 Welcome to Happy Planet, the show for people who care about their health and the health of the planet. On the ThinkTech Live Streaming Network series, I'm your host, Dr. Grace O'Neill. Joining me today in the studio for Live and Zoom is Dr. Ruth Hydrick, PhD, Ironman triathlete, author and speaker. Today we're gonna talk about the power of curiosity and synchronicity, so let's get into it. How did you become interested in triathlons? Well, let's back up and make sure everybody understands what the first triathlon was back in 1979. Here in Hawaii, we had the race around the island. We had the Waikiki, water swim, and we had the Honolulu Marathon. And one day, the three winners of each of those events got together and argued about which one of us was the fittest, the swimmer, the runner, or the cyclist. And they said, we're gonna see, we're gonna have each one of you do all three events, consecutive, no stopping or anything. And the first one crossing the finish line, here at Copilani Park is the fittest. So that became the granddaddy of triathlons. I didn't know that, that's interesting. Yeah, and it consisted of a 2.4 mile rough water swim, 112 mile bike around the island, and then you ran the Honolulu Marathon, 26.2 miles. And if you wanna know who the winner was. Who was the winner? I wanna know. The cyclist was the winner. Oh, really? Now, going back to why curiosity is important and how synchronicity is really a matter of luck. Back in 1968, I was then 33 years old and just kind of starting to see a little bit of aging. And, but really felt I was healthy, normal, the standard American diet. And then I was on a flight, a long flight. And I was looking for something to read on the flight. So I went to the newsstand and I saw this book called Aerobics. And it was a new word back then because Dr. Kenneth Cooper had just coined it. Well, I was curious. And so I bought the book, read it, and it was about running or any exercise with the major muscle groups. So that got me started running in 68. So fast forward to 14 years of daily running, feeling fit and healthy. And one day, I discovered it's lump in my breast. It was so large and it looked like it popped up overnight. I had had fibrocystic breast disease, lumpy breast. And so I thought, oh, it's just another lump but it was big. So anyway, I went in, I've had my mammograms and they all came out negative. So I thought, eh, nothing to worry about but I wanna check and make sure. I got in and the doctor took a look at that and he said, why did you wait so long to come in? And I said, I just discovered it. So he said, well, we're gonna do an excisional biopsy which means surgery to cut the whole thing out. So that's what they did. It was five centimeters, five centimeters. You know, that's big. And I told him, I wanna watch the surgery because I know it's not cancer. I just wanna see what it is. And he said, no, no, you don't wanna watch. I said, yes, I do. And he caved in and I watched it. So he cut deeper and deeper and deeper and he pulled it out and put it on this little tray and cut into it and he saw all these grains of sand and he says, oh, oh, and I jumped up. What do you mean? Oh, oh, he said, no, we'll send it down to pathology and we'll see. So anyway, turns out that a tumor that size, he said that almost automatically qualifies it as stage four cancer. That is really big. So anyway, I couldn't believe it because here I was so healthy as a runner but it turns out that was only half of the equation. The other half came about a week later. I had just had the excisional biopsy and no clear margins. So I was being scheduled for a mastectomy and they said, because you're at such a high risk for breast cancer and the other breast, I suggest we do a double bilateral mastectomy. So I said, oh, yes, I want it. Yes, I don't want to die. And so that was scheduled. Well, I had taken me from work. I was a logistics officer at Hickam Air Force Base and I was on medical leave. And it just happened to be thumbing through a newspaper and I came across this ad. It's yellowed with age. The print so tiny, you can barely see it but what it says, it is diet and cancer, breast diet research and call Dr. McDougal. And it was a Kailua number. So I immediately, curiosity, immediately wanted to see what he was going to do. I knew it wasn't diet because I was already into whole wheat bread and cutting the fat off the chicken and taking the skin off. And I thought, you know, that was good enough. Oh, and low fat dairy. In fact, it was so low fat. It was carnation, powdered milk. So I said, okay, I'm gonna help you improve that it wasn't diet. So I got in to see him. He said, get your medical records. I want to talk to you first. And so I got to Kailua, handed in my medical records. He's looking through them and he says, you know, with a cholesterol this high, you are at as great a risk of dying of breast cancer as you are the heart attack. And I said, wait a minute, I'm running marathons. I had done a bunch of marathons at that point. And he said, and this was just before Jim Ficks wrote his famous book about running. And it was the beginning of the running boom starting. So that was, I was scheduled for chemotherapy and radiation, but Dr. McDougal said, no. We're gonna change your diet. What? He said, yes, here's the evidence. He pulls out a file drawer. And these are the animal studies and these are the epidemiological studies. And he says, there's so much evidence that breast cancer is a diet related disease. Now this, Dr. McNeil is back, back in 1982. I know, so it's the forward thinking. Well, I mean, people still don't recognize that it's a diet related disease. They think breast cancer and then chemotherapy and then radiation. Yeah, so right about that time, I still hadn't gone back to work and I was just watching TV, which I never had time to do before, just looking around. And here's the ABC Wide World of Sports. And it's the third running of the Iron Man Triathlon. And at that time it was right here in Honolulu. And so I watched the swim right down the road at Waikiki Beach and then the bicycle and then the Honolulu marathon. And that was the very famous one where Julie Moss was the winning female. She was in her 20s then. And just before the finish line, she collapsed and the crowd was saying, come on, get up, Julie, get up. And she crawled. And that's when Kathleen McCartney passed her. Yeah, and I'm watching this and thinking, my gosh, wow. You know, with my new diet, what I found out, I was running faster, I was recovering faster. And I thought, all I have to do is add the swimming and dig out my old rusty bike from the garage. And I'm gonna do the Iron Man and I'm gonna show people how powerful this diet is. And so the synchronicity is the luck in finding this book, the luck in seeing the notice here. And the other first book about the change is Making the Change, Dr. John McDougal's very first book with all the recipes. And so I was winning. In fact, I've got a whole bunch of trophies. You can see, in fact, of a bunch of them are in the closet because there's no more room for them. And even got a gold medal in the senior Olympics. I had always thought of that when I was in high school and a swimmer. I thought, I wanna be an Olympic swimmer. Esther Williams was, and you old timers will remember Esther Williams, she was a great swimmer. And the Olympics were famous even then. And I thought, I'm gonna be like her. But then with college and other things distracting me, I just kind of forgot about it until I heard about the senior Olympics when somebody, another running friend of mine, said, you know, you ought to enter the senior Olympics. And I said, the what senior Olympics? He said, yeah, they have state levels and national levels. So I did the state level first, qualified for the national level and got another gold medal and saw, wow. And that's when Dr. McDougal said, you've got a right book. And so that was the first book, Race for Life. And then a couple of years later, it's age 70. I was still doing triathlons. And my editor at Lantern Books, Martin Rowe, called me from New York City. He said, you know, we need you to write a book on senior fitness. And what I knew, and he knew, is that diet and exercise are so vitally important and that we can reverse so many of these diseases. So that's, that's how I got started. So tell people about how, like, how did the breast cancer treatment go? You essentially, you had the mastectomy and then afterward, did you do the chemo or the radiation? Dr. McDougal said, do not do chemo radiation. It causes permanent damage to your immune system. And it is, there's no proof that there's any cure that recurrence is very, very likely if you don't change your diet. And that has turned out to be true. So I- So you've never had a recurrence for how many years now? How old are you now, Ruth? You're 85 or almost 87, then when did you get diagnosed? 36, so it's been, what, 50 years and you've never had a recurrence just on your diet. And that's what it's like. Tell people about what kind of stuff you eat every day, what kind of diet you have. It is fruits and vegetables, legumes and whole grains, a few nuts, not to make them high fat, but some nuts and mushrooms. I read the research, I read Dr. McGregor's nutritionfacts.org and he publishes all the latest research. And so I've added these mushrooms and nuts, walnuts in particular. So I also have a lot of fruit. We're lucky here. You're eating the nuts now because I remember you said it was low fat before but are you limiting the nuts at all, like to a handful or are you eating them fully? In the morning, because I have a handful of almonds because research shows that that helps the bones. And in the evening, a handful of walnuts because that helps the brain. In fact, I have blueberries every night as part of my dessert. Blueberries are brain berries and the research is so clear that it helps prevent dementia. I didn't used to drink coffee and then I started reading the research that the certain amount, up to three to four cups a day is healthy and prevents dementia or helps, they're lower the risk of dementia. So that's, and green tea, I have that, it's my beverage and was doing really, really well just collecting metals. I did, when I was 64, I was going to do 64 races because I did like in one weekend, I did three races, one weekend and I got three first places. Wow. Yeah, and like on the sports page, by coincidence, they were all listed together. You know, Ruth Hydrig, first place, Ruth Hydrig, next call. That's awesome. The editor called me and he said, I can't believe what I'm reading. He said, how did you do it? So he interviewed me and so a story appeared about that. And with all these races, like the winning the Iron Man in Japan and winning the Iron Man in New Zealand, I always stress the diet to the reporters. But amazingly, they don't wanna talk about it. The same is true like with climate change. We know that eating animal products, animal husbandry, it's a number one driver for climate change. And yet the COP26, then nobody mentions it. It's really, really sad if it is so important that we change our diet. So everything was going really, really wonderful until I started about 10 years ago, I started having some strange symptoms. And you know, that's not what happens as you age even though everybody thinks it does. And the reason I knew about that was, are you familiar with the blue zones? Yes. The blue zones and very few people are unfortunately because when I started going to doctors about why I was having joint pain, why I was having these autoimmune disease symptoms, why I was having chronic fatigue when I'd always had so much, you know, an Iron Man triathlon. My first one was 14 and a half hours of constant racing from going that level of energy to hard getting out of bed and just feeling totally exhausted. And I knew with the blue zones where they have the highest level of centenarians and none of these symptoms that I was having and that there are other people in eating the sad diet my blood pressure was still good, my cholesterol still low and my what's the third one metabolic syndrome. I had none of that. So I couldn't figure out what was going on until I picked up a newspaper and saw headline breast implant illness living nightmare. And I thought that's silly. I had reconstructive surgery and they said silicone, you know, these are the answer and you can look normal again. I said, yes, I'll have some more normalcy after this surgery because I went a year without anything. And I was embarrassed when I would be running races and be totally flat chested. So I could hardly wait for the instruction. And they told me, you know, nobody even mentioned any of the possible side effects like a joint pain and the autoimmune and the mental fog and oh gosh, the osteoporosis, hair falling out, all these symptoms. And so I went to these doctors and they said, it's your age, you've got to accept it, you know. And a few even said, well, the osteoporosis is because you don't eat dairy. Well, I knew that the countries that eat the most dairy have the highest osteoporosis and that milk is not, or cheese is even worse is not the answer. And so after reading that article about all these symptoms and I was having the same thing, I went to the plastic surgeon who put them in and said, you've got to take these out. And he said, what, why? And I told, I showed him this story about breast implant illness. And he said, oh, that's silly. We know saline implants or the textured implants are safe silicone. Well, what they didn't know at the time, nobody knew at the time, the research is very recent. It's only been in the past a couple of months that the research done in the Netherlands of all places where they were further ahead in knowing that these were dangerous years ago, they were banned. Canada banned them years ago. And in fact, the researcher from the University of Alberta came to the US on his own dime to the FDA to testify. You've got to get these breast implants off the market. They start their micro gel bleeds of silicone and heavy metals from day one. And of course, because it's micro gel, you don't see any symptoms, but because it goes directly into the circulatory system, guess where it goes? Every organ in the body, head to toe, skin to liver to the brain, it crosses the blood brain barrier, which is supposed to keep all of that stuff out, but it doesn't, it gets through and that's the mental fog that I have. And so it's just been a really a living nightmare. I just wanted to- Yeah, I mean, that's terrible because all these people like you, and there's so many other women who had breast cancer and they were given this alternative and they have no idea that they could be having any symptoms from this. It really isn't known. I actually didn't know about this until you told me about your symptoms. And I never knew there was any such thing. So most medical doctors don't know about this. And when I tell them this, they said, silicone safe. He said, look at the kidney dialysis patients, they use silicone. And there's a big difference between the silicone tubing to do the dialysis and the implant inside the body where the body's immune system immediately recognizes this foreign body and starts attacking it immediately. And so you get chronic inflammation starting from day one just because of the foreign object in the body. There was a PubMed. You're familiar with PubMed. Yeah, and I just printed out this article right here and what it says, silicone breast implants, historical medical error. And so I wanna take this to every one of the 14, oh, now 15 specialists that I went to see about my osteoporosis. This, that's the reason about my joint pain, my autoimmune disease, it's my immune system attacking the heavy metals and the silicone. These are also heavy bodies, foreign bodies in the body and attacking it and the damage that does when it's in the bones, when it's in the organs is collateral damage because that's how everything, skin gets damaged, your hair fall. When I have hair falling out, I look at the follicle and it is, they've gotten smaller and smaller and they're misshapen and the hair's gotten thinner and thinner, you can't even see it. The only way I know some of these hairs have fallen out is because I feel it, you can't see it, but I feel it, I know it's there. That's how the hair is, I've lost 90% of it. I think it doesn't look like it because I had so much hair before, you know, so. Anyway. Tell everyone about your website just, you know, cause we're gonna have to close it up soon, but tell everybody about your website and the book you wrote about this illness so people can be educated about what they can do if they are suffering these symptoms and maybe even read the book before they get a breast implant or if they're thinking about having a breast implant. Yeah, I'd mentioned A Race for Life, my first book, and then I also did a recipe book, chef, cheap, healthy, easy, fast. And then when I hit almost 50 years of running, again, you know, back in 68 when I started, my editor asked me to write a book on lifelong running because he started running as a result of reading and editing my books and thought, oh, I'm gonna try it. So he asked me to write that book. And then I started thinking about, you know, all these women need to know this and they have no idea and their doctors aren't gonna help them. So I decided to write this book on how healthy I was doing Ironman Triathlons and winning races and to gradually get to the point where I could hardly get out of bed and had all these symptoms. Women need to know this. So that's why I started my book and it is on my website, Breast Implant Illness, Living Nightmare. So you can see, maybe Michael can show the Facebook, not Facebook, my website, RuthHydrick.com with the books. Yeah, the books are on the side, Bear, everyone. Yeah, and people go to my website, which is RuthHydrick.com. There's a button they can push and it is Ask Dr. Ruth. And that's where I get questions mostly about diet and breast cancer. They get diagnosed with breast cancer and they Google it. And my name apparently is coming up because I get questions. Right now I'm dealing with a woman in Tasmania, one in, you know, I'm of Australia, and one in Beirut, Lebanon, and one several in Canada and a couple that are somewhere in the US, I don't know, back and forth emails. And I just gradually help them, support them, making them. It's so wonderful here. Yeah, so that's turned out to be it. I spent more time on my website than I did as the Logistics Officer in the Air Force. When I went home, you know, I was free except we had exercises at 2 a.m., but that was kind of rare. I just want, I've reminded me of, I, Team Spirit is an Air Force exercise done with the Koreans, South Koreans. And I played the Chief of Maintenance at Osan Air Base in Korea. And man, that was a highlight. And I was a runner then. And so Koreans would see me running and they want to run with me. I want to be run, run, you know. I ran the Great Wall of China. So all of these exploits have just been taken away from me because of these breast implants. So I am hoping that my kidneys and my liver, my lungs and skin, my natural quote detoxing are gradually gonna get rid of the heavy metals. They have found out there's no way to get the silicone out. It's in the brain. The only way to get the silicone out, they say is to take out the whole organ, which of course, I'm gonna live with this kind of a disability, but I'm gonna manage. I'm doing well. You're amazing Ruth. Sorry, we're out of time, but we have, so we have to wrap it up now, but I'm Dr. Grace O'Neill. This is Healthy Planet on Think Tech live streaming network series. We've been talking with Dr. Ruth Hydrick about the power of synchronicity and curiosity. Thank you all for being here. Thanks to Michael, our broadcast engineer and the rest of the crew at Think Tech for hosting our show. And thanks to you, our listeners for listening. I'll see you on February 17th for more of Healthy Planet on Think Tech, the show for people who care about their health and the health of the planet. Our next show features guests, Kathy Louise Broda, yoga teacher and co-owner of Yoga Studio Purple Yoga. We will be talking about pelvic floor muscles and yoga for back pain. If you have ideas for the show, please contact me at Healthy Planet Think Tech at gmail.com. Check out my website at graceandhawai.com for more information on my projects, including future show guests. I'm Dr. Grace O'Neill. Aloha everyone.