.png)
Roots to Health with Dr. Craig Keever
Welcome to Roots to Health—where we dig deep into the foundation of lifelong wellness! Hosted by Dr. Craig Keever, Northwest Arkansas’ first and only plant-based pediatrician, this podcast unearths the power of nutrition, lifestyle, and holistic health to help kids, families, and adults thrive.
What can you expect?
Dr. Keever breaks down the science of nutrition and disease prevention in a way that’s simple, practical, and life-changing. From raising healthy kids to optimizing adult wellness, each episode delivers key insights that challenge conventional wisdom and empower you to take control of your health.
Whether he’s debunking nutrition myths, explaining how food shapes long-term well-being, or sharing actionable tips for disease prevention, Roots to Health is your go-to guide for vibrant living—one bite, one step, and one conversation at a time.
Get ready to rethink everything you thought you knew about health—and discover just how powerful roots can be!
💚 Subscribe now and let’s grow together!
Roots to Health with Dr. Craig Keever
The Journey to Plant-Based Living and Lifestyle Medicine- My Story-Episode 1
Dr. Craig Keever’s journey from chronic illness to health empowerment unfolds in a compelling narrative that intertwines personal experience and professional insights. As the founder of Ozark Pediatrics, Dr. Keever shares his life-changing decision to embrace a plant-based diet—a choice inspired by both his personal struggles with health and a pivotal documentary that challenged his understanding of nutrition.
Throughout this engaging episode, listeners will dive into the ups and downs of Dr. Keever's health journey, exploring the connection between a poor diet and the chronic diseases affecting millions. He reveals how the Standard American Diet—ironically abbreviated as SAD—led him to face critical health challenges, from high cholesterol to type 2 diabetes. The turning point came when he discovered the principles of plant-based eating and how they could reverse damage and encourage vitality.
Moreover, Dr. Keever discusses the critical role of community and support in achieving lasting dietary change, emphasizing that changing one’s lifestyle is far more beneficial than following a transient diet. Armed with knowledge from the book "Mastering Diabetes", he transformed his understanding of his body’s needs and discovered effective ways to tackle insulin resistance without relying solely on medication.
Listeners looking for inspiration or considering similar lifestyle changes will find valuable tips and insights into the power of nutrition in healing. As a certified physician in lifestyle medicine, Dr. Keever is now committed to guiding others toward healthier choices, illustrating not just the science of nutrition, but the profound impact of embracing a whole-food, plant-based lifestyle.
Join us to learn, reflect, and take actionable steps toward better health as we navigate the complexities of nutrition and chronic disease. Engage with us, and if this episode resonates with you, share your thoughts, subscribe for more, and consider leaving a review!
Thanks for listening to Roots To Health!
The information provided in this video is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have seen or heard in this video. Dr. Craig Keever is a licensed pediatrician, but the content shared here is general in nature and may not be applicable to your individual health needs.
Stay connected and keep the conversation going:
🌱 Follow Dr. Craig Keever for more plant-based pediatric insights:
📍 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ozarkpediatrics/
📍 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ozarkpediatric/
📍 Website: https://www.ozarkpediatrics.org/
🎨 Connect with Amy Keever for art, creativity, and inspiration:
📍 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amykeevergallery/
📍 Website: amykeever.com
📩 Have a question or a topic you’d love to hear about? Send us a message or tag us on social media!
If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and leave a review—it helps more people discover Roots To Health! 🌟
Hello, I'm Craig Kever, dr Craig Kever of Ozark Pediatrics. I've been part of Ozark Pediatrics or, excuse me, the founder of Ozark Pediatrics, since 2016. We'll get into my story here in a minute. The topic of my conversation today is plant-based diets and lifestyle medicine. The first thing I'd like to say here is I brought my lovely wife with me and we're going to probably have some kind of conversational discussion and discourse about all these topics, and so you'll hear plenty from her. She's been an instrumental part in my journey and I've learned an awful lot from her. I think I want to open this up, really, by saying I have a few disclaimers that I'd like to put out to begin with, and the first is I'm not trying to sell anything. I I have trusted in in my education regarding plant-based nutrition the doctors and people that aren't trying to push a particular product, so I want to reaffirm that. Secondly, along those lines, I'll say that I have no affiliation with any products or supplements or anything like that. Thirdly, I want to emphasize as well that I am nobody's food police, so by that I mean I'm not going to condemn anybody for the way they're eating, lord knows. I've had plenty of days where I haven't done the right thing and still today. You know I'm not perfect about it. The issue here at hand is continuing to educate myself and monitor my intake. It definitely gets easier, but not to judge, condemn or criticize somebody else for having different choices. And lastly, I just want to say that my really only desire is to pass on the science of nutrition as I'm learning it and experiencing it, and how that relates to chronic disease in this country, specifically the epidemics of heart disease, cancer, stroke and diabetes. It's been amazing to me to learn more and experience more about how simple nutritional choices have modified, improved and even cured aspects of some of my chronic disease. Moving along, I'll get into my own personal story.
Speaker 1:I was born 1962 in Topeka, Kansas, very middle class. My dad was a banker and my mom was a stay-at-home mom. For the first years of my life. Grew up on the standard American diet Back in the 60s. I don't have any recollection of diet being a huge deal. So growing up I was a little bit chunky as a child and then hit puberty and growth spurt happened and I was lean and mean and relatively, I'd say, moderately athletic Probably my high school weight was in the neighborhood of 180 pounds. I was active in football and wrestling and various activities .
Speaker 1:I graduated high school in 1980, and I then went to work as a psychiatric aide at a couple of different local psychiatric hospitals, kind of interested in working with people. From the beginning. I then, after high school, took a few years off. I was a little bit hard-headed and at that point kind of burned out on school and so while I was working as a psychiatric aid I started some part-time college and then in 1985, I started my full-time college career at Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas. I ended up getting a bachelor's of science degree in biology with a minor in chemistry, because by that time I had kind of set my sights on wanting to go to medical school. During this time I kind of filled out, as most of us do in this country, you know, staying relatively active Probably. My weight fluctuated between about 180 and 200, I'm going to guess, and I say these things only to give kind of a reference point of you know where I came from and then what happened.
Speaker 1:So in 1989, I went to medical school at the University of Kansas. The University of Kansas has two campuses, and so I started that in Kansas City and did my first two years there, all the book work of medical school, and the last two years I chose to move to Wichita due to a smaller class size At Washburn University. I learned the benefits of a smaller class size in terms of how much better education you can get in those situations, and so 50 of the class of 200 in medical school went to Wichita. And so during my medical school career, right in fact right after my first year of medical school, I joined the Army to help pay for the rest of my schooling, and so because of that then, when I finished my medical school, I was able to do my first year postgraduate medical education called the internship at Triple Army Hospital in Honolulu. Great program, very busy program and situated so that I had exposure to a lot of things. Not only from that were all the bread and butter, common pediatric things from the continental US, but being situated in the middle of the Pacific Ocean also had access to education on a lot of unusual things that were brought to us from the Pacific Islands and points around there. So it was a wonderful experience.
Speaker 1:I would say that, in terms of my health, that was the first time that I learned that I had high cholesterol. They did lab work on all the incoming interns and I found out at about let's see this was 1993. I was about 31 years old, that my cholesterol runs about 300 when I'm not paying attention to my diet and not on medicine, and so it was shortly after that that I was started on the statins I don't remember exactly which one I started on, ended up on Lipitor by the time I was older. That did a pretty good job of controlling my cholesterol While I was on medicine. It generally hovered around 150 to 170, which was acceptable to my doctor. So after my internship in 1994, I opted to take a quicker route out of the Army, and so, instead of finishing my residency within the Army, I resigned from that program and went to Fort Rucker, Alabama, and I stayed there for about three years and paid back my active duty commitment to the military as a flight surgeon.
Speaker 1:And on completing my time in Alabama with the Army, I then moved back to Kansas City and finished my pediatric residency at Children's Mercy Hospital in Kansas City. So I was in Kansas City from 1998 to the year 2000. That time, as best as I can recall that, my slow, steady weight gain really began in earnest, as well as, as near as I can recall, I started my first blood pressure medicine for a little elevation in my blood pressure at that time. So, as you can see, my health issues were slowly kind of building, and that's the nature of this chronic disease thing, that it's kind of insidious. And that's what's occurred to me as I've kind of written out my story and thought about it. It just, you know, one thing happens and oh, I got a medicine for that, I can take care of that, and then another thing happens, and then another thing happens. So, on completing my residency in 2000, I began my pediatric practice.
Speaker 1:The first couple of years I was located in central Georgia, about an hour and a half south of Atlanta, and then in 2002, I moved here to Northwest Arkansas, um. So over the next few years I continued my weight gain and by about 2010 I was nearing 300 pounds. I had also, by about that time, started having issues with my blood sugar and my physician put me on metformin, which is generally the first step to treating either pre-diabetes, early diabetes, primarily type 2. And then, moving along as another one of those upticks in chronic disease, by 2012, I had my first sleep study and found that I have sleep apnea and started my CPAP machine. So it was around this time, as I past my 50th birthday, I finally realized my condition.
Speaker 1:I had high blood pressure, high cholesterol, type 2 diabetes, sleep apnea and obesity. My body mass index was probably in the neighborhood of 40. And for those who aren't familiar with the term body mass index , basically any body mass index over 30 by the calculation is considered obese. I never looked in the mirror and thought to myself wow, I'm obese. To me, that word obesity carries a stigma to it At least it did at that time, not so much now that I've kind of educated myself, but it is a diagnostic category. Now for me, it's not the stigma that it was, but at any rate, having realized then that I'm in that kind of condition and then recognized that the number one killer of adults in this country is heart disease, and I'm looking at all these issues that I'm treating.
Speaker 1:Ultimately, by the time I finished all of this, I had been on five different medicines and I realized I really needed a radical change, and so it was around this time that I first saw the movie Forks Over Knives. It's a documentary about plant-based eating and the effects that has on heart disease, and I think it mentions several other types of chronic disease as well, and so really, that was the first time in my life that I ever seriously considered eating any way different than what I had been eating. You know, the standard American diet is just that, if you take that abbreviation SAD, it's really sad, and you would think that a term uh, you know that American we'd be proud of, as you know a patriotic American would be proud of, would be the standard American diet. You would think that would be a good thing, but uh, the truth of the matter is it's killing us, um and so um. Interestingly, not too long, about a week after I saw that first movie, forks Over Knives, and started thinking about the actuality of I need to change my way of eating, I ended up in the hospital just feeling really sluggish and achy and got to work and saw a few kids and just not feeling good, and I asked my nurse to take my blood pressure and it was 210 over 115 and that kind of scared me a little bit and I called my doctor. At this point I was only on one blood pressure medicine and so, like a hard-headed physician, I talked to my doctor. At this point I was only on one blood pressure medicine and , who you know told me that I needed to go to the ER and I talked her out of that and I said, you know, I'd really just like to try a second blood pressure medicine, and I talked them into that, and so I went picking up at lunch and I felt better shortly after taking it and I finished my day in the clinic. But I got home that evening and started making dinner and the aches that I was experiencing earlier in the day returned, most notably an ache in my left shoulder, and so at this point I kind of realized that I better get checked out and so I went to the emergency room. The doctor that took care of me was a friend of mine, received several cases from in the emergency room on a regular basis, so at any rate, he took good care of me and it turns out that all my evaluation was normal in terms of heart disease and didn't have any damage to the heart or anything. It was just a hypertensive urgency, and so, with much relief after that, I came home. Then the next day and now I'm on two blood pressure medicines. For real, not much really happened over the next few years In terms of all that.
Speaker 1:I did continue some research into different ways of eating. I read a little bit about different diet plans, the keto diet and all that, and I have to say I probably have it written in here somewhere. But I have to say I really abhor the word diet, because when you talk about going on a diet, what you're talking about is I'm going to change the way of eating that I'm doing for a little while until I attain my goals, and then it doesn't matter. Well, the problem is that, with that kind of mindset, then that's what causes all the yo-yoing with weight loss, and so I realized very early, even before I started any of this journey, that what I'm really looking for is a lifestyle change period, and so that kept me, I suppose in some ways, from going on a diet.
Speaker 1:The one thing that I did do at that point, as I'm doing my research, was I just stopped drinking soda. There are zero nutritional benefits to drinking soda. It's all sugar and chemicals. And if you're drinking diet, it's all chemicals and none of it's good for you. And this is the same spiel I give to my kids right now in their well child checks. So I think that was helpful, because I was getting a lot of empty calories in drinking too much soda. So, by the way, sweet tea counts as soda because it's got more sugar, probably, than most sodas.
Speaker 1:Sadly.
Speaker 1:I did try several different eating plans during a period of time and I think I had some limited success over about a six year span, because by the time I met my lovely wife in 2020, I think, my weight was somewhere between 260 and 270. So a little marginal success over a pretty long period of time, but still really not getting where I wanted to get. So, as I said, in the year 2020, I met Amy and you know we dated for a while and um really connected on several levels. Uh, of course, but one of the things that occurred to us on our first date um in a random discussion, was Amy was not going to tell me that she was plant-based um, because it's sometimes a little controversial, right, and I brought up some of the issues that I'd had and the fact that I had seen Forks Over Knives and was interested in plant-based eating and it actually which I didn't tell you before I'd actually tried plant-based eating for a period of time. Probably about a month or two was all I could make it.
Speaker 1:I'm not a great cook, not really inventive in the kitchen, and I had no community. I was a single guy and all my friends were into going out to all the restaurants, not getting much support about plant-based eating from them. I mean, they didn't condemn me for it. Fortunately, they didn't ridicule me Some people will, but you know we would go out and do our things, and that did not include any kind of plant-based restaurants, and so the time that I was able to do that, I think for about, like I said, a month or two. I vaguely recall getting some lab work done during that time and I did notice an improvement, but without having a community and without having any real support system, it was really not sustainable for me, and that was the problem with all of my dietary plans and attempts to lose weight. I just could not find that sustainability factor, you know. And so when Amy and I got together and started dating in earnest and, you know, she started sharing her plant-based experience with me, that was a game changer, and at that point then I pretty much dove in headfirst and it has been showing its dividends ever since that time.
Speaker 1:And, as I soon found out in my research and experience, plant-based eating can actually be tweaked in many different ways, depending on what kind of difficulties you're dealing with, and with me having the obesity and hypertension and high cholesterol and type 2 diabetes, there is a plan for that, and the problem was that I hadn't quite gotten there yet. Even though I was eating plant-based and the weight loss was starting, my blood sugars were still not under really good control, and we'll get to that in a little bit here. But because my blood sugars were still not under good control, then I went to my doctor and he wanted to try me on a second medicine for diabetes, and this was an injectable medicine called Trulicity and I attempted to use that for barely the last one month or two months I think it was somewhere around one or two months, and I think I was on a three-month trial and I did. I couldn't make it to the end. I mean, there were so many side effects for me, I was just miserable, nauseated, poor appetite it was. It was awful.
Speaker 1:Interestingly, at about the same time I found this book, uh, called Mastering Diabetes, by authors named Cyrus Combata and Robbie Barbaro. Um, these are two guys that actually have type 1 diabetes. Cyrus was of most interest to me because he developed his type 1 diabetes at the end of college, struggled for a couple of years trying to get control of his blood sugars, following his doctor's advice to the letter and still not having any success to his liking, and so he decided to get an upper-level degree, a PhD, in biochemical nutrition, to figure this out, and he did. Robbie had had diabetes,since a younger age, type 2 diabetes and several other things that have difficulty controlling blood sugars, and he outlined not only the physiology behind it, which was really appealing to me as a physician.
Speaker 1:You know, I used to always think that diabetes was really a problem of sugar and, interestingly, it really it ends up becoming a problem of sugar only because your muscle and liver cells are too full of fat. So insulin resistance is a result of too much fat in the diet and when that reaches a certain critical point, that fat in those cells, your liver and muscle cells interfere with the insulin receptors of the cell, causing your cells not to uptake the sugar that's in your blood and that causes the rise in the blood sugar. So now I finally had a reasonable understanding of the nature of my issue insulin resistance and that was extremely helpful. So how to treat that? Well, the plan, according to Mastering Diabetes, is to limit my fat intake to about no more than 10 to 15 percent of my total calories. Not easy to do. It's a challenge, you know, but in the interest of treating my body in the most natural way possible and not paying big pharma lots of dollars for medicines that were maybe going to slow put a little bit of a break on the progression of my illness, I'm actually getting at the root cause.
Speaker 1:So between this book and then, as I marched along, we found a Lifestyle Medicine physician in Fayetteville. Dr Cynthia Morgan and I started seeing her shortly after this time as well, and between applying the principles in the book and applying the principles of Lifestyle Medicine, which I'll get into later, I started losing weight to the tune of about two to four pounds a month for about a whole two years. So that was really the turning point for me as I continued my journey and my goal was to come off all of my medicines, and so the TruLicity trial and finding the Mastering Diabetes book was around fall of 2021. And I started seeing Dr Morgan, I believe somewhere around the summer of 22. And I was off all of my medicines and my CPAP machine by the summer of 2023. All total, I've lost about 100 pounds now, in addition to all five medicines I was on in my CPAP machine. So for the past almost year my weight has been stable.
Speaker 1:I've been a little bit frustrated because I've not quite reached some of my goals. The major goal I had was coming off my medicines, but I want to do that in the right way, and the problem that I have right now is that, even though my weight's a lot better, my BMI is still around 26% Normal is considered between 15 and 25. So I'm still in the overweight category. And the other issue I suppose I'll go in a little bit to the issue of body mass index right here because it's apropos. So body mass index is a rather crude measurement to kind of decide if you're overweight or not. And I say that because there's a lot of different ways that this can present.
Speaker 1:So picture in your mind Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime. All right, he's in the gym, he's got muscles on muscles, his waist size is tiny, he's going to have a body mass index much greater than 30. However, you're not going to say that he's not in shape or that he's at real risk for metabolic disease. That's the problem with using body mass index as the be-all, end-all number. Now, when you combine body mass index with an appropriate waist size, and then it becomes a little more applicable. And so if you've got a body mass index of 35 and so, just for rough calculations, your waist size should be roughly half of your height.
Speaker 1:So for me, that puts, my waist size should be around 35. My waist size is about 37. So what those numbers are telling me? My BMI still slightly elevated and my waist size still being slightly elevated and my fasting blood sugars still being slightly elevated, albeit without medicine now, but they're only slightly elevated. That tells me that I've still got some work to do. My goal is to have completely normal numbers without the use of medication, and so I'm accomplishing that on a plant-based basis and a lifestyle basis, which, again, I'm getting more into that Because of my experience that I've just outlined.
Speaker 1:I took a course in the summer of 2022, an online course through Cornell University, written by, sponsored by, T Colin Campbell, which was one of the main physician or he's not a physician, he's a doctor of nutrition, a research-oriented scientist from Cornell who's put together this program and so I got certified in plant-based nutrition through that program a three-month course, and then the next year I took it even further and I went ahead and studied for, and passed my board exam for, lifestyle medicine. So I'm now a board-certified lifestyle medicine physician as of December of last year.
