REBOOTED MINDSET
Rebooted Mindset is a weekly talk show that dives deep into real life experiences and offers tried and true solutions that work.
Tune in every Tuesday at 5:30PM EST to join host Alida Hernandez on her journey of recovery, healing and discovery after a life-changing stroke in 2017. Also, Alida is a survivor of several traumas that affect many of us daily.
Through her own struggles, Alida has discovered life-altering remedies for physical, mental and spiritual wellness. She's had to re-learn how to walk, move and regain her strength, and now she's sharing her knowledge with the world.
With a focus on embracing wellness as a lifestyle, Rebooted Mindset aims to help you become a healthier version of yourself. From the body to the mind, the soul to the spirit, Alida shares valuable wellness tips and advice for everyone.
Join us today and start your own journey towards wellness. Listen to Rebooted Mindset every Tuesday at 5:30PM EST.
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REBOOTED MINDSET
Episode #45 - Lies I taught in Medical School with Dr. Lufkin: Lifestyle, Diet, and Chronic Disease Reversal
Episode #45 - Lies I taught in Medical School with Dr. Lufkin: Lifestyle, Diet, and Chronic Disease Reversal
Have you ever wondered about the long-held beliefs we take as gospel truth, especially when it comes to our health and wellness? The fascinating Dr. Lufkin, author of 'Lies I Taught in Medical School', joins us today to unravel some of these misconceptions. He shares his journey from being a staunch medical professor to his eye-opening realization that the evolution of medical knowledge can sometimes lead to misinformation being passed on in medical schools.
Dr. Lufkin's personal story of reversing his chronic diseases through lifestyle changes is a testament to the power of diet, sleep, exercise, and meaningful relationships. We discuss real-life examples from his family - his dietitian aunt who maintained a healthy weight throughout her life, his 83-year-old physically fit uncle, and his mother who lived to 97, all showing the profound impact of lifestyle on health. Our conversation takes a cultural twist as we compare the lifestyle differences between Puerto Rico and America and their effects on health.
We delve deeper into the power of lifestyle changes in preventing and reversing chronic diseases like Type 2 diabetes, using Dr. Lufkin's son's recovery as an example. We also explore the benefits of intermittent fasting and the tricky ways marketing can misrepresent the healthiness of food. As we discuss diet and lifestyle's importance in caring for those with Alzheimer's disease, Dr. Lufkin highlights the influence of the pharmaceutical industry and the need to address mental health when making dietary changes. Join us for this revealing conversation and broaden your understanding of health, wellness, and the lies we've been learning all along.
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Is this thing on? Welcome to Rebooted the Podcast. I'm your host, elita Hernandez. Come join me weekly to hear about my journey from recovery to healing after having a stroke and other life challenges. So let's get talking. Hi everybody, I'm back. Elita Hernandez Rebooted the Podcast, always bringing you interesting and important things for your health. Today I have Dr Lufkin, who wrote a book about the lies I taught at medical school, so this is going to be very interesting.
Speaker 2:Good morning.
Speaker 1:Dr Lufkin, how are you?
Speaker 2:Hi, good morning Elita. I'm so happy to be on your podcast. I'm a fan and it's great to be on the show.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much, so we got to just deep dive in. I don't know how we're going to begin with the book. So, first of all, you've been a medical doctor for all your life I guess well, most of your life and did you teach as well?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I went to medical school after college and then did my residency and internship and then a post graduate fellowship and then I immediately began teaching at UCLA medical school, where I, as a professor. I became a professor there, and the great thing about being a medical professor in a lot of situations is that I was able to not only practice medicine and see patients. I was able to continue being doing what doctors do. But in addition to that, as a medical professor, I was able to do research and have a laboratory funded from research grants and publish a lot of peer reviewed scientific papers. And then maybe the one of the best things about it was also teaching and working with medical students and other health practitioners in training and young doctors, and as often as not, I'd learn more from them than they would from me, I think, just from their questions and their bright minds. It's so much fun. It's a great job.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. That's awesome. So this book that you published recently when did you start that book?
Speaker 2:This book. I started it about two years ago. It followed on a personal health journey that I had and that's what sort of triggered me writing the book, but it's something I've been thinking about for about the last decade really.
Speaker 1:Wow. So the title of the book is Lies. I Taught in Medical School. So when I saw that I was like, what is that about? Because I am a person that in my journey since I was six, since I had the stroke six and a half years ago, I have changed my complete life. So I've changed from my mindset to how I live my life, what I eat, what I think, like everything. So, to save my life because I had lost 50% of my left side and I didn't have a bleeding stroke, it was just lack of oxygen, but thank God that I was able to recover, that I'm recovered from it A lot of people don't recover and I was fortunate that I was sleeping.
Speaker 1:It happened while I was sleeping and I was woken up by a dream that a doctor walked into my dream and said Ms Hernandez, you just had a stroke, just like that, and I woke up. And I woke up. I was like God, whatever you want to think of something, woke me up to say get up, you just had a stroke. So, yeah, I'm telling you that saved my life, because I don't know what, if I would have kept sleeping or something, who knows I could have. Probably, who knows if I would have died. But since then I've just been on the journey to really find out the truth about health, about getting better, getting your health, improving health and not maintaining disease.
Speaker 2:But healing disease. Yeah, yeah, it's so important to reinvent yourself, like you're doing, and as all of us, we go through our lives. We're continually changing and growing and we're never too old to learn new things and never too old to become a new person. And my journey is a little similar to yours. I was doing fine teaching for many decades at the medical school and then I came down with four chronic diseases. I didn't have a stroke, but I developed four diseases that I was prescribed medicines for, and these were the same diseases that killed my father, that my father died of, but he was almost 90 when he died, but I was much younger. I still had kids in elementary school and I could see the writing on the wall.
Speaker 2:And when I got those diseases, I began to question and investigate the diseases and investigate the research and I realized that things were changing our understanding of these diseases and that many of the things that I had taught before in medical school and many of the things that are still being taught were incorrect. And in this country we have a big in the world, really we have a big problem with chronic disease, and it's like never before in history. And that's kind of what this book is about. It's about my journey and then the things that helped me reverse these diseases. I eventually got off all the medications, which is great. The diseases were reversed, but in order to do it, I began, I think, like you're doing. I examined my life, I turned the page and I changed my lifestyle. I changed the foods I was eating, the sleep, the exercise, the friendships, the you know all these things make a difference.
Speaker 2:But that's kind of what the book's about and just the idea of lies. The title is sort of provocative, against people's attention. I don't think anyone intentionally teaches lies, but there's a famous quote from an old expert doctor, one of the leading doctors. He said that 50% of what we learn in medical school will be either incorrect or completely wrong in five years. The problem is we don't know which 50% it is that reflects the evolution of medical knowledge and the uncertainty. So when I talk about lies it's just a matter of underscoring the things that maybe we got wrong.
Speaker 2:They weren't really taught, as lies the mistakes we made, kind of.
Speaker 1:Right right right.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean it has to be very difficult. I mean I have empathy for the doctors because you have to go through some grueling education first of all, and then you have to deal with people every day, which is not an easy task. And I dealt with people when I worked in the IT field, right? So I was like customer service, helping people with problems and computer things, and that wasn't easy. Because you have to deal with people, you have to deal with their issues, right, so you have to deal with their personalities. You have to be like a psychologist almost trying to help other people.
Speaker 1:And I find people are very stuck in the how do you call it, the ritual of medical, of medicine, maybe you know like, oh, I have something wrong, let me go to the doctor, let me go to the doctor, oh yeah, they give me a pill, they give me, you know, I mean, and I mean I personally I tell you I don't like any medicine, any medicine, okay, unless I'm dying, that I have to have something, you know. But I've got enough all my medicine. I was diabetic, I'm still type two, you know, diabetic, but I may, I watch, I maintain my A1C's at 6.1. So I'm, you know, I'm good and, but I was at 13 and a half.
Speaker 2:Wow, wow so.
Speaker 1:I went from 13 and a half before I had the stroke okay to 6.1, from changing everything.
Speaker 2:Wow, good for you. That's your mark, markable. Yeah, that's great yeah.
Speaker 1:And I think I mean my personal opinion. Unfortunately, our foods, nobody really even though we have an. Fda, and we have all this stuff about foods. I don't think it's really managed properly, like the chemicals they put in foods, like the preservatives. All that stuff I do a lot of. I do a lot of reading. I do a lot of research also and I've read a couple of articles, studies that found out that some of the chemicals in our food are changing our DNA.
Speaker 1:Absolutely that it changes the composition of DNA which could could I don't know could enable these diseases to really get to us, you know, and other chemicals that are in our foods that are not necessary. You know, like we need to go back to basic eating raw food salads and greens and natural foods and things like that, like we used to do and that'd be so dependent on the store frozen dinner.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, absolutely, somebody. Somebody said that if we, if we went back to eating the foods 100 that only eight foods that were available 150 years ago, most of us would experience a significant improvement in our health. Yes, because of all the you know, the ultra process junk foods that are really problematic and and right and like you say, the simple trick in a supermarket is just avoid the center aisles where all the junk food is, and if you stay around, foods that require a refrigerator or a freezer or foods that that spoil are, are, in general, going to be healthier than foods that sit on that don't spoil and sit on the shelves for 20 or 30 years.
Speaker 1:I mean, I didn't know how people don't think about it. If you have I don't know, say an example some kind of bread you buy has preservatives in it. Most of the time they'll start getting moldy when it gets old. But I've seen other ones that it looks looks just as fresh and has been there for a month. How is like people don't think about why is that thing still look the same after a month? That's not normal.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like let me eat this oh.
Speaker 2:Like the hostess Twinkie after you know 20 years, I hope. I hope your sponsor is not hostess. I apologize.
Speaker 1:No, way no no, no.
Speaker 2:No way but it's funny, yeah, it's funny. You say that growing up, when I was raised, my mom was a dietitian. So she was, you know, she worked in hospitals and she basically taught people about food. So you can imagine what we ate at home was. You know, we followed the recommendations of the, you know, the FDA and the USDA, the food pyramid, we, we, we, basically we got rid of butter and we ate margarine. It was full of seed oils and trans fats. You know, we, we, we ate low fat food and and and what. In my opinion, I think a lot of those recommendations are unhealthy and actually are driving a lot of the chronic diseases we have. Those types of processed foods like margarine are not as healthy as something, say, butter or olive oil or coconut oil, even.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:That way. But yeah, it's, it's, it's fascinating and I, I I believe that the number one thing we can do to affect our health for chronic disease is is in the choices we make about our nutrition. Other things are going to be important, you know sleep, stress, exercise, but but nutrition is something we get to choose every single day. We get to make a choice every day and and start over with that and you're you're absolutely spot on what you said about the healthcare system and and all of us are a part of it as participants, in other words, we.
Speaker 2:When I go into, I would rather have a pill than not. It's easier to have a pill than than do, than maybe watch my diet, but at the end of the day, watching my diet and eating healthy is going to be much more effective than any pills, because a lot of the pills just treat the symptoms and I can take the pills, but I won't. I won't necessarily get better, but if I change my lifestyle and what I eat and how I live my life, I will become a different person and I won't need the pills anymore, Exactly, exactly.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, I'm anti pills and then I'm reading everything Like right now, this is my breath. Oh, you can't see my breakfast, but I have my protein shake. I have every morning plant based protein. I have a moringa tree. You know what moringa is? Moringa is a plant which has oh, yes, Okay.
Speaker 1:So I have a moringa tree across the street. I cut the leaves, I dry them, I dry them up and I put them in my protein shake, I put them in my tea, I put it in, I eat it as a microgreen. You know, it's just like right outside.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's nice, I live in South Florida so we just went through mango season so I'm outside picking mangoes, I pick up the coconuts, I pick up the avocados that grow. My family's from Puerto Rico, so my grandparents had a farm. So my summers as a little girl I spent in Puerto Rico in the farm feeding the chickens and taking care of the animals that work for food and all the plants, and I used to just grab the fruits, froth the trees and eat them. So I have a thing about nature and dirt and I'd like to get in there. So I have, like, my herb plants here, my basil and my cilantro and all the things that I use for cooking.
Speaker 1:I grow it myself and a little space that I have, but I remember those days. So you were talking, I got to mention my aunt. So my aunt Hilda, she passed a while ago. Rest in peace. But my aunt Hilda was one of the first ones, one of the, well, the first kind of woman in our family to get a degree in the 50s. She went to Hunter College in New York and she became a dietitian and so she had to. Oh, really.
Speaker 1:Yeah, she was a dietitian and I remember when we used to go her house she always had she had her pyramid right, so we had a little protein or vegetable or or carb or whatever. Then she would give us. Even at the end of dinner she would have a little dessert, even if it was a little bit of ice cream or some fruit or something. But she had everything measured and we and she maintained my aunt did not gain, she didn't gain weight till the end of her life. So she maintained if she had the same weight, I think she fluctuated three or four pounds and her entire life and she died at 85.
Speaker 2:Wow Good.
Speaker 1:And the only reason, yeah, and she died because she got shingles and then the shingles got complicated and then she had the men's shot. I don't know what happened. They just, you know, aged to and and she passed. And my uncle, her husband, he used to. He used to man the farm. He built the house that they lived in Puerto Rico. He built the house I was there when they built it and then he's had the farm. So he used to grow beans and and coffee and everything you can think of, and he, he was still in doing that at 83 years old. He was still fit, muscles, he had muscles. He was still fit out there every day. He worked out there and he had, he told me when I was there taking care of them. He said to me um, so I'm having a hard time breathing, I'm not sure what's going on. And that's when they found out he had lung cancer.
Speaker 2:So yeah.
Speaker 1:So that that did him in at the end. You know, um, but I'm telling you, if it wasn't for disease, he would still be in the field.
Speaker 2:Uh-huh.
Speaker 1:Mother mother died at 97 years old and she had 16 children and she lived in Puerto Rico on the farm and she was a strong, tall woman. I remember she was very tall and strong and she lived to like 96, 97 years old. Wow.
Speaker 2:Good for her yeah.
Speaker 1:And the thing is talking about food. So I find food is so important and people don't understand this. You know that's the food you put in. You is so important. In Puerto Rico the soil is red. It's like a brick color because it's so fertile, the minerals. You can smell it. I have. I just smell it. I wish I could take it with me. That, don't let you.
Speaker 1:I just want to take a whole bag here Because if I bring that here and put it in my pot, forget it, everything will grow and um. So I remember just everything being so fresh and you still, when you go to the island, you can go and you walk the. You just walk down the street. You got trees everywhere, fruits and everything you can think of. You know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I just visited Puerto Rico a couple of years ago and it was I hadn't been there in a while and it was after the hurricane, but everyone was so friendly and so nice. I just had such a warm feeling at just being on the island and enjoying it. What a, what a wonderful, magical place that is. I think more people know about it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's. People are there told different than they are here. I'm sorry they they something does America does something to people because when you live in Puerto Rico it's a simple life Okay, you live for your family, you take care of your land to help your family, the house, and you have your own things. Of course, times have changed since I was a little girl. I'm 58 now, so it's been a long time. So things have changed in 50 years, you know. But you still have that. You still have that life in the country and stuff like that. But city says change people. You know money changes people. You know people live in different places and you simulate to where you live. So your whole dynamic changes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:So what do you? So? From the things I was reading, you have different categories of diseases, so we can just pick one with diabetes. What have you found out about diabetes?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's very interesting. Diabetes is probably the single most important disease that we're facing and it's the interesting thing about diabetes is that diabetes when I when I say when I talk about diabetes, I'm referring to type two diabetes, which is which is 90 over 90% of it's the most common type. That type one is is a different type, but it's much more in common that the common one that everyone's getting, that more people are getting now than ever in the history of the world, is this type two diabetes and a couple of things really surprised me about it.
Speaker 2:One, that it's so foundational, in other words, type two diabetes in itself. It creates problems with our bodies, but it also contributes to other chronic diseases. Another type two diabetes is linked to heart attack. It's linked to stroke. It's linked to cancer. It's linked to Alzheimer's disease. Alzheimer's disease is called type three diabetes just because of so many people with there's an increased association of glucose abnormalities, which is what diabetes is, and Alzheimer's disease.
Speaker 2:The other interesting thing about type two diabetes that I didn't realize as a as a doctor, I always thought that type two diabetes was, was like a lot of diseases you know you either had it or you didn't have it. You know, and if you had it, you know you, you did things to treat it. Well, what I'm realizing now is type two diabetes is based on something called insulin resistance, and I don't know if you've talked about that with your audience, but it's not yet. But the body doesn't handle, process the normal hormones that metabolize sugars, basically, which is insulin, and this insulin resistance increases over time in all of us, and as we get older, we all get more of this bad insulin resistance. And once the insulin resistance crosses a certain threshold with your like you mentioned or HA1C values or your fasting glucose. Once the insulin resistance gets high enough, then the diagnosis is made you have type two diabetes. But what was a real revelation to me was the fact that all of us, as we get older, are HA1C and our insulin resistance increases. It gets higher and higher. And the way I look at type two diabetes now is it's it's a disease of aging. In other words, it's sort of like gray hair. In other words, if I live long enough and if I don't die of something else first, I will get type two diabetes. Everybody will.
Speaker 2:So what's the message there? Well, the message is that there are things that we can do to prevent type 2 diabetes and, as you found out, there are things. Type 2 diabetes can actually be reversed with lifestyle changes, with diet. You know, unlike maybe a cancer or a stroke, you can't reverse it with diet. You can lower the risk for it, but once you've got it, it's hard to reverse Type 2 diabetes. You can actually go off insulin, go off all your medications I mean, one of my four chronic diseases was prediabetes and I was on metformin and by changing the lifestyle like you did, I was able to wind it back. So I'm no longer prediabetic. I mean, I'm still type 2 diabetes, like we all are, but I'm in remission, in other words, and that was really a revelation to me.
Speaker 2:So the type 2 diabetes, the fact that it contributes to all the chronic diseases, that the top main killers that will kill 90% of us type 2 diabetes is a root cause. And insulin resistance, secondly, that we're all on the path to diabetes through increasing insulin resistance as we age. It's something we're all facing. And then the third thing is that we can reverse type 2 diabetes, and many doctors still don't really accept this, but it's been shown to my satisfaction in control trials. Where, you know and there are companies like Verde Health that actually the insurance will pay for they will put start you on a nutritional plan that will reverse your type 2 diabetes and get it off there.
Speaker 2:And the fact that we all get it we all are on the path to diabetes. What difference does that make? Well, what it does. I think it should inform our choices about the food we eat, even if we're not diabetic, because we're all essentially at risk for type 2 diabetes and we'll eventually get there if we live long enough, so at age 30, at age 40, before we're diabetic, before any of these things happen, we should look at the choices we make in our food and avoid the foods that drive insulin resistance and that drive us on the path to becoming diabetic.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's so true, I was just thinking a couple of things. So my son he's 20, one of my sons is 23 now. When he was about maybe 12, 13 years old, he had gained some weight and he went to the doctor and he said you know, he's pre-diabetic. You know, his sugars are a little high, he's too young, he needs to lose weight. I came home and I'm like heck. No, you know so this is not happening to my son. So, right away, change the diet. You know snow more pizzas. You know no more going to McDonald's. You know the fast way, because, as a, as a, at that time, I was a single mother. Unfortunately, when you're in a rush and you have a job and you have kids, you're trying to find what is the fastest way to feed them and you're not thinking of nutrition, You're thinking I need to feed them. And because everybody takes their kids to McDonald's and Burger King, who cares? It's so bad for you, I don't enter those places. And it took when I saw my child like that, boom. We took care of it. He lost his weight and he was determined as he got older. Now he is completely fit. He goes to the gym every day, he watches what he eat. He lost about 65 pounds of fat as he got older, you know, when he was like 18, 19, when he started working out. And now he's built muscle and he's going for a weightlifting competition for heavy weights and stuff like that. So so he changed his life. He changed his lifestyle.
Speaker 1:He saw me when I got sick with the stroke too, and I wanted to mention that I thought about these things when I worked in IT and I used to be an IT manager, so my job was very, very hectic. I would go, you know, 10, 12 hours a day. I'd be running around, people have problems and I wouldn't eat properly. And I remember I was getting the signs back then about the diabetes, because my sugar would plummet and I would start shaking and I'm like what is wrong with me? And I'm like, and I could feel like I was going to pass out, and I'm like I don't know what's going on, because I had no food in my stomach. I had no, no fuel. So so from me not eating, then eating, spiking my sugar, going up, then going back down, then going back up, I didn't understand it. I understand it Now, the damage I did to my body.
Speaker 1:I was doing damage to my body. So my body couldn't figure out why I store the food, because I need it later. So then I started gaining weight, right. So then I started getting heavy and then I was drinking. So that didn't help, drinking liquor and all that stuff. But I know that my lifestyle contributed to my sickness, due to the of not sleeping properly, drinking alcohol too much Okay, Poor, poor eating habits. So not eating breakfast, not eating till four o'clock in the afternoon, have an eating all day, drinking coffee all day, you know. Try to fill myself with sugar, Okay, which is the worst thing you can do, because white sugar is so bad for you and and like I, destroyed my system and what be. So before I had the stroke, I was heavy, I was. I have lost about 70 pounds since then.
Speaker 1:And of course, maintained it over the last six and a half years. I lost 70 pounds and and it's been a challenge it's not, it's not. I tell people this is not easy. There's no pill. Stop looking for quick fixes. Okay, stop listening to the stuff on TV. Oh, there's a new program. You just come and you take a pill and you lose 50 pounds. No, it's what you put in the mouth. You know. I tell people, right, you?
Speaker 2:have to watch.
Speaker 1:There's no quick fix for anything. You have to work at it. So I say help. Being healthy is a job.
Speaker 2:In our side, one of the things that that I'd be done I've begun doing. And everybody, you know everybody does everyone's different. Everyone has, you know, chooses their own thing. My mom, the dietitian, always told me you know, you get up, have a healthy breakfast, you know if you're going to work out, you eat something before you work out. You know you take some, you know, gatorade or something or you know, and then you have a snack in the middle of the day and then you have lunch and then you have a snack in the middle of the afternoon, then you have dinner and then you have some snacks in the evening. And what I've done is I've understood about myself is that's not a good way for me, and what I do now is I actually I get up in the morning, I don't eat breakfast and I don't eat lunch, and I eat dinner with my family and that's my one meal of the day, and then I don't eat for the rest of the day, and this is something called intermittent fasting that some people do.
Speaker 2:And you know you shouldn't if you have any medical condition, you shouldn't just go ahead and start it, especially if you're a diabetic or anything. But it's something that you know works for some people and I've found for me it really I never thought I would I would be able to function without eating for such a long time, but your body switches to something called ketones and for me at least, I get a lot of clarity in my brain. I used to get like brain fog when I eat breakfast.
Speaker 2:I'd like mid morning. I'd be like you know, after a big lunch and everything. So that's one thing people can look at too is, you know, we're understanding so many different things and there's so many different options that we get to choose with our lifestyle. It's fun to try different things and figure out what works best for our own health, you know.
Speaker 2:Exactly Some people can't tolerate dairy, you know, and for them, you know, that doesn't work. Or some people can't tolerate grains, you know, and. But we, you know, we get to find what food works best for us and it can really make a difference in our lives.
Speaker 1:It does, and I'm happy you mentioned intermittent fasting, because that's one thing that I do do and that's what changed a lot of my, my weight, and that came off faster. So I usually don't eat from 8pm to probably 10 in the morning, so you know 12 hours or something like that, 14 hours. I do intermittent fasting, so I try to eat in between, you know 10 and eight, and you know, and then I don't eat anything after that and drink a lot of water, and especially here in South Florida, so a lot. Oh, my God, we have a heated. I have a heat advisory on my computer because it's been, oh, really Wow.
Speaker 2:The humidity.
Speaker 1:the humidity is the problem is 60% humidity and then it's 95 degrees, so it was like 110.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:So, I mean my picture is beautiful, as if I could just stay at the beach all day would be nice, but I can't.
Speaker 2:I'm out in California and it's hot here, but at least it's drier than on the East. Coast, so at least we have the humidity working for us a little bit.
Speaker 1:I lived in California for 13 years.
Speaker 2:Oh really.
Speaker 1:I lived in San Fernando Valley when I left I lived in Lake Butaris near Sylmar yeah of course. Of course up there.
Speaker 2:Beautiful up there.
Speaker 1:I missed the California mountains. That's the only thing If I could have this weather I have here with mountains, and then I'll be like in Puerto Rico, right.
Speaker 2:That's what it is. Yeah, that's right, exactly.
Speaker 1:So I do miss the mountains because there's really no, where it is it's the only mountain we have is the garbage dump. But anyway, going back to intermittent fasting, I have somebody that I met here that lives here in South Florida. She wrote a book about intermittent fasting and I'm going to have to call her. I'm going to have her on the show and talk about that, because, oh great yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I found that that has been, it was. It's kind of weird what your mind does. Your mind tricks you, right. So the minute you say intermittent fasting, you can't eat for so many hours, your brain goes what, what do you mean? I can't eat. Like it does something right, Like what do you mean, like you, freak out, I can't eat for 12 hours. You're not going to die, there's nothing body adjusts and you're not. You're not hungry, you don't think about it, you just go. I actually, I feel like I have more energy.
Speaker 2:I do too.
Speaker 1:I do too A lot of people go and go and go, and then I'm like, oh, I have to eat.
Speaker 2:Exactly, yeah, yeah, and it's, it's I use before I did this. I would like it would be like lunchtime and I go oh, it's lunchtime, I got to figure out what to eat, and then I'd go, you know, and I'd like I'd sort of have to force myself to eat something, or I picked and I really wasn't hungry, and same with breakfast. So the intermittent fasting, the great thing about it is when you save money because you've got, you know, as much food and you also save time. It's great with time and I, I like you, I thought I'd be hungry. I said, oh, this isn't going to work, I'm going to be hungry.
Speaker 2:But what I found and maybe you've noticed it too, when I, when I go into fasting, like overnight and you know I don't eat after dinner, and then the body changes from glucose metabolism to ketones, you know, and you go into this, this state called ketosis and with ketosis it's, it's decreases your appetite. So I find I'm not, I'm not, you know, mid morning, and I haven't eaten since, you know, six o'clock the night before, with dinner In mid morning, I'm really not that hungry. I'm drinking black coffee, I'm doing my thing and you know, whatever it is including working out and and it's, it's really, it's really great.
Speaker 2:And then that that you know, when I finally do eat, I can really pay attention to what I'm eating, I can choose really healthy food and whatever it is, it tastes really good because I haven't eaten for 10 hours Exactly.
Speaker 1:It's like you enjoy your meal even more because you're like wow, this tastes so good. You know, but celebration.
Speaker 2:Exactly, exactly.
Speaker 1:But yeah, my husband complains that he's never hungry. He's because he's doing the intermittent fasting with me and he, I'm not hungry, I said, but I just cooked dinner you haven't eaten yet I'm not hungry, so sometimes he eats a little bit, and then some of these are already full.
Speaker 1:Like he is different, you know like he loves more weight than I did, because usually time men lose faster than women. We have more fat content right In our bodies and and I tell, I tell people I said you know you have to it's all about how you think of your life and how you think about food. Unfortunately, there are people out there that are very dependent on food, so that's a whole nother. You know, it's a mental issue, emotional issue, because people are emotional eating and I remember doing that before. The same way, when you grab, when you're, you think life is hard. So I'm going to grab a glass of wine, you know, I mean I could enjoy a glass of wine, but when you're reaching it for a reason, the same way you reach for food. Right, it's not helping.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and the and that was a revelation to me too, and I talked about this in the book a little bit about how the food we eat, especially the ultra process junk foods, it's, it's, it's, there's a huge psychological component to it. In other words, you could, you could, someone can, understand how harmful these foods are, but then they'll go ahead and eat them anyway, even though they know the damage they're doing to their bodies. It's because they're other psychological factors. It's actually like an addiction and I mean, I'm, I'm a process junk food addiction. It's addict in remission. You know, I, I would, you know, I, I've been there, done that. But now I've made the choice. But it wasn't, it wasn't easy, it wasn't just a matter of saying, oh, I know, this is harmful for me, I'm going to stop.
Speaker 2:I had to, like address certain things that were driving the addiction and you know and it's just like other substances like alcohol or tobacco or other types of addictions that we can have that if we don't acknowledge the psychological components and really really face it head on, it's a struggle to give it up.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it is.
Speaker 2:And.
Speaker 1:I and you added the word addiction, because that's what it is. We become addicted to foods, we become, you know, different to different substances in our environments, so it's not just alcohol and tobacco, but other things too, and it's unfortunate. It's unfortunate and yeah in the process food. If I just yeah, if I could.
Speaker 2:On the process food. One other thing that just struck me in this was that process food has a lot of effects on our body, on chronic diseases Like we. You know, we've mentioned all these things. There's one thing I didn't expect and that is the effect it has on mental health. There's a there's a gentleman, christopher Palmer, who's who's written a book called Brain Energy. He'd be great to have on this podcast. He's a psychiatrist from Harvard Medical School Finding that his patients would have schizophrenia and manic depressive orders, these severe psychiatric disorders, where they're in mental hospitals or on medication.
Speaker 2:He found that for some but not all of them, but some of them he could change the food that they eat and basically take them off, process junk foods and remove them entirely, and they go off all medications and they actually get better and they can go into society.
Speaker 2:And so this, this tie between foods we eat and mental health, is very interesting.
Speaker 2:But the the really fascinating part is that it not only drives things like schizophrenia and, you know, major depression, but it also, if we step it back a little and think about you and me and our families and our friends living our regular lives, we're we're not full on psychiatric, we don't have psychiatric diagnosis. But think about it the food, the junk food, the same effects. If it could drive these mental full on mental conditions. It can also drive subtle things like how we relate to our friends, how we relate to our spouse, how we relate to our family, these interactions, and we've seen how, how our world in the last, in the last decade or two, has been polarized. You know politicians can't talk to each other anymore in Washington. You know the the world has become so polarized. People are. People are arguing and being more combative and I can't help but think that the fast foods, the junk foods that are inundating our world now can't. I can't help but wonder what role these are playing in it, because we know they have an effect on our mental health.
Speaker 1:Is there anything that the, the medical community can do to like restrict some of these? Like you know, proven scientific that these chemicals are not good for us. Because, you know, I mean, like they always say, my rule of thumb is right if I can't, if I can't pronounce what's in the ingredients, I'm not going to eat it.
Speaker 1:So and basically, if it's a, if it's in a, in a frozen container or if it's sealed in a package, is processed. But not everything. You know it could be naturally processed but you have to look at the ingredients. So I'm used to it now. But I go to the store takes me forever. I'm like I know that, I know what that's in there, like I read all my labels and all this stuff and and people. You know marketing is amazing. Okay, marketing can be good for marketing can be bad and the sense of her food. So they will put a label on it and they'll say fat free, low, low fat, whatever. Look at the ingredients because they might tell you that but it's not. It's usually the opposite. It's a marketing ploy to get to buy it. You know, and again, this is just reasons that I've done.
Speaker 1:When it comes to like sugar, like refined sugar, refined sugar is so bad, white sugar is so bad, and I and I and I kind of did a test. I only I usually have honey in my teeth. Okay, natural honey. I buy like a gallon. We have Florida honey, you know, and so the other day I couldn't get honey, so we had sugar in the house and I don't like it. But I use it for a couple of days and my stomach was hurting, like I started getting stomach issues, and I'm like what and I go wait a second I started using white sugar, so I cut the white sugar again. I'm very, I'm very sensitive. Like I know, my body, like my, my stomach, starts getting triggered by something and I'm like, what did I eat? Like I'm trying to figure it out, you know yeah people are.
Speaker 1:People are not in tune to their bodies. Your bodies give you some warning signals. So, before, before I had the stroke I had, my body was reacting. I had severe headache on one side of my head. I had. I had these weird like abdominal cramping, almost like a menstrual cramping. That's how it felt, like Okay, and I can add my insulin and my sugar would not go back below 400. Wow For two weeks, for two weeks.
Speaker 1:I was like this I went to the emergency room three times, went to my medical doctor. Nobody could figure it out. I went to the doctor. On a Friday I was at the hospital here and the doctor was so upset to the doctors like, oh, you have migraines, and he gave me oxy. How are you describing me? Oxy coding. You don't know who I am, you don't know my history. Okay, wow, and. And I left the hospital and that night I got, went home and I had a stroke.
Speaker 2:Wow, wow.
Speaker 1:Nobody could figure out. How can you not figure out like this? Like ah, like I could feel my head, like I was going to explode. I'm on one side of my head. I'm like what is going on? You know nobody, nobody. Nobody paid attention to me Like I'm crazy. I that's one thing that I get upset about that I go and I'm like these are my symptoms. I have this pain here. I have this pain here, like I know what's going on, and the doctors that I didn't know, like they ignore what I'm saying.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah that that that's such an important issue and and you know what you said about sugar certainly everyone everyone at least is beginning to understand how bad sugar is for. For us it's, it's really. And the interesting thing is our body has no requirement for sugar. In other words, the glucose that is in sugar, our body can make it from other foods. So there's no requirement for sugar or carbohydrates of any form. So we can live fine without carbohydrates. But what a lot of people don't know. They're aware that sugar is so harmful in all these diseases, but many people don't understand that that flour and rice and these refined carbohydrates convert into sugar essentially in our mouths and our digestive system. So eating a piece of white bread is like eating a candy bar. You know the it, because it converts. As far as our body sees it, it's just a burst of glucose. Same thing with white rice and I mean, and I love bread, I love rice, I love all these things, but I want to see my, I want to live to see my grandchildren, you know.
Speaker 1:So it's an easy decision for me, I can give up these things. I still eat rice, unfortunately. I'm Puerto Rican. I can't be without my rice and beans, but I have. I make like a Jasmine rice but I have tons of red beans on top of it. Okay, so I eat more protein. You know, it's just the flavor, right. So I mix everything together. I have my vegetables, I have my other protein, so I'm trying to do the balanced meal Right. So my plate is not my whole plate, is not this big thing of rice anymore, it's portion control.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, I have the same cultural issue at home. My wife was born in China and she's Chinese, and so you know rice is. So you know we. You know we work with our culture, we work with what we have, and you know we, we do the best choices that we can with all that.
Speaker 1:Exactly, exactly. So what about? And I'm just choosing diseases because unfortunately my mother has Alzheimer's and she has it's. It's in the beginning. I guess she's 85 years old, she's amazing, she's still physically. She's incredible. We live with them because during COVID we had to move in together. My aunt is 83. She fell and hit her head and broke her arm five years ago. So now she has dementia and and what was weird is that she I mean, yeah, I know, it's just a label they put on her for the disease, but my aunt and my mother are so different. So my aunt, when she fell, she hit her head.
Speaker 1:She has like amnesia, I say because she can't remember anything that happened in the past at all. It's just gone. It's like somebody just wiped her history away. She, she's once in a while is interesting I see her wake up and what I mean is that all of a sudden she did the day she was sweeping and I was like she hasn't done that for years. Like all of a sudden, like her brain triggered something. I used to do this, you know, and I'm like what are you doing? I'm sweeping and I'm like, okay, I just let her be, you know.
Speaker 1:So you know I, because I'm with them you know pretty much 24, seven, so I see the changes in them. And then my mother, my mother's a classical pianist. She can still play Chopin and she now she has to put the music notes, but she can still read music and she can still play and she can remember everything that happened in the past. But her short term memory is the issue. So the short term memory and then instructions. I can't give her a three part instruction, right. So I have to say, mom, just take this here, okay. But I can't say, can you take this and then go here and then do this? I can't do that because our brain can't handle the three part or the. There's too many steps. She, she lost already two steps by the time I get to the third one.
Speaker 2:One of the things that that surprised me about in this book about Alzheimer's disease and understanding it, is the way that it's tied to carbohydrate metabolism and insulin resistance. So for some patients not all patients, but some patients with Alzheimer's disease they can get a dramatic improvement in their brain fog and their mental functioning If they change the foods. They need to avoid foods that drive insulin resistance. So it's basically what it turns out to be is a low carbohydrate type diet or a ketogenic diet. In in ketosis there's a. There's a great practitioner named Heather Sanderson who runs she would be great on this podcast as well. She runs nursing homes for Alzheimer's patients, but her nursing homes are a little different because for her nursing home, the Alzheimer's patients go there to get better and then they go home, which is something that you don't expect with Alzheimer's disease. And see, I interviewed her for a program for my podcast that I and I and she was talking about ketosis and the diet effects on Alzheimer's patients. And she says at her centers, all the food is food that's designed to minimize this insulin resistance in this effect and I go well. That's great.
Speaker 2:But how do you know it? How do you know it works? You know, and she goes well. Sometimes it's really dramatic. We have one one of one of her patients is a gentleman who when he's in ketosis in other words when he's observing the ketogenic diet he can recognize his children, his grandchildren's names and he smiles and he interacts with them. But she can tell as soon as he goes out of ketosis, you know, if he, if he eats some carbohydrates or something, he'll no longer remember their names or even recognize them. It's really dramatic.
Speaker 2:So that's that's something to to consider, and Dale Bredesen has written a number of books about that, about the end of Alzheimer's and different approaches to remove toxins in the environment that you've talked about change diet and these other things that for some Alzheimer's patients can actually blow down the disease or even reverse it, because Alzheimer's is a big. It's a big diagnostic category that likely represents a lot of different diseases. You know even well, deficiency can cause brain fog and memory loss. So just give someone a B12 pill you know vitamin B12. You'll quote cure their Alzheimer's. You know they didn't really have Alzheimer's, they just had memory loss because of B12, but they were diagnosed as Alzheimer's because that's what we call people, old people who can't remember things. We call it Alzheimer's. But anyway, there's a lot of breakthroughs with Alzheimer's disease and the effect of lifestyle and, again, these choices we make. So I would urge anyone with caring for anyone with Alzheimer's disease to look closely at the lifestyle because that can have a dramatic effect.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, I mean I cook every day for them, even though I'm a very busy, very busy life with business and the podcast and a whole bunch of things that we're doing. But it's important to me. We were raised to take care of our family. My grandmother died here, this home, when she was 90. My uncle, my aunt's husband, died of cancer here and he was young. He was only 65 when he died and was really sad. But we've always taken care of our family. So my mother and my aunt and I also have my husband's aunt here. She's younger, she's like 71. But she physically has some limitations and stuff.
Speaker 2:So we kind of all take care of each other. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:But I watched the diet. I changed things. My aunt is very stuck to like she only eats certain things. She's very picky, so I try to modify it. Because she want a chicken cutlet. Breaded chicken is fried. So I'm like mm. So I try to do it, so I bake it. Then she'll complain about that, so I try to alternate, like I'll bake meat for her instead of frying, like I change Like the Puerto Rican food, I change it Instead of frying things, I bake it or put in the air fryer just to not have any oils and I try to modify it. And I give my mother the protein. I give her protein every day, plant based, with the moringa powder and everything too. And so I try to give her healthy things as well Fruits and vegetables. I always have a bowl either of clums or a cantaloupe or something in the table so they can eat. I take it out, have some fruit, don't have cake and don't have cookies.
Speaker 1:And they still like those things, but what?
Speaker 2:am I going to do?
Speaker 1:I have to you give it Exactly, so you kind of weigh it. I try to buy them healthy ice cream if they want ice cream. So I'm at that, I mean at 85 years old. Come on, she's lived a long life already.
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 1:But all these diseases. I mean, like we said, my husband's cousin. Unfortunately, he passed away he was only 46 years old, because he was diabetic and he gave up on his life. He got heartbroken, he was heartbroken and he basically gave up and when he passed away he was a big man, over six feet tall, big guy, and he actually I have his picture here Very handsome man, Very handsome man.
Speaker 2:That was him right there.
Speaker 1:Wow, yeah, yeah. So that was JC's aunt's only son and his kidneys shut down.
Speaker 1:All his organs shut down oh my goodness Basically Wow Because of the diabetes, the sugar, and I tell people, I said you can't, this is not a game, diabetes is not a game. When the sugar and I know this for a fact because it happened to me when I was at the worst health in my life my sugar was at 550. I wasn't taking, I wasn't checking my blood and I wasn't taking care of myself. And that's the truth. I was just eating whatever, I was drinking. I was not doing anything. This was about 10 years ago and my sugar was like at 550.
Speaker 1:I went to the doctor and I said I don't know what's going on, but for the last couple of weeks I'm losing weight and I lost 20 pounds, but I wasn't doing anything and I couldn't figure out why I was losing weight and I was thirsty, and thirsty, and thirsty and I was drinking gallons of water a day and I'm like what is? Something's not right. And when I went to the doctor he said you're lucky you haven't had a stroke or a heart attack. Right now. He says your blood pressure is through the roof, your sugar was 550. Your A1C was like 14. It was, I was a mess. And he says basically, your organs are starting to. Your body's eating itself. Right, it's eating the fat. It was eating itself away.
Speaker 1:And I didn't understand that the diabetes starts eating the high sugar starts eating your organs and starts so you can have. You start getting like a bladder infection. I had a bladder infection.
Speaker 1:You start getting as a woman. You get yeast infections, horrible yeast infections, just so many things, and people don't understand. And that's what happened to Carlos, who passed away, his kidney shut down. He was on dialysis already. He just gave up and he had a lot of medication. When I cleaned out his house we found all the insulinses were there. He was on some kind of trial medication. Everything was there. He didn't take it. He just didn't take it. Wow, wow. And it was all about eating. Because what was he eating? He would ask for McDonald's and Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Speaker 1:The worst two things you can possibly eat as a diabetic you can't eat. Kentucky Fried Chicken Fried Chicken, fried Fat, I mean come on.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, it's interesting the effects you can get with the diet. Of that. There's one extreme veganism is one extreme and then the other extreme is sort of carnivore, where people eat only meat. And there's a study with the carnivore people when they eat only meat they don't eat carbohydrates at all, and the carbohydrates is the food group that causes diabetes. So when you take type 2 diabetics and they convert to a carnivore diet, uniformly their diabetes goes into remission. It's amazing because they don't have any carbohydrates in their diet.
Speaker 1:It's not interesting?
Speaker 2:Yeah, because type 2 diabetes is basically a disease of carbohydrate intolerance. It's sort of like lactose intolerance is what people who don't like milk and dairy are lactose intolerant, so that's a disease.
Speaker 2:You have diarrhea, you have all your upset. So how do you cure lactose intolerance? Well, you stop eating anything with lactose in it, so you avoid dairy. So how do you control carbohydrate intolerance, which is type 2 diabetes? Well, you avoid carbohydrates and the diabetes goes away. It's amazing and this I don't think it's emphasized enough to people and it's not well known or even accepted by some physicians.
Speaker 1:Yeah, of all the years I've been diabetic, since the last, since I was like 40. Actually I had gestational diabetes, so for both my children and both pregnancies, and the doctor told me this is a sign that you will going to be full blown diabetic. But still didn't understand. I'm in my 30s, what are you talking about? I mean, we're at that age, in our 30s. We're like, yeah, ok, whatever, so I'll stop eating one thing. Then, when they start saying, well, you can't eat rice, you can't eat pizza, I'm like what are you talking about?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's not. It goes from one extreme to the other. So as a human being, we're very resistant to change. So when somebody tells you you can't do something, all of a sudden you're craving that right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and we're complex people. I have a patient who's diabetic and he's about to get his feet amputated, both of his feet for the diabetes and the number one cause of amputation is diabetes. You know it's a common thing. But I was asking him about his diet and he says he has one coke a day and it's all his doctor will allow him. And I said one coke, that's all. Sugar that's driving your diabetes and he goes I love my coke, I don't need my feet.
Speaker 1:Really.
Speaker 2:Well, he says we're all complicated organisms and all the things that drive us. But he was very clear that if you take the coke you're going to have to give yourself more insulin. It's going to drive your thing. But he still did it one day a week and he was starting to go blind and his feet were going to be amputated, but for him it was worth it to have the coke. That's terrible.
Speaker 1:That's terrible, that's terrible.
Speaker 1:And talking about that to other effects of diabetes. So when I had the stroke my vision changed. So before it changed and I kept saying I'm having a hard time seeing, I went to the doctor and my vision changed three times and actually got better. I don't understand that. It got better, not worse. So I was like I had to take my glasses. I go, wow, I couldn't actually see Like I could see actually better. I said this is really weird, me and my brain. I'm starting to think I wonder why we should do some research, like I should have been a doctor. I'm always like let's do research. Why did vision change.
Speaker 1:Why did it change? Like maybe it has something so, and I had. I remember going when I was real sick. They told me I had diabetic eyes already and they showed me the picture how my veins were, the blood vessels were really bad. And he said if you don't do something you can lose your vision. So thank God, till today, my eyes all healed. I have no diabetic eye, my eyes are normal, they're back to the way it was. And again, just telling people your body does heal. Our body is a fine-tuned machine. Okay, it heals itself. You cut yourself, it seals right. And people used to tell me all the time oh, but you're diabetic. I don't like labels, okay, I have something fine, but I'm not gonna harbor on it every day because then you're focusing on the disease and not a cure.
Speaker 1:At least I feel that way, so you know they used to tell me oh, you're diabetic, you have to care for you, you can't cut yourself, you won't heal. And I'm like I healed in two days it was sealed. I have no problems I have. My feet are fine, you know, I don't have. I'm always, you know, watching everything and it's really sad because I see people in the street and you can see the edema, you know, in their legs, you know, especially for homeless people, because I see a lot of people around and you can see their edema in their legs and their red and puffy and I feel so bad for them Because it's like I know the disease is eating their body away.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I mean the number one cause of amputations. Diabetes is the leading cause of blindness. It's also the leading cause, the number one cause of renal failure and renal transplants and dialysis. So it's huge business for the healthcare system.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, that's the other side of it. I don't wanna get too controversial, but I know there's a lot. The pharmaceutical company, that's a whole, nother thing. Like again, I'm not one for meds. You know I'm happy that you're talking about things that people can help themselves and understand that your body does heal, because that's important, and you, as a medical doctor, it's great that you're doing that. You know to teach other doctors, you know, look at. You know, look at this, look at that. You know, just a little different change of perspective.
Speaker 1:That the body is it can heal, and how can we help other people to really understand it? You know, the only commercials you get on TV are the commercials for the drugs, unfortunately, but there's never a commercial that says hi everybody, today we're gonna heal your body. Today, if you stop eating this, guess what? You know, like they don't do none of that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, absolutely.
Speaker 1:You know they have I always. I mean, I hate to say I'm not gonna mention the name, but there's a commercial that comes out that has like a diet plan right and have prepaid, pre-made food right, and every time that commercial comes on the TV I'm like oh yeah, and you lose weight but you get cancer at the same time. Because you're eating processed food. So you know, I always add to it like doesn't people realize that that convenience is not necessarily healthy?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:So besides diabetes, which is huge, alzheimer's become something that's it's huge as well. They're building a new at the hospital. They bring a whole new building on neuro, neuro, neurology I guess for Alzheimer's and things like that. A whole other building just for that. And I live in Boca Raton, florida, which is a very they have a lot of, you know, elderly community here. So I see it all the time. I see the elderly. It breaks my heart because I see my mother at 85. And if you see her she looks like she's 50, okay. And then I see other people that are just looked like they're just walking dead because they're so ill from their disease and they don't know how to function.
Speaker 1:They don't know about diet and there are dietitians, because I've been, I was sent to a nutritionist and a dietitian, but still there's something missing, like there's something missing there. When you go to the nutritionist, I don't know. Like I said, it's your mindset, you have to be prepared, I want to be healthy, you have to like I think they should have. Besides going to nutritionist, you should go towards psychologist, because I think we should talk about where we're at Mentally and emotionally, or like we talked about when it comes to food, to address those things before you start doing a nutrition plan. Because a person who's having emotional issues with food and then you give them a nutrition plan and you tell them you can't eat this and you can't eat that, it's like a, it's like a mental breakdown. When they told me you can't eat pizza anymore, you can't have this anymore, I'm like, excuse me, wait a second. All my life I eat a certain food and now you want me to cut everything and and like start over again. That's very difficult, that's a very difficult task to do. That. You know, I was really like fighting it, like no, I'm gonna eat what I want to eat you know like, but. But this has been such an amazing conversation I know we can probably talk for hours on end.
Speaker 1:There's so many different diseases high blood pressure you know my ancestors from high blood pressure as well. That's one of the reasons why she fell. She went to walk to go get the mangoes at the neighbor's house and she literally just flat-faced on the ground. I think her blood pressure went up and she just collapsed. And I've taken a good cardiologist now and they've adjusted her medicine. So thank God she's good now with her blood pressure and and mentally she's stable. You know I don't see in the last three years it hasn't really Changed too much. You know it's been pretty steady, which is good. At least I don't have a few. I'm both of them. They're not. Is that they haven't gotten worse? You know, so severe, even with COVID. We all had COVID as well. But but anyway, um, we can get your, we can get your book on all platforms, correct you? But your book is sold on Amazon and all these. Yeah, it's.
Speaker 2:It's actually the pre-orders for Amazon or gonna be going up in a couple weeks. It's available on my website in audiobook form currently and if, if the readers would like to Get the first chapter, I'm happy to give it to them for free. They can download it from my website if they want I can. I can give them the link here, if you'd like.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, and I'll put it under the description and the podcast. Everybody can get to it. And and reach, reach you and Get this incredible book to, to, to just really help you think about your health and the alternatives you have and that we can heal through food and just some lifestyle changes and that's why yeah, yeah, it's the website's Robert Lufkin Lufkin MD.
Speaker 2:Calm, and if you just put slash chapter, you'll be able to download the the audio Version and print version of the first chapter of the book, and hope you enjoy it if you read it.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, definitely. Like I said, I was going through it, I'm still gonna read. I have so many books right now I've been interviewing about I don't I think I did already about eight different authors on different books and and different things and and and I heard that there's a I forgot the day moving right now. I got a press release the other day regarding there's a new like an award for for writers, because it's okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's very hard to be a writer these days because Technology has changed things. I mean it's making it easier for you to get your book out there.
Speaker 2:But it's not the same, like before Was a captivating title.
Speaker 1:It's not exactly the way you know. What do you think? It's just to get your attention. Would you've got my attention? That's for sure. But I'm happy that we had this great conversation for over an hour and we covered a lot of different things. I'm happy you're healthy, I'm healthy, and hopefully we get some other people out there healthier too.
Speaker 2:Thanks. Thanks so much, alita, for having me on your program.
Speaker 1:This is you're very welcome. Thank you so much and have an awesome day and We'll have everybody check out your new book you too Thanks. Thanks, bye, bye.
Speaker 2:Bye.
Speaker 1:Come celebrate your event and create new memories at Studio 33 right here in Fort Lauderdale, off the exit 32 commercial Boulevard. Call us today so you can schedule appointment and see the location as an intimate setting for your private event. Call us at 954-530-7193 again 954-530-7193. Also, our website is studio 33 F, as in Frank LLcom, and you can find us on all social media at Studio 33 FLL as well. Again, call us today for your appointment. You come see our venue. We are filling up fast till the end of the year. 954-530-7193.