Avoiding the Perils of the Standard American Diet—Nathaniel Jordan—The Minister of Wellness

Richard Jacobs: Hello. This is Richard Jacobs with the future tech and future tech health podcast. I have Nathaniel Jordan. His website is theministerofwellness.com. He’s a keynote health and wellness speaker, is a nationally certified health coach with the American Council on exercise, a nutrition fitness specialist. Also in the same council, a certified master trainer with a National Federation of professional trainers, strength coach. The accolades go on and on and on. So Nathaniel, thanks for coming. How are you doing?

Nathaniel Jordan: Hey, I’m doing good, sir. I appreciate you having me on.

Richard Jacobs: Yeah, if you don’t mind, tell me about your health journey. What got you interested in health and fitness?

Nathaniel Jordan: Yeah. I grew up on the standard American Diet. That’s a diet as based off of what I call diseased animals. The overconsumption of animal protein combined with fake foods that don’t exist in nature had a lot of health problems growing up as a child, especially bad acne that really affected me. Going through school, I have very bad skin. I went into the marines and I was on the all marine boxing team and then I got out, became a police officer and I managed to gain 100 pounds. And our large part of that was because I was trapped in that mentality of trying to get as big and strong as possible. So I was eating everything under the sun combined with lifting weights. So I was pretty strong like a football player. But I developed high blood pressure at a very young age. I have a very poor family health history as most Americans do and my father, he started to suffer a myriad of strokes. My uncle started dropping dead of heart attack, stroke to diabetes. And when my blood pressure became high at that age, I knew it was time to make the change. I’d already come to an understanding that a lot of the food that we’re being fed in America is garbage. So I had already taken the turn towards organic, but that wasn’t good enough to completely eradicate my chance of having a heart attack. I had to go all the way plant-rich. And that didn’t happen until I came across some great nutrition guru’s such as Dr. Joel Ferman, a Dr. Michael Greger and it’s a myriad of them now. It’s a growing army of medical doctors that are treating people with nutrition and lifestyle instead of these toxic medications. And I was fortunate to come across it. I reversed a lot of heart problems I had and I found my passion in the midst of doing it. I became so passionate about it that I left the police department after seven years and in 2015 and I became the minister of wellness and now I have my own legion of success stories, it’s a blessing.

Richard Jacobs: So you progressed from having organic food, but you were having all kinds of other foods and you said it took you to go to a mostly or entirely plant-based diet in order for you to stabilize your blood markers and feel good and lose weight.

Nathaniel Jordan: I had to go entirely. I have a very poor family health freeze. I believe my family, they were vegetarian cause they most likely as most African Americans, my family could probably be traced back to West Africa and the Diet over there, the traditional diet is vegetarian, is devoid of any meat. And in my family we have a very poor, I mean I was in my twenties already a high blood pressure and even when I lost a bunch of weight, I still had Hodges glycerides, high cholesterol and I was doing the meat once a week. They won’t go to an organic pizza place and get organic meat. I mean I was grass fed and everything and it still kept my numbers out of whack. And I had to go strictly plant-rich and many people find this, I’ve helped many people reverse high blood pressure and they find that unless they completely get off all animal protein, their cholesterol won’t get into a normal range. And there are other and other blue markers along with returned normal.

Richard Jacobs: Why do you think that is? I mean I know that regular meats have hormones, antibiotics, stuff like that. But if you’re eating grass-fed, pasture-raised stuff without any of that, for some people it doesn’t seem to work. Like what percentage of people do you think it works for and why doesn’t it work for some?

Nathaniel Jordan: Well we as a human species, we were designed to thrive off of the micronutrients and plant foods. So micronutrients, vitamins, minerals, vital nutrients, and the macronutrients where we get our calories is protein, carbs, and fat. So when you look at a piece, if you raise a chicken from scratch, that tiny bit of micronutrients that our body needs that the chicken flesh would have that’s because of naturally raised chicken, for instance, is running around eating grass. So whatever we can be getting in its tissues is getting from the grass. So the main thing that you’re going to get when you eat a chicken per say is protein. And you get a boatload of protein. But that’s pretty much it. And you get a very small amount of other nutrients. You won’t get any fiber. And that’s very dangerous for human beings. We have a very complex digestive system and it’s very dangerous to eat anything without fiber because fiber is what keeps our colon and our digestive system clear from any toxins and pollutants and that’s a huge drawback from an animal. And most of what you’re going to get, even with the healthiest type of meat is still going to be mostly cholesterol and saturated fat and no fiber, very, very little nutrients. So when you lower that and you replace it with a much, much better quality of protein, like beans and nuts and seeds and green vegetables that will give you plenty of protein but won’t sacrifice the amount of fiber and vitamins, minerals, and vital nutrients, you will automatically see a world of difference. And Dean, he’s been doing that with advance. How he became so great from treating people with a 100% low-fat Vegan Diet with severe heart disease that when Bill Clinton develop his heart disease, he found out about him and he helped Bill Clinton reverse his heart disease. That’s why Bill Clinton to this day is an advocate of a strict vegan diet.

Richard Jacobs: What are your thoughts on the Ketogenic Diet? The low carb? There’s a lot, there’s a big movement out there as well that’s espousing that, you know, what are your thoughts on that?

Nathaniel Jordan: It’s not sustainable long-term. And Americans, we’re such a fat, sick nation that people are very desperate to lose weight at any costs. But if you’re desperate to lose weight at any cost, that can lead you down the wrong path. The Ketogenic diet was only meant to be used under medical supervision for children suffering from severe seizures. And it’s only supposed to be a short term diet, but our body needs carbs. That’s why you go into Ketosis because your body’s going to find a way to make carbs from the fat and protein. It is going to find a way to get sugar because our brain and our cells are fueled by sugar and it’s not good to stay in that state. Perpetually is not good. It can be dangerous long-term. And that’s what all of them, of the research that they’ve done on people who stayed on Ketogenic for long years and years and years. Most people can’t. It’s too restrictive and it’s too much. It goes too much against what’s natural to us. We want fresh fruit. We are designed to see a delicious right, juicy apple and want to pick it and eat it off a tree. We’re designed to want sweet potatoes. We’re designed to want a nice, juicy orange. I love grapefruit. Who doesn’t like the taste of a nice fruit salad? I mean, it’s like, it’s natural to us. So that is just to restrain. Most people can’t do it long-term to even see the negative benefits. But when you’re talking about temporary, if you do, I mean you go on a dog on twinkie Diet, you can lose weight. Intermittent fasting is also a popular tool. So a lot of people are dropping the carbs combined with only eating once or twice a day. Oh you absolutely, you’re going to lose weight. And if you’re diabetic and you lose weight, you’re going to reverse diabetes. Your diabetes is just as much as it just about fat loss. So if you get the surgery, if you get surgery, you get sick, you will reverse your diabetes because diabetes is just about the fatness inhibiting insulin from getting inside the cells.

Richard Jacobs: So have you found that people need to be completely vegetarian or Vegan or can they just have like small amounts of meat? A lot of vegetables will still be okay.

Nathaniel Jordan: The body can tolerate a lot. So if someone absolutely couldn’t give up the taste of the animal flesh, and if you overpower the negative effects of the animal. Again, it comes with no fiber, but you overpower that with a bunch of fruits and vegetables on the plate. Yeah, you could get away with it, but when you’re talking about the most overweight, sick lose nation in world history, when you’re talking about heart attack being the leading cause of death. American gets diagnosed with cancer every 20 seconds when you’re talking about diabetes is the third leading cause of death. When you’re talking about people that got a lot of diseases. So for instance, if I have, and this is not uncommon, I have very sick people who reach out to me. So a 300-pound diabetic, no, you have to view food as your medicine. And when you’re talking about medicine food, when you’re talking about what can I eat to reverse diabetes, what can I eat that will fuel my immune system to fight against cancer? That’s going to be the plant foods.

Richard Jacobs: What about comparing being vegetarian versus Vegan? Do you think that veganism is good for people or vegetarians better what’s the interplay there?

Nathaniel Jordan: Now when it comes to the scientific studies, I couldn’t point to anything scientific to say that being a Vegan will extend your life much better. Because throughout the history of the human world, most people have consumed the least fish in the Diet. Even in the blue zones. The problem is in 2019, all the water’s polluted. And even for people who are religious and follow the Diet style that was laid out in the Bible, in the book of Genesis, it was a vegetarian diet, however, it was a Vegan die. But however, it technically wasn’t Vegan because if we were to grow our own food and eat everything ripe right from the ground, right from off a tree, technically we would be eating microorganisms and you might even be eating a little bit of book here and there and that’s how they used to get their vitamin B12. Now everything is washed over and over and over again. And that takes away any of the B12. I can’t say that there’s any proof that someone will live long. What I can say is that if we even now in this extremely toxic world where McDonald’s has spread all across the globe, that in populations where the people are still living the longest and the healthiest, where you have 85-year-olds where they’re very healthy, lean and strong, unlike the elderly here in this country, they are eating, the vast majority of their calories is coming from plant foods. And so it seems like that’s the key that the medicines and plants overpower, the negativity of whatever else they’re doing in their diet.

Richard Jacobs: There are GMO plants, there’s glyphosate is all kinds of crap in them. Certain plants and fruits and everything. So even if you eat vegetarian or vegan, how do you make sure that the plants you’re eating don’t have pesticides on them and they’re not going to affect you badly that way?

Nathaniel Jordan: Well every single nutritional scientific study that has used fresh fruits and vegetables to heal people, to help people reverse disease, it was conventionally grown protose. Our bodies a highly resilient. So I tell people now with the genetically GMO is a different beast. GMO are you taking an apple for instance, and you put in a gene that doesn’t belong in there to help it withstand unlimited sprain. That’s a whole different monster. So we want to stay away from GMO. But when you’re talking about conventional protose, if you take somebody on the standard American diet, like my father, he suffered nod strokes and died at age 66 because all he ate was meat and sugar. If you took him off that meat, sugar diet and he ate nothing but conventional protose and seedless fruits, he will still be alive today. He would have lost weight and he would reverse his heart disease and he will be alive today in excellent health because the body takes in what it needs and rejects what it doesn’t need. And my mother’s living witness to that. My mother is on a very low budget. She buys conventional protose. She washes it to the best of her ability. But she switched over. I convinced her to switch or died after she saw my success. She listened to me, lost 40 pounds and reversed all her diseases and she’s 70 years old and she doesn’t take a single prescription medication.

Richard Jacobs: That’s great.

Nathaniel Jordan: So I always tell people to never ever, ever, we cannot ever allow ourselves to be victims. There’s always a way to do the right thing. So most of the produce that’s the worst of the protose is fed to the animals that we get our meat from anyway. So if you want to reduce your exposure, that guy full state, the pesticides, herbicides, then the first thing you need to do is stop eating meat. All the pollutants and toxins in the environment get stored in fat. So that’s why it’s very important to be as lean as possible. You want to be as lean as possible, very as muscular as you can so that the toxins don’t have anywhere to store it in cells. So lowering your toxicity doesn’t start with going organic on fruits and vegetables. If you want to lower your level of toxicity, that starts with going and getting on a plant-rich diet.

Richard Jacobs: Gotcha. Do you think there’s any place for like Oregon meats again or a pasture raise respite animals or you think so? It’s far better not to have them at all.

Nathaniel Jordan: No, there’s no need for it. There are no health benefits. What will it help with? It won’t help anything. The only reason why people keep it in their diet is that they’re addicted to it, but there’s no meat. There’s no reason to eat meat at all. Like what? What are the health benefits? Like for instance, me, I reversed, I lost 100 pounds, reverse heart disease. All of my levels are normal. What? Why would I add grass-fed meat to my diet? That will be the question before I would do something like that, I would have to ask that. Okay, what would it be giving me that I need that will help protect me against the top 15 killers of all American hear attack stroke? No one can answer that question.

Richard Jacobs: What do you find that people have the hardest time with? Is it meats, is it giving up sugar? So you interact with a lot of people and a lot of them have challenges.

Nathaniel Jordan: It’s all of it. If people were food addicts as the standard American Diet has been designed to be addicting. It’s designed that way, is designed by high-level biochemists to hook the human brain. It’s a monster we’re facing, rather it’s almost impossible to get off this stuff. I’m not trying to sound gloomy here, but it is nearly impossible to achieve long life and excellent health in America. We facing a weird, we lost the war. My job as the minister of wellness is just to, all I do is Apo claim, the absolute truth. I don’t know what people would do when they get into, but people struggle with all of this stuff is people right now on dialysis and they are still ordering a Domino’s pizza right now. They can’t stop. People are 400 pounds that can’t even move. And they inside a Walmart and they loaded up the cart with ice cream. It’s everything. My father couldn’t stop. Seven eight nine-stroke, he was on a feeding tube and he still wanted to get off the feeding tube so he could eat steak.

Richard Jacobs: Right. Did your dad, was he around long enough to see you go through a change or, no?

Nathaniel Jordan: He passed away in October 2015 and shortly after, that’s when I became the minister of wellness. And so he did see me lose a lot of weight, but I couldn’t convince him to change just like I couldn’t, you know, only so far I’ve convinced my mother that changes are hard. It’s difficult. Most people give up hope and they don’t believe life is worth living. So the first thing that, the hardest thing for people to overcome is themselves. Their mindset. That is the hopelessness that people get in become hopeless and the victim mentality. Those are the biggest barriers to people becoming healthy because they don’t believe they have a habit within themselves. They eat in a manner to support excellent health and then they believe that all will it make no difference anyway because we all gone die and the fruits and vegetables are bad for is now too. Those are the two mentalities that I fight against most of the time with people. That is those two mentalities that I’m always trying to get people to come out of and it’s very difficult.

Richard Jacobs: So what’s your best answers for those two situations, what’s your best answer that you’d come up with overtime?

Nathaniel Jordan: Knowledge. Knowledge is power. You have to become infatuated with learning everything about the human body. You have to knowledge, you have to understand addiction. What are they doing to the food that makes it so addicting? I have it on my YouTube channel, the minister of wellness. I have a 28 part health seminar, 12 parts I have covering the power of the G-BOMBS Greens, beans, onions, mushrooms, berries, and seeds. Then I have a 12 part series covering food addiction to 12 components of food addiction. There are 12 components that work together to keep people trapped and you have to learn about it. And I have people that go through those 28 videos and they’re in there losing tons of weight, 40 pounds in four months, 50, 60 pounds reversed in diabetes. I have success stories all across the world now in 2019 and that’s, shows you how, it’s sad really because I have success stories in 2019 of people doing this, but I still have people that believe that it can’t be done because of this factor, that factor, this factor. I’d go over different fruits and vegetables almost every day. I do videos showing how mangoes can help to protect and strengthen the immune system, the fight against cancer, mangoes, apples, onions, berries. All these superfoods. Even today there is a way for us to be lean and healthy. We don’t have to resign ourselves or being hopeless and victims and just waiting for a diagnosis.

Richard Jacobs: It’s true. Well, what do you say to people, well, we’re all going to die someday. I just can’t, you know, like I love X, Y, Z too much. I just can’t do it. Like, so what do you say to someone that tells you that?

Nathaniel Jordan: It’s really, you really can’t say much to them? That’s the thing. And I have a term called insane food Zombie and insane food zombie is somebody, they been chemically lobotomized to the point where they have, they just have given their life over to the food and death care system because that’s what happens. The point is that when you get addicted to this stuff if you can’t get off, here’s what’s going to happen. You are going to get sick, and then you are going to have to go to the medical industry or what I call the sickness care industry or the death care industry. You’re going to go there, you’re going to get diagnosed, and they’re going to put you on a bucket of medications. They’re going to rip organs out of your body. They’re going to treat you to the death, and you’re going to live in a state of misery for the last 10 to 20 years of your life and most people are insane food zombie is willing to go through that. They’re willing to suffer all of that just so they can eat what they want. You can’t say anything to people like that. All you can do is be a living example.

Richard Jacobs: That’s true. So you spend a lot of your time making this content videos and getting the word out. Do you counsel people one on one? Like, I was going to ask you is for people listening to this, how can they take that first step? What do you recommend they do? What are some resources for them?

Nathaniel Jordan: Well, I do help coach people one on one, the first resources to subscribe to my YouTube channel, the minister of wellness, and watch my 12 part series on the power, the g-bombs. So you can learn what to eat, how and why. After you watch that 12 part series, then you need to move on to food addiction because even just because you know what you, how you should be eating the addiction is still going to kick your behind. So you need to learn the 12 components of food addiction. That’s another 12 videos. Then you need to learn the fundamentals of eating the list. I have 28 video health seminar series that I took the time to have for people in a playlist for free on my YouTube channel. And then throughout that, if you need assistance, you can hire me as a health coach. And then I also have books with recipes. I post recipes on my Facebook page @ministerofwellness. Some people follow me on Instagram, some people follow me on Twitter and I have books, I have DVDs of some of the fullest seminars that I’ve done across the nation. So I have plenty of research. I even have high-quality supplements that I sell to help people, multiple top vitamins and so forth created by Dr. Joel From and a medical doctor. Very high-quality supplements. So I have all, I have all the resources. Knowledge is power. You have to start with the mile. You have to be willing to open your mind up to the truth. And no one who listens to all of my videos doesn’t change.

Richard Jacobs: Well, that’s what I was going to ask you. Have you ever worked with someone that it seems like they’re honestly trying, but they just can’t get there?

Nathaniel Jordan: Yeah, I have.

Richard Jacobs: Why do you think that is?

Nathaniel Jordan: No, it is food addiction. Usually, we can handle one or two problems at a time. If you give a human being three problems at one time to solve, usually that’s too much. This 12 components of food addiction, 12 not seven, not eight, not nine, 12 it’s too much. It’s ridiculous. It shouldn’t be as difficult to be healthy, but it is. Most people need rehab. Need a center where we can check ourselves in and get away from this stuff and no, fortunately, that doesn’t exist.

Richard Jacobs: How soon after someone embraces this and says, I’m going to do it, and they change their eating. How long does it take to them to get a result when they contact you and say, Daniel, this and that happened, or I feel this, you know, like how fast does that happen on average?

Nathaniel Jordan: About a week ago, I had a guy that he lost 13 pounds, reverse high blood pressure in two weeks. I had a guy earlier today, he said in two days that he doesn’t need his diabetes medication anymore. It just depends. Depends on how long you’ve had the disease, how severe your level of commitment. And it just depends on the myriad of everybody’s different. A lot of times in six weeks you go real strong and you could see some incredible changes in six weeks. I have people with Vertigo, Lupus, and they’ll start seeing changes immediately. And as long as the food addiction doesn’t come in to suck them back in. And miracles can happen as always away, as long as we have lived in our body and breath in our bones, there’s always hope. And that’s what I try to steal in people is their hope.

Richard Jacobs: That’s great. Well, Daniel I really appreciate you coming on the podcast. People can go to theministerofwellness.com. You got your YouTube channel and everything. So any other ways that you want people to follow up or is that good?

Nathaniel Jordan: Well, January 4, from having a new year’s health kickoff seminar, this is my third annual new year’s. It’s a health fair, a holistic health fair and seminar right here at St Louis, Missouri. And you could come out and hear me live and in-person always had dramatic success stories from people attending a live event. So you can find out about that on theministerofwellness.com under upcoming events. And I have a speaker’s website, Nathanieljordan.com. And I’ve had people from across the nation trying to get things together for me to start doing a national tour. But my next definitive live event is January the fourth, St Louis, Missouri.

Richard Jacobs: Okay, well that’s great. Daniel thanks so much for coming on the podcast. I appreciate it.

Nathaniel Jordan: Thank you for having me.