AMA with Patrick Will from Willcast

Join Patrick Will as we uncover the unsettling realities lurking within your personal care products and learn how to navigate the maze of nutrition misinformation. Join us as we engage in a fascinating dialogue to expose the stark inconsistencies in cosmetic regulations and dissect the complex interaction between insulin, macronutrients, and our health. By tuning into our conversation, you'll gain a deeper understanding of how the evolution of fruits and vegetables has silently influenced our wellbeing, and why your daily beauty routine might need a thorough detox.

Prepare to challenge everything you thought you knew about healthy eating as we scrutinize the modern diet's pitfalls, from the metabolic chaos induced by too much fructose to the deceptive allure of seed oils. Whether you're curious about the potential perils of juicing or considering a shift towards a ketogenic lifestyle, our episode serves as a clarion call for a more informed approach to your food choices. We'll also unveil how deceptive food industry practices might be skewing nutritional guidelines, and offer practical advice for embracing a diet that spans the spectrum from plant-based to carnivore while side-stepping the dangers of processed foods.

In our final act, we tackle the insidious nature of chronic inflammation, unraveling its role as a silent contributor to a plethora of contemporary diseases. Amidst our exploration, the conversation takes a turn towards the importance of a mindful existence, contemplating the profound impact of environmental toxins and the personal care industry on our health. Don't miss the opportunity to enrich your knowledge and take control of your health—join us for this enlightening episode, and stay tuned for my upcoming book release in June 2024 for even more insights into these critical health topics.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

Welcome back to the Hellfongivity Secret Show, and I'm your host, dr Robert Lufkin. Today, we uncover the alarming truths behind your beauty regimen in this far-reaching AMA, where we shed light on the chemicals hidden in plain sight. Our discussion will leave you questioning what's really in those personal care products and why regulation is so much stricter in the EU compared to the US. We are also to have your dietary beliefs challenged in a profound way. We go way beyond the calorie, examining the critical role that insulin and macronutrients play in metabolism and weight loss. By breaking down the science of how different foods, such as the humble doughnut versus cheese, can have vastly different effects on our body's energy storage, this episode will transform the way you think about dieting. We also tackle controversy surrounding modern fruits and vegetables, from their ancestral origins to their genetically modified descendants, and how their altered fructose content may be impacting our health today. This provides a unique perspective on the carnivore diet and the often misunderstood nature of vegetables. Finally, we discuss the often debated diets and the relationship with inflammation, an issue truly at the heart of practically all chronic diseases.

Speaker 1: 1:23

I'll share my own ketogenic, one-militay dietary approach and the reasons I chose brussel sprouts over seed oils. We'll also explore environmental toxins and their hidden impact on health, from the weed killer glyphosate in our grains to the disruption of our oral microbiome. This episode promises to enlighten, challenge and empower you with a fresh perspective on health and longevity. Please join us for a journey through the evolving landscape of medical knowledge and dietary science. This episode is brought to you by L Nutra, maker of the prolonged fasting, mimicking diet. Please support this podcast by checking out their website and taking a look at their amazing products. And now please enjoy this week's episode.

Speaker 2: 2:17

Robert, welcome to the podcast.

Speaker 1: 2:20

Thanks, Patrick. I'm a fan of your work and it's a real pleasure and an honor to be on your program today.

Speaker 2: 2:29

Robert, likewise, as I told you off camera, I really like your work, so it's an honor to have you on the podcast as well. Nutrition and health is something that I mean. It just is everything right Like your health is everything, and what you do is very inspiring. To spread the truth about all of this, you have a book coming out called Lies, a taught in medical school, which is excellent. I really recommend people checking it out. But, robert, before we get into everything, could you briefly explain who you are and what you do for the people who might not be familiar with you?

Speaker 1: 3:05

Sure, yeah, my background is I'm a practicing physician, my specialty is radiology medical imaging although in the last decade or so I've transitioned into metabolic health and wellness and longevity. And I spent my essentially my entire career at medical schools in Southern California as a full professor there and as such I'm sort of a product of the medical establishment. Some things we may talk about today will seem like conspiracy theories or controversial things, but I just want to be clear. I am my background and my position is really in the ivory towers of medicine. I basically I practiced medicine.

Speaker 1: 3:58

I was fortunate to do research, write grants and do hundreds of peer reviewed scientific papers, writing textbooks, all the usual stuff, and also teaching medical students. So what I'm going to talk about today is coming from the perspective of someone kind of on the inside of the medical establishment. I'm going to throw a lot of stones at everything, but hopefully it's done with, you know, with an open heart and honesty, and you know it's the best way that I interpret the literature as I read it. But anyway, that's where I'm coming from.

Speaker 2: 4:35

Great. All right, so quickly. I'm sorry to interrupt the podcast here. I know I do this all always, but I just have a small favorite to ask of you If you haven't subscribed to the podcast yet, what are you doing? No, please consider doing so. It's free, it's risk free, it's great. I keep saying this, but the bigger the podcast gets, the bigger the guests we can have on and ultimately, the bigger the guests are, the more value I can provide to you. So that's something to consider. I consider it a win-win situation, so consider it at least. Thank you so much and enjoy the rest of the episode.

Speaker 2: 5:12

Yeah, your book your new book Lies I Taught in Medical School is so excellent because it really teaches these complex things in a very simple way for dummies like me, which was great. And yeah, I wanted to dive a little bit into some of the lies that you taught about and expand on these. The first one and I think it's the first one in the book as well is a calorie is just a calorie, which is for me, and I think very many people thought for the longest time that a calorie surplus eating more calories than you burn equals putting on weight and a calorie deficit eating less calories than you burn equals losing weight, but essentially there is way more to it than that. Could you expand?

Speaker 1: 6:02

on that. Yeah, what you said is actually true. It makes sense People quote the laws of thermodynamics that calories are converted into energy and the more energy you have, it needs to be stored as fat or excreted somehow. But I guess the problem with the idea that a calorie is just a calorie it doesn't matter what type of food you eat is misleading, and I think it's at the root of the obesity problem that we're facing today the epidemic in obesity. American adults, 50% of us are either overweight or obese, and that number is going up, and it's not just America, it's worldwide. I'm sure in Denmark there are issues as well around this and around the world with where your audience is. But the problem with this notion that a calorie is just a calorie and this is being taught at medical school still I mean, my medical school still teaches that and the problem is that it drives the advice that people are given when they want to lose weight and that is just a calorie is a calorie.

Speaker 1: 7:20

So if you want to lose weight, just exercise more and eat less, eat fewer calories, and we all know that doesn't work. Exercise is a way to build up an appetite. You work up an appetite and we've all probably at one point or another, looked at the content of a candy bar we're about to eat, and then we convert that to how many miles we have to run to burn up that many calories, and it really doesn't pencil out. So a lot of people now say that you can't really outrun a bad diet. In other words, there's not enough exercise you can do to lose weight. So what can you do then? Well, if we examine the idea that a calorie is a calorie and look at it closer, there's actually a solution in there, and that's because the three macronutrients which you've probably talked to your audience about before, which are fat, protein and carbohydrates those three macronutrients provide the energy for our bodies from the food, and basically all food is a mixture of combination one or more of those macronutrients.

Speaker 1: 8:33

But the interesting thing is there's a hormone that drives obesity. It's called insulin. The job of insulin is to take blood sugar out of our, among other things, out of our bloodstream and store it as fat. So this hormone, insulin, really controls whether we gain weight or lose weight, and as an example, you can look at a disease called type one diabetes, which is the less common type of diabetes, where people have low insulin levels. And these people are typically thin, very, very thin, no matter how many calories they eat. They stay thin because they don't have enough insulin. And similarly, if you look the other extreme, if you take insulin it's available as a drug and it's used to treat diabetics. If you take insulin and inject it into anyone, practically I can make anyone gain weight by just giving them insulin. And because insulin signals the body to store fat and typically type two diabetics, who have a excess supply of insulin and they may take extra insulin as well they typically have problems with weight, they're obese, they're overweight.

Speaker 1: 9:50

So what does that mean? What can we learn from this? Well, as it turns out, the three macronutrient groups fat, protein and carbohydrates do not stimulate insulin equally. In fact, carbohydrates by far are the main stimulators of insulin and fat and protein much less. So I could take the same number of calories and if I eat it as carbohydrates I'll have a huge insulin rush and a lot stored as fat, whereas if I take the same number of calories and say, maybe fat, the insulin won't be secreted and I won't gain as much weight.

Speaker 1: 10:29

And sort of an obvious example I can take a donut which is sugar and carbohydrates, let's say it's 300 calories. And then I take an egg or a piece of cheese, which is an equal number of calories, and I'll eat each one of those and the one. The donut actually makes me store fat and in fact I'm hungry after the donut because a lot of my the glucose is stored, so I need more glucose, whereas the cheese or the egg I'll eat 300 calories of that and I'm not hungry anymore. So the idea of the calorie is just a calorie, I think, is misleading and it ignores the fact that insulin drives weight gain and if we just pay attention to which foods we eat, that's a much better approach to weight loss than just counting calories.

Speaker 2: 11:27

And so when people go on low carb diets like keto or carnivore, they lower their insulin, and does that technically mean that they can eat as many calories as they want and not put on weight?

Speaker 1: 11:41

Well, they lower their insulin. We all make some amount of insulin, so even on a low carb diet, we can gain weight. What happens, though, when people go on those types of diets the ketogenic diet or the low carb diet or the carnivore diet other things happen is that their hunger gets suppressed a little bit, so they're not as hungry, and we've all experienced that with trying to eat one potato chip, which is largely pure carbohydrates, versus one piece of cheese. It's much easier to eat one piece of cheese and not eat the whole thing of cheese versus eat one potato chip. It's because the carbohydrates trigger other things in addition to insulin, which drive our hunger and make us much more hungry.

Speaker 2: 12:32

There's a term especially used in the fitness industry the maintenance level of calories. So if you want to put on weight, build muscle mass, you have to eat in a caloric surplus above your maintenance level. So what I'm a little bit confused about is does the maintenance level change when you have lower insulin or higher insulin?

Speaker 1: 12:55

Yeah, that's a great question. Let's go back to the 300 calorie doughnut and the 300 calorie piece of cheese. When I eat a 300 calorie piece of cheese, basically it goes into my body and it's converted to glucose and in some cases it's converted to fats which can also be metabolized, called ketones. But either way it largely goes to the production of energy, because glucose is not turned on very much by fat. On the other hand, when I eat a doughnut, which is basically pure carbohydrates, the effect on my body is to turn insulin way up.

Speaker 1: 13:36

What does insulin do? Well, among other things, it tells the body to store energy as fat. So those 300 calories go in my bloodstream, but maybe, let's say, 150 of those calories get stored at fat. So what happens is I only get 150 calories net net of glucose in my bloodstream. The rest is stored in fat. So my body senses I'm eating half the amount of food that I was with the piece of cheese. And then the other thing with the insulin and the carbohydrates we get rebound effects on hunger. So it's sort of like if I eat carbohydrates the one potato chip thing or if I eat a doughnut, I'm hungry an hour later because it triggers these hunger effects as well.

Speaker 2: 14:26

Okay, and so how does the body choose when, if you're bodybuilding, you're trying to put on muscle mass, you're eating more calories than you burn to try to build muscle mass? Is there a mechanism that the body uses to choose to build muscle instead of fats when you essentially eat more than you should?

Speaker 1: 14:52

Yeah, I mean there are other drivers of building muscle. You know exercise, as we all know. On that, the drivers for storing fat are just insulin, with the food being taken in. So if you have a caloric, I guess your question is if you have a caloric access, is it going to go towards fat reserves or is it going to go towards muscle maintenance? And it depends. If you're exercising, then the glucose will go into the muscles and that's a great way to lower your glucose, which actually lowers your need for insulin. So it's a healthy way to get rid of the glucose and it lowers the insulin spikes there. And there are other factors on building muscle. Now that, of course, is protein, and you know those macronutrients are needed for protein as well, whereas glucose is sort of the metabolic energy for the muscles. Contracting Protein allows them to build muscle and go from there.

Speaker 2: 15:56

Right. Do you know Paul Saladino?

Speaker 1: 16:00

I do. Yeah, I know of his work and, yeah, I like a lot of the things he does. He has some great, great things.

Speaker 2: 16:06

Yeah, absolutely, he talks about. So he eats quite a lot of carbohydrates. I believe he said he eats about 200 grams of carbs, but they're obviously. They're not from refined carbs or refined sugar. They're from fruit and honey as well. What are your thoughts on carbs from fruits?

Speaker 1: 16:31

Well, fruits are an appealing source of food, of any macronutrient, because they're natural, so they're not junk food which fills up most of our supermarkets. Processed, industrialized, refined Fruits are natural. They grow on trees, so that kind of thing, which is good. The problem, though, with modern fruits is you know, hey, you know the story. People often say you know, if we didn't eat anything that wasn't available 150 years ago, most of us would have a significant improvement in health, you know. But you know fruits were around, you know, since Paleolithic times. So for a Paleo diet, you should be able to eat fruit. The problem is, the fruit from long ago is very different from the fruit today, and that is the fruit today is like like a lot of things. It's engineered to optimize certain things that make it appealing and palatable, and for humans that's sugar, fructose and glucose in the fruit it's today's fruit would be unrecognizable by our Paleolithic ancestors. You've seen it, you know, with early bananas. They're very small and they, you know, they're not sweet at all.

Speaker 2: 17:45

And you know it's in the 10,000 years. Yeah.

Speaker 1: 17:48

Yeah, yeah, and you know apples, water, and so I think the danger of assuming that fruits are okay because they're they're they're natural is a problem, because they're not completely natural with fruit today. Personally, I think there's problems with fruit because of the fructose in it. Half of the, you know, half of the sugar, or a large percentage of the sugar, comes from fructose in fruit, and fructose. I think it's an underappreciated health hazard. Now, it's natural and a little bit of fructose is good. The problem is is how much? Because glucose if you look at glucose, the other component of table sugar, sucrose, is made up of glucose plus fructose. The glucose is the sugar that most of us think of. You know, we think of diabetes and glucose in our bloodstream. Almost every cell of the body can metabolize glucose for energy, which is interesting. It makes sense. Fructose is is very different. It's because the only cells other than a small percentage of gut cells the vast majority of fructose is has to be metabolized in the liver.

Speaker 1: 19:05

And what is the liver? Well, the liver is, among other things, it's a detoxification organ. And there's what other, what other chemicals are go to the liver? Well, the obvious one is alcohol. You know, alcohol is something else that's detoxified in the liver. It's something else that, like fructose, is addictive.

Speaker 1: 19:27

In fact, before 1980, the main kind of liver disease that caused fatty replacement in the liver was called alcoholic fatty liver disease and it was called cause from drinking too much alcohol and the alcohol goes to the liver, the liver converts it to fat and it damages the liver. Well, in 1980, something happened. A new disease appeared that people didn't recognize at first. They they had fatty liver and everyone assumed you know, you need to cut back your drinking. And they would say doctor, I've never touched alcohol in my life. And they sort of wink and go, sure, but you need to, you need to stop it, you know. And and then that went on. Eventually children began coming down with these and these children weren't drinking alcohol. So long story short, beginning in 1980, there's a new liver disease called non alcoholic fatty liver disease. It looks just like alcoholic fatty liver disease, but it's not due to alcohol and it it's now surpassed alcoholic fatty liver disease. In fact it's the number one cause of liver failure and the number one cause of liver transplants. And this liver failure, this new fatty liver disease, is driven by fructose.

Speaker 1: 20:42

And Rob Lustig from the University of San Francisco, dr Lustig has shown that if you cut fructose out of the diet and actually even substituting glucose isochlorically with fructose in in kids with fatty liver disease they can reverse the fatty liver disease in a matter of weeks just by removing fructose from the diet. So this is this is a problem with fructose which which comes from fruit. The other thing about fructose is it doesn't spike insulin, unlike glucose, it doesn't make the insulin spike. So in fact the American Dietetic Association used to recommend diabetic association used to recommend that for people, for diabetics. You know, eat fructose, it's sweet but it won't spike your insulin. The problem is fructose in the liver also drives insulin resistance, which is essentially type two diabetes. So it actually makes things worse there. And so fructose and fruit I don't give it a pass and I'm very cautious with the amount of fruit I eat just because of that factor.

Speaker 1: 21:52

The other factor, of course, is high fructose corn syrup, which appeared no surprise. In the 1980s worldwide Coca-Cola and Pepsi switched from cane sugar to high fructose corn syrup and now it's in essentially every junk food. So people eat junk food all the time, so we're getting lots of fructose from that. So in my opinion, you have to be careful with fruit. Dr Saladino's a smart man. I respect him, but we agree to disagree on this point.

Speaker 2: 22:30

So another controversial, I suppose, opinion Saladino has is vegetables or toxic. They have these defense mechanisms. What are your thoughts on that?

Speaker 1: 22:43

Yeah, each of these rabbit holes are fascinating with health and wellness and they're and at the end of the day, nobody really knows I mean the lies I taught. Well, some of the stuff I'm teaching now is gonna turn out to be lies. The famous quote 50% of what is taught in medical school would be wrong five years after you get out. The problem is nobody knows which half. So science is continually evolving. But the plant toxin thing there's actually some science to that and that's one of the things that carnivore advocates use people who we and Dr Saladino used to be a pure carnivore originally I think his first book was called that and now he's backed it off a little bit. But one of their arguments for avoiding plants is not that just meat is good, but actually, like you say, plants are bad and it's the idea that they evolve these toxins to protect themselves because they can't run around and avoid predators, so they develop these natural toxins.

Speaker 1: 23:57

I'm not as worried about all plants and I still eat vegetables and all like that, but I do pretty much avoid grains altogether because grains have whether they've evolved for this purpose or not, they have a number of proteins that are pro-inflammatory. The obvious one is gluten and celiac disease, but most people don't have celiac disease. But I believe, and there's good evidence to show, that up to 50% of adults have inflammatory reaction from grains, including gluten or, if it's not gluten, even other proteins pro-inflammatory proteins that grains have. Also, grains are really high in carbs, so they spike your insulin. And finally, in America at least, there's a weed killer called glyphosate that grains are literally soaked in. So I think in Europe some countries allow it, some countries don't allow it, but in the US glyphosate is in nearly all the grains.

Speaker 2: 25:09

Are grains a vegetable? I didn't even know that.

Speaker 1: 25:12

No, no, no.

Speaker 2: 25:13

Oh, okay, Well yeah?

Speaker 1: 25:14

Well, good question. I'm not sure, yeah, what the? And you could make the argument that grains evolved to carry the seeds so they wanna be attractive to animals to eat them, so it'd be less likely for them to have these toxic. Whatever the toxic chemicals are in them. But at least from my opinion, the advantages of vegetables and the benefits of vegetables outweigh the downsides of these potentially toxic chemicals that Paul mentions. But I eat vegetables once in a while, and so I accept that.

Speaker 2: 25:55

When you say once in a while, how often is that?

Speaker 1: 25:59

Well, I eat just once a day, so one meal a day, and so it usually is very ketogenic meal. So it's low carb, high fat and same amount of protein. Basically, the dials are people change the amount of fat and carbs. Really, most people keep proteins the same as they go to a low carb, low fat or very that. So in my diet I'll have some Brussels sprouts or something like that with it. I'm not afraid of vegetables. One thing I do stay away from for vegetables and fruit. I think a reliable way to make any vegetable or any fruit less healthy is to put it in a blender or juice it that kind of thing. So if I'm gonna eat the vegetable, the fruit, I eat it whole rather than as a juice. And in general, I believe it's not a great idea to drink your calories anyway. Anything you drink shouldn't have calories in it if you wanna be super healthy about it.

Speaker 2: 27:06

Right. So what happens to the vegetables when you blend them?

Speaker 1: 27:12

Well, there's another type of carbohydrate in vegetables in addition to the insulinogenic carbohydrates, and these are groups called fiber and they're soluble and insoluble fibers. These fibers they help our gut. They help our gut microbiome. They're useful for all sorts of things. The other thing they do is they slow the absorption of the carbohydrates, of the starches and glucose in the fruits and vegetables that we eat. And that's actually a beneficial effect because it lowers the spikes in glucose and the spikes in insulin. So the insoluble fiber makes the fruit and the vegetables healthier.

Speaker 1: 28:03

But when you put one of those in a blender, you mechanically break down the fiber. So that fiber, which protects us, is less effective in a blended fruit or vegetable. And it's even less effective when you just do a juice and there's a famous study with apples A whole apple is healthy. You get a little glucose spike and then you make apple sauce by squeezing it and make the sauce. You still have the fiber there, but it's all squished out. You drink that and you get a much bigger spike. And then you take the same amount of calories and apple juice where all the fiber is gone. You drink that and it just shoots through the roof, so you actually can change the same caloric effect just by manipulating the amount of fiber in it.

Speaker 2: 28:57

Okay, so you eat in a ketogenic diet and you eat one meal a day and you eat a bit of Brussels sprout sometimes. And what else do you eat?

Speaker 1: 29:08

Salads yeah, salads, but the problem with salads that most any salad dressing has seed oils in it, so seed oils is something else I avoid. Besides grains and the refined carbohydrates, seed oils are they have the name vegetable oil, but they're, in my opinion, unhealthy, pro-inflammatory oils that we should avoid. In many people there are many experts believe that the seed oils may feed the big drivers for the insulin resistance and the diabetes and the obesity, and that the refined carbohydrates are less so. Even though they all came on the scene in the 1980s with the advent of real industrial strength, junk food that's everywhere now.

Speaker 2: 30:00

Okay, so do you eat meat, right, I do.

Speaker 1: 30:03

What kind of meat? Well, let me just say first of all, there's sort of a political thing about meat eaters or vegans or everything. I'm not in that, I'm completely a political. In fact, I used to be a vegan for like 10 years before I had my kids, and so I think you can be healthy anywhere from the vegan to the carnivore diet that spectrum. The key thing is just avoid junk foods and honestly, there's a lot more junk food in the vegans part of the supermarket than there is in the carnivore part of the supermarket. But you can eat healthy either way. Now I do eat meat and I eat ground beef or chicken or pretty much anything. You try and get things raised, grass fed, if you can, because when a lot of the beef in America is fed the same things that they feed us, the same junk food is basically corn and soybeans. That's subsidized by the federal government. That lowers the cost of junk food. So but yeah, short answer is yes, I eat meat and all kinds.

Speaker 2: 31:14

Okay, it is. I really empathize with people who try to eat healthy. Because it is so complex and you have information from here and there and everywhere. People tell you fruits are unhealthy, people tell you vegetables are unhealthy. It's so hard to navigate this space.

Speaker 1: 31:32

Yeah, and you even have reputable organizations like the like. We talked about the American Diabetic Association advising their diabetic patients to. They have recipes on their website with large amounts of sugar in them and they tell them just to cover this with insulin. But, on the other hand, the American Diabetic Association is funded by a number of companies. It's very interesting to look at the list. One of their biggest funders is a company that runs dialysis centers around the world. Dialysis is what people need for their kidneys when they go into kidney failure, and the number one cause of dialysis the number one cause of kidney failure, of course is diabetes. But other reputable organizations like the American Heart Association, which was funded by the you know Crisco and the junk, junk oils you know early on, still to this day recommends vegetable oil on their website as a quote health heart healthy alternative to other oils which are higher in saturated fats, and I I disagree with that, because vegetable oils and canola oil are seed oils and I think they should be avoided completely.

Speaker 2: 32:48

Yeah, did you see that YouTube has banned or silenced misinformation in quotes from people like Dr Eric Burke, who talks about the ketogenic diet? So now that videos like that will be harder to find on YouTube? That's crazy.

Speaker 1: 33:06

Yeah, it's always. It's always hard when you know what's misinformation. I mean there there. There are reputable studies that that show the advantages of the keto diet. There are some reputable studies that show the advantages of a low carb I mean a low fat diet or the high carb diet. I happen to believe personally the preponderance of the data and the evidence in my mind is that a ketogenic lifestyle is much more healthier for all sorts of reasons. But there are studies out there. So I'm I worry about stuff like that when it becomes very politicized and you know, as our, as our food business has become and healthcare has become, that certain voices will be lost because of this and it's you know, it's difficult to get to the truth in, you know, in dietary studies, because there there are very few controlled prospective studies. They're just not feasible. So it's all epidemiological data, it's correlative data and causality, you know, can't be inferred from that kind of data. So it's very challenging. But when voices are silenced in that fashion, it's very concerning.

Speaker 2: 34:32

Yeah, absolutely. It's very hard to fight these big corporations that have all this money the drug companies, frisco, all those companies.

Speaker 1: 34:43

Absolutely. Yeah, they're tremendous incentives. You know, most of the nutrition company and nutrition departments throughout the medical school system are funded by large junk food companies that you know that have a have a vested interest in minimizing the danger of junk foods and sort of promoting it. It's okay, and even even you know things like the body positivity movement which is, you know, which is sort of accepting people's body, largely applied to obese people. And I, you know, I completely agree that. You know we should all accept our bodies and whatever you know we have, but the idea of promoting it such that they're doing it.

Speaker 1: 35:35

I think body shaming is wrong for any reason. But but obesity normalization by some of these body positivity campaigns can be fatal, if you know. We understand that obesity drives diabetes, it drives cardiovascular disease, it drives hypertension, it drives cancer, it drives Alzheimer's disease. You know there's these associations. So the the, these movements are funded by. You know, large, large junk food companies have a vested interest in people accepting the effects of their junk food and not considering it harmful anymore. And and yeah, there's just so much going on in that area.

Speaker 2: 36:21

Yeah, so some of your research was funded by drug companies in the past, correct? I think you talk about this in the book.

Speaker 1: 36:30

Yeah, I mean as my, you know, as a, as a, you know, tenured professor at a large medical school. I was expected to do research and you know, I had a lab. I have a lab. My lab received millions of dollars in grants from, from drug companies, device makers and, you know, the federal government, nih, and that was the practices I was doing. I evaluated some drugs and even to the point, the policy was that the drug company would not let you publish the results unless they approved the study results. So they could cherry pick and only you know they didn't want bad, bad, uh uh, informant or not bad, but negative information or negative drug results published.

Speaker 1: 37:14

But yeah, I in in the past I did that and, to be clear, the the material in my book, this is not something that I have done. The original research on these are not my ideas necessarily. They're the things that I found in the literature and I applied to my own life and I changed the chronic diseases that I had and was able to reverse them. And I realized that most of my colleagues weren't aware of this and I certainly wasn't aware of it before I did the really deep dive. So this, this book, is an effort just to let other people not suffer the way that I did with these chronic diseases and, you know, take charge of their lives and do lifestyle changes that that really, really make a difference.

Speaker 2: 37:58

What was your thoughts when the drug companies funded this research and they told you you cannot publish this unless it has positive uh connotations as opposed to to our drugs?

Speaker 1: 38:11

To be clear, uh, in my experience with them and different people's experience vary the the drug companies I worked with, they didn't say they would publish it unless it was positive. They said they have final, final veto over any publications. That's all it was. So it's sort of a neutral statement. But, as you you've inferred, they're not going to block positive articles. You know they're probably going to block articles that they don't like for whatever reason, and but giving them the final say sort of removes some of the um, some of the value of academics, in that you know it's hard enough to get negative studies published anyway. A lot of journals just don't want to publish them because they're not as interesting. You know this drug didn't work. But here you have even the drug company that sets up, uh, something where they could even block it. And this, this was a while ago. I'm not sure it's still going on now. I haven't done drug studies for a while with these drug companies, but I suspect it probably is, but I don't know that for a fact.

Speaker 2: 39:15

Okay, I wanted to let's uh change the topic into something else. Um, I wanted to ask about cause. Inflammation is a topic that gets thrown around a lot and I, I gotta be honest, I still don't quite fully understand what inflammation is.

Speaker 1: 39:31

Well, you're not alone. I mean, nobody really understands it. Well, inflammation in general is the body's response to, let's say, in general principle, to foreign material coming in. So let's say, if I get stuck with a thorn from a bush, the tissue around the thorn will swell up, it turn red and cells will go there and the immune system may kick in, depending on what's on it. So that's a healthy response, that's a healthy inflammatory response. It's typically called an acute response because it's sudden. You get stuck with a thorn, you get a little redness and then it heals and go away.

Speaker 1: 40:15

In general, the bad kind of inflammation that people talk about a lot is chronic inflammation and then there are bad kinds of acute inflammation also. But just simplifying things here, in modern society there are certain foods that drive inflammation. There are certain things we can do in our sleep that drive inflammation. There are certain things we can do with exercise that drive inflammation. There are certain things that can do with stress that drive inflammation to the point that inflammation is turned on on our bodies at a low grade all the time. And this low grade inflammatory response is bad for several reasons. It takes up energy, it drives things like insulin resistance and inflammation is associated with all the major chronic diseases that will determine how long we live, basically the big killers, which is cardiovascular disease, cancer and Alzheimer's disease, and then diabetes and obesity as well, and downstream effects of those. So inflammation and it's linked with insulin resistance, although they can occur separately. There are a number of environmental toxins that can trigger inflammation. There's a whole library of diseases called autoimmune diseases that are very poorly understood, but a big factor in those is inflammation and how the body responds to either real threats or real insults, or even perceived insults in the mind and stress. So, in addition to the lifestyle factors I mentioned, there are also other occult toxins in our environment that we may not be aware of from the lead paint on the walls, from mercury, from dental malgum fillings that people used to put in mold toxicity.

Speaker 1: 42:21

Facial personal care products we apply to our skin sunscreen and other things, makeup. These are sort of like, if you think about it, they apply to our skin. So it's like food. Except in the US and really worldwide, there's no significant regulation for personal care products along the same lines as there is for food. If you want to make something to be a food and you're going to serve it to people, it has to meet certain tests that it's not going to harm them.

Speaker 1: 42:55

The personal care products industry is much, much more lenient and much, much less supervised, so there are all sorts of problems with things that we put on our face and we put on our bodies and we use these all the time, potentially that sometimes we put them on and we leave them on all day long, like deodorant maybe. If we use deodorant and even things like mouthwash, which I no longer use because the effect on the oral microbiome it's sort of like taking an antibiotic only you, instead of killing all your gut microbiome, a lot of the oral mouthwash is killed, the oral flora and then it repopulates, but it may repopulate with something pathologic. Nitric oxide, a healthy chemical, is created in the mouth and those bacteria get wiped out with certain mouthwashers as well.

Speaker 2: 43:57

Robert, this has been an awesome conversation. Please let people know where they can find your work.

Speaker 1: 44:05

Probably the easiest way to track me down is my website, which is Robert Lufkin L-U-F isn't Frank K-I-N-M-D dot com, and I'm on social media and other things as well. If people want to get, if you want to try the book and see what it's like, you can download a sample chapter, the first chapter of the book, for free on the website and either an audio form or regular form, and check it out. Let me know what you think.

Speaker 2: 44:37

So it's available for pre-order. When does it come out?

Speaker 1: 44:40

Yeah, the book is published. It's going to be published in May, june 2024. So we're finalizing the figures and locking everything down in the neck by the end of this year, and then the publishers think about six months to do the final preparation before it comes out Right.

Speaker 2: 45:02

I highly, highly, highly recommend people go check in and out. It's great. It's fantastic read. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode of the podcast with Robert Lufkin. If you haven't already, can I hopefully ask you to subscribe to the podcast. It's risk-free and it's literally free as well, if you didn't already know and I keep saying this but the bigger the podcast gets, the bigger the guests we can have on and, ultimately, the more value I can provide to you. Like, this episode was probably the most valuable one I've provided so far. It's literally about your health and longevity and living a long, good life, literally. So, yeah, subscribe to the podcast, at least consider it. Okay, do me the favor, consider subscribing and then we'll talk next time. For the next episode you watch, okay, thank you. See you next time, peace.

Speaker 1: 45:52

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Speaker 3: 46:05

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