In this Podcast episode you’ll learn:
– Why Clint’s long-term career had many benefits for healing RA
– How a physics background provided a tremendous platform for self experimentation
– Getting RA usually begins in the small joints
– Why Rheumatologists don’t recommend dietary changes
– The Paddison Program in detail
– Why dietary fat is the greatest enemy
– Why the Paddison Program can become the standard parallel treatment to medicines worldwide
Andrew: This is FX Medicine, and I am Andrew Whitfield-Cook. Joining me on the line today from Sydney is Clint Paddison. In 2006, Clint was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis and within two years could barely walk, with pain crippling 80% of his body. After surgery and medications failed him, Clint went back to his science roots which in 2000 saw him gain first class honors, the Macquarie Foundation’s science prize, Australian Institute of Physics prize, New South Wales branch, and semi-finalist for the Young Australian of the Year. With bulldog determination, persistence, and scientific experimentation, Clint turned his health around, and now leads a drug-free and pain-free life. With the drugs behind him, he is now a proud father of daughter, Angelina, and a new baby, as well as being a loving husband to gorgeous wife, Melissa. Welcome, Clint, to FX Medicine.
Clint: Good day, hey guys.
Andrew: If you will, mate. Clint, I’ve got to say you have a fantastic and inspiring story, but you’ve also got an interesting past in comedy, haven’t you? So tell us a little bit first about your history.
Clint: Yeah, I’m very transparent to people who feel that maybe my comedy background may undermine the professional integrity that I have when I coach people with their health, with rheumatoid arthritis and other autoimmune diseases because it was actually very beneficial to be involved in a job where I only needed to work two nights, sometimes only one night a week because I had all that extra time on my hands to then work on my health. And this is one thing that I had up my sleeve, and it was a great advantage to me compared to a lot of folks who are trying to work on their health. Because when you are an entertainer, and as I have been for 16 years (and in the last 10 years, mostly corporate events) you do have that extra time and I was therefore able to, as you said earlier in your introduction, go back to my science roots and study this disease like it was a second degree.
So I’ve got a very logical…with a physics background and physics education and degree, I’ve got a problem solving mindset, and so I was able to apply more time to try and work out what was causing my pain than I spent in my entire four years at university. So it took one hell of an effort but there’s nothing more important than working on your health.
Andrew: Which came first, the comedy or the science?
Clint: The science. I did a bachelor of technology at Macquarie University and I went through that with a major in physics, but the degree was actually a technology certificate. And then, I was working in that environment, I had 100 staff working under me when I was only 25 years old. So I was promoted extremely fast in a high tech company and was a real successful, young, corporate businessman working in the high tech industry.
And then, well, in 2000, anyone who’s involved with the high tech industry, and you might remember that the NASDAQ and the whole high tech industry collapsed in 2000.
Andrew: The dot com.
Clint: Yeah, that’s right. And down went the share price so much on our company that there was a huge problem with our business, and now 380 staff that we had in North Ryde in Sydney were all made redundant. So I got just shy of $60,000 tax-free and I thought, “Well, I’m 25.” Well, I would have been 27 years old, and I also, obviously, had save money from the job, and I thought, “I’m just going to go and do something entirely different.” And I had a fear of public speaking, so I thought, “I’m going to conquer that next. I’m going to get rid this fear of public speaking,” and that became my career.
Andrew: So I’ve got to say, comedy…I mean, you talk about the fear of public speaking, comedy would have to be how to bash yourself up with a brick with public…so that would be the hard knocks.
Clint: I find anything I’m terrified of and I go 100% at it. So I was skydiving at the time. So I was skydiving and doing stand-up comedy, and those two things, I think, enough to get the heart racing. I just, full of life, wanted to explore all my fears, and take them on. So this was about three or four years before, probably three or four years before I got rheumatoid. So I don’t think that was an underlying contributor but I have many much more probable cause of my disease which I can get into in a moment.
Andrew: Can you take our listeners through what where the first symptoms that you started to notice something was wrong?
Clint: In my feet, I just started to notice those little…I didn’t even know what they were called at the time, but the balls of the feet and metatarsal joints were starting to get inflamed. And for anyone, for most people who’ve never had this disease, it’s a very, very unusual…you can tell something’s wrong right away when your metatarsals or your feet are inflamed because you’ve never had pain there before. It’s a part of the body that’s never created a trigger or an alert. Hence, so when I had pain in those, the balls of my feet waking up in the morning, and I was in Brisbane doing shows, doing stand-up shows for two weeks up there and I was waking up in the morning with these pains in my feet.
So that concerned me, but nothing too much because I’d always been healthy, I was cross-country champion at school, and I was sports captain at school, and sports captain at university in my college. I ran the City2Surf, the Sydney race, without training, in 69 minutes. I was top 5,000 out of a 100,000 racers, and I hadn’t trained in years. So, yeah, I mean, I was fit by my own layman’s view of myself. And so yeah, you know, I just, yeah…I kind of forgot my train of thought there, but yeah.
So I mean, well, I got the symptoms in my feet and didn’t think much of it, but then I went and started to get pains in my fingers not long thereafter. And I was playing a game of touch football, and I remember running onto the field, gosh, my feet hurting as I’m running on to play touch football. This isn’t right, and in a stroke of horrible fate, I actually, because I hadn’t been training, been a long time since I’d played touch football, in a week of hell, I tore my ACL playing touch football in that match. So I had the pain in my feet a week before, ran on the touch field to play touch football, tore my ACL, fingers started to hurt, and then I had complete…ACL and diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis within a two week period. So it was a horrible, horrible time. So consequently, the rheumatoid which does tend to like to go to areas of the body that are damaged really then started to take hold of my left knee.
Andrew: But it’s not like the osteoarthritis wear-and-tear thing. It’s a little bit different, isn’t it? Can you explain a little bit about that inflammatory process?
Clint: Yeah, most definitely. So the way I describe it is actually a similar way to the one of the first descriptions I ever got from the rheumatologist which said, “It’s actually like multiple sclerosis.” And it is that severe. It is something that absolutely destroys your life. It ruins families, relationships. It causes on average a 13-year reduction in life span, which I believe is due to the drug use, the disease itself doesn’t kill you, and people…the mortality rate itself from the disease, I believe that’s from side effects of all the medications which are as bad as for any disease on the planet.
Andrew: They’re often chemotherapeutics?
Clint: They are, that’s right. That’s methotrexate, but then you escalate beyond that into these biologic drugs which…
Andrew: Yeah, [inaudible 00:10:30].
Clint: Yeah, where you just don’t have to look far into the scientific literature to find that some of them increase cancer by 300%. They cause all sorts of additional side effects with regards to picking up infections. And the thing is that the drugs themselves cause the immune system to be so depleted that the body can’t fight off things that then ultimately cause the mortality. So that’s what happens.
So yeah, with an autoimmune condition, the body is attacking itself, as I said, as severe as the multiple sclerosis. But instead of attacking the nerve endings, it attacks the lining around the joints and what gets implicated mostly is the synovial tissue but also the soft tissue around the joint as well, the little connecting ligaments and tendons, they caught up. There’s a whole bunch of swelling that occurs and the classic photograph of a rheumatoid arthritis hand is one that the middle knuckles of the fingers are all swollen, and it’s very hard to create a fist, and these people, they end up…physical disabilities is common within 10 years. There’s a fairly high statistical rate of not being able to complete work, having to get disability, all sorts of stuff. I mean, it’s absolutely shocking.
One of my other doctors once said to me, as he was inspecting my knee when I said it was a rheumatoid arthritis diagnosis recently. He said, “Of all the diseases I would not want to get, that would be at the top of my list.”
Andrew: Really?
Clint: That’s coming right from the doctor. So that’s just to set the scene. And anyone who’s listening who’s a practitioner and has treated someone with rheumatoid arthritis, they will appreciate the absolute difficulty in getting positive outcomes, in getting improved condition. It is notoriously challenging to treat.
Andrew: And that’s accepted. That’s accepted by orthodox medicine. It is notoriously hard to treat.
Clint: Absolutely, and I have a podcast of my own, and on that podcast I invite doctors who I hold in high regard to come on and they talk about how they treat rheumatoid arthritis, and ones that are sympathetic and use complimentary treatments to the ones that I encourage all confide in me and openly share how difficult it is to treat. However, it can be treated and dramatically improved results can be obtained. But everything has to be done correctly.
Andrew: Yeah, and I think this is the difficult choice, if you like, that rheumatologists and doctors would have in treating RA, especially if it’s chronic care by the GP, and that is you’re tasked with trying to help somebody through an extremely painful and debilitating disease. So this sort hard risk/benefit balance of the medications potentially shortening life indeed versus a short-term improvement of lifestyle, it’s a hard one to make but sometimes you’ve got to make that call. You used drugs initially, though, didn’t you, but you got little relief. Is that right?
Clint: So I want to talk a lot about what you just said. I’m excited to talk about that, but yeah, let me just talk about my specific situation first. I tried, for about 12 to 18 months, to not go on the medications because I thought, given my history with my health…I mean, I’d never even broken a bone and I was the most unperturbed body in terms of no broken bones, no health issues. I mean, I considered myself extremely healthy prior to getting rheumatoid, and so I thought, if anyone can get through this, I’ll be able to and I had a lot of confidence in ability, as I said earlier, to solve problems, and I’d always been very successful with my career and I just thought, “Look, I will be able to work this out.”
But anyways, within 12 to 18 months, I was a disaster. So I tried various changes to my diet, nothing like what I now recommend because I didn’t know the extent of the changes you have to make, and I didn’t know how to get the detail right, but I tried various things. I took every supplement under the sun. I think I’ve taken more than 50 different types of supplements and some of these things may have helped, but when you’re getting the food wrong, you really, you’re trying to do everything the hard way. You wanna have the food right or you’re going nowhere. No matter how many…
Andrew: You push and [crosstalk 00:15:00].
Clint: Exactly, that’s right, that’s right. So with regards to comments about the drug treatments versus lifestyle changes, there’s several, several factors at play there when someone first goes to the rheumatologist after they eventually get an appointment probably two to three months after diagnosis by blood test, and that’s because the rheumatologist are all backed up, and this is, I found, around the world. It’s not just in Australia. Around the world, sometimes people are waiting sometimes up to six months to see a rheumatologist. So the situation’s pretty bad.
When they go and see the rheumatologist, the rheumatologist, if I can speak in broad general terms, does not recommend any dietary changes nor believes in dietary changes, and in fact can get quite offended when dietary changes are discussed because they have not read about any improvement in the scientific literature from people making dietary changes with their outcome for the disease, and nor have they seen many patients come back and make tremendous improvements from dietary changes.
But the first instance with regards to the medical literature, there are studies that showed the improvements that can be made, and although I feel there’s still room to move in that area because a lot of the studies were on a small scale, they’re just hidden amongst thousands of studies about drugs and you just can’t find them, but secondly the studies…I don’t believe the study has been done on the ultimate way forward with this disease and all of the specifics that I’ve included in the program that I get people on and I have had a stop start almost trial done on our program and it didn’t eventuate because a key person move into the corporate world and out to the research field. And by looking at continuing that path and trying to get it done in the future because I think that we can demonstrate, through clinical trials, how much can be done and we can try and get the word out there more. But even right now, there is enough to, you would think, for a rheumatologist to recommend at least a basic dietary change to everyone, but it doesn’t happen and in fact is discouraged.
Andrew: This is what I really can’t understand. Aside from the fact that they may not favor certain dietary factors, like for instance what we’ll talk about, your approach today, apart from that they should at least be aware of the dangers of poor dietary choices life trans fats, lots of high sugar, foods, and refined carbohydrates because these are known pro-inflammatory agents.
Clint: You would think that.
Andrew: There’s no question of that.
Clint: You would think so, but I can tell you with 100% of an educated comment from hundreds of people giving this feedback, from hundreds of rheumatologists’ conversations around the world, they don’t even suggest that. They’re not even at the Jamie Oliver level of, let’s reduce sugar. They’re not even at that level. They’re just…it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter.
Andrew: Yeah, that’s crazy.
Clint: There are a sprinkling, a tiny fraction of the rheumatologists who do know the basics, like you’ve just described, or not even as much as you just described from your educated comment, but just from a…they have a layman’s view on diet, the same as anyone else. So they might say, “You might wanna cut out a little bit of your fast food and stuff,” but honestly, I really hear that, it’s just, “No changes are required for your diet.”
Andrew: Yeah, “We’ll do it all with drugs,” and yet they admit that it’s poorly controlled. This is the thing that gets my mind. Let’s say, if given that you’ve got nothing to offer your patients or the things that you have to offer your patients aren’t even satisfying your clinical judgment, your clinical satisfaction, does not seem medically reasonable to investigate something that might have some chance of some success.
But I would certainly urge everybody who has a diagnosis of RA, indeed any practitioner who is treating any rheumatoid arthritis patients or managing them, to look and read and watch the movie that you’ve got on…the story on your site. That’s the paddisonprogram.com. So P-A-D-D-I-S-O-N-P-R-O-G-R-A-M.com, where you, quite humorously, I’ve got to say, you talked about your story because it’s a very good talk on it. But this is where you detailed at least partly the program which you devised. Can you take our listeners through some of this please, Clint, because it’s really quite inspiring.
Clint: Well, it came about through two different ways. It came about through my absolute insatiable hunger for knowledge, both through my own experimental self guinea pig styles, and it also came about through my thirst for the scientific literature results on this. So as I said, I studied it like a university degree and I put myself through all the tests that I had read about online that there were.
I had a distinct discovery one time where I ate a bunch of cherries after I was experimenting with my diet. I found a couple of books online from…only two people in the world in 2006, 2007 had said that they had eliminated all of their inflammation, and drugs from rheumatoid arthritis. And I read both of them, and both of them had made massive changes in diet. So I’m like, “Okay,” I implemented both the different strategies at different times and quite bad results to be honest.” So when I started doing these changes, I was eating a lot of cherries. The layman thinks the cherries are good for arthritis.
Andrew: With gout anyway.
Clint: Yeah, so I’m doing this one time, and I’ve got violent food poisoning reaction because they weren’t washed and I’d eaten them straight out of the supermarket without washing my hands and without washing the cherries. They were imported from the United States. Now, my pain went away completely after vomiting and having diarrhea for 24 hours.
Now, I don’t mean I had a pain reduction. I mean, I was in [inaudible 00:21:44] cured. I mean, gone. Now, when I tell this story in front of groups of people with RA, like support groups and stuff, I see everyone’s head nodding. We all know this experience because people find that when they don’t eat, the pain goes away. And sure enough, I was able to locate some studies online that showed that if you take, for instance, in one particular study 14 patients on a water fast, all had rheumatoid arthritis. By the end of the 14 days, all their symptoms was gone, like they were all back to normal, like had no disease or symptoms. But then they brought back the food, and it didn’t seem to matter what food you brought back, all the symptoms came back.
Okay, so this leads us into this whole supportive state of the concept of the leaky gut, and the food particles are leaking into the bloodstream. So a lot of educated practitioners who treat patients on a daily basis, and I’ve worked with a lot of naturopaths and spoke in a lot of events where naturopaths are the predominant audience members, and it doesn’t have to be lighted [SP] that leaky gut is one of the underlying causes for most conditions, and so I know I’m preaching to the converted with that.
So we’ve got particles from the food leaking into the blood, then causing molecular mimicry, the body sees the food protein as antigen and develops an antibody to that and then accidentally start attacking the lining of the joints, which looks very similar to, for instance, cow proteins and things because of the finite number of ways that you can put together amino acids to create animal protein, and so we’ve got that going on. And then occasionally people who…just based on my statistics now, about 1 in about 20 people, when they don’t eat, they do not improve.
So what’s happening with this 1 in 20 people is that the lining of the bacteria, the bacterial overgrowth in the gut is all…so the bacteria is also leaking to the bloodstream in the absence of food, and it is the proteins in the bacteria that are also triggering the molecular mimicry, so the body’s creating an antibody to the bacteria that’s leaking in because there’s a bacterial overgrowth, there’s all the bacteria going in. So these people are harder to treat because their body’s got such severe leaky gut that even in the fasting state, their own gut bacteria is leaking in their blood and causing a response. So regardless of whether with case A, which is 95% of people or case B, you still got the same underlying cause.
Andrew: Now, you talk about bacteria, and this concept of bacterial priming, if you like, for rheumatoid arthritis, I think it was protease, versus another arthralgia called ankylosing spondylitis. There’s a professor in England, Professor Alan Ebringer who’s done some very interesting work looking at bacterial overgrowth and a cross reactivity with human leukocyte antigen. Now what he talks about, what he espouses to is that klebsiella basically has a cross reactivity with ankylosing spondylitis, and I’m pretty sure it was protease species have a cross reactivity with rheumatoid arthritis. Some researchers say that it’s a broader array of bacteria and other bugs that cross react. But anyway, it’s a little bit juxtaposed in that Alan Ebringer says get these teenagers usually with ankylosing spondylitis, he said, “Get them off the carbs.” Now, admittedly it’s processed carbs, and he also espouses the use of antibiotics, but he said, “Get them off the carbs onto the higher protein.” Whereas you’re talking about plant food, you’re talking about getting them off all of the meat, call them substrates for these bacteria. Is that correct?
Clint: Absolutely, and that’s now really hit bull’s eye and can help people with rheumatoid arthritis. So here’s the thing, and it took me a long time to work this out, but this is extremely well-supported in not just animal studies but human studies, and I can put all of these in the show notes for this episode so you can have your practitioner’s log-in and get all of the references and validate all of this.
The problem is fat **See research at end of this article**, the problem is fat. Fat, quite simply, causes intestinal inflammation. Fat causes inflammation. There was about seven animal studies rats, mice sort of stuff, that demonstrate this, and there are human studies that demonstrate this as well. And it is the medium chain fatty acids, things like vegetable fats, dairy products, that really start to aggravate the inflammation in the gut. And then there is a 100% reliable link that when there is inflammation in the gut, there is leaky gut. This goes from one thing to the next. So we’ve got to avoid inflaming the gut.
Now you bring up ankylosing spondylitis and I’ve only recently brought to my attention the study that you mentioned by someone with ankylosing spondylitis recently because obviously having had rheumatoid, I spend 99.9% of my time helping people specifically with rheumatoid, but we do get an uptick [SP] of people following our program with the other…psoriasis, lupus, and your ankylosing spondylitis, and psoriatic arthritis, and the big spectrum of other inflammatory autoimmune diseases. So I get feedback from them. But the ankylosing spondylitis, I must say, is the least users of our program. It’s the least [inaudible 00:27:38] on that.
However, I do feel that all of them tend to have the same underlying cause and it would surprise me that the treatment for one does not improve the conditions for another given that, with the exception of only a few, ankylosing spondylitis is one of them, just due to lack of users, but certainly all the others I mentioned, I have had very, very good feedback from people.
So let’s just go into this. So the problem is fat, and it took me years to work out that…well, first of all, how do I do [inaudible 00:28:12] some of my vision in a few minutes. We know that fat causes leaky gut. Now, even lean chicken breast, where it looks like there is no fat on the chicken breast, the fat is in the muscle cells. You’re still talking about 30% of calories from a lean chicken breast are coming from fat, the calorie content. So you cannot eat meat, all animal products in general, including dairy products, cheeses, and milks, and yogurt, without having too much fat in the diet to avoid further inflaming someone with an incredibly inflamed body. So if you’ve got a tiny, tiny spark of a flame or just a simmering of inflammation in the body with rheumatoid arthritis, and that would be your best case, and then you add a pro-inflammatory substance like fat, it’s like just adding some kindling to a small fire and it begins to escalate.
In doing so, you then start to get the cascade effect of inflammation creating leaky gut. You got more leaky gut and more of the proteins causing more of the attack on the joints, and then you got more inflammation. So it’s a very, very delicate little smoldering of fire that’s always happening that you have to try and minimize. So this brings us to a plant-based diet, which therefore, eliminates the major sources of fat in our diet with the exception of some things like some avocados and olives which, by the way, have to go as well for a period of time because…
Andrew: Really?
Clint: Absolutely, yean. It needs to be not just plant-based because there are people around the world right now who may be listening to this who see this [inaudible 00:29:57] rheumatoid arthritis natural treatments or see my name and listen to this who might be on a plant-based diet and not keeping their condition completely at bay because it needs to go beyond that, it needs be low-fat plant-based diet, and then here we can dovetail nicely in with the ankylosing spondylitis study. You’ve got to get rid of refined sugars because he’s absolutely right that simple sugars will stir up rheumatoid arthritis and because the gut bacteria, which is one of the factors of the underlying cause, is an overgrowth of pathogenic bacteria, are feeding on the simple sugar. And so some people find that even fruits will upset them while the others find that fruit can tolerate easy. But everyone struggles with the fat. So fat is an absolute throwing fuel in the fire, but we also need to only eat adequate amounts of protein because excess protein also ends up worsening symptoms because it gets into the bloodstream, and creating a molecular mimicry.
So the way that I explained the core of the problem and I’ll tell you my precise treatment if you like. The cause of the problem I explain in a six-component acronym of BLAAM with two As. So it’s bacteria, which is bacterial overgrowth, leaky guy, which we’re already converted nicely. Acidosis, so this is a systemic over-acid body by consuming Western foods for too long, taking pharmaceutical medicines, and living a stressed life, all of which will contribute to having a lower pH or high acid level in the fluids of the body outside of the blood, and that particular state also that in turn encourages the wrong bacteria in the intestines.
And then, the second A in the BLAAME is acid in terms of gastric acid. So people with rheumatoid arthritis are being shown to have low stomach acids. So in had it when you have low stomach acids, you don’t break down your proteins and when you’ve got incompletely broken down proteins that are getting in the gut, and then you’ve got this intestinal permeability, then they’re ending up in the bloodstream. So you’ve got increase your stomach acid, mucosal lining, the protective mucus around the inside of the lining of the intestine. There’s depleted mucosal lining, meaning that people are malnourished, which has also been shown in scientific lit people with rheumatoid arthritis are generally malnourished since they’ve lost the mucosal lining. And finally, enzymes because we’ve all eaten so many cooked foods and our ability to break down foods with the little scissors, the little enzymes is also depleted, and so we need to bring them back up to help break down in particular [SP] our protein.
So all these things are going and so much needs to be done. So specifically to try and stop this little flame that’s always going to burning off into a big bonfire and we have to get everything right to keep it an absolute minimum so that the gut can heal just like a cut on the outside of your body can slowly heal. But it takes a long time, so we have to keep this little smolder as little as we can for as long as we can.
Andrew: So when you’re talking about any fat being the kindling for the smoldering fire, and you’re saying that, at least in the initial phases, you have to avoid avocado and olive oil, which have their own health benefits, we know, in somebody who doesn’t have rheumatoid arthritis.
Clint: Absolutely, yes.
Andrew: So once you’ve done this initial phase of really getting back to basics and doing the raw food diet — I should expound on that, raw plant food diet — how long do you have to that for and what are the long-term ramifications for food choices? Can you start to sneak in some of these things and manage it, or do you have to be a 100% strict?
Clint: Yeah, well, let me get clear for people if they’re wanting to talk about this with patients or they’re thinking about doing this themselves. So I did eight months of raw food plant based diet getting most of my calories from soaked nuts and soaked seeds. So that they’re activated in terms of their enzyme content and easier to digest for a lot of reasons. But the program that I have when I bring people to a starting point is actually beyond that because that is too hard to recommend. You just don’t recommend someone do something that’s that difficult if you’re hoping to support them and to get any kind of compliance for a period of time.
So the program that I have starts on cooked food and raw food, a mixture of the two. The raw foods that I recommend, the raw component most importantly are the leafy greens because the bacteria need to have fiber to thrive. So healthy bacteria love leafy greens, and so the most consistent healing food anyone with inflammatory arthritis can eat are the leafy greens. So we’re talking bok choys and romaine lettuce. Anything that’s green and grew…any kind of herbs and these sort of things, anything hat’s green and grew in the ground is going to give you good G-wood [SP].
So there’s tons and tons of greens and then we emphasize easy to digest, alkalizing. So anti-acidosis foods that are easy to digest and those foods that I found over years of experimentation helpful are buckwheat, which of course isn’t actually a wheat. It does not contain gluten. It’s just an atrocious name, a misleading name. It’s actually a seed, just like the other food that I recommend that people eat a lot, which is quinoa. So quinoa and buckwheat are very anti-inflammatory, easy to digest foods for most people and they are a great platform those two foods for the first 12 days along with sweet potato, along with lots of seaweed because of the dense mineral content and therefore further alkalizing effects. And also I do encourage people to have garlic as anti-microbial, onions which is the highest dense source of quercetin, good for the tight junctions in the gut. And miso paste, which is a probiotic food obviously from the [inaudible 00:36:44] from the Japanese, which just adds flavor to these otherwise fairly humble simple meals and gets you through the first 12 days.
And from there, it’s about re-introducing foods one at a time over a period of one to two days per food. So it’s not a quick process. It’ll take a month or two. And in that time period, people are finding out what they’re reacting to. Now, I’ve made recommendations and have a step-by-step guide as to the foods that I recommend in specific order. But it’s not the same for everyone. Some people, as we talked earlier, respond terribly to the sugars in fruits. So they need to put fruit aside for a while, whilst others find that the protein, higher protein foods are really challenging. So [inaudible 00:37:30] I tried and sidestepped [SP] both of those for a period of time after the first 12 days and beyond.
And meanwhile I forgot to mention as well people are drinking celery and cucumber juice. So no sugar, just this juice of celery and cucumber, which is cooling, alkalizing, and it has excellent anti-inflammatory effects. And so they get a lot of people saying…a lot of people listen to my free information and doing this program before just say that they’ve just started doing celery and cucumber juices between meals, and that alone has helped them to have not to take something that like their daily non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug or something like that, which is fabulous.
Andrew: So for our Australian practitioners, if you log on to fxmedicine.com.au and put in your details there, we’ll have this information on the Paddison Program for you to link to and then you can join up to that program because I think this stuff is critical, Clint, seriously. This is really awesome.
Clint: So I’m not disillusioned to have feeling that one day this could quite potentially be the co-treatment to the pharmaceutical approach that’s currently used. So I know that in Australia the [inaudible 00:38:44] meds is often used with naturopaths when they say or do all of these changes with regards to your supplementation, avoid this or do that. And it just doesn’t get questioned enough. There are some standards there in place from a dietary point of view that, if I can be so bold to say, that naturopaths are happy just to let that sleeping dog lie. But I challenge anyone who’s treating someone with rheumatoid arthritis to replace the dietary approach that you’re currently using with them and get them to go and do this program, and I will fall off my chair if that patient doesn’t come back in a week or two weeks and say that they have not only improved, but improved dramatically. And it’s the sort thing that can completely reinvigorate a person with this disease with a feeling of hope for the future, and what’s possible because the results are astounding and it can be achieved within just a couple of days because, just by putting olive oil on salad on a daily routine can totally keep people in the inflamed state at a level than then continually promotes the leaky gut, and they just never get out of the cycle. So you need to get everything right and I just hope that people are open minded and entrepreneurial enough to encourage this because the results speak for themselves.
Andrew: Yeah, so the thing that I notice there is you are using activated nuts and seeds as well as buckwheat and quinoa. So does that give you your complete protein so you’re not missing out on any essential amino acids? It would, wouldn’t?
Clint: So quinoa and buckwheat are both complete proteins. So that’s one of the great things about them is that there’s no amino acids missing at all. So you can actually, you could just live off quinoa alone from an amino acid point of view. And with regards to the soaked nuts and seeds, I asked people to re-introduce them later with this sort of the program that I put together for others. I used them in the early stages, but it’s something that I find… I’m trying to emphasize after the first 12 days for people to start to get back onto very useful foods, things like potatoes, and try to be able to eat some brown rice, or even some Basmati rice, things that make their day-to-day desire for satiation fairly easy. And given that they’re only doing maybe a couple of foods a week, three or four different foods at the most a week, I want to postpone some of the more less conventional things like the soaked nuts and seeds just because it doesn’t look good in the work place, or their shop and they’re eating that sort of stuff. I want them to get on useful things quickly.
Andrew: The funny thing is I’m looking at some of that, and I’m actually salivating. So cucumbers and celery just to me is just like yum. Miso paste, oh my goodness. But anyway.
Clint: Well, what that tells me is that your signals from your gut bacteria that are influencing you through the gut-brain access in creating desires for those foods to self-perpetuate those healthy foods. So that tells me right off the bat that you have a healthy gut bacteria and you have a healthy diet.
Andrew: I’ve got Japanese bugs.
Clint: That’s right. You’re overgrowing with Japanese bugs!
Andrew: So I have to ask, though, when you’ve got people that are used to a standard Australian diet, that is SAD. How do you get them…I mean, obviously they’re in desperation but how do you get people to, A, change but more importantly to stay changed? How do you get them to remain motivated on which would seem quite an alien diet to a lot of Australians?
Clint: Yeah, so you’ve nailed with the word “highly motivated” or the phrase in pain determines…when people hit a bad enough situation, they’re willing to make changes. It’s like take it to a whole new extreme. It’s like when you see the documentaries and stuffs when people, the plane crashes in the snow and there’s no way to survive except to eat the dead person. I mean, it gets to a point where you’re in that much pain where you’ll literally do anything and I would have certainly say that this program isn’t anywhere near that kind of stretch. Some people report that really enjoy these foods after the first one or two days.
So the foods themselves are just humble foods. They’re not unpleasant. They’re just not covered in cheese, in oil. They’re not on a bloody crisp bread piece of highly processed flour. These are foods that are wholesome and designed to heal and nourish the body. So the first thing is getting them onto it is not that hardest sell when they’re willing to try anything and the drugs are killing them and the pain is killing them. And so, keeping them on it is partially because the results help build momentum and enthusiasm and determination. So when people see that they can now create a fist or people can now put on a wedding ring they haven’t worn in years or they can walk down the stairs or open the jars or turn on the tap. When they start to do these things, they feel elated and that’s a situation where the good feeling draws more effort. So that’s one part of it. But then there is another part of it where I’ve set up another unit to what I offer to people in this situation, which I setup an online community. Because I was seeing people dropping out, not having any support, a husband and wife or their children, not interested in eating healthy because they either don’t believe it will work or they just…
Andrew: They don’t have the impetus. They don’t have RA.
Clint: Exactly, exactly. And so I’ve set up an online community that my clients have access to in which I also coach people. So I’m active in there every day and it’s an online Facebook, but it’s a private…where everyone’s privacy is protected, people can talk about me [SP], about their condition. And there’s been three different studies that have been conducted on people with RA that show that talking about writing about, and having a social support all around rheumatoid arthritis, all in separate studies have shown clinical improvements in those people who’ve had those…that situation. So they need to write about, talk about, and have people to listen to them about their disease, and their problems, and it all helps clinical outcomes. And that’s why I set this up is to help people get better results, and also help people to stay on it. So that’s the way that I offer to people who are struggling and then everyone else don’t need that because they’re just motivated by their result.
Andrew: I think, as an addendum, to maybe ask, plead with any rheumatologist or anybody treating rheumatoid arthritis sufferers that looking at some of those foods that you used, none of those are nutritionally deficit, and even if you had these people on those foods for two weeks, it’s certainly not going to cause an issue. Somebody’s got to be hospitalized before you would be avoiding any of these foods. I mean, they’ve seriously got to be…they’d have to be in renal shutdown.
Clint: Well, that’s right.
Andrew: So these foods are safe for everybody, and so even you just give it just two weeks, and then let the proof in the pudding, pun not intended, forgive me. But if you did that, then you can at least make an objective assessment rather than looking at the absolutely atrocious dietary research that was done on rheumatoid arthritis. I looked at a couple of it, couple of the things, and they basically regressed that down to sodium and they found no significance. It was ridiculous. So if a rheumatologist is going to be assessing died, don’t assess this one as diet because it’s different.
Clint: And that’s why…I remember we’ve had great conversations on fast. Remember when we’re talking about it right at the start. I talked about how rheumatologists don’t tend to see people come back in and get any improvement from their dietary changes because they’re going out and they’re doing things like the paleo diet or they’re going and they just deciding to eliminate nightshade vegetables or what they’re doing is they say, “Let’s do the Mediterranean diet.” They’re all doing these various things that are fundamentally shackled, fundamentally flawed, one of the greatest dietary aggravators reported in literature I’ve studied the last ten years is meat. How can you possibly go out and do a Paleo autoimmune process that involves meat in the diet and ever get off all your drugs, get rid all your pain, and be able to slowly reintroduce other foods and expect to have somewhat a normal life again? It just doesn’t work. That’s why people on Paleo diet and these other diets come to me and they say, “I’ve tried these things. I got worse and here I am.”
Now, some of them improved quickly at the start because we all know if we’re involved with helping people with inflammation that you eliminate dairy products and everyone improves from everything. You take dairy out of the picture and the whole world would be 50% healthier overnight. However, once you take dairy out and take oils out in the case in some of these diets, but if you retain one of the greatest aggravators, you just will never finally get it fully under control.
Andrew: I think one of the things is people associate that a healthy diet was something that you can use in the clinical diagnosis of something like rheumatoid arthritis and that might not be the case. A Mediterranean diet certainly will research with cardiovascular disease but that’s an autoimmune condition that involves rheumatoid arthritis and destruction of joints. You’ve got a totally different pathology going on. So a “healthy diet” is not necessarily a rheumatoid arthritis healthy diet.
Clint: No, because just to really re-emphasize that point, the studies that are done on people with rheumatoid arthritis in terms of their actual…what’s going on the molecular level inside the gut, inside their intestines. People with intestinal disorders don’t even have the degree of destruction of the gut wall that people with RA have. People with RA are at the absolute extreme end of dysbiosis, a chronic, chronic intestinal disorder. It’s like as bad as it can get. If someone decides…
Andrew: It’s not a joint disease.
Clint: You’ve got one hell of a problem in your gut and your joints are taking the brunt of the consequences of that, but someone who’s trying to improve their likelihood of not having a cardiovascular event do not need to go to the same extremes that someone who has an absolute shambles of a digestive system like in the case of rheumatoid arthritis.
Andrew: Yeah, that’s right. So I’ve got to ask because the testimonials on the paddisonprogram.com are glowing, and skeptics or detractors might say they’re the convert. So I’ve got to ask the others’ end of the question. They’re the ones who got really great relief early on. What’s the worst result that you got from using the Paddison Program?
Clint: So I don’t know if there’s anyone who hasn’t improved but people…there are some people who come around every now and then, and I have clients now, we’re up around the 7,000 around the world and of which…I communicate with a lot of people in our online community on a regular basis. So I get feedback constantly about people’s response to this program and the people — and this is interesting. I’m really glad you asked this — it’s not how long you’ve had the disease that indicates how well you’ll respond to this, and it’s not how bad your diet was leading up to changing your diet and starting the Paddison program. It is what drugs you’ve been taking prior to starting that is the greatest indicator to how well you will improve.
People who have been on prednisone for several years or people who’ve been taking long-term antibiotics or in the most common instance, people who are taking non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs on a regular basis to keep their pain low are the most difficult people to heal. It’s because, pretty straightforward here, prednisone causes leaky gut, it depletes the mucosal lining, exposing the epithelium to all of the food particles as they pass through it. The antibiotics are like a nuclear bomb on all of the civilians in the gut and your non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs are absolutely atrocious in terms of creating gut inflammation and in terms of creating leaky gut. And when you combine non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs with prednisone, you get a two-fold effect in leaky gut and lots people are doing this. And so the hardest people to heal are the people on the wrong medication. So isn’t it tragic?
Andrew: Yeah, absolutely. You’d look at the prevalence of antibiotics, NSAIDs, prednisone…well, look at antibiotics, NSAIDs. Prednisone obviously is controlled, but antibiotics is a travesty. We’re finding this is actually a clinical issue now, where antibiotic resistance is not a going to be, it’s not a climate control we have to look to in the future. It’s here, it’s now, it’s being done. NSAIDs though, over the counter, my goodness, like the abuse of NSAIDs as a “safe therapy,” and especially in children, you got to be kidding me. I’m just waiting. I’m just waiting ’till we see these teenagers with bleeding ulcers. I’m waiting.
Anyway, don’t get even started on that one. Clint, I got to say, I could go on and on because this is really interesting to me, and I’ve got to say it’s quite controversial for me because there was these things…you said olive oil, and I’m going “What?” Professor Les Cleland at Adelaide Hospital, Royal Adelaide Hospital, did his research with fish oil as being safest standard rheumatoid arthritis treatment. But I do admit this is with standard rheumatoid arthritis treatment and standard rheumatoid arthritis results.
Clint: Yeah. Let me comment on fish oils and my comment on fish oils is not as pointed as what I have with everything else and it’s because I never had close experience with them so very long with them myself, and because none of my clients take them, I don’t get much feedback on them if any. Now, the thing with the fish oils is that let’s say for instance that they provide some temporary pain relief on rheumatoid arthritis, and I think that it’s fair to say that the majority of the scientific literature supports that. Let’s say that that’s the case.
Now, what that does is create a wonderful industry for people supplying fish oils, and a pathetic outcome for people who are taking them because all you’re doing is just using a different way of trying to get some pain relief and not addressing the underlying cause. In the meantime, we’re destroying the world’s oceans and supplies of fish by trying to collect the fish for this purpose. And I went to a talk recently only within the last two months that said this year, off the coast of Chile in South America, that for the first time ever, there’s no allowed fishing for fish oil because they’ve depleted this ocean so much that it’s now at risk of extinction of those particular fish. I think, listen, if you’ve got rheumatoid arthritis and you’re treating someone with RA, stop putting Band-Aids on something that will just keep bursting the Band-Aid every day. You’ve got to get to the cause.
Andrew: That’s naturopathy was always to look at the cause. So I have to then ask, are there any supplement which are acceptable, safe and, indeed, which you might use?
Clint: Yeah, and I love some of them and I tell people to pop them like candy. Now, that’s a non-practitioner side because I’m obviously…
Andrew: Please see your practitioner for dosage.
Clint: Exactly, and of course anyone listening to this can probably tell the way that I speak and I’m very forthcoming with opinion and I’ve got no medical background or medical training or naturopathic education. I’m just telling it from experience and from results in working with others, and so obviously, yeah, get it from a professional because I’m not insured.
So with regards to the supplements, we talked about having trouble to break down proteins because of our achlorhydria or lack of hydrochloric acid in the stomach with people with RA. Bromelain was an excellent supplement for me to take in very high doses, and again, just stick with the dose on the pack unless you want to do on your own thing, but I’m not suggesting you do what I did. I just did this for my own personal use. I took a high dose of bromelain and because bromelain, for listeners, assists in the breakdown of protein because we’re trying to avoid incompletely digested proteins entering the blood. So we’re trying to access more of those amino acids because the amino acids when they pass into the blood stream are completely harmless and in fact useful, as opposed to incompletely digested proteins, which should not be present in the blood. So bromelain is one and I recommend that wholeheartedly.
We can all agree and pat ourselves on the back that there’s no arguments around probiotics supplements. We all should encourage probiotic supplements for gut health and I’m always talking about a non-dairy probiotic supplement with a vegetarian [inaudible 00:57:33], so you’ve got no animal products present. And people ask me often which ones should you take, if there’s specific strains and all this sort of stuff. And I think that, on this topic, we really overthink it, and I think the answer to this is always just buy as many probiotics that are on special, take them at different times, different strains, just get them into you in vast quantity because the diversity of the bacteria is just as important as the quantity. So let’s not get caught up in brands, let’s not get caught up in strains, just do it. Just get into them, and if they cost a lot of money, then get what’s on special and get them at the time of the month when your healthy food store has the discount and have them on the shelf, either refrigerated or shelfed bacteria…sorry, probiotics. Both are good, just get into them. Just get into them.
Now, I also like potassium because as studies…it’s one of the only times when I actually like to do nutrient therapy. I like…everything’s got to be whole food, that nutrient therapy with potassium has proven beneficial in a clinical trial. So it’s hard to argue against the only change being done over a 60-day period for people with RA, they just gave them potassium supplements and they gave the other group a placebo, and dramatic difference. The potassium helped them. So, very hard to argue against that, and one of the thoughts behind that is, again, due to the chronic metabolic acidosis, that people with RA have elevated acids in their body, and this is a way of bringing that down. And it’s also supported by another study, where potassium was included with some other minerals. So there was just one of several like magnesium, calcium, and an alkalizing mineral supplement, and they got the same positive results on a group of [inaudible 00:59:30]. So, hard not to recommend potassium for that reason.
In less about specific supplements but more of a general thing that can be purchased from your naturopath or from the healthy stores, it’s just again alkalizing minerals, and I like these in these form ultra greens, so things like spirulina and the all these mixed greens. Because all of these greens are just so helpful for alkalization. And then also I kind of just completely suggest people take a B12 if they are not eating any animal products because we don’t eat our foods close to the source, we are picking out any soil when we eat our carrots and our potatoes these days. And of course, the bacteria comes, the B12 comes from the soil. And back in the day, humans would eat close to the soil, and a couple of hundred years ago, and if were vegan, we would not need to take B12 somewhere. Because these days the foods are well-distanced from where they came from and we lose that bacteria, lose the soil, things are overly clean and stuff, and B12 [inaudible 01:00:36].
So, look, for anti-inflammatory purposes, some people like to take curcumin and there is some good results with curcumins for people who take those but I would only encourage people to take curcumin if they trying to transition of a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, and the reason I say this is because people really become fixated on the supplements as their savior but we really have to shift focus onto the diet and something we haven’t even talked about but is so critical as well for RA is exercise. It’s just so important. So I want people to have two things on their mind when they wake up: heal the gut with the foods and get out there and exercise to substitute the need for pain-killing drug that day. Because enough days consecutively without having to take the non-steroidal drugs, and substituting it, not just cold-turkey but getting something in place of it in the form of cardiovascular exercise for 30 or more minutes a day above walking…more, I’m talking like getting on a treadmill or going for a swim or going to Bikram yoga. Something that really elevates the heart rate. There lies an anti-inflammatory powerhouse. So we have to replace those painkillers, allow the gut to heal for a few weeks, use the exercise, and use the diet. And you cannot not improve if you do these things.
Andrew: I couldn’t agree with you more. I think people need to really read that word called sup-plement. It never said main-ement. It’s sup-plement. It’s to supplement what you’re doing with the diet and exercise. Clint, I can’t thank you enough for taking me through this today and talking us through what you’ve experienced and indeed what you proposed. This is really, really interesting. Confronting, controversial, absolutely, but hey, you talk about 7,000 people. This is something that really needs looking into.
Clint: It is. Again, I’ve taken up a lot of your time. I’m not sure how long, you know, the episode go for, but I do know we’ve covered a lot.
Andrew: It’s all good stuff. This is great.
Clint: I do anticipate, because once I’ve set it as a goal, it will happen, I anticipate that we’ll do a trial on this, and I have lots of support people in high areas, particularly in U.S. I’ve got lots of close contacts now in the U.S. who are very prominent plant-based doctors and rheumatologist and things who are very interested in this. And then I do hope also that we can just…I want to put forward to rheumatologists a guide that I’ve been working on recently, which I hope to disseminate to all of my Paddison Programmers around the world because they all want to get into little hands the evidence that supports what they’re doing so that we, as a ground, as a grassroots group, educate the medical professionals. And I think that’s a real possibility. I mean, I’ve got a lot of supporters who are really passionate about helping me help me spread this word, and it’s because when people have lives improved, they feel indebted to help spread the words to others or to help. It’s the reciprocity situation, and so I hope to be able to continue to empower people to educate their doctors, and that’s what needs to happen. And I’ve always got my hand up to speak at events where rheumatologists and doctors are at, and I am happy to engage in any level of conversation in any format on any medium with people in any kind of profession and defend this to the court. Because without going through this, it can be a little bit intimidating, but having been through it and then also witness so many others have these similar responses, you get an extreme level of confidence. I’ve got nothing to hide, only everything to share.
Andrew: Yeah, and well done, I’ve got to say. I [inaudible 01:04:50] my head toward to you. It’s so brave of you but not just for you, I’m not just talking about…it’s really what you’ve done for other people. It’s really what you’ve done to these people who…they really do suffer from rheumatoid.
Clint: When I was able to get my blood test back and I was…I got off the methotrexate and there was still a lot of healing to be done with regards to my knee joint for a long time to build strength back up in the knee and a lot of things. But if we can only help one person by documenting everything that we can into a way that we can share with others, then it will be worth it. So that’s what we did. I took all the lessons that I learned and all of the science that I had used to justify the decisions I made and I put it all together and that’s where the Paddison Program began, and yeah, it’s just grown from there.
Andrew: Well, I’ll tell you what, any medic could argue in any course two [SP] study as being underpowered. It’s very hard to argue with 7,000. So I would implore, I would urge all practitioners to look into the www.paddisonprogram.com. I can’t thank you enough for joining us on FX Medicine today, Clint. Well done. I look forward to hearing more from you in the future.
Clint: Thanks so much for having me. It’s a great pleasure. I appreciate it.
Andrew: This FX Medicine, and I’m Andrew Whitfield-Cook
This podcast was proudly brought to you by the BioCeuticals seminars series Reprogramming Autoimmunity.
STUDIES ON FAT AND GUT INFLAMMATION
Animal model shows that a consumption of a high-fat diet, by promoting changes in host bile acid composition, reduces the density of microfora and creates an inflammatory environment in the small intestine [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22717075], [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22717075] increase gut permeability [http://nutritionandmetabolism.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1743-7075-7-19], [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3292714/], [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8378108]
which results in dysbiosis that can alter the immune system [http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v487/n7405/full/nature11225.html].
Of all fats measured in animal models, the worst are unsaturated fats (oils) – authors of one study commented that “USF (corn oil/linoleic acid) by itself results in dysregulation of intestinal tight junction integrity leading to increased gut permeability” [http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1530-0277.2011.01673.x/abstract].
Following from this, in human studies, common medium chain fatty acids (found in several vegetable fats and dairy products) cause a “rapid increase in epithelial permeability” in humans [http://jpet.aspetjournals.org/content/284/1/362.abstract] even though authors confess that the mechanism of action is largely unknown.
Note also that inflammation itself causes more intestinal permeability [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19295480] so there is a cascade-like effect from inflammation itself which self-perpetuates the disease. So for healing to occur inflammation must always be kept at a minimum.