Transcription
[Applause]
Okay, good afternoon. My son, some of you may know, is a board-certified internist who works at Kaiser Permanente up in the Northwest. We actually spent last week together. He helped me with a 70-person Whole Foods supermarket immersion program, which we finished yesterday.
He and I have been dealing with a lot of things over the years, him becoming a doctor and living in my shadow, so to speak. One of the things we talked about a couple of months ago is how he’s trying to help people. He’s probably taken care of about 350 people at Kaiser Permanente in the Northwest and has seen phenomenal results. But it’s hard, you know? It’s hard to get people to change.
A couple of months ago, he came to me and said, “You know, Dad, they just don’t care. People just don’t care.” I said, “Excuse me, son, they just don’t know. That’s the problem. People just don’t know why they’re sick, and they don’t know how to get well.”
Can you imagine two young people living life with those kinds of blemishes? Or, as I see it, I watch men walk by in the lobby here at the Hyatt Hotel, and they glance at their profile. They look like they’re seven months pregnant. They do! They look like they’re seven months pregnant. They care; they just don’t know any better.
Many women have to go to the big girls' sizes at the dress shop. I think they care; they just don’t know. For families to lose a father or a husband from a heart attack, it’s just that they don’t know. They really do care.
I’ve been at this since, well, let’s see, 1968. I started in medical school, and in 1972, Mary and I got married and moved to Hawaii, where I started taking care of people. So, in 1972, how many years is that? That’s like, what, 42 years? 42 years! I’ve taken care of thousands of people, not just a few hundred, and I know people care.
Not everybody cares, and it’s not easy to find the people that care and want to change. But when you do, it’s absolutely amazing how you change their lives. You make that difference. Once people see it, as I’m sure almost everybody in this audience does, once you see it, you just can’t believe that everybody doesn’t see it, and everybody doesn’t respond, and everybody doesn’t take action.
I think it’s just because they haven’t seen it. It’s not because they don’t care. We have to go out and tell everybody. I’m going to share with you a little bit about how I’ve come to tell the story.
I used to tell the story in terms of scientific literature. In fact, some of you have read my books. I’ve written 12 national best-selling books, heavily referenced with scientific literature. Thank you!
Well, yesterday, my son went home. Before he left, I dragged him down to the basement where the archives are, where all the research papers that I’ve gathered are sitting in these big file cabinets downstairs. He asked me something because he was seeing patients. We had 70 Whole Foods people last week, and what he saw is that occasionally somebody’s cholesterol went up.
I said, “Well, son, that’s because when they lost a lot of weight—these were people that lost like ten pounds in six days—it’s when they lose weight that the cholesterol and uric acid come out of their body fat and go through the bloodstream.” He says, “Why didn’t I hear of that, Dad?”
I said, “Well, come on downstairs; I’ll show you.” We looked under cholesterol on fasting, and I pulled out the paper. I said, “Here’s the scientific paper.” He says, “You know, this is from 1972. How’d you ever find that paper?”
I said, “Well, you didn’t have computers back then, did you?” He was amazed. Then he said, “Dad, did you read all those papers?” I said, “Son, look at all those underlines. Who do you think put them there?”
I used to try to convince people to take good care of themselves by showing them the facts, you know? Show them that the scientific literature tells the story very clearly. That works for some people.
As time has gone on, I found different ways to tell the story, and I’d like to tell you how I tell the story now. This is about all I talk about. Sometimes I find myself in the shower just washing myself, thinking, “Oh, Dr. McDougall’s color picture book on food poisoning and how to cure it: writing beans, corn, rice, and potatoes.” It just kind of goes over in my mind because that’s all I think about these days—Dr. McDougall’s color picture book.
When I talked to you last time I was here, all I was talking about was the starch solution because that’s the book I just wrote. Who knows what I’m going to be talking about next time? But this is all I have on my mind these days—Dr. McDougall’s color picture book.
Let me tell you how this came about. I wrote these twelve national best-selling books, and only a few people read them. My agent came to me in May of this year and said, “John, we’d like you to write another book. Rodale made a lot of money on the starch solution, and Penguin Putnam—we used to be in the top 5% of book sales for Penguin Putnam—made a lot of money.”
My agent, of course, makes a lot of money every time we sell. That’s the only way she makes money is when our author sells books. So she came to Mary and me in May and said, “Look, I can get you this much money if you’ll write another book.” It was a lot of money, but I said, “I’m not going to write any more word books. I’m done writing word books. I’ve written all the word books anybody ought to write in their whole lifetime. I’m not done writing word books.”
But I said, “I tell you what I’ll do: I’ll write a color picture book for you.” So far, she’s not been interested. But I went to—anybody go with us to Costa Rica? Okay, Ohayou, Larry, and Anne were there. Well, that’s all I was thinking about was the color picture book in June when we had 140 people with us in Costa Rica.
The people who were on the trip helped me put this color picture book together. So, in my trip in June of 2014 to Costa Rica, I put together a 66-page color picture book, and I put it up on our website for free. So far, no literary agent has bought it. Maybe nobody ever will, but it’s free for you.
It’s not only free for you in English; it’s in Dutch and Chinese, and it’s just about to be put up in Japanese and all kinds of languages. It’s a color picture book that explains the story in very simple terms.
What I’d like to do is share with you Dr. McDougall’s color picture book on food poisoning and how to cure it: by eating beans, corn, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and rice.
However, before I put this color picture book out, I wanted to test to make sure that it worked. What I did is I sat down with my six, eight, and ten-year-old grandsons, who live right near us. They’re Heather’s children, and I sat down with them. I went through the 66 pictures in the color picture book and asked them, “Do you understand this?” They said, “Yes, Grandpa, we understand.”
So I figured if they understood it, everybody could understand it. What I did is I used the universal signs for go, stop, and caution, and that helped them understand what I was talking about in terms of what they’re supposed to do.
So if you’d like to read Dr. McDougall’s color picture book on food poisoning and how to cure it, just go to my website. It’s there, and as I say, it’s probably in 15 languages now, and hopefully, we’ll get it in 30, 40, 50, 60 languages so people can understand food poisoning.
You must—I think these days, that’s all I look at it as—you must look at this as food poisoning. When you do, when you look at it as food poisoning, it all makes sense. You know exactly what to do.
For example, what was the book? Endurance. They read the book Endurance about Shackleton’s trip to the Antarctic. You know, I just finished reading a good book. The men were suffering from lead poisoning. You remember that? In the book, the men were eating tomatoes out of lead cans and were suffering from lead poisoning.
These are the explorers to the Antarctic back a hundred years ago, and their ship, the Endurance, sunk in the Antarctic. All they had was canned supplies, and the cans were made of lead. Pretty soon, they started losing their hair and their fingernails, and they were suffering from lead poisoning.
Guess what? As soon as the doctor—remember the doctor on there? As soon as the doctor discovered what it was, he stopped the men from eating the tomatoes, which were in cans made of lead. Guess what happened? In a couple of weeks, the lead poisoning was cured.
The same thing with methyl mercury. People are suffering from methyl mercury poisoning. When you stop the food poisoning, they’re cured. Or say you had chronic staphylococci or Salmonella or Listeria poisoning going on. You were poisoning yourself with these microbes all the time. The way you would cure it is you would stop the food poisoning.
Yes!
Well, what people are suffering from—and maybe, hopefully, when I get done with this presentation, you’ll look at it from the same point of view that I do—what people are suffering from in our society is food poisoning. It’s food poisoning of such a grandiose level that it far exceeds any lead poisoning, tobacco poisoning, heroin poisoning, alcohol poisoning, cocaine poisoning—all the poisonings you can imagine in your family, in your personal life, in your community, in your country, in your world.
All the poisons you can imagine put together are insignificant compared to the food poisoning going on now in terms of the toll that it takes on you personally, your family, your community, your nation, and planet Earth. Food poisoning!
And the way you cure food poisoning is you stop the food poisoning, but you have to recognize it first as food poisoning. Otherwise, you’re kind of helpless.
This is food poisoning. Two-thirds of people, according to current statistics, suffer from food poisoning in this form: they’re overweight or obese. Of course, being overweight and obese is associated with more heart disease, more breast cancer, more colon cancer, more prostate cancer. That’s how you get type 2 diabetes.
So food poisoning results in being overweight and obesity and the secondary manifestations that you see so commonly in our society. This is one result of food poisoning. This is food poisoning. Type 1 and type 2 diabetes are due to food poisoning, and if you stop the food poisoning, people with type 2 diabetes are cured, and people with type 1 diabetes are greatly benefited. They’re not cured.
Food poisoning: 135 million people every year in the United States suffer from this form of food poisoning. In terms of a heart attack, it’s food poisoning.
In my May 2014 newsletter, I published an article that I wouldn’t have published in the past. If I would have written this story that I wrote in my May 2014 newsletter 20 or 30 years ago, my colleagues would have likely come after me, labeled me a quack, told me that I was delusional, that I was misleading patients, that I was keeping them from good standard arthritic care by telling them that lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, and psoriatic arthritis are consequences of food poisoning from the rich Western diet.
If you stopped it, as I reported in my May 2014 newsletter, I showed you 10 cases of debilitating, deadly inflammatory arthritis—people with rheumatoid and psoriatic arthritis—who just stopped the food poisoning. You were cured!
I published ten cases, and I didn’t get a single comment from a single rheumatologist or a single member of any medical society anywhere. Because of this day and age, folks, medical and non-medical recognize food poisoning, know it to be true, and realize we have to do something about it.
So this is food poisoning.
[Music]
Food poisoning: breast, colon, and prostate cancer are due to food poisoning. Everybody knows about the purple pill. Why does everybody know about GERD and indigestion? Nexium and the purple pill? It’s because we have massive food poisoning out there.
You can go into pharmacies all over the world; you can see these pills for sale all over the Western world. Why? Because people are suffering from food poisoning. Food poisoning!
Okay, so now you recognize it. As a matter of fact, if you stop and think about it, and even if you hear there’s even any hint in your mind that what I say is true, what you’re thinking right now is, “Every place I look, I see food poisoning.” All through my family, through my school, through my business—every place I look, people are suffering from food poisoning.
Well, they are! And the only way you’re going to fix it is to stop the food poisoning. Just like Shackleton’s men did with lead poisoning a hundred years ago. They stopped eating out of the lead cans, and the body healed, and the food poisoning went away.
Food poisoning has been recognized for thousands of years. You can go back 3,500 years ago, 4,000 years ago, look at the priests, priestesses, pharaohs, kings, queens of the Middle East, of Egypt. The mummies—you look at the mummified remains of these aristocrats from 3,500, 4,000 years ago, and you see that they suffered from food poisoning.
A recent report of 44 autopsies, so to speak, done with CAT scans, where they looked through the arteries of priests, priestesses, kings, queens, and pharaohs, found that out of the 44 they examined, 20 had extensive atherosclerosis—hardening of the arteries in the heart, the kidneys, the aorta, the legs, and so on. They suffered from food poisoning 3,500, 4,000 years ago.
The aristocrats of three, four, or five hundred years ago—the kings and queens of the past—were fat, had the gout, had diabetes. They suffered from food poisoning. Back then, three, four thousand years ago, or four or five hundred years ago, there were only a few people who were well enough to poison themselves with rich food.
The difference is today we have a society, thanks to the Industrial Revolution, modern technology, and fossil fuels, where everybody in Western society can afford to and does poison themselves with rich foods: Burger King, Dairy Queen, Imperial margarine. That’s why people are sick from food poisoning due to the rich Western diet.
Alright, so how do you fix food poisoning? This is a revelation that I’ve had to come to after 40 years. I used to be a nice guy. I’m not a nice guy anymore. I used to tell people they have to do better, they have to be sensible, they have to be reasonable, they have to cut down. Nobody ever got better!
I mean, I know you most do. You know that I never really did that. I was always pretty tough, but I kind of was nicer in the past. Over the last four decades, trying to help people get better, I have been able to speak more clearly about what you must do.
If you recognize food poisoning, just like the Nelson twins, then Willie, their brother, and Sabrina, and some of you—if you recognize that you’re suffering from food poisoning that’s causing acne, chest pain, breast lumps, constipation, indigestion—if you recognize that in yourself or your friends or relatives, what you must do is you must stop the food poisoning.
Plain and simple!
You can’t cut down. Why can you not cut down? Disobey the Nelson twins tried; they couldn’t do it. They just told you they had to recognize the problem and do it 100%. The reason is, it’s not because 100% really is required. You could do 99.99% if you could, but you can’t!
I know you can’t. That’s what I’ve come to the conclusion about over all these many years: people can’t cut down. They can’t be reasonable; they can’t be sensible; they can’t be prudent. They have to deal with food poisoning the same way that some of us have had to deal with tobacco poisoning, and some of us have had to deal with alcohol poisoning, and some of us have had to deal with cocaine and heroin and other kinds of poisonings.
What we had to do is we had to change our behavior. We had to stop 100%. Believe me, I quit smoking on October 20, 1972, at 7 a.m. in the morning. The only reason I am smoke-free now is because every day I get up and say, “I will not smoke another cigarette.”
You know who I’m talking about. There are very few of you who can be moderate and smoke two cigarettes a day or have a glass of wine three or four times a week. If you are the kind of personality that I am, and you probably recognize the same thing with food, if you want to get over the obesity, overweight, constipation, indigestion, etc., if you want to change your future, you have to do what Nancy Reagan told us to do.
Remember what Nancy Reagan said to the drug addicts? Yeah, that’s what you have to do! There’s nothing in between. You just have to say no. You have to stop doing it.
Alright, food poisoning! This is food poisoning. You might not recognize it as food poisoning, but it is! Start thinking of it in those terms. It is food poisoning for human beings.
I have one pet left. I used to have three parrots, some dogs, and several cats, and a snake here and there. I’ve only got one cat left—that’s it!
To the cat, this is food. That cat would take this particular food source, de-feather it, tear it open, and eat it because that’s the cat’s food. This is not your food!
When you try and eat this food like the cat does, what do you think will happen? You get sick! This is food poisoning!
Oil is food poisoning. You must recognize it as that. There are just two large categories of foods that you have to just say no to, and those are animal foods and oils.
This is hard for people to think. Oil, like olive oil, is toxic. Everybody’s told me it’s good for me. Flaxseed oil is good for me. Fish oil is good for me. No, it’s not! It’s giving you acne and obesity. Greasy skin promotes cancer. We’ve known that since the 1920s.
These vegetable oils are very strong promoters of cancer, heart disease, and all kinds of problems, and you must stop that behavior. When you eat oil, let me just ask you to stop and think about it for a minute.
When you eat, say, for example, you took a couple tablespoons of oil or maybe a whole bowl of oil like this and you ate it, what do you think that oil goes? Do you think it evaporates out of your ears? Do you think it just kind of disappears someplace?
No! When you eat that fat, you wear it on your skin and under your skin, and it causes food poisoning.
What did I tell you? You can’t eat animal foods. Some of you, most of you here, I know you already came here as believers, and you already understand this message. When I give you this message, it doesn’t bother you at all. You’ve already thought through it.
But some of you were dragged here against your will, but you ended up here, and now you have somebody standing on stage—not just myself, but the other presenters—they stand on stage and tell you a message that you’ve heard over and over again, and that is that you’re not supposed to eat meat, butter, eggs, or cheese.
You’ve heard this before, and you’re thinking, “What am I going to do? There’s nothing to eat!” It’s like somebody telling you that you’re not supposed to breathe air anymore. You say, “I will die!” Or, “You’re not supposed to drink water anymore.” You’re not supposed to drink dirty water.
You’re not supposed to breathe dirty air, but you can breathe clean air, and you can eat and drink clean water, and you can eat clean food.
So me just telling you you can’t eat animal foods—you can do else—it leaves some of you with this huge vacuum. You say, “I will never survive!” Until I tell you what you’re supposed to eat.
Here’s what you’re supposed to eat: you’re supposed to eat starch! You are starchy! You are a starchitarian! You are a starchitarian! Until you figure that out, you’re lost. You’re totally out of control. You’re hungry.
You can’t understand why every time you eat, you gain weight, why every time you eat, your stomach hurts. You can’t understand why you don’t have energy. You just can’t understand why the picture doesn’t come together for you until you understand that you’re a starchitarian.
Starches are parts of plants that store a large amount of energy for the plant. Where starch comes from is plants. They take carbon dioxide from the air, they take water from the ground, and they take sunlight as energy. They use that energy to convert carbon dioxide and water into sugar called glucose.
Plants make that glucose for their own needs so that they can run their body parts, their leaves, and their stems and so on. That’s why they make the glucose for their own energy.
Then what a plant does is it takes some of that energy and stores it for use later on. That use later on would be when the plant becomes a new plant.
A plant is growing in the summer and the fall, and then winter comes, the plant dies. Then the next season, the plant has to become a new plant. To become a new plant, it needs genetic material, but it also needs energy to sprout or to germinate.
So the plant, during its growing season, makes the sugar glucose and takes these sugars and stores them in long chains. Then it takes these long chains of sugar, known as starch—you call it complex carbohydrate, but that’s way too confusing for me. It’s called starch!
The plants take the starch and store it in their plant parts so they have energy for the new plant when spring comes. They store it underground in plant parts, like, for example, in tubers or roots or corn. These are underground storage organs the plant stores underground.
Then when the new season comes, the potato sprouts into a new plant from that stored energy. Or the plant can store that energy above ground in the form of seeds called grains and legumes. These are high-sugar seeds: beans, peas, lentils, wheat, corn, and so on.
The plant stores the energy above ground in these seeds so that when the new season comes and the genetic material lands in the ground, it has energy to become a new corn plant or pea plant or bean plant.
That stored energy is called starch, and what you do uniquely as a human being—and I mean uniquely as a human being—is you tap into this stored energy. Human beings are starchitarians, always have been, always will be.
It’s the way you solve food poisoning: you substitute fat, which is from animal foods or vegetable oils, you substitute that energy source for sugar, which is the starch in plants.
So that’s the way you solve food poisoning: you eat starch! Along with that starch, you can have some non-starchy green and yellow vegetables, but not much.
I know some of you have tried to have a lot. You’ve tried to be nutritarians. You’ve tried to live on kale and broccoli and cauliflower and cabbage. You say, “Something’s wrong! I’m starving to death!”
Well, of course you are! That’s not your food! Nobody’s ever lived on a cabbage or kale diet. Never happened; never will happen. There’s just not enough energy.
Now, you can have some of this kale, some of these sprouts, a little lettuce, a little celery. You can have some of that as a side dish. For those of you who are trying to be vegetarians or vegans living on these non-starchy green and yellow vegetables, give it up!
It’s not going to work! You’re not going to feel well. Your stomach will be growling. You’re going to be hungry all the time. Why? Because you have not tapped into a high-energy source, which is known as starch.
You need that energy! You have to chase the two-year-old around. You have to make it to work. You have to maybe do some physical activity or just breathe. You need the energy to just breathe, and you have to get that energy from starch.
You can add some green and yellow vegetables to the side dish—maybe 5%, maybe 10%. If you want to push it, maybe 30% by eyeball. You can have a little bit of fruit too—a little fruit, but not a lot.
Maybe one fruit, maybe three fruits. I have a nectarine tree outside my house, and every late August, that nectarine tree comes in bloom, and I get about three or four grocery bags of nectarines—unbelievably tasty!
I’ll eat one grocery bag myself. Thank goodness that nectarine tree is only in bloom for about five days a year! I would be tempted, but it’s not. Fruits are not in bloom all year long, unless, of course, you have Whole Foods or Safeway.
But otherwise, they’re not in bloom a short time of the year. These are foods that may get you ready for the fall, give you a little extra energy. They’re certainly tasty; they’re a nice reward. They’re simple sugars; they satisfy, but not for very long.
You’re hungry quite quickly after eating fruit. That’s why I have known very few fruitarians in my entire career. Steve Jobs tried for a while, not long. A few other friends that you know have tried to be fruitarians occasionally. They can do it with some effort, but no population has ever lived on a fruit-based diet—not that I know of.
So your diet, when you decide to give up food poisoning, is a diet of starches. Yes, starch is the center of your meal plan, with some fruits and vegetables.
Once you stop the food poisoning, what happens is the body spontaneously cures. This is the miracle! This is why—and I appreciate many of you coming up and telling me how much I helped you.
Even some of you said I cured you. I didn’t cure you! I just gave you a little information so you stopped the food poisoning. Your body naturally cured itself. The body has this innate ability to cure itself, to heal itself.
You go out and get in a horrible auto accident. You break three or four or five bones, slice your skin all to pieces. What do you think happens? As long as you don’t get another car accident, your body heals because it does that. It just naturally heals.
It’s one of the inner powers of the body. You just have to let it happen. The way you let it happen—the body’s always healing. You think your body stopped healing?
I know some of you have heart disease, atherosclerosis, diabetes, and some of you even have cancer. You and your doctors have kind of given up on you and said, “Well, you’re done.” Your body hasn’t stopped!
Your body is continually trying to survive. That’s what it does, without exception. It always does! But most often, it can’t because the injury outpaces the body’s ability to heal.
Let me give you one example before I move on, just to show you how you cure people, cure people, give people an opportunity to cure themselves. You just stop the repeated injury.
Say I had a nervous habit, and that nervous habit was every day I took a couple tablespoons of hydrochloric acid and threw it on my hand. I would get a sore on my hand. I’d get ulcers and inflammation, and maybe some pustules forming there.
At the same time that that injury occurred from the hydrochloric acid, the body would become inflamed. It would swell; it would get red. Fluids would come in there, and what would happen is scar tissue would eventually settle in as the body was healing itself.
But unfortunately, what’s happening now is I had this nervous habit, and I keep throwing acid every day or two on my hand. So even though my hand is trying to heal—and it is, even to the point of forming scar tissue—the injury outstrips the body’s ability to heal.
Now, just say one day I decide to stop throwing hydrochloric acid on my hand. Now, what do you think is going to happen? Three or four days, you start seeing the healing outstrip the injury. A week or so later, there aren’t any new sores. A week or two after that, what you find is you’ve got a little scar tissue left, and it’s done. The body healed!
So the way you cure food poisoning—all the things that I mentioned to you—is you just stop the poison.
Let me—here’s an example. I tried to show this in Mumbai, India. It didn’t go over well, but it’s one that a lot of people can relate to here. Here’s an example of how people knew about food poisoning 2,500 years ago.
Here’s a story about Daniel and his men who were vegetarians. They talked to the gatekeeper in the king’s castle, and what Daniel asked the gatekeeper was whether or not they could do a comparative experiment—the first controlled trial that I’m aware of.
So what Daniel did is he took his men, who were vegan, vegetarian, and he compared them for ten days with the men who ate the royal food. You could see it published in the Bible in the first chapter of Daniel—the results of that controlled trial.
What they found 2,500 years ago is the men who ate the pulses and water were in excellent health compared to the men who ate the rich food. I could have told this story by bringing quotes from the Bhagavad Gita or the Koran or other historical and religious stories.
People have observed this for thousands of years. When folks see rich food—in other words, meat and oil and other junk—and give up the starches, vegetables, and fruits, they get fat and sick.
Okay, now some of you are thinking about changing your diet. You need to know also that the diet that I’m talking about is the diet that winners eat. Since 1968, the long-distance endurance competitions for the Olympics have been dominated by two groups of people.
Since 1968, they’ve come in within the first four places in the Olympics, and those people are from Kenya and Ethiopia. People wonder, “How can they run so long with such endurance?” It’s because they live on corn and other starches.
I love this story because some of your friends and relatives, when you tell them you’re going to give up meat, they’re going to wonder where you get your strength. This is a story of gladiators. Gladiators are known as the barley men.
They won their competitions in the Coliseum in large part because of the way they ate. Gladiators ate barley and beans. Why the barley and beans? Because you didn’t get to come back twice if you weren’t really good. You were done!
The most competitive people throughout history, particularly in long-distance and endurance events, have been starchitarians.
Now, let’s see how fast the healing occurs. I just ran a program. We finished yesterday with 70 people from Whole Foods Market. We had about a dozen diabetics, people with high blood pressure, or overweight, etc.
Immediately, as soon as they come in—the week before that, we ran a program with 50 people who were just independent people who came to our program, and they had diabetes, heart disease, and kidney disease, and so on.
Immediately, what happens when people stop the food poisoning is the bowel gets better, the constipation goes away, the indigestion goes away, the oiliness of the skin changes.
I was listening to the Nelson twins talk about their issue. Well, let’s see, today’s Sunday. It was on Friday morning. I’m sitting down at the table with a whole group of 70 participants from Whole Foods Market, and there was a young woman, a little older than the Nelson twins, sitting there with partially healed scars all over her face.
She’s telling me—and I could just see it; I could just see it in her emotion—how she felt. She says, “I tried everything. I went to the dermatologist. They were going to put me on Accutane. I went on a vegetarian diet. I did everything I could.”
She says, “I want you to know—I just want you to look at my face.” She’s telling me Friday when I look at my face. She says, “It’s all dry, and all the sores are healing.” Just like you just saw here!
That happens within about 24 hours. Of course, when you eat the unhealthy food, you get back into the food poisoning. The greasy skin comes back in a matter of hours.
There’s something called McDougall’s Revenge that occurs quite quickly. Immediately! And then within about four months, most of the problems you have from food poisoning that are able to be healed are healed within about four months.
People with horrible inflammatory arthritis, like rheumatoid or psoriatic arthritis, are pretty much healed in about four months. You’re not going to lose 80 pounds in four months. It takes a little longer than that.
People lose weight at about 8 to 10 to 12 pounds a month. But otherwise, most of the reversal that you’re going to see in terms of chronic illness takes place in about four months.
Do be realistic, though. There is scar tissue left behind, just like with cigarette smoking. If you’ve ever known anybody who smoked cigarettes seriously, like I used to, they have a problem with a terrible cough and wheezing.
As soon as they stop smoking cigarettes, what happens? They get better! It happens in a matter of hours, if not just a couple of days. The same thing happens with the food poisoning. As soon as you stop it, the body starts to get better.
With that long-term smoking that many of you have done, there are scars left in the lungs, just like with the artery disease that you caused from shoveling bacon and eggs into your artery walls. There are scars left. There is residual left.
But you would be amazed at how much of it is reversed. We were on a presidential program in Santa Rosa, California. This is a picture of the resort there. We serve people unlimited amounts of starch-based foods.
Can I tell you? On average, the 70 people lost about 4 pounds in six days. Our average weight loss—I’ll show you the figures in just a second. What we do is we just—we don’t stop the alcohol, we don’t stop the coffee, we don’t stop the other drug addictions people have.
We don’t exercise that much. We don’t ask them to think good thoughts. We don’t have them meditate. All we do is stop the food poisoning, and we get these amazing results at our seven-day program.
It works! A 10-day program—it’s actually seven-day intervals that we’re measuring. We published these results about 15 years ago, and we’re about to publish them again.
Here are the weight losses in 1,615 people. These are the women—about a thousand women that we gathered the data on over the last ten years. The average weight loss is about three pounds.
Did you know that the average weight gain on a seven-day cruise is eight to twelve pounds? I’ve been on the study, look, with the same kind of free-for-all eating, unrestricted eating, the ad libitum eating that we have at our clinic, feeding people foods they very much enjoy.
The average weight loss for women is about three pounds. For men, it’s a little bit more. This data, by the way, was just accepted two weeks ago for publication in the Journal of Nutrition.
So you will see this data coming out probably within the next two or three months. It wasn’t easy to get it accepted, let me tell you, but we finally got it accepted by the Journal of Nutrition.
Here’s the weight loss in men. You notice the more people weigh when they start out, the more they lose. We had a couple of people who lost 10 pounds, a couple of people who lost 12 pounds. Of course, those people who lost 10 or 12 pounds were a couple of people who didn’t lose it at all.
But on average, that’s what you get. On average, in terms of cholesterol drop, we get a 22-point drop in cholesterol—no changes in medication. A 22-point drop in cholesterol in days!
That’s as good as you can get with Lipitor or probably better. The sicker people are, the higher their cholesterol is when they start out, the greater the drop.
For example, people who start with cholesterol in the 250 to 280 range get about a 44-point drop in cholesterol compared to those, say, in the 200 range, which get about a 23-point drop in cholesterol.
We take most people off blood pressure pills, and we get, on average, an 8 over 4 millimeter drop in blood pressure, stopping all their blood pressure medications in almost every case.
1,615 people we analyzed, and people with really high blood pressure will get sometimes pretty profound drops in blood pressure, like 20 over 15 millimeters of mercury drop in blood pressure, and they’ll stop their medications.
Now, those are short-term results, and you’re sitting there thinking, “Well, short-term? That’s seven days.” Yes! You have 1,615 people that you’re publishing in the scientific journals, and you publish the results of 500 people about 15 years ago.
But that’s only seven days! Punk, you brag about seven days? Well, I’m going to have some longer-term data that was presented twice at two medical meetings this year.
It was presented at a meeting in Philadelphia and then one in Boston last week. It was published by—it was presented by Oregon Health and Science University, which is the medical school in Portland.
They did a long-term study of our patients. These were patients with a special need. They were people with multiple sclerosis. What we started in 2008—actually, the study began in 2009. We kind of put our minds together in 2008, and in 2009, we started the study, and in 2013, we finished it.
What we did was a randomized, reader-blinded—in other words, single-blinded—study on the effect of our diet, taking care of people in our clinic on patients with multiple sclerosis.
Now, these are younger people. On average, our patient population is about 55 years of age. These people were on average about 30 years of age. You can see the data. If you want to see the data, it’s in my July 2014 newsletter. I’ll give you the exact figures.
But they were younger people. They didn’t come for weight loss; they came for multiple sclerosis. They were randomized. In other words, we took these 60 people. It’s a study that our foundation paid for, but OHSU did it.
They collected all the data; they did all the analysis completely independent of us. Believe me, this is an unbiased study. They had no intention of showing good results from our program. They were just there to show the results.
So they took these 60 people, and then basically they flipped a coin and said, “You’re going to stay on the control diet, which is the typical American diet, or you’re going to go on the McDougall diet. You’re going to get trained at their clinic in Santa Rosa, California.”
First of all, I want you to know it took almost a year to get the study approved by the Ethics Board. That’s right! The review board that makes sure it’s ethical to do an experiment called the IRB—the ethics board at Oregon Health and Science University—took one year and multiple communications to figure out it was safe to feed people potatoes and rice.
This same board will approve drugs that cost $50,000 a year and kill people and have essentially no effect that you’d want to buy on multiple sources. They’ll approve that kind of study in a couple of hours.
It took us a year! Finally, after a year, they said, “Okay, it’s safe to feed this diet to people with multiple sclerosis.” Then the next thing they said to us, rightly so, is, “Okay, you could try, but nobody’s going to follow this diet.”
Of course, my response is, “Yes, they will! Because we’re going to train them. We’re going to have them go through our clinic. We’re going to teach them all the things that we think are necessary for people to make changes, and we’re going to have them do it.”
Alright, give it a try! So independently, they analyzed what happened to our patients. They looked at the control group, which is in red—that’s the fat intake of the control group, which was 40% fat—and they maintained that 40% fat intake for the entire year.
The intervention group—the ones who were taught properly—and you can do the same thing any place: Los Angeles, Memphis, Miami, Florida, wherever you want. You can even do the same kind of education we have to do in Santa Rosa.
It’s nothing special. We just seriously taught these people how to eat well. We showed them what the foods were like. We explained to them clearly what supports good health and what doesn’t.
We didn’t give any moderation or sensibility. We just taught them exactly what to do, and they did! The results surprised everybody and should surprise you.
But this is what they found: the results are that the intervention group dropped their fat intake to 15% and maintained that fat intake for a year. In other words, they permanently changed their diet.
When you looked at people who changed 100%, they found over 80% of the people who went through the intervention changed their diet 100% and maintained that change for a year.
In other words, we permanently changed their diet in 80% of the people, and that’s what the results show. In addition, we showed an average weight loss, if you included everybody, of about 10 pounds that they maintained for a year.
Ten-pound permanent weight loss! If you took out the three or four people who just plain and simple in the intervention group said, “I’m not going to have anything to do with this,” and they dropped out early, if you take those people out, what you find is the average weight loss was nearly 20 pounds.
In other words, a permanent weight loss! These people didn’t come for weight loss; they came for multiple sclerosis. Yet at the end of the year, the average weight loss was 20 pounds.
Cholesterol drops. Here’s the control group. They drop their cholesterol. You see 186 to 180. They drop their cholesterol 6 points. The intervention group—they came from multiple sclerosis, not heart disease, not high cholesterol.
The intervention group dropped their cholesterol 19 points and maintained it for a year. Same thing with the bad cholesterol. Triglycerides stayed about the same, etc. Those are the results that we got.
Okay, so we have seven-day results, 7 to 10-day results, depending on which study you look at, on approximately 2,000 people. We’ve got one-year results from a randomized, reader-blinded—in other words, the person who was what was going on had no idea who changed the diet and who didn’t.
Properly done, it was as top of science as you could possibly put together because the reputations of the neurology department staff at Oregon Health and Science University depended upon doing the study correctly, and they did!
So we’ve got one-year results showing that people permanently change their diet and get permanent benefits. Now, I’ve been at this for almost 40 years, and I’ve had a chance to take care of many people.
I’m very, very proud of the fact that we made a positive difference in people’s lives. Just like many of you came up to me before the presentation and said, “I know you’re tired of hearing this, but I just want to tell you.”
Ladies and gentlemen, I never get tired of hearing this! I can’t tell you how good it feels to be a physician, to be part of an organization that can impart information to people that they seriously consider and do, you know, change their life.
So I’ve had a chance to take care of many people over the years. I could show you—I could show you a hundred people’s effects. You can go to my website and look at success stories, and what you’ll find are these results.
This is what you should expect. If you watch Jenny Craig or Weight Watchers commercials, they’ll tell you this is the best-case example. You shouldn’t expect this. I’m here to tell you this is what you should expect!
This is what happens when you stop food poisoning. Here’s a lady—this is actually six years ago. She changed her diet. I want you to notice not only did she lose weight, but she looks younger and more attractive.
This lady—this is kind of an interesting story. A newspaper reporter came to me about six months ago and said, “I want a story of a morbidly obese person—severely obese.” That means she had to have a BMI of more than 50%, and the person had to maintain successful weight loss for more than five years.
They came to me and went to organizations all over the world looking for one single case of somebody with massive obesity who maintained their weight loss for more than five years. Well, this lady showed up. She’s one of our patients.
She had a BMI of 51%, and this is her at 11 years. She’s actually at about 15 years now—permanent change! Permanently cured the problem, as essentially everybody does when they stop food poisoning.
It’s the guy from Hawaii who I’ve taken care of for—always been my patient for about eight years. This lady, 1991—so it’s been 23 years ago. She changed her diet. Not just trim, but notice they look younger and more attractive.
This lady wanted to go to Costa Rica with us for many years. She says, “I dreaded a family photo taken in January of 2007. It’s been a long time since I liked any of my pictures. Now I can’t pick one that I don’t like.”
She finally went to Costa Rica with us. This is a lady we took care of maybe 10 years ago. Not just lost weight; they look younger and more attractive.
This guy I took care of has been taking care of for 30 years. He weighed 450 pounds when I started taking care of him—on 25 different medications. You know, we could go on like this for a long time.
You’ve seen it. I know many of you say, “Well, you could put my picture up here.” Well, of course I could! It always happens when you stop the food poisoning. People always get well, and that’s the only way you can fix the problem.
You have to identify the food poisoning, and you have to stop it. Just like with tobacco, you can’t smoke two cigarettes a day. Just like with alcohol, you can’t switch to beer and wine and cure alcoholism. It doesn’t work!
The same thing with food poisoning. You have to identify the poison and replace it. This is food poisoning!
We just had—I told you that we had 70 people who left yesterday from Whole Foods Market. Employees of Whole Foods sent us, as they do, to three other immersion programs since patients every year to these programs.
Why do they do it? Because Whole Foods supermarket makes money doing this by having healthy employees. So on Thursday, they went to a Whole Foods Market. We took a rental bus. We took these 70 people to Whole Foods Market, and I did something I don’t often do.
Because many of them are meat cutters and, you know, cheese salespeople and so on at Whole Foods, but I just happened to be in that mood on Thursday when they were going to Whole Foods Market. I said to them, “Okay, now you’re going to go see Whole Foods Market. You’ve probably never looked at your market this way before. Go to the fruit and vegetables and just kind of look around and smell and see how you feel about it.”
I said, “Then walk down the meat aisle and do the same thing and tell me how you feel about it.” If you haven’t done it, if you’re not there yet, you will be someday. You will be nauseated and sickened by the time you get to the end of the meal.
That’s what they told me. They said they never saw it that way, but that’s exactly how they felt about it. They felt nauseated and sickened as they got to the end of the meal for a very good reason.
This isn’t your food! This is food poisoning! My cat, Einstein, who has Tony bought a few minutes ago—if I took Einstein to Whole Foods or Safeway and walked him down the meat aisle, he’d be over the counter after the butcher and into this food because that’s his food!
Food poisoning! This is food poisoning! I don’t know whether you find this attractive or not, but my guess is you don’t. In fact, my guess is you couldn’t eat this.
We’re not going to do any tests, but my guess is you couldn’t eat it. You’d ask me to quit thoroughly and disguise the taste with barbecue sauce, steak sauce, ketchup, something. You’d ask me to sweeten it, something. You’d ask me to put over this so that it would cover up the taste.
I’ll bet you would! Now, Einstein, he just said, “Fine with that, just like it is.” In fact, I have to tell you, every two or three days, Einstein brings one of these to our back door, usually still with some feathers on it, or he brings a little mouse or something because that’s his food!
This is food poisoning! I know some of you don’t recognize that as that, but I wish you would! In addition to it innately being food poisoning because it’s food that is really tough on your body, it’s also full of methyl mercury.
In fact, it’s probably the only chance the fish have is they’re so sickened with environmental contaminants that people should fear them. Food poisoning!
Just take a look at this and see how you react to these foods. Not much to it, is it? Yellow and brown food? Okay, the only way I can get people to eat this—and I talked to the folks who are in the cheese departments at Whole Foods—the only way you can get people to eat this is you have to load it with salt.
I know this! When I was a resident back in my training 35 years ago, one of my jobs when I was on the kidney service was I had to get the kidney patients to eat saltless cheese and saltless butter. After thorough instruction, I’d come back the next day, and they’d look at me and say, “Doc, you’ve got to be kidding! That’s just a glob of grease!”
You can’t get it down unless you load it with salt and sugar. Food poisoning!
This is food poisoning! And I want you to recognize it. It may be a step better than the original muscle or secretion, but only a tiny step better. And these are the fake foods.
Many of you are into the fake meats, the fake burgers, the fake hotdogs, the fake cheeses. There’s still food poisoning! You’re not going to get well by switching to these fake foods.
This is food poisoning! Think about this! I can’t say it too many times. Do you think about this? The fat goes someplace! The fat you eat is the fat you wear!
Like the Nelson twins and Willie—all over their face, and they end up growing bacteria that make horrible acne. So it goes on the skin, and it goes onto the skin.
There is nothing especially attractive about wearing olive oil around your waist or in your buttocks or thighs. It isn’t any prettier than pig fat!
Okay, one of the reasons that we’re still involved in this food poisoning and so massive all over the world—this isn’t just a problem in the United States. I told you I was in India seven weeks ago.
The people in India are suffering from massive food poisoning, particularly the wealthy people: type 2 diabetes, obesity, breast cancer. I haven’t been to China, but I hear reports of China. What’s happening there over the last thirty years?
Thirty years ago, fewer than 1% of the population in China had type 2 diabetes. Now, what they reported last year in the Journal of the American Medical Association is 12% of the Chinese have diabetes, and 50% are pre-diabetic.
Yeah, this mass of food poisoning continues because of marketing. It’s not a conspiracy! I just want you to know that this is business.
The reason that this continues with your friends and relatives is because business is acting like business. What business does is it tries to sell its products, and one of the ways that a business sells its products is to find something special about its product and then market it to death—in this case, your death.
It’s called unique positioning. They touch something special about their particular car or computer or fax machine, or in this case, food. They take something special about it, and they just advertise its death!
Like automobiles these days, the special thing about an automobile these days is the fact that it gets 54 miles per gallon. You know, it’s designed to be fuel-efficient, and they are!
But most of them are designed very flimsy, very lightweight, and if you get in an auto accident, you’re much more likely to be killed in one of these light cars than in a more traditional heavy car. But that’s not what they advertise!
The fact that you and your family may be crushed to death, they advertise the fact that it gets 54 miles to the gallon. It’s just business!
And so it is with the food industry. They just take something unique about their product and advertise it, whether or not it’s true. They’re not out there trying to hurt you. This is not a conspiracy!
They’re just trying to sell products. For example, in the food industry, they have taken one quality of their food. Let me give you an example: protein.
And they’ve advertised it to the point where everybody believes that you must eat meat to get protein. The first thing your friends will say to you when they find out you’re vegetarian or vegan is, “Where do you get your protein?”
I want to tell you, I have researched it thoroughly. I’ve studied the scientific literature that has been published over the last hundred years. I know it backwards and forwards. I want you to know that there is no such thing as dietary protein deficiency!
You have never had a friend or a relative who has suffered dietary protein deficiency. Dietary protein deficiency has never been reported in any circumstance—experimental, historically, any place on the planet. Never been reported!
In any diet that was sufficient in calories, it doesn’t exist! There’s no such thing as protein deficiency!
Okay, another position that a food company takes has to do with calcium. If I say calcium, you say, “No dairy! Cheese!” You must understand, you can research it yourself.
You have one of those little, you know, Blackberries or iPhones or computers. You can even do the research yourself. You will find out quickly that there has never been a report of dietary calcium deficiency ever on any diet that’s been sufficient in calories.
In other words, populations that live on rice, no dairy, you know, no calcium—never going to report it! There’s no such thing as dietary calcium deficiency!
Yet that’s the second thing that your friends will ask you when you tell them that you’re on a vegan diet: “Where do you get your calcium?”
Okay, now just one third example—the last example of unique positioning. If I say omega-3 fat, you say fish! Understand that no fish has ever made an omega-3 fat!
No animal can desaturate at the carbon 3 position to create an omega-3 fat. No cow, no pig, no sparrow, no fish, no lobster—they can’t do it! Only plants can desaturate at the carbon 3 position. Only plants can make omega-3 fats!
Yet everybody knows if you don’t eat fish, you’ll get omega-3 fatty acid deficiency. So here you have it. You have three warnings to you to not change your diet. If you do, you’ll become protein deficient, you’ll become calcium deficient, you’ll become omega-3 fat deficient.
You will accept that it’s never happened! There’s no such thing! It is not a conspiracy! Nobody’s trying to hurt you!
If it was a conspiracy, they wouldn’t find this alignment where we’d see farmers not having heart attacks. We’d see butchers not having their wives get breast cancer. We would see pork farmers not having constipated kids.
You see, they would take all this information about good eating, and they would keep it to themselves in their family and let all you get sick—all of us get sick. That’s not what happens!
These farmers, these marketers, they’re just as sick as everybody else! Everybody is living under this delusion, this misinformation.
Until you understand that a starch-based diet with fruits and vegetables supplies all the calcium, all the vitamins, all the minerals, all the essential fats, all the everything you need, you’re impaired in your ability to solve food poisoning.
When you look around the world—and this is the theme of the book that I wrote and published in 2011 called The Starch Solution—you’ll find that all large successful populations of people throughout all of verifiable human history have obtained the bulk of their calories from starch.
As I told you, the Chinese before 1980—nobody was obese! Fewer than 1% of the population had type 2 diabetes. 90% of their calories came from rice. It’s because they gave up the rice that they’re fat and sick today!
So you have the Asians living on rice. You have the Mayans and the Aztecs in Central America living on corn. You have the Incas in South America living on potatoes.
Every time you turn on the news in the evening, you see stories about Egypt and Iraq and Iran and Afghanistan. That part of the world is known as the breadbasket of the world. These people, for thousands of years, lived on bread.
As people have in Western Europe, but all of a sudden, bread is evil! Starch makes you fat! How did that happen?
So the diet that has always been consumed—the diet you need to consume—is a diet based on starch, with the addition of fruits and vegetables. That’s the human diet!
I wrote the book called The Starch Solution. It’s the last word book I’m going to write. Instead, I’ve written this color picture book for you.
Now, I could go back over those pictures I showed you—the beef and the chicken and the fish and the butter and so on. Just remember the images that went through your mind. Those are the things you have to give up—the yellow and the brown food, the tastes of grease.
Well, then the tastes of salt and sugar because they’re high, trying to hide the disgusting or bland taste. What you have to do is you have to substitute those food poisons for these foods.
See how you react to these pictures. This is how you solve food poisoning! We served these yesterday morning before the folks went home from their Whole Foods immersion program.
They loved the pancakes! This even went over well in India! I tell people when they come to the program—either they come to the 10-day program or they come to the immersion—I served pea soup, which is made of peas and potatoes and carrots and various kinds of vegetables.
I tell them, “Do you like the pea soup?” They say, “Oh yeah, I love the pea soup!” I tell them, “You can go home after the program, and you can live on pea soup and water for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the next 18 years. You’ll be in phenomenal health!”
You don’t have to make a big deal out of this. You can make up a dish like this and eat it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, 14 times a day, seven days a week. Just live on these kinds of foods. They have everything you need!
I’m sure you find this attractive—oh, mashed potatoes! If it wasn’t for mashed potatoes, I wouldn’t be standing here right now! I was a very sick kid. I grew up in a family—my mother, she was from the Depression era. She had to live on potatoes and rutabagas and, you know, really basic stuff during the Depression.
They lived on the verge of starvation, my mother did, and my father. As life got better, one of the promises they made to their children was they’d never have to suffer like they did, and we didn’t!
At seven, I was severely constipated and lost my tonsils. As a teenager, I had the same kind of skin and acne problems the girls had. At 18, I had a massive stroke. At 24, I had major abdominal surgery. At 22, my mother called me fat.
I’m 158 pounds now. I topped out at about 228. Yeah, but I didn’t suffer like my mom did. No, I didn’t! But she did!
They crash-grate mashed potatoes! This is my point. My mother would make for Bill, my brother, who, by the way, as a doctor, was out helping us last week with this Whole Foods immersion program.
She’d make this great mashed potatoes with peas and corn. She’d put a brown gravy over the top. I know the brown gravy wasn’t made healthy then, but it is now, and it’s still one of my favorite dishes!
I could live on mashed potatoes and peas and corn and brown gravy three times a day! That’s the meal we had Friday night as a graduation meal for the people at Whole Foods—was mashed potatoes!
You can live on sweet potatoes in water. You can live on potatoes and water. You don’t need anything else! Potatoes are known as the anti-scurvy vegetable.
People have, by the millions, lived on potatoes and water alone. That’s all they had! In South America, millions of people—that’s all they had! In Poland and Russia, 114 years ago, that’s all they had!
Post-World War II Germany, that’s all they had! Fortunately, that’s all you need! All the nutrients you need—all the nutrients you require—you can get from sweet potatoes and water alone or potatoes and water alone!
Now, you can’t do that with seeds. You can’t live on a grain like rice or rye or barley or wheat or legumes like beans, peas, and lentils and water alone. You can’t do it!
The reason is that they’re deficient in vitamins A and C. So to live on a diet of rice, you would have to add a slice of orange a day or a flower of broccoli a day to get your A and C.
Otherwise, you could live on rice or barley or wheat or barley and beans like the gladiators did. You just have to have a little bit of fruit and vegetable A, the A and C.
But if you don’t want to go to that trouble, just eat potatoes in water! You’ll be fine! The staff of life—bread! Bread is an evil food!
Well, excuse me! For 10,000 years, people have lived on bread as the primary source of calories! It’s the staff of life! There’s something wrong when it is one of the most feared foods ever!
One of the foods I like best about this picture—do you like this? Are you naturally attracted to this? Do you call this comfort food? You do!
Why do you like this? Because it’s your food! That’s what you’re supposed to eat! That’s why you react positively to this!
I should never mix this with some of the beef and chicken. You remember this? This is all food poisoning! We prefer brown rice. If you come to our clinic, we only serve brown rice.
You come to Hawaii with us in January—we’re going to take 140 people to Hawaii. We do this once a year, and we take about 140 people to Costa Rica. We have not only brown rice, but we also have white rice.
This is a vacation! White rice is not a deal breaker—not preferred. You’re better off with brown, but you’ll do just fine!
I mean, up until 1982, a billion Asians lived on white rice without a case of obesity! You could stand in a town square in Thailand or Vietnam or Cambodia. You could talk—I stood in a town square with a hundred thousand other people. There wouldn’t be a single fat person on white rice!
The deal? Kale! White rice, preferably brown!
So you carry food poisoning. These are not soy burgers! Do you know what they are? Grain burgers!
Alright, so you see all the green lights. My grandsons could clearly tell green. This is what you’re supposed to eat. Red for the other ones—that’s what you’re supposed to eat.
And then some fruits—you can have some fruits! Don’t—one, two, three, four fruits a day’s plenty! You could eat more! A lot of simple sugar—not very satisfying for very long! Very tasty!
Do you need that starch? It’s the center of your meal plan to last you through, to give you the long, sustained energy, the endurance that you need. You’ve got to have that starch!
Fruit isn’t going to quite do it. You can try! I’m not going to hurt you! Have a few green and yellow vegetables—a few, not much!
You’ve tried! It didn’t work! You need to be careful about soy products. We do serve some soy products. On the first Friday night of the program, we serve lasagna.
People think, “Well, that’s fake cheese you put on a lasagna.” No, it’s not! It’s a little tofu ricotta that Mary makes. We use traditional soy products, like a little cooked soybean—edamame.
We will serve a little bit of tofu—not a lot, just as a garnish. So you can have some tofu, some soybeans. They’re a little high-fat, a little high-protein. I don’t think they should be the center of your diet, but as a condiment, they’re fine.
Nuts and seeds—you can eat some nuts and seeds unless you want to lose weight. If you live on nuts and seeds, you’re going to be what is known as a fat vegan.
Am I speaking to anybody here? Probably not! Nuts and seeds are not unhealthy; they’re just rich! 80-90% of the calories are fat!
Nuts and seeds used to be a delicacy! When I was growing up in my family, we had mixed nuts once a year at Christmas. My dad would buy a five-pound bag of mixed nuts, and that’s what a six McDougall’s did!
We took this steel players-like contraption, a nutcracker, we cracked the nuts, and we took a little pick, and we dug them out. It took us seven days, the six of us, to eat a five-pound bag!
Today, nuts are a matter of just—they’re gone! And as a result, there are a lot of well-intended people who are taking in a diet 70, 80, 90% fat by living on nuts and seeds.
They’re not unhealthy; they’re just too rich! You’re not going to accomplish the weight loss you’re looking for, so be careful with the nuts and seeds. You see the caution sign there?
Okay, be careful! And avocados—90% fat! Be careful! They’re okay; they’re healthy, but they’re fattening!
And dried fruits—maybe something you want to add. We often take care of people who are athletically inclined. They need extra calories. Dried fruits would be a good way to get any extra calories.
But if you’re trying to lose weight, the dried fruits should be kept to a minimum. Be careful! And fruit juice—it’s okay! I mean, the body’s tough!
It’ll put up with fruit juice! Consider the body’s put up with two packs of cigarettes, a half a bottle of whiskey, and hot dogs, and it’ll live!
It’ll live on fruit juice, but not as well as it would on the fruit or the vegetable. You don’t make a fruit and vegetable healthier by hitting it a thousand times with a steel blade!
Don’t kid yourself! But what people are thinking is they’re thinking this: “If I take and pulverize my fruits and vegetables, I’ll get more nutrients.”
You don’t need more nutrients! You’re not suffering from nutrient deficiencies! There’s not a person in here with scurvy or beriberi or pellagra or calcium or fat or any deficiency!
The people—not necessarily in this room, but not in the lobby there as you walk out—these are people suffering from food poisoning from excess!
You don’t need more nutrients! If you want a few fruit drinks here and there, fine! Better to eat your fruits whole and vegetables whole!
Spices and salt and sugar—we use salt, sugar, and spice. Many of you think of these as food poisonings. Yeah, but not like oil and wine, like animal foods. Those are the ones that are really sickening you and your family!
You have to focus on something to solve your problems. Focus on the animal foods and the oils—the salt, the sugar, the spices. Well, maybe not exactly health food, but then again, there might be!
And they sure make the difference as to whether you’re going to eat the food or not! That’s the main reason that we use a little salt, sugar, and spice in the food.
I want you to eat the food! I want you to like your starches! If I make them salt-free, chances are you’re not going to like them. If I put a little bit of salt in the food, I bet you’re going to like it!
People love salt naturally! You’re designed as a salt seeker! Remember the tip of your tongue? It has taste buds that taste salt and sugar with pleasure!
That wasn’t a mistake! Nature did not make a mistake by designing us that way! We have sugar-sensitive taste buds, which cause us to go out and get sugar before in the form of rice and corn and sweet potatoes and potatoes and fruits and maybe a little honey and a little maple syrup.
Of course, now everything is loaded with sugar because industry knows how much we love sugar! You’re designed as a sugar seeker!
You should be eating sugar, preferably in its whole natural form! I can trick you into really liking the food if I put a little simple sugar around the top of it!
At the program, we serve oatmeal, and we also serve brown sugar. Mary eats her oatmeal with brown sugar. I eat mine plain. Mary looks pretty good!
If you put a little simple sugar on your pancakes, you know, on your potatoes, on your other foods in the form of ketchup, in the form of a little brown sugar, white sugar, maple syrup, or agave—whatever you want to call it—you will trick yourself into loving the food, and you will eat it, and you will solve food poisoning from the animals and the oils!
We also use a little bit of salt—a little salt! The tongue, remember, tastes with pleasure! Salt! Traditionally, we were taught, “Don’t eat salt! It’s bad for you!”
Lately, however, the Cochrane Collaboration, the Ann Haynes study, the Journal of the American Medical Association—various big scientific research organizations have come out. I mean, as recently as six weeks ago, there was an editorial in The New York Times saying that too low salt may not be good for you!
And it makes sense to me! Too little salt may not be good for you! I know I’ve been traditionally taught to prescribe a low-salt diet. I learned from Walter Kepner at Duke University, who served his patients a diet of white rice, sugar, fruit, and fruit juice.
That’s always served low salt! It was the key to the Kepner diet! I was raised in that kind of environment, thinking that salt was really important to eliminate.
But I’ve got every thought that I don’t know that’s so good for us to be on such a low-salt diet! I think there’s pretty good evidence to say that we should be taking a little salt!
We have the taste buds for salt on the tip of our tongue! They’re not a mistake! The New York Times editorial of about six weeks ago—you’ll find it in the Sunday editorial—says that we should be eating somewhere between 3 and 6 grams of salt a day.
The diet we serve is about a half to 1 gram, and then we have people put about a half a teaspoon of salt on the surface of the food. So our diet is about 2 grams less than the 3 grams that’s recommended by some people these days.
It’s a relatively low-salt diet, but it’s salty enough so that you like the food! I want you to eat the food! If you put a little sugar and salt on the surface of the food, you get great pleasure with very little of these traditionally thought of as evil substances!
Now, you put your favorite spices! Spices can burn! They do! Some people don’t like the idea of adding spice. I remember my Korean patients I used to take care of when I was a plantation doctor 35 years ago.
They would come in, and they’d say, “Doc, you know this kimchi? I really love my kimchi, but Doc, when is the burning going to stop?”
Doc, spices burn! They do! But they also make the food very enjoyable! You can make a starch-based meal plan as tasty as any other meal plan out there!
That’s where the enjoyment is! That’s the only reason you can eat the meat is because you put sugar and salt and spice on it in the form of barbecue sauce!
Hey, wants to! Otherwise, you couldn’t eat it! You could take these same flavorings that allow you to eat something that’s designed for my cat, and you can put them over potatoes and sweet potatoes and corn and rice and so on and make a very tasty meal plan!
Vitamins—don’t take vitamin supplements! They’re toxic! Taking these multi—even one of the multivitamin supplements—the Cochrane Collaboration says for every 1 million multivitamin supplement users, there are 9,000 extra deaths!
The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, the American Heart Association—every organization that I know of