Reversing RA Interview With Clint Paddison on Big Impact Podcast with Anna Chisholm
You’re about to learn:
– Why Clint developed RA from antibiotic use
– How Rheumatoid Arthritis begins in the gut
– Biologic drugs are not the holy grail
– The worst food for RA in the world
– Fast ways to reduce pain within 24 hours
– The future treatment of RA
– More more!!
Disclaimer -the information on this site is not medical advice. Before making any changes to your lifestyle, diet, exercise, drug or supplement routines you must first discuss the changes with a licensed professional.
Anna: Hi, Clint. How are you going?
Clint: I’m great. How are you?
Anna: Good, I’m really well. I’ve taken the day apparently off work today because my babysitter is travelling around Europe. So we’ll do our best with a four year old in the background.
Clint: Yeah. My little two and a half year old might make a guest appearance as well. Let’s hope so, she’s a bit of a star.
Anna: Oh, good, good. I hope so later. Look, I’m absolutely thrilled to have you on the podcast. I came across your podcast probably a few months ago now and I’ve literally been like devouring your episodes ever since.
Clint: Oh, that’s great.
Anna: And, you know, I guess I have a special or a soft spot for Australian podcasters. So I love kinda coming across new things I can listen to, you know, when I’m doing the washing up or driving the kids to day care, you know all those sorts of things.
Clint: Yes.
Anna: And like you were a bit of a podcast, not your selfie or consumer podcast.
Clint: Not much. I don’t really have time. In fact, the times that I think about listening to podcasts is in my car. I often do long trips for my work more. When I say my work – a lot of people know me for this work that we’re talking about on this call, but I also do standup comedy and I’ve been doing standup comedy for 16 years. So I consider that my job or my day job if you like. And I often, you know, will drive two or three hours here or there for a show or I’m at an airport or something like that. And during those times, instead of listening to podcasts over the last six months, I’ve been creating content instead for either for my own podcast or for my mailing list or for my community forum, and yeah. I think we go through cycles where we go from, you know, for heavy creation sort of phase and then we wanna learn a lot.
We go into a learning phase for a long period of time. So at the moment, I mean creation, creation, creation. But when I feel like I need to refuel, then I’ll start to get back into the podcast and I’ll read a ton of books. So the cycle that I’m in is content creation right now, getting all these stuff in my head and getting it out to people who are following my work.
Anna: That’s awesome. I was at a podcasting conference that the ABC put on a couple of months ago now and it’s just so exciting to see this sort of medium expanding and the momentum behind it. And such a good way to, as you said, get content out there in a really accessible way for people.
Clint: Yeah. I mean I really if ever listen to the radio, I just find it painful listening to the people talk crap about things that I care about. No one’s creating any value. It’s just garbage talks separated by garbage advertisement for things that I consider garbage. So, I mean you know, there are radio channels now that you could subscribe to with apps, you know, and things like that where you can create your own channels for music. And so I like to do things like that. If I’m not doing stuff like that then, you know, yeah, podcast is the way to go. You know, just trying to listen to information that’s relevant to your life and not just general crap.
Anna: Absolutely. I love that. I think, you know, the past couple of years for me especially after having kids I find, you know, our times are valuable. I find myself more and more like living really intentionally, like I’m not just happy to go through the motions. It’s like I am specifically choosing now where I wanna direct my focus.
Clint: Yeah, yeah, well said. I completely relate to that. Every moment feels precious and it’s really accentuated with kids because your time to yourself becomes diminished massively. And so when you do have a short time to yourself you think, “How can I get the most return on this piece of time?”
Anna: Absolutely. A two and a half year old will be caving in, mighty busy I would say.
Clint: Yes, yes. And we got a six month old at the moment as well. So, yeah.
Anna: Oh, cool. That’s nice. Look, there’s so many things I wanna talk to you about today but what I’d really love to start with our guest is taking it back I guess to where it began for you and tell us a bit about your health story and, you know, how this all came about. I’m really interested in that.
Clint: Yes. So people don’t know anything about me than my sort of, you know, a cross to bear in this life was rheumatoid arthritis or still is, depending on how you view the way it works in the body. And for me it started well before I actually got the symptoms because where it started for me now retrospectively as I look back on this was when I was about 15 or 16 because I started taking antibiotics for my acne. My dad had pretty bad acne when he was growing up as a teenager. And when all of the, you know, usual over-the-counter kinda creams and gels and things that I was putting on my face weren’t working, I reverted to a suggestion that my dad made out of innocence and love for his son which was, “Hey, you should try what I did if everything else fails and take this antibiotics.”
So I took this low dose doxycycline antibiotic and I stayed on that because it got rid of my acne for about five years, from around the age of, I can’t recall exactly, it was 15 or 16 through to 20 or 21. I was well into university when I stopped this low dose antibiotic treatment. And that ruined all of my gut bacteria and I had no idea and not one doctor ever warned me when I was getting prescription after prescription that perhaps you might wanna stop. No one ever said that. It was just my own kinda curiosity as to what might happen if I stopped taking this antibiotic treatment for my acne. And at 20 or 21 I thought, “You know, let’s take the risk. Let’s stop after five years and see if the acne comes back.”
Anna: Sorry, just to stop you there. Was there anything that like triggered you to make that decision? Like did you start to feel ill or anything like that side effect?
Clint: No, I just thought common sense was starting to prevail that I’ve been on these antibiotics for a very long period of time and maybe the hormonal phase of my life where acne is prevalent, you know, in your teenage years. Maybe it won’t be there anymore if I stop taking it. So let’s just, you know, review after five years and see. Nothing happened when I stopped taking them, like my skin had evidently cleared up some time ago. And I probably been on the antibiotics for at least 6 to 12 months or longer than what I needed to be. And throughout my 20s, I therefore had a lot of digestive issues and I never connected these all together until the digestive issues led to rheumatoid arthritis. And then subsequently I did a tremendous amount of research and self guinea pigging for years until I pieced it all together and got off much more serious drugs than antibiotics later.
And yeah, and got to a point where I’m at now which is hold the drugs and teaching other people about a whole stuff to do with the relationship between the gut and rheumatoid arthritis or other autoimmune diseases.
Anna: And can you just for, you know, the everyday person who might not even know some of the symptoms or what rheumatoid arthritis is. Can you break that down for us a bit?
Clint: Yeah. So I didn’t even know what it was when I got diagnosed which was at age 31 and I just turned 41 now, so it was 10 years ago. And I didn’t know anything about it but people have probably seen some of the gnarly hands on exit by exit on YouTube, if not YouTube on Google if they’ve searched for something. And, you know, hands are all screwed up and twisted and gnarly I guess is the right word. And so fingers are often first implicated you see like swollen joints and then the joints begin to sort of bend a little bit out of shape. And then all joints can be affected, so knees and elbows. And I had it in my jaw or in my chest bone and I had it in my feet and ankles and elbows. I had surgery on my left elbow. You know, my knee needed a knee replacement.
Fortunately, I didn’t end up following that up and now the knee is perfectly usable without pain. And so it just gets into the joints and the body as an autoimmune disease attacks itself. So in multiple sclerosis, the body attacks the nerve endings and it impairs the normal functionality of that part of the body. And with rheumatoid arthritis it attacks the joints. And then other autoimmune diseases it attacks other parts of the body but it’s a self attack. So it’s sort of hideous kind of thing because as you’re going through it you kinda have this frustration where you’re sort of trapped in your own self attack that feels so awful. Because, you know, you can’t blame anything other than your own body and that’s just a very uncomfortable state of mind.
Anna: Yeah. And so when you get the diagnosis at 31, I take it, you know, doctors told you this is what you have. What sort of treatments, like treatment options do they give you at the time? Like what does that mean to a 31 year old who’s diagnosed with that?
Clint: Yeah. So I had to wait a couple of months to get my first appointment with my rheumatologist and I walked in very optimistically because I’ve never had any health condition of any kind. I’ve never even broken a bone before so, you know, I felt pretty invincible 31. My career standup was going great. I’ve been on TV a bunch of times recently. I think I, you know, I felt kind of like a 31-year-old guy who’s got a good career, single, you know, I kinda thought things are moving pretty good. A bit of joint pain here in my fingers and feet. This isn’t gonna be too bad. But the GP had sent me off to the rheumatologist with a diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis and after waiting a couple of months to see the rheumatologist, you know, in that period I’ve done my own research.
And I thought, “Look, it’s not gonna be as bad as what everyone says on the internet because, you know, it just can’t be that bad.” You know I have a feeling that the general population of sensationalists and pessimists and just a big negative bunch, and especially when you get them all together online with a problem, you know, they’ll yeah, really, really take it.
Anna: Bring out the worst in each other.
Clint: Really take it to a new level. And so I’ve gone into the rheumatologist and looked on my left and looked to my right in the waiting room and there’s people in their 60s and 70s and I’m thinking, “Look, you know, I’m in the wrong place. This isn’t meant to be.” The rheumatologist shook my hand very gentle which was much appreciated because at the time I thought, “This guy has got no clout. You know, this guy is a weak dude.” And then as I sat down and he sat down, you know, it struck me. Now, hang on, it wasn’t because of his sort of character. It’s because he’s really cautious as to what my hand might feel. And that wasn’t a good feeling either. I mean I’m in a place where people go when they have pain and it was starting to dawn on me in the first meeting because he talked about the drugs, which was your question.
The drugs they talk about, this is the over-the-counter stuff which is what everyone grabs for, the non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs which we know as Voltaren and Advil and ibuprofen and stuff like that. Now, against a disease as monstrous as rheumatoid, these things don’t play a big enough role in trying to keep the pain at bay and in fact as part of what I teach, they are actually counterproductive in that they actually aggravate the gut which is the source or the underlying cause of the problem. So the first thing people do is actually worsen their disease by grabbing painkillers. So it’s very tragic, yes, yes, right? Now, all the sign specs this up by the way.
Everything that I’ll say to you I can back up with a scientific journal paper and say, “Here’s the study. Go and look at it. X number of people with rheumatoid arthritis went through this. They took those drugs and now they’re worst. See for yourself.” Right? So I can back all these up. So to continue, there’s the non-steroidal drugs but then there are drugs like sort of mega painkillers which are things like prednisone, a steroid. And then they move into the disease modifying anti-rheumatic drugs like sulfasalazine and methotrexate which was the one that was suggested for me, and there’s a number of others. And then it can get really, really nasty or really, really good depending on which side of the fence, which side of the desk in the doctor’s room you sit.
Doctors are in love with the new sort of, not like new, in the last decade a group of drugs called biologic drugs which are their highest grossing revenue drugs on the planet treating auto immune disease has become the cash cow of the pharmaceutical industry. So the doctors look towards biologic drugs to control patients whose condition is sort of uncontrollable on the medications. But, you know, some of them have an increased risk of cancer by 300% and they cause you to catch every flu and every little infection going around because they basically turn off your immune system. So they are your options. I went on to the methotrexate and at 31, you know, I thought look, I might be able to knock this out on the head myself. I went away and did a whole bunch of natural stuff for 12 months and it was a disaster.
I went to every naturopath and homeopath and tried these herbals. And everyone I could find and they all did a great job trying to help but I got really bad really quick and went on the methotrexate. And at this point in the story, that just slowed down my worsening but did not stop it. So I might take a break and let you jump in or I can keep going, whatever you like.
Anna: Totally, I mean it’s so interesting and I guess for a lot of people, you know, it is that question, do I go for medication or do I go for natural therapies. And I think, you know, trying both is probably the best approach at least initially if you don’t know enough about it. But it sounds like you know along the way then you started to discover other ways of healing yourself and in particular foods. And I’m really interested in that part of the story and I guess, you know, my first question is when and how did you discover like the healing nature of foods and what you are putting in your body as having a huge effect or get benefit to slowing down your disease?
Clint: Well, it happened by accident. And what happened was I had a bout of food poisoning to some unwashed imported cherries. And, you know, I’ve been toying with my diet because I found a couple of books and there are only two written that were published on Amazon where people had described their recovery from rheumatoid arthritis and they both used food as their mechanism. Now, both had radically different diets. One of them was a rule vegan approach and the other one was based on, you know, blood test and food sensitivities and stuff like that. Both of them I tried and failed really badly, like on both of them. However, it had picked my interest that if these two people are claiming that it had to do with food, you know, no one else out there has written a book on the recovery.
And so we got two, two is all I got to work with and they both went down to food path. And so I had been experimenting with foods and we hear things like, you know, cherry is a good anti-inflammatory food or maybe you need to, you know, take fish oils. You know just trying these various things. But I had a bout of food poisoning and I was, you know, purging from both ends for 24 hours and lying in the bed and I couldn’t get out without, you know, feeling sick. So I just stayed in the bed except for quick trips to the toilet. And with rheumatoid arthritis, you got to move your joints all the time because when they stop moving they get more inflamed and more stiff and sore. And so I thought, you know I was in self pity mode.
I was lying in the bed not just from the, you know, purging but also from the thoughts that I was gonna be so much worse when I actually got out of bed because I’m not moving at all. But on the contrary in the 24 hours, virtually all the pain went away and this was like the most, you know, the light bulb moment of my whole life because what’s going on? And so I thought, you know, all I need to do is work out how to get these results work without having to vomit and diarrhea for the rest of my life. All right.
Anna: Yet not a good option.
Clint: Okay. And so what I did is I then, first the pain all came back when I started eating again. It just got 100% like came back again. And so then I thought, “Well, is it the vomiting and diarrhea or is it just when I’m empty?” And so I repeated the experiment and just stopped eating. About a week later or two weeks later, I just stopped eating for a couple of days and all the pain went away again. And I said, “Okay. Well, it’s got nothing to do with how the body is empty. It’s just if the body is empty, you get no pain.” And so although this is interesting, so I then started to refine my research for the scientific literature because I am actually a licensed physicist with a first class honors degree by my background, right?
Anna: Among your other talents.
Clint: Yeah. I know, I’ve got the weirdest set of career path that…
Anna: Combination.
Clint: Yeah, it’s a weird one but look, it served me very well for being able to tackle this problem. Because the other way that my, you know, standup comedy career has served me very well is that I only have to work for maybe an hour or two a week. Okay. And so, you know, I do like a corporate level income from doing my standup comedy because I work for companies. I go and charge them a solid amount of cash to be able to entertain them safely and plainly. But, you know, hilariously for half an hour at a time, right? And so I’ve got that unique skill set. And so that enabled me to, you know, cover my lifestyle expenses and so forth and just work a couple of hours a week. So I’ve got this research background and a lot of time and a big problem.
And so working through the scientific literature I found that it was actually well documented that people with rheumatoid arthritis when they went on fasting dramatically improves. And so I thought it’s not just me. And this was huge because then I thought, first of all I thought, “Hey, this is something my doctor doesn’t know. No one told me this, right?” Secondly, it’s got to be a gut issue because if you stop eating and it goes away, you don’t need any more evidence. I mean it’s 100% a gut issue. All right, okay. Yeah, and then thirdly I thought this problem is bigger than me. Because this is not just me trying to improve my pain and improve my life. But if this fasting situation happens with everyone with RA, then if I can work out how to fix this problem, I can help so many people like the numbers are staggering.
And that’s when, you know, I took things mentally to a new level and I thought this could be like the biggest discovery ever. And so I thought, you know, just do anything it takes to try and understand what’s going on. Plus the drug that I was on, methotrexate, didn’t allow me to have children and so I desperately wanted to have a family. And so I was, you know, everything was aligned to try and overcome.
Anna: The stake sounded like they’re pretty high for you at that stage.
Clint: The stakes could not have been higher, yeah. Yeah.
Anna: So, you know, as you’re saying about the fasting. In one of your videos on YouTube, you do say in your presentation like being hungry is healing, and I love that. And it sounds like you know the first couple of days in your program which I wanna get into more all about. Is it just juicing or is it fasting all together? Tell me a bit about that.
Clint: So first of all, yeah. The quote comes from Dr. Hiromi Shinya who’s the author of the Enzyme Factor and the quote is, “You should make friends with gentle hunger.” And the Japanese have an elegant way of putting a lot of things and I’ve really, really taken that quote to heart. Because when we’re not eating the body has an opportunity to use its enzymes to repair and nurture the body. But when we are digesting food, the body takes metabolic enzymes which are enzymes that exist throughout the body to service the myriad of different requirements that the body has for enzymes. Everything from blinking to breathing to growing hair, everything requires enzymes. In the process of digesting food, the body has to take a lot of those resources and it converts those metabolic enzymes into digestive enzymes to assist to breakdown food like little scissors.
So when we’re not digesting food, the body is in a healing state. And so the first two days of my program is just a two-day cleanse where you don’t consume any food of any substance. But, you know, I do encourage people to eat a lot of leafy greens, just plain leafy greens. Just like your Chinese bok choys and mixed leaves of all kinds, it doesn’t matter as long as it’s green and it grew it’s good, right? And that’s just to help a little bit with a little bit of movement through the bowels to create a little bit of activity. It doesn’t normally trigger much but at least something is being a little bit like a gentle broom moving some stuff through. But there’s actually a more important reason to do the two-day cleanse at the start and that’s because people become believers when they go through the two days.
They need to have the cherry incident that I had. They need to see it for themselves to realize that these whole time for the last 5, 10, in some cases 30 years they’ve been eating their way into pain every single day. Yeah.
Anna: I love that. You know, I talk a lot about with my health coaching clients being on a spectrum, you know, for people who come in. Moms who just wanna lose some baby weight and get fit and those sorts, you know, create a healthy lifestyle for their family. You know, maybe we just eat some more fruits and veggies and introduce whole grains and those sorts of things. And then for people who come in from their cardiologist, with heart disease or pre-diabetes or whatever, then you know we go 100% whole food plant based. And one of the benefits of doing that so quickly as you’re just saying is I say the benefits so quickly, so they’re so much more likely to stick at it and yeah, make it a sustainable thing rather than, you know, I can see benefits slowly but I’m not sure which thing actually have the biggest effect, or you know.
Clint: Yeah.
Anna: Yeah, really, really cool way of doing it.
Clint: I prefer to go all in at the start because the results, as you just said, are motivating. But if you just ask people just for a few weeks just drop out dairy and then okay. For another few weeks, now that you’ve lost the dairy, also say take out vegetable oils or something like that which for people with arthritis is very inflammatory. And so, you know, your improvements are not happening quick enough for them to get excited. Because they might be doing a whole bunch of other stuff over those two weeks too that other people have suggested to them. Like all you need to increase this one or change that, and it gets confusing. But if you make it an abrupt truncation to their existing diet and interrupt that suddenly with a low fat plant-based diet, and the improvements happen within two to three days, suddenly they’re fans you know.
Anna: Yeah, absolutely. So can you tell us a little bit more about the protocol, like what’s the main premise behind it all? You know, what are the main… you’re teaching people?
Clint: The main thing is that, well, if you were to summarize it. Because we haven’t got all day, let’s go with the 80/20 principle. What 20% of it gives 80% of the results, okay? And then the other, all the detail beyond that is very helpful but it’s probably beyond the scope of this call. So using the 80/20 principle, I’d say that the 20% of it that has the biggest result is it’s got to be absolutely 100% must be low fat. Now fat is an aggravator to the gut wall. Fat causes more leaky gut. And so with people with rheumatoid arthritis, this is catastrophic because the particles that are causing the antibodies to be created to their own flesh comes about through undigested proteins from food and bacteria that are leaking into their gut. And so we do not want to aggravate a leaky gut situation through additional fat. Now, this doesn’t mean we eat a no fat diet.
Everybody understand that we need healthy fats in our body especially for healthy brain function and just for, you know, they’re not called essential for nothing, right? And so we just want to get those fats through natural plant sources and not add additional heavy fat loads to the body. Now, by definition this means that we must eliminate animal products because all animal products are high in fat. It’s easy to see these, more so when we look at, you know, say milks and cheeses and the dairy side of things. Because in the states, you know, they try to get away with this by them saying 1% fat on their milk and stuff like that. But not as a percentage of calories, it’s the very high in fat as a percentage of calories.
But if you’re drinking any sort of dairy product, sorry, drinking or eating it, it’s too high in fat. People think what about like lean chicken, you know, without and skinless, right? But it’s still 30% fat because as a percentage of calories, all the fat is inside the muscles, these muscles cells. So you cannot consume anything from an animal without taking in too much fat. All right. So we’ve got to get rid of it. It’s not like, you know, I’d like to or maybe we can eat half as much. If my approach is to get the maximum results you can possibly get. I don’t want to do half hearted, I want stuff that’s life changing. So if we want life changing then we have to eliminate the animal products. Now, where it gets a little bit, you know, argumentative amongst some folks is regarding the vegetable oils.
But the bottom line is give me 100 people with rheumatoid, give 50 of them vegetable oils even in small doses and give the other 50, take them off the vegetable oils and I will guarantee you that the 50 that are off the vegetable oils are gonna do better. It’s as simple as that, right? It’s because it’s pure fat and it aggravates the gut by creating more of a leaky gut situation. Now for most of us, a leaky gut to some degree is a natural part of existence because the way that our body transports nutrients from our lumen, from our intestines into our bloodstream is via the gut wall, right? So it’s not like leaky gut or a permeable gut wall is a bad thing. In fact, we wouldn’t last more than a week if it didn’t actually happen, right?
Anna: Yeah, sure.
Clint: It’s just that we don’t want it to happen to a degree that the wrong particles, the larger particles are getting into our bloodstream. Now the vegetable oils tend to be especially bad at causing more of this, so we’ve got to eliminate that. And that includes people’s favorites like olive oil and flaxseed oil and you can’t cook stir fry and coconut oil even though we talked about high boiling points. Forget it, just get off the oils. So that takes care of a lot of the problem, right? So if anyone listening with rheumatoid arthritis just does what I’ve just said, they are probably gonna reduce 50% of their symptoms within a week for the rest of their life.
Anna: That’s amazing, amazing. Honestly, like I cannot believe that we don’t get to all these stuff you know. I don’t know, but anyway, continue. You’re providing immense value for every person who’s listening.
Clint: Right, right. Okay, good. That’s what I like, big value bombs dropping them. Okay, so that’s the thing. Now the next thing is not excess protein. So the issue is that it’s the proteins that are being attacked in the body’s tissues. Okay. The proteins are the enemy. So we don’t want to fuel the bloodstream with heaps and heaps of undigested protein because what that does is it sends out the troops again. It releases the antibodies from the body to go and start attacking once more. So it’s kinda like if there’s a wild dog that lives in the house in the gut in the yard at the end of the street and everyday you walk pass it, banging the cymbals together and screaming at the dog. It’s gonna get really mad every time it sees you and it goes crazy, right?
And so the idea needs to be that we need to try and reduce the screaming and the cymbals when we’re around that dog as much as possible. So we wanna make a wide arc around the dog. We don’t wanna carry the cymbals, we don’t make a sound. The noise is all come from eating too much, particularly animal protein but also plant-based protein when we’re having that stuff enter our bloodstream. And so to avoid that, we need to make sure we go by the dog less frequently and when we do, we do it quietly. And then after a period of time at some point in the future, that dog will allow us to walk past without going nuts. Because it now associates us as a calm person who’s walking by, who is not there to aggravate it. And such is the situation with the gentle restoration of the body after it doesn’t have all the crap entering the body and consequently the bloodstream.
So I encourage people to certainly meet their daily requirements of protein and I’ve been exceeding it for the longest time. And, you know, this isn’t as important as the fat side of things but it’s one to consider if someone is trying to supplement their diet at the moment with protein powders. You know, in the worst possible way would be through a, you know, a dairy-based, like a whey protein powder is like atrocious. But even on the plant-based ones, I encourage people to be careful because these proteins are gonna end up in the blood wall. People still have a bad digestive system and could act as an aggravator for their existing symptoms. So we really need much less protein that everyone thinks with protein obsessed as a community.
You know the studies are being done, the human body really only needs about 26 grams of protein a day as long as it’s throughout a mixture of the correct amino acids in the right combo. But they went ahead and the World Health Organization simply doubled it just to be sure. Let’s just double it to 54 or 52 grams a day. Okay. So now that we’ve doubled the minimum at 54 or 56 or 50, I forget the exact number. You know, everyone’s doing like a 150 or 200, right? It’s extreme amount of over-protein consumption. And all that protein has to be filtered out through the body, it becomes a waste product, right? It’s this all protein that’s acidifying for the body which is another area of teaching that I have. Yeah.
Anna: And so I’m gonna ask you because not for me but because I am plant-based, but for all the people that aren’t plant-based out there, I’m gonna ask you the most hated question by vegans or plant-based people. If I’m not getting my protein through animal products or whey protein powders or plant-based protein powders, where do I get my protein? Where am I gonna go for this daily recommendation? You know, I guess the low side of the daily recommendation that you’re suggesting?
Clint: So it’s impossible to not meet your daily protein requirements if you meet your energy requirements and you eat a range of different foods. It’s just that simple, right?
Anna: Cool.
Clint: It’s that easy. Protein requirements as I’ve just mentioned a minute ago, it’s one of the easiest things we can make. Have you ever met someone who’s not met their… Have you met a deficient person in protein? They don’t exist, they don’t exist. Like for instance, two foods that I recommend early in our program are buckwheat and quinoa. Okay. Now, quinoa is something like 26% protein and buckwheat is something similar like they’re very high in protein. And I know that I’ve made an earlier comment about exceeding protein requirements but something odd and magical goes on with these two pseudo grains, right? Because they’re not actually, you know, grains as we think of wheat and barley and oats and stuff like that. The alkalizing effects that they have because of their mineral content offset the acidifying effects that protein creates in the body to neutralize them as a food.
So they are magic little thing, like I just gave a training video the other day that I actually posted out this morning to my mailing list. But if you only ate rice all day to meet your daily requirement of calories, so you just ate Basmati rice or Jasmine rice all day. I do believe, if I haven’t rubbed it off my white board. I’ll just check, I think it’s on the other side. I think it’s 70 grams of protein you’d get if you only ate rice and nothing else just to meet your daily, like 8,500 kilojoules a day or two, yeah, 3,000 calories per day, whichever unit system you like. You know you can’t avoid protein. In fact, if you were worried about high protein intake, you got a serious problem because you can’t get away from protein. It’s everywhere. It will get into you. Be careful, you’re gonna overload.
Anna: Yeah.
Clint: Right?
Anna: Interesting.
Clint: Yeah, it’s the opposite problem.
Anna: And I think that that will be kind of news to a lot of people because, you know, we’re just brainwashed and fed this misinformation I guess. You need to get your protein and especially if you’re going to the gym and you know. I’m like, “Oh, god, let’s try and learn everything we know and start from scratch almost.”
Clint: Yeah, 100%. And just by the way, you mentioned the gym, I gained three kilos in less than a month once just by eating pretty much rice, grains, and orange juice. Right? You would look at that and you’ll say, “Well, that person is gonna like…” That was just, you know, it’s easy to gain weight at a gym, muscle. And it’s easy to lose weight, like you know if again you bring me a hundred overweight people I’ll give you a hundred people who shed weight easily by eating a low fat plant based diet.
Anna: Absolutely. Sorry to interrupt you.
Clint: No.
Anna: I was just gonna say so on your program, do you actually give people like meal plans and recipes and all that sort of thing?
Clint: Yeah, it’s critical because you deviate just a little bit and everything falls over. Just going back to the oils for instance, my wife is putting olive oil on my salad when we’re in the experimental phase and trying to work out how to eat. I felt like I was doing everything right and I couldn’t work it out. It took me like at least six months of each night having oils in my salad before eventually I said, “Honey, I know you love me. I know you want me to eat my salad and you’re putting this on me. Putting this oil on there because you think it’s gonna make me want to enjoy my salad more.” I said, “But I just go and not have it one night and just see what happens.” I’ve eliminated everything else and sure enough it was the oils. And so there’s a lot of things like that.
You know, for instance, you know I have a whole reintroduction guide which is a step by step, you know, week by week process that people can follow based on the experience that I had. The scientific literature and also the experience of now thousands of people that I’ve worked with with this condition and just started to see in anecdotal ways general trends for foods that work and don’t work. Some harmless foods that are super healthy for healthy people like avocados and olives because they are high in fat. Even though they are plant-based foods, they need to be postponed to later in the program. And other super healthy foods that are wonderful for people who, you know, otherwise healthy like oats for breakfast. Cereal grains are a big problem for people with rheumatoid, and so they need to be postponed a long way into the program as well.
So for anyone who doesn’t have any obvious chronic health condition, I encourage people to have oatmeal for breakfast as the healthiest possible meal. Without dairy, I encourage people to have not gluten free, just standard run on the mill, not Uncle Tobys or some heavily processed, just simply oats out of the bag, 100% oats for breakfast with boiling water poured over the top, and using some fruits for flavor. Or if some people aren’t strictly vegan then, you know, they can put maybe honey on that if they’re not strict vegans. Or they could put, you know, maple syrup or whatever. But that is a very, very, very right way to start the day.
Anna: Absolutely. The way I start my day, every morning…
Clint: Is that right?
Anna: It sounds good. I cannot ask you the question about success stories, like can you give us a couple of examples of some people have gone through your program because, you know, as everyone I love hearing success stories and the impacts and the sorts of things they’re having on people.
Clint: Yeah, yeah. I should just hit screen record on and then play them on the video or something while we’re doing it. Because, you know, when you see them tell their own stories it’s more powerful but let me just pick a couple. In fact, one that makes me emotional is the only time I’ve cried on a podcast and it just hits me in the heart every time because it’s one thing for adults but it’s another entirely for kids. All right. And so we had one woman recently come on the podcast with her son, Cole, and this one broke me apart. Because her little boy, you know, he’s only six years old and rheumatoid arthritis can strike at any age because it’s not got to do with old age arthritis. It’s, you know as I said, it’s auto immune and auto immunity is something that can happen at any age. It tends to happen later because it takes a lifetime to stuff yourself up on the inside. Okay.
But through reasons that are not entirely obvious, though I have my, you know, my suggestions or my thoughts on this. It can happen to kids through no fault to the parents, through, you know, just through bad luck in a lot of ways. But a set of triggers can be at play that causes it to happen in young boys and girls. So he was able to, because of these outstanding parenting, be very well controlled through our program but making the changes to it that I recommend because it’s not for kids. But with parental supervision it can be done carefully and controlled in an accelerated way because, you know, kids still growing and there’s things that need to be taking into account for best practice. So he was staring down the barrel of all the adult drugs, methotrexate, all these other stuff, I mean some really serious heavy stuff.
And the kid now is absolutely perfect, not on any drugs. His whole family now eats predominantly a plant-based diet. And it’s just makes me, you know, that alone makes what I went through worth it, just that. To change that family’s life, that child’s life from such a young age onwards. And because I know, his mom and I, I’ve gotten to know the way that she thinks. I know that this is a life change. It’s not something that’s now he’s better, let’s go and get him on bacon. I mean that’s not how she’s thinking. She knows the importance to stay clean with him and to keep him on track for life. Because, you know, it’s not something you wanna mess with. So that’s one. On our website, paddisonprogram.com, we’ve got a ton out there. People can watch the videos of people telling their stories, you know, women putting their wedding rings on for the first time in 10 years.
You know, girls running, they haven’t run for years and now able to run on the beach or yeah. Yeah, I mean it’s really exciting. And now some of our clients are now inspiring others and so they’ve created Instagram accounts or they’ve written books, all sorts of really cool stuff. And that’s what I’m hoping can be the next phase is that it can create a platform where other people can then spread their own message and be pioneers to educating their doctors and their rheumatologists, and helping other people through their stories. So I’m hoping that it can really blossom and everyone can take part in this, yeah, pioneering journey where we try to educate the medical community of what can be done with diet, exercise, and maybe a few supplements.
Anna: Amazing. You know, one question I really like to ask to my guest, and I won’t take up too much more of your time. But are there any, you know, people of I guess health professionals or otherwise that have been really influential in your journey or books or resources apart obviously from your program that you can recommend other people get their hands on?
Clint: Yeah, yeah. I really love, I’m mentioning before Dr. Shinya. So that’s The Enzyme Factor, so The Enzyme Factor, and that’s on Amazon. He’s got a subsequent book or followup book called The Microbe Factor. If you’re a big fan of his first book you might wanna read. There’s a bit of repetitive content in there but The Enzyme Factor I think is a bit of a classic. And then anything by Dr. McDougall. So we’ve been very niche in this chat about rheumatoid arthritis but Dr. McDougall, he’s the guy. I mean really I just love how he’s such a straight shooter. He can put people’s noses out of joint because he tells things really straight up and down. He said some things on my podcast.
Anna: I love that episode, that was so good. I was walking on the treadmill at the gym going, “Yes, these guys are awesome.”
Clint: Yeah, he went pretty hardcore. But, you know, why not? I mean that’s how he feels and why not say it in ways that shake people up a little bit.
Anna: Yeah.
Clint: Because if we get vanilla flavor messages all the time, we take vanilla flavor action which is not much, right? So we need to shake things up. We need to put some sort of accountability back on to people who are feeling that, you know, are the medical system will take care of me? That’s a load of crap. Look, you know, doctors are going to work within the parameters of their training and their training is medication. And referrals to surgeries and so forth, and that’s fair enough. But if that’s not what you want then it’s not, you know, going to get the sort of information that you’re seeking at the doctor. All right. Look, doctors have the hardest job in the world. I would hate to be a doctor. Think everyone comes in with the worst problems in the world, totally in pain, totally like life is over, like this is shocking. Please, please, please help me. You’re my greatest authority.
You’re the biggest trust of any job within society. And they say, “Well, take pills, take drugs you know.” And then the person is like, “But that’s not what I want.” But the doctor can only give you that. So yeah, it’s frustrating, my poor doctor. Especially because, you know, I’ve got some people here in the medical profession who are followers of what I teach. And it’s great because I can work with them so that they can work with their colleagues. And yeah, I’m really, fingers crossed for everyone, that they continue to be so open minded to what I’m doing.
Anna: Yeah, absolutely. I mean that’s definitely something I’m really passionate about. I have a background as a social worker in hospitals for many years and, you know, since we’re training as a health coach and kinda putting all my skills together. I’m so passionate about medical professionals and coaches working together. Because as you say like the doctors, I don’t think it’s their fault. It’s just they don’t have any training in this stuff in the nutrition. And, you know, the power of I get the healing power of food. So if we can combine our skills and work closely together, then the doctor can, you know, prescribe if necessary or if that’s what the patient wants. And if they do wanna take an alternative like, you know, cardiologists I’m working with, they’ve got… some people that are like, “I don’t wanna go on the drugs.” Just like you said.
So it’s like, “Cool. We’ll go and see Anna and she’ll coach you how to change your diet and lifestyle.” I’ll go down that route, like he doesn’t care. He just wants them to get better and he doesn’t know how to do it that way. So it’s great that there are people out there that are, yeah, have the skill set to do that. So I think that’s really powerful.
Clint: Yeah. And, you know, we need every doctor that we can possibly get but we also need information that currently they’re not able to share with us. So my goal and kind of vision for the future, I’m working on publishing our book that’s currently up until now, only been available online. We originally put our book online as a bit of a trial just to see, you know, whether or not it would be of interest to people. And we’ve been so busy from when we started doing that sort of four and a half years ago that we’ve never had time to actually then sit down and work on a published book. It’s just so remarkably painstakingly long the process of actually publishing a book. I mean god, it’s a lot more work. And so, anyway, I’m in the process doing that now but the vision is that I hope that our book will be sitting on the shelf of every rheumatologist’s office around the world.
And so my vision for the future is that someone when they get diagnosed with RA, if they walk into their rheumatologist’s office at some point in the future, they can sit down and the doctor says, “Tell me about your diet.” And the rheumatologist listens to that person, and if they’re not on a low fat, plant-based diet already they will say, “Read this book. This will explain all the relationships between the science, the gut, the disease, and how it all links together. Come back in two months and if your symptoms are still significant, then we will assist what medications to take in parallel to the Paddison Program.” Okay, not the way the things are currently done which is, “Hey, welcome. He’s methotrexate and if it doesn’t work, here’s a biologic in 12 months time.” For me, that’s a flawed system.
Anna: Absolutely.
Clint: So that’s my goal. And to have a low cost $20 book sitting on the shelf for everyone to be able to either buy themselves or be handed at the doctor’s, I think that, you know, there’s a different future for patients with RA if that gets put in place. So that’s what I’m hoping to achieve and I know I have a lot of people who I work with and who listen to the podcast who have RA who are going to help drive that for me and take a book and take it to the rheumatologist and talk to the rheumatologist. Yeah.
Anna: Absolutely. Clint, you’re an amazing human. You were generous with your time. I really, really appreciate you coming on the podcast today. Thank you so much.
Clint: Thanks, Anna. It’s a privilege and I’m really grateful that you had me on and I hope that this, you know, reaches a lot of people who need it.
Anna: Absolutely. Awesome. All right, have a good day. Get back to your gorgeous child and I will hopefully connect with you again soon.
Clint: Thanks so much.
Anna: Okay, see you.