Visceral Fat, Chronic Disease, and Dietary Root Causes with Alan Goldhamer, D.C.

本站添加: 2026-06-04

[00:00:00]And what if we called that substance chocolate?

[00:00:05]Do you think that people would like that? If you took a thousand people from a thousand cultures and you blindfolded them and you gave them a mouthful of salad and a mouthful of chocolate, do you think they could tell the difference?

[00:00:19]I tell patients if instead of eating chocolate and suffering the consequences, what they should do is melt it down and then rub it all over their belly and their hips where it's going to end up. And that way when they're done, they can wash it off instead of carrying it around all week.

[00:00:38]There was a survey done. This was survey of just women, not men. And they asked these women, "Would you rather have mad, hot, passionate sex or eat chocolate?"

[00:00:50]And the two most common responses were, "What kind of chocolate and how many pieces are we talking about?"

[00:01:00]So, we know now why people are getting fat, and we understand that being overweight is not just an aesthetic problem, but it's a major health concern.

[00:01:16]For about 10% of the fat on your body when you have excess fat is called visceral fat. And visceral fat is the fat that tends to accumulate around your abdomen and around your organs compared to subcutaneous fat which is normal fat storage in the rest of the body. The problem with visceral fat is it's hypertrophic, it's hyperlastic and it's hyper metabolic. So it affects uh you profoundly uh essentially it's acting like a tumor. So, if you have 2 lbs of visceral fat, for example, it's essentially like having a 2 lb tumor in your belly. And if you went up to a person and said, "Look, you have a 2-lb tumor and it's giving off metabolic products that's increasing your risk for heart disease, cancer, diabetes, autoimmune disease, they would be very concerned and might even do something about it." Well, if you have extra fat on your body, it's likely you have excess visceral fat. uh that is essentially acting like a tumor and it's going to be important uh to get rid of that. Um it's a consequence of the pleasure trap.

[00:02:38]You've been put you've been fed with these chemicals whether it's you or a rat or a mouse or a bird are fed with these chemicals that include salt oil and sugar. And the consequence is you eat too much, you get fat, you get visceral fat. The visceral fat acts like a tumor, giving off inflammatory products and is associated with heart disease, diabetes, autoimmune disease, and some forms of cancer. Now, what's interesting about those conditions, which are the leading contributing causes of death and disability, is that they're treated as if they're completely unrelated and independent conditions, and they're not.

[00:03:13]But today you have to go to a different kind of doctor even to be diagnosed and treated for these conditions.

[00:03:25]The the doctor that diagnoses heart disease is completely different specialty than the one that diagnoses diabetes or the one that treats autoimmune diseases because they're treated as if they're independent unrelated conditions.

[00:03:38]And one of the things that's interesting about those conditions and the doctors that treat them, if you go to them, they will say, "Oh, you have high blood pressure. Here is 1 2 3 4 up to five different kinds of medications that we're going to give you." Now, these medications have side effects like chronic cough, fatigue, impetence, and actually even premature death. Which is why we don't give everybody high blood pressure medications. Even though 60 60% of people are hypertensive by the time they reach 60, we don't just put it in the public water supply because those drugs have very serious side effects and dangers including death. And in fact, if you give high blood pressure medication to people that don't have high enough levels of hypertension, you will actually kill more people from the medication than you save from slightly reducing their risk of stroke. Because it turns out high blood pressure medications, for example, do not reduce the risk of heart attack, but they do slightly reduce the risk of stroke. But if you don't wait till people's blood pressure is high enough, the death rate from taking the drugs is higher than the save rate from reducing stroke, which is why you know you you wait to treat people with those medications.

[00:04:50]So this pleasure trap is uh very insidious because if you go to the doctor with for high blood pressure, they will say take these drugs with all their side effects and they will promise you that if you take them exactly as prescribed, you'll never get well. Your doctor will say you'll be on these drugs the rest of your life and we promise you you will be sick forever.

[00:05:15]you'll either die from the consequences of the medication or the consequences of the cardiovascular disease because it will not prevent that disease from progressing. If you go to a different doctor to treat diabetes, they will tell you the same thing. Oh, you have diabetes. It's associated with all of these terrible problems, diabetic neuropathy, retinopathy, heart disease, etc. We're going to give you these medications that will not reduce insulin resistance, but will force blood sugar across the membrane for a while. And if you take these drugs, you'll never get well and you'll be on these drugs the rest of your life. If you go to the doctor for autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis, ulcerative colitis, ankylosing, spondylitis, asthma, eczema, psoriasis, etc. These are conditions where the body immune system is attacking itself. They will give you medications that are very powerful to shut down the immune system.

[00:06:12]And at first it'll be like a dream and then it may become a nightmare because it turns out you need your immune system and when you shut it off uh you increase dramatically the risks of developing for example even more serious problems like cancer. It's interesting to think about autoimmune diseases and cancer as two sides of the same coin that in cancer um the immune system is not working well enough to keep the cancer cells that form every day at bay. So you know you're forming cancer cells and getting mutations and you're getting scesscent cells and your body's uh immune system is going in there and trying to eat those things up and recycle them through a process called autophagy. And if autophagy keeps up as fast as you're forming these older cells and cancerous mutations, uh, you basically do okay.

[00:07:07]But if they're cancerous cells are forming faster than you can eat them up, you start growing tumors and then you get cancer and metastasis and and ultimately die often from a slow and painful death. So the immune system not working well enough um may be associated with cancer. On the other hand, if their immune system is overactive, if you over stimulate uh the immune system in order for example to treat cancer, uh one of the consequences is often getting autoimmune disease where the immune system is too active and begins to attack itself. Depending on which tissue is being attacked depends on which name we give to the autoimmune disease. If it's if your body's immune system is attacking your um uh uh thyroid cells, uh you may end up with the most common cause of hypothyroidism, which is Hashimoto thyroiditis. That's your immune system attacking your thyroid. In fact, it's interesting that the HLAQ gene associated with Hashimoto thyroiditis is the same gene that's been associated with gluten sensitivity. And one of the theories is that when you take genetically vulnerable people and give them access to gluten, the protein in wheat, rye, and barley, the immune system can begin to attack itself. In some people, it shows up as ciliac disease. About 1% of the population, the intestinal tract is attacked by the immune system. And if you don't avoid wheat, rye, barley, uh it will be very serious and potentially fatal. Um in other people though the immune system doesn't attack the intestinal tract but rather attack the thyroid gland and it's called Hashimoto thyroiditis. Um in other people they have symptoms where the immune system is attacking um soft tissues or joints and they have arthritis or they have vasculitis or they have psoriasis or eczema or other conditions like asthma etc. So heat.