From Pharma to Prevention: Rethinking Health with Dr. Joe Pizzorno

In this episode of Supplement Source, Jeff Ventura speaks with Dr. Joe Pizzorno, President of Bastyr University and a pioneer in naturopathic medicine.

They discuss his journey from pharmaceutical research to natural medicine, the divide between drugs and nutrition, and the growing role of supplements in supporting health. Dr. Pizzorno also explains how environmental toxins contribute to chronic disease—and why restoring key nutrients is essential for the future of healthcare.

About the Council for Responsible Nutrition (CRN) 
The Council for Responsible Nutrition (CRN), founded in 1973 and based in Washington, D.C., is the leading trade association representing the dietary supplement and functional food industry. Bringing together manufacturers, ingredient suppliers, and service providers, CRN unites its member companies around a shared commitment to science, transparency, and responsible business practices—advancing a strong, credible marketplace that supports consumer health and industry growth.

In an increasingly complex regulatory and media environment, CRN serves as the industry’s front line—shaping science-based policy, defending market access, and countering misinformation. Through strategic advocacy, self-regulatory leadership, voluntary guidelines, and evidence-based communications, CRN ensures that responsible companies are recognized, protected, and positioned to innovate and compete. Learn more at crnusa.org and follow @CRN_Supplements on X and LinkedIn.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Please note the Council for Responsible Nutrition, CRN, does not endorse any guests appearing on this podcast or any products or services they may discuss. The views and opinions expressed by guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of CRN. Thank you and enjoy the episode.

SPEAKER_01 0:29

You are listening to Supplement Source, the official podcast of the Council for Responsible Nutrition. And now your host, Jeff Ventura.

SPEAKER_03 0:38

Hello, and thank you for listening to Supplement Source. My name is Jeff Ventura, and I am thrilled to be joined this week by Dr. Joe Pizarno, who is the president of Bastier University. Doctor, thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks for the invitation. You're widely considered a pioneer in naturopathic medicine. What first drew you to this field, especially at a time where it really wasn't mainstream?

SPEAKER_02 1:03

What a great question. Actually, kind of an unusual route. So way back in the early 1970s, I was working in the University of Washington School of Medicine, Department of Rheumatology, doing research. I worked with MDs and PhDs looking for a drug to treat arthritis. And our lab was looking at rheumatoid arthritis and gout arthritis, not algebra arthritis. Anyway, those two. And so I was happily doing research and thinking, you know, I think I'll become a PhD and medical resource guy. I just love doing it. Then one day I was having dinner with my roommate from college. I went to Harvard Mont College. I'd have dinner with him, and his wife joined us. And we have a conversation and she talked about, yeah, you know, I'm I've suffered from juvenile rheumatry arthritis since I was a teenage girl, and it's all gone now. I said, What? How can you all be gone now? It's an incurable disease. And I work with these MDs and PhDs, not just in our lab, but across the country, trying to find a drug cure. So I said, What'd you do? She said, I went to a naturopathic doctor. And my response was, What's that? Okay. So I went to her naturopathic doctor and I asked him, So, what do you do for my friend? And he said, Well, I taught her how to eat properly, I detoxified her liver. What does her liver and her diet have to do with her hands and her knees being swollen? Also during this time, I'd become a vegetarian. And I saw my bike with some some changes being a vegetarian. So I asked one of the MDs I was working with what these changes mean. And he looked at me and said, There are errors in your observation because diet doesn't affect you. Now, most MDs wouldn't say that today, but that was what they may still believe it, but that was dogma, you know, 50 years ago. So I, being very scientifically oriented, I went to the nature path doctor and asked him exactly the same question. I say, I've seen these paid changes in my body become a vegetarian. What do they mean? Random dismissed me. He went to his bookshelf, pulled out guidance of medical physiology, and showed me physiologically how my diet would change my physiology. So, well, that's interesting. The nature path knows research better than knows physiology better than MDs and PhDs I'm working with. But that wasn't enough to convince me. Then I would do some research, and we had a post office MD who was there to study a new drug, and it was being tested in ducks. Now it's being tested in ducks because, as you know, their feet, you can really analyze what's going on with their joints. So we got these ducks in and we validated, yep, these are ducks that were genetically bred to get rheumatoid arthritis, and they were the model used to test to see if rheumatoid drugs worked or not. So we got the animals in and get ready to test them. So we go in and they got some plywood, they built a duck run with some sand in it, they got a plastic swimming pole, put the swimming pole in, gave some fresh veggies to eat. Now the ducks are quacking, running, running uh uh you know, in the sand, swimming in the water, really, really happy. It's okay. Now we feel morally appropriate. Okay, now let's wait for them to get the rumor arthritis that they were bred for, we try the drug. And we waited and we waited and we waited. They never got their mute arthritis. Wow. So we're having this going away part for this poor doctor who she had this postdoc failure, and they're all consulting her for the failure. I'm looking at them and said, wait a minute, don't you get it? If you feed them healthfully in a healthy environment, they don't get the disease, so you don't need the drugs. I said, you know, I think I'm gonna stop studying the medical model. I'm gonna go try this natural medicine model. That seems like a good idea. So a long answer, but that's what happened.

SPEAKER_03 4:24

No, it's a great answer. I uh it's it's fascinating. And I and I love that I love that it has ducks in it. I think that's a that's a fantastic story. Let me ask you a question, because you hit on something I think that's so true even today, uh, with regard to how the medical establishment regards nutrition. And there's been a lot of talk with regard to the Maha movement, not to get political, but the sort of notion that nutrition should be taught in medical schools more than it is. Do you feel that we're still sort of stuck back in that era where we haven't made a lot of progress in terms of the mainstream medical establishment understanding the benefits of nutrition?

SPEAKER_02 5:05

Yeah, a great question. So we are seeing something of a bifurcation in conventional medicine because if you look now, there's organizations like uh functional medicine, which has tens of thousands of members. Uh you have integrated medicine, uh tens of thousands of members. So these are MDs who realized that the drug model was incomplete and started looking into more natural approaches. There's huge interest. So one of my publications, I've written or co-authored uh six textbooks for doctors. My textbook, Natural Medicine, has sold over 100,000 copies in four languages all over the world. Over half were bought by MDs. I've had MDs come to me in tears, give me hugs saying, Thank you for the textbook, because this is the medicine I thought I was going to be taught, but still is taught how to use drugs rather than how to cure people. So they they love the idea of cure the medicine, and my textbook has helped them a lot.

SPEAKER_03 5:56

I've always found that sort of curious because I deal as the communications person representing the supplement industry, I deal with a lot of skeptical media that come to me, and they are so quick to write a story that, whether they know it or not, leans toward the efficacy and safety of the drug profile. You know, I came from FDA. I mean, I spent many years at FDA as a public affairs person, and um I find it funny because having been on the inside, I I realize just the scale and scope of the adverse events associated with drugs. So I'm always shocked at the skepticism of s around supplements, the story of the doctor kind of hugging you and as if you freed him from that ignorance. I see that even in the media coverage. Do you see that too? I mean, have you noticed that sometimes when you read the headlines or or reports about the supplement industry that sometimes there's a there's a tilt toward believing in the pharmaceutical model versus the supplement model?

SPEAKER_02 7:03

Oh, oh, absolutely. Um and and it's it's problematic. It's not only the mainstream media that's doing this, but it's in the in PubMed as well. So you know PubMed is the compilation of all natural research. It is full of what I consider fraudulent research that was designed to make natural products look bad and make drugs look better. Um I'll give you an example. Uh I had a toy I wrote a few years ago with one of my uh graduates, and a big study had come out uh asserting that uh fish oil doesn't work. You recall several years ago. Fish oil does not work.

SPEAKER_03 7:35

And those come those those are cyclical, right? They come back every few years.

SPEAKER_02 7:39

So then if you look at the study, you look at, okay, that looked like a large enough sample, that would be good. And then you look at what was the placebo. The placebo was olive oil. So they compared one effect of natural therapy to another effect of natural therapy, and since it wasn't better, it didn't work. Now, in contrast, at the same time, a pharmaceutical drug version of fish oils came out, and they showed really nice clinical results, good study, big numbers, etc. Then you look at what was their placebo, mineral oil. Mineral oil, which is known to damage human beings. So what they do, public study to make the drug look as good as possible because they made the control group look as bad as possible, and make the natural product look irrelevant because both natural products work. PubMed is full of this stuff.

SPEAKER_03 8:21

But I'm sure you've also seen research around supplements move over the years into a more credible zone around supplements, more affordable models, that sort of thing. So I mean I imagine you see that as well, that there is more credible research being done and more people are aware of that research. Do you not see that?

SPEAKER_02 8:43

Oh, absolutely, more and more. So, you know, Mike Murray and I uh wrote the textbook of natural medicine, the first edition was way back in 1985. And we did it because everybody tells us there's no science supporting natural medicine, no science supporting use of dietary supplements and herbs and things to treat people. So we decided to go and look in the research literature. And we were stunned by a lot of research. There's a huge amount of research supporting this, but it doesn't get much attention because it does not support the drug model, which is so expensive and is bankrupting the country.

SPEAKER_03 9:13

Let's talk a little bit about patient impact. Do you think that a lot of people are also not kind of keyed into supplement science, not keyed into the benefits of nutrition? I mean, are we a society that is also ignorant when it comes to that, or do you think that things are changing as the internet has proliferated?

SPEAKER_02 9:36

I think we're I think we're our society uh by forgetting, we have one group of people who are very health conscious, and we represent that group of people who are paying attention. But unfortunately, the majority of people don't. The majority of people think that they can live their lives however they want, and when something breaks, well, they go to the MD and they get fixed. Well, there's many situations where that happens. Drugs work too well. People go, what? They work too well. I say, yeah, they work too well of turn off the symptoms of the body breaking so people don't make the changes they need so the body can be healthy. So use the drug, turn off the symptoms, and after a while, the body damage gets so great that the drugs can't turn off the symptoms anymore.

SPEAKER_03 10:16

Yeah, it's interesting uh how uh you know when you have like a molecular entity, like a drug, how it, you know, and and the and the impact is so instant and severe in most cases, right, where people notice a change. With supplements, I mean, with the exception of maybe like melatonin and a few other supplements that actually have a kind of an immediate physiologic effect on the body, a lot of these things take time and they, you know, you take them over time, they're nutritional supplements. So I think I think it's this notion too, the psychology of this you know, instantaneous culture that we're in, where you take a pill, your headache goes away, to your point about symptoms, right? Um as opposed to you know you take your multivitamin and nothing nothing happens, you know. And what does that mean psychologically to us?

SPEAKER_02 11:07

Yeah, it is a big issue because people expect, like I say, results within hours to days. You start doing herbal medicine, you get results within days to weeks. Start doing nutritional medicine, now we're talking about weeks to months. Now you start doing environmental medicine that I'm doing, we have to get the toxins out and then rebuild bodies. It's months to years to get the results. And people are not used to it taking time to heal the body. But what we do is we try to go for cure, not simply reliviation of symptoms. It's harder to do, it takes more work, but you get better results long run.

SPEAKER_03 11:38

What's really got you pumped these days in your space?

SPEAKER_02 11:42

So it may be a little different than what you might expect. If you're going to PubMed, I've now written three editorials entitled Unimportant Molecules. If you look at our nutrition research, most of it was done 100 years ago. So at that point, we had limited understanding of physiology, and we were pretty much limited to using animal research to find what nutrients were required for life. Okay. So we did a bunch of research, and we determined that there's 43 molecules, vitamins, minerals, amino acids, uh, fatty acids, etc., 43 are required for life. So then, as long as when we grow foods chemically, as long as those 43 molecules are maintained reasonably well, we think conventionally grown food is just fine, chemical grown food. But if you take a step further and say, well, wait a minute, how many molecules are there in food? Look at all the foods of the world. How many molecules are there? There's 50,000 molecules in all the foods of the world. So we decided that 99.9% of molecules in food aren't important. And so when you grow foods and you lose them, it doesn't matter. But it turns out those molecules are critical for health. Okay. We call these the magic nutrients and the and all these kinds of things. No, these are things that should be in our food supply. The proctinoids, the flavonoids, the polyphenols, all these various molecules, incredibly important for health. And we lost them from the food supply. So one of the things I think is so important for our industry is to recognize that we need to get these molecules back into people. And for example, giving people large amounts of bare bearing. Okay, well, that's fine for blood sugar control, but you give them bare bearing to make up for the fact that all these other molecules that are lost as well. So I think more and more we go into giving people back these molecules that have been lost in the food supply, the more effective we will be as an industry.

SPEAKER_03 13:26

Wow. Yeah, that's interesting. And uh puts the focus on functional food too. We talk all the time about supplements here, but we we should not forget functional food as well. What do you think is ahead for the industry? What would you like to see happen next in terms of the supplement industry and the functional food industry?

SPEAKER_02 13:45

So I just I was just at Expo West, got a nice night as you know, got a nice word there. And and I see being very successful.

SPEAKER_03 13:51

Congratulations, by the way.

SPEAKER_02 13:52

Oh, thank you. Yes. I see the industry being very successful on the facade. But you know, I've been doing this for a long time. I remember when these all these organizations first started, and they first started with the dreamers, the people who had innovative product, the person who's a true believer in natural medicine, et cetera. And that's important. But I'm seeing more and more people that are salespeople and business people, nothing wrong with that. But where's the support for that uh true belief in what we're doing, the purpose of why we're important? I mean, Master University. You know, we have uh almost 10,000 graduates out there advancing this industry. We as institutions should be supported. I mean, look at people like Dr. Michael Murray, who's written over 20 books. I mean, our graduates have been given five hundred thousand lectures supporting this medicine. The industry has got to get back.

SPEAKER_03 14:40

Do you think that's because people on the internet are not necessarily doing their own homework or not as the consumer isn't as discerning anymore about the science behind supplementation or the science behind nutrition. And so a lot of these companies can sell, you know, can sell these products, and they and unlike before when Deche came out, you know, when in the in the 90s when, you know, 94 when Deche sort of uh came on the scene, they uh that when that regulatory schema took took effect, there was some credibility building that the industry had to do with the consumer, right? Like to convince them that now it's almost the opposite, where it's sort of like they'll buy anything and they don't need to be convinced about anything as long as there's enough pizzazz and flash to the advertising. Because why do we need all of this science backing up our products when we have people who will buy these products even without the science backing it up, right? Unfortunately.

SPEAKER_02 15:50

There's virtually no way for the consumer to build a friend shape between the good products, the okay products, and the frankly fraudulent products. It's a huge problematic.

SPEAKER_03 16:00

So I call it a race to qu I call it a race to quality, where there's a well, I think that's what's happening because you know you see these like SUPCOs and these other third parties that are trying to come in and be the sort of uh you know the validator of to to tell the consumer what is it?

SPEAKER_02 16:23

Oh, it's hugely problematic. So I'm sorry, as you may know, I'm the editor-in-chief of Integrated Medicine and Clinicians Journal, or I'm CJA for short, we're we're peer-reviewed in PubMec Intext. I just got a submission of a paper done by one of the big companies in the field that looked at twenty different uh product uh different companies doing a particular product. And out of the twenty, only four actually met label claim. Okay. And now, as a journal editor, do I dare publish this? Because I know the names of who are good and who are bad. Yeah, yeah. And I can tell you, you've got good companies out there that are doing it right, and many companies are not doing it right, and it's so hard for them to differentiate themselves. So um what the way I'm I I'm saying I'm lucky. I've visited most of these people. I've seen their manufacturing facilities, I've seen whether they have quality control collapse or not. And I can tell you which I can tell you which are good ones and which are the bad ones. I won't, of course, because challenge a legal position, but there are plenty of good companies out there. We need to support them.

SPEAKER_03 17:22

Yeah. Well, uh, this has just um been a terrific conversation, Dr. Pizorno, uh uh the president of Bastier University. I'm pronouncing that right, Bastier just now. Yeah, Bastier. Uh we thank you so much for coming on Supplement Source, and you are welcome back anytime, sincerely. Um I appreciate you uh taking the time out of your day.

SPEAKER_02 17:43

I'm happy to do it again.