KC Craichy talks with Dr. Patrick Purdue about the biggest nutrition mistakes people make in their diet. What foods should you stop eating and start eating to achieve Super Health?

Audio Transcript

KC: Welcome to Living Fuel TV. I’m KC Craichy. A lot of people are digging their grave with their spoon, and they don’t even know it. Dr. Purdue, welcome.

Dr. Purdue: Thank you very much.

KC: So glad to have you. This has been a really fun series. Dr. Purdue is a doctor of internal medicine, and a Naturopathic Physician. Today, we’re going to discuss some of the mistakes, and things we can do about it in nutrition. Dr. Purdue, what do you see most of in your practice, as far as mistakes?

Dr. Purdue: Oh gosh. That’s a long list. Primarily it comes down to what people eat. Typical American diet, high starch, high sugar diet, and that is the foundation of many, many problems.

KC: The body’s designed to work a certain way, and many of the things people are putting in their system are not really food and they don’t have a signaling mechanism. We know things like resveratrol, they actually invoke a positive genetic expression. Omega3, the same thing, fish oil, for instance. The body is so intelligent and it recognizes foods, but it doesn’t really recognize what they’re doing to things and calling it foods. Would you agree with that?

Dr. Purdue: Yes. On a gene level, our system is wired to interpret signals from good food, from real food. And the more you monkey around with that, the more you change that, the more you highly process and alter it to the point where it doesn’t resemble what Mother Nature created, then you can’t expect your body to be too happy about it.

KC: Not even to know what to do about it. Not to mention all the extra chemicals and stuff that are in the foods and the water. A little example I always like to point out, is if you had a hard boiled egg and you lined them up and asked someone to eat them, they are not going to be eating more than two or three hard boiled eggs before they have a nauseous feeling in their body. Just can’t eat anymore. Your body will make you throw up, if you eat too many hard boiled eggs. If you scramble a dozen hard boiled eggs, a lot of people could eat all of them. Interestingly, there’s a code associated with food in its natural state. Cholecystokinin enzyme, for instance, that sends a signal to the brain. Whereas a carbohydrate, for instance, doesn’t have such a signaling mechanism so you eat the carbohydrate, you digest it in about 20 minutes the sugar hits the brain, the brain goes, Oh, okay, You’re full.” By then, you’ve been eating for 20 minutes longer than you should have. Correct?

Dr. Purdue: Yes.

KC: So food is food and some things that people eat, is not really food.

Dr. Purdue: A lot of what a lot of people eat is not really food.

KC: Unfortunately, most of what a lot of people eat. Seventy percent of the food in the produce in the store is genetically modified. We did a show on that here recently. If you shop in the middle aisles, you get all the boxes with all the things that people created, that are just crazy with various ingredients. The research recently, about the telomere length and the multivitamins and so on, so fourth. Talk about that a little bit.

Dr. Purdue: A couple of female researchers, one that won the Nobel Prize of Medicine last year, for discovering that the aging process and the degenerative process in the body, is linked to the length of telomeres.

KC: Which are?

Dr. Purdue: Which are the little links, when a cell divides, when the nucleus of a cell divides to create two identical and new daughter cells. The telomere is there to transfer that information exactly and precisely.

KC: They shorten over time.

Dr. Purdue: Exactly. As we age, telomere length shortens. So they discovered that is the aging process right there in a nutshell. Obviously, if we can slow that process down, and keep our telomeres as long as they can be for as long as possible, we tend to live longer lives and healthier lives. As you mentioned, multiple vitamins play a role in there. Studies show that helps to protect against telomere shortening. Herbs like astragalus, which has been used in traditional Chinese medicine for thousands of years. It’s widely available, it’s available in powdered supplement form. You can buy the whole root online and pounds full of stuff. Was shown to lengthen the telomeres, in a study two years ago, it was published. There’s a lot of natural products out there that are very important for this.

KC: Virtually everyday many studies come out to say, “This nutrient does that.” Yesterday we talked about a study we saw that Vitamin C impedes the growth of cancer and zinc does this, and Vitamin A does that. Omega3 does this and Vitamin D does that. There’s extraordinary power in natural substances. But people get into this thing about trying to self prescribe, “I’m going to take this much of this and this much of that.” We came up with something a long time ago called the Four Corners of Super Food Nutrition where we would say, “calorie restriction with optimum nutrition has been proven in 3000 studies, and says it extends life, delays disease, enhance performance, optimize weight, and so on.” Then the next area is, if you reduce the glycemic response and the sugar, increase the Broad Spec Antioxidant, and get the right healthy fats,’ that program, with maximum nutrient density and reduced caloric density, really is a great life extending food process. We say, instead of taking the little nutrients here and there, that if you can get all the known essential nutrients and combine it with super foods, like broccoli, spinach, kale, spirulina, blueberry, strawberry, raspberry so on, that you then have the maximum opportunity because there’s so many co-factors. We don’t even know what they do, but when you put them all together, you really have a chance of doing a lot better than just taking isolated nutrients.

Dr. Purdue: Very true. I always get amused with all these studies that come out, that prove that real good, natural food actually works. It’s like, creation provided all that however long ago and should we be surprised that, if you simply eat the original packaging of these foods, that you’ll feel better? You’re healthier? One motivation speaker said one time, “If you had a million dollar race horse, would you feed it coke and cigarettes and candy?”

KC: I totally agree. We talked about, “Would you put coke in the gas tank of your Ferrari?” You’re certainly infinitely more valuable than a Ferrari. Nutrition has incredible impact. We did a show not too long ago, that showed that people did a study with, I won’t say a name, but with a fast food hamburger, and four years after they bought it, it looked the same and smelled the same. The ants didn’t eat it. It didn’t have any mold on it. Imagine what these various chains are putting in people, and what that is actually doing.

Dr. Purdue: I think all we have to do is look around so we can see what it’s doing.

KC: Precisely. So nutrition is a super high impact area. Just changing from what people are doing and making baby steps in the right direction, really are monster steps toward super health.

Dr. Purdue: Exactly. I agree, completely.

KC: Dr. Purdue, it has been a really fun series with you. We thank you for coming, and we look forward to the next time.

Dr. Purdue: Thank you very much.

KC: We sure hope you enjoyed it. God bless you and have a great day.