You may have heard about “the blue zones,” a concept that people living in these areas live longer because of their diet and lifestyle. Dr. Martin challenges the entire premise using the example of Hong Kong versus India.
Dr. Martin also criticizes a recent Harvard study linking high meat consumption to diabetes. The questionnaire style study is misleading and is often bought and paid for. Dr. Martin further explains in today’s episode.
TRANSCRIPT OF TODAY'S EPISODE
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Dr. Martin: Well, good morning everyone. Once again, welcome to another live this morning. Nice to be on with you. We always appreciate everyone coming on. Let me get this board out of the way so I can say hello. Okay, I got that whiteboard back there and I want to talk to you this morning about. People ask me about this, especially the young generation. I guess they watch Netflix or whatever and it's always on what they call the blue zone. Okay? Have you heard of that? The blue zones? Best place to live is the blue zones. Okay? Live the longest. Well, I looked it up, okay? I looked it up and I said, well, I've been to a place. I did seminars there years ago. A place called Hong Kong. Okay? Do you know that Hong Kong has got the highest life expectancy of all nations? Hong Kong? Yeah. 85 point something, okay? Rated number one.
Do you know that Hong Kong has the highest meat consumption in the world? Higher than us. As soon as I, somebody said the blue. What are you talking about? The blue zones? I go look it up. And I go, well, that's a bunch of nonsense. That's a bunch of nonsense. It's not true, okay? But again, it comes from the elites, it comes from propaganda, it comes from indoctrination. And you know what's happening in the world, meat's no good. You have to live on plants, fruits and vegetables and meat's no good. Eggs, limit, cheese, dairy, no, not so much. Not very good for you, right? And there's a whole generation now or two that are buying this. They're buying it. And let's look at something this morning and I brought it up. I'll bring it up on my board here.
So, back to the whiteboard. And I like to use this example. I want to use this example, blue zones. So there are areas where people don't consume, apparently a lot of meat. And they say, well, those are the ones that are the healthiest populations in the world. Well, let me show you a contrast here this morning, okay? This hit the news the other day, so I'll bring it out to you, okay? But we're going to start with blue zones, and I want to start with Hong Kong versus India. Okay? We're talking about blue zones. Hong Kong isn't the blue zone, and the reason is because it's got the highest meat consumption in the world, okay? I've been there. Korea is another one, South Korea, okay? Been there too. Did seminars there too. They consume a lot more meat than we do. You wouldn't think that right about Asians, but they do. Facts. Number one place in the world for meat consumption is Hong Kong, and they have the highest life expectancy.
Now, I want to bring you India, okay? What's happening over there in India? It's not good. Not good. I'll read you a headline. A hundred million diabetics in India, a hundred million. Up 44% in the last four years. Okay? You know what is significant about India? Hong Kong has the highest, highest meat consumption in the world. Do you know what has the lowest meat consumption in the world? India. Yeah, India. A part of the reason is there that cows are sacred. It's part of the reason, okay? It's not all the reason, but India is going through a major crisis in healthcare. I didn't think any place could be as bad as North America, Canada or the USA as far as diabetes is concerned. But India has the lowest life expectancy rate, and they have diabetes coming out the wazoo, both ears, and they have the lowest meat consumption.
And the reason I bring it up, we discussed this yesterday, the reason I bring it up is because the world out there, there was just a new Harvard study that talked about the higher meat consumption, the higher diabetes, according to Harvard, sponsored by, because I looked in the background. First of all, I talked about it. It's a questionnaire study. What did you eat yesterday? What did you eat a week ago? How often do you eat red meat? This is the questionnaire. How often do you eat red meat? Oh, a couple of times a week maybe. And you have diabetes. Okay, questionnaire. Yeah, I got diabetes. Well, if you eat red meat twice a week, twice and you have diabetes, the red meat is the culprit. That's the study. That's it. And Harvard, by the way, who sponsored it? Who sponsored it? Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. You just go behind the scenes, find out who's sponsoring it. What does Bill Gates want? He wants you to eat crickets. He doesn't want you to eat red meat. He's trying to kill you, is what he's trying to do. Seriously, I think he's sincere.
They sincerely believe. Look, I'm going to get political for a minute and please, okay, don't come after, ah you can come after me, I don't care. Okay? No, I'm going to get political for a minute. People who are elite, okay? Not the common folks. Elite. Their religion is climate change. They want to save the planet. Now, does that make them insincere? No, that doesn't make them insincere. They could be very sincere. I don't doubt that Bill Gates believes in climate change. I have no doubt in my mind that he thinks the way to fix climate change at the end of the day is to get rid of about half the population or maybe three quarters of it. And I think he firmly believes in his mind that cows are a big problem and red meat's a big problem in our society. It gives you cholesterol.
And when you have that as the base or the basis of your thinking, you are going to look for blue zones and you're going to drink the Kool-Aid of blue zones. Blue Zones, my foot. They're not even true. You know how I started the reset? I probably talked about it in my last two books, how it started in my clinic. It was an experiment with diabetics. Diabetics who couldn't get control of their blood sugar. And I said, well, 30 days, I put a few people on it, 30 days. Only eggs, meat and cheese, nothing else. You can drink water and you can drink coffee or tea, nothing else. And I had some willing participants and it was incredible. Okay? We're talking several years ago now, diabetics. I had such good success that I had many physicians sending me patients who were diagnosed with diabetes and said, go see Dr. Martin, he's going to put you on an eating program and instead of off to the dietician, it's off to Dr. Martin and he's going to supervise you, which is what I want.
We're going to put you on an eating program and let's see if we can get that A1C or that blood glucose right down because meds are hardly doing it. And I got to give you more metformin and more insulin and more, more, more. And some physicians know this very well. All of them should, but some know this very well. Once a diabetic starts on medication, it never ends well, and I've always said it because medications, am I against them? No, but they're band-aids. They're not meant to be used long-term because they have an expiry date in diabetes, has an expiry date to the point that diabetic is much more susceptible to heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer's, chronic diseases that are killing the population. Diabetics. And it shows you that blood glucose, sugar left unattended in your bloodstream is very dangerous. And when you are a diabetic, you have an allergy. You know that. I know that.
You have an allergy and the study that came out from Harvard, it gave me a migraine. Why? Because I knew the second I saw it, it would be a questionnaire study and it would be are these people, oh, they like red meat, okay, they like red meat. They don't live on red meat, but they like it and it didn't talk about anything else. Didn't talk about smoking, didn't talk about whether they had a sedentary lifestyle. It didn't talk about what else they were eating. It didn't talk about anything. If you pay people ahead of time and you say, we want some conclusions that go our way, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, we want proof. You pay a scientist, they might as well put a patch right over their lab coats sponsored by. They should do it. It's amazing. But here's the truth, guys. Okay, here's the truth.
When it comes to diabetes, meat never, not ever has caused diabetes. It's just the opposite. Eggs. You could have a hundred eggs every day and you'll never get diabetes from eating eggs, and you will never get diabetes from eating cheese ever. There's no correlation. It's the opposite because again, diabetes type two adult onset. Sugar diabetes is what the original name was. Okay? Sugar diabetes is caused by sugar, honey, it's an allergy. And that is not taught in any medical school in North America. They never, ever, ever teach them because they can hardly admit they have a hard time admitting. I'm telling you, I can tell you this for a fact. When a person is a diabetic, medicine doesn't think generally, okay? There's exceptions of course. Generally they don't think of food, they think of medicine. It's their training.
You come into a medical office, you come into a doctor's office, you go to a walk-in clinic or whatever, and they do your A1C or your blood glucose and your A1C is high, but may not even be diabetic high, but it's close. Did they send you home, go on a diet, join the gym, cut out the sugar, and cut out the carbohydrates? Did they do that? No, they don't because the overarching principle in nutrition, okay? The overarching principle, even from the majority of people that teach nutrition, they don't connect diabetes with food. That's why it was adult onset diabetes. They changed the name. You think they were stupid. That was to get people to think like this. You have diabetes, it's your genetics. You have diabetes, we need to put you on medication. No talk. Oh, I might refer you to a dietician who's going to tell you moderation. Now, you need to go into moderation. You cannot cut out carbs because you'll die if you cut out carbs. Don't listen to Dr. Martin. He's a quack. I've heard that a thousand times. Quack, quack, quack, quack, quack.
But the reset started with diabetes. Only diabetics that I put that reset on in my early years of doing it, only diabetics. I didn't give it to anybody else. And the more I studied insulin and insulin resistance, by the time 2011 came and I wrote a book called Two Hormones that Want You Dead. So let's say 29, 2009 or whatever, 2008, I started talking big time about insulin wanting to kill you, insulin resistance. And I made a direct line between insulin and heart disease, insulin and cancer, insulin and Alzheimer's, and of course insulin and diabetes. Because diabetes, you don't just wake up one day and you're diabetic. No, it's been going on for a lot of years. The first thing that happens is high circulating insulin or insulin resistance. You want to get your insulin down, I can prove it to you. You got to cut out carbs. That's what drives insulin. It's rapid. It's the amount of time it takes food to become a sugar, okay? At the end of the day, all food is going to become sugar, but sugar is rapid into your bloodstream.
Ask a teacher, give a kid a chocolate bar. Why do you think they have pizza on Friday at lunch in school? Give kid, especially the canary in the coal mine, the kid with a little bit of hyperactivity, and today they drug them you see. What do they do with kids that are hyperactive? They drug them. They drug them. The pharmaceutical company took over medicine. They drug them. How about teaching mom and dad? Hey, you know your kid. It's a canary in the coal mine. They have some hyperactivity, and the worst thing you can do is give them sugar. And I used to teach kids as young as five years old in my office at five years old. Okay? Hey you, grabbed their little face, you and sugar don't get along. Got it? You and sugar don't get along. Do you understand that? Okay, so when mommy wants to give you cereal, say, mommy, I can't eat that because my brain's going to go hyperactive. I'm going to be out of control, mom. Well, parents know this. Do you give kids sugar at night? Oh no, they're going to be wound up. They won't be able to go to bed. Well, how about when you give it to them at eight o'clock in the morning or 7:30?
Guys, we live in a crazy world, but we're so upside down when it comes to nutrition. It's incredible. And they put the propaganda out there on Netflix and whatever, and they go after young people and they're smart. I give the food industry, they're smart, smart, smart. They are marketers extraordinaire. They are! You know how many people contacted me on this study of diabetes from Harvard and red meat. You know how many people? I told you so Dr. Martin, you're crazier than a hoot owl. They couldn't wait. And I said, well, are you ready for a rebuttal? Would you allow me to rebut what happened in that study? I don't care how much money was behind it, the conclusion was already paid for, bought and paid for, and it's wrong. It's wrong based on nutrition 101. You only have to understand the human body. You only have to understand physiology and biochemistry and understand that what they came to conclusion on red meat is the craziest thing ever. It's crazy because it's not true.
And it's not only not true. That is so deceptive. And they don't worry about little nutcases like me and my audience. They don't worry about that too much. They got 95 to 97, probably 99% of the population duped into believing. If you went door to door in your hometown door to door, do a survey, how much red meat do you think you should eat a week? And most people will tell you, most will tell you, nah, we need to limit it. And if you ask them, why would you want to limit that? Well, cholesterol, cholesterol, we got to keep our cholesterol. What about eggs? How many eggs do you think you should eat a week? And a lot of people will tell you very few. Why? Cholesterol. How about cheese? Well, it's fattening, it's calories. But if you don't understand nutrition 1 0 1, if you have your premise wrong, if you have your foundation wrong, if you see cholesterol as a boogeyman rather than on your side, you will draw conclusions that are not true.
And that's why, guys, I hammer down on this all the time, if you really want to be honest, in what place do they live the longest in the world and probably smoke the most? I've been there to Hong Kong. They eat more meat though than anybody else on the planet. That's just a fact. And where did they eat the less meat in the world? India. India and India has a crisis, major getting worse by the minute of diabetes. The opposite of the Harvard study, the very opposite. They eat less meat and red meat than any population in the world is over in India, and they have more diabetes per capita than anywhere else in the world. North America is number two. We're crazy bad, but we don't eat meat.
Do you know that meat consumption has gone down almost 40% since the 1980s? Because if you asked, not everybody, but the vast majority of people put a big bowl of salad and put a steak beside it and talk to people and go, don't ask them what they like better. Ask them what they think is better for their health. Put a steak and then put a salad, a bowl of salad with broccoli and vegetables coming out their ears and put that in front of a person and just say, look, I'm not talking about what you like. I'm talking about what's better for you. I'm going to tell you that the vast majority of people in your hometown would pick a salad. And if you ask them why they don't know very much, but they'll tell you, well, it's low in calories, it's green, it's good for you. It's going to make you alkaline. They'll tell you, and it's good for your heart, because there's no cholesterol and blah, blah, blah. True or false? That's true.
Bring someone olive oil. Okay? I haven't met. I guess there's always a few. I really haven't met anybody that doesn't think olive oil is good for you. Really. I know there's some people they go, well, is it cold pressed? Is it organic? Is it this and that and the other thing. I get that, but I'm just talking in generalities. Again, let's do the survey door to door. In your hometown, you bring a bottle of olive oil, cold pressed, organic, la, la, la, and you bring them bacon. And I'm going to tell you that 99% would say bacon, bad, olive oil, good. True or false? True or false? It comes down to what we've been taught all these years. I'm trying to give you the other side of it and the truth, because bacon's better than olive oil. It's equal in terms of oleic acid, which makes olive oil famous. I like olive oil, by the way. I just like bacon better. Bacon's got more potassium than your banana. It's got more potassium than your avocado. I'm not saying I like avocado. Bacon's better for you. It's got more protein. It's got better fat.
Okay, guys, you know what tomorrow is? Question and answer Friday. Yes, it is. And that's always fun. Okay? Send in your questions, it's not too late. Okay? Have you got our new book? Sun, Steak and Steel? How come? You should. Okay, I talked about all these things in there. Okay, we love you guys. We'll talk to you soon.
Announcer: You've reached the end of another Doctor Is In Podcast, with your hosts, Doctor Martin Junior and Senior. Be sure to catch our next episode and thanks for listening!