Dr. Oz's Webcast Transcript

Dr. Oz: Soy products are a popular topic. They became of interest to physicians because we knew that people who came from societies where there was a lot of soy seemed to have less cancers, in particular, for example, Japanese women just didn't have a lot of breast cancer. And we thought the soy products were protective because they do, in fact, have phytoestrogens in them. One of the problems, though, is when you take a ton of soy and you replace all your beverages with soy milk and you start getting them in concentrated packets like in tofu, then we start to get a bit more concerned there might be too much phytoestrogen for you, and so we actually don't know the answer to your question in a definitive way. I still think soy products are of great value. I don't dissuade the people in my family from eating them. I do think if you're drinking a lot of soy milk, you might want to diversify a little bit so you're not getting too many phytoestrogens in your diet and just think about how soy used to be eaten historically. They would be eaten in edamame and, you know, bean form and more natural forms. It's harder to concentrate too much of this if you eat those natural forms.

Oprah: Okay, thank you.

Karen: Super. Thank you.

Oprah: All righty. All right. Our next phone call. Who's our next phone call? You tell me the phone lines are flooded. In the meantime, can you tell Andre to get me some rooibos tea upstairs because—okay because—

Dr. Oz: Rooibos tea. Great.

Oprah: I love rooibos tea because it's non—it's decaffeinated and it's—

Dr. Oz: Let me tell you about something that I have been trying to get and talk about on the show for a while but it might be of interest. Probiotics. Do you know much about them?

Oprah: No, not a thing.

Dr. Oz: All right. Folks who have irritable bowel who are tuning in today. People who have chronic fatigue syndromes. People who have a lot of these inflammatory conditions like vaginosis and the like, one of the things that we think might be happening in you, if your immune system is generally depleted, is that the bacteria in your intestinal system aren't growing normally. Now when we're born and we go through the vagina of our mothers or we breast feed, we actually pick up bacteria from there and that colonizes our intestines. And those good bacteria grow in there and eventually there are about 10 times more bacteria living in our gut than cells in our body and that allows us to absorb all of these great nutrients that we need.

Oprah: Isn't the body something? Aren't you still fascinated daily?

Dr. Oz: The reason I went into medicine, Oprah, is because I knew I'd never learn it all.

Oprah: Really.

Dr. Oz: Honest. That's the number one reason I went into it.

Oprah: Did you do surgery today?

Dr. Oz: Yesterday—actually till this morning.

Oprah: You did—

Dr. Oz: Till very early this morning.

Oprah: You did surgery.

Dr. Oz: Yes.

Oprah: Oh, wow. Is it still—every time you open up somebody's chest cavity and there you are in the heart, is it still magical for you?

Dr. Oz: Absolutely. It is the biggest chi source you can imagine. It gives you energy beyond belief. First of all, the fact that people would trust you to help them is very rewarding. But then it's magical. I mean this heart's twisting in there and turning in there, and you have to make peace with it. You can't beat the heart. You've got to sort of coax it to work with you.

Oprah: So how many surgeries do you do a week?

Dr. Oz: Five, six.

Oprah: Really.

Dr. Oz: When I was doing—before I met you I used to do closer to 10 a week. But it's a lot of fun.

Oprah: What's the longest you were ever in surgery?

Dr. Oz: Oh, 24 hours.

Oprah: Twenty-four hours.

Dr. Oz: Yeah.

Oprah: And how do you do that?

Dr. Oz: You know obviously you don't—

Oprah: Do you get to take a nap somewhere and bring somebody else in?

Dr. Oz: A lot of this is the surgical ethos. You would never—it would be a sign of weakness to go sleep. You would absolutely focus.

Oprah: Really.

Dr. Oz: The particular case I'm thinking of is one that I—is a story that always comes back to me because this gentleman, I met him in the holding area before—you know, in the ICU? I told him he was inoperable.

Oprah: Really.

Dr. Oz: And I went to tell him this bad news and he looked at me and he says, "Doc, I was in Vietnam. I've seen death. I'm not dying tomorrow. You're operating on me."

Oprah: Really. Why did you say he was inoperable?

Dr. Oz: Because he really was. I mean he had lots of scar tissue from prior surgery, his heart was completely blown out. It was so dam and it was flooding his lungs. The lungs were like a sponge. They're like dry little airy things but they get boggy and they don't let air go through them and you suffocate to death. So he convinced me. And so I took him to the operating room and I did the operation. I put a mechanical heart in him, and I could not get him out of the room. And I spent 24 hours in that guy's chest.

Oprah: Wow.