Hello, welcome to the Brazilian Health Nut Show. Here you will find cutting-fetch information provided by the best experts in the world so you can learn how to burn fat for the rest of your life. Bruno DiGama is the Brazilian Health Nut in a mission to solve the problems you have when trying to lose weight forever. He is a nutritional therapy practitioner, a certified prisoner trainer, and a holistic lifestyle coach by the Czech Institute.
Don't forget to say hello and sign up to our free newsletter at www.Brazilianhealthnut.com. Let's go! Thank you so much for being here, great with me today. I really appreciate the opportunity to talk to you.
Can you please talk a little bit about your story, like from Leo Gray to the founder of the Intia Nutrition Therapy Association? Okay, well, you know, some looking back, it seems like destiny, but you know, the first half of my life, you know, before I was 40 years old, I wasn't concerned much about health at all because I was, you know, I was an athlete, I was naturally, you know, had good health, but my first career had me traveling constantly. I traveled all over the United States with my first job and mostly driving. And, you know, it was just a fast food lifestyle, so I always make a joke of it.
I'd go by McDonald's, and back in those days, it would say three billion served, you know, and I'd always say to myself, who ate the other two billion, you know, because I'd eaten so many eggnax and egg muffins and those terrible, for breakfast, probably 50% of the time, I had egg muffin and those horrible hash browns that are fried and hydrogenated oils. And, you know, not really taking good care of myself, you know, what I believe, which is not true, is that if you exercise enough, you can eat whatever you want and, you know, go out and run five miles, it would set you back to zero. And that's those bad belief systems exercise is certainly important, but it won't compensate for a bad diet. In fact, it will actually exacerbate that diet.
Right. So by the time I was 40, a major change happened in my life. We were expecting our first, our first person, only child, my son, Grayson, and all of a sudden, you know, the reality was that I was quite unhealthy, that I had very definable signs of heart disease, and I'd lost a lot of my vitality, and, you know, it was struggling, not terribly, but a bit with my weight. All of a sudden, you know, more than ever before, you know, it was really important to me to be healthy for my son.
You know, I had a vision that if I didn't make changes, that I wouldn't be there for him, you know, when he was grown up. So I was very fortunate to do through my chiropractor. I was in a position of looking for a new profession, and he just looked at me and, you know, we got, we were good friends. We were actually over at Catalina Island, and I was telling him that, you know, I needed to start a new profession.
I'd been kind of for five years, not working seriously, just messing around with boats and, you know, things like that. And he just looked at me and he said, I know exactly what you should do. You should, you should work for a friend of mine who's a doctor who sells nutritional supplements to doctors. And then I said, oh, that sounds really interesting, but I don't know anything about that.
And his comment was, well, don't worry, the doctors don't either. I thought it was kind of strange at the time. So I embraced, I got to go to work for a company that sold therapeutic nutrients. And I, and unfortunately, San Diego is also the home of the Price Pottinger Nutrition Foundation.
And I connected up with the then executive director, Pat Connolly. And it was a big part of my education was studying Western prices work and understanding, you know, kind of the pioneer of epigenetics really was Francis Pottinger. Did you know about the foundation before? Or was that?
No, no, Dr. Curry, who was my mentor and my boss introduced me to the foundation. And but immediately, you know, when I, when I started that work, I knew that I'd found, you know, my job, you know, my, my calling, what I had a passion for. And that was really important to me was to have a job that I could embrace passionately.
So I embraced it. And my job basically was to sell, you know, nutritional supplements to doctors, but as a result of that, and all the studying, I developed a strong philosophy about nutrition. And within about a year and a half of starting that job, I was doing lectures to small lectures, two hour lectures to groups of doctors, I would gather together a group of doctors in one of their offices. And I would talk to them about the same things that we talk about in the nutritional therapist training class.
And we would talk about we had five modules, basically digestion, blood sugar, fatty acids, minerals, and actually had four hydration, we didn't do hydration. We added that later. But of course, a very important topic. Yeah, lectures were very, very popular.
And I would bring together kind of the philosophy that I'd learned from, from Price Pottinger Foundation and the functional testing that I'd learned from Dr. Curry and other people like George Goodhart and Wally Schmidt and Robert Blake and others. And I put together, you know, with a lot of help from Dr. Curry, I put together these little talks, they were very, very popular.
And after doing that for about a year, we put it together into a more formal class for doctors where they actually paid money to come. And we formalized it and I would co-teach it with different doctors with different specialties. So not being a doctor myself, I always felt more comfortable if it was a doctor I taught it with a chiropractor and acupuncturist and medical doctors. And finally, one of the chiropractors, he said, he said, I love your seminar.
He said, but he said, you know, why do you think you always have to teach with these, with these doctors? You know, I go, well, because they really understand the science and can answer all the tough questions. And he goes, yeah, but what you don't understand is that's the stuff we already know. We all learned that in medical school or chiropractor college.
He said, I'll pay you, I'll pay you double if you'll just do it by yourself, you know, because what I really embraced was the philosophy of it, the functional testing, and kind of the, you know, came up with a systemic approach, addressing a client, you know, in front of you, how, how do you best serve this client as a nutritionist? Because you know, you know, having been through the nutritional therapist training course yourself, a very strong philosophy about this idea that people will have a number of problems. They don't really go to a doctor because they think there are fatty acids out of balance or they think they might be dehydrated. They go because they're suffering and usually they're suffering relates to horrible immune problems, you know, you know, thyroid issues or female endocrine problems or male performance problems and or they have, you know, cardio and they become hypertensive or have other cardiovascular issues.
But the reality is that those are the end processes of weaknesses in these foundations. You don't just wake up one day and get hard to see you. It's a process. Yeah, it's a process of doing a lot of things wrong for a long time.
And if you look back at any of the modern conditions that plague our society, diabetes, heart disease, obesity, they really have their roots in people's inability to digest properly, their inability to manage their blood sugar. I mean, I think we all recognize now that diabetes and prediabetes is a, is an epidemic of almost unbelievable proportions. They've been eating the wrong kind of fats, people became fat, phobic in the 70s and they're eating insufficient amount of fats, poor quality fats and fats out of balance. And they don't have the minerals to sustain good health because, you know, mineral rich foods and both in animal and vegetable products, basically been eliminated from the diet as we started eating more and more processed foods.
And last but not least, of course, you know, people are chronically dehydrated, you know, less than one from reading Dr. Vodma Dildish's book. Yeah, that's an amazing book. I always recommend to people to just read the book, you're going to understand the importance of water and your life is so, so good.
So important. There's no excuse, you know, it doesn't cost much and it's readily available that people just, they don't really get it. I think drinking a diet soda or having a cup of coffee, you know, it's hydrating them when it's really dehydrating them. So anybody on that all progress, I don't want to make the introduction too long.
Eventually, I really became aware that there was a need for a new profession and that you can teach the doctors all day long. They don't really have the time, a busy chiropractor, a busy medical doctor, busy acupuncture, whatever they're doing. They don't really have the time to really focus on good diet and functional evaluation and the proper use of nutritional supplements. And so I really decided that what we needed is we needed a holistic counterpart to the dietitians who, you know, in my opinion, are not really giving good advice, not most of them.
There is an emerging group of holistic dietitians that have some good ideas, but the conventional dietitians were just more of the same thing that got us into the hole that we're in. So I decided to start a new profession. And so the way I get myself into trouble, Bruno, is I just start telling people I'm going to do something, you know, without really knowing what the heck I'm saying. And eventually, you know, I've said it so many times that in order to save face, I actually have to do it.
Yes, someday I'm going to write a book, you know, someday I'm going to start a new profession, you know, someday I'm going to sell across the ocean. But yeah, eventually, if I say it enough times and kind of visualize, you know, what it's going to look like somehow it happens. And, you know, when we started teaching in 2001, the nutritional therapist practitioner, of course, I always had a vision that it could be, you know, a national international organization. And the fact that it now is, I don't know if you know this, but I'm currently teaching our inaugural class in Australia.
No idea. I do not know it. Yeah, so, so I don't teach so many classes. We have 14 wonderful, you know, instructors that are trained and up and running.
And so, but I don't know, this is part of me that, you know, wanted to be the first one to Australia. Now, I'm just starting to new our first Canadian class. Awesome. Yeah, that's awesome.
NTA, I always recommend to everybody with people who are interested in helping people to become healthier. I always go go to NTA, check it out. It's so worth it. We, you've hidden so many topics that I want to talk to you a little later.
But we started off, I would like to get your opinion in the obesity epidemic. Why do you think there is so much problems nowadays, not just in the US, everywhere in Brazil, Australia itself, so many problems with weight problems? Well, I mean, certainly the United States is the world leaders in obesity and poor health, you know, and it really stems back. To put it into a historical perspective, I mean, we we changed, started changing the diet even more and more processed foods around the turn of the century.
But it was really exacerbated and became a critical problem after the Second World War. This is kind of the big landmarks after the Second World War, all these highly processed foods like margarinds and concentrated and processed foods that were necessary to support the war effort were no longer needed for that. And so the, you know, business enterprise turned that, turned those foods towards the American public to, you know, somewhat ill effect. But I really trace one of the most profound changes was the result of a study that was done, it's called the Seven Nations Study, they're reading the Nine Nations Study where they looked at different nations in Europe and came to the conclusion that the ones that, this is not the conclusion of the study, but the interpretation of the study was that people that ate the lowest fat, you know, were the healthiest and the thinnest.
And the reality was that the study didn't show that, but that was the interpretation and it fit very, very well with our food manufacturing systems who wanted to use these highly processed vegetable oils and that we had this whole era of low-fat, high carbohydrate diets that have really been horrible to our health. So if you put that into perspective, that all started in the late sixties, but really came into a full effect in the 70s. And so in the 70s, people embraced the low-fat diet, you know, start to degree shunned animal products and, you know, felt that any type of vegetable oil, no matter how highly processed was better than any type of animal fat, no matter how natural and well raised. And the result of that has been three generations of a very high glycemic, not just low-fat, but bad-fat diet that's had profound effects on our genetics, but our epigenetics.
So I want to go back, you know, to Dr. Francis Podinger's study with cats. When he changed the diet of his cats in his famous study that he did in the 1930s, all he did really was take away a whole food and add processed food with different degrees of processing and then different degrees of processing and added sugar. And he measured the generational health of the kittens.
And what he found was really quite profound is that when he took an improper diet, this is very, very important for your listeners to remember, when you take an improper diet, it has effect on health. Of course, we recognize that. But what people don't understand is that when you take an improper diet and you hold the diet constant over several generations, that each generation, you know, even less than a whole bit of the generation before, that's the epigenetic value. So that is a small lesson that this is recently, as 15 years ago, that was impossible because there was no known mechanism where you could pass four traditional traits from one generation to the other, except of course, you know, from the mother who we equality to a child.
But what we know now from Podinger's study and from a major epidemiological study that we've done in Sweden is that what children eat profoundly affects the expression of the genes of their children and their grandchildren. And so what we're seeing now is the compounded effect of three generations of very, very poor dieting care. Do you think that's why we have so many kids nowadays that have problems with obesity, even though we're not eating a lot, but they still have problems with obesity. That might be due to this third generation, fourth generation of the Podinger's.
I think it's absolutely true. I spend a lot of time talking to people, public speaking, and one of the questions is, well, I feed my children the same thing we ate, but we never got fat. We didn't have braces. We didn't have crooked teeth.
We didn't have ADD, ADHD. We certainly didn't have autism. So why would, if we're eating the same things, what's changed, there may be some other factors that have changed, but in my opinion, the big thing is that we're seeing this generational effect. So what you ate, when you were, we now know as a result of the Swedish study, that would children eat during what's called the slow growth period, which is the age for a growth between eight and eleven, right before puberty and for boys between nine and 12, what you feed a child at that age will have a profound effect on their children and their grandchildren.
So in the over-caled study in Sweden, they found that when there was an abundance of food, particularly high carbohydrate foods like potatoes and grains, that the children that grew up in those areas of kind of hyperabundance, that they're grandchildren, the granddaughters and the grandsons of those boys and girls, they have a 31-year shorter lifespan than the progeny of people who grew up in times of agricultural scarcity when their diet was more focused on their traditional foods of salmon and a poor and wild game and wild produce. That reminds me of this book that I read by Kate Shannon. I think that's her name. It's called Deep Nutrition, and she has a whole chapter just about how to make beautiful babies and she goes into the importance of the parents' diet and the grandparents' diet and how it affects your baby, and we don't realize if you think it's just about what you're going to be doing now, but everything that we're doing today has an influence on the next generation and the next one.
Particularly when we feed our children. I mean, there's very little generational consequence to when I eat because I'm 65 years old, you know, so I'm not going to be reproducing, but when I ate as a child. Fortunately, when I was young, my diet was pretty good because it was just pre... We certainly ate a lot of processed food, but not to a degree that we do now, but believe me, when my son was young, I was given significant consideration to the health of my grandchildren.
We fed him whole foods, which is possible, and he was raised on raw milk and free-range meat and pork produce and things like that. Real food, right? It's not that complicated. We just need to take a look at what our ancestors ate.
I think one of the things is saying what's the perfect diet. Oh, here's the perfect diet. Well, the thing is, I'm very much a fan of Paleo diets, but depending on whether your ancestors were Australian aboriginals or South American indigenous peoples from Peru or Brazil or Germanic people, my ancestors came from Germany and Scotland and places like that, and all those places had a very different diet. Yes, that's the thing.
I totally agree with that. There is not one Paleo diet, there is many Paleo diets, depending on where you came from, so you can be eating maybe a little more plants, or if you are in a place where there was no plants, so you can be eating more animals, but there is not such a thing as a perfect diet. That's exactly true. I think we have to approach this with respect for the diet of our ancestors, but the single most important thing is people have got to stop eating these highly processed foods, to give a child sugar pasta, cocoa pasta.
I mean, it's really, in my opinion, it's child abuse. Child abuse is against the law. The definition of child abuse is knowingly physically or mentally harming a child, and when you give them these highly processed sugary foods, you're abusing them, and you're abusing them. They're children and they're grandchildren, and they're grandchildren.
Yeah. Hey guys, what's up, Bruno Gama here, president of health and nuts, and let's take a little break from the show because I would like to offer something. If you go to my website, www.bresidenhealthnut.com, and click on the page, burn fat forever, you can go ahead and claim your free consultation with me right now, okay? Or you can just send me email at bresidenhealthnut at gmail.com.
So you can start to lose weight and feel healthier right now, okay? So go ahead and claim your free consultation with me, and remember that spots are limited, okay? Now let's get back to the show. Awesome.
Now I'd like to talk a little bit about your book. You wrote this book I have here called Epigenetics, Bottinger's Prophecy, How Food Research, Genes for Wellness for Units. Can you talk a little bit about Epigenetics as one of these for people that don't know? Sure, I sure can.
Well, go back to pottery. I mean, when I read his book about the generational effect of diet, and what was happening to the kids, some of the things that were happening to the kids is that their faces became narrowed, and their teeth were crooked, and they became lethargic, and they became either aggressive or reclusive, and they had sexual dysfunction, and then I looked around. Even in my first profession, I was working with school. I was in the cartography business.
I worked for a company that made maps, and we sold them to schools, and I was in schools all the time. And I recognized before I knew anything about pottery or anything, that the children, when I would go to a middle school, that the children looked different from my classmates when I was in middle school. And I'm going, gosh, I wonder why that is. And when I read pottery's work, I really understood that this was the result of epigenetics.
Well, the term epigenetics wasn't even known yet, but clearly there was this generational effect. So for your listening audience, basically, what we've always believed is that our health was determined largely by our genetics, because you'd always know somebody that'd say, oh, yeah, all my great uncle lived to be 104, and he smoked three packs of cigarettes, and drank whiskey every day of his life. Well, he had true good genetics, but the thing is, genetics aren't the primary determinant. We know that now that really it's not the genes that you give, but it's how they're expressed.
Yes, they're an exception for the rule. A lot of people bring the exception, but they don't see there was 100,000 other people dying earlier than these 104 years old. Right, right, exactly. And actually, a lot of those people that lived to be an old age, even though they smoked and drank, their diet was actually very, very good.
We had some friends in a rural area where our son grew up, and they basically lived off the land. I mean, they picked berries, and they fished for salmon, and they ate shellfish, and every year they would hunt, and they'd eat a couple of beer, and they'd smoke, and they drank too, but they lived to be a ripe old age. They would have lived another 10 or 15 years if they hadn't smoked, but they at least had the advantage of the diet. Yes.
I told somebody once they were kind of shocked when I would say something, but I said, you know, if somebody told me that I had to eat margarine or smoke cigarettes, one or the other, what would I pick? I said, I'd rather smoke, at least when I smoked, I enjoyed that. There's no redeeming thing about eating margarine. It doesn't taste good, and it's probably worse for you.
Eating hydrogen and oil is probably worse for you than smoking, you know? I was talking to the director of the movie, that sugar film. I don't know if you saw it. It's a new book, Mentry from Australia, and of course you're talking a lot about sugar, the problem with refined carbohydrates, but that's something that we don't hear much people talking about.
It's the problems with vegetable oils, margarine, soy, or corn, or all those kitchen oils. It's so common to see nowadays people using, and I think that's another topic to talk about in terms of obesity, not just the sugar, of course the sugar is super important, but there is more than that. No, the fats are very important. They're very important.
In my book, of course, we point out that they've actually shown in animal studies the profound effect that hydrogen and oils have on epigenetics of the experimental animals. Let me step back to finish my thought. Sure. What I want people to know is that your genetics are important, and they determine to a large degree what you should be eating, but what's even more important is the way those genes are expressed, and the way they're expressed is what we call epigenetics.
You can turn good genes on, and you can turn bad genes off. The opposite is true. You can turn good genes off and bad genes on based on not just diet. There's exercise factors.
We know that pesticides and herbicides and other environmental toxins can have an effect on epigenetics, but that we have control over this. We don't have control over the genes that we inherited, but the way they express themselves, we have control over. At first, when I was reading about potter's work, it's a little depressing because a lot of the young people today are the third generation, and they've had their bad genes turned on for three generations, and their good genes turned off, and those have been carried down from one generation to the other. But the hopeful message that Dr.
Potter gave us is that when he changed the diets of the cats, just one little fact about potter's study is that by the third generation of processed food, the cats couldn't reproduce. They lost interest in sexuality with sexual behavior, which we see more and more. People just aren't interested, or they were infertile, or the female cats were not able to carry their kittens to turn. If you look at our society, we see all those problems today in modern reproduction.
Something like 18% of married couples can't reproduce without medical intervention. But the good news was he changed that diet. When they could no longer reproduce, he took those cats that had crooked teeth, poor health, fatty livers, and he gave them the proper diet, and they were able to reproduce and have kittens. The kittens weren't as healthy as the original kittens, but they were healthier than their parents.
When he found that by changing the diet in four generations, he was able to completely reverse the effects of the bad diet, and to the point where the cats had their original genetic perfection in their intended genetic expression. I think our children are at a disadvantage, but here's the hope that everybody should have, is that you can change the expression of your genes tomorrow by changing your diet, changing your exercise, changing as much as possible to clean up your environment. Yeah, changing environment. There is a chapter in your book called The Environment Stupid.
To take control over the things that we have control, such as diet, exercise, sleep, I think it's super important in stress, and doing some stress management, and trying to not get too much toxic eating organic and all that kind of stuff, and getting outdoors. So we have control over a lot of things. We just have to get into the habit of doing and changing our own mindset and environment so we can do those things easily. Yeah, it's cool.
We have the power to change it, and it's just really a matter of having a mindset, changing our diet, and doing the things that we need to do. I think one of the things, you're talking about losing weight forever, is that the problem is that the methods, I'm preaching to the choir, now because I know you probably know this better than I do, is that the methods that we've been using of calorie restriction and hyper-exercise, that people can lose weight that way, that they can never maintain that. Exactly. We're not rebalancing their body.
I know how it was. I was addicted to fast food, and when I would go into McDonald's, I was so deficient in fats that ransed nasty grease that reeks in those places, it smelled good to me then, because I had such deficiencies that even bad oil smelled good. But once you get those foods out of your life, it's like people that smoke like, oh, I don't know how to ever give up smoking. I hate to admit it, but I was a smoker at one time.
I really enjoy smoking, but once you quit smoking, then smoking becomes repugnant to you, and you go, oh my gosh, how could anybody smoke those nasty things? But it's the same thing with food. The idea for so many years, I'd go into McDonald's or another fast food place, and I'd eat those French fries, and I'd drink the sodas, and I thought, oh, this is delicious, and I love it. But once you quit, it's like quitting smoking, the thought of it is repugnant to me.
So once you reset your body, once you get the right fats into you, and once you get the proper carbohydrates that are nutrient dense and don't have this huge glycemic spike, then you enjoy eating that way. So that's what I love about our movement, Bruno, is everybody loves food. We're all a bunch of foodies. We love food, now we love the food that nourishes us emotionally and physically, and that's what we want to eat.
We want to eat the grass-fed steak, and we want to eat the cheese from raw sheep's milk, and we don't want... God, the idea of sitting down and drinking the Coca-Cola has so little appeal to me, it almost makes my stomach queasy thing. Yeah, I had a month and a half ago, I was with my mum and my godmother traveling in Boston, and so at the end of the trip, I was so tired, and we were eating, and then I was like, okay, let me have a glass of soda, and I felt horrible, I felt like shaking, I felt like something wrong with me, and I was just like, realized that I just had this crazy amount of liquid sugar, and because, you know, I don't have that kind of food very often, so your body gets affected right away, and that's something that's really important, I think, for us to share with people, I was talking to my brother, for example, trying to make him improve his health, and he's like, but I don't like the flavor of this, I don't like the flavor of that, and I said, just give me some time, just because, like you said before, your body's going to go through a process of eating and your taste is going to change, so it's a matter of time, and then you're going to start enjoying this food more than what you're eating right now. Yeah, really true, and I understand people's skeptical because, you know, I didn't quite believe it myself when I started on the journey back to health, that you really do, and so then once you enjoy healthy foods, and once you're using whole foods, your body actually, it's not that you can't overeat healthy foods, you can, but the mechanisms of appetite are changed by healthy foods, so healthy fats actually make you feel satiated and turn your appetite off, whereas the low fat high glycemic diet doesn't, you never feel satiated, so you're eating a low fat, maybe a low calorie diet, but you never stop because your body's constantly craving more and more and more, so.
Yes, let's talk a little bit about this low fat, high fat, low carbs, all these ratios, do you think that matters a lot? What's it take? Can somebody be healthy and lose weight on a high carbohydrate diet or on a high fat diet? What do you think about this, the ratio, like a lot of people talk just about focus a lot on the ratio of macronutrients?
Well, first, you know, I want to go back to an earlier concept that everybody's different, and I think I think kind of what happened, you know, like for Dr. Atkins, you know, the high fat diet worked for him, so then he believed everybody should be on the high fat diet. For Dean Ornish, the low fat diet worked for him, so he thought everybody should be on the low fat diet, but I think that there's not one ratio that works for everybody, there's some general ratios, but the most important thing about fat, more than the ratios, is that you have the quality and the balance, so whatever you do, you have to have, you desperately need the nutrients from healthy saturated fats, and you need the saturated fats that have been so demonized, but the medium chain triglycerides, we know now are actually the ones that, you know, run your metabolism, and that they're healthy for your heart, and that, you know, you need these different types of fats too, even for good cell structure, so here's, in a summary, here's what I think about fats, is it's not about high fat or low fat, it's about balance and quality, so the problem is with the American diet, it's way out of balance towards the polyinsaturates, and the quality of those polyinsaturates is so horrible, and they themselves are unbalanced in terms of the omega-6 and the omega-3s, but it's the perfect storm, so the first thing we need to do is recognize that we shouldn't need any fats that are highly processed, so if it's on the grocery store shelf in a clear plastic bottle, it's not food, it won't even support the life of microorganisms, so why would it be good for us, so I don't want to condemn all polyinsaturates, because there are olive oil or walnut seed oil, fish oil, those are all polyinsaturates that can be very healthy, but these highly processed clear oils, these canola oils, corn oil, soybean oil, almost all the soybean oils from GMO soy, it's contaminated with glyphosate and other farm pesticides, herbicide residues, and they're so highly processed that they have no fat-soluble vitamins, and even their structure is denigrated to where they don't make good cell walls anymore, so it's really about the quality and the balance. I like telling people, you wouldn't go and date anybody, you have to be more picky, you wouldn't go and listen to any kind of music, you select the ones that you think have better quality, so why don't you do that with your food?
Yeah. Before, we could be talking here for another hour, but I want to be respected for the time, but I think we should talk a little bit about the work of western price for people who don't know, I think it's somebody who everybody should appreciate his job for a flower, especially on the nutritional side. Can you talk a little bit about somebody who was western price, right? He's one of my, he was probably my greatest hero, I certainly admire what Podger did, but really what Western Price did was amazing, really.
Western Price grew up in a farm in Canada where most of the food they consume was the food that was produced on their farm, was produced by their neighbors, and when he went to dental school in the United States, and then he ended up selling in Cleveland, and what you have to realize is the time frame when he practiced dentistry, he practiced dentistry from 1899, when food was processed, food was relatively rare, and most of the food, transportation was slow, so even in a city like Cleveland, most of the food was from local farms and locally raised meats and things like that, but by the time he finished practicing in 1930, there'd been this huge urbanization and all the giant food companies that exist today, they had their start then, you know, Kelloggs and General Mills, General Foods, in order to feed these new urban masses, you know, they had to figure out ways to preserve food so that it could be transported without refrigeration, refrigeration was almost non-existent, and transportation was very slow, so people started eating sugary foods, they started eating more refined grains, it was the very beginning of these vegetable oils, and Dr. Price, he had a large pediatric practice, he saw that from the time he started in 1899, until the time he finished practice in 1930, that there was a huge change in the dental presentation of the children, their faces were narrower, they had more allergies and more asthma, cavities, way, way more cavities, crooked orthodontic problems, and so he asked himself the question, why is this change, and his hypothesis was that was because the diet changed, so what he did is he decided to travel around the world, he would find people who still ate their Indigenous peoples, who still ate their traditional diet, and then he would compare it to people who ate what he called the foods of commerce of the modern diet, and so for example he would go to northern Canada in Alaska, and he would look at the Inuit people who ate a very, very high fat diet, very few vegetables, but still they had perfect teeth and they suffered no heart disease and no cancer, and then he would look at the same people who had moved into the trading centers where they were trading with white people for sugar and canned foods and flour and things like that, he would look at their teeth and he would see this remarkable difference just as a result of this dietary change, so he did that all over the world, he did it in Africa, he did it in the Great Barrier Reef Islands, the original people, his very first journey doesn't seem so exotic that he studied the remote people of Switzerland who lived in the high valleys where they didn't have access to processed foods, they died that they had been eating for thousands of years, hundreds and thousands of years, and he compared it to modern Swiss children who were living in the big cities and eating a lot of cocoa and breakfast cereals and sugar and stuff, and even there there was this profound difference in their overall health, their dental presentation of course, that was his main focus, but even their outlook on life, the people who in every culture, whether they were African or herds people or Great Barrier Reef Islanders or Inuit people that wherever people ate their indigenous diets, he found that they had a sense of spirituality, a sense of connectedness, and a sense of peace that the people who had been modernized had lost, people became all the sugar and processed oils that they became more frenzied and they would be more anxious and they became disconnected from whatever their spiritual beliefs were. I think you see that in modern society, not just our children, but so many people are just so disconnected and so completely lack any sense of self as it relates to our spiritual part of our lives. Anyway, he was a remarkable man, he traveled 150,000 miles, I might have that figure wrong, he traveled tens of thousands of miles to some of the most remote parts on the earth at a time when that was very, very difficult and he did it because of this immense curiosity and he came back with a tremendous amount of data and really from him, we garner the lessons of health that guide us as a nutritional therapy association, the respect for ancestral diet, the idea that we all are different, that there's not one diet for everybody that really depends on what our ancestors ate and that he gives us the guidelines to restore our health, the basic principles that we need to help you again.
Yeah, cool, cool. Yeah, nutritional and physical degeneration by West Nick Price, it's my bible for nutrition. I always recommend people this amazing, amazing book. Last question I have for you, Greg, is, okay, people are motivated here now, you know, they listen to you, they probably have a lot of information in their heads.
If you have to tell one thing for them to do, like, what's the thing they should be doing right now to go towards the journey of losing weight forever? Eat real food. I mean, just that's the most basic answer is when people, whatever else they do, if they get rid of all the processed foods and they eat fresh vegetables and good quality needs and high quality dairy, hopefully raw and unprocessed and to the degree that we process, I mean, our ancestors processed food, they cultured their vegetables, you know, the things like sauerkraut and they made yogurt from fresh milk, you know, to these things to preserve it. But the more we get back, the more we shun processed foods and eat real foods, the mechanisms in our body will actually guide us to eat and balance again.
So it's the process foods that throw us out of balance and confuse our sense of appetite. Yeah, just eat real food. Okay, cool. Thank you so much.
Great lesson question. What can people find more about you what you're working on right now? What's the next step for you? Well, thanks for asking.
Well, of course, you know, my greatest accomplishment is I'm the founder of the nutritional therapy association. And you know, it's certainly an emerging profession. We went from just a few years ago to training 200 students a year to this year. We'll have close to 700 students in class.
So anyone that's interested in seeking a new profession, you know, they should definitely explore, you know, an education to become a nutritional therapy practitioner and nutritional therapy consultant, that for the masses who just really want good information and good supervision, they can seek out a nutritional therapy practitioner in their community to help them with their with their dietary, you know, journey back to health. And so you can go to nutritionaltherapy.com and also want to put a plug in for the Price Pottinger Nutrition Foundation PPNF dot org, which is in San Diego. If you have been over this, I'm actually going into a day to class right off the here. There you go.
Very good. Yeah. Be sure and tell them all there. I said, hi, I'm other.
Oh, there's and of course, the other one of Western a price foundation has done wonderful work in educating people and the anybody's interested in reading the first part of my book, you can go to Price to Pottinger's Prophecy dot com and you can download the first chapter for free. And of course, it's available in as an ebook or in most of the major book stores, either carried or haven't available. It's called Pottinger's Prophecy, How Food Resets, Genes for Wellness or Illness. And, you know, I'm just, you know, working, you know, to expand nutritional therapy association.
As I mentioned before, we're now teaching classes. I'm personally teaching a class in Australia and Canada. So it's exciting. I'm hoping that someday we'll have a speaking instructor.
Yes, somebody to speak. Portuguese can go to Brazil into Portugal. Yes, he definitely needs some, well, a lot of nutrition therapy practitioners in Brazil, definitely. Thank you so much.
You may have super appreciated sign and have a good day. Thanks for your enthusiasm. Thanks for having me on this interview. Hope to see you again soon.
Awesome. Thank you. Thanks for listening to the Brazilian Health and that show. Go to www.Brazilianhealthandthat.com for much more information about how to burn fat for the rest of your life.
I'll step away. Go.