Dr. Ron Rosedale MD on how to escape sickness and death from viral infection

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:00.420] – Dr. Ron Rosedale

Everything that happens to these patients scientifically, is connected to leptin. High leptin, leptin resistance attenuates, greatly diminishes the proper immune response. It makes it weaker. And it makes it less accurate. And by that I mean also that when you have high leptin and leptin resistance, it’s like having an assault rifle and just, you know, you might kill some viruses, but you’re going to kill a whole lot of healthy things, too.

[00:00:35.390] – Ivor Cummins

Welcome to the FAT EMPEROR podcast. I’m your host, Ivor Cummins. It’s April 10th, and we have another discussion today on the coronavirus issue with none other than Dr. Ron Rosedale, the original researcher who highlighted the importance of insulin and leptin and all those other hormones in modern chronic disease. So great to see you again, Ron.

[00:00:58.940] – Dr. Ron Rosedale

Great to be here, Ivor. I am glad we can connect again. Sorry under the circumstances.

[00:01:02.930] – Ivor Cummins

Well, challenging circumstances for sure. And you got caught in India. You spend a lot of time there anyway, but you kind of got caught there when this whole thing blew up.

[00:01:14.660] – Dr. Ron Rosedale

Yeah, exactly. So I’m on lockdown here. So yeah, it’s a benefit. It gives me time to connect with nice people like yourself that can kind of help get some information out there and maybe save a few million lives.

[00:01:28.200] – Ivor Cummins

Oh, well, Ron, it’s always a privilege for me to get to connect with someone such as yourself. And you know what? This is a great timing because we’re seeing the coronavirus is impacting certain groups of people vastly more than others. And it’ll be great to help explain some of that susceptibility to serious effects and indeed mortality, tragically. And what underpins all of that.

[00:01:54.920] – Dr. Ron Rosedale

Yeah, and that’s really one of the key questions here. So let’s get away from ACE now. I would say that the emphasis on ACE is misplaced if it isn’t ACE that is predisposing the elderly and diabetics and hypertensives and obese patients to a poor covid outcome, then what else could it be? What else ties all this together? Well. It was interesting, quite a few weeks ago when it started coming down a couple of months ago, when it started coming down, it was found that, again, the so-called cytokine storm, they call it a cytokine storm. Cytokines are kind of cell-to-cell hormones that are very powerful

Most of them cause inflammation. And so there’s a huge release of cytokines in some people that results ultimately, unfortunately, in death, very, very hard to control, the massive amount of pulmonary lung inflammation, and these people die. And they saw that one of the major cytokines that mediates this is something called IL-6 Interleukin six, very pro-inflammatory. So it’s one of the major cytokines that causes this massive inflammation and that helps mediate the death of a lot of these people.

And there are IL-6 inhibitors that are being used for over-inflamed conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis. And they found that giving some of these IL-6 inhibitors improved the outcome of some of these patients. So IL-6 started taking a central stage in all of this. Well, that kind of really kind of perked up my ears, because I also knew that one of the major mediators that caused the release of IL-6 is leptin. That when a person… and you’re aware of my interest in leptin, you know, I wrote a book about this 15 years ago, and talked about some of this – leptin itself is a cytokine.

And leptin is produced in a lot of tissues, but mostly in fat, and it predisposes to visceral fatness that the vast majority, ninety nine percent of people who are overweight and obese have too much leptin, and leptin resistance and all that fat is producing a lot of leptin. And it doesn’t just cause the person to become more fat, but it puts fat in the wrong places, especially visceral fat, the apple shape, and visceral fat is what’s really inflammatory.

[00:04:46.720]

So all these cytokines, inflammatory cytokines that are being produced, it isn’t just from fat, but it’s from visceral fat. And visceral fat is caused from high leptin and leptin resistance. Well, high leptin and leptin resistance is not only in obese people who are predisposed to Covid-19, but also in diabetics, also in hypertensive patients, also in the elderly. Everybody, every condition that predisposes to covid-19 is very likely, if almost assuredly, going to have high leptin and leptin resistance.

And so if one is just looking at a correlation, I think the correlation there would be much higher than with ACE anyway. But not only is it going to be a correlation, you’re going to see a scientific basis for causation. OK, and that’s really important because, as I mentioned, leptin itself is a cytokine and very pro- inflammatory and mediates the expression of other cytokines that are pro-inflammatory, particularly IL 6. So here you have an explanation for the cytokine storm that’s killing everybody.

However, it goes even deeper than that, because although we know now that leptin is very correlated with obesity and that leptin resistance underlies the vast majority, probably ninety five or higher. Ninety nine

percent of obese people, overweight people, anybody who’s overweight is going to be leptin resistant with high leptin. I guess what isn’t common knowledge, and certainly among the vast majority of physicians who barely know anything about leptin, unfortunately, because there are no drugs to treat leptin resistance.

And so, unfortunately, what gets known are those things that are going to produce money, that will make spending millions of dollars on studies worthwhile and so leptin isn’t looked at. There’s no money to be made by improving leptin sensitivity. But leptin is also integrally, intimately involved with the immune system. And so one of the things, the main thing that you want to do with covid or any infection, both to prevent it and to improve your outcome once you get it, is to have a strong, robust immune system.

And you cannot have a strong, robust immune response when you have high leptin as a result of leptin resistance. It’s impossible. And that’s because we know now that leptin receptors, meaning leptin, influences virtually every immune aspect. It’s found in both the innate immune system and the adaptive immune system. It’s found in monocytes and macrophages and natural killer cells and T cells, every type of white blood cell that helps to mediate our immune response is leptin responsive.

[00:08:09.130]

And the problem there when you’re leptin resistant is you kind of lose the orchestration. And so, for instance, we know now that high leptin and leptin resistance is extremely involved in all autoimmune diseases. When the immune system is attacking one’s own tissues. So, it’s involved in lupus and rheumatoid arthritis and greatly involved in multiple sclerosis and in animal models of multiple sclerosis, they find that there’s a huge upsurge in leptin prior to the onset of M.S. And if you keep it down and it won’t get M.S. And so if you keep leptin down, the predisposition to rheumatoid arthritis and lupus has been found to be much less.

And that leptin greatly influences what are called t-regulatory cells to kind of put the brakes on the immune system. And so when you become leptin resistant, you end up having fewer Treg cells or fewer Treg activity both, and if you don’t have enough Treg cells, the immune system goes wild, which is what happens in covid-19 when people die that NK killer cells, natural killer cells, which are one of the first lines of defence against all infections, virus, bacteria and cancer…

There’s a lot about cancer in my new book, and that natural killer cells become desensitized to leptin and cannot function properly. So when you become leptin resistant, natural killer cells become leptin resistant also by overexposure to leptin. Kind of like being in a smelly room, pretty soon you can’t smell. And so, if you’re overexposed to noise, you lose your hearing. So basically, high leptin, high insulin, it can be considered noise, too much noise and more noise cells are exposed to the more they kind of lose their hearing, so they don’t listen to insulin, which is how the vast majority of people become insulin resistant and diabetic.

But then they also become leptin resistant and then the hypothalamus can’t listen to leptin properly. Leptin pretty much controls all aspects of the hypothalamus, including the sympathetic nervous system, which also helps regulate the immune system. Sympathetic nervous system then also then will cause more vasoconstriction and hypertension and things like that. So leptin has huge properties, helps to regulate the thymus, and the thyroid, and reproductive activity. All of these things that are normally regulated by the hypothalamus are very much regulated by leptin also.

Again, goes way beyond just regulating fat storage and appetite, which was the first thing that leptin was found to be integral. And we know the effect goes way beyond that. And so what I really want to get across here is that rather than looking at ACE inhibitors and ACE receptor blocker drugs as being the instigating factor in people getting more covid disease. I think we need to let that go because I think it’s preventing doctors and researchers from looking at other potentially greater sources of problem.

[00:11:49.570] – Ivor Cummins

You say potentially greater there. But to be honest, I mean, the leptin-insulin axis, as you described, of course, a whole lot more… is I would guess, vastly more important.

[00:12:06.490] – Dr. Ron Rosedale

I would say that the chances of high leptin and leptin resistance in those people who have the worst outcomes with covid is going to be getting close to 100 percent. I mean, there could certainly be other things. A person can be born with immune deficiencies and there can certainly be other problems that have COPD because they smoked all their life.

And, of course, they’re going to be more prone to any respiratory difficulties. I’m not talking about those people. I’m talking about people who don’t have obvious respiratory difficulty or who who don’t have obvious immune problems because they’ve been on immune suppressing drugs for autoimmune diseases and taking chemotherapy or they’ve taken chemotherapy for cancer or things like that, which destroys the immune system. So I’m not talking about those people that obviously have secondary, so-called comorbidities, comorbidities that would predispose to disease.

I’m talking about people who don’t have obvious weaknesses that would predispose them to a worse outcome. To me, though, they would have an obvious weakness if it were just measured. And that’s the key. It’s easy to measure. You know, it is in the blood. Just measure leptin, people. Just please measure leptin and measure it accurately. And if they if it’s measured accurately and it is high, bringing it down will greatly improve the outcome of these people.

I’m absolutely sure that that is the case and it will greatly reduce the incidence of this cytokine storm. It has to. It itself is a cytokine. It itself mediates much of this inflammatory storm that people are seeing. It helps mediate the release of IL-6. You know, everything that happens to these patients scientifically is

connected to leptin, high leptin, leptin resistance attenuates, greatly diminishes the proper immune response. It makes it weaker. And it makes it less accurate.

And by that I mean also that when you have high leptin and leptin resistance, it’s like having an assault rifle and just, you know, you might kill some viruses, but you’re going to kill a whole lot of healthy things, too. And so the collateral damage is going to be really great. And that’s what ends up killing people. Basically, collateral damage from the inflammation, high inflammation might help get rid of some of the virus, but it also gets rid of the person, too.

So you don’t really want that.

[00:14:51.120] – Ivor Cummins

Ideally. And, you know, I put out a survey and I got a lot of abuse for this on Twitter many weeks ago, early on into this. And I was thinking primarily around insulin resistance, which is obviously intimately connected. I tend to always think of insulin when I should be thinking the leptin, but that’s just the way…

[00:15:07.630] – Dr. Ron Rosedale

They’re very connected too. And I should actually have mentioned insulin a little bit more than this also. But I know that even more than insulin, leptin is probably more connected with inflammation in the immune system than even insulin is.

[00:15:22.800] – Ivor Cummins

So it’s more proximate to the real causal loops here that you’re talking about. But I suppose for the person in the street, insulin resistance, leptin resistance, hyper insulinemia, high leptin, they’re so connected for most pathological challenges that they’re all. Yeah, but, you know, I put out a survey and I said, imagine there’s a thought experiment. I remember Einstein used to do these. And I said, imagine the next four to six weeks as this thing embarks upon the world.

Imagine people only had access to meat, fish and eggs for the next six weeks. So suddenly all these leptin resistant, insulin resistant people hugely exposed… Well, within a few weeks, their leptin and insulin are going to be shooting down. You know, what effect might that have on the severity of the impact? I said very high, medium or low. And the answer is, I think, as you say, of course, it would have a massive effect if in the next few weeks people only eat meat, fish and eggs because all of this system dysfunction would rapidly start collapsing and the outcomes would be relatively much better with every passing week.

[00:16:37.260] – Dr. Ron Rosedale

With every passing day. And that’s another point I really want to make. Even people now who have heard about leptin, you know, it’s taken a long time because there aren’t any drugs really to to to modulate its

effect. Its effect is really only through diet. Leptin is produced by fat mostly, but also produced in other tissues, but mostly in fat. I had a meeting here in India with a bunch of very influential doctors and one of them said, yeah, you know, leptin is important, but it takes it takes months to bring it down.

And the prevailing thought is that leptin is produced by fat. The more fat you have, the higher the leptin and that you have to then lose fat. In other words, you lose weight. They really mean lose fat to bring leptin down. And this is the fact that is not appreciated and that is it. Leptin levels are mediated by two factors, certainly one is the amount of fat, the more fat you have, the more leptin you will produce… to a point.

But even a greater effect is the secretion of leptin from fat is even more mediated by what you eat. I mean, what you ate that day. In other words, there’s a spike in leptin that people don’t know about and appreciate. So if you eat high carbohydrates or too much protein, actually it will cause a spike in leptin. That spike in leptin isn’t as rapid as, for instance, insulin, which goes up an hour.

Maybe peaks in two hours or three hours, depending on how instant sensitive a person. Leptin might take 12 hours. But regardless, it’s independent of how much fat a person has. And so you continue to spike leptin, you’ll double your leptin. Even higher if you eat a high carbohydrate, high protein meal (carbohydrates probably more than protein) to cause your leptin to go way up. And I personally believe it is those spikes and leptin beyond the leptin that is produced by the amount of fat a person has, the spikes in leptin, the continual spikes in leptin, day in and day out and day in and day out, that end up causing leptin resistance.

[00:19:06.160]

And then when you get leptin resistant, your hypothalamus can’t hear leptin. It thinks you’ve got too little leptin, and that means it thinks that you have to grow fat. And so it makes you make more fat, and prevents the burning of the fat you have and wants you to be hungry so you make more fat. And that’s how you get fat. Your brain doesn’t know how much fat you have. It thinks you have too little when you have too much.

It thinks that you need to be eating more and making more fat. And so it makes you hungry. And so that’s how people get fat. But what isn’t appreciated is that it isn’t the excess fat that is causing this. It is a spike in leptin that is causing this from the meals that they ate. But the key there is that you can bring it down in one day. And I’ve measured it and measured it 20 years ago, more than 20 years ago, that they showed me within one day I dropped people’s leptins in half.

Now, for insulin, it would take about a week to come down. Leptin went down significantly earlier than insulin did. And so, as you mentioned, certainly insulin and leptin and are very closely tied together and the diet for either one, either insulin resistance and leptin resistance and to bring either insulin or leptin down basically is the same. And they work together, certainly. But a lot of times insulin will raise leptin. Well indeed, it will.

Leptin will also raise insulin. It has to do with the sympathetic nervous system. We know that leptin independently increases gluconeogenesis, increases glucose by the liver. And so they’ve shown that leptin itself can be used as a treatment for diabetes. In animals that make no insulin, you can bring sugars down by treatment with leptin itself. And so it has to do with the sympathetic nervous system. And the vagus nerve innervates, you know, all of the viscera, including the liver.

And so leptin is really important. You can bring it down to one day by following the type of diet you mentioned – high fat, moderate protein, very low carbohydrate diet. You do it, in one day and you’re going to bring your leptin levels down to half of what it was. And if they would do that to people in the hospital, I think that you will see a vast improvement. And the incidence of this cytokine storm, when you bring leptin down, is going to go way down.

[00:21:29.460]

The improvement in the immune system, which ultimately has to happen, is going to go way up. And I think that the outcome is going to be great. But there are no drugs involved in what I just said. None. And ultimately, I hope that the morality in wanting to help hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people will kind of take over and the monetary aspect of this will hopefully take a back seat, so they can look at some of these therapies that are not going to make companies vast amounts of money.

And I also should mention when we were talking about the immune system you mentioned eggs, eating a lot of eggs. So one of the reasons you want eat a bunch of eggs is for the cholesterol. And so when people are taking cholesterol lowering drugs, which many of these people are on also. All these people, they’re thinking that we’re taking ACE inhibitors are all on cholesterol lowering drugs too. Cholesterol lowering drugs impair your immune system. What?

Well, I know I’ve heard that, and it’s going around recently, that LDL itself can help kill viruses. I don’t think it works that way. I think that any cells… you cannot make a new cell without cholesterol. Cholesterol is an integral part of our cell membranes. And so if you want to increase your immune response, you have to make white blood cells. Your immune cells have to multiply very rapidly. You cannot multiply white blood cells as rapidly when you don’t have enough cholesterol, when your own liver has to manufacture cholesterol, which is a very complex molecule, it takes a while. It’s much easier to just eat it and then use it and then make white blood cells rapidly. And if you don’t eat enough cholesterol or if you’re taking cholesterol lowering drugs, you your immune response is going to be dampened, it’s going to be slower. Your outcome is going to be more poor. And so eat eggs. Eggs are high in cholesterol. Cholesterol is good for you. You can’t live without it. As I say, there’s no cell in your body that can live without cholesterol.

It’s not the culprit in cardiovascular disease either. And again, we don’t have time to talk about that. I’m sure you’ve talked about it eloquently in the past. So we won’t. So eat enough cholesterol.

[00:24:03.430] – Ivor Cummins

And cholesterol comes in some of the healthiest foods in the planet anyway, so you’re you’re simultaneously eating healthy foods. The egg is a great example. If you switch to eggs only just for the next week, and you also did a little bit of fasting behaviour, so you’re eating sparingly, imagine the difference in seven days’ time to these metrics we’re talking about. And you’re signaling optimization in your immune system. It would be dramatically different, but people think that’s woohoo!

[00:24:36.130] – Dr. Ron Rosedale

It’s not at all. This is this is hard core basic science. Yeah, no question about it. In fact, oddly enough, in South India, my diet is known as the egg diet, because many of them are vegetarians, but some of them will at least eat eggs. And so to get their protein, they’ll eat an egg. And look at the egg. An egg evolved through eons of evolution that selected the most essential nutrients to initiate and sustain life early on. And so what does an egg have? The highest amount of cholesterol of any known food, you know, and that’s not coincidence, you know, evolution in nature didn’t put two hundred and fifty six milligrams of cholesterol in an average egg so that people could start off with heart disease. It put it there because, as I mentioned, you can’t make new cells without cholesterol. And of course, when you’re initiating life, your cells have to divide rapidly so that that foetus can grow.

And so the things that are in the egg are also essential. And what does an egg not have? It has zero carbohydrate. It has high cholesterol and virtually no carbohydrate, because carbohydrate is a non- essential nutrient, we don’t need it. And so nature knows not to even put it there. It would just take up space.

[00:26:01.130] – Ivor Cummins

And you know, eggs, I always say to people when they talk about superfoods, they talk about kale and leaves and just this kind of stupid stuff, but there’s no question about it, you want to talk a superfood -an egg, organ meats. I mean, no brainer. It’s obvious.

[00:26:19.670] – Dr. Ron Rosedale

The incredible edible egg. Yeah. Best food you can eat and especially for covid disease, you know, and then you want to also take some micronutrients. Also, we want to make sure you have enough C and zinc and and things like that. And in fact, the manufacture of ACE-2, for instance, which is anti-inflammatory and the we’ve mentioned is associated with longer life, requires zinc. And so, you know, in many aspects of the immune system. So make sure you have enough zinc,

[00:26:52.700] – Ivor Cummins

Magnesium, probably pretty good to be topped up on too.

[00:26:56.740] – Dr. Ron Rosedale

Yeah, I’m kind of locked down here. I didn’t expect to be here as long as I have been and I am lacking a lot of my supplements I typically would have. And one of those, in fact, the one that I am most missing is my magnesium supplements. I don’t have it. So I’m eating a lot of green vegetables. And to me the advantage of green vegetables green is from chlorophyll. Chlorophyll is chelated magnesium. That is, it’s a very absorbable form of magnesium.

And so one of the benefits, people who are on a vegetarian diet, which has some benefits, a lot of it is bad because they take in so many sugar-forming carbohydrates. And sugar, by the way, also impairs the immune system. Forget about everything else – sugar just by itself, impairs the immune system. And it does so in many ways, you know, sugar glycates, glycates all sorts of proteins, including antibodies and things like that, surface receptors… Glycates mean – when when sugar combines with proteins or DNA or even some fat molecules, it sticks to it. Sugar is very reactive molecules. You get a sugar molecule – it’s got six carbons, hydrogen and OH (hydroxyl). And that’s considered one of the more powerful free radicals, got six of them, one on each carbon. And so it’s very reactive, very reactive molecule. It’s very pro-oxidant. And it increases inflammation and impairs our ability to mount a strong immune response.

[00:28:34.250] – Ivor Cummins

There’s a couple of great human studies on that as well, I don’t think too many years ago, but they show the acute effects, even not even chronic, which is a disaster with sugar, but the acute effects of a high sugar meal and then measuring the immune system components on activity directly after. And there’s the dramatic effect? So this is core science.

[00:28:54.650] – Dr. Ron Rosedale

We’re not talking about inflammation, we’re not talking about insulin resistance and leptin resistance that it causes, which takes months or decades. We’re talking about an immediate effect, within hours, you’re impairing the immune function, which also means that you can correct that impairment within hours. You know, so again, we’re not talking about a long term effect here when people are having an acute illness, and then days and weeks matter a great deal. Yes, you can still have an extremely powerful effect on the immune system and inflammation by changing your diet right now, today in the hospital.

[00:29:40.310]

And yet. I will bet you that bunches of patients in the ICU are being put on D5W, dextrose and water, sugar. Being mainline sugar water is going to raise insulin, is going to raise leptin, and going to devastate the immune system, and that’s a sin. You know, they’re doing the opposite of what ought to be done. So simple. Don’t give D5W. There’s a lot of other alternatives. Lactated ringers even, one could give, and there’s other things.

Give them a diet that is going to lower insulin and lower leptin. But none of this is known. And unfortunately, even doctors that know about this to some extent, don’t appreciate how powerful it is, just changing the diet.

[00:30:35.790] Ivor Cummins

Absolutely, Ron. And the speed of response to a healthier immune system and a healthier physiology to deal with this disaster literally eight hours today, certainly after a week or two, a dramatic change in your potential susceptibility.

And I just remember many years ago with Dr. Steve Horvitz in New York or New Jersey, pal of mine, got me a suite of tests, and I wanted to see low leptin and high adiponectin and low insulin. And sure I did. In fact, my leptin was flagged with an asterisk, because it was kind of on the low end of the population distribution. And my adiponectin, which you want high, obviously, and the opposite way to leptin, was up at 20 plus and also flagged.

Now, that’s a result. But you could go towards that result within a week or two of dumping all processed food on ultra-processed food, eating meat, fish, eggs, vegetables with our minerals and other nutrients, and maybe fasting a little to hypercharge the process. Within a week, you could be a different person immunologically and in every way.

[00:31:46.140] – Dr. Ron Rosedale

Yeah. And again, I would say it would take you a week or two to kind of maximize your effects, but even in one day you can greatly improve it. So, you know, if they would just change the IV and change the diet of people who are in the hospital with this disease, it could make a huge difference and of course, anybody at home can do that themselves. Again, no drugs involved here. And because of that, you’re going to be less apt to hear about this.

And that’s, you know, to say it’s a shame is really an understatement.

[00:32:28.300] – Ivor Cummins

Yeah, it is for sure. And you know what? What I’ve heard about people in acute care in ICU, I mean, that’s really tricky to talk about. Serious stuff. But people who have not yet got it or have it mildly, I mean, that’s kind of, as the Americans say, a no brainer. But the other thing is that the intervention that we’re talking about, it can’t even be called unusual, because it’s the elimination of ultra-processed foods and sugars, refined carbs and factory seed oils, which we all accept, are really bad, in general, and it’s replacing it with real foods.

So there’s no possible risk to doing this. And all the science, as you say, Ron, suggests an enormous upside. I mean, it’s hard to even argue with if someone wants to argue with.

[00:33:16.460] – Dr. Ron Rosedale

And yet they still do it only because a high carbohydrate, low fat diet has been dogma for so long, it just takes doctors a long time to change, just to do something different, even when faced with something that is, like you say, ought to be obvious.

You know, I’ll give you a little story. Well, first of all, I want to mention that keeping insulin down, keeping insulin and signalling and leptin signalling down, you know, improving, I should say, insulin and leptin signalling has for decades now been associated with increased lifespan in laboratory animals. I mean, it’s integral. The insulin pathway was the first anti-aging pathway that was ever found in laboratory animals back in the early 90s. Leptin in multicellular organisms has found to be integral too. You improve leptin sensitivity, you bring leptin down, animals live longer. It’s integral because it helps you burn fat.

Burning fat, I mentioned early on, was integral to being healthy and extending lifespan. And you can’t burn fat unless insulin and leptin or down. So keep it down. You burn more fat and less sugar and you’re going to be healthy. But I remember just tell this one little story before my computer runs out of juice, unfortunately, doesn’t have a lot of juice left. So, that might be good because I’ll keep talking forever about. When was it? I think in the mid 1990s, earlier, maybe ninety four, something like that, I was doing research on insulin and measuring insulin on my patients and found that lowering insulin had all sorts of beneficial effects.

[00:35:02.830]

And the doctor I was working with, John Wilson, a wonderful doctor, said that I need to tell people this. He was head of a society called the Great Lakes College of Advancement in Medicine, and they were having their annual meeting in a month or something, said you’ve got to speak. And I said, I remember being reluctant, you know, not because I was embarrassed and not because I was scared of speaking, but because I said people are going to laugh me off the stage.

It’s so obvious, you know, why feed sugar to a diabetic? You know, he was watching me totally reverse diabetes using a high fat, low carbohydrate diet, which you have to understand at this… you know, this is 90s, early to mid 90s, where a high fat diet was thought to be a killer. Everything was high carbohydrate, low fat. Nobody was giving a high fat diet at this point.

You know, people I guess Atkins had come out with a low carb diet, but it was everybody was following high protein, high protein. There were two or three other people in the world that were advocating low carbohydrate, but they were all high protein. Now, I was just doing high fat and that was… But anyway, I was embarrassed to go on stage and talk about this, because I felt the doctors would laugh me off the stage, because it was so obvious.

You know, they must know. I know that it wasn’t common to say don’t eat, don’t give carbohydrates to a diabetic, but it’s sugar. Why would you feed sugar to a diabetic? You know, it’s got to be obvious to me. And he said, no, it’s not. You know, tell people. Nobody’s heard of any of this. And so I did. And it was a very popular talk. And sure enough, nobody heard any of it, it surprised me.

And then I went to Europe and talked in Europe and Belgium, and nobody around the world had heard of a high fat diet helping disease. But it made you know, it certainly influenced people. And I was sure then, that, you know, the science that I gave was quite extensive and very foundational. And I was sure at that point that a higher fat, low carb diet, certainly for diabetics, would have to take up. Why feed sugar to a diabetic and then give them drugs to lower the sugar?!

[00:37:29.560] – Ivor Cummins

And that made no sense, you know. So I said, all right, you know, I’ve covered it. People know about it. I can go back into the woodwork and it’ll take off now, you know, now that it was shown to people. No! No! To this day, decades later, it’s still big news that a low carbohydrate, high fat diet lowers blood sugar and can reverse diabetes. Now, I keep seeing stuff in Science Today that, whoa, this is big news that was just found that a high fat diet can help diabetes and help cardiovascular disease and all these other things, you know. So thirty years hence, it it still hasn’t taken hold.

[00:38:13.710] – Dr. Ron Rosedale

So, doctors have a hard time changing what they think they know. I think early on I mentioned that. I don’t know if it got on tape or not, but, you know, one of the things that they have to do to advance any type of science is to unteach people, you know, teach people what they think is not true. No, take it away, stop polluting your mind with these untruths, so that then something that is more truthful can enter. And that’s a hard thing to do.

And I’m currently writing a book that’s over a thousand pages and that’s too long for most people. And so I’m trying to have an abridged version, too. It’s difficult because I would say at least two thirds of it is to unteach people, show people why, heart disease is not a disease of cholesterol, and osteoporosis is not a disease of calcium, and diabetes is not a disease of blood sugar and so on. There’s things much deeper and more important and it takes time to unteach people.

But I feel that’s really important, especially in the health profession. They have to understand that what they think they know is wrong. And take it away. And then replace it with something better, like we did here. Take this ACE story away, replace it with leptin and insulin and immune function and things like that. It’s a much better story. It fits science far more robustly and we can save hundreds of thousands of lives if people would just do it. And so I’m about to run out of juice here.

[00:40:02.400] – Ivor Cummins

Well, I’m thinking I’m listening to you so closely and I’m also thinking of your battery. So, yeah, I think in terms of the future, the last 30 years have been squandered, as you say, and very little movement. But your book and other books that touch on the facts and the own teaching, if you will, are all going to keep moving it forward. And in fairness, private industry and capitalism, the Virta health group who are for profit, and multiple groups like that now, there’s one in Ireland wants to go into America. Private industry is beginning to get on the real science and I think that will be…

[00:40:40.800] – Dr. Ron Rosedale

The people behind Virta, I know started to kind of listening to what I had to say quite a long time ago. And so that’s a good thing. And yeah, as you mentioned, ultimately to sustain itself, you have to make some money. Otherwise it can’t sustain, unfortunately, you know, but well, as you know… Yeah. You know, nothing wrong with making (some money)

[00:41:08.490] – Ivor Cummins

Yeah, for sure, and especially when the other side who are continuing to keep the false paradigms alive, are making an absolute fortune, then the side that’s correct needs to be probably at least some element commercial. Otherwise it’ll always get hammered down. But listen, Ron, this is fantastic. Before your battery runs out and let us know when the book’s available, I’ll get it out there. And for everyone else listening as well, hopefully learned the importance of low carb and healthy diets, real food, no processed food, not just for cardiovascular disease and, you know, diabetes and all the other monitoring chronic diseases you have, but also for even this current challenge, there are very, very salient.

And by the way, Ron, just the last thing we’re asking everyone, we have ExtraTimeMovie.com we have a new movie out and it involves a lot of what we talked about being applied to actually stop calcifications, stop heart disease progression in people and even potentially reverse it. So ExtraTimeMovie.com Great if people could share it and get it out there and it’s all in tune with what we’re talking about.

[00:42:18.400] – Dr. Ron Rosedale

Great. Yeah.

[00:42:19.920] – Ivor Cummins

Great stuff, Ron. We’ll circle back in a week or two, I hope. Maybe.

[00:42:23.670] – Dr. Ron Rosedale

Yeah, that would be great. I would love to. Yeah, let’s do it. And I see, you know what’s happening with covid and everything else and see if we’ve made a dent.

[00:42:31.660] – Ivor Cummins

Excellent. Thanks so much, Ron, delightful pleasure, a privilege talking to you again. Bye now.

[00:42:37.720] – Dr. Ron Rosedale

Thanks for having me, I appreciate your forum.

[00:42:42.060] – Ivor Cummins

Thanks for tuning in, guys, if you’re watching on YouTube, you can see my subscribe button in the middle of the screen and go to extra time movie dot com to see our fascinating new documentary on stopping and reversing heart disease.