The Ketogenic Diet - Graham Phillips, ProLongevity, UK
Are humans forgetting the animals that we actually are? The Pharmacist Who Gave Up Drugs - Graham Phillips - talks to us about the impacts of the regular western diet and the impacts on health - in part 1 of 3.
Quote “Cardiovascular disease has gone from “vanishingly rare” to the “leading cause of death” in 100 years. Closely followed by cancer, coming up fast up the tracks is dementia. They're new brand made diseases. We need to think about the root cause because we can't drug our way out of that problem.”
Reported by Torie Robinson | Edited and produced by Carrot Cruncher Media.
Podcast
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00:00 Graham Phillips
“Cardiovascular disease has gone from “vanishingly rare” to the “leading cause of death” in 100 years. Closely followed by cancer, coming up fast up the tracks is dementia. They're new brand made diseases. We need to think about the root cause because we can't drug our way out of that problem.”00:20 Torie Robinson
Fellow homo sapiens! Welcome to, or welcome back to Epilepsy Sparks Insights.
Now, we’ve all heard about the ketogenic diet, right? The whole hashtag #keto has gone a bit wild in many trendy “health” spheres - which are often, to put it politely; echo chambers.
So, what differences can the ketogenic make to human wellbeing - if any - might you ask? Is it a treatment for anything? Can it help to improve Quality of Life? And, you know, since the title of this podcast is “Epilepsy Sparks Insights” (!) - can it be appropriate or can it even benefit the lives of some people with an epilepsy?
Please don’t forget to like, comment and subscribe to our channel. Only about 18% of our regular viewers are actual subscribers, so if you are one of the 82% that haven’t yet subscribed, please do do so today - because the numbers help us with the algorithms which will then promote our channel to more people who aren’t yet familiar with the epilepsies around the world. And now, onto our star of the week, the “pharmacist who gave up drugs” and became passionate about the ketogenic diet; Graham Phillips - who is wearing purple which is, like, kind of the epilepsy colour but it also happens to be the colour of…?01:39 Graham Phillips
ProLongevity, my program. Yeah, that's right.01:43 Torie Robinson
Okay. Well Graham, tell us about you quickly. Give us a quick snippet into who you are.01:47 Graham Phillips
So, I'm famous (or infamous depending on how you look at it) as the “pharmacist who gave up drugs”. So, I started my life as a conventionally trained community pharmacist. We built up a group of 10 pharmacies. We won every possible pharmacy award, most of them twice. And I became very senior in my profession and took some very senior leadership roles. And despite all the awards that I'd won, I eventually ended [up] very frustrated. Because as I was spooning more and more tablets into people, they weren't getting healthier. In fact, they were just getting fatter and sicker and more diabetic by the day, just less slowly. Including myself. And I started to question “What is it? This isn't what I thought I came into.”. You know, health professionals don't come into their profession to spoon tablets into people. They come in hoping they're going to do some real good. And I started to question it all. And I had the same thing myself. I was a fat kid who turned into a fat adult. And I remember being permanently hungry. I call it the “tyranny of food”. I'd be starving at breakfast. And when I'd finished breakfast, I'd still be hungry. And I'd be looking forward. So, the fatter I got, the hungrier I got, the hungrier I got, the fatter I got. Yeah, and every so often I could lose the weight by starving myself and running like hell. None of it was sustainable. And I thought “There must be a better way.”. And that kind of led me to a complete re-exploration of the science between all of this stuff. You know “Why are we getting fatter and sicker and more diabetic by the day? Why is England the sick man of Europe? What's the root cause?”? Because all of us health professionals know that we're dealing with escalating disease. We know that. But what we don't know is: why is it getting worse and worse and worse? If you go back 100 years, there was almost no obesity. The rate of diabetes - I think they worked out that in America 100 years ago, there'd have been 4,250 people with type 2 diabetes, right? You go to America today and virtually everyone's got diabetes. And we're not far behind in this country. So, these diseases of what we call “diabesity” (overweight, and diabetes) - which are kind of a gateway disease to the dementias, the neurodegenerative diseases, cardiovascular diseases, cancer. Vanishing in the area 100 years ago. Pretty much unknown in the hunter-gatherer tribes that still exist. And you don't see them in mammals in the wild. Why do we not look at the root cause and address the root cause?04:38 Torie Robinson
Rather than treating symptoms.04:40 Graham Phillips
Yeah! So, what we do with the modern medicine is the doctors are very, very good at the diagnosis and the pharmacists are very, very good at finessing the drugs. But look around you: it just isn't working. There has to be a better alternative. So, I went back to the root cause and I realised, basically, the old adage that your grandmother told you you are what you eat, do you know what? Your grandma was right. And so we've completely rethought everything. So, I'm now the pharmacist that gave up drugs. Having spooned tablets into people for 25 years, I'm now busy deprescribing and getting them healthy and off the medication by changing their diet and lifestyle.05:18 Torie Robinson
And so, this relates to the epilepsies, which people have probably gathered from what you've just said, but also, I imagine, lots of listeners are thinking “Huh, ketogenic diets!”, which we will get onto. But, just so everyone knows, we actually met - or connected - initially through a call regarding the epilepsies and you noted: nobody had brought up diet and how that can affect people's lives and potentially affect seizure frequency, severity, but also the other symptoms of epilepsy, such as mental health and potentially further on down the line, we know that people with an epilepsy are statistically more likely to develop types of dementia and stuff, but nobody mentioned this. It was just about seizures and drugs!06:04 Graham Phillips
Yeah, and they did a very, very good job of explaining the history of the drugs. There was a whole tree of the older drugs, the newer drugs, and the new drugs to come. Very impressive. But I thought “At some point someone is going to say something about nutrition!”. [But,] like nothing. And then at the end you came on!06:23 Torie Robinson
Hi!06:25 Graham Phillips
And I thought “Oh, we've got a brilliant patient advocate here. Patient advocates are definitely going to talk about their diet.”. Nope. So, I remember sending you a little thing in the chat and said “Has anyone ever mentioned a keto diet to you?” and you basically said “Well, I'm an adult, wouldn't be appropriate”, and I said “Can we talk offline?”.06:44 Torie Robinson
Yeah, well, I don't know about “appropriate”, but what… from, I think it's like, as a supposed adult, we… generally, when we hear “Keto”, it's likely to be that aimed at children. For instance, through Matthew's Friends, the organisation which promotes the use of the ketogenic diet, largely in children, sometimes in more adults, but largely in children. And you know, how to do that, they're really good at that. But for adults, it's kind of… dope you up, let's go. And kind of that's it, generally.07:17 Graham Phillips
Most Centres of Excellence in the treatment of epilepsy somewhere will have a nutritional approach. And it was the only approach. I mean, the relationship between epilepsy and diet has been known since the days of the Greeks. I mean, it goes back thousands of years. And they knew that if someone had epilepsy and you starved them, then it would resolve the epilepsy symptoms. But it's not a great long term strategy, right?07:47 Torie Robinson
You could be a little bit dead from that, right?07:49 Graham Phillips
You could be a little bit dead. And particularly for children where nutrition and their growing is even more important. But they realised tha - this is research done about a hundred years ago at John Hopkins University - what was it about starving people that reduced their seizures? And they found it was the relationship between the levels of ketones in their blood. Now, we human beings are basically dual fuel machines, like a Prius, right? It can use its battery or it can use its engine. And the trouble is we're… essentially, we're feeding our bodies on the wrong fuel all the time. So, if you get a diesel engine, you put petrol in it, things don't end well. And that's kind of what we're doing.08:39 Torie Robinson
Right.08:40 Graham Phillips
So, we're designed to mainly burn fat. But in a modern world we're mainly burning sugar and carbs. And that is the root cause of all the problems. Yet it's most simple.08:52 Torie Robinson
And often carbs that you consume, don't they often just, they become sugar?08:58 Graham Phillips
Yeah, in fact, I wrote a blog about this: Subway bread has got so much sugar in it that according to the Irish government, it's officially not bread.09:07 Torie Robinson
Do you know what? I tried a Subway - this was, to be fair, years ago - and I was like… I almost spat it out. It was so full of sugar. It was more like a cake with a little bit of skanky ham in it.09:18 Graham Phillips
It's exactly what it is. But look where the Subways are. They're around all the schools. So, when the kids come out of school for school lunch, they're basically eating sugar for… all the time. So, we're not nourishing children's plastic brains. Anyway (!), so back at Johns Hopkins: they realised it was about the ketones and they thought, well, we can't fast children long -term. Could we come up with a fasting mimicking diet? In other words, give them a diet that would mimic the benefits of fasting, without fasting. And that's where the keto diet came from. Now, a lot of people hear the word keto and they think of fad, or they hear the word keto and they think of ketoacidosis, right? Now ketoacidosis is the very high levels of ketones that people with Type 1 diabetes get and it's potentially lethal. We're talking about levels 10 times lower than that. So, they're higher levels than we normally have, but actually probably the natural levels. So, more or less 0.5 millimoles and above to give it, sort of to give it as technical term.10:26 Torie Robinson
Just for people who don't know; what is a ketone?10:28 Graham Phillips
It's a form of fuel for the body, effectively. So, we all know that we can burn glucose - that's one fuel. When we burn glucose, our engine tends to misfire. So, it's all done in these cells in our bodies called… sort-of subcells called mitochondria. When you're…it's a bit like rocket fuel; If you get your family hatchback and you put some rocket fuel in it, it will get to the top of the hill that much faster, right? But then, it'll blow up. So, we're essentially fueling our bodies on - most of the time - on the fuel that we're not really designed to have. Essentially, if you look at the history of 2 million years of evolution, we'd have had a high fat, high protein, very low carb diet. We'd have been mainly burning fat for fuel in the form of ketones. So, ketones are the version of the fat that we use to fuel. And when we're burning that as a fuel, it's a clean burn. We don't get all the side effects and the damage isn't done. And the damage could play out in various different ways. So, you know, it depends which body system you're talking about. If the body system is the heart, the cardiovascular system, you get damage there. If it's the brain, you've got some brain cells not firing very well - you might be depressed. If you've got brain cells that are triggered too easily, you might have epilepsy. So, you can kind of start to see how all this signalling and all this fueling all comes together with a single unifying theory. It's a theory of everything. And I know it sounds ridiculous….12:04 Torie Robinson
It sounds, almost, too simple.12:07 Graham Phillips
It does sound too simple, right? And of course it doesn't work for the food industry…12:10 Torie Robinson
It doesn't sell stuff.12:12 Graham Phillips
…because the McDonald's don't want you to know that it's poison. And it doesn't work for the farmer industry who don't want you to say, well “You don't need to be taking a statin, just change your diet.”. And so there's these two huge vested interests who don't want you to know some really simple truths. And the very, very simple truth is if you eat a proper human diet, most of these man-made diseases simply go away.12:34 Torie Robinson
And so, for instance, so, we look at certain tribes, say, in rural parts of the world. Now, I think in our conversations before, you said they tend to live longer. Is that correct statistically?12:46 Graham Phillips
So, it's interesting. So, while it's true to say that we're on average living longer than 100 years ago, and we assume that that's… and I think life expectancy since the introduction of the NHS has increased by 10 years - our assumption is that that's cause and effect and it's really not. So, the way I explain it: if you go back 100 years ago, life expectancy was much less, on average.
Women died in childbirth, or rather women died of childbirth and babies died in childbirth. So, if you take the example of a woman who has twins: 1 dies in childbirth and the other one lives to 80, their average life expectancy is 40. But that 80 year old still lived to 80, right?13:34 Torie Robinson
Right.13:35 Graham Phillips
So, yes, we are living on average longer, but it's not, it's not primarily due to health systems. And I'm not here to knock the NHS. I've worked in it all my life. I'm passionate about it, but root cause. If we can get our bodies fueled on the right fuel (and there's a question of affordability and social equity, we can talk about all of that). But just take the principle that if we can fuel our bodies appropriately, the majority of the diseases go away. And it plays most profoundly into mental health, which has become a fascination for me.14:09 Torie Robinson
Well, same. And also, just quickly, to put it out there, you know, we've been referring to the NHS, but say, you know, in the States, for instance, people spend an absolute fortune, if they have it, have the cash, on drugs and treatments. And I can just imagine people thinking “Imagine if I didn't need to do that. Imagine how that could change my life.”. I’m not an expert on this. I still take medications right now. We'll see what the future holds. And as you know, I'm not a scientist or a clinician, but, so just to put that out there, it's really important.14:46 Graham Phillips
I think it is, and let me be very clear. I know I call myself “the pharmacist that gave up drugs”. That doesn't mean that no one should ever take medication and that all drugs are evil, right? I'm not, absolutely not saying that. Nobody is saying that. What we're really trying to say is “Let's look at the root causes and address those. And then let's use the drugs in a sparing and affordable way.”. And to give you some more context - so you were talking about America.
Their per capita health spend is 4 times what we spend in return for the world's 13th worst healthcare. Right? So they're spending all this money, but they've got worse healthcare, not better healthcare overall, and less life expectancy.15:31 Torie Robinson
And ironically, in some countries, life expectancy is actually decreasing15:35 Graham Phillips
Including here [in the UK].15:36 Torie Robinson
How?!.15:37 Graham Phillips
Healthy life expectancy in the UK has been going backwards for 20 years and life expectancy itself is now slowly declining. But look what people are eating!15:47 Torie Robinson
And that's an important thing you said. Yeah, healthy life expectancy is really important because you can increase life expectancy, say of a person with an epilepsy and with the psychiatric symptoms as well. But if you're doped up on medication and you don't have a quality of life, what is the... this is just my opinion: what is the point in living longer, in that situation? And we spoke about this before; I read a piece by a cancer specialist who said if “I got this particular cancer and they said I had, like, 2 years to live if I didn't have treatment and maybe 2 and a half, 3, if I had the treatment, I would not have the treatment. I would just go through it, have a better quality of life for those two years and that's it.” because the treatment was so horrific. And I'm not saying that that's the case for all cancers or any specific disease, but I think it's a really interesting angle when you're looking at different conditions and diseases.16:44 Graham Phillips
Let me tell you something that you may find interesting. So, the first ever recorded heart attack in the entire world's medical literature was in 1910, right? There were literally no heart attacks recorded before 1910, right? And they knew (because they used to do biopsies), they knew you can go back, in particular Boston's really interesting. They've got the cause of death for hundreds of years for everyone.17:13 Torie Robinson
What they believe to be cause of death (I'm just playing it safe)!17:15 Graham Phillips
Yeah, yeah, but they were doing biopsies. So, if people have been dying… remember now it's the leading cause of death, right? So, no one would argue that 100 years ago their medical establishment were so poor it couldn't recognise the leading cause of death. So, when this heart attack was presented at a medical symposium, everyone said, so what? Like there's one of them, why would we be bothered? And cardiology has gone from, well, cardiovascular disease has gone from “vanishingly rare” to the “leading cause of death” in 100 years. Closely followed by cancer, coming up fast up the tracks is dementia. They're brand new made diseases. We need to think about root cause because we can't drug our way out of that problem.18:01 Torie Robinson
It reminds me of how, post-temporal lobe resection, I'm still having seizures - far fewer - but, I finally was like, I'm still having awful sleep. My mental health is really challenging. And so I made a concerted effort to get more sleep and I got help with that (and so that, or at least one cause of my seizures was not having good sleep) and I reduced my seizure frequency. That's just like one simple example, but rather than having to have my drugs increased or, you know, feel like I'm off my face a lot and tired after seizures, I reduced it by getting more sleep. And it's not as simple as that in many cases, but yeah, you kind of get where I'm coming from.18:46 Graham Phillips
My favourite device. It's not a rude sign. This is my Aura Ring. And this predicts my sleep.18:50 Torie Robinson
I think I have to get one just for that so I can do that. Finger up.18:55 Graham Phillips
Yeah, for me, the biggest thing is sleep. So, I mean, as a youngster, I used to pride myself. I used to say that “Ah, there'll be plenty of time to sleep when I'm dead!”. What I didn't realise then was you will be dead.19:11 Torie Robinson
And also likely to be heavier.19:14 Graham Phillips
It's true. So, when you're short slept, you're hungrier. And not only are you hungrier, you tend to go for the addictive foods, the high… easily processed carbs. It's harder to resist walking past the McDonald's and having that healthy salad. Yeah. So, that's right. So, sleep is absolutely foundational. I can't overstate how sleep has a huge effect on mental health and physiological health. So, I often give this story that you go to your doctor… (it's an apocryphal tale, but you'll recognise it, right): doctor says “Blood pressure's a bit high, come back in a month.. “Still a bit high, start a drug.”. Okay, go back a month later, it's better, but your cholesterol's a bit high, start a statin. And as you walk outside the doctor's surgery, you say, you know, doc, I'm not sleeping very well, and they just shrug at you.20:08 Torie Robinson
And I don't want this to sound like we're completely dissing all the GPs and stuff out there.20:12 Graham Phillips
Not at all!20:13 Torie Robinson
No, and some of this is limited time that they [(the GPs)] might have as well!20:16 Graham Phillips
It's the whole system, right? This isn't… we are in a system, and I've spent my life in that system as a pharmacist, right. I'm paid for dispensing medication and adding value to it. When I get people off medication, I'm literally shooting myself in the foot financially. Why would I do it? Why doesn't the system pay me more to add value in a different way? So no, I'm not attacking my medical colleagues. We need to change the system. We need to change the education and change the direction. And then we can use the resources better and help people.20:48 Torie Robinson
Thank you to Graham for our first instalment regarding the potential impacts of the ketogenic diet! Please do remember that this episode is not clinical advice - if you or someone you know is considering the ketogenic diet as a treatment for anything (or even just a change in diet overall), please run it past your GP or medical specialist first!
If you haven’t already, don’t forget to like, comment, and subscribe to the channel and share the episode with anybody you think could be interested, and see you in next week’s episode where we will actually be continuing our chat about the ketogenic diet with the “pharmacist who gave up drugs”! -
Graham Phillips is the founder of ProLongevity and has been a successful Pharmacist for over 35 years. His purpose is to help people to live a longer, healthier lives.
Graham turned his back on drugs after seeing more and more of his patients getting sick and staying sick, with medication partly masking the issues but not solving them.
ProLongevity, is an approach that combines unique biological data and precision nutrition with health professional support, to hold back the tide of diabesity, and help people transform their metabolic health without the use of medication.
Graham’s aim is to change the way that we approach healthcare in the UK using data, precision nutrition and health professional support to empower individuals to live longer, happier, healthier lives. Importantly, ProLongevity’s approach can reduce the cost and resource burden across the NHS from preventable metabolic diseases.
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X/Twitter: grahamsphillips
LinkedIn: graham-phillips
YouTube: @ProLongevity
ProLongevity: prolongevity.co.uk