256: From Hollywood to Health

256: From Hollywood to Health

with Jim Abrahams

Ashley:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m Ashley Smith. Today we welcome a really special guest, Jim Abrahams. Jim founded the Charlie Foundation, which is a nonprofit that specializes in ketogenic therapy for epilepsy and other neurological conditions.

What makes Jim’s story so special is that you may recognize his work as a writer, producer, and director of comedy movies such as Airplane!, Naked Gun, Ruthless People, and Hot Shots! He transitioned from that life to begin advocating for ketogenic diet therapy when his young son, Charlie, was cured of his epilepsy by utilizing a therapeutic ketogenic diet. The diet was undertaken despite resistance from the five pediatric neurologists he had seen.

When Jim and his wife realized that Charlie was but one of hundreds of thousands of children whose families were either being misinformed or not being informed at all about dietary therapy, they started the Charlie Foundation. This is an inspirational story that I know you’ll love. Please check out the Charlie Foundation in our show notes. They have a wonderful online store of ketogenic books and products where your sales will support this wonderful nonprofit. You can go to CharlieFoundation.org to find out more.

Today’s episode has been brought to you by CytoDetox. CytoDetox is a powerful detox supplement that can help you safely and naturally support your detoxification systems and flush away the toxins you encounter on a daily basis. All CHTV listeners can go to buyCytonow.com to discover the science of CytoDetox and what makes it different from all the other detox products on the market. That’s buyCytonow.com for more information or to purchase. Let’s get started, and welcome, Dr. Pompa and Jim Abrahams, to the show. This is Cellular Healing TV.

Dr. Pompa:
Welcome, Jim, to Cellular Healing TV. I can’t wait for this interview. I have to start here. We were laughing, so I’m already in a laughing mood before the show. I was going back to your writing, producing, and directing days of comedy films, some of my favorites like Airplane! And Naked Gun and Ruthless People, Hot Shots! You were a Hollywood guy, which I can’t wait to transition people.

If they don’t know who you are and why I’m interviewing you in the health space, you have to interview that you came from Hollywood. I was laughing at some of the Airplane! lines and jokes, and I literally fell off my chair laughing at one of the scenes. Thank you for that contribution. I have to say that your greatest contribution on this planet is the Charlie Foundation, and I’m very grateful for that. You have changed so many of my clients and my doctors and all their patients lives because of it. Thank you for that.

Jim:
Thank you. There’s actually a line in Airplane! when the pilot is talking to the doctor on the airplane. The doctor says, “Captain, how soon can we land?” The pilot says, “I can’t tell.” The doctor says, “You can tell me. I’m a doctor.”

Dr. Pompa:
We all started laughing because we said it’s too politically incorrect. I said I don’t know that this would fly today. You said, “It definitely wouldn’t fly today.”

Jim:
I don’t think we would get away with half the script today. I could be wrong, but I think it was rated PG-13.

Dr. Pompa:
I think you’re right. I could sit here and reminisce about those films all day long. I guess that begs the first question. You were a Hollywood writer, producer, and director of some top films. Tell the story. What would transition from that into running the largest as far as when we look at ketosis, keto diets, definitely the original and most successful website information source on ketosis? How did that transition?

Jim:
Well, when our third kid came along, right around his first birthday he had his first seizure. Up until then my life was really reflected in the movies. What can we not take seriously? Let’s look at the media. Let’s look at the world. Anything that we don’t have to take seriously, let’s just not take it seriously. Let’s have a laugh. All of a sudden, Charlie had a seizure.

Dr. Pompa:
How old was Charlie?

Jim:
It was just before his first birthday. The first one was subtle, but they escalated in severity and frequency pretty rapidly. There’s nothing funny about epilepsy. I’ve never heard a good joke about epilepsy. It doesn’t exist.

That changed things a lot, so we started hunting around for a solution. It wasn’t a time in my career where I was doing very well. There were a lot of people who I worked with who had connections with people in different hospitals. We got to skip to the head of the line to see the best known pediatric neurologists in the United States. Within five or six months of Charlie starting to have seizures, he had had seizures in the arms of the head of pediatric neurology at UCLA, LA Children’s, Boston Children’s, Seattle Children’s, and several other pediatric neurologists. The seizures just became more severe, more frequent.

He was diagnosed with something called Lennox-Gastaut syndrome, which is a very severe form of epilepsy and includes [07:09] in those days progressive retardation. The doctors were all in agreement as to treatment options. There were drugs and there was surgery, and that was it. That was all we ever heard about. Again, this is pre [07:29] days.

We tried virtually every drug and none of them worked. Of course, each one has its own special adverse reaction, all of which hit him. He started to regress. He couldn’t walk anymore. By the time he was six or eight months into it, he really couldn’t get out of a chair because one of the seizure types he had was a drop seizure.

It’s sort of like if you pull a lamp cord out of a socket, it just goes out. In a drop seizure all of a sudden you just black out and fall. If you don’t break the fall, you just fall. He would fall on his face, wherever. None of the drugs worked. He was on four or five at a time.

Finally they said there’s a surgery we can try. We bought in, and they tried the surgery on Charlie’s brain. They said there was a cyst in some little [08:45]. They thought maybe they could remove that and it would help, but it didn’t. It was a hideous procedure and set him back further. We felt we were out of options.

We were told that you tried everything and this kid is just most likely going to wind up in a wheelchair somewhere. His main doctor was at UCLA. I went to UCLA library to do some research not really to try to find a cure because the best of the best had told us what we should be doing and we did it. I was trying to figure out how do kids like Charlie and their families make it through life. He was so sick. Do they get to live at home? How does that work? It’s an unusual circumstance. When I started research, my job at the time was writing fart jokes for 13-year-old boys.

Dr. Pompa:
I know you’ve got some good ones.

Jim:
Once you start looking at medical texts, the ketogenic diet is quite prominent. You find out quite early that it was developed in the early 1920s at Mayo Clinic. This was ’93 when I was at the library, but in every decade from the 20s through the 90s it was tried at different hospitals by different doctors in different decades. These were similar patient populations. They had remarkably similar outcomes.

About a third of the kids went on a ketogenic diet who were as sick as Charlie had their seizures go away. Another third were significantly improved. For another third it didn’t work. Nancy and I went to Charlie’s doctor at UCLA. At the same time that I was reading about the ketogenic diet, Nancy had heard about an herbalist who worked out of the strip mall in Houston, Texas. He evidently had herbs that were helpful for kids with seizures.

We went to the doctor at UCLA and said we’ve heard about these two new things. One is this ketogenic diet thing and the other is an herbalist in the strip mall in Houston. What should we do? He said, “Flip a coin. I don’t believe either will work.” In fact, we did flip a coin. We were so desperate.

The strip mall came up first, so we flew with Charlie to Houston and this guy gave Charlie some herbs. That didn’t work, so finally I called John Freeman, the doctor at Johns Hopkins. This was in 1993. Freeman had published a year before one of the many papers I came across that documented the efficacy of the ketogenic diet with 58 consecutive kids who were as sick as Charlie. He found in his result of at least 58 kids in a row, 29% had their seizures go away completely on a ketogenic diet. Mind you, nobody told us about that one.

I called Dr. Freeman and he said, “Send Charlie’s records.” We did. He said, “Why don’t you bring him here, and we’ll try the diet.” We did. I’ve told this story a lot of times, and it’s still—so we did try the diet. In two days his seizures were gone.

At the time we started the diet he was on four medications averaging a dozen seizures a day. He wound up being on the diet for five years. Today he’s a 26-year-old school teacher. He boxes, plays piano. He eats whatever he wants. He’s never taken another anti-epileptic drug. He’s been cured.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s incredible, Jim. I have to ask you this question; did you go back to the doctors? You were with the best of the best. You were a big Hollywood producer. Did you go back to them and say this worked?

Jim:
Yeah, and that’s such an interesting question. The first meeting we had to promote the diet was in 1995. It was done in conjunction with John Freeman and the folks from Hopkins. I talked to a few of the doctors at that meeting, and their answer was—and they knew the data. It was in the texts. It was no secret. They said, “The reason we couldn’t prescribe it is because we didn’t know how it worked. We didn’t understand the mechanisms.”

Dr. Pompa:
Hold on a second. I want to back up and say that’s almost every drug. They don’t know what these drugs are doing. You think you know what it’s doing, but you don’t know what it’s doing to the rest of the body and the rest of the cells. Why don’t they draw the line there?

Jim:
Exactly. They ignored it. I didn’t care why it worked. It worked. He’s fine. He was healthy again. He regained all of the stuff he had lost. He was happy. He was fun to be with again. His siblings had all that pressure off. It just revolutionized our lives. I couldn’t care less why it worked.

Dr. Pompa:
My question would have been if you had this plant that you knew fixed seizures and you didn’t know how it worked or why it worked, but wouldn’t you give it to your son? The answer would be yes. Even if you were worried about legal things, wouldn’t you tell me off the record check into this ketosis diet? We don’t know why it works, but it works in one-third of the cases. We don’t want to look back. Look what it did.

Jim:
In a sense it’s worth repeating the story because it’s contemporary. Now there are tens of thousands of kids who have been on a ketogenic diet who  had bad seizures. It’s the same story. We put them on it for a couple of years and cured it and they went on to live perfectly normal lives. If you ask the Epilepsy Foundation is there a cure, they will say no. I will say what do you mean? They say because we don’t understand the mechanisms and it might be different for one seizure disorder to another, we can’t say that there’s a cure, which is an outrageous step for them to make from my point of view. Now when somebody new today gets in touch with the Epilepsy Foundation with a kid who’s sick with seizures and stuff, they will say there are no cures.

Dr. Pompa:
That just sucks the hope out of you and what it does is it stops people from looking. Why don’t they say there is a cure in at least one-third of the people with a certain diet? We don’t have to claim all are cured. Tell them what it statistically is. I’m not a conspiracy theorist by any means, but you look to the power that the drug companies have.

Let me tell you something, if there was a drug that cured 5% of seizures, the world would know and they would talk about the miracle cure on every darn news station. It’s one of those things. When you look back at the literature that I have in the 1920s and even beyond seizures when Otto Warburg was doing his research on cancer and ketosis, then all the drugs started coming up, the anti-seizure drugs, Neurontin, etc. It went by the wayside. I think only in the last five years it’s been getting more popular, something that I’ve talked about and known for a long time.

Here we are in a different era where we understand the benefits of ketosis. We are understanding the fact that these ketones have amazing powers of healing the brain and cells and down regulating inflammation. My next seminar, Dominic D'Agostino, young researcher is speaking in Nashville. The science is there. We know that these ketones heal.

Humans are meant to go in and out of ketotic states, one of which is resetting our DNA and healing that occurs. Today people don’t typically go into ketosis unless they have to. Talk a little bit about that, and let’s move in beyond seizures. You’ve expanded your foundation for autism, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, so talk about that.

Jim:
Can I just back up one step? I figured when we started the Charlie Foundation in ’94 that we’d be in business for about a year. It’s [19:15]. It just seems so obvious to me. I’ve anguished on the success we’ve had has been nice, but not nearly what it should be. There’s a world of epilepsy population today of over 60 million people. If a half of 1% are using a ketogenic diet, that would be optimistic. You mentioned big pharma as an influence. I think there are other influences too.

Dr. Pompa:
Talk about them.

Jim:
I’m not a conspiracy guy. It’s not like these people get together and say how can we plot against dietary therapies, but there’s also the medical device industry, which has a huge impact in the epilepsy world. It’s billions and billions. I don’t think the medical system teaches diet therapy at medical schools.

I have a friend whose name is Tom Manning, wonderful guy. His daughter has epilepsy. He went through all the same procedures, all kinds of drugs and whatnot. He finally came across the diet and that combination with something else has controlled her seizures. She hasn’t had a seizure now in 400 days, something like that.

The interesting thing is as part of Tom’s job he’s an emergency room doctor. He travels around the United States and lectures other emergency room doctors about emergency room protocol, stuff like that. As a result of his experience with Mallory, his daughter, he’s added two questions to his lectures when he’s talking to doctors. He’ll talk to as many as 100 at a time. First question is how many of you doctors have ever heard of a ketogenic diet? I’ve been there a couple times when he did it.

His estimate is about 3 to 5% have heard of a ketogenic diet. The follow up question is how many of you who have heard of the diet know it can be a cure for epilepsy? No one has ever known that. That’s where the real gap is. People who should be prescribing and using the diet don’t even know about it. They don’t teach diet therapy and nutrition in medical school.

Dr. Pompa:
No, they don’t. Unfortunately, a big part of my seminar that I teach is utilizing the power of ketones and ketosis diets. Again, I think even though I made the statement that it’s been popular in the last five years, it still really isn’t popular for what we’re talking about. It’s popular for weight loss. By the way, I’m staying in a ketosis diet. I don’t even think it’s great for weight loss.

I teach something called diet variation. When you use it as healing tool, it’s absolutely phenomenal what this diet can do. Before we move onto some of these other conditions, your foundation—first of all, you get people who want to go there. The resources are absolutely amazing. I resource it all the time and I tell people about it. What has changed? In other words, what have you seen with your foundation even in the last five years? Has there been a reinterest?

Jim:
It’s a different world. By the way, the name of the foundation is Charlie Foundation. Our website is CharlieFoundation.org and Charlie is spelled with an I-E. I would say seven years ago, eight years ago if you Googled ketogenic diet, the first thing that would come up would be Charlie Foundation. Now it’s on page 97 or something. It’s completely different.

The biggest change is obviously the new applications have had everything in the world to do with that, people with cancer and autism and traumatic disorder and all sorts of stuff. They’ve had a lot to do with it. I mean this only in the best way, but there’s also been a way to make a profit. The problem with the diet was never that it was too difficult. It wasn’t profitable. Now there are new companies. Tom is involved in some.

There are wonderful companies that are coming up with great devices to measure ketones to increase ketones, and there’s so much more science. If you’re going to do science, it has to be paid for. It’s easy to find drug companies with research money, but it hasn’t been up until recently easy to find money to do ketogenic diet research. Now as this whole new cottage industry, and maybe it’s more than cottage that now has developed, there’s much more research into the new applications.

Dr. Pompa:
There’s no doubt. How are the two movies, one was Lorenzo’s Oil and the other was First Do No Harm; those were both about ketosis diet and seizures. Did they help this? What year were those? Were those 80s or 90s? I can’t remember.

Jim:
I did First Do No Harm, and that was ’97. Lorenzo’s Oil, I don’t remember what year it was.

Dr. Pompa:
First Do No Harm was you in 1997. That was with Meryl Streep, correct?

Jim:
Right.

Dr. Pompa:
Folks, if you haven’t seen it, watch that movie. Where can you find that movie? Can you get it on Netflix?

Jim:
I think you can just get it on YouTube. You can watch it online or buy used copies on Amazon. We have copies that we sell for $10 through the Charlie Foundation. On the Charlie Foundation website we have a keto store where we sell at a discount a lot of keto supplies, scales, booklet variations of the ketogenic diet, modified ketogenic, low glycemic index treatment, modified Atkins diet. We have a lot of that available and you can, if you want to purchase it, buy a copy of First Do No Harm.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s good. What else while we’re talking about your website can they get? What other resources would interest people?

Jim:
I think it’s a pretty good primer on the state of keto medical treatment today. I think part of what has happened with this explosion of interest, and I’m glad to hear that we’re very much on the same page about this with the diet for conditioning and weight loss, which is fine, there’s a lot of misinformation out there. If you’re on a ketogenic diet for a real medical therapy, you can’t be as cavalier as it’s portrayed in the media today. You can’t skip a meal. It’s very disciplined and very structured. If you’re on a classic ketogenic diet, which Charlie was for many years, you have to weigh and measure the amount of proteins, carbohydrates, and fats that goes into every meal. That has to be calculated with the help of a dietician.

Dr. Pompa:
The point is with a condition like Charlie’s, the brain has to be constantly fed from ketones. You have to be very careful. If you’re doing it for other reasons, moving in and out of it or having different foods is fine, but not for that. That’s a really good point. That was actually one of my questions for you. I’m sure First Do No Harm was such a good movie. It definitely brought a lot of attention to this cause, your website, and just even the curiosity. I’m sure it didn’t last either.

Jim:
No, it didn’t. It had an interesting reaction. Basically what happened is all of a sudden 11 million people saw First Do No Harm in February of 1997 and the neurology community just wasn’t ready. The diet, as you were saying, is very disciplined. Most of the work is done between an experienced dietician and the patient. There weren’t very many dieticians who were available. I think you’ve talked to Beth Zupec-Kania, who is the dietician we worked with. There weren’t many Beths around in those days.

Dr. Pompa:
If you haven’t seen that, I’ll have my team post that interview here with Beth. There’s some fundamentals there about the diet that we probably won’t cover on this show. Watch that show. We’ll put the link here.

Jim:
There’s also on the YouTube page Charlie Foundation website a lot of interviews with specialists, doctors, and scientists explaining mechanisms and various questions about the diet.

Dr. Pompa:
Your site is a fantastic resource.

Jim:
What I stopped with, the medical community really wasn’t prepared to administer the diet. All of these people sitting at home holding their kids during seizures and that were friends of people who had seizures, all of a sudden phones started ringing off the hook. It had this weird reverse reaction. The doctors couldn’t say we’re not available. We don’t have the program and we can’t do it. There tended to be an explosion of the myths of why you shouldn’t do it.

It’s too difficult. We don’t know the science. It can stunt your growth, things like that. First Do No Harm had a mixed reaction. I don’t know whether it would have been better as a theatrical movie. For a lot of people it did provide hope, so I’m thrilled that we did it. I think the medical community was kind of shocked and not prepared.

Dr. Pompa:
I have to say that movie got my interest in it. It perked my interest in why it worked, and I started digging into the literature and that science. I’m sure it had a positive effect in soa many other people’s lives besides mine. That got my research going in that area to realize there’s something here. It was always back here.

I got sick in about 1999, 2000. I immediately reached for that diet. I knew there was something not right in my nervous system. That’s the first thing that I did that actually worked and started helping me. I ended up having mercury poisoning, but I had so much brain inflammation that was in my brain. The combination of being in ketosis and my cellular detox was magic for me, which brings me to autism.

What are you seeing here? We have an explosion. It’s estimated by 2032 that 1 in 2 kids, if the statistics stay the same, could be on the autism spectrum. Ketosis is the magic. I train doctors all over the country, all over the world. I can tell you putting kids in ketosis, that’s a big deal, so talk about that.

Jim:
I will to the extent I’m knowledgeable. I can tell you that Charlie, my son, does have some autism. He was left with some autism. I mentioned he lives independently and he’s a teacher. He’s happy and doing really well with his life, but we often in retrospect think how lucky were we to put him on the diet when he was one year old? What could this have been if we hadn’t done that for those five years? This is not my area of expertise. I think the evidence is pretty strong that early intervention with diet therapy can be very effective with autism.

Dr. Pompa:
You have a lot of those resources now on your site, correct?

Jim:
The site will speak better than I can. The site addresses the use of diet therapy with autism, with malignant brain tumor. I think malignant brain tumor is the field that has spurred the most amount of recent interest, but certainly there’s evidence that it can be effective even as an adjunctive therapy with tumors.

Dr. Pompa:
I’ve interviewed Thomas Seyfried a couple times on this show. I’m sure you have as well. Utilizing ketosis and fasting to shrink tumors, etc. is pretty remarkable science. He’s fighting an upstream battle.

I have to share this with you. These two over here we adopted. These three were biological. They’re twins and we adopted them at age seven. They had a tragedy in their family. He was on the autism spectrum, sensory integration and Asperger’s.

The first thing we did when we got the children, we’re like living our life with this is going to be very difficult. I had just got well. I immediately said put them on the diet. He went into ketosis hard core. That alone was dramatic for him.

He speaks about it and he knows because there were times where he went off the diet. He’s 22 years old today. He recently had gone off as he moved to San Diego. He said, “I’m putting myself back in the diet.” He does a modified version. When he was young it was hard core ketosis without any interrupts.

Jim:
That’s the other thing that we did. The sugar industry and the processed food industry have an enormous influence on our diet in many of us. If you can take all the sugar out of our diet, we’ll be better for it. You can definitely say that. Certainly kids who are on the spectrum will benefit also dramatically.

Dr. Pompa:
It changed his life, the combination of the diet and my brain detox.

Jim:
Did you do it with your family? Did the whole family eat keto together?

Dr. Pompa:
Fortunately, our whole family ate very well. Dylan we definitely had to be way more strict with. He fought it. I interviewed him one time on the show. He remembers the day we sat on the bed. He was crying because he didn’t want to eat such and such food. You don’t want to look different even in school.

I said, “Dylan, I know you know that you’re not right.” He said, “Yeah.” “How bad do you want it? Do you want to get well? Do you want to be able to be completely well?” He said, “Yes.” I said, “You’re going to have to trust me.”

I had a different influence. I was almost glad I wasn’t his biological father because my wife and I had a different influence. We weren’t as affected emotionally as you are oftentimes with your own kids. It’s different for everybody, but he really buckled down. It would have been easier, to your point, if we were all on the same diet. He was disciplined in it. He stayed true to it. I have to say he healed himself when I think about it.

Jim:
Now they voluntarily do it years later. That’s pretty cool.

Dr. Pompa:
He tells this story. He does detox to this day on and off. He’s back on dialing in the diet. He’s an amazing kid. I always say out of the five he ended up being our easiest. They all agree with that. He doesn’t get caught up in the emotional garbage that all the other kids do.

Jim:
I know the feeling.

Dr. Pompa:
I really need a new picture. I always pull this one up. It’s the same one that’s back there. If you saw him today you’d be like oh, my gosh if you met him. I really should bring him on as an interview. He’s still a little more shy than my other kids. He’s not a talker.

I have to say that Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, these are out there. If we talk about autism being a massive pandemic, these are as well. I think in the medical community they’re not even talked about. I was preparing a PowerPoint this morning, and I pulled a study. It was ketones and Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. It was talking about the results, which are phenomenal. I pulled literally three different studies from my archive. That’s more on your site now too.

Jim:
The ultimate question or one of the questions that I always ask and ask people to ask is why not? If there’s evidence that’s leaning toward a certain outcome that you want, why wouldn’t you try it? It’s healthy. The recipes that are all over the place are just delicious. It’s not that difficult. The adverse affects are easily manageable, if there are any. Even if the science isn’t complete, why not give it a shot?

Dr. Pompa:
I pulled up this study right here, “Benefits of Elevated Ketones.” Ketone bodies proven potential therapeutic use for Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. The science is there. All these studies that I pull up are published in reputable journals. It’s not just my opinion here.

Jim:
In fact, it’s based in science. It is medical therapy. Judging from the last five years or so, we’re very hopeful that it’s only going to expand in popularity.

Dr. Pompa:
No doubt about it. I don’t expect you to burst out science right now. My viewers probably don’t care, but you’ve been looking at this and studying this and you’re not a doctor. You’re a crusader. Looking at it, why do the ketones in the simplest fashion you can say have such a positive effect on the brain for all these different conditions that we noted?

Jim:
I have a very simplistic view. When we went to Johns Hopkins and put Charlie on the diet, there was a dietician there named Millicent Kelly. She was on the verge of retirement, and she had started working with the ketogenic diet in the mid 40s. By the way, there’s an interview with her that was done about a year ago on our website. If you want to see it, it’s just a marvelous interview. She talked about the history of the diet and her history of the diet, Millicent Kelly.

This is as far from scientific as possible, but she likened burning fat to burning a log. When you burn a log, there’s an ash that’s left. Whatever ash is left from burning fat has this positive effect on brain [42:42].

Dr. Pompa:
Meaning that when you burn fat, you make ketones.

Jim:
You make ketones.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s the ash. Whatever that ash is, it is very positive. One of the other things that is close to that example is another simple example that I give people. When you burn glucose—and our cells are meant to do both. It can burn glucose for energy or it can burn fat.

When you burn glucose, it’s like burning wood in a fire that makes a lot of smoke. You need a chimney. When you burn ketones or fat, it burns so much cleaner. It’s like burning natural gas on the stove, especially ketones. You don’t see the smoke.

What that means is when you burn sugar in your cell, there’s a lot of oxidative waste that the body has to deal with in a cell that’s already strained to get rid of it. That’s a problem. When we put people on a ketosis diet, the fat and ketones burn so clean that it doesn’t make all that oxidative waste. It gives us a chance to down regulate that and the body a chance to down regulate that inflammation of the cell.

Jim:
Can I use that?

Dr. Pompa:
You can use that. I have to end with this. First of all, everyone should go check out the great resources, dietary resources, recipes, great interviews, science, you name it. It’s on the CharlieFoundation.org. Go there for sure. If you haven’t watched the movie, First Do No Harm, watch it. If you haven’t watched Naked Gun or Airplane!, watch those too. Those have nothing to do with this.

Jim:
A double feature.

Dr. Pompa:
With that, let’s end there. I either want a really funny fart joke or another joke from Airplane! or Naked Gun. I’ll put you on the spot. We started funny and we’ve got to end funny.

Jim:
I’m trying to think of one.

Dr. Pompa:
That one’s too crude.

Jim:
That’s exactly what’s going on. One of my favorites is when Kareem Abdul-Jabbar played the co-pilot of the airplane in Airplane! A little boy goes into the cockpit and calls him out. He’s like, “You’re not the co-pilot. You’re Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.” The kid calls him out and says, “My dad always said you didn’t play hard enough on defense and you only worked during the playoffs.” It’s always funny when you watch that.

Dr. Pompa:
I have so many favorite pieces of that movie because that was one of those movies that me belly laugh literally. It was all things that today would probably too politically incorrect. It makes me laugh. You can make fun of Italian-Americans, and I’ll laugh every time because stereotypes are funny. A lot of it’s true.

Jim:
It’s not mean-spirited. It’s just fun.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s good stuff. You’ve had such a great contribution to society. You really have. Those movies alone, the fact that you made me belly laugh years ago, that’s healing. Now you’re healing people on this level, from pain to purpose. We’re both here today because of the traumas, the adversity that we had in our life. Look what it’s done.

Here we are serving on another level. You’ve done that. You could have sat on the information, but you took the skills God gave you and you’ve made movies and you’ve developed this amazing resource for so many people. Support his website. Is there another way they can support you, Jim?

Jim:
There’s a donate thing. What I always encourage people to do is if they have had some sort of success with the ketogenic diet for any medical disorder, get in touch with the local media. The people who fund med schools aren’t going to start all of a sudden promoting diet therapy. It’s up to us, the people who have benefited from diet therapy, to promote and go public to tell their stories. The words you used earlier, it is most important to give others hope. The darkest hour, and I remember very clearly, is when you lose hope.

Dr. Pompa:
I remember that too even in my own battle. I didn’t know what was going on. I would try to track things down. If I thought I had something and I read somewhere there’s no cure, it was devastating to me. Thank God I didn’t believe it. Thank you for bringing this to light.

Jim:
Thank you for doing what you do. This is fabulous.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s a pleasure. Thank you for being on Cellular Healing TV. We owe you a lot of respect. I appreciate it.

Jim:
I appreciate it. Thanks.

Ashley:
That’s it for this week. We hope you enjoyed today’s episode. This episode was brought to you by CytoDetox. Please check it out at buyCytonow.com. We’ll be back next week and every Friday at 10:00 AM Eastern. We truly appreciate your support.

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