Book review Digestive tuneup by Dr Mcdougall, part 1 Hero's journey

Added: 2026-06-03

[00:00:00]Okay, this video is for the book review of this book here, Digestive Tune-up by Dr. John McDougall. This is part one.

[00:00:07]Um so he just covers uh digestive diseases of the intestinal tract in this book. It's a very good book, very easy to read.

[00:00:17]He says if you go vegan more than 3 years or if you're pregnant or nursing, you'll probably need to take vitamin B12 a minimum of 5 micrograms today a day. By the way, he took, I think, methylcobalamin. That's the same one I take, methylcobalamin. And I wouldn't take anything with the word cyano in it.

[00:00:32]Um it took him a while to publish this book. It took him 3 years before he could find a publisher who shared his vision for the book.

[00:00:38]Um the medical illustrator was Howard Bartner, did a real good job. The pictures are nice. The characters are called Larry and Louise. McDougall says the prevention's always the preferred option. Yeah, most of these diseases, they're all preventable if you know what you're doing.

[00:00:52]Okay, McDougall says, "I'm the luckiest doctor in the world because my patients regain regain their lost health and appearance by following the simple, cost-free, side-effect-free dietary and lifestyle advice I prescribe." Yeah, that's the truth. The best treatment quite often is free. You just have to learn about it.

[00:01:13]And he says, "The food you put into your body is the single most powerful factor that determines your health and well-being." And that sounds like a straightforward statement, but doctors are not trained in that at all. That would be like a shocking statement to them.

[00:01:26]Uh even though once you studied it for a while, that becomes an obvious statement.

[00:01:29]Okay, um McDougall says, "I will tell you my story, how I was transformed from a chronically ill young man to a person who could be considered the picture of health at 59 years of age." So here he is, right, when he's about 59 years old.

[00:01:43]He was a pretty robust guy, okay? I know we had a stroke. I know we had a little bit of residual left-sided weakness, but he was windsurfing on a routine basis.

[00:01:54]He talks about going on mountain hikes with his grandson in his backpack. Okay, carrying him around on a mountain hike.

[00:02:01]This is not some spinal cord patient or some you know, extended rehab patient, okay? This is a guy who was the best doctor in the world and he had a lot of energy and he traveled around the world leading groups on vacations, you know, to places like Peru and Costa Rica and stuff.

[00:02:17]He continues, "Through dietary change, patients have experienced lower blood pressure, a relief from headaches, arthritis pain, and even in many cases completing heal complete healing of diseases like type 2 diabetes, obesity, rheumatoid arthritis, heart disease, actually reversing the atherosclerosis without medication."

[00:02:35]And then here I'm just going to add a little bit of drama to this. There's only two plots in literature. The hero takes a journey or or a stranger comes to town. It's anonymous who said that quote. There's a couple different potential authors of that one. The hero suffers a catastrophic defeat. So for in his life, he went from young happy teenager to catastrophic defeat. He was smoking cigarettes and eating tons of junk food and he had a stroke at 18 years of age.

[00:02:59]Okay, it was a pretty significant stroke. He had left lower extremity and left upper extremity paralysis, okay? He was hemiplegic.

[00:03:06]Um and he continued to get fat. He didn't initially figure out nutrition.

[00:03:10]He was um 22 years of age By 22 years of age, he was his fattest ever for him, 228 lb. He's kind of tall, he's 6 ft tall.

[00:03:18]Um so he's not that fat for 6 ft tall.

[00:03:21]One point I'd like to make is, you know, he was born in 1947, the time when he had a stroke was about 1965, okay? 1964 1965. So back in those days, they didn't even have cat scanners, okay? The first cat scanners were funded in part by the Beatles. The name of their funding company was EMI, Electrical Musical Instruments, you know, Sir Godfrey Hounsfield, the English physicist helped develop it, you know, the units of density are called Hounsfield units to this day. So the point that I'm saying is they couldn't even do a cat scan on him. MRI had not been invented yet, okay? So when you know, I hear people saying, well, he had a lacunar infarct. Okay, maybe he got a CAT scan later, but I can also tell you most of the time when CAT scans are interpreted by non-neuroradiologist, they'll often call normal variants like a perivascular space of Virchow-Robin in the basal ganglia, they'll often call that a lacunar infarct. So, I'm not even sure he really had a lacunar infarct unless somebody can show me the films or at least the report of the films.

[00:04:14]Okay, so anyways, uh that's where that's at. So, we're going to continue a little bit with this metaphor of the hero's journey. Here he is as a young man. This is when he found Mary, they're very happy.

[00:04:25]Uh did his med school locally and then he decided that he's going to go to Hawaii to do an internship. So, he's working on the sugar plantation and he sees all these manual labor guys and they're real fit. They're skinny, they're energetic, they're cranking out the work and the Filipino guys would retire at 65 years of age. Then they'd go back to the Philippines and they'd get themselves a young bride, like a 30-year-old woman or something, and they would have another family, and they would live into their late 80s, by 90 or so.

[00:04:51]And they were fine. There was no Viagra in those days. They were fine. Okay, and he noticed these guys in the plantation eating old-fashioned plantains as well as the grandparents when he'd see these extended families. A lot of Asian families, they're Japanese, Chinese, Filipinos, uh in Hawaii.

[00:05:05]The oldest ones were still real healthy and skinny with none of the Western diseases, no diabetes, hypertension, obesity, none of that stuff, colon cancer, breast cancer, prostate prostate cancer, but the rich people in the city in Hawaii, they were sick. So, he started going to the library trying to figure this out, but he was taught the lesson cuz it was right there in front of him.

[00:05:26]That was the most important thing.

[00:05:29]And here's the hero's journey uh from Joseph Campbell. So, you know, the hero initially starts out in home sweet home, the familiar world of childhood and family, and then they have to depart that to an underworld. And him, you know, is kind of like tossed into his, you know, despair in the abyss of having a stroke, and then he later goes to the new world and he starts to make progress in his knowledge. And then he would have quite often with progress is not a straight linear upwards course. It's very often two steps up, one step back. Two step up, one step back. He got in trouble in residency because he talked to a patient about diet and one of the head attendings got pissed off. So, he had to go before his residency director, potentially risking kicked out of his residency. Then he gets to his hospital and everybody's pissed off at him.

[00:06:16]Nobody will send him a patient. And then I heard Doug Lyle talking about it. They were so pissed off at him for trying to make things better for patients that they even tried to cut his med mal insurance and really mess with him.

[00:06:29]So, he had to pay his own med mal insurance for a while and he was having a hard time with that. So, what I'm trying to say and nobody would send him a patient. So, it's not like it's all, you know, hugs and kisses for guys, the genius innovators who try to make things better for everybody.

[00:06:45]The big establishment hates their guts.

[00:06:47]They hate them because they're going to change things. Imagine that you are the big establishment.

[00:06:52]You're making millions of dollars, billions of dollars. Do you want some little punk doctor from Podunk trying to change the rules, you know, trying to help the the proles, the you know, the useless eaters so that you can't make your money? No, you're going to be pissed off, okay?

[00:07:07]So, here he is a young guy and look, he's a pretty vigorous looking guy. He's not, you know, a spinal cord patient in prolonged rehab hemiplegic from a stroke or something, okay? Or MS. No, he's a vigorous brilliant young guy. Here he is probably in his early 40s I would predict. Okay, here he is I don't know about early 60s and he was a vigorous, he was a fantastic speaker. Yeah, his left arm's a little weak as but look, he's got his arm up, he moves his arm, okay? He goes windsurfing, he goes mountain hiking with his kid and his grandson in his backpack, okay? He's not that frail. He did have something about 10 years ago. There was um he had a bad fall with a pelvis fracture, and then he also had um his house [snorts] burned down, and he almost died. And so, that left him kind of a little bit frail and debilitated with that. But, what I want to tell you, I'm going to guess he's about 70 here. I don't know for sure.

[00:07:54]And here he is, his most recent picture.

[00:07:56]This is just from, you know, within the last month or so. Look at his face, totally alert and with it. And the reason that's an important statement is anybody who's got experience taking care of real patients in the real world knows this. Most of them are mentally slow, okay? I have internal medicine friends, and they tell me every single one of their patients over 60 is cognitively slow. Because the the the the sad diet, the Standard American Diet, it plugs up all the arteries. It plugs up the arteries in the brain, so they're mentally slow, okay? It plugs up the arteries in the eye, so their vision's going. It plugs up the artery in the ear, so their hearing loss. It plugs up the arteries in the Johnson, so they're uh impotent. It plugs up the arteries in the heart, so they don't got a whole lot of energy for that purpose, either.

[00:08:37]They're going into congestive heart failure, a lot of them, atrial fibrillation, stents, cabbages, and all this stuff, cuz they don't know about the vegan diet.

[00:08:44]Okay. So, now the hero in another world.

[00:08:46]Did his internship at Queen's Medical Center, Honolulu, Hawaii.

[00:08:50]Uh he had right lower quadrant pain. And back in those days, you know, hey, you got right lower quadrant pain, they do an exploratory laparotomy, ex-lap. And the appendix was normal, but they go, "Ah, well, we're in here, we might as well remove it anyway."

[00:09:02]Yeah, great. You end up with adhesions.

[00:09:04]Okay. Um so, then I talked to you about how the the old folks who ate the old-fashioned diet were very healthy compared to the young folks eating more meat, dairy, and oils. Um and he started to realize it's actually strange that medicine never talks about nutrition, that he never learned about it. And um the more he learned about medicine and the importance of nutrition, the more it became impossible for him. He said, "It was impossible for me to practice medicine the way I've been taught. I decided I would be a different kind of doctor." So, there it is, the hero makes an oath that he's going to be different.

[00:09:37]He's not just going to be a conformist weasel and take the easy way out and just, you know, sell drugs. He's going to try to actually really help the proles.

[00:09:45]Okay.

[00:09:46]He decided he said that he wanted to be a doctor who would empower his patients with the knowledge and ability to truly be well.

[00:09:53]Um and then he started to, you know, look around at epidemiology. He said, "Look around the world and you notice that the trimmest, healthiest, most youthful people live on plant-based, high-carbohydrate diets." He said, "The Asians, they follow diets based on rice with vegetables. Chinese before 1970, a billion out of a billion out of a billion are skinny, almost zero type 2 diabetes, obesity, autoimmune disease.

[00:10:20]Uh coronary artery disease." He says, "You go to Peru, trim people, they eat mostly potatoes.

[00:10:25]Uh white rice and potatoes both got one 1% of calories from fat. You go to rural Mexico and they live primarily on corn and beans. Like the Tarahumara, super healthy, can run 100 miles and do it in a day.

[00:10:37]Then you go to Africa and people thrive on millet and beans.

[00:10:41]It's like a grain, millet. You can make a cereal out of it. In New Guinea, sweet potatoes are the main staple. People in New Guinea are eating 93% of their calories from sweet potatoes back in the day and then when they were real healthy and thin.

[00:10:51]In the Middle East, chickpeas and rice are dietary staples. So, wherever they're eating starch-based diets, high in carbohydrates, low in fat, low in animal foods, the people are skinny and healthy.

[00:11:03]Wherever they're westernized, they're fat and sick.

[00:11:06]And so, he says it's not the exercise because even the people who have sedentary jobs and hardly exercise, when they eat these types of diets, they're skinny and healthy.

[00:11:17]You know, on Caldwell Esselstyn in his in his book, Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease, he says he didn't even tell his patients to exercise at all. And the reason is he says, "I didn't want to over, you know, overtax their willpower resources cuz I didn't want to overwhelm them." He says, "As long as they ate correctly, they're fine." So, don't get me wrong, it's good to exercise. You want to optimize things, you want to exercise, but to keep your coronaries clean, you don't have to exercise that much.

[00:11:40]Uh diet's, you know, like 10 times more important than um than exercise, even though exercise is good. Okay, then he says, "It's not genetic." Because whenever people from any of these places migrate to the United States and start eating a westernized diet, they become fat, sick, and stupid just like everybody else, okay?

[00:12:01]Okay, that's it for part one of Digestive Tune-Up book review.