 We're causing so much suffering to animals and it's almost like it's coming full circle and it will be the end of us. That's exactly right. Death leads to death. What right do we have to inflict that on these innocent creatures? Okay, so here we are still at the vegan camp out 2019. We've got Dr. Michael Clapper in as a guest and let me just tell you, I'm honored to have you in. Thank you. I'm honored to be on your program. Now, let's just go straight from the ground up. Can you give a brief overview of what you do? Oh my, it certainly evolved in recent years. I'm a classically trained physician. I graduated from the University of Illinois College of Medicine way back in 1972. I've had postgraduate training in surgery anesthesia orthopedics. For the first 10 years of my life, I've practiced regular blood and guts medicine. A couple of events happened after my 10th year in practice that made it very clear that I should be adopting a plant-based diet for myself, which my body really loved, but also take that into my medical practice and help my patients who were a steady stream of overweight, diabetic, hypertensive, clogged up, and inflamed people. If you get them on a whole food plant-based diet, most of them turn into normal people. These diseases go away. So I joined the staff of True North Health Center in San Rosa, California and practiced a plant-based kind of medicine. I saw wonderful, wonderful improvements in people's health. I thought that I would finish my career there, but it became very evident a couple of years ago that I have to get to the source of the problem. A major source of the problem is my noble medical profession. It has been grotesquely negligent in recognizing the role that our patients die at playing in these diseases. It became completely bankrupt for me and I think my colleagues to practice medicine as if what our patients are eating have no effect on these diseases. Someone in Dr. Flint, Michigan refusing to learn about lead poisoning when every patient he's seeing has lead poisoning. It's a similar thing. So I realized that I want to end my medical career, hopefully many years from now, by going to the medical schools of North America, I've been to the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and give the medical students the lecture I wish somebody had given me 50 years ago when I was a first-year medical student and tell them, listen, you're not going to be seeing leprosy in smallpox. It's going to be obesity and diabetes as much as your patients are eating. And so I've been devoting myself to our initiative called Moving Medicine Forward to deliver this message to the medical schools in every continent I find myself on and that's been the most fulfilling part of my medical practice up to now. Wow, so you're going back to the roots back where it begins when they're getting taught and that's when they're most open to this. And have you come up against any opposition when you're talking to students? Do you get cross-examined afterwards pretty thoroughly or? Oh, absolutely. The paleo-ethic, paleo-ideas and the keto-ideas have really taken hold of my colleagues and many of the medical students. And many of them find that they do get initial improvement in their weight and their blood sugar and their lipids and so they jump on this because they like to taste the steak in their mouth. But we can talk about why I think that's a terrible idea. Certainly from that camp we get as well as the professors who stand in the back of the room with their arms folded who feel this is complete heresy because they never ask about what their patients are eating. Nutrition never figures in to whatever disease they're seeing and it's so tragic because they're all seeing nutritionally-based diseases. The cardiologists is eating clogged arteries and the internists sees the high blood pressure and the rheumatologists sees the sore joints, the dermatologists sees the psoriasis, the pulmonologists sees the allergies, the gastroenterologists sees the colitis, the necrosis. They're all looking at the same disease. That's what their patients are eating. And yet they call it, oh, etiology unknown. We don't know the cause of these diseases, but let's give them some steroids and statins and have them come back in a month or two and see how they're doing. And for scientists, that is so... I've got to be careful, usually my adjectives here, but it certainly doesn't serve the patient and certainly doesn't give much credit to the doctor either and it perpetuates, they become enablers of their patients' diseases. It's time for that to end. The medical system is going bankrupt. Real people are dying on real operating tables from operations they don't need, these bypass operations, et cetera. Most often they don't need them. And so it's time to change that. So there's resistance. Why is there resistance among the professors? Three reasons. One, we're not taught anything about nutrition. And the words barely mentioned in all four years of medical school. We don't believe it has anything to do with these diseases. Second, nutrition's not viewed with respect. It's a sissy science. It's not real hard. It's not surgery. It's not cardiology. The dietitian will deal with it. And ironically, they're all dealing with dietary diseases that they refuse to recognize. And third in the saddest, of course, is that the doctors are eating this food themselves. They're eating the pizzas and the burgers and the lobsters and the steaks. They're not going to tell their patients not to eat that. They like that. And so this is this three-headed hydro that I'm dealing with. But it has to be slain. And it has to fall away. It's bankrupt to turn out another generation of medical students who have no awareness of the role of our patients' daily diet in these diseases. And that's my mission, is to light those fires in those kids' heads to make them realize what no matter if you're a pediatric clinic, surgery clinic, obstetrics, rheumatoid, you're looking after your patients what they're eating. Before you order another $1,000 scan and another $500 set of lab tests, ask them what they ate yesterday. And if it's full of burgers and buffalo wings and pepperoni pizzas, then that's where you need to start. Send them to the plant-based dietitian down the hall and let her educate them and then see them back in a month and see how they're doing. So time to draw on the era of nutritional medicine in our healing practices. And that's what I'm about these days. Well, you're very, very passionate. Now let's talk about this. What about if someone were to say to you, where is your evidence for this? What about, you know, people, they see these health benefits from going full carnivore and, you know, from going low-car, but where is your scientific evidence for what you're saying? Oh, Joey, that's a very perspicacious question. That's the real issue, because nutrition, again, it's been the poor sister of medical research. It's difficult to do pure nutrition research because you're right, where is the double-blind placebo-controlled randomized study? Well, you can't do that in nutrition. People know if they're eating meat or not, by and large, although now you're getting some tasty analogs, I suppose. And these are also conditions over the long haul. These take years to develop. They often go away quite quickly. But the chronicity of this, plus we're also proving a negative, that we're saying that these dietary patterns prevent diseases. So you're talking about diseases that don't happen. So the evidence that we do get is often epidemiologic. You look at the incidence of heart disease in vegans versus the general population. And they say, well, that's just epidemiologic studies. But again, you can't get into every person's arteries and do biopsies of the arterial wall. It's a difficulty area to get this solid proof. When you're just trying to demonstrate the efficacy of a drug, that you can do. You can give up the placebo, the active drug, and follow them for five years and see what happens. That you can do. But these dietary styles are difficult to do. And also, since you're asking a fairly deep question here, there's also an issue for talking about plant-based nutrition, et cetera, is how long the person has been on this dietary style. If they adopted a vegan diet a year ago, after four decades or five decades of running burgers and pizzas to their arteries. Oh yes, I'm a vegan. And yet they dropped dead from a heart attack where they show some disease. They'll say, aha, see, vegan diet didn't work. But your sample was skewed to begin with. So it's a difficult kind of research. So the solid evidence they're looking for is hard to combine. There are some studies. And as I said, lots of epidemiologic ones. Dr. Gary Fraser and the folks at the Loma Linda University have been following vegans in the seventh day Adventist community for decades now. And it's clear these folks are healthier if they maintain a whole food plant-based diet. And we're getting better with our inflammatory markers, with our imaging to start looking what's happening inside the arteries and what's happening inside these various tissues. So the studies are going to appear more and more. But again, a lot of it's going to be epidemiologic. The only thing you can do this to prove the efficacy of diet is get a whole bunch of people on the exact same diet, the exact same diet, follow them for 30 years, 50 years, and see who's still alive, who's had strokes, who's had heart attacks. And that's going to be the definitive proof and even in a randomized study. Well, you're not going to be able to do that study if you're in a randomized people. You're going to be a vegan. You're not. People say, listen, man, I'm going to eat what I want to eat. So it's a difficult arena to tease out a specific objective evidence. And so it's been the Achilles heel of my message delivery. I agree with that. But also the reality is I belong to the American College of Lifestyle Medicine. Well, there's a British society of Lifestyle Medicine. There's the Australasian Society. There's the German Society. There's the South American. Doctors around the world are practicing Lifestyle Medicine and getting their patients on plant-based diet are seeing the same thing. Every physician who practices a lifestyle nutrition-based medicine, we have a stable full of patients who used to have high blood pressure, used to be obese, who used to have diabetes, who used to have clogged arteries. These diseases go away. And as a clinician, you know, I would yell into the wind, don't tell them we're not seeing these things. You can sit there with your arms folded saying, you should give us our double blind concealer and control studies. But the reality is these diseases go away and every doctor is seeing this around the world. And to both negate the physician's experience, but very importantly, deny this powerful therapy to our patients and keep them on the statins and the stents and these palliative treatments without getting to the root of the problem, really fails the patient. As nutritional scientists, we're turning our back on the most powerful tool we have at our disposal and the safest tool we have at our disposal. So it's a difficult arena I'm working in. I understand. There's a lot of variables that confound variables. Why is the Seventh Day Adventist study specifically some of the most solid evidence we have? Indeed, because these are folks who for decades, if not from birth, if they follow the absolute tenets of the Seventh Day Adventist religious philosophy, they do not eat meat. They're vegans. They don't eat meat. They don't eat dairy. Now, in the real world, if you actually go to Loma Linda, California, like I have done, you see a fair number of these people and not everybody in the city of Loma Linda is a Seventh Day Adventist vegan. But those who have been entered into the registry and have been followed and who truly, truly do follow a whole food-plant-based diet, they are clearly leaner and healthier people. They take less medications. They don't show up at the emergency room or chest pain. They're clearly a healthier population. And Dr. Fraser and his epidemiologic crew have really documented this beautifully. Autoimmune diseases, intestinal diseases, and their death rate. Everything shows that they're a healthier population. So with the death rate, what would be the main cause of mortality? That's another classic question. What do these old vegans die out? And, you know, we're all in the hospital dying of nothing. But we... Bonnie is a very complex human. And again, those of us who were not raised as vegans, you know, the damage we do in our early years, our first 20, 30 years of meat-eating, et cetera, may well turn on genes that a cancer will show up years later in the bone marrow or any intestinal wall. Living, you know, eating everything from cooked food to breathing polluted air. These things run through our tissues where in our cells, our DNA lies unfolded. And the food we eat, et cetera, flows through our cells and turns on genes and turns off genes. And some of these, again, may set off blood clotting issues. People get strokes. People die of silent GI bleeds. When you're 100, 110, your immune system isn't working so well. Pneumonia is creeping into your lungs. If you don't clear your secretions well enough. You know, no one lives forever. The mortality rate in this room is 100%. Nobody's getting out of here alive. And some cosmic rays are coming through our body as we speak here. So there's a fate waiting for each of us. The question is, before that last day on Earth, how much joy did you bring into the world, into your own life, into other people's lives? What did you learn? How much have you loved? And how healthy were you? The concept that you're well familiar with of the health span. There's the life span. But if your last 20 years were spent in an old folks home, exactly, then what's the use of living 100 years? You want your health span to be as long as your life span. And that's really the name of the game. It's to stay functional and active and participatory in this amazing life we've been given for as long as possible. And the total number of years, whether it's 84, 92, 106, it almost doesn't matter. Stay healthy and active and loving all your life. And a plant-based diet will help you do that better than anyone that I know. So you're saying the best chances of you reaching your genetic potential in terms of lifespan and some things that are going to come up is if you're focusing on what you can control, which is keeping it whole foods, vegan diet, and you're lessening your chances of these things manifesting in the future as far as you sort of can. Well said. So we're all going to die where vegans aren't immune to things popping up. But let's talk about the number one cause of death for humans worldwide and are vegans less likely to develop heart disease? Oh, there's no question about that. I just put a video on my website called Beyond Cholesterol because I've done a number of vegans walking around with high cholesterol and they're very concerned, some should be, but most don't need to. And I've made it very clear that these atherosclerotic plaques that develop on the inside of the arteries that lead to heart attacks and strokes, as you mentioned. These are not just globs of grease that stick to your artery walls because your LDL is too high. These are inflammatory agents. These arteries are being injured meal after meal of bacon and eggs and fried chicken and alcoholic drinks and high fructose corn syrup and cigarette smoke and stress hormones and all the processing and chemicals we use in our food. These are the chemical assault that rips up the endothelial the inner lining of the artery walls that allows oxidized cholesterol to work its way into the artery walls and set the plaque off. But these arteries are being injured. This is not a person's passive victim. The question is how is the owner of those arteries treating those arteries? And that's why these plaques develop. And a plant-based diet, as opposed to the fried chicken diet and all that implies a whole food plant-based diet if every meal is filled with darkly leafy vegetables and quinoa and whole grains and papayas and whole plant foods the food the molecular stream that then flows through your arteries after a meal like that is so filled with antioxidants and stabilizing agents they give the chemical message to the tissues of calm down, everything's okay they don't set off this inflammation and we can see the inflammatory markers decrease in the artery walls the plaques actually start to melt away. There are very dramatic arteriograms that show this and so again this is not a heart attack is not something that falls out of a tree on you and age 50 these diseases by again pathogenic meal after pathogenic meal with all of that implies meat, dairy, oils, fried foods too much sugar, etc. This is the chemical salt that leads to those those inflammatory changes and if you if you change the nature of the food stream as the weeks go by meal after meal, month after month year after year those arteries heal, those plaques melt away and the artery walls restore themselves with a beautiful process so again much hope for people who've had those heart attacks or want to avoid one the diet that we're in our body is meant to run on so it's almost like if you create the right environment inside your body, your body will do the rest absolutely it knows what to do we have basically the same digestive system that our gorilla and bonobo cousins have and they're up in the trees eating leaves and fruits, they're plant eating creatures and that's basically who we are as well and to become the carnivorous ape and run cooked animal flesh and dairy products and find oil through our tissues meal after meal, it violates natural law and that's where these diseases come from this is a transgression of the way things should be you never see gorillas running down antelopes and tearing their flesh apart the gorillas know what to eat in 40 years in medicine I've never had a giraffe in the office saying Doc, I can't control myself I can't stay away from the cheeseburgers the animals know what to eat and we are plant eating creatures and if we honor that the body knows what to do with those fuels and we stay healthy I'm going to throw something at you that I get a lot in my debates and it's like aren't we natural carnivores and look at these canines our digestive system can digest meat therefore should digest meat and what is your go to response for someone who's been taught that we're actually omnivores or carnivores right, yes well, I feel truly that we are herbivorous creatures on a number of levels if you look at these canine teeth it's laughable almost if you think that we're meant to tear flesh imagine running out on the nearest cow you see jump on its back open your mouth and take a big bite out of its back so what are you going to find you're going to find your mouth is very small and your teeth are very short even your canines and you can't even bite through that muscle dead animals hide along his muscle the the carnivore, the chew carnivores have a hinge like jaw that opens up and down for tearing flesh and if you go into the bathroom in front of the mirror and look at your mouth and look at your canines you'll find that they are shorter than your central incisors where if you look at your house cat's teeth or a mountain lion's teeth you find the canines are much longer than the central incisors so that's a big clue and most importantly we've got a jaw joint that allows for a rotary grinding motion and you look at our flat grinding mollies in the back of our jaw and you see that we're basically set up based high fiber material now so what are these canines for they don't work for biting into our flesh but what they do very well with is the food that really got us through the period at the time, the reality is if you take the time to go to Africa like Nathaniel Domini, the anthropologist from Dartmouth did and examine the teeth of the men and women and the neanderthals you find in between the teeth they're starch grains and if you examine the fossilized fecal dropping with the copper lids when people poop and their BC's turned into stone when you analyze it you see the huge amount of fiber these people are eating 150 grams of fiber a day where most people eat 20 or 30 nowadays the truth is that contrary to the paleolithic mighty hunter myth like every neanderthal had a mastodon in the freezer and spent all day eating mammoth meat because I'm a caveman the reality is from the previous evidence I cited that most of the calories brought into the paleolithic camp were gathered by the women who spent all day pulling up starchy roots and tubers and starchy corns and gathering edible we were starchivores and that's where these starch grains come from and that's what these flat grinding teeth are about and that's what these short little canines are about they were great for biting into carrots and potatoes and starchy roots that's a great use of these canines and with our very small mouth and short canines it's clear that we're starchivore creatures that live on very roots that's the main source of our calories meat yeah we can in small amounts and I don't deny that I'm sure that in emergency famine times if our ancestors came upon a rotting carcass boy, calories are calories and absolutely I'm sure it got us to survival time but you include meat in the diet on a regular basis you start changing gut flora you start changing the lipids in your body you start changing inflammatory markers it's not our food and you start creating changes in the body that are not helpful you eat meat every day you're dropping down big bolts of carnitine down in your intestines you'll summon up a population of microbes in your intestines that eat carnitine and we'll turn that carnitine into a molecule called trimethylamine that your liver will turn to trimethylamine oxide this is a molecule from hell this molecule drives cholesterol to the artery wall it really builds plaque up and our paleo friends I'm afraid are going to learn this one the hard way and all the way around the paleo diet as a physician I have great concern for the folks eating this diet and are packing their intestines for meat two three times a day it's a great way to give yourself colon cancer it's a great way to give yourself a stroke a heart attack and the fats make people insulin resistant that these paleo folks it's going to take 5, 8, 10 years for these diseases to manifest there's already been reports of heart attacks in paleo folks in keto folks from the high TMAO level so as I mentioned this is a diet of death these folks are going to reap a whirlwind of clogged arteries, colon cancers diabetes, autoimmune diseases from Niki gut heart attacks this is a diet of death that state may taste good in the mouth although after a while when you don't eat it it doesn't even taste good but these folks are going to pay a big price and I tell my colleagues are you guys going to be around you're making these records oh you're on a paleo and then you never see these patients again healthcare has become very episodic for you being that patient's family doc 10 years from now, pretty small you're going to be around when that patient passes his first bloody stool from his colon cancer you're going to be around when that ladies lights 10 years light up from her autoimmune arthritis from the Niki gut that your diet has spawned you're going to be around when in 12 years this guy has his stroke and the artery disease and when they get their autoimmune disease the new doctor is going to say oh how did the etiology I don't know we don't know why you developed that colon cancer we don't know why you developed that lepros but he's picking up the pieces of the wreckage that was started by that other doctor with their recommendations your decades before and I tell the docs you know that attitude we practice by do no harm applies to dietary advice too and these young docs and pseudo docs were throwing out this eye everybody out eat keto everybody out eat paleo they don't know what they're saying they don't know what they're doing and there's going to be some severe medical karma as a result of that advice it seems like you're speaking from a deep place of experience and you might have seen a lot of suffering as a doctor so I feel this emotion coming over me because you're speaking from a place of watching people suffer these horrible outcomes from their dietary choices absolutely these are not random events the body is not capricious it doesn't so though I think I'll develop lupus today I think I'll develop cloud arteries today I had a professor say you know people don't get diseases they earn them you know meal after meal and that's what I see and it's wretched to see people with Crohn's disease and colitis and autoimmune arthritis and strokes these are all preventable diseases if you raise a child from infancy on a whole food there's no reason they should ever get it there's no reason they should ever develop a spot of plaque in the arteries there's no reason they should develop arthritis they should go through their life as a healthy homo sapien for as many decades as they can manage on this planet but these diseases that this plague of diseases we're seeing we're all playing innocent victim oh Americans are ill the bits are why are they ill from what they're eating and and it's time to stop running away from that reality do you feel like you're up against the odds here yes but I really feel that the tides are shifting the the evidence is becoming clear every day you see articles showing up in the medical journal about plant-based diets preventing or reversing diseases you see the converse you see studies showing that high red meat diets increase the risk of various diseases absolutely but the public is something has changed you're starting well it's happened 10 years ago he started seeing all these plant-based entrees showing up on the restaurant menus and then you go to the first the natural food stores you see the plant-based entrees but then in the regular stores you're starting to see them and then now of the impossible burgers and the fish and phony fishes and all these things which I welcome no they're not the healthiest yes there's a lot of refined protein and oils but if it gets Joe meat eater off his beef burger onto an impossible burger I'm all for that they are healthier they don't have cholesterol to be oxidized they don't have a new 5G see that that causes inflammation they don't have endotoxin from the slaughterhouse they're inherently healthier in that way but all the way around it's helping society see itself as a non-median society and that's most important thing we can make this transition so the wheels are starting to turn and I'm mildly optimistic well and you've been around fighting this fight for many more years than I have and have you ever felt like you know maybe this isn't achievable or there's a good chance we're not going to make it in time we've piddled away in the 70s 80s I was making these speeches and it's time we got to switch our fuel supply we got to switch our diet and people were too busy into disco and sports and shiny objects and it's still going on to a large extent that's starting to change but we piddled away important decades where we could have made this change and now we're way behind the curve and the ice caps are melting and the Amazon's on fire and it's from our wholesale production of flesh, of animal flesh that's why they're cutting on it for us that's where these fires are coming from that's why the world's getting hotter and that's finally I think seeping into the evil especially the young kids they know they don't have the royalties of the steakhouse that our parents did and so if nature will eke out enough time for us to make this transition to a plant-based diet everything will start to change the forests come back the CO2 is taken out of the air the waters run clean again the soil stabilize the greenhouse gases reverse and where we wind up with a stable ecosystem again so it's doable it depends whether we have enough time but as Dr. Richard Oppenlander in his wonderful book that I recommend called Comfortably Unaware which is just where the Meat and Dairy folks want us he says you can put solar panels in everybody's house you can give everybody electric cars but unless we adopt a plant-based diet on a massive scale none of that's going to make any difference it must start with the world going vegan quite honestly it's interesting how we're causing so much suffering to animals and it's almost like it's coming full circle and it will be the end of us that's exactly right death leads to death and what right have we to inflict death on such an industrial scale a million chickens an hour in America what right do we have to inflict that on these innocent creatures you know the mighty hundred million years ago starving to death and he shoots a deer that's one thing but the massive amount of suffering we're causing to create this huge amount of animal flesh so we can eat and pop those buffalo wings in morning, noon and night that's such a transgression of everything that is that is ethical in the human experience that the in the animals they're going to get their revenge they're in a secret, no cow wants revenge but the truth is I had to take a little sign for it I must admit when a hurricane went through North Carolina a couple years ago and the massive amount of pig installations they had with these sewage pods well the water just swept through and this massive tide of pig feces wound up in everybody's homes and their offices and their restaurants and I had to say you know there's a little bit of justice the message was delivered by the pigs on that one that the politicians don't say that we're doing something out of truth when I've got pigment or up on my living room wall here eight feet high so yes, you're right it's the city is the factory farm shed they're out of sight anonymous shed up in the hillside you see as you drive down the interstate don't worry about what's going on in there well you can't keep that secret any longer and it's coming out in both our disease spectrum and the environment and the ice caps are melting so all the way around you're right the chickens are coming home to loose from your experience in this arena obviously the public are contributing to something that I feel most of them are morally against how do you feel that people go with that their actions coinciding with their belief system against this cruelty absolutely and that's the hope in that no individual even the toughest meat eating guy if you gave them a knife and put them in a room with a calf or a pig you got to kill them to eat tonight darn few of them would pick up that knife you know how I kill that animal most people love the animals the truth of it it's invisible I don't see it somebody else is doing it just give me that piece of anonymous flesh here and we've allowed that we've given people a pass from where their food really comes from and part of the vegan movement and God bless the animal liberation folks who put that in people's faces this is what's really happening this is what's required to get that piece of flesh on your plate their heroes bringing the truth to everyone so it's a delicate line that the animal liberation folks walk like I have to walk you want to turn people off but you want to shine that light of truth so they say you know I don't want to contribute to that anymore and all it is the bean chili instead of the beef chili you know that's the huge sacrifice we're asking people to make if people would just take that step everything would get better including them so yes appealing to their better nature is an important ticket to getting action that matters so how does this happen I believe human beings innately are compassionate they see violence it turns them off they're not like a lion they see a limping animal they don't want to attack the animal they don't want to help the animal so how does this happen that we've been contributing to something so violent and so against our innate nature yeah again there's an innate fear of course we're humans they're just animals and so because we can do something then we do it but also it's so ingrained in our culture it's a cultural thing the child is of the inner and I've seen dozens of them now grow up beautiful, lovely, healthy human beings but at age six months of age when the baby is still nursing at the breast or on the bottom with all the love in the parent's heart your mother didn't know my mother didn't know with all the love in the heart at six months that jar of baby lamb and baby chicken and baby turkey is open and from that point on three times a day animal flesh gets slathered on their child's intestine because we think that we're doing something good the child needs protein to grow and we're going to need anyway and so it started so early and then by age two or three they're eating their happy meals in their fast food restaurants and we get them on this fast food diet very quickly and yet the child really doesn't know what's in that burger doesn't even know where that chicken wing comes from and so we just entrain folks for the long run very early and by the way I know we're running short of time here but for the folks who run into the failed I tried to be a vegan once didn't work for me now I need to meet my feel better or the athletes I need to meet before my athletic endeavor what's going on with those folks and why would they relapse I think and research needs to be done but I think what we're seeing is the mechanism I just mentioned are capable of synthesizing important muscle-based nutrients carnitine, creatine, myoglobin, etc and we have the genes to make those but if those molecules those muscle-based molecules are coming into the body three times a day morning or every meal breakfast lunch, dinner flowing through the tissues all through infancy and childhood and adolescence and routines in 20s and 30s what are your own genes going to do when they're down-regulate they're in your own production of these molecules because it's coming in pre-formed three times a day well that gives you a dependency on those molecules and when you suddenly go vegan at age 30 and suddenly those molecules disappear now you gotta make them all on your own right now most folks can gear up their cellular machinery to do that but sometimes a bell shaped curve some folks may take them weeks, months, years to finally gear up their own carnitine production and during that time they draw down on their own stores that these nutrients don't feel so good and then they eat that piece of meat and it flushes their tissues and they feel better vegan, vegan, alec, carnivore but what are we witnessing this is not normal human physiology this is an acquired dependency created in from feeding a human infant animal flesh three times a day in childhood you can create a dependency on these molecules but so what that's not normal that's not natural we've created this phenomenon so to those folks first of all be patient eventually I had meat cravings for years after I became vegan my body was certainly used to those molecules what can be done either we have to do some serious research what are the carnitine levels is there some supplement that could be engineered don't feel great about keeping that dependency going though it has to be part of a tapering down program over many months or years some people might need to transition a little bit slower but that wouldn't be true of everyone just see how you feel let's just finish off with something like your own you're leaving quite a legacy behind I feel like you're one of the most instrumental speakers in the plant based arena you've got a lot of experience behind you what would be your advice to up and coming advocates and try to adapt to the animal rights arena the plant based health arena and also the environment what would you leave them with advice? it's been so interesting I'll try and formulate the answer to your question but throughout I've been advocating plant based diets for 38 years now and during it I certainly played the health card as a physician that's been my lead in of course and I'm an ethical vegan at heart I love that the animals usually seeps in towards the end of the chart but I'm a passionate environmentalist and so I've always especially since reading John Robbins' book died from New America and other ones become very evident what our meat based diet is doing to the planet so I certainly make that pitch and they've been fairly evenly the recipients of my energy but now with the ice caps melting and the temperature going up and the world getting warmer the environmental some parts of that triad is now becoming so overwhelming it's threatening all our existence so child I see at this festival I want to go up and apologize to them for what we've done to their planet and my God my child what is the world going to be like in 30 years when you're my age 70 years when you're my age and so now the environment has really stepped forward here it's by far the power of God that really has gotten people's attention here and the connection with the meat as much as they hate and oh man they don't want to open that door but it's the truth of it and they say you can't keep a hat pin in a cloth bag for very long and there's no keeping that door closed so I would urge people to advocates one know what you're talking about read the books read Dr. Opelander's books watch the videos know what you're talking about know the connections here don't just be a doom and room person paint the picture of what the world would look like a vegan world tomorrow would be a healing world on every level that people would get healed the waters would get healed the earth would get healed so emphasize the positivity of how a plant based diet fixes our problems because it really is the solution it's just what the doctor ordered and so I would say know your lines school yourself and lay out the positive vision of what a plant based diet will do amazing I suppose we need to maintain perspective as well and keep all of these in the forefront of our minds like the environmental destruction and the sense of urgency would you say that helps keep you going oh absolutely knowing what I know the medical reversals of disease I read and see every day keeps my health juices going but knowing all those animals and those sheds I owe them so much for what we've done to them and the planet which I love so dearly there's no place else to go there's nothing else to do with this I'm working for the kids and I'm working for the animals they're my employers at this point and how can you lose enthusiasm for those two very important constituents well on behalf of the earth and the planet and the animals and all of the movement that you've inspired as well thank you very much for all of your work oh thank you Joey it's been an honor thank you so much for getting this word out for people who need to hear it thank you so much mate thank you amazing work amazing speaker absolutely amazing thank you so much for that I like you for the first time I saw you you're a good one you're a very unique man I've got my own way of saying things you do but very clear and you're using your energy for the best definitely I've got a lot of respect for the amount of time you've been doing this because it can be a tough battle 1981 oh gosh driving out for a bottle of soya milk that was all that there was yeah some tired old lettuce in the corner there it must feel good to see things picking up after all these years at the cold facing look at this amazing it's wonderful it gives me hope thank you so much mate thank you keep it up