Dr Michael Greger discusses Rheumatoid Arthritis and how to manage and even reverse many chronic diseases with the right nutritional approach!
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Clint: Welcome back to the Paddison Podcast. Today’s going to be a real treat for me because I’ve got someone who I really admire on this call. He’s the creator of the incredibly useful website called NutritionFacts.org, a very, very handy website for all scientific-related matters. And he’s just released a book, “How Not to Die.†And I haven’t read that yet but rest assured I’ll be getting my hands on that because I’m a big fan. He is much loved and adored. He’s a leader within the plant-based community. It is Dr. Michael Greger. How are you, Dr. Greger?
Dr. Greger: I’m doing good. Thank you.
Clint: Now you’re there on a walking machine. You’re keeping fit while we do this podcast.
Dr. Greger: I’m keeping fit while I do everything. Yes, 17 miles a day. So what is 17 miles in kilometers?
Clint: I’m guessing about 25.
Dr. Greger: Let’s see, 17 miles in kilometers. Twenty-seven.
Clint: Well, I wasn’t too far off.
Dr. Greger: Not bad, 27. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, sitting is not good for us.
Clint: Right. Right. Well, let me tell you I’m going to stand up as well. So I’m going to get on my knees. That’s the best I can do given that I’m limited. I’m on my knees right now.
Dr. Greger: All right.
Clint: So I’m going to walk on my knees, which I found was quite good for actually repairing some of my knee damage in my left knee. So that suits me.
Dr. Greger: Okay.
Clint: Now I want to pick your brain today. You’re a very busy man, so let’s get straight into this. So first of all, I just want a bit of your background. I know we can research this online but give us the bullet points how you ended up into recommending more plants to people. How did this eventuate for someone who’s a medical doctor?
Dr. Greger: Right. Well, it was actually my grandmother. I think the spark for many kids to want to be a doctor when they grow up is watching a grandparent get sick or even die. But for me, I just watched my grandma get better. She had been diagnosed with end-stage heart disease. She already had so many bypass operations. She basically ran out of plumbing at some point. And so there’s nothing more conventional medicine could do and so they sent her home to die. Confined in a wheel chair, crushing chest pain, her life was over at age 65. And then she heard this program the States called 60 Minutes about this guy called Nathan Pritikin, this early lifestyle medicine pioneer back in the ’70s who’d just opened this clinic in California. She’s actually featured as one of his early success stories. In his biography, it talks about Frances Greger who showed up, they wheeled her in, a few weeks later, she was walking 10 miles a day and went on to live another 31 years on this planet until ’96 with her six grandkids including me.
So not only did she inspire one to go to medical school, she lived to see him graduate. And so what was the magic? The magic was putting her on a plant-based diet with a kind of graded exercise program and her body healed itself. And I think that’s why not only I went into medicine but why I practice the medicine I do today which is lifestyle medicine. Using diet to not only prevent disease but to treat it and in many cases even reverse it.
Clint: And how long have you been on a plant-based diet?
Dr. Greger: Twenty-five years now. Since summer 1990 when Dr. Dean. Ornish published “The Lifestyle Heart Trial” in the Lancet, probably the most prestigious medical journal in the world, and there it was. And so basically he did what Pritikin did but he did what’s called quantitative angiography. He actually looked at the arteries, special X-rays, and could see and could prove this reversal that our family had already known. So it was a randomized controlled trial. Half the people went on plant-based diet and healthy lifestyle behaviors. The other half just did whatever their doctors told them. And, of course, they got worse, and the people that ate better got better and their arteries literally opened up without drugs, without surgery, suggesting that their bodies wanted to heal all along but were just never given the choice.
But you stop eating an artery-clogging diet and your body is able to start dissolving some of that plaque away and look. So it’s essentially the cure to our number one killer. The number one killer of men and women, we’ve known it for 25 years, and so the real question is: Why do hundreds of thousands of people still die from a disease that’s preventable and reversible?
Clint: Well, that’s a very good question. I’ve seen your presentation “Uprooting the Leading Causes of Death”.
In fact, that’s the first time that my wife and I became exposed to your work, and since then, we’ve followed the evolution up to your really successful NutritionFacts.org.
Dr. Greger: Wow.
Clint: Yeah. We’ve been fans for years.
Dr. Greger: Yeah. It’s been a couple years now.
Clint: That’s right. And in fact, one of your videos that you put together, just to give you some direct feedback about how transformative some of the work you do can happen on an individual level, you may recall one that you did about potassium and rheumatoid arthritis.
Dr. Greger: Yeah.
Clint: I’m not sure if it jogs a memory.
Dr. Greger: Yeah. Yeah, I am.
Clint: The study involved taking a group of RA folks through increased potassium intake versus a control group and those who took the potassium supplements quite substantially and significantly improve. And it was at that point that I started supplementing potassium with a little magnesium and I feel that it actually did help me get over the line when I was just smoldering with some residual pain towards the end. So that video played a role for me.
Dr. Greger: Great.
Clint: Now we’ve got an audience listening to this who have inflammatory arthritic conditions and you’re close to the science across a broad range of disease and conditions. Would you say that there is a big disconnect between what we understand about what diet can do with arthritic conditions to where the medical community’s at in terms of where they’re treating it? And I’ll give you an example, it seems that if I speak to anyone who shares your sort of train of thought in terms of leaky gut, dietary, all that sort of side of things compared to say your rheumatologist that works in the local community there seems to be that disconnect that is frustrating for a lot of my clients who don’t have the support from their doctor. So do you feel that the science is going to catch up and allow our medical practitioners at that top level to see that there is such a large role that diet is playing?
Dr. Greger: Yeah. So it’s not the science that needs to catch up it’s the doctors that need to catch up to the science. But this is nothing new. My latest kind of annual review, I talk about what mainstream medicine thought about smoking back in the 1950s. We had decades of research proving that smoking was associated with lung cancer yet…I mean the science was there but smoking was normal. Most doctors smoked. The per capita smoking rate here in the States is 10 cigarettes a day, about 4,000 per year. And so the average American smoked half a pack a day and so when it was just normal all this evidence suggesting that it was bad for you was just kind of dismissed because it’s like, “How could something that just everybody does, how could it be bad for you?”
And then, of course, there’s a very powerful industry throwing lots of money around to silence the medical world. And so looking back at that situation where it was just a mountain of evidence, so by the time in the 1960s when the U.S. Surgeon General came out with the first report saying, “Okay. Smoking’s bad for you.” They had accumulated 7,000 studies. So you’d think maybe after the first 6,000 they could have given people a heads-up. Right?
Clint: Yeah.
Dr. Greger: I mean so if that report came out a year earlier it would have saved that many more lives. It’s like how much science do you need to be able to balance the corporate interests that are trying to silence the science? And so it was just a matter of society catching up with the science. On one hand, yeah, you had all of society, mainstream Madison, even the government telling you to smoke. On the other side you just have the science if you even knew about the science, what was being published back then, and how would you know because it never really made it out into the news. And so we have a very similar situation today. We have this mountain of science showing that we can, for example, reverse heart disease. Okay, so obviously since 1990 not a single person has died of a heart attack. Right? Because we have the cure. We already have it. So you’re like, “Wait a second.”
And that was my big wake-up call that there was more to medicine than just the science. I mean that was very naïve of me to think that, “Oh, well, okay. We found the best treatment. Safer, cheaper, more effective than everything else.” Well, then obviously that’s the standard of care. And that, actually, was what triggered my work on NutritionFacts and all…That made my life’s mission, “Well, wait a second. If the number one…If the cure to the number one killer can be buried in some rabbit hole somewhere what else is there that could be helping my patients?” And so with rheumatoid arthritis, with diabetes, with hypertension, all of these other things where there’s this really amazing research that never makes it out to the world because there’s no profit motive. There’s no press release, there’s no ads on TV because no one’s making any money yet millions of people could be profiting in their own lives in terms of better health. And so it’s not like we needed more science, we just need to take the science that was already there and just let everybody know about it.
Clint: Okay.
Dr. Greger: And the public is just as much in the dark as the medical professionals because how are doctors taught? Doctors are taught…I mean you open up a medical journal, a random medical journal, what’s it about? It’s about drugs. Why? Because the drug companies fund their own studies and so those are the studies that get done and those are the ones that you hear about because there’s ads on TV here in the States for literally drugs on prime-time TV. Yet you’ll never see an ad for sweet potatoes, you’ll never see an ad for broccoli, because there’s no profit margin. You can’t make any money off of it. So a new study comes out on broccoli, no one will ever hear about it. And so that’s really what I did. But it’s not that doctors don’t want to know it’s that they just don’t know. They were never taught this, they’re just…So it’s just a matter of saying, “Have you seen this? This is amazing.”
I mean they do these studies where they do head-to-head comparisons between the leading drug, like this is the leading drug for migraines, for whatever, compare that to food X. I mean that easy. And in many cases the food can work just as well or better than the drug and even if it works just as well the food still wins because it doesn’t have any side effects and it’s cheaper and it’s…So these are tools that physicians just don’t have in their toolbox but once they learn about it they get just as excited as anybody. Doctors, look, if doctors wanted to make money they’d go to the stock market or something. Doctors became doctors because at some level at least early on they wanted to help people. They wanted to make people better and it’s very frustrating to treat auto-immune conditions because people don’t get better.
You just keep adding drugs, try to control the symptoms, and then you add drugs to control the side-effects of the first round of drugs you gave. It’s frustrating for a patient, it’s frustrating for a physician, it’s just not very…The only happy medicine is obstetricians giving…Delivering babies. Right?
Clint: Yeah.
Dr. Greger: Every other doctor is in a really…Is not a very…Doesn’t have a great professional life.
Clint: Maybe a doctor who works in auto-immune once a year gets to deliver a baby so that he gets to stimulate his excitement.
Dr. Greger: Right. Right.
Clint: That should be the Christmas reward once a year.
Dr. Greger: Right. Gets to deliver a baby.
Clint: Yeah. Absolutely. Have you ever had the pleasure?
Dr. Greger: Oh, yeah. No. Of course, of course.
Clint: Awesome. Awesome.
Dr. Greger: I mean it’s actually very stressful, obviously.
Clint: Sure. Sure. But that’s why you’re…
Dr. Greger: Right. Right. It’s not the beautific scene that you imagine. Yeah. But afterwards it feels good.
Clint: Sure. Sure. Sure. I watched a video, you campaigned towards the National Dietary Guidelines to try and make some of the changes so that the public can be encouraged to go down this direction. So you’re hitting it from many angles. How was that received and do you do it every year or was it the first year this year for you?
Dr. Greger: No, no. So the Dietary Guidelines for Americans is updated every five years. So every five years I go and I testify, offer my…So this year I actually went, there were multiple hearings and I went before, after the recommendations were revealed, and the facts that the 2015 guidelines are not year released. In 2010 they didn’t come out until January 2011. but we assume within the next month or so we’ll see them and so we’ll see if they took any of my and other lifestyle medicine practitioners’ suggestions into account. I certainly hope so because that really determines what’s being fed in schools, in the military, in prisons, and that’s the guideline for kind of government feeding programs. And so that affects a lot of people.
Clint: Absolutely. Now can we get a little specific? I want to actually just pick your brains a little bit and what you’ve come to feel about auto-immune conditions. Do you feel that auto-immune diseases do have a very similar underlying cause and that the symptom is just different across the different names?
Dr. Greger: Well, underlying cause is a very basic biochemical level. But can have vastly different triggers, different manifestations, different clinical courses. But what’s really exciting is that they all manifest with this inflammation and there are indeed dietary interventions that can decrease inflammation within the body and seem to help through a wide variety. And so someone may come up to me and say, “Okay, well, what about Sjogren’s or some other auto-immune disease where there’s really no sign.” I mean there just haven’t been any studies looking at dietary interventions. And I say, “Look, there haven’t been any studies so the answer to your question is we don’t know if it’ll help. But the nice thing about eating healthy is that there’s no down side.” Before you take a new drug you want to make sure benefits outweigh the risks because drugs can kill you.
But when it comes to eating healthy or quitting smoking or any kind of safe, simple, side-effect free solution well then why not? I mean it works against all these other auto-immune diseases. Right? So they’re successful dietary trials against Lupus, against rheumatoid arthritis, against osteo-arthritis which has an inflammatory component. And so all of these other things, maybe it’ll help. It certainly can’t hurt and even if it doesn’t help with your particular condition the number one killer of people with auto-immune disease is still heart disease. I mean, still, all the other killers. I mean all you’re going to get is benefit. So in the worst-case scenario you’re going to benefit, feel better, live longer. And people who are sick the last thing they need it a second disease. Right?
Clint: Yeah.
Dr. Greger: It’s bad enough to have rheumatoid arthritis. How about rheumatoid arthritis and kidney failure or rheumatoid arthritis and diabetes? I mean it’s bad enough you have to deal with it so you might as well be absolutely healthy even if it didn’t help for that particular disease. So eat healthy across the board for everybody.
Clint: Yeah. Well, I can support that from a point of view specifically the Sjogren’s. Those people who followed my program have had a lot of anecdotal evidence that that condition has improved.
Dr. Greger: Fantastic.
Clint: So I do feel that with these inflammatory sort of conditions that I’ve worked with, certainly, there’s no…Put it this way, none of them ever get worse by making these changes. Nothing’s ever worsened. So Dr. McDougall who I also enjoy following, he has put on some of his public talks that rheumatoid arthritis is a dietary disease which has…It’s kind of ruffled the feathers of a few rheumatologists that I communicate with. I think that’s certainly the camp that I sort of sit in. Do you feel that it’s that simple or do you feel that there are other factors at play?
Dr. Greger: Well, no, it’s not always the case. I mean if by dietary disease you’re saying that it’s always the case it’s not true and the reason and the way you know that is because by fasting…So therapeutic fasting, so if you do a physician-supervised water-only fast which is done sometimes for auto-immune disease most auto-immune diseases actually get better.
Clint: Yeah. In fact I recall one study where 14 people with RA did a water fast for two weeks and virtually all of their systems was gone after two weeks and that’s the case for most of my clients, nine out of 10 all pain gone in a couple of days.
Dr. Greger: Okay. So it’s the one out of 10.
Clint: Yeah.
Dr. Greger: Okay. So if somebody consuming just water doesn’t get better then it’s not diet. Right?
Clint: Well, hang on a second. I’ve got a theory on this Dr. Greger.
Dr. Greger: All right. Talk to me.
Clint: My theory which I have sort of co-created with actually a chiropractor out of the U.S., my theory is that it’s the protein in the pathogenic bacteria that the body is reacting to in the one in 10 cases where they’re not eating food. So that’s my thought. My feeling is that they’re circulating these pathogenic bacteria in their blood-stream still and that the proteins in the bacteria are still causing antibodies to be created to the bacterial proteins and to the lining of the joints. That’s my thought.
Dr. Greger: And you’re saying those bacteria are a consequence of a diet?
Clint: Yes. From before they did the fast. Maybe older. Yeah.
Dr. Greger: I see. Okay. All right. No, that’s an interesting theory. Okay. Well, in that case then one could make the case that there are both direct and indirect ways it could be considered a dietary disease. But the fact that you put people on a fast and the majority or even one gets better…If one out of 10 got…If one out of 100 got better then there’s obviously a dietary component. All right? And so what more do you need to tell these doctors?
Clint: Yeah.
Dr. Greger: Now, obviously, that’s not sustainable by definition a fast isn’t sustainable. But then if you do an elimination diet, start adding back foods, and see what inflames your joints that can really kind of give you some guidance. But it takes time, it takes energy, it’s so much easier for a doctor to just write a script and hand it to you. But you want to, whenever possible you want to treat the cause, the underlying cause, and not just kind of suppress the inflammatory symptoms. You want to get at the root of the inflammation. I don’t know, did you see the Proteus mirabilis video I did about bacteria and rheumatoid arthritis?
Clint: Yeah. Yeah. And you can explain that a little bit more to our listeners. But it’s about a specific strain of bacteria that has been identified to be in higher prevalence with people with RA than in a control group. Yes?
Dr. Greger: Yeah. So there’s this famous study where this 13-month randomized control trial for rheumatoid arthritis patients put on a strictly plant-based diet for three-and-a-half months and then switched to an egg-free lacto-vegetarian diet for the remainder of the study and compared to the control group that didn’t change their diet at all. The plant-based group, significant improvement in everything down the line; grip strength, joint stiffness, fewer tender joints, all down the list, less tenderness, [inaudible 00:21:47], less swelling, all the laboratory, the C-reactive protein, white count, everything.
And the question is: What’s going on? So one of these leading theories is that it’s this molecular mimicry theory. The thought which originally came out of rheumatic heart disease where if you get, for example, strep throat the reason it’s so important to treat strep throat is because when your body mounts in a response, an anti-body response to destroy the strep bacteria there’s actually a protein that mimics…
There’s a protein in the bacteria that looks a lot like a protein in our heart and when the body attacks this bacteria our heart gets kind of caught in the crossfire, in the friendly fire, and you can get serious valvular disease later in life. And so the thought is that a similar thing is going on in rheumatoid arthritis and so one of the clues to where this infection might…How do you start looking to see? Well, a clue is that rheumatoid arthritis is seen about three times more frequently in women than men. You say, “Well, wait a second. What infection do women get more than men?” Urinary tract infections. Bladder infections. So women get more and so indeed, they started testing the urine of rheumatoid arthritis sufferers and lo and behold did indeed find this bacteria called Proteus morabilis that does have this molecule that looks an awful lot like the molecule in our joints. And so these anti-Proteus anti-bodies against the bacteria may inadvertently attack our own joint tissues leading to this kind of joint destruction.
And, of course, where do bladder infections come from? Many people don’t realize bladder infections actually come from bacteria in the rectum that creep up into the bladder up through the urethra and so, wait a second, how do you change the bacteria in your colon? You do it by changing your diet. And so that’s where…This is kind of the detective story route that lead us to dietary changes. And so we have decades, studies going back decades showing that people going on, for example, raw vegan diets get these dramatic shifts in their gut bacteria and so you put rheumatoid sufferers on that kind of diet, you get the relief, you get greater improvements actually tied to some of the changes in gut flora. You basically culture peoples’ stool and you can see the people that get better have certain shifts in bacteria than the ones that don’t. So since then they’ve also tried plant-based diets including both a combination of cooked and raw foods which also benefited well. And what you see when you put people on a plant-based diet is you see a drop in anti-Proteus anti-bodies compared to the control group. And so now you say, “Well, wait a second. Maybe your immune system has just declined.”
No, you have the same level of anti-bodies against other invaders, against other bacteria. But just specifically lower Proteun and so the thought is that when you shift over to a more plant-based diet you actually get a profound influence on the composition of the urine. So, for example, there are these plant compounds called lignans which end up more in the urine of those eating plants and so higher levels, and they actually have anti-bacterial properties. So the thought is maybe either we’re changing the bacteria in our colon or we’re eating all of these anti-microbial plant compounds that are being excreted into the urine and killing off this bacteria. So regardless of how it’s happening we know we have less of this immune over-reaction to the specific bacteria associated with rheumatoid arthritis and so as you can…
So there’s still so much more work to be done in this area but you don’t have to wait until we figure out exactly what it is. Is it because of changes in the bladder or changes in the colon? Either way the diet works so you do the diet and then we’ll look. If we figure it out, maybe we can tweak it even better to make it more effective. But, until we know, might as well jump onboard because it’s just going to have beneficial side consequences.
Clint: Absolutely. And you mentioned raw food diet earlier on there. I personally went through an eight-month raw food and that was very, very difficult. I sprouted all my nuts and my seeds trying to increase digestibility and enzyme content and lived off just tons and tons of…nuts and seeds were my calories, and fruits and tons and tons of greens. I found that nothing is more healing than consuming leafy greens. Just all the plain salads.
Dr. Greger: Great.
Clint: Without the oils. Just completely plain salads and the juicing of those leafy greens and green vegetables played a dramatic role in pain reduction.
Dr. Greger: Great.
Clint: Yeah.
Dr. Greger: And in that way I think people with these inflammatory conditions are lucky in that their body is actually telling them what’s healthy, what’s not healthy. When most people eat greens they may not feel differently and so they don’t have this kind of built-in compliance mechanism.
Clint: Alarm system.
Dr. Greger: But people are really sensitive and experience the benefits, that gives them the extra motivation to continue eating healthy. If only every time somebody ate a salad, they felt better, then the problem would be solved. Right?
Clint: Right.
Dr. Greger: And so you should see this as like, “My body is super smart and it’s telling me what I should eat and I should just follow its advice.”
Clint: Yeah. That’s certainly a train of thought that I’ve shared with others and it’s something that as a roundabout way is a benefit of having an inflammatory condition. There’s no doubt about that. Do you know Dr. Monica Aggarwal out of Baltimore?
Dr. Greger: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Clint: Yeah. So she’s friends with Dr. Esselstyn and he’s encouraged her to try and compile a bunch of sort of results of people who have benefited from a plant-based diet and try and compile that as a study. And I’m working with her to put together that case and a few other of our…Well, not our.
Dr. Greger: Oh, good.
Clint: A few other doctors. And there’s a few stumbling blocks, aren’t there, with red tape issues and things to get these things over the line? But anyway, we’re working on that at the moment.
Dr. Greger: Great.
Clint: Simultaneously back here in Australia there’s a collaborative group who’s interested in looking at my work and trying to publish that, as well.
Dr. Greger: Wonderful.
Clint: Well, I haven’t published anything since I was a laser physicist when I was 23 years old in a journal called Electronics Letters. And nothing, certainly, in the medical space. I just wanted to ask you how difficult is it to get something like that accepted? We’re just looking at possibly doing a documentary about my journey and looking at taking some people.
Dr. Greger: Well, great.
Clint: Yeah. And looking at taking some people through this process and get that journey that they go through. On a scale of one to 10 how hard is it to get this sort of stuff published?
Dr. Greger: Not hard at all any more. And the reason is is because there’s been an explosion of open access online journals. So I mean it used to be journals would be published in print form and so page space was at a real premium and so there was…There’s only so many articles you can fit so they really had to restrict it. But now many journals are now completely online. They don’t exist in print and so they cost a little extra in terms of editing or something but they could print as many articles an edition as they want. And so they no longer have those restrictions so if it’s a good paper they’ll do it. And there are case reports published all the time. in fact there’s whole journals dedicated to publishing case reports and case series. The British Medical Journal just picked up fasting, a remarkable fasting case report out of the TrueNorth Clinic in California.
Clint: Oh, Dr. Klaper.
Dr. Greger: That showed this…Yeah. Goldhamer and Klaper showed this dramatic reversal in lymphoma with water-only fasting with some amazing imaging. And they’re getting that published in the British Medical Journal which is an excellent journal. And so I mean that just shows, the biggest obstacle to publishing in medical literature is the researcher not submitting it. No, seriously. And you may not be accepted by the first few that you approach but these journals are desperate for good content and I mean, ideally, you get those that are indexed by MedLine. Which is the U.S. National Library of Medicine. It’s kind of the largest medical database. And so if something’s published in a journal that’s indexed by them it’ll show up doing a PubMed search and so it’ll have greater access, more people will be able to read it. But I would be really surprised if you couldn’t get it published. It’s just a matter of submitting it.
Clint: Yeah. Okay. Fabulous. All right. Is there anything else before we wrap this up that you feel that you’d like to share with the listeners who have an opportunity to hear from you now. Inflammatory arthritis, any sort of final words?
Dr. Greger: So I’d encourage people to look at some of the turmeric work. So it’s not just plant-based in general but there are specific plants that may have additional benefits and the spice turmeric, so there’s actually some trials using the spice to calm down inflammation. Specifically in rheumatoid arthritis and Lupus and some of these other auto-immune conditions. And so it’s just a matter of going to NutritionFacts.org and typing in “Rheumatoid Arthritis” or typing in “Auto-Immune” and just looking through the videos. I have about more than 1,000 videos on basically any topic and if people have questions my contact information is there, I’d be happy to answer questions. Everything on the website is free. There’s no ads, not selling anything. Just kind of put it up as a public service so I encourage people…And I’m constantly on the lookout for a new science.
I know for all types of auto-immune and inflammatory conditions from Asthmas, spsoriatic arthritis on down I already have a lot of information up and will continue to dredge the literature for all the new, good stuff. And so I encourage people to subscribe and you can get daily, weekly, monthly updates. However, you’d like. And hopefully one day I’ll come down to Australia and be able to speak around and meet people in person.
Clint: Well, maybe we can organize that. I’m doing an event with Dr. Klaper on the 12th of April at University of New South Wales here in Sydney.
Dr. Greger: [inaudible 00:34:16].
Clint: And I’m very much looking forward to that. So we’re going to do an evening with myself and him talking about the natural reversing mechanisms for RA. And, yeah, if you were to come down here or maybe we could organize something in the future then I’d love to meet you and to work with you in that sense.
Dr. Greger: Sounds great. Sounds great. So say hello to Klaper for me.
Clint: I will. He’s a great man.
Dr. Greger: [Inaudible 00:34:40].
Clint: I’d just like to say a big thank you to your grandma who set all this up.
Dr. Greger: [Inaudible 00:34:46].
Clint: What a wonderful woman to be able to inspire you like she did and so-forth. And what we haven’t gone over which is probably the biggest news in plant-based world in the last 12 months is the lack of beard. You’ve shaved the beard.
Dr. Greger: Yeah. You know, that was actually the publisher. The publisher. So my new book just came out this week here in the States and the publisher says, “Oh, yeah. You’ve got to shave that.” I was like, “All right. I don’t care. All right.” You know? But it’s just funny. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Clint: It’s created quite a wave, hasn’t it?
Dr. Greger: That’s so funny. So I posted the picture on Facebook and it got more comments than everything else I’ve ever posted. Isn’t that ridiculous? I’m posting reversing heart disease, reversing high blood pressure. Yeah, a couple thousand people like it. But I say, “What do you think of the no beard?” And that gets more. It’s ridiculous.
Clint: It’s like melting the internet. It’s fabulous. Well, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it and please don’t stop all the work that you do. It’s absolutely outstanding and I refer to your website regularly. And I’m going to post a link to your website and also links to a couple of the videos specifically. I’ll embed them on this blog post.
Dr. Greger: Oh, great. Great.
Clint: Yeah. And I’d encourage people to also…Are you speaking publicly in the U.S. at the moment anywhere or are they all private talks?
Dr. Greger: Oh, no. No. They’re public. They’re all public.
Clint: They’re all public?
Dr. Greger: So I’ve got 60, about 60 cities in six countries the next two months. So I hope people will check it out.
Clint: Yeah. You can’t miss him. Okay. Thanks, Dr. Greger.
Dr. Greger: Keep up the good work.
Clint: Thank you. Bye-bye.