INCREASE LONGEVITY: What To Eat & When To Eat TO REVERSE AGING | Mark Hyman

In one week, there was an average reduction in all symptoms from all diseases by 70%.

There's no drug on the planet that.

Can reduce all symptoms from all diseases by 70% a week. It just doesn't happen.

Your body has these master switches that regulate aging, longevity and health. And the key to living long and healthy is.

Does fasting affect high blood pressure?

Yes. When you do any of these, strategies that we talked about. Again, they all activate healing systems. So what causes high blood pressure? It's actually an inflammatory disease. It is a disease of oxidative stress. It's driven primarily by two main pathways. We call it essential hypertension, which means essentially we have no clue what causes it, but we actually do. And the two major drivers, there's others, right? Low magnesium, heavy metals, and so forth. the hormonal dysfunction, there are two major, major drivers. One is insulin resistance or the spectrum of poor metabolic health from pre-diabetes to type 2 diabetes, and that is extremely responsive to any of these strategies. And two, sleep apnea, which can drive all kinds of problems in the body, including insulin resistance and lead to high blood pressure. So you kind of got to look at those two things. And for Intermittent fasting, time-restricted eating, keto diets, fasting mimicking diets, they will all help blood pressure.

All right, fantastic. Next question, how can you get enough calories if you lead an active lifestyle and still want to get the benefits of fasting?

It's a good point. I mean, I often will struggle because I will start to drop weight if I'm not careful. It's great for the 88% of people in America who are metabolically unhealthy and who are overweight or skinny fat. So basically, 9 out of 10 people, awesome. For weirdos like me, it can be tricky. So you have to make sure you in the time that you're eating, in the 8 or 10 or 12 hours that you're eating, that you're getting enough food and getting the right food. So you often have to amp up some of the food you're eating. And it's okay to do that.

As a follow-up question to that, we have another individual asking, I fast all day easily. but once I have dinner, the craving to eat more is horrendous. Why is that? And is there anything that I can do about that?

Yes, so here's the problem. Sugar and starch will jack up your insulin. Insulin makes you hungry and crave more carbs and food. When you load all your calories into a too narrow window, let's say I just eat one meal a day, and you have to get 2,000 or 2,500 calories in one meal, it doesn't matter if it's the best food on the planet, any large meal will trigger an insulin spike. So you have to be, I mean, unless it's just pure fat, like unless you just drink olive oil, then it won't do that. But I don't think most people are doing that. So if you're having protein, that gets turned to sugar, it spikes insulin. You basically will start to jack up insulin, and that insulin is the hormone that makes you crave more food, it makes you hungry and want to eat more, even if you just ate a huge meal. So you want to make sure you're not packing all your calories in one meal. That's a problem.

And it's not just how much you eat, it's also what you're eating during that window that you are eating. Can you just make that distinction?

Sure. I mean, yeah, okay. So here's some interesting data. In time-restricted eating, it works even if you don't change your diet, like what you're eating, right? If you're still eating crap and you do that, It helps fix your metabolism. But it works way better if you eat the Pegan diet, meaning a whole foods plant rich, phytochemical rich, high fiber, high quality fat, good protein diet, which is what I recommend. So actually optimizing your diet will help optimize all these technologies as you're doing them.

Next question we have, should the fasting period get longer as you age over 50?

Should you fast longer when you age over 50?

Should you fast at all after the age of 50?

Well, for sure, you should, and you can, and it's helpful. Because what happens as we age is we need more cleanup. We need more repair. We build more waste. We have more old cells. We need more autophagy, more mitophagy. We need to build more muscle. We need to lose more body fat. We need to reduce more inflammation because as we age, all these things start to go wrong. that are really the result of not having the right strategy for optimizing our health. So the normal course of life in America is the typical American diet is lack of exercise, chronic stress and unmitigated or unaddressed, those things will all accelerate aging. So any of these strategies will help to reverse that and actually reverse your biological age.

So we talked about this before, big picture, but I think it's worth hitting on again. So the question for from the listener is, is it appropriate to continue intermittent fasting during pregnancy?

Yes, no, it's not. I mean, I would not recommend pregnant women do what you're saying is intermittent fasting, which is go for 24 hours or 36 hours without eating. Anybody can go 12 hours, and I think we should, and it's probably good for the baby to do that. Longer periods, 14, 16, you have to see how you feel. But, you know, I think One of the challenges I see with pregnancy is that doctors give women a free license to eat whatever they want. Just make sure you gain weight, make sure your baby's growing, eat ice cream and all this crap. Bad idea. You have to still regulate your diet even more when you're pregnant because you're feeding the baby all the basic ingredients to grow and develop. So if you're not having a high quality diet, your baby is not being made of high quality ingredients. So you want to make sure that you optimize the quality of your diet while you're pregnant and not just the ice cream and crap and that you actually are getting enough calories, which you need more calories, right, because you're feeding two. But it doesn't mean you have to crap and you can do a 12-hour overnight fast, which is fine.

That's called breakfast. But in general, it's really important to focus mostly on this, the quality component of it. And if you're doing that, and you have certain cravings or other things like that, as long as you're eating mostly quality food, you really don't have to worry about timing and fasting. There's plenty of time to do that later on. No, no, no. Another question about women's health. Is intermittent fasting good for balancing hormones?

It's tricky because if you do too much fasting or too much starvation, you're activating systems in your body that are designed to prevent fertility. So you can go overboard. most infertility in women is caused by too much sugar and starch. Insulin resistance. Insulin resistance.

PCOS being one of the big culprits of it.

Polycystic ovarian syndrome, but it's not an ovarian problem, it's a nutritional problem. And there's a book actually by a bunch of Harvard scientists called the Fertility Diet, which is about using an approach that lowers blood sugar to actually help fertility. So if you are one of those women who is insulin resistant, who's overweight, who's got belly fat, somewhere on the spectrum of pre-diabetes. And by the way, 90% of people who have pre-diabetes have no clue. Like I said, almost 9 out of 10 Americans have pre-diabetes. That's crazy, right? We said it was one out of two, had pre-diabetes or diabetes. But this new data from government surveys and lab testing has found that 88% of Americans have either high blood pressure, high blood sugar, or abnormal cholesterol. All of those are symptoms of insulin resistance. right? That's what's causing that for the most part. So when you look at that, you go, well, if you're in that state and your hormones are screwed up and women's hormones do get screwed up, they get a lack of ovulation often, they'll get high levels of estrogen because all the fat tissue makes estrogen, they'll get increases in testosterone because of some of the ways the shunting of estrogen goes to testosterone. There's a whole chicken wire pathways that connects all the hormones of progesterone, estrogen, testosterone, very, very similar hormones. They're just slightly tweaked. You'll get more testosterone, which means you can get hair loss on your head, you can grow facial hair, you get acne, get irregular periods. So intermittent fasting, time restricted eating, all these techniques all will help fix that because it fixes insulin resistance. For men, you know, it's interesting because men also have the same phenomena happen, but a little different thing happens. When they gain belly fat and they're having too much starch and sugar, it increases insulin. which then increases fat cells, which then produce estrogen and lowers testosterone. So a lot of guys who have this will have low testosterone, low sex drive, low sex function, they'll have high levels of estrogen, they'll get loss of hair on their bodies, they'll grow man boobs, they'll kind of get smooth skin, so they look more like women. You've seen these guys, they have the beer bellies, and this is because they're eating so much dark sugar, so it can screw up men's hormones too. and on all these techniques will also fix that.

Do you have any mindset tips to help you through the process of fasting, whether it's time-restricted eating or intermittent fasting?

I mean, you just kind of have to decide to do it. It's not actually that hard. I think, you know, anybody can do 12 hours and then you can try, you know, like if I said, can you walk for one minute? unless you're really old or decrepit or in a wheelchair, most people can walk for a minute, right? Then you walk for two minutes, then you walk for three minutes, and then you walk for four minutes, and then you walk for an hour, right? So it's basically starting to actually push the limits of what your body is comfortable with and starting to notice the effects and the benefits of paying attention. Like I said, your body is the best doctor in the room. It will tell you exactly what works and what doesn't. Pay attention.

Can you have coffee or tea when you're doing time-restricted eating or intermittent fasting?

That's a great question. I have understood that the answer is yes if it's got nothing in it, if there's no milk or sugar or cream or anything else, that it won't break ketosis or it won't cause that. Other people have said it might, but I think my gut feeling is that it probably won't have a huge impact because it's not a lot of calories and essentially it's just caffeine and water, basically.

Are there any other nutrients that you might tell people to include? And the answer could be no when they're in their fasting window. Is there any other things that we're looking for or is it more just letting the body do its thing?

I mean, I think most people, like I said, have always said should be on a multivitamin, fish oil, and vitamin D. that usually covers most of the bases to keep all your metabolic pathways going because you are needing more nutrients as you're fasting to actually clean up the waste, to regulate pathways and all the enzymes, all the functions in your body require nutrients. So I think it's important that people be on something. With that said, I don't think there's a reason to stop. I don't think there's a reason to take extra stuff unless you have a specific goal, like if you're trying to fix your liver or if you're trying to fix your kidneys or you're working on something specific. But I think for most people it's okay to just take a good multi-fish on vitamin D and that they probably not only it's okay, it's probably important to do that while you're doing some.

Type of time restricted or intermittent fasting. What are the biggest mistakes people make.

When it comes to intermittent fasting? The biggest one is when we just talked about people say, well, you know, 12 hours is good, 14 hours is better. If 14 hours is good, 16 hours is better. If 16 hours is good, 20 hours is better. If that's good, 22 hours is better. And it's not, it's not. If you're doing time restricted eating on a daily basis, you want to spread your calories out over that window of eight hours because you don't want to load up your system with too many calories in one meal. That is what will cause more problems. So I really don't encourage that. With that said, people can do other forms of fasting like intermittent fasting where they really are having a full fast for 24, 36 hours, that's okay. But you don't want to constantly load all of your calories into too short a window. That's one of the biggest risks I see.

When it comes to intermittent fasting in the West, meaning North America, a lot of the UK and other places that follow very similar lifestyles, it's often that people will skip breakfast as a way to get into their intermittent fasting. I saw an episode that you did with Valter Longo where he said in most of the world when they practice fasting, especially in the East, they actually do have breakfast and they'll skip other meals in the day because breakfast helps power their brain and give them energy for the day. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Yeah, I mean, I think it depends on you. Sometimes people feel like I feel better if I just don't eat in the morning and I have more clarity and focus, but it also depends on what you eat. When I have my power protein, adaptogenic, microbiome, mitochondrial, immune boosting shake in the morning, I feel awesome if I do it after my workout, but I usually give it at least 14 hours from dinner. So, I'll maybe do it at 9 o'clock or something like that after a workout. Other people, if they have the wrong breakfast, it can really cause huge problems. If you're eating starch and sugar for breakfast, basically dessert for breakfast, which is breakfast in America, folks, right? Cereal, which is 75% sugar, and I like to say I'm a cereal killer. I don't think we should be eating cereal. It's one of the biggest myths and propaganda stories of our time. I think we should not be eating the typical American breakfast, which is pancakes, French toast, muffins, bagels, latte, frappuccino, mocha, vaca, buacas. those probably have 600 calories of sugar in them. Those are not what we should be having for breakfast. We need fat and protein for breakfast. So if you start your day with fat and protein for breakfast and phytonutrients, you're gonna do way better and your brain will be fine. But it's also okay if you wanna skip dinner and have breakfast and eat lunch and not eat late in the day. That's okay too. I think that's a fine way to do this.

There's no trick. You can try both ways and see how you feel. Mark, what else do you wanna talk.

About when it comes to fasting? There's some interesting components that we didn't get a chance to touch on. so I'm going to get a little geeky here, guys, because this is the stuff that interests me and hopefully it'll interest you, which is that there are master control switches for aging and health, and they're often genes that regulate our metabolism and our mitochondria. So when I say metabolism, what does that mean? It means how well does your body burn food. In other words, when you take oxygen and calories that you eat in food and you burn them, they burn in a little part of your cell called the mitochondria. And there's tens of thousands of these in the cells you have. And this system has to work well in order for you to be healthy. Many of the things we do cause our mitochondria to age fast and cause them to slow our metabolism down and to have poor function. And that leads to loss of energy, that leads to all the disease. I mean, everything we see is a mitochondrial disease. Heart disease is mitochondrial, diabetes is mitochondrial, Alzheimer's is mitochondrial, Parkinson's is mitochondrial. I mean, all these things are mitochondrial. So, what are the switches that we can play with that we can use the science of when we eat and what we eat to actually activate these pathways that are embedded in us again that are way, way smarter than any pharmaceutical company than any human being. We've been designed to have these systems that literally will reverse aging. So as we began to study these strategies, including calorie restricted eating, they do a number of things. There's a number of genes in the mitochondria that regulate our insulin and blood sugar and metabolism. DAF-2, FOXO, mTOR, and these are really important genes and sirtuins that regulate all these downstream effects. You want to change the expression of those genes so you can optimize the function of your mitochondria, which is the key to longevity. It's the key to healthy life. It's the key to having energy. So you don't really have to know about all this sciencey, geeky stuff, but these particular pathways around Sirtuins and FoxO and DAF-2 and mTOR, they're all regulated by our diet and by the quality of our diet and by the timing of eating and by all these techniques we just talked about. And, I remember talking to one of the scientists, I was in a longevity conference, it was in Upstate New York, I was at Menla, which is Robert Thurman's retreat center, that's a Tibetan retreat center, and he had the Dalai Lama there. all these Tibetan doctors and every Nobel Prize winner and aging and longevity and health, it was quite a collection of people. And the talks were fascinating. And this one guy from MIT, Leonard Guarente, is the scientist that uncovered this pathway around sirtuins. Now we've all heard, oh, red wine is good for you and resveratrol is great and it can extend your life. Well, he's the guy who kind of figured a lot of that out with David Sinclair. And, I said to him, what's the deal with these HRTUINS? What is the thing that's causing them to be dysfunctional, to cause a decrease in mortality, increase in disease, and how do we fix this? He looks at me and he goes, well, it's pretty simple. It's sugar that messes it all up. So it's literally sugar and starch that are causing all these genes to be dysregulated. So what's the antidote to sugar and starch in our diet? It's intermittent fasting, time restricted eating, keto diet, fasting, mimicking diet, all these strategies are designed to reverse the harm that sugar has done to our cells. So you don't actually have to understand all this kind of fancy terms, but you just need to know that your body has these master switches that regulate aging, longevity and health. And the key to living long and healthy is learning how to activate those switches. So that's the beauty of all these techniques. You just do what they say and it'll do it automatically.

That's beautiful. And sugar can be so addictive. And you've built an entire program around helping people. It's called 10 Day Sugar. You built your whole life around sugar. You've built a great documentary called Fed Up. But the 10 Day Detox Diet, there's a book, it's out there, people can.

Get it, they can follow that plan.

First of all, dairy calcium may not be the best utilized and actually may.

Not allow you to actually absorb it as well as plant-based calciums. For example, chia seeds, sesame seeds, chia seeds. Chia seeds, you know, for a serving of chia seeds, you get as much calcium as a glass of milk without all the problems. And, you get Omega-3s and you get fiber and you get protein, you get all kinds of other benefits. Same thing with sesame seeds. Tahini, which is round up sesame seeds, is probably one of the best sources of calcium. You can get it from greens like arugula, which is very high in calcium. Or even if you like to have canned fish like sardines or salmon, if you have the bones sometimes you can get without or the bones, but if you get it with the bones and you eat the bones, you're gonna get a calcium. So that's really important. As far as vitamin D goes, I mean, if you're living below Atlanta in terms of the, you know, the latitude that you live in and you're out in the sun 20 minutes naked from 10 a.m. till 2 p.m. every day, you might not need vitamin D. But unless that's you, you probably do need vitamin D and that's most of us. and we're very low in vitamin D. So about 80 to 90% are either deficient or insufficient in vitamin D and you should really get it from a supplement. And there are many of them out there, but vitamin D3 between 2,000 to 5,000 a day is safe and effective in keeping your vitamin D levels up and everybody's a little different. Some people eat more, some people eat less, depending on their genetics, but really that's a good range and it's important to just check your levels so that.

You see that you're not too low or too high. for the high quality dairy in limited amounts that you are consuming, what type of dairy specifically are you having and how do you have it?

Well, I don't have dairy that often, but when I do, it's generally sheep or goat cheese. And I don't really drink milk, but sheep or goat cheese from grass-fed or pasture-raised goat and sheeps are great. And you have to be careful because what are they feeding them? is it just hay or are they foraging out in the wild and eating all kinds of plants? So I try to get things that I know are having more exposure to a wide variety of plants with different phytochemicals will end up in the milk. The work of Dr. Fred Provenza is fascinating in this area. He's someone we've had on the podcast a few times, and he's a scientist from Utah State University who spent his whole life studying the behavior of goats and animals and what they forage on and the plants they eat and what that does to them, what that does to their health and to the milk and to the quality and the phytochemicals. It's fascinating. So this isn't just some abstract idea. There's tremendous work being done on this by Fred Provenza and Steven Van Vleet, who was at Duke, and now he's going to be at Utah State, and it's got a lot more funding to look at the ways in which what the animals eat determines the quality of the milk and meat and how there are phytochemicals that are in meaningful levels, sometimes even greater than the plants that are concentrated in the animal products. So we don't think of getting our phytochemicals, which means phyto means plant from.

Animals, but actually we can. Now, talk to us about the raw in raw milk, regardless of whether it's cows, sheeps, goats, or anything else that might be out there. A lot of people see that word and they get afraid and I think the government has done a lot well intentioned again to make people very scared about consuming any kind of raw milk products, whether that be straight milk or potentially cheeses. How worried or not worried should people be when it comes to consuming a type of raw milk in their diet?

I mean, you know, it depends how it's all taken care of and where the animals are raised and how they're raised and the cleanliness. But there is a risk of infection, things like brucellosis, campylobacter, cryptosporidium, E. coli, listeria, salmonella. These are various bugs that can occur in milk that can make people pretty sick. So, I think, you know, raw milk can be obtained in America. But it's highly regulated and you kind of have to get it off the grid and some people just swear by it. But I think there is a risk to it. So I think be careful, know where you're getting it from and make sure that you, you, you know, you're smart about it. Is it kind of like raw fish?

I mean, so many people have sushi and there's so many sushi restaurants around there. Of course, you can still get sick from having raw fish. Is it like that, that you just have to be smart, make sure you.

Go to a trusted place? Yeah. I mean, if the fish has to be prepared a certain way, they have to be freezing at first and then thawing it. There's all kinds of tricks to get rid of the parasites. stuff in the fish. I think the same thing is true. But, you know, if it's a really good place, if there's, if there's really good cleanliness in the, in the milk production system, you know, if feces aren't coming into contact with the milk, if there's making sure they check the animals for infection, making sure that there's no tuberculosis in the animal, making sure that, you know, there's, there's no all, not kind of unsanitary conditions in the milk processing plant or cross-contamination from workers. It's, it's a lot of sort of food safety and hygiene that's required if you're gonna make sure you're safe while you're drinking raw milk.

Do you have a case study of a patient or somebody in your practice that dairy and removing dairy from their diet was a key component of them restoring their health? I know you have yours. You shared yours a little earlier. Is there anybody that you can think of where dairy seemed to be something that was very influential in terms of them restoring some of their function?

Actually, this was even before I was a functional medicine doctor, I was an ER doctor. And I was, I just remembered this patient I had come in who was a little kid, was a toddler, probably three years old, two, three years old, and just one ear infection after the other, one sinus infection after the other. And I, you know, interviewed the mother and I said, well, what, what's the story here? Did this was going on since birth? Did it happen a particular time? When did it start to curse as well? When I stopped breastfeeding and I introduced milk into his diet, I'm like, oh, that's interesting, you know, so getting these kids off of dairy often gets rid of sinus infection. ear infections, the congestion that causes in these kids. So, I think that's a sort of a really simple case. I've had people with cystic acne, I've had people with all kinds of inflammatory skin issues like eczema, psoriasis. So, really when you start to look at it, the common inflammatory diseases that people suffer from in terms of respiratory illnesses, in terms of asthma, in terms of eczema, those are hugely responsive to elimination of dairy. and other patients I remember, you know, severe irritable bowel syndrome, you get rid of dairy and they're good. So it depends on this case and the patient. I mean, sometimes it may be more subtle. There may be other factors that you don't maybe see you have a reaction, but is it is a 60 hormones in milk causing some type of hormonal response that's increasing your risk of cancer, such as prostate or uterine cancer. So I'm very cautious about having consumed people consume a lot of dairy, but I'm okay with people trying, especially European sheep or goat. dairy, which you can get in most stores, like Manchego cheese, a sheep cheese from Spain, not that expensive. So you can get some of the products that are available on the market now from Europe and other places where it's either raw or it's, you know how they've been doing this for thousands of years in the same way and the shepherds are taking the goats and sheep up in the mountains. That's okay.

So one of the challenges in the United States is that we have a lot of our dairy consumption that is associated with sugar consumption because it's very rarely that just people are having straight up a glass of milk. It's often milk and cereal, which are sugary cereals. It's often in the form of ice creams and different creams that are out there or they're adding milk to their coffee. So talk about the combination of sugar and dairy together and just any kind of thoughts you want to share.

Sure, I mean, well, you know, Acne is a huge problem. It affects so many people. I know you've struggled with that. And, and you got rid of it by cutting out dairy. I did. Absolutely. And, and sugar is the other big driver of acne. So that combo, sugar and dairy, it's pretty bad for your microbiome. It tends to cause disruptions that lead to inflammation and acne. It can cause more dysbiosis or yeast overgrowth. So it can, it can create a lot more problems if you're combining sugar. And what's really concerning me is that the government says that we should be having three servings of milk a day for adults and two servings of four kids. There is just no data to support that. It's not my opinion. It's not some, you know, crazy idea that came up out of the hat. This is based on extensive literature reviews in major journals like the New England Journal of Medicine by top scientists. And the reason that those guidelines are in there is because the Dairy Council is essentially promoting with the government the use of dairy and it's hugely influential. So, unfortunately, the whole idea that it's nature's perfect food, that it's a great sports drink, that it helps you lose weight, that it's better for your bones, that it's important for kids to grow is just pure nonsense. I mean, I'm six foot three. I never drank milk as a kid. I mean, I hated milk. I don't know why, but I just didn't like it. It tastes like snot to me. So, I just didn't drink it. My mother would force me to have milk. So the only way she'd get me was have coffee and sugar and milk together. But I really think that we have to be very careful about assuming that the propaganda that we hear from the government is true and do our own homework. And check out this article. Just Google Milk and Health Walter Willett. There's also an article on Medium by Dr. Ludwig that we can link to. that's quite good that is actually about exactly this topic. And I think you should look at that and we'll link to it in the show notes. But it's sort of more less academic, more consumer friendly description of the summary of the findings. But it'll open your eyes pretty big.

Now, there's been a lot of education on dairy. You've been a big part of that over the last decade or more. And dairy sales have gone down in terms of total amounts of sales by millions and millions of dollars. And a lot of that is the education and some of that is also dairy alternatives. Now, dairy alternatives have their own story that we have to be mindful of. When it comes to dairy alternatives and plant milks like almond milks and other options that are out there, oat milks, where can they be beneficial and where do we also have to be mindful about their consumption?

I mean, I think there are problems because, you know, almonds, for example, require huge amounts of water. Many of these are not necessarily grown in ways that are regenerative or restore the soil and the earth. Often they're mixed with sugar and thickeners that are not necessarily good for you. So you have to be very careful about where you're getting your product from, what's in it. Some of the thickeners like the carrageenan is terrible for a leaky gut and causes disruption in your gut. and, and leads to all kinds of secondary inflammatory problems. So I think there's, there's a real importance to understanding how we can choose the right Alternatives. But again, you don't have to think about have to having to have milk. It's not like if you get rid of dairy, it means you have to replace it with something else. Like parents go, well, if I don't feed my kids dairy, what am I gonna give them? Soy milk or almond milk? No, you don't have to give them any of that. Just give them food. I mean, kids in Japan don't have milk. Kids in most of the world never, don't have milk. They just have to whatever they eat. Like, it's not special kids food. It's not, you know, some kind of dairy alternative. It's just food. Now, there's foods, for example, that have a lot of calcium, like soy, which tofu has a lot of calcium in it. They can really help. But, you know, we need to sort of break out of this whole idea that we should be consuming dairy every day for our health, because it just, it's false.

And especially for kids, it can be quite problematic. and if people are going to look for plant milks that they want to use in making a smoothie or they want to add to their coffee, what are the big picture things that they should be looking for when it comes to a brand that they choose?

One, it should try to be organic or regenerative, which is hard to find, although organic is easier. Two, it shouldn't be having any added sugars. Three, it shouldn't have these weird thickeners like carrageenan and xanthan gum and other things which can be really damaging to the gut. And, and before, you probably want to pick things that are, you know, more ecologically friendly. Almond milk is great, but it's also a challenge in terms of the amount of water that's used. And most of the almonds are grown in California, and it's, it's a big environmental issue. So, you know, a little bit of soy milk can be okay. Although I would be careful with that because when you have concentrated soy milk, it can create hormonal disruption. You can use coconut milk, you can use, in fact, macadamia milk, cashew milk, hemp milk. There's a lot of milk. You can even make your own. And in my Cookbook, Food, What the Heck Should I Cook, there's a bunch of recipes for how to make your.

Own nut milks at home. Yeah, one simple hack for people, even though it is very simple to make these milks, you can make seed milks. So you could take things like sesame seed butter, and if you throw that in a blender, turn it on high, blend it really quickly with some water, that's a little hack to create your own milks at home. I personally, I tend to go for unsweetened almond milk. There's some good brands that are at Whole Foods that you can find that.

Are out there, because it's hard to.

Find unsweetened milks in general, so it's a little easier my favorite is milkadamia. Milkadamia, right? That's a macadamia nut milk that's out there. You might have to dig a little bit, but again, we don't have to replace the dairy in our diet with milk, but it is nice to have some plant milks to make smoothie out of or to add to your coffee. So great recommendations over there. If somebody was gonna be in a situation where they had dairy and they know that they're typically don't do well with dairy, are there things that they could take supplements or anything else to mitigate the impact of dairy on their body.

Well, people get confused because there's the effects of lactose, which is essentially digestive, where you drink milk and you get bloating, distension, gas, fermentation, and you just feel like you got a food baby. That's from lactose intolerance, which is an enzyme deficiency. So, you can actually take a replacement enzyme with your meal if you tend to get that and you want to have dairy or your you know, gonna maybe accidentally ingest dairy. So that's available and it's called Lactase. There's Lactaid, there's Lactaid milk. So you can actually buy these products in the drugstore. They're available. That's different than the effects of casein, which is the protein in milk. So that often causes more systemic inflammation, more allergies, autoimmunity, cancer, and acne and all sorts of other issues that are from A1 casein. So, you really want to focus on A2 casein. Now, you can go a2milk.com and there's a website where you can find sources of even cow milk that are from heirloom cows or, for example, Guernsey or Jersey cows tend to have less or very little of the A1 casein, mostly A2 casein. So, it's really available to you. Plus, you can source sheep and goat milk or cheese, which has A2 casein, and typically people can tolerate that better. So, I encourage people to shift over to sheep and goat milk. when they can or sheep and goat yogurt or sheep and goat cheese because it tends to be less inflammatory, tends to be better tolerated, tends to even be easier to digest than traditional milk even with lactose intolerance. But you really want to sort of understand that there's really three big areas for milk. One is lactose, one is casein and what kind of casein. Now, the third of the hormones in milk. So, you know, what kind of environment was the animal raised in? Were they milk while they were pregnant? Were they given extra growth hormones? What was going on? So, all those hormones, those 60 different hormones, they can cause cancer, they can cause various kinds of disruptions in metabolism and increases insulin production in the body. So you wanna be very careful about the, the, these three categories, lactose, casein and hormones, and make sure you're minimizing the effects from lactose, minimizing the, the, the A1 casein and minimizing all the hormones.

The reality is that, that it, it's different. If you're celiac, you'll notice one thing. If you're a non-celiac, gluten sensitivity, you'll notice something.

And if you are just sort of.

Wheat allergy, you might know something different.

If you're just, if you don't have.

Any gluten intolerance, but you're eating it and it's affecting you from the carbohydrate perspective, you're going to notice all sorts of things.

So everybody's different, right?

If you're celiac and you stop eating it, all sorts of chronic problems might get better. Autoimmune diseases might get better. Headaches might get better.

Skin rashes might get better. digestive symptoms will get better. So, people have a dramatic improvement. Same thing with non-celiac gluten sensitivity, people.

Often have dramatic changes in their ability.

To feel better quickly.

And, it doesn't take a long time. It can be a week or more.

Sometimes, people need to stay off it.

For three months to really see like I had a patient who had psoriatic arthritis and she really wasn't getting better until she had the 10-week elimination because.

It takes about three months for the.

Body to heal from the gut damage that happens when you eat glue.

So I, I think people will have.

More energy, their digestion will get better, they'll lose weight, they'll get rid of fluid in their bodies, their guts won't hurt. They might have more normal bowel movements, less reflux. They might have, you know, get rid of things like headaches, migraines. We've done a program called growing a new body or the 10-day detox diet.

Or reset under reset.

And they're all very similar. Essentially, they cut out all that stuff. They had all the grains, processed food, sugar, and it's amazing. In a week, in 10 days, and we did this, I just did this last summer in Spain with a and in one week there was an average reduction in all symptoms from all diseases by 70%.

There's no drug on the planet that.

Can reduce all symptoms from all diseases.

By 70% a week.

It just doesn't happen. So, yes, they were also doing other things. They were eating healthier food. They were getting rid of also dairy and also gluten, obviously. But, you know, it's sort of striking when you see the power of the food changes to change people's biology.

Talk to us about white bread versus wheat versus sourdough versus ancient bread.

Okay, well, there's a lot of different kinds of bread. Most of the bread we eat is from regular wheat, dwarf wheat flour. It's highly refined and it's quickly leavened and it's made into all kinds of bread products that often have added sugar and high fructose corn syrup and it's bad.

No one should ever really eat that.

I hate to say it. Then, you know, sourdough bread, if you're getting, for example, maybe an heirloom grain or you get your flour from, you know, an organic non-dwarf wheat Source, more heirloom grains, there's iron corn wheat, there's current wheat, which is a new strain of wheat developed. Sourdough bread can be very good because it helps to digest the enzymes that may make gluten less of an issue. It's easier to digest, and it's been used for thousands of years with so we're just starting. So that, that's sort of an upgrade and Improvement, but it really depends on the flour you're starting with. If you start off with crappy flour and white flour from dwarf wheat, it's not a good idea. And then there's, then there's, you know, some interesting things where we see in Europe, when people go to Europe, they don't have the same intolerance to wheat that they do in this country. And there, they don't actually use the same wheat. They don't use dwarf wheat. And also, their process of making bread is not like a quick, you know, one hour leavening. And they, they may leaven it for 12 hours overnight. and that changes the composition of the proteins and this gluten and allows it to be less reactive. And then there's, you know, all sorts of other sort of grains that you can use that contain gluten. Like in Germany, my favorite breads are those German rye breads or whole grain breads, and they're not made from flour, they're made from whole grains. So essentially you get a meat slicer.

To cut it because it's so thick.

You stood on it, it wouldn't squish at all. and you can't cut it with a regular knife because it's too dense.

That's really great bread. Nobody's really made that here, but that's.

Made from whole kernel grains. And, and so, you know, whether you're looking at, you know, sort of trying other kinds of gluten grains like spelt or rye or certain oats, I mean, you may be able to tolerate those, or you might not tolerate the dwarf wheat that is the prevalent wheat in this country. But my, my typical philosophy is, you know, if you're not celiac and you're not non-celiac gluten sensitivity or you don't have a wheat allergy, that you probably should minimize your intake of wheat in general. Although you can have, if you have some of these other forms of sourdough or German Rye or einkorn wheat, or you can make your own, that's probably okay from time to time. But again, it, it, it also depends on, you know, how, how dense the bread is, how milled it is, how thin the flour is. Because if you are, if you forget about gluten sensitivity, if you're dealing with weight and metabolic issues, which is almost nine out of 10 Americans, it's the devil. You know, it just spikes your blood sugar, spikes your insulin, makes you gain weight, more inflammation, and you end up in the vicious cycle.

Talk to us about how someone can use the reintroduction process to figure out how well they tolerate or don't tolerate a food like bread.

Yeah, well, I think, I think most people, you know, never really do it properly, which is you've got to stop at a hundred percent. and depending on what's going on with you, you might need to do it for two weeks, three weeks, three months. But you need to go cold turkey, 150, because even a thumbnail full of gluten in that time period can cause a relapse and leaky gut and a reactivation of symptoms.

So the key is to sort of.

Stay off it for a long period of time and then reintroduce it and.

See how you feel.

And then, so you, you just, let's say have pasta or you have bread or you have something and you see how you feel. And if your gut hurts, if your joints hurt, if you had a headache, your nose, Rose is runny, if you feel like crap, if you're depressed, you know, I can go on and on, then, you know, maybe your body doesn't tolerate it.

So you can stop it again, then.

You can try it again. So the best real challenge for assessing food sensitivity is what we call a elimination reintroduction diet. And that's really what we're trying to do is get rid of the symptoms by getting rid of the food and seeing what happens when we add it back. And if we add it back and.

We feel like crap, well, our body's telling us something we should pay attention. Let's talk about a case study from your clinic of maybe somebody that you took off of bread and what you noticed happened for them and their body. Yeah, I just remember a patient who.

Had so many different problems. In medicine, we treat people in silos, right? If you have multiple diagnoses, you see multiple doctors. This woman had psoriatic arthritis, she saw the rheumatologist, she had migraines, she saw the neurologist, she had reflux in an irritable bowel. She saw the GI doctor. She had depression. She saw the psychiatrist. She had migraines.

She saw the neurologist. So.

And she was on different pills for every single one of her issues. And no one really asked, you know, what is really going on underneath it all? And clearly she was, you know, systemically inflamed. Every single one of those diseases, depression, migraines, you know, bowel reflux, arthritis, all of that. All of that is inflammation. even depression is inflammation in the brain. And so we took her off gluten, also dairy, cleaned up her gut, and it was a miracle. I mean, it's not a miracle because I see it all the time, but it seems like a miracle because it's not what we learn in traditional medicine. But she had elimination of all of her symptoms. So no more psoriasis, no more arthritis, no more migraines, no more depression, no more reflux, heartburn. and she lost 20 pounds. She was pre-diabetic as well, so she lost 20 pounds and got off all her medications. And I didn't tell her to stop her medications. She just did on her own. But that's how powerful it is when you, when you get someone off the.

Things that are driving inflammation, it's super powerful. And in her instance, it wasn't that she just stopped bread, although that was a big part of it. She also, it sounds like, stopped a few other things that were common triggers in people's diet. What were some of those other things that she either greatly minimized or, or stopped?

I mean, you know, we, we did a combination thing. We essentially got her on an elimination diet. So gluten, dairy, sugar, processed food. We cleaned up her gut. We got her rid of the bad bugs in her gut. We gave her probiotics, vitamin D, fish oil, and, you know, it was kind of amazing to see how simple the intervention was and how dramatic the results were and. she was able to get off all these medications which were huge amount of money and they weren't even working. She was marginally better and she just was all better.

Is there a protocol or a book or something that people could look up that if they wanted to follow this kind of similar to the program that she followed, that they can pull that up or get that book or... Sure.

I mean, the 10-day detox diet is pretty much the book that was derived from my medical practice where I designed a way of eating that was really universally effective for a whole host of problems from obesity to diabetes to autoimmune disease to digestive disorders, hormonal imbalances because it really just takes out all the bad food, puts in all the good food and puts in the structures and things in place to actually help your body survive and thrive.

Dr.

Fantastic. All right, let's go into some community questions that we've gathered together. So the first one is, why does bread in other countries seem to have a different effect on people and their metabolism.

Yeah, so we sort of touched on this before, but if you go to Italy and you have pasta or your bread, it doesn't even bother people. And, you know, I was in Sardinia this summer and they had no crackers and they had their Sardinian bread that the shepherds would take it, they'd make it in like these giant crackers and they would carry it in their thing and they would just add a little water to it and last for months. It was sort of interesting. But that was made from grano capelli, which is an ancient grain that's from Sardinia. It wasn't modern wheat. much more nutrient dense, full of phytochemicals, full of really beneficial compounds that have more protein, more minerals, less starch, less sugar, and that's full of phytochemicals just like the Himalayan Tartyary buckwheat, for example. So, I think it's really common and also I think maybe not just different strains of wheat but also how they ferment it and do the process of actual leavening, which is a much longer process. rather than just being like, you know, one hour in and out American factories. It's really a powerful way to actually get a lot of the harmful effects of bread minimized. So, I see this universally. I don't, I've talked to Alessio Fasano about it and different theories, but I think that's really what we've come up with.

All right. Great answer. Let's go to the next question from our community that we have here. what factor does Roundup play in the quality of wheat and does it impact any other crops? I'm assuming that they mean Roundup glyphosate being applied to crops, especially to wheat.

Yeah, well glyphosate is also known as, you know, weed killer Roundup. It's used on certain GMO products like soy and corn, but it's basically on 70% of agricultural products. 70%, which is just a staggering number. It's the number one agrochemical used globally. It's been linked to significant damage to the soil microbiome, which our health is linked to, as well as our own microbiome. And, and that also is very much linked to cancer. And there's been, you know, 14, 000 lawsuits and billions of dollars in settlements because of its linked to lymphoma and other cancers. So, from my perspective, you know, it's not used on all wheat, but it is often used at harvest to actually drive an easier harvesting process where they desiccate or basically exfoliate the wheat and all you've got left is the grain and all the leaves and stuff is gone. So, it makes it easier to handle, but the unintended consequence is that it's destroying the microbiome of the soil. which is needed to create nutritional density in the plants because if your soil is dead, the microbes and the organic matter in the soil that you're killing are necessary for the plants to extract the nutrients from the soil. So, you can look at broccoli today and it's half as nutritious as it was 50 years ago because of the sort of damage to the soil. So, I think there's a damage to the soil, there's a damage to our microbiome, the damage to the risk of cancer. So I think it's a problem. I mean, we really should ban it.

You want to know my secret for living a long and happy and healthy life? Well, all I have to do is check out my weekly newsletter, Mark's Picks, where I share my favorite tips for health, longevity, well-being, and lots more. Check it out and link below.

All right, next question from the community. So this person writes in and says, I feel really hungry. when I don't eat breads and carbs with a meal, what can I do? Yeah, so the reason you have hunger.

And a beautiful book by my friend, David Ludwig, he calls Always Hungry, which essentially describes the process of our appetite regulation. And what really is going on is that your appetite is controlled by your carbohydrate load. The more carbohydrates you eat, the more your sugar is going to be fluctuating up and down. And we work in a company called Levels, which uses continuous glucose monitoring on a little patch under your skin. and you can see, you know, when you eat, when you eat foods that are not rich in protein and fat and you're eating rich in starch and sugar, your sugar is going to be up and down like a roller coaster all day long. But if you, if you actually combine protein and fat with your meals, not just carbohydrates, you're going to actually even that out and have a much better balanced blood sugar and you won't be hungry and craving. I'm almost never hungry. The only time I get hungry is if I really, like, busy and I didn't bring a snack, and it might be like, you know, 10 hours since I've eaten them. I get pretty hungry. But I'm amazed at how, when I make my protein fat food in the morning, a shake this morning, I had two eggs, I had avocados, a little olive oil. I mean, that was a great breakfast or I might have a shake with.

Protein and fat in it.

So I think we really have to understand that we can't be eating a lot of starch and sugar all day long because we're just going to want more and more and more. And that's what it's designed to do. It really flips your brain into craving more carbohydrates, more sugar. and so it's really a process of shifting your biology to actually more accommodate fat and protein than accommodating sugar and carbohydrates and starch from bread.

All right, great. Next question. Does Dr. Mark Hyman ever eat bread? And if so, what bread is his go-to and how does he make sure he doesn't eat too much?

Well, I'm pretty good with bread.

I've got into kind of some bread hacks.

I like Lynn's life bread, which is yummy. I make it myself. It takes 10 minutes to make or less. And you can buy it online. I don't have any affiliation with the.

Company, but it's just great bread.

And what was the name of that brand? Just so that people. Lynn's life. Lynn's life. And why? Yeah, Lynn's life bread. You can just Google it and just buy the packets. It comes in little brown packets of powder, you know, seeds and stuff. I also like the German rye bread, so I, I'm not really gluten sensitive, but. but I really like to eat the German rye bread. They have it in America in these packets, which are okay, but you know, they're not like the German bread you get in Germany. It's just fresh. So many whole grains, so much like rich, rich flavor and texture. It's just very different. But it's sort of a good standby that you can get in most grocery stores in America. And that's what I like to use. Sometimes, yeah, sometimes I'll eat bread or wheat and I'm not fanatical about it, but I'm very cautious about not eating too much and not, I don't ever go for the bread basket at the table. I never, you know, will deliberately have a lot of bread. If I do, I'll try to eat sourdough or I'll try to make sure it's organic and not sprayed with glyphosate.

And not dwarf wheat. So, I try all that. Fantastic. We'll have the link for that Lynn's Life in the show notes for people that want to check that out. Okay, next question from the community. Can you tell me why wheat affects me so negatively now that I'm post-menopausal? My joints and especially my left hand ache terribly. I even think it affects whether I snore or not.

Yeah, for sure.

I mean, you know, when you're, you know, as you get older, your gut can break down, you can get more leaky gut, you can get more inflammation. So I think, you know, we can get this at any stage of life, but often people will find they're getting more intolerant as they g as they're more unhealthy as they get older. It doesn't mean you can't maintain your health as you get older. It just means if you don't focus on it, it's gonna decline. And that's probably what you're experiencing that it just creates more leaky gut, more.

Inflammation and it's probably good for you to not to take it at all. All right. Next question from our community. If I buy pasta or wheat that's made in Italy, does that help me sidestep the issues with American wheat? Can I have as much bread as I want?

Well, yes and no.

I mean, I would say if you're.

Gonna go for pasta or something, yeah, get the Italian pasta, heirloom pasta or pasta, that's great. As far as eating as much as you want, no bread is bread is bread. I mean, unless you're eating that German bread that I mentioned where you literally can stand on it and it doesn't squish, you need a meat slicer to cut it and you can't cut it with a knife because the knife would break, then okay, the highly pulverized, you know, extremely fine flours that we use in this country to make bread are extremely dangerous. Look, if you're like, oh, well, I don't care. I'm just gonna drink a Coke all day.

Well, fine. And eat bread.

But, like, think whenever you eat bread, think like you're drinking a Coke and.

Think twice about what that does to you. So I would be very cautious about it. Oh, that's great. I think you recently had an episode with Dan Buettner, who created the Blue Zones and went out and did a bunch of research on them. And most of those longest living societies, even the one that you visited in, you know, Italy, they're not having the bread that we think of on a regular basis. So, even if you might find bread from Italy or Europe is a little bit more tolerable, I just was in France. Sure, you might have a croissant here or there when you're on vacation, if you don't feel as crappy as you do when you have it in the U.S. But, that doesn't mean that it's a health food that is a staple as a regular part of our diet.

No, if you have dessert once in a while, fine.

But, it's like that.

Think of it as dessert or as.

A can of Coke.

And then, you know, should not be your staple.

All right, last question from our community here. If I don't feel bad eating bread daily, do I still need to give it up? Is it still worth trying to give up bread for 30 days?

You never know.

I mean, I always say people never know how bad they feel until they start feeling good.

Right.

So you just could have this low level. Level of inflammation. You think it's normal. It's how you feel. Mental Clarity, energy, Focus. digestion, skin, hair, nails, all that can change really quickly when you get off the foods that are inflammatory. So I encourage you to do it anyway. Even 10 days. 10 days is amazing. That's why I created the 10-day detox. And we'll see people have dramatic changes. So it doesn't have to be your.

Whole life but try to check it out because you might really notice something changing your health. All right, Mark, somebody watches this video, they're inspired, they want to try either an elimination diet or they wanna step out of having bread. for 30 days to see if it makes a difference in their health. What are some of the first steps they take after watching this video?

I mean, you know, don't eat flour. Get rid of sugar and flour. I would say it's so powerful for people and just start to notice how you feel. Notice day 1, 2, 3, 4, first few days you might feel bad. Often when people oh, there are a.

Few other things I didn't really mention about wheat that are a problem. One is that it's preserved with something.

Called calcium propionate in this country, which can cause a lot of neurologic effects and it's caused ADD and behavioral issues in kids. And it also contains, you know, when you're digesting gluten, you create something called gluteomorphins, which are peptide like small protein kind of like fragments that go to the brain and act like morphine or heroin. And they, they are called literally, they're called gluteomorphins and they can cause behavioral issues. We see this in schizophrenics and autistic kids and it can make you a little crazy. So, I think nobody knows how we're affected until we stop. And, that's really why I encourage people to take a break.

When you fast, your body will build new stronger mitochondria. It's really important for aging. As we age, we lose the ability to combine air and food effectively. And, a lot of people have heard about intermittent training or high-intensity interval training, you know, where you just exercise really hard for a brief period of time. And then the body's like, oh man, I might have to do that again. I guess I should get strong. So fasting is kind of the same thing, but for the mitochondria in the cells, they go, oh, I might have to skip some meals again. I guess I should get strong. And everyone over age 40 has mitochondrial deficiency unless they're actively managing it. And 48% of people under age 40 have early onset mitochondrial deficiency, according to research by Frank Shallenberger. who's been on my show. Has he been on yours? He's one of the guys.

No, but he's ozone guys. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And he measures mitochondrial efficiency with a very serious set of oxygen masks and all kinds of stuff. So it's real data. So, okay, number one, let's fix our mitochondria with fasting. Number two, your pancreas and to a certain extent your liver makes enzymes and their job is to break down proteins and other food items that you eat. It's also enzymes job to go into the body and fix stuff. So you can only make so many enzymes per day. It's the maximum enzyme production capacity of the body. Well, what if because you're not eating protein, you're not eating carbs during the fast, what if the pancreas is available to make enzymes for healing the body instead of for digesting food? It will do that. and those two things work really well for aging. And there's a bunch of other things around AMPK, which caffeine or coffee can help with, sirtuins, and not a lot of people are talking about supplementation during fasting because some supplements break fasting. And since I wrote a lot about anti-aging supplements and all the other technologies and techniques in Superhuman, I really got into the science about what supplements should you take when you're fasting and which ones should you not take.

And tell us, tell us.

And this is stuff I haven't seen online. And this is from, you know, combing PubMed, and I do a lot of background research when I write a book. So one of the most important enzymes that I think people should be taking when they fast to accelerate this breakdown of old tissues in the body, break up scar tissue adhesions, is proteolytic enzymes. And the most common one is called serrapeptase. and there are other formulas that I mentioned in the book that are essentially, Hey, pancreas, now you don't have to do that. And these can break up the stuff that makes your blood sticky, like called thrombin and fibrinogen. And if you do that when you're fasting, you're getting a whole deep tissue work out there that's really powerful. A lot of people who fast also miss out on electrolytes, good old-fashioned salt. is something that's important, especially in the morning when you first wake up. Some sea salt or Himalayan salt is a good idea, as well as magnesium and potassium. So when you add these precious minerals in during a fast, you actually feel much better and you're keeping your body more balanced. Yeah, it's so true.

I literally take electrolytes every day. I have a little bottle of a liquid electrolytes. I just squirt into the water. I drink. Tom Brady does it. Drink water without electrolytes, which may explain his longevity and health. And I think when people get hydrated, they think, oh, I'm just drinking water. I'm going to be But the truth is, you want your inside of your cells to be hydrated.

Yes.

The only way to get your inside of your cells hydrated is by having enough electrolytes. So if you just drink water without electrolytes, you can literally die.

Yes. People do that in marathons all the time.

In marathons, right?

They.

Dilute their blood. So the salt in their blood goes so low that it causes seizures and coma and death. so you need electrolytes. You really do. Afraid of those. And I think, I think for interest, cellular hydration, it's a really important strategy that most people don't use. And I, I think I'm a big fan of that in terms of really dealing with the fundamental hydration status of.

The body that makes everything else work better. One of the things I do is I drink mineral water, which has a substantial amount of electrolytes in it. There's calcium, magnesium, potassium. There's probably less sodium in but I get plenty of sodium in my food. And it's funny, when you're fasting or when you're not fasting, a little bit of salt when you first wake up takes the load off your adrenal glands. And when you're fasting, it is a state of stress on the body. And it's not a bad stress unless you're already really stressed, in which case I tell you, maybe you ought not to fast. If you got a bad night's sleep, your jet lagged, it's okay, have some breakfast. Just have some protein and some fat and breakfast. Don't have a lot of carbs and you're gonna feel better. So, electrolytes help. The other thing is when you do the prebiotic fiber, that means that you have more water sitting in your digestive system longer and it can absorb better. So, it turns out having fiber helps you stay hydrated. And if you do fiber and electrolytes together even during a fast, some people still say, oh wait, you can only have water during a fast because that's what the mice did. I'm like, yeah, but we're not mice and we have jobs and the mice just sit there and run on a wheel if they feel like it. what we want to do is get the benefits of fasting. And having a caloric surplus during a fast isn't going to work, but we're talking not very much from a calorie perspective and very specific types of calories that your body either doesn't use or doesn't use in a way that's going to break the fast. So you add your electrolytes, you add your digestive enzymes, and away from those, the other supplement that I talk about in Fast this Way that's really important is activated charcoal. Now, we talked about LPS at Lipo polysaccharide, those- Wait, before you get into.

The charcoal, explain what kind of prebiotic fiber you're talking about. Give us an example of some prebiotic fibers that you'd use.

There are now a great variety of prebiotic fiber products on the market, and certainly I formulated one for Bulletproof, but the primary ingredient in many of them is acacia gum, which is basically a sap from a tree that is shown in studies to feed the good guys. You can also add a variety of oligosaccharides. Hydrolyzed guar gum is another one that's out there. And, there are literally dozens of formulas that are designed to be prebiotics. And, I wrote a lot about these and looked into the anti-aging effects of getting enough of this is called soluble fiber. This is not the chunky sawdust kind of metamusil or psyllium husk. I don't mean those. What I mean is the stuff that dissolves in water. And you do that and magically you'll probably have healthier poop, but most importantly you're changing the ratio of the bacteria in your body. You can also take probiotics with prebiotics and doing that during a fast is okay as well. In fact, at that point, if you eat nothing and then you take the good guy prebiotic and the good guy probiotics, you're crowding out the bad guys pretty effectively. You might as well do that. You were fasting anyway. You didn't have breakfast. It's pretty easy to to do now.

Now, if I, if I do too much fasting or inter, even intermittent or time restricted eating, I'll tend to lose too much weight, which I probably shouldn't advertise in public.

But it makes, it makes people jealous, right?

Yeah. I mean, I, and I, you know, I've worked hard at optimizing my metabolism, so I think I, I do very well, but, are there some people who shouldn't really be doing this? Um, that it's, it's too much for their system.

There's a whole chapter for women in Fast this Way that's really important because Mark, you and I know this, we probably don't say it enough. Most of the studies that you'll find on PubMed, they were done on young white men. And that's because that's who was in college. And they used college students as guinea pigs. And until about 20 years ago- I.

Was being the research.

Yeah, exactly. These guys are cheap. They're fodder. And For women, fasting really is different. I have routinely seen women who go on a full ketogenic diet. This is why I've always recommended cyclical keto. That's at the core of the bulletproof thing. Cyclical keto with low-tox in plants. And when you get that dialed in, it still can be a lot for women. So during certain times in your cycle, you know, it's okay to have breakfast. You already have enough biological stress. So you want to do your intermittent fasting on days when you're in pretty good shape. and you don't want to do it when you're completely wrecked.

There's a benefit if you're not doing it every day, like you get, if you do it three days a week, is that good?

I think for women, especially women who have a meaningful amount to lose or if they are in perimenopause, especially try it three days a week or five days a week, but have breakfast a few times and don't have, you know, a bowl of carby cereal, but have some eggs and, you know, salmon or whatever you like for breakfast. What you're going to find there is that if you do intermittent fasting every single day and your metabolism isn't up for it. It's too much of a stress. And the idea of stress is turn stress on, recover, turn stress on, recover. But if you just turn stress on and stay that way, after about six weeks, what you'll find is that women hit the wall first and their thyroid goes off and their sex hormones go off. So their cycle becomes irregular. They don't feel as good and their sleep quality goes down first. Guys take another couple of weeks on that. If they're living a normal stressful life, like, wait a minute, what happened? After you're used to it, after you've become trained on this, you can fast pretty much every morning if you want to. Me, I do an intermittent fast five days a week. Saturday morning, I have breakfast with the kids and sometimes Sunday morning too. And you know what? Sometimes I even have carbs for breakfast, even though it's not good for me.

Because it was a Saturday morning, right? I just don't have gluten and corn syrup. Exactly. Pancakes. That's right. But they're almond coconut flour pancakes that.

Are from my cookbook, Food, what the heck should I eat? Which are really good. you know, I do have that cookbook in the kitchen. My 13 year old daughter reads it. So, yes, Mark, that, that is a good book.

So, so I want, I want to sort of dig in a little geeky science here with you because I think that most people don't realize that all these strategies have a reason that we were designed and exquisitely adapted to starvation. We weren't designed to deal with the amount of abundant food supply we have now, which is about 700 plus calories more a day. than we had per person 50 years ago. Right. Where is it going? It's going in all the junk food, processed food. I mean, snacking, that's a whole other invention that I don't even understand that is just a way to sell more junk that we don't really need to be doing. And so I, I'm not a big snacking person. If you, if you have to snack.

Your last meal was broken.

That's right.

And that's, that's a big part of, of the message and fast this way. You've got to eat in such a way that you don't have cravings and then fasting becomes painless. and my kids have learned this. My daughter, when she was 10, she said, Daddy, we get to school and right away they start trying to make us have a snack. Don't the other kids have breakfast? I'm not hungry until lunch. And she literally asked me that. She was just really genuinely curious and it was so cute, but it was also so sad because some of her friends, their parents are vegan and doing their best. Their kids have a green apple for breakfast. You know how hungry green apples make you?

How could you ever focus on a green apple? It's terrible. It's terrible. And so what I was saying was that when you look at our genetic adaptation, it's to starvation. So we have all these biological mechanisms that optimize our biology in the face of scarcity. And we clean up house, we clean garbage. You were mentioning the sort of mitochondrial renewal. There's something people have heard about called autophagy, which is where you eat your own tissues and cells and recycle them. It's just like a recycling plant that gets rid of the garbage and the old stuff. You also have mitophagy, which is a way to recycle and renew mitochondria. It all happens with the fasting. And, and in fact, there's a great book, I'm sure you've heard of it, that I read years ago called ending the first cause of death. And it's all about, it's all about this. Exactly. And this whole idea that was, I mean, decades ago, because Sid Baker, who's one of my functional medicine mentors, probably the real grandfather of clinical functional medicine, told me about it. And I was like, wow, this is great. It's a little book, a little dense, kind of geeky, but it's just up your, up your, up your, absolutely there, Dave. And, and so the idea is that when you, when you do that, all these things happen. you increase your cognitive function because you want to be able to find the next meal. So your mental alertness and acuity improves. Your metabolism increases the fat burning so you can burn off your fat stores. You lose belly fat, you increase muscle mass, you increase bone density, you reduce inflammation, you activate your antioxidant enzymes, you increase stem cell production. So you literally go into a full, full on rehab repair. and remodel. It's like, it's like getting your old car and taking it to the body shop and cleaning out all the junk and putting in new parts. Essentially what happens when you do this kind of eating. So I think for all of us, it's, it's worth thinking about how do we do this? And that's why your book, Fast this Way is such a great addition to this whole literature because it really guides people on how to do it. I love the, the subtitle is fastest way burn fat, heal inflammation and eat like the high performing human you were meant to be. And I think all of us settle for being less than high performing humans. We all settle for what I call FLC syndrome. That's when you feel like crap. And we don't often know we feel like crap until we don't. And that's why I encourage people to check this book out fastest way and do what Dave's telling you, because it works. And unless you've tried it, unless you've given your body the gift of this experience of learning how to modulate your food intake to change the timing, the frequency, the quality, the kind of food you eat to try some of these hacks. You're not going to really know what's available to you. So, sort of like, you know, Dorothy in her ruby red slippers. She didn't know she could go home all the time with click in her heels. Or, you know, if you've had an elephant standing on your foot your whole life and the elephant finally gets off, you'll go, oh, my God, that's what it feels like to not have an elephant on me. But we just don't know how, how we can actually feel. So talk about the ways in which you've seen changes in yourself and others who follow this because it's so important for people to get it. And talk about once you do that, the various kinds of ways that people are fasting and what you really recommend.

Mark, you've talked about the genetics of aging. I mentioned that 300 pounds. I had arthritis when I was 14. I had all the diseases you expect when you're 70, when I was in my 20s. so I did not get that great genetic start and if I can walk around at 48 with about 10.2 10.5 body fat the New York Times says that I'm almost muscular and I don't.

Over you're slacking you're slacking Dave I'm like seven percent I don't know what is going on with you I know like we're in a competition to get to 180 but like you know you gotta work on that three percent there.

Dave I'm I'm feeling I feel like a failure right now it's it's one of , there are things though where, where that, that idea of fasting as being as important as exercise may be more important than exercise, although I think they're both important. Um, why is it that people are willing to spend an hour a day in a spin class, which is probably creating over training anyway, but they're not willing to skip breakfast. Sometimes I think skipping breakfast is, is easier and it's okay to do both. Uh, it's just from a, a return on investment thing that it's the most important thing that, that I could think of, even if you're not committed to changing your diet, even if you're going to eat all the things that you and I know are not real food, fasting can still help. It's just a lot easier and it helps more if you eat the right way. And one of the things that's really behind Fasting Mark is the idea that fasting is just going without. And in the book, I talk about, okay, let's think through what happens emotionally when you say you're going to go without something. We have other kinds of fasting that you probably haven't thought of. The keto diet is fasting from carbs. The vegan diet, is fasting from animals. I don't know why you'd want to do that if you want to live healthy for a long time, but maybe for a couple weeks to turn on.

That's another podcast.

And hey, go Pegan, there you go. The thing that's also happening, you fast from substances that's called addiction or sobriety, addiction treatment or sobriety. And we have fasting from people, it's called solitude. And we have fasting from the end of the book, I actually tell people faster from hate, right? I also talk about fasting from sex or at least porn for a brief period of time, because your body feels like you're, you're gonna die if you don't have sex frequently. You're not going to die if you don't have sex for a couple of weeks. You're not going to die if you don't have food for a month, but you feel like you're going to die if you don't have food for a brief period. We're talking about skipping breakfast, but the body is like, no. So that's the thing. How do you create a sense of safety? when you're going without something that you think you need, that you feel like you need, but you know you don't need. And just by doing that for brief periods of time, it's just like lifting weights. It's just like exercise, but it's exercise for your emotional body. It's exercise for your spiritual body. It's exercise for your physical body, including those subcellular things that you just talked about. And when we change our mindset to fasting is just exercise, we can do exercise, right? And you might feel like you're going to die on the treadmill, but you know you won't and you do it anyway every day. So, It, we're just gonna normalize fasting and also acknowledge Mark, there are a.

Lot of painful than my workouts. My trainer, I was like, I don't know, that's my, like, no more reps, please. Yeah, he makes me do, he makes me do push ups with bands. You know, you put like a, oh, that's so cool. I love bands.

Like, I'm like, holy cow. Well, I mean, you are looking a little bit bigger in the shoulders there. So all that Tom Brady stuff seems like it's working. Yes, it is. There was something else, I know I'm not exactly answering question, but you mentioned Tom Brady, the other part of his longevity, he figured out, like I did, that nightshades, the lectin problem with nightshades, for me, but not for everyone, for.

About a third of people.

Man, those things cause cravings like no one's business. If you give me nightshades like potatoes or bell peppers or eggplants, man, I want to eat sugar like no one's business.

Right?

So you got to find the foods that don't trigger.

How can you give up tomatoes? I just can't give up tomatoes.

Yeah, I'll still eat some fresh tomatoes. I take out the seeds and you peel them and this is, It was.

A core part of the tomato off the vine in the garden in a hot August summer day. Well, you have a garden.

I live in an organic farm and that's something that I also would encourage people to fast from junk food and industrial meat and things like that.

Now, there's as fast as I can get behind fast from industrial food.

I love that.

It's a real type of fast. You say, look, I'm going to go without because there are people, in fact, a great people listening right now, they're going, you mean I can't have Skittles? I can't have Reese's peanut butter cups? I can't have Cheetos or whatever thing is. Well, you can have them. I'm telling you that fast from them because your body feels like you're going to die if you don't have those. And the side effect of a fast like that, Mark, is as you all know, it builds soil. And we have pigs, sheep, turkeys, chickens, and a great number of vegetables growing on my organic farm. I feed my local community and I am building soil like no one's business. We recovered a five acre gravel pit using animal manure. and turned it back into fertile soil and we're restoring the forest on a part of the property. When you choose to do that kind of a fast, you can still eat, but you're giving back to the planet and the work you've been doing lately on food policy and all that stuff, that is also a part of the fasting world. You are choosing to go without the things that make you weak, even though there's a part of your body that wants you to eat those and you are becoming master of that part of your body. and when you're a master of that part of the body, the side effect is you're nicer to everyone around you because you're eating better food.

Of the categories of things that at this point, based on what we've learned, I would not really eat anymore would be certain candies, which I'll go into each of these in more detail, cereals, certain cereals, soda for sure, fast food, and lots of common takeout. So when we look at candy, this is actually really interesting. The worst food in our entire data set of 51 million glucose data points is... I want to hear this. Drumroll, please.

Skittles. Skittles.

Skittles.

Wow.

Not surprising because it's a refined carbohydrate. Obviously there's refined sugar in there, but it's also kind of a naked carb, right? It doesn't actually have fat, protein, and fiber. A Snickers bar at least has some fat and some protein. the Skittles are just like naked carbs. So the Skittles have an A- Naked carbs.

I love that term. I never heard that.

I love that. They're just on their own, you know, like, and you can think of like fat, protein and fiber as kind of clothing the carbs. So, so Skittles have an average glucose rise in our data set of 83 milligrams per deciliter. So that's certainly gonna take you out. It's way more than a Coca-Cola and you are going to almost inevitably crash after that type of spike because of course when you spike that high, you release all this insulin to soak up that glucose out of the bloodstream and that huge surge of insulin can overshoot. You know, you can, it just, the body responds sort of in an exaggerated way. You take up all that glucose and then people often dip to below their baseline and have that reactive hypoglycemia after the spike, which is when they feel shaky, tired, lethargic. Yeah, exactly. The beauty of achieving more of the gentle rolling hills is that you don't end up having that reactive hypoglycemia that can make you feel really crappy, that post-meal slump that people are often like, oh, I just need a cup of coffee or something. It's like, no, it's the Skittles. And so Skittles have a huge, the other candies that are in the worst part of our data set are Sour Patch Kids, Caramel Corn, Twizzlers, and Jelly Beans. So, you notice they all are similar. They're all these kind of- Jelly beans. Not chocolatey, no protein, no fat, just straight congealed sugar, basically. So, those are the candies.

We used to have those things when I was a kid. It was like this powdered stuff, licorice made or something. I forget what it's called. You put a stick in your licorice, your pure sugar.

Yes, and the stick was made out of sugar too, wasn't it?

Like a candy stick.

I don't remember seeing that anymore. I don't really look for it, but I've I was like, that was my main go-to thing. It's like when I was six, seven years old, I wanted a lollipop. It was like a fentanyl lollipop, you know?

I mean, we use sugar as a pain management tool in hospitals. You know, this is abhorrent, but when children undergo circumcision in the hospital in their first days of life, what do they give them for pain medication? This little dropper called a Sweeties, which is just sugar water. That is the analgesic. So it's like exactly like you said, it literally is like a fentanyl lollipop. So that's candy. So yeah, so get rid of the Skittles. You know, a Snickers bar literally has half the glucose spike of Skittles. So it's pretty amazing. Then it's cereal.

Oh my gosh.

Get the cereal out of the house.

You should eat those. So you mentioned takeout and other things too, right?

Well, just to tell about the cereals, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, Honey Nut Cheerios, Lucky Charms. about 60 or above on glucose responses.

Wait, wait, wait.

Honey, not Cheerios. So we think honey is good, nut is good, and Cheerios are good. So it's like actually just a wolf in sheep's clothing, it sounds like.

After Cinnamon Toast Crunch, that's the worst, yeah.

Oh my God. Worse than Froot Loops or pebbles or cocoa puffs or any of that.

Those, you know, I haven't checked those precisely in our data set, but when you look at just like the top 50 worst foods that people log, all three of those, I mean, these kids are going to school after having these spikes and crashes. And, you know, Mark, like a lot of them are probably eating a glass of OJ on the side, which, you know, these are isolated food logs.

So, I mean, you know, Casey, I just break in for a minute. I remember when I was filming the movie fed up.

Yes.

And one of the, one of the scenes was where the mother was like trying to get her kids to lose weight and her family to lose weight. And she's like, well, what I really focused on is healthy breakfast cereals. And she pulls out these cereals that are marketed as, quote, health foods. I mean, Kellogg, who invented breakfast cereal as a breakfast food, which wasn't a thing, right? These are basically dessert for breakfast. It's 75% sugar. And it's, that is, you know, having a soda with breakfast. So I think, I think people need to get that cereal and starch for breakfast is a huge no-no. If you can do one thing to change your biology quickly, it's get rid of any starch or sugar for breakfast.

Yes. You said that it's like eating sugar for breakfast. I will up the ante here. It's much worse than eating dessert for breakfast. Peach pie has an average glucose spike of 46 milligrams per deciliter. Cinnamon Toast Crunch is 59. It's, you know, and they both have, of course, the refined seed oils and the flour.

It's worse.

So, okay, give me the peach pie. I love.

I know.

Exactly. Exactly. So you mentioned, you know, breakfast, getting rid of the breakfast foods that have the refined starches. This has been one of the most fascinating things we've seen because all the common American breakfast foods are in the worst hundred foods that score and, and Just to run through them really quick, we're talking about, this is in our Worst 50 Foods, Egg McMuffin, Bagel with Cream Cheese, French Toast, Pop-Tarts, Cereal, English Muffin, Blueberry Scone, Cinnamon Roll, Cheerios, Croissant, Toast with Jam. Those are all above a 40 milligram per deciliter spike. So that's a big spike. It's a lot. It's a lot. If you look at then the best foods in our data set, like very little glucose spike. spike, you also see a handful of breakfast foods. And so these are the ones we want to eat.

Like what?

We see frittata, we see avocado and egg, avocado and greens, chia pudding, Greek yogurt and berries. And we actually see this, a lot of people log this, I think because Kelly LeVeque is sort of close in our network, but we get a lot of logs for the Fab 4 Smoothie, which is a smoothie that she has popularized, which is really balanced. It has very minimal fruit, a lot of protein, fiber, fat, and greens. And all of those that I just mentioned all score below 20 milligrams per deciliter. So, you want to get-- I mean, it's basically, Mark, it's the Pegan diet. People can read your book and it's the beautiful nutrient-dense foods that none of those have refined carbs. And I think people sometimes assume that, oh, if I'm going to have a keto breakfast or a low-carb breakfast, I need to eat the animal products. that's not true. Half of those things I just mentioned don't have animal products. The Fab Four Smoothie, the chia pudding, you could do non-dairy yogurt with some berries, some avocado, with, you know, and so, so that's just something important to remember that breakfast is this one's straightforward. Don't eat those first things. Eat those things. So fat and protein for breakfast.

Get rid of the starch and sugar. Yes. Very important. And I, you know, I think it's super important. I mean, I used to, in my sugar detox book. I created a smoothie, which essentially nuts and seeds. So it was raw nuts, almonds, walnuts, beacons, whatever, hemp seeds, chia seeds, flax seeds, putting in, like, cranberries, which is actually very low glycemic, the lemon, maybe some berries, unsweetened macadamia milk or whatever. And it's, it's like basically. And greens you can put in there an avocado, and it's basically a protein and fat smoothie. smoothie. It tastes delicious.

Yeah.

And it's not all the typical. I mean, oh, my God. Like things like Ensure, Boost, all these sort of meal replacement things. Most, you know, traditional smoothies are full of sugar, artificial sweeteners or processed, highly processed protein powders. I mean, it's so good to get just real food. So I love that real food smoothie. I want to ask you a couple more questions. So there are, there are a bunch of things you learned just because this is such a new area. We're just learning about in real time what happens to real people. in a continuous glucose monitoring setting, which people have to realize this is not a technology that's been around for a long time. It's relatively recent and it's even more recent that it's being used at scale by non-diabetics. So, that's a huge thing. We're just learning stuff that we've just never had insight into before and Levels is capturing that data and making sense of it. It has so many beautiful lessons. And, for you, I mean, for anybody listening, you know, Levels is going to be launching, it's a great technology to actually see what's going on with your own biology. And I was super surprised too and shocked. And, I'll just give you a little anecdote of what happened to me. But, the first night we got it, I used it. I was at my friend's and we had this big dinner. We ordered all the healthiest food from this regenerative farm and lamb and these veggies. It was so healthy and non-sugar. There was no starch.

It was amazing.

And, we ate so much food. We just ate a huge volume of food of healthy food.

Food.

And we both were like going to bed checking our sugar and texting each other like, what happened? Our sugar is like 160. This is freaking me out. What's up? Like, I think any big meal also can cause a spike. But there's, there's a few things you learn. One is, what are the surprising things you learn that we should really never eat? I mean, sorry, that we should, that, that actually spike your blood sugar that, that are surprising to you and, and in what foods might not actually Spike your blood sugar, but you still should.

Get kind of This is such a great question. You asked for some surprising foods that spike blood sugar. I want to preface this answer by saying that some of these foods, it's not necessarily that you should avoid them completely because they're actually nutrient-dense whole foods. It's that it's good to be aware of how they're affecting you so that you can figure out how to eat the food in some different way. Maybe eat a smaller portion, maybe pair it more with fat, protein, and fiber. take a walk afterwards. But the intention is not to hear these foods and then say, oh, I can't eat that again. It's not a good food. So this brings me to one of the first ones, which is certain fruits. There are certain fruits that spike people on average a lot more than others. The ones that we see in the data set are banana, which is maybe not that surprising, but grapes. Grapes have an average glucose spike of over 40 milligrams per deciliter. whereas like a mandarin orange for instance is like 20. So it's a very big difference. We also see even within fruits like different types of oranges, a mandarin orange has a low spike. A sumo orange is almost double that. And I mean those sumo oranges are like so unbelievably delicious and you know it also could be kind of a size thing but you know chop up those oranges, put them in some yogurt and have add some zen basil, you know seeds or chia seeds or something with tons of fiber. It's going to potentially blunt that spike. So fruit juice is not a huge surprise, but orange juice, huge spike, average of 40 milligrams per liter. So I would say, of course, avoid liquid sugar, which I would consider juices to be liquid sugar. But certain fruits do have more of a spike than others for sure. The next one, corn on the cob. Average glucose spike of 46 milligrams per deciliter, which is the same as- what.

If you lather it in butter?

Maybe doing some grass-fed. Yeah, I think it's a good point.

Grass-fed beef with it as before?

Or grass-fed butter, some really nice butter, some ghee. I actually put corn now. I only use corn really now within recipes because I know that if I eat corn alone, it's gonna spike me. So for instance, I make these really great hearts of palm crab cakes. So they're crab-less crab cakes and they have some corn in there. They don't spike me. I eat it with an avocado relish. There's lots of other stuff going on. So I just have figured out how to balance it to not spike me. We also see big spikes to some foods that are totally marketed as low carb. Like, I hate to throw some certain brands under the bus, but Smart Sweets, they market themselves as having significantly less sugar than other candy. But they have a higher glucose spike on average than a cinnamon roll. So, what? That's where marketing, people are like, oh, eat the low carb candy. You got to test it on yourself. And then this one was interesting. So the fasting mimicking diet has become really popular.

And actually, yes.

Oh, this one in our top 10 worst scoring foods. So right next to Skittles.

Is... You mean the Passiflora making diet, the Prolon diet?

The tomato soup has an average glucose spike of 53 milligrams per deciliter. I don't quite know... It wasn't the whole program.

It wasn't the whole program. This is an individual food.

Yeah.

One of the soups.

So, I need to talk to Valter.

Longo and tell him to swap out that soup. You should just send it to him. I will.

I'm going to. I'll send in the episode. You know, we, we... We have not met personally, but the thing is their results of the data of that program are profound and it is clearly evidence-based that it is extremely effective for improving cardiometabolic biomarkers. What I would say though is that there's probably a way to even more tweak that program if the ingredients were slightly modified. I don't think that glucose spike in the context of basically eating like 500 calories a day for five days is really going to hurt people. but we want to reduce glycemic variability, you know, and it's probably pretty simple to swap out some ingredients there. So that's good information to have, you know, and the last thing I'd mentioned that has really blown me away is the energy bars. We probably have over 50 different types of energy bars logged in the data set, you know, ranging from quest bars, bulletproof bars, Cliff bars, Luna bars, you know, all of these. and the Spectrum is profound. Yeah, we see that. Somebody's like, what bar should I eat?

It's such a big question. What protein bar? What bar do I have? What's good? And people are eating stuff.

I'm like, totally. And they also wonder about it. You know, they're walking into the Whole Foods, and, you know, you go to that, that aisle with all the bars, and it's like, it's just colors Galore, beautiful packaging, all these claims on every box. Each one has a different thing. It's like, oh, this has no sugar alcohols. This has high etc. Etc. This one's organic. How the heck do you know what to choose? Well, in the future, we can look it up like this and. And figure it out. So, for instance, like, Cliff Bars have a spike around 42 milligrams per deciliter. That's almost 10 points higher than a Snickers bar. Like, I'm glad. I used to eat those.

I used to live on those things. Yeah.

Go macro bars have a spike of around 44 milligrams stress leader. And then you look at some of these, you know, this is all just sort of, you're kind of, you know, anecdotal data. This is obviously not controlled trials, but what I get excited about is that that person in that aisle who has. Yeah, I bet.

I mean, a lot of people are trying to design products are good, but they never had this tool before. So now they can reformulate, maybe think about it. And I think that's the key. We have to stay current with what's true. And I I think your, your work and getting this data is going to.

Be so important to helping us be.

Empowered around making the right choices in general, but also for us. Right. So, so you also mentioned things that, like, could spike your blood sugar. I mean, they don't spike your blood sugar, but actually we should still get rid of.

Why is that?

Well, this is such an important question because I want to be very clear. Glucose is not the only any biomarker that you need to orient your diet around. There are other, it's right now it's the only continuous biomarker that we have that can give us closed-loop biofeedback on nutrition. We don't have anything else that we can put on our bodies and see exactly how food's affecting us. You know, I think, of course, both you and I would probably love to see an inflammatory monitor, an oxidative stress monitor, you know, these things that also affect our insulin levels.

You told me you want our insulin. Of course.

And so that's what we, that's what kind of gets into the things that won't spike glucose, but you still should avoid for optimal metabolic health. The first and the biggest one is fructose. So fructose alone will not spike blood sugar or insulin, but we know from the mechanisms of how insulin resistance develops that it directly contributes to insulin resistance through a really interesting pathway. Fructose has broken down. into a byproduct called uric acid, which goes into the mitochondria, the seat of our metabolism in the cell, and generates oxidative stress, this damaging free radical activity that actually causes the mitochondria to become dysfunctional and process glucose less effectively and shunt glucose to fat storage. So then you start getting fatty liver disease because of fructose, and that fatty liver disease causes liver insulin resistance, which then makes you less able to stabilize and regulate your blood sugar. So fructose has this really interesting side pathway that ultimately leads to more instability in glucose but will not show up on a CGM, if even in isolation. Now, of course, it's a really important thing.

I just want to stop there because you said something super important. You know, if you're, for example, eat a sugary soda with high fructose corn syrup, you'll get a mixture of glucose and sucrose. But if you have pure fructose, which is like agave for example, that's just pure fructose and that actually turns out to be pretty bad for you. If you're eating fructose in the matrix of a fruit, it's probably not as bad, right? It actually can be okay to have it in a complex of a meal. We'll talk about food pairing in a minute. But the idea that you can be eating certain foods, fructose, which, which a lot of, a lot of, like, for example, processed food is mostly fructose. Like they use high fructose corn syrup, but it could be 75 fructose. And that, that isn't going to spike your blood sugar, like you said, but it's going to create a Cascade of events that actually makes you more likely to get diabetic by increasing the uric acid in the liver or the insulin resistance. And the uric acid story is a very fascinating one. And David Perlmutter just wrote a book about it called drop acid, which isn't what you think it's about. Yes, it's about the the acid in the blood that's causing some of these issues.

And fructose is a huge culprit. So I just wanted to pause there. That's so important. So going off of like, what else should we be thinking about? I would love to see a uric acid continuous monitor because then all of a sudden if we could measure both those things, then we start to see a more holistic view of how food is affecting us. Because ultimately our mission at Levels is to help people know how food affects their bodies so we can reverse the metabolic disease epidemic. But right now there's still some blind spots so like you mentioned, David Perlmutter is coming out with a book called Drop Acid about how fructose is affecting our health. We also in February are getting another book by Rick Johnson from University of Colorado that's called Nature Wants Us to Be Fat, which is also all about uric acid. And so I think we're going to be starting to talk a lot more about that come February, which is awesome because fructose is absolutely killing us. There's just absolutely, you know, really no two butts about that. And like you said, it's not the fructose fructose that comes in fruit, which is in a complex of fiber in a whole food, slower to digest and smaller quantities. It's the refined liquid versions that go into our processed foods and that we find in juice that we should really avoid. Because what happens is we over, the liver knows how to process fructose and it knows how to just produce small amounts of uric acid that our body knows how to handle. It's when we overwhelm those pathways in a short period of time, that we get the uric acid skyrocketing and create that oxidative stress. So it's really a lot about pacing. And they've even done research showing that if you drink a Coca-Cola slower, like over the course of an hour or two hours versus in five minutes, it actually has less of a damaging effect on liver because you have to think we're just, we're just made up of a ton of cells that are trying their hardest to process this stuff, right? And so if you can process and clear, process and clear, It's better than if you just jam it down your throat and overwhelm the enzymatic, you know, all these enzymes in the body that are trying so hard to get through it, and then you end up creating an excess of these damaging byproducts that ultimately lead to organ dysfunction. So fructose is a big one. The second big one I would mention is the pro-oxidative stress-inducing foods that come from more like refined fat. So it's like the seed oils that we talked about. about again, the name of the game is in many ways oxidative stress, which is this process that damages our mitochondria. So you want to avoid those refined seed oils that are in everything that's packaged. And you really be vigilant about looking at labels and trying to opt for things that only have oils like avocado oil, olive oil, coconut oil, ghee, butter that are less prone to oxidation.

So, so are you saying this based on your data from levels around the refined seed oils or just in a general way?

Not saying that based on our data set. None of these, actually, these, these, these ones for this question, not talking about our data set. The thing is about, about the data set is that what we're seeing is the real time response to different foods. But the next layer of this onion, when we have lots and lots of people using this type of technology over long periods of time is we think we'll start to see the longer term, the lagging effects of how these other products like fructose and refined seed oils and excess alcohol over the longer term lead to glucose instability. A lot of that we just don't have much knowledge about because we haven't been looking at pre-disease very much in our medical system. We don't really study healthy people and how they go from healthy to pre-disease to disease, because that's not the way that our healthcare system works. We wait until disease and symptoms emerges and then we react and that's a problem. So I think we're gonna see a shift here in starting to understand, but this is more based on what we just know from the mechanisms, the fructose and the seed oils.

So we know a lot about aging in terms of what are the mechanisms that are driving it. It's inflammation, some of them they call it inflammaging, oxidative stress and activation of various pathways like mTOR, which is basically a pathway that's activated by protein and various other things that can, when it's over activated, can cause aging, mitochondrial injury, we have to activate stem cells in order to heal. And it seems like this one approach of a nutrient dense, short-term calorie restricted diet seems to take care of all these things. Is that true? Well, I mean, I don't know about.

All of these things, but it seems the majority, and I think, for example, with inflammation and aging, I think people got it wrong, right? People think that inflammation causes aging, but it's the other way around. It's aging that causes inflammation. Very clear, you know? Inflammation, in fact, one of the criticism in the paper, what's causing the inflammation? The dysfunction. You're starting to have accumulation accumulated junk in the cells, you're starting to have DNA mutations, you have, you know, damaged mitochondria, you have just general damage. As you move forward, any system is going to accumulate protein aggregation, right, in the brain, phosphorylated tau, beta amyloid, oligomeric amyloid, right, so every system is got, it's junk that it gets accumulated. And of course, what happens in the brain if you start accumulating beta the microglia start attacking.

That's the immune system of the brain, right? Yeah.

The microglia, the immune system of the brain, or part of the immune system of the brain, is starting to recognize them as foreign. They start attacking.

You begin the process of inflammation, right? So yeah, it's also inability to get.

Rid of junk and waste. And in fact, you know, one of the things that happened in this paper that we just published, interleukin, I think it was TNF-alpha and several other pro-inflammatory marker were way high in the fasting-mimicking diet.

Really?

And all the reviewers were saying, oh, this is bad. And we said, no, go read the papers. If you look at these two markers, they're central in what's called inflammatory regeneration. So the inflammation may actually have always been good for you if coordinated. What is the body trying to do with the inflammation? It's fixed the problem.

Yeah.

So, but it cannot do that because the system is so damaged and there is not the conditions to repair it. So it keeps spinning the wheels. So this TNF-alpha and other inflammatory marker interleukins are trying to fix it and this is not, I'm not saying it, is very well established that these are central in the repair process.

So then after you finish the fasting-mimicking diet, you'd assume that the markers would come down as the body repairs. Yeah. Is that what you see? Yeah.

Well, we haven't looked long enough, but of course they're gonna come back down. So once you repair it, once the autoimmune problem has gone away, now they're gonna come back down. In fact, we looked this also in the paper, we have human inflammation, body inflammation. So what you see is that in people that have high C-reactive protein.

It's a marker of inflammation.

Marker of systemic inflammation. We looked in this new paper, and we see that white blood cell count goes up, right? So then you start doing the FMD and the CRP comes down and the white blood cell count comes back to normal, right? And it does during the FMD but more also after. When you look a week later, now the white blood cell count is restored to the normal levels.

So you're sort of treating all these different conditions we talked about, whether it's autoimmune, whether it's gut issues, whether it's the aging process itself, whether it's Alzheimer's. But also it seems that just these short periods of fasting leads to reversal of metabolic diseases like weight and obesity and diabetes. How does that work? Because if you're only stopping the calorie influx for five days, how does that carry over to sustained change? I don't understand that. I think many people are wondering how in fact does just restricting your calories for five days a few times a year have all these long-term lasting benefits. It seems like too good to be true.

Well, yes and no. For sure is going after the visceral fat, right? So we know that the visceral fat- Belly fat. Yeah, we know from many other papers that this belly fat is so central in insulin resistance and all kinds of other problems. and so of course after two or three days of a fasting mimicking diet, we have shown in the paper that everything turns into belly fat consumption. So the body is going after, I mean that's the reservoir, that's a food reservoir.

So you don't need the ab roller, you just need the Prolon diet.

You don't, interestingly, it didn't take it from subcutaneous fat, it only took it from visceral and we showed this in mice with the scans and in people with the so that's for sure one way, one of the major ways.

I gotta pause there because what you said was pretty profound. When you do this approach of short-term calorie restriction, you target the fat that causes all the chronic diseases, which is the belly fat or abdominal fat or visceral fat and not the regular fat around under your skin or the subcutaneous fat. That is a profound, important discovery because that is the fat that we all need to target.

Yeah, the other interesting thing is the lean body mass differential effects, right? So it's targeting the fat and temporarily you see the lean body mass as measured by DEXA go down. And then- so you lose muscle. You lose muscle, but only temporarily, right? So usually in all kinds of diets you lose the fat and the muscle. Here you lose the fat, you lose a little bit of muscle. When you refeed within a week, all the muscle is back, right? So now you have an increase least relative lean body mass. So you now gain muscle mass. You pretty much go back to the absolute normal level of muscle. But now compared to your body weight, you've gained muscle mass.

So you have more- Without exercising.

Without exercise. No intervention. So that's one way. The other way we think that makes a big difference is almost everybody will say the following. When after I got through one, two, three cycles of the FMD, FMD, I started looking at food differently. So.

Yeah, you want some water?

So, yeah, after I went through one, two, three cycles of the FMD, I started looking for food differently. And so, for example, if somebody had lots of sweets and lots of candy, lots of starches, etc.

Etc.

They don't feel like eating. like that as much. So they all say... Their cravings go.

Away, their tastes change.

Yeah, I think maybe because the microbiota, maybe because the brain now sees the association, lots of people may have never done five days of a vegan diet so often, right? Completely, 100% vegan. So it is possible that the brain now recognizes the wellness that is associated play with it. And then without anybody telling them anything, they begin to say, I felt better. When I did that, I'm not sure. So for example, I had some obese people that said, I used to eat pizza all the time and I could finish two entire pizzas. And now they say, I may have a few slices and I just don't feel like continuing to eat. So it's really, I think, a conversion of the behavior are based on instinct and not based on, you know, rationale or thinking about it.

So we were talking a little bit before about the ketogenic diet combined with fasting mimicking diets for cancer and other things. Talk more about that because I think people are confused about the variations between fasting mimicking diets and ketogenic diets and intermittent fasting and when you should do what or if you should do any like, what, what is the, the experts opinion here? Because you're probably one who knows most about this. Yeah. So first of all, I always say.

I hate the word intermittent fasting because it doesn't mean anything. I mean, intermittent fasting goes from, I haven't eaten for two hours to I haven't eaten for two months.

Right.

And it goes from, I haven't eaten anything at all or I had a lots of food in a fasting mimicking meal.

Yeah.

So, yeah, it doesn't mean anything. So we need to to what exactly did you do or what exactly should you do?

And I think my- People are referring to like time-restricted eating where you eat within an eight hour period.

Yeah, so if you look at time-restricted eating and the work by Satchin Panda, but if you look at all the data, you would say that, say 12-13 hours of fasting per day are very good and very safe. That's true.

Yeah.

Well, it's normal, but nobody does it anymore. If you look at Satchin's data, it'll show so the average is about 15 hours. And I think this average of 15 hours, it comes with this idea that you should eat five or six times a day. So now, you know, to, to eat five times a day, you're stretching the amount of hours. And so when he did this study and they just asked people, you just mark down when you eat. It was 15 hours. It was not 12. So now I think if you went, in fact, when they went back to 12, people start doing better. Now the argument is, well, what if you go down to six? Could you do even better? Or eight, say, hours where you eat and the rest of it you fast? Well, then you start seeing, A, not too many people in history did that. And B, you're starting seeing the problems. And the problems include gallstone formation and the problem include many, including our own trial, our own study, logical study, people that skip breakfast, they usually do worse. And understandably, you can argue that there is other reasons for that. But that's not a good start, right? So I would say if you keep it 12-13 hours, seems to me like it's a good way to go and it's very safe. There is really no negative association with even the 13 hours that I've seen. Maybe a little bit slight increase in goldstone formation, but it's very slight. When you get to 16 to 18 hours, then you start seeing twice as much risk of, you know, gallbladder removal, not the nicest thing that could happen to you. So, so that's, that's, that's the thing. So, yeah, so there is all kinds of fasting. And what about ketogenic? So, yeah. So ketogenic diet. Again, what does it mean? You know, does it mean that you're gonna do it for a month? Does it mean that it's going to be low protein, high protein, animal based? And so again, we're ketogenic. We gotta go move away, in my to the world and move into what do you mean? Just like medicine, any drug that you take and say, oh, it's a drug that generally blocks the cholesterol pathway. No, it doesn't work like that. It's like, well, exactly what does it do? And show me the data on thousands of patients, et cetera, et cetera. So here I think we need to say, in my opinion, a little bit higher fat, you know, ketogenic, not ketogenic, but certainly I think the 60-30-10 is an ideal diet if you for all time. So 60% carbs, mostly from vegetables and legumes, 30% fats, mostly from olive oil, nuts and fatty fish. And 10% protein, mostly from legumes and fatty fish. That seems to be ideal, not based on my opinion, but really going around the world, looking at the basic research, looking at the clinical trials, etc. Etc. Now, for you specific uses, I think that the ketogenic diet can be modified, be more extreme.

Right.

So if you, you have somebody that has, you know, overweight, obese, all kinds of other problems. Yeah, that's where I see that, you know, let's say a much higher fat level, a much lower carbohydrate level being very useful to get the person to where they need to be.

There's over two billion people on the planet.

Exactly. Exactly.

Right. So this country is 50 to 70%. Yeah.

So the question is, is that reasonable and is it safe for and how should you do it? Let's say an 80-10-10, right? That could be a possibility. So 80% fats, 10% protein, 10% carbs. But how long can somebody stay on that?

And.

How long can they stay on it? And how long do you want to keep them on that without risking them getting into the epidemiological data clearly showing that low carb diets, if they're animal based, they could be detrimental. And I know we disagree on this, but I mean, you know, I'm just thinking, I think it'd be good to come up with things that we know, and that's what I try to do with the book. Come up with things that we know there is no way it is bad for you. I mean, I came up with this denominator, we're like, there is no way, I don't care what they need to, 200 years of publications to say that this is, why? Because the centenarian is one of the pillars. These guys have been doing this for over 100 years and in different parts of the world.

And they eat real food. They don't eat a lot of fast food. They eat real food.

And that's a recommendation, right? So if you do that, then you're for sure in good shape.

Shape.

Now, the argument could be, who's going to be able to do that? Okay. Then we say, well, what's the second best that people can, can reasonably do? I think it's reasonable to eat a 60, you know, vegetable and fish and Lagoon diet. I think it's reasonable to have 30 Fats, you know, and if somebody cannot do it only from vegetable sources, you know, whatever you can add some animal sources, that's okay. And 10. protein. 10 protein is, you know, to most people is, you know, 50, 60, 70 grams of protein a day. So it's not that low. And I think, but even in your.

Own work and your paper in cell metabolism, you sort of talked about how there's a benefit when you're younger, but as you get older, you need more protein for building muscle and you need, you know, significant amounts of, like, for more protein that you talked about would be two cups of yogurt or five ounces of nuts or, you know.

Yeah, so more protein and more variety. I think we were talking earlier about Emma Morano and the fact that Dr. Carlo Bava, the woman who lived to.

Be 117 years old in Italy.

117, that's right. So she was already eating three eggs a day from earlier in her life and then when she turned 95 to 100, Carlo put her on 100 to 150 grams of protein 50 grams of raw meat per day. But lots of times people, journalists talk about that and they forgot to mention that she started when she was around 100 doing this. So at 100, which is very bad if you were 45, it becomes, I think, not a bad idea at all. And I never thought, when Carlo told me that, her doctor told me that, I never thought, are you crazy? and there's a funny story actually. She went to him one day.

And you knew her, you hung out with her.

I used to go two or three times a year. And it's a funny story. She went to Carlo one day and she said, you know, Carlo, I think I need to stop eating meat. And he's like, why? And she said, my journalist came to me and he said, oh, you eat meat every day. This is gonna give you cancer. She was, I think, 107. But I thought it was very entertaining, right? And also very telling of the very naive approach in nutrition, right? This guy is telling 107 year old to worry about eating less meat. He's a journalist because she's gonna get cancer. He's not thinking, no, she's not gonna die of cancer. She's gonna die of pneumonia. She's gonna die because she breaks her and she falls down the stairs.

Yeah.

Or maybe the flu, she might die of the flu.

She's past the age of getting cancer and heart disease.

Well, she might get cancer, but I mean, that's okay. You really need to worry about lots of things in addition to cancer.

Because the frailty is an issue.

The frailty is an issue and the frailty of the immune system is an issue, right? So immunosuppression. If the immune system is weak, then you're gonna have all kinds of problems. So this is why I think, you know, you and I, I are now, and a few others are now moving into, you know, sort of generating this field of complexity. And I think historically it was ignored because people said, it's food.

Yeah. Right.

What the hell could it possibly do to?

Right. And now it's the most powerful drug on the planet.

It's the most powerful drug, but it's very complicated. And the response is very complicated. So now now it's probably one of the most complicated fields in medicine, right? Because the food is thousands and thousands of components and the body's got thousands and thousands of genes and now all these join, you know, get together. That's where nutri technology word comes from. It's like what the hell happens when all this happens?

When you think about it, you've got 20,000 genes but about 5 million variations in those genes, all affected by food. you've got, you know, the microbiome, which is a hundred times as many genes as our own genes, which is another two million genes that get affected. And you've got the chemical reactions in the body that happen every second. And most people don't know that there's 37 billion billion. That's 21 zeros chemical reactions in the body every second, all of which interact with food. So that, that just mind-boggling how do you. and do the math on those numbers of what's actually happening instead of a single pathway, a single drug. And that's the beauty of food and why it's so effective. And I want to dig into this complexity a little bit with you because the protein issue and the protein story is fascinating. In your models, there's a gene that gets activated or pathway that gets activated called mTOR. And this pathway seems to be activated through protein and it seems to accelerate aging. aging. When you're older, you need more protein. But like Emma Morano, she had 150 grams of raw meat. Why didn't that make her age faster if the protein activates mTOR?

Yeah, so it's actually what we call an axis, and the axis is multiple pathways joined together. So it starts with growth hormone releasing hormone, growth hormone, IGF-1, AKT, TOR or or possibly tor without AKT. So there is a whole series of genes that are involved. And what happens is during aging they go down naturally. So if you're 25 years old, IGF-1 is gonna be very high. If you're 90 years old, IGF-1 is gonna be naturally very low. So what we showed in the paper a few years ago is that if you put an adult younger than 50 on a high protein, mid protein, low protein diet, IGF-1 and as a consequence, TOR are gonna be associated with the level of proteins. Okay? So high protein, high IGF-1, high TOR, low protein, low IGF-1, low TOR. If you look at a 65 and older person, you no longer saw any significant difference.

Really? So either high or low protein, there was no change in the mTOR or the IGF-1.

No significant difference. I mean, overall, you cannot say that there is a change no matter how much protein you eat.

So stay away from a lot of meat when you're younger, but once you hit 65, you can have the grass-fed steak, is that it?

That's what a journalist will say. And that's what journalists exactly what journalists say, at least some of them. No, you know, so the idea would be that as you get older and older, you can measure your IGF-1 and let's say that you're 72 and your IGF-1 is 280, you should lower your protein.

That's a measure of growth hormone. Yeah, in a sense.

Insulin-like growth factor one, right? So the one that they're circulating is pretty stable, right? So it stays stable in the blood. So it's better than measuring growth hormone because growth hormone is volatile and it's very hard to follow. But IGF-1 now, most clinics can cheaply measure it and if somebody's 72 and it's got 280 IGF-1 they're eating too much protein.

Yeah.

And so you can still knock it down and these people are at risk for multiple cancer, prostate.

Where should you be?

You should be, we see the ideal level 140. 140 seems to be ideal. Whether you're young or old, now it could be very old that may not be that easy to keep 140.

In.

General, in the adult population, 140 seems to be ideal.

But exercise increases that, right?

No, exercise does not have a big effect on IGF-1 either way, either up or down.

A methyl group is just a carbon and three hydrogens. Carbon is ubiquitous, hydrogens are ubiquitous. I mean, we just evolved using this very simple structure everywhere in the body, as you said, all of the time. and we make it in what's called the methylation cycle. The compound that can deliver methyl groups is called S-adenosylmethionine or SAMe, people know it as, or SAM. And this compound we're producing all of the time in the body and then it zooms around and it engages in one of the 300-plus reactions that use an enzyme called methyltransferase and the SAMe is transferring that methyl group, methyl transferase. the case. So we're using it in detoxification to make neurotransmitters and, you know, to make certain fatty acids, Etc. Just all over the place.

Energy, energy, yes.

Yeah.

Detoxification compounds, everything. Right, right. Yeah.

All over the place. And, and so. But my area is specifically now I'm, I'm focusing a lot of energy on, on epigenetic expression and. So, methylation is happening there too. So, there's DNA methylation in all of our cells in the mitochondria. There's methylation happening. There's other epigenetic methylation processes like histones, the proteins that DNA is wrapped around. They engage in methylation as well. But DNA methylation is unique, and I talk about it in the book. So, we're thinking about gene expression. and this whole field of study is called epigenetics and we're using methylation there, but I also want to acknowledge that there are many other epigenetic processes. The reason I'm focusing on DNA methylation and a lot of scientists are is there are a handful of reasons. First of all, we can study it. We can map out what they call the whole methylome, so the millions of these little methyl groups that are on genetic material we can actually analyze and study. When there are a lot of methyl groups on a promoter region of a gene, that gene is generally turned off. In science, like if you Google DNA methylation, you'll get and you look at your images, you'll see a strand of DNA and these little red lollipops. The methyl group is denoted by these lollipops. So if there's a lot of lollipops on a on a piece of, on a gene, then that gene is inhibited from being transcribed. So a transcription protein can't land on the DNA and initiate transcription. Conversely, if those methyl groups are not present or if there are less methyl groups present, then that gene can be turned on. And as I said in the beginning, as we age, this, the methylation on our genes gets is changed and it's changed, unfortunately, for the worse. So we can see it. The other thing that's extremely important about DNA methylation is that it can be transferred. So there's enzymes, there are DNA methyltransferase enzymes that will continue to pass down those marks through cell division after cell division after cell division. And in this way, they're heritable. so sperm and egg have very complex methylation patterns. When the embryo is formed, a lot of those methyl groups are scrubbed off, and there's a family of enzymes that do that, but not all of them are. Some of them are preserved, and that's the imprint home that you mentioned earlier. Methylation is what turns-- is what dictates the fate of pluripotent stem cells in embryogenesis. So you're a liver cell, you're going to be a heart cell, you're going to be a skin cell. It turns off so methylation turns off one of the chromosomes in, you know, those of us with 2X chromosomes. I mean, it's just methylation plays exquisitely important roles. And so for that reason, we're giving a lot of study attention to it. And I think that ability for it to be a preserved across cell generations and, you know, life life generations makes it one of the big players in epigenetics and that's why we're putting attention there.

We can't- so the idea is basically that you've got this molecule, carbon three hydrogens, I think of it like the.

Currency of the body.

It's constantly changing chemicals all the time. It's being transferred one to another molecule and regulating everything in the body. It's like the central hub of our chemistry. And if it ain't working, your system is screwed. You know, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's, autism. I mean, everything you could think of pretty much that's, that screws up people is, is involved in some way with this process of methylation. And the DNA part is just fascinating because it's, it's really the regulator of which genes get turned on or off. And like you said, in every cell, in every cell is the entire blueprint for everything in your literally, like in your skin cell is a blueprint for your brain or your liver or your kidneys, right?

That's right.

Well, how does the skin cell know to be a skin cell versus a liver cell or a brain cell? Well, it's these regulatory controls on our genes and which ones gets expressed or not. And, this is all the methylation stuff. And, that really is regulated by B6, B12, folate, betaine you mentioned, methionine, all these important molecules that are in our diet and in our food. that by the way, Americans are mostly often deficient in or insufficient in. And so, we've got this sort of pandemic of methylation problems. And, for those who kind of want a little bit deeper dive on this, I've wrote a couple of blogs years ago, and you've probably got a ton of information on this, but you can just Google Hyman and methylation, and you can learn more about it and all the things and ways to play with it. But, we're going to talk about sort of advances even from that article, which.

Was now our understanding of epigenetics. And, just to give people a quick understanding of how the power of this.

A lot of this work was sort of initiated by a guy named Randy Jirtle, who is an amazing scientist. Did he win the Nobel Prize?

He might have, didn't he?

No, but he should.

Their very first paper is the most cited paper in the history of science. So, there's a little bit of that.

It's pretty amazing. Yeah, incredible. So, what he did was he took a genetically identical mice that are designed to fat and diabetic and really unhealthy. They're very visual and yellow. Like, they're blonde, yellow. They're like these big fat yellow mice that look like a big piece of fat. Okay. And genetically identical. And in one litter of these mice, they just did their normal thing, you know, bread, the mice and all that. And this other litter, they gave them methylation factors, you know, B6, folate, B12, and it completely changed their gene expression in such a way that the mice that had the B vitamins and methylation were little, skinny, brown, not diabetic or fat or anything. And so that was just amazing. It's like you've got identical genes and you've got completely different expression. That's what Kara is talking about. And understanding how to regulate that process is a key to unlocking unlocking health and biological aging. So, now carry on with your explanation of the study because I want to take that little detour.

It's an extraordinarily important and big, big deal what they showed. And, it's very visual and he should get the Nobel. And, it's impressive that it's the most cited paper in the history of science. That's nuts. But, yes. And, it really put the power of nutritional interventions on the map. so what you know what? One of the interesting things that they cautioned, I don't even, you probably don't remember this, but at the very end of that abstract, the final sentence is basically a word of caution around appreciating how potent nutrient interventions are. And I think, you know, that ushered us into the era of epigenetics, that particular study and nutritional epigenetics in particular, because A, we were starting to be to actually see at that level, you know, epigenetic expression. They had-- they-- what they did was they methylated and turned off the Agouti gene. But they said, Look, we introduced B vitamins and we turned a gene off. And look at this phenotypic change. It's favorable, but we need to be mindful in general about the power of our interventions. And for me, as I dove into epigenetics, that was my huge aha. It was around 2013 and I was tussling with all of the epigenetic literature coming out around cancer. The thing that just really stopped me and prompted the development of everything was the fact that in the tumor microenvironment, cancer takes over our gene expression. for its own survival and shuts down genes we want on and turns on genes we don't. It is aggressively abnormal methylation in cancer. And my question mark was, if we're slathering everybody, if we're going very B vitamin forward, is this what we want to do all of the time? That was my first step.

I know you really brought that up because it's like, oh, we should never be taking all these high doses of B vitamins. vitamins and methylation factors and maybe that's not always a good idea.

That's right. And I would, that's right. And now that we can see at this level, I think we want to be a little bit more nuanced in how we approach. It's so, and there are without question times we need to go and go hard with B vitamins. Actually, there was a study in glioma using very high dose folate we can talk about later that had some interesting good outcome. So the point is that our interventions, we're not just going to pee those B vitamins out and not have to worry about it. We need to just think a little bit more nuanced. But we know we need methyl donors. We know as we age, basically our genome becomes, generally speaking, less methylated. So we need to just consume as many methyl donors in our diet as possible. So that was our first piece. There's no evidence in the literature that there's anything negative with a high methyl donor or diet. So in that food matrix, go for it. Binge on kale all day long. Have a couple of the chicken fried livers that Mark is talking about. And you're good. That's a really amazing thing. So that's item number one. Food forward always works. But the other piece, the other huge aha for me in this journey was looking at the literature on polyphenols. It turns out that these beautiful compounds that have time in memorial use histories like the catechins in green tea or curcumin or luteolin or resveratrol or quercetin, all of these compounds that we know and love and use and eat and prescribe, et cetera, et cetera, they appear to direct methylation traffic. I mean, at least that's what our findings suggest. So when I first started to read about it, Again, we're looking at this oncology literature, and so in cancer, actually in aging as well, tumor suppressor genes, which are important genes we want on, get hypermethylated and shut off. Okay? Not a good thing. The in vitro studies were showing routinely that these polyphenols will allow for the re-expression of these inhibited inhibited genes. So that's cool. So polyphenols seem to be in in vitro. Yes. And there's a whole table in my book that walks through various tumor suppressor genes and the polyphenols that have been studied. This has also been demonstrated in animal studies as well. And you know diindolylmethane, sulforaphane, we know these things to help us detox, et cetera. But you know what? I think they're doing the heavy lifting mark at the level of the epigenome. I think they're changing genetic expression and then we're studying the downstream effects and saying, oh, they're anti-inflammatory, they're anti-cancer, they're antioxidant, they're detoxification. But I think as we tease it out more and more, we're going to see its gene expression. So as packed into this methylation donor based diet is all of these polyphenols. So it's a very dense polyphenol diet. So again, lots of cruciferous, lots of colorful veggies. We wanted people to consume green tea.

We had a curcumin requirement. And actually in book. Wait, are you saying food is medicine? What are you saying?

No, no, no, no.

I wouldn't go there. I mean, listen, folks, this is just. You gotta kind of tune into what's actually saying. What she's saying. She designed a way of eating, picking certain foods that have very particular compounds in them, both methyl donors, like choline and betaine, things like B vitamin. but also these phytochemicals that also regulate our genes and regulate enzymes and regulate our biology and inflammation and detoxification. And so, when you're eating, it's so far more than calories. Food, as Jeffrey Bland taught us all, is information. It's code and it's going to upgrade or downgrade your biological software literally with every bite. And, that's really quite amazing. And, you showed it. I mean, yeah, that's what you show. You don't take these fancy expensive drugs with side effects and this and that. and that. It's like, what's the side effect of eating sardines? Nothing except good side effects, right? You get choline, you get omega-3 fats, you get protein, you get all this wonderful stuff, right?

I think that that's why, you know, that has to be why we were able to move things as rapidly as we were. Because we looked at it through a sort of orthomolecular functional medicine.

So medicine.

This is like, yeah, this is, this is true functional slash orthomolecular medicine where we're doing the right amount of a nutrient, you know, in the, for, for the right effect. And, and I, orthomolecular means to correct.

To straighten or correct molecules. Like, Orthopedics is a straightener, correct bones. Orthomolecular is to correct and or straighten your molecules. Right.

That's where functional medicine is essentially derived from. And I think that That's why we were able to make a difference. And when you look at other studies where they're doing sort of, there's some caloric restriction data out now, which is beneficial, for sure, or the Mediterranean diet, or there's a study that showed some modest age reduction with just sort of general healthy eating patterns. That's all great. You're going to get no argument.

It's all an upgrade, right? It's an upgrade from fast food and junk food, right?

Yeah, that's right. But using this technology that we're steeped in and our training just really showed something special that I feel is important for we get it, but I want the world to get it because I think it validates the science that we practice from.

So were you also using supplements and exercise and stuff in the study as well?

Yeah, so let's talk about that. The only supplements that we used, because I didn't want to use isolated nutrients, we did a greens powder to kind of extra hit home those all-important polyphenols. So a couple of hits of green powder a couple times a day, and we used a probiotic. We used a Lactobacillus plantarum. The reason that we did that is multifold, but a healthy gut microbiome makes a B complex. You want a natural B complex to take care of your gut. I mean, seriously. And so Lactobacillus plantarum has been shown to increase endogenous microbial production. of natural folates. And so we introduce that.

But a healthy microbe, in English, that means your gut bacteria make B vitamins like folic acid. Okay? You like to use big words, but you know, my mother's always like, use the kiss method. Keep it simple, stupid.

Yeah, for sure. Okay.

I can be your translator. You know, I Dr. Mom had his anger translator.

I'll be your translator. Oh my God, that's so funny, Mark. Yeah, for sure.

Yes.

So we want, and the other piece is that our gut bugs regulate us, you know, and when they, you know, they're playing an intimate role in healthy genetic expression. So we need to love on our gut bugs. And so in this study, we did. We kept it simple and we just used Lactobacillus plantarum, and we significantly circulating methylfolate. There were no B vitamins to be found, but we did increase that in our participants actually by quite a bit. So that's the diet. And then, oh, actually the diet is low glycemic, it's anti-inflammatory, no grains, no legumes, no dairy, and listen, I am a big fan of Blue Zone data, and I know they're loading up on certain grain and and they certainly eat beans and stuff. And I want to say that this is a finite period of time. This is not a lifetime diet. It could be if you wanted it. It's a healthy eating pattern. But I'm all about transitioning back in and bringing the legumes in. But we wanted to really control glycemic cycling.

Well, the other thing you did, by the way, the other thing you did by doing that diet, and just to clarify for people, getting rid of dairy, gluten, sugar processed food.

Yes.

Right. Grains and no alcohol.

No alcohol.

That's exactly my 10-day detox diet, which I use all the time to help people quickly recover from all sorts of problems. And the reason it works is not only because it contains all these nutrient dense phytochemicals and all the B vitamins and all this stuff that you're talking about, but it also eliminates the inflammatory foods and inflammation. inflammation is a cornerstone hallmark of aging. In fact, it's often called inflammaging. So you kind of were doing a double whammy. You were powerhousing all these food is medicine compounds at the same time you were taking away, because I believe if you gave all that stuff and people are eating still in addition to that, a lot of processed foods or even gluten, dairy or sugar, it might not have worked. Right.

Yep, yep. I think that's a reasonable supposition and hopefully as we continue to investigate it, We'll see. We'll see. And we'll be able to layer in individualization and all sorts of exciting stuff. But yeah, I think that's possible. It's like Sid Baker, right? Get red. Add this, get rid of this.

So basically diet you did, you did the greens powder and what else?

Yes.

Oh, and so yeah, a little bit keto leaning, a little modest, very modest time-restricted eating, just 12 hours on, 12 hours off. We didn't want to make it onerous and we also didn't want to just study. time-restricted eating, but we wanted it to be doable for our participants. We had nutritionists meet with our participants weekly. They didn't cheerlead them. They had to read from a very stale script that was IRB approved. But just basically, do you have any questions? Do you need recipes? Yeah, we couldn't-- it was very structured what they were able to do. But I will say-- so when we first designed the study, Ryan over at Health Coach Institute It was dubious that we would be able to have such a sophisticated multivariable study really be successful and have it participant adherence. And I think that it was our nutritionists being there, being present that was the difference in our success. And we do have adherence data that are very good. And it's something that we'll need to write up on. But Mark, I was like, this is my big chance to engage in clinical research. I'm like, this is going to be successful. These guys are sticking to it. And then as the nutritionists made that difference. And incidentally, for folks who want that kind of support, we've got a digital platform that has the nutritionists we used in our study available and all sorts of other stuff to really have pull the branch down for folks who want that. And that's also where we're going to continue to study it if anybody wants to participate in contributing their data to research. So that's diet. And then we had other interventions. And this is where we need to think about In our world, we're focused on the methylation cycle. Anybody who studies functional medicine knows biochemistry in an extraordinary way, and they know a lot about the methylation cycle. But when you get into the science, you will see that methylation is regulated by far more than whether we've got that little cycle is humming along.

What are the things that we can actually do to rejuvenate them and to live to be 180?

The good thing is there's way more way more mitochondrial organelles, these little bacteria in your body, than there are cells in your body. And they are replaceable. So the first thing you want to do is you want to tell them only the strong survive. And there's a few ways- so we.

Call your book Head Strong?

Yeah, exactly. And so you sort of need to manage them like a system instead of little individual things. So you want to take the weakest 20% of your mitochondria and you want to tell them die. And that sounds a little bit brutal, but here's what happens when they die.

Fresh new young ones sprout in the morning.

How do you kill them? All right, here's one of my favorite techniques from Headstrong. Tomorrow morning, when you take a shower, take a nice warm shower at the end of the shower with the water hitting you right in the forehead and.

Chest, turn it to full cold.

And now after about... That sounds like great advice. That's not so much fun.

I can't wait to do it in the morning.

After eight seconds, you're gonna be like, Dave Asprey's a jerk. But if you stick with me for four days, the next day you'll do it, you'll last like 20 seconds. And what's going to happen is the voice in your head, which is your mitochondria, is going to say, you,'re going to die. You must get out. It's unbearable to be in here. But you rationally know, if I'm in here for one minute, I'm not going to die, but it feels like it and you believe that feeling. But what you're doing is you're telling the mitochondria, if you can't make enough energy to keep yourself warm for just.

A minute of cold water, then you're.

Weak and you should die. And that's them saying, Please don't kill me. Please don't kill me. And you're strong, survive. You're gonna die. And when you do that, after the fourth day, you're like, you know what? This isn't that cold. In fact, I feel invigorated. My skin is tighter. I'm losing weight.

I feel good.

I sleep better. It's really powerful. We're talking one minute of cold water. Wow. But four days of pain first, and then all of a sudden, just believe.

Me, just try it for a week.

You're like, you know what? I like my life when I do this.

You like the Iceman, you know?

Yeah, this is like the weak version of that.

You don't have to go swimming. I find, you know, when I was sick with chronic fatigue, the only thing that would give me like a few hours of relief would be to take a steam or a really hot bath and then I would jump in an ice bath. Correct. And that would kind of flush everything.

Out and I feel like a minute of clarity and energy. And the thing is, this doesn't require liquid nitrogen like we have at Bulletproof Labs who do cryotherapy. It's low-tech. free, everyone can do it. And if we all just did that, the measurable incidence of all chronic disease would go down across the country.

That's a great tip.

So what else can we do for a mitochondria? There's two kinds of exercise that matter and I looked up all the research on this stuff and your job with exercise is to make yourself grow healthy young mitochondria but also to grow more mitochondria because who wouldn't want a bigger battery on their iPhone, right?

So one kind of exercise. no battery mode, right? Right. That should shut off all the operating apps. Our body will do that.

The last thing is your brain, but the rest of you, it's like you don't have to repair and regenerate. Why would you do that? You don't have enough energy. Just keep it for the brain. Keep it for the lungs. You're totally right. And what I end up doing for this exercise stuff is one body of research says if you move for 20 minutes a day, it has a set of behavior on maintaining youthful mitochondria. So this means not running, you don't have to go get all dressed up in your Lulu outfit, although you might want to, but all you have to do is just go for a walk. You don't have to run, you don't have to do anything crazy. Just move for 20 minutes a day. That's it?

Well, that's step one. Okay.

All right, that's not too easy. And if you want to really grow more mitochondria and get all the benefits for anti-aging, there's another body of research that says at at least once and maybe twice a week, you need to do something really hard for 10 to 15 minutes.

Meaning basically exercise hard enough so you're gonna throw up?

Pretty much. What I recommend in the book is that once a week you want to sprint and you want to run about 400 yards like a tiger's chasing you and then lay down on your back. It's actually important to lay down on your back instead of stand there. And there's a whole different thing that happens in the brain when you around recovering faster. You do that three times and then you can just say, all right, I'm done. That's not very much pain. That's not very much work and it actually is going to replace being on a spinning thing every day for the week. The idea here is that you can.

Exercise far less time and get far more benefit.

In fact, we created Bulletproof Labs in Santa Monica, which is a facility that has equipment to help people do this with technology because the idea is because if you're commuting home every day and you're commuting to work and you have kids and a family and responsibilities, you just don't have time to do 90 minutes a day.

That's the good news. Yeah, I mean, I read a study years ago where they looked at giving people 30 minutes of interval training, which is what you're talking about, three times a week versus 60 minutes, six days a week of just like a run, light jog, like a regular aerobic exercise. And at the end of 12 weeks, the group that only exercised 30 minutes, three times a week, far less exercise, had 9% less body fat and were far more fit doing far less exercise.

If you get more fit and less time, it's awesome. And here's what's really going on, Marc, and this ties into your functional medicine background. It's relatively easy to whack yourself over the head in the gym. And I see so many CEOs who, well, you know, I'm running my company, I just flew to Japan and back, and I'm going to do an Iron man triathlon. And I'm like, let me guess. Your adrenals are shot. Yeah, you can't sleep, you have no sex drive, your joints hurt all the time. And like, how did you know? It's like, well, here's what happens when you don't recover enough. Well, what happens is exactly that. Hormones crash, adrenals crash, testosterone goes down.

Women oftentimes get monthly hormone problems.

And it just- so you over-exercise, your sex life goes to pot. It really does. And also, if you're constantly stimulating instead of recovering, it just doesn't work. So our job is to actually be masters of recovery, which means small amounts of targeted stimulation. Great news, that takes less time. And then recovery. And recovery means you sleep. It also means that if you're in a toxic relationship that you fix it, it means that if you have a lot of emotional stress, old trauma, PTSD, substance abuse problems, eating disorders, you deal with that stuff. Because if you have chronic stress from just being unhappy, that's enough stress even without exercise. And if you have lots of travel stress, you're jet-lagged. Maybe you don't want to hit the gym really hard. Maybe you just want to take it easy and get some extra sleep and get a massage. And to recognize that the massage makes.

You just as good of a person as going to the gym and lifting heavy things. It's recovery that matters. That's good to know. I'm gonna write that down. Yeah, you know, you said something there very, you know, hopeful is we can actually change our mitochondria by changing our thoughts, that our thoughts actually are being eavesdropped on by our mitochondria. And that if you have a set of beliefs or attitudes that are keeping you stressed, because you and I live very crazy lives, but both of us aren't really stressed. We just seem to kind of go through every day and have a good time and enjoy life, right?

You can do big things and still be happy. In fact, my next book comes out in December. One of the big themes in it is that you can only do big things if you work on happiness first. And whether your goal is to do big things or just do the things that make you happy, you will not have healthy functioning cells if you have a belief system that says everything's a threat. Because the mitochondria, they want to keep your petri dish alive no matter what. And if they believe that you believe there's a tiger tiger present, even if the tiger is just the next email, the next Facebook post, or the next time that you're getting in a fight with your boss or whatever it is, if that looks like a tiger to a dumb little bacteria, they're going to constantly change your metabolism and be ready to fight. And you'll be in that fight or flight mode. And there's a complex thing that happens with neuropeptides, these little tiny chains of amino acids, little protein fragments that are signals throughout the body. And another thing that most people don't know about, when your heartbeat changes to get ready to run away from a tiger, there's a magnetic field around your heart shaped like a donut and it's tipped eight degrees to the left and you can measure this. This isn't the woo-woo side of things. This is hard physics and if there's the electrical current, it makes a magnetic field. We also have proven that mitochondria are sensitive to magnetic fields. That means that they're listening to your heart and when you're ready to run, your heartbeat changes predictably and if they're getting that signal and they're getting peptides of stress, they're going to be like, Screw recovery, screw repair. Who cares about cancer? There's a tiger here.

It's going to eat me. Cancer doesn't matter. It doesn't know it's just your imagination.

That you think your spouse has having an affair, which may not be true. You still get the same response. Exactly. And if that's running the show, your body will naturally make sure that you stay alive right now and not worry about preventing death 20 years from now because, hey, if you miss this one, the one down the road doesn't matter. And if realize they're dumb. They're a little bacteria. They care about three things, Mark. These mitochondria. Number one, run away from kill or hide from scary things, because if you miss that one, it's game over. The Petri dish is dead. Okay. Number two, eat everything. Because otherwise, if you don't eat within a month, you're going to starve to death. And maybe that's not true for us, but that's what they think they're dumb little bacteria. So the algorithm is eat everything. This is why if someone puts a plate of cookies in front of you, it's really hard not to think about the cookies. They just keep calling to you. They're actually not calling to you. It's your mitochondria going, Hey, is that food?

Hey, is that food? Eat it, eat it. Although, I believe if you change your brain chemistry and your hormones, that it won't really look like food anymore. I walk by the Starbucks caray of pastries, those cakes and scones and donuts and muffins, and I'm like, it doesn't look like food. Even if I'm hungry, I'm like, oh.

That doesn't look like food.

It's a rock.

Why would I eat a rock? rock.

You are absolutely, absolutely correct.

I used to want to eat it. I used to go to the airport when I was traveling around and you can sneak around and buy a Cinnabon when no one was looking and I'd get the one with nuts because I.

Thought that was healthier. We've had such a similar path. I used to have these cravings like, I've got willpower. I forget willpower comes from mitochondria. It's energy, right? I've got willpower. But every time you say no to.

These, you're using a little bit of.

Willpower till you run out. I'll just have half the cookie, right?

And then you feel like a bad person.

Well, you're using science, not willpower, to fix the problem. And what happens with me now, the same thing. You look at that and I'm like, those don't make me feel good.

Those aren't food. And I would never eat one. I would rather eat nothing. Like, I would eat it if I wanted to. Like, I'm not gonna go, I'm not gonna eat if I want to, but it doesn't attract me. The desire is gone. And it's sort of striking. And sometimes if I get eating a.

Little too much chocolate and sugar, then it starts, oh, that might be interesting to eat. And then I stop and I'm like, it goes away. It's all hormones and biology. It really is. I can tell you in the last 10 years, there's one time I've had grains. And it was actually when we were hanging out, Mark, in Greece at Vishan La Chiana's event. And we're on some little Greek island, and there's a guy at a little guest house, and he said, Here's some baklava. It was made by my grandmother from local wheat and honey.

I'm like, you know, I'm eating that.

I took some charcoal with it. I felt great the next day. It's fine.

In Europe, it's better, right? It is.

But that sort of to be willing and acceptance but just to not see it that way.

That's mitochondria. Yeah, it's so true. Okay, so now let's get into one of our favorite topics, which is fat. I love fat. We love fat. And it's very relevant to the mitochondria. So tell us how you sort of came to figure out that MCT oil, which is this derivative of coconut oil that has superpowers for your mitochondria, how.

Did you figure that out and tell.

Us why we should use it.

Well, mitochondria can burn three different energy sources. They can burn sugar, and they love to do that because it's quick and easy and dirty and leaves a lot of exhaust.

A lot of exhaust, meaning it leaves oxidative stress and free radicals that causes inflammation and aging. So it's like dirty fuel.

Dirty fuel, exactly. And they can actually burn protein, which is a horrible thing to do for energy. You want to use protein as a building block. But if you eat a high protein diet like I did in the 90s, what happens is they can break this down, but talk about metabolic disaster. It leaves even more dirt than sugar does. So enough protein to restore all your cells, build strong muscles, strong bones, healthy skin, super important. Excessive protein without any either fat or carbs, really bad for you. And then they can burn fat, but most of the time they're not trained to burn fat. So you end up in this situation where if you eat fat, you don't really use it, especially because you're usually eating it in the form of a donut.

And when you eat fat with sugar, it's deadly.

Exactly. It doesn't work at all. So what's left then is this diet that started out in about the year I was born. The Atkins diet was the first modern diet that had ketosis involved. Ketosis is this period where your body says, oh, in order to stay alive, I have to burn fat. Let me get good at it. and this is a state that's been known for thousands of years because every meditation tradition has this period of fasting. When you stop eating for four days.

The brain turns on.

Yeah, you're like, I feel so good and now you can experience oneness with the universe and you can meditate effectively and it actually works. The problem is that it's kind of hard to hold down a job and take care of your kids if you're not eating at all for long periods of time and living in a monastery. So, the original version hack.

Right.

It was like, let's eat bacon and pork rinds and artificial sweeteners, which was the original Atkins diet. And you know what? I lost half of my 100 pounds.

On that diet in the early 90s.

And then of course, gain it back. You gain it back and you can't lose the other half because you're toxic and you don't feel good. So what happened is I started running an anti-aging nonprofit group in the San Francisco Bay Area in Silicon Valley and I started meeting all these experts in metabolism years ahead their time and having them do presentations for the public. This was the first group to import coconut oil into the US after it was banned. And we had found some studies that said coconut oil is really a powerful thing. And coconut oil is about 52% of this thing called MCT oil. And there's four classes of MCT oil. It turns out that the cheapest and most abundant MCT oil doesn't have this ability to turn into ketones for your body to burn. But about 15% of the fat found in coconut oil has that ability, and 5% of the fat, the most precious 5%, is able to dramatically elevate the ketones in your body, which means if you eat coconut oil, it's better than a lot of other oils, but it's not going to put you in ketosis any more than eight hours of fasting. And that's a study from UC San Diego that found that out. But the stuff we use in brain octane, which is that most rare form of MCT, Brain Octane is a bulletproof product. That stuff is able to raise ketones four times more than coconut oil. And what this means is that if you're eating a low carb but not a no carb diet and you put some of that stuff in your bulletproof coffee, you pour it on your salad, put it in your smoothie, the way I do, I do it three times a day, you always have ketones circulating in your body. And when ketones are present, your mitochondria, they're dumb little bacteria, they're like, Hey, I got I've got energy from fat, I've got energy from whatever else you're eating, some carbs from your vegetables.

I'm gonna have some CTO right now.

There you go. And this came about, no one knew that brain octane was better. There was no university research, but I experimented with the different ones to figure out why normal MCT oil was giving me, we called it disaster pants, it was so common in the early days.

Great for constipation.

Exactly. And branched chain oil didn't do that, but more I got a really strong mental edge from that that I didn't get from the other forms of MCT. And that was why we built that into the recipe for Bulletproof. And then research came out years after we started and basically saying, oh, it does raise ketones four times more. But here's the lesson for everyone listening, Mark. It's that if you feel a difference, it's okay to believe what you feel and notice from your food, right? I did not have any data. I made a decision based on, oh, I ran a self-experiment I felt a difference. I'm going to do what works. And if you apply that to your food in your life, and if your doctor or your friend or your nutritionist or some online Guru says, this food's good for you, and you eat it and you do what they said and you feel like crap, it's okay to.

Do something different and doesn't make you a bad person. No, I always say the smartest doctor in the room is your own body. Amen. Listen to your body because it's going to tell you what works and doesn't. Yeah. So the keynote thing is fascinating because there's a whole spate of books out there now on ketogenic diets. There's a whole spate of books on intermittent fasting. Yeah. And fasting. So this is a whole merging area that's really getting a lot of attention. And I'm seeing this in the medical world. We're looking at it for epilepsy, for autism, for Alzheimer's, for diabetes, for cancer, even, and having dramatic effects. And it's, and it's really the body switching from sugar burning to fat burning. And when you do that, it burns cleaner. Your mitochondria love it. It actually does all the anti-aging stuff, which is so cool, like building your stem cells, reducing inflammation, increasing your antioxidant enzymes, building muscle, increasing bone density. It's pretty striking and improving your cognitive function, even your sex drive all improve when you switch to this, which is something we've been doing for literally millions of years because we didn't have grocery stores. We had to hunt and gather. And if we had a bad day, we'd have to be able to function.

The ketogenic trend is interesting. The original Bulletproof Diet book had a section on intermittent fasting and how you could use brain octane or MCT or a fat-only breakfast to increase the rate of ketosis during a fast. So you're not technically fasting because there's some calories, but there's no insulin, no protein and things like that. And the problem is during the research for that, I ate a lot of different foods. I tested a lot of things on myself and I went into extreme ketosis for three months straight. And this is when you basically don't eat very many carbs at all. Less than 50 grams or 30 grams of carbs a day.

Yeah, I said I'm gonna do one.

Serving of broccoli a day. I want to eat like an Eskimo. So I'm eating just tons of fat and protein. And you know what? You'd be eating moss if you ate a Yeah, I would eating more. Well, here's what happened. I developed allergies to eggs, which are an amazing superfood, and I developed allergies to almonds, which I didn't have before. And so what happened? Well, if you go into ketosis and you stay in ketosis in that less than 15 or 30 grams of carbs a day where your body naturally produces these ketones, your gut bacteria get wrecked, like completely wrecked, and they don't make some butyric acid, which is required for you to make energy. In fact, it also raises ketosis, it turns out. So, I ended up coming out with a recommendation there that says be in cyclical ketosis. And, this matters even more for women than for men, which means you can be in ketosis for a week. You can accelerate it using the brain octane and things like that. Or, you can do it without any of that stuff or just with plain coconut oil. But, the deal is after you go in, you need to go out and come back in. Why are you doing doing that, it's because the body likes cycles and because your gut bacteria will completely slay your mitochondria. Here's what happens if you only eat fat and protein, which some people try to do for months on end, and they have to dig themselves out of- Dr.

Fiber, because that's what your gut bacteria live on.

Yeah, and fiber comes from plant foods. Dr. It's fiber, and your gut bacteria, they talk to other bacteria like your mitochondria, and when they're unhappy, they make something called LPS or lipopolysaccharide. saturated fat diet. Fat escorts lipo-polysaccharide past the lining of the gut.

All fat or just certain fats?

It turns out all fats will do it, but saturated fats, specifically the long-chain saturated fats, will do it even more. But it also just so happens that this amazing extract of coconut oil that might go by the name of brain octane protects the liver from lipo-polysaccharides. And one of the reasons I put that in the Bulletproof Coffee recipe was, well, if you do have this going on in your gut and it does go through, at least there's an oil that is shown in a study to provide a benefit. And that said, you want to have healthy gut bacteria that don't make these toxins because those toxins are direct mitochondrial poisons. So if your gut bacteria are off, they will make your body's mitochondria also be off.

So we talked about toxins from other- let's say the idea of intermittent fasting is a cool idea because it's cyclical, right? We used to call it breakfast.

Break the fast.

You're not supposed to eat after dinner and don't eat until breakfast, 14 hours, 16 hour fast. But we don't do that anymore. We eat all night, we have bedtime snacks, we eat first thing in the morning, and we don't give our body a chance to repair and recover.

And it seems to do a lot of the same things. It is shocking what happens. And I would encourage anyone listening, if you've never tried an intermittent fast, it means eat before the sun goes down. and then skip breakfast and have a light lunch. In the morning, you can have just black coffee or tea or you can do it with Bulletproof coffee without any protein, without any sugar or any artificial sweetener. And when you do it either way...

It's no Bulletproof mocha, huh?

There's a chocolate, but if you put much chocolate in there, you're gonna get some carbs and you want no carbs. You want your insulin to your body to say, oh, I've got no energy from sugar, no energy from protein whatsoever. Therefore, what do I do with all I'm going to do my own system repair. And what you're going to find is you weren't hungry, you didn't completely crash and want the muffin at 10:00 a.m. In fact, you probably really like your day. And I'd also encourage you, do not do this every single day, especially if you're a woman. Do this a couple of times, two, three times a week.

You don't have to do it every day. Insulin, of course, is a well-known metabolic hormone. So you eat and insulin goes up. Assuming you're eating carbohydrates and protein, sort of a mixed meal. you eat, insulin goes up. But more importantly, what it is, is a nutrient sensor. It tells your body that food is available. And the reason that's important is because your body only wants to grow when nutrients are available, right? So you don't want to, you're still, you don't want more cells to continue to grow if there's no food available. That's not a good survival strategy. So you, the body links them. In fact, if you look back in evolutionary times, insulin was not a metabolic hormone. It was actually a growth factor. So, as we evolved, we actually used the same molecule that we use as a growth factor for nutrient signaling as well. So, we know that insulin is a very potent growth factor. There's this thing called insulin-like growth factor, or IGF-1.

And.

Walter Longo actually described this group of Ecuadorian dwarfs, the larvaon dwarves who actually have almost no IGF-1, so they're very short. Turns out they're also immune to cancer because if you don't have that growth signaling, then the cells can't grow and the cells that are going to be the most affected are those cancer cells. So what you have to do, of course, is say that, okay, if we have too much insulin, then that's going to be a signal to our body that we need to grow. So, what can you do to sort of reduce that insulin signaling in the body by reducing nutrient availability? Which is two things. One is getting rid of the hyper-processed foods, which tends to really amplify the insulin response. So, sugar, for example, is especially bad because it causes all this insulin resistance, which causes hyperinsulinemia. A lot of the refined foods are very bad because they sort of take away all the other natural components and you're left with this big spike of insulin. Like if you eat cookies, for example, well, you know, it's just gonna, your insulin is just gonna spike up. And the other thing, of course, if you eat very, very frequently, you're going to keep insulin high all the time. So intermittent fasting is another strategy that you could use to reduce insulin. And that's- so it's what you eat.

And when you eat. Yeah, exactly.

So it's what you eat and when you eat, because if you eat a high carbohydrate diet, which people did, like people in China, for example, used to eat a ton of white rice, but almost zero sugar, and they were okay. So it's not necessarily just the carbohydrates.

Well, they, they, I lived in China for a while. You're Chinese. I mean, I traveled around, remember 1984? I mean, they, they, they had no accoutrements of modern living. I mean, they, they had to cut a board. They would use a saw to create boards. They, they would, to grind the flour, they would, like, literally walk in circles for hours with the grain in between two giant stones. They would work in the fields for 14 hours a day with hard labor. And yeah, you can eat a lot of rice if you do that.

Yeah, that's true. And it's also like, it was very, it was like rice and vegetables. Like every day, it was just rice and vegetables, rice and vegetables.

Well, the land of milk and honey, the Chinese phrase for it is the land of fish and rice. So, it's really what they think of. Yeah. so you're talking about what is the problem, which is the incredibly high amount of starch and sugar we consume. And you've talked about this in the diabetes code, the obesity code. This is a central driver of almost all chronic Western diseases, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's, high blood pressure are caused by this phenomena of insulin resistance or too much insulin, which is driven from our basically a highly refined processed carbohydrate diet, and also this constant eating pattern, this thing called snacking, which I think is a modern invention. We have a snack food industry. But, I mean, I don't snack. If you eat properly, you're never hungry. I mean, if you don't have these spikes and insulin going up makes you hungry. But what's fascinating is that what you're saying is that insulin actually fuels the cancer growth and sugar fuels the cancer. growth.

So all of these diseases are actually diseases of too much insulin. So if you look at obesity, for example, if you were to measure the levels of insulin, people who are more overweight tend to have higher insulin. Same with type 2 diabetes, hyperinsulinemia and insulin resistance are really sort of two.

Sides of the same coin.

So one causes the other sort of hyperinsulinemia can cause insulin resistance, insulin resistance can cause hyper insulinemia. So they're really the same thing. And again, the same thing applies to sort of cancer. And this is the pattern that was noticed so many years ago that there are these diseases of sort of too much insulin, which is that sort of they all go together, the heart disease, and you don't see that in people eating traditional diets because they're not eating all the time. So I remember there was a study, this NHANES study, which is a big sort of American survey of lots of things, but they included dietary habits. So in 1977, they found that most people ate three times a day, so breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And by 2004, it was almost up to six times a day, right? So it's like, wow, that's crazy. And it was never this sort of deliberate, hey, there's good scientific evidence that we should eat six times a day. It just sort of crept in there. And I think part of it was, of course, the snack food companies wanted to promote it. And, you know, people thought it was a good idea. So then it was this sort of, it became almost gospel. Oh, you have to eat six meals a day.

Right.

And I remember thinking about it a while ago and thinking, where did that suddenly sneak in? Did we have a big randomized control trial that I missed somehow? Because I don't think so. It was just this gradual change in attitudes and you saw it because I start to think back to my upbringing in the 70s, right? So I grew up in the 70s and you know, if you wanted a sort of after school snack, your mom said, no, you're gonna ruin your dinner, right? And if you wanted a bedtime snack, your mom would say, no, you should have ate more at dinner. And it's like, that's just the way it was. It does. And of course, people would have this sort of natural fasting period from after dinner, which was say six o'clock, because people ate a bit earlier back then to like say eight o'clock. So 14 hours of fasting every single day without even... We call that breakfast. Yeah, exactly. Breaking the fast. That is the word that we use. And it's like somehow we went from that where people didn't have the obesity problems that you diabetes problems because they have this natural fasting period built in that has always been there. It's even built into the English language. And then it's like, oh, you got to eat all the time. And it's like, oh, you can't ever skip your breakfast. You got to snack all the time.

Right.

You see it in schools, for example. Oh, they go to school, they get a mid-morning snack, then they have a lunch, and then they have their after school, and then they have a dinner. Then, you know, you're playing soccer and.

They think that they need to have a snack in between the halves of soccer.

You know, I played well, Jason, you've.

Written a lot about, you've written a lot about fasting and, and the effects of either time restricted eating, which is, you know, 12, 14, 16 hour fasts every day, or taking a 24, 36 hour fast a week, or even longer fast for diabetes. And, and, and I'd love you to sort of share why around cancer, this is so important. And on my podcast, soon we're gonna have Dr. Patrick Hanaway, who's my colleague and friend, was the medical director at Cleveland Clinic who had cancer and used fasting as an approach to his cancer treatment. He still got radiation, but he also did it in a way that actually reduced all the side effects to almost none, has kept him healthy now for well over a year, and this cancer was not a great one, and let him go through the process with really no issues, which was really staggering and really went on a ketogenic diet in order to do that, which is both using fasting and ketogenic diets to drop insulin levels to almost undetectable. So can you talk about this whole idea of fasting, cancer, ketogenic diets, why it's so important, and how it connects to this whole idea of insulin resistance and insulin high insulin levels?

Yeah, so both fasting and ketogenic diets have the same sort of goal at the end, which is trying to lower insulin because the difference between a ketogenic diet diet, say, and a low carb diet is that, you know, you're sort of low carb, ultra low carb for the keto, but sort of moderate protein because protein can also stimulate insulin, whereas some of the older low carb diets were, like, very high in protein. You take protein shapes or whatever it is. And then Atkins, yeah, like Atkins. And so high protein is not always the best idea because you can get high insulin, but you also get this high mTOR. which is sometimes not so good for cancer as well. But the idea is to really drop your insulin levels. And if these are diseases of too much insulin, then that's going to be a very useful adjunctive treatment. So fasting is actually fascinating because there's all these different things we're discovering. So one of the things is sort of autophagy. So as you fast, of course, your nutrient sensors go down. So mTOR insulin go down, and then you activate this process. called autophagy, where you actually start to break down some of your subcellular organelles and stuff. So basically, your body's just trying to clean house.

It's like Pac-Man coming around and cleaning up all the garbage.

Yeah, exactly. People think it's a bad thing.

Maybe people know who Pac-Man was, but that was the original video game that we all played back in the 70s.

Pretty simple.

Very exciting, though. Yeah, I don't know what Pac-Man is anymore.

You can still find them sometimes. But the idea is that people think that this sort of breakdown process is really bad for you, but it's actually really good for you. And in fact, it's sort of one of the keys to rejuvenating the body. That is, you want to break down all your old stuff and then sort of rebuild the stuff that you need. So the whole idea of fasting is you're trying to put the body into this sort of regenerative maintenance mode. mode because what we've recognized over the last little bit is that your body sort of has sort of, you know, you can go into growth mode or you can go into sort of the cell maintenance repair mode. And it really depends on your nutrients availability. When nutrients are available, you want to grow. When nutrients are not available, you don't want to grow. And you want to go into this sort of maintenance repair mode. And everybody thinks growth is good, but growth is not always good, especially as an an adult. So I always say, think about a car. Like, if you have a sports car and you rev that engine and you're running it fast all the time, you're gonna go fast, which is great, but it's gonna burn out much faster. So you can't just keep revving that engine, keep redlining it. You've got to sometimes bring it to the shop, put it in the garage, let it rest and all this stuff.

Pit stop.

Yeah, exactly. A little pit stop.

So.

So that's the point of the human body. too. You can either go for growth or you can go for longevity or cellular maintenance repair. But you gotta have a bit of both. It's a balance there. It's not all growth. And this is where you say, oh, E-D-D-D-D-D. Well, you're going to put your body, your nutrient sensor is going to go up, your growth factors are going to go up, you're going to put yourself in growth mode. But you don't want to do that, especially for a disease such as cancer, which is a disease where cells are growing too much. Your basic feeding into that growth. And that's going to be very, very bad for you. So what you do instead is you do the fasting and you put yourselves into this sort of maintenance repair mode. And it actually allows you to undergo both the chemotherapy and probably the radiation therapy better because chemotherapy, we have a couple studies on fasting and chemotherapy where what you do is you fast sort of just before and during and just after your chemotherapy.

Therapy.

And what they've noticed is that those people tend to get a lot less side effects from their treatment because what you've done, of course, is taking the cells of your normal body and you've sort of put them into a more quiescent state. They're not trying to grow, they're actually trying to slow down. And chemotherapy, the general way it works is it kills the fastest growing cells, which are usually the cancer cells, but it also kills like the hair follicles because they're fast growing cells. It kills the lining of the GI tract, so you get nausea in your hair cells. So if you can put those cells into sort of a quiescent sort of repair mode, it's not going to sustain as much damage from the chemotherapy. And instead, the cancer cells, which can't stop their growth, they're always trying to grow, they can't do that. So therefore they're going to sustain full damage from the chemotherapy while your body is relatively protected. And that's one of the things that might be very interesting to use as an adjunct to sort of standard treatment. I would never advise not to take the standard treatment because of course we spend- you- know, there's a lot of.

Interesting work by Dr. Mukherjee, Siddhartha Mukherjee and others looking at ketogenic diets and cancer. And, I've heard him present on this, it's just fascinating. He wrote the Emperor of All Maladies, it's about cancer, I'm sure you've read that. And, he said that to me, he said, Mark, you know, we figured out the solution to cancer. I'm like, what is it? It's this big discovery. It's like, and the cause, and like, what is it? he's like, it's sugar. I'm like, yeah, you know, I guess that's not really news, but maybe it's good, you know that now. And then he said, we've been studying ketogenic diets and seeing incredible results with pancreatic cancer, melanoma, stage four cancers that weren't responding to anything else. They're animal models. They literally were curing cancers with ketogenic diets, and now they're doing human trials. Can you talk a little bit about some of that research and how, how.

It might be applied to people who are struggling with cancer. Yeah, so this was the sort of big discovery of Dr. Lou Cantley who's discovered sort of this whole pathway, the PI3K pathway that links sort of insulin and growth and cancer. So the important thing is that insulin acts as that growth factor and therefore acts as a sort of and therefore a sort of pro-cancer agent. Sugar, of course, plays a big role in the hyperinsulinemia. And it's interesting because Dr. Luke Cantley, in several of his, you know, articles or whatever, he goes, Sugar scares me, right? Here's this guy who studies cancer for a living, and he's like, yeah, sugar just scares me. And that's the same sort of thing that Siddhartha Mukherjee is talking about, too, right? And that's the whole point is that with ketogenic diets, with fasting, and of course fasting, you have to cycle it because you can't obviously fast. You can't fast forever, right? As opposed to ketogenic diet, which is sort of very low carbohydrate, you could sustain that for years and years. You can't fast forever. You need some food at some point. But the idea is the same. What you're trying to do is really reduce those insulin levels. There's of course studying this in terms of drugs. They're trying to develop these blockers to the whole pathway of PI3K and so on. I think they've developed a couple companies for that. But, you know, just like anything else, it's like, why would you want to do it with a drug when you can do it with your diet?

You know what's so striking, Jason, is that, you know, often when people go get cancer treatment, their doctors make sure you keep your weight up. Eat ice cream, eat milkshakes. have cake, you know, and I'm like, what are you telling them that for? I mean, that is death. And yet it's, it's, it's, it's, I mean, I actually had a radiation oncologist as a patient, worked at MD Anderson, and he was very aware of these studies and these issues, and he tried to tell his patients do the right things. He said, all the nutritionists, this is like the number one cancer hospital in the world, are telling their patients to eat a lot of starch and carbohydrates and sugar to keep their weight up. And it's just such a unfortunate situation that, that is going on right now. so, so when, when we talk about cancer, we're clearly talking about some of the risk factors.

Right.

Sugar. There's other risk factors. And one of the, one of the things that I think is very concerning to me is these, these obesogens, which are environmental chemicals that not only are directly toxic and carcinogenic, but they're actually causing insulin resistance. So they're really creating a double. whammy pesticides, herbicides, additives, all these environmental chemicals that we're exposed to, 80,000 of them that have been developed over the last 100 years. What's your perspective on that and how do we reduce our risks?

Well, I think that stuff is really hard because they're not adequately studied. I mean, there's so many chemicals and what do we know about the effect on the human body for most of these? Like very, very little, right? I mean, you know, they have this classification as generally recognized as safe, but, you know, I mean, that just means it doesn't kill you within a month, right? I mean, that's about it. So, and all of these chemicals, the, like the, you know, even the ones that we eventually find out are really bad for us, I mean, they were originally approved and, you know, for you. So, you know, we trust our government to sort of keep us safe. safe from all these sort of chemicals. Very rudimentary. Like you do it in a, you test the toxicology in some rats and it doesn't kill them and, hey, nothing, you know, you get out there and it doesn't kill people right away. So, hey, you're good. That's the sort of idea that we have. But, yeah, I think that unfortunately, it's hard to know exactly what to say because, one, there's just so many of them. They're changing all the time. How many does that just human. So, like, the classic sort of pesticide was like DDT. Remember it was, yeah, I dated myself here a little bit, but DDT was this big, big time pesticide. It was amazing. Killed everything, right? Turned out it was, like, super, super bad for us and, you know, causing cancer all over the place.

Right.

There's all kinds of stories like that. Now, of course, there's all these other chemicals in there, and we don't even. know what they are. I mean, they're not listening.

I mean, the government did write a whole report on the environmental chemicals and how they're linked to cancer. So, I think that's a big thing. And, I encourage people to check out ewg.org, which is the Environmental Working Group's website, where they have guides on how to reduce your exposure through your food, through household cleaning products, through skincare products, and many other ways to reduce your exposures, household cleaning products. So, I think the more we can do to reduce our intake of these chemicals is a good idea. So let's talk about how to reduce your risk. What can people do who are listening that you talked about in your amazing book, the Cancer Code, a revolutionary understanding of the medical mystery? I encourage everybody to get a copy of the Cancer Code. It's out now because it really is a revolution and understanding of cancer that I think would help so many people. So tell us, what can we do to reduce our risk of getting cancer?

Yeah, I think the most important thing is to go after the sort of hyperinsulinemia because we know it's such a big risk factor. So, you can't always test it, but you'll know because if you are overweight, for example, then you want to try and get back to a normal weight. And there's lots of different ways to do that. Sort of ketogenic diets are not the only way. You can do all kinds of different diets and vegetarian diets and so sort of paleo diets. There's all sorts of good ones. And then the other one, of course, is the sort of reintroduction of intermittent fasting into sort of the normal schedule. And I think that's really important because what, what we've lost, of course, is that balance between feeding and fasting.

Right.

We've gone to a sort of feeding all the time model, which is not so good for growth because we all, you know, you're always your body to grow more. And of course, if you have type 2 diabetes, which is becoming a huge, huge problem. So if you look at pre-diabetes and type 2 diabetes in America, it's like it just skyrocketed over the last 15 years. And that too is a sort of massive, massive risk factor for the development of cancer. The World Health Organization actually classifies 13 different types of cancer as obesity related cancers. so including breast and colorectal. So that's a huge- and prostate and colon, liver, pancreas. And interestingly, if you look at the types of cancer, so we've actually been doing really well for most cancers over time as you track them through the years, most cancers are actually slowly declining, except those obesity related cancers. They're actually going up. So pancreatic cancer going up, liver cancer going up, all of these cancers are going up, and they're not rare diseases. So breast cancer, for example, is very, very common. Colorectal cancer, very, very common. And I think that this is one of the things that we, we hadn't recognized. So I went to medical school in the 90s. We never talked about diet and, you know, cancer. It just wasn't even on the radar screen. It was, it was crazy, except maybe a few people who are really into it. But for the people just didn't talk about it. And then it wasn't until 2003 that the first large papers started to come out that said, hey, this is a big risk factor. And then you multiply it by the millions of people who have it, and that's why it's such a big risk factor. So staying to a normal weight, which includes getting your diet in order, cutting out sugar, cutting out the processed foods for the most part, adding back the intermittent fasting, which is part of a.

Normal sort When you say that, what do you mean? You mean time-restricted eating, right? You mean 12 hour or 14 hour fast?

Yeah, 12 to 14 hours should be your sort of baseline because that's just, you know, 1970s style eating when we didn't have so much obesity. Now, if you're trying to lose weight or if you have type 2 diabetes and you can extend it to say 16 hours, which is time-restricted eating, or you can even go further, 24 hours or even multiple days of fasting. And, you know, people always worry about that. But, you know, that's, that's why I talk about a lot, because a lot of the stuff that we worry about simply isn't true. People worry about, oh, they're going to lose muscle. They can't work, they can't concentrate. I'm like, all you're doing when you don't eat is that you're making your body rely on your body's own store of calories, which is sugar, right, or body fat. That's how your body stores calories. So you're literally using the body fat for precisely the reason that you carry it. So what could be wrong with that? What is more natural than that? If your sugar is high and you don't eat, you're going to use up the sugar and your sugar will fall. Now, that's great news if you have a high sugar and type 2 diabetes, which, of course, that high sugar drives a high insulin, which drives, you know, cancer risk and so on. So something like that is a completely natural way to get this, all of this back in order. And if you're too far along the scale of, you know, you have too much insulin, you don't have to stop at 14 hours. There's nothing to stop you from taking your fast out to, you know, a couple of days at a time.

Right.

And that's the thing is, it's, it's a free intervention. It's a natural intervention. It's been used for thousands of years, right? Every culture and history has used it. It's crazy that we don't use this sort of thing.

If you love that last video, you're.

Gonna love the next one. Check it out here.

That's how we do it.

That's the only way we can extend lifespan is to keep animals and eventually people free of disease for longer and then eventually something gives out fairly quickly, typically. And that's the idea.

Well, I would say every disease of.

Aging is inevitable as long as you live long enough.