Regenerative Health with Max Gulhane, MD
I speak with world leaders on circadian & quantum biology, metabolic medicine & regenerative farming in search of the most effective ways of optimising health and reversing chronic disease.
Regenerative Health with Max Gulhane, MD
83. My Story: From Acne Patient to Lifestyle Doctor
I share my personal journey suffering from acne and irritable bowel syndrome, finding low carb nutrition then eventually circadian & quantum biology. Along the way I meet Dr Paul Saladino, Dr Jack Kruse in Central America, start the Regenerative Health Podcast and advocate for chronic disease reversal.
I was interviewed by my good friend Simon Lewis, my co-founder in REGENERATE and co-founder of How To Carnivore alongside Dr Anthony Chaffee. Check out his YouTube Channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@howtocarnivore/
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DISCLAIMER: The content in this podcast is purely for informational purposes and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on this podcast or YouTube channel. Do not make medication changes without first consulting your treating clinician.
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Welcome, everybody.
Speaker 1:Today we're lucky to be joined by my good friend, dr Max Goulhane. Max, welcome.
Speaker 2:Hey, simon, thanks for having me on my pleasure.
Speaker 1:Okay, guys, I've had Dr Max on the podcast before and I know him very well and I know his story, but he's never really shared his story online. I don't think, well, I haven't heard it. And when I normally get Max on when we chat, we go deep into sunlight and circadian health and maybe nutrition as well. But today, max, I want to hear a bit more about your story and how you got into this crazy world of holistic health. So, max, where did all of this begin for you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, look, it began with, I guess, our family's kind of interest or medical kind of background and there were a couple of doctors in the family and I really thought to myself whether I wanted to be involved in that and I had a good think, I thought critically about it and I really didn't have enough reasons not to at least give it a go. So I finished school and went to university, did an undergraduate science degree at the University of Queensland and did a subsequent year, so a fourth year of uh bench side research using um mouse models. And we actually did some pretty, pretty interesting research using these poor mice that had a genetic mutation in their um, in in one of the uh genes in their gut. Uh, that led to this misfolding of a pretty key protein that's involved in the mucus layer. So these mice actually developed inflammatory bowel disease pretty much spontaneously when they reached a certain age. So what my project was was actually feeding them what we called at the time a high-fat diet, but looking back with what I know now, it was really a seed oil diet, a processed sugar diet, a more of a, you could say, a standard American or processed foods diet. So these mice, when you gave them this more industrialized diet. They had a more severe phenotype or the more severe effect of inflammatory bowel disease. So that was interesting and that was kind of my first touch point, I guess, with the influence of diet and health. But I really didn't think too much about it. And the subsequent year I went down to Melbourne and started medical school at the University of Melbourne and kind of put that lifestyle and dietary facet of things onto the back burner from an intellectual point of view.
Speaker 2:But really around the same time and this is around the age of 19 to 21, I was developing and suffering from pretty bad acne and I was an active guy, I liked bike riding with friends and I was eating. In hindsight I was eating what would be quite a high sugar, high grain diet um, perhaps not refined sugar, but sugar from things like fruit and particularly and all these other kinds of foods again that people think are are healthy, like up and go wheat, bix and and porridge oats. So, and you know I was, I was doing this, I was physically active, uh, eating this higher carb diet, probably not getting a lot of deliberate sun exposure at all, and really suffering from acne that obviously a lot of people have and get rid of by the time they turn 17. So kind of here I was and going through this early adulthood phase and learning about biomedical science, learning about medicine, and having this parallel kind of journey as a patient and experiencing what it was to be a patient. And although acne is, I guess, one of the milder, you could say chronic diseases and maybe lifestyle disease is more appropriate it nevertheless was really instructive for me to really understand about what it's like to be a patient and basically going through a ladder of treatments that start with topical creams and antibiotic creams and then progressing to oral antibiotics and then finally ending in things like Roaccutane or isotretinoin, which is a very heavy drug that has a range of undesirable side effects. That was, I guess, instructive because that laid the path for me to think more critically about chronic disease from a patient's point of view. And then I went to Melbourne and enjoyed my time there, learned a lot of interesting stuff with you know, it was a very good curriculum.
Speaker 2:But I guess my acne flared again and I'd actually stopped the roaccutane because I basically had symptoms of uh, anxiety, depression. So I actually self-seized the medication and you know, you, I spoke to the treating dermatologist, my my dermatologist at the time and they he gave some platitude about, um, you know, an association with low mood that was more related to having acne than it was to the drug itself and it wasn't. It didn't acknowledge, truly like the symptomology, it didn't give me, as a patient at the time, really clear, you know, uh, legitimate my legitimatization or, um, acceptance of that as a possibility. It was more dismissal rather than anything else and you know, again, that was that's part of this understanding of what it's what it is to be a patient.
Speaker 2:So, around 2016 and 2017, uh, I was staying with a housemate of mine, a very good friend of mine. He's been ahead of the curve with a lot of topics throughout his life and he was eating a vegan diet and I thought, hang on, well, I'm obviously suffering from this issue and there was things in the media about improving planet health, improving our health, so I thought I'll try this vegan diet and, lo and behold, not only did the acne progress, but it also was accompanied by all kinds of other things like recurrent colds, irritable bowel syndrome and, again, in hindsight, I was not getting a lot of sunlight, I was eating fruit out of season, I was eating a whole bunch of foods that were essentially mismatched to my latitude and mismatched to the location that I was living, like a Melbourne winter, but I didn't know anything like that at the time, so it got to a nadir or a bottom out, a troughing point that I think everyone who makes changes in their life and lifestyle kind of has to get to. And you know, I remember closing a door when I was going to the hospital in medical school and thinking like just feeling fatigued and tired and just wondering is, if this is, you know, is this how it's supposed to feel? Like is are we supposed to be this tired like for the rest of our lives? And you know, doing everything that we're supposed to be doing with um, with regard to these dietary guidelines.
Speaker 2:So I don't know how I found it exactly, but somewhere along the line I stumbled upon the low carb down under YouTube channel. I wish I could remember the exact moment, but I couldn't. I don't know where I found it, but somehow stumbled upon those videos and began working my way through them and basically came across this whole new idea of understanding that diet could potentially at least mitigate and then possibly even reverse chronic diseases. So, with really not a lot left to lose. I tried at first cutting out fruit and grains and then increasing meat and did this low-carb diet and rather quite miraculously, my irritable bowel type syndromes went away and the acne just cleared up. And it was quickly. I mean, it happened quickly enough to obviously feel like that. That was a there was a massive effect and a massive difference there. So, uh, that was. That was amazingly informative, um, and useful, and you know, and you think back.
Speaker 2:You think back to like everything that you go through maybe years of these pharmaceutical treatments and years of discomfort and suffering and the question in your head is like why? Why was I not told this? So that point was the real, which coincided with my final year of medical school, was also like contrasting which is what I was learning in medical school and what I just managed to, you know, self-treat and yeah, that was really got me to, I guess, the end of the beginning of my journey in this space.
Speaker 1:Nice Max, which videos on Low Carb Down Under were you watching? Was there a particular doctor who you enjoyed?
Speaker 2:Paul Mason was one of the ones that stood out. He I remember definitely watching and enjoying all of his videos. Dr Ken Sikaris, who is a chemical pathologist and had some really good videos, those were and Gary Fetke those probably were the three that I kind of remember and, yeah, it was fascinating because they were referencing scientific literature and that all was well again, well referenced and made sense, but it wasn't anything that I'd be taught in the curriculum.
Speaker 1:Yeah, how did you go studying medicine while your paradigm was was really shifting towards this realization that nutrition is so important and you don't need well, carbohydrates aren't so important yeah, like, like I think it's.
Speaker 2:It's a difficult place to be in because the completion of the degree is reliant on simply checking boxes that are stipulated by the course and by the university. And really I think that's the headspace that most doctors, medical students, are in, and even prior to getting into medical school, which is let's just get into medical school. Once you're in, let's just finish this degree, or let's try and get as high a score as possible, and then, when you finish the medical degree, it's okay, now I just need to get into this specialty. And then, once you're working as a registrar, it's like, okay, I just need to become a fellow, a specialist.
Speaker 2:So there's this tunnel visioning that happens throughout the whole process of the training of MDs and doctors and clinicians. That discourages inquisitive thought beyond what is stipulated or taught in the curriculum. So my, I guess, just natural interest was to, I guess, teach myself what I thought was interesting, while at the same time you know at least passing the degree, which you know I did comfortably. But the onus was very much, and I realized that the onus was very much on us as individuals, on me, to teach myself and to learn the type of information that you know wasn't being taught in this.
Speaker 1:You know this institution so now you're a practicing gp registrar up on the northern rivers of new south wales. How did you decide? You know, when you were doing your medical degree, when you were discovering low carb down under, when you'd healed your own acne, how did you decide, okay, this is the avenue that I want to go down, and then maybe add on a little bit onto what that avenue is that you want to go down and how you want to practice.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So we left off at my arrival at low carb and essentially the time in between that and where I am now was exploring more into carnivore. And that was because of figures like Dr Sean Baker and Dr Paul Saladino, and doing carnivore was a step up above low carb in terms of energy and in terms of mood, in terms of stability, just in general wellbeing. So that was transformative and just again amazing. It felt like really and again in, like my mitochondrial colony was just essentially being revved up and really finely tuned and my energy output, my feelings of well-being were, I guess, attendant in that improvement in that mitochondrial function. But what happened was I started working as a junior doctor in emergency departments general medical wards, obstetrics and gynecology and thankfully during that time it was able to just continue exploring these ideas.
Speaker 2:For me I had, I think, what you could say a similar encounter with strict carnivore that Paul Saladino had, dr Saladino which was after about eight months of really being strict. I had, I guess, a new lagging of energy and a lagging of vitality that I'd initially experienced when I first went on there. So I was really curious as to why that might be. So it kept me just looking. It kept me looking at about what else was going on and what else could be at play here in the health optimizing sphere, because at that point I was really focused on diet exclusively as a tool of health optimization, and I still think it's a key pillar. But my own experience kind of invited me to do a bit more deep dive. And that's when I got to Dr Jack Cruz. And if you're on Twitter in these kind of circles of where a lot of these conversations are happening, then you're inevitably going to come across his work and, for me, his tweets, which are they're so dense in information and with conceptual references that were foreign to me. It was almost like hanging a carrot in front of a donkey or a big chocolate cake in front of a kid. For me, I was compelled to explore the ideas, and that's when I was first introduced to ideas about the effect of light on metabolism, mitochondria and what are the other inputs into mitochondrial function and circadian rhythms and this idea that we should be aligned to the natural light cycle. So I kind of added them into my repertoire but really, really gravitated towards what Dr Saladino was talking about, and he'd since subsequently reintroduced fruit and honey into his diet after um having flagging energy, lower uh androgen like male hormone levels and and lower perhaps, uh, even impaired slightly impaired thyroid function um for him in his personal experience. So, um, I was following him and COVID happened.
Speaker 2:And I don't know where you were, simon, but I was at various places in Melbourne when COVID first hit, working in emergency departments, and it was a stressful time. It was a period and maybe I'll just say this euphemistically is that the response was not congruent, in my opinion, with the epidemiology of the infection. In my time at Melbourne Uni I did a whole year of public health and I took infectious diseases epidemiology and what I saw kind of rolling out pretty quickly after about three months was really a bifurcation of what would have been appropriate versus what was actually happening. And maybe I won't say more than that, but suffice to say at the end of 2022, or the beginning of 2022, sorry, when they finally reopened the borders. That was a period where I was pretty happy to leave Australia at least temporarily, to leave Australia at least temporarily. And in that journey again, I told you I'd been really following Dr Saladino's work and his message.
Speaker 2:I actually sought him out and I traveled over to Costa Rica and through basically a whole lot of chance and the universe working in mysterious ways, I actually met up with him in a very serendipitous way and that meeting on a beach in Costa Rica is a real inflection point and a turning point for me. And, look, we had a conversation. We discussed health, we discussed the role of diet, we discussed the role of light as well, and he came away, he gave me some advice, which I'm very grateful to him for, which was, you know, get a fellowship qualification and kind of really go from there, use that as your foundation to advocate for lifestyle and lifestyle change. So I left that meeting in mid-2022. And that was the point that I launched, or applied to general practice training.
Speaker 2:And that was also the point that I decided to launch my podcast, because I realized that I had a lot of questions and I wanted to talk to people like Dr Sal publicly. But I needed to have some form of proof of work to, I guess, get those people to talk to me. So my podcast, regenerative Health, was really based on on his podcast, fundamental health. Uh, it's a homage to, to, to paul's podcast and uh, yeah, that's. That was the, the kind of journey that that really um, set me up to, to where we are now.
Speaker 1:Love it you know, I think there's something uh, sort of otherworldly about actually meeting people in person and, you know, shaking hands and there's a sharing of vibrations and energy, and that can often open up a whole new world and it can confirm things for you, or and it can steer you in a new direction, and it sounds like that definitely happened for you when you, when you met Saladino, absolutely it was.
Speaker 2:You know it was a Absolutely, it was a path laid out for you. But sometimes, when you meet mentors, when you meet idols, perhaps and there's something powerful in that. So I really mirror the comment, simon, which is, if anyone listening is unsure about what they want to do or unsure of finding a purpose or meaning in their life or whatever they're doing, just think about what you're interested in, think about who are the people who are doing the most exciting things in that field and go seek them out. I think you might be surprised how the universe works to facilitate meetings that you know can be pretty life-changing 100%.
Speaker 1:It's a shortcut. You find somebody who's already doing what you want to do, even though it's not exactly that, but it is in some form. You go and you know, try and communicate with them and try and offer them something, and that's one thing that I think is great about podcasts. First of all, it's kind of a bit you know, it's all very recent Like this has all happened for you in the last two and a half years and now you're very much established, at least in Australia, in the holistic health scene.
Speaker 1:Things can happen really quickly and the beauty of having a podcast or a YouTube channel or something like that is you can easily add value to people. So you can. You know, you can invite somebody on, you can have a conversation and you're promoting them. But at the same time, you're building that connection, you're getting to know each other and you know that's so powerful. I think that's definitely turbocharged. You having the podcast, meeting all these people, and now what we're doing with Regenerate we'll, we'll loop into at the end. That's yeah. That's really accelerating things for us, which I think is amazing. So we've yeah you go max.
Speaker 2:I was just going to mention that if anyone is on the fence about, you know, starting a podcast, I would 100 encourage you to do so because, if nothing else, for the selfish reason of of learning and and everyone obviously has a different learning style and you know, studying, for example, some people like visual learning, some people like to write notes, but I think everyone learns pretty well by talking to someone else and the amount of knowledge that you'll gain by simply having a conversation with an expert in the field and testing your conceptual framework against theirs and then coming away from that discussion, retooling it, reformulating it and then taking it to the next person and basically going on this journey, this intellectual journey, and taking your listeners and your audience along with you.
Speaker 2:I mean, that is that's, that's it's fun and it's it's rewarding's rewarding, and it feels like not only you're leveling up individually, but sometimes it really feels like you're contributing to kind of leveling up the consciousness of humanity and not to sound too grandiose, but really there's like steps of understanding of ideas in society. If you think back to the invention of the printing press, before Gutenberg's printing press, there was basically monks had to hand scribe copies of the Bible there were no books around because it took so much time and energy and effort to simply copy and produce a book. So there was no wonder. Everyone was illiterate and the literacy and reading and writing was only done by monks who were celibate and had enough time to dedicate to learning and reading and writing.
Speaker 2:But if you think about that invention, suddenly they were able to mass accelerate the transmission of knowledge and then, if you bring us up to you know, you fast forward to telecommunications, the telegraphs and the newspapers, tv, radio. I really feel podcast is the latest and greatest iteration of that technology which allows anyone to not only learn anything but really themselves enter into this massive conversation, digital conversation and contribution of knowledge gaining. And so it's amazing. It's amazing what technology has been able to do to help us and it's amazing how much we can learn if we're curious, passionate and, yes, seek out people who we admire and who have more knowledge than us in areas that we're interested in.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the learning has been totally accelerated and, you know, it makes me think of, like, say, kira or Cameron or Tristan, those amazing speakers that we had at Regenerate, all super young, under 30, and sharing this information about quantum biology, circadian health, you know, emfs. That's really very cutting edge and quite mind-blowing. And these guys have fallen deep down the rabbit hole, you know, in some instances over the period of like two years, and now they're essentially, you know, experts in the top 0.1 percent of people who know about these topics. So it's, it's amazing what you can find if you commit to learn something.
Speaker 1:Um, speaking of of learning something you've teased this a few times with the sunlight reference and a bit of circadian health how did you fall down the sunlight, circadian Jack Cruz rabbit hole? Because when you first hear about the power of, you know, just getting natural sunlight and blocking blue light and you know, really, tuning up the circadian rhythm, you know, for me at least, I thought, yeah, that sounds pretty helpful. The circadian rhythm you got, you know, for me at least, I thought, yeah, that sounds pretty helpful. But then I sort of, you know, I didn't think, okay, you know, and I have explored it, obviously through you know, through you and encouraged by you.
Speaker 2:But but what was it that made you think okay, I'm gonna go deep in this and I want to really push and experiment it on myself yeah, look, I was doing a lot myself and and just finding that when I was stringing together perfect circadian days of seeing the sunrise, spending at least 30 minutes but even longer in the morning sun, getting exposed to the sun throughout the day, and then just really be diligent in blocking blue light after dark, whenever that was happening, I got the feeling back that I first got when I went carnival, which I, as I mentioned, was what I believe is really the mitochondrial colony simply kind of humming again.
Speaker 2:That's very interesting, yeah, yeah. And what was going on at the same time was this as I mentioned the journey on the podcast, I interviewed Dr Jack Cruz and he, in his very characteristic way some would say you know, you insert your adjective and brash bombastic you know, you, there's a, there's a. You know, pick the theosaurus up and you can choose any um kind of flavor of adjective to use to describe him. But if nothing else, he um intellectually invites you to explore ideas deeper than where you are currently, and it's a, it's a, it's an invitation to swim into a deeper pool and I, I really think of think of it that way is. And and for me, I felt like I was comfortable in in, maybe the shallow end of the swimming pool talking about diet, talking about um, about a diet only, and basically saying you know that's my wheelhouse, but but really there was cruz, you know, standing in the deep end, being like you know, you going to just stay there or are you going to come dive in here and explore these topics? So, after my three-part series with him, which was incredibly in-depth, that was weaving in evolutionary biology, it was weaving in quantum biology, quantum mechanics, it was weaving in the circadian story and it was weaving in his perspectives on metabolic disease and diabetes, which I was and still am extremely interested in reversing and preventing. He weaved that into as it related to sunlight. And really I kept researching, kept learning, and when you keep going until you can, uh, until you find something that disproves, uh, the statements that you're, you're, you're trying to, um, verify, um, that's, I guess, the scientific method. And, and as I I obviously haven't come close to, to the end point and it, it again just makes more and more and more and more sense.
Speaker 2:And really how I think about it, to kind of summarize, is that optimal metabolic health, which is what we're striving for with a strict low-carbocondyl diet optimal mental health, optimal freedom from autoimmune disease, these all exist. I see them as subsets or included within, in a state where the circadian and quantum biological inputs are dialed. And that really implies that there's a hierarchy or a stepwise function in which, if you address the foundations first, then you essentially get the desired effect, which is health optimization. And it also implies that perhaps, if you only look at diet, you're not addressing the problem at its most fundamental, root cause. And the foundations are what Cruz talks about, I believe, which are these ideas of light, water and magnetism. And the reason why that is the case is because they are the fundamental inputs into mitochondrial biology. And the story of mitochondrial health is the story of chronic disease. As I mentioned, I felt amazing when my mitochondrial colony was tuned. When someone gets a chronic disease, whether that's Alzheimer's disease, parkinson's disease, type 2 diabetes, chronic kidney disease, they're simply manifesting an organ-specific state of mitochondrial end stage dysfunction, cancer included. So, and really, if we want to take this back to the beginning of the whole story, then we do. We really want to understand what are the fundamental inputs into, into mitochondrial physiology.
Speaker 2:And, uh, you know that that's where they are. So you might be thinking about food, and where does food fit into that? Well, you can think about food as a photosynthetic product, meaning that food at its core is light. It's transformed light energy from the sun. That grass blade grew because the plant was able to fix carbon dioxide from the atmosphere with water and under the power of sunlight. So that is where I guess it fits in. And look, we can talk about how that is applied in practice. And everyone, you know everyone has a different degree, I think, to which and sensitivity to which these, these circadian signals, um really, uh, change their perception of of how they feel. But, uh, if we were to be puritanic about these circadian and quantum inputs, which is consistent with our ancestral evolution for 4 million years as homonyms, hominids, then that really is the root cause. Fix that I'm talking about.
Speaker 1:I love it. You know, I think the adventure often begins when you delve into new information, and that whole world of the unknown is fascinating, it's opportunity. It can be a little scary, particularly when you have your paradigm fixed on certain things, am I? You know, I can easily just sort of double down on carnivore and just keep watching carnivore podcast after carnivore podcast and only hang out with carnivores. But is that really going to expand my horizon or increase my awareness? I don't think so. I think delving into new territories, trying things you can always come back to where you were is amazing, and that's what life is about, and I do love that.
Speaker 1:I get to meet people like you and other people in this community who instinctively have that curiosity and that thought of okay, well, obviously we don't know everything. Now, you know and I think Dr Chafee says this I think either you are taught this when you first start medical school or you shouldn't be. It's like half of what you learn will be proven to be false. So have your wits about you and go out there and discover and test and do science. You know science should be, uh, maybe an adjective rather than just an out, rather than something fixed.
Speaker 2:So no, just give the um, absolutely, and I think it is.
Speaker 2:It's scary, it it's scary to really delve into the unknown, which is exactly what you're referencing, simon.
Speaker 2:And it's even scarier to burn off parts of you which is essentially what, parts of our ego, which are intellectual paradigms we've occupied or that we've spent years understanding and talking about and building our identity around, and it's, it's difficult and can be quite scary and painful to, um, basically put them down and venture again into the unknown, venture into the deep end, be an intellectual beginner again, and that that's scary and but, but I see that as my duty as a clinician and a doctor, and that's because that's essentially the oath and that's what we signed up for when we took on this profession, which is one, obviously, to do no harm, but to really be advocates and help our patients as much as we can.
Speaker 2:So I see the intellectual curiosity as a duty, and I know Dr Jack Cruz thinks the same, and I don't judge other people who do remain in their, perhaps in the shallow end, unless they're making a lot of money to uh, you know, to, to, to stay there and they're potentially misleading people. But really, uh, yeah, it's, it's not easy, but I, as I said, it's it's it's an imperative and a duty.
Speaker 1:That's that's how I think about it well, I do judge those who, um, try to stifle people from actually exploring these new ideas, because that does my absolute head in. And that's you. You know that. Trust the science stuff, show me the study it's like you know. Be a little bit more open-minded and realise that this information isn't fixed. So yeah, they're the people who make things a little unpleasant. I find, max, I'm picturing a junior doctor who has just discovered the world of light and circadian health being asked to do night shift. Did that happen to you and how'd that go down?
Speaker 2:yeah, I did a lot of night shift throughout junior doctoring in many different hospitals and you know, you, you, once, you understand circadian biology and you understand, uh, the effect of night shift and the data, the, the evidence about its impact on health, and you don't become too, um, you know, excited about it. But look, thankfully it, knowledge is power, and I was really able to implement and understand how my body works and the body responds to different inputs. When you, when you, um, you know, kind of tune them for night shift and you know, by the end, or at this point, I know exactly what to do to minimize the disruption to, to my health of night shift, and so that's a positive, and I've talked about that at length, um, in previous podcasts. So it can be done and I obviously respect everyone who does it, but I would also give the information that, um, if you can don't do night shift because you're shortening your life, uh, it's that simple yeah, I wouldn't want any of my loved ones to be doing it, it's, it's just so brutal.
Speaker 1:Um, all right. So you, uh, you discovered the carnivore diet and you shook saladino's hand. You discovered the world of light. Have you? Have you shook or shaken cruz's hand?
Speaker 2:yeah, I, I did, I was. I was lucky enough to travel to el salvador at the beginning of this year and an interesting it was a health conference, but really a gathering of interested, light-interested people and a couple of doctors in El Salvador. It was called the Age of Light and yeah, dr Cruz was actually, you know, he was there. He presented and he actually presented about a medical bill, a constitutional amendment that he'd written for the El Salvadoran president, nayib Bukele, with the goal of changing or preventing the use of medicine, the hijacking of medicine or whatever various means as we've seen happen in the West, in America, in Australia, england, and really that is a very broad, encompassing amendment. It hasn't been passed yet and I'm not sure what the status is. I do know for a fact that it was passed to RFK Jr and the Trump campaign and that was basically after RFK started talking about mitochondrial health.
Speaker 2:Chronic disease was in a large part after reading the constitutional amendment that Cruz proposed, that Cruz proposed, but essentially it enshrines protection on the medical industry and on doctors to protect the patient-doctor relationship and handicaps on industry to exploit people, exploit processes and use medications and pharmaceutical medications in ways that aren't in the best interests of the patient and really enshrining the sanctity, as I mentioned, of the doctor to decide, in conjunction with the patient and full informed consent, what they should or shouldn't do, and no one else should have input into that, uh, into that relationship and that decision, and unfortunately, that is exactly what we saw.
Speaker 2:Uh, you know, from from 2020 onwards. So, um, but, but briefly, yes, I did meet dr cruz and, uh, it was great, it was great to meet him in person. Uh, we, we did talk, um about a lot of these things that that, you know, uh, have been the subject of my podcast and, you know, since meeting him, he sent me down a a very interesting, um kind of route with my interviews that I'm continuing to pursue, which, you know, at the moment has been focused on really conveying the importance of sunlight and health, exploring skin cancer and sunlight's relationship to skin cancer, and beginning to talk more about quantum biology and the role of things like the quantum mechanical processes happening in the body and endogenous light that gets emitted from the body. All these kind of cutting-edge concepts that centralised medicine, centralised science, you know, haven't been talking or promoting about at all.
Speaker 1:Yeah, awesome. It may just be my echo chamber and your echo chamber, but it does feel like holistic health is going mainstream. You know we're seeing RFk jr become a big part of trump's campaign and rfk's whole message is make america healthy again, and for him he appears to be starting with food. You know he wants chemicals out of farming. He wants ultra, ultra processed food off the menu and he's bringing seed oils into the mainstream, which is phenomenal, like you wouldn't. These days, a lot of people are catching on to what seed oils are. You compare now to 12 months ago, and it's day and night. It's unbelievable. What do you think about this movement and how do you fit into it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and how do you fit into it? Yeah, look, I think that societal movements they occur. It's like a pendulum swinging and when enough people are sick and diseased and over-medicated and suffering and dying from preventable lifestyle diseases and not getting adequate advice about reversal and prevention from people that should be giving them that advice, then it's simply an inevitable thing that movements like RFK juniors will emerge, and often it is just the right person at the right time with the right message, who's had a unique journey that really puts them into a position of being able to advocate for an issue. And RFK Jr, he's basically riding that wave at the moment and this is a guy who talked a lot for a long time about environmentalism and chemical contamination and a whole range of other important issues, but it seems like this is the time and the place for him to talk about chronic disease. So I see it as an inevitability that this issue is kind of raised and I think that it's up to individuals to explore, understand and really talk about it. And, look, I think that I'm someone who is trying to understand as much as I can so I can communicate more effectively and, again, help spread these messages, and I'm by no means diminishing the really importance of improving food quality quality, of getting endocrine disrupting chemicals, food additives, out of the system, improving agriculture and that's definitely a massive passion of mine and it's just so happens.
Speaker 2:At the moment my, my emphasis is is on light, and really I think that's because of of need as well, which is that, um, sometimes if there's enough people already talking about an issue, then, uh, and you have a different skill set. Then sometimes you're asked to step up and talk about and advocate for an issue that perhaps other people don't have the understanding or or knowledge yet to to talk about. So I guess I I'm gonna be be there promoting the understanding or the awareness of circadian rhythm disruption on health, of an inadequate amount or deficiency of natural sunlight, of these toxic indoor environments that are deprived of natural, non-visible light, and I'm going to be, you know, advocating for all this, you know, at the same time as really encouraging and cheering on people like RFK who are leading with the food message, but I don't doubt that they're eventually going to come around to see how important light is for health.
Speaker 1:I agree with that. You know. I think like if you look at the means siblings, right now they are focused on food. I think it makes particular sense for Callie, who's previously worked for Coca-Cola, to sort of focus on food. I think a logical next step is to look at things like life and at the moment that's probably considered a little bit too far out there. The most socially acceptable would probably be, you know, ultra-processed foods and now seed oils are becoming a little bit more kind of accepted too.
Speaker 1:But you know, eventually people will look at the light environment and eventually, I think, emfs and radiation will also hit a more mainstream point as well. But it's almost like a sort of jumping off point. And you know, like we were talking about before the call, cruz is so advanced and so certain about his stance and you know, having listened to quite a few Cruz podcasts myself, I do tend to agree with him and I think he has the sort of big picture pretty well covered. But you sort of need to meet people where they are sometimes and he tries to expect people to be like all the way down his rabbit hole and as advanced in their thinking as he is, and I don't think that's necessarily a good way to communicate with the masses, whereas the likes of the Means and now RFK as well. They really are communicating with the people somewhat where they are, which is really cool to see.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and look to finish, the RFK point. I wrote a really brief essay that I put on Twitter, which is that, whatever happens with this election, I think RFK's messaging about chronic disease has really changed this Overton window, which is this kind of range of acceptable talking points in the public discourse. He's fundamentally shifted that so that it's going to be difficult for any party to continue to pretend that there's not a problem. And I read there was an article. I think it was talking about one of these public events that was advocating for improving current disease in America, and one of these ivory tower institutional mouthpieces maybe it was something like the Atlantic wrote a kind of a I wouldn't say hit piece, but a disparaging article that essentially, to paraphrase, said contrary to what was the advocates, the food and health advocates at this event, you know, experts assert that the public health crisis in America and children is overblown. So there was some kind of statement to kind of minimize the degree of the problem. And you know, in many parts of Australia well, it's not as bad as the US, but the number of kids that are coming in with, you know, on the autism spectrum is with neurodevelopmental issues, is absolutely enormous. And we had this whole national disability insurance scheme and autism is the fastest-growing diagnosis on that essentially program, meaning that everyone in the country, the society, is bearing the cost of this chronic disease which is, you know, afflicting children. So this becomes imperative collectively for us to understand what is causing these diseases, and you know they're mitochondrial and etiology and they're related to lifestyle.
Speaker 2:So whatever happens, as I mentioned, with this election, I think what Callie and Casey are doing to advocate is great. I think what RFK is doing is massive and I hope that that gets mirrored here in Australia. And really that's what you and I are doing, simon, with our Regenerate brand. We've done three events now. First was in Albury, second was in Melbourne, third was in Albury this year and we're going to do another event early next year to kind of continue to make noise that and remind people that this is actually a problem that needs to be addressed. Yes, on a societal level, but to address it on a societal level we actually also need to address it individually. So the more awareness there is that this is a problem, then we can actually start talking about the solutions. But first it does have to be recognised as problematic, and that's what we're working towards, I guess.
Speaker 1:Absolutely yeah. The more we can raise that awareness, the more we can stop people sweeping it under the rug, the more people can stop saying it's normal. You know, as you were saying, these rates of autism in kids, that ain't normal, all these rates of chronic disease you have a look at a chart. They're going gangbusters and that's not normal. People should be healthy. People living in a natural environment are healthy and everybody should be concerned about this. Healthy and everybody should be concerned about this. Fortunately, people like yourself, those big figures in America and a growing number of Australian doctors and health professionals are speaking up and they're not being silenced like they were. So the tide is really changing, which is exciting. And, yeah, I agree, that's our mission with Regenerate and I think over time, regenerate will grow and get a wider and wider appeal as these issues are brought to the discussion, to the conversation.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you can't hold a swing one of those party balls, you know the pool ball. You can't hold it under the water forever. Like it will come to the surface and that's the truth. Like the truth, especially with this hyper-connected world, is is more and more difficult to to conceal the truth with this access to information. So the more people learn, the more everyone's knowledge gets upgraded, the more people can speak out and the more people can implement changes like the ones that you and I advocate for. And yeah, that's how the world eventually changes, but it happens slowly and it happens one individual at a time.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. Yeah, that's the sort of unexpected benefit of the internet. When it comes out and when everybody starts being connected, it's like, oh, people will just lie to each other. Well, the about, you know, a decentralized network is that the truth comes back around and and people might lie in the short term, but the awareness and the knowledge really, really grows. So and and that's definitely what's happening in this space- yeah, and I want to congratulate you as well, simon.
Speaker 2:I mean you're doing absolutely tremendous work with your how To Carnivore group with Dr Chafee and I think I said it in August in Albury which is you've helped more people reverse their type 2 diabetes than any endocrinologist here in this country and that's not hyperbole. I'm not aware of you know anyone who practicing endocrinologists that have actually reversed more cases of type 2 diabetes than yourself and Dr Chafee, so using a carnivore type diet. So this will get out, and you're, I think you know, just keep it up like. Keep it up and things change, as I mentioned, one person at a time. Thanks, max.
Speaker 1:I appreciate that. All right, dr Max Gulhane, thank you so much for your time. That was an excellent conversation. I think people are going to really enjoy hearing your story, so thank you very much. Thanks, simon.
