Water Fasting Scientist: Surprising Link Between Fasting & Cancer! Fasting Completely Resets Your Gut Microbiome!

Some people think nature is like this but actually it's like this That's why Columbia engineers everything we make for anything nature can throw at you Columbia engineered for whatever this is the most effective treatment That's ever been shown in treating the leading cause of death and disability which is high blood pressure It also reduces insulin resistance it can enhance cognitive capacities And you also see it affecting things like depression and anxiety It's called fasting and there's more fasting introduces not just a chance to lose weight It also mobilizes visceral fat, which is the fat around the belly and the organs Which is giving off inflammatory products that's causing heart disease cancer diabetes and many people are maintaining higher visceral fat Than what they should be so I've spent 40 years helping people get healthy And I can tell you that I think you should be fasting every day So tell me about that then but also isn't the game here just to not eat as much well here's the problem Dr. Alan Goldhammer is a pioneering physician who spent his life helping thousands of people reverse chronic disease eliminate medication and Re-claim their health using one of the most ancient healing tools known to humanity Today we live in a world designed to make you fat sick and miserable or 76% of people are overweight Or obese and where people think that health comes from pills, potions and powders and yet most of us are Bigger and the proven health benefits of fasting in fact And if you look at all of the chemical changes that happened with exercise they also happen to fast things like increase in BD and F I'm neurochemical protecting the brain from Alzheimer's disease I'm what about water fasting so people that have not been successful resolving their conditions with medications including patients with Holicistic or variance syndrome have been profoundly affected by water fasting and we'll go through Babel is research but one thing you want to realize is that all human beings have the capacity to fast Okay, so let's run through the unique selling points versus any other diet or intervention. Let's go Just give me 30 seconds of your time Two things I wanted to say the first thing is a huge thank you for listening and tuning into the show Week after week means the world to all of us and this really is a dream that we absolutely never had and couldn't have imagined getting to this place But secondly, it's a dream where we feel like we're only just getting started and if you enjoy what we do here Please join the 24% of people that listen to this podcast regularly and follow us on this app Here's a promise I'm going to make to you I'm going to do everything in my power to make this show as good as I can now and into the future We're going to deliver the guests that you want me to speak to and we're going to continue to keep doing all of the things you love about this show Thank you Dr Alan Goldhammer My first question is who are you and what have you spent the last four decades of your life doing and why I've spent my entire life Really focused on one topic and that's this idea that you know health results from healthful living I got interested really young I was in elementary school and I had decided that I wanted to pursue this as a Career and when I finished training in the United States I had an opportunity to go to Australia and I studied with a guy named Alec Burton who was the world's leading expert in the use of Medically supervised water only fasting and I saw things there that weren't supposed to be happening people were getting better I saw people with chronic diseases like high blood pressure Resolving their hypertension getting off the medications and so we began to carefully evaluate patients with hypertension In this study 174 consecutive patients with high blood pressure and 174 people normalize their blood pressure without the need for medication After we published that paper we went on and we've published a couple dozen papers now on The use of diet and fasting the literature and we've written a book it's called Confasting Savory Life Which summarizes our work and other people's work on this use of fasting to help the body do what it really does Bastion which is heal itself if you get out of the way so fasting that the word has become incredibly popular But there's a variety of different types of fasting So what is the type of fasting that you spend most of your time doing working on administering to patients? Well fastings the complete abstinence of all substances in an environment of complete rest So what does that mean that means that means that you're actually resting while you're fasting in order to get therapeutic fasting to be Most effective and the reason is if you're very active when you're fasting your body has to produce more glucose in order to carry on the extra muscular and brain activity and the only way that it does that after a glycogen Reserves are depleted is through a process called gluconeogenesis where the body breaks down lean tissue So when you're fasting if your goal is to maximize fat loss and Minimize the in tissue loss. It's important that resting be a part of the protocol It's true if people are more active when they're fasting. They'll lose more weight But that extra weight won't be fat. It'll be lean tissue So so what happens to the body when someone fasts and can you give me like an hour by hour? Or play by play in terms of what actually is the sort of physiological sequence of events that are beneficial for one's health So it's a really interesting fairly well-studied and complex physiological adaptation that human beings make to fasting Normally your brain burns glucose, which is why I get if I have a piece of rad or a bar of chocolate or if you break down protein Which can also break down into glucose, which is what happens after 24 hours of fasting You've depleted your glycogen stores your sugar stores in your muscles And so then the body in order to get the glucose that needs has to either convert to burning fat or break down muscle in order to form glucose what the human being does is it converts its main burner of glucose, which is the brain From burning sugar to burning fat now if it didn't do that You could fast about a week you'd enter starvation to complete your protein stores, and you'd starve to death Because you can convert your brain to burning fat instead of sugar a 70 kilogram male can fast about 70 days Now that doesn't mean they should fast 70 days, but they could fast up to 70 days because your main burner of glucose your brain Will convert to burning a completely different fuel, which is fat So let me see if I've got this correct. So if I'm tipped on a typical American diet I'm gonna be eating lots of things and my body's gonna be breaking that down into this fuel source called glucose If I stop eating the glucose my body has this sort of evolutionary switch Where it's gonna stop burning my fat and turning that into this thing called ketones, which my brain can run on as well That's correct and you have about 24 hours of glycogen stores or sugar stores in your in your muscles in your liver So when you stop eating for the first 24 hours, you're still able to produce glucose from your glycogen stores But once you've depleted your glycogen stores now you're stuck you either burn fat or you break down lean tissue Now because the human brain is so ridiculously large I mean, it's two and a half times a chimferant just it's a huge Glucose burning machine you had to have a way of Being able to use some kind of other fuel for that brain otherwise the first time spring comes late all the human beings would have died And so this biological adaptation was clearly important for our survival in Large part because we have disproportionately large brains that burn you know ridiculous amounts of glucose just because the body does it as a Survival mechanism doesn't posit that it's necessarily healthy though, right? Absolutely And what we've done though is we've taken this biological adaptation which by definition would be you know something the body's capable of doing Safely and efficiently and utilizing it in a very unusual situation and that's where people have consistently been exposed to dietary access You know in the world of our ancient ancestors getting enough to eat not getting eaten was the biological imperative of life It was difficult to get enough to eat in fact most human beings that were born modern humans Probably didn't live to reproduce. They didn't pass on their DNA. We're the results of the winners You know most people starvation predation had all kinds of challenges that would prevent people from reaching reproductive age Taking a biological adaptation something that's natural to the body and applying in a situation where people had Consistent exposure to dietary access. We say dietary access. You mean too much calories too much calories In fact the disease is that we suffer today the heart disease the diabetes the autoimmune diseases some of the cancer These used to be rare conditions that were called the diseases of kings It was the wealthy elite kings that could consistently over eat that would get the gout that would get the heart disease These weren't common conditions that were present for the peasants these were Rarified conditions they've become common conditions because now people are consistently being exposed to dietary access and more importantly We're fooling our brain satiety mechanisms into overeating by putting chemicals in our food and as the consequence We have a situation today where 76% of people are overweight or obese and the extra fat comes with something called this role fat It's the fat that tends to accumulate around the belly in the organs and it's Pro and flammage for a hyper metabolic hypertrophic it acts like a tumor You have people walking around there Maybe they have 20 pounds of extra out-of-post tissue They have two pounds of visceral fat and that visceral fat is giving off inflammatory products that's causing heart disease Cancer diabetes autoimmune diseases and what's weird is these conditions are treated as if they're completely independent Related conditions you have to go to a different kind of doctor to be even diagnosed and treated with these conditions And yet they all seem to be associated with dietary access excess fat excess visceral fat and the inflammation that's associated with that visceral fat Let's run through what happens inside the body when I start fasting and then I want to I want to talk about Fasting and a little bit more specifics But what's what's going on in the body? So you said in the first sort of 24 hours 48 hours my body is going to switch from using glucose as a fuel source to ketones It's going to predominantly shift the brain and liver muscles are going to begin shifting. There's it's a progression depending on your glycogen stores So that you know within 16 hours 24 hours up to 48 hours in that transition you'll be going from burning almost exclusively glucose in the brain to burning predominantly byproducts of fat metabolism ketones and specifically beta hydroxybutyric acid is that basically ketones ketones break down into different components beta hydroxybutyric acid becomes the predominant fuel of the brain It's a byproduct of fat metabolism Okay, and though higher your beta hydroxybutyric acid is the more BDNF is produced BDNF brain drive neurotrophic factors Neurochemical that's thought to be protective in the brain from oxidative damage so that can result in things like Alzheimer's disease and dementia You know and they do rat studies rats in the cage 30 rats both cages everything's identical. They give half the rats a wheel The rats with the wheel will run on the wheel and they don't get Alzheimer's disease and they said why what is it about the exercise that's preventing these rats from getting oxidative damage in their brain that results in dementia or Alzheimer's type disease and they found it was BDNF is dramatically higher with exercise It also goes up with fasting In fact, it's interesting if you look at all the cardiometabolic improvements that happen with exercise the chemical changes that they They also happen with fasting and that's not intuitively obvious because in fasting You know you're resting and exercise your vigorous and you might say what do these two seemingly unrelated phenomena have in common and what I think is going on is that both exercise and fasting Undo the consequences of dietary excess They reduce the fat specifically the visceral fat and the inflammation that leads to all these different diseases And so every time you look at the benefits of exercise you oftentimes see these corollaries with fasting And at some point in this fasting process you'll bring your body moves into a state of autophagy. I've heard that word a few times Yeah, what what is that so autophagy or autophagy is how the body gets rid of senescent cells and waste products and cancer cells and you know it kind of eats up that debris and does the housekeeping And there's some things that increase autophagy and one of those things is fasting You know if you take rodents for example and you let them eat ad libidum they live libidum as much as they want they they will Live to a certain amount of time If you take those rats and you periodically fast them you can increase their lifespan from 30% to 100% Even though the diets the same just with periodic fasting or with systematic underfeeding if you limit instead of giving them as much to eat as they want You feed them at 60% of what they would eat if they ate unlimited amounts and you can dramatically increase their lifespan It's and it's an interesting way of Looking at it from my viewpoint though. They're looking at it wrong. It's not that fasting Double your lifespan. It's overfeeding cuts it in half By overfeeding the rodents they're developing fat visceral fat They get the inflammation and you cut their lifespan in half So what fasting is doing is allowing them to live their full span by getting rid of the consequences of dietary access So isn't the game here then just to not eat as much The versus fasting absolutely the idea is to avoid Excess intake that results in excess fat that results in excess visceral fat The problem is it's very difficult to do that when they are putting chemicals in your feed that fool your satiety mechanisms and lead to overeating So tiny mechanisms being mechanisms that tell you whether you're hungry or not right whether your brain Signals you accurately that the amount of calories you have if you for example Just sit down and and eat your fill of whole plant foods you eat a certain amount and then you feel full But if you put certain chemicals in the feed you'll eat significantly more before you trigger those satiety mechanisms and feel full Those chemicals that we put in our food are salt, oil, and sugar Salt, oil, and sugar are not food. They're hyper concentrated components derived from food They're put back into food and we put them into food to make food taste better And what tasting better actually means is it results in more stimulation of dopamine in your brain Dopamine is the neurochemical associate with pleasure the more dopamine the more pleasure the more you like it And so it turns out that higher chloric density foods or foods that have Chemicals like salt, oil, and sugar and the food will stimulate more dopamine in the brain And that's because your brain evolved in an environment of scarcity It involved where it was difficult to get enough to eat and avoid being eaten And so richer foods had more value and so that people that recognize the value of more concentrated foods tend to live to reproduce and pass on their DNA Today we live in a world where we've Corrupted the whole system and so now we have unlimited amounts of hyper concentrated foods with these chemicals like salt, oil, and sugar So when you eat those foods you will overate the only question is how much and what are the consequences? Should we be intermittent fasting or should we just be restricting on calories? Are they the same thing? Well, there's different tools available to allow for us to eat ad libidam but still Meet optimum nutritional intake one tool is intermittent fasting That is or time restricted feeding which we've practiced for 40 years Which is basically don't eat three to four hours before you go to bed at night So instead of eating right up to the time you go to sleep you with whole calories after the last meal so that you have three to four hours of fasting Every day that gives you a 12 hour fast Every day and if you're trying to lose weight Some people believe you could extend that fasting period in other four hours in the morning Do some exercise in the morning preferentially burning fat And so that would give you a 16 hour fast and limit your feeding window to eight hours And what's the benefit of some people find by limiting the feeding window They can limit some of the overeating that a lot of eating is being done for reasons other than being hungry Sometimes people at night, you know, they've had a big dinner and now they're eating additional food Not necessarily because they're hungry because they're bored. They're tired or they're fatigued And sometimes when they're fatigued and they eat and they feel stimulated They think oh, they must have been hungry when in reality they were tired Our suggestion is when you're tired go to sleep And when you're bored you know engage in productive activities and when you're hungry then you eat And if you limit your feeding window to eight hours Some people find that it's a helpful tool of minimizing some of the overeating Now, it's not going to work for everybody if you have very high cleric needs, you know, you're a competitive athlete Eight hours of feeding window Particularly on high nutrient density low cleric density foods may not give you enough feeding window In order to get the calories that you need when you're trying to burn 3500 to 4000 calories a day On very low cleric density foods you may need to have a 12 hour feeding window In order to be able to get the calorie Density need but for most of us that are trying to maintain or lose weight having a narrow feeding window Are may prove to be of of some benefit when i'm in a ketogenic diet or when i guess I'm fasted which is very rare Why is it that my cognitive performance seems to be significantly better because when i people have heard me say this so many times But it's so true when i'm eating, you know, a normal western diet My ability to articulate myself and think can be creative seems to be diminished Whereas when i'm avoiding carbohydrates um and sugar I seem to be able to think and talk better I think again, it may not be that the ketones are helping you think better It may be that the sugar vacillations are are interfering with your cognitive function For example when people eat particularly refined carbohydrates Their insulin levels go up drive the sugar down then put low blood sugar levels which can interfere with cognitive function As a consequence of this vacillation that's taking place with their blood sugar levels between insulin and glucose When you go on a ketogenic type of an approach or you're in a fasting state Your everything's very stable as far as glucose is concerned and insulin is concerned Okay, so you don't want to be on the sugar road or coaster if you you're doing important work Getting stable seems to help people in their cognitive function so People talk a lot about juice fasting And i don't know there's something about when people say that they're on a juice fast I always think god you're going to be missing important nutrients You're not going to be getting the same quantity of protein necessarily Maybe i don't know you've got microbiomes going to pay the price if you're restricting yourself from having certain things Is juice fasting advisable? Is it a healthy approach? So juice fasting isn't technically fasting because fasting is the complete abstinence of all substances It's a it's a modified form of eating So it's a diet that's high in sugar very low in fiber Virtually no fiber on on these juices Where it can be helpful is people that are trying to make dietary changes and they're addicted to the artificial Stimulation of dopamine their brain that comes from the use of their highly refined diets They're trying to make a change or trying to make a break and because it's sweet in very appealing They'll drink the juices. They'll get their six or eight hundred calories. They'll feel relatively satiated And it allows them to avoid the greasy fatty processed foods that sometimes they're trying to get away from Personally, I think that water fasting has advantages over juice fasting in terms of the magnitude of the detoxifying effect the impact that it has But the advantages the juice fasting or what they call juice fasting is that it can be done without modifying medications You're still in a feeding physiology It can be done safely by people without having to be in a controlled setting like you would for water fasting So there's advantages to the intermittent or modified fasting Approaches. It's not the basis of the research that we've published Which is actually water only fasting. We're fasting people and water only from five to 40 days Five to 40 days. So tell me about that then. So who exactly would you prescribe a 40-day water fast? And presumably in those 40 days they have nothing but water Right patients that are fasting in our Facility are on a fractionally steamed distilled water only That's the only thing they take. They're not taking supplements medications That's fractionally. But you know distilled water. So it's purified water highly purified water So in our case we're using distillation some people use reverse osmosis different ways of getting all the hydrogenated Helicarbons and the chlorine and everything out of the water So just essentially what rainwater would be if the environment wasn't polluted. Okay Now in fairness not everybody's a good candidate for that type of Fasting in order to determine if you're a good candidate obviously you have to review the medical history and make take a look at what people are doing in terms of their Medical treatment particularly in terms of medications Basic laboratory testing to make sure kidney and liver function are intact or capable of adapting to fasting And when people fast they need to rest if people are active. We've already mentioned they'll increase their weight loss But that way it'll be derived from breaking down lean tissue We want to minimize lean tissue maximize fat particularly visceral fat It's also important that they be monitored because people do have issues that can be Aggravated by fasting fasting presents a dehydration response. There's a physiological dehydration that occurs with fasting There's changes in electrolytes So you need to make sure that people are being monitored appropriately And then the most important part probably is they need to be re-fread Progressively So yeah, so when when they're eating after the fast if they go back to two rapid refeeding you can get into problem with post-fasting and teammate You can get refeeding syndrome that could be a very serious or even potentially You know fatal problem that can be completely avoided by following a reasonable protocol of a re-alimentation after fasting Which we is is the reason why we encourage patients that are doing fasting to do it either in a controlled setting or under Some supervision so that they don't make a catastrophic errors in terms of how they do it when it's that length When it's long well Water fasting we're doing fasting anywhere from five to 40 days So anywhere in that range you want to make sure the person's a good candidate That they're fasting in a controlled setting that they rest and they refeed properly So a person that has to say a 20-day fast would have 10 days of controlled refeeding It'll take about half the length of the fast to properly Re-aliment after the fast so that you're ready to go back to hopefully a whole plant food SOS for you type diet And when you say SOS you mean sugar cell and oil for context yeah SOS is the international symbol of danger But it also stands for the chemicals added to food that make people fat second miserable and those are salt oil and sugar What kind of candidate would come to your clinic to do a five to 40-day water fast? What are the symptoms they have? What are the diseases illnesses that they're suffering with? Well, we get a variety of people in ages The conditions we see are often the conditions that we've published papers on because those that's what people know us for So one of the most common conditions is high blood pressure We did a study with our colleague T. Colin Campbell as I mentioned 74 people in a row were able to achieve normal blood pressure without medication We also did a prospective study recently with a colleague from the Mayo Clinic recently that we did 20 Seven people completed fasting with hypertension 26 were able to achieve normal blood pressure without any medication One required half their dose of medication And we had six we fobs where they did well and then we swallowed them at a year And we found that 76% of those people a year later had maintained their weight loss in the majority were still normal blood pressure without medication. Were they still fasting after you? No, of course they were fasting while they were at the center They were back eating a healthy diet and they maintained a healthy enough diet for a year Okay, but they were able to maintain their blood pressure and their weight loss And that's very unusual because you don't find good long-term follow-up showing that people are not only able to get well Sustain those behavioral changes. So it was more of it's more of an intervention In that regard and how long were they fostered for these people? So the people in that study ranged the average fasting was about two weeks So they had two weeks of fasting that normalize their blood pressure a week of refeeding And then even a year later they the majority were able to sustain the behavioral changes such that they're able to keep their weight off And they're able to keep their blood pressure down without the need for medication I'm what's going on neck because there's physiological changes that take place If I went into a 40-day water fast with you there's some physiological things that can happen Of course, I'm going to go into ketosis. My fat's going to start to become my primary fuel source But there's also going to be a Physiocycological Relationship there's going to be something that happens in my psychology. I mean you talked about dopamine There's going to my brain is going to change in some respect my relationship with food is going to shift in some respect Absolutely if you look at the Outcome data for example, we've got studies we've done with dexascanners that look at body composition changes during fasting And so people that would lose say fast for two weeks would lose 10% of their total body weight 20% of their total fat But 40% of their visceral fat visceral fat being the bad fight inside Yeah, that's the 10% of fat that produces the inflammation that's thought to contribute to disease Those same people would have only lost 6% of their lean tissue Now what's interesting tissue like muscle water, you know non-fat tissue Yeah, so the lean tissue mass at six weeks was fully recovered So that the percentage of their lean mass was actually higher at six weeks than it was at baseline But the fat loss continues So even though they're gaining weight after fasting because they're putting their glycogen back in their muscles Which is about two pounds they're rehydrating they're putting fluid and they're putting fiber back in the gut So the scale is going up, but the fat loss even with that weight gain is continuing down And so what you look at is their whole body composition begins to change And also their brain composition too probably in terms of their functional relationship to themselves for one thing a lot of people feel that any kind of pain is a bad thing Any kind of pain is a bad thing and pain must always be avoided If they have a pain they have to take a pill they have to do something because pain is the evil You know issue there Athletes learn that pain is not always bad that sometimes discomfort can be associated with a positive response We find it's easier working sometimes with athletes than people that have not been athletic Because they they've learned to push their body a little bit and the and fasting creates a Hormetic effect as well, whereas there is some physiological stress that's introduced that stress is associated with a healing response Would it not just be Healthier if it were simple to take those people and remove all the processed food from their diet and then keep them on like a Mediterranean diet with like high protein high fiber With that not be a more healthy intervention because at least then I'm not going to lose You've mentioned there I'd lose 6% of my lean tissue At least then I wouldn't lose any muscle necessarily Well, I would agree that if your only goal is weight loss diet and exercise are the key Fasting introduces not just a chance to lose weight, but specifically to mobilize visceral fat. You will eventually Mobilize that visceral fat with Exercise alone There's an advantage to getting rid of that sooner rather than later particularly for people that have high blood pressure diabetes Out of immune disease because the sooner you get rid of the visceral fat and the inflammation the sooner you can get them off the medications the medications themselves Present their own problems and people don't understand if you have high blood pressure You're being medicated not for your high blood pressure But for the diet that causes the high blood pressure Literally the day you change the diet to a health-prone diet the need for medication begins to reduce and if you don't reduce the medication adequately You can actually shut people down from you know consequences of excess medication Is there a different advantage between me doing the fast the water fast versus just going on the ketogenic diet If I was trying to reduce my visceral fat, which is that sort of stubborn fat around your organs Yes, water fasting is a more efficient method of mobilizing specifically visceral fat And the other problem with that when we talk about a ketogenic diet remember there's a lot of different ways of getting into ketosis You can do it with a high fat high protein diet, which is commonly advocated You know the dead doctor atkins diet midst for this or rest of these or those kind of programs Those have some disadvantages high protein particularly high animal protein is actually thought to be one of the major contributing factors To many of these health compromises including cardiovascular disease and cancer and inflammation and the rest of it So we need protein it's an essential nutrient You need about 10% of your calories from protein when you get excess protein you put your risk yourself at risk for kidney disease Cardiovascular disease and other problems We need fat essential fatty acids are a critical part of our ability to be healthy And you also need carbohydrates your designed as a carbohydrate burning machine But you get all the fat all the protein and all the carbohydrates you need from a whole plant food diet You don't need to eat large amounts of animal foods you don't need to eat oils You don't need to eat refined carbohydrates to get the foods you need And in fact a whole plant food SOS free diet gives you the quantity and quality of nutrients you need Without some of the negative consequences or the risks of dietary access that come from these more processed modern diets So if if you were to pitch to me the unique selling points of a water faster your clinic versus any other intervention medical or lifestyle It would be the speed in which You're able to burn visceral fat and the speed in which you're able to lower blood pressure is unlike anything else It also reduces insulin resistance There is no drug that reduces insulin resistance but fasting does And a significant percentage of our type 2 diabetics will achieve normal blood sugar levels Without the need for medication with fasting Again if you do diet and exercise consistently enough long enough You're likely to get many of the same benefits There are some things though that seem to change in fasting That don't change as well with with these modified feeding routines for example fasting you know when you have a computer and it gets corrupted and you turn it off and you turn it back on And you don't know why but now it works You know you've kind of rebooted or flashed the memory whatever it is fasting does a similar thing in humans it appears And particularly when it comes to the gut microbiome So you've got a trillion creatures well trillions of creatures living just in your intestinal tract Particularly bacteria but all kinds of organisms They're an important part of your digestive mechanisms your immune response And they're different depending on what you eat So if you're eating animal-based diet you have different organisms than if you're on a plant-based diet If you're on a high sugar diet and you even fruit sugars and things You get different organisms flourishing than you would If you're in a fasting state and fasting state there's a big drop off in total organisms And then when you refeed depending on how you refeed you can actually regrow those organisms And repopulate that I'm right in thinking if you do a water fast you're going to wipe out a lot of the bacteria in your gut Including the bad ones but also some good ones And then you can reintroduce certain foods that will bring back the good bacteria That's why refeeding after fasting is so important If you refeed carefully you have a chance to reestablish that normal micro floral balance And that may be why we see such good response in many of these GI-related conditions Like all sorts of colitis and Crohn's disease and chronic constipation Your little bowel syndrome But you also see it affecting things like depression and anxiety And probably they say 90-95% of the dopamine and serotonin is produced by the body is actually produced in the gut And so the balance in your gut microbiome may be critically involved in cognitive Function as well as what's going on in the digestive system itself So we're just now learning the impact that fasting has and the effect that microbiome has And the relationship that those two things have together There was a 2024 study that found after a seven-day water early fast levels of harmful fuzobacteria dropped by more than 80% And the gut microbiome shifted to a healthier balance So it's clearly doing some of the work to wipe out some of the bad and healthy gut microbiome bacteria Which gives you an opportunity to reset the gut microbiome which is really interesting Especially as you say you have some of those sort of gut centric diseases Is there a gender component to this between sort of men and women Because obviously women have menstrual cycles and certain hormone fluctuations that men don't have So do you have to think about gender when you're thinking about fasting? Well we know that women have complicated systems in different ways than men And they have different diseases too that show our fibrocystic breast disease, dysmenarium, anaerasia, polycystic ovarian syndrome, all of these conditions that males don't know anything about seem to be associated with excess estradiol hormones When estradiol is high there's a higher association with many of these conditions estradiol normally breaks down to something called estradiol and it's excreted in the urine And that what breaks it down is the gut microbiome and liver function And the gut microbiome and liver function are both profoundly affected by fasting For example we've got in studies we've done looking at fatty liver disease We show significant changes and reversal of fatty liver disease with fasting And as I mentioned the gut microbiome goes through a whole kind of rebooting And that may be why patients that come in with those symptoms The fibrocystic breast disease, dysmenorias, menoragia, etc Often get profound short-term improvement and long-term benefit post-fasting Now all of these things that I'd have to say fasting is great but unless it's a motivating factor to make the diet and lifestyle changes I wouldn't be optimistic about long-term outcomes When we use fasting we're also providing intense education to try to get people motivated to adopt healthy diet and lifestyle habits and it's those diet and lifestyle habits that are going to be necessary to sustain the benefits I mean I'll give you an example in lymphoma which is the type of cancer We published a paper in the British Medical Journal case reports on a young woman who had flicker lymphoma head progressed for a couple years And interestingly enough her doctor, her oncologist, told her the diet didn't matter The diet wasn't related to this particular type of cancer, she could eat whatever she wanted to But nonetheless she decided to come in rather than go through chemotherapy and underwent fasting and we did three weeks of fasting during which time you could literally feel these tumors disappearing. She had her follow-up CT scan and at a year we submitted this case report and it was interesting because BMJ said well maybe she got lucky I mean yes it progressed for two years Yes it went away in 21 days of fasting but maybe you know it was just naturally the time for it to go into remission a small percentage of lymphoma patients do go through spontaneous remission so they said once you follow her for three years and see whether she can sustain that because we can treat lymphoma with drugs and the tumors will go down but they tend to come back and that's the problem it doesn't really reduce necessarily all cosmortality because the condition isn't actually resolved so we followed her for three years and I told her that she had to stick strictly to the diet for a protocol or it would be fatal because I'd track her down and kill her and she did stick to the diet and at three years we have CT evidence that she was cancer-free and we submitted that to BMJ and interestingly enough at first they rejected the follow that they invited it and we kind of appealed that and eventually they did decide to publish the follow-up and then we followed her for 10 years and she continues to be cancer-free and she continues to follow a whole plant food SOS-free diet and she went public with her story she told some podcasts about what her experience was and so we got a lot of lymphoma patients coming to Trumarthath and now we've published a case series which is a series of lymphoma patients including one particular gentleman who was even more progressive as the stage forwarded or already metastasized into the bones he had failed chemotherapy he also did well and we did a three week fast with him interestingly enough his oncologist was quite antagonistic because he was concerned the fasting would make him too weak for treatment but he came in he did the treatment did well went back to the oncologist who said wow that's really impressive why don't you go back and do some more of that he came back we did another 39 day fast and he was able to get dramatic improvement and again those those studies have been published in purview journals that he didn't go into remission with lymphoma it would be considered remission but it's not a cure it's just like you can't cure lymphoma any more than you can cure obesity you can lose the weight and keep it off but if you go back to doing the things that cause it it's coming back you can't cure high blood pressure you can normalize the pressure I've got people have been normal pressure for decades now but if they go back to eating the greasy fatty slimy salty processed food it'll come back because you're managing it you're not curing it the whole concept of a cure is a little bit of a misnomer in medicine you know cure just means you're alive five years after treatment doesn't mean that you've actually resolve the underlying cause of the condition interesting and we have them 120 plates here which is how much food someone would be passing up if they did a 40 day diet so that's how many meals that they would miss on a 40 day water fast which is a lot of food staggering when you see it and it's a lot of work for the body to digest that food and when you take that work away those energies are able to be diverted to dealing with some of the accumulated problems that people have built up whether it's sexist fat and visceral fat it's diabetes it's autoimmune diseases where the body's actually attacking itself I don't know if most people realize that but an autoimmune disease is like rheumatoid arthritis ulcerative colitis ankle losing spondylitis these conditions it's actually your immune system that's attacking your tissues and the theory is that a lot of that is because you have the immune system being compromised by gut leakage where people have leaky tight junctions in their intestinal tract or absorbing materials and then genetically vulnerable people the immune system becomes hyper reactive and begins to attack its own tissues you know if it attacks your thyroid we call it Hashimoto's thyroiditis if it attacks your joints you might call it rheumatoid or osteoarthritis different names for different inflammatory conditions all triggered by leaking of materials into the intestinal tract when you go on a fast first of all you're not eating and so there's not the inflammatory oxidative damage and free radicals that are causing the leaking to begin with and second of all the bodies healing processes are able to be accentuated and so the gut leakage is able to heal after you heal the gut and go back to eating diet that's not full of free radicals you're not smoking you're not drinking alcohol with all of the free radicals from peroxidation of alcohol you're not eating high fat foods and particularly heated fat fat foods and fried foods etc there's not the onslaught of oxidative damage and now you can manage those conditions with a whole plant food SOS free diet now that doesn't mean they're cured if they go back to eating the other foods they're going to flare up their condition but to the degree they're willing to eat healthfully they can manage their condition without the medications oftentimes that are very powerful and have often long-term side effects when someone does a water fast with you if they're doing a 40 day water fast do you make sure that they get electrolytes and vitamins and other things are there other things that you have to give them no we're just giving them water but we are monitoring their their electrolytes and their blood levels to make sure that their reserves are being recycled adequately and they're normal if for example potassium gets below a certain point or sodium gets below a certain point then we go back into a refeeding mode where we give them broths and juices and other materials in order to refeed them we don't allow them to develop symptom secondary to deficiency now what's interesting is potassium for example normal potassium might be 3.5 fasting tolerances would be 3.0 if it goes below 3.0 then we're going to we're going to terminate the fast but generally people are so efficient at recycling their nutrients during fasting that they stay within normal limits without us having to do premature termination and when you finish a long fast like a 40 day fast what are the or even a shorter fast like a 5 day fast what is the protocol for refeeding them what what what you give them what you avoid what's the speed in which you give them calories again they get a day of fresh fruit and vegetable juices for every week of fasting more or less so they're going to get about 600 calories of fresh fruit and vegetable juices if they had a three week fast for about three days what's the thinking here like what's the underlying thought the idea is that we want to introduce initially food without fiber so if there's any digestive challenges that's short lived we want to introduce food starting in the morning rather than at night so if there's any challenges it doesn't disrupt their sleep we want to make sure that they're rehydrating and getting some glucose without necessarily overloading their capacities once they've acclimated to the juices which are relatively easy to absorb and bring up blood sugars relatively quickly moving them out of the fasting phase into more of a feeding phase then we'll introduce raw fruits and vegetables which introduce some fiber and then we'll introduce more concentrated foods like steamed and starchy vegetables until by the length half the length of the fast refeeding they're back to a whole plant food SOS free diet the kind of diet that we want them to sustain forever if you're starting a business that means you're one person doing the workload of probably about 50 people when I first founded this podcast I had no idea that I was about to step into a hundred different roles that I'd never trained for things like researching and production and scheduling and branding all of it all at 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and through this we discovered simply safe interestingly we did have security at the time but the type that we had only triggered an alarm once intruders were inside the building what I like about simply safe is their active guard outdoor protection notifies you and their live monitoring agents when suspicious characters are outside but it also means that guards can trigger alarms or turn on spotlights to deter someone from entering your building if we had had simply safe we would have known earlier that intruders were trying to get in so maybe this is your reminder to make sure your home and workplace is secure simply safe is offering my listeners in the United States an exclusive discount of 50% off their new simply safe security system when you sign up by visiting simplysafe.com/doac to claim 50% off your new system with a professional monitoring plan and get your first month free that simplysafe.com/doac there's no safe like simply safe and what about healthy people healthy people come to you as well and do fasting it's not just people that have these sort of severe health predicaments I think I'm pretty healthy is there a reason or a benefit to someone like me fasting you know we did a study actually on this very question about what happens to healthy people that fast and although there's tremendous improvements in sick people it turns out when you look at the cardiometabolic risk factors when you look at even things like weight and percent body fat and visceral fat on healthy people people that are within healthy limits there's additional improvement their blood cholesterol drops even lower their blood pressures drop lower their percent fat drops even lower in fact proportionally the people that get the most benefit of fasting are healthy people that are doing it preventatively but they tend to need short fast not long fast you're not necessarily taking a healthy person to go 40 day fast these are five to 10 day periods of time rather than the very longer faster usually because there's a condition that takes that long to resolve we want to fast as short as possible but long enough to resolve the problem if you come to me with blood pressure that's 210 over 100 capped on on five medications you're likely to need a longer fast than a person that's 140 over 90 without medication if I'm a healthy person how frequently and for what length should I be thinking about fasting if at all I think you should be fasting every day for 12 hours okay and then you know we don't know what the ideal is that's one of the things we're going to be doing in this in the study is trying to figure that out but what we do in practices we have people fast once a year for a week if they're clinically stable they don't have any healing crisis their numbers all the good that's it we move on and even that week of fasting though has a profound effect on healthy people I might mention though that most people that think they're healthy when you actually objectively look at their biomarkers aren't as healthy as they think many people are maintaining higher visceral fat higher inflammatory markers higher lipid levels than what they probably ideally should be even though they're asymptomatic they say somewhere around two to two and a half percent of people are actually objectively measuring out as healthy some studies say as much as 12 percent depending on the standards that you're using to define health so speaking directly to the viewer now who's at home and there's a reason why they clicked on this conversation they found the subject matter in the title of the thumbnail somewhat compelling if you were speaking directly to the different personas of people listening so you've got maybe someone who is healthy someone who is maybe got a little bit of a weight on that they might want to shift someone that's got specific diseases and has been given diagnosis and maybe's given pills going through these different personas one at a time how would you prescribe water fasting to them and what would you sort of tell them the benefits for them would be if we're thinking about these different personas so starting with the the person on the left side of the spectrum who is largely healthy but is interested in maybe how it'll make them feel or whatever so for the healthy person the main benefit that I see a fasting is it's a forced period of rest and introspection you get a certain clearing of the palate we've actually done a study like this it's on our site where we looked at the sensitivity to sugar the sensitivity salt it's actually enhanced during fasting and so by fasting once a year people kind of recalibrate their palate and it makes it easier for them to make better choices sometimes there's been some slipping and sliding along the dietary regime as people go along during the course of the year it reboots the gut microbiome it tends to enhance cognitive capacities as well as probably brain serotonin and dopamine levels it can affect people's mood states and just how they feel about themselves in the world around them it's obviously not as dramatic as when you take a person that's in agonizing pain or ability and you see those dramatic changes what about then if I want to just lose some weight what protocol should I use for water fasting and what kind of results would I expect to see in what time frame we never know exactly how long a patient's going to fast until we see how they respond to fasting is fasting itself is as much diagnostic as it is therapeutic but usually we can get a pretty good idea like for example I always like to try to get people as close to their optimum weight as possible whether it's with diet and exercise or with fasting we don't think maintaining extra fat is a good thing we think for every pound of excess fat you have on your body there's all kinds of downstream consequences and so if a person say for example 20 pounds overweight they think I they feel best to say 150 pounds but there are 170 pounds we know that they could it will take them about three weeks to to lose that weight because people lose an average about a pound a day so I wouldn't have any concern assuming everything else looks okay fasting that person for three weeks I'd be concerned about fasting them into an emaciated state I don't want to get them very weak I don't want to have them debilitated I want to get them depleted and so we're going to monitor them carefully to make sure that we're well within their their reserves but you know a person that's that's a bit overweight that has maybe their blood pressure is a little bit higher their blood sugar is a little bit higher maybe they have some joint pain maybe they have some various symptoms we want those things to resolve so we're going to estimate how long do we think this person's going to need to fast to get to the point when they feed they'll keep getting healthier rather than sicker can you explain these full graphs to me here that's some full graphs that come from work you've done okay well this is outcome data that comes from studies that we've published and this basically is looking at the percent body weight change and if you look at the bottom graph you'll notice it's over time yeah okay so we're looking at the percentage body weight change during fasting and you notice during refeeding it actually comes down a little bit more even though people are re-alimenting they're losing fat they're regaining water and muscle and then they're able to maintain that percent body change this is 65 day follow-up so we're not for people that aren't watching the video right now and they're just listening to audio what what is it essentially saying happens and in what period of time with what protocol so in this particular study these people lost about 10 percent of their body weight over an average of two weeks of fasting they refed for a week at the facility and then they were followed up 65 days later and at 65 days later you'll notice they'd maintained their total body weight change and then just a little bit more and now they've been back to eating and exercising in the next graph the percent body weight this is the visceral fat mass and visceral fat I guess well that is the 10 percent of the fat that makes up the fat that typically accumulates around the belly in the organs it's the fat that's hypertrophic hypermetabolic hyper it produces inflammation to acts like a tumor so there's two types of feed there the subcutaneous which is on the outside right and then there's visceral which is in the inside and the stuff in the inside is the worst it's fat that wouldn't normally be there here's the problem you evolve the environment of scarcity storing fat is so critical to survival in a world of deficiency or of deficient depletion that the body does everything it can to store fat because the people that store fat in a natural setting they live to reproduce in the modern world it's become a disadvantage because we live in this very natural environment where you can get dietary excess and so even the body is designed for an environment of deficiency it's responding with that genetic programming and so it stores fat even though it's not helpful for you as far as the body's concerned spring might come late the more fat you store the better and as a consequence that visceral fat is associated with these diseases of dietary excess in fasting the body preferentially mobilizes that visceral fat it gets rid of it just like if you go on a fast and have a breast tumor you lose 10 percent of your body fat you don't necessarily lose 10 percent of the tumor you might at least 50 percent of the tumor you might lose the entire tumor because the body has some intelligence to it in terms of how it's mobilizing these tissues you can take a person an animal for example and starve at to death and if you measure its nervous system you'll find the nervous system isn't depleted even when it's starve to death it will preserve those tissues in preference to the visceral fat or the fat tissues and so this graph is showing that visceral fat not only comes down during fasting but it keeps coming down and it continues to come down with refeeding and this particular graph here this is blood pressure so again blood pressure comes down as during fasting it comes down even lower with refeeding and people that are following diet and lifestyle changes are able to maintain that pressure without medication so if you look at our study people that start with stage 3 hypertension so they're 180 or higher systolic blood pressure they lost an average of 60 points on systolic blood pressure not counting the fact that the baselines were often taken on medication and the final graph here that you've got is percent in lean mass so lean mass also went down in fasting because your lean mass is your fluid your muscle lean mass goes down but then it recovers during refeeding and re-elementation and the percentage of lean mass which includes your muscle mass at 6-week fall was actually higher in those patients than it was at baseline are they exercising there during recovery they are not during fasting okay and you mentioned PCOS early when we were talking about the implications for women have you ever done any studies or had patients come to your fasting clinic that have symptoms of PCOS yes we treat we've had you know dozens and dozens of patients with polycystic ovarian syndrome and it's a condition that responds consistently to fasting it also responds to diet and lifestyle change but understand many of the people that have made the diet changes but are not been successful are then referred to us for fasting we always want to try the diet first because a lot of things resolve just by getting a person on a good diet and exercise program and PCOS for people that don't know i'm sure a lot of men don't know about PCOS but some of them will because they might have fertility problems with their partner my partner has been very public that she has PCOS and she's found that the ketogenic diet removing sugar from her diet has had a profound impact on recalibrating her menstrual cycle her menstrual cycle is very inconsistent a regular could be up to 60 days or longer or not at all and then when she removed sugar from her diet and carbohydrates it's now perfect right so it's like every 28 whatever days it is and so I was wondering if you know there's lots of women that are suffering with a variety of different hormonal challenges or things like PCOS if you have any case studies from your clinic of that resetting their menstrual cycles or you know reversing the symptoms of PCOS right it's not uncommon for us to have women that for example have their plumbing is good in terms of their tubes and whatnot but they're having difficulty initiating pregnancy they fast they reboot and sure enough within a cycle or two you know they're able to achieve pregnancy and it's not unusual to have people that have disrupted dish menorrhea menorrhagia etc. within usually not the very first cycle but the second cycle will normalize function right I think the reason for that is the hormones and stuff that for the next cycle are already kind of set up and where you see the changes often you know at that six week follow-up so let's be clear because if you fast it is a form of stress on the body isn't it from everything I know about sort of evolution if you're fasting your menstrual cycles probably going to stop if you're doing an extended fast because your body sends a signal to say listen we don't have the resources in here to give a kid life so we're going to shut down if you take yourself below optimum weight or blow optimum fat yes that's true just meant you know disruption of menstrual cycle happens with excess weight loss of any kind or rapid weight loss but for the patients that we're fasting oftentimes it's quite the opposite they're able to actually normalize there are hormonal cycle and as I mention it may be the conversion of estradiol to estradiol because of improvement in the gut microbiome it's responsible for normalization of that and other hormonal issues that maybe we haven't been able to measure yet because your your body needs energy to to perform its menstrual cycle that's like it's my my my thinking there that if the body senses you don't have the energy to have a baby it's going to shut down your menstrual cycle because having a baby would I think if it doesn't have the reserves so if you're in a the thing is many patients though even though they're fasting they aren't in a depleted state and so you don't see universal disruption of menstrual function because people are fasting but you know athletes oftentimes see it when their percent body fat goes too low they will become amenoriac do you see when someone comes to your clinic and does one of these extended fasts that there's other areas of their life that also improve that are completely sort of like unrelated to the benefits from the fast and I'm talking about world power here and their ability to motivate themselves and be disciplined and persistent and there's I don't think there's any question that those factors are involved you know it's also just education and fear people think if they get on a plane in New York and they flew to California they would die of starvation or Colorado they think the pretzels that they ate saved their life and once people have fasted for five days or 10 days or 40 days the idea of having to skip a meal doesn't seem quite so terrifying you know if there's not something that they that's healthfully eating they just skip the meal until the next one and they're not afraid of the of the that they're going to die or that they're going to enter starvation or they're going to have depletion a lot of people have a lot of fear in their head that's completely illogical unnecessary and the harmful it's so true when you tell me that someone can actually fast for how what's the longest a person could fast will well without severe consequences they say that a seven kilogram male could fast about 70 days but the longest we fast people is 40 days and what happens is you get beyond 40 days everything gets a little bit more delicate you have to be a lot more careful with a lot of balance and other things and so 40 days understand is only one percent of our patients the vast majority are fasting between two weeks and four weeks so there's you know it's 10 days or 14 days or 20 days that's where the big bell curve is you have a small number of people that need to fast longer than that and you see this as a medical intervention you don't see this as something that these people should be doing on a frequent monthly basis you see this as a medical intervention for people with specific issues predominantly I think that everybody should fast every day for 12 hours I think that everybody including healthy people would probably should at least consider fasting once a year for a week and that anybody that has a condition where it's appropriate to fast should fast however long it takes to resolve the condition however frequently it takes to get well so we do have some patients that we're fasting two or three times during a year because they can't fast long enough the first fast to resolve the condition but you know they don't have enough reserves to be able to do you know a longer fast so we will we will do it periodically until the condition resolves and what are the safety concerns with waterfosts yeah well the biggest and most obvious concerns are orthostatic hypotension when people are used to having high blood pressure when you lower their pressure their brains used to higher profusion levels when you drop the pressure they can get dizzy at first until they used to having normal blood pressure and you don't want people falling over and fainting and you know breaking something or having a problem dehydration is an dramatic effect of fasting and it's important part of stimulating the healing crisis but you also don't want to get somebody so depleted that they get into you know cardiac dysrhythmia or they have you know problems and that's why we monitor people twice a day and we make sure that you know they maintain balance you know one of the things we did in confessing save your life is we laid out all the protocols of fasting so a person could really understand what's going on in fasting you know what the benefits are but we also wrote it so that their physicians would stop thinking they're crazy because they're interested in doing something like that because at first blush this sounds like kind of crazy that you're going to have a person do take nothing but water for a prolonged period of time and somehow that's going to be a good thing but when you really look at the science and you look at the experience we've had you found when it's done according to protocol it is a safe and it can be an effective intervention in giving the body a chance to heal itself what are the big misconceptions about fasting that you encounter consistently well one thing is people think that you're going to become depleted because they don't understand the recycling capacity of the body when fasting is done properly and that they're going to deplete their muscles and that the weight they lose in fasting is immediately regained after fasting so there's no you know beneficial reportioning of the body composition and they're driven by the fear and I think instinctive fear that you know we're designed to be intimately concerned about getting enough to eat because in a natural setting that's a constant biological imperative you're always struggling try to get enough to eat and because we live in a constant state of deprivation in a natural setting the use of fasting was never anything other than a survival tool some an adaption the body could make only under force not by choice but it is interesting that every major religion the Jews the James the Hindus the Muslims the Christians the Buddhist all have a deep respect and tradition about fasting there's a reason because it changes the way you feel about yourself in the world around you it's so linked to spiritual traditions like meditation and clarity of mind and spiritual experiences and I think because it is difficult to do that you know some of the benefits you mentioned earlier maybe part of the you know part they're hard for us to quantify yeah what is the most important thing we haven't talked about as it pertains to fasting that we should have talked about we haven't talked about the different kinds of mechanisms which might be going on in fasting that sometimes people are interested we've talked about weight loss you know that that's kind of an obvious one if you don't eat you're going to lose weight but there's also a naturaletic effect the body gets rid of the excess sodium accumulated in the body and that has a profound effect because literally people will lose several pounds of fluid a day early on in fasting just because the body's been holding on to this in order to buffer the effect of sodium sodium you think about it you take a tablespoon of it's endimetic it'll make you throw up you take enough of it'll kill you it'll actually have it there's an LD50 with it even though it's an essential nutrient in small amounts an excess quantity it's associated with hypertension and not to mention obesity and you might say well why would sodium which has no calories make people fat and it's because sodium stimulates what's called passive overeating so if you eat to your full of anything say brown rice you just eat till you reach your satiety you don't want anymore everything else being equal salt that rice up and eat to your full you'll eat more before you feel satisfied people say yeah because it tastes better but that's what tasting better means it means it results in more dope means stimulation in the brain so your brain is going to get fulled with salt and if you take some foods like for example bread the staff of life 1500 calories a pound before you turn it into a butter boat and spread coagulated cow pus all over it and you remove the salt will sugar and yeast what do you get it's called maca and it's punishment on Passover nobody's getting fat eaten maca but they're certainly having trouble with bread and bread related products and it's because the the wheat and the water become a carrier agent for these chemicals take beef boil it and non do you like plain boiled beef not so much it's a carrier agent for the sauces the salt the the things that that it's carrying to the palate so we're using ultra processed foods as carrier agents for these chemicals and that's why we're in trouble 70% of the calorie of the average person is ultra processed foods and we haven't even talked about the chemicals and other things besides the salt will sugar the most of far is the other things that are thought to affect gut microbiome etc so the naturaletic effect of fasting is a kind of rebooting effect that gets rid of the sodium we haven't talked about detoxification if you take a fat bobsie of human beings and what a fat bobsie what's that a bobsie you take a piece of fat or a piece of tissue and you analyze it what you find is there's hundreds of different chemicals PCB dioxide and pesticide ravages heavy metals in everybody to varying degrees people have different degrees of vulnerability that infesting the body rapidly mobilizes those materials and eliminates them in fact that some people have said oh it's so does it so efficiently you shouldn't fast that the body doesn't know what it's doing and it would put it out too quickly and it overloads your system and so don't do it but the reality is the body this is a biological adaptation it does a good job of mobilizing the materials and eliminating them if you take that fat bobsie and you say what where did all those fats come where did all those toxins come from as much as 90% of some of those toxins came from eating animal foods which biologically concentrate those pollution in their environment and then you eat the animal food you get its entire lifetime accumulation of toxins and so when you fast you kick in the system you use to get rid of that stuff and every time you do it it gets better and so these are things that don't necessarily happen to the same degree with our juice fasting or our modified feeding regimes we talked about the autonomic nervous system this is the part of the nervous system the controls of the stuff you don't think about like for example um if you were to go out running and your heart didn't speed up you would be in big trouble and potentially die but it doesn't it doesn't happen because your heart automatically speeds up and pumps more blood that you need and that's controlled by the autonomic or automatic nervous system it has two parts the sympathetic and the parasympathetic they have to be in balance and we've invented hundreds of healing systems to try to rebalance the autonomic nervous system massage biofeedback homeopathy chiropractic manipulation osteopathic manipulation acupuncture relaxation biofeedback how do you think all these things make people feel better at least to some degree it's to the degree to help rebalance the autonomic nervous system the most powerful way to rebalance the autonomic nervous system in my experience is fasting fasting is a profound impact on this autonomic sympathetic per sympathetic balance and I think one of the most profound effects honestly is affect on taste neuro adaptation as I mentioned we did a study on how you taste things and when you go on a fast good food start to taste good when you first come off a conventional diet this kind of food is disgusting tasteless shwill people have no interest in that they can't imagine how anybody could choke it down what kind of food well whole fruits vegetables you know simple foods without salt willing sugar added to they just can't even imagine how anybody could eat that but after fasting whole plant foods start to taste good and the longer you eat them the better they taste to get to the point where you actually would prefer to eat whole plant foods rather than the salty greasy fatty processed foods that everybody else is eating so these are these are big changes that occur in fasting that are not necessarily is easily objectified from a research standpoint but have a profound difference on how people feel and how they live their lives yeah I noticed that as well when I was in the ketogenic diet I noticed that the things that I would usually get cravings for suddenly there was no no cravings at all and funny enough when you're talking about taste changing when I was on a ketogenic diet things tasted sweeter and I don't mean I actually don't mean because obviously I wasn't really eating much sugar it was actually some sugar free drinks just tasted significantly sweeter they were zero sugar drinks but clearly because of some of the sweetness in there they I almost couldn't drink them but when I came off the ketogenic diet and I started having carbohydrates again those drinks didn't taste so sweet anymore but it's your palate that changes the ketogenic diet is a fasting mimicking diet it mimics some of the effects of fasting not the least of which is changes in taste what's called taste neurodotation or sensitivity and it's not carbohydrates that desensitize you it's refined carbohydrates and so if you get people on a whole plant food diet you know fruits and vegetables all whole simple foods they they maintain that acuity of taste but as soon as you put them back on refined carbohydrates the process carbohydrates then they begin to go back into the dietary pleasure trap got you. 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guess what is the what is the the next step if someone is curious what do you what do you recommend they they do well we have a I think a really valuable free service for your viewers and that's that if they go to our website and complete the registration forms and true north help.com I offer free phone conversation with them to tell them whether this might be something they should be considering and try to point them in the right direction if they're really interested they can read our book and fast and save your life and it will tell you and your doctor everything you need to know about what it takes to safely get into a fast through a fast and what the benefits of fasting are thought to be I'll link all of that below for anybody that is curious and wants to learn more and just as a sort of a disclaimer if people are doing water fasting they should seek medical advice and medical support they should see a seek a consultation from someone who knows what they're doing before just trying to do this at home they want to make sure they're a good candidate with history exam and lab they want to make sure if they do fast they're fasting in a restful state staying hydrated properly and that they refeed carefully because it can be a serious problem if you don't do it properly is there a particular case study that comes to mind when you think about the power of fasting and he talked a little bit about the lady that had lymphoma which I read about in the British Medical Journal and I think it was 2015 I was published I think even more powerful than individual case reports are these studies that we've done involving dozens and in some cases almost 200 people and the consistency of the data this works is the most effective treatment that's ever been shown in treating the leading cause of death and disability which is high blood pressure in its consequences if a person has essential hypertension and they fast long enough they're going to normalize their blood pressure and if they're willing to do dangerous and radical things like eat well exercise and get to bed on time they can sustain those results we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're leaving it for and the question left for you is quite a tricky one but it's interesting it is what is the biggest lie that you think is ruining most people's life I think one of the biggest mistakes is that people think that health comes from pills, potions, powders and treatments instead of healthful living health is the direct result of healthful living and that means diet, sleep, exercise but they're hard especially in the world we live in where you know everything I see is trying to play with the neurotransmit chemicals in my brain to get me to be addicted and to or people are trying to sell the pleasure trap they're trying to tell you what you want to hear or not what you need to know what you want to hear is that there's a way to not do hard things but still get good benefits and what you need to know is how to do hard things so you can be successful I think that's like the defining trait of the 21st century is like your ability to do what you know you should for long-term benefits not short-term benefits I think like delayed gratification is maybe the defining trait of the like the 21st century I mean we've all heard of like the those cookie experiments they did on those kids to see which kids would take the cookie and which ones would wait for two cookies later but I think the further in my life I've gone the more I've realized that actually like every self-help book ever written could be one page and it could just say like delayed gratification like do the thing that is in the best interest of long-term you versus short-term you I think that there's three characteristics that everybody should aspire for whether it's a mate whether it's a employee or whether it's a friend what you really are looking for is honesty integrity and intelligence so honesty means they're going to tell the truth integrity is they're going to do the right thing and intelligence means they're going to do things right and that applies for ourselves right as well what if we honestly have high integrity and be intelligent with your own decisioning I think those are the characteristics that determine both success but more importantly happiness the people that I meet that are happy have high degrees of all three of those things some people are very intelligent but they don't necessarily do the right thing some people are honest but you know they'll tell the truth but they won't necessarily tell the whole truth so you know you have to have all three I think to have a high degree of probability of success and what are you working with at the moment what's keeping you busy at this moment in time we're in the process of getting ready to launch a major study we're going to enroll between two and three thousand people for the rest of their life and we're going to track them and try to see if we can avoid the average 16 years of the ability that that greet people at the end of their life we believe with diet sleep exercise and periodic fasting we can avoid the ability that's so common and that make the last 20 years of people's lives the best years of their life instead of the worst you know you said at your clinic you one percent of patients do the 40 day fast what who are those patients what are they suffering with what are they struggling with because that's pretty extreme one woman was a dentist who had a traumatic brain injury secondary to getting hit by a pole an outdoor pole at a ironically enough a continuing education conference and she developed a headache and she had had constant daily head pain from eight to ten every minute of every day for sixteen years and she came in and fasted for 41 days during which time she resolved to a large extent her headaches she refed she had some pro-dromal symptoms minor you know symptoms and then did a second 40 day fast six months later and now it's been 12 years she has no headaches so in her case she was motivated by like a lot of our patients pained ability and fear of death and they were willing to do anything in order to be able to get well including you know a long period of fasting so the people that fast a long time oftentimes are very motivated individuals mostly motivated by you know physical health goals not always some people are doing fasting for spiritual or other types of practices but most of the people we have are just people that have not been successful resolving their conditions with diet lifestyle change with medications and drugs and you know they're they say that it should be the true north health center the last resort one of my colleagues uh may he rest in peace john McDougall used to say we were the punishment and if he had a patient that he would do the diet cherry changes with it but it wasn't successful it fully resolving the problem he would apologize to them and say I'm so sorry but you need to go to gold hammer's place a good luck to you because he thought that was one of the more difficult things that people were ever asked to do I think it is the most difficult thing you ask people to do not the fasting that's not that difficult what's difficult is to go back and live in a world designed to make you fat sick and miserable and try to live healthfully and live with integrity and deal with the social outflux of being successful and as he said a lot of times the people that I see that have the easiest time are the ones that aren't necessarily the most sociable kind of people thank you so much for the work that you do because it's it's fascinating and you're providing another alternative treatment to people who are very often out of out of choice before I came here today my wife said don't be nervous to talk to him because it's just like you know I speak a hundred times a year 50 to 100 people and I see and I said yeah Jennifer it's just like talking to 50 to 100 people except doing it every day for 400 years thanks for getting the word out well no my audience open minded this smart this savvy that curious I hope as well so it's it's really fascinating and I think you know when we think about these longer fasts we often focus on the physiological changes that are going to take place like we talked about the glycogen reserves being depleted and the key to embodies all these things and the Beth and my my hydro you to rate whatever that big word was but I actually think there's really an appreciated part of all of this is the psychological change that takes place when you realize that you can accomplish something but also as you said when you're you sort of rebalance and reset your dopamine levels and when you your your your change your taste adapts to the fasted state and how that can act as an intervention a psychological and physiological intervention just to reset you a little bit every year I do ketosis at least once maybe sometimes twice or three times I have a ketogenic diet and it is it's like a tremendous reset of my habits like resets my habits resets my urges my cravings so think about when a patient goes to a medical doctor and they say oh I have high blood pressure and they say listen we promise you if you do exactly what we tell you we guarantee you you'll never get well you'll be sick the rest of your life and you'll be on these drugs forever and there's not a one I've had so far that that turns out to be true for it changes their entire paradigm when they get overcome the problem that supposedly is helpless and hopeless and nothing can be done changes their it changes their view of reality of course and I mean what you're speaking to there is learned helplessness where if someone tells you there's nothing you can do then you do fall into I mean the studies show this you fall into a state of learned helplessness where you actually stop trying to help yourself and you submit I was reading I was actually reading a study of the day about rats who who fell into a state of learned helplessness because they won't even they wouldn't even try more yeah well that's a really good example the same happens with humans if you if someone tells you something something can't change your start your fucked when you're ready to have a life-changing experience we love you to be our guest to come come to the center do a bit of a fast I'm telling you you're a great candidate you'll have a intense but you know positive experience okay and we'll make sure that if you walk in you walk out okay good that's a prerequisite thank you so much doctor come and keep doing what you're doing thank you thank you make sure you keep what I'm about to say to yourself I'm inviting 10,000 of you to come even deeper into the diorevasseo welcome to my inner circle this is a brand new private community that I'm launching to the world we have so many 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