Dr. Kien Vuu, a radiologist who escaped Vietnam as an infant, discovered that emotional states directly affect cellular health. He teaches a breathing technique to activate the vagus nerve and explains how positive emotions like love and gratitude can add seven years to lifespan and reverse chronic disease.
Chapters
About 5 years ago, you know, somebody would pierce inside my life and they would say, wow, this guy's got a pretty ideal life. He's a medical doctor. He's got a dream house. He's got the car. He's got everything in life that is deemed, you know, quote, success on paper, right? So I worked with people with end-stage diabetes, cancer, you know, renal disease. And as a radiologist, I also knew what those diseases look like in the body. So in fact, I was probably at the top of my game treating a lot of these diseases underneath the white coat. I was overweight. I was diabetic, I had high blood pressure, and I was on prescription medications. I looked at myself in the mirror many days and I said, wow, I didn't like the man I had become. And how am I a doctor who's giving medical advice and telling people to be healthy when I'm walking chronic disease statistic myself? My life will not be subjected to medications only for the rest of my life. How do I turn this around? I was an immigrant to America. I was born a couple of years after the end of the Vietnam War in Vietnam. They basically seized all the businesses, seized all the money that was there. My parents were pretty much left with nothing, and they said to themselves, this is no place to raise a child. And so, overcoming all odds, they basically took me, escaped with me by boat, and we were on a refugee boat filled with 2,000 refugees trying to sail to a better future. I was probably one of the few infants on the boat, the only one that survived. There were people that basically fell off the boat, people died of dysentery. I had dysentery. I nearly died as well. Once there was room in the refugee camps, we were in the refugee camps in the Philippines. And then as an early Christmas present in 1979, we were sponsored to America. We were in a very poor neighborhood in Los Angeles, and I got bussed to a more affluent area for school. And when I was there, I was probably one of the few Asian kids that were there. And so I was constantly being teased for not being white, for the holes in my hand-me-down clothes, for the stinky Chinese food my mom sent me to school with. Right? Go back to your home country, chinky. I got all of that. I remember a lot of times coming home from school, just not liking who I was, not liking the skin I was in. I wish I was taller. I wish I was richer. I wish I didn't have my family. I wish I lived in a different neighborhood. You know, my skin's not accepted. How do I become somebody who could belong when inside I didn't really feel like that was the case? And no matter what I achieved on the outside, the inside still felt the same way. And I had basically used that white coat to cover up for that not enoughness I had inside. When you're in that mode of chasing, you don't feel that, you know, those feelings of true gratitude or that you can be yourself. You're in stress. And a lot of people, when they're in those stress states, will reach for unhealthy habits. They might not sleep very well. They're not going to eat very well. Certainly they're not going to move. You know, they're not going to live a life congruent with a healthy state. And these are things I did not learn in medical school. Tapping into who I truly am as a person, acknowledging, accepting, and loving who that person is, and then diving deep into nutrition, epigenetics, and what it really means to be healthy, that I was able to reverse my conditions in 4 to 6 months. The reason why I share that story is to let people know that you are really your, your best medicine. And if you can understand who you are, if you just understand why you're here and just live that way, and sharing yourself with other people, that's the medicine that will put you at having the highest odds of being in optimal health, having longevity and peak performance, and put you at very low risk of getting chronic disease, potentially even reversing your disease if you're not that far along. As I started to build my understanding of epigenetics and all these other things, it's all very related. And things that you need to do to fix this one heart disease over there might be the same things you need to do to fix depression and anxiety and all these things because they're all connected. And what is these things? Well, You know, it all boils down to the state of our cells. Cells work together through energy to form tissues. Tissues work together through energy to form organs. Organs work together in organ systems, and then they make up who we are. So if we want longevity, peak performance, optimal health, we want all our systems to be optimal. If you have suboptimal cells, you form suboptimal tissues, suboptimal organs. Suboptimal systems. You have suboptimal cardiovascular system, that's when you've got maybe high blood pressure, atherosclerosis, heart attack, and stroke. Suboptimal immune system will give you chronic infections, autoimmune disease, or cancer. Suboptimal nervous system will give you dementia or Alzheimer's disease and things like that. That state of ourselves has less to do with what we got from mom and dad, which is our DNA, but actually how the DNA responds to its cellular environment. When you're stressed, when you're worried, when you're fearful, when there's hate in your body, when there's resentment there, those negative emotional states actually drive up the inflammatory response in our body. Emotions like love, like gratitude, like laughter, like connection, all those emotional states are actually anti-aging. There's a great quote that I constantly go back to, and it's from— I love that. Survivor Viktor Frankl. You know, he was a physician, you know, in the Holocaust, and he witnessed a lot of friends pass away and a lot of just atrocities in that camp. And he said this: between stimulus and response, there's a space. And in that space is our power to choose a response. And in our response lies our growth and freedom. We could have all these subconscious beliefs that might be leading the way that might not be us. But if we can pause and create that space and then decide in that space how we want to respond, that's the magic. So if you find yourself like caught in a negative emotional state, pause and do 10 deep breaths in through your nose, out through your mouth. What does it do? Again, activates your vagus nerves, puts you in parasympathetic. And then I want people to ACT, or ACT, which stands for awareness, choice, and then take action. I had done the science behind, you know, studying purpose and this concept called eudaimonic happiness, which is the happiness you feel when you feel connected to something bigger. It's the happiness that you feel when you're giving back. And it turns out that people that develop this eudaimonic happiness or purpose, in America, they live 7 years longer. You've got a lower chance of getting a cardiovascular event, such as a heart attack or a stroke. Your telomeres are also longer. And for those people who don't know what telomeres are, they're basically these base pairs at the end of your DNA that protect your DNA from getting degraded. So it's a marker for longevity. And so the next question is, as I start to study from the spiritual teachers, it's less a matter of finding rather than remembering those emotions, those positive anti-aging emotions that I talk about. We all have them as kids. I mean, unless we were given like a lot of trauma, but I mean, we know what gives us those positive emotional states. Those things are kind of like our passions, which is ingrained into our own DNA. And we do those things and we serve other people with them and sharing us with other people. And really, that's our purpose.
