It's really important to empower yourselves diet and lifestyle-wise. And the other thing
I see people get in trouble all the time is they want to believe that a certain type of
diet is like a certain type of prostate cancer. Can you imagine if I came into the room and
I said, "That's it! Surgery works for everyone! Everyone needs surgery! That's the only way
it's gonna go!" Now, of course, Scholz would have a heart attack if I did that. Or if I
walked around and said, "proton therapy is the only way to go. That's it! Proton therapy
is clearly the winner!" And why do we think that diet is any different? Why have we done
this to ourselves? "Oh, you got to be vegan. If you ain't vegan, you ain't happening, forget it!
No, what you have to do is you have to tie diet to what we call subjective and objective
outcomes. This is my final piece of advice, and this how it's going to play out because
it's already played out this way in cardiovascular medicine. I don't give a damn what diet you're
on as long as you are moving objectively in a healthy direction. If you're ketogenic,
good for you. If you're vegan, good for you. If you're doing the adrenal diet where you
don't eat breakfast or lunch, good for you. He's skinny, he doesn't have to worry about
gaining weight. I bet you his numbers are outstanding; I can tell you his numbers are
outstanding. It works for him. So you have to pick your numbers. And we pick a number
of numbers when we're losing weight. We pick blood cholesterol, we pick blood pressure,
and we pick blood sugar. We want to make sure your basic numbers are moving the right direction
on that diet. If they're moving in a positive direction working with a doctor that you trust,
that's the diet that works for you.
Because the biggest problem with diet is adherence. What makes somebody happy, so that other thing
that we monitor is how you're doing up here. If you hate your diet but you think its working,
get off that diet. You want to be on something that makes you happy, and you can find today
whether it's keto, whether it's vegan, whether it's vegetarian, maybe it's paleo, maybe it's
intermittent fasting. You can find a dietary program, in moderation, that moves your numbers—PSA,
heart health—in the right direction and makes you happy.
The idea that you can't have a glass of alcohol every once in a while is insane! If you're
having alcohol and gaining weight like most Americans because you have seven calories
per gram, which is almost as much as fat and more than sugar. We have a massive obesity
epidemic and part of it, in my opinion, is due to excessive alcohol consumption, but
we have a lot of people that like their drink every once in a while. It doesn't change their
blood pressure, it doesn't change their cholesterol, it makes them happy to have that drink once
in a while, and they have it in moderation, and then someone says, "you can't have any
pleasure in life."
Life is a terminal disease!
Shit, if you ain't happy, what's the point?
Right?
I understand it works for them. So what's happened in cardiovascular medicine, which
gets a hundred times more money than we'll ever see. A hundred times! You've got to learn
from this. I learned the greatest things about how to treat androgen deprivation toxicity
side effects from the doctors that I hang out with, but I studied breast cancer. Because
breast cancer has dealt with hormone side effects for decades before we dealt with them.
So the same drugs work; the same manipulations work. You got to learn from the outside sources
and what we learned in cardiovascular disease we've been fighting for 30 years. "What diet
is the best?!" It's the diet that you can stick to that changes your numbers in the
direction you want them to change that makes you happy.
Dr. Scholz: Amen.
I think vegan is beautiful. I love the lack of a carbon footprint. I love it. I meet thousands
of vegan people. My son moved that direction; my wife is toward that direction, but you
know what? It ain't me, and it may be me because I'm moving more plant-based and I feel better
and as you get older it's more difficult to digest certain things, so it may be a natural
evolution for me, but it ain't me right now, and it might not be for somebody else, but
I watch those numbers. So my diet, as those numbers take me that direction, that's how
you have to approach diet because I had so many people come up to me yesterday and go,
"well what do you think of Keto? Is that the way to go? Are we shutting down the metabolism
of a cancer cell?" And I go, "Well what's your LDL on Keto? What's your HDL on Keto?
What's your blood pressure on Keto? How do you feel on the Keto? How is your PSA doing
on Keto? They've got to be moving in the direction we want them to move.
And I guarantee you we'll be back up here in 10 years—hopefully not because we've
cured this damn thing—but I will be back up here going, "They all work just fine when
you adhere to them." Just like we ended up doing in cardiovascular disease. Don't think
that diet ain't different than prostate cancer treatment. The idea that we only have one
pathway to success is insane, and you know what that does? That turns you into an analytical
nightmare. So all you're doing is thinking about every little thing that you put in your
mouth. What people are missing when we studied all these blue zones, and these people that
live longer like the Mediterranean diet. The Mediterranean diet is bullshit. It's not a
diet, it's a lifestyle. It's a comprehensive series of changes, whether it's a siesta in
the middle of the day, whether it's walking to work, whether it's socializing with your
family which is a strong spiritual background. A very strong spiritual connectivity with
your fellow person. It's not just about getting olive oil—which one tablespoon gives you
the same amount of calories as a Coca-Cola. It's insane that people think there's like
this magical diet. There's a magical comprehensive lifestyle.