How Fasting Can REVERSE AGING & Prevent Disease! (FASTING FOR SURVIVAL) | Dr. Pradip Jamnadas

Because we're addicted to eating in this lifestyle we want to eat every two three hours and that's one of the biggest impediments that i find in teaching people how to fast hi everyone drew pro here today on the podcast we have dr pradeep gymnatis who's talking all things fasting how to use fasting to age in reverse and reduce chronic inflammation and reverse disease it's a fascinating episode stay tuned why is it That fasting is still so underrated and often overlooked by the traditional medical industrial complex well it's because fasting is not sexy there's nothing fancy

there's no drugs there's it's just fasting so people think oh come on that's that's nothing just not eating and how can i get better because they also don't understand that when you don't eat you're bringing in a whole new biochemistry they don't Understand that they don't know what fasting really does but once they understand that fasting is not just fasting it is a huge new biochemistry it's a whole new metabolism that you're bringing in and then you talk about that metabolism and now how you can get that flexibility in your metabolism now you got their

attention so i think it's been basically we need people like you and and mark and other people that can talk about this and educate people that no Fasting is not just fasting it's not just a boring subject there's so much science behind it and also the other thing is you know traditionally we've been fasting and as you know in the hindu religion buddhist religion christianity and also in islam we do fast and it has been linked more to the religiousness rather than the science when actually there's a lot of science behind it talk about some

of the benefits of fasting for those that are You know nobody's not really familiar with the word anymore but still sometimes there's a little bit of a misunderstanding of the full spectrum of what people have available to them when they tap into the power of fasting if you would say the top three benefits in your experience in reviewing the science what would those be when it comes to the power of fasting well you know three there's so many but first of all Addiction you get rid of addiction because we're addicted to eating in this lifestyle

we want to eat every two three hours so we get addicted to the foods the patterns we change our circadian pattern of eating and our hormones in our body so the addiction has to stop and that's one of the biggest impediments that i find in teaching people how to fast so i want to get rid of that addiction so that's one big thing the second big advantage is what i Call metabolic flexibility that you're supposed to be using another part of your metabolism so you're getting out of the glucose and out of the sugar and

now using another physiology that there are other substrates that you can use for energy in your body and that gives you a healthier and a better metabolic pathway you can use one or the other it's like having a car that can run on two Different fuels so uh and that has a whole bunch of advantages associated with and the third thing is that once you start fasting and you start changing your hormonal status now you get a whole bunch of health benefits coronary artery disease strokes blood pressure uh obesity related diseases such as joint disease

um degenerative changes and even dementia so you get all these advantages so this it's amazing what fasting can actually Do for you and when you look back at the history of it we say why didn't we do this before why didn't we really examine this before it's so true and i want to talk about a little bit your personal history with fasting your family history of fasting but before we go into that i was reflecting in preparation this interview and i was thinking that there's so much misconception about fasting even still some very mainstream Doctors

or people that go on the news and actually tell patients and scare them shitless in terms of you you should be really afraid of doing fasting right you know there's obviously there's different types of fasting and everybody has to personalize it to their goals and their condition and other things but i'm talking about the generalized sense of fear and a lot of that fear is based on the platform of misinformation and i can't think of any Area that there's more information on than this basic idea of why do we get uh fat so to speak

right i think there's a still a little bit of a misunderstanding in terms of this calorie model and what is known as the hormonal model that's tied into insulin so can you break that down for the audience that's listening no you're absolutely right you're absolutely right about this You see the problem is calories calories the old calorie theory was that more calories in the more you're going to gain weight and if you don't burn the calories you're going to gain weight and we know now from numerous studies that that's absolutely not true what it is

is the hormonal model so you're absolutely right about the hormonal model now what we're eating and how often we're eating is changing us in from a hormonal Standpoint so you're a hormonally modified human being now you're no longer the same human being from four generations ago and your hormones are changing because of what you're eating the type of food you're eating the processed foods how often you are eating so that's what's happened and the reason why we've come to this is look every day you're bombarded by advertisements you're bombarded by people who tell you that

you know you've Got to eat five meals a day that you you get in the car you've got to have your drink and your food and you've got to eat on the motion and so every day you know your instinct of saying that you know i'm not hungry but you still eat and there's so much pressure for you to eat because people are everything's being pushed on you the advertisements the snacks the The the everything just points towards consumption consumption because we need to break out of it because otherwise we are going to suffer see

we are addicted because we've been made addicted and then of course the medical profession but also government forces have not really helped us because they've told us dietary advice that was not entirely correct so we were told it was all fats fats Fats fats but now we know it's not all about fats we know that it's also about sugar and carbohydrates and processed foods and what that does to us and changes our physiology so and these foods are addictive so we've moved to a calorie-rich addictive diet and that's why addiction is such a huge part

of everything i talk about to my patients and i've got to get them out of the addiction So that they can make changes in their life so it's not just about just eat this it this is this no i have to recognize that these people are addicted and this addiction is a serious addiction it's as serious is being addicted to morphine or any other drug and it's that serious and people look at me and my patients look and say you mean say i'm a junkie i said yes you're a junkie now you really are and

then i see it every Day i see it every day in my clinic this is my clinic and i run my practice every day i do surgery this morning i did angioplasty i did a stent so i'm a day-to-day cardiologist and when i speak to my patients in the clinic in the afternoons it's addiction you know one day and they go oh my god i was breaking out in a sweat and i felt my sugar was getting low so i had to go and eat and i felt better and i said then did you take

your Sugar level and they said yeah and it was a hundred well then it's not hypoglycemia pure addiction it's pure addiction so that's what's happening we've moved away from eating real food to addictive substances this is these are not foods by the way these are substances so should we be consuming substance or should be consuming real food that's the issues moving away from real food to Substances chemicals addiction and the combinations of these foods is also a problem so you see fasting is also about what type of fuji look at the combinations it's high sugar

and high fat and of course there's lots of salt in it too that combination is not found in nature so when that gets into our body it causes these hormonal changes and the biggest hormonal problem i found was Insulin and i want to tell you a little bit about how i actually got into this please because ultimately i'm just a cardiologist right so why is why is a career just talking about dieting and sugar and weight and and all these things well you know i've been doing angioplasty and standing for over 35 years so fortunately

you know in london i graduated as an md at only to age of 23. so i got into cardiology really early on And i would do this amazing angioplasty and the some patients do great others keep coming back sorry sorry to interrupt could you just explain angioplasty for those that are not familiar with it or maybe not be in the world of you know medicine if you could just explain that absolutely so they come to me with chest pain and i do an angiogram which is putting the dye in The coronary arteries and i find

a blockage so this blockage is preventing the blood from flowing into the heart muscle and supplying the muscle with the oxygen that it requires so these blockages cause chest pain and of course when the blockage is 100 you get a heart attack and there the muscle is completely deprived of oxygen and dies so what i do is i i specialize in putting a fine wire into the coronary artery the artery in the heart and then I would slide a little it's like a spring into the artery and open up that artery and then leave the

spring behind and then deflate the balloon pull it out and now the stent is left behind so the stent is an angioplasty angioplasty means you're just basically fixing an artery or blockage so that's what i'll do and and and drew the thing is that some patients did absolutely great and others would come back with new blockages six months later a year later Two years later and i just couldn't understand it and i looked at my traditional risk factors smoking high blood pressure of course diabetes and then the list starts going blank and i said there

must be more things that are causing this and then that got me really curious and then what happened is that i would have patients Having heart attacks or angina and then i would look at the risk factors and they don't have any and i said no can't be how why does this patient have hardening of the arteries so then this was about 20 years ago i did a study here in my office where i took a hundred patients in whom i did an angioplasty and i said how many of these people have diabetes and i

found that roughly a third of them Had diabetes but i did a glucose tolerance test on all of them in my office it's a cheap test to run so i did it and i found that actually eighty percent of my patients had abnormal sugar metabolism but yet only a third of them had a diagnosis of diabetes so what happened to the other one third or just over one-third is that they had an Abnormality in their sugar metabolism they didn't even know about it and then i found that about ten percent of them were actually diabetic

and they didn't even know they had they had diabetes so there's there's a condition called glucose intolerance that means your sugar level is a little high but not high enough to make a diagnosis of diabetes so i found that at least half of my patients in whom i Didn't have a diagnosis of diabetes actually had slightly elevated sugar levels and then that got me thinking that why is this happening and right around that time we were realizing that insulin levels are really high in these patients and that type 2 diabetes is a is a case

of high pain anemia so let me just explain that a little bit for the audience so what happens is that In these patients they do up high insulin levels which keeps the sugar level down so when you do the glucose transit it doesn't look too bad and you look at the blood test called a hemoglobin a1c which is a test to see what your blood sugar has been doing over the last few weeks they also stay nice and low so but the problem is the insulin level is so high and i found that on my

patients that the insulin levels were so high for 10 years 12 years before they become diabetic so it's finally when the insulin just can't keep the sugar down the sugar starts going up ah now you have diabetes but guess what he's already had high insulin photo by at least 10 to 12 years and right then my curiosity really got there i said you know what there's something going on here and then as the more research came out and other researchers also came in i realized that it's insulin resistance And now almost routinely almost every patient

gets an insulin level now the problem is we were not doing insulin levels before no one was measuring it uh it was if you go to your family doctor and say i want to measure my insulin levels it says no you don't need a glucose tolerance test and you do a glucose tolerance test and it tells you nothing it tells you that your sugars Are okay and you get a pattern on the back and say go home but in reality behind the scenes you got this really high insulin level so i think that this is

a time when we need to be educating our our medical profession also that we need to be looking at the insulin levels because i'm finding that when i find these high insulin levels and then i i chase that and i bring it down through methodologies which we'll talk about in a second Now i'm making an impact on on those patients who have heart disease and all of a sudden i started noticing the patients were getting better when i when i bring their insulin levels down and the way i brought it down there's no magic pill

to bring insulin levels down as you know there's no injection to bring your insulin level down um so that that's where i i got interested in fasting because i realized how am i going to Bring this insulin level down how how am i gonna okay okay we're gonna change the diet don't eat sugary things don't eat carbs don't eat simple stuff but then i as i started peeling that onion i realized that it's not just that it's also processed foods it's also certain combinations of foods and then i realized that oh my god we're eating

too often as well That's when i came and i said you know what there has to be one thing that will help all of this and that has to be fasting and and and and i looked at my insulin responses it was fascinating that if you don't eat all day long and then have only one meal you're gonna make less insulin for that one meal than had you eaten that same meal After having had two previous meals that day so what that tells me is that your your sensitivity to insulin changes on a day-to-day basis

or hour-to-hour basis so even your own circadian cycle as you know uh makes you insulin resistant at certain times of the day you know like when you're waking up in the morning you're going to be a little bit more insulin resistant at that time things Like that so i as i read more and more i got lost in this field i said oh my god this is some amazing stuff and how come we didn't do anything about this so that's how i got into fasting so you can see it was a little roundabout way that

i got into fasting yeah it was a roundabout way but really at each intersection you're asking yourself okay what's deeper okay what's deeper than this okay what's deeper than this And that's what brought you to a place of wow this one thing this insulin which plays so many different roles inside of the body you know one of them being you know keeping your blood sugar you know down is so central to all these conditions you know you mentioned one which is people having their arteries clogged what are some other conditions symptoms issues challenges That people

are going through because often sometimes people hear this and they're like well i don't have any history of diabetes in my family okay i might be a little bit more overweight but i'm not having a diagnosis of diabetes i'm not sure if this is something that i should pay attention to but talk about all the things that this is connected to beyond just diabetes beyond just you know somebody worrying about uh their arteries being Clogged what else is uh insulin and and having too much of it in your body connected to so this insulin doesn't

just affect the uh condition of your arteries in your in your heart because ultimately remember when you when you're born you're you're that blood comes out of your heart and then all the arteries grow out the arteries in your heart go out and then they arteries your aorta your carotid Arteries and then down to your kidney arteries your leg arteries these are all blood vessels and what we've done in medicine is we've compartmentalized everything uh and then we break it up into different organs so we don't see that there's a universal connection so whether if

you have kidney disease for example well what's wrong with your kidneys now there are many different types of kidney Disease but the number one thing is still microvascular disease in your kidneys so when you have high insulin levels the tiny blood vessels in your kidneys are not going to work very well they lose their ability to vasodilate so insulin blocks nitric oxide production nitric oxide is a vasodilator as you know so when your nitric oxide is not that you can't vasodilate and the body is Supposed to have this vasodilatory capacity you're supposed to be a

vasodilate and vasoconstrict and you're supposed to have that flexibility but you immobilize all your tiny blood vessels and cap raise when your insulin levels high so in your kidneys you're not going to get adequate kidney function in the brain you're not going to have adequate brain function you're going to develop major arteries will also clog up your carotids your Peripheral vascular disease so insulin affects every organ because every organ has blood supply and you are as old as your blood supply i mean william osler said that right you're as old as your arteries so the

manifestations of high insulin are widespread so i'll give you an example some of my older patients come in and say you know i'm getting a little demented i'm getting very forgetful and the spouse Will say the same thing and i will find high principle anemia and when i treat them and i change their diet and i'm not i'm just the cardiologist but i tell them look you've got to do the following thing the wife will come back and say you know what his memory is so much better now he's functioning better and we now know

that when you do magnetic resonance imaging studies in the in the brain and look at functional studies that it's the vasodilation phasor Constriction that occurs in your brain in different parts of your brain and you you basically immobilize all that when your insulin levels are high and insulin is a growth factor that's something else that people need so how does it cause hardening of the arteries well the walls of your arteries have smooth muscles okay that's why they can vasoconstrict and vasodilate and what insulin does is that it causes that smooth muscle Proliferation so it

causes it to thicken so the the walls of the arteries become thicker as well so it's a growth factor it also causes left ventricular hypertrophy big word basically the heart muscle all muscles get a little fat when you put the patient on insulin or you have high insulin levels so it's a growth factor growth factors also affect cancer and cancerous cells in the body so a growth factor is something you want When you need it but when you have an inappropriately high insulin level you don't want those growth growth factors to be there so take

blood pressure now i'm going to tell you something about blood pressure i've been dealing with blood pressure since the day i graduated from school and i was told that hypertension is essential well there's no such thing as essential Hypertension there's always a cause for hypertension and the number one cause that i have found in the last 10 15 years it's a high pencil anemia so i'll give you a typical exam young guy like you comes to the office he's got no other problems and my blood pressure is high i bet you've got insulin resistance and

i measure his insulin load this guy high bring his insulin levels down So now he says my doctor told me i have to be on blood pressure medications forever i was one of those doctors that you have to be on blood pressure medicines forever you can't come off this you you can hypertension um and i have realized that that's absolutely not true um if you find a patient who has essential hypertension I now look for hyperinsulinemia and invariably i do find it bring it down through dietary changes and lifestyle changes and the blood pressures go

away and i've done that to hundreds and hundreds of patients in my office so insulin causes hypertension because it's totally a vasoconstriction and it doesn't allow your blood vessels to dilate appropriately and that causes hypertension so when you look at metabolic syndrome Part of it is hypertension and this is how it works it's all because of hyperinsulinemia so it causes hypertension it causes hardening of the arteries in all your organs and then you're going to feel the symptoms of that organ whether it's your brain your kidney or your heart or or even your peripheral vasculature

or even endothelial dysfunction causing erectile dysfunction so As a cardiologist i i don't see those patients but my urology friends and i have now got this rapport going that hey you see those patients with erectile dysfunction they have endothelial dysfunction if they're in the endothelial dysfunction is something going on you should you should be looking at the insulin levels and it's been very exciting because we've Actually restored endothelial dysfunction in these types of patients by appropriate dietary interventions and reducing the insulin so you can see that it has ramifications beyond what we imagine because it

just depends which organ is being affected by the dysfunction due to the hormonal imbalance of hyperinsulinemia yeah it's so true you know in the traditional model of medicine Well-intentioned it was name it tame it and blame it right and or name it blame it and tame it so you're looking for all these different fancy ways to talk about really a few root causes that are there so we might call it erectile dysfunction we might talk about somebody having restriction of blood flow to their brain or inflammation of the brain that's there and we call that

alzheimer's uh you know we have all These different names that are out there and really the question is can we look upstream and see what is the common river what is the common pathway that is feeding all these different components and then again well-intentioned you know you mentioned hypertension they're uh you know thank god that we have the mechanisms of science and again well-intentioned sometimes we put the focus on the wrong element of it so patients become overly Obsessed with thinking about the table salt or the salt that they're adding to their food not realizing

that the vast majority of their salt which be playing partly a role in hypertension is coming from processed foods and those processed foods also have high sugar high fat and that combination which increases insulin in the body and causes a cycle to continue to continue to continue and you know i see the internet It's uh pretty popular these days to feel uh you know kind of negative a little bit about social media the internet it's in the news a lot but i'm so thankful of things like youtube and facebook and other stuff because they're finally

giving people including practitioners who are looking for answers right people that have been to school like yourself and our incredible doctors and other Practitioners out there it's finally giving them access to or questioning or providing them information that allows them to have a potentially new perspective on something that they thought they understood well but wasn't working for them or their patients you are so right you're very astute especially by the fact that you mentioned that salt because the increased salt intake is associated with The the other goodies which are the the sugar and the um

and the vegetable seed oils and that combination and and that's with the deleterious effect so when you get rid of that food then of course blood pressure comes down but we think it's allocated to the salt but it's actually not salt and i gotta tell you a little bit about salt that please as a cardiologist you know uh i was taught that salt is terrible you've Got to stay away from salt and everyone must be in a salt restriction and you must only be on 2 gram sodium well i tell you i don't believe in

the 2 gram sodium diet in fact my patients feel better when they're on a minimum 4 grams to 6 grams and nobody measures it but basically i don't tell you to go measure your your salt intake salt your salads Salt your foods don't go crazy don't eat processed foods because they have all the salted stuff in them so i don't restrict salt only patients are a rustic salt on our patients who have decompensated congestive heart failure so obviously if you're fluid overloaded you have kidney failure and your legs are swollen and your lungs are full

of water then i stay away from salt but otherwise i don't restrict my Salt on my patients in fact in fact the studies do even show that if you do restrict the salt you get more what we call neutral hormonal activation because you you're really getting the body is sensing that there's salt deprivation so that it causes those neural hormonal changes that causes further vasoconstriction um and and actually can worsen blood pressure and that neural hormonal activation is not very very healthy for You if multiple ways not only just blood vessels but your platelets and

their reactivity and you know and i mean we can talk about the um the angiotensin receptors as well and how they all get affected and it's a fascinating subject so i don't restrict salt i think so yeah but the the restriction should be on the processed foods and those combinations that's where it's coming from in our Diets anyway if we pay attention to that and get all the benefits of reducing processed foods in our life i mean it's so amazing there was a study that came out a few years ago we'll link to in the

show notes for everybody to see that processed foods ultra processed foods so we have processed foods and we have ultra processed foods so all the ultra packaged foods that are out there that are in the store aisle which are making Even uh you know that are addictive as you've mentioned they're extremely addictive and it's very difficult for us to stop and they're being engineered by uh scientists who are essentially addiction specialists it's how do we get people to keep on eating these foods so that we have a greater share of the stomach but the study

was saying that pros ultra processed foods are responsible for Approximately 11 million deaths worldwide every single year are directly connected to ultra-processed foods in our diet and you mentioned one of them which you and i have a shared background ancestral our families are from gujarat we were both born in africa that was a beautiful thing to find out about yourself uh yourself in zimbabwe myself in kenya if you've been to uh india when you drive around one of the things That you mentioned earlier you see billboards for it everywhere and that is vegetable oil you

see it all over india there's all these billboards for different types of vegetable oil canola oil peanut oil this oil and it's that this oil is heart healthy there's always a little heart emoji little symbol next to us help us understand how this classification of highly processed seed oils May not actually be what the marketing is trying to say that it is joy you're so observant you're so observant but you see they got that sign because it's cholesterol free so because it's cholesterol free they got the green card to say that hey this is heart

healthy and that all came about again because of us in the medical profession we allow this myth that vascular disease cardiovascular disease is caused by Cholesterol so still pretty widely you know accepted by a lot of people even though it's been disproven now there is no doubt that there is a component here but it gets a little complicated and we can talk about ldl and oxidized ldl and why you get small dense ldl and and that is predictive for cardiovascular disease but not just your totals and you can have a large Well let me explain

a little bit about the ldl particles and then i'm going to talk about vegetable seed oils so we we vilified fats and ldl um and this was wrong first of all when when eisenhower had his heart attack as you know we had to find a cause for this heart attack so then everyone jumped onto fats And then we had ansel keys that came along with his studies and and his studies were not very accurate but then everyone jumped onto that bandwagon and and this caused the mcgovern um party to then come up with the recommendations

that we need to get off fats and start eating more carbs instead and and we the people who are so good actually followed the advice and we have A 55 reduction in meat intake and and and we replaced it all with carbs and and what happened blood pressures went up color and and heart attack went up stroke rakes went up degenerative diseases went up we got sicker and sicker and sicker metabolically um and we blamed cholesterol cholesterol so anything that then came out saying this is cholesterol free got a green card oh yeah this is

great Stuff and that's how vegetable oils got onto this thing onto the scene that hey butter is no good saturated fats are actually no good now these polyunsaturated fats there's two types of fats right there's saturated fats actually saturated fats which are found naturally in meats and and chicken and and in some plants and then you have your Polyunsaturated fats and then you have your trans fats now polyunsaturated fats are what's found in in vegetable seed oils and they were touted as being heart healthy but as time went on more and more studies showed that

actually this that is not true because that's omega-6 and omega-9 those two components of your vegetable cedars are actually very Pro-inflammatory so they cause inflammation in the body and that makes sense because they polyunsaturated so there's double bonds that can interact with things so when you have a saturated fat there's no bonds to interact unsaturated fats have bonds that can interact so they can be oxidized as well and they can attach themselves to other molecules in the body and the plasma lemma you know the lining around each cell So the polyancex fats are actually pro

pro-inflammatory and that's exactly what happened in india that we moved away from consuming saturated fats in the form of ghee ghee which is clarified butter and we all moved over to vegetable seed oils and with it we saw an epidemic of coronary artery disease in younger and younger younger people So we need a society that traditionally didn't really have a lot of that in in their you know in their lineage and background oh absolutely true yeah i was flabbergasted because uh you're right our great-grandparents did not have coronary artery disease and and people say that

all well they didn't know they didn't have it no no no no autopsies were done diagnostic studies were done they did not have coronarity Disease to the extent that we have today and every time a young south asian walks into my office i go oh my god there it is again you know i mean it's terrible at 38 35 they're already coming in with heart disease and when i look at them i find two things wrong with them true number one they're consuming a lot of vegetable seed oils i measure the linoleic acid levels in

the blood And it's sky high so before the upper limit used to be 20 then we found that the population has a higher levels we moved it up to 30 and now 30 is normal how crazy is that um so so linoleic acid is a reflection of your omega-6 intake and omega-6s come from all the processed foods and the vegetable seed oils now why do you use vegetable seed oils because it's nice And dry it has a long shelf life you can print the package it'll be like that for the next year you don't have

to wash it it's cheap yes absolutely so everyone started using vegetable seed oils so the atlantic linoleic acid levels are really really high and then these fats are pro-inflammatory and that causes further inflammation in our body and i found that that the the ldl particles they become small and dense Versus large fluffy particles so many times patients will come to my office and they do the advanced lipid panel which is a blood test that we do on some patients and i'll find that they have a pattern b that means they have small dense ldl particles

and they're doing everything right and i said now what's the final thing i can do for you and i tell them you know what cut out all the vegetable seed oils And start consuming some saturated fats and they look at me with the white eyes saying would you tell me to eat saturated fats and i said yes just just start putting some butter instead of other things other vegetable oils and they'll come back and they'll find that the panel improves six months later they now have a pattern a large fluffy ldl particles less inflammation The

blood markers that i do also are improved so generally speaking vegetable seed oils should be discouraged and in india particularly they advertise that as as an alternative a better form they call it vegetable ghee which is a right very misleading and so i tell all my friends families patients stay away from vegetable seed oils and go back to consuming ghee when You are cooking and it's much much healthier for you get more absorption of all the vitamins a d e k it has a higher burning point when you're cooking with it it's it's not going

to produce trans fats the way the vegetable seed oils produce trend you know look look you know how we take our foods and it's left over and put in the fridge and the next day we take it out again and we reheat it again or we put in the Microwave you're just generating trans fats if you've cooked with vegetable seed oils so you've produced your trans fats as well this is this is a very very bad habit and and traditionally we never did that back home in india or ancestry we would cook each meal separately

we never reheat the meat the meals and reheating food that has been cooked with vegetable seed oils is extremely deleterious and The moment my patients stop doing all that i see the results i see the blood test they also do better they have less event rates but i see it in the blood reports i see benefits vegetable seed oils absolutely no no so a lot of them worry about things like um olive oil you know should i consume olive oil and it's it's supposed to be very healthy now all olive oil is is healthier but

You got to remember that it's not all monounsaturated see many people just categorize oils as one or the other well it's always a blend it's a blend you absolutely right you see olive oil is about depends on where you get it and how it gets into your bottle and all that but it's about 50 monounsaturated and that still leaves another 20 to 30 percent depends on where it's made and how it's uh Comes into your bottle of polyunsaturated and then it has a little bit of saturated fats so olive oil generally speaking is better should

not be heated should be added to your salads because it causes uh when you when you heat olive oil you get rid of the polyphenols and it's got a lower burning point so i i don't heat olive oil so i tell my patients to stay away from That from heating olive oil as well but you're so right about the vanaspatigi and vegetable seed oils and i think that that and the second problem i found in all my young patients is young patients from south asia is high principle anemia even though they're not overweight so the

term applied to them and of course 20 percent of non-obese patients can also have this i call them toffees It's a term that's been turned used by a lot of people thin on the outside fat on the inside so when i look at my south asian patients they are thin but they got a stomach and that's because of insulin resistance too much carbs and what really got me was when i found out that if you look at hindus in india 80 of them are Vegetarian and yet they have the highest sense of coronary artery disease

and and nobody questioned that you know why would why would we have such a high instance of coronarities in a vegetarian population it's because they're consuming vegetable seed oils and they're consuming far too much sugar and it's all processed that's the other thing processed and processed powderized The food is powderized and that's another form of a it's not an ingredient but it's a form of the food that that is that causes this huge rise in your insulin level when you consume it so those are studies that have been done in rats and in human beings

that if you if you powderize something unnatural since when does nature let you consume a powderized substance And then expect your insulin response to be normal it just doesn't happen but we did it and in india you know we grind up everything and and ever since the invention of the steel mill i think it was around here 18 30 18 40 i don't know ever since then if you look at the curve the incidence of all these digital diseases went up the milling process is a malignant Process [Music] and and i think that you know

your great-grandmother my great-grandmother had a stone and she ground the grains if she's going to consume grains non-processed it was very granular and i think that's really important which it meant that it had more fiber content than just The stripped out refined uh flowers that we have today of all different types which are also becoming very pervasive in the health world we're using a lot of tapioca cassava we're using a lot of those flowers and you know they're they're great tasting products and they're nice to have is like occasionally a little bit here and there

and it's beautiful but anytime we strip Out those flowers which a lot of our ancestors just because we didn't have access to the technology anytime we took out the sorry the fiber because we didn't have the technology we now are left with essentially a sugar it's straight up sugar but the population doesn't see it as sugar but it has just as much impact on your blood sugar and your insulin as having straight sugar in the body what absolutely right I mean if you look at the grain it's got the outer husk which is the fiber

then it's got the endosperm and then the germ so everything is stripped out except for all the starch and then you expect that to be a healthy food and then of course because you got rid of all the antioxidants and and other ingredients you add them back to the flour and of course the fiber not On the fiber they'll tell you a little bit about fiber i mean i i as as i said as i peel this onion i found so many layers so the fiber so they say oh yeah fiber is good for the

heart it's good for the heart healthy and i said how how is fiber healthy well fiber does only one thing it doesn't do anything for you Right it's your bacteria you already got the answer see true the thing is that this wisdom in the way nature packages things together so the fiber does a number of things to you and from the time that you consume it first time it it the k cells which are in the duodenum which detect the uh the food that's coming in and It's going to tell the pancreas how much how

much insulin to make so they for some reason when you consume food with those soluble and insoluble fiber they form like a layer and it's like a lattice and the made of the insoluble fiber and the in between the lattice is is the soluble fiber and the insulin response you're going to get is a much attenuated response much smaller response if the Food is containing fiber if it's without the fiber the k cells will just say whoa i've got all these carbs coming in and let's make a gallon of insulin see that's a problem the

second part of this problem is that the fiber which is missing your bacteria and your gut are never going to see that fiber so now your garden Your garden of bacteria in your gut the 10 trillion that you have in there are starving and you're going to grow the wrong bacteria in your gut and because you don't have the right bacteria in your gut you're going to get inflammation definitely you're going to get inflammation because the bacteria in your gut are now turning out to be a huge factor in health which we totally Ignored until

recently and and now we're discovering that oh my god these guys are our friends the 10 trillion bacteria our friends and and now we're changing our mind about that and that's why the fiber has to go back and it's not just fiber in the form of metamucil no no no no in its natural state you've got to have these fibers so that's how it reduces blood pressure oh yeah fiber increases and lowers heart Attack rates it's through inflammation but it's not because you're doing it it's because your bacteria are doing something and the metabolites from

the bacteria have huge health benefits to us and now we're realizing that diet and fasting changes your bacterial flora and if you then go back to your good healthy bacterial flora your immunology Is going to get better your leaky gut your your substances that are actually crossing over and causing inflammation in your body and causing connective tissue disease and other diseases all that gets better so that's a whole new chapter um it's it's the truth it's amazing you know what we're learning now and it comes down to what our granny already knew Is amazing isn't

it it's just it's just fascinating to me it's so fascinating you know my wife was asking me what's today's interview about i said you know if i had to say this the gentleman dr j that i'm interviewing had a mission it would be that i think he's trying to make fasting you said this in the beginning of the interview he said fasting isn't sexy but you're making it sexy and part of the way you're doing That is through storytelling and the combination of patient patient case studies what your experience is but then also the integration

of the science component so let's talk about that since you took us full circle which was beautiful by the way this is why i always tell guests and i don't know if you know but originally when i reached out to your team i was like you know we would really really love like an hour and a half of his time I know it's long and they were like you know he can give you like 40 minutes i was like no no i promise we'll do it justice like we'll make it a good interview because we're

48 minutes in and we just have the basics that are there it took that much time to set the foundation and to come back to what started off the conversation so let's come back to that in terms of fasting you know you said i believe it was one of the talks it was Like there is no drug out there on the planet that can do the same thing that this not doing of something not eating can do in our body so talk about some of the science that's out there that you came across that really

helped you connect the dots in turn and in addition to your own experience with your patients and seeing the improvements with their health Talk about some of the studies or some of the general research that's out there that really help you connect the dots around fasting yeah yeah so so when you're not consuming calories right when you're not consuming calories the insulin levels obviously drop because insulin only is produced when you're ticking in calories so your insulin level drop and i've found through all the research that So what happens now is the body through all

its chemicals and changes realize that hey i need an alternative source of energy well guess what you do have it in the form of fat because you stored it away for a rainy day well the rainy day has come because you haven't eaten so when you don't eat and you're fasting now the rainy day has come and your body has to start mobilizing the fat stores But the problem is that all of us are hyperinsulinemic so as long as your insulin level is high those fat stores are locked away you cannot mobilize them but when

the insulin levels start coming down because you're fasting now those fat stores because you get hormone sensitive lipase and and other hormones as a result the fats start mobilizing the fats now come in the form of triglycerides to your liver your liver will start producing some ketones And the ketones can be utilized by the body as an alternative energy source so fasting unleashes a whole new metabolic pathway of energy production through ketones and you and i do that or supposed to be doing that naturally because it's built in our system to do that because you

are not supposed to be eating every two hours and our physiology is such it's you know we were about more than 10 000 years old And our our our genetic engineering is from that time when you eat now and you may not eat again for another day or two and therefore during those times you have an alternative source of energy and we just didn't realize that we thought there was only one energy source and that was all sugar sugar sugar sugar and glucose only but no these are the pathway available to us so what is

the advantage of having that alternative pathway well When you use that auto path you're getting rid of the fat from the body so you don't develop the obesity that we're getting nowadays but more than that more than that the body makes you stronger because you're going in that pathway why because the body wants you to survive so you when you're in a survival mode You're going to come back stronger and better than before because look if you don't have calories you think you're just going to crawl into a cave and die over there and just

become weaker and weaker and this time i can't think anymore and you just no nature wants you to come back stronger become brighter smarter stronger than before go out and and get your food so that you can get and that's what this ketogenesis is all about it This this new pathway is not just providing energy to you it's actually bringing you back better bringing you back better so the research that i've found is that when you allow this to happen it's a kind of a hometic stress that you're creating on yourself hometic stress means that

you're creating a stress on the body which is going to bring you back better so when you do this fasting there's so many benefits Number one i'll tell you i'll just rattle them off basically there's a thing called brain derived neurotropic factor that is released and that makes your brain brighter smarter you can actually grow new cells and neuroplasticity as well which is fascinating but we never thought that this was possible that our brains can actually uh grow or grow back so bd you know brain tumor neurotropic factor and then when you when you do

feed yourself Afterwards this is the there's a release of stem cells into your bodies these things don't happen under normal circumstances when you're constantly eating so this stem cell mobilization is fascinating information growth hormone during fasting you get growth hormone you get more growth hormone production um during fasting than at any other time so your growth hormone allows you to Maintain your muscles and repair that's fascinating stuff that's going on inside your physiology when you are in the fasting mode which you wouldn't at other times and then there's this thing called autophagy and i know

there's a lot of people talking about autophagy and you you you know about autophagy but um for the audience i'm just going to tell that when you running out of fuel and substance is not Coming in you're going to take all your intracellular redundant parts of your cells and say you know what i'm just going to use these for energy because i need energy right so under the circumstances of fasting and some ketone production you're going to take your intracellular organelles that are redundant and you're going to basically package them into lysosomes and And basically

export them out of the cell so that the body can utilize them now what you've just done is you've cleaned up your intracellular debris as it were and same thing with old mitochondria you're going to get rid of your old mitochondria because the body is now saying you know what um i'm out of fuel here in the house my fire is is getting down well you know there's this old piece of furniture i'm gonna burn this old piece of furniture that's what It's doing it's getting rid of redundant furniture it's gonna now when you feed

yourself again those parts are going to be replaced so the science is now showing that when you clean up your mess in your cells and then you do feed yourself again you're going to get new mitochondria you're going to get better intracellular functions and Energetics is going to get better in the cell so i have found especially right now with everything that's going on with with post covert and and and you know the patients coming out no energy whatsoever and i tell them to do fasting their energy gets better why is that it's because they're

getting mitophagy their mitochondria are getting better They're getting new better mitochondria so the fasting process is not just about losing weight it's about changing your entire cellular mechanisms and we're supposed to have that that's what keeps us young our telomeres also get longer uh when we're doing this uh they don't they don't shorten so fast i should say um so there are so many biochemical changes drew is it's crazy that we we didn't Uh we didn't take advantage of this pathway before uh so everybody gets into a cataractic state at a different level of the

fasting you know it just depends on on what your diet has been before how much how much sugar you've been consuming in your diet but let's say that like i eat once a day that's what i do so for me to get into ketogenesis very easily i start spilling Some ketones very quickly by about 16 hours i'm already got some ketones in my urine so i know that i'm in that pathway others may take them a little bit longer but then slowly it becomes shorter and shorter and shorter so you start producing so what i'm

saying is that you need this metabolic flexibility to to to become uh healthier uh and to heal some of the the bad things that have happened from as a result of our lifestyle and diet So fasting has you know to me as i said in the beginning you know as a cardiologist i realized that when you first start your fasting you're going to get rid of your addictions it's going to be a tough tough process for a couple of weeks then you start fasting one day a week skip one meal a day maybe for three

four days and then skip two meals a day for the next week Or two weeks so that your body is getting used to it look i didn't die nothing happened i missed two meals but i'm still here i felt okay and it empowers the patient to say you know i can do better and then the next time they say you know evening came about it was supposed to be my meal i'm not hungry i feel good i'm just gonna skip it i'll go to tomorrow morning you just did a 36-hour fast so that's how i

empower them to Gradually get into it because if we just go straight to fasting they fail they fail they fail they fail miserably and they feel terrible and then they won't come back to you you know they'll say oh i can't do this fasting stuff but you've got to do gradually you've got to just learn to skip meals and and know what to expect you're going to get some cravings and You get these are all part of your addictions in the beginning then you're going to get some uh some um you you besides the cravings

and the addiction symptoms you can you might get electrolyte imbalance that's where you're going to drink lots of water because as your insulin levels come down you'll find that you'll have a diuresis you you'll have much more urine output So you need to replace sodium because with insulin when your insulin levels are high you hold on to salt and water when your insulin lows come down you start mobilizing all that so you start having a diuresis i'm making so much urine and you're losing salt so if you get cramps and you're getting cramping in your

legs and arms i tell them to take Some a little bit of salt you know with the water and they start getting better so now all of a sudden they say you know i feel good yes doc told me about my cramps i took salt he told me about my cravings and my behavior and i'm just gonna have to work my way through that because i'm i'm a junkie he called me a junkie so i'm a junkie now so i'm getting out of it so it'll take me two weeks to to un undo all that

And after two weeks they feel empowered i did it and then they start feeling better you know the mental fog is gone they're sleeping better their memories better and at the end of the day they they just feel so much energy inside them and they say you know doc i never felt so much energy before and they will go and they work out in the gym they're actually holding on to more muscle as well because the growth hormone levels Are higher as well so they come back and they tell me all this i feel great

doc i don't know what what it is but this fasting stuff is really working with me and if they're really obese once they've reached this stage then i make them do a three-day water fast so first you got to do all this you got to graduate you can't just go to university you first got to go through High school and you get through all this stuff so i make them go through all this and then say okay now you're ready you're going to do a three-day water fast and then it's just water for three days

and now then we get better results yeah one clarifying question that i have is that for example there because i know a lot of people are paying attention watching This on youtube or listening on the podcast for those that might find themselves in that same category would you say you know generally you know time restricted eating you know not hat you know not having food between a certain you know period of time having like an earlier dinner and a little bit of a later back breakfast doing a basic practice that would fall under the world

of fasting of time restricted eating i think generally you know most people Would regard that now even mainstream medicine would say like that's that's safe you know that's all good to go then there's like the longer fasts that are there there's the intermittent fasting and then people working themselves up to like a 24-hour fast and um you've done some great videos on this and we'll link to those as well would you say in the category of a three-day water fast That's something that people can navigate on their own or should they really have some connection

to uh you know a medical professional like yourself or somebody else that's out there do you have any opinions on that that's a great question so if you are on insulin this is very very important if you are on insulin and you're fasting and you're still taking insulin you're going to get Hypoglycemic now that means that your sugar levels are going to drop because you're not taking in calories and you're taking your insulin so you are going to be in grave danger of getting hypoglycemia and you can get a seizure and you can even die

you could get a heart attack so when you are fasting and you're going to do a three-day water fast for example you really even even the 24-hour fast you really need to have a medical Professional that is going to oversee that if you're taking medications so what are my general advice is as follows if you're on insulin you really need to talk to your provider because you should not be taking insulin when you are fasting and even when you do the 24-hour fasts you need to cut back on the amount of insulin so what i

tell my patients typically is that the long-acting insulin you can stay on but the Short-acting insulin that you're taking for meals you shouldn't have you still need your background insulin but the goal here is to get you off insulin so i'll tell you right now i've taken about 150 patients off insulin in the last few years so they've come to me on tons of insulin so i think that when you're fasting you do need medical supervision if you're a diabetic and you're taking insulin now if you the if you're taking oral agents For diabetes for

example then what should you do with those on the days that you're fasting you shouldn't take them you shouldn't take them if you're fasting for 24 hours or more so on the three day water fast i tell them don't take it but they can take all the other medications so there may be on medications for cholesterol or gout or anything else fine you can stay on those medicare but nothing that's going to lower your blood sugar so you Got to be a little cognizant of that and then same thing for blood pressure medications you will

notice that your blood pressure goes down when you are fasting so watch your blood pressure so what i typically do is two things i tell all my patients get a blood pressure cuff you need to monitor your blood pressures on the days that you're fasting or starting this whole program number two if you're on insulin or if you're a Diabetic you should get continuous glucose monitoring the device that you put on your hair i think that's amazing because that'll empower you to know that your symptoms you're having right now are not due to low blood

sugars and you can basically be confident that you're not hurting yourself and you get more confidence and yes the sugar may go up because you didn't take your insulin shot so it goes up from let's say 150 to 200 to 250. that's not going to bother Me that much because that temporary increase in your blood glucose level is not going to harm you that much because it's temporary and then it will come right back down again so if you look at the effects of glycation due to high sugars that effect that detrimental effect on your

proteins through the glycation pro end products is not as deleterious as having that high insulin level and inflammation in your body So i kind of let the sugar run a little bit higher and and and make sure that they don't become hypoglycemic because that that's the problem so when you when you are starting this program and you start skipping meals it's a little bit easier without supervision but once you start getting a little serious and you're only eating once a day or doing a fast more than 24 hours i think you really need to have

a Doctor or somebody who knows a little bit about this involved in your case and that's kind of hard these days because a lot of people don't are still not on board with this fasting issue but it's a great question that i think that generally speaking you do now i tell you i got a patient that came to see me from south florida and he was on his 83rd day of fasting only water 83 days drew i looked at this guy and and he looked amazing and he felt amazing and he didn't have all that

skin you know all over his face and under his arms and everything else so and that's because when you do this type of fasting you lose weight and mostly fat but also your your your skin uh shrinks so you it's a different type of weight loss than than when you're losing weight by by eating five small Meals a day and doing caloric restriction i've definitely seen a difference in the way the patients present but this guy was 83 days and i was shocked i said this is amazing so i i have a blood lab immediately

did his electrolytes in the office normal wow cbc normal are you on any medications now no i was on diabetes medicine and i was on blood pressure medications or these are Nothing the guy looked amazing so he weighed 385 pounds he was down to 230 pounds so i said okay so according to the scale i want you to come down to about 190 i think that that'll be the perfect weight for you um and he just called me he broke his fast so i told him to take some bone broth and and you know broke

his fast gently and he's doing he's doing wonderful now he's not going to go back to eating five times a day or three times a day he knows what To eat how to eat and he's going to start eating only once a day and he says that i'm happy doing that so here is this guy who came off all his medications but i think that people are looking for help and and where are you going to find these practitioners it is it is a bit of a problem too right now there's more and more that

are coming out each day a lot of younger People who are into like working out or crossfit like my brother-in-law he's a cardiologist at kaiser in san diego and you know he practices his lifestyle and he'll work with his patients and try to support them in fasting and other aspects so there's more and more people then there's places like the institute of functional medicine or integrative centers that are out there afram if you dig a little bit you can try to find some doctors that are out there or some Practitioners that can guide you and

i think that you know what you just shared by the way that's an astonishing story and i think there's a couple layers of it number one for people who listen and are immediately shocked like whoa can somebody even survive 83 days just on water here you have uh a medical doctor telling you that he's had first-hand experience with Somebody who did and on top of that you know it sounds like did you formally accept him as a patient so was he working with you yeah this is yeah so you're he's also now a patient so

it's not that you're saying that this is something that everybody should be considering out there you're really highlighting what's possible and how this fear especially for individuals that might be Classified in the obese category or extremely overweight category where there's a lot of extra storage that's there that the body can use you're really highlighting what's possible when we allow our body to do what it needs to do best and then within that everybody can personalize their own approach on how to tap into the power of fasting yeah and the fear factors need to be eradicated

number one oh i'm gonna run out of vitamins well you know your Liver and other parts of your body can store up to two months worth of vitamins and i i when i did the research i was shocked yes there are plenty of vitamins that are stored and that's what it's for it's for rainy days the body was designed in a very supreme fashion to be able to do that to store the micronutrients in your liver so you you don't need to be popping all the time i haven't eaten for two days so i need

to Take my multivitamin i need to know you don't have to not of course if you are nutritionally depleted from the beginning and and let's say you did a spectrocell blood test which is a test that can look at all your micronutrients and if what is missing and you really depleted yeah you might need to take some supplements but you know for most patients they don't need to do that number two fats there's plenty fat storage in your body If i take away all calories from you today you'll the average person can go at least

30 to 40 days and i'm not saying that you should but they can so the fear factor needs to be taken people think that oh my god you missed a couple of meals i'm starving you're not starving you're not going to die you're going to be fine you you your body is supposed to have That physiology you're supposed to subject your body to this type of flexibility if your body is not flexible in that in the metabolic way then i think that you you're setting yourself up for degenerative long-term diseases so on that topic of

metabolic flexibility do you feel it's important as one clarifying point and i'd love to hear your opinions on it Some people recommend that first a a patient or somebody that might be navigating this on their own goes and starts switching towards the direction of a whole food diet so that before they go on a little bit of a longer you know fast or they start even fasting for 24 hours they're not going into almost like a deep detox that comes from going into that what's your experience been with patients especially ones that Are more like

eating processed foods oreos junk food other stuff when they jump right into fasting do you sometimes see that they have what would be seen as either detox symptoms or negative reaction when they first jump in great great great great question yes this is the danger two things one is They are truly addictive to this and there's two forms of addiction that i've discovered with these patients well not me discovery but i have through experience firstly this is the psychological aspect that that you know you've become pavlovian you know you you you come home and the

first thing you want to do is is gorge on some junk food okay it's a pavlovian it's that house it's that Kitchen it's that sofa it's it's sometimes getting into your car that you dig for something so we need to get rid of that pavlovian reflects so i tell patients when do you eat what stimulates your thought about food what what what makes you crave for it uh is it certain friends that make you do it or a certain environment that did so that's those are all psychological cues and and then the second part of

it is the true chemical addiction which i do Believe that is really true because these processed foods especially sugar sugar is number one it goes to the dopamine center and now all of a sudden the next time you eat sugar you need more and more of it and there's cravings but you know what worse than the cravings i have to point this out worse than the cravings are the fact that it changes your brain Completely there's actual neuronal pathway changes that occur in your brain so when you are eating all those oreos all the time

you've already got those pathways built into your brain where the rostral pathways from your dopamine center and limbic system which go to your frontal cortex they down regulate it now what does that mean That means that when you're addicted to that type of food you can't think straight about that food that means you've become a little dumber about the intelligence of of your diet and your control over your diet because it wants to continue to be addicted so you don't get so smart about it okay because if you get smart you're going to not be

an addict addict anymore so it makes your frontal lobe go down in its Function and then it goes to the hippocampus so there's connections that go to the hippocampus that that actually make you remember uh that wonderful feeling that you had when you ate five uh really bad uh processed food items in a matter of one hour so so you get that you can break all these down so yes you're absolutely right to break those neuronal pathways and the habit pathways uh you got to bring in bring in This slowly so you know i do

discuss with my patients how far are they along the path of of this process food addiction and what is the consumption i mean today it's really sad that almost 57 of all the calories that they're consuming these days are coming from processed or ultra processed foods so you've got to bring that number down so changing the content of the diet first before we even introduce fasting i think you're very right you've got to Change what they're eating first because if you just go straight into dieting they will get a lot of withdrawal symptoms and then

as i said you know they're going to be so dismayed and feel so bad they'll fall off the bandwagon they'll never come back again so do make the may do make the change you've got to give them alternative foods you've got to show them that these foods are the ones that are non-addictive foods Non-addictive foods that you got to get on which is basically whole foods real food if it looks like that in nature eat it if it's going to go bad eat it if it's got a barcode on it be suspicious don't touch it

if it's got a food label on it be suspicious try not to read it read it or eat it just get rid of it just get rid of it so just go for real food so people come To me and say you're a cardiologist so you know i became a vegetarian i don't eat meat anymore and i was one of them that believed that meat hey hey this is bad stuff you know i'm cardiology facc i realized that the research doesn't support that so why would red meat be be bad for you it can be

and my uh association with that or my interest in that is that if it's Grain-fed cows they're gonna have too much omega-6 that omega-6 is getting into you now so that beef is not going to have the same concentration of fats of a cow that's eating grass because that's a grass-fed cow it'll have more omega-3 and it'll have more saturated fat in it not the omega-6s you see you are what you eat and what that ate so meat Is actually okay provided it's grass finished and and thereby doesn't have all that omega-6 in it chicken

is okay organic chicken and the eggs organic organic eggs i have no problem with these foods because they are whole they're natural and when i put my patients on these i guess what i get better compliance because you can go ahead and eat your egg have your egg for breakfast you know just get rid of the toast just have your Two eggs for breakfast cardiologists saying two eggs are fine yes because the cholesterol that's in the eggs is not what's going to raise your cholesterol level your cholesterol is what you're making mostly in your liver

so this type of education they get they feel better about it and say doc let me eat eggs he lets me eat beef he lets me eat chicken yeah but i tell him it's going to be the right stuff and then of course with it you got to have your vegetables with it So you're going to make these changes in their diet so they're eating better quality food better classes of food in the whole state with everything just very nature made if it's like that in nature consume it if it can't if it went to

a factory and got changed get rid of it that's the bottom line it's the bottom line and sometimes the simplest answers still take It's an uphill battle against the entire way that society is organized around food and pleasure and as you've mentioned addiction so i want to say for anybody who's listening that is hearing this and is nodding their head along as they're listening or watching this you know uh especially with you dr j working with patients you know that there is So much past baggage that people have to let go of sometimes that's even

trauma sometimes that's uh all sorts of different components as to even though it's a simple answer we know you're fighting an uphill battle and for everybody who's listening that feels that they should be further along than they are you're doing the best you can and yes there might still be changes that you want to make and be gentle in the process but keep on at it because You're headed in the right direction again you know you you you're you're so far ahead of everyone because you understand that your eating behavior is also affected by what

else is going on in your life so if you have a job that's extremely stressful you've had a lot of crises going on in your life then at that point i'm going to tell you okay you got to do this this this and the other It's going to be very difficult for you to do it so when you look at dietary changes and behavioral changes in eating you also got to look at the totality of the patient's life how much stress is going on in his or her life uh what kind of job what can

but you know now you're digging even more layers on that onion you see what i'm saying so you you gotta you it's so deep it's it's a lifestyle so you got to say To yourself okay i'm dr j is not just talking to me about when to eat how to eat and what to eat he's also talking to me about am i happy am i peaceful do i have purpose to have connection am i depressed you know because all these factors are also going to affect not only your eating habits but also your general health

i mean you know let me give you an example i mean We look at the attributable risk of let's say hypertension or cholesterol to coronary artery disease but have you looked at the attributable risk of things like depression it's far worse so if you're depressed you're sitting duck to have a heart attack and nobody talks about that and says okay let's look at your risk factors or sit on your tummy if you're depressed you fill this form up and tell You if you're present nobody's got time to your own family doctor doesn't have time to

do that and yet we don't realize that the attributable risk of depression and other psychological illnesses that you might actually have are far more do you feel connected you know what's your what what's your understanding of your standing in society In general or do you feel that you're at the bottom do you feel do you feel that you have confidence that you can talk with um all these things affect your physiology so diet is big one big part of it but all these other things are so important and and i've got to tell you about

this one study because this will really um Raise your curiosity on how i got involved with this this was a study that was done at johns hopkins they took medical students and uh obviously paid them for the experiment you put an arterial line in their radial artery and they were drawing out blood and putting it through a machine that measures your platelet reactivity okay right so they can tell moment to moment because it's done through light as to whether the platelets are aggregating or Not so platelets as you know are those tiny little particles that

make your blood clot make your blood sticky um which you don't want because you want your arteries to be free-flowing so what happens is that they give them a test while they're doing this and they flip through the page they answer the questions and the platelets are happy they and then they turn the page and now you've got a question that on on a Subject that you were never taught these kids go crazy now oh my god i don't know the answer and guess what happened to a platelet reactivity changed instantaneously true this is this

is so fascinating that that you know and and i read the study about 30 years ago and it stuck with me just but it showed me how your moment to moment moment to moment i'm not saying even moment to moment perception Of stress affects your physiology this is just one example i've got hundreds of examples i can show you of how your your mental state affects your physiology and how your your body reacts on a moment-to-moment basis down to even expression of angiotensin to receptors in your in your in your endothelium and your blood vessels

so whether you're going to actually clot right now or you're going To flow and the number of receptors that are expressed moment you know we say that we have these angiotensin two receptors in our cells right so we think they're fixed they're not three-quarters of them are involuted they don't express themselves now under certain circumstances they'll all of a sudden express themselves and that the stimulus for the expression of those Receptors could be dietary but more so it can also be psychological how you feel and it's amazing to me that that that 50 000 receptors

now all of a sudden they're a hundred thousand expressing themselves so now when the angiotensin comes along you're going to get a hypertensive blood pressure response suddenly your blood pressure goes up so we have these biochemical pathways we know about it But nobody's saying that okay fine let's look at your diet but also come on get a handle on your life let's let's decrease the stress levels let's do some meditation let's look at the peer group that you're spending time with are they supporting you with their habits you know there was a study that was

uh an offshoot from the framingham data the framingham heart study that was done in massachusetts That long longitudinal study and the study's title was the spread of obesity through social networks and they weren't talking about facebook and instagram and that they were talking about how we don't typically think of obesity as a contagious condition or a contagious uh makeup that somebody might have but actually they found that when they looked at somebody in their life if their best friend or There's somebody that was close to them that was a friend even more so than their

spouse even more so than their parents or their siblings if their close friend became obese they were much more likely to become obese themselves so this just goes back to the message that you're sharing that when you step into This mindset of wanting to improve your life feel better and hopefully make the world a better place too you start to look at every single aspect that's there and ask yourself what is the nutrition that i need in that area of my life to feel whole complete and give back to the world and in some cases

it's actual food nutrition in some cases it's healing your relationship in some cases It's there's so many people that are so alone today and don't have somebody that they would call a best friend somebody that they can rely on that they can be that can be their confidant and every time i hear you speak i'm just reminded of like how deeply connected all aspects of our life are and we should feel happy about that because even sometimes you have a week where you don't feel like you hit your fasting goals or you didn't make as

much Progress in your dietary goals that are there or you didn't get as good enough sleep okay great don't beat yourself up there's all these other areas how about just calling a friend that you haven't talked to in a little while and making their day how about doing something nice or kind for someone and feeling that joy that comes from giving back into the world even if it's something really small there's always something that you can do to take a step in the right Direction of feeling better oh absolutely so you see now you're really

talking about a holistic approach to this whole problem of chronic degenerative diseases of which nutrition fasting is one part of it um but you just hit on so many important points about it's it's our whole lifestyle you know that the number of visitors that come see a patient after open heart surgery dictates how well that patient's gonna recover i mean it's Ridiculous the complication rates are higher if that person has no visitors but what's that got to do with complications versus if there's lots of visitors i mean these studies are all done the number of

visitors after open heart surgery to even dictates whether he's gonna or whether he's gonna get home at day number nine or whether he'll be discharged at day number five what's that got to do with it so it's It gets really complicated but you know it gets complicated but then when you sit down and think about it it makes sense that you feel connected your platelets are now pacified your endothelium is working better your blood pressure is better and your physiology your physiology is dictated by the chemicals you put in and the medicines and the food

which is your medicine but also how you think your brain and your your your Whole psyche can also affect your your entire physiology so it's not just fasting i mean you can you can't be unhappy and fast i mean i think that's very bad um and you mentioned something about the contagious uh news of you know this this is definitely because behavior is contagious that's why when you're trying to fast you've got to stay away from those enablers that enable you to break your fast and go back and fall off the Bandwagon because your best

buddy says oh come on man we we we're going to go for a drink and we're going to have some some chips and etc etc that's one thing and the other thing is bacterial flora so you know it's amazing that your bacterial flora can dictate a lot of your physiology too and i'm just digging into all this now and you i'm sure you're aware that You know you can do fecal transplants from an obese person to a thin person and vice versa and you can actually change physiology and this data is just coming out and

it's fascinating but again i tell my patients you know look that may be true just take care of your own flora feed them the right things give your gut a break let the bacteria flourish the good ones because the bad bugs have a short Half-life that means if you don't eat for six or eight hours you've knocked off some of the bad bacteria in your gut so the the good ones are the ones that are going to stay behind and they're going to be your resident population so i said think feed them the right thing

eat eat it accordingly to our program over here and you'll have the right bacteria uh then you won't have to talk about fecal transplants and crapsules and all these things that they talk About these days it's absolutely fascinating stuff it's so true and also too when you get a craving you have to think we don't have the ability to distinguish it now but is that you or is that the quote-unquote wrong bacteria that's having that craving the yeast inside of the body the candida the build-up of different funguses other things like that that are in

the gut that are craving because they feed off of these sugars And those signaling molecules those modulation of the gut bacteria can drive your own craving that's there so sometimes it's not even you that's craving it sometimes it's your bacteria and maybe not the type of bacteria that we want to continue to grow further oh you you are so astute you you hit on that gut brain access connection and it's so true and i Just want to leave you with one word about that that is that almost 50 or 60 of the micronutrients that are

floating around in my bloodstream and your bloodstream are not what we ate it's what the bacteria made and liberated them as a gift to you because you hobbit them and you fed them the right stuff hopefully and the right kinds are there and they now float in your body so if you look at turmeric Which our ancestry uses uh and we say oh it's an antioxidant and all that well actually it works in different ways and similarly there are many others that actually the bacteria the polyphenols are taken up by the bacteria and they utilize

those and then release the final chemicals into your body it's not the polyphenols getting into your bloodstream so you're eating for yourself and you've got to do the fasting all the Stuff but you're also eating for your bacteria and your bacteria in turn are producing tons and tons of chemicals that are then liberated into your bloodstream so you just hit onto a huge thing right there and you know we can talk about hours and hours about all this wonderful new stuff we're learning it's just amazing amazing so amazing i have a couple more questions that

i want you to just be able to share about your world a little Bit and just anything that you want to have if you had to ask for our audience you know uh to to to to check out something that you're up to then i'd love to get to that so a selfish question that i'd love to ask you you know i have i wear a continuous glucose monitor and that's been amazing i was one of those people that i was always more on the thin side but i even noticed that Even in my college

career growing up veg vegetarian everything i started even as thin as i was and quite skinny at the time because i was vegan i actually became vegan after that after being vegetarian i started to get a little bit of the belly so i was that tofu i was that you know thin on the outside you know fat on the inside and i had that belly fat then i got in the world of functional medicine other things tried a bunch of Different stuff started incorporating back in super high quality animal foods into my diet completely a

game changer especially i tested my omega 6 to omega 3 ratio using a mega quant it's a it's a test that's out there that's pretty popular no affiliation and i saw that my omega-6 was really high and my omega-3 was really low so i started incorporating high quality fish into my diet uh Salmon wild caught salmon other things and i felt like a completely different person mentally like i was turned on i wasn't clinically depressed before but i was feeling like i didn't i wasn't a sharp and i didn't feel like that luster for life

so that evolved into as keto became a little bit more popular i said you know what let me try this on now i found through my experimentation of keto and i eating lower Sugar lower carbs in the diet that was there that i falled into what looked like this small class of smaller classification of people that has loosely been called like lean mass hyper-responders those are people who their lipids a lot of people go on a higher saturated fat diet and their lipids improve like a lot of the patients you worked with i went on

that even though i wasn't having the sugar and other things and my Markers my ldl my nmr profile breakdown of my small dents they went in the wrong like in the not the great direction have you worked at all with patients uh like that that are in that category that might signal that you know generally that type of diet works well for a lot of people and probably most people that are following the western diet but there could be either a phenotype or a genotype component where people don't do as well on that diet would

love to hear Any thoughts that you have so i i think you hit on a number of good points over there number one is we are very variable in the way we respond to foods as well so wearing that glucose monitor you'll notice that somebody else eats that same meal their sugar response is different than yours is different so and different foods create a different rising in your glucose so we are all a little bit different so You need to find your food profile that best suits your glucose rice so after experimenting with your diet

to see which of your foods cause the greatest sugar rise and uh in your bloodstream you can't then take that and give it to everybody because they may react a little bit differently so to a certain degree what you've done is very unique because you've you've made you've done a unique examination of your own sugars so we all tend to Respond a little bit differently so i think that that's a very important point and then the other thing is that your lipids for example how they responded generally speaking when i put my patients on a

moderate fat low no sugar moderate protein diet the ldl has to go up exactly like yours did and but what i find a little surprising with you is you Said you had small dense particles they usually they go up but they usually large fluffy particles so when your ldl particles become small this is the take home message that means that no matter what you're doing it may be helping you in other ways but there may be some inflammation going on because when the ldl particle how does it become small dense it becomes more dense because

lipopolysaccharides from Your gut are actually getting in and they displace the cholesterol from the ldl particle and now create a small dense particle that small dense particle also is more likely to get oxidized so these small dense particles you don't want them because they're more oxygen so it tells you that you've got lipopolysaccharides which is endotoxin getting into your bloodstream so then you're going to ask Yourself why is that happening and it may be that that this there's certain foods that may not be causing symptoms in you but maybe causing a breach in your in

your gut barrier that may be because you've got to ask yourself where this information gave and that's the million dollar question i asked every professor when i was doing my fellowship where does this inflammation come from nobody had an answer not a single professor had An answer and and it's plagued me all my life where does this information it comes from the gut it comes from the gut you know it's so interesting that you said that because we had a microbiologist on the podcast his name is kieran krishnan and he's with the company called microbiome

labs and he had suggested to me because i had talked about this early on that i said i had a relapse of some skin irritation and acne and he said you know what for Some people that had a history of leaky gut and i used to i had a lot of antibiotics usage when i was a kid for sore throat other things and i'd suffer from leaky gut in some instances higher saturated fats even though they can be a lot of beneficial like butter ghee coconut oil they actually if your leaky gut isn't fixed they

cause an endotoxemia effect so i removed coconut oil from my diet i removed the higher saturated fat foods Even though i love you know grass-fed beef and i think you know i generally recommend it for people and i noticed a cooling of the inflammation my skin irritation went away and it kind of brought down and now i'm doing a you know an updated gut protocol to heal all that in the meantime i've eased up on some of those foods personally again you know just for my own life to cool that inflammation for me but it

just goes to show you that there's so many Layers that are there generally speaking everything that we talked about in this interview is largely going to work for people that are there but we're all on our own unique journey of figuring things out exactly so we knew that you've got small dense particles lipopolysaccharides get how do they get in they're getting through the leaky gut what is the mechanism what's the carrier molecule the carrier molecule is saturated fat so we do know that the More saturated fat you consume and if you have a liquid gut

now those saturated fats will take endotoxin or lipopolysaccharides into your bloodstream and now of course small dense particles so you've got to work this out so you're absolutely right so working out this chemistry is very important and everyone's individuals say okay you did this you did this you did this but now you got this but what else can cause this so you got to think this Now look i i'm a simple cardiologist i am not a gut doctor nor am i but but you know but you know more than most gut doctors that are out

there just saying i just you know it it it's it's fascinating to me it's very humbling that all this is going on and we need lots more researchers and many people like you to to let people know that look it's complicated but it can be done like how you worked it out you said you still Have a leaky gut okay fine and the saturated fats are the mechanism by which the lipopolysaccharides is getting so you got to look to see which foods may be causing your leaky gut and how can you get rid of that

so again you know that gets really complicated and people do tests in the bloodstream to see which antibodies are there and which foods Might be causing it because you may not have over gi symptoms but you may have certain food intolerances especially wheat products so what i do in my practice as a general rule okay as general rule when i'm suspecting that there's this gut issue going on i just have to stay away from wheat because that's the number one uh problem i've found and when i do that honestly for 80 of the patients it

it it helps my situation they may not come Back and say oh my bowels feel great but i know that i've helped them because i see the markers in the bloodstream and other things their weight and everything else i see so wheat wheat is a big one especially processed wheat you know and it's all processed it's all made into powder wheat is number one and then of course some people don't tolerate um dairy products but i do an elimination a simple elimination look right now just Get rid of all wheat just get rid of all

wheat and then if you're going to eat other substances i i do believe that you need to be careful about some lectins because i tend to to soak the food there the lectin containing foods and then use a pressure cooker to kill them so i teach them a little bit about how to eat right and then i looked and see what's happening so you know with the leaky gut it gets a little Complicated but yeah an elimination diet before i do blood tests because others use so many blood tests it's so true and even just

practicing because uh and there's been a lot of people that have talked about this um even just incorporating fasting fasting is one of those mechanisms that supports your body in repairing that gut lining when you take a break so even taking it full circle fasting can play a central Role in helping you to address that leaky gut in the first place and uh we'll link to the few resources that are out there dr jay i want to be honoring of your time i'm sure you have patience and other stuff and things to get into tell

us a little bit about your world you know i came across these viral videos of you on youtube that you gave as a lecture to uh i forgot the institute's name can you remind me yeah it was florida Hospital which is now known as advent health the biggest yes in orlando i saw those uh immediately i reached out to your office and i said i gotta you know i gotta get dr j on the podcast you know what since you putting out this content and it being out there in the world and getting such a

great response uh you know uh tell me tell us what you're you're up to you know you're seeing patience i mean After this interview i know some people are gonna ask like can i work with him as a doctor you know what's going on in your world are you thinking about writing a book because i think a lot of people would be very interested yeah just tell us a little bit about your world well i'm still a day-to-day cardiologist i still see patients every day and i do my procedures i do pacemakers icds and i

do all this stuff i do angioplasty But um i have a full of fantastic staff so i have a bunch of nurse practitioners and pas that i have trained to address these issues with my patients and those who are the toughest ones then i do still see them so i am a regular practicing physician i am creating new slides i'm going to do another video on food addiction because i really think That that's a huge problem how to overcome food addictions so i'm going to do that one and then the south asian uh paradox and

i'm going to make another series on that so again more education a book you know it's it's so hard to find more hours in the day to do that although i've been told that i should it's hard it's hard to do but hopefully in the future um i do want to do that but on another note i am going to open another wing of my practice which is Going to be for for lifestyle and um medicine where i will see patients personally for a longer period of time i can sit with them for one hour

and then the next visit will be with the nurse practitioner or the nutritionist and then have a nutritionist in the office i'm looking to to build that so i'm not ready for for for that yet but i'm building that because i think this is badly needed but in the meantime you Know if people watch these videos and they make changes because you know i get so many emails that you know we've never seen you we live in some part of the country and you've made a great difference in my life and to me that's very

rewarding because i'm not seeing you and yet i'm able to touch many lives just like you you have in you you have improved thousands of people's lives Through the content of your your talks and i think that that speaks great for for for this new platform that you've created and this internet that we now have with youtube and everything so we'll continue to do this and we're going to cross paths i'd love to meet with you again in the future and tell you about the new things that i'm doing um which is really the gut

bacteria oh my god drew i've read four Books on the gut bacterially i am so excited about it and as you know you know how tmao and and and the and how that all links in with atherosclerosis i'm finally beginning to answer or get a glimpses of of questions that i asked my professors for years and years and years so i think the future is going to be we'll talk more about the gut microbiome And if there's one thing i'm going to leave you with it's that i think that there's a lot there uh i

think it's it's all going a lot is going to come down to the microbiome so that is the next big challenge for people like you oh well i can't wait and i think as our audience continues to go down the rabbit hole of all the work that you put out there in the videos which we'll have a link to all of that in the show notes They're gonna be just excited like like their favorite tv season episode series is like they're waiting for that new season you know you talking about the gut bacteria they're gonna

be super pumped so anytime you want to come back on the podcast and talk about that we would love to have you dr j thank you for your work you know often in medicine you know i have a lot of family members that are doctors my dad was involved with healthcare for A long time and often in that world uh i know how much it's seen as yes when you are sitting one-to-one with patients or in surgery or doing an operation yes that is practice but a new type of practice that's happening because we have

so many people on the planet that are suffering is actually taking a time to dive into the latest research connecting the dots that haven't been Connected because on average it can take 12 to 17 years between the latest science ending up in your physician's room and there's a lot of people that are out there that are suffering that can't wait that long so they need somebody to say okay nobody's done a full on randomized clinical you know double blind trial on this but we don't need to because these dots are there and they're basically connected

i'm going to storytell and i'm going to be Charismatic and i'm going to teach you and that is a form of practice and i just want to say thank you for having the courage to step into that and putting your message out there because there was people that don't have the means don't have the ability to travel don't have the ability to come and see you in person and yet their lives are better off because they're seeing your work and for that i applaud you and i honor you Drew it's been my pleasure and i

look forward to our next meeting wonderful thank you thank you hey youtube if you liked this interview you're going to love this mashup that me and my team did call four steps that you can take today to help you age in reverse check it out given the state of knowledge now given how i feel i am going to do the thing that gives me the most energy and makes me feel the best and if i don't feel good the next Day it's abs