167: Why Healthcare Has Failed You

Transcript of Episode 167: Why Healthcare Has Failed You

With Dr. Daniel Pompa, Meredith Dykstra and Dr. William Davis

Meredith:
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m your host, Meredith Dykstra, and this is Episode 167. We have our resident cellular healing specialist, Dr. Dan Pompa, on the line, of course, and today we welcome very special guest, Dr. William Davis. Now, you may know Dr. Davis from his book, Wheat Belly, but today we’re going to—we’re really excited to dig into his new book called Undoctored. Before we jump in, we have a lot of exciting things to talk about. Let me tell you a little bit more about Dr. Davis.

William Davis, M.D. is a New York Times best-selling author and a cardiologist who advocates unique, insightful, and cutting-edge strategies to help individuals discover the hidden wisdom within them. His blog wheatbelly.com has been visited by millions of people. Dr. Davis also shared his passion for wheat-free living on national television shows, including the Dr. Oz Show and CBS This Morning. His Wheat Belly Total Health program has become a public television special now airing nationwide. He lives in Wisconsin, which you said it’s a little dreary there today, Dr. Davis, but thanks so much for joining us on Cellular Healing TV. We’re so excited to have you.

Dr. Davis:
Thank you. Given the weather, this might be the bright point of my day.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, always. Listen, first off, I want to thank you because you did bring the dangers of wheat to the forefront. You really did. I mean, many of us were talking about it, but it was your book, I think, that really got people to understand it. Here’s the one analogy I think that was really, I think, an amazing analogy that got people to understand even the dangers of raising glucose with whole grains. It was the comparing the slice of whole grain toast or wheat bread, whatever it was, to a can of soda and comparing the glucose rise. I think people just got it. I use that analogy to this day, and I still give you credit in the book for that analogy. Thanks for all those things, doc.

Dr. Davis:
Sure. That was an easy argument to make. There is some more complicated arguments, of course. If we did nothing more than fuss about the carbohydrate content, amylopectin content, it’s an easy argument to make.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. No doubt. I think the other thing you did really well in Wheat Belly was just the history, getting people to understand the history of wheat. Why gluten’s a problem today, and it wasn’t, whatever, before the 1970s, the hybridization that occurred, Norman Borlaug. I think that was just well done. Thank you for that, but with that said, I hope your next book, Undoctored, really stirs the pot even more. I do. This, to me, hits a subject that really needs to get put out there.

You probably already are getting criticized for this book. People are saying why? What do you mean, Dr. Pompa? Tell us a little bit about what inspired you to write a book, Undoctored, and what that even means.

Dr. Davis:
I’ll tell you what I saw through the six years or so of the Wheat Belly experience. The original Wheat Belly book, of course, as you talked about, highlighted what agribusiness did to the wheat plant. It turned it into a high-yield, semi-dwarf strain that became—it amplified its adverse health effects on humans, and if you got rid of it, people enjoyed extraordinary health benefits. It became clear that we had to extend that conversation to all grains, all seeds of grasses. That’s what grains are. They’re all seeds of grass, of course, and you get even further benefits. Then it also became clear that people do even better by addressing all the nutritional deficiencies that were caused by grains but persisted with grain elimination like magnesium and iron and also addressed some common nutritional deficiencies like iodine and omega-3 fatty acids and magnesium.

What I saw, as I further got into this conversation, extended the Wheat Belly conversation, was that hundreds of health conditions were reversing every single day among many, many people. What really got my attention was people would come to me, and say I told my doctor I was going to follow this Wheat Belly lifestyle, and he said it was stupid. He said it was going to kill me and cause heart disease, and I’d get fat. I went back to him, and I was 57 pounds lighter. I was freed of acid reflux, irritable bowel syndrome, eczema, psoriasis, rheumatoid arthritis, type 2 diabetes, obesity, migraine headaches, etc., and he didn’t know what to make of it. What I saw was that people were becoming healthy in spite of their doctors. I’m talking about the mainstream conventional doctors who like to prescribe things like Lipitor, and send them to the hospital for an MRI, and have to see a cardiologist for a heart catheterization. I’m talking about the large mainstream practice of medicine.

I saw people having spectacular successes in health in spite of their doctors. It became clear to me what we really had was the means to restore health across a huge swath of health conditions without the help of the conventional healthcare system, and so that’s why I’ve called this approach, this what I hope to be an enlightening conversation, Undoctored. How to be healthy without the doctor, without the hospital, without big pharma, without the medical device industry, without all those people who profit from your misfortune or who profit—and this is worse, who profit from giving you misinformation.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. I mean, there’s no doubt about that. With the title and the subtitle being, hey, being smarter than your doctor, I’m sure you’ve taken some hits already. How’s that going?

Dr. Davis:
Not as many as you think. As you know, the chiropractic community, the naturopaths, the functional medicine community pay attention to these things. They have their finger on the pulse of what’s new, what’s exciting, what’s natural. My colleagues, that is the gastroenterologist, the primary care docs, the cardiologists, the thoracic surgeons, the huge community of physicians don’t really pay that much attention to this stuff. I was privy to the hospital board meetings and meetings in my division, and I was on faculty at university for some time. They are not concerned with health, what’s going on in nutrition. They’re concerned with how do we grow our thoracic surgery program 18% this year? We only had 650 bypass procedures last year. We only had 8,000 heart catheterizations, and we only did 4,000 MRIs. How do we grow this? How do we increase our market share?

It has nothing to do with health. It has everything to do with growing revenues from healthcare. That’s why I say the enemy of healthcare is not sickness. It’s healthy people.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. No, I read that, and I was like, boy, I really agree with that 100%. I love that. Going back to the grain, I think there is—Meredith, help me on this. Who’s the gentleman now—he just wrote a book. Joe interviewed him, and my doctors have asked me about him. What’s the book called? He’s talking about grains, and saying that it’s not as bad as we think. Here’s how to put healthy grains back into your diet.

Do you know who I’m talking about? The brain’s slipping me. I’ll have it within a moment here. What’s your argument to that? I mean, how much grain? Can some people have some grain better? Talk about that.

Dr. Davis:
There’s a lot of issues in there, and there is variation. You’re right. There is variation in the individual experience. I started in this whole journey because of coronary disease. That’s what I did for a living, right? I did heart catheterizations; put stents in, did angioplasty, those kinds of things. I mean, heart disease is life threatening.

I took it another step, though. I started tracking very early levels of coronary disease using a device called a CT heart scan. This is going back 20 some years. What I saw was, if you did the conventional things to prevent heart disease—these are things like statin drugs, cut your fat, everything in moderation, all that stuff. Heart disease progresses, gallops forward at a horrifying rate. Twenty-five to 30% per year if you track it by a heart scan score. We’ve helped publish some of those data.

My colleague said, well, just don’t track it anymore. Just rely on your patients to call when they have chest pain or if they die. I find that so offensive that I started—look for other solutions. It led me down—as you know, when you ask different questions, you often get different answers. The answers I got were things like vitamin D, right, folded vitamin D into the equation. I saw incredible changes in heart scan scores. They started to actually drop, and I mean a lot.

The number one cause for coronary disease, heart attack, sudden cardiac death, need for angioplasty bypass surgery, it’s not high cholesterol. You and I know that. That’s a semi-fiction. That’s a highly profitable semi-fiction, but the most common cause is an excess of small LDL particles. Small LDL particles are unusually long-lasting. They last five to seven days as compared to 24 hours of large LDL particles caused by fat consumption. They’re highly adherent to connective tissue. They are very oxidation prone. They’re very glycation prone.

In other words, small LDLs are very different animal than large LD, and of course, the cholesterol panel doesn’t tell you anything about that. They have to actually measure it. I ask myself what foods—and this was well-grounded in the literature, scientific literature. What foods cause your body to form an excess of small LDL particles (two things, grains and sugars)? They last a week, so it takes 2 slices of whole wheat bread, 1 bagel, a bowl of cereal, of high-fiber cereal, whatever, to have heart disease risk dramatically increased 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year. That’s all it takes. Now, that’s just the perspective coronary disease risk.

How about autoimmune disease? You now know that the gliadin protein of wheat, rye, and barley and the zein protein of corn is the initiating factor in many if not most cases of autoimmune diseases like type 1 diabetes in children and rheumatoid arthritis. Now, that’s a long-lasting durable effect. In other words, it doesn’t take—you don’t have to eat it every day, three times a day. You can have it on occasion, and you can trigger all the domino effect that leads to autoimmune diseases. Dysbiosis, if we disrupt bowel flora through grain consumption, you just have to eat it once in a while, and you start the process of disrupting bowel flora. There are many effects that are not just momentary but long-lasting.

People who say grains are okay in moderation, what the USDA should be saying is we’re not even sure this should be on a human diet at all because it’s responsible for so many health conditions. We’re not even sure. Of course, the USDA that drafts the food pyramid, food plate is not in the business of protecting the consumer. They’re in the business of protecting agribusiness. That is their charge. The SEC regulates the investment industry. They don’t protect investors necessarily. USDA does not protect consumers. They protect agribusiness. Yet, they’re the people telling us what and how to eat.

When people say we can have grains in moderation, that is—if you look at the science, if you look what happened, it is such an ignorant statement, and the opposite is true, of course. Those of us who are grain-free enjoy magnificent health and upon re-exposure to grains after you’ve been grain-free become very ill. It’s very common, for instance, to have diarrhea, bloating, a return of autoimmune joint inflammation, skin rashes, eczema, psoriasis, neurological dysfunction from grain re-exposure. I’ve seen that so many times. People are bombarded with that opposite message, right, everything in moderation. Grains are the best thing. No. Grains have no role in a human diet. Now, that raises some issues about sustainability, etc. That’s a whole other conversation, but from the perspective of individual human health, I know of no strategy that is more powerful than elimination of all grains.

Dr. Pompa:
I have to say from a—my doctors and myself, we would agree that you can take sugar out of someone’s diet and get a positive response, but when you take grains out of their diet, you get even a more powerful positive response. That’s true, whether it’s from aches or pains. I’m not just talking wheat. I can even go beyond it because, again, there’s multiple problems with grains beyond gluten, and I wrote an article called “Beyond Gluten.”

John Douillard, he wrote a book. That was it. That was the interview, Meredith, that he did with Joe. It was basically, going through a different history of grains, etc.

Meredith:
-inaudible- practitioner. He’s -inaudible-.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. This book was Eat Wheat. That’s what it was. It’s Dr. John Douillard. Yeah. I mean, I have to say, I mean, it was quite shocking. I know Joe interviewed him. I watched the interview. I haven’t had time to cite some of his sources, and I wanted to do that.

Joe’s title is “How to Safely Bring Wheat Back into Your Diet.” No, that wasn’t Joe’s title. I don’t even know. I’ll be with Joe Mercola next week, and I’m going to ask him his take on it. I know it caused a stir. That’s why I wanted to bring it up here. I’m not saying on the line with that—aligning with that thought process, but I just wanted to tell you that it’s out there. There is someone saying, hey, there’s a way to eat healthy, more ancient wheat. I can tell you that, most people who are already challenged, you take grains away, and no doubt they do better. Meredith, I think you have some questions. Fire away.

Meredith:
Echoing.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. You’re echoing. You’re echoing a little bit.

Meredith:
Oh, gosh. Yeah. I was just adding to this from personal experience as well. I had followed a macrobiotic diet for years prior to meeting you, Dr. Pompa, where I was eating brown rice porridge for dinner and millet for lunch, buckwheat for dinner or for breakfast, and just lots of different grains in my diet and then removing them. After I me you, I learned about the inflammation they were creating and these different health issues that they could’ve been linked to. I felt amazing.

Then even just more recently, literally, probably in the past month or so, I’ve added in a little bit of organic corn chips. I had some organic popcorn last night and a little bit of millet toast here and there. I haven’t noticed major symptoms at all. Yeah. I’m curious, Dr. Davis, too what your thoughts are in just small amounts for those of us who are healthier. Is that really going to have a negative impact do you think?

Dr. Davis:
Meredith, there’s no question there is a range of effects. At the worst end of the spectrum is modern high-yield, semi-dwarf wheat with the change forms of gliadin enriched in wheat germ agglutinin or rich in phytates that block mineral absorption, desiccated with glyphosate, herbicide. That’s at the very—less harmful, we get into the traditional wheat strains. We get into corn and then oats and millet, sorghum, etc. Do we ever reach a point where grains are completely benign and harmless and perhaps actually beneficial? There’s a mixture of effects.

Rice is probably the most benign. Rice is almost completely starch. It means that you’re going to be overexposed potentially to starch and amylopectin effects, which include such things as small LDL provocation, high blood sugar, and all the problems of glycation, glucose modification of proteins. We have the added issue that some people are very sensitive to the proteins of grains, and even though rice is less than 1% protein, there is wheat germ agglutinin in rice. It’s in rice, but it’s still called wheat germ agglutinin because the structure is identical to that found in wheat. Wheat germ agglutinin, unrelated to gluten, it’s called agglutinin. Because when it contacts red blood, it causes red blood cell clumping or clotting, and so it’s called wheat germ agglutinin.

There’s a little bit of that in rice, and some people are so sensitive. People with celiac disease, for instance, or a lot of intestinal sensitivities like irritable bowel syndrome, they will react to rice. There’s also a lot of allergic phenomenon to rice, to some of the proteins. Of course, allergies only occur to proteins. Even though it’s less than 1% protein, you can still have—and they are life threatening by the way. Not uncommon a response in infants to rice.

Now, we had this also. The most recently raised issue of arsenic in rice that becomes an issue if you consume rice with some regularity. We don’t think we see arsenic toxicity in the U.S., but they do see it in Bangladesh and in India where they consume a lot more rice. They get also some arsenic from their drinking water. Point being, that’s the—those are the problems with the most benign grain of all, rice. What happen to you if you had an occasional little bit of rice? Probably nothing beyond just provocation of small LDL, a little bit of coronary risk for at least a few days and a little bit of glycation and perhaps some dysbiosis, but you’ll survive it.

I see grains even in the most benign end of the spectrum as, to some degree, some kind of compromise in health. I think we’ve cut so many compromises in health that if you go outside in your own backyard, your neighbor is spraying Roundup on his weeds. You drink the water, and it’s unfiltered at the restaurant. It’s got pharmaceutical drug residues. It’s got chloride, chlorine. It’s got fluoride. In other words, we’re cutting so many— BPA because you didn’t know that the hard plastics they use to serve you water at some function. We’re compromised in so many ways that, whenever we can identify a problem source, we try to minimize it. To me, grains, no matter how you cut it represent some kind of compromise in health. I think most of us, as we learn all these issues, it’s not a compromise you have to make.

Meredith:
Yeah. It’s a great point. I think, however, sometimes too—what about the joy factor of eating some crusty French baguette perhaps that comes from emmer wheat that hasn’t been hybridized. Then, Dr. Pompa, too, I want you to discuss your diet variation concept in theory. How that could tie into not having any grains at all versus the diet variation, adding in some different ingredients to promote the good gut flora. Just have that balance in our bodies of having that variation of different foods.

Dr. Pompa:
Even with diet variation with my clients, they are so sick. What she’s talking about is we do a combination of putting people in ketosis and then a higher healthy carbohydrate diet. The majority if not all of my clients still can’t tolerate grain as they’re raising their carbohydrates. Typically, they do it either with some more berries, or something like sweet potatoes, or something, Meredith, as we discussed. They raise their carbohydrates with different sources. Again, rarely can they use grain because they just can’t tolerate it. I mean, that says something to us healthy people too, at least it does to me.

Dr. Davis:
You guys raise a very important point that becomes a hot button issue for people who are low-carb, or ketotic, or Atkins. That is, if you eliminate or sharply curtail carbohydrate sources in the diet, you’ve also curtailed prebiotic fibers, and I agree with you that there’s something wonderful to be gained by cultivating bowel flora by ingesting a variety of prebiotic fibers. I hate to admit this, but there’s actually something good in grains. That’s the amylose and the arabinoxylan prebiotic fibers. When somebody goes grain-free, they cut out about three or four grams of prebiotic fibers they were getting from grains, and so there actually is a downside. It’s important that we alert people, and if you do go grain-free, get your prebiotic fibers from other sources.

I agree with you. Even further, cultivate bowel flora by using a variety of prebiotic fiber sources like the galacto-oligosaccharides from legumes and the fructooligosaccharides from chicory and the other source of—I think you and I are seeing this wonderful restoration of bowel flora. Thereby, metabolic improvements like drops in triglycerides, drops in blood pressure, drops in insulin, drops in blood sugar, enhanced emotional health, reduced anxiety, deeper dreams, more vivid dreams, kid-like dreams. I agree. Cultivation of bowel floral via prebiotic fiber is a crucial part of this equation.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. When you look at the American Indians as an example and that goes into many other ancient cultures, in the wintertime, they were in ketosis, meats and fats, remarkable how low-carb. Then as spring and summer came, they started changing their diets to a lot of the things you just said. Tiger nuts, I mean, they would chew these tiger nuts, these acorns. They would make these flours from these things, and get this fiber in throughout this monthly period, throughout the summer. There you have it. A lot of the foods, some of those root vegetables they were eating more in the summer versus the winter but gave them that fiber that their microbiome actually needed to survive.

Meredith:
Yeah, very interesting to some point. You talked about the—you mentioned the ketogenic diet, Dr. Pompa. I’m wondering, Dr. Davis, what your thoughts are on the ketogenic diet or the Paleo diet, if you ascribe to a certain diet or just what your thoughts are there.

Dr. Davis:
I use ketosis. I’ve been a big fan of ketosis as a means of accelerating weight loss, breaking weight loss plateaus, enhancing physical and emotional performance. Now you have, of course, this notion, exogenous ketones. That’s really interesting. There’s always this caveat. If you become ketotic, you must address bowel flora via prebiotic fiber supplementation. The only prebiotic fiber sources are all carbohydrate sources.

We used to see this, right, in the Atkins people. They said I did great. I lost 73 pounds. I’m no longer diabetic, but then two years into it, they’re constipated. They’re having these vague abdominal pains. Their triglycerides start to go up. Their blood sugar starts to go up. Their blood pressure goes up, and they start to gain weight. Of course, we’d say you’re not sticking to the diet. They’d say, yes, I am. It was our failure to recognize that it was that they had deprived bowel flora and had developed dysbiosis, so part of the entire equation, no matter what we labeled the diet, has to be this effort to address bowel flora.

A lot of the Paleo people are my friends. These are people I have a lot of respect for like Robb Wolf and Loren Cordain. These are great people. There’s a lot of fuzziness at the edges as it becomes more popular, and we have these nice people advocating some really iffy things like unlimited honey and maple syrup consumption, which a very destructive thing by the way. You be careful. You got to be careful about what’s being called Paleo. I think if we go to the people who really know what they’re talking about like Loren Cordain or Robb Wolf. These guys know their stuff, and I respect their opinion.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. I agree with you. What’s your feeling on protein and how much? That’s a whole other topic as far as mTOR, a high protein, its effect on the cell, etc.?

Dr. Davis:
As you know, you can overdo protein. It’s easy to do. What I advocate is just unrestricted fat intake, and I’ve never seen any ill effect from that. What I did for about 15 years was I consulted on something called complex hyperlipidemias. These are the people with triglycerides of 1400, HDLs of 10, had uncommon postprandial disorders. They had genetic variance like [echo] E4, echo E2, echo EB variations. You will see the people who have problems with fat consumption, but they are so uncommon as to really not even be a mainstream issue. The vast majority of people have problems with carbohydrate consumption.

The whole issue with protein—I’m not sure anybody’s actually advocating protein overconsumption. I think there might be some debate about what represents an ideal protein consumption for purposes of longevity, of maintaining youthfulness, etc. What I’ve done is I always—here’s my simplistic answer. Whenever in doubt, mimic what nature does. If we go back to the way that Native Americans used to eat, or native Canadians, or the Hudza, or the [Muthzas], or the people who really lived off the land hunting and gathering, how did they manage protein? They didn’t. They killed an animal, ate its liver, ate its brain, shared the heart, shared the thyroid gland, ate the meat, ate the fat, ate some fruit, ate some nuts, dug in the dirt for underground—and to me, that’s how we probably should manage our lives too. That is not be so worried about macronutrient composition, relative composition. I think it’s become a bit of a hot button issue because so many people, even when we tell them don’t worry about eating fat, eat it; they still can’t get beyond that fat phobia. I see that as the common tripping point.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. I think that’s less of our viewers. It’s funny you said that because I had the opportunity to go into the bush, and meet a tribe that just recently came out of the mountains, I mean, remarkable experience. First thing I said when I got there is where’s all the men? It was in the morning, and there was no men. They were off hunting since 4 or 4:30 in the morning. The women, a portion of them go out gathering. A portion of them watch the children, right, so I experienced this. The other thing I experienced was the men went out all day without eating, and they would just go and go. They said no. They say it slows them down.

Dr. Davis:
You mean no pasta carb-loading?

Dr. Pompa:
No. Then they come back. Then, like you said, if they get an animal, they feast, and it’s three hours. Meredith, I think we lost you. Yeah. I don’t know. I can hear you. Can you hear me? There she is. There you are. You disappeared momentarily, Meredith.

Meredith:
Oh, I’m back.

Dr. Pompa:
You’re back. Anyways, they would come back and eat this meal that is a very social gathering. It probably lasted three hours. The point being, to your point, is that they weren’t monitoring their protein either, right? I mean, they were just eating. I’m sure they consumed far too much protein. What I always say is don’t eat less. Eat less often. Now we’re emulating what, really, these tribes and very healthy cultures did.

Then I think it changes the physics. We don’t have a study showing that if you eat once or twice a day how much protein. The innate intelligence in the body I think can handle more protein if you’re only eating one time a day. Anyways, I think there’s a lot of room for debate here. I’ll get in an argument with Joe Mercola and Ron Rosedale on this. I think that these things change the game, so emulate what ancient cultures did and healthy ones at that. I agree with you, doc. I love it. That’s great.

Listen, what else did this book bring out? I mean, I think it’s going to bring out a lot of new things. Talk about some of the new concepts that you brought out in this new book, Undoctored.

Dr. Davis:
First, I wanted to cultivate this idea that the doctor, meaning the conventional practicing doctor who thinks that you should submit to his paternalistic orders—take this prescription. Shut up. Don’t ask me your stupid questions. Come back in six months. That’s unacceptable. In this day and age where we have access to so much information, social media, collaborative type functions, we should no longer just take the orders from the doctor who is often not really working for you, but is working for his own—I’m in Milwaukee where the vast majority of doctors are employed by hospital systems. Many of these are still my friends, and they tell me we’re told the more revenue we generate for our hospital system, the larger my end of quarter bonus.

What happens is somebody goes to the ER or the hospital, their doctors. Let’s say for a shoulder pain. They’re told, well, we can’t tell. It might be a sign of heart disease. I can’t be responsible for you because first sign of heart disease sometimes is sudden cardiac death and all that stuff they say to scare the hell out of you. You end up with a stress thallium test, $4,000. You end up with a heart catheterization for a total cost of about $25,000. Because you complained of headaches, you see a neurologist who does an extensive evaluation, including an MRI. You leave for a shoulder ache with a 90,000, $140,000 total healthcare bill. I’ve seen this happen countless times.

The healthcare system has become predatory, and it’s after your insurance money. I want to alert people to that. There are, of course, people who are advocates, primarily in the functional medicine community, the chiropractic community, the operative health community. These are the people we turn to. Not to the gastroenterologist. Not to the endocrinologist. Not to the surgeons. Not to my colleagues, the cardiologists. Not to the conventional primary care community because they’re too deeply mired in this profit, health for-profit idea. That’s one.

I’m speaking to the choir, to you two. We now know that real health wisdom is coming from these kinds of conversations. It’s coming from online collaborations, coming from websites that collect data like patientslikeme.com, and CureTogether, and what I hope my website will become over time. It’s not launched yet, undoctored.com. It’s places people can go for real honest information. We’re not selling drugs. We’re not selling procedures. I’m not trying to direct you to the big hospital down the road that does heart transplantation and implantable defibrillators and all that kind of multi-tens of thousands of dollar procedures, so we want to collaborate on health.

I look back. How much smarter are we than we were ten years ago because of collaboration online? I know all of us I think have raised the bar on sophisticated discussions about nutrition and health so much. Think what it’s going to be—what’s going to happen another ten years because we’re collaborating through these kinds of venues, and so I want to encourage people. While my colleagues say I don’t give a damn what Dr. Google says, we say no. The future is crowdsourced wisdom. When you put 1,000, 10,000 people together with varied interest and experiences, you get answers that are superior to the 1 presumed expert who might call himself a gastroenterologist or a cardiologist. You get better answers from the crowd often. Particularly when you ask pointed answers.

Then lastly, what I saw was—I drew from the cumulative Wheat Belly experience. For me, it was only six basic—not to say there’s only six strategies for health and for every issue. For the vast majority of product health conditions—whether we label it rheumatoid arthritis, or lupus, or hypertension, or coronary disease, or migraine headaches, or plantar fasciitis, or polymyalgia rheumatica, no matter what we labeled it the vast majority of chronic conditions that were non-genetic, non-traumatic, and noninfectious but common chronic health conditions, the vast majority respond to these six—and these are things you already know about. No wheat. No grains, a cap on carbohydrate exposure, omega-3 fatty acid supplementation, iodine supplementation, magnesium, cultivation of bowel flora. You do those handful of things, and something happens.

I call it the 2 plus 2 equals 11 effect. You put them together. You get this wonderful, powerful synergy. Most powerful synergy coming from grain elimination coupled with vitamin D , by the way, and then thirdly, cultivation of bowel flora. There’s something absolutely spectacular about that combination. It’s a synergistic combination of basic strategies, which are largely free or minimal cost, and yet, free you from the tyranny of the healthcare system.

Dr. Pompa:
Don’t you think their greatest tool in the healthcare system—because they are looking at bottom line dollars. Fear, fear is their greatest thing. Even our viewers here, most of our viewers and we have many followers would agree with every word we’re saying. They get number one killer in America, medication, right? I mean, we know these things. I mean, they know these things.

However, I have discussions with many of them and receive their emails and so does Meredith. It’s like, well, I went to my doctor. He basically scared the crap out of them, and they ended up one or two medications with the thing of, well, I take this. I have to take this statin because—I mean, that’s the strategy. They’re able to use fear as leverage to fool even educated people.

Dr. Davis:
Absolutely. One of my favorite lines, favorite because I hated it so much, was one I heard repeated to me by patients many, many, many times, and that was he said I was a walking time bomb. You know what? I’ve met walking time bombs before. You know what? They’re not that common, so this is very common.

The cholesterol treatment issue is a very hot button issue because it’s touched so many people. People will come in with a higher cholesterol, and of course, the primary care doctor or cardiologist will say, “John, you’re a walking time bomb.” You can’t make that determination from a cholesterol panel. There’s absolutely nothing on a cholesterol panel that can label a person a walking time bomb, but they will use that over and over and over. It’s their expedient way to twist your arm into taking a statin drug or, even worse now, submitting to the injectable, many thousands of dollars every month cholesterol drugs. What they see is a path to revenues.

Dr. Pompa:
How do doctors get away with that still when there’s really no study that shows that total cholesterol is really the problem? We know that particle size, the particles, that’s a bigger issue. How are they doing this, doc? I mean, they’re flying with this, and still in the face of what real science is showing.

Dr. Davis:
As you know, we can exchange information in milliseconds, but human attitudes and beliefs don’t change in milliseconds. It changes over decades. The statin drug industry has spent over $2 billion in marketing. They call it clinical research, but we call it marketing. That’s what they use, a salesforce. I practiced for 25 years. I can tell you, until I put a stop to it, I’d have beautiful sales reps coming into my office every day, girls and guys, who were very persuasive in their sales pitches. They provided the bulk of education to my colleagues. If you’re a middle-aged guy with a receding hairline, a big gut, and you’re tired, and a beautiful woman walks in in a miniskirt, and says, “Doc, we’re going to pay for a week long, all-expense paid visit to Orlando where we’re going to talk about statin drugs,” guess what you do? That’s human nature, and it works.

We hear about it in the drug industry, but I’ll tell you where it’s worse, in the medical device industry. When I was in the cath lab doing a lot of procedures, as many as ten a day, you’re going through hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment all the time, all the time, and so you became the hot—this focus of attention of the product reps who made a lot of money and sold a lot of very valuable product. It’s even worse now. You don’t hear anything about that part because it’s hidden behind closed doors at the operating room and the cath labs and other procedural rooms. It’s really bad there. That industry hires a very effective, very sexy, very good looking, very persuasive and smart salesforce. That’s how you get at this community of doctors. Now, as more doctors are female, it’s less effective because a female is a little better at blocking that sort of nonsense than the guys are just from human nature, but they’re very effective at it.

What do you do? When an ophthalmologist makes $2.5 million a year by doing lots and lots and lots of unnecessary or questionable procedures, all their injections they do, the vitreous of the eye, a lot of the cataracts removal, what should they do? You and I will say, well, why don’t you educate people to show them how to not have cataracts, how to not have glaucoma? They would say I don’t have time for that. I am too busy generating procedural revenues. He’s got to pay for his fancy car and house. He’s not about to spend time educating people with a dramatic drop in revenue.

We have this deeply entrenched mindset among my colleagues who are hell-bent on preserving it at the status quo. I’m convinced it’s going to take you, and Meredith, and me, and your viewers who have to start talking about these things to expose it. It’s not going to come from the ophthalmologist making $2.5 million a year. It’s not going to come from my cardiologist colleague who makes $1.2 million a year doing lots of heart catheterizations and implanting defibrillators, so we’ve got to undo that by educating people. It’s like taking down Kodak. You couldn’t take Kodak down by making a better Polaroid camera, but you could take Kodak down by inventing digital photography. They went from $40 billion a year to almost zero overnight because somebody undid their entire business model.

I want to see the same thing happen to conventional healthcare. I want you and me and Meredith, people like us to show people that health is actually quite achievable. You don’t need a page-long list of medications. You don’t need statin drugs. You don’t need an annual colonoscopy. You don’t need any of that nonsense. What you need is to be instructed in some benign ways to achieve health, and you can be freed in so many ways, and this nonsense of 17.5% of the GDP being directed towards healthcare is absolute nonsense. It should be a tiny fraction of that.

Dr. Pompa:
You know what’s funny is I overheard a conversation last week, right? It’s this conversation that went on with two strangers, really, and I was the third on the outside. It went something like this. This was a real conversation that actually happened. She went to her doctor, and she got the high cholesterol, the time bomb thing, right? Basically, she was told to walk five miles a day. The gentleman asked her, well, what dietary recommendation? She said, no, my diet really doesn’t have much to do with it all. I just needed to walk five miles a day.

I mean, literally, it’s like—and the conversation, someone came over and—because I was about to enter into the conversation and be like that guy needs to lose his license, but it didn’t happen. The point is is another strategy is that. People, if we can dumb them down into thinking that diet really doesn’t make that much of a difference, then we got it. They’ve got it. Ultimately, that’s the thing is people don’t get. If they realize how much control they have, they still think they’re unlucky, doc. They think they got Hodgkin’s disease because they’re the unlucky one or cancer because they’re the unlucky one.

It’s garbage. It’s crap. It’s our lifestyles that are doing it. You’re right. They have the power to change. Your book brings that out, and I love that.

Dr. Davis:
Hallelujah!

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. How can they get the book?

Dr. Davis:
The Undoctored book isn’t out yet. It comes out May 9, 2017.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. We had some on. You sent us some things that we could read ahead of time. We appreciate that.

Dr. Davis:
Okay. Because the Wheat Belly community remains so large and vigorous, I’ll maintain that it’ll also—because there’s still lots—there’s plenty more to talk about in grains, as you see, with some of the counterattacks, so I’ll maintain the Wheat Belly Blog and the Wheat Belly Facebook page and some of the other properties. There’s so much here to work on. I wish I could say that we’ve tapped into the Walmart set, but we have not. There’s still plenty of work to do. All we have to do is go to the mall, and see that we still have plenty more. We’ve got enough here to undo—if the USDA and the American Heart Association and the Academy of Nutrition of Dietetics, if they got it right, we wouldn’t have to talk. It’s so colossally wrong that we will be busy for the next 30 years.

Dr. Pompa:
If I would say three things that if, if they say do these dietary things, right, it would be low-fat, eat less, and exercise more, right? All three could not be further from the truth of what really matters. Basically, you’re lazy. You’re a glutton, and you eat too much fat because you’re a glutton. I mean, that’s the message. I mean, that’s the message that our government and media has put out day in, day out. We’re preaching something different. We are. Thank you for all the great work you do.

Dr. Davis:
This is terrific, guys. You guys are doing good work. I’m glad to collaborate with people who are on the right track.

Dr. Pompa:
We reach a lot of people. We reach a lot of people, and we’re blessed to do that. We’re blessed to bring people like yourself that are bringing a counterculture method. That’s for sure. Meredith?

Meredith:
Yeah. Thanks, Dr. Pompa, and thank you, Dr. Davis. Thank you for writing these books, for getting this information out. I know a common theme in all of your books is self-empowerment. Do you have any closing words for viewers who are maybe watching for the first time? This is new information. What would you say to those to take the first step?

Dr. Davis:
This is upsetting, as you two well know, to many people. They have a hard time accepting the fact that they’ve been misled, either intentionally or inadvertently for the past 40 years. I think we just have to look around us, and see what’s happened to the landscape of human health and weight over the past. It’s awful. It’s among the worst ever in the history of humans on this planet, so accept that mistakes were made. Maybe we don’t have to point blame, but accept that mistakes were made. It means that these kinds of conversations blaze the path to finding answers. This is an ongoing conversation. It’s going to evolve. I just encourage people to think, talk, learn, collaborate, and we’ll get to the right answers.

Meredith:
Well said. First step, knowledge is power, but we got to do something with it too, awesome. Thanks, Dr. Pompa. Again, thank you, Dr. Davis. Check out Undoctored out May 9th. This episode will air early May. By the time this is out, you guys will be able to go grab a copy of that book, and get the information. Thanks, everybody, for watching. Have a fantastic weekend, and we’ll see you next week.