#88 Food Matters with James Colquhoun

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Today's cool fact of the day is sweet. It's about honey. Unprocessed honey actually won't spoil. You could even eat honey that's thousands of years old if you found it preserved somewhere, and it wouldn't cause problems for you. Honey is mostly super saturated sugar. That's all it is, is so much sugar that it's hygroscopic, which means it attracts water. When bacteria and other microorganisms come into contact with a hygroscopic solution, they get desiccated. In other words, water is drawn out from them into the solution. So the honey's dehydrating the things that try to eat the honey. The supersaturation of sugar that's in the honey is what works to inhibit the growth of yeast and other fungal spores. It's also interesting that honey's pH is roughly between 3.25 and 4.5, which makes it not an attractive growth medium at all for bacteria. So that means that you have supersaturation to suck moisture out, and you have a pH or an acidity level that weakens bacteria. It turns out that bees are processing honey using an enzyme called glucose oxidase, which modifies sugar into gluconic acid and hydrogen peroxide, another known antimicrobial agent. That's pretty cool. What that means is that honey can be used to treat open wounds, at least raw natural honey can be. And during the Civil War, it was used very frequently. The two main treatments were apple cider vinegar, and raw honey to treat a wound. Even straight white sugar was something that was recorded to save people from deep infections in their deep wounds. That said, I don't recommend you use a lot of honey, but using a little bit of raw honey before bed can have a really positive effect on sleep. This is a trick I've been using with my executive coaching clients for quite a while. So check out honey because it doesn't spoil and it does all sorts of other cool things too.

Today we've got James Callaghan who runs foodmatters.tv and he's the CEO of Food Matters. Really, really cool guy I met at a conference recently and he's been working on uncovering the truth behind real food nutrition and what it does to human lives and even what it does to society. You may have seen one or both of his documentaries. One is called Food Matters, the other is called Hungry for Change. He started doing this because his father got ill and it motivated him to figure out what was going on, what happened, and to really take charge in a way that I would say is pretty much a lot like biohacking. It's worked. He's got 316,000 followers on Facebook. My $20,000 and change to shame here, James. Welcome to the show.

Thank you, Dave. It's a pleasure to be on the show with you.

Now, we have a few things in common. We've both spent a lot of time in California. You're in Santa Monica. We've both written recipe books. You're kind of a— I guess, are you a bit of a hippie? You do yoga, meditation. You take a lot of supplements and you eat organic food. Are you as big a wuss as me?

I'm very alternative comparative to the norm. That's true.

That means you got something to teach all of us. But there's another thing we have in common. You have a young baby, right?

That's correct. 9 weeks, I think. 9 to 10 weeks, thereabouts.

9 to 10 weeks. Now, I don't have a young baby 9 to 10 weeks old. Mine are 4 and 6 now, but you caught your own baby.

That's correct. And it was an incredible experience to be there for the birth. We had the birth here in Santa Monica and I caught the baby. Wow.

So we have that in common as well. I caught both my babies as well. And I'm here to say real men catch their own babies.

I agree. And, you know, there was a time when they didn't allow men into the delivery room. I mean, I was watching a documentary with Anna Mae Gaskin is one of the, the mothers of the natural birth movement, should we say. And she was saying there was times when men would handcuff themselves to their laboring wives so that they could get admitted into the delivery room to be there with their child. It's crazy that we've relegated birth into such a corner of the medical profession.

Wow. All right, so they would handcuff themselves into the, the delivery room. So I guess they had to be there to their wives.

Wow. So that they would get admitted with their wives. And, and, you know, what I felt from experiencing my own birth was that we— I had never seen a birth in my entire life until I was there for the birth of my child. And it was something that really shocked me because I feel that in a tribal environment or natural environment, we would have witnessed and experienced multiple births and laboring women, and we know what that's like. And we just don't know what it's like anymore. It's a fascinating experience for me.

It is an amazing, fascinating, kind of moving experience. If you and you're listening and you get a chance to attend the birth of someone close to you, or better yet, to be there when your own children are born— obviously this applies to guys because Most women are there when their own children are born.

So most, yeah, some are out of it on drugs. I mean, God forbid if you need a medical intervention, that's great. But some by choice, and that's also a choice.

Yeah, there's also some alternative arrangements. I have some friends who used a surrogate parent because they couldn't have kids. So like, I don't think— I don't know if they were there for the birth of their child, but it didn't come out of, you know, the genetic mother. So, you know, it is a, it is a complex world out there, but if you have a chance to be there and to see a baby born in real life, not just on video or something, it's kind of a transformative experience. But that wasn't really going to be the topic of our show, but as we were just getting wired up here to talk, you mentioned that and I'll flat out, it is something that as a biohacker, you want to understand where life comes from and you want to see what the effect the environment starts having on people. It starts right there in the womb and one of the biggest events in your life is your birthday. So, um, it's, it's pretty amazing to see a first birthday.

Indeed. Indeed it is.

All right. Let's talk about food though, cause that's really our topic today. I'm sorry. I got us off track at the beginning. Where does your passion for food come from? I mean, Food Matters is a pretty big thing.

Well, Food Matters was born because we were looking for a way to heal my father. And like you mentioned at the start of the call, it was something where He had entrusted his health to the medical profession, and they had advised him on 6 different medications and altering, altering that cocktail in the hope that one day they would find this magic arrangement of pharmaceutical medications to, to heal his condition, which he was suffering from severe chronic fatigue syndrome, the severity of which had him bedridden for 5 years, and also anxiety and depression. And at that time, Laurentine and I were— my partner— we were studying nutrition and we could see this, this truth emerging. And the truth was that food is better medicine than drugs in many instances. And as we dug deeper into that knowledge and as we interviewed some of the leading experts in that space, which eventually led to the Food Matters film, it convinced us of this new power of nutrition and in particular this core concept that we talk about in Food Matters, Matters, which Charlotte Gerson, the daughter of Max Gerson and the Gerson Institute, who runs the Gerson Institute, talks about this deficiency and toxicity. And I think that it sums it up so well and so perfectly that when we are living in this modern food landscape that we've essentially developed and crafted since the advent of— or since the end of World War II, we have an environment where our food is deficient in nutrients and it's loaded with toxicity. And when that translates into our body, it manifests in all sorts of chronic illness. And that's, that's the root cause of the problem we have these days.

It's been said by a few people that— there, I use the passive voice, I hate doing that— it's been said that the whole idea of toxicity like this is, is unscientific. And in particular, Food Matters has been criticized for being unscientific. Like, what's your take on— what's your take on that?

Okay, well, let's, let's look at the science then in a different way. Let's, let's look at it. Let's, let's tell a little story to ourselves and to everybody who's listening. So prior to World War II, everything was organic. There was no toxic fertilizers, fungicides, pesticides. There was no food additives as such. There was natural ways that we preserved and fermented foods to store them, but there was no food additives, there was no E numbers. And since that time, around 1945, 1950, we started releasing wholesale into the environment these toxins in agriculture. We put them into the food and we went on this sort of this rampage which is still continuing. And what we've noticed in that period of time, in these last sort of few generations, is that our rates of cancer have gone from 1 in 100 to 1 in 3— 1 in 2 and a half, 1 in 3. Heart disease has skyrocketed, diabetes has skyrocketed, obesity has skyrocketed. And no matter what our modern technology throws at this, from all the money we spend on cancer research, all the money we spend on new diabetes drugs, all the money we spend on conquering and beating obesity with fat-free products and sugar-free alternatives and aspartames and food additives. Nothing's fixing it. And my general hypothesis that I'm drawing with this story is that we need to look at what's changed in that time. And the biggest things that have changed is the toxicity that we've added to our environment, the toxicity that we've added to the food chain, the extra stress that we've put ourselves under, and the food or the lack of food that we're eating. We're really not eating food anymore. And so our bodies are simply reacting in a natural way to an unnatural environment, and that's manifesting as disease. And that's a story, and there is plenty of science to back it up, but it gets suppressed by the medical profession because it doesn't fit their interests. People can find it, it exists, and we brought some of it up in Food Matters, and I hope that that we can continue to expose more good research that proves this story correct.

Do you know how many different studies you looked at when you were putting together Food Matters?

With Food Matters, I leveraged off the experts that I was interviewing, and they referred to articles in the, the JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association. They referenced articles in The Lancet, which is the British version. They referenced articles in the nutrition journal here in the US, and it's shocking that so much of this information exists and is available to the public, yet nobody's talking about it. One of the facts from Food Matters which shocked me to no end was that 106,000 people die every year as a result of adverse reactions to pharmaceutical medications. This is not including overdoses or the wrong drug given to the wrong person. This is just people routinely taking the right drug as prescribed to the right person, and we're losing 106,000 people a year. Then when you add on, and this is other research that's available, peer-reviewed in the biggest journals, that people are dying to the rate of 80,000 a year from adverse reactions or over-intervention in hospitals. And then you add these all up and medical— modern medicine is coming in as one of the third largest killers in the US. So something which is meant to be saving us is actually causing us a lot of harm. And as Hippocrates said, which is the oath that every medical doctor in this country and many others swears by when, when going into practice, is first do no harm. and it seems that they're not really doing a good job of that.

That said, I mean, I spent a lot of time in my anti-aging work working with a lot of physicians who don't meet that mold at all. In fact, the vast majority of doctors I know don't believe they're doing harm. Where's the breakdown? Like, is this a systemic problem in medicine, or is this like bad training? Like, where's it coming from? Because most doctors I know didn't get into it for the money. If so, they would have become attorneys.

I think— yeah, that's true. I, I think that, that where the problem lies is that we have an economic issue in medicine. And another thing is that many of the doctors and people at your meeting with and that I meet with are a different type of doctor. But if you were talking about the average person that somebody sees in a medical clinic or as their consulting family physician, they— if we look at the economics behind their training and their certification, they are on every level indoctrinated. Many— if we just look at postgraduate education, so once you qualify as a doctor, you need to keep up a certain amount of credits on an annual basis to remain qualified. 65% of postdoctorate education Association is funded by the pharmaceutical industry. And that alone, combined with the aggressive drug rep campaigns that the pharmaceutical industry runs, it has become a model to effectively, by law, push drugs and sell medications to people. And the more the doctors sell, the more they're rewarded with conferences or trips to Hawaii or golf retreats. And as you really follow the economics in the, in the health profession, the majority of it is very corrupt in a legal way, in a legal way. And the ethics, I think, need to be questioned. But I don't really care too much about that in a funny way. I care about educating people about taking control of their own health like you. And if we can do that, then we we eliminate that problem without having to tackle the top-down, which is a big stone wall right now?

Well, the, the trick is, is changing demand. So I don't actually see a quote normal Western doctor on a regular basis anymore. Insurance isn't that useful. If I break my arm, I get in a car accident, or, you know, have some big thing happen, I'm very, very happy that Western medicine is there because it works. Like they will keep me alive. They'll put respirators in my lungs until I can breathe again and they'll do things that are entirely not available to our caveman ancestors. But to go there for my daily or monthly wellness care, no way. It doesn't work. They're not even the source of that. And by asking them to do it, we're actually encouraging the problem in the system. So if you learn to take control of these things largely by eating and by sleeping and exercising avoiding toxins, if the demand changes and suddenly there's lots of doctors with practices and not that many people going, one of two things is going to happen. Either the doctors are going to focus more on wellness, or in countries that allow it, like the US, we'll see massive regulation about what you're allowed to do to force you to go back into the doctor's office. Which way is it going to go in the US?

That's a, that's a, that's a million-dollar question, and I'm I'm an optimistic person and I feel that people are waking up to this. I feel that people are waking up to the fact that nutrition can be such a powerful cornerstone of a healthy lifestyle and good sleep and detoxifying their bodies. And I'm optimistic that as people become more educated and as the lines of education have opened, we've got podcasts like yours, we've got websites, we've got documentary films, we've got books. We've got more access to this information than ever before. And if we look at even the popularity of the films in the nutrition and health field or the health and wellness field, like the two that we've done, Food Matters and Hungry for Change, but also Food Inc. or Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead or other documentaries in this genre, they've exploded in popularity on streaming platforms like Netflix and Hulu and so forth. So we're seeing more people want this information because they sense that the system is broken and they want to do something about it themselves. And I think that as a generation— I wouldn't say a generation— as a group of people interested in health, we're going to change the system. And I totally agree with supply and demand, like voting with your shopping trolley. I love it.

Now, about 20 years ago, in fact almost exactly 20 years ago, In the US, the government attempted to take control of nutritional supplements and even more control of food in 1994. What happened there was the largest ever revolt from people where they got more calls and more letters to Congress and the Senate than anything ever in history. This resulted in a bill called DSHEA. The Dietary Supplement and Health Something Act, and probably Enhancement Act, or Enforcement Act, whatever it was. What this did was it made vitamins legal in the U.S. over the objections of the pharmaceutical companies and what we can call Big Food and Big Pharma. And there have been a huge number of attacks on that over the last couple of years, and they're increasing in frequency. Dave Asprey, in your video here, Food Matters, I mean, food does matter, but access to food matters as well. You cover quite a lot in the video, but what's your take on what's going to happen over the next few years in terms of food quality? I'm genuinely concerned for people who live particularly in the US. By the way, I don't live in the US anymore. I'm in Canada where the rules are similar but not as bad.

I think that the pharmaceutical industry are seeking heavily to regulate the supplement industry, and they want supplements classed as drugs. But what's going to happen is that once they do that, then foods will be classed as drugs, which is something they don't want because they don't want people to see foods— they don't want people to think that foods have medical efficacy, which is true. Foods affect the biochemistry of your body, which has an effect on, on health. So what's interesting about this is that as they seek to want to regulate the supplement industry and regulate natural foods like drugs, they're seeking to control something that they know has a lot of potential to to help heal people and to help make people well. And it's almost like, can you imagine the oil industry wanting to secretly buy up new technology for battery-powered or water-powered cars or zero-point energy machines? They want to control that negative energy, but they first want to make as much money as they can off oil. I think it's a similar scenario we're seeing here. They want to make as much money off the drugs as they can. But once this— once we get this consciousness shift, it's big enough that people go, hang on, food, supplements, natural medicine is much better for 99% of chronic illness. Accident emergency care, absolutely go to a hospital, but let's do that. They want to control that, so they're trying to get in first, and we're seeing it. Something Bayer has been buying up supplement companies in Europe. Other big pharmaceutical companies are buying up, you know, big natural supplement companies here, and there's pros and cons to that. I mean, my hope is that that on one side we have the biggest companies in the world, the biggest pharmaceutical companies, the biggest food industry companies like McDonald's offering a green organic smoothie. Can you imagine? Or a pharmaceutical company offering us a super high-level raw whole food fermented vitamin supplement? It's a maybe, but they have the power to be able to do it. So should we allow them to do it or should we do it ourselves? It's something that Ultimately, supply and demand will dictate.

It will. One of the things that they taught us at Wharton, it was a kind of a scary simulation, but flat out, it's usually cheaper to spend a dollar telling people that your product is good than it is to spend a dollar making the product good. Because even if you make the product good, no one knows that your product is good. They can't tell. So then you still have to spend the dollar to educate them about why it's good. Which is one of the just game theory reasons that we have low-quality food out there, because no one can tell if it's low or high quality. And if you spend to tell them it's high quality, then you're less profitable and you have less money to put back in your business. So you grow more slowly and investors move their money away from you.

That is so profound. That is so profound on so many levels.

This is what's happening. And it's not like people are evil. Like, even the CEO of Monsanto has children. He may have hatchlings. I'm not sure. But, but like, like, seriously, things like, things like that. Everyone has kids. Everyone has to breathe the same air. And if you run one of these big companies, you actually, at some level, must believe you're not doing great evil when you are doing great evil.

Yeah.

And so part of it is education, but at the end of the day, part of it is these market forces in companies. And when you look at for instance, at Food Matters, I know you cover, you know, some of the economic realities, but you're like out there in the fields and all that stuff. But I'm just curious, like, what's your take on that? And are you going to cover more of that in an upcoming film or documentary, or is that a potential topic?

I would like to cover it in passing in a film, but I think that devoting a whole topic to that is something that other films have done, but it's a big thing to do. Like, you are essentially destructing the economics of these organizations and these industries. And I agree with you when you say that many of them don't feel they're doing anything wrong, because they've got a different filter, and their filter is how can we add more value to shareholders, and that's what they're responsible for. And They also feel— I mean, many of the pharmaceutical companies believe that they're actually alleviating human suffering, which is partly what we believe we're doing as well. There's just many different ways to skin a cat, and there's many different outcomes of a skinned cat, I would imagine, as well.

Yeah.

So I feel that it's something that I would love to cover. But the next film that I really want to do is about humanity as a whole. I would love to look at preconception, conception, gestation, birth, and the first 6 years of life in a big sense, in the sense of how GMOs and pesticides and toxicity are affecting fertility, how nutrition and health are affecting birth and affecting the gestation of a child and the development of a child. And how the subconscious conditioning of the mind in that first 6 years of life sets up a whole different group of people that are going to inherit this earth. And we've essentially degraded or degenerated our species over the last few generations, and we need to either turn that around and do something about it or continue that cycle to wherever that goes, whether it's whether it's some strange technologically toxic soup future that we somehow adapt to and survive in bubbles or move to another planet, or whether, you know, we create a different reality. So I'm excited to explore that, and I think that that topic will fit into that discussion.

I'm really hoping we get a chance to collaborate further. One of the reasons I wrote the Better Baby book was that you have so much leverage in the womb and reducing exposure to toxins and eating the right foods kind of changes the brain of your baby and the genes for life. So if you can get that in a documentary so it's visceral and people see and feel it, you would, you would actually improve a lot of people's lives. But you might not see that improvement for 20 years. You know, the kids weren't even born yet could benefit from a film like that. I, I would be more than willing to support you in getting that. Getting the word out about that film.

I appreciate that.

In terms of Food Matters, who's the coolest person you talked to in the film? Like, what was, what was like the most interesting interview anyway? You don't have to say.

To be honest, I'll tell you, there were so many great characters in that film and I love them all, but one stood out and his name was Andrew Saul. And he's got the glasses and the goatee. And most people recognize him as one of the core characters in the film. And we nearly called the film The Andrew Saul Show because he had just so many puns and so much great research to draw upon. And it was such an exciting interview. It was in Rochester in upstate New York, and we went to his house. And he's a real character, and he's the editor of the Orthomolecular Medicine news service. And orthomolecular medicine is something that was originally a term coined by Linus Pauling, and Linus Pauling is a multiple Nobel laureate who many people would know of. Health, and the only person to ever win one for chemistry and one for peace. And in his later years, he started devoting a lot of his time and attention to research on nutritional therapy, in particular vitamin supplementation at really high doses and how it affects the body. And I'm sure you've done a lot of this research yourself, Dave. And it's incredible that vitamins at level 1 will have an effect on the body, but then a vitamin at level 1,000 will have a completely different effect on the body, a therapeutic effect. And that research has led to some incredible discoveries. And one of the ones we talk about in Food Matters is how intravenous vitamin C can be as effective, if not more effective, than chemotherapy in fighting cancer cells in the body. And yet it has none of the toxic side effects. It's a water-soluble vitamin. Our body knows how to do with it. Why are we not exploring this? Answer: you cannot patent vitamin C. How crazy.

As an example of non-toxicity, I did a 100-gram vitamin C intravenous drip 2 days in a row when I had a sinus infection. 200 grams— the very largest pills you can buy are 1 gram. That's 200 pills of vitamin C in my veins over the course of 2 days. You know what it did? It made me feel better.

That's great. You got over the infection because once you saturate the body with vitamin C, a virus cannot live in that, in that body. This is great information. That's why I was so passionate to get it out there in Food Matters. Ian Bright Hope, a medical doctor who we interviewed in Australia, he talks about how one of the patients he was consulting with, he advised up to 250 grams in one day. So that's a quarter of a kilogram. So that's— you can even go up to that high. And the worst thing he got was nausea, a little bit of nausea. And the best thing he got was he got rid of his chronic illness. So There is a lot to be said for that, but then you cannot patent it. And so much of the medical technology and the, and the, the energy and all these billions of dollars that we raise for cancer research and cancer funding go into drugs that can be patented, that can be profitable for a pharmaceutical company. And I don't mean to say that's a bad thing, but I sort of do because it's inhibiting the growth of real medicine. It's inhibiting— it's inhibiting and holding back access to people. And the biggest thing that annoys me by far is choice. We as consumers should have a choice. If you have cancer, for instance, using one example, you go to your consulting physician or oncologist and they suggest one of three things: chemo, surgery, or radiation. There's never any discussion about intravenous vitamin therapy, Gerson therapy, cleansing, detoxification, juices. No way. The best they say is, well, go clean up your diet or try to eat healthy. How do you do that? They don't give you any advice on that. Consult the food pyramid or the food circle, which is basically upside down in the wrong way. It's telling us to eat grains and meat and dairy. And meat and dairy are not bad, but they are when they're fed corn and soy. So this is hugely— there's a really big issue we have here, and I feel so annoyed and sad and upset for people that are getting diagnosed with these illnesses every day that are given, given options that are ineffective, and they should be given effective options, or at least have the choice. I don't care if people choose conventional therapy as long as they've got the choice. If they've got the choice, they can choose conventional, natural, or a bit of both. Both, but there is no choice right now, and that's a sad state of affairs.

It is a sad state of affairs, and choice wasn't enshrined. This kind of goes back specifically in the US. There was only one founding father in the US who was a physician, and all the rest of them were business people and attorneys. So this guy said flat out, if we do not put in the Bill of Rights or even in the Constitution the right to choose your own healthcare, an enormous— basically, I forget the exact word he used, but basically there will be an abuse of power. The equivalent of a monopoly will form and people's rights will be overridden. And of course, the other founding fathers said, what are you talking about, you dumb doctor? Go get a saw and some vinegar because that's the only tools you have anyway. And pretty much what he foresaw seems to have happened. And right now we still have a good number of rights, but I do think it's worth paying attention to what you can do personally to make sure that you keep getting those rights. And part of that is just understanding what's happening and where you can get the stuff that works because chronic illnesses are on the rise. One in 8 couples are infertile. It's hard to argue that there isn't a change in human health for the worst, particularly in in America and all across the developed West. So if you want to argue that point, then there probably isn't much conversation to be had and you're probably not listening to this podcast because there's a certain point where it's just like we don't have enough of a common filter of reality to actually see the same thing. I see a chair and you see something else, like there's no conversation to be had there. Well, let's talk for a minute about your other documentary, Hungry for Change. What's the synopsis of that? Why should people check that one out?

Well, Hungry for Change really centered itself on the diet industry, and why we did that was because when we helped my father get well, we got him off his medications, we put him onto high-dose nutrient therapy of an orthomolecular style, we cleansed his diet, and within 3 months he had lost 50 pounds, was off all his medications, and was back to this person that I hadn't seen for maybe 7 to 10 years. And he was radiating in health. He was no longer reliant on the medical profession, and this is after 5 years on these medications. And when we would go to family events, everyone would really swerve past the conversation about the medications and the illness, and they would just say, wow, you look incredible. What have you done? How did you lose the weight? Why do you look so young? How is your skin so radiant? And I could see this trend that people People are eminently concerned about how they look and they have anxiety about weight. And that is healthy and unhealthy. It's unhealthy to have an anxiety about a few pounds here and there because we're designed to carry a little bit, let a little bit go and move in flux depending on seasonality and things like this. But it's healthy to be anxious about being 50, 100 pounds or so overweight or more. And we have a huge issue with that as we all know. And so that started us thinking about, hang on, what's happening here? And we started to look at the diet industry and we came across 3 really interesting statistics which shocked me to no end. The first one was the market data research report showing that there's $60 billion spent each year on diet and weight loss related products in the US alone. So that includes the whole gamut of diet sodas, sugar-free products, fat-free, but also detox programs and things like this. So it's a wide range. That's a hell of a lot of money. Then UCLA showed that up to two-thirds of people who go on a diet fail and regain more weight than when they started. And there's more, but those two alone, I mean, That is shocking. And we have fad diets every summer. We have— we're throwing so much at this. We had this war on fat and made everything fat-free. We've had a war on sugar. We've made everything sugar-free. And as a result, we've completely laden our food supply with toxins that are making us fat. And it's—

so we need fat-free, sugar-free, toxin-free food. Air, definitely. Let's eat air.

Air. Let's do air. So it was really interesting to look at that and to think that when somebody is looking to lose weight, they actually have a diet soda and then they don't realize that the aspartame in that diet soda, as per Yale University research, actually increases carbohydrate cravings. So you have the diet soda and then you're eating more bread, you're eating more crackers, you're eating more chips, which is making you fat. So there's is not working. What we're doing is not working. And we wanted to really uncover that and help show people what steps you can take to not only just the weight loss aspect, but really to improve and boost health in general. And I think that that was something we wanted to, to focus on.

So given all the research you did for your dad and for the film, what is the most effective detox and cleansing strategy? Like, what would you do if you met someone full of toxins.

I think there's a lot of different ways to detox the body, and there is true, and you've done a lot of them. I mean, you're, you're the biohacker, you know this, you know this better than all of us. For most people though, the deeper I get into my research, and I feel this is the same for you having— when we had some conversations in Connecticut as well, was that the deeper you and I and many other people in this field get into research, the deeper it actually just takes us back into the simpler ways that we've always lived in some aspects from a nutrition perspective.

Like don't eat crap.

Don't eat crap. To put it down, and Daniel Vitalis did a great job of this in the Hungry for Change film, he said in essence, detox, it's eat real foods, greens, be out in nature, be barefoot in the sunshine, and breathe fresh air. And that's really a lot of it. That's a great start. Now you can add all sorts of accoutrements and supplementation regimes and enemas and all these infrared saunas and all these things onto it, oil pulling, you know, you can add that in. But as a basis, eat natural whole foods, be outside, breathe fresh air. Be in nature, drink good quality spring water. Those elements alone, your body knows how to do. It's hyper-intelligent. That's great.

Didn't you just tell everyone to move out of cities? Like, you just said flat out, like, breathe, breathe air and see sunshine. And in half the cities you go into, the air is polluted in the city, and you're indoors all the time anyway where it's recirculated office air, and you don't see the sun because you're under fluorescent lights unless you're walking from your skyscraper to the next.

That's the problem we have, Dave. That's the problem. So the antithesis of our modern lifestyle is barefoot in the sun, fresh air, and that resets our body. And that's what we need to do. We need to reset our bodies.

So now I, I might live that. Like, you can see on YouTube, my, my feet are actually bare right now. And I do breathe fresh air every day because I live on an island full of trees. And, uh, that said, I'm on airplanes breathing crap air like half the time because I'm flying around to talk about biohacking and, you know, how to upgrade yourself. So there have to be techniques though that people can address when they live in a city and not move, because let's face it, you know, you have a job, you have family, you have reasons you're not going to move. How do you detox and live in the modern world at the same time?

I think then you need to, to step it And the ways that I suggest people step up their detoxification processes is first and foremost green vegetable juice. Green vegetable juices and green plant foods have an incredible power to transform the body and also to draw toxins out of the body. And when we look at the addition of herbs such as parsley and cilantro, especially when added into fresh juices, They have an incredible power to, to draw toxins out of the body, especially the cilantro drawing heavy metal out of it. So there's two natural herbs that are powerful for detoxification that are given to us from some natural, beautiful intelligence. Thank you. That we can put in a juicer or eat whole and help to aid that detoxification process. Now, you're generally exposed to more heavy metals when you're in a city environment, so that's a good start. So green juice is a great add. Next one is infrared sauna. Infrared sauna is great at drawing toxins out of the body. Most people can find an infrared sauna at their local spa, the local area in town. I'm sure they can find it. Massage, bodywork, also really good because we are so not a culture that touches each other. I love when I see traditional cultures sitting down reading a book around the fireplace and they're all massaging each other. It's so great. There is so much history and lineage in acupressure under the foot, using hand massage, cranial sacral massage. There is so much that, that opens up energy meridians in the body, and it opens up the body's ability to heal. Colonic hydrotherapy, colonic irrigation, enemas— this is where you put water in the hole where the sun doesn't shine and let that help clean out your colon. Many people in the health world say death begins in the colon, and I agree. If you've got putrefying corn-fed, soy-fed stuff in there, then that's leaching toxins into your body. And one of the core elements of a great cleansing and detoxification program for people, specifically with cancer patients, is the, is the Gerson therapy. And they recommend up to 6 enemas for people a day. They're also adding in coffee to the enemas, which you might be interested and love to know about. I'm sure.

Here's a hint for anyone wanting to do a coffee enema: you have to cool the coffee first, and no milk or sugar, or even, or even grass-fed butter and coconut oil for that bit.

No Bulletproof Coffee.

The reason for a coffee enema, if you've never heard of one on the show, is that it speeds up liver detoxification. It's a well-known herbalist technique, but it needs to be low toxin coffee for sure. And it needs to not be hot or cold, like body temperature would be preferred.

So I think those additions— also breathwork and yoga. Breath is amazing. I mean, the breath alone stimulates the lymph like nothing else. And doing deep diaphragmatic breathing, it's such a simple technique and none of us do it. We stuck our belly in, we hold all that tension in there, and we need to breathe deeply in our abdomen. So if you— and then skin brushing You know, there's so many great things you can add on. So you create a little checklist like that and you go, once a day I'm going to do them. Either all of them or one of them. That's a great fun thing to do. Stick it on your fridge and say, okay, today I'm going to have a green juice. Done. Or if you're doing a program for like 3 days, you want to tick off those 10 things every day. I'm going to get a massage. I'm going to go infrared sauna. Take a day off work on Friday if you can. Use a leave day and have a 3-day long weekend and just go for it. Barefoot, sun, green juices, enemas, massage, infrared sauna, stack it up, and it helps. Just try to do that every 6 months and you'll feel good.

Kind of like changing the oil in your car, take it in for service every now and then.

Exactly.

We're running up on the end of our interview, but first I've got to ask, you've got 316,000 likes on Facebook. What do you do on Facebook? That makes all those people want to come back?

We have lots of fun events. We're doing a Food Matters IQ quiz, which is just coming to a close now. We've done little recipes. We've got tips for people. We've got articles exposing the horrors of the industry. We've got lots of fun things. And I think that people wanted to watch the film and also then continue the journey a little bit. We recommend new films, new documentaries that come out, any books that we love, or any programs or anything that we're enjoying, and yeah, share the love.

What is your Facebook URL?

It's facebook.com/foodmatters.

That's an easy one to remember. And do you have another URL people should go to for either of of your documentaries?

Sure, I think that our homepage is the best for— you can access all of our documentaries, and that's foodmatters.tv. And also the other film is hungryforchange.tv.

All right, we will put those in the show notes for sure so that you can have— everyone who's listening can get access to those if they like. But before we go, there's a question that I've asked every single person who's been on the podcast, And the question is, what are the top 3 recommendations you have for people, not just for food or anything else, but from your entire life that will help them be higher performance? Like the 3 things people should do to kick more ass.

Oh, that's a great question. I think first by far, and I'm not the best at this, and luckily Laurentine keeps me in check with this, is drink more water. Hydration is so critical to make your body work. It regulates so many functions.

You're not the only person to say that, surprisingly.

Oh really?

That's cool.

Yeah. Okay, nice. And if you've ever read a book called Your Body's Many Cries for Water, it's a fascinating read about how important water is for the body on so many levels. Drink more water. I think also for me personally, from a mindset perspective— and I don't want this to sound spiritual, but it might do is that God resides within you as you. I think there is an ultimate potential within our body, and if we hold the belief that we are powerful beings, that we have an incredible potential within our bodies to, to self-heal, to, to, to operate at peak performances, to, to be able to break through barriers that people didn't think possible, that is so critical. And the antithesis of that is if you think you're old or frail or ailing. And we see so many people in our culture say that on a daily basis, and that becomes manifest in their life. So I think God resides within you as you are ultimate, you are the, the number one water and your ultimate potential. Number 3, this is a good one. Because it's about me personally. It's not the advice that are in the films or documentaries. This is a deep question. How do I achieve ultimate performance in my life? What is my secret? What is our secrets? What are the things? Green juice. Green juice for me.

So 2 beverages and God.

Got it. Yeah.

Now, okay, green juice. Since we have like one more minute left. What kind of green juice?

Okay, I wake up and I first of all use a cold press juicer, and I, I have a little bit of a gripe on the centrifugal juicers. But if people say, what type of juices should I use? Well, first of all, use the one you've got. So use whatever you've got to start with. But I prefer a cold press juicer because it juices it in a cooler fashion so that you get more extracted nutrients You get actually more juice overall, 30 to 50% more juice with the cold press juicer. And what I love putting in a juicer is celery, which is powerful, powerful, incredible cucumber, some sorts of greens, leafy greens, whatever you've got, cos, romaine. Then I put in some of the herbs, parsley, cilantro. And I sweeten it with a little bit of lemon or a little bit of lime. Now that cuts the greens, just gives it this beautiful flavor profile. And if you really can't handle it, which you will as you drink it, your body and your, your blood will change and you'll get into it. But to me, that is such a powerful kickstart. Like it's literally a nutrient, a 15-minute nutrient express to health, as one of the guys says in Hunger for Change. And Green juice can transform lives, and it's, it's a little, little nature biohack. You're basically taking some of the best foods in nature, those green plant foods full of the chlorophyll, full of that concentrated sunlight energy and all the nutrients, and then you're extracting it so that even if you've got a beat-up digestive system, whether it's you've got leaky gut syndrome or you've just been eating a lot of fried food, or if you're not eating enough fermented foods, your digestion's shot, then a green juice is going to go straight into your bloodstream. And see, the hydration, the green juice and the water, and then believing that you have— you are at your own ultimate potential. I mean, that's, that's a good spot. They're 3 that I do on a, on a basis, if not daily.

Sounds like a powerful, powerful set of recommendations. James, thanks a ton for being on the show. We'll make sure to get all your links up in the show notes on bulletproofexec.com. and really appreciate the work you're doing. And I can't wait to hear more about your new film, and anything I can do to help you get that message out there in particular, I'm willing to do.

Dave, thank you so much. You're a force for good, and, um, I've learned a few interesting tricks from you as well, and I've been using a lot more grass-fed butter in my, in my day-to-day life. So thank you.

Uh, you're very welcome. Your skin shows it, man. You look radiantly healthy.

Thanks, Dave.

Have an awesome, awesome day.

If you're looking for a way to know which foods are making you weak, check out the free app that we just released called Bulletproof Food Sense. It works by using the phone camera in order to get a measurement of your heart rate, or you can just type in your heart rate if you know what it is from some other monitoring device. You do this before a meal and you do it after a meal a couple times, and based on changes in your heart rate, the application can help you to identify which foods are causing an immune response in your body. Based on that, you can choose to avoid those foods, and you'll find a huge boost in your performance just from not eating the foods that you have sensitivities to. You'll also find that you can lose weight much more easily when you're not eating foods that cause you to feel foggy and inflamed all the time. This app is free. It's called Bulletproof Food Sense, and it's available on the iPhone Store. You can also take a step further, check out Bulletproof HRV Sense. That stands for heart rate variability sense. Bulletproof HRV Sense Sense goes a step beyond Food Sense, and it works with a wireless heart rate monitor that goes around your chest. You wear the heart rate monitor and it'll talk to your iPhone or your tablet, and it'll show you your stress levels throughout the day. It'll help you know whether you're overtrained, overstressed, or even just help you know which meetings are causing the most stress in your nervous system so you can learn to take control of that stress. This is an awesome So number 1, Bulletproof Food Sense is free, and number 2, Bulletproof HRV Sense is a few dollars, and it makes a huge difference in how you manage and control your stress.

The Human Upgrade, formerly Bulletproof Radio, was created and is hosted by Dave Asprey. The information contained in this podcast is provided for informational purposes only and is not intended for the purposes of diagnosing, treating, curing, or preventing any disease. Before using any products referenced on the podcast, consult with your healthcare provider carefully read all labels and heed all directions and cautions that accompany the products. Information found or received through the podcast should not be used in place of a consultation or advice from a healthcare provider. If you suspect you have a medical problem or should you have any healthcare questions, please promptly call or see your healthcare provider. This podcast, including Dave Asprey and the producers, disclaim responsibility for any possible adverse effects from the use of information contained herein. Opinions of guests are their own, and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guests' qualifications or credibility. This podcast may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products or services. Individuals on this podcast may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to herein. This podcast is owned by Bulletproof Media.