Hey everybody this is Dylan. The last video that I posted was my interview with Dr. Joel Fuhrman where we discussed the differences between his Nutritarian diet and a starch based diet such as Dr. McDougall's diet and I've gotten a lot of questions about whether that interview has changed my own perspective or the way that I eat generally and so I wanted to address that a little bit. First of all I'm not a doctor so whatever I believe is completely irrelevant because because the truth is based in science and research. I don't read the studies, but I do read the doctors that read the studies.
And so when Dr. McDougall tells me one thing and that contradicts a little bit with Dr. Fuhrman, all I can do is choose what works best for me. And it's not that I'm choosing which one I believe is better or will result in better, longer, healthier lifespan, but it's just the one that I'm gonna do that I can do. sustainably and that I'll be successful on.
So let's get into the details. I think these two doctors agree on a whole lot more than they care to admit. When I asked Dr. Fuhrman the differences comparing the Nutritarian to a starch diet, he was just like, oh there are so many.
But come on, there are not that many differences. I will say this, if I had to choose the one diet that would result in the absolute longest possible down to the minute healthy lifespan it would probably be adhering to the tea to the nutritarian diet and that kind of more reductionist approach and i'll explain what i mean by that in a minute but i'm my goal is not to live the absolute longest life i can my goal is to live a long life absolutely free of chronic illness free of someone else having to take care of me in my in the last 10 whatever it is years of my life and then just drop dead peacefully at the end of it all. So my goal is not to measure every little tiny thing and chase after nutrients in order to live to the maximum longest period possible. And I don't think that, I think I've been pretty clear that that is not the goal in our group.
I'm pretty laid back. I want to find a really healthy approach. I want to set rules for myself that I know I will be able to maintain in the long term. so that I am meeting that goal.
And I think most of you would agree with me on that, especially the ones that are coming from a standard American diet and transitioning. Going straight to a nutritarian, get really, really specific approach to nutrients and everything is just overwhelming. It's not necessary. You're trying to get your diet right, to change it from the old ways that were really poisonous to a way that works really, really well and will allow you to live a long, healthy life.
And you don't need to focus on every little. nutrient or the bioavailability of onion and garlic blended together and put into the you don't have to worry about that if your goal is just to live a really long healthy life dr. Furman recommends that I eat less white potatoes than I'm eating am I gonna do that no probably not he also recommends well he probably recommends around the amount of grains that I am eating I don't do all that many grains but it's definitely I'm not I don't hold back It's just that when I walk into the kitchen and I ask myself what I want to eat, more often than not it's white potatoes or beans rather than say grains like rice and quinoa and millet and whatever. But that doesn't mean you should limit your grains necessarily. I think that grains are a perfectly healthy part of a long and life-sustaining diet. So if you like them, eat them.
I feel the same way about white potatoes. I think Dr. Fuhrman absolutely makes some good points about white potatoes and the glycemic index and all these things and how if you're trying to reverse heart disease it may be better to not have the white potatoes and to focus more on the beans. There may be something to that and if you are really trying to reverse your heart disease as quickly as you possibly can.
it might make sense to follow some of Dr. Fuhrman's recommendations over Dr. McDougall's. I don't know, but I'm not doing that. What I'm doing is I'm walking into the kitchen and I'm saying, what do I want to eat? And if it's white potatoes, I'm absolutely going to eat white potatoes.
I'm not going to say, oh, Dr. Fuhrman would recommend that I eat less white potatoes, so maybe I'll eat beans instead. No, I love eating beans. I walk into the kitchen and say, I want beans all the time.
The reason for me is because I love the taste. And they're really easy to eat because I've got them canned, jarred, ready. All I have to do is crack open a jar, put it into the pot, heat it up, add some spices, and I'm done.
Potatoes, I've got to chop them and rinse them and all these things. That doesn't hold me back from the potatoes, but I definitely eat a lot of beans just because of the... convenience.
I don't eat beans because I'm trying to get to follow Dr. Fuhrman's Nutritarian Diet more closely. That is not... a thing that I think about in the kitchen.
Like I always say, the reductionist approach is not one that I'm really in favor of. Dr. Lyle talks about this all the time. People major in minor things.
These doctors agree on like 97% of everything. Dr. Fuhrman says eat the nuts and seeds. Dr. McDougall recommends less nuts and seeds, not because of the healthiness of the whole food, nuts and seeds, but because often it's really hard. hard to control your intake of nuts and seeds because when I have a handful, I have a second and third handful very often. So if you're a person that can eat just one ounce of nuts and seeds a day, then by all means you're doing great.
You can follow Dr. Fuhrman's recommendation with no trouble. Others have a lot of trouble with it. We'll have a few nuts which leads to many nuts which leads to too many nuts and then it starts to hinder our weight loss. So Dr. Fuhrman would say, well eat less, start eating less, eat less, and more nuts because nuts should be a little a small part of every meal because of nutrient this and that whatever just have some nuts if you're having nuts if you don't don't if it's if it's a trigger for you that's causing you to eat out of control then limit your nuts you're still gonna live a long healthy life if you set the rules to be without the nuts but the big picture point here is that if you've set yourself a good set of rules from one of these doctors whether it's Furman Greger, Esselstyn, McDougal, you're going to live a long healthy life free of chronic illness and that at the end of the day is the goal.
If you want to live till you're 126 then maybe you should focus more on Dr. Fuhrman and the Nutritarian Diet. I will say that one thing one of my takeaways from Dr. Fuhrman is that I really do need to focus more on my non-starchy greens. I tell you I barely make salad, it's usually Elise doing it and it's not every day. I want to do better on my nutrient-dense foods like I always recommend that everyone else eat more of and start every meal with for example so what I'm doing is growing microgreens and that's really going to help me I'm not growing microgreens from just me I'm doing it as a business to sell but it's going to result in me having a lot of microgreens available and microgreens are really really really nutrient dense I'm also going to make some videos in the future where I focus on showing you how to do microgreens if should that be something that you want to do.
They're also really easy. There's no rinsing. All I do is cut them and eat them.
So I love that. I don't love rinsing lettuce, chopping lettuce, spinning lettuce, and making a salad. It's not that fun for me and when it's all said and done it didn't provide a lot of calories so I'm less motivated. Not saying that's right but it's just what happens to me when I walk into the kitchen and I make that split-second decision on what I'm I'm going to eat. I'm going to choose the beans because I'm only going to do one thing right now.
So if I have microgreens, for me, that's going to really help me to get the nutrient-dense food. For you, if you're working on weight loss, for example, then eating those non-starchies at the beginning of every meal is critically important, not just for the nutrients, but because it's calorie dilute, which means you're going to fill up your stomach with these calorie dilute foods. You're going to take up more space.
You're going to reach your satiation. more easily with your stomach more full as Dr. Fuhrman would say you're turning down the apostat you're turning down your appetite because your stretch receptors are telling you I've got more bulk in my stomach and now I can eat less calorie dense things like starch or in Dr. Fuhrman's case the beans and the nuts and you'll be full sooner with less calories Dr. Fuhrman talks about a small what does he call it a minimal calorie restriction He clarified in his lectures on the weekend at the conference that he's not saying to restrict your eating necessarily. He's saying that you should focus so heavily on the nutrient rich, calorie dilute, non-starchy vegetables and greens that by the time you get to the starches, you're already full anyway, which is going to automatically create a little bit of a calorie deficit or restriction as he calls it, without having to say... purposely choose to eat less. You can't, I, in my opinion, that doesn't work for me.
Choosing to eat less will not work for me. I'm not gonna lie, I eat till I am absolutely full. Do I need to do that? No. Will I always do that?
Probably not. But right now, I am eating as many calories as I can. I told you I'm trying to put on some muscle, so I'm eating more calories, especially from beans and starch.
But anyway, the point is you don't need to restrict your calories based on Dr. Fuhrman's recommendation. You're just eating so much more non-starchy that by the time you get to the starchy you're kind of restricted. I don't know what is all of his books say, but that was the clarification he gave us at the conference.
Another thing that Dr. Fuhrman says that I really like because I sort of do it automatically without thinking about it, is allowing yourself to go hungry for a while until you start eating. A lot of us think of that as intermittent fasting. Dr. Fuhrman says spend more time in your catabolic stage instead of your anabolic.
Your anabolic being while your body is digesting and storing all of the food that you've just put into it. And then your catabolic is where you use those stores. And he says that it's very healthy to spend time using your stores instead of always in the anabolic stage.
Always eating every time you have this habitual desire to continue to eat. We all do it, I do it too, but I can say that I more often than not go quite a while in the morning before I finally eat. He says it's cool to go to the gym at 11 a.m.
when you've had nothing to eat so far. You've got lots of stores that are going to get you through that. It's healthy to go through these times of a little bit of mental hunger.
You're not hungry hungry, but you're spending some time not eating and not digesting. I totally love that because... I do it, it feels good to do that, and it seems reasonable that it would be healthy.
You have to create a diet for you, a set of rules that you're going to be able to follow sustainably. If you're coming off of a standard American diet, McDougal's set of rules are going to be absolutely amazing for you. They will change your life and make you the healthiest you've ever been before, period. Could you take it a step further and focus on those specific daily dozen from Dr. Greger or the nutritarian specifics of Dr. Fuhrman, like that soup that he makes with all these specific steps and blending the garlic and the onion and adding them back into the soup and all these things?
Yeah, you can do that. If that's how you, to the degree to which you want to take this, then great. If you can sustain that. I can't.
I'm not, food to me is not. I just want to get eaten and get out and get back to doing the things that I need to be doing and I recommend that for you too because I see how sustainable it's been for me and so I think that it will be the same for you. One thing I forgot to say is Dr. McDougall does recommend eating less beans than Dr. Fuhrman like by a long shot but and because Dr. McDougall says you the beans are very protein rich and therefore you don't want to eat too much protein because our diets are you know...
historically have had way too much protein and we don't need as much as everybody's been telling us all our lives dr firman says that we have a lot of resistant starch in beans and therefore a lot of the protein and macronutrients that come from the beans are just passing through you anyway i don't know to me it doesn't matter because i'm going to eat a ton of beans whether dr mcdougall likes it or not i love beans they're easy to eat they're really good calories compared to what I used to eat before, it's a million times better. I don't think I'm going to suffer from eating too much protein just from beans, so I think I'm good. Anyway, we can't chase the nutrients sustainably, in my opinion.
If you've got all the time in the world to do that, then by all means, take it on. I support you. I'm not criticizing you in any way for doing that.
But I really don't think these two approaches are very different from one another, like Dr. Fuhrman sort of implied in our interview. I already eat a pretty healthy supply of nuts. I already eat a very healthy supply of beans, onions, mushrooms, all of his G-bots. bomb stuff, which is the greens, beans, onions, mushrooms, berries, seeds. I could do a little better on berries.
I don't eat a lot of fruit. But anyway, the point here is you can't really chase nutrients sustainably, in my opinion. and you'd be wasting your time to do so. You have way more important things to do unless your process is just so simple and refined that you don't even have to think about it. And great.
For those of you that are specifically worried about reversing chronic illness such as heart disease, is that little handful of nuts a day going to be the thing that stops you from reversing your heart disease? I doubt it. I know Dr. Ornish reintroduced nuts and seeds into his diet recommendations.
I don't know that Dr. Esselstyn has. author of Preventing and Reversing Heart Disease. I don't know.
I can tell you Dr. McDougall doesn't recommend against nuts. He just recommends that you minimize the nuts. Dr. McDougall allows some salt and sugar added to the food.
Dr. Fuhrman would probably recommend you not do that. These are all just very small differences. If you define for yourself a set of rules that you can sustain that's pretty damn good, you're going to do incredibly well.
This is not a group where we focus on the tiny specific details. This is a group where we take you from eating poison to eating healthfully and promoting your health, long life, sustaining, blah, blah, blah. You know the drill. I'm going to continue to encourage you to start with salad and non-starchy greens because that's where we get a lot of nutrients. And that's where we start to get a lot of bulk in our stomach to help us fill up, to control our weight best, and then moving on to the higher calorie density starches, 400 to 600 calories a pound.
You've heard me talk about calorie density over and over. I'm going to continue to recommend these kinds of things. I'm going to say reduce, you know, keep your nuts and seeds to a small amount, which is exactly what Dr. Fuhrman recommends too, in order to control your weight. It's all that simple.
Nothing has changed. except that I, Dylan Holmes, need to eat more greens and nutrient-dense non-starchy veg. There's no doubt about it.
Let's talk really quickly about supplements for a second. You do need your B12 supplement. Nothing has changed there. I have lately been taking a DHA EPA supplement because I'm not every day getting the flax seeds and the walnuts.
I thought that I would do that. I'd hoped that I did, but that was like too specific a set of rules. for me to make sure that I'm incorporating every day to ensure that my DHA EPA is where it needs to be. I haven't tested myself.
I will eventually, but I decided in the meantime to take the little squirt of the DHA EPA. And so that's the other supplement that I've been taking. And then there's vitamin D, which I don't take because I'm out in the sun a lot. If you live in a place or you live a lifestyle where you're not out in the sun, consider getting out in the sun if at all possible. Otherwise, get tested and see how much vitamin D you should be taking in order to make sure that you're good on that.
Dr. Fuhrman recommends some other supplements, but I'm pretty sure he only recommends them at an old age when things like zinc is harder for us to absorb and the amounts that we're getting from our normal diet, stuff like that. But our everyday supplements, the way that I feel about it and many doctors that I follow, is make sure you're getting your B12. DHA, EPA if you're not eating your flax seeds and your walnuts, and vitamin D if you're not getting the sun. Simple as that. Don't allow your diet rules to get so specific that it stops you from sustaining a health-promoting diet.
That is the biggest problem that I see coming from all of this. You need to adopt a set of rules that are simple, a set of rules that is sustainable forever. That you won't fall off the wagon, that you won't become mentally clouded with all of these really specific things that we're hearing all the various doctors talk about.
Figure out your set of rules and make sure you can stick to them and then do stick to them. That is all for now. Please like the video if you enjoyed it.
I'll have more interviews coming soon. I love you. Subscribe to the channel. Bye!