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2009-07-31 Joel Fuhrman MD Chronic Disease

KIRK HAMILTON: Welcome to Staying Healthy Today, a health-oriented radio show committed to bringing you key experts in the fields of nutrition, prevention and integrative medicine.

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Today's show topic is "How To Live Vibrantly And Prevent And Reverse Chronic Disease With The "Eat For Health" Program." My guest today is Dr. Joel Fuhrman, M.D., a board-certified family physician who specializes in preventing and reversing disease through nutritional and natural methods. He is the author of "Eat To Live, A Revolutionary Plan For Fast And Sustained Weight Loss," published by Little, Brown and Co., in 2003. Dr. Fuhrman's other books include "Fasting and Eating for Health, a Medical Doctor's Program for Conquering Disease," "Disease-Proof Your Child," and his two-volume series "Eat for Health" published in 2008. He is a graduate of University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, and Dr. Fuhrman is a former world-class figure skater and member of the United States World Figure Skating team. Dr. Fuhrman lives in Flemington, New Jersey, with his wife Lisa, daughters Talia, Jenna and Kara, and son Shawn.

KIRK HAMILTON: So Dr. Fuhrman welcome and thank you so much for coming and sharing your important work with us today.

DR. JOEL FUHRMAN: Oh, thank you. It's great to be here.

KIRK HAMILTON: When did you first begin to understand the power of a plant-based diet and approaching chronic disease prevention and reversal and then how long have you been working with patients using these principles?

DR. JOEL FUHRMAN: Well I've been in medical practice approximately 20 years, and I went to medical school and decided to pursue this as a career because even when I was a teenager and going through college and was an ice skater I recognized that we lived in crazy world where people were taking - were committing suicide with food and they were going to doctors and getting pills for what are predominantly self-induced diseases. It was like you were hitting yourself with a hammer every day and taking a pill to relieve the pain and giving yourself another smack with the hammer. So I was interested in health and nutrition for my own personal uses for bettering my performance, not getting sick all through my life and I decided to pursue it as a career. So the answer to your question is, I didn't turn over to start doing - using nutrition in my practice at a certain point in my medical career. I decided to go to medical school for that reason and pursued that interest right from the very beginning. And even when I started in medicine, finished medical school, finished my residency 20 years ago, I immediately started treating people with diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, reflux esophagitis, migraine headaches, obesity, and all the full gamut of diseases people get, with nutritional excellence and essentially watching the magic that occurs when you establish such an optimal environment to healing and you find that almost every problem that people can come to a doctor complaining of, can go away and people can get better from them without the need for medication and without having to suffer the rest of their life.

KIRK HAMILTON: There is a term called ‘chronic diseases', and the word inflammation is shared quite a bit. Can you relate how inflammation plays a role in this multitude of chronic diseases as you just explained?

DR. JOEL FUHRMAN: The causes of chronic inflammation leads to overeating behavior and obesity and food addiction, so I've taken that a step further and that's where I think what differentiates my work from other people, is explaining the science, biochemistry and the physiology behind which inflammation and a toxic diet leads to obesity. But in any case, the chronic underpinning of all diseases is the fact that the body has certain nutritional needs that aren't being met. And when you take in calories without a sufficient micronutrient load that would normally accompany regular natural foods, the body builds up higher activity of free radicals and it deposits other toxins in the tissues, such as advanced glycation end products, abbreviated AGEs. The point I'm making here is that micronutrient deficits lead to heightened free radical activity and the cells become congested with toxic waste products which create an inflammatory condition of the body that's promoting diseases, headaches, reflux, heart disease and increased susceptibility to whatever our predisposed genetic weakness are. If you have a tendency to have asthma and you eat improperly, you have more allergies and more asthma attacks. If you have a genetic predisposition to have the asthma and allergies and you have a very excellent diet, then in most cases the allergy and asthma goes away. But you still have that predetermined weakness that should you stress out your body and become inflamed, your problem won't be digestion as much as it will be breathing, where another person may have digestive damage so some other person may go to right to having migraine headaches - they're more prone to that. And we see that as we measure the nutrient levels, the global nutrient scores in people, registering a total level of micronutrients in their tissues, and we find that as that global nutrient score gets extremely low, we start seeing people having daily headache syndromes, having a lot of fatigue and developing a lot of things that bring them to doctor's offices and they get to the doctor's office, they're usually put on drugs and the nutritional deficits are not corrected. And then they're on drugs the rest of their life, bouncing around from doctor to doctor, never getting relief, never getting satisfied or they're put on medications for mixed connective tissue disorders, lupus, and other autoimmune conditions. They're put on drugs that are cancer chemotherapeutic agents like methotrexate, Plaquenil®, Imuran®, prednisone and other dangerous drugs just to control their inflammation, when all they really need to do is eat a health-supporting diet and they wouldn't have had these diseases to begin with.

KIRK HAMILTON: Can you characterize, and you did this in the first chapter of your book - you said, ‘American Food Consumption Pie', what Americans eat. Can you go over that, because that sets the stage for the nutrient deficits that you talk about?

DR. JOEL FUHRMAN: Absolutely. What we are saying here is that food has two types of nutrients in it. It has the macronutrients which are the calories. Macronutrients are those big calorie containing nutrients - fat, carbohydrate and protein, and Americans are eating too much fat, too much carbohydrate and too much protein, calories in general, and then food will also supply us with micronutrients. And micronutrients don't contain calories and there are vitamins, minerals and phytochemicals, and there's 14 vitamins and like 16 essential minerals and they were discovered in 1930, and after the discovery of vitamins and minerals, then people started taking them obviously. We had the vitamin industry become a billion dollar industry. People - we added thiamine and riboflavin into Coco Puffs, they put vitamin C into KoolAid. People thought that they could get better health by supplementing their food and not being so careful sometimes with getting the nutrients from food, and between 1935 and 2005, cancer rates went up every single year. Autoimmune diseases skyrocketed, and heart disease continued to climb dramatically in this country. As a matter of fact, in 1900, there was only 2% of population who had heart attacks and had died of heart disease, and now it's 41% die of heart disease. But the point is that we saw an amazing thing happen, an amazing deterioration of human health and the development of chronic diseases after the invention and use of vitamins and minerals, and it wasn't until about 15 years ago when scientists first recognized that vitamins and minerals were a minor micronutrient load that were in food. They weren't the major load. There were thousands of other nutrients that are not vitamins and minerals that are in food that are essential for the human tissue. Now with that as a background, a backdrop, I'll answer your question now about what Americans are eating because Americans aren't eating food with micronutrients in them. They're eating 30% of calories from animal products, and about 60% of calories from processed foods. And neither animal products nor processed foods contain these extra phytochemicals and phytonutrients that form the major micronutrient load that are in food that humans need to prevent inflammation, prevent cancer, prevent dementia when we get older and prevent heart disease and all these autoimmune conditions, and so as we over the century, we moved away from vegetables and beans and berries and fruits and nuts and seeds, and countries around the world have joined us. I mean, we've led the fight, we've led the movement away from natural foods into processed foods and fast foods, and the world has taken our lead and we've essentially infected the world with fast food and processed foods, so now we've spread obesity and diabetes and heart disease all over the world, and cancer is skyrocketing everywhere, and the point is that we eat a diet, and that both animal products and processed foods, both do not contain significant micronutrients. As far as vitamins and minerals are concerned, none of the antioxidant nutrients are in animal products or processed foods. No vitamin E and vitamin K and folate and bioflavonoids and lignans and the carotenoids, and alpha and beta carotene and gamma carotene and lutein and lycopene. There are no lignans and phytochemicals. In other words, the things that reduce inflammation, the things that have antioxidants, the things that are disease protective aren't just the basic nutrients to keep us moving around and active, they're also nutrients that make cells cleanse themselves and keep our immune systems strong, and those are not present in animal products and not present in processed foods. And the little bit of token vegetation that we are eating is not sufficient to keep Americans well, and we can't get them from vitamin pills either, so what I am saying here Kirk, is that a piece of chicken is just like a bagel. Both of them are sources of macronutrients. The chicken is high in protein, the bagel's high in carbohydrate, but what's coming along for the ride? Where's the other micronutrients humans need? They're both examples of relatively low nutrient food.

KIRK HAMILTON: Well there's a term called nutrient density and then you take it to another level. You say, you have a Health Equation = Nutrients / Calories. And you say your health is dependent on nutrient per calorie density of your diet, and that's one of your fundamental premises. You've been saying it, but can you just clarify it?

DR. JOEL FUHRMAN: Right. That's what I've been saying for the last 10 or 15 years. I came out with that concept in 1996, and I wrote a book called "The Health Equation." When "Eat to Live" came out in 2003, it got a lot of acclaim and scientists around the world starting using that equation. It's called H = N/C. It means the quality of your healthy life expectancy, how healthy you're going to be in your later years, and what your risk of having a heart attack or cancer or stroke or dementia, is linked to the micronutrient per calorie density of the diet you eat. In other words, N/C. Nutrients over calories. That means what we need to have great health - we want to eat a diet that's lower in calories but higher in micronutrients. Which it means is that we have to pick foods to eat that are higher in micronutrients and lower in calories. So what followed from that over the years. Let's explain to people what foods have the most micronutrient per calorie density so people could eat more foods that are high in micronutrients and less foods that are low in macronutrients. That's the secret to reversing disease. Reversing heart attacks, reversing heart disease, getting rid of headaches, autoimmune diseases to recover, getting people with allergies and asthma to go away. We find that micronutrient density is such a critical concept that when applied actually in the real world to real food, we find it's able to have an effect to repair people, not just prevent disease, but actually can be applied therapeutically. Because when taken to extremes it can enable the body to repair and heal itself from degenerative illnesses.

KIRK HAMILTON: Can you share with us the ranking of the foods from high to low of nutrient density or this high scoring on the health equation or what you call, I think a MANDI score?

DR. JOEL FUHRMAN: The chief score we're using now is called an ANDI score. And the word ANDI stands for Aggregate Nutrient Density Index. And the word aggregate is a word that means you add everything up. So in other words, what if I added up all the 14 vitamins, all the 16 minerals, some antioxidant levels, ORAC scores or the sterols in the food. In other words, I gave a global score adding up the precise data of what's in every food and give the food just one number to represent everything that's in it. What we did is normalize everything to a zero to 1000 scale, so we scored all foods essentially on a scale of 1 to 1000 so people could see the comparative nutrient levels of one food compared to another. If you do that you find out that most foods Americans eat score below a 20 on a 0 to 1000 score and that the ones that - the foods that Americans are hardly, that the really high nutrient foods that Americans are not eating, of course, are the foods that score really high.

KIRK HAMILTON: What are those high nutrient foods from high to low?

DR. JOEL FUHRMAN: Well, the highest nutrient foods are green vegetables. And they score way, way higher than almost anything else. So we're talking about - the highest nutrient foods in the world of course are things like kale, collards, bok choy, mustard greens, turnip greens, brussel sprouts, things like that, broccoli, watercress, arugula. In other words the green leafy vegetables score around 1000 on a 0 to 1000 scale. This is the same scale where eggs score 27, milk scores 25, white bread scores 21, apple juice scores 17, french fries score 12. We're talking about what scores over 100 here are fruits and vegetables, and when we look at what fruits and vegetables score, we find that tomatoes, peppers, carrots, things that have color, obviously score very high. And then of course, as fruit goes, blueberry, strawberries, flax seeds, oranges, cantaloupes, cherries, all score very, very high. And when people start to see and they start to eat more of these high nutrients foods in their diet, then we see the miracles happen. So the first thing you're saying here is that greens are the superfoods, and not only do they score the highest on my scoring system, but obviously when we look at studies, we finds that fruits and vegetables in general lower cancer risk and heart attack risk, but looking at green vegetables independently and the cruciferous vegetables like bok choy and kale and collards and arugula and watercress and mustard greens - these foods that American's don't eat, have incredibly powerful effects to reduce the instance of cancer and to prevent the expression of genetic defects in cells that predispose people to cancer, to prevent the expression of those cells with those defects and to increase body repair mechanism to repair DNA breaks that could lead to eventually lead to cancer.

KIRK HAMILTON: Let me ask you because the average American is going to look at this plant-based leafy green diet with vegetables and fruit and they're going to ask the proverbial question, where do I get my protein from if I'm going to cut down on my chicken because it doesn't have a high score?

DR. JOEL FUHRMAN: Well that's the thing here. What I'm saying here to people is that we're getting too much, we're eating too many calories and we're certainly eating way too much protein. We have to eat much less protein and we have to eat less carbohydrate and less fat too. We have to eat less of everything. Americans are - it's funny, because as you eat more nutrients - we'll talk about this later, the effect it has on suppressing appetite and having people be satisfied with less, where they don't have to eat all the time, not getting sick if they don't eat all the time. And so we have the American population that's essentially protein poisoned and excess protein is one of the most critical factors that leads to cancer. To answer your question directly is that green vegetables are high protein foods. Green vegetables are about 40 to 50% protein. Even meat is only about 30% protein, it's 70% fat. So calorie per calorie broccoli has about 11 grams of protein per 100 calories, and T-bone steak with a quarter-inch fat has about 6 grams of protein per 100 calories. We're talking here about that vegetables are high protein foods. Obviously where did the cow get the protein from? He didn't suck it in from the air, he had to eat it right? He ate the grass or the oats. Where did the hippopotamus, rhinoceros, giraffe, and gorilla and elephant get their protein from? They eat the greens. Now some animals eat the vegetables directly, which are high protein and some animals eat the animals, like the lion and tiger ate the zebra or the antelope, they got their protein from the grass - the greens. But the point is that all the protein on the planet that made every animal ever lived came from greens, because greens are the mother of all protein.

KIRK HAMILTON: Well let me ask you this because you were an elite athlete. These are frequent questions that I get asked when I put people on a plant-based diet. How can you be athletic and eat just, predominantly vegetables and fruits and the plant kingdom?

DR. JOEL FUHRMAN: Because we're not just eating vegetables and fruits. We're eating beans, we're eating nuts, we're eating seeds, we're eating green vegetables, we're eating whole grains, we're eating a lot of things. And the point is if we eat just greens, it's not that we'd be deficient in protein, we wouldn't get enough calories, right? We'd be too thin. We couldn't just get by on greens alone. There only 100 calories a pound, most of them (greens). How many pounds of that could we eat? We wouldn't even meet our caloric requirement. Beans are high in protein. Sunflower seeds are about 20% protein. In other words, green vegetables and nuts are high in protein and fat. We don't - in other words, we're talking here about eating a diet that's rich in natural foods. And we're talking here about eating less animal products, or you could be a vegan. You could be in other words, you could be extremely healthy on a well-designed vegan or vegetarian diet and you could be extremely healthy on a diet that uses a minimal amount of animal products, a small amount in your diet in an otherwise well designed - but you can't be healthy on a diet with lots of animal products in it. And this idea that we are supposed to eat lots of animal products for our protein is driving people - making a healthcare crisis and is killing people. The concept that plant-based diets or vegetarian diets are too low in protein is completely and utterly ridiculous. They have a more optimal amount of protein. It's somewhat lower in protein, but a healthier level of protein, but then you're getting protein that's packaged with high nutrients that comes along for the ride. And then you're not getting the excessive protein and plants that we're talking here about, eating a diet higher in plant protein and lower in animal protein as one of the features of it that makes people going to live a lot longer and protect them against disease and also make it easier for them to lose weight as well.

KIRK HAMILTON: So here's another thing that comes up. Assuming they go on this diet, your type of very high plant-based diet, nutrient-rich, you would probably be off dairy products generally, and so someone would say, well where do I get calcium for my bones?

DR. JOEL FUHRMAN: Right. Just like the protein issue. Where does the calcium come in the milk that came from the cow? How do you get the calcium in it? The ate the grains right? The point here is that when you eat an American diet, which is 60% processed foods, it doesn't have any calcium it. And meats and chicken - you know they don't have calcium in them either. Meat and animal meats don't have calcium in it, so where do you get the calcium from? So superficially, it looks like it makes a lot of sense, but if you're eating a diet mostly based on processed foods and animal product, animal muscle meat, you're not going to get any calcium. And of course all the extra animal protein you're eating creates a big acid tide in the blood stream and then you have a huge acid load being urinated out and you lose a lot of calcium in your urine. So it makes superficial sense to say well you've got to drink a lot of milk on that diet because you've got to get a lot of calcium. But the minute you switch your diet to eating vegetables and fruits and beans and things like that, well these foods are naturally high in calcium. And they're not going to cause the acid tide causing you to leach out the calcium from all the acid caused by the excess animal protein. So the answer to your question is, I can answer that question with a question. And I can say, which has more calcium? Bok choy, broccoli, mustard greens or milk? Or sesame seeds and milk? And the answer is green vegetables are the highest calcium containing foods. That's where the cow gets the high calcium from. Because it eats the green vegetables. So what we're saying here is green vegetables not only contain the most calcium, not only contain adequate protein, but they have powerful effects biochemically to reduce the risk of cancer, to improve autoimmune phenomenon, to curtail inflammation, and to extend human life span.

KIRK HAMILTON: Let me ask you about carbohydrate consumption. Good and bad carbohydrates. Are we eating too much? Are we eating too little? Are we eating more whole grains? Tell us your opinion on the carbohydrate issue.

DR. JOEL FUHRMAN: Well, the first and most important thing is that white flour and sugar are carbohydrates. And they cause not just diabetes and heart disease, but they also cause cancer. And when we eat processed foods like that - in other words there are more than 13 different studies linking the consumption of white flour and high sugar food to breast cancer. There are studies that link it to ovarian cancer, pancreatic cancer, prostate cancer. We're talking here about eating bagels and white bread, and putting sugar in your coffee, and drinking down artificial sweeteners and drinking soda, are not just empty calorie foods. They're not just ‘not nutritious', they also cause cancer. They're really foods that should not be - what we're saying here is junk food is cancer causing. It's stealing and robbing the health of our population. It's creating an American population of sickly people with healthcare costs that are so high that it's making people can't afford their homes, it's driving business overseas, it's weighted down our economy causing a recession, and we're not going to really have a successful economy and health in America until we change our diet and we get back better health and less medical care costs, and we're not going to reduce medical care costs by deciding who pays for it. You know, the government pays for it, or this person pays for it, or that person pays for it, doctors do this. It's because we're eating ourselves to death. Every year for the last 40 years we've eaten more and more processed foods and more and more junk. These junky carbohydrates. So we're not talking here about just moving to a vegan diet or moving or cutting out animal products. We're talking here about eating natural foods that are high in nutrients and reducing animal products and reducing processed foods simultaneously. Now that said, the question really was, what's the good carbohydrates? What's the bad carbohydrates? How much carbohydrates do we need? And I talked about white flour and sugar and the junk food carbohydrates people eat. But some carbohydrates are really good for us, and those are the carbohydrates found in foods with a lot nutrients in them. The carbohydrates found, for example, in carrots and tomatoes and peaches and in berries and those are really good things. And what about beans? What about beans, which are super high in carbohydrates, when shown to protect against colon cancer and induce weight loss. What happens when you eat a bean is that a large percentage, like 30% of the starch of the carbohydrate in bean, doesn't even get absorbed by the blood stream. It doesn't even get broken down by the body. It goes into the colon, and the bacteria in the colon break it down and produce short-chain fatty acids which then act as a fuel for the liver to cause more oxidation of fat by the body, which causes us to lose more weight. So we're saying that not only are the carbohydrates in beans different from the carbohydrate in the bagel or pasta, we're saying the carbohydrate in the beans actually have an effect to cause weight loss and to cause you to burn more calories off more efficiently the next day after you eat them. All kinds of mechanisms occur in a beneficial fashion when you eat the natural carbohydrates found in natural foods like peas and beans and seeds and berries as opposed to eating the processed carbohydrates for eating Cheetos and....we can't say that corn chips are the same thing as eating a natural ear of corn. We can't say eating a soy bean tofu hot dog is the same as eating edamame beans. We're talking about here is using- being inventive and creative and making natural foods taste great and what I've done is used gourmet recipes and to use healthy natural foods to make a delicious tasting diet out of the foods that are most protective against diseases to afford people the opportunity not to ever have a heart attack, never get a stroke, never have dementia when they get later years. In other words, we're talking here about giving people the opportunity to live longer than ever before in human history because of so much good information that we've learned out of research coming out of modern nutritional science, which has enabled us to really understand that we don't have to be sick anymore. We don't have to have these diseases that Americans are getting. We can totally protect ourselves. We can live longer than ever before and really stack the deck in our favor and not have it happen to us what's happening now to other - almost all Americans.

KIRK HAMILTON: Let me ask you this, then. Give me - I've got your opinion about carbohydrate. How about fat? Tell me good and bad fat and how you incorporate fat in the diet.

DR. JOEL FUHRMAN: It's like the same answer. You know the same as a good carbohydrates and the bad carbohydrates? There's good fats and bad fats. And one of the most fascinating nutritional stories in the last 20 years in the medical science is that how effective nuts and seeds are at reducing risk of sudden cardiac death and heart attack rate, and in inducing overall prolonged mortality. In the Nurses Health Study and the Physicians Health Study, people that ate 3 to 5 ounces of nuts or seeds a week had a 60% lower risk of cardiac death. Unbelievable! 60% lower! These are people, don't forget, that didn't revamp their whole diet. They didn't eat the nutratarian diet I recommend. They were just eating an American diet and some of them had nuts and seeds and some of them didn't. And because of that one change in their diet, they had a 60% reduction in sudden cardiac death. They had lower risk of epilepsy, seizures, heart attacks, lower risk of cancers. We're talking here that sesame seeds and sunflower seeds and brazil nuts and pistachio nuts contain a host of beneficial nutrients and antioxidants and plant sterols which are one of the most - greatest stories in nutritional science. Sterols lower cholesterol, stabilize the heart, have anticancer effects to dramatically lower a person's risk of cancer, and the biggest contributor to the American diet is - of course these fatty foods that are naturally fatty like nuts and seeds, but they're also pretty high in protein too. They're very low in carbohydrate and they're a critically important addition to a good diet. And I teach people that some people make the mistake, you know these people advocating a low fat vegan diet. They look at studies showing that animal fats promote heart disease. They look at studies showing vegetables oils have rancidity, more inflammation, and are linked to heart attacks and cancer, and they say, well, we might as well tell people to take all fat out of the diet. No oils, no nuts and seeds. Let's just put people on a plant-based vegan diet, low in fat, and they'll be healthy and have less heart disease. And I'm saying, un-huh! Just because oils are not heart-disease reversing, just because animal fats promote high cholesterol and saturated fats....doesn't mean the fats in nuts and seeds do the same. When we look at the data on the studies done on nuts and seeds we see the opposite . When you take the fats that are packaged in nature's protective package with all the nutrients that go along for the ride, we find that the lower amounts of fat that are found in these seeds and nuts are beneficial, not hurtful, and they can prevent dry skin, they can prevent fatigue, and they prevent irregular heart beats such as atrial fibrillation. We're talking here about the fact that some healthy fats in the form of these natural foods are important and good for the diet and are good for your health. So what I've done is I make great recipes by, for example, putting a delicious dressing for your salad made by whipping up an orange with some sesame seeds and cashews and some blood orange vinegar. Make a delicious salad dressing with nuts and seeds because the fat added to the salad facilitates the absorption of the micronutrients in the salad and you absorb more of the anticancer nutrients anyway when you put a little fat with. What I am saying here that to reduce the oil consumption, and in the place of the oil that you're reducing, substitute more of the fatty nuts and seeds because we get more dramatic beneficial effects.

KIRK HAMILTON: Most Americans are overweight. So do you immediately allow nuts and seeds to be liberally used, or do you restrict them for a while until they get down to their ideal body weight and then add them in?

DR. JOEL FUHRMAN: Yes, that's correct. I tell people that because the studies show that people lose weight faster when they eat some nuts and seeds in their diet. In other words, by not taking them all it, it would slow down the weight loss. It would increase the risk of gallstones from the weight loss and it wouldn't be having as good an effect on diabetes and heart disease risk, so I don't take them all out. I tell them eat about one ounce per day. If you're not overweight eat two ounces a day. If you're an athlete and you're physically fit and you're doing a lot of exercise and you want to burn off more calories, go up to four ounces a day or even more. In other words the amount of nuts and seeds, because they're relatively high in calories should be commensurate with your activity level and body weight.

KIRK HAMILTON: Okay. So even on a weight reduction diet you allow nuts or seeds even before they get to their ideal body weight?

DR. JOEL FUHRMAN: Not only do I allow them, but I've seen so many people who don't lose weight because their diet's too low in fat, and by putting the nuts and seeds in their diet, they start to lose weight that wasn't coming off them when the nuts and seeds were not in the diet. So I think that they're important for their weight loss, important for them to feel satisfied with the diet, important for the absorption of nutrients, and important for their overall health, and a diet that's too low in fat, a total low fat - extremely low fat diet could also increase the risk of people forming gallstones as they're losing weight without the nuts and seeds .So yes, I specifically recommend they eat and include some nuts and seeds in their diet.

KIRK HAMILTON: So in your ‘green and bean diet', in one of your books "Eat to Live" - that's one of my favorite terms to share with people, the ‘green and bean diet,' you say simplify the very basic diet, you would throw in some nuts or seeds in that regimen?

DR. JOEL FUHRMAN: Of course. And you know, I coined the word a nutratarian diet so people could say, oh, I'm on a nutratarian diet. So what does that mean? It just means that - well it's a person that understands and recognizes that eating foods that are rich in, naturally rich in nutrients are important for their health. So if you're going to a shop and you're looking to buy some green vegetables and some orange things and you're looking to pick out high nutrient foods because you realize they're important in your diet. You just can't eat anything. You have to go after nutrients. You just can't expect a vitamin pill to give you everything either. So I coined that word and it's really working out well. People can understand this concept because it differentiates it from just a vegetarian diet which may be mostly junk food or not - maybe potato and rice-based, not have a lot of nutrients in it. So we're saying here is that a nutratarian diet could be vegetarian or vegan or it could not be. But in either case, it represents a person who understands that nutritional quality plays a role in their health.

KIRK HAMILTON: How can people get ahold of the essence of your program and your website?

DR. JOEL FUHRMAN: Well, my website is DrFuhrman.com and I do have my latest two books that is "Eat for Health," which really gives people a lot of the things they need to make this not just doable, but taste great and fun and gourmet and all that stuff, and then of course, you know, on DrFuhrman.com, I actually give people medical and health and nutritional advice for their conditions or for their particular problems and issues that might be interfering or preventing them from achieving their health and results they want to achieve. So I actually have a supportive member center, forums, newsletters, information, and actually you can ask me questions right through the web.

KIRK HAMILTON: I want to go back to one point before we close on this section, or this interview. You talked about the healthcare system, and we know we have a healthcare crisis and they're trying to find out how to pay for what. And the truth is, if they followed a program like yours, chronic diseases would be dramatically reduced and it wouldn't be an issue away. There would be no healthcare issue, correct?

DR. JOEL FUHRMAN: Correct. We'd have no people having heart attacks, no people having strokes, we wouldn't have, you know 400 billion dollars - people going through angioplasty and bypass surgeries and cardiac bypass. In other words, the healthcare crisis is just a result of our eating ourselves to death with a knife and fork, and now we have to pay for it.

KIRK HAMILTON: And also with that said, we would have a greater work productivity in our country and our workers would be healthier and we'd be able to compete. I mean, I think that's another issue that I try and share with people about why be healthy. It's actually being patriotic.

DR. JOEL FUHRMAN: That's the thing. A real American hero is a person who's turned around their health because it's not just - we all have a responsibility here and we set an example not just to our families, to other people. And people depend on us. We have children, we have people that work for us, we work for them, and really having you know, and it's spread. Bad health spreads. Bad diets spread and good diets spread too. When you eat healthy and you get healthy and you look the part and you feel the part and you don't have - you are not taking high blood pressure medications and high cholesterol medications and drugs for this and drugs for that, it rubs off on other people and they want to be healthy too. We're all in this together and we all can help each other and you're right. You're exactly on the money here that if we don't spend time advocating teaching and get our patients healthy, we're not going to come out - we're not going to have the quality of life that we want to in this country.

KIRK HAMILTON: Well Dr. Fuhrman I want to thank you very much for sharing with us your "Eat for Health" program. Again you can go to DrFuhrman.com for these programs. And I want to thank you the audience for listening today on this edition of Staying Healthy Today Radio. And remember until next time Stay and Be Well.

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