RESILIENCE FOR LIFE

Dr John Tickell realised early in his medical career that good food and exercise was what many of his patients needed. Then, as a young doctor he was faced with a life threatening situation himself. Fortunately, many years of wholesome eating and good lifestyle choices significantly improved his chance of survival. Decades later he continues on his mission to make us all more resilient by the choices we make. 

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Doctor John Tickell, welcome to a patient story podcast. It's great to be with you, Daniel. Mate, you have had a full life and for people like you that have had such a full life, it's always hard to know where to start a podcast. You started as a general practitioner. You went into obstetrics and eventually developed a strong interest in sports medicine. You played AFL. Now AFL for our international listeners is Australian Football League. It's the premier football sporting code in Australia. And you played for one of the old established teams called Hawthorne, which is still your team, I believe. Correct. And you also became a sports medicine doctor on field in the AFL to work with great such as Ron Barassi. Amazing. I'm sure there's some stories there and I'd love to go and have a cup of tea with you sometime and listen to some of those old stories. Yeah. Ron Barassi taught me something about motivation and inspiration. I call it the mice approach. Daniel. Motivation, inspiration, challenge. Everyone likes to be challenged and excitement or entertainment. Right. And that came from Ron Barassi, did it? Yeah, because we used to sit down when he'd ask me who was, you know, not able to play on the next Saturday and what sort of injuries they had, and he said, yeah, but, but, but I'd say, but what, Ron? You said, well, yeah, but if you put him in the forward pocket, you know, can he get through a game and kick four goals sort of thing. So it was always mix and match. And what of, even if you're a little bit off centre, okay. And just because you weren't busy enough, you, you've gone off and written a whole swag of books, your best immunity, the great australian diet. Two parts of it. Yep. Every woman gets a guide to weight loss and laughter, sex, vegetables and fish, which just sounds like a great night out to me. Are you three out of four of those will make you happy, right? Do you get to choose your own? I learned that from George Burns, the american comedian who died when he was 100. So he laughed his way through life. So humour is a good medicine. Yes, it is. You've also done many presentations, thousands of presentations to conferences and various corporate groups, et cetera, and received many accolades, including General Norman Schwarzkopf, which I was quite impressed about. What did you talk to with General Norman Schwarzkopf? We, the two of us were two of five international speakers at the conferences. And he was the guy, the american guy who ran what they call the tv war, you know, the Middle east war. Yeah. He had various sayings and his talk, his presentation was all about leadership. He had rule 13. When you're in charge, stay in command. He said, the world is full of many leaders. And it's interesting, the american election process to the moment. You know, the american public have been led by somebody who's already in their eighties, and the guy opposing him is nearly 80. And so it's an interesting look at life as to why there aren't any 40 or 50 year olds who are chosen to lead maybe the strongest community in the world in terms of leadership skills. He was the guy who won the war, but he wasn't there on the front lines with a gun or a crossbow. He was getting the orders through to his commanders and making it happen. But my study over many years now is to do with health and wellness. We're all born as magnificent machines, Daniel, but as people age, they tend to, especially in the western world, start to put on weight and we run risks of what I call the chronic diseases in western world called Chad. And people say, what do you mean, Chad? Well, cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer's, diabetes, dementia. The last Australian Institute of Health and Welfare Stats told us that 87% of Australians, that's nine out of ten Australians, have already got the start of a chronic disease when we turn 665. So if you want to be sick in your sixties, live the australian, the american way. And if you don't want to be, you've got to sort of push the pendulum back to the eastern sort of life. Yeah. Now, John, you're a medical doctor, and I've worked with many medical doctors over many, many years myself. And I know that through medical school, nutrition, diet, exercise, lifestyle management is not a very strong part of the course. And I'm wondering how you started this journey so early in the piece where, you know, pharmacology and. And other sciences were predominantly taught. Yes. When you start off your medical career in medical school, looking at the anatomy of the human body and then the biology of the human body, but then you drift into clinical work where people are sick and you treat them. So it came back to, if in doubt, cut it out. That's called surgery. And if you cut it out, you give them some medications that have been stirred up in a laboratory. And so when I got into general practise, Daniel, it started to amaze me after three to five years that people were coming to me. And I thought I was sort of becoming a social worker where if they had a sore big toe, they say, but isn't there a big toe specialist you can send me to? So a general practitioner. I started to question why most patients in inverted common expected me to write them a prescription for a medication, to go around to the pharmacy and get 50 of these in a bottle. I found myself after three to five years, handing out indiscriminately, let's call it valium and antidepressants and those sort of things. And I said to myself, there's got to be a way of treating people before they get sick. And it's called prevention. And one of the australian things that the australian health department I sort of refer to as the Australian Sick department because in terms of preventing cancers and diabetes and Alzheimer's and all that sort of stuff, there's no simple solution in terms of what I call the ace skills. So how many Australians go for a half hour walk six days a week? It's less than 5%. People say, yeah, but I say, well, but what? I'm so busy. And so I say to them, right, right now, how long do you sleep? They go 7 hours. I said, well that means you're awake for 17 hours and there's 34 half hours in 17 hours, 34 half hours in a day. So in a week you're awake for 34. No, 238. Half hours, you're awake, 238. And you're telling me you can't find six of those to take yourself for a brisk walk? I mean, the activity skills of you, you've forgotten how to look after yourself. And then the c word is the coping people now call it, oh, stress management. I've been under a lot of stress, doc, so no, no, no, you're under pressure. If you're under pressure, there are three ways you can react. You can have a positive attitude, a negative attitude. Oh yeah, I can't cope with this or I walk away attitude. I will fix itself. So people are now getting negative stress responses, which stuffs up their own immune system. And this is where you're born with an immune system and it's our responsibility to keep your immunity high. And the last test we all had was this COVID vaccine, the COVID thing that killed thousands and thousands of people around the world, mainly post 70 years of age, because your immune system weakens as you get older. So it's even more important to be active, to cope well and even more important to put the food in that little hole in your face called your mouth. So that your intestinal bacteria are positive, not negative, and that comes back to pure, natural, simple foods. Immunosenescence or ageing of the immune system typically happens. As you just said, people are, you know, 70 plus. However, you can drive that immune system down by eating the wrong foods, not exercising, putting on a lot of weight, having a lot of stress, not pressure. And there are stories of, of people out there in their forties and fifties who have the immune system of a 70 or 80 year old simply because they haven't looked after themselves. I mean, Daniel, do you think it's coincidence that fast food joints, you know, the one with the, the big m outside, they now in Australia, serve 2.7 million meals a day? Really? I do not know that. Wow. Well, I mean, that's because we're a fast society where everyone's in a hurry. I haven't got time to. Haven't got time to cook dinner and blah, blah, blah. And so you drop into, you know, red rooster or your booster or something and you. It's the easy way out. But you are crushing your kids immune system already young in life. Yeah, absolutely. Don't. From an early on, as a professional doctor, you lived a fairly healthy life. A lot of exercise, you cottoned onto. The idea of healthy diet equals healthy life very early. However, in around 2008, you were diagnosed with brain cancer. That must have been quite a shock for you. Well, I had a seizure on an aeroplane. I'd been speaking at a conference in Sydney and I was 10,000 metres in the air or whatever, in the old stuff, it's 30,000ft on a flight and I felt peculiar and I had a seizure on an aeroplane and, you know, the flight attendants jumped on me and the pilot was wondering whether they turn around and go back to Sydney or I said, no, keep going to Melbourne, that's where I live. And so I was met on the tarmac by an ambulance with flashing lights and bells and all that sort of stuff, driving me fast towards the nearest hospital. And, yeah, I was diagnosed with brain cancer and people were saying to me, well, you know, what's the point of being healthy if you're going to get brain cancer? But that middle word of the ace skills activity, cope. The coping thing I had. I mean, you can call this an excuse. I was under tremendous pressure because my accountant had been jailed and I lost a considerable no dollar amount that I'll notify you about. But I lost a considerable amount of money and I wasn't coping very well. And so the build up of that pressure. I wasn't coping at all well and I wasn't sleeping well. And I think my immune system was so low that those little cancers, I mean, every human being gets premitotic cells in their body. Now, again, little cells that aberrantly go wrong and start, you would call it a pre mitotic or a precancerous little lump of cells, and my body wasn't able to cope with it. So one of these lymphoma cells landed in my brain and turned into cancer. So, yeah, it wasn't my fault. I could say it was my accountant's fault for being going to jail and losing me millions, but I. Because I didn't cope very well. My body, you know, taught me a lesson. But when I came out of the anaesthetic from the biopsy and the oncologist was staring at me, and I said, what did you. Did you find a cancer? He said, no, we found five. And in the ward that afternoon, sue and I were listening to him and he said, now, doc, he said, your prognosis, if we don't treat you with anything, is about 15 months. He said, however, there's a new research trial. I've just come. He was a malaysian character and he just been studying in New York, and he said, there's a new immunotherapy drug that they've just released. They're doing trials on it. I think you'd be a good one to go on the trial. He said, by the way, it's $70,000 a dose, but if I get you on the trial, it's $0. I said, where do I sign? So anyway, the combination of the new immunotherapy, immunotherapy is the biggest cancer breakthrough in the last 2030 years. It doesn't kill the cancer cells, it supports your own immune system. So luckily, the oncologist said, I think you're pretty fit, doc. You know, you've been exercising, you've been eating well. Congratulations. So I think this immunotherapy drug will help you and it might even cure you. And so I'm still here 15 years later. And so it's the creation of a new medicine. But the medicine wouldn't have worked unless I had been looking after my own body and soul with my activity, my coping and my eating. I get that. And I'd like to just put in a little promo here for natural medicine. I think we were using the word immunotherapy well before they, the drug companies, and there are certainly many herbs and substances that are specifically used to increase healthy immune cells, natural killer cells and cytotoxic t cells and all sorts of things. And when people who have a foot in both camps use the word immunotherapy, it's good to have a bit of clarity around that as well. But thank you. Yeah. And it's a tragedy today in western countries like Australia, America, UK, that our life. It's interesting when you say to people, how long do you want to live? And they go, I don't know, maybe 87 or 90 or something. I said, well, why not 100? They go, oh, but, you know, I'll probably be frail and, you know, people have to look after me and everything. But healthy to 100. When you go back to the blue zones of the world that I've been to, three out of five. So my favourite place on this planet are the islands of Okinawa. Have you ever heard of. Yeah, yeah. Japan. Yeah. Southern end of Japan. So they've got more healthy centenarians per head of population than anywhere in the world. And you watch them and look at them, and there's no. The elders who live in the northern end of the island, they don't have supermarkets. They just get fresh foods from the fields they grow there. They don't spray pesticides on their food like the western cultures do. Yeah, I. And they don't have motor cars, they have bicycles, they walk everywhere. And they have what they call, in the okinawan dialect, Ikigaia. It's a togetherness, it's a real community thing. So if somebody's in trouble, they gather around and all work out how to help other people. Instead of the western world, where we're all for ourselves competing. There's one other factor there. They call it, I'm sorry, to our japanese listeners, harahachi bu. Well, you're correct. Harahachi bu means eat until you're eight tenths full. That's right. People say to me, how do I know when I'm eight tenths full? You say, will you eat slowly? See, Daniel, there's a 20 minutes delay from your stomach getting fuller and your brain knowing it. So if you like this and eating your fast food fast, you don't know when your 810 is full. Overload our system, which puts pressure on our insulin producing pancreas. And then that's one of the reasons we get type two diabetes, because we stuff ourselves full of empty calories and the insulin production can't keep up. One of the most important lessons I learned was eat. And then just wait ten or 15 or 20 minutes before you actually think about whether you're still hungry. And the other great thing that nobody's got time to do is what I call after meals. The research is absolutely not only prominent, but it's proven that after each of your three meals, if you walk for ten minutes, people say, oh, I got to get to work, mate. You know, like, there's a tv show and I got to watch. I haven't got time to walk for ten minutes, but that will regulate your blood sugar. Walk for ten minutes. W a m. Walk out for meals. I mean, there used to be a contrary opinion to that. People used to say you needed to have all your digestive powers after eating, and so you want. You don't want to distract your blood flow away from your digestive organs to your muscles, and you should wait 20 minutes after eating. Do you still subscribe to that? No, I don't, because it's really interesting. Muscles are working. Tissue and fat. Obesity, visceral fat around the middle here is not working tissue. And the more fat you put on, see, there's more capillaries, tiny blood vessels in muscles. So that's soaking up the calories laying down as energy, but sorry, it's being burnt as energy. Whereas if you're just stationary for the next couple of hours, a lot of those overeaten calories end up in visceral fat, in fat stores, which is not only weighing you down, but making you more prone to illness. When it got through the brain cancer, you realised that not coping and potential stress was potentially part of the causative factor behind that. How did you come out of the treatment? What was your next direction? How did you decide your path going on from there? Well, incidentally, I was. Well, you could call it sacked by the registration body in Australia, because they said I was not in a space where I could treat people, prescribe medicines for people, because, you know, having had brain cancer, your brain's not 100% working. And I was sort of shocked because it means I had zero income. But the other way of looking at it is there's opportunity and adversity and one door closed, another opens. But then I started to travel more to the blue zones and I started to bring back messages about the power of nutritional, let's call it food as medicine. Before pharmaceutical drugs were invented, the Chinese, the Japanese, all the older civilizations, all they had was herbs and spices and those sort of things to treat people. So, you know, I changed direction. I didn't jump the fence, because integrated medicine, if you take a bunch of herbs, they're not going to cure a burst appendix. You need a. Because you get infection and you die, you need a surgeon to cut it out. Our consumption of pills, a pill for every ill, is way over the top. Now, most people over the age of 65 are on at least two and probably more medications in terms of pharmaceutical drugs. But we've forgotten how to eat right. So my teachings, you know, you and I are on the same page now because it's a way of getting up in the morning and people say, you know, they tell me that breakfast is the best meal of the day. And I said, well, not necessarily, but it's the important meal. See, break fast used to be two words. Break your twelve hour fast or whatever. Your 14 hours fast. I mean, you know, Michael Mosley said you got to fast for 15 hours or 16 hours or something. Well, I mean, if you finish your dinner at 7730 and then wake up and have your breakfast at 730 or eight or something, you're still fasting for twelve or 13 hours. Yeah, it's, it's break fast, but you need whole foods. You need whole grains. You see, the labelling laws in Australia on packaged foods are pathetic. Oh, yeah. You know, you have low fat. That means it's got 200% more sugar. We need someone with some health sense in Canberra. See the nutritional bar? You get input from food services manufacturer, food manufacturers, and say they've got to sell more product by putting cartoons and stuff and giving you free, whatever and putting a label on the thing that sounds like it's healthy. Yeah, we'll get more into that in a second, but I'm just interested in pursuing you for a moment. John. So after you came through your cancer, what do you think fundamentally changed about you as a person and you as a doctor? Medical doctors are a necessity in life, but there's pressure from the patients now. I mean, when I started in general practise in a semi rural area, we were booking four patients an hour and then it became known around the areas they're kilometres now that, you know, these doctors would actually talk to you and they had time because, you know, you had 15 minutes with the doctor, but then we were getting so busy we had to book six patients an hour. And then you get less and less time to communicate and the patient is expecting your prescriptions and then you get back to how much rebates you get and how much it costs to go to the doctor. A lot of people today aren't going to the doctor because it costs too much money. So you get back to who is responsible for what we do, what we eat, how many times we walk around the block? Is it government responsibility? Is it you? Is it the food manufacturers? Is it the Reeboks, the nikes of the world? They say, you know, these shoes are absolutely brilliant and they're only $322 each. We live in a commercial world, Daniel, and in terms of selling food, you know, I mean, if I had my way in the woollies and Coles and Igas and Aldis and stuff, I would not have checkout area. There is a wall of what I call crackhead. Now, crap is commercially refined and processed crap. And little Johnny say, oh, mum, I just want one of those. I shut up. Is it. Do you know that all kids coming home from school, whether it's in a bus or walking or in a car or tram or anything, they're plundered with an average of 27 fast food ads a day? Extraordinary. Why do we allow. Why does the government allow fast food ads on tv before 830 until. Okay, well, come back to that. I promise we will. But after your diagnosis, it seems from what I've read about you, you came out from the process of having your cancer treated with a real fight in you about changing people's perception of diet and food, and you seem to almost make it a personal mission from what I've read about you. Do you think that's a fair comment? It's a fair comment, but you've got to be. You've got to justify your own means. If you cross a line like, I have challenged our health minister, Senator Mark Butler, to a discussion, not an argument about what the biggest killer cancer is in Australia today, it's lung cancer. Now, what causes 87% of lung cancer? Cigarettes. Correct. Now, why does the ACCC have consumer safety law number one? The government ACCC safety law number one, all products you supply must be safe. So why does the Commonwealth government break its own rule allowing us to spend $40 million a day buying tobacco that kills 70 people a day? Oh, there's good taxes on that, mate. 13 billion last year. 13 billion. Is that all right? I mean, if. I mean, the challenge hasn't been accepted because Mark Butler wouldn't have one leg to stand on. He'd have no legs. He'd be kneeling because. And it's interesting with the fast food stuff and, you know, the diabetes. I mean, we're now the fourth worst at getting diabetes in the world, 300 new diabetics a day. So in your john, if you don't mind me saying, but it's on public record, you're 79 years old, I think. I'm not counting, but if the queen was still alive I would get a telegram in 21. Well in your time, because you've been the industry in Australia for so long, what have you seen mainly changed? Well, having eleven grandchildren, it's a competition between child and parent as to what age they're allowed to have a cell phone or a mobile phone. And that's one of the disasters of modern life because, you know, in my example, I mean when I was a little kid I'd come home from school and have a snack or something and mum would say now be home by dark. So I'd be out in the gutter playing mud pies and building up my immune system and playing cricket and footy and stuff and mucking around and I say getting dirty, building an immune system. But now the kids, they're playing computer games on their phones and all that sort of stuff. So the inactivity starts early, earlier than we did. You know, as you say, I'm, I'm in my 80th year and we used to spend most of our time outside. The biggest change. So the social media thing, now the government's saying, you know, they're going to ban social media before. I mean, once again you're competing with a Microsoft, you're competing with, you're competing with all these, you know, apples and Sonny's and all this sort of stuff. Who was selling mobile phones to kids? Oh well, you know, and then the mum and dad say, well it's a safety thing, at least we know where you are and all that sort of stuff. So, you know, social, probably the biggest change, one of the other things that hasn't changed, well, it's changing a little bit because when my grandkids go to a party, I said, what did you get to eat? I said oh, you know, hundreds and thousands and chocolate crackles and all that sort of stuff. But you know, our kids, you know, they're trying to have a little stacks of fruit on, all that sort of stuff and just, you know, just try and change. And we count veggies. I mean when I was in hospital, sue used to bring in my dinner. Yeah, at least ten veggies. And the nurse would say, your husband won't eat. Yeah, he eats my dinner. I know. Over the last while, you've developed an interest in diabetes management in Australia and you've raised concerns around the number of people dying from diabetes related conditions and rightly so. I mean you sent me a little message recently which talked about the number of associated deaths, which is far, far exceeding the death toll from murders. Road deaths. Yeah. Every week we have four murders in Australia. We have a road toll of 26 a week in Australia. Breast cancer now kills 63 women a week in Australia. That's a lot lower than it was, because if you get breast cancer in stage one now, see, there's prevention. Now you can go and have a free mammogram, but where can you go and have a free finger prick? Blood tests see diabetes and its complications, which is amputations, blindness, heart attacks and all that sort of stuff that kills 400 people a week. People say, you think, why have we got so many new diabetes? I'm saying because it's the way we live. So my question really is, we know this and many people know this, that too much sugar is not good for you. But there's two questions I have which I'm hoping you can help. One is, how do we as individuals fight against these massive international companies, these massive lobby groups that are continually putting pressure on governments to not distract people from eating more sugar and stopping legislation that may adjust people's diets? How do we do it, John? Well, let's first look at the biggest intake of added sugar in Australia is soft drinks. Right. There are now 108 countries around the world that have a sugar tax which works. So the biggest star has been in Mexico, because it's so close to America. But once you cross the border into Mexico, now, the soft drink manufacturers are blessed if they have less than, you know, x percent sugar, because they don't have to pay any tax. And. And the price, the price is higher. It's a bit like, you know, when the oil price goes up and they say, oh, it's because of Ukraine or because of this or because of that, but because people need fuel for their car, they pay the extra price. And the government, you know, 40% of the petrol is taxed from the government. So the sugar tax works. As I say, Australia does not have a sugar tax because of the forces of the multinational companies. And 108 countries do. I mean, hello. So. And then, you know, the lollies, the sweetest thing, sucrose. See, when you talk about a low carb diet, carbohydrates come. The greek word for sugar is saccharide. So a monosaccharide has got one molecule of sugar, and there's only three monosaccharides. There's glucose, there's galactose, and there's fructose. So if you eat a piece of fruit, it's fructose. It's rapidly absorbed into your body. And so if you eat 22 pieces of fruit a day, you'll have an overload of simple sugars. And unless you walk around the block every time you have a pear or something, you're going to put on weight. But if you sit at your computer all day and just eat vegetables, they're called complex carbohydrates, or oligosaccharides, where all the sugar molecules are stuck together and they're absorbed very slowly. And the biggest difference is fibre. Now, if we're in America, we call fibre, and here it's f I b r e, because the Americans can't spell or we can't. But foods with fibre, vegetables have fibre. Whole grains. The only whole grain supermarket is oats, wheat, mixed fibre. It's a 90% old grain, but every other cereal has got almost zero fibre. It once again gets back to the labelling and fibrous foods. And when we talk about food as medicine, I've been working with senior biochemists now and microbiologists for five years with a food. I don't know whether you want me to tell you what it is. Go ahead. It's called nutricain. Nutri kane. Now, the majority of that nutrikaine, when sugar marketed. We grow a lot of sugar in Australia, and when the sugar is extracted and put in packets, that's sugar, but the fibrous residue, the stalk of the sugarcane, is multifibres and lots of nutrients in it. And then we've taken the food scraps from different orchards, all vegetables and fruits, and mix these together so this nutricain can lower your blood sugar, decrease glycemic index and increase the bacteria in your system, which have anti inflammatory effects. So chronic inflammation with it, with a glass of this stuff instead of your orange juice every morning, it makes a huge difference. Nutricain. I understand what you're saying on that point because when my kids were little and going to school, I remember other kids turning up with little boxes of fruit juice. You know, it takes at least five apples to make a little box of apple juice, and so you're getting the sugar from five apples. And as you explained, it's a single molecule sugar, highly absorbed. But also they've stripped all of the fibre out, so you have no option for reabsorption. To me, those juices are a disaster. Well, you're right, because all those smoothies and juices and stuff, you just said it. I mean, to get a decent glass of orange juice, you've got to squeeze eight oranges and. What are you doing? The fibre. Throw it in the trash. Yeah, exactly. And with a lot of fruits and vegetables, the majority of fibre and nutrients is just under the skin. So if you peel the skin off and throw it away, you're throwing away half the goodness. How do we get governments to put taxes on these sugars? Well, I guess it's lobby. I mean, I'm meeting Tamara with. I won't share her name, but she's the opposition spokesman for health in the state of Victoria, because she is. Her history prior to becoming a politician was as a diabetes educator. She's a nurse. And he got on to me through that LinkedIn thing and said, can we, can we have a chat? So I'm chatting. I'm actually getting into the political side of things now and let's hope we can see some. I mean, I've got a pharmacy group now talking with me about how, I mean, they make a lot of money from prescription drugs and, you know, so they should, because that's getting people unsicked, but to prevent them getting sick, the pharmacy group I'm chatting with now said, doc, let's look at the stuff that prevents people getting sick. So there is an attitude change and it's happening especially with young mums, because a young mum will do anything to make or keep their baby healthy. The young kids, because the young kids are subjected to all these advertising tricks and the sugars and they, you know, if our grandkids don't have a piece of the five veggies on their plate, I say, what's wrong with the Brussels sprouts? So I don't like them. I said, what do you mean? Your body loves them. It's those little, little dots on your tongue called your taste buds, whoever it is that created you, the good lord, they put the brain box, the big box on top of your tongue. I said, you just have to eat a little bit of the Brussels sprout, a little bit of broccoli, because that's going to make you healthy. Oh, is that right, pa? Yeah, yeah. Well, look, unfortunately for the listeners to this podcast, they can't see all your hand actions and movements there, John, but it was very entertaining. Thank you. No worries. Other aspect is people in the west particularly are so addicted to sugar. It's almost like a drug and they seek the taste of it. And you can go to some countries, you know, you can go to the Philippines or somewhere where sugar is just everything. It's just everywhere. How do we, as a health group of health professionals, stop people taking sugar. How do we get them not addicted to sugar? Do you have any tips? Well, see that? I'm looking at a book called Peter Pumpkin and Healthy Friends by doctor John Tigell. Peter Pumpkin working with the Murdoch Children's Research Institute worldwide. We all believe that children, it's obvious that children's where life starts. And the biggest influence on these children are the role models. That's called parents or carers, right? Yep. And teachers. So I've now been invited recently to three schools to give little talks about Peter Pumpkin and his healthy friends because they live next door to a mountain called Mel Mountain and nobody's ever climbed Mel Mountain. Come back alive. So pumpkin dreams. See, Peter Pumpkin's rather large and he gets a little bit of rubbishing at school. And because his parents said, Peter Pumpkin, you got to eat everything on your plate because you've got to win prizes at the show. And the biggest pumpkins always win the prizes. But then when he sort of gets to school and everything, you know, and his friends sort of drop off. But Peter Pumpkin dreams that he's going to, quote, bad mountain, he's going to become a hero. But as he climbs the mountain in his dreams, he meets people called, you know, Doug, drug and nicotine and, and so, you know, it'll turn into a wiggles type of thing. And so kids will start to learn and associate themselves with Peter Pumpkin and his happy friends and healthy friends. John, that is a great book. Where is it available out of interest? It's not. It won't be released until the end of the year. Oh, okay. Well, let me know. I'd love to promote it. Thank you. I love you. Daniel. Daniel, last question. How did you get involved in the natural medicine? Oh, gee. I was a young backpacker in hitchhike my way around Europe nearly 40 years ago, and I actually got a very severe parasite in Egypt and ended up going. I went to some doctors in the UK, gastroenterologist who didn't really help me, and a friend of mine was into homoeopathy at that time and I never heard of a homoeopath before. And then I ended up going to a homoeopath. That really made a very big difference. And so I thought, oh, well, I eventually thought I'd be interested in studying it and got, it's been wonderful, a wonderful, wonderful career. I'm so grateful that I've been exposed to so many amazing people, so many amazing concepts around health and fighting the good fight, man. Well done to you. Need more. And I think, you know, it's persistence. It's persistence if you, you know, lose 99 games a footy in a row if you persist. Persistent, get. It's really interesting when you look at Aussie football and being a Hawthorne supporter, and I know Alistair ClarKson pretty well, and he got to a stage where Hawthorne wonde four premierships in eight years or something. And Alistair Clarkson's motto was, if one soldier goes down injury, that you replace them with another soldier. But he said, if over a period of time, it's not working, you got to get rid of the board, the coach, the players, get a new plan. So we're now, you and I are developing a new plan for a safer, healthier world. And it starts with what you put in there and what you do with your 600 muscles and 180 joints and how you can get on top of this. Pressure, pressure, pressure. Hey, let's have a crack at this. Let's do it a different way. John, that is a wonderful message to finish on. Can people get access to your books somehow or how do they get in touch? Yeah, my website is drjonticekell.com, so dash o dash h, dash n, dash c k ell.com. Some stuff there and there's some wonderful resources on there. Thanks, John, and I really, really appreciate your time. This more than anything else I've done today, because we're talking real healthy, happy stuff. Yeah. Good on you, mate. Well, take care and we'll speak again, I hope. Look forward to it