Hey, welcome to the Eat to Live podcast. I'm here with my dad, Dr. Fuhrman. And I'm here with my daughter, Jenna Fuhrman. That's right. And we are going to talk about diabetes, fiber, blood sugar, all the things Diabetes health.
Well, talking about diabetes, blood sugar, insulin fiber, all those things affect longevity and health even in people who are not diabetic. So it's good to people to gain an overall understanding of all these concepts and how they work. I hate that this is happening so much in the world, but I swear I feel like I'm hearing people as they age, you almost hear about everyone becoming pre-diabetic or diabetic. I feel like I hear a lot of people suffer for them. from that.
And when I'm reading success stories on Dr. Fuhrman online, I notice a lot of them talk about being pre-diabetic, becoming diabetic, and realizing they needed to make a change in their life. Right. Pre-diabetes and diabetes are exploding, but the number of people becoming pre-diabetic, which means that their sugars have already started to rise out of the normal range, but not yet high enough to be formally classified as being a diabetic. So they've already have now a problem with sugar and insulin.
So it's like the sugar that we eat. So the sugar that's going in our blood from the foods we eat? Yes.
In other words, when we eat carbohydrate, it gets broken down into a sugar that goes into our bloodstream that fuels us. Our body is fueled by sugar. Like sitting here discussing things with you, 80% of our energy requirements are being utilized by the brain and the brain could only run on sugar. So our body runs on sugar.
That's the primary gasoline for humans. But when we eat foods like cooked carbohydrate foods, like sweet potato, squash, cauliflower, whatever we're eating, beans, fruits, our body makes sugar. If those carbohydrates are broken down into simple sugars to fuel our cells and to fuel our brain. You know, what's funny is I was just talking with Jacob about this at lunch, because he was asking me about rice. He's like, I feel like I know your dad says bread's really bad.
Like the whiter the bread, the sooner you're dead. But I never hear him talk bad about rice. And I said, no, it's all the same thing. He calls white rice, bread, everything the cake diet. It's like eating cake, which is sugar, sugar, sugar, sugar.
So this is like, this is sugar that doesn't really fuel our body in a good way, right? That's correct. Because those white rice and white potato have had the fiber, I'm sorry, white rice and white bread, I meant to say, have the fiber removed. And the sugar that's the fiber slows the entry of sugar into the bloodstream.
Wait, that's something I didn't know. You're saying white rice and white bread have the fiber removed. That outside grain also contains all the fiber.
That's correct. And it makes it more processed, right? Right. That's white flour is the germ, the inside of the seed without the outside, which is where the fiber is. So you're taking the fiber away.
And when you took the fiber away, the sugar portion breaks down too rapidly. And the sugar goes into your blood too quickly. So that's the rate at which sugar enters the blood is called the glycemic load of that food.
And so that's why sugar and honey and maple syrup have a high glycemic load because when you eat it, it goes into your bloodstream right away. And that's why white flour has almost the equivalent glycemic load as plain ordinary sugar or honey because it goes into the bloodstream immediately because there's no fiber to ease its entry into the bloodstream more slowly. Which is why you call it the cake diet. Right. Which is why it's the cake diet because everything people's eat is the same as cake.
They fry cake. It's a pancake. It's fried cake in a pan. Or they put sugar on the cake. That's just the craziest thing.
And I mean bread and pasta and white flour products, which are just eating sugar, sugar, and more sugar. Now, so the American diet is particularly layered on top to make people diabetic, to do all the things. Because number one.
They're eating a lot of high-glycemic carbohydrates with a high flow of flushing into the bloodstream with a rapid intake of sugar. And that rapid intake of sugar in the bloodstream, because going in so fast, has an effect on the brain to make you crave and desire more sweets. So it makes you into a sugar addict. So you want to eat more calories now. And then the American diet.
is also high in saturated fat because they eat animal products and sweets like hamburgers pizza right and the the animal products and the saturated fat from animal products further distorts the function of the insulin receptor to damage it so now you don't have the receptor where insulin can bind to it on the cells doesn't work very well see insulin is the hormone produced by the pancreas that lowers sugar in the blood And it lowers sugar in the bloodstream by pushing it into the cells, the muscle cells, the brain cells. It pushes it out of the bloodstream into the cells. And when we gain weight, then we become more, and we have more fat in the body, it interferes with the function of the insulin receptor. So that the body has to produce extra insulin.
And the production of extra insulin is a risk factor for both heart disease and cancer in a shortened lifespan. Insulin is a primary fat storage hormone. and higher levels make you have more appetite, and higher levels promote more fat storage and make you hungrier, because insulin is a primary fat storage hormone which produces angiogenesis, which means it promotes the growth of blood vessels to fuel the growth of fat, because fat can't grow without blood vessels growing into it to allow it to get oxygen and nutrients. But in allowing blood vessels to grow into the fat to get fatter, it can allow tumors to replicate.
and even metastasize and allow cancer cells to glean a blood supply. So the things that make us have higher levels of insulin are also cancer promoting. So sugar is therefore cancer promoting because it raises insulin higher. Now we have this population who's overweight and all overweight people are insulin resistant.
So I'm saying there's no such thing as a healthy overweight person. They all have higher levels of insulin and it's higher and higher the more extra fat they put on their body. They have higher levels of insulin but what makes them insulin resistant?
I just want to make sure I understand that term. The fat that gets stored in the cell membranes distort the shape and function of the insulin receptor. So they become insulin receptors from the buildup of fat on the membrane of the cells. When you eat saturated fats from animal products it has an extra negative effect on the shape of the insulin receptors, decreasing the function of the insulin receptor further. So just gaining weight makes you insulin resistant.
When you gain weight and eat animal fats, it makes it even worse. So let me get this right. You're producing all this extra insulin because you're not eating well and you have a lot of sugar.
And so they're like, whoa, we need to regulate this sugar better, so more insulin. But then also you're distorting your insulin receptors. So you're really messing up the process. And so controlling blood sugar in your body becomes a real problem. Is that right?
Yeah, well, before you're pre-diabetic, your sugars are normal, but the body's producing excess insulin in order to keep the sugars normal. Now, to me, that's pre-diabetic, even before the sugars start to go up. So I'm saying all overweight people are pre-diabetic because they're in an abnormal state with heightened insulin even before their sugars start to rise. When their sugars start to rise into the pre-diabetic phase, like your sugars are like 90, 95, 100, I'm saying to me, Everybody calls it pre-diabetes. I call it diabetes because I'm calling pre-diabetes before your sugar store.
I have my own criteria. Totally. You want people to look to a super hobby.
Once you're really diabetic, that's already advanced diabetes to me. Yeah. You know what I mean? Because you're saying, I mean, you always advocate if you're not healthy, you got to work on that. You got to get it there.
You got to make changes. Right. So it's not like, it's like once the scale starts teetering, you're like, let's make a change, not wait until you're over this terrible threshold. Once the sugar is abnormal in the blood, called pre-diabetes.
You've been having excess insulin for a decade. Right. It's been causing damage and the damage has been going on for years before you've been diagnosed with prediabetes, let alone diabetes.
Totally. So we talked about a few fast foods and you call them fast food because the sugars go into your bloodstream really fast, right? Correct. But can you tell us about a few slow foods, like foods that we should eat that have sugar? Right.
Well, that's why we're recommending a whole food plant-based diet. because whole foods are obviously still have all their fiber intact. And the less cooked they are and the less processed they are, the more whole they are. You know what I mean? Like in other words, you could eat steel-cut oats and you could cook it in water or you could take and grind it into an oat flour and then bake bread with it.
Now, baking a bread with an oat flour is not going to be the same as having steel-cut oats cooked in water because you've ground it to a flour, you baked it in the oven. You know, it's going to be higher glycemic and not as natural and not as whole. So we're talking, but it's worse when people use white flour because even the old flour, at least they're grinding the whole grain into a flour. With the white flour, they're taking away the bran and then they're grinding the white flour into a flour, making it even worse.
So white flour is even considerably worse than old flour, but old flour is still not the same thing as eating a whole intact grain, like a steel cut oat or something. Right, there's different levels of processed foods too. Exactly.
Yeah. And some you can incorporate and it makes sense to do. Smaller amounts.
Yeah. But here we have now. People are insulin resistant, which means the beta cells in the pancreas are always producing high levels of insulin, right? Now the hallmark of a longer lifespan living to be past the age of 95, those people are always insulin sensitive, not insulin resistant. And that's all occurs from a lifetime of having low body fat and a lifetime of being slimmer.
And of course, not eating a lot of foods that have a high glycemic. Stress on the body like white rice is a high glycemic stress, you know diet high in white rice like Asian diets Yeah, that's why in Asia when they gain when people coming from China and Japan and South Korea Start to eat a little American food a little soft drinks a little meat a little fried chicken Whatever it is the french fries they become diabetic So early when they're just 10 pounds overweight We have an explosion of diabetes in Asian countries right now and they get diabetes at a lower body weight than then maybe the traditional Europeans do, because obviously the ready diet is so high in white rice, for example, they're almost teeter tottering on the edge. They don't need a lot to like throw them over the edge, a little weight gain and they're in trouble.
I feel like Asian diets get a lot of notoriety for being one of the healthiest. Like people always talk about, oh, the Japanese eat only rice and fish, it's healthy. And then they eat a ton of white rice. Like, so, and they're all thin and healthy. Are they healthy?
Well, they're a little bit healthier than we are. because they're not eating as much fried food, oils, and they're not eating as much meat. They eat a lot of vegetarian cuisine as well. And vegetables. They're eating probably more vegetables, but they're also eating more salt.
They're eating higher levels of salt than we eat. So it balances itself out. They don't live much longer than we do because they have about the same lifespan. Because we have more heart attacks and they have more hemorrhagic strokes and we have more of this cancer and they have more stomach cancer.
So they have more other diseases that are linked to the high salt intake. And we have more other things work to the bacon and meat and cheese intake. So the difference in lifespan is very minimal. Even the Okinawans in the so-called blue zone, which were living about six to eight years longer than the average American, are not living longer than Americans now in Okinawa, because obviously they've been fast foods and other processed foods have invaded those areas of the world. Oh, for sure.
Yeah, so they're not eating the traditional diets where you're living on mostly sweet potatoes with vegetables and a little bit of fish, which is not the, it wasn't a great diet, but it was much better than the American diet. But still, with nutritional science, we could design a diet style that enables almost everybody to live past 95. Because we can, you know, keep them eating food that are mostly whole plants that are low glycemic and also don't make you fat. Because if you, and if you overeat calories, and the major reason, one of the major reasons people in America overeat calories is because they put oil in their food. So it's bad enough they're having all the... high-glycemic carbohydrates, then they throw an extra 500 calories of oil on top.
And that causes an interaction between oil puts a lot fat immediate in your bloodstream. So now you have a lot of sugar in the bloodstream with a lot of fat in the bloodstream, which raises insulin and also raises fat storage. So the fat in the blood gets immediately stored as fat.
And so you're storing everything in the blood as fat. You know, whereas that if you were eating If your fat came from avocados and nuts and seeds, like in a Nutritarian diet, the calories would be absorbed so slowly that they would be preferentially burned for energy, and the sugar would be absorbed more slowly, and those would be preferentially burned for energy. They wouldn't be putting food into the fat supply, we'd be putting food into energy so we'd feel vibrant, active.
strong and we wouldn't put fat on our body. I know people think, yeah, you hear that avocados are fatty food, but now we know it's a slower fatty food. Is that correct?
Right. In other words, I have this term caloric rush, which we've talked about here a lot. The caloric rush refers to not just the carbohydrate It's entering the bloodstream fast with sugar but also oils into the bloodstream fast You get a lot of calories in the blood at one time and that's the cause of diabetes It's putting a lot of calories in the blood at one time Right, which then make the body has to store it as fat and then the beta cells in the pancreas Having to do so much insulin Month after month, year after year, eventually they get overworked and they can't keep up with the insulin needs of the body. And they're having to produce five or ten times as much insulin as a person of normal weight eating a healthy diet would need to produce.
And it's all the years of the beta cells to being so overworked that they start to decrease their capacity for insulin production. Beta cells are tired. They tire out.
Yeah. They poop out. But even when they poop out, they're still producing more insulin than a person of a normal weight on a good diet would ever need.
But they're producing excess amount, but it's not enough for this person to keep their sugars down. So now the sugars start to creep up. So the sugars are creeping up, and the person is diabetic or pre-diabetic, along with excess amount of insulin production. But it's not enough insulin to keep the sugar in the normal range. So it's relatively insulin deficiency.
but not absolute insulin deficiency because they have enough insulin if they were a normal weight and ate healthfully. It's kind of, I don't know why I thought of this just now, but it's kind of like the Titanic. Like when something goes wrong, like the ship starts to sink and a Nutritarian diet will like plug it all up, like eating the right foods will like plug it all up, repair the ship. But if you keep letting it happen, eventually it's just going to sink.
And you got to look at the signs and notice that you could take action today. to avoid it or reverse it. So like, you can reverse diabetes. You do it almost all the time, every day.
Can you tell us about that? Yes, all of our, most of our diabetic, type two diabetic patients who come into the retreat or follow my program, get rid of their diabetes quickly, very quickly. Sometimes so quickly, they could like, they gotta get off their medications really fast or their sugars get too low.
That's what you like, that's what you monitor, I feel like really closely for retreat guys. Yes, yeah, we have to get them off their insulin and off their diabetic medications. By the way, you have a person whose beta cells are overworked.
from their diets and their body weight, straining the production of insulin. And now you go to a, you take diabetic drugs, which are forcing the beta cells in the pancreas to produce more insulin, so you can get the sugar down. And that poops out the insulin production of the beta cells even faster, which makes the diabetic, the diabetes more advanced and more serious.
So going to doctors and taking drugs for diabetes, or taking more insulin, the insulin is the problem. Having too much insulin as it is, adding more insulin to control your sugar makes you gain weight more. You gain more weight, you're more diabetic. So the ACCORD study was a study on, which took people with diabetes and split them into two groups.
And one group got more medical care, more doctor visits, more finger stick to check their sugars all the time. And the other group just left them alone, let them sugars run less high and more sloppily cared for. And the government after numerous, after eight years came in and had to stop the study because they found so many more people were developing serious problems and more death.
And the group getting more medical care. And it showed that more drugs with diabetes meant for more death. Because more trying to keep the sugars lower with more drugs was worse than letting the sugars run higher. And I'm not saying let the sugars run higher. I'm not saying use drugs to put it down either.
You're saying change your diet. Change your life and your exercise. Exercise, change your diet, eat right.
And don't, and my mantra here is don't control your diabetes. Get rid of it. Don't get it numbers better.
Don't manage it. become non-diabetic. And it's, you know, so do what you need to do.
So we put together a program where people are eating vegetables and beans and nuts and seeds and mushrooms and onions. And, you know, they're eating and only intact grains and their diabetes goes away. And they get satisfied with fewer calories now because we're taking away their addictive drive to overeat and all the extra insulin they were producing, which drives them overeating behavior. So they're satisfied with less calories now.
I want to say something about that. less calories because it's so funny to me when you look at like a small McDonald's burger, like you can look at something and say it's five, 600 calories on a standard American diet. And it looks like no food, a tiny bit of pasta, a tiny bit of cheese, a tiny bit of meat, but less calories on a nutrient diet actually looks like a surprising amount of food. I think for a lot of people, I'm never, it's never not a good portion. And I think you don't have to eat like a bird for it to be less calories.
It's just the wiser choices of foods. that are less calories. Right, that's why dieting, on conventional dieting doesn't work. Because people try to cut back on the amount of food and they're not satisfied with that small amount of food.
It's so the worst. You need a certain volume, you need a certain amount of fiber, you need a certain weight in your stomach, you need to feel like you ate a meal. And by eating, try cut back on calories, eat thimble-sized portions of food, it will never sustain a person long-term. I love the volume. I actually love my food.
I'm a good eater, but yes, it's the right food. But people get self-habituated to overeating and- And they get so habituated to eating foods that stimulate the brain that it's very difficult for them to imagine eating this healthfully. That's why people have to just do it.
You know, understand the concept, just do it. And then, of course, we're instructing people to, if you're diabetic, watch your sugar really close when you start the diet. Because you'd be amazed at how fast your sugar will go down. And your medications have to be reduced because if your sugar gets too low, you could pass out or something.
So if you're doing this at home, you definitely should consult your doctor. You need to work with a doctor. Oh, totally. And you need to watch your sugars more closely at the beginning, the first few weeks, not less closely, so your medications could be tapered down. An error on the side of letting your sugars run higher, not trying to medicate them lower, let them run a little high for a while until you get the feel of getting them down.
I like to tell people, you know, let's do what it takes to get your sugar down. And that means, you know, go for, if you can, go for a walk after every meal, you know, do three walks a day. That's your medication.
Your diet and walking is your medication or exercise in general. We'd want them to use their body parts, but it's the whole holistic approach. But if the diabetic person is overweight and not losing weight each week, then they're not improving their diabetes because unless they're losing weight, they're not becoming less diabetic.
You have to lose weight to improve insulin sensitivity. So the two terms here, remember insulin resistance. and insulin sensitivity.
So we want the insulin receptor to be sensitive to insulin. So only a little bit of insulin is needed. And the only way to do that is to lower body fat.
It makes sense. So we can measure body fat too. So let's talk about type 1 because it's a bit different, but I know you can help it as well.
So type 1 diabetes, which often kids get diagnosed with or adults as well, does that mean they're born with distorted insulin receptors? This is my guess. No, it's usually an autoimmune disease.
So your immune system is attacking the beta cells and destroying them. Oh, so you're producing less insulin. You're producing no insulin.
No insulin, you don't produce insulin. That's, see the type two diabetic still produces insulin, but not enough to keep their sugars in the favorable range. So what we gotta do with the type two diabetic is we have to make the body not need as much insulin. So the insulin that's being produced is sufficient. But even with more advancement in type 2 diabetes, where it becomes almost type 1.5, where insulin production keeps going down to the point where they actually have to be put on insulin, and they're not producing much of their own insulin, even in those cases, the nutritarian diet, with increasing the nutrient density of cells and the phytochemicals and antioxidants of the cells, it seems to restore the beta cell function, and it enables this hibernating beta cells to be able to...
reclaim the ability to produce insulin. So the improved nutrition improves both the insulin resistance and the ability of the body to make insulin if needed. So it eventually normalizes the person so they're not diabetic.
Because most conventional physicians will say you can't reverse type 2 diabetes, and we're saying absolutely. It not only reverses insulin resistance, but we also see beta cell function start to improve, and then we can measure C-peptide and insulin levels and see them improve. You know what I mean? See, they're getting better. So it's not with the type one, it's the hallmark is significant or complete destruction of the beta cells in the pancreas by the immune system attack, usually when you're young on the beta.
So the person now is going to require insulin the rest of their life. Okay, I got it. Why have I heard that your diet helps type one diabetics?
Because type one diabetes. Is a death sentence when you eat conventionally. It has a high degree of shortened lifespan, increasing risk of both heart disease and cancer because the chronic exposure to amounts of excess insulin through life shortens lifespan.
You're saying excess insulin from medication, from what you inject with. Right. And when you're taking insulin from medication and eating an American diet, then you're having to use excess insulin to keep your sugars favorable on the American diet.
Right. So the combination of exogenous insulin, medical insulin injected, with the American diet is a witch's cauldron of dangers. And so people are scared to have it or their long-term prognosis with type 1 diabetes. And they think that by taking their finger sticks or putting the insulin monitors on and they're constantly watching their sugar and controlling their insulin, very fine-tuning it to keep it favorable.
They think that's going to be the best thing to extend their lifespan. It doesn't work because watching their sugars really closely makes them have to take excess amount of insulin to compensate for the American diet that requires excess amount of insulin. And by covering whatever sugar they're eating with enough insulin, they wind up taking two times, three times, four times as much insulin that would have been needed.
So I'm saying that what we see happens with type 1 diabetics is instead of you using 50, 60, 70, 80, or 100 units of insulin a day, They wind up only needing 20 units or 15 units a day. Their insulin requirements go way down. And instead of chronically watching and chasing every food they're eating and having their sugars drop on the exercise and go up and down all over the place, which is not good. Instead, they learn to eat the nutritarian diet that we eat, that's consistent. So we eat about the same dietary skeleton.
We eat about the same amount of calories each day. We eat the same glycemically favorable foods each day. We're not pushing our...
We don't need a huge amount of insulin after each meal. So as a type one, I can get by with maybe 12 units of insulin at night and two with each meal. And 12 at night plus two with each meal is six plus 12 is 18 units of insulin a day.
So I could do that every day. And I can keep my sugars always between like 80 and 120, except for right after the meal, it can go up a little higher for the first hour after the meal. And I can exercise without it going too low because I'm not using too much insulin. And I can, you know, play sports. and I can not show my, not have to use excess, worry about insulin or take too much.
Right. And it's the consistency of using, in this case, 12, 2, 2, and 2. It's the consistency of 18 units of insulin throughout this person's whole life now. It makes them, gives them the ability to live a lifespan of 95 to 105 years old, the same as a person who's non-diabetic.
Right. Not a death sentence at all. It's not a death sentence.
Right. Because they're eating healthy like we are and their insulin requirements are relatively low. Right.
It's the combination between the American diet. So it's when you go to a diabetologist, an endocrinologist, a dietician, then you get advice that's gonna kill you because they're gonna fine tune your insulin to control your sugars no matter what you eat, giving you this broad spectrum of unhealthy foods you can eat and you could adjust your insulin to any level possible. We're saying, well, if you're needing more than 18 units of insulin a day, you're eating wrong.
If you're having to use more than two or three units of insulin with each meal, it's not a healthy meal. if you're requiring more than so much insulin at night so we have to so and a type one diabetic can develop extra body fat and be insulin resistant too so they can have type one diabetes requiring more insulin because they're overweight as well so it's more important for a type one diabetic to follow a nutritarian diet because even if they don't get rid of their type one diabetes it's still going to be life-saving to them to follow this way of program and by the way i did publish a research article where i had some very young type 1 diabetics who are able to reverse their type 1 diabetes or forestall it from getting worse when they switch to this diet style. So we can prevent type 1 diabetes, and maybe if you're very newly diagnosed, even make it go into remission. But the most important thing is preventing it in early life with healthy diets from the parents and healthy diet with kids.
And, you know, all these diseases are still the results of bad health and bad nutrition. You know, somebody just said to me yesterday, they said, How is the nutritarian diet working here when the person is eating healthfully and they developed a brain cancer, a brain tumor, you know, at 12 years old or something? And I'm saying, well, unfortunately, you know, unfortunately, the diet your parents eat. Isn't it your grandparents as well?
Maybe some of you. And exposure to chemicals, toxins. Yes, right. It's not all of what you eat because some of these diseases can be called from what your parents eat. We know that the consumption of luncheon meats like pastrami and hot dogs.
Not just in a woman when she's pregnant, but even three years before pregnancy can increase risk of leukemia or brain tumors in the child. So we're saying here, yeah, it is what we eat. But of course, we may have to go back to what your parents ate and what your grandmother ate too.
Because we're destroying the cells and the genes from prior generations by the unhealthy diet. So the unhealthy diet and exposure to chemicals is at the foundation of all these diseases. But sometimes you can get a bad... hand dealt to you because of what chemical exposures were that happened when you were in the womb or that your parent or your mother had before you were in the womb you know what i mean you know what really kills me i see this campaign on the internet and on social media it's like and i hear it from dieticians people who have authority in a voice or you think they have authority and they say let's stop demonizing food like you should be able to eat the lunch meat eat this fried food i'm not going to label a food as good versus bad food and i'm like okay let me get this straight So there's one type of food, and I care about happiness and health, right? I want people to be happy.
But there's foods out there that cause cancer, you to live in a hospital, you to lose your loved ones early, hurt the long-term health of the people that you love. And then there's foods that are-Childhood cancer. Yeah, childhood.
The major cause of childhood cancer is junk food and not eating vegetables. And then there's foods. Blueberries, my favorite food.
Fresh vegetables. but foods that are fun to pick in the garden and people look at that, like, it's not a way to live. Like that's the only way to live, you know? So it really need to live.
No. So it really kills me that people are like, stop labeling foods as good as bad. I don't care.
If you call foods bad foods, I prefer actually not even to call them foods because I don't even, I'll go to a carnival and look at like all this fried foods and I'm like, do people know what that does to your insides? That's genuinely how I see it. And I hope that people can come to a understanding and recognize that there's some foods that promote health. happiness and a good freaking life and other foods that tear it away from you.
So yes, there are such things as good food. They're the cause of tragedy. Totally.
You're right. We have a tremendous movement in this country. First, the movement is that healthy at any weight, as if that's possible.
It's impossible. There's no such thing as healthy overweight people. And then eat anything you want and don't worry about food because that's not emotionally healthy to worry about what you eat.
Totally. It's just emotionally healthy to eat anything you want and to... And I guess to self-destruct with food, I guess it's okay to smoke anything you want or snort anything you want. Totally.
Or drink all the alcohol you want. And I'm going to be super clear. It's not like I don't feel for people that are overweight. I know it's super hard.
We know foods are very addicting. Like it is freaking really challenging. But that doesn't mean it's not worth it.
So it's not like the American diet, you always said it should be like designed by terrorists because. It really does attack and it does it so insidiously. Like it's so tough and it sucks, but people just have to rip off the bandaid and just, like you say, freaking do it so that they can learn to love it.
We're not blaming people who can't do it because we recognize the fact that these foods are designer designed, are scientist designed. Smart, smartly. To hook people and to cause food addiction. And overweightness. And they can't stop eating them.
And because it's so difficult to stop eating them because they're so addicting that people think they. They can't revel in their failure and just be sad because they've tried to diet. It doesn't work for them.
They have to give up. So they give up dieting for their emotional health. It's too emotional, stressful to try to lose weight and try to eat healthy because the drive to eat these foods and to overeat on them is too strong. And they became food obsessed too. That's the problem too.
All they're thinking about is food and being skinny when it shouldn't really be about that. Well, you can't help it because when you're eating these foods, they take over part of your brain. And they also become the major source of your pleasure in life.
In other words, food is now a larger source of your life's pleasure and happiness than it is meant to be. And if you take that away from people, they feel like they have nothing. And the more emotionally, the more unstructured and unhealthy they are emotionally, the more they need alcohol, drugs, or food to be a substitute for enjoying the world around us and getting the pleasure in life from. all the pleasures life have to offer. Totally.
Including feeling good about yourself because you're trying to have goodwill for people, you know, and like the outside world and enjoy the world around you. So it's like we tell people, stop eating at six o'clock. and go out and enjoy your life without food. Games.
I love games. I'm so obsessed. But people don't have the ability to, they think if you take the food away, what's the point of living?
There's no more enjoyment in life. I'm not going to go out drinking with my friends. I'm not going to go out to bars. I'm not going to go out to restaurants.
Might as well just be dead. What's fun in life? I can't go to restaurants and eat, you know, recreate with food. So their whole life, that's their pleasure in life because they're so emotionally unhealthy that they've got to resort to brain-stimulating substances as their only source of pleasure.
Well, those things take a lot of time too. Going out to dinner and like socializing, going to bars, restaurants, they take a lot of time. So that might be people's hobby, but like get a new hobby.
You know, it's really wild once you, there's so many things to do, whether it's like cards, chess, sail, I surf, I dance, I walk. And it's not always easy. Sometimes I just want to lay on my couch, but. The more you're in the habit of doing it, like an atomic habit, the easier it is. Well, of course, and there's so much things people can enjoy in the world around us.
We have entertainment, we have sports, we have music, we have art, we have everything we can enjoy. And we can do, you know, playing games. Sometimes that first step is really hard, though. Like if you're in the habit of just going to restaurants and bars and you work and do that, it's all you know. It's kind of weird to take that first step doing something different that you have no experience in.
What's the something different? They're not eating after, not recreating with food? Yeah, not recreating with food and then also like picking up a new hobby or activity, you know, that's not just laying on your couch or eating, especially when you're a creature of habit or haven't done that. Like say, Dr. Fuhrman, say you were in bed for...
Like, I guess, say you ate, you worked, and then you would hang out, eat more, and go to bed, watch TV. Right. And you've never done anything extracurricular besides that for, like, 20 years.
You just worked, worked, worked, ate, ate, ate, worked, worked, worked, slept. Right. What then would you pick up to do? You don't know how to ski.
Like, you don't know how to play tennis. Like, sometimes that's scary. Do I have to get a lesson?
Do I, I'm going to be so bad? Like, I feel like that could be scary. Yeah.
I mean, doing things that don't involve getting pleasure from eating food. Right. Some people don't know what to do, I think.
Yeah. And that's sociable. Maybe that's true. But I guess that's where the learning comes when you have, you need the help of other people, social connections, and being involved with other interests that don't involve food.
You got to find your interest, your passion. And I think that being a nutritarian brings people back to their passion in life because they have not just freeing up time, but it gives them, it frees up their own health and it brings back more intellectual creativity. So now they're getting their creativity back like a child excited about the world and what they you know Or a teen so when they're when the creativity come back comes back They develop more interest in things and that interest could be Painting finger paint when you were a kid you like finger painted. I love painting You know and just like people like to do stuff and they like to just make things out of clay They like to do you know They like to go and look at the woods and look things growing in the woods and look for berries and you know And I'm saying you you get this fascination of pleasure from just the world in general, of all the beauty, like looking at the world with the eyes of a child. And what I'm saying is your creativity comes back and it takes a, many people have expressed this to me.
They say the cloud lifted off their brain. I've heard that. Yeah, I've lost this cloud of fog, the fog lifted.
And they start to find things that make, that they're passionate and interested in to make their life more fulfilled. I think a struggle too is like people as they age or become an adult, you know, whatever that means, start to be like afraid of being bad at something or afraid of trying something new. And I just want people to know, I think it's so healthy and happy and cool to try things you're really bad at and even do them. Like I painted for a long time.
I'm actually a terrible painter, but that didn't mean I didn't enjoy like mixing the colors and stuff like that. But certain times you'll try it. You might try a ton of hobbies that have nothing to do with food. You try five of them and like one of them clicks. Great.
It will, you'll have so much more fun and be happier for it. And it will help you reach your health goals, which are so cool. Right. Right, and also your pleasure is not just from eating. Right.
But of course, we get pleasure from eating, but the pleasure is in its compartment in... we get pleasure in meeting, but you also have to do a lot of other things to get enjoyment in life. And it's not just about food.
So the people that say, oh, just shoot me right now. I'd rather be dead if I can't eat healthy, if I can't recreate with food. And if I had to eat like you, I'd rather be dead. Well, that shows a real problem with their life. It's not just about food.
It's about-Or they have to make a change. Like, you know, it's not a healthy lifestyle. Right, so that's where the holistic viewpoint, I guess, can help this person.
But I guess, but the message here, nevertheless, is that- Why would a person be, accept the fact of being sick the rest of their life and taking these drugs the rest of your life that shorten your lifespan and the diabetic drugs shorten lifespan, don't lengthen it. And people are told, well, once you have diabetes, you got to stay taking these drugs the rest of your life. And I just want to be clear with that message that people should not give in to the conventional viewpoint that once you're sick, once you're overweight, once you have heart disease, you're stuck there taking drugs the rest of your life.
Right. Because that's what really leads to people's downfall and leads to the brains not having, losing their incitement and enjoyment of life. Yeah. And it gives the brain more fear too.
And you're drugged out all the time. And drugs, you know, and drugs have side effects, which meaning that they have, these drugs, you're taking multiple drugs that interact with each other that affect not just your, which affect brain function. So now you have, in any case. A few more questions.
Okay. Doctor. So I know people talk a lot about fiber with diabetes too and how like take fiber, eat fiber.
What's the deal? Why do people talk about like fiber, blood sugar and diabetes so much? Right. Well, because fiber is the component of the food that slows the glucose into the bloodstream.
And remove the fiber from the food, the sugar rushes in. So when you drink apple juice, it's a high glycemic, diabetic, unfavorable food because you took the fiber, you separated the sugar from the fiber in the apple. What about like green juice then? Well, greens are not high in sugar.
Right. Greens are high in protein, so they're not high in carbohydrate anyway. But you're right. I don't recommend people drink oat milk because you shouldn't be drinking carbohydrate liquids. Drink soy milk, it's a protein liquid.
Drink hemp milk, but don't drink oat milk and rice milk. They're high carbohydrate, and apple juice, they're high carbohydrate liquids. So we shouldn't be eating, we should be eating and chewing our carbohydrates and mixing it with saliva to maintain the fiber. And you know, we score carbohydrates on a hierarchical scale of quality where beans are the most diabetic favorable carbohydrate.
And White bread would be the worst, and then white potatoes was not as good as sweet potatoes, and sweet potatoes not as good as peas and carrots, and carrots not as good as peas, and peas not as good as chickpeas. And, you know, so we have a whole scale of dietary, a hierarchical scale of what's best for your glycemic load, but the nutritarian diet is so unique. Because we're still able to eat some fruit, but it's not mostly fruit.
And we're still able to eat enough fat, but we're not totally fat restricted. But the fat from nuts and seeds have a different biological effect. So we don't have to restrict fat so much.
So we can use the fat for sauces and dressings. And we can have some nuts and seeds and some... You know, we talked about this in prior podcasts, that we don't need to restrict all the fat. We just need to change the type of fat from oil and animal fats into the fats from whole foods.
Because again, the whole food fats... go into the bloodstream very slowly like the whole food carbohydrates go into the bloodstream very slowly. Slow foods.
Slow foods. And then when you eat the right food, it creates a thickening of the microbiome of the bacteria that cover the villi in the small intestines. You know what the villi are? Those are those finger-like projections because the walls of the small intestines are shaped like your fingers.
And then they're covered with a coating of bacteria. And when you eat animal products, your coating is more gram negatives, you produce more unfavorable bacteria that produce unfavorable compounds. When you eat more sweets and sugar, like the diet that has more sugar in meat, you're producing all these bad bacteria and yeast forms.
But when you eat green vegetables and mushrooms and onions and beans, you create all these favorable bacteria that thicken and coat and permanently live over the villi. And now these bacteria slow the absorption of glucose into the bloodstream. So when you eat a mango, that mango is moderately glycemic, but it functions as a low glycemic food because the sugar is going in so slowly because you regularly ate mushrooms and beans and greens and onions. So let me say that one more time.
I'm saying these two raw foods, raw green vegetables like lettuce and arugula and bok choy and kale, raw greens and raw onion or scallion and the two cooked foods. cooked mushrooms and cooked beans. Those four foods have the most powerful effect at building a protective biofilm over the villi that makes everything you eat low glycemic because you regularly add the beans and the greens. Now let's take a keto person.
Now this keto guy on the keto diet, he can't eat a mango because look, look when I eat the mango, look at my blood sugar monitor. My sugar went to 300 when I ate the mango. I can't eat that.
I got to stay eating tuna fish and, Tuna fish, coconut, and butter. Yeah, because my sugars will go through the roof. Well, yeah, his sugars are going through the roof of the mango because he's distorted the shape of insulin receptor from the saturated fats he's eating.
So he's deactivated his insulin receptors. And he doesn't have a good microbiome to slow the absorption. So us nutritarians don't have to avoid fruit sugar.
We can eat fruit and it's not going to raise our blood sugars because our insulin resistance is low. Our insulin resistance is low. Our insulin sensitivity is high and our microbiome is more robust. It's that combination.
I want to thank you for telling us about that because I feel like I hear so much about the microbiome. This is good for your gut, that microbiome health. And I do get it now a lot more.
It's these healthy foods give you a healthy microbiome, give you an optimal range of blood sugar, do all the things for you in one full swoop. Right. And these foods have both soluble and insoluble fiber.
The soluble fiber. are the fibers that best feed the bacteria in the gut and best feed the insoluble fibers, bring a cold bulk in the stool to move the stool along so you have nice bowel movements. But it's this combination of soluble and insoluble, which is highly present in healthy foods like beans and nuts and greens and mushrooms.
There's so many of these beneficial fibers of both types that it becomes the greatest, best fuel for the microbiome. And now we're saying that even better than taking Probiotic pills is eating the wide variety of foods on a nutritarian diet. A nutritarian diet is the most microbiome favorable diet. If you could design a diet just based on the microbiome, with the most diversity of bacteria in your gut, well, that's what we've done. We've put together, because all these foods are the foods that produce the healthiest gut, also produce the healthiest cell nutrient density.
So we're increasing cell nutrient density. including microbiome, biodiversity, and thickness of gram positives, at the same time as we're also having a favorable anti-inflammatory omega-3 index. We put all the right pegs in the holes to maximize health. And when you do that, diabetes goes away.
People just become non-diabetic. And they lose weight effortlessly. It's amazing.
They lose weight like crazy. And I feel like on WebMD or like when I search different diseases or health issues or concerns, You'll see a lot eat like a high fiber diet. And what I was trying to explain to someone that I was trying to help, it's just a vegetarian diet. Like you were saying, any food that's not processed, that's raw in its best form is high in fiber.
Right. And people are eating like, you know, they're vegan, right? Vegan cheese and a vegan pizza and a wrap and a tortilla.
And, you know, they're eating all this stuff that, yeah, it's vegan, but it's still, you know, baked. cooked, full of acrylamides, full of oil, overly processed or even partially processed. Sometimes it makes a big difference, the fact that you're eating so much raw food.
Of course, the nutritarian diet still has fruit in it, but it's not excessive in fruit. A diet can be excessive in fruit too. So we're going for nutritional variety and diversity.
And because this diet is so diverse, and diversity means that we get more protein out of the diet, we get the healthy fats, and we get the healthy carbohydrates in the healthiest form. And then you can't develop, you can't have type 2 diabetes. It's too difficult to be type 2 diabetic.
The body just reverts back to being normal. All right, Dr. Fuhrman, give me five foods that you think every... Person who might have a diabetes concern should eat like I what like well-rounded foods I don't want you to just say like all green vegetables like give us five good choices of like carbs fat sugar I know berries is probably on it. So first let's first, you know, the g-bombs are five the g-bombs are six foods Okay, gee bombs greens beans onions mushrooms berries and seeds now Those are the six foods that fight cancer and fight diabetes the most too, the foods we should eat every day. But also, people eat all types of vegetables, but when they're diabetic, they eat more green vegetables and low carbohydrate vegetables and lower carbohydrate like cauliflower and eggplant and peppers and tomatoes and mushrooms.
And they probably eat less potatoes and rice and grains. I thought you recommended sweet potatoes for people with diabetes. No.
Well... No, I recommend beans over sweet potato and peas over sweet potato. So we have mostly beans and peas with a little bit of sweet potato.
Sweet potato might be a smaller portion. If we had a plate, half the plate should be greens. Then maybe if you had some bean dish, that would be more of the plate.
Beans and mushrooms and onions with the greens would be best. And then if you had a little bit of sweet potato, that's fine. A little bit of sweet potato or quinoa, would that be a good choice? Quinoa, sweet potato, beets and carrots. So a little bit of the starches.
A little bit of those starches. The reason why I'm saying a little bit of the starches is because the beans are more favorable. and we don't have enough space in the stomach to eat the beans and all that, to eat all that food in one meal. So we'd prefer to have more of the beans at dinner. And then the lunch, you know, is big salad, vegetable bean soup and some fruit for dessert.
And so-Do you think it's detrimental to people who have diabetes to not eat berries? Because I know a lot of people think berries are too high in sugar. It's detrimental to not eat berries, yes. Berries have anti-diabetic effects. They have anti-cancer effects.
Even though they're sugar. Even though they're sugar. The effect they have on building healthy bacteria in the gut and slowing sugar absorption from other foods that are not berries is greater than the sugar absorption you get from the berries you're consuming. So people should eat berries and loquats and kumquats and things like that and blackberries, you know. In other words, they should not avoid them because they're a fruit.
Yeah. I put, I said because berries are sugar in quotation marks. which is kind of comical because they actually are sugar.
It's not like quotes. They really are sugar, but it's a-There's sugar in there. It's a slower, yeah, it's a slower. It's slowly absorbed, and they supply so much types of nutrients and fiber in the berries.
They're so rich in fiber that they support the growth of bacteria, and the bacteria and the health of the gut is improved by berries to a degree to make the movement of sugar into the bloodstream slowed. That's the same thing with beans do. Beans are very slowly digestible carbohydrates. And they have resistant starch, which means they have great fuel for the growth of bacteria, and all their carbohydrate doesn't turn into sugar because part of the carbohydrate is degraded by bacteria and turns into fat.
And the short-chain fatty acids have anti-inflammatory effects, anti-diabetic effects, and anti-apistat effects, because you have an appetite and you have an apostat. And the apostat in the brain is controlled by your intake of fiber. So when you eat beans, you get a special type of fiber called resistant starch.
that produces more of these short-chain fatty acid, butyrate, there's a negative feedback loop on the apostat in the brain, the hypothalamus, making you satisfied with fewer calories. So the reason why we don't eat so much rice, potato, things like that, is because these more favorable carbohydrates are more satiating, more satisfying, and more protein. So we can eat those foods, but they're not the majors.
You know, we're trying to eat more variety of different types. For sure. So this is so... Check, Yeah, so when you design a diet to make it ideal, you just get a better outcome. And you're happier.
I swear it. Which is cool. You taught me a lot.
I didn't think that you could, but I've definitely learned a lot this episode. Oh, good. Great.
I hope you guys learned a lot, too. High five. Give me some oomph.
Okay. Is that a good one? All right. Yes.
All right, I hope you enjoyed that episode. Until next time. Good luck, everybody.