Dr. Joel Fuhrman

Great to be here. Looking forward to it.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman

Right now, we have the highest heart attack and cancer rates in the world in this country. In other words, we have about 40% of Americans dying of heart attacks and strokes and about over 30% dying of cancers added together. Therefore we should ensure healthy eating for kids.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman

Right now, we have a diet that it was joke around. They say the diet Americans equal the S-A-D or Standard American Diet could be better designed or had it designed by Al-Qaeda, to kill everybody here. In other words, it’s a deadly diet we’re eating. This food should be out of children’s reach and we should ensure healthy eating for kids.

Now, we’re talking about parents who are misinformed, eating a dangerous diet and they’re in-charge of raising the next generation and they don’t have knowledge about nutrition or maybe have the knowledge but through the way they eaten over the last decades, they become addicted to unhealthy foods. This is not the healthy eating for kids. Their food preferences and food choices are based on foods that are highly palatable and dangerous. There’s a lot of confusion with things that are popular, the food preferences, the people that write books, and support people’s desire to eat those foods, keep promoting those dangerous foods.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman

The first step is we have to walk the walk if we want to talk to talk. It means that if you don’t model the diet you want your children to eat, there’s no point even not having this discussion because, it’s then just a hypocrite. Children will never learn to healthy and to have healthy eating for kids. Medical studies also show that children only eat as well and eventually wind up eating the diet their parents eat. So they only eat as well as the parents demonstrate they eat and eventually they eat that way.

There’s some issues we can discuss about healthy eating for kids and how to get children to eat healthy but we have to frame that first for the, “What is a healthy diet and what’s so unhealthy about the way people are eating right now” that’s resulting in this explosion of cancer, heart attacks, and dementia.

Before we discuss healthy eating for kids, I just want to make clear that with this high rate of cancer and with the number one cause death in children other than accidents being acute lymphoblastic leukemia, the diet we eat when we’re young in life and the diet that the child is exposed to prior the conception during pregnancy and the first 10 years of life has the largest impact on their future health. What are the disease outcomes they get later in life? Whether they develop immune condition or allergies or asthmatic or they’re more susceptible to infections. What type of cancer and what age do they get cancer when they’re an adult? It can be a cancer that may kill them. It could be a breast cancer, prostate cancer, or colon cancer.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman

I just wanted to finish the point I was making that the diet you eat when the first 10 years of life has the biggest impact on what cancer you develop later on in life. We have to ensure healthy eating for kids.

It’s not just the diet you eat in the first 10 years. It’s also the diet eaten during pregnancy and the foods the mother’s eat in the two years before conception because the eggs of her children are living in her body and those eggs can be negatively affected by her poor food choices like fast foods, processed foods, nitrates and processed meats. All this things can negatively affect their baby even before the baby is conceived.

I’m about fully gassed because the American diet is solo and fully because people in this country don’t consume sufficient green vegetables especially leafy greens and beans neither they ensure healthy eating for kids. It’s the greens and beans that contain folate. Folic acid is the synthetic form of folate that’s supplied from petroleum by product. It’s not made from real food. There’s no folic acid in food. Food contains folate and the body has to take that folic acid you get from a supplement and convert it into folate to work as same as folate can.

There’s a strong link between folic acid supplements and later life breast cancer and prostate cancer. Folic acid supplements are risk factor for cancer and our society advocates women to take folic acid. We do the same thing with almost everything doctors do. Because people eat poorly, we give them cholesterol in drugs and blood pressure medications. We don’t fix their diets. They don’t have high cholesterol and high blood pressure. We don’t make them eat a diet that’s mostly nutrient-dense and plant-rich. I call that diet The Nutritarian Diet. It’s designed to be essentially protective against heart attacks, strokes and cancers. The same way we also to consider healthy eating for kids.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman

There are a lot of irresponsible statements and I consider them almost to the point of being dangerous made by people and their food movement. That’s an example of irresponsible statements that can be dangerous if people listen to that kind of advice.

A person on a raw food, vegan diet 80/10/10, doesn’t take supplements. That’s utterly ridiculous. Those foods have no vitamin B12 in it and people following that type of diet could become paralyzed or even killed by lack of B12. We can go on and on their but let’s not use that as a focal point because that 80/10/10 is largely a fruit based diet and the 10/10 refers to 10% of calories from fat and 10% of calories from protein and a lot of people can develop fat deficiencies, dementia, and other difficulties in later in life in following that kind of program. I’m not certainly recommending anything like that keeping in view healthy eating for kids.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman

Going back to your question about a pound of green vegetables a day, I’m saying that we should eat a big salad every day and with the tomato, carrots, and cabbage. It could probably add up to a pound and then cook green vegetables. You should really strive to eat half a pound a day but the green vegetables all together could add up to about a pound. However, I don’t want to forget people to get focused on this number of trying to get a pound. It’s a simple thing here.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman

I have people to stop with their doing, get out a piece of paper and write, “The salad is the main dish and at least once a day, and have a giant salad. In that salad, make sure you put some raw cruciferous vegetables in that salad.” The raw cruciferous family include the watercress, arugula, cabbage, kale, and bok choy. Put some raw cruciferous because the raw cruciferous have the most powerful anti-cancer longevity effects when you eat them raw. Put a little raw onion there too because the raw onion has tremendous benefits especially when you eat it raw against cancer

If we can get the whole population making a promise of big salad every day and in addition to that, I do recommend people have a large oversized portion of steamed greens like asparagus, artichoke, broccolis, zucchini, and Brussel sprouts. I want people to really make vegetables essential to diet, so is important to ensure healthy eating for kids. There may be nuts, seeds, beans, and other starchy like orange vegetables and yellow vegetables.

The point I’m making is, whether you’re a vegan or not, whether you need a little bit of animal products or no animal products.

Just being on a vegan diet doesn’t make it healthy. You have to eat a lot of vegetables, be healthy, prevent cancer, and push the envelope of human longevity.

The diet has to be vegetable based, not green based, not meat based, not pasta and bread based, not oil based, not fruit based. It has to be vegetable based. We have to eat a large amount of vegetables to really protect ourselves.

If you’re eating relatively healthy and you’re eating a huge amount of vegetables, then what is it that you’re still missing? Why would you need any supplements? Is there anything that could be low on a diet that’s so nutritionally rich and nutritionally complete?

Dr. Joel Fuhrman

Usually, it doesn’t work that way keeping in view healthy eating for kids. If you take an animal like a monkey and you feed them. They’ll eat whatever you give them but once you start giving them foods that have high caloric concentration and are intensely flavored, then they’ll choose those foods that are more calorically dense, highly flavored, sweetened, salted, and calorically concentrated like white flour products. They’ll choose that over eating natural foods.

You put a rat in a cage, they’ll stop eating the vegetables and they’ll start just eating the croissant and the donut. They won’t even touch it and they’ll eat themselves to death. They can get a little injection of intravenous cocaine, which they’ll do and it’ll hit the speaker to get the cocaine but they’ll even take the donuts of sugary and fried in oil, the color of sugary highly concentrated foods. They’ll choose that over the cocaine.

You can’t just give a child choices. They’re going to choose the worst choice. You have to change the way the family eats.

That means you don’t have those choices available in the home.

The only way to get is to expose them to healthy food choices and not have the unhealthy choices in front of them.

If you want to change over, you could say,”We get a family meeting. We did this as a whole family.” We eat external foods that most people eat, which is about 55% of the American diet is highly refined and processed foods. Like donuts, cookies, crackers, rice cakes, breakfast starch, white bread, and soft drinks. That’s more than half the American diet and 30% is animal product.

We’re talking about vegetation. You have to really have a choice of all types of vegetation in the house but that’s really much all you have.

Your house and your home has to be a protected environment of healthy foods, where kids can freely eat what’s available.

They can’t make the choices, open the refrigerator and say, “Oh, I’m going to eat the broccoli and I’m not going to eat the pasta with the cream sauce, the fettuccine alfredo. I’m going to eat the burger with melted cheese on it. I’m going to have the broccoli and the peas.” They’re not going to shoot that. They’re not going to do that. You have to only have the broccoli, the peas, the pineapple, the oats with the flaxseeds, and the walnuts.

You have to only have healthy food and ensure healthy eating for kids. That’s the only way to get kids to eat healthy. It like I always say, “Shipwreck the family on Gilligan’s island.” On Gilligan’s island, nobody is going to not eat healthy food. They’re not going to starve themselves to death. That’s how I always tell people after a lot of years of study and scientific thought. I figured out that Skipper never really lived on that island.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman

It’s true regarding healthy eating for kids. You like what you used to eating. People from Thailand like Thai food. In other words, you like where the food you’re eating but the point is we’re in a toxic food environment and what happens is children get trained to like those dangerous food stuff. Of course in most homes, parents are eating it too.

It’s funny because I remember when my son was four years old by then he had no idea about healthy eating for kids. We took him to this elementary school where his sisters were performing in a choir. There were chocolate chip cookies being given out to every kid that walked on the door. His nose of the space was at the same light at the table and they handed the chocolate chip cookie. He never saw a chocolate cookie before. He smelled it and we were saying “What’s he going to do?” It’s kind of interesting to watch. What if Ziggy does a lick?” We took a little nibble of it and he went, “Oh! That’s junk food” and threw it back on the table because it was too sweet for him. It was like he didn’t have a taste of something that was artificially sweetened in that degree. It was just too much for him.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman

I guess the point I and you are making is that we can make healthy ice creams, healthy pies, and healthy all kinds of desserts. I can make extra delicious tasting burger with mushroom, walnuts, and beans. We can make all types of healthy eating for kids, food taste delicious and kids love this kind of stuff. However, the parents have to really get it. It’s really a whole family effort and we don’t make up rules for the children that are different from rules of the adults.

If everybody wants to go out and eat something unhealthy once a week or something, the whole family has that right but they should decide it as a family and made up the rules not to bring unhealthy food into the house and not to bring traditional desserts or ice cream in or only have it.

I think what you were bringing up are all valuable and that we can learn to like healthy food and we have to transition people from the American diet on to this healthy diet.

I remember when my son was younger, I used to come downstairs and he’d be eating kale with a cream sauce made of soy milk, cashew, and onion and I’d say, “Get that kale away from that kid. He’s eating too much green vegetables and I can’t have him getting stronger than me.” Then he’d eat some broccoli and kale and then come over to give me a push and I’d stumble backwards and do a backflip over the couch and say, “Get those greens away from that kid.” He’d wake up in the morning. He’d be making muscles coming down stairs “Where’s the broccoli dad? I got to get stronger than dad.” It’s so funny, we made a joke out of it. This is how healthy eating for kids can be encouraged.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman

Other than healthy eating for kids we also enlist children to help their parents eat healthier because that’s the key. Children are not as addicted. They can make change easier. It’s the parents that sabotage. When we’re teaching children in schools, the parents sabotage it. They want to bring the junks into the school because they’re the food addicts. They’re the ones who are usually overweight and can’t stop eating junk foods. They’re like sabotaging their children’s future.

However, the other issue you brought up is about confusion in the marketplace like a study showing one thing, the soy and the fat. I just want to clarify that because I don’t think any of those things you said are true.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman

A long late people and the late press, a lot of things are magnified and distorted. However, if we take a convention of nutritional scientists who are not commercially affiliated or not biased with strong commercial interest, not working for a food company, then we can see that 90% of all nutritional scientists in the world agree on three basic issues.

1. That the American diet and the way the modern world is eating is way too low to have natural produce. We have to more fruits and vegetables, beans, nuts, and seeds. We have to eat more whole plant foods.
2. Processed foods and high glycemic carbohydrates like white flour products and refined sugars create not just diabetes and heart attacks but they also link to cancer and a very powerful relationship. Keep this food away from children to ensure healthy eating for kids.

So when you eat a bagel, a croissant, or white bread, you are eating a strongly cancer promoting food. The whiter the bread, the sooner you’re dead. These are things that powerfully dangerous like pizza and pasta.

3. We have to dramatically reduce the amount of animal products eaten because they have lots of mechanisms not only the unsaturated fat but they are high protein, high iron levels, the other bacteria that grow in response to eating those foods that we have to significantly reduce the amount of animal products Americans are eating which are now over 30% of total caloric intake. All healthy and long-lived societies eat 10% or less.

There are more than a hundred different studies and some very excellent meta-analysis over many years showing the people in higher consumption of animal products have the dramatic high risk of cancer. Another recent study showed a fourfold increase rate of cancer deaths when these people will be followed for 20 years eating a higher amounts of animal products. These things are not controversial. They’re clear.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman

The idea that you voiced earlier that study shows no saturate has good, not bad. That’s not true. The studies didn’t show that at all. They just show that when you substituted high saturated fat animal products and put high sugar, high glycemic carbohydrates, things didn’t get better. They got worst. That doesn’t absolve saturated fat of being dangerous. It just means that high glycemic carbohydrates are even more dangerous. We’re talking about two dangerous foods that everybody agrees are dangerous.

I just want to be clear what people interpret from what you hear on the front page of Time Magazine and what people read and promote on the internet just confuses people. It’s a shame they get confused by these issues.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman

I also say,

Dr. Joel Fuhrman

But anyway, that’s right. The point is we have to do this as a family. I know we’re talking to parents here. We know when we were growing up, a lot of us had our mothers and fathers might smoke cigarettes because when they were kids, smoking didn’t seem so bad. They got addicted and had a hard time quitting. As children, we recognize smoking was so bad. We were taught in school. We helped our parents quit smoking. We played a role in them in improving their health and that’s what we have to do with regard to food.

People on a childbearing age are brought in an environment where processed foods and fast foods were highly prevalent. They became addicted to this dangerous, highly addictive food stuff that is destroying them. We have now a population that are more than about 80% of people are overweight. We’re talking about a very unhealthy population, the narrative medical care cost, and the human tragedy that represents as astronomical from the way people are eating.

What I’m saying here is kids can recognize that parents aren’t always the model of best behavior. We have to enlist them. Even the parents can enlist their child. You have to help.

If you want your child to be healthy and eat healthy, you have to look at yourself. Be the role model to ensure healthy eating for kids. If you look at yourself first, you know what you say? “Put on the oxygen mask on yourself first before you help others”.” The parents have to clean up their act and they can enlist their child to help clean.

The first step is to clean up your own act and enlist the child’s help in helping you live healthier because that child loves you, wants you to be healthy, and live a long life. Help promote healthy eating for kids they will help you back.

We have tremendous scientific information and support today for the facts are you don’t have to have heart attacks and strokes. You don’t have to get demented. We can win the war on cancer.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman

Nutritional science has made dramatic advances in recent years and we’re armed with the information to have a better, longer, and higher quality of life. But we have to make the significant change and we have to enlist the younger generation to help that change stick.

The way to have them understand is by reading this stuff together, watching the video, learning nutritional information together, and discussing it as a family in family meetings in how we’re going to promote healthy eating for kids and help each other in a way that’s not critical of one family or try attacking a certain child eating unhealthy but trying to put together a program that the whole family can adopt and can strive to emulate as a family unit.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman

Isn’t it amazing that we love our kids so much, we hold them in our arms when they’re born, we look into their eyes, we put their seatbelts on, we brush their teeth at night, we tuck them in bed at night. We do everything we can to protect them, and yet, we feed the foods that guarantee they’re going to get cancer when they get to a certain age as adults. We don’t really care about healthy eating for kids. That cancer is caused by the foods the parents fed that kid. The parents have no idea that it’s their choices and the foods they let their child eat.

When the child is growing and when the cells are replicating, that’s when the DNA of the cell unravels itself the widest, the greatest potential for DNA breaks, and demethylation defects. That’s when the ground worked what is laid for cancer to develop which reveals how important it is to consider healthy eating for kids.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman

So when you get breast cancer at age 65, that’s caused by mostly what your parents fed you or what you’re were eating in the first 5 and 10 years of your life.

Going through puberty at age 10-12 is dangerous and that is caused by what you ate. What you ate in the first 5 or 6 years of life determine when you went through puberty.

Sure I want people to eat healthy when they’re older and protects against dementia, heart disease, and cancers.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman

If parents knew the tremendous power what they were feeding their children had too, pretty much draw the photo or draw the destiny of their children’s health future, they would look at this as being essential.

I’m saying here that it’s reading, writing, arithmetic and nutrition. We all got to become students of nutrition and we should know the power of healthy eating for kids. This is not just for doctors and health professionals.

Nutrition is the most critical thing that affects our life and our happiness, our ability to concentrate in school and be successful in our careers, therefore encourage healthy eating for kids. To be able to have a good marriage and have ways to help your children and not have tragedies in our lives is because we’re in control of our health only when we’re in control of putting good quality food in our body.

We are what we eat is true. I don’t know how we got divorced from this. How the processed foods, the food promotion, cold cereals, fast foods, baked goods became the predominant way people food lived in. It’s just amazing how our country developed socially and economically, and how that became norm. And now, we’re fighting in a hole to get out of that because it’s really just something that can’t be sustained.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman

I use the term, “G-BOMBS” to help people remember the foods they’re supposed to be aiming to eat for every day. G-BOMBS stands for Greens, Beans, Onions, Mushrooms, Berries, and Seeds. The seeds like flax seeds, chia seeds, sesame seeds, and sunflower seeds.

I want people to eat and make a big pot of soup on the weekends as a family, with the vegetables, beans, mushrooms, onions and all kinds of vegetables. They can have that half the week. I want people eat at least 3 to 5 fresh fruits a day. I want people to eat at least half a cup of beans every day. Have cooked and raw vegetables. But also have some fresh fruit particularly berries, a powerful anti-cancer effects. Mushrooms have dramatic benefits. Seeds and nuts should be a major fat source in your diet.

It’s a complete different way of looking at food .To understand this foods of the super foods that have tremendous effects to medicate your disease risk and to make yourself super healthy.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman

Thank you so much.