#151: Dr. John McDougall - Health and Healing on a Starch-Based Diet
Over their career, the McDougalls have built a private medical practice, two residential programs, a food company, a travel business, several popular websites, and authored 13 national bestselling books.
Dr. John McDougall was drawn to medicine because of his own health “fate.” At 18, he suffered a massive stroke and was an anomaly to the doctors in Michigan who wanted to explore “why” and “how” this could happen to someone so young.
This health scare inspired his own journey to become a doctor, which eventually led McDougall and his wife, Mary, to Hawaii to practice medicine on a sugar plantation in Hawaii and service over 5,000 residents. What he saw there changed the course of his medical practice forever.
The healthiest people on the island, the first-generation elders who had come from China, Japan, Korea, and the Philippines, were the healthiest and most vibrant people…still active, with no medications, and still in bodies fit for movement. It was their children and grandchildren, however, those second and third generations, that were struggling.
Why? They had adopted a western diet of meat, dairy, and processed foods.
The secret, Dr. McDougall discovered, was STARCH. Those healthy islanders subsisted on a diet comprised mostly of rice, potatoes, vegetables, and fruits and THAT inspired the work he does today through his McDougall programs and education.
Beyond diet, the McDougalls are also dedicated to informing citizens about the positive effects of dietary therapy on chronic disease and our Planet. Animal agriculture, as we’re learning, is also one of the main culprits contributing to climate change and we discuss all of his “four deadly dietary deceptions” outlined at mcdougallfoundation.org.
It’s an inspiring conversation from one of the legends and it was an honor to sit down with Dr. John McDougall.
About John McDougall, MD
John McDougall’s national recognition as a nutrition expert earned him a position in the Great Nutrition Debate 2000 presented by the USDA. He is a board-certified internist, author of 13 national best-selling books and co-founder of the McDougall Program. He has dedicated over 50 years of his life caring for people with diet and lifestyle medicine.
Episode Timestamps
12:05 The health incident that changed his life forever
16:50 “We all suffer from food poisoning” - animal foods and vegetable oil
19:00 99.9% of humans are “starchivores”
25:30 Why 1980 was a turning point for nutrition, food research, and technology
32:00 Pioneers and mentors of Dr. McDougall in the early days, including Henry Heimlich
34:30 Four Deadly Dietary Deceptions - #1 Protein
35:20 #2 Calcium - Osteoporosis is an excess of protein?! Dr. McDougall explains.
40:33 #3 Omega 3 fatty acids - Where do the fish get them? Plants!
49:05 #4 Starch - Why has it become so vilified? Starch does NOT make you fat. Here’s why.
1:06:40 Dr. McDougall addresses the myth, “As we age, we just get fatter and sicker.”
1:08:00 Myth #2 debunked- “A well-balanced diet is the best”
1:10:00 Is Dr. McDougall optimistic about the future of our health and planet? And, what can we do to slow the progression of climate change?
Episode Resources
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Promo Music: Your Love by Atch License: Creative Commons License - Attribution 3.0
Full YouTube Transcript
Rip Esselstyn:
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Rip Esselstyn:
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Dr. John McDougall:
You know, you're convinced you have to add a lot of protein, a lot of dairy. You're convincing people to eat animal foods, saturated fats, cholesterol, lack of fiber, vitamin and mineral misbalances, and highly environmentally-contaminated food full of carcinogens. And you're convinced it's not just the fact that it's a deficiency problem. It's the most toxic thing that you can eat. That's why I call it food poisoning.
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 the show.
Rip Esselstyn:
Hello, my PLANTSTRONG potatoes, and I'm calling you potatoes today because it is so apropos considering the guest that I have on the podcast. Earlier this year I was able to have the esteemed Dr. Dean Ornish on the podcast, and most recently I welcomed my father, Dr. Caldwell B. Esselstyn Jr. to answer your questions as part of a special Father's Day podcast. If you missed either of these shows, I highly recommend listening and watching the wisdom of these two pioneers. I'll be sure to put a link into the show notes for these episodes so that you can go back and take a look.
Rip Esselstyn:
Today, however, I'm going to continue the pioneer world tour with none other than one of the most iconic and legendary people in this space, Dr. John mcGod, McDougall. He has been an absolute hero and mentor of mine for decades, and it was an absolute thrill for me to talk about John's past, present and his future legacy. His story is as fascinating as the plant-based movement that he launched back in the late 1970s, early 1980s. John was drawn to medicine because of his own health fate. Incredibly, at the tender age of just 18, he suffered a massive stroke and was a total anomaly to the physicians in Michigan who wanted to explore why and how. How in the world could this happen to someone so young?
Rip Esselstyn:
And this is what inspired his own medical journey, which eventually led John and his wife, Mary, to the Big Island of Hawaii as a doctor on a sugar plantation. And it's what he witnessed on this sugar plantation that changed the course of his medical practice forever. Now, the healthiest people on the island were the first generation elders who had come from China, Japan, Korea and the Philippines. They were the healthiest and most vibrant people. They were still active. They were on zero medications, and they had bodies that were fit for movement. However, it was their children and their grandchildren, those second and third generations, that were struggling. And you may ask, why? And the answer is, because they had adopted a Western diet loaded with meat, dairy and processed foods.
Rip Esselstyn:
And the secret, the secret that Dr. McDougall discovered was starch. It's considered a bad word here in America for all the wrong reasons, but those healthy islanders subsisted on a diet comprised mostly of rice, potatoes, vegetables, and fruits, and this is what inspired the work that Dr. McDougall does through all of his programming and education today. Now, animal agriculture, as we are so abundantly learning, is also one of the main culprits contributing to climate change. We've had lots of people on the podcast talking about this. And John and I discuss this today under the umbrella of his four deadly dietary deceptions, as outlined at mcdougallfoundation.org.
Rip Esselstyn:
This is a super inspiring conversation from one of the absolute giants and gods in the field. It was an honor for me to sit down with Dr. John McDougall, and I know you're going to enjoy this. John, this is an absolute pleasure. You have been one of my heroes since I got into this space really and started eating this way in 1987, personally. I know that you were a huge, huge influence on my father and him getting into plant-based. He read, I think, it was The McDougall Program in 1983. I think you have probably been practicing this lifestyle holistic medicine longer than any other person on the planet, truly. And-
Dr. John McDougall:
I think so, except for anybody live.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yes. Yes. But you're an absolute giant, a legend, the patriarch of the movement. I want you to know how much we owe you a debt of gratitude for just your insane, ravenous personality that takes no prisoners, that has fought the good fight, and this is one of my dreams to have you on the show. So, thank you.
Dr. John McDougall:
Well, I hope you recorded that.
Rip Esselstyn:
Oh, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
Dr. John McDougall:
All right.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Yeah, we're rolling, baby.
Dr. John McDougall:
Thank you, Rip. But you know, I look at your dad and T. Colin Campbell, and even Dean Ornish and all the other people. I mean, it's been a war that needed a lot of soldiers, I'll tell you, and yourself. And the sad thing is we haven't won as much territory as we should have, but it seems that way in the world is that, it doesn't matter if you're good or evil, or you tell the truth or you're dishonest. Somehow or another, the bad guys win too often.
Rip Esselstyn:
Well, I know that you've got a couple of people that you really admire that influenced you.
Dr. John McDougall:
Yes.
Rip Esselstyn:
For example, one of them was Nathan Pritikin.
Dr. John McDougall:
Absolutely. Yeah.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yep. And you've written a lot about Nathan. You've got some incredible interviews with Nathan. You have a great YouTube interview that you did with him 40 years ago.
Dr. John McDougall:
Yeah. I was just a kid.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah, you were absolutely a little kid, but I've read a lot of your newsletters that are remarkable, going back to probably 19... What was it? When did you start those? 1990?
Dr. John McDougall:
Well, 1986, I think I wrote my first paper newsletter. And then we went online in 2002.
Rip Esselstyn:
Wow. But you say that, and unfortunately, Nathan died at the tender age of 69, but you said if he would've lived longer, it would have made it much harder for paleo, keto and some of these other ones to take a foothold.
Dr. John McDougall:
Yeah. He was a really strong man and very focused. Nobody got in his way. He took on Robert Atkins, and in my opinion he beat him terribly. And, yeah, it was a sad thing for the world to take him at age 69. It wasn't fair. And one of the things I look at now, Rip, is that I've outlived not only Nathan Pritikin but Robert Atkins. So I'm 75-years-old now and hopefully I get a few more years to fight the battle. I'm certainly looking forward to it.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Well, and you're 75, but you like to say that, growing up, you pretty much abused yourself.
Dr. John McDougall:
Oh, yeah.
Rip Esselstyn:
And at the tender age of 18, in October of 1965, you had an event that really informed the direction of your medical career.
Dr. John McDougall:
It changed my life.
Rip Esselstyn:
And can you share with the PLANTSTRONG audience what happened? Because I don't think a lot of my listeners know your personal story, and I want them to hear that.
Dr. John McDougall:
Well, I was raised in, like so many people in the family, that believe the most important nutrients were calcium and protein. And so my parents made sure I had lots of meat and lots of dairy, and I enthusiastically do everything, even to this day. And so I suffered health problems, stomach pains, constipation as a little kid. Lost my tonsils at age seven. I was at the last of the pack out in gym class. I had no endurance, and had the typical oily skin and acne. Then at 18-years-old I had a massive stroke. And here, what, 56 years later, I still walk with a limp and when I go windsurfing I have a terrible poor jibe. So it's been-
Rip Esselstyn:
Good to know.
Dr. John McDougall:
... it was a major change for me. Actually, I look at it as one of those things. I know I would've never been a doctor and had the opportunity to be with you today, if it wasn't for that event where I was hospitalized at Grace Hospital in Detroit, Michigan, for two weeks after I had this stroke, because there I met doctors. I was raised in a family where doctors were next to God and I certainly was not that quality of a person, so I never had an aspiration to be a doctor, even though I loved the sciences. But once I met doctors, I figured, "Heck, I can do what they do." So I left with a whole new attitude about the medical profession that it was just people that were involved in this business. It wasn't anything particularly special. It was just people who happened to get an education.
Dr. John McDougall:
And so I took advantage of that. At age... Let's see, I was about 22-years-old, and my mother called me fat. I think I reached my weight at 90 pounds more than I weigh now, and at 24 I had major abdominal surgery. And I don't think I'd have made it past my late 20s or early 30s, but I had heart surgery or I'd been dead. But a very fortunate thing happened to me. I met my wife, Mary, back in 1971, and in 1972 we went to Hawaii. And the next year, after a year of surgical internship in Hawaii, I took on a job as a sugar plantation doctor. People don't even know what a sugar plantation doctor is these days, but I took care of 5,000 people on a sugar plantation on the Big Island of Hawaii.
Dr. John McDougall:
These people were very interesting in the sense that, I was their doctor. I mean, I did everything for them. I pronounced them dead. I caught their babies. I did brain surgery in the middle of the night. I was basically it. And the thing is that in my general practice with these people, I felt like I was a terrible doctor because all I was doing was pushing pills and they never, never got better from chronic disease. I came from a time when you knew what real doctors did. I watched Ben Casey, Dr. Kildare and Marcus Welby, and I wasn't performing at all like that. I thought I was a terrible, terrible doctor. I had another enlightenment there on my plantation and that was, I was taking care of first, second, third, and fourth generation people, first generation being born in their native land.
Dr. John McDougall:
In this case, we're talking about Koreans and Chinese and Japanese and Filipinos, primarily. In the first generation they learned a diet of rice and vegetables. And then they moved to the Big Island to start a new life, and they had their families and their families were influenced by Western eating. So the second generation, they ate more rich food and they got more overweight and sicker. And by the time they got to my third generation of patients, and I was taking care of all four generations of people in my practice. I could see it right before my eyes. The genes didn't change, the environment on the plantation hadn't changed for 100 years. But here I saw this drastic change in health where my first generation they never were overweight. They were hard-working into their 80s and sometimes 90s. They actually, men were fathering children in their 70s and 80s, and boy, was that an inspiration, I'll tell you.
Dr. John McDougall:
Here I am in my 70s. I want to be just as good as they were. Anyway, they had never had diabetes, never had heart trouble or breast cancer or colon cancer, prostate cancer. No autoimmune diseases. This is my first generation. But as I mentioned, as the second generation, third generation learned the Western diet, they became progressively more ill because they were being poisoned. This is food poisoning, Rip. I have to explain in those terms and I do these days so people can understand it. This is food poisoning, and I try and make it simple for people. Just like I could tell your audience about tobacco poisoning and they would understand what that is and they'd understand how to solve it. You just quit the tobacco, or I could talk about alcohol poisoning, and they would understand what to do. You must stop the alcohol.
Dr. John McDougall:
But when it comes to food poisoning, people get really confused because we're taught all kinds of incorrect and ineffective things like skinning your chicken and skim milk, and just all kinds of namby-pamby stuff that doesn't work. So what I've been trying to teach is that you suffer from food poisoning and we can put that into two categories of poisons, just like smoking and alcohol have one category. The two categories of poisons are animal foods. Okay, anything from an animal, whether you strip off its parts or you take the secretions from an animal. So any animal food is one category of food poison. And the other category of food is vegetable oil. So, there are oils that we need that are in plants. As long as they're in plants they're just fine.
Dr. John McDougall:
But when you strip it out of the corn or the olive, what happens is you end up with an isolated, concentrated nutrient that it's poisonous. It's at best medicinal, at worst it's a serious toxin. So knowing that you just have two food poisons to deal with, two categories of food poison, people can put their arms around. They know what to do, except, then they say to themselves, "There's nothing to eat." They go, "Oh, animal foods and oils, that's all I eat." Well, then I have to teach them the other side of the coin, and that is what is the diet of the human being? And the diet of the human being is starch. And I know that is hard for people to grasp, but a lot of your listeners are people of history, and people of geography.
Dr. John McDougall:
And if you'll just relate to some of the things that you know, you know that the human being has been a starch eater for its entire existence with few exceptions. For example, we're very focused on Native Americans and we can find evidence of Native Americans eating potatoes 10, 12,000 years ago in what we call the Four Corners, which are four states that come together, their archeologic findings. Or if you think of the Native Americans or you go down into Central America, you think of people of the corn. The Aztecs and Mayans were known as the people of the corn. They had babies, they went to work, they fought battles. They competed in athletic events that are comparable to the Olympics. They did that for 1,300 years living on corn.
Dr. John McDougall:
If you go further south and you look at the people who lived in the Andes in South America, like for example the Incas. The Incas lived on potatoes until they went to battle, and because potatoes are so heavy, they fought on quinoa. And there are other couple of examples I want to mention. We're focused on Ukraine these days and we've been focused a lot on Egypt and Iraq and Iran. This part of the world has been, and still is known, as the bread basket of the world, okay? So bread should come to mind. I know it's vilified, but people have lived on bread. It's the staff of life. And then when I mentioned the Asian population, I mentioned Chinese or Japanese or Koreans or Tais. What do people think about? Immediately, rice comes to mind. Before 1980, 90% of the food on a typical Asian's plate was rice.
Dr. John McDougall:
I know it was white rice, but it ain't that big a deal. I mean, good grief, on white rice we almost lost to the Japanese World War II and we lost the Vietnamese conflict on white rice. So we've put our villains in the wrong place. Not that brown rice isn't better. It certainly is. But you've got to fight your battles where you have a good chance of winning. And so what people need to do is they need to think of themselves as starch eaters. And how much starch? Well, when you look at your plate and that's what you ought be doing, is just eyeballing your plate. You don't have to measure, you don't have to take a dietician along. Look it up in a dietetic handbook. You just look and you go, "Oh, that's 90% of my food is starch." Maybe 75%. And then the rest is green and yellow vegetables, which are non-starchy. Non-starchy plant foods, and fruits.
Dr. John McDougall:
Now I know there's a big swing out there and I know many of your guests that you've had on have been into Nutritarian diets that have focused on green and yellow vegetables, but no population ever lived on green and yellow vegetables. They lived on starch. If you try, for example, if I was going to live on cabbage or broccoli or kale, I'm sorry, you'd eat all day. I'd have to eat like 11 to 22 pounds of cabbage a day to get my calories, that kind of thing. So these non-starchy green and yellow vegetables are important. They're interesting, colorful, et cetera, but unless you base your diet around starch, you just don't have the performance that you need.
Dr. John McDougall:
You don't satisfy the appetite like you need. And again, I offer you as evidence, and then I'll stop talking in a second. I offer you as evidence the fact that 99.99% of people who ever walked this earth have been starch eaters, starchetarians, starchivores. That's been their food. And they've had a little meat. Somebody challenged me a couple of days ago and said, "Well, they weren't vegans." You're right they weren't vegans. You don't have to be a vegan if you don't want to be. We just teach a vegan diet. The important thing is that the bulkier calories come from starch. I mean, like 90%, and the rest shouldn't come from chickens and cows either. It should come from fruits and vegetables.
Rip Esselstyn:
Let me go back to the Big Island of Hawaii and the sugar plantation and your 5,000 patients. How soon were you able to connect the dots that, "Hey, it's the food. It's the food. It's the food." I mean, was it a year? Was it four years? I mean, I don't know how long you were there.
Dr. John McDougall:
It took me three years. At the end of three years I decided that I was a terrible doctor. I really did. I blamed myself for the fact that my patients weren't getting well and I decided to go back in training and learn how to be a good doctor. So I left my plantation job and I moved back to Oahu and went to John Burns School of Medicine and became a board certified internist. Well, by that time, I'd kind of noticed the difference between my generations of patients. And I'll tell you, my personal diet by then had only changed to where we were eating range fed beef, and we were eating brown rice. But I really hadn't made the real transition until about 1977, which is when I can say that I became essentially a vegan.
Rip Esselstyn:
Right.
Dr. John McDougall:
And then I went back into this university setting to become a board-certified internist and they had the Hawaii Medical Library on the grounds of the Queen's Medical Center. Well, I tell you, I discovered in the library that I was not the original inventor of this information. There were tens of thousands of researchers had studied the fact and found the fact that rich foods make people sick. And the most important thing was when you change them back to the diet that people eat. In other words, you got rid of the meat, you got rid of the dairy and the oil, and you put them on rice and corn and potatoes and sweet potatoes, they got well. The angina stopped. The blood pressure came down. The diabetes was cured when it's type 2 diabetes. The autoimmune diseases went away.
Dr. John McDougall:
All this was published. It was published between, well, even before 1880, but certainly between 1920 and 1980. In 1980 what happened is, we had Cable News Network and we had the peak of harnessing fossil fuels and technology and transportation. And industry took over. They just took over. They took over science, they took over research. And so after 1980, you really can't trust things that have been published unless you discover the biases of the researchers, which I'm very careful to do. But it's just money. It's just money, Rip. That's all it is. Don't take it personal. It's not a conspiracy. It's just making money.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Yeah. All right. So, you dove in to the Hawaii Library and saw all this research that supported what you were kind of maybe thinking, and maybe allowed you to connect all the dots. And then, was it there that you discovered Nathaniel Pritikin and Denis Burkitt and Walter Kempner and all these guys?
Dr. John McDougall:
Absolutely. That's where I discovered them. I actually discovered them in various ways. Somebody gave me a set of tapes from Nathan Pritikin. And by that time, I pretty much figured all this out. I just said, "How could I see this and nobody else does? There's got to be something wrong with me." And I spent a good time in the library. That's where I spent all my entertainment time. And then Nathan Pritikin came to me in a set of audio tapes, and, oh, I was in tears. I said, "Somebody else sees this this way, too." And so that was a big deal. And Denis Burkitt, I got to know him pretty well. I had him on my television show. In fact, the only two video interviews that exist of Nathan Pritikin and Denis Burkitt, I did.
Dr. John McDougall:
They're on my website and you reference them, so I know you've seen them. They were a big influence on me, I have to say. Nathan Pritikin probably taught me as much about how to care for patients as anybody, except for Walter Kempner. Walter Kempner was a medical doctor at Duke University. He developed the rice diet. He taught me. He taught me just how simple a diet could be and provide adequate nutrition and also provide powerful healing. Walter Kempner's rice diet... Walter Kempner, first of all, you have to understand, was one of the most famous researchers in the world. Walter Kempner supported Duke University for two decades financially. His work just-
Rip Esselstyn:
Just the '40s and '50s?
Dr. John McDougall:
Yes. And the Kempner program was there for seven decades.
Rip Esselstyn:
Wow.
Dr. John McDougall:
Walter Kempner, he taught me not only could a simple diet of rice... Now listen to this. Rice, and it was white rice, fruit, fruit juice, and table sugar. That's all he fed the patients. They gave them a little vitamin pill, but that's it. How such a simple diet could not only support good health, you could live. I mean, my initial thought would be, you'd suffer from malnutrition, some kind of deficiency diseases. And that wasn't the case.
Rip Esselstyn:
Well, wasn't he specifically-
Dr. John McDougall:
But he also found... Hmm?
Rip Esselstyn:
Wasn't he specifically, John, with the white rice, the fruit, the fruit juice and the white sugar, wasn't he intentionally trying to get his patients' level of protein down to about 5%?
Dr. John McDougall:
Or less. 5% or less. Protein is evil. If I had to pick one thing that has done most harm to people, it would be the nutrient protein. And the one thing that's done the most harm to our environment is the idea of protein as an important nutrient. There's no such thing as protein deficiency. It's never been reported. It doesn't exist. And yet almost the entire food industry is focused on selling you protein. Why? Because that's where you make the money. And the other thing they try and say is calcium. Yeah. His diet was about three, 4% protein. And it was 93% sugar.
Rip Esselstyn:
And why was his protein that low? Was it because his patients had... What did his patients have? Was it some sort of kidney failure or...
Dr. John McDougall:
Yeah, he had a lot of kidney failure patients, but protein is hard to process. You don't store protein. If protein was stored, we'd all look like Arnold Schwarzenegger used to look. So it's not stored in the muscles. You have to get rid of it, and you have to process it through the liver and the kidneys. He took a lot of care of a lot of kidney patients. Walter Kempner was also big on salt and that was another real serious focus. He used to wash his white rice just to get the extra sodium off the rice. And so it was a very, very low protein, very low sodium diet. And with that kind of restriction, he took people with malignant hypertension. I mean, they're dying with high blood pressure, and he would cure 60% of them. People with terrible heart failure. You look at their chest X-rays and their heart was as big as their chest cavity.
Dr. John McDougall:
He was the first one to show you could reverse heart disease, long before your dad and long before Ornish ever showed you could reverse heart disease. He did it by showing serial EKGs where the classic sign of ischemia due to blockages of the heart arteries is called ST depression on an EKG. And he showed his patients who had angina, who in other words had heart disease. They didn't have the modern technology like the angiograms and heart scans and so on, to evaluate it. He'd take a simple EKG, he'd show ST depressions, put them on the rice diet. A few months later, the ST segments would be upright, which means the ischemia went away. He showed that at the end of the '40s. Yeah. So, again, he was the pioneer. And of all the doctors that had an influence on me that he was, and as far as a broad spectrum practice, it was Nathan Pritikin.
Rip Esselstyn:
Can you also, because I know in reading a lot of your newsletters, another gentleman that you hold in the highest regard and was very influential was Henry Heimlich.
Dr. John McDougall:
Oh, yeah. I know Henry. Henry wasn't very much interested in diet until he got sick. I'm not going to mention what he was ill with. But one of the greatest things that I hold up as pride was the fact that what Henry Heimlich, the man who saved more lives than any other person in the world with the Heimlich chest tube in the Heimlich maneuver. When he got ill, he came to my clinic to get well. And I believe he was in his early 70s. He lived to be in his early 90s with his condition. And it's because he changed his diet.
Dr. John McDougall:
But, yeah, I got to know Henry Heimlich. A couple of things that he taught me. He said, "John, they're never going to give you a platform. You're going to have to run around them." And I kind of woke up and at that point I stopped trying to be friendly. I stopped trying to be politically correct. I just started running around my colleagues. And the other thing he taught me is, he says, "If the people around you understand what you're saying, you're probably not being inventive enough." And to this day, even though what I teach is really simple, most people don't understand what I'm saying.
Rip Esselstyn:
Well, and my father won the Benjamin's Spock Compassion Medicine Award. I think it was in 2005. And Henry Heimlich was one of the ones that presented it to my father.
Dr. John McDougall:
Oh, wow.
Rip Esselstyn:
And he basically said that when you're challenging the system, as you are always doing, John, as my father also did, you're going to have all kinds of arrows in your back. Everybody's coming after you. And he said, "But that's a good thing because you know you're doing it right."
Dr. John McDougall:
Never seemed to bother me.
Rip Esselstyn:
No
Dr. John McDougall:
Actually, I live in a world where I think people like me. That's how off-base I am. I just don't feel my enemy side, I don't know why.
Rip Esselstyn:
Well, you like to say that your parents taught you to tell the truth always and that your life is guided by your passions. And that certainly is true with you. Let me ask you this, John. So you have a huge new passion for diet and climate, and how the two are so interrelated. And on your website, mcdougallfoundation.org, you basically list four deadly dietary deceptions that are out there. You touched briefly on protein, but do you want to say anything more about protein? I mean, I'd love for you to talk about the other three.
Dr. John McDougall:
Well, protein, as I mentioned, there's never been a case of dietary protein deficiency. It doesn't exist. None of your friends have it nor do they have amino acid deficiency. You've never seen it. It doesn't exist. It's impossible. The need for protein for the human being is so low that you can't possibly not meet it except by some synthetic diet. The other deception is calcium.
Rip Esselstyn:
Calcium. Yeah.
Dr. John McDougall:
Yeah. And there, again, you start out with the fact that there's never been a case of calcium deficiency ever described on any natural diet, and people immediately think about osteoporosis. Osteoporosis is actually due to an excess of protein, and what happens is, it's kind of a long story, but briefly when you eat too much protein, it breaks down to amino acids and that means your system becomes acidic and your bones dissolve to neutralize the acid, and that's how you get osteoporosis. So there's two of the dietary deceptions. The third one would be that you...
Rip Esselstyn:
John, before you go on to the third. So tell me this with calcium. So you're saying that we can get all the calcium that we need for strong, healthy bones from the plants?
Dr. John McDougall:
Well, you can't miss. I mean, if elephants can do it and hippopotamuses can do it, and giraffes can do it, and the Asians can do it, and Aztecs and Mayans can do it, I think we can do it. Calcium comes from the ground and our need is so low, there's never been a case of insufficiency on any natural diet. It just does not exist. But a whole industry's built on this lie. It's called unique positioning. It's part of public relations for anybody in business. You find something unique about your product and then you advertise it to death. And in this case, it's to the death of your patients, of people on the planet.
Dr. John McDougall:
When they convince people you have to add a lot of protein, a lot of dairy, you're convincing people to eat animal foods, saturated fats, cholesterol, lack of fiber, vitamin and mineral misbalances, and highly environmentally-contaminated food full of carcinogens, you're convinced it's not just the fact that it's a deficiency problem. It's the most toxic thing that you can eat. That's why I call it food poisoning.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. But so tell me this, then. So we live in a country where most Americans are probably consuming three to five servings of dairy products a day that are loaded with calcium. So how is it that we somehow have a so-called deficiency? Is it because the protein is trumping the calcium that's in those products?
Dr. John McDougall:
Right. It's because they focus on osteoporosis. The bones have a lot of calcium in them. The bones store minerals, and that's where the connection comes in is, there's calcium in the bones. Well, there's calcium in dairy, so obviously you got to eat dairy. It's like, you should eat brains to be smart.
Rip Esselstyn:
Right.
Dr. John McDougall:
Or testicles to have a good sex life. Or eat meat to grow muscle. It's just pretty stupid. Anyway, that's the kind of nonsense people have it mixed up, they think, because the dairy industry's taught us that, plain is simple. They've taught us that it's a calcium deficiency, when I guess I should go into it a little more detail. When you eat animal foods, they're sold and they truly are high in protein. Protein breaks down into amino acids. There are 20 different amino acids that create all the different proteins in nature. And so you break down into amino acids. These are acids, and there's a kind of amino acid in animal foods that's prevalent, and these are sulfur containing amino acids.
Dr. John McDougall:
They are methionine and cysteine, and they break down into sulfuric acid, a very powerful acid. So you dump all this acid in the system, the body must maintain a pH of 7.4. You die if you don't maintain that pH. So you're dumping all this acid meal after meal into your system. The primary buffering system of the body is the bones. Every medical student is taught that. Every dietician is taught that. And so the bones have to dissolve and they release alkaline material, and in the process of dissolving they also release calcium and other minerals that end up in the urine. And that whole process leads to little bones in the kidneys, which are called calcium kidney stones.
Dr. John McDougall:
That's how you get calcium kidney stones, and all this is... I mean, the science is absolutely solid, but the dairy industry, they hire their spin doctors and they pay good wages and they get them to lie, and so the public is confused. Who are you supposed to listen to? Rip Esselstyn and John McDougall, or the people that can buy multimillion dollar Super Bowl ads?
Rip Esselstyn:
Yes.
Dr. John McDougall:
Who wins out? They got the money.
Rip Esselstyn:
Okay. Let's move on. I appreciate you doing a little bit more of a deep dive on calcium so we can really understand what's going on there. So the third deadly dietary deception that you have on your website is omega-3 fatty acids.
Dr. John McDougall:
Right. Right. Well, when you think of omega-3 fats, it comes to mind as fish, just like you think of calcium, you come to mind as dairy, or protein comes to mind as meat. That's the connection. That's the unique position. So you think, "Well, I got to eat more fish." Well, okay. But fish never made an omega-3 fat. No animal can desaturate at the carbon 3 position. It's something only plants could do. So how did the fish get the omega-3 fats? Well, they eat seaweed. They eat algae. That's how they got it. And the seaweed and algae made the omega-3 fats. So my plea is for you to go to the original source, the plants. There's no such thing as a fatty acid deficiency. It doesn't exist, except under any really bizarre laboratory created diets. That's it. In other words, they're selling you something that's not a problem.
Dr. John McDougall:
Now what they're selling you is fish. A couple of problems here. One is, the fish are almost gone, Rip. When I was a young boy, and I love the ocean, I'm a windsurfer, a sailor, a scuba diver. That's been my life. When I was a little boy, compared to now, 90% of the fish are gone and that strikes me very hard. As far as people who eat fish go, you suffer terribly, too. Fish are highly contaminated with, for example, methylmercury. I can tell how much fish you eat by biopsying your fat and looking at the methylmercury content of your body fat. This is a poison. Methylmercury is a poison. Anyway, you get all kinds of carcinogens and environmental contaminants that hurt the brain, across Parkinson's disease, degeneration of the brain.
Dr. John McDougall:
Also, the initiators and promoters of cancer, these chemicals are. And of course they get in the food chain, and as you move up the food chain biomagnification occurs and you concentrate these chemicals so that when you eat on the top of the food chain, which is the dairy and the meat, or worse yet, if you're a baby sucking off mother's breast, that's the very top of the food chain. Then you get poisoned. It's serious. They declared in some research done by the Environmental Protection Agency in the 1970s, they analyzed the breast milk of 1,400 women in 48 states for environmental contaminants, and they consider milk a health hazard. In Alaska, the women in Alaska who breastfeed their babies, their breast milk is considered so toxic. They're very heavy fish and animal-product eaters, the people living up in... The Inuit Eskimo. It's considered so toxic that it should be buried in a toxic waste dump.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah, that's severe.
Dr. John McDougall:
From every point of view you look at it, from your food bill, if you're concerned about animal rights, if you're concerned about the planet, if you've got heart disease, if you've got colon cancer, if you've got diabetes, you've got rheumatoid arthritis. If you're a religious person you believe in your Bible. It all says that you should not be doing what you're doing to the temple.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Tell me this. So then, as far as the omega-3 fats, then in your opinion, what's the best place to get your omega-3s if you're not getting it from fish?
Dr. John McDougall:
Anything. You can't miss. You see, once you supply the needs, then any extra is superfluous. You can't push the system further by say eating more protein, more vitamins, more essential fats. It's like your car requires 12 spark plugs. You put 18 under the hood and it doesn't run any better. So, lettuce, rice, even potatoes, which are very, very... They're only 1% fat. Fatty acid deficiency does not occur on any natural diet. And I know a lot of people teach otherwise, and once they understand the poison problem with fish and what it's doing to the environment, all this fish eating, then they start looking for plant sources of omega-3s and they teach people to eat lots of flaxseed oil and things like that. This is not a good idea. Flaxseed, maybe so, as long as you don't grind it up and extract the oil out of it, you'll probably do okay. But the oil promotes cancer and it depresses the immune system.
Rip Esselstyn:
Well, let me ask you this before we move on to the fourth deadly dietary deception, which you say is starch. Which, obviously, we want to talk about that because you are Mr. Starch.
Dr. John McDougall:
Right. Dr. Potato.
Rip Esselstyn:
That's right. Dr. Potato. So, what's your stance when it comes to... Is there such a thing as a healthy fat? I mean, because you have all these keto and paleo people saying, "But the brain is 60% fat. You need fat for the brain and to be healthy." What's your comeback?
Dr. John McDougall:
Well, what they do is they tell you you have to have these omega-3 fats. And what they have to do is explain why terrestrial-bound people, in other words, those that don't have access to an ocean, how did they ever survived? Because they didn't have that concentrated fish fat. The need for essential fats is small. It's supplied by rice, potatoes, beans, corn. And again, once you get enough, that's enough. People go so far as to say things like, "You'll get Alzheimer's disease, unless you buy my omega-3 supplement that I happen to sell here on my website." They say that. That's complete nonsense and actually I've pulled up the studies on it and they show clearly that omega-3 fats will not prevent Alzheimer's disease, even though if you, in a circuitous way, you go through a whole bunch of explanations, the bottom line is, this is nonsense.
Rip Esselstyn:
But that's what-
Dr. John McDougall:
It scares people. They get scared.
Rip Esselstyn:
But I want to move beyond omega-3. It's just a fat, in general, because you love to say the fat you eat is the fat you wear.
Dr. John McDougall:
Right.
Rip Esselstyn:
I mean, I even heard Jay Leno say that-
Dr. John McDougall:
Oh, yeah.
Rip Esselstyn:
... 20, 25 years ago on The Tonight Show. But, so, is there such a thing as a healthy fat? Are you a fan of, I mean-
Dr. John McDougall:
Oh, yeah. The fat from rice. Fat from oranges. Yeah, you need essential fat. Essential fatty acid deficiency is a bad thing. The only time that I'm aware of that essential fatty acid deficiency has occurred was when they started making baby formulas in the 1930s. What they did is they made them out of whole cow's milk. And then what happened is the kids got overweight. So to correct the problem of the kids becoming obese from drinking whole cow's milk formulas, they developed low fat formulas and they took all the fat out of the formula and they developed fatty acid deficiency in the children. But that's the only situation I'm aware of in the scientific literature of fatty acid deficiency ever occurring.
Rip Esselstyn:
Right. So let's move on to number four, which is starch. So you say starch is also a deadly dietary deception. How so?
Dr. John McDougall:
Well, it's been the opposite way. The deception is that you need these things when it comes to calcium, omega-3 fats and protein, but it's the opposite message in the sense that people teach starches are bad. Starches make you fat. I don't know what else do they say about starch. Starch is vilified and that's the dietary deception, is people don't understand the importance of starch in the human diet. Again, I can take you back two-and-a-half million years to humanoids, lived on plant-based diets. Every archeologic study that is published over the last 20 years shows populations of people that lived primarily on starches. I can take you back 105,000 years ago to Mozambique and show you that they ate grains. I can show you that the Neanderthal 30 to 40,000 years ago was a starch eater, I mean all the way from the cold North Sea to the steaming hot Mediterranean.
Dr. John McDougall:
If you look between the teeth of the Neanderthal, you find starch granules. So these mighty warriors that were not hunters to any degree, and again, let me be clear. It's not that they were vegans or vegetarians or didn't hunt. These people did. It's just the bulk of the calories came from starch. But let me explain to you why this has become a misunderstanding. It has to do with sexism, with gender bias. It happens to be the way men treat women and always have. You see, the men, they went out on the hunt, spent a couple of weeks looking for some type of animal to kill, and maybe got lucky. And maybe they were fortunate enough to get that animal part back to the village before it rotted. But the people who were providing the calories for the village, they were the grandparents, the women, the children.
Dr. John McDougall:
They didn't get the glory. So when you talk about hunter gatherers, their hunters, the men got the glory. Not because they provided the calories. That's what men do. That's the way we guys act. So you're not going to change that. But it's a total myth. Gathering the food, in other words, picking up various plant parts, and of course, a little later on the people... And it wasn't just 10, 12,000 years ago. It was 100,000 years ago agriculture was developed in various societies. People get the idea that this is a relatively modern change. It occurred gradually over at least 100,000 years. And of course it was much accelerated 10 to 12,000 years ago.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Yeah. So it is remarkable how it seems over the last, probably 15, 20 years, starch has been so vilified, right? The breads, the pastas, the potatoes. Oh, my God, they're so fattening, blah, blah, blah. You like to refer to yourself... I mean, you are Dr. Potato and you and Mary have done some really, really wild experiments, right? Like eating only potatoes for 30 days, correct?
Dr. John McDougall:
Well, we've only done that for two weeks, but there are people who've done it for... The head of the Washington Potato Commission, whose name escapes me right now, but he went on an all-potato diet for 60 days. And then there's the gentleman from-
Rip Esselstyn:
Australia.
Dr. John McDougall:
... Australia, Spud Fit. Yeah. He lived for over a year on potatoes alone, but there are also experiments from, for example, 1920. Dr. Kon did an experiment. You can look this up, by the way, when we're done talking. You can go to your internet browser and look up Kon, K-O-N, and all potato diet. It's a free document, and you'll see how he took a man and a woman and housed them so he had total control over their food. And for six months he fed them an all-potato diet. Now this man and woman, they were special in the sense that they were what is equivalent to marathon runners, very athletic, and they made a couple of statements. One is, they did not tire of the all-potato diet. That's pretty important. I think I can live on just potatoes alone. They're so satisfying. They're so enjoyable. And the other thing-
Rip Esselstyn:
Which potato? Which potato, John? Which potato?
Dr. John McDougall:
To tell you the truth, sweet potato has become some of my favorites lately, but the white potato is still my favorite.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yukon Gold? Okay.
Dr. John McDougall:
Yukon Gold's okay, too. Yeah. We have probably potatoes four times a week. Maybe we have sweet potatoes a couple of times and white potatoes a couple of times. Mary buys the little ones, and I don't know what she calls them, and then she buys the big ones and you can tell my kitchen skills are not up to what they should be. That's why I got lucky 50 years ago and found somebody that complimented my deficiencies.
Rip Esselstyn:
Do you ever cook or does Mary do most of the cooking?
Dr. John McDougall:
No, I do breakfast every morning.
Rip Esselstyn:
Oh, you do? And what does that usually look like? It's probably not potatoes.
Dr. John McDougall:
It's all the same.
Rip Esselstyn:
Is it oatmeal? What is it?
Dr. John McDougall:
It's oatmeal. Yeah. It's oatmeal and fruit. And one of the things I've discovered recently is that the fruit that you buy fresh spoils and we get flies and you have to throw a good share of it out. And so what I've been doing lately, and when I say lately, the last few years, is I go to the frozen fruit section. I buy frozen fruits and heat them up in the microwave and cook the oatmeal every morning without exception. So when we have the grandkids over, they like to have hash brown potatoes and-
Rip Esselstyn:
Pancakes?
Dr. John McDougall:
... a few pancakes and waffles. And so we fix them, but otherwise every morning, seven days a week, I cook breakfast and it's the same. But I never tire of it.
Rip Esselstyn:
Is it the old-fashioned oats or is it steel-cut outs? Do you know?
Dr. John McDougall:
It doesn't make any difference, but we happen to have the old-fashioned kind.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah, yeah.
Dr. John McDougall:
Oats are oats, pretty much.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. So I want to go back to what we were talking about, because I interrupted you. You were talking about those two kind of marathon runners, that Kon-
Dr. John McDougall:
Yes.
Rip Esselstyn:
... was doing that experiment with for 60 days. They ate just potatoes.
Dr. John McDougall:
Right. Yeah, they did. And again, you can look it up Kon All Potato Diet. It'll pull up right away for you. Yes, they did, and they were in excellent health. They declared them in excellent health when they said solely and practically all of the protein came from potatoes. That's the statement they make. And they did not tire of the all potato diet.
Rip Esselstyn:
What are some of the attributes of the potato that you're so enamored with?
Dr. John McDougall:
Well, they provide carbohydrate. I've just put together a talk. I don't know how I'll release it, on aging.
Rip Esselstyn:
Ooh.
Dr. John McDougall:
Yeah. And it's, I suppose, because of my age. I'm interested in aging, and you go through the animal experiments which range all the way from flies to rhesus monkeys, but particularly the mice and rats studies. I know, a lot of people, they object to what I have to say, talking about animal studies, but they provide some pretty crucial information. And what they find is that the animals live longest and they have the best brain health. I mean, they run maze experiments. They put mice and rats through mazes, and they have the best brain health on a diet that is 1 to 10 protein to carbohydrate, okay? 1 to 10.
Dr. John McDougall:
And so the diet we recommend and you recommend is 1 to 10 protein to carbohydrate. In other words, it's about 8% protein and about 85% carbohydrate. You do the math, it's 1 to 10. And then the experiments have been done on people. Not very many, but you have, for example, the Blue Zones. I'm sure you're familiar with Dan Buettner's work.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah.
Dr. John McDougall:
And you're probably familiar with the Biosphere 2, which is where, in Tucson, Arizona, for two years they lived in an isolated, confined environment and they grew all their own food. They were basically vegans. A little goat milk, and, I don't know, tiny bit of animal food. But their diet, likewise, was a diet that prolonged life. It was essentially very low protein, high carbohydrate. And then there's a new experiment that just came out, which I've worked on and I'll talk about when I give the lecture. It looked at brain atrophy. What they looked at is the hypothalamus, and as you age your hypothalamus atrophies. You have a general mental decline as you get older. I hope it doesn't show.
Dr. John McDougall:
But anyways, what they can do is they can measure by doing CAT scans, they can measure the size of the hypothalamus and also the lateral ventricles, which lie right next to the hypothalamus. And that way you can show atrophy of the hypothalamus. They did this experiment that lasted 18 months on people, and they fed him various diets. And they fed them with the standard diet, the American diet. And then they fed them the Mediterranean diet, which is a diet high in fruits and vegetables. Then they exaggerated the Mediterranean diet and they made it more in the direction that you and I recommend. And they added some polyphenols in the form of tea and extra supplements. And what they showed was on a diet, that the more you increase the carbohydrate and lower the protein, the less atrophy had of the hypothalamus.
Rip Esselstyn:
Wow.
Dr. John McDougall:
So anyway, it's a rather interesting experiment and I've just been putting this in a new lecture that I'm doing. But what it turns out is that if you look at the animal experiments and the human experiments, and you want to age gracefully and you want to live as long as possible, and you want to keep the brain... Memory. Oh, there you go. The hypothalamus has to do mostly with memory, okay? Slipped my mind there for a minute. That's what you want to do. You want to live as long as you can, and you want to keep as much of your intellectual function as possible. And that's what the research I've been doing is on, lately, is how to, again, because I'm at that phase of life where you want to avoid death and disability, just like your dad-
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Well, that's exciting, and I can't wait to hear that lecture.
Dr. John McDougall:
Yeah. Well, it'll be out sometime this week, I think I'll have it out.
Rip Esselstyn:
Oh, fantastic. So we were talking about potatoes and all the attributes that were wonderful about the potato. And so, would you say you have some form of potatoes every single day? Does Mary kind of try something out?
Dr. John McDougall:
Most of the time. Most of the time. Our meal is very simple, just like yours is and everybody else's is. People are very monotonous in their eating. They have the same thing for lunch and breakfast and dinner pretty much every day. And they go to a restaurant, they order the same thing off the menu of that restaurant every time they go. There are a few people who like to have a wide variety, but most of us are very monotonous. So our meals consist of oatmeal for breakfast, every day. And then we go on to lunch and dinner. We have a lot of leftovers for lunch. So basically we're talking about the same kind of meal. And for dinner we'll have potatoes. Like sweet potatoes and broccoli is a pretty big deal in our home. And it's all vegan. Regardless of what you may hear me say, our diet is very strictly vegan.
Dr. John McDougall:
We'll have various kinds of low fat salad dressings or sauces over the top of the potatoes. But Mary made pea pods the last time we had white potatoes, and then she makes rice dishes. And we occasionally have tofu with our rice dishes just to enrich them a little bit. Not that you ever have to eat a tofu. You never have to do that, but it adds a little bit of richness to the meal. And so she makes a lot of what we call fried rice. We don't fry it. We use no oil at all. And she'll cook something up in a wok and put various frozen vegetables. Again, we use a lot of frozen stuff because it's easy for us, Rip. We go to the grocery store maybe every 10 to 14 days and it's real easy if you don't buy fresh stuff. You fill up your freezer, and frozen food is in many ways better than fresh.
Rip Esselstyn:
Oh, yeah. I hear you loud and clear there. Our freezer is loaded to the brim with frozen fruits and frozen vegetables. And last night, my 13-year-old daughter made the most amazing rice stir-fry with frozen vegetables, a little bit of cashews in there, but she had peas, corn, broccoli, cauliflower. It was incredible. Loved it. Loved it. Yeah.
Dr. John McDougall:
It's been 13 years. I think the last time we got together, she was just a little baby.
Rip Esselstyn:
She was. Actually at the McDougall, when we went to Costa Rica-
Dr. John McDougall:
Oh, yeah.
Rip Esselstyn:
... in 2010, she was one-year-old.
Dr. John McDougall:
Wow. Yeah. That's been a long time. That was a lot of fun. We look back on those trips we did, about 30 adventure trips where we took people all over, mostly North and South America, Hawaii, and down the Amazon and Costa Rica and Peru and different places. And the reason we took people places is, well, it became a really, really enjoyable business. Initially, it wasn't that way, but eventually it grew into actually a profitable business. But people really wanted to come with us because it was so hard to travel and we provided all the food. As you remember at the hotel that you were at, I think you were at the Hilton or something.
Rip Esselstyn:
I think it was the Hilton. Yeah, it was the Hilton, yeah.
Dr. John McDougall:
We had our own food line and all the food was just the way it should be. People seemed to like it a lot. We did the same thing with cruise ships. We took people down the Amazon. We took 58 people down the Amazon. That was quite an adventure. We took cruises to Belize and through the Panama Canal and to Costa Rica, and had just an amazing time. I don't know with this day and age, with the COVID and difficulty in traveling, I don't know whether I'll ever be able to do that again. But that was really fun. If we go, I'd sure like to show your daughter some of the things that we've done.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah.
Dr. John McDougall:
You just have one daughter now, Rip? Or do you have two?
Rip Esselstyn:
No, John. Well, yeah, but I don't know if you've ever met my youngest. So my youngest has just turned eight. Her name's Hope, and then Sophie's 13, who you met in Costa Rica. And then I have a son, Cole, who's now 15. Time marches on. He's 15.
Dr. John McDougall:
Wow.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah.
Dr. John McDougall:
15. Well, you know, my oldest grandson is 18 and I've got a 15-year-old just about ready to learn to drive. Grandson. It's amazing how fast time goes.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. And now tell me, many children do you have? Is it Heather and Craig? Am I correct?
Dr. John McDougall:
Yeah. Heather and Craig and Patrick. Craig is a professor at Oregon Health & Science University, the medical school there. And Heather runs the business now. And my other son, Patrick, he's a very successful engineer. He works in the chemistry and engineering business. Very proud of my children. And then we have seven grandchildren.
Rip Esselstyn:
Wow. And is it fair to say-
Rip Esselstyn:
Is it fair to say that most McDougalls are plant-based like you?
Dr. John McDougall:
Oh, unquestionably. Unquestionably. We're here living in the Northwest. My granddaughter, anything that even sounds like an animal she won't come close to, and she's now 10-years-old. So, yeah, they're all... I can't say that they're anymore that I'd want to claim that I was 100% pure vegan and never touched leather. Our family, if you walked into any of our homes, you'd find somewhere between 90 and 99% of what they eat is compliant with what we believe is best for them. They have their birthday cakes and occasional treats. They go out trick or treated on Halloween.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yep. Yeah.
Dr. John McDougall:
Actually, one of the jokes in our family is that, of the seven grandkids, which one can find Babe Ruth bars for grandpa.
Rip Esselstyn:
Is that your favorite?
Dr. John McDougall:
That was my favorite in the past. There are a lot of favorites I've had that I've decided aren't worth the trouble.
Rip Esselstyn:
Well, you know, my dad's was Reese's Peanut Butter Cups for a while.
Dr. John McDougall:
Is that right?
Rip Esselstyn:
Oh, yeah.
Dr. John McDougall:
Well, you know, perfection is not what it has to be about. But the problem is, people can't learn moderation. If they add a little bit to their life, what happens is they fall off the wagon, and so that's why you have to teach an alcoholic that they can't drink at all, and a cigarette smoker and a drug addict that you just can't touch the stuff. And when it comes to food, it's the same thing. People who are very much involved in a destructive diet, you have to tell them, "Look, you just don't do that." One birthday cake and it's down off every buffet line in town. They just never stop. So you have to teach perfection, but in all practicality, the more you do, the better results you'll get. Except for the fact is you can't do just a little bit. I know that.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yes. I have so many questions that I want to ask you and we're going to run out of time today. So what I'd love to-
Dr. John McDougall:
We can do it again.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah, what I'd love to do is invite you back on the podcast, because I want to ask you all about your thoughts on screening, supplements, alcohol, caffeine, all these things that you just have such a wonderful understanding of, and I think we need another hour, but as we wrap this up, I want to ask you two questions.
Dr. John McDougall:
Okay.
Rip Esselstyn:
And the first is, there's two basic beliefs that most people hold that I think you would say are not true. And the first is, as we age, we naturally become fatter and sicker. That is a complete falsehood, correct? As we age-
Dr. John McDougall:
Oh, absolutely.
Rip Esselstyn:
... we become fatter and sicker. But most people think that's the case.
Dr. John McDougall:
I learned that from my plantation patients, a bit back between 1973 and 1976 when I was a sugar plantation doctor. My first generation patients, they lived into their 80s and 90s and worked into their 80s and 90s. They were always trim. They never had any of the problems that I was treating. And as I mentioned, my older Filipino males, they would retire from the plantation. They'd go back down to the Philippines, they'd buy a young 20-year-old bride and they'd bring her back and they'd start a family. And I was impressed. I thought, "Wow, that's the way to spend your 70s and 80s. Not in a convalescent home." But, yeah, absolutely untrue.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. So it's the food. It's the food, it's the food, it's the food.
Dr. John McDougall:
It's the food, yeah.
Rip Esselstyn:
And don't you have a trademark on, "It's the food"?
Dr. John McDougall:
Well, yes we do. We started using that about 10 years ago.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah.
Dr. John McDougall:
But regardless, it's pretty common.
Rip Esselstyn:
It is. It's brilliant. And the second thing that most people believe is that a well-balanced diet is best. What are your thoughts on that? Obviously-
Dr. John McDougall:
Well, it depends on your perspective what a well-balanced diet is. If you happen to learn how to eat from the food industry, the US food industry, then you have to have, of course, plenty of protein, plenty of calcium. If you were raised, for example, in China or Japan, you would be taught something completely different. And it's just like when people migrate from countries where they eat starch-based diets. Like for example the Latinos who migrate here from rural areas where they still live on corn and beans and squash. There's somewhat of an adjustment to eating at McDonald's. And the same thing with people who come from Asia. They still stay with their rice dishes.
Dr. John McDougall:
It's all a perspective of what your environment is teaching, and our environment is built around capitalism, which I'm not trying to say anything negative about it. It's just the fact that the more you do and the more money you make, the more successful you consider yourself. And the result has been that we have... Well, I don't know whether we still have the sickest country. There are a lot of people competing out there.
Rip Esselstyn:
There are
Dr. John McDougall:
We are a pretty sick country. So, well-balanced is, again, just from the perspective of who's making the rules.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. So, John, as we wrap this up, I want to ask you one last question and that is, you and I were at that summit that James Cameron held in 2013 in Santa Barbara. And back in 2013, I mean, this was something that he really wanted us to try and have this kind of brain trust and try and figure out how can we get this message out to as many of the developed nations as possible. Here we are, it's almost 10 years later. It seems like everywhere I turn there's forest fires, it's getting hotter. Climate change, it is here and it is upon us. Your house burned down in Santa Rosa, right? You-
Dr. John McDougall:
Yeah, we lost everything.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yep. You experienced it firsthand. So my question to you is, are you optimistic that we're going to be able to survive this?
Dr. John McDougall:
Well, I am. I wasn't up until recently because of people's inertia, as far as cutting back on fossil fuel use. It's obvious people won't do it, or haven't done it to any extent that they should have. And the reluctance to change their diet because the research, the scientific research shows, and you can find that on the website mcdougallfoundation.org, that you can cut your contribution of global warming gases by 80% overnight when you switch from the Western diet to the kind of diet that we recommend, which I call a traditional diet.
Rip Esselstyn:
80%, and that's [inaudible 01:13:49]-
Dr. John McDougall:
And there are eight scientific papers. If you go to mcdougallfoundation.org, and there are no conflicting papers that show you can reduce it by 50 to 87%. Average 80%.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. And a lot of that comes from the work of Sailesh Rao, who we also have-
Dr. John McDougall:
Well, he's done some of it, and he's a very important man, but there are other researchers from around the world who've done similar studies. So when people criticize Sailesh Rao, then that's fine. I mean, I think he's done some phenomenal work and I think he'll be one of the leaders in this movement to save the planet. But there are lots of other researchers from very respected research labs that have come up with the same or similar conclusions. And again, they're on my website. So you ask me, do I have hope? Let me give you a final tip for your listeners and something I've recently discovered. I do have hope, and I want you to go to a website. It's meer.org, M-E-E-R. Meer.org.
Dr. John McDougall:
It's Dr. Ye Tao. And what his idea is, is because we're not going to be able to solve the carbon problem. There's just too much CO2 in the atmosphere. There's too many global warm gases in the atmosphere to ever reduce it. Carbon capture is a joke. A very expensive, cruel joke. Even planting trees is not going to do it. I think the addition of a good diet, at least I believed up until recently, would make the difference to save the planet. But I've gotten to the point where, because of the reluctance of people to change that, I kind of hold out a lot of hope there.
Dr. John McDougall:
But if you go to meer.org, you'll hear a discussion of how to control global warming and how to control the temperature on the planet, which is our only card left. And we can do that by reflecting sunlight using mirrors. Or you say it's crazy. Look at what Dr. Tao has to say. He's got it pretty much worked out. The question is, well, we got on it as a planet. Will the seven billion people on this planet decide that the ship is sinking and will do anything to keep afloat? And I think that he's got it right. At least I'd like to see somebody take the effort to prove him wrong, that we can reflect enough sunlight away from the earth to cool the planet so your children, Rip, and my grandchildren will have a future. And right now it looks pretty dismal.
Rip Esselstyn:
Right. So you're saying, the answer's probably going to be mirrors and not plants.
Dr. John McDougall:
Well, it's going to be something besides just carbon dioxide control, because we're so far past that. When you and I started talking about this 20 years ago, it was at a point where we could have done something, but Al Gore tells us, since his publication in 2006 of An Inconvenient Truth, he tells us, if you compare the carbon that has been put in the atmosphere before his presentation and afterwards, we've put in more carbon since 2006 than we ever did in the entire history of human existence.
Dr. John McDougall:
So people just won't stop. Industry won't stop. The elite, the rich, the bankers, they just won't stop, even though I have to believe they have children and grandchildren too. I don't understand why they won't do something more. Anyway, I believe we're past that point. Not that we don't have to do it. You really need to get off the fossil fuel. You really need to change to a vegan diet. This is absolutely crucial to do. Hopefully we'll be in existence for more than 100 years or 500 years or 1,000 years. But the immediate concern will be to lower the temperature on the plant. And M-E-E-R.
Rip Esselstyn:
You've got it.
Dr. John McDougall:
Yeah. You want to hear-
Rip Esselstyn:
You check it out.
Dr. John McDougall:
... I have nothing to do with these people at all. Just the day I found out about them is the day I had a bigger smile on my face than I had a long time.
Rip Esselstyn:
Good. Good, good, good, John, I want you to come back.
Dr. John McDougall:
I'd love to.
Rip Esselstyn:
I want another great talk with you. Again, I want you to know, John, again, what a giant you've been in my life. So many people admire you and Mary, and just allowing us to literally stand on your shoulders, on your head, on every part of your body as we've done our best to spread this message that you have been standing behind since the late 1970s. It's just remarkable. I want you to know how much I love you. I love your passion, the way you've always challenged the system, the way you have led with the truth, and you're unwavering. You're absolutely unwavering. And I love that about you. And the world is a better place because of John and Mary McDougall. So thank you so much.
Dr. John McDougall:
Well, thank you, Rip. We've got an army to build. It's going to take a lot of us, and so, the fact that you've got a following that's dedicated and understands the truth, and they're trying to spread the word, too. Whatever your talents are. I just want to say something to your viewers. Whatever your talent is, use that to spread the word because we have to do it. The stakes are so high.
Rip Esselstyn:
Right.
Dr. John McDougall:
Not just for your own health. For everything.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Well, I think you have something on, I think, it's mcdougallfoundation.org where the stakes have never been higher, and we're talking about planet earth here.
Dr. John McDougall:
Yeah, just our home.
Rip Esselstyn:
Just our home. Exactly. John, hit me with a fist bump, all right? Hit me with a fist bump.
Dr. John McDougall:
All right. All right. There you go.
Rip Esselstyn:
PLANTSTRONG, John. PLANTSTRONG. Thank you. There we go.
Dr. John McDougall:
I look forward to the time that we can personally share some place together, Rip. You and your family have been our best friends for many years.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Thank you. I look forward to having John back on the podcast to continue this important conversation. To learn more about John's work, visit drmcdougall.com, or mcdougallfoundation.org. Remember, as Dr. John McDougall says, "It's the food. It's always been the food." And as I like to say, 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 B. Esselstyn Jr. and Ann Crile Esselstyn. Thanks for listening.
