Pam Popper, Food Over Medicine

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Dr. Pam Popper is a naturopath, an internationally recognized expert on nutrition, medicine and health, and the Executive Director of The Wellness Forum. The company offers educational programs designed to assist individuals in changing their health outcomes through improved diet and lifestyle habits; to assist employers in reducing the costs of health insurance and medical care for employees; and to educate health care professionals about how to use diet and lifestyle for preventing, reversing, and stopping the progression of degenerative disease.

Dr. Popper is the author of several books; her most recent is Food Over Medicine: The Conversation That Can Save Your Life . She is the Founder of The Wellness Forum Foundation, which offers programming in schools designed to improve children’s health through better nutrition.

Dr. Popper serves on the Physician’s Steering Committee and the President’s Board for the Physicians’ Committee for Responsible Medicine in Washington D.C. Dr. Popper is one of the health care professionals involved in the famed Sacramento Food Bank Project, in which economically disadvantaged people were shown how to reverse their diseases and eliminate medications with diet.

Dr. Popper is part of Dr. T. Colin Campbell’s teaching team at eCornell, teaching part of a certification course on plant-based nutrition. She has been featured in many widely distributed documentaries, including Processed People and Making a Killing and appears in a new film, Forks Over Knives, which played in major theaters throughout North America in 2011. She is one of the co-authors of the companion book which was on the New York Times bestseller list for 66 weeks.

Dr. Popper is also a lobbyist and public policy expert, and continually works toward changing laws that interfere with patients’ right to choose their health provider and method of care. She has testified in front of legislative committees on numerous occasions, and has testified twice in front of the USDA’s Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee.

TRANSCRIPTION:

Hello I’m Caryn Hartglass and you’re listening to It’s All About Food. Thank you for joining me today. It’s July 23rd, 2013—gosh I was going to say some other year. Here we are, it’s lovely summer day. I think we’re kind of over the heat spell, I hope, I hope. I’ve been trying to keep cool and before we get started with my first interview today I wanted to remind you: You know you can call in and ask questions. The number is 1-888-874-4888 and you may know this, you can e-mail me any time, during the program or any time during the week, info@realmeals.org. A couple of other things going on. I wanted to mention some of my friends. Betsy Carson who is producing the vegan mashup season has a Kickstarter going on to get season two going with Terry Hope Romero, Miyoko Schinner and Toni Fiori, and if you want to help they are looking for funding and they have four days to go to reach their goal. So if you google “kickstarter vegan mashup” you should be able to find it. If you want to help that would be a lovely, lovely thing to do. OK, now let’s get to my first very wonderful guest Dr. Pam Popper is a naturopath, an internationally recognized expert on nutrition, medicine and health, and the Executive Director of The Wellness Forum. She has helped tens of thousands of people regain their health and has helped many employers reduce health care costs with worksite health improvement programs for employees and is founder of the Wellness Forum Institute for Health Studies. She appeared as an expert in the acclaimed film “Forks Over Knives”. Welcome to It’s All About Food.

Pam Popper: Thank you for having me.

Caryn Hartglass: Hi. It was really lovely meeting you at the BenBella anniversary celebration in Brooklyn at The Gutter. That was a really hip bowling alley place, a really nice party.

Pam Popper: That was fun, that was a great event. Of course we were celebrating, everyone has a new book out…including me. That was fun.

Caryn Hartglass: I’m excited because I’m going to be talking to not only you but Dr. Campbell later on and also Bhava Ram who wrote Warrior Pose. I don’t know if you got to read that book but…

Pam Popper: I have it, it’s on my stack. I always have like a hundred books I haven’t yet read. The problem is I keep buying more. I’m like a book junkie. I guess I could have worse habits, right?

Caryn Hartglass: Right. That was really an inspirational story. I didn’t even know until the end that we went vegan. So that was like an extra bonus in the whole story. OK, let’s get to the meat of the conversation today—that’s the plant-based meat, of course.

Pam Popper: Of course.

Caryn Hartglass: So you have helped so many people and I’m sure that’s made a lot of people happy and that must mean a lot to you.

Pam Popper: Well, it does and it’s why I love coming to work every day. I think it’s such a contrast. If you talk to people in the healthcare field most of them are pretty disenchanted with it: They don’t like it; they’re not making money; they’re depressed and discouraged and it’s not fun and the whole nine yards. It’s just such a contrast to the way that people who practice and administer health care the way that we do see things because when people come in here they get well. And then they’re happy and they love you and you never get tired of that. We’ve helped a lot of people and it’s a very gratifying experience and I can’t ever imagine doing anything other than this.

Caryn Hartglass: Now a lot of people who enter the health care industry, especially doctors I think, really have a good motive. They want to help people get well and then over time falling into the system…whatever…it must be really frustrating.

Pam Popper: Well it is and part of the problem is that nobody, including me, is taught, or was taught, how to cure anybody of anything. It’s all about symptom mitigation and of course if you’re a traditional medical doctor, symptom mitigation is with pharmaceutical drugs. If you’re trained as a naturopath like me, symptom mitigation is with supplements. It all points to the same end which is the patient feels better while he or she gets worse because you’re not addressing the underlying cause of what caused the illness which is almost always related to diet and lifestyle choices. So I’m sure it’s frustrating for a physician to spend a small fortune to go to school to learn how to be a doctor to watch people get worse instead of better and crankier instead of nicer. At some point in time you say, gosh I don’t think this is what I signed up for. Then, as you mentioned, you fall into the institution of medicine which is I think kind of an unsavory business these days and that makes it even less fun.

Caryn Hartglass: OK, so you’ve created the Wellness Forum and before I get into some of the questions that I have with your book why don’t you tell us about the Wellness Forum.

Pam Popper: The Wellness Forum is in business to help people change their health outcomes by making diet and lifestyle change. We offer educational programs that lead to that result. And then there are so many applications for programs like that. So we help individuals who want to regain their health, we help companies to lower health insurance costs by going into the work site and teaching people how to eat and exercise their way out of the conditions that are costing their employers so much money. We own a school so we teach healthcare professionals how to practice differently—we make up for the training that they’re not getting through their traditional education. And we have a foundation that goes into schools and provides educational programming to school children and teachers that isn’t sponsored by industry. So lots of different applications for the same message which really is that most of what we spend our time, money and resources on in this country from a health care perspective is degenerative disease and I call these food-borne illnesses. You eat your way in and we can show you how to eat your way out.

Pam Popper: And you’re located in Ohio?

Pam Popper: We’re located in Ohio but we do business all over the United States and many, many foreign countries because all of our programming can be done via distance learning. So we have conference calls and books and DVDs and you can participate no matter where you are. So we have members in Bulgaria and Iceland and Greece and all over place. It’s really kind of interesting the different types of people we get to interact with. It’s also interesting that the problems are the same everywhere. In other words there may be a few little oases of health that are left on the planet where people are actually kind of trim and doing well from a health perspective but in almost every country now you’ve got a large population of people who are overfed, overweight and undernourished and sick. That’s great for business but not so great for mankind.

Caryn Hartglass: It’s kind of an amazing thing how we got to this place. Sometimes I wonder: Are humans just meant to suffer? As we become more affluent and we have means, are we just looking for new problems, we we just creating these problems? Because these are problems we know how to fix.

Pam Popper: Well, I don’t think that we’re looking for problems and I don’t think humans are meant to suffer. I think the problem is that we’re living in an environment for which we’re not very well adapted. In other words, if you look at our history on the planet, we didn’t used to have to make choices about food. Nobody went to the grocery store a thousand years ago and wandered around with 200 choices of ice cream. Humans ate locally grown, available food, inexpensive food, unless you were part of the royal class. And it had a protective effect. And in places in the world where people still, mostly for financial reasons, eat that way, they don’t suffer from chronic degenerative conditions. So what’s happened is our ability to produce massive amounts of food inexpensively, some of which I would not even classify as food. You read the labels on some of these packages and there’s nothing food in it. It’s just chemicals and coloring agents. But we live in a land that’s filled with this stuff and we don’t really teach people how to make the right choices when given the choice between good and bad choices. So that’s where our problem is. Humans for the first time in their lives can choose anything they want, at any time of the day or night, and they invariably make poor choices because they don’t know the consequences of doing so.

Caryn Hartglass: You know it’s funny, I don’t know if you hear the little chimes in the background, but the ice cream truck is around my neighborhood, you don’t even have to go to the grocery store, it comes to you. You barely have to move.

Pam Popper: That’s the other thing too. Our whole existence is set up now so that you don’t have to move. We’ve got cordless phones, we don’t have to get up an answer the phone. We’ve got remotes on our TV. Our jobs are sedentary. I’m sitting here talking to you which is why I have to go out and run because so much of what I do I’m sitting around a desk or on the phone. So we really have to work hard to do the things that human beings are designed to do which is eat a plant-based diet and to be physically active because our natural lives these days, the way that they trend, doesn’t provide either of those things.

Caryn Hartglass: Alright, let’s get to Food Over Medicine. I like the style, it’s a conversation between you and Glen Merzer. We almost feel we’re right there with you getting the information. It’s very comfortable, very easy to understand.

Pam Popper: Yes. I have to give Glen the credit for it. It was actually his idea. I also have to say I think I’m pretty smart about diet, health and medicine and I know a lot of stuff but to the extent that this book is fun to read, I also give Glen the credit for that. He’s a marvelous marvelous writer and I think he took what could be a rather dry subject and turned it into something interesting, easy-to-follow and easy to understand. So I have to give him the credit for that. I’ll take credit for the ideas but I’ll give him credit for the writing because he deserves it.

Caryn Hartglass: OK, thank you Glen. So let’s talk about some of the things just to whet people’s appetite about the book.

Pam Popper: Let’s start with the reason I wanted to write this book. There’s so many books about diet and health and medicine right now, why do we need one more? I think the first thing is I have some things to say about diet that I think haven’t been covered real well and I wanted to say those things. But the big point I wanted to make, and it’s very important, is that you can watch every morsel you put into your mouth and eat what we might term a plant-perfect diet and you still can end up having adverse health consequences as a result of your interaction with the medical community if you’re not an educated medical consumer. The days are over when you can just show up in a doctor’s office and do what you’re told because doctors are trained to administer tests and treatments and drugs and supplements most of which are useless and many of which are harmful. So what I really want to do is I want consumers to be educated medical consumers. The exception to the rule is if you’re involved in some type of traumatic event like a car accident and boy you want to go to the hospital and do what they tell you to do so they can save your life but what most of us is engaging in is not that, it’s regular trips to doctors where we are recommended, all kinds of things are recommended, ranging from diagnostic testing to the drugs and supplements as I mentioned and a great deal of it is not really a very good idea.

Caryn Hartglass: I want to talk quickly about breast cancer and prostate cancer because you mention some really scary things in your book about people getting diagnosed and being treated for something they really shouldn’t be treated for.

Pam Popper: The problem with diagnostic testing is that first of all, we now have such great imaging equipment and that sounds like that would be great but we’re actually diagnosing people and they might be better off not knowing anything that is wrong. In other words, let’s start with prostate cancer because that’s a little bit easier situation. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force has now said that prostate cancer screening, PSA testing, as it were, is useless for men of all ages. The man who invented the test has said it’s not really very useful. One of the reasons is that PSA is not really a very good marker for determining if you have a form of prostate cancer that is gonna kill you or you’ll die with but not of. Humans are not wired to be told that they have prostate cancer but just forget about it, go live your life, we just don’t do that. Once you’re diagnosed with prostate cancer even though we have no way of knowing if it’s going to turn into anything we treat everybody as if it is. You have some people with early stage or really slow-growing cancers that they’d be better off not knowing about and doing all kinds of treatments that often lead to incontinence and impotence and that sort of thing and a great deal of that treatment is just unnecessary. If you look at breast cancer, mammography does not reduce the risk of dying of breast cancer. And in fact, it’s quite harmful. About one out of 2000 women will get some benefit from mammography screening and for every woman that benefits we actually kill six. And I meant what I said—kill six. I don’t think that most women who have mammograms know that and I don’t think many of them would choose that if they really understood that. That’s an example of how we misuse diagnostic testing. And one other thing I want to mention is, the other thing we don’t talk much about, is when people have these tests they think the testing is going to save their life and so they have the test and they’re told that we didn’t detect anything and then they go back to living their lives, eating a bad diet, not exercising and I’ll get tested next year and see if I’m still getting away with my bad habits instead of understanding that testing isn’t going to save your life. And what you better do is change your bad habits now so you’re not dealing with something that can’t be fixed. A lot of times by the time people find out that they’re sick they have something that’s pretty aggressive and you can’t always fix it. So diagnostic testing and early detection really are virtually useless and people say well my gosh what are we supposed to do? I tell them you’re supposed to live the right life style and eat the right diet for humans. And that’s the best protection you’re going to have. I wish I could tell you that all the rest of the stuff would help you but it just doesn’t.

Caryn Hartglass: That’s really powerful information and I know that so many people are just scared, they’re feared into going to the doctor and having the check. It’s quite criminal.

Pam Popper: And doctors enthusiastically recommend this stuff. And get angry if you don’t do what you’re told. I have people that I know that have been fired by doctors—if you’re not going to do what I tell you to do you can’t come here any more. It’s the arrogance of …

Caryn Hartglass: I wish there were doctors…I know there are a few…but I wish there were more doctors that would fire patients that didn’t do the right thing. I remember a doctor who wouldn’t treat patients who weren’t trying to quit smoking. He would say if you’re not going to do the best that you can for your own health then I don’t want to participate.

Pam Popper: Exactly, exactly. That’s the way that it should be. At the very least we need to be having what I call the informed consent discussion. Here’s the way it should go. When you show up in the doctor’s office and for the first time you get a blood test that shows that your cholesterol is going up the conversation should go like this: Doctor says to patient: Look, your cholesterol is too high. We have a couple of options here. I can put you on a statin drug and the best of the bunch will reduce your risk of a major coronary event or death from a coronary event by about 1.6%. Lots of side effects, pages and pages and pages of them including cognitive decline, one of the top ones now. The FDA made them add that to the list and a lot of other things you don’t want to have happen or I can show you how to change your diet, your cholesterol will drop to the place where it will be lower than your IQ within a few months and you’ll never have to worry about the stuff again. You’ll be heart attack proof and you can go on and live your life and a lot of other bad things won’t happen to you either. So which would you like to do? I think that most people…my experience is most people when confronted with that stark contrast and that information will choose to at least try the diet. But that’s not what’s happening. What’s happening is people not only get sucked in to doing all this useless diagnostic testing but then when they find out that something is wrong then they’re told to engage in taking drugs or procedures or surgeries and biopsies and all kinds of other stuff that don’t really offer much protection and a lot of which do more harm than good. Also, not even told that they could eat their way out of their condition.

Caryn Hartglass: I think more people are getting the idea that a healthy plant-based diet can definitely help with heart disease and diabetes. At least I know my listeners know that because I’ve been talking about it for such a long time. And many people have seen the film that you were in, Forks Over Knives, which is so important, an easy way and a powerful way to get the message really fast about how food can be your medicine. But there are other illnesses that aren’t getting as much press. We’ll stick with the clogged artery for a moment and coronary artery disease but you have a number of anecdotes in your book, different people that you’ve worked with and one of them I just wanted to highlight because I know someone who has recently had something similar so this was your story with Barry and Elizabeth and Barry had…his mind went blank. It would last for a few minutes and he had a lot of tests done. All he had was high cholesterol and high blood pressure. Your interpretation of what he had I found really interesting. What should people do with a symptom like this which can be really scary?

Pam Popper: Well Barry’s experience was really instructive and the first thing is the interesting parts of the story is to me, first of all if you have friends and family who haven’t listened to you yet, don’t give up hope because these are some of my dearest friends and they’ve never eaten fast food and junk like in the traditional sense but they never really ate my diet either. They were always really respectful and all that sort of thing and I stay with them for a few days every year and they always had the stuff for me to eat and everything but they weren’t eating this diet and they weren’t really to terribly much interested in changing to it. The second thing is that they have this terrible thing called “good insurance”. So when Barry got…this started happening to Barry he ends up at a very famed clinic in South Florida where they spent thousands of dollars testing him. I thought this was fascinating. In fact, when he really got frightened and he said I want your help and I’ll do anything you tell me to do, he overnighted his medical records to me and they came in a box. I said I need to look at all this stuff because I’m thinking, I want to make sure I’m not missing something. They had images…I mean he’d been in there for lots of testing. They really took advantage of the fact that he had such good insurance. He sent me this box of medical records and all this stuff that they did…images and I’m looking at the whole thing and the bottom line is he had advanced coronary artery disease and he was a candidate for…they wanted him to have bypass surgery and that scared him half to death and he was a candidate for a heart attack. So I called him back and I said listen, this isn’t anything exotic, as you mentioned, you’ve got high blood pressure and high cholesterol, here’s what you need to do and it’s time for you to eat my diet. He said I’ll do anything you tell me to do because I don’t want to have surgery. He and his wife adopted two children from Russia so he’s got these two children and he says I want to be able to raise my kids and the whole nine yards. So he instantaneously converts to the diet and of course Elizabeth, his wife, does too because she loves her husband and is supportive and the whole nine yards and, long story short, within a few days–problem gone. When he went back to the clinic to have a blood draw and that sort of thing, they actually did the brachial artery tourniquet test. They told him he had the arteries of a 20 year old man and he’s in his 60s. So within a very short time he ate his way out of it. They both lost a lot of weight. They’re both really attractive people but…they look like a Hollywood couple, as I said in the book, now. It was just that simple. He’s never strayed from it and he’s never had another one of those events and his cholesterol has stayed low and his blood pressure’s low, he doesn’t take any medications and hopefully he’ll live to be a hundred and that’s wonderful. I care about this story because first of all I want everybody to be healthy but the second thing is these are really, really good friends and if something had happened to Barry it would’ve touched me in a very personal way. So when you get a chance to save a friend that’s really a special thing.

Caryn Hartglass: The symptom though is what triggered my attention. He just blanked out for a few minutes, couldn’t remember names of things and you said that was impaired oxygenation to the brain from coronary artery disease and I don’t think most people really realize that.

Pam Popper: Well you know I spent two days last week attending a conference on nutrition and the brain and looking at this very issue…lots and lots of presenters and I think they thing that people don’t realize is that the brain is the biggest utilizer of energy, oxygen, water and when those arteries…if you have coronary artery disease you don’t get it in one place, it’s systemic, you get it everywhere. So when the arteries start to become filled with plaque and the epithelial tissue is damaged and you’re not pumping out nitric oxide any more. You don’t have that problem just in your legs or near your heart, you’ve got that problem in the arteries that go to your brain also and so that impaired blood flow starts to cause…you’re not only at risk of a heart attack, you start to experience cognitive decline and had Barry not changed his ways he could have had a heart attack and that could have been devastating. The other thing that could have happened, he could have ended up with Alzheimer’s Disease and we see millions and millions of people right now suffering from that. It’s one more food-borne condition that can be prevented and, in its early stages, even helped a bit by eating the right diet and engaging in physical activity.

Caryn Hartglass: Plaque in the brain or plaque in the arteries—it gets you either way.

Pam Popper: Yes and it’s preventable. I think that’s the message we have to get out to people. It’s such a fatalistic attitude…oh you know this runs in my family so I’m destined to get it.

Caryn Hartglass: Talk about the diet, what’s the food? What do you tell people to eat and not to eat?

Pam Popper: You want to get the dairy out of the diet. That’s out. You want to get the oils out of the diet, no liquid pure fat, that’s just a bad idea. But the four principal food groups that our people live on are fruits, vegetables, whole grains and legumes, so lots of potatoes and rice and beans and vegetables and salads and fruit. Just picture the freshest, the most fabulous plant-based meals you can imagine. That’s what we eat all day. Very little processed food. There’s room for some cereal, bread and pasta and that sort of thing but that’s kind of higher up on the list, you don’t eat as much of that stuff. Really minimizing the high fat plant foods and this is important because a lot of people will convert to a plant-based diet and they’ll eat a lot of nuts and seeds and olives and coconut and that sort of thing and that’ll pack the pounds on you just like animal food will. So you want to really pay attention and not have too much of that. And if you’re going to eat animal foods, no more than two or three servings a week, must be organic or wild-caught, less is better, none is fine too. You certainly don’t need to eat it, but we don’t necessarily take it away. And then understanding that there’s a place for treats. I think sometimes people look at our diet and they think, you know, how do these people have fun. I’ll have a piece of cake at a birthday party and champagne on New Year’s Eve is nice. There’s room for that but the problem that people get into is they don’t really differentiate between food and a treat and they start treating themselves five times a day and that’s how they end up in my office with some of the problems described in the book. This stuff just needs to be occasional and situational. You know, cookies aren’t lunch and you don’t need them every day. Christmas is a good time for a cookie.

Caryn Hartglass: The thing that makes it a treat is that it’s special.

Pam Popper: Yes, absolutely.

Caryn Hartglass: And it’s only special if you save it for special occasions when you can enjoy it.

Pam Popper: And along that line, you have to get this stuff out of your house. You just can’t tempt yourself and play willpower games. I know a lot about why to do this. I’m pretty educated on the topic obviously but if I’m standing in my kitchen at 10 o’clock at night saying, I’ve got some blueberries, some bananas and apples and peaches and chocolate and cookies. Sooner or later that stuff is going to call my name and I’m going to eat it. So I really keep my environment real clean. I only have this stuff when I’m out some place and I can have a piece of it or a bite of it and then when I go home there isn’t any more so I can’t really hurt myself with this treat-type food. You have to get good at setting up your environment to help you succeed instead of trying to play willpower games with yourself.

Caryn Hartglass: I’m a big believer. I’ve been pushing this diet for a decade but there’s some new information all the time about how this diet can really affect different illnesses. Can we…we just have a few more minutes left…I wanted to touch on Crohn’s Disease which is becoming more and more popular and many doctors will tell you it’s not curable.

Pam Popper: I know and I love treating people with Crohn’s Disease because we can help them and it is curable. Basically, Crohn’s Disease and Ulcerative Colitis, both very similar conditions, are inflammatory bowel conditions and the life that these people lead is eventually so horrible. They have twenty bloody bowel movements before noon. They are always conscious of where the nearest bathroom is. The pain and agony associated with this eventually results in very intensive medications including chemotherapy drugs and sometimes bowel resection. We use a whole foods, plant-based diet here. It’s a little bit different protocol here because you have to calm down the inflammation first. It takes us about three to four weeks at the outside to get the inflammation calmed down so that people are having two or three bowel movements a day and then we start very gradually adding more and more healthy plant foods to the diet and doing some probiotic treatment. Within a few months these people are functioning normally eating a diet very much like the one you and I eat. There are a few additional restrictions but not many and they remain asymptomatic. My longest success story has been asymptomatic now for eleven years and of course, Jill Collette’s story’s in the book. She ended up working in our yoga studio here and found out she could come and see me for free. It’s one of the best benefits of working here. Within just a short time…her problem had gone on for twenty years, all cleaned up. And she‘s never had another episode, this was a few years ago, so I’m always excited to work with these people for two reasons. First of all, because I know how to help them and I’m so excited about it and the second thing is they’re so miserable that they’ll do what I tell them to, they don’t argue with me so we don’t have diet problems with this particular population. They follow directions carefully and as soon as they start to see things improving they do not go back.

Caryn Hartglass: It’s just amazing that so many people are plagued with this and they are told they can’t be cured. It’s just evil.

Pam Popper: Oh, it is.

Caryn Hartglass: Do you ever talk to the Crohn’s Foundation?

Pam Popper: Have you seen the advice on their website? They tell these people to eat all these foods that actually cause things to get worse. They absolutely have no interest in promoting diet. I don’t want to pick on them because the MS Society doesn’t have anything about diet on their website…

Caryn Hartglass: …and the Breast Cancer websites tell you to drink milk.

Pam Popper: They’re funded by pharmaceutical companies and the food companies so we’re not going to change them. What we have to do…what we’re doing right now is very important. We have to get out to the consumer and let the consumer know that there’s a different alternative and eventually you just dry up the number of people patronizing these organizations and they’ll go away. When everybody in America is healthy there won’t be any need for a Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation and there won’t be any need for the American Cancer Society. People say oh Pam you’re just daydreaming. I’m really not. I really see this happening in my lifetime. I really believe that this whole medical system is going to completely be toppled and we will be having this conversation when we’re in our rocking chairs at the age of 90 saying wasn’t that a fabulous thing we just watched happen.

Caryn Hartglass: Yeah, I can’t wait for that. We’re not going to be in rocking chairs though, we’re going to be running marathons.

Pam Popper: Yeah there are people who do that at the age of 90 actually. I know my grandfather was working on a construction site at the age of 94, the day before he died. He just went to sleep and he didn’t get up. I want that to be me. Not necessarily the construction site but the go to sleep and don’t get up the next day.

Caryn Hartglass: Thank you Dr. Popper so much for writing this book. I recommend everyone pick it up especially if you know people who have illnesses. This is really easy read and a great way to get people to come over to the path of our food.

Transcribed by Suzanne Kelly, 8/15/2013

  18 comments for “Pam Popper, Food Over Medicine

  1. I am a 52 year old very active male who is now probably 25 pounds over weight sitting right at about 200lbs. That is down from a record high of 223 and lost the weight mainly from what is considered “eating properly”. As a former wrestler in High School and College and use to cut weight the old fashion way (basically starving then stuffing, starving and stuffing and so on) I finally decided to get serious about loosing weight. As a person who doesn’t feel or look 52 and have vowed “not to get old and fat” I have become frustrated with sitting at 200 lbs. the last few weeks and want to get off my high blood pressure medicine and high cholesterol medicine. Neither of which is too high, however, with taking vitamins, Omega 3, low dose aspirin and a thyroid pill, whenever I travel I have a big bag of pills in my suit case which is stereotypical of getting old! So, one day I started googling books on how to stop using medicine and found this book by Pamela Popper and ordered through Amazon. In a couple days it showed up and as a person who doesn’t read ANY BOOKS, I was captivated by this one! Still can’t believe I read 228 pages in just a couple of days with time I made available but I certainly did and have already began to eat as suggested in the book and already feel better! I love all the foods on this program (with the exception of onions and mushrooms) and have already began experimenting with new recipes and have a list started of new foods to purchase as soon as I can locate a health food store in my area. As a person that has also lifted weights in the past and consider myself somewhat educated on fitness and diet, I was concerned about losing muscle on this program, however, now feel more educated on how much protein is actually needed and the amount of protein in some vegan foods. The one thing that was annoying at first and then became angering was Glen Merzer on his liberal soap box. And his rants towards the end of the book simply made the last chapter a disappointment for a non book reader. It is my opinion that politics could and should have been left out of this book. Especially, when you have to figure roughly 50% of the population would find it irritating. With that said, I look forward to more readings on this subject thanks to Food over Medicine and find Pamela Popper’s words and style very enjoyable and convincing.

    • Thanks for your comments Michael. I recommend Dr. Fuhrman’s books as well and you won’t get any soap box there, just up-to-date information on health and nutrition: Eat to Live, The End of Heart Disease, The End of Diabetes. You can listen to my interviews with Dr. Fuhrman on this site.

  2. I have high blood pressure and diabetes. I want to eliminate both of them and get off of the medication that I have been on the past five years. I heard you today on the Karen Hunter Show-Sirius XM Radio. My phone number is 702-806-4170 and I would love to speak with you regarding my health issues.

  3. Hello. I looked on the website to find the “21 days to eliminate diabetes”, but was not sure if it was a book that needs to be purchased or what it is exactly. Please let me know how I can get the answer, my husband was just recently diagnosed with type ii diabetes, and I really want to help him get healthy.
    Thank you.

    • The best book in my opinion is Dr. Fuhrman’s The End of Diabetes. You should also get his Eat To Live Cookbook. Dr. Fuhrman will be back on my weekly radio show, It’s All Bout Food on April 5 to talk about his newest book, The End of Heart Disease.

  4. Hello. I was wondering if you have a recipe book or go by any particular books. Also, what type of desserts you eat. Thank you

  5. I stumbled onto this website looking for ways to lower my blood pressure. (I’m a 42 year old female with blood pressure that has been high for the last 4 months.) I’m grateful to have read this conversation. Just about every dr. I’ve spoken to wants to put me on meds without even asking about my diet or looking for alternatives. Smh..thank you for seeking and actually living a healthy lifestyle. I will definitely look into the books and websites mentioned here.

  6. I just finished reading “Food over Medicine”, it was excellent. How do I find out about Wellness 101?

    • Hopefully you were able to track down the information that you needed.

      Surprised someone did not comment.

      Check Wellness Forum Health; my good friends are there to help and amazingly, they ALWAYS have a human to answer the phone!!!!! And they have e-mail addresses/and they respond!!!!!!

      Anyone hear of The Institute for the Psychology of Eating? Thoughts?

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