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2009-07-31 Joel Fuhrman MD Diabetes Reversal

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 "Learn The Safest And Fastest Way To Reverse Diabetes And Lose Weight With The "Eat For Health Program." Our 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, the 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," and "Disease-Proof Your Child," and his two-volume series "Eat for Health" published in 2008. He is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, and Dr. Joel 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: Dr. Fuhrman thank you so much for taking time out of your busy practice today to talk about a problem that I think is very important and that's diabetes, the epidemic of diabetes and how your "Eat for Health" program might approach that.

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

KIRK HAMILTON: You know, when you go to the CDC website or you go to any of the major medical websites and you get an estimate of 8% of U.S. population have either type 1 or type 2 diabetes, and another 19% have what's called pre-diabetes which is a blood sugar (fasting) betwen100 and 125, that means more than a quarter of the U.S. population has a high blood sugar problem. And so do you see a lot of diabetes in your practice?

DR. JOEL FUHRMAN: It's amazing. You know it's utterly amazing how many people are diabetics. I think that what the statistic is - as you just said, there has been an incredible increase in diabetes in the last 50 years, in the last even 10 or so years. It's incredibly exploded. And I think it's now more than 40% of Americans are now either glucose intolerant, prediabetic or diabetic. It's just skyrocketing. It's utterly amazing, I have a completely different viewpoint than most any person you would speak to on diabetes. As matter of fact so many of my patients had reversed their diabetes, and we're talking here about becoming nondiabetic, so that it kind of inflames the medical community that I say that, that people aren't diabetic any more. A person came into the emergency room right in Flemington where I live close to the hospital where I have my practice, with some complication of diabetes, and the emergency room doctor whispered into her ear, don't tell anybody, but go see Dr. Fuhrman. He could probably get rid of your diabetes and get you well. And so this person came to see me. She wrote up her story in a magazine because she was a school principal and then the American Diabetic Association called me up and said, "You know, all these great successes. Can you write a story up about how you treat your diabetes patients? How you do so well with your diabetic patients." So I said, "Sure." I wrote them up an article and I had about six different cases of people who are no longer on medications because they got rid of their diabetes, and they called me back and said, "We can't publish this because you have these people getting well. You know they're not even diabetic anymore. We don't believe that. We can't do that. We can't have people being taken off their medications. We are sponsored by the drug companies and we can't, you know" - blah, blah, blah, blah. So I said, "Well fine." (They said) "Can you just put people who've improved their diabetes but not gotten rid of it?" And I go, "No, these are real cases. These are people who don't have diabetes any more. They've lost the weight. They've done what they needed to do, and they're no longer diabetic. If you don't want to print it, don't print it, but I'm not going to make them - seem like they didn't get that result." Can you believe that?

KIRK HAMILTON: Well, I'll tell you why I can believe it, and I had the same - a similar experience. I was - I happened to watch a public television special and it was about the diabetic epidemic, and they kept using the word controlling diabetes. Controlling diabetes.

DR. JOEL FUHRMAN: Right, controlling it, exactly.

KIRK HAMILTON: I got up afterwards and I said, you know, okay, I'll give you type 1. I'll give you that. Very small percentage. But the type 2 people I said this is a reversible condition and it just -it doesn't resonate. You know the word control, they're okay with. You say reverse, and that's why I wanted to have you on. And other people that I've had on that have taken patients and reversed diabetes, because for me it's the model of a classic chronic disease that has immediate feedback for patient, not only in weight loss but they can check their blood sugar five, six times a day, and if we knock that one down, all the other ones come down.

Tell me your approach, or what's so unique about your approach to diabetes.

DR. JOEL FUHRMAN: I think that there's a few things that make it unique. One is the fact is that I believe my approach is the most effective approach for weight loss in general. And the reason why it's more effective for weight loss, not only because it's the healthiest way to eat, but also because it reduces people cravings and desire to overeat. It makes them comfortable eating less food. So number one you know, I've had patients that lost - and people I've never met, who've read my books of course - that lost 100 pounds, 200 pounds, and multiple people who lost over 300 pounds. You know we have all these thousands who've lost dramatic amounts of weight and when you interview these people and say how come this works for you when dieting hasn't worked for you in the past. And they said, well, I've always felt like I was on a diet because I was always, felt hungry and, you know, I was trying to eat less food. And now I don't want to eat as much food. I just don't feel the desire to and I'm eating as much food as I want and it's working. Because obviously we're talking here about the concept of nutrient density, that as you eat a diet that's higher in micronutrients in the diet, it reduces food cravings and the symptoms of hunger and addiction which we can talk about. So that's one issue. And the second issue is that losing weight alone is not sufficient to restore function to a failing pancreas. You have to reduce inflammation, restore proper nutrient levels, and improve cellular function by establishing an optimal level of micronutrients in the tissues. So a high nutrient diet, of course, is not just about weight loss. It's establishing the right level of nutrients in the tissue so cells can heal. And the third thing is, is that there are certain factors in seeds, in beans, in vegetables. There are certain factors that don't just make them good foods, but they make the body burn fat. They slow down glycolysis, they lower insulin secretion levels, and they lower glucose levels by certain scientific well-defined mechanisms, which we can discuss as the show goes on. You can discuss, for example, what is the mechanism via which beans induce weight loss and help lower blood glucose in diabetes. So not only is the designed diet to be weight loss favorable, heart attack prevention favorable and diabetes favorable, but because I'm a student of the nutritional science, we actually can tweak the nutritional recommendations to maximally treat their diabetes so the disease just melts away. And of course, my mantra is telling people don't control your diabetes, don't treat your diabetes. Let's just get rid of your diabetes. Be non-diabetic. So I say you get rid of it. What does that mean to get rid of it? It means your sugars run below 100 and you don't need medications to have that achieve that.

KIRK HAMILTON: I glad you said below 100, because I like getting people around 90ish or below. But tell me, run me through a normal daily diet or an average daily diet. I'd like people to get a picture of this Dr. Fuhrman diet.

DR. JOEL FUHRMAN: Sure. Well you know for a diabetic diet, and we're talking here about a diet that we say is plant-based because we want people to be on a diet that's pretty much mostly plants with very little animal products. But it doesn't have to be 100% vegan. A person could have a couple of servicing of animal products per week, like one serving of fish a week or one serving of chicken a week or something like that, and still get effectiveness in the diet, but they can't eat lots of animal products. And the other issue to consider is that oil in your diet can cause you to gain a lot of weight and eating - putting oil all over your food is very...can sabotage your weight loss goals and the other thing is that eggs and white potatoes are not favorable for diabetics. They've both been shown in nutrition studies to produce - to not have good effects on diabetics. So we're talking about white potatoes increasing the risk of diabetes in medical studies, we're talking here about eggs increasing the risk of diabetes and making type 2 diabetes worse and predisposing people to diabetes. So if you are using animal products, we want the people to eat mostly maybe one piece of fish and one piece of white meat something, and not really have any animal products in your diet. Or just do a vegetarian diet. And that means that we're talking about a salad with a delicious dressing like a Russian fig dressing with tomato sauce, with almond butter, sunflower seeds mixed in, or fig vinegar, a delicious dressing we make, or a bowl of vegetable bean soup made with a carrot juice or tomato juice base with beans in it, with dill and oregano and garlic and herbs and spices and delicious tasting soup. Or maybe for dinner having some green vegetables with garlic and almonds, brussel sprouts or string beans or eating raw vegetables with a hummus dip or a salsa dip and a delicious, like strawberry-pineapple sorbet for dessert or something. We're talking about eating natural foods prepared to be delicious, but with their full complement and full assortment of nutrients present. Because what I'm saying here, Kirk, is that we can't get the nutrients we need merely from taking a vitamin pill. We used to think that there were just 14 vitamins and 16 minerals, but in the last 15 years we learned that the major micronutrient load that we thought was mostly vitamins and minerals, the major micronutrients in real food is phytochemicals. In other words, there are thousands of other nutrients that are newly discovered that are essential for human nutrition. And only by getting the full symphony of nutrient that work synergistically, in other words, they all work together, so the sum of the total is better of each individual one. So it's not just taking resveratrol, it's not just taking more of this nutrient or that nutrient. It's getting the full - getting thousands of different nutrients simultaneously that can help the body reverse disease.

KIRK HAMILTON: When you use your "Eat for Health" dietary program, how does it help diabetics improve, for example, wound healing, their kidney problems, the eye problems that come along, and even things for men like erectile dysfunction? How do those problems resolve as they go on your "Eat For Health" program and their diabetes improves?

DR. JOEL FUHRMAN: Yes. There's two types of complications that diabetics get. One is defects in the circulation, which is called macrovascular disease. In other words, you get an obstruction in the blood leading to your heart or to your kidney, or you get obstruction in the blood flow of blood going to your penis and you can't have an erection. Those are all macrovascular complications. And those macrovascular complications are made worse by being overweight, by having high cholesterol, by eating the food that caused the overweight condition, and of course by having insulin in your body. In other words, when you gain weight, the body, the fat cells produce a protein that blocks the activity of insulin and now the body, the pancreas is forced to produce more insulin. And the insulin itself being produced in higher amounts by the pancreas causes weight gain and the insulin itself causes deposition of atherosclerosis or plaque on the wall of the blood vessels leading to acceleration of the atherolosclerotic process. And then doctors come along, and then of course as you get more overweight and more diabetic, and get more, higher and higher levels of insulin production, your body eventually - insulin production eventually starts to ‘poop out.' It can't go higher and higher. And it starts to even drop off as your pancreas cells fail and your glucose levels start to rise, and the doctors come along and give you more insulin or give you drugs that try to force a failing pancreas to produce more insulin. So as these drugs have been shown, as you try to get more tighter control to push the glucose levels down, it gives you more insulin and it makes the heart disease even worse. But they're stuck between a rock and a hard place because the high levels of glucose are causing microvascular diseases like nerve damage which can cause tingling in your feet and the inability to feel pain in your feet, kidney damage, and eye, and cause you to go blind. So what do you do? If we give you more drugs or more insulin, it's going to make you have more heart disease and give you more - if there's sugars left behind...your sugar's going to cause destruction and that's why the answer is simple. It's lifestyle. It's exercise twice a day. It's eat a diet that causes you to drop 50 pounds if you're overweight. It's eat high nutrient foods. In other words, you can't take the place of aggressive nutritional intervention and exercise with drugs. Drugs just can't do it. If we never invented the medications, diabetics would be much better off. Because then doctors would be forced to tell people, you've got to lose 30 pounds, you've got to start exercising every day, you've got to eat vegetables and beans and seeds, and stop eating so much fatty meats and processed garbage. The drugs are like the permission slip. It's like giving the person opportunity to think that they're okay and that they can just eat whatever they want, and eventually the disease gets worse and they drop dead.

KIRK HAMILTON: In your patients - do you take them off their medications for the blood sugar control, let's say a Glucophage® or whatever, right away as they aggressively go on their program or do they get weaned off as their weight drops and their blood sugar comes down?

DR. JOEL FUHRMAN: Both. In other words, it's very important at the very first initiation to this program at the first visit to just cut down their medication by at least 50%. If you don't cut their medications down by at least 50%, they could have a hypoglycemic crisis. Their blood sugar could go down too low with the dietary change and they can pass out and that wouldn't be safe. So as a physician who specializes in nutrition, I know exactly how to take care of these patients. I know exactly how much to cut their medications down, which medications they should stay on which won't cause their blood sugar to go too low, which medication they have to stop first, and all those things are being considered. And then, of course, we know how with time what's the rate the other medications should be reduced and weaned off so that blood sugars stay in the perfect range. So this is all part of the - my specialty of taking people and I write this up for doctors so that they can learn from me how to curtail and reduce people's medications. And, also, don't forget, Kirk, I keep in close contact with these patients when they first start the program because if a new patient comes to me, I want to say to them, you know, here's my cell phone. You know, and call me up on the weekend and let me know how things are going, and if your sugar gets to be too high or too low, give me a buzz if you're not sure what to do. In other words, I give them detailed instructions, what to do if the sugar goes high, what to do if the sugar goes too low. In other words, we say usually the minute you get one reading below 120, you're going to cut this medication back. The next day you get another reading below 120, cutting the medication back some more. Next day another - you know, every time you get a reading below 120, you've got to be reducing the medication because the next day it could be too low after that . So it's a very astute point you just made. Is that with high blood pressure and with diabetes, if the medications are not curtailed, it may be unsafe because the blood pressures get to low or the glucose could get too low. But you can't - if a person's not on medication that can't happen. The blood sugars are not going to get too low if they're not on medication. It's the medication that causes it to get too low. You just overmedicated the person. And the point is, don't underestimate how effective this diet style is at reversing diabetes and reducing high blood pressure because you don't want to have doctors overmedicate their patients if they adopt this program.

KIRK HAMILTON: It's very clear to me that my initial title was, you know, "Is diabetes reversible?" and it obviously is, and you've made that very clear and feel very adamant and obviously you've done it a lot, that it is reversible.

I want to close on one topic. Talk about food addiction. We have excess calories, we get overweight and we get diabetes. But people are addicted to food. You want to go into that a little bit?

DR. JOEL FUHRMAN: Sure. Kirk, if you were drinking 10 cups of coffee a day and you tried to stop drinking coffee, would you feel better or would you feel worse when you tried to stop it initially?

KIRK HAMILTON: Probably initially feel worse.

DR. JOEL FUHRMAN: Right. And what if you were shooting up with heroin? Getting off drugs and getting off toxins is painful. But what about when people just eat poorly and eat unhealthfully? They build up toxins in their tissues because your tissues need antioxidants and nutrients to cleanse themselves and reduce free radical activity and prevent AGEs from being deposited. I'm saying here that a low nutrient diet causes toxic waste products to build up in people's tissues just as if they were smoking cigarettes. And now, when they try to stop eating those toxins and eat healthier or they just stop eating for a few hours. So, in other words, if you're eating a meal, you're not in a detoxification phase. You're in an anabolic phase, not a catabolic phase. It's, you know, you're taking calories, food from the outside environment... You're building, you're not going to be detoxifying and you're not going to have a caffeine headache. It's when the meal finishes digesting that you go into a place called glycolysis, when you're just doing nothing. Eating off this food - living off the stored calories that are now in your body. That's when the body detoxifies and that's when you get the caffeine withdrawal headache. That's when you feel shaky and weak and headachy and irritable and stomach cramping and headachy. And that's where people, the minute they stop digesting food, they don't tolerate how they feel because the body starts to detoxify from that poisonous or toxic diet or low nutrient diet. And they start to feel shaky and weak and irritable and they have to keep eating. Or, they have to eat a meal so heavy in calories and such a concentrated foods stuffs, macaroni and cheese, and cheeseburgers and a steak. They gotta eat foods that are so rich in calories to keep them digesting for four to six hours, so they keep digesting right up to the point where they eat the next meal. They can't tolerate not digesting because they can't tolerate going to detoxification mode. I'm saying that the body detoxifies in cycles and that most people, what they think is this shakiness or weakness or headache or stomach cramping that they think is hunger, I've labeled toxic hunger. I'm defining it as an addictive withdrawal symptom from their toxic or nutrient poor diets and what we find is, is when we put people on nutrient-rich diets, those symptoms go away, and they don't feel like they have to eat food just to feel well and keep their energy up. So that the reason why these people couldn't lose weight in the past, is their dietary quality wasn't being considered. It's why, you know, Weight Watchers and Nutrisystems and this diet and that diet don't work, because when you tell people cut back on food, they can't. They don't feel comfortable. They feel like they're always on a diet. It's like telling people to breathe less oxygen, because they feel like they have to eat. They feel hungry.

KIRK HAMILTON: Dr. Fuhrman, I've got to wrap this up. I'm definitely - you know, if you're willing to come back, we'll take the different chronic diseases and share your approach to them, the Eat for Health approach. So, Dr. Fuhrman - his website is DrFuhrman.com. You can be on their newsletter list. There's lots of information that I get off that site and it's excellent. I love his books, "Eat to Live" and the "Eat for Health" two volume series. I highly recommend them. Dr. Fuhrman, again, I just want to thank you for taking the time, because it's just great to hear practitioners talk about reversing and not just controlling. So thank you very much for coming on today.

DR. JOEL FUHRMAN: My pleasure Kirk. Thanks for the great work you're doing, too.

KIRK HAMILTON: 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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