Welcome to Destiny. Now here's your host, Cliff Dunning. Hey, how are you? Come on, let's have a talk. This is one of my favorite programs that I've been thinking about and waiting to unveil to you. This is another series in the Biohacking Basics program, and today we're talking about fasting and fasting. Fasting has been known about for centuries and you can go back to the Greeks and even the Egyptians write about the benefits of fasting. That's
abstaining from eating. And what is important about this is that when we don't eat, we're not starving ourselves. We're caught stopping from consuming food. We're basically allowing the body to quiet itself, the digestive system to stop digesting foods, and in doing so, there's a number of processes to go to work that we will be discussing today now. Intermitute fasting has been all the rage for well almost ten years now, and this is where you take a
day and you don't eat. You don't eat from say six o'clock the night before until perhaps nine am the next day, fifteen sixteen hours of non eating. That's very beneficial. But what we're going to talk about today is much more lengthied fast of two to five in some cases two weeks of just drinking fluids. In the case we're discussing today, just water fast. I do a quarterly fast
every change of season winter, fall, summer, autumn. I try to do between three and five days, depending on what kind of work my work week is, because when you're working and you have a lot of mental stress, it can really knock you down because your body is basically
shutting off and releasing a bunch of toxins. So but when you're doing a longer fast, you're allowing your digestive system and your body as a whole to sweep out various disease processes, various inflammation processes, and inflammation is a real problem for most of us right now because when you're internal organs and your brain has inflammation, it can cause havoc on your body. In fact, they have discovered people who have dementia have chronic inflammation of the brain,
and this also goes for various organs. If your organs are dealing with inflammation, this is a real issue. So short flat fast are fine, they're great for maintenance. But again I try to do four lengthy fast during times of the year, usually the changing of the seasons, the solstice or the equinoxes, where it's a seasonal change, and it's surprising when you do them during that time of year,
they actually feel a little bit better. But I'll tell you, when you've been abusing yourself, eating a lot of sugars, a lot of carbohydrates, a lot of gluten, it's a it's a challenge for the body to sweep it out. But I'll tell you when you do a lengthy fast of a few days or more, I think the max I've gotten now is five days without eating. It is wonderful the results, and you're stopping the various disease processes. You are in some ways you're writing the ship, You're
helping your digestion, you're helping your elimination. And I've been doing fast for probably, I want to say, thirty plus years, and I try to do like I said, I try to do one every seasonal change. And I'm starting to get back to intermitute fasting now. My guest today is an expert and he runs a clinic here in northern California, and the the book we're going to talk about today
is called can Fasting Save Your Life? And he's going to actually talk about the twenty four thousand people who have come through his clinic and the various issues that people have been dealing with, everything from chronic pain, arthritis, to ms and in some cases he is gonna say this, and it's pretty shocking people that have various forms of cancer. And when you can apply a self healing technique that begins to tear down the disease process known as cancer,
you're talking about miracle healing. And we don't hear enough about long term fasting because it's not comfortable. It's uncomfortable.
And the beauty of this clinic we're talking about today is that it's a supervised fast and he'll also present a series of suggestions for those who don't live in California as to where you can go and have these I again, have been following fasting for many, many years, and when I was younger, fasting was a rage of kind of like the Hippie movement, the New Age movement,
and there were sanitariums in various parts of California. If you go back to the turn of the Central Tree, there were actual healing sanitariums that suggested obstination of food, not eating, just drinking fluids. Now when I fast, I have coffee, tea and water for five days or more. And then also breaking the fast, it's called refeeding is critically important. You don't want to eat any cooked food, you don't want to have meats, you want to have
raw foods if you can, no breads, no gluten. You want to slowly re enter the feeding phase without stressing out the body. So the refeeding post fasting is just as important as the actual fast itself. So I think you're going to be amazed at our guests today. And this biohacking basic program is really really important because it's again not discussed a great deal. It's very very simple to do because you're just substaining from food and the
benefits are just amazing. And one of the things that we don't hear enough about is how fasting can remove what they call these sinescent cells, otherwise known as zombie cells. And if you have an accumulation of these zombie cells, this is what the beginning of illnesses and your body can't get rid of them, so they just store these zombie cells and you want to use fasting and other nutritional programs to get rid of sinescent cells, because that
is the beginning again, it's the beginning of disease. So today's biohacking Basics program is the miracle of fasting. And my guest is doctor Alan Goldhammer. We're featuring an incredible opportunity to visit one of the real enigmas of the ancient world, and that is Easter Island in the Pacific Ocean. This is a new tour that we're doing. It looks like this will probably be the only chance we get
to go. But we're lucky because doctor Edwin Barnhardt, our host and our tour leader, has been surveying this island for a number of years and has some really amazing insights on just how detailed and how complicated and how mysterious this island is going to be. March fifteenth through twenty third, I wanted to ask just a brief question or two because I obviously have never been there. I'm really excited to be a part of this. It's a highlight.
Talk about the moai. There's a number of them, aren't there.
There are so many moai there. It's out you see from coffee table books that there's lines of them, but in point of fact, there's over one thousand moi and they're spread all over the island. They're where ancient villages used to be. So we're going to go visit a bunch of those. There's also the quarry. There's one quarry where almost all of them were made, and a lot of them are still half made lying in the quarry. That thing is just a sight to see how.
Grew up briefly, and I didn't realize they have an observatory there. Is it a planetarium or is it more of a setup for evening sites.
It's a planetarium. It's a passion project by a man named EDMUNDO Edwards who's been studying the archaeo astronomy of the island for his entire life, I think almost fifty years now. He knows more than anyone and he put together this planetarium to share this lifetime of knowledge with the visitors that come to the place.
Fantastic. So March fifteenth to the twenty third, that is a week, and it sounds like we've really packed a lot in during those seven days, right.
I tell you, For an island that's only twelve miles across. There is an endless amount of things to see there. I'm looking forward to it. Fantastic, all right.
For more information, go to Earth Ancients dot com forward slash tours, look for the photo of Ed standing next to one of the big Mai sculptures and registered as soon as you can. Again go to Earthnchients dot com
forward slash tours. Thanks Ed, Thank you, Cliff. As we continue our series biohic Hacking Basics, we're talking on fasting this week, a subject that I've been very interested in for probably thirty or more years, simply because I realized at a younger age that when you stop eating, the body goes to work and becomes a what they consider kind of a broom, sweeping away problems and helping the body heal. And my guest today is doctor Alan Goldhammer.
He has just released a new book called Can Fasting Save Your Life? What a great title, and he is the director of the True North Health Clinicians in Santa Rosas just north of me, and would you believe he's been doing this for four four decades, so it's amazing. And we're going to talk about this new book and the benefits and the power of fasting. So Alan, welcome to Destiny. Great to have you on the program.
Thank you for having me talk a little bit about your own journey, your own perhaps you know understanding of the benefits of fasting and how you developed this clinic.
I started very young. I was a teenager, and you know, kind of being on the spectrum, got interested in something and never lost focus. It happened to be fasting and diet. I read a book by Shelton who said that health had causes, just like disease had causes. So if you wanted to be healthy, you had to do the things that cause health, and that was diet, sleep, exercise, and fasting,
and so that kind of got me interested. I was motivated also by my uncle, who was a medical doctor, and he said that there was nothing worse than doctors that did alternative medicine. And when I mentioned I was interested in going into alternate medicine, he said I would not go into alternate medicine, that nobody in our family would go to a doctor like that, let alone become a doctor like that, and that better I should be a communist spy.
Oh my god.
He was really upset. I remember screaming at me, and my dad took me aside after he left me said, son, I don't know anything about this alternative business, but anything that makes him that angry and mad, it can't be bad. So you stick to your guns in good luck.
That's hilarious.
And you know, I had later became one of my first patients when I got out of school. He was having transing Nashimi attacks that had gotten into serious trouble. Ended up fasting for twenty six days, made a remarkable recovery twenty years later, helped us our edit our first book, which was The Pleasure Trap, and then you know, ended up doing very well.
So so as a young person, you're into it. So are you saying, as a teenager you are actually doing a couple of day fast.
Well, I not only did some occasional fasting, but more importantly, I adopted a whole plant food SOS free diet, so you know, I began eating healthily and really could experience the changes that that happened. And I did some periodic fasting as well. I'd have to see the diet, the sleep, the exercise seemed to be the most critical components in
long term. Hell. Fasting is a great tool, as we'll talk about today, but without the diet's, sleep and exercise, fasting alone is not going to get you where you want to.
Go, right. It's a wellness therapy that you need to follow. So talk a little bit about your experience as a young faster and how that carried it so forward into your perhaps your early years, and then your education and eventually becoming this expert of this clinic.
Yeah. Well, I went to Chiropractic College at Western States in Oregon, and then I got an opportunity to attend to Osteopathic College in Australia with a guy named Alec Burton who was the world's leading authority in the use of fasting and human beings. So when I came back from Australia in nineteen eighty four, my wife, doctor Jennifer Morano, and I open the True North Health Center and we've
been operating it continuously for forty years. We've had twenty five thousand patients come through and do medically supervised water only fasten and as you said, we just came out
with a book. Recently, we've published twenty two papers in the scientific literature case supports and studies, and this book is largely built on our own original research that deals with fasting in a way to give patients the understanding of how fasting works and what they need to know, but also to give people's doctors an understanding that fast is not actually crazy and all the things necessary to help a person get through fasting safely and effectively. So
I think it's an important book. It's certainly the first book that's like that, and hopefully it'll turn out to be very useful to people that are serious about understanding how fasting worked.
Yeah, it's a good primer for those who are interested in learning about fasting in the different types of fasting that are available. Let's talk briefly historically what we know about fasting. You write in the in your book that the Chinese were fasting as far back as twenty five hundred years ago. Who else of our ancestors were documenting the results of their fasting? I think you know.
Fasting itself, when you think about it, is what's called a biological adaptation. Every single human being that couldn't fast died, and what's fasting is essentially the conversion of our largest burner of glucose, which is the brain from burning sugar to burning fat. That's essentially what fasting comes down to, the brain changes fuels. If your brain kept burning glucose, you could only go a week or so before you'd enter starvation. Human being, because of fasting, can go seventy
days or more before entering starvation. That's why you'll never see chimps wandering away from the tropics, because they don't have the same conversion process, and so they need a constant source of redla available food. Human beings wandered away from the tropics, and everybody that couldn't convert their bulboustereronal and that that huge brain that we carry around to bringing a different fuel dyed. That's what a biological adaptation means.
That was so critical. All the ones that didn't have it didn't make it, and we're left with a population around the world right now of almost what eight billion people, all of which if you take food away, they go into ketosis and begin this fasting process. So all we've done is taken this very ancient biological adaptation and applied it in a very unusual situation that never occurred before,
which is where people had consistent dietary excess. In the old days, there was no cardiovascid disease, there was no diabetes, there was very little of these chronic the general diseases. As a consequence, we they used to be called the diseases of kings because it was only the wealthy, elite kings that could get the gout and get these conditions that were right, and now they're abiquitous because we got ultra processed foods. Seventy percent of calories come from multiprocessed
foods now, and so people are getting fat. And when you get fat, you get visceral fat. And the visceral fat is pro It acts like a tumor, it's hyper metabolic, it gives off inflammatory products. So if you have extra fat on your body, let's say you have twenty pounds of fat in your body, ten percent of that on average is going to be visceral fat. The fat that accumulates are on the organs that it's like having a
two pound tumor in your abdomen. And so when you go on to fast, one of the exciting things is the body not only gets rid of fat, but it preferentially mobilizes visceral fat. So if you go on to fast and lose ten percent of your total body weight, which you would say in two week fast, you'll not lose just ten percent of your tumor, but possibly fifty
or one hundred percent of your tumor. For example, in a study we did on fasting and body composition using a dex scanner, these people fasted an average of about two weeks. They lost ten percent of their body fat, twenty percent of their total or ten percent of their body weight, twenty percent of their total fat, and forty percent of their visceral fat, only six percent of lean tissue, and that was fully recovered at six week follow up,
and the fat loss continues. So this is the way of giving the body a chance to reformulate its body composition.
Are you suggesting that our ancestors would fast periodically out of necessity or that it was just something they did seasonally.
No, it was always by choice. Spring came late, there was nothing to eat, they would fast, and those that couldn't fast died. It would never do it by choice, it was always by force. But the reality is spring comes late, and we evolved in an environment of scarcity. Most people didn't live to reproduce. Most people died from starvation and predation, and it was a tough world. The people that survived were the ones that could store enough
fat to survive those periods of deprivation. And so you know today, if you get fat easily, that's not necessarily a bad thing. Biologically, that means you have good plummet you absorb what you eat. The problem is, up till two hundred year years ago, these mechanisms were great because people rarely got too much to eat because it was
so difficult just getting enough. But since the Industrial Revolution, we began to process foods, and now if you have good biological genes, the problem is in the modern worlds, you're screwed because if you eat those highly process foods, you're gonna get fat. If you get fat, you're gonna get viceral fat, and it's gonna produce inflammation, and then
you're gonna get heart disease, diabetes cancer, not immune disease. Now, what's interesting is those diseases are treated as if they're unrelated, independent conditions. You have to go to different kinds of doctors even to be diagnosed with those different diseases. But they have something in common. They're all associated with the inflammation that's coming from excess visceral fat.
Yeah. I don't want to slam allopathy too hard today, but they're gonna come up a lot. Currently in the United States, it's a Western culture. Allopathic medicine is the dominant treatment of wellness. And they don't even understand fasting you're diagnosed and you're giving a medicine.
What they do understand is disease though, and they will tell you if you go to a doctor today and you say have high blood pressure or diabetes, they will tell you, listen, you take these drugs, and I promise you you'll never get well. You'll be sick forever, and you'll be on the drugs the rest of your life. So they will honestly tell you that what they're doing for you has nothing to do with you getting well.
Well. They won't say that, but or they will.
They will tell you you'll be on these drugs for how long? Two weeks, two months? No, they'll tell you you'll be on these drugs the rest of your life. Why because you'll never recover. If you're a drug addict and you go to the impatient program for thirty days. Say you're a heroin addict, there's a ninety percent chance you'll
be back to using heroin in a year. If you're an alcoholic and you go to an inpatient program for thirty days and ninety visits in ninety days, to a twelve step program, and you have family support, there's an eighty three percent chance you'll be drinking within a year. If you're overweight and you want to lose five percent of your body weight, there's a ninety five percent chance if you follow your doctor's advice, you will be have
regained your obesity within a year. There's only a five percent chance that you'll lose your weight and keep it off. And if your BMI is over forty, there's a ninety nine percent chance you will not lose that weight and develop a healthy weight ever, because treating a weight loss is less successful than treating drug addiction. Because at least with drug addicts, we tell them the truth. They have to stop drinking completely. What we tell overweight people is
eat less and it doesn't work very well. Or change the color of your meat from red to white, or put your food on a smaller plate and chop your food and put your fork down between each bite and you won't be overweight anymore. We lie to them instead of saying you're overweight because you're fooling the tiding mechanisms you will bring with chemicals called salt oil and sugar. If you don't remove the SOS, it's very difficult to remove the weight loss. So what we advocate is a
whole plant food diet that's SOS free. SOS, of course, is the international symbol of danger, but it also stands for the chemicals we put in our food that fool our brain and cause us to gain the extra weight. Now those chemicals are salt, oil and sugar.
I just want to remind our listeners that a document just came out, a worldwide study that showed the America, the United States, is the tenth worst country for healthcare among the industrial nations. That's the last on the list. And that's not that's not a good thing to happen, given the multi trillions of dollars that we spend on healthcare each year.
But that's because we spend our money treating the leading cause of depth, which are hard tosease, cancer, diabetes, et cetera, instead of treating the actual causes of death. The reason people get heart disease, cancer and diabetes, which is a high fat, high protein diet, and smoking and alcohol consumption.
If we focused on treating the actual causes of disease drinking, smoking, and eating a poor diet rather than waiting until people develop diseases and then ineffectively treating them with drugs and stents and bypass procedures, we might be able to get more bang for our buck.
Yeah, but it has to do with the education. When you say alan, I mean we're talking about physicians that are graduating that get maybe one class of nutrition and everything else is pharmacology.
Well, that's because medicine has nothing to do with healthcare. It's got to do with the management of the symptoms of disease using drugs and surgery. And frankly, they do a rather impressive job. They figured out more drugs that you can take for the rest of your life than ever before, and so the industry has never been more profitable or lucrative. It's working great as far as that's concerned.
Yeah, but there's more sick people. That doesn't help.
As long as they're on drugs the rest of your life. What's the problem.
Yeah, it's not a good statement for our country. You define fasting than your book as pro long fast can you define interminute fasting with the other types of fasting that you promote.
So one thing we've promoted for the last forty years is let's call it time restrictive feeding, which, as we suggest, people do not eat three to four hours before they go to bed every night, and that's going to give them a period of twelve to sixteen hours of fasting every day. So you don't eat, say let's see, you have dinner at five o'clock or six o'clock, you don't eat again until you go to sleep, you wake up
in the morning. For trying to lose weight, you might even do some exercise before you start eating in the morning. And during that eight hour feeding window, you limit yourself to whole plant foods that are free of salt, oil, and sugar. If you do that and you're a male, you're gonna lose three pounds a week down to optimum weight. If you're a female, you're gonna lose about two pounds
a week down doctium weight. We're gonna lose about fifty percent less weight, everything else being equal, because essentially females are in that you're conserving fat storage devices. Biologically speaking, they're full of estrogen, which is a fat storage hormone that allows them to adapt a period of biological mobility called pregnancy. So males are going to lose weight easier than females are. Everything else being equal, and if you
ask any husband and wife, they'll agree that. You know, when they go on a diet together, it doesn't work the same. So it doesn't mean we can't be overweight as males. We do have to work harder at it than females do.
Okay, So that's intermittent fasting. What's the other alternative?
There's the other there's also that's time restricted feeding. There's other times of fasting when people fast for two days a week, or you know, on and off and different things. But what we've been advocating is time restricted feeding for everybody every day and then as needed. It curred a prolonged water only fasting where you're in a controlled environment, under rest and you're doing nothing but water, and we do that for up to forty days with patients at
a time. Good So Moses, David, Elijah Jesus and our patients have been able to do long term fast and we tell them they're in good company.
You know, that's funny. What's the benefit of water only because I do a fast and I'll have water tea. I think the longest fast I've done so far is five days.
Yeah. So if those other modified forms of fasting where people include juices or teas or boss with things and they're fine and they have utility, they can be a safe and you know, useful tool. But water only fasting is what is the is the focus of the studies that we've published, the book that we've written, and it's
where the research is. And when you have a person that's really sick, there's nothing like water only fasting when it comes to say, reversing diabetes, hypertension, automine disease, or cancer. Modified fasting and healthy eating and diet and life cell can be great, and there's lots of people advocating that. Vaulter Longo has published a lot of work on Internet and fasting. They have products like prol on and other things.
The advantage to that is it's it's a gentler, slower, safer kind of approach that people can do that doesn't require our history exam lab and monitoring that water fasting does. In order to do a long term water fast first you have to make sure you're a good candidate for a fasting, not everybody is, and the way you do that is by medical history, physical examine, some lab testing. And then if you are a good candidate for fasting, you have to make sure you rest during fasting and
you stay hydrated so you avoid dehydration and debilitation. And then you have to carefully refeed after fasting to avoid post fasting a demo or potentially fatal refeeding syndrome. So if you take a person in fast and for say thirty days, and you too too rapidly refeed them, they can get really sick. And so it's important that there's a protocol that's fauled. That's what we've laid out in
our book Can Fastening Save Your Life? It tells people how to determine are they a candidate for fasting, if they're going to fast, how to do it, and if they're doing it, once they're done doing it, how to refeed and how to eat after fasting so that you can maintain a good long term success.
Okay, give us a couple of examples of someone who would not be a good candidate for fast So.
A person, for example, that's on certain types of medications like antiquagulant therapy or story therapy. You can't just stop those medications. The rapid withdrawal of those medications can result in a stroke or problem. But you can't fast on medications because drugs become greatly potentiated during fasting. As toxic as drugs are in the fed state, in the fasting state,
they could become greatly potentiated. So a medication you might be able to take in the feeding state and get away with it, a non stralian inflammatory, for example, in the fasting state, could shut down your kidneys to deliver and create all kinds of problems. So we don't fast on medications, but you can't just arbitrarily discontinue all medications. That's why you need to work with a position that's not an idiot to help you figure out how to
transition into a state where you can't fasting. Or if you can't do that, let's say you're on a medication that can't be conveniently withdrawn, then we would modify the protocol into more of like what you mentioned to juice fast or modified fast and see where you'd be able to do that safely and continue to take your medications to do water only. Fasting does work, that you take some time to make sure that you're a good candidate and that it be done properly, or it can be really become a mess.
I mean, everybody seems to be on some kind of drug because of the allopathic model that we're all facing with. If someone's on statins, is that a drug that would be compromising for a fast.
Well, you wouldn't fast on status. But there's absolutely no reason you can't discontinue statum medications. Statum medications don't work very well if you actually look at you know the number of people that benefit versus those that are damaged from statu medications that with the withdrawal of statum medications
is normally not one of those complicating factors. In fact, some medications like bloo pressure medications, you have to withdraw even in preparation for fasting, because just going on a healthy diet reduces your needs for medications. Your blood pressure comes down, you don't get off the medications, you'll be having people passing out and having all kinds of problems because people are not being medicated for their high blood pressure.
They're being medicated for the diet that causes the high blood pressure, and the moment you change the cause, which is the diet, you have to start appropriately withdrawing the medication. Yeah, but obviously you monitor the situation. You do want to have rebound hypertensive prices or something like that. But that's why we're saying if people are going to do long term fasting, there's one or two ways to do it.
You can work with people like us that provide remote support in conjunction with your local doctor, and they can use the information in the book to educate themselves as well as their doctor. Where they come to toe in our health center where that's what we do. We put people in an inpatient setting. They get examined twice a day, they're carefully monitored, and we've done it with twenty five thousand people in a row and everybody that's walked in is walked out.
And that was one of my questions. You haven't lost anybody.
No, not only have we not had anybody die, but we've actually published the only long term water fast and safety study where we've actually looked at all cause mortality complications, what happens, and all of that's detailed in our book.
Yeah, I want to talk real briefly about chapter three, which you just highlighted, called is fasting safe? Give us the basics of somebody who might be concerned, especially with.
Prolonged fast well again, people that are on medications where you can't be stabilized, people that have antirex or nevosa, people that are in a cataxic state, may not be caochandists for fasting. If you're pregnant or lactating, that wouldn't be a good time. Yeah, long wild only fastening. If you're lactating, your illusion real production, that's not desirable. There are problems atrial fibrillation, recent stroke am I. Again, if you're on any coagulant therapy, those are medications you have
to be exquisitely careful about withdrawing. People that are on neuropsychmads. Again, we're happy to help people get off these medications, but you have to do it slowly and carefully, a lot of times we have doctors that work remotely for people through telemedicine, and they'll work with them sometimes for weeks or months excellent before they actually come out to the center.
The only annoying thing about that is, like I've been enrolling these patients in the study, like the one we did with the Male Clinic looking at hyper and we'll enroll people in these studies because they're good candidates, and then they'll work with our doctors remotely, and oftentimes they do so well that they no longer qualified for the study by the time they come in. It's so annoying.
You're just too good, fella.
So you know, the reality is it helps results in healthical living. It's diets, sleep, and exercise. If you can do the diet, sleep and exercise, often you'll do so well. Fastening becomes secondary. But some people have trouble implementing the diet and lifestyle changes, and so if fasting could be a hopeful tool at adjusting their palate, correcting their got microwium, helping them get off medications, there's a lot of people that once they feel better, their capacity that fast improves a lot.
We're going to take a short commercial break to allow our sponsors to identify themselves, and we will return shortly with my guest today, doctor Allan Goldhammer discussing his latest book, Can Fasting Save Your Life? We'll be right back. My guest today is doctor Allan Goldhammer. He is the director of True North Health Clinic, a fasting clinic in Santa Rosa, California, and we're discussing his latest book just came out called
Can fast Save Your Life? Inflammation has come around to be well studied now and when you have an inflammated brain, apparently this is the beginning of dementia and other problems. But you have a section in your book where you describe fasting to balance metabolism. Why is that important? I understand why it is, but talk a little bit for our listeners.
Well, you know, I mean there's a number of things there. When we talk about tables, we also talk about got microbiomas. It relates to it. And also you mentioned this brain information. This is really important. There's some great studies done on a rodents initially where they had thirty rats. These are genetically bred animals are identical. So you have thirty rodents and another thirty romans. Each of them are identical, and they're fed identically, and they're in the same identical cage.
It's the only difference was they gave half of the wheel, and the rats with the wheel would run on the wheel and they wouldn't develop Alzheimer's disease. And people said, what the heck, how is it that exercise is preventing Alzheimer's disease? And they analyzed the rats and they realized that what was happening is the exercise induced BDNF brain drive neutrophic factor, which is a chemical that prevents Alzheimer's disease by neutralizing the effect of inflammation in the brain.
And so it turns out that if you exercise, your incidence of brain inflammation goes down a lot. Well, one of the other things that dramatically increases BDNF brain drive neutrophic factor is fast And so if you take rats, for example, again matched rats, and you feed them identically, do everything the same, but you periodically fast after the rats you double their lifespan. Wow, they live twice as long. And part of it is BDNF goes up and other
biomarker changes. In fact, if you look at all the biome marker changes that occur with exercise, almost all of them also improve with fasting. And that's weird when you think about it. It's not intuitively obvious because in exercise you're vigorous and active. In fasting, you're resting. Why would both of these completely unrelated activities avoid and cause the same biochemical improvements? And I think the reason is that both of these things have one thing in common. They
both undo the consequence of dietary access. They both get rid of the fat and the visceral fat that produces the inflammation that causes all these diseases. These are not unrelated conditions. These are all common conditions but manifesting in different ways. And that's why these different conditions respond to fasting. Whether it's high blood pressure. If you look at high
blood pssure, the believing contribute causes death and disability. We have the largest effects that they've ever been shown in treating high blood pressure. We took one hundred and seventy four consecutive patients with high blood pressure, and one hundred and seventy four people normalize the pressure enough to eliminate the need for medication. We have a law ourgest effects ever shown with a sixty point dropping in sistelic blood pressure and stage WE hypertension.
They all fast at the same time period.
No, it ranges from five to forty days. The need for fasting various on the circumstance of the patient. We recently did a study with our colleague from the male clinic. Twenty seven patients with hypertension on medications. Twenty six were able to normalize their pressure entirely without medication. One required
half dosing at six We follow up. Then we followed those patients for one year and we said what percentage of those people would have maintained their weight loss and what percentage of them would still be off drugs and have normal blood pressure. Seventy six percent of those patients on follow up had maintained their weight loss and the majority had normal blood pressure without medication even a year later.
So what it shows you was highly motivated people that are willing to do dangerous and radical things like eat well and exercise and go to bebon on and maybe do some fasting can not only overcome this disease but maintain it long term. And this is a disease that almost every doctor in the country will tell you you'll be on the drugs for the rest of your life because they don't see people get well.
HM. That's fascinating.
I was in Texas. I gave a talk to a group of medical doctors diamatologists, and we talked about my experience treating diabetes. And one of the doctors came up and these doctors were almost all overweight. They were serving a pulled pork sandwiches and chocolate cake. And there was nothing to eat at this conference for me except there were some decorations on the table, some bell peppers, they put some Brits. I have to say they were delicious.
But anyway, that afterwards, one of the doctors came up to me and he said, you know, I've been treating diabegs for twenty five years. I've never seen one get well. He says, maybe I should try this diet stuff myself. And I'm thinking, you know, if I'd been treating somebody for twenty five years and nobody ever get well, I'd start thinking maybe it's me. But you know, maybe that's just me.
Yeah, Hey, are there any studies on the effects of fasting with the pre onset of dementia or any of these brain fog conditions that are just overwhelming us right now?
So there's no conditions showing the reversal of established dementia with fasting. But there is some excellent data coming out from Dean Ornish, the guy who's been famous for his work on cardiavastuo disease, and he's looking at He's looked at prostate cancer, and now he's looking at Alzheimer's disease. And so I would defer to his work. We haven't published anything on Alzheimer's. You know, it's a very difficult to study. You have to do really long term follow up.
It's hard to objectify. We tend to focus on the low hanging fruit, the people that are dooming success that have fabulous results and make us look good because we're still doing something that's considered very controversial. I don't know that we're still up there being equated with Jim Jones or something. But you know, fasting long term still seems kind of radical. I mean, most people think if they got on a plane in New York and they flew all the way to California, they'd die over Colorado if
they didn't eat those pretzels. You know, that's pretty sure. The pretzels saved their life.
That's funny.
But he is doing work on Alzheimer's and diet, and so I'd looked at him for research on Alzheimer's. It's not a condition that we've had success reversing.
Well, it's funny because we were just talking about the reduction of inflammation, which is the big problem with dementia, and if fasting reduces it or perhaps limits it with a follow up refeeding as you call it, and lifestyle change, I wonder if there is a chance to reduce it or I'm not sure you can reduce or eliminate the.
Damaged to stop it. We know that you can stop it. Like I said, exercise helps prevent Alzheimer's disease, and rats and human beings that by increasing BDNF and fasting definitely increased b D and F. But remember, inflammation isn't the enemy. Inflammation is the process of the body uses to get well. It's just when the inflammation doesn't work, when it's limited because of the greasy, fatty, slimy, dead, decaying flesh, you know, disease state, it never gets a chance to help the
body resolve the problem. It becomes damaging in and of itself. So like in fasting, inflammation actually goes up. But then it resolves the problem and comes down dramatically. So it's not that the inflammation is the problem, it's just the medical management is seeing inflammation as the problem, so they give you drugs the suppression inflammation, and the problem is at first, it's like if you treat umatron arthritis and you get pregnice on it. First it's like a dream
because the pain goes away. But then it becomes a nightmare because it turns out the way it works is turning off the immune system if you need your immune system, and so long term it's a nightmare. It's like these new drugs they're using for weight loss, so zepic ANDJP inhibitors. People are eating ultra processed foods. They can't regulate the quantity, so they get fat. You give these drugs to people, they get sick enough that they eat less of that
highly processed food. They lose some of their appetite, and so they get a little bit less fat. On the long run, it's a complete nightmare because you know, all you're doing is giving people the ability to keep doing the thing that causes the problem, but making them sick enough that they don't eat as much of it. That's not a good long term solution. Yeah, a short term though, they lose some weight. But if you just are interested in short from weight loss, I tell patients just get
a chainsaw, cut your leg off at the hip. It's forty pounds overnight, no messing around, Eat whatever you want.
Jesus duck. That's pretty radical. That's pretty extreme. About all.
Radical means radical, root rut, or cause. So yeah, everything we do is pretty radical or trying to get the root cause, which is, instead of trying to suppress your satiety mechanism so you can keep eating crap, what we would say is, let's stop eating crap. It's like trying to treat alcoholics by telling them to drink beer and wine. It's not going to work long term. R Okay, what
works is to stop drinking. You want to lose weight, stop eating the sugar, oil, and salt that full your society mechanisms, and you will lose weight.
Yeah. I want you to address a portion of the book that I thought was pretty enlightening, which is fasting for the reduction of obesity. This is a huge problem in America because not only our diet but sedentary life styles that creep up and then you're given the drugs for cholesterol, you're given blood thinners for perhaps a heart condition, and it's an ugly cycle that people fall into.
It's a very lucrative cycle though it's working great and especially now the new drugs you have to take for the rest of your life, that's what they're looking at. Drugs you take or inject forever. Becomes a great profit center. And also it means you don't have to give up your addiction. You know. Again, alcoholics don't like being told they have to stop drinking. It seems so radical. I mean,
no drinking at all. But you know, overweight people don't want to be told they have to give up the hyperprocess foods, which makes us up to seventy percent of the calories that people eat. As we're talking about going really radical back to a whole plant food diet, the kind of foods people ate for two hundred thousand years until the Industrial Revolution two hundred years ago. A lot of us to strut transitioning to ultra process foods. Well,
that's the diet of people eat. When you go into a grocery store, Like I made a comment that ninety five percent of the foods and Whole Foods have nothing to do with Whole Foods. And the owner of Whole Foods who was at our facility at the time before it got bought by Amazon, so that was not true. It was ninety nine percent the ninety nine percent of the food and ninety nine percent of the profit had nothing to do with Whole Foods.
Wow.
And so you know, and I and they explained to me, you should be grateful to those people buying the meat, fish, fowl, eggs, dairy products of oil, AsSalt, sugar, chocolate, because they're all the profit was. If it wasn't for them, there'd be no Whole Foods. And so now when I go into Whole Foods, like I was just in New York and
there was a huge Whole Foods. There were like one hundred checkouts, and I saw all these people filling up their carts with all this highly processed, help compromising food. But my attitude's very different. I went around and thanked them for their support. You know, it's like, you know, you're.
Fuddy come to my clinic. You suggest in your book prolonged water fast can reverse obesity. All is how that works.
So what happens in water fasting is I mentioned in a study we did recently where people in what two weeks are fasting, they would lose ten percent of fat, twenty percent of the ten percent of their body weight, twenty percent of their fat, forty percent of their visceral fat. You lose this weight, and the fat loss continues even as you replenish protein, water, fiber, and glycogen. And then, assuming you're willing to eat a whole plant food diet,
you'll continue to lose weight. And that's exactly what our patients do. So and if you're a male, you can expect an average or three pounds a week, a female about two pounds a week, and that's with moderate activity. That's not being an Olympic athlete. It's not doing anything, you know, outrageous, and so you will see these transformations. More importantly, we've got lots of people that are able to lose that fifty one hundred pounds, but years later
they've kept it off. And so even though we know the chance of a male ever doing that is one in one two hundred and eighty in the United States, you know our numbers are completely different. But it's because we're getting people to fundamentally change their diet lifestyle. You have to change what you put in your mouth, and if you want it to be effective, it also helps to get enough sleep and do enough exercise.
So plant based diet it means no meat whatsoever. Are you saying no.
Beef, but we're saying exclusively whole plant food diet that's SOS free. Basically, here's what you tell patients. Close your eyes and go inside yourself and ask yourself any food that could possibly give you joy or comfort and get rid of it, So no more hand get nothing. Fruits and vegetables, grains and humes, nuts and seeds, no meat, fish, fowl, eggs, dry proucts, oil, salt or sugar. And we say it really quickly. What you give up is meat, fish, fally stairy,
parks of ol, salt, sugar. By saying it quickly, you don't seem like you're giving up so much. And then when you talk about what you can have, you say it really slowly. Fruit and then name them all apples, bananas, pea, juice. Pair the whole food, though we're not talking about juicing so much and processing and drying, talking about whole So for breakfast, for example, you might have fruits and some grains.
You might have a grain like oatmeal at lunch, big salads, and how do you know if you have enough salad? If you don't have a scale way out a pound of salad, you just put your salad down and wait for the people that work to walk in the room and they go, oh my gosh, you're not gonna eat all that, are you? You know you're okay if they don't react with shock and awe. You've got the wrong size bull. Get yourself a bucket. You got to eat a lot.
You eat so.
Much low chloric density, high nutrition density food. There's no room left for the highly processed foods. It's making everybody fat for they So you got to eat more, and you gotta sleep more. Get the bet on time so you can wake up feeling refreshed, getting some exercise. These are critically important issues, but it's exactly what people don't do. They deprive themselves asleep, They get over stimulated, they get angry, mad and frustrated, so they use drugs like a food
to deal with their emotional issues. They don't dissipate their stress with exercise. They surround themselves with what I call energy vampires, and those are people that do what they do best, and that's make other people as sick and miserable as they are, so by comparison, they don't have to feel so bad. And so if you're of those loving, caring kind people that worries about what other people feel, it's even harder because you know, even as you lose weight,
they start getting upset. You ask women what happens when they lose fifty pounds. They go back to work. The other women aren't going like, Oh, we're so proud of you. You must have adopted a whole plant food diet. What can we do to help? No, you walk in the room and they're going like, oh, here she comes that bit. You know, they're all over the Where are you going to get your protein from? It's no good to be a fanatic though, there's nothing but fortunately men, it's not
so bad. Men lose fifty pounds, they go back to what the other men don't notice, and if they do notice, they don't care. So a little bit easier for the males, a little bit harder for the females. That's just how it is.
Interesting talk about the state someone's physiology is in as they're fit fasting and you actually talk about reversing obesity, but you also talked about the refeeding process and how that adds to the continual weight loss. I think that's fascinating. Is there a trigger point and a mechanism in the system that is turned on at a certain point when somebody is trying to reduce the body fat.
Well, one of the things that's unique about fasting is that not only preferentially mobilizes fat, but it particularly targets this visceral fat, this tumor like material that's hypermetabolic, that's giving off inflammatory products. Once you lose the fat, if you're on a whole plant food sus free diet, you're not getting the chlored density necessary to put on the excess fat. So your body will continue to mobilize fat
as it regains protein, water, fiber, and glycogen. So let's say you lose twenty pounds in faster, you're going to regain ten pounds, but it's not that it's water fiber doing protein, and the fat loss will continue even if the scale is up initially, then you're gonna stabilize and then you're going to lose weight. You know, we've proven this over and over again. But more importantly, you're going to normalize your blood pressure, you're going to normalize your
blood sugar levels. You're going to reboot the gut microbiome. Think about this. You got maybe a trillion creatures of more five pounds of organs living in your gut, little creatures swimming around, protozoa bacteria eating, swimming and dedicating inside you. Right now today you have five pounds of creatures deficating inside your xestinal time and what they pooing you depends
on what you feed them. If you feed them meat, fish, valleys and diary parks, they're going to be pooing things like TMA trimethylaminoxidacent to you, which is why mediators get so much color cancer and prompts. On the other hand, if you feed them plants, you get different organisms and different pooh. You're going to be getting vitamin K and fertilizer things you actually need. So if you want to have fertilizers to the TMA, feed your organisms plants. Think
about this. If you took your body and separated whole you know, human cells from non human cells, like you know your skin is teeming with bacteria, your guts teeming with vecteria. There's actually more quantitative numbers of non human cells than human cells making up your body right now. Wow, there are more non human cells in that mass you carrier out than human cells. So it's very important that
we get along with these organisms. And the way you do that is to feed them the diet they're designed to eat, which is high amounts of vegetable sailos, not greasy, fatty, slimy, dead, decaying flesh.
Talk about real briefly about these this new term sinessence cells or zombie cells. This is a big thing right now. People are trying to rid themselves of these zombie cells. How does fasting work with that?
Well, the thing what's really exciting is that the Nobel Prize actually for medicine twenty eighteen Yocenary assuming was about autophogy. How the immune system eats up these old decrepit cells and cancer cells and gets rid of them. And it turns out that one of the things that dramatically increases
autopogy is fast. Really, the reasons why we see the results in some of the tumor cases like lymphoem and whatnot, maybe because increased autoplogy is one of the consequences of excuse me faster, And so, for example, we published a pace in the British Medical Journal on a woman with Flicker lymphoma type of lymph cancer was stage three confirmed by excisional biopsy. Her doctor told her that diet didn't matter,
she'd eat whatever she wanted. Diet had nothing to do with the condition, that fasting was criminal quackery, but she decided to come in and do a fast anyway. She fasted for twenty one days, during which time her tumors disappeared. Couldn't find her tumors anymore, sent her back to oncologist who examined her, and she said it was funny. He was examining her, but he couldn't find the tumors and
he looked at the chart. He looked at her and he asked her finally what happened, and she said, well, I went to the criminal quacks and I did the fasting and the tumors went away, and he said, oh my, you know. And so we followed this patient and at one year we published this case report in the British Medical Journal on the reversal of lymphoma with fasting, and then we followed her three years and ten years and she continues to be cancer free well. And then since
then we did what's called a KSE series. We had a series of patients with the limp foam, including somebody that had failed chemotherapy and had recurrent returned, another one that had actually metastasizing you as bones was very severe,
and all of them have done well. We publish this case series, and now what we'd like to do as a clinical trial random assignment to condition half of them divided into standard care where they stay sick, and half of them where they do fasting and diet and get well, and they compare them long term to see what's preferable. And so you know, part of that mechanism of what we're seeing there is probably this increased autopogy that's associated with fasting and improved diet.
What would be a maintenance level of fasting for sinescent cell reduction or elimination.
So your constantly cells are constantly dying off, you're constantly forming cancer cells. If you managed to kill the cancer cells, get rid of them faster than you form them, you stay healthy. If they've formed faster than you get rid of me, you grow tumors, and then you get sick and die. Right, so there's a several things you can do to improve your body natural atopogenic components. Number one is you can get enough sleep. Slip deprivation is immune suppressive.
Number two, you can avoid the chemicals that inhibit atophagy, which includes most of the drugs that are given to people. Number three, you can go on a whole plant food sus free diet, huge difference compared to a greasy, faty SLIMI processed food diet. And number four you can use fasting. And I suggest people fast every day sixteen hours, so later, don't eat three to four hours before you go to bed. Right, you'll get a twelve to sixteen hour fast every day.
Well, what would be the breakfast time, Well, you skip.
Bros, try to lose weight. We want to go sixteen hours. So let's say your dinner is at five or six o'clock. You don't eat again until maybe nine or ten o'clock the next day, okay, and before breakfast you get a chance maybe do some exercise preferentially mobilize your fat stores. And so if you're trying to gain weight or just stabilize. Where you're a kid and you need to have more hours of eating, then what you would do is you
do the same thing. You don't eat three to four hours before you go to bet, but you might have an earlier breakfast.
Okay, And this is in essence of what you're suggesting, is this is doing a clean sweep of these sinessence cells.
Well not just the SINESSA cells, but also all of these immunological factors of the body as.
The body needs to reveewerate.
Okay, that occasionally we would do a longer medically supervised fast depending on the person. If they're healthy, we do relatively short fast five to ten days once a year. If they're sick, we do as long as it takes up to forty days. However often it takes to get the problems solved. For example, we had a dentist at
our facility. We talk about this in the book. She had been to a dental a conference that got hit in the head by a tent polar all right, I read that one and God on dural tear and had constant daily headache for you know, eight out of ten to ten out of ten every minute of every day for sixteen years, was completely disabled around it. And she came in and did a water only fast We faster forty one days the first time, and then we refet her for six months and then did forty days is
the second time. And now it's been almost fifteen years. She has no headache. So she got a resolution after a life long of hell and probably because of the inflammation, you know, negative inflammator effects of long term water only fasting.
Yeah.
So we treat a lot of people with chronic syphalgia, chronic migraines. It's not just the fasting, but the fasting the diet. We'll use therapies like manipular therapy, physical therapy, exercise, and you know, large percentage of these people that we see and these are the chronic chronics, are able to
get well. Thank goodness, because I mean, if you put people through the hell we put people through with diet change and exercise and having to fast, if you didn't get good results, I'm telling you they get in, alum in a baseball bat, they beat your head in.
I'm glad you have a sense of humor about this, because we're making a challenge. Let's talk real briefly, and then I want to move on. I want to talk about another condition that is a mainstay of allopathic medicine, and this is hypertension. And high blood pressure is a a condition that people seem to get at all ages, but most likely most prominently in their fifties and sixties, and the medication for this is just deadly. Talk about the FAST and how to reduce hypertension.
Well, hypertension is great because the drugs cause chronic coff, the tee impotence, and premature deaths. The drugs are so dangerous, in fact, they won't give them to you until your blood pressure is quite high. Yes, it seems to be so high that the risk of dying from the stroke is at reduction from blood pressure that its outweighs the increased death rate from taking the drugs. Fifty percent of people won't take the drugs because they don't like the
chronic coff, the tea, infetits, and other side effects. The good news is, as I mentioned earlier, virtually everybody with essentral hypertension normalist is their blood pressure with FAST. So we've had hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of patients and in fact we hade hundreds of patients who documented and research studies. Of the twenty five thousand people that we've threated, we've probably had close to ten thousand people with elevated blood pressure.
So it's a high percentage of your patient.
Sixty two percent of all of the population you have high bloo pressure by the time reach sixty right, okay, So and you know, a significan percent even as young as twenty five now significant percentage of people hypertension. So you know, it's it's ubiquitous because of the greasy, fatty,
high salt diets. When you feed people, and essentially all of those people will normalize their blood pressure if they're willing to do the fast, and then if they're willing to stick on the diet, they can usually maintain it. In fact, you know they'll come in two twenty over one twenty capped on medications and still normalize their pressure eliminate the needs for drugs. It's unbelievably how consistent blood pressure is. It's just one of the most responsive conditions,
and we've published the most papers on it. If you go to our website tunorthout dot com, you can see all of the papers we publish different studies, including prospective studies. Now, as I mentioned, we did a paper with our colleague at the Mail Clinic and they's been published in per view journals. There's no question it works. The problem is not everybody wants to take time off and fast. Not
everybody wants to make diet lifestyle changes. It's just like if you go up to your people, you know their alcohol, and you say, hey, you know how your life sucks. It's because of the booze. They don't go, oh, it's the alcohol. I had no idea. Oh, thank you so much. I just won't drink anymore. It's tell you to mind your own f and business because you know they don't want to hear it. And that's true with blood pressure.
If you drop up to a patient with the high blood pressure and say, look, you can completely normalize your blood pressure, eliminate the medications and these side effects and just cut that completely out of your life, It's like, oh, great, what do I have to do? Well, you have to get enough rest, you have to do moderate exercise, and you have to eat a whole plant food sus free diet. No, no, no,
I could never do that. Give up my boke and my coffee and my alcohol and my pot and my you know, processed foods and my No then no, no, it's not possi.
That we're going to take a brief break to allow our sponsors to identify themselves, and we will return shortly with my guest today, Alan gold Hammer, discussing his new book, Can Fasting Save Your Life?
M Wild.
All the memories are on replay. I read for you.
Bunch a thousands of miles away, ever re hardy ever read fields thoughts.
My guest today is doctor Alan Goldhammer, the director of True North Health Clinic, and he's describing some of the techniques that they use for water fasting here in northern California. Talk real briefly, Alan about what you call refeeding, which is the beginning to eat food following along diet fast. Excuse me, this is critical, isn't it, Because if you start eating the crap that you were eating before, you're just going to throw the whole thing into reverse.
Well, not only in reverse, can actually create what's called post fastening, a demo or even potentially fatal refeeding syndrome.
Give us a sample of what you would suggest to somebody to say who just came off of two weeks.
So two week fast. Just here's the general rules, and we talked about this in the book Can Fasten and Save Your Life as a whole. You know, it's all laid out, but it takes about one day of juice for every week of fasting, one day of raw food for every week of fasting, and one day of steam starts your food. So two week fast, we know it's going to take seven days to recover from that. The first day or two is going to be fresh vegetable based juices and broth. Then we're going to introduce raw
fruit and vegetables. Then we're going to introduce some steam vegetables in addition to the raw for vegetables. Then we're going to introduce some starchy vegetables. So by the day seven, you're going to be an exclusively whole plant food ass free diet. And if you do that properly, you avoid all of the problems of twenty five thousand people. We've never had refeting syndrome.
What is refeeding syndrome.
Where electro white balance can become O you refinek into cardiac arrass and death. So your blood, your blood shirt look reft too quickly. They saw a lot of problems in World War two, and they elaborate bread people from the concentration camps and they try to build them up too quickly, and then they end up killing some people and creating problems. So you have to kind of come off of it slowly and get really sick otherwise.
Mm.
So that's why we advocate when you're going to fast, you got to do it right or you end up with a mess. The horror stories you hear are always people that just maybe didn't understand, you know, the principles are fasting. That's why we wrote this book.
Yeah, it's great, and that's a very big key. And I've always been taught that the returning to the food is just as important as the fact more important.
I think that's the key. That's where people make the mistakes really fast. Okay, it's they oh, if they're gonna screw it up, it's they screwed up with the refeeding.
Because you can reintroduce the wrong foods too soon and just.
Be and you know, people are coming off of fast and the brain is saying, hey, let's get to it, you know, let's go the other way and the people that have the most trouble, the very people that have the most trouble giving up those foods anyway, because their addicts. To begin with, people don't like to think of themselves as addictive, but they are. They're addicted to the artificial stimulation of doping in their brain from the chemicals. Whether
it's alcohol, cocaine, methamphetamines, or salt, oil and sugar. They all work on the same pathways. Now, granted, you know there are also a lot of these are white powders to you notice that, like cocaine, like sugar, there's a lot of these salt. You know, a lot of these white powders. You got to watch out for white powders. That's what I'm saying.
Talk briefly about uh emeo uh compromise people people who have immunity problems. I read a little bit of your book at fasting is just a huge benefit to kickstart the humanity Tuckay.
Yeah, what's really remarkable. A lot of people that we come in and have suppressed immune responses, usually from the medications given to treat autoimmune diseases, or they have HIV and they've been on you know, disease modifying medications, and these patients often do dramatically better. You'll see objective changes in their white counts in their acute phase, erectro proteins
go down. There's a lot of research that we've cited and we're doing now to objectify objectively the change that occur with fasting there, and it is really quite impressive. And that's why what's happened now is Falter Longo did some intertween research. They had rats that they had induced cancer, and so these are genetically bred rats two separate groups. With the first group, they would give them enough chemotherapy to kill all the cancer cells, but unfortunately all the
rats would die from poisoning from the chemotherapy. It's right, therapy is pretty poisonous, but you have to kill all the cancer cells that it comes back. So then they took the same rats with the same cancer and the same chemotherapy, but the faster the rats before and after treatment, all thirty routes survive dramatically, enhancing cancer free survival. And the reason is of something called differential stress sensitization and
differential stress sensitivity. It turns out in the fasting state, cancer cells have a biological disadvantage. Cancer cells have higher metabolic rates. They don't do well in a ketogenic environment. In a fat based environment, their primary philosophy glucose, so when you put them in a fat based environment, they have a selective disadvantage. But the human cells and the immune cells have an advantage because fastenings a biological adaptation.
They do fine in the suppressed in the low glucose state, they do fine in the high ketone state, and so it gives them a chance for the chemotherapy to be more effective. It also protects the healthy cells from the damaging effects of chemotherapy. And so as soon as Walter Longo published that paper, the pharmaceutical companies went, oh wait a second, fasting is doing something to the body to
make our therapy work better. Fasting transformed from being criminal quack to cutting edge research, and now they're desperately trying to come up with what we're called fasting mimicking drugs. So they want drugs that will do to the body what fasting does, but without that nasty fasting, and in
a form that they can sell. Oh my god, it's been great because now that all this research going on, how is the fasting doing that so that they can reproduce it and sell you a drug to do it better and make more money.
That shows the pharmaceutical companies are running the show there.
The pharmaceutical companies are doing better than ever before if you look at like just who's making the most money. And again they've got this model. Now, don't give you antibiotics for ten days and then you're better. No, no, no, no, You do this drug and you'll be on misdrunic the rest of your life. You can't stop it ever.
Oh my god, that's terrible, Alan, I want to do it. For instance, you've been your doctors and you've been complaining about a sore hip no excuse me, a sore stomach, and the doctor is just giving you the news that you have stage two cancer. What would you do?
Well, there's two things you do. First of all, you get properly worked up. You go to the latest, greatest oncologists and you ask them in a very important question, are there any therapies like ammuno therapies or whatever that are appropriate for me? And can you share them with me any information that if I do those therapies I
might live longer or better. So that's number one. Okay, so you're all worked up, you have good evaluation, You look at your medical options, and then in addition, you say, what do I have to do to get healthier? Boost my immune system in order to ad to give the body a chance to fight off the situation.
Well, the outpath's not going to be able to tell you that.
No, No, you're going to go to a different kind of doctor.
Okay, go to a Chinese medical doctor.
If you come to the that are, you go to one of our telemedicine doctors and will help you evaluate. And we have some medical doctors that are unique because they're not idiots. I know that's hard to believe. Nobody ever believes those people exist, but they're like unicorns. And so or you go to lifestyle medicine doctors. The doctors out now they're interested in trying to help you get healthy.
And so then you're gonna look at diets, sleep and exercise and then see whether or not maybe fasting might help speed the process up. So you look at your medical options, you get fully informed. Some forms of cancer, for example, there are like immunotherapy options that are maybe helpful and people might live longer and better if they
do it than if they don't. There's other types of cancer that it's hard to find medical evidence that people are living longer better a lot of the more common cancers. And you can read The Emperor of All Maladies by Mukaraji, who got the Poetzer Prize for his book on the history of cancer and its treatment and you know, and he goes through and talks about, you know, medical treatment and the limitations and do people live longer or not?
And it's sometimes a little shocking and disappointing to find out how in effect of many of these very aggressive and expensive and devastating treatments are. But that's the basic model is first find out is there any medical treatment that actually is shown to be helpful, See whether that's relevant, See what you can do with diet and lifestyle change, and then consider whether fasting might have some utility for you.
I would think fasting would be just a way to reorganize the physiology of the body which is fighting the cancer. Wouldn't that be a problem.
Because fasting is a way to reorganize the physiology of the body and help improve the it's just when it's fighting the cancer. Yeah, but it's important for us that people be worked out first, though, because then we can take full credit when they get resolution. If these patients that we couldn't publish these case reports, if we didn't have good objective baselines, and then when they get well, we can rub their success in their our college's face, which is the fun part.
Yeah. I mean I have a lot of friends that are all a pass and my grandfather was an alopathic doctor. What do you think of the new I don't want to say byproduct, but it's called functional medicine where they're actually I have doc friends that are actually taking credentials to add this to their practice, and I think there's some positive space.
In fact, I just came from doing the continuing ed seminar I contribu so you did in Los Angeles to the lastile Medicine. They had, you know, one hundred of the plantation group. They have hundreds of doctors. I've spoken to many of these conferences and I'm usually the odd person out because I'm not a medical doctor and they're
virtually all medical doctors. But as a chiropractor, you know, it's always fine going in and pissing everybody off, you know, just having the wrong credentials, in the wrong background, on the wrong training, and saying the wrong things. But the reality is this is what works. Diet, sleep, exercise, and fasting. That's what actually works. And the lifestyle medicine doctors understand that,
and they're trying to implement in their practice. But they tell me their biggest frustration is it's hard to find patients willing to make those lifestyle changes. It's like asking a person to quit smoking. People don't want to quit smoking.
Oh, that's a different animal.
They don't want to quit drinking, and they and they certainly don't want to give up all their highly processed foes, their addicts, and they don't want to give it up.
Even with a really detrimental diagnosis.
Well, do you think smokers don't know that they're going to start coughing up chunks their lung at some point? Yeah? Are they shocked? Oh my god, it's not good for me. I thought it was good to call my nerves, which is what their medical doctor might have started, you know, told them when they first started smoking forty years ago. No, they know it's not good for him. Drinking, You think most drunks are thinking, oh, I'm taking it for the big wirenment. You know, it's like, you know, no, they
know it's not good for him. And do you think people munching down on that greasy, fatty, slimy process food don't think that they're probably not doing themselves any favor. I think they know, but it's hard to quit when you're an ad.
Itt Well, Tolly, you didn't answer my question. You talked about other types of medicine, but are you familiar with this new credential that only alapas can get called functional medicine.
Well, the functional medicine is really displacing highly toxic allopathic drugs for pills, potions, and powders of another color. Mostly. Oh okay, So I really advocate the plantition people the lifestyle medicine because they're focusing on that and lifstyle functional meta doctors are doing. You know, here's the thing. Something that's way less bad doesn't mean it's good.
So you're saying, and I haven't looked at it as closely as you have. They're still advocating drugs.
It's mostly still seeing things from a deficiency model, which pill, potion or powers.
Oh, they're not looking at the holistic views.
Have some functional messad doctors do a great job. You're including diet lifestyle issue and there are okay, so, but functional medicine and lifestyle medicine are different. Lifestyle is changing the lifestyle, Functional is changing the chemistry using less toxic substances. That's my gross oversimplication, oversimplification. I'm sure i'll get some nasty letters from functional messa doctors say oh no, we're we're doing much more than just that.
But well, it's funny because you said you were down in LA with lifetocks. What's the metaline doctors?
The ones that invite me are usually the lifestyle medicine doctors that are advocating diet and lifestyle change. Functional medicine doctors are usually the ones that will be You'll have definitely bland there who says, you know, don't do fasting because it's too dangerous unless you take their proprietary products. You know, then it's okay. So I'll tell you how I think. I evaluate other scientists' intelligence based on how
much they agree with me. So when Walter Longo published his book and said don't do long turn and fasting unless you do it at the Tune North Health Center, I said, hey, This guy's a genius. You know, so.
Funny, so funny. The book's called Ken Fasting You Save Your Life. My guest today has been doctor Allan Goldhammer. I want to ask you what is a supervised fast? Give us the overview when somebody wants to look at what you're doing.
Sure, so a supervised fast, whether you're doing it at home or at the Tuneuth Health Center, a doctor will review your history, examine lab to make sure you're a good candidate for fasting. There's no country indication to help you. Wean off mat it's all that stuff. And then at this tune North Health Center or at home, there's going to be at the Turn of Thought Center, our doctor
see patients twice a day. We collect vitals, we answer their questions, make sure they're doing okay, do appropriate lab testing, blend and urine testing, and then we provide We call it education. It's actually kind of brainwashing. But it's classes and videos and all kinds of stuff so that when people go home they have the skill sets needed to be successful. But even if a person's fasting at home,
we offer live streaming of all of our classes. I wonder if people can freely see they don't need to pay anything. They just go to our website. Anybody that wants to watch our classes can do that. We have a Roku channel with a lot of video that's all free. They can watch the video. So even if they're doing at home, they can still get the education just by
going through our website. But they still need to have and then our doctors will provide remote support to them if they're doing it at home or obviously if they're the center, we're able to hold their hand go through the reefeeding process carefully. There's also companies like Whole Harvest Now that are out there making SOS free foods available that they can deliver for people that haven't moved up
to learning curve on the food. There's also well your World, there's leaf Side, so there's a number of companies offering SOS free options now, which is great. So we're I just want to mention no to your listeners. We offer a free service that they might be interested in. If they go to our website at tuneoorthhealth dot com and fill out their registration forms, I will review their medical history and offer them a phone conversation for free.
Oh dude, watch out they're.
A candidate for fasting, point them in the direction maybe of a doctor that might be able to help them. There's no cost for that, and I would be happy to talk to them if they go to the website and fill out the forums first, because it allows me to efficiently review their medical history, make sure that they don't do something stupid, and you know, maybe they need to do a modified version of it or something. We
can certainly give them that advice. If they are at the candidate, I can either hook them up with a telemedicine person or try to refer them to somebody that might be helpful to them closer to where they are, or if they decide they want to come to the center, that's fine. We're happy to lock them up. But you know, that service is nice because they can at least get their fundamental questions answered. Obviously, I would like them if they can read our book Can Fast and Save Your Life.
That's a great thing. It has a lot of information in there. But at least they have a way to get up their personal questions answered where an email. They can email me as well. I'm happy to you know, I try to answer all those emails in a timely manner.
I think you're very very generous alan to take all the oh.
Yeah, my pleasure. That's what I do, though, is try to provide the generalification. I do this kind of these podcasts and this kind of stuff. That's fine.
Yeah, thank you for that. That's fantastic. Finally, who did you write the book for? I mean, was it kind of just your history because you have forty years behind this clinic? But who did the book?
Who is the target? Was the person that was thinking about they want to know about fast and should they fast and how would they do that right? And also their doctor because if they go to their doctor and say I want to do it fast, many of the doctors would say, well, you're just crazy. We're gonna you know, it's ridiculous. But if they read this book it's so based well, as you saw, it's really based on the twenty two papers we published in the periity literature, most
doctors will think, oh, maybe this isn't actually crazy. There looks like there might be something to it. Okay, if you're going to do it, here's the parameters we need to make sure you do it safely. Okay. So it was written for the patient but also for their doctor so that if somebody was going to because white problems.
I get calls from people, well intentioned people that are trying to do fasting and they totally f it up, and so they create a mass unnecessarily and it just sometimes they didn't understand they had to rest when they're faster. They can't be driving to work, there can't be can't do so they can't take the igroprof and there's a
different way to deal with it. And so we wanted to make sure those people that were trying to do the right thing, but you know, we're having serious problems, and that fasting didn't get made to look bad even when it isn't bad, it's a good thing. And also
so that physicians would be able to see it. And what we found is many doctors once they see somebody get well, sometimes it's the only time in their practice they've ever seen anybody get well, and then they get all enthused about it, and many of them actually come in as patients and they do it fast at the center. And now we've added people to our base physicians that are now enthusiastic supporters because they've seen, oh, people can
get well with that. I just saw a cardiologist who told me the biggest frustration he's had is he has trouble getting people to do the diet and lifestyle change. Yeah, he knows it works, he does in himself, but even with his patients that are looking at bypasses, it's still so hard to beat addiction, you know, and you know they know. It's hard to get him quit smoking, it's hard to get him quit drinking, and it's hard to
get him to make diet lifestyle changes. It's just statistically less likely to make diet mustyle genus than it is to quit.
Hero Yeah, I really wish that the dominant health modality, which is allopathic medicine, would begin incorporating a little more of these alternative I won't even call it alternative, fundamental health traditions like fasting in their PA.
Well, I think it is. The lifestyle medicine is an example of thousands of dogtars.
But that's a minor portion.
But there's fifteen hundred. I mean that conference between the live and the remote is I think fifteen hundred doctors. So I mean, granted that's there's sixty eight, you know, hour.
Mean all California docs.
No no, these are all across the nation.
Spoke in Florida.
I spoken if this happened to be California. But remember it's broadcast and it's broadcast all over the world. So I mean they have, however, many hundred doctors they have at the events, but it's there's thousands of people watching it remotely. You know, I did a show with Rich
Roll has four point five million views. I mean, you realize how many people four point five It's enough that I was walking down the street in Las Vegas, just minding my own business on the street, and some guy came up to me and goes, oh, I know you. You're doctor Calipus. That's what you remember because I called milk Calapus or something.
Even God, it's so funny.
So it's interesting. If I go in Costco now, people come over, they want to take photos of the cart and stuff. You know, they've got questions. That's interesting, and so that would never have happened in the old days. I always speak to, you know, fifty people, five hundred people, whatever it is, speak to millions of people like you probably have tens of thousands of people that watch your podcast.
If I were to go do live lectures. It would take me four hundred and fifty years to reach as many people as we'll reach with this show today.
Yeah, you know, social media is great.
It's unbelievable. It's unbelivable. How can there be thousands and thousands and thousands of people that you can you can reach, you know, without having to like fly across the country. And it's a big This is such a miracle. I can't even imagine it.
And it's fantastic. As we continue, as we close, I should say, Alan, let's give us to the contact, give us your website and all the other details.
Of so the website's real simple, it's true North Health dot com. Okay, And if you go to the website, you get everything you need, phone numbers, direct contact to me, websites you can do the registration.
Is there a wedding list for the clinic.
There is a little waitlist on the clinic, but it's not terribly We have a big clinic.
You know.
We have eighty two patient beds, oh, eighty two beds beds for patients. We have about twenty for staff. So we had we had a fifteen hundred admissions a year, and you know, there's only so many people that are willing to fast and make lifestyle changes. It's not like everybody out there wants to do it. It's a small percentage of the you know, I find the biggest motivator is
pained ability and fear of death. So people that are really suffering, they're their best patience because they'll do anything. They'll even change their diet and lifestyle. You may. The other group is the healthy people that do it premitively to stay well. And we've actually shown in a study we published recently that the cardio metabolic changes in healthy
people actually are even bigger than sick people. The people that make it the most benefit of fasting are the healthy people that do you know, relatively short periods of fast and preventively, rather than even just the sick people who obviously get benefit that the healthy people may really be where the best long term changes are going to turn out to be.
Wow, fantastic, Hey, my success in this new book it just came out, Can Fast Save Your Life? I think what just came out this week?
Yeah, well it's yeah, a few weeks ago it was released and so it's brand new there.
So yeah, much successed about it. Yeah, I enjoyed it. It's a good Bremmer and I hope that more people hear about it. Hey, Alan, I really appreciate your time.
Thank you, absolutely, it's nice to meet you.
You know, I'm not so sure on one hundred percent water fast because that's really kind of brutal. I ease into it with, you know, a cup of coffee on the first Monday, So the night before I'm doing a elongated fast, I will stop eating at like six o'clock on a Sunday, and then I'll make coffee. I drink decaf ground roast decaf, uh, and then I'll have a cup of coffee. On Monday. I'll have another cup of coffee coffee in the afternoon, and then tea and water
for the evening. And that kind of sets the tone. And I really worked hard to to schedule my week with less stress, and that means taking less meetings. You know. I do research for all my interviews, so I'm gonna be reading the book and coming up with notations and questions and so forth. So that's that. Can't I can't stop that, but I try to reduce my travel. I try to give myself time to get out in the
air during the day. And if I do that and I'm not too stressed up, and I go to bed a little bit earlier, I find that the fasts are easier to do and you can stretch them out. All of a sudden, you're into the second day. Your days gone on the second day, you got your third day, and after the For me, the third day is where the body is releasing toxins and junk into the system, and that's where you can feel a little weak and uncomfortable.
But it's minor. It's really really minor. Now, if if you have a major disease process, if you're dealing with a diagnosis of cancer or MS, or rheumatoid arthritis or diabetes, you've allowed your body you haven't been paying attention to your signals. The body's been telling you've probably for years that you've got a problem, and you haven't been paying attention.
You have to be careful about those kinds of fast because you can release a lot of poison and really shut your body down, and you don't want to do that. So if you've been diagnosed with an illness, first of all, go to doctor Goldhammer's website and see what the recommendations are. For somebody in your area, and maybe start off with a twenty four hour fast and then move on to a two day and so forth every other month or every second month or whatever. But you know what, it's
not just fasting. You've got to think about your diet. No more deep fried food, no more alcohol, and God forbid you smoke, because if you're smoking, you're really making a mess of things. So anyhow, everybody's different. Ticket, slow ticket, one day at a time, and I guarantee you you'll feel so rejuvenated. It's really a rejuvenating technique, just fantastic for rehelping regain your health. So again, the books available on Amazon, it's called Can Fasting Save Your Life? Is
a little bit clinical. I mean he gets into the prop the positives of it. But you know, it's a starter. It's not a very expensive book. You know, you can start with that and then go and find other books. Bernard Jensen is a good one. Paul Bragg on fasting. Bernard Jensen is one that I followed. He's been around. He passed away god twenty years ago, if not more.
And then you might, you know, do a search for doing a two day fast or four day fast now I highly recommend doctor Jason fung Fu and g. He wrote a book a couple of years ago called The Complete Guide to Fasting, and he describes how to do a short fast couple of days, and how to also do an extended fast. And he has been around for a while. You can see his videos on YouTube. They're all free, and he is an expert. And he is somebody who has helped people with type two diabetes and
help them reverse it. And it's funny how the body will correct itself from these degenerative types of diseases like diabetes, chronic fatigue, arthritis, even certain types of cancer. When you do a fast, now you just don't do the fast and go back to eating your regular food. You got to really keep an eye on your diet. You had to eliminate fatty foods, foods that are deep fried, and alcohol.
If you're if you have a chronic illness, you can just need to eliminate them if you're serious about getting well. If you're not serious and you're you have a problem with addictions in your you know, obese, then you got to start somewhere and start eliminating the problem areas of you know, over eating fried food, alcohol, cigarettes, so forth and so on, or else you're gonna die young. You know a lot of people do in America. People pass
away in their fifties and the sixties. But you need to consider feeling well and being well and fasting this one area again. Check check out Jason Fong. All these books I'm mentioning you can see on Amazon, or you can go to Jason Fong j A s O N f U n G. He's an MD. He's in Canada, The Complete Guide to Fasting two Days to one week and longer. I think he's got a forty day fast in there, and that's I can't imagine. I'd have to
go on a retreat. And you know that's why Alan Goldhammer's retreat, the True North Health Clinic in northern California is a place you go for two weeks supervised, and then you break your fast, you start refeeding. So anyhow, I am fascinated with fasting. I plan to live to be one hundred plus. My mother right now is ninety four. She's slowed down quite a bit. She hasn't really ever fasted. She's taken really good care of her health though, but
she's got issues everyone. You get into your nineties, you're going to have issues, but hey, you want to live as long and as comfortably and as healthily as you can. So I hope you enjoyed that program. Okay, that's it for this program, and I think my guest today, Alan Goldhammer, coming to us from True North Health Clinic in Santa Rosa, California. And there's always a team of Guilt tour Mark Foster and everyone who makes this thing happen. I really appreciate
your help. All right, take care and be well, and we will talk to you next time.