DoctorOz: Quit Added Sugar Without Giving Up Fruit with Dr. Joel Fuhrman

And failed before today, a brand new approach to quitting sugar. This one is for real people in the real world. Now, we know it feels impossible, but quitting sugar doesn't have to make you mean, grumpy, and antisocial. There is a way to have sweetness in your life without undermining your health goals. Today, the man who has helped millions quit sugar and transform their lives, Dr. Joel Fuhrman, is here to show you how. But first, to give you the sugar quitter's guide to life, please welcome my friend, med school classmate, Joel Fuhrman. Now, Joel has always been a little different, but I'm going to quote you on this. He says that removing toxic foods like sugar from your diet makes it, I'm going to quote him, almost impossible. To have a heart attack. That's a pretty bold statement. That is. You know, and it's critical that people know that they don't have to have a heart attack and don't have to have a stroke. You don't have to. You know, I just published a study in the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine on 443 people with high blood pressure. They normalized their LDL cholesterol. They dropped their blood pressure 26 points. And you know, there are isolated populations around the world where they don't have exposure to commercial foods, like the Kitava study. People into their 80s and 90s, no heart attacks. No chest pain, no high blood pressure. In other words, when you eat right, heart disease is not the inevitable consequence of aging. It's not mostly genetic. It's mostly what we're putting in our mouth. And these people, they're from Kitava? Kitava's the island that's off the coast of Papua New Guinea. It's a small island that was isolated, and there's no heart disease. Zero. Not one recorded case. So let's walk through the reasons why Dr. Fuhrman feels so passionately about sugar. And this is, if you're going to quit sugar, And your dependence is, you know, tight but can be lost today if you follow along with us. This is what's going to happen to your body off that sugar. Now, you may notice some simple changes, you know, a little while down the road. But initially, once the withdrawal is over, you'll notice improvements, clearing actually of your skin. That pain that looks out to the world will be much nicer. Your body will begin to do a total about face. And then the part you're going to notice the most, and so will other people, sustained weight loss. It's going to keep dropping and dropping and dropping. Probably the best way to lose weight of all. is get rid of that sugar. Scaling back your sugar habit by just 200 calories a day could help drop your weight by about 10 pounds within half a year. That's a big difference. And then your heart's job gets a whole lot easier, to Joel's point, because your blood pressure will begin to drop. And within a few weeks of decreasing your sugar, you're also going to see a decrease in your LDL, that lousy cholesterol that causes heart disease. In fact, cutting sugar from your diet will reduce your risk of dying from heart-related issues by about three times. It plummets threefold. There's no drug that does that, that I'm aware of. So today we're going to give you, I'll be right back, Joel, the Sugar Quitters Guide to Life. We are giving everyone today this guide. It's the best place to start because it's for real people and it's a real plan that's going to work in the real world. I've got three of our viewers here. Stacey, Melanie, and Michelle have tried to quit sugar in the past, but they say they have failed. So we asked them to each write down the obstacle that got in their way because I think their obstacles will be like your obstacles. So Stacey, take it away. What is your obstacle, my dear? I have to have dessert. You'd want dessert every day? Every day. Actually, a year and a half ago, I had a heart attack, and that was the one thing that my doctor said, take the sugar out. So I took away the candy and the sodas and the things like that, but the dessert couldn't go. Is your heart okay? Yes, it's getting better. Day by day, it gets better and better, but I eat ice cream every day for lunch, for breakfast, for dinner. Yeah. That's an addiction, right? My goodness, if you had a heart attack, you'd eat dessert. I mean, I love ice cream, too, but I'd probably give it up. Well, I gave everything else up, you know, one thing at a time. Well, it's your turn, right? We'll get that last thing today. Melanie, take it away. What's your deal? Intense sugar cravings. I have sugar with every meal. I actually build my, my meals are built around what sugar I can eat. I will have less substantial foods to have more sugar because I want to have more, the calories are more in the sugar than the good foods. Sure, of course they are. Yeah. That's the reason you have sugar cravings. We're going to get to that in a minute. And Michelle, what's your problem? Dr. Oz, if I don't have sugar, I don't know what to eat. I try to take all your advice. I eat healthy. I exercise. I do all the right things, yet I'm constantly snacking. I keep dark chocolate chips around all the time. I go to bake cookies one day, and they're all gone because they've been my midnight snack. All right, so we're going to address each of these problems. We're going to go one by one. You're going to stay with us if you don't mind. I'm going back to Joel because this is exactly what he sees in his practice. It is actually the reasons we can't stop in our sugars. And they're big problems. Listen, I was being a little light with you earlier, but literally if you have a heart attack and your life is at risk, the fact that it's hard to give up desserts is a demonstration of how powerfully these things have got us around the neck. And you deserve better than that. So stick with us. We'll be right back. So let's first describe, just to go over the dessert every day issue, because Joel's got a solution for it. And so in fact, Joel, he calls this thing, it's very interesting, the sweet six. Now, Joel's always been good with numbers. He always was when we were in medical school together. But I want you to explain, if you don't mind, to people, what the sweet six are and how they might help with these dessert cravings. Right. Well, first of all, you can eat desserts and desserts are delicious and they're satisfying, but you can't, but they have to be made with high fiber, natural foods, full of phytochemicals, full of nutrients. Otherwise you're going to be craving food all the time. Yeah, you can't stop eating all the time because you'd be feeling irritable without those foods. But here's a way you can make desserts taste delicious that are healthy for you. All right, so we can actually satisfy people and get them away from the ice cream and the like. Absolutely. Give them delicious ice cream that's sweetened with a date. Or here's an apricot ice cream or a mango ice cream, sweetened with real fruit. Make some chocolate ice cream. Put some cocoa beans in it. You have a chocolate-flavored ice cream or a cake made with beans and cocoa beans and vanilla. Healthy food can taste fantastic. We will put desserts made with these magical six ingredients up on DrRoz.com. Joel has them in his books as well. This is an interesting way to tantalize those taste buds, and it actually works. All right, let's move on to the second big issue, which is cravings. For anybody out there like Melanie who has cravings, you actually argue, Joel, that a lot of it has to do with micronutrients that they don't have. So explain for the average person how they're going to get those micronutrients into their diet. So I'm going to put some screens up here. Does this work, vegetables? That's right. The first thing is, vegetables are the richest source of micronutrients. They're the food with the highest micronutrient density per calorie. And one of my mantras is, you have to make the salad the main dish at least once a day and eat raw vegetables. All right, so vegetables we know are good. Beans are going to work as a source of protein. And that's what I love in seeds. Again, deal with the cravings because they're giving us the minerals. They're going to become plants. They make sense. They're secret. They're the secret to your success. You eat the fat from these foods instead of oil and animal fats. And you know what they do? They increase stool fat. These are anti, the fats are anti-fat. So in theory, if you eat a lot of these, your poop should float because fat floats. That's right. You increase stool fat, which means all the fat calories are not biologically accessible to the body. All the calories aren't absorbed by the body. What do you think, Melanie? Does your poop float right now? Uh, no. Not yet. We've got to fix that. All right, finally, what separates this plan from the rest, you argue, is that you say we should eat a minimum of three servings of fruit a day. I was a bit surprised by this because there's lots of sugar in fruits. Absolutely. Fruits are rich in phytochemicals. They're linked to lower risk of heart disease, lower risk of stroke, lower rate of cancer. Fruits are favorable foods to eat regularly. Well, Joe, I mean, I talk about fruit in a positive way generally, but a lot of folks say, I gain weight on fruit. I don't want to eat fruit. We actually limit it sometimes because we don't be able to have too much of that sugar. Right. You disagree? Well, it's very hard to eat this in the context of a nutritarian diet, because the diet itself is so high in fiber, and the fruit is high fiber, too, and the fiber blunts the absorption of glucose into the body. It comes into the body slowly, because the fiber holds it like a magnet in the digestive tract. All right, so I have a donut, right? I get pure sugar into my bloodstream in a fairly aggressive way. It ran into your bloodstream within minutes, from your lips to your hips, right onto your body, because you just put the pure sugar. In minutes, it's absorbed, spikes a big insulin response, and the insulin stays circulating for hours, and that's a fat storage hormone. You created fat on your body, you promoted atherosclerosis, you raised your cholesterol level. All right, now, sugar is in fruit also. What happens there? Well, here you put a little bit of sugar in food. Let's say you have 10 grams of sugar, but you put in 20 grams of fiber with it. The fiber went over that. That's right. The fiber covered up that sugar. The sugar can't get through into the bloodstream. And all this fiber promotes the growth of bacteria, too. So it blunts the effect, and you have a horse of a different animal. Now, the body doesn't view it the same way. What do you guys think? Definitely makes sense. All right, now I'm going to transition us, because Joel's famous for helping people lose hundreds of pounds. So this woman, take a look at her. She says Dr. Fuhrman changed her life because she lost, watch carefully, 90 pounds. In fact, she says, I was fat until I started doing this one thing. Just this one thing. Find out what that is next. We're back with Dr. Joel Fuhrman, who has millions of devoted followers and patients who swear by his methods to shed the pounds and reverse disease. Now, recently we heard from one of them, and she said, I was fat until I started doing this. Don't you want to know what this is? Makes me curious. They're not my words. They do belong to Darcy. She lost 90 pounds. If y'all want to know what she did, are you curious? Well, here she is to tell us herself. Darcy, come on out. But I know who you really want to meet is Joel. Thank you so much. It was so good to meet you. Wow. Thank you. That's terrific. So good to see you. Have a seat. So, you know, many of Joel's followers have never met him before. You've not met before, I guess. No, today's the first day. I know it's been a dream of yours. So what do you have? He's all yours. Take him away. Before I started following you, before I found you, I was sick. I had hypertension. And I was too young to be ready for a heart attack. And I found you at the bottom. I saw you on TV. I got the book. And I committed for six weeks. And it changed my life forever. That's amazing. And most importantly, it's not just about weight loss. It's about you were in pain and you had medical problems and now you're well again. So that's so great to see you well. They seem so different from each other, those symptoms. And yet, getting rid of sugar helped with all of them in your case. It wouldn't work like that for everybody. But it's remarkable that we have that many problems and we can't possibly think of a way out of them. And we do once in a while find simple solutions that work reproducibly. I think it was the sugar, and I think it was everything. It's flooding the body with all those nutrients. Yeah, it makes such a difference. Everyone is out there baitedly awaiting the end of that sentence I showed at the beginning. What is the one thing you did that allowed you to lose the 90 pounds, to get past all these medical issues that have been hindering you? The biggest thing besides making a short-term commitment, which is how the long-term commitment came about, because I didn't think I would ever eat this way. And I was just desperate. Eating salads, eating all the vegetables. Salads. That's the answer. Yes. I lost weight very quickly by eating that way. Joe, why do you make salads the foundation of your plan? Well, I always say the salad is the main dish at least once a day. Number one, they're about 100 calories a pound, and the stomach only holds a liter of food. So it's like having natural gastric bypass surgery because volume and fiber play a huge role in how many calories you choose to consume each day. Come let's show it everybody Come give me a hand. We're going to do this together. Let's just take the typical stomach, and we made it represented in these little boxes. So I'll be the standard American diet, which we call SAD because it is the standard American diet. So I put my muffin in there, and notice it doesn't do very much, does it? It doesn't take up a lot of room. It goes up maybe a third of your stomach if you're lucky. If you eat eggs, which we tell people to eat, lots of protein. It tastes good. It tastes good. It's a good start. And we put them in there, and what happens? A couple sneak in with muffins, but the rest of them, when they go where they're supposed to go, you end up with a stomach that's going to be, I don't know, half full, two-thirds full. You've still got a lot of space in there. And then we got one of your breakfast salads, Darcy. Yes. Is this about what you would do when you're big? I kid you not, and I have witnesses to prove it. My salads are just about that size for one meal. And we fill your stomach. That's a lot of salad. That's a lot of salad. I don't even need a salad that big. Is this how full you feel? Yeah, it is. I mean, there are times where I might not eat the whole thing. I may have leftovers with my breakfast. I like salads. I do eat them for breakfast more often than not. For breakfast? Yeah. For breakfast, then. I don't touch them with any breakfast. Most people don't do that, but you like them so much. I really do. I have had weeks where I would start to maybe eat a little bit of oatmeal or just my fruit and nuts, but I find that the weeks that I start my day with the vegetables and the fruit mixed in, That I just feel better. I'm happy for no reason. So this is your typical breakfast, I'm told. That's a fair amount of food. Yes. And I didn't know you could make so many different things out of beans and vegetables until I ate this way. I'm very proud of you. I'm happy you lost the weight, but I'm especially happy you found your health. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you very much. The recipe is on DrOz.com for more recipes. You got Dr. Fuhrman's new book, The End of Heart Disease. It is out now. Everybody in my audience is going home with a copy. Enjoy, my friends. Thank you for watching. Don't forget to subscribe and turn on notifications so you never miss out on new videos to live the good life.