 Welcome to Healthy Planet, the show for people who care about their health and the health of our planet on the ThinkTech Livestreamy Network series. I'm your host, Dr. Grace O'Neill. Joining me today is Dr. John McDougal. Welcome Dr. McDougal. Tell us about your journey to discovering the starch-based diet and how it helps people with chronic disease. Well, thank you for having me on. My name is John McDougal and my beginning is in Hawaii. I don't know whether you can see the full shot there. But if you do, you see the picture of the Hawaiian Islands behind me because I really have my experience in Hawaii to credit basically everybody, everything I am today. I was raised in Michigan and wanted to escape and decided the nicest place in the world to escape would be the Hawaiian Islands. And so Mary and I left there for there in 1972. Did a internship at Queen's Medical Center. And then I became what is known as a sugar plantation doctor. But you know, people don't even recognize that particular entity, sugar plantation doctors. I've asked them, you know, do you remember the sugar plantation? They don't. But anyway, I was a sugar plantation doctor, which was my job along with three other doctors was to take care of all the employees of Hamakua sugar, which were 5,000 employees. And we did everything from catching their babies to pronouncing them dead, you know, and everything in between. We were it as far as the doctors are concerned. Well, what I learned was two major things. One is that I wasn't taught how to treat chronic disease. As a result, essentially all of my patients with chronic conditions stayed sick and continued to get worse. And I thought I was a bad doctor to tell you the truth. I kind of blame it on myself if they weren't getting better. So people with high blood pressure, diabetes, cancer, heart disease, arthritis, and so on, they never get better. They just get a bunch of pills and excuses. It was the first thing I learned is just what shortcomings medicine has for the patient. The second thing I learned was how important diet is. And I think the big on the whole, I was unique in the sense that we had this population of people that were first, second, third and fourth generation. Our first generation were people from Japan, the Philippines, China, Korea, who learned their native diet while they lived in their native lands. They learned a diet of rice and vegetables, and they brought that diet with them when they moved to Hawaii to start new families. Their children were a bit more influenced by the Western diet. And as a matter of fact, right up from our our plantation was Texas Drive-In, the home of the Malasauva. And lots of people ate there. In fact, you don't go to the big island without eating there. So they ate more rich food, more greasy food, more meat, more dairy, et cetera. By the time I got to the third generation, I was taking care of people who were just as sick, just as overweight, as people I'd learned about medicine in Michigan and on the island of Oahu. And it was because of their food. They lived on rice. That's why they were healthy. And since then, I've spent my whole life, the last 47 years, taking care of people with that observation in mind. That is rich foods make you sick. And the right diet for people is a starch-based diet, like my Asian patients ate. This one was based on rice. If you take people who are sick, obesity, high blood pressure, stomach trouble, diabetes, et cetera, and you put them back on the diet for human beings, they do well. And so that's all I've been doing for 47 years. Taking care of 12,000 people. Myself ran a couple of live-in programs. One was based at a hospital. One was based at a resort. And right now we run a 12-day internet-based program, which is our most successful attempt at helping people. We take care of them over the internet for a 12-day period of time, medical care, et cetera. Anyway, I've had a very rewarding practice for the last, what's been going on more than a half a century. Yes, you've helped a lot of people and helped a lot of people also lose weight. I've been listening to your book on Audible, the McDougal program for maximum weight loss. What do you recommend if somebody is in the same vein as your book, I guess, trying to lose a lot of weight and they're already plant-based, like you recommend avoiding certain things, correct? What would those things be? They'll plant-based or vegetarian or even vegan doesn't really mean anything in terms of what I consider good health. You can be a vegan and live on coaxing potato chips. You know, vegetarians often, they think that, well, vegans, including vegans, they think fake foods and lots of oils are just fine for them. The vegetarians, they'll include dairy and eggs in their diet. You know, you're not talking about anything that resembles good health. What we're talking about is a diet based on starch. If you do a little bit of history and you look back at what people have eaten, you find that 99.999% of people who ever walked this earth lived on starch-based diets. Native Hawaiians, they lived on taro and breadfruit. That was their diet. It was only when the missionaries came and brought the pigs did they end up eating a lot of rich food. It was the queens and the kings that were at Hawaii who, these royalty and their fellow aristocrats, they got to eat the rich food. But otherwise, the traditional Hawaiian diet is a diet of starch, of taro and breadfruit with, you know, a little fish on occasion when they caught fish, but it wasn't the dominant part of their diet. And so we can go, we can go all over the world and make the same analogy. You go to Central America, Mexico, these are the people of the corn. They lived on corn. The Native American lived on, I mean, we're talking about 12,000 years ago, the Native American lived on diets of potatoes and sometimes diets of corn. You go to South America, the Incas lived on potatoes. Go to the bread basket of the world. You know what that is. That's what they're talking about every night on the news. Iran, Egypt, Iraq, Ukraine, the bread basket of the world. This is not the pork chop basket of the world. This is the bread basket of the world. And we just started out talking about what Asians eat. Typically, you know, that's what most people think that Asians live on. But Asians have lived on many, many other starches successfully, not just rice. So you also said people should minimize, like say somebody is based, they should also minimize their avocados, nuts and seeds as well. And soy, I think was also something you said that people should minimize if they're trying to lose weight. If you want to lose weight, you got to do. It's not that they're unhealthy, nuts and seeds and avocados. I would consider them healthy. But they're very rich. And they're 90% fat and the fat you eats, the fat you wear. So whereas, whereas, you know, back when, when an avocado tree only came in bloom as a dozen Hawaii, you know, for a week or two weeks, now we have avocado trees in bloom all year long at, at Safeway and Kroger and other markets. And that's the problem. You know, we're nuts. You know, nuts provided some extra calories for people to store as they were going through a difficult winter when crop wasn't available. So you have nuts coming in season again at the end of summer, the beginning of fall, which will provide some extra concentrated calories to get through through a difficult winter. But otherwise, you know, starch has been the diet of essentially everybody that's walked this earth with a few exceptions. The exceptions being the aristocrats of old who were obese, had diabetes, heart disease, gout, et cetera. And the other exception would be the few populations that have lived at the extremes of the environment like the Inuit Eskimo. But otherwise it starts to power people throughout history. And you know, that's, that's what the human being eats. And the reason people are sick. And I saw it. I mean, good grief. I was there for 15 years in Hawaii. And I saw the transition in health and people, you know, where, you know, predominantly the Asian population was trim and healthy, but not, not anymore. You know, and the sickness, I mean, some of the statistics, and I don't want to quote them because, you know, some of them may be a little dated, but as I recall the Filipino has the highest rate of gout of anybody on this planet. And the Chinese has the highest rates of cancer. The ones that live in Hawaii, I'm talking about. Yeah, yeah. You know, we have an epidemic of diseases that are due to eating rich food. And the simple solution is to go back your, your ancestors diet. Your grandma, or great grandma, and they have to go that far. When you asked for dinner, what was for dinner on Sunday? You know, she said rice or potatoes. Now, when you ask for what's for dinner, when you go over to visit on Sunday, it's pork chops, you know, or steak or fried chicken or whatever. You know, you don't, you don't only have to go back that far, three generations, and you have people eating starch-based diets. And for the previous main years, they eat starch-based diets. This is just an aberration, the rich Western diet is caused the dominant amount of sickness, the heart disease, you know, major organ cancers, diabetes. Anyway, it goes on and on. And plus, look, when 80% of the population, and it may be worse in Hawaii, when 80% of the population is either overweight or obese, something wrong. It's not people. It's something terribly wrong. It's not a lack of medications or treatments. It's the food. That's what's wrong. So what do you think about people who are concerned about getting adequate omega-3s on a plant-based diet? What would you say to them? I would, I would ask them, what makes omega-3s? And they'd say fish and I'd say no. No animal makes omega-3 fats. Can't be done. Never has been. Never will be. No fish ever made an omega-3 fat. Well, where do you get omega-3 fats from? Do you have a plant? No. Why does a fish have a lot of omega-3 fat? Because the fish eats seaweed and algae and stores it in its body fat. So why not go to the original source of omega-3s? You'll never miss. There's never been a case of omega-3 fatty acid deficiency on any natural diet. It doesn't exist. Something made up to cell supplements. So you don't believe in the ratios that people are are recommending, you know, there's a certain ratio they recommend to omega-3 to omega-6 ratio. Whatever the ratio is, it's what plants have. You know, look, there are a lot of people have a lot of ideas, but when you go through all of history, a long history, you know, essentially all the research, you know, and just a simple logic. You know, if we were, and I read an article today about the carnivore diet, which is where people are living basically on just only animal food. History tells us, research tells us, you're immediately constipated, and you have greasy skin and greasy hair, and you start putting a load on your kidneys and you're, you know, you're liver that'll likely kill you. You know, you don't have to wait long on an all carnivore diet to get into trouble. In fact, one of the examples was when Robert Atkins started out. Bacon, butter, and brie was his diet. No plants, no carbohydrates, and of course Robert Atkins died obese with terrible heart disease. He was a sickly man. Do you remember that I was when he died? I ought to live with Robert Atkins, so that might say something to you. So what would you say, a lot of people are concerned about having this double copy of ApoE4 gene, and they want to prevent Alzheimer's. What would you say would be the best person a person like, what would be the best thing a person like that could do to prevent Alzheimer's? I can't use your genes, can you? So that was out, and it's only an association, it's not a cause-and-effect issue. Alzheimer's is not a genetic inherited disease due to food poisoning. It's due to one, excuse me, not just food poisoning, but one particular specific element that's commonly found in our food. The first case of Alzheimer's disease was discovered in 1903 by Lewis Alzheimer. First case, and now it affects millions of people worldwide. I'll give you the short answer, and you can look it up. You can study it, you can spend weeks studying it. You'll come to the same conclusion that I've come to, is Alzheimer's is due to aluminum poisoning. The metal aluminum is Alzheimer's, and so that's why it's epidemic. That's why it's not likely to be solved soon, because the aluminum industry is very, very powerful and rich. They have a lot of lobbyists who keep the trick. Keep the secret a secret. So we have a pretty good question from one of our viewers. The question was, what if a person ate a healthy plant-based diet and exercised, but still came down with a serious illness and condition anyway? What should that person do? Should they change anything in particular? Well, what if you had a race horse, and a race horse broke its leg? Would you put it on dog food? No, of course not. Okay, so there are problems that happen besides those due to food. Those caused by food. You can get hit by a car. You can catch an infection. You know, there are lots of things that happen to people. The vast majority of illnesses are due to being a glutton, to eating the richest diet known to human beings. You're going to continue to be sick and overweight, and your family is going to be sick and overweight, and you're going to suffer terribly until you figure out that the human diet is a diet based on starch, corn, rice, potatoes, sweet potatoes, breads, pastas. That's the human diet with the addition of fruits and vegetables. Animal foods, and you know, I'm going to tell you that all populations were vegan. They ate anything they could get their hands on, including I was just watching a report on how Austrians used to live on grubs, you know, little worms? Yeah. Grub. So, you know, right, you know, it's not a vegan diet we're talking about. It's talking about a diet based on starch. And when people ask, my patients ask, you know, how much starch should I eat, doc? I say, you look at your plate, 90% of your plate should make up the amount of starch. And then the rest of fruits and vegetables. How much animal food should I eat? Well, you need none. I think someone should have like salad first, try to fill as much up on that, and then what they can't, because the, you know, they're more nutrient dense, like having salad is, you know, leafy greens are more nutrient dense than say starch. Two issues there. If you've been to Europe, and Europe ate the salad last. The second issue is, do you know anybody with deficiency diseases? Do you have friends with scurvy? No. Berry, berry. Allegra. Why would you be looking for more nutrients when it's not a problem? The problem is in excess. Do you have friends that suffer from excess fat? Yeah. Excess cholesterol. Excess salt. You know, a problem is a problem of excess, not a problem of deficiency. Why look at the wrong direction? Why? Because lots of people get to sell lots of supplements and make billions of dollars. That's why. It's just money. Now, how about somebody with hypothyroidism? Do you have any thoughts? There are some plant-based people and they have hypothyroidism. Is there anything they could do for that? They could take thyroid supplementation. They have to. But there's nothing in terms of their diet, like would you advise them to avoid differences or soy or something like that? The thyroid gland is dead. In most cases of thyroid deficiency hypothyroidism, your doctor will tell you are due to autoimmune thyroiditis. In other words, the body attacks the thyroid gland. And the reason the body attacks the thyroid gland is because we eat foreign thyroids. We eat thyroids from pigs and cows. Do you know how we eat foreign thyroids? Do you know where you find them on your dinner plate? In animal products, it's definitely in the animal products. Like hot dogs or something. Hot dogs. Yeah. So you eat these foreign, foreign thyroids. The body recognizes them as being foreign. And it gets mixed up and attacks your own thyroid gland. It's dead. It's not a grow back. I don't care what you do. But you can live healthfully, inexpensively, safely by taking a thyroid supplement, which is what my patients do. I'm a real doctor. I'm a board-certified internist. I've been practicing medicine for half a century. Good grief. I don't practice anything that is other than what it should be, other than proper care of people. And I don't treat dietary diseases with drugs. Yeah. Except as a last resort. I may deal with some of their issues. But you take dietary diseases just by fixing the food. It's like when somebody has a bad cough and they have mucus coming out of their lungs. You could give them a cough, sir. Or you could tell them to stop smoking. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I can give you a bunch of blood pressure pills, cholesterol pills, etc. Or I could tell you to stop eating the foods that are making you sick. And those are the animal foods and the free oils. Yeah. You know, like flaxseed oil or corn oil and safflower oil. These are toxic. So once you do that, what happens is you heal. Well, our results are we get nearly 90% of people off of their medications, particularly their blood pressure and diabetes medication. 90%. You know, our weight loss is like 3.1 pounds in seven days. It's 20 pounds on average in a year. Nobody else gets those kind of weight loss results. You know, we have, you know, our curate for, well, it's really high. Is that the in-person program? Or are you talking the- Oh, we've done it, we've done it several ways. I did it for 16 years at St. Helena Hospital in California. I did it for 18 years at a resort in Santa Rosa. And then with the pandemic, everything closed down. And so we brought the program to the internet, which is the best thing that ever happened to you and to us. Patients get so much more out of an internet experience. We do telemedicine. We come into your home several times a day. Lectures are good to your convenience. We're running on right now. We have real 50 happy people who we're taking care of, and they come from Sydney, Australia, and Shanghai, and London, and they're all over the world. That's great. I started practicing. I started, my first practice was for 15 years. After I finished my surgical internship, I did a residency at John Byrne School of Medicine for Internal Medicine. Then I practiced as a general practitioner the rest of the time I was there, which was a while, maybe another eight years or so. My kids are full Hawaiian. They were all born in Hawaii. But Mary and I are about as Hawaiian as you can get being transplants. That's what we think of as our home. That's why I have the picture up here. Do you see the picture? I show that to everybody that comes into my home for an interview. What was I going to say? Is there anything that you would tell in terms of diet for an 80-year-old to eat differently than a 30-year-old? Are there nutrients that they should get more of? The only difference happens if you go off human mother's breast milk and you go on to solid food and eat that the rest of your life, a starch-based diet. I don't know. I think things have passed a lot. An observation that I made when I lived in Hawaii, hopefully you can still make today, that that is that grandma and grandpa who still maintain their starch-based diet, whether it be rice for an Asian, whether it be taro and bread food, potatoes for your native Hawaiian, they're the ones that are still working in the yard, are still trim and healthy. Their kids are sick and obese. What happened? Did their genes change? A big bunch of wrath of God fall on them. They changed their food. That's what got me so excited about it. I saw this right from my eyes. You can definitely see it. I used to work at Kuakini and you can definitely see it because there's very, very old patients and then you have their grandson or granddaughter that comes in and you can see through the generations what people look like when they arrive in Hawaii. Why did they look that way? I just think people are eating too much fat, like you said. They look that way because they lived on starch, which means also too much fat and too many animals and too much cholesterol and too much protein, but you've got to get that word starch in your vocabulary. You're going to be out of control. It's just like the good morning greeting for Chinese instead of saying, hello, how are you? They say, have you had your rice today? And a bride is not considered a proper bride until she properly knows how to cook rice. Look, it's not been that far that you've come from your beginnings from your grandparents. Maybe your parents, you can still see this, but you better look fast because it's going quickly all over the world. My parents just came from Taiwan, but I was born here. So I do want to go to your website though because I think there's a lot of good resources. So if you could go, Eric, to his website and show people who are watching online. There's a lot of things here. I was actually going to try out some of your recipes. They look really good because I was surfing your website. This one of the vegetable chowder, that looks pretty good. There's a lot of ones that look good. They have beans and rice. And then if you could show his program. And by the way, we also have a free program. We have the program where our staff, our team takes care of you and helps you get off your drugs or on the right drugs. We have that program, which is our main effort. But Mary and I, since we've had a website, we've offered the program free. It's on the website, 12 days of menus, all the instructions, all the recipes you'd ever need. A good share of the medical advice you could ever use is on that website. Yeah, the website's great. Sometimes I Google for my patients actually about different problems people have like kidney stones, which is very diet related. There's a lot of things you can do for your diet to decrease your incidence of kidney stones. And I've taken some stuff from your website because it's been very helpful. And I think there's some good information about gallstones as well on your website that I've given to patients. So I find it very helpful as well. If you can be an adversary to teach the kind of diet that your grandma and grandpa ate, then you're going to do just fine. That's the problem. And that's one of the problems with this kind of eating. In addition to the fact that it's hard to make a living, there aren't very many businesses that come out of feeding your potatoes, is that a person with a seventh grade education can teach you. You don't have to go to medical school to learn this. So if the common person could share this profound message of healing, it shows you just how simple and easy to understand it is. The truth is simple and easy to understand. People are sick as they live like kings and queens. They eat rich food. The way you get your health back is eat the human diet, which is a starch-based diet with fruits and vegetables. That's it. Go for a walk, you little son. Well, thank you for all the work you do. All the work you've done all these years and your books are fabulous. I don't know if you can show Eric the starch solution. And then I've also been listening on Audible to the McDougal program for maximum weight loss. Both are fabulous books and you go through actually different nutrients that people might be concerned about like protein, calcium, when they change to a plant-based diet. And I think that's very helpful for people as well. I didn't really get to go into that. But thank you so much for being on the show. We do a free open talk to the public every Sunday night at 5 p.m. Pacific time. It's on our YouTube channel, which has got loads of educational videos on there. But we also do this time, just like you and I spent the last few minutes together, a time where people can ask us questions, no charge, no obligation. You don't even have to identify yourself. And so we offer that to the public. Sunday night, Pacific time. Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for being on the show. We're out of time, so we have to wrap it up. I'm Dr. Grace O'Neill. This is Healthy Planet on the ThinkTech Live Streaming Network series. We've been talking with Dr. John Doogle. Thank you, Eric, our broadcast engineer and the rest of the crew at ThinkTech for hosting our show. And thanks to you, our listeners for listening. I'll see you in two weeks for more of Healthy Planet on ThinkTech, the show for people who care about their health and the health of our planet. My special guest will be Winston Walsh of the Manoa Outdoor Circle. We will be talking about protecting and preserving Hawaii's environment. If you have ideas for the show or questions for my future show guests, please contact me at HealthyPlanetThinkTech at gmail.com. Check out my website at graceandhawai.com or Instagram at GracefulLiving365 for more information on my projects, including future show guests. I'm Dr. Grace O'Neill. Aloha, everyone. Thank you so much for watching ThinkTech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn and donate to us at ThinkTechHawaii.com. Mahalo.