Dr. Antti Heikkilä's work is based on solid clinical experience of over 43 years, as well as many reliable published studies. Dr. Heikkilä's recommendation for the treatment of diabetes is a natural and nutritional diet low in carbohydrates. Many of Dr. Heikkilä's patients have been able to come off their medication or have completely cured themselves with a low carbohydrate diet.
Dr. Heikkilä is the author of Nutrition Therapy for Diabetes as well as dozens of medical papers
Running Time: 01:59:00
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Here's the transcript:
Joe: Hi and welcome to SOTT Talk Radio. I'm Joe Quinn. With me in the studio are my co-hosts this week: Niall Bradley.
Niall: Hello.
Joe: Jason Martin.
Jason: Hello.
Joe: And Juliana Barembuem.
Juliana: Hello.
Joe: This week we are talking partly about diabetes and other modern illnesses. Diabetes has, as probably many people know, reached epidemic proportions in the world today: 'Millions of people worldwide suffer from type 2 diabetes. Up to one third of the world's population is pre-diabetic. Diabetes is caused by disturbances in the metabolism of a hormone called insulin and it is a serious illness affecting the whole body and leads to many complications, even premature death. Our guest this week, who will be talking about it shortly, is: Dr. Antti Heikkilä; he is a surgeon, orthopedic and traumatology specialist at Eira Hospital in Helsinki, Finland. He strongly criticizes the current treatment for diabetes that is based on the use of a large amount of insulin, as well as a diet low in fat and high in carbohydrates. According to Dr. Heikkilä, this officially recommended treatment worsens the condition by confusing insulin metabolism even more. Insulin is not harmless, it is a poison and excess amounts cause much damage in the body. Welcome to the show Dr. Heikkilä.
Antti: Hello everybody.
Niall: Hello.
Juliana: Hello.
Joe: You're very welcome.
Niall: Thank you very much for coming on.
Joe: Can we call you Doctor Antti?
Antti: Yes you can call, or Antti, I hate this Doctor name.
Joe: You don't like the Doctor name? Although you are a doctor, are you still practicing?
Antti: Yes, yes, yes, or if you think British way, they call surgeons Mr.
Joe: That's right, yes ok, you're Mr.
Antti: But it doesn't matter, okay, I'm on.
Niall: Okay, you've been in practice for some 40 years?
Antti: Yeah, 43 years now. I started in the early '70s, seeing what has been coming and going in medicine. Some years this is fashionable and next year it's not and so it's not science in that sense. I think it's kind of, I don't know, I call it madness in a way because what counts in medicine is practice; clinical work and clinical experience. It's not real science which has very limited amount of knowledge - what really happens between patient and doctor - and that's why I always criticize this scientific based medicine which I think is an illusion, supports only big pharma and so on, but it's not in the patient's interest.
Niall: Wow, well you don't often hear that from a doctor so fair play to you for just saying it as it is. You must be fed up though, you do sound like you are partly fed up with all the lies and the BS that comes with the way in which medicine has been, like you say, effectively controlled by big pharma.
Antti: Yeah, nowadays the big change happened in the 1980's when Reagan was president so the whole medicine was given to the hands of the big pharma, I mean the basic medical studies are financed by the big pharma. So it's the same thing; do you believe the used car dealer.
Niall: I've always said that things got significantly worse with Reagan.
Antti: Yeah, I think it was a big change you know. They gained some kind of upper level of secret society, I call it, because they decided what is fashionable and what is not, there is no discussion anymore, no debate, no conversation; they gave us recommendations like the pope in Rome. So we have to follow them otherwise we get problems.
Niall: Otherwise you get struck off as a doctor. How have you managed to cope with both saying the truth as it is and giving patients real advice and still being a doctor?
Antti: Yeah, I'm a bit strange fellow you know. I quit operations in that sense, in that I was specialized in the back surgery. In the 70's and 80's, it was tremendous, new technology began managing accident patients with spinal damage and so on. I was working with that side, then I was stuck with pain surgery, which is nonsense, because I saw that these lay people, we call them bone setters, got much better results than the doctors So I started to think its a new way and I studied the manipulation methods and I found it's a very, very good way to treat back patients pains. And then I went to see my professor and I said: "Listen, I have a new idea how we have to treat these patients at the hospitals" and he said to me then: "Mr. Heikkilä, don't ever speak about this issue here, anymore". So that was the turning point for myself and I was thinking, "I don't want to stay here anymore and play golf with these idiots", so I left the hospital and I started other new things but then I started to write books and tell the people about how they can treat themselves by natural ways and so on.
But I am very well known here and people like me but I have to say I am very competent. I get good results, so they can't touch me in that sense, you know. I give them all advice and its very inspiring talking with people. Most of the problems people have are, more or less, psychosomatic; pains and all this; miseries in the mind and so on. They treat with chemicals these kinds of things, I think its nonsense. I compare it with the human mind and body like it's a computer in a way. I don't accept that people are like machines but that's the way to think about them; how it works. I always say to my patients that it's nothing wrong with your hardware; it's the software; we have to fix it. So they can understand it more as a functional problem. If they change their diet or change their habit, do yoga or exercises, you get much better results than using operations and pills.
Joe: Yeah absolutely. Antti, we didn't actually mention your book but you've written a very good book; it's quite short but it's very succinct and to the point and it's called: Nutrition Therapy for Diabetes, and right now it is available on Kindle at Amazon for people to buy it. It's a very easy and very good read but it deals mostly with diabetes and if you could just talk a little bit about why you focus on diabetes and what diabetes is. Because I think a lot of people tend to think that diabetes is just another illness in itself and that you just deal with insulin injections and that's it but its implicated in many other very serious conditions that often lead to death or perhaps diseases, modern illnesses, and modern diseases that have the highest toll on people especially in the western world.
Antti: Well first of all, when I started this business you didn't see diabetics so much as today, it's an enormous change. And the second thing is when I started this doctor work in those days, it was the normal procedure to reduce carbohydrates among all diabetics. The change came in the 1980's when they started telling people that now they don't have to follow the difficult diet. They said: 'you can eat everything, even sugar if you take your pills and take your medication and injections' and I found this a very, very stupid thing. It's the same that if you are allergic to, for example, tomatoes: 'eat tomatoes if you take your cortisol'. Diabetes is nothing mysterious. The human race is not used to eating so much sugar and carbohydrates. How much they are putting in themselves today and that's why, during the life process, there is going to be some point that your body cannot handle this amount of sugar; so that's diabetes.
But you can reduce the disease by reducing the amount of sugar. It's very, very simple, that's why I write so clearly as I can for lay people, that if you reduce your amount of sugar you will get healed but it doesn't go away. You have to stay with the diet for the rest of your life but you can lead a normal life. All this laboratory analysis and they normalize when you have this kind of diet. I wanted to spread the word, that people who start this type of diet, it's easier to handle and I have a lot of feedback from people I have never seen. They have read my book, started the diet and lost about 40 kilos of weight and rid all the medication, living a normal life and it's amazing. They have done it by themselves without white coat specialists around them. And it happens very quickly, very fast when you start with these procedures. So, that's why I wrote a simple short book, not a big novel.
Juliana: What about the claim that there's a strong genetic component in diabetes? Many people say: "well diet is not going to be important because my father had it and therefore I'm diabetic too". Is there anything you can you tell us about that?
Antti: Yeah, that's the point you know, it's about the north European people, they have found out more than probably 60% of the people have some kind of genes which are given the risk to getting diabetes. But so what? It doesn't matter. If you choose the right type of food, you never get the illness.
Juliana: Exactly.
Antti: In the future, when we know more about the epigenetics and how to handle genes, we can make you an individual diet. That's what I see in the future but from what I have experienced here in the country, in Finland or north Scandinavia, people are very prone to get diabetes. I think in the states it's the same thing. I give the advice if your family has high diabetics then it's better for you to start this type of diet so you can be healthy all your life.
Juliana: And this is very, very interesting what you're saying because recently we've been recommending a book - I don't know if you're familiar with Dr. Gabor Mate's book When the Body says No?
Antti: Yes, I've seen it but not read it.
Juliana: Well, one of the things he says is that you inherit the genes but not the disease and that's something a lot of people don't take into account. They think that well if I have the genes then therefore there is nothing to do but what you're saying is that you can have the genes and never develop the disease if you combine a good diet, stopping yourself from eating certain things plus the emotional aspect because you mentioned the psychosomatic side. So that brings, I think, a lot of hope to many people but on the other hand, what happens when the disease has been in the body for a long time? Say a person has had diabetes for 20 years and then suddenly they meet you. Is there a lot of hope for them? Is there something you can revert completely?
Antti: I have very good experience with type 2 diabetes, even those people who have 10 or 20 years of diabetes. They can get healed with this type of procedures. Also with type 1 diabetes they get a lot of good results with insulin and steady blood sugar. I think it's a basic diet for most people nowadays. Eating sugar is dangerous. As John Yudkin said in the 70's, they crushed him because it was against big business.
Joe: I find it very interesting when you said that years ago, in the 70's, the standard treatment for diabetics was to cut out carbs, or cut them way down.
Antti: That was when they changed the system, in the late 80's and so on.
Joe: It's amazing because today no doctors appear to be aware at all that that was ever a treatment for diabetes because if you're diabetic and you go to the doctor, he's not going to tell you anything about cutting out carbs.
Antti: I've always said that the doctors are not intellectuals, they read a lot and try to follow the rules but they don't think. They don't make any conclusions about the reality, of what happens amongst the patients. They follow the rules and that's a crushing system for the future. It's manipulated outside. In the past, its normal procedure where I ask the patient, 'how are you'. If he said that he's better, that's a good sign. If he said it's not good, there's something to do. But if you go to the doctor nowadays and they find out that you have a little bit high cholesterol and they put you on statins and in a couple of weeks, the old guy cannot walk. He comes to the doctor and says "listen, it's impossible to walk, it's the legs hurting and muscles are painful" and so on. But the doctor says, "please you have to take this medication because it's the recommendation nowadays". It's nonsense.
Juliana: It's really sad.
Antti: The basic task for the doctors is to release the suffering, not increase it.
Juliana: Yeah, it's really sad because doctors are not even aware I think of the fact that they are following orders, like you say in your book, they were political decisions to begin with, and they're not decisions made based on experience, on listening to the patients and getting real results. But it's just a political decision that favors pharmaceuticals and the doctors seem to be convinced that they're doing the right thing by telling you, like in the example you just gave, 'keep taking the statins', right?
Antti: Yeah, that's true and I think it should be common knowledge about what happened during the rules of Reagan and so on. What kind of decisions they made instead. I don't know if you are aware about it, for example in Scandinavia, we are following the United States rules here strictly but if you go to Paris, into France, or in Germany they have their own rules. That's the old traditional way of treating patients and they don't follow this ultra-scientific recommendation as they say from FDA that we have to do it. But since we are a small country, it's harder to follow the system here and I think it's a very, very bad thing. It sucks our national health economy down because it's bloody expensive also.
Niall: Yeah, well I'm sorry to throw you into a little bit more despair but I know that in France, big pharma rules also.
Antti: Oh {laughter}. Yeah I know, they have started a big business there but in Germany, even though it is a very, very chemical orientated society, the normal doctor works. They don't use so much medicine as we do here or in the states and there is a new kind of practice also in France, they just take it easy in the traditional way but they are highly [technologically] orientated doctors who use all kind of high tech systems and medications. I think it's kind of a bad religion. It's not science. Religion is money.
Joe: Absolutely. I just wanted to back track a little bit so that people know what we're talking about. Some statistics on diabetes: this is from the American Diabetes Association and according to them there are almost 26 million children and adults in the United States, that's almost 9% of the population, have diabetes and 79 million people, which is more than a quarter almost 30% of the American population, have pre-diabetes and also there's over 25% of seniors in the US have diabetes. But just to give an example of what I was saying earlier, that diabetes is not an isolated condition, that it's the complications from diabetes that include heart disease and stroke. There's various statistics in that where heart disease was noted on 68% of diabetes related death certificates, 67% had high blood pressure, and blindness is associated with diabetes. In 2005 to 2008, 4.2 million people or 28.5% with diabetes aged 40 or older had diabetic retinopathy. There's also nervous system disease and even amputation which the statistics on amputation more than 60% of none traumatic lower limb amputations occur in people with diabetes. So, this is not just a situation of someone with diabetes and they have to take insulin. Diabetes is a precursor to many other much more serious illnesses that ultimately end in death for a lot of people.
Antti: Yeah I think it's pretty much the same here also, the statistics. What I've been thinking lately, after receiving so much feedback from the people, I think it all accounts to diet. If somebody gets diabetes, another can have heart disease and the third can have neurological disease, they mention Alzheimer or something, and the fourth can have cancer. For example, cancer and sugar is connected and diabetes and cancer is connected. High sugar level is connected to heart disease, so you get a cross reaction all around. And I've seen that. I've put people on this type of diet and they have received a lot of help with it and that's an amazing thing.
But I go back in history; there was another guy I mentioned in Germany, a professor in the 70's. There was a big argument with American and British people: which causes heart disease? The Americans said it's the animal fat and Yudkin collected a huge amount of information about sugar and he found out that sugar is the key point. And now you know Obama has changed his policy against sugar, so sugar is coming up and being the next enemy and forget the fat because if you eat sugar, you get sugar spikes even though you don't have diabetes. Sugar spikes high in your blood temporarily and then you push it down with insulin. These sugar spikes damages the inner layer of the arteries and if this goes on, that's the cause of your arteriosclerosis and so on. That was shown by John Yudkin and he calculated how much sugar you have to eat. He said that 120g of sugar increased your risk to get a heart attack or die of heart disease, 10 times as the people who don't eat sugar at all.
What is 120g of sugar? It's a big chocolate plate. Now they push all the food with sugar, and sugar and sugar because they have replaced the fat with sugar. If you take, for example, in the morning fruit yogurt, it gives you 20 or 30g of sugar, but you don't taste it and that means 5-6 teaspoons of sugar in your coffee. No one can drink that, it's too sweet. But it they put in a little fat, that white stuff which they call milk, you don't taste it. And then you take fruit juice and it gives you 20g, so you get 40 or 50g of sugar in the morning and if you go at lunchtime and take some kind of sweet for example, or piece of chocolate, you get 60g, by this method you get 100g of sugar a day. You know everybody is use to that and that's one reason for this epidemic nowadays because the food has been spoilt. It's not natural anymore because they destroyed the food by taking the fat away and putting sugar in it. Otherwise it doesn't taste at all but if they put in the sugar, people buy it. That's the key point nowadays.
Juliana: Once again we come back to a very recent change because, as Nora Gedgaudas says in Primal Body Primal Mind - have you read that one?
Antti: Yes I know those books.
Juliana: She has some statistics there and she says that in as far as refined sugar goes in the US, in 1750 people consumed 4 pounds of sugar per person per year. Then she moves onto 1850, 20 pounds per person per year and then in 1996 160 pounds per person per year. That's huge and now we are probably at what, 200-250 because of all of the sugar added, so again it's kind of recent. Our genetics, our bodies haven't evolved to consume sugar. We were hunter gatherers. We were eating basically animals; animal fat and animal protein mostly.
Antti: Yeah that's true. You know, it's a kind of nonsense to speak about only the genes. It's the same thing that if you make a cat a vegan, you have to use a lot of medication to keep the animal alive. Cat's metabolism is based on animal food only. It's the same question about a human, its normal to have such kind of genes that makes us diabetic if we eat sugar. It's not the disease itself it kind of tells us something about what kind of human race is. It's not an idea to talk more or change the genes but we have to change the environment or the food we are eating. But you know the problem is it's the strongest forces against us is the food industry which is the most powerful industry, more than the military complex, in the world nowadays. So they used, for example in the European parliament, they wanted to change the food labels a little bit, more info about it, but the food industries and lobbyists used one billion euros to fight against it and it was a minor thing you know. We are living in a world where it no use to speak sense to people who make decisions. I believe for change and voting by feet, so that's why I contacted you because I like your pages, you know, a little bit anarchist in myself {laughter}.
Niall: Good for you.
Jason: I was just thinking on what he said basically this kind of symbiotic relationship between 2 parasitic organisms in the world; basically big agro, the agricultural businesses, and big pharma. They seem to work off each other in the sense that the big agricultural business basically causes the problems that the big pharma business then attempts to suppress the symptoms through medication. And all the while you have modern academic science, modern medical science, kind of acting like a late Catholic church trying to convince everybody: "no, no, no, the world is not round, no, no, no, we're the center of the universe, we swear" and all of these people are getting quite angry about this and they're sort of doing this, 'no, no, no, it's not true, it's not true', and they're just serving the agenda. It's a symbiotic relationship between a group of parasites basically who are feeding off of the general population of the world.
Antti: But you understand it's a genius business to steal money.
Juliana: Not only that but they make us pay for the poison because we gladly go to the supermarket and buy the food and then buy the drugs.
Antti: Speaking about the food prices, that's how they are. They make the basic stuff in the market if you go there. If you go to the market nowadays there's about 20 present items that are, in some sense, to be there, and 80% is shit. But you know they make the biggest money with grains. I have a farmer who had coeliac and it's kind of a tragic thing because he was a big farmer making grains, and he asked me if I know how much he gets from his 1 ton of grain? I said I don't have any ideas about it and he said it costs about 140 euros per ton. So then he asked me do you know how much a ton of bread costs when you go to the shop? He spoke in terms of tons because he was a big farmer. I said that I don't have any idea. That cost is about 6,000 euros. You can imagine that if you take cheap grains and make the morning cereals and so on, and label them and brand them, you make a huge fortune with nothing. You know the shelf life is years, so that's how they corrupt these food studies and everything. They say that cereals are real healthy food. I said its shit, its money.
Joe: Dr. Antti we have a call here from one of our listeners so I'm going to go ahead and take it.
Hi caller, what's your name and where you calling from?
Caller: Hi my name is Bahar and I'm from the Netherlands. I would like to ask Mr. Antti a question. I know you're specialized in diabetes but I wonder what your experience is with viral infections or genetic, viral infections, like herpes?
Antti: Well herpes?
Bahar: Yes, for example you have herpes simplex which can occur in the eye or on the lips or in the brain even.
Antti: Yeah, I have gotten quite good results with this diet, it's very important to reduce the sugar amount and even in ketogenic diet, absolutely no grains because the gluten is the most devastating substance for the immune system and the third thing is take coconut oil. This oil is strange because it kills viruses.
Bahar: Okay.
Antti: You have to try these three things. I have gotten good results with this procedure. The coconut oil is very interesting in that sense, I have had patients with leukemia, kids with leukemia, and it is a difficult task when they go to treatment and they destroy the bone marrow and change the whole system and that's the time when the viruses come and the people die with this virus infection. So coconut oil has tremendously good results with only giving this coconut oil. It kills viruses and they have survived this process. It's simple: no prescription, normal food.
Juliana: How much coconut oil do you recommend your patient to take in those cases?
Antti: I mean it's different in every case but I have to think what is the problem? If the problem is the virus infection then coconut is the best choice. But I think this patient always had sensitivity to gluten so you have to leave the gluten. The gluten that we are talking about is the grains. The gluten is the big issue nowadays. If you are speaking about the virus infection, that means that you have a weak immune system and the gluten is something which makes it weak so you have to leave it. Try it.
Bahar: Yes, I don't eat gluten or even dairy and I do notice that it helps me to a certain extent to control my condition. One thing that I am worried about is that the eye doctor has prescribed a steroid drop to tackle the inflammation and I wonder what your experience is with steroids?
Antti: Steroids is only medication for symptoms, it's not affecting the real cause. You have to think about this differently. You have to improve your immune system by diet.
Bahar: Okay.
Jason: So how much coconut oil would you suggest the person put in their diet? How much oil should they be eating?
Antti: Adults need about 1to 3 spoons a day, that's Okay. It's very affective if you have Alzheimer's. If you give granny 1 or 2 spoons of coconut oil, they get excited, they start to walk and remember things. I have gotten good results for that because another point on Alzheimer's, they say it's a kind of diabetes also.
Jason: Is there anything other than coconut oil that you can take for anti-viral uses? Or immune system support?
Antti: I don't know anything else. It's okay to use a whole amount of medication but this is tremendously affective. I've seen it in the practice, its simple and no side effects or anything. Why not try it first.
Jason: Yeah, Bahar. Have you been trying coconut oil?
Bahar: I tried coconut oil a couple of years ago and I got really nauseous because of it. I have tried, recently, coconut milk and that seems to be okay with me, so I was thinking maybe that I'm sensitive to coconut? Or, maybe I should try the oil again and maybe try with smaller amounts?
Juliana: Yeah.
Jason: Stacked over the day might be good.
Antti: Yeah, smaller amounts but I've seen that people who are not on the low carb diet, they get symptoms with the coconut oil. If you are on low carb you get better results with the coconut oil.
Bahar: Okay.
Joe: Okay, Bahar is that it?
Bahar: Yes, thanks a lot.
Niall: Alright thanks for your call, bye and good luck.
Juliana: Bye.
Joe: Dr. Antti, I'm just looking through your book here and I just wanted to go back to something towards the beginning of your book where you talk about when you published your book, I suppose in Finnish in 2008, and as soon as it was published the Finnish Medical Journal attacked you.
Antti: Yeah, it's a funny, funny thing. First there was a female colleague in Sweden who published on the net this similar type of advice for diabetics, and they made a complaint about her but then the government office studied the case and said: "that this is normal treatment of diabetes in Sweden, using the local diet", so that was okay. But when I published the book in Finland, probably they get exposed in a way that they have hidden this information from the patients. First they sent a letter to all the bookstores and warned the bookstore keepers that my book is dangerous. They got mad, they took my book but that's silly, that's how they act. The basic evil is the Finnish Diabetics Association which is an extension of the American Association here in Finland. They don't want to have any other interference.
Joe: Yeah.
Antti: But in the American Journal, they crushed my book but the strange thing is I replied but they didn't publish it and that's why I get mad and resign from the association.
Joe: Yeah absolutely, I can understand its pure censorship. It's interesting, what you say, that while they attacked your book and tried to stop it from being sold in book stores, they didn't want to appeal to the authorities or take an official complaint against what was in your book because, as you say in your book, a similar process had pursued that avenue in Sweden. And a Swedish doctor had proposed a low carbohydrate diet for diabetics and that she published the information on a popular website and then nutritionists complained to the authorities about her and demanded that they cancel her license. But when they investigated they found out that there was nothing wrong. In fact, there was evidence that the low carbohydrate diet was beneficial for diabetes. So they didn't take this action against you because they have learned, in Sweden, that this would simply achieve the opposite of what they wanted to which was confirming that the low carbohydrate diet is good for preventing diabetes.
Antti: So that's why I contacted you, it's better to get some support from abroad.
Jason: It's important to remember that the church made Galileo retract his statements and its where the whole: 'Eppur si muove' [And yet it moves] comes from and it's kind of the same situation. The academic authority goes around making people retract, or hide or conceal or be afraid to publish their findings but 'yet it moves', there's nowhere around it.
Antti: Yeah, in a way, we are in a similar situation nowadays but arguments are different. But I compare this situation, I don't know how old you are, but if you remember in Iran was a leader named Ayatollah Khomeini and he used to say the western world is in the hands of Satan and he was right. We used to have a Jesus Christ in the western world but now it's written on the dollar bill and says, 'in god we trust', it's money. What counts is economically sound and I think it's kind of fascist men in that way. People must go first and then comes economics.
Jason: What I find interesting based on that statement is that Satanism, the religion in America was called LaVeyan Satanism, is essentially taken from an author named Ayn Rand who is, admittedly, the basis of the neo-conservative philosophy in America. And so it's interesting that you say that because in a certain sense, they exactly are Satanists admittedly. It's just kind of interesting.
Antti: We're living in interesting times {laughs}.
Juliana: Oh yeah.
Jason: A Chinese curse.
Antti: Yeah.
Jason: May you live in interesting times.
Antti: But I mean, it's thanks to the internet as the way to spread the word around the world is revolutionary.
Niall: Indeed on our news page SOTT.net, substantially we're tackling the big lies that are told in terms of politics and economics but these things cut across all areas. The big lies are as much of a lie as something as simple as your breakfast.
Jason: What's so interesting about what you and him have been saying about 'thank god for the internet' and all this stuff, the fall of world religion and Catholicism in the west and the control of the church was heralded by the printing press and the ability to disseminate the ideas of the natural philosophers at the time. And today we have the same situation where the proliferation of the internet is allowing a lot of independent researchers, who are not part of the academic inquisitorial church body, to disseminate ideas to people which is kind of, in the same sense, the combat that can be fought right now against this sort of dogmatic, this elite scientific oppression that is going on in medicine, specifically, and also in other sciences. Physics and the whole gamut are fooled by a kind of elite academic church doctors. They even call themselves doctors.
Antti: Yeah, yeah. But it's interesting and that stimulates me, the struggle. What counts in my world is clinical experience. I always follow the ideas by the patients and I can change my ideas when I see a different thing in the patients. And that's the real reality of it, to see how it goes in the patients. Not something, high level knowledge - whatever it is - it's very, very down to earth thing that I'm doing.
Niall: In your book, you describe part of the way in which you changed your approach to helping people was to start listening to them which doctors don't do.
Antti: Yeah that's true, absolutely right. The only thing is to get them to talk. People are very shy to talk about their intimate things and so on. I'm a little bit of a strange fellow because I touch the people, I handle them and more or less when they have pains, I manipulate. Then I ask how they are doing in the family and their work and whatever. So I like to open them because if you touch the patient and ask about how is your life, it's a very, very strong thing even though it doesn't respond in that spot. But when he comes the next time, he'll be able to tell you. He started to think about his life now and these kinds of things, it's very, very heavy in his life and so on. So it's kind of psychotherapy, or however you call it. And I study what kind of medication they have and I take, normally, all the medication away. I use the diet and I activate to do things because most of the medication the people are now eating is needless, they don't need, they are using only for the symptoms, they are not for healing. There is no kind of medicine which heals itself. Even antibiotics, they help you but if you don't have the power itself, you will die anyhow. That supports your recovery but never heals anything and I always point out to the patient to realize that it's a waste of money, waste of the health eating these medications because they don't help. For example, especially with the pains, it's horrible how they drug the people with pain you know. It's strange that police catch the people that are selling drugs, which are much safer than the drugs the doctors are prescribing. The real drug pushers are doctors nowadays.
Jason: Yeah, drug pushers.
Antti: If you think about this OxyContin and all this stuff, it's a horrible thing. You know I have a lot of patients, now in Europe it's possible to get cannabis but you get it from Holland, so I write prescriptions to Holland and people travel there.
Joe: Oh yeah?
Antti: When they get the prescription about cannabis they can come here but no deal to write it here you know, they don't get it here, you get problems with the police if you have cannabis, it's nonsense. I look at the American studies and the death statistics. There was a special mention about cannabis last year. There was no death from cannabis in America, 350,000,000 people. So it's the safest drug we have. Even aspirin, they have estimated in Finland, we have around 5 million people, it kills about 200 to 300 people a year.
Jason: Yeah, that reminds me of a sketch from Cat Williams where he says: "nobody has ever died from an overdose of marijuana but if you take too many aspirins, you'll die"
Antti: And they call this science, I don't know, I just can't understand the logic.
Joe: Well, like you said before, the logic is about money as you say in your book for example, obesity. There's obviously a lot of news and medical research into obesity, particularly in the US but also in Western Europe. You say that obesity has become an obsession among health professionals that while writing your book the American Medical Association came to a decision that obesity is a disease.
Antti: Yeah, that's nonsense. It's simple. It's not a disease itself. They mix ideas in medicine, that's really, really frightening for the future.
Joe: But again you explain it in your book, and you've explained it here, you say that the current trend in medicine is to make each symptom an independent disease which can then be treated with a different drug and that's just about selling drugs. So like you said, they're drug pushers.
Antti: Yeah, it was not too long ago when they mentioned it in the mental side that the independent thinkers are mad, they're sick people, they have a diagnosis number for it. We have to all, you and me, start taking some psycho drugs now. It is nonsense. For example shyness is a disease now, shyness. That has its own number for it and you take pills for it.
Juliana: And if you want to be healthy you're orthorexic because you're obsessed with healthy habits.
Jason: The DSM 4 has that odd disease now if you don't agree with authority you have...
Niall: Oppositional defiance disorder.
Jason: Oppositional defiance disorder.
Antti: We are all together sick people, we don't agree with the mainstream.
Jason: Its heresy, that's basically what they're saying, in a certain sense. They're saying we're heretics and we need to be put on the rack, or put on the flames, and purged of our heretical evil against mainstream science that has come down, I don't know from where, and is the inherent word of the scientific god and anyone who says anything against it, or goes against it, needs to be burned at the stake. Thankfully right now its metaphorical and allegorical 'burned at the stake', meaning they just sort of burn you in words but who knows if, one day, they really might start putting people to the flame.
Juliana: But you know what really makes me angry, doctor, is that from what you're saying there is a way to cure these people with basically conscience, empathy, listening to them, and treating the body. Not because of the symptoms that the patient is experiencing but for the person as a whole; emotions, genetics, diet, and everything together. You can't say that the only science that has been produced is pro-pharma because there are independent studies that have shown over and over and over, for example, that stress is related to inflammatory hormones, like cytokines, which then can trigger an autoimmune disease, for example. So there is a science, it just gets so buried that even doctors and humans have lost, basically, their conscience, their willingness to listen to each other to get some basic logic. Your body is suffering. When your body is telling you something then treat it as a whole and don't give a pill to somebody who is in a struggle and that has been lost. And I think your patients must be the luckiest people in the world because there are not very many doctors who treat them like that.
Antti: That's true that the mind plays a greater role and I am more aware about it since. I heard one study which was made in the holy place Harvard Medical School {laughter} and it was handled with meditation and genes and they found out that people who meditated, they have better results closing these genes which are connected with inflammation and heart disease. It's not bad but the Harvard studies are connected with the Rockefellers and the medical industry and so on, but I don't know why they have done this kind of study. I think that's the real future in our health.
Joe: The other big issue these days in terms of peoples' health is cholesterol and you talk about it in your book as well and the myths around cholesterol and everybody taking statins to reduce their cholesterol. Can you explain a little bit about what's going on with cholesterol and why everybody is so terrified of having high cholesterol?
Antti: If you think about it's using common sense about it. For example, when we use the proteins as a fuel or in the build-up of the body parts, there comes a lot of nitrogen which is harmful for the body and it's made for urine, uric acid, and it goes away with urine. But cholesterol is different. You lose cholesterol in your guts through the bile system but it comes back to the body, it's so valuable that the body sucks it from the gut back into circulation. They use the cholesterol all the time because it's vital for all cells. But now when we talk about cholesterol, there's a big difference with the cholesterol itself. And there's another thing is these lipoproteins which carries the cholesterol in the body from the body back to the liver and they say that this lipoprotein, LDL, is harmful or bad cholesterol - which is not scientific - but they say that causes problems. They test only that LDL amount because statins lowers LDL. Its selective reductionist because you can divide the LDL into 2 parts: there is the big ball - I call them balls because they are ball forms like a football - and that's the type R. There is a small ball, like a golf ball, small one. In some situations the small one, which is the type of big, can cause problems because if it gets connected with oxygen then it can cause a problem. But how does it get oxidized? It gets oxidized because it's filled also with this lipoprotein, not only the cholesterol but there is a lot of all kinds of fat in it, but if you eat an excess of Omega 6 fats, which also goes into these balls of cholesterol, and these are the fats which are very easily oxidized because they are unstable.
Joe: Like vegetable fat?
Antti: Yeah, when they come from liver, they put ubiquinone and selenium and vitamin E in it as a protector so the fats do not get oxidized. But if you stick to statins, it reduces the amount of ubiquinone. So it goes around the body like a time bomb which can get oxidized, that's the thing. But if you use a lot of anti-oxidants it's not harmful. Even though you have higher levels of cholesterol, they are natural. Nowadays, most of the heart attacks and the people who are brought into the hospital, more than 75 percent have a lower amount of cholesterol in their blood. So it's not connected with that thing at all.
Joe: You say in your book that the pharmaceutical companies and medical association deliberately try to confuse and complicate the issue about cholesterol and you even said that pharmaceutical companies employ mathematicians to write their papers with complex math.
Antti: That's true. And doctors don't know anything about the mathematics but if you think about reductionist science, for example, if you take the human body and studied it and think about the cancer, for example breast cancer, you can divide the person, in this example it's a breast, so you can divide by what kind of cancer it is it. Ductile cancer, or whatever it is, and then you can divide into cells and you can see the cancer cells. Even though you can go lower and divide the cells and see some proteins or molecules which are connected to cells. If you go to the atom level, the whole disease disappears, like magic. What about all diseases, it's a kind of process or function of how the whole system works and nowadays, for example, we speak about the cancer, it doesn't come from any cell, it comes from the stem cells because every tissue has stem cells and this transforms into the malignancy and they start to create more and more cells. So what you have to do is use radiotherapy so they can kill these new cells but not the stem cells. You can kill them totally, if not the whole cancer away, but still there are cancerous stem cells which can create new cancer. But what we have found out is with nutrition you can transform these stem cells back to normal cells and that's fantastic. And that's what I use in my practice because I use this diet and these micronutrients for transforming these cancer cells. A very interesting substance is turmeric which is an herb from India. But there are many others as well and so when we go back to the primary of what is diabetes and what is nutrition therapy, we have to somehow naturally interfere with the whole of the system. As I gave in the example, the reductionist, when we go to the atom level, there is no disease anymore.
Joe: Yeah where does it go?
Antti: We can improve the function, or normalize the function, which is disturbed somehow, or something like that, and I think that's what I see in patients. It's not pollution around the world, or something like that, but it's the food we are eating. It's the quality of the food and it's the utmost vital importance for everybody. If you go out anywhere, even in Paris, 80% of the restaurants in Paris now are shit. They offer bad quality food and it's all around you and that's big business. That makes us sick. And coming back to diabetes, it's that same thing that sugar is the fuel for cancer cells. I use with these patients the ketogenic diet and it has good results. People who repeatedly had cancer recovered with this diet.
Joe: I just want to promote your book Nutrition Therapy for Diabetes, it's a very good read, a very easy read and people really should get it and even, I think, it's more beneficial. Maybe a lot of our listeners understand these issues and know about this stuff that we're talking about. We have a chat room going on and a lot of people are saying that they know people and members of their family have diabetes, so your book would be a very good book to actually give to a family member who maybe isn't into reading very complicated books or a lot of details. Because the point you keep making over and over again is that, in relation to diabetes, its utterly ridiculous for standard medical practice or doctors to tell people that they need to take insulin shots because they don't produce their own insulin rather than telling them that they should stop eating the food that requires them to take insulin because insulin is released into your body to remove sugar from your blood. So the simple answer is: stop putting so much sugar into your blood from the food that you eat. It's so simple and yet its mind blowing to me those doctors can't even make that simple connection themselves.
Antti: Yeah, that's crazy, that's how I think too. It's funny, I don't know, it's like a mad movie this world. It's so simple that it makes me cry when I see these patients, and that's my experience that people who started to do this diet and got extremely good results. People like me. The colleagues don't like me but the people, if they go to food stores, come to see me and ask "What do you think can I buy this food product?" It's so funny. I think when the people realize how simple it is, it could be a real revolution. Especially since I have met a lot of middle aged men, eating a lot of medicines, who are scared about death and carrying a lot of weight and when they have recovered, they get mad because they have been lied to all their lives and this is a strong power. Some of these people are in very high positions in society and that's how it's going to change something in the world because, I don't know, the Finnish temper, they are quiet people but when they get mad, you have to run.
Juliana: Good.
Antti: But what I have tried to point out is I recommend that everybody should try it and see how it works.
Juliana: Well we have about several hundred people in our discussion forum and all of us here have actually tried this diet that you've mentioned several times, the ketogenic diet, are finding even better results than with the standard 'Paleolithic diet' and we've recently had several people who have diabetes have contacted us because they said exactly what you're saying, 'I've had huge results with this diet'. I think in particular, one of our forum members reduced the quantity of insulin he's taken by half. But on the other hand, you can see that people have been buried in propaganda and what I'm thinking mostly is about the famous ketoacidosis. If you don't mind for those listeners who may be hesitating, doctors have been telling them for years to be careful because you can't eat too many fats because you'll get ketoacidosis or diabetes and ketoacidosis and stuff. We know from our research and from our own experience, and I think you will agree, fat is the ideal fuel for the brain and for the body. But what is this problem with ketoacidosis that makes people, especially with diabetes, afraid of trying a diet like the one you propose?
Antti: Yes that's the situation here also. They warned people. Gradually they lost the game because since 2008, when my first book came out, there's a tremendous amount of people who have changed their habits and started the diet. They are filled with knowledge in this country nowadays so they don't believe those doctors. I have been on TV also but I get sick and tired of the system. I was arguing with health doctors but they're scared of me because I know so much and they don't know anything, they are bureaucrats. It's going to change step by step, when one started the diet and gets results and that's it, he or she tells another and so on.
Juliana: But can you explain exactly what the difference is between ketoacidosis and healthy ketosis?
Antti: The difference is that everybody has some ketones in the blood all the time. Ketoacidosis is different from this ketosis that we are getting from the food or the diet, in that sense because these people don't have insulin at all. They don't have any insulin and when they don't take their insulin and they start to eat, the body can't use any carbohydrate or sugar at all so that makes the whole blood very sticky. At the same time every cell needs energy all of the time so the body changes the system and tries to make energy from the fat and that's when ketones comes into the picture. But the key issue is the high sugar, not the ketone issue. But together they make acidosis in the blood and that means a disturbance of the mineral content of the blood and that is life threatening. But no one gets any ketoacidosis with this diet if there is insulin at that stage. These people who don't have insulin, they have to take their insulin but they can manage with a fraction of what is the normal amount. But most problematic is that they use the insulin now for type 2 diabetics. That's a crime because they have too much insulin in their blood and why give excess insulin?
Juliana: That's crazy!
Antti: The only problem, what I say to people when they start this kind of diet, if they have insulin, they have to be cautious because the blood sugar can go too low when they start if they have too much insulin. I say it's during the diet that you have to decrease the amount of the insulin and normally if the patient is type 2 diabetic and they have insulin, they rebuild the whole insulin from 2 to 7 days, in a week time at least, not more. But type 1 diabetes they can get the amount low in a week, the same time, but they use insulin. There is a lot of propaganda in that sense that, I think, is the biggest crime to use insulin in that amount for type 2 diabetes patients, not the type 1 diabetes.
Niall: But type 1, could they at some point stop taking insulin? We should probably distinguish the two: the type 1 is where it's so damaged that you're not producing any of your own insulin, is that correct?
Antti: Look, there are very few patients which have no insulin at all. There's always a little bit of production. So I have patients who are type 1 that can live without insulin when they are on this diet because they don't need so much insulin because there's no sugar. But nowadays there are an increasing number of people who get late onset diabetes in their thirties or forties. That's the type 1, which is an autoimmune disease connected with gluten and I always recommend that all the type 1 diabetes patients take grains away because this is the cause of autoimmunity. Especially north Europeans, they are very sensitive to grains and I think quite a majority of the American people are also sensitive to grains. If there is diabetes or autoimmunity disease in the family, its best to avoid all grains. It's very beneficial. There's one study published, a patient story which happened in Copenhagen published in the British Medical Journal. It was a 7 year old boy who had type 1 diabetes. At that same time they found out that he has coeliac and they put him on a non-grain diet and he recovered totally. He lives a normal life now. And I have a few patients and I will also write some patient story to the British Medical Journal but they are in their 30's now. They had this kind of reaction for example one patient, she's something like 32 year old female, in her family there are a lot of autoimmune disease but not diabetes. She got diabetes quite suddenly and she came to see me because she knew that I'm kind of a strange guy and we started this diet. She has lived now more than a year without insulin and we can measure the production of insulin.
Juliana: Do you think it would work the same with somebody who has had type 1 diabetes for a long, long time or is it only when you catch it at the beginning?
Antti: I don't have any experience with persons who have had diabetes a long time. But I have written some text about it, it's been shown in theory that it's possible but I'm not sure about that because I have not met these kinds of patients. But this new incidence, I have a couple of them and they have recovered only by this diet. But there are two sides to the diet: you have to reduce the amount of sugar and the carbs because this pushes the insulin too much, it's a stressing factor. Another is the grains which is a cause for autoimmunity and a reaction from that. And then I improved it by using quite a lot of vitamin D3 because it supports the immune system also.
Joe: Dr. Antti, we have a question from our chat room, it's a short one about Ebola.
Antti: Yeah?
Joe: Is there any relationship between Ebola or any potentially protective aspects to a keto diet for something like Ebola?
Antti: I don't have any experience about it.
Joe: Yes, thankfully so far anyway. But theoretically I mean...
Antti: I don't speak about theories, I speak about my experience.
Joe: Okay.
Antti: So I have no idea about it.
Joe: But in a general sense does a low carb diet protect against a host of viral infections? We have experience when cutting out carbs or reducing carbs a lot, that and other people we know say that they tend to get less colds and less flus.
Antti: Yes, because the sugar disturbs the immune system. Another place is the gut and the healthy bacteria. So if you eat a lot of starch and sugar, they create pathological bacteria in the gut and that's the basic reason that things go wrong. But on this diet you get extremely good bacteria in your gut. You don't have to eat it because they just start to build up by themselves.
Joe: You say in your book that 60% of our immune system is essentially located in our guts.
Antti: Yeah, that's true. It's difficult to say how much, but about 60%. Some people say there are 70%. I am a modest guy so I say 60%. It's of vital importance. You have to see the broader aspect because if you eat sugar, it's not only the question of how it increases the blood sugar levels but it also disturbs your immune system and your guts and your protective bacteria and everything, it's a huge amount. These complicated issues have always interested me because the mind is involved in the immune system also. If you are stressed your immune system goes down and that has been shown. They say that your gut is a brain, it's a secondary brain they say, because there is some kind of nervous system that you have in the brain. It's really, really interesting.
Niall: Well, something everyone here can testify is to a whole host of things clearing up once we've gone ketogenic: of having more energy, having a clearer mind and everything. But there's still some resistance. There are some issues, of course, that pop up and so we try to experiment here and there. Mainly we try and increase the fat intake because we've been researching and finding, basically, the higher it is the better and this is not as easy as it seems. So what could you suggest for people? We tried something recently, we called it 'the fat bomb' where we tried to take as much fat as possible, next to the protein we eat every day, in the form of usually butter. We experiment with coconut cream, coconut oil and lard.
Joe: Do you have a recommendation for how people can get for example this figure of more than 60% of their intake from fat. How do you go about that?
Antti: I use a little bit of political tactics with that because what I've done is I've divided the food into 3 categories. There is animal food and there are local plants and high carb plants and I said its mathematics. This diet works well if it's lower than 60g of carbohydrates a day. I found it works like that. You don't have to go to ketogenic to get results in diabetes but it's around 60grams but it varies for each individual. I'm not so strict in that. Let's look at the mathematics. If you take animal food, its nothing to do with the carbohydrates, there is some carbohydrate in animal food but we don't count it. I said you have to be careful with plants and only choose these non-starchy plants and I show them in the paper; and I write them down as notes so they can take home. I said if you take a piece of bread, with one slice its 100g of bread, it's not a big piece. It can give you 60g of carbohydrate, that's all. That's your meal of the day and they take this non-starchy vegetable, for example collard or cruciferous vegetables, if you take 1kg of cabbage you get 20g of carbohydrates. You can eat 3kg I say. You can eat so much that nobody could eat so much.
So then I say eat healthy fats and I mean natural fats, animal fats, butter or olive oil, but good quality olive oil and coconut oil. But don't be afraid of fats and I said if you feel hungry, you can increase the fats, I don't speak about the amount of fat. But you follow them a little bit along the way, a couple of months as they eat the diet you are talking about. They have been so scared about the fats but in Sweden they use LCHF, low carb, high fat foods. I don't know why they use this kind of name. Why don't they speak about low carb food because I have met a lot of people who don't lose weight because they are eating too much calories by fat. They get mixed up. They believe that they can eat 1kg of the fat. They believe that when they are in ketosis they can get thinner even though they eat 5000kcal, that's nonsense.
Juliana: So there has to be a balance between the amount of fat and the caloric intake if one is aiming at losing weight. And there also has to be a limit in the amount of protein one eats right because otherwise it can turn into sugar.
Antti: Yeah that's true. I think that excess protein is not healthy. Its stresses your liver and other things because there is no store for extra protein in our body, only fat, and a little bit of space for sugar but not for protein. I use a model of a plate. I use it to show them the usual amount of vegetables, beef steak, a piece of chicken, fish, or something like that, olive oil and butter and so on if you make food using butter. There is no need to take excess amount of fat. They must be a little bit cautious about the fat. I've seen a lot of patients who can do it but there are a lot of patients who cannot. They get easily mixed up because if they want to have change in their lives, I have been thinking, that you have to give them very simple rules to follow and I said: 'don't think about anything else other than to count your carbs. There is no good or bad carbs. There is only the amount of carbs, that's the basic thing.
Joe: Yeah. Dr. Antti, we have a question from someone in our chat room again, it says: do you know what ESBL is?
Antti: No, what is it?
Joe: I looked it up and I think its extended spectrum b-lactamases.
Antti: Yeah.
Joe: The actual question is do you have any pointers for patients who have developed ESBL as a result of conditions that require continual antibiotics?
Antti: No I don't have any experience about them, I don't have it sorry.
Joe: No problem. But I think what we are saying here is that no matter what anybody's condition is, that there's a good chance that eating too many carbs and too much sugar is a bad idea. So that the first step in anything, no matter what it is really, should be to reduce the carbs in your diet.
Juliana: Yeah and if you've taken antibiotics for a very long time and developed a condition, it's probably because your gut is destroyed and in any case it's going to help.
Antti: That's true. But basically, I recommend it to all patients who have any disease at all. But in autoimmunity, I recommend also grainless food because those are gluten free. If you go to the store and they say this is gluten free, there's always a little bit of gluten in it because the authorities allow to sell some stuff which is gluten free but they are not totally gluten free.
Juliana: Like corn or rice.
Antti: I'm absolutely strict in that sense and I say forget all grains if you have some sensitivity to them. There's also grain types of food which can mimic the same things and that's why I say better to go on with this type of diet that you leave out all this high carb food. There's all kind of grains, rice and whatsoever.
Joe: So we have another question about honey or maple syrup. Does the fact that they have high amount of sugar outweigh their health benefits? Do they have any health benefits?
Antti: No, I think we come back to if you put a lot of vitamins or vital stuff in the sugar it doesn't make it any better. Especially honey, its fructose. Basically, it's poor food fructose and nowadays it's very' very common, especially to women that have fatty liver disease, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. It's caused by sugar, especially fructose. So I don't recommend it all.
Joe: Honey is for bees.
Antti: Yeah, let them eat that. I live in the country where we have bears, they like it.
Joe: Yeah, let the bears eat the honey
Antti: Not far from where I live there is a bear, we have to be careful about him. Now they have woken up. It's been a long winter, they have been sleeping.
Niall: I've read somewhere that once you're keto-adapted, you require less vitamin C and in fact can stop supplementing it. Now in your book you recommend to stick with a daily dose of at least 1000mg?
Antti: I was a great fan of Linus Pauling. Because in the 70's I was in New York and I met psychiatrist Richard Ritner, he was familiar with nutrition on mental diseases. He just used food as a treatment for mental problems, not all those medicines. He was quite a strange guy but he was a friend of Abram Hoffer, who was a Canadian psychiatrist, who used these kinds of diet methods for treating mental illness. By the way I think this is common sense that we have lost our ability to make our own vitamin C, so I think it's relevant to take some replacement. And another thing, especially in Finland where we live quite north so there's no sun, most of the people are lacking vitamin D and vitamin D is of utmost importance to health in general. I recommend taking quite a large amount of it. That's the basic vitamin. There is a quite a lot of something else in Germany, they have used this alpha lipoic acid and its very good stuff and I recommend it for diabetics because it balances the blood sugar but it prevents the damage that sugar makes in the body and that's what the Germans have done. I think that's all, if you choose the vegetables and natural foods, you get all the other stuff from there in natural resources. These high carb foods are condensed with anything chemical for energy. But vegetables are rich in all kinds of things. For example: cabbage has 6 different kinds of chemicals which is good for breast cancer and prevents it. Why not use these kinds of stuff?
Joe: Okay, Dr. Antti we are kind of running out of time so we're probably going to end it here. It's been really good chatting to you and I think you're doing great work and you should, far from being condemned and attacked by the Finnish Medical Association, you should be given some kind of an award as far as I'm concerned.
Niall: Well, maybe his reward is that he is attacked? In times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. I think that is your award, I'm afraid.
Joe: But for our listeners, Dr. Antti has written a very good book and like I've mentioned, it's also it's a very good book to give to people who are just starting out with what these ideas are, to family members who know nothing about it. It's very accessible, very easy to read and it's got a lot of very good information so it's called: Nutrition Therapy for Diabetes and it's available from amazon.com. So, Dr. Antti, thank you very much once again for joining us.
Juliana: Thank you very much.
Antti: Thank you.
Joe: And good luck with your work.
Antti: Thank you.
Joe: Keep the faith.
Juliana: Stay strong and don't eat carbs.
Niall: We don't need to tell him that.
Thank you doctor, bye, bye.
Juliana: Bye, bye.
Antti: Bye.
Joe: Bye.
Niall: Well that was cool, an anarchist doctor.
Juliana: He was great.
Niall: Yeah. He speaks like he writes. In his book he just says it. He says: "I'm fed up with the lies".
Joe: It's really useful because he repeats the same thing but not in the same way and he gives plenty of examples of case studies of people who have rather good changes just from getting the carbs out of their diets. Of course the average person these days is eating maybe 70%, or more, everyday of their food intake as carbohydrate which is basically sugar. The basic idea here is that insulin is released into your body to remove the sugar from your blood because too much sugar in your blood will kill you very quickly. So it's a defense mechanism by your body to get rid of this sugar but insulin, when its produced and activated within your body too often, is actually damaging and can damage the walls of you arteries and cause all sorts of inflammation within your body and the answer is simple. This process causes all of these diseases associated with all these modern diseases; heart disease, arthritis, a whole host of diseases and the answer is so simple, it's just a get off the carbs shtick. They're addictive but do you want to be diabetic? Do you want to die earlier of heart disease? Do you want to get arthritis? It's just a choice. It's hard but you got to push through it. It's your own health and it's in your hands to take responsibility for it and make sure you live to ripe old age.
Juliana: It's like any addiction. You can continue doing something that is self-destructive, or you can actually stop and finally have some self-respect and want to do something better with your life and find ways to cope with it. And one of them is managing your diet better.
Joe: What you put into your body seems so simple in the end. People think about external effects on their health, breathing smoke, even smoking and stuff, and other sorts of danger in the world that can end your life like walking in front of a bus. But they never think about the idea that what you are putting through the insides of your body every single day of your life? What is going in there and what is it doing.
Niall: It's sanctioned from on high.
Joe: Well exactly but it's so simple. We're talking about the inside of your body, the vital organs within your body that are being used and processing food every day. So what is it? Question what it is. What is in the food you are putting in your body? Is it full of chemicals? What are these chemicals? Are they good for us? Could they be causing disease? Well yeah, of course they could. It's not rocket science but it's been made into rocket science by modern medicine. It's like 'oh you silly people' and that's why I was laughing earlier on, like the distinction Juliana made between doctors and humans, she said this kind of information is denied to doctors and humans.
{laughter}
Niall: I think she meant to say 'and non-doctors'.
Joe: I know what she meant but it was funny, it was a nice distinction because doctors really aren't human, sorry to all those doctors out there. All the evil doctors, you're not human.
Jason: Well, here's the thing, I've met a lot of doctors in my life and most of them really aren't, they're machines, they're trained monkeys, they live through their years of medical school and all they did was learn how to regurgitate facts and figures and look at a chart to compare symptoms, to come to a diagnosis and they're just trained monkeys.
Joe: Yeah, robots.
Jason: Most technical professions have become that way.
Joe: You'd almost rather have a monkey treat you than a doctor.
Jason: Pretty much.
Niall: At least it'll make you laugh
Jason: I don't know because bananas are pretty carby.
Joe: Anti-bananas. Eat these.
Juliana: But that's all the more surprising when a doctor says the things he just said. You did like 10 years of study, you have like maybe of 10 hours 1 lecture here or there about nutrition. You believe what you are preaching, because they're preaching basically, and then to come around and say 'no this is all lies, you should eat fat' which is the complete opposite. You should pay attention to your diet. You should not take drugs. Can you imagine the revolution that a doctor has to go through? But people do what they are told to do but these people are the ones that are preaching.
Joe: Well, I've noticed that recently it's finally dawning on people and finally some light is being shed on the very negative effects of carbs, in particular sugar. If you look on the web and go on Google, look at the news, put in 'sugar and health', you'll see a lot of mainstream articles citing medical reports now that are saying, actually it's not fat that causes heart disease, its sugar, sugar is the evil thing. More and more you're seeing 'sugar, sugar, sugar is evil'. So at least that provides some opportunity for the average person to cite official sources that are actually saying, what we've been saying, and what people like Dr. Antti has been saying for years which is that sugar and carbs are evil and fat is actually good for you. They're at least saying that fat isn't the problem, sugar is the problem. They don't go as far to say fat is good. In the same article or the same study you'll find them saying sugar is evil but so is fat.
Jason: Well, it kind of reminds me again because I always harp on the whole 'science is just another kind of a religion' thing. Bill Altemeyer wrote a book called Amazing Conversions where he's talking about people who've converted from an Atheistic belief system to Christianity, or vice versa, come from Christianity, and he says in built in the system of Christianity is its own downfall. The belief of an absolute truth, which is fundamental to science, is when a person who is a Christian suddenly begins to put the doctrine to the test of how true is it, they find that it doesn't really mirror the world that I live in so therefore it can't be the word of god. Built into science, the idea that that the scientific method of avoiding logical fallacies and all this different stuff, is the mechanism for what this doctor has done, or what other doctors do, of getting away from the dogmatic false science that has been passed off recently because as a general rule, empirical positive science is supposed to rule. But what we're looking at here is a bunch of scientists who represent a version of reality that's simply doesn't measure up. Since this whole low fat, high carb, 'yay vegetarianism, yay veganism' stuff has come about, all we see is this massive rise in all these different diseases and all these unspecified diseases: IBS and autoimmune diseases and diabetes.
Niall: People going mad, people literally losing their minds
Jason: People going mad. Look at Alzheimer's disease, it came out of nowhere and it's just gone up, up and up, and we know for a fact that one of the causes of Alzheimer's disease is basically a lack of good fat. Your brain is made up of what, fat. If you don't eat it, of course your brain is going to deteriorate because it's not getting what it needs. So built into science, actually, is the mechanism for this revolution. The whole 'I believe in the scientific method in empirical results' and the current way of doing things that is manipulated by Big Agra and Big Pharma is not getting any results at all. It's basically making things worse.
Joe: It's making them money.
Juliana: It may go both ways, we don't know. There are people who could. There's also the potential for anger in people, like Dr. Antti was saying, people get really, really mad when they discover how much they've been lied to. The problem is that, I don't know how it's going to go because at the same time you read articles saying sugar is the culprit, it's not so much fat or whatever, recently there have also been articles about how, for example, aspartame is not so bad. So I think it's a time for people who really saw the contradictions to say something and to not be sucked in by the next lie that comes along because they're going to try to cover their tracks. So if people don't get mad right now and talk to others and say 'no you have cholesterol, forget about it, it's all a lie'. Then next month there'll be new lies.
Niall: This is part and parcel of rebuilding your immune system; psychological defense against lies. It's not just that you'll change your diet and that's it. Dr. Antti says, 'it's a lifestyle change' and part of the reason that it's so hard for people is because well, I can give them very, very simple instructions, it's extremely difficult for them because there's so much emotion attached to the way things have always been for them.
Jason: Well, there's a kind of a cultural conspiracy. That it's kind of, in a certain sense, it is a conspiracy. You know if you cut out bread it really makes it difficult for you to go over to somebody's house and eat, or eat out with them, because if you invite them over to your house and you don't have any bread, they start to freak out, it's like watching a crack addict, "what do you mean there is no bread?" In the middle of dinner, they'll stop and say "somebody's got to go to the store and get some bread. Where's the wine?!" They freak out. So there's this cultural pressure that surrounds people that is the thing that makes it the most difficult and also the fact that it's not easy to just go to the store and find high fat products. It's almost impossible actually because all the products on the store shelves advertise low fat. Everything is about high sugar, high carbs, low fat, and in ease of convenience.
Niall: You want a high fat meal you'll have to work for it.
Jason: Yeah, if you want a high fat meal and there's people going around talking about we should have a fat tax. They want to tax things like butter and high fat foods and it's really like living in a sort of bible belt, fundamentalist Christian sort of environment. It's like that scene from Donnie Darko where the mother is in the meeting about whether or not they should ban a book by Graham Green. I mean it's like this surrealistic thing about banning this piece of literature. She's like, "do you even know who Graham Green is?" And then she's like, "I think we've all seen Bonanza" {laughter}. That's the kind of world that we live in. There are people who are not only ignorant, they're in error. If someone was ignorant it would be just, 'oh I just don't know'.
Niall: They speak the language of liberalism which, at its core, has individual freedom but they will deny the very thing to those people.
Jason: Yeah that's the same thing. It's very infuriating actually when you think about it. These types of people who are just going in the opposite direction of objective reality which is, basically, that fat is good for you. It is was what you were evolved to live off of and plants and most vegetable matter are sugars. I say that all vegetables are sugars because all carbohydrates are sugars. It's what it's going to turn into in your body. When you tell somebody 'don't eat sugar', they say 'well I don't' and they'll be sitting there chowing down on a piece of bread and you have to kind of explain to them the basic idea that a carbohydrate is a sugar. It goes into a vat of acid in your stomach and gets broken down into its constituent parts. Those parts are then either reassembled or consumed as sugars. That's basically what it is.
Juliana: Yeah well, there is low sugar or whatever.
Jason: That's sugar, it's a sugar
Joe: You know if you smoke these days at bars, you have to go outside or even if you go to someone's house and you smoke they send you out to the porch or outside. You're not allowed to smoke in people's house because smoking is going to kill you and kill everybody in the house immediately. It's like bringing a frickin' gas bomb into the house, "get that out of here". I think that all the people who are on low carb diets and keto diets that have their own houses and have friends come over, or family members, and demand where's the bread, "what do you mean you don't have any bread?" You maybe keep some bread or bring your own bread and you should tell them to go out on the porch and eat it.
Juliana: Absolutely.
Niall: I don't want to see it, take that bread out of here.
Joe: Well just to give them an idea.
Jason: Well, the twisted golden rule: 'do unto others what has been done unto you' kind of thing.
Juliana: Well, you can say that passive carb eating is very dangerous.
Niall: Second hand carbs.
Joe: Absolutely, second hand carbs.
Jason: I smell that carbohydrate!
Niall: You know how long I worked to get over my addiction and you're waving that thing in my face!
Joe: You're waving that piece of bread in my face, flaunting it.
Anyway, I think we're going to leave that for the night folks. It's been good but all good things come to an end. So we will be back next week. Thanks to our callers and our chatters. So until next week, you all have a good one and we'll be back.
Niall: Bye, bye
Juliana: Bye, bye
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