Help Your Body Heal Ep. 1 - Plants Meat And Carbs | My Momma Ma Momma Said Carbs Are The Devil!

it is a beautiful day and I choose to live with you I'm Gooby I used to be a neurosurgeon and now I'm a person trying to find a way to live that takes care of my whole being and the living beings around me this is the first episode in a series that I intend to make called help your body heal and in this first episode I will talk about plants meat and carbs and the other title to this is my mama said that carbs are the devil well my my mom didn't actually say those words

but I would imagine Bobby fé mom and the water boy Adam Sandler's movie the water boy would have said that and I kind of heard a lot of people say something like that so I wanted to talk about diet because I think really the food that we eat is the first and most important step to healing and I would like to share what I have learned over the last well my whole life really so I've been alive for 40 years so four decades but I've really learned a lot over the last 10 years while I

was practicing medicine as a neurosurgeon now a lot of people will say why is a neurosurgeon talking about nutrition he should stick to his Lane and talk about cutting and I I accept that I accept that that's how people might feel uh but I I think I did learn some valuable things in nearly a decade of practicing neurosurgery focused on taking care of degenerative dis disease what that is that's a fancy word but that what that means is the body couldn't heal the joint in the spine and there's many joints in the spine every bone

in the spine has three joints that connected to the next bone and uh if the body is not healing well those joints break down that can cause pain in the joint like in the neck or back it can cause a a disc which is the cartilage between the bones to bulge out or herniate out and pinch nerves and cause nerve problems like pain numbness or weakness it can cause a number of things can cause spinal cord injury but those those are the things that I saw and the reason why I'm talking about nutrition is because

I saw patients heal at different rates some patients healed really quickly and they healed themselves before I could operate on them so they healed without surgery and other patients would not heal well and even with a technically perfect surgery they would get worse so that's why a neuro well ex neurosurgeon I'm not practicing anymore that's why an ex neurosurgeon is talking about nutrition so um this this might be a little bit of a longer video so I'm going to give you a quick outline of what I'm going to talk about so that you can have

an idea of what's coming and you could skip ahead too if you if you want to go to a certain spot in this talk uh the first thing I want to talk about is my background how I grew up how I learned to eat with my family um how my family eats and then um and then fast forward to uh f fast forward to residency and then when I was practicing neurosurgery and how I saw patients heal quickly and learned what they did which was a number of things but most importantly I think was the

diet um so yeah we're going to talk about my background what I learned from my patients what I experienced myself when I started doing what they were doing oh I think I got a visitor hi dubie duie good morning oh duie just woke up she's drinking some water so um the third thing was talking about my own experience doing the things that I saw in my patients do and then um me learning what evidence is out there I guess duie wants to say hi you can say hi good morning girl so the uh yeah the

fourth part is talking about what evidence is out there and what other doctors have seen and experienced anecdotally and in in um uh very detailed wellth thought out research studies uh and I'll end with what I think is the most important research paper that uh that I think I've I've ever seen on on diet um so those are the five things and so we'll get started with the first one so I I'm Korean uh by uh by Heritage I was actually born here in the United States um my both of my parents are Korean immigrants

um they came over when they were in high school and for the vast majority of my childhood I grew up in Oklahoma Oklahoma is a state in the middle of the United States and it's considered the midwest um and so for people who aren't from for people who aren't from the United States uh uh Oklahoma is known for farmland for cattle uh for um like corn and wheat Fields um yeah it's kind of like a red regular regular American uh kind of living so when I was growing up um you know ate Korean food and

Korean food is known for U really yummy meat like uh I'm sure some people have been to Korean barbecues before and uh Koreans are really good at marinating meat uh whether it's beef pork chicken uh and uh also um preparing fish in a really yummy way and uh most Koreans eat white rice not brown rice so oh Koreans also eat a fermented cabbage called gimchi uh so growing up the the way that I ate with my family is that the meat dish or the fish is the centerpiece of the meal and everything revolves around that

that and you can have some white rice with it and then some vegetables you know to be healthy but the main thing was the animal protein because uh what I learned when I was a kid is you need protein to to grow now that's what I was taught as a kid and I'll explain later that maybe that's not the best way to do things but it is a way and you know I've survived till now I'm 40 years old so that way was that way got me to at least my 30s um so I went

to college I went to medical school now oh Medical School medical school is very interesting I went to a uh I went to a good medical school I I don't know what the ranking is now but I think it's still in the top 10 um so I I had a very good education in my opinion uh for that time and I learned a lot of like anatomy and how the body works and how the body can break down but one thing that was really lacking in my opinion was learning about nutrition and how it can

prevent problems from my recollection now this was a while ago because my first year Medical School classes were in 2004 that's 20 years ago from my recollection I only had I think maybe 4 hours total of lectures on nutrition I think some on vitamins some on um yeah it was more focused on like vitamins carbohydrates lipids how are they structured why your body needs them so it was really kind of like breaking down the food into its chemicals and trying to understand why we need those chemicals rather than really focusing on the types of foods

might be good or bad or not good or bad but helpful for the body to heal or or not heal so I don't remember a class on that so you know that is that was the state of medical education in 2004 at a top tier medical school now I don't know what what medical school education is like now and I sure hope that there's more of a focus on what I'm about to talk about in this video so I went to medical school my thoughts on diet didn't change like really at all uh based on

the very small amount of classes that were taught on nutrition so I went to residency in neurosurgery and the first time I was confronted with the fact that well maybe the way that I'm eating the way I learn to eat might not be very helpful for my body uh was when I was eating lunch with one of my resident colleagues um he is a really really smart man uh he is he was a year above me in residency and he's now a professor of spine surgery at uh University and uh we were sitting we were

sitting at the cafeteria in the hospital and um uh you know residents are really busy so know we it's kind of rare to be able to sit down and just chat for a while but for some reason we had time that day and I got a big slice of pizza like I think it was like like that big like huge like size of my face slice of pizza thick crust lots of cheese it had everything on it sashes pepperoni Peppers mushrooms um olives uh yeah it was it looked amazing and it tasted really good too

but my friend said you know that's going to kill you right and I was like uh well okay sure I mean Pizza isn't the healthiest food I mean I guess I could eat a salad or something but I thought that that was kind of strange that he would say that to me while I was eating kind of makes me feel bad about what I was eating um and that really for some reason I remember that even though it didn't really change how I ate at the time um and then I I went through residency I

was gaining weight because I was stressed out and you don't sleep much in residency or at least you didn't back then I think that was right when there were some workour uh res limitations CU before people would work like 100 120 hours a week um but when I started residency uh they instituted an 80 Hour Work Week limit which we really tried to stay under but we were always at 80 hours or maybe slightly higher but 80 80 hours is what we uh what we were supposed to do and we're pretty good about keeping to

that but that means you don't sleep very much so yeah I didn't sleep much I ate the same way that I had been eating um as a kid and young adult and I gained weight and I started to develop some neck and back pain uh when I would operate because um when you when you do spine surgery um the patient is laying on their belly so imagine here's a patient you put them down here's their head their face you put them face down on a table and then you stand next to them you stand next

to them like this and you look over and you operate inside inside their back right in there so I spent all day standing up I'm wearing my PJs by the way um I stand all day yeah actually I have to have to sit like this stand all oh yeah going a half stand it's kind of uncomfortable um stand all day and I'd be looking down like this operating with my fingers and because spine surgery has a uh a lot of x-rays you have to wear lead so you're wearing a lead vest and skirt and a

neck protector and then you got a headlight headlamp on your head that's attached to a light box so you got a weight on your head and then you spend literally all day and all morning all after afterno sometimes into the evening like this making very fine movements with your fingertips and being super focused well that is not a good posture and at the end of the day my neck would hurt and my low back would hurt uh and I was I was in my late 20s and I started to develop that uh which was ironic

cuz I was trying to help people fix their necks and backs and my neck and back was getting worse so I finished residency and then I took my first job um and I was practicing and uh trying to help people with with their back and then a second time a colleague of mine called out how I was eating um this guy this guy is um I'm very grateful I met him he he is a well he was a pain medicine specialist so an anesthesiologist trained in helping people with pain usually in the joints so he'll

do injections uh he since retired but um he really helps me learn the important things that I'm about to share with you he really started me on this path of learning something that I didn't know was important at the time uh but when I started that job U he invited my wife and I out with his wife and um he took us out to Korean food and then um I ordered my favorite dish at the time which is uh spicy pork marinated um with white rice and a huge plate of spicy pork came out white

rice and I was eating it and I was so happy that that I mean this thing looked delicious and then he said the same thing that my really smart colleague in residency said he said you know that's going to kill you right and same thought in my head came up as like wow that's kind of a mean thing to say to someone who's just about to enjoy this meal um and I thought in my head well okay this is red meat I know red you're not supposed to eat too much red meat but that's kind

of uh kind of a hyperbole to say it's going to kill me um but I I really respect that guy and I know that he's a really good-hearted person so I just started asking him I was like what do you mean by that and why don't you eat meat and he he really started talking with me about how um eating certain ways can help you heal quickly or not heal quickly or not heal at all and um and that that really kind of like set a light bulb off because at that time I was beginning

my practice and I was doing surgeries that I had learned to do um and I learned to do them well and I was gaining more experience I was getting better at doing these surgeries and I do have a somewhat obsessive personality I don't think I have OCD but I definitely do obsess over things I really like and so I would obsess over doing a surgery the very best way possible and um I thought that I was doing surgery I was learning to do surgery I think technically well you of course I made some mistakes in

the beginning and well at the end too but I I was getting I thought thought pretty good but despite that some patients would get better some would get worse some would stay the same after doing what I thought was the equivalent surgery for each person and it was um it was a little bit of a mystery to me um now in residency they do teach us some stuff about how the body heals without surgery um but the focus really is on how to do a surgery well like how to cut well how to drill well

how to choose the right patient uh that would benefit from surgery um and there is a very famous study done in neurosurgery called the sport trial SP O R T and U this is kind of the extent to to which we learn about how patients can heal without surgery uh in this study they looked at people with disc corations and whether they get um surgery or if they have maximal medical therapy that's like Physical Therapy medications rest exercise stretches um maybe chiropractor maybe AC acupuncture but they they looked at all uh patients they divided them

into patients that got surgery and patients that did not have surgery and then they looked at him 2 years later and what they found was that at 2 years later it really didn't matter matter whether you had surgery or not cuz everyone was about the same most people got better um they did find that patient that were in such severe pain they couldn't walk or had weakness in the nerve because the nerve was being pinched so bad um they benefited from surgery because it took away the pain quicker and it prevented uh some permanent weakness

in most cases so in surgery we learned okay the people that in residency we learned that the people that would benefit from discarnation surgery are people that are in just such severe pain they can't move they can't even get out of bed or the ones with weakness in a muscle that's inovated by the nerve that's being pinched by the buling disc and the flip side to that is that some people actually a lot of people get better without surgery if you give them enough time all right so I did learn that in residency but what

I didn't learn was that people heal at different rates based off of what they do and sometimes actually all the time that's more powerful than the surgery tools that I have to help people so I did not learn that in residency I learned that after residency and um you know I talked a little bit about what that meant for for me in whether to continue doing surgery or not um that was that other video that went viral uh but this video is really focused on how how I learned how people heal quickly um so when

my my pain medicine partner said or told me about oh yeah you can heal quicker or slower based off of what you eat I said what oh H maybe that's why some of my patients get better some of them get worse and some stay the same so at that time this was maybe one year into practice I started just asking my patients all kinds of stuff starting with what do you normally eat and like do you eat primarily vegetables fruits um fatty stuff carbohydrates do you avoid carbs um yeah I started asking that and then

of course I already was asking do they smoke do they do drugs and then I added you know how much do you sleep are you really stressed out and uh much later I added what's your social situation U like do you have friends what's your relationships with your family and then even later years later I I start talking about well what do you do for stress are you really anxious things like that but the first was what do you eat that's where I started and then um I just kind of kept a mental note for

each patient actually sometimes I would write it down in the the chart uh so that I could remember but um yeah I would keep a mental note of What patients ate primarily and um and I would just follow them because you know when you see a patient in clinic you can't do surgery right away unless they came in through the ER the emergency room and they need an emergency surgery that that's a different situation but usually in clinic you um I was seeing patients with um neck and back problems it could be neck and back

pain could be a pinched nerve causing numbness or weakness in the arms or legs or walking or balance um and I would uh I would mentally keep track of how they do over time so if someone needs surgery I would recommend surgery and then schedule them for usually it was about four anywhere from like four to 6 weeks sometimes the patient schedule required it to be even farther out like two months out uh from when we decided to have surgery uh other times I would say oh well you know you you should do some more

conservative management and I would recommend like physical therapy or going to a chiropractor or a u uh pain management or um Physical Medicine rehab doctor who could do injections of steroid into different parts of the spine and then I would see them back after that so that would that would take a month or two to get scheduled for the injection get the injection and then have at least a couple weeks to see if the injection helped so this was a good way well inadvertently it was a good way to see what happens to people over

months and and I noticed that the patients who said that they ate a lot of vegetables and fruits they would heal quickly and and what I mean by that is a lot of times they would call me like a week before their surgery was scheduled and say that their pain went away their leg pain and numbness went away and they could walk again normally or if it was in the neck their arm pain got better uh and that was always surprising to me because a lot of times a lot of times these patients were really

miserable when I saw them in clinic I mean they they had they were disabled and so when they call me like 3 weeks after I see them and they say oh yeah my my Pain's better do I still need surgery I have a huge discernation on the MRI I don't I need to get that out and um most of the time we would I would say well if your Pain's better we don't need to do surgery uh but you know sometimes sometimes the patients would not be completely better maybe like 90% better and they had

a huge discarnation on their MRI and so they would say well I still have a little bit of lingering stuff and I know the MRI has a huge discreation so I'd rather just get it out and so I would say well okay since you're still having symptoms let's just do the surgery so i' take them to surgery i' open them up and cut them open and then I get down to the spine open up the spine with the drill and then under the microscope I would it's a huge microscope I mean it takes up the

whole room and it's a boom that that comes over the patient and I can see with two eyes so so in 3D I can see down into this tiny tube the tube is 18 mm so less than 2 cm um and it's long it's like this long so I'm operating through smaller than inside of a toilet paper roll um so I'm using a microscope to see in there and these patients that got like 90% better and they were healing well a lot of times when i' go in there I would see that the disc herniation

was gone I I'd have the MRI on the TV wall TV and I can see this big discernation pinching the nerve and then I'd be looking with the microscope into the person's back and I'm actually looking I can see the whole where the discernation came out of I can maybe see a little bump where it came from but it's is gone the nerve is fine there's the nerve is the nerve sits in a little tube and the tube is fully inflated with water there might be a little bit of red next to the covering of

the tube where the discnation had irritated the nerve but it wasn't pinched anymore um so in so in the three weeks between me seeing them and them being horribly disabled and then them wanting surgery and me agreeing to it and the time that you know they ended up having surgery because they were they still had 10% of symptoms or so their body had dissolved that big hunk of cartilage that was sitting and on on the nerve um that was always interesting to me and uh actually it was a little frustrating because it was frustrating because

um when you go into to a surgery and then you go down to the spine and you don't find what you're looking for you have to be 100% certain that you were in the correct space and you didn't operate on the wrong part of the spine that was normal that would be a huge no no um and so these surgeries were mystifying and frustrating at the same time because I would have to spend extra time to look around and really feel everywhere and make sure that I I didn't miss the discnation that it wasn't like

tucked away somewhere else or I'd have to shoot an x-ray and make sure that I was at the exact place that I'm supposed to be at uh but yeah yeah so some people they can they they could heal and those people were usually doing um they were eating a lot of vegetables and fruit and not too much animal Foods um and they weren't eating salty uh because I did have patients that were vegan so they didn't eat any animal Foods um but they they I had patients that didn't heal well in their spine as vegans

and they were eating very salty with lots of processed foods so foods with extra added salt and sugars uh so being vegan by itself does not guarantee that you'll heal well it's really eating Whole Foods so the actual plant or veggie rather than the processed version of it so if you think if you think of an orange an orange is healthy to eat but if you squeeze it out and you just take the orange juice that's not as healthy um another well better example is a potato potato you boil a potato and just eat it

plain that's actually really healthy actually one large potato is about a fifth of the protein you need for the whole day and yeah plants do have protein um and I'll go into that later uh but if you had five large potatoes which would be I think a really boring way to eat for the whole day but if you had five large potatoes you would get the minimum protein that you need for the whole day um so a whole food is you're taking the actual plant the vegetable or fruit or or grain and you're eating the

whole thing now for grains that's oh I want to go back to the potatoes so a whole potato is healthy uh it has a lot of sugar so you know um it's not maybe not the best food uh uh but my point to this is if you take it and you slice it up into strips and you fry it and you douse it in salt and then you dip that fried piece of potato that's doused in salt and and you know it's got It's soaked up all the oil from the frying and then you dip

it in to uh ketchup which is tomatoes mixed with salt and sugar and then you eat them that uh that's not very healthy so you you can have a potato and you can have a french fry um a potato is a whole food French fres is a processed food um so both are vegan both don't have any animal Foods in them but the potatoes helps you heal the French fry doesn't help you heal or potato chip is similar won't help you heal um so what I what I learned from my patients is that if you

eat Whole Foods mostly plant-based most of my patients were not vegan they ate animal Foods once in a while like once a week or once a month maybe twice a week but they weren't eating much they were really focusing on Whole Food plant-based foods and watching the salt when they did that they healed really quickly so quick that I couldn't operate on them and the benefit of that is that if they heal without surgery there's no Scar Tissue because when I do a surgery even if I do it the perfect way just by going down

through the skin and fat and muscle down to the bone through the bone and work around the nerves I create scar tissue around that whole path all the way down to around the nerve and sometimes just the scar tissue can wrap around a nerve and cause um permanent nerve pain which is that's awful because you can't cut out scar because as soon as you cut on scar you make more scar so patients that have that problem like they had a good surgery their problem was fixed but then the scar wraps around the nerve and squeezes

it and then they end up with lifelong nerve pain they cannot be fixed except with alev deated some with medicines uh there's some other ways to deal with it but uh surgery no matter how you do surgery you will develop Scar Tissue if you can heal without surgery then you can heal without a scar and the body can function normally so there is a huge advantage to helping your body heal these problems in my experien is in joints joint problems in the back and neck um there's a huge advantage to of your body healing things

rather than a surgeon going in there and cutting it out and creating Scar Tissue the body is way better of a surgeon than any human uh with a knife can can be so I learned that by talking with my patients and observing them and doing surgery in some cases and at that time I was still having neck and back pain after a long day of operating sometimes my surgeries would be well most of my surgeries because they were mostly spine surgeries um there would be an hour to an hour and a half long if I

had to put screws and rods into a spine to fuse a joint uh it would take me like 3 to 4 hours or if it was a really big surgery um like a brain tumor surgery sometimes that would take me all day and into the night starting at 7:30 in the morning and finishing sometime like around 9 or 10 p.m. those were exhausting days um and I would I would have really bad neck pain and back pain uh sometimes I wake up with a crick in my neck and then have a stiff neck and not

not be able to turn turn my head very well but I'd still go to clinic and try to help people with neck and back problems even though I couldn't really move my neck very well that's so ironic uh but when I saw my patients start healing uh like this then I tried that out too I tried that out I said okay well you know what the heck this seems to work really well for a lot of people maybe I need to change the way I eat and just see what happens because you I got this

neck problem and back problem so um my personality is to really dive head head first into things um I have to use the restroom so I have I have to come back all right I'll be right back all right I I am back from my potty break so I was telling you about how I felt when I first started doing what my patients were doing so um the way I usually do things this is my personality is that I dive head first into something that I think might be good just to try it out and

sometimes sometimes it's good sometimes it's actually not good and I get hurt uh but I kind of do things in a little bit of an extreme way my moderation is not something that I'm very good at uh so when I when I first did what my patients were doing I said well I'm going to just do the extreme version of what they're doing and go vegan and really avoid salt so I just got a BN I went to the supermarket I got a bunch of vegetables I got like broccoli cauliflower so zucchini carrots and um

and then I I just cook them I like steamed them or tried to uh sort of pan fry them but without oil just with like a thin layer of water and then I put some spices on it and then at that time I would add a little salt um cuz I didn't understand the salt thing at that time uh but I I will talk about salt in the next episode um so I I did that and I just really ate just vegetables and maybe a little bit of brown rice uh and couple things happened well

I lost weight really quickly mainly because you know I probably wasn't getting enough calories at that time and I think a lot of inflammation in my body calmed down uh but I think I wasn't getting enough calories uh for the number of calories I was expending in the day uh you I didn't really know what I was doing at that time um but yeah I lost weight uh my body felt calmer like more peaceful I didn't have that general malce or Malay is just a bad feeling like like just uncomfortable you just feel uncomfortable in

your body and or just not so good and that kind of feeling that went away uh and then I noticed that I could operate all day long and not have neck or back pain but this did take it wasn't immediate it took about a month so about four weeks and during that four weeks I farted a lot a lot a lot um like just toting the horn like nonstop just walking and tuning the horn and I'll talk about what's going on there that'll be the third episode it'll be called the farting episode uh but there's

something really important going on with the farting what what's causing the farting and this time period of for weeks about four weeks uh after 4 weeks I could operate I could operate all day and into the night and not have neck or back pain anymore this was 9 years ago yeah I was aged 31 when I learned when I learned this from my patients and my partner uh and so I thought wow this actually Works my what my patients are doing worked for me and I feel really good and I lost a lot of weight

and I can move my body and I don't feel bad all the time in my in my body at least I I was still struggling with mind Loops of anxiety and fear but my body felt good um hi oh okay oh it's okay just do whatever you need yeah what was I talking about yeah my body felt good and my patient showed me uhoh hold on we got a little Interruption here okay my patients showed me a way to help me heal my own spine which I'm very grateful for so thank you patients for for

showing me a way to heal my own spine but I also found that it not only healed my spine but it healed a lot of things uh like what was very noticeable was my my fingers so my finger nails and my toenails like the the nail and the edge around I think that's called the cuticle I'm not sure the name of that but that that where the skin and the nail meets would would be way healthier than than normal for me at that time instead of having like a bunch of skin tags things were things

were smooth and they looked normal um and then my skin my skin felt smoother uh so those are the things I noticed but mainly is the neck and back pain were I was the most grateful for because that was causing uh discomfort so I saw I saw when patients did I tried it out myself and it worked for me and I I was a spine surgeon trying to help patients get better from spine problems with Sur surgery but now I had figured out a tool that might even be more powerful than surgery and so I

said well why not do both why not do surgery and tell patients they need to eat whole food plant-based with low salt well in the beginning I didn't know what I was doing and I really took the wrong approach uh I I I told told patients I'm like hey you got this problem we could do a surgery it could make you better might make you worse might uh uh well in some situations I'd say that other situations we would have to do surgery because they were so far gone that they needed surgery otherwise they'd be

in a wheelchair the rest of their life so those situations I would still explain the plant-based diet thing um but I think a lot of people would just look at me with glazed eyes and like why is the surgeon talking about the food eat this is a mechanical problem there's a disc pinching a nerve he just needs to cut it out why the heck is he telling me this um so I would get glazed over eyes i' get rolled eyes sometimes I would get anger because you know what people eat is so integral to who

they are and the culture they come from and the family the family traditions they have and so when someone when someone says hey how are you're eating not good for you that's uh that can be enraging um it's not it doesn't feel good to hear that so in the beginning I I was I was telling all the patients hey you need to do this otherwise I mean this problem might recur again even if if I get you better with a good surgery it might happen again and so I would at that time I would take

personal responsibility for their outcome and the problem with that is that you can't choose something for someone else U it just doesn't work that way you can't tell people hey you need to do this and then it makes them do that no it doesn't it doesn't work that way in fact if you tell someone hey you really need to do X then they would sometimes be like yeah screw you I'm not going to do that um and you know personally I'm like that if someone tells me to do something and they're they don't give me

a good reason or a reason that I think is good enough then I would sometimes just do the opposite just out of spite it's not a good way to live but that's just kind of how I work um uh so yeah in the beginning yeah I didn't have a good way to tell patients about this information but over time I learned that everyone has their own choices to make it's not my responsibility um for what someone decides to do with their life because that's their choice um if they want to live a certain way then

that's that's their choice and I'm not responsible for those choices I am respon at that time I was responsible for doing a good surgery doing the best surgery I could possibly do in order to give them the best shot at having a good quality life but it was kind of like a tug-of-war with me uh inside internally um because I felt like the surgery could help but the diet was more powerful and I didn't have control over what PE people ate even if I told them the information um uh so yeah towards the end of

my practice I I would just explain to patients um this is like experience that I that I have that I've seen with other patients and that if you do when some patients they eat whole food plant-based with low sodium and they exercise they get enough sleep and they're not stressed out and they have good social relations they heal really quickly and they usually don't need surgery and the opposite is if someone just sits on the couch eats pizza and hot wings and uh smoke cigarettes um it doesn't move around is uh doesn't have a social

life you know they they don't have any friends and they work a stressful job they're not going to heal no matter what no matter what they do even if it's a good surgery they'll they might be better for a few months six months and then they come back with the same problem so I would just lay it out that way and say hey here's the information this is what happens to people if they do this or that and then um then I would say uh then we talk about surgery and I would just leave it

at that so that there was information there for people to see and they could choose for themselves whether they wanted to do X or Y um and then I didn't take the responsibility on of what they chose they they chose whatever they want that's that's good and I am a firm believer in diversity is good so if everyone did the exact same thing our our species as a whole would not be strong because um in diversity you have strength uh all kinds of things happen in life so you want to have different ways of approaching

life um with different people so I I welcome diversity uh uh but I also want people to know that there is some Pathways some Pathways up the mountain that are easier than other Pathways so other Pathways might be like the analogy of climbing a mountain you want to get to the top uh there are established climbing routes that are easier than other routs um you can still climb a really difficult dangerous route but there's a good chance you might die and never reach the top um and so in presenting this data I was showing a

way to get up the mountain that's not saying it's easy but it's easier than maybe other paths um so even at the end of my practice when I had kind of fine-tuned this talk U and I would spend at least 10 minutes with every new patient talking about this so my patient visits were longer um and I could see less patients because I took longer time um but even with a fine-tuned talk and presenting information that way I would say I would estimate probably maybe one in 20 patients actually decided to do that may maybe

more I I'm not exactly sure U but the ones that did often would avoid surgery uh all right so I'm going to shift tracks now and now I want to talk about so once I figured this out I looked to other doctors experiences uh and for research so the last part of this talk I'm going to talk about a few doctors that um that whose stories are very important to this topic and then the last part is a medical paper I'm going to show on the computer um with the data uh because you know people

want to know yeah sure this is anecdotal information what what data is out there so I'm going to show that at the end okay so there are um well there's two doctors I want to talk about in particular no three doctors three Darkness okay uh one is a PhD so that's the first one um around the time that I was figuring this stuff out there was a really cool documentary called Forks Over Knives the title Forks Over Knives means you can heal yourself by eating you know with a fork rather than undergoing surgery which is

under a knife so Forks Over Knives that that documentary I think is on Netflix uh it's really good in that documentary I saw a doctor named colen Campbell and uh he's a PhD I believe in nutrition and uh he did some interesting work uh there's two things that he did that I found really interesting one was um a study where he oh there's three things that he stories from uh from Dr Campbell so the first story is he early on in his career he went I think to the Philippines and then uh he saw that

the kids of Rich parents were getting cancer at a much higher rate than the kids um who were poor and it was really strange to him because the kids who were Rich were getting more protein and at that time you know the really concern was getting enough protein um and so he thought that was really strange that the kids were getting lots of protein which in this case was animal protein we're getting more cancer than the poor kids and um then he did us so that's the first story The Second Story is then he looked

at epidemiology data that means looking at a large number of people over time in China and then he what he found was that um different Villages and cities and regions in China have different traditions for their diet some areas eat way more uh animal Foods some some areas eat more plant-based Foods some areas eat more carbohydrate heavy uh well usually in general Asian diets are pretty carbohydrate heavy with the rice um but what he found was that the regions that were traditionally eating way more animal Foods they had much higher rates of cancer just like

he had seen with the rich kids um earlier on in his career uh so that's Story number two that regions that ate more animal foods for their protein rather than plant-based foods for protein had more cancer and then the third story of his that I found found really interesting was he tried to replicate this in the lab with rats so he would feed uh he would feed rats three different things uh one was a protein from cow's milk goes casine and he'd feed the rats soy protein and a um gluten a wheat protein uh and

then he would induce liver cancer in these rats with a chemical that creates cancer um and then he would see what happens to them and what he found was that um the rats who were fed the milk protein the casine they all died from cancer the ones that ate the soyer gluten protein they still had some cancer in the livers but they they on average would live and the cancers were there but they wouldn't grow um if they if they at the end of the study they would kill the rat and they open them up

and look at the liver there were some cancers there but they weren't growing like in the rats that ate casine the milk protein so those are three very interesting stories um and research done by Dr Campbell um the second doctor I want to talk about is Dr John McDougall he's a medical doctor and in his early career he uh worked in Hawaii so in in Hawaii uh what he noticed is that he was just taking care of the you know The Islander Islander population what he noticed was that there was a definite Health disparity between

Generations so the older generation the ones who typically just immigrated or who had immigrated from their native country somewhere in Asia they tended to live a long life with minimal health problems and were skinnier and then the Next Generation the firstborn generation in Hawaii they started to get more health problems like diabetes some heart disease some cancer they were a little overweight and then their babies so the grandkids of the Immigrant they tended to have lots of these health problems that are similar to a lot of American uh American health problems heart disease U stroke

uh diabetes cholesterol issues cancer U obesity and uh and he found that it was because the the original immigrant the grand grandparents they still ate the way they used to eat when they were a child but then the next Generation started to eat a little bit more like the standard American diet standard American diet is sad sad um the the the grand grandchildren generation just ate the sad diet and their bodies were sad um so that's that's Dr John mcdougall's story and so Dr McDougall uh he now practices in Santa clar California or Santa Rosa

what somoma somewhere in that area um he advocates for a whole food plant-based diet that is low in fat uh and he says starches carbohydrates are fine as long as their whole food um and that's that is that was very helpful to hear because uh my mom has dealt with diabetes and um you know she tries to avoid carbs a lot and I'm going to the the paper at the end of this talk is going to address that issue are carbs the devil or not but John McDougall says Dr John McDougall says carbs are not

the devil they actually are very healthy and you should be eating them and it's okay to eat a lot of them um and you try to minimize the amount of animal protein and and fat um John McDougall actually helped I emailed him early on in my career and I asked him hey I'm a neurosurgeon I see these things in my spine patients do you have any knowledge about um how a plant-based diet might help heal spine problems and he actually sent me two papers um this was maybe 8 years ago uh maybe 9 years ago

at the time he he wrote back to me and sent me two papers that were actually very helpful and I will make an episode about that which would be called um yeah essentially how plant-based diet can help fix spine problems like how how does it actually fix spine problems um but I'll do that after the uh the salt episode in the farting episode um so that's the second doctor I wanted to talk about the Third Doctor is Dr Gregor g r g r Gregor uh he's a really cool Doctor Who has a YouTube channel called

nutrition facts and a website I think it's nutritionfacts.org uh and what he does is he goes through all the latest research and just kind of breaks it down into an easy to understand easy to understand but datadriven explanation for what might be good for you and what might be not good for you in terms of food so nutrition facts YouTube learned a lot from that channel and Dr Gregor and i' I've heard him talk uh at this uh there's a plant-based nutrition conference that's done every year in in um California uh I went last year

and it was awesome I got to hear Dr Gregor and Dr McDougall talk I don't think Dr Campbell was there um but a lot of other doctors who are experts in their fields um share their stories and information and research uh so if anyone's interested especially if you're a medical professional I highly recommend checking out International plant-based nutrition conference is done every year there's actually coming up um September 20th in Anaheim California and you can you can um uh you can register online uh for um virtual attendance and you can get continuing medical education credits

for that so um I intend to either attend this conference in person or virtually I haven't decided yet uh cuz I don't live in California so it's a little bit of a trip uh but Dr Gregor he oh he has an excellent book called how not to die I like that title how not to die it's kind of funny because you know we all we all die uh but this this book is called how not to die um he he's a he's a funny guy uh and very smart and way smarter than I am about

nutrition stuff so I highly recommend checking out his channel nutrition facts those are the three three doctors I want to tell you about and um to end this this first episode this episode is really the longest because I have to explain all these things about how I got to understand this and it's a long story um uh the other episodes will be shorter probably but maybe not um this is to conclude this talk is we are going to look at this study this is published in the Lancet it's available for free uh the title is

called dietary carbohydrate intake and mortality a prospective cohort study and metaanalysis okay that's a bunch of research speak for we did a very carefully constructed research study to try to eliminate biases uh and try to find the truth okay prospective cohort study metaanalysis it means they're they start at a certain time and they look forward in time they look at groups of people uh and then metanalysis means that they also examine other research studies that are similar and see if the findings line up um this was published in Lancet in 2018 and it was research

done by doctors in Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston so that's one of the hospitals in the Harvard system and the epidemiology division in University of Minnesota Minneapolis uh and the epidemiology division at Harvard public health school um research papers can be very boring so I'm I'm going to just I'm going to give you the highlights of this study and and we won't go into the really nitty-gritty stuff what they wanted to do is they wanted to find out well how how long do people live based off of how much carbohydrates they ate and in

addition to that they said well if someone's not eating much carbohydrates what other things are they eating are they getting fat and protein from plants or animals so there's really two things that they're looking at they're looking at carbohydrate intake and then plant-based and animal-based fat and protein intake and they looked at 15,000 adults age 45 to 64 so you know middle AG to just before retirement age and they started in uh the late 1980s and follow these people for let's see 25 years okay so this research study took 20 well at least 25 years

I mean more because they had to create the study and then do the analysis but the data collection took 25 years okay so this is this is a lot of work that these doctors did and it's a lot of information so over 25 years of those 15,000 people 6,000 people died so 40% of the people who participated in this research they died 60% were still alive and from that they calculated well at the beginning they asked patients what do you normally eat uh they they calculated how much calories they got from carbohydrates versus animal protein

and fat versus plant protein and fat and then they just looked and said well is there a relationship between um how much of each type of food uh and how long people live and the results are fascinating so let's go let's go to the results now this is all the data that that shows that you know this research study is constructed well and they they try to eliminate biases like race diabetes hypertension smoking education level income level um weight change you know those kinds of things all right so this is the first result it's very

interesting let's see if we can zoom in on this all right that's good all right so this is a graph of how much how many calories are from carbohydrates in the diet and how long you live so the left the Y AIS this is um Hazard ratio that that's uh essentially like the higher the number the higher risk of dying so you know lower number one is good means you live the longest or below one means yeah you live even longer and the bottom the x- axxis is energy from carbohydrates and that's in terms of

calories so what they found is that if about half of the calories you eat are from carbohydrates you actually live lived the longest at least in this group of 15,000 people they followed for 25 years so so it looks like 50 to slightly higher 55% calorie intake from carbohydrates actually helps you live the longest now if if you deviate from that now deviate is not a good word if you choose to do something different than 50% the results are shown here let's go to the extremes so let's go to the far right let's say 80%

of the calories you eat are from carbohydrates so let's say you just ate rice and bread and pasta all day every day with just maybe a little bit of other stuff here and there well your risk of dying goes up about 1 Point by factor of 1.2 or ratio of 1.2 um well that's not that much but it is not as good as at 50% now if you go to the Other Extreme and you do 20% of your calories from um carbohydrates and 80% from fat and protein of various sources then boy your risk of

dying goes up a lot here 20% carbohydrate energy is is a hazard ratio of nearly 1.6 times the risk of dying or 1.6 ratio of dying um wow that's that's a lot and that that's including for accounting for you know sex race total energy consumption diabetes smoking cigarette smoking physical activity income level and education so I mean this is this is really fascinating that if you have a low carb diet you are at increased risk of dying by a significant amount I mean we're not talking like 1 or 2% we're talking about like I don't

know what the percentage comes out to for hazard ratio but a hazard ratio of 1.6 times I that's a lot that that is not a small difference so so you know my patients that well and family members that recommend oh you should go on a low carb diet now I understand why they say that because I I have patients that do or had patients because I don't practice anymore I had patients that do like a keto diet keto diet is a low carb diet and it usually means that the rest of the food you're eating

is high in animal protein and fat um doesn't have to be and you could do it with plant protein and fat but usually people are doing it with just eating more like chicken or fish or eggs things like that um I understand why people do that because uh when you do a low carb diet as high animal protein and fat your body goes into ketosis that's why it's called a Keto diet and it starts burning off fat uh and uh um people lose weight um and you you can you can look good on the outside

U you you have low body fat and so your muscles are defined um you're carrying less weight on your body um and you can do it relatively easily and quickly on a keto diet so I totally understand why people like that and a lot of people say that it helps with joint problems and and inflammation and and I think those people are are cutting out process foods and so I'm all for cutting out processed foods like excess salt and sugar intake uh but that comes with a a huge asteris um that I think a lot

of people are not aware of and that's this information that if you have a low carb diet no matter if you have no matter if you have plants or animals protein and fat your risk of dying goes up significantly with a very low carb diet um now anecdotally so this is not this research in my experience the patients that were doing a keto type of diet or a low carb High animal protein and fat diet for a long time they often had the worst spines they had the worst ability to heal their spinal joints and

um I'm going to go into that in more detail in another episode but it I think it has to do with the blood vessels to the spine getting clogged up with cholesterol atherosclerosis and the blood flow to the spine is is uh is not good and when the blood flow is not good to a certain area of the spine your body can't get in there and fix it up can't heal it well and so what I what I saw was that the patients with the worst joints and the worst ability to heal were doing a

keto diet or low low carb animal protein fat low carb High animal protein and fat diet um so yes I understand you can lose weight you can look good but inside you might not be doing so good uh so there's a huge asteris and you know I'm not telling people what to do and I I think everyone should choose what they want um and I think there's many paths up the mountain but some are easier and some are really hard uh so I think everyone should have the full amount of information to know what the

consequences of their choices are and they should be able to choose no one should choose for them okay so um yeah let's talk about let's talk about the other part to this the study so that was the main part now they compared their results to other studies so I think their study is the red one here and then they compared it to another study that collected data in a similar fashion and that study is the blue line and you can see that that's pretty similar the optimal amount of carbohydrate intake is still around 50 to

55% somewhere in that range so it was not just this study they actually looked at a couple studies now this is the second part and this is this is really interesting I mean this this study I'm so grateful that these doctors spent literally like three decades trying to trying to get all this information all right this this is the second part and very important when someone well when we eat you can eat carbohydrates fats and proteins and so they they wondered well when someone eats animal protein and fat what happens and when someone eats plant

protein and fat what happens and you have to understand that these patients they weren't just vegans and carnivores the majority are mixed somewhere somewhere in a gradient of you know some people ate a lot of animal protein and some vegetables and then others ate um you know a lot of veggies and hardly any meat and then there's everyone in between like some people ate about equal amounts of each so they looked at they looked at that and um I want to show you uh when people have animal protein and fat with low carbohydrate so let's

look at the one that says a r i this one right here because that's their study with a low to moderate carbohydrate intake consumption and animal protein and fat your risk of dying goes up one by a hazard ratio of 1.2 you know higher numbers means you more likely to die early now let's look at if you have a low to moderate carbohydrate consumption and you eat plant protein and fat or predominantly plant protein and fat we'll look at the AR I study which is this one 0.86 that means you are less likely to to

die and you live longer if you do this this combination moderate carbohydrate and the rest of the food you eat has plant protein and fat Okay so this study to me really just is the basis of how I how I think about plants meat and carbohydrates so carb hydrates are actually not the devil you really want to yeah they're not the devil um but they could be you know if you eat high fructose corn syrup in a Coca-Cola well I shouldn't say Brands if you if you uh drink high fructose corn syrup in a soda

and uh uh you have you know a a pizza with a supreme pizza that I used to eat and then you eat um yeah if you eat that way you you're not I mean you'll live you know I I I lived I'm 40 now and for 30 years I ate that way I ate supreme pizza and pork and chicken and white rice and uh you I had some health problems uh but I still lived I still lived to uh the age of 31 when I started eating differently because what I learned from my patients and

my colleagues and really smart doctors who have dedicated their lives to trying to figure this out so I am by no means an expert in nutrition um and I am not a nutrition nutritionist I didn't go to school for that I I went to school for medical school and surgery training uh but I still think that what I learned and what I experienced and uh um the information I've gathered over these many years is potentially very helpful to a lot of people um I think there's many different right ways to live okay if someone wants

to eat meat that's fine um and oh I should I should end this by saying that um what we eat is really oh look there's two things what we eat is really important socially U if we look at our closest animal cousins they're the chimpanzees so they're Apes like us 99% of the calories they eat are from Plants but 1% is from animal meat they actually go and kill monkeys so chimpanzees are not monkeys they're Apes but they will go and Hunt monies in the jungle and kill them and eat their meat and they will

actually share their meat for social reasons for friendship uh and for meeting for sex um that's 1% of the calories they they eat so our closest animal cousins they eat predominantly plant-based but they use meat for social reasons um and so when we eat with our friends and our family uh our Traditions at least in America um you know festive Gatherings for eating usually include a lot of meat or fish or other animal foods and that is an important thing socially and if if you um if you don't eat those if you don't eat those

Foods then you kind of get excluded uh and you know that is harmful healthwise being excluded or um uh not being able to socialize so for my own practice I I don't eat 100% vegan anymore uh I do at home um well most of the time almost all the time uh but when I go out with friends or family uh you know once a week or once every couple weeks I will eat a little bit of meat or fish or cheese uh just to enjoy the time I have with my friends and family um and

I found that that's a nice balance for me um oh I have so many stories I will tell you one more story uh is that there was one patient that I took care of in the ER at my first job and he was 95 or something 90 90 something and he was vegan his whole life and um uh I saw him I think for a brain problem in the ER um I think he had some bleeding on his brain I think that was the problem uh but otherwise he was very healthy uh and he told

me how sad he was he was so sad and he told me he's vegan he said I've been vegan my whole life because I love animals uh but what happened was that I outlived everybody that I I that I know and that I care about and they cared about me everybody else died and I am 90 I forget how how old he was in the '90s but he's like I'm I'm in my 90s and I'm so lonely because everyone else died and I'm still alive well that's really heavy uh so you know there are positive

poses and negatives to every choice in life and um I think after I think after meeting that guy I I think I I told my wife let's go have a steak uh so so there there are choices in life and I think there's multiple right ways to live each one has its own positives and negatives just like going up a mountain uh on different routes has its own positives and negatives and uh just wanted to share that with you I hope that helps you um be informed about the choices you make in your life and

help help you make choices um to help your whole being the choices that you're happy about uh hope you have a wonderful day and thanks for listening to this story