[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW]  Eric Berg, popularly known as Dr. Berg or “The Knowledge Doc,” is a nutritionist and chiropractor specializing in weight loss and alternative health care. He has published more than 6,000 videos and amassed 13 million followers on YouTube, and has trained more than 2,500 doctors and health care practitioners in how diet can impact your health.

“When you reduce carbohydrates, it then forces your body to go after your own fat as fuel. So for weight loss, it’s great. And for other things, it’s good too,” says Dr. Berg.

In this episode, we discuss Dr. Berg’s approach to health, why he advocates for a keto diet and intermittent fasting, and his thoughts on Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Health and Human Services secretary.

“If we are going to make some changes, we have to, first of all, make people aware of these hidden ingredients and start to get them out of your diet,” he says. “They find these loopholes and they try to cheat the system. And it’s called ‘organic,’ but is it really organic?”

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Eric Berg: I’m really happy to be here. I’ve watched your show for many years, and so thank you for having me on.

Mr. Jekielek: Let’s talk about disease and health in America. Here in America, we spend an incredible amount per capita on health care, but the outcomes compared to the amount that is being spent seem pretty low. Why is that?

Mr. Berg: Yes, you’re right, because we spend 4.5 trillion and we have the worst health outcomes. I'd like to give everyone a bird’s eye view of what I think the situation is, because it’s really simple when you step back and look at it. On one side, you have big pharma. They’re helping provide the solutions to our medical problems. Then on the other side, we have big food or junk food and they’re both funneling down this way.

Right in the middle you have the medical establishment. The paradigm that we’re operating off of is that if you want to get healthy, you just take this pill for your symptom. But if we look at chronic disease, most of that comes from our diet and ultra processed food calories. It’s junk food, right? That’s the majority of the root cause of most of this problem.

These medications are basically treating the symptoms of junk food. We don’t really bring up the diet in that consultation with the doctor. When the doctor evaluates someone, they’re not really diving into what they eat. When I was in practice in Alexander, Virginia for 30 years, all day long, the first question I would ask is, what are you eating? Someone came in with a problem, whatever it is, when did it start? What did you eat just before that?

I had a patient who went to several doctors, including the emergency rooms, and spent $40,000 out of pocket for her heart problem. She had angina. No one asked her, what did you eat just before you had the symptoms? It was a series of really bad banana splits every day for three days in a row. All I had to do was change her diet and all that angina went away. They couldn’t find anything on the test.

Mr. Jekielek: Defined for me junk food because that might mean different things to different people.

Mr. Berg: You really have to define what food is. It’s hard to talk about junk food without knowing what it is. Real food is that which is eaten to sustain energy, the growth and repair of tissue, nourishment. That’s what the Latin word for food means. Then what is, if we compare that to other things that we’re eating like junk food, can junk food actually sustain life? Can it repair our bodies? Can it help us grow?

The answer is no, because you’re taking a food that’s so refined, so processed, so dead. There’s nothing else in it. They take all the nutrients out of it. They put a couple of synthetic vitamins in there. You have a lot of byproducts and chemicals. It’s so refined. It has no shelf life. It just can sit on the shelf for a long time. So is that food? I don’t think it is.

So junk food is not food. It’s something else and it’s composed of mainly three things. We have refined sugars, refined seed oils, and refined starches, which are basically hidden sugars. That’s like the main three ingredients. But then there’s food coloring, flavorings and preservatives. With a lot of these foods it’s the same ingredients, with the different flavors, different colorings, and different packaging.

If over 50% of the population is consuming junk food, adults, and over 63% of the teenagers are consuming these ultra processed foods, then how are we going to be able to create health? You can’t. So this is really at the root of chronic disease. We’re not eating things to sustain life. This is why we have chronic illness.

Mr. Jekielek: Let’s talk about the 30 years that you were in practice. You were a chiropractor primarily, but then branched out from there. Can you give us a picture of that?

Mr. Berg: I had no intention of getting into what I am doing now. I was the worst patient you could ever imagine as far as diet. I would literally eat pure junk food all the way up until I was like 28 years old. I got away with it for so many years, but then it caught up with me. But the only thing green that I ate was pistachio ice cream and lime green jello. But other than that, I never ate a vegetable or anything healthy.

I was going along and getting away with it until I started getting in my 20s. All of a sudden, I was arthritic in my fingers and my back. I had chronic fatigue syndrome. I couldn’t sleep. I started going downhill. In fact, my wife said, you don’t look too good. You look kind of gray and almost greenish. I was going downhill.

Of course, it was a good and bad thing. The good thing was that it woke me up to eating healthily and figuring out things. I stumbled on what to do to correct things. But if I never had that experience, I never would have gotten into health at all.

I stumbled on a book called Mastering the Zone. And I didn’t even read the whole book. I just read the introduction and it said something about insulin and avoiding carbs and eating high quality protein. So the next morning I had a buffalo burger instead of my cereal, like red meat, which I thought was really bad for you at the time because it causes cancer, which is totally a lie. So I ate that and it was almost like someone just literally took a helmet off my head and I could actually think clearly. I was like, oh my goodness, this is amazing. The way I was trying to solve my problems back then, instead of changing my diet, I would just be taking supplements, taking this supplement. I would be doing colon cleanses and detoxes and driving down the street. I would tell my wife, hey, there’s the health house. Let’s go in there and then come back with a whole bunch of vitamins. And it wasn’t working because the foundation wasn’t there.

Mr. Jekielek: Please tell us about the ketogenic diet. There are even medical professionals who say it can become dangerous. Explain to me how this works.

Mr. Berg: In real simple terms, you’re basically just eliminating the massive amount of carbs that people eat. Because when you reduce carbohydrates, it then forces your body to go after your own fat as fuel. And so for weight loss, it’s great. And for other things, it’s good too. The average person that’s not overweight has literally 100,000 calories of fat on their body. So they have a lot more stored energy for running on fat than they do from the dietary source of calories. So if you don’t tap into your own fat, then you’re going to be dependent on the next meal. You’re not going to be able to go long before you’re hungry.

So when you start shifting off to the ketogenic diet, which is basically, the breakdown of fat into ketones as an alternative fuel, then you can go a lot longer because you’re running off these calories that are just stored. And that allows you to get rid of your cravings and your hunger and produce a whole bunch of health effects, especially for your brain and your heart that you never could do if you’re not in ketosis. could do if you’re not in ketosis.

There is a certain condition, but that’s only with like advanced diabetes type one, which you have to inject the person with insulin, that if they forget their medication and they don’t take insulin and their blood sugars go too high, then the body can develop a different type of ketosis, which is like a dangerous type of ketosis. So that’s a completely different thing.

But since it has the word ketones in it or ketosis, people mix them together and say all of ketosis is bad, which is not true. Our bodies were designed to not have to eat every hour-and-a-half. Our bodies were designed to be in ketosis. Even when we’re born, we’re going through the ketosis.

There’s going to be some vested interest against that. They’re going to put out all sorts of things about ketosis. Mainly, they'll say something like well yes ketosis does work and it does help you lose weight but we don’t know what’s going to happen long term well just a little bit of doubt in people’s mind and then they just they’re discouraged

Mr. Jekielek: The bottom line is anyone can jump on the keto diet and do it and there’s no health risk. This is what you’re saying here, right?

Mr. Berg: The risk is not doing it especially since most people have what’s called insulin resistance. That’s a condition where you’ve eaten carbs for so long chronically that your body is now having a, it’s almost like a pre-diabetic situation where you can’t use insulin as well. It’s not working. And so then you get all sorts of problems like a fatty liver and you’re overweight in your midsection and you start swelling and the heart suffers, the brain suffers. So I think the dangers of not doing it are great. There’s also a dirty keto people go on. They go to McDonald’s and they'll just eat the meat without the bun. That’s fine as a step up.

But the way that I teach people to do it is to do it the healthy version. And it’s okay if someone goes off the ketogenic diet, it’s actually sometimes good to remind themselves of what they feel like. Like for me, it took me a long time to change my diet because I love junk food, especially Doritos and chips. So I had to go back and forth and back and forth to the point where I said, I don’t want to feel bad anymore. I’m just going to keep it consistent. And rarely do I ever go off it, just because I like the way I feel without it.

Mr. Jekielek: Why is a McDonald’s burger with no bun called dirty keto? What does that mean?

Mr. Berg: That means you’re using the lower quality of calories on the ketogenic diet. For example, you know, keto diet is not necessarily high fat, like people think they can eat more fat and go into ketosis. No, no way you get into ketosis by lowering your carbohydrate. Okay, so now, of course, you have to replace those carbohydrates with something. So that’s fat.

Now, when people do like seed oils and like you can go and fry something in like corn oil and it’s still keto because it’s low carb, but is it the healthy version? Maybe not. So there’s different levels of quality of ingredients. You can look at the Atkins bars. They are just filled with soy protein isolates, and that is pretty low quality protein. Yes, it’s keto, but is it healthy? I wouldn’t think so.

Mr. Jekielek: To your point about getting healthy carbohydrates, you actually live on a farm. You’re growing both carbohydrates and non-carbohydrates. Tell us about that.

Mr. Berg: I have the fortunate option to live on the farm. I lived in Bethesda and actually Alexandria for many years. After 30 years, I was like, we need to move into a location where there’s more space. We actually live off the land. I have gardens. I have animals. We eat the meat. So I’m lucky in that way. I can actually have a freezer full of meat from my farm and control that. But you don’t necessarily have to live on a farm to be healthy. You could get this high quality protein anywhere. But that’s basically where I live. I have a little studio that I’m in right now. I do my videos and I do basically one video every single day. We have like 5700 videos that I’ve done. That’s pretty much what I have been up to lately.

Mr. Jekielek: How did we get to this place where we forgot what good food is?

Mr. Berg: I released a video today where I interviewed my father who’s 87 years old. I asked him, what did they eat back then? How can we compare that to now? Did they have food allergies? No. Did they have autism? No. Was there anyone that was overweight? No. Was there any diabetes? No. You didn’t even have these problems.

One of the conclusions that I came up with is there has been a new category of food that was invented or created or manufactured by the food industry called the snack foods. So we have the crackers, the chips, and the snack bars. Back then, your parents would tell you not to ruin your appetite. If they did have the snack, it was like an apple or something out of the garden.

Now, we snack on ultra-processed food calories. We’re dealing with highly refined things that will raise our insulin between meals. We have three meals and then we add the snacks. Now, we get these spikes all day long. We’re creating a chronic insulin situation which is literally destroying our health at a very early age. I remember asking my father, what kind of cereal did you have? He said, oatmeal with milk, that was it. There weren’t these cereals that they have now.

Mr. Jekielek: How did this happen? It’s not just the reality of the junk food, but it’s the actual guidance to some extent.

Mr. Berg: You remember when tobacco was healthy. People smoked and so that went on over a period of time. Then there was a shift where smoking was bad. Cigarette manufacturing companies shifted gears and they bought up some of the junk food industry. Then they started producing food that was very profitable.

Take one ingredient, corn. The type of corn they use in junk food is not sweet corn. They use what’s called dent corn or field corn. It’s inedible. You can’t even eat it. But that’s the corn that’s in the chips. It’s in most of the products. Because of the subsidies, they basically can buy a cubic ton of this corn for $198.

I think about how many boxes of Corn Flakes you can make for under 200 bucks. So you have super cheap food that gives you a lot of pleasure at the expense of no nutrition and very little protein. So it’s going to keep you eating it. My problem was the Doritos. I could just start and I would down the whole bag in one sitting without even thinking twice.

So we created this industry and it has created addictions. And 50 years later, here we are with this problem. Unfortunately, you, as a taxpayer, unknowingly pay for most of the raw material in this junk food through the subsidies. That’s something that has to be cleaned up by this new administration.

Mr. Jekielek: Let’s talk about this new administration. But before we go there, somehow a high carbohydrate diet became what we were supposed to do. Is that just pure lobbying? How did that happen?

Mr. Berg: It’s pure profit because you have to make profit on things that have no shelf life. I mean, let’s just take beef, for example. The margins on beef is like 3%. So why would you want to get into the beef business, right? If you look at junk food, if you take a look at just profit, they make about $260 billion a year just on the starches. And an average person consumes about 250 to 300 pounds of starch every single year.

Whereas the sugars, it’s like they might make, it’s like 10 billion. It doesn’t even compare. Yet people consume about 150 pounds of sugar a year. But starches are like, that’s something that people don’t talk about. So I think if we are going to make some changes, we have to, first of all, make people aware of these hidden ingredients and start to get them out of your diet.

Mr. Jekielek: If there are hidden subsidies and you start taking apart the system, you’re going to impact America’s farmers.

Mr. Berg: Those farmers played a big role in getting this administration elected. What we should do is reward the small farmer, because they’re being put out of business and support them and maybe subsidize the farmers that are doing it right with healthier foods rather than the large industrial farms that are just literally producing the lowest quality food you could imagine.

Mr. Jekielek: What about large farms that produce higher quality food? Because there must be a range.

Mr. Berg: Yes, there is a total range. Cornucopia Institute is a great activist group that I support. They have a food scoring system where they look at these farms. They talk about who’s doing right and who’s not doing it right. Some of them find these loopholes and try to cheat the system. It’s called organic, but is it really organic? So they’re really trying to keep the integrity, at least in the organic sphere.

There has to be a lot more transparency, because the largest privately owned company in the United States, I won’t even say the name, that’s the company that makes most of the starches and the seed oils and some of the sugars too. They’re a privately owned company, and so they don’t have to disclose certain things. There’s all kinds of mysteries in this area that I’m really interested in, and maybe someday we'll really find out what’s going on.

Mr. Jekielek: What is the promise of this new administration in your view?

Mr. Berg: RFK is a non-politician. He’s going to be a really good person to get in there to cut the umbilical cords between the cozy relationships and the conflict of interest between industry and the government. Right now, these food guidelines are associated with who has the strongest lobbyist.

Mr. Jekielek: Who has the strongest lobbyist?

Mr. Berg: There’s too much influence from industry in our food system, in our medical system, in the research of drugs. He’s going to clean that up. And of course, they’re going to attack him for this. But it’s going to be a really vital change to remove this conflict of interest and have more transparency so we can actually focus more on the root causes of health and, you know, support the smaller farmer and make it possible for our generation to be healthy. Because right now, it’s getting worse. We’re not getting our product. The food guidelines are so important because that trickles down into the school system, the nursing home, the hospitals, the assisted living home.

There’s an individual I know in Arizona. He owns four assisted living homes. Okay. What’s really interesting about him is that he changes the diet. He doesn’t allow junk food. And these people are coming in from places like hospice and his rate of reducing medications through the help of their online doctor or their doctor that’s on site. It’s like 47%. You go in there with certain medications and then you’re coming out with less than half of the medications. He told me about a software that he uses to coordinate between the medical doctor and the medications is owned by a CEO.

I told him to contact the CEO. I wanted to know, on average, what’s the average number of medications that these patients are on. He did that for me, and you’re not going to believe what he said. He took a hundred random people out of his database of people all over the United States in these assisted living homes. He found a range between 91 medications to 42 medications, with an average of 48 medications per person.

He sent me a document with one patient on 48 medications. Okay. I looked through this. I almost vomited and said, you have to be kidding me. An average person going to an assisted living home is on 48 medications. This is outrageous. This is insane. Why wouldn’t we want someone like Bobby Kennedy to go in there, straighten this up, improve it, and get people to start eating real food all over the place, not just in schools, but also in assisting-living homes, hospitals, and in the military?

Mr. Jekielek: I remember thinking that too. It’s so bizarre that the food you get in hospitals isn’t really very high quality. Nutritionally, you might want that, right?

Mr. Berg: I know. I went in for surgery. I was like, do you have any protein? No, we have jello crocs. I said, I need protein. It’s sickening. Especially with before surgery and after the surgery, you need actual food.

Mr. Jekielek: It does seem crazy that across 100 random people in elder care facilities, an average person would be on 48 medications. That seems astonishingly high. Presumably they need at least some of those medications. You’re arguing there’s an over-prescription scenario happening here.

Mr. Berg: The question is, did you bring up food? Are you using food in your equation when you’re diagnosing? How do you know what is causing what? Are you looking at the side effects from the medications? Maybe you’re just treating the side effects of the medication with another medication and we go round and round. When you treat symptoms and not real causes, you don’t really improve your health.

Even your blood sugars, you take medication to lower your blood sugars. Where do you think that’s going? Where do you think that sugar is going? Is it evaporating? It’s you’re just changing one problem. You’re shifting it to another part of the body, especially something called iatrogenic disease. That is medication-caused disease. As far as the top leading causes of death, iatrogenic is number three. Antibiotics and steroids should be reevaluated. The system is unworkable.

Mr. Jekielek: There are medical doctors that do look at causes and not just symptoms, but basically the default is to look at the symptoms. Is that the right way to characterize it?

Mr. Berg: There’s more and more doctors looking at the whole body. Even endocrinologists that I know are looking at the diet, because there’s just a disconnect. They refer anything related to food to the dietician, but then they don’t have control of that. The new trend will be looking at the whole body, so they’re not just stuck in this managing the symptom model.

If an engineer looks at this logically, they’re going to go, wait, what’s wrong with this? What’s the mechanism? What’s underneath it? Do we ever take these people off the medication? What’s the long-term plan?

Mr. Jekielek: There are many people that are interested in weight loss right now. There are very popular new drugs that are working for people. If someone is interested in weight loss, where should they look first?

Mr. Berg: If we look at just weight loss by itself, there’s just one thing you need to know about how the body stores fat. And that has to do with the hormone insulin. So if you want to lose weight, you’ve got to keep that insulin low. So there’s two ways to do it. One is to lower your carbohydrates, and that would be the sugars and starches.

But the other way too, is you can also do a different thing, which is do intermittent fasting, start skipping your breakfast and having like two meals and not the snacks. So if you go longer without the snacks, what you’re going to find is you'll go into ketosis, your appetite will go down. And we’re not even talking about lowering calories. We’re just talking about not eating so frequently. You can lose a lot of weight like that because every time you eat, you raise insulin regardless of what you eat. So it’s very important to know that.

And the other thing I think that people don’t know about is that all it takes is a little bit of carbohydrate to bump you out of ketosis for a longer period of time, like sometimes up to 48 hours. So that half a glass of wine or that toast, you kind of have to now wait for a day and a half to two days before you get back in the ketosis. So a lot of people are saying, well, I’m, I’m, I’m trying it, but it’s not working. Well, then you ask them what they’re doing. They’re like, I do have a little bit of something in between the meals.

I’m like, okay, just do intermittent fasting, watch what happens. And it finally works for them. Because if you try to do a diet with higher in carbs, it’s torture because you’re trying to lose weight with hunger and cravings. That’s hard. At night, you’re like looking at the cupboard and saying, I need some carbs, right? So it will make it easier. Yes, it does take discipline. But the best thing is to not have it in the house where it can tempt you.

Mr. Jekielek: I want to touch on a few things that you recommend. We’ve discussed vitamin D. It was such an important thing during the COVID-19 pandemic where people with higher levels of vitamin D had a lot better outcomes on average.

Mr. Berg: Vitamin D is the most important vitamin because it’s involved in 10% of all of our genes. That’s like over 2,500 genes. Think about how vast that is, right? Everything from the immune system to the brain to inflammation to your bones. So it’s not just about bones, absorbing calcium for bones. It’s about a lot of different things.

The question is, can you get enough vitamin D from the diet? No, you can’t. It’s impossible. So you can get it from the sun. But think about what happened in the 80s. Someone had this idea that we should stay out of the sun because the sun causes skin cancer. We became sun-phobic. Nowadays, it’s even hard to find kids outside.

To maintain all the systems in the body, we need a maintenance dosage of 10,000 IUs of vitamin D3 on a daily basis. Very few people know that, and very few people are doing that. They’re using the outdated information that was only researched about with your bones preventing rickets, which is like soft bones in children. And they’re not looking at all this amazing research.

And I think because the amount of competition with medications is very high, because if you take a look at vitamin D, what it can do for inflammation, what it can do for autoimmune, what it can do for respiratory infections, what it can do for insulin issues. It’s literally amazing when you dive into the research. I have over 280 videos on vitamin D.

So I am very interested in this topic, because it’s the lowest hanging fruit if you want to get someone healthy. If you just give them vitamin D for so many issues, they can actually improve. And it’s inexpensive. You could use the sun if it’s summer, but if not, it’s not that expensive as a modality and a treatment.

Mr. Jekielek: What about turmeric?

Mr. Berg: Turmeric has this active ingredient called curcumin. Out of all of the herbal remedies, that one is the most researched. It has the most broad spectrum effects of anything. On the scale of importance, that’s a really top herb that can literally do so many things. It can grow in very dehydrated environments, so that plant has adapted for hundreds of thousands of years to create these amazing defense mechanisms and these properties of survival. It helps our bodies in many different ways, especially as an anti-inflammatory. I would highly recommend including it in your diet through curries or tea.

Mr. Jekielek: Turmeric is delicious. It’s just a wonderful thing.

Mr. Berg: One thing that I made a mistake about, I’m always the kind of guy that if it’s a little is good, a lot is better. No, not with turmeric.

Mr. Jekielek: There’s definitely a limit, and you don’t want to get it on your shirt.

Mr. Berg: Yes. I grew it, then I dried it out. I started to eat it throughout the day for several days in a row. I was just eating it constantly and then I got sick. You don’t need that much, just have a little bit.

Mr. Jekielek: You help people with fatigue. You must have a broad approach to dealing with that.

Mr. Berg: When you take a symptom like fatigue, that can come from a lot of different things. So the first question I always ask is like, what are you eating? But as far as nutrients go, there’s a really important nutrient that people know about, but they don’t really connect it to fatigue. But if you go into the cells, the energy factory of the cell, the mitochondria, which is a very important part of the cell, in order to make energy, the last little, on the assembly line, the last little part of that requires magnesium.

It’s a little motor that spins. It’s an enzyme that spins like 400 times a second. It’s like the most amazing little motor and it’s in your body and it’s working to make what’s called ATP and it requires magnesium. Yes, it is magnesium people take for leg cramps and to sleep and for stress. But you should take magnesium for energy. Because if you take vitamin D, that’s the most important. The second one is magnesium.

Magnesium is almost impossible to test because most of the magnesium is inside the tissues. It’s not in the blood. I mean, only 1% of it’s in the blood. So you have to have a special test and no one gets that. It’s something that’s also very commonly deficient. And the one that I would recommend is something like a magnesium glycinate, because that’s the one that won’t cause diarrhea. And it gets absorbed 80%.

You take it right before bed. And great for muscle stuff, sleeping. Apparently, it’s good for sleeping, but then it’s also good for energy. You know what? It takes energy to sleep, which is interesting. Some people are too tired to actually rest. So they’re laying down, they’re restless, and they just can’t get into a relaxed state.

Mr. Jekielek: What about superfoods? What is the top superfood in your mind?

Mr. Berg: I think this is going to surprise you, because when people think of superfoods, they drink the green drinks, right? But there’s a much higher level of superfood that has virtually every nutrient, and it’s very bioavailable, and it’s actually red meat. People are going to say, oh my gosh, I thought that was processed meat. No, I’m talking about grass-fed red meat, whether it’s beef or lamb. It has so many nutrients, iron and B12, and plus the protein is the highest quality. It’s even better than eggs because it has better omega And so it’s really a good healing food because I think people have gone on to the plant proteins and they’re not going to feel as good. So it’s high quality protein. Most of our body is protein. And that would be something that a person would notice immediately a difference.

Mr. Jekielek: Eric, a final thought as we finish up?

Mr. Berg: My final thought on this would be instead of this huge focus on treating disease and focusing on getting rid of disease, let’s start to focus on creating our health. It’s a different question. It’s a different model. Instead of waiting till you get a disease and treating it, let’s prevent that by looking at common, simple things that you can do to lifestyle changes that involve at the real essence of it, eating real food. That’s the most important thing you can do.

Mr. Jekielek: Eric Berg, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Mr. Berg: Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.