343: Moving Forward In Medicine with Dr. Michael Klaper

00:00:00 Dr. Klaper: If you raise a child on a diet of whole plant foods, which is certainly doable, breastfeed them till one and a half, two years old and then transition them onto fruits and veggies and beans and nuts, et cetera, nut butters, et cetera, then you certainly raise a child. I've seen now two generations of healthy plant-based kids grow up in the big and strong and clear and bright folks. But the point is that child should never develop.

00:00:26 Maya: This is the Healthy Lifestyle Solutions podcast, and I'm your host, Maya Acosta. If you're willing to go with me, together we can discover how simple lifestyle choices can help improve our quality of life and increase our longevity in a good way. Let's get started.

00:00:45 Dr. Riz: Well, hi, everyone. Welcome back to the Healthy Lifestyle Solutions podcast. Today for my segment in Doctor in the House, I have a wonderful guest who you will enjoy. Dr. Michael Klaper is a graduate of the University of Illinois College of Medicine in Chicago. He practiced acute care medicine in Hawaii, Canada, California, Florida, and New Zealand. After a 50-year career as a primary care physician, Dr. Klaper, who is a member of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine, now focuses on sharing with fellow health professionals the science of how health-promoting food and lifestyle choices can arrest and reverse chronic disease.

00:01:20 Dr. Riz: A longtime radio host and a pilot, Dr. Klaper has served as nutrition advisor to NASA's programs for space colonists on the moon and Mars and on the nutrition task force of the American Medical Students Association. On his website, DoctorKlaper.com, visitors can find the latest nutrition information through his numerous articles and videos and learn about his Moving Medicine Forward initiative to promote applied nutrition being taught in medical schools. Dr. Michael Klaper is also our guest of honor at an upcoming culinary medicine workshop. It is my honor and I'm very excited to have you here. Let's welcome, Dr. Klaper.

00:01:59 Dr. Klaper: Well, thank you very much, Riz. I really appreciate it. It's an honor to be on your fine broadcast as well.

00:02:05 Dr. Riz: Yeah, you know, I'd like to start just by personalizing this for the audience in that I think I first met you on the holistic holiday at Sea Cruise about four or five years ago. And I was just so excited to see your name on the agenda. And when I started to make my list of what I'm going to go see, I was like, wow, he's doing four different lectures. You were the hardest working lecturer on the cruise, I'll tell you that. And so I really enjoyed that. And I got to meet you. So I was really excited. I got to meet your wife, Alese, and participated in some of her yoga classes that she had put on. So that was a really wonderful event. And I, you know, really enjoyed getting to know you and, you know, having developed our relationship since then. So, you know, you've done so much. You know, tell us what, you know, just right now, what's going on in your world, what you're focusing on? You know, what's going on with you?

00:03:15 Dr. Klaper: Oh, my well, sir, as you know, we both deal with the general public and their medical travails. And it's becoming blazingly blindingly obvious that the majority of patients that you and I see for the standard Western diseases, high blood pressure, diabetes, clot arteries, obesity, inflammatory diseases, the vast majority of them are either outright cause or least significantly been made worse by the standard American diet that the patients are eating every four hours, a steady flood of animal protein and animal fats and dairy and oils and sugar and processed foods and salt, floods through the tissues and causes so many imbalances that clog arteries as you deal with, but also again, like this obese interfere with insulin production set off inflammation.

00:04:11 Dr. Klaper: I've got a t-shirt that I wear when I lecture the medical students saying, it's the food, it's been the food all along, you know? And so with that background, we're asking what do I do? I realized that as much as I love acute care medicine, I've made my career dealing with acute problems, you've got to really get to the root of the problem and it's the diet and lifestyle. And so I realized that the point that we can really make the greatest difference is with the doctors themselves. We need for so many reasons to make a society wide transition to a diet that is predominantly whole plant foods. We're not going to become vegan overnight, it'd be nice, but the majority of foods that goes down our throat should have grown out of the ground and that puts a very healthy food stream through our systems that really starts reversing these diseases.

00:05:16 Dr. Klaper: But no one's mentioning this to the public, it's really not widely promulgated. And I realized that the one major bottleneck is our noble profession, the doctors. We never mention nutrition to our patients. The patient leaves with a prescription in their hand for more insulin or more, higher doses of statins, but nobody really talks to them about the food. The doctors are eating it themselves too. And I realized this to doctors, especially the medical students. Before Western medical thoughts seizes their brain there, the acupuncture point is reaching the med students before, while they're still open to the idea that nutrition is important.

00:06:00 Dr. Klaper: So when you ask what's been occupying my time lately, it's our non-profit initiative that you mentioned, Moving Medicine Forward, where I'm going to the medical schools and the medical students by Zoom and in person and giving them the lecture I wish someone had given me 50 years ago when I was a first year medical student telling me and I tell the students, you know, before you order another $500 set of blood tests and another $1,000 scan, ask your patient who's sitting in front of you, overweight, diabetic, hypertensive, clogged up and inflamed, what they ate yesterday. And if it's all full of burgers and buffalo wings and pepperoni pizzas, that's why they're sitting in front of you doctor with these medical conditions, send them to the plant based dietitian, let her do the counseling, let her show them the videos, let her take the shot. You see them back in a couple of weeks and see if they're not leaner and healthier.

00:06:58 Dr. Klaper: That's the way medicine should be practiced in the 21st century. That's like Johnny Appleseed. Those are the seeds I want to plant in these young doctors to the heads and hearts that it's not a matter of just managing your patient's chronic disease. You want to heal these patients then get real about why they're sitting in front of you and it's the food they're eating. So this is our revolutionary medicine, a message that we're trying to get out and we're having a good bit of success doing it. I'll be glad to talk to you about it but when you ask what I'm doing, it's I'm devoting full time to our Moving Medicine Forward initiative to get this word into the awareness of the medical students and doctors.

00:07:38 Dr. Riz: Wonderful, wonderful. It's interesting that you say that's a revolutionary message, right? And it's such a simple message. And a couple of things that, you know, number one, we were working with you to try to do some of that Moving Medicine Forward and then unfortunately the pandemic hit and slowed us down a little bit, but I'm glad to see that you're continuing to pursue that and hopefully we can help you as you move through Texas and hit some of the medical schools. And then something else you said was very interesting is you said send them to the nutritionist and then see them back in a couple of weeks. And to me, that's fascinating because, you know, are you implying that just within a couple of weeks, we'll see changes?

00:08:20 Dr. Klaper: Oh, it's absolutely remarkable. One of the most exciting transformations in medicine is what happens when we adopt the diet that basically our bodies are meant to run on. We've got basically the same digestive system that our gorilla and bonobo cousins have. They're up in the trees eating leaves and fruits and vegetation all day. They pass these big soft stools and they don't develop clogged arteries. They don't develop type 2 diabetes. They don't develop Crohn's disease. And it's, you know, it's a “natural diet” for humans. Well, when you do, you start running that through the system instead of the meat and the dairy and the oils and processed foods. It is just remarkable.

00:09:04 Dr. Klaper: I used to work at True North Health Center in Northern California and people would come in with the same class of diseases, obesity, diabetes, hypertension. We put them on a diet of whole plant foods and within days, but certainly within a couple of weeks, you see the difference. The obesity begins to melt away. The arteries relax and open up. The high blood pressure starts coming down. The insulin receptors start opening up. Their diabetes starts getting better. Their skin starts clearing up. The eczema, the psoriasis, the acne starts clearing up. The joints stop hurting so much. The asthmatic folds stop wheezing so much. The migraine headaches get better. They turn into normal healthy people right in front of your eyes. It's the most exciting transformation in medicine.

00:09:55 Dr. Klaper: Really, as you know, I tell the med students, what greater gift could you want for your patients? Why are you going into medicine if not to help them truly regain their health and adopting a whole food plant-based diet is square one to do that.

00:10:09 Dr. Riz: Right. I mean, as an acute care physician, it's fascinating to me. I mean, we put patients on medications for years and it's not really impacting it tremendously. You know, it's maybe reducing the hemoglobin A1C one percent or reducing the blood pressure five to ten points or reducing the cholesterol 15 points, but they still have all those diseases. And here we got, you know, you're talking about a lifestyle change where these things go away in a matter of weeks. And that's fascinating to me. And that's a great message to share with our medical students.

00:10:44 Dr. Klaper: Absolutely. And you remember when, and it's adhered to all medical students, but when you're, especially the second, third year medical student, boy, you want those medical tools. You want to learn how to use diuretics to make that edema go away. You want to learn how to use antibiotics to clear out that pneumonia. Well, I can tell that, how would you like the most powerful therapeutic tool of all? That will not only ameliorate these symptoms that are so dramatic, but actually cure the patient's disease. How is like, that tool in your armament area, with that arrow in your quiver? And it gets their attention. It really opens their heads up to this, again, it's a very powerful healing technique. It's the best kind of medicine.

00:11:28 Dr. Riz: Right, right. So tell me when you're making the rounds on these medical schools, how are the students responding?

00:11:35 Dr. Klaper: Oh, it's remarkable. It's getting easier for me in a number of ways in that, in every medical school class now, there are 20 or 30 students. They've seen films like ‘Forks Over Knives’ and ‘What the Health’ and ‘Cowspiracy’. The lights on in a lot of these young folks' heads already that food is important here. And it's the nutritionally interested, lifestyle interested students who we make contact with. And they're the ones who issue the invitation. We do go ahead and run around the administration, they don't want to hear this message. We go right to the students. And so they set up the webinar, etc. And we always get 40, 50, 60, first, second, third, fourth year med students, but we always get family practice residents, surgical residents, internal medicine residents, and a few attending physicians.

00:12:38 Dr. Klaper: Also, we're getting a lot of young attendings on the staff that are already members of the American Academy of Lifestyle Medicine. They're already aware of this very powerful wind breezing through medicine now about lifestyle medicine, how powerful it is. So the students who tune in, they're kind of preselected. They are open to the message. But they need to hear a senior physician who's been in the trenches for decades saying, “This is real. Do you want to heal these patients? Here's the science behind it.” And my presentation is titled, ‘What I Wish I Learned in Medical School About Nutrition’.

00:13:15 Dr. Klaper: And we go into the science, how does a plant-based diet change inflammation? How does it melt away arterial plaque? Does it reverse diabetes? Because they will show me the science, they want to see the science behind it. And once you show it to them, “Wow, that's so beautiful. It's so elegant.” And we give them lots of resources where to follow up on this. And again, one lecture can change the course of a career. You can't unring the bell. Once you look behind the curtain, you can't pretend you don't know it's behind the curtain. So we want to tear that curtain down. So the students are very open to this. I've had very few negative comments. It's just, yeah, people get healthier on a plant-based diet. There's not much controversy about it, the truth of it is.

00:14:05 Dr. Riz: Yeah. And I think when I think about just going back in my career, I was in medical school in the late 80s and early 90s. And of course, we weren't presented with this information. And then we were the stewards of health for the next few decades. And so when people come to us about nutritional advice, we didn't have anything good. Right now, if you ask 10 different doctors nutritional advice, you're going to get 10 different answers. But what I like about what you said is there's a fair significant number of students today who are understanding this message. So they're going to be able to carry that torch forward. And there's going to be a more uniform message and a greater understanding. And this is preventive health, right? It's about preventing disease, which we should be focusing on. Everyone knows that. So I love that idea.

00:14:53 Dr. Klaper: Absolutely. If you raise a child on a diet of whole plant foods, which is certainly doable, breastfeed them until they're one and a half, two years old, and then transition them on to fruits and veggies and beans and nuts, et cetera, nut butters, et cetera, then you certainly raise a child. I've seen now two generations of healthy plant-based kids grow up into big and strong and clear and bright folks. But the point is, that child should never develop your specialty disease. They should never develop clogged arteries, they should never become obese, they should never develop hypertension, they should never develop autoimmune diseases. When you say it's the best preventive medicine, it really is. These diseases that you and I spend our careers in battle with, really shouldn't happen on a healthy plant-based diet. They should make it to a 110, lean and healthy with clean arteries and free of the maladies that you and I spend so much time treating. So yes, it's the ultimate preventive medicine. It certainly is.

00:15:55 Dr. Riz: Yeah. And I think the other thing that strikes me about all of this is it's scientific, it's evidence-based, it's backed by data. This isn't just some diet or something that people are making up. I mean, this is-

00:16:05 Dr. Klaper: No, it's not California woo-woo stuff. It's real. Yeah. There's good science behind it.

00:16:12 Dr. Riz: Yeah. So that also is– that's actually where I came from. And as you talked about, what I deal with is these people at end of life with metabolic syndrome, metabolic syndrome being that combination of obesity, hypercholesterolemia, hypertension and diabetes, and all these things together lead to bad, bad problems. The leading cause of a killer, the leading killer of Americans in the United States, is cardiovascular disease. So again, and it's striking that they're all essentially preventable, to a great extent.

00:16:45 Dr. Klaper: Absolutely. Absolutely. These are all human-made diseases and they shouldn't happen. We need to stop inflicting the suffering upon ourselves. A lot of- the word doctor comes from the word ‘doctrine’, a teacher. We're teachers. We need to teach a healthy life and healthy eating and a lot of these diseases would exit stage left there. We agree.

00:17:08 Dr. Riz: Yeah. So, but I want to bring something up and this is just for our audience to understand that we want the doctors to be on board and understand, but you don't need a doctor to be whole food plant-based do you, right?

00:17:21 Dr. Klaper: Absolutely not. Absolutely not. And I get calls and emails all the time, “Who's a plant-based doctor in my area?” And it's nice to be able to talk to your doctor who won't shake their finger at you when you talk about plant-based nutrition. But in truth, if you eat a healthy whole food plant-based diet, go out and take a walk every day in the sunshine and do good work and have love in your life, you really shouldn't have much need for a doctor. They should be able to help tape off your medicine. But after that, you know, if you have called, fall and gas your hand, go to the urgent care center and get your hands sewed up. But other than that, you shouldn't have much need for a doctor. Actually, your body is your best doctor.

00:18:05 Dr. Riz: Yeah. I always joke that we're trying to put ourselves out of business.

00:18:08 Dr. Klaper: Out of business. You bet. Fine with me.

00:18:11 Dr. Riz: That'd be a very noble cause to try to achieve. I do like that. Well, I got a question for you. Tell me about some of the most surprising things you've learned from medical practice in the last 40 years.

00:18:25 Dr. Klaper: Well, again, it kind of circles back to what we've been implying all along. But when I went to med school in the early 70s, and I would open up my big, thick black textbook of Harrison's textbook of internal medicine, and you look up these diseases, diabetes and atherosclerosis. And when I would look at the cause, etiology, inevitably I'd run into these two were, etiology unknown. We didn't know the cause of them. And second, on the clinical course, that these diseases are, remember, these two were relentlessly progressive. Once they start going, nothing slows it down. It's like a runaway freight train.

00:19:06 Dr. Klaper: So etiology unknown, relatively and that's the dogma that I implanted in my head. I could offer my patients no hope. I had no hope. There's one reason I left general practice and went into anesthesia. I was just so despondent and seeing my patients getting sicker and sicker. I didn't have anything to offer them. And again, now, after the end of a 50 year career, and I see how reversible these diseases are, I stand on the mountain. “Why didn't somebody tell me that these are reversible diseases,” that high blood pressure can be resolved and go away. Type 2 diabetes can be reversed. Clogged arteries can be reversed. That, when you say what's the most remarkable thing I learned is that these major killer diseases that when I think of all the three in the morning emergency room scenes I was in for chest pain and abdominal pain and hyperglycemia, it was… again, it was from these food related diseases. The fact that these were reversible with a healthy plant-based diet, there's something to celebrate and also tear whatever remaining hairs I have out. So that's the most exciting thing again for your viewers. And it's something to talk about with your primary care doctor. Have you been newly diagnosed with high blood pressure with type 2 diabetes? “Doc, Let's come up with a program.” “I’d like to know how are we going to reverse my high blood pressure?” “How are we going to reverse my type 2 diabetes?” “How are we going to reverse my inflammatory arthritis here?”

00:20:50 Dr. Klaper: Just the patient needs to know this, the doctor needs to know that these are largely reversible. Some depends how much damage has been done. You may not reverse every last symptom and not that every medication might disappear from your medicine cabinet. But to just open the door to the fact that so many of these severe chronic diseases have a large reversible component again, starting with your diet and your lifestyle, you're not asleep, you need a day walk every day. But the reversibility of these diseases by far is the biggest ray of light that I've run into in my medical career.

00:21:28 Dr. Riz: Yeah, absolutely fascinating to me. In fact, you know, I'd like to hear a little bit more about your time at True North. Maybe talk about some stories about, you know, people would really love to hear specifics about the reversibility. You know, I imagine you've got, you would see patients maybe for seven days, 10 days or a month and see dramatic changes. Can you share something, some of those?

00:21:53 Dr. Klaper: Oh, absolutely. Thank you. That's… Thank you. That opens the doors, lots of wonderful memories come flooding back. So True North Health Center is in Santa Rosa, California, about an hour north of San Francisco in the wine country. And it's a converted apartment complex. They have room for about 50 to 60 inpatients. And there are MDs on staff, osteopaths, chiropractors on staff. And everyone is assessed medically and their medical issues are dealt with if you are an insulin-requiring diabetic or whatever the, you know, proper medical care is given.

00:22:31 Dr. Klaper: But the baseline is that everyone when they come in, is fed a diet based on whole-plant foods. Breakfast is hearty oatmeal with fruits and nuts and seeds and some oat milk or soy milk. Lunches and dinners, there's always a big colorful salad, a hearty bowl of vegetable soup, big plates of steamed green and yellow vegetables, and some healthy starch of sweet potatoes or squash or and lots of legumes, beans, peas, chickpeas, lentils in various national and nationalities, Italian style, Mexican, Asian. And so this steady plant-based food stream that starts pouring through the person's bloodstream, meal after meal after meal. And it's like the analogy I use, like, an automotive terminology.

00:23:30 Dr. Klaper: If you had a nice gasoline burning sports car, but instead of regular gasoline, you're into the gas tank, you're pouring diesel fuel, which is kerosene, it's oily, it doesn't burn clearly. And the spark plugs follow up and the gas line clogs up and the black smoke coming out of the back of the exhaust pipe. “Oh, my car has a disease. What's wrong with my car?” Car doesn't have a disease. It's just, it's malfunctioning predictably, precisely as it would malfunction by putting the wrong fuel into the system that's assigned to run on it. That's of course what's happening in our body. And the meat and the dairy and the oils, sugar, that's the wrong fuel for this plant-burning body we have here. So when you put the right fuel in, you drain out the diesel fuel, clean off the spark plugs, open up the gas line. Boy, the engine, the machine runs great.

00:24:29 Dr. Klaper: And really, you see that within a few days, there's some, sometimes some detox symptoms. The person may get a little lightheaded, a little headache for a few days. But after three, four, five days of that, boy, you see him in the courtyard and their eyes are clear. They got a spring in their step. And usually the first thing they say, “Look, I had my first good dump in the last six months, Doc. I feel great.” And so their bowels start working really well. That certainly improves their view of the universe. But then, we take, the intern knocks on the door twice a day in everybody's room, checks their blood pressure, checks their vinyl sign. And the people on the high blood pressure, they notice that those blood pressures start coming down.

00:25:17 Dr. Klaper: And as soon as we hear, “Doc, I stood up, went to the bathroom last night, I got lightheaded, thought I might pass out.” That's the end of the blood pressure pills. And we're able to get people off medications that I was told they will take these pills the rest of their life as a lifetime medication. No, you not only can get these people off their medication, you have to get them off. They will stand up and pass out. Their blood pressure is too low. That was something I was told never happens, but it does, particularly. The same thing with our insulin requiring diabetic folks.

00:25:51 Dr. Klaper: So come in on 20 units of insulin because their insulin receptors are so clogged up with fat. Well, you stop the fats off the dairy, stop the oils, their insulin receptors open up, and suddenly they need less insulin, less insulin. And finally, their blood sugar is going down to their boots. And finally, you write your “stop in DC insulin, discontinue insulin.” The first time I wrote that order, “stop the insulin.” I thought there'd be a puff of smoke. And the ghost of my internal medicine professor would appear, say, “What did you say? Stop his insulin? Nobody gets off insulin!”

00:26:30 Dr. Klaper: Well, of course, nothing. This already happened. Yes, we get lots of people off insulin. So that was an exciting moment. The things that you never thought you'd see came to pass regularly there and in the hands of any good lifestyle medicine physician. You get to these same wonderful changes. But I always remember one morning we had a woman who had been plagued with really severe inflammatory arthritis. And she came in, she did a water fast for 10 days and then started eating. And I came in to make rounds with the interns. And she had big tears going down her cheeks. And I said, “Marilyn, what's wrong? Are you in pain?” And she says, “No, this is the first time I've been able to make a fist in 10 years. My joints are working again.” And it just melted my heart. I gave her such a big hug. And you don't hear that in most clinics.

00:27:33 Dr. Riz: No, that's got to be so gratifying because curing chronic disease is not what we do traditionally in our family practice clinics and our internal medicine clinics. They're just giving out, you know, and I hate to characterize it this way, but oftentimes just giving out pills to manage the disease. So it's got to be so gratifying to actually reverse someone's disease and have them walk out of there having been de-prescribed of multiple medications.

00:27:59 Dr. Klaper: Oh, you go to bed at night and you go, yes, great day. And that makes your whole... Now I know I became a doctor, you know, when you hear that from a patient.

00:28:08 Dr. Riz: Right, right. You know, and that kind of brings to my mind and you brought it up that, you know, back when you went to medical school, you were taught these conditions exist and they're progressive. And that was it, they didn't know the etiology of them, but we have to accept that over the past few decades, we have now begun to elucidate the causes for them. And therefore, you know, maybe our model for treating them should be different rather than just, “Okay, we don't know what causes it, so here, take a pill.” But now, “Okay, now we know what causes it. And we know that by doing this and this and this, you can actually reverse it.” And that makes a lot of sense to me. It kind of had a basic level. Unfortunately, I think our many, so many of our physicians were still trained in that kind of old model that that’s where they stick.

00:28:54 Dr. Klaper: Absolutely. And you used such a beautiful, elegant and powerful term in there, you go that I had never heard in 45 years, deprescribing. You know, what a beautiful concept why we're, you know, we're quick to reach that prescription pad. And then we prescribe like crazy here. But there comes a point, not only the patient doesn't need the medicine, that you've got to get them off the medicine. Well, there's an arch too, you can't just stop them all at once. Some of these medicines, you got to take them off, you got to do various sequences, that's the art of deprescribing. And it's so beautiful. We're starting to teach medical students that. But how wonderful it is with a positive sign that that's necessary at all, because it was, it was not part of our vocabulary growing up here as physicians. So that's a very hopeful sign that the idea of deep prescribing is now a foot in medical circles.

00:29:47 Dr. Riz: Right, right. And I can see where it's so foreign to our current practitioners, just they weren't trained that way. But I think, you know, you've got, you know, you hit the ball on the head, so to speak, that by getting to the younger physicians and helping them understand this new way of looking at things, a new paradigm that they they had the opportunity  to move forward and be healers and, and actually cure people.

00:30:14 Dr. Klaper: Yes, the term I use when I want to reach the students before “pharmacosclerosis” sets in their brain there. And you know, they think that drugs and surgery are the only treatment for diseases. Before that sets in, ask them what they ate.

00:30:31 Dr. Riz: Right. I mean, it's fascinating. I mean, we spent, I remember we spent an entire semester, no, in fact, an entire year with pharmacology. And it was an intense course. And we were learning everything about drugs and how to prescribe them and their side effects. And gosh, don't get me started on the side effects. My patients would come in on four or five or six medications for their chronic diseases. And they'll also have two or three or four medications for the side effects from those medications. So not only are you taking six meds for your diseases, you're taking four meds for the side effects from your diseases. And that's crazy.

00:31:08 Dr. Riz: But you know, yeah, I mean, I would love to see us, you know, focus, give as much time on nutrition in health as much as we give pharmacology in health, you know. And then and then also, it's striking to me how the medications themselves in general, you know, obviously, there are good medications and they're important antibiotics and other things like that. But the ones that, you know, we kind of use a lot for our chronic diseases are not nearly as effective as a change in nutrition. You know, there's nothing there's no medication out there that'll drop your cholesterol 50 or 75 points, right?

00:31:44 Dr. Klaper: Absolutely. Absolutely.

00:31:47 Dr. Riz: But diet will, in just four weeks. Right?

00:31:51 Dr. Klaper: So lower your cholesterol, stop eating somebody else's cholesterol for starters.

00:31:58 Dr. Riz: Well, to that end, what do you think about, you know, we were before we started the interview, we kind of talked about how it's, it's tough for us when we know the right message. And we want to share this with our patients. But there's such little adoption. What do you think about that? And how can that be addressed?

00:32:15 Dr. Klaper:  Oh, my homo sapiens, very… what a species, you know, the word, the term homo sapiens, sapient, the word sapient means wise, we are wisdom. If you're sapient, you're wise, the wise one. Oh my, if we were wise, we would only have to be told once by your doctor, “stop eating animals, eat a plant based diet, and comes back and see me about…” “Okay, doctor”, and there'll be the end of it, you know, and…

00:32:43 Dr. Riz: Come back and see me in 50 years, right?

00:32:47 Dr. Klaper: 50 years. Exactly. You shouldn't need me. But alas, we humans, we love the taste that we get used to, the taste that we grew up with, gets associated with family and our childhood memories. And we love the taste of the hot dog and the ice cream and all those things we ate before. And the things that we are constantly told from the advertising and from their parents and society, this is you must, you must eat meat three times a day. That this ice cream is low fat, so it's okay for you. All these ways that, that things that aren't good for us gets packaged in a way that we think they're acceptable. And we wind up paying the price.

00:33:34 Dr. Klaper: Again, it's gasoline and it's diesel fuel into a gasoline burning engine. And so you and I, as plant-based physicians, we've got this major obstacle, this major hurdle, this wall to break through to get to the patients. And this is the art of medicine. And there's, we have tools available for us that we didn't have before in every year. There's jumpstart programs, there's films, there's personal coaches, there's insurance incentives. We're nibbling away around the edges. But our society isn't really serious about it. The meat industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the medical industry make a lot of money keeping things just the way they are.

00:34:29 Dr. Klaper: And because the truth is animal agriculture needs to disappear for the planet itself. We need to get the cows off the field, let the horse come back, let the trees grow. They take carbon dioxide out of the air and turn it into solid wood. For all these reasons, animal agriculture needs to go the way of whaling and slavery. You know, something we used to do. But oh, that's, you know, ring so many bells there that, well, that's not, I'm not American. If I'm American, I get to eat my steak. And so that's part of what keeps people stuck there.

00:35:02 Dr. Klaper: Well, the young people hopefully will leap over that and not be seduced by that. They give me hope, young people in the internet. So when you ask, you know, what's it going to take? We're nibbling around the edges, but again, so far it's done on a one-by-one-by-one. Yes, that patient is sitting in front of you with the clogged arteries and he's just had a mini stroke, and he's already got chest pain. You often have his ear, “What do I need to do, doc? Tell me what I need to do.” And those are the ones who are most open to the plant-based message. And if you can link them up with a good coach or a dietician, you know, that often is what it takes.

00:35:45 Dr. Klaper: Often the wife is, ‘whatever she makes me, I'll eat’, you know? I mean, it's a matter of getting to the, and one of the first questions I ask is who does the shopping and the cooking in your house? That's such an important issue. And ask the obstacles, what's keeping you from adopting a plant-based diet? “Well, the guys at work will laugh at me and you know, you got to deal with the social issues.” There's a multifactorial issue and the physician has to be, you know, a juggler with lots of balls in the air there, but an improvisational artist to strike the right chord and help and lead that person.

00:36:32 Dr. Klaper: Now, how about just one meal a day? How about a plant-based lunch every day? Let's start with that, you know, and whatever they need to hear, whatever door you can open for them, that's the door to open and help them walk through it because nature, you know, to have a stroke and not die, you know, life certainly gets unfun at that point because people say, “Well, I'll have my heart attack and die, die, gotta die of something”. But then you have your stroke and you don't die. You have your heart attack and you don't die. And you wind up getting out of breath going to the mailbox, you'll also have your heart muscle.

00:37:09 Dr. Klaper: You want to prevent those tragedies in the patient's lives. So you listen and you talk and you find that little opening that, and you put great plant-based food in their mouths, you know, great plant-based chili and “Oh, I could eat that. That's okay. If that's plant-based food, I could eat that.” Yes. So it's quite an art to get it. But eventually, as I'm saying, you know, this is what it takes when those counseling sessions to help convince your patients. But hopefully, hopefully, this is going to be sweep through society, especially through the young people when they get, what a threat to their future existence of the meat-based diet truly is. I'm hoping that it will sweep through in music videos and talk shows and podcasts where eating meat becomes like smoking cigarettes or working or wearing fur. And if a young person orders a beef burger, his friends say, “Are you still eating that, man?” You know, then you and I won't have to wrestle with every individual patient. It'll just be what's done, what society does at this point. So that's what we're working for here. And hopefully, we’ll get there. We’ve got no other choice.

00:38:31 Dr. Riz: Right, right. And we just have to continue sharing the message and hope that it takes traction in some people and then it keeps going. You know what, what you're saying to me or what I hear is that the physician has to be more than just a doctor. They have to be kind of a guide or a coach, a life coach and guide people and also find ways to help them navigate our current world. I always say that if just simply knowing the right thing to do was all we needed, everybody would do the right thing. But there's so many things that impact our decision making. And you know, there's people who do lots of things that they know is not good for them. People smoke, people drink to excess and then people eat meat.

00:39:13 Dr. Riz: It's funny, my patients all come in, they all know that if I say, what changes do you, before I, if I don't even tell them, okay, this is what you knew, I say, “What changes do you think you need to make?” And, and the vast majority will say, “Well, I need to eat less meat” before I even ever say it. So they know it. And so they know the right thing. It's just a matter of finding a way to implement it. And like you said, there's so many factors. It's multifactorial, it's cultural, it's social, it's personal. And it is very personal, isn't it? You know?

00:39:45 Dr. Klaper: Oh, absolutely.

00:39:51 Dr. Riz: As a vascular surgeon, patients will come in and see me preoperatively for a consultation. And I might talk about cutting their carotid artery open or cutting open their belly to repair their aneurysm and their aorta, or to do major bypass operations. And these are not minor things in my elderly sick patients. And, but after one meeting, typically 15 minutes, 30 minutes, I've instilled enough confidence in them that they'll let me do it. And they're confident in it. But the minute I start talking about food and nutrition, there's a whole different story. They think I'm crazy and they, they, I like credibility, which is very, so that it's a very personal thing. And it's hard to get through.

00:40:36 Dr. Klaper: Absolutely. Funny things. What you just said is so profound. I remember through this interview, I'm going to ponder that. That's absolutely right. I mean, the procedures you do, sir, are among the most invasive of all the medicine has in our material. Yeah. And, and they'll, absolutely not. Where do you need to cut me over? But change my diet, not eat cheeseburgers?! What a radical thing you're proposing!

00:41:03 Dr. Riz: Right. That's radical, right? Yeah. Crazy. Well, so I've got a couple of other questions I've got here for you. We covered the medical students, I think. What is your, I mean, and I think we've danced around this, but very specifically, what would be your message to patients in the 21st century?

00:41:30 Dr. Klaper: Well, your body is never ‘not looking’. You can't, there's no fooling your body. You know, welcome to Camp Stop Kidding Yourself. You can't tell your body, “Look over here! I need a cheeseburger there.” “What was that?” “I didn't do anything.” Who are you kidding? Your bloodstream, your liver knows, your arteries know it. So, Shakespeare said “to thine own arteries be true.” If he didn't, he should have said that.

00:41:58 Dr. Klaper: So every meal counts, is the point. And we are plant-eating hominids. The more whole plant foods you eat, the leaner and healthier you're going to be. That's square one. That's step one. So swerve your diet to that to the greatest extent possible. Do you have to be 100% vegan? No. And if you have a little piece of meat once or twice a month, it’s… lightning probably is not going to come out of the sky and strike you dead. You have to use the V word. The vegan police are not going to show up in your door and not look in your fridge.

00:42:29 Dr. Klaper: But do the best you can. So have a salad every day. Have whole plant foods to the greatest extent possible. Get lots of legumes in your diet. And the less animal products of all types, the better. And the less processed things. Colorful packages and boxes aren't real food. Eat things that grew in the garden that you could identify. Oh, there's a tomato. There's a cucumber. That's what you want to eat there. So as long as those kind of foods are composing the majority of your food stream, you can see a little bit around the edges.

00:43:06 Dr. Klaper: But Dr. Colin Campbell wrote this wonderful book called Whole, W-H-O-L-E. And the point is, instead of focusing on this vitamin and that mineral whatever, it's the whole food stream. That gorilla eating the leaves and fruit up in the trees. It's the whole food stream going through that magnificent creature's digestive system that makes them, gives them the spectacular energy that they have in vitality. Well, again with us, it's that whole food stream. As long as it's made of whole plant foods, you're going to have very little traffic with people like Dr. Riz and myself here. Go live your life. Be healthy and happy. Stay out of the clutches of the doctors as much as you can and you should be able to do that with a healthy diet and lifestyle.

00:43:55 Dr. Riz: Yeah, yeah. That'll give me more time to go to the gym, so.

00:43:57 Dr. Klaper: Absolutely. I would go ride my bike and play my clarinet. Absolutely.

00:44:05 Dr. Riz: Well, that's I think a wonderful message. Dr. Klaper, I've really enjoyed having you join us for the show. I thought before we finish up, I'd ask you if there's websites or social media that you'd like to share with people or and also talk, you know, is there any things that you just kind of generally want to share about your initiatives or what's going on or what's coming up for you?

00:44:27 Dr. Klaper: Thank you very much. A couple of things. If people would like to learn more about what we're doing and actually help us do this because we have expenses, go to our website movingmedforward.com. Moving Med Forward and you'll learn about what we're doing and how you can help. And I have a YouTube channel, Dr. Michael Klaper. We've got an Instagram and Facebook channel. They're down in the show notes here. And the, let's see, is there, oh, and if you are going to be in the Dallas area this week, I don't know when we're going to be broadcasting this program, but come on up to the, to the culinary workshop that we're having this coming Sunday, July 22nd. And I'll be there. Dr. Riz and Dr. Colin Zhu will be there and Maya will be there. So do join us at the upcoming workshop. I hope this is broadcast in time for that. There will be time for the notice.

00:45:32 Dr. Riz: Well, thank you. We appreciate that little plug there.

00:45:35 Dr. Klaper: Okay, you bet. So check out our website, check out my YouTube channel, and thank you for your support. And if you know, if you know so, a medical student at some med school, or you know someone's on the faculty of the medical school, who might be interested in getting me in for and giving this lecture, go to our website movingmedforward.com and we have a form to fill out. Give us the name of those med students and faculty members and we'll get in touch with them and help move medicine forward. So we create a new generation of nutritionally aware young doctors and pharmacists and nurses and dentists and occupational therapists. They all need to hear the message and we're going to try and reach every one of them. Thank you very much.

00:46:15 Dr. Riz: Agreed. What a wonderful message. And by the way, so I'm going to throw my own plug in here, you just reminded me. My daughter just got accepted to medical school. And so she'll be going to one of our neighboring states, Arkansas, and you'll be hearing from us very soon about setting something up.

00:46:30 Dr. Klaper: Wonderful, good for her.

00:46:32 Dr. Riz: Well, thank you. Okay, friends. Well, I hope you enjoyed this discussion with Dr. Klaper. He's a pioneer and inspiration to me and Maya and so many of us. If you would like more interviews like this one, simply send us a message at my social media account dr_riz_bukhari on IG. Again, thank you very much and we'll see you next time. Bye bye.

00:46:57 Maya: You've been listening to the Healthy Lifestyle Solutions Podcast with your host, Maya Acosta. If you've enjoyed this content, please share with one friend who can benefit. You can also leave us a five star review at ratethispodcast.com/hls. This helps us to spread our message. As always, thank you for being a listener.