#255: Alan Goldhamer, DC - Can Fasting Save Your Life?
In 1984, True North Health Center opened their doors in Santa Rosa, California offering an alternative way to heal from disease and lose weight. Since that time, Dr. Alan Goldhamer and his team have supervised over 25,000 water-only fasts – with results that are astounding - disease reversal, weight loss, and a return to metabolic health.
The term “fasting” is all over the place, with intermittent fasting and fasting mimicking diets in the mainstream media. Dr. Goldhamer gives us a quick primer on all of the differences and talks candidly about the importance of diet and lifestyle changes to lifelong health.
As he stresses, a water-only fast – or any fast for that matter - will do no good if you go right back to eating the salty, oily, and sugary foods that destroyed your health in the first place.
Dr. Goldhamer and his colleague, Dr. Tashia Myers, just released the new book Can Fasting Save Your Life? – and this is what we discuss today.
So, is fasting a good choice for you? Let’s find out with Dr. Alan Goldhamer.
Episode Highlights
2:07 The Origins of True North Health Center and Reflecting on 40 Years
7:07 The Impact of Salt, Oil, and Sugar on our metabolic health
9:32 Understanding Salt, Oil, and Sugar as Chemicals
11:32 The Dangers of Excessive Sodium Intake
13:19 The Impact of Artificial Dopamine Stimulation
16:13 The Release of Can Fasting Save Your Life?
22:59 The Duration and Supervision of Water-Only Fasting
23:58 Fasting vs. Starving: Understanding the Difference
26:28 The Importance of Controlled Refeeding
28:12 Monitoring Signs of Starvation During Fasting
32:56 The Rise in Popularity of Fasting
36:20 The Common Goal of Fasting and Exercise
36:38 Beneficial Biochemical Changes During Fasting
39:11 Dr. Goldhamer's Insights on Fasting Safety
41:30 Acknowledging Dr. T. Colin Campbell's Contribution
43:28 The Discovery of Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease
44:30 Tackling the Obesity Crisis
1:09:42 The Importance of Medication Management During Fasting
1:15:18 Fasting's Impact on Cancer
1:19:05 Exploring True North and New Book Insights
About Alan Goldhamer, DC
Dr. Alan Goldhamer is the founder of TrueNorth Health Center, a state-of-the-art facility that provides medical and chiropractic services, psychotherapy and counseling, as well as massage and body work. He is also director of the Center's groundbreaking residential health education program.
Articulate, inspiring and energetic, Dr. Goldhamer is one of the most pioneering and dedicated visionaries in health today. An outspoken professional who doesn't shy away from a spirited debate, he is deeply committed to helping people stuck in self-destructive cycles reclaim their ability to change their lives.
Dr. Goldhamer has supervised the fasts of thousands of patients. Under his guidance, the Center has become one of the premier training facilities for doctors wishing to gain certification in the supervision of therapeutic fasting.
Dr. Goldhamer was the principal investigator in two landmark studies. The first: "Medically Supervised Water-Only Fasting in the Treatment of Hypertension" appeared in the June 2001 issue of the Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics. Its publication marked a turning point in the evolution of evidence supporting the benefits of water-only fasting. The second study: "Medically Supervised Water-Only Fasting in the Treatment of Borderline Hypertension," appeared in the October 2002 issue of the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine.
Currently, Dr. Goldhamer is directing a team that is developing a prospective study, incorporating random assignment and long-term follow-up on the cost and clinical outcomes in the treatment of diabetes and high blood pressure with fasting and a health-promoting diet.
After completing his chiropractic education at Western States Chiropractic College in Portland, Oregon, Dr. Goldhamer traveled to Australia, where he became licensed as an osteopathic physician. He is the author of The Health Promoting Cookbook and co-author of The Pleasure Trap: Mastering The Hidden Force That Undermines Health and Happiness.
Episode Resources
True North Health Center in Santa Rosa, CA
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Full Transcript via AI Transcription
[0:00] I'm Rip Esselstyn, and you're listening to the PLANTSTRONG Podcast. Can fasting really save your life? I discuss the many benefits and research-backed results of this ancient practice with none other than the godfather of water fasting, Dr. Alan Goldhamer, the founder of the True North Health Center, right after this message from PLANTSTRONG.
[0:31] Hello, my PLANTSTRONG cousins. I got to give a shout out for PlantStock 2024. After a four-year hiatus, we are bringing back our in-person event with all the Brock stars that you know and you love. Carleigh Bodrug, Mrs. PlantU, the social media sensation. We have Dr. Will Bolshewitz, Mr. Fiber Fueled. We have Dr. Gemma Newman, who's over from the UK. We have Dr. Dawn Mussallem, with the Mayo Clinic. We have John Mackey, who recently retired from Whole Food Market Stores, where he was at the helm for 44 years. We have Doug Evans, who is Mr. Sprout. And of course, what would a Plant-Stocj be without Jane Esselstyn and her co-pilot in crime, Anne Crile Esselstyn. You are going to have endless buffets of plant-strong food. We're going to have more More activities than you know what to do with, whether it's pickleball, yoga, hiking, walking, cornhole, frisbee, golf, live music, dancing, stargazing.
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[2:08] Way, way back in 1984, True North Health Center opened their doors in Santa Rosa, California, the home not only of True North Health Center, but also Dr. John McDougall, and they offered an alternative way to heal from disease and lose weight. Since that time, Alan Goldhamer and his team have supervised over 25,000 water-only fasts with results that are astounding, that include disease reversal, weight loss, and a return to metabolic normalcy. Dr. Goldhamer and his colleague, Dr. Tashia Myers, just released the new book, Can Fasting Save Your Life? And the conversation that I have with Alan today is, it's just typical Alan. He is so unrelentingly authentic and real and just no holds bar. And I love him for that.
[3:22] The term fasting is all over the place these days with intermittent fasting and fasting mimicking diets all over the mainstream media. What Dr. Goldhamer gives us is a quick primer on all of the differences and he talks super candidly about the importance of diet and lifestyle changes to long-term health. I mean, let's be honest, a water-only fast or any fast for that matter, it's not going going to do any good at all if you go right back to eating the salty, oily, and sugary foods that destroyed your health in the very first place. So, is fasting a good idea for you? Let's find out with Dr. Alan Goldhamer.
[4:13] Alan Goldhamer, welcome back to the PLANTSTRONG podcast. It is great to see you. And I got to ask you. You're looking younger than the last time that I had you on, which was episode 142. We're now pushing up against 260, 275. So how is it that you look younger now than last time? Is it something in the water there at True Health? Yeah, maybe it's something in the water at True North Health. I try to practice what I preach. So diet, sleep, and exercise, that seems to be the key to slowing down the process. I just turned 65. I know my grandson, who's just started college, calls me the AO, which I guess stands for ancient one.
[5:01] Well, you don't look ancient to me. You look incredible. So let's just start out at the top. You started True North Health Center 40 years ago, this year, right? 1984. Can you believe that.
[5:19] You are now the ancient one. You've been doing this for 40 years. Did you ever think when you started this in 1984 that you'd be doing it 40 years later? Yeah, I kind of did. I got started with my interest in all this when I was like 16 years old. And like most people that are on the spectrum, they get interested in something and then tend to stay with it. If it's spiders or dinosaurs, for me, it happened to be nutrition and fasting. And so that's all I've ever done. That's all I've ever been interested in. And it's all I ever can see myself being involved with because it's just, you know, it's a really interesting challenge, not only trying to figure out how to get people well, but then how to help them and encourage them to stay well. And, you know, that may be an even bigger challenge is, you know, because people live in a world designed to make them fat, sick and miserable. And they have to overcome tremendous challenges in order to lose weight and particularly keep it off and maintain optimum health. And so helping figure out how to make that happen is a huge challenge. Yeah. Well, you just said a lot right there. And I think one of the things that I want to explore in this is you said that people have to overcome a lot of challenges kind of just to be healthy.
[6:32] But don't you think at the bottom of it, that once you have the knowledge, those challenges and all those hurdles kind of just disappear for the most part. And it's a pretty clear runway to what it, what it means to be healthy.
[6:49] Well, I think that the, once you have the knowledge, it certainly makes it possible, but it doesn't, I don't think just disappear because you still have all the other social impacts and other consequences. The fact is people are addicts. They're addicted to the artificial stimulation
[7:03] of dopamine in their brain, and they can be addicted to alcohol or heroin. They can also be addicted to the artificial stimulation of dopamine from the chemicals that are put into food, and those chemicals include salt, oil, and sugar. That's the way we talk about a diet. It not only has to be exclusively plant foods, but it also needs to be SOS-free, And that's why we try to encourage patients to eliminate the salt, oil, and sugar from their foods so that that artificial stimulation of dopamine can be muted and people can have a better chance of being successful. The problem today is you have 72% of the population are overweight or obese. And as much as people want to pretend that being overweight is just an aesthetic issue, it's not. It's a major health risk factor. For every pound of fat you have, there's about a tenth of a pound of what's called visceral fat. And visceral fat's hypermetabolic, inflammatory, producing essentially tumor. If you think about a person that's 20 pounds overweight has maybe on average two pounds of visceral fat. If you went up to a person and said, look, you have a two-pound tumor in your abdomen, they wouldn't be shocked to figure out that that two-pound tumor could be producing consequences that compromise their health.
[8:15] But that's exactly what you have when you have two pounds of visceral fat. You have this material that produces inflammation that's associated with heart disease, cancer, diabetes, autoimmune diseases. And it's interesting, those different diseases are all treated by completely separate entities. You have to go to different doctors just to, you know, be able to get them evaluated. And yet they all have something in common. The consequence of dietary excess, the excess fat, the excess visceral fat is what's making them sick. And that has to be reversed if people are going to achieve optimum health. Even recently, when we had this pandemic with COVID, the one thing that wasn't discussed was the major risk factor for dying. Besides age, it was obesity. The fatter you are, the more likely you are to die from infectious disease, including COVID-19. But that was never discussed because acknowledging that overweight is a problem is considered politically incorrect. Correct that it's you know it's blaming the victim rather than acknowledging the fat that is the fatter we are the sicker we are the more likely we are to die prematurely.
[9:17] So you just said a couple things that i want to ask you about first thing is you referred to salt oil and sugar as chemicals i've never heard them referred
[9:28] to as chemicals before salt oil and sugar are not food. They're hyper-concentrated byproducts extracted from food that are added back into food to make the food taste better. What tasting better means is that whatever you're putting in your mouth results in more dopamine stimulation in your brain. And so salt, oil, and sugar are not food. And so when you realize that, you realize these are chemicals added to food, it's not as surprising to find out that that's what the problem is, is why people are overweight and why they develop the visceral fat and why they're getting sick. So you think about sugar. There's not a lot of controversy about sugar being a refined carbohydrate, empty calories, stimulates insulin production. You get the binging, the craving. I think a lot of people acknowledge that refined carbohydrates are a source of obesity. But 86% of all the carbohydrates people eat in industrialized society are refined carbohydrates. They're not whole plant foods. They're not anything remotely like whole plant foods.
[10:27] I think people also understand oil. When you rip a cell apart and take out one component of the oil, that nine calorie per gram, highly concentrated processed food product, you know, it's going to contribute to obesity and the diseases that come as a consequence of it. I love John McDougall's comment. The fat you eat is the fat you wear, that you can do a fat biopsy of a person and tell what type of fat they've been eating because it's so efficiently stored. And so the idea that, okay, Okay, so now people are starting to recognize what people like Codwell Essence seem to have been saying for 50 years. You know, it's the fat. It's what you're putting in your mouth.
[11:04] Where we get into criticism is around acknowledging the other fine white powder that gets to people. It's not just cocaine and sugar. It's also salt. Salt is an essential nutrient. Without sodium, you die. But you don't need to add fractionated salt to the food to get enough sodium. Just like you get enough carbohydrate, you get enough essential fatty acids from the diet, you get enough sodium from the diet. American Heart Association says you need 500 milligrams of sodium a day.
[11:32] Other people will argue maybe as much as 1,000 or 1,200 milligrams of sodium a day. The RDA's limit is no more than 2,400 milligrams a day, but people on average are getting two, three, four times that amount. out. And the way that salt can make you fat, even though there's no calories in salt, is that it stimulates passive overeating. If you think about, if you take an animal or a human, give them any food, say rice, and eat till they're satiated, till they're satisfied, they'll eat a certain amount. Everything else being equal, you salt the food up, they'll eat more before they reach satiety. And people say, yeah, because it tastes better. Well, that's, as I said, that's what tasting better means is the salt stimulates more dopamine, it fools the body, and you overeat, and that's a major contributing to fat. Think about this.
[12:20] Bread, people like bread, but it has 1,500 calories a pound. That's before you turn it into a butter boat and spread coagulated cow pus all over it, increasing caloric density even more. But if you take the salt, oil, sugar, and yeast away from bread, it's called matzah, and it's punishment on Passover. People are not getting into trouble with so much eating matzah. They're getting trouble eating bread. And the bread is a carrier agent for the salt, the oil, the sugar. Think about meat. How many of your guys that you know would like to sit down and just eat, say, a plate of boiled beef? You know, gnaw on that for a while. How exciting is that? No, it's the sauces, the gravy, it's the salt.
[13:00] The beef becomes a carrier agent for the chemicals that we put on the beef that make it more desirable. And, of course, you cook it at high temperature, get a lot of acrylamides and all kinds of other stuff that are probably less desirable. So my point is, the reason we're overweight is because of the chemicals we put on our food.
[13:20] And if we want to solve the overweight problem, we have to solve this artificial stimulation of dopamine. We need to go whole plant food, SOS free diet. Wow. You know, you the way you explain that and your choice of words is phenomenal. Absolutely phenomenal. Phenomenal. So you said something, you said, if you're carrying 20 extra pounds of weight, you essentially have like the equivalent of a two pound tumor. So it's 10%. Would you say that it kind of is proportional if you're a hundred pounds overweight? Is it a 10 pound tumor? I mean, it varies from person to person. Some people have a higher or lower percentage of visceral fat. You also have some people who are not overweight, but they're over fat. So even though their weight to height ratio might be okay, too much of their body is made up of fat because they're not willing to do things like exercise.
[14:15] And so if you don't get enough sleep, if you don't exercise, if you don't eat healthy, you're not going to be healthy. And in fact, do you know that only 12% of people in the United States are metabolically healthy? And of those 12%, some of those are not overweight, but they smoke, they have other bad habits. If you you look at the basic indicators of health things like do you smoke or not are you um not overweight another would say uh 20 percent uh or less body fat for a male 25 for a female um do you have a quote healthy diet not necessarily even a diet like we're talking about but just ones that include some food and you know only 2.7 percent of the population engage in the most fundamental aspects that would determine health. So that means 97 out of 100 people are not. When we did a study recently trying to look at the effect of fasting on healthy people, it was hard to find healthy people. We finally had to start recruiting from our staff because it was so hard to find people that were actually metabolically healthy. Right. Now, when you say metabolic, metabolically healthy, are you talking about like the criteria for metabolic syndrome?
[15:30] Can you just touch upon? Yeah. Just think of it very simply as not being overweight and not being over fat. So people that are, you know, not, you know, not over 25 percent body fat if you're female, over 20 percent body fat if you're a male. So the idea is there's a lot of complex physiological processes that are going on in determining this. But simply enough, and about 10% on average of fat tends to be visceral fat. The more obese you are, the higher your ratio of visceral fat is likely to be.
[16:06] But just not being big doesn't necessarily guarantee you don't have excess fat
[16:12] or excess visceral fat. Right. So you have a new book that you've just launched into the world. Can you hold it up for everybody to see? There it is. Can fasting save your life? And then it says restore and maintain your ideal weight, avoid disease and disability as you age and discover the science behind safe, clinically approved fasting. Why did you write the book now?
[16:41] Well, the principal author of this book is our director of research, Tasha Myers, and myself, who work together, combining a scientific background that Dr. Myers has and the clinical experience that I've had in fasting 25,000 people. And what we've done is we've put a book together that gives people the information they need to know to understand fasting, its history, its use. It provides the information a physician would need to know to help a patient get through a fast without screwing it up. And it culminates that we've published almost 20 papers in the peer-reviewed literature now, clinical trials as well as case reports. And it brings all of that information and the information from others in the fasting field like Walter Longo together into a comprehensive book that really tells the truth about what we know and what we don't know about fasting and how to use fasting to help people most effectively. And it also helps people determine if fasting is good for them, if fasting can help save their life. Right, right. And you decided not to write another book with your...
[17:45] You're one of your best friends from life, and that's Doug Lyle, huh? Well, Dr. Lyle is working on a new book right now that is going to be brilliant, but he's not quite ready for it to come to market. So we didn't want to wait around for him to finish that book so we could write this one. So Dr. Myers was willing to step up and really is the best person, I think, in the world to have written this book, because she is the one with the most information in terms of reviewing the scientific literature and has the brains and the smarts in the background to really make sense of it. And what's great is she's a wonderful writer, and she takes really complex things but makes it understandable so even people like I can really fully get it. Right. Good, good.
[18:29] So, you know, fasting has gone on forever, right, whether it's been food scarcity, diversity, religion, spirituality, entertainment, medical therapy, like what you do. But tell me, like, tell the audience, what exactly is fasting? Let's talk about the basics. Yeah, the fasting we're talking about is not the, right now, there's a lot of discussion about intermittent fasting, time-restricted feeding, that type of stuff. That's all very interesting. Walter Longo and others have pioneered that work. This is actually a little different. this is long-term water-only fasting. So this is a medically supervised water-only fasting up to 40 days. So patients come to the True North Health Center, or they work at home along with their physician, and they're able to go on water only for up to 40 days. Now, you know, typically patients are fasting one, two, three weeks. It's like a bell curve. There's a relatively small number of people that need the really extreme fasting. But, you know, we tell people Moses, Moses, David, Elijah, Jesus, and our patients fast for up to 40 days. We tell them they're in good company. You know, this has been going on for a long time. It turns out that this is what's called a biological adaptation. Fasting was so important to humans that every person that couldn't fast died.
[19:50] And the reason is the human brain is our biggest burner of glucose. And our brain is ridiculously large. It's two and a half times our closest relatives like the chimps. It burns so much glucose that if you couldn't fast, which is essentially changing your brain from burning sugar to burning fat, you could only go around a week or so before you start burning your lean tissues and enter starvation and die. But because we can fast, a lean male, 70-kilogram male could fast 70 days. Now, I'm not saying you should fast 70 days. I'm saying you could fast 70 days because we convert from burning sugar to burning fat, and that allows us to use our fat reserves to carry on our existence. Human beings that wandered away from the tropics and its ready supply of regular fuel, all those humans that wandered away from the tropics that couldn't fast died.
[20:42] Because they couldn't go long enough. And we did, we went all over the planet. Because of fasting, we've been able to, you know, if spring comes away, we don't bite the dust. And that's essentially why today we use this very natural biological adaptation in a very unnatural situation. And that's where people get exposed to dietary excess. Because before we had the dietary pleasure trap, there was no obesity. In fact, the only people that used to have obesity and developed the diseases of dietary excess, the heart disease, the cancer, the diabetes, these were people called kings because it was the wealthy elite kings that could get access to the animal foods and the processed foods. The average person couldn't afford to get access to unlimited quantities of those foods. And as a consequence, we've seen an epidemic of diseases that used to be very rare, heart disease, diabetes, autoimmune diseases. These diseases that are epidemic now used to be a relatively rare phenomenon. Well.
[21:41] So you've been doing this water-only fasting since 1984 at True North. What are the origins of water-only fasting in the United States? Do you know where it began? Well, you know, the person that the most modern person that kind of brought it to the forefront was Herbert Shelton. And so Herbert Shelton, you know, introduced fasting and the concepts of natural hygiene to the population. Before him, the early natural hygienists, Walter Page, Troll, Jennings, these guys were doctors from the mid-1800s that discovered that the pill, potion, powders of the day didn't work as well as essentially doing nothing, which was diet and fasting. And, of course, before that, the very basis of the naturopathic medicine movement, you know, back in England and, you know, was around these concepts of the body healing itself, first level therapeutic order intervention, the body needed the requirements of health and that health was the natural consequence of these. Today, you know, allopathic medicine is, you know, kind of taken over. And so it's just now that there's a resurgence of some of these older ways of thinking. And fasting happens to be perhaps one of the most, the oldest and most established interventions, but it's kind of just now becoming more popular. Hmm.
[22:59] So you mentioned it's a kind of a bell curve, how long people typically do the water only fasting at True North from a week or two weeks to 40 days and maybe some people longer.
[23:12] When you say water only, is it a special type of water that we're drinking here? It's just pure water. We use fractionally steamed distilled water just because that's the most efficient way of getting pure water. But you could reuse reverse osmosis. you could get if you could get rainwater in an environment that wasn't polluted that would be distilled water so we just want water h2o we don't want hydrogen and halocarbons we don't want chlorine we don't because fasting patients become really sensitive and they won't tolerate municipal water they just won't take it they don't like it got it what is the difference and you talk about this in the book but i want the audience to understand and i'd like to understand it at a deeper level. What's the difference between fasting and starving?
[23:58] Sure. So fasting by definition is the period of time when you have labile reserves and the body's able to conserve those reserves and recycle them. Once you deplete your reserves, and as I said, in a typical 70 kilogram male, that would be around 70 days, you enter a process called starvation. And that's where your body breaks down lean tissue, vital proteins, and you would, you know, relatively quickly die. So we don't do starvation at the TrueNorth Health Center because it would really screw up our long-term outcome data. So we stick to the fasting. We monitor people carefully to make sure that we're in the fasting state, not entering into starvation. And we know that you can do that safely. Number one, we've done it for 40 years. We've had 25,000 people, 25,000 people that walk in, 25,000 people that walk out. So we work real hard on preserving our safety deck. We've also published a fasting safety study.
[24:49] And that in all of our studies, people can read the whole study if they go to our website at truenorthhealth.com or they read our book, Can Fasting Save Your Life? They can see the results of this carefully done study looking at adverse events in fasting. We know, you know, what the percentages are, what the conditions to look for. And we've shown that it is a safe process if it's done according to protocol. But that means you have to have a history to make sure that a person is a good candidate for fasting, a physical exam and lab monitoring to get them through the fast and appropriate refeeding after the fast.
[25:22] Whether people are fasting at the True North Health Center under supervision or they're doing it at home in conjunction with their local doctor, they still have to follow the same protocol, history, exam, lab and monitoring in order to ensure that fasting is done effectively. Effectively the mistake that people make is they're sometimes too active in fasting they'll ride in cars which is not safe or they'll be going to work or trying to do something like that not advisable you want to rest during fasting or they re they um re-element too quickly they eat too quickly the wrong foods after fasting and that can be a very serious problem particularly a very long fast you can get what's called refeeding syndrome you get post the edema you can get very sick or even potentially die from inappropriate refeeding after a prolonged long period of fasting. We saw evidence of refeeding syndrome after the world war, where they liberated the camps where people had been starved and they refed them too quickly, got them really sick. So we learned you have to come off a fast appropriately. It takes half the length of a fast to refeed properly. Wow. So a fast actually requires 20 days of controlled refeeding to ensure that it'd be done effectively. Well, you mentioned in the book that.
[26:28] Um somebody that many of us know that suffered from that was david blaine who i think he went what 40 i think he talked 40 something days without four days yeah and then suffered from that refeeding yeah so we you know we've done 25 000 fasts over 40 years we've had no cases of refeeding syndrome during that time wow so so far it seems to be working but we have a very strict protocol that we follow you know we start with fresh fruits and vegetable juices we go to raw off fruit and vegetables, then steamed and starchy vegetables, then more concentrated foods. And it's done according to a pattern. So again, it takes about half the length of the fast to recover. So if you have a 10-day fast, you've got about five days of controlled refeeding. And it's amongst the most important parts of fasting in order to not just get a good fast, which is pretty straightforward, but also have good refeeding, which can be a little trickier for people.
[27:20] Do you have availability at the True North Health Center right now? If I wanted to come... We've expanded our capacities at True North. We now have 75 patient beds. We do book ahead. You know, you've got to plan a couple of months ahead, but we do have the ability to process about 1500 patients a year now. So that's been really good. And we're also doing a lot of remote fasting supervision in conjunction with doctors that we know that are able to help people do this safely and effectively at home. Not everybody is a candidate for home fasting. There are people with conditions, people on medications that really need to be done in a medically supervised setting. But there are other people that are able to do this and navigate this successfully. And we have doctors that are experienced in helping them do that. And the thing about this book is it gives you the information and it gives your doctor the information, what you need in order to be able to get through fasting safely and effectively. Yeah. When you say.
[28:12] That there's, you know, the difference between fasting and starvation is you basically deplete all your reserves.
[28:19] Like obviously there's testing that is done that, that lets you know when you've kind of crossed over that threshold. But can you give me an example? Like what, what are some of the telltale signs that I've gone into, gone into a state of starvation? Well, you know, there's, there's a number of blood tests that are monitored and we actually review these in detail in the the book, but things like sodium, potassium, serum protein levels, there are clearly defined standards that you can follow to determine that the person is still within the nutritional norms of fasting. Not necessarily the standard norms you see on your blood panels, but the norms associated with fasting. And this part, like for example, we don't fast people if their sodium levels are below 130 or potassium is below 3.0, for example, we would move into a refeeding process. And so even though you might not necessarily feel that that was a problem, we know from experience that if we use those standards, we don't run into problems with people getting into pollution issues. So even though sodium, normal sodium might be 135, we know from experience, as long as we're over 130 in patients that are appropriately selected for fasting, those people are going to be able to have, you know, a successful event. And so that's the kind of information that we've included in the book. So the doctors have, you know, that haven't had the experience of doing this, can at least have the information necessary to make sure there aren't going to be problems in their lives. Do you find that many physicians out there have an open mind?
[29:46] Well, some physicians do. In fact, I'll be speaking in September to the lifestyle medicine group of doctors that tend to be much more open to the idea that health can result from healthful living and that diet and lifestyle play a role. Most physicians, quite quite frankly, never get the benefit of seeing anybody get well. They'll tell patients, for example, with high blood pressure, oh, you'll be on these drugs the rest of your life because if you do what I tell you to do, I promise you, you'll never get well. You'll be sick forever. And that's it. Same thing with diabetes, autoimmune diseases, they're on drugs forever. The thing that's nice about this approach is for highly motivated patients, if they're willing to to do the dangerous and radical things like eat well, exercise, and go to bed on time and maybe fast, they can actually get well. Now, you're not curing anything. You're not curing obesity. You can lose the weight and keep it off, but if you go back to eating greasy, fatty, slimy, dead, decaying, flesh-processed foods, you're going to get fat again. You're not curing high blood pressure. You have normal blood pressure. It may stay that way the rest of your life, but if you go back to the salty processed foods, it's coming back. You're managing these conditions. You're not curing these conditions. And so the idea is that you're managing it with diet and lifestyle change rather than treating it with drugs. Okay. You, can you say that one more time? The, the dead declaim, you will put that, what was it? What was that phrase again?
[31:12] You said it. Well, you know, animal products really are, if you think about it, the moment you kill the animal, its flesh begins to decay, you know, and if you don't use preservative techniques like salt, salt the meat up to try to keep the bacteria down or refrigeration, you can tell from smell and everything else that it is, in fact, dead, decaying flesh. You know, and we talk about things like dairy products. You know, dairy products are probably one of the biggest challenges to human health that people, in my opinion, that people eat. In fact, it's interesting. I wrote an article once. It was called Nobody Needs Milk. And I think they released it on T. Colin Campbell's site. I think it has somewhere around 4 million downloads. loads it really struck somebody told me it was absolute guarantee that we'll never get funding from the american dairy council but i i when i did a movie i think it was uh what the health i i talked about milk and that you know there's 750 000 pus cells legally allowed up to 750 000 pus cells per cc in milk now obviously not all milk has 750 000 puzzles i think the average only has about half that, about 320,000 pus cells. So drinking milk, in my opinion, is like finding a cow with a festering wound and sticking a straw in it and sucking. So I made that comment in one of these movies. I'm walking on the street. This happened to be in Las Vegas, I think. And somebody came up to me and said, hey, I recognize you. You're Dr. Cow Pus.
[32:40] That's what they remembered.
[32:44] But it is. When you really think about it, it's pretty disgusting. So, you know. Yeah. Well, you kind of call it like it is, don't you? Hey. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
[32:57] So it seems like this very neglected lifestyle intervention has been getting more and more traction than ever before. Why do you think that is? Do you think it's in large part because of your work? and then no no i think it's because 72 of the population are overweight or obese and people are sick and dying and suffering and they're tired of it and they're looking in desperation for answers.
[33:24] And I think that, you know, the work that Walter Longo, for example, did publishing a journal of metabolism, 2015, huge effect, this whole intermittent fasting, introducing the concept of, you know, limited fasting. And we've been practicing this approach and encouraging people to do time restricted eating since the very beginning, 40 years ago, we said, don't eat three to four hours before you go to bed and then delay your breakfast so you can do some exercise in the morning. And that gives you a 12 to 16 hour fast every day by limiting your feeding window to eight to 12 hours. It'll reduce the tendency to overeat. It means you'll have better quality sleep because you're not having to do digestion late at night. And a lot of the eating people were doing at night wasn't because they were hungry. It was because they were tired or bored or angry, and they were looking to have the food stimulate dopamine production in their brain. They were using it like a drug. Once you stop all that nonsense, you start to lose weight. If you're a male, we expect people adopting a whole plant food diet to lose around three pounds a week. A female, male about 50% less at around two pounds a week. Because women are full of estrogen, they're essentially energy conserving fat storage devices, biologically speaking. So it makes it harder for them to lose weight because they're designed to have higher levels of estrogen. If you inject men with estrogen, they get fat, they grow breasts and get hips. If you inject women with enough testosterone, they would lose their fat. The problem is they get hair and get cancer and die. So we don't recommend that as a therapy. But the point is the differences between males and females is largely biological.
[34:53] So if you happen to be a woman, what does that mean? It means you have to work twice as hard to get half the results. So get used to it. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Well, the term intermittent fasting is.
[35:07] It seems like it's everywhere these days. And I would imagine that that has been a kind of a positive thing. And you mentioned kind of shrinking the window that you eat. Do you think that that is a nice way for people to set boundaries, as you said, so that they're not overeating and snacking here, there, and everywhere? I do think it can help some people set boundaries. I also think that, you know, the thought is that that 16-hour fast is enough to stimulate some of the biochemical changes associated with fasting. And that day after day, day after week after month, that may have a cumulative benefit. When you do a long-term fast, of course, you get a geometric impact on those mechanisms, but it's not just while you're fasting. Those enzyme systems are persistent after fastings, whether it's the detoxifying enzyme systems or the macronutrient mobilizing enzyme systems. Same thing with athletics. When you exercise, you get better at mobilizing glycogen stores because you induce enzyme systems that are forced by the stress of exercise. It's interesting that the changes that occur with exercise are often the same changes that occur with fasting, biochemically speaking. And you might say, why would that be? With exercise, you're all vigorous. Fasting, you're resting. But it turns out that both exercise and fasting have one very important thing in common.
[36:17] They both undo the consequence of dietary excess. And dietary excess results in fat, fat results in visceral fat. Visceral fat produces inflammation that causes heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and autoimmune disease.
[36:31] You mentioned the biochemical changes that happen when you fast.
[36:38] Can you talk about some more things that happen to the body when you're fasting that are beneficial and why we want to seek that? One of the biggest things is probably just this detoxification concept. Human beings, if you do a fat biopsy of most any human, you're You're going to find hundreds of different chemicals there, PCB, dioxin, pesticide, heavy metals, all kinds of garbage that comes from, for example, breathing polluted air, drinking polluted water. But taking drugs. But I think the 90% of the average person's toxic load came from one behavior, and that was eating animal foods. Meat, fish, fowl, eggs, and dairy products biologically concentrate the pollution, not just from the environment, but from the feed, the drugs they get, the antibiotics, the pesticides, et cetera. And it builds up in the animal tissue day after day, after week, after month. So if you decide to kill that animal and eat it, you get its entire lifetime accumulation of toxins. In some areas, you can see two to a thousand times the concentration of certain toxins in a calorie of, say, animal food compared to plant foods. So just by going on a whole plant food diet, you eliminate one major source of this toxicity. Well, in fasting, the body rapidly mobilizes and eliminates these accumulated.
[37:58] Intermediary products, metabolism, and toxic products. In fact, it's so rapid that there are people out there saying don't ever fast because you'll detoxify too quickly unless you buy their proprietary products. So if you pay for the pills and potions, then apparently it's okay. The reality is that fasting is a biological adaptation. The body is well equipped to be able to do this. And it does a good job of mobilizing, eliminating materials. And there's good studies looking at fat biopsies before and after fasting showing total toxic load drops, et cetera. There's been studies on PCB, et cetera. So we know that detoxifying does occur. You can see it clinically. You know, the mouth coats up and tastes like something crawls in there and dies. You get skin rashes, detox, elimination, all kinds of what I call entertaining symptoms during fasting. The interesting thing is the people that prepare well for fasting, those that are, say, vegetarians and that are not on drugs, they usually have a pretty easy time. They have, they're what I call boring fasters. But the people that are coming up off greasy, fatty, slimy processed foods. They're taking lots of drugs. Those people can have a lot of very interesting symptoms as the body unwinds this and goes through what we call healing crisis, where chronic problems become acute and the body heals itself.
[39:11] Wow. Man, just wind you up and let you go. I absolutely love it. Before we went off on that little side tangent there, you were talking about how you've never had a death at True North Health Center and how safe it is. But in reading your book, what seemed absolutely incredulous to me is that the safety of medically supervised prolonged water-only fast was not assessed in a peer-reviewed publication until 2018.
[39:43] Yeah, that was our study that we did. And, you know, the reason we did that actually was interesting because we had a resident doctor there who was a medical doctor from the Mayo Clinic. His name was Stephan Esser. And Dr. Esser said that we needed to do a safety study because otherwise he wouldn't be able to, as a physician, apply these principles when he got into practice. And so we at that time, we didn't have the sophisticated computer systems that we have today. And there certainly wasn't any AI available. So we manually went through and charted every symptom in every patient, applied the common terminology for adverse events in the Cancer Society to every patient for five years. And we collected those hundreds and hundreds of patients that fasted, analyzed all of their adverse events, and then published the first long-term clinical trial of fasting and safety assessment. And it was good that we did that because later when Walter Longo wrote his book on fasting, he said, don't ever do long-term water only fasting because it's too dangerous.
[40:56] Unless you do it at the true North health center, because he was aware of our published safety study. And since I evaluate other researchers intelligence based on how much they agree with me, I consider Walter Longo a genius.
[41:13] I love it. Yeah. So yeah, The forward to your book is by T. Colin Campbell, who everybody listening to this podcast better know about. And you should have read the China study and seen the forks over knives.
[41:31] He actually came there twice. Correct.
[41:35] After his exposure to dioxin. Is that correct? Well, he's been to the True North Health Center many times. But originally what brought him to us and he's publicly talked about this so we can discuss it. And he talks about it in the introduction of our book, Confessing Saved Your Life, is he was the first scientist to isolate dioxin, the active agent in Agent Orange. And so he got a very, very high exposure level because at that time they didn't even know what they were dealing with. And he eventually developed problems, neurological problems associated with that, dystonia and whatnot. And he met with me at a conference where he was speaking. Speaking and we talked about you know using fasting and he was familiar with fasting from the medical literature and the scientific literature and so he thought that that would be worthwhile giving a try and he did and to make a long story short he did very well and now here he is 90 years old yeah uh and uh you know continuing to write books and really make major contributions he's he and your dad actually are my heroes and they're both you know these are of the guys that have been living it and doing it, they're both in their 90s and really influencing large numbers of people. He was also...
[42:49] Able to help us with our first published paper. He was the co-author of our first paper, Medically Supervised Water-Only Fasting and the Treatment of Hypertension that we did like 20 years ago, and was largely responsible for, you know, how we were able to get that first paper published because of his tremendous help. So he came in, he fasted, he did well, and he's continued to do well since then. He's used fasting as we've recommended, and, you know, Hopefully, we'll get many more good years of productive activity out of both Dr. Campbell and Dr. Esselstyn. Hear, hear. Absolutely.
[43:28] Do you know what non-alcoholic fatty liver disease is? You ever heard of it? I do. In fact, we studied it, and we've shown that the fatty liver index is improved with fasting. In fact, fasting is something that has now been well-demonstrated to positively affect this condition. Well, and it's something that is, I mean, almost a pandemic, it seems these days in this country. Why do you think that is, Alan? Because people are eating diets that are based on animal foods and sugar, oil, and salt, and they're becoming fat and getting overweight. They're taking drugs and alcohol and substances that stress the liver. And there's also diseases, you know, viral diseases that, you know, are impacting people's liver function, including, you know, hepatitis, hepatitis A, B, C, et cetera. Yeah. You have a whole chapter in your book about how fasting can reverse obesity. And we've talked about how, what, 72 or 75% of Americans are overweight or obese.
[44:30] Have you found that fasting can help tackle the obesity crisis? It is, but it only works in people willing to make the diet and lifestyle changes. I want you to think about this. If you're an alcoholic and you want to quit alcohol for a year, the chance of you doing that, even if you, say, go to an inpatient program for 30 days, 90 visits to 90 days to a 12-step program and you have family support, you know, is in the about 12% range that most people will fail. If you're a heroin addict, even if you have court-ordered rehab facility and whatnot, the chance of you not using heroin in a year is around 10%, about 90% failure rate. But if a person, say, is overweight and wants to lose weight, even if it's just, say, 5% of their body weight, the chance that they'll lose that 5% and keep it off for a year, that chance of that is about 5%, 95% failure rate. And for a person that's obese, if their BMI is 40 or over, the chance of them ever losing that weight and keeping it off for a male is about 1 in 1,200 or so. And for a woman, it's around 1%.
[45:37] One in 660 or so, a 99.9% failure rate. And the reason is with drug addicts, we tell them the truth. They have to stop taking the drugs. But with overweight people, we lie to them and we tell them, well, just change the color of your meat from red to white or just, you know, eat less or put your food on a smaller plate and then you won't be obese anymore. We don't tell them the truth. They have to adopt a whole plant food, SOS free diet, and then they can overcome the dietary pleasure trap, lose the weight and keep it off. But we now have long-term data, not just short-term data, showing that people that are motivated can not only normalize, say, blood pressure and weight during fasting, but even a year later, they can still be maintaining their normal blood pressure without drugs and normal weight. We published a study with our colleagues at the Mayo Clinic, in fact, where 28 of the 29 people with hypertension were able to normalize blood pressure without medications. that six-week follow-up, all but one had been able to maintain it. And a year later, 75% of the follow-up were able to maintain their weight loss and their drug-free normal blood pressure state. So clearly, if you're highly motivated, it is possible to adopt and make these changes. But it's really difficult. And most people are not willing to do what it takes to get well, which includes diet, sleep, and exercise.
[47:04] So let me ask you this. So do you find that, let's say doing a one to two to three to four week water only fast, not only are you going to have all these changes, these biochemical changes that are going on at a metabolic level, but also it resets. When you reintroduce the juicing, the fruits, the vegetables in an SOS manner, do you basically reset the palate so you now have a fighting chance? And then going forward, you've just got to kind of...
[47:43] Basically resist all of the, you know, hyper-palatized processed foods and the animal products that are out there. Is that fair to say? Well, we've actually published a study on taste adaptation. We actually did a clinical trial where we showed that the response of salt and sugar does in fact change during fasting and the hedonic response to food changes and it's persistent.
[48:03] And so fasting is like, you know, you're using a computer and sometimes it gets corrupted, your hard drive gets corrupted and it doesn't work and you shut the dang thing off and you turn it on and you don't know why, but now it's working again because you've kind of rebooted the hard drive. Well, that's essentially what fasting is doing to humans. It reboots the palate. It has a profound effect on the gut microbiome, huge changes. You know, people that, for example, meat eaters have different bacteria living in their guts than plant eaters do. Plant eaters have a thousand different strains of organisms working together and they're producing, you know, these are living creatures. We're talking five pounds of organisms living in the gut and they're are breathing, eating, and defecating inside you. And what they poo in you depends on what you feed them. If you feed them meat, fish, fowl, eggs, and dairy products, you're going to have high levels of things like TMA, which is trimethylaminoxidase, which is associated with heart disease and cancer and all kinds of problems. If you're on a plant-based diet, you're going to get fertilizer. You're getting vitamin K and all kinds of other stuff. So you've got to decide what kind of organisms you want and what you want them pooing in you. And you do that by deciding what you shove in your mouth. And that's why a whole plant food SOS free diet. And then if you are out of balance, one way to rebalance the system is with fasting. And if you do a fast, that organ, we know there's huge changes in that flora. And then with the proper prebiotic exposure, that is the right vegetable cellulose based foods, you can grow back that thousand strain of healthy organisms associated with not only long life, but also with, you know, plant based eaters.
[49:33] That's interesting. Even though you're not eating for, let's say, up to 40 days, your microbiome, is it actually getting healthier? There's a huge die-off. There's a big drop-off in population. Then the diet after fasting creates the environment for the normal organisms to be able to regrow and repopulate. That's why it's so important after fasting you don't go back to eating the things that made you fat and sick you instead follow the appropriate fasting refeeding protocol so that you can grow back the normal organisms and get a really good result and make us look good and are you a believer in, prebiotics or probiotics or you think prebiotic is your diet that is the best prebiotic that's the vegetable salience that comes from eating whole plant foods you don't need to buy pills and potions. You just need to eat the whole plant food diet.
[50:30] Probiotics are designed usually for people that have imbalances and that maybe they don't have the ability to fast, but they're trying to re-manipulate the population or they've had to take antibiotics and they're trying to re-manipulate the population. There is some evidence that it might have some clinical utility, but it's nothing compared to rebooting the whole system with fasting and then a healthy diet in my experience. Right, right. Tell me this. You mentioned that like on a whole food plant-based SOS-free diet. The average weight loss for men, I believe you said, was three pounds a week. For women, it's about half that, primarily because of the estrogen. Two pounds a week. Two pounds. Okay. Two pounds a week.
[51:08] What's the typical weight loss that you see with somebody that is fasting per day or per week? Average weight loss in fasting is a pound a day. Now, there'll be a little more in the beginning because you're diuresing and getting rid of fluids, but it's about a pound a day. So a three-week fast, people lose about 21 pounds. Now, here's the thing. When you lose weight in fasting, some of it's water, some of it's protein, some of it's fiber, some of it's glycogen, some of it's fat. And some of that fat is visceral fat. And we did a study. It's in our book. We got a DEXA scanner. We tracked people. I think there were 68 people in this study over two years. And we showed what happens to body composition in these people when they fast. So let's say, for example, a person fasts for two weeks and they lose 10% of their total body weight. They didn't lose 10% of their fat. They'll lose about 20% of their total fat. And what's interesting, they'll lose 40% of their visceral fat.
[51:59] And then when they regain weight after fasting, let's say they lost 20 pounds during the fast and they regain 10 as they come off the fast, they're gaining water because they rehydrate. They're putting two pounds of glycogen back in their muscles. They're gaining lean tissue and they're gaining obviously some fiber in their gut, but they're not gaining fat. The fat continues to come off even as the weight goes back up. And so at the end of six weeks, the percentage of their body from lean tissue is actually higher than it was in baseline, the fat loss continues and the visceral fat loss continues. And so even though, yes, you're rehydrating, but you're basically reproportioning your body. And the old idea was, well, you lose weight, but then you gain it back. There's no difference. Well, there's a huge difference. The problem is it's dependent on eating healthfully after fasting. It's eating a plant-based diet, doing all the right things there. If you go back to eating at the fast food, obviously you're going to be able to get fat again. There's nothing that keeps you from regaining the thing. If you'd go back to doing the things that caused it.
[53:03] You, you, you mentioned earlier about, I think it was a study that you guys did where it was 29 people and 28 of the 29 were able to reverse their, I think it was hypertension. You have a whole chapter on how fasting can reverse hypertension. Hypertension, and... There's nothing that works better than fasting to treat high blood pressure in humans. And if you look at our data, it's really clear. Both the studies we published with T. Colin Campbell, and then the more recent studies we published with our colleagues from the Mayo Clinic, this is the most effective way of treating essential hypertension that's been identified. And it seems like, I mean, hypertension seems to be one of the leading causes of death. death, and so you've actually, I mean, this is one of the best ways to treat it.
[53:55] Typically, do you find, is there a magic number of days that it takes to kind of get that systolic and diastolic where we want it? Yeah, it's however many days it takes in order to normalize your blood pressure. So it ranges from five to 40. And in some cases, it might actually take more than one fast. But most people, we're talking two to three weeks of fasting for, you know, stage two or stage three hypertension and five to 10 days for stage one hypertension. So, you know, there's some general rules of thumb. When we review a person's medical history, we can usually give them a pretty good idea based on their condition, their lab, their reserves, how long they're going to need to fast to get the desirable effect. With blood pressure, we treated so many thousands of people. We have a pretty good idea of what a given individual is going to need in order to be able to recover. And one of the services we offer is that if people go to our website at truenorthhealth.com and complete the registration forms, we offer a free phone conversation to discuss, are they a good candidate? What should they expect? And try to refer them to the most appropriate place, whether it's us at True North, one of the other facilities that does fasting supervision, use our telemedicine doctors to help them with remote fasting in conjunction with their local family physician. So we try to steer them in the best direction. And we can do that without that costing them anything. How long have you had telemedicine docs affiliated with you guys? We've been doing that now for a few years, since the pandemic.
[55:23] Because during the pandemic, 15% of our patients come from foreign countries. They couldn't get into the country oftentimes. times. And so we started working with remote doctors, and then we found it was really a convenience for people. And not everybody can have the ability to come to the True North Health Center. Or maybe they needed to do something right away, and we didn't have an opening for them right away. So we started doing this, and now we have some doctors that are very experienced at providing remote support. But keep in mind, not everybody is a good candidate for remote support. But during our screening call, we'll let them know if they're a good candidate, and if they are, given the resources that they need. And now with a new book, which is great, is we have those resources well codified and for both the patient and for their doctors to really understand what's going to need to happen.
[56:06] It seems to me, and tell me if you agree, that there's going to be a lot of breakthroughs in medicine here.
[56:17] I don't know if you want to call them hacks, but it seems like with the advent of artificial intelligence and what's going on with maybe different stem cells and blah, blah, blah. Is there anything that has caught your attention because you seem to have your finger on the pulse of this stuff that you're like, wow, this is something that I never expected and it's just kind of.
[56:39] It's come about in the last maybe five, 10 years or no. Well, yeah, I think the big thing that's become really apparent that I just didn't understand how powerful it was, was the use of fasting in a whole plant food SOS free diet. The fact is we're treating a wide variety of the leading contributing causes to death and disability. And the results are phenomenal. We published a paper in the British Medical Journal, for example, on the successful treatment of stage three follicular lymphoma. You know, we had a patient who'd had two year progressive history of cancer. Um her her oncologist had told her you know diet didn't matter her doctor told her that uh fasting was criminal quackery uh comes in and fast for 21 days resolves her tumor we get a one-year follow-up uh we published a case report and they publish it in the british medical journal showing the results we do a three-year follow-up so show that she's maintained a cancer-free state for three years. Now we have a 10-year follow-up on that patient. And now since then, we've been treating a lot of lymphoma patients and we've got a number of them. We've got an actual just published or it's just been accepted for publication, a case series.
[57:47] So that's going to be coming out. We're hoping that'll allow us to justify a clinical trial where we can do an RCT, a random assignment to condition in treating lymphoma. You either keep people sick and doing the conventional thing or get them well and let's compare and see who does well over the long run. So just the fact that those articles will get published in those big impact journals, that's a huge change.
[58:09] You know, that would never have even been considered in the earlier days. I mean, they wouldn't have even opened the letter if they see where it's coming from. Now, you know, we're publishing papers in Nutrients and Curious and other major impact journals. So I think that there is a change that's happening, and it's in part because there is more credible scientific information being published. And and also because people like codwell esselstein and t colin campbell have been writing books and just beating people over the head um with the with their uh the facts and so it's starting to slowly sink in a little bit the fact you have a whole group of medical doctors lifestyle medicine people advocating diet and lifestyle you know it's an important part of medicine that wasn't happening you know when i started practicing 1984 what we do was considered criminal quackery Right. I mean, we had to keep a really low profile even today. You know, I never spoke locally. It was always out of state, out of area. We didn't ever talk too much about the specific results that we're seeing. Now we're going on YouTube and having millions of viewers and publishing books. And, you know, that we couldn't have done and still stayed in practice, you know, back in 1984. So things are changing, but they're a lot slower to change than what you kind of expect.
[59:29] Yeah. You have a whole chapter on the therapeutic potential of fasting, and you mentioned one of these words already, autophagy and apoptosis. How do you pronounce that? Apoptosis. Yeah. Can you let the audience know specifically what those two things are and how they work together? Essentially, you're just talking about how the body eats up cancer cells and eats up old, decaying cells and recycles material. And this was relatively recent recognition. In fact, the Nobel Prize for Medicine 2016, Yoshinori Ishumi was his work on autophagy and how that body is like basically trying to eat up the cancer cells before they grow into tumors and get carried away. And if you're eating them up faster than they're forming, you stay healthy. And if they form faster than you can deal with them, you grow tumors and get sick. Now, granted, that's a gross oversimplification. But the important thing to know is that these processes of self-healing are accentuated during fasting. And so that may be why we're seeing things heal in the fasting state that we're not seeing healing maybe in the feeding state or seeing them heal a lot faster. And so fasting can make things heal faster. So that's one of the reasons we use it. Yeah. No, it seems to make a lot of sense. Do you recommend fasting for healthy people? It turns out we just did a study where we found after tremendous struggle.
[1:00:59] Metabolically healthy people, as I said, many of them were on our staff and we fasted them and looked at their cardiometabolic risk factors and other biochemical markers. And it turns out as helpful as fasting is in sick people, it's actually maybe even more healthy. What? Healthy people. That the magnitude of the effect on healthy people may even be greater than on sick people proportionally. And so we're going to do a large study called the Navigator Study, where we enroll 2,000 to 3,000 people for the rest of their life. And we really take a look at people that are willing to eat a plant-based diet and fast for a week, a year, to see can we, in fact, avoid debility that occurs later in life? Can we slow down the aging process? We believe that you can. We know it works in rats, because you periodically fast rats, you double their lifespan.
[1:01:46] And we believe that it's going to be true in people as well. So I I don't think it's just the sick people that will benefit from fasting. The difference is healthy people generally don't have to fast that long. It's a shorter fast. And two, they have a much easier time of it. You know, it's not as nearly as complicated as it is in dealing with people getting off their medications and dealing with all their problems. I just want to point out, though, that it's actually a very small percentage of the population right now that are healthy.
[1:02:13] Even people that think they're healthy, when you actually evaluate them, they have risk factors that are showing up in their blood parameters, et cetera, that maybe they're not yet aware of. Because the only people we see that really are healthy tend to be the people that do the diet, the sleep and the exercise consistently.
[1:02:32] Give me an example. If you like, let's say that I think that I'm healthy and I do think that I'm healthy. Healthy but like what might be something that when you test me might bite me in the ass and say you know what you rip you think you're healthy but guess what this well you're clearly metabolically healthy you're not overweight you have you know high a low percent body fat high percent muscle mass but we also want to check blood pressure for example some people think they're healthy but their blood pressure is 120 over over 80 and they think that's healthy it's actually not healthy you have a 20 increased all-cause mortality compared to if your blood pressure was at a lower level and it would be for example the people in our study the average blood pressure was 110 systolic at start but on follow-up it was down around 104 106 wow so you might think well is that does it matter well yeah that that may be a large proportional change actually than maybe even a person that starts up with a higher level of pressure some people come in and they have you know normal cholesterol levels but on six-week follow-up they were significantly lower, which is also significantly healthier. Their CRP might have been within the normal range, but it was actually proportionally lower on follow-up. So when you look at the book or you look at our studies, you can see, you know, this is all laid out very carefully.
[1:03:47] There is significant benefit that's showing up not just during fasting, but on follow up on those people that utilize fasting. And so, again, we have to do a long term study.
[1:03:57] This was a small end, but I believe that what we're going to find is the people that get the most overall benefit are people just like you that are trying to not only be healthy now, but stay healthy so that the last 20 years of your life are going to be the most engaging, most rewarding. warding. And I think, you know, your dad is an example of somebody who's 90, what, 91 years old now? 91 this year. But he may be, you know, he's still highly productive, you know, making significant contributions. And whereas many people by that age that, you know, they're not able to even really function, they've become dependent on others. They're finding themselves unable to walk or move long in nursing home beds, waiting for people to change their diapers. And here, people that have adopted these plant-based diets, maybe even not as early as we've got exposure are still able to maintain good high quality life right up until hopefully they have a good life and then a good death where they go to bed and don't wake up rather than having to be you know debilitated for years or decades and that's what we're seeing in people in fact you know i mentioned my mom when she was 92 years old said that all of her friends had died she had all of them all 50 of her lifelong friends were dead and she said it got harder and harder to make new friends because even people 10 years younger than her were too old and sick to engage in doing the things she wanted to do. And she said, Alan, you have to warn your patients.
[1:05:19] If they're going to eat this kind of a diet, make younger friends.
[1:05:25] So your mother followed the whole food plant-based SOS diet. Is that correct? Well, later in her life, when I got into school, she adopted the diet, as her friends say, they went on her son's crazy diet. And she passed away a little bit over 93 years old, but she was a good example of a person that, you know, recovered her health, maintained a higher degree of health, and then went very quickly. In fact, I remember she called me. She actually called me the night before she passed away. It was a Sunday night. I remember she said, Alan, I want you to put me on the hospice. And I said, why do you want to go on the hospice? Are you having any problems? She goes, no, but if you're on the hospice, they don't take I'm going to take you to the hospital and I'm not going to any damn hospital. And the next morning she was dead. Wow. Wow. So she must've had some kind of premonition, even though she wasn't having any particular complaint, but she passed away very quickly, which is the way she wanted. She wanted to live and when she was done, she was going to be gone. And that worked well for her. Yeah.
[1:06:26] So I think I told you this, maybe the last conversation we had over a year, almost two years ago, I have never fasted. Right. I think my longest fast is maybe when I've been on an airplane and there's nothing to eat and I haven't eaten for, you know, till 2 2 p.m after not eating during the night and no breakfast so if i wanted to start a fast you you mentioned i think earlier you said you know one week a year is there any benefit to doing uh one day a week or do you what's your recommendation for i think you should be fasting every day for 12 to 16 hours you might have to limit it to 12 hours only because we've you've got to get enough calories into you to meet your exercise needs and requirements and your work requirements. And so you may not be able to go, you may not be able to get enough calories from low density, high nutrition food in eight hours, much like kids, you know, with kids, you have a little bit larger feeding window because you've got to get enough in there. Yeah. But I think you should be fasting, certainly not eating three hours before you go to bed every day.
[1:07:33] Yeah. And then I think what we should do the next time we talk, I think it should be you coming to true North health center and doing a short water fast and talking about what your experience is of it. And I think it's people like yourselves that are very healthy, but get additional benefits. And we'll, we'll let the proof be in the pudding by having you do a short, say three to five day fast, whatever's appropriate and see what your experience is going to be. Having that kind of intense epiphany experience and all, and I'm willing to have you do it and, and broadcast it good or bad. And, you know, you tell the truth about what your experience is. Well, I'd love to do that, But tell me, for people that don't want to fly to True North, is this something – remind me, how should they do it at home? Should it be medically supervised? Yeah. First, get educated. Read the book. Yep. Okay? If you're a good candidate and we can provide a free phone conversation to clear them, they'll talk to their local doctor who will get the basic blood testing done. They can work with one of our coaches or with their doctor. They go through the test. They have to rest.
[1:08:38] So they're going to lead in properly. They eat whole fruits, vegetables, steamed vegetables only for a couple days. They're stable off all their medication, including caffeine, alcohol, animal food, nicotine, et cetera. They rest and fast. They recover properly, half the length of fast refeeding according to the protocol in the book. And they work with their doctor to make sure that any untoward events are properly dealt with. If they can arrange to be able to rest and do things properly, they're appropriately screened, they're going to have a safe and effective experience. They're going to lose weight. They're going to clear their palate. It can be a really life-changing event.
[1:09:13] So you said two things that I think are going to disqualify probably 90% of the population, and that was caffeine and alcohol. Well, you've got to be free of drugs of addiction before you fast. You don't fast on caffeine, alcohol, or prescription medications. Even drugs that might be safe in the feeding state, like you might be able to take ibuprofen. But in the fasting state, that can become dangerous in terms of kidney, liver function, as well as gastric health. So drugs and fasting don't go together. And you definitely need to work with
[1:09:40] your doctor on withdrawal of any medication. Some medications you can't just arbitrarily stop, anticoagulant therapies, prednisone, et cetera, steroid medications. The rapid withdrawal of those medications can result in serious consequences. So you have to work with your doctor to get stable off those medications before you would consider fasting. Sometimes you can do modified fasting or simpler methods. And oftentimes, frankly, that's what we do with people that are remote is we'll We'll have them on a 600 calories of vegetable broth and juices and things that are a little gentle. It's slower, but it's also safer. So there's modified versions of fasting that people can do without help. If water fasting is done, though, you better do it right. Do it right or don't do it. Right, right. Who did you and Tasha dedicate the book to?
[1:10:26] Well, you know, if you open up the book here, you'll see that, you know, dedication is located here on page IX.
[1:10:45] So Misa and Tia are the principal author's children and also the patients of the True North Health Center. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So her kids, you know, she has two babies and she wrote this book while she was pregnant with her second child. In fact, I remember having meetings with her even up to the point where she was having contractions. And I was joking or that, you know, that we could schedule a meeting, you know, if her labor went on for too long, we could kind of do some more meetings during the labor. But it turned out labor didn't last that long. So and she was busy because she delivered the baby herself. So, you know, it was a real incredible work of effort on hers in terms of the research and the writing that she's just did a really fabulous job. And when you read this book, you'll really see she's just very good, as I said, at making complex issues understandable. Yeah. When did you guys.
[1:11:43] When was the seed planted for you and her to write the book and how long did it take? Well, we started, she's been with us for 10 years. And the first thing she did when she joined Truneth Health Center was get us to publish that first case report in the British Medical Journal on the treatment of lymphoma. And we began doing all the research that forms the basis of this book for the last 10 years. So if you read this book, you'll realize that most of it's based on our own original research published in peer-reviewed journals. And so we've We've published those papers, done that research over the last 10 years. The last two years, you know, we've been working with the publisher in terms of getting the final product done. And it's just being released on June 25th from, you know, on Amazon. So it's it's it's really, you know, kind of hot off the press now. Hot off the press.
[1:12:36] Is there anything actually I do have a couple more questions for you and then we're going to wind down. And that is, so during a typical water only fast, right? How much water is the typical person drinking over the course of the day? Well, it'll vary because some people, we're monitoring specific gravity in urine and other parameters to make sure hydration is maintained. So there's a minimum of 40 ounces of water that's consumed during fasting. It could go up to 80 ounces or in some cases more, depending on the size of the person and their metabolic realities. The problem is sometimes we have to restrict water a little bit because if sodium levels are too low, you can actually flush electrolytes out if you're consuming too much water. So what we're doing is we're asking people to consume at least 40 ounces a day, and then we're monitoring their urine and specific gravity and their physical exam that we're doing every day. So we're examining people twice a day, taking their vitals, keeping a close eye. We're doing laboratory testing, blood and urine testing. So we have parameters that we can use to guide people to drink more, drink less. As long as people are not overly active, they're not laying out in the the sun too much. They're not getting dehydrated. They typically hold up quite well up to 40 days. We don't do fasting over 40 days. It gets a little bit more complicated when you give them the long fast over 40 days. Right. And in the book, I think you mentioned that the longest water only fast that you know of is like 328 days.
[1:14:03] 368. Yeah. That was an overweight person that fast under medical care. We don't recommend a fast of a year. It's 40 days. In fact, you know, when I went to Australia, the guy I trained with, Alec Burton, was the world's leading, most experienced person with fasting supervision. And he used to fast people 60 days, 68 days. One guy, he fasted 103 days. And I asked him, why aren't we fasting people over 40 days now? You say we only go up to 40 days. And he said, oh, because of sleep deprivation. And I said, oh, do the patients have trouble sleeping after 40 days? He goes, not the patients, me. Because after 40 days, it gets a little more, you have to be a little bit more careful, full electrolyte balance, et cetera. So he decided that he was going to limit the fasting to 40 days. And, you know, Moses, David, Elijah, Jesus all fasted up to 40 days. Our patients, they're in good company. What have you found –.
[1:14:53] Happens to most people as far as their energy is concerned? Does their energy increase, decrease?
[1:15:01] Are they sleeping better, sleeping worse? Does it just depend upon the person? It depends on the patients. People coming in with chronic fatigue, like they're coming with chronic fatigue syndrome and they've got long COVID, these kinds of conditions, they often actually sometimes start feeling better even during fasting.
[1:15:16] But most people, their energy goes down during fasting. Fasting can be an intense process depending on what type of detox detoxifying is going on but it's the it's the six-week follow-up where you follow people up afterwards where you see the profound change and we even know now there's even changes in mitochondrial production during fasting the actual energy components and the cells increase there's all these things we're starting to learn you know it doesn't really change how we do fasting but it changes how we understand what's happening during fasting and the more we learn the more exciting it seems to be getting right now it's so exciting in fact that pharmaceutical companies have recognized that, for example, fasting in relation to cancer makes cancer cells more vulnerable to the immune system, but also to chemotherapy, and that fasting protects healthy cells from the ravaging effects of chemotherapy. And once Walter Longo had published that paper showing, for example, you have 30 rats with cancer. If you treat them enough to kill all the cancer cells, they all die. But if you take the same rats with the same cancer and use fasting, all 30 rats survive in dramatically enhanced cancer-free survival. That the effect of differential stress sensitization was that cancer cells become more vulnerable. Once that happened, the pharmaceutical company said, oh, wait a second.
[1:16:27] Fasting is not criminal quackery. It's cutting edge research. And now they want to desperately come up with what are called fasting mimicking drugs. Sure, of course. What they want is a pill they can sell that'll do to your body what fasting does without all that nasty fasting.
[1:16:43] And I'm sure you're not going to be a fan of that. Let me ask you this. I got to get your opinion on these new weight loss drugs, you know, the Ozempic, Wegovia. What do you think? Do you think it's just a nightmare? Well, I think you just wait a few more months and start looking at the literature. You'll start seeing everything from gastric motility issues on down, just like it always does with these drugs. You know, this isn't the first magic weight loss drug that they've pushed. One in eight people, I think they say, have tried Ozempic. And if you make people sick enough, they will lose weight. I tell people, look, you want rapid weight loss, just get a chainsaw, cut your hip off of the leg, it's 40 pounds. You know, in the long run, these are not methods that are gonna turn out to be consistent with long-term health. If you wanna get healthy, you have to live healthy. It's diet, sleep, and exercise. Will there be short-term benefits? Sure, you can go on the dead Dr. Atkins diet, may his soul rest in peace, and you can lose weight short-term. It's just not a good long-term health strategy.
[1:17:38] So what we're interested in isn't just short-term gain, but long-term benefit. How can you avoid the last 20 years of your life debility? It's not going to be, in my opinion, on a high-fat, high-protein, animal-based diet. It's going to be on a healthy diet, healthy lifestyle. And, you know, it may take you longer to achieve your goals than some short-term fix, but you're going to avoid the debility that's already starting to show up, by the way, from these medical interventions that try to force weight loss. Yeah. Doesn't the keto, the whole keto diet, doesn't it basically just, I think Dr. Clapper refers to it as a physiological parlor trick that kind of, you get the same kind of effects as if you're fasting because you're no longer taking in the carbohydrates. Is that correct in some sense? You're going to ketosis. Anytime you're in ketosis, whether it's healthfully fasting or it's on some high protein, high fat diet, you'll have a hunger blunting effect. And let's face it, most of these people are eating animal foods three times a day anyway. It's not that they're eating so much more animal food. It's what they're doing is not eating refined carbohydrates. And since 86% of the carbohydrates people eat are flour and sugar products, getting rid of that's going to cause some benefit. I don't care what else you're doing. If you want to get healthy, though, get rid of all the sugar, oil, and salt. Get rid of the animal foods. Adopt a whole plant food diet. Get some exercise and go to bed on time. Do that for a while and then decide, do I need to compromise my long-term health for short-term gains?
[1:19:06] Hey, is there anything that I haven't asked you about your new book or True North that I should have? No, I think you've got it covered. People have the idea. They can go to our website, truenorthhealth.com. They can learn everything they want to learn. We have a free Roku channel now with some of our content. We do live streaming. They can participate in some of the classes we teach every day at the center freely by just going onto our website. And really, this is a a great book, if I do say so myself. If you read this book, it will give you the information you need to know to get and stay healthy. Well, Alan, I can't even tell you how much I needed a dose of the Goldhamer. Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. I tell you what, I love it. I love your passion. I love what you're, you know, you've been so committed to your form of medicine, to your art form for so long. And it's great to see everything coming to fruition. This book, the way True North Health has just like blossomed, waiting lists, you know, telehealth medicine. You've got satellite centers. I mean, this is fantastic.
[1:20:22] Way to be, way to be my man. So, so at some point I do want to come out there for a, whatever, three to seven day stay and we'll, and I'll, and I'll document it all. Well, we're looking forward to locking you up.
[1:20:37] Looking forward to being locked up. Hey, my PLANTSTRONG brother, will you give me a PLANTSTRONG virtual fist bump on the way out? Bam. Thank you.
[1:20:51] Can fasting save your life? it's out now and I'll be sure to link to it in today's show notes. For more information on the services of True North Health Center, visit truenorthhealth.com. Thank you so, so much for listening and for sharing. And until next time, always, always keep it PLANTSTRONG. The PLANTSTRONG podcast team includes Carrie Barrett, Laurie Kortowich, and Ami Mackey. If you like what you hear, do us a favor and share the show with your friends and loved ones. You can always leave a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And while you're there, make sure to hit that follow button so that you never miss an episode. As always, this and every episode is dedicated to my parents, Dr. Caldwell B. Esselstyn Jr. And Anne Crile Esselstyn. Thanks so much for listening.
