Why Many Chronic Diseases Are Preventable–And Why No One Tells You This: Dr. Robert Lufkin

Dr. Robert Lufkin was once a self-described “product of the medical establishment,” with a fruitful career as a professor of medicine. He’s published hundreds of scientific papers, and has received millions of dollars in government funding.

But when, out of the blue, he was diagnosed with four seemingly unrelated chronic diseases—and told that he was going to have to be on medication for life—he started looking elsewhere for answers.

“It was through lifestyle changes that I was able to reverse these very serious and potentially fatal diseases, and get off all medications for them,” Dr. Lufkin says.

Today, Dr. Lufkin educates people far and wide on how to take charge of their metabolic health, and is in the process of building new healthcare institutions, including a managed care organization and an undergraduate medical school.

He is the author of, “Lies I Taught in Medical School: And the Truths That Can Save Your Life.”

Watch the clip:

“The growth in these diseases is unprecedented in our history, and they’re frankly not sustainable. Half the adult population is hypertensive, the growth rate in type 2 diabetes is going to approach 50 percent of the population soon. When that happens, all these chronic diseases are going to explode. And it doesn’t have to be that way, because this disease is reversible with, in most cases, lifestyle,” says Dr. Lufkin.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek: Dr. Robert Lufkin, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Dr. Robert Lufkin: Jan, it’s a pleasure to be here. I’m a fan of your program and it’s so much fun to be here.

Mr. Jekielek: You are a distinguished medical professional. I'd like to let our audience know what you’ve done. Please tell us about yourself.

Dr. Lufkin: I’m a product of the medical establishment. In other words, I’m not a conspiracy theorist, although I acknowledge there are conspiracies out there, and there are perverse financial incentives and other incentives in our industry. But basically, I’m a product of mainstream medicine. I’ve spent my entire career at two large medical schools with the academic rank of full professor.

I have published hundreds of peer reviewed scientific papers. My laboratory has received millions of dollars from the federal government and NIH, as well as from drug companies and equipment manufacturers. I am really speaking from the inside of the medical school academic establishment.

Mr. Jekielek: But you had an experience that changed you?

Dr. Lufkin: Yes, just a little about my background. I was raised by my parents. My mom was a registered dietician so she specialized in nutrition. Growing up we followed the food pyramid. We religiously avoided saturated fat, and we ate low fat foods. We avoided butter because of the saturated fat, and we substituted margarine that had trans fats and industrial seed oils. We ate a lot of grains and junk foods, which we thought were healthy at the time.

Then fast-forward, I went to medical school and eventually entered a career in academics where I essentially spent my whole career. Everything went along fine until about 10 years ago. Out of the blue, I was diagnosed with four chronic diseases that completely took me by surprise. I went to specialists to educate myself about these diseases and find out how to treat them. They basically prescribed prescription medicines for each one.

They told me the diseases were more or less unrelated and the prescription medicines would be necessary to not only treat the symptoms but also to control the underlying disease. Although they did recommend lifestyle changes, they also said, “Sure, it’s worth improving your lifestyle, but the reality is you’re going to be on these drugs for the rest of your life. Lifestyle really doesn’t work for these things.”

That was a wake-up call for me. It got my attention very quickly and I began talking to other experts. I began doing research and understanding about these diseases, and I eventually began to question the things that I had been taught. I looked closely at some of the breakthroughs in our understanding that have been made in the last few years.

It changed the way I thought about these diseases. I realized that a lot of what I had been teaching, and sadly, what many of my colleagues are still teaching about these diseases and metabolic health in general was incorrect.

When I implemented a program myself with lifestyle changes, I changed some things very radically, like diet, sleep, exercise and stress reduction. When I went back to my doctors, they couldn’t believe it. They thought the labs were broken. They wanted me to retest the labs.

Long story short, what happened was all my labs returned as normal. The diseases were essentially reversed and I was off all prescription medicines, and that’s where I’ve been ever since then.

Mr. Jekielek: What were the diseases?

Dr. Lufkin: One was an arthritis, a type of arthritis called gout, which is due to urate crystal deposition. There was hypertension, and I was in good company because half of adult Americans have hypertension. The third one was pre-Type 2 diabetes, because my blood sugars were abnormally high. The fourth one was dyslipidemia, which was an abnormality of blood fats.

If you think about it, arthritis and hypertension are not really related. Blood fats and arthritis also don’t have an association. But I came to understand that these diseases are all fundamentally driven by the same basic mechanisms. Unfortunately, there aren’t prescription medicines for these mechanisms. What works for reversing these diseases is lifestyle changes.

The good news is that lifestyle is in our control. We get to make choices every single day when we wake up; what we’re going to eat, how we’re going to exercise, and how we’re going to live our lives. It’s really empowering that we can take back control of our health with our lifestyle.

Mr. Jekielek: You’re saying that you changed your diet and some of your habits and that’s it. Then you went back and they said, “These labs can’t be right.”

Dr. Lufkin: That’s correct. I was following the standard, recommended American diet, with that food pyramid, and I basically turned it upside down. I began doing things like intermittent fasting and fairly aggressive dietary changes and I’ve never felt better. I don’t consider it a diet now, I just consider it the way I live. Being in ketosis, my brain is clearer than it has ever been. I don’t want to eat carbohydrates anymore in the middle of the day or snack all the time.

But to answer your question, yes, it was through lifestyle changes that I was able to reverse these very serious and potentially fatal diseases and get off all medications. I’m not recommending that people stop their medications without their doctor’s approval, because that could be dangerous. I am not saying to just stop everything and try lifestyle. I’m saying begin lifestyle. You‘ll find that when you go see your doctor, they’ll tell you you don’t need the medicines anymore if you have the same success that I had.

Mr. Jekielek: We’re here with Dr. Paul Marik at this FLCCC [Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance] conference. He started treating Covid in a way that was unorthodox and much more effective. He similarly had this realization that a lot of what he had been taught wasn’t entirely correct, and then embarked on a journey looking at diabetes.

He has this whole cancer monograph of hundreds of peer reviewed research papers showing off-label drugs and vitamins that have profound impact on reducing the incidence of cancer. A lot of research has been done well and we just don’t know about it.

Dr. Lufkin: Yes, there is a tremendous amount of research being done and 7,000 papers are written every day.

Mr. Jekielek: On these lifestyle changes, people have researched them. It’s not just someone just saying, “Oh, I’m going to try this.

Dr. Lufkin: Yes. There are peer reviewed prospective controlled studies for diabetes where people can reverse type two diabetes with dietary interventions to the point that they go off insulin and all drugs. The results are out there. But the medical system is a large institution and there are a lot of institutional drivers and factors.

You can go to a hospital and say, “I have a program for diabetes. I can take 90 percent of your Type 2 diabetics off their diabetes meds and return them to a normal blood glucose level. I want to offer you this program.” However, diabetes is the number one cause of surgical amputations and it drives a lot of surgical business. Today, Type 2 diabetes is the number one cause of renal failure, renal transplants, and dialysis. That’s a huge business.

Type 2 diabetes is a leading cause of blindness. Type 2 diabetes is a major driver for cardiovascular disease, stroke, and heart attack, which statistically is the number one killer that determines most of our longevity. Alzheimer’s disease is now strongly linked to glucose metabolism, which is what diabetes is, to the point where some authors are referring to Alzheimer’s disease as Type 3 diabetes. Diabetics have a much higher rate of cancer as well. All these diseases are linked, and coming up with a program to reverse diabetes is going to change everything in healthcare.

Mr. Jekielek: What you’re talking about is unfathomable, because you’re suggesting that the health system wants to keep people sick.

Dr. Lufkin: There are things built into the health system. I don’t think any human being wants to hurt another human being or wants them to be unhealthy. Perhaps subconsciously we tell ourselves things that make us do things. But I believe that the people are basically good and they want to do good things. But looking at the other side of the argument, there are biases built into our institution.

In other words, say I’m a doctor in a clinic and I have a diabetic patient. I get to spend seven minutes with them. It’s much easier to prescribe metformin and insulin and take a couple lab tests than it is to do an entire program about a low carbohydrate diet and switch over their whole eating structure. It’s been known that carbohydrates drive Type 2 diabetes for a long time, it’s not a secret. But getting people to avoid junk foods and avoid the carbohydrates that drive Type 2 diabetes is a big ask.

Right now in our healthcare system, it’s not enough for the doctor to just say, “Stop eating carbohydrates and you won’t need this insulin.” Sometimes the patient says, “I'd rather have a pill or even a shot than change my whole diet and give up all my junk food and change my way of living.” There are many different factors.

There’s a lot of pushback from individuals. Junk food itself is addictive and junk food is mainly carbohydrates. It’s high in seed oils. All these things drive insulin resistance and Type 2 diabetes. I confess I’m a recovering junk food addict and I know how hard it is to give that stuff up. It’s not enough for the doctor to just tell me, “Don’t eat junk food.” I know enough not to eat junk food, but there are subconscious drivers that we all have that drive our addictions, and it’s not easy to get over them.

Patients come to me for their diabetes and I tell them, “Just cut out carbohydrates.” They'll go to another doctor. They will say they want a pill and want something that works like that. But this diabetes effect, this insulin resistance, and this metabolic abnormality that was driving all four of the diseases that I had, it turns out that it drives not only those diseases, but also all the chronic diseases that essentially determine our longevity. Cardiovascular disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s disease are all driven by that.

If we improve our metabolic health, not only do we lower our risk of getting these chronic diseases, we actually improve our longevity and change many of the phenotypes or appearances of aging. It’s not just being healthier, but it’s actually that we will live a lot longer. It’s dramatic how these things are all tied together.

Mr. Jekielek: You said the food pyramid is actually inverted. I believe I saw a South Park episode about this.

Dr. Lufkin: Yes, it’s on my Twitter feed, or Instagram as well.

Speaker 1: Sir, we’ve got a match.

Speaker 2: Nutrition is stabilizing.

Speaker 1: We’ve got a well-balanced vaccine, sir.

Mr. Jekielek: Okay, so how is that? Please explain that.

Dr. Lufkin: That’s a great question. One of the prime drivers of the metabolic disease state that we’re all in, and the epidemic of these chronic diseases that we’re facing in the 2020s had its origin back in the 1960s and ‘70s when United States public health got into making policy for nutritional decisions. Basically, it was around the mistaken idea that dietary cholesterol and dietary saturated fat drives heart disease, and heart disease was and is the number one killer.

The United States created a food pyramid plan which emphasized a low fat diet and a high carbohydrate diet, which is basically a junk food diet. It is a pyramid with carbohydrates and sugars at the bottom and things like fats at the top of the pyramid where you eat less of them. This pyramid then became public health policy and all the schools use this for kids.

Mr. Jekielek: I remember being taught something like that. It was the same structure as you described, especially concerning saturated fat which was the enemy.

Dr. Lufkin: Exactly, cholesterol and eggs too. Today, even the conservative, orthodox cardiologists will admit that dietary cholesterol doesn’t really affect serum cholesterol. Those egg white omelets at the restaurants you see, you don’t need to eat those anymore. In my opinion, one of the healthiest things we can eat is an egg.

But these dietary changes starting in the ‘60s and ’70s have now swept through society to where we’re consuming large amounts of junk food, which means a large amount of carbohydrates and refined carbohydrate sugars, and a large amount of seed oils, which are industrial oils. They have the benign sounding name of vegetable oils but there’s no vegetables in them. They were originally developed as a lubricant for German U-boats in World War I with Crisco oil. But they’re unhealthy, and in my opinion, they drive insulin resistance and drive inflammation.

We are now seeped in these things. On top of that, with this fast food revolution, it’s not just what we’re eating that’s bad, but we’re eating all the time. When I was growing up, we used to eat three meals a day. Then basically it became, “No, eat six small meals a day.” My kids at school have snacks scheduled into their day. People are eating all the time. Eating itself drives inflammation which is our normal response to food being in our gut.

Anytime you eat something, the body normally gets a little inflamed just as a protection from that foreign protein, that foreign material coming into the body. If you don’t want to change what you’re eating, you can still improve your health just by not eating all the time.

In other words, narrow your eating window. Cut out between-meal snacks, maybe even skip breakfast, and maybe even skip lunch. I eat one meal a day and I’ve never felt better. I don’t get brain fog in the middle of the day and I’m in ketosis nearly all the time. For me, it’s a healthy way to be and I love it.

Mr. Jekielek: I started a keto diet years ago. I go on and off it as a weight loss thing. It actually works well when you’re in that state of ketosis. The fat is being burned instead of the carbohydrates.

Dr. Lufkin: If you think about ketosis, human beings evolved over hundreds of thousands of years primarily as hunter-gatherers. If you’re a hunter-gatherer, you eat when you have a kill, and then you may fast for a week, at which point you’re in ketosis. Jared Diamond, who wrote Guns, Germs, and Steel, and Yuval Harari, who wrote Sapiens, both famously agree that the worst possible thing that human beings have done was the development of agriculture 12,000 years ago.

You can see why, because agriculture made food available nearly constantly. That was accelerated, of course, with refrigeration and junk foods. But as food became more and more available, people did not go into ketosis, because there wasn’t this period of fasting between the hunt and the kill.

As I researched it more, the amazing thing about ketosis is that it doesn’t just help diabetes, but it also helps cancer. It’s a cancer treatment or an adjunct to chemotherapy for patients. For many Alzheimer’s disease patients, ketosis helps bring back their memory. One could argue that ketosis was the natural healthy state of human beings throughout history until literally the last 12,000 years. Some of the most amazing things about ketosis is its effect on neurodegenerative diseases like Guillain-Barre syndrome, Parkinson’s disease, and certainly seizures.

Fasting, which drives ketosis, is an accepted treatment for seizures. There is a whole body of work about how junk food drives violence in kids. These are correlation studies, not controlled prospective studies, so causality can’t be inferred. But there are certainly some correlations with people eating junk food and becoming more angry, becoming more depressed, and becoming more anxious. Some of the possibilities out there now are really exciting.

Mr. Jekielek: You mentioned the agrarian revolution being the worst thing that happened to humanity, but arguably, it created civilization. Then it wasn’t all bad, but you’re saying in terms of the body.

Dr. Lufkin: Yes, in terms of the body. Certainly, when I heard that, I thought, “This can’t be true. Civilization allowed people to have philosopher classes and working classes, different classes of people with spare time to have food served.” But interestingly, there is now evidence that there were some relatively advanced civilizations much earlier than we thought, like Gobekli Tepe in Turkey and another similar site in Egypt as well. Before the agricultural revolution, it may not be that we were all hunter-gatherers, living in caves. But you’re right, it is a balance. There were benefits from agriculture.

Mr. Jekielek: It doesn’t have to be one or the other. We have been conditioned to believe that a pill or some medical intervention is going to solve our problem. We’ve given away our responsibility for our health to the doctors. That also translates into the use of all sorts of medications, many of which interact with each other in negative ways.

I’ve heard statistics about how many medications some people take. These all have side effects. The more you take, the more likely one of those side effects will come up. Some are hidden and will come up later. We’re now a highly medicalized society.

Dr. Lufkin: That’s a great point. Part of it is that if I go to a doctor, I'd much rather get a pill than get a lecture about exercising more and changing my diet. I used to believe that lifestyle didn’t really matter, and what really worked was a pill. Furthermore, I used to believe, and many people still believe, that taking the pill will actually not just treat the symptoms of the disease, but it will actually control the disease and make them healthier. That’s really not true in many, if not most cases.

For example, in Type 2 diabetes, giving the patient insulin and metformin to control the blood sugar spikes doesn’t really control the long-term effects of the disease. You still continue to progress with your diabetes. You get your foot amputated, you get your renal failure, you get your blindness, you get your heart attack, and you get your Alzheimer’s.

People aren’t aware that in many cases, these pills don’t really solve the problem. They just treat the symptoms. The interesting thing is there’s no pill for metabolic disease. There’s no pill that you can take that will reverse these things. Metabolic disease is driven by lifestyle and lifestyle is really the secret to curing it.

Mr. Jekielek: The corollary is that you have to be responsible. No one will do it for you, especially these 3-letter agencies that avoid responsibility at any cost. It’s a theme in our society that people want some external factor to fix things.

Dr. Lufkin: Exactly. I love this about your show which questions the narratives and asks the big questions about science and other things in our society. To your point, we need to take responsibility. A lot of medicine over the 20th century developed a very paternalistic attitude. You let the doctor take care of everything.

They’re going to take care of everything and you turn over all responsibility to the doctor. The problem with that is, as we’ve seen, the doctor doesn’t control your lifestyle. You control your lifestyle. We all control our lifestyle, so we need to learn that we’re in charge of our health, not the doctor.

Mr. Jekielek: If I recall correctly, half of what professors in medical school teach their students is wrong. That’s very disturbing news.

Dr. Lufkin: One of the greatest physicians of all time, Sir William Osler, famously made one of the greatest comments about medical education when he addressed a group of medical students on the day of their graduation. At the time, most medical students were male. He said, “Gentlemen, I have a confession to make. Half of what we’ve just taught you is wrong. The problem is we don’t know which half.”

People who understand medical education or even science itself will know that science is a process. It’s all about questioning the existing narrative and throwing out the stuff that’s incorrect and learning the new stuff. Sir William Osler pointed it out beautifully, and that’s the theme for my book. I have the clickbait title of Lies I Taught in Medical School. It goes through that half of the things I taught were wrong. Hopefully, it can help people avoid the mistakes that I made and which nearly cost me my health and my life.

Mr. Jekielek: Please tell us how you are trying to change things.

Dr. Lufkin: After I was able to reverse my own health conditions I wanted to get the message out to people, and I had written many textbooks as part of my academic career.

Mr. Jekielek: To be clear, the message is that lifestyle will transform your health.

Dr. Lufkin: That’s right. We are in charge of our health. The medicines that we are prescribed for the chronic diseases that are trying to kill us really don’t treat the underlying disease. If you want to get to the root cause, you need to change your lifestyle and change your metabolism and your metabolic health. That is the message of the book.

I began to look at new ways I could get the message out. I had never been on Twitter and I wasn’t a big Facebook person, but I embraced social media. I began using Twitter and I just passed a hundred thousand followers. I have 250,000 total on social media so far, and I began reaching out to them.

We were publishing this book. A couple of weeks ago I was in Costa Rica filming a TV series on longevity and health and wellness and metabolism. It just got picked up by PBS and the Discovery Channel and will be airing in about six months to a year. I realized that it’s not enough just to educate people and get the message out. We need to change things in the healthcare system.

On the next step of my journey, together with other physicians in Los Angeles, we’ve purchased and put together a managed care organization in Southern California. It has over 100,00 patients, 200 physicians, 200 primary care physicians, and 600 specialists.

Mr. Jekielek: To be clear, is this an existing provider?

Dr. Lufkin: Yes, we are acquiring it. It’s important to note that these patients are underserved. In other words, they are Medicare and Medicaid, which means they’re socioeconomically disadvantaged. That means generally they have poor health and poor access to healthcare. It is our mission to change that.

We’re going to bring in the latest cutting edge technology, some of the things in my book, some of the things we’ve talked about, and some of these ideas of lifestyle to these people. There is an advantage to having a managed care organization like this instead of an insurance company that makes money by denying claims.

With managed care, we make money by making the patients healthier. We can spend the resources of the organization on anything that works. It can be red light therapy, it can be massage, it can be meditation, it can be movie theater tickets, or whatever incentivizes the patients to actually be healthier. That’s what we are doing.

On top of that, we’ve built an innovation lab where young companies can come in and we will incubate their healthcare technology. We try it on some of the patients who want to try it out. If it works, we amplify it across the network and help them get started. We’re setting up a venture studio fund so that these companies can be funded. We just realized that it’s a great thing to do. It’s great to show healthcare change. That’s a big step.

But we wanted to go one last step, and that was the education process. We’ve set up a new graduate medical education program for family medicine, psychiatry, and transitional medicine at a hospital in southern California. This summer, we’re starting a radiology program to teach some of these newer ideas of medicine. We’re even considering starting a new undergraduate program, which would be a new medical school as well.

Mr. Jekielek: That’s absolutely great. But this is what I keep coming up against, there’s also so much that’s not working right.

Dr. Lufkin: Yes. The knowledge is out there and it’s just a matter of getting it into the people’s hands. I used to think that I just needed to tell my friend who’s a diabetic not to put sugar in his coffee and he will be fine. He’s an intelligent person. I explained about glucose. He gets it and he knows. But what happens the next time I see him having coffee—he’s putting sugar in it. It’s the addiction thing.

It’s not enough just to tell people sometimes. They may need to be enrolled in a coaching program with an addiction component. We’re starting to use a low dose Naltrexone, which is an addiction medicine that works for other types of substance abuse. We’re applying it for patients with junk food addictions and carbohydrate addictions.

Mr. Jekielek: The drug Ozempic is big in the media these days and a lot of people take it. Apparently, there are problems with it. How do you understand that drug?

Dr. Lufkin: It’s a great drug in that it helps people with weight loss, but the problem is you have to be on the drug long term. When people get off the drug, they frequently rebound. Also, the drug is fairly expensive. This is basically taking a pill when lifestyle would do it. For some of these people, they’re not able to get into a program and learn lifestyle changes that can make a difference.

With things like ketosis people say, “How do you have the willpower to only have one meal a day?” The answer is, “I don’t. I’m a junk food addict.” But once we get into this metabolic state of ketosis, the appetite goes away. Then I’m not hungry and it’s easy. Can you eat just one potato chip? Of course not, you have to eat the whole bag.

Potato chips are junk food and they’re full of carbohydrates. They drive insulin and they drive our hunger. Can you eat just one hard-boiled egg or one slice of cheese? Of course you can, because it doesn’t contain the macronutrients that drive insulin and drive your appetite.

By eating healthy foods and avoiding junk foods, our appetite naturally goes away or is maintained in control. This is for many people, but not all people. Some people need surgery and need Ozempic and these other drugs. But it’s possible to do it without these things if the right programs are in place.

Mr. Jekielek: With any of these drugs there’s always some side effects. You’re talking about using the body’s own systems to deal with the issue, which seems like a better idea.

Dr. Lufkin: Even the longevity drugs like metformin or rapamycin, which turns down mTOR, people say, “Why don’t I just take rapamycin, increase my longevity, improve my metabolic health?” Fine, you can take rapamycin.

I take rapamycin, but I also do it with lifestyle because there are things that can benefit from lifestyle that rapamycin probably doesn’t provide. We don’t understand the systems well enough to know how any of these drugs really work. But lifestyle is a proven thing that’s been developed over tens of thousands of years.

Mr. Jekielek: As human beings are prone to accepting orthodoxies and once we accept them, it’s hard to change our minds. With this inverted food pyramid, it’s disturbing when you think about the impact it has had over generations. Now, we find it has been indoctrination in the wrong direction. I’ve talked to people about this and they say, “How could that be? I won’t accept that.”

Dr. Lufkin: I’m saying it’s the opposite, but many, many intelligent people disagree with me. The National Nutrition Council that designs the food pyramid issues an updated version every few years. It continues the narrative that cereals and grains and carbohydrates should be a significant portion of our diet, with a smaller amount of protein, and then avoiding saturated fats. There is one reason the council comes up with these recommendations, and there was a fascinating paper that came out on this.

There are a number of conflicts with the council concerning the major food manufacturers who basically benefit from manufacturing junk foods. They sell junk foods that the food council then recommends in the food pyramid. One problem is there’s not a lobbying force for lifestyle. Lifestyle is free. If I fast during the day, I actually save money because I don’t spend it on breakfast or lunch and I have more time.

But there’s no lobbying group for that. We’re up against a number of financial influences that drive the system even in the face of knowledge. To the contrary, people are still getting the information. Our school lunch programs are still driven by this food pyramid and these food recommendations.

The narrative today is such that if anyone handed a 12-year-old child a lit cigarette, everyone would be aghast and it just wouldn’t happen. But someone can hand a 12-year-old child a bowl of sugar cereal and pour chocolate milk on it, and nobody thinks anything of it. Actually, it’s very damaging to the child, even at that age. It drives the incidence of Type 2 diabetes in children which at one time we didn’t see at all.

Changing the narrative is possible. I used to think drinking orange juice was healthy. Most people think orange juice is healthy. You see it on television and movies as a healthy breakfast, but in my opinion, it’s not. It’s basically sugar and it’s like eating a candy bar. We need to change that narrative so that people can instinctively realize what is healthy, and realize that lifestyle can have a dramatic effect. It’s a big challenge to do that.

Mr. Jekielek: Yes, it feels like the challenge of our time.

Dr. Lufkin: It does. The growth of the chronic diseases that we’ve been talking about are unprecedented in our history, and frankly, this is not sustainable. Half the adult population is hypertensive. The growth rate in Type two diabetes is going to approach 50 percent of the population soon. When that happens, all these chronic diseases are going to explode. It doesn’t have to be that way because this disease is reversible in most cases with lifestyle.

Mr. Jekielek: I’ve become interested in brain chemistry and the hippocampus. We hear that 80 percent of common Covid vaccine injuries are actually neurological. Also, Alzheimer’s disease has skyrocketed.

Dr. Lufkin: Absolutely.

Mr. Jekielek: It’s a disease that was almost unheard of 100 years ago.

Dr. Lufkin: Exactly. Alzheimer’s represents the ultimate failure of the medical research establishment. For decades there has been unlimited money available to come up with a treatment for Alzheimer’s. To this day, there’s no significant pharmaceutical treatment for Alzheimer’s that will have any significant effect on the progression of the disease.

Researchers like Dale Bredesen and others have come up with innovative techniques where they look at Alzheimer’s not as a disease of amyloid beta, but actually as a disease of many different things. It may be vitamin D deficiency, or it may be a parasitic infection. It may be lead or mercury poisoning.

There are many different factors, but one of the factors is glucose metabolism. It is known that you could diagnose Alzheimer’s disease with a PET/CT scan, which looks at brain glucose. Low metabolism of grain glucose indicates Alzheimer’s disease in certain patients.

Ketosis is an alternate fuel source for the brain beyond glucose. When Alzheimer’s patients are put on a ketogenic diet and they go into ketosis, the brain is able to use ketones instead of glucose. Many of the patients are able to have significant improvements in their memory from these ketogenic diets.

Heather Sandison, a protege of Dale Bredesen, runs a bunch of clinics. They are actually nursing homes for Alzheimer’s disease and they’re pretty much unique. I’ve never heard of anyone else doing this. She has a program where the Alzheimer’s disease patient goes in, gets treated, gets better, and then goes home. Usually, Alzheimer’s is a one-way street. You go into a nursing home and you don’t come out.

Mr. Jekielek: I would like to invite some of the folks you mentioned today onto the show to talk about this. Any final thoughts as we finish up?

Dr. Lufkin: Every morning when I get up, I get to choose my lifestyle. I get to make choices about the food I eat, what I put in my mouth, and how much I exercise. It’s a choice we get to make every single day to take control of my health and longevity.

Mr. Jekielek: Dr. Robert Lufkin, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Dr. Lufkin: Thank you, Jan. It’s been great.

Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Dr. Robert Lufkin and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.

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