Listen
Listen to this podcast or watch the video. CLICK HERE
Transcript
- 04:34 Foundations of the Perfect Health Diet
- 15:12 Dairy
- 19:23 Butter, cholesterol, and saturated fat
- 25:26 Hybridization and meat quality
- 26:56 Foods to include in the diet
- 34:35 Foods to eliminate from the diet
- 41:03 Problems with grains, legumes, beans, and soy
Wendy Myers: Good morning everyone. Welcome to the Live to 110 podcast. My name is Wendy Myers and I’m a certified Holistic Health and Nutrition Coach. We’re broadcasting live from Malibu, California, and today I am going to be interviewing Paul Jaminet of perfecthealthdiet.com about his fantastic book, The Perfect Health Diet, naturally.
Dr. Jaminet and his wife have collaborated for many years on their book on what they think is the perfect diet for optimum health. And it is a Paleo or ancestral-based diet, but it’s tweaked based upon their extensive research and dietary knowledge.
But before we get started, I have to do a little disclaimer. Please keep in mind that this program is not intended to diagnose or treat any disease or health conditions. The Live to 110 Podcast is solely informational in nature. Please consult your healthcare practitioner before engaging in any treatment I suggest on this show.
And please do check up on my website, myersdetox.com™. I started the site to educate you about Paleo nutrition and the importance of detoxing from heavy metals and industrial chemicals that I believe are the major underlying causes of disease, and how to treat your health conditions naturally without medication.
And my goal with myersdetox.com™ is to help you prevent disease and live a long healthy life. And if you like what you hear on today’s show, please give the podcast a nice review and rating in iTunes. This will help people around the world to find the show easier and get my word out on health. I would really appreciate it a lot.
Wendy Myers: Now, let’s get on with the show. Good afternoon Paul. How are you?
Dr. Paul Jaminet: Very good, Wendy. It’s great to be with you.
Wendy Myers: Yes. Thank you so much for being on the show. First, why don’t you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself?
Dr. Paul Jaminet: Well, I have sort of a checkered career. I started out as an astrophysicist, and I had an 11 year career in Science at MIT, EUT Berkley and Harvard. I got a little bored with Science and during the internet boom, I decided to jump into the software industry and did a couple of start-ups. And then, when the company I had co-founded moved to California, I stayed here.
My wife is a Scientist at Harvard Medical School. And I decided to start doing something I always wanted to do: writing some books. But I have some chronic health problems and they seem to keep getting worse. I noticed that my productivity wasn’t good. I was having neurological issues, memory loss, and I just wasn’t being very productive.
So my focus shifted a little to figuring out my health. And I started making progress after we discovered the Paleo diet in 2005, that had some good effects but also some bad effects, and it needed refinement. We’ve basically spent the last eight years figuring out how to improve Paleo and make it better.
And we fixed our own health problems around 2010. And we decided we knew enough to share it with others. So we wrote our book, and we had thousands of readers report great results. And so, that’s basically our history. So now we’re just trying to share what we’ve learned and help other people become healthy.
4:30 Foundations of the perfect health diet
Wendy Myers: Yeah, that’s great. And I love reading your book as well, because I totally identify with what you’re trying to do with the book. It’s to start with the Paleo-based diet, but add in new foods that maybe cavemen didn’t eat that we have absolutely adapted to and are incredibly nutritious. It’s foolish to think we can’t adapt to eating new foods. So what are the foundations or the tenants of the Perfect Health Diet?
Dr. Paul Jaminet: Well, I would say the first and most important thing is it’s a natural whole foods diet. So processed foods in the supermarket, they have a triple whammy of ill health. They tend to be made of purified ingredients, so they lack a lot of nutrition. They tend to be pulled from the most toxic foods, and the manner in which they are prepared in factory uses a lot high heat and pressure which creates more toxins. So it tends to be nutrient-poor, toxin-rich. And so it’s very desirable to shop around the edges of the supermarket, get natural whole foods, cook for yourself at home using natural cooking methods.
And then, our goal is basically to create a diet that is free of toxins and that is optimally nourishing. So it’s the balanced diet that gives you the optimal amount of every nutrient. And so in the book, we go through many of the nutrients that humans need, and figure out how much we need, and think about what mix of foods we should eat in order to get optimal nutrition.
And it works out to maybe three quarters to a pound of meat or fish per day, about a pound of what we call safe starches, about a pound of sugary plant foods and about another pound of vegetables. And so basically, roughly three pounds of plant foods, one pound of animal foods a day. But most of the calories end up coming from the animal foods and from healthy fats that are used to flavor things.
We recommend a lot of what we call supplemental foods that are rich in specific nutrients that you need. Some things like liver, egg yolks, sea food of all kinds, seaweed, shellfish, and oily marine fish like salmon are valuable to include in diet. Fermented vegetables, bone, and stocks and stews made from bones and joints are very good sources of both calcium and collagen. And collagen is extremely important to get in the diet.
So there is a pretty broad range of nutritious foods that we make a point of persuading people to eat. And in general, I would call our diet balanced and moderate. People often tell you to eat a balance diet, but what does that mean? So we try to figure out what that is.
And so we recommend a little bit more in carbohydrates than the average Paleo-diet that you eat. On the other hand, it’s only half to two-thirds as many carbohydrates as the average American eats.
So in some ways, our diet resembles classic gourmet cuisines like classic French cooking or classic Chinese cuisine. A lot of Asian cuisines are very similar to the Perfect Health Diet.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, and I noticed that the basic foundation of the diet is like a Paleo or ancestral type of diet, but you modernized it and improved it by including dairy and starches like rice and potatoes. Why is that?
Dr. Paul Jaminet: First of all, there are historical reasons how we developed it. So I mentioned that my wife and I had problems on Paleo when we first tried it, and I had problems with being too low-carb. So I was excluding the starches and I developed dry eyes, dry mouth, hypothyroid symptoms and other problems, and some gut problems and other things. And I ultimately realized that I needed more carbohydrates, and I just felt a lot better if I was getting carbohydrates in the diet.
As we did more research, we realized that the body really has significant need for dietary glucose. So it’s valuable to nourish yourself with some starches. It’s only once you eat so much that you exceed your body’s need for glucose and the body has to dispose of it that you start running into problems. And that’s generally over about a 30% carb-diet. So even diabetics can eat a 20%-carb diet generally quite well.
So partly in that case, it was personal experience. In other cases, it’s been research-oriented or based on a few cases. Some feedback from readers have led us to investigate the literature more deeply and adjust our recommendations a little. But basically, what’s interesting is we found that when you bring that Paleo perspective and an evolutionary perspective, then a lot of the data in the literature starts to make a lot more sense.
There are usually ways to interpret things that are different from the way the authors of papers interpret them. When you look at their data, the great majority of the data actually points towards the diet like ours. So that was really a pleasing thing to find as we did our research. And it was also very pleasing that the more we learned and the more we adjusted the diet, the more we kept getting led back to gourmet traditional cuisines—like I mentioned French and Thai and Chinese, Japanese cuisines.
In retrospect, that makes a lot of sense. We didn’t realize that at that time. But the reward system of the human brain has evolved to make healthy foods taste delicious to us. And so if you’re eating a natural whole foods diet, then the meals that taste great would generally be the healthiest ones. So it’s very pleasing that we ended up in a place where all of the evidence seems to point in the same direction and to be supportive of our diet.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, absolutely. Do you think that there’s something to be said for some people need more starches than others and that it’s an individual thing? Some people that I listened to said they do better with their way or whatnot, doing less starches and less grains, and others need a lot more.
Dr. Paul Jaminet: Well, there are some variations, but I would say that most of the variations are due to things like different gut bacteria and gut flora, or to health conditions like greatest illnesses like diabetes or bowel disease. In general, I would say 30% carbs is really optimal for everybody. It’s optimal for the human body, but some people have genetic disorders and glucose metabolism that usually shows up in the brain.
So those people may want to switch to a ketogenic diet, which tends to be lower carb. And we’ve had dozens of people care their migraines by switching to a ketogenic diet.
I would say that’s very common, some sort of genetic disorders that affect glucose metabolism. And then, the biggest factor that makes people have trouble with carbs is gut dysbiosis. The carbohydrates feed whatever infectious pathogens they have in their gut, and they get a big influx of toxins from the microbial activity and if they’re lousy.
The solution there isn’t to never eat carbs for the rest of your life. It’s to fix the gut problem and restore normal gut flora, and then you will be able to eat carbohydrates.
So, there are some individual differences, but I would say that the fundamental biology of people is pretty similar. A few people have genetic mutations which have an impact, but usually they don’t make a dramatic change in how you should eat. It’s more of tweaking things. And then, gut flora problems can have significant effects creating food sensitivities or problems with carbohydrates.
14:44 Dairy
Wendy Myers: Yeah. That’s a big problem today in our society people are eating so much sugar and wheat and whatnot. The pathogenic bacteria are exploding in people’s intestine. What about dairy? You include dairy on the Perfect Health Diet. Can you explain why you included that?
Dr. Paul Jaminet: That is a little tricky, because it’s such a complicated food. It has to be so that milk can have everything that an infant needs. So it’s a little bit hard to analyze. There are various issues with it.
On the good side, the nutrient composition is just about perfect. And the fatty acid profile is just about perfect for us. So it’s just like it’s the perfect food for infants. It’s still an extremely good food for adults in terms of its nutrient content.
So it would be a shame to give that up. Now, the basic potential problems are cross-species proteins. So many mammalian proteins will be bio-active in us, but yet they’re foreign and we can have sensitivities to them. They may not match our biology that well.
So it’s not uncommon to have sensitivities to casein – one of the proteins in dairy – if it’s not properly digested. And pasteurized milk, it seems to make it hard to digest. Then they can have various hormones and other things. And then milk can also carry infectious disease. It’s possible that pasteurization may not entirely kill all pathogens. So they are mixed, and people don’t cook milk when they get at home.
So there are various pros and cons to milk. In general, the fatty parts of milk like butter are extremely good for us. Most of the problematic parts of milk are more water-soluble, or they’re in white blood cells or other things that are in the milk, if the cow had an infection or something.
So something like butter, especially clarified butter or ghee, is good. And fermented dairy is generally quite good because bacteria break down toxins and other harmful things when they ferment. So things like yogurt and aged cheese are generally quite healthy. So we can direct fermented and fatty, dairy foods and recommend it against drinking milk.
Wendy Myers: Are you a proponent of raw dairy?
Dr. Paul Jaminet: Again, it has pros and cons. It’s definitely more digestible, more nourishing, but on the other hand there is an infectious disease risk. So the farmer has to be extremely careful, because it’s very easy for the udder to be contaminated with feces and so on. So it’s a judgment call.
18:50 Butter, cholesterol, and saturated fat
Wendy Myers: Yeah. I love that you said that butter is really nutritious. It kills me whenever I go to a client’s home and everyone has margarine in their refrigerator. And everyone has vilified butter and it is done, and the doctors had told them to avoid it because of high cholesterol. Can you shed a little bit of light on that myth?
Dr. Paul Jaminet: Yeah. Margarine is awful, and butter is just about the perfect fat, especially if it’s clarified butter. There is a lot of prejudice against saturated fats, and that’s largely disappeared because with another 20 years of research, people realized that none of it panned out.
Actually in clinical trials, saturated fat always does as well or better than other kinds of fat or than carbohydrates. There was a lot of testing and of those, especially the polyunsaturated fats, because when lipid hypothesis was big, everybody assumed that if you replaced saturated fats with polyunsaturated fats, it had been shown that that could lower cholesterol levels.
Everybody figured, “If we lower cholesterol levels, then we’ll have fewer heart attacks.” And so they made these clinical trials where they replaced saturated fats with polyunsaturated fats. And in nearly all of them, the death rate went up substantially in polyunsaturated fat group.
So in retrospect, people have done some epidemiological studies, which seem to suggest saturated fat might be bad. And those with more data, we’ve found that those correlations disappeared or reversed. And then people made improper inferences from a bunch of really short-term studies like the response to a single meal and inflammatory response to a single meal. If you’re changing your diet— people are eating one diet, if you give them a totally different set of foods, then the short-term response doesn’t indicate the long-term helpfulness.
So there are just a lot of mistaken inferences. Generally speaking, what we’ve learned is that saturated fats are really extremely good for intra-cellular health. They make your mitochondria very healthy, your cells very healthy. And that’s a foundation for general health.
The short-term negative effects are—saturated fats help cells push out things they don’t want into the blood, and then the body has to deal with that. So there’s a little bit of dynamics there, but actually overtime, saturated fats will generally make people healthier.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. I’ve also read that you need saturated fats in the diet to absorb minerals into your bones, as well.
Dr. Paul Jaminet: Saturated fats make up like 45% or so of all the fats in the body. And they’re also building blocks for making cholesterol and other lipids, and for making important hormones, the sterile hormones, things like vitamin D and related things, testosterone. So they’re definitely nourishing. When people eat lipid-deficient diets like the macrobiotic diet, then they often get into situations where the body is really starved free of these fats with negative health effects.
Wendy Myers: What about with red meats or any kind of meats with saturated fats? You obviously need to be eating those for health as well, right?
Dr. Paul Jaminet: Yeah, that’s right. So we recommend making ruminant meats like beef, lamb, goat as a cornerstone of your diet, plus fish and seafood. So in general, anything, any animal where the food chain is built on something green like green grasses in case of cows or on algae in the case of seafood, it’s going to be the healthiest food for us.
The animals whose food chain is based on nuts and seeds tend to be less healthy for us. So in general, the red meat items are quite good for us. The one possible exception is pork. A lot of pork animals carry infections. So I recommend not eating pork liver, pork blood, pork intestines; and also cooking other cuts of pork thoroughly. So it’s probably good to simmer them for 20 minutes or something in order to make sure you kill any pathogens that might have infected that pig.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I read something interesting the other day that bacon is the most nutritious part of the pig. Is that supposed to be the case?
Dr. Paul Jaminet: I wouldn’t say that, but it’s benign and relatively safe. It’s among the safest parts of the pig.
24:54 Hybridization and meat quality
Wendy Myers: Okay. Yeah, I was really excited when I learned that. I really like bacon. But even, I’m worried about eating it now, because there are parasitic infection issues with pigs. But can you tell me about your knowledge about the history about hybridization or breeding of beef, and how does this affect quality of the meat?
Dr. Paul Jaminet: Well, I’m not an expert on the history of cattle breeding. So you may be thinking about the different types of milk and the different types of caseins in animals. So it seems like some people maybe extra-sensitive to certain breeds of cow.
There’s also such a thing as a beef allergy which has turned out to be due to– it’s actually a tick allergy, but any bodies with the tick can cross-react with beef. But everybody who has that continues eating beef. So I guess it’s not that severe.
And the casein problem which creates sensitivities to milk, that’s really dependent on poor digestion. So if people’s digestion is working well, then they won’t really have that sensitivity. So those kinds of sensitivities are usually diagnostic for digestive issue.
26:28 Foods to include in the diet
Wendy Myers: Okay. So what foods do you think are particularly nutritious and should be included in one’s diet?
Dr. Paul Jaminet: I would say liver is extremely important. It has a lot of nutrients that are pretty hard to get elsewhere. And if you just include a quarter pound of liver per week in your diet, then a lot of nutritional issues will often go away.
And then another key one is egg yolks. And we recommend including three egg yolks a day in your cooking. You can eat the egg whites also, but egg sensitivities are pretty common. And also, the egg white doesn’t have much nutrition. So you can actually increase the nutrient density of your diet if you discard the egg whites and eat more meat to get that protein, and just keep the egg yolks. And you can avoid…
Wendy Myers: That’s funny. That’s the exact opposite of what so many trainers, or so many will be seeing this as common knowledge to eat the egg yolks and not the whites.
Dr. Paul Jaminet: Yeah, that’s another mistake from cholesterol phobia. So the egg white is basically protein. Not many people are deficient in protein. It’s pretty easy to find meat or fish to give you enough protein.
Wendy Myers: Can you bypass the sensitivity issues that many people have with eggs just by eating the yolks?
Dr. Paul Jaminet: Yeah. First of all, most of the sensitivity is generally to proteins in the white. So if you discard the white, you are reducing your odds of sensitivity by 80% to 90%. And the other thing to do is to cook the white. So I would recommend mixing it in with something like coconut milk or something else in some kind of dish or soup or stew or something, and then cooking it.
And the cooked yolk proteins are much more easily digested. So in one study, the raw proteins were only 54% digested but the cooked ones were 93% digested. If you cook them, then you’re reducing your chances of your sensitivity by 90% again.
So just those two steps, discarding the white and cooking the yolks, are probably reducing any sensitivity reactions by 95% or maybe more. That will generally prevent any sensitivity from developing in the first place. As long as you heal up your digestive tract the sensitivity will go away.
So you just don’t want to introduce lots of those undigested proteins into your body, because then you’ll keep generating more anti-bodies. If you can cook them enough so that you reduce the influx and then heal your gut, then the anti-bodies will go away and the sensitivity will go away.
Wendy Myers: What are some of the other foods that you think are really nutritious that people should be eating every day?
Dr. Paul Jaminet: Seafood is really important. Shellfish has a lot of nutrition. We recommend one meal a week of oily marine fish like salmon, sardines. We recommend eating seaweeds which have a lot of valuable minerals.
We recommend fermented vegetables. Fermented foods have a lot of nutrients that are hard to get otherwise, like vitamin K2, vitamin B12, nucleotides, phospholipids. So there are various useful things there. And they also make the vegetables more digestible. So you get a lot of vegetable nutrition, and you get a lot of probiotic bacteria. So you want to ferment vegetables in a fermenting chamber that creates an environment similar to our colon. That way, you’ll generate a lot of beneficial bacteria.
And then finally, I would say you need collagen. So you should have lots of connective tissues and some bones in your diet. And you should simmer them for quite a while to render the digestible and solubilized minerals from the bone. If you make soups and stews out of bones and joints and connective tissue material, it’s good to buy beef tendon, chicken feet, ox tails, bones that you can use for making soups and stews.
And so, we always have sets of food preparing, vegetable fermenting. We always have bones and joints material around and we make a stock. After we cook dinner, we can put some bones on the stove and simmer them for three hours. Then, we got a stock that we can use for cooking for the next few days.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. I’ve got a habit of making chicken broth at least once a week, and I just have a little cup every morning. What a lot of people don’t realize, especially if they have a degenerative joint issues or arthritis, that they need that collagen to repair their joints essentially.
Dr. Paul Jaminet: Yeah. So collagen supplements are really well-attested But if you go to a store and look at the price of the supplement, it’s like this tiny amount, $30 to $40. Whereas you can get a joint material, collagen-rich material, extremely for $3 a pound at the butcher, and just cook it yourself. It’s extremely important.
So collagen is 30% of all the protein in your body. Basically, this extra-cellular matrix material is 30% of your body weight, just about. And it’s constantly breaking down, and you need to provide the nutrients to replenish it. And often people get are chronic infections. This is one of my problems, where the extra-cellular matrix is getting broken down by the infection. You need to constantly repair it. So you need extra collagen, extra vitamin C and other nutrients. And you need carbohydrates. So, it’s important to get collagen in your diet. It makes a difference.
34:09 Foods to eliminate from the diet
Wendy Myers: Yeah, and that bone broth is also extremely mineral-rich as well. You’re leeching all those minerals from the bones. It’s just an incredibly nutritious food. So what foods do you advocate eliminating from the diet?
Dr. Paul Jaminet: Most of the standard Paleo items, like cereal grains, legumes, added sugar and vegetable seed oils that are high in Omega 6. So, definitely cutting down Omega 6 fats is a major, major point of emphasis for our diet. You really need very little Omega 6 in your diet: 2%, 3% of energy is optimal. And there are really big negative effects to eating Omega 6 fats beyond about 4%of energy. And the average American is eating 9%.
So I’d say that’s one of the major problems with the American diet. And it’s also a major reason why US life expectancy is about four years shorter than most of Europe or East Asia. There really isn’t that much difference in our diet apart from we have higher omega 6 intake from vegetable oils.
The grains and legumes. The reason for that is basically grasses co-evolve with mammals. Herbivorous mammals had been grazing on cereal grains and legumes for 50 million years. These grains and legumes have evolved toxins in their seeds to prevent mammalian digestion from working, and those toxins work against us. And if they get into the body, they work not only against the digestive tract but against all of our other organs too. And there is a lot of evidence for grains and legumes causing problems.
So many people have improved their health by going on gluten-free diets, which get rid of the most dangerous grain toxins. There are also plenty of studies relating to legumes. There was just a study out that people who ate tofu regularly had a much higher risk for cognitive impairment and brain atrophy 20 years later.
Wendy Myers: I had a really unfortunate thing happened with that. I went vegetarian right after I had my daughter. And at about one year old, I started stuffing her full of tofu. I had this brilliant idea that she was going to get her healthy beans.
It’s the vegetarian diet. The basis of it is beans for protein. And I started feeding her tofu every single day. And she has a one year speech delay. I think that definitely I was in part responsible. And additionally, soy, if it’s fed to children, it can give them manganese toxicity as well, which is real nasty. It’s so nasty.
Dr. Paul Jaminet: Yeah, yeah. Manganese is a neurotoxin too. It’s unfortunate. Hopefully, she’ll fully recover. If she is eating well now, then the body has great healing powers and so it should normalize itself.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. I’m hopeful it will. Definitely, no more soy and she’s on definitely a Paleo diet. So she will be fine.
Dr. Paul Jaminet: Yeah. So probably the biggest difference in regards to the grains and legumes from other Paleo diets is we recommend including white rice. And it basically gets back to the fundamental principal of our diet. We’re trying to eliminate toxins and provide an optimal amount of nutrition.
White rice is unique among the grains, and all the known toxins in rice are destroyed during cooking. And you can destroy many of the other grain toxins if you cook them for a long time in simmering water. But nobody likes to have soggy spaghetti.
But white rice, the normal cooking of white rice destroys its toxins. So it’s quite a safe food. And we don’t want to exclude foods unnecessarily. And like I said before, glucose is a nutrient. So white rice, even though it’s not nutrient-rich, it does have some nutrition and it’s certainly a very convenient food.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, that’s really interesting that you’re saying that white rice should be eaten instead of brown rice. We’ve been told forever that brown rice is healthier than white rice.
Dr. Paul Jaminet: I don’t think so. The brown has most of the proteins and most of the toxins. And so if you mill off the brown, you’re actually making a cereal grain safer.
Some authorities recommend eating the brown because of fiber, but actually in clinical trials where they give grain fiber to people, the people who get the grain fiber always end up with worse cell. And that makes sense, because the beneficial kinds of fiber are actually the ones in fruits and vegetables, or there’s a kind called resistant starch, which is not what’s in the brown.
So resistant starch is most common actually in potatoes and tubers, starchy root vegetables and storage organs. So it’s actually very good to eat potatoes and fruits and vegetables, and get the fibers in those, but you don’t want to get fiber from whole grains.
40:35 Problems with grains, legumes, beans, and soy
Wendy Myers: What are some of the problems of other types of grains like gluten-containing grains for instance?
Dr. Paul Jaminet: Wheat has a lot of negative effects. It seems like people whose ancestors have been eating wheat for thousands of years have adapted somewhat and are better at detoxifying them. So it seems like the negative effects of wheat show up most strongly in aboriginal population or in people who don’t have a long history of agriculture. But even in Europeans, there is a lot of people with gluten-sensitivity. There may be insidious effects from various wheat toxins.
So there was study last year in Japan where they looked at children. They compared children who routinely eat wheat versus children who routinely eat rice. So rice is the traditional food in Japan, but wheat has been making in-routes. And it turns out that the children who ate wheat had lower IQ’s and signs of brain damage on MRI’s compared to the children who ate rice. And they’re IQ’s where like three points or four points lower.
There are other similar evidences. Like in China, there are wheat-growing regions and rice-growing regions. And in the China study, they compiled a lot of health data from, I think it was 829 Chinese provinces. It turned out the strongest correlation with good health was eating rice. And the strongest correlation with bad health was eating wheat.
So if rice is significantly better than wheat, that’s exactly the pattern that you’d expect because those are staple foods in different regions. People are eating a lot of them. So they have a big impact, and they show up high in the correlation studies.
So likewise, when you look at wheat-eating countries versus rice-eating countries like compare East Asia to America and Europe. Generally speaking, the more wheat people eat, the shorter the life expectancy in that country. The more they eat rice, the longer the life expectancy.
So studies tends to say that rice is safer than wheat, that wheat does harm. But it’s really hard to conclusively prove the negative effects when it takes 50, 60, 70 years for the negative effects to show up.
So if wheat is shortening your life span by three or four years, it’s just gradually breaking down bodily functions, but it’s very hard to do an experiment where you can observe the effects. It takes 70 years to show up.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. So what are some of the problems with legumes? Like what problems do beans pose on the diet?
Dr. Paul Jaminet: Well, they’re very similar biologically to grains. So they evolved a lot of toxins to suppress mammalian digestion, and those can cause great harm.
In many of them, just eating a small amount of bean that’s raw can be fatal. We mentioned a few cases like that in the book. Raw beans will kill rats or mice very quickly.
So now cooking destroys many of the toxins, but in order to really reduce the toxin level from beans, what you need to do is soak them for like 24 hours to start the germination process. That really cuts down the toxin load. And then you need to cook them thoroughly.
So it’s basically like traditional Indian cooking where they soak the beans for 24 hours, and then they simmer them in a curry for six hours, really long cooking times. So they can be made safe or most beans can, but nobody cooks that way nowadays. Certainly industrial food producers don’t. And in factories, they’re trying to get the food in and out through the factory as quickly as they can. And so they are quite toxin-rich and we just recommend avoiding it.
Wendy Myers: A lot of people think that soy is healthy. Yet, you exclude it from the Perfect Health Diet. I completely agree with excluding it from the diet for so many reasons. Can you explain some of your detailed reasons for why you recommend avoiding soy?
Dr. Paul Jaminet: We talked about some of them. It does have a lot of toxins that act on digestion. I mentioned the tofu study where it let to cognitive has declined. Soy is one of the most common food sensitivities. In fact, probably the majority of people that have egg-sensitivities are actually sensitive to soy proteins in the eggs, because chickens are usually fed soy to give them protein.
And then, soy also has huge effects on reproductive functions in both men and women. So it tends to impair sperm quality in men. It’s associated with uterine fibroids and endometriosis in women. It has various phytoestrogens and other things with hormonal activity.
So there’s a lot of potential issues with soy. Also the oil, soy bean oil, is majority Omega 6 fat. So that really contributes to the Omega 6 problem that I mentioned. So there are a lot of reasons for avoiding soy.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. I had someone complain about a blog post to my site about soy, vilifying soy. The commenter was complaining that the phytoestrogen of soy are very actually weak, and that they don’t affect our estrogen receptors very well. What do you think about that?
Dr. Paul Jaminet: Well they are weak estrogens, but I think there is a reason to believe that they have significant effects.
So for instance, my wife ate a lot of soy for a long time and developed uterine fibroids and endometriosis, and that association was very common. And I don’t think it’s necessarily due to the phytoestrogens. I think it’s probably other toxins that are more relevant.
But I think the fundamental issue is this plants have been getting eaten by mammals for tens of millions of years. Unlike vegetables where their big threat is insects and germs and they make a lot of toxins but they’re not that toxic to us, these are plants that have been making toxins specifically for mammals. And they act very specifically on our biology, and disrupt our biology. And they’re invented to prevent our digestive tracts from digesting food. And genes are shared by all the organs. So anything that is powerful enough to stop our intestine from digesting food is also powerful enough to disrupt the function of other organs.
And so I don’t really see a good reason for eating these foods. Their fatty acid composition is bad. Their proteins are toxic to us. There is plenty of good protein sources in meat and fish. So even if you are a vegetarian, I’d recommend you eat dairy and eggs to get proteins. You can eat yogurt and eggs, and be a Lacto Ovo Vegetarian. So I just don’t see anything positive about soy to make it worth taking the risk.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. It’s really sad there is such an escalating problem with infertility in the United States. I think it’s directly or definitely correlated with soy because we get a lot of soy. We get so much more soy. We are ingesting so much more of it than we realized, because it’s in everything. It’s the filler in fast food, filler in vegetarian product foods, in Asian restaurants. It’s cooked in dishes everywhere. It’s definitely something to be wary of.
Dr. Paul Jaminet: Yeah. Of course, it’s one of the subsidized crops in the United States and just the cheapest, one of the cheapest raw materials for food producers. And they use it in everywhere.
Wendy Myers: Thank you so much for being in the show and that was just so informative. Can you tell the listeners a little about your Perfect Health Retreat? I think it’s really interesting that you have this retreat that people can go there and they can learn, and eat your diet, and start incorporating the principles into their lives.
Dr. Paul Jaminet: Yeah. We wanted to make it easier for people to learn our program. Actually, we have a lot more than diet. We also have lifestyle advice in regards to Circadian Rhythms, intermittent fasting, enhancing immunity, how to overcome chronic infections.
If people go to our website perfecthealthdiet.com and look at our reader results page, they’ll see that we got our readers reporting cures of like hundreds of conditions. We think that makes sense, because we’re basically trying to address every single factor that impairs health, and remove all the causes of disease.
So if we get rid of toxins from your diet, if we nourish your body optimally, if we give your body the right environmental stimulation and support immune function optimally; then it should have the best possible chance to overcome whatever is causing the diseases.
But we still want to learn exactly what we can cure and we want to help people cure their own diseases, because so many people are not getting health properly from medicine. And so we started out this Perfect Health Retreat Program. It’s in an upscale property in Austin, Texas. And basically, all of your food is provided for 30 days. You’re going to have a 30-day educational program of talks and so on.
There is a resident trainer with an exercise program including yoga instructors, primal seven movements. There is a gym membership. There are classes in cooking and gardening, hunting and fishing. It’s just an extensive program helping you learn how to cook, how to eat, how to shop for food, how to live your life optimally.
And so we give people an optimum diet and lifestyle for 30 days so that they see the effects in their body. And we also train them in everything they need to know, understanding the science behind everything so that they’ll be able to live out the diet and lifestyle when they go back home.
And so far at least, it has had tremendous results. We got like 10 participants so far, and every one of them has had a tremendous health improvements. And the bright new conditions are great. We had four obese people who have lost tremendous amount of weight. One fellow who’s there now had lost 21 pounds in less than a month.
Wendy Myers: Woah. I’m going there next year!
Dr. Paul Jaminet: We’ve had several diabetics who normalized their blood sugar. We’ve had a woman with Sjogren’s syndrome, who is now able to cry, and one with lupus who has recovered a great deal.
We had a woman with Sjogran’s syndrome who had to walk with the cane and everybody who is on pain medications has given up all their pain medications after staying with us. And she was walking with the cane and had been scheduled for knee and hip surgery. She doesn’t need the surgery and now is walking pain free.
So, it’s exciting because I think we have a chance to prove with an unbiased sample. We see everybody. We see the results. And so if there are any negative results, we see those too. We haven’t had any yet, and hopefully we won’t.
And that’s good because people just don’t believe reader results reported to a website, because they don’t know if it’s a bias sample. Some people have negative results and didn’t report it. And this is a really good test, because at the retreat house, we are providing the food.
It’s a controlled environment. There are bright lights during the day, and dim amber lights at night for Circadian rhythm purposes. We provide exercise at the right opportunities at the right Circadian times. So it really is a good test and everything is optimized and it really seems to be working for everybody who has gone so far.
Wendy Myers: That’s a really a testament to using food as medicine. When you nourish the body properly, it can heal its powerful regenerative capacities.
Dr. Paul Jaminet: Yeah, that’s right. I think diet and lifestyle are really crucial. Diet, nutrition, lifestyle.
Wendy Myers: So what projects do you have on the horizon? What are you up to these days?
Dr. Paul Jaminet: Well, I’m working on preparing and improving the educational materials for the Perfect Health Retreats. And ultimately, we’re going to make videos out of them. And so we may have video products eventually.
And my wife and I are working on a cookbook. I ‘m also working with the Ancestral Health Society to create a scholarly journal called The Journal of Evolution and Health. And we’ll be launching that pretty soon.
That’s a very exciting project because hopefully it can be a forum for us that reach out and show the benefits of ancestral diet and lifestyle to the medical community, to the academic scientific community. And I’m really looking forward to promoting that conversation and compiling the evidence that diet and lifestyle can really be effective in healing.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. I’m really excited to see what comes out of that journal because it can be difficult to find studies and peer-reviewed research and what not on the benefits of eating grass-fed meat and eating an ancestral diet. So I’m really hungry for more information on those subjects.
Dr. Paul Jaminet: Yeah. I think generally, it can really be a focal point for bringing everybody who’s interested in natural healing approaches, and synthesizing all the knowledge and experience we have with the best science and best research, and engaging with other people who are outside the ancestral lifestyle, and exposing them to what we learned, and bringing more people into the community. So, I think it’s potentially a very exciting project.
Wendy Myers: Paul, thank you so much for being on the show. And everyone, please take a peek of his amazingly informative website, perfecthealthdiet.com. He’s got an incredible blog, supplement recommendations, recipes and of course more information on his book, The Perfect Health Diet. So again, Paul, thank you for being on the show.
Dr. Paul Jaminet: Okay. Thank you very much Wendy.
Wendy Myers: Thank you. So next week I’ll be interviewing fellow podcaster Beverly Myer on how to optimize your feel good neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine without supplement or anti-depressant medications. This is a big issue because 10% of the population is on anti-depressant medication.
It’s the wrong approach for many people since studies do show that anti-depressants typically by the placebo effect. And you need to start thinking about natural approaches like diet and maybe some targeted supplementation.
So everyone, thank you so much out there. To all the listeners for tuning into the Live 110 Podcast. Please remember to leave a review on iTunes if you enjoyed what you heard today on the show. Thank you so much for listening. Bye-bye.
