Kris: I’m Kris Costello and today we’re talking with one of America’s best loved doctors Dr. Michael Roizen. Dr. Roizen, thank you so much for joining us today.

Dr. Roizen: Kris it’s always a privilege and you’re from the best loved area of the country so I think all of us would love to be out there in Santa Barbara with you.

Kris: Now Dr. Roizen you’ve written just the popular series along with Dr. Oz “The You Series”, “You on Staying Healthy and Young” and your newest “You on Having a Baby”, but there’s a subject that I know a lot of our listeners are interested in and wondering about and I wondered if you could speak a little bit to what is going on with these really high rates of autism and learning disabilities in American children these days?

Dr. Roizen: Kris, there’s no doubt it has increased over the last 50 years. There’s also no doubt that both environment and genetics play a role. And in the genetics, for example, if two engineers marry each other instead of a 1 in a 150 or 160 rate of autism there’s almost a 1 in 15 or 16 so it’s a much higher predominant. And obviously the engineers reflect a genetic personality trait that may have more genetic basis. On the other hand there also is an increase in some polluted areas where the farmers had specific wells they drew from. So it appears that there’s both an environmental and a genetic component and the environmental may relate to something we’re doing to our environment on a more widespread basis whether it is pesticides or whether it is the way we’re, if you will, growing things etc, there are a whole raft of things that are being investigated. In fact some of the people at UC Davis are doing what we would call some of the most important environmental work in the area trying to find out what it is. What we know that it isn’t form pretty darn good studies now is we know it isn’t the mercury content of vaccines or at least any one vaccination.

Kris: Yeah. Well I want to ask you about that because I know there’s so much antidotal information from parents that they see their kids get a vaccination and then they just freak out because that day or that night, you know, the child has a fever. There’s lots of stories out there, which I’m sure you’ve seen too.

Dr. Roizen: When you get a fever or stress reaction you bring out certain diseases that would have been brought out anyway that are of the mitochondria. And so in the specific examples where it’s been examined, where it’s been “triggered within a very short timeframe after vaccination” it almost invariably, in fact I think it has been invariable, there is a genetic disease that is known to be triggered by a inflammatory response and that disease just hasn’t been evident until then. So there are known triggers. Those things would have come out were they to have gotten, if you will, a fever in the future. So that gives us some important messages. In the “You Having a Baby” book Mehmet and I did a series on what vaccination your child should get and why and looking at the numbers needed to treat so any parent could make their own decisions, but we did this in a way that both the pro and the anti- vaccine group have yelled at us strongly. We actually had 34 different consultants, people very much on both sides of the issue, as well as people representing the medical establishment and people representing the anti-vaccine group, and tried to mold a conclusion from it. It was by far the longest and hardest thing we’ve had to write because literally virtually everyone of the people we talked to after we had come to the conclusion that we had both sides were annoyed at us for not going with the traditional view and not going with the all vaccines are bad. Clearly the vaccines have saved a lot of people and clearly there are better ways to give them. And the other point is we don’t want the anti- vaccine group to stop it because they have forced a great deal of improvement in vaccine safety.

Kris: Are there ways to make the vaccines safer I mean that’s the first thing that comes to mind for me is why can’t they take some of these additives out?

Dr. Roizen: Literally on childhood vaccines they’ve taken the mercury out of all but one or two of them and the amount of mercury you get in the typical flu shot now that is not individual dose, and you can get individual dose for kids, but the kind that is in the one that us adults get is the amount you get in eating the average four ounce piece of tuna. So it’s not very much mercury and it’s in a much more benign form than in fact the fish tuna is in. So one is we don’t think that’s the problem. There are much more what we would call efficient ways of making the vaccine so they can get done less expensively perhaps and more efficiently the problem is they haven’t been as tried and tested as the current one. So there will be as we pushed on vaccine manufacturers they’re now much safer than they were, for example, in 1980. They aren’t totally safe but let me give you an example, for the flu shot we know that at most it causes 1 in 3 million serious adverse events, yet at the same time we know it prevents one in 36,000 people at a minimum who get vaccinated from dying. So the benefit to risk ration is at least 100 and maybe 10,000 to 1. So we’ve gotten them to the point where the most serious adverse affect there is a substantial benefit to risk standpoint. On the other hand the way they’re given in multiples when you’re newborn, etc, there are ways, and that’s what we go into in that toolbox in the back of the book, of schedules in ways of giving them which we think will be much safer and have the theoretical benefit of being much safer. There isn’t enough data because they haven’t been tested in that way.

Kris: Well and that must have been fascinating to be in the middle of those groups as you mentioned.

Dr. Roizen: Well we often did this on radio. Mehmet and I host Oprah Radio a medical program for an hour a day and so we would often have the people on the radio with us while we were hashing this out and we got some pretty violent arguments in the studio. We were really surprised with the – how do I call it - the heat of the situation rather than actually the substance of it. It’s gotten polarized, much like politics, where it doesn’t need to be and that’s why we think we came to a rational and non-polarized idea. When we got through and we said that both sides are mad at us. Newt Gingrich who were interviewing on another topic one day said “Well you got both sides mad at you, you must be right at the right point.”

Kris: And so you got these recommendations in “You Having a Baby.”

Dr. Roizen: Right but we’ve put things we couldn’t get into the main text that we thought only some people would read. We put in appendices of what we called Toolboxes at the end and so one of them is, for example, Pop’s Pregnancy Recipes it’s the tool for dad to make recipes for mom. They’re easy, you make them in under 30 minutes start to finish even a doc, even Mehmet and I can make them which is how we tested that we could make them we both had to make them, and we put them there in the back so their fertility issues. There is a plan on, if you will, all the things pop should do on the wait to the hospital or what to plan for there’s an exercise tool. There’s how to choose your OB/GYN and how to choose your pediatrician and there’s a guideline for medications and toxins. So obviously not everyone is going to read that as they will read about how to eat during pregnancy or what vitamins to take or why certain things are good and certain things are bad or about epigenetics, which is how you lay genetics of the child on top of the genetics you and your partner have given the child. There are a lot of things in there but the toolbox is we thought only some people would read. For more interviews with the world’s top health and medical experts go to Michael Senoff’s www.HardToFindSeminars.com

Kris: Right. And Dr. Roizen that was one of the things we wanted to talk with you about I mean the “You” series is wildly popular obviously. We know that “You Staying Young” was I think what the Number 3 bestselling book in the world and I think part of that is its so reader friendly. And one of the things I just loved in “You Having a Baby” was your analogy with the whole DNA and the genes to each partner bringing their favorite recipes and then kind of explaining epigenetics in that way because for a lot of people that’s a big word.

Dr. Roizen: Right. Epigenetics is only epi on top of genetics. And just imagine, and I’ll use the analogy we use in the book that you bring all your family recipes, and let’s just say you’re a woman and he brings all his family recipes so you’ve got this stack of recipes, well you wouldn’t know which ones were useful unless you put post-it notes on top of them and that post-it note helps you pull that out faster and use it. Well that’s just what epigenetics is so it doesn’t change the underlying gene it just changes whether you like to use it, or in fact you might put things with a grey post-it note on them when you don’t want to use it and that’s exactly what the body does. For example, if you under nourish yourself during pregnancy let’s say you’re bulimic and you under nourish yourself the child thinks he’s going to be in a starvation mode and learns to slow down his metabolic rate. Well the way he does that is by posting a note on top of a gene that might have normal metabolism and say “Go into slow mode.” And so it is or don’t be read, if you will, that protein that ups metabolism don’t get this read skip that one. So you don’t produce that protein which increases your activity so you’ve got slower activity or slower metabolic rate. So what happens if the child then gets born and eats normally he gains weight too fast?

Kris: So epigenetics is this one of the really exciting things in medicine right now because we’re hearing a lot about this and just the potential to turn on and turn off different genes through lifestyle changes. What do you see with all of that happening?

Dr. Roizen: Well we’ll get know much more in five to seven years when we have really inexpensive test to measure your geno. So we’ll know do you have the GSTM1 gene and if you do does broccoli turn it on in you as it does in the vast majority of people? Why am I mentioning that? Well that’s just one of whatever it is 26,000 genes you might have and if you got the active form of that you can produce a protein that causes breast and colon and prostate cancers to commit suicide. And we know it’s pretty easy to turn it on and most people you eat four servings of broccoli a week that’s only four handfuls and it stays on for about a month. So it’s pretty easy to turn that gene on, and in fact, get rid of breast, colon and prostate cancer. So growth gets most of those cells to commit suicide by doing that. So there’re pretty easy ways that we will know how to influence the genes we have. Right now we know only a few such as the GSTM1 gene and the Grass Family of genes which promote colon, breast and prostate cancer. We know that saturated fat and sugar turn those genes on and that by avoiding those foods you can reduce those promoter genes that promote colon, breast and prostate cancer.

Kris: And is this a fairly new idea in medicine this idea of food having such power per health?

Dr. Roizen: Well it’s really been around if you look at worse statements you are what you eat very long time ago. But the fact that they influence individual gene is really about a eight or nine year old idea and the development of it obviously it’s still going on we don’t know all the genes and all the foods that influenced them specifically but it is pretty new and exciting and it’s one of the most exciting things that come out of the geno project. You’re listening to Www.Hardtofindseminars.com. I’m Kris Costello and we’re talking with Dr. Michael Roizen.

Kris: So Dr. Roizen what’s your Web site so our listeners can find out what you’re up to?

Dr. Roizen: Well we really use two Web sites, the first is www.RealAge.com and the second is if you want to follow the Dr. Oz Show which does a lot of the science of this in a fun and playful way, it’s www.DoctorOz.com.

Kris: Now Real Age you mentioned I noticed you’re in your 60s and your real age is what?

Dr. Roizen: Well I’m 64 and my real age is about a little over 44.

Kris: Wow very impressive. Now what do you do to do that? How do you get that age?

Dr. Roizen: Well on Real Age there are 151 things you can do that change your rate of aging, everything from simple stuff like flossing your teeth, and why does that work because it changes the rate of inflammation in arteries to. In fact, doing things that are more unusual such as making sure you get six or more cups of coffee a day or having the right amount of Vitamin D level or, if you will, as I said having four servings of broccoli or six walnuts twice a day. And the reasons for those and what are alternatives so if you can’t take fish oil there is a vegetarian alternative that is in fact more effective because it’s where the fish get the algae from DHA. So it’s where the fish gets the Omega 3 from which is algae and that produces DHA. So there are a lot of neat things on there to help people stay and get healthy.

Kris: Did you say I get to have six cups or I don’t get to have six cups.

Dr. Roizen: The more you have the better six cups is really the trigger point at which you really get a lot of the benefit in reducing brain aging.

Kris: Really.

Dr. Roizen: That’s right.

Kris: That’s amazing. I thought you had to cut out caffeine.

Dr. Roizen: No we want you, in fact, from a standpoint of health there are four side effects of caffeine, migraine headache, heart arrhythmias gastric upset and anxiety. If you don’t have one of those then all the others- that is the other choices, the more caffeine you have the younger you are.

Kris: Interesting. Okay. So back to “You Having a Baby” we talked about epigenetics and this powerful, powerful idea that you can actually change how the genes are expressed. What are some of the things that new moms need to do during their pregnancy to really have the optimal experience for mom and baby?

Dr. Roizen: Well the first is to understand that it is a majestic and wonderful experience in the vast majority of cases everything turns out just normal. So the most important things is to relax, yes get knowledge, yes form a buddy group and bond with other moms-to- be or with people who already have children so you can get their wisdom and expertise, but to realize this is going to be just fine because stress is the worst thing in the world. The second thing is to plan your pregnancy, if you will, since 50% are unplanned anytime you think you might be pregnant, which is everybody in fact who’s from age 12 on to menopause probably should be taking prenatal vitamins everyday because you need them literally three months before you get pregnant. So relax start the prenatal vitamins as soon as you can and if you’re not pregnant yet start them three months beforehand or far in advance and keep taking them through breastfeeding, etc until you reach menopause. The third is to understand you’re not eating for two you’re eating for one point one and there is a value in limiting your calorie intake so you only gain roughly 24 pounds. And secondly there’s a value in making those calories as high quality as you can because of the epigenetic effect of foods on your child. And one corollary of that is if you eat a lot of junk food during your pregnancy your child will begin to like junk food and will have that ensconced in his genes by that epigenetic pathway. On the other hand, if you eat just healthy food the child will like healthy food much more. If you eat burritos that are cheese laden he’ll like burritos that are cheese laden; it’s a very interesting phenomenon on how we adjust the senses.

Kris: How about caffeine during pregnancy? www.HardToFindSeminars.com.

Dr. Roizen: That’s one of the few times in life you absolutely want to cut the caffeine out because caffeine does increase miscarriage rate.

Kris: Okay. So that’s a strong reason not to.

Dr. Roizen: Absolutely and it occurs at about 200 milligram a day that the interesting thing is one cup of coffee maybe between 50 and 150 and so you shouldn’t have any but even decaffeinated coffees when we tested them they have 20 to 30 milligrams of caffeine. So it’s not that you can substitute decaffeinated coffee for regular coffee when you’re pregnant you probably should cut it all out totally.

Kris: Now also Dr. Roizen what do you think about the whole concept of home births versus hospital births?

Dr. Roizen: I think that this is an individual choice and if you are otherwise healthy, meaning there’s something unusual with your pregnancy and things are going fine and you don’t have any unusual genetic traits or anything else, then there’s every reason to have a home birth, in fact, if you want one and if you’re close enough to a hospital. What do we mean by that is because emergencies occur even in rush hours you want to be within 30 minutes of the hospital and secondly you want to take then a practitioner who’s willing to come do a home birth and will work with someone else who is at hospital in case an emergency occurs. But home births, obviously, they’re low risk that is who selects for it and that’s a very good thing.

Kris: And we’re out in California so we have to ask you that right.

Dr. Roizen: It’s everyplace and it’s a great thing. Both Mehmet and I, even though we’re both traditional physicians think it’s a wonderful thing if you could do a home birth. Lisa Oz tried home birth, that is Mehmet’s wife, and ended up with a stalled labor so she ended up not having home birth any of the time. And I participated in probably because I helped do OB anesthesia at UC San Francisco when I was in my younger days and at University of Chicago I participated in probably over 5000 hospital deliveries yet we both love home birth.

Kris: My one regret is I didn’t do a home birth but, you know, can’t do everything right.

Dr. Roizen: And not only that that’s right, I mean, there are some reasons why some of us can’t do them.

Kris: So Dr. Roizen if there are a few really just key things that you’d like women and men to know about “You Having a Baby” what would those things be?

Dr. Roizen: Well I think the way we did it and the way we wrote about it was the goal is to make sure mom knows that is you know all about what’s going to happen at each stage of the game. We tried to do it in the least stressful way possible that is to make sure that everyone knew what was going to happen what options you had at each stage. So during delivery, for example, you get to decide what type of pain relief you want and you can plan for it. But at each stage we wanted to make sure that you knew that there were some things that you couldn’t control and to understand that and to work with them in advance.

Kris: Wonderful. And Dr. Roizen for our listeners that would like to find out more about what you’re doing can you mention those Web sites again please?

Dr. Roizen: Sure. It’s www.RealAge.com and www.DoctorOz.com.

Kris: Alright and what’s coming up next for you?

Dr. Roizen: Mehmet and I have a fairly active schedule. I think the next book is “You the Smart Parent”. We obviously relied on our wives a great deal for parenting our own children and this is actually a fun thing as well meaning the book is a lot of fun.

Kris: Ah and what kind of things will that go into?

Dr. Roizen: What it goes into is how you should frame, what attitude, what things you should do for brain development and for muscular development and how to get, if you will, the best parent out of yourselves and out of your partner you can and what we know about what parenting does for child development. The team that worked together on “You Having a Baby” had delivered over, I think it was around 12,000 children at the time, we ended the book being published. This book we’ve only had I think it is 18 children among us in the team but we have two pediatricians including my wife as the developmental pediatrician helping us a great deal on the book.

Kris: And that’s a logical progression after having a baby it is good to know what to do with it afterwards isn’t it?

Dr. Roizen: We aren’t through with it but we always learn so much so in writing “You Want a Baby” we learned, for example, why fingerprints are so unique and so different and how they get formed. I don’t know if you know that when you’re in uterol you hold onto the side of the amniotic fluid cavity of the womb and you push against your placenta. And that pushing that ridges on the placenta indents your fingers and they’re what give you the swirls. So there are whole bunch of interesting things that Mehmet and I never knew that we can make the books more interesting with.

Kris: That’s interesting because we were just talking with Dr. D’Adama and he mentioned I don’t know if you’ve heard this one same thing with the fingerprints where you can actually tell if you’ve had a good time in uterol if they’re symmetrical if they match. Have you heard that one?

Dr. Roizen: Yeah I don’t know that. That means both arms are up.

Kris: Yeah I thought that was fascinating so I can’t wait. I’ve got to go get a fingerprint thing. Well Dr. Roizen we want to thank you so much for joining us on Www.Hardtofindseminars.com and why don’t you mention that Web site one more time so people can find you, and of course they can Google your name too. You’ve got the third bestselling book in the world I imagine they can find you pretty easily.

Dr. Roizen: Its www.RealAge.com and www.DoctorOz.com.

Kris: Well thank you so much.

Dr. Roizen: Thank you.