146: Beyond Quick Fixes: Nurturing Long-Term Well-Being with Dr. Mary Pardee

Hello again, everyone, and welcome to today's show. If you're one of the 130 million people that are dealing with Sirs Lyme disease, autoimmune disease, or other conditions that are impacted by mold on a daily basis, and you need to learn how to eliminate that exposure, then you're in the right place. My name is Brian Carr, and you're listening to Mold Finders Radio.

Hey, everyone, what's going on today is going to be cool because I'm not just going to berate you with mold stuff all day. I actually think that. That what we're going to talk about is really cool because it's. It's more big picture about, like, how we live and the quality of our lives and how we approach that and how we kind of, like, set ourselves up for success, assess for that down the road. And I have Dr. Mary Pardee on. She's a naturopathic medical doctor. She's the founder of Modern Med, which is a total wellness company in Sherman Oaks. And just the idea of something called a total wellness company as, as opposed to something that's like, certain, you know, focus on a certain thing is like a cool concept, and I think it's like a good kind of foundation for where we're going to go today. So first off, welcome. How are you?

Good. Thank you for having me, Brian. Appreciate it.

Yeah, of course. So tell me, what is a total wellness company?

Transparently, I actually haven't used that term too often, but I love how naturally it came out of my mouth before we started filming.

I use it in conversation sometimes, but you can't even find it on our website. How I view total wellness, though, is when somebody comes into my office, I'm not just checking their labs. I'm not just looking at nutrition. We're really doing a very holistic overview of somebody's life, from talking about any past history of trauma to their relationships to their community, to their nutrition exercise. Our forms take people, like, at least an hour or two to fill out. And so we really want to look at everything when we look at wellness.

Yeah. And so, like, what's your approach, I guess, to working with someone? Right. So there's the. That's a very broad scope. Right. So is there, like a certain type of person that. That kind of gravitates to you guys more than maybe somebody else? Like, like, who are the people that are. That are going through this path with you guys?

Yeah. So me personally, I have two buckets of different patients that I see one of them, which we'll talk about today are these preventative wellness clients or patients. And these are healthy people that want to stay healthy or get healthier. And then I have another group of people where I specialize in integrative treatments for gastrointestinal conditions, which we probably won't get into today. But that's really the two subsets that I focus on. Both from my past history myself, I grew up with GI issues, and that's really where I decided to specialize in gi. And I also came from an exercise science performance world after college, working in research for the government for a little bit and was just fascinated with how can we perform better, live healthier, longer, higher quality life lives. And that's kind of where I am today.

That's really cool. It's a cool mix of the two things we've talked about on this show. We talked about GI all the time because obviously, like, environmental impact on your gut and all that stuff is like a huge connection there. Almost feel like I'm beaten with a dead horse with multiple people. So.

We could maybe touch on it, like, briefly, but. But the idea of, like, preventative wellness and like, let me ask you a question on that, because, say you have somebody who's coming in with GI stuff that's going on, right? Let's say there's an environmental component to it. Let's say, like, that's the person. The person listening to this most likely is who that is. And then we lay on top of that, this idea of preventative wellness. At what phase does the preventative part start coming in as opposed to, like, the root cause treatment part? Is it something that happens in conjunction with each other? Is it like. Like, what is your thoughts on that?

Yeah, so usually when somebody comes to see me and they have a GI symptoms, so they're coming in, they've got constipation or bloating or chronic diarrhea, or they've been diagnosed with irritable bowel syndrome and they want better management. Then the first thing that we're doing is we're focusing on the symptom that's bothering them the most because we really want to improve their quality of life as quickly as we can. And so with those people, we'll go in, we'll really deep dive into their GI health first. And once symptom management is reached a point where they're feeling pretty good, then we can start to integrate the preventative wellness things. And the reason behind that is you don't want to do too much at once. First of all, if I gave you every single thing to do from longevity, preventative wellness and fix your ibs that hasn't been managed that well, then you're never going to come back to see me because you're going to get a list so long it's overwhelming. It's not bite sized. So I'm constantly working. One of my goals as a practitioner is to give people bite size things that are doable in an amount of time where then they can come back and we can bite off the next piece. Because this really is a, you know, pun intended, like a longevity plan. Like we're not looking to fix everything in one session. We want to have multiple conversations because a lot of it is education about like what are the things that actually help you live longer. And I think there's a lot of misconceptions when it comes to that.

Yeah. And I think, you know, when people are, they have whatever their issue is, right. And they're, they're like so focused on that thing and then like it almost becomes where the goal is just to stop that. Like, let's just get this handled. But there's a longer goal. Right. And that's kind of where you're into like, that's like almost like phase one to say, okay, let's feel like better in the immediate. But part of it is like what caused that to happen in the first place? Like what allowed that to happen? I feel like, and you could tell me if I'm just ranting, but I feel like a lot of these types of things happen because the longevity piece that you're talking about, we're not really doing things in the way that is, that is increasing our resiliency and which would be extending our longevity and how that works. And then it makes us more susceptible to things, to these short term things that happen.

Yeah, absolutely. I totally agree. I think that we need to look at the way that we're living.

And really examine if it's for a health promoting life or if we're really battling against something that is going to be more disease causing. I totally agree with what you're saying. And that's part of it is start to evaluate how did you get here. If it took this amount of time to develop prediabetes or diabetes, then it's going to take a little time to get out of it. But if we can really instill those foundations of health back in place and we can get a lot of improvement in symptoms and in lab work and all the things from a preventative lens.

Yeah. And I feel like, once you get past that and kind of starting getting, you know, getting into the preventative stuff, which, I mean, do you, do you view preventative and longevity as the same thing? Is that kind of the same thing for you?

I absolutely do, yeah. And I think we want to make the distinction where we're not just preventing, we're also promoting health. And so, you know, there's this concept of sick care versus well care or health care, and we don't want to just treat disease and prevent disease. We also want to promote health. And so those things are a little bit different because.

They'Re doing the same thing, but the level at which you need to address them is different. So, you know, somebody that just wants to prevent diabetes is going to need to do less than somebody who wants to be able to.

Go for a long hike at an incline when they're 85 years old. Right. Like, those are two different standards. And getting clear with people about, you know, what do you envision for yourself? I think can be, can be really helpful. And really we're coming in at the place of wellness promotion and making sure that people can still be functional and enjoy all the things that they like to do right now as they're aging.

It's such an important point, the looking beyond getting over this initial hump thing and like, what do you want to be able to do later? I don't do that incredibly well. You know, I feel like a lot of people don't. Like, you're so focused on the, on the initial and it's like, it's so funny because from a long term perspective, you could do things in a, like, less amount of effort. You know, it doesn't take us at all. Like compounds. There's things you can do. You generate habits. It goes over. So like, the amount of work it takes to do some of these long term things is way less than the amount of work it takes to fix something in the immediate short term.

Our minds just don't really see long term in the same priorities that they're short term. And it makes it so difficult to get someone to wrap around that. But I've been trying to reframe my head around that lately too. And when I try to do all the things, and I think what you said earlier is, okay, now I have this list of all these things, and then I end up not doing any of these things. It's like, all right, how do I prioritize? Like, today I fasted for 17 hours because I literally just ate before we got on.

Was like, Gorge, which was probably not good either. But I, you know, because like, oh, at 17 hours, autophagy starts. We start killing, you know, killing off like pre cancer cells and like all, you know, all the things that are not serving us inside of our bodies. Like, oh, this is good. This will help me like long term. Let me do this. Right. And I literally just jumped into it. I've done it for two days. I heard about it three days ago. I was like, bam, I'm in it. Right. And it's like, how sustainable is that when you have other things that you do.

Better? Question is, what was your first meal post fast today?

It was basically what my breakfast would have been, but later. So it was like eggs and avocado and like, like, like toast and peanut butter or something.

So savory. Nice.

Yeah. And then my next meal is probably right when we get off and I have no idea what that's going to be. Whatever happens to be fridge, probably leftovers are.

Yeah. Anyway, so, so it's going to go on. But so this idea, and you mentioned it earlier, you said health span versus lifespan. And I think this kind of like summarizes this concept of what we're talking about. Can you, when you, when you hear that phrase, you say that phrase like, like, what do you mean? So people can kind of wrap their head around that.

Yeah. So health span is looking at, you know, if you have a curve of your life. So let's go over lifespan first.

How you would view that is you have a really straight line up until the age of 70 when things start to drop off. And that's really looking at just your lifespan is how long are you going to live? Do we want to live until we're 80, 90, what that looks like. But now since medicine has advanced so much, we're able to extend people's lives with all of these technologies that we have. They have dialysis for end stage kidney disease. They have things to extend the life of cancer patients. They have all of these things. But it doesn't mean that the quality of life is also improving. That's really the biggest factor is that when we look at health span, we're factoring in quality of life. That's what I was referring to before with the curve. The quality of life typically really drastically starts to decline around the age of 75 ish for most people. If you just take it on average being much lower at 90 compared to when you were at 65. The ideal, when we're talking preventative medicine and longevity isn't just to make you live till you're 90, but you're miserable. We want you to live long and maintain that quality of life. And this is where the term squaring off your health span curve comes in, where we want your quality of life to remain really, really high until you die. That would be a square. Instead of having this decline happen quite drastically around the age of 75. In order to do that, we really have to prioritize the things that we know can most likely lead to your death and also lead to reductions in quality of life. Things like metabolic disease, heart disease, kidney failure, all of these things can contribute to a decline in quality quality of life. As we start to age, death is inevitable. So I'm not in the camp of we're going to live to 200. I think that we're supposed to die and. But we really want to make sure that we can still do the things we want to do later in life.

You know when you were saying that, like the visual I had in my head, I think about stuff very like numbers and math. That's kind of how I think about stuff. And you're like, okay, so we're going to extend how long we live. So say we were going to live till 9 or until 80. So then only the last 5 years of our life would kind of suck after 75. But now I'm going to extend it to 90. It's not last 15 years of my life are going to suck if I don't fix what's going on. So you kind of have. You actually have things in motion in medicine that's outside of, you know, integrative and functional stuff that's just naturally going to help keep us alive longer. And all that that's going to do for us is make the back end of our lives suck a lot longer. Unless we're doing these other things to do what you're saying, squaring off that curve. I mean, it's just like such a. It's such a visual. The way that, that I see in my head, the way that you said it, it's like, how do we not do this? You know?

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And it becomes to be like an ethical question, like, should we be keeping ourselves alive that long? Do we want to be? And at some point, we lose kind of the autonomy of that too, in certain situations.

Yeah. I mean, it's like going like down the road a little more. I mean, you know, when you get to that age, like I've had grandparents and, you know, different things, and you kind of see how it is. And you know, they'll. Some of them have even told me, like, I just like, wish this was over, you know, and. And they don't have the ability to make that happen. And you don't have the ability to change anything at that point because it's too late. It's a very sad thing. And you know, just like, you, like, prep for retirement and you prep for all of these things, like, from a financial perspective and from like, you know, I'm planning to buy this house, whatever it is. Like, we really got to start prepping for that last 15 years in there, because 15 years is a long time to be laying in bed and bored and not doing anything and getting depressed and like, all of that stuff. So sorry, it's so downer right now. Just to put some context around all this and why I'm really excited to have this talk. Let's flip it around. We don't want to be our last 15 years of our lives miserable in bed with our kids, taking care of us and not moving around. Let's talk about some of the things that you work on with your patients, with your clients. Some of the things that are the biggest impact and maybe even some of the things are less of the lower amount of work that we have to do that have a big impact over a long term. Like, let's get into some of that stuff.

Yeah, absolutely. So people come to see me. They. They come into the office, and the first thing we're going to do is we're going to review their history. So something that's really important is for us to get familiar with their family history. You know, what was mom, dad's history like? Are they dead? Are they alive? What did they die of? If so, same with grandparents. And to just see, is there a significant family history of dementia or heart disease or diabetes? Is there going to be one that we should really focus on? Because that's most likely the one is going to be an issue for you. So your family history can tell you a lot about what you should be focusing the majority of your time on in terms of all of these things that we can do to help prevent things. So that's really important. Then we're also going to go around what are you currently doing yourself for your nutrition, your exercise, what does your community look like? What does your mental health look like, Any history of trauma that's currently affecting you? And then we'll go through any review of systems of anything hurting right now. Little minor things that we want to look into as well. Well, so we do a really comprehensive assessment of, you know, where is somebody at today when they're coming into my office? And based on that assessment, we're going to order lab work after that first visit. And the lab work will change depending on what they tell me about family history and what they've told me about their past medical history. If they're like, yeah, I have high cholesterol, then I'm going to be really pushing them to do an advanced cardiac panel and maybe even a coronary artery calcium score to look at things from a much deeper perspective. So we're not going to do just like baseline tests with longevity patients in general. I'm advocating for a pretty comprehensive set of lab work to get much more information than you would get from, say, your Kaiser primary care physician on your yearly annual exam. We're going to look at an advanced cardiac panel, which would include your standard lipid panel. But also we want to look at things like APOB as well as lp. We want to look at inflammatory markers like crp, full metabolic panels, looking at your average blood sugar over the last three months, which we use HbA1c for that fasting insulin, which not many doctors will run, but we definitely want to look at that sometimes. We'll also do an oral glucose tolerance test if we want to start to nerd out on your metabolism or you're drinking a solution of sugar and getting your blood drawn a few times after to see how you respond to that sugar. We also will use like, things like continuous glucose monitors like Dexcom in some people, where we want to see how they're responding to sugars and how their insulin is responding after drinking a solution as well. For hormones, we're going to test testosterone on pretty much everybody, but we also may be looking at female sex hormones, depending if there are symptoms or if they're in their perimenopausal or menopausal years to see if we're going to be doing any hormone replacement therapy. So it's very dependent on where the person is in their stage of life. If they're having menstrual issues, then we'd be looking at that thing, then a full thyroid. So typically, if you're having any complaints of fatigue, your primary care will order just a tsh. But we're going to go a step further and look at your free thyroid hormones, maybe reverse T3, as well as the antibodies that can be associated with Hashimoto's. We look at genetics for some people as well. So APOE is on the list of the things that I discuss with people of. Do you want to know your APOE status? That's going to be the genetic marker that increases the risk for Alzheimer's disease if you have that ApoE4 allele, specifically from either mom or dad or both. Because there's actionable. So all of these things we're running, there's actionables to them. We're not going to just run something and say, like, hey, you have this. You're screwed. Like, there's no point in my mind of doing anything like that. These are all things that we're going to say, okay, your fasting insulin is high. It looks like you have some insulin resistance. And here's how we need to fix that. We'll also run an omega 3 index, which is a advanced test. Quest offers one of them. We prefer the one from Omega Quant to look at the Omega 3s in the cell membrane of your cells because it has a influence on the risk for acute coronary syndromes. So things like heart attack and stroke. And then we'll also look at micronutrients. We're going to look at vitamin D. We'll look at B12, folate, magnesium. As I'm rambling here, you can tell there's so many more tests. If you walked into Kaiser, depending on your age, they would run a complete blood count, a cmp, maybe a tsh, maybe a lipid panel, depending how old you are. But it's really limited. So we do a much more extensive deep dive into your lab work to get an overview. Then there's other tests that aren't blood based that we do with our patients as well. A big one being dexa, which we can talk about, but that's looking at body composition versus your bmi. And so your doctor will calculate. Yeah, go ahead.

Oh, no. I was gonna say. I, I'd actually, let's pause there because I feel like that's a whole.

That was a lot.

I need to take a second conversation. I, by the way, I went in to get like my annual. At some point, which frankly, I just feel like such a waste of time going to, like, your general to do that. And I went in there, I was. And I asked, I was like, I want micronutrient testing. Because at the time I was like, doing a parasite thing. And I was like, so am I even getting my nutrients? Are they getting sucked up by, like, what's going on? And they just looked at me and said, no. It's like, no. Like, how do you know? Like, I was like, okay. And then I, I just like sat through the rest of the thing and then I just left and never went to the lab to run what they gave me because like why would I run just this like thing that isn't going to actually tell me anything. It was very, very eye opening, even though I kind of knew it was always happening. But like to go in and see it just like, what's the point anyways? So you talked through, I think like four major sections. There was, it was cardio, it was metabolic.

Yeah, cardio, metabolic, hormone, sex hormones are going to be like depending on what stage of life somebody's in. Maybe, maybe not. Thyroid panel, we do for pretty much everybody. Inflammatory markers, crp, homocysteine, I'd put under that category as well. Genetic mostly. Apoe, we're looking at omega 3 index and then your micronutrients, vitamin D and the B vitamins.

Got it. So maybe like pick out what do you think is the most common thing that you see when you run these and then maybe we could like talk through like what that looks like, what or what a response on your end looks like from that maybe what you think is contributing to whatever that problem is. We pick out a couple from these and we can like talk through them.

Sure, yeah. The most common that we see is definitely correlated to the most common cause of death too. So the number one cause of death is cardiovascular disease. And that we. That's what we see most common, common for the general population. So it's very, very common to see high LDL C levels as well as high APOB levels lp less common. But you definitely see it in practice. And so that's something that if we look at, you know, 100 people, a good chunk of them are going to have something that we're going to want to work on in that category. So that's where we're doing a lot of the work. It's also just the most common cause of death. So you know, if we can cross that one off the list or lower the risk for it, we can never cross it off of. But if we can really try to lower that risk the most, then we're increasing both health span and lifespan at that point because it is so common to have issues.

What are some of the recommendations that come off of seeing that? How do you work through that?

Yeah, and that's where we also will separate from your traditional Kaiser doc. I have nothing against Kaiser, first of all.

Okay. I always bash local inspector.

You could do Kaiser. It's fine.

Sorry, I'm Sorry, Kaiser. No, I'm just being like your annual kind of 7 minute physical exam thing. So I confused myself when I went in that. So yeah. The other thing that differentiates us though is not just the labs that we run, it's also the treatment. So their main treatment would be put you on a statin medication, which we do do. So we still have the pharmaceutical option and sometimes we will definitely use that. But we're also definitely going to on nutrition recommendations how you can change this nutritionally. So from things like EPO B level, you're looking at saturated fat in the diet and then for some people like high fructose intake. So we're looking at carbohydrates a little bit as well too. But really lowering saturated fat can help to lower apob as well. And then there's things like psyllium hustle use, natural therapeutics as well. So we have all of these different tools that we can choose from versus just pharmaceuticals. So diet, exercise, lifestyle, intervent herbs, vitamins, minerals as well as pharmaceuticals. And then we also will go to mental health for a lot of these. Especially when other things come up in the blood work that may be due to high stress in somebody's life or going through a divorce or whatever it may be that's specific to them.

Yeah, it makes sense. It's funny because I think a lot of people get into the whole that start deep diving, the integrative approach, the functional medicine approach. It becomes very black and white. Like you know, the general, the general doctors out there with all their pills. This isn't the way you do it. The way you do it is you do all of these other things and like it's okay to do both things. Like it's just don't be so focused on one. And I think that's part of what the problem is on the one side of the fence from kind of more of your general practitioners. It's we do this film, we do this thing. We don't really understand what's happening. But like it's okay to use some stuff if you need to use some stuff as long as you're understanding why you're using it. And then you're also getting towards whatever the root cause of the need to use it was. So then eventually you don't have to use it anymore. Right. Like, and I guess me as a non doctor is saying how I would like to see it from my side of the fence, I suppose. But I mean I would prefer to work with someone personally who's not going to be Hard steadfast on one or the other. But there's conversations about where something comes into play. Here's where medication can help. But the plan is that it's this amount of time, hopefully we reevaluate, you're off of it at some point in time. You're not on this for the rest of your life. Right. Because like that means that we're not fixing. Either we're not fixing what's causing it, or we went so far down the road that it's just like a disaster and like maybe we can't even get to it.

You were talking about like blood sugar earlier, continuous blood sugar monitoring. Possibly.

So again, I told you I heard this thing and dove into fasting stuff for a couple days. So a lot of it is like blood sugar regulation and stuff like that. So I'm just kind of curious now that my head has been in it and I like deep dove it for like 48 hours.

Where, where you think like sugar and blood sugar management and avoiding massive spikes and things like that. Like what role that plays in the grand scheme of things when it comes to just overall performance.

Yeah. And this is one that I'm still researching, so I'll definitely admit that. And I've changed my opinion on it already, so who knows what I'll say in a year. But at this point, my stance on looking at like continuous glucose monitors is what we're talking about. And we're also talking about them in non diabetic patients, which is very different. So of course, if you have diabetes, these are the one of the best things that have come to market to prevent you from having to stick your finger all the time. But we're really focusing on healthy people and using CGMs in this population. And so I find it as an interesting practice to use on somebody once or twice a year, pretty much maximum. So I don't advocate for wearing a CGM all the time, and that's because you can really learn pretty quickly what these things do. But it is nice to go through that process and just to have it on your arm and to start to see it go up or go down. And what we're looking for there is, you know, we're looking to see how you respond to the sugars in your diet. So if you're eating something with 75 grams of sugar, how high does that increase your, your level? And so I like to see it go as high as like 120 and then start to come down at that point when somebody has a huge spike from that Same amount of glucose. That's kind of telling me that they're not able to process those sugars as well. And there's likely insulin resistance there. And that's the key thing that I'm looking for, is, is there insulin resistance there? The other thing we can typically see is hepatic insulin resistance, insulin resistance at the liver level. So if you're seeing an overnight elevation in blood glucose, and that can give us an insight that that is likely an issue there as well. And so then we can use that data and go in and help treat the person from, from that lens. People also love numbers. So if it increases compliance, then I'm all for it. So I'm like, yeah, if you need to see the numbers yourself, let's put that thing on you and then let's go from there. It also can help to influence, like, wow, if I eat a bunch of protein, I don't get as big of a spike. When it comes to the science of spikes, do we care for our blood sugar spikes a few times during the day, especially if it's getting up to like that 120, which is totally normal? No, we don't. That's a normal response that your body has to sugars in your diet. So if you eat a sweet potato, if you eat anything that has sugars in them that are from carbohydrates, you're going to increase your blood sugar level. And it doesn't mean it's bad. It's how your body, body is supposed to, and is engineered to design, to, to actually respond to these things that go into your blood. So we're really just using it to, to help people see how their body works and also like how other things. So we'll see. Exercise will drop your blood sugar, and so people can visualize that and be like, oh, wow, I need to go for a walk after I eat meals. Like, that really helps me. Or, you know, what happens if I get a good night's sleep versus I go out drinking and have, have six drinks that night, what happens the next day to my blood sugar? So a lot of these are things that are very intuitive, but when we see it on a graph, it makes us more likely to actually make the changes.

Yeah, for sure. It's also, I, I mean, I feel like from a food point of view, that's like the hardest thing to change with someone is, is the eating part. You know, we have, there's, there's relationships with food. You get dopamine hits when you eat certain things. There's like all this stuff that happens, and it's like a tough thing to do. So, like, seeing that happen and then. So can we tie the knot on this? So what. What is the. The negative effect of having, let's say, excessive sugar spikes or excessive spikes that come up like that? So what's the problem with that?

Yeah, and so if you're continually elevating your blood sugar for a prolonged period of time, your A1C is going to elevate. But the thing that we're really concerned about is elevations or worsening, I should say, of insulin resistance and the development of type 2 diabetes. So what happens is if there's too much blood sugar in your bloodstream for too long, then you get something that happens to your red blood cells, which is actually what we're measuring when we measure an A1C level. But it's also thought that the excess sugar being exposed to your bloodstream for that long can cause endothelial dysfunction. So it can cause issues in the arteries of your body that can lead to and progress to cardiovascular disease as. Which is why type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease are comorbid conditions. So those are the two things that we're looking at. There is we don't want the development of type 2 diabetes or pre diabetes, and then we also don't want the worsening of effects from the endothelial standpoint and cardiovascular disease, does it also reduce.

The amount of. The ease that oxygen can move through the body? You mentioned the thing about what you're seeing with red blood cells. And I just, just again, in my deep dive, this is so great. I have somebody I can ask questions to you after I just go down a rabbit hole to see if it's right. Something about. You mentioned the red blood cells that you see around the blood cells. I thought what I had read basically suggested, like, it's almost like the sugar wraps the cells in a way, and then they're not able to pass oxygen throughout the body as easily. Is that making sense or am I, like, not thinking of that properly?

I don't. I don't know that off the top of my head in terms of its ability to change oxygen. Oxygen delivery. But I'd have to look it up. Honestly, it's okay.

I selfishly, I'm like, oh, what about this?

This.

Okay, so.

How. How many of these things do you see on average, like an individual person is dealing with? So we talk cardio, metabolic, hormones, thyroid, like, like these, you know, six, seven different things that you mentioned. How many of these things does somebody on Average have that they need to navigate.

At the same time it's totally dependent on the person and you know what they're doing already and what they've been doing in terms of. Or have they been exercising really religiously for the last 20 years. That person's going to look totally different metabolically than somebody who's been sitting on the couch and is just starting now. They're well known wellness journey. So it's very dependent on genetics has a huge role as well, but it just depends on the person. So there's a lot of people that come into my office and it's like everything looks great. Let's repeat in six months to a year and like, and then here are your things. Right. Like your, your dad died of this. So like let's, let's do this. Coronary artery calcium score. Let's, let's do this one more step to make sure that we're, we're looking at everything. And then you have people that are overweight or obese, they have a family history of heart disease and they come in and we have to change a whole bunch of things. So I'm seeing them pretty frequently for the first year or so. So it's very dependent on the person.

Yeah, I mean that totally makes sense.

What are kind of like the non negotiable things that everybody should be doing? So regardless of they came in and somebody's healthier than the other person or whatever, what are the things from a longevity perspective that everyone just needs to be doing and if they're not, like we just know that it's causing a long term problem down the road.

Yeah. So one of the first ones I put in there is exercising. And that's gonna. Look, there's a few types that I advocate for, but one of them is resistance training. That's probably the one that I see the people doing the least of and I think is so important is making sure that you're putting on muscle mass onto your frame. So when we talk about this health span curve and squaring off the health span curve, one of the big issues we see is the dramatic loss in muscle mass that happens as we age. And so it's so common that I talk to people my age and they're like, well I'm healthy. Like I don't have anything. Like I don't need to see, I don't need to see somebody like you. And they're not. Same with finances that you brought up before. Right. They're not doing their, their health the same as they would their finances. So they're not, they are worried about the retirement funds, but they're not worried about like their retirement fund of their body, which, you know, a big portion of that is how much muscle you have on your body. So being under muscled is something that I see in many, many people. It's probably one of the most common things that I'm seeing. So that's a big one, is resistance training, knowing how to put muscle on your body and then with that body composition. And I do view those as two different things because you can have enough muscle on your body, but you can have too much fat. So that's somebody who has, you know, high fat levels, but also high muscle levels. And so in those people. I'm going to lose my headphone.

And those people were really focusing on reducing body fat. So we're optimizing their body composition from that perspective. And then somebody who has normal body fat but is under muscle, then we want to just focus on putting muscle on those people. And that's really why we do the DEXA scan. So we're doing the DEXA in order to tell how much muscle mass they have on their body, how much fat mass they have on their body and of that fat, how much of it is around their, their kidneys, liver, spleen, their visceral organs. And so we're getting a deeper dive into that, but it's really around their training routines, like how much are they lifting weights? And then we go into cardiometabolic health as well. So what are they doing for their heart in terms of cardiovascular exercise? And we can kind of titrate that based on what their goals are and what they want to do later in life. But exercise is a huge piece. You know, I.

I love Instagram and I don't like it for a lot of reasons, but it's so common that I see people are doing these ice baths and they're even injecting themselves with peptides and they're doing all these crazy things, but they're not exercising regularly. It's the lowest hanging fruit we have here that we have so much data on. You're swapping in for something that just came out two years ago that's hip and trendy right now, now. So that's one of the big ones that I see.

Are there any of the more like biohacky type of things, whether it's sauna or, you know, so ice baths, you know, cold showers, you know, that, that cold shot, proteins, like all that stuff, red light, whole body vibration, just like the whole list keeps going. Are there any, are there any of those things that you feel like are kind of, I mean, not maybe as primary as exercise, but if you could do it, like, you would go here next.

Next. Yeah. So the next, the next one is sauna for me. So I think sauna actually has good research. We have a sauna. I love going in it. I'm probably in there like five days a week. But the reason sauna has good research is it's an exercise memetic, so it mimics the effects of exercise. So you're getting a little cardio workout in the sauna because when you go into heat, what happens is your peripheral arteries dilate and your heart rate has to increase in response to that, that. And so with the heart rate increase and the dilation that's happening, we'll also see increases in cortisol, norepinephrine, your adrenaline hormones. And as I'm explaining this, if I explained what exercise does, it's the same exact thing. So you're getting the same kind of effects of exercise, but in a shorter duration and less of an intensity too. But you have like a mild exercise mimetic effect of sauna, which is really nice. It also is really relaxing and it's a nice way to end the day. So sauna. I'm definitely a fan of, of, I'm not a huge fan of a cold plunge. And I know some people love it. And it's like, hey, if you're already exercising, you're already, you know, eating well. You're, you're already doing all the things and you want to do cold plunge. Amazing. Just don't do cold plunge instead of going to the gym. Like, I don't think that that's a good swap right there.

Yeah, you gotta, you gotta kind of like, prioritize it. I, I, I do a cold shower thing because I don't have a plunge. But, but it's.

It'S a lot easier to do it straight out of the sauna because I'm just so hot. And I'm like, yes, put cold water on me, basically. So it's like, way easier to do it. But as soon as you do it immediately, it's like, now I start focusing on my breathing, like it's the whole thing. But when I come out, man, I feel awesome, like, when I come out of it. And so it's really, really cool to do it that way. So. But I found that, like, I don't know what the science is behind it, but, like, the feeling I have Coming off of it, out of sauna and straight into it. It is like an awesome, like, kind of body high that I get when I come out of it. Doing it that way.

Yeah. And I think you do get, like, a little dopamine hit. You get a change in your neurochemistry. And so if that's really, like, the thing that would help you the most, and I think it's wonderful. I think, like, go for it, do it. I hate cold, so it's more of a personal thing for me. I'm like, there's not enough research that's going to make me live longer that I want to do it all the time. If I'm really feeling, like, down or something, then I can see, like, turning the shower on cold. I would definitely do. But that's just me, personally.

Took me a long time to get to the point I. I started where I would, like, be in the shower, and then like the last 30 seconds I would just hit it, like, do a pulled hit and then I would get out, you know, and now I can get in, just start it cold, and I can do like a five minutes, like in a cold shower and, like, be okay.

Oh, wow.

Honestly, only if I'm coming out of the sauna, though. If it's like, hey, I just woke up this morning. I'm like, there's no way I'm jumping a cold shower, like, right away in the morning.

So.

All right. Is there. Do you think there's anything that we should be hitting on in this sort of, like, overview that we haven't touched on?

Man, you tell me. I think we hit all the main points that, that I was.

Looking at. There's other things, I'm sure, but I think we. We hit them. We didn't talk about grip strength. We want to go over that to end with. But other than that, I think we. We kind of tapped on every thing.

What is it?

Grip strength.

Grip strength. Talk about it. Why do we need to talk about it?

Yeah, yeah. So grip strength is another thing we do in office with people. So if you come to see me for a longevity workup, I have a grip strength machine that measures how strong your grip is. And the actual process is really simple. And you've probably seen them at bars and things like that where they look kind of similar. The ones that bars, you just hold on to as hard as you can, which is exactly what you do with this jammer Device. Device. But it's a little device and you just grip it as hard as you can. We give people Three tries per hand. And then we calculate their average grip strength for their right hand and their left hand. And we can figure out what percentile they're in for their gender and their age to see where they fall in relationship to their peers. And the reason we do it is that grip strength is related to the risk for mortality. So I have a quote here, actually, that they determined that grip strength was more powerful, a predictor of cardiovascular mortality than systolic blood pressure. And systolic pressure is going to be your blood pressure when your heart is contracting. That top number when they read your blood pressure, which we know is a really important factor for heart disease. So that's why we do grip strength is that we can see, you know, we can, we can make associations with how strong your grip is is to how strong your whole body is. And that's really what it's looking at to determine that. And we'll track that. So if somebody comes back lower than we want to see them, then we're going to send them off with an exercise prescription of saying these are the things that can help improve your grip strength. But also we want to look at total body strength at that point because we're not just going to train for the grip strength test itself. We want to train your whole body to get the effects that the study is probably actually looking at. And so we give really specific exercise recommendations as to, you know, what you want to be targeting to be a strong person that's going to be able to do all of those things as you age. And I think that's a, it's a really important thing to keep in mind as a part of, you know, the health span practices. Is that strength measurement?

Yeah, I think that's cool. I hadn't heard the grip strength thing before. It's so funny so that it's like, oh, so I just do like these until I can. Grip stress parter, for those of you listening, you know, like doing hand squeezes. No, you're right. It's probably indicative of like your whole body is X amount of strong and therefore you can grab things. So that makes sense.

Well, this was cool. And as promised, I didn't even talk about mold one time, so it might be a first on this where we didn't even bring it up once, which is fine. Which is fine for an episode. So.

This is really cool. I hope people, like walk away with this, with this understanding that what healthspan versus lifespan really means and how they relate to each other and how one is extending. If you're not extending the other one. You're gonna regret it when you're in that phase and there's nothing else that we can do about it. So hopefully this serves as a little kick in the butt to go lift some heavy things today.

So where can people find you, talk to you? How do you work with people if they want to talk to you somewhere? How's all that work?

Yeah, so I do one on one care so you can see me as a patient if you're in California. Our website is modernmed.com it's mod r n med.com so no e and Modern. And then I give away a ton of free content on my Instagram pages as well. So at Dr. Mary party is my IG handle. And then our business IG handle is at Model Modern Med Modrn Med, if you want to consume that way. And I do have a gut health course that's available if you're interested in that sector, which I can send you the link for. And I'm coming out with a supplements course as well, which we kind of debunk and talk about the research around supplementation and whether you know your supplements have research behind them or whether they have nothing behind them and you should not buy them anymore and save your money.

That's nice. I've seen the amount of supplements people take because somebody on Instagram told them they needed this form of magnesium.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on, taking the time. Really appreciate it.

Thank you, Brian. I appreciate it.

So that's it for today's show, everyone. Thanks so much for tuning in. If you enjoyed the show, please take a moment and subscribe and give a rating wherever you get your podcasts. It'll help spread the word to those who really need it the most.