a phrase earlier, when we were talking about the 4-H Club. The substances, the forces, the influences, the conditions. The things that result in health. There's an old book called Nature's Seven Doctors, where they talk about fresh, pure water, and clean air, and enough sleep, and enough rest, and positive mental attitude, and eating enough fruits and vegetables, and being physically active. All these were considered nature's seven doctors, right? Well, in the science of human health, which is known as hygiene. Not just washing your hands, but the entire science of human health is referred to as hygiene. There are clear cut descriptions of the more than 30 different features of human life that are absolutely essential to our wellbeing. Look, I mean, we're talking about life and death stuff here, but it doesn't mean we can't be lighthearted about it and have a good time.
When we need to be serious, we can be very serious, but we also have to be congenial and have some social time. We can't just be living in a cave, all by ourself, all the time. That's not the healthiest way to go forward. All of these different aspects, and food is just one of them. We get bent out of shape about food. It's like, "Never talk about politics, religion, or food, because you're really stepping on people's toes." I'm not trying to step on toes. I'm just saying, "Fruits and vegetables work well for me. If you want to join me, the water's fine. If you don't, fine." But if you want to find out more, go to my website. I got the biggest FAQ on raw foods that exists. You can go to my forum, it's free, and ask any question you want. Stuff like that. If you want to find out about it, great. But for people who aren't interested... One of my mentors said, "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't hold their head under till they get thirsty."
Rip Esselstyn:
Doug, let's talk for a second about protein.
Dr. Doug Graham:
If we can.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yep. I think we can, I think we've got enough time.
Dr. Doug Graham:
It's easy.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yep, yep. I'm going to read something that I got from your book. Here, let me find it here. We talked about this a little earlier, but I want to repeat it again. You say, "In truth, there's really no such thing as a high-protein diet," which we talked about. Then on page 104, you say, "There is a mountain of compelling research showing that low-quality, plant protein is the healthiest type," and T. Colin Campbell also talks about that. How a high bioavailable protein doesn't necessarily mean that it's good for you. And so, can you expound on that?
Dr. Doug Graham:
Well, we start stressing the kidneys, and we start stressing the liver, when we eat higher content of protein than what we... See, it's a funny world. Nutrition's a funny concept, because in all other sciences, in all the other health sciences, what we learn: When we look at blood work, we go, "Oh, we don't want to be too high in magnesium, we don't want to be too low. We don't want to be too high in red blood cells, we don't want to be too low. We don't want to be too high in this or too low." Always, we want to be, what's called, within normal limits. But in the world of nutrition, we somehow bought into the idea that more is better. That's not the case. Too much vitamin A, and you die. Too much Vitamin K, and you die. Too much of many things, and you die.
Rip Esselstyn:
Even water, yeah.
Dr. Doug Graham:
I mean, more is not better. Therefore, the highest source of this, that, or the next thing is not automatically the best source. In fact, it very often isn't. The highest source of vitamin A is polar bear liver. But if you want to go to the really highest source, the highest source of vitamin A is a vitamin A supplement. We think of supplements as being more nutritious than food. Because the word, their name is supplement. We think of it as a verb, not a noun. We get in trouble because of that, because what if we change the name? What if we call them detriments? They're the most isolated, pharmaceutically pure, crystal, white powder on the planet. With no shelf life, right? Like an endless shelf life. It can't go bad. Anything that can't go bad already is bad. Otherwise, it could go bad. It's the most isolated thing. We look at protein powder like it's a good thing, but we look at sugar like it's a bad thing.
Rip Esselstyn:
You're right.
Dr. Doug Graham:
Sugar is an isolated calorie source stripped of all its related or associated nutrients, but protein powder is an isolated calorie source stripped of all its associated nutrients.
Rip Esselstyn:
Just like oils, right? Just like oils.
Dr. Doug Graham:
Oils, the same. Again, they're empty calories. These are empty calories. An interesting thing happens. My physiology teacher back in medical school was a lady named Mrs. Petit, and I really liked Mrs. Petit. She knew a ton of stuff. One day, we were reviewing for the national boards in physiology. I mean, about to sit the board, right? We took a special course, and you just review physiology for hours. She said something that I'd never... She might have said it before, but I never caught it. She said, "Any protein, every protein. When you heat it, the bonds separate and cross-link and rejoin." They're called cross-linked proteins, and cross-linked proteins are invariably two things.
Number one, they're indigestible. Number two, they get recognized as foreign substances and can be carcinogenic. I went up to her afterwards, after class. I said, "What do you mean cross-linked proteins are indigestible?" She said, "Well, technically that's not how we describe them. We describe them as enzyme resistant." Cross-linked bonds are enzyme-resistant bonds. Kind of like in the movie, where the guy goes, "Bonds, enzyme-resistant bonds." I go, "Enzyme-resistant bonds?" She goes, "We do not manufacture the enzymes that will help us break down enzyme-resistant bonds." We don't have them, we can't access those proteins. All that protein that people are eating that's cooked protein, they're not even accessing it.
Rip Esselstyn:
So, what does it do?
Dr. Doug Graham:
They poop it out. They're living on a low-protein diet, just like everybody else. This is why the scientists tell us that if our protein intake goes below 3%, we could get in trouble. But above 10%, we definitely are stressing our kidneys.
Rip Esselstyn:
Right. What else is going on when your protein content goes above 10%? You talk about, in the books, like-
Dr. Doug Graham:
Do you ever see kids run around at a birthday party, right? When their blood sugar goes sky high?
Rip Esselstyn:
Oh, absolutely.
Dr. Doug Graham:
Isolated nutrient. When protein goes up, every alarm bell in the planet, every alarm bell on your body goes off, right? Says, "We've got to lower this protein content." It does that in a variety of ways, right? Heart rate goes up, blood pressure goes up, respiratory rate goes up, temperature goes up. As we start trying to process this protein faster to get it out of the bloodstream, because this is a medical emergency. White blood cell count goes from 3 million to 18 million. That's the equivalent of your temperature going from 100 to 600. That would be crazy. If your temperature went up to 600, right? Parameters for most things don't change by more than three or four percent, between unhealthy and healthy. Blood calcium goes from nine to 11, and that's a big range. But here, we're talking about normal being 3 million.
After every single meal of cooked food, white blood cell count shooting up to 18 million. Because foreign proteins, these indigestible enzyme-resistant, cross-link bonds enter into the bloodstream, create every emergency possible. We got to deal with that, so you're now stressing your adrenals. You create a cascade of problems as the body tries to fend off this stuff. The white blood cells are the all-American cells. You use them once and throw them away. They start collecting this protein as fast as possible. We get all this pus, we get all this mucus creation. Nothing good happens when you exceed your needs. It would be like buying you a pair of size 27 shoes. I didn't answer what you were looking for.
Rip Esselstyn:
Which is basically, the protein you're going to get from animal products. It's too high in the sulfuric containing amino acid, supposedly promotes inflammation. It's very bioavailable, but what you're going to get from maybe your fruits and your veggies is more of a Goldilocks version.
Dr. Doug Graham:
Well, it's bioavailable when it's raw. The raw meat, right? That's bioavailable protein, but not once it's cooked. That cross-link protein, it might as well be glued together. We talked about it earlier, difference between paste and glues. Paste is a plant-based product and glue is an animal-based product. You're creating glue when you start cooking animal proteins.
Rip Esselstyn:
Right, right. And so, do you consider plant-based proteins a low quality?
Dr. Doug Graham:
Well, low and high is, again, a funny phrase, right? Because if you're a size seven shoe, size three is low. But if you're a size three shoe, then three is perfect. What the scientists have told us is that we need to get 3% to 10% of our calories from fat, and three to 10 from protein. Anything beyond 10 is excess. But when nutrition studies have been done on diet, and they've concluded that low fat diets are a complete waste of time, they're looking at a standard western diet. 45% of calories coming from fat. Then they do a low-fat diet, and then it's only 35% of calories. I read one study that was down to 33. That's still triple to quadruple what I'm recommending, and what the sports scientists are recommending, and what the performance specialists are recommending, and what the oncologists are recommending, and what the cardiologists are recommending, and what the diabetes specialists are all recommending. If they're following the JAMA notes from 1959.
I'm sure you've watched that video, how to become a diabetic in 30 minutes. Everybody's recommending what they call low-fat diet, but it's not low. Low implies a problem. When you're low on petrol, you're low on gas. Uh-oh, the water level's gone low. It's almost like we left out the word "too". It's too low, right? It implies a problem. But in this case, we're just saying compared to the high-fat diet. That the standard western diet is so high in fat, ours is actually within normal limits. Three to 10% is within normal limits. 15%, I don't care. You want to go up into the high teens. That's all within normal limits, but you exceed that and predictable health decline is what happens. Now, your genetics will determine whether that's cancer, heart disease, diabetes, digestive disorders. That's going to be through your genetics, where your strengths and weaknesses lie, but that's what's coming.
Rip Esselstyn:
At what age do you think 80, 10, 10 is good for... Like starting age three, four, five? Two? What do you think?
Dr. Doug Graham:
I think the important thing there is: When children wean, that they should wean onto fruit. That's the important thing. They should wean onto something else that's sweet and juicy. In all other species, they wean onto whatever the parents eat, but our parents weren't eaten fruit and veg, so it was difficult.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. I've got a 13-year-old, a 15-year-old, and an eight-year-old. Obviously, they're 100% plant-based, plant strong. I told my wife I was interviewing you today, and I was really fascinated by your book and all the information that's in there. She's like, "Well, I don't know if we could-
Dr. Doug Graham:
[inaudible 01:34:05].
Rip Esselstyn:
"But I don't know if we could ever do this with our kids." I'm like, "Well, I'll be sure to ask Doug that."
Dr. Doug Graham:
My daughter weaned at eight years of age. She said to Rozzi, she said, "Mom, I'm done." She knew she was done, and it was hard on Rozzi. It wasn't hard on Franchesca. She said, "I'm done, Mom. I'm done. I don't need to come to you anymore. I'm there." She never went back, not once after that. But until then, yeah. We didn't ever try to force the process. We said, "It's always there. It's always available. Take your time." But, she had her first food just after she turned one. She had her first fruit just after she turned one.
Rip Esselstyn:
Doug.
Dr. Doug Graham:
I think it's easy to feed kids fruit. I've never had trouble getting kids to eat fruit. They love berries. They want you to prepare it for them, maybe, but I've never found kids that wouldn't eat fruit. They love it.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. I think one of the things my wife was worried about is, "Well, don't they need more fat than that?" You're saying, "No, that's fine." All the fat you need is right there in the fruits and the vegetables, 3% to 10%,
Dr. Doug Graham:
You certainly need a little more fat when you're little. Mother's milk is 50% fat, and that's why the weaning process could take seven or 10 years. I mean, it was okay. If it took seven years to go from 50% fat down to 15% fat, that's only a couple of percentage points a year. It's not much. They can get that from avocado. They can get that even from some seeds, eventually. Nuts, eventually. But no rush on introducing those, because they're linked with hyperallergic responses if you give kids nuts and seeds too early. But certainly, all the fatty fruits are easy. Ackee, things like that. But if they're actually weaning over those years, then they're getting the fats from mother's milk.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Listen, I've heard about your book for, literally, a good 20 years. I'm actually surprised it's taken me this long to reach out to you, get you on the podcast, and-
Dr. Doug Graham:
Thank you.
Rip Esselstyn:
... get to know you a little bit, but I am absolutely positive that this podcast is going to create a lot of questions and a lot of furor in the community. I know, I know that this is not what you've set out to do, so I would love to have you back on again. We can continue to go down this rabbit hole a little bit, if you're game for it?
Dr. Doug Graham:
I would love it. I don't mean to sound repetitive, and I don't mean to sound unrelenting, but eat more fruit, man. The answer for everybody is, eat more fruit. Eat what you want, but eat more fruit.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah, yeah. Hey, this morning I had... In a big bowl, I had two bananas. I had a grapefruit, I had a sumo orange, I had a kiwi, and I had a bunch of frozen berries. I put all that in a bowl and ate it, and I did it in honor of you.
Dr. Doug Graham:
Bless your heart. That's really fantastic.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Going for the bullseye. All right. Dr. Doug Graham, thanks for coming on the show.
You're a trailblazer, you're enlightening. Thank you for getting out there and speaking your truth.
Dr. Doug Graham:
Thank you, Rip. Go to health, my man.
Rip Esselstyn:
Hey, Doug. Where can people go to find out more about you? Websites, social media?
Dr. Doug Graham:
If you want to put in the link, fine. If we run out of time, but it's foodnsport. It's the word "food", the letter "N", the word "sport",.com. 10 letters, foodnsport.com. Go there, you get all the information you want. You can email me, you can ask questions, whatever you need. I mean, I just tell everybody, "Up your health." Rip, I'll tell you too. Up yours too, buddy. I mean, like up your health.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yes, yes, yes.
Dr. Doug Graham:
Look, health is serious business, but it's the best feeling in the world. Nothing tastes better than feeling good feels. I just love feeling good.
Rip Esselstyn:
Right on. Hey, fist bump.
Dr. Doug Graham:
Absolutely.
Rip Esselstyn:
Plant Strong, 811. Dr. Doug Graham's book is the 80/10/10 Diet. I'll be sure to link it up, along with his other resources, in the show notes for today. As Doug and every teacher has ever told us, eat more fruits and veggies. We've got to satisfy that sweet tooth, after all. Have a great week. As always, keep it Plant Strong. Thank you for listening to the Plant Strong podcast. You can support the show by taking a quick minute to follow us wherever you listen to your favorite podcast.
Leaving us a positive review and sharing the show with your network is another great way to help us reach as many people as possible with the exciting news about plants. Thank you in advance for your support. It means everything. The Plant Strong podcast team includes Carrie Barrett, Lori Kortowich, Ami Mackey, Patrick Gavin, and Wade Clarke. This season is dedicated to all of those courageous truth 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 B. Esselstyn Jr. and Anne Crile Esselstyn. Thanks for listening.
