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 video:
“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.
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
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.