Participants: Nick Evenson (Host), Dr. James Marcum
Series Code: UP
Program Code: UP000102A
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00:17 If your doctor told you that you could have better hair,
00:20 healthier skin, lose some weight, maybe even lower your 00:23 cholesterol just by changing your nutrition, would you do it? 00:26 On the Ultimate Prescription today we're going to be talking 00:29 about food as medicine, so stay with us. 00:31 The program starts in just a moment. 00:33 I'm Dr. James Marcum. 00:35 Are you interested in discovering the reason why? 00:38 Do you want solutions to your health care problem? 00:41 Are you tired of taking medications? 00:44 Well, you're about to be given the Ultimate Prescription. 00:50 Hello, and thank you for joining us today for the 00:52 Ultimate Prescription. 00:53 I'm your host, Nick Evenson. 00:54 And we're here with Dr. James Marcum. 00:56 And we are talking about food as medicine. 00:58 On today's program we're going to be talking a little bit about 01:01 flax seed, but before that Dr. Marcum, welcome to the program. 01:04 Thanks, Nick, it's nice being here. 01:06 And it's really fun to talk about different ways we can use 01:10 to treat the body, not only to prevent the disease with 01:14 nutrition, but also to treat specific disease 01:18 conditions with nutrition. 01:20 And I'm just excited that we now have the technology to have 01:23 these studies, and people are doing these studies, 01:26 where we can sort of give the evidence based medicine 01:28 to support using different foods to treat different 01:32 medical conditions. 01:33 What are some of the really common therapies? 01:35 I mean we have medications, we have surgeries, 01:39 we have physical therapy, nutritional therapy? Uh huh. 01:43 What would you call this? 01:45 I would call it nutritional therapy; that's good. 01:47 You know, if we treat brains and get people to think, 01:50 we call that cognitive therapy. Right. 01:52 We can treat belief systems. 01:55 We can treat habits and get people moving. 01:57 We can treat... We have rest therapy where we teach 02:00 people how to rest. 02:01 There's music therapy. 02:03 So there's a lot of ways to change the body. 02:05 Unfortunately, a lot of them we don't have the studies 02:09 to prove the efficacy. 02:11 And the reason we don't have the studies is because no 02:14 one's funding them. 02:15 It's very expensive to do studies. Uh huh. 02:18 Most studies now are done by the pharmaceutical industry. 02:22 The people making the money. 02:23 Yes. Sure. They're the ones that are evaluating the study, 02:25 evaluating the data, so you always have to look carefully, 02:28 you know, if there's secondary interest in this study, 02:31 and who's funding the studies. 02:33 But in general nutritional therapy is great at treating 02:38 lots of different chronic diseases. 02:40 What are some of the most common diseases that are 02:43 treated with nutrition? 02:45 Well, you know, the ones I've seen personally: obesity. 02:49 Obesity is, of course, treated very well with 02:52 plant based nutrition. Uh huh. 02:53 It's a great way to lose weight. 02:55 And losing weight helps all sorts of chronic disease states; 02:59 helps take pressure off the bones, just losing weight helps 03:02 diabetes, high blood pressure, you know, helps depression, 03:05 helps many things just by losing weight. 03:08 Nutrition, plant based, helps with that. 03:10 There's specific diseases that are ravishing us now in America: 03:15 type 2 diabetes. That's where the blood sugar goes too high. 03:19 You have symptoms like being thirsty, going to the bathroom 03:23 a lot, some people lose weight, some people gain weight. 03:26 But, you know, the hallmark treatment for that is 03:29 different medications. 03:31 And there's a lot of different medications. 03:33 But recent research is now showing that these medications 03:36 may not be doing much other than making the numbers look better. 03:40 So they're just kind of masking the problem? 03:42 Yeah. They don't really solve the problem, you know. 03:44 And they spend a lot of money on the kilometers, 03:46 and the measuring sticks, and all that's okay. 03:49 But for awhile they thought that type 2 diabetes, if you brought 03:53 the blood sugar down you lowered the risk of 03:55 heart attacks and strokes. 03:57 Well, that's not really true. 03:59 And lately they said, Well, it helps protect the small blood 04:03 vessels, which are damaged by this blood sugar 04:06 and the physiology of type 2. 04:08 Well, now this thing. 04:09 Well, the date on that might be a little bit shaky. 04:11 So people are wondering, Well, if the medicines don't work, 04:15 how do you reverse type 2 diabetes? 04:18 And in many cases if you are still making insulin, 04:22 you can reverse it with nutritional therapy, 04:24 and a great exercise program, and not eating some of the bad 04:28 things that feed type 2 diabetes like fats, and sugars that have 04:34 not a low glycemic interest, the ones, the fast sugars, 04:38 which spike your blood sugar. 04:39 So that's one chronic disease. 04:41 We've talked about obesity, high blood pressure, okay? 04:44 Okay. That can be treated very well with nutritional therapy: 04:47 eating the right foods, avoiding the wrong foods. 04:50 We've talked about different foods in the last few episodes 04:53 that lower the blood pressure. 04:55 And again, we're going to talk today about another one that 04:59 can lower the blood pressure in flax. 05:01 And if you can lower the blood pressure in diabetes, 05:04 you decrease the risk of stroke, heart disease, 05:07 blood vessel disease throughout the body. 05:09 So that's another chronic disease. Right. 05:11 Other things that we don't think about that's treated well with 05:14 nutritional therapy is inflammation. 05:16 We can help our joints not wear out as much if we don't have 05:22 as much weight and inflammation on the joints. Right, uh huh. 05:26 If we don't have a lot of foods that cause oxidation, 05:29 or aging in the body, we actually can slow down aging 05:32 with plants and antioxidants, not to mention the 05:35 chronic disease of cancer. 05:37 We now know that nutrition helps lower the risk of many different 05:40 types of cancer: colon cancer, breast cancer. 05:44 We can lower those risks. 05:46 So if you start adding up, look at all of the chronic disease. 05:48 People that eat plant based nutrition tend to 05:50 sleep better at night. 05:52 You don't need the insomnia medicines. 05:53 They tend to have lower rates of depression. Right. 05:57 So, and they have less rates of side effects of medications 06:00 that are used for chronic disease. 06:01 They can decrease... 06:03 If they have to take pain medicines they can decrease 06:05 the amount of pain medicines they have to take. 06:07 So if you start adding up you say, Wow! For almost all the 06:11 chronic disease nutritional therapy is used to treat it. 06:15 And many times it can actually reverse it. 06:17 So why don't we talk about this as first line treatments? 06:22 Well, when I write a prescription for, like today, 06:25 I'd write one for flax. 06:26 And people would go, You know, you're loony. 06:28 I just want something that's easier to do. 06:30 So it takes a lot of education, it takes a lot of research 06:35 by the patients, it takes going against, sort of the easy way, 06:39 in society to treat different medical conditions. 06:42 So those are some of the medical conditions that, especially the 06:45 chronic ones that respond to nutritional therapy. 06:48 Right. So it sounds like, if we go back to the diabetes, 06:52 type 2 diabetes, it's not super commonly known in the public 06:56 that you could get that with a plant based diet. 06:58 But amongst medical professionals 07:01 is it commonly accepted? 07:02 Yes. Well, it's not commonly accepted because it's 07:05 not the easy thing. 07:06 And a lot of physicians don't have the skills to do that. 07:09 You know, they just don't know how... 07:10 Haven't been trained. 07:12 That's right. And what does that look like? 07:14 It takes time. It takes education. 07:16 You know, how do we educate the patient to do that? Yeah. 07:20 So those types of things are a challenge. 07:23 And that's what we have to have extra support on: 07:26 programs like this, websites where people want to learn more, 07:30 and eventually I think it's going to be talked about at 07:32 higher levels, because we can't afford to spend money 07:36 on symptoms anymore. Right. 07:38 We have to actually fix problems and improve the 07:40 health of the world. 07:42 We don't see some of these chronic diseases 07:44 in other countries. 07:45 You know, in Africa they don't have these problems. 07:48 You know, they don't have some of these chronic diseases. 07:50 Now they have different diseases from infections, and those types 07:55 of things, but they don't have some of the things, 07:57 you know, sanitary diseases that they pass. 07:59 But they don't have some of the disease sets that we have. 08:01 We have diseases that are stemming from processed foods. 08:04 Yes, and chronic. We have chronic problems that are 08:07 because of our lifestyles. 08:08 Yeah, yeah. Well, let's talk a little about flax seed. 08:11 We have some right here today. 08:12 And this is ground up flax seed. 08:14 And the reason that we grind it up is because your 08:17 body can't process it. 08:19 The seed encapsulates the nutrients too well if it's 08:22 not ground up a bit. Is that right? 08:23 Yep, that's correct. 08:24 You want to release. 08:26 It's a powerful little tiny seed wrapped in a hull. 08:28 And you can't release the energy of that seed when the hull 08:31 is wrapped around it. 08:33 Right. So what are some of the ways that you 08:35 like to use flax seed? 08:36 Well, flax seeds, I use them to treat many different medical 08:41 conditions in my patients, and I also use it as part of my 08:45 diet to stay healthy. Right. 08:47 I don't want to get bogged down in the science, 08:50 but there's a few key things about flax I want 08:53 everyone to remember. Okay. 08:55 One is omega-3 fatty acids, the healthy fats. Uh huh. 09:00 That's one, and word number two is a word called lignin. 09:03 Okay, now what is lignin? 09:05 And why do we need lignin? 09:06 Lignin is a... Flax is a good source of that. 09:11 But in our body its converted to what we call a phytoestrogen. 09:16 Okay. And that, phytoestrogens sort of dampens our own body 09:20 response to estrogen. 09:22 And so lignin's are important. 09:24 And when we have less of those, the estrogen, 09:27 it helps in the male. 09:29 It helps the testosterone go up. 09:30 When estrogen levels go down it does good things in females. 09:33 If you have breast cancer tissue it's very helpful. 09:36 If you're a clotter, having lower estrogen is very careful. 09:39 And in studies done so far, when you have more omega-3's, 09:44 okay? the healthy fats, this seems to help with 09:48 inflammation in the body. Okay. 09:50 So every inflammatory condition this will help. 09:53 Joint pains: it might help problems in the bowels 09:57 that have inflammation. 09:58 It's helping this inflammation that's going on; 10:00 this bad inflammation, not the good inflammation. Yeah. 10:03 It lowers cholesterol. 10:05 So this is a way you could lower your cholesterol levels. 10:09 When you have a lot of omega-3's it can make the blood 10:12 a little bit thinner. 10:13 Omega-3's go into the brain, so it can be a help with people 10:16 that have depression. 10:18 It also helps bone strength. 10:20 It also helps insulin resistance. 10:22 What that means is it helps insulin work better, 10:25 so that insulin can take sugar into the cells. 10:28 So it's going to help type 2 diabetes. Um, right. 10:30 Now there's tons of good studies, and I want to give some 10:34 evidence behind all this. 10:36 One of the studies for the Journal of Hypertension, 10:39 this was published just a few years ago in 2013, 10:42 it showed that high blood pressure could be 10:45 treated by taking flax. 10:47 In fact they studied people and the people when they started 10:52 they did this for six months. 10:53 When they started the top number was 148, so after a period of 10:57 time it got down to the 140's, just on taking flax every day. 11:01 Now just to give you a feel of some of the medications we use 11:05 to lower blood pressure, like the calcium channel blockers. 11:08 They just lower the top number by 8 points, and the bottom 11:12 number by 3 points over the same period of time. Okay. 11:15 So flax was lowering it just as much. 11:18 Another common type of drug called an ACE inhibitor was 11:22 lowering it 5, the systolic, and 2 on the diastolic. 11:25 And you see a 158 to 143, that's quite, 11:29 that's a 10 to 15 point drop. Right. 11:32 So flax was very impressive in lowering blood pressure. 11:36 Now it has all of these good effects: 11:38 the inflammatory effect. 11:39 And some of the effect might have been that when people eat 11:41 flax they feel full, they tend not to overeat, 11:45 and it helps other things in the body. 11:47 It might even help the good and bad bowel flora, which might 11:50 be even playing a role. 11:51 When these nutrients are in the body, it probably helps by 11:54 numerous different physiologic mechanisms, because there's so 11:57 many chemicals that make up that little powerful seed. 12:00 I was just going to say, it sounds like we've got a battle 12:01 of the chemists going on here. 12:03 We've got the chemist who made us our flax seed, 12:06 which works in these cases, and then we have our human chemists 12:09 who put together these pharmaceutical drugs, 12:12 which do the same thing, but maybe the flax seed 12:14 is a better option. 12:16 That is an excellent observation. 12:17 Because every, these foods have chemistry in them that do things 12:21 in the body, and, of course, these plant based chemistry, 12:24 our body tends to utilize it. 12:26 It doesn't seem to hurt as much. 12:27 There's been several studies about breast cancer. 12:31 And the National Cancer Institute did a study, 12:34 and it showed that it lowers the risk of breast 12:37 cancer taking flax. 12:38 And also, if you've had breast cancer it could lower the risk 12:41 of recurrence with flax. 12:43 Now for men, not to be under sold, it also lowers the risk 12:47 of prostate cancer, and it can actually be used to treat a 12:51 condition called benign prostatic hyperplasia. 12:54 As we age the prostate can get bigger. 12:57 We can have to go to the bathroom a lot. 12:59 And they've done a couple of studies that say if you can take 13:02 flax on a regular basis, it's just as effective as taking some 13:05 of the medications that we use to shrink the prostate, 13:09 and help the urine get out of it better. 13:11 So that is pretty... And they were we're just taking 13:14 1 tablespoon of ground flax a day. 13:16 And that tablespoon could just be sprinkled on oatmeal, 13:19 you could put it on a salad, you could add it to some food. 13:23 A lot of people now use flax as an egg substitute. 13:26 Yep. What they do is they take about a tablespoon of flax, 13:30 they mix it with some water. 13:32 That's equal to about 1 egg in your cooking. That's right. 13:35 So you can use flax and have the benefit of lowering the risk of 13:38 breast and prostate cancer, shrinking your prostate, 13:41 lowering your blood pressure, decreasing 13:43 inflammation on your body. 13:45 All those good things to help flax, not to mention it also 13:48 helps with constipation. Really? 13:51 It can speed up your bowels, because it makes more of the 13:53 good bacteria. It's fiber. 13:55 Fiber helps increase the speed that things move 13:58 through our bowels. 14:00 Why is that so important? 14:01 Well, if you put something bad in your bowel; 14:03 you say you eat something bad. 14:04 Let's say you cheat. 14:06 And it just lays in your bowel for long periods of time, 14:09 and it has a carcinogen. 14:11 Let's say you eat something really bad that's carcinogenic, 14:13 and it just lays there. 14:14 It doesn't move through your bowel. 14:16 It just sits there. 14:17 It's not something you want hanging around. 14:19 Exactly! More of that stuff gets absorbed in you. 14:20 It damages the mucous of the bowel. 14:22 It gets absorbed in you more. 14:23 Well, if you can keep the bowels moving, you can exceed the 14:27 transit time, and it won't stay in contact with your bowel 14:30 for long periods of time. 14:32 That's why we've found that people that eat heavy meat diets 14:36 have higher rates of cancer. 14:37 And people that speed up their gastric motility with fiber, 14:41 speeds up the gastric mobility, they have lower rates of cancer. 14:45 So here we have a nutrient packed seed that you can add 14:49 to your diet to treat many of the disease conditions. 14:52 You know, it's been studies that help with diabetes, 14:55 it helps blood pressure. 14:56 It helps a lot of the chronic disease that we have today. 15:00 Now I think one thing that I want to stress is that it 15:04 really, the Omega-3's seem to be very important in brain health. 15:08 Right. You know you've heard about Omega 3's, Omega 6. 15:11 We've heard about DHEA, that chemical, 15:14 and how it helps brain health. 15:15 Well, these Omega-3's in the body can be made into Omega 6's, 15:20 and that God has given us great ways to use this chemical to be 15:25 turned into other biochemical's that we need in our body. 15:29 It's almost like a building block for other things. 15:32 And what's neat, Nick, is you've made the observation how 15:35 pharmaceuticals change our chemistry. 15:37 These nutrients change our chemistry, and we're just now 15:41 scratching the surface of what it does in many 15:44 parts of our bodies. 15:45 Especially about how things that are antioxidants seems to 15:50 protect our DNA, turn off damaging things that cause 15:55 mutations, and cause problems. 15:56 This is a very valuable and important concept 16:00 as nutrition is medicine. 16:01 But I don't want to think that's the only way we have medicines. 16:04 There's many other ways as well. 16:05 Well, this is all very exciting, and some great uses for flax 16:09 seed here, and a lot of health benefits. 16:11 We're going to take a break, and we will be back in just a 16:13 moment with more food as medicine here on the 16:15 Ultimate Prescription. Stay with us. |
Revised 2017-05-04