Dr. Mehmet Oz (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services) on Food, Medicine, and the Future of Healthcare

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1:34so dr oz television personality turned government official is this is such an interesting thing he's going to be the new administrator of the center for medicare and medicaid services cms he's going to be in charge of all medicare and medicaid what does he know or think about about these parts of our government. You know, Medicare, Medicaid combined with Social Security is the biggest part of government spending. So it'd be interesting to know what he thinks about. Like on his show, he would talk about all sorts of things, ranging from medicine to alternative medicine to various other methods of healing.

2:13I wanna know how he's gonna be in the government. So I did have a podcast with Dr. Oz several years ago. This is a republishing of it, but he does describe his approach to medicine. And I think this is, as a citizen, this is useful. That's why I wanted to share it again. He's gonna be working closely with RFK Jr. He's been working closely with Marty McCary, who's also been on the podcast, new head of the FDA. So here's Dr. Oz.

2:43This isn't your average business podcast and he's not your average host. This is the James Altucher Show.

3:00here with dr oz welcome to the show well you're very kind to have me dr oz i feel like you're a superhero to me even your name like dr oz it's like a superhero name like and then there must be a secret identity you know underneath but you've done so much good in the world i love your basic philosophy of let's connect the patient directly with medicine or the resources the patient needs to help themselves. I like the idea of removing the gatekeepers in many cases. So we've burdened a lot of folks with the belief that they can't become the world experts in their bodies. And that's a significant mistaken assumption because when you give others, You abdicate your own responsibility to your own health, and you give that power to somebody else, then they can manipulate it.

3:47Now, oftentimes, a well-meaning physician will do their best to help you out, but it doesn't always work out the way that it should work out for you. You need to have a plan B. And I'm arguing that for most of us, plan B should be the first step, which is understand your body, customize what's done to you. Any advice offered to you, you ought to triangulate with at least second opinion. This is, by the way, an interesting observation. Just give you some numbers because you're a good numbers person. How do you know I'm a good numbers person? Because you do a lot of business, folks. I listen to the podcast.

4:15If you ask the average person about second opinions, you know, think about getting it. One in 10 will get a second opinion. And the excuse that's often put forth is that, you know, I don't have time, don't have money, don't have expertise to find the right second opinion. Lots of reasons. Plus, what good is it going to do? It turns out that one in three times, one third of the time, when you get a second opinion, it changes the diagnosis or the treatment that's recommended. So it's a pretty big deal. And then folks will say, oh, it's just a minor procedure. You know what a minor procedure is, James?

4:44It's a procedure to somebody else. If someone's gonna cut your skin, that's not minor anymore. So go ahead and put your hand up. Yeah, it's uncomfortable, but sometimes they take shots at you. But by putting your hand up, you're actually making the healthcare system work better. Because every doctor that you talk to will be able to opine on the other doctor's opinions. And by doing that, they'd be like little bees, going to different flowers. You're going around fertilizing the entire forest. What I worry about with second opinions, and I agree with you, because we've seen many examples on the podcast.

5:13I think it was Ray Dalio who said he got a third opinion on a cancer diagnosis, and he didn't even have cancer. Ray's a good example. Ray's maybe the most logical person I've ever met and incredibly insightful about the craziness we have around emotions that cloud our analytic minds. It's not that emotion's not important. Obviously, it's critical. But you ought to use the analytic mind as well, which is why I think Ray does such a beautiful job, as you teased out. of just getting people to be honest. You know, not all opinions are equal. They should be valued and respected, but they don't all carry the same weight when it comes to making the final decision.

5:47I think that's important because, and look, I wanna, the main reason we're here is I want, I love this book, Food Can Fix It, that you wrote. The subtitle, which I'm always bad at remembering, the superfood switch to fight fat, defy aging and eat your way healthy. I read the book, it's great. I felt lucky as I was reading the book because I'm like, oh, I do this, I do this, I do this. some things I don't do, but I do most of it. And so I felt blessed. I just turned 50. So I feel very, I actually feel in the best health of my life in part because I switched my nutrition about five or six years ago.

6:19And I switched it to mostly the things you recommend here. So I'm really excited to talk about this. These ideas have personally touched me and in part because people like you are releasing this information that's so valuable that society has forgotten. One thing I always worried about, and just to continue with what you're saying is it's important for people to realize everyone's got an agenda. So as you just said, when you go to the second doctor, they know the first doctor's opinion, but they want your business. So they're going to recommend, they're going to, you have to know, understand the FDA, they have their agenda when they approve drugs and the lobbying industries for every, uh, drug company or, or food industry or whatever.

6:55So in the government, like everybody's got their own agenda about health and it might not be the same as your personal agenda. You know, and there's a saying, um, uh, it's a recession when your neighbor loses his job, it's a depression when you lose your job. So you have to choose yourself for health. That stated, all we should expect is transparency. People all have their own motivations and that's normal, completely healthy. It's what makes America run. Fantastic. I have very few complaints about people who selfishly make decisions. In fact, I think most of us should be a bit more selfish in that we abuse ourselves at the expense of others.

7:29And that actually is a bad role model. Well, why do you think that happens? because I think there's a set, like I'm happy to, I've had a podcast about this recently also. I'm happy to tell you to take your pills, but it's really hard for me to take my pills. Why does the individual have a hard time helping themselves? I think a lot of this comes from parenting. Think about this. When you, as a mom or dad, do everything for your kids, what you're messaging to your kids is they have to do the same thing for their children and for their relationships. Give, give, give, give, give. And giving is a good thing.

7:58You want to give, but not to the expense of yourself. and if you're on a plane and the auction goes out, right? You reach for the auction and put it on your face first. You don't put it on your child's face, not because you don't love your child, but you need to be awake enough to take care of your child. And too often in traditional and otherwise healthy families and relationships, we sacrifice all for our kids, but the kids aren't going to model that well because kids aren't going to treat themselves the way you treat them. They're going to treat themselves the way you treat yourself. So if you give up your entire career, if you gain weight, if you don't manage the basic issues in your life effectively because your kid's soccer practice comes first, your kids are going to do the same thing when they have to make that decision.

8:40I would argue, take care of yourself, make sure you're in good shape, make sure you can actually play soccer with them, and then take them to soccer games. I think that there's almost concentric layers from that. There's yourself, then there's your relationships. The parents should take care of their own relationship even before they hug and cuddle with the kids because the kids will model that later on in their relationships. and then out to health and to food and to medicines and to every area, to career, which I might ask you about later after we talk about the book? Well, the best example of all is health.

9:13I mean, everything else comes out from that as well. But in health, people will frequently abuse their bodies because they can't cope with the stress that's caused by a job obligation they have or relationship that they're in. They stress eat, which is, by the way, a very effective way of coping with stress. Why do people stress eat? It works. Very simply stated. Anyone who says otherwise just doesn't understand the science of it. So I'm stressed. I feel like instead of eating like broccoli, I feel like eating chips. Yeah, because broccoli doesn't actually hit your brain like dopamine, the way sugar does.

9:39Really? Sugar hits your brain like crack cocaine. It smacks the dopamine receptors. It gets you feeling really good. It helps you cope. It works. However, it's maladaptive. So in a small little - Meaning? Meaning that short term, it'll do the D, but long term, it's a bad problem. And it's not the right way to deal with the process. Because if you're stressed out by let's say a malevolent person in your life, go deal with the malevolent person in your life. Don't medicate with sugar. Or by the way, narcotics or any other medication. If you can't sleep at night, the best solution is not a nightly sleeping pill.

10:11It's to figure out what's ruminating that's causing you to not be able to sleep. What's going on deep inside your body, maybe because of the food you're eating that's preventing you from getting a night of rest that you know is so vital to your wellbeing. And when we don't deal with the root cause of problems, which at its very core is what this book's about, Then you end up putting layers of paint on it. Listen, if there's a crack in the wall in this beautiful studio we're taping in now, you don't just paint the crack, you fix the crack. Otherwise, the paint's gonna chip off anyway. So go to the root issue.

10:39Food was always how we fixed it because when you walk into a grocery store, you walk into a pharmacy. That's exactly how our bodies receive that. So if you ignore the fact that the indoles, which are chemicals found in cruciferous vegetables like broccoli that you mentioned earlier. That's because I wanna get that spinner that you talk about in the book. turn broccoli into pasta, and then I can replace my pasta cravings. That works, by the way. And that's one of the hacks that gets you there. But if you ignore the benefits of broccoli and other cruciferous vegetables and helping your liver detoxify your body, thus being correlated with reduction in some ailments, maybe even cancers, then you're throwing away a beautiful opportunity to help yourself.

11:18And part of the reason I didn't write this book for 10 years, because I've written something, this book is my eighth New York Times bestseller. And I don't take credit for this myself because I never do these books by myself. I work with teams. I pull all the data. I have researchers and writers and editors, people who really help me tease out what's most important. But when I finished my seventh New York Times bestseller, I stopped writing because I thought I said everything I felt I needed to say at that time. But over the last decade, there's been a gargantuan advance in the ability of science to tell you why your mom was right, to underline and emphasize why certain foods make a big difference, to pain and depression and mental cognition and your heart and your cancer risk and all these other things, including your weight, that historically we sort of thought were true, but we didn't know why.

12:04Because science is much better at proving that a gunshot to the chest is well treated with a suture, which is, by the way, my specialty is heart surgery. That's a truthful statement. Easy to prove, easy to validate. Science is not so readily able to show that subtle metabolic processes in the billions of humans that are on the planet all react the same way to the same piece of broccoli. I think that's because if you think about just the nature of scientific testing, you can do a study that lasts over five years has many more ways to go wrong than a study that lasts for three seconds. So if you're shot in the heart with a gun and you operate and the guy lives, then that proves that this is a viable method.

12:45And antibiotics can work within days. Again, much easier to show than giving you broccoli every day and showing that it affects colon cancer rates. However, over the last decade, we've gotten much more sophisticated at understanding the mechanisms of why these chemicals in foods make a difference. So let's talk about specifically food can fix it. Let's fix some things. And again, I think this is great because it shows it. I think over the past hundred years, there's been this separation of, oh, food is something we eat as opposed to food as fuel, food as medicine, food as the way our body lives and thinks and grows and fights for our health.

13:24So let's let's talk about it. You know, there's a lot of things you talk about, but let's let's talk about a brain function. That's the chapter I got most interested in. Like, how can I make my brain better? And by the way, this book has a 21-day diet that you recommend because in part, 21 days is a number, and I think to help change habits. Let me explain that for a second, and I promise you I'll remember to get to the brain. Your memory better be good because I just turned 50 and I get worried about my memory now. Well, we're related and we just found out. Yes, and we're cousins, so we're linked genetically on this.

14:00So, what was I saying? No. So first off, the interesting thing about the human brain is until 10 ,000 years ago, it was dependent on whatever we could go out there and capture, wild animals, fresh berries, fruits, whatever. Şatalhöyük was the first real human settlement. And it was in Turkey, which is where my ancestors are from. And we see that humans got smaller, shorter, and probably sicker when we moved into large communities where you had to create food, not for your betterment, but for the community's betterment. Would you agree with Yuval Harari's sentiment in Sapiens that wheat domesticated us?

14:39Yes. And that it was kind of a net negative on human health? Sapiens is a profoundly important book for a lot of reasons. One of the most important is because it respects the power of food over us. And interestingly, he raises, Yuval, in that book, the provocative insight that we left Africa 70 ,000 years ago and all of us homo sapiens, we're all snapping ourselves in the back, giving ourselves rotator cuff injuries, congratulating ourselves for taking over the planet. But we've had evidence of the species in existence for 250 ,000 years. What took us so long? What we were doing in North Africa for 180 ,000 years, hanging out, doing nothing.

15:15And what got us to finally move out was the ability to believe, to have an understanding that non-tangible concepts could actually be truthful and were as valid as things you could touch. So faith being an example, but not even faith in religion, just capitalism is a faith. I believe that we could unify ourselves in larger groups. Food fell off the wagon. It stopped becoming critical because when you move from the family unit of 50 to the community of 500 ,000, 5 ,000, 50 ,000, make an army, whatever, most ancient armies were 30 ,000 in that range. So these were lots of mouths to feed. You just put calories in people.

15:51And you had to specialize. Somebody had to specialize in making food. Right, and the specialist began doing just that. But you give up some vital nutrients that feed our brain. So back to your question about what makes the brain healthier. Our brain cells are primarily made of fat. We are all fatheads. You can say that and not be insulting someone. It's a truthful statement. You want fats that are flexible, that are malleable, because the brain neurons speak to each other through their membranes. And the membranes are where the fat's stored. It's a lipid layer. And so when you have omega-3 fats, which are the fats that fish have, because fish live in cold water, many of them, the salmon, et cetera, they have to be able to move in cold water.

16:30Well, fats that freeze in the cold, butter, right? Or some of the other fats aren't as good as omega-3 fats, which stay very flexible. Now they're fragile, but they're flexible. So what does that mean? So that means that they can just go through the brain easier to feed the brain? And they all get into the brain, but the brain uses them to make membranes, to make cells. So you want a brain cell that's rigid like a block and can bend, or you want a brain cell that's flexible, malleable, can receive information, exchange information and communicate more readily. You want brain cells that are able to learn and prosper and grow and nurture themselves.

17:05And we know that children who are given neonates, who are given omega-3 fats seem to do better. So it seems though, again, we have this artificial industry that feeds the brain for very short term, like let's say Adderall. I'm not saying making any judgment one way or the other, but there are all these things now that we give our kids to kind of boost the energy and there's coffee and so on. What are foods that just long-term just feed the brain, make you smarter, avoid dementia and so on? Omega-3 fats because they help with cognitive function and they help with stress management. And when your brain is able to cope with stress more readily, it's less depression.

17:45So like salmon. Omega-3, salmon, sardines. You can also get vegetarian sources. They're not quite as good, but walnuts, flax seeds, et cetera. Second, a lot of the deep, richly colored fruits and vegetables are helpful. Blueberries are basically brain berries. They're full of antioxidants. These colorful vegetables and fruits have those colors to protect themselves from the oxidation of the sun. So they're very specifically helping these plants and vegetables thrive. When you eat them, you get those benefits. You know, red wine has resveratrol in it, which specifically affects our cells and alcohol, interestingly, because it allows us to be more social.

18:18You know, red wine for breakfast doesn't work. Red wine, at dinner with your friends, when you're talking, allows your brain to sort of step back from the day-to-day mundane issues and begin to call to higher elements of ourselves to talk. And that trains the brain. It's like a muscle. You've got to use it to keep it going. And we know that certain foods are really toxic to the brain. For a lot of people, wheat is an irritant to the brain. There's a wheat brain belief that many hold. I think there's some validity to it. We're not even 100 % sure which of the elements within wheat, although I could postulate, are problematic, but for some people, it causes inflammation of the brain.

18:53Fried foods, sugary foods, they tend to delos a bit. Weight gain is a major issue for the brain. Do you eat sugary foods at all? No, I'll eat fruits that have natural, foods that have sugar naturally, I'm fine with. Otherwise, generally, I'll look at the information packet on the back, and if it's more than four grams of sugar per serving, I won't take it. Even though with fruits, like chemically, it's all just sugar. It all just boils down to the same thing. No, it's not true, and I'll tell you why. Let's stop to take a quick break. We'll be right back.

19:50job descriptions and then quickly get your job in front of the right people. You get qualified candidates at the end of the day. The most important thing to your business is the quality of the candidates. And with LinkedIn, of course, you can feel confident that you're getting the best. Based on LinkedIn data, 72 % of small, medium businesses say using LinkedIn helps them find high quality candidates. Find out why more than 2.5 million small businesses use LinkedIn for hiring today. Find your next great hire on LinkedIn. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash altature. That's linkedin.com slash altature to post your job for free.

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21:00Generally, I look at the information packet on the back, and if it's more than four grams of sugar per serving, I won't take it. Even though with fruits, chemically, it's all just sugar. It all just boils down to the same thing. No, it's not true. And I'll tell you why. Because it comes as a packet of fiber with sugar. If you mix fiber with sugar, the glycemic index effect is much different. So yes, if I took a teaspoon of sugar, which is 16 calories, by the way. So put sugar in your coffee or your tea. Don't put artificial sweeteners in there. They don't work anyway. But if you have a teaspoon of sugar, that 16 calories by itself goes right to my bloodstream, stimulates insulin, and I go through the usual cycling.

21:33I take that same amount of fiber, of sugar with fiber and the fiber holds it in my gut. So it slowly is released into my bloodstream. And so when I get it, I don't get the big hormonal surge that's required to cope with the 16 calories of sugar and I can deal better. Our ancestors never had access to sugar. There's no sugar in the wild. It's really hard to get it out of the food you eat. We had access to salt, which is a much safer additive than sugar. But sugar in the high dose form that we're giving it to people right now is a major problem. So is this kind of the difference between smoothies and juicing?

22:06A lot of people are into juicing, put their fruits in a juicer and boom. But then you're left with the sugar, you're not left with the fiber. I think a smoothie with the fiber is a better solution. However, a juice is not a bad food. It's rich in antioxidants, other nutrients, other benefits. It doesn't have fiber. So I'd much rather you get the fiber with it if you can. But our reason we're having problems in health in America is not because of our juices. We're having problems in America because of carbonated beverages or the sugary beverages, and readily added sugar to almost all the processed food.

22:37It's hard for you to find a processed food these days. It doesn't have something, either sugar or salt added in significant doses. Right, there's that saying, when you go shopping, go shop on the end aisles and not any of the middle aisles because that's where all the processed foods are. For good reasons. And when you begin to appreciate the majesty of the body, how spectacularly well it functions when it's given the right kinds of nutrients, then you begin to appreciate the power of food to fix it. But it's not just the nutrients. It's also the community that it builds. There's a sacredness to food that's always brought us together as a people.